Just for a little while, stop thinking about all the problems, crises, tasks. everything that’s pulling and pushing on us.
Be in that quiet space.
After all these years, some of us still need permission to let go.
Melody Beatty
Tag: Life
The sun still shines
A lot of wisdom in this:
The trick to having a happy life is to remember that it all comes down to what we ourselves make of the life we have.
“The sun shines and warms and lights us and we have no curiosity to know why this is so”, Ralph Waldo Emerson says, ” but we ask the reason of all evil, of pain, and hunger and mosquitoes and silly people.”
Joan Chittister, O.S.B., American Benedictine nun.
Sunday Quote: Circumstances
May whatever circumstances that arise serve the awakening of compassion.
Buddhist Aspiration quoted by Tara Brach, Radical Compassion in Challenging Times
An invitation
When life does not in any way add up, we must turn to the part of us that has never wanted a life of simple calculation. To be consoled is to be invited into the terrible ground of beauty upon which our inevitable disappearance stands, to a voice that does not soothe falsely, but touches the epicenter of our pain or articulates the essence of our loss, and then emancipates us into the privilege of both life and death as equal birthrights.
Solace is a direct seeing and participation; a celebration of the beautiful coming and going, appearance and disappearance of which we have always been a part. Solace is not meant to be an answer, but an invitation, through the door of pain and difficulty, to the depth of suffering and simultaneous beauty in the world that the strategic mind by itself cannot grasp nor make sense of.
David Whyte
A choice for today
In Auschwitz, we never knew from one moment to another what was going to happen….I couldn’t fight or flee, but I learned how to stay in a situation and make the best of what is. I still had choices. So, when we were stripped and shorn of our hair, Magda asked me, ‘How do I look?’ She looked like a mangy dog, but I told her: ‘Your eyes are so beautiful. I never noticed when you had all that hair.’ Every day, we could choose to pay attention to what we’d lost or what we still had.
Edith Eger , 1927 – Holocaust Survivor, The Choice: Embrace the Possible
Not turning away
This isn’t a journey about becoming something. This is about unbecoming who we are not, about undeceiving ourselves. We don’t end up anywhere other than where we have always been, except that we perceive where we have always been completely differently. We realize that the heaven everyone is seeking is where we have always been. We are already as much as we will ever be. But the question is – do we know it? …….And so one of the most important steps is to come into agreement with your life so that you’re not turning away from yourself in any way. And the amazing thing is that when we are no longer turning away from ourselves, we find a great amount of energy, a great capacity for clarity and wisdom, and we start to see everything we need to see.
Adyashanti, The End of Your World
