Sean

“The elders versed in the mores of the Celtic culture instructed me in the meaning of a special word, buíochas. It means, as best I can render it, tender gratitude. The buíochas should be very high in each person, like a glass that is full. Buíochas is also a self-protection. You should carry gratitude in your heart for everything inside and outside your life and all the small things that impinge on your consciousness. The feeling of buíochas is like a medicine of the mind that holds your life together. The old saying buíochas le Dia, thanks be to God, reminded the human family that life itself is the greatest gift and should therefore be treasured in yourself and in all others.”
― Diana Beresford-Kroeger, To Speak for the Trees: My Life's Journey from Ancient Celtic Wisdom to a Healing Vision of the Forest

“In the twilight of the world that we inhabit there will come to some on soft, silent wings a strange understanding: that things have not always been the way they are, and that therefore they need not always be as they have been. And Hegel says that this understanding is itself the sign that indeed the night is coming, that maybe the morning will be ours to see.” Hegel”
― John Crowley, Daemonomania

“The body receives gratuity. The world gives graciously, disinterestedly, asking for nothing back, expecting nothing in return; it has no scales, no balance sheet. Our senses cede nothing in return for it, can give nothing back to the source of given beauties. What could the eye give back to the sun, or the palate to the vines of Yquem?”
― Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies

“I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery – air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, ‘This is what it is to be happy.’ FROM ‘THE BELL JAR’, SYLVIA PLATH HEINEMANN, LONDON, 1963”
― Claire Thompson, Mindfulness and the Natural World: Bringing our Awareness Back to Nature