God, I said. What good is language?
part of me wondered, but I did not stop.
God I said, from deep inside of me.
Outside it was almost dawn:
the birds awake in all the trees, singing.
These were not the words I had grown up to say:
My mind quiet before the growing sounds.
The birds have opened all their throats once and then again and again:
God, each one singing, asking for nothing, inside my heart.
Nadia Colburn, Where the Light Enters
photo mike prince
We are fascinated by words –
but where we meet
is in the silence behind them
Ram Dass
photo renatt stowe
Our life is not a problem to be solved, it is a gift to be opened. The color of the sky, the song of the bird, a word of kindness, a strain of music, the sun on our face, the companionship of friends, the taste of the sea air, the shape of clouds in summer, the reds of maples in fall — there are so many gifts in a single life. If we are preoccupied with what is missing and what is broken and wrong, we lose the miraculous harvest of all these tiny gifts, piled one upon the other, that accumulate without our acknowledging them.
Wayne Muller, How then Shall We live: Four Simple Questions that Reveal the Beauty and Meaning of Our Lives
We live between the act of awakening and the act of surrender. Each morning we awaken to the light and the invitation to a new day in the world of time; each night we surrender to the dark to be taken to play in the world of dreams where time is no more. At birth we were awakened and emerged to become visible in the world. At death we will surrender again to the dark to become invisible. Awakening and surrender: they frame each day and each life; between them the journey where anything can happen, the beauty and the frailty.
John O Donohue
photo benson kua
Be the silent watcher of your thoughts and behaviour.
You are not your thoughts
You are beneath the thinker
You are the stillness beneath the mental noise.
You are the love and joy beneath the pain
Eckhart Tolle
What is happiness but growth in peace,
The timeless sense of time when furniture
Has stood a life’s span in a single place,
And as the air moves, so the old dreams stir
The shining leaves of present happiness?
No one has heard thought or listened to a mind,
But where people have lived in inwardness
The air is charged with blessing and does bless;
Windows look out on mountains and the walls are kind.
May Sarton, The Work of Happiness
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