What sustains us on the way

Mystery is not much in favor these days. The notion that there are limits to what we can do, what we can know, limits to our dominion, does not sit well with kings and queens of the hill. Humility and reverence, we hear, are the attitudes of cowards. . . . By ‘mystery’ I do not mean simply the blank places on our maps. I mean the divine source — not a void, not a darkness, but an uncapturable fullness. We are sustained by processes and powers that we can neither fathom nor do without. I speak of that ground as holy because it is ultimate, it is what makes us possible, that shapes and upholds everything we see. The stories I am most interested in hearing, reading, and telling, are those that help us imagine our lives in relation to that ground.

Scott Russell Sanders, Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World

A spirit of adventure

Not a bad attitude to have as we start the day, seeing moments – even difficult ones – as “adventures” .

Wish that your journey be a long one, 

full of adventures, full of knowing.

(Vα εύχεσαι να είναι μακρύς ο δρόμος, γεμάτος περιπέτειες, γεμάτος γνώσεις)

Cavafy’s advice to Odysseus before he set out on his voyage back to Ithaca

Step by step

Mind always goes ahead or lags behind.

Remain with the moment.

Osho

 

Sunday Quote: A unique life

Traveler, your footprints
are the only road, nothing else.
Traveler, there is no path;
you make your own path as you walk.

Antonio Machado

On a journey

A new month. We think we know where we are going.

Surely it is better to wait and see, moment by moment. Who knows where we will end up?

Whales follow
the whale-roads.
Geese, roads of magnetized air.

Yet how often
the heart
that set out for Peru
arrives in China,

Steering hard.
consulting the charts
the whole journey.

Jane Hirshfield, China

 

Moments of orange light: An invitation to happiness

A very grey start to the day here in Ireland …but every day we are given opportunities to collect little moments of colour that give us courage to keep going and renew happiness.

We are invited not just to live life, but to celebrate it.

The poppies send up their orange flares; swaying
in the wind, their congregations are a levitation

of bright dust, of thin and lacy leaves.
There isn’t a place in this world that doesn’t

sooner or later drown in the indigos of darkness,
but now, for a while, the roughage

shines like a miracle as it floats above everything
with its yellow hair.
Of course, loss is the great lesson.

But I also say this: that light is an invitation
to happiness, and that happiness, when it’s done right, is a kind of holiness, palpable and redemptive.

Inside the bright fields, touched by their rough and spongy gold,
I am washed and washed in the river
of earthly delight—

and what are you going to do —
what can you do about it —
deep, blue night?

Mary Oliver, Poppies