The land of heart’s desire

I look back with gladness to the day when I found the path to the land of heart’s desire, and thank Fate ceaselessly with a loud voice that she did not permit town to sap all the years away while the heart was turning to wind-voices and flower-faces and the hands of kindly earth.

~ Mrs. George Cran, The Garden of Ignorance, 1913

Love is

(Apple blossoms.)

Love is a fruit in season at all times, and within reach of every hand.

~ Mother Theresa

The whole world is self

Don’t disregard your life.  It is too precious.  This moment, right now, is the only life you will ever have.  You can’t store it up for the ideal time.  When you walk, walk with your whole body and mind joining the floor.  Place your eyes in the soles of your feet, walking as if the floor were a dear friend.  This is intimacy with all things, where the whole world is self, where there is no ‘outside’ or other.

~ Pat Phelan

The first drops of rain

The first drops of rain always bring a smile on our faces.  The smell of wet soil, the damp grass, and the slosh of puddles under our feet makes us want to dance with wanton joy.  Rains make a heart go romantic.  Ever danced in the rain?  The feeling is inexplicably beautiful.  Hold your sweetheart’s hand and walk in the rain while the clouds play cupid.

~ G. K. Chesterton

The sublime seas

Be not the slave of your own past —
plunge into the sublime seas,
dive deep, and swim far,
so you shall come back
with self-respect,
with new power,
with an advanced experience,
that shall explain
and overlook
the old.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Noticing

The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice.  And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice there is little we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.

~ Daniel Goleman

Winter has been teaching me about itself this year, putting on all kinds of displays that I might never have noticed without this commitment to go outside every day.  I am grateful to finally be noticing, and for the lessons and the gifts I’ve received as a result of noticing.

The middle way

As human beings, not only do we seek resolution, but we also feel that we deserve resolution.  However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution.  We don’t deserve resolution; we deserve something better than that. We deserve our birthright, which is the middle way, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity.

~ Pema Chödrön

From the distance

Your beloved and your friends were once strangers.  Somehow at a particular time, they came from the distance toward your life.  Their arrival seemed so accidental and contingent.  Now your life is unimaginable without them.  Similarly, your identity and vision are composed of a certain constellation of ideas and feelings that surfaced from the depths of the distance within you.  To lose them now would be to lose yourself.

~ John O’Donohue

This everything dance

I like to live in the sound of water, in the feel of the mountain air.  A sharp reminder hits me:  this world still is alive; it stretches out there shivering toward its own creation, and I’m part of it.  Even my breathing enters into this elaborate give-and-take, this bowing to sun and moon, day and night, winter, summer, storm, still — this tranquil chaos that seems to be going somewhere.  This wilderness with a great peacefulness in it.  This motionless turmoil, this everything dance.

~ William Stafford

Small enlightenment

Enlightenment is always there.  Small enlightenment will bring great enlightenment.  If you breathe in and are aware that you are alive — that you can touch the miracle of being alive — then that is a kind of enlightenment.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh