Michael Meade Quotes

There is a poem at the heart of things and a mythic story in the heart of each of us.

At critical moments in the life of individuals and of societies, it is not necessarily the facts that are needed as much as a profound narrative that makes sense of life’s conflicts and misunderstandings. When all seems to be falling apart and becoming less rational and more chaotic, it is usually a different story that is needed to make things whole again. Mythic imagination can break the spell of time and open us to a level of life that remains timeless. Myth is not about what happened in past times; myth is about what happens to people all of the time.

What good is a path that doesn’t carry us to the edge of our capacity and then beyond that place? A true calling involves a great exposure before it can become a genuine refuge.

The ship is always off course. Anybody who sails knows that. Sailing is being off course and correcting. That gives a sense of what life is about.

Timing can be everything and wisdom requires the patience to wait as well as the courage to leap when the time becomes right.

Soul is found where life deepens us, where meaning calls to us, where trouble deters us, wherever and however we slow down in the midst of the rushing and racing at the surface level of life.

An old Celtic proverb boldly places death right at the center of life. ‘Death is the middle of a long life,’ they used to say. Ancient people did things like that; they put death at the center instead of casting it out of sight and leaving such an important subject until the last possible moment. Of course, they lived close to nature and couldn’t help but see how the forest grew from fallen trees and how death seemed to replenish life from fallen members. Only the unwise and the overly fearful think that death is the blind enemy of life.

When seen with imagination, all things shift toward meaning, releasing energies that are hidden within appearances, releasing the inner wings of spirit, opening wide the doors to healing and wholeness.

The divine is at the edge of our awareness and vision, but it is also within us as the first seeker found when all seemed lost completely. In order to find the dream of life again, we must first find the way that the dream exists within our own souls. We may be daunted by the surfacing of all the dilemmas and trouble of this troubled world, but the deep self and soul within us already knows how we are intended to swim in the blessed turmoil of the waters of life. For humans exist to bring meaning to the surface of life and awareness to the dream of existence.

There will always be the facts of life to contend with, and there are times when the facts can become overwhelming. Yet, there is a poem at the heart of things and a mythic story in the heart of each of us. At certain times it is the poetry of life and the mythic imagination of the soul that become necessary in order to heal the wounds inflicted by an excess of reason or an overuse of force. When we unfold the story wound within our souls and untie the knots within us, we add presence to the world and contribute to the spirit of life in a specific and authentic way.

The real education is when you awaken and nourish and guide the inner spirit, this inner genius. The community grows from the giving of the gifts of the people in it, which is really giving from the genius.

Some might ask whether the path is before us or within us. The answer is: Yes. We are both driven from within by our resident spirit and something outside calls forth the genius within us.

Once a person falls in the fields of love, all the rules are already broken; the lover becomes open and exalted in ways that transcend the local issues as well as the commonly held beliefs. Love, like genuine devotion, will find a way. Where duty becomes replaced with love, a greater and deeper faith will blossom forth. For the deepest meaning of “belief” refers to being loyal to what the heart already loves. As people used to say, “What the heart loves is the cure.” The cure for healing the wounds and conflicts between faiths and systems of belief involves awakening to the unique ways that each heart carries devotion and love. When followed far enough, simple belief can transform into wisdom; raw passions can become a greater compassion that trusts what resides in one’s heart and even in the hearts of others. Until the heart opens and the eyes begin to see there is always the danger of blindness and narrowness and the tendency to hold onto narrow ways of being.

Mentoring is an archetypal activity that has timeless elements which can connect us to the universal ground where nature renews itself and culture becomes reimagined. Youth and elder meet where the pressure of the future meets the presence of the past. Old and young are opposites that secretly identify with each other for neither fits well into the mainstream of life.

A community best serves itself when it truly serves the awakening of the unique story trying to come to life through each person born.

Something deep in the human soul awakens as things fall apart. Something in the soul knows that everything in this world can become lost. And something in the soul knows how to survive periods of devastation, disorientation and loss. Descent and falling is the way of the soul from its beginning. We each fell from the womb of life when the waters of the inner sea broke and it came time for us to breathe on our own.

The issue is not simply one of needing to save the world, but also of needing to solve the problem of the loss of soul throughout the modern world. Part of what has been lost in the reckless rushing of modernity is the sense that each life has an authentic interior that shelters important emotions as well as inherent purpose, and that the dignity of existence includes a necessary instinct to unfold the unique story woven inside each living soul.

Liberation happens each time we become conscious of the contents of the soul.

The second adventure involves the divine spark hidden in each soul and the dark times require that the inner light of soul be found again. Perhaps there is no greater time to awaken to the adventure the soul would have us live and become agents of the divine in this world.

The only choice once your world has been torn apart is to find your genius and live with that. ‘Normal’ is out of the question. The healing for veterans, or anyone going through great tragedy, is finding your natural spirit and your genius that was waiting to be found. That can now become the cohering principle in your life. The idea of patching someone up and back into normal when they’ve had extremely abnormal experiences is a misunderstanding.

In order to understand the conditions we are in, we must place ourselves not in the mainstream of life but in the timeless stream of myth. As the fabric of life loosens, the veil between this world of hard facts and the otherworld of great imagination also becomes thinner and more permeable. Just as time seems to be running out, timeless things try to slip back into human awareness.

Everyone who enters the world comes in with hidden gold, it's called your natural gifts. The job of a person is to find the hidden gold and give it. It turns out that when you give it you get more than when you hold on to it, that's the economy of the soul.

When we place our immediate conflicts in the territory of an archetypal story we can better see the nature of our problems and find solutions that bring creative imagination to bear in the realm of hard facts and hardening dilemmas.

What is most lacking in the modern world of duplications and facsimiles, of endless information and intentional misinformation, is the authenticity that makes life truly meaningful and spiritually rewarding.

One of the open secrets of life on earth is that the answer to life’s burning question has been inscribed in one’s soul all along. The soul is a kind of ancient vessel that holds the exact knowledge we seek and need to find our way in life. Each life is a pilgrimage intended to arrive at the center of the pilgrim’s soul. From that vantage point, the issue is not whether we managed to choose the right god or the only way to live righteously; such notions fail to recognize the inborn intimacy each soul already has with the divine.

Fate and destiny are close woven within us and near them can be found the true genius of our lives.

If we want the world to change, the healing of culture and greater balance in nature, it has to start inside the human soul.

Healing is a revolutionary act and we are here to awaken to the true nature of our own souls and the gifts we have to give to the world.

The hardest thing in life may be to learn to truly trust that there is something noble and generative in ourselves. This is a greater sense of the notion of believing in our self; to truly believe in oneself means to uncover the inner core of imagination and authenticity that can also be called the genius within us. When we connect to the inner resident of the soul, we also learn how we are woven to the Soul of the World.

The thread that ties us to the center is the hidden cord of the heart, it is the thread of genius that can connect the mind with the heart, that allows the mind to feel and reveals the thought set within the heart.

We may be closest to hearing the call when we feel most alone or in trouble, for genius hides behind the wound and one of the greatest wounds in life is to not know who we are intended to be or what we are supposed to serve in life.

Whereas literalists and fundamentalists tend to choose one pole of any dilemma or opposition, whereas modern political parties and religious groups tend towards demonizing each other, the creative individual must be born again and again in the crucible created by the tension between opposing instincts, conflicted feelings, and contrasting ideas.

Myth and nature are the two great garments of the world, with nature being the living green garment that covers the planet and myth being the multidimensional, many-colored fabric that continually weaves human culture.

When a situation feels like a matter of life and death the deep self is close at hand and it already carries inner medicine and its own life remedy.

Myth offers a third place to stand or a third way to see when we find ourselves caught between opposing ideas and hardening ideologies.

Education at a deep level means to ‘lead out’ what is trying to be born from within. The job of a true teacher is to help awaken the inner pupil that has its own way of being and unique way of perceiving the world.

In these dark and uncertain times, there can be great value in imagining a bit of star in each human soul. Not just that it gives some hope for humanity at a time when man’s inhumanity to man seems ever on the increase; but also because it points to an inner brightness that can light the way in dark times.

The ability to be tough-minded remains useful; but by now, the fact that we are all in trouble in terms of both nature and culture can only be denied by those who become overly conservative and blindly reactionary. The more tender-hearted imagination that suggests we are all in this together and that there must be an underlying unity in life may be the only way to survive.

Many people believe that eliminating the apparent causes of fear will eliminate it, but fear, like beauty, is part of the world. The fear of fear results in the growth of terror as well as a loss of the beauty and wonder of the world. By fearing fear, we create the room for terror and panic to grow. People become blinded by fear, driven by anxieties, and increasingly ruled by phobias and obsessions. When we fail to recognize how fear works in the world, we become ruled by it. The point is not to become paralyzed with foreboding or be caught in the panic that can grip the collective and cause people to run blindly in the wrong direction. The point is to willingly go where most fear to go, to follow where the fear might lead and face the ways that the world roars at us.

Set within the seed of the soul is not jut a fleeting image or a vague pattern but a lifelong story enfolded within, waiting to be cracked open and lived all the way out.

There is a greater will, a greater need and purpose hidden within each life, and there is an inner law that knows best how each must live and that is worth stealing for; it’s worth dying for, and worth living for as well.

When a person becomes aware of their genius and they live it and they give generously from it, they change the world, they affect the world. And when they depart everyone knows something is missing.

Life roars at us when it wants or needs us to change. Ultimately, change means trans formation, a shifting from one form to another that involves the magic of creation. The trouble with entrenched oppositions is that each side becomes increasingly one-sided and single minded and unable to grow or meaningfully change. In the blindness of fear and the willfulness of abstract beliefs, people forget or reject the unseen yet essential unity that underlies all the oppositions in life.

Each life involves an essential errand; not simply the task of survival, but a life-mission embedded in the soul from the beginning.

Inside each one of us there is a mostly hidden, mostly golden, mostly eternal image or aspect of being, similar to the gold that is buried in the earth. We are the earthlings, the children of the earth, and therefore we are a replica, in a sense, of the earth itself. One of the ideas that is important is: As above, so below. As outside, so within.

A true pilgrimage requires letting go of the very things most people try to hold onto. In seeking after what the soul desires, we become pilgrims with no home but the path the soul would have us follow.

Sometimes, the greatest safety can be found in taking the right risk. Whether it be an individual, a community or a country, when faced with tragedy or fearful uncertainty, we either become bigger and enter life more fully, or else we accept a diminished life and resign ourselves to a smaller way of being.

Something watches over us and we know it when we follow the little voice inside or heed the warning or inspiration that arrives as if on wings. We need the intermediaries that keep us close to the spirit of life, to the wonders of nature and to the subtleties of our own inner nature.

In the end, what we fear will not go away, for it indicates what we must go through in order to awaken, become more genuine, and live more fully. The problem is that we tend to be most afraid of what our own souls require of us. Often our deepest fear is that we might become who we are intended to be, who we already are at our core. For becoming who we truly are requires the greatest amount of change.

Our deepest longings and the question of who we are intended to be cuts us in half, dividing us within ourselves. At critical stages and significant moments in the course of life, we sink with the weight of our own questions; we drown in our own psyche in order to reach a subtle ground that secretly sustains our every breath. In that sense, all separations, splits, and conflicts are evidence of a unity we long to find, both individually and collectively.

Something ancient in us bends us toward the origins of the whole thing. We either drown in the splits and confusions of our lives, or we surrender to something greater than ourselves. The water of our deepest troubles is also the water of our own solution. In surrender, we descend down to the bottom of it and back to the beginning of it; down into what is divided in order to get back to the wholeness before the split. Healing, health, wealth, wholeness: all hail from the same roots. To heal is to make whole again; wholeness is what all healing seeks and what alone can truly unify our spirit.

A society that fails to water the life-seeds of its members may be capable of instructing its citizens, but will be incapable of truly educating its children or wholly embracing its youth.

There is a myth at the heart of things and some element of genius in the heart of each person.

Each soul lives on the verge of remembering the forgotten agreement and original dream that it carries; yet each moment can be another point when the dream of life becomes lost again. Each meaningful step we take on the path of life involves some tension between the needs of the common world and the dreams of the soul. This inherent tension can stop us in our tracks, yet can also be the source of vital energy needed for the soul to grow. Each time we remember a piece of why we came to life we pull the seeds of eternity farther into the world of time. The inner seed keeps trying to sprout, but often our fate must place us in a crossroads or nail us to a cross before we pay proper attention to it.

A genuine education must somehow serve the wings of spirit and imagination that each child brings to life.

In the end, as at the beginning, the divine turns out to be most interested in the unique life of the individual soul. That’s what was meant by the old idea that “inside people is where god learns.” This is not a religious notion, but more of a spiritual insight. For this conversation god is simply the shortest way to refer to the divine. When a unique life becomes fully livedeveryone involved learns something and it becomes clear that god was involved all along.

Until a person has failed significantly or missed the boat, they will not know how to hold the tension until the right moment or how to test the waters before pushing on.

What good is a dream that doesn’t test the mettle of the dreamer? What good is a path that doesn’t carry us to the edge of our capacity and then beyond that place? A true calling involves a great exposure before it can become a genuine refuge.

The problem in most situations is not a lack of calling but a fear of responding to the call.

What’s secretly in the water of modern culture is that people enter the world empty. That’s a very dangerous idea,because if everybody’s empty than other people can get us to do whatever they want because there’s nothing in us to stand against it. But if we came to do something that’s meaningful, that involves giving and making the world a more beautiful, healthy, lively place, then you become a difficult person to move around and manipulate.