A Monday meander: Thinking ahead

Net fishing in the creek. (Trough Creek State Park, Pennsylvania)

The innocent mistake that keeps us caught in our own particular style of ignorance, unkindness, and shut-downness is that we are never encouraged to see clearly what is, with gentleness. Instead, there’s a kind of basic misunderstanding that we should try to be better than we already are, that we should try to improve ourselves, that we should try to get away from painful things, and that if we could just learn how to get away from the painful things, then we would be happy. That is the innocent, naïve misunderstanding that we all share, which keeps us unhappy.

~ Pema Chödron

Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.

~ Henri Nouwen

A Monday meander: Summer vacation edition

Along the way, a field of sunflowers. We stopped to take a look (and a couple of photos).

It’s not enough to love something–or someone. Of course you love a person or art or music or the theatre. But you have to imagine that this person or this thing is trapped in a house afire, and the fire is apathy, and the fire is ignorance, and you have to go into the house all the time, day after day, year after year, and put out the flames and save the thing you love and rebuild the house in which it lives, and show it to others who will come to the rescue when you no longer can. Love is cheap and silly–a moron can love ice cream–but devotion is something worth talking about.

–Eva Le Gallienne

Officially Walktober

Little hand, small flowers from the meadow.

[Walking] is the perfect way of moving if you want to see into the life of things.  It is the one way of freedom.  If you go to a place on anything but your own feet you are taken there too fast, and miss a thousand delicate joys that were waiting for you by the wayside.

~ Elizabeth von Arnim, The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rugen

Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars.

~ Barbara Brown Taylor

All aboard

It will soon be time to board car 172.

I remember in ’37 when trolley cars were so big in New York.  It was five cents for a ride… There used to be open-air buses, and you could go up a spiral staircase and sit up on top.  Those were great, great days.

~ Tiny Tim

Bicycles and trolleys

A Saturday ride with the kids.

Around the world–even in some of the countries most troubled by poverty or civil war or pollution–many thoughtful people are making a deep, concerted search for a way to live in harmony with each other and the earth. Their efforts, which rarely reach the headlines, are among the most important events occurring today. Sometimes these people call themselves peace workers, at other times environmentalists, but most of the time they work in humble anonymity. They are simply quiet people changing the world by changing themselves.

~ Eknath Easwaran, Your Life is Your Message: Finding Harmony With Yourself, Others, and the Earth

People say that modern life has grown so complicated, so busy, so crowded that we have to hurry even to survive. We need not accept that idea. It is quite possible to live in the midst of a highly developed technological society and keep an easy, relaxed pace while doing a lot of hard work. We have a choice.

~ Eknath Easwaran, Passage Meditation: Bringing the Deep Wisdom of the Heart into Daily Life

A Monday meander: How I spent my summer vacation

An early morning walk.

The purpose of a vacation is to have the time to rest.  But many of us, even when we go on vacation, don’t know how to rest.  We may even come back more tired than before we left.

~ Thich Nhat Hahn

A vacation frequently means that the family goes away for a rest, accompanied by a mother who sees that the others get it.

~ Marcelene Cox

A Monday meander: Away and back again

The brilliant reds on the foliage of a blueberry bush in the rain garden.

With an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

~ William Wordsworth