Let The Heart Be The Skin

David Price
5 min readSep 10, 2024

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Harry Brioche, A Ray of Hope, 2023.

God loves his creation more than a mother loves her child.

~ Murshid SAM

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Look at your wrist, see the bluish veins? The blood flowing through them contains hemoglobin, a protein that has four iron atoms incorporated into its structure. Iron is only produced in one place, it can only be forged in the core of dying stars.

…remember that you are built from, and kept alive by, pieces of stardust.

~ Vethox

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Maybe it’s the animalness that will make the world right again ; the wisdom of the elephants, the enthusiasm of the canines, the grace of the snakes, the mildness of the anteaters. Perhaps being human needs some diluting.

~ Carol Emshwiller

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Ironically, the changes and deaths we experience in life do us much more good than harm. Nevertheless, we always make a big drama out of everything, especially the changes we label as “bad.” So learn to enjoy and appreciate life instead of going around things you have no control over.

~ Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche

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…Once burning off the atmosphere of self-interest, there’s a tenderness that never goes away.

This tenderness is the sonar by which we sense the interior life. This tenderness is the impulse that frees us. For anything is possible when we let the heart be our skin.

The point is to feel whatever comes our way, not ‘conclude’ it out of its aliveness. The unnerving blessing about being alive is that it can change us forever.

~ Mark Nepo

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We don’t mourn artists we never met because we knew them, we mourn them because they helped us know ourselves.

~ From Judy Ryan

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Artists often act as the feeling-function, the heart, of a society. They are devoted to seeing what others ignore or find dismissible. Out of that practice they develop vision. We don’t realize when we’re young that our society is basically rudderless, precisely because it lacks any vision of our place in the web of life and how grand it all is. Going the way of the world pits us against our own earthly instincts.

We’re the only animal on earth to lose touch with our own grounded, manifest intelligence. We’ve wandered away from Soul into a strange imitation of reason, which is not even the real thing. We’re seduced by pseudo-logic which we use to justify our prejudices and foregone conclusions. Without insights that originate in the heart we wander among a million blind alleyways.

We do need help to know ourselves. Only people with real vision can further that project, whether they’re artists or not. We hear so much insufferable claptrap presented as logic that we can be persuaded that the chaos we see is only normal and justified. There’s a cacophony of voices, all contradicting each other, all convinced they have proof of an ultimate truth but lacking any wisdom of the heart.

The logic behind the human conflicts we see everywhere is created and sustained by lack of vision. If only our educational system promoted vision instead of power we might settle down and have a peaceful world.

Innate in our animal body is a sense of earthly connectedness. That sense of limitation balances the demands of survival with empathy. Only humans have lost those restraints. No animal could be convinced to become a billionaire and to store up enough resources for a thousand lifetimes or more. We need to come down to earth again.

Greg Spalenka

I think it’s essential to open up our view of the cosmos and our place in it. Our vision needs to be both expansive and detailed. We need to wonder at the magnitude of Creation and our place in it, and we need to care.

Being astonished is part of it but without caring about it, without a heart connection to specific expressions of it, people, animals, nature, we’re still too disconnected to protect it. At this point, humanity is a loaded gun pointed at the heart of the planet.

Our intellect alone is probably not strong enough to correct that. The heart is more powerful, but intellect and heart working together is what we need. For that we need a different way of raising and educating our children.

Greg Spalenka

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Here are three reviews of my writing:

David Price has become one of my favorite writers once I discovered his work on the Medium site a few years ago. I’m amazed at how he continually is able to spark my consciousness with thoughts, ideas and observations of our world and the range of possibilities in the human experience. The best way to sum it up might be to say that through his words and images, Mr Price has a knack for providing rich sustenance for the human soul.

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Insightful and eloquent musings on the human condition

A regular contributor on Medium, David Price’s articles caught my attention a couple of years ago. Combined with stunning artwork — some of which is his own — and often wonderful quotes from celebrated sources, his daily submissions became a fixture with my morning coffee. He combines an almost poetic prose with razor-sharp insights into the state of humanity and the world we’ve created. Time and again I’ve been thoroughly impressed by his views of the state of things, both the good and the bad, views that will often follow me around all day. This book is a collection of a number of his articles, and I highly recommend it.

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This book encourages in the true sense of that word as no other I have known the creative process in oneself as spiritual necessity. David Price’s writing is beautifully alive, articulate, kind. The form is prose; the feel is poetic, flowing, metaphoric. There is not a dry line in it. I heartily recommend it to anyone who longs to crack the shell around their own creativity, to become more sensitive, creative, and alive themselves.

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Plus this comment:

There is something about your writing, an ineffable quality I can’t quite place. It’s brilliant.

— Shain Thomas

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It is this version:

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David Price

I write about creativity, loving, language learning and psycho/spirituality. I’m a longtime painter and reader.