It is a sign of great inner insecurity
to be hostile to the unfamiliar
Anais Nin
photo leo hidalgo
Tag: Joy
A good way to measure
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
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
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
Accompanying
‘Compassion’, when literally translated, means ‘ suffering with others’ and ‘with’ is the most important word, because it implies belonging. ‘Companion’ is ‘one who travels with another’. So in this relationship there is no guide, there is no healer and no one healed; we simply accompany one another.
As we inquire into the heart of service, we see a pattern: common to all habits that hinder us in our work is a sense of separateness; and common to all those moments and actions that truly seem to serve is the experience of unity. As my friend Reb Anderson says, “We are simply walking through birth and death holding hands.”
Frank Ostaseski
photo takato marui
Space for gratitude
Then there was Jim, who said that for many years he took walks that were ‘ranting’ walks. He would walk and contemplate all the things that angered him about the world. One day he decided to begin taking ‘gratitude’ walks. ‘Now while I walk I recount all the things I am grateful for in my life and don’t allow myself to think of negative things at all. I have found this simple practice to be a great gift.’
John Izzo, The Five Secrets you must Discover before Your Die
Mindfulbalance 