"In every moment there is a choice. I believe that the world today is beautiful and I celebrate it totally, not with fear but with joy and happiness and a gratitude for being alive. This is what I ask people to consider experiencing now, in this moment."

~ Tony Samara

 

 

If a person wishes to enter the Buddha realm, he should purify his mind so it becomes as if vacuous and empty, and leave far behind the various phenomena and graspings. One should cause the mind, whatever direction it goes, to be without obstructions. Can you be like this in your everyday practice? If you are able to respond in this way, then the moon and water will face each other calmly, and the wind in the pines will be clear and never ending. Meditating in this way, one could experience the boundlessness of one's original mind, which is identical to the mind of all the Buddhas.

 - Hongzhi

painting credit: RealPainter

“When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.

The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits - islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh