We are all meant to be mothers of God,
for God is always needing to be born.
Meister Eckhart
Sunday Quote: Always a need
Tag: Be fully present
Enchantments
To live in an enchanting world we also have to assume a receptive posture rather than an exclusively active one.
We can become skilled at allowing the world in, taking its secrets to heart and finding power outside of ourselves.
Thomas Moore, The Education of the Heart
A slip of light stays
Even in the dark of winter we get reminders of colour and light
Three times my life has opened.
Once, into darkness and rain.
Once, into what the body carries at all times within it and
starts to remember each time it enters the act of love.
Once, to the fire that holds all.
These three were not different.
You will recognize what I am saying or you will not.
But outside my window all day a maple has stepped
from her leaves like a woman in love with winter, dropping
the colored silks.
Neither are we different in what we know.
There is a door. It opens. Then it is closed. But a slip of
light stays, like a scrap of unreadable paper left on the floor,
or the one red leaf the snow releases in March.
Jane Hirshfield, The Lives of the Heart: Poems
Not wasting a day
Continuous practice, day after day, is the most appropriate way of expressing gratitude.
This means that you practice continuously, without wasting a single day of your life, without using it for your own sake.
Why is it so? Your life is a fortunate outcome of the continuous practice of the past. You should express your gratitude immediately.
Dogen quoted in Kazuaki Tanahashi, Enlightenment Unfolds Kazuaki Tanahashi
A choice
Past and present join
in the winter solstice.
The days will stretch and we survive.
with losses, yes, and lessons too
to reap the honey of the hive
of history. The yield of what is given
insists a choice – to live; to thrive
Peter Fallon, 1951 – Irish Poet, A Winter Solstice
An important guest
Waiting presents an enormous challenge.
We are impatient, I-can-fix-it kinds of people . . . but not all situations can be fixed. We assume that everything in life can be made better by taking action, but sometimes it just isn’t so. We shrink when we are presented with situations where action does no good at all. We deplore the passivity of waiting. Yet waiting is an enormous opportunity if we regard it as a wise teacher. Waiting offers us a great deal when we choose to learn.
Waiting is an important guest to honor in the guest house of our humanity. If we consciously allow waiting to be our teacher, we can accommodate waiting more peacefully. If we welcome waiting as a spiritual discipline, waiting will present its spiritual gifts. Waiting contains some of our richest spiritual opportunities if we are conscious enough and courageous enough to name them and live into them.
Holly Whitcomb, The Seven Spiritual Gifts of Waiting
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