Misery is a moment of suffering allowed to become everything. So, when feeling miserable, we must look wider than what hurts. When feeling a splinter, we must, while trying to remove it, remember there is a body that is not splinter, and a spirit that is not splinter, and a world that is not splinter.
Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening.
Human beings are made of water.
we were not designed
to hold ourselves
together,
rather run freely
like oceans,
like rivers.
Beau Taplin, Run Freely
In Shakespeare’s King Lear Act IV, the King asks Gloucester how he was so good at seeing “how this world goes?” And Gloucester, who was blind, answers:
“I see it feelingly.”
On ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.
One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye
Antoine de Saint Exupéry, The Little Prince
You are floating in empty space in a universe that goes on forever.
If you have to be here, at least be happy and enjoy the experience.
Michael Singer, The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself
It didn’t behave
like anything you had
ever imagined. The wind
tore at the trees, the rain
fell for days slant and hard…
I watched
the trees bow and their leaves fall
and crawl back into the earth.
As though, that was that…
But listen now to what happened
to the actual trees;
toward the end of that summer they
pushed new leaves from their stubbed limbs.
It was the wrong season, yes,
but they couldn’t stop. They
looked like telephone poles and didn’t
care. And after the leaves came
blossoms.
For some things
there are no wrong seasons.
Which is what I dream of for me.
Mary Oliver, Hurricane (excerpts)
We all carry these interior lists and shoulds…
Dropping all we carry – all our preconceptions, our interior lists of the ways we’ve failed and the ways we’ve been wronged, all the secret burdens we work at maintaining – dropping all regret and expectations lets our mentality die. Dropping all we have constructed as imperative allows us to be born again into the simplicity of spirit that arises from unencumbered being
Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening
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