Roger Housden Quotes

“All I know, lying in this bed or not lying here, is that this is the life that was given to me. The life that throbs along through any and all of my moments: this is it! If ever I wonder what my life was meant to look like, I have only to look around me. This, whatever I am doing or not doing, is what it is. This, right here, is as good as it gets! Your "one wild and precious life," as Mary Oliver says. And when you follow its movement, without trying to direct it with preconceived plans for the future, your life will lead you where you need to go. When you trust it, your body, rather than your mind, will walk you through the life you are meant to be living, whatever it may be.”

— Roger Housden

“When you die, God and the Angels will hold you accountable for all the pleasures you were allowed in life that you denied yourself.”

— Roger Housden

“But it happens, and I am thankful enough for that, for those fleeting, wakeful moments of beauty and truth. They are the real joy of being human, brief matches that flare in the dark.”

— Roger Housden

“When the heart opens, we forget ourselves and the world pours in: this world, and also the invisible world of meaning that sustains everything that was and ever shall be.”

— Roger Housden

That is what happens when the heart door opens- you become less yourself than part of everything.' Many are the sentinels who guard that door: our fears, our self-importance, our meanness, our greed, our bitterness, and others.

— Roger Housden

“The willingness to let go of what we know you might even call an expression of faith. Faith: not that things will work out as we hope, but faith, simply, in life and its extraordinary intelligence that never fails to surprise. While belief holds on tightly, faith lets go.”

— Roger Housden

“Love, like everything else, exists in a spectrum. Love of another, love of the world, love of God, all these loves are really one love in different degrees of light and density.”

— Roger Housden

“His priorities for a rich and contented life were friendship, freedom, the pleasures of an examined life, and enough food and shelter to keep body and soul together.”

— Roger Housden

When we fall utterly, something gathers us up. But our falling must be without reservation, without expectation, without hope, though not hopeless. You cant plan that kind of falling. When you abandon yourself utterly to life, the river will flow, and the log jam will free. Impossible is another word for grace. Who wouldve thought it, life takes another turn, and you are gathered up into a whole different way of seeing and being.

— Roger Housden

“The heart, like the grape, is prone to delivering its harvest in the same moment it appears to be crushed.”

— Roger Housden

To keep faith with life is to experience that everything- everything that comes to us whatever it is- has its place in the puzzle of our existence.

— Roger Housden

“Day by day, tiny specks of us float away.”

— Roger Housden

“In today's world it is deceptively easy to lose sight of our direction and the things that matter and give us joy. How quickly the days can slip by, the years all gone, and we, at the end of our lives, mourning the life we dreamed of but never lived. Poetry urges us to stand once and for all, and now, in the heart of our own life.”

— Roger Housden

“Time, for example, is intimately connected with the goddess Kali, which partly accounts for her destructive nature. Energy - in Einstein's equation, E=MC2 - is personified in India as Shakti in her various guises.”

— Roger Housden