Sunday, April 22, 2012

For the Service April 15th: The Bounce


The Bounce. Finding our resiliance. Why do many people and organizations crumble in the face of difficulty, while others use adversity to bounce back even stronger? The experience of bounce can range from an uncanny feeling of levitation to a supreme tranquil relaxation. It is precisely when all seems lost that the opportunity exists to rewire your brain. It's often during life's most difficult times that we discover our most critical hidden strengths and that we forge our most important capabilities.

-Harriet Tubman : “if you hear the dogs, keep going. If you see the torches, keep going. If you hear them shouting, keep going. If you want a taste of freedom, keep going.

- bell hooks : “Contrary to what we may have been taught to think, unnecessary and unchosen suffering wounds us but need not scar us for life. It does mark us. What we allow the mark of our suffering to become is in our own hands.”

- Howard Thurman : I have never since lost sight of the far-flung mystery and redemption of the sacrament of pain.

It is small wonder that so much is made in the Christian religion of the necessity of rebirths.  There need not be only one single rebirth, but again and again a man may be reborn until at last there is nothing that remains between him and God.

[Alice Walker describes her  book, The Way Forward is with a Broken Heart as]...” the stories that came to me to be told after the close of a magical marriage to an extraordinary man that ended in a less-than-magical divorce. I found myself unmoored, unmated, ungrounded in a way that challenged everything I'd ever thought about human relationships. Situated squarely in that terrifying paradise called freedom, precipitously out on so many emotional limbs, it was as if I had been born; and in fact I was being reborn as the woman I was to become."
- Alice Walker

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