gradience

We often define ourselves by our roles and labels, building sandcastles and clinging to them, fearing the inevitable tide. Sandcastles are beautiful, but we cannot live inside them. Because the tide rises. That's what the tide does. We must remember: I am the builder, not the castle. I am separate and whole, over here, eyes on the horizon, sun on my shoulders, welcoming the tide. Building, rebuilding. Playfully. Lightly. Never changing, always changing.

Untamed - Glennon Doyle

From the point of view of time, we say "impermanence," and from the point of view of space, we say "nonself." Things cannot remain themselves for two consecutive moments, therefore, there is nothing that can be called a permanent "self." Before you entered this room, you were different physically and mentally. Looking deeply at impermanence, you see nonself. Looking deeply at nonself, you see impermanence

Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching

(6.37) If you've seen the present you've seen everything. Since beginning as it'll be forever. The same substance, the same form. All of it.

Meditations - Marcus Aurelius

(7.23) Nature takes substance and makes a horse. Then melts it down and makes a tree. Then for a person. Each existing only briefly.

Meditations - Marcus Aurelius

The work of sacred art: putting us in touch with something we know intimately yet remains beyond our comprehension.

Patrick Bringley: All the Beauty in the World

Now, scholars can be very useful and necessary, in their own dull and unamusing way. They provide a lot of information. It's just that there is Something More, and that Something More is what life is really all about.

Benjamin Hoff - The Tao of Pooh

The sun and stars that float in the open air.... the appleshaped earth and we upon it... surely the drift of them is something grand; I do not know what it is except that it is grand, and that it is happiness,

Leaves of Grass - Walt Whitman

There is an indescribable joy that glows within us... inexplicably... This is not a joy over this or that, but is the soul's whole-hearted cry.

Soren Kierkegaard

In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warmed us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil. Its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned.

Annie Dillard, Total Eclipse of the Heart