Still I

Still I’m Connected to You

Quotes and thoughts on the theme for the JHYM Retreat, November, 2011

To touch the soul of another human being is to walk on holy ground.

- Stephen Covey

The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt.

- Frederick Buechner

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.

- John Muir

I am a part of all that I have ever met

- Alfred Tennyson

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

- e.e. cummings

All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naïve. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: that I am nobody but myself.

- Ralph Ellison, “Battle Royal”

It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.

- e.e. cummings

Wherever you go, go with all your heart.

- Confucius

Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.

- Dr. Seuss

Diversity is not about how we differ. Diversity is about embracing one another’s uniqueness.

- Ola Joseph

If there is light in the soul, there will be beauty in the person.

If there is beauty in the person, there will be harmony in the house.

If there is harmony in the house, there will be order in the nation.

If there is order in the nation, there will be peace in the world.

- Chinese Proverb

The ‘still, small voice’ of God never calls on me to be like another man. It appeals to me to rise to my full stature and fulfill the promise that sleeps within my being.

- Sam Keen

Music is what’s supposed to actually remind us that we’re a community, a family.

- Eric Bibb

If you do not listen to your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself. Also, you will have betrayed our community in failing to make your contribution to the whole.

- Rollo May

There is an endless net of threads throughout the universe….

At every crossing of the threads there is an individual.

And every individual is a crystal bead.

And every crystal bead reflects

Not only the light from every other crystal in the net

But also every other reflection

Throughout the entire universe.

an adaptation of The Net of Jewels, or Indra's Net, one of the oldest written creations of humanity

- Anne Adams

The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another.

- Thomas Merton

Connected by Eric Bibb

I got my own roots to water,

got my own family tree.

Got my own set of heroes,

that means something to me.

I got my own way to travel,

my own story to tell.

In my own time.

Got my own way of talking, got my own way to smile.

Got my own way of walking,

my own lookingstyle.

Got my own way of praying,

my very own way to sing.

Still I’m connected to you and everyone and everything.

I got my own list of questions,

got my own truth to live.

Got my own hand made gifts,

that I’m longing to give.

Got my own star to follow,