"But how are you supposed to be unafraid when you only rarely reach your sanctuary get trapped outside in life rising up, and knock yourself numb against its obstacles? This is why I long so impatiently to get to work, to begin my workday, because life can become art only once it has become work. I know I cannot extricate my life from the fates with which it has grown intertwined, but I have to find the strength to lift life in its entirety, exactly the way it is and including everything, into calmness, into solitude, into the quiet of profound labor." (Rilke)

Barriers

"At present, people create barriers between each other by their fragmentary thought. Each one operates separately. When these barriers have dissolved, then there arises one mind, where they are all one unit, but each person also retains his or her own individual awareness. That one mind will still exist even when they separate, and when they come together, it will be as if they hadn't separated. It's actually a single intelligence that works with people who are moving in relationship with one another. . . . If you had a number of people who really pulled together and worked together in this way, it would be remarkable. They would stand out so much that everyone would know they were different."
David Bohm (physicist, philosopher, & mystic)

Listen

"You can listen with a sharp focus and understand what it is you're relating to on a very specific basis. But there's also a soft focus, where you're actually able to hear the melody that's created by all the parts coming together. That melody changes as each part changes, because the melody is the sum total of everything that's present at the time. A lot of times we don't listen for that, and a lot of times we don't know it's there, and a lot of times we get stunned by the fact that we hear it, and then everything stops."
Ysaye Barnwell

Messy Ways...

"Life behaves in messy ways...continuously exploring systems bent on discovering what works are far more practical and successful than our attempts at efficiency. Such systems are not trying to reduce inputs in order to maximize outputs. They slosh around in the mess, involve many individuals, encourage discoveries, and move quickly past mistakes. They are learning all the time, engaging everyone in finding what works. The system succeeds because it involves many tinkerers focused on figuring out what is possible. Could we begin to appreciate that this kind of tinkering is efficient?"
(Margaret Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers from A Simpler Way)

See through fear...

When a country is in harmony with the Tao, the factories make trucks and tractors. When a country goes counter to the Tao, warheads are stockpiled outside the cities. There is no greater illusion than fear, no greater wrong than preparing to defend yourself, no greater misfortune than having an enemy. Whoever can see through all fear always be safe.
Lao Tse

Leadership

"A leader is a person who has an unusual degree of power to project on other people his or her shadow or his or her light. A leader is a person who has an unusual degree of power to create the conditions under which other people must live and move and have their being-conditions that can either be as illuminating as heaven or as shadowy as hell. A leader is a person who must take special responsibility for what's going on inside him or her self, inside his or her consciousness, lest the act of leadership create more harm than good."
--Parker Palmer

The MIrror of Simple Souls

“God has nowhere to put his goodness, if not in me�no place to put himself entire, if not in me. And by this means I am the exemplar of salvation, and what is more, I am the salvation itself of every creature, and the glory of God�”
Marguerite de Porete -- "The Mirror of Simple Souls

Grass grows, water flows

"Sitting quietly
doing nothing
spring comes
and the grass grows
by itself."
-- Zen poem