Most of our energy goes into upholding our importance.
If we were capable of losing some of that importance….We would free our energy from trying to maintain the illusory idea of our grandeur;
and we would provide ourselves with enough energy to catch a glimpse of the actual grandeur of the universe.
Carlos Castaneda
Lent and Ramadan both start this week : invitations to reflect.
Each person is born with an unencumbered spot, free of expectation and regret, free of ambition and embarrassment, free of fear and worry.
To know this spot of inwardness is to know who we are, not by surface markers of identity, not by where we work or what we wear or how we like to be addressed, but by feeling our place in relation to the Infinite and by inhabiting it.
This is a hard lifelong task, for the nature of becoming is a constant filming over of where we begin, while the nature of being is a constant erosion of what is not essential. Each of us lives in the midst of this ongoing tension, growing tarnished or covered over, only to be worn back to that incorruptible spot of grace at our core.
Mark Nepo, Unlearning Back to God
Today is Pancake Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday. In Latin countries, it marks the end of the Carnival period, Mardi Gras or “Fat Tuesday”. The practice of carnival probably began in ancient times when the last Sunday before the beginning of Lent was called Dominica Carnevala, or “farewell to meat Sunday” – referring to the upcoming Lenten period of fasting and simplification
.Simplify the problem of life:
distinguish the necessary and the real.
Probe the earth to see where your main roots run.
Thoreau
Remember to keep a calm head in difficult times
[aequam memento rebus in arduis servare mentem]
Horace, Odes, book II, poem III, lines 1 – 2
Developing good habits for a new month:
A practice is any act habitually entered into with our whole heart that takes us to the deeper place. Some of these practices, we might not think of as prayer and meditation: tending the roses, a long, slow walk to no place in particular, a quiet moment at day’s end, being vulnerable in the presence of that person in whose presence we’re taken to the deeper place, the pause between two lines of a poem.
There are these acts that reground us in the depth dimensions of our life that matter most; so if we’re faithful to our practice, our practice will be faithful to us.
James Finlay, Practice That Grounds Us in the Sustaining Love of God
A person who thinks all the time
has nothing to think about except thoughts,
so he loses touch with reality and lives in a world of illusion.
Alan Watts
Mindfulbalance 