Kyle

“Human beings have a natural urge to worship that “something greater” which coheres us, but we, in modernity, are living in a kind of spiritual cul-de-sac where our gifts only serve the human community. Unlike the many shamanic cultures that practice dreamwork, ritual, and thanksgiving, Westerners have forgotten what indigenous people understand to be cardinal: that this world owes its life to the unseen. Every hunt and every harvest, every death, and every birth is distinguished by ceremony for that which we cannot see, feeding back that which feeds us. I believe our epidemic alienation is, in good part, the felt negligence of that reciprocity.”
― Toko-pa Turner, Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home

“You are a complete, fully realized human being. You are a soul who has a body. You are the one your ancestors were praying for and waiting for through the generations. You have been given a unique set of gifts, and you yourself are a gift to the world.”
― Anton Treuer, The Cultural Toolbox: Traditional Ojibwe Living in the Modern World

“We do not know we are full of paradise because we are so full of our own noise that we cannot hear God singing us and all things into being.”
― Thomas Merton, A Book of Hours

“In authoritarian philosophy the concept of equality does not exist. The authoritarian character may sometimes use the word equality either conventionally or because it suits his purposes. But it has no real meaning or weight for him, since it concerns something outside the reach of his emotional experience. For him the world is composed of people with power and those without it, of superior ones and inferior ones. On the basis of his sado-masochistic strivings, he experiences only domination or submission, but never solidarity. Differences, whether of sex or race, to him are necessarily signs of superiority or inferiority. A difference which does not have this connotation is unthinkable to him.”
― Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom