From within or from behind
a light shines through us upon things,
and makes us aware that we are nothing,
but the light is all.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Posts tagged as:
joyful quotes
“Wisdom is the art of living
in rhythm with your soul, your life,
and with the Divine….Wisdom is
the way you learn to decipher
the unknown which is our
closest companion.”
~John O’Donohue, in an interview with
Krista Tippet, Speaking of Faith
“After you jump and
before you land
is God.”
~Gabrielle Roth, Maps To Ecstasy
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“Earthly things must be known to be loved;
Divine things must be loved to be known.”
~Blaise Pascal
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First we receive the light;
Then we impart the light.
Thus we repair the world.
~Kabbalah
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E.B. White said, “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” Do you have similar desires tugging at you every morning? I desire simplicity AND celebration; working with passion AND time with my family; to give And to receive. Although I am not convinced I can improve the world, I do want to pour forth blessings, beauty, and love into it, and I want to continue to determine how to keep my own burden upon it small.
Sometimes I find a halting duality in my desires, when I fall into either/or thinking: improve OR enjoy, simplicity OR celebration, work OR play. Then it is hard to plan the day. I am saved often by the reminder of Both/And. I may both work and play, both improve and enjoy, both give and receive.
I offer these quotations from my Happiness book of quotations, published by Andrews McMeel, coupled with these friendly pictures of a goat at North Tabor Farm. I love goats. I love their full embodiment of humility and playfulness, enthusiasm and curiosity. They do not seem torn between the desires to improve or enjoy- they simply enjoy.
Live in each season as it passes;
breathe the air,
drink the drink,
taste the fruit.
~Henry David Thoreau
Mix a little foolishness
in with your serious plans.
It is lovely to be silly at the right moment.
~Horace
The burden of self is lightened
when I laugh at myself.
~Rabindranath Tagore
The car has broken down,
my love is far away.
My bones feel weary,
and my mind is tired.
Still, I can say with joy
that happiness remains.
~Ingrid Goff-Maidoff
Dwell as near as possible
to the channel in which your life flows.
~Henry David Thoreau
It is the simple things in life that make living worthwhile,
the sweet fundamental things
such as love and duty, work and rest, and
living close to nature. ~Laura Ingalls Wilder
The Infinite Goodness has such wide arms,
it takes everyone that turns to it.
~Dante
Such blessings we receive,
such gifts of grace!
If we have wandered
from the path of gladness,
point us back to Life!
~Ingrid Goff-Maidoff
The journey is the reward.
~Chinese Proverb
If only we’d stop trying to be happy~
we’d have a pretty good time.
~Edith Wharton
Be happy. It’s one way of being wise.
~Colette
The big question is whether you are going to be able
to say a hearty “yes!” to your adventure.
~Joseph Campbell
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The very purpose of our lives
is happiness and joyfulness.
That is very clear.
~Dalai Lama
On Tuesday, June 2nd, I will be a guest at Jan Lundy’s blog, Awake Is Good. I will be there all day to explore joy- to have a conversation with you. Please stop by. At the end of the day, Jan will give away a copy of my Joy Book, as well as a bunch of my other inspirational offerings. I will open our conversation Tuesday with this article.
Exploring Joy
I love words. I love to get down into them, coaxing them from a tight bud into an open flower, revealing multiple petals fragrant with meaning. And I love to make connections between wisdom traditions, listening for what others have said throughout time and around the world. This has become a kind of path for me, and it is the way in which I have been exploring Joy for many years. While I don’t know everything there is to know about Joy, I have sought the world’s wisdom, sat with it fondly, and welcomed Joy to take up residence in my thoughts and in my heart. For me, Joy will always be a kind of personal opening, or a journey - an intimate exploration into life and a sense of love and belonging.
In my exploration of Joy, I found that we all have various ideas about what it means. Some of us have even developed an aversion for the word, so I was eager to move beyond a bud-like understanding and open it up to a fuller flower. I also discovered that many dictionaries offer a rather superficial definition: the anticipation of something one wants or desires. Yet I had a strong inkling that Joy was not merely the result of something as fleeting as wants and desires, accomplishment or acquisition, (and not even simply the exuberant rush of good feelings) but more to do with a sustained intimacy with the eternal, spiritual dimension of our lives -a dimension which is sometimes forgotten or ignored in the fret and hurry of our culture today.
In fact, the more I explored Joy, unfolded and opened joy, the more it dawned on me, and I had to ask: what if Joy was this spiritual dimension as well as our relationship to it? What if joy was our essence: joy, love, innocence, harmony and wisdom? What if joyfulness came from this spiritual understanding? And what if we have forgotten this and are instead living with a mistaken and impoverished identity?
I soon began collecting a mass of quotes to support my theory. Here are just a few of my favorites:
Joy is the realization
of the truth of our oneness,
The oneness of our soul with the world,
and of the world-soul
with supreme Love.
