In this hectic world, may your day be gentle.
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Author: Majella
A lifelong learner with a love of words and the power of language.
The First Notes Of Summer
The cicadas sang louder and yet louder.
The sun did not rise, it overflowed.
— Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
Summer feels as if it’s arriving. Two warm days in a row, cicadas in full voice — the season suddenly here.
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The Quiet of Trees
Seek out a tree and let it teach you stillness.
Eckhart Tolle
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The Power Of Words
Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind (via exhaled-spirals)
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Live The Questions
I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet
Rilke’s words remind me of my impatience — my need for clarity, for certainty, for knowing how to live forward. But these things take time. Looking back now, I see that if I had allowed more to unfold in its own way, the road to here might have been gentler. Some of the answers might have come more quietly, and with fewer struggles.
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Man’s Search For Meaning
There are books that stay with us because they open something quiet and essential within us. Viktor Frankl writes of the one freedom no circumstance can take away: the freedom to choose our attitude, our way. He reminds us that when life cannot be changed, we are invited to change ourselves; and, that in extraordinary situations, our most human reactions are natural.
Man’s Search for Meaning is a book I return to often. Each reading is a reminder of what matters — presence, and the work of shaping our inner world. One of my all time favourite books.
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.
Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behaviour.
Victor Frankl
My copy is a much older edition but I couldn’t find an image for it.
May I Meet This Too With Kindness
One method I learned from my teacher, Diana Winston, is elegantly simple. In your usual meditation, simply add a few words to each time you notice your attention wandering: May I meet this too with kindness.
Whatever comes up, repeat this phrase of loving-kindness toward your thoughts, feelings, or sensations. Do it as many times as you need to, and then guide your attention back to the anchor of the breath once again …as you move through the day, try repeating the same phrase – “may I meet this too with kindness” – whenever you notice you are being hard on yourself, judgmental toward yourself, or unkind in any way. Often, learning to meet yourself with kindness can feel like the medicine your heart and inner life yearns for, especially if you’re used to meeting yourself with all kinds of judgment and past conditioning.
Amanda Gilbert – Meditation Teacher, Author and Professor of Mindfulness
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Curating Quietude 