Spring

In the landscape of spring, there is neither better nor worse. The flowering branches grow naturally, some long, some short. ~ Zen

Poem About "Mother"

Mother

by Ted Kooser

Mid April already, and the wild plums
bloom at the roadside, a lacy white
against the exuberant, jubilant green
of new grass an the dusty, fading black
of burned-out ditches. No leaves, not yet,
only the delicate, star-petaled
blossoms, sweet with their timeless perfume.

You have been gone a month today
and have missed three rains and one nightlong
watch for tornadoes. I sat in the cellar
from six to eight while fat spring clouds
went somersaulting, rumbling east. Then it poured,
a storm that walked on legs of lightning,
dragging its shaggy belly over the fields.

The meadowlarks are back, and the finches
are turning from green to gold. Those same
two geese have come to the pond again this year,
honking in over the trees and splashing down.
They never nest, but stay a week or two
then leave. The peonies are up, the red sprouts
burning in circles like birthday candles,

for this is the month of my birth, as you know,
the best month to be born in, thanks to you,
everything ready to burst with living.
There will be no more new flannel nightshirts
sewn on your old black Singer, no birthday card
addressed in a shaky but businesslike hand.
You asked me if I would be sad when it happened

and I am sad. But the iris I moved from your house
now hold in the dusty dry fists of their roots
green knives and forks as if waiting for dinner,
as if spring were a feast. I thank you for that.
Were it not for the way you taught me to look
at the world, to see the life at play in everything,
I would have to be lonely forever.

"Mother" by Ted Kooser, from Delights & Shadows. © Copper Canyon Press, 2004. Reprinted with permission

ANimals in Nature - Today's Daily OM

April 29, 2011Messengers of Direction
Animals in Nature


Animals share our planet with us, but experience it differently—each has its own abilities and gifts that allow them to interact successfully with the natural world. Since we are merely one manifestation of the universe’s energy in action, when we feel the need for direction we can turn to animals in nature for guidance. Animals can show us different ways to approach and deal with our challenges.

As we hold a question in mind, we can begin to pay attention to the animal activity around us. Staring out a window we may notice a bird soaring high in the sky, showing us how to look at our situation from a greater distance. If we don’t get an immediate answer, we can remember that the universe has its own perfect timing that doesn’t heed the ticking of the clock. Instead, we can release our question into the universe’s care, and then trust that an animal messenger will carry inspiration our way. In the meantime, we align ourselves with the universe’s rhythm—opening, humbling ourselves, and shifting our perceptions so that at the perfect time we will be ready. Then, even weeks later, the sight of a small bird hopping from branch to branch may signal for us to use a talent other than our greatest strength and to take small leaps rather than fly over details. A squirrel bounding across an open expanse of grass to stash its latest prize may remind us to check our favorite hid! ing places for forgotten treasure. Even if we don’t see actual animals, their representations may hold messages; whether we see them in a shape in the clouds, a picture, or a show on television, their symbolic meaning is the same.

Animals are closer to the rhythms and cycles of nature and have fewer distractions from it than humans do. That is why they are the perfect messengers when we are in need of advice. Just by being themselves they remind us of the wisdom of the universe, and that all answers are available to us when we reconnect with our source and with those who know how to be nurtured by it.
Animals in nature always have a message for us, start noticing what animals show up in your life and when.

Happy Easter

TIME CREATIONS

There is time for everything
Time to pretend and time to be real
Time to cry and time to laugh
Time to be quiet and time to speak
Time to remember wrong decisions
And time to never take them again
Time to choose and time to loose
Time to suffer and time to persist
Time to be good and time to be indifferent
Time to fight and win
And time to go against the wind
Time to fight and leave
Time to seek for peace
Time to strive to understand
Time not to try to reason
And there is time to have time
Time to be too busy
Time to play jokes
Time to discover and be joyful
Time to passionately speak your soul
And Time to be sorry for
The time we lost
The time others lost because of us
The egocentric love
The purposeful pain we cause
The ignorants we are
There is time to
BE HERE and BE NOW
There is time in 60 minutes
And each second occurs only once
And if you waste your chance to be on time
and if you are too much of a coward to say things in time
and if you are too scared to make the most of each second
and if you are just listening to comfortable "friends'" voices
Rather than the voice of your heart
And if you prefer to twist this voice
What if one day you wake up
and wonder:
What have I done all this time?
I built a castle .... on sand.
I created a knot... that broke
I did politics .... lower level.
I did daily calculations ...
And I got it all wrong ...because
The castle fell down
The knot broke
Politics went wrong
Calculations were sick
Oooops..you say:
I forgot to calculate the time.
Your price to pay!
"You see I had no time to take time to Take the Time into consideration.
Time went so fast
that there was No time thinking about time
Simple isn't it?"
People die and we cry "why"
It was their time.
There is time to get ready.
Take your time.
Share your life to the depth of love
With the dearest ones
Time flows
No time goes back
TIME Is your best friend.
TIME is truth
Real, like black and white.
TIME is a part of nature
TIME teaches us to be humble
"Ask and it shall be given to you"
You get impatient?
Response comes in HIS time.
BE HERE and BE NOW
AND BELIEVE.
... when you believe miracles can happen!
written by citizen of the world

