Longing for our idealized images of life separates us from our true selves and from our true callings.
Quotations
One leaf left on a branch
and not a sound of sadness
or despair. One leaf left
on a branch and no unhappiness.
One leaf left all by itself
in the air and it does not speak
of loneliness or death.
One leaf and it spends itself
in swaying mildly in the breeze.
Leo Tolstoy on Kindness and the Measure of Love
...in our culture, it has been aptly observed, "we are never as kind as we want to be, but nothing outrages us more than people being unkind to us." In his stirring Syracuse commencement address, George Saunders confessed with unsentimental ruefulness: "What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness." I doubt any decent person, upon candid reflection, would rank any other species of regret higher. To be human is to leap toward our highest moral potentialities, only to trip over the foibled actualities of our reflexive patterns. To be a good human is to keep leaping anyway.
One cool judgment is worth a thousand hasty counsels. The thing to do is supply light, not heat.
Against the Slippery Slope of Evil
"Under conditions of terror," Hannah Arendt wrote in her classic treatise on the normalization of evil, "most people will comply but some people will not...No more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation." Under such conditions, counting ourselves among the few who refuse to comply has less to do with whether we believe ourselves to be good than it does with the deliberate protections we must place between unrelenting evil and our own sanity and goodness, for among the most insaning aspects of tyrannical regimes is the Stockholm syndrome of the psyche they inflict upon us — upon ordinary people, not-evil people, people who consider themselves decent and good, but who slowly, through a cascade of countless small concessions, lose sight of the North Star of their native moral compass.
Rather than relying on a thin, idealized hope that we will all one day just get along, we can approach conflict resolution as an art form that we are privileged to develop and hone.
Beyond Religion
The fundamental problem, I believe, is that at every level we are giving too much
attention to the external, material aspects of life while neglecting moral ethics and
inner values...I call for each of us to come to our own understanding of the
importance of inner values. For it is these inner values which are the source of both an ethically harmonious world and the individual peace of mind, confidence, and happiness we all seek. Of course, all the world's major religions, with their
emphasis on love, compassion, patience, tolerance, and forgiveness, can and do
promote inner values. But the reality of the world today is that grounding ethics in religion is no longer adequate. This is why I believe the time has come to find a way of thinking about spirituality and ethics that is beyond religion.
Indigo Children
People get blocked by living: hurrying and consuming things of no value thinking this is life. Real life is from a point within that radiates out to the world, a point within filled with serenity and assurance that we are loved, that we have a role to play in this world...This is the center of the real self, the best place to be. If you can live from this place, you will be Love's messenger.
Then there is the listening at the gates of the heart which has been closed for so long, and waiting for that mysterious inner voice to speak. When we hear it, we know it is the Truth to which we must now surrender our lives.
Truthfulness, honor, is not something which springs ablaze of itself, it has to be created between people.
THE IMITATION OF CHRIST
Blessed are those ears
Which hear the secret
Whisperings of Jesus,
And give no heed to the
Deceitful whisperings of this world,
And
Blessed are the good
Plain ears which heed
Not outward speech but
What God speaks and
Teaches inwardly in the soul.
I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.
We have a long, long way to go. So let us hasten along the road, the road of human tenderness and generosity. Groping, we may find one another's hands in the dark.
The same stream of life that runs through the world runs through my veins night and day and dances in rhythmic measure. It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the Earth into the numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of flowers.
Compassion for others begins with kindness to ourselves.
The dream of my life
Is to lie down by a slow river
And stare at the light in the trees —
To learn something by being nothing
A little while but the rich
Lens of attention.
If we fall in love with creation deeper and deeper, we will respond to its
endangerment with passion.
Gaia and God
An ecological spirituality needs to be built on three premises: the transience of selves, the living interdependency of all things, and the value of the personal in communion. Many spiritual traditions have emphasized the need to "let go of ego" but in ways that diminished the value of the person, undercutting particularly those, like women, who scarcely have been allowed individuated personhood at all. We need to "let go of the ego" in a different sense. We are called to affirm the integrity of our personal center of being, in mutuality with the personal centers of all other beings across species and, at the same time, accept the transience of these personal selves.
