Peace is every step.
The shining red sun is my heart.
Each flower smiles with me.
How green, how fresh all that grows.
How cool the wind blows.
Peace is every step.
It turns the endless path to joy.
Quotations
Peace Is Every Step
Our work for peace must begin within the private world of each of us . . .
All that matters is to be at one
with the living God
to be a creature in the house of the God of Life.
Like a cat asleep on a chair
at peace, in peace . . .
feeling the presence of Peace
like a great assurance
a deep calm in the heart
a presence
as of the master sitting at the board
in his own and great being
in the house of life.
We will not build a peaceful world by following a negative path. It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it. We must concentrate . . . on the positive affirmation of peace. We must see that peace represents a sweeter music, a cosmic melody that is far superior to the discords of war. Somehow, we must transform the dynamics of the world power struggle . . . to a positive contest to harness humanity's creative genius for the purpose of making peace and prosperity a reality for all the nations of the world. . . . If we have a will -- and determination -- to mount such a peace offensive, we will unlock hitherto tightly sealed doors of hope and transform our imminent cosmic elegy into a psalm of creative fulfillment.
Humanity must remember that peace is not God's gift to us; peace is our gift to one another.
Peace Pilgrim
Inner peace is not found by staying on the surface of life, or by attempting to escape from life through any means. Inner peace is found by facing life squarely, solving its problems, and delving as far beneath the surface as possible to discover its verities and realities.
Everyone thirsts for peace, but few people understand that perfect peace cannot be obtained as long as the inner soul is not filled with the presence of God.
May the peace of each moment enfold you in rhythm with heaven’s celestial heartfelt beat.
Sacred America
The essence of nonviolence, the lack of any impulse to harm, lies in the peace passing understanding at the heart of all of us and of every religious tradition. From that place ensues trust in the unfolding process of life, at the same time as action to the greater good. It is the source of action because compassion naturally arises from wisdom and wisdom is the nature of that place. Compassion is being moved, literally, to act for the greater good.
Inviting Silence
We do not need to be experts or geniuses to remember that all of existence is precious. We do not need cathedrals to remind ourselves to experience the sacred. We need only to be deeply respectful of what is fundamentally true; and that is what we rediscover when we center ourselves in silence.
Poems of the Sacred Unknown
There is no dark like a night
replete with the mystery of death.
There is no truth like a fleeting wind.
There is no lover like a lonely tree.
There is no friend like a blade
of faithful grass.
There is no light like a solitary beam
from the sun.
There is no poem like an evolving earth
and no Poet like the great Grace
of Silence.
Within us is the soul of the whole, the wise silence, the universal beauty, the eternal One.
The Springs of Contemplation
Since noise is increasing in all directions, the psychology of silence has taken on a special meaning. We are already so adapted to an abundance of screeching sound that we are surprised when stillness suddenly envelops us. Not that this happens very often. We begin to see that the whole question of our relation to the world, both positive and negative, centers in something like silence. So our service to the world might be simply to keep a place where there is no noise, where people can be silent together.
The Measure of My Days
Silence receives too little appreciation, silence being a higher, rarer thing than sound. Silence implies inner riches, and a savouring of impressions. Babies value this too. They lie silent, and one can suppose them asleep but look closer, and with eyes wide open they are sparkling like jewels in the dark. Silence is beyond many of us, and hardly taken into account as one of life's favours. It can be sacred. Its implications are unstatable. It has a superiority that makes the interruption of the spoken word crude, rendering small what was infinite.
Celtic Benediction
In the busyness of this day
grant me a stillness of seeing, O God.
In the conflicting voices of my heart
grant me a calmness of hearing.
Let my seeing and hearing
my words and my actions
be rooted in a silent certainty of your presence.
Let my passions for life
and the longings for justice that stir within me
be grounded in the experience of your stillness.
Let my life be rooted in the ground of your peace, O God,
let me be rooted in the depths of your peace.
The phoebe sits on her nest
Hour after hour,
Day after day,
Waiting for life to burst out
From under her warmth.
Can I weave a nest of silence,
weave it of listening,
listening, listening,
Layer upon layer?
