A Quote by Jane Hirshfield

It's more for me as with going into a forest: if you sit quietly for a long time, the life around you emerges. As the world grows ever more clamorous, my hunger for silence steepens. I unplug the landline.
This silence, this moment, every moment, if it's genuinely inside you, brings what you need. There's nothing to believe. Only when I stopped believing in myself did I come into this beauty. Sit quietly, and listen for a voice that will say, 'Be more silent.' Die and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign that you've died. Your old life was a frantic running from silence. Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking. Live in silence.
For a long time, perhaps too long, we believed that the world around us would become more and more peaceful, and the order more stable.
When people note that more and more voters are cutting their landline phones and that more and more people are refusing to pick up phone calls from numbers they don't know, they are identifying problems that the polling industry has long struggled with and continue to try to adapt to.
Did you ever sit quietly with your back straight, not moving, just only cherishing the beauty of silence?
I've learned from my pets that it's okay to sit around, and people don't love you any less if you sit around all the time. In fact they might love you more, 'cos they always know where you're always going to be: you're always going to be laying in bed.
We sit silently and watch the world around us. This has taken a lifetime to learn. It seems only the old are able to sit next to one another and not say anything and still feel content. The young, brash and impatient, must always break the silence. It is a waste, for silence is pure. Silence is holy. It draws people together because only those who are comfortable with each other can sit without speaking. This is the great paradox.
What can be said about chronic hunger. Perhaps that there's a hunger that can make you sick with hunger. That it comes in addition to the hunger you already feel. That there is a hunger which is always new, which grows insatiably, which pounces on the never-ending old hunger that already took such effort to tame. How can you face the world if all you can say about yourself is that you're hungry.
The most profound benefit of yoga and meditation for me has been a natural relaxing into my life. Obstacles are not so scary. I am more fluid, more curious, and at the same time more patient. I have more options for happiness because I don't require specific conditions. It is a relief to discover that I can be happy even if the world doesn't revolve around me or my agenda.
Life can be lived as a temporary arrangement. Life is a temporary arrangement! But the longer you go without changing, the more obscure the likelihood you ever will. After enough time passes, the idea of another way of life grows even more misty.
With a fantasy world, it's like, this is my world. I literally made it. So if I tell you something, you do have to sit back and observe more. You need to sit back and listen more to understand what is going on or what's happening in the world. And I think there's a lot of power in that.
I am going to spend more time face-to-face with my friends and family. I am going to unplug more.
We sit and talk quietly, with long lapses of silence, and I am aware of the stream that has no language, coursing beneath the quiet heaven of your eyes, which has no speech.
The more I got into presenting things to the world, the further it was taking me away from what I was, which was someone who just used to sit quietly at a piano and sing and play. It became very important to me not to lose sight of that.
Can you visualize a world with no more death, no more pain, no more hunger, no more fear, no more sorrow, no more crying nor sickness, a world where everything is a joy and a pleasure? - A society where everybody works together in harmony, cooperation and love? That's Heaven!
Even if I am simply one more woman laying one more brick in the foundation of a new and more humane world, it is enough to make me rise eagerly from my bed each morning and face the challenge of breaking the historic silence that has held women captive for so long.
In barely one generation, we've moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them - often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug.
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