In the same way that each infant arrives with a unique set of fingerprints as well as precise brain printing, each soul bears an inner imprint and unique psychic pattern. Human nature includes the hallmark of genius and a stamp of uniqueness provided by great nature. Nature produces life on a massive scale, yet each person born remains singular, never to be repeated. Just as there is no such thing as an average rainfall or an average tree, there is no such thing as an average person.

Michael Meade - The Genius Myth

~

Your dominant gifts are a clue into the problem you are assigned to solve.

Holy Eros - James Whitehead & Evelyn Whitehead

~

Why is there such a vast self-help industry in this country? Why do all these selves need help? They have been deprived of something by our psychological culture. They have been deprived of the sense that there is something else in life, some purpose that has come with them into the world.

James Hillman

~

Everyone is gifted. This means that everyone has something to give. A person who does not feel gifted is lost in a pit of oblivion and confusion. The question is: what happens when what you do does not align with who you are? It means you are betraying the very vitality that defines you and are thus inviting great pain into your life.

Malidoma Somé

~

…the gift is a thing we do not get by our own efforts. We cannot buy it; we cannot acquire it through an act of will. It is bestowed upon us.

Lewis Hyde

~

Our gifts are often simultaneously our greatest strengths and our greatest weaknesses. When we accept this in ourselves and others, we can begin to become truly whole people and create space in the world for others to do the same.

Caitlin Childs

~

A gift is not a gift until it’s given.

Lewis Hyde

~

The courage to participate with others in reciprocal gift exchange is at the core of hope, both in individuals and in our collective lives together. The hope that we will not simply survive, but thrive, if we believe that all of us have gifts worthy of leading with. There is abundance all around us all the time.

Bruce Anderson - Walking Your Gifted Path

~

The naming of their gifts is the most powerful thing that will ever happen to a child.

John McKnight, Recognizing Gifts

~

There are deeper names we carry that we don’t know about or fully understand.

Luis Rodriguez

 ~

Squandering our gifts brings distress to our lives. As it turns out, it’s not merely benign or “too bad” if we don’t use the gifts we’ve been given; we pay for it with our emotional and physical well-being. …we feel disconnected and weighed down by feelings of emptiness, frustration, resentment, shame, disappointment, fear, and even grief.

Brené Brown - The Gifts of Imperfection

~

Leadership springs from the pursuit of purpose. Purpose is longing—love for what the soul wants most to pursue in and through this life. The Greeks called it Eros—the capacity to follow what is most intensely missing or unfinished in our lives. Purpose wells up from the soul. It is not something we invent. It finds us—if we pay attention.

Bob Anderson - Mastering Leadership

~

Comparing gifts is our mind’s safety mechanism kicking in. Because there is hard work and uncertainty in using our gifts, the mind looks for a cop-out, an opportunity to get off the hook to act. If we can convince ourselves that our gifts are unimportant compared to someone else’s, then we justify our staying put.

Three Lies About Gifts - Unknown author

~

We waste our cancer if we believe it is a curse and not a gift.

John Piper - Don’t Waste Your Cancer

~

The greatest gift you can give one another is rapt attention to one another’s existence.

Sue Atchley Ebaugh

~

There are so many gifts

Still unopened from your birthday,

There are so many hand-crafted presents

That have been sent to you by God.

Hafiz - So Many Gifts

~

A king sent you to a country to carry out one special, specific task. You go to the country and you perform a hundred other tasks, but if you have not performed the task you were sent for, it is as if you have performed nothing at all. So man has come into the world for a particular task and that is his purpose. If he doesn’t perform it, he will have done nothing.

Rumi

~

So, when we seek our birthright gifts, it is important not to equate them with the techniques our society names as skills. Our gifts may be as simple as a real interest in other people, a quiet and caring manner, an eye for beauty, a love of rhythm and sound. But in those simple personal gifts, the seeds of vocation are often found, if we are willing to do the inner and outer work necessary to cultivate our mastery.

