To laugh is to risk appearing the fool.

To weep is to risk appearing sentimental. To reach out for another is to risk involvement. To expose your feelings is to risk exposing your true self.

To place your ideas, your dreams before the crowd is to risk their loss.

To love is to risk not being loved in return.

To live is to risk dying.

To hope is to risk despair. To try is to risk failure.

But risks must be taken because the greatest hazard is to risk nothing

Those who risk nothing do nothing, have nothing and are nothing.

They may avoid suffering and sorrow, but they simply cannot learn, feel, change, grow, love, live.

Chained by their own fears, they are slaves;

They have forfeited freedom. Only a person who risks is free.

– from “Reflecting on The Serenity Prayer” by Philip St. Romain

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There are many winds full of anger, and lust and greed. They move the rubbish around, but the solid mountain of our true nature stays where it’s always been.

Still the wood I knocked on
is the family tree. I’m not a god,
I haven’t the face for it.

Devotion is my disease,
or a way out. That accounts
for sons, and for everything.

Not so much “enough,”
there is more to be done,
yes, and to be done with.

You were the sun and moon.
Now darkness loves me;
the lights come on.

“… forgiveness is not something God does, it is who God is.” – Richard Rohr

How many thousands of divinity students
have dipped their bodies into the old night of your name.
What the girls waken to is you,
and when the young men dressed in silver weave
and flash in battle – that is also you.

The poets always met
in your long vaulted corridors.
And they were emperors of pure sound
and moving and deep and assured.

You are the delicate hour at nightfall
that makes all the poets equally good;
you crowd full of darkness into their mouths,
and every poet, sensing he has discovered greatness,
surrounds you with magnificent things.

A hundred thousand harps take you
like wings and sweep you up out of silence.
And your primitive wind is blowing
the fragrance of your marvelous power
to every being and to every creature in need.

Walt Whitman –

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.