wei wu wei: "action without action" or "effortless doing"

The deep secrecy of my own being is often hidden from me by my own estimate of what I am. My idea of what I am is falsified by my admiration for what I do. And my illusions about myself are bred by contagion from the illusions of other men. We all seek to imitate one another's imagined greatness.
If I do not know who I am, it is because I think I am the sort of person everyone around me wants to be. Perhaps I have never asked myself whether I really wanted to become what everybody else seems to want to become. Perhaps if I only realized that I do not admire what everyone seems to admire, I would really begin to live after all. I would be liberated from the painful duty of saying what I really do not think.

~ Thomas Merton
with thanks to whiskey river

a vast similitude

On the beach at night alone,

As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song,

As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the universes 

and of the future.

A vast similitude interlocks all,

All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets,

All distances of place however wide,

All distances of time, all inanimate forms,

All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, or in different worlds,

All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes,

All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages,

All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe,

All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future,

.

This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann’d,

And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.

~ Walt Whitman

photo by chertkova svetlana

recommended

A refreshing vision our intimate connection with each other

and life itself.

~  by Gregory Boyle 

 

the art of dying - training for nonviolence

Just as one must learn the art of killing in the training for violence, 

so one must learn the art of dying in the training for nonviolence. 

Violence does not mean emancipation from fear, 

but discovering the means of combating the cause for fear. 

The votary of nonviolence has to cultivate the capacity for sacrifice 

of the highest type in order to be free from fear. 

He reckons not if he should lose his land, his wealth, his life. 

Whoever has not overcome all fear cannot practice nonviolence to perfection. 

~ Mohandas K. Gandhi

art by picasso

the chance of humming

A

man

standing on two logs in a river

might do all right floating with the current

while humming in the

now.

Though

if one log is tied to a camel,

who is also heading south along the bank - at the same pace -

all could still be well

with the 

world

unless the camel

thinks he forgot something, and

abruptly turns upstream,

then

uh-oh.

Most minds

do not live in the present

and can stick to a reasonable plan; most minds abruptly turn

and undermine the

chance

of

humming.

~ Rumi

translation by Daniel Ladinsky

from Love Poems from God

watercolor by Kim Novak

Love

...

Love is the strongest force the world possesses,
and yet it is the humblest imaginable

...

~ Mahatma Gandhi