But one must first become small,
Nothing but a presence,
Attentive as a nesting bird,
Proffering no slightest wish
Toward anything
that might happen or be given,
Only the warm, faithful waiting,
contained in one’s smallness.
Beyond the question,
the silence.
Before the answer,
the silence.
We need to find God, and God cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence.
The Way Through
I am discovering that Silence is not a concept, an idea, not the familiar "absence of sound." Instead, I "enter" silence as if I were to open a door, cross a threshold, and enter a room. Silence is substantive, tactile, like material. I feel its layers. It has depth like water, shallow or deep. I immerse myself in it. It is like water, supportive. I lay back in it. It is buoyant or it can draw me down. I think about whether or not it has a bottom, a ground. Perhaps its bottom turns into a top at some point, just as going east eventually leads west. I feel secure in the way it totally envelops. It is pleasurable yet mysterious.
Mark Van Doren wrote about "the [silent] web of the world, how thick and how thin, ancient and full of grace." What a lovely vocation for me to spend the rest of my years playing with the secrets of that shining place.
God is the mirror of silence in which all creation is reflected.
The Spirit of Silence
Silence touches us in so many ways: as something which offers sanctuary and tranquility, as something which brings us into touch with the inner depths which elude us in the hurly-burly of our everyday lives, as a source of joy, as an inspiration for art, literature or music, and because it awakens us to the present moment which can only be fully experienced with a mind that is free of preconceptions. These encounters can be the source of a wonderful clarity.
Realize that we are truly one. We may be different in our cultures, color, beliefs, sizes, shapes, morals, and education, but we have the same feelings of wanting to be loved, accepted, and safe. We want our families and children to be healthy and safe and happy. We all need love in our lives.
Realize that each soul is related to you.
When you recognize that everyone is part of you,
you will find that you cannot
withdraw from one another.
Power Vs Force
The universe holds its breath as we choose, instant by instant, which pathway to follow; for the universe, the very essence of life itself, is highly conscious. Every act, thought, and choice adds to a permanent mosaic; our decisions ripple through the universe of consciousness to affect the lives of all. Lest this idea be considered merely mystical or fanciful, let's remember that fundamental tenet of the new theoretical physics: Everything in the universe is interconnected, one with everything else. . . . There are no secrets; nothing is hidden, nor can it be. Our spirits stand naked in time for all to see -- everyone's life, finally, is accountable to the universe.
It does not matter what name you attach to it, but your consciousness must ascend to the point through which you view the universe with your God-centered nature. The feeling accompanying this experience is that of complete oneness with the Universal Whole. One merges into a euphoria of absolute unity with all life . . .
Graceful Exits
Great masters live well, not for anticipated personal gain, but for the love of God. Their lives are full of selfless service because they understand that we are all One. It is time for us to perceive ourselves as spiritual beings with physical experiences rather than as physical beings with spiritual experiences.
Survival is the second law of life.
The first is that we are all one.
He drew a circle that shut me out -- heretic, rebel, a thing to flout. But love and I had the wit to win: we drew a circle that took them in
A single Spirit fills infinity. It is that of God, whom nothing limits or divides, who is everywhere entire and nowhere confined
True Meditation
True meditation is about waking up from the dream of separation to the truth of unity . . . awakening to the realization of what you and everything actually is, the oneness of all. To perceive everything as one is not an altered state of consciousness; it's an unaltered state of consciousness, the natural state of consciousness. Enlightenment is the natural state, the innocent state which is uncontaminated by control or manipulation of mind. We wake up by allowing ourselves to rest in the natural state from the very beginning . . . by "allowing everything to be as it is."
Dialogue with Silence
This will be my solitude, to be separated from myself so that I am able to love You alone, to love You so much that I no longer realize I am loving anything. I no longer desire to be myself, but to find myself transformed in You, so that there is no "myself" but only Yourself. That is when I will be what You have willed to make me from all eternity: not myself, but Love.
We invent nothing. We borrow and recreate. We uncover and discover. All has been given. . . . We have only to open our eyes and hearts to become one with that which is.
The mere idea of oneness is not the same as the experience of oneness. The actual experience makes all the difference.
