Tag: Joy

The longest day of the year

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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

Sing a joyful song

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Birdsong brings relief
to my longing
I’m just as ecstatic as they are,
but with nothing to say!
Please universal soul, practice
some song or something through me!

Rumi

The first gift

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Despite all the darkness, human hope is based on the instinct that at the deepest level of reality some intimate kindness holds sway.  This is the heart of blessing.  To believe in blessing is to believe that our being here, our very presence in the world, is itself the first gift, the primal blessing. As Rilke says: Heir zu sein ist so viel – “to be here is immense”.

John O Donohue, Benedictus, To Bless the Space Between Us

Really taste life

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry.

Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

Ernest Hemingway

Your own myth

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Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things
have gone with others.

Unfold
your own myth, without complicated explanation,
so everyone will understand the passage,
we have opened you.

Start walking toward Shams. Your legs will get heavy and tired.

Then comes a moment
of feeling the wings you’ve grown,
lifting.

Rumi

The way you travel

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Close is what we almost always are: close to happiness, close to another, close to leaving, close to tears, close to God, close to losing faith, close to being done…close to success, and even, with the greatest sense of satisfaction, close to giving the whole thing up.

Our human essence lies not in arrival but in being almost there: we are creatures who are on the way, our journey a series of impending unanticipated arrivals.

Human beings do not find their essence through fulfilment or eventual arrival but by staying close to the way they like to travel, to the way they hold the conversation between the ground on which they stand and the horizon to which they go.

David Whyte, “Close” in Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words