On Duality

Because suffering is impermanent, 

that is why we can transform it.
Because happiness is impermanent, 

that is why we have to nourish it. 

                                                            
                                                                  Thay, 10th June 2014

On Duality

How does a part of the world leave the world?
How can wetness leave water?

Do not try to put out a fire by throwing on more fire.
Do not wash a wound with blood.

No matter how fast you run, 
your shadow more than keeps up.
Sometimes it's in front.

Only full, overhead sun diminishes your shadow.

But that shadow has been serving you.
What hurts you blesses you.
Darkness is your candle.
Your boundaries are your quest.

Rumi

On Healing

 

Last night as I was sleeping

I dreamed - blessed illusion -

That I had a beehive 

Here inside my Heart

And the Golden Bees

Were making

White combs and sweet honey

From my old failures.

Antonio Machado

On Courage

The bravery is believing in yourself.
 
And that nobody can teach you.

On Diversity

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things,

For skies of couple-color as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stiple on trout that swim;

Fresh fire-coal chestnut-falls; finches wings;

Landscape plotted and pierced - fold, fallow and plough;

And all trades, their gear, tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who know how?)

With swift, slow, sweet, sour, adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

On Connection

Ah, not to be cut off

Ah, not to be cut off, 

not throught the slightest partition,

shut out from the law of the stars.

The inner, what is it?

If not intensified sky,

hurled through with birds and deep

with the winds of homecoming.

Rainer Maria Rilke

On Living the Questions

I would like to beg you

to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Art: Justyna Kopania