It's a wonder to behold how human beings feel after making their own music. It's been well-documented throughout history that people really put themselves on a higher spiritual level when they involve themselves in music or any of the allied arts. Our lives are so affected by what we do artistically. But too often we hold back because of our limiting image of success thinking: I don't know how to do this. We need to give ourselves the freedom to create our own sounds of music.
from "Playing for the Fun of It" by Jeff Wangenheim
No matter what the weather looks like outside the window, life is warming up. Something in nature knows what it is doing; even if from time to time winter icily touches the napes of our necks with its cold fingers. . . . Woods will fill with black-birds and grackles, and swollen buds will cling like small birds to wet branches. . . . Old oaks sleep as long as they can, while the rest of creation exhibits an aching restlessness to move on. As everything begins to move, an almost forgotten song plays in our chests, the music of beginning again. The early small birds flit here and there on the rising winds; a lone, red-winged blackbird sits unmoving in the empty cherry tree . . . waiting . . . To live is to change, to move through one transition after another, to reinvent one's life, as needed. . . .
~ from AN ALMANAC FOR THE SOUL by Marv and Nancy Hiles
There are two silences. One silence I choose to keep when I need to hear a word that will heal, instruct, or console. The other silence comes when I have heard something so powerful, so real, that words, spoken or written, would only diminish its power.
~ from ALL THE DAYS OF MY LIFE by Marv and Nancy Hiles
One day builds on another. Our lives accumulate in increments of moments, hours, and days. Everything depends on this present moment and our courage to turn aside in delight, wonder, and gratitude.
~ from ALL THE DAYS OF MY LIFE by Marv & Nancy Hiles
To pray is not to use special language; it is the sound of a cry or a laugh rising from ordinary days. Formal or official words can often be lifeless. To pray we need to return like children to an elemental language of soul, to something close to song, to chant, to playground singing.
from ALL THE DAYS OF MY LIFE by Marv and Nancy Hiles
Spring can be the most difficult season of the year catching us between the rising tide of life and the damp caverns of memory that lie among the sleepy roots of our being. It is time to attend the soil that has lain fallow for many months -- we are, after all, animated ground. April can be an agitating month, leaving us to ride out this new, insistent life from places inside us never before reached. Kites, in the driven skies, tug at thin strings that tether them to earth, just as our souls tug at our bodies. Swallows and purple martins dive heart-stoppingly into the emptiness. Something light and lithe in us responds. . . . We are, after all, much more than rational beings.
from AN ALMANAC FOR THE SOUL by Marv and Nancy Hiles
Our planet is awash in the gentle light and shadow of an impenetrable Mystery; it is time, in spite of all our vaunted learning and might, to kneel at the rim of the abyss of our profound unknowing.
from ALL THE DAYS OF MY LIFE, by Marv and Nancy Hiles
A hidden river runs beneath the conscious layers of our lives. We become fatigued not from overwork, but from how much energy it takes to stage our lives in order to drown out the sounds of the river inside us.
from All the Days of My Life, by Marv and Nancy Hiles
There is no there anywhere, no destination, only ways through, passages, resting spots, doors that swing open to where a vision is hammered out, painted, written, sung or prayed behind the facade of the common.
from ALL THE DAYS OF MY LIFE by Marv and Nancy Hiles
One winter day something will shine out from an everyday object and the darkness will flood with light. Something we have seen a thousand times suddenly becomes the sentinel of another world.
from ALL THE DAYS OF MY LIFE by Marv and Nancy Hiles
We will never "solve" life, crack its ultimate code, or frame it with consistency. It is forever enigmatic and resists control by words or concepts. What is left to us is the rise and fall of a songline and the vision of a Great White Rose.
from ALL THE DAYS OF MY LIFE by Marv and Nancy Hiles
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