This is what our love is —a sacred pattern of unbroken unity, sewn flawlessly, invisible inside all other images, thoughts, smells, and sounds.
This is what our love is —a sacred pattern of unbroken unity, sewn flawlessly, invisible inside all other images, thoughts, smells, and sounds.
People are too heavy for you? Do not carry them on your shoulders, hold them in your heart.
The heart is like a garden. It can grow compassion or fear, resentment or love. What seeds will you plant there?
It has been well observed that though nations may differ from nations, communities from communities, and people from people, human nature is the same everywhere. As there is but one sun that warms and gives light to the earth, there is but one God who teaches us to love one another and care for each other.
How
Did the rose
Ever open its heart
And give to this world
All its
Beauty?
It felt the encouragement of light
Against its
Being
Otherwise,
We all remain
Too
Frightened.
Maybe the purpose of being here, wherever we are, is to increase the durability and the occasions of love among and between peoples. Love, as the concentration of tender caring and tender excitement, or love as the reason for joy.
There is only one breath. All are made of the same clay. The light within all is the same.
This rock has seen many storms. Here it stands exposed to the elements, covered with the scars of its past. But one thing that always gave me comfort in coming here—it has not crumbled. It is still standing at the water’s edge, facing the wind and the sea and whatever the future will bring...Our hearts are like this rock. They will not crumble as long as we live and as long as we love.
The insight at the heart of nonviolence is that we live in a tragic gap—a gap between the way things are and the way we know they might be… If we want to live nonviolent lives, we must learn to stand in the tragic gap, faithfully holding the tension between reality and possibility in hopes of being opened to a third way... [of breaking our] collective hearts open to justice, truth, and love.
There is an old Hasidic tale that tells us how such things happen. The pupil comes to the rebbe and asks, "Why does Torah tell us to 'place these words upon your hearts’? Why does it not tell us to place these holy words in our hearts?" The rebbe answers, "It is because as we are, our hearts are closed, and we cannot place the holy words in our hearts. So we place them on top of our hearts. And there they stay until, one day, the heart breaks, and the words fall in."
Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and
laughter at once,
so I see that my joy and pain are one.
Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up
and the door of my heart
can be left open,
the door of compassion.
In spiritual maturity, the opposite of injustice is not justice, but compassion. Not me against you, not me straightening out the present ill, fighting to gain a just result for myself and others, but compassion, a life that goes against nothing and fulfills everything.
To love another is to see the face of the Beloved mirroring your own.
There is no need for temples, no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple: The philosophy is kindness.
Compassion is not a social facade. Compassion is not a sham designed to mask our essential self–centeredness. Compassion is the emotion that links us to those outside ourselves. It is the capacity for outreach. It enables us, it drives us, to go beyond ourselves to the beating pulse of the rest of the world. Compassion, then, is a dimension of what it means to be fully human.
Some day, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we shall harness the energies of love. Then, for a second time in the history of the world, we will have discovered fire.
They are not long,
These days to be,
But a taste of eternity.
Yet in each day,
In each hour,
There is the power
Of a Now
That stretches timeless
In its core
And knows eternity
Be not more.
I abandon all that I think I am, all that I hope to be, all that I believe I possess. I let go of the past, I withdraw my grasping hand from the future, and in the great silence of this moment, I alertly rest my soul.
For a child, time as the great circus parade of past, present, and future, cause and effect, has scarcely started yet and means little because for a child all time is by and large NOW time and apparently endless. What child, while summer is happening, bothers to think much that summer will end? What child, when snow is on the ground, stops to remember that not long ago the ground was snowless? It is by content rather than its duration that a child knows time, by its quality rather than its quantity — happy and sad times.
I live in unfamiliar places:
The unknowing of empty spaces
Between what was and what is yet to be.
It is the hardest earthly place for me
To dwell within, pause, absolutely still.
Knowing only God and love can fill
The wanting, one drop at a time.
It's only through the heart's abiding
That Wisdom might be found hiding
In the shadows of such Sacred Pause.
I offer up what was to mourn in empty spaces,
Let go of worn embraces
So what is yet to be
May somehow birth in me.
In this well ordered universe, the perfect vehicle for our spiritual growth and unfoldment is exactly our present situation.
As spring and summer follow
autumn and winter,
so our lives have their seasons.
Help us to live in the eternal moment,
awaiting your perfect timing
in all things.
