You cannot understand life and its mysteries as long as you try to grasp it. Indeed, you cannot grasp it just as you cannot walk off with a river in a bucket. If you try to capture running water in a bucket, it is clear that you do not understand it and that you will always be disappointed, for in the bucket the water does not run. To “have” running water you must let go of it and let it run.
Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity
photo Paul Glazzard
It is very important that you only do what you love to do.
You may be poor, you may go hungry, you may lose your car, you may have to move into a shabby place to live, but you will totally live.
And at the end of your days you will bless your life because you have done what you came here to do.
Otherwise, you will do things only for a reason, to please other people, and you will never have lived.
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
You must descend from
your head into your heart.
At present your thoughts of God
are in your head. And God Himself is,
as it were, outside you, and
so your prayer and other spiritual
exercises remain exterior.
Whilst you are still
in your head, thoughts will not easily be subdued but
will always be whirling about, like snow
in winter or clouds of mosquitoes in summer.
Saint Theophan the Recluse, (1815–1894) monk of the Russian Orthodox Church
photo alan Murray-Rust
My grandmother’s eyes say Allah is everywhere, even in death.
When she talks of the orchard and the new olive press,
when she tells the stories of Joha and his foolish wisdoms,
He is her first thought, what she really thinks of is His name.
“Answer, if you hear the words under the words—
otherwise it is just a world with a lot of rough edges,
difficult to get through, and our pockets full of stones.“
Naomi Shihab Nye, The Words Under the Words
I love you, gentlest of Ways,
who ripened us as we wrestled with you.
you, the great homesickness we could never shake off,
you, the forest that always surrounded us,
you, the song we sang in every silence,
you dark net threading through us,
on the day you made us you created yourself,
and we grew sturdy in your sunlight…
let your hand rest on the rim of heaven now and mutely bear the darkness we bring over you.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours, translation anita barrows and joanna macy
