Take a pitcher full of water and set it down in the water
– now it has water inside and water outside.
We mustn’t give it a name,
lest silly people start talking again about the body and the soul.
Kabir
Everywhere and everything
Tag: Joy
Sunday Quote: The dance
Life dances and you have to dance with it, whether it is taking you on a wonderful ride or is stepping on your toes. This is the necessary price and transcendent gift of being incarnate; alive in a body. Each moment is a fresh moment in the dance, and if you are lost in clinging to the past or clinging to your fears of the future, you are not present for the dance.
Philip Moffitt
photo cindy funk
New adventures
It is a sign of great inner insecurity
to be hostile to the unfamiliar
Anais Nin
photo leo hidalgo
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
