Year: 2018

Demented gardeners

Karl Duffy1 Comment

[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

Off to work

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The place God calls you to

is the place where your deep gladness

and the world’s deep hunger meet

Frederick Buechner, born 1926, American writer, preacher, and theologian

Sunday quote: Perspective

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You are floating in empty space in a universe that goes on forever.

If you have to be here, at least be happy and enjoy the experience. 

Michael Singer,  The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself

There are no wrong seasons.

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It didn’t behave
like anything you had
ever imagined. The wind
tore at the trees, the rain
fell for days slant and hard…

 I watched
the trees bow and their leaves fall
and crawl back into the earth.
As though, that was that…

 But listen now to what happened
to the actual trees;
toward the end of that summer they
pushed new leaves from their stubbed limbs.
It was the wrong season, yes,
but they couldn’t stop. They
looked like telephone poles and didn’t
care. And after the leaves came
blossoms.

For some things
there are no wrong seasons.
Which is what I dream of for me.

Mary Oliver, Hurricane (excerpts)

Today

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I do not want to step so quickly over a beautiful line on God’s Palm 
As I move through the earth’s 
Marketplace 
Today.

Something has happened
To my understanding of existence
That now makes my heart always full of wonder
And kindness.

I do not want to step so quickly
Over this sacred place on God’s body
That is right beneath your
Own foot

As I dance with
Precious life
Today.

 

 Today from Daniel Ladinsky, The Gift: Poems by Hafiz the Great Sufi Master

Applying the lessons of autumn

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We all carry these interior lists and shoulds…

Dropping all we carry – all our preconceptions, our interior lists of the ways we’ve failed and the ways we’ve been wronged, all the secret burdens we work at maintaining – dropping all regret and expectations lets our mentality die. Dropping all we have constructed as imperative allows us to be born again into the simplicity of spirit that arises from unencumbered being

Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening