What inspires you?
Or should I ask, who inspires you?
I’ve been inspired by sunrises and waning moons, by beautiful words and the one-antlered deer that sleeps in the sun on the hill outside my window.
Today, Five Minutes in the Morning suggests we find a poem, a saying or a piece of prose that speaks to our imagination, and that we look at it frequently.
Here are two that speak to me, the first of which was on my vision board.
Hell and heaven are within you. The doors are very close: with the right hand you can open one, with the left hand you can open another. With just a change of your mind your being is transformed – from heaven to hell and from hell to heaven. This goes on continuously. What is the secret? The secret is that whenever you are unconscious, whenever you act unconsciously, without awareness, you are in hell; whenever you are conscious, whenever you act with full awareness, you are in heaven. If this awareness becomes so integrated, so consolidated that you never lose it, there is no hell for you. If unconsciousness becomes so consolidated, so integrated that you never lose it, then there is no heaven. Fortunately unconsciousness can never become so consolidated; a part always remains conscious.
– Osho
Here is the second, the poem Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye:
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 everywhere like a shadow or a friend.
Share your inspiring words below, dear reader.
And have a wonderful Wednesday!