Quotations

I am being driven forward
Into an unknown lane.
The pass grows steeper,
The air colder and sharper.
A wind from my unknown goal
Stirs the strings of expectation.
Still the question:
Shall I ever get there?
There where life resounds,
A clear pure note
in the silence.

I see the way of the artist as a kind of pilgrimage. When you go on a pilgrimage, you set out from where you happen to be and start walking toward a place of great sanctity in the hope of returning from it renewed, enriched, and sanctified. However far you may walk, every pilgrimage is a safari into your own dark interior, an inner journey. For pilgrimages belong to the inner world, to the realm called the "religious."

When changewinds swirl through our lives, they often call us to undertake a new passage of the spiritual journey: that of confronting the lost and counterfeit places within us and releasing our deeper, innermost self–our true selves. They call us to come home to ourselves, to become who we really are.

We journey together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent on its vulnerable supplies of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace, preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and the love we give our fragile craft.

If you wish to meet the Beloved, go as far as your own heart.

We all belong in the heart of God. We belong in God; that is where our heart has its home. In God's heart we always find what we need: attentiveness, the responsiveness, the safe haven for our vulnerable selves. We all belong in the heart of God.

We all belong to God, not as a possession to be grasped, but as a partner in a loving union in which we become free and vibrantly alive. We all belong in the heart of God. Everyone belongs, for we journey together and we are who we are by virtue of our belonging to one another.

The world is a mirror of infinite beauty,
yet no one sees it.
It is a Temple of majesty,
yet no one regards it.
It is a region of Light and Peace,
did not humans disquiet it.
It is the Paradise of God,
the place of Angels,
and the Gate of Heaven.

Exiled on earth as we are, unless we are able to content ourselves with that shadow of Paradise that is Virgin Nature, we must create for ourselves surroundings which, by their truth and their beauty recall our heavenly origin and thereby also awaken our hope.

Who can afford to live without beauty?
Beauty fills us with passion;
it graces us with joy and lights up our existence.
A landscape, a piece of music, a film, a dance –
suddenly all dreariness is gone,
we are left bewitched and dazzled.
If we get lost in dark despair,
beauty takes us back to Center.

BEAUTY: bountiful blessings of the Beloved ...
praise, humility, gratitude,
our response.

Guided by my heritage of a love of beauty
and respect for strength – in search of my
mother's garden, I found my own.

Beauty is a celebration of is-ness... Beauty is felt in the now, with no if-only's or should-be's or someday-it-might-be's.

Perhaps it seems surprising that physicists seek beauty, but in fact they have no choice. As yet there has not been an exception to the rule that the demonstrable solution to any problem will turn out to be an aesthetic solution.

Composers know how to use harmony and melody like a net to catch beauty's colors and radiance. And when we like what we hear, we open our pores to take in more – just as we close them against what seems ugly or offensive. Isn't that why we remember so vividly the hours or days spent in places we love, perhaps in the mountains or by the sea, where all our senses were awake?

Where is beauty located? Everywhere we recognize it: the pattern is in us. Beauty is the name we give our response to the perfection we sense around us, and within us.

We naturally use our faith to strengthen our relationship with God, to focus our thoughts on what is good, to help us love our neighbor. I ask a lot from my faith. To me, it's not simply a place of comfort; it is a reference point from which I take the indecipherable events of my world and place them in a context that is holy, sacred, and dynamic. It won't make the world go away, but it does have the power to shape one into a person of deep sensitivity and true passion.

Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the
power of reason to believe.

In terms of faith, it's the story (and not the facts) that grips the imagination, impregnates the heart, and animates the spirit
within bringing meaning and integration into one's experience.

Without faith that it is possible to render reality understandable by means of our theoretical constructs, without faith in an inner harmony of the world, there could be no science. This faith is and always will be the basic motivation behind every creative scientific idea. All our endeavors, all the dramatic conflicts between old and new ideas are supported by the eternal desire for knowledge, the unshakeable faith in cosmic harmony which becomes stronger the more difficulties loom before us.

The only thing that counts is FAITH expressing itself through love.

Once there was a great bombing, and I had my baby sister with me. I had Maria on my back and I was running back home, but I could not breathe, I could not swallow. I could not say anything. When I came home, mamika embraced me. She said, "Why are you so frightened?" That was such a balm to me. Her words still live inside me. She said, "All of us will meet anyway, even if they kill you. "There was such a strength for me in those moments. Through my mother's calm, unshakeable faith, God came to comfort me.

No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere;
I see Heaven's glories shine,
And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.

We live by faith, and if from time to time the veil is parted briefly, it is to encourage us for a specific task or to sustain us through a period we couldn't otherwise endure. But it is faith that we stand most in need of. Why did I let faith die? Faith is the great teacher and molder of hearts, the temperer of souls, as gold is tested in fire. When our other strengths fail, there at the base of our empty souls is a mysterious silent wealth. There at the bottom of the barrel is the real strength, not power or resources, not worldly wisdom or a solid defense system, but rather the will to continue to love and to live in faith by the truth.

To be fully human, we must recognize the full humanity of all other people. Each of us will be fully human only when we recognize the Aliveness of all Creation, when we learn to speak of God in Everything, and to humbly admit our interdependence and Oneness with the Great Web we call Creation.

Insects singing, larvae, pupae, seeds celebrating their fecundity, cones opening, draped boughs undulating from trunks connecting earth to sky, everything vital, everything expressing a divine Spirit, God filling all space. A single swirl of energy–birth, growth, feeding, breeding, decay–all of it continuous Life, teeming with mystery, and she a part of it.

She felt an incoming and an unfurling, a momentary mindlessness, a long-awaited union, a beautiful silent Oneness, and she was left with an unutterable calm.