Shakespeare Trivia

Today is traditionally held to be the birthday of William Shakespeare (books by this author), who was baptized on April 26, 1564, in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England. He left behind no personal papers; so much of what we know, or think we know, about him comes to us from public and court documents, with a fair measure of inference and speculation. We do know that his father John was a glove maker and alderman, and his mother, Mary Arden, was a landed heiress. William's extensive knowledge of Latin and Greek likely came from his education at the well-respected local grammar school. That was the extent of his formal education, which has led to hundreds of years of conspiracy theories disputing the authorship of his plays, since many found it unbelievable that he could have written so knowledgeably about history, politics, royalty, and foreign lands on a grammar school education. Various figures, such as Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, the 17th Earl of Oxford, and even Queen Elizabeth I, have been put forward as possible — though unproven — ghost writers.
We know that he married the older — and pregnant — Anne Hathaway when he was 18 and she was 26, and she gave birth to a daughter, Judith, six months later. Twins Hamnet and Judith followed two years after that, and son Hamnet died at age 11. It's speculated that his son's death hit Shakespeare hard, because he began to write Hamlet soon afterward.
He moved to London around 1588 — possibly to escape deer-poaching charges in Stratford — and began a career as an actor and a playwright. By 1594, he was also managing partner of the Lord Chamberlain's Men, a popular London theater troupe. He was popular in his lifetime, but his popularity didn't rise to the level that George Bernard Shaw referred to as "bardolatry" until the 19th century.
In 1611, he retired to Stratford and made out his will, leaving to his wife, Anne, his "second-best bed." He died on or around his birthday in 1616, and was buried in the Church of the Holy Trinity in Stratford, leaving a last verse behind as his epitaph: "Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbeare / to dig the dust enclosed here. / Blessed be the man who spares these stones, / and cursed be he who moves my bones."
Though biographical details may be sketchy, his literary legacy is certain. He wrote 38 plays, 154 sonnets, and a couple of epic narrative poems. He created some of the most unforgettable characters ever written for the stage, and shifted effortlessly between formal court language and coarse vernacular. The Oxford English Dictionary credits him with coining 3,000 new words, and has contributed more phrases and sayings to the English language than any other individual. His idioms have woven themselves so snugly into our daily conversations that we aren't even aware of them most of the time, phrases such as "a fool's paradise," "a sorry sight," "dead as a doornail," "Greek to me," "come what may," "eaten out of house and home," "forever and a day," "heart's content," "slept a wink," "love is blind," "night owl," "wild goose chase," and "into thin air."
Though we have no way of knowing whether the Bard of Avon was writing of his own impending retirement when he wrote Prospero's soliloquy from The Tempest in about 1610, it's satisfying to think so:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

Kindness Lives

End of Days

by Marge Piercy

Almost always with cats, the end
comes creeping over the two of you—
she stops eating, his back legs
no longer support him, she leans
to your hand and purrs but cannot
rise—sometimes a whimper of pain
although they are stoic. They see
death clearly though hooded eyes.

Then there is the long weepy
trip to the vet, the carrier no
longer necessary, the last time
in your lap. The injection is quick.
Simply they stop breathing
in your arms. You bring them
home to bury in the flower garden,
planting a bush over a deep grave.

