In novels – as in life – there is no perfection. We do the best we can with the tools we have at our disposal. Given that we are changing, the tools are changing, the thing itself is changing — there must be a moment when we stop. When we say, This is the best I can do for now… There is nobility in the effort, courage in the dailiness — the doggedness. It is a process of trying and failing. Of beginning again.
Dani Shapiro, Devotion
photo filiberto strazzari
Be ahead of all parting, as if it had already happened,
like winter, which even now is passing.
For beneath the winter is a winter so endless
that to survive it at all is a triumph of the heart.
Be. And know as well the need to not be:
let that ground of all that changes
bring you to completion now.
Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus II, 13
photo stephen sweeney
The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.
Thomas Merton
photo bea represa
Everything comes down to time in the end – to the passing of time, to changing. Ever thought of that? Anything that makes you happy or sad, isn’t it all based on minutes going by? Isn’t happiness expecting something that time is going to bring you? Isn’t sadness wishing time back again? If only you could turn it back again, you think. If only you could change this or that, undo what you have done, if only you could roll the minutes the other way, for once.
Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
photo by Muhammad Mahdi Karim
Among the sixteen types of meditation,
the baby’s practice is the best.
Yuan Wu, Chinese Chan monk, 1063–1135
photo zivya
To bring your attention to a stone, a tree, or an animal does not mean to think about it, but simply to perceive it, to hold it in your awareness. … Something of its essence then transmits itself to you. You can sense how still it is, and in doing so the same stillness arises within you. You sense how deeply it rests in Being – completely at one with what it is and where it is. In realizing this you too come to a place of rest deep within yourself.
Eckhart Tolle, Stillness Speaks
photo jarno
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