“Iola Pond” - A place I once lived
Weekly Tao Te Ching
Chapter 63
By paying attention to the small step that lies immediately before us, we do our work without strain and stress.
Life is simply living itself as us.
Would-be leaders promise quick and easy ways to fix a world they broke in the first place. But only by staying with the present moment and seeing the difficulties as opportunities will we lift the burdens of the world.
🛎 William Martin’s Website/ His Books📚
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Weekly - Mirabai Starr
Guess what? You’re a mystic. The world has conditioned us to put certain beings on a pedestal and perceive them as embodying a more exalted life than the sometimes bleak version we may be living. But, the definition of a mystic is someone who has a direct encounter with the sacred. That’s you. In your moments of watching the sky and watching TV, eating a delicious meal or changing a diaper, making tea and making love, the sacred and the ordinary are braided together.
The way of the everyday mystic is to weave our humanness into the tapestry of our relationship with the divine. We welcome everything and expand our ability to hold what is. We bow at the feet of reality. Not by turning away from what hurts but by tenderly turning toward it. Heartbreak is part of the path of holiness.
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Weekly - Anthony de Mello
“We were brought up to need people. For what? For acceptance, approval, appreciation, applause - for what they call success. Those are words that do not correspond to reality. They are conventions, things that are invented, but we don't realize that they don't correspond to reality. What is success? It is what one group decided is a good thing. Another group will decide the same thing is bad.”
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Weekly - Alan Watts
“To put is still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet.”
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Weekly - William Paul Young
“What one regards as interruptions are precisely one’s life.” (C. S. Lewis)
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Doodle of the Week (1)
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Weekly - Deng Ming Dao
“Help others for all the times that you have been ignored. Be kind to others, for all the times that you have been scorned.”
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Weekly - Peter Rollins
“There is a deep sense in which we are all ghost towns. We are all haunted by the memory of those we love, those with whom we feel we have unfinished business. While they may no longer be with us, a faint aroma of their presence remains, a presence that haunts us until we make our peace with them and let them go. The problem, however, is that we tend to spend a great deal of energy in attempting to avoid the truth. We construct an image of ourselves that seeks to shield us from a confrontation with our ghosts. Hence we often encounter them only late at night, in the corridors of our dreams.”
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Weekly - Maya Angelou
First best is falling in love. Second best is being in love. Least best is falling out of love. But any of it is better than never having been in love.
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Weekly - Thich Nhat Hanh
"We have to continue to learn. We have to be open. And we have to be ready to release our knowledge in order to come to a higher understanding of reality.”
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Doodle of the Week (2)
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Weekly - Richard Rohr
“Everything has to be understood in opposition to something else. For some dang reason, the ego prefers to make one side better than the other, so we choose. And we decide males are better than females, America is better than Canada, Democrats are better than Republicans. And for most people, once this decision is made, it is amazing the amount of blindness they become capable of. They really don't see what's right in front of them. Once you see this, it's an amazing breakthrough, and that is the starting place for moving away from dualistic thinking.”
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Weekly - Brian D. McLaren
“I have no doubt that Jesus would actually practice the neighborliness he preached rather than following our example of religious supremacy, hostility, fear, isolation, misinformation, exclusion, or demonization.”
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Keith’s Weekly Pick
“A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.”
~Laotzu
"Cranes, Pines, and Bamboo" by Ogata Kōrin (1658-1716)
