June 2021 Touchstones Ministry Theme: Care of the Soul

June 2021 Readings from the Common Bowl

June 1: “Food for the body is not enough. There must be food for the soul.” ~ Dorothy Day

June 2: “The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.” ~ Emily Dickinson

June 3: “The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live.” ~ Victor Hugo

June 4: “Memory is the personal journalism of the soul.” ~ Richard Schickel

June 5: “A genuine odyssey is not about piling up experiences. It is a deeply felt, risky, unpredictable tour of the soul.” ~ Thomas Moore

June 6: “The human soul is hungry for beauty; we seek it everywhere—in landscape, music, art, clothes, furniture, gardening, companionship, love, religion, and in ourselves.” ~ John O’Donohue

June 7: “There is an eternal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives.” ~ Josephine Hart

June 8: “The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire.” ~ Ferdinand Foch

June 9: “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul—and sings the tunes without the words—and never stops at all.” ~ Emily Dickinson

June 10: “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” ~ Simone Weil

June 11: “Re-examine all that you have been told… dismiss that which insults your soul.” ~ Walt Whitman

June 12: “I’ve redefined success as ‘fulfilling your soul’s purpose.’” ~ Jack Canfield

June 13: “It’s true about the eyes being the window to the soul. Your face can be etched with worry, and twisted by ageing, but the eyes tell the true story of who you are.” ~ Naomie Harris

June 14: “The soul is partly in time and partly in eternity. We might remember the part that resides in eternity when we feel despair over the part that is in life.” ~ Thomas Moore

June 15: “You have to grow from the inside out. None can teach you; none can make you spiritual. There is no other teacher but your own soul.” ~ Swami Vivekananda

June 16: “Since love grows within you, so beauty grows. For love is the beauty of the soul.” ~ Saint Augustine

June 17: “It may help us, in those times of trouble, to remember that love is not only about relationship, it is also an affair of the soul.” ~ Thomas Moore

June 18: “I trust that when people meet, we meet for a transcendent reason, and that the challenges we face in life are always lessons that serve our soul’s growth.” ~ Marianne Williamson

June 19: “Begin to see yourself as a soul with a body rather than a body with a soul.” ~ Wayne Dyer

June 20: “Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.” ~ Walt Whitman

June 21: “Find out who you are and be that person. That’s what your soul was put on this Earth to be. Find that truth, live that truth and everything else will come.” ~ Ellen DeGeneres

June 22: “…to the soul, the most minute details and the most ordinary activities, carried out with mindfulness and art, have an effect far beyond their apparent insignificance.” ~ Thomas Moore

June 23: “Age wrinkles the body. Quitting wrinkles the soul.” ~ Douglas MacArthur

June 24 “The wilderness is healing, a therapy for the soul.” ~ Nicholas Kristof

June 25: “The soul is stronger than its surroundings.” ~ William James

June 26: “I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.” ~ T. S. Eliot

June 27: “For what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his soul?” ~ Jesus

June 28: “…you cannot have an impactful life with an impoverished soul.” ~ John Ortberg

June 29: “How many times do we lose an occasion for soul work by leaping ahead to final solutions without pausing to savor the undertones? …thus, we lose opportunities to know ourselves for our motives and our secrets.” ~ Thomas Moore

June 30: “Beauty awakens the soul to act.” ~ Dante Alighieri

Bonus Day: “Here’s the deal. The human soul doesn’t want to be advised or fixed or saved. It simply wants to be witnessed — to be seen, heard and companioned exactly as it is. …As Mary Oliver has written, ‘This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.’” ~ Parker Palmer