Living fully

The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright.Ezekiel excoriates false prophets who have “not gone up into the gaps.” The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit’s one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time like a once blind man unbound. The gaps are the cliffs in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fjords splitting the cliffs of mystery.

Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock – more than a maple – a universe. This is how you spend the afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Sunday Quote: new and unique

Each second we live is a new and unique moment of the universe

— a moment that never was before and never will be again.


Pablo Casals quoted in Diane Loomans, Full Esteem Ahead

Now the dancing begins

The mind is constantly trying to figure out
what page it’s on in the story of itself.


Close the book. Burn the bookmark. End of story.


Now the dancing begins.

Ikko Narasaki Roshi, Zen Buddhist monk, died 1996.

Forgive the year

If we forgive life for not being what we told it to be, or expected, or wished, or longed for it to be,

we forgive ourselves for not being what we might have been also.

And then we can be what we are, which is boundless

John Tarrant

Leaving behind

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said..
A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made..
Or a garden planted….
It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as
you change something from the way it was before you touched it
into something that’s like you
after you take your hands away..
The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said..
The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all….the gardener will be there a lifetime.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

We can begin now

We may need to bid farewell to parts of ourselves rooted in safety but not in truth.

In the end we will only carry the reflection, “did I love well”. This will be the residue that either gladdens or aches our heart. As this year comes to an end, let us honor ourselves and those we love by letting go. We can bring fresh eyes to this moment and birth that which enlivens us. As for loving well, we can begin now. We can fly with the angels as we take ourselves lightly.

Ram Dass