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On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old QUOTES

On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old QUOTES

1 " Wholeness is the goal [of life], but wholeness does not mean perfection. It means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life. "

― Parker J. Palmer , On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old

2 " Suffering breaks our hearts, but the heart can break in two different ways. There's the brittle heart that breaks into shards, shattering the one who suffers as it explodes, and sometimes taking others down when it's thrown like a grenade at the ostensible source of its pain.
Then there's the supple heart, the one that breaks open, not apart, the one that can grow into greater capacity for the many forms of love. Only the supple heart can hold suffering in a way that opens to new life. "

― Parker J. Palmer , On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old

3 " When I'm asked for the 'elevator speech' that sums up my work, I always respond, 'I always take the stairs, so I don't have an elevator speech. If you'd like to walk with me awhile, I'd love to talk.' I don't know of a life worth living or work worth doing that can be reduced to a sound bite." (40) "

― Parker J. Palmer , On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old

4 " The only way to become whole is to put our arms lovingly around -everything- we know ourselves to be: self-serving and generous, spiteful and compassionate, cowardly and courageous, treacherous and trustworthy. We must be able to say to ourselves and to the world at large, "I am -all- of the above." If we can't embrace the whole of who we are--embrace it with transformative love--we'll imprison the creative energies hidden in our own shadows and be unable to engage creatively with the world's complex mix of shadow and light. "

― Parker J. Palmer , On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old

5 " To grow in love and service, you must value ignorance as much as knowledge and failure as much as success. "

― Parker J. Palmer , On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old

6 " I no longer ask, “What do I want to let go of, and what do I want to hang on to?” Instead I ask, “What do I want to let go of, and what do I want to give myself to?” The desire to “hang on” comes from a sense of scarcity and fear. The desire to “give myself” comes from a sense of abundance and generosity. That’s the kind of truth I want to wither into. "

― Parker J. Palmer , On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old

7 " I’ll be asking if I was faithful to my gifts, to the needs I saw around me, and to the ways I engaged those needs with my gifts—faithful, that is, to the value, rightness, and truth of offering the world the best I had, as best I could. For helping me understand this—and for imbuing "

― Parker J. Palmer , On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old

8 " Smashing clay pots is called iconoclasm, a good thing when it’s needed. The failure to do it when needed is called idolatry, always a bad thing. In both writing and faith, we need to commit conceptual suicide again and again—if we are serious about the vastness of the treasure and the inadequacy of our frail, finite, and flawed words. "

― Parker J. Palmer , On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old

9 " It’s unfair to lay all responsibility for the future on the younger generation. After all, the problems they face are partly due to the fact that we, their elders, screwed up. Worse still, it’s not true that the young alone are in charge of what comes next. We—young and old together—hold the future in our hands. If our common life is to become more compassionate, creative, and just, it will take an intergenerational effort. "

― Parker J. Palmer , On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old

10 " If it’s true, as I claimed in the Prelude, that old is just another word for nothing left to lose, then taking the risk of a deep inward dive should get easier with age. It’s a risk we need to take. Aging and dying well, like everything else worth doing, require practice—practice going over the edge toward “the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest. "

― Parker J. Palmer , On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old

11 " The Cross is the sign of contradiction—destroying the seriousness of the Law, of the Empire, of the armies . . . But the magicians keep turning the cross to their own purposes. Yes, it is for them too a sign of contradiction: the awful blasphemy of the religious magician who makes the cross contradict mercy! This is of course the ultimate temptation of Christianity! "

― Parker J. Palmer , On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old

12 " logical but ungrounded ideas. It’s not the ethical self that wants to live by someone else’s “oughts.” It’s not the spiritual self that wants to fly nonstop to heaven. True self is the self with which we arrive on earth, the self that simply wants us to be who we were born to be. True self tells us who we are, where we are planted in the ecosystem of life, what “right action” looks like for us, and how we can grow more fully into our own potentials. As an old Hasidic tale reminds us, our mission is to live into the shape of true self, not the shape of someone else’s life: Before he died, Rabbi Zusya said: “In the world to come they will not ask me, ‘Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me, ‘Why were you not Zusya?’”18 Memo to myself: stay on the ground, turn around, ask, and listen. True self is true friend—it’s a friendship we ignore at our peril. And pass the word: friends don’t let friends live at altitude. "

― Parker J. Palmer , On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old

13 " In a prose passage on a life in art—without explanation or elaboration, as if the idea had just popped into his head and he had to capture it before it fled—Thoreau drops this simple couplet: My life has been the poem I would have writ But I could not both live and utter it. "

― Parker J. Palmer , On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old

14 " The first essay in this chapter, “The Music of Mentoring,” comes from my own experience of being a mentor. But its roots reach back to the years when I was mentored, to the elders who graced my life and helped me find my path when I was young. Mentors kept showing up for me until I was in my mid-thirties—then they stopped coming. I grieved that fact for a while, until I saw the secret hidden in plain sight: it was my turn to pay it forward by serving as a mentor for members of the rising generation. Then I found another secret hidden behind the first one: when I help young people flourish, they return the favor. "

― Parker J. Palmer , On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old

15 " Reach out to the younger generation—not to advise them but to learn from them, gain energy from them, and support them on their way. Erik Erikson called this kind of reaching out “generativity,” an alternative to the “stagnation” of age that sooner or later leads to despair. 2. Move toward whatever you fear, not away from it. I try to remember the advice I was given on an Outward Bound course when I was frozen with fear on a rock face in the middle of a 100-foot rappel: “If you can’t get out of it, get into it!” If, for example, you fear “the other,” get into his or her story face-to-face, and watch your fear shrink as your empathy expands. 3. Spend time in the natural world, as much time as you can. Nature constantly reminds me that everything has a place, that nothing need be excluded. That “mess” on the forest floor—like the messes in my own life— has an amazing integrity and harmony to it. "

― Parker J. Palmer , On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old