Ceaseless search

To seek the living manifestation of spiritual and ethical values themselves, regardless of the label they come under, is to discover unexpected kinship…  In this view, faith is no longer a matter of an allegiance to a specific community or identity, but a ceaseless search for the beautiful ways to realize the human potential in every given age and place.

~ Mohja Kahf

A form of meditation

(Fishing the Colorado River.)

Fishing provides that connection with the whole living world.  It gives you the opportunity of being totally immersed, turning back into yourself in a good way.  A form of meditation, some form of communion with levels of yourself that are deeper than the ordinary self.

~ Ted Hughes

Journeys

Journeys bring power and love
Back into you. If you can’t go somewhere,
Move in the passageways of the self.
They are like shafts of light,
Always changing, and you change
When you explore them.

~ Rumi

Your whole past…

You whole past was but a birth and a becoming.

~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Restoration area

What do I want to take home from my summer vacation?  Time.  The wonderful luxury of being at rest.  The days when you shut down the mental machinery that keeps life on track and let life simply wander.  The days when you stop planning, analyzing, thinking and just are.  Summer is my period of grace.

~ Ellen Goodman

(I will be cross posting this at Life in the Bogs today as it seems to fit both blogs.  It should also be noted that this bird may well be the same playful bird pictured in an earlier post but he showed up at a different spot on a different day.)

Forever leaving

(Canyon Loop Trail near Boulder, Colorado.)

And we:  spectators, always, everywhere, looking at everything, and never from!  Who’s turned us around like this, so that whatever we do, we always have the look of someone going away?  Just as a person on the last hill showing him or her the whole valley one last time, turns, and stops, and lingers — so we live, and are forever leaving.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Plain sailing

(Sunrise.  Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, Florida)

The unknown is what it is.  And to be frightened of it is what sends everybody scurrying around chasing dreams, illusions, wars, peace, love, hate, all that …  Accept that it’s unknown, and it’s plain sailing.

~ John Lennon

Exits and entrances

Every exit is . . .  an entrance somewhere else.

~ Tom Stoppard

Links between the ages

(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

Age

As we grow old …  the beauty steals inward.

~  Ralph Waldo Emerson