The Art of Living

Pink Moon — the Pond (excerpt) — Mary Oliver

… You walk down to the shore.
Your coming stills them,
but little by little the silence lifts
until song is everywhere
and your soul rises from your bones
and strides out over the water.
It is a crazy thing to do —
for no one can live like that,
floating around in the darkness
over the gauzy water.
Left on the shore your bones
keep shouting come back!
But your soul won’t listen;
in the distance it is unfolding
like a pair of wings, it is sparking
like hot wires.  So,
like a good friend,
you decide to follow.
You step off the shore
and plummet to your knees …
and now you are caught …
And that’s when it happens —
you see everything
through their eyes,
their joy, their necessity;
… And that’s when you know
you will live whether you will or not,
one way or another,
because everything is everything else,
one long muscle.
It’s no more mysterious than that.
So you relax, you don’t fight it anymore,
… in the moonlight, as it says
yes.

On Being Human

I wish I could show you, when you are lonely or in darkness, the astonishing Light of your own Being. — Hafiz

Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of being human. — Victor Frankl

Our existence was for the white man’s comfort and well-being; we had to accept being deprived of just being human. — Rosa Parks

Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine. Whoever I am, thou knowest, O [God], I am thine. — Deitrich Bonhoeffer

We have a tendency to think in terms of doing and not in terms of being. … Our time is first of all for us to be. To be what? To be alive, to be peaceful, to be joyful, to be loving. ― Thich Nhat Hanh, The Art of Living

You’ve got to keep asserting the complexity and the originality of life, and the multiplicity of it, and the facets of it. This is about being a complex human being in the world, not about finding a villain. This is no time for anything else than the best that you’ve got. ― Toni Morrison

Well, there is good news, and that is why they call it the gospel. The news is not that we are worse than we think, it is that we are better than we think, and better than we deserve to be. Why? Because at the very bottom of the whole enterprise is the indisputable fact that we are created, made, formed, invented, patented in the image of goodness itself … People … cannot take away from you the fact that you are a child of God and bear the impression of God in your very soul. — Peter Gomes

More than one writer calls Psalm 139 a creation psalm, but not one about the vast mysteries of the heavens and earth or even the marvelous workings of nature around us. This creation is God’s own ongoing work in bringing the human person to fullness of life, unwrapping the mystery of us and loving us all the while. — Kathryn Matthews

Just Imagine

Imagination opens up possibility, but sometimes we do not dare to imagine something as beautiful as God. — Nanette Sawyer, (in The Hyphenateds)

We live in a world where bad stories are told, stories that teach us life doesn’t mean anything and that humanity has no great purpose. It’s a good calling, then, to speak a better story. How brightly a better story shines. How easily the world looks to it in wonder. How grateful we are to hear these stories, and how happy it makes us to repeat them. — Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

What a stunning vocation for the church, to stand free and hope-filled in a world gone fearful – and to think, imagine, dream, vision a future that God will yet enact. — Walter Brueggemann

From wonder into wonder existence opens. — Lao Tzu

From every mountainside, let freedom ring. When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’ — Martin Luther King Jr., ‘I Have a Dream’ speech

On this day we commemorate Dr. King’s great dream of a vibrant, multiracial nation united in justice, peace and reconciliation; a nation that has a place at the table for children of every race and room at the inn for every needy child. We are called on this holiday, not merely to honor, but to celebrate the values of equality, tolerance and interracial sister and brotherhood he so compellingly expressed in his great dream for America. — Coretta Scott King

Commentary about the significance of this holiday from New York Times contributor Chris Lebron: What, To the Black American, Is Martin Luther King Jr. Day?