For the past six months or so, I have been an eager listener of the podcast 'Harry Potter and the Sacred Text'. Each new show focuses on a specific chapter and analyzes what takes place through the lens of a pre-determined theme (i.e. mercy, fear, thankfulness, regret etc...). The two hosts also apply a Spiritual Practice to certain sections of that chapter for deeper analysis. For those of you who have loved the Harry Potter books I highly recommend listening; and for those of you who haven't read the books, stop reading this immediately and go get them!
One of the Spiritual Practices is - Florilegia. An edited definition from their website is "a compilation of excerpts from other writings". In the podcast, the two hosts will pick the sentences or phrases that jumped out and spoke to them in that particular chapter; they then string them together to see what new meaning(s) they are able to discover. They call the lines they've chosen 'sparklets'.
I love this idea. As far back as I can remember, I've written down quotes from books, songs, movies...anything that struck me as profound, or beautiful, or something I could completely relate to. I've occasionally even shared those beloved favorites on this blog. So I decided to practice Floriglegia myself. However, instead of honing in on just one book or chapter, I've chosen words from any book, song, poem, thought, conversation, etc....that 'sparkled' in my mind. I began this quest last Sunday and finished Saturday night. Here are all my sparklets in the order they came to me.
What you really want at the end is a surprising inevitability. What you really want is the characters to be changed at the end. As long as hate dwells in the human heart, real peace is impossible. You will become your favorite color. Complacency is lethal. It is the wrong time to be thinking of you; it's the wrong place to be cheating on you. What makes city life meaningful is what you hide. What our heart intends and what our words intend. Was I born wild, have I been asleep this whole damn time. Life, too, slipped by in much the same way, speeding up as it ran along the tracks laid out by time and fortune. It's not a mistake it's just a layer. How difficult it was to tell the truth and be sincere at the same time. All behavioral has a communication. Your body keeps score of all that happened. Just be free. Little by little that fiery glow, the light to take ones breath, had faded. He had seen when her soul lit her face like firelight. The story's always talking, you just gotta listen.
I'm still working on unearthing a deep meaning from them, but I did instantly spot an underlying theme running through most of my sparklets (with a few outliers thrown in). I'll tie what I see into another post that I'm working on, but in the meantime I'm open to others interpretations. I know the same thing is interpreted differently by different people, and sometimes people on the outside of a story are able to see things those on the inside can't. So anyone, everyone, out there - thoughts, ideas...
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