Quotes (Page 2 of 7)

Living a life devoid of ceremony leaves us without allies. Shut out of our reality, they abandon us to a world without intelligence – the very image of modernist ideology. The mechanistic worldview becomes its own self-fulfilling prophecy, and we are indeed left with nothing but force by which to affect the world.

In a ceremony, one attends fully to the task at hand, performing each action just as it should be. A ceremony is therefore a practice for all of life, a practice in doing everything just as it should be done. An earnest ceremonial practice is like a magnet that aligns more and more of life to its field; it is a prayer that asks, “May everything I do be a ceremony.

How do we protect those susceptible to Covid?” invites us into “How do we care for vulnerable people in general?

There is a vital need to return to “the root of the root,” and at the very core of our predicament is our forgetfulness of the sacred nature of creation. Having forgotten that the Earth is sacred, we use it as a resource to be exploited, and human beings have become consumers to fulfill this economic model.

Yes, we will have to learn how to live at the end of an era, at a time of increasing insecurity, disturbance, even chaos. We will see more and more the value of care, compassion, and community, and develop the tools of radical resilience, as we are already recognizing in our response to the virus.

We can’t return to normal, because the normal that we had was precisely the problem.

Anticipatory grief is the mind going to the future and imagining the worst. To calm yourself, you want to come into the present. This will be familiar advice to anyone who has meditated or practiced mindfulness but people are always surprised at how prosaic this can be.

All we need to do to find what connects us is to look down at the dirt beneath our feet.

But more and more I am reminded of an older word: bodhicitta, Sanskrit for “awakened heart.” It is that moment when you are overwhelmed by a great compassion for all around you, and you finally let go of the attachment to yourself as a thing in isolation, something separate.

It was—this was the secret, sudden thing—so delicious. Not knowing which way was which, or where the edges were. She was dissolved by it. She could drown right now and it would be a pleasure.