What we call “mind” and “matter,” “material” and “immaterial,” are not separate realms, but names we give to the patterns that arise in an interactive dance.*
AleXander McManus

Distancing ourselves from the multidimensional world of the senses, coming to label and quantify and classify as our primary mode of knowing, we relieve ourselves from the abundance of these realities and say, with a sigh of relief, “This is only this, and that is only that.**
Jean Houston

If I could slow down, put aside
for a moment
the things that demand my attention but
won’t matter tomorrow, if
I would allow myself to be curious and
to explore this person, this view, this object, this idea, this
interruption,
Then I will understand this world is far from being
a this is only this and that is only that
world.

*AleXander McManus’ Blue Moments;
**Jean Houston’s The Possible Human.

If we don’t create and control our environment, our environment creates and controls us.*
Marshall Goldsmith

Reality, we begin to sense, is not made of things. It is made through relation – through generative interaction, where presence meets presence, where attention touches form, where the seen and the unseen converge.**
AleXander McManus

It’s a relationship.

We find ourselves in enriching and enervating environments –
These are different for each of us: one person’s deenergising space
can be energising for someone else;
We can’t always avoid the spaces that empty us, but the person who
knows and lives from their strengths^ is best able to relate and
co-create with their environments, avoiding damaging or being damaged.

*Ben Hardy’s Be Your Future Self Now;
**AleXander McManus’ Blue Moments;
^We are also creators of our energising or enriching environments.

Regardless of collective affiliations or influences, our challenge. in behalf of the wild soul and our creative spirit is to not merge with any collective, but to distinguish ourselves from those who surround us, building bridges back to them as we choose.*
Clarissa Pinkola Estés

We do not merely exist – we resonate. As light bends to gravity, so too do we bend toward one another.**
AleXander McManus

There is no box for you to fit,
Your true shape is unrepeated light;
Only as light with light shall
we find our belonging together,
Our completeness.

*Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ Women Who Run With the Wolves;
**AleXander McManus’ Blue Moments.

It was the road of trials. In the hero’s journey, it is a time of incredible tests.*
Jean Houston

Freedom means freedom in the face of three things: (1) the instincts; (2) inherited disposition;
and (3) environment.**
Viktor Frankl

Our instincts may not always be true,
Our dispositions not always helpful, nor our environments
nurturing; the easy paths will not
provide our freedom from
that which holds us back from becoming what
we each are capable of becoming –
We must test and question, and be prepared to
let go.

*Jean Houston’s A Mythic Life;
**Viktor Frankl’s The Doctor and the Soul.

The moments you lose yourself in are clues.*
Martin Amor and Alex Pellew

There is only
the moment,
The action,
The other,
Beyond ego,
Even beyond true self,
There is soul.

What are you doing?
Why are you doing it?
Who are you doing it with or for?
When are you doing it?

*Martin Amor and Alex Pellew’s The Idea In You.

I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.*
John Cage

Derek Sivers’ Hell Yeah or No.

Yes, we must continue to read and write and cipher, but we also need to embrace an education for liberating the ability to imagine, to dream, and to expand the limits of the possible.*
Jean Houston

And we are part of the universe – dreaming creatures made of clay and lightning.**
AleXander McManus

Wallace Stevens wrote about
the pressure of reality and
the power of imagination;^ how
the one doesn’t overpower the other,
But when they converse and co-create,
A new reality is created.

*Jean Houston’s A Mythic Life;
**AleXander McManus’ Blue Moments;
^Wallace Stevens The Necessary Angel.

Tramping is a straying from the obvious, even the crookedest road is sometimes too straight.*
Stephen Graham

We are not born to succeed at every turn. We are born to try—to dream, to imagine, to strive and to take risks. We are hardwired to practise failing.**
Bernadette Jiwa

Magic does not result from
a flick of the wrist or
some incantational utterance; magic is
the child of turning up in places others
ignore, continuing when others go home, failing
to the embarrassment of others, being super
hungry to learn before
failing again, and knowing that
just as the universe found a way,
So will you.

When the universe makes you wonder,
all is as it should be.^

*Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places;
**Bernadette Jiwa’s blog Briefly: On Risking Failure;
^Cirque de Soleil’s Varekai, from AleXander McManus’ Blue Moments.

The answer Dorothy was looking for was right there in her back yard, but she couldn’t see it. To find it … she had to be shoved out of her normal routine, her comfort zone, in order to gain the perspective necessary to see through her unbelief.
Lisa Cron

I mythologise where others pathologise.**
Jean Houston

It’s possible to go over and over something that has
happened or is happening to us, but it’s no fun, and
there’s probably little traction, or
we can take it to the myth, moving it from the normal and ordinary
to see it in a new way – the obstacle is the way,
The problem is the possibility, you’re
the agent, not the victim … and all of that –
Where you wield your strengths, employ
your energies, and live
out your values.

*Lisa Cron’s Story or Die;
**Jean Houston’s A Mythic Life.

religion and philosophy
what I’d learned in the churches and schools
were all too heavy
for this travelling life
all that remained to me was poetry
as unobtrusive as breathing
a poetry like the wind
and the maple leaf
that I spoke to myself
moving over the land*
Kenneth White

See it all.
Touch it all.
Hear it all.
Taste it all.
Do it all.
Appreciate the wonderful physical world.**
Derek Sivers

I wonder now whether I was born on the edge of a town where
it met the Yorkshire countryside, or born on the edge of the countryside where
it met the small market town, but I think I knew the words
before I spoke them: I need a day to have fields in it.

More than ever, Spring fills me with awe; I notice with deep down thankfulness how
that which had seemed so dead for so long returns to life –
An affection, I sense, not only borne of my nearly sixty six years, but from the tens,
If not hundreds of thousands of years of nature imprinted on my soul.^

*Philip Newell’s Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul;
**Derek Sivers’ How To Live;
^Some who live in cities may report how they are unnerved when they find themselves in nature, but this is the result of a much more recent history, and they need to give themselves time to remember.