All the Days of My Life
We are overdosed on data and underfed on the mysterious. Our brains inflate while our souls wither. Constant interference by interpreting and explaining can distance us from life itself. God woos us into the wildness of unknowing where we are tempted by deeper senses.
EVERYDAY GRATITUDE
We live in a time when science is validating what humans have known throughout the ages: that compassion is not a luxury; it is a necessity for our well-being, resilience, and survival.
I know not how others see me, but to myself I seem a small child playing on a beach, delighted at the discovery of a shiny stone or shell, while an entire ocean of Truth lay undiscovered before my eyes.
Old Turtle and the Broken Truth
"First, my child," said Old Turtle, "remember that there are truths all around us, and within us. They twinkle in the night sky and bloom upon the earth. They fall upon us every day, silent as the snow and gentle as the rain. The people, clutching their one truth, forget that it is a part of all the small and lovely truths of life."
The Soul's Religion
Faith is strong trust in self and life even in the face of evidence to the contrary. Like belief, it consists more in love than knowledge, or perhaps it is just that love takes precedence. It is intuitive. It is a power of the soul, not of the mind alone and based on the most subtle of perception. It is born and nurtured in the area of the third eye, the open heart, and the sensitivity of an ear tuned to mystery.
Call out to the whole divine night for what you love. What you stand for. Earn your name. Be kind, and wild, and disciplined, and absolutely generous.
Silence of the Heart
Every enlightened person on the earth,
everyone who's been liberated has had these virtues.
You cannot be freed without them.
The first one is compassion.
The second one is humility.
And the third one is service.
I believe that God is in me as the sun is in the color and fragrance of a flower — the Light in my darkness, the Voice in my silence.
Native American Proverb
May your life be like a wildflower, growing freely in the beauty and joy of each day.
What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us.
Great Tide Rising
Even as seas rise against shores, another great tide is beginning to rise— a tide of outrage against the pillage of the planet, a tide of commitment to justice and human rights, a swelling affirmation of moral responsibility to the future and to Earth's fullness of life.
Perfection of the Morning
What was extraordinary was that I saw clearly, indisputably, finally, that the child, the grass, the trees, the sky above were all woven of the same material, were all part of the same fabric, which was the fabric of which the universe is made, and that this fabric lived. As pointed contrast, the cement sidewalk lay ugly and dead, a scar in the picture; except for it, the whole scene was transcendent with beauty, the colors had an intensity, a purity not present in "real" life, and the vision was imbued with a feeling of the perfect peace and oneness and benevolence of the universe.
To Bless the Space Between Us
The word blessing evokes a sense of warmth and protection; it suggests that no life is alone or unreachable. Each life is clothed in raiment of spirit that secretly links it to everything else.
The Fifth Sacred Thing
To call these things sacred is to say that they have a value beyond their usefulness for human ends, that they themselves become the standard by which our acts, our economics, our laws, and our purposes must be judged. No one has the right to appropriate them or profit from them at the expense of others. Any government that fails to protect them forfeits its legitimacy.
All people, all living things, are part of the earth life, and so are sacred. No one of us stands higher or lower than any other. Only justice can assure balance: only ecological balance can sustain freedom. Only in freedom can that fifth sacred thing we call spirit flourish in its full diversity.
Sacred Water
Through greater intimacy with the natural world, we begin to appreciate its complexity and gain a clearer understanding of the relationship between the rains, the soul, and the plants, the animals and the trees, and how the welfare of one living being depends on that of another.
The Illuminated Soul
My father always told me that plants and flowers have souls. How else could wise King Solomon have spoken to them? He wouldn't have had much conversation with them if they hadn't had souls! We have to respect all growing things even if we do not understand their ways.
Mind of our Mother
Culture has a way of giving us ladders when we need trees, reason when we need myth, and separateness when we need unity. In the music of the universe, there is harmony. The discord, the non-harmonious, is slowly drifting back in to the misty domains of our lost games. Ritual is being restored to rite. With a higher sense of the rhythms of the planet, we can recognize the emerging vision of grace. A grace to honor, not befowl, our Mother. A grace to honor each other as end products of diverse cultural journeys. A grace to become the kind of human that can embody the spiritual. A grace to blend into all that is, was, and shall be.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
We are all bound by a covenant of reciprocity: plant breath for animal breath, winter and summer, predator and prey, grass and fire, night and day, living and
dying. Water knows this, clouds know this. Soil and rocks know they are dancing in a continuous giveaway of making, unmaking, and making again the earth.
