The year she graduated, her yearbook entry, like many others, said, “Future: Homemaker.” Not an ambitious choice by today’s standards, she knows. Not an impossible one, she thought at the time. Life was like a trip to the Piggly Wiggly, she assumed in those days. You went in with a vague idea of what you wanted, followed the arrows up and down the aisles, and emerged, like everyone else, with a full cart.
–Lisa Koger, “The Retirement Party,” (1990) from In the Stacks
Category Archives: Quotes
Open Up
There is no defense against an open heart and a supple body in dialogue with wildness. Internal strength is an absorption of external landscape. We are informed by beauty, raw and sensual. Through an erotics of place our sensitivity becomes our sensibility.
–Terry Tempest Williams, “Yellowstone: The Erotics of Place,” from An Unspoken Hunger
The basic creative energy of life — life force — bubbles up and courses through all of existence. It can be experienced as open, free, unburdened, full of possibility, energizing. Or this very same energy can be experienced as petty, narrow, stuck, caught. Even though there are so many teachings, so many meditations, so many instructions, the basic point of it all is just to learn to be extremely honest and also wholehearted about what exists in your mind — thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations, the whole thing that adds up to what we call “me” or “I.”
–Pema Chodron, “The Wisdom of No Escape,” from The Wisdom of No Escape
How to Pray for Peace
Applying [the] ancient science of prayer to living in peace, for example, peace would not be created by praying for peace, in the sense of praying for something that we do not have, and wishing it was different. Peace is created by holding those thoughts, feelings, and emotions firmly within us that we would have if we lived in peace. It is the creating of the experience of peace in our inner world that causes it to appear in our outer world.
More Loving
The More Loving One Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.–W. H. Auden
Because Sometimes You Need to Hear This
This is an excerpt from a journal that Henri Nouwen kept during a period of deep depression. It has become a pivotal book in my life.
Avoid All Forms of Self-Rejection
You must avoid not only blaming others but also blaming yourself. You are inclined to blame yourself for the difficulties you experience in relationships. But self-blame is not a form of humility. It is a form of self-rejection in which you ignore or deny your own goodness and beauty.
When a friendship does not blossom, when a word is not received, when a gesture of love is not appreciated, do not blame it on yourself. This is both untrue and hurtful. Every time you reject yourself, you idealize others. You want to be with those whom you consider better, stronger, more intelligent, more gifted than yourself. Thus you make yourself emotionally dependent, leading others to feel unable to fulfill your expectations and causing them to withdraw from you. This makes you blame yourself even more, and you enter a danger spiral of self-rejection and neediness.
Avoid all forms of self-rejection. Acknowledge your limitations, but claim your unique gifts and thereby live as an equal among equals. That will set you free from your obsessive and possessive needs and enable you to give and receive true affection and friendship.
–Henri Nouwen, The Inner Voice of Love
What He Said!
Joe Perez attempted to define his spiritual philosophy and did such an admirable job that I’m compelled to post it. I could not have put it better:
A philosophy of life should keep me grounded in being in the world and in my body and emotions, affirm the value and dignity of life, and encourage living with richness, abundance, and an ethical sensitivity towards others. A rich and abundant life, it seems to me, is one that affirms our individuality, encourages deep, affectionate, and intimate long-term relationships and friendships, and staying interconnected with the pulses and rhythms of nature in joyous and non-destructive ways.
A philosophy of life should have a realistic appraisal of the dark side of human life and the potential for humans to think and act in delusional, destructive, and death-dealing ways. The philosophy must also demand that individuals take responsibility for their own beliefs and actions, and insist that we strive to own our projections of negative attributes, rather than directing our attention to the supposed “evil” of others or directing our attention to endeavours outside of our control.
A philosophy of life should define spirituality as efforts to realize greater self-awareness with the aim of overcoming limiting beliefs and behaviors that keep us from living with inner peace and health of mind, body, and spirit. A philosophy of life should not seek to diminish, sentimentalize, or rationalize the mysterious and awe-inspiring nature of life. And it will avoid providing supposedly certain answers for understanding the mystery of death.
A philosophy of life should invite us to humbly live with an awareness that what immortality is to be found in life may be had by directing our full energy and attention to this life and this world as it presents itself to us, and by honoring with gratitude the memories of the departed and best wisdom traditions of all those on whose shoulders we stand.
