Don’t waste time calculating your chances of success or failure.
Just fix your aim and begin
Chinese Master Guan Yin Tzu quoted in Stephen Cope, The Great Work of Your life
Tag: Life
Embodied practice
Re-examine all you have been told
at school or church or in any book;
Dismiss whatever insults your own soul;
And your very flesh shall be a great poem,
and have the richest fluency, not only in its words,
But in the silent lines of its lips and face,
And between the lashes of your eyes,
and in every motion and joint of your body.
Walt Whitman, Preface to Leaves of Grass, 1855 edition
A new day, a new week
“Let there be Buechner”. And why not? Out of the primeval chaos of sleep he calls me to be life again. He calls me to be this rather than that; he calls me to be here rather than there; he calls me to be now rather than then. Waking into the new day, we are all of us Adam on the morning of creation, and the world is ours to name.
Out of many fragments we are called to put back together a self again.
Frederick Buechner, The Alphabet of Grace
Sunday Quote: Unknown
One is never afraid of the unknown;
one is afraid of the known coming to an end.
Jiddu Krisnamurti
Healing our wounds
Looking down into my father’s
dead face
for the last time
my mother said without
tears, without smiles
without regrets
but with civility
“Good night, Willie Lee, I’ll see you
in the morning.”
And it was then I knew that the healing
of all our wounds
is forgiveness
that permits a promise
of our return
at the end.
Alice Walker, Collected Poems
Solid and loose
Things arise and pass away. Our natural tendency is to make them solid, to get stuck in our perception, the form, to come to definite conclusions about what is happening. However, all the images and inferences we have in our mind can be very deceptive. Sometimes. we need to hold things lightly, to wait until what is happening reveals itself, rather than getting caught up in the sign before us.
Whenever something can be distinguished by signs
there is deception
The Diamond Sutra, discourse of the Buddha to the monk Subhuti
