Ruth Allen > Quotes

“Listening is how we can love better.”
― Ruth Allen, Weathering: How the earth's deep wisdom can help us endure life's storms

“If we can be courageous and go into these liminal, impermanent, dark-associated places with kindness and curiosity and the intention to bear with – be it with the shame we carry, the depressed periods, the fears, the sides of ourselves we don’t like – we will find out new things about ourselves, we will learn new lessons. There is more that grows in the dark than fear. It also incubates transformational and transitional power.”
― Ruth Allen, Weathering: How the earth's deep wisdom can help us endure life's storms

“We can do so much, and while we can’t do everything, what we can do is enormous and magnificent.”
― Ruth Allen, Weathering: How the earth's deep wisdom can help us endure life's storms

“Life has a remarkable way of finding its way around the least useful of our limitations and is rarely far away in the form of imagination and innovation. It is always amazing to me that creative output can be at its most startling, unique and poignant under limited conditions; indeed, many of us do better with fewer choices to overwhelm us, and almost all of us do better with something to rally against.”
― Ruth Allen, Weathering: How the earth's deep wisdom can help us endure life's storms

“Boundaries are reparative and give us space to build confidence and repair relationships with people who have hurt us. They offer enclosure, which is sometimes necessary and fruitful in a frantic world, and may help us define our niche in the world, better helping us find ourselves and what we have to offer by way of gifts and passions.”
― Ruth Allen, Weathering: How the earth's deep wisdom can help us endure life's storms

“Weathering recognises that in some areas of life we need a greater pursuit than curing the incurable. It is not fixes we need, but recovery towards truth. Some aspects of ourselves we may need to live with and manage, some griefs may linger, often the dis-ease we feel is not in our heads but is a function of the environment in which we live and its inequalities.”
― Ruth Allen, Weathering: How the earth's deep wisdom can help us endure life's storms

“In reality, life does not often conform to our wish for certainty, and there are few examples in the natural world of things staying certain, fixed, knowable, stable, definitive or enduring. Ambiguity and ambivalence are more natural states of being that no one wants to talk about, with most things moving in and out of balance and flux every second of the day.”
― Ruth Allen, Weathering: How the earth's deep wisdom can help us endure life's storms

“The problem is not so much that we bury things deeply, but that they tend to come back when we have no capacity to hold them. We are ever at the mercy of our own surfacings demanding to be noticed.”
― Ruth Allen, Weathering: How the earth's deep wisdom can help us endure life's storms

“There can be no perfection or rising above all that is natural, only endless cycles of accumulation and erosion, disappearances and emergences played out on every conceivable scale. It is not our job to transcend our troubles and vulnerabilities, but to let the waters run through and over, and do their work. When something falls apart, another thing opens. We cannot know what will be better or worse, only that it will be different.”
― Ruth Allen, Weathering: How the earth's deep wisdom can help us endure life's storms

“Weathering well does not guarantee reward or the promise of a better future, it’s only staying with the trouble. Anyone can and will weather, but weathering well necessitates a radical acceptance of all that will be revealed along the way and a commitment to stay true to your new shape.”
― Ruth Allen, Weathering: How the earth's deep wisdom can help us endure life's storms

“So much of what we love in a landscape is the result of discontinuity.”
― Ruth Allen, Weathering: How the earth's deep wisdom can help us endure life's storms

“Resting-in-place is something rocks do very well. They are not impervious to being shaken around and disturbed by the prevailing conditions in their environment, but it is in their nature to return to repose as soon as possible – to achieve a steady state in their place – that lends them an effortless poise and gracefulness”
― Ruth Allen, Weathering: How the earth's deep wisdom can help us endure life's storms

“We wonder at the rate of burn-out as it tears through the West, forgetting that we have been fetishising productivity, efficiency and optimisation of our time for many decades now, encouraging the conditions that have led to fire.”
― Ruth Allen, Weathering: How the earth's deep wisdom can help us endure life's storms

“A grief well-tended to is a grief that has been given space to unfold and be felt.”
― Ruth Allen, Weathering: How the earth's deep wisdom can help us endure life's storms

“It is because you are this, that I realise I am that. Like rock, people find their voice and come alive because they have an other to sing with, to harmonise with or to explore discordance with. Who we are is affected by what and who runs through us.”
― Ruth Allen, Weathering: How the earth's deep wisdom can help us endure life's storms

“Can this landscape offer me safe containment to work through the things that are hurting in me? For people who are grieving things that have been lost, sometimes the most containing aspect of being outside in the landscape is that it doesn’t offer you the platitudes and expectations that a well-meaning person might. It doesn’t wish you to be fixed or better, but offers a witnessing that so many of us really need as we navigate the losses.”
― Ruth Allen, Weathering: How the earth's deep wisdom can help us endure life's storms

“This tells me two fundamental truths: one, that in order to evolve and grow, we must be prepared to face the erosive aspects of life. Two, it’s the weathering that creates the finest landscape of our lives, shaping us and defining us over time.”
― Ruth Allen, Weathering: How the earth's deep wisdom can help us endure life's storms

“Part of the journey into our human weathering is tending to the wounds, connecting through the wounds, and actively loving what remains towards restoration. We need to love because of and not in spite of, which is the work of time, something that geology has plenty of, but we do not. It might be brief, but what else is time for, if not to love. What else is love for if not to smooth the divisive edges of complexity and difference so that all might rub along better, not the same, but together. This is not a love or belonging that demands allegiance or agreement, but one that can tolerate, even embrace, authentic otherness.”
― Ruth Allen, Weathering: How the earth's deep wisdom can help us endure life's storms

“feel right straight away, or even be comfortable. Sometimes what we need is not the warmth of the sun, but the desperate beat of rain that leaves us shivering and cold. Sometimes we need to be met in a way that mirrors our inner weather.”
― Ruth Allen, Weathering: How the earth's deep wisdom can help us endure life's storms

“Where there is creative curiosity rooted in empathy and open-heartedness, there cannot be control.”
― Ruth Allen, Weathering: How the earth's deep wisdom can help us endure life's storms

“we try to get a handle on what it means to live in fuller reciprocity as compassionate and curious action, rather than only thought-based gratitude.”
― Ruth Allen, Weathering: How the earth's deep wisdom can help us endure life's storms

“We have minds that will take us anywhere, but bodies that will say No. We have almost limitless ambition, but are checked by mortality. Where our head-minds are more likely to try and find a way around a limitation, it is our body-mind that will be the one to say stop, no more, I’m tired.”
― Ruth Allen, Weathering: How the earth's deep wisdom can help us endure life's storms

“In grief, we are made nomads in our most familiar places, strangers to our friends, unfamiliar to ourselves. There is no going back to a landscape you knew before grief, because you are now irrevocably in a different place. The valleys will not infill and flatten out, there will always now be the spectre of shadow on the lee-side of the sunlit uplands. A shadow that was always there, but never seen in the young days before things started to disappear. In journeying the terrain of losses we don’t know where we will end up.”
― Ruth Allen, Weathering: How the earth's deep wisdom can help us endure life's storms

“The road up, And the road down, Are one and the same.”
― Ruth Allen, Weathering: How the earth's deep wisdom can help us endure life's storms