It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.
Alain de Botton, A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary
What is wrong with us human beings, and has been wrong since time immemorial, is that without ever stating it in so many words, we believe that we have entered the realm of immortality. We behave as if we are never going to die – an infantile arrogance.
But even more injurious than this sense of immortality is what comes with it : the sense that we can engulf this inconceivable universe with our minds.
Carlos Castaneda, The Active Side of Infinity
All Saints Day in the Christian Calendar
Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already am.
That I will never fulfill my obligation to surpass myself unless I first accept myself, and if I accept myself fully in the right way, I will already have surpassed myself.
Thomas Merton, Journal, October 2, 1958
The Festival of Samhain, marking the end of the year and the beginning of the new one in the Celtic calendar. Traditionally, bonfires were lit to remind us that the encroaching darkness will not prevail
Thinking gives off smoke to prove the existence of fire
There are wonderful shapes in rising smoke that imagination loves to watch
But it’s a mistake to leave the fire for that filmy sight
Stay here at the flame’s core
Rumi
Daylight saving time in Ireland and around Europe.
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.
David Whyte, Sweet Darkness
There’s that long bend in the river on the way home. Fluffy bursts of milkweed are floating through shafts of sunlight or disappearing where trees reach out from their deep dark roots.
Maybe people have to go in and out of shadows till they learn that floating,
that immensity waiting to receive whatever arrives with trust.
Maybe somebody has to explore what happens when one of us wanders over near the edge and falls for awhile.
Maybe it was your turn.
William Stafford, Afterwards
Mindfulbalance 