aging quotes

“You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done... you are fierce with reality.” Florida Scott-Maxwell  The Measure of My Days

Now I Become Myself          May Sarton

Now I become myself. It’s taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
“Hurry, you will be dead before—”
(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!
The black shadow on the paper
Is my hand; the shadow of a word
As thought shapes the shaper
Falls heavy on the page, is heard.
All fuses now, falls into place
From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant.
As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root,
So all the poem is, can give,
Grows in me to become the song;
Made so and rooted so by love.
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun 

"God breaks the heart again and again until it stays open."

This quotation from the Sufi master Inayat Khan begins Laura Kelly Fanucci's lovely exploration into what it means to grapple with suffering, parenting, and the nature of love.

“From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them, and that is eternity.”
~ Edvard Munch

“I would request that my body in death be buried not cremated, so that the energy content contained within it gets returned to the earth, so that flora and fauna can dine upon it, just as I have dined upon flora and fauna during my lifetime.”
~ Neil deGrasse Tyson

“If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture—that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves.”
~ Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

Sculpture from garden art located in Antwerp, Belgium. http://wassenaardailyphoto.blogspot.com/…/antwerp-garden-ar…

Revering the Universe. Caring for Nature. Celebrating Life.