What Holds Us Together

Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.

Barry Lopez

I write today from the Cederberg, looking out at ridges of red rock and scrubby vegetation, receding into the distance in fading colours of blue and grey. I've been reading, allowing words to sink into and soothe my spirit. Little fiscals and weavers dart in the branches, sometimes venturing onto the patio near my feet, curious and skittish.

Today I share a selection of words, ones that nurture and ground me on days when I feel I am unravelling. Lopez says that words hold us together, and I wonder if he means not only us as a collective, but also as individuals. I offer these words to you and hope that in them you find compassion and nourishment.

It is an injured, limping world, yes. Its vitality is reduced, yes, as if the full spectrum of the rainbow is being painted out with grey. The extinctions of this era -- extinctions of culture and of species, extinctions of minds and philosophies and languages -- will haunt the future in bleached and muted reproach, yes. And yet, and yet, and yet -- I want to paint the rainbow, as far as I can, prismatically, through language. You cannot ultimately break a rainbow, you can only fail to see its myriad, shattered beauties. And I believe in beauty as I believe in goodness, that people are profoundly good in spite of it all...

Jay Griffiths (in an interview with Sharon Blackie)

...you will never catch up.

Walk around feeling like a leaf

know you could tumble at any second.

Then decide what to do with your time.

Naomi Shihab Nye

The Christian story of incarnation in the body of a boy- a boy whose ancestors were both famous and infamous – is one that can spur us towards living with the courage that is indigenous to us. To be human is to be in the image of something good, and image comes from imagination. To be human is to be in the imagination of God, and the imagination is the source of integrity as well as cracks. To be born is to be born into a story of possibility, a story of failure, a story of imagination and the failure of imagination. To be born is to be born with the possibility of courage. Hello to courage.

Pádraig Ó Tuama

Now I see it’s in the spaces where nothing is happening that one has to make a life.

Pico Iyer

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature -- the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.

Rachel Carson

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Let everything happen to you

Beauty and terror

Just keep going

No feeling is final.

Rainer Maria Rilke

The final words are from Jay Griffiths again, ones I try to remember when the demands and expectations of everyday life feel stifling:

What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakeable, unforgettable, unshamable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quitessence, pure spirit, resolving into no contituents. Don't waste your wildness: it is precious and necessary.

With appreciation and wishes for a beautiful week,

Carri.