Divine Movement

There is

Nothing

But

Divine movement

In

This

World.

~ Hafiz

Your Favorite Chair

May you have a favorite chair.
You know, the one you visit
when the voice in the recording says,
"Imagine you are sitting in your
favorite place in the whole world."

The spot where you nestle in with a sigh,
and you instantly soften and settle.
The place where you can breathe again,
where you remember that you are alive,
and remember that all is well with the world.

Your chair of contentment.

Your sanctuary, your refuge.

The place where you become you again.
Where you remember to be happy and thankful.
Where you remember that you are blessed.

~ C. C.

Wonderful Moment

Maybe we, too, are living like dead people. We move about life in our own corpse beacause we are not touching life in depth. We live a kind of artificial life, with lots of plans, lots of worries and anger. Never are we able to establish ourselves in the here and now and live our lives deeply. We have to wake up! We have to make it possible for the moment of awareness to manifest. This is the practice will save us - this is the revolution.

Has the most wonderful moment of your life already happened? Ask yourself that question. Most of us will answer that it hasn't happened yet, but that it could happen at any time. No matter how old we are, we tend to feel that the most wonderful moment of our life has not happened yet. We fear maybe it's too late, but we are still hoping. But the truth is, if we continue to live in forgetfulness - that is, without the presence of mindfulness - the moment is never going to happen.

The teaching of the Buddha tells you clearly and plainly to make this the most magnificent and wonderful moment of your life. This present moment must become the most wonderful moment in your life. All you need to transform this present moment into a wonderful one is freedom. All you need to do is free yourself from your worries and preoccupations about the past, the future.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Right, or Kind?

You can practice being right,

or practice being kind.

~ Anne Lamott

Love Where You Are

We do only three things in life: we sit, we stand, and we lie horizontal. That's about it. Everything else is a story.

Life is not difficult; it's your thinking that makes it difficult. That's where you happiness or misery comes from.

There are two ways to sit or stand or lie horizontal: you can do it comfortably, or you can do it with stress. If you don't love where you are, I invite you to question your beliefs.

~ Byron Katie

God's Joy

Don’t grieve, anything you lose
comes round in another form.
The child weaned from mother’s milk
Now drinks wine and honey mixed.

God’s joy moves
From unmarked box
To unmarked box,
From cell to cell.

As rainwater,
Down into flowerbed.
As roses,
Up from ground.

Now it looks like a plate of rice and fish,
Now a cliff covered with vines,
Now a horse being saddled.

It hides within all these,
Til one day
It cracks them open.

~ Rumi

The Gift of an Ordinary Day

Our photo albums from those days are full of pictures of birthday cakes and holiday celebrations, vacation trips and family adventures, piano recitals and baseball games. But the memories I find myself sifting through the past to find, the ones that I would now give anything to relive, are the ones that no one ever thought to photograph, the ones that came and went as softly as a breeze on a summer afternoon.

No picture, or home video, or diary entry can begin to capture the nubbly texture, subtle tones, and secret shades of a family's life as it is from one hour, or day, or season, to the next. It has taken a while, but I know it now - the most wonderful gift we had, the gift I've finally learned to cherish above all else, was the gift of all those perfectly ordinary days.

~ Katrina Kenison