Someday we’ll live in the sky.
Meanwhile, the house of our lives is the world.
The fields, the ponds, the birds.
The thick black oaks — surely they are the
children of God.
The feistiness among the tiger lilies,
the hedges of runaway honeysuckle, that no one owns.
Where is it? I ask, and then
my feet know it.
One jump, and I’m home.
Mary Oliver, Boundaries
He knows how to enjoy the fullness of each moment, as his own mind is serene and at peace. There is a sufficiency in the things around him
At Nantai I sit quietly with an incense burning,
One day of contentment, all things are forgotten,
Not that my mind is stopped and thoughts are put away,
But that there is really nothing to disturb my serenity.
Shou-an , quoted in Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism – First Series
One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. One can collect only a few, and they are more beautiful if they are few… My life… lacks this quality of significance and therefore beauty, because there is so little empty space…. There are so few empty pages in my engagement pad, or empty hours in the day, or empty rooms in my life in which to stand alone and find myself. Too many activities, and people, and things. Too many worthy activities, valuable things, and interesting people. For it is not merely the trivial which clutters our lives but the important as well. We can have a surfeit of treasures – an excess of shells, where one or two would be significant.
And this was written before mobile phones….
The world is full of people
who have stopped listening to themselves
Joseph Campbell
Drinking tea, eating rice,
I pass my time as it comes;
Looking down at the stream,
Looking up at the mountains,
How serene and relaxed I feel indeed!
Ch’an master Nan-ch’üan P’u-yüan, c. 749 – c. 835
In meditation, you are supposed to closely observe your mind and body, witness the ceaseless arising and passing of all your feelings, and realise how pointless it is to pursue them. When the pursuit stops, the mind becomes very relaxed, clear and satisfied. All kinds of feelings go on arising and passing – joy, anger, boredom, lust – but once you stop craving particular feelings, you can just accept them for what they are. You live in the present moment instead of fantasising about what might have been. The resulting serenity is so profound that those who spend their lives in the frenzied pursuit of pleasant feelings can hardly imagine it. It is like a man standing for decades on the seashore, embracing certain ‘good’ waves and trying to prevent them from disintegrating, while simultaneously pushing back ‘bad’ waves to prevent them from getting near him. Day in, day out, the man stands on the beach, driving himself crazy with this fruitless exercise. Eventually, he sits down on the sand and just allows the waves to come and go as they please. How peaceful!
Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
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