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"Ask me whether what I have done is my life."
"... the life I am living is not the same as the life that wants to live in me... I sometimes catch a glimpse of my true life, a life hidden like the river beneath the ice."
"Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent."
"Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening."
"The word vocation itself is rooted in the Latin word for voice. Vocation does not mean a goal I pursue. It means a calling that I hear."
"An inevitable though often ignored dimension of the quest for 'wholeness' is that we must embrace what we dislike or find shameful about ourselves as well as what we are confident and proud of."
"The soul speaks its truth only under quiet, inviting, and trustworthy conditions. The soul is like a wild animal - tough, resilient, savvy, self-sufficient, and yet exceedingly shy. If we want to see a wild animal, the last thing we should do is go crashing through the woods, shouting for the creature to come out. But if we are willing to walk quietly into the woods ..."
"True vocation joins self and service, as Frederick Buechner asserts when he defines vocation as 'the place where your deep gladness meets the world's deep need.'"
"Quaker teacher Douglas Steere was fond of saying that the ancient human question 'Who am I' leads inevitably to the equally important question 'Whose am I?' - for there is no selfhood outside of relationship."
"Teaching, I was coming to understand, is my native way of being in the world. Make me a cleric, or a CEO or a poet or a politician and teaching is what I will do. Teaching is at the he
"We must withdraw the negative projections we make on people and situations - projections that serve mainly to mask our fears about ourselves - and acknowledge and embrace our own liabilities and limits."
"self-care is never a selfish act"
"Had I not followed my despair... I might have continued to pursue a work that was not mine to do, causing further harm to myself, to the people and projects with which I worked, and to a profession that is well worth doing - by those who are called to do it."
"no punishment anyone might inflict on them could possible worse than the punishment they inflict on themselves by conspiring in their own diminishment."
"A clearness committee -- a process in which the group refrains from giving you advice but spends three hours asking you honest, open questions to help you discover your own inner truth."
"By then it was obvious, even to me, that my desire to be president had much more to do with my ego than with the ecology of my life - so obvious that when the clearness committee ended, I called the school and withdrew my name from consideration. Had I taken the job, it would have been very bad for me and a disaster for the school."
"Dorothy Day -- Do not give to the poor expecting to get their gratitude so that you can feel good about yourself. If you do, your giving will be thin and short-lived, and that is not what the poor need; it will only impoverish them further. Give only if you have something you must give; give only if you are someone for whom giving is its own reward."
"One sign that I am violating with my own nature in the same of nobility is a condition called burnout. Though usually regarded as the result of trying to give too much, burnout in my experience results from trying to give what I do not possess. [Burnout] does not result from giving all I have: it merely reveals the nothingness from which I was trying to give in the first place."
"Depression is the ultimate state of disconnection."
"'You seem to look upon depression as the hand of an enemy trying to crush you... do you think you could see it instead as the hand of a friend, pressing you down to the ground on which it is safe to stand?'"
"The problem with living at the high altitude is simple: when we slip, as we always do, we have a long, long way to fall... I had been trained as an intellectual not only to think - an activity I greatly value - but also to live largely in my head, the place in the human body that is farther from the ground."
"There were the visitor's who began by saying, 'I know exactly how you feel...' Whatever comfort or counsel these people may have intended to speak, I heard nothing beyond their opening words, because I knew they were peddling a falsehood: no one can fully experience another person's mystery. Paradoxically, it was my friends' empathetic attempt to identify with me that made me feel even more isolated."
"One of the hardest things we must do sometimes is to be present to another person's pain without trying to fix it, to simply stand respectfully at the edge of that person's mystery and misery. Standing there, we feel useless and powerless.. In an effort to avoid those feelings, I give advice, which sets me, not you, free.
"Why must we go in and down? Because as we do so, we will meet the darkness that we carry within ourselves - the ultimate source of the shadows that we project onto other people. If we do not understand that the enemy is within, we will find a thousand ways of making someone 'out there' into the enemy, becoming leaders who oppress rather than liberate others."
"Good leadership comes from people who have penetrated their own inner darkness and arrived at the place where we are at one with one another, people who can lead the rest of us to a place of 'hidden wholeness' because they have been there and know the way."
"Emerge with the capacity to lead the rest of us toward community, toward our complex and inexplicable caring for each other."
"If you can't get out of it, get into it!"
"The average group can tolerate no more than fifteen seconds of silence: if we are not making noise, we believe nothing good is happening and something must be dying."
"The great community asks us to do only what we are able and trust the rest to other hands."
"The best leaders in every setting reward people for taking worthwhile risks even if they are likely to fail. These leaders know that the death of an initiative - if it was tested for good reasons - is always a source of new learning."
"By allowing something to die when its time is due, we create the conditions under which new life can emerge."
"We do not need to be the fear we have"
"Rilke--- living the questions"
"Metaphors are more than literary devices, of course: most of us use metaphors, albeit unconsciously, to name our experience of life."
"Faced with this inevitable winter, what does nature do in autumn? It scatters the seeds that will bring new growth in the spring - and scatters them with amazing abandon... I am rarely aware that seeds are being planted. Instead my mind is on the fact that the green growth of summer is browning and beginning to die... On the surface, it seemed that life was lessening, but silently and lavishly the seeds of new life were always being sown."
"Opposites do not negate each other... they need each other for health"
"I confused the teaching with the teacher."
"Before spring becomes beautiful, it is plug ugly, nothing but mud and muck. I have walked in the early spring through fields that will suck your boots off, a world so wet and woeful it makes you yearn for the return of ice. But in that muddy mess, the conditions of rebirth are being created...It helps me understand that the humiliating events of life, the events that leave 'mud on my face' ... may create the fertile soil in which something new can grow."
"Though spring begins slowly and tentatively, it grows with a tenacity that never fails to touch me. The smallest and most tender shoots insist on having their way, coming up through ground that looked, only a few weeks earlier, as if it would never grow anything again."
"If you receive a gift, you keep it alive not by clinging to it but by passing it along."
"Whether the scarce resource is money or love or power or words, the true law of life is that we generate more of whatever seems scarce by trusting its supply and passing it around. Authentic abundance does not lie in secured stockpiles of food or cash or influence or affection but in belonging to a community where we can give those goods to others who need them - and receive them from others when we are in need."
"Here is a summertime truth: abundance is a communal act... Community doesn't just create abundance - community is abundance. If we could learn that equation from the world of nature, the human world might be transformed."
I'd love to borrow this one.
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