Who knows? Only time

...

Who can say where the road goes
Where the day flows, only time
And who can say if your love grows
As your heart chose, only time

...

Sustain

The feeling towards the means by which we earn our bread, the feeling towards the person we fall in love with, the feeling towards the way we wish to shape ourselves in this life -- all these feelings that initially arise naturally, eventually require consistent sustenance for further development of the action motivated by them. How we sustain then becomes an excellent creativity test.

If Tomorrow Never Comes

  - from the blog Positive Thoughts

 

For surely there's always tomorrow to make up for an oversight, and we always get a second chance to make everything right.

There will always be another day to say our "I love you's." And certainly there's another chance to say our "Anything I can do's?"

But just in case I might be wrong, and today is all I get, I'd like to say how much you are appreciated and I hope we never forget, tomorrow is not promised to anyone, young or old alike. And today may be the last chance you get to hold your loved one tight.

So if you're waiting for tomorrow, why not do it today?

For if tomorrow never comes, you'll surely regret the day, that you didn't take that extra time for a smile, a hug, or a kiss and you were too busy to grant someone, what turned out to be their one last wish.

So hold your loved ones close today, whisper in their ear. Tell them how much you love them and that you'll always hold them dear. Take time to say "I'm sorry," "please forgive me," "thank you" or "it's okay".

And if tomorrow never comes, you'll have no regrets about today.  

Details

Padmasambhava, the great Indian master said, “Although my view is higher than the sky, my attention to actions and their effects is finer than flour.” In other words, as his wisdom into the emptiness of all things became more and more clear, his attention to details, to his words, thoughts, and deeds became more and more meticulous.

Source: Excerpt from the article Practicing Virtue, by Geoffrey Shugen Arnold, in the publication Mountain Record: The Zen Practitioner's Journal [Volume 30, No. 4 - Summer 2012]

Being a Person

Be a person here. Stand by the river, invoke
the owls. Invoke winter, then spring.
Let any season that wants to come here make its own
call. After that sound goes away, wait.

A slow bubble rises through the earth
and begins to include sky, stars, all space,
even the outracing, expanding thought.
Come back and hear the little sound again.

Suddenly this dream you are having matches
everyone’s dream, and the result is the world.
If a different call came there wouldn’t be any
world, or you, or the river, or the owls calling.

How you stand here is important. How you
listen for the next thing to happen. How you breathe.

Source: From Even in Quiet Places by William Stafford

Wide Gaze

Jenny Curran: Were you scared in Vietnam?
Forrest Gump: Yes. Well, I-I don't know. Sometimes it would stop raining long enough for the stars to come out... and then it was nice. It was like just before the sun goes to bed down on the bayou. There was always a million sparkles on the water... like that mountain lake. It was so clear, Jenny, it looked like there were two skies one on top of the other. And then in the desert, when the sun comes up, I couldn't tell where heaven stopped and the earth began. It's so beautiful. 

Source: Quote from the movie Forrest Gump

Life opens with a "Yes"

Here are some uplifting words my mom left me as a parting gift:

"Each day has a gift to give, small joys and great ones, too...

Beauty to see and songs to hear and wonderful things to do...

Enjoy each to the fullest for they add up to nothing less than a lifetime of lovely moments and a heart full of happiness."

It was great having her here. You know the experience has been good when you can look back, revisit each memory, then face ahead and walk (maybe run) on, with a smile on your face and these words in your heart -- "No regrets!" 

And generally speaking, I truly believe that every day of our lives is an open invitation -- to live fully, to live with no regrets, to live within the "Yes!"