bittersoft

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When the big clock at the train station stopped, the leaves kept falling, the trains kept running, my mother’s hair kept growing longer and blacker, and my father’s body kept filling up with time. I can’t see the year on the station’s calendar. We slept under the stopped hands of the clock until morning, when a man entered carrying a ladder. He climbed up to the clock’s face and opened it with a key. No one but he knew what he saw. Below him, the mortal faces went on passing toward all compass points. people went on crossing borders, buying tickets in one time zone and setting foot in another. Crossing thresholds: sleep to waking and back, waiting room to moving train and back, war zone to safe zone and back. Crossing between gain and loss: learning new words for the world and the things in it. Forgetting old words for the heart and the things in it. And collecting words in a different language for those three primary colors: staying, leaving, and returning. And only the man at the top of the ladder understood what he saw behind the face which was neither smiling nor frowning. And my father’s body went on filling up with death until it reached the highest etched mark of his eyes and spilled into mine. And my mother’s hair goes on never reaching the earth.

Big Clock, Li-Young Lee

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Cherry blossoms - lights of years past.

Matsuo Bashō, from On Love And Barley: Haiku Of Bashō (translation by Lucien Stryk) 

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Unknown Singer, painting by Nicholas Roerich (1920)

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Before we were born we had no feeling; we were one with the universe. After we are separated by birth from this oneness, as the water falling from the waterfall is separated by wind and rocks, then we have feeling. Whether it is separated into drops or not, water is water. Our life and death are the same thing. When the water returns to its original oneness with the river, it no longer has any individual feeling to it; it resumes its own nature, and finds composure. How very glad the water must be to come back with the original river!

Shunryū Suzuki

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In the dreamy silence Of the afternoon, a Cloth of gold is woven Over wood and prairie; And the jaybird, newly Fallen from the heaven, Scatters cordial greetings, And the air is filled with Scarlet leaves, that, dropping, Rise again, as ever, With a useless sigh for Rest—and it is Autumn.

Alexander Posey, Autumn (The Poems of Alexander Lawrence Posey, 1910)

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Gustave Flaubert, from a notebook entry written c. September 1839 (x)

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No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

Heraclitus

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There is no way to be. You are. It is enough, full stop.

Mooji

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( x )

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there’s life, and then there’s later. Maybe it’s myself that I miss. (…)

Mary Oliver, from Blueberries in “Blue Horses: Poems”

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Vincent van Gogh Still Life with French Novels and Glass with a Rose 1887

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Act without expectation.

Lao Tzu 

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“Real fearlessness is the product of tenderness. It comes from letting the world tickle your heart, your raw and beautiful heart. You are willing to open up, without resistance or shyness, and face the world. You are willing to share your heart with others.”

— Chögyam Trungpa

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Buddhism advises you not to implant feelings that you don’t really have or avoid feelings that you do have. If you are miserable you are miserable; that is the reality, that is what is happening, so confront that. Look it square in the eye without flinching. When you are having a bad time, examine that experience, observe it mindfully, study the phenomenon and learn its mechanics. The way out of a trap is to study the trap itself, learn how it is built. You do this by taking the thing apart piece by piece. The trap can’t trap you if it has been taken to pieces. The result is freedom.

Henepola Gunaratana (via aspiritualwarrior)

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In the remote Buddhist monastery of Haeinsa is preserved the Tripitaka Koreana, the most complete corpus of Buddhist doctrinal texts in the world, dating from 1251.

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“We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas.”

— Alan Watts