“absolute attention is prayer.” --- Simone Weil

“The sacred is in the ordinary...it is to be found in one's daily life, in one's neighbors, friends, and family, in one's own backyard...travel may be a flight from confronting the sacred--this lesson can be easily lost. To be looking elsewhere for miracles is to me a sure sign of ignorance that everything is miraculous.” 

 ― Abraham Harold Maslow

who said this?

“there is nothing more sacred, nothing more extraordinary, then paying close attention to the ordinary moments of our mundane lives.” . . . awhile back, while listening to podcasts, I jotted down this quote in my notebook, but failed to record who said it. All I remember is that I was listening to a poet giving a speech in a unitarian church. Can anyone help me identify the author?

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Wordsworth’s real God was not the God of the church but the God of the hills. . . . brought from that heaven of the books and dwelt on the downs visible in the faraway distance seen from the top of a hill and in every cloud shadow that wandered across the valley. . . . -- William Hale White (The autobiography of Mark Rutherford)
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What are we saying but a gladness of being – coleman barks
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Moonlight floods the whole sky from horizon to horizon;
How much it can fill your room depends on its windows.
― Rumi
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"People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child -- our own two eyes. All is a miracle." — Thich Nhat Hanh
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If you ask me why I dwell among green mountains,
I should laugh silently; my soul is serene.
The peach blossom follows the moving water.
There is another heaven and earth beyond the world of men.
– Li Po
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My body is like a drifting cloud. I ask for nothing, I want nothing. My greatest joy is a quiet nap; my only desire for this life is to see the beauties of the seasons. – kamo ; Journeys of Simplicity; Traveling Light by Philip Harnden

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The true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life. - William Morris
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“We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are.” —The Talmud
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Each moment is a place you've never been. -- Mark Strand
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a quote . . .

“Silence is the language of God, all else is poor translation.” – rumi

a quote . . .

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
there are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
–rumi

a quote . . .

"The wave does not need to die to become water. She is already water." — Thich Nhat Hanh

a quote . . .

What strikes me as essential are that a haiku be: (1) brief (as long as it needs to be, as short as it can be); (2) a concatenation of words (this is, after all, a literary art, and the words of a haiku are not the experience it contains; on the other hand, the words of the haiku are another and new experience); (3) an opening (to something, though not always the same thing, but always larger than the flat description would be by itself). – Jim Kacian

a quote . . .

To strip human nature until its divine attributes are made clear, to inform ordinary activities with spiritual fervor, to give wings of eternity to that which is most ephemeral; to make divine things human and human things divine. --Pablo Casals

a quote

The artist's role is to invent rhythms and forms to reveal a deeper apprehension of reality for the viewer. --Leland Bell

a quote

What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the winter time. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the Sunset. --Crowfoot

a quote

the poem is not a thing we see -- it is, rather, a light by which we may see. -- Robert Penn Warren