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

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