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Quote by Mike Mariani

“The identities people foster in their afterlives are rarely arrived at incidentally--they do not wander haphazardly into their passions, careers, perspectives, and beliefs. The individuals they become are forged in voids, sowed on fallow land, pursued against the finest of margins, and people seize on them because their survival in some sense depends on it.”

Quote by Mike Mariani

Book:What Doesn't Kill Us Makes Us: Who We Become After Tragedy and Trauma
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What Doesn't Kill Us Makes Us: Who We Become After Tragedy and Trauma

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Mike Mariani

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“But as to the influence of the death of someone near on those he leaves behind, it has long seemed to me that this ought to be no other than a higher responsibility. Does the person who passes away not leave all the things he had begun in hundreds of ways to be continued by those who outlive him, if they had shared any kind of inner bond at all? In recent years I had to live through so many close experiences of death, but not one person has been taken from me without my having found the tasks around me increased. The weight of this unexplained and perhaps greatest event, which only due to a misunderstanding has gained the reputation of being arbitrary and cruel, presses us (I think increasingly) more evenly and more deeply into life and places the utmost obligations on our slowly growing strengths.”

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Book:The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation
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“I want to encourage you in your pain so that you will completely experience it in all its fullness, because as the experience of a new intensity it is a great life experience and leads everything back again to life, like everything that reaches a certain degree of greatest strength.”

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Book:The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation
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“Look at a dog on a leash. This monstrous, abject “pet” used to be a magnificent, powerful, proud wolf. Now it’s a joke. That’s what human interference with carnivorous nature achieves – the opposite of evolution, the removal of animals from vibrant nature to make them pathetic, enfeebled playthings and projections of human beings, with all their crazy neuroses and subjective mental traumas. The example of dogs should provide a horrific warning from history of how strong animals can be turned by humans into the most pathetic creatures.”

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Book:The Wolf Tamers: How They Made the Strong Weak
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“First, this is what we welcome now above all, that human beings are making a new start here and there to rebuild life with the strength and the faith of their indestructible hearts. There are others who could try this but who still just stand there, staring and trying to make sense of it all, and for whom sadness and sloth finally become utterly insurmountable. And this even though, based on feeling and reflection, only one thing is urgently needed: to attach oneself somewhere to nature with unconditional purpose, to what is strong, striving, and bright, and to move forward without guile, even if it can happen only in the least important, daily matters.”

LossGriefStrengthResilienceDeath Of A Loved One
Book:The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation
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“Each time we tackle something with joy, each time we open our eyes toward a yet untouched distance, we transform not only this and the next moment, but we also rearrange and gradually absorb the past inside of us. We dissolve the foreign body of pain of which we know neither its actual consistency and makeup nor how many (perhaps) life-affirming stimuli it imparts, once it has been dissolved, to our blood! Death, especially the most completely felt and experienced death, has never remained an obstacle to life for a surviving individual, because its innermost essence is not contrary to us (as one may occasionally suspect), but it is more knowing about life than we are in our most vital moments. I always think that such a great weight, with its tremendous pressure, somehow has the task of forcing us into a deeper, more intimate layer of life so that we may grow out of it all the more vibrant and fertile. I gained this experience very early on through various circumstances, and it was then confirmed from pain to pain: What is here and now is, after all, what has been given and is expected of us, and we must attempt to transform everything that happens to us into a new familiarity and friendliness with it. For where else should we direct our senses, which after all have been exquisitely designed to grasp and master what is here?”

DeathLossGriefStrengthResilience
Book:The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation
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