Year: 2013

Give this gift today

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Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

Simone Weil.

Never fully knowing

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You can never know whether or not God is in a story until you get all the way to the end. For if only two words are still missing, yes, even if the pause after the final words still hasn’t occurred, He can always still show up.

 Rilke,  Stories of God

The everyday

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SweepingMonk

We want life to have meaning, we want fulfillment, healing and even ecstasy,

but the human paradox is that we find these things by starting where we are,

not where we wish we were.

 Kathleen Norris, The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and “Women’s Work”

Trusting in times of danger

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All night under the pines
the fox moves through the darkness
with a mouthful of teeth
and a reputation for death
which it deserves.
In the spicy villages of the mice
he is famous, his nose in the grass
is like an earthquake, his feet on the path
is a message so absolute
that the mouse, hearing it,
makes himself as small as he can
as he sits silent or, trembling, goes on
hunting among the grasses
for the ripe seeds.

Maker of All Things,
including appetite, including stealth,
including the fear that makes
all of us, sometime or other,
flee for the sake of our small and precious lives,
let me abide in your shadow–
let me hold on to the edge of your robe
as you determine what you must let be lost
and what will be saved.

Mary Oliver, Maker of all Things, even Healing

Sunday Quote: Seeing and not yet seeing

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The art of living is to enjoy what we can see

and not complain about what remains in the dark

Henri Nouwen, The Dance of Life

photo:  Philippe Alès, Contre-allée de l’avenue Foch, Le Havre.

No longer rushing after something

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The mind can be free only when it is completely still. Though it has problems, innumerable urges, conflicts, ambitions, if — through self-knowledge, through watching itself without acceptance or condemnation — the mind is choicelessly aware of its own process, then out of that awareness there comes an astonishing silence, a quietness of the mind in which there is no movement of any kind. It is only then that the mind is free because it is no longer desiring anything; it is no longer seeking; it is no longer pursuing a goal, an ideal — which are all the projections of a conditioned mind.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

photo russavia