How odd, I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.
– David Foster Wallace
NON-ATTAINMENT
In spiritual traditions non-acquisitiveness is essential to fulfillment. To live a happy, healthy life it is essential to relinquish the quest to simply get more – more cash, more power, or more fame – because the itch to accumulate inflames the spirit and distracts from making progress on the path. Ironically, it is by the wisdom of not-getting that you achieve all things. For when you relinquish our grasp, when you stop chasing after the world, the things you really need come to you as gifts.
– Tias Little
I have never met a heavy heart that wasn’t a phone booth with a red cape inside.
Some people will never understand what kind of super power it takes for some people to just walk outside…
You.
You stay here with me, okay?
– Andrea Gibson
The world, I’ve discovered, is a masterful flirt. It leaves little gifts everywhere—the way morning light catches in spider webs, how rain releases that earthy sweetness into the air (petrichor, they call it, though no word could fully capture that particular alchemy of water and dust that smells like pure possibility), the particular green of new leaves that somehow manages to be both ancient and urgent. But here’s the thing about flirtation: it requires participation. The world can bat its eyelashes all it wants, but if we’re not looking, if we’re not present enough to catch the gesture, the moment dies unwitnessed.
– Stephanie Tyler
When Solutions Are Technologies Of Avoidance
by Bayo Akomolafe
When things don’t go according to plan, when the laboratory explodes into splinters of glass, smoke, and worthy intentions, it is very usual to subject the errant event to an analysis of what went wrong so we can draw useful lessons. Who doesn’t do this? We all do, I suppose. But of late I have wondered whether this very obvious thing to do isn’t a getting around something else – a blindness to a different sense of things.
The Yoruba have a proverb: Ile oba t’o jo, ewa lo busi. The king’s palace burns, and is more beautiful. You might think you’ve heard this before in a more familiar saying about dark clouds with silver linings or some other anecdote with the germ of the idea that rough times don’t last. But I think the Yoruba proverb is saying something more. Something else. Instead of merely instrumentalizing the failure, quarantining it behind the defence mechanisms of the ego, surrounding it with measuring devices to extract nuggets of wisdom, and processing those rough resources into bullions of solutions, I think it suggests that there’s wisdom in being taken by it. Taken by the plumes braiding the air with our desperation. Taken by the mystery of this thing we rudely call life that isn’t anchored to our best efforts. Taken – at least for the moment – by the disruption; by the glitch; by the dying; by the swaying; by the memorized lines that won’t show up when it is time; by the limbs that won’t move when we will them to; by the lyrics that travel to the places where migrant darlings – killed by their authors – take up new dwellings.
At what point do solutions become technologies of avoidance? And is it okay to try something else? To let the ruins become fleeting messengers of a queer commonwealth of abundance in a world that is richer with losses than with the things that are lost?
Failure is difficult. Humiliating. But I suspect there is some gift, some beauty – a lock of Persephone’s hair, maybe – in bowing down ever so slightly to the tornado as it screams across the plains in front of you, a dismembered town left in its wake.
“Look for the black goat while it is daytime,” another Nigerian proverb cautions. There is a time for solutions. Then there are other times. Let them pass unnamed.
“If we ever stop talking.
Send me a Song”
To make up for lost time, you need
only to put down the grudge
you are holding so you can pick up
the phone and say, ‘How many days
did we need each other at the same time
without knowing it?’
Bitterness is the easiest way
to leave this world having had only
a near-life experience.
– Andrea Gibson
Music tells us to move, to dance… But when we are still ‘within’ music, we absorb all of its power. We are its container. Not every movement needs to go out into the world. We can keep some for ourselves. Contained. Powerful.
– Meg Howrey
There are stars whose radiance is visible on Earth though they have long been extinct. There are people whose brilliance continues to light the world though they are no longer among the living. These lights are particularly bright when the night is dark. They light the way for humankind.
– Hannah Senesh
Run Ragged
by A. R. Ammons
I said I don’t want to be older, but it’s be older
and older or nothing, right: and day by day
it’s been older every day since the beginning:
still, there was a bracket of young years
within which one could say, these are not the
older years or the baby years: there are, as
Shakespeare said, groups of time, the
transitions from one group to another usually
unalarming: people who have nothing to say
should say nothing: they should drum syllables
or squeeze verbs (or nouns) or cast them like
die, craps, creeps: for example, I don’t
feel at home in this universe and it may be
the only one: that is so pathetic: I think
that is so heartrending with content:
how can the place you come from not be your
home: is the only way to make a phrase
interesting to make it sound like it’s not a
phrase: or it could be two phrases or go two
different ways when you are really going nowhere
well, the human race needs a better track,
the track itself worn or grown over.
A ‘dobe house is fireproof, if built right, and one story high; earthquake proof, dust proof, sound proof, heat and cold proof, rat and termite proof, oh, and yes, bullet proof and almost proof against bad design, due to the thickness of its walls and damned if they don’t take on more character with age.
It is said that if the workers sing as they make adobe bricks for a home, the home will always be a happy one.
– Harry Oliver, 1000 Palms, California
The true problem is that the object we are dealing with, from the outset, when it comes to desire, is in no way an object that is predestined to satisfy the instincts, in no way an object destined to satisfy the subject by serving as his instinctual complement.
The object of desire is the signifier of desire for desire.
– Jacques Lacan
…Tolkien did not merely create hundreds of erudite, apposite, and funny sayings – however great an artistic achievement that is – he also invented entire wisdom traditions in which these sayings belong.
– David Rowe, The Proverbs of Middle-earth
It’s important to try to write when you are in the wrong mood or when the weather is wrong.
– John Ashbery
You cannot get educated by this self-propagating system in which people study to pass exams, and teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything.
You learn something by doing it yourself, by asking questions, by thinking, and by experimenting.
– Richard Feynman
Take a cue from Rumi, and live as if at least something is rigged in your favor. Acknowledge joy when it shows up. Befriend the harder feelings when they stop by–they’re just stopping by, not moving in. Remember that you are your body, and your body is you–you’re partners in this life, not enemies.
– Heidi Barr, Collisions of Earth and Sky
Never give up. Never give in. Never become hostile… Hate is too big a burden to bear.
– John Lewis
Dreams are not arbitrary. They’re not planted in our brain by alien forces. They are natural by-products of our psyche seeking its own healing and development. Dreams come to us as part of the psyche’s natural process of healing itself for developing our journey.
– James Hollis
There’s a terror
in knowing
what the world
is about.
– David Bowie
The long silences need to be loved, perhaps
more than the words
which arrive
to describe them
in time.
– Franz Wright
When we meet pain with tenderness, we awaken love—and love is deeply nourishing.
– Zohar Lavie
Writing has become almost a celebrity thing in the sense that people don’t want to write; they want to be authors. And that’s quite different.
– Toni Morrison
This world is like a mountain. Your echo depends on you. If you scream good things, the world will give it back. If you scream bad things, the world will give it back. Even if someone says badly about you, speak well about him.
– Shams of Tabrizi
I quickly see the limitations of whatever I say or whatever judgment I make about anything.
– Susan Sontag
To have the courage to accept a quality which one does not like in oneself, and which one has chosen to repress for many years, is an act of great courage. But if one does not accept the quality, then it functions behind one’s back.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
…how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life – namely myself.
– C.S. Lewis
When you are intelligent, you are fully awake and, in that state, meet problems instantaneously.
– Krishnamurti
Do battle with yourself: if you have the will to conquer anger, it cannot conquer you.
– Seneca
People were linked together
more by enmity than by love.
It was not love but the formation
of mutual enemies that made
a bonding between human
beings possible.
– Shūsaku Endō
I was a bad student, and I only read books that had horses and dogs and mysteries. Beatrix Potter—her tiny little pictures of tiny little worlds.
– Fanny Howe
the scent of orchids
like a foreign land
crescent moon
– Ogawa
It’s a privilege to track your calories. It means you have enough to eat.
It’s a privilege to exercise. It means you have a job that doesn’t require manual labour.
Stop complaining and realize how blessed you are to have these problems.
– Dan Go
But all examples of excess become a fault.
– Seneca
the trees once
entwined by spring wind
now stand alone—
between your voice and mine
only the sky remains
– Nitu Yumnam
I’ve always thought I could use my brain and my heart to jockey everyone around to the good. But life is not jockeyable. When you try, you make people infinitely crazier than they already were, including or especially yourself.
– Anne Lamott
bindweed
and day lilies
entwined
like you and me
summer every day
– Voima Oy
A real prayer has nothing to suggest to God except a deep gratitude, thankfulness. It simply accepts whatsoever God is pouring.
– Osho
I am not a saint
Because I keep trying to be a sound, something
You will remember
Once you’ve lived enough not to believe in heaven.
– Jericho Brown
The only path by which another person can upset you is through your own thought.
– Joseph Murphy
We are involved in a serious social revolution. By and large, American politics is dominated by politicians who build their careers on immoral compromises and ally themselves with open forms of political, economic, and social exploitation.
– John Lewis, March on Washington
We are all connected to the same Source. Thus there is nothing you can think of or do to ‘another’ that will not also vibrate through you.
– James Blanchard Cisneros
The Space Between
by Jill Jupen
This entire day
I have felt
just a few seconds
separated from myself.
Stepping outside
I close the door upon my foot.
The glass on the table
is moments away
from the water I pour.
I speak words
that sound foreign
even to me;
said too early,
or perhaps too late.
The tenderness
I thought I felt
is gone
before my hand
ever reaches your arm.
To know that you are a prisoner of your mind is the dawn of wisdom. The problem is not yours – it is your mind’s only. Begin by disassociating yourself from your mind. Resolutely remind yourself that you are not the mind and that its problems are not yours.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
One of the things that we do not talk about when we talk about writing is the sound and scent and sensuality of it, the scratching and hammering and tapping, the pitter of pencils and the scribble and scrawl of pens…
– Brian Doyle
A smile on the face
Of the beloved,
And we caused it.
Never again having
To ask
The universe
If we have a purpose.
Settled forever:
The question of our worth.
– Gregory Orr
BACKWARD MIRACLE
Every once in a while
we need a
backward miracle
that will strip language,
make it hold for
a minute: just the
vessel with the
wine in it—
a sacramental
refusal to multiply,
reclaiming the
single loaf
and the single
fish thereby.
– Kay Ryan
Wouldn’t it be dreadful if some day, in our own world, at home, men started going wild inside, like the animals here, and still looked like men, so that you’d never know which were which?
– Lucy (C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian)
I knew a girl. Her hobbies included telling me I was wrong about my own life.
– J. D. Daniels
a young couple
filled with hope
little butterflies
– Issa
Silence, according to Western and Eastern tradition alike, is necessary for the emergence of persons.
– Ivan Illich
Words are the clothes thoughts wear.
– Samuel Beckett
I knew that the American Empire in which I lived was approaching its imminent end, but I could not quite believe it.
– William T. Vollmann
It’s not how much we give but how much love we put into giving.
– Mother Teresa
The room was cheap and sordid,
hidden above the suspect taverna.
From the window you could see the alley,
dirty and narrow. From below
came the voices of workmen
playing cards, enjoying themselves.
– C.P. Cavafy
Just get rid of ignorance and delusions, and you will know that you are a Buddha and that you are already complete as you are. If you awaken to this, you will burst out laughing at how much effort you spent in order for you to become yourself.
– Daehaeng
Technological solutionism–that approach that says that the answer to every problem is a new technology–is equivalent to driving a car that only has a gas pedal, but no brakes. You may be able to steer, but you can never slow down.
– Vince F. Horn
the endless blue
of the Aegean Sea …
smell of summer
– Chen-ou Liu
Everywhere man blames nature and fate, yet his fate is nothing but the echo of his character and his passion, his errors and his weaknesses.
– Democritus
It’s a strange feeling, beautiful but also eerie: not only that you can step into time’s flow, but that you ARE the flow itself.
– Natalie Hodges
I’m not interested in what you should have done. What are you going to do now?
– Hatchet (Paul Scott Grill, Travel By Star)
People finally don’t have much affection for questions, especially one so leprous as the apparent lack of a fair system of rewards and punishments on earth. The question is not less gnawing and unpleasant for being so otiose, so naive. And we are not concerned with the grander issues: say the Nez Percé children receiving the hail of cavalry fire in their sleeping tents. Nothing is quite so grotesque as the meeting of a child and a bullet. And what distances in comprehension: the press at the time insisted we had won. We would like to think that the whole starry universe would curdle at such a monstrosity: the conjunctions of Orion twisted askew, the arms of the Southern Cross drooping. Of course not: immutable is immutable and everyone in his own private manner dashes his brains against the long-suffering question that is so luminously obvious. Even gods aren’t exempt: note Jesus’s howl of despair as he stepped rather tentatively into eternity. And we can’t seem to go from large to small because everything is the same size. Everyone’s skin is so particular and we are so largely unimaginable to one another.
– Jim Harrison, Legends Of The Fall
You can be far away inside, and far away outside.
– JonArno Lawson
Growth doesn’t just set you free—it sets things on fire. Old roles, old dynamics, old relationships. From the ashes, something truer rises: not the self that kept the peace, but the self that finally knows peace.
– @tinybuddha
Crossing Kansas by Train
The telephone poles
Have been holding their
Arms out
A long time now
To birds
That will not
Settle there
But pass with
Strange cawings
Westward to
Where dark trees
Gather about a
Waterhole this
Is Kansas the
Mountains start here
Just behind
The closed eyes
Of a farmer’s
Sons asleep
In their workclothes
– Donald Justice
Hanamatsuri
I should sober up
tomorrow
– Shirotomo
Pray for rain and watch it walk across
the sea, to bless the bare head of the carrion
corbeaux, even the shy agouti, and Maria,
old pirogue left on shore, open casket
at Punta de la Playa.
– Christian Campbell
chain-link fences
on both sides of the road …
post election
– Chen-ou Liu
The Brothers Grimm owed their success to “a strain of medievalism…that suggested the German past might not be all rye bread and muddy farmyards—or rather that humble places and people might also generate stories, heroes, culture.”
– Regina Marler
It’s funny how white people never think
anyone else has a history.
Imagine that?
– Sisonke Msimang
The show of intellectualism is a clever high wire act where we (as both spectators and performers) assume mental hygiene and the idealized mind are capable of providing the means to balance over life’s abyss.
As many know from experience with the tragic, when we expect deliberative thinking by itself to provide us the sole means of balance, well, the vicissitudes of our creaturely life inevitably come along to tip us off the tightrope and we fall toward any number of existential crises —crises that we don’t give a crap about analyzing in the purely abstract— crises that beckon an urgent re-framing of perspective and force us to re-value what’s important in the short time we’re here.
A humbling and helpful 12-step addage for the high-minded person trying to think their way through recovery goes, “I can’t think my way into right action, I have to act my way in to right thinking.”
Perhaps if we’ve been living solely from our heads (to exclusion of body and emotion), a fall into our full featured humanity is what’s called for. I’d like to imagine there are other ways of coming out of a stuck place when enthralled with our intellect — ways other than crisis. But it’s how many of us who lean so heavily on our thinking find our way back to our hearts, our bodies. We hit a bottom with grief, loss of meaning, mid-life issues, etc., and no matter how clever our thoughts, we can’t think our way through the visceral process, we have to be with it, there’s no outsmarting it….
– Andrew Hagel
The more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the more RESISTANCE we will feel toward pursuing it.
– Steven Pressfield
C. G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters (Bollingen Series XCVII)
Margaret Tilly, a concert pianist of San Francisco, English by origin, became interested in experimentation with the therapeutic value of music when used specifically in certain cases. This interest grew out of her own experience with Jungian analysis, and Miss Tilly was urged by analysts to acquaint Jung with her work
In 1956, while in Geneva to give a concert on radio, she decided to send Jung some papers that she had written. A reply came by return mail, from Jung’s secretary, asking her to come to Kusnacht two days later.
Margaret Tilly: When I walked into his hall, Dr. Jung came with hands outstretched to welcome me, and I felt that here was one of the warmest and friendliest persons I had ever been with —so easy to talk to that one did not feel overawed.
We sat at a round table in the window of his study. My papers were lying in front of him and he seemed to be literally bursting with interest and curiosity.
He said, “I have read and heard a great deal about music therapy, and it always seemed to me so sentimental and superficial that I was not interested. But these papers of yours are entirely different, and I simply cannot wait to hear what you do. I can’t imagine what it is. You must please use your !language, not mine.”
I didn’t immediately understand what he meant by the last sentence, but said, “Before I talk, Dr. Jung, may I ask what your own relationship to music has been?”
And his reply was a surprise. “My mother was a fine singer, so was her sister, and my daughter is a fine pianist. I know the whole literature—I have heard everything and all the great performers, but I never listen to music any more. It exhausts and irritates me.”
When I asked why, he replied, “Because music is dealing with such deep archetypal material, and those who play don’t realize this.”
And then I understood at last why the idea has grown up that Jung is not particularly sympathetic to music. He cares too much, not too little.
At this point he said, “With your permission I have asked Miss Bailey and my daughter to join us this afternoon, as they will be so interested in what you are going to tell us. Now let us have a cup of tea together.”
And we proceeded into his large, dark, cozy living room, where he introduced me to his daughter and Miss Bailey,’ who were sitting in front of a fire. On the far side of the room was a Bechstein grand with its top raised.
We had a gay and delightful time around the fire, Dr. Jung full of fun and charm, and as I swallowed my last drop of tea, he said, “I can’t wait another minute—let’s begin, but you use your language.”
I said, “Do you mean you want me to play?” and he said, “Yes. I want you to treat me exactly as though I were one of your patients. Now—what do you think I need?”
We both roared with laughter and I said, “You really are standing me up, aren’t you?”
He said, “Yes, I am. Now, let’s go to the piano. I am very slightly deaf, so may I sit close?”
And with that he sat down just behind me, so that I had to turn round a little to see him.
I began to play. When I turned round, he was obviously very moved, and said, “Go on—go on.” And I played again.
This second time he was far more deeply moved, saying, “I don’t know what is happening to me—what are you doing?”
And we started to talk. He fired question after question at me. “In such and such a case what would you try to accomplish—where would you expect to get—what would you do? Don’t just tell me, show me—show me”; and gradually as we worked he said, “I begin to see what you are doing—show me more.”
I told him many case histories, and we worked on for over two hours. He was very excited and as easy and naïve as a child to work with. Finally he burst out with:
“This opens up whole new avenues of research I’d never even dreamed of. Because of what you’ve shown me this afternoon—not just what you’ve said, but what I have actually felt and experienced—I feel that from now on music should be an essential part of every analysis. This reaches the deep archetypal material that we can only sometimes reach in our analytical work with patients. This is most remarkable.”Psychoanalytic therapy workshops
At this point some evil genie made me look at my watch, and I said, “Dr. Jung, I have to go, or I miss my train back to Paris.”
“Oh, you mustn’t go,” he said. “Can’t you stay a few days and be with us? Can’t you come back?” I most reluctantly took my leave. His daughter drove me to the train and I sat in a daze all the way to Paris.’ – C. G Jung Speaking by William McGuire; The Therapy of Music; Pages 273-276
Footnote: Alan Watts, in his autobiography In My Own Way (New York, 1972), p. 394, refers briefly to Margaret Tilly’s meeting with Jung and adds:
“Shortly afterwards, Jung’s daughter said to Margaret, `Perhaps you don’t realize that you did something very important for me and my father. I have always loved music, but he has never understood it, and this was a barrier between us. Your coming has changed all that, and I don’t know how to thank you.’”
You can seem like a millionaire to one person and a homeless person to the next. The ants think you are a giant, and the trees don’t even notice you. You think you have a boring life, but the next person might be striving for your lifestyle. Comparison is the thief of joy, so stay kind and keep loving life. Life is all just a big game of perspective.
– unknown
Disappearance isn’t always about leaving.
Sometimes, you vanish inside your own life
– drifting further with each day until no
one, not even you, knows where you’ve
gone.
– Paul Auster
… when the truth isn’t hopeful, the telling of it is.
– Andrea Gibson
I do not want anybody to be a Jungian. I want people above all to be themselves. As for ‘isms,’ they are the viruses of our day, and responsible for greater disasters than any medieval plague or pest has ever been. Should I be found one day only to have created another ‘ism,’ then I will have failed in all I tried to do.
– Carl Jung
The process is the main thing, not the fruition.
– Pema Chödrön
Don’t try to hold on to the wave
That’s breaking against your foot: so long as
You stand in the stream fresh waves
Will always keep breaking against it.
– Bertolt Brecht
Poetry can also act as an antidote to the jump scares of eye-catching headlines and to the endless doom of backlit screens.
– Diego Báez
A drop of water, if it could write out its own history, would explain the universe to us.
– Lucy Larcom
The swirly nature of love – the fricking “tornadic uplift” of it – is only a part of what shows that love is not about controlling anything but your own respectfully appreciative attention and responsiveness.
– George Gorman
While they were preparing the hemlock, Socrates was learning how to play a new tune on the flute. “What will be the use of that?” he was asked. “To know this tune before dying.” If I dare repeat this reply long since trivialized by the handbooks, it is because it seems to me the sole serious justification of any desire to know, whether exercised on the brink of death or at any other moment of existence.
– Emil Cioran, Drawn and Quartered
Inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists. There is, there has been, there will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It’s made up of all those who’ve consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners — I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem that they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’
– Wisława Szymborska
To name the ache too soon is always to risk the medicine becoming the poison.
– Báyò Akómoláfé
The experience of eros as lack alerts a person to the boundaries of himself, of other people, of things in general. It is the edge separating my tongue from the taste for which it longs that teaches me what an edge is.
– Anne Carson
Optimism is radical. It is the hard choice, the brave choice. And it is, it seems to me, most needed now, in the face of despair—just as a car is most useful when you have a distance to close. Otherwise it is a large, unmovable object parked in the garage. These days, the safest way for someone to appear intelligent is being skeptical by default. We seem sophisticated when we say “we don’t believe” and disingenuous when we say “we do.” History and fable have both proven that nothing is ever entirely lost. David can take Goliath. A beach in Normandy can turn the tide of war. Bravery can topple the powerful. These facts are often seen as exceptional, but they are not. Every day, we all become the balance of our choices—choices between love and fear, belief or despair. No hope is ever too small.
– Guillermo Del Toro
The world under heaven, after a long period of division, tends to unite; after a long period of union, tends to divide. This has been so since antiquity.
– Luo Guanzhong
The rose
was not searching for the rose.
Motionless in the sky
it was searching for something else.
– Lorca
My heart of silk
is filled with lights
with lost bells
with lilies and bees.
I will go very far,
farther than these mountains
farther than the oceans,
way up near the stars,
to ask Christ the Lord
to give back to me
the soul I had as a child,
Matured by fairy tales,
with its hat of feather
and its wooden sword.
– Fredrico Garcia Lorca
Why do we care about singers? Wherein lies the power of songs? Maybe it derives from the sheer strangeness of there being singing in the world. The note, the scale, the chord; melodies, harmonies, arrangements; symphonies, ragas, Chinese operas, jazz, the blues: that such things should exist, that we should have discovered the magical intervals and distances that yield the poor cluster of notes, all within the span of a human hand from which we can build our cathedrals of sound, is as alchemical a mystery as mathematics, or wine, or love. Maybe the birds taught us. Maybe not. Maybe we are just creatures in search of exaltation. We don’t have much of it. Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many painful ways deficient. Song turns them into something else. Song shows us a world that is worthy of our yearning, it shows us our selves as they might be, if we were worthy of the world.
– Salman Rushdie
My heart is a parachute that has never opened in time.
– Andrea Gibson
Oh, to parley with what is not mine,
with the distance of wildness and the clash
that thrills and flenses my form and season,
till tumbling from sense and bastion I feel
the chancy call of a breathtaking knowing –
as if a frog and a dove were creating
something even more shiny than affection’s rhyme.
– George Gorman
The Song of the Universal.
by Walt Whitman
COME, said the Muse,
Sing me a song no poet yet has chanted,
Sing me the Universal.
In this broad Earth of ours,
Amid the measureless grossness and the slag,
Enclosed and safe within its central heart,
Nestles the seed Perfection.
By every life a share, or more or less,
None born but it is born—conceal’d or unconceal’d, the
seed is waiting.
Lo! keen-eyed towering Science!
As from tall peaks the Modern overlooking,
Successive, absolute flats issuing.
Yet again, lo! the Soul—above all science;
For it, has History gather’d like husks around the globe;
For it, the entire star-myriads roll through the sky.
In spiral roads, by long detours,
(As a much-tacking ship upon the sea,)
For it, the partial to the permanent flowing,
For it, the Real to the Ideal tends.
For it, the mystic evolution;
Not the right only justified—what we call evil also justified.
Forth from their masks, no matter what,
From the huge, festering trunk—from craft and guile
and tears,
Health to emerge, and joy—joy universal.
Out of the bulk, the morbid and the shallow,
Out of the bad majority—the varied, countless frauds
of men and States,
Electric, antiseptic yet—cleaving, suffusing all,
Only the Good is universal.
Over the mountain growths, disease and sorrow,
An uncaught bird is ever hovering, hovering,
High in the purer, happier air.
From imperfection’s murkiest cloud,
Darts always forth one ray of perfect light,
One flash of Heaven’s glory just heard,
To fashion’s custom’s discord,
To the mad Babel-din, the deafening orgies,
Soothing each lull a strain is heard,
From some far shore, the final chorus sounding.
O the blest eyes! the happy hearts!
That see—that know the guiding thread so fine,
Along the mighty labyrinth!
And thou, America!
For the Scheme’s culmination—its Thought and its
Reality,
For these (not for thyself) Thou hast arrived.
Thou too surroundest all;
Embracing, carrying, welcoming all, Thou too, by path-
ways broad and new,
To the Ideal tendest.
The measur’d faiths of other lands—the grandeurs of
the past,
Are not for Thee but grandeurs of Thine own;
Deific faiths and amplitudes, absorbing, comprehending
all,
All eligible to all.
All, all for immortality!
Love, like the light, silently wrapping all!
Nature’s amelioration blessing all!
The blossoms, fruits of ages—orchards divine and certain;
Forms, objects, growths, humanities, to spiritual images
ripening.
Give me, O God, to sing that thought!
Give me—give him or her I love this quenchless faith,
In Thy ensemble—whatever else withheld, withhold not
from us,
Belief in plan of Thee enclosed in time and space,
Health, peace, salvation universal.
Is it a dream?
Nay, but the lack of it the dream.
And, failing it, life’s lore and wealth a dream,
And all the world a dream.
Obsession
by Charles Baudelaire
Great forests, you alarm me like a mighty fane;
Like organ-tones you roar, and in our hearts of stone,
Where ancient sobs vibrate, O halls of endless pain!
The answering echoes of your “De Profundis” moan.
I hate thee, Ocean! hate thy tumults and thy throbs,
My spirit finds them in himself. This bitter glee
Of vanquished mortals, full of insults and of sobs,
I hear it in the mighteous laughter of the sea.
O starless night! thy loveliness my soul inhales,
Without those starry rays which speak a language known,
For I desire the dark, the naked and the lone.
But e’en those darknesses themselves to me are veils,
Where live—and, by the millions ’neath my eyelids prance,
Long, long departed Beings with familiar glance.
Sometimes a gift is given and neither giver nor recipient knows what its true dimensions are, and what it appears to be at first is not what it will be in the end. Like beginnings, endings have endless recessions, layers atop the layers, consequences that ripple outward.
– Rebecca Solnit
The merrel also knew its wing had not healed. But I could reach a great height once more before it failed me, it said. And from there I would fold my wings and plummet to the earth as if a hare or a fawn had caught my eye; but it would be myself I stooped toward. It would be a good flight and a good death. And so I eat their dead things cut up on a pole, dreaming of my last flight.
– Robin McKinley
All that I see arches, and light arches around it. The air churns out forces and lashes the marveling land. A hundred times through the fields and along the deep roads I’ve cried Holy. I see a hundred insects moving across the air, rising and falling. Chipped notes of birdsong descend from the trees, tuneful and broken; the notes pile about me like leaves. Why do these molded clouds make themselves overhead innocently changing, trailing their flat blue shadows up and down everything, and passing, and gone? Ladies and gentlemen! You are given insects, and birdsong, and a replenishing series of clouds.
– Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
Walking faster and faster, weightless, I feel the wine. It sheds light in slats through my rib cage, and fills the buttressed vaults of my ribs with light pooled and buoyant. I am moth; I am light. I am prayer and I can hardly see.
– Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
A nun lives in the fires of the spirit, a thinker lives in the bright wick of the mind, an artist lives jammed in the pool of materials. (Or, a nun lives, thoughtful and tough, in the mind, a nun lives, with that special poignancy peculiar to religious, in the exile of materials; and a thinker, who would think of something, lives in the clash of materials, and in the world of spirit where all long thoughts must lead; and an artist lives in the mind, that warehouse of forms, and an artist lives, of course, in the spirit. So.
– Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared.
– Audre Lorde
The god of today is a tree. He is a forest of trees or a desert, or a wedge from wideness down to a scatter of stars, stars like salt low and dumb and abiding. Today’s god said: shed. He peels from eternity always, spread; he winds into time like a rind.
– Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
When we enter a new situation, we’re activated to focus our attention on this new event. However, traumatized people tend to be riveted on their traumas; new situations are connected to — and constricted by — that past event. The key to dissolving this constriction is simply learning to stay with the sensation until it begins to change. When you contact that stuck sensation, it will begin to change, simply because that’s the nature of all sensation. However, when you come in contact with that constriction for the first time, it can often give rise to fear. Indeed, the sensation is likely to get worse before it gets better because, for the first time, you’re experiencing it directly. As you stay with it, it may continue to get worse, then better, in a cycle of expansion and contraction. What’s important to realize is that you can pendulate — swing back and forth — between these sensations of expansion and contraction. And this means that you’re no longer stuck!
– Peter Levine
I will never deny how badly I want to live.
I have a measly wrinkle collection compared to my dream goal.
I would absolutely love to be a before-picture.
This world looks at super models the way
I now look at ninety year olds who have hair so silver
they could tinsel their own trees, so many
laugh lines their faces look like roadmaps to heaven.
But I did not meet this life until I met its brevity.
Did not meet my voice until I knew every word
could be my last. I did not know what prayer was
until I started praying for what I already have.
When I speak of the sweetness of this life
I don’t mean my butterflies never cry.
I don’t mean my heartbeat never aches.
I mean I am learning the infinite difference
between saying “I fear death” and saying “death isn’t fair”
if it finds me soon. A short life
doesn’t always equate to a life cut short.
A long life doesn’t always equate to a full one.
My life is so now full it is overflowing with
how many beautiful things can be seen in a single second,
how it is possible to blow up a second like a balloon
and fit infinity inside of it, until I am bursting
with laughter when anyone calls me an old soul
because I can’t help but feel like this is my first time here
marveling at the steam rising from a cup of coffee,
or two wild geese stopping traffic as they mosey across the road,
or my own breath and another birthday candle
to celebrate the holiday of having a body.
– Andrea Gibson
Happiness was never important. The problem is that we don’t know what we really want. What makes us happy is not to get what we want. But to dream about it. Happiness is for opportunists. So I think that the only life of deep satisfaction is a life of eternal struggle, especially struggle with oneself. If you want to remain happy, just remain stupid. Authentic masters are never happy; happiness is a category of slaves.
– Slavoj Žižek
To become imperceptible oneself, to have dismantled love in order to become capable of loving. To have dismantled one’s self in order finally to be alone and meet the true double at the other end of the line. A clandestine passenger on a motionless voyage. To become like everybody else; but this, precisely, is a becoming only for one who knows how to be nobody, to no longer be anybody. To paint oneself gray on gray.
– Gilles Deleuze
Houses are really bodies. We connect ourselves with walls, roofs, and objects just as we hang on to our livers, skeletons, flesh and bloodstream. I am no beauty, no mirror is necessary to assure me of this absolute fact. Nevertheless I have a death grip on this haggard frame as if it were the limpid body of Venus herself.
– Leonora Carrington
When in doubt, listen to your heart. This is why the popular phrase widely used, “Listen to your heart,” is so powerful —because it is true. The heart is where your intuition resides. The heart has no filters nor does it categorize things as good, bad, fair, unfair, right, or wrong. To the heart, there is only truth. Here is scientific fact to help you understand this. Your heart feels six seconds before your brain thinks.
– Waleuska Lazo
Words cling to the very core of our memories and lie there in silence until a new desire reawakens them and recharges them with loving energy. That is one of the qualities of love that moves me most, their capacity for transmitting love. Like water, words are a wonderful conductor of energy. And the most powerful, transforming energy is the energy of love.
– Laura Esquivel
Although the pure truth has never been stated, nevertheless it has never been lost. Its existence does not depend upon human statement but upon human sensitivity. In this it is unlike all other knowledge.
– Paul Brunton
The Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert talk about the two “hungers”. There is the Great Hunger and there is the Little Hunger. The Little Hunger wants food for the belly; but the Great Hunger, the greatest hunger of all, is the hunger for meaning…
There is ultimately only one thing that makes human beings deeply and profoundly bitter, and that is to have thrust upon them a life without meaning. There is nothing wrong in searching for happiness. But of far more comfort to the soul is something greater than happiness or unhappiness, and that is meaning. Because meaning transfigures all.
Once what you are doing has for you meaning, it is irrelevant whether you’re happy or unhappy. You are content – you are not alone in your Spirit – you belong.
– Laurens van der Post
…for I keep in the light as much as I can. Let the old heathens count Darkness the womb of all things. I count Light the older, from the tread of whose feet fell the first shadow – and that was Darkness. Darkness exists but by the light, and for the light.
– George MacDonald
You need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select your clothes every day. This is a power you can cultivate.
– Elizabeth Gilbert
THE TOUCH OF LATE JULY
With and without you
the intense consolation
of dusk at high tide.
– Tom D’Evelyn
Man has to cope with the problem of suffering. The Oriental wants to get rid of suffering by casting it off. Western man tries to suppress suffering with drugs. But suffering has to be overcome, and the only way to overcome it is to endure it.
