Tigers

 There is nothing like the thrill of walking through the jungle looking for a tiger and knowing they could be watching you already.

Ashlan Gorse Cousteau

You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

Steve Jobs

I claim that all those who think they can cherry-pick science simply don't understand how science works. That's what I claim. And if they did, they'd be less prone to just assert that somehow scientists are clueless.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

I always knew looking back on my tears would bring me laughter, but I never knew looking back on my laughter would make me cry.

Cat Stevens

A story of life through quotes: 

There are tigers everywhere!!  When we go boldly forth into the jungle of taking steps into our dreams our journey is exciting and alive and we get to have adventures and learn and grow. 

OR 

We can choose to only go/believe take the road that we think is safe, on the flat earth, with guns in our hand so we can destroy tigers before we see them and never learn that these tigers are just like us ... they are all the other human animals afraid to go beyond their carefully walled in limits and beliefs because of their fears of us ... like an endless game where everyone ends up dead except the victors and the world is a decimated shell containing a only a small minded group who cry for the past they destroyed ... just before they die of boredom or start killing each other because, after all that battle for a homogenous race, religion and culture, someone in the dared to have a different thought which was interpreted as a tiger.

And because my intention is positive this is only a cautionary tale and the first 2 quotes are the places we can go to overcome our limits and limiting beliefs.

Cheers
Jeanne

Life Flows on within you and without you

 When you've seen beyond yourself, then you may find, peace of mind is waiting there.

George Harrison

From: Sgt Peppers lonely hearts club band

Within You Without You

We were talking about the space between us all
And the people who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion
Never glimpse the truth
Then it's far too late
When they pass away
We were talking about the love we all could share
When we find it, to try our best to hold it there with our love
With our love, we could save the world, if they only knew

Try to realise it's all within yourself
No one else can make you change
And to see you're really only very small
And life flows on within you and without you

We were talking about the love that's gone so cold
And the people who gain the world and lose their soul
They don't know
They can't see
Are you one of them?

When you've seen beyond yourself then you may find
Peace of mind is waiting there
And the time will come when you see we're all one
And life flows on within you and without you

Cheers
Jeanne

More on Freedom

 “One of the things I learned when I was negotiating was that until I changed myself, I could not change others.”

Nelson Mandela

“May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.”
Nelson Mandela

"Freedom" is a word I hear frequently in these days of lockdowns and restrictions due to the spread of the Covid virus. Many of us who've not had to deal with much in the way of personal restrictions before are having a difficult time accepting these restrictions and feel our Individual Rights are of ultimate importance. Opportunities we've taken for granted; jobs, school, social gatherings, our rights to move about and travel freely have been limited. 

Some of the books I've read recently such as Nelson Mandela's book "Long Walk to Freedom", Thomas King's "Indians on Vacation" and Susan Straight's "I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked out all the Pots" are making me think about what this word "Freedom" means. 

I'm wondering how to be free if freedom means we require a set of external conditions... 

and if those external conditions are met for me and not the rest of humankind who and what am I that I deserve them and how free am I really??

I am grateful for this opportunity to read and learn and continue to think beyond what I thought before. Thinking about what my "hopes" are and making choices reflecting these hopes means I get to give up wishing to go back to the past "freedoms", which my mind has already idealized and even were I to go back I am not the same person ... What a Relief!!! 

FREEDOM vs freedom

 "Where do you begin telling someone their world is not the only one?"

Lee Maracle

"Words are sacred, once spoken they cannot be retrieved. Sometimes they fall out of the mouth in moments of thoughtlessness when the speaker focuses on images which don’t include the one spoken to, and burn holes in the lives of the listener.” 

from Ravensong by Lee Maracle

“Find free­dom in the con­text you inherit”
Lee Mar­a­cle (Stó:lō)

We are offered great gifts from writers and people who are speaking up from all cultures, beliefs, tribes, and world experiences that are different from ours. It is probably easier for us to imagine living on Mars than it is to understand their reality. This last quote reminds me of Victor Frankl's speaking about life in the Nazi concentration camps 

When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

And why do I choose these quotes week after week?? What is in me that I choose the books and the stories I do? I wonder this, why I am I sitting here feeling helpless to "do" anything, when I have so much freedom? Is this one of those tragic paradoxes... that those of us who have freedom and opportunity become possessive of that freedom ... feel we deserve it? I think somehow we are trapped in a conditioned box that does not allow us to see no one is truly free until everyone is free. And our real freedom only comes when the risks we take challenge us to grow out of our safety zones of that "freedom we deserve". That inherent belief inside us that we are "good" people and have no responsibility to look deeper into our complicity and responsibility for the oppression of others, for the destruction and imbalance of opportunity and freedom. We say we are in the helpless against government and corporate greed, corruption and wasteful mismanagement when, in fact, they represent us. The only way things will ever change is if we change ourselves and it takes one step at a time as our eyes open. It is easy to get bogged down in the enormity of change that is needed, but once one tiny changes start happening miracles can follow.

Lee Maracle


Lee Maracle, of Salish and Cree ancestry, a member of the Sto:loh Nation, was born in North Vancouver, B.C. She is the mother of four and grandmother of four.

Maracle was one of the first Aboriginal people to be published in the early 1970s, and she is now one of the most highly published First Nations writers in Canada. She is an award-winning poet, novelist, performance storyteller, scriptwriter, actor and keeper/mythmaker among the Sto:lo People.

Maracle was recently award the Order of Canada "For her contributions to Canada's literary landscape and for her influential voice in cultural relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Canada."