We die to each other daily.
What we know of other people
Is only our memory of the moments
During which we knew them. And they have changed since then.
To pretend that they and we are the same
Is a useful and convenient social convention
Which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember
That at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.
T. S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party
photo a davey
Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
Simone Weil.
You can never know whether or not God is in a story until you get all the way to the end. For if only two words are still missing, yes, even if the pause after the final words still hasn’t occurred, He can always still show up.
Rilke, Stories of God
We want life to have meaning, we want fulfillment, healing and even ecstasy,
but the human paradox is that we find these things by starting where we are,
not where we wish we were.
Kathleen Norris, The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and “Women’s Work”
All night under the pines
the fox moves through the darkness
with a mouthful of teeth
and a reputation for death
which it deserves.
In the spicy villages of the mice
he is famous, his nose in the grass
is like an earthquake, his feet on the path
is a message so absolute
that the mouse, hearing it,
makes himself as small as he can
as he sits silent or, trembling, goes on
hunting among the grasses
for the ripe seeds.
Maker of All Things,
including appetite, including stealth,
including the fear that makes
all of us, sometime or other,
flee for the sake of our small and precious lives,
let me abide in your shadow–
let me hold on to the edge of your robe
as you determine what you must let be lost
and what will be saved.
Mary Oliver, Maker of all Things, even Healing
The art of living is to enjoy what we can see
and not complain about what remains in the dark
Henri Nouwen, The Dance of Life
photo: Philippe Alès, Contre-allée de l’avenue Foch, Le Havre.
