Squirrel

“[written 2,600 years ago]

Another Sama

After twenty-five years on the Path,
I'd experienced almost everything--
except peace.

When I was young,
my mother told me
that I would find true happiness
only in marriage.

Remembering her words all those years
later,
something in me began to tremble.

I gave myself to the trembling--
and it showed me
all the pain
this little heart
had ever known.

And how countless lives of searching
had brought me
at last
to the present moment,
which I happily married.

Can you imagine?

We've been living together
ever since,
without
a single
argument.”
― Matty Weingast, The First Free Women: Poems of the Early Buddhist Nuns

“Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we feel His presence most when His works are on the grandest scale spread before us; and it is in the unclouded night-sky, where His worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest His infinitude, His omnipotence, His omnipresence.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Even if I now saw you
only once,
I would long for you
through worlds,
worlds.”
― Izumi Shikibu, The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan