Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday.
It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain.
You can feel the silent and invisible life.
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
Tag: Mindfulness
You can choose
What I want to say is
that the past is the past,
and the present is what your life is,
and you are capable
of choosing what that will be,
darling citizen.
So come to the pond,
or the river of your imagination,
or the harbor of your longing,
and put your lips to the world.
And live
your life.
Mary Oliver, from Mornings at Blackwater
In its own time
Its only when caterpillarness is done that one becomes a butterfly.
That again is part of this paradox.
You cannot rip away caterpillarness.
The whole trip occurs in an unfolding process of which we have no control.
Ram Dass
Believing our fears
Sometimes we build a reality out of our greatest fears or anticipate the worst of others, when the reality is far from what we have constructed:
Unaware that our stories are stories, we usually experience them as the world. Like fish that do not see the water they swim in, we normally do not notice the medium we dwell within. We take for granted that the world we experience is just the way things are. But our concepts and ideas about the world, like the stories they are part of, strongly affect our perception of reality. In … practice, one learns, early on and then continually, the truth of my favorite bumper sticker: “Don’t believe everything you think.”
David Loy, The World Is Made of Stories
The awake silence within
All that is necessary to awaken to yourself as the radiant emptiness of spirit
is to stop seeking something more or better or different,
and to turn your attention inward to the awake silence that you are.
Adyashanti
What is holding you back?
A monk asked the master Sengcan: “Master, show me the way to liberation.”
Sengcan replied: “Who binds you?”
The monk replied: “No one binds me.”
Sengcan said: “Then why do you seek liberation?”
