Our physical space may be more restricted, but our hearts can still dance
May my ashes, when you have them, friend,
and give them to the ocean
leap in the froth of the waves,
still loving the moment,
still ready, beyond all else,
to dance for the world.
Mary Oliver, Prayer
Let everything happen to you.
Beauty and terror.
Just keep going.
No feeling is final .
Rilke
We blink a thousand times a day. A thousand times a day the world goes dark. A thousand times a day we wake. We can’t escape this opening and closing. Even as you read this, your eyes, along with your heart and mind, are blinking – opening and closing repeatedly, no matter what you do. It is part of being human.
Yet so much depends on which you see as home – being open or closed. Do you see life as one stream of light interspersed with nights of dark, or as one stream of darkness interspersed with days of light? Though there will never be an answer, what we believe about the nature of life matters. It lifts or burdens our days. So ask yourself, more than once, Is life one long miracle of feeling interspersed with moments of breaking? Do we repeatedly fall into our humanness from never-ending light? Or is life one long painful breaking interspersed with moments of wonder? Do we struggle up from the unending dark briefly into glimpses of light?
Mark Nepo, The Book Of Awakening
One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires, causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these – to be fierce and to show mercy toward others, both, are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity. Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it. If you would help to calm the tumult, this is one of the strongest things you can do.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Letter to a Young Activist During Troubled Times: Do not Lose Heart, We were made for these Times
Even if our movement is restricted, there are countless opportunities to have an impact on another persons mood
I think sometimes about this phrase, “made my day” — that we have the power, with our words and with all kinds of small gestures like that. Even somebody being really nice in a checkout line, or you being nice to somebody in a checkout line, after the last two people were really rude to them. And you watch a transformation take place that you made — that their day was getting broken, and you made. What an incredible power we have, to walk through the world, making somebody’s day.
Krista Tippett, On Being Blog, in conversation with Ross Gay
“Enlightenment is like the moon reflected in a dewdrop on a blade of grass. The moon does not get wet, nor is the drop of water broken.
And the whole moon and the entire sky are reflected in even one drop of water”. Dogen,
In truth, the smallest stem of a damaged heart, like a single blade of grass, holds the essence of everything alive.
Enlightenment is the kiss of anything – moon, storm, or kindness – that opens us to that essence.
Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening
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