Thomas Merton

Come into Animal Presence — Denise Levertov
Come into animal presence.
No man is so guileless as
the serpent. The lonely white
rabbit on the roof is a star
twitching its ears at the rain.
The llama intricately
folding its hind legs to be seated
not disdains but mildly
disregards human approval.
What joy when the insouciant
armadillo glances at us and doesn’t
quicken his trotting
across the track into the palm brush.

What is this joy? That no animal
falters, but knows what it must do?
That the snake has no blemish,
that the rabbit inspects his strange surroundings
in white star-silence? The llama
rests in dignity, the armadillo
has some intention to pursue in the palm-forest.
Those who were sacred have remained so,
holiness does not dissolve, it is a presence
of bronze, only the sight that saw it
faltered and turned from it.
An old joy returns in holy presence.

You. Your presence. Why can I not dip into your presence as I dip into sleep, clasp it and bask in it? How hold it? How savour it? It is more than I wanted. And less. — Muriel Ciolkowska

Your true home is in the here and the now. ― Thich Nhat Hanh

Be here now. — Ram Dass

Being fully present isn’t something that happens once and then you have achieved it; it’s being awake to the ebb and flow and movement and creation of life, being alive to the process of life itself. That also has its softness. … This is the process of making friends with ourselves and with our world. It involves not just the parts we like, but the whole picture, because it all has a lot to teach us. — Pema Chodron, The Wisdom of No Escape and the Path of Loving-Kindness

Whether you understand it or not, God loves you, is present in you, lives in you, dwells in you, calls you, saves you and offers you an understanding and compassion which are like nothing you have ever found in a book or heard in a sermon. ― Thomas Merton, The Hidden Ground Of Love

Here both recognizes and demands recognition … In order for something to be handed over a hand must extend and a hand must receive. We must both be here in this world in this life in this place indicating the presence of. ― Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric

My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.
— Mark Twain

My mother said to me, “If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.” Instead I was a painter and became Picasso. — Pablo Picasso

The fastest way to break the cycle of perfectionism and become a fearless mother is to give up doing it perfectly — indeed to embrace uncertainty and imperfection. — Arianna Huffington

Imagine feeling more love from someone than you have ever known. You’re being loved even more than your mother loved you when you were an infant, more than you were ever loved by your father, your child, or your most intimate lover—anyone. … This love is actually part of you; it is always flowing through you. It’s like the subatomic texture of the universe, the dark matter that connects everything. When you tune in to that flow, you will feel it in your own heart—not your physical heart or your emotional heart, but your spiritual heart, the place you point to in your chest when you say, “I am.” This is your deeper heart, your intuitive heart. It is the place where the higher mind, pure awareness, the subtler emotions, and your soul identity all come together and you connect to the universe, where presence and love are. ― Ram Dass, Be Love Now

Mother
Whatever she was to me, she was the human
caught in something she could hardly stand,
she was like a flying singing being,
limed and jessed, a small soprano
of the trees, of ngetal and luis, reed and quickbeam.
No one said I had come from inside her,
yet from where else but that softness and music,
at birth I had stepped somehow back out of that laurel,
into which I had rushed away from my father,
and my mother was like a sister,
in thrall to three fathers
— mine, and hers, and Our Heavenly.
What she took from me she needed,
and much of what I had I had of her gift.
And it was as if I had known her from long before,
from any town square, back to near our beginning,
as if, in her, I met every woman burned with
ruis, coll, uath, saille, duir, beth, fearn, nion —
elder, hazel, hawthorn, willow, oak, alder, ash.
When I look back, I see her in woods,
woods in flower, though when I knew her
she was doing her time in the live grave,
she ate what she could,
coluratura lips pursed around some smaller spirit,
but if I sing, I sing from her.
First I would hear the note struck
on the piano, then her voice, rising toward it,
Druid mother I would hold now
in my boughs and pour forth
a newborn’s caroling.
— Sharon Olds