Stop and enlarge

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Caroline asked him what message should be given to future generations.

Tell them to stop and enlarge moments throughout their days to become aware of the mysteries and miracles of creation all around them –

the movement of a squirrel, the sound of a bird, the pattern of a leaf, changing patterns of light, the sun, the rain, the stars, dawn and sunset.

Tell them we are not ourselves without everything and everyone else.

 Thomas Berry as reported in Carolyn W. Toben’s book Recovering a Sense of the Sacred: Conversations with Thomas Berry

Insight

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The first forty years of life furnish the text, while the remaining thirty supply the commentary;

and without the commentary we are unable to understand aright the true sense and coherence of the text, together with the moral it contains.

Schopenhauer Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life, Chapter 6,

parts

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Wherever you go,

you meet a part of your story.

Eudora Welty, 1909–2001, American short-story writer and novelist

Sunday Quote: sanctuary

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In the monastery of your heart

you have a temple

where all Buddhas unite

Jetsun Milarepa, 1052 – 1135

No possibility is lost

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Dear Lou, I cannot be entirely unhappy

You have shown me that I am still somehow the same,

even the same in a more strengthened way,

that actually none of my old possibilities are .. lost,

perhaps they are really all there,

only that for a while I don’t know how to use them

Rilke, Letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé

Those moments

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When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn; when we see children in a moment when they are really children, when we know love in our own hearts;

or when, like the Japanese poet, Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash

– at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the ‘newness,’ the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident,

all these provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.

Thomas Merton