If I always seek to pattern my life after another, mine is being wasted re-doing things for my own empty acceptance. But, if I live my life my way and only let the other [artists] influence me as a reference, a starting point, I can build an even higher awareness instead of staying dormant.*
Keith Haring

In the Celtic World from the earliest centuries, speech was viewed as our greatest strength, greater than any physical force. True words hold a mighty energy for change.**
Philip Newell

Our truest words
don’t just come from
anywhere;
they thrill forth from
humility,
accepting the wonder
of our life as
it is and as it
may become.

*From Keith Haring’s Keith Haring Journals;
**From Philip Newell’s Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul.

Much of the stress and emptiness that haunts us can be traced back to our lack of attention to beauty. Internally, the mind becomes course and dull if it remains unvisited by images and thoughts which hold the radiance of beauty.*
John O’Donohue

The only essential is this: the gift must always move.**
Lewis Hyde

Input beauty.

Imagine.

Innovate.

Output beauty.

*From John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty;
**From Lewis Hyde’s The Gift.

These peregrini, as they were also known, viewed their wanderings, or peregrinations, as a process of seeking their place of “resurrection” – they were searching for their path of new beginnings.*

I wander through old and new texts because new words and old words in new combinations are important for hope and for beauty.

Staying where I am is not a good place, as Erich Fromm reflects:

Our social pattern is such that the successful man is not supposed to be afraid or bored or lonely. He must find this world the best of all our worlds; in order to have the best chance for promotion he must repress fear as well as doubt, depression, boredom, or hopelessness.**

Jan Steward writes of a better way:

Play is a way of working and work is a way of playing. Our best times are when working and playing are the same.^

Yet, beneath the surface of a life that has separated play from work, or, as Johan Huizinga had exposed, separated play from seriousness, there lies one or more of Fromm’s ailments.

We need to wander as an expression of hope, becoming perigrini, for then we shall

see and cherish all signs of new life and [will be] ready at every moment to help the birth of that which is ready to be born**.

*From Philip Newell’s Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul;
**From Erich Fromm’s The Revolution of Hope;
^Jan Steward from Corita Kent and Jan Steward’s Learning by Heart.

To live well and prosper, first know your natural bent, your star, your genius and the place suitable to these; here live. Follow your natural profession.*
Marsilio Ficino

… becoming.

Courage means to live from the heart.

For this, we have to be who we are and not who we are not.

For this, we require humility: that is not to have to high an option of myself, nor too low an opinion, but a true opinion.

Back in 1489, Marsilio Ficino published his book on self-improvement Three Books on Life, and, whilst he mixes a number of things into this, including astrology, he expresses a timeless truth: we must recognise our talents and preferences.

Ben Hardy has written much more recently about the critical nature of our environments for growing ourselves, But Anna Katharina Schaffner notes that the fifteenth century, Ficino also

urges us consciously to choose the environment that harmonises most with our needs.**

Humility is critical for something else, too.

Together with gratitude and faithfulness, it helps form our inner guide as someone we can trust, our Truth-Self.

Not that this Self is ever fully formed, rather it is ever seeking to be complete.

I really appreciated a conversation yesterday with one of my dreamwhisperers about whether we can trust the inner guide – look at what some get up to because they trust their inner guide – because it made me really think about how we need to positively develop the person we can trust, and part of this is the conversation with good, loving, reverent, compassionate sources.

My inner guide is a communitas, not only me on my own.

*Marsilio Ficino, quoted in Anna Katharina Schaffner’s The Art of Self-Improvement;
**Anna Katharina Schaffner’s The Art of Self-Improvement.

Self-knowledge might be the most difficult of life’s rewards – the hardest to earn and the hardest to bear. To know yourself is to know that you are not an unassailable fixity amid the entropic storm of the universe but a set of fragilities in constant flux. To know yourself is to know that you are not invulnerable.*
Maria Popova

To open ourselves to the way of insight is not an easy thing: we find ourselves struggling against the inner resistance of all we already know.

What we find though, perhaps as we get older and are mindful of all our mistakes and failings, is that openness and change are critical to life:

What you love to do will grow in you as you stay true to who too are and allow yourself to change and develop freely.**

As I was reading this morning, my encouragers lined up:

You observe a lot by watching.^

Pay attention to the world and train yourself to notice the details that others miss.^^

A god can create a world only by listening.*^

Incomplete knowledge leads to asking what-if questions, because the questioner has treated reality as undetermined; it’s up to you to make sense of it.^*

May we come to the realisation that we only use a small part of our capacities to see and understand more, and that all we need to pursue this way are learnable:

Curiosity

Observation

Openness

Reflection

Creativity.

