When we are no longer able to change a situation,
we are challenged to change ourselves.
Victor Frankl
Category: Make the most of life
Hope
Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well,
but the certainty that something makes sense,
regardless of how it turns out
Vaclav Havel
In our darkest night
Being Irish, I always remember Newgrange on this day. It is an enormous burial tomb, built over 5000 years ago, before Stonehenge and the Pyramids. It has with a small, dark inner chamber where the light penetrates just once a year at the dawn of this day, to warm those who have died for a few moments.
The Ancient Celts knew intimately the passage of the sun and the sacredness of certain days. Today, the darkest and shortest day of the year, they ensured that the sun still touched where they were buried. For us too, no matter how dark our interior life becomes, or how deeply we feel buried, light can still enter and illuminate. No matter how frozen we feel or how we shut ourselves off in fear of expoitation by others, we can be warmed and opened.
May hope and light, in some way, touch us all today.
When I am weak there I am strong
It is a general principle, in all the wisdom traditions, that we learn a lot from when we go through difficulties. We can broaden that out to say that sometimes we are wiser after we have made mistakes, if we regard them as opportunities to learn. Sometimes we clarify our awareness of what we want by seeing clearly what we do not want.
Where you stumble,
there lies your treasure.
Joseph Campbell
Sunday Quote: On seeing the dawn in winter
One may not reach the dawn
save by the path of the night.
Kahlil Gibran
Seeing the beautiful in the difficult
Sometimes we do
not fully understand why things have turned out as they have. At times like this we understand that we cannot make life problem-free, but our focus is to try and give to our everyday life a depth and value. To do this we may have to sit with the difficult moments without understanding why they are there. Rilke suggests that we love the difficult. It is not easy, but his words encourage us to believe that there is meaning underneath what is happening.
What is required of us is that we love the difficult and learn to deal with it. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us. Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our happiness, our dreams: there against the depth of this background, they stand out, there for the first time we see how beautiful they are.
Rilke
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