The practice of resting, of stopping, is crucial. If we cannot rest, it is because we have not stopped. W have continued to run. We began to run a long time ago. We even continue to run in our sleep. We think that happiness and well-being aren’t possible in the heart and the now. That belief is inherent in us. We have received the seed of that belief from our parents and our grandparents. They struggled all their lives and believed that happiness was only possible in the future. That’s why when we were children, we already had the habit of running. We believed that happiness was something to seek in the future. But the teaching of the Buddha is that you can be happy right here, right now. The conditions for your well-being and happiness are found in the present moment.

~Thich Nhat Hanh

whispers of longings become our siren’s call…..

inquiry for today~   when love becomes your touchstone, notice how connected you feel……

being true to this calling

If you put your hands in the dirt, and then use them, unwashed, to bring food to your mouth, you’re likely to take in a microbe called Mycobacterium vaccae, which triggers in your brain a burst of serotonin, a neurotransmitter that will lift your mood and sharpen your thinking. So the smell of thawing soil in spring rouses us from our winter slumber, children make mud pies, and gardeners eagerly dig.

What humans have learned about our world and ourselves is no doubt dwarfed by what we don’t yet know, and may never know. And the more we decipher, the more we realize that everything is connected to everything else, near and distant, living and nonliving, as mystics have long testified. This connectedness, this grand communion, is what I have come to think of as soul- not my soul, as if I were a being apart, but the soul of Being itself, the whole of things.

I have abandoned the religious creed in which I first encountered words like soul, sacred, holy, reverence, divinity, and awe, but I refuse to abandon the words themselves. For they point to what is of ultimate value, what claims our deepest respect. I wish to say that Earth is holy, precious, surpassingly beautiful and bountiful, deserving of our utmost care. Although our survival is at stake, an appeal to fear won’t inspire such care, because fear is exhausting and selfish. Only love will.

Think of how you love whatever you passionately love: music, flowers, painting, poetry, baseball, language, dance, the first frog calls of spring, the return of sandhill cranes, the sound of rain on a metal roof, the full moon in a clear night sky, the splash of the Milky Way, every atom and whisper of the one with whom you share your bed. That is how we must love the world.

~Scott Russell Sanders