Day and night, gifts keep pelting down on us.
If we were aware of this, gratefulness would overwhelm us. But we go through life in a daze.
A power failure makes us aware of what a gift electricity is; a sprained ankle lets us appreciate walking as a gift, a sleepless night, sleep.
How much we are missing in life
by noticing gifts only when we are suddenly deprived of them.
David Steindal-Rast
photo: forS
Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before or after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
TS Eliot, Four Quartets
Life consists in penetrating the unknown
and fashioning our actions in accord
with the new knowledge thus acquired
Leo Tolstoy
Do you bow your head when you pray
or do you look up into that blue space?
Take your choice, prayers fly from all directions.
And don’t worry about what language you use,
God no doubt understands them all.
Even when the swans are flying north
and making such a ruckus of noise,
God is surely listening and understanding.
Rumi said, There is no proof of the soul.
But isn’t the return of spring
and how it springs up in our hearts a pretty good hint?
Yes, I know, God’s silence never breaks,
but is that really a problem?
There are thousands of voices, after all.
And furthermore, don’t you imagine (I just suggest it)
that the swans know about as much as we do
about the whole business?
So listen to them and watch them,
singing as they fly.
Take from it what you can.
Mary Oliver, Whistling Swans
How strange that the nature of life is to change but the nature of human beings is to resist change. And how ironic that the difficult times we fear might ruin us are the very ones that can break us open and help us blossom into what we were meant to be
Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times can Help us Grow
Perhaps the real point of life is simply to wear us down until we have no choice but to start abandoning our defenses. We learn that the way things are is simply the way they are meant to be right now, and then, suddenly, at long last, we catch a glimpse of the abundance in the moment – abundance even in the face of things falling apart.
Katrina Kenison, Magical Journey, An Apprenticeship in Contentment
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