The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Death: The Final Stage of Growth,
As David Whyte says, we have many allies as we make our way through each day and each week – the blue sky, the wind on our face, the yellow daffodils blooming early because of the mild early Spring. If we can notice them we get some space from the worrying thoughts that accompany us
To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings
David Whyte
When you fall in love with the unknown,
you are free.
Byron Katie
Even when we cannot see the while picture, it is good to have an underlying trust.
Let me fall if I must.
The one I will become will catch me
Baal Shem Tov, 1698 – 1760, Jewish rabbi and mystic, founder of Hasidic Judaism
A predictable but sad post today on hearing of the death of Mary Oliver
When death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it’s over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
Mary Oliver, When Death Comes
Once a young woman said to me, “Hafiz, what
is the sign of someone who knows God?”
I became very quiet, and looked deep into her
eyes, then replied,
“My dear, they have dropped the knife. Someone
who knows God has dropped the cruel knife
that most so often use upon their tender self
and others.”
Hafiz, Persia, 1315 – 1390
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