From the beginning
the flying birds have left
no footprints on the blue sky
Musō Soseki, Zen Buddhist Monk, calligraphy artist, poem writer, and garden designer, 1275 – 1351
photo wing chi poon
Hold everything lightly
Tag: Life
….Not taking things personally
In fully allowing conditions to be what they are, we stabilize our hearts and find peace. It’s like putting a boat into water. We make an ark of truth: ‘the conditions are like this,’ and in that truth, we don’t adopt the conditions as our own. This is important: you can’t drain the sea, but you don’t have to drown.
Ajahn Sucitto, Parami
photo pmalkowski
…
The basic choice….
When I was about six years old I received an essential …. teaching from an old woman sitting in the sun. I was walking by her house one day feeling lonely, unloved, and mad, kicking anything I could find. Laughing, she said to me, “Little girl, don’t you go letting life harden your heart.” Right there, I received this pith instruction: We can let the circumstances of our lives harden us so that we become increasingly resentful and afraid, or we can let them soften us and make us kinder and more open to what scares us. We always have the choice.
Pema Chodron, The Places that Scare you
photo vivian eng
Welcoming everything that happens today
The understanding of welcome, outlined in this post, applies not just to other people but also to the emotions and thoughts provoked by everything that happens today:
Hospitality means creating welcoming space for the other. Henri J. Nouwen notes that the Dutch word for hospitality, gastvrijheid, means ‘the freedom of the guest.’ It entails creating not just physical room but emotional spaciousness where the stranger can enter and be himself or herself, where the stranger can become ally instead of threat, friend instead of enemy: “That precious experience — when contemplated, cherished, and celebrated — enables me in turn to welcome others: I begin to be less fearful of the other; I start to see the stranger as gift. I become willing to create space in myself to invite the other in, and I open myself to the possibility of being changed by the presence of the other“.
Sister Marilyn Lacey, Creating Welcoming Space, from Awakin org
photo hyougushi
The quiet growth of winter
Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence,
and I learn, whatever state I may be in,
therein to be content
Helen Keller.
photo berit
Standing here
One of our human absurdities is the fact that we’re constantly thinking about either the future or the past. Those who are young think of the future because they’ve got more of it. Those who are older think more about the past because, for them, there is more of it. But in order to experience life, we have to live each moment. Life has not been happening in the past. That’s memory. Life is not going to happen in the future. That’s planning. The only time we can live is now, this moment, and as absurd as it may seem, we’ve got to learn that. As human beings with life spans of sixty, seventy, or eighty years, we have to learn to actually experience living in the present. When we have learned that, we will have eliminated a great many of our problems.
Ayya Khema, Being Nobody, Going Nowhere
photo ali