~Rabindranath Tagore
From Joy I came.
For Joy I live.
And in Sacred Joy
I shall melt again.
~Yogananda
You are seeking joy and peace
in far off places,
but the spring of joy is in your heart.
The haven of peace is in yourself.
~Sai Baba
I have spoken these things to you
That my joy may remain in you,
And that your joy may remain full.
~John 15:11
As essential and ubiquitous as air,
the presence of Joy is boundless, eternal,
without beginning, without end, spacious, ever-new,
ever-flowing, growth, the expanding universe,
infinite energy, bliss emptiness,
the fragrance of a marigold,
the free fluttering of wings…
(ok- I wrote that one.)
This exploration alone landed me in a profound state of Joy. I found that Joy emanates and is in fact suffused with a much deeper meaning than the one in my dictionary. Eventually I, with humility and boldness, penned a new definition for Joy.
JOY:
1: An abiding and profound sense
of love and belonging.
2: A deep passionate awareness
of the very act and art of living.
3: A sacred happiness. 4: An intimate trust.
5: A vibration. 6: An inner smile.
7:A Divine Current flowing through us
and into the world.
My next question was: How do we return to the presence and practice of joy? What I am learning is this: To arrive at this Joy, we each find our own personal ways to tune into it, tend to it, and infuse our lives with it. When we live from a place of intimacy with life, we live with an awareness of love and belonging; we feel held, energized, and at home in the world. There are as many ways to cultivate this intimacy as there are people - some of us practice meditation, yoga, walking in nature; some attend churches, temples and synagogues; some write, some cook, some play the kazoo, some run, others hold each other. I say it isn’t either this or that- it’s all of it, all of it. Lighting a candle, enjoying the fragrance of a flower, contemplative reading, creating art, listening to birdsong or music, singing - even just breathing deeply - there are tens of thousands of ways to land ourselves in Joy.
What are some of yours?
Take this
fanciful Joy.
Let it bloom
Inside you
like an orchid.
Let it open you
like a window.
Let it lift you up
to ride the wind.
Oh, Beautiful Soul,
pitch your tent
in this field of joy
and adventure out
from there…
~Ingrid
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Beauty is Life when Life reveals its Holy face.
~Kahlil Gibran
Everything has beauty,
but not everyone sees it.
~Confucius
There is no creature that does not have a radiance. Be it greenness of seed, blossom or beauty, it could not be creation without it. To be a creature is to be brilliant, beautiful, and on fire.
~Hildegard of Bingen
When it comes to beauty, may we have a beholder’s eye; an infinite witness within, and the ability to see the splendor that exists at every turn. The more beauty we perceive, the more open our hearts will become, and that beauty beheld will venture in, until it lights our luminous souls, sings in our gorgeous ears, and dances like brilliant diamonds in our smiling and radiant eyes…Ingrid
The question is not what you look at,
but what you see.
~Henry David Thoreau
If the doors of perception were cleansed,
Everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.
~William Blake
Here is my secret. It’s quite simple:
one sees clearly only with the heart.
Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.
–Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The Divine Manifestation is ubiquitous,
Only our eyes are not open to it.
~Joseph Campbell
…Viewing the world with the eyes of the heart,
it is illumined by our own inner light…
~Ingrid Goff-Maidoff
…With an eye made quiet
by the power of harmony
and the deep power of joy,
we see into the life of things.
~William Wordsworth
…I realized that what had changed was not outside
in the trees and streams and birds, but inside me.
As the mystics say, I was seeing the world by the light within. Through years of dedicated endeavor, the lamp had been lit in the depths of my consciousness, and all of nature had assumed an indescribable splendor.
~Eknath Eswaren
What is beauty,
if not the light of
a joy filled heart?
~Ingrid Goff-Maidoff
Beauty will come in the dawn
And beauty will come with the sunlight.
Beauty will come to us from everywhere,
Where heaven ends, where the sky ends.
Beauty will surround us.
We will walk in beauty.
~Billy Yellow, Navajo Medicine Man
Though we travel the world over
to find the beautiful,
we must carry it with us
or we find it not.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
Excerpted from the book, JOY, LIGHT, BEAUTIFUL WISDOM
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“Spirituality means love in action.
It means enjoying our spiritual riches and sharing them with all we meet.
We can learn to balance our spiritual practices with our worldly responsibilities,
enjoying the fruits within ourselves and sharing our gifts with humanity.”
~ Empowering Your Soul Through Meditationby Rajinder Singh
Today I am feeling very grateful for my work in this world, which is the work of sharing. And I am feeling grateful for this website and this online community. We all have our own ways of putting our love into action- what are some of yours?
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Men are convertible.
They want awakening.
Get the soul out of bed,
out of her deep habitual sleep,
out into God’s universe.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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