Tag Archives: quotes

Giving Voice to Astonishment

“So, all of you lovers of wild nature, keep going outside, even when it’s cold. Notice the way ice cracks in the sun. Notice the burst of red when a cardinal visits your bird feeder. Notice how cold air reminds you to how it feels to be alive, even when it isn’t comfortable. Build your capacity for attentiveness, and practice paying attention, and then give voice to the bits of astonishment that gather in the wake of doing so. Be attentive to the way winter polishes the moon, and give in to wonder. Because the world needs us to keep wonder alive.”

—Heidi Barr

Awe & Wonder

I have been witnessing. I have been attuned. I have been immersed in wonder and awe.  Not every moment, every hour, but more and more and more. There are big forces out there responding in ways that are incalculable and hard to articulate. They are listening. They have been waiting.  It is beautiful.  It is interactive. I am learning each day to stay awake, as Rumi says, “don’t go back to sleep!”

Oh this life has so much inner expansion lying dormant for us to touch. Magnificent. Awe inspiring, wonder evoking….  These philosophers, poets and scientists words express this awe and wonder much better than I ever could, but I’m seeing it, feeling it, living it from my home to Chief Mountain – all sacred:

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”
Albert Einstein

“How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?” Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.”
Carl Sagan,

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
W.B. Yeats

Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.”
Marcus Aurelius

“The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that make life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living is quite finite.”
Richard Dawkins

“The obligation falls upon us to foster in ourselves the sensibilities that modernity has suppressed or even denigrated. … Without awe, our lives are impoverished, our society decays.”
Abraham Joshua Heschel

“Awe, you see, is what moves us forward.”
Joseph Campbell

“I suspect that it was simply that I had admired the earth, and the universe. The more I say and think that I admire it, and love it, the more it gives me what I admire, or strange coincidences that leave me in more awe than I was before.”
Michael Whone

The Leaf’s Song

 

What Can I Say (by Mary Oliver)

What can I say that I have not said before?
So I’ll say it again.
The leaf has a song in it.
Stone is the face of patience.
Inside the river there is an unfinishable story
and you are somewhere in it
and it will never end until all ends.

Take your busy heart to the art museum and the
chamber of commerce
but take it also to the forest.
The song you heard singing in the leaf when you
were a child
is singing still.
I am of years lived, so far, seventy-four,
and the leaf is singing still.

-Mary Oliver

Live In Fertile Soil

“In the rush to return to normal, use this time to consider which parts of normal are worth rushing back to.”

-Dave Hollis

“Live in fertile soil. Take in nutrients like your life depends on it. Breathe fresh air, in and out. Take a break from the rapids, surrender, and the current will either carry you or kick you out towards its gentle edges. Move away from depleting habitats. Leave a sedentary mind and body for the one that is waiting for you on the other side of this and any other present uncertainty. Your future gains certainty when you rise, like your voluntary breath, actively inspiring, consciously and unconsciously inhaling and exhaling.”

-Erika Putnam

Two Breaths

From the introduction page to Mark Nepo’s Seven Thousand Ways to Listen:

“At a gathering in San Francisco, I met Marco, a careful and patient photographer from Santa Clara. When asked what surprised him during the last year, his voice began to quiver. He’d witnessed two breaths that had changed his life. His daughter’s first breath. Then his mother’s last breath. As his daughter inhaled the world, it seemed to awaken her soul on Earth. As his mother exhaled her years, it seemed to free her soul of the world. These two breaths jarred Marco to live more openly and honestly. He took these two breaths into his own daily breathing and quickly saw their common presence in everyone’s breathing. Is it possible that, with each inhalation, we take in the world and awaken our soul? And with each exhalation, do we free ourselves of the world, which inevitably entangles us? Is this how we fill up and empty a hundred times a day, always seeking the gift of the two breaths? Perhaps this is the work of being.”