Master-list of quotes

-“May the quiet fire of God’s love and compassion
Arise in your heart.
May the flames of love, joy, and peace
Enlighten the steps of your path in this world.
And may you be like the burning bush,
The presence of God for each other,
That holy healing light of love.”

–Bob Holmes

-“In our quest for happiness and the avoidance of suffering, we are all fundamentally the same, and therefore equal. Despite the characteristics that differentiate us – race, language, religion, gender, wealth and many others – we are all equal in terms of our basic humanity.”

-Dalai Lama

-“One cannot give what he does not possess. To give love you must possess love.
One cannot teach what he does not understand. To teach love you must comprehend love.
One cannot know what he does not study. To study love you must live in love.
One cannot appreciate what he does not recognize. To recognize love you must be receptive to love.
One cannot have doubt about that which he wishes to trust. To trust love you must be convinced of love.
One cannot admit what he does not yield to. To yield to love you must be vulnerable to love.
One cannot love what he does not dedicate himself to. To dedicate yourself to love you must be forever growing in love.”

-Leo Buscaglia

-“In youth we learn…in age we understand.”

-Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

-“When a loved one is in physical or emotional pain,
when their world no longer makes sense,
your simple listening can work wonders.

-“Tell the story of the mountain you climbed.  Your words could become a page to someone else’s survival guide.”

-Morgan Harper Nichols

“Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.”

-Jamie Anderson

-“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow.”

-Melody Beattie

-“Nothing in nature lives for itself. Rivers don’t drink their own water. Trees don’t eat their own fruit. Sun doesn’t give heat for itself. Flowers don’t spread fragrance for themselves. Living for others is the rule of nature. And therein lies the secret of life.”

-Amit Gupta

-“At its most blissful, romantic love is a passionate flame that allows us to transcend ourselves. Even love that ends unhappily can leave us liberated, more deeply insightful, transformed.”

-“Love is an act of the imagination…Most of us are not originators of stories. Most of us pull our ideas of love from the culture, from the poets and artists who bring this form of desire and gratification together into one script, one scenario. Only then does the average individual try to change the imaginary act into a lived life.”

-Ethel Spector Person

– “The cathedrals we build reflect the sacred spaces that trees have already been creating for thousands of years. Next time you are in the forest, imagine this space as one of the primordial or original churches. A sanctuary that has helped inspire the creation of thousands of other sanctuary spaces.”

– Christine Valters Paintner

-“Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darkness of other people.”

-Carl Jung

-“The scars you share become lighthouses for people who are headed to the same rocks you hit…”

-Anon

-“If a couple can maintain the childlike, magical butterfly feelings in holding hands for the first time throughout their relationship, “love” just happens.”

-Myself

-“I am no longer waiting for a special occasion; I burn the best candles on ordinary days.
I am no longer waiting for the house to be clean; I fill it with people who understand that even dust is Sacred.
I am no longer waiting for everyone to understand me; It’s just not their task
I am no longer waiting for the perfect children; my children have their own names that burn as brightly as any star.
I am no longer waiting for the other shoe to drop; It already did, and I survived.
I am no longer waiting for the time to be right; the time is always now.
I am no longer waiting for the mate who will complete me; I am grateful to be so warmly, tenderly held.
I am no longer waiting for a quiet moment; my heart can be stilled whenever it is called.
I am no longer waiting for the world to be at peace; I unclench my grasp and breathe peace in and out.
I am no longer waiting to do something great; being awake to carry my grain of sand is enough.
I am no longer waiting to be recognized; I know that I dance in a holy circle.
I am no longer waiting for Forgiveness. I believe, I Believe.”

-Mary Anne Perrone

-“You’re an interesting species.  An interesting mix.  You’re capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares.  You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you’re not.  See, in all our searching, the only thing we’ve found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other.”

