When things no longer have the ability to offend you,
they cease to exist in the old way.
Jianzhi Sengcan, died 606, the Third Zen Patriarch
Without distinction
Tag: Life
Quiet power
Sorcerers maintain that talking about ourselves makes us accessible and weak, while learning how to be quiet fills us with power.
A principle of the path of knowledge is to turn your own life into something so unpredictable that not even you yourself knows what’s going to happen.
Carlos Castaneda
The key
The key to our deepest happiness
lies in changing our vision
of where to find it
Sharon Salzberg, Finding your Way
Go with the flow
Get out of the construction business!
Stop building bridges across the raging waters of samsaric existence, attempting to reach the “far shore,” nirvana.
Better to simply relax, at ease and carefree, in total naturalness, and just go with the primordial flow, however it occurs and happens.
And remember this: whether or not you go with the flow, it always goes with you.
Nyoshül Khenpo Rinpoche, 1932 – 1999 , Tibetan lama
The heaven of the grass
What I know
I could put into a pack
as if it were bread and cheese, and carry it on one shoulder,
important and honorable, but so small!
While everything else continues, unexplained and unexplainable. How wonderful it is
to follow a thought quietly
to its logical end.
I have done this a few times.
But mostly I just stand in the dark field,
in the middle of the world, breathing
in and out. Life so far doesn’t have any other name
but breath and light, wind and rain.
If there’s a temple, I haven’t found it yet.
I simply go on drifting, in the heaven of the grass and the weeds.
Mary Oliver, What Is There Beyond Knowing
A vale of soul-making
Our path will always be strewn with broken branches and stones, yet even the obstacles in our path are part of the path. They make it real. We are not angels and the hard edges of the physical world offer a resistance that, if they do not break us first, can temper the soul and open it to another world, which is nowhere if not here .
This life is a “vale of Soul-making” Keats says. When we see it that way, being lost is not only part of the journey; it is the royal way of becoming real, meaning that our outer knowing can be an accurate reflection of our inner knowing.
Roger Housden, Ten poems for Difficult Times
Mindfulbalance 