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Sunday, September 19, 2010
Defeats
We may encounter many defeats – maybe it’s imperative that we encounter the defeats – but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be.
Maya Angelou, The Art of Fiction, The Paris Review Interviews, vol. IV
Saturday, September 18, 2010
Three questions
If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
If I am only for myself, what am I?
If not now, when?
Rabbi Hillel
Friday, September 17, 2010
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Spirituality
Spirituality is what takes us beyond religious practice to the purpose of religion: the awareness of the sacred in the mundane, the consciousness of God everywhere, in everyone.
Joan Chittister, Welcome to the Wisdom of the World and Its Meaning for You
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Writing & Reading
Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul.
Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Welcoming strangers
The other must always must have precedence over myself, not because she or he is necessarily congenial or shares my opinions, but simply because she or he is there and needs me.
Emmanuel Levinas
quoted and paraphrased by Dow Marmur, rabbi emeritus, Holy Blossom Temple, Our duty to welcome strangers, Toronto Star, September 6, 2010, A13
Monday, September 13, 2010
Identity
One can't talk about a sense of place without acknowledging where one comes from.
Joseph Boyden, From Mushkegowuk to New Orleans: A Mixed Blood Highway
Sunday, September 12, 2010
A Sign of health in the mind
A sign of health in the mind is the ability of one individual to enter imaginatively and accurately into the thoughts and feelings and hopes and fears of another person; also to allow the other person to do the same to us.
Donald Winnicott
Saturday, September 11, 2010
All that has ever mattered
I love you, I love you.
That is all that has ever mattered.
Live your full life and I will always be with you.
cell phone call, September 11, 2001
Friday, September 10, 2010
Painting portraits
There is still something to be said for painting portraits of the people we have loved, for trying to express those moments that seem so inexpressibly beautiful, the ones that change us and deepen us.
Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Children & War
The time has come to make the protection of children – all our children – a common cause that can unite us across the boundaries of our political orientation, religious affiliation and cultural traditions. We must reclaim our lost taboos, and make the abuse and brutalization of children simply unacceptable.
* * *
But today, to paraphrase the poet W.B. Yeats, things have fallen apart, the moral centre is no longer holding. In so many conflicts today, anything goes. Children, women, the elderly, granary stores, crops, livestock – all have become fair game in the single-minded struggle for power, in an attempt not just to prevail but to humiliate, not simply to subdue but to annihilate the “enemy community” altogether. This is the phenomenon of total war.
Olara Otunnu, Ugandan 2011 Presidential Candidate
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Question to ponder
What did you do when the poor
suffered, when tenderness
and life
burned out in them?
Otto René Castillo
Robert Márquez, ed. Latin American Revolutionary Poetry
Monday, September 6, 2010
Saving the world
Before we move from recklessness to responsibility, from selfishness to a decent happiness, we must want to save our world. And in order to save our world we must learn to love it – and in order to love it we must become familiar with it again. That is where my work begins, and why I keep walking, and looking.
Mary Oliver
Sunday, September 5, 2010
On a path
We are not going to sainthood here, we are just on a path.
Sara Miles, Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion
Saturday, September 4, 2010
Life is energy
Life is energy, and energy is creativity. And even when individuals pass on, the energy is retained in the work of art, locked in it and awaiting release if only someone will take time and the care to unlock it.
Marianne Moore
Friday, September 3, 2010
Experiential Understanding
Wisdom does not mean knowledge but experiential understanding. Wisdom helps you to change radically your habits and perceptions, as you discover the constantly changing, interconnected nature of the whole existence.
Matine Batchelor
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Spiritual transformation
The naked truth of spiritual transformation is that if we don’t change our lives ourselves, nothing will change them for us. That’s the secret of spiritual self-mastery. No one can do it for us. Although help is available, we need to take it upon ourselves to find and utilize it.
Lama Surya Das, Buddha Is As Buddha Does
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Monday, August 30, 2010
Hope
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
Sunday, August 29, 2010
God of Abundance
O God of abundance, you feed us every day.
