Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.*
(Mohandas Gandhi)

We have unlearned the patience and attention of lingering at the thresholds where the unknown awaits us.**
(John O’Donohue)

Hungry?

Beyond everyday appetites, do you find yourself discontented and dissatisfied, but not sure what it will take to sate these feelings?

We’re often find ourselves in a rush, and rush blurs much of what is happening both around and within us. We’re possibly unable to articulate exactly what we feel, we only know something is amiss.

Richard Rohr, identifies these feelings as good things, perhaps a little unexpected coming from a Franciscan friar:

It’s a kind of sacred discontent, a holy dissatisfaction, and a holy desire for more life, love, and generativity.^

Rohr intimates this more is not only about receiving, but also giving – giving I believe to be bespoke to each of us.

We can try and satisfy these felt needs with all kinds of things, only to be disappointed.

We need bigger stories.

James Carse writes of myths:

 Myth provokes explanation but accepts none of it.  Where explanation absorbs the unspeakable into the speakable, myth reintroduces the silence that makes original discourse possible.^^

I understand Carse to be saying, whilst myth provokes understanding and meaning, it will not allow us to declare “this is it,” but holds us before the oh-so-large wonder and mystery of unknown depths until something new and unexpected arises.

I came across some words from my friend Dan concerning a venture we were engaged in together some years ago – a bigger story that, in truth, we had no idea where it was leading:

VOX is scary, and we have to keep doing the scary stuff, else we’ll just keep doing the same stuff and not very well.*^

How do we enter more?

The way in is as close as our lives. In attending to what they’re whispering to us, the will be shown the way.

*Mohandas Gandhi, quoted in Jay Cross’ Informal Learning
**From John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty
^From Richard Rohr’s The Divine Dance
**From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games
*^Dan Arnold about VOXedinburgh back in 2013