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Storytelling has always been at the heart of being human because it serves some of our most basic needs: passing along our traditions, confessing failings, healing wounds, engendering hope, strengthening our sense of community.

Parker J. Palmer

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Parker J. Palmer
Sense
Passing
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Confessing
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Tradition
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Traditions
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More quotes by Parker J. Palmer

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The human soul doesn't want to be fixed, it simply wants to be seen and heard. The soul is like a wild animal - tough, resilient and shy. When we go crashing through the woods shouting for it to come out so we can help it, the soul will stay in hiding. But if we are willing to sit quietly and wait for a while, the soul may show itself.
Parker J. Palmer
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Teaching like any truly human activity emerges from one's inwardness.
Parker J. Palmer
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Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.
Parker J. Palmer
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I am not sure that any sight or sound on earth is as exquisite as the hushed descent of a sky full of snow.
Parker J. Palmer
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Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.
Parker J. Palmer
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Mentoring is a mutuality that requires more than meeting the right teacher: the teacher must meet the right student.
Parker J. Palmer
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A leader is a person who must take special responsibility for what's going on inside of himself or herself ... lest the act of leadership create more harm than good.
Parker J. Palmer
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Connection and connectedness are other words for community and communion.
Parker J. Palmer
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The spiritual life is about becoming more at home in your own skin.
Parker J. Palmer
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When you are with young people, it is almost inconceivable that things wouldn't arise that you'd have to respond to, such as someone wrestling on the bus. And how you handle that, how you respond to that, how you deal with that is a lesson to the people you are on the bus with.
Parker J. Palmer
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We are participants in a vast communion of being, and if we open ourselves to its guidance, we can learn anew how to live in this great and gracious community of truth.
Parker J. Palmer
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Good teachers join self and subject and students in the fabric of life.
Parker J. Palmer
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It's more important to be in right relationship than it is to be right.
Parker J. Palmer
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Community is a place where the connections felt in our hearts make themselves known in the bonds between people, and where the tuggings and pullings of those bonds keep opening our hearts.
Parker J. Palmer
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The inner life of any great thing will be incomprehensible to me until I develop and deepen an inner life of my own.
Parker J. Palmer
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Everybody is on a lifelong journey toward trying to live more deeply. There is nobody who can say, Well, I've got that one checked off my to-do list. We have to be honest with ourselves about where we are on this journey and about the difficulty of living in our own identities and integrity.
Parker J. Palmer
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I want my inner truth to be the plumb line for the choices I make about my life - about the work that I do and how I do it, about the relationships I enter into and how I conduct them.
Parker J. Palmer
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Afraid that our inner light will be extinguished or our inner darkness exposed, we hide our true identities from each other. In the process, we become separated from our own souls. We end up living divided lives, so far removed from the truth we hold within that we cannot know the 'integrity that comes from being what you are.
Parker J. Palmer
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It is because as we are, our hearts are closed, and we cannot place the holy words in our hearts. So we place them on top of our hearts. And there they stay until, one day, the heart breaks and the words fall in.
Parker J. Palmer
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Authority is granted to people who are perceived as authoring their own words, their own actions, their own lives, rather than playing a scripted role at great remove from their own hearts.
Parker J. Palmer