muttering to an old friend

If I asked you to pray for me.. . would you?
Or if you can not, out or principle and conviction, might you send an encouraging word to an old friend?
(would you still consider me a brother?)
Have you ever felt abandoned?
Please don't forget me in your fame and fortune.
Slightly more broken than usual,
Yet still in love with resurrection.
Always sentimental,
Yours truly,

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motion of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

- Wendell Berry

Hello Neighbor

"In worship we have our neighbors to right and left, before and behind, yet the Eternal Presence is over all and beneath all. Worship does not consist in achieving a mental state of concentrated isolation from one’s fellows. But in depth of common worship it is as if we found our separate lives were all one life, within whom we live and move and have our being."

- Thomas Raymond Kelly

This is how I want to teach

"Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”

 -Paulo Freire

Don't Change Me.. .

 “. . . one should bear in mind that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more dubious of success, nor more dangerous to administer than to introduce a new system of things . . . .”

-Machiavelli

stay humble

OZYMANDIAS

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

- Percy Bysshe Shelley

Don't Be Afraid

"It is the basic principle of spiritual life that we learn the deepest things in unknown territory. Often it is when we feel most confused inwardly and are in the midst of our greatest difficulties that something new will open. We awaken most easily to the mystery of life through our weakest side. The areas of our greatest strength, where we are the most competent and clearest, tend to keep us away from the mystery."

- Jack Kornfield