Your heart needs to be broken – and broken open – at least once to discover what your heart means and to have a heart for others. ~ Richard Rohr

Your buddy misses you.

So many hearts I find, broke like yours and mine
Torn by what we’ve done and can’t undo
I just want to hold you, come on let me hold you
Like Bernadette would do

We’ve been around, we fall, we fly
We mostly fall, we mostly run
And every now and then we try
To mend the damage that we’ve done

Knowing when you do not need any more. Acting just enough. Saying enough. Stopping when there is enough. Some may be wasted, nature is prodigal. Harmony is not bought with parsimoniousness.

Yet stopping is “going on.” To cling to something and want more of it, to use it more, to squeeze enjoyment out of it. This is to “stop” and not “go on.” But to leave it alone at the right time, this is the right stopping, the right going on. To leave a thing alone before you have had anything to do with it, if it is for your use, to leave it without use, is not “stopping,” it is not even beginning. Use it to go on.

To be great is to go on. To go on is to be far. To be far is to return.

~ Thomas Merton, Journal entry, May 16 1961

EVAGRIUS PONTICUS wrote, “The only thing owned by one of our brothers was a book of the Gospels. He sold it and gave the proceeds for the support of the poor. What he said is worth remembering. ‘I have sold the book that tells me to sell my possessions and give the money to the poor.’”