34 Quotes for 34 Years.
Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined finding myself on my 34th birthday in complete isolation, 5 days into a month of total silence, in the middle of the Mayan jungle, dieting the master trees of the Amazon, 5 weeks into a 1-year ancient rite of passage...
...indeed, until a few years ago, I wasn't even aware that this was a thing you could do. And yet, here we are. The Tao unfolds in mysterious, miraculous ways.
I've missed you. I've missed the space we have here. I really hope you've been well. Deep breath...
Writing here is an intimate affair for me. I know the vast majority of you personally. Many I have met in person, some online, and a small contingent still to meet. This isn't a faceless list to me. These are friends, colleagues, teachers, family.
It makes me nervous, actually. Wanting to send something valuable, fear of vulnerability, not wasting time, fear no one likes it—all the usual suspects show up. Every time.
I find myself in a quiet, tender, very squishy stage of life. I completed my 8 months of facilitating (phenomenal, best thing I've ever done so far)—took a few short weeks to pack on as much weight as I could—and have begun my full apprenticeship/initation. Stage 2 of this gigantic multi-year process.
It's been challenging—really tough already. This process, by my own volition and by its own nature, is stripping everything from me. My relationships, my work, my standing in society, various roles and identities once inhabited, routines, structures, core beliefs. Everything slowly falls away...
That void is quite difficult to inhabit on a day-to-day basis with any degree of sanity. But the void is also pregnant with possibility.
There's been beauty too, no doubt. We are still in the early days. I expected to be writing more than I am. But some periods you just need to soak it all in first. I hope, and intend, to publish more while this continues. We will see.
Though I would not let myself miss this annual tradition, sharing a few pithy ideas on my birthday. Here are 32 Reflections, and 33 Thoughts from years past:
Eric Brown
Eric Brown
This year, I dug into my quote archive and excavated a few gems. And as I did this, something interesting happened...
Hints of a story emerged. A narrative arc—a hero's journey of sorts—threaded through the whispers of these inspiring individuals. I arranged the quotes in a few 'chapters', and in order.
If you read these thoughtfully, maybe you'll pick up on the thread too. Echoes of eternity, the glorious depths of the human spirit, the raging against the dying of the light, and the miraculous gift of life and finding your place in it.
I love you dearly, talk more soon.
EB. 🙏🏻
“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.” – Aldous Huxley
“A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to commit outrages…” – Hermann Hesse
“Wealth is what you have minus what you want; and by that definition some billionaires are broke.” – Morgan Housel
“A lot of the progress impulse is a pathological result of emptiness.” – Daniel Schmachtenberger
“A child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.” – African Proverb
“Historically, the most terrible things; war, genocide, and slavery, have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.” – Howard Zinn
“The tragedy of life is not death, but what we let die inside us while we live.” – Native American Proverb
“Hope has two beautiful daughters - Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are, and Courage to see that they do not remain as they are.” – St. Augustine
“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” – Anais Nin
“The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud.” – Coco Chanel
“How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself?” – Epictetus
“One should decide within the space of 7 breaths.” – Yamamoto Tsunetomo
“A man without a vision for his future will always return to his past.”
“To become who you want to be, you must sacrifice who you are.”
“The depth of the learning is in direct relation to the intensity of the experience.” – Robert Monroe
“Schools of deep thought have always imposed the discipline of silence.” – Oswald Wirth
“He who is only an athlete is too crude, too vulgar, too much of a savage. He who is a scholar only is too soft, too effeminate. The ideal citizen is the scholar athlete, the man of thought and the man of action.” – Plato
“The most intelligent men, like the strongest, find their happiness where others would find only disaster: in the labyrinth, in being hard with themselves and with others, in effort; their delight is in self-mastery; in them asceticism becomes second nature, a necessity, an instinct. They regard a difficult task as a privilege; it is to them a recreation to play with burdens that would crush all others.” – Nietzsche
“He who delights in solitude is either a wild beast or a God.” – Nietzsche
“The lion and tiger may be larger, but you will never see the wolf perform at the circus…”
“What’s the core principle of a healthy identity? It’s something like the willingness and ability to adopt the stance of optimal challenge in the face of the catastrophe of life and the reality of atrocity. It’s a dancing stance. A playful stance if optimized. Eyes fully open, facing forward.” – Jordan Peterson
“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play, his labour and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself he always seems to be doing both.” – Lawrence Pearsall Jacks
“If there were any one period of time that one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of revolution? When old and new stand side by side and admit of being compared. When the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope. And when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new. This time, like all times, is a very good time, if we but know what to do with it.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“We must go far beyond any transformation of contemporary culture. We must go back to the genetic imperative from which human cultures emerge originally and from which they can never be separated without losing their integrity and their survival capacity. None of our existing cultures can deal with this situation out of its own resources. We must invent, or reinvent, a sustainable human culture by a descent into our pre-rational, our instinctive resources. Our cultural resources have lost their integrity. They cannot be trusted. What is needed is not transcendence but "inscendence," not the brain but the gene.” – Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth
“There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth—we are all crew.” – Marshall McLuhan
“Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and destroys a visible Nature. Unaware that the Nature he's destroying is this God he's worshiping.” – Hubert Reeves
“The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will make you an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.” – Werner Heisenberg
“We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.” – William James
“Life, like a dome of many-colored glass / Stains the white radiance of Eternity.” – Shelly
“Life unfolds of its own and does not need commentary. The habit of editorializing about what is witnessed needs to be voluntarily surrendered to God.” – David Hawkins
“My own self I will place in Suchness, and, so that all the world might be helped, I will place all beings into Suchness, and I will lead to Nirvana the whole immeasurable world of beings.“ – Astasahasrika Prajnaparamita
“When we’re conscious with every step, making tea becomes a work of art." – Eckhart Tolle
“There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirt requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet.” – Annie Dillard
“It is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in the broken world.” – Mary Oliver, Invitation
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