What happens if I try to build a life dedicated to avoiding all danger and all unnecessary risk?
It’s interesting that the worse things get, the more we believe the next technological fix is going to get us out of it. But it’s like being in quicksand: the more you struggle the deeper you sink.
If we don’t preserve forest habitat for spotted owls, then soon we won’t have trees to refresh the air we breathe. And we’re realizing that this applies to social ecology, as well.
We now realize that we’re not living in a piecemeal world, but a world where everything is linked together.
There is the extreme of hopelessness and the inevitability of doom, a deep despair that comes from the sense that our industrial, consuming society is jeopardizing the planet.
Throughout my life, I’ve had different metaphors for freedom. At one time, it was skin diving. In the ocean you feel weightless; you escape from gravity.
There has always been a part of me that saw wilderness and risk-taking as the path to freedom.
I think we’re inevitably going to be depressed when we focus the major part of our energy and attention on something that doesn’t give us meaning, only material things.
It’s perfectly possible to spend forty hours a week on a job that’s meaningless, as long as you know what your real vocation is and find some way to express it. Then you won’t confuse your job with the meaning of your life.
To really love a person completely is to come to a point where your stories are intertwined.
The deepest mystery comes not when we don’t know somebody well, but when we do.
I’ve spent my life cultivating knowledge of myself. But the more I know myself, the more utterly mysterious I become.
The more we chase away the false mysteries – those things we think we know about ourselves and others – the more mysterious our existence becomes.
I fall into all kinds of inauthenticity when I conspire to forget my mortality.
At thirty I lived in a world where death wasn’t immediately real; it was always something “out there.” My deeply held illusions of immortality – a product of my very conservative religious upbringing – were still pretty much intact.
Every time I come across a rattlesnake on my farm I initially react in fear and am tempted to kill it. Then I realize I wouldn’t want to live in a world where all wild things – without and within – are domesticated.
In problems of logic, contradictory statements cannot be true; in the psyche, only contradictions are true. Self-image and shadow are Siamese twins, and the psyche is equally formed by the conscious and unconscious. Whatever appears to be true on the surface is linked to an opposite truth beneath the surface. What you see is not what you get.
A man who does not know how to wage a just battle, first with himself and then with others, has no values worth defending, no ideals worth aspiring to, no awareness of the disease of which he might be healed. And no mensch worships the status quo.
The world is run largely by urban, sedentary males. The symbol of power is the chair.
The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder. – RALPH SOCKMAN.
If the only prayer you said in your whole life was “thank you,” that would be sufficient. – MEISTER ECKHART.