Our original face

If we’ve been eating a regular meal of resentment toward our spouse, our boss, our parents, or “the world,” the boat’s going to come back around in the next minute because it’s accustomed to us filling our plate. But we must be able to ask and to discover, “Who was I before I resented my spouse? And even before that?”

This is the primary way we learn to live in our True Self, where we are led by a foundational “yes,” not by the petty push backs of “no.”

Richard Rohr

Reality, as it is

Zen is not some fancy, special art of living.

Our teaching is just to live,

always in reality, in its exact sense.

 Shunryu Suzuki Roshi 

Ordinary

We need to remember that in sharp contrast to … self-seeking exceptionality, God works through the ordinary. Meister Eckhart gives us a word here: “If you are doing anything special, you’re not seeking God.”

Maggie Ross, Anglican hermit and theologian

Sunday Quote: Two sides

Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Manon, Ballerina

The movement of life

A season or an hour of the day is a visitation whose return is not always assured. Every spring following a long winter feels as miraculous as if we are seeing it for the first time. Out of the dead garden rises abundance beyond a winter eye’s comprehension…..To make friends with the hours is to come to know all the hidden correspondences inside our own bodies that match the richness and movement of life we see around us. 

David Whyte, Time is a Season

mundane miracles

Today is Candlemas, another ancient feast, this one dating from the 4th Century in the Christian tradition, reflecting a need to mark this moment – halfway between the winter and the spring solstices – by bringing light into the darkness. 

Spirituse me today, not in some miracle that

would make others marvel, and would make me proud.

Not in the word of wisdom, that would stay in the mind

and make me remembered.

Not in the heroic act, that would change the world for the better

and me for the worse.

But in the mundane miracles, of honesty and truth,

that keep the sky from falling.

In the unremembered quiet words, that keep a soul on the path.

And in the unnoticed acts, that keep the world moving

slowly closer to the light.

Grahame Davis, Prayer