I like it that Virginia Woolf and I share a last name and spelling. I don’t know of any relationship via lineage. But I’m content to feel that little spark of joy.
She lived in the late 1800s through mid 1900s. English. I like it that she was known in her writing for developing the inner lives of her characters.
I so relate — in Wander School and in Becoming & Belonging. That’s crafting ways to explore more of the inner life connected to the outer life.
Earlier this week I found a few pieces written by Woolf (from the Marginalian). I took a few chunks of that writing to invite reflection in a Men’s Group.
For inspiration. And some attention to the inner life.
“Beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself,
there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.
This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees
with the life outside us.”
…
“The man who is aware of himself is henceforth independent;
and he is never bored,
and life is only too short,
and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.
He alone lives, while other people, slaves of ceremony, let life slip past them in a kind of dream.”
…
“Let us simmer over our incalculable cauldron,
our enthrallling confusion, our hotch-potch of impulses, our perpetual miracle —
for the soul throws up wonders every second.
Movement and change are the essence of our being;
rigidity is death; conformity is death;
let us say what comes into our heads, repeat ourselves, contradict ourselves,
fling out the wildest nonsense,
and follow the most fantastic fancies without caring what the world does or think or says.”
