INSPIRATION
What you find here is a growing compendium of inspirational words. The poems and quotes have been shared alongside teaching stories at past Fireside Mindfulness sessions.
I find they have the power to create bridges of beauty and wisdom from our own minds and hearts to the universal and back again.
Fireside Mindfulness 17th October 2025
Theme: Healing and Transformation
Stone Girl...
with the stone face.
The stone heart stone hands stone feet.
See in between she has also stone
and does not speak.
She is acting her part in the dialogue
like the wind listening to wind
or the wind listening to stone.
Stone on wind. Wind on stone.
I think you are almost sisters.
I think you have sat together a long
time. Oh silence, What, from you, wants to emerge?
How I Became a Warrior by Jeff Foster
Once, I ran from fear
so fear controlled me.
Until I learned to hold fear like a newborn.
Listen to it, but not give in.
Honor it, but not worship it.
Fear could not stop me anymore.
I walked with courage into the storm.
I still have fear,
but it does not have me.
Once, I was ashamed of who I was.
I invited shame into my heart.
I let it burn.
It told me, “I am only trying
to protect your vulnerability”.
I thanked shame dearly,
and stepped into life anyway,
unashamed, with shame as a lover.
Once, I had great sadness
buried deep inside.
I invited it to come out and play.
I wept oceans. My tear ducts ran dry.
And I found joy right there.
Right at the core of my sorrow.
It was heartbreak that taught me how to love.
Once, I had anxiety.
A mind that wouldn’t stop.
Thoughts that wouldn’t be silent.
So I stopped trying to silence them.
And I dropped out of the mind,
and into the Earth.
Into the mud.
Where I was held strong
like a tree, unshakeable, safe.
Once, anger burned in the depths.
I called anger into the light of myself.
I felt its shocking power.
I let my heart pound and my blood boil.
Listened to it, finally.
And it screamed, “Respect yourself fiercely now!”.
“Speak your truth with passion!”.
“Say no when you mean no!”.
“Walk your path with courage!”.
“Let no one speak for you!”
Anger became an honest friend.
A truthful guide.
A beautiful wild child.
Once, loneliness cut deep.
I tried to distract and numb myself.
Ran to people and places and things.
Even pretended I was “happy”.
But soon I could not run anymore.
And I tumbled into the heart of loneliness.
And I died and was reborn
into an exquisite solitude and stillness.
That connected me to all things.
So I was not lonely, but alone with All Life.
My heart One with all other hearts.
Once, I ran from difficult feelings.
Now, they are my advisors, confidants, friends,
and they all have a home in me,
and they all belong and have dignity.
I am sensitive, soft, fragile,
my arms wrapped around all my inner children.
And in my sensitivity, power.
In my fragility, an unshakeable Presence.
In the depths of my wounds,
in what I had named “darkness”,
I found a blazing Light
that guides me now in battle.
I became a warrior
when I turned towards myself.
And started listening.
Love like Water by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
We could say the pain
was a block so great
it could not be moved.
We could say love
did not try to move it.
Love simply dissolved the mass
and surrounded it
the way water meets a block of salt,
breaking apart each ionic bond
until every atom of sodium and chloride
is surrounded by molecules of water.
And in this way,
and sooner than you’d think,
the pain was rearranged
into minuscule bits,
and there was no part of the pain
that was not touched by love.
The pain was no less, it’s true.
But mixed with love, dispersed,
the pain became something new.
Something vital that encouraged
a different kind of life,
a substance that supported buoyancy—
a medium to carry me.
I love you, gentlest of ways
Rainer Maria Rilke
I love you, gentlest of ways,
who ripened us as we wrestled with you.
You, the great homesickness we could never shake off,
you, the forest that always surrounded us,
you, the song we sang in every silence,
you, the dark net threading through us,
on the day you made us you created yourself,
and we grew sturdy in your sunlight....
Let your hand rest on the rim of Heaven now
and mutely bear the darkness we bring over you.
Fireside Mindfulness 14th Sept. 2025
Theme: Experiencing Oneness
'If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe' Carl Sagan, American TV presenter
'Through our willingness to become the one we are, we become one with everything.' Gunilla Norris, poet
From Ancestors by David Percival
Our ancestors are everywhere.
At Tu Hieu we walked and sat amidst the tombs,
Contemplated hundreds of graves
And achieved a oneness with these spiritual ancestors
I had never dreamed of.
Interbeing settles on me like the mist falling on my clothes
And penetrates into my very bones.
From The Heart of Understanding - Commentaries on the Prajnaparamita Sutra by Thich Nhat Hanh
'If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without the cloud, there will be no rain. Without the rain, the trees cannot grow. Without trees, we cannot make paper. So the cloud is essential to the paper’s existence.
If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are.
Looking deeper, we can see the sunshine in the paper. Without the sunshine, the forest cannot grow. Without the forest, we cannot have paper. And we can see the logger, the wheat used to make his bread, the soil, the rain, and even you, the reader — all present in this sheet of paper.
Everything co-exists with everything else. The one is made of the many, and the many reveal the one. That is oneness.'
From The New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton
When we are alone on a starlit night;
when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat;
when we see children in a moment when they are really children; when we know love in our own hearts;
or when, like the Japanese poet Bashō we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash
--at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the "newness," the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.
For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness.
The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast.
The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life,
the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own,
the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity and despair.
But it does not matter much, because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things;
or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there.
Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us,
for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it to or not.
Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose,
cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance.
Song by Gabriella Mistral translated by Langston Hughes
A woman is singing in the valley. The shadows falling blot her out, but her song spreads over the fields.
Her heart is broken, like the jar she dropped this afternoon among the pebbles in the brook.
As she sings, the hidden wound sharpens on the thread of her song, and becomes thin and hard. Her voice in modulation dampens with blood.
In the fields the other voices die with the dying day, and a moment ago the song of the last slow-poke bird stopped. But her deathless heart, alive with grief, gathers all the silent voices into her voice, sharp now, yet very sweet.
Does she sing for a husband who looks at her silently in the dusk, or for a child whom her song caresses? Or does she sing for her own heart, more helpless than a babe at nightfall?
Night grows maternal before this song that goes to meet it; the stars, with a sweetness that is human, are beginning to come out; the sky full of stars becomes human and understands the sorrows of this world.
Her song, as pure as water filled with light, cleanses the plain and rinses the mean air of day in which men hate. From the throat of the woman who keeps on singing, day rises nobly evaporating towards the stars.
Fireside Mindfulness 20thJune 2025
THEME: Deep Attention
Where Does the Temple Begin and Where Does it End? by Mary Oliver
There are things you can’t reach. But
you can reach out to them, and all day long.
The wind, the bird flying away. The idea of God.
And it can keep you as busy as anything else, and happier.
The snake slides away; the fish jumps, like a little lily,
out of the water and back in; the goldfinches sing
from the unreachable top of the tree.
I look; morning to night I am never done with looking.
Looking I mean not just standing around, but standing around
as though with your arms open.
And thinking: maybe something will come, some
shining coil of wind,
or a few leaves from any old tree –
they are all in this too.
And now I will tell you the truth.
Everything in the world
comes.
At least, closer.
And, cordially.
. . .
Like the nibbling, tinsel-eyed fish; the unlooping snake.
Like goldfinches, little dolls of gold
fluttering around the corner of the sky
of God, the blue air.
'Teannalach' by John O'Donohue in Divine Beauty
'...it means awareness, but in truth it is about seven layers deeper than awareness.'
Fireside Mindfulness 25th May 2025
THEME: Love's Triumph
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
'If we could read the secret history of our enemies
we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering
enough to disarm all hostility.'
Please Call Me by My True Names – Thich Nhat Hanh
Don’t say that I will depart tomorrow —
even today I am still arriving.
Look deeply: every second I am arriving
to be a bud on a Spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with still-fragile wings,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.
I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
to fear and to hope.
The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death
of all that is alive.
I am the mayfly metamorphosing
on the surface of the river.
And I am the bird
that swoops down to swallow the mayfly.
I am the frog swimming happily
in the clear water of a pond.
And I am the grass-snake
that silently feeds itself on the frog.
I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks.
And I am the arms merchant,
selling deadly weapons to Uganda.
I am the twelve-year-old girl,
refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean
after being raped by a sea pirate.
And I am the pirate,
my heart not yet capable
of seeing and loving.
I am a member of the politburo,
with plenty of power in my hands.
And I am the man who has to pay
his “debt of blood” to my people
dying slowly in a forced-labor camp.
My joy is like Spring, so warm
it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth.
My pain is like a river of tears,
so vast it fills the four oceans.
Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and my laughter at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.
Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up,
and so the door of my heart
can be left open,
the door of compassion.
Between Our Poles by Hafiz, rendered by Daniel Ladinsky
Who
Can I tell
The secrets of love?
Who has not confined their life
To a padded sell?
Look at
The nature of a river.
Its size, strength, and ability to give
Are often gauged by its width
And current.
God
Too moves between our poles, our depth.
He flows and gathers power between
Our heart’s range of
Forgiveness and
Compassion.
Who
Can I tell,
Who can Hafiz tell tonight
All the secrets of
Love?
Fireside Mindfulness 2nd May 2025
THEME: Impermanence and Eternity
From Auguries of Innocence by William Blake
To see a world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
The Faces at Braga by David Whyte
In monastery darkness
by the light of one flashlight,
the old shrine room waits in silence.
While beside the door
we see the terrible figure,
fierce eyes demanding, “Will you step through?”
And the old monk leads us,
bent back nudging blackness
prayer beads in the hand that beckons.
We light the butter lamps
and bow, eyes blinking in the
pungent smoke, look up without a word,
see faces in meditation,
a hundred faces carved above,
eye lines wrinkled in the handheld light.
Such love in solid wood—
taken from the hillsides and carved in silence,
they have the vibrant stillness of those who made them.
Engulfed by the past
they have been neglected, but through
smoke and darkness they are like the flowers
we have seen growing
through the dust of eroded slopes,
their slowly opening faces turned toward the mountain.
Carved in devotion
their eyes have softened through age
and their mouths curve through delight of the carver’s hand.
If only our own faces
would allow the invisible carver’s hand
to bring the deep grain of love to the surface.
If only we knew
as the carver knew, how the flaws
in the wood led his searching chisel to the very core,
we would smile too
and not need faces immobilized
by fear and the weight of things undone.
When we fight with our failing
we ignore the entrance to the shrine itself
and wrestle with the guardian, fierce figure on the side of good.
And as we fight
our eyes are hooded with grief
and our mouths are dry with pain.
If only we could give ourselves
to the blows of the carver’s hands,
the lines in our faces would be the trace lines of rivers
feeding the sea
where voices meet, praising the features
of the mountain and the cloud and the sky.
Our faces would fall away
until we, growing younger toward death
everyday, would gather all our flaws in celebration
to merge with them perfectly,
impossibly, wedded to our essence,
full of silence from the carver’s hands.
Tale of Two Moments by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Holding my girl
on the couch,
came a moment
so tender because
I remembered
I will die—
what grace when,
minutes later,
lost in the bliss
of her warmth,
came a moment
so tender because
I forgot.