quotes & passages from retreat

While I was reading while retreating,if something struck me if I would stop and spend a few minutes writing the passage then commenting on it. Here are a few of the passages I read, hoping they inspire you in some small way as they did me.

"Simplicity means having a clear focus on the one necessary thing, an undivided heart." ~Elaine Prevallet (Elaine wrote a small book titled Reflections on Simplicity. She lives at Cedars of Peace)

"When I am liberated by silence, when I am no longer involved in the measurement of life, but in the living of it, my whole life becomes a prayer." ~Thomas Merton

"It in not silent here. But there is stillness. The essence of that spiritual source we humans try foolishly to name." ~Visitor at Simplicity

On talking, "The watching or knowing place in me is in a position that doesn't correspond with the position represented by my word. I am not in my word. The word is empty of my presence, my truth. If, for the word to be whole, to have integrity, in must contain my inner truth." ~Elaine Prevallet

"Poets must read and study, but they must learn to tilt and whisper, shout or dance, each in his or her own way, or we might as well copy the old books. But no, that would never do, for always the new self swimming around in the old world feels itself uniquely verbal. And that is just the point; how the world, moist and beautiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That's the big question and the one the world throws at you every morning, "Here you are alive. Would you like to make a comment?" ~Mary Oliver in Long Life