Ripeness is
what falls away with ease.
Not only the heavy apple, the pear,
but also the dried brown strands
of autumn iris from their core.
To let your body
love this world
that gave itself to your care
in all of its ripeness, with ease,
and will take itself from you
in equal ripeness and ease,
is also harvest.
And however sharply
you are tested —
this sorrow, that great love —
it too will leave on that clean knife
Jane Hirshfield,
Calming and stilling are the willingness to commit to just being wholeheartedly present in one moment at a time,
to commit to one breath,
to commit to the sense of our feet touching the ground.
To know this, we begin to train the mind.
Christina Feldman, Blindfolding Mara
When fear makes your choices for you, no security measures on earth will keep the things you dread from finding you.
But if you can avoid avoidance – if you can choose to embrace experiences out of passion, enthusiasm, and a readiness to feel whatever arises – then nothing, nothing in all this dangerous world, can keep you from being safe.
Martha Beck
The Ancient Desert Fathers, when they were disconsolate and without hope, would repeat one word, over and over, as a kind of soothing mantra.
And the word wasn’t “Jesus” or “God” or “Love.”
The word was “Today.” It kept them where they needed to be.
Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart
Live as if you were living a second time,
and as though you had acted wrongly the first time.
Victor Frankl
The Feast of All Saints
Our struggles are not separate from the luminous vastness within each of us.
We don’t get rid of struggle to discover this open space; nor does its discovery necessarily rid us of our struggles.
The riddle of the obstacle is solved not by pushing it away or by holding on to it, but by meeting it with silence and by discovering in this meeting that sacred ground, which upholds both joy and sorrow, both struggle and freedom from struggle.
When we realize this, we will struggle less with our struggles, and we will have solved by our own silence the riddles that guard the doorway into the silent land.
Martin Laird, Into a Silent Land
Mindfulbalance 