simple acceptance and openness

The everyday practice is simply to develop a complete acceptance and openness to all situations and emotions, and to all people, experiencing everything totally without mental reservations and blockages, so that one never withdraws or centralizes into oneself.

~ Trungpa Rinpoche

We must come to the point at which we have the freedom, the courage, to look at things as a baby does, without foreknowledge; to let whatever new reality apperception comes, let it come in and experience it fully and totally, without understanding it.  For understanding is only classifying something by previously established patterns of thought.

~ Fazal Inayat-Khan

individual shoots were younger

The individual shoots were younger, but these new growths from the past few centuries were not considered to be stand-alone trees but part of a larger whole.. The root is certainly a more decisive factor than what is growing above ground.  After all, it is the root that looks after the survival of an organism. It is the root that has withstood severe changes in climatic conditions. And it is the root that has regrown trunks time and time again. It is in the roots that centuries of experience are stored, and it is this experience that has allowed the tree's survival to the present day.

~ Peter Wohllenben

from The Hidden Life of Trees

... down deep, at the molecular heart of life,
we’re essentially identical to trees.

~ Carl Sagan

 

thank you

.

Meditation enables them to go

Deeper and deeper into consciousness,

From the world of words to the world of thoughts,

Then beyond thoughts to wisdom in the Self.

...

Sharp like a razor's edge, the sages say,

Is the path, difficult to traverse.

~ Katha Upanishad

This is the passage from which the title of Somerset Maugham's book The Razor's Edge was taken. His story traces the spiritual journey of an American fighter pilot traumatized by WWI. The book is apparently based on the life of Guy Hague who had spent time with Ramana Maharshi in Tamil Nadu, India, as did Maugham himself.

William Somerset Maugham was born on this day in 1874 in Paris. He was trained as a doctor and work on the front as a Red Cross volunteer during WWI. He became famous with his semi- autobiographical novel Of Human Bondage in 1915. Maugham's novels seem to make apparent the beauty of and intricacy of the fabric of life in-which we are all entwined.

Happy Birthday Mr. Maugham and thank you.

keep letting go

‎Non-aggression doesn't mean that you're not supposed to get angry; it doesn't mean that you're not supposed to set boundaries; it doesn't mean that you're not supposed to be sharp; it doesn't mean that you don't have neurotic upheavals and meltdowns. What it does mean is that we have to keep letting go - until we are naked with ourselves, and we are making room for the person we actually are. And it's the exact same process with other people. We have to let go, let go, let go . . . Until we see and we are seen.

 

 

 

  ~ Reggie Ray

with thanks to whiskey river
art by banksy

all of a sudden

All my life perplexed by truth and falsity, right and wrong;

Now amusing myself in the moonlight,

Laughing at the wind,

Listening to the song of birds -

So many years spent idly contemplating

The immense white layer on the mountains;

This winter, all of a sudden,

I see it for the first time as a snow-mountain.

~ Dogen

from The Zen Poetry of Dogen by Steven Heine

 

the thing with feathers

"Hope" is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tune without the words—
And never stops—at all—

And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard—
And sore must be the storm—
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm—

I've heard it in the chillest land—
And on the strangest Sea—
Yet, never, in Extremity,
It asked a crumb—of Me.


~ Emily Dickinson

from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Edited by R. W. Franklin

 with thanks to Love is a Place

many shapes

You come and go. The doors swing closed 

ever more gently, almost without a shudder. 

Of all those who move through the quiet houses, 

you are the quietest. 

We become so accustomed to you, 

we no longer look up 

when your shadow falls over the book we are reading 

and makes it glow. For all things 

sing you: at times 

we just hear them more clearly. 

Often when I imagine you 

your wholeness cascades into many shapes. 

You run like a herd of luminous deer 

and I am dark, I am forest. 

You are a wheel at which I stand, 

whose dark spokes sometimes catch me up, 

revolve me nearer to the center. 

Then all the work I put my hand to 

widens from turn to turn. 

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from Love Poems to God, 

The Book of Monastic Life