There is a place in you where you have never been wounded

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<< Meister Eckhart (14th century German mystic), whom I love, said, “There is a place in the soul that neither time nor space nor no created thing can touch.” If you cash it out, what it means is that your identity is not equivalent to your biography and that there is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there is still a sureness in you, where there’s a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you. And I think the intention of prayer and spirituality and love is now and again to visit that inner kind of sanctuary.

Beauty isn’t all about just … nice … loveliness. Beauty is about more rounded, substantial “becoming”.

Beauty is about an emerging fullness, a greater sense of grace and elegance, a deeper sense of depth, and also a kind of homecoming for the enriched memory of your unfolding life.

… the dawn goes up, and the twilight comes, even in the most roughest inner-city place. And I think that, connecting to the elemental can be a way of coming into rhythm with the universe.

And I do think that there is a way in which the outer presence, even through memory or imagination, can be brought inward as a sustaining thing.

You know, there are individuals holding out on frontlines, holding the humane tissue alive in areas of ultimate barbarity, where things are visible that the human eye should never see. And they’re able to sustain it, because there is, in them, some kind of sense of beauty that knows the horizon that we are really called to in some way.

I love Pascal’s phrase, you should always keep something beautiful in your mind. And I have often … if you can keep some kind of little contour that you can glimpse sideways at, now and again, you can endure great bleakness.

Is everyone is an artist? … everyone is involved, whether they like it or not, in the construction of their world. So it’s never as given as it actually looks.

You are always shaping it and building it. And I feel that, from that perspective, that each of us is an artist. … I believe that everyone has imagination, that no matter how mature and adult and sophisticated a person might seem, that person is still essentially an ex-baby. And as children, we all lived in an imaginal world — you know, when you’d be told, “Don’t cross that wall, because there’s monsters over there,” my God, the world you would create on the other side of the wall! …

Meister Eckhart again: “So many people come to me asking how I should pray, how I should think, what I should do. And the whole time, they neglect the most important question, which is, how should I be?”

And I think when you slow it down, then you find your rhythm. And when you come into rhythm, then you come into a different kind of time. >>

John O'Donohue, "The Inner Landscape of Beauty." On Being. Krista Tippett.

full interview here -> https://bit.ly/3bzjSTQ