In a world that lives like a fist
trust is no more than waking
with your hands open.
Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening
photo angie garrett
Tag: heart
Speech and silence
I’ve been thinking about something for a long time, and I keep noticing that most human speech – if not all human speech – is made with the outgoing breath. This is the strange thing about presence and absence. When we breath in, our bodies are filled with nutrients and nourishment. Our blood is filled with oxygen, our skin gets flush; our bones get harder – they get compacted. Our muscles get toned and we feel very present when we’re breathing in. The problem is, that when we’re breathing in, we can’t speak. So presence and silence have something to do with each other.
Li-Young Lee
photo epSos.de
Taking people for granted
Day and night, gifts keep pelting down on us.
If we were aware of this, gratefulness would overwhelm us. But we go through life in a daze.
A power failure makes us aware of what a gift electricity is; a sprained ankle lets us appreciate walking as a gift, a sleepless night, sleep.
How much we are missing in life
by noticing gifts only when we are suddenly deprived of them.
David Steindal-Rast
photo: forS
Blossom
How strange that the nature of life is to change but the nature of human beings is to resist change. And how ironic that the difficult times we fear might ruin us are the very ones that can break us open and help us blossom into what we were meant to be
Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times can Help us Grow
What fills the heart
Perhaps the real point of life is simply to wear us down until we have no choice but to start abandoning our defenses. We learn that the way things are is simply the way they are meant to be right now, and then, suddenly, at long last, we catch a glimpse of the abundance in the moment – abundance even in the face of things falling apart.
Katrina Kenison, Magical Journey, An Apprenticeship in Contentment
Joy
An eye is meant to see things.
The soul is here for its own joy.
A head has one use: To love a genuine love.
The feet: To chase after it.
Love is for vanishing into the sky. The mind,
for learning what men have done and tried to do.
Mysteries are not to be solved: The eye goes blind
when it only wants to see why.
A lover is always accused of something.
But when he finds his love, whatever was lost
in the looking comes back completely changed.
Rumi, Night and Sleep
