Is giorra cabhair Dé ná an doras.
Divine help is closer than the door.
(Celtic proverb)
If you have a few moments, please watch Blessings, a short film, at Emergence Magazine. There are no ads, no spamming of any sort. It’s a beautiful reading of part of David Whyte’s Blessings poems.
I do not write this in a spirit of sourness or personal disappointment of any kind, nor do I have any romantic attachment to suffering as a source of insight or virtue. On the contrary, I would like to see more smiles, more laughter, more hugs, more happiness and, better yet, joy. In my own vision of utopia, there is not only more comfort, and security for everyone — better jobs, health care, and so forth — there are also more parties, festivities, and opportunities for dancing in the streets. Once our basic material needs are met — in my utopia, anyway — life becomes a perpetual celebration in which everyone has a talent to contribute. But we cannot levitate ourselves into that blessed condition by wishing it. We need to brace ourselves for a struggle against terrifying obstacles, both of our own making and imposed by the natural world. And the first step is to recover from the mass delusion that is positive thinking.
~ Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America
Continue reading “On my soapbox: The myth of positive thinking”
This is not a season
but a pause
between one future & another,
a day after a day,
a breathing space before death,
a breathing, the rainthrowing itself down out of the
bluegrey sky, clear joy.~ Margaret Atwood, from Rain
History has the cruel reality of a nightmare, and the grandeur of man consists in his making beautiful and lasting works out of the real substance of that nightmare. Or, to put it another way, it consists in transforming the nightmare into vision; in freeing ourselves from the shapeless horror of reality – if only for an instant – by means of creation.
~ Octavio Paz
I think of the trees and how simply they let go, let fall the riches of a season, how without grief (it seems) they can let go and go deep into their roots for renewal and sleep…. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.
~ May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude
What if our religion was each other. If our practice was our life. If prayer, our words. What if the temple was the Earth. If forests were our church. If holy water–the rivers, lakes, and ocean. What if meditation was our relationships. If the teacher was life. If wisdom was self-knowledge. If love was the center of our being.”
~ Ganga White
Before change can happen, a clear choice must be made. I believe we all have the freedom to choose the direction of our lives and the values we stand for. We have only to embrace our beliefs at a deep level and our path of change will open. Profound change begins in the heart. From the moment we embrace the clear intention for change, each of us according to our individual natures is inspired to act in a way to bring about a healthy and benign outcome. All life will conspire to bring this about. If enough of us decide to make the change, to surrender ourselves to it, transformation will happen. I have faith in our capacity, as beings of love, to transcend the challenges we face on Earth, should we choose to.
~ Ranchor Prime, The Eight Elements
Dragonflies are reminders that we are light and we can reflect light in powerful ways if we choose to do so.
~ Robyn Nola
We speak of things “catching our gaze,” “calling our attention,” “grabbing our focus,” and those are all quite precise ways of speaking, because as we’re wandering the world, things solicit our attention, draw us into dialog, a kind of conversation without words. A fallen leaf on the ground calls my attention, and so I slow down to stop and gaze at it. And so, in my experience, this leaf is not dead, though it’s been lying on the ground for days. It has its own agency. It has its own power, its potency. And so, it is with everything we experience.
~ David Abrams, The Ecology of Perception, Emergence Magazine
