“The ability to sleep may well forsake us, leaving us wakeful for two or three hours in those darkest and most interminable hours of the night, say from two to five. This can be a real affliction: we can toss and turn and try angrily to fall asleep again. Or it can be an opportunity…”
“As I grow older, I seem to need more time for inner stillness…. This can happen in the midst of daily chores or when walking in a crowd or riding in a train. It means being still, open, reflective, holding within myself the crucible of joy and pain of all the world, and lifting it up to God.”
“I am convinced it is a great art to know how to grow old gracefully, and I am determined to practise it… I always thought I should love to grow old, and I find it even more delightful than I thought. It is so delicious to be done with things, and to feel no need any longer to concern myself much about earthly affairs… I am tremendously content to let one activity after another go, and to await quietly and happily the opening of the door at the end of the passage-way, that will let me in to my real abiding place.”
“Every stage of our lives offers fresh opportunities. Responding to divine guidance, try to discern the right time to undertake or relinquish responsibilities without undue pride or guilt. Attend to what love requires of you, which may not be great busyness.”
“Each morning is new now. I wake to the inner music of thanks for the dear gift of life and with eager plans for the uses of the day. The first sound I hear, whether a flock of chirping birds, or the whispering wind, or of traffic with its urgency, is dear. The growing light is an omen, and a good one. Thoughts crowd in, and the mind’s wheels begin their busy turning like those of the cars and trucks out on the main road.”
“We must be confident that there is still more ‘life’ to be ‘lived’ and yet more heights to be scaled. The tragedy of middle age is that, so often, men and women cease to press ‘towards the goal of their high calling’. They cease learning, cease growing; they give up and resign from life. As wisdom dawns with age, we begin to measure our experiences not by what life gives to us, not by the things withheld from us, but by their power to help us to grow in spiritual wisdom.”
Who made the world? / Who made the swan, and the black bear? / Who made the grasshopper? / This grasshopper, I mean— / the one who has flung herself out of the grass, / the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, / who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down— / who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
“I pray most for courage, especially as I get older and my bones can be broken more easily. The last time I was arrested, the roadway that I lay on was extremely hard, and I didn’t know what the police… might have in their minds.”
“All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change. God is Change.”
“It is very hard to find anything joyful if you are suffering grief, loss, pain or sadness. However, joy can emerge as a result of our faith; it is one of the “fruits of the spirit”. For Quakers, this can mean silent worship or prayer, either individually or in a group. We seek to come closer to the Spirit and to be open to Divine Guidance. As a result of worship, many of us feel deep connection to each other, to society, to the universe.”
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