Seeing, letting go, reaching down, staying close, shape-shifting, redeeming.

It is asking you to transform,
and change doesn’t happen when we hold onto too much—
it occurs when we allow space to come between things.

So let go.

Give away what you no longer need,
burn the pain that you carry,
release it all.

Slow down for a minute, darling.

– from Elephant Journal

“We need not accept the choices purveyed to us by life as we know it.” Subvert, transfigure, redeem.

– from @brainpicker, Maria Popova

“yes. yes I do. have the right to be this lush and neverending”

“i have a life to garden.
a multiverse to wake from sleep.”

“the warmest light is your body”

– from Nayyirah Waheed

I formed my ideas/understanding of the world, life and existence from my parents, teachers and caregivers. Growing up, I took in much more words and images. Trying to understand what’s within. Now, to pause seeing the world, life and existence as they are often or rarely told, shown. To not be fed ideas about what’s inside by things out there. To pause seeing the world through newspapers written and sentences spoken without quite much thought. Without enough thought put insofar as to soothe me. And then to start seeing while holding hands with the voice inside that often speaks in a language of feeling. (Could be love. To start seeing with love.)

To see the immense blankness and rich quiet that all the newspapers try to frantically cover up and try to save me from. To choose not to feed on cultivated noise. To get dazed by the blankness and deafened-muted by the quiet so that I might hear a drop coming out of my heart, if it were to come. get to hear the drops coming out of my heart. And then slowly, the drops coming out of dear, fellow hearts. Some dearest.

End qu/n-otes

“Love is the quality of attention we pay to things” – poet J.D. McClatchy

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity” – philosopher Simone Weil

Living the Questions

To not limit the enquiries to questions that are expected to have answers.

To stay humble in front of questions to which I do not know the answers.
To not be irked by them, to not be disoriented by them.
To live with them. To live them.

To hold something without judgement.
To move to that field from the fields of right and wrong.

To not let the cycle of hurt continue. To break that cycle and to recycle.

And to do this especially with children, to not let them ‘grow out of their questions’ telling them that ‘it would be easier that way’.

Continue reading “Living the Questions”

Faith, Spiritual life, Hope – Content Mixture

“In a century of staggering open questions, hope becomes a calling for those of us who can hold it, for the sake of the world.”

“In a century of staggering open questions, hope becomes a calling for those of us who can hold it, for the sake of the world. Hope is distinct, in my mind, from optimism or idealism. It has nothing to do with wishing. It references reality at every turn and reveres truth. It lives open eyed and wholehearted with the darkness that is woven ineluctably into the light of life and sometimes seems to overcome it. Hope, like every virtue, is a choice that becomes a practice that becomes spiritual muscle memory. It’s a renewable resource for moving through life as it is, not as we wish it to be.”

– Krista Tippett – Becoming Wise

“I lean a bit more confidently into the experience that life is so endlessly perplexing. I love that word, perplexing. In this sense, spiritual life is a reasonable, reality-based pursuit. It can have mystical entry points and destinations, to be sure. But it is in the end about befriending reality, the common human experience of mystery included.”

“The opposite of faith is not doubt. The opposite of faith is certainty.” I have thrown this line into more than a few erudite discussions, and it delightfully shakes things up.”

– Krista Tippett: Religion does not have a monopoly on faith

“Secular society has been unfairly impoverished by the loss of an array of practices and themes which atheists typically find it impossible to live with because they seem too closely associated with, to quote Nietzsche’s useful phrase, ‘the bad odours of religion’.
…
We are presented with an unpleasant choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle or just charming rituals for which we struggle to find equivalents in secular society.
…
In giving up on so much, we have allowed religion to claim as its exclusive dominion areas of experience which should rightly belong to all mankind – and which we should feel unembarrassed about re-appropriating for the secular realm.”

“Our soul-related needs are ready to be freed of the particular tint given to them by relgions – even if it is, paradoxically, the study of religions which often holds the key to their rediscovery and re-articulation.
…
The underlying thesis is not that secularism is wrong, but that we have too often secularized badly – inasmuch as, in the course of ridding ourselves of unfeasible ideas, we have unnecessarily surrendered some of the most useful and attractive parts of the faiths.”

“To conclude, this book does not endeavour to do justive to particular religions; they have their own apologists. It tries, instead, to examine aspects of religious life which contain concepts that could fruitfully be applied to the problems of secular society. It attempts to burn off religions’ more dogmatic aspects in order to distil a few aspects of them that could prove timely and consoling to sceptical and contemporary minds facing the crises and griefs of finite existence on a troubled planet. It hopes to rescue some of what is beautiful, touching and wise from all that no longer seems true.”

– Alain de Botton – Religion for Atheists

Of Dusty Mess and Cleaner Air

All this mess we seem to be stewing in right now could be the dust rising from opening doors long closed. Or discovering new ones. It could be us getting caught off-guard, nudged and sometimes pushed. All this mess could be us feeling irksome of  seeing particularly non-flattering realities. Of having to navigate uncharted waters. Again.

A mess can be dealt with. Dust can settle. Like it’s said about how each generation tends to think they are the most special ones ever to live, it could appear as “this is the most messy the world has ever been.” That being a perfectly valid feeling when you are caught in the thick of it, it might do us better to try and not dwell there for too long.

Because a mess can be fixed and dust can settle. If and when that happens, I wouldn’t want to be too attached to the dusty mess to stand clueless breathing cleaner air.

It should be obvious enough but it’s amazing nonetheless, how we try to keep it together even when the dust is thick and visibility is challenging.