Someday we’ll live in the sky.
Meanwhile, the house of our lives is the world.
The fields, the ponds, the birds.
The thick black oaks — surely they are the
children of God.
The feistiness among the tiger lilies,
the hedges of runaway honeysuckle, that no one owns.
Where is it? I ask, and then
my feet know it.
One jump, and I’m home.
Mary Oliver, Boundaries (Extract)
Misery is a moment of suffering allowed to become everything. So, when feeling miserable, we must look wider than what hurts. When feeling a splinter, we must, while trying to remove it, remember there is a body that is not splinter, and a spirit that is not splinter, and a world that is not splinter.
Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening.
In Shakespeare’s King Lear Act IV, the King asks Gloucester how he was so good at seeing “how this world goes?” And Gloucester, who was blind, answers:
“I see it feelingly.”
On ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.
One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye
Antoine de Saint Exupéry, The Little Prince
I do not want to step so quickly over a beautiful line on God’s Palm
As I move through the earth’s
Marketplace
Today.
Something has happened
To my understanding of existence
That now makes my heart always full of wonder
And kindness.
I do not want to step so quickly
Over this sacred place on God’s body
That is right beneath your
Own foot
As I dance with
Precious life
Today.
Today from Daniel Ladinsky, The Gift: Poems by Hafiz the Great Sufi Master
Apprentice yourself to the curve of your own disappearance
David Whyte
Become totally empty.
Let your heart be at peace.
Amidst the rush of worldly comings and goings,
observe how endings become beginnings.
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, 16
