In Japan, there is an art to fixing broken pottery called kintsugi. The cracks are mended with a resin painted gold. The idea is that what is broken becomes more beautiful for having been broken.
In this way, the Japanese honor the broken rather than hiding it.
So often, we hide our wounds, our scars, our cracks. But what if they are the very openings through which we grow?
Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening
Try to be, only to be. The all-important word is ‘try’. Allot enough time daily for sitting quietly and trying, just trying, to go beyond the personality, with its addictions and obsessions. Don’t ask how, it cannot be explained. You just keep on trying until you succeed.
What matters supremely is sincerity, earnestness; you must really have had surfeit of being the person you are, now see the urgent need of being free of this unnecessary self-identification with a bundle of memories and habits. This steady resistance against the unnecessary is the secret of success
Nisargadatta Maharaj, I AM THAT.
The unsatisfactory nature of life does not mean we are getting it wrong. Our experience is characterized by a constant restless quality :
At its core, dukkha is the tension of resisting life as it is.
Psychologically, it manifests as anxiety, self-judgment, and the relentless pursuit of ‘somewhere else’ to be happy.
Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance
Follow anything in its act of being – a snowflake falling, ice melting, a loved one waking – and we are ushered into the ongoing moment of the beginning, the quiet instant from which each breath starts.
What makes THIS moment so crucial is that it continually releases the freshness of living. The key to finding this moment and all its freshness, again and again, is slowing down. When we find ourselves stalled in our very serious and ambitious plans, we are often being asked to re-find the beginning of time.
Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening
As Mary Oliver reminded us yesterday, paying attention is how one stands rightly in this world.
Attention is the most basic form of love. To pay attention to your breath, to the bird outside, to the ache in your heart -this is how you honor the sacredness of life.
Pema Chodron, The Wisdom of No Escape
Attention is a narrowing and an expansion. You focus on one leaf, and in that act, the whole forest becomes more alive.
To see a single thing clearly is to see its connection to everything else.
Jane Hirshfield, Poetry and the Mind of Concentration
In Buddhism, the First Noble Truth acknowledges simply “There is suffering”. This helps us to simply observe and witness things as they are: impermanent, unsatisfactory and not personal. The underlying word dukkha means that ultimately conditions are “incapable of satisfying” Mary Oliver here reminds us to stay with everything in our lives, and in some sense say “It’s OK”, not because it is nice or not painful, but because it is already here. Denial is a failure of attention.
But, listen,
what’s important?
Nothing’s important
except that the great and cruel mystery of the world,
of which this is a part,
not to be denied.
Mary Oliver, Turtle
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