Ripeness is
what falls away with ease.
Not only the heavy apple,
the pear,
but also the dried brown strands
of autumn iris from their core.
To let your body
love this world
that gave itself to your care
in all of its ripeness,
with ease,
and will take itself from you
in equal ripeness and ease,
is also harvest.
And however sharply
you are tested –
this sorrow, that great love –
it too will leave on that clean knife.
Jane Hirshfield, Ripeness
Beginning in infancy (or even before) each of us, in response to perceived threats to our well-being, develops a false self: a set of protective behaviors driven at root by a sense of need and lack. The essence of the false self is driven, addictive energy, consisting of tremendous emotional investment in compensatory “emotional programs for happiness.”
Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening
We live the given life, and not the planned
Wendell Berry
All this rushing
Will soon be over;
For it is in lingering
That we receive insight.
Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus
When you get out of the driver’s seat, you find that life can drive itself, that actually life has always been driving itself.
When you get out of the driver’s seat, it can drive itself so much easier – it can flow in ways you never imagined.
Life becomes almost magical. The illusion of the “me” is no longer in the way.
Life begins to flow, and you never know where it will take you.
Adyashanti
The mind is always seeking zones of safety, and these zones of safety are continually falling apart. Then we scramble to get another zone of safety back together again. We spend all our energy and waste our lives trying to re-create these zones of safety, which are always falling apart.
That’s samsara: The cycle of suffering that comes from continuing to seek happiness in all the wrong places.
Pema Chödrön, The Wisdom of No Escape
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