Ritual’s role in all human cultures is to relieve and resolve anxiety, by turning people outward in shared, symbolic acts, modern society has weakened those ritual ties.  Secular rituals, particular rituals whose point is cooperation itself, have proved too feeble to provide that support.*
Richard Sennett

*Richard Sennett’s Together.

The missing ingredients in most conversations are curiosity and willingness to ask questions to which we do not already know the answer.*
Edgar Schein

*Edgar Schein’s Humble Inquiry.

I am bigger than this. And may I be helped to grow to my full size. … I am not concerned with what we like. I am concerned with our power to grasp, to comprehend, to penetrate, and to embrace.*
M. C. Richards

Thus, in the journey of transformation, we participate in these symbolic dramas and actively engage in archetypal existence. We form a powerful sense of identity with the archetypal character, and this mythic being becomes an aspect of ourselves writ large.**
Jean Houston

If we are not as big as we can be,
It’s likely that you and me
know what is stunting our growth,
What we must turn away from, give up, lay down,
Sacrifice.

Beneath the ordinary of our lives
lies the unexplored mythic,
Some greater story –
Perhaps from the past, the now,
Or calling us from an imagined future –
Directing us through
some transformation to
a bigger life.

*M. C. Richards’ Centering;
**Jean Houston’s A Mythic Life.

While interacting within scenes, or talking or thinking about each other in separate scenes, roles reveal and clarify each other by contrast and contradiction.*
Robert McKee

The painting is like a thread that runs through all the reasons for all the other things that makes one’s life.**
Georgia O’Keefe

That moment when someone annoys us
is likely to be accompanied by a want
for them to be more like us;
But it is equally an opportunity to
appreciate their differences,
And allow something deeper to happen.

*Robert McKee’s newsletter: Why Character Differences Are Crucial;
Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals.

As well as opening doors, the children made dens: the doors allowing access and adventure, the dens permitting retreat and shelter. Young children are, as all parents know, natural den makers.*
Robert Macfarlane

In the most connected time in history, we’re quickly losing touch with ourselves.**
Ryder Carroll

I need doors and dens,
Goings and comings,
Outs and ins,
Their rhythm bringing me alive:
Door den door den door den;
Sometimes,
Door door den door den den door den,
Or,
Den door door door den den door den den –
But not,
Door door door door door,
And never,
Den den den den den den.

I hope I remember.

*Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks;
**Ryder Carroll’s The Bullet Journal Method.

Work, after all, at its best, is one of the great human gateways to the eternal and timeless.*
David Whyte

Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.**
Chuck Close

Inspiration follows perseverance.

It’s not only about turning up –
You’ll be glad to here,
But it is about
you
turning up –
Not trying to be someone else;
And though you may have strayed
from your self,
There’s still time
and possibility
to respond to the call of you:
When we arrive on earth,
we are provided with no map for our life journey.
Only gradually,
as our identity forms
and we get an inkling of who we are,
do possibilities begin to emerge
that call us.^

You are not only
naturally you, but
also the person you have chosen to be –
The hard work of becoming you
that you have persevered in.

As for writing, so for life:
And like “flow,” “natural” is one of the words behind 
writer’s block.
So let’s suppose there’s no such thing as writer’s block.
There’s loss of confidence
And forgetting to think
And failing to prepare
And not reading enough
And giving up on patient
And hastening to write
And learning your audience
And never really trying to understand how sentences
work.
Above all, there’s never learning to trust yourself
Or your capacity to learn or think or perceive.^^

When you turn up
again and again,
You will find enough:
If we go down to ourselves, we find that we possess
exactly what we desire.*^

*David Whyte’s Crossing the Unknown Sea;
**Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals;
^John O’Donohue’s To Bless the Space Between Us;
^^Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several short sentences about writing;
*^Simone Weil, from John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty.

This is unexpected;
It’s the moment that you haven’t spent all of your life
building up to –
But here it is.

The next move is yours and may be
more significant than you could imagine:
the
will to be oneself is heroism*.

*Ortega y Gasset, from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey.

Acceleration arises from the desire itself – desire for the life we intuit awaits us. The desire itself translated step by step, day by day, into action is enough to propel us enormous distances.*
David Whyte

When we are in rhythm with our own natures, things flow and balance naturally.**
John O’Donohue

Have we found our whole heart yet?

Or do we still try and move through
Each day with a half-heart?

Willpower is not only
finite, but
appears to meet an equal resistance;
Heartfulness is self-renewing when
delivered faithfully each day in the small actions
that give shape to our desires:
Let yourself be silently drawn by the
strange pull of what you really love. I
t will not lead you astray.^

For me, these daily actions are to
read, journal, write, doodle, converse –
Yours will be different, though
no less powerful.

The sustaining power of rituals
is that they conserve
energy.^^

*David Whyte’s Crossing the Unknown Sea;
**John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty;
^Rumi, from Elle Luna’s The Crossroads of Should and Must;
^^Tony Schwartz and Jim Loehr’s The Power of Full Engagement.

Transience turns everything to air. You look behind and see no signs even of a yesterday that was so intense. Yet in truth, nothing ever disappears, nothing is lost. Everything that happens to us in the world passes into us. It all becomes part of the inner temple of the soul and it can never be lost.*
John O’Donohue

The last time we took an action on an idea, extended ourselves for a friend, and perhaps encouraged ourselves for a new project – these happened because the story worked.**
Seth Godin

We are more substantial than we know,
Our lives filled with so much that will make us
stronger, more imaginative, creative, generous.

The thing that makes the difference between so much
being lost to us, and so to each other,
And instead to be
accessed and engaged with, is
our story.

I want to unfold.
I don’t want to stay folded anymore,
because where I am folded,
I am a lie.^

*John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty;
**Seth Godin’s blog: What’s your story?;
^Rainer Maria Rilke from Keri Smith’s The Wander Society.

While the knowing of the mind is limited by frontiers, the soul has no frontiers.*
John O’Donohue

Whatever powers we have in the world, in our work, in our powers of leadership, in our imaginations, they are the gifts of a much larger world than one when have made for ourselves. They are only part of deeper, inescapable, ancestral imaginings which we join and which inform our ever day and to which, every next day, we introduce our own children. More truthfully, perhaps, we let our children go out into the world and find if for themselves, and report it back to us as if new … .**
David Whyte

There is an ordinary world –
Sport, politics, shopping, comedy shows, food, jobs … –
And there is a special world –
Meaning, myths, inexplicable things, presence, alchemy, connection … .

Dot dot dot … .

Both lists are wonderfully long –
passing through my life.**

More than ever, I know,
I would not want to live in one without the other.

We don’t have to.

The child takes in the world as if it were food. 
And his world nourishes or starves him. 
Nothing escapes his thirst;
secrets are impossible. 
He identifies with his surroundings,
and they live within him unconsciously.^

*John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty;
**David Whyte’s Crossing the Unknown Sea;
^M. C. Richards’ Centering.