-Carl Sagan

-“So through the eyes love attains the heart, for the eyes are the scouts of the heart. And the eyes go reconnoitering for what it would please the heart to possess. And when they are in full accord and firm, all three in one resolve, at that time perfect love is born from what the eyes have made welcome, to the heart. For as all true loves know, love is perfect kindness, which is born, there is no doubt, from the heart and the eyes.”

-Joseph Campbell

-“Everything you do right now ripples outward and affects everyone.  Your posture can shine your heart or transmit anxiety.  Your breath can radiate love or muddy the room in depression.  Your glance can awaken joy.  Your words can inspire freedom.  Your every act can open hearts and minds.”

-David Deida

-“We synthesize happiness, but we think happiness is a thing to be found.  We believe synthetic happiness is not of the same quality as natural happiness, natural happiness being getting what we want.”

-Dan Gilbert

-“Each of us has a spark of life inside us, and our highest endeavor ought to be to set off that spark in one another.”

Kenny Ausubel

-“Every person in whatever condition he or she is placed in life has the right to be happy.  Happiness does not come automatically nor does it remain with us for all the time.”

–Ashok Gulla

-“I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires rather than attempting to satisfy them.”

-John Stuart Mill

“Happiness is contagious…when you reflect happiness, then all others around you catch the happiness bug and are happy too.”

-Jennifer Leese

-“…You have two choices: love or fear.  Choose love, and don’t ever let fear turn against your playful heart.”

-“I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.”

-“I’ve often said that I wish people could realize all their dreams of wealth and fame so they could see that it is not where you’ll find your sense of completion.”

-“Fear is going to be a player in your life, but you get to decide how much.  You can spend your whole life imagining ghosts, worrying about your pathway to the future, but all there will ever be is what’s happening here, and the decisions we make in this moment, which are based in either love or fear.  So many of us choose our path out of fear disguised as practicality.  What we really want seems impossibly out of reach and ridiculous to expect, so we never dare to ask the universe for it-.”

-“You can fail at what you don’t want, so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love.”

-“…The effect you have on others is the most valuable currency there is.”

-“…The voice of your ego, if you listen to it there will always be someone who seems to be doing better than you.  No matter what you gain, ego will not let you rest.  It will tell you that you cannot stop until you’ve achieved immortality…”

-Jim Carrey

-“If you love a flower, don’t pick it up.  Because if you pick it up, it dies and ceases to be what you love.  So, if you love a flower let it be.  Love is not about possession.  Love is about appreciation.”

-“To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it.”

-“Falling in love you remain a child; rising in love you mature. By and by love becomes not a relationship, it becomes a state of your being. Not that you are in love – now you are love.”

-Osho

-“If a child is given love, he becomes loving … If he’s helped when he needs help, he becomes helpful. And if he has been truly valued at home … he grows up secure enough to look beyond himself to the welfare of others.”

-Joyce Brothers

-“A man who conquers himself is greater than one who conquers a thousand men in battle.”

-Buddha

-“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead —his eyes are closed”….. (…”The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.”)

-“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world”.

-“Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere”.

-Albert Einstein

-“I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death”.

-Robert Fulghum, (All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten: Uncommon Thoughts On Common Things)

-“I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen”.

-J.G. Ballard

-“Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality.”

-Lewis Carroll

“There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into sun”.

― Pablo Picasso

 

-“Here is calm so deep, grasses cease waving. . . . Wonderful how completely everything in wild nature fits into us, as if truly part and parent of us. The sun shines not on us but in us. The rivers flow not past, but through us, thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing. The trees wave and the flowers bloom in our bodies as well as our souls, and every bird song, wind song, and; tremendous storm song of the rocks in the heart of the mountains is our song, our very own, and sings our love.”

-“I have a low opinion of books; they are but piles of stones set up to show coming travelers where other minds have been, or at best signal smokes to call attention. Cadmus and all the other inventors of letters receive a thousandfold more credit than they deserve. No amount of word-making will ever make a single soul to know these mountains. As well seek to warm the naked and frostbitten by lectures on caloric and pictures of flame. One day’s exposure to mountains is better than cartloads of books. See how willingly Nature poses herself upon photographers’ plates. No earthly chemicals are so sensitive as those of the human soul. All that is required is exposure, and purity of material. ‘The pure in heart shall see God!’. . . .”

