hold on n let go

The challenge is simultaneously to
hold on and to let go; it is to see clearly what we are doing and at
the same time see through it.


Ajahn Amaro

My life has been the poem

"My life has been the poem I would have writ,
But I could not both live and utter it."


Henry David Thoreau

song unsung

I have spent my days stringing
and unstringing my instrument
while the song I came to sing
remains unsung.


R. Tagore
(1861-1941)

time enough

I touch God in my song
as the hill touches the faraway sea
with its waterfall.
The butterfly counts not months but moments
and has time enough.


R. Tagore
(1861-1941)

all things pass

All things pass and nothing abides;
you cannot step twice
into the same stream.


Heraclitus

Knowing the Other

Intimacy is tuning into someone else's reality,
and risking being changed by that experience.


Stephanie Dowrick

freely n fully

When a man and a woman love each other but do not avow their love, they are not yet in love. Their very silence meeans that their love has not reached the point of self-surrender. It is the love that each freely and fully reveals to the other that brings about the radically new situation of being in love and that begins the unfolding of its life-long implications.


Lonergan

Nature n Art

Nature, it seems, must always clash with Art,
And yet, before we know it, both are one;
I too have learned: Their enmity is none,
Since each compels me, and in equal part.

Hard, honest work counts most! And once we start
To measure out the hours and never shun
Art's daily labour till our task is one,
Freely again may Nature move the heart.

So too all growth and ripening of the mind:
To the pure heights of ultimate consummation
In vain the unbound spirit seeks to flee.

Who seeks great gain leaves easy gain behind.
None proves a master but by limitation
And only law can give us liberty.



Goethe

unlived lives

"The horror of death
is the horror of dying
with unlived lives
in our bodies."

Norman Brown

certainty

Certainty
is nothing more than
what results from the
inability to imagine otherwise.


Wittgenstein

The Inner Eye of Love

Not infrequently one meets people who have spent years in dryness, in inner suffering, in darkness. Their meditation is sleepy and uncomfortable and seems like a waste of time: they think they are doing nothing. But the tiny flame of love is burning quietly in the depths of their being; the loving knowledge is there in secret; their experience is profoundly mystical. This will seem less strange if we reflect that human love is often just the same. It grows secretly at night when no one is watching like the seed scattered upon the ground. Then one morning we wake up - and there it is! Quite often it is only in moments of separation and death that we advert to the depth of our own love. Or again human love may at first be filled with rapturous love; but the lean and fallow years have to come.


The Inner Eye of Love
William Johnston

madness

There are some who think this man mad,
But I prefer the madness of this man
to the sanity of others.


Wordsworth on William Blake

Some Kind of Wonderful

All you have to do is touch my hand
To show me that you understand
And something happens to me
That's some kind of wonderful
Anytime my little world turns blue
I just have to look at you
Everything seems to be some kind of wonderful

I know I can't express this feeling of tenderness
There's so much I wanna say
But the right words just don't come my way
I just know when I'm in your embrace
This world is a happy place
And something happens to me
That's some kind of wonderful

I know I can't express this feeling of tenderness
There's so much I wanna say
But the right words just don't come my way
I just know when I'm in your embrace
This world is a happy place
And something happens to me
That's some kind of wonderful
Oh wonderful, some kind of wonderful


Performed by Peter Cincotti
Music & Lyrics by Gerald Goffin & Carole King

the unsolved in your heart

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart
and try to learn to love the questions themselves.....

strong or miserable

We make ourselves miserable
or we make ourselves strong.

The amount of work is the same.


Carlos Castaneda
Don Juan, Journey to Ixtian

disease of superficiality

The habit of prematurely cutting off processes of
thought, or slurring over them, has assumed serious proportions
in the man of modern urban civilization. Restlessly
he clamours for ever new stimuli in increasingly
quicker succession just as he demands increasing speed
in his means of locomotion. This rapid bombardment of
impressions has gradually blunted his sensitivity, and
thus he always needs new stimuli, louder, coarser, and
more variegated. Such a process, if not checked, can
end only in disaster. Already we see at large a decline
of finer aesthetic susceptibility and a growing incapacity
for genuine natural joy. The place of both is taken
by a hectic, short-breathed excitement incapable of giving
any true aesthetic or emotional satisfaction.


Nyanaponika Thera
The Power of Mindfulness

Written in the stars

I am here to tell you we can never meet again
Simple really, isn't it, a word or two and then
A lifetime of not knowing where or how or why or when
You think of me or speak of me or wonder what befell
The someone you once loved so long ago so well

Never wonder what I'll feel as living shuffles by
You don't have to ask me and I need not reply
Every moment of my life from now until I die
I will think or dream of you and fail to understand
How a perfect love can be confounded out of hand

Is it written in the stars
Are we paying for some crime
Is that all that we are good for
Just a stretch of mortal time

Is this God's experiment
In which we have no say
In which we're given paradise
But only for a day

Nothing can be altered, there is nothing to decide
No escape, no change of heart, no anyplace to hide
You are all I'll ever want, but this I am denied
Sometimes in my darkest thoughts, I wish I'd never learned
What it is to be in love and have that love returned


Music by Elton John
Lyrics by Tim Rice
Produced by Peter Collins and Wilbur Rimes
Duet with Leann Rimes
Available on the album Elton John and Tim Rice's Aida

movement of the will

Turning towards a spiritual path effects a deep-seated reversal in the movement of the will. The will tends to move in an outward direction, pushing for the extension of its bounds of self-identity. It seeks to gain increasing territory for the self, to widen the range of ownership, control and domination. When we turn to the spiritual path, the ground is laid for this pattern to be undermined and turned around. Our drive for self-expansion is the root of our bondage. It is a mode of craving, of grasping and clinging, leading headlong into frustration and despair. When this is understood the danger in egocentric seeking comes to the surface and the will turns in the opposite direction, moving towards renunciation and detachment. The objects of clinging are gradually relinquished, the sense of "I" and "mine" withdrawn from the objects to which it has attached itself. Ultimate deliverance is now seen to lie, not in the extension of the ego to the limits of infinity, but in the utter abolition of the ego-delusion at its base.


Bhikkhu Bodhi paraphrased

correct insight

In subtle ways, concealed from ourselves, our desires condition our perceptions, twisting them to fit into the mould they themselves want to impose. Thus our minds work by way of selection and exclusion. We take note of those things agreeable to our pre-conceptions; we blot out or distort those that threaten to throw them into disarray.

To reach beyond fear and danger we must sharpen and widen our vision. We have to pierce through the deceptions that lull us into a comfortable complacency, to take a straight look down into the depths of our existence, without turning away uneasily or running after distractions.

The real way to safety lies through correct insight, not through wishful thinking.


Bhikkhu Bodhi

to find progress

One of the ways of stopping science would be only to do experiments in the region where you know the law. But experimenters search most diligently, and with the greatest effort, in exactly those places where it seems most likely that we can prove our theories wrong. In other words we are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.

Richard Feynman