Well, I wrote a book. But it’s not about helping my mother die. It’s about helping myself live. It’s about how losing my best friend, the person whose voice I trusted most in this world, called me forth to befriend myself and claim my own voice in deep, unprecedented, and vital ways. And it’s about learning to exchange a fantasy life, fueled by a stark fear of intimacy, for a real life fueled by the vulnerability and messiness of real love.
~ Cheryl Rice, Where Have I Been All My life?
Silence is the source of healing. When we bring things from within ourselves out into the light of awareness, a healing process happens. In the silence, we can let go of all anger, sadness, fear, loneliness and frustration.
~ Swami Dhyan Giten, Presence — Working from Within
When one walks in the woods or climbs mountains, there is a wonderful unity of body, mind, and spirit. Hiking strengthens the legs, increases stamina, invigorates the blood, and soothes the mind. Away from the madness of society, one is freed to observe nature’s lessons.
Erosion. Gnarled roots. The carcass of a dead deer. A flight of swallows. The high spirals of hawks. Bladed reflections of rushing water. Just budding bare branches. Gray rock, cracked, shattered, and worn. A fallen tree. A lone cloud. The laughter of plum branches. Even a little circle of rocks beside the trail — who put them there, or did any hand arrange them, and no matter which, what are the secrets of that circle?
There are a thousand meanings in every view, if only we open ourselves to see the scripture of the landscape.
~ Deng Ming-Dao, 365 Tao Daily Meditations
The eyes of the future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time. They are kneeling with hands clasped that we might act with restraint, that we might leave room for the life that is destined to come. To protect what is wild is to protect what is gentle. Perhaps the wilderness we fear is the pause between our own heartbeats, the silent space that says we live only by grace. Wilderness lives by this same grace. Wild mercy is in our hands.
~ Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place
The rain began again. It fell heavily, easily, with no meaning or intention but the fulfillment of its own nature, which was to fall and fall.
~ Helen Garner
breezes at dawn 