Zen Calendar Quotes

I don't have time for a real post today (I made up for it by posting twice earlier in the week which I don't usually do), so I thought I'd share some of the $1 Shop Zen calendar quotes that have been piling up by my computer (I probably have 40 little slips here to transcribe! Is that Zen of me?! ;-)

From yesterday:

"When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace it with words and ideas and abstractions--such as merit, such as past, present, and future--our direct, spontaneous experience of the thing itself, in the beauty and precision of this present moment."

--Peter Matthiessen

And from the day before:

"The world is not to be put in order. The world is order. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order."

--Henry Miller

And from the day before that:

"...The sacred is in the ordinary...it is to be found in one's daily life, in one's neighbors, friends, and family, in one's own backyard...travel may be a flight from confronting the sacred--this lesson can be easily lost. To be looking elsewhere for miracles is to me a sure sign of ignorance that everything is miraculous."

--Abraham Maslow

And, finally for now, from earlier this month:

"You cannot understand life and its mysteries as long as you try to grasp it. Indeed, you cannot grasp it just as you cannot walk off with the river in a bucket. If you try to capture running water in a bucket, it is clear that you do not understand it and that you will always be disappointed, for in the bucket the water does not run. To 'have' running water, you must let go of it and let it run."

--Alan Watts