Every person, in the course of his life, must build — starting with the natural territory of his own self — a work, into which something enters from all the elements of the earth. He makes his own soul throughout all his earthly days; and at the same time he collaborates in another work, which infinitely transcends, while at the same time narrowly determines, the perspectives of his individual achievement: the completing of the world.
Teilhard de Chardin
photo ralf roletschek
The peculiar grace of a shaker chair is due to the fact
that it was made by someone capable of believing
that an angel might come and sit on it.
Thomas Merton
photo carl wycoff, Shaker Village, Pleasant Hill.
Each thing — each stone, blossom, child— is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance, push out beyond what we each belong to
for some empty freedom.
If we surrendered to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.
Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making and struggle, lonely and confused.
So, like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God’s heart;
they have never left him.
This is what the things can teach us:
to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.
Rilke, The Book of Hours
The invariable mark of wisdom
is to see the miraculous in the common.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, chapter 8
I love this quote from Karl Rahner, one of the greatest Catholic theologians of the last Century. There is a great comfort in knowing in our bones the truth of these words. We have to continually balance two aspects within us: one which wants to know everything, to be everywhere, to be faithful to the energy and desire within. The other is that restlessness which knows that this can never really be possible, and that how we relate to what we don’t know is ultimately more important than what we do know.
In the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable
we eventually learn that here, in this life,
all symphonies remain unfinished
The Full Moon is more beautiful
when partially obscured by clouds.
Murata Shuko
Mindfulbalance 