The forest is peaceful, why aren’t you?
You hold on to things, causing your confusion.
Let nature teach you. Hear the bird’s song then let go.
If you know nature, you’ll know the Way. If you know the Way, you’ll know nature.
Ajahn Chah
photo Phil Champion
Be attentive and notice that whatever arises passes away; that whatever condition of your mind or body – whether it is a sensation of pleasure or pain, feeling or memory, sight, sound, smell, taste or touch, inside or outside – is just a condition. It’s important to reflect on what ‘ignorance’ really means when .. called … the origin of all suffering. ‘Being ignorant’ means that we identify with these conditions, by regarding them as ‘me’ or ‘mine’, or as something that we don’t want to be ‘me’ or ‘mine’. We’ve got the idea that we’ve got to find some permanent pleasant condition, we have to achieve something, get something we don’t have. But you can notice that desire in your mind is a moving thing, looking for something, so it’s a changing condition that arises and passes away – it’s not-self.
Ajahn Sumedho, Everything that arises passes away
photo sean p bender
Whatever is subject to arising,
is also subject to passing away
Collection of Middle-length Discourses, 56
photo jm garg
Here in the Irish and Celtic calendar, the season of Autumn began on Monday, the 1st of September. Although the weather is still very mild, the mornings are misty and some leaves have already started to fall. We are moving into a period which helps us reflect on impermanence and on the fact that all things change. Our meditation practice reminds us that there is only suffering to be had when we try to fix things solid, or hold onto them, like the long days of summer or the memories of times past. We instinctively prefer permanence and how it tells a story of a solid, single identity. Instead, in reality, like the seasons, we are always changing; things come and go in our lives. Nature lets go and moves on. Maybe we can learn from that.
If I can let you go as trees let go
Their leaves, so casually, one by one;
If I can come to know what they do know,
That fall is the release, the consummation,
Then fear of time and the uncertain fruit
Would not distemper the great lucid skies
This strangest autumn, mellow and acute.
If I can take the dark with open eyes
And call it seasonal, not harsh or strange
(For love itself may need a time of sleep),
And, treelike, stand unmoved before the change,
Lose what I lose to keep what I can keep,
The strong root still alive under the snow,
Love will endure – if I can let you go.
May Sarton, Autumn Sonnets
photo of the Barrow river at Bagenalstown, Co. Carlow.
Every one of us is called upon, probably many times, to start a new life: a frightening diagnosis, a marriage, a move, a loss of a job or a limb or a loved one, a graduation, bringing a new baby home: it’s impossible to think at first how this all will be possible. Eventually, what moves it all forward is the subterranean ebb and flow of being alive among the living.
In my own worst seasons I’ve come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with my life again.
Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again
Barbara Kingsolver High Tide in Tucson
As human beings, not only do we seek resolution, but we also feel that we deserve resolution. However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution. We don’t deserve resolution; we deserve something better than that. We deserve our birthright, which is the middle way, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity. To the degree that we’ve been avoiding uncertainty, we’re naturally going to have withdrawal symptoms — withdrawal from always thinking that there’s a problem and that someone, somewhere, needs to fix it.
Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart
photo sajid213
