Re: [pct-l] An Invitation

["Jeff Thompson" <sierra141@hotmail.com>]

>The Invitation 
>by Oriah/Mountain Dreamer, Native American Elder, May 1994 
>  [..great stuff snipped...]
>I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls 
>away. I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you 
>truly like the company you keep in the empty moments. 

Chris,
Thanks, I loved that.  It reminded me of William Faulkner's 12/10/50 
acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature:

"...the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths 
lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed--love and honor and pity 
and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors 
under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which 
nobody loses anything of value, and victories without hope and worst of 
all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal 
bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands. 

Until he learns these things, he will write as though he stood among and 
watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy 
enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the 
last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless 
rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then 
there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible 
voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will 
not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone 
among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a 
spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance."

If you liked the end of his speech, the full text is at:

http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/faulkner/faulkner.html

Peace,
Jeff

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