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Words can never capture what we are – language always fails beautifully in this regard – but this chap has a lovely turn of phrase and a simple brevity which always makes me smile and feel a gentle ‘yes’ every time I read him.
In this world you can
search for everything,
except love and death.
They find you when the
time comes.
Imagine waking up one morning to the realization that you have no opinions. And that, moreover, you have no likes or dislikes. What would the world look like in that event? How would you feel?
A room with no furniture
We tend to define ourselves and fashion our identities in opposition to other people instead of discovering who we really are in relationship with other people.
No matter how compelling or beautiful they may be, words appeal in the main to the linear, thinking mind that thinks in words.
— Dōgen
This is the history of the world: revolutionaries turning into tyrants, leaders who claim to stand with the masses turning the individuals within …
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside: Doris Lessing on the Antidote to Self-Righteousness and Our Best Hope for Humanity
No idea why, but the Scandinavian concept of Hygge has never appealed to me. Quite the reverse, I find coziness suffocating and stultifying. Then again I’m the kind of idiot who likes to sleep with a window open, even in winter.
Make no mistake about this. We are are not doing life. Life is doing us.
We don’t exist and function and live exactly as we do without every other aspect of the universe doing the same.
Notice how explanations don’t explain anything and fail to bring an end to questioning. As children we knew this very well. Always asking ‘why?’ to every explanation and answer given. We, and by definition the Universe, are unknowable, like a ruler trying to measure itself.
If memories were needed, were meant to last, we’d never forget a thing.
Judging others from a distance is easy, lazy and more often than not, diminishes the self, all the while hiding behind a wall of self righteousness.
Understanding others does not mean agreeing with them. It is an underused facet of our imaginative powers to inhabit the worlds of other people. To walk their streets and share their spaces is to do a service to ourselves and others.
The more we all experience about each other the more we all learn, grow and become less defensive and ultimately able to disagree with each other in a way that doesn’t tear each other apart.
…even in your own hidden life, you can become a powerful agent of transformation in a broken, darkened world. There is a huge force field that opens when intention focuses and directs itself toward transformation.
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
Our hope for a particular outcome can blind us to the truth of why it doesn’t happen.
I have never been especially impressed by the heroics of people convinced they are about to change the world. I am more awed by those who struggle to make one small difference.
— Ellen Goodman
There are no obstacles to life. Obstacles are life.
Our existence is our statement. Our being is our saying. Everything is said in our living.
We too are living now through such a world, caught again between two ages, confused and conflicted, suffocating and suffering. But we have a powerful instrument for self-understanding, for cutting through the confusion to draw from these civilizational phase transitions new and stronger structures of possibility: the creative spirit.