Tag: Life

Earth stuff and star stuff

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The practice of cultivating a loving and kind attitude towards ourselves and others, is not a self-improvement technique but an act of quiet daring. As we let down our habitual guard, as we soften and relax, allowing ourselves to loosen the grip of the thoughts and fears that haunt us, we remember the life is here, quietly offering itself to us in this very moment. We remember that we inhabit bodies that come to us from ancestors who endured and overcame much. We remember our deep connection to the earth and also to the stars. We are made of earth stuff and star stuff.

Tracy Cochran

Sent out

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God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear: “You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing“….

Flare up like a flame and make big shadows I can move in.

Rilke, The Book of Hours I, 59

Nothing to Seek

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Birth, old age, Sickness, and death:

From the beginning this is the way things have always been.

Any thought of release from this life will wrap you only more tightly in its snares.

The sleeping person looks for a Buddha, The troubled person turns toward meditation.

But the one who knows that there’s nothing to seek, knows too that there’s nothing to say.

She keeps her mouth closed.

Ly Ngoc Kieu, 1041 – 1113, Vietnamese zen Buddhist nun.

Translation Thich Nhat Hahn and Jane Hirshfield

A raindrop

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The human body at peace with itself
Is more precious than the rarest gem.
Cherish your body.
It is yours this time only.
The human form is won with difficulty.
It is easy to lose.
All worldly things are brief,
Like a flash of lightning in the sky.
This life you must know as the tiny splash of a raindrop
That disappears even as it comes into being.
Therefore set your goal.
Make use of every day and night to achieve it

Je Tsongkhapa, 1357–1419, Tibetan Buddhist monk

Take the time

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It takes a long time to sift through the more superficial voices of your own gift in order to enter into the deep signature and tonality of your Otherness. When you speak from that deep, inner voice, you are really speaking from the unique tabernacle of your own presence. There is a voice within you that no one, not even you, has ever heard. Give yourself the opportunity of silence and begin to develop your listening in order to hear, deep within yourself, the music of your own spirit.

John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: Spiritual Wisdom from the Celtic World

With all your energy

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We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won’t do harm – yes, choose a place where you won’t do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.

E.M. Forster, A Room with a View