Tag: Life

Sunday Quote: Full of wonder

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This is a wonderful day.

I’ve never seen this one before

Maya Angelou

You make the waves

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Very stormy weather in Ireland this past week, continuing overnight with heavy rain.  The Eastern tradition called the causes of emotional pain ‘worldly winds’: gusts of blame and loss, happiness and unhappiness. They blow through the heart and throw us off balance, making us feel that we never feel good enough where we are or how our life actually is:

Nothing outside yourself can cause any trouble.

You yourself make the waves in your mind.

If you leave your mind as it is, it will become calm.

This mind is called big mind.

Shunryu Suzuki

Turning up, despite our fears

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Even in beautiful places, we all have to be with different kinds of limitations: we look for an ideal life, but even in nature not every fruit is perfect in shape or colour:

I decided that the most subversive, revolutionary thing I could do

was to show up for my life

and not be ashamed.

Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year

A way of holding things

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Express yourself completely, then keep quiet.

Strong winds do not last all morning,

And the heavy rains do not last all day.

What causes them?

Heaven and Earth.

If Heaven and Earth cannot make things last forever, 

How can we?

Lao Tzu, Tao te Ching

Sunday Quote: Seeing what is important

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A quiet Sunday in a long weekend, with some gone away or starting holidays. When we stop running we come to see what really matters

What in your life is Calling you,
When all the noise is silenced,
The meetings adjourned..
The lists laid aside,
And the Wild Iris blooms
By itself
In the dark forest…
What still pulls on your Soul?

Rumi

Loving life

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I’ve always had the feeling that life loves the liver of it. You must live and life will be good to you, give you experiences. They may not all be that pleasant, but nobody promised you a rose garden. But more than likely if you do dare, what you get are the marvelous returns. Courage is probably the most important of the virtues, because without courage you cannot practice any of the other virtues, you can’t say against a murderous society, I oppose your murdering. You got to have courage to do so. I seem to have known that a long time and found great joy in it.

Maya Angelou, in Judith Rich, Conversations with Maya Angelou