There is no such dichotomy as 'human rights' versus 'property rights. ' No human rights can exist without property rights.
Alec Wilkinson is a spare, clear, and lucid writer who works in stylistic simplicity with material that is not simple at all.
Soon the child’s clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions, and abstractions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor of the ego. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day, we become seekers.
Zen is really just a reminder to stay alive and to be awake. We tend to daydream all the time, speculating about the future and dwelling on the past. Zen practice is about appreciating your life in this moment. If you are truly aware of five minutes a day, then you are doing pretty well. We are beset by both the future and the past, and there is no reality apart from the here and now.
I can watch elephants (and elephants alone) for hours at a time, for sooner or later the elephant will do something very strange. . . There is mystery behind that masked gray visage, and ancient life force, delicate and mighty, awesome and enchanted, commanding the silence ordinarily reserved for mountain peaks, great fires, and the sea.
In this very breath that we take now lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us.
The secret of the mountain is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no "meaning," they are meaning; the mountains are. The sun is round. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, there is a ringing that we share. I understand all this, not in my mind but in my heart, knowing how meaningless it is to try to capture what cannot be expressed, knowing that mere words will remain when I read it all again, another day.
People like to run their mouths.
I am, I think the only surviving member of the original Battle Creek church. The church was disbanded, with the exception of thirteen members, in 1870.
It would be well, perhaps, if we were to spend more of our days and nights without any obstruction between us and the celestial bodies, if the poet did not speak so much from under a roof, or the saint dwell there so long. Birds do not sing in caves, nor do doves cherish their innocence in dovecots.
We need to move forward, from the common currency to the banking union to a common financial policy and, in the middle-term, to a common foreign and security policy. That will take time, because we need to figure out how to deal with those countries that don't always want a more tightly integrated European Union.