Accepting This - By Mark Nepo

Yes, it is true. I confess,
I have thought great thoughts, and sung great songs—all of it rehearsal for the majesty of being held.
The dream is awakened when thinking I love you and life begins when saying I love you and joy moves like blood when embracing others with love.
My efforts now turn from trying to outrun suffering to accepting love wherever I can find it.
Stripped of causes and plans and things to strive for, I have discovered everything I could need or ask for is right here— in flawed abundance.
We cannot eliminate hunger, but we can feed each other. We cannot eliminate loneliness, but we can hold each other. We cannot eliminate pain, but we can live a life of compassion.
Ultimately, we are small living things awakened in the stream, not gods who carve out rivers.
Like human fish, we are asked to experience meaning in the life that moves through the gill of our heart.
There is nothing to do and nowhere to go. Accepting this, we can do everything and go anywhere.

Never Knowing Where We Fly - By Mark Nepo

“Birds learn how to fly, never knowing where flight will take them.” There is a deep and humbling lesson in the way of birds. Their wings grow and stretch and span patches of air. First tentatively and then with confidence, they lift, they pump, they glide, they land. It seems, for birds, it is the act of flying that is the goal. True, they migrate and seek out food, but when flying, there is the sense that being aloft is their true destination.

Unlike birds, we confuse our time on Earth, again and again, with obsessions of where we are going-often to the point that we frustrate and stall our human ability to fly. We frequently tame and hush our need to love, to learn, to know the truth of spirit, until we can be assured that our efforts will take us somewhere. All these conditions and hesitations and yes-buts and what ifs turn the human journey upside down, never letting the heart, wing that it is, truly unfold.
Yet, without consideration or reservation, it is simply the presence of light that stirs birds to sing and lift.

They do not understand concepts such as holding back or only investing if the return seems certain. In this, we are the only creatures that seek out guarantees, and in so doing, we snuff the spark that is discovery.

Just how often do we cripple ourselves by not letting love with all its risks teach us how to fly? How many times do our hearts stall because we won’t let the wingspan of our passion open us fully into our gifts? How frequently do we search for a song of guidance that can only come from inside us?

I know that over the years, through fear and expectation, my mind has gathered and hoarded places I needed to go, things I needed to have, selves I needed to be. But here I am, without most of them-the goals and wants all used up in learning how to love.

So, try as I do to imagine and construct where I am headed, try as I will to plan and know what this life of feeling means, it is the pulse of what I feel itself that lifts me into spirit. In truth, wings don’t grow any differently to fit south or east or west, and our lives, no matter how we train ourselves, are more fundamental than any direction of worldly ambition. We, like the birds, are meant to fly and sing-that’s all-and all our plans and schemes are twigs of nest that, once outgrown, we leave.

Inspiring Quotes on Fully Living

"A human being is a part of the whole, called by us Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest-a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty."
~Einstein

For a man, as for a flower and beast and bird, the triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive.
~John Muir

All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
~Pablo Picasso

So many of our problems arise because we always feel cut off from something we need. We do not feel whole and therefore turn expectantly toward other people for the qualities we imagine missing in ourselves. All of the problems of the world, from one person’s anxiety to warfare between nations, can be traced to this feeling of not being whole.
~ Lama Thubten Yeshe