Our Visions

RIC_3371-1, a photo by rchoephoto on Flickr.

Our visions begins with our desires.

Audre Lorde

Journey

RIC_7818-1, a photo by rchoephoto on Flickr.

Mistrust no one who offers you
water from a well,
a songbird's feather,
something that's mended twice.
Always travel lighter

than the heart.

Lorna Crozier,
Packing for the Future: Instructions

What We Mean

RIC_0378-1, a photo by rchoephoto on Flickr.

What we say with our words is so much less important than what we mean with our lives.

Only our lives give weight to our words. 

Mary Jo Leddy, Radical Gratitude

Compassion

RIC_2422-1, a photo by rchoephoto on Flickr.

How is it possible that suffering that is neither my own nor of my concern should immediately affect me as though it were my own, and with such force that it moves me to action? … my own true inner being actually exists in every living creature … [and] is the ground of that compassion upon which all true, that is to say, unselfish, virtue rests and whose expression is in every good deed.

Arthur Schopenhauer, “On the Foundations of Morality,” Sämtliche Werke

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Music

RIC_1220-1, a photo by rchoephoto on Flickr.

When words leave off,

music begins. 

Heinrich Heine

Living

RIC_9999-1, a photo by rchoephoto on Flickr.

Most people are not afraid of dying;

they are afraid of not having lived. 

Harold S. Kushner, Living a Life That Matters

Images

RCC_1291, a photo by rchoephoto on Flickr. 

 Illustrations tell stories that exemplify the point of
   the text.  Images embody the point.

  M. Craig Barnes,
     The Pastor As Minor Poet: Texts and Subtexts in the Ministerial Life

Patron to Heaven

RIC_7822-1, a photo by rchoephoto on Flickr.

The great American writer Herman Melville says somewhere in The White Whale that a man ought to be “a patriot to heaven,” and I believe it is a good thing, this ambition to be cosmopolitan, this idea to be citizens not of a small parcel of the world that changes according to the currents of politics, according to the wars, to what occurs, but to feel that the whole world is our country.

Jorge Luis Borges, Borges en Sur

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Seeing

RIC_0117
Originally uploaded by rchoephoto

Vemos por algo que nos ilumina; por algo que no vemos.

We see by means of something which illumines us, which we do not see.

Antonia Porchia, Voices, translated by W.S. Merwin

Hope

RIC_3519
Originally uploaded by rchoephoto

You get what you hope for, but what you hope for isn’t something you can always recognize.

Zadie Smith, In Conversation with Zadie Smith by Eleanor Wachtel

All Beings

RCC_1677
Originally uploaded by rchoephoto

It should not be believed that all beings exist for the sake of the existence of human beings. On the contrary, all the other beings too have been intended for their own sakes and not for the sake of anything else.

Maimonides

Life

RC1_8502
Originally uploaded by rchoephoto

Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?

Henry David Thoreau