Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,
what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.
Rilke
Reflecting on the challenges posed by this ongoing pandemic:
Reality met on its own terms demands …..another identity …..more silent and more here than the one looking hungrily for an easy, unearned answer.
David Whyte, Consolations
The long silences need to be loved, perhaps
more than the words
which arrive
to describe them
in time.
Franz Wright, 1953 – 2015 American Poet, East Boston, 1996
We must find a way to replace yearning for what life has withheld from us with gratitude for what we have been given.
Kent Nerburn
Transformation not only shifts how you view the world, but also how you relate to the world. In every situation, ask yourself, ‘Am I being an actor or a victim? Am I valuing or devaluing? Am I focused on me or on us?’ As humans, we are meaning-making creatures. We can create any meaning we want. Why not create a life-enhancing set of possibilities, rather than an endless refrain of victimization and suffering? Manifesting your transformation in the world is what makes it substantial.
Marilyn Schlitz, Social anthropologist, researcher and writer,
You begin to see that there are seasons in your life, in the same way as there as seasons in nature.
They weave into one another as day follows night, bringing, not messages of hope and fear,
but messages of how things are.
Chogram Trungpa Rinpoche, How to Rule
When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible- in life as in love – is in growth, in fluidity… in freedom.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1906 – 2001, American author and aviator, Gift from the Sea
