Become the most interested person in the room.*
Bernadette Jiwa

*Bernadette Jiwa’s What Great Storytellers Know.

Talent is cheap – you have to be obsessed, otherwise you are going to give up.*
John Baldessari

Tension doesn’t always feel good, but there’s value in it. Tension energises and stirs awareness. Tension catalyses action. Tension makes everything more interesting. What we do with the tensions we experience is what makes life such a colourful, redemptive, tragic, joyful, and surprising experience. Tension is the wild card.**
Katherine Morgan Schafler

Try,
Fail,
Learn,
Try again,
Fail again,
Learn again,
Try again …
For such a journey, we require talent and
passion – this matters! –
It’s why you noticed it when no one else did –
And because it comes with tensions:
It begins with a problem – something is not as it might be –
It’s bigger and more complex than you first thought,
You’re not qualified to take this on,
There’s no one else,
Wherever you going to find the time?,
This is getting worse and not better,
Something in you is going to have to change …
It’s just as well you’re
obsessed.

*From Austin Kleon’s blog: You have to be obsessed;
**Katherine Morgan Schaffer’s The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control.

To know yourself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility.*
Brother Dave

As far as nature is concerned, we are all followers.**
Alan Lightman

Why settle for more when we can settle for
less? –
When I know what I lack and
what I am not, I come upon my truth, and,
humbled,
I become a noticer, a learner;
As Seth Godin points out for those who believe they are
more than they truly are:
The thunderstorm doesn’t know we exist …
The weather would be there with or without you.^

Nature is always a great place for growing humility, also
Death and mortality are worth a pondering,
Out of which respect for the dignity of every person and
each living creature grows.

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.^^

*Ian Morgan Cron’s The Road Back to You;
**Alan Lightman’s The Transcendent Brain;
^Seth Godin’s blog: Are you weather?;
^^Matthew 5:5.

If we go down to ourselves, we find that we possess
exactly what we desire.*
Simone Weil

The ego wants nothing less than to see God. The soul knows, however, that if the Divine were to appear, the ego would not recognise it. The heavens cannot open for the soul; they are already open.**
James Carse

Life is too short to explore
all that is open to us,
But it is also enough.

*John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty;
**James Carse’s Breakfast at the Victory.

To enter a wood is to pass into a different world in which we ourselves are transformed, it is where you travel to find yourself, often, paradoxically, by getting lost.*
Roger Deakin

Mystical vision is the way the soul sees.**
James Carse

A wood will do it, or
the openness of a beach unencumbered
by people or their “augmentations” –
But also a book or listening to someone’s story or gardening or
eyes closed and listening for 4′ 33″ …

Where do you go to become lost,
Yet know exactly where you are?

*Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks;
**James Carse’s Breakfast at the Victory.

And no matter how hard you look, you’re almost invisible
to yourself,
Camouflaged by familiarity.*
Verlyn Klinkenborg

I don’t think you can know a place unless you walk it, because it isn’t about distance, but about content.**
Chris Arnade

We discover more about the person we can become
on the journey from the
familiar to the unfamiliar,
From the centre, to the edges –
Slowly, because we want to take in more,
We want to feed the soul.

The ego is concerned with centres, the soul lives on margins, circumferences, horizons.^

*Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several short sentences about writing;
**Chris Arnade’s post: Why I Walk;
^James Carse’s Breakfast at the Victory.

The lecture was so perfectly adequate it left almost nothing to be said. And for that reason, it said nothing.*
James Carse

Once across [the threshold], the hero is swallowed by the unknown, be it a whale, a wolf, a sarcophagus, or a cave.**
Jean Houston

I replace James Carse’s “lecture” with “life” –
And, seeking to avoid the perfectly adequate life,
I cross the threshold.

*James Carse’s Breakfast at the Victory;
**Jean Houston’s A Mythic Life.

Joseph Campbell made it clear that the journey of the hero was also an allegory of the soul’s journey towards enightenment.*
Jean Houston

Those we call teachers may or may not be teachers. Those around whom surprising thinking emerges are teachers.**
James Carse

You can’t,
Neither can I enlighten you –
It takes form in a place
we fashion together,
In a to-and-fro-ness of lives,
In openness and a willingness
to receive:
I’ve heard it said
there’s a window that opens
from one mind to
another,
but if there’s no wall,
there’s no need for fitting a window,
or the latch.^

*Jean Houston’s A Mythic Life;
**James Carse’s Breakfast at the Victory;
**Rumi, from James Carse’s Breakfast at the Victory.

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.*
Henry David Thoreau

Creativity is not doing something, it is looking through whatever we do with the eye of the sleepless watcher, it is remaining through whatever we say an uncritically receptive listener.**
James Carse

Slow down,
Be quiet,
Open up,
Hang around,
Ask questions,
Notice 2.0:
the more you study
delight,
the more
delight
there is to study^ –
Still, I miss so much,
I’ll keep trying.

The test of a student is not how much he knows, but how much he wants to know.^^

*Krista Tippett’s Becoming Wise;
**James Clear’s Breakfast at the Victory;
^Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights;
^^Alice Wellington Rollins, from James Clear’s 3-2-1 newsletter: On the shortness of life, what mastery requires, and how to overlap the things you love.

Many people live half lives, turning the rheostat down to a very dim version of who and what they really are.*
Jean Houston

And then the knowledge comes to me that I have space within me for a second, timeless, larger life.**
Rainer Maria Rilke

It doesn’t feel like a half life,
Just life,
Until we notice,
Out of the corner of our eye,
A burning bush,
And, wandering over,
We find our holy ground.

Without direct, positive, informational knowledge, it is impossible to live at all. Without apophatic knowledge, it is impossible to be human.^

*Jean Houston’s A Mythic Life;
**David Brook’s The Second Mountain;
^James Carse’s Breakfast at the Victory.