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”
I give thanks for arriving
Safely in a new dawn,
For the gifts of eyes
To see the world,
The gift of mind
To feel at home
In my life.
The waves of possibility
Breaking on the shore of dawn,
The harvest of the past
That awaits my hunger,
And all the furtherings
This new day will bring.~John O’Donohue
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
I really am a pessimist. I’ve always felt that fascism is a more natural governmental condition than democracy. Democracy is a grace. It’s something essentially splendid because it’s not at all routine or automatic. Fascism goes back to our infancy and childhood, where we were always told how to live. We were told, Yes, you may do this; no, you may not do that. So the secret of fascism is that it has this appeal to people whose later lives are not satisfactory.
~ Normal Mailer
And that is just the point… how the world, moist and beautiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That’s the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. “Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?”
~ Mary Oliver
Our hearts can become filled with praise and thanks without the use of words.
~ Paul Tillich
I know a few of you out there practice yoga and/or meditation and some have chosen the word Gratitude for this year’s word or theme. So, I thought I’d share with you that Spirit Voyage has a 40-day meditation practice going that began yesterday (but you can climb aboard today or anytime, really). It’s called A Grateful Heart. The meditation is beautiful. Join me, if you’re interested. (For those who don’t like signing up for stuff via email, you don’t have to. Just use the link I provided. I enjoy the daily messages and reminders, but they really aren’t necessary.)
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”
