Life dances and you have to dance with it, whether it is taking you on a wonderful ride or is stepping on your toes. This is the necessary price and transcendent gift of being incarnate; alive in a body. But it is just life dancing. Life will move you in the rhythm and direction of its own nature.
Each moment is a fresh moment in the dance, and if you are lost in clinging to the past or clinging to your fears of the future, you are not present for the dance.
Philip Moffitt
The greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity or power
but self-rejection
Henri Nouwen
A monk asked “What is the substance of a true person?”
The Master said “Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter”
The monk said “Put like that, it is hard for me to understand”
The Master said “You asked about the substance of a true person, didnt you?”
Traditional Zen koan dialogue
As the author says, we need to change our stories.
[The] four stories at the heart of western imperial civilisation….have profound ecological implications.
There is the ‘prosperity story’ which promotes worship of material acquisition and money, the ‘biblical story’ which focuses on the afterlife rather than the world around us, the ‘security story’ which builds up the military and police to protect relationships of domination, and the ‘secular meaning story’ which reduces life to matter and mechanism.
These are not, however, stories in the usual sense of narratives. They exist behind and between the lines of the texts that surround us – the news reports that describe the ‘bad news’ about a drop in Christmas sales, or the ‘good news’ that airline profits are up…
[…] underneath common ways of writing and speaking in industrial societies are stories about unlimited economic growth as being not just possible but the goal of society, of the accumulation of unnecessary goods as a path towards self-improvement, of progress and success defined narrowly in terms of technological innovation and profit, and of nature as something separate from humans, a mere stock of resources to be exploited.
Arran Stibbe, Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live By
We must sense that we live in a world which in some respects is mysterious; that things happen and can be experienced which remain inexplicable; that not everything which happens can be anticipated.
The unexpected and the incredible belong in this world.
Only then is life whole.
Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
Our world, so we see and hear on all sides, is drowning in materialism, commercialism, consumerism. But the problem is not really there. What we ordinarily speak of as materialism is a result, not a cause. The root of materialism is a poverty of ideas about the inner and the outer world. Less and less does our contemporary culture have, or even seek, commerce with great ideas, and it is that lack that is weakening the human spirit. This is the essence of materialism. Materialism is a disease of the mind starved for ideas.
Jacob Needleman, 1934 – 2022, American philosopher, author, and religious scholar, The American Soul: Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Founders
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