Tag: Life

All things are charged with..

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Another Saturday, another piece from Mary Oliver

The dog, the donkey, surely they know they are alive. Who would argue otherwise? But now, after years of consideration, I am getting beyond that. What about the sunflowers? What about The tulips, and the pines? Listen, all you have to do is start and There?ll be no stopping. What about mountains? What about water Slipping over rocks? And speaking of stones, what about The little ones you can Hold in your hands, their heartbeats So secret, so hidden it may take years Before, finally, you hear them?

Mary Oliver, Swan: Poems and Prose Poems

All things therefore are charged with love, are charged with God and if we knew how to touch them give off sparks and take fire, yield drops and flow, ring and tell of him

Gerard Manley Hopkins, Letters

Trust the real

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The tragic sense of life is ironically not tragic at all, at least in the Big Picture. We are merely joining the great parade of humanity that has walked ahead of us and will follow after us.  The tragic sense of life is not unbelief, pessimism, fatalism, or cynicism.  It is just ultimate and humiliating realism, for which some reason demands a lot of forgiveness of almost everything.  Faith is simply to trust the real….  This is perhaps our major stumbling stone, the price we must pay to keep the human heart from closing down and to keep the soul open for something more.

Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: a Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

Problems and inconveniences

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One of life’s best coping mechanisms is to know the difference between an inconvenience and a problem. If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire, then you’ve got a problem. Everything else is an inconvenience. Life is inconvenient. Life is lumpy. A lump in the oatmeal, a lump in the throat and a lump in the breast are not the same kind of lump. One needs to learn the difference.

Robert Fulghum, American author and Unitarian Minister, Uh-Oh: Some Observations from Both Sides of the Refrigerator Door

Necessary for beauty

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More wisdom from Dogen. I really like this saying: 

Without the bitterest cold that penetrates to the very bone,

how can plum blossoms send forth their fragrance all over the world?

Dogen, Buddhist monk and philosopher, founder of the Soto school of Zen, 1200 – 1253,

Sunday Quote: All around

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Zen Master Dogen wrote, ‘The Way is basically perfect and all-pervading.’ 

I’m already in it.

We are all in it; we are made of it.

Susan Moon

An inner rhythm

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We should not force ourselves to change by hammering our lives into any predetermined shape. We do not need to operate according to the idea of a predetermined program or plan for our lives. Rather, we need to practice a new art of attention to the inner rhythm of our days and lives. This attention brings a new awareness of our own human and divine presence..if you work with a different rhythm, you will come easily and naturally home to yourself.  Your soul knows the geography of your destiny.  Your soul alone has the map of your future

John O’Donohue, Anam Chara