Monthly Archives: March 2015
“If our hearts are ready for anything, we are free to be ourselves. There’s room for the wildness of our animal selves, for passion and play. There’s room for our human selves, for intimacy and understanding, creativity and productivity. There’s room for spirit, for the light of awareness to suffuse our moments. The Tibetans describe this confidence to be who we are as ‘the lion’s roar.'” ~ Tara Brach, True Refuge
Art by Dan May
“May we have the courage to take the step Into the unknown that beckons us; Trust that a richer life awaits us there, That we will lose nothing But what has already died; Feel the deeper knowing in us sure Of all that is about to be born beyond The pale frames where we stayed confined, Not realizing how such vacant endurance Was bleaching our soul’s desire.” ~John O’Donohue
Art by NC Wyeth
“As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.” ~Virginia Woolf
41 years ago on this date, Gaura Devi led a group of 27 women in the Garhwal Himalayas, to form circles around trees to stop them being felled by loggers. Their protest lasted four days and eventually succeeded when contractors gave up. It was the birth of the Chipko movement in India.
Source: Good News Network
“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity… and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.” ~William Blake
“There are no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ people. Some are a little better or a little worse, but all are activated more by misunderstanding than malice. A blindness to what is going on in each other’s hearts… nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see …each other in life. Vanity, fear, desire, competition– all such distortions within our own egos– condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions to our own egos the corresponding distortions in the egos of others, and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other. That’s how it is in all living relationships except when there is that rare case of two people who love intensely enough to burn through all those layer of opacity and see each other’s naked hearts.” ~ Tennessee Williams
Art by Sasha Fantom
Madison Chandler and Mark Smesrud co-founded Purple Door Coffee, a Denver-based nonprofit that employs young people “who have been homeless and want to leave homelessness behind.” The shop provides a 52-week curriculum, teaching employees practical skills — like budgeting and banking — as well as the know-how to improve their physical, emotional and mental health. What a beautiful business model.
“So come to the pond, or the river of your imagination, or the harbor of your longing, and put your lips to the world. And live your life.” ~ Mary Oliver
Art by David Hoff Richter
“I wonder what you mean when you use the word ‘I’? I have been very interested in this problem for a long long time; and I have come to the conclusion that what most civilized people mean by that word is a hallucination, that is to say, a false sense of personal identity that is at complete variance with the facts of Nature. And as a result of having a false sense of identity we act in a way that is inappropriate to our natural environment, and when that inappropriate way of action is magnified by a very powerful technology we swiftly begin to see the results of a profound discord between man and Nature.” ~Alan Watts
Under The Blue Door 