Month: October 2018

Sunday Quote: Longing

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Could it be in longing we are most ourselves?

Li-Young Lee, LV

Always at home

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Someday we’ll live in the sky.

Meanwhile, the house of our lives is the world.
The fields, the ponds, the birds.
The thick black oaks — surely they are the
     children of God.
The feistiness among the tiger lilies,
the hedges of runaway honeysuckle, that no one owns.

Where is it? I ask, and then
my feet know it.

One jump, and I’m home.

Mary Oliver, Boundaries (Extract) 

Look wide

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Misery is a moment of suffering allowed to become everything. So, when feeling miserable, we must look wider than what hurts. When feeling a splinter, we must, while trying to remove it, remember there is a body that is not splinter, and a spirit that is not splinter, and a world that is not splinter.

Mark Nepo,  The Book of Awakening.

Letting go

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Human beings are made of water.

we were not designed
to hold ourselves 
together,

rather run freely
like oceans,
like rivers.

Beau Taplin, Run Freely

Seeing with the heart

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In Shakespeare’s King Lear Act IV, the King asks Gloucester how he was so good at seeing “how this world goes?” And Gloucester, who was blind, answers:

“I see it feelingly.”

On ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.

One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye

Antoine de Saint Exupéry, The Little Prince

Demented gardeners

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[Even some] lovely people feel that their real identity is working on themselves, and some work on themselves with such harshness. Like a demented gardener who won’t let the soil settle for anything to grow, they keep raking, tearing away the nurturing clay from their own heart, then they’re surprised that they feel so empty and vacant. Self-compassion is paramount. When you are compassionate with yourself, you trust in your soul, which you let guide your life. Your soul knows the geography of your destiny better than you do.

John O’Donoghue, Anam Chara