Treat every moment as your last
It is not a preparation for something else
Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginners Mind
photo by Alan light
Tag: Present moment
Why look elsewhere
There is no need to run outside
For better seeing,
For better seeing,
Nor to peer from a window. Rather abide
At the center of your being;
At the center of your being;
For the more you leave it, the less you learn.
Search your heart and see
If he is wise who takes each turn:
The way to do is to be.
If he is wise who takes each turn:
The way to do is to be.
Lao Tzu
photo : found5dollar
Where you are
I said to the wanting-creature inside me:
What is this river you want to cross?
Do you believe there is some place that will make the
soul less thirsty?
In that great absence you will find nothing.
Be strong then, and enter into your own body;
there you have a solid place for your feet.
Think about it carefully!
Don’t go off somewhere else!
Kabir says this: just throw away all thoughts of
imaginary things,
and stand firm in that which you are.
Kabir
Right now
A similar theme on staying in the present moment, this time from the early Christian tradition
One of the early Desert Fathers said
‘There is no such thing as delay with the Holy Spirit.’
This means that everything happens at the right moment.
Laurence Freeman, Common Ground: Letters to a World Community of Meditators
photo: inexplicable
Moments are all we have
Small moments or days are enough to see the richness of life, if we are able to pay attention and give ourselves fully:
What is this dark hum among the roses?
The bees have gone simple, sipping,
that’s all. What did you expect? Sophistication?
They’re small creatures and they are
filling their bodies with sweetness, how could they not
moan in happiness? The little
worker bee lives, I have read, about three weeks.
Is that long? Long enough, I suppose, to understand
that life is a blessing.
Mary Oliver, Hum
Not fixing
Often, intimacy arises not from any attempt to take the pain away, but from a living through together; not from a working out, but from a being with. Trust and closeness deepen from holding and being held. I am learning, pain by pain and tension by tension, that after all my strategies fail, the strength of love waits in receiving and negotiating; in accepting each other and not problem solving each other; in listening and affirming each other, not trying to fix those we love.
Mark Nepo
