After a tiring day …(x2)

While on the subject of Helen Exley giftbooks, here are lines from another one of her books. This one’s about love, for those who like fairytales! Er, forgot the name of the book though….saved these lines on my fone! :)

Read on folks:

1. My husband is humble… and when he says, “Why do you love me? I am so ordinary,” it hurts, because I can never find the words to tell him he is my whole world.

2. When you are away too long, I put on your ancient gardening jacket and sit wrapped round in you. (Pam Brown)

3. One of the oldest human needs is having someone wonder where you are when you don’t come home at night.

4. A husband is a man who when someone tells him he is hen-pecked, answers, yes, but I am pecked by a good hen. (Heheh….)

5. The story of a love is not important. What is important is that one is capable of love. It is perhaps the only glimpse we are permitted of eternity.

After a tiring day….

 

 

Don’t know what a book called A Special Gift of Peace & Calm was doing on the bottom rack of the Crime & Mystery section at Crossword last Sunday. But I’m glad I chanced upon it. It’s a thin, pocket-size Helen Exley giftbook, which led me to check out more such books at the store.

Here I reproduce some enchanting lines I got from that book:

1. And silence… like a poultice…. comes to heal the blows of sound.

2. There are times when we stop. We sit still. We lose ourselves in a pile of leaves or its memory. We listen, and breezes from a whole other world begin to whisper.

3. I wish you quiet sleep, dreams of meadows deep in flowers and grass, of oceans calm and flecked with silver, of islands hushed by gentle waves, of countries of your own invention, of easy talk with friends…of roads leading to a reunion…of sorrow comforted. Of hope restored. 

4. LET peace enfold you: Shed the day’s anxieties, one by one. No need to hurry. Let the body drowse. Unwind….little by little. Still the mind. Breathe slow…until at last the busy world retreats, and leaves you in a gentleness, a stillness, a refuge of peace and calm.

5. Nothing is so strong as gentleness; nothing so gentle as real strength. 

6. May peace and peace and peace be everywhere. (From The Upanishads)

7. What life can compare to this? Sitting quietly by the window, I watch the leaves fall and the flowers bloom, as the seasons come and go.

8. I laugh when I hear that the fish in the water is thirsty. You don’t grasp the fact that what is most alive of all is inside your own house; and so you walk from one holy city to the next with a confused look! (Kabir)

9. Calm is a clear well that you may draw from whenever you have need.

10. Nothing is worth more than this day. We tend to be alive in the future, not now. We say, “Wait until I finish school and get my Ph.D degree, and then I will be really alive.” When we have it and it’s not easy to get, we say to ourselves, “I have to wait until I have a job in order to be really alive.” And then, after a job, a car. After the car, a house. We are not capable of being alive in the present moment. We tend to postpone being alive to the future, the distant future, we don’t know when. Now is not the moment to be alive. We may never be alive at all in our entire life. 

11. QUIET NIGHT: Lie gently in the dark, and listen to the rain pattering against the glass, the swish of passing cars, the hush of leaves. Renounce decisions, speculation, the tug of time. The world beyond the window….enfolds your silence, holds you softly. Sleep.