I will not die an unlived life
By Dawna Markova

I will not die an unlived life.
I will not live in fear of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid, more accessible,
to loosen my heart until it becomes
a wing, a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance;
to live so that which comes to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom
and that which comes to me as blossom,
goes on as fruit.

The Guest House
by Rumi

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
Who violently sweep you house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
They may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whomever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

A Blessing of Solitude
by John O'Donohue

May you recognize in your life the presence, power, and light of your soul.
May you realize that you are never alone,
that your soul in its brightness and belonging connects you
  intimately with the rhythm of the universe.
May you have respect for your own individuality and difference.
May you realize that the shape of your soul is unique,
  that you have a special destiny here,
that behind the facade of your life there is something
  beautiful, good and eternal happening.
May you learn to see yourself with the same delight, pride,
  and expectation with which God sees you in every moment.

Begin
by Rumi

This is now. Now is. Don't postpone till then. Spend the spark of iron on stone.
Sit at the head of the table; dip your spoon in the bowl. Seat yourself next to
your joy and have your awakened soul pour wine. Branches in the spring wind,
easy dance of jasmine and cypress. Cloth for green robes has been cut from
pure absence. You're the tailor, settled among his shop goods, quietly sewing.

From A Streetcar in your Stomach
by Noelle Oxenhandler

Don't get caught up in the drama. All those elaborate stories we tell ourselves--about loss, failure, shattered hope, betrayal, blame--are not what is most true about who we are. Detaching from the story's plot line, even just a little, makes possible another move, a plunge deeper in, to the story below the story.

From Lovingkindness : The Revolutionary Art of Happiness
Sharon Salzberg

"When our minds are full of anger and hatred toward others, in fact *we* are the ones who are actually suffering, caught in this mind state. But it is not so easy to access that place inside us which can forgive, which can love. In some ways to be able to forgive, to let go, is a type of dying. It is the ability to say, "I am not that person anymore, and you are not that person anymore." Forgiveness allows us to recapture some part of ourselves that we left behind in bondage to a past event. Some part of our identity may also need to die in that letting go, so that we can reclaim the energy bound up in the past."

1 Corinthians 13 - New International Version

1. If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.
2. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.
3. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.
4. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.
5. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.
6. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.
7. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
8. Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.
9. For we know in part and we prophesy in part,
10. but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears.
11. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.
12. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
13. And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

From The Wisdom of the Enneagram
by Don Richard Riso & Russ Hudson

Love is not a commodity that can be won, demanded, earned or bestowed by someone else--or that can be given to someone else, because, it is, in its highest and truest form, not a function of the ego. Love is not a poker chip that can be given or withheld; if the "love" we seek has those qualities then it's not real. When two people are truly present to each other, love naturally arises. Love is something that cannot be won or lost, because it is always available--but only to the degree that we are present and therefore receptive to it. We cannot will ourselves to love ourselves or to love others. All we can do, paradoxically, is to recognize the presence of love in ourselves and others.

The Prayer of St. Francis

Make me a channel of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me bring you love.
where there is injury, your pardon, Lord.
And where there's doubt, true faith in you.

Make me a channel of your peace.
Where there's despair in life, let me bring hope.
Where there is darkness -- only light,
And where there's sadness, ever joy.

O Master, grant that I may never seek
So much to be consoled as to console.
To be understood as to understand.
To be loved, as to love with all my soul.

Make me a channel of your peace.
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned.
In giving to all men that we receive,
And in dying that we're born to eternal life.

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day
by Rabindranath Tagore

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day
runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.
It is the same life that shoots in joy
through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass
and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.
It is the same life that is rocked
in the ocean-cradle of birth and of death in ebb and in flow.
I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life
and my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.

From Return to Love
by Marianne Williamson

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, "Who am I to be – brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous?"
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small doesn't serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so small that others won't feel insecure around you.
We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.
It's not just in us, it's in everyone.
As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give others permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

From Letter to a Young Poet
by Ranier Maria Rilke

Be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart.
Try to love the questions themselves ,
as if they were locked rooms or books
written in a very foreign language.
Do not seek the answers which cannot be given to you
because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is, to live everything.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps then, someday far in the future,
you will gradually, without even noticing it,
live your way into the answer.

The Summer Day
by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

The Road Not Taken
by Robert Frost

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Loving the wrong person
by Andrew Boyd, aka Brother Void

We're all seeking that special person who is right for us. But if you've been through enough relationships, you begin to suspect there's no right person, just different flavors of wrong. Why is this? Because you yourself are wrong in some way, and you seek out partners who are wrong in some complementary way. But it takes a lot of living to grow fully into your own wrongness. And it isn't until you finally run up against your deepest demons, your unsolvable problems--the ones that make you truly who you are--that we're ready to find a lifelong mate. Only then do you finally know what you're looking for. You're looking for the wrong person. But not just any wrong person: the right wrong person--someone you lovingly gaze upon and think, "This is the problem I want to have."

