You are not obliged to be beautiful You don't have to shine. Blooming will happen when it happens. If you can be still for a moment you might notice that the roots that feed you are still reaching silently through the dark.
~ Lynn Ungar in "November" from THESE DAYS: POEMS FOR THE PANDEMIC AGE
Enjoying the Friends of Silence monthly newsletter? Now you can sign up to receive a free daily quote in your inbox each morning taken from more than 39 years of 422 newsletters and 5,600 quotes on silence and the contemplative path.
Kay and I went to Walpi, maybe the oldest continuous inhabited village on the continent... Near a stole altar lives an ancient great-grandmother, over a hundred years old, some say. She asked us to come in. Her hands are arthritic but she is a working potter. She not only throws the pots, but paints them afterward. I asked her how she manages to do it, since her knuckles are knotted by arthritis and she is nearly blind with cataracts.
She said, "It's not my hands that make the pot, it's my spirit. My hands are broken by my potteries hold my soul, and that's whole."
~ from THE THEFT OF THE SPIRIT by Carl A. Hammerschlag