AOM Meditations: 090418

Farmhouse with Birch Trees (1903) by Gustav Klimt

Thanks to our Friend for sending us this beautiful art

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“When the mind is festering with trouble or the heart torn, we can find healing among the silence of mountains or fields, or listen to the simple, steadying rhythm of waves. The slowness and stillness gradually takes us over. Our breathing deepens and our hearts calm and our hungers relent. When serenity is restored, new perspectives open to us and difficulty can begin to seem like an invitation to new growth.

This invitation to friendship with nature does of course entail a willingness to be alone out there. Yet this aloneness is anything but lonely. Solitude gradually clarifies the heart until a true tranquility is reached. The irony is that at the heart of that aloneness you feel intimately connected with the world. Indeed, the beauty of nature is often the wisest balm for it gently relieves and releases the caged mind.”

~John O'Donohue

AOM Meditations: 122017

"Solitude gives us time to let our hair down and see what we need, do what we need, and have the quiet to explore its benefits.  When we have alone time, we can take a quiet bath.  When we have solitude, we can use the quiet bath to explore what we need to do with our solitude.

Busy people may be able to squeeze in alone time now and again, but people who are living in balance require solitude.  Solitude is that quiet mist of peacefulness that enters our ears and makes its own music, enters our eyes and creates its own art, and enters our pores and imagines its own muse.

Solitude returns us to ourselves while expanding us beyond our boundaries.  Solitude is precious and essential."

~Anne Wilson Schaef

Meditations for Living in Balance

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"Reflection is in many ways a lost art. It is an eyepiece to a world hidden away, the world within ourselves which is alive with truths and beauties and darkness we have never glimpsed. It seems sad that we slice our time too thin for dreaming long dreams and thinking long thoughts. We've grown uncomfortable with that sort of thing. 

For a long time I had been uneasy left alone. I would snap on the television or grab a book or make brownies. Anything. I suppose we are restless all alone with ourselves, all alone in a room with a stranger. What if we face ourselves and find we don't like the person we meet? I didn't even want to spend much time in prayer because God might confront me and I'd have to look at myself."

~Sue Monk Kidd

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"Only when the clamor of the outside world is silenced 

will you be able to hear the deeper vibration. 

Listen carefully."

~Sarah Ban Breathnach

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“I find it wholesome to be alone 

the greater part of the time. 

To be in company, even with the best, 

is soon wearisome and dissipating. 

I love to be alone. 

I never found the companion 

that was so companionable as solitude.”

~Henry David Thoreau

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“Guard well your spare moments. 

They are like uncut diamonds. 

Discard them 

and their value will never be known. 

Improve them 

and they will become 

the brightest gems in a useful life.”

~Ralph Waldo Emerson 

The Bliss of Solitude in Nature: 122017

by Eloi Biosca Photography

by Nude-Soul Photography

by cable9tuba photography

by Iris Bachman Photography