Everything we do is sacred

Every action is shaping and reshaping the world around us.

I’ve had the flu so here are some inspirations from some other minds on the connectedness of everything. We are here with a purpose. What we do matters. The decisions we make, matter.

It’s like the butterfly effect where the flap of the wing changes the weather halfway around the world. [Andrea Gyorody]

If everyone plants a single flower for a butterfly, what happens next? The revolution can begin with the little things. Everything is connected—you’ll see how quickly it will spread, from you to me to the oak trees. [Desireé Reneé Martinez]

The greatest good is the knowledge of the union which the mind has with the whole nature. [Baruch Spinoza]

Our individual separateness is in a sense illusory; we are parts of the great stream of law and cause, parts of God; we are the flitting forms of a being greater than ourselves, and endless while we die. Our bodies are cells in the body of the race, our race is an incident in the drama of life; our minds are the fitful flashes of eternal light. [Will Durant]

Not everything that happens during the day is an open portending a good or evil development in the future, but everything has meaning to one degree or another, for the world is an ever-weaving tapestry from which no thread can be pulled without destroying the integrity of the cloth. The breadth of Creation makes it impossible for us to step back far enough to see the story that the tapestry tells; the intricacy of it, from the macro to the micro to the subatomic, makes it impossible for us to comprehend the megatrillions of connections between the threads in just one small fragment of the whole. [Dean Koontz]

Encourage yourself

Self-praise activates: 

  • Love

  • Trust

  • Joy

  • Excitement

  • Oxytocin 

  • Abundance 

Self-criticism activates:

  • Fear

  • Anger

  • Disgust

  • Shame

  • Sadness 

  • Scarcity 

Under praise’s spell, no one’s light can diminish our own. We need to bask in that shit.

On the other hand, criticism is contracting and makes us small. Small is not who we are.

Remember a time when you felt encouraged, seen, loved. Sit with that. How does it feel in your physical body? In your emotions? Mind? In your Spirit?

If you’re like me, you can feel it best in your physical body. I stand a little taller. Maybe my shoulders drop.

“Good job, Joce” I say to myself as I post this. 

Get out of your logical mind

Here’s another way to say it:

Take a bird’s-eye view. 

From high up, details fade and we can access the big picture. This vantage point can lead to fresh ideas and inspirations.

From here we can: 

  • free-associate

  • harness our emotion + intuition

  • feel our gut feelings

  • access the creative well inside

I’ve been a bit under the weather. Yesterday I had just enough energy to make an ikebana arrangement.

Ikebana is the Japanese art of flower arranging. The practice roughly translates to “making flowers come alive.”

You could call these arrangements abstract. They aren’t trying to achieve a particular design or mimic something in nature. 

You could say they don’t “make sense.” 

And this is the exact source of their beauty.

They are unconventional, each botanical given the space to be, and, when successful, to also be in harmony with one another.