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“Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him.

In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is but another name for tameness. It is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in Hamlet and the Iliad, in all the scriptures and mythologies, not learned in the schools, that delights us.

In short, all good things are wild and free. There is something in a strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by the human voice—take the sound of a bugle in a summer night, for instance—which by its wildness, to speak without satire, reminds me of the cries emitted by wild beasts in their native forests. It is so much of their wildness as I can understand. Give me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones.

Here is this vast, savage, hovering mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.

We hug the earth—how rarely we mount! Methinks we might elevate ourselves a little more. We might climb a tree, at least. I found my account in climbing a tree once. It was a tall white pine, on the top of a hill; and though I got well pitched, I was well paid for it, for I discovered new mountains in the horizon which I had never seen before—so much more of the earth and the heavens. I might have walked about the foot of the tree for threescore years and ten, and yet I certainly should never have seen them. But, above all, I discovered around me—it was near the end of June—on the ends of the topmost branches only, a few minute and delicate red conelike blossoms, the fertile flower of the white pine looking heavenward.��

~ Henry David Thoreau

Conflict Resolution Techniques:

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“When you claim authority (not bogus “guru�� authority, but real leadership), you’re constructing something. If you aren’t solving a problem for your audience, go back to the drawing board until you can.

Not everyone who builds is a nice guy. Steve Jobs wasn’t a particularly nice guy. But he was no troll, either. He built a hell of a company �� one that added to people’s lives, instead of sucking energy into an endless attention black hole.

Attention is not the same thing as authority. You can’t just be a contrarian jackass �� it’s not in service of anything.��

~ Sonia Simone

“It is important to understand that the experience of joy and grace, as well as contentment and salvation, is not arrived at by the elimination of conflict, but through one’s precision of movement within it.��



“Mastery of anything is, more than anything else, the transformation of work into play.��

"Your reflections on presence ran through many of the conversations during your last workshop and is also a continuing theme in your written works and elsewhere. Could you condense your views on this into an easily understandable, everyday definition? What's necessary to become more present in every moment?"

My personal sense of presence that I kind of carry around with me is along the lines of "Somebody has to be there first before acting." The more one is there, the better the results in whatever you're doing - more precision, subtlety, relevance...and much less dispersion and depletion. When you watch someone who is good at this, you can sometimes feel like they're actually stretching out the walls of possibility in a given situation, literally creating open space. Much of this comes only through time and experience, eventual understanding that how one does something, not the specifics of action, is what impacts others most. In thinking of people I know who have exceptional presence, they all embody these common traits, which I hope serves as a decent working definition:

~ Open receptivity and panoramic perception

~ Attentiveness and conviction in engagement

~ Unselfconscious equanimity and generosity

~ Close, conscious proximity to essential priorities

~ Self-generated enthusiasm and inspiration

I hesitate to give a single example of this, because there are so many variations in tone, mood and forms of expression, but here's someone with obvious presence who also happens to be talking about the subject...



~ Darrell Calkins

The word wakefulness is a synonym for mindfulness. Wakefulness is described by the American physician Jon Kabat-Zinn as a state of mindful awareness. By being fully awake in the present moment, Kabat-Zinn suggests that we can live fully, with great awareness and intent, which has the potential to give us and those around us an improved sense of peace, joy and well-being.

"Mindfulness is often spoken of as the heart of Buddhist meditation. It's not about Buddhism, but about paying attention. That's what all meditation is, no matter what tradition or particular technique is used.

In Asian languages, the word for mind and the word for heart are the same. So if you're not hearing mindfulness in some deep way as heartfulness, you're not really understanding it. Compassion and kindness are intrinsically woven into it. You could think of mindfulness as wise and affectionate attention.

Mindfulness is not about getting anywhere else - it's about being where you are and knowing it. We are talking about awareness itself: a whole repertoire of ways of knowing that virtually all come through the senses.

My definition of healing is coming to terms with things as they are, so that you can do whatever you can to optimize your potential, whether you are living with chronic pain or having a baby. You can't control the universe, so mindfulness involves learning to cultivate wisdom and equanimity- not passive resignation-in the face of what Zorba the Greek called the full catastrophe of the human condition."

Jon Kabat-Zinn

"It is up to us to devise our own rituals. I feel that ritual rises from the earth. If we slow down and listen to the land we are on, we will know what to do. Our rituals must speak to the particular ways we've been shaped, or misshaped, by our culture. One of the values of ritual is that it has the capacity to derange us, to shake us out of old forms. We need that derangement, because the current arrangement isn't working. We have ceremonies, but we come out of those pretty much the same as when we went in. You're supposed to emerge from a ritual wondering what the hell just happened."

~ Francis Weller



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