Mostly I just stand in the dark field,
in the middle of the world, breathing
in and out. Life so far doesn’t have any other name
but breath and light, wind and rain.
If there’s a temple, I haven’t found it yet.
Mary Oliver, What is there Beyond Knowing
photo Andy Beecroft
All things, the grass as well as the trees,
are tender and soft while alive
When dead, they are withered and dried.
Therefore the stiff and the rigid are companions of death
The gentle and the kind are the companions of life
Lao Tzu
photo Francisco Javier Epinoza Pérez
A thousand times I have ascertained and
found it to be true:
The affairs of this world are really nothing
into nothing.
Still though, we should dance.
Hafiz
Breath – you invisible poem!
Pure, continuous change
with all that is, flow and counterflow
where rhythmically I come to be.
Each time a wave that occurs just once in a sea I discover I am.
You, innermost of oceans, you, infinitude of space.
How many far places were once within me.
Some winds are like my own child.
When I breathe them now, do they know me again?
Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus II, 1
photo Zwiadowca21
I have learned to live each day as it comes,
and not to borrow trouble by dreading tomorrow.
It is the dark menace of the future that makes cowards of us.
Dorothy Day, American journalist and Catholic Social activist
photo Audrey
One of the aims of meditation practice is to develop a mind that sees, and does not get hooked into events too easily. The “Ten Thousand things” in this quote is a shorthand way of talking about all the experiences – good and bad – which arise and pass away. It stands for all of reality, which contains the right mix of experiences for our growth, and with its ebbs and flows is continually rearranging itself.
When the ten thousand things are viewed in their oneness
we return to the origin
and remain where we have always been.
Sosan, Third Zen Patriarch, died 606
