Terry Tempest Williams: This Is My Living Faith

This is my living faith, an active faith, a faith of verbs: to question, explore, experiment, experience, walk, run, dance, play, eat, love, learn, dare, taste, touch, smell, listen, speak, write, read, draw, provoke, emote, scream, sin, repent, cry, kneel, pray, bow, rise, stand, look, laugh, cajole, create, confront, confound, walk back, walk forward, circle, hide, and seek.

― Terry Tempest Williams, Leap

David Richo: Once We Love Ourselves

Once we love ourselves

people no longer look good to us unless

they are good for us.

- David Richo, How To Be An Adult In Relationships:

The Five Keys To Mindful Loving

Holiday Blessings: When Love Awakens In Your Life

 Whatever your religious or spiritual beliefs, let us each come together 

with the shared experience of that which weaves through and connects us all --

Love.

With love and warmest of holiday blessings ~ Molly

When love awakens in your life, in the night of your heart, it is like the dawn breaking within you. Where before there was anonymity, now there is intimacy; where before there was fear, now there is courage; where before in your life there was awkwardness, now there is a rhythm of grace and gracefulness; where before you used to be jagged, now you are elegant and in rhythm with your self. When love awakens in your life, it is like a rebirth, a new beginning.
 

― John O'Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

photo by David Lloyd Glover

John O'Donohue: A Blessing for Equilibrium

 

Like the joy of the sea coming home to shore,
May the relief of laughter rinse through your soul.

As the wind loves to call things to dance,
May your gravity by lightened by grace.

Like the dignity of moonlight restoring the earth,
May your thoughts incline with reverence and respect.

As water takes whatever shape it is in,
So free may you be about who you become.

As silence smiles on the other side of what's said,
May your sense of irony bring perspective.

As time remains free of all that it frames,
May your mind stay clear of all it names.

May your prayer of listening deepen enough
to hear in the depths the laughter of God.

― John O'Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings

 

Hafiz: The Subject Tonight Is Love

The subject tonight is Love

And for tomorrow night as well,

As a matter of fact

I know of no better topic

For us to discuss

Until we all

Die!

- Hafiz 
 

Hafiz: It Felt Love

It Felt Love

 

 How 
Did the rose 
Ever open its heart 

And give to this world 
All its 
Beauty? 

It felt the encouragement of light 
Against its 
Being, 

Otherwise, 
We all remain 

Too 

Frightened.

- from The Gift, Poems by Hafiz

 

Tara Brach: Our Wounds and Our Awakening

The poet Rumi saw clearly the relationship between our wounds 

and our awakening. He counseled, “Don’t turn away. Keep your gaze 

on the bandaged place. That’s where the light enters you.” 

― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With The Heart Of A Buddha

 

Mary Oliver: Morning Poem

Every morning 
the world 
is created. 
Under the orange

 

sticks of the sun 
the heaped 
ashes of the night 
turn into leaves again

 

and fasten themselves to the high branches— 
and the ponds appear 
like black cloth 
on which are painted islands

 

of summer lilies. 
If it is your nature 
to be happy 
you will swim away along the soft trails

 

for hours, your imagination 
alighting everywhere. 
And if your spirit 
carries within it

 

the thorn 
that is heavier than lead— 
if it's all you can do 
to keep on trudging—

 

there is still 
somewhere deep within you 
a beast shouting that the earth 
is exactly what it wanted—

 

each pond with its blazing lilies 
is a prayer heard and answered 
lavishly, 
every morning,

 

whether or not 
you have ever dared to be happy, 
whether or not 
you have ever dared to pray.

— Mary Oliver

  

A Celebration of Winter Solstice

There is a tendency to want to hurry from autumn to spring, to avoid the long dark days that winter brings. Many people do not like constant days bereft of light and months filled with colder temperatures. They struggle with the bleakness of land and the emptiness of trees. Their eyes and hearts seek color. Their spirits tire of tasting the endless gray skies. There is great rejoicing in the thought that light and warmth will soon be filling more and more of each new day.

 

But winter darkness has a positive side to it. As we gather to celebrate the first turn from winter to spring, we are invited to recognize and honor the beauty in the often unwanted season of winter. Let us invite our hearts to be glad for the courage winter proclaims. Let us be grateful for the wisdom winter brings in teaching us about the need for withdrawal as an essential part of renewal. Let us also encourage our spirits as Earth prepares to come forth from this time of withdrawal into a season filled with light.

 

The winter solstice celebrates the return of hope to our land as our planet experiences the first slow turn toward greater daylight. Soon we will welcome the return of the sun and the coming of springtime. As we do so, let us remember and embrace the positive, enriching aspects of winter's darkness. Pause now to sit in silence in the darkness of this space. Let this space be a safe enclosure of creative gestation for you.

 Joyce Rupp and Macrina Wiederkehr, from The Circle of Life

Starhawk: How Do We Love All the Children?

Amory Lovins says the primary design criteria he uses is the question “How do we love all the children?” Not just our children, not just the ones who look like us or who have resources, not just the human children but the young of birds and salmon and redwood trees. When we love all the children, when that love is truly sacred to us in the sense of being most important, then we have to take action in the world to enact that love. We are called to make the earth a place where all the children can thrive.

 
― Starhawk, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religions of the Great Goddess