Monday, April 27, 2026: Quotes from the Emmaus Retreat: 

All day I think about it, then at night I say it. Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing? I have no idea. My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that, and I intend to end up there. (Rumi)

Home is the place we all must find, child! It’s not just a place where you eat or sleep. Home is knowing. Home is knowing your mind, knowing your heart, knowing your courage. If we know ourselves, we’re always home, anywhere. (Glinda, the Good Witch, The Wizard of Oz) 

In a dark time, the eye begins to see. (Theodore Roethke)

We are what Christ is. (John Phillip Newell)

Let go…or be dragged. (Old Zen saying)

Many of us know the feeling of having abandoned some part of ourselves as we’ve journeyed through life. (Jane Pretat)

You want to cry aloud for your mistakes. But to tell you the truth, the world doesn’t need any more of that sound. (Mary Oliver)

In our souls, as on the sea, storms subside gradually. (Pierre de Chardin) 

I’m not going to die, honey; I’m going home like a shooting star! 

(Sojourner Truth)

The stars created the atoms of our body…we are made of star dust! 

(Brian Swimme)

To have to let go of the person I was and accept the person I am now.  

(Terese Lux)

Wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life. Knowing this gives me hope that human wholeness — mine, yours, ours, — need not be a utopian dream, if we can use devastation as a seedbed for new life.  - (Parker Palmer) 

Midway on life’s journey, I found myself / In dark woods, the right road lost. (Robert Pinsky / The Inferno of Dante)

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves…. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. (Rainer Maria Rilke)

We came from the Great Silence without fear into this world of noise. Perhaps we can return without fear as well, crossing back over knowing that the Great Silence is our first and final home. (Parker Palmer)

This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of  attentiveness. (Mary Oliver) 

The more deeply we are our true selves, the less self is in us. (Meister Eckhart)

One hand opens in grief.The other in gratitude.Pressing them together, we pray. (Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, poet)

Prayer is an act which makes the heart audible to God. It is an event that starts in us and ends in God. (Unknown)

A person’s shadow is the whole of the unconscious parts of a persons story. It is the part of oneself that has been denied life; it is all the possibilities good, bad, and indifferent that could have been lived but have not been lived. It is all that one dislikes about oneself so much that one hides it from oneself as well as others. (Brewi and Brennan from Midlife Spirituality and Jungian Archetypes)

True self is the self with which we arrive on earth; the self that simply wants us to be who we were born to be.  (Parker Palmer)

What is not faced inwardly will play out in our external world; whatever burdens within, will sooner or later, burden without...as every good 12 stepper knows: What we resist, will persist. (James Hollis)

You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the ocean in a drop. (Rumi)

Attention is love in action.  (John O’Donohue)

And the Beloved Community says Amen!