Michael Meade > Quotes

“A false sense of security is the only kind there is.”
― Michael Meade

“Run towards the roar,’ the old people used to tell the young ones. When faced with great danger and when people panic and seek a false sense of safety, run towards the roaring and go where you fear to go. For only in facing your fears can you find some safety and a way through. When the world rattles and the end seems near, go towards the roar.”
― Michael Meade, Why the World Doesn't End: Tales of Renewal in Times of Loss

“Becoming a genuine individual requires learning the oppositions within oneself. Those who fail or refuse to face the oppositions within have no choice but to find enemies to project upon. Enemy simply means a "not-friend;" unless a person deals with the not-friend within they require enemies around them.”
― Michael Meade

“An old Celtic proverb boldly places death right at the center of life. ‘Death is the middle of a long life,’ they used to say. Ancient people did things like that; they put death at the center instead of casting it out of sight and leaving such an important subject until the last possible moment. Of course, they lived close to nature and couldn’t help but see how the forest grew from fallen trees and how death seemed to replenish life from fallen members. Only the unwise and the overly fearful think that death is the blind enemy of life.”
― Michael Meade

“In the end, what we fear will not go away, for it indicates what we must go through in order to awaken, become more genuine, and live more fully. The problem is that we tend to be most afraid of what our own souls require of us. Often our deepest fear is that we might become who we are intended to be, who we already are at our core. For becoming who we truly are requires the greatest amount of change.”
― Michael Meade, Why the World Doesn't End: Tales of Renewal in Times of Loss

“If you don't know who you are, anyone can name you.”
― Michael Meade

“Timing can be everything and wisdom requires the patience to wait as well as the courage to leap when the time becomes right.”
― Michael Meade, The Genius Myth

“When a person becomes aware of their genius and they live it and they give generously from it, they change the world, they affect the world. And when they depart everyone knows something is missing.”
― Michael Meade

“The real treasure of life, the one difficult to find and hard to attain, is never far from us. That’s an unwritten rule on this earth. What we desperately desire and need most is buried in the recesses of our innermost being all along. This is the open secret found in many traditions and told in many ways. Yet it remains a secret
because trusting in oneself remains one of the hardest things to do in life.”
― Michael Meade

“Inside each one of us there is a mostly hidden, mostly golden, mostly eternal image or aspect of being, similar to the gold that is buried in the earth. We are the earthlings, the children of the earth, and therefore we are a replica, in a sense, of the earth itself. One of the ideas that is important is: As above, so below. As outside, so within.”
― Michael Meade

“Something deep in the human soul awakens as things fall apart. Something in the soul knows that everything in this world can become lost. And something in the soul knows how to survive periods of devastation, disorientation and loss. Descent and falling is the way of the soul from its beginning. We each fell from the womb of life when the waters of the inner sea broke and it came time for us to breathe on our own.”
― Michael Meade, Why the World Doesn't End: Tales of Renewal in Times of Loss

“The genius inside a person wants activity. It’s connected to the stars; it’s connected to a spark and it wants to burn and it wants to make and it wants to create and it has gifts to give. That is the nature of inner genius.”
― Michael Meade

“Our job is not to comprehend or control everything, but to learn which story we are in and which of the many things calling out in the world is calling to us. Our job is to be fully alive in the life we have, to pick up the invisible thread of our own story and follow where it leads. Our job is to find the thread of our own dream and live it all the way to the end.”
― Michael Meade, Why the World Doesn't End: Tales of Renewal in Times of Loss

“The ship is always off course. Anybody who sails knows that. Sailing is being off course and correcting. That gives a sense of what life is about.”
― Michael Meade

“In these dark and uncertain times, there can be great value in imagining a bit of star in each human soul.
Not just that it gives some hope for humanity at a time when man’s inhumanity to man seems ever on the increase; but also because it points to an inner brightness
that can light the way
in dark times.”
― Michael Meade, The Genius Myth

“If we want the world to change, the healing of culture and greater balance in nature, it has to start inside the human soul.”
― Michael Meade

“Liberation happens each time we become conscious of the contents of the soul.”
― Michael Meade, Why the World Doesn't End: Tales of Renewal in Times of Loss

“All meaningful change requires a genuine surrender. Yet, to surrender does not simply mean to give up; more to give up one’s usual self and allow something other to enter and redeem the lesser sense of self. In surrendering, we fall to the bottom of our arguments and seek to touch the origin of our lives again. Only then can we see as we were meant to see, from the depth of the psyche where the genius resides, where the seeds of wisdom and purpose were planted before we were born.”
― Michael Meade, Fate and Destiny, The Two Agreements of the Soul

“Life roars at us when it wants or needs us to change. Ultimately, change means trans formation, a shifting from one form to another that involves the magic of creation. The trouble with entrenched oppositions is that each side becomes increasingly one-sided and single minded and unable to grow or meaningfully change. In the blindness of fear and the willfulness of abstract beliefs, people forget or reject the unseen yet essential unity that underlies all the oppositions in life.”
― Michael Meade, Why the World Doesn't End: Tales of Renewal in Times of Loss

“Each life involves an essential errand; not simply the task of survival, but a life-mission embedded in the soul from the beginning.”
― Michael Meade

“We may be closest to hearing the call when we feel most alone or in trouble, for genius hides behind the wound and one of the greatest wounds in life is to not know who we are intended to be or what we are supposed to serve in life.”
― Michael Meade, The Genius Myth

“A true pilgrimage requires letting go of the very things most people try to hold onto. In seeking after what the soul desires, we become pilgrims with no home but the path the soul would have us follow.”
― Michael Meade, Fate and Destiny, The Two Agreements of the Soul

“What’s secretly in the water
of modern culture is that people
enter the world empty.
That’s a very dangerous idea,
because if everybody’s empty
than other people can get us
to do whatever they want
because there’s nothing
in us to stand against it.

But if we came to do
something that’s meaningful,
that involves giving and
making the world a more
beautiful, healthy, lively place,
then you become a difficult person
to move around and manipulate.”
― Michael Meade

“There is a greater will, a greater need and purpose hidden within each life, and there is an inner law that knows best how each must live and that is worth stealing for; it’s worth dying for, and worth living for as well.”
― Michael Meade, Fate and Destiny, The Two Agreements of the Soul

“The real education is when you awaken and nourish and guide the inner spirit, this inner genius. The community grows from the giving of the gifts of the people in it, which is really giving from the genius.”
― Michael Meade

“Mythic imagination can break the spell of time and open us to a level of life that remains timeless. Myth is not about what happened in past times; myth is about what happens to people all of the time.”
― Michael Meade, The Genius Myth

“Mentoring is an archetypal activity that has timeless elements which can connect us to the universal ground where nature renews itself and culture becomes reimagined. Youth and elder meet where the pressure of the future meets the presence of the past. Old and young are opposites that secretly identify with each other; for neither fits well into the mainstream of life.”
― Michael Meade, The Genius Myth

“The hardest thing in life may be to learn to truly trust that there is something noble and generative in ourselves. This is a greater sense of the notion of believing in our self; to truly believe in oneself means to uncover the inner core of imagination and authenticity that can also be called the genius within us. When we connect to the inner resident of the soul, we also learn how we are woven to the Soul of the World.”
― Michael Meade, The Genius Myth

“Whether we know it or not, our lives are acts of imagination and the world is continually re-imagined through us.”
― Michael Meade, The Genius Myth

“To be purposeful is not to be goal oriented, but to seek to reconnect to the source of one's life.”
― Michael Meade