Tag: Mindfulness

This day – do not waste the invitations

Karl Duffy3 Comments

We often rush through a day – preoccupied with the practical things that need to get done – that we do not have time to celebrate:

A journey can become a sacred thing:

Make sure, before you go, to take the time
To bless your going forth,
To free your heart of ballast
So that the compass of your soul
Might direct you toward the territories of spirit
Where you will discover more of your hidden life,
And the urgencies that deserve to claim you

May you travel in an awakened way,
Gathered wisely into your inner ground;
That you may not waste the invitations
Which wait along the way to transform you.

John O Donohue, For the Traveler

What sustains us on the way

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Mystery is not much in favor these days. The notion that there are limits to what we can do, what we can know, limits to our dominion, does not sit well with kings and queens of the hill. Humility and reverence, we hear, are the attitudes of cowards. . . . By ‘mystery’ I do not mean simply the blank places on our maps. I mean the divine source — not a void, not a darkness, but an uncapturable fullness. We are sustained by processes and powers that we can neither fathom nor do without. I speak of that ground as holy because it is ultimate, it is what makes us possible, that shapes and upholds everything we see. The stories I am most interested in hearing, reading, and telling, are those that help us imagine our lives in relation to that ground.

Scott Russell Sanders, Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World

A spirit of adventure

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Not a bad attitude to have as we start the day, seeing moments – even difficult ones – as “adventures” .

Wish that your journey be a long one, 

full of adventures, full of knowing.

(Vα εύχεσαι να είναι μακρύς ο δρόμος, γεμάτος περιπέτειες, γεμάτος γνώσεις)

Cavafy’s advice to Odysseus before he set out on his voyage back to Ithaca

Step by step

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Mind always goes ahead or lags behind.

Remain with the moment.

Osho

 

Sunday Quote: A unique life

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Traveler, your footprints
are the only road, nothing else.
Traveler, there is no path;
you make your own path as you walk.

Antonio Machado

On a journey

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A new month. We think we know where we are going.

Surely it is better to wait and see, moment by moment. Who knows where we will end up?

Whales follow
the whale-roads.
Geese, roads of magnetized air.

Yet how often
the heart
that set out for Peru
arrives in China,

Steering hard.
consulting the charts
the whole journey.

Jane Hirshfield, China