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[keepingthings]

All will come again into its strength: the fields undivided, the waters undammed, the trees towering and the walls built low. And in the valleys, people as strong and varied as the land. And no churches where God is imprisoned and lamented like a trapped and wounded animal. The houses welcoming all who knock and a sense of boundless offering in all relations, and in you and me. No yearning for an afterlife, no looking beyond, no belittling of death, but only longing for what belongs to us and serving earth, lest we remain unused.

Ranier Maria Rilke

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Let the beauty we love be what we do. / There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

Rumi

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A true vocation calls us out beyond ourselves, breaks our heart in the process and then humbles, simplifies and enlightens us about the hidden, core nature of the work that enticed us in the first place. We find that all along, we had what we needed from the beginning, and that in the end we have returned to its essence, an essence we could not understand until we had undertaken the journey.... The authentic watermark running through the background of a life's work is an arrival at generosity....Perhaps the greatest legacy we can leave from our work is... the passing on of a sense of sheer privilege, of having found a road, a way to follow, and then having been allowed to walk it.

David Whyte, Consolations

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Normal day, let me be aware of the treasure you are. Let me learn from you, love you, bless you before you depart. Let me not pass you by in quest of some rare and perfect tomorrow. Let me hold you while I may, for it may not always be so. One day I shall dig my nails into the earth, or bury my face in the pillow, or stretch myself taut, or raise my hands to the sky and want, more than all the world, your return.

Mary Jean Irion

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BrainPickings

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a moment

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Spinning a Vinyl Record So Fast That It Shatters

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(via bulletsmikey)

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Rothko, Robert Roth

[keepingthings]

There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading — that is a good life. A day that closely resembles every other day of the past ten or twenty years does not suggest itself as a good one. But who would not call Pasteur’s life a good one, or Thomas Mann’s?

Annie Dillard

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source

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“The Mirrored Night Sky”, by Xiaohua Zhao, China

“An enthralled stargazer is immersed in the stars as the luminous purple sky is mirrored in the thin sheet of water across the world’s largest salt flat, Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia.” – Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2015

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Let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped.

Carl Sagan

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Now is the time to discard that carefulness that too closely resembles a lack of conviction.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. I stroke the beam of my lamp slowly along the flank of something more permanent than fish or weed the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck the thing itself and not the myth the drowned face always staring toward the sun the evidence of damage worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty the ribs of the disaster

Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck

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I submit that this is what the real, no-bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.

12 years ago today, David Foster Wallace delivered his magnificent “This Is Water” speech. (via explore-blog)