The human adventure is a wandering through the vale of the world for the sake of making soul.
Our life is psychological, and the purpose of life is to make psyche of it, to find connections between life and soul
James Hillman
Making our soul
Tag: Present moment
An overcast day
Pay close attention to your mean thoughts.
That sourness may be a blessing,
as an overcast day brings rain for the roses
and relief to dry soil.
Don’t look so sourly on your sourness!
It may be it’s carrying what you most deeply need
and want.
What seems to be keeping you from joy
may be what leads you to joy.
Don’t call it a dead branch.
Call it the live, moist root.
Don’t always be waiting to see
what’s behind it.
Reach for it.
Hold your meanness to your chest
as a healing root,
and be through with waiting.
Rumi in Coleman Banks, Delicious Laughter: Rambunctious Teaching Stories from the Mathnawi
Capacity for delight
Whether success or failure: the truth of a life really has little to do with its quality.
The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight.
The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.
May Sarton
Pay attention
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Mary Oliver, The Summer Day [extract]
Lifelong search
There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives. Some find it in the place of their birth; others may leave a seaside town, parched, and find themselves refreshed in the desert. There are those born in rolling countryside who are really only at ease in the intense and busy loneliness of the city. For some, the search is for the imprint of another; a child or a mother, a grandfather or a brother, a lover, a husband, a wife, or a foe. We may go through our lives happy or unhappy, successful or unfulfilled, loved or unloved, without ever standing cold with the shock of recognition, without ever feeling the agony as the twisted iron in our soul unlocks itself and we slip at last into place.
Josephine Hart, Damage
Really see
If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.
Picasso
Mindfulbalance 