Tag: Life

The greatest gift we can give today

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From William Stafford, A Ritual to Read to Each Other:

If you don’t know the kind of person I am 

And I don’t know the kind of person you are

a pattern that others made may prevail in the world

and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind….

Seeing a person free of everything we thought of him or her is a most extraordinary event. Things become luminous. We realize our common nature of no-nature. This is seeing from the heart – compassion.

Katherine Thanas, The Truth of This Life

Sunday Quote: This year….

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A New Years motto….
We are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love.
William Blake, The Little Black Boy

Learning

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Everything that happens to you is your teacher…

the secret is to learn to sit at the feet of your own life and be taught by it.

Polly Berrien Berends, 1940 – 2017,  Writer and sculptor

To be indestructible

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To believe means: To set free the indestructible in you, or more precisely: to be freed, or more precisely: to be indestructible, or more precisely, to be.

Croire signifie : libérer l’indestructible en soi, ou plus exactement : se libérer, ou plus exactement : être indestructible, ou plus exactement être.

Franz Kafka, 1883 –  1924, Journals

Really drinking tea

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When you sit in a café, with a lot of music in the background and a lot of projects in your head, you’re not really drinking your coffee or your tea. You’re drinking your projects, you’re drinking your worries. You are not real, and the coffee is not real either. Your coffee can only reveal itself to you as a reality when you go back to your self and produce your true presence, freeing yourself from the past, the future, and from your worries. When you are real, the tea also becomes real and the encounter between you and the tea is real. This is genuine tea drinking.

Thich Nhat Hanh

Purpose

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The post-Christmas sales are in full flow… A lot of the activity in the modern celebration of this season comes from the lack of an ability to rest in how we are or where we are, right now,  in our lives.  When there is a sense of “not enough”, there is a tendency to seek more or other,  through things or comparisons.

There is nothing accidental about the fact that we in the West are starved for some real sense of meaning and crying out for something that, in spite of all our apparent sophistication and material success, we are no longer even able to name. This western civilization of ours was created for a purpose. Until we start to discover that purpose again, our lives will be meaningless. Unless we touch our roots and make contact again with the essence of our past, we can have no future

Peter Kingsley. 1953 – Author, early Greek Philosophy scholar.