Today’s breath and meditation practice is a long one. If you could use the kind of reprieve and sanity that only silence, breath, and discipline can offer, this one is for you.
Lately I have been quiet here, not because I have not had anything to say, but because I have been busy finishing spring programs. Also, I have recently returned from Ma/Re, an immersive gathering in the South of France centered on the theme: Future Ancestry. We explored what it means to recognize and honor what shapes us while participating fully in how we are shaping the world to be more equitable and hospitable for all.
It left me thinking about something I return to often. We do not become ourselves all at once. We become ourselves in relationship with the people we love, the places that change us, the losses that humble us, the questions we cannot outrun, the practices that steady us, and the words that quietly take up residence inside us. We are always being shaped by what we repeatedly return to.
So today, instead of offering you my words, I would like to invite you into the library I have been building within myself.
Its shelves are filled with underlined books, journals, margins, notebooks, phone notes, half-remembered conversations, and dog-eared pages. They hold other people’s insights; sentences I reach for when my mind becomes too loud, when grief arrives, when love rearranges me, when beauty catches me off guard, or when I simply need to remember we all carry the same struggles and same exquisite beauty.
Perhaps one of these voices will meet you exactly where you are. Or perhaps it will leave behind a sentence you carry far longer than you expect.
In no particular order:
“However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.” Joan Didion
“Start with the impossible. Proceed calmly toward the improbable. No worry, there are at least five exits.” Father Daniel Berrigan
“I said to the sun, ‘Tell me about the big bang.’ The sun said, ‘it hurts to become.” Andrea Gibson
“Attention is the beginning of devotion.” Mary Oliver
"A life without astonishment becomes administrative." Martin Shaw
In many shamanic societies, if you came to a medicine person complaining of being disheartened, dispirited, or depressed, they would ask one of four questions: "When did you stop dancing? When did you stop singing? When did you stop being enchanted by stories? When did you stop being comforted by the sweet territory of silence?” Gabrielle Roth
“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” Anaïs Nin
“Never bet against maya. Truth is infinitely simple. Delusion is infinitely complex. There is no over-estimating our ability to avoid making eye contact with the obvious.” Author unconfirmed
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” Carl Jung
“There are two questions that we have to ask ourselves. The 1st is " Where am I going?" and the 2nd is "Who will go with me?" If you ever get these questions in the wrong order , you are in trouble.” Howard Thurman
“One's not half of two; two are halves of one.” E.E. Cummings
“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense that once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.” James Baldwin
“In the end, what we fear will not go away, for it indicates what we must go through in order to awaken, become more genuine, and live more fully. The problem is that we tend to be most afraid of what our own souls require of us. Often our deepest fear is that we might become who we are intended to be, who we already are at our core. For becoming who we truly are requires the greatest amount of change.” Michael Meade
“The Edge... There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.” Hunter S. Thompson
“God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.” Widely attributed to Voltaire
“I have nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.” Jack Kerouac
“A false sense of security is the only kind there is. If you don’t know who you are, anyone can name you.” Michael Meade
“Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything.” Nisargadatta Maharaj
“Don’t forget love; it will bring all the madness you need to unfurl yourself across the universe.” Mirabai
“The thing is to understand myself: the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die. That is what I now recognize as the most important thing.” Søren Kierkegaard
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” John Keats
“To love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals.” Heidi Priebe
“God protects us from nothing, but sustains us through everything.” Author unconfirmed
“We need to learn the skills of restraint, of holding close to the heart what needs our utmost attention. We are often too quick to reveal, lacking subtlety in what we expose about ourselves… We must learn to modulate our exposure, allowing things to ripen and mature in the container of the heart before revealing our secret inside flesh to others. In doing so, we will be better able to hear the subtle character and nuanced complexities of our inner life.” Francis Weller
“All you need is already within you, only you must approach yourself with reverence and love. Self-condemnation and self-disgust are grievous errors. Your constant flight from pain and search for pleasure is a sign of the love you bear for yourself, all I plead with you is this: make love of yourself perfect. Deny yourself nothing; give yourself infinity and eternity and discover that you do not need them. You are beyond.” Nisargadatta Maharaj
“When someone tells you, “I love you,” and then you feel, “Oh, I must be worthy after all,” that’s an illusion. That’s not true. Or someone says, “I hate you,” and you think, “Oh, God, I knew it; I’m not very worthy,” that’s not true either. Neither one of these thoughts hold any intrinsic reality. They are an overlay. When someone says, “I love you,” he is telling you about himself, not you. When someone says, “I hate you,” she is telling you about herself, not you. World views are self views—literally” Adyashanti
“We become what we love and who we love shapes what we become." St Claire of Assisi
“The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.” Richard Rohr
“Life is hard because you’re leaving your comfort zone, or because you’re staying in it.” Author unconfirmed
“Where we stopped dancing, singing, being enchanted by stories, or finding comfort in silence is where we have experienced the loss of soul. Dancing, singing, storytelling, and silence are the four universal healing salves.” Gabrielle Roth
“I had drunk so deeply of grief and innocently gambled so hard with fate and irony that a special kind of vision was gathering in my eyes, not entirely clear just yet. This was the same look people saw in your eyes when you have died for beauty and come to live accepting nature as life with no promise of paradise, and mad at people who couldn't see that.” Martin Prechtel
“Sometimes God calms the storm, other times He calms the sailor." Unknown
“We need the tonic of wildness... At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.” Henry David Thoreau
"The only thing ever achieved in life without effort is failure." St Francis of Assisi
“Reality is kinder than the stories we tell about it." Byron Katie
“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.” Anais Nin
“All flourishing is mutual.” Robin Wall Kimmerer
“Science explains how things work. Ancient traditions explain how to apply the things that work.” Author unconfirmed
“The heart of most spiritual practices is simply this: Remember who you are. Remember what you love. Remember what is sacred. Remember what is true. Remember that you will die and that this day is a gift. Remember how you wish to live.” Wayne Muller
“Enlightenment is nothing more than the complete absence of resistance to what is. End of story.” Adyashanti
“Let me fall if I must fall. The one I will become will catch me.” Baal Shem Tov
“There will come a time when you believe everything is finished; that will be the beginning. Your new life is going to cost you your old one.” Louis L’Amour
“One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it.” Clarissa Pinkola Estés
“From an endless sea of wistful souls who’ve waited out eternity, it’s now your turn, in time and space. And there are simply no words that can express just how uniquely special this privilege is.” Rasha
“Forgive me for picking back up what I laid down at your feet... on faith.” Unknown
“Be here now. The place where everything happens but the place that never seems like it’s enough. We always think the future will be better, or scarier, but all that is needed for wholeness, for God, is this moment.” Richard Rohr
“Somewhere deep within was a place beyond all faults and virtues that had to be confirmed before I could run the risk of opening my life up to another. To find ultimate security in an ultimate vulnerability, this is to be loved.” Howard Thurman
May we all become, the mystics, poets, artists, ecologists, philosophers, romantics, psychologists, and the rare voices who allow themselves to be altered by mystery rather than rushing to explain it.
Lastly, I’ll be updating my Member’s Library before the fall with my most recently completed contemplative program, Higher Power. Until then, all fall programming will be finalized shortly on my site.
My heart to yours,
A
