There is no right or wrong path. There is only the path that you choose. Whatever you choose, there will be many opportunities for you to grow and expand
– Kuan Yin
Category Archives: STEP 3
“She cast her fragrance and her radiance over me. I ought never to have run away from her… I ought to have guessed all the affection that lay behind her poor little stratagems. Flowers are so inconsistent! But I was too young to know how to love her.” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
Flowers open without choosing the rich man’s ground, the moon shines bright on mountains and rivers; only within the heart of men is evil; all other things must resolve themselves into heaven’s parental care of the human race. (Chinese).
Care, and not fine stables, make a good horse.
FOTO – CHEEKY THE PONY AT RALEIGH
When lazy horses begin to start, old women to dance, and white clouds to rain, there is no stopping them.
DANISH.
“Let us decide on the route that we wish to take to pass our life, and attempt to sow that route with flowers.” — Émilie du Châtelet,
Martin Harrison
White Flowers8 September 2014
The air the wind the outside and outsize
of what’s possible and imaginable
clear and clean endeavour into the atmosphere
of light on dark and glittering spaces
where crimson rosellas swerve sideways
into cascades of down-hanging white flowers
they land whistling in that snowy down
that galactic spray of weeping branches
now revealing themselves in an entirety
of whitenesses for a few days in a
suddenness which takes my breath away
FOTO – GARDEN AT DAVIDSONS WHALING STATION EDEN NSW 2013
T.R.U.S.T. – Try Really Using Step Three.
However, none of the steps work by magic. We do not just say the words of the steps; We learn to live them. We see for ourselves that the program has something to offer us.
FOTO – STEPS DOWN TO LAKE AT MALLACOOTA 2013
“There’s nothing –absolutely nothing –half so much worth doing as messing about in boats.” ― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind In The Willows
When I was a boy I loved fishing. Yet in my youth I gave it up. I could no longer wrench a fish from its hook. But today I sit and bait a hook again. I bait my hook with liquorice. A fly hinders me. I flick it away. How does a fly fly so far out to sea? If I could fly I would look down and see myself as a speck in a speck of a boat, and I would see many boats like mine criss-crossing on a silent sea.
foto – merimbula nsw south coast
go in the direction your head is pointed in. Jung Chang, Wild Swans
“We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of the God as we understood him.”
The Third Step requires a surrendered attitude of spiritual growth if we want to keep the good things coming. Our will is a simple way of stating what we want. Our wants direct our lives and if they are not in alignment with what we need, we have a contradiction to overcome. Turning our will over to the God of our understanding removes the burden of contradiction. We find that some of the things we wanted come more quickly when we let go. Other things cease to be interesting to us, and it is even hard to recall what they were. Having dealt with surrender and a new belief we look outward to turn our life and will over to something far more powerful and loving than ourselves. We entrust ourselves to God’s care. This is a big change from our attitudes of fear and distrust. We become part of the whole. We are putting action to what we learned in the Second Step. We made a decision to trust God’s care of us. We do what is necessary and the outcome simply belongs to God. We are not as powerful as the God of our understanding. We are indeed powerless. In recovery, we grow but not to the point where we can afford to stop praying. We have to maintain, and sometimes renew, our decision to actually let God take care of us. We try to remain open and aware of His guidance through our prayers, meditations and the people in our lives. The decision to trust God’s care releases us from the need to try to control what we have no real control over.
You are today where your thoughts have brought you; you will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you.
James Allen
Some days will drip in slow descent
along the creases of our skin;
they leave our inspiration clogged,
the texture of our labors thin.
Some days will coil with cobra-stealth,
attack when we are least prepared;
we cannot walk unscathed and yet
survival’s sweet – for we have dared!
Some days erect their wired barbs;
we struggle, bleed, admit we failed.
(And foolishly withdraw in shame –
as though our virtue was impaled.)
But ah, the days that string their pearls
across our shoulders, warmly rest
their sundrop auras…these we clasp
in awe, aware that we are blest.
© Laryalee Fraser
How did you get here? Close your eyes and surrender.
~ Rumi
“At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me?” –
Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road
“He hesitated, but then stepped beneath the tree and knelt, depositing me gently on the ground between two giant roots. And he stayed there, kneeling beside me, holding my hand in his. Something splashed the back of my hand, cold as spring water, crystalling to my skin. A faery’s tears.”
― Julie Kagawa, The Iron Queen
Don’t be pushed by your problems. Be led by your dreams.”
― Becca Chopra, The Chakra Diaries
Taking the first step with the good thought, the second with the good word, and the third with the good deed, I enter paradise.
Destiny has two ways of crushing us – by refusing our wishes and by fulfilling them.
Henri Frederic Amiel
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/wishes_2.html
“If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.”
― C.S. Lewis
In the darkest hour the soul is replenished and given strength to continue and endure.
“Your weaknesses are the key to the unimaginable bigger future that God has envisioned for you. Your strengths are probably already bearing all the fruit they can. They will continue to bear those good fruits in your life, but at some point they will begin to plateau. Your richer, more abundant future is intimately linked to your weaknesses.”
― Matthew Kelly
Well, she wore far too much rouge last night, and not quite enough clothes. That is always a sign of desperation in a woman.”
― Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband
Life is magnificent – just as it comes.
Life has no need for fancy clothes, or lipstick.
Life is no pig.
Our life is the greatest gift of all creation.
When we are unhappy with life –
when we are shocked by the stock market,
or dismayed by our choice of political candidates,
let us not lash out in anger.
But also, let us not try to pretty up life
with some lipstick and some party clothes.
See life clearly – no rose coloured glasses –
and then CHOOSE to love life.
CHOOSE to be happy, be joyful, be grateful,
be forgiving of everyone and of every act
we believe has hurt us.
Life just “IS.”
We get to CHOOSE our relationship with life.
– Jonathan Lockwood Huie
The journey is part of the experience – an expression of the seriousness of one’s intent. One doesn’t take the A train to Mecca.”
― Anthony Bourdain, A Cook’s Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines
“We allow ourselves to be blown by the winds because we do know what we want: our hearts know it, even if our thoughts are sometimes slow to follow- but in the end they do catch up with our hearts and then we think we have made a decision”
― Muhammad Asad, The Road to Mecca
Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion.
THOMAS JEFFERSON, letter to Peter Carr, Aug. 10, 1787
“All we have to do is understand that we’re all here for a reason and to commit ourselves to that. Then we can laugh at our sufferings, large and small and walk fearlessly, aware that each step has meaning”
― Paulo Coelho, The Witch Of Portobello
Letting go is easy: it’s all downhill.”
― Lauren Oliver
“Spirituality is a mixed-up, topsy-turvy, helter-skelter godliness that turns our lives into an upside-down toboggan ride of unexpected turns, surprise bumps and bone shattering crashes .”
― Mike Yaconelli, Messy Spirituality: God’s Annoying Love for Imperfect People
Like everything else in his life, he crashed forward, caution the first casualty.”
― Neal Shusterman, Full Tilt
“When you put fear behind the wheel, you’re bound to crash, but when you drive in faith the ride will be rough, but preceding into a journey of your lifetime.”
― Anthony Liccione
Don’t estimate the value of a badger skin before catching the badger.
“Only the keeper sees
that,where the ring-dove broods
and the badgers roll at ease,
there was once a road through the woods”
― Rudyard Kipling
The clown may be the source of mirth, but – who shall make the clown laugh?
― Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus
“No clowns were funny. That was the whole purpose of a clown. People laughed at clowns, but only out of nervousness. The point of clowns was that, after watching them, anything else that happened seemed enjoyable”
― Terry Pratchett, The City Watch Trilogy: A Discworld Omnibus.
Don’t call the alligator a big-mouth till you have crossed the river.
Belize.
“I don’t do romance, in the same way I don’t do heroin Russian roulette, or nude alligator wrestling. I consider all of the above self-destructive, and demeaning and these are things up with which I will not put.”
― D.D. Barant, Dying Bites
A sense of humour is the only divine quality of man”
― Arthur Schopenhauer
Out of compassion I destroy the darkness of their ignorance. From within them I light the lamp of wisdom and dispel all darkness from their lives.
Bhagavad Gita
It is always sad when someone leaves home, unless they are simply going around the corner and will return in a few minutes with ice-cream sandwiches.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can’t Avoid
“…We leave our homeland, our property and our friends. We give up the familiar ground that supports our ego, admit the helplessness of ego to control its world and secure itself. We give up our clingings to superiority and self-preservation…It means giving up searching for a home, becoming a refugee, a lonely person who must depend on himself…Fundamentally, no one can help us. If we seek to relieve our loneliness, we will be distracted from the path. Instead, we must make a relationship with loneliness until it becomes aloneness.”
― Chögyam Trungpa, The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation
The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning.
~Ivy Baker Priest
http://www.quotegarden.com/hang-in.html
“The worst isn’t the last thing about the world. It’s the next to the last thing. The last thing is the best. It’s the power from on high that comes down into the world, that wells up from the rock-bottom worst of the world like a hidden spring. Can you believe it? The last, best thing is the laughing deep in the hearts of the saints, sometimes our hearts even. Yes. You are terribly loved and forgiven. Yes. You are healed. All is well.”
― Frederick Buechner, The Final Beast
There is only one success: to be able to spend your life in your own way, and not to give others absurd maddening claims upon it.
Christopher Darlington Morley (1890-1957)
http://www.gunnar.cc/quotes.html
“Take hold of your own life.
See that the whole existence is celebrating.
These trees are not serious, these birds are not serious.
The rivers and the oceans are wild,
and everywhere there is fun,
everywhere there is joy and delight.
Watch existence,
listen to the existence and become part of it.”
― Osho
THE OLD PROVERBIAL RECOVERY 