The Soul is an Open Letter
To the seer every person’s soul is just like an open letter, but if he were to divulge its secrets his sight would become dimmer every day, because it is a trust given to him by God. Spiritual trust is given to those who can keep that trust and who are able to keep a secret.
–Pir-o-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan
From: A Meditation Theme for Each Day
Selected and arranged by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan
To Have Insight
Intuition can be described as a glimpse of knowledge that one has stored within oneself, that comes at a time when it is needed. It is a disclosure of one’s own spirit that unveils all things. It is by seeing the cause of every fault in oneself that one is able to have insight into human nature.
–Pir-o-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan
From: A Meditation Theme for Each Day
Selected and arranged by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan
The Abode of the Way
From Daily Zen:
Heaven is calm and clear,
Earth is stable and peaceful.
Beings who lose these
Qualities die,
While those who emulate
Them live.
Calm spaciousness is the
House of spiritual light;
Open selflessness is the
Abode of the Way.— Huai-nan-tzu
Don’t Plant Anything But Love
Ghazal (Ode) 916, from Rumi’s “Diwan-e
Shams”When you plant a tree
every leaf that grows will tell you,
what you sow will bear fruit.
So if you have any sense, my friend
don’t plant anything but love,
you show your worth by what you seek.
Water flows to those who want purity
wash you hands of all desires and
come to the table of Love.Do you want me to tell you a secret?
The flowers attract the most beautiful lover
with their sweet smile and scent.
If you let God weave the verse in your poem
people will read it forever.— Translation by Azima Melita Kolin
and Maryam Mafi
“Rumi: Hidden Music”
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, 2001
Words to Ponder #78
The charity that begins at home cannot rest there but draws one inexorably over the threshold and off the porch and down the street and so out and out and out and out into the world which becomes the home wherein charity begins until it becomes possible, in theory at least, to love the whole of creation with the same patience, affection, and amusement one first practiced, in between the pouts and tantrums, with parents, siblings, spouse, and children.
–Nancy Mairs, Ordinary Time (1993)
Words to Ponder #77
Manners indeed are like the cypher in arithmetic — they may not be much in themselves, but they are capable of adding a great deal to the value of everything else.
–Freya Stark, East Is West (1945)
Words to Ponder #76
To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.
–Cynthia Ozick, Trust (1966)
Words to Ponder #75
As a way of ushering in the New Year, here are two quotes for good measure.
Celebratin’ New Year’s Eve is like eatin’ oranges. You got to let go your dignity t’ really enjoy ’em.
–Edna Ferber, Buttered Side Down (1912)
The etiquette question that troubles so many fastidious people New Year’s Day is: How am I ever going to face those people again?
–Judith Martin, Miss Manners’ Guide to Excrutiatingly Correct Behavior (1982)
Happy New Year! See you in 2004.
Words to Ponder #74
Mysticism and creativity have this in common: they require a person to live truthfully at every level of being.
–Marilyn Whiteside, in Journal of Creative Behavior (1981)
Words to Ponder #73
I should think you could be gladder on Monday mornin’ than any other day in the week, because ‘twould be a whole week before you’d have another one!
–Eleanor H. Porter, Pollyanna (1912)
Words to Ponder #72
He prayed as he breathed, forming no words and making no specific requests, only holding in his heart, like broken birds in cupped hands, all those people who were in stress or grief.
–Ellis Peters, A Morbid Taste for Bones (1977)
Words to Ponder #71
It is typical, in America, that a person’s hometown is not the place where he is living now but is the place he left behind.
–Margaret Mead and Rhoda Metraux, A Way of Seeing (1970)
Words to Ponder #70
Being a child is largely a flux of bold and furtive guesswork, fixed ideas continually dislodged by scrambling and tentative revision…. All our energy and cunning go into getting our bearings without letting on that we are ignorant and lost.
–Fernanda Eberstadt, Isaac and His Demons (1991)
Words to Ponder #69
People can say what they like about the eternal verities, love and truth and so on, but nothing’s as eternal as the dishes.
–Margaret Mahy, The Catalogue of the Universe (1985)