You've got to sing like you don't need the money, love like you'll never get hurt. You've got to dance like nobody's watching. You've got to come from the heart, if you want it to work.
Susanna Clark and Richard Leigh, Come From the Heart
(Sung by Kathy Mattea on Willow in the Wind)
Truth is the perfect circle. Its center is everywhere; its circumference stretches into infinite space. The land on which we stand is sacred; no matter where we stand.
Lama Surya Dass, Awakening to the Sacred
Celtic mysteries occurred in twi-states between night and day, in dew that was neither rain nor river, in mistletoe that was not a plant or a tree, in the trance state that was neither sleep nor waking. The Christian sense of duality -- good and bad, right and wrong, black and white, body and soul -- was unknown to the Druid. The key to Celtic philosophy is the merging of dark and light, natural and supernatural, conscious and unconscious. The sithean themselves existed in this twi-state, beings who dwelled between one world and another, creatures who were neither men nor gods.
Elizabeth Sutherland, Ravens and Black Rain: The Story of Highland Second Sight
...out of the whole symbol-building achievement of the past, what survives today (hardly altered in efficiency or in function) is the tale of wonder. The tale survives, furthermore, not simply as a quaint relic of days childlike in belief. Its world of magic is symptomatic of fevers deeply burning in the psyche: permanent presences, desires, fears, ideals, potentialities that have glowed in the nerves, hummed in the blood, baffled the senses since the beginning.
Joseph Campbell, Flight of the Wild Gander
There was a power in the borders of things: in the twilight hours that separated day from night; in rivers that divided lands; in the caves and wells that lay suspended between the earth and the underworld. The ancient holy days had been the divisions between summer and winter, and that border in time created a threshold for other things; that was why ghosts and goblins were thought to roam on Halloween and Beltane. The mountains themselves were a border . . . . They separated the placid coastal plain from the flatland to the west, and there was magic in them.
Sharyn McCrumb, The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter
If you can't get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you'd best teach it to dance.
George Bernard Shaw
It's the simple things in life that are the most extraordinary.
Paul Coelho
We are all filled with a longing for the wild. There are few culturally sanctioned antidotes for this yearning. We were taught to feel shame for such a desire. We grew our hair long and used it to hide our feelings. But the shadow of the Wild Woman still lurks behind us during our days and in our nights. No matter where we are, the shadow that trots behind us is definitely four footed.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves
Literature exists at every level of experience. It is inclusive, not exclusive. It embraces; it does not reduce, however simply it is expressed. The purpose of the storyteller is to relate the truth in a manner that is simple: to integrate without reduction; for it is rarely possible to declare the truth as it is, because the universe presents itself as a Mystery. We have to find parables; we have to find stories to unriddle the world.
Alan Garner, The Voice That Thunders
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light in the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm out of the whinnying green stable on to the fields of praise.
Dylan Thomas, Fern Hill
I am no longer tethered to earth . . . .I touch the clouds and hear the whisper of the divine.
Mary Dike Midkiff, She Flies Without Wings
These two things, the spiritual and the material, though we call then by different names, in their origin are one and the same. This sameness is a mystery -- the mystery of mysteries. It is the gate of all wonders.
Lao-Tze, Tao Te Ching
To return to our senses is to renew our bond with wider life, to feel the soil beneath the pavement, to sense — even when indoors — the moon's gaze upon the roof.
David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous
The road inward can become a road outward. For the traveler with open eyes and alert senses, the outward road can become a road home.
Dag Hammarskjold, Markings
Who publishes the sheet-music of the winds or the music of water written in River-lines?
John Muir, John of the Mountains
A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets her intuition lead her wherever it wants. A good scientist has freed herself of concepts and keeps her mind open to what is.
Lao-Tze, Tao Te Ching
To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.
The Bible, Ecclesiastes 3:1
Enlightenment. Justice. Do no harm. Leave the world better than you found it.
Patricia Daniels Cornwell
When one combines a process of inquiry with content of beauty and antiquity, when, even as a lark, one opens the flow of archetypal images contained in the history and legends of people long negated by this culture, many who confront these images are going to take to them and begin a journey unimagined by those who started the process.
Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon
That which is imagined, need never be lost.
Clive Barker, Weaveworld
The more one knows, the more one comprehends, the more one realizes that everything turns in a circle.
Goethe
If we seek the real source of the dance, if we go to nature, we find that the dance of the future is the dance of the past, the dance of eternity, and has been and will always be the same. . . . But the dance of the future will have to become again a high religious art as it was with the Greeks. For art which is not religious is not art, it is mere merchandise.
Isadora Duncan
Nothing ever begins. There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any other story springs. The threads can always be traced back to some earlier tale, and to the tales which preceded that; though as the narrator's voice recedes the connections will seem to grow more tenuous, for each age will want the tale told as if it were of its own making. Thus the pagan will be sanctified, the tragic become laughable; great lovers will stoop to sentiment, and demons dwindle to clockwork toys. Nothing is fixed. In and out the shuttle goes, fact and fiction, mind and matter, woven into patterns that may only have this in common; that among them is a filigree which will with time become a world.
Clive Barker, Weaveworld
The world is full of stories, and from time to time they permit themselves to be told.
Cherokee Saying
... Because we had survived/sisters and brothers, daughters and sons/we discovered bones that rose/ from the dark earth and sang as white birds in the trees/Because the story of our life/becomes our life/ Because each of us tells the same story/but tells it differently/and none of us tells it the same way twice...
Lisel Moeller, Why We Tell Stories
Every day, mindful practice. When the mind is disciplined, then the Way can work for us. Otherwise, all we do is talk of Tao; everything is just words; and the world will know us as its one great fool.
Loy Ching-Yuen, The Book of the Heart
We carry within us the wonders we seek without us.
Sir Thomas Browne
Silence is a great help to a seeker after Truth, for in the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in a clearer light, and what is elusive and deceptive resolves itself into crystal clearness. Our earthly existence is a long and arduous quest after Truth, and the soul requires inward restfulness to attain its full height.
Mahatma Gandhi
To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.
Lao-Tze, Tao Te Ching
Come out of the circle of time, and into the circle of love.
Rumi
The geese do not wish to leave their reflection behind; the water has no mind to retain their image. Coming, going, the waterfowl leaves not a trace, nor does it need a guide.
Dogen Zenji
But to have been this once, even if only once; to have been at one with the earth seems beyond undoing.
Rilke, Ninth Elegy
In this immeasurable darkness, be the power that rounds your senses in their magic ring, the sense of their mysterious power. And if the earthly no longer knows your name, whisper to the silent earth: I'm flowing. To the flashing water say: I am.
R.M. Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus
Let us make friends with silence, at "the still point of the turning world". Then will a new power manifest, the light of intuition.
Christmas Humphreys
The distinction between past, present, and the future is only an illusion, however persistent. Time is not at all what it seems. It does not flow in only one direction, and the future exists simultaneously with the past.
Albert Einstein
Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Wherever a dancer stands is holy ground.
Martha Graham
The final truth is not to be grasped for the simple reason that that which wants to grasp it is also part of that which is to be grasped.
Wei Wu Wei
If a man does not keep pace with his companions perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured and far away.
Henry David Thoreau
My greatest wealth is the deep stillness in which I strive and grow and win what the world cannot take from me with fire or sword.
Goethe
The universe is still and complete. Everything that ever was, is; everything that ever will be, is - and so on, in all possible combinations. Though in perceiving it we imagine that it is in motion, and unfinished, it is quite finished and quite astonishingly beautiful.
Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale
. . . . the written word carries a pivotal magic — the same magic that once sparkled for us in the eyes of an owl and the glide of an otter.
David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous
Time past, time to come, somehow the Tale gets told.
John Crowley, Little Big
The idea of return is based on the course of nature. Movement is cyclical and the course completes itself. Everything comes of itself at the appointed time.
The I Ching
Words are symbols which turn matter into spirit.
Elbert Hubbard
The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.
Ambassador Kosh, Babylon 5
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
Lao-Tze, Tao Te Ching
As I make my slow pilgrimage through the world, a certain sense of beautiful mystery seems to gather and grow.
A. C. Benson, From a College Window
The world is a perfect place, so perfect that even if there is nothing afterward, all of this will have been enough.
Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale
Our task, rather, is that of taking up the written word, with all of its potency, and patiently, carefully, writing language back into the land. It is the practice of spinning tales that want to be told, again and again..... planting words, like seeds under rocks and fallen logs — letting language take root, once again, in the earthen silence of shadow and bone and leaf.
David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.
Albert Einstein
We are the living links in a life force that moves and plays around and through us, binding the deepest soils with the farthest stars.
Alan Chadwick
The shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just water, but the blood of our ancestors. If we sell you our land, you must remember that it is sacred. Each ghostly reflection in the clear water of the lakes tells of events and memories in the life of my people. The water's murmur is the voice of my father's father. The rivers are our brothers. They quench our thirst. They carry our canoes and feed our children. So you must give to the rivers the kindness you would give any brother. This we know: The earth does not belong to man, man belongs to earth.
Chief Seattle
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.
Carl Sagan
I suppose what makes me most glad is that we all recognize each other in this metaphysical space of silence and happening, and get some sense, for a moment, that we are full of paradise without knowing it.
Thomas Merton
Do, or do not. There is no try.
Yoda
The same stream of life that runs through the world runs through my veins night and day in rhythmic measure.
Rabindranath Tagore
Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the Earth are never alone or weary of life.
