If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things,
This is the best season of your life.
Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.
In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime.
But all these times and places and occasions are now and here.
God himself culminates in the present moment,
and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages.
The past is already gone, the future is not yet here. There’s only one moment for you to live, and that is the present moment.
If you are depressed, you live in the past.
If you are anxious, you live in the future.
If you are at peace, you live in the present
You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen.
Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary.
The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice,
it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
The Real Work (Wendell Berry)
It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
The Journey (Mary Oliver)
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice-
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do-
determined to save
the only life you could save.
