While sitting on the floor of a room in Japan and looking out on a small garden with flowers blooming and dragon flies hovering in space, I sensed that this small world, almost underfoot, shall I say, had a validity all its own, but must be realized and appreciated from its own level in space.
I suddenly felt I had too long been exclusively above my boots.
Mark George Tobey, 1890 – 1976, American painted, strongly influenced by Asian calligraphy.
Not adding to our inevitable difficulties by lamenting, resisting, feeling sorry for ourselves, or making them into the story of our lives. One of the Buddhas most useful teachings: how we speak to ourselves about our challenges reduces our suffering.
Now a well-instructed person, when touched with a feeling of pain, does not sorrow, grieve, or lament, does not beat his breast or become distraught. So he feels one pain: physical, but not mental. As they are touched by that painful feeling, they are not resistant. No resistance-obsession with regard to that painful feeling consumes them.
Just as if they were to shoot a person with an arrow and, right afterward, did not shoot them with another one, so that they would feel the pain of only one arrow. In the same way, when touched with a feeling of pain, the well-instructed person does not sorrow, grieve, or lament, does not beat his breast or become distraught. They feels one pain: physical, but not mental
Their accepting or rejecting are scattered, gone to their end, do not exist. Knowing the dustless, sorrowless state, they discern rightly, are beyond becoming, have gone to the Further Shore.
The Buddha, The Sallatha Sutta
Nobody said it was easy, to stay in the fire, stay alert, and forebear.
But the alternative is to suffer what is, anyway,
but with no true or reliable relationship with it
Susan Murphy, Upside-Down Zen
The secret of Zen is just two words: not always so.
[In Japanese it is two words]
Suzuki Roshi
How do we accurately evaluate our options and make purposeful decisions when we are so powerfully influenced by our past? Our capacity to be here, now, is always highly problematic.
Holding on to consciousness when history floods us is one of the most difficult things we ever do. And achieving it now is no guarantee that we can do the same tomorrow. Only the sustained effort to remain conscious simultaneously of our own unique journey and the earlier, blocking paradigm, brings the possibility of mature choice.
James Hollis, The Eden Project
Where is our comfort but in the free, uninvolved, finally mysterious beauty and grace of this world, that we did not make, that has no price?
Where is our sanity but there?
Where is our pleasure but in working and resting kindly in the presence of this world?
Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace
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