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You are not a problem to be solved.
Just as nothing is gained or attained, nothing is lost or wasted.
You can’t take credit for yourself, only responsibility.
You know that the antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest? … The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness.
― David Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea
One my favourite book titles.
It also happens to be a great book too.
The only possible place to get to, the only attainable perspective, the only condition one simply cannot help experiencing is the present moment whatever it is, however it is.
There is nothing to be done but see ourselves clearly. With this clear recognition, what happens next is what happens next regardless of what we may want.
Therefore, I do not view the self as an improvement project that begins with incompletion and evolves towards completion. The chaos does not need to be ordered. The entropy does not need to be reduced. The demons do not need to be tamed. The jagged edges don’t need to be smoothed out.
A man in love is unmasked. He has no preferences, makes no distinctions, acknowledges no differences, sees himself in everyone. He has, in effect, ceased to be a person.
A man in love
Cold feet
Warm heart
Today
We had a power cut today so I spent the time chopping wood for the stoves.
What’s the cliché? He who chops the wood warms himself twice? Or something along those lines.
The brook has returned to its normal level now after the floods, running clean and bright. No rain forecast for a few days now which might give the land time to dry out a bit. A neighbour who has lived here for twenty years said he’s never seen it so bad.
If I am constantly on the move, tripping, going from here to there and back again, then I am in a restless state, hanging on to the outer rim of the wheel. I will seek relief from this mental foment in experiences of pleasure. But, of course, no pleasure lasts for long; it invariably yields to the restlessness that creates the desire for pleasure in the first place. Where, then, is my release from pain? Nowhere else but at the centre of the wheel. Where there are no distinctions. Where indifference to one is indifference to the other.
Rest-less
The insights of so-called awakening/ enlightenment are not acquiring new information but simply recognising what we already are.
A day off today between a twelve hour shift yesterday and another one tomorrow. In my old job this would have depressed me greatly but these days I couldn’t feel better about it. Such is the profound magnitude and good fortune to have work that you love. Work that is somehow an extension or expression of who and what you are. And often we don’t know who and what we are until the work allows us to express ourselves. A chicken and egg situation but such is life.
Today will be spent contemplatively, outside in nature, inside with coffee and perhaps an invigorating run down by the river later. But mostly in gratitude for, well, everything really.
All I can be is who I am right now; I can experience that and work with it. That’s all I can do. The rest is the dream of the ego.
— Charlotte ‘Joko’ Beck
Some days I am struck more forcibly than other days by just how much we unconsciously define ourselves and create identities by our preferences. What we like and don’t like. Who we like and don’t like. No wonder we create so much unnecessary trouble for ourselves.
Dawn. Sitting still and silent in my car. The rain has abated, floods receding but the wind howls and gusts on, buffeting the car and bending the trees around me. Coffee cup warm in my hand, the Sunday traffic slowly begins to appear. Who are they, where are they going and why?
So storm Darragh gave us a right old battering! Woke up this morning to the brook raging higher than previously and the ground strewn with debris. Oddly, and despite all the rain, the roads to work were passable albeit by dodging large expanses of standing water and numerous tree branches.
Since moving to ‘the wilds’ from our former urban environment my relationship with the weather has become more ambivalent. As with the rest of life, you get what you get when you get it.