Tag: Nature

My strength is trust

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A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life.  The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and smallest scar on my bark. I was born to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers.  I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me.  I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else.  I trust that God is in me.  I trust that my labour is holy. Out of this trust I live

Hermann Hesse, Trees: Reflections and Poems

Pay attention

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I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.

Mary Oliver, The Summer Day [extract]

Listen

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The sounds of streams
are Buddha’s speech.
The coloured mountains
are Buddha’s pure body.

Night brings eighty-four thousand poems of Buddha.

Listen, someday you may awaken.

Su Shi, 1037 – 1101, Chinese calligrapher, essayist and poet.

Grounded

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While sitting on the floor of a room in Japan and looking out on a small garden with flowers blooming and dragon flies hovering in space, I sensed that this small world, almost underfoot, shall I say, had a validity all its own, but must be realized and appreciated from its own level in space.

I suddenly felt I had too long been exclusively above my boots.

Mark George Tobey, 1890 – 1976, American painted, strongly influenced by Asian calligraphy.

Teachers

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A monk once asked Joshu, ‘Who is my teacher?’

Joshu said, ‘Clouds rising out of the mountains, streams entering the valley without a sound.’

The monk said, ‘I wasn’t asking about them.’

Joshu said, ‘Though they are your teachers, you don’t recognize them.‘

from Henry Shukman, One Blade of Grass: Finding the Old Road of the Heart

Blue

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We have had bright Summer weather all week here, spacious blue skies, something of a rarity in Ireland

I thank God for most this
amazing day; for the leaping greenly
spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;
and for everything which is natural, which is
infinite, which is yes.

e. e. cummings

Meditation comes alive through a growing capacity to release our habitual entanglement in the stories and plans, conflicts and worries that make up the small sense of self, and to rest in awareness. In meditation we do this simply by acknowledging the moment-to-moment changing conditions… Without identifying with them, we can rest in the awareness itself, beyond conditions, and experience what my teacher Ajahn Chah called “jai pongsai”, our natural lightness of heart.

Wise attention has a gracious witnessing quality, acknowledging each event – whether boredom or jealousy, plans or excitement, gain or loss, pleasure or pain – with a slight bow. Moment by moment we release the illusion of getting “somewhere” and rest in the timeless present, witnessing with easy awareness all that passes by. As we let go, our innate freedom and wisdom manifest. Nothing to have, nothing to be. Ajahn Chah called this “resting in the One Who Knows.”

Jack Kornfield, A Mind Like Sky Meditation