Whether success or failure: the truth of a life really has little to do with its quality.
The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight.
The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.
May Sarton
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Mary Oliver, The Summer Day [extract]
There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives. Some find it in the place of their birth; others may leave a seaside town, parched, and find themselves refreshed in the desert. There are those born in rolling countryside who are really only at ease in the intense and busy loneliness of the city. For some, the search is for the imprint of another; a child or a mother, a grandfather or a brother, a lover, a husband, a wife, or a foe. We may go through our lives happy or unhappy, successful or unfulfilled, loved or unloved, without ever standing cold with the shock of recognition, without ever feeling the agony as the twisted iron in our soul unlocks itself and we slip at last into place.
Josephine Hart, Damage
If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.
Picasso
The sounds of streams
are Buddha’s speech.
The coloured mountains
are Buddha’s pure body.
Night brings eighty-four thousand poems of Buddha.
Listen, someday you may awaken.
Su Shi, 1037 – 1101, Chinese calligrapher, essayist and poet.
Spiritual practice is not about accomplishing anything — not about winning or losing — but about ceasing to struggle and relaxing as it is.
Pema Chodron
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