– CG Jung
Ars Poetica
“What can I know? What ought I to do?
What may I hope? What is the human being?”
– Immanuel Kant
To answer Kant’s last question
she should take the curtains from her eyes
and lay them on the bed.
She should stand on her head and dream,
empty herself of I, I, I, I.
She should walk inside the living and the dead,
become some other passerby.
– Catherine Barnett
It’s True
Oh what a hard time I have
loving you as I love you.
On account of your love I have an air ache,
a heart ache, a hat ache
Someone please buy
this hatband of mine
and this fine-spun white sadness
perfect for kerchiefs!
Oh, what a hard time I have
loving you as I love you.
– Federico García Lorca, (tr. Christopher Maurer)
When I write, the process is full of risk, error and painstaking self-correction. It arrives somewhere surprising only when I’ve stayed in uncertainty long enough to find out what I had initially failed to understand.
– Meghan O’Rourke
I don’t think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.
– Margaret Atwood
The universe is not human-centric. Every life form has a role to play – that is the beauty of it.
– Sadhguru
The reclamation of the feminine is not a movement. It’s restoration of order.
– Nika Solé
Most people imagine that if they stop thinking, that’s sort of the end: the life of the mind instantly curls up and dies.
– Alan Watts
I’d stand in the shadows of your heart
and tell you I’m not afraid of your dark.
– Andrea Gibson
Love and grace are bigger than the nightmare, supposedly. Without trusting this, we’re doomed and ridiculous.
– Anne Lamott
‘Poetry,’ [Charles Baudelaire] once wrote, ‘cannot, under pain of death or of failure, become assimilated to science or to morality; it does not have Truth as its goal. It only has itself.’
– Claire Ortiz Hill
butterflies and birds
dancing into the sky
a cloud of flowers
– Basho
…writing remains. Not because it is safe to write, and certainly not because there is time or quiet or shelter for it, but because without writing, there would be nothing left that resembles continuity. Words arrive not after the devastation but within it.
– @AlaaQAlQaisi
I took no pride in my solitude; but I was dependent on it. The darkness of the room was like sunlight to me.
– Charles Bukowski
Don’t tell of suffering, talk about nothing but blessings.
– Rumi
Why I Like Marriage
by George Ovitt
At breakfast I tell my wife
To bury me in my new suit.
“The gray one?” she asks,
“Yes, with the pinstripes,”
“Fine,” and she sips her tea.
This is what I like about marriage—
The not-being-surprised part of it,
As in how I can decide on my
Funeral attire, then read aloud
A Times review of a restaurant
In Paris that we will never visit,
And a moment later suggest a
Walk in the snow—why not?
By lunchtime I will have decided
Against the gray suit and burial
Altogether, having seen a billboard
For cremations—$850, complete;
“On second thought,” I begin,
And my wife will nod, and sip her tea,
And say, “I know,” and mean it.
We cannot lead the worldly life and the higher life. We cannot allow ourselves to run after worldly love and affections and have the higher Divine Love at the same time. God and worldly affections, God and worldly passion and pleasure, cannot live together.
– Swami Brahmananda
Our happiness depends on the habit of mind we cultivate.
– Norman Vincent Peale
Don’t tell me the sky’s the limit when there are footprints on the moon.
– Paul Brandt
Certain philosophers assert that the external world does not exist, and that it is within ourselves that we develop our lives. However that may be, love, even in its humblest beginnings, is a striking example of how little reality means to us.
– Marcel Proust, Volume V In Search Of Lost Time
In a world that tells us we should always be doing more, sitting still can be an act of rebellion, the ultimate rejection of a culture that tells us our value is tied to our productivity.
– Christopher Rivas
After Brecht
Be thankful it’s this dark.
Nobody knows what you’re up to.
What if they did –
who’s to say it’s wrong?
Anything we want to do,
as long as we can find the energy,
we do it. That’s how come
it’s getting darker all the time.
What if some dark night
they do you in. No last moments
marred by the injustice of it all.
I don’t know who to thank.
– David Bromige
One has come into the presence of mystery. After all the trouble one has taken to be a modern man, one has come back under the spell of a primitive awe, wordless and humble.
– Wendell Berry
The possession of anything begins in the mind.
– Bruce Lee
The telephone is the writer’s devil, the dictionary his guardian angel.
– Octavio Paz
It’s wonderful to admire oneself
with complete candor, tallying up the merits of each
of the latrines.
– Frank O’Hara
Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.
– Edgar Degas
There is a Single Law.
The Law of Nature.
The Law of Equilibrium.
The Law of Unity.
The Law Of infinite Love.
We exist within it.
It covers us
like a mother covers a child.
If we correspond to it,
we will prosper.
If we don’t correspond to it,
we’ll suffer.
– Abraham the Patriarch
I was reading something by Plath, who’s been a common gateway drug for young women writers, and I was just blown away. It gave me a certain feeling, like the feeling you get when you listen to a piece of music you love, that moves you in some way, that opens up your spirit. The way poetry made me feel when I was reading it made me want to write it and create my own version. Whatever energy was held in that language, I wanted to find my own way of accessing it. So that was the beginning, and it really was like lightning.
– Kim Addonizio
Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness.
– Anne Frank
Just like you can too little or too much of certain macros (carbs, protein, fats), you can get too little or too much of certain wavelengths of light (visible, infrared, UV)
– Abud Bakri MD
Who now shall giue vnto me words and sound,
Equall vnto this haughtie enterprise?
Or who shal lend me wings, with which from ground
My lowly verse may loftily arise,
And lift it selfe vnto the highest skies?
– Edmund Spenser
If you really care for others, you don’t demonstrate consistent self-sacrifice, you demonstrate appropriate self-sacrifice.
– @VinceFHorn
Other countries may offer you discoveries in manners or lore or landscape; Greece offers you something harder — the discovery of yourself.
– Lawrence Durrell
You must be capable not only of great fineness of perception, but of great boldness of imagination if you are going to make use of all that the great artist gives you.
– Virginia Woolf
I have a theory that ‘holidays’ evolved from the medieval pilgrimage, and are essentially a kind of penance for being so happy and comfortable in one’s daily life.
– Philip Larkin
The tragedy of the contemporary academy is that even when traditional liberal learning clearly wins with students and donors, it loses with those in power.
– Dr. Jennifer Frey
He has nothing useful to say about fascism who is unwilling to mention capitalism.
– Max Horkheimer
I wept and wept. I had come to believe that if I really wanted something badly enough, the very act of my wanting it was an assurance that I would not get it.
– Audre Lorde
We are suffocating among people who believe they are absolutely right. And for all those who can only live in dialogue and human friendship, this silence is the end of the world.
– Albert Camus
I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies; for the hardest victory is over self.
– Aristotle
Yoga and writing both demand that I stay with what’s true and what’s present, however painful it may be—the sticky joint, the breaking heart, the ragged, unacceptable truth that needs to be spoken.
– Anne Cushman
We all live in a
beautifully
round world.
– Lêdo Ivo
I paced my room, imagined
myself an Aztec Angel, hurled
those words against walls, faced
the mirror, proud I was brown,
proud I was my father’s son.
– Daniel Elias Galicia
Fidelity
Say the facts:
Someone decided not to choose you.
Someone decided not to fight for you,
turning from the wild colts of your broken heart.
Someone left your one life
on its knees.
What will you do
with those ruins? When Christ
knelt before his judges,
he didn’t say a word to them,
a syllable.
He tried, He is still trying
to tell you: Your life
is the miracle
you think it is.
Give it to the ones who do believe.
– Joseph Fasano
If you get close to what
you love, who you are is
revealed to you.
– Ethan Hawke
Change is also loss, and in that sense a parent can lose a child every day, until you realize that you’d better stop predicting what they’re going to become and concentrate on what is right in front of you.
– Rachel Cusk
The physical world is true and real; the inner world is also true and real. It is when we muddle them, when we fail to live the inner world as symbol, when we try to locate it in literal people, that the illusory world is created.
– Robert A. Johnson
Truth is contrary to our nature, not so error, and this for a very simple reason; truth demands that we should recognize ourselves as limited, error flatters us that, in one way or another, we are unlimited.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Everybody has a ‘gripping stranger’ in their lives… a stranger who unwittingly possesses a bizarre hold over you. Maybe it’s the kid in cut-offs who mows your lawn or the woman wearing White Shoulders who stamps your book at the library — a stranger who, if you were to come home and find a message from them on your answering machine saying ‘Drop everything. I love you. Come away with me now to Florida,’ you’d follow them.
– Douglas Coupland, Generation X
If we do not have the depths, how do we have the heights? Yet you fear the depths, and do not want to confess that you are afraid of them. It is good, though, that you fear yourselves; say it out loud that you are afraid of yourselves. It is wisdom to fear oneself. Only the heroes say that they are fearless. But you know what happens to the hero.
– CG Jung
You could make an entire second world out of what people throw away. The landfill is where I figured out one of my main philosophies, that everybody alive is basically in the process of trading out their old stuff for different stuff, day in day out.
– Barbara Kingsolver
There are persons who, when they cease to shock us, cease to interest us.
– F. H. Bradley
But if the doctor wishes to help a human being he must be able to accept him as he is. And he can do this in reality only when he has already seen and accepted himself as he is.
– CG Jung
We all have ordeals we must face… It’s through them that we find a new direction in our lives. The more grueling the ordeal, the more it can help us down the road.
– Haruki Murakami
Peace, which costs nothing, is attended with infinitely more advantage, than any victory with all its expense.
– Thomas Paine
You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.
– Marcus Aurelius
Whoever goes deeply into poetry escapes from being as certitude, meets with the absence of the gods, lives in the intimacy of this absence, becomes responsible for it, assumes its risk, and endures its favor.
– Maurice Blanchot
Psychology needs drama, not analysis; pathos, not cure.
– James Hillman
The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.
– Zadie Smith
We have to face things as they are, look at them very closely and see the urgency of doing something immediately, not leaving it to the scientist, politician or intellectual.
– Krishnamurti
Read books because you will never be able to meet and spend uninterrupted time with the thoughts of so many brilliant and unique people.
– Mark Manson
Even when they call us mad, when they call us subversives and communists and all the epithets they put on us, we know we only preach the subversive witness of the Beatitudes, which has turned everything upside down…
– St. Oscar Romero
The worst labyrinth is not that intricate form that can entrap us forever, but a single and precise straight line.
– Jorge Luis Borges
When thee builds a prison, thee had better build with the thought ever in thy min that thee and thy children may occupy the cells.
– Elizabeth Fry
Before you start pointing fingers, make sure your hands are clean.
– Jimi Hendrix
Never worry what others say when you walk away from all the drama. Be grateful you had the strength and courage to stay out of the conflict and be at peace with your choices.
– Elle Sommer
Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.
– Herbert Marcuse
How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been; how gloriously different are the saints.
– C.S. Lewis
I write to multiply the space I live in.
– Hélène Cixous
Ethics and equity and the principles of justice do not change with the calendar.
– D. H. Lawrence
The body is an archive. Memory lives in flesh.
– Tina Campt
Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry.
– Umberto Eco
Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
You don’t live for the world; you build it inside you.
– Toni Morrison
To become is just as important as to be.
– Simone de Beauvoir
Only fragments are accurate. The whole always lies.
– Georges Bataille
Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
No one is truly themselves, except in exile.
– Emil Cioran
The truth of a thing is in the feel of it, not in the think of it.
– Stanley Kubrick
There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.
– Nelson Mandela
Truth isn’t found by merely connecting logical dots or filling gaps with preferred beliefs in the immediate layer of analysis. Instead, it resides in comprehending the formation of our widest spectrum of experiences, acknowledging that nothing exists independently and that everything remains within the realm of conditions.
– Primoz Korelc Hiriko
Our planet is poorly equipped for delight. One must snatch gladness from the days that are. In this life it’s not difficult to die. To make life is more difficult by far.
– Vladimir Mayakovsky
In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay.
– Ernst Fischer
The unknown is not behind us, but stitched into every second.
– John Berger
WANT
They say men want freedom
and girls want love,
but I’ve seen women leave
lovers and countries and kingdoms
of comfort just for the chance
to sleep unbothered, to bathe
unwatched, to waltz around
apartments all their own,
wearing nothing but lipstick—
the color of desire.
– Joy Sullivan
Not one person in a hundred knows how to be silent and listen, no, nor even to conceive what such a thing means. Yet only then you can detect, beyond the fatuous clamor, the silence of which the universe is made.
– Samuel Beckett
Those who have suffered understand suffering and therefore extend their hand.
– Patti Smith
Come see me
in the good light
Come tell me
what you tell the truth.
Come trouble me.
Come lightning strike.
Come read aloud
what I can’t yet pronounce
of my own life.
– Andrea Gibson
Once in a while, we all succumb
to the merely personal.
Those glass shards and snipped metal
That glitter and disappear and glitter again
in the edged night light
Of memory’s anxious sky.
– Charles Wright
Time as hunger.
Time passing and gazing.
Time as perseverance.
Mountain time.
Time as paper folded to look like a mountain.
Time compared to the wild fantastic silence of stars.
– Anne Carson
You think that just because it’s already happened, the past is finished and unchangeable? Oh no, the past is cloaked in multicolored taffeta and every time we look at it we see a different hue.
– Milan Kundera
You will need to state the reason for your visit. / Don’t say because my parents’ house / still sits empty on a bluff overlooking the sea
– Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
Upon Arrival
by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
You will need to state the reason for your visit.
Don’t say because I want to walk down old roads
and caress stone walls the color of my skin.
You will need to state the reason for your visit.
Don’t say because the olives are ready for harvest
and I will coax the fruit from the trees,
press it into liquid gold.
You will need to state the reason for your visit.
Don’t say because my parents’ house
still sits empty on a bluff overlooking the sea,
the green shutters my grandfather had just painted
remain sealed shut
and the army listed the property’s owners
as absentees.
You will need to state the reason for your visit.
Don’t say because I am carrying prayers in my suitcase
for a people who wait,
and I’ll unfold them
embroidered linens of verse
and spread them out across the land.
iv. “The leaves stir not”
The leaves stir not,
[They] all are steady as the cloudless sky;
How deep the quiet: all is motionless,
As if the life of the vast world was hush’d
Into breathless dreams.
– Wordsworth
Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul.
– Aldous Huxley
Don’t take anything personally. Nothing others do or say is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions of others you won’t be the victim of needless suffering.
– Don Miguel Ruiz
Never throw caution to the wind. It could whip back into your eyes and blind you.
– Stephen Colbert
To spin the web and not be caught in it, to create the world, to create your own life, to rule your fate, to name the grandmothers as well as the fathers, to draw nets and not straight lines, to be a maker as well as a cleaner, to be able to sing and not be silenced, to take down the veil and appear: all these are the banners on the laundry line I hang out.
– Rebecca Solnit
Freedom is not a state; it is an act. It is not some enchanted garden perched high on a distant plateau where we can finally sit down and rest. Freedom is the continuous action we all must take, and each generation must do its part to create an even more fair, more just society.
– John Lewis
Everyone arrives one day and asks, is this it?
And the stars answer back with more stars.
– Victoria Chang
Rumour is a pipe Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures And of so easy and so plain a stop That the blunt monster with uncounted heads, The still-discordant wavering multitude, Can play upon it.
– William Shakespeare
Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave
and eats a bread it does not harvest.
Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero,
and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful.
Pity a nation that despises a passion in its dream,
yet submits in its awakening.
Pity the nation that raises not its voice
save when it walks in a funeral,
boasts not except among its ruins,
and will rebel not save when its neck is laid
between the sword and the block.
Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox,
whose philosopher is a juggler,
and whose art is the art of patching and mimicking
Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpeting,
and farewells him with hooting,
only to welcome another with trumpeting again.
Pity the nation whose sages are dumb with years
and whose strong men are yet in the cradle.
Pity the nation divided into fragments,
each fragment deeming itself a nation.
– Kahlil Gibran
When bodies are discussed, especially in popular culture, it has often meant a very circumscribed set of themes, largely to do with what the body looks like or how to maintain it at a pinnacle of health. The body as a set of surfaces, of more or less pleasing aspect. The perfect, unattainable body, so smooth and gleaming it is practically alien. What to feed it, how to groom it, the multiple dismaying ways in which it might fail to fit in or measure up. But the element of the body that interested me was the experience of living inside it, inhabiting a vehicle that was so cataclysmically vulnerable, so unreliably subject to pleasure and pain, hatred and desire.
– Olivia Laing
Sadly, because our culture has devalued the feminine, we have repressed so much of her nature, so many of her qualities. Instead we live primarily masculine values; we are goal-oriented, competitive, driven. Masculine values even dominate our spiritual quest; we seek to be better, to improve ourselves, to get somewhere. We have forgotten the feminine qualities of waiting, listening, being empty. We have dismissed the deep need of the soul, our longing, the feminine side of love.
– Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
No one ever begins anything, except by grace. To sin means to think that one can begin something oneself. We never start anything; we always respond.
– René Girard
In Hollywood, more often than not, they’re making more kind of traditional films, stories that are understood by people. And the entire story is understood. And they become worried if even for one small moment something happens that is not understood by everyone. But what’s so fantastic is to get down into areas where things are abstract and where things are felt, or understood in an intuitive way that, you can’t, you know, put a microphone to somebody at the theatre and say ‘Did you understand that?’ but they come out with a strange, fantastic feeling and they can carry that, and it opens some little door or something that’s magical and that’s the power that film has.
– David Lynch
Whenever the intensity of looking reaches a certain degree, one becomes aware of an equally intense energy coming towards one through the appearance of whatever it is one is scrutinizing.
– John Berger
I had begun to go silent. I could feel it happening to me, as though concrete were filling my cells. The more silent I grew, the more silence I wanted. Silence had become almost voluptuous—it was becoming my place of refuge. It became indistinguishable from rage. I tended this silence/rage in the darkness of my organs. I called it my privacy.
– Ariana Reines
All the chance events of our lives are materials from which we can make what we like. Whoever is rich in spirit makes much of his life. Every acquaintance, every incident would be for the thoroughly spiritual person the first element in an endless series — the beginning of an endless novel.
– Novalis
I have always thought that life and literature are intermingled and that this intermingling has been my quest.
– V. S. Pritchett
ENTERING THE KINGDOM
The crows see me.
They stretch their glossy necks
In the tallest branches
Of green trees. I am
Possibly dangerous, I am
Entering the kingdom.
The dream of my life
Is to lie down by a slow river
And stare at the light in the trees—
To learn something by being nothing
A little while but the rich
Lens of attention.
But the crows puff their feathers and cry
Between me and the sun,
And I should go now.
They know me for what I am.
No dreamer,
No eater of leaves.
– Mary Oliver
At first a yogi feels his mind
Is tumbling like a waterfall;
In mid-course, like the Ganges
It flows on slow and gentle;
In the end, it is a great
Vast ocean, where the Lights
Of Son and Mother merge in one.
– Tilopa
All at once it occured to me – why paint? Why should I limit myself to two dimensions when I could make art from anything at all: fire,water, the human body? Anything!
– Marina Abramovic
Q: Perhaps you feel a bit out of step with
your contemporaries?
UKL: Why should a woman of 74 want to be
“in step with” anybody? Am I in an army, or
something?
– Ursula K Le Guin
It is hard for most of us to believe that both angels and demons mingle with humans on Earth. Yet tradition teaches that they are rarely seen in their essential form; they go about their business in plausibly devised appearances, looking like regular people in order to pass unnoticed.
They are instructed, in fact ordered, to affect the lives of men and women, either to raise them to higher consciousness or at least higher ethics, or to seduce them downward to the animal sphere.
Their common purpose is to allow us to exercise our free will, to choose.
This free will is the unique power granted to men and women and which we must exercise or eventually lose. If either angelic or demonic influence was always stronger than our free will, people would be compelled to be good or to be bad. Real choice would not exist and free will would simply be a comforting fantasy. But in the actual struggle of forces, a man or woman can choose to follow the light with difficulty and at some cost, or not. The great Cosmic Design requires us to force our souls through this eternal struggle.
– Lillian Firestone
Theoretically, we are aware that the earth is spinning, but in reality we do not notice it: the ground we walk on seems to be stationary and gives no cause for alarm. The same happens with Time.
– Marcel Proust
Your words are you. You are them and not much more. The Description: the fieldness of fields, the weediness of weeds … When is description mere? Never. A freshness in the seeing, an innocency in the vision, the angle of perception, the bringing together of details, not necessarily as metaphors, even, just as objects. Be one of those on whom nothing is lost. Don’t strain for arrangement. Look and put it down and let your sensibility be the sieve.
– Theodore Roethke
Existence is a grand cosmic joke, and we, the punchline, spend our days deciphering the laughter of the universe.
– Jean-Paul Sartre
I know that / hope is the hardest / love we carry.
– Jane Hirshfield
At the farthest remove from knowledge, the poem is exemplarily a thought that is obtained in the retreat, or the defection, of everything that supports the faculty to know. And no doubt this is why the poem has always disconcerted philosophy.
– Badiou
It is the genius of Jung to argue that “gods” exist, but only metaphorically and only in a natural dimension. That natural dimension is the psyche.
– Michael Vannoy Adams
One must have courage to see what one does see and not to deny it for convenience.
– Javier Marías
Sometimes I think my whole professional life has been based on this hunch I had, early on, that many people feel just as muddled as I do, and might be happy to tag along with me on this search for clarity, for precision.
– Zadie Smith
For the rest of my life,
I will live with my hands outstretched
for things that are no longer there.
– Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
If you do not react to
conditioning, then you’re
always in the Silence.
It is how you react
where you are
that counts.
– Robert Adams
When I first got glasses I was shocked that the world was Clear and Defined, it had never occurred to me that seeing everything blurry wasn’t just How Things Are.
– River Kenna
It would take too long to explain the intimate alliance of contradictions in human nature which makes love itself wear at times the desperate shape of betrayal. And perhaps there is no possible explanation.
– Joseph Conrad
An education ought to be useless, or at least have a component of uselessness.
– Michael Hofmann
The White Horse
The youth walks up to the white horse to put its halter on
and the horse looks at him in silence.
They are so silent they are in another world.
– D. H. Lawrence
One may keep holiday without extravagance.
– Seneca
Break problems down to basic principles before solving them.
– Prof. Feynman
I’d been reading Keats since I was fourteen or so, and I was just accepting rhythm as he used it, like Robert Lowell did. That put me in a very archaic sound. It was a repetitive sound. It’s like bad rock music, not Kendrick Lamar.
– Fanny Howe
One of the best things a man can bring into the world with him is a natural humility of spirit. About the next best thing he can bring, and they usually go together, is an appreciative spirit — a loving and susceptible heart.
– John Burroughs
He whose bride is a ghost cannot live. Even though in his blood there existed the force of a life of one hundred years, that force must quickly perish.
– Lafcadio Hearn
Teachers tell you to just delete me, cross me out, excise me from your short story, essay, poem, slice-of-life documentary storytelling article. Because apparently, I’m just … unnecessary? But they’re just wrong. Just so, so wrong.
– Kerry Elson
traveling
with the gods
numbering the days
– Basho
The solution is not to suppress our rage or to let it explode. The solution is to process our rage in safe containers…. We have to move those energies.
– Valarie Kaur
Have only love in your heart for others. The more you see the good in them, the more you will establish good in yourself.
– Paramahansa Yogananda
Should art have a purpose
Beyond that
Of bringing the greatest joy
To its creator?
– Sarita Talwai
Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you’re already in heaven now.
– Jack Kerouac
Loafing
I looked into the room a moment ago,
and this is what I saw—
my chair in its place by the window,
the book turned facedown on the table.
And on the sill, the cigarette
left burning in its ashtray.
Malingerer! my uncle yelled at me
so long ago. He was right.
I’ve set aside time today,
same as every day,
for doing nothing at all.
– Raymond Carver
Neuroscience shows that our closest relationships literally shape our brains. They influence our emotional responses, decision-making patterns, and daily behaviors. Over time, who we attach to rewires who we become.
– Sheleana Aiyana
The moment there is self-pity you have provided the soil in which sorrow takes root.
– J. Krishnamurti
The more one knows, the more one still has to learn. Ignorance increases in the same proportion as knowledge– or rather, not ignorance, but the knowledge of ignorance.
– Friedrich Schlegel
cool summer breeze
rising up with the
cicada’s song
– Issa
Maybe the point isn’t to be exceptional. Maybe it’s to be present, to be real, to be kind. Maybe it’s to pass on something quieter than legacy but more lasting than ego: attention, care, perspective.
– Tony Collins
When I start writing any book, I want one thing: for the book to turn out well, which is to say for it to be a self-sufficient work of literature, one unconnected with current issues of people or the state.
– Vladimir Sorokin
In every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the People.
– Eugene Victor Debs
Are you polluting the world or cleaning up the mess? You are responsible for your inner space; nobody else is, just as you are responsible for the planet. As within, so without: If humans clear inner pollution, then they will also cease to create outer pollution.
– Eckhart Tolle
If I have to distill this thought—this feeling—into questions, I’d ask the following. Is parody dangerous? Does satire of a regime ultimately serve the regime?
– Vladimir Sorokin
Oh I just understood why Seeking is unsustainable and a bad habit to get into
If you actively seek things out, your ego has more control in grabbing the things it thinks it wants
Rather than receiving what comes to you and wants you
This is how people get lost in giant book piles and lose years to The Correct Practices that aren’t actually what their souls want to find
The habit of seeking implies some sense of searching out specific things,, and the specific things your thinking mind wants to seek out are mostly gonna be the wrong things, compared to noticing what’s already coming into your life and following it
—took me years of seeking before finally dropping it and opening up to the path that kept throwing itself at my feet
– River Kenna
Life’s inherent nature is impermanence. Energy flows, and things change. But in the end, everything works out for the best. To be stable, we must learn to stay in the centre and watch the world around us change as if it is a great drama.
– Brahma Kumaris
Enlightenment or awakening is not the creation of a new state of affairs but the recognition of what already is.
– Alan Watts
It seems to me that love should not make all else disappear but should simply tint it with new nuances; I would like a love that accompanies me through life, not that absorbs all my life.
– Simone de Beauvoir
Let us get this straight: I do not and never have felt your love for A. ridiculous. Nothing could be less ridiculous than a young man’s feelings of that kind, even if it does not ripen into final love or end in marriage.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
We breathe air exhaled from trees
whose leaves are made of starlight.
Our veins echo the patterns
of rivers, branches, and root systems.
We are not a part of nature.
We are nature.
– Marysia Miernowska
And that other self, who watches me from the distance of decades,
what will she say? Will she look at me with hatred or with compassion,
I whose choices made her what she will be?
– Jane Hirshfield
What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.
– C.S. Lewis
The Dharma reminds us: the world isn’t just about us. Everyone matters.
– Myokei Caine-Barrett, Shonin
To be choicelessly aware of everything about you and within yourself, is meditation.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
In the overall context of the spiritual journey, it is important to remember that self-transformation is a continuous process, not a one-time event. One cannot say, “I used to be a nonspiritual person, but now I have been transformed into a spiritual person. My old self is dead.” We are constantly being transformed when we travel on the path.
– Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche
monsoon night …
side-by-side on the porch
my old dog and me
– Chen-ou Liu
There is a gathering
of something beyond
these trees
Each day it grows
stronger, suggesting
that the earth will pass away
before armies conquer it
What remains
has always been here
humming its lullabies of peace
if only we have ears to hear
– Mark Gordon
In capitalist countries, a multitude of moral teachers, advisors, and “disorientators” stand between the exploited and those in power.
– Frantz Fanon
A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is.
– C.S. Lewis
how will life be
when it unfolds in your hands,
a fish squirming
to return to water,
or a ship ready to sail?
– Chen-ou Liu
pulling light
from the other world …
Milky Way
– Yatsuka Ishihara
By saving other species from ourselves, we give our descendants the chance to ridicule our harebrained theories and keep observing, keep learning, and keep expanding their imaginations to encompass the truths of the living world.
– Michelle Nijhuism
Love hath breath’d upon me and I live!
Love shineth in its deep.
Love hath lived within me and I breathe!
Lo now I wake from sleep.
– Tolkien
Summer night—
even the stars
are whispering to each other.
– Kobayashi Issa
summer lake
she and I ankle-deep
in stars
– Chen-ou Liu
silence isn’t peace.
it’s just the fear of being wrong.
dressed in calm.
– Eli Shade
Suppose we stopped compartmentalizing death, cutting it off from life. Imagine if we regarded dying as a final stage of growth that held an unprecedented opportunity for transformation. Could we turn toward death like a master teacher and ask, “How, then, shall I live?”
– Frank Ostaseski
I have no doubt whatever of the future. I know there are times in the history of all reforms, when the future looks dark… I, for one, have gone through all this. I have had fifty years of it, and yet I have not lost either heart or hope.
– Frederick Douglass
What is the point of literature? I think that the person who asks that question will not find my answer convincing anyway.
– Abdulrazak Gurnah
The intuitive is a type that doesn’t see, doesn’t see the stumbling block before his feet, but he smells a rat for ten miles.
– CG Jung
What makes a subject difficult to understand… is the contrast between the understanding of the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things that are most obvious can become the most difficult to understand. What has to be overcome is not difficulty of the intellect but of the will.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
If we go too deep into the dark, we can’t tolerate the light. We have to slowly work our way back.
– Robin Robertson
He who does not read, at 70 years will have lived only one life, his own! He who reads, will have lived 5000 years: He was there when Cain killed Abel, when Renzo married Lucia, when Leopardi admired infinity… Because “Reading is backward immortality.”
– Umberto Eco
The writer is a secret criminal. How? First because writing tries to undertake the journey toward strange sources of art that are foreign to us. “The thing” does not happen here, it happens somewhere else, in a strange and foreign country.
– Hélène Cixous
Here is how I spend my days now. I live in a beautiful place. I sleep in a beautiful bed. I eat beautiful food. I go for walks through beautiful places. I care for people deeply. At night my bed is full of love, because I alone am in it. I cry easily, from pain and pleasure, and I don’t apologize for that. In the mornings I step outside and I’m thankful for another day. It took me many years to arrive at such a life.
– Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen
You can lead an untroubled life provided you can grow, can think and act systematically.
– Marcus Aurelius
This was my first lesson on the nature of love: that in a moment it could fulfill the cravings of a lifetime, like a light that someone might shine into a cavern that has been dark for a million years.
– Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
We depend on change in order to live, so just acquaint yourself with the fact that it’s all inconstant. Pleasure isn’t for sure; pain isn’t for sure; happiness isn’t for sure; stillness isn’t for sure; distraction isn’t for sure. Whatever arises, you should tell it: ‘Don’t try to fool me. You’re not for sure.’
– Ajaan Chah
That’s what I’m trying to communicate as a therapist—the idea of not pushing away the unpleasant emotions, feelings, and thoughts and not clinging to the pleasant.
– Mark Epstein
The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.
– Khalil Gibran
When people do not know how to get close, they fight.
– Virginia Satir
the modern world is kind to Lilith. — cruel to lovers.
– J Luna
The silence must be longer. The music is about the silence. The sounds are there to surround the silence.
– Arvo Pärt
I say, play your own way. Don’t play what the public wants. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you’re doing, even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years.
– Thelonious Monk
If art is the place that you feel the most fulfilled, then that is how you must fill it, to live your most creative life and make it glorious.
– Stephanie Elizondo Griest
We are, I know not how, somewhat double in ourselves, so that what we believe we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn.
– Montaigne
It seems to me that love should not make all else disappear but should simply tint it with new nuances; I would like a love that accompanies me through life, not that absorbs all my life.
– Simone de Beauvoir
The human spirit is more powerful than any drug – and that is what needs to be nourished: with work, play, friendship, family. These are the things that matter.
– Robin Williams
The man who has a conscience suffers whilst acknowledging his sin. That is his punishment.
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky
If we’re going to fight a disease, let’s fight one of the most terrible diseases of all, indifference.
– Robin Williams
This adversity is the springboard you needed.
– Maxime Lagacé
The mind must be given relaxation. It will rise improved and sharper after a good break.
– Seneca
You cannot understand life and its mysteries as long as you try to grasp it. Indeed, you cannot grasp it, just as you cannot walk off with a river in a bucket. If you try to capture running water in a bucket, it is clear that you do not understand it and that you will always be disappointed, for in the bucket the water does not run. To “have” running water you must let go of it and let it run. The same is true of life and of God.
– Alan Watts
A politician divides mankind into two classes: tools and enemies.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
When the silence inside becomes louder than the mind, the Universe begins to speak in every breath.
– Nirmala
Never mistake motion for action.
– Ernest Hemingway
It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.
– George Eliot
Battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.
– Walt Whitman
If you are concerned with what is beyond the nothingness, it means you are frightened of being nothing. Be nothing. Life then becomes extraordinarily simple and beautiful.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
The imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere.
– Terence McKenna
Learn your religion, do not inherit it.
– Imam Ali
The truth is hidden in plain sight. It is so simple and obvious that most people fail to see it.
– Khorshed Bhavnagri
The truly wise have an inner joy that is like a fire; it warms the world.
– The Dalai Lama
Enough of words. Come
to me without a sound.
– Jalaluddin Rumi
The special mark of the modern world is not that it is skeptical, but that it is dogmatic without knowing it.
– G.K. Chesterton
It took me quite a long time to develop a voice, and now that I have it, I am not going to be silent.
– Madeleine K. Albright
Cynicism is misread as intelligence.
– Ocean Vuong
A billionaire didn’t work 100,000 times harder than a teacher or a janitor. They were in a system that paid them differently.
– Robert Reich
Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.
– Lawrence Ferlinghetti
poetry doesn’t belong to those who write it, but those who need it
– Il Postino
Dostoevsky: I still believe there’s a version of us in some parcaller world.
Kafka: Even in parrcallere world’s, she’d choose not to stay..
Art originates in experiment
– Quintilian
The ignorant work for their own profit, the wise work for the welfare of the world, without thought for themselves.
– Bhagavad Gita
If you’re using dialogue, say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.
