It is not easy for a man to be as great as a mountain or a forest.
But that is why the Creator gave them to us as teachers.
Now that I am old I look once more toward them for lessons,
instead of trying to understand the ways of men,
Kent Nerburn, Neither Wolf nor Dog: On Forgotten Roads with an Indian Elder
photo mwolf89
We have forgotten the age-old fact
that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions
Carl Jung
When a person doesn’t have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity. A person can almost be defined by his or her attitude toward gratitude. For me, every hour is grace. And I feel gratitude in my heart each time I can meet someone and look at his or her smile.
Elie Wiesel, Holocaust Survivor and author, died July 2nd 2016
Simple flowers from the Mad Hatter Cafe, Castledermot
At a certain moment in [Nietzsche’s] life, the idea came to him of what he called ‘the love of your fate.’ Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, ‘This is what I need.’ It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment — not discouragement — you will find the strength is there. This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow.
Then, when looking back at your life, you will see that the moments which seemed to be great failures followed by wreckage were the incidents that shaped the life you have now. You’ll see that this is really true. Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes.
Joseph Campbell
Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability —
and that it may take a very long time.
Teilhard de Chardin, Jesuit theologian and scientist, died this day 1955
photo nathalia morelatto
We can learn to recognize that the difficulty is our path instead of trying to escape from it. This is a radical yet necessary change in our perspective. When uncomfortable things happen to us, we rarely want to have anything to do with them. We might respond with the belief ‘Things shouldn’t be this way’ or ‘Life shouldn’t be so messy.’ Who says? Who says that life shouldn’t be a mess? When life is not fitting our expectations of how it’s supposed to be, we usually try to change it to fit our expectations. But the key to practice is not to try to change our life but to change our relationship to our expectations — to learn to see whatever is happening as our path.
Ezra Bayda, Being Zen
photo philip halling
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