“If we view ALL living things as a gift of GOD, created for our pleasure and enjoyment, to love and respect, to treasure and to guard for our next generations, and look after our own self with the same loving care-the future will be something Not To Be Feared, but treasured.
Our todays depend on our yesterdays and our tomorrows depend on our todays.
Have you loved yourself today?
Have you admired and thanked the flowers, treasured the birds or gazed up at the mountains and felt a sense of awe?
The best medicine of all the simplest medicine. “Let’s all learn self-love, self-forgiveness, compassion and understanding.” I took to saying at the end of workshops. It was a summary of all my knowledge and experience. “Then we’ll be able to give those gifts to others. By healing the person, we can heal Mother Earth.””

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

“When we can allow things to be just what they are and show up for reality with open hands, clear eyes, and a compassionate heart, a space opens in which there is room for both the fire of desire and also equanimity.”

Mirabai Starr

“I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny, invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man’s pride.”

William James, Father of American Psychology, who died on this day in 1910

“It’s not complicated. Your body rooted to the earth, where it is, as it is, its very weight a sacrament, gravity the Mother’s love, pressing you to her breast, and all around the flower of your flesh, the kiss of space. Invisible planets caress you. Inhalation rises through the hollow stem of your spine, effortlessly threading the soil to the center of the galaxy, while your exhalation pours stars into the loam. Dissolve the world into boundless blue. Now let it be recreated by a gentle kneading, the rise and fall of your chest. Your soul, this breathing body. Your body, awareness. You are the sacrament, you are the wedding. The bridal chamber is your heart. It’s not complicated. This is the highest meditation: being as you Are.”

Fred Lamotte

“Be ours a religion which, like sunshine, goes everywhere; its temple, all space; its shrine, the good heart; its creed, all truth; its ritual, works of love; its profession of faith, divine living.”

Theodore Parker, Unitarian minister and abolitionist, born on this day in 1810

On Meditating, Sort Of, by Mary Oliver,

“Meditation, so I’ve heard, is best accomplished
if you entertain a certain strict posture.
Frankly, I prefer just to lounge under a tree.
So why should I think I could ever be successful?

Some days I fall asleep, or land in that
even better place — half asleep —
where the world, spring, summer, autumn, winter —
flies through my mind in its
hardy ascent and its uncompromising descent.

So I just lie like that, while distance and time
reveal their true attitudes: they never
heard of me, and never will, or ever need to.

Of course I wake up finally
thinking, how wonderful to be who I am,
made out of earth and water,
my own thoughts, my own fingerprints —
all that glorious, temporary stuff.”

Inventory by Dorothy Parker, born on this day in 1893,

“Four be the things I am wiser to know:
Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe.
Four be the things I’d been better without:
Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt.
Three be the things I shall never attain:
Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.
Three be the things I shall have till I die:
Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.”

“Seekers are people of faith even if they do not belong to a particular religion. Faith in this sense is deeper than one’s belief system. Belief systems belong to the level of pluralism; faith to the level of unity. Faith is constitutive of human nature itself. It is openness to Ultimate Mystery. It is the acceptance of authentic living with all its creativity and the acceptance of dying with its potential for a greater fullness of life. The experience of the transcendent dimension in oneself is an expression of this fundamental faith at work.”

Thomas Keating

“Silence is the gift of music
when its closing cadence dies
in hush of adoration.

Silence is fulfilment of desire
that ends in asking
to find true prayer unspoken.

Silence is the benediction
that stills the day’s debate
by speaking the Eternal Word.”

Marjorie Easton

“If we were to walk in the woods and a spring appeared just when we became thirsty, we would call it a miracle. And if on a second walk, if we became thirsty at just that point again, and again the spring appeared, we would remark on the coincidence. But if that spring were there always, we would take it for granted and cease to notice it. Yet is that not more miraculous still.”

Baal Shem Tov