The seed of suffering in you may be strong, but don’t wait until you have no more suffering before allowing yourself to be happy.
Suffering is not enough. Life is both dreadful and wonderful…
How can I smile when I am filled with so much sorrow?
It is natural – you need to smile to your sorrow because you are more than your sorrow.
Thich Nhat Hahn
Difficult things provoke all your irritations and bring your habitual patterns to the surface. And that becomes the moment of truth. You have the choice to launch into your lousy habitual patterns, or to stay with the rawness and discomfort of the situation and let it transform you.
Pema Chodron
How you respond to tragedy and suffering is one true measure of your strength. You need to see those moments as moments of growth. You need to look upon them as gifts to help you reclaim what is important in your life. The question you must ask yourself is not if you will heal, but how. Grief and pain have their own duration, and when they begin to pass, you must take care to guide the shape of the new being you are to become. So you should not fear tragedy and suffering. Like love, they make you more a part of the human family. From them can come your greatest creativity. They are the fire that burns you pure.
Kent Nerburn
Over and over we break
open, we break and
we break and we open.
For a while, we try to fix
the vessel — as if
to be broken is bad.
As if with glue and tape
and a steady hand we
might bring things to perfect
again. As if they were ever
perfect. As if to be broken is not
also perfect. As if to be open
is not the path toward joy.
The vase that’s been shattered
and cracked will never
hold water. Eventually
it will leak. And at some
point, perhaps, we decide
that we’re done with picking
our flowers anyway, and no
longer need a place to contain them
We watch them grow just
as wildflowers do — unfenced,
unmanaged, blossoming only
when they’re ready — and mygod,
how beautiful they are amidst
the mounting pile of shards.
Rosemery Wahtola Trommer, American Poet, The Way it is
I do dimly perceive that whilst everything around me is ever changing, ever dying, there is underlying all that change a living power that is changeless, that holds all together, that creates, dissolves and recreates...for I can see that in the midst of death, life persists, in the midst of untruth, truth persists, in the midst of darkness, light persists.
Mohatma Gandhi, Spiritual Message (London, Kingsley Hall, 20 October 1931)
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread
Their greenness is a kind of grief.
Is it that they are born again
and we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.
Yet still unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
Philip Larkin
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