This everything dance

I like to live in the sound of water, in the feel of the mountain air.  A sharp reminder hits me:  this world still is alive; it stretches out there shivering toward its own creation, and I’m part of it.  Even my breathing enters into this elaborate give-and-take, this bowing to sun and moon, day and night, winter, summer, storm, still — this tranquil chaos that seems to be going somewhere.  This wilderness with a great peacefulness in it.  This motionless turmoil, this everything dance.

~ William Stafford

The answer is never the answer

(At the bridge.)

The answer is never the answer.  What’s really interesting is the mystery.  If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you’ll always be seeking.  I’ve never seen anybody really find the answer — they think they have, so they stop thinking.  But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom.  The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.

~ Ken Kesy

Going to the next level

(Approaching the abyss)

We have no where to go (really) but down — eventually we must all let go and jump — it is supposedly that act which propels us to the next level — to enlightenment.  What would bring us to this point — where are we willing to give up the self?  Does the fall into the abyss always result in enlightenment?  How would we know?  What do we have to give up to make such a leap?

~ Hakuin Ekaku

I don’t know how we know.  I do know one of the things we have to give up to make a leap, any leap, is fear.  I’ve had to give it up a few times, to carry on with the commitment I made to get outside every day.  I think it was the commitment that gave me the courage to give up the fear so I could make those leaps.

Or maybe I’m just plain crazy, like The Fool in the Tarot, a card I have long identified with.  Sometimes it takes a little crazy to move on or move up, or even just to carry on.

Small enlightenment

Enlightenment is always there.  Small enlightenment will bring great enlightenment.  If you breathe in and are aware that you are alive — that you can touch the miracle of being alive — then that is a kind of enlightenment.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

There is no path

For the discovery of truth there is no path…

~ J. Krishnamurti

Wonder

(The storage room.  Washington, D.C.)

Wonder begins with the element of surprise.  The now almost obsolete word ‘wonderstruck’ suggests that wonder breaks into consciousness with a dramatic suddenness that produces amazement or astonishment.  Because of the suddenness with which it appears, wonder reduces us momentarily to silence.  We associate gaping, breathlessness, bewilderment, and even stupor with wonder, because it jolts us out of the world of common sense in which our language is at home.  The language and categories we customarily use to deal with experience are inadequate to the encounter, and hence we are initially immobilized and dumbfounded.  We are silent before some new dimension of meaning which being revealed.

~ Sam Keen

Altruism

(Making yourself a(t) home.  Washington, D.C.)

All altruism springs from putting yourself in the other person’s place.

~ Harry Emerson Fosdick

Arriving

A mind that is passionate is inquiring, searching, looking, asking, demanding, not merely trying to find for its discontent some object in which it can fulfill itself and go to sleep.  A passionate mind is groping, seeking, breaking through, not accepting any tradition; it is not a decided mind, not a mind that has arrived, but it is a young mind that is ever arriving.

~ J. Krishnamurti

The eternal hush of silence

Listen closely.
The eternal hush of silence goes on and on throughout all this, and has been going on, and will go on and on.  This is because the world is nothing but a dream and is just thought of and the everlasting eternity pays no attention to it.

~ Jack Kerouac

The time is now

It’s hard to remember that this day will never come again.  That the time is now and the place is here and that there are no second chances at a single moment.

~ Jeanette Winterson