Storytelling brings us home to our hearts. It requires no props, no money, nothing but revealing history, our experience, and our inner world. It doesn't matter if you're gifted at weaving a yarn or simply speak from your heart. What matters is that you tap into the wonder of your own life and share it with others. Telling the stories of our lives to each other brings a richness of spirit and validates our specialness. Storytelling ignites our imagination as we create pictures and scenes from words. It is also a wonderful way to build community.

(Charlotte Sophia Kasl, A Home for the Heart, 167)

Immortality

"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve it by not dying."

--Woody Allen

"The response of faith drops the demand that we keep living history and accepts the fact that, in the final analysis, we are born to die...It means that we have to face the loss of our historical potency. After we die, we cannot make history. True, a few important people will still have lingering influence through their works, or their memory may be used as a symbol for some cause or ideology, but they cannot make anything."

(James R. Wilkes, To Wrestle and To Dance, 130)

Soul development

An individual soul can be likened to our universe. Just as the universe is thought to have had its beginning at the moment of the Big Bang, so an individual soul might be understood to have a definite birth at the moment of conception. Just as our universe has been expanding, the inner universe of a soul is constantly growing. The inner cosmos, like the outer one, goes through many phases in its evolution. Connections in the mind rapidly multiply in early infancy, just as the most important developments in the physical universe occurred in the first few minutes. Gradually, in both cases, a unique identity emerges. Both are immortal but also have a definite beginning: the 'birth' of the universe involves bringing together and reorganizing pre-existing fundamental particles, while the creation of the soul involves imprinting eternal spirit with a unique identity and character.

(from Anjam Khursheed, The Universe Within, 160)

Understand that you have within yourself, upon a small scale, a second universe: within you there is a sun, there is a moon, and there are also stars.

--Origen (cited in The Orthodox Way, Kallistos Ware, 43)

Inspiration

Take your breathing...It isn't particularly pleasant, and it certainly isn't unpleasant. So your animal brain judges it irrelevant. Talk about ignorance-- it only happens to be the mystery that sustains your life and connects you to every other living thing!

-- A Return to Innocence: Philosophical Guidance in an Age of Cynicism, Jeffrey M. Schwartz, 190)

If we only knew that we are powerless all the time and these artificial worlds of comfort are just an illusion.

(From The Weakest Link by Derek Darby)

(From The Inner Limits of Mankind,E. Lazlo, pp.25-26)

The blame is tacitly and shifted to the nature and finitude of the environment, and engineers are scurrying to their drawing boards to redesign it here and there so that we can remain as and what we are.
It is forgotten that not our world, but we human beings are the cause of our problems, and that only be redesigning our thinking and acting, not the world around us, can we solve them.

(From The Way of the (Modern) World by Craig M. Gay, 295-96; 299-300)

Of course, one of the deepest splits that has opened up within our modern civilization has been between our need for genuinely personal relatedness and the dreary impersonality of so much of modern institutional life, a split that has been helpfully characterized as a kind of "overgrowth of objective culture" at the expense of truly human subjectivity. This overgrowth of objectivity is evident in the "managed" quality of modern political life; in modern science's "objectification" of the world and in the utilitarian spirit of modern technology; and in the modern economy's "leveling" of all quality by means of merely quantitative monetary abstraction. Indeed, the overgrowth of objective culture is even evident in the so-called private sphere of subjective autonomy, for it appears that self-constructing individuals quite often envision and treat even themselves largely as manipulable objects....It is, of course, not terribly surprising to find that the overgrowth of objectivity in modern society and culture has yielded the fruit of loneliness. Unable to truly apprehend others, the self that is possessed by the spirit of objectification is itself reduced to an object incapable of truly personal existence. The cost of establishing control over the world by means of technical-rational objectification, in other words, has been nothing short of personal existence, and we have established a measure of control over our world only to discover that the self-understanding responsible for initiating the process-- which seemed at first to be so confident in its position in the universe --has by now vanished into "postmodern" nothingness. This is perhaps the supreme irony of the modern intellectual condition. The immensely painful and nature of this condition, furthermore, which might otherwise be such as to call the whole project of objectification into question, is assuaged by the distractions and diversions of consumer culture...

Liquid Gift by Mortal from Pura
(Jyro)

your wounds
your eyes
your strength
your lies
i want more
want it all
everything
everything
reveal yourself to me!
show your face
show your veins
scratch your scales
lift your wings
spill your blood
bare your soul
sacrifice
this is gold
reveal yourself!
until your self is revealed
and if i never touch your scars
I'll know who you are
only if you tell me
and what if i will never know
how you're hurting so
only you can say
life is loss
death is gain
if love is truth
say your name
i want more
want it all
everything
everything
reveal yourself to me!
until your soul is revealed
i see your self in me!

Quiver by Jeff Johnson from The Isle of Dreams

The cycle continues,
As the waves keep on crashing in,
While the ground that I'm walking on
quivers with each blow.

And a voice from within longing to be free cries:
"I can't take this anymore..."

Still the voice from within longing to be free cries:
"I can't take this anymore..."

But the cycle continues,
And the waves keep on crashing in,
And this dream that I'm living in...
...it quivers.

However hard I try, I find it impossible to construct anything greater than these three words, "Love one another"--- only to the end, and without exceptions: then all is justified and life is illumined, whereas otherwise it is an abomination and a burden.

---Mother Maria of Paris (cited in The Orthodox Way, Kallistos Ware, 40)

On that note:

From This Beautiful Mess, Sixpence None the Richer...

love, salvation, the fear of death (slocum/arhelger)

well i'm staring straight into the face of hell
you're so close and you can't even tell
i'm so wrapped up inside
because i don't have much to love

horrified i reel from pits unseen
falling off my pedestal of plentiful deeds
as it crumbles down on top of me
i contemplate my lack of love

come and save my soul
before it's not too late
i'm not afraid to admit
how much i hate myself

all these gongs and cymbals ring inside my head
surrendered body to the flames has singed the skin
can't speak in tongues and even if i could it's nothing
because i cannot love

come and save my soul
before it's not too late
i'm not afraid to admit
how much i hate myself

well i'm staring into the face of hell
i'm so close and i can't even tell
i'm so afraid i'll amount to nothing
because i cannot love