Parker Palmer - The Active Life

~

An occupation is the only thing which balances the distinctive capacity of an individual with his social service. To find out what one is fitted to do and to secure an opportunity to do it is the key to happiness. Nothing is more tragic than failure to discover one’s true business in life, or to find that one has drifted or been forced by circumstance into an uncongenial calling.

John Dewey - Democracy and Education

~

…initiation lies at the core of any genuine human life. And this is true for two reasons. The first is that any genuine human life implies profound crises, ordeals, suffering, loss and reconquest of self, “death and resurrection.” The second is that, whatever degree of fulfillment it may have brought him, at a certain moment every man sees his life as a failure. This vision does not arise from a moral judgment made on his past, but from an obscure feeling that he has missed his vocation: that he has betrayed the very best that was in him.

Mircea Eliade - Rites and Symbols of Initiation

~

What would really be a lesson that everybody should learn is that…things come out of nothing. Things evolve out of nothing. The tiniest seed in the right situation turns into the most beautiful forest, and then, the most promising seed in the wrong situation turns into nothing… But with this insight you could have another kind of life. You could say, “Well, I know that things come from nothing very much and start from unpromising beginnings, and I’m an unpromising beginning—I could start something”.

Brian Eno

~

Each child may be a gift to its people, but each can easily become a burden to the community until their inner abilities are found and used. Each has the ability to become a boon or a bane to the rest of the human village. The difference depends on whether people feel welcome in this world and whether they find ways to use their natural gifts and make a meaningful way in life. When a culture forgets this, it will fail to welcome the newborns, it will neglect its own youth, and its old people will cling to lives not fully lived.

Michael Meade - Fate and Destiny

~

Despite what we say to ourselves about wanting to know who we really are, there is a very strong chance that we will steer clear of decisive meetings with ourselves for as long as possible. It is far easier to walk in shoes too small for us that to step into the largeness that the soul expects and demands.

James Hollis - Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life

~

I want to know if you are prepared to live in the world with its harsh need to change you. If you can look back with firm eyes saying this is where I stand.

David Whyte

~

I am not what has happened to me. I am what I choose to become.

Carl Jung

~

Consider this: “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive”.

Howard Thurman

~

We may choose careers, but we do not choose vocation. Vocation chooses us. To choose what chooses us is a freedom, the by-product of which will be a sense of rightness and a harmony within, even if lived out in the world of conflict, absent validation, and at considerable personal cost.

James Hollis - Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life

~

The thing about a natural gift is that it can be a curse, too. We should all be so lucky to have that kind of curse in the way that you’re cursed with the drive for the never-ending pursuit of whatever it is. Whether it be excellence, or having a better message, or more empowering, or whatever it is. You have that never-ending pursuit. It’s pretty tricky, because, it’s like this fire that you gotta keep putting wood in and it’s like, ok, the woods getting low and you gotta fill it up again. And how do you make the transition from doing it from anger, which is where we usually start from, to all of a sudden this new transition to, O.K., let’s do it from being content…..oh, that’s tricky. Wow, that’s a rough one. Or from anger to happiness, oh, that’s even harder.

Laird Hamilton

~

…we sometimes summon our cynicism and decide that the free gift was an illusion. We say, “there is no free lunch,” forgetting that women have been cooking lunch for free for millennia.

Genevieve Vaughan - The Enigma of the Gift

~

I don’t mean to be sentimental about suffering, but people who cannot suffer can never grow up and can never discover who they are.

James Baldwin - The Fire Next Time

~

A pitcher cries for water to carry. And a person for work that is real.

Marge Piercy

~

Punishing a person, when their gift is being given in ways that are not helpful, sends a message to the person’s psyche that the most valuable part of who they are is not worthy of others’ attention and gratitude. The likely result is a building of resentment, a purposeful lack of appreciation of others’ gifts, and a continuing escalation of the disruptive behavior.

