embracing the paradoxical soul (6 March 2016)

What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it. 

- Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

Life is not a problem to solve, 
but a mystery to embrace ...

- me

We belong to a Mystery far grander than our little selves and our little time. Great storytellers and spiritual teachers always know this. A sacred myth keeps a people healthy, happy, and whole--even inside their pain. They give deep meaning and pull us into "deep time," which encompasses all time, past and future, geological and chronological, and not just our little time or culture. Such stories are the very food of the soul. When we start fairy tales with lines like "Long ago, in a faraway land" we are reaching for deep time truth. 
Remember, the opposite of rational is not necessarily irrational, but it can also be transrational or bigger than the rational mind can process. Things like love, death, sex, suffering, God, and infinity are transrational experiences... The transrational has the capacity to keep us inside an open system and a larger horizon so that the soul, the heart, and the mind do not close down inside of small and suffering times. 

- Richard Rohr, The Naked Now

I think

therefore I am

- René Descartes