meghna
@meghnamann
meghna
It took time for me to accept that where we are has as much to do with our formation as with whom and during what. Place is the one thing that always is. We are always somewhere. I have been without people but never without place. Perhaps that is why it is so easy to become numb to it.
Cole Arthur Riley • This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment. If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know you will never become anything, a... See more
The Sense of Wonder
goodreads.com
Rachel Carson's best known book is Silent Spring, but this book (originally an essay) is a personal favorite. She maintained a deep conviction that wonder has to be at the foundation of our relationship with wider world. This book is a demonstration of that belief, and a celebration of the expansive potential of curiosity and wonder. Her writing is a great reminder that with enough attention, adults can develop the 'clear eyed vision' that comes naturally to children, but fades over time if not kept alive.
Many of us, in pursuit of the spiritual, become woefully neglectful of the physical.
Cole Arthur Riley • This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
Don’t forget this: Nothing is truly ever ordinary. I’m telling you, Protect the truest things about you and it will become easier to hear the truth everyplace else.
Cole Arthur Riley • This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
truth and self-discovery
This alteration of the real self requires tremendous emotional labor, which comes at a great psychological cost — we lose sense of who we are and where we stand. (Those of us who have had to take care of a parent’s emotional needs and feelings from a young age at the expense of feeling our own, at the expense of knowing our own, are particularly vu... See more
Maria Popova • Article
I say you have to learn how to be with and a part of something in order to know how to be alone. I think it is only out of a deep anchoring in community that one can ever be free to explore the solitary.
Cole Arthur Riley • This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
For me, most simply, contemplative spirituality is a fidelity to beholding the divine in all things. In the field, on the walk home, sitting under the oak tree that hugs my house. A sacred attention.
Cole Arthur Riley • This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
I have a full life. A privileged life. An unendangered life. But sometimes the simple joys escape me. Joy is not always a feeling that is freely bestowed upon us, often it is something we must actively seek. In a way, joy is a decision, an action, even a practised method of being. It is an earned thing brought into focus by what we have lost — at l... See more