Ayudante

“Regrets are illuminations come too late.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

“‎Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
So you mustn’t be frightened, if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and over everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“If some are still dominated by their former bad habits, and yet can teach by mere words, let them teach. . . . For perhaps, by being put to shame by their own words, they will eventually begin to practice what they teach.”
― John Climacus

“It doesn’t interest me if there is one God
or many gods.
I want to know if you belong or feel
abandoned,
if you can know despair or see it in others,
I want to know

if you are prepared to live in the world
with its harsh need
to change you. If you can look back
with firm eyes,
saying this is where I stand. I want to know
if you know
how to melt into that fierce heat of living, 
falling toward
the center of your longing. I want to know
if you are willing
to live, day by day, with the consequence of love
and the bitter
unwanted passion of your sure defeat.

I have heard, in that fierce embrace, even
the gods speak of God.”
― David Whyte, River Flow: New & Selected Poems 1984-2007