“Today, see if you can stretch your heart and expand your love so that it touches not only those to whom you can give it easily, but also to those who need it so much.”
“Not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being in the world, and there are kinds and grades of each. There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy; the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face; the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul, whence emerge new thoughts; the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, “This… this…”; the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity; the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear; the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination, loud and subvocal speech but sullen to say it; baffled silence; the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos.”
-Paul Goodman
So many silences, a profound collection. To these eloquent words of Goodman’s I would add, the silence of being one with nature, and in awe of the beauty and connections …
“Words may help you understand something, but experience allows you to know. Never, ever trade your own experience for someone else’s words about anything that is really important. Like God, for instance. Or love. Or what is true about another.”
“Turn into the ocean of your unlived life, and bring the warmth of awareness into the hidden places inside you. Behold the forms of love as they reconfigure, and open to the unmet feelings, the disowned longings, and the split-off pieces you have lost contact with. Dare to see that they do not mean you harm, but have come longing for integration. There are jewels concealed in the forgotten pathways, awaiting discovery, filled with energy and information for the journey ahead.
But the substance which shapes these pathways is of the unknown, and is unbearably creative. It was never going to turn out the way you thought. Rather than seeing this as a mistake or cosmic error, you can find rest here. It is not the rest of the mind where everything is resolved, but the rest of the heart where everything is held and metabolized in wholeness. Love will never be pinned down or worked out. It is just too wild for all that.
If we do not meet, hold, and integrate the heartbreak, the fear, the rage, and the entirety of our essence vulnerability – if we do not provide sanctuary for the aliveness of the somatic world – we will inevitably place this burden on the others in our lives, to care for it on our behalf. While others can help us along the way, they cannot take care of this sacred material for us. For this is their gift to us.
It is an act of love to remove this burden from our lovers, our friends, and our families. And to take experiential, full-spectrum responsibility for its holding and its care. As we integrate the arising narrative, emotions, feelings, and sensations within the spaciousness of awareness, we become open, warm, transparent vessels for love to come alive here, and to seed this world with its qualities.
You need not postpone being fully here for another moment. This moment is the perfect place to begin.”
“Some photographers take reality…and impose the domination of their own thought and spirit. Others come before reality more tenderly and a photograph to them is an instrument of love and revelation.”
“I declare this world is so beautiful I can hardly believe it exists.”
