1My soul rests in God alone. My salvation is from him. 2He alone is my rock and my salvation, my fortress— I will never be greatly shaken. 3How long will you assault a man, would all of you throw him down, Like a leaning wall, like a tottering fence? 4They fully intend to throw him down from his lofty place. They delight in lies. They bless with their mouth, but they curse inwardly. Selah. 5My soul, wait in silence for God alone, for my expectation is from him. 6He alone is my rock and my salvation, my fortress. I will not be shaken. 7With God is my salvation and my honor. The rock of my strength, and my refuge, is in God. 8Trust in him at all times, you people. Pour out your heart before him. God is a refuge for us. Selah.
The writer talks to his own soul, reminding it where to rest while pressures and critics circle. Steadiness here doesn't come from controlling the outcome but from knowing where one's security actually lives. Notice the invitation to pour out the heart honestly instead of putting on a brave face. Today may hold its share of noise, and this passage suggests that a settled center is something we return to again and again, not something we achieve once.
How can our principles become dead, unless the impressions [thoughts] which correspond to them are extinguished? But it is in thy power continuously to fan these thoughts into a flame. I can have that opinion about anything which I ought to have. If I can, why am I disturbed? The things which are external to my mind have no relation at all to my mind.—Let this be the state of thy affects, and thou standest erect. To recover thy life is in thy power.
George Long, 1862
Marcus Aurelius was Roman emperor from 161 to 180. He wrote these private notes to himself in Greek, mostly while on military campaign, and never meant to publish them. They survived through Byzantine manuscript copies and were first printed in the 16th century.
Marcus compares our convictions to a fire. They don't go out because someone argues us out of them. They go out because we stop tending them. Most of us know in principle that a delayed train or a sharp email can't reach into the mind, yet we forget it by lunchtime. His point is that steadiness is maintained by a habit of attention, and a temperament has little to do with it. The last line is also encouraging: a life that has drifted can be recovered at any hour, starting with the next thought.
PracticePick one conviction you already hold, such as 'a delay is not an injury' or 'I can choose my reply.' Write it on a card or in your phone. When something irritates you today, reread it before you react, and ask whether the thing itself is bothering you or only your opinion of it.
A thousand-year-old English poem makes a Gospel book narrate how it was made from a slaughtered calf.
Around the year 1000, a scribe copied a large anthology of Old English poetry. It is now called the Exeter Book, and it holds about ninety-four riddles. Their solutions are not written down anywhere, so the reader has to work them out. Riddle 26 is one of the grimmest. The speaker says an enemy took its life and stole its strength. It is a Gospel book, and it is describing its own manufacture.
The poem follows the process step by step. The skin is soaked, dunked in water, and set in the sun, where it loses its hair. A knife edge scrapes it smooth. Fingers fold the sheets. Then comes the quill, which the riddle calls a bird's joy. It dips into a drop of dark liquid, which the poet calls a portion of the stream and tree-dye. The quill steps across the page and leaves a black track behind it. Finally a man fits it with wooden boards, covers it in hide, and decorates it with gold and wire.
The riddle turns on a pun about bodies. The animal is dead, but its skin carries the Word. The poem then changes tone. It promises that anyone who uses the book will be bolder in heart, wiser in spirit, and richer in friends. It ends with the standard riddle challenge to say what I am called, and adds that the name is famous and holy.
The form lasted because it makes everyday processes strange. The Anglo-Saxon riddlers took plain labor like scraping, soaking, and sewing and described it as if it were violence or magic. A different riddle in the collection gives a moth eating words only a few lines. It calls the moth a thief in the dark that is no wiser for having swallowed them. Together the two poems show how the collection treated the written word as something physical.
RememberRiddle 26 is a tenth-century poem in which a Gospel book narrates its own making, from calf to quill and ink to gold binding.
Read nextKevin Crossley-Holland, The Exeter Book Riddles
Source: Wikipedia: Exeter Book Riddle 26 and Exeter Book Riddles