The Journey

Learning any new language is difficult at first. But as you start to master the basics, it gets easier. Research with young children has shown that many learn systems thinking remarkably quickly. It appears that we have latent skills as systems thinkers that are undeveloped, even repressed by formal education in linear thinking. . . Western languages, with their subject-verb-object structure, are biased toward a linear view. If we want to see systemwide interrelationships, we need a language of interrelationships, a language made up of circles. ~ Peter Senge

The appreciation we develop for our natural world will help us find a more balanced, sane approach to ourselves. Treating nature with reverence and appreciation, we might learn to treat ourselves the same way.

~ Tarthang Tulka

Our goal is to create a beloved community and this will require a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives.

~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Then let us begin by radically changing how we behave. Don't blame me; talk with me. Don't withdraw from me; step toward me. Don't shun me; embrace me. Don't sue me; mediate with me. Don't assume; question. Don't let our difference blind us to our commonality. ~ Christina Baldwin

Whether we're working with clay, paint, words or music, we begin to understand that the medium has its own voice and is merely asking us to listen. ~ Julia Chiapella

If we let beauty instruct us, we can recover wholeness and balance.

~ Tarthang Tulka

Malidoma Somé says, "The wild realm is counting on humans to come back into meaningful community with one another and within it. I believe the circle is teaching us how to take our place in the natural order." ~ Christina Baldwin

Don't look at it,

Feel it with your eyes.

~ Gulley Jimson

Persons who love nature find a common basis for understanding people of other countries, since the love of nature is universal among men of all nations. ~ Dag Hammarskjold

When we know communion is possible,

We find ways to return to it again and again.

~ Christina Baldwin

We have to take time in our lives to tell our stories from our hearts. That will transform us into action and change.

~ Stuart Sisters

Imagine the shifts in all aspects of our culture if we believed and behaved with a sense of unity.

~ Christina Baldwin

If we look at the world as citizens of the circle ~ a birthright that precedes all current political, social, and spiritual divisions ~ we begin to ask: "What piece of the world's condition can I respond to? Be in relationship with? Dialogue about?" The first step to answering these questions is to practice seeing everything around us and within us as interconnected. ~ Christina Baldwin

Peace cannot be kept by force,

It can only be achieved by understanding.

~ Albert Einstein

The unitive vision of the Mandala re-enters through the conflict and tragedy of a planet almost completely polarized. We are at the frontier of a new level of integration. Everything in the world is crying for it, and in this process the principles of sacred art return once more to their rightful place in human development. The Mandala may become once more the root image of a global symbolism, a common and organic language utterly necessary for unifying the now diverse remnants of what was once a brotherhood and sisterhood.

` Jose and Miriam Arguelles

If we want to move toward better, richer understandings of culture and community, we cannot stop at enhancing dialogue with our imagined dominant group. It is time for dialogue across margins. ~ Ruth Behar and Deborah Gordon

We have to learn to speak to those we do not wish to convert, but with whom we wish to live. . . In a society of plurality and change, there may be no detailed moral consensus that can be engraved on tablets of stone. But there can and must be a continuing conversation, joined by as many voices as possible, on what makes our society a collective enterprise; a community that embraces communities. ~ Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

Through symbolic awareness the voice of nature can teach us to live in mutuality.

~ L. Teal Willoughby

In the time before European settlers changed the face of the continent, the native peoples of North America had a relationship to the land that might never be recreated. . . The earth spoke with a strong voice, and the people fashioned their lives according to what they heard. As the Mohawk said, "Our Grand parents of old, they are saying, 'Listen to her, all, to the Earth our Mother, to what she is saying.' People, listen all." What they heard were some of life's basic lessons: All motions are circular; no action is free of consequence; all life begins from the ground beneath our feet; all living and nonliving things are related in flesh and spirit; and for human beings, solace comes from alignment with natural forces, not from the attempt to conquer, overcome, or bend those forces to one's will. ~ Jeremy Schmidt and Laine Thom

There is an old American Indian proverb that says, "Great Spirit, grant that I may not criticize my neighbor until I have walked a mile in her moccasins. Simply listening to my neighbor is the most powerful way that I can do this. Listening, opening myself to her feelings and her point of view, accepting that she does feel the way that she feels, dissolves the boundary between us. Listening allows the other to get inside me, to become a part of me. It allows us to "meet."

~ Dana Zohar

Changing how we think about ourselves in relation to other people is the next evolutionary step for humankind.

~ Barbara Bollmann

The Sacred Circle is built on respect and trust. The image is of the garden. Each plant has its name and its place. There is no one flower that conceals the need for another. Each bloom has its unique and irreplaceable beauty. ~ Julia Cameron

. . . And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,

And Eternity in an hour.

~ William Blake

The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its powers.

~ Black Elk

By accepting impermanence, we let go of our tight grasp on what and whom we love, and knowing it or they will be gone, we see more clearly what it is we love about them.

~ Robert Thurman

Insight, I believe, refers to that depth of understanding that comes by setting experiences, yours and mine, familiar and exotic new and old, side by side, learning by letting them speak to one another. ~ Mary Catherine Bateson

If we know about the patterns that rule our lives, it will allow us to be more responsible toward others and the earth.

~ Dianna

. . . Nor could we listen to the various creatures of earth, each telling its own story. The time has now come, however, when we will listen or we will die. The time has come to lower our voices, to cease imposing our mechanistic patterns on the biological processes of the earth, to resist the impulse to control, to command, to force, to oppress, and begin quite humbly to follow the guidance of the larger community on which all life depends. ~ Thomas Berry

Perhaps the healing of the world rests on just this sort of shift in our way of seeing, a coming to know that in our suffering and in our joy we are connected to one another with unbreakable and compelling human bonds. ~ Rachel Naomi Remen

In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.

~ from The Great Law of the Iroquois Confederacy

I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together, like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mightily flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. ~ Black Elk

I say that if each person in the world will simply take a small piece of this huge thing, this tablecloth, bedspread, whatever and work it regardless of the color of the yarn, we will have harmony on this planet.

~ Cicely Tyson