“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”
― Mary Oliver

Eyes So Soft

Don't
Surrender
Your loneliness so quickly.
Let it cut more
Deep

Let it ferment and season you
As few human
Or even divine ingredients can.

Something missing in my heart tonight
Has made my eyes so soft,
My voice so tender,
My need of God
Absolutely
Clear

Spiritual Warrior

"When the spiritual warrior progresses on the path he paradoxically finds himself more alone.  He is like an island sitting alone in the middle of the lake...Although the warrior's life is dedicated to helping others, he realizes that he will never be able to completely share his experience with others.  The fullness of his experience is his own, and he must live with his own truth.  Yet he is more and more in love with the world.  That combination of love affair and loneliness is what enables the warrior to constantly reach out to help others.   By renouncing his private world the warrior discovers a greater universe and a fuller and fuller broken heart.   This is not something to feel bad about; it a cause for rejoicing."   Chogyam Trungpa

Fundementalism

"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself."

Friedrich Nietzche

Open Heart

To Open Toward the Heart

Today, like every day,
we are ruined and lonely.

...Don't retreat,
fleeing your emptiness
through the doorway of thinking.

Try making some music instead.

There are hundreds of ways
to kneel in prayer —hundreds of ways to open
toward the heart of the Friend's beauty.

~Maulana Rumi

Translated by David and Sabrineh Fideler

Love After Love

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here.  Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine.  Give bread.  Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit.  Feast on your life.

Loneliness

Today, like every day,
we are ruined and lonely.

Don't retreat,
fleeing your emptiness
through the doorway
of thinking.

Try making some music instead.

There are hundreds of ways
to kneel in prayer —
hundreds of ways to open
toward the heart
of the Friend's beauty.

~Maulana Rumi

Longing

"We have grown accustomed to shutting down or blotting out feelings of loneliness, longing, hunger.  It's less challenging to feed the hunger with explanations, concepts, rules (or drugs, food or drink) than to rest awhile in the depths of the heart's longing."  Elizabeth Lesser

Identity

"It is important not to take care of or be taken care of all of the time.   They [mothers/women] are always caring, always wanting care.   They are stuck, fixated on the nurturing mother-child archetype.  But you don't always need to be cared for.  You don't have to justify your existence by caring for others.   Instead of making mutual care an absolute principle, you could understand that need, absence and ignorance allow wonder and new life.  You need to feel your own essence - who you are when you are not acknowledged and supported by someone else.   This empty underworld of your identity is an important ingredient in your reality, and when you are learning this lesson you may think you are in a dark night."  Thomas Moore

Aloneness

You cannot be lonely if you like the person you're alone with. ~ Dr. Wayne Dyer

Dark Night of the Soul

"Your dark night is liminal, an in-between place, and that explains in part why it is so uncomfortable.   It is neither here nor there.   It seems to take you out of life rather than further into it.   It becomes difficult to find words to describe your experience, and you may hesitate to describe it to friends because people usually want good news.   They don't know what's going on.   Nobody around knows what is happening to you.   But something is taking place, some deep process dissolving you and remaking you into something new."   Thomas Moore

Life as Story

"As creatures of story, we long for story; not just wordiness but the quality of interaction story engages in us.  Ironically so many of us experience great loneliness as we jostle around each other on crowded streets, overhear each other on cell phone, or cruise the internet late at night.   As we practice the art of storycatching, we can look for opportunities to insert story space into our daily life when we pay attention, and when we are paid attention to, we learn to take our place in the story going on around us."  Christina Baldwin

Perhaps

"Perhaps we wouldn't eat so much or smoke, or drink so much, if we were paying attention to ourselves.   Perhaps we wouldn't talk so much if we were paying attention to each other.   All of these oral activities are trying to meet a need, and perhaps the greatest need is to be seen and heard."  Christina Baldwin

Loneliness

"We may think we're lonely because we have no friends, when the fact is we have no relationship to ourselves, and for that reason we feel lonely and friendless."  Thomas Moore

Feeding the Fire

"If you aren't feeding the fire of anger or the fire of craving by talking to yourself, then the fire doesn't have anything to feed on.   It peeks and passes on.   Instead of relating directly with sorrow or loneliness or the anger, we think that the way to end it is to blame it on someone else.   We think, curiously enough, that this will make the pain go away.  Instead, acting out is what makes it last."   Pema Chondron

Stories

"Perhaps the most profound of the tools we have at our disposal is the simple act of telling our stories to other human travelers- in a circle around the fire, at the back fence with the neighbor, or at the kitchen table.   By sharing our most human traits, we begin to feel  less odd, less lonely, and less pessimistic.   And the core of each story-each personal myth-we uncover a splendid treasure, a source of unending power and sweetness; the shining soul of each wayfarer."   Elizabeth Lesser

Aloneness

"It takes great courage to meet the full force of your aloneness.   Most of the activity of society is subconsciously designed to quell the voice crying in the wilderness within you."   John O' Donahue

Solitude

"When you inhabit your solitude fully and experience its outer extremes of isolation and abandonment, you will find that at it's heart there is neither loneliness nor emptiness but intimacy and shelter."   John O' Donahue

Solitude

"Solitude is one of the most precious things in the human spirit.   It is different from loneliness.   When you are lonely, you become acutely conscious of your own separation.   Solitude can be a homecoming to your own deepest belonging.   We cannot continue to seek outside ourselves for the things that we need from within.   The blessings for which we hunger are not to be found in other places or people.   They are at home in the heart of the soul."   John O' Donahue