…No path

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dune

Go forth on your path,
As it exists only through your walking

Saint Augustine, Sermon 169.

Sunday Quote: No map….

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You must give up the life you planned

in order to have the life that is waiting for you

Joseph Campbell

Arising and returning

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The “10,000 is things”expression for all that happens in a life, or in the world of our experience. They arise and pass away, continually rearranging themselves,  and we have to learn how to work with this reality:

The ten thousand things arise together;

In their arising is their return.

Now they flower, and flowering sink homeward, returning to the root.

The return to the root is peace.

Peace: to accept what must be

and to know what endures.

In that knowledge is wisdom

Lao Tzu

Not striving

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You don’t have to do anything to acquire happiness. The great Meister Eckhart said very beautifully, “God is not attained by a process of addition to anything in the soul, but by a process of subtraction.” You don’t do anything to be free, you drop something. Then you’re free. 

Anthony de Mello, sj.

photo paul nelhams

The secret for a full life

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The butterfly counts not months but moments,

and has time enough.

Rabindranath Tagore

The Hearts Actions

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Everything has two endings – a horse, a piece of string, a phone call.

Before a life, air.
And after.

As silence is not silence, but a limit of hearing.

As some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking.

So it was when love slipped inside us.

As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.

The heart’s actions
are neither the sentence nor its reprieve.

Salt hay and thistles, above the cold granite.
One bird singing back to another because it can’t not

Jane Hirshfield, born 1953, American poet:  Come,  Thief: Poems

photo brian robert marshall