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
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
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
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
Everyone, from time to time, experiences a challenge which makes life seem less safe, when things seem to tighten around them – a new job, relationship difficulties, facing an illness or being let down. Under these pressures we may stumble and even fall:
If there be anywhere on earth a lover of God who is always kept safe,
I know nothing of it, for it was not shown to me.
But this was shown:
that in falling and rising again we are always kept in that same precious love.
Julian of Norwich
photo of memorial for Captain Scott South Pole, by Barneygumble
For Christians this evening begins three days of reflection, the most significant part of the yearly calendar.
Often people devote their primary attention to the facts of their lives, to their situation, to their work, to their status. Most of their energy goes into doing. Meister Echhart writes beautifully about this temptation. He says many people wonder where they should be and what they should do, when in fact they should be more concerned about how to be. The love side of your life is the place of greatest tenderness within you. In a culture preoccupied with fixities and definites and correspondingly impatient mystery, it is difficult to step out from the transparency of false light into the more candlelit world of the soul.
John O’Donohue
photo: echiner1
