Inspirations
“Every moment of light and dark is a miracle.”
— Walt Whitman
“Call the world if you please the vale of soul-making. Then, you will find out the use of the world…”
— John Keats, In a Letter to His Brother
“We are made of the same stardust of which all things are made, and when we are immersed in suffering or when we are experiencing intense joy we are being nothing other than what we can’t help but be: a part of our world.”
— Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
“Articulation allows a slight gap to open between the feeling and the self, and that gap permits the freedom of both.”
— Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World
“Get strong with bare feet on the ground and with everything that is born from it. Get smarter every day by listening to your intuition, looking at the world with the eye of your forehead. Heal yourself, with beautiful love, and always remember: you are the medicine”
— Maria Sabina
“If there is destruction of grasping hope, there is freedom from gods; if there is destruction of aversive fear, there is freedom from demons.”
— Machik Labdrön
Of a certainty, the man who can see all creatures in himself, himself in all creatures, knows no sorrow.
— The Upanishads
“A story must be judged according to whether it makes sense. And ‘making sense’ must be here understood in its most direct meaning: to make sense is to enliven the senses. A story that makes sense is one that stirs the senses from their slumber, one that opens the eyes and the ears to their real surroundings, tuning the tongue to the actual tastes in the air and sending chills of recognition along the surface of the skin. To make sense is to release the body from the constraints imposed by outworn ways of speaking, and hence to renew and rejuvenate one’s felt awareness of the world. It is to make the senses wake up to where they are.”
— David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous
“In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.”
— Carl Gustav Jung
“Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more — more unseen forms become manifest to him.”
— Rumi
“…These images must point past themselves to that ultimate truth which must be told: that life does not have any one absolutely fixed meaning. These images must point past all meanings given, beyond all definitions and relationships, to that ineffable mystery that is just the existence, the being of ourselves and of our world. If we give that mystery an exact meaning, we diminish the experience of its real depth…Here we sense the function of metaphor that allows us to make a journey we could not otherwise make, past all categories of definition.”
— Joseph Campbell, Thou Art That
“Memory is never a precise duplicate of the original; instead, it is a continuing act of creation…”
— Rosalind Cartwright, The Twenty-four Hour Mind: the Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives
“If we continue to operate in terms of a Cartesian dualism of mind versus matter, we shall probably also continue to see the world in terms of God versus man; elite versus people; chosen race versus others; nation versus nation; and man versus environment. It is doubtful whether a species having both an advanced technology and this strange way of looking at its world can endure.”
— Gregory Bateson
“…the coincidence of the many things that fit together to make a picture is singular. They occur only once. They never occur for you in quite the same way that they occur for someone else, so that in the tiny differences between them, you can reemploy a model or strategy that someone else has used and still reproduce an original picture. Those things that do have a distinct life of their own strike me as being things coming to you out of life itself.”
— Emmet Gowin, Changing the Earth
The Tao is called the Great Mother: empty yet inexhaustible. She gives birth to infinite worlds, yet her immaculate purity is never lost. She assumes countless forms, yet her true identity remains intact.
— Lao-Tzu
Umntu ngumuntu ngabantu. (I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am).
— Xhosa proverb