Each morning since a week last Tuesday I have stepped out of our third floor flat onto a very silent landing. No kids’ clutter outside the door opposite. Double doors firmly shut. Our next door neighbours and friends are in Australia for a month. I miss them. Second floor next. More closed doors. Since a week last Wednesday another family of neighbours and friends has been gone, en route to California for six months. Wee Lauchie has just started to walk. I miss them too.
It is a blessing to have neighbours who are friends, to have neighbours with lively twins who aged 10 make you cakes and yorkshire puddings. These things are precious and we should not take them for granted.
Another of my communities is in shock. One of our members, only 51, died suddenly last Saturday. We all grieve for his wife, family and friends. We are brutally reminded of how fleeting life is – a fact we do not care to face in western society which likes to insulate itself from life’s rough edges, from risk, from death, from transience.
But today there was an uplifting email from a young friend, a former student of mine, whom I have not seen for a long time. After many difficulties, she has just been allocated a flat she can afford, in a part of London she loves, within a supportive community. Better still, her art work is coming together in a wonderful way. She sounds joyful; at last her direction is opening out.
Many years ago I read her horoscope, telling her she needed to paint her life on a big canvas – that symbolic art, perhaps astrological art, could be her forte. She got in touch to tell me that her work is now taking off in just that direction. She also said kind things about my first book, which she has just read. Her email made my day.
As I walked to my office, a passage about the richness and transience of life, and our connectedness with one another, floated into my mind and lodged there. It expresses beautifully and poignantly how I feel today. Aware of the rich weave of dark and light which is our life: very, very aware of the importance and also the underlying frailty of all our relationships. Truly, we are but on loan to one another, should cherish one another….
Beautiful Rainbow Obsidian
(http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Obsidian)
“ There is an ancient Aztec Indian prayer that reflects on the preciousness of life and the fleetingness of it. As the Aztecs thank the Creator for their life and breath, they acknowledge that they are only on loan to each other for a short while, and just like the drawings that they have made in crystalline obsidian fade, so, too, will their life quickly be gone.
‘Oh, only for so short a while you have loaned us
to each other, because we take form in your act
of drawing us.
And we take life in your painting us,
And we breathe in your singing us.
But only for so short a while have you loaned us
to each other.’ ”
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Grateful thanks to my friend C.M. for reading me this passage recently, thereby inspiring me to use it too!
(from p55, PRAYING OUR GOODBYES The Spirituality of Change by Joyce Rupp 1988)
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550 words copyright Anne Whitaker 2010
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Favourite Quotes: Richard Holloway on Doubt
March 26, 2010
Along with most people in Scotland who have more than a passing interest in matters spiritual, religious and theological, I have known about Richard Holloway for a long time. (see below this quote for biographical details) However, until recently I had not got around to reading any of his writing.
I had, however, listened to a eulogy for my late mother-in-law, written by Richard Holloway for her funeral service ten years ago. She had been a Samaritan volunteer and churchgoer in Edinburgh for many years and as such knew Richard Holloway, then Bishop of Edinburgh, quite well. I was struck by the straightforward fluency and honesty of what he wrote, delivering an admiring and affectionate word portrait, but not shirking mention of the more problematic aspects of her character.
I have always appreciated honesty which avoids unkindness, but values truth more than comfort. That is what came across during the eulogy, revealing itself again as I work my way through Holloway’s deep probing writing on questions of faith and doubt as they thread themselves though the ever-present gifts and frailties of humankind – admiring his blend of humour, erudition, compassionate feeling and dispassionate analysis.
If you appreciate and are challenged by this quote, join me in reading through his books!
Light - and Dark....
