Sunday quote: learning

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I keep looking for one more teacher,
only to find that fish learn from water
and birds learn from sky.

Mark Nepo, Behind the Thunder

Always there

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Out here it’s impossible to be lonely.
The land walking beside you is your oldest friend,
pleasantly silent, like already you’ve told the best stories
and each of you knows how much the other made up.

Naomi Shihab Nye, At the Seven Mile Ranch, Comstock, Texas

Beannachtaí na Féile Pádraig 

  Happy Saint Patrick’s Day.

Sacred

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When you treat your time as though you are a machine;

a doing machine;

you are committing violence against the sacredness of life itself.

Philip Moffitt

Change

blossom tree 140413

All things change when we do

The first word “Ah”

blossoms into others

All of them true.

Kukai,  774–835,  Japanese monk, civil servant, scholar, poet.

As the week begins

snow bolton

Mysteriously, wonderfully,

I bid farewell to what goes

I greet what comes;

for what comes cannot be denied

and what goes cannot be detained

Chuang Tzu

Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?

(But where are the snows of yesteryear?)

French saying

photo of last fridays Spring weather in Kildare

Putting labels

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A label is a mask life wears. We put labels on life all the time. ‘Right,’ ‘wrong,’ ‘success,’ ‘failure, ‘ lucky’, ‘unlucky’ may be as limiting a way of seeing things as ‘diabetic’, ‘epileptic’, ‘manic-depressive’ ….. Labeling sets up an expectation of life that is often so compelling we can no longer see things as they really are. This expectation often gives us a false sense of familiarity toward something that is really new and unprecedented. We are in relationship with our expectations and not with life itself.. Belief traps or frees us. Labels may become self-fulfilling prophecies. 

Rachel Naomi Remen

photo rinina25