Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things
have gone with others.
Unfold
your own myth, without complicated explanation,
so everyone will understand the passage,
we have opened you.
Start walking toward Shams. Your legs will get heavy and tired.
Then comes a moment
of feeling the wings you’ve grown,
lifting.
Rumi
We may in the past have had marvellous spiritual experiences – almost everyone in this world is lucky enough to experience satori once in their life . . . Ever afterwards, you search for that experience again: ‘I want it that way.’ You once had a wonderful girlfriend, and now you want another just like her. That way of thinking blocks the possibility of meeting with life. This is why meditation…. means affirming that your everyday mind is the way – not the mind you ought to have or the mind you might have if you practiced acceptance or concentration. We want you to look at it just the way it is right now – that’s Buddha. Just like that.
Alan Watts, Zen: The Supreme Experience
Close is what we almost always are: close to happiness, close to another, close to leaving, close to tears, close to God, close to losing faith, close to being done…close to success, and even, with the greatest sense of satisfaction, close to giving the whole thing up.
Our human essence lies not in arrival but in being almost there: we are creatures who are on the way, our journey a series of impending unanticipated arrivals.
Human beings do not find their essence through fulfilment or eventual arrival but by staying close to the way they like to travel, to the way they hold the conversation between the ground on which they stand and the horizon to which they go.
David Whyte, “Close” in Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words
Each time we go out, the world is open and free; it offers itself so graciously to our hearts, to create something new and wholesome from it each day. It is a travesty of possibility and freedom to think we have no choice, that things are the way they are and that the one street, the one right way is all that is allotted to us. Certainty is a subtle destroyer…
John O Donohue, Eternal Echoes
A bank Holiday here in Ireland.
What will be the good of the conquest of leisure and health, if no one remembers how to use them?
Bertrand Russell 1872 – 1970 British Philosopher
Happiness,
not in another place, but this place . . .
not for another hour, but this hour.
Walt Whitman
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