We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won't do harm...and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.

- E.M Forster, English author

These wars and these breakouts are really big bells of mindfulness for humanity and for all of us who are present today. And my encouragement - and I reflected on this a lot to ask myself what I can do - is to transform the seed of discrimination in me, to transform the fear and violence in me. That is my responsibility. And this is our responsibility.

- Brother Phap Huu, Plum Village

People who surrender all their blocks and conflicts experience a free flow of energy.

It is a mistake to confuse excitement or arousal with the vital flow of simply being. Stimulants and emotional adventures arouse people, but such arousal does not enhance one's energies. On the contrary, excitement spends energy and exhausts vitality.

Think of excitement as tension that comes when stimulation meets resistance. The exciting experience ends when the stimulation stops or when the person wears out.

But the vitality of being is a continuous flow. It meets no resistance and goes on and on without stress.

Excitement is rooted in passing desires. Vital energy springs from the eternal.

- The Universe

It's already yours.

- The Universe

No one saves us but ourselves
No one can and no one may
We ourselves must walk the path

- Buddha

The only thing worthy of you is compassion –
invincible, limitless, unconditional.
Hatred will never let you face
the beast in man.

One day, when you face this beast alone
with your courage intact, your eyes kind,
untroubled
(even as no one sees them),
out of your smile
will bloom a flower.

And those who love you
will behold you
across ten thousand worlds of birth and dying.
Alone again,
I will go on with bent head,
knowing that love has become eternal.
On the long, rough road
the sun and moon will continue to shine.

- Thích Nhất Hạnh, a Vietnamese Thiền Buddhist monk, peace activist, prolific author, poet and teacher, who founded the Plum Village Tradition, historically recognized as the main inspiration for engaged Buddhism.

The wise person, learning how things happen, lives according to the principal.

Without this understanding one might dismiss the single principal of how things happen as total nonsense. After all, they say, any principal that does not get you love or money or power must be useless. A silent mind is a dumb mind. Selflessness is no way to get ahead. Virtue is for fools. Kindness is weakness. And so on.

This is a problem: because the wise person's only allegiance is to how things happen, people who do not see how things happen naturally think the wise person's behavior has no basis in reality. Also, the wise person's silence and manner of being are disturbing. Because the wise person's motives are obscure, the wise person is hard to figure out.

The problem comes back to the fact the principal is not a thing and cannot be defined. That does not make sense to some people.

It is not easy to understand a person whose foundation is invisible.