Egos Anonymous Reflections — Egos Anonymous

"Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is one element of faith." —Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith Self-will often wants certainty before it will commit. It waits for proof, for resolution, for clarity that seems reliable. In the

Wendy Etter 5/13/26 Wendy Etter 5/13/26

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"The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere." —Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea There is a particular tiredness that comes not from doing too much but from maintaining a version of ourselves that doesn't quite m

Wendy Etter 5/12/26 Wendy Etter 5/12/26

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"I dwell in Possibility—" —Emily Dickinson, poem 466 The ego tends to dwell in probability—in what is likely, what is safe, what can be reasonably expected given past experience. Possibility, in that framework, gets measured agai

Wendy Etter 5/11/26 Wendy Etter 5/11/26

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"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite." —William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Blake was not describing a mystical technique or a special state. He was describing wh

Wendy Etter 5/10/26 Wendy Etter 5/10/26

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"Nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul." —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations Marcus Aurelius wrote this as emperor of Rome—someone for whom external circumstances were rarely quiet or untroubled

Wendy Etter 5/9/26 Wendy Etter 5/9/26

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"The world is charged with the grandeur of God." —Gerard Manley Hopkins, God's Grandeur Hopkins wrote this in 1877, in a world that was rapidly industrializing and, he felt, losing touch with something essential. The charge he de

Wendy Etter 5/8/26 Wendy Etter 5/8/26

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"All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you." —Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower These lines appear as a kind of scripture in Butler's novel—spare, almost liturgical, impossible to argue with. Everything

Wendy Etter 5/7/26 Wendy Etter 5/7/26

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"In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer." —Albert Camus, Return to Tipasa The discovery Camus describes did not come during a comfortable season. It came in depth—in the difficulty

Wendy Etter 5/6/26 Wendy Etter 5/6/26

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"Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another." —Toni Morrison, Beloved There may be moments when something loosens—a long-held pattern softens, a defense drops, a burden is set down. These mo

Wendy Etter 5/5/26 Wendy Etter 5/5/26

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"All real living is meeting." —Martin Buber, I and Thou Buber spent much of his life thinking about the difference between two kinds of relating. In one, the other person becomes an object—something to manage, evaluate, or move a

Wendy Etter 5/4/26 Wendy Etter 5/4/26

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"Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes." —Carl Jung, letter to Fanny Bowditch, 1916 Much of our energy can go outward—toward what others are doing, what circumstances are offering, what the world owes us or threatens

Wendy Etter 5/3/26 Wendy Etter 5/3/26

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"The chief thing that separates us from God is the thought that we are separated from God." —Thomas Keating, Open Mind, Open Heart The sense of distance from something larger than ourselves may not be a description of reality. It

Wendy Etter 5/2/26 Wendy Etter 5/2/26

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"What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?" —George Eliot, Middlemarch Self-will can make life feel like a largely private project—something to get right, to manage well, to secure against futu

Wendy Etter 5/1/26 Wendy Etter 5/1/26

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"Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole." —Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving We tend to experien

Wendy Etter 4/30/26 Wendy Etter 4/30/26

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"So hope for a great sea-change On the far side of revenge. Believe that a further shore Is reachable from here." —Seamus Heaney, The Cure at Troy Revenge, in this sense, can describe any closed loop—the resentment we return t

Wendy Etter 4/29/26 Wendy Etter 4/29/26

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"I am rooted, but I flow." —Virginia Woolf, The Waves To be rooted suggests a ground that holds—something beneath the surface that doesn't shift with every mood or circumstance. Many of us have spent years looking for that steadi

Wendy Etter 4/28/26 Wendy Etter 4/28/26

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"Men are disturbed not by the things which happen, but by the opinions about the things." —Epictetus, Enchiridion The ego tends to experience events and interpretations of events as the same thing. Something happens, and the stor

Wendy Etter 4/27/26 Wendy Etter 4/27/26

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"There is a desire within each of us, in the deep center of ourselves that we call our heart. We were born with it, it is never completely satisfied, and it never stops pulling at us." —Gerald May, Will and Spirit Much of our eff

Wendy Etter 4/26/26 Wendy Etter 4/26/26

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"Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams." —Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov Love as an idea can be quite comfortable. In the abstract, we are generous, patient, understanding. It is the a

Wendy Etter 4/25/26 Wendy Etter 4/25/26

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"Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach." —Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Letter to a Young Activist During Troubled Times Self-will can

Wendy Etter 4/24/26 Wendy Etter 4/24/26

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