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What is the point of all you have learned if you can’t employ it when you are floundering in a nadir?
In the vortex of cancer, all other sounds drown out, and you hear only the beating of your heart, the drawing of your own breath, the uncertainty of your footfalls. You may be surrounded by the hugest crowd of family and friends, and by the shiniest love, but you walk alone through these medical valleys of darkness.
We immediately understand each other, those of us who have staggered along the paths of serious sickness,
we have the ability to find, nurture and carry our own inner, living light — a light to ward off the darkness. This is not about burning brightly, but yielding simple phosphorescence — being luminous at temperatures below incandescence, quietly glowing without combusting. Staying alive, remaining upright, even when lashed by doubt.
First, pay attention. Second, do not underestimate the soothing power of the ordinary. Third, seek awe, and nature, daily. Fourth . . . well, so many things: show kindness; practise grace; eschew vanity; be bold; embrace friends, family, faith and doubt, imperfection and mess; and live deliberately.
sometimes the best way to pay attention to country is to keep your mouth shut, open your eyes and just listen.
All the basic activities of life occur in water-filled cells bounded by membranes, tiny containers whose insides are remnants of the sea.’ In other words, the sea is inside us.
Studies have shown that awe can make us more patient and less irritable, more humble, more curious and creative
‘If you adapt to cold water, you also blunt your stress response to other daily stresses such as road rage, exams or getting fired at work.’
In order to endure, to survive trauma or even just to stay afloat when life threatens to suck us under, we need to know we are not alone.
We spend a lot of time in life trying to make ourselves feel bigger — to project ourselves, occupy space, command attention, demand respect — so much so that we seem to have forgotten how comforting it can be to feel small and experience the awe that comes from being silenced by something greater than ourselves, something unfathomable, unconquerable and mysterious.
When we shrink in significance, we become better at living alongside and caring for others. And we become more content.
Wonder prompts us to ask questions of each other and the world. It is also an antidote to distraction.
generations of mystics and seekers have insisted that something connects silence with the sublime, you have to wonder who we could be if we paused more often.
in order to learn, you need to slow down, shut up and allow yourself to sit in silence.
Let tiny drops of stillness fall gently through my day.’
‘Life is best when you live deeply and look up.’)
It’s never going to be simple, but the best way to bulldoze over the expectation of approval is to master your own story.
no one can make you feel inferior unless you consent to them doing so. She was right — and we need to refuse to give that consent.
What it is crucial to understand is that to keep records is to insist on significance: by doing so, you place something on record, and assert that it is of note.
‘Hope and peace have to include acceptance of a certain impermanence to everything, of the certain obliteration of all we love, beauty and light and huge marred love.’ Some things — and faces — are better left alone. Some things are best left ephemeral.
wabi sabi is not just an aesthetic but an emotion or outlook, ‘valuing the old and imperfect and enduring in a world that hankers for the new’.
grace — showing generosity and forgiveness even to those who do not deserve it — is not weak but extraordinarily powerful. Second, that kindness should not just be an aspiration but a daily practice, a muscle that, if exercised, can grow strong and become a habit or a way of life. Third, that sometimes you do not need to overthink resilience.
‘You just get on with it.’ After one day, another comes, then another.
No one is only just one thing.
I have long savoured the prospect of letting myself go. It’s just the most delicious concept: a balloon wafting into the ether, a raft flowing smoothly with the current. One day, I have imagined, I will find myself wandering along the street, either cheerfully unkempt with hair askew, or impossibly fabulous, wearing a curious assortment of clothes — perhaps a vintage frock with dapper heels — that meet just my liking. I might bump into an old acquaintance who will regard me with confusion. ‘Oh,’ I’ll exclaim, with an easy laugh, and, touching her arm lightly, I’ll say, ‘I thought you might
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Okh man! I love this so much!!!
the bones of women become aerated, filled with bubbles of air, and thinner, as they grow older, just like the hollow bones of birds. This lightness of limbs enables flight. It allows us to let go.
Find your voice, and raise it. Stake your authority, and state it. Don’t recoil. Don’t back down.
‘We are all just walking each other home.’
SOMETIMES IT IS HARD to know if home is where you return to or where you start from.
‘The very act of writing and sharing is one of catharsis. It’s important to remember the sharing part too — poetry made for the page tends to stay there. Work written to be shared helps us rehumanise the dehumanised — whether it’s our own stories we share, or the stories of others.’
behind every earthly law is a deeper magic that defies logic: a forgiveness of the unforgivable, a selfless gesture, a moment of grace.
Reading the fine print of your mortality is a great sifter of rubbish.
We’re all on this mad Earth together, bumbling about, trying to figure it out.
FAITH MAY BE A form of living light but it is not neat and ordered. It exists in mess and chaos and doubt and brokenness.
Theology is much like space travel: a wondering about the infinite.
theology is about ‘“making raids on the unspeakable”. Poetry does it, great music does it, and I think theology is of that order. It’s not an attempt to describe the world in a scientific way. It’s puzzling over the nature of things.’ This sums it up so well for me: a puzzling over the nature of things, and a love of nature itself, which is where God is best found. Sometimes the only place. In the sea, the stones, the silence.
if you can somehow try to let your life be your witness to whatever it is you believe, grace will always leak through the cracks.
courage is persisting in the face of fear, so faith is persisting in the presence of doubt.
‘the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt’.
when in doubt, reach for experts, as well as those with lived experience, and those who have not been heard; ask whose story and truth is being told; probe the gaps in the evidence; go to original sources; burrow into footnotes; coax the shadows into the light; and perhaps even ‘follow knowledge like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bound of human thought’,
the true church is based on love, and lived out in thousands of little parishes, where people care for each other.
There is nothing stronger, Hannah Gadbsy said, ‘than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself’.
All we can do really is keep placing one foot on the earth, then the other, to seek out ancient paths and forests, certain in the knowledge that others have endured before us. We must love. And we must look outwards and upwards at all times, caring for others, seeking wonder and stalking awe, every day, to find the magic that will sustain us and fuel the light within — our own phosphorescence. And always, always pay attention to the world as we live our one wild and precious life, even when we’re floating in the Bardo, about to return to the surface, bursting for air.
Oh wow
