Tag: growth

…and taking the first step.

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Start with the ground you know,
the pale ground beneath your feet,
your own way of starting
the conversation.

Start with your own question,
give up on other people’s questions,
don’t let them
smother something simple.

To find another’s voice,
follow your own voice,
wait until that voice
becomes a  private ear
listening to another.

Start right now,  take a small step
you can call your own
don’t follow
someone else’s heroics, be humble
and focused,
start close in, don’t mistake
that other
for your own.

Start close in,
don’t take the second step
or the third,
start with the first thing
close in, the step
you don’t want to take.

David Whyte, Start Close in

Always learning

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Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn;

that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; 

that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.

Ralph Waldo Emerson,  Circles

Not having a fixed idea of progress

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The individuation process, as the way of development and maturation of the psyche, does not follow a straight line, nor does it always lead onwards and upwards. The course it follows is rather “stadial”, consisting of progress and regress, flux and stagnation in alternating sequence. Only when we glance back over a long stretch of the way can we notice the development. If we wish to mark out the way somehow or other, it can equally well be considered a “spiral”, the same problems and motifs occurring again and again on different levels.

It is always a matter of something obsolete that must be left behind to die in order that the new may be born.

Jolande Jacobi, Jungian psychologist

You are all possibilities

Karl Duffy1 Comment

South West Coast Path above Pudcombe Cove

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. Søren Kierkegaard

… Look back down the path as if seeing your past and then south over the hazy blue coast as if present to a wide future,
recall the way you are all possibilities you can see and how you live best as an appreciator of horizons
whether you reach them or not,
admit that once you have got up from your chair and opened the door,
once you have walked out into the clean air
toward that edge and taken the path up high beyond the ordinary you have become
the privileged and the pilgrim
the one who will tell the story
and the one, coming back
from the mountain,
who helped to make it.

David Whyte, Mameen

Meaning unfolds slowly

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Meaning does not come to us in finished form, ready-made; it must be found, created, received, constructed. We grow our way toward it. And sometimes the precious bit of true self, the unlived bit of soul, hides in psychological complexes, in illness, even in tragedy, even in sin…Some mysterious power uses what we see as horrific as as the defeat of all our hopes to bring about our salvation.

Ann Bedford Ulanov, Jungian Psychoanalyst.

What defines us

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Our dreams reveal to us the basic truth of life: years are biological, the spirit is eternal. The number of our years does not define us. There is in the human being a life force that never dies. It is the life force that proves to us that age does not fossilize us. Down deep, where our souls live, we stay forever young. It is this surging, driving force that brings us to the bar of life every day of our lives, whatever our age, however much we have been through, prepared to live life to the hilt again. It is only the cold, clear light of dawn that damps it, the fear in ourselves that th years have taken us beyond the right to be active. It is our own fault is we refuse to think again all the great ideas of our life – and our own position on each of them.

Joan Chittister, The Gift of Years