You have traveled too fast over false ground;
Now your soul has come to take you back.
Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through.
John O’Donohue, For One Who Is Exhausted, a Blessing
Cefalu, Sicily
Don’t change: Desire to change is the enemy of love.
Don’t change yourselves: Love yourselves as you are.
Don’t change others: Love all others as they are.
Don’t change the world: It is in God’s hands and he knows.
And if you do that….. change will occur marvellously in its own way and in its own time
Yield to the current of life unencumbered by baggage.
Anthony de Mello sj.
Happiness lies not in finding what is missing,
but in finding what is present
Tara Brach
Don’t hide love.
If you feel it, express it – not to demand that others love you back, but simply to live outwardly the best of what you feel inwardly.
The worst that can happen to your heart is not rejection by another person but failure to act on the love you feel.
Martha Beck
We all have an deep seated drive to seek happiness somewhere else, with special conditions
Reaching the mystery is nothing other than breaking through
and grabbing an ordinary person’s life.
Zen saying
Saw some Giant Redwood trees walking in the grounds of Emo Court last weekend. They are quite young compared to the ones in California – only 170 years – being planted in 1853, but still an impressive size
Some of these trees have been here since Jesus walked on water
Some of these trees have been here
since Vikings drove their boats
onto the shores of Newfoundland…
Some of these trees have survived lightning strikes and forest fires…..
They have grown beyond
their trauma and focus now
on the daily climb, the adding-on
of needle and bark, on nature’s drive
to rise above and see beyond
until the day when death will fell them
and the earth will add them to its riches.
We can be like these trees, pull on the layers of living like fine
new garments, house the needy
in the caverns of our grief, grow
beyond the stories of our scars
stretch our branches toward the bristling stars.
Tamara Madison, American poet, Sequoia Sempervirens [extract], from the A Year of Being Here blog
Mindfulbalance 
