Cultivating Familiarity

Mindfulness involves cultivating familiarity and intimacy with aspects of everyday experience that we often take for granted.

~Jon Kabat-Zinn

Is This What Being Vulnerable Feels Like?

i’ll run the risk
of being intimate with brokenness.

~ Sleeping At Last

Beginning, EquanimityDaron LarsonAugust 19, 2015Sleeping At Last, music, musicians, self, memory, growing up, struggle, risk, intimacy, hope, vulnerability, equanimity, liberation, Martin KlimasComment

To Tell the Modes Apart

Mindfulness practice doesn’t eliminate my personal narrative. It gradually changes my relationship to it.

Beginning, Clarity, Myths & MisperceptionsDaron LarsonJuly 6, 2015narrative, attention, intimacy, self, self/other, freedom, liberation, practice, awarenessComment

How the Earth Sees Us

How can we ever know the difference we make to the soul of the earth? Where the infinite stillness of the earth meets the passion of the human eye, invisible depths strain towards the mirror of the name.

In the word, the earth breaks silence. It has waited a long time for the word. Concealed beneath familiarity and silence, the earth holds back and it never occurs to us to wonder how the earth sees us. Is it not possible that a place could have huge affection for those who dwell there?

~ John O'Donohue

The Beautiful Fragility

Let it come closer, let it engulf you if it must.
Until there is no division between self and sadness.
Until you cannot call it sadness at all.
Until there is only intimacy.

~ Jeff Foster

Feel In, Equanimity, Practice in Stillness, Practice in LifeDaron LarsonDecember 31, 2014sadness, feelings, emotions, equanimity, discomfort, joy, self, intimacy, vulnerabilityComment

Finally Paying Attention to All of Myself

"How do I understand that I am enough for the mere fact that I exist?"

~ Jennifer Moon

Turning to Me

"Our voices echo in the spray
and steam of this room where once,
long ago, he knelt at the tub’s edge
to pour cups of bathwater over my head."

~ Amy Fleury

Daron LarsonMarch 11, 2014Amy Fleury, aging, body, growing up, intimacy, parenting, poetryComment

For No Good Reason

"One of the most difficult things to say to another person is, I hope that you will love me for no good reason. But it is what we all want and rarely dare to say to one another – to our children, to our parents and mates, to our friends, and to strangers. Especially to strangers, who have neither good nor bad reasons to love us."

~ Russell Banks, from The Angel on the Roof