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
It is a sign of great inner insecurity
to be hostile to the unfamiliar
Anais Nin
photo leo hidalgo
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)
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
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
‘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
