The sailor who does not adjust to the wind conditions will have a difficult time.
One ship drives east and another drives west by the same winds that blow.
Its the set of the sails
and not the gales that determines the way they go.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox, 1850 – 1919, American author and poet.
It’s not the road ahead that wears you out –
it’s the grain of sand in your shoe.
Old Arabian Proverb
A lunar eclipse tonight
Just as we can’t see all the phases of the moon on any one night, we can’t hear the phases of truth or the heart unless we listen for how the truth of feeling grows full and dark and full again over time.
Patience, the art of waiting, is the heart-skill that opens the world. I’m discovering after all these years that listening deeply over time is one uninterrupted growing – one continuous act.
In this way, the tree on that ridge bending to the wind till it grows to the bend is how it listens over time. And in the act of receiving our darkest cries, the heart begins to soften the howl of our wound.
Mark Nepo, Seven Thousand Ways to Listen
The teaching on impermanence (anicca) is not a morbid fixation on decay but a clear-eyed recognition of the way things are. Everything that arises passes away – this is the nature of all conditioned phenomena. The body, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness are all in a state of continual flux.
When we resist this truth, we suffer. We grasp at relationships, possessions, even our own identities, as if they could be permanent. But the tighter we cling, the more pain we feel when they inevitably change.
The path to liberation lies in fully realizing anicca – not just as an idea, but as a direct experience. Through meditation, we watch the breath come and go, sensations shift, thoughts dissolve. Over time, the heart learns to let go. We see that because all things are impermanent, nothing is worth clinging to.
This is why the Buddha said: ‘All conditioned things are impermanent—when one sees this with wisdom, one turns away from suffering.’ (Dhammapada 277)
Ajahn Amaro, The Island
There seems to be two kinds of searchers: those who seek to make their ego something other than it is, i.e. holy, happy, unselfish . . .
and those who understand
that all such attempts are just gesticulation and playacting, that there is only one thing that can be done,
which is to dis-identify themselves with the ego, by realising its unreality, and by becoming aware of their eternal identity with pure Being.
Wei Wu Wei, [Terence James Stannus Gray] 1895 -1986, writer on Taoism
The moment you have the idea of becoming something, there is striving, there is effort, there is conflict.
But if you can simply observe what is without trying to change it, then there is a totally different kind of energy
– not the energy of resistance, but the energy of understanding.
Jiddu Krisnamurti, Freedom from the Known
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