Tag: growth

Love is vulnerable

Karl Duffy3 Comments

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that  casket –  safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.

C.S. Lewis, The Fours Loves

Sunday Quote: ….and the wind

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In the East the moon is a symbol of Enlightenment, in the West of the Unconscious. Times of difficulty can be times of growth

Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.

Izumi Shikibu, Japanese poet, 974-1034, one of the thirty-six female immortals of poetry.

No permanence

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Still in China. This time an even earlier thinker. We could save ourselves a lot of hassle if we truly lived this:

We cling to our own point of view, as if everything depended on it.

Yet our views have no permanence; like autumn and winter, they gradually pass away.

Chuang Tzu, Chinese Philosopher,  4th century 

Sunday Quote: Lie low

Karl Duffy2 Comments

This is the time to be slow,
Lie low to the wall
Until the bitter weather passes

Time will come good;
And you will find your feet
Again on fresh pastures of promise,
Where the air will be kind
And blushed with beginning

John O’Donohue, from To Bless the Space Between Us

Guiding star

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Today is Candlemas, so I could post about light and darkness, as the days begin to noticeably lengthen in the Northern Hemisphere and hope returns. But instead, sticking with an idea in yesterdays post, different tradition:

Every blade of grass

has a constellation in the heavens

that strikes it and says, ‘Grow! Grow!’

The Talmud

Sunday Quote: Change is a constant

Karl Duffy3 Comments

I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be

Joan Didion