Rachel Carson
Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.
Chief Seattle
Ahead, there were such sights unfolding: friends and places they'd feared gone forever coming to greet them, eager for shared rapture. There was time for all their miracles now. For ghosts and for transformations; for passion and ambiguity; for noon-day visions and midnight glory. Time in abundance. For nothing ever begins. And this story, having no beginning, will have no end.
Clive Barker, Weaveworld
See the world as it truly is, small and blue, beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats.
Archibald Macleish
It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
Ursula Kroeber LeGuin
More wise is it to dream, not of hallowed ground, but of the hallowed gardens of the soul, wherein She shall appear white and radiant, or that upon the hills where we wander, the Shepherdess shall call us home.
Fiona MacLeod
Within the perfect symmetry of a circle, is held the essential nature of the universe. Strive to learn from it. . . . to reflect that order.
XXI Stanza of Merlin
Shared pain is lessened, shared joy is increased. Thus we refute entropy.
Spider Robinson
The world is full of stories, not of atoms.
Muriel Rukeyser
I found God in myself and I loved Her. I loved her fiercely.
Ntozake Shange, for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf
What is life? It is a flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.
Crowfoot
There are two ways of spreading light; to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
Edith Wharton
For every locomotive they build, I shall paint another angel.
Edward Bourne Jones
Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are the artists of one kind or another. The function of the artist is the mythologization of the environment and the world.
Joseph Campbell, Hero With a Thousand Faces
. . . . it will be always the one, shape shifting yet marvelously constant story that we find, together with a challengingly persistent suggestion of more remaining to be experienced than will ever be known or told.
Joseph Campbell, Hero With a Thousand Faces
The power of myth and art is this magical ability to open doors, to make connections -- not only between us and the natural world, but between us and the rest of humanity. Myths show us what we have in common with every other human being, no matter what culture we come from, no matter what century we live in. . . . and at the same time, mythic stories and art celebrate our essential differences.
Alan Lee
Nothing is random, nor will anything ever be, whether a long string of perfectly blue days that begin and end in golden dimness, the most seemingly chaotic political acts, the rise of a great city, the crystalline structure of a gem that has never seen the light, the distributions of fortune, what time the milkman gets up, the position of the electron, or the occurrence of one astonishingly frigid winter after another.
Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale
Mandala means "circle" more especially a magic circle. . . . I have come across cases of women who did not draw mandalas, but danced them instead. In India this has a special name. . . . mandala nrithya, the mandala dance.
Carl Gustav Jung
The further in you go, the bigger it gets.
John Crowley, Little, Big
We come spinning out of nothingness, scattering stars like dust. . . . The stars form a circle, and in the center we dance.
Rumi
In the end, or, rather, as things really are, any event, no matter how small, is intimately and sensibly tied to all others. All rivers run full to the sea; those who are apart are brought together; the lost ones are redeemed; the dead come back to life; the perfectly blue days have begun and ended in golden dimness continue, immobile and accessible; and, when all is perceived in such a way as to obviate time, justice becomes apparent not as something that will be, but as something that is.
Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale
The diversity that beckons to us outside is a mere shadow play of the real treasures that are inside.
Paramahansa Yogananda
There is a deep core in our being that is of the nature of a mirror, that can never be tarnished by the impressions upon it.
Hazrat Inayat Khan, The Mysticism and Sound of Music
Re-examine all you have been told . . . . Dismiss what insults your Soul.
Walt Whitman
Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart . . . . Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.
Carl Gustav Jung
As I walk, As I walk / The Universe is walking with me.
From the Navajo Rain Dance ceremony
Will they ever come to me again, the long, long dances? On through the dark till the dim stars wane. . . . Shall I feel the dew on my throat and the stream of wind in my hair?
Euripides, The Bacchae
The eyes, the skin, the tongue, ears and nostrils — all are gates where our body receives the nourishment of otherness. This landscape of shadowed voices, these feathered bodies and antlers and tumbling streams — these breathing shapes are our family, the beings with whom we are engaged, with whom we struggle and suffer and celebrate.
David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous
The truth simply is. It cannot be voted into existence. It must be perceived by every individual in the changeless Self within.
Paramahansa Yogananda
Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known.
Winnie-the-Pooh
What we call the beginning is often the end and to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from . . . . We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
T. S. Eliot
The great curved earth and the round moon count the days and nights, every one a growth, a movement, becoming, curving like the mounded earth, the closing of the circle, the covering of the furrow, a great round.
Meridel Le Sueur, Winter Prairie Woman
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
Oscar Wilde
We live in illusion and the appearance of things. There is a reality. We are that reality. When you understand this, you see that you are nothing, and being nothing, you are everything. That is all.
Kalu Rinpoche
God prays by dancing.
Thomas Merton
Page updated on May 1, 2002
