You are the only you that has ever lived; your idiom is the only idiom of its. kind in all of existence and if you cannot hear the sound of the genuine in you, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of the strings that somebody else pulls …* Brian McLaren
It most likely boils down to one thing, the one thing behind everything else that we imagine and do, the one thing we keep returning to in order to orientate our lives towards meaning and purpose; It’s useful to write it down every so often, and then make it happen in any which we we can.
No wonder some of our parents forgot to mention soul, as it is apt to distract from Serious Goals and Aspirations. It is as playful and illogical as a kitten, as watchful as God or a baby. It rubs its back lazily against trees. It stops and gasps at beauty and is bathed in it. And sometimes it begins to weep.* Anne Lamott
Your soul is much larger than you! You are just along for the ride. When you learn to live there, you will learn to live with everyone and everything else too.** Richard Rohr
Who taught you about soul?
I bet they were bigger than the people around them, more fun, more inquisitive, more effusive, more in wonderment, more loving, more forgiving, more more.
What most of us don’t realise is that when a story grabs us, that conflict, and its resolution, becomes ours.* Lisa Cron
The only thing that is doing the thing is doing the thing.** Loopy
Stories are how we live our lives, and we can even be drawn into stories that are not ours – attentively listening to a friend or watching a movie can find us anticipating and experiencing what is happening; We can find ourselves experiencing our own story as we tell it or write it down, but, As amazing as our bodies and minds are for transporting us into a story, all of the imagining and feeling are there for one thing only, And that is doing it.
And so I began to grapple with the truth that people-pleasers are prone to resist until it halfway kills them: that very often the best way to benefit others is to focus on doing your thing.* Oliver Burkeman
Why are people gonna be glad they saw your show? And whatever your answer is, rehearse it, grow it, feed into it, make it the main thing.** Gabe Anderson
How long have you been holding back on what you have to give?
Not wanting to upset others, or sound jarring, or be misunderstood or be hurt?
Ignoring or missing your cue to bring what only you can?
I do it so to compensate for something I think is missing in the common message. My public writing is a counterpoint to complement the popular point. Of course, I don’t think the stuff I say is the only way to go. I’m just the counter melody.^
There it is again: your cue to enter stage right (or left or from above or below) – or will you miss it, again?
How do you measure on this little test – How curious and questioning are you, how deep is your gladness, how much of you is present in this moment?
Curiosity is one way we know that our souls are functioning. So is deep gladness. So is presence.^^
To do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: OWN LIFE it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity.* George Orwell
If I chose to hide you away, it is for a reason. I have brought you to this place. Drink in the silence. Seek solitude.
Listen to the silence.
It will teach you. It will build strength Let others share it with you. It is little to be found elsewhere.
Silence will speak more to you in a day than the world of voices can teach you in a lifetime. Find silence. Find solitude – and having discovered her riches, bind her to your heart. Frances Roberts
The person happy to be alone is indeed a dangerous person for they shall know and be themself, Untethered, unattached, Not to do their own thing, but to bring their different and best for others.
The ultimate aim of the quest must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and power to serve others.^
Detached self-observation is essential for knowing our emotional selves. Such self-observation entails stepping back from our experience … Via trials, tribulations, and illuminating revelations, the hero’s journey chronicles the transformation of consciousness from a state of unawarenesss to a state of deep self-understanding.* Anna Katharina Schaffner
The ultimate aim of the quest must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and power to serve others.* Joseph Campbell
A journey traditionally references our travel in a day – something different for each of us; a journal is our capturing and reflecting upon that travel, revealing we are more than our activity, we are also an observer of ourself for the sake of others – These together provide our balance, our dynamic and static: We experience the journey differently when reflecting upon it, in turn enabling us to be more reflective in the throes of the journey.
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.
Here’s another quality of generous questions, questions as social art and civic 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 words 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?
*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.
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