All Moments Are Key Moments

“Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments and life itself is grace.”

--Frederick Buechner

Photos by Anthony F. Chiffolo

God in Me Can See

Once I can recognize the divine image where I don’t want to see the divine image, then I have learned how to see. It’s really that simple. And here’s the rub: I’m not the one that is doing the seeing. It’s like there is another pair of eyes inside of me seeing through me, seeing with me, seeing in me. God can see God everywhere, and God in me can see God everywhere.

--Richard Rohr

Photos by Anthony F. Chiffolo

Find Life in Your Heart

"You’ve got to get out of your head and into your heart. Right now your thoughts are in your head, and God seems to be outside you. Your prayer and all your spiritual exercises also remain exterior. As long as you are in your head, you will never master your thoughts, which continue to whirl around your head like snow in a winter’s storm or like mosquitoes in the summer’s heat.

"If you descend into your heart, you will have no more difficulty. Your mind will empty out and your thoughts will dissipate. Thoughts are always in your mind chasing one another about, and you will never manage to get them under control. But if you enter into your heart and can remain there, then every time your thoughts invade, you will only have to descend into your heart and your thoughts will vanish into thin air. This will be your safe haven. Don’t be lazy! Descend! You will find life in your heart. There you must live."

---St. Theophan the Recluse

Photos by Anthony F. Chiffolo

Having New Eyes

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

--Marcel Proust

Photos by Anthony F. Chiffolo

Know How to See

"By virtue of the Creation and, still more, of the Incarnation, nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see."

 

--Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Photos by Anthony F. Chiffolo

Days of Our Lives

 

“How we spend our days, is of course, how we spend our lives.”

 

--Annie Dillard

Photos by Anthony F. Chiffolo

Reintegration

The worst thing that can happen to a person who is already divided up into a dozen different compartments is to seal off yet another compartment and tell him that this one is more important than all others, and that he must henceforth exercise a special care in keeping it separate from them. . . The first thing you have to do, before you start thinking about such a thing as contemplation, is to try to recover your basic natural unity, to reintegrate your compartmentalized being into a coordinated and simple whole, and learn to live as a unified human person. This means that you have to bring back together the fragments of your distracted existence so that when you say "I" there is really someone present to support the pronoun you have uttered.

--Thomas Merton, The Inner Experience

Photos by Anthony F. Chiffolo

"Devotion Is the Source of Success"

"There is a difference between doing something with great devotion and doing something without rest. Without great devotion, you cannot become immersed in the here and now; your mind wanders off to the past and the future, and you cannot achieve what you desire."

--Ilchi Lee

"The bee emerges..."

How reluctantly

the bee emerges from deep

within the peony

--Basho

"Summer Grasses"

Summer grasses:

all that remains of great soldiers'

imperial dreams

--Basho

"On the Road"

Long conversations

beside blooming irises--

joys of life on the road

--Basho

"With flowers You write..."

With flowers You write,
O Giver of Life;
With songs You give color,
with songs You shade
those who live here on the earth.
Later You will erase eagles and tigers,
we live only in Your book of paintings,
here, on the earth.

Poem from Miguel Leon-Portilla, ed. and trans., Native Mesoamerican Spirituality: Ancient Myths, Discourses, Stories, Doctrines, Hymns, Poems from the Aztec, Yucatec, Quiche-Maya and Other Sacred Traditions (New York: Paulist Press, 1980).