🕊 sacred stillness

  • And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of it. This very wish, if you use it calmly and carefully and like a tool, will help you spread out your solitude over a great distance. Most people have turned toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything. Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it. It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning is always a long, secluded time, and therefore loving, for a long time, is: solitude, a heightened and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves. Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent?), it is a high incentive for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become a world, to become a world in herself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses her and calls him to vast distances. Only in this sense, as the task of working on themselves ("to hearken and to hammer day and night"), may young people use the love that is given to them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely long enough. The claims that the difficult work of love makes upon our development are greater than life, and we, as beginners, are not equal to them. But if we nevertheless endure and take this love upon us as burden and apprenticeship, instead of losing ourselves in the whole easy and frivolous game behind which people have hidden from the most solemn solemnity of their being, then a small advance and a lightning will perhaps be perceptible to those who come long after us. This more human love (which will fulfill itself with infinite consideration and gentleness, and kindness and clarity in binding and releasing) will resemble what we are now preparing painfully and with great struggle: the love that consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.

    — Rainer Maria Rilke

  • What you meet in another being is the projection of your own level of evolution.

    — Ram Dass

  • I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers flow in the right direction, will the earth turn as it was taught, and if not how shall I correct it? Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven, can I do better? Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows can do it and I am, well, hopeless. Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it, am I going to get rheumatism, lockjaw, dementia? Finally, I saw that worrying had come to nothing. And gave it up. And took my old body and went out into the morning, and sang.

    — Mary Oliver

  • I want to unfold. I don’t want to stay folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie. and I want my grasp of things to be true before you. I want to describe myself like a painting that I looked at closely for a long time, like a saying that I finally understood, like the pitcher I use every day, like the face of my mother, like a ship that carried me through the wildest storm of all.

    — Rainer Maria Rilke

  • This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight. The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.

    — Rumi

  • Gratitude or resentment. What will it be today?

    — Mantra from coaching school

  • Have compassion for everyone you meet, even if they don't want it. what appears bad manners, an ill temper, or cynicism is always a sign of things no ears have heard, no eyes have seen. you do not know what wars are going on down there where the spirit meets the bone.

    — Miller Williams

  • I am responsible. Although I may not be able to prevent the worst from happening, I am responsible for my attitude toward the inevitable misfortunes that darken life. Bad things do happen; how I respond to them defines my character and the quality of my life. I can choose to sit in perpetual sadness, immobilized by the gravity of my loss, or I can choose to rise from the pain and treasure the most precious gift I have - life itself.

    — Walter Anderson

  • If you are with another human being and if you want to get free, if you want to awaken and get free, you can do it by dealing with the people around you without expecting that they will also want to get free. If you're lucky, you'll be around other people who also want to get free. In Buddhism, it's called the sangha, or in Hinduism, the satsang. Every religion has that. It's the fellowship, the community, the spiritual community of the people who are seeking together. It's very reinforcing to those qualities in you that want to awaken to be around other people who similarly want to awaken because they help remind you of it. It’s why we look for people who are simpatico to those values. The highest one of those is where two people have consciously and intentionally said, yes, let us get free and let us use our relationship with one another as one of the vehicles for doing that. In order to do that, since we know that in freedom there is truth, since there's no risk in real truth in the free universe, let us be truthful with one another. That is a very high and very special relationship. It is very rare, very rare. … As long as you are identified with your separateness, the little me, you will constantly look around the world to get proof that you are loved, that you are enough, that you're safe, that it's okay. You are needful. Always needful. And most relationships end up, "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine." When you have worked on yourself so that you're resting in what you are, you're resting in your presence, in your is-ness, in your love, then all of your actions are a celebration of it. They don't come out of your separateness, they come out of your unity...

    — Ram Dass

  • There’s a thread you follow. It goes among things that change. But it doesn’t change. People wonder about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread. But it is hard for others to see. While you hold it you can’t get lost. Tragedies happen; people get hurt or die; and you suffer and get old. Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding. You don’t ever let go of the thread.

    — William Stafford

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