Category: Be fully present

Everything can wake up

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Happiness floats.
It doesn’t need you to hold it down.
It doesn’t need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records . . .

Naomi Shihab Nye, So Much Happiness [extract]

Sunday Quote: Go deeper

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You have been walking the water’s edge, holding up your robes to keep them dry.

You must dive naked under, deeper, under a thousand times deeper.

Love flows down.

Rumi

New eyes

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The storm is over; too bad, I say.
At least storms are clear
about their dangerous intent.

Ordinary days are what I fear,
the sneaky speed
with which noon arrives, the sun shining while a government darkens
a decade or a man falls out of love.

I fear the solace of repetition, a withheld slap in the face.

Stephen Dunn, Ordinary Days

Here

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Find your hope, then, on the ground under your feet.
Your hope of Heaven, let it rest on the ground underfoot.
The world is no better than its places. Its places at last
are no better than their people while their people
continue in them. When the people make
dark the light within them, the world darkens.

Wendell Berry

Our interior expectations

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We come to realize that the universe mirrors back to us perfectly our beliefs, our intentions, our sincerity. What is is the product of the map of reality you carry inside you?

If you want to change your experience, you need to change the map.


 Alberto Villoldo, One Spirit Medicine: Ancient Ways to Ultimate Wellness

Beautify our gaze

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We have often heard that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  This is usually taken to mean that the sense of beauty is utterly subjective; there is no accounting for taste because each person’s taste is different.  The statement has another, more subtle meaning: if our style of looking becomes beautiful, then beauty will become visible and shine forth for us. We will be surprised to discover beauty in unexpected places where the ungraceful eye would never linger.  The graced eye can glimpse beauty anywhere, for beauty does not reserve itself for special elite moments or instances; it does not wait for perfection but is present already secretly in everything.  When we beautify our gaze, the grace of hidden beauty becomes our joy and our sanctuary.

John O Donohue, Beauty: Rediscovering The True Sources of Compassion, Serenity, and Hope