The first half of life feeds on projections – this is how the unconscious becomes conscious. If we did not project idealism and love, we might never leave home. However, in the second half of the journey our projected values, hopes, and dreams lose some of their magical power. Our illusions are disillusioned. It must be so if we are to collect our own missing pieces and become more whole.
Jerry Ruhl, Inner Work Blog
What is balance in a society whose skewing of time has it totally off-balance? What is balance in a culture that has destroyed the night with perpetual light and keeps equipment going twenty-four hours a day because it is more costly to turn machines on and of than it is to pay people to run them at strange and difficult hours? In the first place balance for us is obviously not a mathematical division of the day. For most of us our days simply do not divide that easily. In the second place, balance for us is clearly not equivalence. Because I have done forty hours of work this week doesn’t mean that I will have forty hours of prayer and leisure. What it does mean, however, is that somehow I must make time for both. I must make time or die inside.
Joan Chittister, Wisdom Distilled from the Daily
photo:guido gerding
Let us open our leaves like a flower,
and be receptive.
John Keats
…You come, dreaming of ferns and flowers
and new leaves unfolding
upon the brash turnip-hearted skunk cabbage…
…Your kneel beside it. The smell
is lurid and flows in the most
unabashed way…
…but these are the woods you love,
where the secret name
of every death is life again – a miracle…
…What blazes the trail is not necessarily pretty.
Mary Oliver, Skunk Cabbage
Do not judge each day
by the harvest you reap
but by the seeds
that you plant.
Robert Louis Stevenson
My grandmother’s eyes say Allah is everywhere, even in death.
When she talks of the orchard and the new olive press,
when she tells the stories of Joha and his foolish wisdoms,
He is her first thought, what she really thinks of is His name.
“Answer, if you hear the words under the words—
otherwise it is just a world with a lot of rough edges,
difficult to get through, and our pockets full of stones.“
Naomi Shihab Nye, The Words Under the Words
Mindfulbalance 