Over and over again, people come to me, and they tell me, You just don’t know how strong I am. They say “strength” and I want to hear “balance.” The strength idea has effort in it; this is not what I’m looking for.
Strength that has effort in it is not what you need; you need the strength that is the result of ease.
Ida Rolf , 1896 – 1979, biochemist, creator of “Rolfing” manual therapy
So I read….Armenians, I read, salt their newborn babies. I check somewhere else: so did the Jews at the time of the prophets. They washed a baby in water, salted him, and wrapped him in cloths. When God promised to Aaron and all the Levites all the offerings Israel made to God, the firstfruits and the firstling livestock, “all the best of the oil, and all the best of the wine,” he said of this promise, “It is a covenant of salt forever.” In the Roman church baptism, the priest places salt in the infant’s mouth.
I salt my breakfast eggs. All day long I feel created.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
What saves a person is to take a step.
Then another step.
C.S. Lewis
It is my feeling that the only thing you have to fear is fear, in that sense that to the extent that you have enough faith or trust to let it happen, you always go through the next one and the next one and the next one. In Tibetan literature they say, ‘Embrace your ten thousand horrible demons and your ten thousand beautiful demons’. You’ve just got to take it all and keep going. All your fears have to be embraced, entertained, honored, and you go on with them.
Ram Dass
One positive aspect of the lockdown, and what is allowed, is the extra time spent walking in nature. (I am not sure that his interpretation is, strictly speaking, etymologically correct, but it predates him by some centuries and is a nice idea)
Do you know the origin of that word ‘saunter?’ It’s a beautiful word. Away back in the Middle Ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going, they would reply, “A la sainte terre,’ ‘To the Holy Land.’ And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently.
John Muir, 1838 – 1914
Once you know that there is something other than what you have bitten into most of the time, your choices take on a new kind of karmic significance… This process slowly tunes you back into the harmony of things. It’s like, if you’re driving to school and you are in a hurry and the traffic becomes a terrible opposition to you, you struggle to move faster and faster. But you could take a breath and say, ‘Well, I’m in traffic; when I get to school, I’ll get to school; I am doing the best that I can, but it is also about this moment.’ You open yourself up to the flow and accept that there is a certain rate at which the traffic moves.
Ram Dass
Mindfulbalance 