As you do

The self is relatedness. Only when the self mirrors itself in so many mirrors does it really exist. . . You can never come to your self by building a meditation hut on top of Mount Everest; you will only be visited by your own ghosts and that is not individuation. . . . 

The self only exists inasmuch as you appear. 

Not that you are, but that you do the self. 

The self appears in your deeds and deeds always mean relationship.

Jung, Seminar on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra,

As they are

The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them. 

Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island

An accepting gaze

File:Birch tree leaves.jpg

In a true you-and-I relationship, we are present mindfully, non-intrusively, the way we are present with things in nature. We do not tell a birch tree it should be more like an elm. We face it with no agenda, only an appreciation that becomes participation: ‘I love looking at this birch’ becomes ‘I am this birch’ and then ‘I and this birch are opening to a mystery that transcends and holds us both.”

David Richo, When the Past is Present