Quotes (only the introduction :P) of a book I randomly picked up today by Gregg Levoy, entitled Callings. You'd think I'd have got enough of this stuff going to the college that I did, where they're alllllll about the keyword "calling" and finding it..... but guess I didn't... I always feel like I can improve on my intuition or listening to that 'higher voice', and following a "calling" is not always an easy thing (often it's very difficult)... so the more I read the more I liked.. and I feel like I can take away something from this book. So.. yeah... just a few of the highlights so far:
"This book is about religion in the original sense of the word--re-ligare, to re-connect--to remember what has been dis-membered: our own selves, the deep life within us that is a strong "religious" impulse despite whatever outward waywardness our lives may exibit."
"They may be calls to do something… to be something..They may be calls toward something or away form something; calls to change something, review our commitment to it, or come back to it in an entirely new way; calls toward whatever we've dared and double-dared ourselves to do for as long as we can remember."
"Unfortunately, we often simply tune out the longings we feel, rather than confront and act on them. Perhaps we do not really forget our calls but we fear what they might demand of us in pursuing them..perhaps we also fear the hope that such calls evoke in us, and the power we know that is dammed up behind our resistance."
"Saying yes to the calls tends to place you on the path where half of yourself thinks it doesn't make a bit of sense, where the other half knows your life won't make sense without it."
"'Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.'" Vaclav Havel
"The great breakthroughs in our lives generally happen in the accumulation of innumerable small steps and minor achievements. We're called to reach out to someone, to pick up an odd book on a library shelf, to sign up for a class even though we're convinced we don't have enough time or money .. these are the fire drills for our bigger calls."
Lin *
Jason
Sarah
Phil