The urgency of seeing anew, seeing with eyes washed clear by contemplative prayer, seeing with eyes cleansed by tears, but above all seeing with delight and wonder. . . . Delight [is] a glorious word which carries a lightness about it and seems to be saying this thing is good and I am good, and I am happy with my relationship to this world around me, but above all I am happy with my relationship to myself, to my own inwardness, and also to my own outwardness.
Esther de Wall, Lost in Wonder
We all have dreams. We trust that whatever is placed in our hearts will come to fruition, even if we do not know the how
Rabbi Lawrence Kushner quotes the Talmud:
Amemar, Mar Zutra and Rab Ashi would say this:
“Holy One of Being, I am yours and my dreams are yours.
I have dreamed a dream, and I do not know what it means”.
We arrive in this world with birthright gifts — then we spend the first half of our lives abandoning them or letting others disabuse us of them. As young people, we are surrounded by expectations that may have little to do with who we really are, expectations held by people who are not trying to discern our selfhood but to fit us into slots. In families, schools, workplaces, and religious communities, we are trained away from true self toward images of acceptability; under social pressures like racism and sexism our original shape is deformed beyond recognition; and we ourselves, driven by fear, too often betray true self to gain the approval of others….We are disabused of original giftedness in the first half of our lives. Then — if we are awake, aware, and able to admit our loss — we spend the second half trying to recover and reclaim the gift we once possessed.
Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak
If the doors of perception were cleansed
then everything would appear to man as it is,
Infinite.
William Blake
For to know nothing is nothing,
not to want to know anything likewise,
but to be beyond knowing anything,
to know you are beyond knowing anything,
that is when peace enters in.
Samuel Beckett, Molloy
Ask the large questions, but seek small answers.
A flower,
or the space between a branch and a rock,
these are enough.
Kent Nerburn
Mindfulbalance 