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August of another summer, and once again I am drinking the sun
Be still, my soul, and steadfast. Earth and heaven both are still watching though time is draining from the clock and your walk, that was confident and quick, has become slow. So, be slow if you must, but let the heart still play its true part. Love still as once you loved, deeply and without patience. Let God and the world know you are grateful. That the gift has been given.
Maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside each of us.
THREE THINGS TO REMEMBER As long as you’re dancing, you can break the rules. Sometimes breaking the rules is just extending the rules. Sometimes there are no rules.
So let us go on, cheerfully enough, this and every crisping day, though the sun be swinging east, and the ponds be cold and black, and the sweets of the year be doomed.
Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing. And gave it up. And took my old body and went out into the morning, and sang.
Joy is not made to be a crumb.
WE SHAKE WITH JOY We shake with joy, we shake with grief. What a time they have, these two housed as they are in the same body.
And I have become the child of the clouds, and of hope. I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is. I have become older and, cherishing what I have learned, I have become younger.
Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.
Beauty without purpose is beauty without virtue.
believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.
Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.
And consider, always, every day, the determination of the grass to grow despite the unending obstacles.
If God exists he isn’t just churches and mathematics. He’s the forest, He’s the desert. He’s the ice caps, that are dying. He’s the ghetto and the Museum of Fine Arts.
What I want to say is that the past is the past, and the present is what your life is, and you are capable of choosing what that will be,
darling citizen.
Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.
God, rest in my heart and fortify me, take away my hunger for answers,
Lord God, mercy is in your hands, pour me a little. And tenderness too. My need is great. Beauty walks so freely and with such gentleness.
Oh, feed me this day, Holy Spirit, with the fragrance of the fields and the freshness of the oceans which you have made, and help me to hear and to hold in all dearness those exacting and wonderful
words of our Lord Christ Jesus, saying: Follow me.
Another morning and I wake with thirst for the goodness I do not have. I walk out to the pond and all the way God has given us such beautiful lessons.
even silence can feel, to the world, like happiness, like praise,
Eat, drink, be happy. Accept the miracle.
how much honey can the heart stand, I wonder, before it must break?
When loneliness comes stalking, go into the fields, consider the orderliness of the world. Notice something you have never noticed before,
A lifetime isn’t long enough for the beauty of this world and the responsibilities of your life.
Do the stars frighten you by their heaviness and their endless number? Does it bother you, that mercy is so difficult to understand?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
For years and years I struggled just to love my life. And then the butterfly rose, weightless, in the wind. “Don’t love your life too much,” it said, and vanished into the world.
In the book of the Sioux it is written: they have gone away into the earth to hide. Nothing will coax them out again but the people dancing.
To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.
I only say, except as we have loved, All news arrives as from a distant land.
