Know that joy is rarer, more difficult, and more beautiful than sadness.
Once you make this all-important discovery,
you must embrace joy as a moral obligation.
André Gide
Joy
Tag: balance
Sunday Quote: Always a need
We are all meant to be mothers of God,
for God is always needing to be born.
Meister Eckhart
Enchantments
To live in an enchanting world we also have to assume a receptive posture rather than an exclusively active one.
We can become skilled at allowing the world in, taking its secrets to heart and finding power outside of ourselves.
Thomas Moore, The Education of the Heart
A choice
Past and present join
in the winter solstice.
The days will stretch and we survive.
with losses, yes, and lessons too
to reap the honey of the hive
of history. The yield of what is given
insists a choice – to live; to thrive
Peter Fallon, 1951 – Irish Poet, A Winter Solstice
An important guest
Waiting presents an enormous challenge.
We are impatient, I-can-fix-it kinds of people . . . but not all situations can be fixed. We assume that everything in life can be made better by taking action, but sometimes it just isn’t so. We shrink when we are presented with situations where action does no good at all. We deplore the passivity of waiting. Yet waiting is an enormous opportunity if we regard it as a wise teacher. Waiting offers us a great deal when we choose to learn.
Waiting is an important guest to honor in the guest house of our humanity. If we consciously allow waiting to be our teacher, we can accommodate waiting more peacefully. If we welcome waiting as a spiritual discipline, waiting will present its spiritual gifts. Waiting contains some of our richest spiritual opportunities if we are conscious enough and courageous enough to name them and live into them.
Holly Whitcomb, The Seven Spiritual Gifts of Waiting
Fabrications
If we take our vulnerable shell to be our true identity, if we think our mask is our true face, we will protect it with fabrications even at the cost of violating our own truth.
This seems to be the collective endeavor of society: the more busily we dedicate ourselves to it, the more certainly it becomes a collective illusion, until in the end we have the enormous, obsessive, uncontrollable dynamic of fabrications designed to protect mere fictitious identities – “selves”, that is to say, regarded as objects. Selves that can stand back and see themselves having fun (an illusion which reassures them they are real).
Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable
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