"No summer ever came back, and no two summers ever were alike. Times change, and people change; and if our hearts do not change as readily, so much the worse for us."

Nathaniel Hawthorne

"Not to be able to stop thinking is a dreadful affliction, but we don’t realize this because almost everyone is suffering from it, so it is considered normal. This incessant mental noise prevents you from finding that realm of inner stillness that is inseparable from Being."

Eckhart Tolle

hipsterbitch

"Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence."

Eric Fromm

"The new spirituality…will produce an experience in human encounters in which we become a living demonstration of the basic spiritual teaching `We are all one.`"

Neale Donald Walsch

"By letting it go it all gets done. The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try. The world is beyond the winning."

Lao Tzu

Natalie Perkins, The Beautiful Positive, ink and digital, 2009

John W. Sloat: “Oliver Wendell Holmes, a century and a half ago, saw the metaphorical significance of the chambered home of the Nautilus. These fascinating sea shells are spiral in shape and consist of a series of ever-larger chambers in each of which the sea creature lives for a season until it outgrows that particular space.

The nautilus then enlarges its shell by the addition of a new chamber suitable for the next stage of its life. What a perfect image for spiritual evolution! In order to begin a new stage in our growth, we have to think “outside the box.”

Yet, every time we abandon an old worldview for a new and wider vision, we merely find ourselves in a larger box. And while each box serves its particular function for a time, we are always in danger of claiming that the chamber we currently occupy is the ultimate one.

The spiral shape of the nautilus shell suggests that it can keep growing forever. There is no design for a “final” chamber. The creature must keep building new chambers as long as it lives. It cannot go back to the previous ones; they no longer fit. It cannot stay in its present space or it will die. It has no choice but to move on. And on.

Perhaps one day we might be able to create for ourselves a box so large that it would encompass all of God. But that space would then include everything, even those realities which we now purposely exclude by limiting the size of today’s chamber.”