Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time:
not always, for every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting,
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.
from Marge Percy, The Seven of Pentacles
Every day has enough trouble of its own
When you go to sleep
bury all that has happened in the mercy of God
It will be safe there
Stand back from what has happened
and be grateful for it all
When the new day begins
be sure that you yourself can be
new and pure as new light
It is like the resurrection
Rule for a New Brother
photo izemah
The reality is that, despite our best efforts, life can be challenging sometimes, and we can fall short and not fully measure up. Thus, some way of starting over is an essential practice. The mind likes to have ideas about things and people, and they are often ideas of perfection, which is probably not possible in this world. This can makes it harder to be at ease with vulnerability or have patience with a world that has ups and downs
We’d so much rather be kind, generous, loving and wise all the time – not to mention calm and peaceful – [but…] our major task as persons of the Way is to accept our human-ness...which includes greed, anger, ignorance and all the other emotions, thoughts and behaviors that we’d rather not feel, think or do.
How to cope with this paradox? It’s very simple, really, although not easy…we rely on the practice of vow and repentance. We vow to do our best, and then, when we make our inevitable mistakes, we repent. We recognize that we have done harm, and then we vow again to have as big a view as possible under the circumstances, so that maybe the next time….and on and on, endlessly, forever. This practice is not something we can learn and complete…it’s a lifetime’s worth of, as we sometimes say, 9 times fall down, 10 times get up. Or, an infinite number of times fall down, and an infinite number of times, plus one, get up.
Melissa Myozen Blacker, on her Blog Firefly Hall
photo brian snelson
Whatever is happening, whatever is changing, whatever is going or not going according to my plans
— I release my hold on all of it.
I leave behind who I think I am, who I want to be, what I want the world to be.
I come home to the great peace of the present moment.
Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open, How Difficult Times Can Help us Grow
photo Daniel Mayer
I heard a man say a poem once,
he said,
‘All that lives is holy.’
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
We have forgotten the age-old fact
that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions
Carl Jung
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