“We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate; it oppresses.” 

~ C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul

"Whenever we touch nature we get clean. People who have got dirty through too much civilization take a walk in the woods, or a bath in the sea... They... allow nature to touch them. It can be done within or without. Walking in the woods, lying on the grass, taking a bath in the sea, are from the outside; entering the unconscious, entering yourself through dreams, is touching nature from the inside and is the same thing, things are put right again."

~ C.G. Jung

The nine types of silence:

"Not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being in the world, and there are kinds and grades of each. There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy; the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face; the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul, whence emerge new thoughts; the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, “This… this…”; the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity; the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear; the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination, loud and subvocal speech but sullen to say it; baffled silence; the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos."

~ Paul Goodman, psychotherapist & co-founder of Gestalt

When women reassert their relationship with the wildish nature, they are gifted with a permanent and internal watcher, a knower, a visionary, an oracle, and inspiratrice, an intuitive, a maker, a creator, an inventor, and a listener who guide, suggest and urge a vibrant life in the inner and outer worlds. When women are with the Wild Woman, the fact of that relationship glows through them. 


~ Clarissa Pinkola Estés
 

 Man is much more than a ‘rational being’ and lives more by sympathies and impressions than by conclusions. It darkens his eyes and dries up the wells of his humanity to be forever in search of doctrine. We need wholesome, experiencing na­tures, I dare affirm, much more than we need sound reasoning. 


~ Woodrow Wilson, from On Being Human
 

"It’s no coincidence that just at this point in our insight into our mysteriousness as human beings struggling towards compassion, we are also moving into an awakened interest in the language of myth and fairy tale. The language of logical arguments, of proofs, is the language of the limited self we know and can manipulate. But the language of parable and poetry, of storytelling, moves from the imprisoned language of the provable into the freed language of what I must, for lack of another word, continue to call faith." 

~ Madeleine L’Engle

“They [human lives] are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven’s music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual’s life. Anna could have chosen another way to take her life. But the motif of death and the railway station, unforgettably bound to the birth of love, enticed her in her hour of despair with its dark beauty. Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.
It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences (like the meeting of Anna, Vronsky, the railway station, and death or the meeting of Beethoven, Tomas, Tereza, and the cognac), but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life a dimension of beauty.”

~ Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

I do believe that were the public to awaken to its hunger for beauty, there would be rebellion in the streets. Was it not aesthetics that took down the berlin wall and opened china? Not market consumerism and western gadgets as we are told, but music, color, fashion, shoes, fabrics, films, dance, lyrics, and the shapes of cars. The aesthetic response leads to political action, becomes political action, is political action.

~ James Hillman, "City and Soul"

“We are so close to the Earth that we often forget—it is alive. And the language of its aliveness is what we call nature. When we listen to nature, we are listening to the Earth. Of course, such a conversation takes time, because we are too small to readily grasp what the Earth has to say. The vast Earth has carried us our whole lives. Can we thank it? It has held up and endured everything for thousands of years. Can we ask it how? It speaks with a thousand tongues, none of which uses words. Yet, to build a relationship with that which holds us up seems essential.

But what can we hear? As the smog we’ve created prevents us from seeing the sky, the noise of machinery we’ve created prevents us from hearing the wind and birds and quiet teachers that have always been there. When I leave the mechanical hive, even briefly, I can tell that the horse runs to know its father, the wind. Just the other day, I took a walk where there is no pavement. I lost my way and followed two geese until I reached the end of my small logic.”

~ Mark Nepo, ' Conversation With the Elements: Wisdom and practical guidance on opening to the world'

  

'Frontera Entre El Abrazo de Amor de el Universo'

(Love Embrace of the Universe)

by Frida Kahlo

RITUAL

Because plunging into another element, the cold water, or greeting the sun from a height, are impressive moments, and we must do ·something to celebrate them. In bathing you have exposed yourself in a somewhat risqué costume and you want an outlet for your feelings. We always put everything on to our parents or forefathers. We make them responsible for everything and we think we have explained something by this, but as a matter of fact we have not. When we hide Easter eggs, it means that we are expressing an unconscious thought, that thought is - "Now it is the time for the beginning of new lives,” Everywhere there are young things " and we are moved by this thought as the primitives are by the rising sun.”

 

[Carl Jung on Affects and Customs]

Lecture VI 2nd June, 1934

Pages 110-113.

“To practice any art,

no matter how well or badly,

is a way to make your soul grow.

So do it.”

 

~ Kurt Vonnegut, 'A Man Without a Country'