Life as Prayer

Gentleness is everywhere in daily life, a sign that faith rules through ordinary things, through cooking and small talk, through storytelling, fishing, tending animals and sweetcorn and flowers, through sports, music and books, raising kids...all the places where the gravy soaks in and grace shines through. Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people. 

     Garrison Keillor 

Contentment comes as the infallible result of great acceptances, great humilities, of not trying to make ourselves this or that, (to conform to some dramatized version of ourselves) but of surrendering ourselves to the fullness of life, of letting life flow through us. 

     David Grayson 

Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word "loneliness" to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word "solitude" to express the glory of being alone. 

     Paul Tillich

What a lovely surprise to discover how unlonely being alone can be. 

     Ellen Burstyn

Loneliness is the poverty of self. Solitude is the richness of self. 

     May Sarton 

If only I may grow firmer, simpler, quieter, warmer. 

     Dag Hammarskjold 

My greatest wealth is the deep stillness in which I strive and grow and win what the world cannot take from me with fire or sword. 

     Goethe

My earliest emotions are bound to the earth and to the labors of the fields. I find in the land a profound suggestion of poverty and I love poverty above all other things....not sordid and famished poverty, but poverty that is blessed, simple, humble, lie brown bread.

     Federico Garcia Lorca 

There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fountain of action and joy. It rises up in wordless gentleness and flows out of me from unseen roots of all created being. 

     Thomas Merton