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is this anything

~ a compendium, by Nancy Coughlin

is this anything

Tag Archives: paradox

broken (a quote from Anne Lamott)

01 Wednesday Jun 2016

Posted by is this anything in don't know, quotation

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Tags

acceptance, anne lamott, grace, grief, love, paradox, quotation, surrender, zen

“You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.” ― Anne Lamott

rain-dancing woman

 

knowing (a tweet)

14 Thursday Apr 2016

Posted by is this anything in twitter tweets

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acceptance, apophenia, balance, comfort, freedom, grace, grief, paradox, suffering, thinking out loud, transience, tweet, zen

ants stick

The knowing is beautiful. Thus, the struggle that brought you the knowing–mustn’t that also be beautiful?

everything (a quote from Goethe)

27 Friday Feb 2015

Posted by is this anything in quotation

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apophenia, both, goethe, illusion, paradox, quotation, serendipity

messy face

Everything is both simpler than we can imagine and more entangled than we can conceive.   –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

the same (a tweet)

14 Sunday Dec 2014

Posted by is this anything in twitter tweets, Uncategorized

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Tags

balance, compassion, illusion, love, paradox, zen

Buddha seatbelt

Self-reminder: we are all the same in everything but form.

tweet (a quote from Lao Tzu)

10 Wednesday Dec 2014

Posted by is this anything in Uncategorized

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agoraphobia, balance, both, comfort, compassion, lao tzu, love, paradox, quotation, surrender, zen

Lao Tzu: “Without opening your door, you can open your heart to the world.” #zen #agoraphobia

mailbox agoraphobe

meditation (a quote from Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche)

17 Monday Nov 2014

Posted by is this anything in quotation

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

ambition, balance, dzongsar jamyang khyentse, letting go, meditation, paradox, quotation, serenity, surrender, zen

puddle_fish

If we have ambitions—even if our aim is enlightenment— then there is no meditation, because we are thinking about it, craving it, fantasizing, imagining things. That is not meditation. This is why an important characteristic of shamatha meditation is to let go of any goal and simply sit for the sake of sitting. We breathe in and out, and we just watch that. Nothing else. It doesn’t matter if we get enlightenment or not. It doesn’t matter if our friends get enlightened faster. Who cares? We are just breathing. We just sit straight and watch the breath in and out. Nothing else. We let go of our ambitions. This includes trying to do a perfect shamatha meditation. We should get rid of even that. Just sit.

—Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche

torment (a quote from Nassim Nicholas Taleb)

23 Thursday Oct 2014

Posted by is this anything in quotation

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antifragile, metaphor, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, paradox, quotation, randomness, surrender, zen

“Like tormenting love, some thoughts are so antifragile that you feed them by trying to get rid of them.” –Nassim Nicholas Taleb

magnificent obsession

useful fiction (a poem-like thing)

17 Friday Oct 2014

Posted by is this anything in poem

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Tags

both, illusion, paradox, serenity, slice of life, thinking out loud, time, yin yang, zen

AliceDownHole

To Time, sweet illusion so helpful when wanting
to taste something new or again.
Without you who knows how I’d write my next sentence:
I’d lose me in everywhen.

forever (a tweet)

08 Wednesday Oct 2014

Posted by is this anything in twitter tweets

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Tags

balance, both, eternity, gabby douglas, infinity, moment, now, paradox, transience

There’s only now, of course. But now is an infinity unto itself. Now is forever in a moment.

gabby douglas

reminder: stay surprisable (a tweet)

18 Thursday Sep 2014

Posted by is this anything in twitter tweets

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absurdity, apophenia, autism, both, coincidence, happiness, illusion, miracle, paradox, randomness, serendipity, surprise, surrender, zen

If I’m not careful, I’ll waste an absurd amount of time finding only those things I’m already looking for.
giraffe road

#peace (a tweet)

01 Friday Aug 2014

Posted by is this anything in twitter tweets

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compassion, love, paradox, peace, surrender, tweet, union, zen

We’ll know peace only once we finally see that there’s no They, there’s only We. Nor any There, but only Here. Nor any time but Now.

buddha dog

@zerosumr (a tweet)

27 Sunday Jul 2014

Posted by is this anything in twitter tweets

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acceptance, apophenia, both, comfort, death, friendship, grace, imkertje, metaphor, miracle, paradox, randomness, surrender, transience, tweet, zen

u know how i know yer Here, mijn schatje? Coz w/ yr death u finally taught me yr ineffable truth: that Here is an infinite place.

laughing buddha

 

 

presence (a quote by Ram Dass)

25 Friday Jul 2014

Posted by is this anything in quotation

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apophenia, autism, desire, paradox, quotation, ram dass, randomness, surrender, transience, zen

“As long as you have certain desires about how it ought to be you can’t see how it is.”

—Baba Ram Dass

Llama-photobombs-the-kiss-scene-resizecrop--

time (a tweet)

04 Sunday May 2014

Posted by is this anything in twitter tweets

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compassion, love, paradox, surrender, thinking out loud, tweet, yin yang, zen

I think it’s time we finally started believing in what we already know.

