May you receive great encouragement
when new frontiers beckon.
May you take time to celebrate
the quiet miracles that seek no attention.
May you experience each day
as a sacred gift
woven around the heart of wonder.
John O’Donoghue, Benedictus
photo giorgio minguzzi
True restfulness is living ordinary life with a sense of ease, gratitude, appreciation, peace and prayer. We are restful when ordinary life is enough.
Ron Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern
Belonging is related to longing. If you hyphenate belonging, it yields a lovely axiom for spiritual growth: Be – Your – Longing. Longing is a precious instinct in the soul. Where you belong should always be worthy of your dignity. You should belong first in your own interiority. If you belong there, and if you are in rhythm with yourself and connected to that deep, unique source within, then you will never be vulnerable when your outside belonging is qualified, relativized, or taken away. You will still be able to stand on your own ground, the ground of your soul, where you are not a tenant, where you are at home.
John O’Donohue, Anamchara
photo bart whelan
When you ride in a boat and watch the shore, you might assume that the shore is moving. But when you keep your eyes closely on the boat, you can see that the boat moves. Similarly, if you examine many things with a confused body and mind, you might suppose that your mind and nature are fixed. However, if you practice intimately and return to where you are, it will be clear that there is nothing at all that has an unchanging self.
Dogen
If you would look at a flower, any thought about that flower prevents you from looking at it. The words the rose, the violet, it is this flower, that flower, it is that species, keep you from observing. To look there must be no interference of the word, which is the objectifying of thought. There must be freedom from the word, and to look there must be silence; otherwise you can’t look. If you look at your wife or husband, all the memories that you have had, either of pleasure or pain, interfere with looking. It is only when you look without the image that there is a relationship.
Jiddu Krisnmurti.
Photo Daniel J Layton
