Tag: balance

Sunday Quote: the little things

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The little things?

The little moments?

They aren’t little

Jon Kabat Zinn

Happy to be alive

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I heard a bird congratulating itself
all day for being a jay.
Nobody cared. But it was glad
all over again, and said so, again

William Stafford, News Every Day

photo Magnus Manske

Thousands of voices

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swans

Do you bow your head when you pray 
or do you look up into that blue space? 
Take your choice, prayers fly from all directions. 
And don’t worry about what language you use, 
God no doubt understands them all. 
Even when the swans are flying north 
and making such a ruckus of noise, 
God is surely listening and understanding. 
Rumi said, There is no proof of the soul. 
But isn’t the return of spring 
and how it springs up in our hearts a pretty good hint? 
Yes, I know, God’s silence never breaks, 
but is that really a problem? 
There are thousands of voices, after all. 
And furthermore, don’t you imagine (I just suggest it) 
that the swans know about as much as we do 
about the whole business? 
So listen to them and watch them, 
singing as they fly. 
Take from it what you can.

Mary Oliver, Whistling Swans

Blossom

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cherry-blossom-1209577_960_720How strange that the nature of life is to change but the nature of human beings is to resist change. And how ironic that the difficult times we fear might ruin us are the very ones that can break us open and help us blossom into what we were meant to be

Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times can Help us Grow

In our hands

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What we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us. It is only because so many people have not absorbed and transformed their fates while they were living in them that they have not realized what was emerging from them; it was so alien to them that, in their confusion and fear, they thought it must have entered them at the very moment they became aware of it, for they swore they had never before found anything like that inside them. Just as people for a long time had a wrong idea about the sun’s motion, they are even now wrong about the motion of what is to come. The future stands still but we move in infinite space.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Photo arnold paul

An endless longing

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If you want to build a ship,

don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work,

but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

photo alvesgaspar