Phosphoros et Sapientia > Phosphoros's Quotes

“There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“My soul
must reach
into the clouds
and touch
the beauty
of madness.”
― Melody Lee, Moon Gypsy

“When you have made good friends with yourself, your situation will be more friendly too.”
― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

“Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.”
― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

“I read somewhere about a family who had only one son. They were very poor. This son was extremely precious to them, and the only thing that mattered to his family was that he bring them some financial support and prestige. Then he was thrown from a horse and crippled. It seemed like the end of their lives. Two weeks after that, the army came into the village and took away all the healthy, strong men to fight in the war, and this young man was allowed to stay behind and take care of his family.

Life is like that.

We don’t know anything. We call something bad; we call it good, but we really just don’t know.

When things fall apart and we’re on the verge of we know not what, the test for each of us is to stay on that brink not concretize. The spiritual journey is not about Heaven and finally getting to a place that’s really swell. In fact, that way of looking at things is what keeps us miserable Thinking that we can find some lasting pleasure and avoid pain is what in Buddhism is called Samsara, a hopeless cycle that goes round and round endlessly and causes us to suffer greatly.

The very First Noble Truth of the Buddha points out that suffering is inevitable for human beings as long as we believe that things last—that they don’t disintegrate, that they can be counted on to satisfy our hunger for security.

From this point of view, the only time we ever know what’s really going on is when the rug’s been pulled out and we can’t find anywhere to land. We use these situations either to wake ourselves up or to put ourselves to sleep.

Right now, the very instant of our groundlessness is the seed of taking care of those who need our care and of discovering our goodness.”
― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

“I have a friend dying of AIDS. Before I was leaving for a trip, we were talking. He said, ‘I didn’t want this, and I hated this, and I was terrified of this, but it turns out that this illness has been my greatest gift.’ He said, ‘Now, every moment is so precious to me. All the people in my life are so precious to me. My whole life means so much to me.’

Something had really changed, and he felt ready for his death.

Something that was horrifying and scary had turned into a gift.

Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved; they come together, and they fall apart-- then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.

When we think that something is going to bring us pleasure, we don’t know what’s really going to happen. When we think something is going to give us misery, we don’t know. Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all. We try to do what we think is going to help, but we don’t know; we never know if we’re going to fall flat or sit up tall. When there’s a big disappointment, we don’t know if that’s the end of the story.

It may be just the beginning of a great adventure.”
― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“Life is a good teacher and a good friend.

Things are always in transition, if we could only realize it. Nothing ever sums itself up in the way we like to dream about. The off-center, in -between state is an ideal situation, a situation in which we don’t get caught and we can open our hearts and minds beyond limit. It’s a very tender, nonaggressive, open-ended state of affairs.”
― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

“Getting the knack of catching ourselves, of gently and compassionately catching ourselves is the Path of the Warrior. We catch ourselves one zillion times, as once again, whether we like it or not, we harden into resentment, bitterness, righteous indignation, harden in any way, even into a sense of relieve, a sense of inspiration.”
― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

“Every day we could think about the aggression in the world, in New York, Los Angeles, Halifax, Taiwan, Beirut, Kuwait, Somalia, Iraq, everywhere.

All over the world, everybody always strikes out at the enemy, and the pain escalates forever.

Every day we could reflect on this and ask ourselves: ‘Am I going to add to the aggression in the world?’

Every day at the moment when things get edgy, we can just ask ourselves: ‘Am I going to practice peace or am I going to war?”
― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

“In the lands where my feet are firmly planted. Although a lot of attention has been paid to the question of whether ancient European cultures honored a “Great Mother” goddess, in these islands we were actually honoring a Great Grandmother. Her name in the Gaelic languages of Scotland and Ireland is the Cailleach: literally, the Old Woman. There are traces of other divine old women scattered throughout the rest of the British Isles and Europe; they’re probably the oldest deities of all. How thoroughly we’ve been taught to forget. Today, we don’t see these narratives as remnants of ancient belief systems — rather, they’re presented to us as folktales intended merely to entertain, as oddities of primitive history, the vaguely amusing relics of more superstitious times or bedtime stories for children.”
― Sharon Blackie, Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life