-“Beside the grand history of the glaciers and their own, the mountain streams sing the history of every avalanche or earthquake and of snow, all easily recognized by the human ear, and every word evoked by the falling leaf and drinking deer, beside a thousand other facts so small and spoken by the stream in so low a voice the human ear cannot hear them. Thus every event is written and spoken. The wing scars the sky, making a path inevitably as the deer in snow, and the winds all know it and tell it though we hear it not. ”

-John Muir

-“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

-H. Jackson Brown Jr.

-“Age has no reality except in the physical world. The essence of a human being is resistant to the passage of time. Our inner lives are eternal, which is to say that our spirits remain as youthful and vigorous as when we were in full bloom. Think of love as a state of grace, not the means to anything, but the alpha and omega. An end in itself.”

-Gabriel García Márquez

-“The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.”

–Anaïs Nin

-“Seeds are what is most important to life, to our sustenance.  For many centuries the planting of the seed in the earth symbolized the mystery of life and the journey of the soul – through a descent into the underworld, life was regenerated.  Through the darkness we are reborn into the light.  In our current supermarket life of prepackaged products, we may have forgotten this mystery, and yet it remains within our psyche as one of the most symbolic and nourishing stories of the soul, a connection with the deepest meaning of our existence.  And now as the integrity of the seed is threatened, so is the story and its primal meaning.”  (‘Sacred Seed’ book)

-Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

-“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.”

-E.E. Cummings

-“Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.”

-Pema Chödrön

-“The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.”

-William Blake

-“A friend of the heart provides peace of mind, no matter the species.”

-Anon

-“To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from.”

-Terry Tempest Williams

-“The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community, from the mere animal biology to an act of culture.”

-“A garden should make you feel you’ve entered privileged space — a place not just set apart but reverberant — and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry.” (Second Nature: A Gardeners Education)

-Michael Pollan

-” Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”

-Carl Jung

-“One thing about growing up is realizing you don’t hate anything anymore.  Things either matter or they don’t.”

-Anon

-“Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.” (Desert Solitaire)

-“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grotto’s of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you — beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.”

-Edward Abbey

-“The way to love someone is to lightly run your finger over that person’s soul until you find a crack, and then gently pour your love into that crack.”

-Keith Miller

-“Ignoring your passion is slow suicide. Never ignore what your heart pumps for. Mold your career around your lifestyle,not your lifestyle around your career.”

-Anon

-“The spiral in a snail’s shell is the same mathematically as the spiral in the Milky Way galaxy, and it’s also the same mathematically as the spirals in our DNA. It’s the same ratio that you’ll find in very basic music that transcends cultures all over the world.”

-Joseph Gordon-Levitt

-“Having a lover/friend who regards you as a living growing creature, being, just as much as the tree from the ground, or a ficus in the house, or a rose garden out in the side yard… having a lover and friends who look at you as a true living breathing entity, one that is human but made of very fine and moist and magical things as well… a lover and friends who support the creature in you… these are the people you are looking for. They will be the friends of your soul for life. Mindful choosing of friends and lovers, not to mention teachers, is critical to remaining conscious, remaining intuitive, remaining in charge of the fiery light that sees and knows.” (Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype)

-“I hope you will go out and let stories, that is life, happen to you, and that you will work with these stories… water them with your blood and tears and your laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom.”

-“Go out in the woods, go out. If you don’t go out in the woods nothing will ever happen and your life will never begin.”

-Clarissa Pinkola Estés

-“God isn’t a noun but a process…a continual, infinitely creative outpouring of love and light onto all living things.”

-“Love is what we are born with. Fear is what we learn. The spiritual journey is the unlearning of fear and prejudices and the acceptance of love back in our hearts. Love is the essential reality and our purpose on earth. To be consciously aware of it, to experience love in ourselves and others, is the meaning of life. Meaning does not lie in things. Meaning lies in us.”

