Tag: Life

See yourself with kindness

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9th century Zen master, Tozan Ryokai, attained enlightenment many times. Once when he was crossing a river he saw himself reflected in the water and composed a verse, “Don’t try to figure out who you are. If you figure out who you are, what you understand will be far away from you. You will have just an image of yourself.”

Actually, you are in the river. You may say that is just a shadow or a reflection of yourself, but if you look carefully with warm-hearted feeling, that is you. You may think you are very warm-hearted, but when you try to understand how warm, you cannot actually measure. Yet when you see yourself with a warm feeling in the mirror or the water, that is actually you. And whatever you do, you are there.

Suzuki Roshi, Not Always So: Practicing the True Spirit of Zen

Sunday Quote: Looking up

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If you cry because the sun has gone out of your life,

your tears will prevent you from seeing the stars.

Rabindranath Tagore

A large meadow

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The great Suzuki Roshi’s classic image on how meditation develops space in our lives and allows us work with whatever challenging thoughts arise: 

The way to control your sheep or cow is

to give him a large, spacious meadow .

Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

Sunday Quote: Joy in an incomplete world

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This morning,  thousands rose early to catch the birdsong at dawn in an annual celebration entitled “Dawn Chorus Day” which went out live on radio from locations all over the world

A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer,

it sings because it has a song.

 Maya Angelou

Better to give

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This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love:

The more they give, the more they possess.

 Rainer Maria Rilke

Balance

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25% of Irish people check work emails while on holidays.  49% of Irish people between 25 and 34 check social media overnight if they can’t sleep.

Irish Times, Signs of the Times Survey 2019, April 27, 2019.

What is balance in a society whose skewing of time has it totally off-balance? What is balance in a culture that has destroyed the night with perpetual light and keeps equipment going twenty-four hours a day because it is more costly to turn machines on and of than it is to pay people to run them at strange and difficult hours? In the first place balance for us is obviously not a mathematical division of the day. For most of us our days simply do not divide that easily. In the second place, balance for us is clearly not equivalence. Because I have done forty hours of work this week does not mean that I will have forty hours of prayer and leisure. What it does mean, however, is that somehow I must make time for both. I must make time or die inside.

Joan Chittister, Wisdom Distilled from the Daily