Someday we’ll live in the sky.
Meanwhile, the house of our lives is the world.
The fields, the ponds, the birds.
The thick black oaks — surely they are the
children of God.
The feistiness among the tiger lilies,
the hedges of runaway honeysuckle, that no one owns.
Where is it? I ask, and then
my feet know it.
One jump, and I’m home.
Mary Oliver, Boundaries (Extract)
Misery is a moment of suffering allowed to become everything. So, when feeling miserable, we must look wider than what hurts. When feeling a splinter, we must, while trying to remove it, remember there is a body that is not splinter, and a spirit that is not splinter, and a world that is not splinter.
Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening.
Human beings are made of water.
we were not designed
to hold ourselves
together,
rather run freely
like oceans,
like rivers.
Beau Taplin, Run Freely
The place God calls you to
is the place where your deep gladness
and the world’s deep hunger meet
Frederick Buechner, born 1926, American writer, preacher, and theologian
You are floating in empty space in a universe that goes on forever.
If you have to be here, at least be happy and enjoy the experience.
Michael Singer, The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself
It didn’t behave
like anything you had
ever imagined. The wind
tore at the trees, the rain
fell for days slant and hard…
I watched
the trees bow and their leaves fall
and crawl back into the earth.
As though, that was that…
But listen now to what happened
to the actual trees;
toward the end of that summer they
pushed new leaves from their stubbed limbs.
It was the wrong season, yes,
but they couldn’t stop. They
looked like telephone poles and didn’t
care. And after the leaves came
blossoms.
For some things
there are no wrong seasons.
Which is what I dream of for me.
Mary Oliver, Hurricane (excerpts)
