Does the robin sing because the cold of winter is leaving or the warmth of spring is coming? Or might he be singing because each without the other would lessen both?
~ Craig D. Lounsbrough
Like the robin, we sometimes sing to show how strong we are, and we sometimes sing in hope of better times. We sing either way.
~ Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
Scientists are now affirming what many indigenous peoples and mystics have known for a long time: the world is made of sound. Everything around and within us is comprised of vibrating stuff. As a songwriter, I am always listening for the songs that are already here. My job is to catch these whispered suggestions and bring them into form.
~ Barbara McAfee
I think that my job is to observe people and the world, and not to judge them. I always hope to position myself away from so-called conclusions. I would like to leave everything wide open to all the possibilities in the world.
~ Haruki Murakami
You must love your work, and not be always looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin. And the other is, you must not be ashamed of your work, and think it would be more honorable to you to be doing something else. You must have a pride in your own work and in learning to do it well, and not be always saying, There’s this and there’s that—if I had this or that to do, I might make something of it.
~ George Eliot, Middlemarch
This I now know for certain: I do all of my growing during the times in my life when I am offering compassion to the parts of myself that have not yet grown. I never once managed to shame myself into a version of me I loved more (and trust me, I spent decades trying). As Meg says, “shame is never fertile soil for growth”. A better world is not created from a planet of people hating themselves, but hate’s opposite. Sweet community, I hope as you read this today, you can scan yourself, look deep within, and decide every part of you is good news. And I would love to hear about a time where loving a part of you that felt harder-to-love was the seed of some incredible shift.
~ Andrea Gibson, beautiful poet, from her recent newsletter
My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive.
~Maya Angelou
Continue reading “This tape will self destruct in five seconds”
One of the reasons that old age is so disconcerting to many people is that they feel as if they’re stripped of their roles. As we enter old age and face physical frailty, the departure of children, retirement, and the deaths of loved ones, we see the lights fading, the audience dwindles, and we are overwhelmed by a loss of purpose, and by the fear of not knowing how to behave or where we now fit in this play. The Ego, whose very sustenance has been the roles it played in the public eye, becomes irate, despairing, or numb, in the face of its own obsolescence. It may harken back to roles in its past to assert itself, but these strategies bring only more suffering as the Ego fights a losing battle.
As we learn to distinguish between our Egos — marked by our mind and thoughts — and the witnessing Soul — who’s not subject to them — we begin to see the opportunity that aging offers. We begin to separate who we are from the roles that we play, and to recognize why the Ego clings as it does to behaviors and images that no longer suit us. Stripped of its roles, the Ego is revealed as fiction. But for the person without a spiritual context, this is pure tragedy, for seekers of truth who are aware of the Soul, it is only the beginning.
Rather than wonder what new “role” we can invent for ourselves in the world then, the question that concerns us might be better put this way: How can we, as aging people, make our wisdom felt in the world? By embodying wisdom. We can find a happy balance between participation and retreat, remembering that while it is our duty to be of service if possible, it is also important that we prepare for our own journeys into death, through contemplation, quiet time, and deepening knowledge of ourselves.
~ Ram Dass
“Do billboard salesmen record their sales on charts? If so, who’s at the top of the billboard charts for billboard sales?”
― Ryan Lilly
The music was more than music- at least what we are used to hearing. The music was feeling itself. The sound connected instantly with something deep and joyous. Those powerful moments of true knowledge that we have to paper over with daily life. The music tapped the back of our terrors, too. Things we’d lived through and didn’t want to ever repeat. Shredded imaginings, unadmitted longings, fear and also surprisingly pleasures. No, we can’t live at that pitch. But every so often something shatters like ice and we are in the river of our existence. We are aware. And this realization was in the music, somehow, or in the way Shamengwa played it.
― Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves
breezes at dawn 