That is how I would like to cease,
held in a lover's arms and quickly
fading to black like an old-fashioned
movie embrace. I hate the white
silent scream of hospitals, the whine
of pain like air-conditioning's hum.
I want to click the off switch.
And if I can no longer choose

I want someone who loves me
there, not a doctor with forty patients
and his morality to keep me sort
of, kind of alive or sort of undead.
Why are we more rational and kinder
to our pets than to ourselves or our
parents? Death is not the worst
thing; denying it can be.

"End of Days" by Marge Piercy, from The Hunger Moon: New and Selected Poems, 1980 - 2010. © Alfred A. Knopf, 2011. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

On this day in 1926, the phrase "grace under pressure" was used for the first time in print. Ernest Hemingway (books by this author) used the phrase in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (books by this author). The two met a year earlier in a Parisian bar called Dingo and began a tumultuous, alcohol- and envy-fueled friendship, which Hemingway wrote about in his memoir A Moveable Feast (published posthumously in 1964).
Hemingway was a prolific correspondent, and he probably wrote six to seven thousand letters in his lifetime, perhaps because he was an informal letter writer who believed letters should never be written for posterity. Write letters "for the day and the hour," said Hemingway in a May 1950 letter to English professor and author Arthur Mizener. "Posterity will always look after herself." In his letters, he regularly ignored apostrophes, rarely crossed a t or dotted an i. And while he frequently boasted that he was a better speller than Fitzgerald, he almost always misspelled certain words, including apologize (apoligize), responsibility (responsability), and volume (volumne). He would also drop pronouns and common articles (an and the) from his letters (and sometimes even from conversation). He might have been mimicking the language of cables and telegraphs, which he loved, but he also thought the shortened, abrupt style was manly and down-to-earth.
In this particular letter to Fitzgerald, Hemingway gossips, talks about what he's getting paid, offers facetious money advice, badmouths other writers, and asks Fitzgerald to read his new manuscript, The Sun Also Rises. He uses the phrase "grace under pressure" to describe what he means when he uses the word "guts":
"Was not referring to guts but to something else. Grace under pressure. Guts never made any money for anybody except violin string manufacturers."

Nature Calls

On this spring day in 1944, three months before the family was found and arrested, Anne Frank (books by this author) wrote in her diary: "Is there anything more beautiful in the world than to sit before an open window and enjoy nature, to listen to the birds singing, feel the sun on your cheeks and have a darling boy in your arms?"

Two Special Birthdays

It's the birthday of novelist Isak Dinesen (books by this author), the pen name of Karen Blixen, born Karen Dinesen in Rungsted, Denmark (1885). She said: "When I was a young girl, it was very far from my thoughts to go to Africa, nor did I dream then that an African farm should be the place in which I should be perfectly happy. That goes to prove that God has a greater and finer power of imagination than we have."
She started publishing stories in Danish magazines when she was 22 years old. Two years later, she had an affair with her second cousin, Baron Hans von Blixen-Finecke. Soon after that relationship fell apart, she was engaged to his twin brother, Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke. During the year of their engagement, a relative went on a hunting expedition in Africa and came back full of stories about how wonderful it was. Bror and Karen became enamored with the idea of life in a faraway place. So a year after she got engaged, Dinesen got on a ship in Naples and sailed to Kenya to join her fiancée there. They were married in Kenya, in January of 1914, and together established a coffee plantation, which their families had bought for them.
She divorced her husband a few years later — he was unfaithful and she contracted syphilis from him, the same disease that had driven her father to commit suicide. She kept the coffee plantation. She fell in love with another man, a big-game hunter who took tourists out on safaris. But in 1931, the whole world was suffering from an economic depression, and her farm was so unprofitable she had to sell it. Two months later, her lover died in a plane crash. She went back to Denmark, where she lived for the rest of her life.
Six year later, she published her memoir Out of Africa (1937). It was a best-seller, and it was made into a film starring Meryl Streep, which opens with the same line as the novel: "I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills." Dinesen was a favorite to win the Nobel Prize in literature several times, but she never did — the committee members were afraid of awarding too many prizes to Scandinavians. When Hemingway won the prize in 1954, he said, "I would have been happy — happier — today if the prize had gone to that beautiful writer Isak Dinesen."
In Out of Africa she wrote: "Coffee-growing is a long job. It does not all come out as you imagine, when, yourself young and hopeful, in the streaming rain, you carry the boxes of your shining young coffee-plants from the nurseries, and, with the whole number of farm-hands in the field, watch the plants set in the regular rows of holes in the wet ground where they are to grow, and then have them thickly shaded against the sun, with branches broken from the bush, since obscurity is the privilege of young things. It is four or five years till the trees come into bearing, and in the meantime you will get drought on the land, or diseases, and the bold native weeds will grow up thick in the fields — the black-jack, which has long scabrous seed-vessels that hang on to your clothes and stocking. Some of the trees have been badly planted with their tap-roots bent; they will die just as they begin to flower. You plan a little over 600 trees to the acre, and I had 600 acres of land with coffee; my oxen dragged the cultivators up and down the fields, between the rows of trees, many thousand miles, patiently, awaiting coming bounties."

