Going forward silently

Learn from the rivers
in clefts and in crevices:
those in small channels flow noisily,
the great flow silent.
Whatever is not full,  makes noise.
Whatever is full is quiet.

Buddha, Nalaka Sutta

To be peace

When you are feeling overwhelmed, you’re trying too hard.

That kind of energy does not help the other person and it does not help you. You should not be too eager to help right away. There are two things, to be and to do. Don’t think too much about to do – to be is first. To be peace. To be joy. And then to do joy, to do happiness – on the basis of being. Being fresh. Being peaceful. Being compassionate. This is the basic practice. It’s like a person sitting at the foot of a tree. The tree does not have to do anything, but the tree is fresh and alive. When you are like that tree, sending out waves of freshness, you help to calm down the suffering in the other person.

Thich Nhat Hanh, Be Beautiful, Be yourself

The good as well as the bad

To be grateful for the good things that happen in our lives is easy, but to be grateful for all our lives—the good as well as the bad, the moments of joy as well as the moments of sorrow, the successes as well as the failures, the rewards as well as the rejections—that requires hard spiritual work.

Still, we are only truly grateful people when we can say thank you to all that has brought us to the present moment.

Henri Nouwen

Sometimes we cannot see the way

 

Very foggy all day yesterday

and the Irish weather service have issued a Yellow Warning for fog this morning: 

In any given moment we have two options:

to step forward into growth or to step back into safety.

Abraham H. Maslow

Colour on a cold January Monday

We live in all we seek. The hidden shows up in too-plain sight. It lives captive on the face of the obvious – the people, events, and things of the day – to which we as sophisticated children have long since become oblivious.

What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.

 Annie Dillard

 

A new response

And that is just the point… how the world, moist and beautiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response.

That’s the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. 

“Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?”

Mary Oliver