The thing to do, it seems to me, is to prepare yourself so you can be a rainbow in somebody else’s cloud.
Somebody who may not look like you. May not call God the same name you call God – if they call God at all. I may not dance your dances or speak your language.
But be a blessing to somebody. That’s what I think.
– Maya Angelou
But listen to me
For one moment quit being sad.
Hear blessings
dropping their blossoms
around you
Rumi
I love the word pause. . . .
Such a time represents a kind of time that is vanishing: a floating time, completely free of usefulness, suspended between wakefulness and sleep.
This is the time zone of wonder,
when we fall out of the habitual, the taken-for-granted, and are startled by what is.
Noelle Oxenhandler.
It’s not impermanence per se, or even knowing we’re going to die, that is the cause of our suffering, the Buddha taught.
Rather, it’s our resistance to the fundamental uncertainty of our situation.
Our discomfort arises from all of our effort to put ground under our feet, to realize our dream of constant okayness.
Pema Chödrön
Another Spring haiku.
Inner contentment arises when we recognise that what we have, right now, is enough. When the mind is calm, the outer world feels aligned with it. We are friends with life and with other people
In the shadow of the cherry blossom,
there is no such thing
as a stranger
Kobayashi Issa, 1763 – 1828.
We cannot control our life. If we are set upon doing so, we have abdicated from peace, which must balance what is desired with what is possible.
As Hokusai shows so memorably, the great wave is in waiting for any boat. It is unpredictable, as uncontrollable now as it was at the dawn of time. Will the slender boats survive or will they be overwhelmed?
The risk is a human constant; it has to be accepted – and laid aside. What we can do, we do. Beyond that, we endure, our endurance framed by a sense of what matters and what does not. The worst is not that we may be overwhelmed by disaster, but to fail to live by principle. Yet we are fallible, and so the real worst, the antithesis of peace, is to refuse to recognise failure and humbly begin again.
Sr Wendy Beckett The Art of Lent: A Painting A Day From Ash Wednesday To Easter
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