My eyes already touch the sunny hill
going far ahead of the road I have begun
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp
It has its inner light even from a distance
and changes us even if we do not reach it
into something else, which hardly sensing it, we already are.
Rainer Maria Rilke
photo: oregon department of transportation
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,
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
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
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
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
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