You Want Adventure
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Holding Presence is to love the other exactly as they are, not as you want them to be. It is love without judging, without getting the other tangled up in your own unconscious, unlived life. Holding presence is to create room so the other can grow into their destiny. They can feel that.
— Marion Woodman
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What is it, in the end, that induces one to go their own way and to rise out of unconscious identity with the mass as out of a swathing mist? Not necessity, for necessity comes to many, and they all take refuge in convention. Not moral decision, for nine times out of ten we decide for convention likewise.
~Jung
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We are on the hero’s journey when we submit to the deep processes of life and allow them to affect us and bore their necessities into us. We are the hero when we take on the challenges and go through our initiations and transformations, enduring loss and gain, feeling happy and sad, making progress and falling back. The hero is engaged in life The hero is not the one who displays force and muscle without deep insight or the courage to be. The hero may not look heroic from the outside but may go through powerful developments in a quiet way. The difference is that the real hero engages life and reflects on it. She becomes more and more what he or she is destined to be.
~~ Thomas Moore
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We want adventure but we also want to be safe. We want to live and some of us want to live intensely, doing things that challenge us. Some people have more tolerance for the kind of risk that calls forth their true strengths. Most of us prefer to avoid that kind of challenge because it hurts. Some heroes are reluctant heroes. And sometimes the whole process happens to unassuming and normal looking citizens.
It’s not unusual to figure out the safest, most secure path through life when you’re quite young and nail it down with great diligence. And there are the reckless fools who seem unaware or unconcerned about the dangers life poses. I have to admit I’m one of those, not because I’m so brave but rather because I’m preoccupied by the inspirations I’m chasing.
There are many kinds of adventure but two things stand out for me, love and creativity…