118 Quotes by Darrell Calkins

"If you don’t practice presence, you never learn how to have busyness facilitate accomplishment."

"How many people are watching a movie right now, or reading a book or listening to a song or looking into their life or dreaming with this profound, conscious or not, yearning more than anything for some kind of relationship somewhere with someone or something that would cause them to stagger in intimate rawness in friendship and love?"

"Love has an enormous spectrum of expression and impact. At the far end, it begins to unravel and move away from subjective experience and personal preference. It becomes pure intent, something that no longer tickles our desires, but fulfills the deeper needs of each circumstance we’re in."

"By music I mean the ‘spirit of the game,’ which is what all spirituality ultimately points to — ‘I hear the voice’ (of Nature, God, beauty, truth, love…). Hear it and move onto or into. The easiest way to do that is to notice and invest in whatever it is that provokes wonderment. You could call this coming back to mysticism as a way of life. We were all already there as children."

"Listen and look long at beauty that compels you, spontaneously engage what naturally calls to you…this is how we recover our true personal values."

"The divine is a mystery, so the impulse to really discover, like a child, has to be the core response to anything."

"Make a bigger deal of things…urgently passionate…more vulnerable, less hesitant…subtle, efficient…more interesting, independent choices."

"We need specific, frequent rituals that plug us back into recalling, for lack of a better phrase, the meaning of life. Such rituals can be anything in which we stop, feel and look clearly at what we love and value most, or even simpler – emptying out everything in the way of those."

"An initial perception or impulse has an infinite number of directions it can go."

"A state of grace is when everything imperfect disappears, leaving just stripped-down harmony. One is left empty, with nothing except a fluid open sensation, similar to becoming the sound from a tuning fork piercing through space."