The Unclad Soul

“Everybody’s gotta learn; nobody’s born knowing.”   ―   Harper Lee, Novelist

“Is your first responsibility to yourself? The question is misleading; that is, it misleads the person who takes it to heart. It’s like asking, must you shift your weight in order to walk? Of course you must, but anyone who concentrates first on shifting their weight will not walk well.” – Hugh Prather, Writer/Mystic

There are basically two kinds of fear. One is a healthy, informed fear. The other is a neurotic, uninformed fear. If I see an oncologist about various symptoms of dizziness, blackouts, severe nausea and other physiological issues and the doctor after a series of tests tells me I have a massive malignant and inoperable tumor on my spine, I have a legitimate right to be fearful. The facts are in and I must face them. If on the other hand I wake up with a painful stomach ache and spend the day believing I have stomach cancer, then my fear is irrational and probably meaningless. I have nothing to base my fear on except my own neurotic worries that I am dying. This is where we are in America politically and religiously. Huge numbers of our citizens are living in the worst kind of hysterical, obsessive fear based on nothing more than their own gut feelings, and of course, the maddening, overwrought deceitfulness and hype of various forms of media that keep telling us we’re all a...

“Perhaps we just need little reminders from time to time that we are already dignified, deserving, worthy. Sometimes we don't feel that way because of the wounds and the scars we carry from the past or because of the uncertainty of the future. It is doubtful that we came to feel undeserving on our own. We were helped to feel unworthy. We were taught it in a thousand ways when we were little, and we learned our lessons well.”   ―   Jon Kabat-Zinn, Physician/Author

“What you seek is seeking you.”   ~ Rumi, Persian Poet

"In my own life, as winters turn into spring, I find it not only hard to cope with mud but also hard to credit the small harbingers of larger life to come, hard to hope until the outcome is secure. Spring teaches me to look more carefully for the green stems of possibility; for the intuitive hunch that may turn into a larger insight, for the glance or touch that may thaw a frozen relationship, for the stranger's act of kindness that makes the world seem hospitable again."  ~ Parker Palmer, Author/Educator

“We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. And this has been based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know with any certainty what was good even for us. We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and to learn what is good for it. We must learn to cooperate in its processes, and to yield to its limits. But even more important, we must learn to acknowledge that the creation is full of mystery; we will never entirely understand it. We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe. We must recover the sense of the majesty of creation, and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For I do not doubt that it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it. ~ Wendell Berry, American Poet ...