Be What You Are - Hermann Hesse

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer,
then a tree has something to say to us:
Be still!  Be still!  Look at me!  Life is not easy,
life is not difficult.  Home is neither here nor there.
Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees
rustling in the wind at evening.  If one listens to them
silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel,
its meaning.  It is not so much a matter of escaping
from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so.
It is a longing for home, for new metaphors for life.
It leads home.  Every path leads homeward, every step
is birth, every step is death...

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy
before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts,
long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives
than ours.  They are wiser than we are, as long as we do
not listen to them.  But when we have learned how to
listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the
childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve incomparable
joy.  Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer
wants to be a tree.  He wants to be nothing except what
he is.  That is home.  That is happiness...

Hermann Hesse

from: Trees: Reflections and Poems

via - The Beauty We Love

~

To put it simply, let that mysterious grace move in your
spirit as it will and follow wherever it leads you.  Let it
be the active doer and you the passive receiver.  Do not
meddle with it, but let it be...  Your part is to be as wood
to a carpenter or a home to a dweller.  Remain blind
during this time cutting away all desire to know, for
knowledge is a hindrance here.  Be content to feel this
mysterious grace sweetly awaken in the depths of your
spirit.  Forget everything...

The Cloud of Unknowing