It's the birthday of novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder (books by this author), born in Madison, Wisconsin (1897). He won his first Pulitzer Prize when he was 30 years old for his second novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927). In 1934, he went to a lecture by Gertrude Stein in Chicago, and he was fascinated by her. She was 60 years old and he was in his 30s, but they were both dealing with sudden success — he from Bridge of San Luis Rey and his Pulitzer, she from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. He invited her to stay in his Chicago apartment during speaking tours, and despite their difference in age and writing styles, they became good friends and corresponded for the rest of Stein's life.
It was The Making of Americans (1925) — Stein's difficult, experimental, 900-page novel — that inspired Wilder's most famous play, Our Town (1938). Like The Making of Americans, it traces the intertwining lives of two families, and Wilder used his own version of modernism — the set was minimal, and the play's narrator was in direct conversation with the audience. But where The Making of Americans was a commercial failure and didn't go over well with frustrated critics, Our Town was immediately popular — it was a big Broadway success, and Wilder won another Pulitzer Prize. Our Town has become one of the most-produced American plays.
In September of 1937, he wrote to Stein: "I can no longer conceal from you that I'm writing the most beautiful little play you can imagine. Every morning brings an hour's increment to it and that's all, but I've finished two acts already. It's a little play with all the big subjects in it; and it's a big play with all the little things of life lovingly impressed into it. And when I finish it next Friday, there's another coming around the corner. Lope de Vega wrote three plays a week in his thirties and four plays a week in his forties and so I let these come as they like. This play is an immersion, immersion into a New Hampshire town. It's called Our Town and its third act is based on your ideas, as on great pillars, and whether you know it or not, until further notice, you're in a deep-knit collaboration already."

Charlie Chaplin's Birthday

It's the birthday of actor Charlie Chaplin, born in 1889. Although Chaplin's birth certificate has never been found, it has always been assumed that he was born in London. Earlier this year, the Chaplin children shared a new piece of information about their father: He may have been born in a gypsy caravan. His daughter Victoria inherited a desk from her father, and when she had a locksmith open a locked drawer, she found a letter from a man named Jack Hill. He said: "Hello Charlie, If you would like to know, you were born in a caravan. It was a good one, it belonged to the gypsy queen who was my auntie. You were born on the Black Patch in Smethwick. So was I, two and a half years later. Your mum did move again with her dad's circus and later settled down in London but whereabouts I do not know."

The Black Patch was a bustling Romani community (the Romani are an ethnic group often called Gypsies) outside the city of Birmingham.
Chaplin's parents, both entertainers, split up when he was two years old. He lived mostly with his mother and half-brother, but his mother was in and out of asylums, and he spent time in a workhouse and then in a school for poor children.

He went on to become one of the most famous film stars of all time. He got a job in a play, The Painful Predicament of Sherlock Holmes, that turned out to be a surprise hit. He toured the United States with an acting troupe and got signed on to the movies. He starred in short films that featured slapstick comedy, and developed his signature character, the Little Tramp, a vagabond gentleman in an old coat, funny little mustache, and cane. He was convinced that a movie would be funny as long as he put a well-developed character in to a setting and let things evolve. But this improvisation was combined with intense control over other parts of the film — he insisted on going through every scene again and again with every actor until it was how he wanted it. His films included The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), and The Great Dictator (1940).

He said, "Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself."
And, "'I remain one thing and one thing only and that is a clown. It places me on a far higher plane than any politician."

Sad, But True

The Best Year of Her Life

by Gerald Locklin

When my two-year-old daughter
sees someone come through the door
whom she loves, and hasn't seen for a while,
and has been anticipating
she literally shrieks with joy.

I have to go into the other room
so that no one will notice the tears in my eyes.

