Anam Cara

Anam Cara means "Soul Friend." Anam is the Gaelic word for soul and Cara is the word for friend. In Celtic tradition, an Anam Cara is a teacher, companion or spiritual guide. With the Anam Cara you can share your innermost self to reveal the hidden intimacies of your life, your mind and your heart. This friendship cuts across all convention to create an act of recognition and belonging that joins souls in an ancient and eternal way. In everyone's life, there is a great need for an Anam Cara, a soul friend. In this relationship, you are understood as you are, without mask or pretention. When you are understood, you are at home.

Successful Poet

"The successful poet, the poet who really carries his message, is the one to whom the words come that have this particular power... What he does for you, what he does for us all is always to produce a metaphor in which we suddenly see two separate parts of the world, and we say, 'My God, why did I not think that they belonged together?' ... It is the essence of poetry, as of painting, as of all art, to communicate that, to leap over the gulf between us -- to make the metaphor suddenly speak to us, not so that we understand it, but so that we recreate it. Style is the means by which we recreate the content for ourselves." --Jacob Bronowski
  

One Body

"Once you have adopted such an attitude of infinite interconnectedness, you naturally want to liberate not just yourself but all beings from suffering.  The Buddha calls this 'the conception of the spirit of enlightenment.'  It is the soul of the Bodhisattva, the person who dedicates him-or herself to helping all beings achieve total happiness.  When you open to the inevitability of your infinite interconnectedness with other sensitive beings, you develop compassion.  You learn to feel empathy for them, to love them, to want their happiness.  You want to keep them from suffering, and you do so just as if they were a part of you.  You don't think your behavior makes you special.  You don't congratulate yourself for helping others, just as you won't congratulate yourself for healing your own leg when you hurt it.  It is natural for you to love your leg because it is one with you, and so it is natural for you to love others.  You would certainly never harm another being.  As the great Buddhist adapt Shantideva (8th century Indian sage) wrote, 'How wonderful it would be when all beings experience each other as limbs on the one body of life!'"  Robert Thurman, professor, Columbia, in his book, Infinite Life

Dalai Wisdom

Rules for Being Human

Never to forget

"The only dream worth having is to dream that you will live while you are alive, and die only when you are dead. To love, to be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and vulgar disparity of the life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget."
- Arundhati Roy

Let it go

"To live in this world, you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go." 
- Mary Oliver

Stones