Take a moment to enter the Doodle Zone … the the doodler’s breathing slows; her heart rate decreases; her mind relaxes; her focus sharpens. She find herself momentarily a picture of relaxed tranquility amid the hustle and bustle of daily life. She also find herself surprised at the insights that result from this seemingly insignificant endeavour.*
Sunni Brown

I didn’t mind the wait –
In fact, I hoped it would go on a little longer,
I became more aware of the people around me,
Their interactions;
Getting the drinks became more of an experience.

The Doodle Zone is everywhere;
All we need to carry is a plain paged notebook
and black pen, and, best of all,
Everyone can doodle.

*Sunni Brown’s The Doodle Revolution.

Resist chronology
It will always impose itself.
Break the flow of time once it begins.
Better yet, resist it from the start.*
Verlyn Klinkenborg

To migrate away from the named places (territories whose topography was continuous with memory and community) to the coasts (unmapped islands, the anonymous forests) was to reach land that did not bear the marks of occupation. It was to act out a movement from history to eternity.**
Robert Macfarlane

To be peregrini, wanderers, is a matter of heart
and soul;
Otherwise we would have to cast our flimsy craft
upon the chopping waters, and wait to discover where
winds and tides have taken us.

There are timeless places to explore all around us,
In the eternities of reading, or
spending time with a fascinating other, or
working on some art or artisanship, or
wandering through sagely nature … .

*Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several short sentences about writing;
**Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places.

What is the new horizon in you that wants to be seen?*
John O’Donohue

*John O’Donohue’s Benedictus.

There is only to be a continuing search for more – as of a mind eager to grow. … a world of change, new thoughts, new things, new magnitudes, and continuing transformation, not of petrification, rigidity, and some canonised found “truth.”*
Joseph Campbell

Cultural change often affects the young first.**
Jean Twenge

Until more recently in human history,
There have always been myths, guiding stories
to help us navigate our existence and potential,
Mythologist Joseph Campbell concluding:
Mythology is apparently
coeval with mankind.*

Tied with our understanding of who we are
and the contribution we bring,
The old myths are no longer able to serve us as we need them to,
And whilst we continue to advance on the outside,
Our inside worlds can be unexplored, unsuccoured, even
scary places.

My sense is that some of the old myths,
Re-imagined, will nurture us,
But each of us is capable of shaping our own myth, most likely
Woven with the more timeless from the ancient that always allowed
For this cocreating to be the best of ways, understanding that we are
shapers, makers, artists, imagineers.

A morning when you become a pure vessel
For what wants to ascend from silence …
To reach beyond silence
And the wheel of repitition. …
In order to come to birth
In a clean line of form,
That claims from time
A rhythm not yet heard
That calls space to
A different shape.^

*Joseph Campbell’s Myths to Live By;
**Jean Twenge’s iGen;
^John O’Donohue’s Benedictus: For the Artist at the Start of the Day.

Why are we not better than we are?*
Eric Trethewey

We probably are,
But it’s all about the editing.

Editing takes time,
It’s focused work
on our own that
takes our vital energy with the
door closed.

And the great thing about being tired of our story
is that stories can be edited.
Stories can be fixed.
Stories can go from dull to exciting,
from rambling to focused, and
from drudgery to read to exhilarating to live.**

*Maria Popova’s The Marginalian: Why Are We Not Better: How Poetry Saves Lives;
**Donald Miller’s Hero On a Mission.

Each society and each individual usually explores only a tiny fraction of their horizon of possibility.*
Yuval Noah Harari

What I think is that a good life is one hero journey after another. Over and over again, you are called to new adventure, you are called to new horizons.**
Joseph Campbell

The realisation that our lives are stories
comprising a number of significant elements that
we may arrange in a number of different ways, makes it possible
for our experience of life to significantly alter:
Whether we like it or not,
the lives we live are stories.
Our lives have a beginning, middle, and end,
and inside those three acts we play many roles.^

We may have tried to alter our lives before, and
this has not been our experience –
A different role, a different place –
But what is needed is to look beneath the surface of this story:
The secret to diagnosing a problem with a broken scene
lies in its subtext.^^

To find our deepest joy meets the world’s
greatest need, wrapped in
talents, environments and values, is to
open new horizons:
Being more vulnerable,
we reach out, we extend our hands
and your hearts to others who are wounded.
It is only at such a pass that we grow into a larger sense
of what life is about and act, therefore,
out of a deeper and nobler nature.*^

If the story doesn’t work,
We can go to the subtext again,
rewrite it, begin over;
There are no rules as to how many time we can do this, and
eventually our new horizon will open:
Pathfinding is at the core of creating
with significance,
and finding the path is largely the work of
finding non-paths
until the path is evident.^*

Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm
For your soul sense the world that awaits you.⁺

*Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens;
**Joseph Campbell’s Pathways to Bliss;
^Donald Miller’s Hero On a Mission;
^^Robert McKee‘s newsletter: The Secret to Fixing Broken Scenes;
*^Jean Houston’s A Mythic Life;
^*Seth Godin’s The Song of Significance;
⁺John O’Donohue’s Benedictus: For a New Beginning.

Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always –
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing no less than everything) …*
T. S. Eliot

Knowledge allows us to get our bearings, but it’s imagination and action that give its the forward motion we need to start and finish.**
Bernadette Jiwa

Knowing how stuff gets in the way of life-in-all-its-fullness,
Jesus of Nazerath
encouraged his disciples instead to seek the kingdom –
And it’s remains true that there’s more than the latest fashion and
quirky restaurant;
they’re fun but they don’t deed our sense of
destiny,
Our greater story:
The basic story of the hero journey
Involves giving up where you are,
going into the realm of adventure,
coming to some kind of
symbolically rendered realisation,
and then returning to the field of normal life.^

But to know our destiny is not enough,
We must put it into action, and
this is not easy at all;
Joseph Campbell identifies three outcomes to
the returning to the normal life with the
realisation we have discovered:
There will be no reception for it, and so we give up and
return to the “fashion and food,” the “bread and circus” life;
We only give the world what it wants (serving food and fashion with our discovery); or,
We slowly teach the world what it is that we are returning with –
It is in the actioning that we’ll figure this out.

Viva el reino.

*David Whyte’s Crossing the Unknown Sea;
**Bernadette Jiwa’s blog The Story of Telling: Start to Finish;
^Joseph Campbell’s Pathways to Bliss.

Society wants us to live a planned existence, following paths that have been travelled by others.  Tried and true.  The known, the expected, the controlled, the safe.  The path of the wanderer is not this.  The path of the wanderer is an experiment with the unknown.  To idle.  To daydream.*
Keri Smith

Life had gotten too busy. It seemed as if my existence had become just one long to-do list. I had forgotten about my dreams, my goals, my what-ifs, my what-if-I-coulds.**
Amy Haines

Humans are at their best when
living within a larger story,
Becoming lost or diminished or both
in the ordinary and everyday;
A myth provides wellbeing, provides
the nurture we need to keep developing
throughout our lives as we are capable of;
Joseph Campbell likens this to a joey growing in
their mother’s pouch:
Now, in order to aid personal development,
mythology does not have to be reasonable,
it doesn’t have to be rational,
it doesn’t have to be true;
it has to be comfortable,
like a pouch.^

The psalmist reflects this in declaring:
I have calmed and quieted my soul,
… my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.
O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time on and for evermore.^^

Joseph Campbell outlines how a myth
must function on four levels:
Providing consciousness with a sense of meaning;
Presenting an image of the Cosmos to maintain mystical awe;
Validating and maintaining a certain sociological system;
Psychologically and pedagogically carrying a person through life.

He argues that the
second and third of these have been taken over
by secular orders and so our traditional myths
no longer serve us as we need them to;
We need new myths or to rethink the old,
or a combination of the two if we are to
move into stories of wellbeing,
To a calm and quiet soul:
In contrast to the Western reliance on drugs
and verbal therapies, other traditions around the world
rely on mindfulness, movement, rhythms and action.*^

The psychiatrist Carl Jung decided that he needed to find and
enact his own myth,
Discovering it in building,
Describing it as his “task of tasks,” it led to him
creating his retreat home in Ascona,
A place where many more thoughts and ideas were
to emerge and grow his work.

Jung had returned to his childhood for
the symbols that most spoke to him,
And he found memories of building with small stones
that led him to build with big stones;
Campbell proffers:
The way to find your own myth
is to determine those traditional symbols
that speak to you and use them,
you might say,
as bases for meditation.
Let the work for you.^

In dreamwhispering,
This is what we are about.

*Keri Smith’s The Wander Society;
**Ryder Carroll’s The Bullet Journal Method;
^Joseph Campbell’s Pathways to Bliss;
^^Psalm 131:2-3;
*^Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score.

Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisite for growth?: the openness to experience events, and willingness to be changed by them.*
Warren Berger

Clues that you might not be trying hard enough.
You usually succeed.
You rarely feel like an imposter.
You already know what you need to know.
You’re confident it’s going to work.**
Seth Godin

All of this focus on the Self –
Isn’t it unhealthy?

The thing is,
When we focus on who we are then
we notice what we can do,
And that means what we can do for others:
The more we explore who we are,
the more we become invisible.
“When we study the self
it disappears.”^

A true personal myth will lead us to a
truly social myth:
And it is the myth we live for others that satisfies
most of all.

May I live this day
Compassionate of heart,
Clear in word,
Gracious in awareness,
Courageous in thought,
Generous in love.^^

*Warren Berger’s Glimmer;
**Seth Godin’s blog: Clues that you might not be trying hard enough;
^Lewis Hyde’s A Primer for Forgetting;
^^John O’Donohue’s Benedictus: Matins.

What is the new horizon in you that wants to be seen?
John O’Donohue

Most innovative projects … tend to begin with someone venturing out into the world, looking around, and noticing a problem.
Warren Berger

It’s likely that you and I will need a problem in order to unwrap or break
open
More of who we are:
This is what Jung calls individuation,
to see people and yourself in terms of what you indeed are,
not in terms of all those archetypes that your are projecting around
and that have been projected on you.^

There’s always more, and
easy just won’t do it.

Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.^^

*John O’Donohue’s Benedictus;
**Warren Berger’s Glimmer;
^Joseph Campbell’s Pathways to Bliss;
^Bernard Malamud, from Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals.