Browsing Tags quote
A new quote for my book with flowers growing on it.
Van Gogh paints it, Fromm says it, Jesus lives it, and Tolkein turns it into everyone’s story; normal is a very bad place to be.
“As they sang the hobbit felt the love of beautiful things made by hands and by cunning and by magic moving through him, a fierce and jealous love, the desire of the hearts of dwarves. Then something tookish woke up inside him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves, and wear a sword instead of a walking stick.”
Thanks to grand master blogess Oddny Gumaer for digging this out of pinterest and planting it in my inbox. Hopefully in 2015 I’ll finish my book. Until then lets keep fighting dragons, babe.
“What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit their very self?” Luke 9:25
Not just integrity | Presence
“Our life and deeds make our words intelligible; our words help people understand our life and deeds. Life, word, and deed are signs of living presence of someone greater than ourselves.”
Bryant Myers, Walking with the poor
The wrong thing to say at the end of your life.
“I have been asking myself why I’m here most of my life. If there’s a purpose I don’t care anymore. I’m seventy-four. I’m on my way out. Let the young people learn the hard way, like I did. No one ever told me anything.” -Frank Donofrio, a barber
Todays wisdom from Chesterton, via Gill
“Distribute the dignified people and the capable people and the highly business-like people among all the situations which their ambition or their innate corruption may demand; but keep close to your heart, keep deep in your inner councils the absurd people. Let the clever people pretend to govern you, let the unimpeachable people pretend to advise you, but let the fools alone influence you; let the laughable people whose faults you see and understand be the only people who are really inside your life, who really come near you or accompany you on your lonely march towards the last impossibility.“
Consider: You need friends that are true, who march with you towards reaching your dreams.
Jesus and John Lennon {joy or a joint?}
The World says: fit or else.
Why do you feel trapped? What is it that keeps you from breaking the bond of social machinery and doing one wonderful thing that everything in you says to do? That one thing is likely God’s will for your life. What keeps you from doing it?
“The basic thing nobody asks is why do people take drugs of any sort? Why do we have these accessories to normal living to live? I mean, is there something wrong with society that’s making us so pressurized, that we cannot live without guarding ourselves against it?”
John Lennon
I know this is a stretch, but I propose that the apostle Paul and John Lennon have a lot in common. The major difference is that Paul offers a solution to the world system, or the ‘society-making-us-pressurized’, by recognizing Gods will.
So it’s easier to smoke a joint. I admit it. Take a toke and everything is fine. At least for the next 15 minutes it is. But unless you stay high, the world system tumbles back in on you and crushes you with unbearable weight. If you don’t identify Gods will, you will be crushed. You can sedate it with some psychotropic exit plan or simply check out in a haze of disappointment and bitterness. That’s what I call normal. Or you can take the hand of the man who changed water to wine and learn to love life.
“And so, dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all he has done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice—the kind he will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship him. Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.”
Paul the apostle, Romans 12:1-2
It’s funny to me that the World we conform to, the World that kills our dreams and makes us fearful of risk, gets our intense loyalty. We give ourselves to the World and we get back what the World gives: nothing deeper than rearranged atomic particles that take shape in the form of a pad, pod, auto, or wallpaper texture.
Transformed: That’s the key.
And what when we get it?
Please, if this touches you, go and ask the next wealthy person you meet what makes him or her get up in the morning. Please do it! The ones I have asked have never answered that it is to get the World’s stuff, but to live a life of meaningful adventure – even if for one moment. That’s what we were built for and it’s what we all run into one way or another.
Some days I would like to hit 5th in a Ferrari on a coastal highway. I would like to smoke a joint and gain a few minutes of freedom. But then I remind myself that the joy I seek is mine here and now. I only need a change of mind to get it back. I need to be “transformed” and stop viewing the World as my cage.
The World is a defeated enemy. Normal is over friends.
