This existence of ours is as transient as autumn clouds,
Watching the birth and death of beings is like looking at movements of a dance,
A lifetime is like a flash of lightning in the sky,
Rushing by, like a torrent down a steep mountain.
The Buddha, Lalitavistara Sutra, 13.79
“I’ve known rivers,” writes Langston Hughes. “I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers“.
Am I going to flow with my river nature today, or am I going to swim against it? this is what I ask myself when I get out of bed each morning. And when I go to sleep, I apologize to the river gods for any hard strokes I made against the current, and for splashing about like a drowning person. I pray that tomorrow I may once again know the pleasure of following my soul downstream, because I’ve known rivers- and once we’ve known rivers, once we have stretched out on the dark waters, trusting the river gods, going in the direction of life even if it is headfirst toward the rapids – we want to taste that water again;
we want our souls to grow deep like the rivers again.
Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How difficult times can help us grow
To treat life as less than a miracle is to give up on it.
Wendell Berry, Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition
Within the circles of our lives
we dance the circles of the years,
the circles of the seasons
within the circles of the years,
the cycles of the moon
within the circles of the seasons,
the circles of our reasons
within the cycles of the moon.
Again, again we come and go,
changed, changing. Hands
join, unjoin in love and fear,
grief and joy. The circles turn,
each giving into each, into all.
Only music keeps us here,
each by all the others held.
In the hold of hands and eyes
we turn in pairs, that joining
joining each to all again.
And then we turn aside, alone,
out of the sunlight gone
into the darker circles of return.
Wendell Berry
And to die,
which is letting go
of the ground we stand on and cling to every day,
is like the swan, when he nervously lets himself down
into the water, which receives him gaily
and which flows joyfully under
and after him, wave after wave,
while the swan, unmoving and marvellously calm,
is pleased to be carried, each moment more fully grown,
more like a king, further and further on.
Rilke
If someone isn’t what others want them to be, the others become angry.
Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.
Paolo Coelho, The Alchemist
