Tag: inspiration

Gaps

Karl Duffy2 Comments

File:Cheltenham Spa Station ... MIND THE GAP. (6191893794).jpg

The ‘law of white spaces’ is an important piece of universal legislation that we ignore at our personal and collective peril. The law states that it is the white space between the words on a page that make it readable. Or the silence between two musical notes. Or the rest between periods of action. Without periods of silence and non-action our words and our deeds jumble up into meaningless spirals of stress. We need a web of silence spread around the world just as extensively as the web of technology.

Laurence Freeman, Web of Silence

A good way to measure

Karl Duffy3 Comments

File:Colours of Happiness 3.jpg

I read in Brand’s “Popular Antiquities” that “Bishop Stillingfleet observes, that among the peoples of the northern nations, the Feast of the New Year was observed with more than ordinary jollity: thence, as Olaus Wormius and Scheffer observe, they reckoned their age by so many Iolas.” (Iola: to make merry) So may we measure our lives by our joys.

We have lived, not in proportion to the number of years that we have spent on the earth,

but in proportion as we have enjoyed

Henry David Thoreau, Journals (1860)

Born anew every morning

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Karak Castle.JPG

And I have dreamed
of the morning coming in
like a bird through the window
not burdened by a thought

the light a singing

as I had hoped

Wendall Berry, The Design of the House

photo LiAnna Davis

Grace and wonder and mystery

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Ilex aquifolium Holly.jpg

Everything we need or want is waiting inside each day … right before us in flawed abundance …nothing is clean or perfect, and nothing unfolds as planned.  For the Universe is vital, not perfect.  Full of endless seeds attempting to be one thing, colliding with another, and becoming a third.

 One of the more difficult paradoxes to accept is that this abundance of gifts is always quietly present and it is we who drift in and out of seeing it.  The one recurring doorway to this vitality is our simple participation in life.  When we slip into heartless watching, the abundance seems to vanish.  When we dare to show up and be fully present, grace and wonder and mystery start to appear, even in the midst of pain.  Not as planned dreams, or as images of lovers, or as scripts of success designed by our fantasies of ourselves.  But as oddly shaped pods of vitality bursting to multiply and bring us further into the mystery of living.

Mark Nepo, The Exquisite Risk.

photo anemoneprojectors

Eyes fixed on the present

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

File:Crossing the Bad Step - geograph.org.uk - 829277.jpg

We don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

Howard Zinn, US Historian, playwright, and social activist

photo gordon hatton

Sunday Quote: Mysteries

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Those who are willing to be vulnerable

move among mysteries

Theodore Roethke, American Poet, Straw for the Fire