I love the gentle kindness in these words, and they are so true of real love.
Sadly, they are far away from how we often treat ourselves.
We are not wholly bad or good
We who live our lives under Milk Wood
And Thou, I know will be the first
To see our best side, and not our worst.
Minister Eli Jenkin’s prayer in Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood, sometimes known as the Sunset poem
photo wiliam warby
Have good trust in yourself,
not in the one that you think you should be
but in the one that you are
Taizan Maezumi, 1931— 1995, Japanese zen Buddhist teacher
photo venpia
Suppose we did our work
like the snow, quietly, quietly.
leaving nothing out.
Wendell Berry
photo rod allday
With again more news of violence and hatred….
Ultimately we have just one moral duty:
to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves more and more
and to reflect it towards others, and the more peace there is in us,
the more peace there will be in our troubled world.
Etty Hillesum, killed in Auschwitz in November 1943 aged 21.
photo lewis collard.com
We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. And if we could only arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.
Rainer Maria Rilke
hoto raul654
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