“Meditation is not about becoming a better person or a more spiritual person. It’s about becoming a more honest person.”
— Barry Magid, Ordinary Mind Zendo
I enjoy Day One Journal’s On This Day feature popping up, as it does, entries from years past. The older the entries the more I don’t recognise the author. Many seem written by someone I can barely relate to, someone completely different which, in one sense, is true.
“The point of Zen is not to escape life, but to live it completely, to taste fully the richness, the sweetness, the bitterness, the sourness, and the umami of every moment.”
— Barry Magid, Ordinary Mind Zendo
Whatever a tree does, whatever a fly does, whatever the sea does, whatever a penguin does, whatever a star does; we’re busy doing our version of it.
“Meditation/ contemplation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.”
— Alan Watts
I like being in art galleries in the same way I like being in churches. And I like having no idea why.
“If we have one job in times like this, it is to be bearers, through our careful grief, of love, of grace, of light even, into this present darkness.”
So, made it into work after all, dodging lots of standing water most of the way. Thought it would be much worse. Just goes to show you never can tell.
The brook now running brown and a little faster and higher. Another twelve hours of this rain and we’ll have a full on raging torrent and widespread flooding. Chance of making it to work in the morning? 50/50 I’m guessing.
“It boils down to waking up moment to moment. Being present, open, unprotected. Allowing the tenderness, the heartbreak, the vulnerability, the love, and the wonder. The mind can make it all very complicated, but it’s really so very simple.”
— Joan Tollifson
Wet and windy out there so keeping warm and dry indoors watching the footie. Newcastle flying against Forest. Expecting similar from Liverpool vs. City later…
“And that to me is the healthy heart of contemplation (a.k.a. meditation). It’s an allowing. It’s a participation in the living truth that’s always already here, before we even have thoughts or names for it. And it’s embrace with that. It’s a participation with that, and in that, and as that. Contemplation is allowing an embrace from a more original state of affairs, an always already there naturalness. A matter-of-fact wonder of life as it is, ‘before’ we have a technique or an idea about things.”
— Prof. Michael Sheehy