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caught (Ram Dass)

04 Sunday May 2014

Posted by is this anything in quotation

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Tags

compassion, games, happiness, illusion, imbalance, paradox, power, quotation, ram dass, surrender, wroclaw, zen

“If everybody gets caught in your game, you lose. Do you hear that one? If you win, you lose.” –Ram Dass

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is this anything (an extended tweet)

11 Friday Apr 2014

Posted by is this anything in twitter tweets

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Tags

acceptance, don't know, helplessness, imkertje, metaphor, mushin, paradox, surrender, truth, tweet, writing, zen

Some days I don’t feel like searching [through clover] for [four-leaf] metaphors. I want to tell this story straight, for once–but I honestly don’t know how. As it is, can you glimpse it, love? Could it be hiding, maybe, in the spaces between my words?Image

 

 

both all and nothing, too (tweet)

24 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by is this anything in twitter tweets

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Tags

balance, both, metaphor, non-duality, paradox, thinking out loud, transience, tweet, yin yang, zen

The trick: to re-remember that we’re Both. Both sea and wave. Both log and fire. Both noun and verb.

holding-praising-the-sun-silhouette

Icari (thinking out loud)

20 Thursday Mar 2014

Posted by is this anything in Evolving ideas, journal entry, random thought

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Tags

adventure, bliss, bruegel, freedom, grace, icarus, illusion, metaphor, paradox, play, surrender, thinking out loud, zen

Glancing up from armchair reverie, I watch two BASE-jumpers on a PBS documentary called “The Birdmen”. They leap from the fabulous cliff, wearing suits with stunted wings—not so much wings as webbing, as if their outflung arms and legs are tissued to their bodies–brightly flavored sails that billow as the young men fall. They look like neon kites, these men, and they fly seemingly free for a long while–relatively speaking–and then when the time is ripe they open parachutes and float the final yardage to the ground.

As the first one lands, the camera rushes in and asks how-do-you-feel. The jumper shouts terrific great whooohooooo. Then the other man returns to earth and the camera can only, mutely, watch as the flyers recombine—wide-eyed, whooping, babbling but articulate, reviewing every millimoment—each angle of the sun, each sudden rocky outcrop, each barely traversable river of wind, and it’s clear not just that they’re brothers now, at least for this moment, but that the two of them speak a language different from the rest of us–an idiom very complex, full of shortcuts and inside jokes, exotically precise in its vocabulary, references, metaphors, silences. We are, all of us—or nearly all of us–outsiders to their vision. They have no way, not really, to explain who they’ve become, who they’re becoming, who they’ve been all along—no way and maybe no need to explain such impossibles to the earthbound likes of us. Even when, later (as I half-hear them, from the kitchen now), they conjure similes (“free as an eagle”…) to express to the camera the feeling, the meaning of their adventure, comparisons don’t help; the abyss between us is unbridgeable. We can’t know what they know unless or until we do what they’ve done.

And this is an essence of zen, too, I think—if you meander far enough along the nowhere path, you start to learn and speak, however haltingly, a language no one else can know unless they’ve been here too. And it can leave you feeling alone, if you don’t feel a partner beside you on your adventure: someone in the same clownish, precarious costume, poised atop the same magnificent cliff, wishing you smooth sailing as you both leap—whooohooooo!–into the void of no-mind. It can feel lonely, plunging into that placeless place alone. But of course you have to not-mind feeling precisely thus, even as you also see–with your usual wry laugh at how (again!) you’ve had to re-recall it–that you’re not alone at all. We’re all flames in the fireplace, dancing like puppets up from behind a guileful log. We each seem singular, independent of each other, so that it’s only when we really look–beneath, behind, around, past, through–that we see how fused we are. We’re fingers of the same hand, leaves drifting downward from the same tall tree, offshoots from the same root, flames rising high and low from the same all-nurturing, all-consuming fire.

icarus2

here (a tweet)

15 Saturday Mar 2014

Posted by is this anything in twitter tweets

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Tags

death, eternity, grace, imkertje, paradox, tweet, zen

Maybe souls who leave their bodies are still here. Maybe it’s just that “here” turns out to be a very big place.

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Two (tweets)

12 Wednesday Mar 2014

Posted by is this anything in twitter tweets

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Tags

buddhism, grief, happiness, imkertje, love, mushin, paradox, surrender, transience, truth, tweet, zen

O, the night I typed to him not knowing he’d left his body! Now I long to ask him what came next…

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…then laugh because of course that’s all he’d been talking about, the whole time.

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balancing act (tweet)

07 Friday Mar 2014

Posted by is this anything in twitter tweets

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Tags

balance, choice, desire, grace, grief, letting go, love, paradox, yin yang, zen

Tightrope path: to allow yourself to want something to the exact degree you’re willing to let it go.

.BDv2E2JCMAAmUxq

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exquisite paradox (quotation)

04 Tuesday Mar 2014

Tags

meditation, paradox, ram dass, surrender, zen

exquisite paradox (quotation)

Posted by is this anything | Filed under quotation

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Both (thinking out loud)

01 Saturday Mar 2014

Posted by is this anything in random thought

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Tags

balance, paradox, thinking out loud, yin yang, zen

We are both log and fire, both noun and verb. Time devours us, yes, but it’s as true to say that we devour time. And the odd thing is, I can’t think of any way this simultaneity can’t go on forever. Our cyclical natures–the perpetual balancing act of matter and energy, growth and dissolution, birth death birth death birth death birth–will keep us caught in their back-and-forth until the universe ends, or the laws of physics change. How could it possibly be otherwise? Frankly, there’s just nowhere else to be but here, and no other time–no time we can taste–but now.

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Tags

acceptance apophenia autism balance both choice comfort compassion freedom grace grief happiness illusion love memory metaphor paradox poem quotation randomness serendipity serenity surrender thinking out loud transience tweet writing zen

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Nathan AM Smith on Excerpts (a poem, maybe?)
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