Image of Jordan Pond where everything can seem so clarifying and sacred. The Lake of Beauty by  Edward Carpenter Let your mind be quiet, realising the beauty of the world, and the immense, the boundless treasures that it holds in store. All that you have within you, all that your heart desires, all that your Nature so specially fits you for — that or the counterpart of it waits embedded in the great Whole, for you. It will surely come to you. Yet equally surely not one moment before its appointed time will it come. All your crying and fever and reaching out of hands will make no difference. Therefore do not begin that game at all. Do not recklessly spill the waters of your mind in this direction and in that, lest you become like a spring lost and dissipated in the desert. But draw them together into a little compass, and hold them still, so still; And let them become clear, so clear — so limpid, so mirror-like; At last the mountains and the sky shall glass themselves in peac...

  “We don’t sit in meditation to be good meditators. We sit in meditation so that we will be more awake in our lives.” Pema Chodron During times of grief, like that which I am experiencing now after the death of my father, there is an almost constant voice crying out: Do Something!   And all my training, all my formation, all my experience whispers back: That is the wrong question.   Again the counter voice: Don’t just sit there, do something! And still small voice: Be still…be I often turn to Pema Chodron in times of anxiety and uncertainty even though her answer seems to be: learn to be in the anxiety, in the uncertainty. I have in the past wanted to reject that difficult prescription. And yet persistent events of loss, deaths, pandemics, broken relationships, violence and injustice continue , beyond my control. So I try to shift my perspective away from the How can I fix it mode, toward the how can I simply be in this situation mode. Seems passive at first and counter ...