sow seeds......................

 

In cultivating loving-kindness, we train first to be honest, loving, and compassionate toward ourselves.  Rather than nurturing self-denigration, we begin to cultivate a clear-seeing kindness.  Sometimes we feel good and strong.  Sometimes we feel inadequate and weak.  But our loving-kindness is unconditional.  No matter how we feel, we can aspire to be happy.  We can learn to act and think in ways that sow seeds of our future well-being, gradually becoming more aware of what causes happiness as well as what causes distress.  Without loving-kindness for ourselves it is difficult, if not impossible, to genuinely feel it for others.

 -Pema Chödrön

Yardwork....................................

via

Some thoughts..............................

..................................................................on close-run things.

The tenth rule of happiness.............

Karma................................

"The greatest ignorance of all is the mistaken belief that we can ever receive more than we truly earn. Sooner or later there will be an accounting. We throw the boomerang, good or bad."

-Earl Nightingale, as excerpted from here

As we make it....................

We must not hope to be mowers,
    And to gather the ripe gold ears,
Unless we have first been sowers
    And watered the furrows with tears.

It is not just as we take it
    This mystical world of ours
Life's field will yield as we make it
    A harvest of thorns or flowers.

-Goethe,   Perseverance 

Consequences......................................

      There's no such thing as damnation in Buddhism.  Karmic retribution isn't a punishment, it's a natural consequence.  You're only reaping what you've sown.  If you throw a stone up in the air it's no good being astonished if it falls back down on your head.  It's a bit difference from the usual idea of sin - although I find very interesting Father Laurence Freedman's explanation:  "The Greek for sin means to miss the target.  Sin is what turns consciousness away from truth.  Being the consequence of illusion and selfishness, sin includes its own punishment.  God doesn't do the punishing.'
-Matthieu Ricard, as excerpted from here