Greetings Readers!
Welcome to another edition of our Perennial Meditations (Saturday Review) with a short contemplation and links to this week’s meditations.
Our Perennial Habits course continued this week with meditations on The Wisdom of Being Grateful and The Middle Way — Buddhist Teaching. The next virtual meetup is on The Art (and Wisdom) of Contemplative Practices. It’s scheduled for Wednesday, May 24th (at 7:00 pm EST); you can register here. For our final meetup of the course, I’ll be joined by Dr. Brian Russell (author of Centering Prayer and previous podcast guest) to discuss the wisdom of integrating stillness practices in daily life.
Here is your Saturday Review with a short meditation & contemplation!
The Joy of Existing
This week’s Saturday meditation comes from the new book Don’t Forget to Live by Pierre Hadot. In Hadot’s final book, he explores Goethe’s relationship with ancient spiritual exercises—transformative acts of intellect and imagination.
Goethe explains,
For what good is all this extravagance of suns, planets, and moons, of stars and milky ways, comets, nebulas, worlds that have become and are becoming, if finally, one happy person does not rejoice unconsciously at her own existence?
For Goethe, reality and existence are thus inseparable from the joy of existing. In a letter to a friend, Goethe wrote, “Pleasure, joy, participation in things: that is the only reality, and all that produces reality. All else is vanity, and merely traps us.”
Contemplation Questions (Pick one or create your own!):
What if merely existing is enough to be joyful?
How will you remember to live a joyful life?
This Week’s Meditations…
Thank you for reading this week; I hope you found something useful.
Until next time, be wise and be well,
P.S. Feel free to comment, ask questions, or make suggestions!