Walk and touch peace every moment.
Walk and touch happiness every moment.
Each step brings a fresh breeze.
Each step makes a flower bloom.
The Earth will be safe
when we feel safe in ourselves.
Thich Nhat Hanh
He who stands stretching on tiptoe
doesn’t stand firm.
He who rushes all the time
cannot maintain the pace.
He who makes a show
dims his own light.
He who defines himself
can’t know who he really is.
He who tries to have power over others
can’t empower himself.
He who clings to his work
will create nothing that endures.
According to followers of the Tao,
“These are unnecessary luggage.”
They do not bring happiness.
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching 24
We don’t stop playing because we grow old;
we grow old because we stop playing.
George Bernard Shaw
Mystery is not much in favor these days. The notion that there are limits to what we can do, what we can know, limits to our dominion, does not sit well with kings and queens of the hill. Humility and reverence, we hear, are the attitudes of cowards. . . . By ‘mystery’ I do not mean simply the blank places on our maps. I mean the divine source — not a void, not a darkness, but an uncapturable fullness. We are sustained by processes and powers that we can neither fathom nor do without. I speak of that ground as holy because it is ultimate, it is what makes us possible, that shapes and upholds everything we see. The stories I am most interested in hearing, reading, and telling, are those that help us imagine our lives in relation to that ground.
Scott Russell Sanders, Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World
A new month. We think we know where we are going.
Surely it is better to wait and see, moment by moment. Who knows where we will end up?
Whales follow
the whale-roads.
Geese, roads of magnetized air.
Yet how often
the heart
that set out for Peru
arrives in China,
Steering hard.
consulting the charts
the whole journey.
Jane Hirshfield, China
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