Letting there be room for not knowing
is the most important thing of all.
Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart
Putting down the burden
The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry, to equanimity, receptivity, and peace, is the most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of the personal center of energy, which I have analyzed so often; and the chief wonder of it is that it so often comes about, not by doing, but by simply relaxing and throwing the burden down.
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, a Study in Human Nature.
Living with gaps
We think we need to hold everything close….to know where everything is going.
But probably, in life, the most important skill to learn is….
There are poets who learn from you
to say, what you, in your aloneness, are;
and they learn through you to live distantness,
as the evenings through the great stars
become accustomed to eternity.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Girls
Resilience
More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs – all this resinous, unretractable earth.
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs – all this resinous, unretractable earth.
Jane Hirshfield, Optimism
Unique experiences
To the attentive eye,
each moment of the year
has its own beauty,
and in the same field,
it beholds,
every hour,
a picture which was never seen before,
and which shall never be seen again.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Being filled by each moment
You don’t run down the present, pursue it with baited hooks and nets.
You wait for it, empty-handed, and you are filled.
You’ll have fish left over…
It is by definition, Christmas, the incarnation.
This old rock planet gets the present for a present on its birthday every day.
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
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