May we all grow in grace and peace,
and not neglect the silence that is printed in the center of our being.
It will not fail us.
Thomas Merton, Letters
Tag: Present moment
Now
Time isn’t precious at all, because it is an illusion.
What you perceive as precious is not time
but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed.
The more you are focused on time – past and future – the more you miss the Now,
the most precious thing
there is.
Eckhart Tolle
We make up our life moment by moment
Some brain-science thoughts giving the same message as yesterday’s meditation one…
Instead of seeing the brain as rigid, fixed in mode, programmed like a computer, there is now a much more biological and powerful notion of “experiential selection,” of experience literally shaping the connectivity and function of the brain.
But how then do our frames, our momentary moments, hold together? How, if there is only transience, do we achieve continuity? Our passing thoughts, as James says ( in an image which smacks of cowboy life in the l880’s) do not wander round like wild cattle. Each one is owned, our own, and bears the brand of this ownership, and each thought, in James’ words, is born an owner of the thoughts that went before, and “dies owned, transmitting whatever it realized as its Self to its own later proprietor.
We come around to Proust’s image, itself slightly reminiscent of photography…..that we consist entirely of “a collection of moments,” even though these flow into one another like Borges’s river.
Oliver Sachs, In the River of Consciousness
At home
When we can be centered in ourselves,
even for brief periods of time in the face of the pull of the outer world,
not having to look elsewhere for something to fill us up or make us happy,
we can be at home wherever we find ourselves,
at peace with things as they are, moment by moment.
Jon Kabat Zinn
The small things
Do not think that love has to be extraordinary in order to be genuine.
What we need is to love without getting tired.
Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies.
Mother Teresa
Make something beautiful
Maybe our world will grow kinder eventually.
Maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside each of us.
Mary Oliver, Franz Marc’s Blue Horses
