Melissavanbiljon

“As an artist, the voices you listen to ought to align with that inner Voice that knows who you are. When that foundation is set, then the rest of the voices can begin to build and work together, becoming the voice of a community, adding synergy and depth to your art that you couldn’t possibly manufacture on your own.”
― Michael Gungor, The Crowd, The Critic And The Muse: A Book For Creators

“It was the twentieth-century French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre who described the café as a ‘fullness of being’. Throughout its history, Sartre and many others like him have found at the café table something life-giving. Most often it has to do with its provision of space that is both personal and public, secluded yet connected. This communion of the café table is not first about intimacy but connection no less. Very often the communal nature of the café is found in its anonymity amidst life.”
― Simon Carey Holt, Eating Heaven: Spirituality at the Table

“Ashram Cat
When the guru sat down to worship each evening, the ashram cat would get in the way and distract the worshipers. So he ordered the cat be tied up during evening worship. Long after the guru died, the cat continued to be tied up during evening worship. And when the cat eventually died, another cat was brought to the ashram so that it could be dutifully tied up during evening worship. Centuries later, learned treatises were written by the guru's disciples on the essential role of a cat in all properly conducted worship.
That's often the way we operate in the church. We don't ask the right questions, and we overlay our past experiences-or reactions
against them-on what we think we should do for the future.”
― Mark Pierson, The Art of Curating Worship: Reshaping the Role of Worship Leader

“The Canadian-American journalist Jane Jacobs once described this life of the city’s streets and in its neighbourhoods as a ‘dance’ of constant movement and change: not a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time … but an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. It is this dance, this ‘ballet of the good city sidewalk’, that makes the city a place worth being, a human place.”
― Simon Carey Holt, Eating Heaven: Spirituality at the Table