I live by the truth that “No” is a complete sentence.
I rest as a spiritual act.
Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
Slowing down
Tag: Present moment
Cold
The first real cold spell of winter expected over the next few days. We prefer life to be all sunshine, but…
Without the bitterest cold that penetrates to the very bone,
how can plum blossoms send forth their fragrance all over the world?
Dogen, 1200 – 1253, Buddhist monk, founder of the Soto school of Zen.
Sunday Quote: Facts and Dreams
We must shape life so
that at some future hour,
facts and dreams meet.
Victor Hugo
Doesn’t add anything
Sun-faced Buddha and Moon-faced Buddha are metaphors used in Buddhism. The Sun-faced Buddha lives in the world for a long period – 1800 years or for eternity, the Moon- faced just for one day.
When we think about our human lives:
There are, as you know, people who live long, like those Sun-faced Buddhas, and there are people whose lives are short, like those Moon-faced Buddhas.
It’s useless to worry.
Baso Dōitsu 709 – 788 recorded in The Blue Cliff Record, a collection of Chan Buddhist koans compiled in 1125
Not beyond this moment
Our lives are not beyond this breath there on the chilly glass, but of that breath
and in this life the hands in our mittens are never really empty.
It is all around us, free, this wonderful life: clear jingle of tire chains, the laughter of ice that breaks under our boots. Each hour is a gift to those who take it up.
Ted Kooser, American Pulitzer Prize winning Poet, December
everything belongs
One point that Ajahn Sumedho would stress regularly, is that loving things is not the same as liking them. Having kindness for ourselves or for other beings is not the same as liking everything.
We often come a cropper by trying to make ourselves like everything. This is a completely wrong approach. When we taste something that’s bitter and try to force ourselves to believe it’s sweet this is just falsity, it’s just sugaring things over. It doesn’t work. It just makes the bitter even worse….We’re not trying to like everything, rather we’re recognising that everything belongs. Everything is part of nature: the bitter as well as the sweet, the beautiful as well as the ugly, the cruel as well as the kindly. The heart that recognises that fundamentally everything belongs is what I would describe as being the heart of kindness, the essence of kindness.
Ajahn Amaro, Radical Acceptance
Mindfulbalance 