Month: October 2025

Halloween

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Ancient knowledge from the Celtic calendar which saw tonight as the threshold between the light and dark times of the year, when the earth turns inward. Sometimes wisdom doesn’t have to be learned so much as reawakened. We scroll endlessly, but rarely return to stillness to rediscover the thresholds where mystery begins.

Fashioned from clay, we carry the memory of the earth. Ancient, forgotten things stir within our hearts, memories from the time before the mind was born. Within us are depths that keep watch. These are depths that no words can trawl or light unriddle.

Our neon times have neglected and evaded the depth-kingdoms of interiority in favor of the ghost realms of cyberspace. We have unlearned the patience and attention of lingering at the thresholds where the unknown awaits us. We have become haunted pilgrims addicted to distraction and driven by the speed and colour of images.

John O’Donohue, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace

A still center

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Unless there is a still center in the middle of the storm,
unless individuals in the midst of all their activities
preserve a secret room in the hearts
where they sit alone before God,
unless we do this, we will lose all sense
of direction and be torn to pieces.

anonymous monk in the Egyptian desert 

Be water

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Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.

Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless — like water. Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup; you put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle; you put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.

Bruce Lee, based on the Pierre Berton Interview 1971.

Complaining

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See if you can catch yourself complaining in either speech or thought, about a situation you find yourself in, what other people do or say, your surroundings, your life situation, even the weather.

To complain is always nonacceptance of what is.

It invariably carries an unconscious negative charge. When you complain, you make yourself a victim.

Leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness

Eckhart Tolle

Cares drop away

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Climb the mountains and get their glad tidings.

Nature’s peace will flow to you as the sunshine flows into the trees.

The winds blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy,

while cares drop away from you

like the leaves of autumn

John Muir

Sunday Quote: a new loveliness

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To live completely, wholly, every day as if it were a new loveliness, there must be dying to everything of yesterday,

otherwise you live mechanically, and a mechanical mind can never know what love is or what freedom is.

Krisnamurti