The Journey

Maybe the journey isn’t so much about becoming anything.

Maybe it’s about unbecoming everything.

that really isn’t you

so you can be who you were meant to be

in the first place.

Paulo Coelho

Hard to believe

All truth is a paradox.

Grief,  friends, time and tears will heal you.

Tears will bathe and baptize and hydrate you and the ground on which you walk. The first thing God says to Moses is, “Take off your shoes.”

We are on holy ground. Hard to believe, but the truest thing I know.

Anne Lamott, 12 Truths I Learnt from Life and Writing

Life flows

When effort is needed, effort will appear.
When effortlessness becomes essential, it will assert itself.
You need not push life about.
Just flow with it and give yourself completely to the task of the present moment,
which is the dying now to the now. For living is dying.
Without death life cannot be.

Nisargadatta Maharaj, 1897 – 1981, Hindu Non-Dualist teacher

Walking in light

 

A poem for this Easter Monday, traditionally in Italy “Lunedì dell’Angelo”, (Monday of the Angel), a day for going for a walk,  remembering the road to Emmaus story in the New Testament

Now you know the worst
we humans have to know
about ourselves, and I am sorry,

for I know that you will be afraid.
To those of our bodies given
without pity to be burned, I know

there is no answer
but loving one another,
even our enemies, and this is hard.

But remember:
when a man of war becomes a man of peace,
he gives a light, divine

though it is also human.
When a man of peace is killed
by a man of war, he gives a light.

You do not have to walk in darkness.
If you will have the courage for love,
you may walk in light.

Wendell Berry, Now you Know the Worst

Our reality as humans

The period between Good Friday and Easter Sunday shows us all the aspects of human life, from darkness to light:

We, this people, on this small and drifting planet

Whose hands can strike with such abandon

That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living

Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness

That the haughty neck is happy to bow

And the proud back is glad to bend

Out of such chaos, of such contradiction

We learn that we are neither devils nor divines

Maya Angelou, A Brave and Startling Truth

 

Connected

Live in the nowhere that you come from,

even though you have an address here.

Rumi