Curated Content

"The universe is a creative dance into novelty."

Alfred North Whitehead

Martín Prechtel

Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard earned, makes demands upon us and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynisim. Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like... keeps the devil down in the hole. It says, 'the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending.' It says, 'the world is worth believing in.' In time, we come to find that this is so. - Nick Cave

"Real revelation comes through silence." - Fred Rogers

"Everything always bears looking into, astonishing as that fact is." - Marilynne Robinson

“Science comes to a stop at the frontiers of logic but nature does not.  

She thrives on ground as yet untrodden by theory.” - C.G. Jung

Elizabeth S. Green

"People who understand each other's vulnerabilities will protect each other's dignity." - Saket Soni

Jean-Francois Millet

"A great gift of any adult to a child is to love what you do in front of the child. If you love to bicycle, if you love to repair things, do that in front of the child. Let them catch the attitude that that's fun. Attitudes are caught, not taught." - Fred Rogers

All flourishing is mutual. 

Robin Wall Zimmerer

Personality is the supreme realization of the innate idiosyncracy of a living being. It is an act of high courage flung in the face of life, the absolute affirmation of all that constitutes the individual, the most successful adaptation to the universal conditions of existence coupled with the greatest possible freedom for self-determination. - Carl Jung

I confess - I stalked her - in the grocery store: her crown - of snowy braids held in place by a great silver clip - her erect bearing, her radiating tenderness - the way she placed yogurt and avocadoes in her basket - beaming peace like the North Star. - I wanted to ask, what aisle did you find - your serenity in, do you know - how to be married for 50 years, or how to live alone  - excuse me for interrupting but you seem to possess - some knowledge that makes the earth burn and turn on its axis - But we don't request such things from strangers - nowadays. So I said, "I love your hair." - Alison Luterman

"Time is like falling... we are always on the verge of falling forward into nothingness; but, in each moment, the world becomes anew, and the creative advance continues." - Robert Mesle

One particle of dust is raised and the great earth lies therein; one flower blooms and the universe rises with it. But where should our eye be fixed when the dust is not yet stirred and the flower has not yet bloomed? Therefore, it is said that, like cutting a bundle of thread, one cut cuts all asunder; again, like dyeing a bundle of thread, one dyeing dyes all in the same color. Now yourself get out of all the entangling relations and rip them up to pieces, but do not lose track of your inner treasure; for it is through this that the high and the low universally responding and the advanced and the backward making no distinction, each manifests itself in full perfection. - Yengo Hekigan

Maybe the meaning of our lives are actually not even within the scope of our understanding. Take the cyanobacteria as an example. They were the first bacteria to photosynthesize and collectively, they spent 2.5 billion years converting carbon dioxide on our planet into oxygen, thus allowing for the development of the ozone layer and with it, the possibility for the  survival of multi-cellular life. As individuals, each one lived probably only a couple of days and may have felt that the world was not dramatically impacted by their short existence, yet every breath they took contributed to the possibility of countless lives that they would never see. Couldn't the same be true for us? - Tom Chi

He believed that human beings were inside a story that had no ending because its teller had started without conceiving of one, and that after ten thousand tales was no nearer to finding the resolution of the last page. Story was the stuff of life, and to realize you were inside one allowed you to sometimes surrender to the plot, to bear a little easier the griefs and sufferings and to enjoy more fully the twists that came along the way. 

- Niall Williams This is Happiness

"We are the universe carrying forth in its mission about which we don't know a great deal but nevertheless we know that we are immersed in it, in this drama." - Brian Swimme

No matter what our particular job, especially in our world today, we all are called to be tikkun olam: repairers of creation. Thank you for whatever you do wherever you are to bring joy and light and hope and faith and pardon and love to your neighbor and to yourself. - Fred Rogers 

'Tis a fearful thing - to love what death can touch. - A fearful thing - to love, to hope, to dream, to be - to be - and oh, to lose. - A thing for fools this, - and a holy thing - a holy thing - to love. For your life has lived in me, - your laugh once lifted me, - your word was gift to me. - To remember this brings painful joy. - 'Tis a human thing, love, - a holy thing, to love - what death has touched. - Yehuda HaLevi

Surprise is the nature of the universe.

Terry Prachett The Wee Free Men

"Consciousness is a very recent acquisition of nature and it is still in an experimental state. It is frail, menaced by specific dangers, and easily injured." - C. G. Jung

The Purse-Seine by Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962)

Our sardine-fisherman work at night in the dark of the moon; daylight or moonlight

They could not tell where to spread the net, unable to see the phosphoresecence of the shoals of fish.

They work northward from Monterey, coasting Santa Cruz; off New Year's Point or off Pigeon Point

The look-out man will see some lakes of milk-colored light on the sea's night-purple; he points, and the helmsman

Turns the dark prow, the motorboat circles the gleaming shoal and drifts out to her seine-net. They close the circle

And purse the bottom of the net, then with great labor haul it in.

I cannot tell you

How beautiful the scene is, and a little terrible, then, when the crowded fish

Know they are caught, and wildly beat from one wall to the other of their closing destiny the phosphoresecent 

water to a pool of flame, each beautiful slender body sheeted with flame, like a live rocket

A comet's tale wake of clear yellow flame; while outside the narrowing 

Floats and cordage of the net great sea-lions come up to watch, sighing in the dark; the vast walls of night

Stand erect to the stars.

Lately I was looking from a night mountain-top 

On a wide city, the colored splendor, galaxies of light: how could I help but recall the seine-net

Gathering the luminous fish? I cannot tell you how beautiful the city appeared, and a little terrible.

I thought, We have geared the machines and locked all together into interdependence; we have built the great citites; now 

There is no escape. We have gathered vast populations incapable of free survival, insulated

From the strong earth, each person in himself helpless, on all dependent. The circle is closed, and the net

Is being hauled in. They hardly feel the cords drawing, yet they shine already. The inevitable mass-disasters

Will not come in our time nor in our children's, but we and our children

Must watch the net draw narrower, government take all powers - or revolution, and the new government

Take more than all, add to kept bodies kept souls - or anarchy, the mass-disasters.

These things are Progress;

Do you marvel our verse is troubled or frowning, while it keeps its reason? Or it lets go, lets the mood flow

In the manner of the recent young men into mere hysteria, splintered gleams, crackled laughter. But they are quite wrong.

There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew that cultures decay, and life's end is death.

“Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away – an ephemeral apparition . . . Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom that passes. The rhizome remains (MDR 18). The great secret is to embody something essential in our lives. Then, undefeated by age, we can proceed with dignity and meaning, and, as the end approaches, be ready ‘to die with life'. For the goal of old age is not senility, but wisdom.” - C. G. Jung

Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depth of their hearts, where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God's eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed... I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other. - Thomas Merton

How shallow, puny, and imperfect are efforts to sound the depths in the nature of things. - Alfred North Whitehead 

Only time and tears take away grief; that is what they're for.  

Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight

In order to understand time we must consider the moments of the past as enfolded in the present. 

- David Bohm

We arise out of our bodies, which are the stubborn facts of the immediate relevant past. We are also carried on by our immediate past of personal experience; we finish a sentence because we have begun it. 

- Alfred North Whitehead

"Graceful receiving is one of the most wonderful gifts we can give anybody." - Fred Rogers

“[Other animals] are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.” - Henry Beston

"The dense fields of weeds waiting to entrap a vessel never existed, except in the imaginations of sailors. And the gloomy hulks of vessels doomed to endless drifting in the clinging weed are only the ghosts of things that never were." - Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us

"The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift." - Albert Einstein