It is time now, I said, for the deepening and quieting of the spirit
Among the flux of happenings.
Something had pestered me so much
I thought my heart would break.
I mean the mechanical part.
I went down in the afternoon
To the sea which held me, until I grew easy.
About tomorrow, who knows anything.
Except that it will be a time, again,
For the deepening and the quieting of the spirit.
Mary Oliver, Swimming, One Day in August
All mental activity, all these choices and possibilities, is confusing and even exhausting. Just as the body needs regular rest, so does the mind. To rest the mind in complete stillness, in pure awareness, is to return it to its original nature, its natural state. We don’t need to narrate all the events of our life. We don’t need the mind to comment internally on everything and everyone we encounter. This narration, these comments, separates us from just experiencing life as it is.
Jan Chozen Bays, How to Train a Wild Elephant
When you are identified on the level of “I am the body and I am my feelings, thoughts and memories”, you’re always limiting, binding yourself to unsatisfactory conditions. These conditions can never satisfy you, because they’re changing: when you try to find security and lasting happiness in things that are forever changing, you’re going to be terribly disappointed. You going to feel this… sense of lack, and we tend to take that as a very personal flaw: “There’s something wrong with me. What’s wrong with me that I should feel lonely, inadequate, incomplete, or unfulfilled?“
Ajahn Sumedho, The Sound of SIlence
John Keats, the great English Romantic poet, writing about the qualities needed for full openness to the infinite depth of the world and of the person:
When man is capable of being in uncertainties,
Mysteries, doubts,
without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.
Letter to George and Tom Keats, December 1817
photo: heather
Every person, in the course of his life, must build — starting with the natural territory of his own self — a work, into which something enters from all the elements of the earth. He makes his own soul throughout all his earthly days; and at the same time he collaborates in another work, which infinitely transcends, while at the same time narrowly determines, the perspectives of his individual achievement: the completing of the world.
Teilhard de Chardin
photo ralf roletschek
The peculiar grace of a shaker chair is due to the fact
that it was made by someone capable of believing
that an angel might come and sit on it.
Thomas Merton
photo carl wycoff, Shaker Village, Pleasant Hill.
