Empire is made
of sand, not stone…

—Sam Hamill

Pull yourself together
Let yourself go

(It's all breathing)

Practise like your life depends upon it

Real thought is always creative & always surprises.

A sense that it's come from the muse, not from me.

Patience is the art of caring slowly.

—John Ciardi

Meditation develops spiritual resilience. Eventually nothing gets you down. Not for long anyway.

ALL HEART
belly lower heart
head upper heart

play with it  :  never force it

Yielding, at its most subtle & refined, suckers the world into giving you the energy you need to do what you want to do. We call this borrowing energy.

for it is not so much to know the self
as to know it as it is known
   by galaxy and cedar cone,
as if birth had never found it
and death could never end it

—A R Ammons

Poetry uses language to reach beyond language.

I know that a painting is finished when the ground becomes groundless and the surface dissolves into that groundlessness.

—Raquel Rabinovich

There’s a name for attention at its most intense and generous: love. Attention is love. Love is attention. They are one and the same.

—Eric Weiner

Despite history and progress, which is really only technological progress (Picasso announced after visiting Altamira that art has not really gone anywhere in 30,000 years and Alfred North Whitehead said all Western philosophy is just footnotes to Plato). So despite history – so-called human progress – there's always been a counter current, an underground, secret subculture trying to move away from the civilised, the social, the cultural, move backwards towards inner silence, spiritual insight and a naked simplicity.

The Hebrew for attention is tsumet lev (תשומת לב) which literally translates as placing the heart.

Alchemists say patience is the Ladder

and humility the Key to their Garden

Nowadays most are not just closed off, they're immured – walled in behind endless commentary, their own and their culture's.

Somewhere in the forest is a clearing.
Somewhere in the clearing is a man.
Somewhere in the man is a spark.
The spark creates worlds, and
leaves them in ruin.

—Gyrðir Elíasson

The teacher never tires of repeating themselves in the somewhat vain hope that one day the student will wake up and exclaim: Why have you never told me that before?!

A heart so big it swallows everything up

a matter of principle

beginner’s mind: keeping yourself open to the process

Zazen: wholeheartedly sitting in the middle of your life with great clarity and practicality.

—Kosho Uchiyama

Prayer is a natural response to being alive in a natural world.

This is why all primitive cultures are religious.

Anne Lamott says there are basically three prayers: Help, Thanks and Wow! Each is a natural response to a situation: when in trouble, even if we don't admit it or blatantly ask for it, we wish for help; when we receive something that pleases us we always offer some sort of thanks, if only a smile of satisfaction; and when confronted by something that leaves us speechless and ripped open, we bleed energy, if only for a moment. If we were better able to let our energy out then each of these would be a prayer – an honest exchange of feeling (energy) with the world.

To use the mind to work on the mind.
How stupid can you get!