The whole idea is that you’ve got to bring out again that which you went to recover, the unrealised, unutilised potential in yourself.*
Joseph Campbell

I thought of the old Latin root of the word desire, meaning de sider, of the stars. To have a desire in your life literally means to keep your star in sight, to follow a glimmer, a beacon, a disappearing will-o’-the-wisp over the horizon into someplace you cannot yet fully imagine.**
David Whyte

The thing about potential is
we won’t know what it really is –
It begins with a desire, but then we must
set out to release it, to
realise it,
And much can change on the journey:
How vain it is to sit down to
write when you have not stood up
to live.
Methinks that the moment my
legs begin to move,
my thoughts begin to
flow.^

Potential takes us on a wilder journey
of mythological proportions
towards that unimaginable someplace.

*Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey;
**David Whyte’s Crossing the Unknown Sea;
^Henry David Thoreau, from Annie Murphy Paul’s The Extended Mind.

Art is what we call it when we are able to create something new that changes someone.*
Seth Godin

Our society does not teach us how to be an effective giver of gifts. The schools don’t emphasise it. The popular culture its confused by it.**
David Brooks

The possibility of beginning again –
Just sounds too good to be true –
Yet beginnings are the gift I long to bring –
It’s the receiving that is the hardest thing.

*Seth Godin’s The Practice;
**David Brooks’ The Second Mountain.

Puhpowee, she explained, translates as “the force which forces mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight.*
Robin Wall Kimmerer

Not for mushrooms, but
there’s a kind of puhpowee force
that drives each of us to bring an
elegant solution into the world
to meet some problem that has
caught our attention;
How would you describe yours?

*Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass.

One study found that people who were directed to doodle while carrying out a boring listening task remembered 29 percent more information than people who did not doodle, likely because the latter group had let their attention slip away entirely.*
Annie Murphy Paul

The point isn’t to listen to boring stuff –
Though everything becomes more accessible
with doodling –
The point is, doodling allows us to be
more present and open.

*Annie Murphy Paul’s The Extended Mind.

Julia Cameron’s morning pages help unlock something inside. Not the use or a magical mystical power, but simply the truth of your chosen identity. If you do something creative each day, you’re now a creative person. Not a blocked person, a striving person, not an untalented person. A creative person.*
Seth Godin

It may be the help provided to
the person on the helpline, or
the solution to the
rewiring conundrum, or
the support imagined
for a co-worker, or
the form of words that will most
engage the listener, or
the elegant solution to the
insurmountable problem, or …
Or …
However you are creative –
And you are –
Journaling will likely
make it bigger and
take it further.

*Seth Godin’s The Practice.

When you get past making labels for things, it is possible to combine and transform elements in to new things. Look at things until their import, identity, name, use, and description have dissolved.*
Corita Kent

Yes, we can copy the
externalities of something,
And that may be useful for
a moment,
Or,
We can copy
the parts, elements, layers,
Depths and mysteries of what makes this
this,
And that is quite another thing,
Full of iteration and innovation.

*Corita Kent and Jan Steward’s Learning By Heart.

Open sails
And stretch my spine
The night’s gone
The day’s mine*
Lemn Sissay

*Lemn Sissay’s let the light pour in.

Wonder, the mental state of openness, questioning, curiosity, and embracing mystery, arises out of experiences of awe … .*
Dacher Keltner

It’s about discovering with all that we are intended to be, with awe and wonder.**
Sunil Raheja

Here are three movements
from Mr Keltner for continuing empowerment
awe in us.

Represent –
Mark the moment:
Perhaps write it down or mark the spot.

Symbolise –
Share it with others:
Incorporated into your work or as a short story.

Ritualise –
Bring this awe into your practice,
Allow it to shape you and be shaped by you.

*Dacher Keltner’s Awe;
**Sunil Raheja’s Dancing With Wisdom.

My name is Why
It’s all I’ve got
This is my life
In one shot*
Lemn Sissay

All you are is what you have and what you give.**
“Shevek”

Awesome doesn’t have to be big,
As well as causing us to
experience our ego as smaller
and our soul as larger,
Awe is awe when it
leads us to
curiosity and
wonder and
questioning.

*Lemn Sissay’s let the light pour in;
**A character from Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, from Maria Popova’s The Marginalian: Ursula K. Le Guin on Suffering and Getting To the Other Side of Pain.

I saw there was no self; that selfishness was all folly, and the result of circumstance; that it was only because I thought self real that I suffered; that I had only to live in the idea of the all; and all was mine.*
Margaret Fuller

Being put in our place by something bigger than ourselves is not a humiliation; it should be accepted as a relief from our insanely hopeful ambitions for our lives.**
Alain de Botton

The ego serves a purpose, and
then it is a hindrance;
We move from dependence to
independence, but are then
prevented
from moving to interdependence where
“all is mine”:
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.^

It isn’t a once and for all experience –
We humans know how to lose a good thing – but
the power to find it again each day is
within each of us.

*Dacher Keltner’s Awe;
**Alain de Botton’s Religion For Atheists;
^Walt Whitman, from Dacher Keltner’s Awe.