A natural cycle

Losses aren’t cataclysmic if they teach the heart and soul their natural cycle of breaking and healing.

A real tragedy? That’s the loss of the heart and soul themselves. If you’ve abandoned yourself in the effort to keep anyone or anything else, unlearn that pattern. Live your truth, losses be damned. Just like that, your heart and soul will return home.

Martha Beck

Both rain and sun

The cloud weeps, and then the garden sprouts.
The baby cries, and the mother’s milk flows.
The Nurse of Creation has said, Let them cry a lot.

This rain-weeping and sun-burning twine together
to make us grow. Keep your intelligence white-hot
and your grief glistening,
so your life will stay fresh.
Cry easily like a little child.

Rumi

The well within

If your happiness depends on what somebody else does, I guess you do have a problem.

Richard Bach

Soft yet strong

A slight antidote to some of the overly sentimental messages popular on this day:

In Irish, when you talk about trust, there’s a beautiful phrase from West Kerry where you say, “mo sheasamh ort lá na choise tinne” — “You are the place where I stand on the day when my feet are sore.” That is soft and kind language, but it is so robust. That is what we can have with each other.

Padraig O’Tuama, On Being Blog

Embrace destiny

The wise person leans on a pillar that is never shaken,

Travels a road that is never blocked,

is endowed from a resource that is never exhausted,

and learns from a teacher that never dies.

They are successful In whatever they undertake, and arrive wherever they go.

Whatever they do, they embrace destiny and go along without confusion.

Wen-tzu, Taoist, disciple of Lao Tzu

Continue writing

Embrace uncertainty.

Some of the most beautiful chapters in our lives won’t have a title until much later

Bob Goff, 1959 – ,  lawyer and author