I will find that special person who is wrong for me in just the right way.

From Learning the Tarot
by Joan Bunning

True power always comes from the Divine. It passes through us and then flows out into the world. When we understand this relationship, we are blessed because this flow brings with it a tremendous feeling of expansion and fulfillment. Problems develop when we forget that we are not the source of power, but its conduit.

From Radical Acceptance
by Tara Brach

In the myth of Eden, God created the garden and dropped the tree of knowledge, with its delicious and dangerous fruits, right smack-dab in the middle. He then deposited some humans close by, and forbade these curious, fruit-loving creatures from taking a taste. It was a setup. Eve naturally grasped at the fuit and then was shamed and punished for doing so.
We experience this situation daily inside our own psyche. We are encouraged by our culture to keep ourselves comfortable, to be right, to possess things, to be better than others, to look good, to be admired. We are also told that we should feel ashamed of our selfishness, that we are flawed for being so self-centered, sinful when we are indulgent.

Sometimes we turn to God
when our foundations are shaking
only to find out
it is God who is shaking them.
--Unknown

What do you despise?
By this you are truly known.
--Frank Herbert

Argue for your limitations,
And sure enough, they are yours.
--Richard Bach

The mark of your ignorance
is the depth of your belief
in injustice and tragedy.
What the caterpillar calls the end of the world,
the Master calls the butterfly.
--Richard Bach

If one is not half mad,
How can one give birth to a dancing star?
--Nietzche

I need so much time for doing nothing,
I have no time for work.
--Pierre Reverdy

As an intrepid traveler on the path to love, you open yourself to whatever comes your way--hurt, fear, neediness, joy, bliss--invite it in, observe it, make friends with it, and let it pass. If you seek only refuge, security, and comfort, you imprison your relationship and the vitality will wane. The commitment to staying awake will free you from holding back and allow you to feel the roar, purr, glow and breath of spirit rippling through you, sensuous and alive.
--Charlotte Kasl, Ph.D.

Beannacht ("blessing" in Gaelic)
by John O'Donohue

On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.

And when your eyes
freeze behind
the gray window
and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,
may a flock of colors,
indigo, red, green,
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
in the curach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.

* curach: a small wicker boat of Welsh and Irish origin.

In the pursuit of knowledge,
every day something is added.
In the practice of the Way,
every day something is dropped.
Less and less do you need to force things,
until finally you arrive at non-action.
When nothing is done,
nothing is left undone.

--Lao-tse, Tao Te Ching

LET IT SING
From Violet—A New Musical
Music by Jeanine Tesori
Lyrics by Brian Crawley

Raise your foot, now that’s the way
You’ll be movin’ on today
Raise the other, put it down
Now you’re headed into town
Whoa boy, you got left, right?
Oh boy, ain’t that right

Got some years ahead to go;
You’ll go free if you take it slow
Whoa boy, you got left, right?
Oh boy, ain’t that right

Two kinds of people in this world,
Some say yes and some say no
Time to say what side you’re on;
Eeny meeny miny mo
Say yes, and your adventures start
Not always as expected;
Say no, you stay apart,
But you stay protected

You’ve got to give yourself a reason to rejoice,
For the music you make counts for everything
Now every living soul has got a voice—
You got to give it room and let it sing
My family never had too much,
Made the best of every day
Ate what was on our plates, you know?
Never threw a thing away
We kept our nightmares on a shelf,
Our dreams were on the table;
Pass ‘em down and help yourself
As long as you are able

My Mama told me, Son, forget what might have been
Give yourself a break whatever’s happening
Don’t let your spirit, Son, come closin’ in—
You got to give it room, and let it sing, let it sing
You got to give it room, and let it sing
You got to lift up your voice and sing
Got some years ahead to go
You’ll go free if you take it slow
Got some years, it won’t be long
You’ll be free to sing your song
Whoa boy, you got left, right?
Oh boy…

There’s preciously little, really, folks like us control—
You can make your music from the simplest thing
And you’re the one has got to tend your soul;
You got to give it room, and let it sing, let it sing
You got to give it room, and let it sing
You got to let it sing
You got to let it sing
You got to give it room, and let it sing

JABBERWOCKY
by Lewis Carroll

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought --
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

"And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"
He chortled in his joy.

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.