In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves:
the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.
Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality
photo Karin Beate Nøsterud/norden.org
Tag: Life
Love does that
All day long the little donkey labours, sometimes
with heavy loads on her back and sometimes just with worries
about the things that bother only donkeys.
And worries, as we know, can be more exhausting
than physical labour.
Once in a while a kind monk comes
to her stable and brings a pear, but more
than that,
he looks into the donkey’s eyes and touches her ears
and for a few seconds the donkey is free
and even seems to laugh,
because love does that.
Love frees.
Meister Eckhart
photo dave whalley
….. A new month – another invitation to notice.
Oh do you have time
to linger
for just a little while
out of your busy
and very important day
for the goldfinches
that have gathered
in a field of thistles
for a musical battle,
to see who can sing
the highest note,
or the lowest,
or the most expressive of mirth,
or the most tender?
Their strong, blunt beaks
drink the air
as they strive
melodiously
not for your sake
and not for mine
and not for the sake of winning
but for sheer delight and gratitude –
believe us, they say,
it is a serious thing
just to be alive
on this fresh morning
in the broken world.
I beg of you,
do not walk by
without pausing
to attend to this
rather ridiculous performance.
It could mean something.
It could mean everything.
It could be what Rilke meant, when he wrote:
You must change your life.
Mary Oliver, Invitation
photo stevevoght
A new week….
May you receive great encouragement
when new frontiers beckon.
May you take time to celebrate
the quiet miracles that seek no attention.
May you experience each day
as a sacred gift
woven around the heart of wonder.
John O’Donoghue, Benedictus
photo giorgio minguzzi
Sunday Quote: A Day of Rest
True restfulness is living ordinary life with a sense of ease, gratitude, appreciation, peace and prayer. We are restful when ordinary life is enough.
Ron Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern
Our Inner world
Do not despise your inner world. Our society is very outward-looking, very taken up with the latest new object, the latest piece of gossip, the latest opportunity for self-assertion and status.
But we all begin our lives as helpless babies, dependent on others for comfort, food, and survival itself. And even though we develop a degree of mastery and independence, we always remain alarmingly weak and incomplete, dependent on others and on an uncertain world for whatever we are able to achieve. Our emotional life maps our incompleteness: A creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger. We are all going to encounter illness, loss, and aging, and we’re not well prepared for these inevitable events by a culture that directs us to think of externals only, and to measure ourselves in terms of our possessions of externals.
What is the remedy…? A kind of self-love that does not shrink from the needy and incomplete parts of the self, but accepts those with interest and curiosity, and tries to develop a language with which to talk about needs and feelings.
Martha Nussbaum., American Philosopher, Lecturer in Ethics and Law, born 1947
