The ground’s generosity takes in our compost and grows beauty.
Try to be more like the ground.
Rumi
quote
the cleansing value of sorrow
Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.
Rumi
when we’re looking the wrong way
It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem.
G K Chesterton
Sometimes the bounty we seek is on the inside.
Sometimes it lies in a direction we are blind to.
Sometimes we need someone else’s mirror to help to look where we need to look.
living life
Let yourself be drawn by the stronger pull of that which you truly love.
Rumi
When we find a contribution, a toil, a role that aligns with why we were born into this world, then life becomes living.
an actor in our own story
In a fractured age, when cynicism is God, here is a possible heresy: we live by stories, we also live in them.
One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, we are also living the stories we planted – knowingly or unknowingly – in ourselves. We live the stories that either give our lives meaning, or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives.
Ben Okri
the words within
Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth
Rumi
black boot, golden slipper
There are only two ways to live your life.
One, as though nothing is a miracle.
The other, as if everything is.
Albert Einstein
seeing what isn’t seen
Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add colour to my sunset sky.
Rabindranath Tagore
thinking our way out of the darkness
Farmers used to think that it was in the nature of chickens to peck at one another, that they were basically loners, unsocial animals that couldn’t mingle without being nasty.
On some farms, their beaks were clipped, but this only made it more difficult for the chickens to eat – which made them hungrier, so they pecked at themselves and one another even more. Then a chicken farmer somewhere noticed something exquisitely simple that changed everything: chicken coops were dark, and the absence of light was what was causing the chickens to peck at themselves and one another. As soon as that farmer introduced a light source into his coops, his chickens stopped pecking—it was as simple as that.
People are not all that different. When we don’t know what our minds need to think well together, we are like chickens pecking around in the dark. This isn’t as far afield as it might seem. When we are communicating and thinking well together, our faces actually “light up.” When our minds don’t get enough light, our thinking breaks down and we begin to peck at one another and ourselves.
Humans can no longer afford to think in division and darkness. Collaborative intelligence is the light that is necessary for our individual and collective survival. We have no choice now but to think together.
Dawna Markova & Angie McArthur
shoulder shrug
You can bear your troubles or you can shrug them off … they’re your shoulders.
Robert Breault
illuminated dandelion 