“Because there is such an intrinsic connection between faith and doubt, the Church ought to be big enough to contain both sympathetically.This is the kind of theological magnanimity that is important for itself, but it is also important for secondary reasons. Since it is possible to believe and to doubt for the wrong reasons as well as the right ones, and we don’t always know the one from the other, we need the constant challenge of the other tendency to keep us honest. This will make life uncomfortable, of course, but the work of our purgation demands it. Growth is painful, but no element in our nature is exempt from the process of sanctification. The Church….should be as inclusive as possible. It should be big enough to hold Thomas the empiricist, as well as John the mystic, and Peter, who was often baffled and confused…..the paradox of justification by faith is that it is God’s faith in us that ultimately matters, and not our faith in God. There is a faith beyond faith, which is deeper than trust in our own trustfulness and is an abandonment to the ultimate graciousness of the universe….This is the trust beyond trust that says ‘yes’ even to the night.It is close to the dereliction of Good Friday….“
Light - and Dark....
(from Anger Sex Doubt & Death by Richard Holloway, SPCK Publications, 1992, UK, pp 81-82. I realise this is quite a lengthy extract! Should Richard Holloway or SSPK object, please let me know how many words I can quote and I will edit accordingly….)
Richard F. Holloway (born 26 November 1933) is a Scottish writer and broadcaster and was formerly Bishop of Edinburgh in the Scottish Episcopal Church. To read more about him and his writing, click HERE
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500 words copyright Anne Whitaker/Richard Holloway 2010
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Favourite Quotes: Max Planck on scientific truths
January 19, 2010
“A new scientific truth does not triumph
by convincing its opponents and making
them see the light, but rather because its
opponents eventually die.“
Max Planck
(April 23, 1858 – October 4, 1947)
Nobel Prize-winning German physicist
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As I slowly emerge from the post-Festive fug, my only resolution for 2010 is to embark on some re-reads of a few of the books which have made the most powerful impression on me in the last few years. One of these is undoubtedly Peter Russell’s “From Science to God”, from which (p17) the above quote is taken. The book is “…the story of Peter Russell’s lifelong exploration into the nature of consciousness – how he went from being a convinced atheist, studying mathematics and physics, to realising a profound personal synthesis of the mystical and scientific.”
I have had a lifelong interest in science. But my capacity to understand its paradigms is seriously handicapped by having done Classics instead of science at school – not that reading Homer in the original Greek wasn’t great fun! Thus people like Russell, who can clarify and inspire without being patronising to the scientifically uneducated like me, are a great gift to the world! If you want to find out more about Peter Russell, his website is : www.peterussell.com
NOT the Xmas Round Robin….
December 15, 2009
At Christmas time 2004, having read about a dozen round robins arriving with their respective cards, all eulogising each family’s travels and achievements in the year just ending, I became seriously fed up.
The “Not the Xmas round robin” concept was born in that moment.
Life is not all sunshine and achievement as depicted in the standard end of the year card insert, I thought to myself. So why not produce something a bit different – a piece of reflection conveying some shadow as well as light, something more honest, something offering a bit of inspiration from our common experiences of being human ?
Since then I have written a “not the Xmas round robin” piece of end-of-year reflection for inclusion in my Xmas cards every year. People like it. So this year I thought I’d share it with you – my increasing band of loyal readers here at “Writing from the Twelfth House”.
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“not the Xmas round robin 2009″
……a quotation from “Simple Abundance” by Sarah Ban Breathnach for 8 December states……
“ Gloom we have always with us, a rank and sturdy weed, but joy requires tending.”
Barbara Holland
As you legions of devoted fans of Anne Whitaker’s Annual Thought for the Day will be well aware by now, Ian and I have had a pretty hefty allocation of family and health difficulties in recent years although our overriding feeling continues to be one of gratitude for my full recovery from what I now think of (with a characteristic tinge of melodrama, but not that much!) as my Descent and Return from the Underworld, 2001-08.
There have been many consequences flowing from this experience, and I am very slowly beginning to appreciate what riches one can bring back from the Underworld – provided that the experience of Descent and Return is understood as part of “the stormy journey of the soul” and accepted in that spirit. (not easy, by the way!!)
Ian and me, Dartmoor, August 2009
One of the gifts for both Ian and myself – and probably the most important development of 2009 – has been a growing understanding of how vulnerable we all are behind our carefully crafted defences, how ephemeral this life is, and how quickly and brutally all that we thought we had can be taken from us.
