We parked the car at the roadside and walked onto the grass. We stood together and sent our praises to the Most High. The prayer was sweet and when I dropped my head onto the cool, grass-covered earth, I felt myself truly a servant. For just a fleeting moment my heart was full of joy. As we walked back to the car, I began to understand. Prayer is service in the absolute. It is selfless service to God. Actually, one's entire life could be a prayer.
~ from THE WRITING ON THE WATER by Muhyiddin Shakoor
May you always have work for your hands to do, May your pockets hold always a coin or two, May the sun shine bright on your windowpane May the rainbow be certain to follow each rain. May the hand of a friend always be near you, And May God fill your heart with gladness to cheer you.
There is a quiet light that shines in every heart. . . . It is what illuminates our minds to see beauty, our desire to seek possibility, and our hearts to love life. Without this subtle quickening our days would be empty and wearisome, and no horizon would ever awaken our longing. Our passion for life is quietly sustained from somewhere in us that is wedded to the energy and excitement of life. This shy inner light is what enables us to recognize and receive our very presence here as blessing. We enter the world as strangers who all at once become heirs to a harvest of memory, spirit, and dream that has long preceded us and will now enfold, nourish, and sustain us. The gift of the world is our first blessing.
~ from TO BLESS THE SPACE BETWEEEN US by John O'Donohue
Greetings and Beautiful Blessings, dear friends! It is easy to find beauty everywhere we look as the earth bursts forth with new growth and lovely blooms. Beauty makes no demands on us at such times except that we open our eyes and look about us. But in other seasons of our lives, more may be required of us. It can be necessary to first find beauty within ourselves in order to perceive it without; and sometimes our search is not easy. We may feel at times that we are filled with darkness, that there could not be anything but ugliness inside us. But beauty is there, too, and we will find it as we turn our gaze deeply inward and silently ask that the beautiful light of the sacred fill us and radiate outward in all directions. Once we know it within, we will find it everywhere we look; for, as Nan Merrill once said, “Beauty and love cut through illusion.”
God's beauty is expressed whenever we of earth so desire to seek for it. It shall not be difficult for us to behold beauty, when we behold the beauty of God within our own consciousness. . . . Beauty is everywhere to those who would behold it. When God reigns supreme in the consciousness of humankind, the tiniest blade of grass speaks of God's beauty.
To wonder at beauty, Stand guard over truth, Look up to the noble, Resolve on the good. This leadeth us truly To purpose in living, To right in our doing, To peace in our feeling, To light in our thinking. And teaches us trust, In the working of God, In all that there is, In the width of the world, In the depth of the soul.
The Navaho word hozho, translated into English as "beauty," also means harmony, wholeness, goodness. One story that suggests the dynamic way that beauty comes alive between us concerns a contemporary Navajo weaver. A man ordered a rug of an especially complex pattern on two separate occasions from the same weaver. Both rugs came out perfectly and the weaver remarked to her brother that there must have been something special about the owner. It was understood that the outcome of the rugs was dependent not on the weaver's skill and ability but upon the hozho in the owner's life. The hozho of his life evoked the beauty in the rugs. In the Navaho world view, beauty exists not simply in the object, or in the artist who made the object; it is expressed in relationships.
~ from NOTES ON THE NEED FOR BEAUTY, by J. Ruth Gendler
Too late I loved you, O Beauty so ancient yet ever new! Too late I loved you! And, behold, you were within me, and I out of myself, and there I searched for you.
Who walks with beauty has no need of fear; The sun and moon and stars keep pace . . . Invisible hands restore the ruined year, And time, itself, grows beautifully dim.
