Mindfulness of the body is awareness of... the taste and smell of this moment.

And here we are with our improved human world that we've spent a great deal of time and energy working on. We've improved the rivers and the lakes and the land and our society and our ways of living to the point where we now wonder if the human race will survive.

What makes human life - which is inseparable from this moment--so precious is its fleeting nature. And not that it doesn't last but that it never returns again.

We're never called on to do what hurts. We just do what hurts out of ignorance and habit. Once we see what we're doing, we can stop.

Whatever the world dishes up, we take it on--not on our own terms, but on the world's.

Socrates pointed out that we carry on as though death were the greatest of all calamities-yet, for all we know, it might be the greatest of all blessings. What are we going to call good? What are we going to call bad? Good or bad is never our choice, or even the issue.

There's nothing to prove, nothing to figure out, nothing to get, nothing to understand. When we finally stop explaining everything to ourselves, we may discover that in silence, complete understanding is already there.