Gundula Schatz

"Politics and spirituality are the two sides of the same coin.  Politics is the driving force visible to the outside; spirituality is the internal force driving the consciousness to open up to the world and conjoin it.  Politics bared of spiritual awareness always leads to violence and the abuse of power. Spirituality without political engagement resembles an escape from the world."

-- Gundula Schatz

The Great Blessing

The Great Blending

For intervals, then, throughout our lives
we savor a concurrence, the great blending
of our chance selves with what sustains
all chance. We ride the wave and are
the wave. And with renewed belief
inner and outer we find our talk
turned to prayer, our prayer into truth:
for an interval, early, we become at home in the world.

- William Stafford

Practicing Peace

 "We are always at a crossroads, moment by moment. 

We can choose to open the wound further, 

 creating more suffering for ourselves and others, 

or 

 we can choose to heal the wound." 

~ Pema Chödrön, author of "Practicing Peace in Times of War"

SORROW

"Our sorrow is in equal measure love.  

We only mourn what we deeply care for...

In speaking fear, you also show the trust and courage it takes to speak it, in a fear phobic society.

The anger we express has its source in our passion for justice.

And as to this bowl, it's emptiness is to be honored too.  

To be empty allows space for the new to arise."

- Joanna Macy and Molly Brown in their inspired book
Coming Back to Life  

"For Camus ... [our] astonishment [at life] results from our confrontation with a world that refuses to surrender meaning. It occurs when our need for meaning shatters against the indifference, immovable and absolute, of the world. As a result, absurdity is not an autonomous state; it does not exist in the world, but is instead exhaled from the abyss that divides us from a mute world. 'This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment it is all that links them together.' ...

Camus

"In November [1940], Camus confided to his journal: 'Understand this: we can despair of the meaning of life in general, but not of the particular forms that it takes; we can despair of existence, for we have no power over it, but not of history, where the individual can do everything. It is individuals who are killing us today. Why should not individuals manage to give the world peace? We must simply begin without thinking of such grandiose aims.' "

Lonesome

 "Between stimulus and response there is a space.  In that space is our power to choose our response.  In our response lies our growth and our freedom." -- Often misattributed to Viktor Frankl, the actual author is unknown