– John Steinbeck
You must always be prepared to place a bet on yourself, on your future, heading in a direction that others seem to fear.
– Robert Greene
Whenever we engage in consumption or production patterns which take more than we need, we are engaging in violence.
– Vandana Shiva
Some days are typing days.
Some days are thinking days.
But both days are writing days.
– V. E. Schwab
No pilgrimage is holier than compassion,
no gospel is truer than kindness,
no offering is grander than love.
– Abhijit Naskar
It is the force of love
that will lead us
beyond fragmentation,
loneliness, and fear.
– Sharon Salzberg
To Those Who Come After
by Bertolt Brecht
I
To the cities I came in a time of disorder
That was ruled by hunger.
I sheltered with the people in a time of uproar
And then I joined in their rebellion.
That’s how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.
I ate my dinners between the battles,
I lay down to sleep among the murderers,
I didn’t care much for love
And for nature’s beauties I had little patience.
That’s how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.
The city streets all led to foul swamps in my time,
My speech betrayed me to the butchers.
I could do only little
But without me those that ruled could not sleep so easily:
That’s what I hoped.
That’s how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.
Our forces were slight and small,
Our goal lay in the far distance
Clearly in our sights,
If for me myself beyond my reaching.
That’s how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.
II
You who will come to the surface
From the flood that’s overwhelmed us and drowned us all
Must think, when you speak of our weakness in times of darkness
That you’ve not had to face:
Days when we were used to changing countries
More often than shoes,
Through the war of the classes despairing
That there was only injustice and no outrage.
Even so we realized
Hatred of oppression still distorts the features,
Anger at injustice still makes voices raised and ugly.
Oh we, who wished to lay for the foundations for peace and friendliness,
Could never be friendly ourselves.
And in the future when no longer
Do human beings still treat themselves as animals,
Look back on us with indulgence.
*
And to the themes in this powerful poem, Martin Prechtel writes a powerful epilogue in his book Rescuing the Light:
“When the chips are down and the army is coming, you’ve got to save your kids, you’ve got to flee or fight. But when things settle down, you have to stop running, take off your armor, and remember how to once again be human. That’s what really saves the kids.”
We actually contain a built-in ability to rise above restriction, incapacity, or limitation and, as a result of this ability, possess a vital adaptive spirit that we have not yet fully accessed. While this ability can lead us to transcendence, paradoxically it can lead also to violence; our longing for transcendence arises from our intuitive sensing of this adaptive potential and our violence arises from our failure to develop it.
– Joseph Chilton Pearce
I, who manufacture the future like a diligent spider. And the best of me is when I know nothing and manufacture whatever.
– Clarice Lispector
Breath, dreams, silence,
invincible calm…
you triumph.
– Paul Valéry
The mystic Simone Weil wrote to a friend on another continent, “Let us love this distance, which is thoroughly woven with friendship, since those who do not love each other are not separated.” For Weil, love is the atmosphere that fills and colors the distance be- tween herself and her friend. Even when that friend arrives on the doorstep, something remains impossibly remote: when you step forward to embrace them your arms are wrapped around mystery, around the un- knowable, around that which cannot be possessed. The far seeps in even to the nearest. After all we hardly know our own depths.
– Rebecca Solnit
The Tao is always at ease.
It overcomes without competing,
answers without speaking a word,
arrives without being summoned,
accomplishes without a plan.
Its net covers the whole universe.
And though its meshes are wide,
it doesn’t let a thing slip through.
– Stephen Mitchell, Tao te Ching
Kinds of water drown us. Kinds of water do not.
– Anne Carson
I am something supernatural
not exactly god, ghost, spirit, angel, principle or element –
There is no term for it in English.
– Anne Carson
EACH STEP
Nowhere on this earth
is it not a place where the lovers
turn lightly in sleep in each others’ arms,
the blue pastures of dusk flowing gladly
into the dawn.
Nowhere that is not reached by the scent
of good bread
through an open window,
by the flash of fish in the flashing of summer streams,
or the trees unfolding their praises—
apricots, pears— of the winter-chill nights.
Briefly, briefly, we see it, and forget.
As if the spell were too powerful to hold on the tongue,
as if we preferred the weight to the prize
Like a horse
that carries on his own back
the sacks of oats he will need, unsuspecting,
looking always ahead,
over the mountains, to where sweet springs lie.
He remembers this much from his youth,
the taste of things, cold and pure—
while the water-sound sings on and on, unlistened to,
in his ears;
while each step is nothing less than the glistening
river-body reentering home.
How could I have come so far
(And always on such dark trails)
I must have traveled by the light
shining from the faces of all those I have loved.
– Thomas McGrath
Nothing Is Lost
by Noel Coward
Deep in the sub-conscious we are told
Lie all our memories, lie all the notes
Of all the music we have ever heard
And all the phrases those we loved have spoken,
Sorrows and losses time has since consoled,
Family jokes, outmoded anecdotes
Each sentimental souvenir and token
Everything seen, experienced, each word
Addressed to us in infancy before,
Before we we could even know or understand
The implications of our wonderland.
There they all are, the legendary lies
The birthday treats, the sights, the sounds, the tears
Forgotten debris of forgotten years
Waiting to be recalled, waiting to rise
Before our world dissolves before our eyes
Waiting for some small, intimate reminder,
A word, a tune, a known familiar scent
And echo from the past when, innocent
We looked upon the present with delight
And doubted not the future would be kinder
A never knew the loneliness of night.
Fire-Flowers
And only where the forest fires have sped,
Scorching relentlessly the cool north lands,
A sweet wild flower lifts its purple head,
And, like some gentle spirit sorrow-fed,
It hides the scars with almost human hands.
– Emily Pauline Johnson
Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche always used to say to me, ‘Don’t be so afraid of being embarrassed. If you’re going to really take a chance on yourself, there’s going to be a lot of humiliation-you are going to make a fool of yourself; feel like an idiot; as though you’re acting like a three year old child and all of it.’ But his thing was: we’re not trying to be adults, we’re actually trying to become realized people.
– Reggie Ray
What kind of world / would let loose / a low orange moon / that shocks you / into being
– Maggie Nelson
I tell people, Make a list of ten things you hate and tear them down in a short story or poem. Make a list of ten things you love and celebrate them. When I wrote ‘Fahrenheit 451’ I hated book burners and I loved libraries. So there you are.
– Ray Bradbury
These moments of time will disappear. You yourself will forget my voice, the body you desired, your tremblings, your hesitations. I would so like for you… to carry away a part of me… Not a vague memory… but the energy of a star, its vibration in the dark. A truth.
– Mathias Énard, (trans. Charlotte Mandell)
The best advice on writing I’ve ever received was, ‘Rewrite it!’ A lot of editors said that. They were all right. Writing is really rewriting–making the story better, clearer, truer.
– Robert Lipsyte
Not knowing why, I feel
Attached to this world where
We come only to die.
– Natsume Soseki, (tr. Soiku Shigematsu)
Being a poet means that I have already written but that I have actually written nothing. Poetry is an act without a beginning or an end. It is really a promise of a beginning, a perpetual beginning.
– Adonis (‘Ali Ahmad Sa’id)
Those who think –as do many– “Let me first correct society, then get around to myself” are barred from even the outer gate of the mansion of God’s peace.
– Joseph Campbell
“read to me tonight by the fire” / “read to me aloud from Hölderlin and the Greeks”
– Susan Stewart / Susan Taubes
Learn your craft, and persist. The rest, as Henry James said, is the madness of art.
– Kim Addonizio
Nearer to Thee, not by delusion led,
Though there no house fires burn nor bright eyes gaze:
We rise, but by the symbol charioted,
Through loved things rising up to Love’s own ways:
By these the soul unto the vast has wings
And sets the seal celestial on all mortal things.
– Æ
People who are led by the shadow cheat themselves by thinking their motives are highly moral, while in fact they are crude drives for power. The shadow mixes things in an unclean way, mixes up facts and opinions, for instance. . . . The shadow gets hold of a good idea and carries it out on the wrong level, on an archaic level. When one is unaware of the shadow, it falsifies the personality.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
He who has always put desire off till later, who sees love as a divine song separated from the flesh, something that has passed into poetry like the arm’s movement into marble, for eternity, he trembles to approach this moving form, perfect, other, undefined.
– Énard; tr. Mandell
Tolkien belonged to that very rare class of linguists, now becoming extinct, who like the Grimm brothers could understand and recapture the glamour of ‘the word.’ ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’
– Simonne d’Ardenne
There are so many layers to us, and some of them we never see—or we see only in glimpses that we try to give shape to by using our brains, which are limited.
– Mary Gaitskill
In the changes of the world the shapes of lands and of seas have been broken and remade; rivers have not kept their courses, neither have mountains remained steadfast; and to Cuiviénen there is no returning.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
To live in gratitude aligns you very powerfully with Reality. Living in gratitude is a sign of a higher state of consciousness than the ego.
– Adyashanti
Immediately prescribe some character and some form to yourself.
– Epictetus
Believe a single thought that runs contrary to what is and you suffer. No exceptions.
– Adyashanti
If you ever wonder why someone is still grieving, or when they’ll ‘get over it,’ I’ll save you the trouble. We never will. And that’s not weakness. That’s love.
– Jameson Arasi
Laziness is not the problem.
Staying on the path that leads to nowhere is.
– @moveorperish
To be is to be perceived.
– George Berkeley
Western civilization needs a complete overhaul or it will fall apart one day or another. It has realized the most complete perversion of any rational order of things. Reign of matter, of gold, of machine, of number, it no longer possesses breath, or liberty, or light.
– Julius Evola
Nothing is a problem — everything is a scene.
And I? I am the calm, conscious actor.
Not reacting, just flowing…
Not resisting, just responding.
Every scene is a moment to express
my peace, my power, and my presence.
– Brahma Kumaris
Perhaps the truest form of touching the reality of this moment is this: to experience our capacity to praise and love our world, as it is. Even when it’s on fire.
– Joanna Macy
In those days, living as we did in the country, without the dubious benefits of radio or television, we had to rely on such primitive forms of amusement as books, quarelling, parties, and the laughter of our friend.
– Gerald Durrell
Extend acts of kindness, asking for nothing in return. … This is an essential activity for connecting to intention because the universal all-creating Spirit returns acts of kindness with the response: ‘How may I be kind to you?’
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
There, do you see the guiding star,
on the northern sky,
smiling incessantly, calming
the anxious travelers with its light
directing them to explore the
unexplored, and win the unknown.
– @chandanas
There is no tragedy in
having to start again, as
long as you start again.
– Albert Camus
all my life
I expect no grand bouquet
yet wish for
someone to greet me
with a single flower
– Kiyoko Ogawa
Too deep in my destiny timeline to
entertain the unseriousness of the world.
– Nika Solé
The practice of all the bodhisattvas is
to slay attachment
And the rest — mind’s afflictions – at
once, the very moment they arise,
Taking as weapons the remedies held with
mindfulness and vigilance.
For once the kleshas have become familiar,
they’ll be harder to avert.
– Gyelse Tokme Zangpo
walking out
in the middle of the lecture
on astrology
we see summer stars
in each other’s eyes
– Chen-ou Liu
Love changes the whole climate of your inner being – and with that change the whole existence is changed.
– Osho
Be kind to yourself. Not indulgent. Not harsh. Just kind. It changes everything.
– Norman Fischer
I don’t like the term ‘description of the world,’ it contains a clear reference to secondariness—to illustrativeness. No, instead, a writer must conceive of his own worlds—not describe the world that’s already been created.
– Vladimir Sorokin
The best works of art are like life: paradoxical, beautiful, strange, true, alive, and a hundred other things besides.
– Toby Thompson
I don’t want to have this pain, but I feel it anyway… When I see the hunger, the misery, the dead, the war, it seems as if all these disasters are happening to me. With any poem that I have written, I have ripped a piece of my heart.
– Simin Behbahani
…but once more I comforted myself with hope and went on.
– George MacDonald
We are getting close to having an Underground Railroad for Immigrants.
– Michael Steele
Habits are like supervisors
that you don’t notice.
– Hannes Messemer
Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.
– Iris Murdoch
We die into each moment like salt into water.
– Meister Eckhart
To become empty is to become full. To know nothing is to begin to understand.
– The Tao
A being who does not doubt does not believe either.
– Miguel de Unamuno
Obscurity is not always a vice; sometimes it is the condition of being profound.
– José Ortega y Gasset
You never understand how much you believe something until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death.
– C.S. Lewis
When you understand one thing through and through, you understand everything.
– Shunryu Suzuki
Every perception is an hallucination corrected by experience.
– Bertrand Russell
Consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown.
– Erwin Schrödinger
My novels aren’t realist. They’re not selective transcriptions of the real world. They’re highly organized missives from my imagination.
– Dennis Cooper
Capitalism tends to destroy its two sources of wealth: nature and human beings.
– Karl Marx
We make our own omens by the meaning we confer upon chance events, and it is the making of meaning that makes us human, that makes us capable of holding something as austere and total as the universe, as time, as love without breaking.
– Maria Popova
Fasting helps us to try harder because then we are like a boxer in the arena: you cannot just stand around awkwardly, but have to bring out all your skills and techniques to fight in order to not get knocked down.
– Ajaan Suchart Abhijato
For my part, the thing that I should wish to obtain from money would be leisure with security. But what the typical modern man desires to get with it is more money, with a view to ostentation, splendor, and the outshining of those who have hitherto been his equals.
– Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness
The future is the rest of society recognizing that so many answers are within the disability communities.
– Saleem Hue Penny, 2024 Disability Futures Fellow
We must build our arks with love and ride out the storm with courage and know that the little sprig of green in the dove’s mouth betokens a reality beyond the storm more precious than the likes of us can imagine.
– Frederick Buechner (The Hungering Dark)
But how does everyone *not* keep an inventory of 15-20 languages they truly plan on learning?
– Day Heisinger-Nixon, In an Ecosystem, Everything Has a Name
Paradox is the technique for seizing the conflicting aspects of any problem. Paradox coalesces or telescopes various facets of a complex process in a single instant.
– Marshall McLuhan, Take Today
Unrighteous fortune seldom spares the highest worth; no one with safety can long front so frequent perils. Whom calamity oft passes by she finds at last.
– Seneca, Hercules Furens
No matter how careful you are, there’s going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn’t experience it all. There’s that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should’ve been paying attention. Well, get used to that feeling. That’s how your whole life will feel some day. This is all practice.
– Chuck Palahniuk
Just as madness lurks in our creativity and threatens to make dead its aliveness, so does creativity lurk in our madness. That is an astounding and heart-supporting fact.
– Ann Belford Ulanov, Madness and Creativity
One crucial disadvantage about the end of metaphysical views is that the individual looks his own short life span too squarely in the eye and feels no strong incentive to build on enduring institutions, designed for the ages.
– Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
If there really was a Supreme Being who had to listen to people’s prayers all the time, he would go out of his mind.
– Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through
Then I remembered that night is the fairies’ day, and the moon their sun; and I thought – Everything sleeps and dreams now: when the night comes, it will be different.
– George MacDonald, Phantastes
What we are left with is the fact that the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion.
– Sigmund Freud
The earth is dead…We people are just worms on top of it, worms on its fat, revolting carcass, eating its entrails and all its poisons… Nothing can help us, we were born rotten… There you have it!
– Louis-Ferdinand Céline
People label themselves with all sorts of adjectives. I can only pronounce myself as ‘nauseatingly miserable beyond repair’.
– Franz Kafka
Old Soul
To the one who remembers Pangaea,
to the soul dredged deep of a
land before God broke bread of it with
mighty words of root and cause to christen
the continents cast across the waters; be strong.
Though no one taught you of your unique
endowment, instinct and archetype are
a lamp unto your feet. The world within is as
large as the one outside, of an elemental image
arching from in the beginning to
amen. You have come into your
faith now, you are of the deeper walk, so;
Hold dear the silence within the
bounds of earth, sky, and time.
Heed not the clamor and extend
polite refusal to the alchemies of
fools and their followers. Do not
go their way. Instead, find in
each day some simple moment of
reckoning and all will be well. Tend
to the part of creation you are
given to for that is the body and the
blood of it. And know this: you would
not have that disquieting
shadow of yours were it not for
the common grace of light.
Between is your rightful place
to bend and fray the
luminous substance of love. Yours
is a refuge for the
neophyte hungry for the
remembrance you are holding.
– James Scott Smith
buck moon—
shedding my old self
for something new
– @lafcadiopoetry
In the Falling Dark
by Bruce Cockburn
And the lights lie tumbled out like gems
The moon is nothing but a toothless grin
Floating out on the evening wind
The smell of sweat and lube oil pervades the night
And the rush of life in flight at the speed of light
A million footsteps whispering
A guitar sounds — some voices sing
Smoke on the breeze — eyes that sting
Far in the east a yellow cloud bank climbs
Stretching away to be part of tomorrow’s time
Earthbound while everything expands
So many grains of sand
Slipping from hand to hand
Catching the light and falling into dark
The world fades out like an overheard remark
In the falling dark
Light pours from a million radiant lives
Off of kids and dogs and the hard-shelled husbands and wives
All that glory shining around and we’re all caught taking a dive
And all the beasts of the hills around shout, “such a waste!
Don’t you know that from the first to the last
we’re all one in the gift of grace!”
There may be times when what is most needed is, not so much a new discovery or a new idea as a different ‘slant’; I mean a comparatively slight readjustment in our way of looking at the things and ideas on which attention is already fixed.
– Owen Barfield
These awakened capacities are always available below our surface consciousness, in the ground of our experience, but they’re hidden by our limiting habits of thought and reaction.
– Lama John Makransky
The higher we soar, the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
The books transported her into new worlds. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.
– Roald Dahl
Remember that imagination and art don’t conform to a capitalist’s ratio of productivity to time, however easy it is to succumb to the wish that with enough effort they could be made to.
– Adam Haslett
It is futile to speak of liberty as long as economic slavery exists.
– Peter Kropotkin
Men’s natures are alike, it is their habits that carry them far apart.
– Confucius, Analects
Until our minds are completely transformed, we will keep falling down. The choice is between getting up and starting to walk again or giving up and staying on the ground. If we keep lying down, nothing will result but great-er depression and hopelessness.
– Dzigar Kongtrul
I need you
the way astonishment,
which is really just
the disruption of routine,
requires routine.
– Carl Phillips
A prophet has a responsibility for the moment, an openness to what the moment reveals. He is a person who knows what time it is.
– Abraham Joshua Heschel
A human being is rather like a tune; he has various notes in his emotions, in his life.
– V. S. Pritchett
Chamfort says that he never had a moment’s happiness before having lost all hope and that Dante’s lines would look better on the gates of Paradise.
– Samuel Beckett
Until Carl and I had children, I really was writing very bourgeois little things—my work was very self-referential, female. Pathetic, to use one of Eileen Myles’s favorite words.
– Fanny Howe
A potential problem of ANY psychological or spiritual approach is that it closes the doors to completely independent contemplation. As powerful as an approach may be, it’s a lens and you’re taught that lens – you haven’t discovered it for yourself. And that’s fine.
But instead of using lenses on how the mind works, who looks at the mind directly, puts aside ANY preconceptions and ideas about it, and contemplates for hours on end: what is this mind and how is it functioning? Almost nobody.
But I’d say this is the most powerful work one could do, looking directly and finding out for oneself. A skill and an attitude already very hard, but it corrodes ever more in today’s world. Really, everything you don’t find out for yourself is hearsay. Useful hearsay, and in most relative regards it’s cool to simply go to it. But when you care about truth, about what you are and what reality is and about how your mind works, looking directly is really the only way to go deep.
We can still use lenses, but we see them for what they are. And then, without anything we’ve ever heard muddying our inquiry, we keep contemplating: what is true? what is reality? what am I? what is mind, what is love, what is an emotion, what is a thought?
If you spin your wheels for long enough, you realize this is what authentic spirituality is about. Teachers can remind you to look, but you have to look, long and hard, if you want to see. Maybe it’s not that helpful that 99% of teachings are simply telling you what you’ll find. And we’re really good at taking that information and imagining we already found it or we pattern match our experience to match what they told us we’ll find. This is an endless illusion. Get out now. Start looking with the most honest attitude: you don’t know, and maybe you can know, and maybe it’s not like anything you’ve ever been told. Find out for yourself and don’t stop prematurely.
It’s exactly in the context of this deep, independent contemplation, that teachings like “it’s all already here, there’s nothing to do” is out of place. It’s extremely fruitful in some context, but we’re masters at taking things out of context to feel good and have certainty.
But no conceptual teaching will ever give certainty. And truth doesn’t have anything to do with feeling good. One of the first insights we need to make for ourselves is the clear difference between direct consciousness and mental fabrication. That’s foundational for any inquiry.
It’s easy to never engage this kind of looking but be an expert at any spiritual discourse ever conceived. But it’s hard to look and not know. But if you do look, you don’t need any discourse whatsoever. If anything, someone who facilitates this process might help.
– Marvin Keilbach
What humans do over the next 50 years will determine the fate of all life on the planet.
– Sir David Attenborough
Leave it to a dreamy eyed woman
to soften the heart
of a otherwise frigid man.
– Whitney Barnes
The posture… was not greatly unlike that of a soldier who is tied neck and heels… when the idea of philosophy was added to the figure now discovered, it would have been very difficult for any spectator to have refrained from immoderate laughter.
– Henry Fielding
Don’t waste time
watching and reacting
to the minds of ‘others’.
Your own mind
causes more trouble
than the minds
of everyone put together.
– Mooji
“If its wounds won’t close, it isn’t a poem.”
they say
it’s tragic gravity.
– Laura Kerr
flowers
blooming in the colors
of a watermelon
– Basho
That’s what the world is , after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.
– Haruki Murakami
after the lightening
the sound of dew
dripping off bamboo
– Buson
Don’t confuse ‘familiar’ with ‘acceptable.’ Toxic relationships can fool you like that.
– Steve Maraboli
I’ve always loved the night, when everyone else is asleep and the world is all mine. It’s quiet and dark—the perfect time for creativity.
– Jonathan Harnisch
The only place we can rest is in this very moment, living deeply and richly and fully right now, meeting each person and event with an open heart. This is where we have a chance to meet joy, to come home to our breath and our true nature.
– Laura Burges
Nothing in the world is better suited to laziness than orthodoxy. If you gag your mouth, stop up your ears and put a blinder over your eyes, you can sleep peacefully.
– Jacob Burckhardt
All poetry is ‘hermetic,’ ‘cryptic,’ heretical use of words–not to sell, not to instruct in skills designed to produce & sell–so, in that sense, l’art is always pour l’art: the un-paraphrasable is what we want
– Anselm Hollo
So everything lets us down, including curiosity and honesty and what we love best. Yes, said the voice, but cheer up, it’s fun in the end.
– Roberto Bolaño
We have more information than emperors could have dreamed of. We are also subjected to more misinformation than they could have conceived of in their worst nightmare.
– Ryan Holiday
How might we fashion
the pace of chance?
– Sam Kerbel
summer heat fatigue
must be a pose in yoga
– Shimaneko-kun
hometown visit
even the wind
has changed
– Nitu Yumnam
We all start off knowing the same truth(s) and then – the rest of our lives consist of how we chose to distort it.
– Pat Thomas
How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with Pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious? I am afraid it means they are worshipping an imaginary God.
– C.S. Lewis
Destroy a single being’s joy, and you will work the ruin of yourself.
– Shantideva
When there are troubles within us, we must address them head-on. Do not look for distractions – distraction is not a solution.
– Sadhguru
My greatest discovery so far: The world is a tragedy to those who feel, a comedy to those who think. Most people neither think nor feel.
– Patricia Highsmith
My wish is to stay always like this, living quietly in a corner of nature.
– Claude Monet
Song
Love that is bound has gone
with the late alchemy of stars at dawn
affirming as they die
what day’s accustomed clarities deny.
Love that is lost remains
with the green advent of next season’s rains
that start the trees to flower
through their impetuous, unreported hour.
– Rosamund Stanhope
On Eroded Solar Masses
Say each eroded molecular cloud
contained uncountable solar masses
not typical but density per cubic centimeter
welling up across a million years
never speaking of the highest suns
through a totem of errors but totem
taking from density no known error
alive as pattern
as irrational ascension
sans squared impalpable quanta
its implacable winds
teeming sub-flow as absentia
– Will Alexander
Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.
– Aldous Huxley
We made love a little while ago & my husband said it was better than both Picasso and Judy Garland. But I guess that’s just bragging not relevant.
– Alice Notley
There’s an infinity of ways in which you can move from that spot over there to here. But do your movements allow us to feel your spirit? Have you figured those movements out in your head? Or are we seeing your soul in motion?…. the essential thing is that your movements, even when you’re standing still, embody your soul at all times.
– Ohno Kazuo
There is also a fable told by Phaedrus, about how Simonides was once a victim of shipwreck. As the other passengers scurried about the sinking ship trying to save their possessions, the poet stood idle. When questioned, he declared, mecum mea sunt cuncta: everything that is me is with me.
– Anne Carson
The ‘kingdom of heaven’ is not something lying ‘above the earth’ or coming ‘after death’. It does not have a yesterday or a day after tomorrow, and it will not arrive in a ‘thousand years’. It is an experience of the heart. It is everywhere and it is nowhere.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
This is the truth. They stood on the stones in the lightly falling snow and listened to the silvery, trembling sound of thousands of keys being shaken, unlocking the air, once upon a time.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
The natural symbol, without our being sufficiently conscious of the fact, is identical with the reality of the world that appears to us, for every object in the natural world is at the same time a symbolic reality to us. The psyche certainly does not use an “object” of nature as a “symbol,” but rather the experience of an “object” itself is always already symbolic experience. The star or tree in us is no less real and no less symbolic than it is in outward experience. For each possibility of experience either presupposes a spiritually forming, that is to say a symbolic activity, or is identical with this.
That is, everything spiritual appears to us first not just in nature but as nature; or we could formulate this just as well the other way around: everything natural, whether outward or inward, appears to us as an image, that is to say as formed spirit. We are surrounded by images, inwardly and outwardly, but at the same time formed and determined in all our experiences by the natural symbol as though by a unitary natural-spiritual reality, for our psychic system only grasps that which appears to us as the real world through the world of natural symbolism.
– Erich Neumann
I was dancing, dancing through the crowded room and absolutely unable to stop smiling. Women who dance with their eyes closed, smiling, are as near to heaven as you can get on earth, and there I was, in heaven, only in Bakersfield.
– Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company
For Horses, Horseflies
We know nothing of the lives of others.
Under the surface, what strange desires,
what rages, weaknesses, fears.
Sometimes it breaks into the daily paper
and we shake our heads in wonder —
“Who would behave in such a way?” we ask.
Unspoken the thought, “Let me not be tested.”
Unspoken the thought, “Let me not be known.”
Under the surface, something that whispers,
“Anything can be done.”
For horses, horseflies. For humans, shame.
– Jane Hirshfield
I want to bottle-feed rage to every baby girl so that it fortifies her bones and muscles. I want her to flex, and feel the power growing inside her as she herself grows from a child into a young woman.
For too long, men have called us names designed to insult, but also designed to imply we are too angry to be taken seriously: Feminazi. Ball breaker. Crazy feminist. Bitch. Hysterical. Witch. Yes, I am those things. In other words, I am an angry woman. And angry women are free women.
– Mona Eltahawy
When the aim is to feel wholeness itself. She laid her hand on the deeply furrowed bark, groping for the area of darkest color. The trunks would be painted with a palette. Solids would develop from the center outward. Avoiding any kind of line. The body pressed against the trunk until she were certain of being extinguished by the darkness. One achieves a concealed drawing. Which is most like night.
– C.D. Wright
Paradise may be the time when we can finally turn to our past and see that its beauty was there despite our being there. In fact, its beauty can finally be seen because we aren’t there.
– Fanny Howe
How I hate all the barbarians who imagine that they are wise because they no longer have a heart!
– Friedrich Hölderlin
But in the romantic ideal upon which our modern mythos of love is built, the solidity of that togetherness is taken to such an extreme as to render love fragile. When lovers are expected to fuse together so closely and completely, mutuality mutates into a paralyzing codependence — a calcified and rigid firmness that becomes brittle to the possibility of growth.
In the most nourishing kind of love, the communion of togetherness coexists with an integrity of individuality, the two aspects always in dynamic and fluid dialogue. The philosopher Martin Heidegger captured this beautifully in his love letters to Hannah Arendt: “Why is love rich beyond all other possible human experiences and a sweet burden to those seized in its grasp? Because we become what we love and yet remain ourselves
– Maria Popova
It is possible that the things we live through
do not make us stronger.
I think of the ways I am more fragile
now. The blueness larger, the heart a well-damaged
muscle. The way my mind and heart
must sometimes close their eyes upon meeting.
– Missy-Marie Montgomery
Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted, the indifference of those who should have known better, the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most, that has made it possible for evil to triumph.
– Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia
chorus
should we discuss your
philanthropy
prometheus
I went a bit too far
chorus
how do you mean
prometheus
I stopped them seeing death before them
chorus
who
prometheus
human beings
chorus
how
prometheus
I planted blind hope in their hearts
chorus
why
prometheus
they were breaking
chorus
you fool
– Anne Carson
But the greatest human problems are not social problems, but decisions that the individual has to make alone. The most important feelings of which man is capable of emphasize his separateness from other people, not his kinship with them. The feelings of a mountaineer towards a mountain emphasize his kinship with the mountain rather than with the rest of mankind. The same goes for the leap of the heart experienced by a sailor when he smells the sea, or for the astronomer’s feeling about the stars, or for the archaeologist’s love of the past.
My feeling of love for my fellowmen makes me aware of my humanness, but my feeling about a mountain gives me an oddly nonhuman sensation. It would be incorrect, perhaps, to call it ‘superhuman’; but it nevertheless gives me a sense of transcending my everyday humanity. Maslow’s importance is that he has placed these experiences of ‘transcendence’ at the centre of his psychology. He sees them as the compass by which man gains a sense of the magnetic north of his existence. They bring a glimpse of ‘the source of power, meaning and purpose’ inside himself. This can be seen with great clarity in the matter of the cure of alcoholics. Alcoholism arises from what I have called ‘generalised hypertension’, a feeling of strain or anxiety about practically everything. It might be described as a ‘passively negative’ attitude towards existence. The negativity prevents proper relaxation; there is a perpetual excess of adrenalin in the bloodstream. Alcohol may produce the necessary relaxation, switch off the anxiety, allow one to feel like a real human being instead of a bundle of over-tense nerves. Recurrence of hypertension makes the alcoholic remedy a habit, but the disadvantages soon begin to outweigh the advantage: hangovers, headaches, fatigue, guilt, general inefficiency. And, above all, passivity.
The alcoholics are given mescalin or LSD, and then peak experiences are induced by means of music or poetry or colours blending on a screen. They are suddenly gripped and shaken by a sense of meaning, of just how incredibly interesting life can be for the undefeated. They also become aware of the vicious circle involved in alcoholism: misery and passivity leading to a general running-down of the vital powers, and to the lower levels of perception that are the outcome of fatigue. ‘The spirit world shuts not its gates, Your heart is dead, your senses sleep,’ says the Earth Spirit to Faust. And the senses sleep when there is not enough energy to run them efficiently. On the other hand, when the level of will and determination is high, the senses wake up. (Maslow was not particularly literary, or he might have been amused to think that Faust is suffering from exactly the same problem as the girl in the chewing gum factory (described earlier), and that he had, incidentally, solved a problem that had troubled European culture for nearly two centuries).
Peak experiences are a by-product of this higher energy-drive. The alcoholic drinks because he is seeking peak experiences; (the same, of course, goes for all addicts, whether of drugs or tobacco.) In fact, he is moving away from them, like a lost traveler walking away from the inn in which he hopes to spend the night. The moment he sees with clarity what he needs to do to regain the peak experience, he does an about-face and ceases to be an alcoholic.
– Colin Wilson
Underneath all the drama, the restlessness, the hopes and fears, behind the narratives we weave about ourselves, and even before we’ve thought of ourselves as ourselves, lies a simple, unadorned awareness. It’s not even a thing—just an event that happens, a little burst of knowing, deep in the center of it all.
– Andrew Olendzki
Courage consists, however, in agreeing to flee rather than live tranquilly and hypocritically in false refuges. Values, morals, homelands, religions, and these private certitudes that our vanity and our complacency bestow generously on us, have many deceptive sojourns as the world arranges for those who think they are standing straight and at ease, among stable things
– Gilles Deleuze
The fact that a symbol possesses an indefinite number of aspects does not mean that it is imprecise at all. Indeed it is its reading on an indefinite number of levels which confers on it its extreme precision. Commenting on the theatre of Samuel Beckett, Brook writes:
Beckett’s plays are symbols in an exact sense of the word. A false symbol is soft and vague: a true symbol is hard and clear. When we say ‘symbolic’ we often mean something drearily obscure: a true symbol is specific, it is the only form a certain truth can take… We get nowhere if we expect to be told what they mean, yet each one has a relation with us we can’t deny. If we accept this, the symbol opens in us a great wondering O.
– Peter Brook
Psychological work lies in coming to terms with the ghosts of our unlived lives. Not our grief for what we wanted and have missed for ourselves. Not a laying to rest of adolescent ambitions. The mystery of the psyche is that we are haunted not by what we want out of life, but by what life wants out of us. We can never lay these unlived potentials to rest. Relentlessly they seek to be lived out, regardless of how deeply we bury them. Working nine to five may be an essential adaptation for working in an urban culture, but just how well does it suit us to the instinctual energies patterned in the psyche? Learning to live out only what our parents could tolerate may have been an essential relationship to our families growing up, but just how well does it suit us to the yearnings still waiting to be played out deep within?
– D. Stephenson Bond
The heartbeat is actually the sound
made by the heart valves closing.
If you, my love, ever hold a
stethoscope to my chest, I will tell you
to listen for the silence in between.
What is and what will always be yours
is the sound of my heart finally
opening.
– Andrea Gibson
The Bee is not afraid of me.
I know the Butterfly.
