All beings are encompassed within one all-encompassing great energy:
This I understood from the coolness of this morning’s passing breeze
Wu-men Hui-k’ai, 1183 -1260, Chinese Chan Master
Tag: Life
A new month
Be passionate about some part of the natural and/or human worlds and take risks on its behalf, no matter how vulnerable they make you. No one ever died saying, “I’m sure glad for the self-centered, self-serving and self-protective life I lived.”
Offer yourself to the world — your energies, your gifts, your visions, your heart — with open-hearted generosity. But understand that when you live that way you will soon learn how little you know and how easy it is to fail.
To grow in love and service, you — I, all of us — must value ignorance as much as knowledge and failure as much as success… Clinging to what you already know and do well is the path to an unlived life. So, cultivate beginner’s mind, walk straight into your not-knowing, and take the risk of failing and falling again and again, then getting up again and again to learn — that’s the path to a life lived large, in service of love, truth, and justice.
Parker Palmer, The Six Pillars of the Wholehearted Life, Commencement Address, Naropa University
Sunday Quote: Unsettled
People wish to be settled;
only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The beauty within us
Incredibly warm Spring weather here these days, signs of growth all round
It’s the beauty within us that makes it possible for us to recognize the beauty around us.
The question is not what you look at but what you see.
Henry David Thoreau
In a daze
Day and night gifts keep pelting down on us. If we were aware of this, gratefulness would overwhelm us. But we go through life in a daze. A power failure makes us aware of what a gift electricity is; a sprained ankle lets us appreciate walking as a gift, a sleepless night, sleep. How much we are missing in life by noticing gifts only when we are suddenly deprived of them.
David Steindl-Rast
A radical stance
To wait with openness and trust is an enormously radical attitude toward life. It is choosing to hope that something is happening for us that is far beyond our own imaginings….The spiritual life is a life in which we wait, actively present to the moment, trusting that new things will happen to us, new things that are far beyond our own imagination, fantasy, or prediction. That, indeed, is a very radical stance toward life in a world preoccupied with control.
Henri Nouwen, A Spirituality of Waiting
