Tag: Present moment

Summer light

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Every year  the lilies are so perfect
I can hardly believe their lapped light crowding
the black, mid-summer ponds.
Nobody could count all of them –

the muskrats swimming among the pads and the grasses can reach out their muscular arms and touch only so many, they are that rife and wild.

But what in this world is perfect?

I bend closer and see. how this one is clearly lopsided —
and that one wears an orange blight – and this one is a glossy cheek
half nibbled away – and that one is a slumped purse,  full of its own unstoppable decay.

Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled – to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing –
that the light is everything –  that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.

Mary Oliver, The Ponds

Never fully fixed

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File:Blurred pictures Night in Manhattan 20091205 018.JPG

Self-love involves a yes to myself in whatever I am going through, instead of holding on to some concept of what or how I should be. Any idea I have about who I am or who I should be is never accurate, for it always falls short of the living presence that I am, as this unfolds freshly in each new moment. Who I am is not a fixed entity but a dynamic stream of experiencing that is alive in every moment – when I let myself happen.

John Welwood.

Fresh eyes

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File:The Greeting (2212741327).jpg

We die to each other daily.
What we know of other people
Is only our memory of the moments
During which we knew them. And they have changed since then.
To pretend that they and we are the same
Is a useful and convenient social convention
Which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember
That at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.

T. S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party

photo a davey

Entry points

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waiting for the elevator

If the intention is to bring awareness to the direct experience of the present moment, with fresh eyes, then life itself becomes the practice. What’s so powerful about understanding that wherever you are that is the entry point is that it frees us of this false belief that we need to be in a certain head space to train our minds toward mindfulness. In the moments you are doubting, agitated, restless or bored, these are the entry points to the present moment…no matter what is happening in your life at any given moment, that is what you can practice being mindful with.

Elisha Goldstein, A Key Mindful Lesson for us all

Our life as it is

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shoot_nations_ednamarie
After all our futile efforts to transform our ordinary minds into idealized minds, we discover the fundamental paradox of practice is that leaving everything alone is itself what is ultimately transformative.
Barry Magid

Living too many lives

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“Ain’t you thinkin’ what’s it gonna be like when we get there? Ain’t you scared it won’t be nice like we thought?”

“No”, she said quickly. “No, I ain’t. You can’t do that. I can’t do that. It’s too much – livin’ too many lives.

Up ahead they’s a thousan’ lives we might live, but when it comes, it’ll on’y be one”.

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath