Good
day, and welcome to this new week of ours! We
hope
that you're able to go through the week with peace
of mind
and spirit, and that you're able to pass on that
peace to the
others who share your world with you.
Beauty is so abundant; even if it's not
within immediate reach,
it's not hard to find. Indeed, it may be right in
front of your nose,
something you take for granted until someone else points
it out. -Leslie
Levine
Live for today.
Multitudes of people
have failed to live for today. . . .
What they have had
within their grasp today they have missed entirely,
because only the future has intrigued them. -William Allen White
Authentic
values are those by which a life
can be lived, which can form a people
that produces great deeds and thoughts.
-
Allan
Bloom
Laws
alone can not secure freedom of expression; in order that
every person present their views without penalty there must be a spirit
of tolerance in the entire population. -
Albert Einstein
The journey of the soul is a continual cycle,
somewhat like the seasons. In spring, things
open. In summer, they come to great
fruition. In fall, things go out in a blaze of
glory. In winter, the seed is in the dark
ground and can't be seen.
At different points of our journey, throughout our
whole life, we are in one of these cycles.
Winter is often experienced as a period of
despair. At the same time, it is a period of
creative hibernation and development. When we
get sunk down in the dark night of the soul, it
helps to remember this is just one phase that will
change into something else. We will come out
of the darkness with something that will help us and
help other people. It is actually kind of a
purification phase.
When we are in the light, we also have to accept
that we will be going back into the dark
again. The aspen tree is a good example.
In summer, the leaves are green, lush with
chlorophyll. In autumn, the leaves are at
their greatest beauty, a blaze of gold. Yet
this is a time of their greatest pain, since they
are becoming depleted of the chlorophyll that helps
them breathe. When they are in their last
phase, the golden leaves tremble in the wind and
then drop off the trees. But they come back
again. It is that way in our own lives, also.
Perhaps that's why I find nature so nurturing. I love to
hike, especially in the mountains. When I'm walking in
nature, I feel in awe of the wonder of creation.
Nature is
full of surprises, always changing, and we must change with
it. In nature, the soul is renewed and called to open and
grow. In the wilderness, you're up against whatever nature
brings you--the dangers as well as the beauty.
I was raised in a big city. We were poor and didn't have a
car, so we had little access to nature. At the row house
where I grew up, there were very few trees or even
greenery. But my grandmother used to tell me stories about
her life on a farm. She read Walt Whitman, Emerson, and
Thoreau to me. Sitting on her lap as a young girl, I was
given the gift of a greater reality than the big cement city
that was my world.
I grew up in an alcoholic family where there was a lot of pain
and violence. It was a traumatic, disruptive life. I
was plunged into darkness as a child, but at the same time I
felt love from my family--even from my father, who was
drinking. When he was sober, he took me on walks around
the city. My father loved animals and would introduce
me to the dogs in different neighborhoods. I got a sense
of adventure from my father. From my mother, who supported
the family, I got a sense of incredible stability and
loyalty. My relationship with my grandmother gave me
security and tenderness. Both she and my father introduced
me to the world of books.
Reading has been very important to me on my soul's
journey. Reading Dostoevsky and Rilke and participating in
their souls' journeys has given me hope and encouragement.
It helped me to touch the really dark sides of myself, as well
as the joyous and redeeming sides. Because I was somewhat
isolated in my family environment, a lot of my hope for change
came from books. I'm very grateful to the authors who
helped me along the way, because without their books, I don't
know what would have happened to me.
For me, reading poetry and literature is always nurturing,
because it puts me in touch with myself and with other people,
especially people in other countries. Films do that
also. I see the soul's journey as one that's both unique
and universal at the same time. Each time I read a great
book or go to a great film or listen to a symphony, it opens my
heart and puts me in touch with someone else's journey and the
soul's journey that we all share. . . .
Everyone gets thrown off balance. What keeps me centered
is walking in nature. I find a balance and sense of
serenity there. While I am walking, I often say the
Serenity Prayer. I also say it before I lecture or any
time I need to center myself.
Being with friends and in relationship with others is central to
nourishing my life. When we are feeling overwhelmed and
stuck in our own despair, we need to reach out to other
people. Sometimes you think it's only you. It's
important to gather something in yourself to give to somebody
else. That helps you connect and unite with somebody else,
and it takes the focus off your own pain. Dreams sometimes
come to help us in those situations. If we're open to
what's going on inside and outside us, we can see a
connection. It might be a chance encounter with a person,
or seeing a flower. It could be anything. That's why
I love the films of Krystov Kielovski, the Polish
director. They show the mysterious connections among
people, animals, and the moods of Nature, and how our souls'
paths are mysteriously interwoven.
If you can offer yourself as a channel for creation who
nourishes both yourself and others, I think that in the process
you find a community of travelers on the soul's journey.
