Meredith Kimbrough MS, LPC

"The doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door."
Clarissa Pinkola Estés - Women Who Run With the Wolves, 1992.

Vilhelm Hammershøi - The Four Rooms, 1914.

/ Joseph Campbell /
"Life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived. Follow the path that is no path, follow your bliss."
"Joseph John Campbell was an American writer. He was a professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College who worked in comparative mythology and comparative religion. His work covers many aspects of the human experience. Campbell's best-known work is his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in which he discusses his theory of the journey of the archetypal hero shared by world mythologies, termed the monomyth. Since the publication of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell's theories have been applied by a wide variety of modern writers and artists. His philosophy has been summarized by his own often repeated phrase: "Follow your bliss." He gained recognition in Hollywood when George Lucas credited Campbell's work as influencing his Star Wars saga. Campbell's approach to folklore topics such as myth and his influence on popular culture has been the subject of criticism, including from folklorists.
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Born: Joseph John Campbell, March 26, 1904, White Plains, New York, U.S.
Died: October 30, 1987, Honolulu, Hawaii, U.S.
Institutions: Sarah Lawrence College
Education: Dartmouth College, Columbia University (BA, MA)
Academic advisors: Roger Sherman Loomis
Influences: Adolf Bastian, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Oswald Spengler, James George Frazer, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Heinrich Zimmer, James Joyce, Thomas Mann
Influenced: George Lucas, Alan Watts, Jim Morrison, Christopher Vogler, Dan Harmon, Keith Buckley, Buddy Nielsen, Chuck Palahniuk, Dave Carter
Joseph Campbell (1991). “The Hero's Journey: The World of Joseph Campbell : Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work”, Harper San Francisco

“…because if you see yourself in the correct way, you are all as much extraordinary phenomenon of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of the stars, and the form of a galaxy. You are all just like that, and there is nothing wrong with you at all.”

— Alan Watts

[ Artist • Ana Novaes ]

Dependency may appear to be love because it is a force that causes people to fiercely attach themselves to one another. But in actuality it is not love; it is a form of antilove. It has its genesis in a parental failure to love and it perpetuates the failure. It seeks to receive rather than to give. It nourishes infantilism rather than growth. It works to trap and constrict rather than to liberate. Ultimately it destroys rather than builds relationships, and it destroys rather than builds people. ~M. Scott Peck

(Book [ad]: The Road Less Traveled https://amzn.to/4e2tGGZ)

(Art: Photograph of actors Daniel Day-Lewis and Vicky Krieps, scene from movie 'Phantom Thread')

“For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the courage to start all over again.”

~Francis Scott Fitzgerald

Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes 🌹

Love can't be won or earned, for it is a spontaneous expression of affection and warmth in response to another person's being. It's “I love you,” not “I love what you are doing.” Love implies an acceptance that was denied the child. Once we give up our true self to play a role, we are fated to be rejected because we have already rejected ourselves.

-- Dr. Alexander Lowen

I don't believe the cure for loneliness is meeting someone, not necessarily. I think it's about two things: learning how to befriend yourself and understanding that many of the things that seem to afflict us as individuals are in fact a result of larger forces of stigma and exclusion, which can and should be resisted.
[...] So much of the pain of loneliness is to do with concealment, with feeling compelled to hide vulnerability, to tuck ugliness away, to cover up scars as if they are literally repulsive. But why hide? What's so shameful about wanting, about desire, about having failed to achieve satisfaction, about experiencing unhappiness? Why this need to constantly inhabit peak states, or to be comfortably sealed inside a unit of two, turned inward from the world at large? ~Olivia Laing

(Book: The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone [ad] https://amzn.to/3W59fCV)

(Art: 'Ice Storm', 1971 by Andrew Wyeth)

“The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”

― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“Only when you are confronted with an insoluble conflict do you know something about the Self and how the Self operates; only in a situation where you are absolutely in need of a creative solution will you experience the source within yourself; so it always needs the impossible.”

— Carl Jung

[ Art • “Red” by Aykut Aydoğdu ]

The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.

