← Home Archive Reading About

  • The idolatry of geography

    I finished the chapter in John Philip Newell’s The Great Search on Rabindranath Tagore this morning. Tagore was an Indian writer, thinker, and artist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. I thought this was particularly profound:

    It was the nationalism of Britain that had humiliated India, he said. This would not be resolved by yet another nationalism trying to counteract it. Tagore called this “the idolatry of Geography”, an absolutizing of boundaries that breeds suspicion and disrespect for those on the other side of the barriers we have artificially created.

    Sadly, it feels like we’re entering a period of history where the idolatry of geography is reasserting itself.

    → 9:19 AM, 19 Jun

  • Age and forgiveness

    The older I get, the more it feels like I must forgive almost everything for not being perfect, or as I first wanted or needed it to be.

    —Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things

    → 3:44 PM, 3 Apr

  • A deprivation of our inner world

    This from John Philip Newell in The Great Search, reflecting on the wisdom of Thomas Berry, offers a striking insight:

    It is not just our lungs and bodies that are damaged by particle and light pollution in the cities. It is “soul-deprivation”, says [Thomas] Berry. To not be able to see the stars is a deprivation of our inner world, a loss of wonder, and thus a diminishing of our imagination and the ability to remember our origins in the heavens and to dream our way forward into new beginnings on Earth.

    → 12:56 PM, 15 Feb

  • 💭 A great reminder from designer and community builder Eso Tolson: Our work isn’t just what we get paid for—it’s what we contribute to the world:

    We think our “work" is the job we go to or the place we get a check from. No. Your work is the very special thing that you add to this world. Your vision. Your light. Your love. What you share. What you create. How you make people feel. Etc. That, my friends, is truly our WORK.

    → 7:21 AM, 7 Feb

  • I love this quote from Vincent Van Gogh:

    Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.

    It’s a powerful reminder that starting small is still starting and that small beginnings can lead to significant endings.

    → 5:37 PM, 26 Jan

  • The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.

    —George Orwell

    → 9:49 AM, 21 Jan

  • Let no man pull you so low as to hate him.

    —Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, from his sermon titled “The Most Durable Power,” delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church on November 6, 1956.

    A good reminder that hate—like unforgiveness and bitterness—is always a form of self-harm.

    → 10:44 AM, 15 Jan

  • It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.

    —Charlie Munger, the American investor best known for being the longtime vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway.

    → 10:33 AM, 13 Jan

  • “The soul needs living models to grow.” Love this from Richard Rohr:

    The soul needs living models to grow, exemplars with the expansive energies of love. People who are eager to love change us at the deeper levels. They alone seem able to open the field of both mind and heart at the same time. When we’re in this different state—and that is what it is—we find ourselves open to directions or possibilities we would never allow or imagine before. 

    → 10:36 PM, 12 Jan

  • It is easier to build strong children than fix broken adults!

    —Steve Chalke

    Cheaper too!

    → 8:44 PM, 6 Jan
  • RSS
  • JSON Feed
  • Micro.blog