“I’m stringing these two brief quotes together because they are, to me, related. Whether it’s taking in these enlightened moments or whether it is drop by drop cultivating the capacity to have enlightened moments, it’s enormously realistic and hopeful to recognize that every day gives us opportunities for enlightened moments. Everything gives us opportunities to heal ourselves and to grow wisdom, peace, happiness, and love, which will then help us have even more enlightened moments. I think that’s an upward spiral that we can all rise on and in so doing be kinder to others, less aggressive toward them, and more able to help them too in their own paths of awakening.”

I do not know if there are enlightened beings but I am sure that there are enlightened moments.

Suzuki Roshi (1904-1971) Sōtō Zen monk and teacher
who helped popularize Zen Buddhism in the United States

Think not lightly of good, saying it will not come to me. Drop by drop is the water pot filled, likewise the wise one gathering it little by little fills oneself with good.

Dhammapada proverb

“This quote inspires me in a very deep way, and continues to grow in my understanding of our connection to life and to the earth. We are deeply interwoven. We were separated long ago from feeling that connection to the earth. This healing is restoring that connection in new and deeper ways. For me taking the time to be quiet, and be still, and notice a tree, notice a flower is not separate from any other work. It’s always has to do with deep healing of all parts of my being.”

I had a vision that the ancestors told us to heal the world. When we heal ourselves, we also heal our ancestors, our grandmothers, our grandfathers and our children, when we heal ourselves, we also heal Mother Earth.

Grandmother Rita Pitka Blumenstein(1933-2021)
was a Yup’ik elder from Alaska,
a renowned traditional healer, and the first person ever certified
as a traditional doctor in the state.
She was also a founding member of the
International Council of 13 Indigenous Grandmothers.

“This is what women do. This is our work. And I find a lot of meaning in this, because I very much subscribe to the fact that the rise of women in our authentic power is needed if the world is to be reconstituted or protected. Many spiritual teachers have pointed to this need for the rise of the feminine and I love that she talks about women being spinners and weavers. I myself was a textile designer earlier in my life and I consider that my book is a big weaving of many dimensions of life, the inner, the outer, the mundane, the holy, all of it of a piece. This metaphor of a textile is profound for me as she talks about the fine fibers of our own hearts and wounds equally is embodied. Learning to weave ourselves back into our bodies, back into our hearts, back into the land around us, back into our instinctual selves and intuitive knowing, to me, is what I write about. It’s a theme very strong for me in my book.”

Women are spinners and weavers. We are the ones who spin the threads and weave them into meaning and pattern. Like silkworms, we create those threads out of our own substance, pulling the strong, fine fibers out of our own hearts and wounds. It’s time to make some new threads. Time to strengthen the frayed, wild edges of our being and then weave ourselves back into the fabric of our culture. Once we knew the patterns for weaving the world, we can piece them together again. We can remake the world.

Sharon Blackie, British author who wrote If Women Rose Rooted

“This inspired me because I really feel if we all realized we are somebody, we could do something about anything around the world – anything that matters to us. It doesn’t have to be the food supply. It could be 5G, it could be fracking, it could be whatever it is that is important to you if you just believe that you can do something about that. My mother always instilled in me that you really can do anything that you want to do and that you really are an amazing human being if you just see yourself as amazing. She didn’t say this directly but I got it from her energy and her love and I still do. If you see yourself as amazing and you see other people as amazing, then what we can accomplish will be amazing around the world.”

I always wondered why somebody didn’t do something about that. Then I realized I am somebody.

Lily Tomlin, actress, comedian, writer, singer and producer

“We live in a difficult time where we’re not listening to each other enough and where there’s a lot of darkness both in the political realm and in corporate America. This is happening around the world and not just in the United States. It is also happening in our personal relationships. The way we change this is by each of us engaging and working to be a positive force and light and having conversations, doing our own little bit to fight those human glitches to move the world forward.”

Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

“This is a living mantra for me. It’s the question I ask all the time: What does love want? How does love want me to listen? Does love want me to respond? Does love want me to be in a hurry as I go for this walk? Does love want me to keep thinking thoughts that divide me from other people? . . . And in a relationship, you have to say, what does the relationship want if it’s going to bring us into the coherence of love. So, find your relationship to love and see how it obliges you to listen, to speak, and to act. That’s what that quote says to me.”

Who loves, loves love and loving love forms a circle so complete there is no end to the love.

 Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, (1090–1153)
A 12th-century medieval monk, theologian, and mystic
This is a modern adaptation of his famous passage on love.

“This quote connects to the ideas of not searching for meaning but making meaning. Meaning is on our shoulders to make, and if it goes away for a while, it will come back because we can invite it back and coax it back in.”

You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

Albert Camus (1913-1960) A French existentialist and
recipient of the 1947 Nobel Prize in Literature.
The quote is from Intuitions, an essay written in 1932
included in the collection Youthful Writings

“That is where we’re at now. We’ve become a force of nature, and we can either continue to destroy or continue to build up. One thing Thomas Berry says is that all we need to do is leave nature alone, and it will bounce back. It’s resilient. So that is my favorite quote from Thomas Berry.”

We cannot make a blade of grass. Yet there is liable not to be a blade of grass in the future unless it is accepted, protected, and fostered by the human.

Thomas Berry, D.P., Ph.D. (1914-2009) was a Catholic Priest,
geologian (“Earth Scholar”) and author of
The Sacred Universe: Earth, Spirituality,
and Religion in the Twenty-first Century

“For many years, I heard that poem only one way. I heard it as a statement of a kind of bitterness, of our obliviousness to suffering. That we are gathering blossoms, while ignoring the great suffering everywhere under our feet. But as I have been revisited by that Haiku, during the time of the coronavirus, I have heard it with more equality between the blossoms and the hell realm. And, I have understood it as the blossoms continue to matter as much as the suffering does. It is perfectly true that they coexist in our lives. We walk on the roof of hell and we can still gather blossoms. We gather blossoms and all around us is suffering. This poem has changed its meaning to fit the time.”

We walk on the roof of hell, gathering blossoms.

Issa, 18^th century Japanese poet

“What he meant was if you can see things differently, then you have discovered something wonderful. I really believe we are working toward a new paradigm right now. What I realized, at least in my way of looking at it, was there are three things we need in order to adjust to this movement. We need flexibility because things keep changing and we have to adjust to whatever it is. We need creativity which is the new eyes to see what is happening in a new way that works for us, and the third one is the most important one. We need heart centeredness. Everything we do must be with love, with heart centeredness, and with caring. This will make all the difference in the world. It will be a new paradigm if we can remember flexibility, creativity, and heart centeredness. It’s a lot to ask of us. However, we’re human beings and we have all this within us. When I think of that quote I think about how we can look at things in a new way and how important that is to the future and to whatever’s coming next.”

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscape but in having new eyes.

Marcel Proust (1871-1922), French writer who wrote
Remembrance of Things Past