No wonder some of our parents forgot to mention soul, as it is apt to distract from Serious Goals and Aspirations. It is as playful and illogical as a kitten, as watchful as God or a baby. It rubs its back lazily against trees. It stops and gasps at beauty and is bathed in it. And sometimes it begins to weep.*
Anne Lamott

Your soul is much larger than you!  You are just along for the ride. When you learn to live there, you will learn to live with everyone and everything else too.**
Richard Rohr

Who taught you about soul?

I bet they were bigger than the
people around them, more
fun, more
inquisitive, more
effusive, more
in wonderment, more
loving, more
forgiving, more
more.

*Anne Lamott’s Dusk Night Dawn;
**Richard Rohr’s Immortal Diamond.

What most of us don’t realise is that when a story grabs us, that conflict, and its resolution, becomes ours.*
Lisa Cron

The only thing that is doing the thing is doing the thing.**
Loopy

Stories are how we live our lives, and we can even be drawn into
stories that are not ours – attentively listening to
A friend or watching a movie can find us anticipating and
experiencing what is happening;
We can find ourselves experiencing our own story as
we tell it or write it down, but,
As amazing as our bodies and minds are for transporting us
into a story, all of the imagining and feeling are there for one thing only,
And that is doing it.

*Lisa Cron’s Story Or Die;
**James Clear’s 3-2-1 newsletter: On the joy of losing, how to set expectations with others, and notes to myself.

And so I began to grapple with the truth that people-pleasers are prone to resist until it halfway kills them: that very often the best way to benefit others is to focus on doing your thing.*
Oliver Burkeman

Why are people gonna be glad they saw your show? And whatever your answer is, rehearse it, grow it, feed into it, make it the main thing.**
Gabe Anderson

How long have you been
holding back on what you have
to give?

Not wanting to upset others, or
sound jarring, or be misunderstood or
be hurt?

Ignoring or missing
your cue to bring what only
you can?

I do it so to compensate for something I think is missing in the common message. My public writing is a counterpoint to complement the popular point. Of course, I don’t think the stuff I say is the only way to go. I’m just the counter melody.^

There it is again: your cue to
enter stage right (or left or
from above or below) – or will you miss it, again?

How do you measure on this little test –
How curious and questioning are you, how deep is
your gladness, how much of you is present in this moment?

Curiosity is one way we know that our souls are functioning. So is deep gladness. So is presence.^^

*Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals;
**Gabe Anderson’s blog: They Want a Great Time;
^Derek Sivers’ Hell Yeah or No;
^^Anne Lamott’s Dusk Night Dawn.

To do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: OWN LIFE it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity.*
George Orwell

If I chose to hide you away, it is for a reason.
I have brought you to this place.
Drink in the silence. Seek solitude.

Listen to the silence.

It will teach you. It will build strength
Let others share it with you.
It is little to be found elsewhere.

Silence will speak more to you in a day than the world of voices can teach you in a lifetime.
Find silence. Find solitude – and having discovered her riches, bind her to your heart.
Frances Roberts

The person happy to be alone is
indeed a dangerous person for
they shall know and be themself,
Untethered, unattached,
Not to do their own thing, but
to bring their different and best for others.

The ultimate aim of the quest must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and power to serve others.^

*George Orwell’s 1984;
**The Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer;
^Joseph Campbell, from Jospeh Campbell and Bill Moyers’ The Power of Myth.

Detached self-observation is essential for knowing our emotional selves. Such self-observation entails stepping back from our experience … Via trials, tribulations, and illuminating revelations, the hero’s journey chronicles the transformation of consciousness from a state of unawarenesss to a state of deep self-understanding.*
Anna Katharina Schaffner

The ultimate aim of the quest must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and power to serve others.*
Joseph Campbell

A journey traditionally references our travel in a day – something different
for each of us; a journal is
our capturing and reflecting upon that travel, revealing
we are more than our activity, we are also
an observer of ourself for the sake of others –
These together provide our balance, our dynamic and static:
We experience the journey differently when reflecting upon it, in turn
enabling us to be more reflective in
the throes of the journey.

*Anna Katharina Schafner’s The Art of Self-Improvement;
**Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers’ The Power of Myth.

If your music comes from your heart and soul, and if you feel it inside yourself, it will affect others in the same way.*
Robert Schumann

No two human beings ever experience two sensations, experiences, feelings, or thoughts identically. Everything changes. Everything is always different.**
Keith Haring

Robert Schumann is almost right –
Here’s his statement again with one change:
If your music comes from your heart and soul,
and if you feel it inside yourself,
it will affect others in some different way.

