Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,
what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29
photo Glendalough, County Wicklow ,Ireland by cqui
The secret of life is to let every segment of it produce its own yield at its own pace. Every period has something new to teach us: The harvest of youth is achievement; the harvest of middle age is perspective; the harvest of age is wisdom; the harvest of life is serenity.
Joan Chittister, In a High Spiritual Season
Today is the birthday of the 13th Century Persian Poet Rumi. So here is one of my favourite short quotations, which in its few lines contains as much as we need to know.
Keep walking, though there’s no place to get to.
Don’t try to see through the distances.
That’s not for human beings. Move within,
But don’t move the way fear makes you move.
People are in every way prevented from getting inside themselves.
Our greatest problem is a fear of depth
Thomas Merton
photo anjali.verma999
Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress.
Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it.
Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone.
Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water.
If you can’t go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does
Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad
The task is to shift the identity more toward the movable conversation that stands behind us, a deep undercurrent we can tap into that carries on unconcerned with the surface tribulations. In this depth we try to create a real silence in which to keep our long-standing, well-established, self-protective stories away, to let ourselves alone so we can experience the physical vulnerability of the question and be transformed by it. We give these smaller protective stories away so that we can see how they come back to us once we have established a larger way of being in the world.
David Whyte, The Three Marriages
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