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What is life? It is the flash of the firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset. Crowfoot (a Blackfoot Indian, 1821-1890)

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Carmel Point

The extraordinary patience of things! This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses * How beautiful when we first beheld it, Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs; No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing, Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads * Now the spoiler has come: does it care? Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide That swells and in time will ebb, and all Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty Lives in the very grain of the granite, Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff. * As for us: We must uncenter our minds from ourselves; We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

Robinson Jeffers

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Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security doesn't exist in nature, not do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure. Helen Keller

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Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say it is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you every where like a shadow or a friend.

~ Naomi Shihab Nye ~

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The more you have, the more you are occupied, the less you give. But the less you have, the more free you are. Mother Teresa

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the dog, reminding us of our mortality, grows old

the daffodils, reminding us of our life, bloom freely

the breeze, reminding us to love, kisses our cheek

Stephen Wilder

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Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living things, a man will not himself find peace. Albert Schweitzer

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Whenever I hear the edgeless sound in the deep night O Mother! I find you again.

Whenever I stand beneath the light of the seamless sky O Father! I bow my head.

The sun goes down Our shadows dissolve The pine tree darken O Darling! We must go home

Kyozan Joshu Sasaki

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As soon as a man does not take his existence for granted, but beholds it as something unfathomably mysterious, thought begins. Albert Schweitzer