Every day is a new opportunity to begin again.
Was yesterday harsh or difficult?
Did you find yourself (like I did) complaining and grousing and expecting the worst of people?
Did you miss the chance to get outdoors and breathe fresh air?
Did you put more time into stuff and money than into people and ideas?
Did you forget to notice the green, the birdsong, the summer cast of sunlight?
Did you write or say something you wish you hadn’t?
Today is a new day, a fresh slate, a blank sheet of paper.
Choose your pathway with determination and lightness of heart.
Begin, begin, begin again, beloved.
Grateful for the always freshness of beginnings.
May we do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly in Beauty!
“Always we begin again.” —St. Benedict
Thomas Merton: “There are only three stages to this work: to be a beginner, to be more of a beginner, and to be only a beginner.”
“If the Angel deigns to come it will be because you have convinced her, not by tears, but by your humble resolve to be always beginning; to be a beginner.” —Rainer Maria Rilke
“One does not ask of one who suffers: What is your country and what is your religion? One merely says: You suffer, that is enough for me.” —Louis Pasteur
“Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.” —James Bovard
“We must ask ourselves as Americans, ‘Can we really survive the worship of our own destructiveness? We do not exist in isolation. Our sense of community and compassionate intelligence must be extended to all life-forms, plants, animals, rocks, rivers, and human beings.” —Terry Tempest Williams
Jan Richardson:
did you not know
what the Holy One
can do with dust?
“I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.” —William Stafford
“There are years that ask the question and years that answer.” —Zora Neale Hurston
“Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I would like to see you living in better conditions.” —Hafiz
“One puts down the first line. . .in trust that life and language are abundant enough to complete it.” —Wendell Berry
“Speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee.” —Job 12:8
“Sometimes the truth depends on a walk around the lake.” —Wallace Stevens
“Tell all the truth, but tell it slant.” —Emily Dickinson
“The contemplative stance is the third way. We stand in the middle, neither taking the world on from another power position nor denying it for fear of the pain it will bring. We hold the dark side of reality and the pain of the world until it transforms us, knowing that we are both complicit in the evil and can participate in wholeness and holiness.” —Richard Rohr
Clarissa Pinkola Estes on the Curanderisma healing tradition: “In this tradition a story is ‘holy,’ and it is used as medicine. The story is not told to lift you up, to make you feel better, or to entertain you, although all those things can be true. The story is meant to take the spirit into a descent to find something that is lost or missing and to bring it back to consciousness again.”
Mockingbird Chronicles 