Weekly Words: "An Observation"

"True gardeners cannot bear a glove
Between the sure touch and the tender root,
Must let their hands grow knotted as they move
With a rough sensitivity about
Under the earth, between the rock and shoot,
Never to bruise or wound the hidden fruit.
And so I watched my mother's hands grow scarred,
She who could heal the wounded plant or friend
With the same vulnerable yet rigorous love;
I minded once to see her beauty gnarled,
But now her truth is given me to live,
As I learn for myself we must be hard
To move among the tender with an open hand,
And to stay sensitive up to the end
Pay with some toughness for a gentle world."

- May Sarton

Weekly Words: "Collaborators in love"

"Love is a many-splendored thing. This classic saying is apt, not only because love can emerge from the shoots of any other positive emotion you experience, be it amusement, serenity, or gratitude, but also because of your many viable collaborators in love, ranging from our sister to your soul mate, your newborn to your neighbor, even someone you’ve never met before...

At the level of positivity resonance, micro-moments of love are virtually identical regardless of whether they bloom between you and a stranger or you and a soul mate; between you and an infant or you and your lifelong best friend. The clearest difference between the love you feel with intimates and the love you feel with anyone with whom you share a connection is its sheer frequency. Spending more total moments together increases your chances to feast on micro-moments of positivity resonance. These micro-moments change you."

- Barbara Fredrickson

Weekly Words: "Time really stops"

"We call ourselves homo sapien sapiens. That's the species name we've given ourselves. And that means from the Latin sapere, which means "to taste" or "to know." The species that knows and knows that it knows. So that means really awareness and meta-awareness. And it would be nice if that were actually true, but I think it's a little premature to call ourselves that. And now maybe we need to live ourselves into owning that name by cultivating awareness and awareness of awareness itself and let that be in some sense the guide as to what we're going to invest in, how we're going to make decisions about where we live, where we're going to send our kids to school, how we're going to be at the dinner table. Whether we're going to take our bodies and our children and our parents for granted or whether we're going to live life as if it really mattered moment by moment.

And that's not some kind of prescription for more stuff that you need to do in order to be happy. This is getting out of your own way long enough to realize that you already have the potential for tremendous well-being and happiness right here, right now. Nothing else has to change.

One thing it does is it really slows down time. When you're in the present moment, time really stops."

- Jon Kabat-Zinn

Weekly Words: "Living in the moment, and then letting go"

“The chaos in nature is quiet, latent,” she says. “A lamb’s death is quiet; so is the gradual death of a crop of flowers.” Sitting on the lawn, birds singing from the trees, she remembers that long-ago bunch of black dahlias and sighs. “People look at flowers as objects — as a decorating element, not a living thing. But sometimes the most beautiful thing is the most fleeting. The most fragrant, delicate rose — often those wilt in minutes. Flowers are about living in the moment, and then letting go.”

- "Into the Wild With Sarah Ryhanen"

Weekly Words: "Cultivating mindfulness"

"Most of life is imaginary.

Human beings have a habit of compulsive thinking that is so pervasive that we lose sight of the fact that we are nearly always thinking. Most of what we interact with is not the world itself, but our beliefs about it, our expectations of it, and our personal interests in it.

We have a very difficult time observing something without confusing it with the thoughts we have about it, and so the bulk of what we experience in life is imaginary things. As Mark Twain said: “I’ve been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”

The best treatment I’ve found? Cultivating mindfulness."

- David Cain

Weekly Words: "A Sanctuary for Our Souls"

"It took me a long time and a good deal of sweat to understand it — just how much our Earth is a sanctuary for our souls...

...As the gardener creates, so does the garden transform the inner life of its creator. The garden’s cycle mirrors our own growth, complete with floods, heat, drought, infestation; dying, resurrecting, blossoming, blooming, maturing, rotting; bounty, beauty, miracles.

In our deeper psyche we tend to our life’s garden of sorrows and joys. We pull out, cut back, dig up, bury, sow, support, and nourish hoping one day to harvest our life’s experiences into wisdom. Without all this soul/gardening work, our spirits are swamped under the weeds, our creative gifts choked, our true selves unable to flourish."

- Catherine Ann Lombard, "A Communion with the Earth: Gardening and Gratitude"

Weekly Words: "Capable of Becoming"

"I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element.  It is my personal approach that creates the climate.  It is my daily mood that makes the weather.  I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous.  I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration.  I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal.  In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person humanized or de-humanized.  If we treat people as they are, we make them worse.  If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming."

-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Weekly Words: "Time is Land for Tilling"

"One of the most important characteristics distinguishing man from all other forms of nature is his knowledge of transitoriness, of beginning and end, and therefore of the gift of time.

In man, transitory life attains its peak of animation, of soul power, so to speak. This does not mean man alone would have a soul. Soul quality pervades all beings. But man’s soul is most awake in his knowledge of the inter-changeability of the terms “existence” and “transitoriness.”

To man, time is given like a piece of land, as it were, entrusted to him for faithful tilling; a space in which to strive incessantly, achieve self-realization, move onward and upward. Yes, with the aid of time, man becomes capable of wresting the immortal from the mortal."

- Thomas Mann