This is the pruning period, when life can look pretty drab; the dead branches of our old habits will be lying all around us and the new leaves will not yet have begun to grow.
But for all of us, if we keep at our pruning carefully, the spring is bound to come.
There will still be gardening to do, but when we see our new ways blossoming and the good fruit we have begun to bear for others, this pruning of self-will will be a source of lasting satisfaction.
~ Eknath Easwaran
[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
It’s hard to walk briskly at this time of year; the accelerating pace of unfolding spring slows my own. I repeatedly stop- to watch what’s moving. Soon the torrent of migrants will completely overwhelm my ability to keep up with all the changes. But it’s easy to revel in the exuberance and the sense of rebirth, renewal.
~ Carl Safina, The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World
Birthdays! What music in the world! In these unresting times, when nothing intellectual, economic, social, political, seems stable; when customs and traditions hoary with age are mixed with explosive elements, this oldest of institutions is not in danger of yielding to destructive forces.
~J.R. Macduff, Birthdays, 1893
Continue reading “If we were having coffee: Celebrating a birthday”
The sunlight was playing in the cattails at the back of the pond yesterday evening, creating a bridge between here and there, here and there being wherever/whenever you want/need them to be. Perhaps in the middle is a place called Common Ground where we can get away from the extremes and remember love, respect, and kindness.
Memory is like patches of sunlight in an overcast valley, shifting with the movement of the clouds. Now and then the light will fall on a particular point in time, illuminating it for a moment before the wind seals up the gap, and the world is in shadows again.
~ Tan Twan Eng
Daisies of the world unite — you have nothing to lose but your chains.
~ Unknown
breezes at dawn 