“Iola Pond” - A place I once lived
Weekly Tao Te Ching
CHAPTER 46
When a culture knows the Tao, it creates beautiful and useful things.
Each person contributes what is natural, and nothing is left undone. Contentment is the normal state of things.
When a culture does not know the Tao, it produces useless toys and distractions. It stockpiles weapons of every sort, and people live in fear. Each person is forced to fit a slot, controlled, confined, and miserable.
No one is content.
🛎 William Martin’s Website / His Books📚
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Weekly - Mirabai Starr
“Interdependence with all beings has never again been an abstract concept to me. I am viscerally aware of my debt to every blade of grass. Innumerable, unexpected blessings emerged from the ashes of my loss: a childlike wonderment and gratitude in the face of the simplest things: a bowl of buttered noodles, reading poetry to my husband in bed, two horses prancing across the field behind our house. These are the blossoms that unfold from my growing relationship with the Mystery of Love…”
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Weekly - Anthony de Mello
“A thought is a screen, not a mirror; that is why you live in a thought envelope, untouched by Reality.”
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Weekly - Alan Watts
“Although the rhythm of the waves beats a kind of time, it is not clock or calendar time. It has no urgency. It happens to be timeless time. I know that I am listening to a rhythm which has been just the same for millions of years, and it takes me out of a world of relentlessly ticking clocks. Clocks for some reason or other always seem to be marching, and, as with armies, marching is never to anything but doom. But in the motion of waves there is no marching rhythm. It harmonizes with our very breathing. It does not count our days. Its pulse is not in the stingy spirit of measuring, of marking out how much still remains. It is the breathing of eternity, like the God Brahma of Indian mythology inhaling and exhaling, manifesting and dissolving the worlds, forever. As a mere conception this might sound appallingly monotonous, until you come to listen to the breaking and washing of waves.”
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Weekly - William Paul Young
“Every human being is a universe within themselves. Your mother and father participated with God to create a soul who would never cease to exist. Your parents, as cocreators, supplied the stuff, genetics and more, uniquely combined to form a masterpiece, not flawless but still astounding; and we took from their hands what they brought to us, submitting to their timing and history and added what only we could bring to them- life. You were conceived, a living wonder who exploded into being.”
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Doodle of the Week (1)
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Weekly - Deng Ming Dao
“Life is a constant series of opportunities. If we don’t reach out for things, if we don’t take advantage of what comes our way, then we cannot be in harmony with the essential nature of life.”
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Weekly - Peter Rollins
“The face of our beloved can thus be described as an icon. Just as with an idol, it is the way we interact with an object, rather than a property in the object itself, that renders it an icon. But in the look of love, objects are exposed as icons. The face of our beloved is not a signpost, for a signpost is not the place where it points; yet neither is the face a pure manifestation of our beloved. Rather, the face is the place where the beloved is both revealed and hidden.”
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Weekly - Maya Angelou
Human beings are more alike than unalike. Whether in Paris, Texas, or Paris, France, we all want to have good jobs where we are needed and respected and paid just a little more than we deserve. We want healthy children, safe streets, to be loved and have the unmitigated gall to accept love.
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Weekly - Thich Nhat Hanh
"It is my conviction that there is no way to peace—peace is the way.”
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Doodle of the Week (2)
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Weekly - Richard Rohr
“Most of us were taught that God would love us if and when we change. In fact, God loves you so that you can change. What empowers change, what makes you desirous of change is the experience of love. It is that inherent experience of love that becomes the engine of change.”
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Weekly - Brian D. McLaren
“Jesus was short on sermons, long on conversations; short on answers, long on questions; short on abstraction and propositions, long on stories and parables; short on telling you what to think, long on challenging you to think for yourself.”
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Keith’s Weekly Pick
“The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them”
~Thomas Merton
"Cranes, Pines, and Bamboo" by Ogata Kōrin (1658-1716)
