Tag: Life

The smallest bit of beauty

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Nature teaches us that the moment when darkness is greatest is also the moment that light is about to return.

[In Iran] On the winter solstice families gather for a feast and surround themselves with candles, eat pomegranates and nuts, and recite poetry. “It is a beautiful way of assuring you that you have lived through long nights before. It is precisely at the point that the night is longest and darkest that you’ve actually turned a corner.”

Medieval Persian writings suggested that if one could not afford a feast, it is enough to bring a flower, “Look for the smallest bit of beauty around you. That very much resonates today, at a time where it seems like the mega-systems are all broken or falling apart, to return your gaze to the small.”

Omid Safi, professor of Iranian studies at Duke University, describing the 2,500 year old Iranian winter tradition of Yalda in the New York Times

Sunday Quote: Praise

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O tell us, poet, what you do?
— I praise.


But those, dark, deadly, devastating ways,
how do you bear them, suffer them?
— I praise.

But the nameless, the anonymous. How, Poet, can you still invoke it?

– I praise.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Praise

Make a poem

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Some words for these, the darkest days of the year: Silence, praise and inner life.

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come out of the silence,
like prayers prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb the silence
from which it came.  

Wendell Berry, How to Be a Poet

Every step

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Courage is like – it’s a habitus, a habit, a virtue: You get it by courageous acts.

It’s like you learn to swim by swimming. You learn courage by couraging.

Mary Daly

Another life

Karl Duffy2 Comments

We are born with only one obligation – to be completely who we are. Yet how much of our time is spent comparing ourselves to others, dead and alive? This is encouraged as necessary in the pursuit of excellence. Yet a flower in its excellence does not yearn to be a fish, and a fish in its unmanaged elegance does not long to be a tiger. But we humans find ourselves always falling into the dream of another life. Or we secretly aspire to the fortune or fame of people we don’t really know. When feeling badly about ourselves, we often try on other skins rather than understand and care for our own. Yet when we compare ourselves to others, we see neither ourselves nor those we look up to. We only experience the tension of comparing, as if there is only one ounce of being to feed all our hungers.

Mark Nepo, The Book Of Awakening

Buying happiness

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If we are silly enough to remain at the mercy of the people who want to sell us happiness, it will be impossible for us ever to be content with anything. How would they profit if we became  content? We would no longer need their new product. The last thing the salesman wants is for the buyer to become content. You are of no use in our society unless you are always wanting to grasp what you never have. The Greeks were not as smart as we are. In their primitive way they put Tantalus in hell. [Advertising]…on the contrary, would convince us that Tantalus is in heaven.

Thomas Merton