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

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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

How about a Wednesday Wander?

June moon. (June’s full moon is known as a Strawberry Moon but ours looked more like a Peach Moon in the indigo sky.)

Deep trust in life is not a feeling but a stance that you deliberately take.  It is the attitude we call courage.

~ Br. David Steindl-Rast

Our experiences of embodiment may not always correspond with idealized images of holiness, but these preconceptions derive from masculine standards of perfection. Such paradigms have caused great harm, and they are no longer valid. I invite you to abandon your efforts to fix yourself and instead reclaim your innate beauty and worth as a luminous cell in the body of Mother Earth.

~ Mirabai Starr

A Monday Meander: Place

 

At sunrise.

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

Rain and sun and in-between

Dancing with the moon, a double exposure.

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.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

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

If we were having coffee on a Friday: January passes through winter

A sunrise in early January.

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

A Monday meander: Comfort zones

One foggy morning. (Looking out at the neighbor’s new dock.)

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