Juan Pablo

“Once Luang Por Chah was going to visit a branch monastery down near the Cambodian border. The road through the hills down to the borderlands was very twisting and precipitous. Luang Por Chah was in the front of the little pickup truck with a young Western monk and the driver, while there were a few other monks on the benches in the back.

The Western monk soon realized that the driver was extremely reckless, and he became convinced the driver had a death wish. They were haring around the steep mountain roads, with enormous drops and blind corners, screeching
around one bend after another. The monk sat there the whole time thinking, ‘We’re gonna die! We’re gonna die! We’re gonna die!’ and he kept looking over to Ajahn Chah to see if he was reacting, and whether he was going to ask the driver to slow down. Instead Ajahn Chah sat there quite calmly looking out of the windscreen and didn’t say a thing.

To the young monk’s amazement they got through the hills safely and arrived at their destination. When they got there Ajahn Chah turned around to him with a big grin and said, ‘Scary ride, huh?”
― Ajahn Amaro, The Breakthrough

“Because everything that begins must end. What causes us to suffer is not in the past or the future: it is here, now, in our memory, in our expectations. We long for timelessness, we endure the passing of time: we suffer time. Time is suffering.”
― Carlo Rovelli, L'ordine del tempo

“To send light into the darkness of men's hearts--such is the duty of the artist.”
― Robert Schumann

“A man reaches close
and lifts a quarter
from inside a girl’s ear,
from her hands takes a dove
she didn’t know was there.
Which amazes more,
you may wonder:
the quarter’s serrated murmur
against the thumb
or the dove’s knuckled silence?
That he found them,
or that she never had,
or that in Portugal,
this same half-stopped moment,
it’s almost dawn,
and a woman in a wheelchair
is singing a fado
that puts every life in the room
on one pan of a scale,
itself on the other,
and the copper bowls balance.”
― Jane Hirshfield, Poetry Magazine September 2012