The pretty people in the Woods
Receive me cordially –
The Brooks laugh louder when I come –
The Breezes madder play;
Wherefore mine eye thy silver mists,
Wherefore, Oh Summer’s Day?
– Emily Dickinson
I shall stand
for the
human side
of every
question.
– Margaret Brown
twisted vine …
I ask myself the same
old questions
– Brendon Kent
Who does not know what it is like to go with a friend to a railway station and then to watch the train take them away? As you walk along the platform back into the city, the person who has just gone is often more there, more totally there, than when you embraced them before they climbed into the train. When we embrace to say good- bye, maybe we do it for this reason – to take into our arms what we want to keep when they’ve gone.
– John Berger
From “De Jure Sanguinis”
by Kiki Petrosino
You won’t feel like this forever, unless
forever is here. Follow the dark blue
blades of kale, the flat dials of sunflowers
leading back to speech, or its underside.
Love translated you across an ocean
& now you cannot really come away
or say how, exactly, your love began.
Was it music in the mouth, or weeping
in the blood? The ancestral body splits
into water & seeds, pure syllables.
Wreck and Restore Me
Once on a violent afternoon
I prayed Please take me apart, and soon.
I fear what’s before me,
and grow despairing, mean and hard.
Demolish and renovate me, Lord.
Wreck and restore me.
Habit by habit, flaw by flaw,
break and mend me under love’s law.
The work requires it.
Retrofit me to do your will.
Yes, I know it will hurt, and still
my soul desires it.
Straighten what I have ruined or bent
for years since I was innocent.
Help me be mild.
The good in me please amplify
until this boy and you and I
are reconciled.
– Jane Greer
Poetry is the fiction we use to prove the fact.
– Charles Wright
To work magic is to weave the unseen forces into form, to make the intangible tangible, and thereby re-enchant the world.
– Thomas Moore
Don’t feel badly if you find yourself too restless to meditate deeply. Calmness will come in time, if you practice regularly. Just never accept the thought that meditation is not for you. Remember, calmness is your eternal, true nature.
– Paramahansa Yogananda
Winter man, winter woman, frozen at the heart,
lethal as a falling falcon, full of subtle art,
having put the earth beneath you – master and not friend –
miracles alone can’t teach you how to love again.
Winter people, winter world, caught in your own spell,
pinioned in the cunning coils of your heaven’s hell,
in your hives of stone and steel you tremble for the day
when the bells of spring will peal and sweep your works away.
“You are not the villain here,” sings the truthful snow.
“You are not the hero and you are not the foe.”
“You are just the seed of life still learning how to grow
far beyond your frazzled sense of a tale too great to know.”
Such a fierce yet fragile seed that bears the brunt of time,
as children of the tree of life, you yearn to fill the sky.
Now buried deep in bitter ground you are more like the dead.
But when the pipes of spring come ’round, you will lift up your heads.
You will lift up your hearts to shout with gladness loud and long!
You will cast off the husk of doubt to sing your heartfelt song.
Your ancient song of love between all creatures great and small
will echo from the highest hills and from the starry halls!
– George Gorman
I hied here, this high hill,
To hear who hailed here,
Who wailed here in the night—
Who might my courage ignite
Beyond my grasping sight.
Some dozens rang, some hundred
Voices sang—some highly,
Some slyly, some shyly
Barely whispered, like a kite
Flapping, flipping, ducking
In the wind—up, over
And down again, down to
Where we all begin.
Again, and again, I heard their
Calls, cawing, gnawing
At the very souls
Do rave and rove and ramble:
Doves on rocks; doe in bramble.
Cawing, as if enwisened;
Crying for the light;
Chirping behind blankly:
Leap so you should fall!
Fall free, fall forward, fall right!
Fall until ground breaks,
Always in front.
Always in front.
I hied here for weep and want.
Bird in flight, merry bright,
Rest me on the murmuring mountain
Rest here—
Rest with all my might.
Crawled and sprawled o’er crumbling clay,
Cradle of moon-white stones—
Cairn-clicked tongues sung in sun,
Sand-warm rays weighted,
Thoughts heady touched—
Sleep, snake coiled in hands of
Man’s most lasted fronts,
Sleep, and wake when tongues’re dumb.
What use the purple martin?
Fleet feathers what fouled the nest?
Strike me with lightness and
Sheen, strike the lake’s surface,
Sip the surface as you pass!
And as you swoop and spin
Inside my breast, be what
Is best—be it fouled
Or feathered, foreword,
Or past—step you where
The serpent rests, to spring!
Rhythm of two nimble legs
To shuffle the decayed mass.
Worn worm below the wallow,
Fleet martin in his hollow,
Hear I, who hied this high,
High hill to bide here,
Whosoever has flied here.
– Gerald Manley Hopkins
If the structure does not permit dialogue, the structure must be changed.
– Paulo Freire
Justice has nothing to do with victor nations and vanquished nations, but must be a moral standard that all the world’s peoples can agree to. To seek this and to achieve it—that is true civilization.
– Hideki Tojo
Act the way you’d like to be, and soon you’ll be the way you act.
– Leonard Cohen
If we are inspired only by literature that reflects our own interests, all reading becomes a form of
narcissism.
– Terry Eagleton
Teaching is not a lost art,
but regard for teaching
is a lost tradition.
– Jacques Barzun
Is getting older simply encountering more and more people who have been genetically engineered specifically to irritate you or is that just me not wanting to leave my house?
– Nikita Gill
To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly.
– J. Robert Oppenheimer
Why are we worn out? Why do we, who start out so passionate, brave, noble, believing, become totally bankrupt by the age of thirty or thirty-five? Why is it that one is extinguished by consumption, another puts a bullet in his head, a third seeks oblivion in vodka, cards, a fourth, in order to stifle fear and anguish, cynically tramples underfoot the portrait of his pure, beautiful youth? Why is it that, once fallen, we do not try to rise, and, having lost one thing, we do not seek another? Why?
– Anton Chekhov
It’s a cruel and random world, but the chaos is all so beautiful.
– Hiromu Arakawa
When they kissed
Olympus shook.
– ACHILLES by Jared Singer
(Forgotten Necessities)
I hate everything that does not relate to literature.
Conversations bore me (even when they relate to literature), to visit people bores me, the joys and sorrows of my relatives bore me to my soul.
Conversation takes the importance, the seriousness, the truth, out of everything I think.
– Franz Kafka, diary entry, 1918
Like a traveler on a train
we can put down our bags.
We can relax out grip
and trust in the unfolding of life.
Do not worry.
There is a web of life
into which we are born,
from which we can never fall.
– Jack Kornfield
Short Talk On Orchids
We live by tunneling for we are people buried alive. To me, the tunnels you make will seem strangely aimless, uprooted orchids. But the fragrance is undying. A Little Boy has run away from Amherst a few Days ago, writes Emily Dickinson in a letter of 1883, and when asked where he was going
replied, Vermont or Asia.
– Anne Carson
Body means reality. Sometimes the body is an abyss and one gets engulfed, while spirit flutters around by itself like a butterfly.
A dangerous separation ensues that leads to death, for one lives outside of reality. Vitality in its fullest is experienced when one lives totally within the body and with the body!
Every spiritual progress includes a better connection to the body.
– Jung
Cupped in the palm
of infinity.
You and I
will never leave
that place.
– Andrea Gibson
A man goes to knowledge as he goes to war: wide-awake, with fear, with respect, and with absolute assurance. Going to knowledge or going to war in any other manner is a mistake, and whoever makes it might never live to regret it.
– Carlos Castaneda
If Music is a Place – then Jazz is the City, Folk is the Wilderness, Rock is the Road, Classical is a Temple.
– Vera Nazarian
The Renewal
by Theodore Roethke
1
What glories would we? Motions of the soul?
The centaur and the sibyl romp and sing
Within the reach of my imagining:
Such affirmations are perpetual.
I teach my sighs to lengthen into songs,
Yet, like a tree, endure the shift of things.
2
The night wind rises. Does my father live?
Dark hangs upon the waters of the soul;
My flesh is breathing slower than a wall.
Love alters all. Unblood my instinct, love.
These waters drowse me into sleep so kind
I walk as if my face would kiss the wind.
3
Sudden renewal of the self—from where?
A raw ghost drinks the fluid in my spine;
I know I love, yet know not where I am;
I paw the dark, the shifting midnight air.
Will the self, lost, be found again? In form?
I walk the night to keep my five wits warm.
4
Dry bones! Dry bones! I find my loving heart,
Illumination brought to such a pitch
I see the rubblestones begin to stretch
As if reality had split apart
And the whole motion of the soul lay bare:
I find that love, and I am everywhere.
Plain
Some evenings I’d like to climb
up the bell towers in the plain,
to see the great pink clouds
slow on the horizon
like mountains interwoven
with rays.
I
I’d understand from poplars’ motion
where the river passes
and what wind it drags;
foretell where the sun will rise
tomorrow
and what course it will take, shown
on already whitened rice,
on the grain.
10
I would touch with my fingers
the rim of the bells, when day declines
and the breeze lifts:
feel pass in their bronze the beat
of great flights far away.
– Antonia Pozzi, Undated
A poem, being an instance of language, hence essentially dialogue, may be a letter in a bottle thrown out to sea with the – surely not always strong — hope that it may somehow wash up somewhere, perhaps on a shoreline of the heart. In this way, too, poems are en route: they are headed toward.
Toward what? Toward something open, inhabitable, an approachable you, perhaps, an approachable reality.
– Paul Celan (translated by Rosmarie Waldrop)
The suffering which has not yet arisen should be avoided.
– Yoga Sutras of Pantanjali II:16
There’s hard lessons in this world.
What’s the hardest?
I don’t know.
Maybe it’s just that when things are gone
they’re gone.
They aint comin back.
– Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain
Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: ‘You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.
– Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
Virginia Writes to Vita
and still doesn’t know
what love is.
The night is blue
in green.
The night is a blackbird
searching for one dolphin
in a bedfull of oysters’.
There are no martyrs
here.
The only point
of continuing
to row this old boat
is to help
another through.
– Natalie Marino
The safest communities are those with the most housing and resources, not those that make it a crime to be poor or sick.
– Jesse Rabinowitz
there must be a way.
surely there must be a way that we
have not yet
thought of.
who put this brain inside of me?
it cries
it demands
it says that there is a chance.
it will not say
“no.”
– Charles Bukowski
How does it start the sea has endless beginnings
– Alice Oswald
All of us yearn for the highest wisdom, but we have to rely on ourselves in the end.
– Czeslaw Milosz
Avoid cliques, gangs, groups.
The presence of a crowd won’t
make your writing any better than it is.
– Zadie Smith
Time, which is your enemy in almost everything in this life, is your friend in writing.
– Tobias Wolff
Socrates was the one who started it.
He would deliver knowledge, anyone’s knowledge – knowledge of which he himself was unaware.
That resembles what Freud, rather late in the piece, called ‘the unconscious’.
In his own way, Socrates wasn’t such a bad analyst.
– Jacques Lacan
A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.
– Albert Camus
Look on the rising sun: there God does live
And gives his light, and gives his heat away.
And flowers & trees & beasts & men receive
Comfort in morning joy in the noonday.
And we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love.
– William Blake
You only love
when you love in vain.
(…)
You ask the secret.
It has just one name:
again.
– Miroslav Holub
how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and
buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
– E. E. Cummings
each time I jump
I think I’m escaping
but somehow
I always land beside
the same unsaid things
– Nitu Yumnam
Rhapsody
by Frank O’Hara
515 Madison Avenue
door to heaven? portal
stopped realities and eternal licentiousness
or at least the jungle of impossible eagerness
your marble is bronze and your lianas elevator cables
swinging from the myth of ascending
I would join
or declining the challenge of racial attractions
they zing on (into the lynch, dear friends)
while everywhere love is breathing draftily
like a doorway linking 53rd with 54th
the east-bound with the west-bound traffic by 8,000,000s
o midtown tunnels and the tunnels, too, of Holland
where is the summit where all aims are clear
the pin-point light upon a fear of lust
as agony’s needlework grows up around the unicorn
and fences him for milk- and yoghurt-work
when I see Gianni I know he’s thinking of John Ericson
playing the Rachmaninoff 2nd or Elizabeth Taylor
taking sleeping-pills and Jane thinks of Manderley
and Irkutsk while I cough lightly in the smog of desire
and my eyes water achingly imitating the true blue
a sight of Manahatta in the towering needle
multi-faceted insight of the fly in the stringless labyrinth
Canada plans a higher place than the Empire State Building
I am getting into a cab at 9th Street and 1st Avenue
and the Negro driver tells me about a $120 apartment
“where you can’t walk across the floor after 10 at night
not even to pee, cause it keeps them awake downstairs”
no, I don’t like that “well, I didn’t take it”
perfect in the hot humid morning on my way to work
a little supper-club conversation for the mill of the gods
you were there always and you know all about these things
as indifferent as an encyclopedia with your calm brown eyes
it isn’t enough to smile when you run the gauntlet
you’ve got to spit like Niagara Falls on everybody or
Victoria Falls or at least the beautiful urban fountains of Madrid
as the Niger joins the Gulf of Guinea near the Menemsha Bar
that is what you learn in the early morning passing Madison Avenue
where you’ve never spent any time and stores eat up light
I have always wanted to be near it
though the day is long (and I don’t mean Madison Avenue)
lying in a hammock on St. Mark’s Place sorting my poems
in the rancid nourishment of this mountainous island
they are coming and we holy ones must go
is Tibet historically a part of China? as I historically
belong to the enormous bliss of American death.
Healing isn’t a straight line. Some days you feel fierce. Other days, fragile. But both are part of the process.
– Heather Prince
unable to settle down
the traveling heart
remains
– Basho
Far more crucial than what we know or do not know is what we do not want to know.
– Eric Hoffer
One of the greatest pieces of wisdom I’ve ever heard comes from Fritz Perls–He said: “Fear is excitement without the breath.” Same mechanisms that produce excitement also produce fear and any fear can be transformed into excitement by breathing fully with it.
– Guy Hendricks
The best thing you can do for your children is to ensure they never witness anger, fear or conflict at home. Let them grow up in an atmosphere of Joy and Love.
– Sadhguru
In a life properly lived, you’re a river. You touch things lightly or deeply; you move along because life herself moves, and you can’t stop it; you can’t figure out a banal game plan applicable to all situations; you just have to go with the ‘beingness’ of life.
– Jim Harrison
A book should open old wounds, even inflict new ones. A book should be a danger.
– Emil Cioran
Real happiness only comes as a side-effect of peace. Most of it is going to come from acceptance, not from changing your external environment.
– @naval
If you want to make the maximum amount of money possible, if you want to get rich over your life in a deterministically predictable way, stay on the bleeding edge of trends and study technology, design, and art—become really good at something.
– @naval
I was reminded of the Four Immutable Laws of the Spirit: Whoever is present are the right people. Whenever it begins is the right time. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened. And when it’s over, it’s over.
– Anne Lamott
When someone said, This isn’t good, I would say, Well, I actually think it’s brilliant, and the brilliance will be revealed when you’re ready.
– Lynn Nottage
Your body will always take care of itself. Who grows the oranges in the orange tree? Who grows mangoes in a mango tree? Who takes care of the world and the earth? The same power that takes care of all the things on this planet, will take care of your body.
– Robert Adams
Never depend upon institutions or government to solve any problem. All social movements are founded by, guided by, motivated and seen through by the passion of individuals.
– Margaret Mead
When i see you through my eyes, i think that we are different. When i see you through my heart, i know that we’re the same.
– Doe Zantamata
Imagine how you would treat God if God were standing in front of you. Now carry that over to your human encounters and imagine how you would treat everybody else if you held them as divine.
– Neale Donald Walsch
And they searched his chest / But could only find his heart / And they searched his heart / But could only find his people.
– Mahmoud Darwish
They were only speaking the part of god that they themselves could glimpse. And this truth was only as small as they themselves were small.
– Lauren Groff, The Vaster Wilds
God made everything out of nothing, but the nothing shows through.
– Paul Valéry
We fight the nothing constantly, and we always lose.
– Paul Valéry
Packed Carefully Away
by Jane Greer
It seemed an endless season of letting go,
and what was lost, surrendered, none will guess.
The tide will always smooth the battered beach
and the charred heart of the wood burst forth in green.
And all that was given up no one will know,
nor the cost which now seems nearly a caress:
all kept in secret, forming no part of speech.
Embers will cool and sands be made pristine.
All kept in secret, saved but pressed down low,
packed carefully away with a muttered blessing.
Tide cannot alter what it cannot reach.
The charred heart of the wood remains unseen.
A faithful and genuinely self-sacrificing passion will speak to us with what seems the voice of God.
– C.S. Lewis
When looking at a map of Russia and its size, you understand that it’s not a cow, but a brontosaurus.
– Vladimir Sorokin
Philosophy is never supplication: but without supplication, there is no conceivable reply.
– Georges Bataille
serene and asleep
there is peace on earth
little snail
– Issa
Karma is just you, repeating your patterns, virtues, and flaws until you finally get what you deserve.
– @naval
I think at some point I became a sort of permanent adolescent, wanting to participate in a rebellion against grown-ups.
– Fanny Howe
Guard your time. Forget the money.
– @naval
Another time, perhaps. And I shall call
The laughter that lies sleeping in your voice
To wake, or finish poems when you begin them;
The sterile years have starry moments in them.
Love me or love me not, the leaves will fall,
And we shall walk them down. I have my joys.
– Joy Davidman, Sonnet XLI (to C.S. Lewis)
The happiest of all lives is a busy solitude.
– Voltaire
Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.
– Doris Lessing
The true poet is all-knowing — he is a real world in miniature.
– Novalis
The profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader. The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Plato described the two different ways of approaching truth as mythos and logos. Mythos is a more silent, intuitive way of looking at reality and logos is more of a scientific, discursive, logical way, and we need both.
– Karen Armstrong
At age twelve I didn’t wonder, all the time, what other people were thinking about me. That was a magical reprieve.
– Don Lee
To have love snatched from you, especially unexpectedly, and then to be told to turn to memories. Rather than succor, my memories bring eloquent stabs of pain that say, “This is what you will never again have.” Sometimes they bring laughter, but laughter like glowing coals that soon burst aflame in pain.
– Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
We think of Beatrice leading Dante up to Paradise, but he experienced that only after he had gone through Hell. Normally, the anima does not take a man by the hand and lead him right to Paradise; she puts him first into a hot cauldron where he is nicely roasted for a while.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
Life stretches out from moment to moment in stupendous infinitude. Nothing can be more real than what you suppose it to be. Whatever you think the cosmos to be it is and it could not possibly be anything else as long as you are you and I am I.
– Henry Miller
As the entrepreneur of its own self, the neoliberal subject has no capacity for relationships with others that might be free of purpose. Nor do entrepreneurs know what purpose-free friendship would even look like.
– Byung-chul Han, Psychopolitics
We live for books.
– Umberto Eco
There are books so alive that you’re always afraid that while you weren’t reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river.
– Marina Tsvetaeva
We don’t know when love will arrive. We don’t know when it will fade. We can only know that the unexpected will happen, that certainty is a falsity, and that things will be impermanent regardless of how tightly we clench our fists around them.
– Sunita Puri
We ourselves sometimes don’t know how to make our lives interesting. And it starts with the little things. I’m not even talking about bigger things. Is it really so hard to understand? After all, it’s in our hands to make life interesting.
– Vasily Shukshin
We are called not to run from the discomfort, or run from the grief, or the feelings of outrage, or even fear…when we can just be with it and keep breathing, it turns, it turns to reveal its other face; and the other face of our pain for the world is our love for the world, our absolute, inseparable connectedness to all life.
– Joanna Macy
If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.
– George Bernard Shaw
If I think about good and evil, it’s definitely without the capital letters. But I’m very interested in writing about goodness.
– Marie NDiaye
In vain would we talk about nature, nature doesn’t want this; it is no use to talk about the divine, the divine doesn’t want this, and anyway, no matter how much we want to, we are unable to talk about anything other than ourselves, because we are only capable of talking about history, about the human condition, about that never-changing quality whose essence carries such titillating relevance only for us…
– László Krasznahorkai
Freedom of the spirit is a bottomless well. Our substantial nature could not be the basis of freedom. On the contrary, all nature is born of freedom.
– Nikolai Berdyaev
Philosophical discussion unites the two greatest and purest pleasures of human life: study and society.
– David Hume
Does it make any difference at all if it happened anywhere else? It happened here. That’s everything, right?
– Richard Powers, Bewilderment
In contrast to many of his followers, Jung didn’t take his teaching as holy writ no more than he would have thought his word was to become a body of dogma. Jung warned that his ideas were tentative at best, subject to change, and reflective of the era in which he lived: “Whatever happens in a given moment has inevitably the quality peculiar to that moment” Jung understood both the ethical seriousness and the limits of his knowledge. He saw himself as an innovator but also, and more importantly, as part of a lineage of philosophers and healers.
– Claire Douglas, Marie-Louise von Franz and the Conference of the Birds
If only a world-wide consciousness could arise that all division and fission are due to the splitting of opposites in the psyche, then we should know where to begin.
– Carl Gustav Jung
In all classes, from the lowest to almost the highest, economic fear governs men’s thoughts by day and their dreams at night, making their work nerve-racking and their leisure unrefreshing. This ever-present terror is, I think, the main cause of the mood of madness which has swept over great parts of the civilized world.
– Bertrand Russell
Poetry is the only literary form that can accommodate such a rapid rate of reading; being able to jump seamlessly between voices like this can expand the way we think about the world.
– Laura Buccieri
There is really only one war, the war within ourselves, which produces
external wars.
– J Krishnamurti
More than naming a pet, or choosing a title for my own creative work, settling on a title for a work of translation feels to me akin to naming a child, a separate soul whose name might help carve out their path.
– Layla Benitez-James
Metaphysical fallacies contain the only clues we have to what thinking means to those who engage in it.
– Hannah Arendt
You were a masterpiece I was proud to display in the gallery of my life
yet to you, I was just a mirror that only served you best in the
darkness of your closet
– Najya Williams, Epistle For Adelphia Asiya
All those solitary hours of daydreaming were a kind of training for poetry.
– Charles Simic
We have all started to see alike
worse
we have all started to write alike
I rest assured that you
are not a final word
likeness
– Laura Kerr
I tend to prefer books in which the bow isn’t perfectly tied but slightly undone. After all, our lives are full of secrets that will never be revealed, enigmas that will never be resolved.
– Marie NDiaye
The one who sees through the illusion of mind is freed. The one who tries to fix the mind remains trapped in illusion.
– Jigme Lingpa
a day at the beach —
all of the sunglasses
fill with clouds
– Chen-ou Liu
. . . We may study and practice the teachings, and they may penetrate a bit, but if we don’t want to relate to our obscurations, and refuse to believe they are even there, no spiritual development can take place. Without the proper motivation to guide and protect us, we will want to get enmeshed just as we do in all of our ordinary relationships. Meanwhile the teacher will just be waiting . . . waiting . . . waiting for the day we decide to surrender to wisdom rather than ignorance.
– Dzigar Kongtrul, Light Comes Through
We cannot become someone
new until we not only see
our current self, but consume it
– Jared Singer
When all is said and done, it would not surprise anyone if Trump were seen as the most grotesque, vile and repulsive human being of the 21st century.
– Bill Madden
Tibetans love the concept of seeing a coiled snake on the floor and realizing it is just a piece of rope. That’s what realization does.
Just as we can’t unsee what is seen, we can’t unrealize what is realized. If you think it’s hard to realize the true nature of the mind, it’s impossible to un-realize what has been realized.
What I write each day is more demanding as time goes on. And by ‘demanding” I don’t mean it takes me more time. What I mean is that the bar continues to be raised so that I have to be increasingly more integral in what I write, as I see it, to communicate to others.
I am reminded of the widening gyre of Yeats poem “The Second Coming.” I certainly am not escaping the widening of the gyre. I have to work within it. That is the nature of Samsara.
In practical terms, the whole concept of Samsara means we work against what’s good for us, against our own true nature and are not even aware of it.
That’s what Samsara is, failing to realize the nature of the mind and how it works. In other words, we work and have always worked counter to our own best interests.
Is it any wonder that from time to time we are brought down a peg or two and have to rebuild our little house of cards that we call our Self?
We should welcome this bit of sobering rather than continue to ignore or work counter to the truth of our existence or lack thereof. One thing that helps is to recognize that we are not to blame for ignoring the truth of reality. It is not like we once knew and turned away. My dharma teacher made it very clear that we never knew and have never known anything but reifying and ignoring reality. We have yet to be aware, much less to realize the true nature of our mind.
And it is not conscious ignoring on our part, but rather ignorance is our heritage. We were born into it and of it. And it is not a case of original sin as some faiths have it. We did not once know and then fall away from grace. We have never known grace although it exists right here within us all this time. We are not aware of it much less realize it. That’s the key issue.
And this is why the word Buddha means “aware” because the historical Buddha succeeded in becoming aware of what he (and we) are unaware of. He became aware and understood, experienced it consciously, and then, on top of that, ‘Realized’ the true nature of the mind and how it works, and that realization, like all realizations, stuck.
Realization is not something that comes and goes. Realization comes and stays. That’s its nature.
In other words, ‘Realization’, by nature, dispels ignorance because it is nothing more than that we see our mistake, how we mistook reality to be something it is not, like the rope for a snake. And in that moment of realization, as the Tibetans say, the darkness of eons of ignorance vanishes like striking a match in a dark cave.
The only thing that happens is that we can suddenly see because of the light of awareness, and with that the darkness just vanishes. However, realization is a one-way street. Once we realize, we cannot go back to not having realized, to not seeing. We have seen or realized and thus we have ‘realized’.
The Buddha became aware and with that stopped ignoring the true or actual nature of the mind. And he spent the rest of his life trying to point out to the rest of us how we too can realize the true nature of the mind.
– Michael Erlewine
Fiction is the truth because without footnotes and without any kind of factual reportage, when it’s true you know it. And then it becomes dangerous.
– Arundhati Roy
Nature’s real value lies in the realm of the intangibles, vistas, solitude and quiet . . . There is great need for people to come in touch with silence, cyclic rhythms, and natural beauty if they are to retain their perspective. Tension, speed, and lack of real purpose in their daily lives make it mandatory they go to places where they can find themselves, regain their dignity and fulfillment as humans. It is the intangibles of the land they need.
– Sigurd F. Olson
We can change our world for the kinder, for the more loving, for the more responsible. We can be activists with love, not hate. We can bring our work in line with our life’s mission: to be of benefit- for a more equal and decent society.
– Waylon H. Lewis
Aftermath
after Jim Moore
When the empire finally crumbles,
and the ruler has fallen, in that first
deep breath of silence just before
re-birth, please let us choose to dig
each other out of the ruins, hand
clasping hand, stranger lifting stranger.
Let us know that when everyone
has dust in our lungs, sand in our eyes,
dirt on our faces, we are all the same
person. Let us begin the first step
of each of us placing one stone on top
of another stone on top of another,
all of us a part of the building, the rising
rubblework a testament to what can be.
– paula gordon lepp
you say “both sides”
and with those two words
you bury
a thousand names
– @daliah.lina
If man is to survive, he will learn to take a delight in the
essential differences between cultures.
To learn that differences in ideas and
attitudes are a delight, part of life’s
exciting variety, not something to fear.
– Gene Roddenberry
Listening in Deep Space
by Diane Thiel
We’ve always been out looking for answers,
telling stories about ourselves,
searching for connection, choosing
to send out Stravinsky and whale song,
which, in translation, might very well be
our undoing instead of a welcome.
We launch satellites, probes, telescopes
unfolding like origami, navigating
geomagnetic storms, major disruptions.
Rovers with spirit and perseverance
mapping the unknown. We listen
through large arrays adjusted eagerly
to hear the news that we are not alone.
Considering the history at home,
in houses, across continents, oceans,
even in quests armed with good intentions,
what one seeker has done to another—
what will we do when we find each other?
TURNING
Going too fast for myself I missed
more than I think I can remember
almost everything it seems sometimes
and yet there are chances that come back
that I did not notice when they stood
where I could have reached out and touched them
this morning the black shepherd dog
still young looking up and saying
Are you ready this time
– W. S. Merwin
I want to infect you with the tremendous
excitement of living, because I believe that
you have the strength to bear it.
– Tennessee Williams
SOME NIGHT AGAIN
When the world vanishes, I will come back
here by the power of my dreams and create it
again, starting where that clear
depth in the mountain lake began,
where you swam one night across the moonlight
and I thought: Still, it’s good, though it has to end.
– William Stafford
AT EVERY GAS STATION THERE ARE MECHANICS
Around them my cleanliness stinks.
I smell it. And so do they.
I always want to tell them I used to box,
and change tires, and eat heroes.
It is my hands hanging out
of my sleeves like white gloves.
It is what I’ve not done, and do not know.
If they mention the differential
I pay whatever price. When
they tell me what’s wrong beneath my hood
I nod, and become meek.
If they were to say I could not
have my car back, that it was theirs,
I would say thank you, you must be right.
And then I would walk home,
and create an accident.
– Stephen Dunn
the shortest poem is a name
– anne michaels
Together we decide which way the dream goes.
– Matt Rasmussen
Our cultural and psychological responses are from the past, but modified by the conjunction of the past with the present. So the past is controlling and modifying the present.
– Krishnamurti
As a child I was always the ball bearings for my whole family; I thought I was indispensable to their survival, preventing hard metal from grinding against hard metal, so the family didn’t come to a broken, screeching, metallic halt.
– Anne Lamott
We must see to it that we put the best of ourselves in our letters; for there is nothing to suggest that we shall see each other again soon.
– Walter Benjamin to Gretel Adorno; tr. Wieland Hoban
Underneath pride, jealousy, fear—there’s basic goodness. In you. In them. In all of us.
– Mingyur Rinpoche
Let us not pretend to know what it is, this forgetting.
– Derrida
Someone understanding you is usually less about intelligence and more about level of consciousness. Which is why you just have to let people perceive you from their level without it being personal.
– Nika Solé
I am aware that, every time I have a conversation with a book, I benefit from someone’s decision against silence.
– Yiyun Li
All other knowledge is hurtful to him who has not the science of honesty and goodness.
– Montaigne
A passionate obsession with the outside world or the private lives of others is an attempt to compensate for a lack of meaning in one’s own life.
– Eric Hoffer
Studies suggest it’s best not to mention problem in front of power even to say there is none. Gloria Steinem says women lose power as they age and yet the loudest voice in my head is my mother.
– Solmaz Sharif
The poetic work begins tomorrow.
– René Char
All our plans failed. None of the medicine worked.
Look! How this sickened heart finally finished me off.
– Mir Taqi Mir
with blueberry juice i write my country anew in the lexicon of empire
– Gunnar Wærness, translated from the Norwegian by Gabriel Gudding
Good copy is a poor substitute for good UI. Good marketing is a poor substitute for a good product.
– @naval
When you wish good for others, good things come back to you. This is the LAW of NATURE.
– Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
If we are fractured
we are fractured
like stars
bred to shine
in every direction,
through any dimension,
billions of years
since and hence.
– Dorianne Laux
avoid
being like me
a melon split into two
– Basho
A story cannot be judged from its summarized plot, but only from the way this is told, and from the ideas and feelings which are stirred in the author – whether ever consciously formulated by him or not – in the telling, and which breathe a life and purpose into it.
– Tolkien
Every time I thought I was being rejected from something good, I was actually being redirected to something better.
– Steve Maraboli
Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now.
– @naval
This cruel era
Turned me like a river.
Life was switched on me, flowed
In a different riverbed,
By another course,
And I don’t know my own banks.
O, how many shows I missed,
While the curtain rose
And fell without me. How many friends
I never met once.
– Anna Akhmatova, tr. Liza Tucker
May you be angry about what deserves anger, and may you experience such a transformation of your own anger that you become an agent of loving transformation in our world.
– Brian McLaren
Innocence shags experience and I’ll never grow.
Experience catches the dove, and I’m lost.
I find you at this intimate pasture.
A number in a tree.
A grey field of otherwise.
Inventing a globe and a wheel
to turn it on.
Inventing a dress and the bird
it remembers.
This you of my equal and never is a restoration.
Beside the elements when they broke into picture
this is my reference to the amity of sand.
– Elizabeth Willis
Political leaders are never leaders.
For leaders we have to look
to the Awakeners!
– Henry Miller
History is still not Time; nor is evolution. They are both consequences. Time is a state: the flame in which there lives the salamander of the human soul.
– Andrei Tarkovsky
there is nothing that
distracts me music is
only a crossword puzzle
– Frank O’Hara
I was not traversing the same streets as the people who were walking about town that day, I was traversing a past, gliding, sad and sweet; a past which was moreover compounded of so many different pasts that it was difficult for me to recognize the cause of my melancholy.
– Marcel Proust
One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.
– Omar El Akkad
There is only one solitude, and it is large and not easy to bear…People are drawn to the easy and to the easiest side of the easy. But it is clear that we must hold ourselves to the difficult.
– Rilke
news after news
of record-shattering heat
day after day
a homeless man evicted
into the mayor’s silence
– Chen-ou Liu
If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.
– Ben Lerner
We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget that the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it’s all about.
– Joseph Campbell
The sky was so clear and blue, so striking in its stillness, that I wanted to cry.
– Lisa Ko
First, create your ego. Then destroy it. This is all of life.
– Kamand Kojouri
Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
– James Baldwin
Logic is neither the preface, nor the instrument, nor the formula, nor an episode of philosophy. It is, rather, a coordinated pragmatic science opposed to poetry and to ethics and deriving from the demand for a positive truth and the premise of the possibility of a system.
– Friedrich Schlegel
Doubt is the hammer that breaks the windows clouded with human fancies, and lets in the pure light.
– George MacDonald
There is only one problem in the whole world. We must restore to people their spiritual significance, their spiritual concerns. You see, we can no longer live with refrigerators, politics, balance sheets, and crosswords. We simply cannot. We cannot live without poetry, without color, without love.
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
You may be very learned and do the things society calls good, but they are all within the prison walls of tradition and therefore of no revolutionary value at all.
