A good many people feel off-center, stretched-too-thin, stressed out, and 'pulled in all directions' these days, for a variety of reasons. I've written before of this sense of feeling, in Bilbo Baggins' words, "Like too little butter spread over too... Continue Reading →
"If you don't know where you are going, any road will do." ~ Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland If you do have a notion or yearning, even if it's only a whisper of a gist, then interesting things can unfold... Continue Reading →
"Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a... Continue Reading →
“Grief is subversive, undermining the quiet agreement to behave and be in control of our emotions. It is an active protest that declares our refusal to live numb and small." "There is something feral about grief, something essentially outside of... Continue Reading →
"We all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we... Continue Reading →
"We humans have so much more creative juice than we realize. Our intentions create our lives and so the more conscious we become in making our choices, the more we can shape our individual lives and attend to the reclaiming... Continue Reading →
"While many urbanized cultures turn almost exclusively to the modern world for direction and inspiration, and feel that the future will bring new answers to our existing problems, indigenous cultures especially in more natural surroundings are increasingly pulling from both... Continue Reading →
"You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn’t care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can’t be a way of life – the important part of writing is living. You have to live in... Continue Reading →
"The power of taking a stand centers us in something larger than our own life starring us. We start to realize that we have been “given” life and that it’s a gift. When we use our life as an instrument... Continue Reading →
"We are descending into the dark time of the year, the juicy time of mystery of earth and psyche. This liminal time before Samhain calls us to cast off that which does not serve us and evoke the wild woman."... Continue Reading →
"May you listen to your longing to be free. May the frames of your belonging be large enough for the dreams of your soul. May you arise each day with a voice of blessing whispering in your heart that something... Continue Reading →
"We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or... Continue Reading →
"I believe that it's time to say our first relationship and responsibility is with the Creative Spirit." "Not to brand it, not to sell it, not to convince others with it, but to have a relation first and foremost where... Continue Reading →
“Yes, our life energy must be a gift for our future. Your life, my life, everybody’s life must follow your given path. So pray or meditate. Follow your inner path and learn just how powerful you are and learn that... Continue Reading →
“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on... Continue Reading →
"We believe, however, that we may not need something new, but need to reawaken something very old, to reawaken our understanding of Earth wisdom." ~ George Sessions and Bill Deval, Deep Ecology
"We that are here now are touched in some mysterious way with the ability to change and make the future. Those who wake to the wonder of this magic moment, who wake to the possibilities of this charged conjunction, are... Continue Reading →
"In detachment lies the wisdom of uncertainty … in the wisdom of uncertainty lies the freedom from our past, from the known, which is the prison of past conditioning. And in our willingness to step into the unknown, the field... Continue Reading →
"The creative act is a courageous, ancient gesture, a dynamic exploration of the dark mystery that is human existence." ~ Adriana Diaz, as quoted in Roderick MacIver's Art As A Way of Life. The creative gesture means many things. Yes,... Continue Reading →
“This rich tapestry of the Guardian, of the Ancestor, that says “I am here, but I’m here to awaken your sense of Mystery, that is what life seeks from you because your Mystery will elicit your curiosity and from your... Continue Reading →
"If you don’t know the trees you may be lost in the forest, but if you don’t know the stories you may be lost in life." ~ A Siberian Elder's Proverb "Those who do not have power over the story that... Continue Reading →
"Who speaks of liberty while the human mind is in chains?" ~ Frances Wright, writer, abolitionist, social reformer, 1828 Frances "Fanny" Wright lived and died more than half a century before women in the United States won the right to... Continue Reading →
Now that we're in retrospective mode, seeing 2020 in the rearview mirror while integrating all of the many experiences and perspective-shifters (or at least, perspective challengers) that the last year included, The Hero/Heroine's Journey yet again renews its relevance. The... Continue Reading →
When we wander off the well-traveled path and begin to do a bit of deeper-digging, we realize pretty quickly that the foundational stories we've been taught and told are either incomplete -- key bits left out, you might say --... Continue Reading →
“If you have these two things - the willingness to change, and the acceptance of everything as it comes, you will have all you need to work with.” –Charlotte Selver (1901 - 2003), grand dame of 'experience through the senses'... Continue Reading →
"The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds and makes of all political and social life a mass illness. Without this housecleaning, we cannot begin to... Continue Reading →
"When we use language that fits into the established framework of the culture, when we try to make our ideas respectable, we limit what we can say and think." "But when we use a term like "magic," when we leap... Continue Reading →
"Let the stream follow its course, it will know the way among the mountains. Watch, and it will lead you to the ocean with gentle certainty -- unforced. Have faith in your direction." David M. Bell, Spirit of Nature: The... Continue Reading →
"One of the characteristics of "mass society" is precisely that it tends to keep man from fully achieving his identity ..." "To have identity is not merely to have a face and a name, a recognizable physical presence." "Identity in... Continue Reading →