“I am never lost in the mountains, it is where I find myself”
-Lee Hiller
Category Archives: Sweet Breathing
Love is All There Is
“Eventually you will come to understand that love heals everything, and love is all there is”
– Gary Zukav
Center of Our Being
“May we not neglect the silenceprinted in the center of our being.It will not fail us.”-Thomas Merton
Being Pulled by the Stars Again
“I’m restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.”
-Anais Nin
“We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.”
-Anais Nin
Hidden Presence
“May you know that absence is alive with hidden presence, that nothing is ever lost or forgotten.May the absences in your life grow full of eternal echo.May you sense around you the secret Elsewhere where the presences that have left you dwell.”-John O’Donohue
Joy of Inner Belonging
JOURNEY OF THE SOUL (John O’Donohue)
“One of the qualities that you can develop, particularly in your older years, is a sense of great compassion for yourself. When you visit the wounds within the temple of memory, you should not blame yourself for making bad mistakes that you greatly regret. Sometimes you have grown unexpectedly through these mistakes. Frequently, in a journey of the soul, the most precious moments are the mistakes. They have brought you to a place that you would otherwise have always avoided. You should bring a compassionate mindfulness to your mistakes and wounds. Endeavor to inhabit the rhythm you were in at that time. If you visit this configuration of your soul with forgiveness in your heart, it will fall into place itself. When you forgive yourself, the inner wounds begin to heal. You come in out of the exile of hurt into the joy of inner belonging.”
-John O’Donohue
The Earth Remembered Me
I cannot get enough of Mary Oliver right now… her words are buoying me, reminding me of the earth’s deep sustenance and peace.
The earth does remember me and my heart is full of gratitude. I am deeply embedded in her peaceful embrace today with the rain sweetly softening and nourishing…
Softening and nourishing and sweetening everything including me.
“I thought the earth remembered me,she took me back so tenderly,arranging her dark skirts, her pocketsfull of lichens and seeds.I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,nothing between me and the white fire of the starsbut my thoughts and they floated light as mothsamong the branches of the perfect trees.All night I heard the small kingdomsbreathing around me, the insects,and the birds who do their work in the darkness.All night I rose and fell, as if in water,grappling with a luminous doom. By morningI had vanished at least a dozen times’into something better.”-Mary Oliver
The Leaf’s Song
What Can I Say (by Mary Oliver)
What can I say that I have not said before?
So I’ll say it again.
The leaf has a song in it.
Stone is the face of patience.
Inside the river there is an unfinishable story
and you are somewhere in it
and it will never end until all ends.Take your busy heart to the art museum and the
chamber of commerce
but take it also to the forest.
The song you heard singing in the leaf when you
were a child
is singing still.
I am of years lived, so far, seventy-four,
and the leaf is singing still.-Mary Oliver
Speak, Listen & Learn
“Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.”-Herman Hesse
Love All the Things
How I needed this today – I absorbed these words by David Whythe through every cell, with thankfulness and grace.
THE HOUSE OF BELONGINGI awokethis morningin the gold lightturning this wayand thatthinking fora momentit was onedaylike any other.Butthe veil had gonefrom mydarkened heartandI thoughtit must have been the quietcandlelightthat filled my room,it must have beenthe firsteasy rhythmwith which I breathedmyself to sleep,it must have beenthe prayer I saidspeaking to the othernessof the night.AndI thoughtthis is the good dayyou couldmeet your love,this is the gray daysomeone closeto you could die.This is the dayyou realizehow easily the threadis brokenbetween this worldand the nextand I found myselfsitting upin the quiet pathwayof light,the tawny closegrained cedarburning roundme like fireand all the angelsof this houselyheaven ascendingthrough the firstroof of lightthe sun had made.This is the bright homein which I live,this is whereI askmy friendsto come,this is where I wantto love all the thingsit has taken me so longto learn to love.This is the templeof my adult alonenessand I belongto that alonenessas I belong to my life.There is no houselike the house of belonging.”-David Whyte (The House of Belonging)“There is nothing like waking in a sunlit room with view, but perhaps nothing better than waking in a sunlit room with a view than waking with a writing desk in a sunlit room with a view. And in the case of this poem, waking in a sunlit room with a writing desk and a view after a passing through a very dark passage in life. ‘What shape waits in the seed of you to grow and spread its branches against a future sky? Is it waiting in the fertile sea? In the trees beyond the house? In the life you can imagine for yourself? In the open and lovely white page on the waiting desk?”
-David Whyte
