“In every breath
if you’re the centre
of your own desires
you’ll lose the grace
of your beloved

But if in every breath
you blow away
your self claim
the ecstasy of love
will soon arrive

In every breath
if you’re the centre
of your own thoughts
the sadness of autumn
will fall on you

but if in every breath
you strip naked
just like a winter
the joy of spring
will grow from within

All your impatience
comes from the push
for gain of patience
let go of the effort
and peace will arrive

All your unfulfilled desires
are from your greed
for gain of fulfilments
let go of them all
and they will be sent as gifts

Fall in love with
the agony of love
not the ecstasy
then the beloved
will fall in love with you”

Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, from Rumi: Fountain of Fire. Translated from the original Persian by Nader Khalili.

“Sometimes if we don’t do anything, we help more than if we do a lot. We call that non-action. It’s like the calm person on a small boat in a storm. That person doesn’t have to do much, just be themselves, and the situation can change.”

From Peace Is This Moment by Thich Nhat Hanh

Lughnasadh / Lammas Eve

“A bird’s song calms your nervous system. Breathing in soil helps you to feel safe and release serotonin within. Medicines and wild foods grow at our feet. The air holds anti-inflammatory bacteria. Our oxygen is a continuous reciprocal relationship with the rooted ones and the rivers and seas.. Death is alchemised into life by the fungi and insects. If you listen, look and feel the land’s true stories you will see how each moment you are held by this life, by this earth. The wild isn’t the nonsensical, chaotic, dirty, cruel place. It is kind, reciprocal and nourishing, and it has woven you into belonging since your first breath.”

Brigit Anna McNeill

International Day of Friendship

“A friend is someone who helps you up when you’re down, and if they can’t, they lay down beside you and listen.”

From Winnie the Pooh by A. A. Milne

“To have humility is to experience reality, not in relation to ourselves, but in its sacred independence. It is to see, judge, and act from the point of rest in ourselves. Then, how much disappears, and all that remains falls into place.

In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable.”

From Markings by Dag Hammarskjöld (1905 – 1961), UN Secretary-General and Unitarian, born on this day

“What we call the highest and the lowest in nature are both equally perfect. A willow bush is as beautiful as the human form divine.”

Beatrix Potter (1866 – 1943), writer, artist and Unitarian, born on this day

“The awareness of being a child of God tends to stabilize the ego and results in a new courage, fearlessness, and power. I have seen it happen again and again.

When I was a youngster, this was drilled into me by my grandmother. The idea was given to her by a certain slave minister who, on occasion, held secret religious meetings with his fellow slaves. How everything in me quivered with the pulsing tremor of raw energy when, in her recital, she would come to the triumphant climax of the minister: “You – you are not n*ggers. You – you are not slaves. You are God’s children.” This established for them the ground of personal dignity, so that a profound sense of personal worth could absorb the fear reaction. This alone is not enough, but without it, nothing else is of value.”

Howard Thurman (1899 – 1981), quoted in Christian Mystics by Matthew Fox

“It’s dark because you are trying too hard.
Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly.
Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply.
Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humourless little prig.
Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me.
When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic.
No rhetoric, no tremolos,
no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell.
And of course, no theology, no metaphysics.
Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light.

So throw away your baggage and go forward.
There are quick-sands all about you, sucking at your feet,
trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair.
That’s why you must walk so lightly.
Lightly my darling,
on tiptoes and no luggage,
not even a sponge bag,
completely unencumbered.”

From Island by Aldous Huxley (1894 – 1963), born on this day

“In my view, all that is necessary for faith is the belief that by doing our best we shall come nearer to success and that success in our aims (the improvement of the lot of mankind, present and future) is worth attaining.”

Rosalind Franklin (1920 – 1958), chemist, whose work contributed to the discovery of the structure of DNA, born on this day

“The more one does and sees and feels, the more one is able to do, and the more genuine may be one’s appreciation of fundamental things like home and love, and understanding companionship.”

Amelia Earhart, aviator, born on this day in 1897, disappeared over the Pacific Ocean on 2 July 1937