Tag: Present moment

Quality time with yourself

Karl Duffy3 Comments

Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but ‘steal’ some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.

Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951–1959

The need to dominate

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Spoken 40 years ago but still applies to what is happening today…

I hope you live without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated. I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people. And when you fail, and are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is. Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing — instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon. Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.

Ursula K Le Guin, A Left handed Commencement Address, Mills College 1983

The end of the world

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To be human we need to experience the end of the world.

We need to lose the world, to lose a world,

to discover that there is more than one world and that the world isn’t what we think it is.

Hélène Cixous,  June 1937 -,  French feminist writer, poet, playwright, and philosopher.

What we have learnt

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It could happen any time, tornado,
earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen.
Or sunshine, love, salvation.

It could, you know. That’s why we wake
and look out – no guarantees
in this life.

But some bonuses, like morning,
like right now, like noon,
like evening.

William Stafford, Yes

Paradox and ambiguity

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As human beings, not only do we seek resolution, we feel that we deserve resolution. However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution. We deserve something better than resolution: we deserve our birthright …an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity

Pema Chodron, Comfortable with Uncertainty

Sunday Quote: All of experience

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The “10, 000 things” is a shorthand way of talking about all the experiences –  good and bad – which arise and pass away in our lifetime, continually in movement, with ebbs and flows.  Eastern wisdom considered that they  contain the right mix of experiences for our growth.

When the 10,000 things become one,
then we return to the center,
where we have always been.

Chuang-Tse, Chinese philosopher, 4th century BC