Quotes About Awareness

The young hear memory in the voice of their elders and, delighted by these voices from the past or bored by them, too often miss the content behind the content. Memory is not about what went on in the past. It is about what is going on inside of us right this moment. It is never idle. It never lets us alone.

These days too many of us seem inclined to cover our ears, close our eyes, and blindly follow the most narrow, conservative tenets of religion or else seek comfort in the ancient traditions of New Age ritual.

To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self

The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.

we are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.

We are not idealized wild things. We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.

Now that she had the diagnosis to explain her sense of reality, she sorted some of the chaotic jumble of thoughts and memories. "I'd feel funny having 'daydreamed' my way through whole seasons," Jo said, "but then I'd hear someone say, 'Time flies,' or 'How did it get to be three o'clock already?' and I'd think that everyone was like me.

Why didn't I feel that I belonged to my parents? How could I have known that I was not right? I think it has always been part of me. Can a newborn sense her parents' disappointment and feelings of frustration at not being able to change the unchangeable?

She wanted to know about them, not to know them.

I don't know these stories as well as they know me, I've discovered.

When assaulted by sexual knowledge for the first time, a girl plunges into a period of blackness, which is required in order to let her emotions catch up with her body. Sleeping Beauty sleeps. Cinderella waits, and while she waits she works her way through the darkness of depression. Snow White both works and sleeps before she is ready to open her eyes and find a Prince leaning over her.

A world without empathy is a world that is dead to others—and if we are dead to others, we are dead to ourselves. The sharing of another's pain can take us past the narrow canyon of selfish disregard, and even cruelty, and into the larger, more expansive landscape of wisdom and compassion.

Nowhere to go, nothing to do … Lost and found in the moment … Just practice this … Maybe here is where we find wholeheartedness and our true freedom.

Denial of death runs rampant through our culture, leaving us woefully unprepared when it is our time to die, or our time to help others die. We often aren't available for those who need us, paralyzed as we are by anxiety and resistance—nor are we available for ourselves.

In the end, I learned that the practice of Not-Knowing is the very ground of altruism, because it opens us up to a much wider horizon than our preconceptions could ever afford us and can let in connection and tenderness.

The secret of life," say the Utes, "is in the shadows and not in the open sun; to see anything at all, you must look deeply into the shadow of a living thing.

action, calls us to turn or return to the world with

Realizing fully the true nature of place is to talk its language and hold its silence.

The second tenet, bearing witness, calls us to be present with the suffering and joy in the world, as it is, without judgment or any attachment to outcome.

Iris Murdoch defined humility as a "selfless respect for reality.

Speaking in Creation's tongues, hearing Creation's voices, the boundary of our soul expands. Earth has many voices. Those who understand that Earth is a living being know this because they have translated themselves to the humble grasses and old trees. They know that Earth is a community that is constantly talking to itself; a communicating universe. And whether we know it or not, we are participating in the web of this community.

Well, I'll tell you, I don't know how aware teenagers are of me. I think it really depends on the teenager and how well-versed in music they are and what kind of music they like.

Except for those people over there with the wagonette we might be the only living creatures in the whole world,' said Edith, airily dismissing the entire animal kingdom at one stroke.

Thinking's all right if you have the time for it.