We spend all our energy and waste our lives trying to re-create zones of safety, which are always falling apart. That’s the essence of samsara – the cycle of suffering that comes from continuing to seek happiness in all the wrong places.
Pema Chodron, Comfortable with Uncertainty: 108 Ways Teachings on Cultivating Fearlessness and Compassion
With no mind, flowers lure the butterfly;
With no mind, the butterfly visits the blossoms.
Yet when flowers bloom, the butterfly comes;
When the butterfly comes, the flowers bloom.
Ryokan, 1758 – 1831, Buddhist monk, hermit and poet.
When you allow for uncertainty, then you don’t always have to find solutions. You can live through a problem until it’s not a problem anymore. Instead of seeing things as problems, you see the life you are living. You can live your way into the answers. This is different from standing outside of your life and throwing stones at your problems from a safe distance.
John Tarrant, Why Play with Koans?
Meister Eckhart said, “There is a place in the soul — there is a place in the soul that neither time, nor space, nor no created thing can touch.” And I really thought that was amazing, and what it means is that your identity is not equivalent to your biography. And that there is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there’s still a sureness in you, where there’s a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you. And I think the intention of prayer and spirituality and love is now and again to visit that inner kind of sanctuary.
John O’Donoghue, Interview with Krista Tippett, On Being
And the heart, unscrolled,
is comforted by such small things:
a cup of green tea rescues us,
grows deep and large,
a lake
Jane Hirshfield, Recalling a Sung Dynasty Landscape
chris gladis
We can sometimes feel fragmented in our inner life, sucked into a crisis, pulled in all directions, but…
There is not a “fragment” in all nature,
for every relative fragment of one thing
is a full harmonious unit in itself.
John Muir, A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf
