Good and true.

Your task is not to seek for love,

but merely to seek and find

all the barriers within yourself

that you have built against it.

a handful of earth

cries aloud

i used to be hair or

i used to be bones

Out beyond ideas of

wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field.

I will meet you there.

images: 1/ book archive, british book of birds 2/ sam caldwell 3/jane reaction 4/wikimedia commons 5/ wikimedia commons: pulpit rock at kiama (I've been there!)

All words by Sufi poet, Rumi.

A man and a loom.

The torrential rain we have been having here for the past few days has stopped. Everything has been given a good wash and the trees, sky, water look clear and bright.

It feels like I'm starting again too, after feeling mostly restless, anxious and overwhelmed last week. It felt like a vague seasickness had decided to take root in my stomach and wouldn't go away. I feel like I've come out of that now but it also made me realise just how much more I need to trust myself, trust my values and trust that feeling of wholeness inside me when things get a bit heavy. If I can't, then I will constantly be depending on other people or things to "make" me happy and I know that is just an impossible request (and I would hate for someone to expect it of me).

I read something today that has stuck with me, a saying by Ghandi that was written on the wall of his ashram:

My life is my message.

It's such a simple philosophy but one that I would like to keep in mind more often. When I think about what "message" my life expresses now compared to what I would like it to say..well, let's just say it's a bit of a gap. But I'm going to try, now in gentler, slower, smaller ways to live a life that's truer to my self- no big dramatic changes, just chipping away very very slowly at the self-doubt and vanity (and everything else) that has become second nature. I actually feel hopeful. I hope you do too.

"..And I will not weep from despair, but simply because I will be happy in my shed tears. I will be drunk with my own tenderness. Sticky spring leaves, the blue sky- I love them all, that's all. Such things you love not with your mind, not with logic, but with your insides, your guts, you love your first young strength..Do you understand any of this blather, Alyoshka, or not?" Ivan suddenly laughed.

"I understand it all too well, Ivan: to want to love with your insides, your guts- you said it beautifully, and I'm terribly glad that you want so much to live," Alyosha exclaimed. "I think that everyone should love life before everything else in the world."

"Love life more than its meaning?"

"Certainly, love it before logic, as you say, certainly before logic, and only then will I also understand its meaning. That is how I've long imagined it. Half your work is done and acquired , Ivan: you love life. Now you need only apply yourself to the second half, and you are saved."

- The Brothers Karamazov.

images by Prokudin-Gorskii. Ostrechina River, 1909.

A teaspoon of Mother Teresa: for when you don't know what to do when faced with all the suffering in the world.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

"What can you do to promote world peace? Go home and love your family."

"I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love."

"It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish."

"Never worry about numbers. Help one person at a time and always start with the person nearest you."

"Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat."

"Each one of them is Jesus in disguise."



"In the West there is a tendency to be profit-oriented, where everything is measured according to the results and we get caught up in being more and more active to generate results. In the East -- especially in India -- I find that people are more content to just be, to just sit around under a banyan tree for half a day chatting to each other. Westerners would probably call that wasting time. But there is value to it. Being with someone, listening without a clock and without anticipation of results, teaches us about love. The success of love is in the loving -- it is not in the result of loving. "

"Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies."

"Let us not be satisfied with just giving money. Money is not enough, money can be got, but they need your hearts to love them. So, spread your love everywhere you go."

"Live simply so others may simply live."