The trail is the thing, not the end of the trail.
Travel too fast,
and you miss all you are travelling for
Louis L’Amour, Western author
Slow down
Tag: Meditation
Keep the mind high
What is important is to keep our mind high in the world of true understanding and returning to the world of our daily experience to seek therein the truth of beauty.
No matter what we may be doing at a given moment, we must not forget that it has a bearing upon our everlasting self, which is poetry.
Matsuo Bashō, 1644 – 1694
New Spring blossoms
Long ago and far from here, a pilgrim was traveling in the hills. His thoughts were like clouds and dreams. He became lost in his walking.
He rounded a bend, and on the opposite wall of the canyon there was a peach tree in blossom. The blossoms were white with crimson in the center. No veil separated him from them, and suddenly the peach blossoms were him. The tree, the river, the birds, the sunlight, the morning cold – everything was peach blossoms. He laughed out loud. His name was Lingyun, and he wrote:
“For thirty years I searched for a Master Swordsman.
How many times did the leaves fall, and the branches burst into bud?
But from the moment I saw these peach blossoms,
I’ve had no doubts”.
It can be a shock – the heart coming forth. Anything, anything that we meet, is a peach blossom. An email about cancer, a phone call, the winter moonrise. When we truly meet any part of the universe, we recognize it. It feels like I’m seeing my own face. The things I thought I needed to be happy, I don’t need. I don’t need the perfectly respectable life that everyone wants. Mainly I don’t need to know what happens next. My own life is an unknown path through peach blossoms.
John Tarrant, The World Catches Us Every Time
The trick
The trick, as far as Buddhism is concerned,
is to accept the fact that no experience can ever be as complete as we would wish,
that no object can ever satisfy completely
Mark Epstein
A prayer for these times
This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.
Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated
And let my cry come unto Thee.
T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday
Worried
The purpose of meditation is to come back to who we actually are.
We are not only the often harried and worried self we feel we are.
Nor the one excited by the prospect of pleasures to enjoy, and fearful of losing out on them
Henry Shukman
Mindfulbalance 