Each one of us has lived through some devastation, some loneliness, some weather superstorm or spiritual superstorm, when we look at each other we must say, I understand. I understand how you feel because I have been there myself. We must support each other and empathize with each other because each of us is more alike than we are unalike.
Maya Angelou
As long as the mind is comparing, there is no love, and the mind is always judging, comparing, weighing, looking to find where the weakness is. So where there is comparison, there is no love. When the mother and father love their children, they do not compare them, they do not compare their child with another child; it is their child and they love their child. But you want to compare yourself with something better, with something nobler, with something richer, so you create in yourself a lack of love. You are always concerned with yourself in relationship to somebody else. As the mind becomes more and more comparative, more and more possessive, more and more depending, it creates a pattern in which it gets caught, so it cannot look at anything anew, afresh.
And so it destroys that very thing, that very perfume of life, which is love.
J. Krishnamurti
Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief.
Do justly, now.
Love mercy, now.
Walk humbly, now.
You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.
The Talmud
The word blessing evokes a sense of warmth and protection; it suggests that no life is alone or unreachable.
Each life is clothed in raiment of spirit that secretly links it to everything else.
Though suffering and chaos befall us, they can never quench that inner light of providence.
John O’Donohue
Close your eyes.
Gather all the kindling
About your heart
To create one spark.
That is all you need
To nourish the flame
That will cleanse the dark
Of its weight of festered fear.
John O’Donohue, Benedictus, To Bless the Space between Us
What is this self inside us, this silent observer,
Severe and speechless critic, who can terrorize us
And urge us on to futile activity
And in the end, judge us still more severely
For the errors into which his own reproaches drove us.
T. S. Eliot, The Elder Statesman
