Taking a step into a larger life

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We get to this point in our life [where] we see that stepping into a larger life is intimidating because it requires that we risk being who we really are, that is, what wants to come to the world through us – rather than serving our ego comforts or whatever instructions came our way. We cannot expect someone else to give us permission. The parent complexes, or the culture complexes, are embedded in our history and will never stop saying what they always said. So it is up to us at this later point, when we have served those voices so long, to realize that our own psyches have a unique point of view, that each one of us is different and that we are bound for different destinies. Stepping into largeness will require that we discern our personal authority – rather than the authority of others or the authority of our internalized admonitions – and live this inner authority with risk and boldness.

James Hollis, What Matters Most: Living a more Considered Life.

photo wiros

The best we can

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In novels – as in life –  there is no perfection. We do the best we can with the tools we have at our disposal. Given that we are changing, the tools are changing, the thing itself is changing — there must be a moment when we stop. When we say, This is the best I can do for now… There is nobility in the effort, courage in the dailiness — the doggedness. It is a process of trying and failing. Of beginning again.

Dani Shapiro, Devotion

photo filiberto strazzari

Keeping the self fluid

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Be ahead of all parting, as if it had already happened,
like winter, which even now is passing.
For beneath the winter is a winter so endless
that to survive it at all is a triumph of the heart.

Be. And know as well the need to not be:
let that ground of all that changes
bring you to completion now.

Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus II, 13

photo stephen sweeney

Perfectly seen

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The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.

Thomas Merton

photo bea represa

Stillness

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To bring your attention to a stone, a tree, or an animal does not mean to think about it, but simply to perceive it, to hold it in your awareness. … Something of its essence then transmits itself to you. You can sense how still it is, and in doing so the same stillness arises within you. You sense how deeply it rests in Being – completely at one with what it is and where it is. In realizing this you too come to a place of rest deep within yourself.

Eckhart Tolle, Stillness Speaks

photo jarno

Sunday Quote: Joy

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Joy is the simplest form of gratitude.

Karl Barth