Continuous practice, day after day, is the most appropriate way of expressing gratitude.
This means that you practice continuously, without wasting a single day of your life, without using it for your own sake.
Why is it so? Your life is a fortunate outcome of the continuous practice of the past. You should express your gratitude immediately.
Dogen quoted in Kazuaki Tanahashi, Enlightenment Unfolds Kazuaki Tanahashi
Past and present join
in the winter solstice.
The days will stretch and we survive.
with losses, yes, and lessons too
to reap the honey of the hive
of history. The yield of what is given
insists a choice – to live; to thrive
Peter Fallon, 1951 – Irish Poet, A Winter Solstice
Waiting, watching, trusting…what people have done at this time of year since the beginning of time. These universal themes, rooted in nature, speak to the heart all through the year
Hope begins in the dark,
the stubborn hope that if you just show up
and try to do the right thing,
the dawn will come.
You wait and watch and work:
you don’t give up.
Anne Lamott
Very cold weather here this past week.
This is the time to be slow,
Lie low to the wall
Until the bitter weather passes.
Try, as best you can, not to let
The wire brush of doubt
Scrape from your heart
All sense of yourself
And your hesitant light.
If you remain generous,
Time will come good;
And you will find your feet
Again on fresh pastures of promise,
Where the air will be kind
And blushed with beginning.
John O’Donohue, from Beannacht, Book of Blessings
We must also remember that it is not our responsibility to fix all the brokenness of the world — only to fix what we can. Otherwise we become grandiose, as if we were put here to be the savior of the humanity around us.
Mindfulness and compassion are genuinely undertaken one step at a time, one person, one moment.
Jack Kornfield
There is only one thing that all twelve stages [of the Four Noble Truths] have in common — they all present a highly subjective experience without mention of self. They are all expressed as: “There is; it is to be; it has been.”
The unenlightened perspective surely is: “I am; I should; I have…” If I was a mathematician, I could probably draw up an equation based upon these data which concludes: “I am” = “unenlightenment.”
The description of the practice of the Four Noble Truths does not suggest a process of becoming enlightened. It seems that a particular viewpoint is sustained, and understanding arises through it. The viewpoint is a focus upon dukkha [suffering/ stress] in an objective, dispassionate way. …This leads to a most powerful insight because it reveals that dukkha is structured, created and not absolute, and therefore possible to be dismantled or not created.
Ajahn Sucitto, The Dawn of the Dhamma
