If you cry because the sun has gone out of your life,
your tears will prevent you from seeing the stars.
Rabindranath Tagore
Tag: Life
A large meadow
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 .
Sunday Quote: Joy in an incomplete world
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
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
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
As you do
The self is relatedness. Only when the self mirrors itself in so many mirrors does it really exist. . . You can never come to your self by building a meditation hut on top of Mount Everest; you will only be visited by your own ghosts and that is not individuation. . . .
The self only exists inasmuch as you appear.
Not that you are, but that you do the self.
The self appears in your deeds and deeds always mean relationship.
Jung, Seminar on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra,
