For the one who believes in it, a blessing can signal the start of a journey of transformation.*
John O’Donohue

Mythology begins where madness starts. A person who is truly gripped by a calling, by a dedication, by a zeal, will sacrifice his security, will sacrifice even his life … he will give himself entirely to his myth.**
Joseph Campbell

A blessing doesn’t change things, doesn’t change you –
Believing and living it does,
A blessing is a whisper, a signpost from someone or somewhere that awakens you to
a different reality, one that encourages and enables
the truest you to emerge,
To live without reserve something that matters to you and
benefits others.

May you discover and live your myth.^

*John O’Donohue’s Benedictus;
**Joseph Campbell’s Pathways to Bliss;
^A myth is a story that resonates with us at the deepest level of our being, so they become one and the same..

What am I really? What is my work here?*
Clarissa Pinkola Estés

We are small creatures.
Our lives are not long,
but long enough to learn.**
Stephen Lawhead

In the middle of the night, I came upon a question –
I had found myself playing the comparison game (a game we always lose),
Reflecting on what others have and are able to do.

The question?:
What brings meaning and joy to me?

To imagine another’s future with them,
To figure out ways of getting there,
To gather ideas as means of travel to this future,
To never stop learning,
To see each person as incomparable,
To receive this as the meaningful place where my
deepest joy meets another’s need.

I am grateful for all those who have, and still,
Help me: guides, writers, whisperers, god.

What brings meaning and joy to you?

Your answers will be different to mine,
They are your richness, and you still have enough time:
When our future rearranges us, then
our past becomes the fuel for our art.

*Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ Women Who Run With the Wolves:
**The Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer

When people rediscover the thread that runs through their story, it is often a revelation. They are no longer directionless; suddenly, their narrative has the potential for a fitting ending – or for continuation down a previously unseen path.*
William Seighart

You can see how mastery over a few things makes it possible to live an abundant and devout life – for, if you keep watch over these things, the gods won’t ask for more.**
Marcus Aurelius

Have you lost your thread –
O perhaps you hadn’t found to lose it, and
there’s likely been a confusing number of threads –
You need the thread that will take you to places you haven’t imagined
yet.

Find your curiosity and it will lead you (back) to your thread:
Make time to explore and observe,
Don’t go for the first thread, or even the forty second,
Consider your options and how they resonate with your
talents and energies and values,
Then follow the thread with a heart and produce your
art.^

*William Seighart’s The Poetry Pharmacy;
**Ryan Holiday’s The Daily Stoic.

The greatest possible success we teach our children … is not popularity or power or profit or pleasure, but service, connection, community and love. So we will challenge them to set … the goal of becoming the most loving version of themselves.**
Brian McLaren

If you don’t realise that you have power, you might not be able to exercise it. The power to speak up, to participate, to invent, to lead, to encourage, to vote, to connect, to organise, to march, to write, to say ‘no’ or to say ‘yes’. It’s tempting to imagine we have less power than we do. It lets us off the hook. For now.^
Seth Godin

There is the power that comes with status, title, or role,
That is, from the outside,
Though better the power that comes with abilities and talents –
From the inside, and
the right things being done by the right people at the right time for the right reasons –
Yet this still needs help from the power that flows from deep character:
Service and sacrifice, connection and community, hope and invention, risk and activeness,
And most of all, understanding and love;
We may have to wait forever to be afforded the first kind of power, but
the other powers are waiting for us to use them today.

*A little music to listen to while you’re reading.
**Brian McLaren’s Faith After Doubt;
^Seth Godin’s blog: Unaware.

tiffle: to potter aimlessly in a landscape Suffolk*
Robert Macfarlane

Perhaps the best we can do is to help people get to where they’ve wanted to go all along**
Seth Godin

As I tiffle through the interstices of people’s existence and being,
Aiming to notice what even they perhaps have not seen
or noticed the significance of – hoping to uncover something that
deeply resonates and must be brought to the light of their ordinary world;^
Simply drop me a line if you want to go-a-tiffling.

Our work is to show we have been breathed upon – to show it, give it out, sing it out, to live out in the topside world what we have received through our sudden knowings, from body, from dreams and journeys of all sorts.^^

*Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks;
**Seth Godin’s This Is Strategy;
^The ordinary world (Estés’ “topside world”) is our everyday life, the special world is where we discover the deep wonders and truths about ourselves – the worlds uncovered in traditional myths;
^^Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ Women Who Run With the Wolves.

Creativity doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.*
Seth Godin

Refuse almost everything. Do almost nothing. But the things you do, do them all the way.**
Derek Sivers

It’s important to first learn
the domain, the field, the system, and we may start out
copying a lot, yet
the aim isn’t to replicate but to
bring something new – our peculiar rhyme – and to
lean into this.

That’s what our art requires of us. We show up and do it anyway, not because someone asked us but because our persistent heart tells us to.^

*Seth Godin’s The Practice;
**Derek Sivers’ Hell Yeah or No;
^Bernadette Jiwa’s The Story of Telling blog: Doing the Work Anyway.

You must have a place to which you can go, in your heart, your mind, or your house, almost every day, where you do not know what your owe anyone or what anyone owes you. You must have a place you can go to where you do not know what your work is or who you work for, where you do not know who you are married to or who your children are.*
Joseph Campbell

You can’t step in the same river twice, because your footprint the first time turned the river into a different river. And it changed you as well.**
Seth Godin

Leave your ordinary world awhile, and
enter your special sphere,
Be lost with yourself, less selfish
with all you carry, to
be restored to yourself, and find you are
unable to remain the same.

*David Whyte’s Crossing the Unknown Sea;
**Seth Godin’s This is Strategy.

Thirty years from now, therapy is going to centre on what is going well and why.*
Katherine Morgan Scafler

No one is ever ready until they start. Life begins at the edge of your comfort zone.**
Chris Fontana

How old will you be if you wait thirty years to
be able to do what you can do today?

There may not be thirty more years of wisdom to accrue-
Wisdom grows when we start.

You may not believe yourself ready for
the things that bring you to your edge, your truest you.

But these already lie within you,^ the means by which you
embrace and navigate the effort, change, risk, and journeying.

*Katherine Morgan Scafler’s The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control;
**Jean Houston’s The Wizard of Us;
^Dreamwhispering is all about uncovering the things that help you start; drop me a line to find out more.

The stories of gods or heroes descending into the underworld, threading through labyrinths and fighting with monsters, brought to light the mysterious workings of the psyche, showing people how to cope with their own interior crises.*
Karen Armstrong

Mythological images are the images by which consciousness is put in touch with unconsciousness. That’s what they are. When you don’t have your mythological images, or when your consciousness rejects them for some reason or other, you are out of touch with your own deepest part.**
Joseph Campbell

The next time
I find myself awake in
the long darkness of the night,
Wading through and unable to resist
all the difficult stuff,
I am going to reimagine it within
my myth^ – dark caves to navigate with
burning torches, fearsome creatures to be
provided with form to shrink them – because
a myth is not only about the enjoyable stuff,
It also succours our wellbeing, enabling us to be
agents rather than victims.

*Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth;
**Joseph Campbell’s Pathways to Bliss;
^The megamyths of history may not serve us as they did our forebears, but they can still inform our more personal myths so necessary for today. Such a myth requires the metaphysical/mystical, cosmological, sociological, and pedagogical. And if our myths are not to our liking, or are not working, we can change them.

Surprise is the great enabler of seeing.*
Alan Jacobs

*Alan Jacob’s Snakes and Ladders blog: Architectural Thoughts.