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Cheryl's Reviews > Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World
Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World
by
One of the questions that John loved to pose was “when was your last great conversation with someone?” Good conversation chases the truth of things, it demolishes the flimsy foundation of facade, and it penetrates the depths so as to soar unto unfolding possibility.
A wonderful book of conversations that a journalist had with poet and theologian John O’Donohue over the years, and a portrait of a beautiful soul full of beauty and grace, trying to help us navigate being alive instead of sleepwalking. I am a leaf, and what I choose to spend my time on is my calling, and my ‘thought-lens’ is challenged and expanded exactly the way I need it to be.
Imagination according to William Blake is about the awakening to and recognition of the sacredness of all the difference that there is. Where the imagination is alive, wonder is completely alive. Where the imagination is alive, possibility is awake.
Memory now seems focused almost exclusively on past woundedness and hurt, some of it real, some induced. It’s sad that people don’t use their good memories and revisit again and again the harvest of memory that is within them, and live out of the riches of that harvest, rather than the poverty of their woundedness.
Landscape has a soul and a presence, and landscape- living in the mode of silence0 is always wrapped in seamless prayer.
Be consoled in the secret symmetry of your soul.
I love mountains. I feel that mountains are huge contemplatives. They are there and they are in the presence up to their necks and they are still in it and with it and within it. One of the lovely ways to pray is to take your body out into the landscape and to be still in it. Your body is made out of clay, so your body is actually a miniature landscape that has got up from the earth and now walking on the normal landscape.
There is incredible symmetry in a tree, between its inner life and its outer life,between its rooted memory and its external active presence. A tree grows up and down at once and produces enough branches too incarnate it’s wild divinity. It doesn’t limit itself- it reaches for the sky and it reaches for the source, all in one kind of seamless movement. So I think landscape is an incredible, mystical teacher, and when you begin to tune into its sacred presence, something shifts inside you.
FOR A NEW BEGINNING
In out of the way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.
For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you have outgrown.
It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the gray promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.
Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.
There is nothing as intimate as a human being. Every human person is inevitably involved with two worlds: the world they carry within them and the world that is out there.
All thinking that is imbued with wonder is graceful and gracious thinking.
One of the most exciting and energizing forms of thought is the question. I always think that the question is like a lantern. It illuminates new landscapes and new areas as it moves. Therefore, the question always assumes that there are many different dimensions to a though that you are either blind to or that are not available to you. One of the reasons that we wonder is because we are limited, and that limitation is one of the great gateways of wonder.
There was a contest in Ancient Greece to find out who could write a sentence that would somehow always be true. The sentence that won the competition was “This too shall pass.”
We should never forget that death is waiting for us. A man once said to a friend of mine in Gaelic, ‘we’ll be lying down in the earth for about fifteen million years, and we have short exposure.’ You have to begin to transfigure your fear...at the end of your life, when death comes, it won’t be some kind of monster, but it can actually be a friend who hides the most truthful image of your soul.
FOR EQUILIBRIUM
Like the joy of the sea coming home to shore,
May the relief of laughter rinse through your soul.
As the wind loves to call things to dance,
May your gravity be lightened by grace.
Like the dignity of moonlight restoring the earth,
May your thoughts incline with reverence and respect.
As water takes whatever shape it is in,
So free maybe you be about who you become.
As silence smiles on the other side of what’s said,
May your sense of irony bring perspective.
As time remains free of all that it frames,
May your mind stay clear of all it names.
May your prayer of listening deepen enough
To hear in the depths the laughter of God.
The French phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty says the body is not an object to think about. Rather, it is a grouping of lived-through meanings, which move towards equilibrium.
Walk around feeling like a leaf. Know you could tumble any second, then decide what to do with your time.
One of the greatest tragedies of our time is that everyone is ripping off second hand thinking. We can liberate ourselves by trusting our own instinct and finding the thought-lenses which show us our world in the way we need to see it, that can calm and bring us home, and also challenge us.
Thoughts are our inner senses. Meister Eckhart
by
One of the questions that John loved to pose was “when was your last great conversation with someone?” Good conversation chases the truth of things, it demolishes the flimsy foundation of facade, and it penetrates the depths so as to soar unto unfolding possibility.
A wonderful book of conversations that a journalist had with poet and theologian John O’Donohue over the years, and a portrait of a beautiful soul full of beauty and grace, trying to help us navigate being alive instead of sleepwalking. I am a leaf, and what I choose to spend my time on is my calling, and my ‘thought-lens’ is challenged and expanded exactly the way I need it to be.
Imagination according to William Blake is about the awakening to and recognition of the sacredness of all the difference that there is. Where the imagination is alive, wonder is completely alive. Where the imagination is alive, possibility is awake.
Memory now seems focused almost exclusively on past woundedness and hurt, some of it real, some induced. It’s sad that people don’t use their good memories and revisit again and again the harvest of memory that is within them, and live out of the riches of that harvest, rather than the poverty of their woundedness.
Landscape has a soul and a presence, and landscape- living in the mode of silence0 is always wrapped in seamless prayer.
Be consoled in the secret symmetry of your soul.
I love mountains. I feel that mountains are huge contemplatives. They are there and they are in the presence up to their necks and they are still in it and with it and within it. One of the lovely ways to pray is to take your body out into the landscape and to be still in it. Your body is made out of clay, so your body is actually a miniature landscape that has got up from the earth and now walking on the normal landscape.
There is incredible symmetry in a tree, between its inner life and its outer life,between its rooted memory and its external active presence. A tree grows up and down at once and produces enough branches too incarnate it’s wild divinity. It doesn’t limit itself- it reaches for the sky and it reaches for the source, all in one kind of seamless movement. So I think landscape is an incredible, mystical teacher, and when you begin to tune into its sacred presence, something shifts inside you.
