The Sun Lives for One Day

Marney Ward

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The Navajo teach their children that every morning when the sun comes up, it’s a brand-new sun. It’s born each morning, it lives for the duration of one day, and in the evening it passes on, never to return again. As soon as the children are old enough to understand, the adults take them out at dawn and they say, ‘The sun has only one day. You must live this day in a good way, so that the sun won’t have wasted precious time.’ Acknowledging the preciousness of each day is a good way to live, a good way to reconnect with our basic joy.

~ Pema Chödrön

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Only things talk to me. Rodin things, Gothic cathedral things, antiquity things, — all things that are accomplished things. They send me back to models; to the animated world of living things, simple and seen without interpretation, I claim things. I’m starting to see in a new way: flowers often mean infinitely to me and I’ve always gotten unique stimulus from animals.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

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Go meet your dark god. He can do for you what I can’t anymore: he can consecrate you to the sun and maturity.

Lou Andreas-Salomé to Rainer Maria Rilke — December 13, 1926 — two weeks before the death of the poet.

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