Everybody is a story. When I was a child, people sat around kitchen tables and told their stories. We don't do that so much anymore. Sitting around the table telling stories is not just a way of passing time. It is the way the wisdom gets passed along. The stuff that helps us to live a life worth remembering.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of storytelling in connecting individuals and passing down wisdom.
Rachel Naomi Remen reflects on the significance of storytelling as a vital part of human relationships and wisdom sharing. She suggests that the act of sitting together and sharing personal narratives not only strengthens bonds among people but also conveys valuable life lessons that enrich our experiences and memories.
In practice
This quote can be used in a family gathering to encourage storytelling among relatives.
Helping, fixing, and serving represent three different ways of seeing life. When you help, you see life as weak. when you fix, you see life as broken. When you serve, you see life as whole. Fixing and helping may be the work of the ego, and service the work of the soul.
In this culture the soul and the heart too often go homeless. Listening creates a holy silence. When you listen generously to people, they can hear the truth in themselves, often for the first time. And in the silence of listening, you can know yourself in everyone. Eventually you may be able to hear, in everyone and beyond everyone, the unseen singing softly to itself and to you.
At the deepest level, the creative process and the healing process arise from a single source. When you are an artist, you are a healer; a wordless trust of the same mystery is the foundation of your work and its integrity.
The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention…. A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.
Grieving allows us to heal, to remember with love rather than pain. It is a sorting process. One by one you let go of the things that are gone and you mourn for them. One by one you take hold of the things that have become a part of who you are and build again.
Life is known only by those who have found a way to be comfortable with change and the unknown. Given the nature of life, there may be no security, but only adventure.
You see, we are here, as far as I can tell, to help each other - our brothers, our sisters, our friends, our enemies. That's to help each other, not hurt each other.
He was ugly, himself. Weird-ugly. But ugliness in a man doesn't matter, much. Ugliness in a woman is her life.
Part of the reason people don't talk about their loneliness is that they feel they will be judged for it.
To fully understand the black immigrant experience in the U.S., we must understand it not in contrast to the African-American experience, but central to it.
No human law can abolish the natural and original right of marriage, nor in any way limit the chief and principal purpose of marriage ordained by God’s authority from the beginning: “Increase and multiply.
Men rarely worry about using or being used because all relationships work that way. A man perceives himself as owning and being owned by a woman. 'Use' is a dirty word only when there's an imbalance in the relationship.
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