“In my research I’ve found that the same can be said for the conspiracies we make up to justify stereotypes and to explain that fight with our partner or the disapproving look from our boss or child’s behavior at school. We make up hidden stories that tell us who is against us and who is with us. Whom we can trust and who is not to be trusted. Conspiracy thinking is all about fear-based self-protection and our intolerance for uncertainty. When we depend on self-protecting narratives often enough, they become our default stories. And we must not forget that storytelling is a powerful integration tool. We start weaving these hidden, false stories into our lives and they eventually distort who we are and how we relate to others.”
–Brene Brown, Rising Strong
Peter Gabriel
Meaning and Continuity of Time, or Karma…Everything is Now
Dancing Backward on a Mountain
Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!! or a BOOM!?!?!?!?
Morning Trip (84)
“Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.
Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.
In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.
Break clear away, once in a while, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.
Take a course in good water and air; and in the eternal youth of Nature you may renew your own. Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you.
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.
Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn.
The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.
I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.
The grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried all at once; a shower is forever falling; vapour is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.
Let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life.
Going to the mountains is going home.
Between every two pines is a doorway to a new world.
As long as I live, I’ll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I’ll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm, and the avalanche. I’ll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the world as I can.
Everybody needs beauty…places to play in and pray in where nature may heal and cheer and give strength to the body and soul alike.
One day’s exposure to mountains is better than a cartload of books.
Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is necessity; that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.”
Downside Up
Morning Trip (83)
Normally, I do not write as myself on the Morning Trip posts. I’ve been feeling a slow-down, which might be a speeding-up, here. I’m working very hard and getting nowhere. I’m doing nothing and making leaps. I do not think in myself, that I can tell. I know that it is all ok. I feel really NOT ok! Many thoughts about what I found this morning, and then even suggestions for music for me, had selections dealing with the same issues. So, I’m going with it, in gratitude for those who post such things, so that I might find them in a moment of ‘need’ for myself.
“The search for reason ends at the known; on the immense expanse beyond it only the sense of the ineffable can glide. It alone knows the route to that which is remote from experience and understanding. Neither of them is amphibious: reason cannot go beyond the shore, and the sense of the ineffable is out of place where we measure, where we weigh. We do not leave the shore of the known in search of adventure or suspense or because of the failure of reason to answer our questions. We sail because our mind is like a fantastic seashell, and when applying our ear to its lips we hear a perpetual murmur from the waves beyond the shore. Citizens of two realms, we all must sustain a dual allegiance: we sense the ineffable in one realm, we name and exploit reality in another. Between the two we set up a system of references, but we can never fill the gap. They are as far and as close to each other as time and calendar, as violin and melody, as life and what lies beyond the last breath.”
– Abraham Joshua Heschel
Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion
Morning Trip (68)
“Mindful
Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less
kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle
in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for –
to look, to listen,
to lose myself
inside this soft world –
to instruct myself
over and over
in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,
the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant –
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,
the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help
but grow wise
with such teachings
as these –
the untrimmable light
of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?”
– Mary Oliver
Morning Trip (35)
“The workshop . . .
The paper I write on or you
write on, every word we write,
every cross and twirl of the
pen, and the curious way we
write what we think, yet very
faintly . . .
In them realities for you and
me — in them poems for you
and me . . .
In them themes, hints, provokers.”
– Walt Whitman
Elisa's Spot 