Our elders say that ceremony is the way we can
remember to remember. In the dance of the giveaway, remember that the earth is a gift that we must pass on, just as it came to us. When we forget, the dances we'll need will be for mourning. For the passing of polar bears, the silence of cranes, for the death of rivers and the memory of snow.
Turtle Island
FOR THE CHILDREN
The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything going up,
up, as we all
go down.
In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.
To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:
stay together
learn the flowers
go light
The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything going up,
up, as we all
go down.
In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.
To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:
stay together
learn the flowers
go light
The heart can't wait to speak of this ecstasy
The soul is kissing the earth, saying,
Oh God, what a blessing!
Haiku Pond
This is what Nature wants to restore in us: that breathless harmony in which her voice becomes ours and our voice hers, and it seems blessed just to walk in her shadow. . . her light shining-out from our eyes.
To the Native American, song is the breath of the spirit that consecrates each act of life.
We thought of life by analogy with a journey, with a pilgrimage,
which had a serious purpose at that end,
and the thing was to get to that thing at that end.
Success, or whatever it is, or maybe heaven after you're dead.
But we missed the point the whole way along.
It was a musical thing, and you were supposed to sing or to
dance while the music was being played.
which had a serious purpose at that end,
and the thing was to get to that thing at that end.
Success, or whatever it is, or maybe heaven after you're dead.
But we missed the point the whole way along.
It was a musical thing, and you were supposed to sing or to
dance while the music was being played.
The sacred is not in heaven or far away. It is all around us, and small human rituals can connect us to its presence.
the Heart of Prayer, Gratefulness
Too easily are we inclined to
imagine that God created this
world for a purpose. We are so
caught up in purpose that we
would feel more comfortable if
God shared our preoccupation
with work. But God plays. The
birds in a single tree are
sufficient proof that God did not
set out with a divine
no-nonsense attitude to make a
creature that would perfectly
achieve the purpose of a bird.
What could that purpose be I
wonder? There are titmice,
juncos, and chickadees; woodpeckers, gold finches, starlings and crows. The only bird
God never created is the no-nonsense bird. As we open our eyes and hearts to God's
creation, we quickly perceive that God is playful, a God of leisure.
The Light Inside the Dark
Each age has its own task...Our hermitage is the act of living with attention in the
midst of things: amid the rhythms of work, and love, the bath with the child, the
endlessly growing paperwork, the ever-present likelihood of war, the necessity for
taking action to help the world. For us, a good spiritual life is permeable and robust. It
faces things squarely, knowing the smallest moments are all we have, and that even the
smallest moment is full of happiness.
In our culture we are trained to be doers and
makers, not dreamers and seers. So I make an
appeal for "holy leisure," a leisure that makes us
more human. Holy leisure involves
contemplation...the personal pursuit of meaning.
Leisure allows for the contemplation that will
bring meaning and energy to our lives and room
within ourselves for holy reading, gentle
awareness, and deep reflection.
Elected silence, sing to me
and beat upon my whorled ear,
pipe me to pastures still and be
the music I care to hear.
and beat upon my whorled ear,
pipe me to pastures still and be
the music I care to hear.
Weavings (Mar/Apr 2003)
I sense Lizzie's presence beckoning me away from the only socially acceptable
addiction of our time: workaholism. She asks me to stop and look at what I am doing,
at why I am so busy, at who I am and what it is that keeps me so mindlessly driven and
competitive. It is not hard work that she questions, for she knows all too well the value
of labor, but she invites me into awareness and honest self-scrutiny. Perhaps it is
because I have chosen to live with a divided heart that the idolatry of being busy has
claimed me. Perhaps it is Lizzie's faithful attention to what matters most – her focused,
un-fussy attentiveness – that makes me
think of her as I ponder the meaning of
singleness of heart.
All the Days of My Life
Hard work and drawing up plans are helpful, but not always. We do not build our souls as much as we find them along the way. We discover them by accident as much as by intention. There is a time to take our lives in hand, but there is also a time to take our hands off our lives, and to leave what seems apparent and trust ourselves to the hidden.