“And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.” —John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Ikigai: the process of allowing the self’s possibilities to blossom.

What is something about yourself that makes you feel happy and that you do not worry about suddenly disappearing?

I have done nothing all summer but wait for myself to be myself again — Georgia O’Keeffe (via kafk-a)

"Work with poets, magicians, dancers and all the other artisans of the invisible, to put the mystery of the world back in its place." Jorn de Précy

"Within us is the soul of the whole, the wise silence, the universal beauty, the eternal One."

JH: In your psychology studies, did you get into the Jungian idea of the collective unconscious?

LB: Oh, of course. Oh, I don’t know, I haven’t pursued it. What I have pursued is my experience. And I always regard things like that as parallels to my experience. So they’re what I call confirmations, or they’re support. They’re "Eureka!" experiences, you know.

"No, I didn’t know it, didn’t know it. You see, this is the kind of knowledge I trust, the kind which thrusts itself upon you, beaks through your consciousness until you believe that inner sense."

At the heart of each spiritual tradition are the questions: how to be in the world without losing what matters,

"And because once my work leaves my hands and is delivered to you, it sort of belongs to all of us. I change you and you change me and we continue onwards and forwards."

Thanks to impermanence, everything is possible. -Thich Nhat Hanh

As I get further away from you
I see you more clearly.
[…]
I gave you every gift,
blue of the spring morning,
time you didn’t know how to use—

— Louise Glück, “Retreating Wind,”  The Wild Iris (Ecco, 1992)

"And I’ve had dreams like that, you know, which, so that I felt that what I was doing was supported some place deep in my experience. I came to trust this, more and more. And there has been a quality, I think, of an involvement with -- oh, I don’t know what to call it -- something sacred, I think. And I’ve endeavored to be in touch with it, whatever it is."