One great thing about growing old is that nothing is going to lead to anything.

Everything is of the moment.

– Joseph Campbell

f I had told my novice master in 1961 that I wasn’t going to fight my distractions, he would have said, “So you’re going to entertain lustful or hateful thoughts?” But that would have largely missed the point. The real learning curve happens when you can admit that you’re having a thought or feeling and see that it’s empty, passing, and part of your own fantasy world that has no final reality except as a lesson.

Listen honestly to yourself. Listen to whatever thought or feeling arises. Listen long enough to ask, “Why am I thinking this? What is this saying about me that I need to entertain this negative, accusatory, or lustful thought?”

You don’t have to hate yourself or condemn your self for a thought or feeling, but you do have to let it yield its wisdom. Then you will see it is the wounded or needy part of you that wants these unhealthy thoughts. The Whole You, your True Self, does not need them, and will not identify with them.

If you can allow your thoughts and feelings to pass through you, neither clinging to them nor opposing them-and without ever expecting perfect success I promise that you will come to a deeper, wider, and wiser place. Believe it or not, even your inability to fully succeed is, in itself, another wonderful lesson. – Richard Rohr

Often in a church I have thought that while there is scant hope for me, I can ask God to strengthen the holiness of all these good people here that man, that woman, that child… and I do so. In St. Anne’s Basilica it struck me in the middle of a white-robed priest’s French service that possibly everybody in that stone chamber, and possibly everybody in every other house of prayer on earth, thinks this way. What if we are all praying for one another in the hope that the others are holy, when we are not? Of course this must be the case. Then-again possibly-surely it adds up to something or other? – Annie Dillard, from For The Time Being

I think a good way to conceive of sacred space is as a playground. If what you’re doing seems like play, you are in it. But you can’t play with my toys, you have to have your own. Your life should have yielded some. – Joseph Campbell

Christian Wiman: If nature abhors a vacuum, Christ abhors a vagueness. If God is love, Christ is love for this one person, this one place, this one time-bound and time ravaged self.

A sacred space is any space that is set apart from the usual context of life. In the secular context, one is concerned with pairs of opposites: cause and effect, gain and loss, and so on. Sacred space has no function in the of earning a living or a reputation. Practical use is not the dominant feature of anything in the space. You do not have anything in your sacred space that’s not of significance to you for the harmonization of your own life. In your sacred space, things are working in terms of your dynamic and not anybody else’s.

Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again.

You really don’t have a sacred space, a rescue land, until you find somewhere to be that’s not a wasteland, some field of action where there is a spring of ambrosia a joy that comes from inside, not something external that puts joy into you – a place that lets you experience your own will and your own intention and your own wish so that, in small, the Kingdom is there. I think everybody, whether they know it or not, is in need of such a place. – Joseph Campbell

not always easy but it’s what we all need today.

Fun I love, but too much fun is of all things the most loathsome. Mirth is better than fun, and happiness is better than mirth. I feel that a man may be happy in this world. And I know that this world is a world of imagination and vision. I see every thing I paint in this world, but everybody does not see alike. To the eyes of a miser a guinea is far more beautiful than the Sun, and a bag worn with the use of money has more beautiful proportions than a vine filled with grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity, and by these I shall not regulate my proportions; and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees. – William Blake

Can I get used to it day after day
a little at a time while the tide keeps
coming in faster the waves get bigger
building on each other breaking records
this is not the world that I remember
then comes the day when I open the box
that I remember packing with such care
and there is the face that I had known well
in little pieces staring up at me
it is not mentioned on the front pages
but somewhere far back near the real estate
among the things that happen every day
to someone who now happens to be me
and what can I do and who can tell me
then there is what the doctor comes to say
endless patience will never be enough
the only hope is to be the daylight