William Carlos Williams, Winter Trees
We are more interested in making others believe we are happy
than in trying to be happy ourselves.
de La Rochefoucauld,
Suffering is our best teacher because it hangs onto us and keeps us in its grip until we have learned that particular lesson. Only then does suffering let go. If we haven’t learned our lesson, we can be quite sure that the same lesson is going to come again, because life is nothing but an adult education class. If we don’t pass in any of the subjects, we just have to sit the examination again. Whatever lesson we have missed, we will get it again. That is why we find ourselves reacting to similar situations in similar ways many times.
Ayya Khema, Being Nothing, Going Nowhere
photo nigel callaghan
After learning from Dogen and the Japanese Zen tradition yesterday, today we can learn from Bodhidharma, (6th Century), the larger-than-life transmitter of Chan Buddhism to China, who similarly reminds us that direct knowing is often richer than understanding reality just by thinking.
If you use your (thinking) mind to study reality,
You won’t understand either your mind or reality.
If you study reality without using your mind
You’ll understand both.
photo oxfordian kissuth
We have only now,
only this single eternal moment opening and unfolding before us,
day and night.
Jack Kornfield
