this being human is a guest house

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Who gets up early to discover the moment light begins?

Who finds us here circling, bewitched, like atoms?

—Rumi

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Set your life on fire.

Seek those who fan your flames.

Who gets up early to discover the moment the light begins?

What was whispered to the rose to break it open last night was whispered to my heart. 

You’ve gotten drunk on so many kinds of wine. 

Taste this. It won’t make you wild.

It’s fire. 

Give up, if you don’t understand by this time that your living is firewood. 

Set your life on fire.

Seek those who fan your flames. 

The lamps are different,

But the Light is the same. 

To change, a person must face the dragon of his appetites with another dragon, the life-energy of the soul. 

What is the body? 

That shadow of a shadow of your love, that somehow contains the entire universe. 

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival. 

A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. 

Welcome and attend them all!

Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight. 

The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in. 

Sorrows are the rags of old clothes and jackets that serve to cover, and then are taken off.

That undressing, and the beautiful naked body underneath, is the sweetness that comes after grief.

You haven’t dared yet lose faith - so, can faith grow in you? 

Gamble everything for love, if you’re a true human being. 

If these poems repeat themselves, then so does Spring. 

—Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī

this being human is a guest house

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make it rain

 

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The view of things that all plurality is only apparent, that in the endless series of individuals, passing simultaneously and successively into and out of life, generation after generation, age after age, there is but one and the same entity really existing, which is present and identical in all alike; this theory … may be carried back to the remotest antiquity. 

It is the alpha and omega of the oldest book in the world, the sacred Vedas, whose dogmatic part, or rather esoteric teaching, is found in the Upanishads. There, in almost every page this profound doctrine lies enshrined; with tireless repetition, in countless adaptations, by many varied parables and similes it is expounded and inculcated.


—Arthur Schopenhauer

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We are not one but many.

Every other living organism has a point of view, something like mind, a feeling for life and a strong inclination to go on getting about in it. We humans not only construct a world but are, ourselves, an often intimate part of the makings, the natural constructions, of other kinds of equally semiotic life in this ecology of meanings.

Our various, always subjectively experienced, umwelten overlap, not with shared points of view but with shared biosemiotic systems. This shared and finally semiotically interdependent ecology of meanings is what we mean when we talk about reality.


—Wendy Wheeler
A Feeling for Life

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I will light candles this Christmas.

Candles of joy, despite all the sadness.
Candles of hope where despair keeps watch.
Candles of courage where fear is ever present.
Candles of peace for tempest-tossed days.
Candles of grace to ease heavy burdens.
Candles of love to inspire all of my living.
Candles that will burn all the year long. 


—Howard Thurman
Meditations Of The Heart (1953)

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