-Marianne Williamson

-“Recovering from suffering is not like recovering from a disease. Many people don’t come out healed; they come out different. They crash through the logic of individual utility and behave paradoxically. Instead of recoiling from the sorts of loving commitments that almost always involve suffering, they throw themselves more deeply into them. Even while experiencing the worst and most lacerating consequences, some people double down on vulnerability. They hurl themselves deeper and gratefully into their art, loved ones and commitments.” (What Suffering Does https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/08/opinion/brooks-what-suffering-does.html)

-David Brooks

-“Every smooth stone scattered along the beach is the result of years of pummeling, buffeting and tumbling by the tides and waves and storms. Hold it gently. It’s been through a lot. Remember that the next time you meet a gentle soul.”

-Jim Wern

-“Magic exists. Who can doubt it, when there are rainbows and wildflowers, the music of the wind and the silence of the stars? Anyone who has loved has been touched by magic. It is such a simple and such an extraordinary part of the lives we live.”

-Nora Roberts

-“I do believe in an everyday sort of magic — the inexplicable connectedness we sometimes experience with places, people, works of art and the like; the eerie appropriateness of moments of synchronicity; the whispered voice, the hidden presence, when we think we’re alone.”

-Charles de Lint

-“Magic, indeed, is all around us, in stones, flowers, stars, the dawn wind and the sunset cloud; all we need is the ability to see and understand.”

-Doreen Valiente

-“To romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery and wonder of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite.”

-Novalis

-“Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone – and finding that that’s OK with them.”

-“Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won’t find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity. We throw a cordon of love around the chosen one and decide that everything within it will somehow be free of our faults. We locate inside another a perfection that eludes us within ourselves, and through our union with the beloved hope to maintain (against the evidence of all self-knowledge) a precarious faith in our species.”

-“Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane, ship or train. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is in front of our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts at times requiring large views, new thoughts new places. Introspective reflections which are liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape. The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do.

At the end of hours of train-dreaming, we may feel we have been returned to ourselves – that is, brought back into contact with emotions and ideas of importance to us. It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestice setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, but who may not be who we essentially are.

If we find poetry in the service station and motel, if we are drawn to the airport or train carriage, it is perhaps because, in spite of their architectural compromises and discomforts, in spite of their garish colours and harsh lighting, we implicitly feel that these isolated places offer us a material setting for an alternative to the selfish ease, the habits and confinement of the ordinary, rooted world.”

-Alain de Botton

-What is love?  The following quotes are from an article attempting to answer this question from various perspectives-  ( https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/13/what-is-love-five-theories )

The nun: ‘Love is free yet binds us’

“Love is more easily experienced than defined. As a theological virtue, by which we love God above all things and our neighbors as ourselves for his sake, it seems remote until we encounter it enfleshed, so to say, in the life of another – in acts of kindness, generosity and self-sacrifice. Love’s the one thing that can never hurt anyone, although it may cost dearly. The paradox of love is that it is supremely free yet attaches us with bonds stronger than death. It cannot be bought or sold; there is nothing it cannot face; love is life’s greatest blessing.

-Catherine Wybourne (a Benedictine nun)

The philosopher: ‘Love is a passionate commitment’

-“The answer remains elusive in part because love is not one thing. Love for parents, partners, children, country, neighbor, God and so on all have different qualities. Each has its variants – blind, one-sided, tragic, steadfast, fickle, reciprocated, misguided, unconditional. At its best, however, all love is a kind a passionate commitment that we nurture and develop, even though it usually arrives in our lives unbidden. That’s why it is more than just a powerful feeling. Without the commitment, it is mere infatuation. Without the passion, it is mere dedication. Without nurturing, even the best can wither and die.”

