When you allow for uncertainty, then you don’t always have to find solutions. You can live through a problem until it’s not a problem anymore. Instead of seeing things as problems, you see the life you are living. You can live your way into the answers. This is different from standing outside of your life and throwing stones at your problems from a safe distance.
John Tarrant, Why Play with Koans?
Meister Eckhart said, “There is a place in the soul — there is a place in the soul that neither time, nor space, nor no created thing can touch.” And I really thought that was amazing, and what it means is that your identity is not equivalent to your biography. And that there is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there’s still a sureness in you, where there’s a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you. And I think the intention of prayer and spirituality and love is now and again to visit that inner kind of sanctuary.
John O’Donoghue, Interview with Krista Tippett, On Being
And the heart, unscrolled,
is comforted by such small things:
a cup of green tea rescues us,
grows deep and large,
a lake
Jane Hirshfield, Recalling a Sung Dynasty Landscape
chris gladis
We can sometimes feel fragmented in our inner life, sucked into a crisis, pulled in all directions, but…
There is not a “fragment” in all nature,
for every relative fragment of one thing
is a full harmonious unit in itself.
John Muir, A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf
There is great psychological wisdom in the ancient texts as to how to deal with the strong emotions stirred up by challenges we face every day. Being able to see, without making it a story about ourselves:
You shouldn’t chase after the past, and don’t place expectations on the future.
The past no longer is. The future has not yet come.
Whatever is present in life as it is in the very here and now
you clearly see, right there, right there.
Not taken in. You dwell in stability and freedom
That’s how you develop the heart.
The Buddha, Bhaddekaratta Sutta, Majjhima Nikaya No.131.
Today marks the start of Advent – the start of a new year in the Christian Calendar, this year occurring between the shopping festivals of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Two different views of what makes us happy. One feeds the ever wanting heart, which sees only what can be bought. The other feeds, as a friend reminded me yesterday, that part of us which cannot be seen, that which is hidden:
If your soul is un-wanting, you will see what is hidden.
The ever-wanting soul is forever chasing
only what it wants.
Lau Tzu, Tao Te Ching
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