Tag Archives: Death

373. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing. ~Agatha Christie

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Even as the stone
of the fruit must break,
that its heart may stand in the sun,
so you must know pain…
Accept the seasons of your heart,
even as you have always
accepted the seasons
that pass over your fields…
~Khalil Gibran

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Our Father, each day is a little life, each night a tiny death; help us to live with faith and hope and love. Lift our duty above drudgery; let not our strength fail, or the vision fade, in the heat and burden of the day.
O God, make us patient and pitiful one with another in the fret and jar of life, remembering that each fights a hard fight and walks a lonely way.
Forgive us, Lord, if we hurt our fellow souls; teach us a gentler tone, a sweeter charity of words, and a more healing touch.
Sustain us, O God, when we must face sorrow; give us courage for the day and hope for the morrow.
Day unto day may we lay hold of thy hand and look up into thy face, whatever befall, until our work is finished and the day is done. Amen.
~St. Francis of Assisi, 1181-1226

I love you, Lord, my strength. Psalm 18:1  ✝

Thank you, Lord Jesus, that you save, you heal, you restore, and you reveal Your Father’s heart to us! You have captured me with grace and I’m caught in Your infinite embrace!

298. All the flowers of all the tomorrows are in the seeds of today. ~Author Unknown

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The Seed-Shop

Here in a quiet and dusty room they lie,
Faded as crumbled stone or shifting sand,
Forlorn as ashes, shriveled, scentless, dry-
Meadows and gardens running through my hand.

In this brown husk a dale of hawthorn dreams;
A cedar in this narrow cell is thrust
That will drink deeply of a century’s streams;
These lilies shall make summer on my dust.

Here in their safe and simple house of death,
Sealed in their shells, a million roses leap;
Here I can blow a garden with my breath,
And in my hand a forest lies asleep.

~Muriel Stuart, English poet

He put before them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”  ~Matthew 13:31-32   ✝

178. All the flowers of all the tomorrows are in the seeds of today and yesterday. ~Chinese Proverb

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In the garden the door is always open into the holy –
growth, birth, death.
Every flower holds the whole mystery in its short cycle,
and in the garden we are never far away from death,
fertilizing, good, creative death.
~May Sarton

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Every year the unseen becomes visible as new life explodes from quiet, dark, sustaining wombs.  Beneath the soil roots grow and above the surface tiny leaves yield proof of life.  Enlivening rains come, and the leaves grow.  Daylight hours lengthen, and they grow more.  Amid the leaves emerge buds, and they grow.  Buds burst into flowers, the flowers fade, and their petals fall.  Fruits, seed heads, or pods appear, and they ripen.  Fruits are harvested, seeds are spilled onto the soil, and buds are set inside woody canes or branches.  Then comes the time of rest, the discontinuance of the same, the different new genesis.  The beginnings, the middles, the ends–never an ending without a beginning–never a beginning without an ending, so goes the cyclic constancy of a garden.

The land produced vegetation; plants bearing seed according to its kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds.  And God saw that it was good.  ~Genesis 1:12  ✝

19. Let us love winter, for it is the spring of genius. ~Pietro Aretino

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We need a renaissance of wonder.
We need to renew, in our hearts and in our souls,
the deathless dream, the eternal poetry, the perennial sense
that life is miracle and magic.
~E. Merrill Root

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Since it is year’s end, we have entered the season of somber gardens, short days, low temperatures, and more-gray-than-blue skies.  The reckless abandon of the growing seasons has yielded to deepening winter’s, unadventurous restraint.  But, while looking out a window brings into view only the barrenness of winter, an actual venture out into its domain can expose wondrous sights like the seed pod in the photograph.  What a treat to see wondrous silken filaments that look like angel hair releasing seeds that are proof of a continuously running thread in Creation’s tapestry.  Such finds are tangible fragments of God’s imagination buried deep in the mystery of nature, and the aura of holiness that surrounds them often leaves onlookers amazed and awestruck.  These miraculous strands are the same kind of threads that govern the ceaseless ebbing and flowing of oceanic waves, the waxing and waning of the moon, the rising and setting of the sun, the birth and death of life forms, and the endless repetition of the seasons.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.
It is the source of all true art and all science.
He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder
and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.
~Albert Einstein

Rediscovering awe helps us appreciate the vast wonders of what the Creator’s mind imagined, what His words spoke, and what His hands created.  It bring us closer to God and restores our childlike joy and zeal for life.  The unfathomable mysteries of life are sacred benedictions; their blessings encourage us to stay in the Lord’s keeping and continue searching for His intent for our lives.

Who among the gods is like you, LORD?  Who is like you—majestic in holiness, awesome in glory, working wonders?  ~Exodus 15:11   ✝

**”if an object or expression can bring about, within us, a sense of serene melancholy and a spiritual longing, then that object could be said to be wabi-sabi.” “Wabi-sabi nurtures all that is authentic by acknowledging three simple realities: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect.”  The photo of the seed pod is a excellent example of Wabi Sabi.