Rise in us now, make us into your bread,
that we may share your gifts with a hungry world,
and join in love with all people,
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
Sara Miles, Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Friday, August 27, 2010
Empathy
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
George Eliot, Middlemarch
… what those lines suggest is that if we had complete empathy, if we could understand how people are from the inside, we would be capable of loving them as God loved them.
Zadie Smith, In Conversation with Zadie Smith by Eleanor Wachtel
George Eliot, Middlemarch
… what those lines suggest is that if we had complete empathy, if we could understand how people are from the inside, we would be capable of loving them as God loved them.
Zadie Smith, In Conversation with Zadie Smith by Eleanor Wachtel
Thursday, August 26, 2010
How To Be Alone
Lonely is a freedom that breathes easy and weightless, and lonely is healing if you make it.
Tanya Davis, How To Be Alone
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7X7sZzSXYs
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Serving
The thing about serving is that it’s not about you.
Sara Miles, Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
What we are
Life is what we are; what we do is what we are and become.
Lama Surya Das, Buddha Is As Buddha Does
Monday, August 23, 2010
This world
The world is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a long path to perfection. No, it is perfect in every moment.
Herman Hesse, Siddhartha
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Works of art
Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing to be so little appreciated as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and fairly judge them.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Friday, August 20, 2010
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Spiritual practice
The important point of spiritual practice is not to try to escape your life, but to face it – exactly and completely.
Dainin Katagiri Roshi
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Perspective
To figure out what was really happening behind the clichés, I’d learned, meant a practice of looking not at the centre but at the edges of things – at the unlikeliest and weakest people, not the most apparently powerful.
Sara Miles, Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion
Monday, August 16, 2010
Winds of grace
The winds of grace are always blowing, but you have to raise the sail.
Sri Ramakrishna
Sunday, August 15, 2010
You
Remember one thing only: that it’s you – nobody else – who determines your destiny and decides your fate. Nobody else can be alive for you.
E. E. Cummings
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Friday, August 13, 2010
Practice Compassion
If you want others to be happy,
practice compassion.
If you want to be happy,
practice compassion.
The Dalai Lama
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Care
Unless someone like you
cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better.
It’s not.
Dr. Seuss, The Lorax
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Conversation
Conversation isn’t, after all, a moment: It’s a process, and it keeps happening, with cycles of acceptance and resistance, epiphany and doubt.
Sara Miles, Take This Bread, A Radical Conversion
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Identity
An organization’s identity includes current interpretations of its history, present decisions and activities, and its sense of its future. Identity is both what we want to believe is true and what our actions show to be true about ourselves.
Margaret J. Wheatley, Finding Our Way: Leadership For an Uncertain Time
Monday, August 9, 2010
Balance
You cannot balance one thing; you balance a diversity of things. And diversity is the engine of the evolution of living things, including living civilizations.
Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile
Sunday, August 8, 2010
God
God is universal; confined to no spot, defined by no dogma, appropriated by no sect.
Mary Baker Eddy
Saturday, August 7, 2010
Friday, August 6, 2010
Stories
The only thing that keeps us from floating off with the wind is our stories. They give us a name and put us in a place, allow us to keep on touching.
Tom Spanbauer
Thursday, August 5, 2010
To be alive
We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.
Thornton Wilder
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Falling in love with a revolution
I’d learn that it’s possible to fall in love with a revolution – then doubt it, fight with it, lose faith in it, and return with a sense of humour and a harder, lasting love. I would have to learn the same thing about church when I was much older, and it would be no easier.
Sara Miles, Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Gift to the world
People who are at ease with themselves are a wonderful gift to the world. They model for us with a power that words can never match.
David Kundtz, Everyday Serenity: Meditations for people who do too much
Monday, August 2, 2010
Seeing well
If you want to see well, you must not stand in one place. ... And this is the way I think the world's stories should be told – from many different perspectives.
Chinua Achebe
Sunday, August 1, 2010
Self
So many of us define ourselves by what we have, what we wear, what kind of house we live in, and what kind of car we drive … if you think of yourself as the woman in the Cartier watch and the Hermes scarf, a house fire will destroy not only your possessions but your self.
Linda Henley
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