to heal

Sakyamuni (Buddha) himself refused to answer speculative questions, 

and he would not permit abstract philosophical discussion.  

His doctrine was not a doctrine but a way of being in the world.  

His religion was not a set of beliefs and convictions or of rites and sacraments,

 but an opening to love.  

His philosophy was not a world view but a significant silence,

 in which the fracture implied by conceptual knowledge 

was allowed to heal and reality appeared again in its mysterious

 "suchness."

~ Thomas Merton

from Zen and the Birds of Appetite

 

no better love

No better love than love with no object,

no more satisfying work than work with no purpose.

If you could give up tricks and cleverness,

that would be the cleverest trick!

~ Rumi

from The Essential Rumi

translations by Coleman Barks with John Moyne

see yourself in the cruelest

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.

~  Thich Nhat Hanh

with thanks to louie, louie 

vanishing

We are vanishing from the earth, yet I cannot think we are useless

or else Usen would not have created us. He created all tribes of 

men and certainly had a righteous purpose in creating each.

~ Geronimo

 

vocation to solitude

 To deliver oneself up, to hand oneself over, entrust oneself completely to the silence of a wide landscape of woods and hills, or sea, or desert; to sit still while the sun comes up over that land and fills its silences with light. To pray and work in the morning and to labor and rest in the afternoon, and to sit still again in meditation in the evening when night falls up on that land and when the silence fills itself with darkness and with stars… to belong completely to such silence, to let it soak into the bones, to breathe nothing but silence, to feed on silence, and to turn the very substance of life into a living and vigilant silence.

~ Thomas Merton 

from Thoughts in Solitude
  art by Odilon Redon, " Silence"

with thanks to Parabola