I want to live with deep intimacy every day of my life. I am guided, sometimes driven, by an ache to take the necessary risks that will let me live close to what is within and around me. And I am sometimes afraid that it will be too much, that I will not have, or be connected to, whatever it takes to be with it all, to bear the exquisite beauty and bone-wrenching sorrow of being fully alive.

~Oriah Mountain Dreamer

I sit in quiet simply to remember how…..

inquiry for today~ this is the day you were meant to have….

this reckoning….

All real living hurts as well as fulfils. Happiness comes when we have lived

and have a respite for sheer forgetting. Happiness, in the vulgar sense, is just a holiday experience.

The life-long happiness lies in being used by life; hurt by life, driven and goaded by life, replenished

and overjoyed with life, fighting for life’s sake.

That is real happiness. In the undergoing, a large part of it is pain.

If a man loves life, and feels the sacredness and mystery of life,

then he knows that life is full of strange and subtle and even conflicting imperatives.

And a wise man learns to recognize the imperatives as they arise — or nearly so — and to obey.

But most men bruise themselves to death trying to fight and overcome their own, new, life-born needs,

life’s ever strange imperatives. The secret of all life is obedience:

obedience to the urge that arises in the soul, the urge that is life itself, urging us to new gestures,

new embraces, new emotions, new combinations, new creations.

~D.H. Lawrence