Jeremiah 22:13-19
v.15 "If your cedar is more splendid, does that prove you a king? Think of your father: he ate and drank, dealt justly and fairly; all went well with him. He dispensed justice to the lowly and poor; did not this show he knew me? says the Lord. But you have no eyes, no thought for anything but gain, set only on the innocent blood you can shed, on cruel acts of tyranny."
The New English Bible
"You do not have the right to eliminate yourself, you do not belong to you. You belong to the universe."
"So I vowed to keep myself alive, but only if I would never use me again for just me..."
John Love, "Buckminster Fuller," Quest, 1979, p.104.
"To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?" Thoreau, Walden
"The unpardonable sin in Campbell's book, was the sin of inadvertence, of not being alert, not quite awake."
Bill Moyers, writing about Joseph Campbell
"Over the years I have seen the power of taking an unconditional relationship to life... a sort of willingness to show up for whatever life may offer and meet with it rather than wishing to edit and change the inevitable...
When people begin to take such an attitude they seem to become intensely alive, intensely present. Their losses and suffering have not caused them to reject life, have not cast them into a place of resentment, victimization, or bitterness...
From such people I have learned a new definition of the word "joy." I had thought joy to be rather synonymous with happiness, but it seems now to be far less vulnerable than happiness. Joy seems to be a part of an unconditional wish to live, not holding back because life may not meet our preferences and expectations. Joy seems to be a function of the willingness to accept the whole, and to show up to meet with whatever is there...
Joy seems more closely related to aliveness than to happiness."
Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., Kitchen Table Wisdom, pp.169-170
" If we eat an apple, could we taste the rain, tell what dirt it was planted in, what part of the country it came from? That would be being completely present."
From "Li-Young Lee," Poets & Writers, Nov/Dec, p.25,26.
"We think of children as vulnerable. In my experience, they're giants. Their bodies and souls are amazingly resilient. What we often mistake for fragility is their openness..."
Fred Epstein, pediatric neurosurgeon, "If I Get to Five: What Children Can Teach Us About Courage and Character."
McCARRISTON: I am blessed by life. I am blessed by consciousness. I am, at root, a profoundly joyful person. I know great sadness, which is often with me, but I feel as if I wanted so much to get in, and I'm one of the lucky ones who knows that I got in. And, of course, it's optional whether you're going to get in...
MOYERS: To get in?
McCARRISTON: Into the field of time. Here. Briefly. In the garden. Here. It's just so beautiful, it's so beautiful.
MOYERS: Even though you were abused and beaten you can still celebrate the moment, the garden?
McCARRISTON: Oh yes, but that violence isn't the garden. That's evil.
MOYERS: The evil in the garden?
McCARRISTON: The evil in the garden, yes --our human capacity for blindness to our own cruelty...
Human blindness to human cruelty does not come from the hand of God, it is not just human nature, it is definitely not inevitable. It is learned. So I feel that if by making my poems beautiful my work can contribute one little stone to this generation's efforts to illuminate and enlarge our understanding of evil and human suffering, that would be a great joy."
Bill Moyers, interview with Linda McCarriston, The Language of Life, pp.284,285.
Mosiah 1-3 Nancy Baird - February 8, 2011 (Audio)
