Sacred river rocks

Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn, a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter. If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things, this is the best season of your life.

—Wumen Huikai, “The Best Season”

“To experience the landscape as a theophany is to take seriously the way the divine can be revealed through nature and through created things. It means we can join in with all of the elements and creatures in singing God’s praise.” --- Christine Valters Paintner, PhD  The Soul’s Slow Ripening: 12 Celtic Practices for Seeking the Sacred

“Esther de Waal writes that Benedictine life ‘simply consists in doing the ordinary things of daily life carefully and lovingly, with the attention and reverence that can make of them a way of prayers, a way of God.’"

--- Christine Valters Paintner, PhD,  The Artist’s Rule: Nurturing Your Creative Soul with Monastic Wisdom

There is more to feel in your beautiful life than to feel unworthy of your beautiful life.  There is more to do with your beautiful life than to believe the lies they told you to keep you feeling unworthy. -
S.C. Lourie

"For the Celtic monks, thresholds were sacred places. The space or the moment between—whether physical places or experiences—is a place of possibility. Rather than waiting being a nuisance or arriving with a sense that you are wasting time, the pause at a threshold is an invitation to breathe into the now and receive its gifts."

--- Christine Valters Paintner, PhD,  The Wisdom of the Body: A Contemplative Journey to Wholeness for Women

Bannerstones

As soon as we realize/remember that it’s love, well-being, contentment, enjoyment, happiness that ego is promising at the end of all its manipulation/gyrations, and that ego can never deliver any of those, we start giving attention to what the heart desires here and now. No more falling for false promises of what we’ll get “as soon as;” we’re going to choose and have what we truly want right here, right now.
- Cheri Huber

Everything is unhindered, clouds gracefully floating up to the peaks, the moonlight glitteringly flowing down mountain streams.
― John Daido Loori

“Active Hope is waking up to the beauty of life on whose behalf we can act. We belong to this world.”

“If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you. Besides, those voices are merely guardians and demons protecting the real treasure, the first thoughts of the mind.” 

~ Natalie Goldberg

"The unfolding of the Hours each day reminds us of the divine dwelling in every moment. This is the call of the monk, but of the poet as well. Both focus on paying attention to life and lifting it up, naming moments, and in the process illuminating their holiness." --- Christine Valters Paintner, PhD  Dreaming of Stones: Poems

"Contemplative presence to nature transforms our daily choices so we become conscious of how to live within the matrix of creation in life-giving ways." --- Christine Valters Paintner, PhD  The Self-Study Online Retreat ~ Water, Wind, Earth and Fire: Praying with the Elements