Life offers its wisdom generously.
Everything teaches
Not everyone learns
Rachel Naomi Remen
photo Woodstown beach Co.Waterford by tony quilty
Tag: balance
Expectations
Our life in the world comes to us in the shape of time.
Consequently, our expectation is both a creative and constructive force.
If you expect to find nothing within yourself but the repressed, abandoned, and shameful elements of your past or a haunted hunger, all you will find is emptiness and desperation.
The way you look at things is the most powerful force in shaping your life.
In a vital sense, perception is reality.
John O’Donohue, AnamChara
photo of girl standing on the Calanque of Sormiou, near Marseille by benh lieu song
Embracing the New
“I will stay with it and endure through suffering hardship
and once the heaving sea has shaken my raft to pieces,
then I will swim.”
Homer, The Odyssey
On my printer I have this quote from Odysseus, as every morning we awake and we face the same perils as that ancient mariner. Every day we are cast upon the high seas of the soul. Whether we wish to be or not, we are already there, and have orders to show up. We begin showing up when we ask ourselves where are we blocked by fear, by lack of permission to live our own life, by self-doubt? What do we gain from staying stuck? Where is life served by our staying stuck? Who, or what are we waiting for before beginning our real life? How does staying stuck help anyone around us? Every day we are summoned anew to high adventure on the tenebrous seas of the soul. Living our lives, and not someone else’s, calls us to voyage, and if our familiar structures falter, then we swim.
James Hollis, Embracing the New: Avoiding a Routinized Life
photo Bernd Reuschenberg
Sunday Quote: Looking outside
One way to express the crisis of our time is to say
that most of us have an address
but cannot be found there.
Henri Nouwen
The best gift
Stepping out of the busyness,
stopping our endless pursuit of getting somewhere else,
is perhaps the most beautiful offering we can make to our spirit.
Tara Brach, True Refuge: Finding Peace and Freedom in your own Awakened Heart
Nowhere to go, Nothing to achieve
The greatest thing in the world is to know how to be one with oneself.
(La plus grande chose du monde, c’est de savoir être à soi)
Michel de Montaigne, Essais Book I, ch. 39
