Grace and wonder and mystery

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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

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‘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

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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

Sunday Quote: Mysteries

Those who are willing to be vulnerable

move among mysteries

Theodore Roethke, American Poet, Straw for the Fire

Sunday Quote: How distance is shortened

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Only from the heart

can you touch the sky

Rumi

photo nojavan

Finally seeing

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Life is no passing memory of what has been
nor the remaining pages in a great book
waiting to be read.

It is the opening of eyes long closed.

Davids Whyte, The Opening of Eyes

Photo of Lake Leman from Nyon by Alexandra Lee