Courage to Continue

“Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

“It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up.”
~ Babe Ruth

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
~ Winston Churchill

Pure and simple: I am not perfect. I am human, with my issues and insecurities. But the best part of me isn't that I do no wrong. In fact, I make mistakes, and sometimes I keep making them over and over. But one of the best thing about me is that I get up. I keep trying, sometimes futilely, but I keep trying with my heart, with good intentions. I just need to let go of the results, and just work with good intentions, and right actions.

Love

“You cannot save people. You can only love them.”

~ Anaïs Nin

All we need to do is be willing to forgive. The Universe will take care of the hows

"The very person you find it hardest to forgive is the one you need to let go of the most. Forgiveness means letting go. It has nothing to do with condoning behavior, it's just letting the whole thing go. We do not have to know how to forgive. All we need to do is be willing to forgive. The Universe will take care of the hows."

- Louise Hay

Flat Tire is also Part of the Journey

There is a problem in thinking that you are supposed to be advancing in your practice all the time. You don’t have to constantly be on the road. If you have a flat tire, that is also part of the journey. Ambition makes you feel that you are not doing anything. There seems to be a hypnotic quality to ambition and speed, so that you feel that you are standing still just because you want to go so fast. You might actually be getting close to your goal.
~ Chogyam Trungpa

Well, flat tire fixed. Time to move on.

Sometimes - actually, many, many, many times, it feels like I'm not moving anywhere on my practice. In fact, often it feels like I'm going backwards. I don't know if the "flat tire" is really part of the journey, and if I am actually getting close to my goal - if there's any. I just know that I need to continue going in the right direction, no matter how much the people around me mock me. No matter how they tell me I have not changed. I'm not doing this for them, although in a paradoxical way, I am. I am doing this for myself, although paradoxically, it doesn't work if the motivation is selfish.

"Unashamed Desire" by Missy Higgins

New Single from Missy Higgins' new album, The Ol' Razzle Dazzle - "Unashamed Desire"

I've been playing this song on a loop lately. The lyrics captivates me, like a declaration of authenticity - I am real, I will not be ashamed of my desires. I am not afraid to love. I yearn for this proud honesty about certain aspects of my own life.





http://missyhiggins.com/

Empty all my pockets and take what you like
Empty all my pockets if you like
I've got nothing to hide
Empty all my pockets and take what you like
Empty all my pockets if you like
I've got nothing to hide

My unashamed desire
is an open fire
Unashamed desire

Open up my chest and take what you like
Open up my chest if you like
I've got nothing to hide
Cut open my heart and turn on the light
Cut open my heartache if you like
I've got nothing to hide

My unashamed desire
is an open fire
Unashamed desire
And I'm not afraid to love
Not afraid to love
Unashamed desire

We get one sweet moment in the arms of youth
I don't wanna waste time holding down the truth
I've got everything to win and only pain to lose
This is my
Unashamed desire
Unashamed desire
Unashamed desire
Unashamed desire
And I'm not afraid to love
Not afraid to love
Unashamed desire…

The Invitation by Oriah

It doesn’t interest me
what you do for a living.
I want to know
what you ache for
and if you dare to dream
of meeting your heart’s longing.

It doesn’t interest me
how old you are.
I want to know
if you will risk
looking like a fool
for love
for your dream
for the adventure of being alive.
It doesn’t interest me
what planets are
squaring your moon...
I want to know
if you have touched
the centre of your own sorrow
if you have been opened
by life’s betrayals
or have become shrivelled and closed
from fear of further pain.
I want to know
if you can sit with pain
mine or your own
without moving to hide it
or fade it
or fix it.
I want to know
if you can be with joy
mine or your own
if you can dance with wildness
and let the ecstasy fill you
to the tips of your fingers and toes
without cautioning us
to be careful
to be realistic
to remember the limitations
of being human.
It doesn’t interest me
if the story you are telling me
is true.
I want to know if you can
disappoint another
to be true to yourself.
If you can bear
the accusation of betrayal
and not betray your own soul.
If you can be faithless
and therefore trustworthy.
I want to know if you can see Beauty
even when it is not pretty
every day.
And if you can source your own life
from its presence.
I want to know
if you can live with failure
yours and mine
and still stand at the edge of the lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon,
“Yes.”
It doesn’t interest me
to know where you live
or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up
after the night of grief and despair
weary and bruised to the bone
and do what needs to be done
to feed the children.
It doesn’t interest me
who you know
or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand
in the centre of the fire
with me
and not shrink back.
It doesn’t interest me
where or what or with whom
you have studied.
I want to know
what sustains you
from the inside
when all else falls away.
I want to know
if you can be alone
with yourself
and if you truly like
the company you keep
in the empty moments.

