What is in front of you

Happiness lies not in finding what is missing,

but in finding what is present

Tara Brach

Don’t hide love

Don’t hide love.

If you feel it, express it – not to demand that others love you back, but simply to live outwardly the best of what you feel inwardly.

The worst that can happen to your heart is not rejection by another person but failure to act on the love you feel. 

Martha Beck

Sunday Quote: Reaching the mystery

We all have an deep seated drive to seek happiness somewhere else, with special conditions

Reaching the mystery is nothing other than breaking through

and grabbing an ordinary person’s life.

Zen saying

Stretch upwards

Saw some Giant Redwood trees walking in the grounds of Emo Court last weekend. They are quite young compared to the ones in California – only 170 years – being planted in 1853, but still an impressive size

Some of these trees have been here since Jesus walked on water

Some of these trees have been here

since Vikings drove their boats

onto the shores of Newfoundland…

Some of these trees have survived lightning strikes and forest fires…..

They have grown beyond

their trauma and focus now

on the daily climb, the adding-on

of needle and bark, on nature’s drive

to rise above and see beyond

until the day when death will fell them

and the earth will add them to its riches.

We can be like these trees, pull on the layers of living like fine

new garments, house the needy

in the caverns of our grief, grow

beyond the stories of our scars

stretch our branches toward the bristling stars.

Tamara Madison, American poet, Sequoia Sempervirens [extract], from the A Year of Being Here blog

Ordinary mind

When the mind is at peace,
the world too is at peace.
Nothing real, nothing absent.
Not holding on to reality,
not getting stuck in the void,
you are neither holy nor wise, just
an ordinary fellow who has completed his work.

P’ang Yün (Layman Pang) died 808, famous lay practitioner of Ch’an Buddhism

What matters

All that matters is what you love
and what you love is who you are
and who you are is where you will be
when death takes you across the river.

John Squadra, 1932 – American artist and poet