Ireland moving back to much tighter restrictions again for 6 weeks, requiring that our inner resources be strong:
Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.
Where is there a place for you to be? No place […] Nothing outside you can give you any place […]
In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got.
Flannery O’Connor, 1925 – 1964, American novelist, Wise Blood
There are no new stressful thoughts.
They’re all recycled.
Byron Katie
To wander in the fields of flowers,
pull the thorns from your heart.
Rumi
The ego loves to complain and feel resentful not only about other people but also about situations. What you can do to a person, you can also do to a situation: make it into an enemy. The implication is always: this should not be happening; I don’t want to be here; I don’t want to be doing this; I’m being treated unfairly. And the ego’s greatest enemy of all is, of course, the present moment, which is to say, life itself.
Eckhart Tolle
We live in a time of the dissected soul, the immediate disclosure; our thoughts, imaginings and longings exposed to the light too much, too early and too often, our best qualities squeezed too soon into a world already awash with too easily articulated ideas that oppress our sense of self and our sense of others. What is real is almost always to begin with, hidden, and does not want to be understood by the part of our mind that mistakenly thinks it knows what is happening….Hiding leaves life to itself, to become more of itself. Hiding is the radical independence necessary for our emergence into the light of a proper human future.
David Whyte, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words
Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said….It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime
Ray Bradbury, Farenheit 451
