There is a time for departure
even when there’s no certain place to go.
Tennessee Williams, Camino Real
photo MOs810
Category: Make the most of life
Our own path
We are not here to fit in, be well-balanced, or provide exempla for others. We are here to be eccentric, different, perhaps strange, perhaps merely to add our small piece, our little clunky, chunky selves, to the great mosaic of being. As the gods intended, we are here to become more and more ourselves.
James Hollis, What Matters Most
photo of the top of Skellig Michael by mike shields.
Expectations
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
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
“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
A time for rest
O little forests, meekly
Touch the snow with low branches!
O covered stones, Hide the house of growth!
Secret vegetal words, Unlettered water,
Daily Zero.
Pray undistracted, Curled tree carved in steel –
Buried zenith!
Fire, turn inward
To your weak fort, To a burly infant spot,
A house of nothing.
O peace, bless this mad place:
Silence, love this growth.
O silence, golden zero, Unsetting sun
Love winter when the plant says nothing
Thomas Merton
photo lumpytrout
Mindfulbalance 