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Make Beauty With Your Life
“In exile, we must do as the goddess Innana did, surrendering layer after layer of armour and adornment, until we are bare. We must then undergo a symbolic death of the old life in order to be reborn with greater resilience and a holy assignment to carry forward.
The initiated adult has learned to withstand uncertainty, has paid a debt to the gods through his loss and his grief, and has decided to make beauty with his life as the future ancestor that he is.” — Excerpt from Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home by Toko-pa Turner (belongingbook.com
We in the West, with our way of thinking of the natural world, we are not the norm — we’re the anomaly. Most societies around the planet have these extraordinarily rich relationships where they never see people as part of the problem, but part of the essential solution — because it’s only people that can maintain the cosmic balance of the world. — Wade Davis
Never hope to find wisdom at the high colleges alone: consult old women, gypsies, magicians, wanderers, and all manner of peasant folk, and learn from them, for these have more knowledge about such things than all the high colleges. — Paracelsus
We are in a time of loss and initiation, a time when the astonishing beauty of the world can reveal itself to us. We are ready for it, at least some of us are. Some have preceded us…
