You cannot understand life and its mysteries as long as you try to grasp it. Indeed, you cannot grasp it just as you cannot walk off with a river in a bucket. If you try to capture running water in a bucket, it is clear that you do not understand it and that you will always be disappointed, for in the bucket the water does not run. To “have” running water you must let go of it and let it run.
Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity
photo Paul Glazzard
It is very important that you only do what you love to do.
You may be poor, you may go hungry, you may lose your car, you may have to move into a shabby place to live, but you will totally live.
And at the end of your days you will bless your life because you have done what you came here to do.
Otherwise, you will do things only for a reason, to please other people, and you will never have lived.
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
If you want to be as clear and refreshing as
the breath of the morning breeze,
be like the sun – have nothing but warmth and light
for everyone.
Shaikh Abu-Saeed Abil-Kheir, 967 – 1049, Persian Sufi poet
photo fitri agung
Times of travel or transition can give rise to a lot of emotions and they always like to give birth to thoughts about how we are doing or where we are headed in life. It is best to just hold emotions as mental events that pass through and not believe the stories that arise out of them:
Trust in the simple act of attention. Awareness includes emotions as mental objects, rather than as subjects. If you don’t know this, you tend to identify with your emotions and your emotions become yourself. You become this emotional thing that has become terribly upset because the world is not respecting you enough. Our refuge is in the deathless reality rather than the transient and unstable conditions. If you trust in awareness, then the self and the emotions about oneself, whatever they might be, can be seen in terms of what they are — not judged, not made into a problem, but just noticed: “It’s like this.”
Ajahn Sumedho, The Problem with Personality
photo andeggs
Everyone is overridden by thoughts;
that’s why they have so much heartache and sorrow.
At times I give myself up to thought purposefully;
But when I choose, I spring up from those under its sway.
I am like a high-flying bird, and thought is a gnat:
How should a gnat overpower me?
Rumi
photo andrew bowden
