Quotes about Connection

You don't have to worry about what their vibration is if your vibration is one of connection. Because if your vibration is one of connection -- you're going to dominate the vibration. This is the way you learn your relationships. The thing that most people do not understand, is that you get to control the way you feel, because you get to choose the thoughts you think. Most people think that they only have the option of responding to the circumstances that surround them. And that's what makes them attempt the impossible, which is to control the circumstances around them, which only feeds their feeling of frustration and vulnerability, because it doesn't take very much life experience to discover you can't control all of those circumstances. But you can control your vibration. And when you control your vibration, you've controlled everything that has anything to do with you. 

Life is not about always being happy -- the art is in being able to feel connected to the Beauty of Life, even when you are sad.  And, if you can express that Beauty, other people can feel connected in a deep and meaningful way.

Every person is born paired with a spiritual self, a higher self -- some people say the Divine or the Universal Self or the Soul.  Our language reflects this:  When we are sad, our hearts need to be re-paired to our spiritual selves, "repaired".  Likewise, "dis.." and "des.." are prefixes meaning "apart" and when we lose our connection, we feel disabled, disjointed and, if it is bad enough,  despair" (apart from our pair).   So, the spiritual choice, the critical choice,  is daily re-pairing or eventual des-pairing.

We are less lonely when we connect. Art is connection.

Quand on trouve la connexion avec la beaute de la nature on trouve sa beaute.

The Key to Sustainability is Community.

You have been hiding so long
aimlessly drifting
in the sea of my love

Even so
You have always been
connected to me
Connected, revealed
in the known
in the unmanifest
I am life itself

Hunger for Connection Brought to "The Seeker Academy," by L. D. Gussin


Yes, the characters in L. D. Gussin's "The Seeker Academy" are "hungry for the truth" as Christopher Noel says on the book's cover. But, these characters are even hungrier for connection, as symbolized by the Gorganzola-and-fig pizza at the book's beginning.

This hunger for connection extends in every direction. Their hunger grows vertically--into the world of the spirit (upward), and it extends into a wish for greater depth within themselves(inward and downward). The hunger grows horizontally and outward into relationships with romantic and married partners, family, friends, community, and casually encountered strangers. The masterful contribution of "The Seeker Academy" is laying these hungers for connection vulnerably bare and deftly showing the multitude of ways we human beings push and pull through,and often past, our desires. I frequently found myself pausing to make a mental note as I recognized a comment in the text that pointed to a tendency in myself.

From a writing craft standpoint, one of L.D. Gussin's greatest achievements is in his credible and warm fleshing out of leading lady Grace Hudson, and telling the story through her eyes. Grace, a middle-aged drama teacher in a middle school brings impeccable observation and a tendency toward wry mimicry into her roles as matron, mother, care-taking aunt, and then among the elders of the temporary staff at the Seeker Academy.

What better guide could we have into the culture of the Seeker Academy? ("Grace wanted to dismiss this coded talk.... But she also felt Sophie to be thoughtful and sincere.") Gussin doesn't go for satire, but neither does he go for whole-hog idolatry of New Age spiritual shopping. Very gently, Gussin reveals the wounding and natural human yearning that has drawn these people into the world of the Seeker Academy. Gussin also reveals, in a balanced way, the extent that this world of spiritual mélange delivers healing for wounds, and rapture for transcendental yearning--and to the extent it does not.

An amazing feature of The Seeker Academy is its encyclopedic knowledge of holistic healing and the history of spiritual seeking communities in America (since Thoreau, the Transcendentalists, and Chautauqua) and in Europe with the Romantics. Interwoven among the book's conversations and theatrical performances is a compendium and classification of New Age Philosophy. Make no mistake, Gussin has done a great deal of homework which undergirds The Seeker Academy. In addition to the broad swath, there is even practical, detailed information on how to perform sitting meditation.

Gussin's style in its slight formality, occasional sentence inversion, elegance, and wording of chapter titles reminds me pleasantly of the early 20th century books that crammed our bookcases when I was growing up in the 1950s and devoured books from an earlier generation. ("Grace knew that her body would ache the next day, as her heart ached from the winter in hell, but she was glad for the struggle.") There's a graciousness here that serves Gussin's tale well. I love the lyrical thread of poetic imagery that weaves through the book.

Grace Hudson lives up to her name, embodying as she does the quality of grace and carrying the surname of a great American river. Grace enters the Seeker Academy as a person willing "to give life a chance." Her "role-the-dice openness" helps her navigate the turbulent waves of her Seeker Academy experience with its not-yet-digested emotions and ideas.