Thus we have been learning to live as fully as we can in each day, never being too busy to stop and appreciate the many small but pleasurable moments in life therein.
The still watchfulness of the herons on the nearby River Kelvin. The delightful smile on nine month old neighbour wee Lauchie’s face, as he leans over to rub noses, his latest favourite trick. A peaceful cup of coffee whilst listening to children rehearsing carols in Princes Square, Glasgow’s elegant city centre shopping precinct, magically decorated at this time of year, during a pause in Xmas shopping on a wet and dreary Glasgow day. Having a good laugh, either at our own or the world’s stupidities (have you done your risk assessment before digging out the Xmas tree lights yet?!)
So the quotation above means a lot to me. It is easy to moan and buckle under life’s many pains great and small. But cultivating joy (if you can – I appreciate that life is simply too hard for many people in this world to be able to manage to do so) and living in the moment as much as possible has recently been confirmed by research as being the route to happiness.
So – let me and Ian confirm this truth for you for free. It works!
In conclusion, lest you are beginning by now to think I am losing my sardonic edge in the declining years, I leave you all, especially the over-50s, with this observation recently made to me by a rather cynical but witty person I know:
“Anyone over fifty who is not in pain for one reason or another, is dead!”
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650 words copyright Anne Whitaker 2009
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Favourite Quotes: Marcus Aurelius on how to live
November 13, 2009
Belief that one’s spirit lives on – in a form which as yet, despite all the theories advanced and blood shed to date, no-one has ever established as definitive – makes life and its vicissitudes much easier to bear. Unfortunately, one cannot make oneself believe in anything, whether it be the existence of God or the infallibility of Professor Dawkins, to give but two contemporary examples. Belief either arrives, or it doesn’t. Sometimes it arrives – then goes away again. One can go through long spells playing hide-and-seek with belief. So what to do, as life rolls on in its inevitable way?
Whilst trawling through some sites the other night, I came across some guiding wisdom from that wise, Stoical and only mildly cynical ancient Roman, Marcus Aurelius.
(26 April 121 – 17 March 180)
Marcus Aurelius in bronze: The Louvre, Paris
“Ah” I thought. ” Time to post a quote. I should share this prescription with my increasing band of readers, especially those who seem to love the Favourite Quotes theme on this site.”
Read, enjoy – and comment!
” Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones. I am not afraid. “
Marcus Aurelius
found at
Favourite Quote: from an interview with scientist Paul Davies in “Devout Sceptics”
September 5, 2009
” The older I get, the more I find that I am returning to those deep questions, and asking ‘Why?’ I don’t think it’s enough to shrug this question aside. My scientific colleagues will often say, ‘Scientists shouldn’t ask “why?’ questions’. Well, that response reminds me of my school days: ‘Sit down, Davies, and shut up!’ I’m afraid I’m not going to sit down, and I’m not going to shut up. I’m going to go on asking these ‘why?’ questions. We do want to know why the world is as it is. Why did it come to exist 13.7 billion years ago in a Big Bang? Why are the laws of electromagnetism and gravitation as they are? Why those laws? What are we doing here? And, in particular, how come we are able to understand the world? Why is it that we’re equipped with intellects that can unpick all this wonderful cosmic order and make sense of it? It’s truly astonishing.”(from a 2002 conversation)
The Big Why ?
from – (p57) – “Devout Sceptics conversations on faith and doubt“ with Bel Mooney (2004) If you are preoccupied – as I always have been – with The Big Why?, and find it intriguing and stimulating to browse the musings of other people regarding how we got here, why we are here, and what is the point of it all, then the above book is definitely for you. Mooney’s edited transcripts from the popular BBC Radio 4 series, Devout Sceptics, feature well-known people as diverse as authors Phillip Pullman, Joanna Trollope and Jeanette Winterson, broadcasters Kate Adie and John Humphries, scientists James Lovelock and Paul Davies: 20 in all. These interviews will make you think. Do check this book out.
“…. the miracle of the living soul ….”
