fall

O, open your hearts, friends,
that your pain and loneliness
be turned to Love;
And then, we shall rejoice in the Beloved
together!

Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell...
And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

Some sounds
use words. I hear
the language of leaves.
It is deep and order
soft and real.

People leave traces of themselves where they feel most comfortable, most worthwhile.

As leaves fall to the earth and surrender to the soil, may we, too, move our attention from the outer world to the Inner Being. As we move toward a season of stillness, may our path be straight, returning to the Source. Listen. The stillness calls to you.

I remember a friend of mine saying to me, are you happy? And I said, well, I have moments of being happy, but I've stopped trying to be happy because every time I wasn't, I thought I was failing. What I want is to be alive. And every one of these emotions has vitality in them. My grief is vital. My sadness is vital. My anger is vital. Even my fear is vital. And I want to be alive, not happy. You know, I want to feel my own pulse...

The whole world is a series of miracles, but we are so accustomed to them that we call them everyday matters.

A religion to be true must include everything from the amoeba to the milky way.

On every level of life, from housework to heights of prayer, in all judgment and efforts to get things done, hurry and impatience are sure marks of the amateur.

In the Middle Ages, spiritual advisors always warned against a state that had a variety of names but was difficult to describe: inertia, ill pleasure (acedia), nausea, laziness (pigrita), dullness (tarditas). All these terms pointed to a joyless, antimystical condition: an idleness that can be highly busy, a nauseousness with life that has learned the morbid art of seeing only decay and destruction in everything, a laziness of life that makes us too sluggish to look for God's radiance in creation or to make it shine again.