– Krishnamurti
Buy yourself some ice cream.
Draw a circle where you stand.
Run your fingers through the mud
and let the lotus bruise your hands.
– Will Kimbrough
You are the living spell, written by stars, spoken by time.
– Mystical Grimoire
Our prejudices are so deeply rooted that we never think of them as prejudices but call them common sense.
– George Bernard Shaw
You should never ever succumb to nihilism. If you can’t maintain revolutionary optimism, just do it out of spite.
– Hasan Piker
The value of every person is what he knows.
– Imam Ali
Paradise was made for tender hearts; hell, for loveless hearts.
– Voltaire
The extravert knows, by feeling himself into others, by what human means people can be won over, whereas the introvert tries to create values in himself with which he tries to impress and force others toward him, or even bring them to his knees.
– Carl Jung
Nature and teaching are closely related; for teaching reforms a person, and by reforming remakes his nature.
– Democritus
I will not tire of declaring that if we really want an effective end to violence we must remove the violence that lies at the root of all violence: structural violence, social injustice, exclusion of citizens from the management of the country, repression. All this is what constitutes the primal cause from which the rest flows naturally.
– Oscar Romero
Compassion isn’t about solutions. It’s about giving all the love that you’ve got.
– Cheryl Strayed
Growth in grace is growth downward. It is the forming of a lower estimate of ourselves. It is a deepening realization of our nothingness. It is a heartfelt recognition that we are not worthy of the least of God’s mercies.
– Arthur Pink
The edge between sense and nonsense is shadow thin, and in all our deepest convictions we hover in the shadow, uncertain whether we know what our words mean, nevertheless bound by the conviction to say them.
– R.P. Blackmur
A persistent irony recognized and celebrated by novelists, poets, and playwrights is that as one moves closer to the unique characteristics of a person or a place, one discovers the universal.
– Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot
You never draw out of the deep of yourself that which you want; you always draw that which you are, and you are that which you feel yourself to be.
– Neville Goddard
If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can’t have any result whatever, you’ve beaten them.
– George Orwell
Woe to our society if to be human becomes a heroic act.
– Elie Wiesel
You are rewarded not according to your work or your time but according to the measure of your love.
– St. Catherine of Siena
As soon as you see your own shadow and admit that you are not perfect, you cannot identify yourself with the “Great Wise Man” and create a Puer Aeternus with your anima.
– Carl Jung
Where the land is flat there is no flow of water; it has nowhere to go; it stagnates. In order to produce energy you must have opposites—an above and a below.
– Carl Jung
…a symbol of the unity of personality, a symbol of the self, where the war of opposites finds peace.
In this way the primordial being becomes the distant goal of man’s self-development.
– Carl Jung
Some people. and particularly introverts. always put the wrong foot forward. They have a particular genius for putting their finger on the sore spot.
– Carl Jung
They praised the glow in my soul,
Danced in its shadow,
But the moment it flickered,
They vanished with the dusk.
– Faiza
In the United States, where the problems of the working poor were profound, anything that smacked of welfare was easy for lobbyists to defeat. And basic income was easily dismissed as a form of socialism—the ultimate idea-killing label in the world’s capitalist superpower.
– Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World by Peter S. Goodman
If we’d know we were going to be the Beatles, we’d have tried harder.
– George Harrison
You become political when you can no longer endure the world.
– Marguerite Duras
She bought me a bonsai,
I did not plant nor water,
Neither of us grew
– Nathaniel Rochester
Don’t turn your back on wisdom, for she will protect you. Love her, and she will guard you.
– Proverbs 4:6
With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil – that takes religion.
– Steven Weinberg
I’m Jewish. “Never again” means NEVER AGAIN FOR ANYONE.
– Susan Elliott Reach
Our mind paints the astral plane, its color tied to thought’s refrain. Hold hate—dark shades remain. Choose love—light breaks the chain
– Chad Erickson
The sea is like music. It has all the dreams of the soul within itself and sounds them over.
– Jung
We organize in the cracks, the spaces the empire can’t control.
– @weprintrevolution
Competition happens at the bottom.
The people at the top are collaborating.
– unknown
ALONE
by Philip Levine
Sunset, and the olive grove flames
on the far hill. We descend
into the lunging shadows
of goat grass, and the air
deepens like smoke.
You were behind me, but when I turned
there was the wrangling of crows
and the long grass rising in the wind
and the swelling tips of grain
turning to water under a black sky.
All around me the thousand
small denials of the day
rose like insects to the flaming
of an old truth, someone alone
following a broken trail of stones
toward the deep and starless river.
On Eroded Solar Masses
by Will Alexander
Say each eroded molecular cloud
contained uncountable solar masses
not typical but density per cubic centimeter
welling up across a million years
never speaking of the highest suns
through a totem of errors but totem
taking from density no known error
alive as pattern
as irrational ascension
sans squared impalpable quanta
its implacable winds
teeming sub-flow as absentia
A reader knows the difference.
“I needed you.”
“I needed you.”
“I needed you.”
IT’S POSSIBLE TO BE
COMPLETELY
ENLIGHTENED … EXCEPT
WITH YOUR FAMILY.
– CHOGYAM TRUNGPA
Make it a rule never to
give a child a book you
would not read yourself.
– George Bernard Shaw
Americans have
decided to be
stupid and
shallow since
1980. Madonna
is like Nero; she
marks the
turning point.
– Joni Mitchell
To come back to a place
you’ve never left
and see the old moon
still leaning on the ruined barn
and watch the stream
still rivering. And the trees’
stiff alphabet
still rehearsing signs
you still can’t read,
a love-letter from the future
sealed with a kiss
but from whose lips?
– Robert Kelly
if there is no savior, I’ll do it myself, I’ll forgive myself
– Danez Smith
Love is never any better than the lover.
Wicked people love wickedly,
violent people love violently,
weak people love weakly,
stupid people love stupidly,
but the love of a free man is never safe.
There is no gift for the beloved.
The lover alone possesses his gift of love.
– Toni Morrison
I wash my hands of those
who imagine chattering
to be knowledge,
silence to be ignorance,
and affection to be art.
– Kahlil Gibran
Once you teach people to say what they do not understand, it is easy enough to get them to say anything you like.
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Being human is no small task. This world belongs to the courageous ones.
– Anam Thubten
One can’t build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out.
– Anne Sexton
The atheist staring from his attic window is often nearer to God than the believer caught up in his own false image of God.
– Martin Buber
Our true home is the place where “What if”s disappear.
– Pico Iyer
Fresh water on Sunday, new pages discarded. Reporters talk it up, Islanders play it down. Films do not leave you to your own thoughts. Language preys on the mind.
– Clark Coolidge
What would it be about if it weren’t about your comfort?
– Kenneth Folk
But logic is not all; one needs one’s heart to follow an idea.
– Prof. Feynman
on forever’s very now we stand
– e. e. cummings
The best way, perhaps the only way, to change others is to become an example.
– @naval
Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.
– Lawrence Durrell
New hottest thing anyone has said to me:
“If you have thoughts on this let me know — your consciousness is trustworthy and I can triangulate reality through you”
– River Kenna
I kneel into a dream
where I am good & loved.
I am good. I am loved.
– Natalie Wee
Friends I am here to modestly report
seeing in an orchard
in my town
a goldfinch kissing
a sunflower.
– Ross Gay
I think that’s what we’re feeling, out in the world. We are thirsty. We are hungry, and we have forgotten where our sources of nourishment lie. We are collectively forgetting what feeds our spirits because we’re erasing them, destroying them, killing them-at our own peril.
– Terry Tempest Williams
Socialism is, in fact, a form of
Christianity, people wishing to
imitate Christ.
– Kurt Vonnegut
I found the
world to be
woefully
lacking in
safe places.
So, I became
one.
– J. Warren Welch
I would rather people
speak up imperfectly
than not speak up at all.
I would rather have people
join movements for liberation late
than not have them join at all.
I would rather
hear your voice
than not hear it at all.
It is not too late to save this world.
And I would rather people believe that
than not believe it at all.
– Nikita Gill
Everything you have ever seen with your eyes is the self-emptying of God into multitudinous physical and visible forms. In other words, Infinity is forever limiting itself into finite expressions, and this could even be called the “suffering” of God.
– Richard Rohr
There are a whole lot of things in this world you haven’t started wondering
about yet.
– Roald Dahl
When our grief cannot be spoken, it falls into the shadow and arises as symptoms. So many of us are depressed, anxious, and lonely. We struggle with addictions and find ourselves moving at a breathless pace, trying to keep up with the machinery of culture.
Grief is subversive, undermining the quiet agreement to behave and be in control of our emotions. It is an act of protest that declares our refusal to live numb and small. There is something feral about grief, something essentially outside the ordained and sanctioned behaviors of our culture. Because of that, grief is necessary to the vitality of the soul. Contrary to our fears, grief is suffused with life-force…. It is not a state of deadness or emotional flatness. Grief is alive, wild, untamed and cannot be domesticated. It resists the demands to remain passive and still. We move in jangled, unsettled, and riotous ways when grief takes hold of us. It is truly an emotion that rises from the soul.
– Francis Weller
Humility is a form of liberation: it makes us accept our frailties and inadequacies, that we stop wanting to constantly mask in the eyes of others. It gives us the effects of the grip, of the obsession of social judgment, since we seek neither to hide its limits nor to put them forward.
– Christophe Andre
Skywalking
Much grief awaits us, friends.
From this day on
We’ll be testing our luck
Like a man stretching a wire
Between two skyscrapers,
Who sets out to walk on it
Carrying an open umbrella
Which the wind may snatch away
When he is halfway,
And then have its fun
Bouncing it off walls and windows.
We are likely to forget the man
Waving his arms up there
Like a scarecrow in a squall.
– Charles Simic
if you do not think that a house
where everyone must be fine
all the time
is fine
you can leave that house
or leave yourself
choose your rupture
– Tricia Dearborn, The Family Line
When I’m in Canada, I feel this is what the world should be like.
– Jane Fonda
Habit makes us weak against the self. Even simple habits die hard. You may be aware of how bad smoking is for your health, but that doesn’t necessarily convince you to stop smoking, especially when you enjoy the ritual, the slender shape of the cigarette, the way the tobacco smolders, the fragrant smoke curling around your fingers.
But the habit of self is not just a simple addiction like smoking cigarettes. From time immemorial we have been addicted to the self. It is how we identify ourselves. It is what we love most dearly. It is also what we hate most fiercely at times. Its existence is also the thing that we work hardest to try to validate. Almost everything that we do or think or have, including our spiritual path, is a means to confirm its existence. It is the self that fears failure and longs for success, fears hell and longs for heaven. The self loathes suffering and loves the causes of suffering. It stupidly wages war in the name of peace. It wishes for enlightenment but detests the path to enlightenment. It wishes to work as a socialist but live as a capitalist.
When the self feels lonely, it desires friendship. Its possessiveness of those it loves manifests in passion that can lead to aggression. Its supposed enemies—such as spiritual paths designed to conquer the ego—are often corrupted and recruited as the self’s ally. Its skill in playing the game of deception is nearly perfect.
It weaves a cocoon around itself like a silkworm; but unlike a silkworm, it doesn’t know how to find the way out.
– Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche
Our teepees were round like the nests of birds, and these were always set in a circle, the nation’s hoop, a nest of many nests, where the Great Spirit meant for us to hatch our children.
– Black Elk
Quietly do the next and
most necessary thing.
– C.G. Jung
You must be true to your own way until at last you actually come to the point where you see it is necessary to forget all about yourself.
– Shunryu Suzuki
The whole duty of man consists in being reasonable and just… I am reasonable because I know the difference between understanding and not understanding and I am just because I have no opinion about things I don’t understand.
– Gertrude Stein
What connects us? Physicists don’t
know what to call that entanglement
other than an attribute of the
quantum world. The entangling
experience is what I refer to as
‘space-time dreaming.’
– Arnold Mindell
You are not different from your friend, but with your friend you are different from yourself, and recognizing that, I withdrew, wanting to protect my honesty, because I had defined integrity on two dimensions.
– Lyn Hejinian
School, politics, sports, and games train us to compete against others. True rewards – wealth, knowledge, love, fitness, and equanimity – come from ignoring others and improving ourselves.
– @naval
There’s a way a city leans after it’s been hit.
Not physically
I mean it like a person who’s just gotten bad news
but hasn’t sat down yet.
– Sushanta Basumatary
Everyone making art is a pioneer.
You’re the first to feel it exactly like you do.
That’s enough.
– Laura Kerr
Poets calling themselves pioneers on here is wild.
You’re not clearing a path.
You’re joining a centuries-long conversation.
Pull up a chair.
– Laura Kerr
Morning Star
by C. D. Wright
This isn’t the end. It simply
cannot be the end. It is a road.
You go ahead coatless, light-
soaked, more rutilant than
the road. The soles of your shoes
sparkle. You walk softly
as you move further inside
your subject. It is a living
season. The trees are anxious
to be included. The car with fins
beams through countless
oncoming points of rage and need.
The sloughed-off cells
under our bed form little hills
of dead matter. If the most sidereal
drink is pain, the most soothing
clock is music. A poetry
of shine could come of this.
It will be predominately
green. You will be allowed
to color in as much as you want
for green is good
for the teeth and the eyes.
God’s Mouth
The girl thought that the sky was God’s
wide-open mouth. After discussion, arguing,
I decided to agree. She was so sure
of herself, adamant in fact, as if stomping
a foot made anything true. I suppose
that at the back of the mouth is the brain
that created insects and galaxies, the girl
herself who is now singing a banal popular song
in a thin reedy voice. Then she told me
about a huge African catfish who keeps
her unruly children in her mouth. They come
and go, retreating when in danger. God is like
that, the girl said. We can go in and out.
– Jim Harrison
I am unable to make any distinction between the feeling I get from life and the way I translate that feeling into painting.
– Henri Matisse
Everyone just wants to be happy. Even when it looks unskillful, that’s what we’re reaching for.
– Vanessa Zuisei Goddard
Prescribing how poems should speak flattens what they are.
A poem is not always a voice.
In my work, it’s a field.
The missing is the point.
Some poems reach emotional conclusions—and do so brilliantly.
But a poem that refuses tidy resolution may be closer to the truth.
– Laura Kerr
Wherever tenants in the same building or portfolio organize, they have the potential leverage to force repairs, drive down the rent, and halt evictions.
– Charlie Dulik
So many of my transparencies could not resist the race!
– Frank O’Hara
In anger, we should refrain both from speech and action.
– Pythagoras
Melancholy and happenstance,
patience worn thin of the daily prance
Doused and sealed in a crypt of sand,
for pillaging crops and life of the land
– Michael J, Rhubarb bandits
Evil calls for expiation, otherwise the wicked will destroy the world utterly, or the good will suffocate in the rage which they cannot vent, and in either case no good will come of it.
– C.G. Jung
We’re in a world where it is basically 30 people who are in the same group chats who are responsible for a substantial amount of what happens in our economy and politics… Economics as a discipline leaves us very ill-equipped to have useful thoughts on this.
– Krugman & Ferrell
The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.
– Bachelard
THE LEADER
Head like a big
watermelon,
frequently thumped
and still not ripe.
– Wendell Berry
The tunes of my own choosing
all sounded false and wrong.
I sought a newer music,
I found an older song.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
Cause nobody’s the slightest idea who we are, or who we were, not even we ourselves — except, that is, in the glimmer of a moment of fair business between strangers, or the nod of knowing and agreement between friends. Other than these, we go out anonymous into the insect air and all we are is the dust of colour, brief engineerings of wings towards a glint of light on a blade of grass or a leaf in a summer dark.
– Ali Smith, How to Be Both
No one wants to be a ‘human being’, that’s not supposed to be something worth being. No one wants to be a ‘Christian’, that’s not supposed to be anything either. People don’t think tasks like these suffice for life. Yet they all want — yes, they fight and struggle and wear themselves out — to become something.
– Søren Kierkegaard
It is easy to speak with precision upon a general theme. Only, one must commonly surrender all ambition to be certain. It is equally easy to be certain. One has only to be sufficiently vague.
– Charles Sanders Peirce
The weaker the consciousness of a person is, the more he or she is likely to get fixated in projection, even when the reality has long departed from it, and he or she will remain captive to the power of history, the agenda of longing, and the wheel of repetition.
– James Hollis
No one will remember you if you say there’s no such thing / as a magical nerve gas or that there was no miracle / that day on the battlefield. If you say milk is good / for you or that we should love our mothers.
– David Kirby
Truth must enter into the soul, penetrate and saturate it, or else it is of no value.
– Spurgeon
With the support of tranquility, what is wise will often be obvious and simple. This is especially true in meditation; everyone has the ability to be wise in meditation, provided we are not too agitated to recognize it.
– Gil Fronsdal
Many traumatized people can’t describe their feelings, leading to a disconnect with their needs.
– Brad Schipke
The lack of empathy is rotting this nation from the inside out.
– Dr. Allison Wiltz
If I’m able to see how my intentions are connected to the anxiety I feel, then there’s a chance for me to break free from attachment and the suffering that follows from it.
– Suli Qyre
Don’t try to be better than you are, otherwise the devil gets angry. Don’t try to be worse because God gets angry. Try to be what you are, that is acrobatics enough.
– Carl Jung
The heart wisdom is wild wisdom. It’s spontaneous creativity, it’s enchanting, it’s illogical, it’s beautiful, it’s alive.
– Katerina Satori
We find no rest for our weary bones unless we cling to the word of grace.
– Martin Luther
We’re only travelers, singing songs whose meanings are obscure, wandering through the dark sky. That is all.
– Hao Jingfang
You cannot take any people, of any color, and exempt them from the requirements of civilization – including work, behavioral standards, personal responsibility, and all the other basic things that the clever intelligentsia disdain – without ruinous consequences to them and to society at large.
– Thomas Sowell
A body will not become weak where the intention is strong.
– Imam Sadiq
The ego changes all the time, it has every kind of illusion, but the Self is as it is, there is nothing we can alter in it.
– Carl Jung
I wish I knew how we achieve the goal of world peace. My bumper sticker reads ‘Just Another Version of You.’ The sooner we agree that we’re just other versions of each other – we human beings – the sooner we will find some sense of world peace.
– Norman Lear
The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.
– G.K. Chesterton
You deserve love that feels like clarity, not confusion disguised as passion.
– Robert Wilkinson
Only the self enters in there, or the man who has completely become his self. he who is neither in events. nor in men, nor in his thoughts.
– Carl Jung
Poetry does not flow from thin air but requires always either a literal faith, and imaginative faith, or, as in Shakespeare, a mind full of many provisional faiths. The life we all live is not alone enough of a subject for the serious artist; it must be life with a leaning, life with a tendency to shape itself only in certain forms, to afford its must lucid revelations only in certain lights.
– R.P. Blackmur
Life is made up of small pleasures. Happiness is made up of those tiny successes. The big ones come too infrequently. And if you don’t collect all these tiny successes, the big ones don’t really mean anything.
– Norman Lear
Civil Wars happen when the victimized are armed. Genocide happens when they are not.
– A.E. Samaan
One can never know in what form a man will experience God.
– Carl Jung
Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.
– Sun Tzu
When the soul returns into itself and reflects, it passes into the realm of pure ideas and eternal truths; then it is freed from opinion and wanders no longer.
– Plato
my inbox is full of compliments
from people who don’t know
they’re reading the autopsy of a boy
who wrote his way back from the dead.
– Christopher Sexton
Poets, create from the very depths of the collective unconscious, voicing aloud what others only dream.
– Carl Jung
The eyes are more exact witnesses than the ears.
– Heraclitus
The major problem of life is learning how to handle the costly interruptions. The door that slams shut, the plan that got sidetracked the marriage that failed, or that lovely poem that didn’t get written because someone knocked on the door.
– Martin Luther King Jr
It’s not ‘natural’ to speak well, eloquently, in an interesting, articulate way. People living in groups, families, communes say little…have few verbal means. Eloquence…thinking in words…is a byproduct of solitude, deracination, a heightened painful individuality. In groups, it’s more natural to sing, to dance, to pray: given, rather than invented (individual) speech.
– Susan Sontag
The most common lie is that which one lies to himself; lying to others is relatively an exception.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
To die hating them, that was freedom.
– George Orwell
How incredible in some ways it is to thirst for pen and paper. To need them as if they were water.
– Alice Walker
People who appear most outwardly perfect often hide the most inner chaos.
– Sigmund Freud
I think people would be happier if they admitted things more often. In a sense we are all prisoners of some memory, or fear, or disappointment — we are all defined by something we can’t change.
– Simon Van Booy
I believe alien life is quite common in the universe, although intelligent life is less so. Some say it has yet to appear on planet Earth.
– Stephen Hawking
Talking of patriotism, what humbug it is; it is a word that always commemorates a robbery. Patriotism is being carried to insane excess. I know men who do not love God because he is a foreigner.
– Mark Twain
I was made to go with my girl the way a saxophone was made to go with the night.
– Mark Knopfler
Get people to sing together and they’ll and they’ll act together too.
– Pete Seeger
If only we’d stop trying to be happy, we’d have a pretty good time.
– Edith Wharton
Whatever the apparent cause of any riots may be, the real one is always want of happiness. It shows that something is wrong in the system of government that injures the felicity by which society is to be preserved.
– Thomas Paine
To whom do I owe the biggest apology?
No one’s been crueler than I’ve been to me.
– Alanis Morissette, Sorry to Myself
Most people won’t attack your flaws.
They’ll attack your light.
Because your light exposes their shadows.
– Joselyn Ramos
“Everybody ‘writes’,” he said. He didn’t know until he saw my notebook that I was married to it.
– Alice Walker
A friend is one who joyfully sings with you when you are on the mountaintop, and silently walks beside you through the valley.
– William Arthur Ward
Things will improve when we start living on the top of the earth, on wind and light.
– Louise Erdrich
It is recovered!
What? Eternity.
It is the sea
Mixed with the sun.
– Arthur Rimbaud, tr. Louise Varèse
Humans aren’t evolved to worry about everything happening outside of their immediate environment.
– @naval
“Sound of Surviving”
I deliver
four rapid jabs, then a right
at my rival …
the blood dripping off
my shadow on the wall
another
defeat by greedflation
and rent hike …
I yell out, I want to feel
alive in this broken world
– Chen-ou Liu
A wise man accepts his pain, endures it, but does not add to it.
– Marcus Aurelius
In feature films, the director is god. In documentaries films, God is the director.
– Alfred Hitchcock
I name a cloud
for each of those involved
– reiko nakahara
I remember the black wharves and the slips
and the sea-tides tossing free,
and the Spanish sailers with bearded lips
and the beauty, and the mystery of the ships,
and the magic of the sea…
– Rudyard Kipling
summer drought
ant tracks in the dust
to another world
– Chen-ou Liu
If you’re hurt, you’re hurt. It doesn’t matter if anyone else thinks you don’t have a good enough reason. Pain doesn’t require approval.
– Sara Beth Durst
You can’t fool me. I know the difference between being busy and not being interested.
– sakara
tardigrade
in the Antarctic
is that all you’ve got?
– Jerome Berglund
“emily dickinson summer,” i whispered and never left the house again
– melissa broder
Love. No matter where I start, I always end up here.
– John Perkins
With few words I shall make thee understand my soul.
– Michelangelo
Samadhi, love, and psychological healing lead one away from fascism and all manner of authoritarianism.
– @awakened_living
We meet in words and we part in words, we adopt words and we lose words, after all, what is between man and man except the words that connect or separate.
– J. Elia
Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.
– Virginia Woolf
They’re trying to convince people they can’t do the things they’ve been doing easily for years – to write emails, to write a presentation. Your daughter wants you to make up a bedtime story about puppies – to write that for you.”
We will get to the point, she says with a grim laugh, “that you will essentially become just a skin bag of organs and bones, nothing else. You won’t know anything and you will be told repeatedly that you can’t do it, which is the opposite of what life has to offer.
Capitulating all kinds of decisions like where to go on vacation, what to wear today, who to date, what to eat. People are already doing this. You won’t have to process grief, because you’ll have uploaded photos and voice messages from your mother who just died, and then she can talk to you via AI video call every day. One of the ways it’s going to destroy humans, long before there’s a nuclear disaster, is going to be the emotional hollowing-out of people.
– Justine Bateman on AI
But we have never met our brains before, and perhaps we lack the metaphor with which to understand them. When I lie in bed in the morning, struggling to get up – a problem that has come with retirement and became much worse with hormone therapy and radiotherapy for cancer – I find it hard to escape a marine metaphor. My conscious self is like a small boat sailing on a deep ocean, or perhaps more like a submarine that comes to the surface when I awake. I then delude myself that I am steering the boat, when in fact its course is determined by the wind and the deep currents.
But this is a false metaphor, of course, as my conscious and unconscious selves are part of the same phenomenon, in a way that we find impossible to describe. The submarine is part of the ocean, not separate from it.
Most writers trying to describe the relationship between the conscious and unconscious sink into a muddled flood of analogies and metaphors – or perhaps I should more modestly say that I become muddled by what I read. My conscious and unconscious selves (for want of a better word) are made of the same material – the electrochemical activity of my 86 billion nerve cells. T am both my conscious and unconscious – they are not separate entities. Some psychologists and philosophers delight in telling us that our sense of self is an illusion. I briefly studied philosophy at Oxford University, but eventually fled to the more practical world of medicine. But at least I learned from studying philosophy for one year the importance of the phrase It all depends on what you mean by. The word ‘self’ is not easy to define, and the word illusion simply means that something is different from how it appears. I have no intention of going down the rabbit hole of what the word ‘self’ means, but I realise that I find it very hard to know what it is that I might be losing as my brain shrinks. How can I compare myself now with my past self?
– Henry Marsh
…the soul, disappears, comes back, draws nearer, moves away, alien to itself, elusive, at times certain, at others uncertain of its own existence, while the body is and is and is and has no place of its own.
– Wislawa Szymborska
If I look back on my life, the most wonderful things were always given to me, free or unexpectedly. Never in my life did I get something wonderful by trying to get it or with a strong intention.
– Hong Sangsoo
This book has you by heart. It knows you
backwards,
you and your sulky anguish, because you’re in it
now, you’re in this book,
it’s reading you, you’re caught by it, you can’t
get out.
– Margaret Atwood
In the summer I stretch out on the shore
And think of you
Had I told the sea
What I felt for you,
It would have left its shores,
Its shells,
Its fish,
And followed me.
– Nizar Qabbani
Writing is walking on a dizzying silence setting one word after the other on emptiness. Writing is miraculous and terrifying like the flight of a bird who has no wings but flings itself out and only gets wings by flying.
– Hélène Cixous
Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.
– Chuck Klosterman
Christianity taught us to see the eye of the lord looking down upon us. Such forms of knowledge project an image of reality, at the expense of reality itself. They talk figures and icons and signs, but fail to perceive forces and flows. They bind us to other realities, and especially the reality of power as it subjugates us. Their function is to tame, and the result is the fabrication of docile and obedient subjects.
– Gilles Deleuze
Did you ever notice how in the Bible, when ever God needed to punish someone, or make an example, or whenever God needed a killing, he sent an angel? Did you ever wonder what a creature like that must be like? A whole existence spent praising your God, but always with one wing dipped in blood. Would you ever really want to see an angel?
– Thomas Daggett
Get out of the construction business! Stop building bridges across the raging waters of samsaric existence, attempting to reach the “far shore,” nirvana. Better to simply relax, at ease and carefree, in total naturalness, and just go with the primordial flow, however it occurs and happens. And remember this: whether or not you go with the flow, it always goes with you.
– Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche
We sometimes go on as though people can’t express themselves. In fact they’re always expressing themselves. The sorriest couples are those where the woman can’t be preoccupied or tired without the man saying “What’s wrong? Say something…,” or the man, without the woman saying … and so on. Radio and television have spread this spirit everywhere, and we’re riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images. Stupidity’s never blind or mute. So it’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves;
What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying. What we’re plagued by these days isn’t any blocking of communication, but pointless statements. But what we call the meaning of a statement is its point. That’s the only definition of meaning, and it comes to the same thing as a statement’s novelty. You can listen to people for hours, but what’s the point? …
That’s why arguments are such a strain, why there’s never any point arguing. You can’t just tell someone what they’re saying is pointless. So you tell them it’s wrong. But what someone says is never wrong, the problem isn’t that some things are wrong, but that they’re stupid or irrelevant. That they’ve already been said a thousand times. The notions of relevance, necessity, the point of something, are a thousand times more significant than the notion of truth. Not as substitutes for truth, but as the measure of the truth of what I’m saying. It’s the same in mathematics: Poincaré used to say that many mathematical theories are completely irrelevant, pointless; He didn’t say they were wrong – that wouldn’t have been so bad.
– Gilles Deleuze
Gorgeous, amazing things come into our lives when we are paying attention: mangoes, grandnieces, Bach, ponds. This happens more often when we have as little expectation as possible. If you say, ‘Well, that’s pretty much what I thought I’d see,’ you are in trouble. At that point, you have to ask yourself why you are even here. And if I were you, I would pray ‘Help.’ Astonishing material and revelation appear in our lives all the time. Let it be. Unto us, so much is given. We just have to be open for business.
– Anne Lamott, Help Thanks Wow, The Three Essential Prayers
…and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.
– John Steinbeck
Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution.
– Teilhard de Chardin
May your love be firm,
and may your dream of life together
be a river between two shores—
by day bathed in sunlight, and by night
illuminated from within…
– James Bertolino
When, in Paradise Lost, Adam asks about the movements of the heavens, Raphael refuses to answer. “Let it speak,” he says, “the Maker’s high magnificence, who built / so spacious, and his line stretcht out so far; / That man may know he dwells not in his own; / An edifice too large for him to fill, / Lodg’d in a small partition, and the rest / Ordain’d for uses to his Lord best known.
– Bill McKibben, The End of Nature
I stood in the back corner watching them. They resembled three veterans who had met once more on a cold day after years of separation, and had lit a fire to warm themselves. I had pricked up my ears to overhear what they said, but none of them opened his mouth. You felt the air between them was vibrating and that a string of unspoken words was being unwound from mouth to mouth. Without the slightest doubt, this was how the angels spoke in heaven. How long did their silence last – how many hours? It seemed to me time had come to a standstill, that one hour and one century were of the same length.
– Nikos Kazantzakis
In his essays on world events, Jung was at pains to point out that society is vulnerable to psychic epidemics, since we no longer have any forms to humanize or contain our nonrational impulses. In these essays he argued not only that we can expect an increase in neurotic or mentally disturbed individuals, but that the social fabric itself is disturbed, and increasingly prone to acts of madness, violence and irrationality.
– David Tacey, How to Read Jung
The empty community of greed propped up by the cult of corporate personhood selects ever more severely for dark traits, until “empathy” is forever vanquished, silently and thoroughly replaced by a completely pervasive, all-encompassing, viciously relentless malignant narcissism that knows no beauty, harmony, or sustenance, only cold, violent, murderous destruction as its sole sad “strength” – treating humans, animals, plants, and all abundantly bountiful creatures, creations, and spontaneously arising magical beings inhabiting our vast fertile earth as two-dimensional objects to be ruthlessly cannibalized, wholly suffocated and subsumed into a grandiose false reality fabricated, eternally reinforced and constantly reified by utterly traumatized toddlers in order to escape the truth – too painful to face – that they will never know love, only bitter competition to the death for corporeal survival and oneupsmanship, DARVOing til the end, mercilessly killing their own family and flesh (their very own selves) preemptively for sport and “supply” with no reproach, due process, or comeuppance, leaving none for all and all for none.
Something’s gotta give
– Daniel Brummel
let them in
weary women, men and children
..into our hearts
– Gabriel Rosenstock
The universe is a great unknown wonderful place, and we know nothing, really, to speak of about it. I think that either depresses and frightens one or is exhilarating. We are very important, and we’re not important in quite the way we think we are. Each one of us is unique, and we can find out a whole lot just by examining ourselves. I think that’s the essential thing. Not paying attention to how you’re going to make money, just paying attention to whatever is around you. Each one of those seconds is your only chance. It’s your life. And it’s wonderful. The more attention that we pay to our ordinary lives leads to a real elation that we’re here at all.
– W.S. Merwin
Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it’s the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. …Science fiction is central to everything we’ve ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don’t know what they’re talking about.
– Ray Bradbury
One person may be seriously injured, but recovers quickly. Another person may be less seriously injured, but is left in the throes of chronic pain. Still another receives no physical injury, undergoes no strain of muscular exertion, and yet becomes racked with neuromuscular pain. In a large measure, these individual differences may be assigned to differences in the nervous system’s reactions to stress. Whether stress is physical or mental, its general effects are essentially the same. Even when stress is solely centered in the mind, the body never escapes its harrowing effects…
– J.F. Vannerson, M.A., D.C.
I see myself as just doomed, pitiful — An awful realization that I have been fooling myself all my life thinking there was a next thing to do to keep the show going and actually I’m just a sick clown and so is everybody else…
– Jack Kerouac
We are stars wrapped in skin.
The light you are seeking
has always been within.
– Rumi
Courage consists, however, in agreeing to flee rather than live tranquilly and hypocritically in false refuges. Values, morals, homelands, religions, and these private certitudes that our vanity and our complacency bestow generously on us, have many deceptive sojourns as the world arranges for those who think they are standing straight and at ease, among stable things.
– Gilles Deleuze
The body always speaks, perhaps eloquently or perhaps without meaning, but never without telling us a great deal about the condition and thoughts of the individual.
– Betty Jones
We want our lives and deaths to be like that — something formal,
a kingdom.
Filled with the sense of the manyness of existence.
– Jane Hirshfield
But I tell you, nothing is pointless, and nothing is meaningless if the artist will face it. And it’s his business to face it. He hasn’t got the right to sidestep it like that. Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist—the only thing he’s good for—is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning. Even if it’s only his view of a meaning. That’s what he’s for—to give his view of life. Surely, we understand very little of what is happening to us at any given moment. But by remembering, comparing, waiting to know the consequences, we can sometimes see what an event really meant, what it was trying to teach us.