July 3, 2009
All my life’s work has been with people: as an adult education teacher in many settings, as a psychiatric social worker, as a private counsellor, trainer and supervisor of counsellors – and as a professional astrologer and astrology teacher. At the core of this apparent vocational diversity has been, I now understand, the same drive. It is that urge to find meaningful contexts for my own tiny, ephemeral spark of life, whilst offering some affirmation to others that their tiny flame matters too: it is worth struggling to get our light to burn with a purer and brighter radiance.
Something ineffable and charged can on occasions arise in deep communication between one person and another – those in the helping professions and their clients are by no means the sole partakers of this context. There is a moment in which the feeling of safety, intimacy, trust, empathy and openness of exchange becomes so intense that the level on which two people are interacting shifts from ‘ordinary’ to numinous.
The Diamond Soul
In that moment, (to my subjective recollection) both souls are held, in a state of grace, in the palm of some vast invisible benevolent Hand. Both sparks of life are suspended in a sense of the sacred….
Such a state can never be evoked. It can only be bestowed – fleeting, memorable, perhaps life changing.
Coming across the following quotes recently thus struck a profound chord:
first, from Jung –
“ That is why I say to any beginner: learn your theories as well as you can, but put them aside when you touch the miracle of the living soul. Not theories but your creative individuality alone must decide.”
Carl Jung from “Contributions to Analytical Psychology” quoted in Self and Society Vol 27 No 1 March 1999, p 22.
second, from ‘Gilead’ by Marilynne Robinson, p 51 –
“ When people come to speak to me, whatever they say, I am struck by a kind of incandescence in them, the ‘I’ whose predicate can be ‘love’ or ‘fear’ or ‘want’, and whose object can be ‘someone’ or ‘nothing’ and it won’t really matter, because the loveliness is just in that presence, shaped around ‘I’ like a flame on a wick, emanating itself in grief and guilt and joy and whatever else …. To see this aspect of life is a privilege of the ministry which is seldom mentioned.”
(‘Gilead’, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, is a wonderful novel in which, towards the end of Rev John Ames’ life in 1956, he begins a letter to his young son, setting down all that he wishes to communicate which impending death will otherwise render impossible.)
I urge you to read it for its humanity and its wisdom.
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450 words copyright Anne Whitaker 2009
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Favourite Quotes: Andrew Sullivan on faith
May 15, 2009
I came across this quote from Andrew Sullivan in an article of his in the UK’s Sunday Times on 10th May 2009 and thought I would share it with my readers. I like its modesty, openness and lack of pretension.
“….My own view, as a struggling and doubting person of faith, is that truth matters in whatever mode we find it — but ultimate truth, because we are not ultimate beings, will always elude us. The search for this truth is the point….. Humans cannot live without this search, never have and never will. Our consciousness asks questions to which there will never be a complete answer; we are religious because we are human. And the challenge of our time is neither the arrogant dismissal of religious life and heritage, nor the rigid insistence that all metaphysical questions are already answered or unaskable, but a humble openness to history and science and revelation in the journey of faith….”
Andrew Sullivan is a British-born blogger, author, supporter of gay rights, and political commentator, resident in the USA since 1984. A pioneer in political weblog journalism, his blog The Daily Dish won the 2008 Weblog Award for Best Blog. He takes a moderate approach to religion; as such he vocally rejects fundamentalism of any kind, including both fundamentalist Christianity and Islam, and describes himself as a “dogged defender of pluralism and secularism”.
Inspiration to faith....
In his Sunday Times column of May 10th 2009, ‘Light at the end of religion’s dark tunnel‘ from which the above quote is taken, he discusses Robert Wright’s book The Evolution of God which is due to be published in June 2009 in the USA. He describes the book as “….a non-believer’s open-minded exploration of how religious doctrine and practice have changed through human history – usually for the better.” In his affirmation of The Evolution of God, Sullivan states that the book gives him hope by providing a reminder that if we can step back from our current position of religious embattlement, “….the long-term prognosis is much better than you might imagine….”.
“How relieving”, he says, “to have a sane, sober rationalist point this out.”
350 words copyright Anne Whitaker 2009
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Favourite quotes: message from Bill Gates….
April 18, 2009
This turned up as a Forward in my husband’s email recently. Normally, I delete any Forwards I receive, and never read his. However, I thought this one was worth quoting in full (I haven’t checked its provenance….):
“Subject: MESSAGE FROM BILL GATES
This should be posted in all schools and work places
Love him or hate him, he sure hits the nail on the head with this!
Bill Gates recently gave a speech at a high school about 11 things they did not,
and will not learn in school. He talks about how feel-good, politically
correct teachings created a generation of kids with no concept of reality
and how this concept set them up for failure in the real world.
Rule 1: Life is not fair – get used to it!
Rule 2: The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect
you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.
Rule 3: You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You
won’t be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.
Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.
Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had
a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.
Rule 6: If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t whine about
your mistakes, learn from them.
Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are
now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and
listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you
save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent’s generation, try
delousing the closet in your own room.
Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS
NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they’ll give you as
MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.
Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and
very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF.
Do that on your own time.
Rule 10: Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to
leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
Rule 11: Be nice to nerds.. Chances are you’ll end up working for one. “
Comments on this quote are welcome!
Favourite quotes: surviving crisis
March 21, 2009
As regular visitors to this site will know, a long family crisis triggered my collapse with severe burnout at the end of 2001. I had to let go of a busy, creative life and rest for years. It took me until 2008 to recover my natural vitality, once more able to re-connect with the world from which I had had of necessity to retreat.
However, some of you may have come across the Chinese ideogram for crisis which contains the two concepts of threat and opportunity. Energy collapse deprived me of the one constant which I had always relied on to get me through whatever life threw at me – my strong will. I discovered – and this was a brutal, frightening discovery – that my will had collapsed along with my energy.
Thus I had to learn, very slowly, the value of letting life shape me whilst lying on a couch much of the day, reading avidly and tapping my laptop. I discovered the virtues of passivity, and the creative space that opens up within when of necessity you do very little. I had to rely on the loving support of those closest – my husband, my brother and a small group of close friends, and remain full of gratitude for that constancy and care.
Fortunate to have a strong and rich inner life to draw on, a significant part of what sustained me was knowing that although this long ordeal was mine, it was also archetypal. As Stanislav Grof so vividly puts it, “the stormy journey of the soul” has been a central part of all human experience throughout the ages. I was not alone in my descent into the Underworld. It is a well-worn path. I also knew that through the tests encountered in the Underworld, your soul grows into a shape which more closely fits the essence of who you are meant to be. So I hung on, called upon Spirit to guide me, survived, and grew.
Now I am beginning to reap the rewards of that long crisis which was so threatening yet so full of opportunity. Offering out some of the fruits of retreat, I hope that these offerings may inspire others. All my life I have loved and been inspired by quotes. Here are two which I pinned up in our kitchen, absorbing their energy and wisdom when my own energy was perilously low.
I do hope you find them of value!
“It is far more creative to work with the idea of mindfulness rather than with the idea of will.Too often people try to change their lives by using the will as a kind of hammer to beat their lives into shape. If you work with a different rhythm, you will come easily and naturally home to yourself. Your soul knows the geography of your destiny. Your soul alone has the map of your future, therefore you can trust this indirect, oblique side of yourself. If you do, it will take you where you need to go.”
John O’Donohue, pp 83-4 “Anam Cara” Bantam Books 1999
(John O’Donohue 1956-2008 was an Irish poet turned priest, whose writing merged Celtic spirit and love of the natural world )
“In the midst of winter
I finally learned
That there was in me
An invincible summer”
This is a popular quote whose original source I have as yet not traced, but have come across a slight variation ie ‘within me there lay an invincible summer’ - different sites have different versions. Come on, detectives out there! Where in Camus’ writings does this quote appear? Let me know!
( Albert Camus 1913-1960 was a French philosopher best known for his book L’Etranger (The Outsider) whose existentialist philosophy influenced a whole post-war generation)
600 words copyright Anne Whitaker 2009
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