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Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better to take things as they come along with patience and equanimity. Carl Jung

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Ten Degrees

How beautiful the sun as it skims across the air in the hush of ten degrees, disc of palest yellow hope along a sky

of circumstance; how beautifully we watch it fall, the random tern, forgotten mole, the infant tree inside rough winter bark.

How beautiful this frost, female fingers tracing down the glass, how beautiful this world too cold to criticize itself;

how beautiful Earth's creatures are, happy and forever safe from the only perfect tragedy, which is of course to never have been born.

Tom Chandler

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True humanity is no inherent right but an achievement; and only through the earth may we be as one with all who have been and all who are yet to be, sharers and partakers of the mystery of living, reaching to the full of human peace and the full of human joy. Henry Beston

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Emily, This Place, and You

She got out of the car here one day, and it was snowing a little. She could see little glimpses of those mountains, and away down there by the river the curtain of snow would shift, and those deep secret places looked all the more mysterious. It was quiet, you know.

Her life seemed quiet, too. There had been troubles, sure * everyone has some. But now, looking out there, she felt easy, at home in the world * maybe like a casual snowflake. And some people loved her. She would remember that. And remember this place.

As you will, wherever you go after this day, just a stop by the road, and a glimpse of someone's life, and your own, too, how you can look out any time, just being part of things, getting used to being a person, taking it easy, you know.

William Stafford

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One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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You Must Sing

He sings in his father's arms, sings his father to sleep, all the while seeing how on that face grown suddenly strange, wasting to shadow, time moves. Stern time. Sweet time. Because his father

asked, he sings; because they are wholly lost. How else, in immaculate noon, will each find each, who are so close now? So close and lost. His voice stands at windows, runs everywhere.

Was death giant? O, how will he find his father? They are so close. Was death a gust? By which door did it come? All the day's doors are closed. He must go out of those hours, that house,

the enfolding limbs, go burdened to lean: you must sing to be found; when found, you must sing.

~ Li-Young Lee ~

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Let us sing now, not in order to enjoy a life of leisure, but in order to lighten your labors. You should sing as wayfarers do * sing, but continue your journey. Do not be lazy, but sing to make your journey more enjoyable. Sing, but keep going. St. Augustine

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East Coker V (excerpt) -- T. S. Eliot

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated Of dead and living. Not the intense moment Isolated, with no before and after, But a lifetime burning in every moment And not the lifetime of one man only But of old stones that cannot be deciphered. There is a time for the evening under starlight, A time for the evening under lamplight (The evening with the photograph album). Love is most nearly itself When here and now cease to matter. Old men ought to be explorers Here or there does not matter We must be still and still moving Into another intensity For a further union, a deeper communion Through the dark cold and the empty desolation, The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

~ T. S. Eliot ~

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The most important thing is to find out what the most important thing is. Shunryu Suzuki