Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful,
we must carry it with us, or we find it not.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
photo mailander00
Tag: Mindfulness
Learning from animals
Love, love, love, says Percy.
And hurry as fast as you can
along the shining beach, or the rubble, or the dust.
Then, go to sleep.
Give up your body heat, your beating heart.
Then, trust.
Mary Oliver, I Ask Percy How I should live my Life
photo of dog hurrying to the beach by andrew thomas
The best we can
In novels – as in life – there is no perfection. We do the best we can with the tools we have at our disposal. Given that we are changing, the tools are changing, the thing itself is changing — there must be a moment when we stop. When we say, This is the best I can do for now… There is nobility in the effort, courage in the dailiness — the doggedness. It is a process of trying and failing. Of beginning again.
Dani Shapiro, Devotion
photo filiberto strazzari
Keeping the self fluid
Be ahead of all parting, as if it had already happened,
like winter, which even now is passing.
For beneath the winter is a winter so endless
that to survive it at all is a triumph of the heart.
Be. And know as well the need to not be:
let that ground of all that changes
bring you to completion now.
Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus II, 13
photo stephen sweeney
Perfectly seen
The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.
Thomas Merton
photo bea represa
Time passing
Everything comes down to time in the end – to the passing of time, to changing. Ever thought of that? Anything that makes you happy or sad, isn’t it all based on minutes going by? Isn’t happiness expecting something that time is going to bring you? Isn’t sadness wishing time back again? If only you could turn it back again, you think. If only you could change this or that, undo what you have done, if only you could roll the minutes the other way, for once.
Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
photo by Muhammad Mahdi Karim
