The afternoon glow is brightening the bamboo, the fountains are bubbling with delight, the soughing of the pines is heard in our kettle.  Let us dream of evanescence, and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things.
- Okakura Kakuzo

How Wonderful By Irving Feldman

How wonderful to be understood, to just sit here while some kind person relieves you of the awful burden of having to explain yourself, of having to find other words to say what you meant, or what you think you thought you meant, and of the worse burden of finding no words, of being struck dumb . . . because some bright person has found just the right words for you—and you have only to sit here and be grateful for words so quiet so discerning they seem not words but literate light, in which your merely lucid blossoming grows lustrous. How wonderful that is! And how altogether wonderful it is not to be understood, not at all, to, well, just sit here while someone not unkindly is saying those impossibly wrong things, or quite possibly they’re the right things if you are, which you’re not, that someone —a difference, finally, so indifferent it would be conceit not to let it pass, unkindness, really, to spoil someone’s fun. And so you don’t mind, you welcome the umbrage of those high murmurings over your head, having found, after all, you are grateful —and you understand this, how wonderful!— that you’ve been led to be quietly yourself, like a root growing wise in darkness under the light litter, the falling words.

time to be silly,
dress up in costumes, dance, sing
sixty-eight year's worth.

Bright green grass glows as
mid-day rain encloses house
in a gentle thrum.

8:08 AM
sunlight under a black sky -
a dampening day

Meditation is not just a rest or retreat from the turmoil of the stream or the impurity of the world. It is a way of being the stream, so that one can be at home in both the white water and the eddies.

—Gary Snyder, “Just One Breath”

Your heart knows the way. Run in that direction
- Rumi

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.
- Henry David Thoreau

We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit. 
- e.e. cummings