FOR A NEW BEGINNING
In out of the way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.
For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you have outgrown.
It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the gray promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.
Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.
There is nothing as intimate as a human being. Every human person is inevitably involved with two worlds: the world they carry within them and the world that is out there.
All thinking that is imbued with wonder is graceful and gracious thinking.
One of the most exciting and energizing forms of thought is the question. I always think that the question is like a lantern. It illuminates new landscapes and new areas as it moves. Therefore, the question always assumes that there are many different dimensions to a though that you are either blind to or that are not available to you. One of the reasons that we wonder is because we are limited, and that limitation is one of the great gateways of wonder.
There was a contest in Ancient Greece to find out who could write a sentence that would somehow always be true. The sentence that won the competition was “This too shall pass.”
We should never forget that death is waiting for us. A man once said to a friend of mine in Gaelic, ‘we’ll be lying down in the earth for about fifteen million years, and we have short exposure.’ You have to begin to transfigure your fear...at the end of your life, when death comes, it won’t be some kind of monster, but it can actually be a friend who hides the most truthful image of your soul.
FOR EQUILIBRIUM
Like the joy of the sea coming home to shore,
May the relief of laughter rinse through your soul.
As the wind loves to call things to dance,
May your gravity be lightened by grace.
Like the dignity of moonlight restoring the earth,
May your thoughts incline with reverence and respect.
As water takes whatever shape it is in,
So free maybe you be about who you become.
As silence smiles on the other side of what’s said,
May your sense of irony bring perspective.
As time remains free of all that it frames,
May your mind stay clear of all it names.
May your prayer of listening deepen enough
To hear in the depths the laughter of God.
The French phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty says the body is not an object to think about. Rather, it is a grouping of lived-through meanings, which move towards equilibrium.
Walk around feeling like a leaf. Know you could tumble any second, then decide what to do with your time.
One of the greatest tragedies of our time is that everyone is ripping off second hand thinking. We can liberate ourselves by trusting our own instinct and finding the thought-lenses which show us our world in the way we need to see it, that can calm and bring us home, and also challenge us.
Thoughts are our inner senses. Meister Eckhart
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Quotes Cheryl Liked
“If you go out for several hours into a place that is wild, your mind begins to slow down, down, down. What is happening is that the clay of your body is retrieving its own sense of sisterhood with the great clay of the landscape.”
― Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World
― Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World
“Most of us are moving through such an undergrowth of excess that we cannot sense the shape of ourselves any more.”
― Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World
― Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World
“One of the questions that John loved to pose was “when was your last great conversation with someone?” Good conversation chases the truth of things, it demolishes the flimsy foundation of facade, and it penetrates the depths so as to soar unto unfolding possibility.”
― Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World
― Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World
“Imagination according to William Blake is about the awakening to and recognition of the sacredness of all the difference that there is. Where the imagination is alive, wonder is completely alive. Where the imagination is alive, possibility is awake.”
― Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World
― Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World
“Landscape has a soul and a presence, and landscape- living in the mode of silence is always wrapped in seamless prayer.”
― Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World
― Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World
“Be consoled in the secret symmetry of your soul.”
― Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World
― Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World
“I love mountains. I feel that mountains are huge contemplatives. They are there and they are in the presence up to their necks and they are still in it and with it and within it. One of the lovely ways to pray is to take your body out into the landscape and to be still in it. Your body is made out of clay, so your body is actually a miniature landscape that has got up from the earth and now walking on the normal landscape.”
― Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World
― Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World
“There is incredible symmetry in a tree, between its inner life and its outer life,between its rooted memory and its external active presence. A tree grows up and down at once and produces enough branches too incarnate it’s wild divinity. It doesn’t limit itself- it reaches for the sky and it reaches for the source, all in one kind of seamless movement. So I think landscape is an incredible, mystical teacher, and when you begin to tune into its sacred presence, something shifts inside you.”
― Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World
― Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World
“FOR A NEW BEGINNING
In out of the way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.
For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you have outgrown.
It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the gray promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.
Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.”
― Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World
In out of the way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.
For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you have outgrown.
It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the gray promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.
Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.”
― Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World
“All thinking that is imbued with wonder is graceful and gracious thinking.”
― Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World
― Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World
“One of the most exciting and energizing forms of thought is the question. I always think that the question is like a lantern. It illuminates new landscapes and new areas as it moves. Therefore, the question always assumes that there are many different dimensions to a though that you are either blind to or that are not available to you. One of the reasons that we wonder is because we are limited, and that limitation is one of the great gateways of wonder.”
― Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World
― Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World
“There was a contest in Ancient Greece to find out who could write a sentence that would somehow always be true. The sentence that won the competition was “This too shall pass.”
― Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World
― Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World
“We should never forget that death is waiting for us. A man once said to a friend of mine in Gaelic, ‘we’ll be lying down in the earth for about fifteen million years, and we have short exposure.’ You have to begin to transfigure your fear...at the end of your life, when death comes, it won’t be some kind of monster, but it can actually be a friend who hides the most truthful image of your soul.”
― Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World
― Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World
“The French phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty says the body is not an object to think about. Rather, it is a grouping of lived-through meanings, which move towards equilibrium.”
― Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World
― Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World
“Walk around feeling like a leaf. Know you could tumble any second, then decide what to do with your time.”
― Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World
― Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World
“One of the greatest tragedies of our time is that everyone is ripping off second hand thinking. We can liberate ourselves by trusting our own instinct and finding the thought-lenses which show us our world in the way we need to see it, that can calm and bring us home, and also challenge us.”
― Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World
― Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World
Reading Progress
February 8, 2020
–
Started Reading
February 8, 2020
– Shelved
February 18, 2020
–
Finished Reading
