When you become enlightened it can come about through a very small or ordinary thing. You see, the most difficult thing for someone to accept is the plainness of their life. To discover magnificence in every moment of a simple life is truly life’s greatest reward.
Hua-Ching Ni, Entering the Tao
You should go home to your hermitage; it is inside you. Close the doors, light the fire, and make it cozy again. That is what I call ‘taking refuge in the island of self.’ If you don’t go home to yourself, you continue to lose yourself. You destroy yourself and you destroy people around you, even if you have goodwill and want to do something to help. That is why the practice of going home to the island of self is so important. No one can take your true home away.
Thich Nhat Hahn, Peace Begins Here
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
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