“Meditation is not just blindly following whatever the person next to you does. To meditate you have to be skillful and make good use of your intelligence.”
—Thich Nhat Hanh, Anger, Wisdom for Cooling the Flames
Month: July 2021
Morning Trip (344)
Though I cannot flee from the world of corruption, I can prepare tea with water from a mountain stream and put my heart to rest.
—-Ueda Akinari
Morning Trip (343)
”From the center of my life, there came a great fountain…”
—Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat Pray Love (Used a line of poem from Louise Gluck)
Morning Trip (342)
”Out here in the woods I can think of nothing except God and it is not so much that I think of Him either. I am as aware of Him as of the sun and the clouds and the blue sky and the thin cedar trees. When I first came out here, I was asleep…but I read a few lines from the Desert Fathers and then, after that, my whole being was full of serenity and vigilance.
Who am I writing this for, anyway? It is a waste of time! Enough to say that as long as I am out here I cannot think of Camaldoli either; no question of being here and dreaming of somewhere else. Engulfed in the simple and lucid actuality which is the afternoon: I mean God’s afternoon, this sacramental moment of time when the shadows will get longer and longer, and one small bird sings quietly in the cedars, and one car goes by in the remote distance and the oak leaves move in the wind.”
—— Thomas Merton, When the Trees Say Nothing, Writings on Nature
Morning Trip (341)
”Magic is a discipline of the mind, and it begins with understanding how consciousness is shaped and how our view of reality is constructed. Since the time of the Witch persecutions, knowledge that derives from the worldview of an animate, interconnected, dynamic universe is considered suspect—-either outright evil or simply woo-woo.
But whenever an area of knowledge is considered suspect, our minds are constricted. The Universe is too big, too complex, too ever-changing for us to know it completely, so we choose to view it through a certain frame—-one that screens out pieces of information that conflict with the categories in our minds. The narrower that frame, the more we screen out, the less we are capable of understanding or doing.”
—-Starhawk, author of The Spiral Dance
Elisa's Spot 