Abba Moses asked Abba Sylvanus, ‘Can a person lay a new foundation every day?’
The old man said,
‘If they work hard, they can lay a new foundation at every moment.‘
From the sayings of the Desert Fathers. Abba Moses lived 330 – 405 AD
Tag: Life
Here and not here
Acknowledging that there is a groundlessness at the heart of the human condition, or an unsatisfactory element to our experience, is part of most spiritual traditions. As Pema Chodron says: “The truth is that we can never avoid uncertainty. This not knowing is part of the adventure.…”
Why are we made the way we are made, that to love
Is to want?
Well, you are gone now, and this morning I have walked out
To the back shore,
To the ocean which, even if we think we have measured it,
Has not final measure.
Sometimes you can see the great whales there,
Breaching and playing.
Sometimes the swans linger just long enough
For us to be astonished.
Then they lift their wings, they become again
A part of the untouchable clouds.
Mary Oliver, There you were and it was like spring
Not resisting change
Strong winds are predicted for this weekend, the tail-end of an Atlantic storm…
Time and again I was seeing that if I could handle the winds of the current storm, they would end up blowing in some great gift… Challenging situations create the force needed to bring about change. The problem is that we generally use all the stirred up energy intended to bring about change, to resist change. I was learning to sit quietly in the midst of the howling winds and wait to see what constructing action was being asked of me.
Michael SInger, The Surrender Project
Something is always far away.
We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it, rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire……. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance? If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed? For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them and the blue instead tints the next beyond. Somewhere in this is the mystery of why tragedies are more beautiful than comedies and why we take a huge pleasure in the sadness of certain songs and stories. Something is always far away.
Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
The unknown is an answer
It was in the process of asking that I came upon a truth:
that the unknown is an answer.
That there are answers upon answers,
and sometimes no questions at all.
Mary Oliver, Breakage
Sunday Quote: Trust the process
La ruta nos aportó otro paso natural.
The path provides the natural next step.
Spanish palindrome – reading the same backwards as forwards. It is on the subject of pilgrimage or life’s journey , which, as we walk, returns us to our origins
Mindfulbalance 