Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.
~Rumi
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There is a tribe in Africa where the birth of a child is not counted from when they’ve been born, nor from when they are conceived, but from the day that the child was a thought in the mother’s mind.
And when a woman decides she will have a child, she goes off and sits under a tree by herself, and she listens until she can hear the song of the child that wants to come. And after she’s heard the song, she comes back to the man who will be the child’s father, and teaches it to him. And then, when they make love and physically conceive the child, some of that time they sing the song of the child, as a way to invite it.
And then when the mother is pregnant, she teaches that child’s song to the midwives and the old women of the village, so that when the child is born, the women and the people around her sing the child’s song to welcome it. Continue reading
Wisdom tells me I am nothing.
Love tells me I am everything.
And between the two
my life flows.
~Nisargadatta Maharaj
Holding on is believing that there’s only a past, letting go is knowing that there’s a future.
~Daphne Rose Kingma
To lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.
~Sir John Lubbock
Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer utters itself.
~Carol Ann Duffy
We need to learn to love the flawed, imperfect things we create, and to forgive ourselves for creating them. Regret doesn’t remind us that we did it badly, it reminds us that we know we could do better.
~Kathryn Schultz
It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all.
~J.K. Rowling
When I let go of who I am, I become what I might be. When I let go of what I have, I receive what I need.
~Tao Te Ching
Calvin & Hobbes by Bill Watterson
Re-visiting this post in memory of my dad. It was my very first blog post. ~Viki/pathwriter
I was visited by the spirit of my father this afternoon as I raked my yard. Turning the rake over and dragging it along the ground to release the leaves that had been skewered by the tines, I was pulled back in time to the day my dad showed me this little trick of unclogging my rake.
A simple thing, of course, but, at the time, to the child that I was, it was amazing. It was one of those “how cool is that!” moments. I’ve never lost the feeling of childlike wonder and delight at learning what seemed at the time to be a mysterious grownup secret that my dad was letting me in on. I still think it’s a pretty neat trick, and his presence is with me every time I do it.
I have these sorts of moments from time to time. I recall my father showing…
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I am a part of all that I have met.
~Alfred Lord Tennyson
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