Later, after my daughter has gone to bed,
I say to my wife,

"She will never be this happy again,"
and my wife gets angry and snaps,
"Don't you dare communicate your negativism to her!"
And, of course, I won't, if I can possibly help it,
and of course I fully expect her
to have much joy in her life,
and, of course, I hope to be able
to contribute to that joy —
I hope, in other words, that she'll always
be happy to see me come through the door—

but why kid ourselves — she, like every child,
has a life of great suffering ahead of her,
and while joy will not go out of her life,
she will one of these days cease to actually,
literally, jump and shriek for joy.

"The Best Year of Her Life" by Gerald Locklin, from Men of Our Time. © University of Georgia Press, 1992. Reprinted with permission

Just Try!

Gnostics on Trial

by Linda Gregg

Let us make the test. Say God wants you
to be unhappy. That there is no good.
That there are horrors in store for us
if we do manage to move toward Him.
Say you keep Art in its place, not too high.
And that everything, even eternity, is measurable.
Look at the photographs of the dead,
both natural (one by one) and unnatural
in masses. All tangled. You know about that.
And can put Beauty in its place. Not too high,
and passing. Make love our search for unhappiness,
which is His plan to help us.
Disregard that afternoon breeze from the Aegean
on a body almost asleep in the shuttered room.
Ignore melons, and talking with friends.
Try to keep from rejoicing. Try
to keep from happiness. Just try.

 

"Gnostics on Trial" by Linda Gregg, from Too Bright To See and Alma. © Graywolf Press, 2001. Reprinted with permission.

Poem on Why We're Here

Why I'm Here by Jacqueline Berger Because my mother was on a date with a man in the band, and my father, thinking she was alone, asked her to dance. And because, years earlier, my father dug a foxhole but his buddy sick with the flu, asked him for it, so he dug another for himself. In the night the first hole was shelled. I'm here because my mother was twenty-seven and in the '50s that was old to still be single. And because my father wouldn't work on weapons, though he was an atomic engineer. My mother, having gone to Berkeley, liked that. My father liked that she didn't eat like a bird when he took her to the best restaurant in L.A. The rest of the reasons are long gone. One decides to get dressed, go out, though she'd rather stay home, but no, melancholy must be battled through, so the skirt, the cinched belt, the shoes, and a life is changed. I'm here because Jews were hated so my grandparents left their villages, came to America, married one who could cook, one whose brother had a business, married longing and disappointment and secured in this way the future. It's good to treasure the gift, but good to see that it wasn't really meant for you. The feeling that it couldn't have been otherwise is just a feeling. My family around the patio table in July. I've taken over the barbequing that used to be my father's job, ask him how many coals, though I know how many. We've been gathering here for years, so I believe we will go on forever. It's right to praise the random, the tiny god of probability that brought us here, to praise not meaning, but feeling, the still-warm sky at dusk, the light that lingers and the night that when it comes is gentle.   "Why I'm Here" by Jacqueline Berger, from The Gift That Arrives Broken. © Autumn House Press, 2010. Reprinted with permission

Life and Death

It's the anniversary of the death of Kurt Cobain, the front man of the influential alternative band Nirvana, who shot and killed himself in the guesthouse of his home in Seattle, Washington (1994). He was 27.

In the note he left, he wrote: "I still can't get over the frustration, the guilt and empathy I have for everyone. There's good in all of us and I think I simply love people too much."

Personal Growth

Are You Worthy?

Love yourself just the way you are.

Published: April 4, 2011

By Esther and Jerry Hicks

Your positive emotions connect you to source.