Life may be brimming over with experiences, but somewhere, deep inside, all of us carry a vast and fruitful loneliness wherever we go. And sometimes the most important thing in the whole day is the rest we take between two deep breaths, or the turning inward in prayer for five short minutes.
In our most ordinary days we have moments of happiness, moments of comfort and enjoyment, moments of seeing something that pleased us, something that touched us, moments of contacting the tenderness of our hearts... It's essential during the day ... to begin to cherish those moments as precious. Gradually we can begin to cherish the preciousness of our whole life just as it is, with its ups and downs, its failures and successes, its roughness and smoothness.
There has never been a time
when you and I have not existed...
There will never be a time
when we will cease to be.
when each day
is sacred
when each hour
is sacred
when each instant
is sacred
earth and you
space and you
bearing the sacred
through time
you'll reach
the fields of light.
Follow anything in its act of being — a snowflake falling, ice melting, a loved one waking — and we are ushered into the ongoing moment of the beginning, the quiet instant from which each breath starts. What makes this moment so crucial is that it continually releases the freshness of living. The key to finding this moment and all its freshness, again and again, is slowing down. When we find ourselves stalled in our very serious and ambitious plans, we are often being asked to re-find the beginning of time.
Time is not at all what it seems. It does not flow in only one direction, and the future exists simultaneously with the past.
What a treasure this life is!
Every second belongs to eternity.
Make me, O Lord, at last, a simple thing
Time cannot overwhelm.
Once I transcended time
A bud broke to a rose.
And I rose from a last diminishing.
Around our pillows golden ladders rise,
And up and down the skies,
With winged sandals shod,
The angels come, and go, the Messengers of God!
I believe we are free, within limits, and yet there is an unseen hand, a guiding angel, that somehow, like a submerged propeller, drives us on.
We attract angels by becoming the qualities that are of interest to them. When we focus on such qualities as compassion, faith or tolerance . . . we attract angelic beings that are trying to help develop that in all humanity.
I believe that angels are forms, images, and expressions through which the essences and energy forces of God can be transmitted and that, since there are an infinite number of these forms, the greatest service anyone can pay the angelic host is never consciously to limit the ways angels might appear to us.
Her eyes were kindled from the lamps of Heaven.
Her voice reached through me, tender, sweet and low:
An angel's voice, a music of its own.
And in the center, great wings spread apart,
more than a thousand festive angels shone,
each one distinct in radiance, and in art.
The earth has grown old
with its burden of care
but in truth it always is young
The heart of the jewel
burns lustrous and fair,
and its soul full of music breaks the air
When the song of angels is sung.
The sun receives information from the center of the galaxy. Light comes from other stars as well as the sun. The universe communicates with itself through light. Light beams are messengers, and one synonym for messenger is "angel." A light ray is an angel. An angel is a being of light carrying information outward from the center of our galaxy, star to star, sun to planet. Our seemingly solid bodies are created from condensed sunlight, making us vessels of light, just like angels. Our true identity is angelic, or light-filled. We are beings filled with the information that comes to earth in light.
If we would cooperate with the angels in their work, we must put aside all selfish and self-centered thought and throw ourselves heart and soul into the service of others.
Angels are evidence that God is taking notice of us. They ask the same always: surrender, obedience, submission, and humility before the Holy One. Some say they make us homesick for heaven.
Angels rejoice as we befriend their companioning presence.
There must be always remaining in everyone's life some place for the singing of angels, some place for that which in itself is breathlessly beautiful, and by an inherent prerogative, throws all the rest of life into a new and creative relatedness, something that gathers up in itself all the freshets of experience from drab and commonplace areas of living and glows in one bright white light of penetrating beauty and meaning—then passes. The commonplace is shot through with new glory; old burdens become lighter, deep and ancient wounds lose much of their old, old hurting. A crown is placed over our heads that for the rest of our lives we are trying to grow tall enough to wear. Despite all the crassness of life, despite all the hardness of life, despite all the harsh discords of life, life is saved by the singing of angels.
I live in the woods out of necessity. I get out of bed in the middle of the night because it is imperative that I hear the silence of the night, aloud, and with my face on the floor, say psalms, alone, in the silence of the night... The silence of the forest is my bride and the sweet dark warmth of the whole world is my love and out of the heart of that dark warmth comes the secret that is heard only in the silence...
Silence is that place just before the voice of God. It is the void in which God and I meet in the center of my soul.