Through our willingness to be the one we are, we become one with everything.
Peak Vitality
Indivisible oneness is the creative energy that turns a seed into a maple tree, or a watermelon or a human being or anything else that's alive. It's invisible, omnipresent, and absolutely indivisible. We can't divide oneness. Meditation offers us the closest experience we can have of rejoining our Source and being in the oneness at the same time that we're embodied. This means we have to tame our ego.
Time is what keeps the light from reaching us.
There is no greater obstacle to God than time.
Take time to play . . .
it is the secret of youth.
Take time for friendship . . .
it strengthens the spirit.
Take time to think . . .
it is the source of power.
Take time to dream . . .
it hitches the soul to the stars.
Take time.
Emissary of Light
The end of time will not come like people think. Time will end in Light because it began in darkness. Time will end when humanity accepts eternity as its home . . . when people understand the true meaning of peace so they can choose love over fear.
A Mythic Life
What a gift is the recognition of our multiple streams of time! Most of us have had some experience of breaking out of the monochronic monotony of one-thing-afteranother. Time flies; time crawls or stands still. We regularly experience the
spectrum of party time, hanging out time, condensed time, wasting time, scheduled time, falling in love time, anxiety time, creative time, borning time, dying time, meditation time, timeless time. Ecstasy and terror have their own temporal cadences, and in high creative moments as well as in mystical experience, the categories of time are strained by the tension of eternity.
Dialogue with Silence
The things of time are in connivance with eternity. There is a greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question. Eternity is in the present. Eternity is in the palm of the hand. Eternity is a seed of fire whose sudden roots break barriers that keep my heart from being an abyss.
Awakening Loving-Kindness
The Navajo teach their children that every morning when the sun comes up, it's a brand new sun. It's born each morning, it lives for the duration of one day, and
in the evening it passes on, never to return again. As soon as the children are old enough to understand, the adults take them out at dawn and they say, "The sun has only one day. You must live this day in a good way, so that the sun won't have wasted precious time." Acknowledging the preciousness of each day is a good way to live, a good way to reconnect with our basic joy.
As a river flows in ideal sequence
May your love discover time is presence.
O The Chimneys
How many oceans have vanished in sand, how much sand has been prayed hard in the stone, how much time has been wept away in the singing horn of the seashells, how much mortal abandonment in the fishes' pearl eyes, how many morning trumpets in the coral, how many star patterns in crystal, how much seed of laughter in the gulls' throat, how many threads of longing for home have been traversed on the nightly course of the constellations, how much fertile earth for the root of the word: You -- behind all the crashing patterns of the secrets You --
The Present Moment
The present moment is where life can be found, and if you don't arrive there you miss your appointment with life. You don't have to run anymore. Breathing in, we say, "I have arrived." Breathing out, we say, "I am home." This is a very strong practice, a very deep practice.
The Prophet
Yet the timeless in you is aware of life's timelessness, And knows that yesterday is but today’s memory and tomorrow is today's dream. And that that which sings and contemplates in you is still dwelling within the bounds of that first moment which scattered the stars into space.
Time is an illusion of this earth life.
Resting Reaping Times
Sabbath time. Sabbatical time. Jubilee time. Time to rest, to delight in what is given, to breathe in the beauty. Time to be fallow, to heal wounds, forgive, regenerate. Time to restore the world to its primal pattern. Time to anticipate a new world in which justice, mercy, and peace truly flourish. Time that anticipates the end and fullness of all time when tears, mourning, and death itself will yield to the bountiful, blooming garden of God’s own time.
And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people
permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
Everything can be taken from an individual, but one thing: the last of the human
freedoms -- to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.
Silence of the Heart
"I" is the first pronoun. The second pronoun is "am." When you realize "I am," you become free. This is called "Being." Not doing this or being that. Just plain Being.
I AM.
Nothing to Lose But Our Illusions
Once you start to see through the myth of status, possessions, and unlimited
consumption as a path to happiness, you'll find that you have all kinds of freedom
and time. It's like a deal you can make with the universe: I'll give up greed for
freedom. Then you can start putting your time to good use.