Inside this new love, die. Your way begins on the other side. Become the sky.
Take an axe to the prison wall. Escape. Walk out like someone suddenly born into colour.
Do it now. You’re covered with thick cloud. Slide out the side. Die, and be quiet.
Quietness is the surest sign that you’ve died. Your old life was a frantic running from silence.
The speechless full moon comes out now.
Rumi, Quietness
This moment is always here, since we know no other moment than the present moment.
It is always dying, always becoming past more rapidly than imagination can conceive. Yet at the same time it is always being born, always new, emerging just as rapidly from that complete unknown we call the future.
Thinking about it almost makes you breathless.
Alan Watts
If we go forward, we die; if we go backward, we die.
So let’s go forward and die.
African Proverb
A walk is just as good…
When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having,
just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road,
without a thought on anything but on the ride you are taking.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Scientific American, 1896
[or as I saw it written on a wall in Italy…”pedala senza pensare a nient’altro che alla strada che percorri”]
Who needs to reach beyond all this wonder surrounding us….
Who needs to feel they will survive their death, either as a transcendent conscious soul residing in heaven or re-entering nature again and again?
What we are given is precious enough – a moment of awareness.
Andrew Olendzki, Unlimiting Mind: The Radically Experiential Psychology of Buddhism
It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.
Alain de Botton, A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary
Mindfulbalance 