"Turning"

Going too fast for myself I missed

more than I think I can remember

almost everything it seems sometimes

and yet there are chances that come back

that I did not notice when they stood

where I could have reached out and touched them

this morning the black shepherd dog

still young looking up and saying

Are you ready this time

- W.S. Merwin

from The New Yorker, 05/16/11

Still, what I want in my life

is to be willing

to be dazzled--

to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even

to float a little

above this difficult world.

I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.

I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing--

that the light is everything-- that it is more than the sum

of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.

- Mary Oliver

excerpt from The Ponds

from the collection House of Light

A man is rich in proportion to the amount of things which he can afford to let alone.

- Thoreau

The world's spiritual geniuses seem to discover universally that the mind's muddy river, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash, cannot be dammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness. Instead you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights; you look along it, mildly, acknowledging its presence without interest and gazing beyond it into the realm of the real where subjects and objects act and rest purely, without utterance. "Launch into the deep," says Jacques Ellul, "and you shall see."

- Annie Dillard

from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, p. 35

The Taoists call that person a master whose happiness is absolutely his own. He can be happy irrespective of the situation: young he is happy, old he is happy; as an emperor he is happy, as a beggar he is happy. His song is uncontaminated by circumstances; his song is his own, his song is his natural rhythm.

- Osho

from Tao: The Pathless Path, p. 64

And now let us welcome the new year, full of things that have never been.

- Rilke

In contemplation, we practice pointing ourselves in a particular direction and staying there for a while. When we hold our mind to something, it has no alternative but to get more familiar with that place.

- Sakyong Mipham

from Ruling Your World, p. 109-110