Bruce Anderson - The Teacher’s Gift: Using Your Core Gift to Inspire and Heal

~

Often, people working with the homeless get bogged down providing services for addiction, mental health, abuse, behavioral issues and employment. What gets ignored is helping people rediscover, and in some cases discover for the first time, their giftedness. It is so critical. Where people find hope, where their soul and their spirit are resuscitated, it’s in being able to give expression to their gifts.

Louis Nanni, former Director, Center for the Homeless, South Bend, Indiana

~

The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.

Mark Twain

~

Most of us are unfamiliar with a deep and abiding sense of purpose, not because we don’t have one, but because we have not integrated a discipline of silent attention into our lives. Without this discipline, we run the risk of becoming seriously off course and never living into our true destiny. Discovering purpose is simply a matter of paying attention to what our life has been telling us. Life has been speaking to us for a long time about what matters most. It has been leaving clues. It remains for us to have the courage to maintain a discipline of attention to the subtle way our soul calls to us.

Bob Anderson - Mastering Leadership

~

We all feel that we’re not enough to make a difference. That we need to be more somehow. What if we were exactly what’s needed? What then? How would I live if I was exactly what’s needed to heal the world?

Rachel Naomi Remen

~

It just gets you deep to the core. I have relationships with clients that are fundamentally different after helping them find their gift. I recognize how many judgements, prejudices, and fears I have about people…and how deeply homeless people are hurt by not being seen for who they really are.

Philip Bates - Seeds for Recovery Publication, Community Activators

~

We are supposed to live out this big dream. The problem is, our families either don’t know or they forget this is supposed to happen and they repress the dream. The good news is this: an imperfect family gives us the opportunity to walk out wounded, looking for a blessing. Families are the rough material from which gifts are formed.

Michael Meade - Speaking at a youth and mentors’ event

~

I cannot give what I do not possess, so I need to know what gifts have grown up within me that are now ready to be harvested and shared. If the gifts I give are mine, grown from the seed of pure self, I can give them without burning out. Like the fruit of a tree, they will replenish themselves in due season.

Parker Palmer -  A Hidden Wholeness

~

When we mistakenly give our gifts believing we are doing so only out of service to another person, we discard one of the most beautiful and essential ideas about gifts—the reciprocity within the gift means that both the giver and the receiver benefit. The receiver gets the gift that is given, and the giver receives the healing and a conscious awareness of the increased ability that results each time the gift is given.

Bruce Anderson - Being En Pointe: Dancing with our gifts

~

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

George Bernard Shaw

~

Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray.

Rumi

~

Hospitality, then, is our grateful Christian response to God’s gift of a home. Like all true gifts, a home does not belong entirely to the one who received it, for it bears the mark of the Giver, who wants us to share it with others.

Smith and Carvill - The Gift of the Stranger

~

After a few weeks among the poor in Lima, Peru, I was so impressed by their gifts of joy, peace, and gentleness—not withstanding their great needs—that I came to realize that my vocation was as much that of receiver as of giver. Perhaps it was more important for me to receive from the poor the many gifts born of their love than to try and make myself valuable in their eyes.

Henri J.W. Nouwen - My Sister, My Brother

~

What each must seek in their life never was on land or sea. It is something out of their own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else.

Joseph Campbell

~

Go all the way with it. Do not back off. For once, go all the goddamn way with what matters.

Ernest Hemingway

~

Each person has a variety of ordinary and extraordinary gifts. The people whom we call handicapped are people who are missing some typical ordinary gifts. However, such people also have a variety of other ordinary and extraordinary gifts capable of stimulating interaction and meaning with others. Seeing disability somehow prevents us from seeing the gifts in a person, at least at first. And so we are surprised when we find ourselves experiencing pleasure, meaning, and opportunity in the presence of a disabled person.

