I will light candles this Christmas, Candles of joy, despite all sadness, Candles of hope where despair keeps watch. Candles of courage where fear is ever present, Candles of peace for tempest-tossed days, Candles of grace to ease heavy burdens. Candles of love to inspire all my living, Candles that will burn all the year long.
The Goddess is not separate from the world – She IS the world, and all things in it: moon, sun, earth, star, stone, seed, flowing river, wind, wave, leaf and branch, bud and blossom, fang and claw, woman and man.
Pie can't compete with cake. Put candles in a cake, it's a birthday cake. Put candles in a pie, someone's drunk in the kitchen.
One of the Taliban spokesmen said they have thousands of men who look forward to death like Americans look forward to living, which is great because we can arrange that. We'll set them up with death, we'll continue living.
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying says that death is the graduation ceremony, while living is just a long course in learning and preparing for the next journey. If we acknowledge death as the beginning, then how can we fear it?
One of the things that makes a dead leaf fall to the ground is the bud of the new leaf that pushes it off the limb.
Old age is the time when birthday candles cost more than the birthday cake itself, and half of your urine is wasted on medical testing.
I thought: 'It would be great to create a series of clothes that looked like that tree.' Clothes that gave you the green of the leaf and the warm brown of the underside of that leaf and the vanilla colored blossom.
How massively the mountains stand, while low to the ground the sand blows. The sand blows on and on. And then there are no mountains, none at all, the sand has kissed and whispered them away. And still, the sand blows on.
Feel the wind. This wind blows from world to world and from life to death. This is the wind of dharma. Be in love with the wind. It is an intimate lover. It enraptures you. It blows you through eternity.
One leaf left on a branch and not a sound of sadness or despair. One leaf left on a branch and no unhappiness. One leaf left all by itself in the air and it does not speak of loneliness or death. One leaf and it spends itself in swaying mildly in the breeze.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
The first memory I have, anyway, I guess - I think it was my second birthday and the cake came out with the candles and I was very excited and I was, like, "Oh! A cake!" and then my cousin blew out the candles. I was so disappointed. It just broke my heart. And so that's stamped in my brain.
Life, in a sense, is living and surviving. And all that makes for living and surviving is good. He who follows the fact cannot go astray, while he who has no reverence for the fact wanders afar.
We're living in a time when the most famous people in the world have no specific skill set and are known for living their lives in front of the world. How strange is that? The appeal makes sense to me - it's like 'The Truman Show,' getting a chance to peak into someone's bedroom or see the way someone fights with their husband.
Well, birthdays are merely symbolic of how another year has gone by and how little we've grown. No matter how desperate we are that someday a better self will emerge, with each flicker of the candles on the cake, we know it's not to be, that for the rest of our sad, wretched pathetic lives, this is who we are to the bitter end. Inevitably, irrevocably; happy birthday? No such thing.