*From Maria Popova’s The Marginalian blog: Bob Dylan on Vulnerability, the Meaning of Integrity, and Music as an Instrument of Truth;
**From gapingvoid’s blog: Life without dissonance;
^Yogi Berra, quoted in Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score;
^^From Rohiit Bhargava’s Non Obvious 2019;
*^From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games;
^*From Richard Sennett’s Building and Dwelling.

Our hope lies not primarily in human reason and scientific analysis, but in the untamed regions of intuition and human imagination.*
Philip Newell

For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth – that Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.**
Viktor Frankl

If your imagination cannot fly, may it run, and if it cannot run, may it walk, but, please, bring your imagination.

May we recover from our imagination-sickness and, critically, weave imagining with love

Finding the edges of the box can be a great place to begin:

It’s the limits that make it interesting, the limits that give us an edge to the box, something to leverage against.

*From Philip Newell’s Sacred Earth Sacred Soul;
**Viktor Frankl, quoted in Jonah Paquette’s Awestruck;
^From Seth Godin’s blog: Limitless.

Text means the surface of a work of art and its execution in its medium: paint on canvas, chords from a piano, steps by a dancer. In the art of story, text names the words on the page of a novel, or the outer life of a character. Subtext means the inner substance of a work of art, the meanings and feelings that flow below the surface.*
Robert McKee

The heart never forgets. Everything of significance is inscribed here. The heart is the archive of all our intimate memory. What is truly felt leaves the deepest inscription. Each of us carries the book of our life inside our hearts.*
John O’Donohue

Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey takes the protagonist from their familiar though ordinary world into an unfamiliar though special world.

Their call may be some difficult circumstance in life or a desire to become unstuck, and so their journey begins.

They encounter a guide, at least one person who will journey with them, someone who has experienced something not dissimilar and knows something of what lies in front.

There comes a point of commitment, a leaving of the familiar as the protagonist throws themself into their quest.

There will now come trials and challenges which both test and prove the content of the “hero.”

When these are completed, their journey is far from over: everything so far has made it possible to approach their most important engagement of all.

Demanding everything, in this moment they wonder if they will be enough.

Their gained treasure is to find that when they pour themselves into the vessel of this adventure they fill it up and more.

They have what they need.

It is now time to leave the special world and re-enter their own world, but something has shifted.

They notice a shift within towards a new beginning.

Their old and new come together into a greater story.

It is a larger familiar, an ordinary plus.

Welcome to dreamwhispering where we explore your journey, which I like to think of as exploring the subtext of our lives.

*From Robert McKee‘s newsletter: Why Dialogue is Critical to Character;
**From John O’Donohue’s Benedictus.

It is, in essence, the arc of acquiring greater psychological flexibility: facing difficult emotions and thoughts with greater openness; letting go of limiting self-stories; finding resources within that allow us to see ourselves and our situation in a new way; connecting with a deeper and more authentic sense of self; connecting with a chosen purpose and discovering the actions that help us to fulfil it; and finally committing to those actions with perseverance.*
Steven Hayes

Stories that follow the hero’s journey blueprint, for example, can teach us about the important threshold moments that we all have to master.**
Anna Katharina Schaffner

We’ve all been there.

Blaming circumstances and systems and individuals for the problems we face.

In the end, unless we can magically line all of those things up in such a way as to convince them they need to change, our best efforts may well be spent beginning our journey within.

We still have to convince ourselves, and that’s hard, and it’s far from easy and simple, but, as all those who have made their own hero’s journey encourage us, it’s not impossible.

*From Steven Hayes’ A Liberated Mind;
**From Anna Katharina’s Schaffner’s The Art of Self-Improvement.

In addition, we humans can influence our evolution by the environments we construct and the choices we make; our evolution is not just a matter of chance.*
Steven Hayes

Perhaps this is a scarier thought than not having enough: now there’s nowhere to hide.

Today is a wonderful day, but I get to bring something more into it, and what will that be?

*From Steven Hayes’ A Liberated Mind.

The way I chose to put the messages of my life together into a picture is related to all I have ever seen through the eyes of other picture makers and through a constant kind of looking I do myself. What is my own is the constancy of observation of forms and feelings as they combine into the final object to which I sign my name and for which I assume responsibility.
Corita Kent

Genuine self-knowledge has to be the starting point for any attempt to improve ourselves.
Anna Katharina Schaffner.

I have been helped by many people to find and know myself, and I have borrowed from many to put my work, my art, together.

But I know this is what I must do and I sign my name to it.

What I’d love to hear about, though, is what you have brought together from many sources and is the things you must do.

Corita Kent from Corita Kent and Jan Steward’s Learning By Heart;
From Anna Katharina Schaffner’s The Art of Self-Improvement.