1 result for (book:deavf1 AND heading:"essay 1 thursday april 1 1982" AND stemmed:crisi)
[... 19 paragraphs ...]
When we hesitate, hold back, falter, when we hold back energy in the hopes of saving it, when we allow fear rather than trust to guide our activities, when the quality of our lives becomes less than we know it should be—then warnings flash. (Long pause.) One crisis after another may arise to gain our attention. This has happened in many people’s lives—and so recently the same kind of warning recently appeared in my own life.
[... 14 paragraphs ...]
—wiped away the results of the three strong doses of prune juice I’d been given. Yet there was, I knew, a fellowship even in those processes—one that I had perhaps too long ignored: the quality of fellowship, as a species or a family or a community comes together to help one of its own kind. And as I was to see, even for all of the pessimistic suggestions of medical science itself, in the very middle of crisis there was a certain indisputable sense of cooperation—a “vulgar” physical optimism, and a kind of humor that I had long forgotten existed.
[... 5 paragraphs ...]
This is a good place to explain that while Jane was in the hospital neither of us ever made any attempt to “convert” the people there—doctors, nurses, technicians, say—to a belief in the Seth material. Beyond saying that Jane was a writer and that I was an artist, we told no one of our interests in life. We weren’t there to impose our beliefs upon anyone else. We’d made the conscious, joint decision during a time of crisis to seek certain kinds of help from skilled practitioners in the medical field, and we were willing to learn from them, even if those people were pretty certain to have belief systems very different from ours. (Well, I should add with a touch of a smile, at least we were more willing to learn in the beginning!)
[... 2 paragraphs ...]