INSPIRATION
Poems
Any Morning
Just lying on the couch and being happy.
Only humming a little, the quiet sound in the head. Trouble is busy elsewhere at the moment, it has so much to do in the world.
People who might judge are mostly asleep; they can’t monitor you all the time, and sometimes they forget. When dawn flows over the hedge you can get up and act busy.
Little corners like this, pieces of Heaven
left lying around, can be picked up and saved.
People won’t even see that you have them,
they are so light and easy to hide.
Later in the day you can act like the others.
You can shake your head. You can frown.
- William Stafford
“We Have Not Come to Take Prisoners”
We have not come here to take prisoners,
But to surrender ever more deeply
To freedom and joy
We have not come into this exquisite world
To hold ourselves hostage from love.
Run my dear,
From anything
That may not strengthen
Your precious budding wings.
Run like hell my dear,
Form anyone likely
To put a sharp knife
Into the sacred, tender vision
Of your beautiful heart
We have a duty to befriend
Those aspects of obedience
That stand outside of our house
And shout to reason
“ O please, O please,
Come out and play”
For we have not come here to take prisoners
Or to confine our wondrous spirits,
But to experience ever and ever more deeply
Our divine courage, freedom, and Light!
-Hafiz
Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It's just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.
- Pema Chodron
"At a certain point I realized that the life I was leading was not right for me and I decided to try to live a life truer to myself.
​
-Mayumi Oda
The world exerts tremendous pressure on the psyche. Collective opinion terrorizes the soul! The demands of the world obsess the psyche, and the world and its distractions offer to use us ALL the time available. Each person then needs, early on, to go inside, far enough to water the plants, awaken the animals, become friends with desire, and to sense what Machado calls the living pulse of the spirit. Start the fire in the hearth and close the door~ so that what is inside has sufficient power to hold its own against the forces longing to invade.
​
-Robert Bly
​
​
Always we hope someone else has the answer. Some other place will be better, some other time it will turn out. This is it. No one else has the answer, no other place will be better and it has already turned out. At the center of your being you have the answer, you know who you are and you know what you want. There is no need to run outside for better seeing or to peer from a window. Rather abide at the center of your being; for the more you leave it the less you learn.
--Lao-Tzu, Author of Tao Te Ching