Our culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts.
We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center.
So we lost our center and have to find it again.
Anais Nin
Tag: Present moment
Growing resilience
Each person can take one of two attitudes: to build or to plant.
The builders might take years over their tasks, but one day, they finish what they’re doing. Then they find they’re hemmed in by their own walls. Life loses its meaning when the building stops.
Then there are those who plant. They endure storms and all the many vicissitudes of the seasons, and they rarely rest. But, unlike a building, a garden never stops growing. And while it requires the gardener’s constant attention, it also allows life for the gardener to be a great adventure.
Paulo Coelho, Brida
Always changing
High winds do not last all morning
Heavy rain does not last all day
Why is this? Such is Heaven and Earth!
If heaven and earth cannot make things eternal
Why do we think it happens for us?
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
Sunday Quote: What myth
Thoreau, Campbell, and Euripides ask the same question for the same reason:
What myth is playing out now in your life?
What sacred, spiritual drama is in play in what appears to be secular life?
Thomas Moore
Through difficulties..
I know from my personal experience that out of pathos (great suffering) we come to know pothos (our sense of emerging self).
Through the portal of the intolerable, we deepen into soul.
Stephen Aizenstat, Dream Tending: Awakening to the Healing Power of Dreams
Hope is a choice
The other spiritual discipline and way to stay grounded is that however seriously we must take what’s happening in the world and what the headlines are reflecting, it is never the full story of our time. It’s not the last word on what we’re capable of. It’s not the whole story of us. And we have to take that other narrative that’s not reaching the headline point, which is a very specific bar. Journalism, the way it came down to us from the 20th century, is absolutely focused, utterly and completely, on what is catastrophic, corrupt, and failing. And then, at the same time, there are good people. There are healing initiatives. There is a narrative of healing and of hope and of goodness, and we also just, as a discipline, have to take that in, as well — not instead of, but the both/and of humanity and of our world.
And I think it’s only in doing that that we keep flexing and strengthening our hope muscle. Hope is a muscle. It’s a choice. It is a vigorous choice, to see what is wrong and what needs healing and needs repair and needs our attention and also to keep our hearts and our imaginations and our energy oriented towards what we want to build, what we want to create, what we’re walking towards.
Krista Tippett, On Being Blog
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