A line from Mr Holmes earlier this week has echoed in me. A universal word, from a wronged mother who has just received an apology from her young son:
“Lesson there then for you. Don’t always speak what you think.”
Good counsel hereunder is less concise, but echoes catholic ecology for heart and soul and mind and body too:
The Lake of Beauty
Let your mind be quiet, realising the beauty of the world, and
the immense the boundless treasures that it holds in store.All that you have within you, all that your heart desires, all
that your Nature so specially fits you for – that or the
counterpart of it waits embedded in the great Whole, for
you. It will surely come to you.Yet equally surely not one moment before its appointed time
will it come. All your crying and fever and reaching out of
hands will make no difference.Therefore do not begin that game at all.
Do not recklessly spill the waters of your mind in this direction
and in that, lest you become like a spring lost and dissipated
in the desert.But draw them together into a little compass, and hold them
still, so still;And let them become clear, so clear – so limpid, so mirror-like;
At last the mountains and the sky shall glass themselves in
peaceful beauty,And the antelope shall descend to drink, and to gaze at his
reflected image, and the lion to quench his thirst,And Love himself shall come and bend over, and catch his
own likeness in you.Edward Carpenter