The interesting thing about this work is that we don’t really do anything for them. If we tried, I think we would fail miserably. Instead we invite them to do something radically new for themselves, namely to experiment with living intentionally from moment to moment. When I was talking to a reporter, she said, “Oh, you mean to live for the moment:” I said “No, it isn’t that. That has a hedonistic ring to it. I mean to live in the moment.
Jon Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living
Misery is a moment of suffering allowed to become everything. So, when feeling miserable, we must look wider than what hurts. When feeling a splinter, we must, while trying to remove it, remember there is a body that is not splinter, and a spirit that is not splinter, and a world that is not splinter.
Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening.
I do not want to step so quickly over a beautiful line on God’s Palm
As I move through the earth’s
Marketplace
Today.
Something has happened
To my understanding of existence
That now makes my heart always full of wonder
And kindness.
I do not want to step so quickly
Over this sacred place on God’s body
That is right beneath your
Own foot
As I dance with
Precious life
Today.
Today from Daniel Ladinsky, The Gift: Poems by Hafiz the Great Sufi Master
To dare is to lose one’s footing temporarily;
to not dare, is to lose one’s life
Søren Kierkegaard
Consciously inhabiting our senses is a pathway to the present moment, to feeling truly alive. Tuning in to our senses in nature invites presence and joy, whether we’re smelling the first full bouquets of apple and cherry blossoms in spring, seeing a crystalline carpet of dew on the lawn in the early morning, feeling the warm moisture of a tropical breeze as it softens our bodies and melts our hard edges, or hearing the dawn chorus of birdsong. Living with such a full awareness, we can be present to life’s gifts when they present themselves.
Mark Coleman, Awake in the Wild: Mindfulness in Nature as a Path to Self Discovery
For those who would see directly into essential nature, the idea of the sacred is a delusion and an obstruction: it diverts us from seeing what is before our eyes: plain thusness. And This, thusness, is the nature of the nature of nature. The wild in the wild
Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild
