Quotes About Presence

You see: light escapes from a body at night and in the morning, despite the oppressive vacancy of her leaving's shadow, light comes up over the mountains and it is and it is and it is.

Annie Dillard once wrote, "How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and that one is what we are doing." I think about this a lot when I'm planning my day and what sort of pleasure I might suck out of its marrow during these tumultuous times of constant upheaval and war. Sometimes that means noticing even the most mundane of tasks in order to know we are alive, that we are living.

The dog does this beautiful thing, it waits. It stills itself and determines that the waiting is essential.

Just this morning, I saw seven cardinals brash and bold as sin in a leafless tree. I let them be for a long while before I shook the air and screwed it all up just by being alive too.

She had a way of wearing anything so that the cloth seemed glad and independently animated.

Linda wrote to her son from her hotel room opposite the Cambridge Common just hours after they parted, the first volley in an extraordinary correspondence that continued until the week of her death, nearly four decades later. During his freshman year, she wrote virtually every day—in other words, she appeared in his mailbox in the morning, a palpable, reassuring presence thanks to her remarkable skill as a letter writer.

WHAT WE GAIN FROM MINDFULNESS

God's blessings are not about ease and comfort, but rather about the joy of being a part of God's work, being used by God for God's purposes, and being accompanied by God's presence, particularly in the face of adversity.

Our task in worship is to prepare ourselves spiritually to hear the Spirit speak, sometimes despite the music and preaching.

I had never understood before the invisibility of a human. How what we take to be a person is in fact a spirit we can never see.

He experienced a familiar comfort being in the presence of another person's unknowable pain. More than any landscape, this place felt like home.

We're not individuals. We're haunted by the living as well as the dead.

I had never understood before the invisibility of a human. How what we take to be a person is in fact a spirit we can never see. Not until I sat in that room, with the dead vehicle that had carried my brother through his life, and for which I had always mistaken him.

The present had somehow ceased to be an emergency.

There was just the sensation of it. A

A name isn't a person," Ga said. "Don't ever remember someone by their name. To keep someone alive, you put them inside you, you put their face on your heart. Then, no matter where you are, they're always with you because they're a part of you." He put his hands on their shoulders. "It's you that matter, not your names. It's the two of you I'll never forget.

The ways we miss our lives is life', Randall Jarrell quoted by A.P.

However much you have been wanting and hoping and dreaming of meeting the person of your dreams, it is only when you meet them that you will start missing them. It seems that the presence of an object is required to make its absence felt (or to make the absence of something felt). A kind of longing may have preceded their arrival, but you have to meet in order to feel the full force of your frustration in their absence.

Maybe some are so busy waiting, they forget what indescribable beauty is right there in front of them.

We can get so busy doing urgent things and so preoccupied with what comes next that we don't experience now. Afraid of being late, we rush from the past to the future. The present moment becomes a crack between what we did and what we have yet to do. It is virtually lost to us. We don't get to our futures any faster if we hurry. And we certainly don't become better people in haste. More likely than not, the faster we go the less we become.

They simply put us in a place where we can begin to notice God and respond to his word to us.

There are youngsters who prefer no talk at all when they're upset. For them, Mom or Dad's presence is comfort enough.

Never feel like you need to visit him, ever?" "I see him every morning in the mirror. I think of him as the ghost version of me. And who needs to visit your own ghost?

I'm a big personality. I walk into a room, big and tall and loud.