Rumi - Guest House
This being human is a guest house
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
- Rumi
PS A related thought to this Rumi poem is that it may help to think about ’sustaining contradiction’ - which to me relates to this quote:
"…the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald.
And also the idea of learning to learn fromfrom everything, listening and watching as well as experiecing - to find a balance between carrying and putting down.
On me: I have spent the last amazing weeks exploring voice and story and more…now sitting with question ‘what is next’. I am in listening, rest and digestion mode as I take in more deeply what I have learned and listen for what to do next, thinking around a movement and sound practice (eg dance and song), beacuse life and change is movement…and the interaction between movement and breath. I am thinking about mountains and how they are at once on the ground and in the air and also a mountain. I am also learning to/trusting that what comes up will be the right thing. There is a song running in my head ‘hold on just a little while longer…everything will be alright‘ and another from a story called Buffulo woman ‘Oh great spirit, earth and sky and sea, you are inside, and all around me‘- hope this finds you well!
Image via the ever-fabulous Pia Davis via collective wisdom initiative
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May 21st, 2007 at 8:09 pm
you may find some interesting things here too:
http://www.collectivewisdominitiative.org/papers/hurley_archetypal.htm#eating
May 24th, 2007 at 3:07 pm
Favorite Quotes with thanks to http://www.herownroom.com/ which I came across while looking for the original source of the lines that is attributed to Nelson Mandela’s speech ‘our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, but …that we are powerful beyond measure’ (full version is at the bottom) and belongs to Marianne Williamson - it is an urban myth that it was ever icluded (http://www.newsobserver.com/667/story/436158.html) and that makes it all the more powerful to me!! It is yet another example of the power of a misquote! Enjoy the quotes below!!!
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
Virginia Woolf
When an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.
Carl Gustav Jung
Standing alone today demands even more courage and strength than it did in former cultures. From infancy, children have been programmed to perform. Rather than living from their own needs and feelings, they learn to assess situations in order to please others. Without an inner core of certainty grounded in their own musculature, they lack the inner resources to stand alone. Pummeled by mass media and peer group pressures, their identity may be utterly absorbed by collective stereotypes. In the absence of adequate rites of passage, ad-men become the high priests of an initiation into the addictions of consumerism.
Marion Woodman
The way of the mystic and the way of the artist
are very much alike, except that the mystic does not have a craft.
The craft holds the artist to the world,
and the mystic goes through his psyche into the transcendent…
Joseph Campbell
No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.
Alice Walker
The main thing in one’s own private world is to try to laugh as much as you cry.
Maya Angelou
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Do not open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
Rumi
You are your work. Don’t trade the stuff of your life, time, for nothing
more than dollars. That’s a rotten bargain.
Rita Mae Brown
Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.
Kahlil Gibran
Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all. Security is mostly a
superstition. It does not exist in nature.
Helen Keller
Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not
attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy
purpose.
Helen Keller
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.
Anais Nin
He who binds to himself a joy
Doth the winged life destroy
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in Eternity’s sun rise
William Blake
Without an understanding of myth or religion, without an understanding of the relationship between destruction and creation, death and rebirth, the individual suffers the mysteries of life as meaningless mayhem alone.
Marion Woodman
It doesn’t matter who my father was. It matters who I remember he was.
Anne Sexton
Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not
sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn’t make us better, then
what on Earth is it for?
Alice Walker
The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his
own ends, but one who allows art to realize its supreme purpose through him.
Carl Jung
We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.
Anais Nin
Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The
fearful are caught as often as the bold.
Helen Keller
This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment. First to let go of life. Finally, to take a step without feet.
Rumi
We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to
have the life that is awaiting us…. The old skin has to be shed before the
new one is to come.
Joseph Campbell
You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in
which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which
you think you cannot do.
Eleanor Roosevelt
If we fail to nourish our souls, they wither, and without soul, life ceases to have meaning. The creative process shrivels in the absence of continual dialogue with the soul. And creativity is what makes life worth living.
Marion Woodman
Pain nourishes courage. You cannot be brave if you have only had
wonderful things happen to you.
Mary Tyler Moore
To me, the black black woman is our essential mother–the blacker she is the
more us she is–and to see the hatred that is turned on her is enough to
make me despair, almost entirely, of our future as a people.
Alice Walker
It no longer bothers me that I may be constantly searching for father
figures; by this time, I have found several and dearly enjoyed knowing them all.
Alice Walker
I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life’s a
bitch. You’ve got to go out and kick ass.
Maya Angelou
The quality of strength lined with tenderness is an unbeatable combination,
as are intelligence and necessity when unblunted by formal education.
Maya Angelou
Children’s talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.
Maya Angelou
Too few is as many as too many.
Gertrude Stein
To love without role, without power plays, is revolution.
Rita Mae Brown
I still miss those I loved who are no longer with me but I find I am grateful for having loved them. The gratitude has finally conquered the loss.
Rita Mae Brown
Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.
Anais Nin
I write emotional algebra.
Anais Nin
There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
Anais Nin
A friend is a second self.
Aristotle
Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you’re a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.
Colette
Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.
Beatrix Potter
To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.
Emily Dickinson
A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
That day.
Emily Dickinson
One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.
Simone de Beauvoire
The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels.
Simone de Beauvoire
I have met brave women who are exploring the outer edge of human possibility, with no history to guide them, and with a courage to make themselves vulnerable that I find moving beyond words.
Gloria Steinem
It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.
Gertrude Stein
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate…..
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, to be gorgeous,
talented, and fabulous. Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking
so that others won’t feel insecure around you.
We are born to make manifest the glory of God within us.
And as we let our light shine, we consciously give others
permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear,
our presence automatically liberates others.
Marianne Williamson - used by Nelson Mandela in his 1994 Inaugural Speech
http://www.herownroom.com/quotes.htm
June 6th, 2007 at 3:09 pm
Hi Natalie -
Saw your new post today - must admit have been waiting for it and was glad to see a new one up. I just wanted to thank you for the inspiring poem - fitting for this new blogger’s state of mind (and current situation in life), and definitely a bit of needed inspiration.
Keep ‘em coming!
Ayelet
June 16th, 2007 at 4:11 pm
Hey Nat!
It has been a while since I hit up your blog. This post was beautiful and it really spoke to me. I was in the shower today and I realised how greatful I am for all the people (even the men) who have walked across my path on thier way to somewhere else. I don’t part with all of them amicably, and I don’t always share a pleasant journey with them, but from each I have the gift of a new perspective. Although I did not stand in thier shoes, I walked beside them for a time, and this is a privilege- to see the world from a place where you will not be again. It is a world made valuable by its rarity and vanishing nature, and the fact that it is yet another place which lay undiscovered and untold until you had the courage to step into it.
I love you Nat. Keep sharing,
Kath
June 19th, 2007 at 4:14 am
thanks Kath and Ayelet!! indeed, K, your mentioning courage seems important for me because sometimes I also get afraid or don’t trust becuase the things that show up seem so…so not what I thought they would be. And yet…well then that is part of it, and like you say in stepping into it you get to see and learn something you never knew or could have discovered before! reminds me of a ‘re-story’ journey freeflow exercise I did with a woman and as the story unfolded (the rules are the faciltator starts and then you keep going back and forth trusting story to unfold and whatever you say works)… she “jumped on the back on an elephant who than stomped a crevice she had to climb down and deep in the dark dark bottom there she was first scared and it was dark but then there came worms with lights for eyes and there she spied a golden pearl…which she took…and took back up with her when she found her way to a magic staircase…” Only in going where the story went did she find that pearl…
How much of life is like that? finding yourself somewhere you didnt ask for, somewhere dark or not pretty and yet discovering something beautiful, valuable and true that you can keep and carry and take with you - even if as a memory and lesson…
July 2nd, 2007 at 9:51 am
thanks so much :). I am going to try to keep that in mind always. It gives me a feeling of clear aequinimity and gratitude.
November 10th, 2007 at 2:05 am
Hello! My name is John! Your site is good!
January 22nd, 2008 at 12:23 pm
The image shown over is just so greta . I really like to explore new places anmd would surely want to be there once for a while
February 13th, 2008 at 12:18 am
“In Antiquity every tree, every spring, every stream, every hill had its own genius loci, its guardian spirit,”…
March 20th, 2008 at 8:46 am
nice work man 10x