Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens of God’s people and also members of his household…

…so that there be no division… but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.

The lesson may not be to make better decisions or be a better person. The lesson may be much simpler: change your beliefs. Make some new decisions. Let yourself discover some new, better, sunnier beliefs about yourself and your life. Allow yourself to believe that the decisions you make are fine.

p. 88, Journey to the Heart, Melody Beattie

Ghosts: A History

In our own century, Carl Jung has reminded us that to grow we must eventually stop running from our “shadow” and turn to face it.

p. 286, wise women, edited by susan cahill

It is a place of immense community and of humbled solitude; we sit together in our aloneness and speak, one at a time, our deepest language of need, hope, loss, and survival. We remember that all things are connected.
Remembering this is a part of the ceremony.
The intention of the ceremony is to put a person back together by restructuring the human mind.

pp. 278-279, wise women, edited by s. cahill

Integrity

We are in need of an integrity of being that recognizes [the] disregarded inner world. I mean integrity in the true sense of this word, the sense that addresses a human wholeness and completeness, an entirity of living, with body, land, and the human self in relation with all the rest, and with a love that remembers itself.
There are sacred dimensions to such love and they allow for viewing the world in all its beauty with gratitude depth and the thread of connection.

p. 276, wise women, edited by susan cahill

More than Symbol…

… more than the bread and wine of Christ, the body is a knowing connection, it is a telling thing, the medium of experience, expression, being, and knowing.
Just as the earth is one of the bodies of the universe, we are the bodies of earth, accidental atoms given this form.
An ancient and undivided world lives curled inside is with an ancestral memory that remembers our lives in the wilderness.
What the body knows and where it takes is navigated from an inner map not always carried in daily conciousness.

p. 276, wise woman, edited by susan cahill

From Department of the Interior

Reanimation of the World

Culture evolves out of the experience of living with a land. … It’s an intricate science, reconnecting and restoring the human body with earth, cosmos.

… In the young science of ecology, it is known that every piece of the puzzle of life is necessary. … newly discovering an old understanding that everything on earth is alive an that the relationship of all these lives makes for the whole living planet.

p. 275, wise women, edited by susan cahill

From The Habit of Being

Even in the life of a Christian, faith rises and falls like the tides of an invisible sea. it’s there, even when he can’t see it or feel it, if he wants it to be there. You realize, i think, that it is more valuable, more mysterious, altogether more immense than anything you can learn or decide upon…

p. 233, wise women, edited bu susan cahill

Work that Enfaiths (1990)

The writing… has brought me a little bit closer to faith as distinct from mere shaky belief. Thus for me the subject is really reversed; not “faith that works” but “work that enfaiths”.

p. 229, wise women, edited by susan cahill