Quotes About Presence

I saw a button pin once that said: "I'm not tense. I'm just very, very alert.

Maybe what we say to each other is not so important after all, but just that we are alive together, and present for each other as best we can be.

I believe that when all si said and done, all you can do is to show up for someone in crisis, which seems so inadequate. But then when you do, it can radically change everything. Your there-ness, your stepping into a scared [person's] line of vision, can be life giving, because often everyone else is in hiding...

How alive am I willing to be?

We can pray for a shot at having a life in which we are present and awake and paying attention and being kind to ourselves. We can pray, "Hello? Is there anyone there?" We can pray, "Am I too far gone, or can you help me get out of my isolated self-obsession?" We can say anything to God. It's all prayer.

I do believe that God is with us even when we're at our craziest and that this goodness guides, provides, and protects.

I'm pretty sure that it is only by experiencing that ocean of sadness in a naked and immediate way that we come to be healed--which is to say, that we come to experience life with a real sense of presence and spaciousness and peace.

sometimes when you need to feel the all-embracing nature of God, paradoxically you need to hang out in the ordinariness, in daily ritual and comfort.

Jesus is] saying that we could be aware of, filled with, and saved by the presence of holy beauty, rather than worship golden calves.

Nothing can be delicious when you are holding your breath. For something to be delicious, you have to be present to savor it, and presence is in attention and in the flow of breath. It begins in the mouth, my parents' preferred site of comfort, and then it connects our heads to our bodies through our throats, and into our lungs and tummies, a beautiful connective cord of air.

There really is only today, although luckily that is also the eternal now.

The Amen is only as good as the attitude. If you are trying to finish up quickly so you can check your cell phone messages, you are missing the chance to spend quiet moments with the giver of life and the eternal, which means you may reap continued feelings of life racing along without you. So as Samuel Beckett admonished us to fail again, and fail better, we try to pray again, and pray better, for slightly longer and with slightly more honesty, breathing more, deeper, and with more attention.

I'm pretty sure that only by experiencing that ocean of sadness in a naked and immediate way do we come to be healed—which is to say, we come to experience life with a real sense of presence and spaciousness and peace.

I'm not sure I even recognize the ever-presence of mercy anymore, the divine and the human; the messy, crippled, transforming, heartbreaking, lovely, devastating presence of mercy. But I have come to believe that I am starving to death for it, and my world is, too.

The trees are so huge that they shut you up.

I remind myself of this when I cannot get any work done: to live as if I am dying, because the truth is we are all terminal on this bus. To live as if we are dying gives us a chance to experience some real presence.

what good people can do in the face of great sorrow. We help some time pass for those suffering. We sit with them in their hopeless pain and feel terrible with them, without trying to fix them with platitudes; doing this with them is just about the most gracious gift we have to offer. We give up what we think we should be doing, or think we need to get done, to keep them company. We help them to bear being in time and space during unbearable times and spaces.

what good people can do in the face of great sorrow. We help some time pass for those suffering. We sit with them in their hopeless pain and feel terrible with them, without trying to fix them with platitudes; doing this with them is just about the most gracious gift we have to offer. We give up what we think we should be doing, or think we need to get done, to keep them company.

had to learn to be present without paying quite so much attention to my poor old overamped mind, because this was the source of most of my unhappiness. And it still is. The

Goodness and courage are how the divine presents itself so often—whether in drag, as close friends, or as EMTs.

One of the immutable laws of being human is that the people who show up are the right people.

SHORE AND GROUND Keep walking, though there's no place to get to. Don't try to see through the distances. That's not for human beings. Move within, but don't move the way fear makes you move. Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened. Don't open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument. Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground. RUMI

Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance. T. S. ELIOT

When KFKD is playing, we are at cross purposes with the river. So we need to sit there, and breathe, calm ourselves down, push back our sleeves, and begin again.