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"People say that we’re all seeking a meaning for life.... I think what we’re really seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our innermost being and reality, so that we can actually feel the rapture of being alive."
Joseph Campbell
“We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.”
Anais Nin
“Look at a stone cutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”
Jacob A. Riis
“It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown...”
Andre Deutsch
photo by E.F.D.J.“Remember, the mind likes to assume it "know what it knows" but often its perceptions are just not accurate. Yet strong judgments are made all the time based on limited information...When we judge someone and then adopt an attitude toward them, that shuts down other possibilities and locks us away from the insight of our hearts.”
Doc Childre and Howard Martin
I was reminded today, by a wise and practicing Buddhist, about the art of observing and seeing others with the heart, rather than knee jerking to assessments based in personal opinion.
As a social worker, there are very fine lines between our learned/practiced skills and our personal and professional intuitive skills. We are trained to be open and non-judgmental to all those we meet. We are also trained to assess people and their situations, with the goal of empowerment and healing. With our ingrained “assessor” hat always on, the process of receiving and interpreting information is so swift, we often miss how that process and conclusion actually occurs within us.
“It is then that you will hear a voice within yourself. It was there all the time, but you never listened before.
Faintly it will speak to you at first, but it will grow louder and clearer the more you take heed of its message
until one day it thunders inside you and you will have come home.”
Rusty Berkus
“To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.”
-Mary Oliver-
Photo by grassrootsmsw“The arms of love encompass you with your present, your past, your future, the arms of love gather you together.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
photo by J.A.S.“Actually, we have no problems -
We have opportunities for which we should give thanks…
An error we refuse to correct has many lives.
It takes courage to face one's own shortcomings
and wisdom to do something about them.”
Edgar Cacye
“One doesn’t discover new lands
Without consenting to lose sight of the shore
For a very long time.”
Andre Gide
“I know for certain that we never lose the people we love, even to death. They continue to participate in every act, thought and decision we make. Their love leaves an indelible imprint in our memories. We find comfort in knowing that our lives have been enriched by having shared their love.”
Leo Buscaglia
“I hope that my achievements in life shall be these: that I will have fought for what was right and fair; that I will have risked for that which mattered; and that I will have given help to those who were in need… that I will have left the Earth a better place for what I've done and who I've been.”
C. Hoppe
“Aging is not 'lost youth' but a new stage of opportunity and strength.”
Betty Friedan
"Which road do I take?" she asked.
"Where do you want to go?" responded the Cheshire cat.
"I don't know,"
"Then," said the cat, "it doesn't matter."
“Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.”
Thomas Merton
“New York City, the incomparable, the brilliant star city of cities, the forty-ninth state, a law unto itself, the Cyclopean Paradox, the inferno with no-out-of bounds, the supreme expression of both the miseries and the splendors of contemporary civilization, the Macedonia of the United States. It meets the most severe test that may be applied to definition of a metropolis ¾ it stays up all night. But also it becomes a small town when it rains.”
“When I stopped seeing my mother with the eyes of a child, I saw the woman who helped me give birth to myself.”
Lifetime, institutional bureaucrats
don't believe in 'magic.'
The realm of the unknown and unquantifiable,
is unsafe to their
procedure and result oriented mind.
How sad,
that they will go through their lives,
having missed the beauty and depth
of humanity;
and never experience the 'magic.'
Theirs is a constricted world;
based in a false sense
of safety and security.
In the end,
Numbers and formulaic strategies
are just that...
logical entities.
In the end,
it is our humanity,
in all of it's intricacy and complexity,
that remains and whispers to us,
"Have you seen the magic? Do you see it now? Can you feel it?
What does it reveal to you? What lessons have you learned from it?
Who are you, because of the magic?"
Why wait till the end?
