End of Year Things to Think About

Here are some thoughts worth considering . . .

“Pain travels through families until someone is ready to feel it.” – Stephi Wagner, Healing the Mother Wound

“For many of us, our generational ‘curse’ is avoidance. We come from people who just act like ‘it’ didn’t / doesn’t happen. But pain demands to be felt. And somewhere along the line, a child will be born whose charge it is to feel it all. These are your shamans, your priests and priestesses, your healers.  You call them mental health patients and label their power as depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder and the like. But these are the ones who are born with the gift of feeling. And as we all know, you can’t heal the pain that you refuse to feel.” – Dionne Shannette Wood

“When a person can’t find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.” – Victor E. Frankl

“The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.” – Plato

“Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

“These messages are deeply rooted in our history.  We’re kept in check by fear of authenticity and failure.  Our parents want us to be pragmatic and stay safe and they pass these inane messages onto us meaning well.  We so quickly forget that we owe our existences to innovators and creators who stepped out of their boxes and found a new way to do everything.”[1]

“Evil preaches tolerance until it is dominant, then it tries to silence good.” – Archbishop Charles J. Chaput

“Optimism is a political act.  Those who benefit from the status quo are perfectly happy for us to think nothing is going to get any better.  In fact, theses days, cynicism is obedience.” – Alex Steffen, The Bright Green City

“In the absence of certainty, a core fantasy of disappointment dissolves the possibility of even partial knowledge.”[2]

“Procrastination is the death of desire.” – Skip Moen

“Rainbows are God’s grief refracted by light.” – Skip Moen

Clearly others are traveling with us.

 

[1] http://shalavee.com/tag/stephi-wagner/

[2] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg,  Bewilderments: Reflections on the Book of Numbers, p. xv.