Hope brings stress, because it creates desires and expectations. Some expectations and desires make me happy, but mainly they make me tense. I start to strive for something and meanwhile, I forget to live. Just feel what happens in your body when you start a sentence with “I hope thatÂ…”

If you hang on to hope, you’ll always have to wait: for the money that will make you happy, for the compliment that will make your day, for the hereafter that will bring you peace. Waiting makes you passive and keeps you from creating joy in your life.

Hoping for a better future means rejecting what is here, and this means you also reject a part of yourself. You resist something and thus push it away. You suppress yourself and keep yourself small.

–Tijn Touber, “Abandon all hope,” Ode Magazine, May 2005

Cynicism is an adjustment of expectations down. We expect the bad to continue or get worse.

When we understand cynicism from an ecological view, we realize that cynicism is an effective way to excuse ourselves from responsibility. The deeper our cynicism, the more we project responsibility for our world on other people. It works for anyone who wants to enjoy tangible and immediate relief from responsibility. So, the question is: What’s the opposite of cynicism and what kind of people seek its opposite?

My initial reaction is that the opposite isn’t a kind of hope that plays the same role of projecting responsibility on other people and conditions.

–Jack, JackZen

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

–Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love

Today this quote resonates, yet two days ago it would not have. Contrary to my general demeanor on this site (of being a rather “put-together” person), it was a difficult ten days, especially at work. I returned to my job last week, feeling enervated and disconnected from my it, my staff, the company. There had been a reorganization a few weeks ago resulting in a change of managers for me. Then I was out of touch for a couple of weeks with family concerns. Yesterday I realized that I was not only sad about my father-in-law, but about the loss of a supervisor whom I like and admire greatly (she was promoted). I also struggled with grief over my loss of motivation. In the face of death, the value of everything changed. To expend great effort for anything felt tinged with folly.

However, yesterday I met with my new manager and we talked about all this. I told her I needed support and motivation, and we decided on some ways to achieve this. I’ve been taking it easier with my students this week, and they are responding well.

I’m always amazed how my attitude shapes my life. The only thing that changed yesterday was that I experienced the relief of talking about my feelings and situation and received the empathy and connection I needed. Today I did the same tasks as always but felt much cheerier.

Spring is in full form here in California. The air is laced with the scent of roses, citrus blooms, and other flowering plants. I’ve been tending my garden and battling the snails. My flowers are blooming. I put air in my bike tires and took a ride today (which my legs are complaining about now). The past two nights I’ve cooked some complex and yummy dinners, and I’ve savored the activity. This has all helped restore balance.

I had a mammogram today — the usual annual experience of being prodded and squeezed between glass plates. The woman who did the exam was vivacious, bright, and friendly. She put me at ease as we talked about husbands, boyfriends, and so on. It was the most fun I’ve ever had getting a mammogram. The words “most fun” and “mammogram” have likely never been used in this way before! The technician was joyful and had a beautiful spirit, which put my morning on the right track.

I think about my father-in-law as well. It’s not a constant sorrow, but one that surfaces and submerges. So there you have it. Joy, sorrow. Life, death. In breath, out breath.

All is well.

By being attentive, by learning to listen (or recovering the natural capacity to listen which cannot be learned any more than breathing), we can find ourself engulfed in such happiness that it cannot be explained; the happiness of being at one with everything in that hidden ground of Love for which there can be no explanations.

–Thomas Merton

I found this moving, and oddly comforting.

We placed a linen cloth over her face, and tied the bonnet on, and then she was a bundled white human-shaped figure: no features, no distinguishing marks, only legs and arms, a torso and a head, a small still white figure. A little awkwardly we lifted her and placed her atop the white sheet we had laid over the plain pine box, and wrapped the sheet over her, and then, suddenly, out of the blue, I was shaking with silent tears. I leaned on the edge of the coffin of a woman I had never known, and understood what we had done for her, and wept and wept.

–Rachel Barenblat

Do read the entire, tender story of her first experience with taharah at her blog, Velveteen Rabbi.

“Where is the dwelling of God?” This was the question with which the Rabbi of Kotzk surprised a number of learned men who happened to be visiting him. They laughed at him: “What a thing to ask! Is not the whole world full of his glory?” Then he answered his own question: “God dwells wherever people let him in.”

–Martin Buber

Ooo, I want to read this! Must restrain myself from rushing out to purchase it, though.

Rubble is the ground on which our deepest friendships are built. If you haven’t already, you will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and you never completely get over the loss of a deeply beloved person. But this is also good news. The person lives forever, in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through, and you learn to dance with the banged-up heart. You dance to the absurdities of life; you dance to the minuet of old friendships.

–Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

[via Shirl, a friend with whom I dance]

I was thinking how amazing it was that the world contained so many lives. Out in these streets people were embroiled in a thousand matters, money problems, love problems, school problems. People were falling in love, getting married, going to drug rehab, learning how to ice-skate, getting bifocals, studying for exams, trying on clothes, getting their hair cut, and getting born. And in some houses people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered. What really mattered in life, what gave it weight, was death.

–Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

If I die, survive me with such sheer force that you waken the furies of the pallid and the cold, from south to south lift your indelible eyes, from sun to sun dream through your singing mouth. I don’t want your laughter or your steps to waver, I don’t want my heritage of joy to die. Don’t call up my person. I am absent. Live in my absence as if in a house. Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air Absence is a house so transparent that I, lifeless, will see you, living, and if you suffer, my love, I will die again. – Pablo Neruda

[via whiskeyriver]