Humanity

A celebration of friendship, family, love, and laughter. 

  

Local children enjoy the simple pleasures of the seashore in the Philippines province of Zambales, which was once devastated by the eruption of Mount Pinatubo. Photo by Christian Incocencio.

Fresh from his bath, his towel discarded, Thomas joins his father, Jack, and grandpa, Ross, in a spot of bird watching while on holiday in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, USA. Photo by Kathleen Hunter.

A small boy and his grandfather play basketball in a park in Milan, Italy. Photo by Sylvia Morara.

In the village of Narsingpur in West Bengal, India, Sarojini, who comes from a family of potters, tells her grandchildren stories of her childhood. Photo by Gautam Basu.

Jean and Ron from the Gold Coast, Australia, who met as teenagers and were then separated by war, show affection on their sixty-fifth wedding anniversary. Photo by Wayne Jones.

  

Photo Essay on YES magazine. See more photos at: 

http://www.yesmagazine.org/happiness/humanity

Life is a dream

 
Life is an opportunity, benefit from it.

Life is beauty, admire it.

Life is bliss, taste it.

Life is a dream, realize it.

Life is a challenge, meet it.

Life is a duty, complete it.

Life is a game, play it.

Life is costly, care for it.

Life is wealth, keep it.

Life is love, enjoy it.

Life is mystery, know it.

Life is a promise, fulfill it.

Life is sorrow, overcome it.

Life is a song, sing it.

Life is a struggle, accept it.

Life is tragedy, confront it.

Life is an adventure, dare it.

Life is luck, make it.

Life is too precious, do not destroy it.

Life is life, fight for it.

Mother Teresa

Are you a mere picture

Painting by Mahmoud Farschian

Are you a mere picture, and not as true as those stars, true as this dust? They throb with the pulse of things, but you are immensely aloof in your stillness, painted form.

The day was when you walked with me, your breath warm, your limbs singing of life. My world found its speech in your voice, and touched my heart with your face. You suddenly stopped in your walk, in the shadow-side of the Forever, and I went on alone.

Life, like a child, laughs, shaking its rattle of death as it runs; it beckons me on, I follow the unseen; but you stand there, where you stopped behind that dust and those stars; and you are a mere picture.

No, it cannot be. Had the life-flood utterly stopped in you, it would stop the river in its flow, and the foot-fall of dawn in her cadence of colours. Had the glimmering dusk of your hair vanished in the hopeless dark, the woodland shade of summer would die with its dreams.

Can it be true that I forgot you? We haste on without heed, forgetting the flowers on the roadside hedge. Yet they breathe unaware into our forgetfulness, filling it with music. You have moved from my world, to take seat at the root of my life, and therefore is this forgetting-remembrance lost in its own depth.

You are no longer before my songs, but one with them. You came to me with the first ray of dawn. I lost you with the last gold of evening. Ever since I am always finding you through the dark. No, you are no mere picture.

R. Tagore

Global spirit

Hope Springs Eternal

An angel’s loving hand directs a rainbow of hope towards a fertile and beautiful earth, and like a bulb in spring life bursts forth – another gem in the vast garden of the universe.

• The wisdom to perceive the interconnectedness of all life and living.
  
   
• The courage not to fear or deny difference; but to respect and strive to understand people of different cultures, and to grow from encounters with them.
  
  

• The compassion to maintain an imaginative empathy that reaches beyond one's immediate surroundings and extends to those suffering in distant places.

These qualities are the essential elements of global citizenship. 

Diversity should not beget conflict in the world, but richness.

Earth is originally a green oasis with no need for national borders; it is the venue for the shared existence of humankind, the embodiment of our common destiny.

Daisaku Ikeda

Imagine there's no countries

Imagine all the people

Living life in peace

From the greater silence I shall return…

…People of Orphalese, the wind bids me leave you.

Less hasty am I than the wind, yet I must go.

We wanderers, ever seeking the lonelier way, begin no day where we have ended another day; and no sunrise finds us where sunset left us.

Even while the earth sleeps we travel.

...

But should my voice fade in your ears, and my love vanish in your memory, then I will come again,

And with a richer heart and lips more yielding to the spirit will I speak.

Yea, I shall return with the tide…

I go with the wind, people of Orphalese, but not down into emptiness;

Know therefore, that from the greater silence I shall return…

In the stillness of the night I have walked in your streets, and my spirit has entered your houses,

And your heart-beats were in my heart, and your breath was upon my face, and I knew you all.

Ay, I knew your joy and your pain, and in your sleep your dreams were my dreams...

Fare you well, people of Orphalese.

Forget not that I shall come back to you.

Farewell to you and the youth I have spent with you.

It was but yesterday we met in a dream.

You have sung to me in my aloneness, and I of your longings have built a tower in the sky.

But now our sleep has fled and our dream is over, and it is no longer dawn.

The noontide is upon us and our half waking has turned to fuller day, and we must part.

If in the twilight of memory we should meet once more, we shall speak again together and you shall sing to me a deeper song.

And if our hands should meet in another dream, we shall build another tower in the sky.



From The Prophet - Kahlil Gibran

Canoe in the Mist

That photograph says more about me than any words of description could.... It speaks of, and to, the very depths of my soul. It speaks of my deepest connections and my deepest desires. It speaks of the deepest hopes of my life. It speaks of my deepest truth. It speaks of silence, simplicity, and solitude. And yes, to me it even speaks of a certain uncertainty (what an ironic phrase that), and of traveling through life lightly and with a hand that holds lightly, not grasping.... To me it even speaks of the impermanence of all things, arising, "blooming," and fading away on their own....

    Go quietly, carry little.

I believe that:

-Love is ultimately all that matters in this world, and

-The present moment is all that is....

LOVE. Love your partner, your spouse, your lover. Love your kids. Love them desperately, love them completely. Give yourself to love. Love all beings as much as you can. You will love imperfectly. You will fail. Sometimes you will fail so badly as to find hate in yourself. It is there. But love, and love again.

Do it today. Repeat for as long as you breathe. I believe nothing else ultimately matters.

from a lover of the wilderness, a lover of the silence...

• canoeinthemist.blogspot.com