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May the light of your soul guide you. May the light of your soul bless the work you do with the secret love and warmth of your heart. May you see in what you do the beauty of your own soul. May the sacredness of your work bring healing, light, and renewal to those who work with you and to those who see and receive your work. May your work never weary you. May it release within you wellsprings of refreshment, inspiration, and excitement. May you be present in what you do. May you never become lost in the bland absences. May the day never burden. May dawn find you awake and alert, approaching
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The Celtic cross is a beautiful symbol. The circle around the beams of the cross rescues the loneliness where the two lines of pain intersect and seems to calm and console their forsaken linearity.
spring is the youngest season. Winter is the oldest season. Winter was there from the very beginning. It reigned amidst the silence and bleakness of nature for hundreds of millions of years before vegetation. Spring is a youthful season; it comes forth in a rush of life and promise, hope and possibility. At the heart of the spring, there is a great inner longing. It is the time when desire and memory stir toward each other.
Everything that happens to us, happens to us in and through time. Time is the force that brings every new experience to the door of your heart. All that happens to you is controlled and determined by time.
Time opens up and opens out the mystery of the soul.
Transience is the force of time that makes a ghost of every experience.
To visit the temple of memory is not merely to journey back to the past; it is rather to awaken and integrate everything that happens to you.
One of the faces of death is negativity. In every person there is some wound of negativity; this is like a blister on your life. You can be quite destructive toward yourself, even when times are good. Some people are having wonderful lives right now, but they do not actually realize it.
Negativity is an addiction to the bleak shadow that lingers around every human form.
Fear is like fog; it spreads everywhere and falsifies the shape of everything.
Hans Georg Gadamer, a wonderful German philosopher, has a lovely phrase: “A horizon is something toward which we journey, but it is also something that journeys along with us.”
The eternal comes to us mainly in terms of nothingness and emptiness.
Nothingness is the sister of possibility. It makes an urgent space for that which is new, surprising, and unexpected. When you feel nothingness and emptiness gnawing at your life, there is no need to despair. This is a call from your soul, awakening your life to new possibilities.
we are always waiting for the great moment of gathering or belonging, and it always evades us. We are haunted with a deep sense of absence. There is something missing from our lives. We always expect it to be filled by a definite person, object, or project. We are desperate to fill this emptiness, but the soul tells us, if we listen to it, that this absence can never be filled.
It is a strange and magical fact to be here, walking around in a body, to have a whole world within you and a world at your fingertips outside you. It is an immense privilege, and it is incredible that humans manage to forget the miracle of being here.
Often our loneliness and isolation are the result of a failure of spiritual imagination. We forget that there is no such thing as empty space. All space is full of presence,
God is the greatest circle of all, the largest embrace in the universe, which holds visible and invisible, temporal and eternal, as one.
I believe that this is what eternal life means: It is a life where all that we seek—goodness, unity, beauty, truth, and love—are no longer distant from us but are now completely present with us.
There is a lovely poem by R. S. Thomas on the notion of eternity. It is deliberately minimal in form but very powerful: I think that maybe I will be a little surer of being a little nearer. That’s all. Eternity is in the understanding that that little is more than enough.
