Today’s Recommendation: A Wild Love for the World

A Wild Love for the World:
Joanna Macy and the Work of Our Time
★★★★ 1/2

Joanna Macy is a scholar of Buddhism, systems thinking, and deep ecology whose decades of writing, teaching, and activism have inspired people around the world. In this collection of writings, leading spiritual teachers, deep ecologists, and diverse writers and activists explore the major facets of Macy’s lifework. Combined with eleven pieces from Macy herself, the result is a rich chorus of wisdom and compassion to support the work of our time.

“Being fully present to fear, to gratitude, to all that is—this is the practice of mutual belonging. As living members of the living body of Earth, we are grounded in that kind of belonging. Even when faced with cataclysmic changes, nothing can ever separate us from Earth. We are already home.”— Joanna Macy

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Daily Insight: Pema Chödrön: Watering the Seed of Goodwill

“Making the aspirations is like watering the seed of goodwill so it can begin to grow. In the course of doing this we’ll become acquainted with our barriers—numbness, inadequacy, skepticism, resentment, righteous indignation, pride, and all the others. As we continue to do this practice, we make friends with our fears, our grasping, and our aversion. Unconditional good heart toward others is not even a possibility unless we attend to our own demons. Everything we encounter thus becomes an opportunity for practicing loving-kindness.”

― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You:
A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

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Daily Insight: Thich Nhat Hanh on Being Alive

“Many of us live like dead people because we live without awareness. We carry our dead bodies with us and circulate throughout the world. We are pulled into the past or we are pulled forward into the future or we are caught by our projects or our despair and anger. We are not truly alive; we are not inhabited by awareness of the miracle of being alive.”

― Thich Nhat Hanh,
No Death, No Fear

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Daily Insight: Fear and Now by Eckhart Tolle

"A great deal of what people say, think, or do is actually motivated by fear, which of course is always linked with having your focus on the future and being out of touch with the Now. As there are no problems in the Now, there is no fear either."

— Eckhart Tolle

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Words of Wisdom for Nov. 29, 2019: Chogyam Trungpa on Fearlessness

“Real fearlessness is the product of tenderness. It comes from letting the world tickle your heart, your raw and beautiful heart. You are willing to open up, without resistance or shyness, and face the world. You are willing to share your heart with others.”

― Chogyam Trungpa
Training the Mind and Cultivating Loving-Kindness

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Words of Wisdom for Nov. 26, 2019: Running From Fear is Fear

“To remain stable is to refrain from trying to separate yourself from a pain because you know that you cannot. Running away from fear is fear, fighting pain is pain, trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought. There is no escape.”

― Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity:
A Message for an Age of Anxiety

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Words of Wisdom for Nov. 8, 2019: Tara Brach on the Armor of Tensions

“While the bodies of young children are usually relaxed and flexible, if experiences of fear are continuous over the years, chronic tightening happens. Our shoulders may become permanently knotted and raised, our head thrust forward, our back hunched, our chest sunken. Rather than a temporary reaction to danger, we develop a permanent suit of armor. We become, as Chogyam Trungpa puts it, “a bundle of tense muscles defending our existence.” We often don’t even recognize this armor because it feels like such a familiar part of who we are. But we can see it in others. And when we are meditating, we can feel it in ourselves—the tightness, the areas where we feel nothing.”

― Tara Brach

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Words of Wisdom for Nov. 1, 2019: Alan Watts on Fear and Clinging

"There is nothing that men desire more than life ... In one form or another they try to possess it by every possible means, as happiness, as power, as joy, as wealth, as spiritual insight, and even as simple existence to which they cling with all their might for fear that it will be taken away. But one thing is certain: the harder you try to posess life, the faster it slips away from you, and the less you understand of its mystery."

— Alan Watts, Zen

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