Lifeline
Thinking of the challenges that I face in life, these quotes from What Are People For by Wendell Berry seemed timely, much appreciated.
The clarification of pain, healing cultivates the scar that is the course of time and nature over damage: the landmark and mindmark that is the notation of a limit.
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.–William Blake.
When the road of excess has reached the place of wisdom it is a healed wound, a long scar.
The more local and settled the culture, the better it stays put, the less the damage. It is the foreigner whose road of excess leads to a desert.
Blake gives the just proportion in another proverb: “No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.”
The grace that is health of creatures can only be held in common.
The task of healing is to respect oneself as a creature, no more and no less. A creature is not a creator, and cannot be. There is only one Creation, and we are its members.
Good work finds the way between pride and despair. It graces with health. It heals with grace. It preserves the given so that it remains a gift
By it we lose loneliness.
We clasp the hands of those who go before us, and the hands of those who come after us; we enter the circle of each other’s arms. and the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a dance,
and the larger circle of all creatures, passing in and out of life, who move also in a dance, to a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it except in fragments.
