gratitude
how did you find me here?

#732 – seasick
If you don’t become the ocean, you’ll be seasick every day. – Leonard Cohen

No matter how far you go down a wrong road, turn back. – Turkish proverb
photo: New Mexico, September 2017
The night is not endless
A single sentence, a single word, a single awareness may turn life over, and while you may not yet be found, you are no longer lost. It is impossible to express. Your dream of the world is unmasked, creating an opening. The night, however dark, is not endless, because in that smallest opening you glimpsed light moving in the dark. It was the first real thing you have known. – Paula D’Arcy

Photo: Airline Road, Maine 2008
Today grant work to laborers, bread to the hungry, joy to the sorrowful,
— grace and redemption to all people.

Give us strength in temptation, endurance in trial, and gratitude in prosperity.

Help us to spend this day in the spirit of joy.
photo: Solvang, CA December 2017
quail
I went out on the porch before dawn to think of these things, and the words of Ezekiel (22:30): “And I sought among them for a man that might set up a hedge and stand in the gap before me in favor of the land that I might not destroy it, and I found none.” And while I was standing there, quails began to whistle all over the field and in the wood. I had not heard any for weeks and thought sure they were all dead, for there have been hunters everywhere. No, there they are! Signs of life, of gentleness, of helplessness, of providence, of love. They just keep on existing and loving and making more quails and whistling in the bushes. – Thomas Merton, journal entry November 7, 1965
The house without a window is Hell…
The house without a window is Hell:
to make a window is the foundation of true religion.
Don’t thrust your axe upon every thicket:
come, use your axe to cut open a window.
~ Rumi

Photo: Assisi 2005