– Katherine Anne Porter
We achieve this vitality of spirit by rejecting the relentless promotion of despair and opening our eyes to the beauty of things, however imperiled, degraded, or difficult to love the world may appear to be. We try to view the world not as it is packaged, presented and sold to us but as we imagine it could be. We do not look away from the world, we look directly at it and allow the spirit of hope – the necessary driver of change – to inspire us to action. I wrote in Faith, Hope and Carnage, ‘Hope is optimism with a broken heart’. This means that hope has an earned understanding of the sorrowful or corrupted nature of things, yet it rises to attend to the world even still. We understand that our demoralization becomes the most serious impediment to bettering the world. In its active form, hope is a supreme gesture of love, a radical and audacious duty, whereas despair is a stagnant rejection of life itself.
– Nick Cave
Alexander Chee once said something like, When you put something that actually happened to you in a story, you have to privilege the needs of the story and not merely what happened. I don’t remember the exact quote, but I think about that all the time.
– Brandon Taylor
Does anything in nature despair except man? An animal with a foot caught in a trap does not seem to despair. It is too busy trying to survive. It is all closed in, to a kind of still, intense waiting. Is this a key? Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.
– May Sarton
I find that easy versions of the song arrive first. Although they might be able to stand as songs, they can’t stand as songs that I can sing. So to find a song that I can sing, to engage my interest, to penetrate my boredom with myself and my disinterest in my own opinions, to penetrate those barriers, the song has to speak to me with a certain urgency. To be able to find that song that I can be interested in takes many versions and it takes a lot of uncovering.
– Leonard Cohen
Some people, I am told, have memories like computers, nothing to do but punch the button and wait for the print-out. Mine is more like a Japanese library of the old style, without a card file or an indexing system or any systematic shelf plan. Nobody knows where anything is except the old geezer in felt slippers who has been shuffling up and down those stacks for sixty-nine years. When you hand him a problem he doesn’t come back with a cart full and dump it before you, a jackpot of instant retrieval. He finds one thing, which reminds him of another, which leads him off to the annex, which directs him to the east wing, which sends him back two tiers from where he started. Bit by bit he finds you what you want, but like his boss who seems to be under pressure to examine his life, he takes his time.
– Wallace Stegner
Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.
– William Faulkner
A Boat
O beautiful
was the werewolf
in his evil forest.
We took him
to the carnival
and he started
crying
when he saw
the Ferris wheel.
Electric
green and red tears
flowed down
his furry cheeks.
He looked
like a boat
out on the dark
water.
– Richard Brautigan
I tried to establish order over the chaos of my imagination, but this essence, the same that presented itself to me still hazily when I was a child, has always struck me as the very heart of truth. It is our duty to set ourselves an end beyond our individual concerns, beyond our convenient, agreeable habits, higher than our own selves, and disdaining laughter, hunger, even death, to toil night and day to attain that end. No, not to attain it. The self-respecting soul, as soon as he reaches his goal, places it still further away. Not to attain it, but never to halt in the ascent. Only thus does life acquire nobility and oneness.
– Nikos Kazantzakis
An impression of oneself is an organic phenomenon that is not at all intellectual. How is it that at one moment I don’t vibrate and at another, I do? How is it that I receive or do not receive a current of energy, allow it to feed me or not to feed me? How do I sing with it, or resonate with it like a musical instrument? Life keeps hitting us, producing only a dull sound. Yet suddenly, there is a pure, crystalline sound. How does that come about?
– Michel Conge, Inner Octaves
Remember how long you have been putting these things off, and how often you have received an opportunity from the gods and have not made use of it. By now you ought to realize what cosmos you are apart of, and what divine administrator you owe your existence to, and that an end to your time here has been marked out, and if you do not use this time for clearing the clouds from your mind, it will be gone and so will you.
– Jacob Needleman
I have heard my teacher say, where there are machines, there inevitably are machine affairs; where there are machine affairs, there inevitably are machine minds. with a machine mind in your breast, the pure and simple in your nature cannot develop. And when the pure and simple cannot develop, you won’t have any peace, in spirit or in life. Without peace in spirit and in life, the Tao will no longer support you.
– Chuang Tzŭ
And the speck of my heart, in my shed of flesh and bone, began to sing out, the way the sun would sing if the sun could sing, if light had a mouth and a tongue, if the sky had a throat, if god wasn’t just an idea but shoulders and a spine, gathered from everywhere, even the most distant planets, blazing up. Where am I? Even the rough words come to me now, quick as thistles. Who made your tyrant’s body, your thirst, your delving, your gladness? Oh tiger, oh bone-breaker, oh tree on fire! Get away from me. Come closer.
– Mary Oliver
What you have by heart, the bastards cannot touch, they cannot take it from you … What you don’t know by heart, you really haven’t loved deeply enough.
– George Steiner
Everything great in the world is done by neurotics; they alone founded our religions and created our masterpieces.
– Marcel Proust
If we were to see the entire mechanism that leads to clinging, we would understand that there really isn’t anything to cling to.
– Bhante Henepola Gunaratana
A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, – this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.
– Ursula Le Guin
This is how we reveal ourselves:
these tiny flashes of discomfort,
the reactions we can’t hide.
– Christina Lauren
What heaven can be more real than to retain the spirit-world of childhood?
– Beatrix Potter
Rather than asking for more—which implies shortages and, therefore, creates a vibrational match to more shortages—focus on what you have and how thankful you are for everything that has shown up in your life.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
Elected Silence, sing to me
And beat upon my whorlèd ear,
– Gerard Manley Hopkins
My life is a story of the self-realization of the unconscious. Everything in the unconscious seeks outward manifestation.
– C.G. Jung
Tolkien’s heroes are humble and therefore look to the past, to the wisdom they had been given. His villains and fools are proud and therefore scorn tradition and look only within themselves for their wisdom.
– Peter Kreeft
In the rage of the stars: I tell you unconsciousness
is the treasure, the tower, the fortress;
Referred to that one may live anything.
– Robinson Jeffers
Her green mind made the world around her green.
The queen is an example. . . . This green queen
In the seeming of the summer of her sun
By her own seeming made the summer change.
– Wallace Stevens, Description Without Place
The enemy of a love is never outside, it’s not a man or a woman, it’s what we lack in ourselves.
– Anaïs Nin
The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy.
– Seneca
You can consume too much of a good thing— whether it’s food or facts.
– Ryan Holiday
The work of art offers an experience of contradictions and incommensurabilities—these are much better than truths.
– Lyn Hejinian, Positions of the Sun
Indeed, everything comes alive when contradictions accumulate.
– Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
Half your problems are just your mind making minor things seem like major things. What are you over-emphasizing right now?
– James Clear
Once your nervous system stops working against you and starts working for you, everything changes.
– Nika Solé
But if we understand anything of the unconscious, we know that it cannot be swallowed. We also know that it is dangerous to suppress it, because the unconscious is life and this life turns against us if suppressed, as happens in neurosis.
– CG Jung
Life can be like a play with no script. All the more reason to take pleasure in improvising your role, don’t you think?
– Shunmyo Masuno
All the crafts of subtlety, all the effort, all the loneliness and death, the thin and blazing threads of reason, the spill of blessing, the passion behind these silences — all the invention turns to one end: the fertilizing of the moment, so that there may be more life.
– Muriel Rukeyser
We look for ancestors as if the world were completed. It is constantly being torn away. Wars and suppression on every level tear it. The life of the world is in its living people, in those who express that life and the dynamic equilibrium, which is its home. Once that expression is made, the responsibility is to receive it.
– Muriel Rukeyser
Behind every fascism there is a failed revolution.
– Walter Benjamin
The key to success is to keep growing in all areas of life-mental, emotional, spiritual, as well as physical.
– Julius Erving
What the future holds for you depends on your state of consciousness now.
– Eckhart Tolle
I began writing in fearful earnest—my mind zoomed all night every night.
– Truman Capote
The mind is of infinite variety, and that’s important to recognize. This kind of wholeness is the ultimate creative space. Everything arises in it and never leaves it.
– Anne Klein
I like poetry a lot … Understanding metaphors helps to make thought agile, intuitive, flexible, acute. Those who have imagination do not become inflexible, they have a sense of humor, they always enjoy the sweetness of mercy and inner freedom.
– Pope Francis
You won’t regret the quiet moments—when you paused for love, noticed the sky, or simply breathed and felt alive. That’s the real magic. Don’t rush past it.
– Dede Hawkins
Teach your children that they need nothing exterior to themselves to be happy – no person, place, or thing – and that true happiness is found within. Teach them that they are sufficient unto themselves.
– Neale Donald Walsch
For like all great artists J.R.R. Tolkien escapes ideology by being too quick for its nets, too complex for its grand simplicities, too fantastic for its rationality, too real for its generalizations.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
I knew I wanted to be creative, and one day I just started writing.
– Walter Mosley
If we would only see that all limitations are self imposed and chosen out of fear, we would leap at once.
– Adyashanti
If you are really not aware
that God is constantly hunting for you,
Then pay close attention
to every breath you take…
– Rumi
The art of forgetting is an impossibility because any allusion represents a presence, even when it refers to an absence.
– Judith Schalansky
Upon discovering truth, the natural love one has for oneself expands until it encompasses the whole world. This Love removes the ego.
– Mooji
When it comes to medicine and nutrition, subtract before you add.
– @naval
I have no house only a shadow. But whenever you are in need of a shadow, my shadow is yours.
– Malcolm Lowry
Most of the narrators and chief characters in my fiction are versions of myself that never materialized, potential versions of myself.
– Gerald Murnane
And I am still the breath you require,
My veil the vapor of your vast empire…
– Paul Valery
But in what language one might call one’s own, if the other, the one that came before, absolutely, in which nothing was said, makes each of them, even the solitary tongue from which each of us comes, almost definitively foreign?
– Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, (tr. Leslie Hill)
WHAT DO REPUBLICANS WANT?
what do Republicans want?
they do not want Oz
they know Oz is a fiction
but they do want
a RETURN to Oz.
it is the notion of a RETURN
that excites them.
they know their lives are unsatisfactory
full of pain and humiliation
and they know or feel
that this was not always true.
weren’t they children once
wasn’t there a maternal figure
who cared for them
and a paternal figure who protected them?
why should they not be appalled
by adulthood
and by politicians
who will help anyone but them,
especially if anyone
is of a different race
a different color
a different speech pattern.
can they not see
that we, not they,
are the lost children
who have stepped out of paradise
into a world of uncertainty
and the cruel lack of kindness.
we have made a *wrong turn.*
it is we, not they, who are unloved.
we are the lost boys of paradise
who need a savior
to lead us out of the selva oscura
into which we have stepped
through the cruelties of rulers
who would take our manhood
steal our women
and force us into poverty
and the laughter
of the rich.
come back,
come back,
Robin Hood.
– Jack Foley
AWARENESS UNDERNEATH THOUGHT
The invitation is to become aware of whatever sensations, emotions, and thoughts are present in this moment, and as best one can, for at least a brief moment, take a peek at it with total openness and discernment, without or underneath the story of me and my pain, my stress, my problems, and the like. That awareness becomes one’s home base, so to speak, a domicile or refuge in which one can take up residency and to which one can return over and over again whenever one gets pulled into the thought stream, or emotional reactivity, or revery.
Dropping underneath thought, for instance, and residing in awareness doesn’t mean that the developmental arc of learning, growing, healing, and transforming stops, nor that responding appropriately to situations and circumstances is ignored or inhibited—on the contrary, those experiences unfold on their own when you learn to pay attention and rest in awareness of whatever is unfolding in the present moment in the spheres of body, mind, heart, and environment.
– Jon Kabat-Zinn
Then shall the chief musician declare:
“The phoenix is the measure of the fruit,
until the dream is knowledge and knowledge is a dream.”
And then once again the entire choir shall cry in passionate unity,
Singing and celebrating love and love’s victory,
Ascending and descending the heights of assent, climbing and
chanting triumphantly: Before the morning was, you were:
Before the snow shone,
And the light sang, and the stone
Abiding, rode the fullness or endured the emptiness,
You were: you were alone.
– Delmore Schwartz
Truth; that long clean clear simple undeniable unchallengeable straight and shining line, on one side of which black is black and on the other white is white, has now become an angle, a point of view.
– William Faulkner
A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good many take their images precooked out of a can and swallow them down whole, absent-mindedly and with little relish.
– W.H. Auden
The principal aim of therapy is not…an impossible state of happiness, but to…acquire steadfastness and philosophic patience in face of suffering. …Behind a neurosis there is so often concealed all the natural and necessary suffering the patient has been unwilling to bear.
– C.G. Jung
He has gradually vanquished the demon of wine
And does not get wildly drunk;
But the karma of words remains;
He has not abandoned verse.
– Po Chü-i (Hakurakuten)
Our heart center is what feels our narrative, it feels our conclusions, it feels our unresolved conflicts.
– Adyashanti
Understanding a sentence in language is much more akin to understanding a theme in music than one may think.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than the glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.
– Theodor W. Adorno
In the Time of Light-Stepping
Lines were drawn.
Sometimes they even appeared
right in front of us
as we moved in and out
of the many worlds on fire.
The lines were on walls
screens and faces
in flooded valleys and river beds
in ports of call and departure
inside of people shuffling by —
the vapor of their silent grief
stifling lungs like aerated lead.
On blinking screens,
man-boys chased their balls
as if this were some kind of
World-Changing Activity.
Despite the great expense,
the faulty investments,
the nation applauded
the revelry of the gladiators —
not so much for their
prowess and athleticism
but out of gratitude for the mindless distraction.
Presidents sported and laughed;
dined like Romans,
calloused and forgetful,
as bridges crumbled.
The People became adept
at quickly moving on, daily,
from each tragic layer upon layer.
Resting gently in their soft beds,
“leaders” ceased to ponder
the lost and the dead;
the hostages still being held,
heartlessly,
in deep caverns of haunted hate.
Nor could they bear witness
to the children starving
amidst the rubble.
The ancient practice had returned:
“Make the innocent
answer for the sins
of their fathers.”
All sides
in every age
get this one wrong
despite what the
holy books say.
There is no such thing as “erasure”;
only seed-planting, shoulder to shoulder.
Vendettas yield more vendettas.
Meanwhile,
the Great Mother of Time
began speaking in a new language.
It was not a language of words, at first.
It was a language
of clouds and rivers
tears and thunder.
A language of silent breezes
passing through branches.
It carried a funerary dirge
that left us all speechless,
less happy,
less innocent,
unable to do anything
but step lightly
and hope for a different age
worthy of those yet unborn.
– Frank Mac Owen
When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.
– Neil Postman
Life has always been creative and co-creative. Sentience and consciousness are the same. Full presence is when any creature fully cares. We’re not as different as we think. Even as the differences could become more interesting.
– George Gorman
Maybe everything terrible in us is, in its deepest being, something helpless needing our help.
– Maria Rainer Rilke
It was as if even the little misunderstandings were placed in their path deliberately, to better illustrate the workings of grace.
– Zadie Smith
Just as a single seed planted in the right environment and conditions can bring a large tree bearing flowers and fruit every year, the karmic imprints of our actions can lead to multiple results over a long period of time.
– Kathleen McDonald
now it’s computers and more computers
and soon everybody will have one,
3-year-olds will have computers
and everybody will know everything
about everybody else
long before they meet them.
nobody will want to meet anybody
else ever again
and everybody will be
a recluse
like I am now.
– Charles Bukowski
we don’t belong, yet everywhere we’ve lived
a promised land lies. through its teeth,
a shrill voice that sounds of home
– Zach Goldberg
Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.
– Oscar Wilde
People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they’ll have good voice boxes in case there’s ever anything really meaningful to say.
– Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Two things can help your nervous system:
Being around kindhearted and self-aware people
Developing the inner balance to not react to everything around you
– yung pueblo
Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.
– Jean-Paul Sartre
When I met Jung, he told me to be true to myself, and true to my type. And that is what I wish for you. If you go against your typological makeup, you go against your grain, and you will get splinters. Go with it, and your life will have ease, flow, and purpose.
– Robert A Johnson
We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things — metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
What a subtle, treacherous thing it was to let yourself go that way! Because once you’ve started it was terribly difficult to stop; soon you were saying “I’m sorry, of course you’re right”, and “Whatever you think is best”, and “you’re the most wonderful and valuable thing in the world”, and the next thing you knew all honesty, all truth, was as far away and glimmering, as hopelessly unattainable as the world of the golden people.
– Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road
Schiller says that man is at his highest level only when he plays, when he has no conscious purpose. Creativity through play is such a well-known and essential factor that one does not need to point it out, but we see again and again that if we try.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
Healthy is being aware
of how much you can
actually give and when
you need a break.
– yung pueblo
If you speak to the condition of your times with some accuracy and intention, then it may speak to the future, too.
– Gary Snyder
The unphilosophical and philosophical attitudes can be very sharply distinguished (with scarcely any intermediate forms) by the fact that the first accepts everything that happens as regards its general form, and finds occasion for surprise only in that special content by which something that happens here today differs from what happened there yesterday; whereas for the second, it is precisely the common features of all experience, such as characterize everything we encounter, which are the primary and most profound occasion for astonishment.
– Erwin Schrödinger
day walk
he walks the path you never see
she wanders the wood you can’t know
she steps from her eyes
he breathes from his heels
– The Walkative Revolution, Guillemot
When care is mutual,
words are simple.
When it’s not,
they’re exhausting.
– unknown
Every
by Wendy Cope
Every ditch or stream or river the train crosses.
Every ploughed field, every row of trees.
Every square church tower in the distance.
Every minute of sunshine, every shadow.
Every wisp of cloud in the wide, blue, East
Anglian sky.
Every day. Every day that’s left.
No Regret
resenting all
who with charm and
beauty cultivate all that
I let go to weed
but I study the beauty
and know the names
of many of these
wild flowers
– Rochelle Kraut
when I am in your presence I feel life is strong
and will defeat all its enemies and all of mine
and all of yours in you and mine in me
– Frank O’Hara
Without thoughts, there’s no mind.
– Papaji
We serve God and truth by serving each other. In time, we realize that the sacred space within us is just as vast as that which is outside us. There is no other, only us, only this, beyond words and ideas, names and forms, including concepts.
We is the new I.
– Lama Surya Das
In the late eighteenth century, we still had sages, but no exact photometric instruments. Now we have the most sensitive instruments to measure the brightness of the stars but no sages. So it always goes.
– Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
The Orange Balloon
An orange balloon floats against the sky
let go by a small boy’s hand
the hand is unimportant here
it is the balloon on which our happiness depends
or is it the sky?
vast untended full and empty
clouds way too much feeling
but it isn’t the sky where our eye rests
it’s the small box of blue space
around the orange balloon
the space in which the balloon
moves wallows breathes
this box of blue is your space we say
it defines you
and the clouds drift sideways
the drifting takes years
it takes forever
– Kate Gale
Analytic therapists embrace their subjectivity, and they learn from their affective reactions a lot about what their clients are trying to say.
– Nancy McWilliams
today even the billboards are on rent strike / & no one knows what to buy or what could induce our uncontainable future
– Rosie Stockton, Fuel
I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading: It vexes me to choose another guide.
– Emily Brontë
As failures go, attempting to recall the past is like trying to grasp the meaning of existence. Both make one feel like a baby clutching at a basketball: one’s palms keeps sliding off.
– Joseph Brodsky
Let me wear the day
Well so when it reaches you
You will enjoy it.
– Sonia Sanchez
All tyranny begins with the desire to coerce others for the greater good.
– @naval
ORIGINAL FACE
Learn the backward step
that turns your light inward
to illuminate your self.
Body and mind of themselves
will drop away,
and your original face will be manifest.
Coming, going, the waterbirds
don’t leave a trace,
don’t follow a path.
Midnight.
No waves,
no wind, the empty boat
is flooded with moonlight.
Enlightenment is like the moon reflected on the water.
The moon does not get wet, nor is the water broken.
Although its light is wide and great,
The moon is reflected even in a puddle an inch wide.
The whole moon and the entire sky
Are reflected in one dewdrop on the grass.
– Dogen
It made her question why human beings always appeared to be coming along so nicely as a whole when the bottom would fall out once again and they began collecting ears and filings from each other’s heads.
– Eve Babitz
To hear never-heard sounds,
To see never-seen colors and shapes,
To try to understand the imperceptible
Power pervading the world;
To fly and find pure ethereal substances
That are not of matter
But of that invisible soul pervading reality.
To hear another soul and to whisper to another soul;
To be a lantern in the darkness
Or an umbrella in a stormy day;
To feel much more than know.
To be the eyes of an eagle, slope of a mountain;
To be a wave understanding the influence of the moon;
To be a tree and read the memory of the leaves;
To be an insignificant pedestrian on the streets
Of crazy cities watching, watching, and watching.
To be a smile on the face of a woman
And shine in her memory
As a moment saved without planning.
– Dejan Stojanovic
Most of us have been displaced from those cultures of origin, a global diaspora of refugees severed not only from land, but from the sheer genius that comes from belonging in symbiotic relation to it.
– Tyson Yunkaporta
But most urgent on my list of appreciation are those of you who have welcomed my tunes into your lives, into your kitchens when you’re doing the dishes, in your bedrooms, in your courting and conceiving, into those nights of loss and bewilderment, and into those aimless places of the heart, which only a song seems to be able to enter. It is before this sudden and strange and mysterious intimacy that has developed between us that I bow my head with real gratitude. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
– Leonard Cohen
Some people make you feel better about living. Some people you meet and you feel this little lift in your heart, this ‘Ah’, because there’s something in them that’s brighter or lighter, something beautiful or better than you, and here’s the magic: instead of feeling worse, instead of feeling ‘why am I so ordinary?’, you feel just the opposite, you feel glad. In a weird way you feel better, because before this you hadn’t realized or you’d forgotten human beings could shine so.
– Niall Williams
Even disasters have design. I told her I distrust history now more than ever, because how much of it has always been gaslighting and ruthless curating? How much of what we believe was decided for us? I explained to her that we are always living in each other’s collective imagination. We can only be free to the extent to which we, or people who love us, can see.
– Eloghosa Osunde
Nearly without exception, the guardians of morality draw their credentials from the domination system – government, military, transnational corporations, banks, churches, synagogues, campuses, and media – all with a lucrative stake in the status quo. And therefore, the domination system has a rigid determinism, putting profit before people. It is ideological, violent, and unjust. The domination system is a massive, powerful, social coalition skilled in the application of carrot and stick. The carrot is a combination of lies and bribes, the stick is familial disgrace, media ridicule, social ostracism, indictment, and imprisonment when one resists the lies and bribes.
– Philip Berrigan
I hope you live without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated. I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people. And when you fail, and are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is. Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing — instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon. Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
This is the mark of great ideas: they unify people and they also act to unify the disparate parts of the human being; they speak of a social order that is possible on the basis of an ordering within the individual self.
– Jacob Needleman
Even among men lacking all distinction he inevitably stood out as a man lacking more distinction than all the rest, and people who met him were always impressed by how unimpressive he was.
– Joseph Heller
Life, then, was song and purple font, imagining in words a future.
– Maya Catherine Popa
The difference between dishonesty and make-believe was artistic imagination.
– Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads
Reading is probably another way of being in a place.
– José Saramago
When we are preoccupied with survival, we cannot play. We have lost our trust. When we were talking about what it feels like to be creative, one of you mentioned the experience of not being bound by time and space – being “taken out of yourself”
– Liz Greene
Get a hobby, a shrink said. / I consider that scrapbooking / is keeping people alive.
– Aaron Smith
I was born on the edge of respectability. I needed to go back to where I started: the outskirts. Where it was safe to not belong, because there, I had always belonged to myself.
– Sarah Kokernot
The next best thing to being wise oneself is to live in a circle of those who are.
– C.S. Lewis
The less you talk, the more time you have for the essential things.
– Niki Lauda
Revolution that runs counter to nature is a sword that always turns against the one brandishing it.
– Herman Bavinck
Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children.
– MLK
What can ’scape the eye Of God, all-seeing, or deceive His heart. Omniscient!
– John Milton
At times we will be asked to be a doula of death,
as an old dream is taken to dust.
At some point, we are asked to release
what we thought would last forever:
the person we imagined would always remain,
the future we believed was certain,
the dream we wrapped our soul around.
To grieve is not to fail the path,
but to walk it with sacred attention.
And with embodied devotion.
A piece of the soul is drawn downward,
escorted by Hermes and Persephone
into the fertile darkness of the underworld,
where it can rest, unravel, and be reimagined.
To stand at that threshold,
as something beloved dissolves,
is to become a doula of death –
a companion to what is leaving,
a witness to the alchemy of endings.
And from the hollow that remains,
a new seed is quietly planted –
one that knows how to root
in the soil of what was once let go.
– Matt Licata
Nearby is the country they call life. / You will know it by its seriousness.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
DAY POEM
What kind of letter would you like?
I like the letters of the alphabet that slide downhill
somehow we all expected to become exasperated little gods
dog nose pushing open the door just now then
didn’t I say I was on my way to the laundromat
also I had to have an eye exam
– Mel Nichols
The person who makes
something today isn’t the
same person who returns
to the work tomorrow.
– Rick Rubin
The Lie
our dreams are of a solitude
that cannot have been
we lie fractured together
in the way
we have spoken
each other’s names
we kiss
the way
there is no light
– Joe Wenderoth
One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds. Pain linked to pain, fragility to fragility.
– Haruki Murakami
Break free from the mold
you made for yourself,
for the animal
in you that craves
routines like sugar,
addicted to the stress
of your comforts. Sling
your arm around the waist
of your discomfort
– Samantha Thornhill
EPIGRAM
Engraved on the Collar of a Dog which
I gave to his Royal Highness
I am his Highness’ dog at Kew;
Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?
– Alexander Pope
Where is there one who can do it?
When inwardly I put myself together
before irreconcilable opposites:
I couldn’t go on: though I kept looking;
remained the looker lost in himself,
looked without conditions, on my knees,
until I had attained myself.
– R.M. Rilke
I would like to move over to your side of the world, see into your dreams.
– Mathias Enard
You cannot think in the present. The moment you think it has become the past. So the mind cannot exist in the present. It exists only in the memory of the past, or it projects into the future. It never comes in contact with the present -it cannot come, that is impossible.
– Osho
Knowledge is having the right answers.
Intelligence is asking the right questions.
Wisdom is knowing when to ask the right questions.
– Prof. Feynman
People seem good while they are oppressed, but they only wish to become oppressors in their turn: life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.
– Bertrand Russell
You’ve stacked up all the images
and shuffled them with words.
– Ingeborg Bachmann, (tr. Peter Filkins)
Wisdom comes with the ability to be still. Just look and just listen. No more is needed. Being still, looking, and listening activates the non-conceptual intelligence within you. Let stillness direct your words and actions.
– Eckhart Tolle
We grow out of this world in exactly the same way that the apples grow on the apple tree.
– Alan Watts
…every man is a hero if he strives more for others than for himself alone.
– Taran (Lloyd Alexander, The High King)
Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.
– Sebastian Junger
Living things are those things which replicate, adapt, and locally reverse entropy.
– @naval
What’s so great about birds, besides their beauty, is that they are very different from us—we are so earthbound and they are so free—and yet so similar, especially to our children in their vulnerability.
– Anne Lamott
is this rain
only falling on me?
a common bird
– Issa
It turns out that we have a collective immune system, not just an individual one.
– @naval
To alter the universe, alter your thoughts, because the only universe you will ever know is in your mind.
– Bryant McGill
. . . We may study and practice the teachings, and they may penetrate a bit, but if we don’t want to relate to our obscurations, and refuse to believe they are even there, no spiritual development can take place.
– Dzigar Kongtrul
The highest form of human intelligence is to observe yourself without judgment.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
Do not be discouraged by the brokenness of the world.
All things break and all things
can be mended.
Not by time, as they say,
but by the intention of the heart.
– Mevlana Rumi
Our relationship to nature is going to be different than other generations’ relationship to nature because we have damaged everything.
I think otherness helps in understanding the divisions that people have and appreciating those divisions and seeing that they’re hopelessly stupid.
– Maren Hassinger, Ravelin
To what extent, in which ways, are you a cannibal, and how careful are you about who you consume? We consume each other in a thousand ways, some of them joys, some of them crimes and nightmares.
The author’s annotation: Something that’s really important to me is to be clear that madness, criminality, forgetfulness, selfishness, cluelessness are not someone else’s attributes; the question is not who has those qualities but to what degree each of us possess them and how aware are we of that, and how gracefully and maybe compassionately do we try to work with those limits, stains, and sins that are our own, as well as other people’s. There’s such a tendency to render the world in binaries: you’re a paranoid schizophrenic and me over here I’m sane; you have a disease that makes you forget things and my memory is impeccable; you drive a car/eat meat/pay taxes and I am beyond reproach (or situated to reproach you in a left-puritan way). We’re all implicated. But as for the cannibalism, we do live off each other, from mother’s milk to blood transfusions and organ transplants to the way we are all enclosed in a world that is the result of human labor, human making, of clothes, of houses, of food, of systems. Maybe what I’m interested is the ways we consume each other that are gifts rather than thefts, that don’t involve destruction of the body or soul …
– Rebecca Solnit
We can understand making offerings to demons as “appreciate your lunacy.” Bow to your own weakness, your own craziness, your own resistance. Congratulate yourself for them, appreciate them. Truly it is a marvel, the extent to which we are selfish, confused, lazy, resentful, and so on. We come by these things honestly. We have been well trained to manifest them at every turn. This is the prodigy of human life bursting forth at its seams, it is the effect of our upbringing, our society, which we appreciate even as we are trying to tame it and bring it gently round to the good. So we make offerings to the demons inside us and we develop a sense of humorous appreciation for our own stupidity. We are in good company! We can laugh at ourselves and everyone else.
– Norman Fischer
Living is a horizontal fall.
– Jean Cocteau
What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.
– Jean Cocteau
What uniform can I wear to hide my heavy heart?
It is too heavy. It will always show.
Jacques felt himself growing gloomy again
He was well aware that to live on earth a man
must follow its fashions, and hearts were no longer worn.
– Jean Cocteau
I laugh.
She looks.
She laughs.
It is sunset
and we are driving home.
– Anne Carson
Spurning breezy despair and jovial resignation, they might even assume the usual condition of riders elsewhere: a bitter, but spiritually liberating powerlessness.
– Pankaj Mishra, Brightest in the American intelligentsia
Monument to the impossible. The best of yourself given to total loss, to what will never be obtained.
– Philippe Jaccottet (translated by André Lefevere)
A country is considered the more civilized the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak and a powerful one too powerful.
– Primo Levi
If you try to convert someone, it will never be to effect his salvation but to make him suffer like yourself, to be sure he is exposed to the same ordeals and endures them with the same impatience…We convert not to liberate but to enchain.
– Emil Cioran
Sometimes our pain is simply asking us to slow down and feel what we’ve been too afraid to feel. Sometimes our symptoms are sacred messages.
– Jessi Brooks
red dragonflies
flying in formation
straight through the town
– Issa
What you leave behind is not what
is engraved in stone monuments,
but what is woven into the lives
of others.
– Pericles
The greater the difficulty, the more glory in surmounting it.
– Epicurus
The world is full of teachers but devoid of students.
– @naval
what I saw was thorns
until one day I passed by
and saw blackberries
– Lit Hum
When I’m acting, I’m two beings. There’s the one monitoring the distance between myself and the camera, making sure I hit my marks, and there is the one driven by this inner fire, this delicious fear…
– Jeanne Moreau
In the end, we forget the details of our lives that embarrass us or are too painful. We just lie back and allow ourselves to float along calmly over the deep waters, with our eyes closed.
– Patrick Modiano
Democracy proves as fragile as its leaders, but TV’s expanse has led to all kinds of unintentional consequences.
– Tim Riley reviews Alan Siegel’s Stupid TV, Be More Funny.
In psychology, you have only understood a thing when you have lived it, or when it has entered the realm of doing and experiencing, but not before.
– Carl G. Jung
Conversations consist for the most part of things one does not say.
– Cees Nooteboom
In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity.
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
As usual I’ll be late
Stopping on the way to look at books or scarves
Wondering how you’ll tell me
Finally to go screw myself once and for all
– David Saint John
All of history is that of a more or less latent fascism. Always and everywhere the rich and the poor. The buyers and the sold. The leaders and the herd. The system never changes.
– Elsa Morante
The techniques we learn on the meditation cushion are not meant just for the cushion. After all, we’re not creating suffering for ourselves only on the cushion. We go through life. So we’re going to take those techniques and use them on a day-to-day basis.
– Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Loving people live in a loving world. Hostile people live in a hostile world.
Same world.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
You, me, all of us, we’re screwed. Everyone acts from fear, the next year, two years. What happens, you think, to people like us? … When people are afraid, we get the Christian Taliban.
– Rebecca Makkai
Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.
– Marcus Aurelius
There was nothing one could do when love came. It was fast, and it was strong, and if it were not good, then surely God would not have allowed it such power.
– Luis Alberto Urrea
By reading, you learn almost everything.
– José Saramago
These are the times to grow our souls. Each of us is called upon to embrace the conviction that despite the powers and principalities bent on commodifying all our human relationships, we have the power within us to create the world anew.
– Grace Lee Boggs
When I stopped chasing light, it sat down inside my breath and asked me to speak.
– Adira Thomé, Portuguese Cloudwalker and Seer
If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.
– Charles Darwin
We shall then first be true persons when we have suffered ourselves to be fitted into our places. We are marble waiting to be shaped, metal waiting to be run into a mould.
– C.S. Lewis
The divine does not answer requests. It echoes frequency. And frequency is born of devotion.
– Kaleb Nyima
It is August.
My life is going to change. I feel it.
