CREATIVITY AND OTHER LIFE QUALITIES: The Quest: Not putting off until tomorrow the joys we can share today.

Friday

The Quest: Not putting off until tomorrow the joys we can share today.

Updated 16 April 2010

Thanks for being patient with me as I've been going through a kind of Quest or extended life-meditation walk about the notion of "not putting off until tomorrow" the JOY we can experience today. Some of us, even the reformed work-aholics among us, are very good at not putting off until tomorrow the WORK we can accomplish today. But try to get us to have a little more FUN and we manage to come up with all this "stuff" we must get done first.

Well, I'm sure I'll say more about my Quest sometime. For now, I've been sorting it through. The recent loss of a dear friend has prompted this journey. I'm grateful, with many others, for the memory of our dear Lindsey. You know Lindsey and her beloved life-partner invited us to tour the southern regions of the Congo with them two years ago. It would have been an amazing trip because they have done everything from swimming with a school of manta rays to watching cheetahs run free. We missed the opportunity because it wasn't a good time for us to take two weeks off from our responsibilities here.

Now Lindsey has recently transitioned to other loveliness. I miss her so much. Having corresponded with Lindsey about her many adventures and stories during my writing nights since Nov. 2008, also meeting with Lindsey and her life-partner at our annual Thanksgiving retreat near Monterey, I can tell you without equivocation, that would have been an enormously beautiful and enJOYable trip.

May you, Dear Reader, never put off until tomorrow the joy you can experience and savor today. With love,
Diane

Diane Solis

The poetry of Diane Solis has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, excerpted in Expressive Writing: Classroom and Community, and has been published or is forthcoming in literary journals and magazines, including, America, Big Muddy, The Healing Muse, Hobo Camp Review, The Lost Country, Psychological Perspectives, Sinister Wisdom, Slink Chunk Press and elsewhere. Her chapbook ART SPIRITS, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. A science writer and technical editor by trade, Solis practices contemplative and Zen forms of meditation and travels to remote places to photograph and write about the "wild" she encounters there. She resides on the Central Pacific Coast with her partner.

www.dmsolis.blogspot.com

The Latest Quotes for Contemplation:

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. --Annie Dillard

I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times, in life after life, age after age, forever. ~ Tagore

I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world.... ~ Frank O'Hara

Of all fires love is the only inexhaustible one. ~Pablo Neruda

Prophets are so dangerous because they cry in season and out of season, politely and impolitely, loud and long. ~Joan Chittister

When I say be creative, I don't mean you should all go and become great painters and great poets. I simply mean let your life be a painting, let your life be a poem. ~ Osho

There are a hundred paths through the world that are easier than loving. But, who wants easier? ~ Mary Oliver

Without warning, as a whirlwind swoops on an oak, Love shakes my heart. ~ Sappho

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
T.S. Eliot, from "Little Gidding"

Love many things, for therein lies your true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well... ~ Vincent van Gogh

I have found that to love and be loved is the most empowering and exhilarating of all human emotions. ~ Jane Goodall

Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone--we find it with another. ~Thomas Merton

I am certain that after the dust of centuries has passed over our cities, we, too, will be remembered not for our victories or defeats in battle or in politics, but for our contribution to the human spirit.
~John F. Kennedy

I cannot write convincingly about anything that I am not passionate about. ~Darrell Bourque, Poet Laureate of Louisiana

In the lover's heart is a lute which plays the melody of longing. ~Rumi

But perhaps the most important thing about my father was that he taught us the simplest things -- Navajo things -- like how to just sit and be quiet, to blend in and watch, or to move so silently we'd become a part of the forest. My father taught us how to live the concepts of our culture, especially the importance of communicating with the natural world. ~Lori Arviso Alvord, M.D.