The urgency of seeing anew, seeing with eyes washed clear by contemplative prayer, seeing with eyes cleansed by tears, but above all seeing with delight and wonder. . . . Delight [is] a glorious word which carries a lightness about it and seems to be saying this thing is good and I am good, and I am happy with my relationship to this world around me, but above all I am happy with my relationship to myself, to my own inwardness, and also to my own outwardness.
Esther de Wall, Lost in Wonder
You should go home to your hermitage; it is inside you. Close the doors, light the fire, and make it cozy again. That is what I call ‘taking refuge in the island of self.’ If you don’t go home to yourself, you continue to lose yourself. You destroy yourself and you destroy people around you, even if you have goodwill and want to do something to help. That is why the practice of going home to the island of self is so important. No one can take your true home away.
Thich Nhat Hahn, Peace Begins Here
We all have dreams. We trust that whatever is placed in our hearts will come to fruition, even if we do not know the how
Rabbi Lawrence Kushner quotes the Talmud:
Amemar, Mar Zutra and Rab Ashi would say this:
“Holy One of Being, I am yours and my dreams are yours.
I have dreamed a dream, and I do not know what it means”.
We arrive in this world with birthright gifts — then we spend the first half of our lives abandoning them or letting others disabuse us of them. As young people, we are surrounded by expectations that may have little to do with who we really are, expectations held by people who are not trying to discern our selfhood but to fit us into slots. In families, schools, workplaces, and religious communities, we are trained away from true self toward images of acceptability; under social pressures like racism and sexism our original shape is deformed beyond recognition; and we ourselves, driven by fear, too often betray true self to gain the approval of others….We are disabused of original giftedness in the first half of our lives. Then — if we are awake, aware, and able to admit our loss — we spend the second half trying to recover and reclaim the gift we once possessed.
Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak
There is a story by Mark Twain about a man going to heaven. When he arrived, he was given a pair of wings and a harp, and for a few days he used the wings as a way of moving about, and plucked on the strings of the harp trying to get some celestial music out of it. Both were pretty much of a bother, and finally he realized that in heaven you don’t actually need wings to go anyplace; and simply by desiring heavenly music, the celestial musicians appear and commence to play. So he put down the wings and the harp, and began to enjoy himself. Similarly, we sometimes limit ourselves by preconceptions of purity and happiness. We burden ourselves with unnecessary wings or halos or harps thinking that happiness consists of having certain things or acting in a certain way. When we leave aside our limited views it is possible to open up to deeper experiences of joy.
Joseph Goldstein
What’s needed is self-surrender, not endless effort.
Rumi
Mindfulbalance 