We can wish that things were different, but…
Where is liberation to be found? The Buddha taught that both human suffering and human enlightenment are found in our own fathom-long body with its senses and mind. If not here and now, where else will we find it?
Jack Kornfield
Our difficulties are not obstacles to the path; they are the path itself. They are opportunities to awaken. Can we learn what it means to welcome an unwanted situation, with its sense of groundlessness, as a wake-up call? Can we look at it as a signal that there is something here to be learned? Can we allow it to penetrate our hearts? By learning to do this, we are taking the first step toward learning what it means to open to life as it is. We are learning what it means to be willing to be with whatever life presents us. Even when we don’t like it, we understand that this difficulty is our practice, our path, our life.
Ezra Bayda, Being Zen
Once a day, take a moment to remember your real life’s work and differentiate it from the games you play in order to achieve it.
Then, commit to playing wholeheartedly.
Martha Beck
The pandemic has meant that we have lost a lot of what we were accustomed to. Can we still look for beauty or “see the moon” when our modern day structures fall?
The barn’s burnt down,
now I can see the moon.
Mizuta Masahide, 1657–1723, Japanese Zen poet
The aim of life is to live,
and to live means to be awake, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely awake.
Henry Miller
The first snowdrops in my garden, a very welcome sign of life in this pandemic winter.
If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving and for once could do nothing perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves and threatening ourselves with death. Perhaps the earth can teach us, as when everything seems dead and later proves to be alive.
Pablo Nerudo, Keeping Quiet
Mindfulbalance 