-Julian Baggini (a philosopher and writer)

The psychotherapist: ‘Love has many guises’

-“Unlike us, the ancients did not lump all the various emotions that we label “love” under the one word. They had several variations, including:

Philia which they saw as a deep but usually non-sexual intimacy between close friends and family members or as a deep bond forged by soldiers as they fought alongside each other in battle. Ludus describes a more playful affection found in fooling around or flirting. Pragma is the mature love that develops over a long period of time between long-term couples and involves actively practising goodwill, commitment, compromise and understanding. Agape is a more generalised love, it’s not about exclusivity but about love for all of humanity. Philautia is self love, which isn’t as selfish as it sounds. As Aristotle discovered and as any psychotherapist will tell you, in order to care for others you need to be able to care about yourself. Last, and probably least even though it causes the most trouble, eros is about sexual passion and desire. Unless it morphs into philia and/or pragma, eros will burn itself out.

Love is all of the above. But is it possibly unrealistic to expect to experience all six types with only one person. This is why family and community are important.”

-Philippa Perry (a psychotherapist and author)

The physicist: ‘Love is chemistry’

-“Biologically, love is a powerful neurological condition like hunger or thirst, only more permanent. We talk about love being blind or unconditional, in the sense that we have no control over it. But then, that is not so surprising since love is basically chemistry. While lust is a temporary passionate sexual desire involving the increased release of chemicals such as testosterone and estrogen, in true love, or attachment and bonding, the brain can release a whole set of chemicals: pheromones, dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, oxytocin and vasopressin. However, from an evolutionary perspective, love can be viewed as a survival tool – a mechanism we have evolved to promote long-term relationships, mutual defense and parental support of children and to promote feelings of safety and security.”

-Jim Al-Khalili (a theoretical physicist and science writer)

-“Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.”

-Sylvia Plath

-“A man must find time for himself. Time is what we spend our lives with. If we are not careful we find others spending it for us. . . . It is necessary now and then for a man to go away by himself and experience loneliness; to sit on a rock in the forest and to ask of himself, ‘Who am I, and where have I been, and where am I going?’ . . . If one is not careful, one allows diversions to take up one’s time—the stuff of life.”

-“Two bubbles found they had rainbows on their curves.
They flickered out saying:
“It was worth being a bubble, just to have held that rainbow thirty seconds.”

-Carl Sandburg

-“When we speak of man, we have a conception of humanity as a whole, and before applying scientific methods to the investigation of his movement we must accept this as a physical fact. But can anyone doubt to-day that all the millions of individuals and all the innumerable types and characters constitute an entity, a unit? Though free to think and act, we are held together, like the stars in the firmament, with ties inseparable. These ties cannot be seen, but we can feel them. I cut myself in the finger, and it pains me: this finger is a part of me. I see a friend hurt, and it hurts me, too: my friend and I are one. And now I see stricken down an enemy, a lump of matter which, of all the lumps of matter in the universe, I care least for, and it still grieves me. Does this not prove that each of us is only part of a whole?
For ages this idea has been proclaimed in the consummately wise teachings of religion, probably not alone as a means of insuring peace and harmony among men, but as a deeply founded truth. The Buddhist expresses it in one way, the Christian in another, but both say the same: We are all one. Metaphysical proofs are, however, not the only ones which we are able to bring forth in support of this idea. Science, too, recognizes this connectedness of separate individuals, though not quite in the same sense as it admits that the suns, planets, and moons of a constellation are one body, and there can be no doubt that it will be experimentally confirmed in times to come, when our means and methods for investigating psychical and other states and phenomena shall have been brought to great perfection. Still more: this one human being lives on and on. The individual is ephemeral, races and nations come and pass away, but man remains. Therein lies the profound difference between the individual and the whole.”

-Nikola Tesla

-“Sometimes we get so caught up in trying to accomplish something big, that we fail to notice the little things that give life its magic.”

-Anon

-“Love is the absence of judgment.” (I add is is also the absence of expectations)

-Dalai Lama

-“You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing, and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life.”

