Today is the Feast of Candlemas, which echoes themes found in many traditions around this time – new life, the first budding of plants, the return of the sun – light and warmth at the halfway point between the winter and the spring solstices.
We need constant reminders of the presence of light.
We are stars wrapped in skin,
The light you are seeking has always been within.
Rumi
We all share a common story, with moments of weakness, wrong turns or unwanted places in our lives. However, if we see them wisely, they can become a fertile seedbed, bringing forth growth into the fullness of our lives.
Pay close attention to your mean thoughts.
That sourness may be a blessing,
as an overcast day brings rain for the roses
and relief to dry soil.
Don’t look so sourly on your sourness!
It may be it’s carrying what you most deeply need
and want. What seems to be keeping you from joy
may be what leads you to joy.
Don’t call it a dead branch.
Call it the live, moist root.
Don’t always be waiting to see
what’s behind it. That wait and see
poisons your Spirit.
Reach for it.
Hold your meanness to your chest
as a healing root,
and be through with waiting.
Rumi
Life is serious all the time, but living cannot be.
You may have all the solemnity you wish in your neckties, but in anything important (such as sex, death, and religion), you must have mirth or you will have madness.
G.K. Chesterton
One kind word can warm three winter months
Japanese proverb
The shape of each soul is different.
There is a secret destiny for each person.
We need to return to the solitude within, to find again the dream that lies at the hearth of the soul.
John O’Donohue
When life is ‘enough,’ we don’t need any more. What a good feeling it is when our days are enough. The world is enough. We don’t often let that feeling in. It’s a foreign feeling because we tend to live our lives feeling that they are not enough. But we can change that perception. Saying that this is life and I don’t need anything more is a wonderful statement of grace and power. If we don’t need any more, if we don’t need to control everything, we can let life unfold. …. We must remember that our power comes from knowing that everything is all right and everyone is unfolding exactly as they are supposed to
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
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