Plain sailing

(Sunrise.  Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, Florida)

The unknown is what it is.  And to be frightened of it is what sends everybody scurrying around chasing dreams, illusions, wars, peace, love, hate, all that …  Accept that it’s unknown, and it’s plain sailing.

~ John Lennon

Beginner

Be willing to be a beginner every single morning.

~ Meister Eckhart

Mindfulness

(Red-tailed hawk on a snowy day.)

Try to be mindful, and let things take their natural course.  Then your mind will become still in any surroundings, like a clear forest pool.  All kinds of wonderful, rare animals will come to drink at the pool, and you will clearly see the nature of all things.  You will see many strange and wonderful things come and go, but you will be still.

~ Ajahn Chah

Finding peace in the living room

(A stream of sunlight.  December 2009.)

There is no need to go to India or anywhere else to find peace.  You will find that deep place of silence right in your room, your garden, or even your bathtub.

~ Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

Treat it with care

(Sun catcher on a rainy day in December.)

Your body is precious.  It is our vehicle for awakening.  Treat it with care.

~ Buddha

Daily life

(Yesterday’s rainbow.)

There is no enlightenment outside of daily life.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Remember

(Afternoon sunlight hitting the wall.)

The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming.  But again and again we avoid the long thoughts.  We cling to the present out of wariness of the past.  And why not, after all?  We get confused.  We need such escape as we can find.  But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need — not all the time, surely, but from time to time — to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are the most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us.  The name of the room is Remember — the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.

~ Frederick Buechner

Sunflowers

Your diamonds are not in far distant mountains or in yonder seas; they are in your own backyard, if you but dig for them.

~ Russell H. Conwell

I think I’m going to forever associate sunflowers with my mother’s illness and death.  Not in a bad way, but in a way I can’t fully explain just yet.  Perhaps I’ll never be able to explain it completely other than to say that somehow sunflowers brought a measure of beauty, peace, light, and comfort into my life at a time when I most needed those things.  Some of my sunflower photos even served as expressions of my feelings —  feelings I couldn’t put into words — on my blogs.

I was going through my collection of sunflower pictures when I came across this one, in a possibly-rejects file (the “possibly-rejects” are those photos I couldn’t make a decision about in regards to saving or deleting).  I don’t know why I didn’t like it at the time or why I suddenly see something in it now that I didn’t then, but I’m glad I saved it.  It was, for me, worth another look.

Boundless

(November moonrise.)

The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.

~ Jean Jacques Rousseau

Autumn wind

(Autumn in the woods.)

behind me
the autumn wind blows
me home

~ Issa, 1806