Womb by Rachel Barenblat,

“At the bend of the river
there’s a pond we don’t call
the womb of the world, though we could —
this patch of deep water reflecting
tall purple loosestrife.
The pond is a womb, the world
is a womb. Emerge glorious
and dripping, emerge like Life
radiant and new. Then listen
to cricket-song’s rise and fall —
the One Who speaks us into being
the One Who enwombs all creation
is murmuring blessing over
and over, telling us who we are.”

“Do you know what you are?
You are a manuscript of a divine letter.
You are a mirror reflecting a noble face.
This universe is not outside of you.
Look inside yourself;
everything that you want,
you are already that.”

Rumi

“Love is the very foundation, beauty and fulfilment of life. If we dive deep enough into ourselves, we will find that the one thread of universal love ties all beings together. As this awareness dawns within us, peace alone will reign.

Once we develop the attitude that “I am love, the embodiment of love,” then we need not wander in search of peace for peace will come in search of us.

Love sustains everything!”

Mata Amritanandamayi, also known as Amma

“Every time I meet a tree, if I am truly awake, I stand in awe before it. I listen to its voice, a silent sermon moving me to my depths, touching my heart, and stirring within my soul a yearning to give my all.

Nature’s music is never over; her silences are pauses, not conclusions.

The love of nature is a passion for those in whom it once lodges. It can never be quenched. It cannot change. It is a furious, burning, physical greed, as well as a state of mystical exaltation. It will have its own.

No accident of environment or circumstance need cut us off from nature. … It does not matter how shut in we are. Opportunity for wide experience is of small account in this as in other things; it is depth that brings understanding and life.

Green is the fresh emblem of well -founded hopes. In blue the spirit can wander, but in green it can rest.”

Mary Webb

From The Cure at Troy by Seamus Heaney, who died on this day in 2013,

“Human beings suffer,
they torture one another,
they get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
can fully right a wrong
inflicted or endured.

The innocent in gaols
beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker’s father
stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
faints at the funeral home.

History says, Don’t hope
on this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
the longed for tidal wave
of justice can rise up,
and hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
on the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
and cures and healing wells.

Call the miracle self-healing:
The utter self-revealing
double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
the outcry and the birth-cry
of new life at its term.”

“Spirit of beauty, whose revelations come to us in sun and rain, dawn and dusk,
In all flowing, circling, shining and living things,
And in the quiet at the heart of all motion,
Be within us this day as the wonder and welcome of the living soul.
Awaken our senses and quicken our minds
That we may partake, and be inwardly fed and renewed.
May we give our hearts to beauty,
As the harp gives itself to the hand.
May we turn towards the true and the good,
As buds and flowers are uplifted to the sun.”

Joseph Trapp, Unitarian Universalist minister (1899 – 1992)

“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