What is the true self? It’s brilliantly transparent like the deep blue sky, and there’s no gap between it and all living beings.
~ Kodo Sawaki Roshi, “The True Self”
Sky
fly
You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.
~ Toni Morrison
The sea
The sea is a mirror, not only to the clouds, the sun, the moon, and the stars, but to all one’s dreams, to all one’s speculations… . The sea tells us that everything is changing and that nothing ever changes, that tides go out and return, that all existence is a rhythm.
~ Arthur Symons, In a Northern Bay, 1918
Messages
Soul is that unconditioned, mysterious, untamed, undomesticated, unique individual wild core of ourselves which is inextricably connected to the mysteries of wild nature.
– Claire Dunn
Being a person
Be a person here. Stand by the river, invoke
the owls. Invoke winter, then spring.
Let any season that wants to come here make its own
call. After that sound goes away, wait.A slow bubble rises through the earth
and begins to include sky, stars, all space,
even the outracing, expanding thought.
Come back and hear the little sound again.Suddenly this dream you are having matches
everyone’s dream, and the result is the world.
If a different call came there wouldn’t be any
world, or you, or the river, or the owls calling.How you stand here is important. How you
listen for the next things to happen. How you breathe.~ William Stafford, Text as published in Even in Quiet Places: Poems (Confluence Press, 2010).
Blessing
Some wish blessings, others pray for them. Some send blessings and they become one.
~ Joyce C. Lock
a dumb experiment
…We listen to words
so we can silently
reach into the other.Let the ear and mouth get quiet,
so this taste can come to the lip.Too long we have been saying poetry,
talking discourses, explaining the mystery outloud.Let us try a dumb experiment.
~ Rumi
slowing down
There is more to life than increasing its speed.
~ Mohandas K. Gandhi
life and death
It is a seeing of every moment of life against the horizon of death, and a challenge to incorporate that awareness of dying into every moment so as to become more fully alive.
~ David Steindl-Bast
we are star dust
What I am really saying is that you don’t need to do anything, because if you see yourself in the correct way, you are all as much extraordinary phenomenon of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of the stars, and the form of a galaxy. You are all just like that, and there is nothing wrong with you at all.
~ Alan Watts, Still the Mind
morning attitude 