I had the thought
to occasionally post some doodles from the archives
of 2014 to the present for the
particular day.

You have travelled too fast over false ground;
Now your soul has come to take you back.
Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through.*
John O’Donohue

When I let go of the destination for a moment …
When I let go of the destination for a moment …
When I let go of the destination for a moment …
When I let go of the destination for a moment …
When I let go of the destination for a moment …
When I let go of the destination for a moment …
When I let go of the destination for a moment …

*John O’Donohue’s Benedictus: For One Who is Exhausted).

It’s a grand thing to get leave to live.*
Nan Shepherd

Your big break. Some people get one. Most people don’t. But if you’re reading this, it means that you’ve received more than one, perhaps a countless number of, little breaks.**
Seth Godin

I guess we’d all agree on how
it’s important to live before we die,
Given the biggest break of all –
That of being here.
The odds were stacked against us, but here we are
with daily options on how we want to live.
The Windigo is a Anishinaabe legendary monster that
exists to consume and consumes to exist,
But the more the Windigo ingests the hungrier it becomes:
Windigo is the name for that within us
which cares more for its own survival
than for anything else.^
Robin Wall Kimmerer sees the Windigo’s footprints
in all of our corporate and personal destructiveness:
industrially-blemished lakes, deforested
hillsides, coalmine-wasted
countryside, poisoned
waterways,
New kitchens replaced with
newer kitchens, Clothes
we never wear, food
going to waste.
The Windigo does not live, perhaps does not even survive, but
only exists:
What native people once sought to rein in,
we are now asked to unleash in a
systematic policy of sanctioned greed.^
None of us have failed to be taken in by this monster, but
there’s another part to our story –
Perhaps we have noticed how we recover when we give,
When we notice our talents, energies and values, turning
these outwards in giftedness to others, we find
life is richer.

*Philip Newell’s Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul;
**Seth Godin’s blog: Your big break;
^Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass.

When in doubt, come back to the stories.*
Chris Guillebeau

When we see in new ways and have the courage to speak it, we access a deep power of the soul.**
Philip Newell

Some have forgotten and wandered away
from their story,
Others have not explored theirs.
But we all have a story, the best place
to return to when we are lost.

*Chris Guillebeau’s The Happiness of Pursuit;
**Philip Newell’s Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul.

He views his musical practice as a chance to enrol others in a journey, and the volunteers in his orchestras find that this journey -the chance to lean into possibility, to fail, to connect, to hear and to be heard – changes their lives.*
Seth Godin, of Ben Zander)

the only essential is this: the give must always move**
Lewis Hyde

If you are passionately following your songline, it’s likely that
you were influenced by one or more following theirs,
Which also means that others may be inspired by you,
To find and to follow their songline.

*Seth Godin’s blog: Home is wherever my cello is;
**Lewis Hyde’s The Gift.

Our social patterns such that the successful man is not supposed to be afraid or bored or lonely. He must find this world the best of all worlds; in order to have the best chance for promotion he must repress fear as well as doubt, depression, boredom, or hopefulness.*
Erich Fromm

These perigrini, as they were also known, viewed their wanderings, or peregrinations, as a process of seeking their places of “resurrection” – they were searching for their path of new beginnings.**
Philip Newell

Before the path of fresh beginnings will appear, we must
admit this is not where we want to be.

*Erich Fromm’s The Revolution of Hope;
**Philip Newell’s Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul.

True originality in storytelling is the meeting of form and content.*
Robert McKee

Brigid challenges us to be people on our knees, that is, people midwifing new births for this moment in time. The good news is that we do not have to create the births. Our role, rather, is to midwife what is trying to come forth from deep within the human soul.**
Philip Newell

We are each capable of birthing something new;
If we follow our must
this will be the way of it.
But as well as having something worth sharing, we also require
a way to share it, else
the rest of us will miss out –
And as this is a sacred thing, we want to avoid that.
If you can’t find the right container
for your contents,
There’ll be someone who’ll help you find one, or
they have a container and are looking for some
contents.