Judith Snow - What I Know About Community

~

Your gifts rest deep in your bones—yet, when you give them, they become a visible and actionable oath demonstrating over and over again your faith in the thread of life you are woven into.

Bruce Anderson - Walking Your Gifted Path

~

A key covenant is to see the gifts of the widow. And the orphan. And the immigrant. Anyone on the margin. We were all there once. People of any prosperity or power are always surprised when the gifts of those that they blame or look down on are revealed. This exposure of gifts is the way into the kind of community that we want. It’s one of the most significant acts that we can do.

Peter Block, Walter Bruggemann, John McKnight - An Other Kingdom

~

Amidst a period of world-wide uncertainty, there is an acceleration of calling and a great need for the natural genius of each person to awaken. There may be no better time to learn the pattern set within the soul and claim the mythic thread that brought us to life to begin with. When aligned with the soul’s mythic thread, we can express the natural genius of our lives and be of genuine service to others and to a world increasingly in need of inspiration, imagination and healing.

Michael Meade - Workshop: Personal Myth: The Unique Story Trying to Live Through You.

~

It’s lovely when you find someone who is doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing and their work is an expression of their inner gift and in witnessing to that gift and bringing it out they actually provide an incredible service to us all. And I think you see that the gifts that are given to us as individuals are not for us alone, or for our own self-improvement, but they are actually for the community and to be offered.

John O’Donohue - Inner Landscape of Beauty, On Being with Krista Tippet

~

Living well is not about eradicating our wounds and weaknesses, but understanding how they complete our identity and equip us to help others.

Rachel Naomi Remen

~

“No good thing is easy.” They told us that,

While we dug our fingers into the stones

And looked beseechingly into their eyes.

They say the hurt is good for you. It makes

What comes later a gift all the more

Precious in your bleeding hands.

William Stafford - Consolations (from The Darkness Around Us Is Deep)

~

…the most subtle barrier to the discernment of our native gifts is in the gifts themselves: they are so central to us, so integral to who we are, that we take them for granted and are often utterly unaware of the mastery they give us.

Parker Palmer - The Active Life

~

The critical problems of becoming male and female, of relations within the family, and of passing into old age are directly related to the devices which the society offers the individual to help him achieve the new adjustment. Somehow we seem to have forgotten this—or perhaps the ritual has become so completely individualistic that it is now found for many only in the privacy of the psychoanalyst’s couch.

Salon T. Kimbal - Introduction to Rites of Passage

~

Leadership is fundamentally the act of articulating and acting in pursuit of a vision that flows from our commitment to a higher purpose. Each of us has a unique and personal purpose that is seeking expression through our lives. Vision is a picture of how we want to actualize that meaning in tangible ways. It is a way of perceiving the specific direction our spirit longs to go. True vision is specific, strategic, loyal and communal.

Bob Anderson - Mastering Leadership

~

Integrity means to live from the place in you that has the greatest truth.

Rachel Naomi Remen

~

There is a place in the soul where neither time, nor space, nor no creative thing can touch. Your identity is not equivalent to your biography. There is a place in you where you have never been wounded. Where there is still a sureness in you, where there is a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you. And I think the intention of prayer and spirituality and love is now and again to visit that inner kind of sanctuary.

John O’Donohue - Inner Landscape of Beauty: On Being with Krista Tippett

~

Knowing your gift is a matter of personal dignity. This seed of dignity is bigger thanthe degree of tragedies or disappointments we experience. It can be hindered by too much suffering and abuse, but it cannot be taken away from us. Our dignity lies in knowing our path and having the courage for a renewed start to the giving of the gift.

Gina Anderson - Seeds for Recovery Publication

~

The healing road’s not a highway

It’s a path where speed’s not king.

It’s a slow road, it’s a toll road

To unlock the gifts you bring.

Look forward while looking back

And see what looks the same

The gift you bring’s on a well-worn path

Part of your true name

Bruce Anderson - The Gift (refrain lyrics)

~

It’s an old idea of each of us having one or two ideas in life and spending our years expressing them, and expressing them, and expressing them.

John Ashbery, poet

~

It’s worthwhile making a distinction between talents and gifts. More important than our talents are our gifts. We may have only a few talents, but we have many gifts. Our gifts are the many ways in which we express ourhumanity. They are part of who we are: friendship, kindness, patience, joy, peace, forgiveness, gentleness, love, hope, trust, and many others. These are the true gifts we have to offer each other.

Henri J.M. Nouwen - Life of the Beloved

~

Intelligence minus purpose equals stupidity.

Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

~

…our job is to make choices that create the right conditions for the dharma to flourish. The Gift is indestructible. It is a seed. We are not required to be God. We are not required to create the seed. Only to plant it wisely and well.

Stephen Cope - The Great Work of Your Life

~

There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit distributes them. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord.

Holy Bible, 1 Corinthians 12:4

~

A gift is not a gift until it is given.

Lewis Hyde - The Gift

~

Talent is like the marksman who hits a target which others cannot reach; genius is like the marksman who hits a target … which others cannot even see.

Arthur Schopenhauer - The World as Will and Representation

~

What have you learned

From the burn of the stove left on too long?

What can you offer humanity

If you dance all night

To someone else’s song?

At your core lies the door

Which only can be opened

By the key of community.

Set free by the need

And the absence of greed

Because our cups do runneth over.

Dawn Solomon - A Young Person's Response to the Idea of Gifts.

~

In the longing for our giant selves, there lies our goodness.

Kahlil Gibran

~

The social structures of the gift still serve a purpose: to remind its members of the truth of their connectedness, to rein in anyone who may have forgotten, and to provide gift structures that work to meet the society’s needs.

Charles Eisenstein - Sacred Economics

~

God created you with unimaginable gifts. It is the affirmation of others that makes that gift possible. You only know you have a gift when there is someone to say, ‘Thank You’. Affirmation creates community.

Henri J.M. Nouwen

~

Surrendering to the pull of your identify is like tumbling into the safety net that has always been there for you, waiting for you to see it and take the plunge into its woven warmth. What you are doing is handing over the reins of your life to the part of you you can count on the most to make wise decision, to build meaningful relationships, to guide you through pain, to steer you to a place in this world you can call your own.

Larry Ackerman - The Identity Code

~

Receiving often is harder than giving. Giving is very important: giving insight, giving hope, giving courage, giving advice, giving support, giving money, and, most of all, giving ourselves. Without giving there is no brotherhood and sisterhood. But receiving is just as important, because by receiving we reveal to the givers that they have gifts to offer. When we say, “Thank you, you gave me hope; thank you, you gave me a reason to live; thank you, you allowed me to realize my dream,” we make givers aware of their unique and precious gifts. Sometimes it is only in the eyes of the receivers that givers discover their gifts.

Henri J.M. Nouwen

~

Someone I loved once gave me a box of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.

Mary Oliver

~

Everyone has a gift for something, even if it is the gift of being a good friend.

Marian Anderson

~

Societies have progressed in so far as they themselves…have succeeded in stabilizing relationships, giving, receiving, and finally, giving in return.… Only then did people learn how to create mutual interests, giving mutual satisfaction, and, in the end, to defend them without having to resort to arms.

Marcel Mauss - The Gift

~

Finding your gift, and finding ways to give it, brings a palpable sense of peace. Your search is finally over, along with the anxiety it creates. The emptiness that has eaten at your gut subsides. Authenticity, and the strength it produces, is yours: nothing about you is made up.

Larry Ackerman - The Identity Code

~

Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms.

Holy Bible, 1 Peter 4:10

~

All individuals have distinct biologies, but no one has a predetermined biological fate. Every individual is built with the capacity, as Patrick Bateson says, “to develop in a number of distinctly different ways.” To discover your own potential, add water, love, perseverance, and lots and lots of time.

