Calm in quiet times is not real calm:
When you can be calm in the midst of activity, this is the true state of nature.
Happiness in time of comfort is not real happiness
When you can be happy in the midst of challenges, then you see the true potential of the mind.
Hanchu Daoren, Chinese philosopher, 1572 – 1620
photo bureau of land management
Stop talking, Stop thinking
And there is nothing that you will not understand
Seng-Ts’an, Third Chinese Patriarch
photo donald bain
Look at a tree, a flower, a plant.
Let your awareness rest upon it.
How still they are, how deeply rooted in Being.
Allow nature to teach you stillness
Eckhart Tolle
photo hans braxmeier
I don’t know where prayers go, or what they do.
Do cats pray, while they sleep
half-asleep in the sun?
The sunflowers? The old black oak
growing older every year?
I know I can walk through the world,
along the shore or under the trees,
with my mind filled with things
of little importance, in full
self-attendance. A condition I can’t really
call being alive
Is a prayer a gift, or a petition, or does it matter?
The sunflowers blaze, maybe that’s their way.
Maybe the cats are sound asleep. Maybe not.
While I was thinking this I happened to be standing
just outside my door, with my notebook open,
which is the way I begin every morning.
Then a wren in the privet began to sing.
He was positively drenched in enthusiasm,
I don’t know why. And yet, why not.
I wouldn’t persuade you from whatever you believe
or whatever you don’t. That’s your business.
But I thought, of the wren’s singing, what could this be
if it isn’t a prayer?
Mary Oliver, I Happened to Be Standing
photo sylvain haye
Those who serve life adapt to changes as they go along. Changes arise from the nature of time; those who know the nature of time do not have fixed ways. Therefore I say “Ways can be guides, but not fixed paths; names can be designated, but not fixed labels”.
Master Wen, Wen-Tzu, precise date unknown, c 5th century BC
photo tognopop
He thought that if he stood on the bottom rail of the bridge and leant over,
and watched the river slipping slowly away beneath him,
then he would suddenly know everything that there was to be known.
A. A Milne, The House at Pooh Corner, chapter 6