Abraham speaks on the subject of our ideas of self-worth and our feelings about our actions:
If you will pay attention to your emotions, they will help you find the appropriateness of your behavior, and you will come to understand the worthiness that is at the core of you. It is not necessary, or even possible, to pinpoint the turning point when humans stopped believing in their value and worthiness. It has been gradual erosion caused by the disallowance of Connection with Source because of the comparison of human experience in search of the one “right” answer or the one “right” behavior. And now, a feeling of unworthiness runs rampant on your planet, and much of human thought is directed toward lack, which only promotes more disallowance of alignment with Source and with love and with Well-Being.
You are here in your physical bodies as extensions of Source Energy, experiencing specific contrast and coming to specific new decisions about the goodness of life, and every time your experience poses a question to you—an equivalent answer is born in the experience of Source. Every time your experience poses a problem to you—an equivalent solution is born in the experience of Source. And so, because of your willingness to live and explore and experience contrast, you are giving birth to constant new rockets of desire—and All-That-Is expands because of what you are living.
When it becomes your dominant intention to find good-feeling thoughts, then you become one who is most often a Vibrational Match to the Source within you, and the good feeling that will then be usually present within you is your indication that you are fulfilling your reason for being and that you are continuing to keep up with the expansion of your own Being.
Every experience causes you to expand, and your positive emotion is your indication that you are keeping up with that new expansion. Negative emotion is your indication that the greater part of you has moved to an expanded place—but you are holding back. And so, by paying attention to the way you feel, and by continually reaching for the best-feeling thoughts you can find, you will establish a rhythm of alignment that will help you immediately realize when you are straying from the goodness that you have become.
It is our absolute promise to you that you will never be able to take action that is contrary to the joyful, loving, God-Source Being within you without feeling very strong negative emotion. . . . There are many people who are completely out of alignment with the Source within them, who stand in condemnation of others while asserting their claim on righteousness. But the anger that burns within them is evidence of their disallowance of the very rightness they are making claim to. Anger and hatred and condemnation are not symbols of alignment with God—but indicators of misalignment with that which you call God.
Some would say, “Then the feeling of guilt that I have must mean that I am doing something evil or wrong.” But we want you to understand that your negative emotion simply means that the thought that is vibrating within you does not match the Vibration of your Source. Source continues to love you. When you do not love you, you feel the discord.
If we were standing in your physical shoes and we were contemplating an action that caused negative emotion, we would not proceed with the action until we had resolved the negative emotion. We would make sure that we had come into alignment with Source before proceeding. By feeling for the improved thought, in time, and usually in a short time, you will feel the harmony of your Source; and you will know the appropriateness of your behavior. We would not look for the long lists of right and wrong, but instead, we would feel for the emotion of alignment with Source.
Negative emotion does not mean that you are not good. It means that your currently active thought does not harmonize with the currently active thoughts of Source on the same subject. Usually, by the time you have spent 50 or 60 or 70 years in your body, you come to the very clear awareness that you cannot please them all. In fact, you usually understand that you cannot please very many of them, because each of them wants something different from you. Attempting to guide yourself through the approval of others is futile and painful. But you may trust your inner Guidance. In fact, it is really the only thing that you can trust, because it holds the complete understanding of who-you-really-are, who-you-have-become, and where you stand in Vibrational relationship with that expanded Being.
When you understand your relationship with the Source within you and you are aware of your own Emotional Guidance System—which continually indicates your Vibrational relationship with Source—it will not be possible for you to stray from the wholeness and goodness and the worthiness that is you.

Esther Hicks is an inspirational speaker and author. She co-authored eight books with her husband, Jerry Hicks. Together, they have presented Law of Attraction workshops for Abraham-Hicks Publications in up to 60 cities per year since 1987. Visit: http://www.abraham-hicks.com/lawofattractionsource/index.php.

Quotes for the Day

 "Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it;
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it." ~ Goethe

"To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts." ~ Thoreau

"Inside you there's an artist you don't know about... Say yes quickly, if you know, if you've known it from before the beginning of the universe." ~ Rumi

"Knowledge of what you love somehow comes to you; you don't have to read nor analyze nor study. If you love a thing enough, knowledge of it seeps into you, with particulars more real than any chart can furnish." ~ Jessamyn West

May the warm winds of Heaven
Blow softly upon your house.
May the Great Spirit
Bless all who enter there.
May your Mocassins
Make happy tracks in many snows,
and may the Rainbow
Always touch your shoulder.

Cherokee Blessing

North American Indian Nation

Friends are the Angels that help you fly.

~ Julia VeRost

Do you want me to tell you
something really subversive?
Love is everything it's cracked up to be.
That's why people are so cynical about it.
It really is worth fighting for,
being brave for and risking everything for.

Erica Jong

American Author and Teacher

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

~ Oscar Wilde

We are made for goodness. We are made for love. We are made for friendliness. We are made for togetherness. We are made for all of the beautiful things that you and I know. We are made to tell the world that there are no outsiders. All are welcome: black, white, red, yellow, rich, poor, educated, not educated, male, female, gay, straight, all, all, all. We all belong to this family, this human family, God's family.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu

South African Activist and Nobel Peace Prize Recipient

Fear less, hope more; whine less, breathe more; talk less, say more; hate less, love more; and all good things are yours.

