...be steady in truth, free from worldly anxieties and centered in the self.

"I am a part of all that I have met." - Alfred Tennyson

"Hear me, four quarters of the world - a relative I am! Give me the strength to walk the soft earth, a relative to all that is! Give me the eyes to see and the strength to understand, that I may be like you. With your power only can I face the winds." - Black Elk (1863-1950) Oglala Sioux holy man

"This is the duty of our generation as we enter the twenty-first century -- solidarity with the weak, the persecuted, the lonely, the sick, and those in despair. It is expressed by the desire to give a noble and humanizing meaning to a community in which all members will define themselves not by their own identity but by that of others." -Elie Wiesel

"Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on the earth. I said then and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free." - Eugene V. Debs

"The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt." - Frederick Buechner

"I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can." - George Bernard Shaw

"There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication.... Try the experiment of communicating, with fullness and accuracy, some experience to another, especially if it be somewhat complicated, and you will find your own attitude toward your experience changing." - John Dewey

We are all longing to go home to some place we have never been — a place half-remembered and half-envisioned we can only catch glimpses of from time to time. Community. Somewhere, there are people to whom we can speak with passion without having the words catch in our throats. Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us, eyes will light up as we enter, voices will celebrate with us whenever we come into our own power. Community means strength that joins our strength to do the work that needs to be done. Arms to hold us when we falter. A circle of healing. A circle of friends. Someplace where we can be free.

Come out of the circle of time
And into the circle of love.

This is what I believe:
That I am I.
That my soul is a dark forest.
That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest.
That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back.
That I must have the courage to let them come and go.
That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women.
There is my creed.

- D.H. Lawrence

"There was magic in a forest, on a mountaintop or seashore; in the heart of a desert and, yes, even on a city street. There was beauty in humankind and the creatures with which they shared this world; and there was mystery, too."
- Charles de Lint, Spiritwalk

"Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life."
- Simone Weil

"There are worlds beyond worlds and times beyond times, all of them true,
all of them real, and all of them (as children know) penetrating each other."
- P.L. Travers, author/creator of Mary Poppins

"Without mysteries, life would be very dull indeed. What would be left to strive for if everything were known?"
Ð Charles de Lint, "Where Desert Spirits Crowd the Night"

"The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,
Are of imagination all compact."
- William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

"The fey wonders of the world only exist while there are those with the sight to see them."
- Charles de Lint, Into the Green

"Begin at the beginning ... then go on till you come to the end: then stop."
- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

"A blank page or canvas ... so many possibilities!"
- spoken by Georges Seurat in the Stephen Sondheim musical Sunday in the Park with George

"Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen."
- John Steinbeck

"An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail."
- Edwin Land

"Curiouser and curiouser!"
- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

'If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform one million realities.'

'If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude.'

'Nothing will work unless you do.'

'My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry; to get my work done and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return.'

'One isn't necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.'

'The religious mind does not belong to any group, any sect, any belief, any church, any organized circus; therefore it is capable of looking at things directly and understanding things immediately. Such is the religious mind, because it is a light to itself. Its light is not lit by another…' - Beyond Violence, Chapter 10.

'To understand ourselves requires objective, kindly, dispassionate study of ourselves, ourselves being the organism as a whole—our body, our feelings, our thoughts. They are not separate, they are interrelated. It is only when we understand the organism as a whole that we can go beyond and discover still further, greater, vaster things.' - Collected Works, Vol. 3 - Ojai 1944 - Talk 1.

“I don't know if I continue, even today, always liking myself. But what I learned to do many years ago was to forgive myself. It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes- it is inevitable. But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, 'well, if I'd known better I'd have done better,' that's all. So you say to people who you think you may have injured, 'I'm sorry,' and then you say to yourself, 'I'm sorry.' If we all hold on to the mistake, we can't see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror; we can't see what we're capable of being. You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one's own self. I think that young men and women are so caught by the way they see themselves. Now mind you. When a larger society sees them as unattractive, as threats, as too black or too white or too poor or too fat or too thin or too sexual or too asexual, that's rough. But you can overcome that. The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don't have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell we should never teach.” - Maya Angelou

"At the beginning, we only love those that love us.
Then we learn to love sponteanously, but still waiting to be loved.
Later on we love without being loved, but hoping that our love will be accepted.
Finally, our love is so pure and simple that we just love without any motive just for the joy of love."  - Edna Contreras

“The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.” - Thomas Merton

"Through the power of love which unifies all things and propels them forward, the wheel is again set into motion.
As it was before, so shall it be again.
Through divine love the rememberance is kindled.
From the awakening, the creation.
The creation is new within the uncreated.
And so it always was and shall be.
Wholeness magnifying wholeness.
And so it begins anew..."

Vak Devi, Cody Waycaster,
Mayan Monkey Scribe

POSTPONED UNTIL MARCH! PLease check back for new dates! 

 

Re-connecting to Self and Highest womens group workshop two opportunities:

February 10th and February 17th NYC | $150

February 10th 2-6pm
February 17th 10-2pm

Women's Workshop - Meditation, Ritual, Breathing, Belief-work, Raw food (preparing and sampling), and more.
Re-connect, Listen, Learn, Love, Laugh!

 

6-8 Women/Workshop - please contact startwithlove@gmail.com to sign up, for location, and more information.

Please sign up by February 3.

'How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.' - Anne Frank

'God, make me so uncomfortable that I will do the very thing I fear.'

'Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality--not as we expect it to be but as it is--is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love.' - (Carl) Frederick Buechner

'Let us plant dates even though those who plant them will never eat them. We must live by the love of what we will never see. This is the secret discipline. It is a refusal to let the creative act be dissolved away in immediate sense experience, and a stubborn commitment to the future of our grandchildren. Such disciplined love is what has given prophets, revolutionaries, and saints the courage to die for the future they envisaged. They make their own bodies the seed of their highest hope.' -Ruben Alves

Listen to the Mustn’ts

Listen to the MUSTN’TS, child
Listen to the DON’TS
Listen to the SHOULDN’TS
The IMPOSSIBLES, the WONT’S
Listen to the NEVER HAVES
Then listen close to me --
Anything can happen, child
ANYTHING can be.

Shel Silverstein
Where The Sidewalk Ends

"Let your doubt be your calling. Then your doubt will be invisible. You'll inhabit it like an atmosphere."  Denis Johnson