Right there in the uncertainty of everyday chaos is our own wisdom mind.
Pema Chodron
Live simply that others may live.
Mahatma Ghandi
The wisest mind has something yet to learn.
George Santayana
Use it up, wear it out. Make it do or do without.
Old New England Maxim
Clear mind is like the full moon in the sky. Sometimes clouds come and cover it, but the moon is always behind them. Clouds go away, then the moon shines brightly. So don't worry about clear mind: it is always there. When thinking comes, behind it is clear mind. When thinking goes, there is only clear mind. Thinking comes and goes, comes and goes. You must not be attached to the coming or the going.
Zen Master Seung Sahn
I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief.
Gerry Spence
Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.
Alan Watts
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
A path with heart will include our unique gifts and creativity. The outer expression of our heart may be to write books, to build buildings, to create ways for people to serve one another. It may be to teach or to garden, to serve food or play music. Whatever we choose, the creations of our life must be grounded in our hearts. Our love is the source of all energy to create and connect. If we act without a connection to the heart, even the greatest things in our life can become dried up, meaningless, or barren.
Jack Kornfield
In the sweet territory of silence we touch the mystery. It's the place of reflection and contemplation, and it's the place where we can connect with the deep knowing, to the deep wisdom way.
Angeles Arrien
Silence is the shaft we descend to the depths of contemplation. Silence is the vehicle that takes us to the innermost centre of our being which is the place for all authentic practice.
Sister Elaine MacInnes, Light Sitting in Light
The song of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all. To hear even a few notes of it, you must first live here for a long time, and then you must know the speech of hills and rivers. Then of a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over the rimrocks , sit quietly and listen for a wolf to howl, and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it - a vast pulsing harmony - its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries.
Aldo Leopold
We rarely hear the inward music, but we’re all dancing to it nevertheless.
Jalâluddîn Rumi
Those of us who have been initiated into the Underworld at any age have served as high priestesses of the Darkness and have earned the freedom to travel at will from the light to the dark. If we choose, we can go back there to support our spiritual sisters as they learn the ways of the Dark without having to endure our own painful initiation again.
Victoria Weinstein,Persephone's Underworld Journey
Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.
Buddha
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I can hear the sizzle of newborn stars, and know anything of meaning, of the fierce magic emerging here. I am witness to flexible eternity, the evolving past, and I know we will live forever, as dust or breath in the face of stars, in the shifting pattern of winds.
Joy Harjo, Secrets From the Centre of the World
This is the essence of the grandmother's lightness. The lightness of aging gracefully, of aging fully, and letting the passions of a fully-lived life burn you right through to ash.
Marian McCain, Elderwoman
She has entered me, this Goddess of living and dying things, this Goddess of the African dust, of the long awaited rain, of the deep song of the night, this Goddess of ancestral longing and ancient breathings. She flows through me now, like the red soil of the Umfolozi Valley flows through me; like the red rich tide of all womankind, inevitable and cyclical, flows from between parted legs. Her blood, the eternal fertility, having the wisdom to leave unborn all that could have been but is not yet needed. I am not afraid.
Ann Mortifee, When the Rains Come
Practically speaking, a life that is vowed to simplicity, appropriate boldness, good humor, gratitude, unstinting work and play, and lots of walking brings us close to the actual existing world and its wholeness.
Gary Snyder
True peace comes with the discovery that we can respect the seasons of life with a spacious and undefended heart. In it we learn to trust, to rest in the truth of the way things are, to willingly accept the measure of joy and sorrow we are given.
Jack Kornfield, The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness, and Peace
The time of darkness is past. The winter solstice brings the victory of light. After decay comes the turning point. The powerful light which was banished returns. There is movement, but it is not brought about by force. The idea of return is based upon the course of nature. The movement is cyclical, and the course completes itself. Therefore it is not necessary to hasten anything artificially. Everything comes of itself at the appointed time. This is the meaning of heaven and earth.
The I Ching, (Fu, The Turning Point)
The earth which sustains humanity must not be injured, it must not be destroyed.
Hildegarde of Bingen
The real miracle is not to walk on water or in thin air, but to walk on the earth.
Thich Nhat Hanh
... to make blossoming possible, we must embrace our losses. We must face the reality of a brokenness of heart that is both personal and of the world. Surprisingly, that is when we discover that the pain is the mantra: the very suffering of the world can be what repeatedly calls us back to the imperative of its healing. If we can persist and sit with the reality, not running from it, a music may eventually be heard. The fetters of destructive control loosen. Life’s dance resurges. And there is joy in spite of everything.
Alastair McIntosh, Soil and Soul
To dance then, is to pray, to meditate, to enter into communion with the larger dance, which is the universe.
Jean Houston
Dance, trance and the ecstasy of life. There's nothing the human species needs to experience more today.
Matthew Fox
The first shamanic task is to free the body to experience the power of being.
Gabrielle Roth
Rhythm touches deep chords of resonance in our ancestral memories; whenever we connect with other human beings through rhythmic music, dance, or drumming, the memory of humankind as one family arises.
Reinhard Flatischler
This page updated on February 1, 2003
