“To learn the scriptures is easy,
to live them, hard.
The search for the Real
is no simple matter.
Deep in my looking,
the last words vanished.
Joyous and silent,
the waking that met me there.”

Lalla Ded (1320 – 1392), Kashmiri poet and mystic

“No matter how bad things become, they will eventually get better. In the end, the innate desire of all people for truth, justice and human understanding must triumph over ignorance and despair. So if the Chinese oppressed us, it could only strengthen us.”

From Freedom in Exile by the Dalai Lama, who fled to India and was granted political asylum there on this day in 1959

“in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman

whistles far and wee

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it’s
spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer
old balloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it’s
spring
and
the

            goat-footed

balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee”

E.E. Cummings

“Water soundless, a wandering stream skirts bamboo forest. And west of Bamboo, wildflowers delight in gentle spring.
Facing all this under thatch eaves, I sit through the day not a single bird. No song. Mountain quiet goes deeper still.”

Wang An-Shih (1021 – 1086)

“Hope is about the possible; despair is about the impossible.”

Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274)

Hope in a Prison of Despair by Evelyn de Morgan

“The interdependence of all living things is something we often take for granted. It goes unnoticed in the daily round, so we forget that what happens in one place has its effect upon another place. It is only now that deforestation has been revealed to be a terrible legacy to our children that we begin to appreciate the contribution of trees to the life of our planet.

At this time of year, the spring rains have an important function in the revivification of the land, especially around the full moon. Trees are able to draw up the rainfall from their roots to their highest branches so that the canopy can become green again. As the leaves emerge from their buds, we notice a corresponding unfurling of spirit in ourselves as we respond with gladness to the annual regreening of the world.

As those leaves unfurl, they exude oxygen, so vital for our planet’s atmosphere and our own living breath. The carbon dioxide that human beings exhale is absorbed and transformed by trees. Our lives and those of the trees are beautifully and aptly intertwined as we share and replenish the atmosphere for each other. Our breath and the exhalation of trees have a symbiotic link that is necessary to our very life.

Verdancy of spirit comes when the sap rises in our souls, when we return to a state of thankfulness and welcome the spring with joy.”

Caitlin Matthews

“With maturity comes the wish to economize – to be more simple. Maturity is the period when one finds the just measure.”

Béla Bartok, composer and Unitarian, born on this day in 1881

“My peace, O my brothers, is in solitude,
And my Beloved is with me always,
For His love I can find no substitute.”

Rabia al-Adawiyya (717 – 801)

“No longer conscious of my movement, I discovered a new unity with nature. I had found a new source of power and beauty, a source I never dreamt existed.”

Roger Bannister (born on this day in 1929) on running the first sub four-minute mile

INTERNATIONAL DAY OF WATER

“Let us bless the humility of water,
Always willing to take the shape
Of whatever otherness holds it,
The buoyancy of water,
Stronger than the deadening,
Downward drag of gravity,
The innocence of water,
Flowing forth, without thought
Of what awaits it,
The refreshment of water,
Dissolving the crystals of thirst.
Water: voice of grief,
Cry of love,
In the flowing tear.
Water: vehicle and idiom
Of all the inner voyaging
That keeps us alive.
Blessed be water,
Our first mother.”

John O’Donohue