& her tragic flaw was her romance with all she saw

artistsintheclassroom7:

“Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.”

“Poetry is language against which you have no defenses.”

“First of all, one of the powerful dynamics of leadership is being visible. One of the vulnerabilities of being visible is that when you’re visible you can be seen, and when you can be seen you can be touched, and when you can be touched you can be hurt. So all of us have these elaborate ways of looking as if we’re showing up, and not showing up. Except in an organizational setting it has tremendous consequences on other people’s lives. We’ve all worked in organizations where someone is sitting there at a crossroads or nexus in the organization - they’re there, but they’re not there.  And because of that they’re blocking everything that’s tying to come though their particular portal – So one of the dynamics you have to get over with is this idea that you can occupy a position of responsibility, that you can have a courageous conversation without being vulnerable.”

“There’s no self that will survive a real conversation.”

“Anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you.”

“Non of us really feel we deserve our happiness.”

“We’re constantly naming things too early.“ 

"One of the interesting qualities of being human is by the look of it, we’re the only part of creation that can actually refuse to be ourselves. And as far as I can see there’s no other part of our world that can do that; The cloud is the cloud, the mountain is the mountain, the tree is the tree, the hawk is the hawk….. One of the healing things about the natural world to human beings is that it’s just itself. But we as human beings are really quite extraordinary in that we can actually refuse to be ourselves. We can get afraid of the way we are. And we can temporarily put a mask over our face and pretend to be somebody else or something else. And the interesting things is then we can take it another step of virtuosity, and forget that we were pretending to be someone else. And become the person we were, on the surface at least - who we were just pretending to be in the first place. – So one of the astonishing qualities of being human is the measure of our reluctance to be here, actually. And I think one of the great necessities of self knowledge is understanding, and even tasting, the single malt essence of your own reluctance to be here. All the ways you don’t want to have the conversation.”

“Self knowledge is not fully possible for human beings.”

From On Being: The Conversational Nature of Reality: David Whyte | Krista Tippett

So great