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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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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