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The Antidote
“To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.” — E.E. Cummings
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From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we — I mean all human beings — are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself. And I see this when I have a shock. — Virginia Wolfe
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For the ancient Greeks your character is “given” to you in some sense — who you are is not completely within your control. “Your” actions reveal “your” character but are also something given to you, something granted by the divine…With the ancient Greeks, the daemonic appears not only through elements “inside” the self — the passions, the blood — as noted above, but also “outside” the self — in wind, rain, fire, animals.
— James Hillman
Yes, we ourselves are the fingers and toes of God. We are strings in the fabric of creation, and…
