If you listen to the traffic with a clear mind,
without any concepts,
it is not noisy,
it is only what it is.
Stephen Mitchell, Dropping Ashes on the Buddha: The Teaching of Zen Master Seung Sahn
What it is
Tag: Present moment
Let the world wait
When you get up in the morning, let the world wait.
Defy it a little.
First learn something to inspire you. Take a few moments to meditate upon it.
And then you may plunge ahead into the darkness, full of light with which to illuminate it.
Tzvi Freeman, Canadian rabbi and author
Sunday Quote: Like a mirror
The wise person uses the mind like a mirror.
It grasps nothing, it refuses nothing.
It receives but does not keep.
Zhuangzi, Chinese Philosopher, 4th Century BC
Drops of Dew
The washing never gets done.
The furnace never gets heated.
Books never get read.
Life is never completed.
Life is like a ball which one must continually
catch and hit so that it won’t fall.
When the fence is repaired at one end,
it collapses at the other. The roof leaks,
the kitchen door won’t close,
there are cracks in the foundation,
the torn knees of children’s pants . . .
One can’t keep everything in mind.
The wonder is
that beside all this one can notice
the spring which is so full of everything
continuing in all directions – into evening clouds,
into the redwing’s song and into every
drop of dew on every blade of grass in the meadow,
as far as the eye can see, into the dusk.
Jaan Kaplinski, 1940 – 2021, Estonian poet, philosopher and cultural critic, The wonder is
Made fresh again
Here’s my new favorite meditation: Load up your washing machine, press the buttons, and then sit by the magical cube as it does its magic. When it roars and sloshes, hear the echo of your fear, anger, and despair. When it spins, recognize your own times of confusion, of apparently pointless repetition. When it seems to have finished, only to rev up again, think of the times you’ve had to start over. And realize that all this bashing and crashing is your soul being cleaned, renewed, and made fresh again.
Once you relax into the process, you’ll learn the great secret: It is through doing the laundry that we find our way to the ecstasy.
Martha Beck, Blog, The Turbulent Secrets to Soul Renewal
Be faithful
The river is famous to the fish…
The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse…
The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.
The idea you carry close to your bosom
is famous to your bosom…
I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.
Naomi Shihab Nye, Famous [extracts]
Mindfulbalance 