this moment

 

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This moment is like this.

—Ajahn Sumedho



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question

 

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You ask why I make my home
in the mountain forest
and I smile, and am silent,
and even my soul remains quiet:
It lives in the other world
which no one owns.
The peach trees blossom.
The water flows.


—Li Po

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not to worry

 

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Ever since happiness heard your name, it has been running through the streets trying to find you!

—Hafiz

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dear friends

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Practice until you see yourself in the cruelest person on Earth, in the child starving, in the political prisoner. Continue until you recognize yourself in everyone in the supermarket, on the street corner, in a concentration camp, on a leaf, in a dewdrop.

Meditate until you see yourself in a speck of dust in a distant galaxy. See and listen with the whole of your being. 

If you are fully present, the rain of Dharma will water the deepest seeds in your consciousness, and tomorrow, while you are washing the dishes or looking at the blue sky, that seed will spring forth, and love and understanding will appear as a beautiful flower.

[..]


You too are a tree. During a storm of emotions, you should not stay at the level of the head or the heart, which are like the top of the tree. You have to leave the heart, the eye of the storm, and come back to the trunk of the tree. 

Your trunk is one centimeter below your navel. Focus there, paying attention only to the movement of your abdomen, and continue to breathe.
 

—Thích Nhất Hạnh

. . .

Inside us there is something that has no name,

that something is what we are.

—José Saramago

Blindness 

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wait - what ?

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The moon is the earth’s conscience. —Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

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The moon, it turns out, is a great place for men. One-sixth gravity must be a lot of fun, and when Armstrong and Aldrin went into their bouncy little dance, like two happy children, it was a moment not only of triumph but of gaiety.

The moon, on the other hand, is a poor place for flags. Ours looked stiff and awkward, trying to float on the breeze that does not blow. (There must be a lesson here somewhere.) It is traditional, of course, for explorers to plant the flag, but it struck us, as we watched with awe and admiration and pride, that our two fellows were universal men, not national men, and should have been equipped accordingly.

Like every great river and every great sea, the moon belongs to none and belongs to all. It still holds the key to madness, still controls the tides that lap on shores everywhere, still guards the lovers who kiss in every land under no banner but the sky. What a pity that in our moment of triumph we did not forswear the familiar Iwo Jima scene and plant instead a device acceptable to all: a limp white handkerchief, perhaps, symbol of the common cold, which, like the moon, affects us all, unites us all.

—E. B. White
July 26, 1969

 

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