David Shenk - The Genius In All Of Us

~

Every problem is a gift. Without problems we would not grow.

Anthony Robbins

~

A wonderful gift may not be wrapped as you expect.

Jonathan Lockwood Huie

~

How little we understand of the gifts we have been given or the shape of the path we took to reach our salvation.

Harley King - What I Was Meant to Forget

~

Some people today are wandering generalities instead of meaningful specifics because they have failed to discover and mine the wealth of potentials in them.

Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

~

Gift ain’t what you take by effort, as swag ain’t what you worthy have.

Toba Beta - Master of Stupidity

~

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.

Joseph Campbell

~

Between the time a gift comes to us and the time we pass it along, we suffer gratitude. Moreover, with gifts that are agents of change, it is only when the gift has worked in us, only when we have come up to its level, as it were, that we can give it away again. Passing the gift along is the act of gratitude that finishes the labor. The transformation is not accomplished until we have the power to give the gift on our own terms.

Lewis Hyde - The Gift

~

Instead of trying to be weird in a normal world, maybe be normal in a weird world. In other words, you should always go where there is a “you-shaped-hole” in the world. Don’t wait for permission, give yourself permission. Don’t wait to be seen, see yourself. Stop waiting for a big idea because you can make your idea big. Instead of waiting for a place to fit in, make a hole in the world that is right for you. In other words, own that spot in the world only you can stand in, the place of your history and experiences, visions, and hopes. Stand in your onlyness. It is a position of real strength and, from that place, you can dent the world.

Nilofer Merchant - Go Where There is a You-Shaped Hole

~

When bartering for commodities or buying them with money, at the conclusion of the transaction, the partners own what they have bought or traded…This presupposes that the things or the services that are bartered, sold or bought are wholly alienable, detachable from the sellers. This is not the case in an “economy and a moral code based on gift-giving,” since the thing given is not alienated and the giver retains rights over what he has given, and subsequently benefits from a series of “advantages”.

Maurice Godelier - The Enigma of the Gift

~

When people are in the zone, they align naturally with a way of thinking that works best for them. I believe this is the reason that time seems to take on a new dimension when you are in the zone. When people use a thinking style completely natural to them, everything comes more easily.

Ken Robinson - The Element

~

There are several problems with this (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) …test takers often don’t settle neatly into any of the categories when they take the MBTI.…More telling, though, is that many people who repeat the test end up in a different box when they do so. It’s true in at least half of the cases, according to some studies.

Ken Robinson - The Element

~

Their (helping professionals) conscious intent is to be of service to humankind, or they say they find the work interesting, but they are often extrapolating the wound of the family of origin to those of humanity in general. Thus, the archetype of the wounded healer is ubiquitous. It can both constitute one’s vocational calling and at the same time be the chief source of stress and burn-out as the primal wounds are evoked over and over again, unceasingly pulling the caregiver back in the place of wounding to suffer it anew.

James Hollis - Creating a Life

~

Furthermore, giftedness grows from different roots making it possible to speak of three different sorts of gifts. First, some gifts seem to arise simply because of the unique makeup of the individual. One person picks up whistling at age 5, another has always enjoyed listening to other’s stories. Secondly, some gifts are tied to a general characteristic. Only women bear babies. Lastly, many gifts arise from the efforts that an individual makes to deal with her or his experience. After a long fight with cancer, a person may develop a high tolerance for pain, an appreciation for beautiful sunrises and the desire, time and capacity to visit severely ill people.

Judith Snow - What I Know About Community

~

“I had a dream last night", he replied. "And in my dream the Angel of the Lord asked me a question, and it upset me so that I couldn’t sleep the rest of the night.” “But you’re a holy man!", they exclaimed. "You study God’s law, you know the Torah; what question could have bothered you so?” “In my dream, the Angel did not ask me, 'Zusha, why were you not a Moses, leading God’s people to freedom?’ The Angel did not ask me, ‘Zusha, why were you not a David, conquering kingdoms in my name?’ The Angel did not ask me that.” “But Zusha", they cried. "What was the question?” “In my dream the Angel asked me, ‘Zusha, why were you not Zusha?’ And for that, I have no answer.”

