Must needs solitude.*
Elle Luna

Alone is my before and after.

*Elle Luna’s The Crossroads of Should and Must.

You have your own stories, the dramatic and more ordinary moments where what has gone wrong becomes an opening to more of yourself and part of your gift to the world. This is the beginning of wisdom.*
Krista Tippett

I’m really glad it didn’t work;
I’d been trying for sixteen years in three different places, but,
finally,
I stopped the striving –
Maybe, if I’d have got it to work, I would be still in that role,
But that would be a shame, because when I embraced getting it wrong, I was
set upon a path that has carried me to
the most fulfilling service I have been able to make, and the path
continues to unfold.

*Krista Tippett’s Becoming Wise.

Worldly limitations impose a new and welcome humility, for they force us to treat things as they are rather than as we wish them to be … Every playground has two basic properties, which are two sides of the same coin: boundaries and contents.*
Ian Bogost

Poetry takes something that we know already and turns it into something new.**
T. S. Eliot

When there are no boundaries.

Limitations make life richer –
When we see something for what it truly is, then
we can begin to play, to use our imagination, to
make something different, so
we pay humble attention:
Our life experience will equal
what we pay attention to.^

As a player, we may feel that what we do
is quite ordinary, but our everyday and obvious
may appear to others as freshness and originality,
Non-obvious and hopeful.

We begin the play by embracing the limitations, including
our own.

*Ian Bogost’s Play Anything;
**Madeleine L’Engle’s Walking on Water;
^William James, from Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing.

Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.*
Mary Oliver

There are things that we avoid looking at too closely. If we looked, really saw what was happening, we’d have to change our minds, admit we were mistaken, refactor our priorities or take action.**
Seth Godin

See deeply,
Be wowed more often,
Have something important to share;
Mary and Seth are likely thinking of
a superabundance of subjects
and objects,
In this moment, I’m pondering the
interaction we have with each other.

*Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing;
**Seth Godin’s blog: Avert your eyes.

Askesis (n) a place of confinement without which there can be no energy or purpose*

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is the power to choose your response.**
Viktor Frankl

We expand the space between
stimulus and response through
humility (who I am, not who I am not) and
gratitude (open to all I have, though may not own) and
faithfulness (small offering of who I am and what I have) –
These are my discoveries in
the twenty eight or so years following the provision of
my first askesis, wherein
I faced my shortcomings, but also
the deeper longings for my life;
I realise that I have since fashioned a daily confinement
in which I seek to embrace energy and purpose –
The hope being to emerge with
integrity (a connectedness to all and everything), with
wholeness (enoughness rather than completeness) and
perseverance (to complete whatever the distance is before me).

It’s not so much a place of magic, but,
I hope,
Centring and grounding.

*A definition from Eugene Peterson’s Under the Unpredictable Plant;
**Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing.

As soon as humans had completed the evolutionary process, they found that a longing for transcendence was built into their condition.*
Karen Armstrong

There’s nothing you can do that’s more important than being fulfilled. You become a sign, you become a signal, transparent to transcendence; in this way you will find, live, and become a realisation of your own personal myth.**
Joseph Campbell

Moses Mendelssohn confessed:
There lies in me an
irresistible drive towards
completeness and perfection.^ –
I understand this longing, though
I concluded that I’d probably choose
beauty over perfection.

I do want to be the best me
I can be, though, and to make the best
contribution that I can bring, and
I enjoy the thought of Viktor Frankl that
we are each an unrepeatable imperfection
without whom the world is the poorer –
A thought to play with on our
transcendent journeys.

(Thank you to those who have recently subscribed to thin|silence; I hope I encourage you to share the beauty of your unrepeatable imperfection.)

*Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth;
**Joseph Campbell’s Pathways to Bliss;
^Alan Lightman’s The Transcendent Brain.

Heroism permeates ordinary life, in repetitions far smaller and weirder than the flow of the seasons and the years.*
Ian Bogost

I do believe in the materiality of the mind, but I confess that I am still mystified by the nature of consciousness.**
Alan Lightman

Another word for selfless moments?
Heroism?
I’d like to take all of the consciousness
that I have, and be more
present,
Using it less to worry about yesterday
or tomorrow, and more to
enjoy the beauty all around me, to
read and doodle, to
be with people and
do them some good, to
bring beauty and harmony to those in
stress and discord,
Rather than being the source of
the latter to them:
The source of all art
is the human psyche’s primal need for
the resolution of stress and discord through
beauty and harmony.^

*Ian Bogost’s Play Anything;
**Alan Lightman’s The Transcendent Brain;
^Robert McKee‘s newsletter: The World Is Ready For Your Story.

Most of my spiritual breakthroughs have been against my will. I am mortal, impermanent, imperfect, scared, often uptight and even petty, but wow, what a beautiful sunset.*
Anne Lamott

There’s no shortage in today’s world of wicked problems wrapped around beautiful questions – meaning that somewhere deep inside that thorny issue, embedded at the core lies an undiscovered question of great value.**
Warren Berger

Is perfect always beautiful?
Is beautiful always perfect?
If I had to choose one over the other –
Except for things like planes and everyone
who keeps them in the air –
I would probably choose beauty,
Maybe because it offers an
old wicked problem like me some
hope – that is a form of energy waiting to be
converted
into a different energy:
To hope is a state of being. 
It is an inner readiness,
that of intense but not-yet-spent
activeness.^ –
To find the beautiful question, then,
Lying at the centre
of each one of us.

*Anne Lamott’s Almost Everything;
**Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question;
^Erich Fromm’s The Revolution of Hope.

Traditionally, a journey was a rhythm of three forces: time, self and space … The greed for destination obliterates the journey … When you regain a sense of your life as a journey of discovery, you return to a rhythm of yourself. When you take time to travel with reverence, a richer life unfolds before you.*
John O’Donohue

It’s so easy to belittle and resent the things we’re good at. We think, ‘since I’m good at it, it just must be something everyone is good at, so it’s not worth much’ or, ‘I’m good at this but it’s not as valuable as being good at THAT’.**
Gabe Anderson

You are made for discovery with reverence –
A part of what you are discovering, not
apart from it,
And whilst life is limited to
discovering only a portion of all that is,
Yet this will help you not
to be lost in space, to
know yourself, and
be at peace with time and what may be
achieved over a lifetime rather than immediately or
sooner.

*John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty;
**Gabe Anderson’s blog: Things You’re Good At.

I tell the six year olds that if they want to have great lives, they need to read a lot or listen to the written word. If they rely only on their own thinking, they will not notice the power that is all around them, the force-be-with-you kind of power.*
Annie Dillard

Pay close, foolish, even absurd attention to things.**
Ian Bogost

He was ten or eleven,
A “smart-mouth” who thought
he knew it all;
I can only hope that,
Sooner rather than later –
And way sooner than I did –
He will discover the wonders
that are all around him,
Not only in people but
in all things, leading to
curiosity and observation and widening the search and
reflection and making something that is quite
ingenious.

*Anne Lamott’s Almost Everything;
**Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing.