While fasting detoxifies the body, silence purifies speech and brings rest to the chattering mind, and meditation takes you deep into your own being.
Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralysed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds’ wings.
We are responsible for what we are, and whatever we wish ourselves to be, we have the power to make ourselves. So we have to know how to act.
Year’s end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us.
Lao Tan said, “I was letting my mind wander in the beginning of things.”
“What does this mean?” asked Confucius. Lao Tan said, “It means to attain Perfect Beauty and wander in Perfect Happiness. He who attains Perfect Beauty and wanders in Perfect Happiness may be called the Perfect Man.”
