The moment we choose to love, we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love, we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others. That action is the testimony of love as the practice of freedom.
Once we recognise what it is we are feeling, once we recognise we can feel deeply, love deeply, can feel joy, then we will demand that all parts of our lives produce that kind of joy.
Scared and sacred are spelled with the same letters. Awful proceeds from the same root word as awesome. Terrify and terrific. Every negative experience hold the seed of transformation.
Making your mark on the world is hard. If it were easy, everybody would do it, but it's not. It takes patience, it takes commitment and it comes with plenty of failure along the way. The real test is not whether you avoid this failure, because you won't. It's whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, or whether you learn from it; whether you choose to persevere.
We all have our own life to pursue, our own kind of dream to be weaving and we all have some power to make wishes come true, as long as we keep believing.
Grief can awaken us to new values and new and deeper appreciations. Grief can cause us to reprioritise things in our lives, to recognise what's really important and put it first. It can heighten our gratitude as we cease taking the gifts life bestows on us for granted. It can give use the wisdom of being with death. Grief can make death the companion on our left who guides us and gives us advice. None of this growth makes the loss good and worthwhile but it is the good that comes out of the bad.
There is neither happiness nor misery in the world. There is only the comparison one state to another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life.
Spirituality exists wherever we struggle with the issue of how our lives fit into the greater cosmic scheme of things. This is true even when our questions never give way to specific answers or give way to specific answers or give rise to specific practices such as prayer or meditation. We encounter spiritual issues every time we wonder where the universe comes from, why we are here or what happens when we die. We also become spiritual when we become moved by values such as beauty, love or creativity that seem to reveal a meaning or power beyond our visible world. An idea or practice is spiritual when it reveals our personal desire to establish a felt-relationship with the deepest meanings or powers governing life.
We rely on poets, philosophers and playwrights to articulate what most of us can only feel in joy and sorrow. They illuminate the thoughts for which we only grope; they give us the strength and balm we cannot find in ourselves.
Faith as ultimate concern is an act of the total personality. It happen in the center of the personal life and includes all its elements. Faith is the most centered act of the human mind. It is not a movement of a special section or a special function of our total being. They are all united in the act of faith.
Truth resides in every human heart and one has to search for it there and to be guided by truth as one sees it. No one has a right to coerce others to act according to his own view of truth.
Everything is based on mind, is led by mind, is fashioned by mind. If you speak and act with a polluted mind, suffering will follow you as the wheels of the oxcart follow the footsteps of the ox. If you speak and act with a pure mind, happiness will follow you as a shadow clings to a form.
Have patience with all things but chiefly have patience with yourself. Do not lose courage in considering your own imperfections but instantly set about remedying them. Every day, begin the task anew.
No road is too long for him who advances slowly and does not hurry and no attainment is beyond his reach who equips himself with patience to achieve it.
Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the surface of a lead. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it and describe what's going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness or if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.
We see daily that our lives are terrible and little, without continuity, buyable and salable at any moment, mere blips on a screen, that this is the way we live now. Memory marketed as nostalgia; terror reduced to mere suspense, to melodrama.
Time is a companion that goes with us on a journey. It reminds us to cherish each moment, because it will never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we have lived.