We
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Passion is power. On the color spectrum from
faint interest to rabid obsession, it is toward the
red end of the continuum. Passion is accompanied
by the sound of primal yahoos, castanets in the heart,
the beating of wings. It is the natural
exudation of love, any kind of love, and spills from
us like heat from a fire. Passion is the
smelling salts of the soul. Passion's message is
the same one that love brings: follow.
Passion is what we are most deeply curious about, most
hungry for, will most hate to lose in life. It
is the most desperate wish we need to yell down the
well of our lives. It is whatever we pursue
merely for its own sake, what we study when there are
no tests to take, what we create though no one may
ever see it. It makes us forget that the sun
rose and set, that we have bodily functions and
personal relations that could use a little
tending. It is what we'd do if we weren't
worried about consequences, about money, about making
everyone happy but ourselves. It is whatever we
could be tempted to sell our souls for in order to
have a hundred extra years just to devote to it,
whatever fills us with the feeling poet Anne Sexton
was referring to when she said that, "when I'm
writing, I know I'm doing the thing I was born to
do." It is what matters most, whether we're
doing it or not.
"There is a sudden knock at your door," says
author Deena Metzger in her book Writing for Your
Life. "A trusted friend enters to warn
you that the Dream Police will arrive in twenty
minutes. Everything, everything in your life
that you have not written down will evaporate on their
arrival. You have only twenty minutes to
preserve what is most precious in your life, what has
formed you, what sustains you, what is essential, what
you cannot live without.
"Whatever you forget will disappear.
Everything, to be saved, must be named, in its
particularity. Not trees, but oak. Not
animals, but wolf. Not people, but Alicia.
As in reality, what has no name, no specificity,
vanishes."
Whatever passions you can specify, know that there are
also passions within those passions that constitute
their emotional cores, which is what you're really
after, the needs your passions satisfy, what
you want them to bring to you. The passion may
be painting, parenting, solving mysteries, making
people laugh, solitude, social action, or a certain
country, but within it are metapassions: the
need for freedom, creative fulfillment, security,
belonging, influence, love.
Our passions call us to follow not just the painting
or inventing or the public speaking but also the need
for expression; to follow not just politics or martial
arts but also the need for power or empowerment; to
honor not just our hunger for retreat or meditation or
a move to the country but also for serenity. A
woman I know is ardent about carving statues of Buddha
and has come to understand that she is also trying to
teach herself about compassion. A man I know has
a passion for Ireland--the country of his
ancestors--and it has led him to explore his own
lifelong feelings of rootlessness and exile, and his
need for bearings.
"The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain
skilled and supple way," the author Annie Dillard
once wrote, "to locate the most tender and live
spot and plug into the pulse.
Living
Life Fully, the e-zine
exists to try to provide for visitors of the world wide web a
place
of growth, peace, inspiration, and encouragement. Our
articles
are presented as thoughts of the authors--by no means do
we
mean to present them as ways that anyone has to live
life. Take
from them what you will, and disagree with
whatever you disagree
with--just know that they'll be here for you
each week.
Surely
all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having
gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one
can go any further. The further one goes, the more private,
the more personal, the more singular an experience becomes,
and the thing one is making is, finally, the necessary, irrepressible,
and, as nearly as possible, definitive utterance of this singularity.
I've had some pretty harsh lessons on simplicity in my lifetime,
mostly due to the many moves that I've had to make from place to
place--and sometimes the new place was hundreds--even
thousands--of miles from the old place. What that meant, of
course, was that I had to move everything that I owned from one
place to another, and that often was a very difficult thing to
accomplish, depending on how much stuff I've had.
I'm not a person who has complex tastes. I don't have tons
of furniture and clothing, and what my wife and I do have has
always been quite modest. But modesty doesn't change the
fact that when you're living somewhere, you have stuff--a couch
and beds and lamps and chairs and tables--and on and on and
on. The less of this stuff that you have, of course, the
easier the move. The more stuff you have, the more
complicated and time-consuming and expensive the move.
Simplicity is
an exact medium between too little and too much.
Joshua
Reynolds
Most of the
stuff that I've accumulated over the years is in the
form of books and music, for I love both. As
much as I love reading and listening to music,
though, I know that the books and the CDs have
complicated my life when it comes to moving, and
sometimes they complicate my life when I'm trying to
find places for them when we have a new place to
live (and I've already switched to digital copies of
most everything that I'm going to. Holding a
book in my hands and turning pages is a much more
gratifying experience than "turning" a
page on a screen).
I know that I need to simplify. The
questions are difficult to answer, though: how
do I do so, and which stuff do I get rid of?
