Tag: Life

What to remember in a time of change

Karl Duffy2 Comments

A similar theme, this time from the Christian tradition:

Nothing lasts. No single thing can consume our entire life’s meaning. No single thing can give us total satisfaction. Nothing is worth everything: neither past, nor present nor future. It isn’t true that the loss of any single thing will destroy us. Everything in life has some value and life is full of valuable things, things worth living for, things worth doing, things worth becoming, things worth loving again. It is only a matter of being detached enough from one thing to be open to everything else.

The essence of life is not to find the one thing that satisfies us  but to realize that nothing can ever completely satisfy us.

Joan Chittister, After Great Pain: Finding a Way Out

Radiate joy

Karl Duffy1 Comment

This is the primary…affirmation within all of Scripture…
To believe that we and our world are good, very good; 

to take delight in our lives and in each other; 

 to live lives that radiate joy rather than depression, boredom, and resentment;

well … that sounds simple and easy, but remains a rare thing that’s seldom accomplished.

The most important challenge that all of us face in life is to….bless rather than to curse!

Ron Rolheiser, Blessing and Cursing Life

 

Hold this day lightly

Karl Duffy3 Comments

Most of us are very good at bringing suffering upon ourselves, by taking something that is happening and fixating on it, creating a worry and letting it take root inside us. We are less good at simply letting things be, without wanting to fix the world according to our preferences: 

Sitting quietly,

doing nothing,

Spring comes,

and the grass grows,

by itself.

Matsuo Bashō, 1644 – 1694

Beyond what can be seen

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File:Giardino Ryoan-ji.jpg

At Ryoan-ji in Kyoto there is a famous rock garden;

Wherever in it a person stands, one of the fifteen rocks cannot be seen.

The garden reminds that always something unknowable is present, just beyond what can be perceived or comprehended – and that something is as much part of the real as any other stone amid the raked gravel.

Jane Hirshfield

photo adriano

Like being re-born each day

Karl Duffy2 Comments

There is no ideal in observation.
When you have an ideal, you cease to observe,
you are then merely approximating the present to the idea,
and therefore there is duality, conflict,
and all the rest of it.

The mind has to be in the state when it can see, observe.
The experience of the observation
is really an astonishing state.

In that there is no duality.
The mind is simply —

aware

Jiddu Krisnamurti

Sunday Quote: The source of our growth

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File:Jaskinia Mylna-okno Pawlikowskiego.jpg

The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for.

The …thing in the cave, that was so dreaded, has become the center.

Joseph Campbell.

photo EMeczKa