If artistic creations emerge from our lives and the ways in which we see the world, then it seems useful to engage the workplace as a source of creative subject matter and energy. The job is the place where most of us spend time and expend effort each day. It is the world we inhabit, and I believe we can make it better and more satisfying through the conscious use of the creative process. . . . Our creations and our lives are enhanced when we realize that everything in our environment is a source for imagination.
~ from “The Practice of Creativity in the Workplace” by Shaun McNiff, in THE SOUL OF CREATIVITY, ed. by Tona P. Myers
If you ask for grace to realize who you are, ask also for the courage you will need to do so. To realize who you are, you will have to walk through all the shadows in your inner landscape. It is not easy. You will need to give up all your views about yourself again and again, each time they crystallize into a pattern. You will have to experience and release all the pain in your life. You will have to embrace your death. You will have to bear everything to realize everything. A perfect divine economy.
~ from A FIELD GUIDE TO THE SOUL by James Thornton
We are all native speakers of the language of life. To talk with what lives, we have to listen patiently and quietly for a long time. We have to listen in a place where we can hear, where the sounds of the living world are louder than the sounds of the machine world. If we have the patience and the silence we can begin to hear. If many of us listen, many of us will hear. We will learn the language of the living Earth, and it will become our language again.
~ from A FIELD GUIDE TO THE SOUL by James Thornton
Our culture has lost touch with the soul and with any way to meet it. It becomes more difficult all the time simply to be quiet: mobile phones, faxes, and e-mail make us more accessible to the intrusions of information. Being reflective may soon seem a radical act. Without being reflective, without entering into moments of silence, we cannot let the soul in. The soul's voice is a still, soft one, and we must be quiet if we are to hear it.
~ from A FIELD GUIDE TO THE SOUL by James Thornton
