Tag: Life

Opposites and contraries

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From what I gather in reading ancient texts, right up to the present, human beings have always been confronted by the same kinds of problems. I think that this world is not a realm that admits to a solution. That isn’t what this world is about. It’s a different kind of activity that we have here. We have to deal with good and evil continually. With joy and despair, with all the antinomies, all the opposites and contraries. That’s what our life is about. We can’t abdicate that.

Leonard Cohen, Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen: Interviews and Encounters

Getting old

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No one grows old by living

– only by losing interest in living

Marie Beynon Rey

taking the light within

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The Summer Solstice

Each morning we awaken to the light and the invitation to a new day in the world of time; each night we surrender to the dark to be taken to play in the world of dreams where time is no more. At birth we were awakened and emerged to become visible in the world. At death we will surrender again to the dark to become invisible.

Awakening and surrender: they  frame each day and each life; between them the journey where anything can happen, the beauty and the frailty.

John O’Donohue.

photo of the Grianán of Aileach in County Donegal by Mark McGaughey on Wikipedia

Stop interfering

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Having the capacity to be still

means stop interfering with what’s happening.

Adyashanti

Just live out your life

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Suzuki Roshi once said about questioning our life, our purpose, “It’s like putting a horse on top of a horse and then climbing on and trying to ride. Riding a horse by itself is hard enough. Why add another horse? Then it’s impossible”

We add that extra horse when we constantly question ourselves rather than just live out our lives, and be who we are at every moment.

Natalie Goldberg, Long Quiet Highway.

the ability to bend

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When filled with qi, the body is like a tree branch filled with sap; it can bend and flow with the breeze, but it does not snap or lose its connection with the root. On the other hand, a stiff, dead branch is easily broken. Thus the adage of Lao Zi, “Concentrate the qi and you will achieve the utmost suppleness…

Suppleness is the essence of life“

Kenneth S. Cohen, The Way of Qigong