By Oriah © Mountain Dreaming,
from the book The Invitation
published by HarperONE, San Francisco,
1999 All rights reserved

Clean Up After Ourselves

Being tidy and meticulous is the Buddhist message—meticulous in cleaning your oryoki bowls, meticulous in how you walk, meticulous in how you treat your clothing and your household articles. We can’t get away with being sloppy; we have to introduce the principle of tidiness more and more into our lives. When economic chaos or family chaos takes place, apart from obvious issues of economic mismanagement, marital problems, or emotional problems, we find that domestic details have not been taken care of. There are cockroaches running all over; there is never enough toilet tissue; the toilet bowls are overflowing; and the dishes are not washed. All those problems come from a careless attitude. It is predictable. But when we clean up after ourselves, according to exactly the same principles we follow in oryoki, we have nothing to blame. When we begin to live our lives in that way, cleaning up after ourselves, what is left is further vision and further openness, which leads to cleaning up the rest of the world.

~ Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Article: Power of Intention by Sharon Salzberg

One day as my teacher, John Friend, was demonstrating a pose, he made an awkward-looking movement, then rebalanced. Coming out of it he asked, "What just happened?" One by one, my classmates offered a Sanskrit name for that extra little twist. Finally, John turned to me and repeated his question, "What just happened?" I replied, "To be honest, I think you fell." "You're right," he said. "I fell. Then I started over. That's good yoga."


[Source: http://www.oprah.com/spirit/Sharon-Salzberg-The-Power-of-Intention]

Challenge

Been going through a crisis of faith lately. Trying to see that everything happens for a reason, but a part of me keeps wanting to do something to change things. My habitual patterns are stirring again, I can feel them coming on. I need faith, to believe things fall out of my life for a reason, so that better things can come in.

Sometimes we have enough awareness to catch our patterns, but the challenge remains in coping with them.

My readings are turning more inward these days. Probably less time for fiction. It feels like I have been walking in a fog the last four years, and I only just woke up. I am less sure of myself these days. Not even sure if I am really the good person that I am. I seem to just keep hurting the people I care about. My best laid plans just don't pan out the way I wanted them to.

Start over.

MUSIC | One More Hour

An old favourite of mine.

Jeff Buckley's "Hallelujah"

Sunday

Simple pleasures in life.

POEM | Love After Love by Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

The last few weeks were spent with friends. Good friends, the kind that you share laughters with. I love them, and they love me too. The strangeness, of being with friends again, that seems to be leading me back to myself. The strangeness of slowly realising, though I have known it for a while, that I had been choosing not to participate in my own life.

POEM | Failing and Flying

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

~ Jack Gilbert

POEM | Orpheus in Greenwich Village Orpheus in Greenwich Village

What if Orpheus,
confident in the hard-
found mastery,
should go down into Hell?
Out of the clean light down?
And then, surrounded
by the closing beasts
and readying his lyre,
should notice, suddenly,
they had no ears?

~ Jack Gilbert

Aloneness - Audrey Hepburn

"I have to be alone very often. I’d be quite happy if I spent from Saturday night until Monday morning alone in my apartment. That’s how I refuel."

~ Audrey Hepburn

no help for that / Charles Bukowski

there is a place in the heart that
will never be filled

a space

and even during the
best moments
and
the greatest
times

we will know it

we will know it
more than
ever

there is a place in the heart that
will never be filled

and

we will wait
and
wait

in that
space.

~ You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense, 1986

"What is the most astounding fact you can share with us about the Universe?"

Astrophysicist Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson was asked by a reader of TIME magazine, "What is the most astounding fact you can share with us about the Universe?"

This was his answer





"To see the world in a grain of sand, and to see heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hands, and eternity in an hour."
William Blake

"We long to return. And we can. Because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself."
~ Carl Sagan

We do not know our own souls

You ever have one of those moments when there's a quote in your head, and you don't know where to find it. But you can't sleep until you find it? Well, this is one of those moments, but thankfully I still have the book where I first found it. From Virginia Woolf, "The Moment" and Other Essays:

"We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds' feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so. Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable. But in health the genial pretence must be kept up, and the effort renewed -- to communicate, to civilise, to share, to cultivate the desert, to educate the native, to work together by day and by night to sport. In illness thus make-believe ceases."

I do not know why I was suddenly so obsessed with finding this quote. I know that it has been a while since I have written anything on this blog. However, something major came to a close recently, and while there is great sadness, there is also a sense of relief, like a chapter has been closed somehow.

So the question remains: What now?

It is now time for reflection. I need silence and solitude.

Awakening

“You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip, or you talk with Richard, and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death.”

~ Anais Nin