How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these.
~ George Washington Carver
Is it time uninterrupted? Only the present comprehended? Are our thoughts nothing but passing trains, no stops, devoid of dimension, whizzing by massive posters with repeating images? Catching a fragment from a window seat, yet another fragment from the next identical frame? If I write in the present yet digress, is that still real time? Real time, I reasoned, cannot be divided into sections like numbers on the face of a clock. If I write about the past as I simultaneously dwell in the present, am I still in real time? Perhaps there is no past or future, only the perpetual present that contains this trinity of memory. I looked out into the street and noticed the light changing. Perhaps the sun had slipped behind a cloud. Perhaps time had slipped away.
~ Patti Smith, on the fluidity of past and present
I believe I have already suggested that colour is the most obvious bridge between emotion and perception, that is, between subjective experience of the psyche and quality objective in nature. Both light up only between the extremes of light and darkness, and in their reciprocal interplay. Thus, outward the rainbow–or, if you prefer it, the spectrum–is the bridge between dark and light, but inwardly the rainbow is, what the soul itself is, the bridge between body and spirit, between earth and heaven.
~ Owen Barfield
When I set a glass prism on a windowsill and allow the sun to flood through it, a spectrum of colors dances on the floor. What we call “white” is a rainbow of colored rays packed into a small space. The prism sets them free. Love is the white light of emotion.
~ Diane Ackerman
If you have ever followed a rainbow to its end, it leads you to the ground on which you are standing.
~ Alan Cohen
Have no fear of perfection — you’ll never reach it.
~ Salvador Dali
One of the basic rules of the universe is that nothing is perfect. Perfection simply doesn’t exist…..Without imperfection, neither you nor I would exist.
~ Stephen Hawking
I am glad that I paid so little attention to good advice; had I abided by it I might have been saved from some of my most valuable mistakes.
~ Edna St. Vincent Millay
When deer show up in your life it is time to be gentle with yourself and others. A new innocence and freshness is about to be awakened or born. There is going to be a gentle, enticing lure of new adventures. Ask yourself important questions. Are you trying to force things? Are others? Are you being too critical and uncaring of yourself? When deer show up there is an opportunity to express gentle love that will open new doors to adventure for you.
~ Ted Andrews, Animal Speak
When you have the deer as spirit animal, you are able to bring gentleness and grace in every aspects of your life, even in the most challenging moments. By inspiration from the deer’s qualities, you can achieve ambitious goals and tackle difficult situation smoothly with a touch of gentleness and grace.
The deer spirit animal will remind you to be gentle with yourself and others. The grace and gentleness characteristic of this spirit animal echo the qualities brought forth when living from the heart. For example, the traditional symbol used for the heart chakra has the deer (sometimes also represented as an antelope) as emblematic animal of the energy of love and harmony with oneself and others.
~ Elena Harris
Toads are mostly found on land but can also survive in water. They inhabit every section of the globe and have the ability to endure some of the worse weather conditions. The common connotation of the toad spirit animal is transformation and survival. The toad undergoes a life metamorphosis from a tadpole into a toad. Besides, it braves different weather conditions to find shelter and food.
…The toad as a spirit animal is symbolic of growth. If you have a toad as your spirit guide, consider yourself lucky. Your connection with the spiritual realm is renewed because of this bond. The toad spirit guide will bring you spiritual help to solve all your concerns.
If you are looking for an emotional cleansing, call on the toad spirit guide. It is the best animal totem in this particular context because of its association with water. Besides, the cleanup can also help you start viewing life from a different but better lens.
Another toad totem spiritual significance in your life is intelligence. People born under this spirit animal have the blessings of good brains. It is this gift that they use to survive. When faced with confrontations, solid muscle alone cannot work. There must be a blend of both the strength of the mind and the body.
~ Wendy Jackson Continue reading “Toad”
In the first movement, our infancy as a species, we felt no separation from the natural world around us. Trees, rocks, and plants surrounded us with a living presence as intimate and pulsing as our own bodies. In that primal intimacy, which anthropologists call “participation mystique,” we were as one with our world as a child in the mother’s womb.
Then self-consciousness arose and gave us distance on our world. We needed that distance in order to make decisions and strategies, in order to measure, judge and to monitor our judgments. With the emergence of free-will, the fall out of the Garden of Eden, the second movement began — the lonely and heroic journey of the ego. Nowadays, yearning to reclaim a sense of wholeness, some of us tend to disparage that movement of separation from nature, but it brought us great gains for which we can be grateful. The distanced and observing eye brought us tools of science, and a priceless view of the vast, orderly intricacy of our world. The recognition of our individuality brought us trial by jury and the Bill of Rights.
Now, harvesting these gains, we are ready to return. The third movement begins. Having gained distance and sophistication of perception, we can turn and recognize who we have been all along. Now it can dawn on us: we are our world knowing itself. We can relinquish our separateness. We can come home again — and participate in our world in a richer, more responsible and poignantly beautiful way than before, in our infancy.”
~World as Lover, World as Self