~ Swedish Proverb

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. ~ Oscar Wilde

"They say a person needs just three things to be truly happy in this world: someone to love, something to do, and something to hope for."

Tom Bodett

The Guest House, poem by Rumi

To know we must begin with solitude. It all comes from there. From the perspective of solitude we become sensitive to the pressure of our conditioning.

- Nisargadatta

The trees, the flowers, the plants grow in silence. The stars, the sun, the moon move in silence.  Silence gives us a new perspective.

- Mother Teresa

What you get by reaching your destination
is not nearly as important
as what you will become
by reaching your destination.

Zig Ziglar

American Author, Salesman and Inspirational Speaker

The Guest House

You begin by letting thoughts flow and watching them. The very observation slows down the

mind till it stops altogether. Once the mind is quiet, keep it quiet.

- Nisargadatta

Mindfulness meditation is simply stopping in this moment and seeing, clearly.

- Jon Kabat-Zinn

In every moment you are either creating suffering for yourself and others or you are not.

- Phillip Moffitt

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep.

You must ask for what you really want. Don’t go back to sleep.

People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open. Don’t go back to sleep.

- Rumi

“I don’t know” is the only true statement the mind can ever make.

- Nisargadatta

“Know who you are. Live your life according to that. Forgive yourself. Forgive others.”

- Dipa Ma

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

William Stafford, 1914-1993

American Poet and Pacifist

What are we here for, if not to help one another?
Surely, we didn't come all this way to be comfortable
We didn't travel across so much time and space
To impress our neighbors with our fancy cars.
And we're certainly not here to sit on the sidelines
And watch the world go by on our big screen tv's...
So what are we here for, if not to help one another?

 

Ron Atchison

The Mayor of Inspiration Peak

Everywhere I look I see myself. There I go: that bald man, this angry child, that fearful cat, that cool stone, that bubbling brook, that worm struggling for its life, that bird desperate to feed her hungry babies, that one trapped in his rage, this one anxious but fearful of finding out why. Hardly strangers! Empathy is the life of the soul, I think, because the soul that allows us to see the one in the other is the soul that finds joy.

Claudia Michele

More Quotes About 'Myself'  The Tipping Point

Flowers... are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1844

One can live
   magnificently
     in this world
   if one knows how to work
       and how to love.

Leo Tolstoy, 1828-1910

Russian Novelist and Social Reformer

Love is, above all, the gift of oneself.

~ Jean Anouilh

For money you can have everything it is said. No, that is not true. You can buy food, but not appetite; medicine, but not health; soft beds, but not sleep; knowledge but not intelligence; glitter, but not comfort; fun, but not pleasure; acquaintances, but not friendship; servants, but not faithfulness; grey hair, but not honor; quiet days, but not peace. The shell of all things you can get for money. But not the kernel. That cannot be had for money.

Arne Garborg, 1851-1924

Norwegian Author and Journalist

Very often a change of self is needed more than a change of scene.

~ A. C. Benson

You've got a lot of choices. If getting out of bed in the morning is a chore and you're not smiling on a regular basis, try another choice.

Steven D. Woodhull
"The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged
by the way its animals are treated”.
Mahatma Ghandi

My imagination can picture no fairer happiness than to continue living for art.

~ Clara Schumann

"In the end, it's not going to matter how many breaths you took, but how many moments took your breath away "

(Shing Xiong)

Whatever precautions you take so the photograph will look like this or that, there comes a moment when the photograph surprises you. It is the other’s gaze that wins out and decides.
~Jacques Derrida

Kindness is the sunshine in which virtue grows.

~ Robert Green Ingersoll

The greatness of a nation consists not so much in the number of its people or the extent of its territory as in the extent and justice of its compassion.

— inscription on a memorial in Port Elizabeth, South Africa,
to the thousands of animals that died in the Boer War, 1899-1902

 

Hear our prayer, Lord, for all animals; May they be well fed and well trained and happy. Protect them from hunger and fear and suffering And, we pray, protect specially, dear Lord, The little cat who is the companion of our house.       Keep her safe as she goes abroad       And bring her back to comfort us.

                                              — Russian prayer

“We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.”

~Mother Theresa.