This is my living faith, an active faith, a faith of verbs: to question, explore, experiment, experience, walk, run, dance, play, eat, love, learn, dare, taste, touch, smell, listen, argue, speak, write, read, draw, provoke, emote, scream, sin, repent, cry, kneel, pray, bow, rise, stand, look, laugh, cajole, create, confront, confound, walk back, walk forward, circle, hide, and seek. To seek: to embrace the questions, be wary of answers.
–Terry Tempest Williams, naturalist and author (b. 1955)
Verbs draw me toward life and living.
Nouns and labels are towards death and dying; attempts to put a net on a butterfly, to capture it, to put it into a box, and to literally pin it down. Sadly, a butterfly in a box is no longer a butterfly.
Try tasting an orientation of verbs and see if the nouns don’t fade into their boxes, leaving you more and more alive, living, and experiencing.
I’ve noticed that Rick Hanson, PhD, wrote about a similar viewpoint in his post “See Beings Not Bodies” on the UCSD Center for Mindfulness blog.
http://ucsdcfm.wordpress.com/2011/10/30/see-beings-not-bodies/
It’s well-written. I particularly like his suggestion of a gradual approach to trying it out.
Great list! ♥