A simple reminder for these Covid-19 times
In difficult times carry something beautiful in your heart.
Blaise Pascal
Tag: Life
Sunday Quote: The depths within
Like many countries, Ireland yesterday went into a more complete lockdown, greatly restricting physical movement. This allows the space for a heightened interior focus. And at the same time there are signs all round of movement towards deeper compassion and more conscious living.
I can’t give you any advice but this:
to go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows.
Rilke
Notice the treasure before your eyes
One way we need to work with the mind these days is to notice the beauty in the ordinary moments of each day…
I have seen the sun break through to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
R.S. Thomas, The Bright Field
A simplification
These days we have to reduce our activities, which creates conditions that are good for meditation practice. And in an associated way, meditation practice creates the conditions of mind which helps us to work with the new situation.
Sitting in meditation is essentially simplifying space. Our daily lives are in constant movement: lots of things going on, lots of people talking, lots of events taking place. In the middle of that, it’s very difficult to sense what we are in our life. When we simplify the situation, when we take away the externals and remove ourselves from the ringing phone, the television, the people who visit us, the dog who needs a walk, we get a chance to face ourselves.
Charlotte Joko Beck
Every moment is rich
With the restriction on movement and activities these days due to the virus and our caring for each other by creating some distance, we renounce some of the things we would normally like to do. However, this can make space for noticing what we have in our lives, instead of focusing on what we have not.
The ground of renunciation is realizing that we already have exactly what we need,
that what we have already is good.
Every moment of time has enormous energy in it,
and we could connect with that.
Pema Chodron
It is always unknown territory
It’s been a unsettling week. The old rhythms which felt known and familiar are challenged. But as yesterdays post said, it’s the unknown which pulls back the veil…
“How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” (Plato)…
The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration – how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?
Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
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