For all those who dare to
walk the "path less travelled" ...
And in doing so, create new futures
for our organizations and communities.
We dedicate this page to sharing thoughts from people past and present who inspire us. Feel free to e-mail quotes and your own inspirations to us.
Linda and Glenna
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LOST
STAND STILL.
The trees ahead and the bushes beside you are not lost
Wherever you are in called here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger.
You must ask permission to know it and be known.
Listen, the forest breathes, it whispers
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again saying HERE.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a branch does is lost on you,
Then you are truly lost.
STAND STILL. The forest knows where you are.
You must let it find you.
-- David Wagner, Who Shall Be the Sun
"The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit one's home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; the shift and vanish too. Stalk the gap. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock -- more than a maple -- a universe." Annie Dillard
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing
There is a field
I will meet you there
When the soul lies down in that grass
The world is too full to talk about.
- Rumi
"(Bohm) suggests that what the cosmos is doing as we dialogue is to change its ideas of itself. Our doubts and our question, our small truths and large ones are all forms of its drive toward clarity and truth. Through us, the universe questions itself and tries out various answers on itself in an effort parallel to our own - to decipher its own being. This as I reflect on it, is awesome. It assigns a role to man that was once reserved for the gods." Renee Weber, Dialogue with Scientists and Sages: The Search for Unity, 1986.
"Dialogue is to love, what blood is to the body. When the flow of blood stops, the body dies. When dialogue stops, love dies and resentment and hate are born. But dialogue can restore a dead relationship. Indeed, this is the miracle of dialogue: it can bring relationship into being, and it can bring into being once again a relationship that has died. There is only one qualification to these claims for dialogue: it must be mutual and proceed from both sides, and the parties to it must persist relentlessly." Reuel L. Howe, The Miracle of Dialogue, 1963.