Month: December 2014

Expectations

Karl Duffy4 Comments

File:Marseille Girl Looking Over Calanque Sormiou.jpg

Our life in the world comes to us in the shape of time.

Consequently, our expectation is both a creative and constructive force.

If you expect to find nothing within yourself but the repressed, abandoned, and shameful elements of your past or a haunted hunger, all you will find is emptiness and desperation. 

The way you look at things is the most powerful force in shaping your life.

In a vital sense, perception is reality.

John O’Donohue,  AnamChara

photo of girl standing on the Calanque of Sormiou, near Marseille by benh lieu song

How to open up infinite possibilities

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Looking over the Negev (7680744384).jpg

When you become comfortable with uncertainty,

infinite possibilities open up in your life…fear is no longer a dominant factor in what you do,

and no longer prevents you from taking action to initiate change

Eckhart Tolle

photo neil ward

Embracing the New

Karl Duffy1 Comment

 File:Isarflöße.jpg

“I will stay with it and endure through suffering hardship 

and once the heaving sea has shaken my raft to pieces,

then I will swim.”

Homer, The Odyssey

On my printer I have this quote from Odysseus,  as every morning we awake and we face the same perils as that ancient mariner.  Every day we are cast upon the high seas of the soul. Whether we wish to be or not, we are already there, and have orders to show up. We begin showing up when we ask ourselves where are we blocked by fear, by lack of permission to live our own life, by self-doubt? What do we gain from staying stuck? Where is life served by our staying stuck? Who, or what are we waiting for before beginning our real life? How does staying stuck help anyone around us? Every day we are summoned anew to high adventure on the tenebrous seas of the soul. Living our lives, and not someone else’s, calls us to voyage, and if our familiar structures falter, then we swim.

James Hollis, Embracing the New: Avoiding a Routinized Life

photo Bernd Reuschenberg

Sunday Quote: Looking outside

Karl Duffy2 Comments

File:Empty house in Zhukovka - Kerch, Ukraine - panoramio.jpg

One way to express the crisis of our time is to say

that most of us have an address

but cannot be found there.

Henri Nouwen

The best gift

Karl Duffy2 Comments

File:Tamme eend wammes.jpg

Stepping out of the busyness,

stopping our endless pursuit of getting somewhere else,

is perhaps the most beautiful offering we can make to our spirit.

Tara Brach, True Refuge: Finding Peace and Freedom in your own Awakened Heart

Nowhere to go, Nothing to achieve

Karl Duffy3 Comments

File:Relax.jpg

The greatest thing in the world is to know how to be one with oneself.

(La plus grande chose du monde, c’est de savoir être à soi)

Michel de Montaigne, Essais Book I, ch. 39