“We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.”
— E.E. Cummings (via spirituallyminded)
“Rather than asking if you can ever be free, because ‘ever’ is a huge amount of future time, ask if you can be free at this moment. The only place where you can or need to be free is this moment. Not the rest of your life. Just Now.”
— Eckhart Tolle
There’s a story about a beautiful tree, a large beautiful tree; and on the lower branch, there lived a little bird and the bird used to hop from branch to branch, in this tremendous tree. It would eat sweet berries and it would sing and whistle and was very happy. Then it would hop on another branch and there were sour berries and it would get upset, and stop singing till it found sweet berries again. And this went on for years; sweet berries, sour berries. It was happy when it found the sweet berries, unhappy when it found the sour berries.
Isn’t this like us? When we think we found something we like, we become very happy. But then when it changes like all things must change, we become miserable.
And so the bird started to think about this and it flew around the tree. It happened to gaze way up to the top of the large tree and it saw a majestic big bird sitting there, a translucent shining bird. It looked so happy and so radiant. Doing nothing, just sitting at the top of that tree, in bliss. And the little bird said:
“Oh how I wish I could be like that big bird. Look how happy it is. It doesn’t have to hunt for sweet berries or look for anything. It just sits there by itself, so radiant. I think I will fly up to it and discover its secret.“
So it started to fly up toward the big bird, but a quarter of the way up the tree it saw some beautiful red berries and it stopped and started to eat the berries and they were delicious. So it forgot all about the big bird. It started to sing again, it was happy.
Isn’t this like us? We find something we like and we forget about spiritual life. And we say, "This is what I want, a new Jaguar, a new house, a new companion, a new something,” but then after a while we become disgusted, disillusioned.
So after a while the sweet berries ran out and there were only sour berries left on the tree and the bird again became disillusioned. So it started to fly around the tree again and looked way up on the top and saw the translucent radiant bird sitting there once again, so majestic, so happy and blissful. And again it said to itself:
"This time, I’m going right to the top.”
But on the way up, it got half way up the tree again, and then it saw some beautiful purple berries. It had not seen purple berries in years. It loved purple berries. So it stopped and started to eat up the purple berries and became very happy again, started to sing, eating berries.
And again it’s like us. We find a new companion. We get a new toy. We move to a new state, whatever we do. We think that’s it, now I’m going to be real happy.
~ Robert Adams
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