Wild Geese

Image

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

Mary Oliver

Nonviolent Communication

Centre for Nonviolent Communication

NVC UK

Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman

From page 114:

"It was early in the Vietnam War, and an American platoon was hunkered down in some rice paddies, in the heat of a firefight with the Vietcong. Suddenly a line of six monks started walking along the elevated berms that separated paddy from paddy. Perfectly calm and poised, the monks walked directly toward the line of fire.

"They didn't look right, they didn't look left. They walked straight through," recalls David Busch, one of the American soldiers. "It was really strange, because nobody shot at 'em. And after they walked over the berm, suddenly all the fight was out of me. It just didn't feel like I wanted to do this anymore, at least not that day. It must have been that way for everybody, because everybody quit. We just stopped fighting.""

Helen Simmonds

image from Jonathan Cooper Gallery

FLOW by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

If I quoted everything from this book that I wanted to, the post would be as long as my arm! - here are my top two:

From p33:

"The shape and content of life depend on how attention has been used. Entirely different realities will emerge depending on how it is invested...We create ourselves by how we invest this [psychic] energy...hence attention is our most important tool in the task of improving the quality of experience."

From p208:

"We all start with preconceived notions of what we want from life. These include the basic needs programmed into us by our genes to ensure survival - the need for food, comfort, sex, dominance over other beings. They also include the desires that our specific culture has inculcated in us - to be slim, rich, educated, and well-liked. If we embrace these goals and are lucky, we may replicate the ideal physical and social image for our historical time and place. But is this the best use of our psychic energy? And what if we cannot realise these ends? We will never become aware of other possibilities unless, like the painter who watches with care what is happening on the canvas, we pay attention to what is happening around us, and evaluate events on the basis of how they make us feel, rather than evaluating them exclusively in terms of preconceived notions. If we do so we my discover that, contrary to what we are led to believe...it is more enjoyable to talk with one's two-year-old than to play golf with the company president."

photo from Milk Photos

Happiness

So early it's still almost dark out.
I'm near the window with coffee,
and the usual early morning stuff
that passes for thought.
When I see the boy and his friend
walking up the road
to deliver the newspaper.
They wear caps and sweaters,
and one boy has a bag over his shoulder.
They are so happy
they aren't saying anything, these boys.
I think if they could, they would take
each other's arm.
It's early in the morning,
and they are doing this thing together.
They come on, slowly.
The sky is taking on light,
though the moon still hangs pale over the water.
Such beauty that for a minute
death and ambition, even love,
doesn't enter into this.
Happiness. It comes on
unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,
any early morning talk about it.

Raymond Carver

picture from here

Healing without Freud or Prozac

A book by Dr David Servan-Schreiber (thanks Andrew for the lend of it)

From the end of the chapter Love Is a Biological Need:

"Thankfully, this important key to our emotional brain does not depend on a partner's love alone. Actually, it depends on the quality of all our emotional bonds - with our children, our parents, our brothers and sisters, our friends, our animals. What is important is the feeling of being fully oneself with someone else. To be able to show we are weak and vulnerable, as well as strong and radiant. To be able to laugh, but also to cry. To feel that our emotions are understood. To know that we are useful and important to someone. And to have a minimum of warm physical contacts. Quite simply, to be loved."

From the chapter The Larger Connection (Quoting Abraham Maslow):

"'The best way to become a better helper is to become a better person. But one necessary aspect of becoming a better person is via helping other people. So one can and must do both simultaneously.'"

Here's the author's website which is full of useful info: www.instincttoheal.org

photo by Caroline Phelan

Do You Not Know That I Need To Touch You

Do you not know that I need to touch you

as I touch a fruit or child?

Knowledge I need of you that comes not with words.

Let me touch your hair, your moving lip,

the bone beneath the gentle skin.

I will not harm you - I do not want your sex.

Trust me to touch you and to leave you whole.

Frances Horovitz (1938-83)

Mark Williams on Mindfulness

Mark Williams on Mindfulness from The School of Life on Vimeo.

"What mindfulness training is partly about is waking up to the actual life that we live. It's not trying to get somewhere based on fear - it's actually a way of discerning what our deepest values are, and living in line with those values."

Or, as Jon Kabat-Zin puts it...

"...start to pay attention to what might be most fundamental in our lives rather than most urgent."

(You can watch him on YouTube here)

http://www.toast.co.uk/

Master the twenty-four hours

"All of us are apprenticed to the same teacher that the religious institutions originally worked with: reality. Reality-insight says...master the twenty-four hours.

Do it well, without self-pity. It is as hard to get the children herded into the car pool and down the road to the bus as it is to chant sutras in the Buddha-hall on a cold morning. One move is not better than the other, each can be quite boring, and they both have the virtuous quality of repetition.

Repetition and ritual and their good results come in many forms. Changing the filter, wiping noses, going to meetings, picking up around the house, washing dishes, checking the dipstick - don't let yourself think these are distracting you from your more serious pursuits. Such a round of chores is not a set of difficulties we hope to escape from so that we may do our "practice" which will put us on a "path" - it is our path."

Gary Snider, The Practice of the Wild, from Jon Kabbat-Zin's book, Wherever You Go, There You Are.

Brene Brown on vulnerability