the divine, the meaning

“All awakening to love is a spiritual awakening.”

All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks

“When we begin to experience the sacred in our everyday lives we bring to mundane tasks a quality of concentration and engagement that lifts the spirit.”

All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks

“Even the most exalted states and the most exceptional spiritual accomplishments are unimportant if we cannot be happy in the most basic and ordinary ways, if we cannot touch one another and the life we have been given with our hearts.”

Jack Kornfield

“An individual does not need to be a believer in a religion to embrace the idea that there is an animating principle in the self-- a life force (some of us call it soul) that when nurtured enhances our capacity to be more fully self-actualized and able to engage in communion with the world around us.”

All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks

“Longing itself is a creative and spiritual state.”

Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole by Susan Cain

“Those who search for intimacy with others are reacting to this longing. They think another human will fulfill them. But how many of us have actually ever been totally fulfilled by another person? Maybe for a while, but not forever. We want something more fulfilling, more intimate. We want God. But not everyone dares to go into this abyss of pain,

“But longing is momentum in disguise: It’s active, not passive; touched with the creative, the tender, and the divine. We long for something, or someone. We reach for it, move toward it. The word longing derives from the Old English langian, meaning “to grow long,” and the German langen—to reach, to extend. The word yearning is linguistically assoc

“As for me, I believe that the very nature of existential longing — of longing for a perfect and beautiful world of unconditional love and everlasting life — extinguishes these distinctions between atheists and believers. The longing comes through Yahweh or Allah, Christ or Krishna, no more and no less than it comes through the books and the music;