“It gives you a good feeling. Each year, you rediscover in a garden the magic of life. A flower arrives, and it is a miracle. The leaves fall in the autumn, and it looks fantastic. There is a tenderness about a garden, and you can’t help but be sensitive to that.”
The fact is, life is a great mystery. None of us knows how long we have here. We may, by some miracle, still be around a hundred years from now. Or we may be gone next week. No one knows. So I say, live lightly. Glide as smoothly as you can over the bumps and dips of this world – they really don’t matter in the big scheme of things. Embrace each day as the gift that it is. Live love, live joy, and live kindness. Live compassion, live gratitude, and live courage. Watch, listen, and learn with humility. Think, speak, and act with intention. And then, when the stars align and the wind is at your back, be ready to fly when the universe presents you with the opportunity to fly.
“A positive and cheerful state of mind is a direct and immediate gain – the very currency, as it were, of happiness. It is not, like all else, merely a cheque upon the bank. For it alone makes us immediately happy in the present moment, and that is the highest blessing for beings like us, whose existence is but an infinitesimal moment between two eternities.”
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Every spring, when I see the California poppies bloom, it fills my heart with warmth. It reminds me that love exists outside of time and space. It reminds me that every single day of this brief lifetime – this exquisite and most precious moment between eternities that we’ve been given – is an opportunity for us to manifest our inner light, to engage in acts of compassion, kindness, goodness, and love, and to expand our enlightened mind.
These beautiful, vibrantly orange-colored flowers bloom every spring, and then disappear. But the sensations that they awaken within me remain vividly present, all year around. I truly believe that love – real love – once created, can never be destroyed. And joy, indeed, is the infallible sign of the presence of God. And every time we engage from a pure heart with the Spirit of Light and Love within us, we touch eternity.
“Just imagine becoming the way you used to be… before you understood the meaning of any word, before opinions took over your mind. The real you is loving, joyful, and free. The real you is just like a flower, just like the wind, just like the ocean, just like the sun.”
“Music, [poetry, and art] are the wine which inspire people to new generative processes, and we [artists] are Bacchus, pressing out this glorious wine for mankind and making them spiritually drunken.”