To me, this is what bearing witness is; just relaxing and settling down, and learning to be in, as Carl Jung would say “the time of your life”…
Life becomes alive only when we are expansive, and we can expand only when we learn to relax: into our seat, into our feet on the floor, into our breath and our belly. From this place of relaxation we can bear witness to anything.
Koshin Paley Ellison, Wholehearthed
Happiness floats.
It doesn’t need you to hold it down.
It doesn’t need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records . . .
Naomi Shihab Nye, So Much Happiness [extract]
You have been walking the water’s edge, holding up your robes to keep them dry.
You must dive naked under, deeper, under a thousand times deeper.
Love flows down.
Rumi
This is the art of the soul:
to harvest your deeper life
from all the seasons of your experience.
John O’Donohue
I will be like
someone who cannot
hide their love
but my joy will become
ordinary
and everyday
and like a lover
I will find out
exactly what it is like
to be the happiest,
the only one in creation
to really
understand
how much,
I’m just a hair’s breadth
from dying.
David Whyte, Mortality My Mistress [extract]
It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.
Seneca, On the Shortness of life
