Quotes about Connection

As technological civilization diminishes the biotic diversity of the earth, language itself is diminished. As there are fewer and fewer songbirds in the air, due to the destruction of their forests and wetlands, human speech loses more and more of its evocative power. For when we no longer hear the voices of warbler and wren, our own speaking can no longer be nourished by their cadences. As the splashing speech of the rivers is silenced by more and more dams, as we drive more and more of the land’s wild voices into the oblivion of extinction, our own languages become increasingly impoverished and weightless, progressively emptied of their earthly resonance.

The senses are complementary powers evolved in complex interdependence with one another. Each sense is a unique modality of this body’s existence, yet in the activity of perception these divergent modalities necessarily intercommunicate and overlap. It is thus that a raven soaring in the distance is not, for me, a mere visual image; as I follow it with my eyes, I inevitably feel the stretch and flex of its wings with my own muscles, and its sudden swoop toward the nearby trees is a visceral as well as a visual experience for me. The raven’s loud, guttural cry, as it swerves overhead, is not circumscribed within a strictly audible field – it echoes through the visible, immediately animating the visible landscape with the reckless style or mood proper to that jet black shape. My various senses, diverging as they do from a single, coherent body, coherently converge, as well, in the perceived thing, just as the separate perspectives of my two eyes converge upon the raven and convene there into a single focus. My senses connect up with each other in the things I perceive, or rather each perceived thing gathers my senses together in a coherent manner and it is this that enables me to experience the thing itself as a center of forces, as another nexus of experience, as an Other.

My life and the world’s life are deeply intertwined; when I wake up one morning to find that a week-long illness has subsided and that my strength has returned, the world, when I step outside, fairly crackles with energy and activity: swallows are swooping by in vivid flight; waves of heat rise from the newly paved road smelling strongly of tar; the old red barn across the field juts into the sky at an intense angle. Likewise, when a haze descends upon the valley in which I dwell, it descends upon my awareness as well, muddling my thoughts, making my muscles yearn for sleep. The world and I reciprocate one another. The landscape as I directly experience it is hardly a determinate object; it is an ambiguous realm that responds to my emotions and calls forth feelings from me in turn.

The happy individual is able to renew daily and with full consciousness all the basic expressions of human identity: work, love, communication, play, and rest.

We might well believe that the law of universal gravitation whereby each physical reality attracts and is attracted to every other physical reality has its correspondence in the hidden or overt attraction of all human beings and all human societies to each other. This attraction takes place within a functional balance of tensions whereby each is sustained in its existence by all the others even as each sustains the others in existence. This seems to be demonstrated in the extensive and continuing efforts of humans to encounter each other and to establish a universal network of communication throughout the human order.

Your will is the ego part of you that believes you're separate from others, separate from what you'd like to accomplish or have, and separate from God. It also believes that you are your acquisitions, achievements, and accolades. This ego will wants you to constantly acquire evidence of your importance... On the other hand, your imagination is the concept of Spirit within you. ...with imagination, we have the power to be anything we desire to be.

The ability to see yourself as a temporary expression of intention and to see yourself in all of humanity is a characteristic of the holy relationship. It's the ability to celebrate and honor in all others, the place where we're all one. ...establish a holy relationship with your Source, the world community, your neighbors, acquaintances, family, the animal kingdom, our planet, and yourself.

Poets and mystics have been telling us for centuries: Wake up.  Wake to your true self.  Wake to your own connections to what is around you right now.  Gaze into someone's eyes, and discover who looks back.  Penetrate the mysteries where the worlds touch.  Don't go back to sleep.

And if, as I pass,
I should look you in the eye,
do not be afraid: I want
only to glimpse the emptiness
at the center of your heart,
I want to reach for you
because I know,
as you do, we might never have met.

Willing to experience aloneness,
I discover connection everywhere;
Turning to face my fear,
I meet the warrior who lives within;
Opening to my loss,
I am given unimaginable gifts;
Surrendering into emptiness,
I find fullness without end.

Each condition I flee from pursues me.
Each condition I welcome transforms me
And becomes itself transformed…

We are energetic beings where spirit meets matter, all connected through a timeless energetic matrix. While the quest for health and well being may seem limited to a personal experience, it is through actively honoring ourself and others with integrity and truth, celebrating life with appreciation and gratitude, engaging in pursuits that allow us to achieve our highest potential and expand our consciousness, that we each support and facilitate the transformation and wellbeing of others and the world we live.  This is our responsibility as evolving energetic beings and it is time that we all embrace this way of Being.

Anywhere, anytime, I'd sacrifice the finest nuance for a laugh, the most elegant trope for a smile.

The best way to lead people into the future is to connect with them deeply in the present.

Eating with the fullest pleasure - pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance - is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.

Shakespeare possesses the power of subordinating nature for the purposes of expression, beyond all poets.  His imperial muse tosses the creation like a bauble from hand to hand, and uses it to embody any caprice of thought that is uppermost in his mind.  The remotest spaces of nature are visited, and the farthest sundered things are brought together, by subtle spiritual connection.  We are made aware that magnitude of material things is relative, and all objects shrink and expand to serve the passion of the poet.

We are earth people on a spiritual journey to the stars. Our quest, our earth walk, is to look within, to know who we are, to see that we are connected to all things, that there is no separation, only in the mind.

Self-actualizing people have a deep feeling of identification, sympathy, and affection for human beings in general.  They feel kinship and connection, as if all people were members of a single family.

Quantum physics shows us the universe as a dynamic web of connection.

To keeping silence I resigned
My friends would think I was a nut
Turning water into wine
Open doors would soon be shut
So I went from day to day
Though my life was in a rut
'Til I thought of what I'd say
Which connection I should cut

Paloma you cry out, you beg for connection
The dreams you seek are straight ahead in every direction

Today is a good day to dream!

Every time you opt in to kindness
Make one connection, used to divide us
It echoes all over the world

Wasn't making any great connection
Wasn't falling for any intricate scheme
Nothing that would pass inspection
Just thinking of a series of dreams

I connect, therefore I am.

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. 

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/