Reb Zusha

~

As William Stafford says, “Who are you really, wanderer?” At a certain point, closure should come to the wandering and we should enter the quest. We become custodians for our gifts.

Orland Bishop

~

There is no greater gift you can give or receive than to honor your calling. It’s why you were born. And how you become most truly alive.

Oprah Winfrey

~

The exceptional status of each human being derives from the unique significance of suffering and flourishing in the context of our remembrances of the past and of the memories we have constructed of the future we anticipate.

Antonio Damasio - The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures

~

There are two parts to the rediscovery of the place of genius. In one, we sense the golden light of the flame in ourselves; in the other, someone else must see the flame in us. Both are necessary for the fire to grow. When both occur, there is an outbreak of spirit that changes the course of our lives. If neither of these things happen, we may die, either literally or inside. If others see the flame in us but we don’t recognize it, we will burn just for them and eventually burn out.

Michael Meade - Men and the Water of Life.

~

Figure out who you are. Then do it on purpose.

Dolly Parton

~

“Where is the power of gifts organized in a community?” is the central question.

John McKnight

~

To give anything less than your bestis to sacrifice the gift.

Steve Prefontaine

~

The purpose of life is to discover your gift. The work of life is to develop it. The meaning of life is to give your gift away.

David Viscott

~

Realize that your gift does not belong merely to you.

Sunday Adelaja

~

AA has “twelve steps to recovery,” which more or less summarize the program. The twelfth step is an act of gratitude: recovery alcoholics help other alcoholics when called up on to do so. It is a step in which the gift is passed along, so it is right that it should be the final one. In AA they speak of “2-steppers”—that is, people who take Step One (accepting they are an alcoholic) and then jump directly to Step Twelve ((helping others) without the in-between steps where the labor lies. They try to pass along something they themselves have not yet received.

Lewis Hyde - The Gift

~

The gift, to be true, must be the flowing of the giver unto me, correspondent to my flowing unto him. When the waters are at level, then my goods pass to him, and his to me.

Ralph Waldo Emerson - Gifts essay

~

…what has been so amazing over all these years is that I think we come to a point where our commitment to the truth is so strong that actually there’s a feeling of delight in seeing the flaws, in seeing the defilements. Now, when I watch my mind, I’m so happy to see them because in the seeing of them is the possibility of being free to make choices that are guided more by loving kindness and compassion.

Joseph Goldstein, Buddhist - Contributor: Transforming Suffering

~

We will be most nearly real when we serve our vocation. We will not be spared suffering, but we will be granted a deeply felt sense that our life is right, even when suffering isolation and rejection.

James Hollis - Creating a Life

~

We all must grow up in the circumstances we are born into. We all become, to one degree or another, the products of our environment and of the times in which we live. Yet, we also carry within us something that is timeless and able to transcend our immediate circumstances and commonly accepted limitations.

Michael Meade - The Genius Myth

~

Rings and jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts. The only gift is a portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me. Therefore the poet brings his poem; the shepherd, his lamb;the farmer, corn; the miner, a stone; the painter, his picture; the girl, a handkerchief of her own sewing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

~

…the gift that you’re going to give and keep on giving is an invisible gift that will take many different forms and that you learn more of each time you allow it to take a different form. You move from your 20s into your 30s, and you suddenly find another larger form for it or a different shape that makes a different connection. And then you deepen it in your 40s. And you get overwhelmed by it in your 50s. And then it returns to you again in more mature forms, settled forms, in your 60s. This is the gift that keeps giving, and it’s that internal, deeper source. It’s you becoming more and more real and more and more visible in the world.

David Whyte