Although Gussin's book is a novel of ideas, the relational strand of connection most compels me. The message I take away at the end of "The Seeker Academy" is that yes,"this life is a guesthouse" and in every moment we have the choice presented to us to be the decent human beings we essentially are.

Visit Janet Grace Riehl's blog "Riehl Life: Village Wisdom for the 21st Century" (www.riehlife.com) to share more of her thoughts on connection through the arts, across cultures, and within the family. Janet is the author of "Sightlines: A Poet's Diary," a downhome love story beyond death. You can read sample poems on her website http://www.riehlife.com/

We are one, after all, you and I. Together we suffer, together exist, and forever will recreate each other.

As a 62 year old businessman who had a near death experience during a cardiac arrest puts it - "One thing I learned was that we are all part  of one big, living universe. If we think we can hurt another person or another living thing without hurting ourselves we are sadly mistaken. I look at a forest or a flower or a bird now, and say ' That is me, part of me'. We are connected with all things and if we send love along those connections, then we are happy."

What is it that caused your great-grandmother on her meeting with your great-grandfather to recognize him as her future mate and the future father of her children? You can call it a mystery, but it is a mystery that does not imply doubt. We can presume she felt something definite. She felt affinity.

My birth and yours were unique, each birth is unique, and every incident across the world and across the great nebulae is unique--and every event unfolds the universe.

 Affinity, affinity. All beings are made up by affinity. The whole universe, through every dimension, forms a vast net of affinity that is all of a piece--a multi-dimensional web. With any movement within the web, everything moves. Each gesture, each blink brings a new kind of equilibrium and new kinds of interplay throughout the net. This is a never-ending process from the unknown past to the unknown future, and through all other dimensions including the eternal present. Touches that bring joy and harmony bring new interplay and new equilibrium. Touches that cause suffering and death bring new interplay and new equilibrium as well.

When you hear that my body has ceased to exist, please do not feel sad. Just look deeply and see that my life and work continue in so many friends, so many young people, in their own ways and through their work. I will continue in everyone and everything I have ever touched. I have nothinng to fear and nothing to regret. 

"Giving connects two people, the giver and the receiver, and this connection gives birth to a new sense of belonging."

The experience of separateness arouses anxiety; it is, indeed, the source of all anxiety.

Look to their positive intent, especially when they appear to have none. - Kare Anderson

People like people who like them. - Kare Anderson

All know that the drop merges into the ocean, but few know that the ocean merges into the drop.

How could the drops of water know themselves as a river? Yet the river flows on.

A soul connection is a resonance between two people who respond to the essential beauty of each other's individual natures, behind their facades, and who connect on this deeper level.  This kind of mutual recognition provides the catalyst for a potent alchemy.  It is a sacred alliance whose purpose is to help both partners discover and realize their deepest potentials.  While a heart connection lets us appreciate those we love just as they are, a soul connection opens up a further dimension -- seeing and loving them for who they could be, and for who we could become under their influence.  This means recognizing that we both have an important part to play in helping each other become more fully who we are....A soul connection not only inspires us to expand, but also forces us to confront whatever stands in the way of that expansion.

Self-realization means that we have been consciously connected withour source of being.  Once we have made this connection, then nothing can go wrong...

He nurtures his connection from a distance...The rhythm is fixed in his life now - a support and distraction, the way in which he confirms his most human feelings.

We're gonna get high, high, high, when we're low. The fires burn from better days. She scream why, oh why? I said I don't know!

...it is important to understand, not intellectually but actually in your daily life, how you have built images about your wife, your husband, your neighbor, your child, your country, your leaders, your politicians, your gods--you have nothing but images. The images create the space between you and what you observe and in that space there is conflict, so what we are going to find out now together is whether it is possible to be free of the space we create, not only outside ourselves but in ourselves, the space which divides people in all their relationships...

I saw you once and I looked into your eyes and there was a connection.  I give to you responsibility.

The absolute best way to develop a relationship with someone that will lead to a powerful connection and meaningful interaction is to wake up with them.

The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention…. A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well~intentioned words.

"That night I stayed in the house. Before I fell asleep I thought of a name for him, for I could not call him Dog. The name I thought of was Rontu, which means in our language Fox Eyes." -- Karana (The first time she actually had a "friend" on the island in the 19 years she was stuck there.)

Making mental connections is our most crucial learning tool, the essence of human intelligence; to forge links; to go beyond the given; to see patterns, relationships, context.