Tag: Life

Loving our lives

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

When Bodhidharma was asked, “What is the first principle of the holy teaching”, he didn’t say suffering. He said, “Vast emptiness. Nothing holy.” This is what the Heart Sutra says, too. The Heart Sutra says, “Things are founded on emptiness.”

This means really that things don’t truly have a cause. Things have a virtue in themselves beyond anything we can say that causes them. So you have a virtue in yourself beyond anything that brought it about. Any suffering that arises in you because of your history, any gifts you have because of your history, these are strong things, yet they are also just a pure appearance of Buddha nature. Even your suffering and also your joy. I think in some sense we can’t take credit for either. We just have to learn to love our lives so deeply that we welcome whatever comes.

John Tarrant, Poison and Joy

This world

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

We imagined [the divine] as distant and inaccessible, whereas in fact we live steeped in its burning layers . . . This palpable world, which we are used to treating with the boredom and disrespect with which we habitually regard places with no sacred association, is a holy place.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu 

Let the world wait

Karl Duffy1 Comment

When you get up in the morning, let the world wait.

Defy it a little.

First learn something to inspire you. Take a few moments to meditate upon it.

And then you may plunge ahead into the darkness, full of light with which to illuminate it.

Tzvi Freeman, Canadian rabbi and author

Made fresh again

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Here’s my new favorite meditation: Load up your washing machine, press the buttons, and then sit by the magical cube as it does its magic. When it roars and sloshes, hear the echo of your fear, anger, and despair. When it spins, recognize your own times of confusion, of apparently pointless repetition. When it seems to have finished, only to rev up again, think of the times you’ve had to start over. And realize that all this bashing and crashing is your soul being cleaned, renewed, and made fresh again.

Once you relax into the process, you’ll learn the great secret: It is through doing the laundry that we find our way to the ecstasy. 

Martha Beck, Blog, The Turbulent Secrets to Soul Renewal

Be faithful

Karl DuffyLeave a comment
The river is famous to the fish…

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse…

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.
The idea you carry close to your bosom
is famous to your bosom…

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.

Naomi Shihab Nye, Famous [extracts]

Flow

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Let its weight fall back
into the earth;
for heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.

The trees you planted in childhood have grown
too heavy. You cannot bring them along.
Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.

Rilke, Part I, Sonnet IV