Jacob Nordby Quotes

The art of living is to fall in love over and over again.
It is no easy thing to walk through the world with an open heart, embracing everything, and also stand true, allowing no poison to infect us.
But be cracked open often.
Pour yourself into life withholding nothing. Heal and be healed. This is the way of living in full.

False humility is a form of psychosis which was imprinted on most of us since birth. It is a mental illness because it locks us in a victim state of keeping our light turned down, denying who we really are and silently begging for permission to simply show up as ourselves in the world. But there is good news. This is a jail whose lock is broken. We can walk free whenever we know the truth, and by so doing we show others an example of an end to madness. An example of freedom.

If you could possibly understand how precious and powerful your experience of this one lifetime as yourself is, you wouldn't be trying to go anywhere else.
If you could know the perfection of time and space,
You would slow each moment down
To drain every possible nuance of juice and flavor from it.
When you leave this place, your body and mind and the earth which holds you, you will look back and only wish you had known the immense richness that you hurried through trying to find other better states of being.
But this is the best bite.
Heaven is here.
Nirvana is now.
As soon as you know that for sure
Your life will never be the same again.
In fact, in every way it seeks to get your attention. begs you to awaken to the magic right before your eyes.

I need to be startlingly clear. This thing of finding your authentic voice, expressing your blessed weirdness and revealing your soul isn't an elegant process. You don't do it to be cool. You don't do it to get laid or get rich. It's only real when it is ruthless, relentless and inevitable. But it is also a matter of personal and collective survival. Yes, it's that important. You are that critical.

Life loves to reveal herself to the raw, courageous doubters; to those who are willing to live inside the question.

We are, all of us, always only one breath or softening of our thought away from an invasion of divine wonder and fresh miracles. Soul waits for any small opening of our hearts to steal into everyday life.

Welcome the small cracking of your hard-clodded shell,
Embrace the warm sting of tears,
Kiss the shadow which frightens you awake as you turn the corners of your day,
Love the whole of everything,
Smooth sunshine skies and
Jagged edges
Which all seek us out in
Constant whisper and touch
To say, 'hello, Beautiful. You're alive

Hello," Life says, "Remember me?
We started out together here
When you were just a bundle
Of innocent amazement.
Remember how you saw the world
With nothing but wonder?
We were such rowdy playmates then.
We painted on the sky with clouds
And made magic out of
Clothespins and peanut butter.
Remember, can you, how I became stained and heavy
With trouble?
Not safe now. Lots of no.
They dressed me in painful clothes
And made you wear them, too.
You don't recognize me, do you
But I've never abandoned you
Or lost my wild, happy desire
To show you
Play with you
Kiss you
Hide and seek down twisty paths
And always discover more.
Want to run away with me again?
Shall we elope without ever leaving
Because that's possible, you know.
I've never been anywhere but here
Waiting for you
To remember.

It's a funny thing, how it works...
The moment we stop trying so hard to be someone, we become ourselves--only what was there all along, waiting and peeking out from behind all the masks we wore.
And when this happens, we discover that Who We Really Are is much greater than anything we might have pretended or even hoped to be.

Too many people confuse real magic with magical thinking. Real magic isn't a trick and it transforms our lives. Magical thinking is denial.
Real magic is what happens when we break old belief patterns and have the courage to employ the native laws of the Universe

There are times on Earth when extraordinary consciousness invades everyday life. There are times on Earth when unseen forces make a calamity of the status quo. There are times on Earth when it seems as though a divine arsonist has set fire to the world as we know it.
- We live in such times.

Every pain, addiction, anguish, longing, depression, anger or fear
is an orphaned part of us
seeking joy,
some disowned shadow
wanting to return
to the light
and home
of ourselves.

So long as you believe yourself to be 'only human' you have accepted life in a prison cell whose door remains locked only by your own mind.
By saying, 'well, I'm only human', you have blindly submitted to all the limitations, fears, pettiness, greed and hatreds which make the common person weak and fragile.
Most never become aware that another way is possible.
You are human, but much more, too.
The much-moreness is the vast, brilliant freedom and power which has confined itself in your humanity.
If you are willing (and not everyone is, which is also a perfectly valid choice), you can begin to explore your native powers and experience freedom within limitation. When you do this, you live fully while you are here and you are no longer afraid to die.
When you are not afraid of death but seek to live in a state of always-discovering, this is when life is transformed and you accept your birthright to choose and create in extraordinary fashion.

There are no self made heroes or leaders. No matter how rugged or self assured, everyone requires a cast of players - friends, mentors, lovers, critics, villains and supporters - who call, invite, seduce, goad and encourage them to finally step into their true power.
We are all heroes and leaders in some way, and we all need each other.

The master in us all lives behind the masks and roles and wounds and beliefs. It calls us to live deep, full, radical lives. It asks us not to wait until we are told by anyone that we have arrived. It invites us forward, across the line of fear and unworthiness, to experience mastery in this moment--as much as we can right now. To learn from stumbling. To rise again and keep walking until we no longer notice our feet in their effortless dance. But mostly not to wait until some distant, perfect someday. Mastery is now.

Your enormous soul had so many choices of who it could show up as.
It chose you.

We wait, starving for moments of high magic to inspire us, but life is full of common enchantment waiting for our alchemists eyes to notice.

I have come to differentiate not at all between what is spiritual and the rest of life. There is only Life, all of it is good and the more I am aware of this in every moment, the more my spirit comes alive.

The great mission of our day is not conquering the sea or space, disease or tyranny. The grand quest which calls to the hero in every one of us is to become fully alive--to stand up and claim our birthright, which is inner freedom, love and radiant purpose. By fulfilling this, we transform the world.

With poetry and writing, the question isn't "do you know the right words?".
The real question is, "can you make words from the unwordable, chisel blocks of raw silence into shapes and touch our souls?

I don't analyze beautiful. I sit in its presence and love the wholeness of it--the sweet and sad and raw and bright together.
Poetry is that, the weaving of light-shadow. Making words from the unwordable.

You have left a trail of breadcrumb clues which will lead you to the place where your purpose and passion have already met and are simply waiting for you to find them.

The trick is to ride the wave,
Fast, wide-open and
in deep Now-magic.
Free, burning fear for fuel
Generous, knowing there is always more where that came from.
Cresting, spray of liquid jewels hanging, shining in the sun and wind.
Flying down the wave in graceful slices.
Rolling, tumbling under, over
Breathless falling, floating into the deep dark beneath.
Rising, face breaks the surface
Laughing
Kneeling, standing
Riding again.
Sunset waits behind the horizon
But daylight begs us to swim
Out beyond
Where our feet can't touch bottom.
Into the deep wild
Where the next wave can
sweep us higher,
Show us what else is possible
In this marvelous place.

Find your purpose, find your passion. Find your passion, find your purpose. Turn either way, it doesn't matter. Because how do you separate conjoined twins like these?

What do you really want?
Did you know that every single one of your desires is an expression of your soul's longing to experience human life as you?
It's true.
These pure impulses get filtered through our conditioning and show up distorted at times, but follow them back to their source and nothing you desire is anything but good and possible.

Life is an endless attempt to word the unwordable, to make what cannot be touched walk on the ground, to embody what can never be fit inside a single lifetime.
We see reflections of ourselves in sunrises, hear our perfection in thunderstorms and babies' laughter--touch, taste and feel--and then try to somehow remember all of that while taking out the trash, paying bills and a million other ways we have invented to forget.
We weave together within ourselves mud and spirit, shadow and light, animal and angel.
No wonder humans feel crazy most of the time.

But you aren't crazy. You are doing a heroic thing by being here as yourself.