Martha Graham – There is a vitality

There is a vitality, a life-force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time this expression is unique. and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it! It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.

Martha Graham

Margaret Mead – Never Doubt

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.

Margaret Mead

Keri Smith – Life is a constantly morphing thing

Life is a constantly morphing thing. Just when you think you know where it’s all headed you wake up the next morning to a completely different view. The landscape has changed along with the seasons, but the trees are the same trees, only your view has changed. So you try to cling to the old things that used to comfort you, clinging to the familiar, but they provide little or no solace. The fears do not subside. At this point we have no choice but to surrender to the unknown.

that is where the real beauty lies.

It is not in the knowing, the familiar, the expected. But in the embracing of the unknown. a willingness to walk down a new path and to trust that everything is as it should be. perfect. as it is.

Schopenhauer said,”When you look back on your life, it looks as though it were a plot, but when you are into it, it’s a mess: just one surprise after another. Then, later, you see it was perfect.”

Sometimes there are little glimpses of the perfection, amidst the mess. It is at those times we feel blessed beyond measure.

Keri Smith from The Wish Jar Journal

Ask Calvin’s Dad

Calvin’s dad answering questions, quoted from various Calvin and Hobbes books by Bill Watterson.

Q. Why does the sun set?
A. It’s because hot air rises. The sun’s hot in the middle of the day, so it rises high in the sky. In the evening then, it cools down and sets.
Q. Why does it go from east to west?
A. Solar wind.

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Mary Jean Irion – Then Let Me Go to Nature

Then let me go to nature as I came from nature
to the great cycles of creativity that I have dimly, so dimly, understood . . .
When you commit my ashes to the ground . . .commit them!
For then one cycle of individual life will be over,
and a unit of nature will be separated into its minute parts
for participation in new ways,
as atoms rearrange in the mysterious slow seething of the world.
Just as I have come from infinity, so I return to infinity,
between which events, for a little time, I came to celebrate that miracle
which I could never fathom.
Therefore, when it is time . . . yield me dying,
yield me dead in this tradition-
-earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust–
in sure and certain hope that the dust which bloomed briefly
in my loving will bloom again, bloom again in the renewal of species,
each meaning according to its kind with not even a single day of the mayfly
scorned; that this dust will bloom again and again and always again
until the seas run dry and the mountains disappear.

Mary Jean Irion, 1970
from “Yes, World: A Mosaic of Meditation”
available from www.alibris.com

Robert Henri – You Can Do Anything You Want To Do

You can do anything you want to do. What is rare is this actual wanting to do a certain thing; wanting it so much that you are practically blind to all other things, that nothing else will satisfy you…. I know I have said a lot when I say ‘You can do anything you want to do.’ But I mean it… Blunder ahead with your personal view… The real work of art is the result of a magnificent struggle.

Painter Robert Henri from his book The Art Spirit

Only Love!

There are only 4 questions of value in life, Don Octavio:

What is sacred?
Of What is the spirit made?
What is worth Living for? and
What is worth Dying for?

The answer to each is the same: only Love!

Don Juan DeMarco to Don Octavio
in the film Don Juan DeMarco

Robert Grudin – Four-dimensional Chess

Chess, which exists predominantly in two dimensions, is one of the world’s most difficult games. Three-dimensional chess is an invitation to insanity. But human relationships, even of the simplest order, are like a kind of four-dimensional chess, a game whose pieces and positions change subtly and inexorably between moves, whose players stare dumbly while their powerful positions deteriorate into hopeless predicaments and while improbable combinations suddenly become inevitable. To make matters worse, some games are open to any number of players, and all sides are expected to win.

Robert Grudin
From Time and the Art of Living