Beaver Creek, Sedona, Arizona
Another week of rain, and I haven’t been out with the camera, so here’s an image full of wonderful energy and colour from my trip to Arizona last year. This is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been, with incredible aliveness.
“Mindfulness is a deceptive condition. It’s not dramatic. it doesn’t produce immediate, spectacular experiences – and we are addicted to dramatic, spectacular experiences. Mindfulness is a subtle process of learning to be ourselves at an increasingly real, profound and simple level. It may be embarrassing but it may also be inspiring, because it starts revealing our childishness, our weakness, shame, silly foibles, and also our marvellous wisdom, amazing capacity for love and compassion and clarity. It may reveal everything.
Mindfulness brings the mind out of fragmentation into its natural centre. It brings the mind out of its usual state of being scattered and distracted and blown by the wind, where it can’t know anything about anything, let alone itself. So there’s this paradox. We yearn to be happy, kind, loving and wise and we look for these qualities in all sorts of strange places, while they are in our hearts all the time.”
– Rob Nairn, ‘Living, Dreaming, Dying – wisdom of Tibetan psychology’
Paradox and red rocks
Nature and Sedona