– Raymond Carver
once you step into the Stream, all the game mechanics change – you’re not allowed to live by the same rules you did before
I don’t see people talk about the specifics of this enough, I think i’ll thread on this. drop your own examples too, plz
Biggest one I see across the board: you’re not allowed to cut corners anymore
You may have gotten away with it your whole life, half-assing your integrity, your morality, your skillfulness and relationships and whatever else,
and you might get frustrated watching the other people who STILL can get away with half-assing the things that matter most,
but for you, that era draws more and more to a close, over and over again as you keep going down the Path
You have to actually lean in to your beliefs and let them guide your life. you have to actually show the fuck up.
and when you don’t, shit falls apart. You’re actually responsible for how your life looks now, there’s an unmistakable connection between how well you live by your values and how well your life goes
– River Kenna
None of us have much time. And yet you act as if things were eternal—the way you fear and long for them.
– Marcus Aurelius
making my lawn
a teahouse among
the summer trees
– Issa
Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.
– Paulo Coelho
I’ve deprioritized the role of writing in my life.
– Geoff Dyer
Perilous to us all are the devices of an art deeper than we possess ourselves.
– Gandalf (Tolkien, The Two Towers)
If I could say I was assigned something at birth, it would be to keep the soul fresh and clean, and to not let anything bring it down.
– Fanny Howe
I knew that it was cruel
to be so optimistic, but, in my
solitude, I couldn’t resist the
urge and spent entire days
basking in idiotic fantasies,
sometimes verging on prayer.
– Mieko Kawakami
We can only escape from the world by outgrowing the world. Death may take man out of the world but only wisdom can take the world out of the man.
As long as the human being is obsessed by worldliness, he will suffer from the Karmic consequences of false allegiances.
When however, worldliness is transmuted into Spiritual Integrity he is free, even though he still dwells physically among worldly things.
– Manly Hall
Neither revolution nor reformation can ultimately change a society, rather you must tell a new powerful tale, one so persuasive that it sweeps away the old myths and becomes the preferred story…
– Ivan Illich
I have often told my students that if you walk around with your eyes and ears open, you can’t possibly live long enough to write all of the potential stories you will glimpse along the way.
– Jill McCorkle
We met ourselves as we came back
As we hiked the trail from the north.
Our foot-prints mixed in the rainy path
Coming back and going forth.
The prints of my comrade’s hob-nailed shoes
And my tramp shoes mixed in the rain.
– Vachel Lindsay
A Glorious Day
by Yu Jian
Translated by Wang Ping
Translated from the Chinese
A glorious day—sunlight on everything
A white rock shines in the Vermont woods
That’s Joe Brainard’s grave an American poet
1942–1994 graduate of an Oklahoma high school
Wearing dark-rimmed glasses Who has read your poems?
Under the green mountains the lake is quiet the birds are napping
I remember water lilies summer near its end
When he died Kenward brought it here
A rock through the woods bears and fallen leaves make way
White like a bone in his memory no words
In the sixties they were here drinking
Smoking weed listening to the pines watching sunset on the hill
I touch the rock recoil as if scorched
So cold like the geniuses’ foreheads
Cool like a rock
In this world that burns like a furnace
Art should be the arm and the shoulder and the kind eyes–all of which let others
know you deserve to live and to be loved. That is what matters, baby. Bringing people home.
– Tennessee Williams
We all have limitations.
They are worth befriending.
They teach us a lot. They can
show us what we most need
to pay attention to and
honor.
– Jon Kabat-Zinn
Too many people spend life
being dutiful descendants
instead of good ancestors.
Make your kids proud,
not your parents.
– unknown
Love needs no words.For a short period you can put your trust in wordless emotion. But in the long run there is no love without words and no love with words alone…
– Lena Andersson
By the time you’re eighty years old you’ve learned everything. You only have to remember it.
– Bill Vaughan
The self is a bore: it is intrinsically enervating, pointless, futile.
– Krishnamurti
your story falls from the same sky as all the saints
clear as trumpets part air to
parade the pain
a weight too great to bear
before a nation of blind witnesses
– Phil Saint Denis Sanchez
…one dragon, however hot, does not make a summer…
– Tolkien, Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics
His poetry is not manufactured and pristine. It’s raw, full-throated, ferocious, bloody, and weird. That’s why it endures.
– William Boyle on a new biography of Frank Stanford
The whole semi-hysterical confrontation with doubt is tied up with falling in love and having your heart broken, when something you totally believed in has managed to fail you. And that abyss you fall into is doubt plus doubt plus doubt
plus doubt.
– Fanny Howe
I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty…an America which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft.
– President John F. Kennedy
Once,
during kickboxing practice
my best friend kicked my jaw off its hinges;
left it a creaky, unstable door
and I’ve never spoken confidently since.
– Chelsea Guevara in Cipota
As I look upon the experience of an experimentalist, everything that you do is, in a sense, succeeding. It’s telling you what not to do, as well as what to do. Not infrequently, I go into the laboratory, and people would say something didn’t work. And I say, “Great, we’ve made a great discovery!” If you thought it was going to work, and it didn’t work, that tells you as much as if it did. So my attitude is not one of pitfalls; my attitude is one of challenges and “What is nature telling me?”
Now, some people might look at something and let it go by, because they don’t recognize the pattern and the significance. It’s the sensitivity to pattern recognition that seems to me to be of great importance. It’s a matter of being able to find meaning, whether it’s positive or negative, in whatever you encounter. It’s like a journey. It’s like finding the paths that will allow you to go forward, or that path that has a block that tells you to start over again or do something else.
– Jonas Salk
I consider that I have many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work done.
– James Baldwin
When you reach the end of what you should know, you will be at the beginning of what you should sense.
– Khalil Gibran, Sand and Foam
Great poets feel into the future with most sensitive antennas and live out ahead of us a piece of future development, a yet unrealized potential. Poets and philosophers, if they do not sell out to please, but have the courage to be themselves, represent the most precious and dangerous models a culture can have.
– Hermann Hesse
FALLING ASLEEP
I yawn,
I stretch,
I stretch out,
I stretch all over
in my body
as in a large, luxurious sleeping bag.
And then I fall
down,
down
to the bottom of happiness.
– Anna Swir
The real meaning of persona is a mask, such as actors were accustomed to wear on the ancient stage; and it is quite true that no one shows himself as he is, but wears his mask and plays his part. Indeed, the whole of our social arrangements may be likened to a perpetual comedy; and this is why a man who is worth anything finds society so insipid, while a blockhead is quite at home in it.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Technologies are like cannibals that eat alive all existing populations. The first person to get swallowed is the consumer. There’s nothing neutral about any technology.
– Marshall McLuhan
Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths?
– Edith Wharton
The Master allows things to happen. She shapes events as they come. She steps out of the way and lets the Tao speak for itself.
– Tao Te Ching Translation: Stephen Mitchell
I don’t know if you’ve experienced this, but I’ve often been told – maybe because I’m queer, maybe because I’m Asian American, I don’t know – that I should be grateful for where I am. Like, ‘Don’t be too ambitious, don’t ask for too much, don’t believe that you can have that dignity, or that seriousness, taking yourself and your work seriously from start to finish.’ But I think, meanwhile, the people who make weapons never tell themselves to be humble. The people who destroy our world, who milk capital from people and products – the people who design Amazon and atom bombs – they don’t say, ‘Let’s lower the blast radius.’ People who make automatic weapons don’t say, ‘Let’s have this gun shoot fewer bullets.’ Their ambition is always unquestioned and ever increasing.
Meanwhile we keep telling our artists to, ‘Tone it down, don’t take your work so seriously.’ And I think it’s so refreshing, as a younger writer, to hear you say, ‘I’ve been taking this absolutely seriously from the beginning.’ It’s a powerful thing. To see the body of work reflect that as evidence, that to give yourself dignity in your craft is actually the most respect you can give to your field.
– Ocean Vuong
Experience stands on its own dunghill in medicine, and reason yields its place. Medicine has always professed experience to be the touchstone of its operations. Plato was right to say that good doctors themselves ought to have had the diseases they want to cure, and been subject themselves to the misfortunes and circumstances which they have to diagnose. Let them catch the pox if they want to know how to cure it. I’d trust such a doctor.
– Montaigne
Although invested with anxiety or disbelief the situation is settling itself to transform into a surprising success.
– Sophie Strand
Everything in my life, from flat tires to late appointments, is conspiring to make sure I am perfectly on time for another moment of contact. Not on time for human events, but for those truly important convergences between species.”
– Sophie Strand
We need the poet who “lives in life,” mixes with mud, rolls in rot, claws the scoundrels, bleeds and bloodies, and, gasping in the field, writes right there, his wounds like faucets above his page, at once besmutching and ennobling it. We need, also, the poet who finds life always interesting, sometimes appalling, sometimes appealing, but consistently amenable to a clarifying enchantment via the powers of Art. His reverence for the word Art is what chiefly distinguishes him from Poet I. Poet II, moreover, may postpone com- position until he is off the field, rid of the fray’s insignia, and has had a bath.
Poet Il is Robert Hayden, one of a growing group of Negro poets believing that matter is not enough, believing that there should be a marriage between matter and manner. Robert Hay- den, for at least thirty years, has busied himself with a very active and earnest subscription to his faith in spite of occasional light heckling from the bare-fight-boys, the snarls of whom, indeed, have been at least half-affectionate because few are quicker than they to sense authentic quality in the work of the “enemy” and to salute it.
– Gwendolyn Brooks on Robert Hayden
The more thankful you are, the more life gives you to be thankful for. Gratitude unlocks the flow. Stay in it—and watch abundance rush in.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
Elaborate reading is what is required, reading that comes to the edge of a chant without having the literary meaning clouded by the chant.
– Vachel Lindsay
an unintegrated relationship is a one that either person can’t be Whole in
whether that’s being unable to bring all of yourself to the relationship, or needing to pretend to things that aren’t You — or depending on your partner to complete you & your capacities
– River Kenna
Weak and narrow are the powers implanted in the limbs of men; many the woes that fall on them and blunt the edge of thought; short is the measure of the life in death through which they toil; then are they borne away, like smoke they vanish into air, and what they dream they know is but the little each has stumbled on in wandering about the world; yet boast they all that they have learned the whole—vain fools! For what that is, no eye has seen, no ear has heard, nor can it be conceived by the mind of man. You, then, since you have fallen to this place, shall know no more than human wisdom may attain. But, gods avert the madness of those babblers of my tongue, and cause the stream of holy words to issue from my lips. And you, great muse of memory, maiden with the milk-white arms, I pray to you to teach me things that creatures of a day may hear.
– Empedokles
All around us, we can see people trying to solve by logical argument, or by the acquiring of information, problems that can only be dealt with by a change of heart.
– Mary Midgley, Why Smartness Is Not Enough
I do not know how to get with what I know to be true, that life is change, and that we need muscle, flexibility, and awareness. Unfortunately, these are not my strong suits. My strong suits are held breath and false good cheer.
– Anne Lamott
Movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul’s weather to all who can read it.
– Martha Graham
POLITICS AND ART
Brutal policy,
like inferior art, knows
whose fault it all is.
– Les Murray
The gods were here first, and they’re bigger.
They always were, and always will be
living it up in their father’s mansion.
You only crawled from the drain
a few millennia ago,
after inventing legs for yourself
so you could stand, inventing fists
in order to raise them and curse the heavens.
Do the gods see us?
Will the waters be rising soon?
The waters will be rising soon.
Find someone or something to cling to.
– Kim Addonizio, Storm Catechism
When I was a young man about to go out into the world, my father says to me a very valuable thing. He says to me like this… “Son,” the old guy says, “I am sorry that I am not able to bank roll you to a very large start, but not having any potatoes which to give you, I am now going to stake you to some very valuable advice. One of these days in your travels, a guy is going to come to you and show you a nice, brand new deck of cards on which (Sky snaps fingers) the seal has not yet been broken. This man is going to offer to bet you that he can make the jack of spades jump out of that deck and squirt cider in your ear. Now son, you do not take this bet, for as sure as you stand there, you are going to wind up with an earful of cider.”
– Sky Masterson
Unable to afford going to a sanitarium in the mountains, [Gindler] stayed at home and became interested in sensing her inner response to every activity at every moment during the day. While just coming out of the sleeping state she gave herself up to the first stirrings of the awakening organism, to its elemental desire for extending – and discovered how spontaneously breathing responded to the slightest movement. This process belonged to her need for regeneration, but also to her need to protect herself against noise from the outside and inside. She found that in this practice she came into a state where she was no longer disturbed by her own thoughts and worries.And she came to experience … that calm in the physical field (Gelassenheit) is equivalent to trust in the psychic field… It is a state of being in balance. The core of the word is lassen, “allowing” in contrast to “doing” or “controlling” or “resisting.” Lassen is also related to sensing the pull of gravity. There is an interdependence between sensing one’s weight (sensing the attraction of the earth on one’s substance) and trusting, self-confidence, finding a standing point – and calmness. This means “trusting, a deep confidence in the world, in life, in one’s organism. This was her discovery, and it became basic to all other research.
– Hengstenberg
The aim of my work is not learning certain movements, but rather the achievement of concentration. Only by means of concentration can we attain the full functioning of the physical apparatus in relation to mental and spiritual life…
– Gindler
in tiny rented rooms I was struck by miracles.
– Charles Bukowski
Public services have, to use the economist’s word, a strong redistributional effect. And this effect is strongly in favor of those with lower incomes. Those who clamor the loudest for public economy are those for whom public services do the least. Tax reduction that curtails or limits public services has a double effect in comforting the comfortable and afflicting the poor.
– John Kenneth Galbraith
The Antichrists are antichristing each other with antichristly ferocity so I must go and make peace.
– Leonora Carrington
There’s a song that wants to sing itself through us. We just got to be available. Maybe the song that is to be sung through us is the most beautiful requiem for an irreplaceable planet or maybe it’s a song of joyous rebirth as we create a new culture that doesn’t destroy its world. But in any case, there’s absolutely no excuse for our making our passionate love for our world dependent on what we think of its degree of health, whether we think it’s going to go on forever. Those are just thoughts anyway. But this moment you’re alive, so you can just dial up the magic of that at any time.
– Joanna Macy
We are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
– William Wordsworth
It’s gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to sit alone with images on a screen given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. And that’s fine in low doses, but if it’s the basic main staple of your diet, you’re going to die. In a very meaningful way, you’re going to die.
– David Foster Wallace
Why did no one tell us
that to die is to be
reincarnated in those
we love while they
are still alive?
– Andrea Gibson
Cigarette
With earth you wonder whether God lit
the wrong end of the cigarette, tossed it aside.
But no, we were magnificent once.
Now we humans are vile machines of attrition.
Nothing escapes our notice, even the butterflies
in the Amazon that must get their salt
from the tears of turtles are a possible profit
for window displays, salt ads,
a fortune in butterflies drinking tears.
– Jim Harrison
A bookshop is powder-magazine, a dynamite-shed, a drugstore of poisons, a bar of intoxicants, a den of opiates, an island of sirens.
– John Cowper Powys
You have within you the most amazing logical analyzer that exists in the known world. And the point is to get it to work for you.
– Alan Watts
When we stop, we can create space. When we stop, we can settle the mind and then think from a place of clarity.
– Rev. Grace Song
You’re exhausted from holding back so much of what you are, and holding up so much of what you aren’t.
– River Kenna
A shining breakfast, a breakfast shining, no dispute, no practice, nothing, nothing at all.
A sudden slice changes the whole plate, it does so suddenly.
An imitation, more imitation, imitation succeed imitations.
– Gertrude Stein
a swarm, an infinite number,
yet one whole, one cluster of bees,
as a trail or a Galaxy
of numberless stars,
that seem one but are many;
it was they, the veil
that concealed yet revealed
– H.D.
Once you create karma, it will always be with you—but that karma can change direction. When you work on karma, it becomes good karma.
– Shunryu Suzuki Roshi
Alignment is the revolution. The world can’t touch those who are protected by divine order.
– Nika Solé
There’s no reason to be surprised by change. In fact, we should be suspicious of its absence, not surprised by its presence.
– Malcolm Gladwell
Poems are things. I like when they’re jagged—long lines and short lines next to each other … If I had to choose between a poem being therapeutic and it being a better poem, I’d want it to be a better poem.
– Sharon Olds
The definition of the novel tends to be more elastic in Italy, and autofiction isn’t some trendy thing but recognized as a loose tradition.
– Jhumpa Lahiri
Stop leaving and you will arrive, Stop searching and you will see, Stop running away and you will be found.
– Laozi
Numbers go on and on, but what does mathematics help? In any human life there is really only one of everything.
– Damon Galgut, The Promise
All of this talking about what’s up in the sky, or down in hell, for that matter, isn’t half as important as what’s right here, right now, right in front of your eyes. Things are tough. Folks broke. Kids hungry. Sick. Everything. And people has got to have more faith in one another, believe in each other. There’s a spirit of some kind we’ve all got. That’s got to draw us all together.
– Woody Guthrie
If all your inner life depends on external events and on how people treat you, then indeed you have no individuality. You have nothing in yourself that can maintain itself apart from external reality and how it behaves towards you – nothing in you with which to resist life.
– Maurice Nicoll
People have actually said to me, and rudely, “Don’t you wish you could have done this when you were 35?” This is the truth: I couldn’t have done it when I was 35. I didn’t know enough. I hadn’t experienced enough. Every artist has their own personal evolution. I’m a very slow bloomer.
– Helen Pashgian
Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.
– Seamus Heaney
We cry and kiss and come at the same moment. And the next moment we analyze and talk rationally. It is like the life of the Russians in The Idiot. It is hysteria. In cooler moments I wonder at the extravagance of our feelings.
– Anaïs Nin
I think attachment is what happens fast, first, and hard. Then you find out what happened, and tell yourself stories about what you want to happen that are full of lies and truth—about yourself and your object. It doesn’t matter when in your life that impact happens;: it just requires a sense of being tethered to something that’s enigmatic and then finding out what it stands for, what you want from it, and how loose and tight you want the tethering to be, which is where lots of the incoherence or craziness emerges.
All amour is amour fou. We know that it involves risk. We know that staying reliable to it involves work. The relation between the risk and the work of fidelity is fundamentally affective and, at the same time, ethical: What’s political about this relation—why we need feminist, queer, and intimacy politics generally—is that we are trained so badly and so unimaginatively for normative skills at negotiating love, at recognizing attachments, at cultivating capaciousness and patience where our own impossibility meets the impossibility of others, and where our own needs encounter ridiculously atrophied understandings of what a good life fantasy could be.
I could go on… . . . I see the wasted life of confused and blocked attachment and exhausted optimism everywhere.
– Lauren Berlant
I am dancing a single dance throughout my whole life. My dance is identical with the everlasting revolution. I recovered my language through dancing, and saw politics through dancing. I will live up to ethics through dancing, and perceive the map of history through dancing. I gained courage to stand against power through dancing. I am re-scrutinizing the ‘instinct’ through dancing. I want to know God through dancing. I want to encounter matter through dancing. A dancer, in essence, is an anonymous lightning, a medium of the place. This is how I want to be. The endless performance/dance. An attempt to verify dance from the minimal to the maximal by rendering my body as an example. Or an attempt to discover and initiate dance in all places.
– Min Tanaka
Even without love
Even after all this time
My body continues to generate real, healthy, human emotion.
– Ariana Reines
Every state of negative emotion is like a blown up rubber animal. There are different kinds of negative emotions but all are inflated. Prick any kind of a rubber animal and it collapses. Self observation is like the prick; the principle always works. However, this habit of using pins may make it impossible to blow up the same animal (negative emotion) again and again.
– Alfred Richard Orage
Kekule dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World.
But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, “The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning,” is to be delivered in to a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that “productivity” and “earnings” keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity – most of the World, animal, vegetable, and mineral, is laid waste in the process.
The System may or may not understand that it’s only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life.
– Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
When Toni Morrison said ‘write the book you want to read,’ she didn’t mean everybody.
– Fran Lebowitz
He who doesn’t know the truth is an idiot. But he who knows the truth and says it is a lie, he is a criminal.
– Bertolt Brecht
It is true that both spell and poem take their origin in the experience of lack and in a wish that stems from it.
– Thomas M. Greene
The fairly common assumption that we ourselves can afford to be ignorant because somewhere there is somebody who knows the answer — such an assumption builds ignorance fast, and builds it widely. The rapid growth of knowledge we sometimes boast about, seen in this perspective, looks like its opposite: the rapid growth of ignorance. Unchecked, it could become absolute; and that would be disaster. For no one then would trust himself to speculate about the huge central things that matter most. He would have lost the ambition, and to that extent the power, to do so.
– Mark Van Doren
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many—they are few.
– Percy Bysshe Shelley
We all live in the sublime. Where else can we live ? That is the only place of life.
– Maurice Maeterlinck
Why “The Body Keeps the Score” Is a Trap
by Leah Piotroski
Bessel van der Kolk’s book has become gospel in trauma circles. It tells us that trauma imprints itself on the body, that memory lives in flesh, that healing means revisiting, remembering, and releasing. And it wraps all of this in the comforting language of neuroscience and embodiment.
But here’s the problem:
It turns the body into a courtroom. Where the truth must be revealed. Where the body must “speak.” Where dissociation is treated as failure, not wisdom. Where memory is treated as the goal, not the trap.
This is not liberation. This is surveillance with a soft voice.
The Body Refuses to Perform the Story
Instead of assuming the body is keeping a score we must uncover, what if we asked:
What if the body is actively trying to lose the game?
Your fascia — the slippery, webbed connective tissue that wraps organs, muscles, bones — does not think in language. It does not store “narratives.” It senses. It responds. It adapts. It absorbs and it slips. It is a site of communication, not confession.
Fascia doesn’t “remember” in the way van der Kolk claims. It orients. It signals. It sometimes goes quiet. Not because it’s wounded, but because it is wise.
The body is not a filing cabinet for trauma. The body is a swamp, a field, a liminal architecture.
What you call a symptom may be a doorway. What you call numbness may be sacred silence. What you call a freeze response may be the refusal to perform under gaze.
Van der Kolk’s framework is still entangled in therapeutic capitalism — the idea that we must become knowable, narratable, and reintegrated in order to be well. But what if wellness is not the goal?
What if integration is just another name for assimilation?
Fascia: Not a Storage Unit — a Spell
Fascia holds tension, yes. But not like a grudge. Like a net. It is responsive, sensitive, relational. It’s part of your felt sense of self, not your story of self.
Fascia may thicken around pain not to trap it, but to protect you from being opened too soon, too often, for someone else’s comfort. It’s a fluid system, not a scorecard.
To work with fascia is not to reveal the wound. It is to unhook the compulsion to explain.
The Trauma Industry Profits from the Reopening
There is money in the wound. Not in its healing, but in its repetition. The trauma industry thrives on the idea that your pain must be made visible. Again and again. For your therapist. For your group. For your partner. For your own reflection. Each time, a new container. A new modality. A new version of your story to keep alive, retold like a spell that keeps summoning the ghost.
They say it’s empowerment. They say it’s embodiment. But they don’t tell you that the house is built to keep you inside. That the frameworks are shaped like cages. That wholeness, in this economy, is always just out of reach.
You become a client of your own survival. A lifelong subscriber to progress. Always processing. Always almost there.
What they don’t sell is silence. They don’t market stillness without meaning. They can’t package decay. There is no certification for becoming illegible. No course on sacred refusal.
And so they pathologize forgetting. They turn disinterest into dysfunction. They rename your portals “symptoms.” Your avoidance becomes a diagnosis. Your dreaming becomes disassociation. Your quiet becomes a crisis.
They love you most when you’re narrating your pain. They love you when you’re dying. When your story makes sense — to them.
But you weren’t made to make sense.
Ritual: Discharge Instructions for a Body That Never Checked In
Find a crumpled receipt. Or a scrap of paper pretending to be one. Hold it in your non-dominant hand.
Place the paper underneath something that has touched the ground– a stone, a shoe, a piece of unwashed clothing.
Say (softly, without knowing why):
This was never mine to carry.
Tear the corner off the paper. Put the torn piece in your mouth. Don’t swallow. Just hold it.
Spit it into running water — sink, stream, bath, doesn’t matter.
Turn off the lights. Walk out of the room without checking if it worked.
darling, the moon is still the
moon
in all of its phases.
– isra al-thibeh
Agreements can channel cooperative possibilities into meaningful interactions. Yet these can be interfered with. The unfriendliest way of limiting a creature’s freedom is to constrain its interactive opportunities. Because any interaction could involve some developmentally transformative exchanges.
The Trader is the skilled aspect of us that can, or could, improve one’s awareness of the relevant details, patterns, and agreements that pan out. So the Counselor, on the one hand, yearns to develop inwardly, and hopefully in sync, with the outward developments of the Trader, on the other hand. For both Trader and Counselor love to grow beyond the tugs and tethers of barely functional scaffoldings, thanks to the free exchanges of minds unwilling to comply with enslavement.
– George Gorman
In the ancient house of poetry
where myths are born
and where they crawl to die,
in the dark and doorless
house of words, a crystal world
that makes its own strange light,
I dangle on the hook
of this old hope and sing
of unlost love –
a love so fraught with truth
that gods must die
and spells must fail
and still the house survives.
Where the news of the stars comes down.
– George Gorman
Compassion is not religious business, it is human business. It is not luxury, it is essential for our own peace and mental stability. It is essential for human survival.
– HH Dalai Lama
The Brain—is wider than the Sky—
For—put them side by side—
The one the other will contain
With ease—and You—beside—
The Brain is deeper than the sea—
For—hold them—Blue to Blue—
The one the other will absorb—
As Sponges—Buckets—do—
The Brain is just the weight of God—
For—Heft them—Pound for Pound—
And they will differ—if they do—
As Syllable from Sound—
– Emily Dickinson
We live not from signs alone, but from signs’ sounds;
not from the life of the word, but from the skin of sound.
The veneer of the world in the shadowland of words.
– Pere Gimferrer
The message actually communicated is the subjective effect created in the recipient by the structure of content and medium operating in the total environment.
– Marshall McLuhan
Moonlight in the kitchen is a sign of God.
– Anne Carson
We live in all we seek. The hidden shows up in too-plain sight. It lives captive on the face of the obvious – the people, events, and things of the day – to which we as sophisticated children have long since become oblivious…
– Annie Dillard
We have a very sterilized sense of power, and that power is losing its powerfulness. We need other places of power…The times are urgent, let us be slowed down by the beings that exceed us. The times are urgent, let us be defeated by things that we cannot understand. The times are urgent, let us defract our ways of knowing. The times are urgent, let us be released from the traps of the things we already know.
– Bayo Akomolafe
Could I
If you are not the free person you want to be, you must find a place to tell the truth about that. To tell how things go for you. Candor is like a skein being produced inside the belly day after day, it has to get itself woven out somewhere. You could whisper down a well. You could write a letter and keep it in a drawer. You could inscribe a curse on a ribbon of lead and bury it in the ground to lie unread for thousands of years. The point is not to find a reader, the point is the telling itself. Consider a person standing alone in a room. The house is silent. She is looking down at a piece of paper. Noth- ing else exists. All her veins go down into this paper. She takes her pen and writes on it some marks no one else will ever see, she bestows on it a kind of surplus, she tops it off with a gesture as private and accurate as her own name.
– Anne Carson
Since we tend to see ourselves primarily in the light of our intentions, which are invisible to others, while we see others mainly in the light of their actions, which are all that’s visible to us, we have a situation in which misunderstanding and injustice are the order of the day.
– J.G. Bennett
In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it may be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light, and what I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid? To question or to speak as I believed could have meant pain, or death. But we all hurt in so many different ways, all the time, and pain will either change, or end.
Death, on the other hand, is the final silence. And that might be coming quickly, now, without regard for whether I had ever spoken what needed to be said, or had only betrayed myself into small silences, while I planned someday to speak, or waited for someone else’s words. And I began to recognize a source of power within myself that comes from the knowledge that while it is most desirable to be afraid, learning to put fear into a perspective gave me great strength. I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself.
My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had ever made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences. And it was the concern and caring of all those women which gave me strength and enabled me to scrutinize the essentials of my living.
– Audre Lorde
In a time when labels are weaponized and dissent is recast as danger, I choose to define myself—before others try to do it for me.
Credo
I am a loyal American. I believe it is the sacred duty of all citizens to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic—not as a slogan, but as a living commitment to democracy, justice, and human dignity.
I believe in a government of the people, by the people, and for the people—not for the powerful few, not for corporations, and not for any one ideology, but for the many, in all our differences and dreams.
I believe democracy lives not only in ballots or courtrooms, but in how we care for one another—through solidarity, mutual aid, and the daily labor of civic life.
I believe in equal justice under law. That means due process, not show trials. Rule of law, not rule by decree. Courts that serve the people, not a party. And rights that belong to everyone—not just the loudest or the wealthiest.
I believe in freedom of speech—not as a weapon for bullies, but as a cornerstone of democratic life. Debate, disagreement, dissent: these are not threats to the nation. They are signs that the nation is still alive.
I believe a free press is not the enemy of the people but the watchdog of the republic. Without investigative reporting, whistleblowers, and truth-tellers, power goes unchecked and democracy decays.
I embrace the diversity of peoples, cultures, faiths, languages, and identities that define the American experience. I see the diversity of sexual orientation as part of that richness—voices that belong in the chorus of our democracy.
I reject the use of surveillance, manipulation, and algorithmic control to shape public opinion or suppress dissent. Citizenship requires awareness, not compliance.
I believe in freedom of religion—and just as firmly, in freedom from religion. The separation of church and state is not an attack on faith; it is the best protection we have for the conscience of all.
I believe in our responsibility to future generations—to protect the land, water, and air that sustain life, and to recognize that environmental justice is inseparable from human justice.
I am a pacifist. I believe that hate breeds hate, and violence opens doors that are hard to close. The politics of cruelty, fear, and division have no place in a nation built on hope, compromise, and common cause.
I do not shrink from disagreement. I will challenge policies and ideologies that I believe endanger democracy, human rights, or the planet. But I will not surrender to the logic of enemies. Even when I reject another’s politics, I will not deny their humanity. We are still bound by the fragile civic fabric that holds us together—threaded by respect, decency, and a refusal to become what we oppose.
This is my creed. This is the America I believe in. And I will defend it—with words, with action, and with unwavering hope.
– James B. Greenberg
Sunset by Randall Mann
Fog, like reason, settles on the peeling district.
This is the new money. The new economy.
Where my lover lives. When I left him,
I left books, coats, silverware. Things.
It wasn’t charity; it was an impure,
commonplace case of forgetting.
(May he find some use
for my low-rent betrayals.) Land ends
with miles of aloe along the Great Highway.
Surfers strip off their suits, half-naked
to the naked sea. The sand’s ignored
BEWARE OF THE UNDERTOW signs:
these are the notes of the drowned.
The liminal space between what was and what’s coming. The abyss of the unknown. The unmanifest. That’s where you remember who you are.
– Nika Solé
In the ultimate reality, there’s nothing as we know it, as we conceive it. As long as you’re able to voice it, it’s false. As long as you are able to think about it, it does not exist. Reality is silence, not words.
– Robert Adams
Then I perceived, what I had never thought, that all these staring houses were not alike, but different one from another, because they held different dreams.
– Lord Dunsany
The problem is that we cannot imagine a future where we possess less but are more.
– Charles Bowden
Prejudices are what fools use for reason.
– Francois Voltaire
reading glasses
a flash of summer sun
in her haiku
– @ruralitalics
the river has washed
the red hot sun
into the sea
– Basho
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction
by Wallace Stevens
To Henry Church
And for what, except for you, do I feel love?
Do I press the extremest book of the wisest man
Close to me, hidden in me day and night?
In the uncertain light of single, certain truth,
Equal in living changingness to the light
In which I meet you, in which we sit at rest,
For a moment in the central of our being,
The vivid transparence that you bring is peace.
‘IT MUST BE ABSTRACT’’
I
Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea
Of this invention, this invented world,
The inconceivable idea of the sun.
You must become an ignorant man again
And see the sun again with an ignorant eye
And see it clearly in the idea of it.
Never suppose an inventing mind as source
Of this idea nor for that mind compose
A voluminous master folded in his fire.
How clean the sun when seen in its idea,
Washed in the remotest cleanliness of a heaven
That has expelled us and our images . . .
The death of one god is the death of all.
Let purple Phoebus lie in umber harvest,
Let Phoebus slumber and die in autumn umber,
Phoebus is dead, ephebe. But Phoebus was
A name for something that never could be named.
There was a project for the sun and is.
There is a project for the sun. The sun
Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be
In the difficulty of what it is to be.
II
It is the celestial ennui of apartments
That sends us back to the first idea, the quick
Of this invention; and yet so poisonous
Are the ravishments of truth, so fatal to
The truth itself, the first idea becomes
The hermit in a poet’s metaphors,
Who comes and goes and comes and goes all day.
May there be an ennui of the first idea?
What else, prodigious scholar, should there be?
The monastic man is an artist. The philosopher
Appoints man’s place in music, say, today.
Bur the priest desires. The philosopher desires.
And no to have is the beginning of desire.
To have what is no is its ancient cycle.
It is desire at the end of winter, when
It observes the effortless weather turning blue
And sees the myosotis on its bush.
Being virile, it hears the calendar hymn.
It knows that what it has is what is not
And throws it away like a thing of another time,
As morning throws off stale moonlight and shabby sleep.
III
The poem refreshes life so that we share,
For a moment, the first idea . . . It satisfies
Belief in an immaculate beginning
And sends us, winged by an unconscious will,
To an immaculate end. We move between these points:
From that ever-early candor to its late plural
And the candor of them is the strong exhilaration
Of what we feel from what we think, of thought
Beating in the hear, as if blood newly came,
An elixir, an excitation, a pure power.
The poem, through candor, brings back a power again
That gives a candid kind to everything.
We say: At night an Arabian in my room,
With his damned hoobla-hoobla-hobbla-how,
Inscribes a primitive astronomy
Across the unscrawled foes the future casts
And throws his stars around the floor. By day
The wood-dove used to chant his hoobla-hoo
And still the grossest iridescence of ocean
Howls hoo and rises and howls hoo and fall.
Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation.
IV
The first idea was not our own. Adam
In Eden was the father of Descartes
And eve made air the mirror of herself,
Of her sons and of her daughters. They found themselves
In heaven as in a glass; a second earth;
And in the earth itself they found a green—
The inhabitants of a very varnished green.