*Robert McKee‘s newsletter: Why Content is Key;
**Philip Newell’s Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul.

What you love to do with grow in you, so long as you stay true to who you are and allow yourself to change and develop freely.*
Hugh Macleod

Pay attention to the world, and train yourself to notice the details that others miss.
Rohit Bhargava

I must continue on a path of
openness and change.
Some may argue that I will be an insubstantial man,
Blown this way or that by the next idea I meet, that
I will lack belief and conviction.
Yet it is in this tension that I am who I am,
That we are who we are:
When we both remain the same and change:
Self-knowledge might be the most difficult of life’s rewards –
the hardest to earn and the hardest to bear.
To know yourself is to know that you are not an unassailable fixity
amid the entropic storm of the universe
but a set of fragilities in constant flux.
To know yourself is to know that you are not
invulnerable.^

*gapingvoid’s blog: Life without dissonance;
**Rohit Bhargava’s Non Obvious 2019;
^Maria Popova’s The Marginalian: Bob Dylan on Vulnerability, the Meaning of Integrity, and Music as an Instrument of Truth.

Far too often in this confused world we are faced with choices, all of which are wrong, and the only thing we can do, in fear and trembling, is to choose the least wrong,, without pretending to ourselves that it is right.
Madeleine L’Engle

Our hope lies not primarily in human reason and scientific analysis but in the untamed regions of intuition and human imagination within us.**
Philip Newell

What to focus on?
What to let go of?
Which way to go?
Where to remain?
Where to leave?
Who to listen to?
Who to ignore?
To be clear –
And we want to be clear –
Is not easy.
The lack of clarity in which we find ourselves
has a certain current and speed to it,
Carrying us along, but,
We can haul ourselves out
and, for a moment,
Listen,
Listen to the untamed life within,
More song than compass,
Or poem,
Distilling clarity from confusion.

*Madeleine L’Engle’s Walking on Water;
**Philip Newell’s Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul.

The nuances observed by specialised vocabularies are evaporating from common usage, burnt off by capital, apathy and urbanisation. The terrain beyond the city fringe has become progressively more understood in terms of large generic units (‘field,’ ‘hill,’ ‘valley,’ ‘wood’). It has become a blandscape.*
Robert Macfarlane

My frame was not hidden from you
    when I was made in the secret place,
    when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
 Your eyes saw my unformed body;
    all the days ordained for me were written in your book
    before one of them came to be.**

The thousands of old words in Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks
come from noticing,
People noticing the variety and subtleties of their world and
creating words for these, words for:
weather, water, holes in the ground, rocks, trees, frosts …
Gathered and listed by Macfarlane as lands –
Flatlands,
Uplands,
Waterlands,
Coastlands,
Underlands,
Northlands,
Edgelands,
Earthlands,
Woodlands.
Listing because we are forgetting,
Forgetting because we are disconnecting;
Forgetting our ancient mother, as the psalm proffers, and
disconnecting from or forgetting ourselves as a result.
Macfarlane is helping me to remember, as is
Robin Wall Kimmerer, from
her own experiences as a Native American, who shares with me today
how the guidelines of the Honourable Harvest –
Including ‘Never take the first, never take the last,’
Take only what you need,’
‘Never take more than half’ – are not written down or even
spoken often, but are
reinforced in small acts of daily life.^
I cannot hope to be as knowledgeable as Macfarlane who
walks back and forth through landscapes, or to be as traditioned and heritaged as Wall Kimmerer,
But I will keep reading to learn, I will
stop to notice a sunrise or sunset, I will look for the first
flowers of Spring, and be alert to the scents of nature as the year warms up,
I will notice the waves along a shore, walk transfixed by the
majesty of trees, be deeply moved by the sway of
a grass meadow, trying to remember in many small ways
I am the earth and the earth is me.

We don’t have to figure out everything by ourselves: there are intelligences other than our own teachers all around us. Imagine how much less lonely the world could be.^

*Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks;
**Psalm 138:15,16;
^Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass.