My Grandfather's Blessings by Rachel Naomi Remen

“Most of us lead far more meaningful lives than we know. Often finding meaning is not about doing things differently; it is about seeing familiar things in new ways. ”
― Rachel Naomi Remen, My Grandfather's Blessings : Stories of Strength, Refuge, and Belonging

“Our purpose in life is to grow in wisdom and in love.”
― Rachel Naomi Remen MD, My Grandfather's Blessings - Stories of Strength, Refuge and Belonging

“How strange to think that great pain may be impermanent. Something in us all seems to want to carve it in granite, as if only this would do full honor to its terrible significance. But even pain is blessed with impermanence...
p 259”
― Rachel Naomi Remen, My Grandfather's Blessings : Stories of Strength, Refuge, and Belonging

“Perhaps real wisdom lies in not seeking answers at all. Any answer we find will not be true for long. An answer is a place where we can fall asleep as life moves past us to its next question. After all these years I have begun to wonder if the secret of living well is not in having all the answers but in pursuing unanswerable questions in good company.”
― Rachel Naomi Remen, My Grandfather's Blessings : Stories of Strength, Refuge, and Belonging

“It has been said that sometimes we need a story more than food in order to live.
p 374”
― Rachel Naomi Remen, My Grandfather's Blessings : Stories of Strength, Refuge, and Belonging

“Life wastes nothing. Over and over again every molecule that has ever been is gathered up by the hand of life to be reshaped into yet another form.
p 259”
― Rachel Naomi Remen, My Grandfather's Blessings : Stories of Strength, Refuge, and Belonging

“The marks life leaves on everything it touches transform perfection into wholeness. Older, wiser cultures choose to claim this wholeness in the things that they create. In Japan, Zen gardeners purposefully leave a fat dandelion in the midst of the exquisite, ritually precise patterns of the meditation garden. In Iran, even the most skilled of rug weavers includes an intentional error, the “Persian Flaw,” in the magnificence of a Tabriz or Qashqai carpet…and Native Americans wove a broken bead, the “spirit bead,” into every beaded masterpiece. Nothing that has a soul is perfect. When life weaves a spirit bead into your very fabric, you may stumble upon a wholeness greater than you had dreamed possible before.”
― Rachel Naomi Remen, My Grandfather's Blessings : Stories of Strength, Refuge, and Belonging

“I recall vividly the night before one of my own early surgeries, an eight-hour affair that would alter my body permanently. I was twenty-seven and unmarried at the time. Late in the evening a pleasant elderly woman, a technical aide, had come to my hospital room to shave my abdomen in preparation for the procedure. As she went about this humble task with great skill, she had asked me about the next day's surgery. Filled with resentment, self-pity, and a sense of victimhood, I told her what was planned and burst into tears. She had seemed quite surprised. "How would YOU feel if they were going to do this to YOU tomorrow?" I asked her angrily. she had taken my question literally and had thought it over. Then, patting me gently, she had said, "If I needed it to live, I would be glad for the help." Her answer had changed everything.”
― Rachel Naomi Remen, My Grandfather's Blessings : Stories of Strength, Refuge, and Belonging

“Whether we are aware of it or not, we will refine the quality of our humanity throughout the course of our lives. More and more, people seek spiritual techniques to help them do this. But joy and suffering will do this for you, too. Every lifetime offers countless opportunities to become more whole.
Life offers its wisdom generously. Everything teaches. Not everyone learns. Life asks of us the same thing we have been asked in every class: "Stay awake." "Pay attention." But paying attention is no simple matter. It requires us not to be distracted by expectations, past experiences, labels, and masks. It asks that we not jump to early conclusions and that we remain open to surprise. Wisdom comes most easily to those who have the courage to embrace life without judgment and are willing to not know, sometimes for a long time. It requires us to be more fully and simply alive than we have been taught to be. It may require us to suffer. But ultimately we will be more than we were when we began.”
― Rachel Naomi Remen, My Grandfather's Blessings : Stories of Strength, Refuge, and Belonging

“All life has in it the dimension of the Unknown; it is a thing forever unfolding. It seems important to consider the possibility that science may have defined life too small. If we define life too small, we will define ourselves too small as well.”
― Rachel Naomi Remen, My Grandfather's Blessings : Stories of Strength, Refuge, and Belonging

“Sometimes just being in someone's presence is strong medicine.”
― Rachel Naomi Remen, My Grandfather's Blessings : Stories of Strength, Refuge, and Belonging

“No matter what means we use, service is always a work of the heart. There are times when the power of science is so seductive that we may come to feel that all that is required to serve others is to get our science right, our diagnosis, our treatment. But science can never serve unless it is first translated by people into a work of the heart.”
― Rachel Naomi Remen, My Grandfather's Blessings : Stories of Strength, Refuge, and Belonging