💭 Things to return to

When we were very young, our bodies told us that we could break through the constraints of the mundane world and seize a more colorful, wild life for ourselves. As we grew older, we caught glimpses of lives that looked more exciting and full of promise than ours, through a million shiny portholes, and we began to define joy as something that lived

Allowing and encouraging a quality of play and experimentation in practice is vital, and vitalizing. I can’t emphasize this enough. Usually that’s how we learn best as human beings, and it keeps things from getting rigid and feeling heavy.

“The child says: ‘When I am a big boy.’ But what is that? The big boy says, ‘When I grow up.’ And then, grown up, he says: ‘When I get married.’ But to be married, what is that after all? The thought changes to ‘When I’m able to retire.’ And then, when retirement comes, he looks back over the landscape traversed; a cold wind seems to sweep over it;

The path forward from here isn’t that complicated. You explore your defenses and your shame with a spirit of curiosity, and you give yourself more permission to be your soft, effusive self out in the open. If that feels like a lot, remember that merely grounding yourself in the moment is a start. You stop and breathe and forgive yourself for who

It may be that we are only here to learn how to love.

I understand now that no one else in the world knows what I should do. The experts don’t know, the ministers, the therapists, the magazines, the authors, my parents, my friends, they don’t know. Not even the folks who love me the most. Because no one has ever lived or will ever live this life I am attempting to live, with my gifts and challenges

With that great countercultural courage of defying cynicism, Eiseley insists that it was the humans who nourished the highest in their nature by means of love, who lived with such exquisite tenderness for life in all of its expressions, that propelled our species from the caves to the cathedrals, from savagery to sonnets.