existence

The Word became flesh to communicate to us human beings caught in the mud, the pain, the fears and the brokenness of existence, the life, the joy, the communion, the ecstatic gift of love that is the source of all love and life and unity in our universe and that is the very life of God.

Jean Vanier

look

If you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment.

Georgia O'Keefe

difference

The difference between you and God is that God doesn't think He's you.

Anne Lamott

small

Any concern too small to be turned into a prayer is to small to be made into a burden.

Corrie ten Boom, Clippings from My Notebook

green

Fresh and green we will remain

Bearing fruit to a ripe old age

Happy to tell about Your name

A blessed endeavour

The righteous flourish like the palm

And grow like the cedars of Lebanon

Planted in the courts of God

Forever and ever

Fresh and Green, Music and Lyric by Steve Bell, adapted from Psalm 92

understand

Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man's desire to understand.

Neil Armstrong

mending

Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.

Anne Lamott

precious

We must be careful with our lives, for Christ's sake, because it would seem that they are the only lives we are going to have in this puzzling and perilous world, and so they are very precious and what we do with them matters enormously.

Frederick Buechner

simply

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers today;

And give us not to think so far away

As the uncertain harvest; keep us here

All simply in the springing of the year.

Robert Frost

recklessly

Everything is blooming most recklessly. If it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.

Rainer Maria Rilke

gladness

The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.

Frederick Buechner

instrument

Spring makes its own statement, so loud and clear that the gardener seems to be only one of the intruments, not the composer.

Geoffrey B. Charlesworth

fathomless

Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.

Frederick Buechner

moo

Who was the first guy that looked at a cow and said, "I think that I'll drink whatever comes out of those things when I squeeze them?"

Calvin & Hobbes

dwell

Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life.

Rachel Carson

without

God, who foresaw your tribulation, has specially armed you to go through it, not without pain but without stain.

C.S. Lewis

reflection

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.

Thomas Merton

whispers

God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

C.S. Lewis

expressive

A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.

Henry David Thoreau

dream

It is almost impossible to watch a sunset and not dream.

Bern Williams

hourglass

Seize the day, seize whatever you can

'Cause life slips away just like hourglass sand

Seize the day, pray for grace from God's hand

Then nothing will stand in your way

Seize the day

Carolyn Arends, Seize the Day

intoxicate

Flowers really do intoxicate me.

Vita Sackville-West

wild

My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here, My heart's in the Highlands a chasing the deer; Chasing the wild deer, and following the roe; My heart's in the Highlands, wherever I go.

Robert Burns