Jennifer

“Life can find you only if you are paying real attention to something other than you own concerns, if you can hear and see the essence of otherness in the world, if you can treat the world as if it is not just a backdrop to your own journey, if you can have a relationship with the world that isn't based on triumphing over it or complaining about it.”
― David Whyte, The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship

“We can never know in the beginning, in giving ourselves to a person, to a work, to a marriage or to a cause, exactly what kind of love we are involved with. When we demand a certain specific kind of reciprocation before the revelation has flowered completely we find ourselves disappointed and bereaved and in that grief may miss the particular form of love that is actually possible but that did not meet our initial and too specific expectations. Feeling bereft we take our identity as one who is disappointed in love, our almost proud disappointment preventing us from seeing the lack of reciprocation from the person or the situation as simply a difficult invitation into a deeper and as yet unrecognizable form of affection.”
― David Whyte, Consolations - Revised edition: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

“Son,'he said,' ye cannot in your present state understand eternity...That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, "No future bliss can make up for it," not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say "Let me have but this and I'll take the consequences": little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man's past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man's past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why...the Blessed will say "We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven, : and the Lost, "We were always in Hell." And both will speak truly.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

“The interesting dynamic about human happiness in the marriage to work is that we can glide down the road in the metaphorical Jaguar XK 150, having a completely miserable, blazing argument with our partner while the wind is blowing unheeded through our hair. I can also find myself in the aptly name Ford Focus, laughing my way into a marvelous excursion. But neither Ford Focus nor Jaguar can guarantee us a place in the kingdom of happiness. It is the one in the driver's set, setting the destination and the attitude for the journey of work and vocation, who seems to make up our real possibilities for satisfaction over time.

The difficult truth is that our kingdom does not have to be very big at all in order for us to do good work: what is difficult is simply starting the work and carrying on with it day after day. My work space can be a small corner of a table on a train or if we are really, really focused, a knee on which to balance a writing pad.”
― David Whyte, The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship