Quotes About Presence

What is essential is the sense of God's presence during dark seasons of questioning. . . . Our need for specific answers is dissolved in the greater issue of the lordship of Christ over all questions —those that have answers and those that don't.2 A heart

Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God; But only he who sees takes off his shoes; The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.1 So said the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

holding a book but reading the empty spaces.

Important thing is not the me that's lying here, but the me that's sitting on the edge of the bed looking back at me, and the me that's downstairs cooking supper, or out in the garage under the car, or in the library reading. All the new parts, they count. I'm not really dying today. No person ever died that had a family.

You are all there, the people in the city. I can't believe I was ever among you. When you are away from a city it becomes a fantasy. Any town, New York, Chicago, with its people, becomes improbable with distance. Just as I am improbable here, in Illinois, in a small town by a quiet lake. All of us improbable to one another because we are not present to one another. And it is so good to hear the sounds, and know that Mexico City is still there and the people moving and living.

It is a subliminal thing. It is the tick of a clock that has ticked so long one no longer notices. Something is in a room when a man lives in it. Something is not in the room when a man is dead in it.

All of us improbable to one another because we are not present to one another

He had felt that a moment before his making the turn, someone had been there. The air seemed charged with a special calm as if someone had waited there, quietly, and only a moment before he came, simply turned to a shadow and let him through. Perhaps his nose detected a faint perfume, perhaps the skin on the backs of his hands, on his face, felt the temperature rise at this one spot where a person's standing might raise the immediate atmosphere ten degrees for an instant.

I think of her hands but I don't see them doing anything at all. They just hang there at her sides or they lay there on her lap or there's a cigarette in them, but that's all.

Don't ever be a Rocket Man." I stopped. "I mean it," he said. "Because when you're out there you want to be here, and when you're here you want to be out there. Don't start that.

Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away.

The best sculpture, like the head of Nefertiti, says again and again, The Beautiful One was here, is here, and will be here, forever.

Todos deben dejar algo al morir, decía mi abuelo. Un niño o un libro o un cuadro o una casa o una pared o un par de zapatos. O un jardín. Algo que las manos de uno han tocado de algún modo. El alma tendrá entonces adonde ir el día de la muerte, y cuando la gente mire ese árbol, o esa flor, allí estará uno. No

Earth's crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God. But only he who sees takes off his shoes. The rest sit round and pluck blackberries. 1806-1861 BRITISH POET

That is a greeting which says that the god that is in you recognizes the god in the other. These people are aware of the divine presence in all things.

You have to have a feeling for where you are. You've got only one life to live, and you don't have to live it for six people. Pay attention to it.

He seemed to hasten the retreat of departing light by his very presence; the setting sun dipped sharply, as though fleeing before our nigger; a black mist emanated from him; a subtle and dismal influence; a something cold and gloomy that floated out and settled on all the faces like a mourning veil. The circle broke up. The joy of laughter died on stiffened lips.

That man seems to have a particular talent for being on the spot whenever there is something picturesque to be done.

The point was in his being a gifted creature, and that of all his gifts the one that stood out pre-eminently, that carried with it a sense of real presence, was his ability to talk, his words—the gift of expression, the bewildering, the illuminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness. The

Had you been the Emperor of the East and West, you could not have ignored your inferiority in his presence.

The point was in his being a gifted creature, and that of all his gifts the one that stood out pre-eminently, that carried with it a sense of real presence, was his ability to talk, his words—the gift of expression, the bewildering, the illuminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness.

Without that strong personal presence, the essay doesn't quite exist; it becomes an article, a piece, or some other indefinable verbal construction.

Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, a great Dzogchen master of the last century, taught, "There is one thing we always need, and that is the watchman named mindfulness, the guard who is on the lookout for when we get carried away in mindlessness.

The emphasis in meditation is very much on undistracted awareness: not thinking about things, not analyzing, not getting lost in the story, but just seeing the nature of what is happening in the mind. Careful, accurate observation of the moment's reality is the key to the whole process.