[...] The world is vast and our own powers are limited. If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give. And to demand too much is the surest way of getting even less than is possible. The man who can forget his worries by means of a genuine interest in, say, the Council of Trent, or the life history of stars, will find that, when he returns from his excursion into the impersonal world, he has acquired a poise and calm which enable him to deal with his worries in the best way, and he will in the meantime have experienced a genuine even if temporary happiness. ~Bertrand Russell

(Book: The Conquest of Happiness [ad] https://amzn.to/49dF27k)

Someone can be madly in love with you and still not be ready. They can love you in a way you have never been loved and still not join you on the bridge. And whatever their reasons you must leave. Because you never ever have to inspire anyone to meet you on the bridge. You never ever have to convince someone to do the work to be ready. There is more extraordinary love, more love that you have never seen, out here in this wide and wild universe. And there is the love that will be ready.~Nayyirah Waheed

(Book: Salt [ad] https://amzn.to/42GQGWM)

(Art: Painting by Joseph Lorusso)

Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but 'steal' some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be. ~Albert Camus

(Book: Notebooks 1951-1959 [ad] https://amzn.to/4975S1Q)

(Art: Painting by Mark Edwards)

It took me way too long to figure this out, but better late than never they say! Own your imperfections, flex your flaws, and let your freak flag fly proudly

❤

“When you teach your daughter, explicitly or by passive rejection, that she must ignore her outrage, that she must be kind and accepting to the point of not defending herself or other people, that she must not rock the boat for any reason, you are not strengthening her prosocial sense; you are damaging it...and the first person she will stop protecting is herself."
Martha Stout

Henri Cartier - Bresson - Girl with Braids, Mexico (detail), 1934.

“Inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It’s made up of all those who’ve consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners — and I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’

“All sorts of torturers, dictators, fanatics, and demagogues struggling for power by way of a few loudly shouted slogans also enjoy their jobs, and they too perform their duties with inventive fervor. Well, yes, but they ‘know.’ They know, and whatever they know is enough for them once and for all. They don’t want to find out about anything else, since that might diminish their arguments’ force. And any knowledge that doesn’t lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life. In the most extreme cases, cases well known from ancient and modern history, it even poses a lethal threat to society.

“This is why I value that little phrase ‘I don’t know’ so highly. It’s small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended.”—Wisława Szymborska, in her acceptance of the 1996 Nobel Prize.

Via .marginalian

Photograph by Joanna Helander.

David Whyte David Whyte is an internationally acclaimed poet, author and speaker.

❤Via: https://www.instagram.com/philosophors/

"It is insane to be in competition with others. Work out a method where you are able to support your friends, your peers, and those with whom you live, while at the same time working very hard to mind your own business and tend to the most important task you have: To improve yourself and use yourself in the best way to earn your place on land. The world will always try to make you think about how you're doing against the others, but ignore this. You need to do--and have to do--the work you were put here to do." Arthur Miller/Interview with James Grissom/1998/Photo by Arnold Newman

/ Ray Bradbury /
"You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance."
"Ray Douglas Bradbury was an American author and screenwriter. One of the most celebrated 20th-century American writers, he worked in a variety of modes, including fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery, and realistic fiction. Bradbury was mainly known for his novel Fahrenheit 451 and his short-story collections The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man. Most of his best known work is speculative fiction, but he also worked in other genres, such as the coming of age novel Dandelion Wine and the fictionalized memoir Green Shadows, White Whale. He also wrote and consulted on screenplays and television scripts, including Moby Dick and It Came from Outer Space. Many of his works were adapted into television and film productions as well as comic books. The New York Times called Bradbury "the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream.""
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Born: Ray Douglas Bradbury, August 22, 1920, Waukegan, Illinois, U.S.
Died: June 05, 2012, Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Resting place: Westwood Memorial Park, Westwood, Los Angeles
Occupation: Writer
Education: Los Angeles High School
Period: 1938–2012
Genre: Fantasy, science fiction, horror fiction, mystery fiction, magic realism
Notable works: Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Illustrated Man
Notable awards:American Academy of Arts and Letters (1954), Inkpot Award (1974), Daytime Emmy Award (1994), National Medal of Arts (2004), Pulitzer Prize Special Citation (2007)

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird — equal seekers of sweetness. Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn? Am I no longer young and still not half-perfect? Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture. Which is mostly rejoicing, since all ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart and these body-clothes, a mouth with which to give shouts of joy to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is that we live forever. ~Mary Oliver

(Book: Thirst: Poems https://amzn.to/3llSxi4)