COLLAGE SEGMENTS

        It can be very therapeutic to choose segments of poems and quotes when you are working through an issue. Ultimately, it helps you find your own voice. This is a very simple exercise to do and there is great release in this way of expression and it is fun too.

Photo by LLW (Strawberry Fields, Central Park, NYC)

UNCOMMON PRAYERS AND THANKS

a bridge of suspended hope . . .


Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
--Leonard Cohen

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love
the questions themselves like locked rooms or books written in a
foreign tongue. The point is to live everything. Live the questions
now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without even noticing it, live
your way some distant day into the answers.

-- Rilke

When you feel your song is orchestrated wrong,
why should you prolong your stay?
When the wind and the weather blow your dreams sky-high
sail away sail away - sail away!
-- Noel Coward

work of the eyes is done, now go and do heart work
on all the images imprisoned within you;
for you overpower them:
but even now you don't know them

--Rilke
I don't know which takes more courage: surviving a lifelong
endurance test because you once made a promise or breaking free,
disrupting all your world.

-- Anne Tyler

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
And there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple picking now.

-- Robert Frost (adapted -(After Apple-Picking)

But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Lines From: Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening

-- Robert Frost
Said one oyster to a neighboring oyster, "l have a very great pain within me. It is heavy and round and I am in distress."
And the other oyster replied with haughty complacence "Praise be to the heavens and to the sea, I have no pain within me. I am well and whole both within and without."
At that moment a crab was passing by and heard the two oysters, and he said to the one who was well and whole both within and without, "Yes, you are well and whole, but the pain that your neighbor bears is a pearl of exceeding beauty."

When the way comes
to an end, then change-
having changed, you
pass through.
-- I Ching

Your grief tor what you've lost lifts a
mirror up to where you're bravely working.
Expecting the worst you look, and instead,
here's the joyful face you've been wanting
to see.
Your hand opens and closes and opens
and closes.
If it were always a fist or always
stretched open
you would be paralyzed.
Your deepest presence is
in every small contracting and expanding,
the two as beautifully
balanced and coordinated
as bird wings.

-- Rumi

The maelstrom of appointments which constitute a life ....

LISTS..LISTS..LISTS..LISTS..LISTS..LISTS

yes is a world & in this world of yes live . . . all worlds


-- e. e. cummings

Choose life instead of those prisms with no
depth even if their colors are purer,
instead of this hour always hidden,
instead of these terrible vehicles of cold flame . . .
Choose this heart with its safety catch . . .
Its scars from escapes, choose . . .
the life of being here, nothing but being here . . .
-- Andre Breton

One more river
And that's the river of ---
One more river,
There's one more river to cross

-- anonymous (spiritual)

Make choices
    while the river
    of my life flows
  Build a bridge
 Cross over. . .
  Can I ever return?
    (Lila)

In the middle of the journey of
 our life
I found myself in a dark
wood
where the straight road had been
lost sight of

-- Dante Alighieri

Let us cross over the river,
and rest under the trees.
-- Stonewall Jackson

This sadness is nothing but the
gentle music of passing things,
and without it, whatever is
beautiful does not touch us.
-- Hesse

There is no cure for birth
and death save to enjoy the interval.
-- George Santayana

Sitting quietly, doing nothing, spring comes, and the grass
grows by itself.


(Zen Saying)

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Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dream crossed twilight between birth
    and dying.
     -- T. S. Eliot