Who We Really Are

I’ve been reading Marianne Williamson’s book, A Return to Love. It is fabulous, and with the turning of each page, I feel my understanding cracking open just a little more. It is hard not to quote every single paragraph because everything she writes is insightful and encouraging, whether she is writing about relationships, God’s love, miracles, or our careers and aspirations. Throughout, she urges us to put away our judgments and guilt, to always forgive, and to look into our own hearts and minds to see what needs to be changed.

Here are several especially enlightening quotes:

A spiritual teacher from India once pointed out that there is no such thing as a gray sky. The sky is always blue. Sometimes, however, gray clouds come and cover the blue sky. We then think the sky is gray. It is the same with our minds. We’re always perfect. We can’t not be. Our fearful patterns, our dysfunctional habits, take hold within our minds and cover our perfection. Temporarily. That is all. We are still perfect sons of God. There has never been a storm that hasn’t passed. Gray clouds never last forever. the blue sky does. pg. 118


This next quote speaks to me in a special way as I am always second-guessing myself, thinking I’m not good enough, I don’t have real talent, why should I even try.

We all have the potential for greatness, but it gets plowed out of us early. Fear entered when someone told us there’s a first prize, second prize, and third prize, that some efforts deserve an A, and some get a C. After a while, part us becomes afraid to even try. The only thing we have to give to the world is our own grasp on it. The ego argues that this is not enough. It leads us to cover up our simple truth, to try to invent a better one. But the ego isn’t protecting us here, although as always, it pretends to. It isn’t guarding us against making fools of ourselves; it is guarding us against experience of who we really are, the brilliance of expressing it, and the joy that the expression brings to ourselves and others.

I love the story of the little girl who showed her teacher a picture she painted of a tree. The tree was purple. The teacher said, “Sweetheart, I’ve never seen a purple tree, now have I?”

“Oh?” said the little girl. “That’s too bad.” (140-141)


And my Dad is doing fine. After striking the top of his head on a sharp metal pole…again I’m not sure of the particulars, such as where was this deathly pole?...the wound is now healing after having staples put in his head. It was scary though. At first I thought he might have chopped his hand off with the wood-cutter or something.