Tag: Life

Keep believing

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It’s madness to hate all roses because you got scratched with one thorn, to give up all dreams because one of them didn’t come true, to give up all attempts because one of them failed. …..

There will always be another opportunity, another friend, another love, a new strength. For every end, there is always a new beginning….. And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

Hidden in plain sight

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Just as well, with the amount of rain we are getting in Ireland…

I had a discussion with a great master in Japan, and we were talking about the various people who are working to translate the Zen books into English, and he said,”That’s a waste of time.

If you really understand Zen, you can use any book. You could use the bible. You could use Alice in Wonderland. you could use the dictionary, because the sound of the rain needs no translation”.

Alan Watts, In my Own Way

Sunday Quote: A light in the heart

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No striving, no grasping at this or that, no entertaining any self-involved stories whatsoever.

Instead, attention pivots toward a light in the heart in which the ‘field of boundless emptiness’ is revealed.

All questions and doubts are put to rest.

Hongzhi Zhengjue, 1091–1157, Chinese Chan Buddhist monk

This practice

Karl Duffy1 Comment

If you can’t sleep, get up. Make tea. Pray. If you can’t pray, pray anyway. Light a candle. Kneel. Watch. If you can’t watch, watch anyway.

There are hares looking for food. And there are sleeping robins beyond the dark window. There are burrowing things burrowing.

There is this posture, this story, this practice, that – even if nothing else holds you – holds you.

Pádraig Ó Tuama, Irish poet, creater of the beautiful podcast Poetry Unbound

Seeing piece by piece

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE.

And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one.

We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sunday Quote: Before

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Can you remember who you were,

before the world told you who you should be?

Charles Bukowski, 1920 – 1994, American poet, novelist, and short story writer.