Our full attention or presence is our most valuable currency. Where, when, and whom we offer it to illustrates what we most value or love. I thought of Mary Oliver’s ‘instructions for life’ today, when I saw these buds transforming in the April sunshine.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
Compassionate of heart
Clear in word
Gracious in awareness
Courageous in thought
Generous in love
~John O’Donohue
The expanding sunlight meets chilly temperatures today, as winter bows to spring’s promise of green, then blossom. Soon the daffodils and tulips will flag winter’s surrender, and the season of rebirth and renewal will have fully arrived. Are you ready, too?
The heart is where we integrate what we know in our minds with what we know in our bones, the place where our knowledge can become more fully human.
Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word “love” as a state of being, or a state of grace–not the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.
~James Baldwin
We are all wounded inside in some way or other. We all carry unhappiness within us
for some reason or other. Which is why we need a little gentleness and healing from
one another. Healing in words, healing beyond words. Like gestures. Warm gestures.
Like friendship, which will always be a mystery. Like a smile, which someone
described as the shortest distance between two people. ~Ben Okri
