Remember who you were before the world told you who to be.
– Charles Bukowski
Oscar Wilde said that some things are too important to be taken seriously. Art is one of those things. Setting the bar low, especially to get started, frees you to play, explore, and test without attachment to results.
― Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being
Beauty is the convenient and traditional name of something which art and nature share, and which gives a fairly clear sense to the idea of quality of experience and change of consciousness. I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important. And of course this is something which we may also do deliberately: give attention to nature in order to clear our minds of selfish care
Iris Murdoch, on beauty as an occasion of ‘unselfing,’ The Sovereignty of Good (Routledge, 2013)
Water has great generosity and humility. It insists on no particular shape. It takes on the shape of whatever contains it: jug, stream, well, river, lake, ocean, tears, rain, mist or moisture. In this sense water holds a wonderful imaginative invitation in it.
The imagination is always drawn to the hidden form of things. Through its patience it coaxes the form to emerge.
….
… the imagination is a faculty that is oblique and indirect. It works to discover the forms of perception and possibility that we need for our journey. Imagination attends to the great flow of life, and in this way it elicits the form of one’s identity as it emerges from the matrix of one’s experience.
text excerpted from © The Four Elements, John O’Donohue (2010, Transworld Ireland, pp 45-46)
As we apprentice ourselves to the way of nature, we begin to understand that all of life is in a continuous cycle of giving and receiving. It is the honoring of this cycle that makes us feel at home in ourselves and in relation to the rest of nature.
~ Toko-pa Turner, Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home
Many of us feel that longing to return, for a spiritual homecoming. This is not a return to some imaginary past when America was great. It is a return to a relationship with the holy and the wild that echoes the intimacy our ancestors knew, but also heals the wounds that severed us from the rest of our human and more-than-human kinfolk in the first place.
We re-member ourselves back into sacred relationship by responding with an open heart to the Holy Wild who calls us back into communion. It may feel like a series of odd synchronicities — a small bird who lands on the railing close to you and looks you straight in the eye for an instant, a sense of welcoming you can’t explain nor deny when you slow down on your daily walk and notice the saplings and crows as individual beings, or a feeling of being witnessed by other people who are walking a similar path of return.
~ from the Center For Wild Spirituality newsletter
Cats are connoisseurs of comfort.
~James Herriot, James Herriot’s Cat Stories
I have lived with several Zen masters — all of them cats.
~ Eckhart Tolle
Because the greatest part of a road trip isn’t arriving at your destination. It’s all the wild stuff that happens along the way.
— Emma Chase
Sometimes the most scenic roads in life are the detours you didn’t mean to make.
— Angela N Blount
My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive.
~Maya Angelou
Continue reading “This tape will self destruct in five seconds”
breezes at dawn 