Success

To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child , a garden patch, or a redeemed condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sunday, July 06, 2014

Life and death...

The ideas in the recent blog post (Dealing with Terminal Illness) by Om Swami are quite in line with Tagore's Gitanjali Verse '...because I love this life, I know I shall love death as well...':


'I was not aware of the moment when I first crossed the threshold of this life. 
What was the power that made me open out into this vast mystery 
like a bud in the forest at midnight? 
When in the morning I looked upon the light 
I felt in a moment that I was no stranger in this world, 
that the inscrutable without name and form had taken me 
in its arms in the form of my own mother. 
Even so, in death the same unknown will appear 
as ever known to me. 
And because I love this life, I know I shall love death as well. 
The child cries out when from the right breast the mother takes it away 
to find in the very next moment its consolation in the left one.'



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