If your music comes from your heart and soul, and if you feel it inside yourself, it will affect others in the same way.*
Robert Schumann

No two human beings ever experience two sensations, experiences, feelings, or thoughts identically. Everything changes. Everything is always different.**
Keith Haring

Robert Schumann is almost right –
Here’s his statement again with one change:
If your music comes from your heart and soul,
and if you feel it inside yourself,
it will affect others in some different way.

That the person for whom we
make, compose, sing, doodle, expound, ideate, fix
this thing, feels differently about it is
exactly the point: we want others
to feel alive as only they can feel alive.

And on it goes.

*Steven Isserlis’ Robert Schumann’s Advice to Young Musicians;
**Keith Haring’s Keith Haring Journals.

Here’s another quality of generous questions, questions as social art and cvic tools: they may not want answers, or not immediately. They might be raised in order to be pondered, dwelt on, instead.*
Krista Tippett

Given the uniqueness of each of us, it should not be surprising that one of the greatest challenges is to inhabit our own individuality and to discover which life-form best expresses it.**
John O’Donohue

You don’t have to ask the same questions as everyone else –
Indeed, I’d rather you didn’t,
I hope you’ll ask the questions that only you can because
I know that I need them –
Born of your generosity, the
expression of your uniqueness, the ones
no-one else thought to ask:
Why is that?

Perhaps all of our questions are iterations of
the one big inquiry our lives are about? –
It feels so for me:
Who is your true self?
What is your contribution?
And the thousands of other inquiries …
All different ways for asking,
Do you know how utterly amazing
humans can be,
How amazing you are? –
What’s yours?

*Krista Tippett’s Becoming Wise;
**John O’Donohue’s Benedictus; I swapped “question” for “life-form.”

We are, as a species, finding it increasingly hard to imagine that we are part of something which is larger than our own capacity. We have come to accept a heresy of aloofness, a humanist belief in human difference, and we suppress wherever possible the checks and balances on us – the reminders that the world is greater than us or that we are contained within it. On almost every front, we have a turning away from felt relationship with the natural world.*
Robert Macfarlane

When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realise, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money.**
Alanis Obomsawim

How’s the universe’s great experiment of
consciousness working out? –
Here, on this blue planet hanging in space, most species
seem to be doing okay, except
for one – the one that
is capable of providing a name for
what is happening to Earth, the one that
knows how it’s happened and how to
begin sorting it out, but also the one that
resists;
Steven Pressfield writes that Resistance asks
two questions of us:
How bad do you want it?
Why do you want it?^ –
He goes on to suggest that
when it comes to the first, we need
full commitment, and for the second,
We must admit to having
no other choice – whilse also wanting
fun and beauty^^ …
For our children?
For our greater body, the Earth?
To keep the great experiment rolling?

A few places to play?:
The Carbon Almanac and it’s daily blog,
Trendwatching, too.

*Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places;
**Seth Godin’s The Carbon Almanac;
^Steven Pressfield’s Do the Work;
^^I hope that our solutions to climate change will be replete with fun and beauty – the sooner we start the more likely this will be.

Scale is rarely the first signal of important work.*
Seth Godin

Serious games are all around us, whether we choose to play them or not.*
Seth Godin

If this important work
comes from deep within you, then
you must keep going –
This is your faith;
Do not be pulled off course,
Do not compare your work with others,
Learn from them but
do no repeat them,
Your instinct, your intuition,
This, too, is your faith;
Numbers are not important at first, and
they may never be important –
One is the smallest audience we require,
Remaining a special number for me, and
you may be the one.^

*Seth Godin’s blog: The NSE confusions;
**Seth Godin’s This is Strategy;
^You’re welcome to get in touch to find out more about my dreamwwhispering work: geoffrey@thinsilence.org.

