"Whatever is newly born needs a name and when we are more and more  welcomed by the silence, naming becomes our job. We have to notice, to bless with attention the beasts before us, both the rough and the smooth."

~ John Tarrant

To live is to be
uncertain.
Certainty comes
at the end.

~ Erica Jong

"How do I understand that I am enough for the mere fact that I exist?"

~ Jennifer Moon

"Gratitude encounters interruptions as invitations, deepens and expands horizons for re-envisioning reality, and cultivates depth perception for how we see other people."

~ Laura Russell

What happens when, just for a moment, we stay with our pain, our fear, our doubt, our discomfort, our grief, our broken heart, even our numbness, without trying to change it, or fix it, or numb ourselves to it, or get rid of it in any way? What happens when, even when we feel like leaving, abandoning the moment for the promise of a future salvation, we stay, sitting with the raw, unfiltered, boundlessly alive life-energy that is simply trying to express right now?

~ Jeff Foster

"The only way I've found to try to keep my balance in a globe permanently on the move—and ever more cluttered with stuff—is to step out of the world on a regular basis, and to step back from my life, so as to see what's truly inside them. Otherwise, I can feel I'm standing two inches away from a vast and constantly shifting canvas, terminally unable to make out the larger picture."

~ Pico Iyer

"Bad things are going to happen."

Transcendence isn't an escape plan, but an engagement strategy: liberation through intimacy. Transcending the self and the world begins with deeply accepting the self and the world. It grows naturally out of countless direct experiences of life as it is being lived and an intimate familiarity with how its composition constantly fluctuates.

And yet, though we strain
against the deadening grip
of daily necessity,
I sense there is this mystery:

All life is being lived.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

May you awaken to the mystery of being here and enter
the quiet immensity of your own presence.
May you have joy and peace in the temple of your senses.

~ John O'Donohue

Everyone is doing their best, even when it seems like they are doing their worst.
Everyone is dreaming or having a nightmare, battling with pain you may never understand.
You don't have to condone their actions.
You may not be able to wake them up.
You don't have to like what happened.
Simply let go of the illusion
that it could have been any different.

~ Jeff Foster

"Because I write poetry, I can sit down and write things that I don’t have proof of, or even know the end of the sentence. I can feel around and nobody gets hurt, right? It’s a poem. And so I wrote this poem out of grief and an attempt to make it very plain to myself, the argument that I’d come up with." 
 

~ Jennifer Michael Hecht

"Truth clears away / So many souvenirs. The shelves come clean." ~ Clive James

It’s okay to feel, deeply.
It’s okay to not know. 
It’s okay to play 
on the raw edge of life.

Mindfulness practice leads to better decision making due to the skills it develops over time.  It’s about paying attention to ordinary experience differently.

Whether we are giving or receiving care, we come face-to-face with time’s elasticity – how it seems to speed up and slow down.

"The process of finding the truth may not be a process by which we feel increasingly better and better. It may be a process by which we look at things honestly, sincerely, truthfully, and that may or may not be an easy thing to do."

~ Adyashanti

Five strategies for reducing travel stress -- especially around the holidays -- by Allan Lokos, from "Peace While Traveling? Not Impossible," by Rachel Lee Harris, The New York Times, December 15, 2011.

isn’t there some value in motivating ourselves through unpleasant tasks and activities by imagining the relief that will follow? Is there really anything wrong with taking a bit of comfort during a tedious meeting or lecture on Wednesday morning by imagining how much fun we’re planning to have on Friday evening?