All there is

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Practice is just hearing, just seeing, just feeling. This is what Christians call the face of God: simply taking in this world as it manifests. We feel our body; we hear the cars and birds. That’s all there is.

Charlotte Joko Beck.

photo nottsexminer

Being fully, honestly, here

Episcopal Priest Robert Farrer Capon warns “We spend a long time wishing we were elsewhere and otherwise“. We are like the character in the movie Postcards from the Edge who sends a card home from vacation,  “Having a wonderful time. Wish I were here”

Frederic Brussat, Spiritual Literacy

photo coillte.ie

Grounded

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The emphasis in working life is to get things done, get results and move things on, which can give each day a driven quality and make moment-to-moment awareness difficult. Grounding ourselves every now and then in the body and attuning simply and calmly to the breath can help us remain balanced, and allows us let go of some of the ways we can get locked into fixed positions:

May we learn to return

And rest in the beauty

Of animal being,

Learn to lean low,

Leave our locked minds,

and with freed senses

feel the earth breathing with us.

John O’Donoghue, “To Learn from Animal Being”

photo Ireen Trummer

 

Learning from nature

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Look at a tree, a flower, a plant.

Let your awareness rest upon it.

How still they are, how deeply rooted in Being.

Allow nature to teach you stillness

Eckhart Tolle

photo hans braxmeier

Lessons from nature: Moments of rest

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All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.

William Carlos Williams, Winter Trees

Sunday Quote: On the shortest day in the year

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With life as short as a half taken breath,
don’t plant anything but love.

Rumi

photo gila national forest