Manford Carter

“I sit beneath the cliff, quiet and alone.
Round moon in the middle of the sky’s a bird
ablaze:
all things seen are mere shadows in its brilliance,
that single wheel of perfect light…
Alone, its spirit naturally comes clear.
Swallowed in emptiness in this cave of darkest
mystery,
because of the finger pointing, I saw the moon.
That moon became the pivot of my heart.”
― Han Shan, Cold Mountain Poems: Zen Poems of Han Shan, Shih Te, and Wang Fan-chih

“My joy is like Spring, so warm
it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth.
My pain is like a river of tears,
so vast it fills the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and laughter at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Being Peace

“Do you wait for things to happen, or do you make them happen yourself? I believe in writing your own story.”
― Charlotte Eriksson

“Think of love as a state of grace not as a means to anything... but an end in itself.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera