[T]he genius of an individual lies in the inhabitation of their peculiar and particular spirit in conversation with the world. Genius is something in itself and no other thing.*
David Whyte

The shape of each soul is different. An individual is a carefully fashioned, unique world. The shape of the flaw that each person carries is also different. The flaw is the special shape of personal limitation; angled at a unique awkwardness to the world, it makes our difficulty and challenge in the world different from that of others.**
John O’Donohue

Embrace your awkwardness,
Understand and grow it,
Express and edge it,
But do not lose it:
Of course,
once you sand off the edges,
it’s hard to get traction.^

Your flaw will lead you into your
flow.

When you trust yourself enough
to integrate your strangeness,
you bestow a gift on yourself.**

*David Whyte’s Crossing the Unknown Sea;
**John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty;
^Seth Godin’s blog: Sanding off all the edges.

Sankofa is a term in Twi, a dialect of the Akan language in Ghana. It means “go back and get it.” …

“I’m not sure what it is yet, let’s interact and see” opens the door to forward motion and wonder, instead of pushing hard for things to get back to normal.*
Seth Godin

The best present is a mixture of
the best past and the
best future –
We can be deep-time people,
If we want to be.

*Seth Godin’s The Song of Significance.

When you discover something new about yourself, you become more grounded and free. It is delightful when you find out more of your hidden light, when the radiance inside you glimmers through in new unexpected colours.*
John O’Donohue

Touching people’s lives in a positive way is as close as I can get to an idea of religion. Belief in one’s self is only a mirror of belief in other people and every person.**
Keith Haring

More delightful than discovering what
lies within ourselves is discovering what exists within
the lives of others.

Edward Chip Anderson handed out
a stack of reading glasses to the group
at the close of the day exploring our strengths,
Making the simple request that for the next week
we spend a few moments wearing our glasses
as a prompt for
reflection:
Half of the time to be spent on our own abilities,
The other half imagining those
of the people around us.

I have never forgotten Chip’s request;
In many ways it has shaped my work,
And perhaps here, in seeing each other
in a deeper way,
There lies the hope of the world.

*John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty;
**Keith Haring’s Keith Haring Journals.

Find the nerds, the motivated, and the overlooked, and figure out what they need to thrive. That exploration will reveal what others have needed as well but didn’t care enough to speak about it.*
Seth Godin

It is interesting to ask: what are the limits you have set for your life?  Where are the lines of those limits?  Why do you think you cannot go beyond them?  How real are they?  Did you construct the  limits out of fear and anxiety? … The awakening of the beauty of your creativity can totally change the way you view limits.**
John O’Donohue

Everyone has a special world
beyond the limits of the ordinary,
Where abilities and joys and actions
come into sharper definition and
take on greater significance within
a larger story that will
bring the change we need:
When you see the list not as a
continuing barrier
but as a threshold,
You are already beyond.**

*Seth Godin’s The Song of Significance;
**John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty.

The human imagination can not be programmed by a computer. Our imagination is our greatest hope for survival.*
Keith Haring

The earth is your customer, and many people will be aligned as you serve it.**
Seth Godin

The important word in the title is “we.”

The human imagination is incomparable,
And what occurs when Imaginations
get together is nothing short of exponential;
We’re discovering more about human community
and about ourselves:
The who-ness of someone
can never be finally named, know,
claimed, controlled or
predicted.^

Our world needs us.

*Keith Haring’s Keith Haring Journals;
**Seth Godin’s The Song of Significance (also the doodle quote);
^John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty.

It’s a cause of relief. You get to give up on something that was always impossible – the quest to become the optimised, infinitely capable, emotionally invincible, fully independent person you’re officially supposed to be. Then you get to roll up your sleeves and start work on what’s gloriously possible instead.*
Oliver Burkeman

The awakening of individuality is a continual unfolding of our presence.**
John O’Donohue

Getting ready for the day –
Wash, dress, breakfast, help others,
Gather everything you need to take with you –
Ready?,
Or forgotten something?

How do you prime yourself for
the best day today can be?

