It has been said that sometimes we need a story more than food in order to live. p 374
Interpretation
Stories nourish our soul and spirit just as food nourishes our body.
This quote by Rachel Naomi Remen emphasizes the profound importance of storytelling in our lives. It suggests that, beyond physical sustenance, we require emotional and spiritual nourishment, which can often be fulfilled through stories that inspire, heal, and connect us with others. In this context, stories help us make sense of our experiences and provide comfort and hope.
In practice
In a discussion about mental health, this quote can highlight the importance of sharing personal stories for healing.
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.
Jumping from boulder to boulder and never falling, with a heavy pack, is easier than it sounds; you just can't fall when you get into the rhythm of the dance.
I worry hope will crush me, the way love has so many times before. Are they so different, hope and love? O & E in the same place, half of the other in each word. Both swimming in unknowns. I’ve been through the big changes. These ones should seem easier in comparison, I should be more prepared, but they don’t and I’m not. Sometimes I feel like a broken-wing butterfly, clinging to a window screen. Afraid to let go. Afraid to stay. Wondering how much wing is enough to fly.
I've observed over and over that people seem to get a much deeper sense of fulfillment out of something they've done as an act of service than out of the things they do for themselves.
And with the passing years, what had once seemed like a miracle or the luckiest of chances and which he had always promised himself he would never become enslaved by, has gradually become his sole reason to go on living.
I can look back on my life, where there have been moments where things might have gone the other way. Everything is like stepping stones, and I've seen people I admire falter. We're all vulnerable.
Life holds only one tragedy, ultimately: not to have been a saint.
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