If the path before you is clear,
you’re probably on someone else’s
Joseph Campbell
photo gthills
Tag: Life
Bare Attention
If you would look at a flower, any thought about that flower prevents you from looking at it. The words the rose, the violet, it is this flower, that flower, it is that species, keep you from observing. To look there must be no interference of the word, which is the objectifying of thought. There must be freedom from the word, and to look there must be silence; otherwise you can’t look. If you look at your wife or husband, all the memories that you have had, either of pleasure or pain, interfere with looking. It is only when you look without the image that there is a relationship.
Jiddu Krisnmurti.
Photo Daniel J Layton
Slow time
I went for a walk yesterday, but being Ireland, it started to rain and I had to abandon my plans. The day before had been so warm and bright…At times like this we can get irritated, as what “should” have happened gets disrupted. We rush on to the next moment, not noticing what is actually in front of us. We want reality to correspond to what we think should be going on, and do not go slow enough to notice what actually is:
Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through.
Become inclined to watch the way of rain
When it falls slow and free.
Imitate the habit of twilight,
Taking time to open the well of color
That fostered the brightness of day.
Draw alongside the silence of stone
Until its calmness can claim you.
Be excessively gentle with yourself.
Stay clear of those vexed in spirit.
Learn to linger around someone of ease
Who feels they have all the time in the world.
Gradually, you will return to yourself,
Having learned a new respect for your heart
And the joy that dwells far within slow time.
John O’Donohue, A Blessing for One who is Exhausted.
photo adrian benko
Not wasting moments
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
photo: martin dawes
Sunday Quote: What is important
What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments,
but what is woven into the lives of others.
Pericles, Greek Statesman, Orator and General, 495 – 429 BC
photo rod waddington
What Holiness is
This is, I think, what holiness is:
the natural world, where every moment is full
of the passion to keep moving.
Inside every mind there’s a hermit’s cave full of light,
full of snow, full of concentration.
I’ve knelt there, and so have you,
hanging on to what you love,
to what is lovely.
Mary Oliver, At the Lake
photo of St. Finbar’s Oratory, Gougane Barra by (WT shared) Spircle at wts Wikivoyage
