They lay next to each other and listened to the rain.
So life hasn’t turned out right for either of us, not the way we expected, he said.
Except it feels good now, at this moment.
Better than I have reason to believe I deserve, he said.
Oh, you deserve to be happy. Don’t you believe that?
I believe that’s how it’s turned out, for the last couple of months. For whatever reason.
– Kent Haruf, Our Souls at Night
But she grasped the urgency of the moment, knowing what almost everyone in France knows, which is to say that life is not lived in the future. “Seize the moment,” she said. “Pay attention to your life right now.”
-Kate Betts, My Paris Dream: An Education in Style, Slang, and Seduction in the Great City on the Seine
I hope you’ll discover, as I have, that its not what lands you in the dark woods that defines you, but what you do to make it out.
– Joseph Luzzi, In a Dark Wood
Our hermitage is the act of living with attention in the midst of things: amid the rhythms of work and love, the bath with the child, the endlessly growing paperwork, the ever-present likelihood of war, the necessity for taking action to help the world. For us, a good spiritual life is permeable and robust. It faces things squarely, knowing the smallest moments are all we have, and that even the smallest moment is full of happiness…
What we need, and what we love, what consoles us and what redeems us, is here each moment, already within us. It waits for us to recognize its presence. We have only to give ourselves up to it, and our one life, and all life, welcomes us into its arms.
~ John Tarrant
Yet another glorious quote that I found on A First Sip. Have I convinced you yet that you need to be reading this blog?
It’s not about having things figured out, or about communicating with other people, trying to make them understand what you understand. It’s about a chicken dinner at a drive-in. A soft pillow. Things that don’t need explaining.
– Ann Beattie
