I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.
I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.
To live content with small means.
To seek elegance rather than luxury,
and refinement rather than fashion.
To be worthy not respectable,
and wealthy not rich.
To study hard, think quietly, talk gently,
act frankly, to listen to stars, birds, babes,
and sages with open heart, to bear all cheerfully,
do all bravely, await occasions, hurry never.
In a word, to let the spiritual,
unbidden and unconscious,
Grow up through the common.
This is to be my symphony.
The value of a human being can be measured by what he or she most deeply wants. Be free of possessing things. Sit at an empty table. Be pleased with water, the taste of being at home.
As you open yourself to your soul, a calming sense of peace and connectedness develops within you. This peaceful feeling deepens your levels of thought, releases the innate healing powers of your body, reminds you to be grateful for all the gifts of life, and broadens your perspective, so that you can be at peace with the way things are.
~ Jack Canfield from "Rekindling the Fires of Your Soul"
Now let your great and wise and powerful
be as the poor and foolish little ones:
unembarrassed to receive the incredible gift,
and not knotted in guilt over your lack of worth,
and not struggling to "earn" what cannot be deserved,
but just simply, joyfully accepting of all
that is given so humbly and gladly in Love.
~ from ENCOUNTER AT BETHLEHEM by Jean Jones Andersen
The restless hollowness which surfaces into our consciousness when we reflect in silence is already the nearness of God, who is like the pure light which, spread over everything, hides itself by making everything else visible in the silent lowliness of its being. The
Incarnation urges us, in the experience of
solitude, to trust the nearness— it is not
emptiness; to let go and then we will find; to give up and then we will be rich.
