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).