Tag: Life

Not as solid as we are making it out to be

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Emptiness refers to the fact that things are not as solid and real as they seem. something that we hold in our hands might appear completely solid and unchanging, but that’s an illusion. Whatever it may be, it is changing all the time, and when we investigate, we find change and fluidity where before we assumed permanence and solidity. This does not make the phenomenal world nothing; at the same time, its essential nature is not what we usually think it is.

Yongey Mingpur Rinoche, In Love with the World

Light and dark

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As one matures,
a greater tolerance of ambiguity
is essential both for growth 
and as a measure of respect for the autonomy of the mystery.
James Hollis, Tracking the Gods

Enough

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Our whole spiritual transformation

brings us to the point where we realize

that in our own being,

we are enough.

Ram Dass

We are more than what happens to us

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Our awareness of our depth of being is fleeting. Yet just because we close our eyes doesn’t mean the sun has disappeared. And just because we can’t keep the unquestionable fact of being alive in view doesn’t mean that the inherent vitality of life has disappeared. We are more than what happens to us. We are more than what we think or fear. The turbulence we encounter is very real, but underneath what happens to us is the inherent, unwavering fact of life filling us from within.

Mark Nepo, The One Life We’re Given: Finding the Wisdom That Waits in Your Heart

….Yet knowing as the leaves do

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If I can let you go as trees let go
Their leaves, so casually, one by one;
If I can come to know what they do know,
That fall is the release, the consummation,
Then fear of time and the uncertain fruit
Would not distemper the great lucid skies
This strangest autumn, mellow and acute.
If I can take the dark with open eyes
And call it seasonal, not harsh or strange

(For love itself may need a time of sleep),
And, treelike, stand unmoved before the change,
Lose what I lose to keep what I can keep,
The strong root still alive under the snow,
Love will endure – if I can let you go.

May Sarton, Autumn Sonnets

Not knowing….

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The essential religious experience is that you are being “known through” more than knowing anything in particular yourself. Despite this difference, it will feel like a true kind of knowing. But it is also a freedom not to have to know!

Richard Rohr, The Naked Now