Solitude and A Sacred Place
You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.
~ Joseph Campbell
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The older I get, the more I realize that childhood and old age are not only connected, but they are the two deepest states in which we are allowed to live. They reveal the true essence of an individual, before or after the efforts, aspirations, ambitions in life.
The eyes of the child and the eyes of the old woman look with calm frankness of those who have not yet entered the masquerade dance or have already left it. And the whole interval seems like a vain commotion, an empty commotion, an unnecessary chaos that makes you wonder why it had to happen.
~ Marguerite Yourcenar.
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Our culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center. So we lost our center and have to find it again.
