I came to the very edge
where nothing at all needs saying …
Pablo Neruda, It is Born
photo calflier001
Tag: Mindfulness
Not always rushing
The Buddhists define spirituality as shamatha, or “tranquil abiding.” We are drawn to a spiritual path out of a desire for tranquil abiding. Just saying the words feels wonderful, like an antidote to the fear, unhappiness, and anxiety with which we often approach life. Fear of what? Fear of our basic human condition. If we stop long enough to take a quiet look at our situation, we’ll hear the tick-tick-ticking of time’s impersonal progress. For each of us, time’s march breeds a different fear: for some it is the terror of death; for others it is the worry of a life unlived; for some it signifies the loss of what we hold dear and familiar. These are not thoughts with which we usually enjoy lingering. Spirituality invites us to linger. It gives us a way of standing naked in the truth of the human condition; meeting it head-on with curiosity and openness. This is serious work, but the mysterious outcome of the work is a lightness of heart — what we call happiness.
Elizabeth Lesser, The Seekers Guide: Making your life a Spiritual Adventure
photo of Glendalough in autumn by J.-H. Janßen
When you get stuck behind a tractor
It always happens when we are on the way to some appointment….trapped in our schedules, trapped in our cars…
Our old people noticed this from the beginning. They said that the white man lived in a world of cages, and that if we didn’t look out, they would make us live in cages too.
So we started noticing. Everything looked like cages. Your clothes fit like cages. Your houses looked like cages. You put your fences around your yards so they looked like cages. Everything was a cage. You turned the land into cages. Little squares. Then after you had all these cages you made a government to protect these cages. And that government was all cages. All laws about what you couldn’t do. The only freedom you had was inside your own cage. Then you wondered why you weren’t happy and didn’t feel free.
You made all the cages, then you wondered why you didn’t feel free.
Kent Nerburn, Neither Wolf nor Dog: On Forgotten Roads with an Indian Elder
photo eric jones
Actually living
If my happiness at this moment consists largely in reviewing happy memories and expectations, I am but dimly aware of this present. I shall still be dimly aware of the present when the good things that I have been expecting come to pass. For I shall have formed a habit of looking behind and ahead, making it difficult for me to attend to the here and now. If, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world.
Alan Watts
photo Shenandoah national park
Keep knocking
It must be said that things do not always work out as we would like. This teaches us patience and trust.
However, sometimes we get news of reward after long effort that is richly deserved. We don’t expect it, find it hard to believe, and yet – as Heaney says – it is like a gust of wind that can catch “the heart off guard and blow it open”. This teaches us the unforced nature of joy:
Work. Keep digging your well.
Don’t think about giving up from work.
Water is there somewhere.
Keep knocking, and the joy inside
will eventually open a window
and look out to see who’s there.
Rumi
The Comparing Mind
Our tendency to compare nearly always robs us of joy
and stops us living fully the life that we actually have.
What you do not have you find everywhere
W.S. Merwin, American Poet, born 1927, Provision
photo evelyn simak
