Soft

Soft.

Simply let experience take place very freely, so that our open heart is suffused with the tenderness of true compassion.

~Tsokniy Rinpoche II

Sunrise on a Friday

Softly rising.

Faith means living with uncertainty — feeling your way through life, letting your heart guide you like a lantern in the dark.

~ Dan Millman

To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh.

~Pema Chodron

Wednesday wander: In a world

Sunrise this morning.

Within sorrow is grace.  When we come close to those things that break us down, we touch those things that also break us open.  And in that breaking open, we uncover our true nature.

~ Wayne Muller

A sunny day on Assateague Island

When the sky and sea are almost the same color and the horizon disappears.

What already exists immediately around us is more important than all of our anxieties about what’s not there yet. The imperfection of reality is perfect.

~ Kyle Chayka

Rivers, oceans, forests, mountains, earth, and rocks are all our body.  To protect the living environment is also to protect ourselves.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Mornings

Morning moon, just before sunrise (sometime last week).

Deep acceptance of ultimate mystery is ironically the best way to keep the mind and heart spaces always open and always growing.

~ Richard Rohr

A Saturday saunter: Light and shadow

Snow moon dancing with the clouds.

Our culture teaches us from early infancy to split and polarize dark and light, which I call here “mother” and “father.” So some people admire the right-thinking, well-lit side of the personality, and that group one can associate with the father, if one wants to; and some admire the left-thinking, poorly-lit side, and that group one can associate with the mother, if one wants to, and mythologically with the Great Mother. Most artists, poets, and musicians belong to the second group and love intuition, music, the feminine, owls, and the ocean. The right-thinking group loves action, commerce, and Empire.

~ Robert Bly, A Little Book on the Human Shadow

A Saturday saunter

A small bit of sunshine.

There is an art to wandering.  If I have a destination, a plan – an objective – I’ve lost the ability to find serendipity.  I’ve become too focused, too single-minded.  I am on a quest, not a ramble.  I search for the Holy Grail of particularity, and miss the chalice freely offered, filled full to overflowing.

~ Cathy Johnson, On Becoming Lost

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks—who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived “from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going à la Sainte Terre,” to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer,” a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.

~ Henry David Thoreau, Walking