Have you ever seen anything in your life more wonderful than the way the sun, every evening, relaxed and easy, floats toward the horizon and into the clouds or the hills, or the rumpled sea, and is gone– and how it slides again out of the blackness, every morning, on the other side of the…
In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake, coming back to this life from the other more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world where everything began, there is a small opening into the new day that closes the moment you begin your plans. What you can plan is too small for you to…
I cannot tell you how the light comes. What I know is that it is more ancient than imagining. That it travels across an astounding expanse to reach us. That it loves searching out what is hidden what is lost what is forgotten or in peril or in pain. That it has a fondness for…
Last week in the new Mindfulness Based Healthy Living course we were exploring exercise and sleep habits for promoting health and wellbeing. In the realm of sleep we are looking at improving sleep hygiene and introducing periods of non-sleep deep rest, such as bodyscan, yoga nidra and progressive relaxation. So, I thought it would be…
When one is able to overcome the romantic and emotional attitude, one discovers truth even in the kitchen sink. Chögyam Trungpa This morning, with my bare feet planted onto the kitchen floor, flat and smooth, my small brown earthenware coffee cup warms my hands as I look into the windswept garden. It’s really…
It was as if a window suddenly blew open and the sky outside the mind came flooding in. My childhood shriveled to a close, thread of smoke that rose and touched a cloud — or the cloud’s replica adrift on the slow river of thinking — and disappeared inside it. In that dark water, a…
Imagine you wake up with a second chance: The blue jay hawks his pretty wares and the oak still stands, spreading glorious shade. If you don’t look back, the future never happens. How good to rise in sunlight, in the prodigal smell of biscuits – eggs and sausage on the grill. The whole sky is…
There is a brokenness out of which comes the unbroken, a shatteredness out of which blooms the unshatterable. There is a sorrow beyond all grief that leads to joy and a fragility out of whose depths emerges strength. There is a hollow space too vast for words through which we pass with each loss, out…
Wake up. Day calls you to your life: your duty. Tear your body from the black night and the shadows that covered it, this body for which light waited on tiptoe at dawn. Stand up, affirm the straight, simple will to be perfect, unbent purity. Touch the temple of your body. Is it hot? Cold?…