It is important to focus on the reality of cycles.
Good follows bad and bad follows good. Life is a series of ups and downs. It is important not to identify with the ups and downs of life; rather we must learn how to step outside ourselves and just notice.
We must not be attached to the good; we must not be depressed by the bad.
The ups and downs are just part of the flow of life.
Susan Jeffers, Embracing Uncertainty
I see a hundred insects moving across the air, rising and falling. Chipped notes of birdsong descend from the trees, tuneful and broken; the notes pile about me like leaves. Why do these molded clouds make themselves overhead innocently changing, trailing their flat blue shadows up and down everything, and passing, and gone?
Ladies and gentlemen!
You are given insects, and birdsong, and a replenishing series of clouds.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
Caroline asked him what message should be given to future generations.
Tell them to stop and enlarge moments throughout their days to become aware of the mysteries and miracles of creation all around them –
the movement of a squirrel, the sound of a bird, the pattern of a leaf, changing patterns of light, the sun, the rain, the stars, dawn and sunset.
Tell them we are not ourselves without everything and everyone else.
Thomas Berry as reported in Carolyn W. Toben’s book Recovering a Sense of the Sacred: Conversations with Thomas Berry
The first forty years of life furnish the text, while the remaining thirty supply the commentary;
and without the commentary we are unable to understand aright the true sense and coherence of the text, together with the moral it contains.
Schopenhauer Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life, Chapter 6,
Wherever you go,
you meet a part of your story.
Eudora Welty, 1909–2001, American short-story writer and novelist
In the monastery of your heart
you have a temple
where all Buddhas unite
Jetsun Milarepa, 1052 – 1135
