Marcus Aurelius

“I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own - not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine.”

(from Meditations, Book Two)

Actually the rapture is already happening

Not in that instant way

you were taught to fear

after you threw the baby out with the

dirty bath water that tried to

drench you in its heavy darkness

and drown the natural love

you were born knowing.

It’s happening in that instant way

you now revere,

in the moment the sun gleams white

on the underside of the shining blackness

of a crow’s wing

In those moments that birth anew

an eternal and unshakeable convert

to love of the sacred

that is here right now.

(Ash)

Jelaluddin Rumi

Who gets up early
to discover the moment light begins?
Who finds us here circling, bewildered, like atoms?
Who comes to a spring thirsty
and sees the moon reflected in it?
Who, like Jacob blind with grief and age,
smells the shirt of his lost son
and can see again?
Who lets a bucket down and brings up
a flowing prophet?
Or like Moses goes for fire
and finds what burns inside the sunrise?

Jesus slips into a house to escape enemies,
and opens a door to the other world.
Soloman cuts open a fish, and there's a gold ring.
Omar storms in to kill the prophet
and leaves with blessings.
Chase a deer and end up everywhere!
An oyster opens his mouth to swallow on drop.
Now there's a pearl.
A vagrant wanders empty ruins.
Suddenly he's wealthy.

But don't be satisfied with stories, how things
have gone with others. Unfold
your own myth, without complicated explanation,
so everyone will understand the passage,
We have opened you.

Start walking toward Shams. Your legs will get heavy
and tired. Then comes a moment
of feeling the wings you've grown,
lifting.

(The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks)

Audre Lorde

Learn to use what you feel to move you toward action. Change, personal and political, does not come about in a day, nor a year. But it is our day-to-day decisions, the way in which we testify with our lives to those things which we say we believe, that empower us. Your power is relative, but it is real. And if you do not learn to use it, it will be used against you, and me, and our children. Change did not begin with you and it will not end with you. But what you do with your life is an absolutely vital piece of that chain. The testimony of your living is the missing remnant in the fabric of our future.

D.H. Lawrence

I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.

And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill.

I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self -

and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help

and patience, and a certain difficult repentance

long difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistake, and the freeing oneself

from the endless repetition of the mistake which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.