The Feast of All Saints
All of the places of our lives are sanctuaries; some of them just happen to have steeples.
And all of the people in our lives are saints; it is just that some of them have day jobs and most will never have feast days named for them
Robert Benson, Between the Dreaming and the Coming true
Halloween, the ancient feast of Samhain, believed to be a time when the boundary between the living and the dead thinned,
Faeries, come take me out of this dull world,
For I would ride with you
upon the wind,
Run on the top of the dishevelled tide,
And dance
upon the mountains like a flame.
William Butler Yeats, The Land of Heart’s Desire
Every day is a new creation.
This day, fresh and unspoiled, is God’s gift. Its beauty isn’t in flawless skies, but in the invitation it carries: to receive love, to offer kindness, to notice the holy shimmering just beneath the surface of the now. That potential makes every day inherently beautiful
Henri Nouwen, Bread for the Journey
Awareness is not the same as thinking.
Awareness is the vast, spacious soul place that doesn’t think.
It watches the thinking. So don’t take your thinking seriously.
Richard Rohr, Franciscan Mysticism
There are lots of ways of being miserable,’
says a character in a short story by Edith Wharton,
‘but there’s only one way of being comfortable,
and that is to stop running around after happiness.‘
Oliver Burkeman,The Antidote: Happiness for People who cannot stand Positive thinking
No one imagines that a symphony is supposed to improve in quality as it goes along, or that the whole object of playing it is to reach the finale. The point of music is discovered in every moment of playing and listening to it.
It is the same, I feel, with the greater part of our lives, and if we are unduly absorbed in improving them we may forget altogether to live them.
Alan Watts
