Tag: Life

Simple daily tasks

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These T-shirts we fold into
perfect white squares

These tortillas we slice and fry to crisp strips
This rich egg scrambled in a gray clay bowl

This bed whose covers I straighten
smoothing edges till blue quilt fits brown blanket
and nothing hangs out

This envelope I address
so the name balances like a cloud
in the center of sky

This page I type and retype
This table I dust till the scarred wood shines
This bundle of clothes I wash and hang and wash again
like flags we share, a country so close
no one needs to name it

The days are nouns: touch them
The hands are churches that worship the world

Naomi Shihab Nye, Daily

Another chance

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I know now, after fifty years, that the finding/losing, forgetting/remembering, leaving/returning, never stops.

The whole of life is about another chance,

and while we are alive, till the very end, there is always another chance.

Jeanette Winterson

Sunday Quote: Wounds

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The great challenge is
living your wounds through
instead of thinking them through…

Your heart is greater than your wounds.

Henri Nouwen, The Inner Voice of Love

The here ….

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Healing is coming to terms with the actuality of things.

Jon Kabat Zinn

Darkness and light

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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

Threshold

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There are thresholds which thought alone, left to itself, can never permit us to cross.

An experience is required – an experience of poverty, of sickness.

Gabriel Marcel,  quoted in Gelin, Les Pauvres de Yahvé