Tag: Life

Balance

Karl Duffy1 Comment

I suspect that we too often have lost contact with the source of our own existence and have become strangers in our own house. We tend to run around trying to solve the problems of our world while anxiously avoiding confrontation with that reality wherein our problems find their deepest roots: our own selves.

In many ways we are like the busy executive who walks up to a precious flower and says: “What for God’s sake are you doing here? Can’t you get busy somehow?” and then finds the flower’s response incomprehensible: “I am sorry, but I am just here to be beautiful.”

How can we also come to this wisdom of the flower that being is more important than doing?

How can we come to a creative contact with the grounding of our own life?


Henri Nouwen

Tie your camel

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On getting the right balance between action and acceptance:

Anas ibn Malik reported: A man said, “O Messenger of Allah, should I tie my camel and trust in Allah, or should I leave her untied and trust in Allah?”

The Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, said, “Tie your camel and trust in Allah.”

Imam Abu `Isa Muhammad at-Tirmidhi, Sunan al-Tirmidhī, 2517

Relax the fist

Karl Duffy1 Comment

I hope you can live your life with slightly less firmly clenched fists and slightly more open hands. Slightly less control. Slightly more trust. Slightly less I need to know everything beforehand. Slightly more take life as it comes. It does all of us a world of good. Life doesn’t have to be lived with constant anxiety about things not turning out the way we want. We don’t have to make ourselves smaller than we are. We have a choice. Do we want to grab life by he throat or do we want to embrace it?

Relax that fist as often as you can.

Bjorn Natthiko Lindeblad, I May be Wrong, and other wisdoms from life as a Forest Monk.

Sunday Quote: We can choose joy

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It’s not what happens but how we relate to it…

Is it the weather that is cold,

or is it the person who is cold?

Think neither cold nor heat —  at that moment, where is the self to be found?

Dogen, again, in his commentary on Dongshan’s (807–869) koan “Cold and Heat”

Eating breakfast

Karl Duffy1 Comment

We sometimes think that happiness comes from special circumstances or lofty insights, involving practices which require great effort, rather than the simple day-to-day circumstances before us:

Dropping off body and mind is good practice.

[There is]…nothing fundamental to rely on, including not others, not self, not sentient beings, and not causes or conditions.

Although this is so, eating breakfast comes first.

Dogen, 1200-1253, founder of the Soto branch of Zen Buddhism.

(“Dropping off body and mind” refers to sitting meditation)

You know you have to follow

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There is a road always beckoning.

When you see the two sides of it

closing together at that far horizon

and deep in the foundations of your own heart

at exactly the same time,

that’s how you know it’s the road

you have to follow.

that’s how you know

it’s where you have to go.

That’s how you know.

It’s just beyond yourself,

it’s where you need to be.

David Whyte, Just Beyond Yourself