The first lesson to learn is to resign oneself to the little difficulties in life, not to hit out at everything one comes up against.
If one were able to manage this one would not need to cultivate great power; even one’s presence would be healing.
Hazrat Inayat Khan, 1882 – 1927, Sufi teacher and founder of the Sufi Order in the West
A beautiful Spring morning, open to possibilities and kindness
If you keep a green bough
in your heart,
a singing bird
will come.
Chinese Proverb
The guest is inside you, and also inside me;
you know the sprout is hidden inside the seed.
We are all struggling; none of us has gone far.
Let your arrogance go, and look around inside.
The blue sky opens out farther and farther,
the daily sense of failure goes away,
the damage I have done to myself fades,
a million suns come forward with light,
when I sit firmly in that world.
I hear bells ringing that no one has shaken,
inside “love” there is more joy than we know of,
rain pours down, although the sky is clear of clouds,
there are whole rivers of light.
Kabir, Ecstatic Poems
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, died 1996
The sun rises in spite of everything
and the far cities are beautiful and bright.
I lie here in a riot of sunlight
watching the day break and the clouds flying.
Everything is going to be all right.
Derek Mahon, 1941-2020, Irish Poet, Everything is going to be all right.
In the Christian tradition the season of Lent begins today, a period of simplification and an opportunity to make space for the deeper realities in our lives, creating room to see what is happening, to go deeper and see where we are being called to invest our energy.
Most people today seems to think that sacrifice means giving something up. This is how shallow our religious sense has become. Sacrifice really involves the art of drawing energy from one level and reinvesting it at another level to produce a higher form of consciousness.
Robert Johnson, Jungian Analyst, Balancing Heaven and Earth
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