Tag: Life

You are all possibilities

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Recall the way mere mortals are overwhelmed
by circumstance, how great reputations
dissolve with infirmity and how you,
in particular, stand a hairsbreadth from losing
everyone you hold dear.

Then, look back down the path to the north,
the way you came, as if seeing
your entire past and then south
over the hazy blue coast as if present
to a broad future.

Recall the way you are all possibilities
you can see and how you live best
as an appreciator of horizons
whether you reach them or not.

David Whyte, Mameen (extract)

Appreciating life

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There’s a kind of white moth, I don’t know
what kind, that glimmers
by mid-May
in the forest, just
as the pink mocassin flowers
are rising.

If you notice anything,
it leads you to notice
more
and more.

And anyway
I was so full of energy.
I was always running around, looking
at this and that….

Finally, I noticed enough.
All around me in the forest
the white moths floated.

How long do they live, fluttering
in and out of the shadows?

You aren’t much, I said
one day to my reflection
in a green pond,
and grinned.

Mary Oliver, Moths (extracts) 

Sunday quote; Ordinary

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The real challenge lies in just being able to integrate awareness into the most ordinary things.

Ajahn Sumedho

Desire to control

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What [the Buddha] saw was that life is the permanent experience of suffering. This suffering is primarily occasioned by the ego’s desire to control – to control the environment, to control others, to control in proportion to our losses. The only path through and beyond this suffering, according to the Buddha, is the relinquishment of the desire to control, to let be, to go with the wisdom implicit in the transience of nature. This release is the proper cure for neurosis, for then one is not split off from nature, including ourselves, who are a part of nature. Such a relinquishment does not render one a slave to loss, but rather a participant in the act of letting go. Only letting go can bring peace and serenity […] None of us will likely attain Buddhahood, but we need not be eternal victims either.

James Hollis, Swamplands of the Soul: New Life in Dismal Places

Listen

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Nature’s silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block. The Chinese say that we live in the world of the ten thousand things. Each of the ten thousand things cries out to us precisely nothing.
Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk

Allow things to blow through

Karl Duffy4 Comments

More wise words from the Thai Forest tradition for when times are uncertain

When you are in an emotionally rocky state, the most skilful response may simply be to receive what you are feeling at the present moment with some clarity and sympathy; to sit quietly and allow things to blow through. Whatever the state, the initial response has to be –  stay present and cultivate spaciousness. The way that cause and effect work is that even five minutes of not acting on or suppressing the present mind-state results in some kind of ease of diminution of pressure. Then we begin to recognize a natural sanity, a seed of Awakening that’s there when the doing stops. It’s not far off. But we do need to get in touch with and encourage it. 

Ajahn Sucitto, Kamma and the End of Kamma