It was the road of trials. In the hero’s journey, it is a time of incredible tests.* Jean Houston
Freedom means freedom in the face of three things: (1) the instincts; (2) inherited disposition; and (3) environment.** Viktor Frankl
Our instincts may not always be true, Our dispositions not always helpful, nor our environments nurturing; the easy paths will not provide our freedom from that which holds us back from becoming what we each are capable of becoming – We must test and question, and be prepared to let go.
Yes, we must continue to read and write and cipher, but we also need to embrace an education for liberating the ability to imagine, to dream, and to expand the limits of the possible.* Jean Houston
And we are part of the universe – dreaming creatures made of clay and lightning.** AleXander McManus
Wallace Stevens wrote about the pressure of reality and the power of imagination;^ how the one doesn’t overpower the other, But when they converse and co-create, A new reality is created.
Tramping is a straying from the obvious, even the crookedest road is sometimes too straight.* Stephen Graham
We are not born to succeed at every turn. We are born to try—to dream, to imagine, to strive and to take risks. We are hardwired to practise failing.** Bernadette Jiwa
Magic does not result from a flick of the wrist or some incantational utterance; magic is the child of turning up in places others ignore, continuing when others go home, failing to the embarrassment of others, being super hungry to learn before failing again, and knowing that just as the universe found a way, So will you.
When the universe makes you wonder, all is as it should be.^
The answer Dorothy was looking for was right there in her back yard, but she couldn’t see it. To find it … she had to be shoved out of her normal routine, her comfort zone, in order to gain the perspective necessary to see through her unbelief. Lisa Cron
I mythologise where others pathologise.** Jean Houston
It’s possible to go over and over something that has happened or is happening to us, but it’s no fun, and there’s probably little traction, or we can take it to the myth, moving it from the normal and ordinary to see it in a new way – the obstacle is the way, The problem is the possibility, you’re the agent, not the victim … and all of that – Where you wield your strengths, employ your energies, and live out your values.
religion and philosophy what I’d learned in the churches and schools were all too heavy for this travelling life all that remained to me was poetry as unobtrusive as breathing a poetry like the wind and the maple leaf that I spoke to myself moving over the land* Kenneth White
See it all. Touch it all. Hear it all. Taste it all. Do it all. Appreciate the wonderful physical world.** Derek Sivers
I wonder now whether I was born on the edge of a town where it met the Yorkshire countryside, or born on the edge of the countryside where it met the small market town, but I think I knew the words before I spoke them: I need a day to have fields in it.
More than ever, Spring fills me with awe; I notice with deep down thankfulness how that which had seemed so dead for so long returns to life – An affection, I sense, not only borne of my nearly sixty six years, but from the tens, If not hundreds of thousands of years of nature imprinted on my soul.^
*Philip Newell’s Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul; **Derek Sivers’ How To Live; ^Some who live in cities may report how they are unnerved when they find themselves in nature, but this is the result of a much more recent history, and they need to give themselves time to remember.
Can I, as the Sufis ask, “be who I am before I was”? … To be who I am before I was. It was an impossibility; at least it was the rational, ego awake intelligence. To that intelligence the phrase doesn’t even make sense.* James Carse
If it’s unimportant, never do it. If it’s important, do it every day.** Derek Sivers
We are born in possibility, we must not die in disappointment.
Do we follow the trail of shoulds and miss the path of musts?^
Being creative is not only about thinking. It’s about feeling … Feeling, hunches, subconscious perceptions can all play a central part in creative work, and not only in the arts.* Sir Ken Robinson
Conceptualisation isolates consciousness from its object, thought from experience, and the local consensual reality, from the larger Reality about.** Jean Houston
I had found myself fascinated by a Greater One-Horned Rhinoceros^ in Edinburgh zoo, I wanted to feel its presence by being still and watching it move, but I could also have deepened my listening, my feeling, my smelling – Perhaps I would have more fully sensed what we call a rhino but is far more.
When we discover something then we quickly follow with a name, And when we think we know something we have a shortcut for understanding that leaves a lot of knowledge behind, The kind that may help us be more creative; It’s understandable for anything from fitting everything into a day to having a picture of our world, from communication to human progress, But sometimes we need to be open to our senses.^
*Ken Robinson’s Out of Our Minds; **Jean Houston’s The Possible Human; ^Whose name is Qabid; ^^A simple playful exercise based on John cage’s 4′ 33″ symphony, that you may like to try, involves setting a timer to four minute and thirty three seconds, closing one’s eyes, listening deeply, adding feeling (the sensation of breeze, etc.), followed by smelling, and then opening eyes.
After all, a life without a cause is a life without affect.* Paulo Coelho
Entelechy, a Greek word meaning the dynamic purpose that drives us forward toward realising our essential self, that gives us our higher destiny and the capacities and skills that our destiny needs for its unfolding.** Jean Houston
I am not my cause and you are not yours – Please, god, save us from ourselves; It doesn’t matter what the cause is – We can try different ones until we find one that sticks; What matters is that we can spend ourselves in service to it – that is, to others – and in our spending discover our never-spentness, and everyone can bring entelechy to what they do.^
No choice is inherently the best. What makes something the best choice? You. You make it the best through your commitment to it. Your dedication and actions make any choice great.^^ Living for others is how to live.*^
*Paulo Coelho’s Aleph; **Jean Houston’s A Mythic Life; ^Myths have helped people through millennia to figure out the best ways to live. Perhaps try rewriting your own story as a myth: the challenges you must do something about, what you learn about yourself as you engage with these, especially your talents, energies, and values. ^^Derek Sivers’ How To Live; *^Derek Sivers’ Hell Yeah or No.
THIN|SILENCE 
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