Let us live in this love and this happiness,
you and I and all of us,
in the love of Christ and in contemplation,
for this is where we find ourselves and one another as we truly are.
It is only in this love that we can at last become real.  

- Thomas Merton
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Even as a tortoise draws in its limbs, the wise can draw in their senses at will. Aspirants abstain from sense pleasures, but they still crave for them. These cravings will disappear when they see the highest goal. Even of those who tread the path, the stormy senses can sweep off the mind. They live in wisdom, who subdue their senses and keep their minds ever absorbed in me.

- The Bhagavad Gita
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The state of your soul is always expressed in your outer conditions. And in the intangible influence in which you radiate at large.  

-Anonymous

What you are shouts so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.  

-Emerson

Giving up things is how to keep them:
not allowing life to fall prey to fear
to discouragement or superstitions
not closing oneself off or seeking to forget
but making everything a dialogue with God.  

- Pope Francis

Who of you would give his son a rock when he asks you for bread?
Who would give him a snake when he asks for a fish?
If you, shiftless as you are, know how to give the good things to your children,
how much more will our father in heaven know what to give you?  

- Jesus
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Our work is not a profession, but a vocation, chosen to satiate the thirst of Jesus by total surrender, complete, without counting the cost.  

- Mother Teresa

O God, I commend to you this time and ask you to bless and to strengthen me in my heartfelt search for that silence and stillness in which I pray I shall find you and you will find me. -St. John

-Esther deWaal

Mitote - Your mind is a dream where 1000 people talk at the same time, and nobody understands each other.

- Miguel Ruiz

How Women Get Burned

I'm an abandoned house
looted and ransacked
vandalized, burned.
Choking on ash.
No exceptions to your scorched earth policy.
Turn around.
Do you think you are the first man to light me on fire?
Years ago, covered in dust, dilapidated, divorced, decaying.
This is how you found me.

-Emilija Blum

Mid-August On Sourdough Mountain Lookout

Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat
After five days rain.
Pitch glows on the fir canes
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read.
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow water from a tin cup.
Looking down for miles, through high, still air.

- Gary Snyder

Just because you can't drink all that falls

If the nut of mystery can't be held,
at least let me touch the shell.  

- Rumi

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