“”All things love each other. All nature is oriented toward a thou. All beings that are love are in communion with each other.. All beings love each other or feed each other, and are all united in a gigantic process of birth and growth and reproduction and death… All nature is in close touch and interwoven. All nature is in constant embrace. The wind which caresses me and the sun which kisses me, the air which I inhale, and the fish which swims in the water, the distant star and I who behold it: we are all in close touch with one another.”
Ernesto Cardenal

Life… is a place of no-survival, for we all die and all beings die. The question is: Is it also a place of life-before-death and love-before-death? How much love is truly shared? And how much are we part of that love?”

From Christian Mystics by Matthew Fox

“Everything around us is a drop of God’s love: animate and inanimate, plants and beasts, birds and mountains, sea and sunset, and the sky strewn with stars. They are small loves through which we come to Great Love.”

St. Porphyrios of Kasokalyvia (1906 – 1991)

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream..”

Shirley Jackson (1916 – 1965), horror writer, born on this day

Feast Day of St Lucy

“Knock, and He’ll open the door.
Vanish, and He’ll make you shine like
the sun.
Fall, and He’ll raise you to the heavens.
Become nothing and He’ll turn you
into everything.”

Rumi

“Nothing ceases to exist – there is no example of this in nature.. .There is an entire mass of things that cannot rationally explained. There are newborn thoughts that have not yet found form. How foolish to deny the existence of the soul. After all, that a life has begun, that cannot be denied. It is necessary to believe in immortality, insofar as it can be demonstrated that the atoms of life or the spirit of life must continue to exist after the body’s death. But of what does it exist, this characteristic of holding a body together, causing matter to change and develop, this spirit of life? I felt it as a sensual delight that I should become one with – become this earth which is forever radiated by the sun in such a constant ferment and which lives – lives – and which will grow plants from my decaying body – trees and flowers – and the sun will warm them and I will exist in them – and nothing will perish – and that is eternity.”

Edvard Munch (1863 – 1944), painter, born on this day

International Mountain Day

“Well, I have discovered my mountain – its weathers, its airs and lights, its singing burns, its haunted dells, its pinnacles and tarns, its birds and flowers, its snows, its long blue distances. Year by year, I have grown in familiarity with them all.

But if the whole truth of them is to be told as I have found it, I too am involved. I have been the instrument of my own discovering; and to govern the stops of the instrument needs learning too. Thus the senses must be trained and disciplined, the eye to look, the ear to listen, the body must be trained to move with the right harmonies. I can teach my body many skills by which to learn the nature of the mountain. One of the most compelling is quiescence.

A 4 am start leaves plenty of time for these hours of quiescence, and perhaps of sleep, on the summits. One’s body is limber with the sustained rhythm of mounting, and relaxed in the ease that follows the eating of food. One is as tranquil as the stones, rooted far down in their immobility. The soil is no more a part of the earth. If sleep comes at such a moment, its coming is a movement as natural as day. And after – ceasing to be a stone, to be the soil of the earth, opening eyes that have human cognisance behind them upon what one has been so profoundly a part of. That is all.
One has been in.”

From The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd, 1947

“The intellectual, the moral, the religious seem to me all naturally bound up and interlinked together in one great and harmonious whole.”

Ada Lovelace (1815 – 1852), mathematician, born on this day

“The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven…

“Yet he who reigns within himself, and rules
Passions, desires, and fears, is more a king.”

John Milton (1608 – 1674), poet, born on this day

“I put my trust in you, O God, as best as I am able.
May I be strong. May I not be afraid
May all who open their hearts
hear your voice and know your love.
Lead me, teach me, help me to trust.

You are gracious to us, O God
You guide us, you forgive our clumsy ways
You help us prosper.

When I am sad and anxious
I school my heart to trust
I act with integrity and uprightness
And hope to feel your touch in my heart.
May it be so for all the peoples of the earth
Who call you by many names.”

Psalm 25 Trust by Christine Robinson

“Celebration is an active state, an act of expressing reverence or appreciation. To be entertained is a passive state – it is to receive pleasure afforded by an amusing act or a spectacle. Entertainment is a diversion, a distraction of the mind from the preoccupations of daily living. Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one’s actions. Celebration is an act of expressing respect or reverence for that which one needs or honours. In modern usage, the term suggests demonstrations, often public demonstrations, of joy and festivity, such as singing, shouting, speechmaking, feasting, and the like. Yet what I mean is not outward ceremony and public demonstration, but rather inward appreciation, lending spiritual form to everyday acts. Its essence is to call attention to the sublime or solemn aspects of living, to rise above the confines of consumption.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907 – 1972), rabbi, theologian and philosopher, quoted in Fragments of Holiness for Daily Reflection