Whatever disquiet we sense in a room
we have brought there.
And so I instruct my ribs each morning,
pointing to hinge and plaster and wood –
You are matter, as they are.
See how perfectly it can be done.
Hold, one day more, what is asked.
Jane Hirshfield, A Room [extract]
Happiness, anxiety, joy, resentment — we have many words for the many emotions we experience in our lifetimes. But deep down, there are only two emotions: love and fear. All positive emotions come from love, all negative emotions from fear. From love flows happiness, contentment, peace, and joy. From fear comes anger, hate, anxiety and guilt.
We have to make a decision to be in one place or the other. If you don’t actively choose love, you will find yourself in a place of either fear or one of its component feelings. Every moment offers the choice to choose one or the other. And we must continually make these choices, especially in difficult circumstances when our commitment to love, instead of fear, is challenged.
Elizabeth Kubler Ross
There is a deep hole in your being, like an abyss.
You will never succeed in filling that hole, because your needs are inexhaustible. You have to work around it so that gradually the abyss closes. Since the hole is so enormous and your anguish so deep, you will always be tempted to flee from it.
There are two extremes to avoid: being completely absorbed in your pain and being distracted by so many things that you stay far away from the wound you want to heal.
Henri Nouwen, The Inner Voice of Love
O taste and see
the subway Bible poster said,
meaning The Lord, meaning
if anything, all that lives
to the imagination’s tongue,
grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather,
to breathe them, bite,
savor, chew, swallow, transform into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,
living in the orchard and being hungry, and plucking
the fruit.
Denise Levertov, O Taste and See
The human adventure is a wandering through the vale of the world for the sake of making soul.
Our life is psychological, and the purpose of life is to make psyche of it, to find connections between life and soul
James Hillman
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.
Reach for it.
Hold your meanness to your chest
as a healing root,
and be through with waiting.
Rumi in Coleman Banks, Delicious Laughter: Rambunctious Teaching Stories from the Mathnawi
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