Every person, in the course of his life, must build — starting with the natural territory of his own self — a work, into which something enters from all the elements of the earth. He makes his own soul throughout all his earthly days; and at the same time he collaborates in another work, which infinitely transcends, while at the same time narrowly determines, the perspectives of his individual achievement: the completing of the world.
Teilhard de Chardin
photo ralf roletschek
Every year the lilies are so perfect
I can hardly believe their lapped light crowding
the black, mid-summer ponds.
Nobody could count all of them –
the muskrats swimming among the pads and the grasses can reach out their muscular arms and touch only so many, they are that rife and wild.
But what in this world is perfect?
I bend closer and see. how this one is clearly lopsided —
and that one wears an orange blight – and this one is a glossy cheek
half nibbled away – and that one is a slumped purse, full of its own unstoppable decay.
Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled – to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing –
that the light is everything – that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.
Mary Oliver, The Ponds
You can never know whether or not God is in a story until you get all the way to the end. For if only two words are still missing, yes, even if the pause after the final words still hasn’t occurred, He can always still show up.
Rilke, Stories of God
All night under the pines
the fox moves through the darkness
with a mouthful of teeth
and a reputation for death
which it deserves.
In the spicy villages of the mice
he is famous, his nose in the grass
is like an earthquake, his feet on the path
is a message so absolute
that the mouse, hearing it,
makes himself as small as he can
as he sits silent or, trembling, goes on
hunting among the grasses
for the ripe seeds.
Maker of All Things,
including appetite, including stealth,
including the fear that makes
all of us, sometime or other,
flee for the sake of our small and precious lives,
let me abide in your shadow–
let me hold on to the edge of your robe
as you determine what you must let be lost
and what will be saved.
Mary Oliver, Maker of all Things, even Healing
Unconditional love does not require a passive acceptance of whatever happens in the name of love. Rather, in the real spaces of our daily relationships, it means maintaining a commitment that no condition will keep us from bringing all of who we are to each other honestly.
Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening
photo aallen
Don’t ask what the world needs.
Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it.
Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
Howard Thurman, African-American author and Civil Rights leader, in conversation with Gil Bailie
