Best of 2018’s Week 31

As time passed, I grew to know many of the people around me better than they knew themselves, but in that process I lost myself.

Brene Brown
Braving the Wilderness

These are some of the personally significant messages, Tweets, pictures, memes, and miscellaneous posts from this past week.

Every crack is also an opening.

Mark Nepo
The Book of Awakening
August 5

When in the midst of great change, it is helpful to remember how a chick is born. From the view of the chick, it is a terrifying struggle. Confined and curled in a dark shell, half-formed, the chick eats all its food and stretches to the contours of the shell. It begins to feel hungry and cramped. Eventually, the chick begins to starve and feel suffocated by the ever-shrinking space of its World.

Finally, its own growth begins to crack the shell, and the world as the chick knows it is coming to an end. Its sky is falling. As the chick wriggles through the cracks, it begins to eat the shell. At that moment – growing but fragile, starving and cramped, it’s world breaking – the chick must feel like it is dying. Yet once everything it has relied on falls away the chick is born. It doesn’t die but falls into the world.

The lesson is profound. Transformation always involves the falling away of things we have our light on, and we are left with the feeling that the world as we know it is coming to an end, because it is.

When faced with great change – in self, in relationship, in our sense of calling – we somehow must take in all that has enclosed us, nurtured us, incubated us, so when the new life is upon us, the old is within us.