If we can stay awake when our lives are changing, secrets will be revealed to us–secrets about ourselves, about the nature of life, and about the eternal source of happiness and peace that is always available, always renewable, already within us.
~Elizabeth Lesser
We’re all bozos on the bus,
so we might as well sit back
and enjoy the ride.
~Wavy Gravy
One of my heroes is the clown-activist, Wavy Gravy. He is best known for a role that he played in 1969, when he was the master of ceremonies at the Woodstock festival. Since then, he’s been a social activist, a major “fun-d” raiser for good causes, a Ben and Jerry’s ice cream flavor, an unofficial hospital chaplain, and the founder of a children’s camp for inner city kids. Every four years he campaigns as a candidate for president of the United States, under the pseudonym of Nobody, making speeches all over the country, with slogans like “Nobody for President,” “Nobody’s Perfect,” and “Nobody Should Have That Much Power.” He’s a seriously funny person, and a person who is serious about helping others. “Like the best of clowns,” wrote a reporter in The Village Voice, “Wavy Gravy makes as a big fool of himself as is necessary to make a wiser man of you. He is one of the better people on earth.”
Wavy (I’m on a first-name basis with him from clown workshops he’s offered at Omega) is a master of one-liners, like the famous one he delivered on the Woodstock stage: Continue reading
How quickly I judge, and therefore diminish their humanity.
~Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow
If you’ve been a regular reader of this blog in the last couple of weeks, you’ve probably noticed that I’ve posted a number of quotes from Elizabeth Lesser’s book Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow. A couple of you even asked if I would write a review of the book (which I had already considered doing), so here are my thoughts. Continue reading
Who would want to be an ego, when we can be a soul?
~Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open
At any given moment…you have your soul—what [Viktor] Frankl called the last of the human freedoms, the freedom to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances. When you exercise the last of the human freedoms—when you choose to learn and to grow from the weight of the world—you are putting your soul in charge of your life. You are choosing not the attitude of your smaller and more fearful self but rather the attitude of your soul, which is hopeful, expansive, and eternal. You are living for the deeper truth hidden in the pain of circumstance…
~Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open
In the end, what will matter is how much we loved—our children, our mates, our families, our friends, everyone we knew, everyone who traveled with us during our brief visit to this unbearably lovely place. What will matter is the good we did, not the good we expected others to do.
~Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open
In the difficult are the friendly forces,
the hands that work on us.
~Rainer Maria Rilke
Every shift in our life comes courtesy of the friendly forces; every catastrophe can hand us exactly what we need to awaken into who we really are. It’s difficult, though, when you’re in the middle of a painful transition, to mine the experience for inner growth. And when your life falls apart, it’s a lot easier to blame someone else, to rail against fate, or to shut down to the hopeful messages carried on the winds of change. Sometimes, when friends try to help by saying, “There’s a reason for everything,” or “It’s a blessing in disguise,” you just want to run away, or you want to say, “Yeah, if it’s such a blessing, then why does it hurt so much?” Continue reading
Adversity is a natural part of being human. It is the height of arrogance to prescribe a moral code or health regime or spiritual practice as an amulet to keep things from falling apart. Things do fall apart. It is in their nature to do so. Continue reading
Adversity is a natural part of being human. It is the height of arrogance to prescribe a moral code or health regime or spiritual practice as an amulet to keep things from falling apart. Things do fall apart. It is in their nature to do so. When we try to protect ourselves Continue reading
Flow with the river.
The nature of life is change. Your very body is a river of change. From year to year, every one of your cells is replaced. Literally, who you were yesterday is not who you are today. So when you wake up in the morning, ask yourself: Continue reading
Don’t look for water. Be thirsty.
We don’t question our need for food or water or air. We honor those instincts in order to survive and thrive. We also have a spiritual instinct—we sense that there is more to life than just the daily grind. That there is meaning and wonder, and that we were put here to love each other and life itself. The first step on a spiritual path is to value your spiritual instinct—to allow yourself to be thirsty Continue reading
