Pages

"Pongáio" was the name my Aunt Mona gave to a long, green, cool room where we gathered at her home —
replete with comfy chairs, a rocker, sewing machine, sewing goods, beautiful beads, shelves, books, bibelots, photographs, odds'n'ends, mementos of a life, treasures —
a gathering of all the useful & 'useless' things that so make life a pleasure.



Friday, August 22, 2008

Quotes from Judith

From Judith Gayle, at Planetwaves:
Bengali poet, Rabindranath Tagore gives us a look at the inner workings of growing consciousness here:
Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers
but to be fearless in facing them.
Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain
but for the heart to conquer it.
Let me not look to allies in life's battlefield
but to my own strength.
Let me not crave in anxious fear to be saved
but hope for patience to win my freedom.
...
And Tagore gave us a definition for faith, a lovely one, when he said,
"Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark."
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart got right to the heart of it when he said,
"Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius."
I'll leave you with a favorite from T. Golas; I think of it as the final prayer bead.
"Go beyond reason to love. It is safe. It is the only safety."

Friday, August 15, 2008

Emotions vs Feelings

For the purposes of this discussion, let's differentiate between emotions and feelings. Emotion is that highly charged state that comes upon us, described in the East as the restless tiger pacing the jungle of our minds; we are advised to simply watch it pass, uninterrupted. Feeling is more in tune with our intuitive capacity in that it sends a signal advising us of the energy we are dealing with.
Feelings are like signposts; they function to inform us of the terrain ahead. We cannot, in actuality, get our feelings hurt -- that's our ego that's yelping. But we can get painful feelings from another person who does not seek our well-being; more likely than not, they are more mindlessly focused on their own desires than on anything we might need from them.
(... have to find where I got this quote from!!!)