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.

(This is Friday’s blog and doodle (30 June): I must have got distracted at the important part of actually posting it! Apologies.)

Without mythic keys we have neither culture nor religion, no art, architecture, drama, ritual, epic, social customs, or mental disorders. We would have only a grey world, with little if anything calling us forward to that strange and beautiful country that recedes even as we try to civilise it.*
Jean Houston

Whenever we attempt something difficult there is always a sense that we have to wake some slumbering giant inside ourselves, some greater force as yet hidden from us.**
David Whyte

All that we think of as human life
Resides upon story –
Stories we tell ourselves collectively, and
individually.

David Whyte tells us that work is a story that
provides us with safety from
“the wilder, nonhuman forces of existence,”**
And Robin Wall Kimmerer’s telling of the Skywoman myth
assures us that we will survive:
we are always falling …
spinning into someplace new and unexpected.
Despite our fears of falling,
the gifts of the world stand by to catch us.^

Our stories help us to understand our falls,
To pick ourselves up,
And to keep going.

Whyte goes on to ponder the modern-day lives that have become
mythical for us:
Parks, Churchill, King, Mandela,
How they were simply living into or upon
their own stories –
Something we too must aspire to;
Not to live their lives, for we cannot,
But to daily live upon our stories.

*Jean Houston’s A Mythic Life;
**David Whyte’s Crossing the Unknown Sea;
^Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass.

A good conversation is a constant stream of unexpected responses.*
Tim Harford

*Tim Harford’s Messy.

My hunger for freedom is my hunger for myself, my hunger for my creative initiative.*
M. C. Richards

*M. C. Richards’ Centering.

conversation (n.) mid-14c., “place where one lives or dwells,” also “general course of actions or habits, manner of conducting oneself in the world,” both senses now obsolete; from Old French conversacion “behaviour, life, way of life, monastic life” 

In the farmhouse all those years ago, I stumbled into conversational intimacy with a stranger and felt the whole course of my life pivot in the encounter.*
David Whyte

Conversations are becoming endangered –
Texts and voicemails and tweets are pushing them
to the edges of our lives,
Small screens in buggies cause us
to wonder where the skills will be learned.

We are losing the
“I had no idea we were going to
talk about this when we began” for
“I’ll tell you what I think (and
I’m not interested in what you think)” –
At-ness not with-ness.

I have a sense, though, that
conversation will make a comeback because
we are human, and
this is where we desire to live most of all:
I’ve found that every want
can be distilled down into one:
connection.**

(Dreamwhispering is,
Firstly and foremostly
a journey of conversations.)

*David Whyte’s Crossing the Unknown Sea;
**Katherine Morgan Schafner’s The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control.

When you’re present, you don’t have control, and you don’t care. When you’re connected to your power, you don’t need control. … What matters is that you understand that being open is powerful.*
Katherine Morgan Schafler

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.**
Viktor Frankl

The fourth elemental truth^ states
You are not in control,
And yet this does not mean that you are not
powerful;
Learning for life,
The endless openness to more,
Without and within, is about
learning to be powerful –
Openness provides choice and
choice is powerful:
Education is personal or it is nothing.^^

Surely we ought to know our minds?,
Doesn’t openness suggest weakness?

We learn to be our own person,
Our true person, and using the
whole of life rather than some smaller part
to make this so:
A creative person.
initiating, enacting.
Using their lifetime to find
their original face,
to awaken their own voice,
beyond all learning, habit, thought.
When the human community finally knows itself,
it will discover that it lives at the centre.
People will be artists in their life and labour.*^

*Katherine Morgan Schafler’s The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control;
**Ben Hardy’s Be Your Future Self Now;
^Richard Rohr’s Adam’s Return;
^^Ken Robinson’s Out of Our Minds;
*^M. C. Richards’ Centering; I have replaced Mary Richards’ use of the masculine pronoun to highlight this is for everyone.