rebirth

And some day there will be nothing left of everything that has twisted my life and grieved it and filled me so often with such anguish. Some day, with the last exhaustion, peace will come and the motherly earth will gather me back home. It won't be the end of things, only a way of being born again, a bathing and a slumbering where the old and the withered sink down, where the young and new begin to breathe. Then, with other thoughts, I will walk along streets like these, and listen to streams, and overhear what the sky says in the evening, over and over and over.

Nothing can dwindle to nothing, as Nature restores one thing from the stuff of another, nor does she allow a birth, without a corresponding death.

HYMN OF THE DIVINE DANDELION I am born as the sun, But then turn into the moon, As my blonde hairs turn Grayish-white and fallTo the ground, Only to be buried again, Then to be born again, Into a thousand suns And a thousand Moons. Suzy Kassem

There was a charm in being reborn into the world when one was old enough to appreciate it.

O Earth, lie heavily upon her eyes;Seal her sweet eyes weary of watching Earth;Lie close around her; leave no room for mirthWith its harsh laughter, nor for sound of sighs.She hath no questions, she hath no replies.

Tears ache in my throat and each time his lips caress mine I__ closer to the dam within me bursting open. He__ undoing me, tearing out my demons with burning strokes of his lips and the salty taste of his mouth. In his arms, I__ changing, becoming anew.

You have to remember one life, one death__his one! To enter fully the day, the hour, the moment whether it appears as life or death, whether we catch it on the inbreath or outbreath, requires only a moment, this moment. And along with it all the mindfulness we can muster, and each stage of our ongoing birth, and the confident joy of our inherent luminosity. (24)

Sometimes you have to kind of die inside in order to rise from your own ashes and believe in yourself and love yourself to become a new person.

She died--this was the way she died;And when her breath was done,Took up her simple wardrobeAnd started for the sun.Her little figure at the gateThe angels must have spied,Since I could never find herUpon the mortal side.

Man, when he is re-born, passes through the ages as he who is born; and the preceding state is always as an egg in respect to the subsequent one, thus he is continually conceived and born: and this not only when he lives in the world, but also when he comes into another life to eternity: and still when he cannot be further perfected, then to be as an egg to those things which remain to be manifested, which are indefinite.

The phoenix must burn to emerge.

Being smart takes patience. Being wise takes pain. Being apathetic takes practice. Being in love takes everything...away.

Each night, when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn.

The glow flares bright__right as the billion-year-old light around us. Bright as a sun.Almost every particle in the universe was once part of a star.First, hydrogen condensing and collapsing, bringing radiance to the void.Furnaces burning bright, then fading, giving all they had left back into the cosmos.Carbon and oxygen. Iron and gold.Vast clouds swirling with their own gravity. Coalescing and disintegrating.Generation to generation.The remnants of stellar alchemy, stirring into life, then consciousness.Crawling from the oceans. Taking to the skies.And from there, back to the stars that birthed them.A perfect circle.

Suppose a man threw into the sea a yoke with one hole in it, and the east wind carried it to the west, and the west wind carried it to the east, and the north wind carried it to the south, and the south wind carried it to the north. Suppose there were a blind turtle that came up once at the end of each century. What do you think, bhikkhus? Would that blind turtle put his neck into that yoke with one hole in it?""He might, venerable sir, sometime or other at the end of a long period.""Bhikkhus, the blind turtle would sooner put his neck into that yoke with a single hole in it than a fool, once gone to perdition, would take to regain the human state, I say. Why is that? Because there is no practising of the Dhamma there, no practising of what is righteous, no doing of what is wholesome, no performance of merit. There mutual devouring prevails, and the slaughter of the weak.

As David Zucker watched the casket of his late wife being lowered into the ground, he thought the worst must surely be over and it was time to start the slow healing process to begin life anew.

I wondered about my inner child. In fact, I was troubled. Did I even have an inner child, I asked myself, given that, in essence, I__ just been born?

If there is nothing new under the sun, at least the sun itself is always new, always re-creating itself out of its own inexhaustible fire.