I wake up every morning with a great desire to live joyfully.
~ Alexandra Stoddard
Living
(Afternoon sunlight hitting the wall.)
The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts. We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need — not all the time, surely, but from time to time — to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are the most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember — the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.
~ Frederick Buechner
It is not by meticulous care in avoiding all contaminations that we can keep our [spiritual body] clean and give it grace, but by urging it to give vigorous expression to its inner life in the very midst of all the dust and heat and hurts.
~ Rabindranath Tagore
(The kitchen table. Robbins Crossing. November 2009.)
We inherit from our ancestors gifts so often taken for granted — our names, the color of our eyes and the texture of our hair, the unfolding of varied abilities and interests in different subjects . . . Each of us contains within our fragile vessels of skin and bones and cells this inheritance of soul. We are links between the ages, containing past and present expectations, sacred memories and future promise. Only when we recognize that we are heirs can we truly be pioneers.
~ Edward C. Sellner
As we grow old … the beauty steals inward.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are limited, not by our abilities, but by our vision.
~ Author unknown
This is not my usual style, but I liked the light, colors and shapes in an otherwise blurry photo so I blurred and twisted them a bit.
The more we let each voice sing out with its own true tone, the richer will be the diversity of the chant in unison.
~ Angelus Silesius