Tag: Present moment

Keep knocking

Karl Duffy1 Comment

doorIt must be said that things do not always work out as we would like. This teaches us patience and trust.

However, sometimes we get news of  reward after long effort that is richly deserved. We don’t expect it, find it hard to believe,  and yet –  as Heaney says –  it is like a gust of wind that can catch “the heart off guard and blow it open”. This teaches us the unforced nature of  joy:

Work. Keep digging your well.
Don’t think about giving up from work.
Water is there somewhere.

Keep knocking, and the joy inside
will eventually open a window
and look out to see who’s there.

Rumi

The Comparing Mind

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:The grass is always greener - geograph.org.uk - 783326.jpg

Our tendency to compare nearly always robs us of joy

and stops us living fully the life that we actually have.

What you do not have you find everywhere

W.S. Merwin, American Poet, born 1927, Provision

photo evelyn simak

Doing the ordinary

Karl Duffy3 Comments

File:Waiter in a restaurant, Paris 2011.jpg

Our guide for today and this week: doing the ordinary things with attention and with love.

When the mind is at peace,
the world too is at peace.
Nothing real, nothing absent.
Not holding on to reality,
not getting stuck in the void,
you are neither holy nor wise, just
an ordinary fellow who has completed his work.

Layman Pang, 740 – 808, Chinese Chan layman

photo florian plag

Beneath

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File:2016-07-27 Seagull in Zandvoort aan Zee (02) (freddy2001).jpg

Be the silent watcher of your thoughts and behavior.

You are beneath the thinker.

You are the stillness beneath the mental noise.

You are the love and joy beneath the pain.

Eckhart Tolle

photo freddy2001

The basic truth about happiness

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Blackberries, Swindon and Cricklade Railway - geograph.org.uk - 549615.jpg

“All is always now,” says T. S. Eliot.

This statement implies a profound insight: Not only is the now not in time; time is in the now.

When the future comes, it will be now, and any past event becomes now as we remember it. There is only one now. It cannot be multiplied; it simply is.

The now is the opposite of time.

In fact, this is Augustine’s definition: “Eternity is the now that does not pass away.”

A happiness anchored in the now is eternal.

David Steindl-Rast, A Basic Human Approach to Happiness

photo Brian Robert Marshall

Sunday Quote: Still heart

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File:TofukujiReiunin1.jpg

In the still heart that refuses nothing,

the world is twice born.  

Jane Hirshfield