All things, the grass as well as the trees,
are tender and soft while alive
When dead, they are withered and dried.
Therefore the stiff and the rigid are companions of death
The gentle and the kind are the companions of life
Lao Tzu
photo Francisco Javier Epinoza Pérez
A thousand times I have ascertained and
found it to be true:
The affairs of this world are really nothing
into nothing.
Still though, we should dance.
Hafiz
I have learned to live each day as it comes,
and not to borrow trouble by dreading tomorrow.
It is the dark menace of the future that makes cowards of us.
Dorothy Day, American journalist and Catholic Social activist
photo Audrey
One of the aims of meditation practice is to develop a mind that sees, and does not get hooked into events too easily. The “Ten Thousand things” in this quote is a shorthand way of talking about all the experiences – good and bad – which arise and pass away. It stands for all of reality, which contains the right mix of experiences for our growth, and with its ebbs and flows is continually rearranging itself.
When the ten thousand things are viewed in their oneness
we return to the origin
and remain where we have always been.
Sosan, Third Zen Patriarch, died 606
The most heartbreaking thing is not heartbreak; it’s avoiding heartbreak. Inside the transience of life is the thusness of everything, of the tree with forty crows on it in the winter, the sound of death-metal drums from the kids in the barn, and the feeling of sadness when you lose someone. A lot of suffering is resistance to the life of feeling. If you surrender, you are surrendering to what is really going on. This is just to notice that nothing beyond your life is more important than your life.
John Tarrant, Surprises on the Way
I will always have fears,
but I need not be my fears—
for I have other places in my inner landscape
from which I can speak and act
Parker Palmer
photo of morning sun at Portmarnock, Co. Dublin
