Our life is the truth that we seek. Only my life is the truth, the truth above all. We create the truth by living it. – C.G. Jung, from The Red Book
truth
acceptance
a little lonely is not a bad thing
You are wise enough to understand that being “a little lonely” is not a bad thing. A writer’s occupation is one of the loneliest in the world, even if the loneliness is only an inner solitude and isolation, for that he must have at times if he is to be truly creative. And so I believe only the person who knows and is not afraid of loneliness should aspire to be a writer. But there are also rewards that are rich and peculiarly satisfying. – Rachel Carson
to discover the truth about myself…
Man’s intelligence, however we may misuse it, is far too keen and too sure to rest for long in error. It may embrace a lie and cling to it stubbornly, believing it to be true: but it cannot find true rest in falsehood. The mind that is in love with error wears itself out with anxiety, lest its error be discovered for what it is. But the man who loves truth can already find rest in the acknowledgment of his mistakes, for that is the beginning of truth.
The first step toward finding God, Who is Truth, is to discover the truth about myself: and if I have been in error, this first step to truth is the discovery of my error. A false and illusory “experience” of what appears to be God’s action in the soul may bring with it, for a moment, a kind of interior silence: the silence of a soul that rests in an illusion. But this silence is quickly disturbed by a deep under- current of unrest and noise. The tension of a soul trying to hold itself in silence, when it has no truth to appease it with a superior silence, is louder than the noise of big cities and more disturbing than the movement of an army.
– Thomas Merton
growing up emotionally
In summary, we might say:
- Be enough in earnest about emotional growth to make it the most important concern of your life.
- Be willing to say. “No,” to anything which interferes with that continued growth.
- Attempt to be objective and honest in the selection of courses which best fit your new emotional pattern.
- If the deeper self does not wish to do a certain thing, that fact is justification enough for not doing it. Each of us is primarily responsible in accounting to himself.
- In following such a course of action, you will be amazed to discover that decisiveness earns the admiration of acquaintances, since most of them wish that they could exercise the same kind of courage.
In the process of growing up emotionally we will often be startled to discover vistas of new satisfactions opening up before us. We will begin to realize that our childish fears have kept us from enjoying freedom, that our desire for universal approval has made it impossible for us to gain the approval which we most desire.
These new satisfactions will not come all at once. Neither should we expect to plunge immediately into large decisions that tax our emotional strength too greatly. The first tentative steps will be the most important and with exercise greater decisions can be undertaken.
The great mountaineers begin their training by climbing little hills. In growing up, we must all learn how to walk before we can run.
- Lewis F. Presnall
It is not complicated to lead the spiritual life. But…
It is not complicated to lead the spiritual life. But it is difficult. We are blind and subject to a thousand illusions. We must expect to be making mistakes almost all the time. We must be content to fall repeatedly and to begin again to try to deny ourselves, for the love of God.
It is when we are angry at our own If that is all our self-denial amounts to, our mistakes will never help us. that we tend most of all to deny ourselves for love of ourselves. We want to shake off the hateful thing that has humbled us. In our rush to escape the humiliation of our own mistakes, we run head first into the opposite error, seeking comfort and compensation. And so we spend our lives running back and forth from one attachment to another.
If that is all our self-denial amounts to, our mistakes will never help us.
The thing to do when you have made a mistake is not to give up doing what you were doing and start something altogether new, but to start over again with the thing you began badly and try, for the love of God, to do it well.
– Thomas Merton, from The Sign of Jonas
do nothing
Our being is not to be enriched merely by activity and experience as such. Everything depends on the quality of our acts and our experiences. A multitude of badly performed actions and of experiences only half-lived exhausts and depletes our being. By doing things badly we make ourselves less real. This growing unreality cannot help but make us unhappy and fill us with a sense of guilt. But the purity of our conscience has a natural proportion with the depth of our being and the quality of our acts: and when our activity is habitually disordered, our malformed conscience can think of nothing better to tell us than to multiply the quantity of our acts, without perfecting their quality. And so we go from bad to worse, exhaust ourselves, empty our whole life of all content, and fall into despair.
There are times, then, when in order to keep ourselves in existence at all we simply have to sit back for a while and do nothing. And for a man who has let himself be drawn completely out of himself by his activity, nothing is more difficult than to sit still and rest, doing nothing at all. The very act of resting is the hardest and most courageous act he can perform: and often it is quite beyond his power.
We must first recover the possession of our own being.
– Thomas Merton
Climbing along the River – William Stafford
Willows never forget how it feels to be young. Do you remember where you came from? Gravel remembers. Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean. Exactly at midnight yesterday sighs away. What I believe is, all animals have one soul. Over the land they love they crisscross forever.
The black moment
One thing that comes out in myths is that at the bottom of the abyss comes the voice of salvation. The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light. – Joseph Campbell
life as it is
Those who think – and their name is legion – that they know how the universe could have been better than it is, how it would have been had they created it, without pain, without sorrow, without time, without life, are unfit for illumination. Or those who think as do many “Let me first correct society, then get around to myself” are barred from even the outer gate of the mansion of God’s peace. All societies are evil, sorrowful, inequitable; and so they will always be. So if you really want to help this world, what you will have to teach is how to live in it. And that no one can do who has not himself learned how to live in it in the joyful sorrow and sorrowful joy of the knowledge of life as it is. – Joseph Campbell
forgiveness
David Whyte –
Strangely, forgiveness never arises from the part of us that was actually wounded. The wounded self may be the part of us incapable of forgetting, and perhaps, not actually meant to forget, as if, like the foundational dynamics of the physiological immune system our psychological defenses must remember and organize against any future attacks — after all, the identity of the one who must forgive is actually founded on the very fact of having been wounded.
Stranger still, it is that wounded, branded, un-forgetting part of us that eventually makes forgiveness an act of compassion rather than one of simple forgetting. To forgive is to assume a larger identity than the person who was first hurt, to mature and bring to fruition an identity that can put its arm, not only around the afflicted one within but also around the memories seared within us by the original blow and through a kind of psychological virtuosity, extend our understanding to one who first delivered it. Forgiveness is a skill, a way of preserving clarity, sanity and generosity in an individual life, a beautiful way of shaping the mind to a future we want for ourselves; an admittance that if forgiveness comes through understanding, and if understanding is just a matter of time and application then we might as well begin forgiving right at the beginning of any drama rather than put ourselves through the full cycle of festering, incapacitation, reluctant healing and eventual blessing.
To forgive is to put oneself in a larger gravitational field of experience than the one that first seemed to hurt us. We reimagine ourselves in the light of our maturity and we reimagine the past in the light of our new identity, we allow ourselves to be gifted by a story larger than the story that first hurt us and left us bereft.
Edge of Atlantic 