Quote of the Day

“There are, it seems, two muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say, ‘It is yet more difficult than you thought.’ This is the muse of form. It may be then that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction, to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”         —Wendell Berry, from Poetry and Marriage: The Use of Old Forms

Quote of the Day

Concerning the Via Creativa path of creation spirituality: “Creativity is not about painting a picture or producing an object; it is about wrestling with the demons and angels in the depths of our psyches and daring to name them, to put them where they can breathe and have space and we can look at them. This process of listening to our images and birthing them allows us to embrace our ‘enemies’—that is, the shadow side of ourselves—as well as to embrace our biggest visions and dreams. Art-as-meditation becomes the basic prayer form in the practice of creation spirituality.”
—Matthew Fox, Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth

Quote of the Day

“If you take life absolutely seriously, you must realize there’s the counter-play to it, that the world of law is simply an optional world. When you do something you create a pattern that excludes other possibilities, and there comes a time for opening up to all possibility and the creative act.

Actually, everybody who has ever done creative work of any kind knows this moment. You make your plans in terms of what the mind can think of, and if you hold to those plans you’re going to have a dry, dead piece of work. What you have to do is open out underneath into chaos, and then a new thing comes, and if you bring your critical faculty down too early you’re going to kill it.

There’s a beautiful letter that Schiller wrote to a young author who was having the trouble that’s known as writer’s block. This young writer had oh, so much to say, but he couldn’t write. This is a normal situation. Schiller said simply, ‘Your problem is that you’re bringing the critical factor into play before you have let the lyric factor work.’

Look what happens to us in our schools: we learn to criticize Milton and Shakespeare and Goethe and everybody else, and then the teacher says, ‘Now do some creative work.’ You sit down and this bit of spilth begins coming out and you think, Oh, my God! That’s nothing. Of course you can’t write like Shakespeare, but you can write like you, perhaps, if you let yourself go.”

—Joseph Campbell, Goddeses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine

Quote of the Day

Cartoon by Edward Steed

Quote of the Day

“Well, I’m not a mystic, in that I don’t practice any austerities, and I’ve never had a mystical experience. So I’m not a mystic. I’m a scholar, and that’s all. I remember when Alan Watts one time asked me, ‘Joe, what yoga do you practice?’ I said, ‘I underline sentences.’”

—Joseph Campbell, in an interview with Jeffrey Mishlove

Quote of the Day

“It’s an endless quest without knowing what your quest is.”

—Socrates in the form of a 9-year-old

Quote of the Day

“What has always been basic to resurrection, or Easter, is crucifixion. If you want to resurrect, you must have crucifixion. Too many interpretations of the Crucifixion have failed to emphasize that. They emphasize the calamity of the event. And if you emphasize calamity, then you look for someone to blame. That is why people have blamed the Jews for it. But it is not a calamity if it leads to new life. Through the Crucifixion we were unshelled, we were able to be born to resurrection. That is not a calamity. We must look freshly at this so that its symbolism can be sensed.”
—Joseph Campbell, from Thou Art That

Quote of the Day

“The hero’s journey always begins with the call. One way or another, a guide must come to say, ‘Look, you’re in Sleepy Land. Wake. Come on a trip. There is a whole aspect of your consciousness, your being, that’s not been touched. So you’re at home here? Well, there’s not enough of you there.’ And so it starts.”
—Joseph Campbell

Quote of the Day

You do this, you do that
You argue left, you argue right
You come down, you go up
This person says no, you say yes
Back and forth
You are happy
You are really happy 

                —Ikkyu (1394–1481)

Quote of the Day

“Love after Love”

The time will come

when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

—Derek Walcott, from Collected Poems 1948–1984