Over the years, we've given an awful lot of stuff to
charity thrift stores. We could have
a yard sales, but we prefer to give it to
an organization that will use the money from selling
it for positive reasons. But even as I do
this, I know in my heart that I should be doing it
more, for the possessions that I have, have caused me a great deal of stress during
our moves
and settling in periods. And I know that we should
never feel such stress over something like
possessions. Not all of our moves have been
planned, either, which meant that we had much less
time to decide what we could do without each time
that we moved.
Simplicity
is making the journey of this life
with just baggage enough.
Charles Dudley Warner
Our culture definitely values the acquisition and
maintenance of possessions. We are a very
materialistic culture, not one that values
simplicity in many forms at all. In fact, most
of us rarely think of simplifying our lives,
especially through the strategy of ridding ourselves
of many of our possessions. After all, we may
need this stuff, right? And if I get rid of it
now and I end up needing it, I'll just have to buy
it again, and that would simply be a waste of money.
I think that in many ways, the difficulties I have
in getting rid of things is due to a fundamental
lack of trust that I grew up with. As an Adult
Child of an Alcoholic, I've always had trust
issues--trust in other people and trust in life to
take care of me. Because of the alcoholism in
the family, we never had enough money to get many of
the necessities of life, much less any luxuries or
other items. And we lost a great deal over the
years to repossessions, etc. I know now, though, that if I do
end up needing something that I get rid of, I
will have the resources necessary to get it again
when I truly need it. My brain is well aware
of this fact, but my heart still has a hard time
getting rid of things.
So I keep given lessons in the need to
simplify, and I hope that eventually, the lesson
sticks. I know that I make do with far fewer
things than most of the people I know (with the
exception of books), but there is still a huge
amount of room for me to simplify my life even
more. And it's good that these lessons come
regularly, so that I'm reminded of them rather
constantly. While we don't want to move
again in the near future, I do want to be sure that
if something happens that makes it necessary to do
so, it won't be such a difficult ordeal as it's
become here.
Simplicity of life
is the true secret of happiness. Unhampered
experience
of joy which lies within comes out of simplicity. Your
life should
never be complicated with too many things.
Chinananda
So I continue
to go through boxes and set stuff aside to go to the
thrift stores. And I try to figure out what
I'm going to do with my teaching stuff so that it's
as out-of-the-way as possible. And I try to keep my sense of humor
through the frustration, because I know this is a
lesson that I should have learned years ago, and in
all reality, I should have seen this coming.
And I have to keep a sense of humor because if I
don't, I'm going to let a silly situation get me
down--and that's something that I don't want to let
happen.
I promise that three months from now, things will be
simpler for me, especially as far as possessions are
concerned, and that I'll have significantly less and
fewer of everything (even books!).
We are lonesome animals. We spend all of our life
trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient
methods is to tell a story begging the listener
to
say--and to
feel-- "Yes, that is the way it is, or at least
that is the way
I feel it." You’re not as alone as you thought.
John Steinbeck
Wishing
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Do you wish the World were better?
Let me tell you what to do:
Set a watch upon your actions,
Keep them always straight and true.
Rid your mind of selfish motives,
Let your thoughts be clean and high.
You can make a little Eden
Of the sphere you occupy.
Do you wish the World were wiser?
Then suppose you make a start,
By accumulating wisdom
In the scrap book of your heart.
Do not waste on page on folly;
Live to learn and learn to live.
If you want to give men knowledge
You must get it ere you give.
Do you wish the world were happy?
Then remember day by day,
Just to scatter seeds of kindness,
As you pass along the way.
For the pleasures of the many
May be oft times traced to one.
As the hand that plants an acorn,
Shelters armies from the sun.
You
have to define success in your own way.What maintains
your dignity and integrity and what is your life’s plan;
where do you want to put your efforts?I could be richer
and more famous, but I would have to give up things
that are of infinitely more value.
Laura Schlessinger
Yes, life
can be mysterious and confusing--but there's much of life that's
actually rather dependable and reliable. Some principles apply
to life in so many different contexts that they can truly be called
universal--and learning what they are and how to approach them and use
them can teach us some of the most important lessons that we've ever
learned.
My doctorate is in Teaching and Learning. I use it a lot when I
teach at school, but I also do my best to apply what I've learned to
the life I'm living, and to observe how others live their lives.
What makes them happy or unhappy, stressed or peaceful, selfish or
generous, compassionate or arrogant? In this book, I've done my
best to pass on to you what I've learned from people in my life,
writers whose works I've read, and stories that I've heard.
Perhaps these principles can be a positive part of your life, too! Universal Principles of Living Life Fully. Awareness of
these principles can explain a lot and take much of the frustration
out of the lives we lead.
Explore all of our
quotations pages--these links will take you to the first page of each
topic, and those pages will contain links to any additional pages on
the same topic (there are five pages on adversity, for example).
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