Intention gives us the power to
describe and name possible futures.
And possible futures help us claim
the path we’re willing to work for.^

Priming enables us to more than reactive,
To respond, or better still,
To protect:
Freedom comes from not being
the direct reaction of your environment.^^

We speak of being our best self, but
better than this is to be our true self,
And a little time at the beginning of the day
set in the most natural way for us –
Perhaps quietness, journaling, reading, walking,
Listening to inspiring music or a thoughtful podcast –
Prepares us to be our strongest self and
to make our contribution.

If you are using one of these ways or another,
You already know the benefit:
If not,
Why not give one or other a test run for a week, or two?

Maybe we struggle to justify something like this
to others or
to ourselves, but as Seth Godin reminds us:
Mortals must do what they are here
to do or
they will become cranky.*^
And no-one wants your cranky
or mine:
They want us to
do that beautiful thing
we are here to do.

*Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks;
**John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty;
^Seth Godin’s The Song of Significance;
^^Ben Hardy’s Be Your Future Self Now;
*^Seth Godin’s Tales of the Revolution.

Imagine a team member with all the traditional vocation skills: productive, skilled, experienced. A resumé that can prove it. A fine baseline. Now add to it. Perceptive, charismatic, driven, focused, goal-setting, inspiring ad motivated. Generous, empathetic, and consistent. A deep listener, with patience.*

But if we’re seeking a liminal state, the significance of getting from here to there, then we’re in a mode of discovery, not driving a train on a single set of tracks.*
Seth Godin

To young children, of course, nature is full of doors – is nothing bt doors really – and they swing open at every step.**
Robert Macfarlane

Fossicking is rummaging, searching, prospecting.

The dreamwhispering I get up to
is about foraging through the hidden and/or
unexplored parts of our lives,
Delving beneath the surface of the obvious and familiar
to the unnoticed or undervalued,
Out of which emerges a richer story.

By the time we come to the end of a
journey of conversations, there’s
an agglomeration of thoughts, feelings, expressions, and
possibilities to be sifted through;
Every one can lead to somehere, to
something, to
someone –
Smorgasboardian possibilities.

*Seth Godin’s The Song of Significance;
**Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks.

Many indigenous peoples share the understanding that we are each endowed with a particular gift, a unique ability. Birds to sing and stars to glitter, for instance. It is understood that these gifts have a dual nature, though: a gift is also a responsibility.*
Robin Wall Kimmerer

To this quality of aliveness, the shan-shui artists gave the name zi-ran, which might be translated as “self-ablazement,” “self-thusness” or “wildness.”**
Robert Macfarlane

That thing you love doing – which
interests you so much that you have
invested and sacrificed to hone it
across the span of your life
so that it defines you –
That is what we need;
It is where significance lies:
the future we imagine is just that:
not an alien anything, but what we imagine,
what we can imagine.
And often it’s what we
can’t imagine that we’re most in need of.^

*Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass;
**Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places; the shan-shui are “rivers and mountains;”
^Alan Jacobs’ Breaking Bread With the Dead.

Tools can create efficiency, but value can only come from change, from humanity, and from the rare form of connection that comes with significance. …

Humans are not a resource.
We are not a tool.
Humans are the point.*
Seth Godin

Helping others live within their significance
is entirely the point;
Giving our lives for such a cause
is where we encounter our own meaning.

*Seth Godin’s The Song of Significance.

We need to see the subtle difference between the truth and the true. Truth is about accuracy, whilst being true is about intention.*
Erwin McManus

The dream of prayer and art is to come nearer, even to slip through to dwell for a while in the vicinity of the essence.**
John O’Donohue

Yesterday, my wife and I
found ourselves on the wrong end
of the M6 motorway being closed all day;
It wasn’t that we had an impossible task returning home, but
it was going to take longer and
put on a load more miles.

If you find yourself wondering if you’re in the wrong place,
Or doing the wrong work, or you’ve made a critical mistake,
Or have lost that sense of purpose that once was yours,
The good news is that
returning to where you need to be is not impossible,
It’s just inconvenient, and yet,
Being true to yourself is always worth it.

*Erwin McManus’ The Genius of Jesus;
**John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty.