If we are unable to find tranquility within ourselves,
it is useless to seek it elsewhere.
(Si nous sommes incapables de trouver la tranquillite en nous-mêmes,
il ne sert à rien de la chercher ailleurs)
La Rochefoucauld,
Tag: heart
Birdsong on the first day of Spring
I don’t know where prayers go, or what they do.
Do cats pray, while they sleep
half-asleep in the sun?
The sunflowers? The old black oak
growing older every year?
I know I can walk through the world,
along the shore or under the trees,
with my mind filled with things
of little importance, in full
self-attendance. A condition I can’t really
call being alive
Is a prayer a gift, or a petition, or does it matter?
The sunflowers blaze, maybe that’s their way.
Maybe the cats are sound asleep. Maybe not.
While I was thinking this I happened to be standing
just outside my door, with my notebook open,
which is the way I begin every morning.
Then a wren in the privet began to sing.
He was positively drenched in enthusiasm,
I don’t know why. And yet, why not.
I wouldn’t persuade you from whatever you believe
or whatever you don’t. That’s your business.
But I thought, of the wren’s singing, what could this be
if it isn’t a prayer?
Mary Oliver, I Happened to Be Standing
photo sylvain haye
Moment by Moment
A post from an Irish author, to mark St Patrick’s Day
I would love to live like a river flows,
carried by the surprise of its own unfolding
John O’Donohue
photo of Kells Bridge over the Kings River by Mike Searle
Life’s journey
I do not understand the mystery of grace –
only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.
Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies
A kind of frontier
It is possible to attain a state where we are free from suffering. We free ourselves from suffering by being fully in the conversation, rather than something static, having a conversation at every turn. As an individual, I must learn to live at a kind of frontier between what I think is me and what I think is not me, so that my identify is more of a meeting place; an edge between past and present rather than an island around which the events of life swirl and move on…Even grief and loss, if felt in a timeless way, can be free from disconnection or suffering.
David Whyte, The Three Marriages
photo svickova
As they are
The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them.
Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island
photo paul stocker
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