Help me resist the urge to dispute whether things are true or false which is like arguing whether it is day or night. It is always one or the other somewhere in the world. Together, we can penetrate a higher truth which like the sun is always being conveyed.
When feeling badly about ourselves, we often try on other skins rather than understand and care for our own.
Now, I want only to give away all that I’m blessed to know and disappear in the stream.
Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything. And between the two my life flows. – NISARGADATTA MAHARAJ.
In this world, hate never yet dispelled hate. Only love dispels hate. This is the law, ancient and inexhaustible. – BUDDHA.
If you had a sad childhood, so what? You can dance with only one leg and see the snowflake falling with only one eye. – ROBERT BLY.
So, if you can, give up the want of another and be who you are, and more often than not, love will come at the precise moment you are simply loving yourself.
Having an honest friend-one before whom you can dump all your heart’s pockets and still feel that you are worth something-is a form of wealth that will buy you nothing but will give you everything. And mysteriously and rightly, to find such a friend, we must be such a friend.
Yet beneath all the talk of tragedy and grace, I have come to believe that we are destined to be opened by the living of our days, and whether we like it or not, whether we choose to participate or not, we will, in time, every one of us, wear the deeper part of who we are as a new skin.
The eye can see what we have in common or focus on what keeps us apart. And the heart can feel what joins us with everything or replay its many cuts. And the tongue can praise the wind or warn against the storm, can praise the sea or dread the flood.
I was born with the ability to see in metaphor.
We often mistake the journey of healing as one that covers over a wound. But as wounds need air and light to knit and heal, our pain and sorrow need to be brought out into the open so we can be healed by life.
Just as a vine or shrub – no matter how often it is cut back – will keep growing to the light, the human heart – no matter how often it is cut – can reassert its impulse to love.
Our crucial task when in pain or despair is not to let the sour feelings spill into everything, so that we stain our sense of the world. Yet we must also take care not to so contain our feelings that they fester and infect our sense of ourselves. Somewhere between these two extremes waits the life of healthy expression, not personalizing everything and not painting the world with our troubles.
We are the stage and all the players.
For only when we can outwait the dark will the sharpness of experience recede like a tide to reveal what has survived beneath it all. Often what seems tragic, if looked at long enough, reveals itself as part of a larger transformation.
The gift of patience opens when our body, heart, and mind slow enough to move in unison.
I had tried so hard to please that I never realized no one was watching.
Whatever our path, whatever the color or grain of our days, whatever riddles we must solve to stay alive, the secret of life somehow always has to do with the awakening and freeing of what has been asleep.
Kindness is the antidote to everything. Just as water soothes fire, kindness calms how we burn each other from time to time. And under all the ways we burn and hurt, there’s the soft and lasting presence we were born with, waiting to blossom in the midst of any trouble.