Tag: Life

No Maps

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

File:Ortelius 1592 Ireland Map.jpg

It’s so tempting to want the answers before we begin the journey. We like to know our way.  We like to have maps.  We like to have guides.  But we are more like a breathing puzzle, a living bag of pieces, and each day shows us what a piece or two is for, where it might go, how it might fit.  Over time, a picture starts to emerge by which we begin to understand our place in the world. Unfortunately we waste a lot of time seeking someone to tell us what life will be like once we live it. We drain ourselves of vital inner fortitude by asking others to map our way. The instructions are in the living.

Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening

Map of Ireland 1592 by Abraham Ortelius

A different day

Karl Duffy8 Comments

dawn jura

If you’re determined to think of yourself as limited, fearful, vulnerable, or scarred by past experience,

know only that you have chosen to do so,

and that the opportunity to experience yourself differently is always available

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, The Joy of Living

Losing and starting again

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Big Tree

We did not come to remain whole.
We came to lose our leaves like the trees,
The trees that are broken
And start again, drawing up on great roots;
Like mad poets captured by the Moors,
Men who live out
A second life.

Robert Bly, A Home in the Dark Grass

Not trying to impress

Karl Duffy2 Comments

chinese mountains 2

The secret of the mountain is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no “meaning,” they are meaning; the mountains are. The sun is round. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, there is a ringing that we share.

Peter Matthiessen, the Snow Leopard

 

Attached to the idea

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File:Comic book superheros (7153401117).jpg

In the midst of this vast, unfathomable, ever-changing, dying, and renewing flow of life, the human brain  ceaselessly engages in trying to fix for itself a state of permanency and certainty. Having the capacity to think and form pictures of ourselves, to remember them and become deeply attached to them, we take this world of pictures and ideas for real. We thoroughly believe in the reality of the picture story of our personal life. We are totally identified with it and want it to go on forever.  The idea of “forever” is itself an invention of the human brain. Forever is a dream.

Toni Packer, The Work of this Moment

photo helgi halldorsson

Sunday Quote: The process, not the result

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Macro shot of tiny flowers on a wall

We think that accomplishing things will complete us,

when it is experiencing life that will.

Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening

Photo from the beautiful site http://www.judesphotography.wordpress.com