Let go of the mind, the thousand blue
story fragments we tell ourselves
each day to keep the world underfoot.
If you can awaken
inside the familiar
and discover it strange
you need never leave home.
Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser, Braided Creek : A Conversation in Poetry
No activity can be successfully pursued by an individual who is preoccupied … since the mind when distracted absorbs nothing deeply, but rejects everything which is, so to speak, crammed into it.
Living is the least important activity of the preoccupied man; yet there is nothing which is harder to learn… Learning how to live takes a whole life, and, which may surprise you more, it takes a whole life to learn how to die.
Seneca, On the Shortness of LIfe
If we pay attention, we will realize that every moment around us, there is a world that we did not create that’s been there for 13.8 billion years, and there’s trillions of cells in your body that are doing what they’re supposed to do, and all of nature, everything.
You wake up and you realize, “I’m not doing any of this. I didn’t make my body. I didn’t make my mind think. I don’t make my heart beat. I don’t make my breath breathe, etc, etc, yet I have this notion that I have to make things happen. Yet, all throughout the universe, things are happening everywhere and I’m not doing them, so why exactly am I the one that’s in charge of what’s unfolding in front of me?”
What you realize at some point is that you’re not; that the moment in front of you that’s unfolding is no different than all the zillions of other moments that aren’t in front of you that are unfolding in accordance to the laws of nature, the laws of creation. You start to practice saying, “I want to pay attention to what the universe is creating in front of me just like it’s creating everywhere where I’m not, and let me see how I can participate in that – be part of that – instead of interfering with it with my desires and my fears.”
That’s living from a place of surrender.
Michael Singer, Living From A Place Of Surrender, Sounds True Blog
More from the always inspiring Dogen. Very little can be added to this as we start another week…
In performing your duties maintain
joyful mind,
kind mind
and great mind
Dogen, 1200 – 1253, Buddhist monk, founder of the Soto school of Zen.
Wait in the stillness, until you get what you came for.
Byron Katie
Hell is timely, for hell is the thought
that hell will go on, on and on, without end.
Heaven is only present, instantaneous and eternal,
a mayfly, a blue dayflower, a life entirely given,
complete forever in its hour.
Wendell Berry, VIII
Mindfulbalance 