Tag: Joy

The strength to survive

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In the light of all that is happening this year and this week, we all need to keep our hopes alive

There is an Ethiopian legend about a shepherd  boy Alemayu that speaks to me of the power of hope. Alemayu had to spend the night on a bitterly cold mountain. He had only a very thin cloth to wear. To the amazement of all the villagers, he returned alive and well. When they asked him how he survived, he replied: ” ‘The night was bitter. When all the sky was dark, I thought I would die. Then far, far off I saw a shepherd’s fire on another mountain. I kept my eyes on the red glow in the distance, and I dreamed of being warm. And that is how I had the strength to survive.

Each one of us has a  “shepherd’s fire on another mountain” that has kept our hope alive.  This fire has given us the courage to recover our lost self and believe in the dreams that stir in our soul.

Joyce Rupp, Dear Heart, Come Home

We are lost

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It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Wendell Berry

Sunday Quote: Simplicity

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All Saints Day, starting a month were there is an emphasis on simplifying, remembering and integrating, imitating the slower pace of nature. This is somewhat different to the current fashion of accumulating and rushing around at this time, as the main shopping festivals arrive.

Maybe a side effect of the pandemic this year will be to slow things down and remind us of what is important

The man to whom little is not enough

will not benefit from more.

Saint Columbanus, 540 – 615, Irish monk, missionary and founder of monasteries.

One is satisfied not by the quantity of food, but by the absence of greed. 

Gurdjieff, 1866- 1949

Sunday Quote: Don’t give up

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If you hear a voice within you say ‘you cannot paint’,

then by all means paint,

and that voice will be silenced.

Van Gogh

Sunday Quote: No bitterness

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To wander in the fields of flowers,

pull the thorns from your heart.  

Rumi

Leaving a mark

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Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said….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, Farenheit 451