Each of us is a voyager. This is what the universe invites us to be in our lives and relationships, because the universe keeps changing, unfolding, evolving.*
Philip Newell

When we get to where we’re going … perhaps we should stop. Unless the going was the point.**
Seth Godin

*Philip Newell’s Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul;
**Seth Godin’s blog: When we get to where we’re going.

This is the song of significance. This is what motivates people to do the work that can’t be automated, mechanised, or outsourced. And this is the song that humans yearn to sing together.*
Seth Godin

For I know no trouble in life which does not stand as a counterpoint to some positive capacity.**
M. C. Richards

Significance grows in the soil of humility;
If we embrace who we are –
Not grasping for more than we are or
less than we are –
Then we find freedom in who we are and:
Innovation is the child of freedom and
the parent of prosperity.^

Which brings us to another reality:
Significance grows towards need;
What we love to do will
change someone’s life for the better.

*Seth Godin’s The Song of Significance;
M. C. Richards’s Centering;
^Matt Ridley’s How Innovation Works.

And so it’s worth asking: what actions – what acts of generosity or car for the world, what ambitious schemes for investments in the distant future – might it be meaningful to undertake today, if you would come to terms with never seeing the results?*
Oliver Burkeman

If you’ve signed yup for way finding, forgive yourself if it takes a little (or a lot) longer. Because if we knew the right answer we’ll have found it already. That’s the hard part.**
Seth Godin

… can you help?

I may need to pass this on to you,
If time runs out;
Not to do it the exact same way,
but somehow,
In your way,
To keep making the gift available
to whoever knows it is for them.

*Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks;
**Seth Godin’s blog: The wayfinding premium.

Spiritual maturity is largely a growth in seeing, and full seeing seems to take most of your lifetime, with a huge leap in your final years.*
Richard Rohr

The world is alive, generous, and waiting patiently for us to figure it out.**
Tom de Blassos

We were told by our parents,
“You look with your eyes, not with your hands,”
But that isn’t true –
There are many ways of looking:
Our looking develops our talents,
And our talents grow our looking.

We are made for looking;
Sometimes we get our looking wrong,
But sometimes we get it very right, and
we want to sing a song of joy –
And when we do, it’s as though the world joins in.

Determine never to stop looking –
You’ve got the look, too.

*Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward;
**Claudia Bedrick and Maria Popova’s A Velocity of Being.

Sometimes I feel caught between two opposing selves — the “false self” imposed by society and what I would call my “true self.” How often we confuse the two and assume society’s mould to be our true self. … I saw that the entity I had taken to be “me” was really a fabrication. My true nature, I realized, was much more real, both uglier and more beautiful than I could have imagined.*
Thich Nhat Hanh

When Eve saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her Adam, who was with her, and he ate.**

Alas, there are no shortcuts to wisdom;
Knowledge remains only that
until we begin to live with or in spite of it.

Seeking to know ourselves is the
beginning of our path to wisdom:
We will not enjoy all that we discover about ourselves, for sure –
There will be some enjoyable surprises, too;
If we try to begin somewhere else,
This is where we’ll be led back to:
It’s the human condition.
We call ourselves homo sapiens sapiens
… which means”to taste” or “to know.”
The species that knows and knows that it knows.
And noe maybe we need to live ourselves into
owning that name
by cultivating awareness
and awareness of awareness itself
and let that be in some sense the guide
as to what we’re going to invest in … .^

*Maria Popova’s The Marginalian blog: How the Great Zen Master and Peace Activist Thich Nhat Hanh Found Himself and Lost His Self in a Library Epiphany;
**Genesis 3:6;
^Jon Kabat-Zinn from Krista Tippett’s Becoming Wise.

Talent is cheap – you have to be obsessed, otherwise, you are going to give up.*
John Baldessari

I found myself telling him … that I felt stopped at a crossroads, looking for direction, unsure of my next steps. I told him I was beginning to feel a few icy tendrils of cynicism around what work might actually mean to most of the adult world, and with a long work life still ahead of me, I wanted to know what it took to find a life and a work such as he had found, a work into which you could really put your heart and soul.**
David Whyte

If Richard Sennett is even half-right^ about how
the first industrial revolution took away people’s skilful hands, and
the second industrial revolution incarnated in the computer
took away our skilful minds,
Then AI will only compound our forfeitures.

We are meaning-making creatures, and a part of this
is meaningful work to shape our days with purpose.

There’s never been a more critical time –
How often have these words been spoken through history? –
To identify our talents in which a deep passion resides,
To notice what we are doing when we are feeling highly energised,
To inscribe these things within our values,
To stop waiting for someone else to dictate our story and
to pen our own.

*Austin Kleon’s blog: You have to be obsessed;
**David Whyte’s Crossing the Unknown Sea;
^Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman.

To know yourself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility.*
Brother Dave

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.**
Jesus of Nazareth

Who is the most humble person in the world?

No-one knows, but they must be having
a whale of a time,
The grandest of adventures.

I come to this place at the beginning of the day
to calm and quiet my soul,
To meet with larger thoughts from
greater lives –
Not to become more like them or
do what they do,
But to become more who I am
and do what I must do:
Sooner or later we must distinguish between
what we are not and what we are.
We must accept the fact that we are not
what we would like to be.
We must cast of our false, exterior self
like the cheap and shiny garment it is … .
We must find our real self,
in all its elemental poverty,
but also in it great and
very simple dignity … .*

*Ian Morgan Cron’s The Road Back to You;
**Matthew 5:5;
^Thomas Merton from Ian Morgan Cron’s The Road Back to You.

Everything in my life, it seemed, had led to this point, this perfect point, poised between the unwashed white and blue of temple and sky.*
Jean Houston

Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey
helps us to see that there is both an ordinary world
and a special world;
There is the ordinary world of
catching buses and spinach between the teeth,
But there is also a mythical world of
meaning and significance.

Systems thinker Peter Senge informs us
that there is both a reinforcing loop and a
balancing loop to any system;**
When there is a problem,
We must go to the balancing loop
to fix it –
And on the brighter side,
When it’s working well,
It takes us to
our perfect, timeless point
of being and doing.

Our myth, or story, is the balancing loop
for what we experience as life-in-all-its-fullness.

*Jean Houston’s A Mythic Life;
**Peter Senge’s The 5th Discipline.

We connect to an inner place of wonder, and thus we are open to recognising the spirit of wonder in the world around us.*
Kelvy Bird

Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.**

Silence and wonder,
These excite me;
If these were all my life were about,
I would be content, I feel.

And yet there is more,
For I find I must break the silence,
Allow the wonder to pour into inspiration and
into activity:
All you have to do is write one true sentence.
Write the truest sentence you know.^
Yet, I know where I must come
first of all.

*Kelvy Bird’s Generative Scribing;
**1 Kings 19:11-12;
^Ernest Hemingway, from Bernadette Jiwa’s What Great Storytellers Know.

And no matter how hard you look, you’re almost invisible
to yourself,
Camouflaged by familiarity.*
Verlyn Klinkenborg

When you feel the rush of fear as you put your point of view, your art, or your idea out into the world, this is not an invitation to step back into the shadows; it’s a sign that you’re at the edge, right where you should be.**
Martin Amor and Alex Pellew

Do what you are passionate about:
It will save you from the overfamiliar that even now is
closing in around you,
And will save you from those lullabies of
“easy and repeat.”

Your passion reminds you that
you are more than this,
A Human Becoming,
Journeying, never arriving,
The worries and fears telling you how
you are still alive.

*Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several short sentences about writing;
**Martin Amor and Alex Pellew’s The Idea in You