You live,
not by securing yourself against impermanence,
but by finding yourself as impermanence
Michael Stone, Awake in the World
Our cat Barney who died on Tuesday, aged 19
Tag: Life
The value of being lost
A little more on wandering in a desert or going through a barren or difficult period in our lives
Not knowing what to do is just as real and just as useful as knowing what to do.
Not knowing stops us from taking false directions. Not knowing what to do, we start to pay real attention. Just as people lost in the wilderness, on a cliff face or in a blizzard pay attention with a kind of acuity that they would not have if they thought they knew where they were. Why? Because for those who are really lost, their life depends on paying real attention. If you think you know where you are, you stop looking.
David Whyte
The danger of compulsive working
Western laziness ……consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so there is no time at all to confront the real issues. This form of laziness lies in our failure to choose worthwhile applications for our energy. We are so addicted to looking outside ourselves that we have lost access to our inner being almost completely. We are terrified to look inward, because our culture has given us no idea of what we will find. So we make our lives so hectic that we eliminate the slightest risk of looking into ourselves. … in a world dedicated to distraction, silence and stillness terrify us; we protect ourselves from them with noise and frantic busyness. Looking into the nature of our mind is the last thing we would dare to do.
Sogyal Rinpoche
photo: wusirichard
Sunday Quote: Making space to listen
Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it,
listen for what it intends to do with you
Parker Palmer
photo patrick doheny
Facing the chaos within
Even if a person does not observe Lent, the themes are universal and necessary :
Sometimes the etymology of a word can be helpful. Linguistically, lent is derived from an old English word meaning springtime. In Latin, lente means slowly. Etymologically, then, lent points to the coming of spring and it invites us to slow down our lives so as to be able to take stock of ourselves.
Lent has always been understood as a time to metaphorically spend forty days in the desert unprotected by normal nourishment so as to have to face “Satan” and the “wild animals” and see whether the “angels” will indeed come and look after us when we reach that point where we can no longer look after ourselves. For us, “Satan” and “wild animals” refer particularly to the chaos inside of us that normally we either deny or simply refuse to face – our paranoia, our anger, our jealousies, our distance from others, our fantasies, our grandiosity, our addictions, our unresolved hurts…. The normal food that we eat – distracted ordinary life – works to shield us from the deeper chaos that lurks beneath the surface of our lives.
Lent invites us to stop eating whatever protects us from having to face the desert that is inside of us. It invites us to feel our smallness, to feel our vulnerability, to feel our fears, and to open ourselves up the chaos of the desert so that we can finally give the angels a chance to feed us. That’s the ideal of lent, to face one’s chaos.
Ron Rolheiser, Entering Lent
photo: Another believer
What holds meaning and mystery for you?
The start of the season of Lent – an interior simplification and going into the desert. Seeing what is essential through a letting go of some of the distractions and non-essentials in our lives:
I like to ask one of the questions I have found most useful in setting intentions and making choices: Where does the energy want to go now? I ask this question and sit with the sense of the life-force within. . . . following my breath, letting go of my to-do lists and all the things I think I “should” get to. . . .and every time- if I am willing – I get a sense of where the energy that is manifest in this one small human life, is drawn. This isn’t a passive exercise – it’s not “just” about “going with the flow.” It’s discerning where our essential being is drawn, what holds meaning and mystery for us now, and then coming into alignment with that flow to take actions, make choices, offer what we are to the world
Oriah Mountain Dreamer
photo tiia monto