-“When I understand myself, I understand you, and out of that understanding comes love. Love is the missing factor; there is a lack of affection, of warmth in relationship; and because we lack that love, that tenderness, that generosity, that mercy in relationship, we escape into mass action which produces further confusion, further misery. We fill our hearts with blueprints for world reform and do not look to that one resolving factor which is love.”

-Jiddu Krishnamurti

-“Life isn’t about how you survived the storm … it’s about how you danced in the rain. Dance with me.”

-Regina Brett

-“If I had a star for every time you brightened my day, I’d have a galaxy in my hand.”

-Anon

-“The Wilderness holds answers to more questions than we have yet learned to ask.”

-Nancy Wynne Newhall

-“When you recover or discover something that nourishes your soul and brings joy, care enough about yourself to make room for it in your life.”

-Jean Shinoda Bolen

-“When you think of your wild nature, what comes to mind?  Are you running through an old growth forest on the heels of a wolf? Diving naked into a cool pool of water?  Howling at the full moon as you dance around a fire?  Maybe you are doing all of those things.  And if you are, that’s fabulous.  We all need to run through forests, dive into refreshment and give voice to those things that make us howl and dance with abandon.

But sometimes it’s more subtle than that.

Sometimes your wild nature shows up when you lift your eyes to the sun that peeks through the clouds on a dreary day during a slow walk through a city park.  It shows up when you put your high heels in the closet for good because they just aren’t worth it. It shows up when you step outside under a sliver of new moon and wonder where the light has gone through tears that just won’t stop.  It shows up in shadows and dreams and the stuff that no one wants to talk about because it isn’t pretty or nice or put together.

Your wild nature shows up in everything that is authentically you.  You will feel it everywhere if you make a point to notice it.  Your wild essence is found “at the bottom of the well, in the headwaters, in the ether before time. [It is] in the tear and in the ocean. [It] lives in the cambria of trees, which pings as it grows.  [It] is from the future and from the beginning of time.” ~Clarissa Pinkola Estes (adapted)

The wild nature is subtle in its splendor, as opulent as it is gentle, and as quiet as it is screaming from the treetops.  It is all that you can imagine and all those things that you still cannot.” (https://wildfirewellness.org/2016/01/12/subtle-splendor/)

-Heidi Barr

-“The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.”

-Henry Miller

-“Agape indicates an unconquerable benevolence, invincible goodwill. If we regard a person with agape, it means that no matter what that person does to us, no matter how he treats us, no matter if he insults us or injures us or grieves us, we will never allow any bitterness against him to invade our hearts, but will regard him with that unconquerable benevolence and goodwill which will seek nothing but his highest good. From this certain things emerge.  Agape does not mean a feeling of the heart, which we cannot help, and which comes unbidden and unsought; it means a determination of the mind, whereby we achieve this unconquerable goodwill even to those who hurt and injure us. Agape, someone has said, is the power to love those whom we do not like and who may not like us. In point of fact we can only have agape when Jesus Christ enables us to conquer our natural tendency to anger and to bitterness, and to achieve this invincible goodwill to all men.”

-William Barclay

-“The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it’s not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of another person–without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other. They allow the other absolute freedom, because they know that if the other leaves, they will be as happy as they are now. Their happiness cannot be taken by the other, because it is not given by the other.”

-Osho

-“The lives of those fully engaged in the human struggle will be riddled with bullet holes. Whatever happened in the life of Jesus is in some way going to happen to us. Wounds are necessary. The soul has to be wounded as well as the body. To think that the natural and proper state is to be without wounds is an illusion. Those who wear bulletproof vests protecting themselves from failure, shipwreck, and heartbreak will never know what love is. The unwounded life bears no resemblance to the Rabbi”.

-“The wild, unrestricted love of God is not simply an inspiring idea. When it imposes itself on mind and heart with the stark reality of ontological truth, it determines why and at what time you get up in the morning, how you pass your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, and who you hang with; it affects what breaks your heart, what amazes you, and what makes your heart happy.” -(The Furious Longing of God)

-Brennan Manning