This is the irrational season
when love blooms bright and wild.
Had Mary been filled with reason
there’d have been no room for the child
Madeleine L’Engle, 1918 – 2007, American author
This is the irrational season
when love blooms bright and wild.
Had Mary been filled with reason
there’d have been no room for the child
Madeleine L’Engle, 1918 – 2007, American author
“All is always now,” says T. S. Eliot.
This statement implies a profound insight: Not only is the now not in time; time is in the now.
When the future comes, it will be now, and any past event becomes now as we remember it. There is only one now. It cannot be multiplied; it simply is.
The now is the opposite of time.
In fact, this is Augustine’s definition: “Eternity is the now that does not pass away.”
A happiness anchored in the now is eternal.
David Steindl-Rast, A Basic Human Approach to Happiness
photo Brian Robert Marshall
Small moments or days are enough to see the richness of life, if we are able to pay attention and give ourselves fully:
What is this dark hum among the roses?
The bees have gone simple, sipping,
that’s all. What did you expect? Sophistication?
They’re small creatures and they are
filling their bodies with sweetness, how could they not
moan in happiness? The little
worker bee lives, I have read, about three weeks.
Is that long? Long enough, I suppose, to understand
that life is a blessing.
Mary Oliver, Hum
If you don’t break your ropes
while you’re alive,
do you think ghosts will do it after?
Kabir
photo: maizeam
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
This is, I think, what holiness is:
the natural world, where every moment is full
of the passion to keep moving.
Inside every mind there’s a hermit’s cave full of light,
full of snow, full of concentration.
I’ve knelt there, and so have you,
hanging on to what you love,
to what is lovely.
Mary Oliver, At the Lake
photo of St. Finbar’s Oratory, Gougane Barra by (WT shared) Spircle at wts Wikivoyage