Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief.
Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now.
You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.
The Talmud
Tag: heart
Taking time
You have traveled too fast over false ground;
Now your soul has come to take you back.
Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through.
Become inclined to watch the way of rain
When it falls slow and free.
Imitate the habit of twilight,
Taking time to open the well of color
That fostered the brightness of day.
Draw alongside the silence of stone
Until its calmness can claim you.
John O’Donohue, To Bless the Space Between us
Sunday Quote: Home
The ache for home lives in all of us,
the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.
Maya Angelou
…leading to long, slow conversations
Our culture is so focused on … youth, that we don’t have a good model for what aging and dying could be like. All we feel is the lack of things: we’re not as youthful as we were, we’re not as limber as we were, we’re not as this, we’re not as that. Almost everything that we hear and see in the media is about how to maintain your youth as long as possible. All this focus on stopping aging implies that someone made a big mistake in the universe. It’s as if we should be getting younger instead of older.
But we’re missing a very important point. There’s something beautiful about quiet and peace. There’s something beautiful about not trying to do anything, but simply, in some way, your heart joining the whole world. There’s a time in life for building something up in this world: a family, an institution, a business, a creative life: there’s a time for that. There’s also a time for becoming quiet, a time for slow conversations with people that we love, and a time for reflecting on all the things that we’ve seen in many years of living. When the time for those things comes, it’s beautiful.
Norman Fischer, Suffering and Possibility
photo ian mckenzie
What limits us
Letting go of fixation is effectively a process of learning to be free, because every time we let go of something, we become free of it. Whatever we fixate upon limits us because fixation makes us dependent upon something other than ourselves. Each time we let go of something, we experience another level of freedom.
Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche, Letting go of Spiritual Experience
….separate
At the end of the day, we discover that humility
– the strength to separate our sense of the meaning of life from what we do –
is the only real answer to lifelong happiness.
Joan Chittister, Aspects of the Heart
photo xlibber
