“Great art and great science involve a leap of imagination into a world that is different from the present.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,
Creativity: Flow and the Psychology
of Discovery and Invention

“In the form and function of play, itself an independent entity which is senseless and irrational, man’s consciousness that he is embedded in a sacred order of things finds its first, highest, and holiest expression.”

– Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens, p. 17-18

“When women learn to see the world as it truly is, without prejudice, and apply their skills of ‘women’s work’ to cleaning up the mess and choosing what will live and what will die, they manifest the Great Goddess in both her destructive and her nurturing aspects. No one who comes face to face with the totality of her power leaves unscathed.”

— Jody Bower, Jane Eyre’s Sisters:
How Women Live and Write the Heroine’s Story

“Oral cultures indeed produce powerful and beautiful verbal performances of high artistic and human worth, which are no longer even possible once writing has taken possession of the psyche. Nevertheless, without writing, human consciousness cannot achieve its fuller potentials, cannot produce other beautiful and powerful creations.”

–Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy

“Today we get together to remind ourselves that we were given a responsibility to live in balance and harmony with one another and with all the living things of Mother Earth. We think of the people we met and the ones we haven’t met as yet. We remember that all of the people who live on every part of Mother Earth are all connected, related and bound together in the same circle of life. So we bring our minds together as one. As we pile high our greetings, express our love and give thanks to all of the people here and everywhere on Mother Earth.

“Now our minds are as one.”

—Haudenosaunee Prayer by Mohawk storyteller Kay Olan

“The new myth tells the story of the endless development of Cosmos out of Chaos and of the interrelatedness of all things–atoms, mountains, people, woods, rivers, and microbes–in a fragile community of which it is urgent that we become aware not only as romantic or objective observers, but as outgrowths of Gaia with at least a temporary mission of consciousness.”

–David Leeming, Myth: A Biography of Belief

“Whether or not our rigid mature minds reject play, everything is still the display of the natural secret essence of the elements. If we are serious and rigid, our subtle elements become congested and cannot reflect this wisdom display. If our mind is calm and vast and playful, we can always recognize this essence display.”

— Thinley Norbu, Magic Dance: The Display of the Self-Nature of the Five Wisdom Dakinis

“To change how we see things takes falling in love. Then the same becomes altogether different. Like love, a shift of sight can be redemptive–not in the religious sense of saving the soul for heaven, but in a more pragmatic sense. As at a redemption center, you get something back for what you had misperceived as merely worthless.”

– James Hillman, The Soul’s Code

“True realism consists in revealing the surprising things that habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing.”

– Jean Cocteau

“We keep hearing about the revolution around us all the time: the revolution, the revolution, the revolution. Revolution doesn’t have to do with smashing something; it has to do with bringing something forth…. You have to find the zeal in yourself and bring that out.”

— Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss

“The aim of life is to embrace the infinitely creative process whose purpose is nothing other than itself.”

— Mark C. Taylor, After God

“But there are neither maps nor exercises to help us find the duende. We only know that he burns the blood like a poultice of broken glass, that he exhausts, that he rejects all the sweet geometry we have learned, that he smashes styles….
The duende’s arrival always means a radical change in forms. It brings to old planes unknown feelings of freshness, with the quality of something newly created, like a miracle, and it produces an almost religious enthusiasm.”

— Federico Garcia Lorca, “Play and Theory of the Duende”

“And anyway, I thought, sipping my home-made wine and squinting up at the night sky for sputniks, Mammy had told me there were as many different beliefs as there were scattered stars. And I knew the stars were without number.”

— Graham Joyce, The Limits of Enchantment

“This is the eternal origin of art that a human being confronts a form that wants to become a work through him. Not a figment of his soul but something that appears to the soul and demands the soul’s creative power. What is required is a deed that a man does with his whole being: if he commits it and speaks with his being the basic word to the form that appears, then the creative power is released and the work comes into being.”

– Martin Buber, I and Thou, p. 60