“Hagitude: hags with attitude. Like the Cailleach, and all the other feisty, aging women of European myth and folklore who we’ve so thoroughly buried — just as we’ve relegated the aging women of contemporary life to the shadows. They’re the inconvenient ones, the invisible ones. The overculture would so like to pretend they’re not there.”
― Sharon Blackie, Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life

“I have no intention of being invisible. But I’m quite prepared to be inconvenient.”
― Sharon Blackie, Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life

“But really, why should the Cailleach matter now? Why should the other fierce and shining old women of European myth and folklore who populate the pages of this book matter? Why should any of these old stories matter? Aren’t they just ancient history? Nice to know, but irrelevant to our infinitely more sophisticated lives today? Well, they matter because the ways in which we think about aging depend on the stories we tell about it. How we think about aging women depends on the images we hold of them. And the images we hold of aging women today aren’t healthy. Truth is, there is no clear image of enviable female elderhood in the contemporary cultural mythology of the West; it’s not an archetype we recognize anymore. In our culture, old women are mostly ignored, encouraged to be inconspicuous, or held up as objects of derision and satire. But our old mythology and folklore tell us something very much more interesting: that it hasn’t always been so. In our more distant past, as of course in many indigenous cultures today, female elders were respected and had important and meaningful roles to play. They are the ones who hold the myths and the wisdom stories, the ones who know where the medicine plants grow and what their uses are. They serve as guides for younger adults; they’re the caregivers and mentors for the community’s children. They know when the community is going to the dogs, and they’re not afraid to speak out and say so. When they do, they’re listened to. Their focus is on giving back — on bringing out, for the sake of Earth and community, the hard-earned wisdom which they’ve grown within themselves.”
― Sharon Blackie, Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life

“Take this story from the southwest of Ireland. One day, a parish priest visited the Cailleach’s house to ask how old she was. He thought, as such men do, that he was a fine fellow, and very clever; he’d heard that she claimed to be as old as time, and he wanted to catch her out. Well, the old woman replied that she couldn’t quite remember her exact age, but every year on her birthday, she told him, she would kill a bullock, and after she’d eaten it, she would throw one of its thigh bones into her attic. So if he wanted to, he could go up to the attic and count the bones. “For every bone you find up there in that attic,” she said to him, “you can add a year of my life.” Well, he counted the bones for a day and a night and still he couldn’t make a dent in them. His hands, they say, were shaking as he pulled at the door handle and left.”
― Sharon Blackie, Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life

“It’s not surprising that these old myths and stories of Europe that I’m offering up should be populated with European women. Although migration has been a major force throughout human history, most of these old folktales have their roots in poor, often rural communities in which travel — either in or out — was much less of an option, and in which there was much less diversity than we experience in our world today. But that doesn’t mean that they exclude others. These stories offer up wisdom which is accessible and relevant to all women who are now rooted in these lands — whatever their skin color or ancestry. It’s a wisdom that’s accessible and relevant, in many different ways, to all those who identify as women.”
― Sharon Blackie, Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life

“Myths and stories such as these help us not only to understand life as it is, or was, but to dream life as it ought to be. We perceive, explain, and make sense of the world through stories. They are the stars we navigate by, and that’s why storytelling is a universal human phenomenon, a vital aspect of communal life across all cultures and throughout the entirety of our known history. Stories teach us everything we know, and their lessons are deep and rich. Stories can reveal to us longings that we never knew we had, fire us up with new ideas and insights, and inspire us to grow and change. The characters in stories are great teachers too: they are role models for our development, helping us to reimagine ourselves. Helping us to unravel who we are and to work out who we want to become.”
― Sharon Blackie, Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life

“But I always related to the Old Woman. The one who haunted the edgelands, the mysterious shadow in the heart of the darkwood. The exile, the rebel, the one who shrugged off the fetters of conventional society; the one who imagined and cultivated her own vision of how the world should be, thank you very much. At the earliest of ages, I already knew that was the old woman I wanted to grow into. The spirited, unpredictable, not-to-be-messed-with elder. An elder who’s always ready to tell you the often-unwelcome truths about the condition of your life — leavened, of course, with compassion, and a glint of fierce humor in her eyes.”
― Sharon Blackie, Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life

