Close your eyes. Find green mountains and pure water within your heart. Silently drinking, feel these become part of you.
When you hold the green tea in the bowl in your hands
The self and the natural world cease to be separate.
Sen Genshitsu, 1923 – 2025, \Grand master of the Urasenke tea tradition
The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the hearts of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe.
Mother Nature never moves in straight lines. She moves in curves and curlicues. Fact is, I love the many crooked trees that are growing everywhere. They look like they’ve fought for survival in a tough world. Like me. Like you. They grow both up and sideways, twisted and curved from battling the wind, the storms, or a gardener’s pruning shears.
Every time I see crooked roots and branches, I stop and pay attention. Static yet dynamic, fixed but moving every which way, such trees tell their life story. Their presence is a history book, just like ours. They grow upwards, yes, always up, but to the sides as well. “That’s me,” I acknowledge, as I move on.
In fact, maybe that’s all of us — reaching upward, trying to better ourselves and our conditions in many ways as we seek nourishment from above, but often forced to move to one side or another just to survive. We are shaped by our longings, by the facts of our lives, and by the force of the elements, including our own elemental desires.
Why do I think all this is so important? Because our efforts to succeed move us away from being who we truly are. In other words, let’s give up, just for today, insisting on how things OUGHT to be, and embrace how they really are. And how we are. That’s where real life is!
Patty de Llosa, Blogpost, Will We Ever Get It Straight?
Within each of us is the acorn, the soul seed, the germ of our unique genius and destiny. Our goal here is to uncover the acorn to reconnect with the inner angel.
.. Don’t go looking for what’s wrong with us, rather, … go in search of our genius
Our soul – with its insistence on finding the still point from which it keeps rising – carries us through the seasons of our lives. This still point under all that keeps moving waits under every season we can imagine. It is the silent center that keeps us sane. We all have different names for this immovable ground, but I call it spirit.
Each passing year, we are asked to return to the ground of our spirit in order to go on. Each passing year, we are asked to listen like the seed for our crack of light in spring, to listen like the brook for our soft gurgle in summer, to listen like the leaf for our orange face in fall, to listen like the snow for a quiet place where we can powder down and rest
Mindfulbalance 