In love with the horizon

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We tend to focus on, and speak about the soul life of an individual in terms of spiritual comfort and deep nourishment, qualities which are a central, and abiding dynamic of its presence,

but the equally unsettling and disturbing quality about this strange, often wild and courageous faculty of belonging inside us we have come to name ‘the soul’ is its ruthless, and almost tidal wish to find its own way to a full union with the world.

The soul is a planner’s nightmare, the career counsellor’s central surprise, the biographer’s conundrum, an internal abiding spring that is both a source and a continual unstoppable flow, an internal stranger at the door of our outer life about to break everything apart and leave;

a pilgrim suddenly more in love with the horizon than its home; and most disturbingly, someone who is willing to fail, often spectacularly, at their own life rather than succeed drably, at someone else’s

David Whyte

Not seeing the results of our efforts

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Once, when I was particularly depressed, a friend and pacifist from Holland told me something very beautiful: “The people who worked to build the cathedrals in the Middle Ages never saw them completed. It took two hundred years and more to build them. Some stonecutter somewhere sculpted a beautiful rose; it was his life’s work, and it was all he ever saw. But he never entered into the completed cathedral.

But one day, the cathedral was really there.

You must imagine peace the same way

Dorothee Soelle, Against the Wind

no special clothes

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Paying attention required no equipment, no special clothes, no green fees or personal trainers. You do not even have to be in particularly good shape, all you need is a body on this earth, willing to notice where it is, trusting that something as small as a hazelnut can become an altar in this world.

Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World

Sunday Quote: What Is Already Here?

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Our minds are always asking “How can this moment be better?”

What if we tried asking today, “What is already here?” and stop wishing that reality become something else:

A monk asked Yaoshan

What is the essenital truth in all your teaching?

Yaushan replied

Clouds are in the blue sky;

water is in the bottle

Chan master Yaoshan Weiyan , 751–834, found in the Transmission of the Lamp

A Culture That Adores Power

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When power is concentrated in the hands of a few, it tends to become opaque and evade public oversight, increasing the risk of distorted forms of development that give rise to new dependencies, exclusions, manipulations and inequalities

Pope Leo, Magnifica Humanitas

We will be known as a culture that feared death and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity for the few and cared little for the penury of the
many.

We will be known as a culture that taught and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke little if at all about the quality of life for
people (other people), for dogs, for rivers.

All the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a commodity.

And they will say that this structure
was held together politically, which it was, and they will say also that our politics was no more than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of the heart, and that the heart, in those days, was small, and hard, and full of meanness.

Mary Oliver, Of the Empire in Red Bird, 2008

Building a More Human Future

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Caring for other people, for the earth, for rivers, for dogs, is the essence of holiness.

The Torah does not command us to be angels — it says be people of holiness …

first be a person, then be holy.

God has plenty of angels in the heavens

Menachem Mendel of Kotzk, 1787 – 1859.