After the cold and the storms, bright Spring-like days in Ireland for the weekend.
And if you missed a day, there was always the next,
and if you missed a year, it didn’t matter,
the hills weren’t going anywhere,
the thyme and rosemary kept coming back,
the sun kept rising, the bushes kept bearing fruit.
Louise Gluck, Sunrise [extract]
Five hundred of Rumi’s odes conclude with khamush, silence.
Rumi is less interested in language, more attuned to the sources of it.….Rumi has a whole theory of language based on the reed flute (ney). Beneath everything we say, and within each note of the reed flute, lies a nostalgia for the reed bed. Language and music are possible only because we’re empty, hollow, and separated from the source. All language is a longing for home.
Colman Barks, On Silence
It is hard to believe that the practice can be reduced to something so simple, paying direct attention to the present moment – to this breath, this person, this walk, to this washing of the dishes. We imagine it should be something grander. It may be simple; however, it is not easy
One day a man asked Zen master Ikkyu, “Master, will you please write for me some pointers to the highest wisdom?”
Ikkyu immediately took his brush and wrote the word: “Attention.”
“Is that all?” asked the man. “Will you not add something more ?”
Ikkyu then wrote : “Attention. Attention. Attention.”
Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.
He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.
Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in. Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This new day is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We hurry through the so-called boring things in order to attend to that which we deem more important, interesting.
Perhaps the final freedom will be a recognition that everything in every moment is ‘essential’ and that nothing at all is ‘important.’
Helen M. Luke, 1904- 1995, Jungian therapist and writer
In the Sufi Master Rumi’s “Table Talk”, there is this fierce and pointed passage:
“The master said there is one thing in this world which must never be forgotten. If you were to forget everything else, but were not to forget this, there would be no cause to worry, while if you remembered, performed and attended to everything else, but forgot that one thing, you would in fact have done nothing whatsoever.
It is as if a king had sent you to a country to carry out one special, specific task. You go to the country and you perform a hundred other tasks, but if you have not performed the task you were sent for, it is as if you have performed nothing at all.
So each person has come into the world for a particular task, and that is their purpose. If they don’t perform it, they will have done nothing.
Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying,
Mindfulbalance 