When Nothing Is Missing

Eternity is not somewhere beyond this life. It is this moment when we stop reaching backward and forward. When thought stops measuring time, the eternal is simply what remains: entirely present, always.

Eternity is not infinity.

It is not a long time.

It does not begin at the end of time.

It does not run parallel to time.

In its entirety it always was.

In its entirety it will always be.

It is entirely present always.

Wendell Berry, From Leavings.

Wendell Berry died on Monday aged 92. He was an activist, a poet and a farmer whose poems, as one writer said, “should be read as part of a spiritual practice and as poems, in some sense, devoted to dwelling, to living thoughtfully in one place

Beyond the confines of labels

Just as a flame blown out by the wind
Goes to rest and cannot be defined,
So the wise person, freed from name and form
Goes to rest
beyond all reckoning.

The Buddha,  Sutta Nipāta 4.6

The Buddha often used the image of a flame going out – not destroyed, but freed from conditions. Likewise, the liberated mind is not annihilated but beyond all definitions.

Ajahn Amaro, The Island

Open door

Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark.

That’s where the most important things come from,

where you yourself came from, and where you will go.

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

the secret of life

The cure for boredom is curiosity.
There is no cure for curiosity.

Dorothy Parker

Stuck

Our self talk matters. “I can’t” frequently means “I have never learned another way.”

Through the first years of life, we organize our entire system in a direction which will forever after guide us in that direction. We end up being restricted, we don’t do music, we don’t do other things.

What is most important, we find ourselves capable of doing only those things that we already know.

Moshe Feldenkrais

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when we learn

It is not in calm weather

that one sees the skill of the pilot,

but in a storm.

Epictetus, Discourses 1.24.6