To know a physical place you must become intimate with it. You must open yourself to its textures, its colours in varying day and night lights, its sonic dimensions. You must in some way become vulnerable to it. In the end, there’s little difference between growing into the love of a place and growing into the love of a person.
~ Barry Lopez
Continue reading “A Monday Meander: Place”
He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.
~
First of all, although men have a common destiny, each individual also has to work out his own personal salvation for himself in fear and trembling. We can help one another to find the meaning of life no doubt. But in the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for “finding himself.” If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence. You cannot tell me who I am and I cannot tell you who you are. If you do not know your own identity, who is going to identify you?
~ Thomas Merton
1.
The cloud is free only
to go with the wind.The rain is free
only in falling.The water is free only
in its gathering together,in its downward courses,
in its rising into the air.2.
In law is rest
if you love the law,
if you enter, singing, into it
as water in its descent.3.
Or song is truest law,
and you must enter singing;
it has no other entrance.It is the great chorus
of parts. The only outlawry
is in division.4.
Whatever is singing
is found, awaiting the return
of whatever is lost.5.
Meet us in the air
over the water,
sing the swallows.
Meet me, meet me,
the redbird sings,
here here here here.~ Wendell Berry, The Law That Marries All Things
Continue reading “If we were having coffee on a Friday: January passes through winter”
When we pause, allow a gap, and breath deeply, we can experience instant refreshment. Suddenly we slow down, look out, and there’s the world. It can feel like briefly standing in the eye of the tornado or the still point of a turning wheel. Our mood may be agitated or cheerful. What we see and hear may be chaos or it may be the ocean, the mountains, or birds flying across a clear blue sky. Either way, momentarily our mind is still and we are not pulled in or pushed away by what we are experiencing.
~ Pema Chodron
Let us always meet each other with smile, for the smile is the beginning of love.
~ Mother Teresa
We are not going to change the whole world, but we can change ourselves and feel free as birds. We can be serene even in the midst of calamities and, by our serenity, make others more tranquil. Serenity is contagious. If we smile at someone, he or she will smile back. And a smile costs nothing. We should plague everyone with joy. If we are to die in a minute, why not die happily, laughing?”
~ Sri S. Satchidananda, The Yoga Sutras
I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather no shadow unless there is also light.
~ Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
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
