Just for a little while, stop thinking about all the problems, crises, tasks. everything that’s pulling and pushing on us.
Be in that quiet space.
After all these years, some of us still need permission to let go.
Melody Beatty
Tag: Nature
The sun still shines
A lot of wisdom in this:
The trick to having a happy life is to remember that it all comes down to what we ourselves make of the life we have.
“The sun shines and warms and lights us and we have no curiosity to know why this is so”, Ralph Waldo Emerson says, ” but we ask the reason of all evil, of pain, and hunger and mosquitoes and silly people.”
Joan Chittister, O.S.B., American Benedictine nun.
Change
Today is the Autumn Equinox, which is celebrated as a public holiday in Japan.
Imitate the trees.
Learn to lose in order to recover,
and remember that nothing stays the same for long,
not even pain.
May Sarton, 1912 – 1995, Belgian-American poet and novelist.
Natural rhythms
In meditation we’re learning from Nature rather than from society, so you have to train in terms of wilderness awareness: to learn from your bodily intelligence. Otherwise, if you’re trying to get your business-model, ‘get it done’ mind, to take you to samādhi (concentration or calm) it’s like riding an elephant as if you’re driving a taxi: you implant stress onto a natural process and that constricts your awareness.
Ajahn Sucitto
Sunday Quote: In this ordinary life
There are days when I am convinced that Heaven starts already, now, in this ordinary life, just as it is, in all its incompleteness, yet, this is where Heaven starts. See within yourself, if you can find it.
I walked through the field in front of the house, lots of swallows flying, everywhere! Some very near me. It was magical.
We are already one, yet we know it not
Thomas Merton
True genius
It is not “human genius”
that makes us human, but an old love,
an old intelligence of the heart
we gather to us from the world,
from the creatures, from the angels
of inspiration, from the dead —
an intelligence merely nonexistent
to those who do not have it, but
to those who have it more dear than life.
Wendell Berry, Some Further Words (extract)
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