“But here in the contemporary West, we don’t really do elders: instead, we have “the elderly.” The connotations are quite different. According to the Cambridge English Dictionary online, “elderly” is nothing more than “a polite word for ‘old.’” The online Merriam-Webster Dictionary informs us that “elderly” can also mean “old-fashioned.” In Lexico, the Oxford online thesaurus, the word is associated with synonyms such as “doddering,” “decrepit,” “in one’s dotage,” “past one’s prime,” “past it,” and “over the hill.” It doesn’t paint a pretty picture; these are not exactly the adjectives that most aging women would aspire to embody. But the aging woman has had a particularly troubled history in Western culture. The last convictions might have taken place in the eighteenth century, but in many ways we still haven’t quite recovered from our demonization in the witch trials. Older women, when they’re not rendered completely invisible, are still trivialized and marginalized, and often actively ridiculed. “Little old ladies,” we call them here in Britain; “old bats” (if we think they’re crazy), or “old bags” and “old trouts” (if they don’t live up to our expectations that old women should rarely be seen, and certainly should never be heard).”
― Sharon Blackie, Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life

“What would it mean, instead of being an elderly woman, to be an elder woman? Because to be an elder implies something rather different — it implies authority: “a leader” or “senior figure” in a tribe or other group, says Lexico. According to Merriam-Webster, a person “having authority by virtue of age and experience.” The Cambridge Dictionary tells us it’s “an older person, especially one with a respected position in society.” So how do women transition from becoming elderly to becoming elder?”
― Sharon Blackie, Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life

“Because in contemporary Western society, to be old is rarely to be thought of as gifted and wise. We see old age as a time of loss, of decay; we focus on holding aging and death at bay. We find the process embarrassing, verging on distasteful. It’s not something we really want to hear about, and yet the media is full of it, and all of it negative. We’re constantly flooded with stories about the “burden” that old people place on health services, and with news about Alzheimer’s disease, designed to strike horror into all aging hearts. There are endless exposés of appalling conditions in care homes; stories about older women being preyed upon, scammed, and even raped; stories about the impossibility of finding or even holding down a job once you’re over fifty and are effectively written off by a culture which prides itself on productivity rather than quality. Where are the stories of empowered and fulfilled elders? Where are the stories of the ways in which they can bring meaning and hope into the lives of the young? Where are the still-thriving lives?”
― Sharon Blackie, Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life

“This lack of cultural recognition and support for the process of becoming elder is why so many people with aging bodies insist on trying to live as though they were still approaching midlife. It’s why so few of us investigate the rich possibilities of growing older, or undertake the necessary inner work that prepares us for a passage into a more conscious and meaningful elderhood. And even if we can bring ourselves to talk about the biological and psychological dimensions of aging, more often than not we back away from discussing the existential — or spiritual — dimensions. We avoid the only question that it makes sense for us to ask now: What is all of this life for? Why are we still here; what do we still have to offer? But we don’t much talk about spirituality in this post-Enlightenment culture which respects and rewards only rationality. We live in a society whose power systems value only the material, and which dismiss, become vaguely embarrassed about, or actively ridicule the spiritual. Elderhood is a passage that ends in death by design, and we don’t much talk about death, either. So many taboos to overcome; so many strong feelings which arise.”
― Sharon Blackie, Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life

“ever since the groundbreaking work of Carl Jung in the first half of the twentieth century, most depth psychologists have argued that the journey into elderhood is a spiritual passage above all, and that the purpose of the second half of our lives is to grow into the person that we were always meant to become. Jung believed that aging fulfilled a necessary function, saying: “A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own …”3”
― Sharon Blackie, Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life

“But as a folklorist and mythologist too, I firmly believe that story is our primary inspiration — an ancient, much-neglected tool which helps us conjure up sharply honed images of who exactly it is that we might want to become if we are lucky enough to grow old. Because stories are spells; they change things. When they hook us and reel us into their magic, they change us. It’s stories that will save us, in the end. Not just the stories we read or tell, or the stories we want to be in, but the ones that live inside us and the ones we live inside. The stories we invite in, those that we choose to inhabit.”
― Sharon Blackie, Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life

