Tag: Joy

Take the time

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It takes a long time to sift through the more superficial voices of your own gift in order to enter into the deep signature and tonality of your Otherness. When you speak from that deep, inner voice, you are really speaking from the unique tabernacle of your own presence. There is a voice within you that no one, not even you, has ever heard. Give yourself the opportunity of silence and begin to develop your listening in order to hear, deep within yourself, the music of your own spirit.

John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: Spiritual Wisdom from the Celtic World

Don’t be your own obstacle

Karl Duffy1 Comment

If you free yourself from the comparing and jealous mind, your creativity opens up endlessly. Just as water springs from a fountain, creativity springs from every moment. You must not be your own obstacle. You must not be owned by the environment you are in. You must own the environment, the phenomenal world around you. You must be able to freely move in and out of your mind. This is being free. That is my belief.

Jeong Kwan, Buddhist nun and chef of Korean cuisine

Fat with Blessing

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A small green island where one white cow lives alone,

a meadow of an island.

The cow grazes till nightfall, full and fat,

but during the night she panics

and grows thin as a single hair. “What shall I eat

tomorrow? There’s nothing left!”

By dawn, the grass has grown up again, waist-high.

The cow starts eating and by dark the meadow is clipped short.

She’s full of strength and energy, but she panics

in the dark as before, and grows abnormally thin overnight.

The cow does this over and over, and this is all she does.

She never thinks, “This meadow has never failed

to grow back. Why should I be afraid every night that it won’t?”

The cow is the soul. The island field is this world where

that grows lean with fear and fat with blessing.

Lean or fat.

White cow, don’t make yourself miserable

with what is to come, or not to come.

Rumi

Endless winding beauty

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Stop now, right now, and look around you. This is your place in the labyrinth. There is no place else you need to be. See with eyes that aren’t fixed on goals, or focused on flaws. You are part of the endless, winding beauty. And as you learn to see the dappled loveliness of your life, as your new eyes help you begin loving the labyrinth, you’ll slowly come to realize that the labyrinth was made solely for the purpose of loving you. 

Martha Beck

Do what you love

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Pursue, keep up with, circle round and round your life, as a dog does his master’s chaise.

Do what you love. Know your own bone, gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.  

Thoreau

Sunday quote: Don’t wait

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Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.

The Talmud