Sometimes, to achieve something, it is best if we step back or let go, as the Daoist-sounding great Zen Master reminds us
When you leave the way to the way,
you attain the way.
Dogen, Bodaisatta-Shishobo, The Bodhisattva’s Four Methods of Guidance, 1234
Don’t go outside your house to see flowers.
My friend, don’t bother with that excursion.
Inside your body there are flowers.
One flower has a thousand petals.
That will do for a place to sit.
Sitting there you will have a glimpse of beauty;
inside the body and out of it,
before gardens and after gardens
Kabir
To live without roads
seemed one way not to get lost.
Naomi Shihab Nye
Deep in the wintry parts of our minds, we are hardy stock and know that there is no such thing as a work-free transformation. We know that we will have to burn to the ground in one way or another, and then sit right in the ashes of who we once thought we were and go on from there.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves
The universe does not
revolve around you.
The stars and planets spinning
through the ballroom of space
dance with one another
quite outside of your small life.
You cannot hold gravity
or seasons; even air and water
inevitably evade your grasp.
Why not, then, let go?
You could move through time
like a shark through water,
neither restless nor ceasing,
absorbed in and absorbing
the native element.
Why pretend you can do otherwise?
The world comes in at every pore,
mixes in your blood before
breath releases you into
the world again. Did you think
the fragile boundary of your skin
could build a wall?
Listen. Every molecule is humming
its particular pitch.
Of course you are a symphony.
Whose tune do you think
the planets are singing
as they dance?
Lynn Ungar, Boundaries
Parker J Palmer related a story in his wonderful book Let your Life Speak about an elder Quaker woman who explained to him at an important time “An open door and a closed door are the same thing. They both send you in a direction”.
“Proceeding as the way opens” means that life has a holy rhythm.
Carrie Newcomer, As Way Opens
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