The same stream of life
that runs through the world
runs through my veins.
- Rabindranath Tagore
We are so achievement-oriented that we often surge right by the true value of relating to what's before us, because we think that accomplishing things will complete us, when it is experiencing life that will.
Yet, if we can outlast the urge to judge everything we encounter, a miracle starts to surround us in which painting, music, poetry, running water, flowers, wind through trees, open vistas - all touch and draw out their counterpart that lives quietly within us.
The nineteenth-century poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called this inner terrain "inscape." And just as no landscape can flourish without sun and water, our inscape must be irrigated and drenched with many forms of life if we are to thrive.
So, when feeling suck or disconnected from the miracle of life, as will happen to us all, try to listen, see, feel, and just take in. Try to let the energies of life stir their counterparts within you.
In order to be whole, suspend your criticism. For life is not a matter of taste, but of awakening, not a matter of finding things pleasing or disturbing, but of finding things completing, not a matter of liking or disliking, but of opening the geography of one's soul.
- Mark Nepo,
The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want
by Being Present to the Life You Have
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