“As a culture, our failure to understand or embrace aging is also related to the fact that we are increasingly and profoundly cut off from nature, and thus from the natural cycles and rhythms of our human life. And yet the old women in our old stories, without exception, are forces of nature, and of the ancestral Otherworld which is so beautifully entangled with this world. There are no twice-removed, transcendental star-goddesses here; no twinkly fairy queens, reluctant to sully themselves with the dirt and mess of physical incarnation. Our old women are the dark heart of the forest, the stone womb of the mountain, immanent in the living land itself. They’re elemental beings: storm hags, fire keepers, grandmothers of the sea. They show us how to live when everything we thought mattered to us has been stripped away; they teach us how to stay rooted in the face of inevitable death. They teach us how to stand firm in the face of all the culture’s bullshit, and laugh.”
― Sharon Blackie, Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life

“It’s interesting, nevertheless, that there are very few European folk and fairy tales with older women as their main protagonists. I have found no stories that clearly teach us how to transition into a rich and meaningful elderhood, or which hold up a mirror of clarity to the nature of our life journey at this time. But still, there exist many different kinds of archetypal old women who play pivotal roles in the stories: characters who pull the strings, weave the webs, test or advise the heroes and heroines. These elders are usually presented as wise — though they manifest their wisdom in very different ways. What, then, is the nature of an elder woman’s wisdom, and how might myths and fairy tales offer us insight into the ways that each of us could uniquely embody it?”
― Sharon Blackie, Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life

“but at the age of fifty, rage seemed to have taken up residence at the back of my throat, hovering on the threshold of speech, always ready to make a break for it. It didn’t take much to trigger.”
― Sharon Blackie, Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life

“I’d been storing up rage like ancient magma, and I was all set to erupt.”
― Sharon Blackie, Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life

“In Classical mythology, righteous wrath was the province of old women. Three very specific old women, in fact: the Furies (or the Erinyes, in Greek). Fragments of myth featuring the Furies are found in the earliest records of ancient Greek culture. These sisters were much more ancient than any of the Olympian deities, indicating the persistence of an older, female-dominated tradition which endured here and there even when later, more patriarchal, mythologies set in. The role of the Furies was to preside over complaints brought to them by humans about behavior that was thought to be intolerable: from lesser misdemeanors such as the insolence of the young to the aged, of children to parents, of hosts to guests — to crimes that were very much worse. It was their role to punish such crimes by relentlessly hounding their perpetrators. The Greek poet Hesiod names the three sisters as Alecto — “unceasing in anger,” the punisher of moral crimes; Megaera — “jealous one,” the punisher of infidelity, oath-breaking, and theft; and Tisiphone — “avenger of murder.” They were, he said, the daughters of Gaea (the goddess who personified the Earth), who conceived them from the blood of her spouse, Uranus, after he had been castrated by his son, Cronos. They lived in the Underworld, and like other chthonic deities, like seeds that lie buried beneath the Earth, they were also identified with its fertility. The wrath of the Furies manifested itself in a number of ways: a tormenting madness would be inflicted on the perpetrator of a patricide or matricide; murderers usually suffered a dire disease, and nations which harbored such criminals could be stricken with famine and plague. The Furies could only be placated with ritual purification, and the completion of a task specifically assigned by them for atonement. It’s important to understand that although the Furies were feared, they were also respected and perceived to be necessary: they represented justice, and were seen to be defenders of moral and legal order. The Furies were portrayed as the foul-smelling, decidedly haggish possessors of bat-like wings, with black snakes adorning their hair, arms, and waists, and blood dripping from their eyes. And they carried brass-studded scourges in their hands. In my menopausal years, I certainly had days when I could have gone with that look. I’m happy to admit that the existence of seriously not-to-be-messed-with elder women like the Furies in our oldest European mythology gives me great pleasure. And it’s difficult not to see them as the perfect menopausal role models, because sudden upwellings of (mostly righteous) anger are a feature of many women’s experience of menopause”
― Sharon Blackie, Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life