I guess that’s all I’ve got left, then. Loving what’s left with the time I have left.*
Hannah

We are always wrong in some essential way about what our story is. We are never living out exactly the story we think we are. We are never exactly the character in the story we mean to be. But to be wrong in these ways is what makes it a story, openended and unpredictable, instead of a fixed plot rolling out to its foreknown conclusion.**
James Carse

Look for the wild in you,
It’s still there, no matter how much
parenting, education, work-life, enculturisation, and life experiences
have sought to make you predictable;
No matter what has preceded
this moment, your wild makes it possible to
be fully your limited, unpredictable, imperfect, unfolding, and
glorious self.

What’s your next thought,
Write it down –
No matter how crazy:
You need one small way to live this thought,
To cross the threshold,
The rest will follow,
Though it’s probably not what’s expected.^

Once you have crossed the threshold, if it really is your adventure – if it is a journey that is appropriate to your deep spiritual need or readiness – helpers will come along the way to provide magical aid.^^

*Brian McLaren’s Faith After Doubt;
**James Carse’s Breakfast At the Victory;
^You can always share it with me;
^^Joseph Campbell’s Pathways to Bliss.

Resistance’s goal is not to wound or disable. Resistance aims to kill. Its target is the epicentre of our being: our genius, our soul, the unique and priceless gift we were put on this earth to give that no one else has but us. Resistance means business.*
Steven Pressfield

Often, when something goes wrong, it is the small acts of self-care that we abandon first – even when they are the very things that have the power to heal us.**
William Seighart

The higher the stakes the greater
the resistance – coming at us from beyond and
within, so we’ll definitely
mess up, get hurt, doubt ourselves, and even
give up, and some have almost
been destroyed by it so that
they hurt everything around them.

A lack of self-care is doing
resistance’s work for it –
If you see a friend in a similar place, you
wouldn’t walk away but you’d help them to get back up;
You don’t write them off, so
why don’t you give yourself a hand, some
self-compassion, another chance.

This can look a lot like journaling, which
helps us separate the instructive from the destructive,
Re-arming us for another attempt at
bringing into the world the
unique and priceless that only we can;
We have already lost the gifts of so many,
We don’t want to lose yours.

Faithfulness is our response to resistance,
Faithfulness being playful with who we are and what we have,
Faithfulness that begets perseverance;
If there’s one thing that resistance
struggles with, it’s perseverance:
Here you come again,
And I’m cheering you on.

*Steven Pressfield’s Do the Work;
**William Seighart’s The Poetry Pharmacy.

So I finally figured out what’s great about this. Getting knocked on my ass has made me humble as hell. It’s been years since I called for help. It’s been years since I was open to advice.*
Derek Sivers

Hierarchy is not just what we do, it is who we are.**
Matthew Syed

Humility is a choice in a
world of hierarchies,^ to
see ourselves and to see
others more accurately, not only
as we are, but as we may
become, meaning humility is not
about decrease but increase.

*Derek Sivers’ Hell Yeah or No;
**Matthew Syed’s Rebel Ideas;
^Matthew Syed describes two sorts of hierarchies: dominance and privilege – humility is alive and well in the latter.

I believe in finding what I didn’t know I was looking for.*
Austin Kleon

To follow your gift is a calling to a wonderful adventure of discovery. Some of the deepest longings in you is the voice of your gift. The gifts calls you to embrace it.**
John O’Donohue

I hope that you never
know everything about yourself, and that
the joy of this pursuit will
never be lost to you;
Discovering more about yourself will lead
to more discoveries out there, whilst the more
you uncover out there, the more you’ll
uncover in yourself –
That should keep you
busy for a while.

*Austin Kleon’s blog: Spontaneity is learning and browsing is research;
**John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.

The challenge is to find a way of life in harmony with your gifts and needs.*
John O’Donohue

Are you Successful when you do this?
Is it Intuitive to you?
Do you Grow as a result?
Does it meet a Need in you –
Then you’ve found the SIGN
you are looking for.

*John O’Donohue’s Benedictus.

a sense of humour is the only divine quality of man*
Arthur Schopenhauer

Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest.**
Hermann Hesse

I need to laugh
at myself far more
often, and begin to
recover from my
seriousness malady.

*Jean Houston’s The Wizard of Us;
**James Clear’s 3-2-1 newsletter: How to help someone, the value of bad luck, and rewarding competence.