That the person for whom we
make, compose, sing, doodle, expound, ideate, fix
this thing, feels differently about it is
exactly the point: we want others
to feel alive as only they can feel alive.

And so it continues.

*Steven Isserlis’ Robert Schumann’s Advice to Young Musicians;
**Keith Haring’s Keith Haring Journals.

Here’s another quality of generous questions, questions as social art and civic tools: they may not want answers, or not immediately. They might be raised in order to be pondered, dwelt on, instead.*
Krista Tippett

Given the uniqueness of each of us, it should not be surprising that one of the greatest challenges is to inhabit our own individuality and to discover which life-form best expresses it.**
John O’Donohue

You don’t have to ask the same questions as everyone else –
Indeed, I’d rather you didn’t,
I hope you’ll ask the questions that only you can because
I know that I need them –
Born of your generosity, the
expression of your uniqueness, the ones
no-one else thought to ask:
Why is that?

Perhaps all of our questions are iterations of
the one big inquiry our lives are about? –
It feels so for me:
Who is your true self?
What is your contribution?
And the thousands of other inquiries …
All different ways for asking,
Do you know how utterly amazing
humans can be,
How amazing you are? –
What’s yours?

*Krista Tippett’s Becoming Wise;
**John O’Donohue’s Benedictus; I swapped “question” for “life-form.”

We are, as a species, finding it increasingly hard to imagine that we are part of something which is larger than our own capacity. We have come to accept a heresy of aloofness, a humanist belief in human difference, and we suppress wherever possible the checks and balances on us – the reminders that the world is greater than us or that we are contained within it. On almost every front, we have a turning away from felt relationship with the natural world.*
Robert Macfarlane

When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realise, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money.**
Alanis Obomsawim

How’s the universe’s great experiment of
consciousness working out? –
Here on this blue planet hanging in space, most species
seem to be doing okay, except
for one – the one that
is capable of providing words for
what is happening to Earth, the one that
knows how it’s happened and how to
begin sorting it out, but also the one that
resists;
Steven Pressfield writes that Resistance asks
two questions of us:
How bad do you want it?
Why do you want it?^ –
He goes on to suggest that
when it comes to the first, we need
full commitment, and for the second,
We must admit to having
no other choice – whilse also wanting
fun and beauty^^ …
For our children?
For our greater body, the Earth?
To keep the great experiment rolling?

A few places to play?:
The Carbon Almanac and it’s daily blog,
Trendwatching, too.

*Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places;
**Seth Godin’s The Carbon Almanac;
^Steven Pressfield’s Do the Work;
^^I hope that our solutions to climate change will be replete with fun and beauty – the sooner we start the more likely this will be.

Scale is rarely the first signal of important work.*
Seth Godin

Serious games are all around us, whether we choose to play them or not.*
Seth Godin

If this important work
comes from deep within you, then
you must keep going –
This is your faith;
Do not be pulled off course,
Do not compare your work with others,
Learn from them but
do no repeat them,
Your instinct, your intuition,
This, too, is your faith;
Numbers are not important at first, and
they may never be important –
One is the smallest audience we require,
Remaining a special number for me, and
you may be the one.^

*Seth Godin’s blog: The NSE confusions;
**Seth Godin’s This is Strategy;
^You’re welcome to get in touch to find out more about my dreamwwhispering work: geoffrey@thinsilence.org.

I guess that’s all I’ve got left, then. Loving what’s left with the time I have left.*
Hannah

We are always wrong in some essential way about what our story is. We are never living out exactly the story we think we are. We are never exactly the character in the story we mean to be. But to be wrong in these ways is what makes it a story, openended and unpredictable, instead of a fixed plot rolling out to its foreknown conclusion.**
James Carse

Look for the wild in you,
It’s still there, no matter how much
parenting, education, work-life, enculturisation, and life experiences
have sought to make you predictable;
No matter what has preceded
this moment, your wild makes it possible to
be fully your limited, unpredictable, imperfect, unfolding, and
glorious self.

What’s your next thought,
Write it down –
No matter how crazy:
You need one small way to live this thought,
To cross the threshold,
The rest will follow,
Though it’s probably not what’s expected.^

Once you have crossed the threshold, if it really is your adventure – if it is a journey that is appropriate to your deep spiritual need or readiness – helpers will come along the way to provide magical aid.^^

*Brian McLaren’s Faith After Doubt;
**James Carse’s Breakfast At the Victory;
^You can always share it with me;
^^Joseph Campbell’s Pathways to Bliss.