Victory

"It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken from you, not by angels or by demons, heaven or hell."

Buddha

Love

"It is love alone that clears the rust from the heart, the mirror of the soul."

Hazrat Inayat Khan

Sacred power

"There is hidden in our heart a wonderful power. It is a divine power, a sacred power, and it can be developed and cherished by keeping our attitude right."

Hazrat Inayat Khan

Kind

"Today I bent the truth to be kind, and I have no regret, for I am far surer of what is kind than I am of what is true."

Robert Brault

Respect & Reverence

"I know to love is to respect.
And reverence is the nature of my love."

Thich Nhat Hanh

Curious

"I am a kind of paranoid in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy."

J.D. Salinger

Alone

Smallness alone wants to be special.

DI

Dignity presides

"Somewhere in us a dignity presides
That is more gracious than the smallness
That fuels us with fear and force,
A dignity that trusts the form a day takes."

John O'Donohue

Awareness

"And if worship is not leading to the fire, if adoration is not leading to LOVE, if the liturgy is not leading to a clearer perception of reality, if God is not leading to life , of what use is Religion? Except to create more division, more fanaticism, more antagonism?
It is not from lack of religion in the ordinary sense of the word that the world is suffering, it is from lack of love , lack of awareness. And love is generated through awareness and through no other way. Understand the obstructions you are putting in the way of love , freedom, and happiness and they will drop. Turn on the light of awareness and the darkness will disappear. Happiness is not something you can acquire, love is not something you produce, love is not something that you have , love is something that has you. You do not have the wind, the sun ,the stars ,the moon ,the rain….You do not posses these things, you surrender to them…."

Anthony De Mello

Awakening

"A sober awakening from false enthusiasm is quite possible and very favorable."

I Ching, R. Wilhelm

A better way

"If everyone would only sweep their own doorstep, the whole world would be clean."

Mother Teresa

Two hands

For Warmth

by Thich Nhat Hanh

I hold my face between my hands

no I am not crying

I hold my face between my hands

to keep my loneliness warm

two hands protecting

two hands nourishing

two hands to prevent

my soul from leaving me

in anger

Thank You Life

for helping us to see
what need be & what need not be.

Energies of Love

"Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness the energies of Love; and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire."

Teilhard de Chardin

Urgent

It does not matter if we do not know
Why there's pain around.
What we need are helping hands,
Not learned views and sound.

when disasters strike - v. v. raman - 2000

A radiance

"The brain speaks through words; the heart in the glance of the eyes; and the soul through a radiance that charges the atmosphere, magnetizing all."

Bowl of Saki, by Hazrat Inayat Khan

Thank you Love

for helping us to be benevolent.

Song for today

Die Schmetterlinge (Butterflies) - Tschotscholossa (1971)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQn_iFYPyvU

Tsho ... tsholoza

It has a song

“A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.”

Maya Angelou

Trusting

"I come back and trust the Buddha within myself."

Thich Nhat Hanh

Present moment, perfect teacher

"…feelings like disappointment, embarrassment, irritation, resentment, anger, jealousy, and fear, instead of being bad news, are actually very clear moments that teach us where it is that we’re holding back. They teach us to perk up and lean in when we feel we’d rather collapse and back away. They’re like messengers that show us, with terrifying clarity, exactly where we’re stuck. This very moment is the perfect teacher, and, lucky for us, it’s with us wherever we are."

Pema Chödrön

Balance

"The wise man should keep the balance between love and power; he should keep the love in his nature ever increasing and expanding, and at the same time strengthen the will so that the heart may not easily be broken."

Bowl of Saki, by Hazrat Inayat Khan

Inventions

"You have invented words like effort, inner, outer, self, and so on, and seek to impose them on reality. Things just happen to be as they are, but we want to build them into a pattern, laid down by the structure of our language. So strong is this habit, that we tend to deny reality to what cannot be verbalized. We just refuse to see that words are mere symbols, related by convention and habit to repeated experiences."

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Deep need

"Our deepest need is for the joy that comes with loving and being loved, with knowing we are of genuine use to others."

Eknath Easwara

Play, laugh & rejoice

Play heals body. Laughter heals mind. Joy heals soul.

"Your body cannot heal without play.
Your mind cannot heal without laughter.
Your soul cannot heal without joy."

Catherine Rippenger Fenwick

Extravagant affections

"We must not deprive ourselves, our loved ones, of the luxury of our extravagant affections."

Mary Gordon

It matters

"I was going to change my shirt, but I changed my mind instead." Pooh

Of a day

"The Inner History of a Day" by John O'Donohue.

We seldom notice how each day is a holy place
Where the eucharist of the ordinary happens,
Transforming our broken fragments
Into an eternal continuity that keeps us.

Somewhere in us a dignity presides
That is more gracious than the smallness
That fuels us with fear and force,
A dignity that trusts the form a day takes.

So at the end of this day, we give thanks
For being betrothed to the unknown
And for the secret work
Through which the mind of the day
And wisdom of the soul become one.

Patient attention

"If I have made any valuable discoveries. it has been owing more to patient attention than to any other talent."

Sir isaac Newton

Nothing special

"Be nothing special."

David K. Reynolds


"It is
what it is
and it is nothing special."

Michael´s saying

So much

"There is so much love and so much hurt in words, but the same is true of silence."

Louis Masson

When disasters strike

When lightning strikes a praying crowd
And the pious burn and die;
When earthquakes bury decent folk
And orphaned children cry;

When sick and old are abandoned too
And people lose their mind:
Try not for these and disasters such
Answers clear to find.

There are times to ask if God indeed
Is fancy or a fact.
There are times at which we need to go
And soon begin to act.

With loss and pain and intense grief
We don't have much to gain,
From arguments on heaven and hell.
They'll all be just in vain.

Let's search and see what we can do
For those who are in need,
How best we can console and heal,
How we can clothe and feed.

It does not matter if we do not know
Why there's pain around.
What we need are helping hands,
Not learned views and sound.

when disasters strike - v. v. raman - 2000

Again

"There is a mystic in every one of us, yearning to play again in the universe."

Matthew Fox

Work

"So meditation is both nothing at all -- because there is no place to go and nothing to do -- and simultaneously the hardest work in the world -- because our mindlessness habit is so strongly developed and resistant to being seen and dismantled through our awareness. And it does require method and technique and effort to develop and refine our capacity for awareness so that it can tame the unruly qualities of the mind that make it at times so opaque and insensate."

Jon Kabat-Zinn


"Love and understanding are not two subjects, they are one."

Thich Nhat Hanh


Only The Love Heals

Light

"To love someone deeply gives you strength.
Being loved by someone deeply gives you courage."

Lao Tzu

Twins

"God and the world are like twins"

Jewish saying

In Praise of the Earth

by John O'Donohue

Let us bless
The imagination of the Earth,
That knew early the patience
To harness the mind of time,
Waited for the seas to warm,
Ready to welcome the emergence
Of things dreaming of voyaging
Among the stillness of land.

And how light knew to nurse
The growth until the face of the Earth
Brightened beneath a vision of color.

When the ages of ice came
And sealed the Earth inside
An endless coma of cold,
The heart of the Earth held hope,
Storing fragments of memory,
Ready for the return of the sun.

Let us thank the Earth
That offers ground for home
And hold our feet firm
To walk in space open
To infinite galaxies.

Let us salute the silence
And certainty of mountains:
Their sublime stillness,
Their dream-filled hearts.

The wonder of a garden
Trusting the first warmth of spring
Until its black infinity of cells
Becomes charged with dream;
Then the silent, slow nurture
Of the seed's self, coaxing it
To trust the act of death.

The humility of the Earth
That transfigures all
That has fallen
Of outlived growth.

The kindness of the Earth,
Opening to receive
Our worn forms
Into the final stillness.

Let us ask forgiveness of the Earth
For all our sins against her:
For our violence and poisonings
Of her beauty.

Let us remember within us
The ancient clay,
Holding the memory of seasons,
The passion of the wind,
The fluency of water,
The warmth of fire,
The quiver-touch of the sun
And shadowed sureness of the moon.

That we may awaken,
To live to the full
The dream of the Earth
Who chose us to emerge
And incarnate its hidden night
In mind, spirit, and light.

Windows or walls

"Words are windows, or they’re walls,
They sentence us, or set us free."

Ruth Bebermaier

Attention

"Emotions respond immediately to the truth of things. They are the most alert form of attention"
James Hillman

"Boredom is lack of attention."
Fritz Perls

"For lack of attention a thousand forms of loveliness elude us every day."
Evelyn Underhill

A word

A word
It acts like music
A word
It acts like water
It acts like wind
A word
Like earth and like fire

Use your word wisely.
It changes the world.

Doris InOma

Silence liberates

Silence Liberates by Sri Chinmoy

There lived a pious man in Bengal, India. Every day a Sanskrit scholar would come to his house and read aloud a few soul-stirring spiritual teachings from the Gita, the Upanishads and the Vedas. The master of the house was an aspirant. He would listen most devotedly to these discourses.

The family had a bird called Krishna. Krishna was kept in a cage in the room where the discourses were given. It also listened to these talks.

One day the bird spoke to its master, "Could you please tell me what benefit you actually derive from these spiritual talks?"

The master answered, "O Krishna, you don't seem to understand that these spiritual talks will liberate me, free me from bondage!

The bird said: "You have been listening to these discourses for the last few years, but I don't see any change in you. Would you kindly ask your teacher what will actually happen to you?" On the following day the master of the house said to his teacher, "Guru, I have been listening to your spiritual talks for the last ten years. Is it not true that I will get liberation and freedom?"

The teacher kept quiet. He scratched his head, pondered over the question, but found no reply. He just remained unhappily silent for about an hour and then left the house.

The master of the house was stunned. His guru could not give an answer to the bird's question, but the bird found an answer. The Answer.

From that day on, the bird stopped eating. It stopped even its usual chirping. It became absolutely silent. The master and his family placed food inside the cage every day, but the bird would not touch anything.

One day the master looked at the bird, and seeing no sign of life in it, took it gently out of the cage. With a tearful heart, he placed his Krishna on the floor. In a twinkling, the bird flew away into the infinite freedom of the sky!

The bird taught. Its master and his guru learned:

Silence Liberates

To be well grounded

"Come out of the circle of time and into the circle of love."

Rumi

Step by step

"We cannot live in a world that is not our own, in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a home. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening, to use our own voice, to see our own light."

Hildegard of Bingen, 11th C.

Wonderful memory

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGzqbEeVWhs

Impossible Dream

Impossible dream, dead dream...there is no warm ice cream.

Dreams are happy or not.

One wants us to dream the happy dream

Thought of La Mancha recently, was there with Love years ago. He is blessed and so am I, everyone is. Looked at photos, Don Quixote and what I wrote: "Windmills, God´s smile, rainbow warrior in black,

Love is Light

Love Is Light Still

To see anything

To see colours or darkness

Light Is

TYL

DI

Sussja

"Rabbi Sussja spoke before the end: In the next world people will not ask me, "Why weren't you Moses?" They will ask me, "Why weren't you Sussja?"

Martin Bubber, Chassidic Stories

Kissing the earth

"Walk as if you were kissing the earth with your feet, as if you were massaging the earth."

Thich Nhat Hanh

Simply listen & honor

We become healthy, when we are heard, by someone who has no need to agree or disagree, but benevolence.

TYL, DI

Sound

Little boy singing - I´m yours
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkHTsc9PU2A

from S. & Y. (Danke)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I'm Yours - Jason Mraz
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErMWX--UJZ4

Footprints on the moon

"Never tell me the sky's the limit when there are footprints on the moon."
(biiig footprints)

Unknown

Going too far

"Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go."

T.S. Eliot

Ah "I-know-mind"

"When I hear somebody sigh, "Life is hard," I am always tempted to ask, "Compared to what?"

Sydney J. Harris

Activity

Patience is a quiet activity of consciousness that can be ignored but not turned off.

Doris InOma, TYL

The earth is still

"The earth is still. It does not act of itself but is constantly receptive to the influences of heaven. Thus its life becomes inexhaustible and eternal."

I Ching, R. Wilhelm

Understand

"If you understand everything, you must be misinformed."

Zen saying

Confidence - capacity

"As is our confidence, so is our capacity."

William Hazlitt

Better than doubt

Butter Speculatius, there are better friends than Doubt.
Doubt is a mask of fear. Doubt is a companion of fear.
Better than doubt is to know that I just do not know.

Universe communes

The Universe communes with us.
We commune with the Universe.
May we ask the right questions.
And then be trusting & patient.
May we fulfill..the Present!

Thank You Life

Breathing

"Breathing in: To praise . . .
Breathing out: is the whole thing."

Rainer Maria Rilke

Silence

"The experience of silence is now so rare that we must guard it and treasure it. This is especially true of shared silence."

Gunilla Norris


"Only in the oasis of silence can we drink deeply from the inner cup of wisdom."

Sue Patton Thoele

Teaching ourselves

"We were born to be fearless."

"We do not inherit fear from our ancestors. It is not an instinctive reaction, nor is it necesary for survival. Caution, yes; recognition of potential danger, yes; but not fear. We have to be taught how to be afraid."

"It doesn't matter if we have self-doubt, or painful memories, or fear of anything whatsoever. We learned how to act one way; we can teach ourselves how to act differently. Self-doubt can be erased by teaching ourselves - over and over and over again - to trust in ourselves and/or in a higher power."

"To trust, not that nothing bad will ever happen, but that whatever happens we will be able to cope, and that more good things will happen than bad. How do we know? We don't. The future is never fixed, but now is the moment of power. What we do and how we think in the present moment may not control the future, but it has more influence on the future than anything else. There is no fear without self-doubt. Self-doubt begins with a decision. It can end with a decision, too."

Serge Kahili King

Aloha TYL

Laugh & cry

"May I laugh all my laughter, may I cry all my tears. May I love the rain as deeply as the sun when it clears."

Scott Kalechstein

Attentiveness

"Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul."

Nicholas Malebranche

Widening rings

I live my life in widening rings
That spread themselves over all
I may not complete the last of these things
But to journey is my call

I circle round God, the most ancient form
My journey a thousand years long
Yet still I don't know: Am I a falcon? a storm?
Or part of a much larger song.

Rainer Maria Rilke transl. by Mark Wutka

Be

"If I held you any closer I would be on the other side of you."

Groucho Marx

Ocean

"all scriptures before nature's manuscript are as little pools of water before the ocean."

Hazrat Inayat Khan

No claim for truth

"The goodbye to every claim for truth is the advent of responsibility for the world. Only after the goodbye to objectivity comes compassion and connectedness with man and creation into being."

Heinz von Foerster

Forgive yourself

"If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete."

Siddhārtha Gautama


"...forgive yourself as easily as you forgive others."

Peace Pilgrim

Ways of love

"We have to unlearn the thinking of the world, in order to learn the ways of love"

ZenCharm

Still

Remember: It´s Still Christmas

Well

"Well," said Pooh, "what I like best," and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn't know what it was called.

A.A. Milne

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


"She thinks that happiness is a mat that sits on her doorway."

Rob Thomas

Happy New Year!