The 2009 Heron Dance Daybook & Planner

The 2009 Heron Dance Daybook & Planner features:

Page 11

It is very hard to pray if one does not know how. We must help ourselves to learn. The most important thing is silence. Souls of prayer are souls of deep silence. We cannot place ourselves directly in God’s presence without imposing on ourselves interior and exterior silence. That is why we must accustom ourselves to stillness of the soul, of the eyes, of the tongue.

- Mother Teresa, Love: A Fruit Always in Season., Daily Meditations

Page 31

I don’t believe how much time I have to spend listening to even get one poem. It is pathetic. I have to keep going out alone to Yellowstone just to listen. Sometimes nothing will happen, and yet I know that something is happening during that time of listening, but I may not “produce a result.” And yet it is a kind of layering. It is that years and years of years of visiting similar places. It is that repetitiveness that something is happening. I wish I could say what it was. I just know that it is very important.

- Lyn Dalebout, Yellowstone poet

Page 59

For a voyage to a destination, wherever it may be, is also a voyage inside oneself; even as a cyclone carries along with it the center in which it must ultimately come to rest. At these moments I think not only of the places I have been to but also of the distances I have traveled within myself without a friend or ship; and of the long way yet to go before I come home within myself and within the journey. And always when the curtains are lifted, the night is without, peering in steadily and constantly, with the light of the stars far beyond.

- Laurens van der Post, Venture to the Interior

Page 69

One night I went for a walk by the sea along the empty shore. It was not gay, but neither was it sad – it was beautiful. The deep blue sky was flecked with clouds of a blue deeper than the fundamental blue of intense cobalt, and others of a clearer blue, like the blue whiteness of the Milky Way. In the blue depth the stars were sparkling, greenish, yellow, white, pink, more brilliant, more sparkling gemlike than at home – even in Paris: opals you might call them, emeralds, lapis luzuli, rubies, sapphires. The sea was very deep ultramarine – the shore a sort of violet and faint russet as I saw it, and on the dunes (they are about seventeen feet high) some bushes Prussian blue.

- Vincent van Gogh in a letter to his brother Theo.

Page 112

Robertson Davies, the Canadian author, said one of the most important things in his life was being able to take a nap every day after lunch for twenty minutes. That’s for two reasons. One is that by developing a schedule that’s under your control, you are not being flogged around by life, as he puts it; you are not always jumping to someone else’s tune. You develop your own rhythm of work and rest. The other thing is that it’s during idle time that ideas have a chance to recombine in new ways, because if we think consciously about solving a problem or writing a book, then we are sitting there forcing our ideas to move in a lockstep, in a straight line, and probably what comes out is not very new or original.For original ideas to come about, you have to let them percolate under the level of consciousness in a place where we have no way to make them obey our own desires or our own direction. So they find their way, their random combinations that are driven by forces we don’t know about. It’s through this recombination that something new may come up, not when we try to push them directly.

- Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, interviewed by Michael Toms in New Dimensions

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