This shell is not of my own making
Borrowing it from heaven and earth
I live out each and every day
Eichi Enomoto, 1903 – 1998, Hermit crab
One’s life is a combination of what one borrows and what one is gifted with. Without borrowing all the strength from heaven and earth, one cannot truly live, even for a minute
Shunda Aoyama, Zen Seeds
The first snowdrops in my garden, a very welcome sign of life in this pandemic winter.
If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving and for once could do nothing perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves and threatening ourselves with death. Perhaps the earth can teach us, as when everything seems dead and later proves to be alive.
Pablo Nerudo, Keeping Quiet
Michel de Montaigne, On Solitude
The current of life requires us to stand up, again and again, and we are not defeated when we are worn down, just exposed anew at a deeper level. We are meant to live between the two. In this way, life keeps getting more and more precious. It is a natural law like gravity or osmosis: Stand up to be worn bare. It is how everything in the way is thinned, so we can feel just how thoroughly alive we are.
Mark Nepo
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.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.
Rilke
When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible- in life as in love – is in growth, in fluidity… in freedom.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1906 – 2001, American author and aviator, Gift from the Sea
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