You do not convince people with arguments, strategies or tactics.
You convince them by learning how to welcome them.
For that, it is necessary to keep doors open, above all the doors to the heart.
Pope Francis
In the heart
Month: December 2020
Where
God comes to you disguised as your life.
Paula D’Arcy, American Writer, retreat leader and seminar speaker
Between darkness and light
At first, we are children of the darkness. Your body and your face were formed first in the kind darkness of your mother’s womb. You lived the first nine months in there. Your birth was the first journey from darkness into light. All your life, your mind lives within the darkness of your body. Every thought you have is a flint moment, a spark of light from your inner darkness. The miracle of thought is its presence in the night side of your soul; the brilliance of thought is born of darkness. Each day is a journey. We come out of the night into the day. All creativity awakens at this primal threshold where light and darkness test and bless each other. You only discover the balance in your life when you learn to trust the flow of this ancient rhythm
John O’Donohue
The smallest bit of beauty
Nature teaches us that the moment when darkness is greatest is also the moment that light is about to return.
[In Iran] On the winter solstice families gather for a feast and surround themselves with candles, eat pomegranates and nuts, and recite poetry. “It is a beautiful way of assuring you that you have lived through long nights before. It is precisely at the point that the night is longest and darkest that you’ve actually turned a corner.”
Medieval Persian writings suggested that if one could not afford a feast, it is enough to bring a flower, “Look for the smallest bit of beauty around you. That very much resonates today, at a time where it seems like the mega-systems are all broken or falling apart, to return your gaze to the small.”
Omid Safi, professor of Iranian studies at Duke University, describing the 2,500 year old Iranian winter tradition of Yalda in the New York Times
Inner things
Today is the Winter Solstice. Yet, all of this year had some qualities of winter.
In a way, winter is the real spring,
the time when the inner things happen,
the resurge of nature.
Edna O’Brien, Irish writer
Sunday Quote: Praise
O tell us, poet, what you do?
— I praise.
But those, dark, deadly, devastating ways,
how do you bear them, suffer them?
— I praise.
But the nameless, the anonymous. How, Poet, can you still invoke it?
– I praise.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Praise
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