But the first idea was not to shape the clouds
In imitation. The clouds preceded us.
There was a muddy centre before we breathed.
There was a myth before the myth began,
Venerable and articulate and complete.
From this the poem springs: that we live in a place
That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves
And hard it is in spire of blazoned days.
We are the mimics. Clouds are pedagogues.
The air is not a mirror but bare board,
Coulisse bright-dark, tragic chiaroscuro
And comic color of the rose, in which
Abysmal instruments make sounds like pips
Of the sweeping meanings that we add to them.
V
The lion roars at the enraging desert,
Reddens the sand with his red-colored noise,
Defies red emptiness to evolve his match,
Master by foot and jaws and by the mane,
Most supple challenger. The elephant
Breaches the darkness of Ceylon with blares,
The glitter-goes on surfaces of tanks,
Shattering velvetest far-away. The bear,
The ponderous cinnamon, snarls in his mountain
At summer thunder and sleeps through winter snow.
But you, ephebe, look from your attic window,
Your mansard with a rented piano. You lie
In silence upon your bed. You clutch the corner
Of the pillow in your hand. You writhe and press
A bitter utterance from your writhing, dumb,
Yet voluble of dumb violence. You look
Across the roofs as sigil and as ward
And in your centre mark them and are cowed . . .
These are the heroic children whom time breeds
Against the first idea—to lash the lion,
Caparison elephants, teach bears to juggle.
VI
Not to be realized because not to
Be seen, not to be loved nor hated because
Not to be realized. Weather by Franz Hals,
Brushed up by brushy winds in brushy clouds,
Wetted by blue, colder for white. Not to
Be spoken to, without a roof, without
First fruits, without the virginal of birds,
The dark-blown ceinture loosened, not relinquished.
Gay is, gay was, the gay forsythia
And yellow, yellow thins the Northern blue.
Without a name and nothing to be desired,
If only imagined but imagined well.
My house has changed a little in the sun.
The fragrance of the magnolias come close,
False flick, false form, but falseness close to kin.
It must be visible or invisible,
Invisible or visible or both:
A seeing and unseeing in the eye.
The weather and the giant of the weather,
Say the weather, the mere weather, the mere air:
An abstraction blooded, as a man by though.
VII
It feels good as it is without the giant,
A thinker of the first idea. Perhaps
The truth depends on a walk around a lake,
A composing as the body tires, a stop
To see hepatica, a stop to watch
A definition growing certain and
A wait within that certainty, a rest
In the swags of pine-trees bordering the lake.
Perhaps there are times of inherent excellence,
As when the cocks crows on the left and all
Is well, incalculable balances,
At which a kind of Swiss perfection comes
And a familiar music of the machine
Sets up its Schwarmerei, not balances
That we achieve but balances that happen,
As a man and woman meet and love forthwith.
Perhaps there are moments of awakening,
Extreme, fortuitous, personal, in which
We more than awaken, sit on the edge of sleep,
As on an elevation, and behold
The academies like structures in a mist.
VIII
Can we compose a castle-fortress-home,
Even with the help of Viollet-le-Duc,
And see the MacCullough there as major man?
The first idea is an imagined thing.
The pensive giant prone in violet space
May be the MacCullough, an expedient,
Logos and logic, crystal hypothesis,
Incipit and a form to speak the word
And every latent double in the word,
Beau linguist. But the MacCullough is MacCullough.
It does not follow that major man is man.
If MacCullough himself lay lounging by the sea,
Drowned in its washes, reading in the sound,
About the thinker of the first idea,
He might take habit, whether from wave or phrase,
Or power of the wave, or deepened speech,
Or a leaner being, moving in on him,
Of greater aptitude and apprehension,
As if the waves at last were never broken,
As if the language suddenly, with ease,
Said things it had laboriously spoken.
IX
The romantic intoning, the declaimed clairvoyance
Are parts of apotheosis, appropriate
And of its nature, the idiom thereof.
They differ from reason’s click-clack, its applied
Enflashings. But apotheosis is not
The origin of the major man. He comes,
Compact in invincible foils, from reason,
Lighted at midnight by the studious eye,
Swaddled in revery, the object of
The hum of thoughts evaded in the mind,
Hidden from other thoughts, he that reposes
On a breast forever precious for that touch,
For whom the good of April falls tenderly,
Falls down, the cock-birds calling at the time.
My dame, sing for this person accurate songs.
He is and may be but oh! He is, he is,
This foundling of the infected past, so bright,
So moving in the manner of his hand.
Yet look not at his colored eyes. Give him
No names. Dismiss him form your images.
The hot of him is purest in the heart.
X
The major abstraction is the idea of man
And major man is its exponent, abler
In the abstract than in his singular,
More fecund as principle than particle,
Happy fecundity, flor-abundant force,
In being more than an exception, part,
Though an heroic part, of the commonal.
The major abstraction is the commonal,
The inanimate, difficult visage. Who is it?
What rabbi, grown furious with human wish,
What chieftain, walking by himself, crying
Most miserable, most victorious,
Does not see these separate figures one by one,
And yet see only one, in his old coat,
His slouching pantaloons, beyond the town,
Looking for what was, where it used to be?
Cloudless the morning. It is he. The man
In that old coat, those sagging pantaloons,
It is of him, ephebe, to make, to confect
The final elegance, not to console
Nor sanctify, but plainly to propound.
‘IT MUST CHANGE’’
I
The old seraph, parcel-gilded, among violets
Inhaled the appointed odor, while the doves
Rose up like phantoms from chronologies.
The Italian girls wore jonquils in their hair
And these the seraph saw, had seen long since,
In the bandeaux of the mothers, would see again.
The bees came booming as if they had never gone,
As if hyacinths had never gone. We say
This changes and that changes. Thus the constant
Violets, doves, girls, bees and hyacinths
Are inconstant objects of inconstant cause
In a universe of inconstancy. This means
Night-blue is an inconstant thing. The seraph
Is satyr in Saturn, according to his thoughts.
It means the distaste we feel for this withered scene
Is that it has not changed enough. It remains,
It is a repetition. The bees come booming
As if—The pigeons clatter in the air.
An erotic perfume, half of the body, half
Of an obvious acid is sure what it intends
And the booming is blunt, not broken in subtleties.
II
The President ordains the bee to be
Immortal. The President ordains. But does
The body lift its heavy wing, take up,
Again, an inexhaustible being, rise
Over the loftiest antagonist
To drone the green phrases of its juvenal?
Why should the bee recapture a lost blague,
Find a deep echo in a horn and buzz
The bottomless trophy, new hornsman after old?
The President has apples on the table
And barefoot servants round him, who adjust
The curtains to a metaphysical t
And the banners of the nation flutter, burst
ON the flag-poles in a red-blue dazzle, whack
At the halyards. Why, then, when in golden fury
Spring vanishes the scraps of winter, why
Should there be a question of returning or
Of death in memory’s dream? Is spring a sleep?
This warmth is for lovers at last accomplishing
Their love, this beginning, not resuming, this
Booming and booming of the new-come bee.
III
The great statue of the General Du Puy
Rested immobile, though neighboring catafalques
Bore off the residents of its noble Place.
The right, uplifted foreleg of the horse
Suggested that, at the final funeral,
The music halted and the horse stood still.
On Sundays, lawyers in their promenades
Approached this strongly-heightened effigy
To study the past, and doctors, having bathed
Themselves with care, sought out the nerveless frame
Of a suspension, a permanence, so rigid
That it made the General a bit absurd,
Changed his true flesh to an inhuman bronze.
There never had been, never could be, such
A man. The lawyers disbelieved, the doctors
Said that as keen, illustrious ornament,
As a setting for geraniums, the General,
The very Place Du Puy, in fact, belonged
Among our more vestigial states of mind.
Nothing had happened because nothing had changed.
Yet the General was rubbish in the end.
IV
Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imagined
On the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come.
Music falls on the silence like a sense,
A passion that we feel, not understand.
Morning and afternoon are clasped together
And North and South are an intrinsic couple
And sun and rain a plural, like two lovers
That walk away as one in the greenest body.
In solitude the trumpets of solitude
Are not of another solitude resounding;
A little string speaks for a crowd of voices.
The partaker partakes of that which changes him.
The child that touches takes character from the thing,
The body, it touches. The captain and his men
Are one and the sailor and the sea are one.
Follow after, O my companion, my fellow, my self,
Sister and solace, brother and delight.
V
On a blue island in a sky-wide water
The wild orange trees continued to bloom and to bear,
Long after the planter’s death. A few limes remained,
Where his house had fallen, three scraggy trees weighted
With garbled green. These were the planter’s turquoise
And his orange blotches, these were his zero green,
A green baked greener in the greenest sun.
These were his beaches, his sea-myrtles in
White sand, his patter of the long sea-slushes.
There was an island beyond him on which rested,
An island to the South, on which rested like
A mountain, a pine-apple pungent as Cuban summer.
And la-bas, la-bas, the cool bananas grew,
Hung heavily on the great banana tree,
Which pierces clouds and bends on half the world.
He thought often of the land from which he came,
How that whole country was a melon, pink
If seen rightly and yet a possible red.
An unaffected man in a negative light
Could not have borne his labor nor have died
Sighing that he should leave the banjo’s twang.
VI
Bethou me, said sparrow, to the crackled blade,
And you, and you, bethou me as you blow,
When in my coppice you behold me be.
Ah, ke! The bloody wren, the felon jay,
Ke-ke, the jug throated robin pouring out,
Bethou, bethou, bethou me in my glade.
There was such idiot minstrelsy in rain,
So many clappers going without bells,
That these bethous compose a heavenly gong.
One voice repeating, one tireless chorister,
The phrases of a single phrase, ke-ke,
A single text, granite monotony,
One sole face, like a photograph of fate,
Glass-blower’s destiny, bloodless episcopus,
Eye without lid, mind without any dream—
These are of minstrels lacking minstrelsy,
Of an earth in which the first leaf is the tale
Of leaves, in which the sparrow is a bird
Of stone, that never changes. Bethou him, you
And you, bethou him and bethou. It is
A sound like any other. It will end.
VII
After a luster of the moon, we say
We have not the need of any paradise,
We have not the need of any seducing hymn.
It is true. Tonight the lilacs magnify
The easy passion, the ever-ready love
Of the lover that lies within us and we breathe
An odor evoking nothing, absolute.
We encounter in the dead middle of the night
The purple odor, the abundant bloom.
The lover sighs as for accessible bliss,
Which he can take within him on his breath,
Possess in his heart, conceal and nothing known.
For easy passion and ever-ready love
Are of our earthy birth and here and now
And where we live and everywhere we live,
As in the top-cloud of a May night-evening,
As in the courage of the ignorant man,
Who changes by book, in the heat of the scholar, who writes
The book, hot for another accessible bliss;
The fluctuations of certainty, the change
Of degrees of perception in the scholar’s dark.
VIII
On her trip around the world, Nanzia Nunzio
Confronted Ozymandia. She went
Alone and like a vestal long-prepared.
I am the spouse. She took her necklace off
And laid it in the sand. As I am, I am
The spouse. She opened her stone-studded belt.
I am the spouse, divested of bright gold,
The spouse beyond emerald or amethyst,
Beyond the burning body that I bear.
I am the woman stripped more nakedly
Than nakedness, standing before an inflexible
Order, saying I am the contemplated spouse.
Speak to me that, which spoken, will array me
In its own only precious ornament.
Set on me the spirit’s diamond coronal.
Clothe me entire in the final filament,
So that I tremble with such love so known
And myself am precious for your perfecting.
Then Ozymandias said the spouse, the bride
Is never naked. A fictive covering
Weaves always glistening form the heart and mind.
IX
The poem goes form the poet’s gibberish to
The gibberish of the vulgate and back again.
Does it move to and fro or is it of both
At once? Is it a luminous flattering
Or the concentration of a cloudy day?
Is there a poem that never reaches words
And one that chaffers the time away?
Is the poem both peculiar and general?
There’s a meditation there, in which there seems
To be an evasion, a thing not apprehended or
Not apprehended well. Does the poet
Evade us, as in a senseless element?
Evade, this hot, dependent orator,
The spokesman at our bluntest barriers,
Exponent by a form of speech, the speaker
Of a speech only a little of the tongue?
It is the gibberish of the vulgate that he seeks.
He tries by a peculiar speech to speak
The peculiar potency of the general,
To compound the imagination’s Latin with
The lingua franca et jocundissima.
X
A bench was his catalepsy, Theatre
Of Trope. He sat in the park. The water of
The lake was full of artificial things,
Like a page of music, like an upper air,
Like a momentary color, in which swans
Were seraphs, were saints, were changing essences.
The west wind was the music, the motion, the force
To which the swans curveted, a will to change,
A will to make iris frettings on the blank.
There was a will to change, a necessitous
And present way, a presentation, a kind
Of volatile world, too constant to be denied,
The eye of a vagabond in metaphor
That catches our own. The casual is not
Enough. The freshness of transformation is
The freshness of a world. It is our own,
It is ourselves, the freshness of ourselves,
And that necessity and that presentation
Are rubbings of a glass in which we peer.
Of these beginnings, gay and green, propose
The suitable amours. Time will write them down.
‘IT MUST GIVE PLEASURE’’
I
To sing jubilas at exact, accustomed times,
To be crested and wear the mane of a multitude
And so, as part, to exult with its great throat,
To speak of joy and to sing of it, borne on
The shoulders of joyous men, to feel the heart
That is the common, the bravest fundament,
This is a facile exercise. Jerome
Begat the tubas and the fire-wind strings,
The golden fingers picking dark-blue air:
For companies of voices moving there,
To find of sound the bleakest ancestor,
To find of light a music issuing
Whereon it falls in more than sensual m ode.
But the difficultest rigor is forthwith,
On the image of what we see, to catch from that
Irrational moment its unreasoning,
As when the sun comes rising, when the sea
Clears deeply, when the moon hangs on the wall
Of heaven-haven. These are not things transformed.
Yet we are shaken by them as if they were.
We reason about them with a later reason.
II
The blue woman, linked and lacquered, at her window
Did not desire that feathery argentines
Should be cold silver, neither that frothy clouds
Should foam, be foamy waves, should move like them,
Nor that the sexual blossoms should repose
Without their fierce addictions, nor that the heat
Of summer, growing fragrant in the night,
Should strengthen her abortive dreams and take
In sleep its natural form. It was enough
For her that she remembered: the argentines
Of spring come to their places in the grape leaves
To cool their ruddy pulses; the frothy clouds
Are nothing but frothy clouds; the frothy blooms
Waste without puberty; and afterward,
When the harmonious heat of August pines
Enters the room, it drowses and is the night.
It was enough for her that she remembered.
The blue woman looked and from her window named
The corals of the dogwood, cold and clear,
Cold, coldly delineating, being real,
Clear and, except for the eye, without intrusion.
III
A lasting visage in a lasting bush,
A face of stone in an unending red,
Red-emerald, red-slitted-blue, a face of slate,
An ancient forehead hung with heavy hair,
The channel slots of rain, the red-rose-red
And weathered and the ruby-water-worn,
The vines around the throat, the shapeless lips,
The frown like serpents basking on the brow,
The spent feeling leaving nothing of itself,
Red-in-red repetitions never going
Away, a little rusty, a little rouged,
A little roughened and ruder, a crown
The eye could not escape, a red renown
Blowing itself upon the tedious ear.
An effulgence faded, dull cornelian
Too venerably used. That might have bee.
It might and might have been. But as it was,
A dead shepherd brought tremendous chords from hell
And bad the sheep carouse. Or so they said.
Children in love with them brought early flowers
And scattered them about, no two alike.
IV
We reason of these things with later reason
And we make of what we see, what we see clearly
And have seen, a place dependent on ourselves.
There was a mystic marriage in Catawba,
At noon it was on the mid-day of the year
Between a great captain and the maiden Bawda.
This was their ceremonial hymn: Anon
We loved but would no marriage make. Anon
The one refused the other one to take,
Foreswore the sipping of the marriage wine.
Each must the other take not for his high,
His puissant, front nor for her subtle sound,
The shoo-shoo-shoo of secret cymbals round.
Each must the other take as sign, short sign
To stop the whirlwind, balk the elements.
The great captain loved the ever-hill Catawba
And therefore married Bawda, whom he found there,
And Bawda loved the captain as she loved the sun.
They married well because the marriage-place
Was what they loved. It was neither heaven nor hell.
They were love’s characters come face to face.
V
We drank Meursault, ate lobster Bombay with mango
Chutney. Then the Canon Aspirin declaimed
Of his sister, in what a sensible ecstasy
She lived in her house. She had two daughters, one
Of four, and one of seven, whom she dressed
The way a painter of pauvred color paints.
But still she painted them, appropriate to
Their poverty, a gray-blue yellowed out
With ribbon, a rigid statement of them, white,
With Sunday pearls, her widow’s gayety.
She hid them under simple names She held
Them closelier to her by rejecting dreams.
The words they spoke were voices that she heard.
She looked at them and saw them as they were
And what she felt fought off the barest phrase.
The Canon Aspirin, having said these things,
Reflected, humming an outline of a fugue
Of praise, a conjugation done by choirs.
Yet when her children slept, his sister herself
Demanded of sleep, in the excitements of silence
Only the unmuddled self of sleep, for them.
VI
When at long midnight the Canon came to sleep
And normal things had yawned themselves away,
The nothingness was a nakedness, a point,
Beyond which fact could not progress as fact.
Thereon the learning of the man conceived
Once more night’s pale illuminations, gold
Beneath, far underneath, the surface of
His eye and audible in the mountain of
His ear, the very material of his mind.
So that he was the ascending wings he saw
And moved on them in orbits’ outer stars
Descending to the children’s bed, on which
They lay. Forth then with huge pathetic force
Straight to the utmost crown of night he flew.
The nothingness was a nakedness, a point
Beyond which thought could not progress as thought.
He had to choose. But it was not a choice
Between excluding things. It was not a choice
Between, but of. He chose to include the things
That in each other are included, the whole,
The complicate, the amassing harmony.
VII
He imposes orders as he thinks of them,
As the fox and snake do. It is a brave affair.
Next he builds capitols and in their corridors,
Whiter than wax, sonorous, fame as it is,
He establishes statues of reasonable men,
Who surpassed the most literate owl, the most erudite
Of elephants. But to impose is not
To discover. To discover an order as of
A season, to discover summer and know it,
To discover winter and know it well, to find
Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all,
Out of nothing to have come on major weather,
It is possible, possible, possible. It must
Be possible. It must be that in time
The real will from its crude compoundings come,
Seeming at first, a beast disgorged, unlike,
Warmed by a desperate milk. To find the real,
To be stripped of every fiction except one,
The fiction of an absolute—Angel,
Be silent in your luminous cloud and hear
The luminous melody of proper sound.
VIII
What am I to believe? If the angel in his cloud,
Serenely gazing at the violent abyss,
Plucks on his strings to pluck abysmal glory,
Leaps downward through evening’s revelations, and
On his spredden wings, needs nothing but deep space,
Forgets the gold centre, the golden destiny,
Grows warm in the motionless motion of his flight,
Am I that imagine this angel less-satisfied?
Are the wings his, the lapis-haunted air?
Is it he or is it I that experience this?
Is it I then that keep saying there is an hour
Filled with expressible bliss, in which I have
No need, am happy, forget need’s golden hand,
Am satisfied without solacing majesty,
And if there is an hour there is a day,
There is a month, a year, there is a time
In which majesty is a mirror of the self:
I have not but I am and as I am, I am.
These external regions, what do we fill them with
Except reflections, the escapades of death,
Cinderella fulfilling herself beneath the roof?
IX
Whistle aloud, too weedy wren. I can
Do all that angels can. I enjoy like them,
Like men besides, like men in light secluded,
Enjoying angels. Whistle, forced bugler,
That bugles for the mate, nearby the nest,
Cock bugler, whistle and bugle and stop just short,
Red robin, stop in your preludes, practicing
Mere repetitions. These things at least comprise
An occupation, an exercise, a work,
A thing final in itself and, therefore, good:
One of the vast repetitions final in
Themselves and, therefore, good, the going round
And round and round, the merely going round,
Until merely going round is a final good,
The way wine comes at a table in a wood.
And we enjoy like men, the way a leaf
Above the table spins its constant spin,
So that we look at it with pleasure, look
At it spinning its eccentric measure. Perhaps,
The man-hero is not the exceptional monster,
But he that of repetition is most master.
X
Fat girl, terrestrial, my summer, my night,
How is it I find you in difference, see you there
In a moving contour, a change not quite completed?
You are familiar yet an aberration.
Civil, madam, I am, but underneath
A tree, this unprovoked sensation requires
That I should name you flatly, waste no words,
Check your evasions, hold you to yourself.
Even so when I think of you as strong or tired,
Bent over work, anxious, content, alone,
You remain the more than natural figure. You
Become the soft-footed phantom, the irrational
Distortion, however fragrant, however dear.
That’s it: the more than rational distortion,
The fiction that results from feeling. Yes, that.
They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne.
We shall return at twilight from the lecture
Pleased that the irrational is rational,
Until flicked by feeling, in a gildered street,
I call you by name, my green, my fluent mundo.
You will have stopped revolving except in crystal.
———————-
Soldier, there is a war between the mind
And sky, between thought and day and night. IT is
For that the poet is always in the sun,
Patches the moon together in his room
To his Virgilian cadences, up down,
Up down. It is a war that never ends.
Yet it depends on yours. The two are one.
They are a plural, a right and left, a pair,
Two parallels that meet if only in
The meeting of their shadows or that meet
In a book in a barrack, a letter from Malay.
But your war ends. And after it you return
With six meats and twelve wines or else without
To walk another room . . . Monsieur and comrade,
The soldier is poor without the poet’s lines,
His petty syllabi, the sounds that stick,
Inevitably modulating, in the blood.
And war for war, each has its gallant kind.
How simply the fictive hero becomes the real;
How gladly with proper words the solider dies,
If he must, or lives on the bread of faithful speech.
Well, I can’t think of an instance in the history of America where a piece of developed land has been reclaimed as wilderness. Instead, we have a continual, ever-growing process of compromise, whereby inch by inch, foot by foot, and mile by mile the wilderness is being whittled away. Every time the miners or the loggers or the road builders want to get at some new chunk of wilderness, there’s a big struggle and controversy and hullabaloo, and then the solution is what they call a “compromise”; that is, the environmentalists give up part of the wilderness in order to save the rest. Then five or ten years later the developers are back again, wanting another hunk of that same piece of public land.
– Edward Abbey
Look, we’re all scared we’re never going to work again, or that the work will fail us, embarrass us. The world is tough–it’s why we drink or shoot up or pray or fuck around. We need escapes from the reality that’s around us all the time. And the reality is that no one is good enough or pretty enough or important enough to just have things happen for them. You go out and you get them. You make them happen. I’m not afraid to say this, to remind people of the worry and the jostling and the begging and the pestering and the demanding. I may suck the oxygen out of a room, but I get the job, and I get it right. I’ve never disappointed an audience in my life, and I never will, because we’re both out there together, getting what we need. And it didn’t come to me while I was gardening or having my hair done or walking the dog along the fucking Thames. I went out and I got it.
– Elaine Stritch
The trouble with being educated is that it takes a long time; it uses up the better part of your life and when you are finished what you know is that you would have benefited more by going into banking.
– Philip K Dick
America feels like a
subscription service
that keeps raising the
price and removing
the features
– unknown
It might do us good to remember from time to time
that, while differing widely in the various little bits we
know, in our infinite ignorance we are all equal.
– Karl Popper
Inside every pose there an optimal point of balance, a sweet spot, where all the connective tissues of the body harmonize. It is point of perfect tension between grounding and lifting, flexion and extension, expanding outward and pulling in. In yoga, this “sweet spot” has the quality of sukha a word that literally means to be in a “good space.” In the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali defines the sweet spot as the moment where relaxation and effort are embodied in equal measure. It is a state of equilibrium where the nerves let go and the breath moves deep in the body.
In the beginning of practice, most people generally have no idea about the sweet spot. They are so accustomed to being under strain that the feeling of equanimity is foreign. It takes time to hit the sweet spot and to know how to stay in it. Sometimes it requires but a small shift—a slight raise of the hip, a subtle retraction of the shoulder, a fractional turn of the spine. When you hit the sweet spot, your mind goes quiet and there is a feeling of serenity and composure inside. This is the direct experience of immersion, a kind of absorption (samadhi) where all the tissues are bathed in fluid.
The fulfillment of yoga has long been compared to extracting nectar from a fruit. When the practice matures there is a mellowing, a ripening and the nectar flows inside. Finding the sweet spot is to tap this nectar, this most interior juice, so that like an inoculation it moves through you everywhere at once.
– Tias Little
It’s necessary to maintain a state of disobedience against…everything. One must remain somehow, though how, open to any subject or form in principle, open to the possibility of liking, open to the possibility of using. I try to maintain no continuous restrictions in my poetics except with regard to particular works, since writing at all means making some sort of choices. But NO DOCTRINES. Rather I tend to maintain a sense that a particular form or set of rules at a certain point might serve me for a while.
Like many writers I feel ambivalent about words, I know they don’t work, I know they aren’t it. I don’t in the least feel that everything is language. I have a sense that there has been language from the beginning, that it isn’t fundamentally an invention. These are contradictory positions but positions are just words. I don’t believe that the best poems are just words, I think they’re the same as reality; I tend to think reality is poetry, and that it isn’t words. But words are one way to get at reality/poetry, what we’re in all the time. I think words are among us and everywhere else, mingling, fusing with, backing off from us and everything else.
– Alice Notley
& I wanted you as a thief in the night, & I wanted you to promulgate my cult, & I wanted you as breakdown, as private life & I wanted you, parent of revolution, & I wanted you to make the land carry more sheep for the wool trade, and I wanted you, a talisman, & I wanted you, arboreal mixed up with city & I wanted you at the front, as someone who might walk to the edge of town, & I wanted you up to my neck, & I wanted you as partner to my friend’s existence, and I wanted you changed by daylight, and I wanted as I need books, & I wanted you
– Anne Waldman
People aren’t taught to project themselves in dynamic, articulate ways. And most people aren’t gorgeous or absolutely sure of who they are. I know that I make films, I’m an artist. But there are times when I don’t really know who I am. The unconscious assumption of who we are and what we’re here for, those questions are fragile in most people’s minds. There are times when that unconscious sense of ourselves slips through our fingers.
– Todd Haynes
A life of writing is a nonlife devoted to the possibility of fire.
– Simon Critchley
PERFUME—the heady and elusive marriage of the essences of herbs and spices, wild grasses and flowers, bark and animal and tree—is an engine of the universe. From earliest times, people have taken pleasure in rubbing fragrant substances into their skin. Timeless and universal, scent has been a powerful force in ritual, medicine, myth, and conquest. Perfume has helped people to pray, to heal, to make love and war, to prepare for death, to create. To inspire, after all, is literally “to breathe in.”
– Mandy Aftel
No permanence is ours; we are a wave
That flows to fit whatever form it finds
– Hermann Hesse
If a friend of mine gave a feast, and did not invite me to it, I should not mind a bit. but if a friend of mine had a sorrow and refused to allow me to share it, I should feel it most bitterly. If he shut the doors of the house of mourning against me, I would move back again and again and beg to be admitted so that I might share in what I was entitled to share. If he thought me unworthy, unfit to weep with him, I should feel it as the most poignant humiliation.
– Oscar Wilde
David Wright: If I can quote you at yourself, you’ve talked about how literature can hold open human wounds, the wounds of history, how poetry can allow us to see the ruptures in the language, the ruptures in the self, the ruptures in the culture that occur in situations of extremity. It strikes me that the story you were telling about the prison and going to the barrio and being in that room [during her time in El Salvador as a human rights advocates, at the beginning of the Salvadoran Civil War]. That’s not a story you’ve allowed to heal over in any way. It’s a wound that’s supposed to be held open in some way.
Carolyn Forché: Yes. Because I don’t want to lose what I learned there. And I don’t want to move on. And I don’t want closure. And I don’t want to recover. Because I don’t want to lose what happened to me. I don’t want that to be changed back. I don’t want to return to the obliviousness that I had participated in before that. You have to hold things open in order to nurture whatever new awareness was born there.
(…) repetition is a very flexible convention. It has obvious sonic value. It shifts, emphasizes, accretes, augments, alters meaning. Repetition has a built-in momentum and thus can be used to establish or at least insinuate cadence. Very pleasurable. And when you are working on a longer work, repetition serves as a significant point of return, in lieu of a predetermined destination or definite narrative arc. It provides a breath-catching point of orientation. Very serviceable.
– CD Wright
The best stories I have heard were pointless, the best books those whose plot I can never remember, the best individuals those whom I never get anywhere with. Though it has been practiced on me time and again I never cease to marvel how it happens that with certain individuals whom I know, within a few minutes after greeting them we are embarked on an endless voyage comparable in feeling and trajectory only to the deep middle dream which the practiced dreamer slips into like a bone slips into its socket.
– Henry Miller
Deep down, we know our devotion to reality is just a marriage of convenience, and we leave it to the seers, the shamans, the ascetics, the religious teachers, the artists among us to reach a higher state of awareness, from which they transcend our rigorous but routinely analyzing senses and become closer to the raw experience of nature that pours into the unconscious, the world of dreams, the source of myth…..
Our several senses, which feel so personal and impromptu, and seem at times to divorce us from other people, reach far beyond us. They’re an extension of the genetic chain that connects us to everyone who has ever lived; they bind us to other people and to animals, across time and country and happenstance. ….
It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery. However many of life’s large, captivating principles and small, captivating details we may explore, unpuzzle, and learn by heart, there will still be vast unknown realms to lure us. If uncertainty is the essence of romance, there will always be enough uncertainty to make life sizzle and renew our sense of wonder. It bothers some people that no matter how passionately they may delve, the universe remains inscrutable.
“For my part,” Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote, “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one’s curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sun-struck hills every day. Where there is no risk, the emotional terrain is flat and unyielding, and, despite all its dimensions, valleys, pinnacles, and detours, life will seem to have none of its magnificent geography, only a length. It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.”
– Diane Ackerman
The true inner self must be drawn up like a jewel from the bottom of the sea, rescued from confusion, from indistinction, from immersion in the common, the nondescript, the trivial, the sordid, the evanescent
– Thomas Merton
Here is the fringey edge where elements meet and realms mingle, where time and eternity spatter each other with foam.
– Annie Dillard
Everything Is Going To Be Alright
by Derik Mahon
How should I not be glad to contemplate
the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window
and a high tide reflected on the ceiling ?
There will be dying, there will be dying.
but there is no need to go into that.
The poems flow from the hand unbidden
and the hidden source is the watchful heart.
The sun rises in spite of everything
and the far cities are beautiful and bright.
I lie here in a riot of sunlight
watching the day break and the clouds flying.
Everything is going to be alright.
To be purposeful is not to be goal oriented, but to seek to reconnect to the source of one’s life.
– Michael Meade
Why was I always suffering, always browbeaten, always accused, for ever condemned? Why could I never please? Why was it useless to try to win any one’s favor?
– Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
You can’t wait for healing to feel whole in gratitude. You have to actually feel wholeness and gratitude for your healing to begin. You can’t wait for wealth to feel abundance. That would be the old model of cause and effect. You would have to feel abundance ahead of the actual experience to generate wealth.
– Dr. Joe Dispenza
The question is: can you live with all the ups and downs of being human experience and still be aware and nurtured by the truth of who you are?
Yes!
– Gangaji
When we leave the body, we leave behind skin color, nationality, riches, religious orientation. We are souls, and souls are of one energy.
– Dr. Brian Weiss
We do not want to survive merely, or to survive so as to be tormented forever in hell. We want to survive interestingly, even elegantly.
– Alan Watts
Black frost binds hard and holds the waste of life;
No phantom sun can warm it.
– A. E. Waite
Then her soul sat on her lips, and language flowed, from what source I cannot tell.
– Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
…if collective material is completely contradictory, if our basic ethical disposition is completely contradictory, only then is it possible for us to have an individual, responsible, free conscious superstructure over those basic opposites.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
The day is made up of its moments of silence. The rest is lost time.
– Nicolás Gómez Dávila
When the standards have been set, the work of philosophy is just this, to examine and uphold the standards, but the work of a truly good person is in using those standards when they know them.
– Epictetus
August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.
– Sylvia Plath
Women are heaven; women are dharma; and women are the highest penance. Women are Buddha; women are the Sangha; and women are the perfection of Wisdom.
– Candamaharosana Tantra
For just one minute a day,
it would be best to try
looking upon yourself
as God does,
for SHE knows your royal,
true nature.
– Hafiz
Might saying “I wonder,” rather than “I believe” (or “I know”), be the best way to step beyond the world’s mounting dividedness?
– Pico Iyer
$80K car loan → “Nice ride, enjoy it.”
$150K student debt → “Everyone has it, no big deal.”
$25K vacation on credit → “You only live once.”
$10K in Bitcoin → “You’re crazy, that’s gambling.”
Society will cheer you on going broke,
but will panic the second you try to build wealth.
– @silvinaescudero
Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame. When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts.
– Garry Winogrand
Faith is the ultimate subject, the true self. Therefore, when we distance ourselves from the one moment of faith, we are already far from the Tathagata, away from the self, and are living in a sky of illusory dreams.
– Soga Ryōjin
I have a self, but am not bound by that self.
I have a lineage, but am not bound by that lineage.
I have a society, but am not bound by that society.
I have a life, but am not bound by that life.
– @VinceFHorn
C.S. Lewis had a passion for hearing things read aloud, a power of memory for things received in that way, and also a facility in extempore criticism…
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Life should feel ridiculously full of hope again
For no small unwarranted reason. Perhaps
You should consider breaking a law today.
– Aaron Fagan
snow geese
unzip the morning sky
my journey starts
– Chen-ou Liu
The illusion is collapsing. Anything that was not built on truth or divinity is dissolving. The old world is burning down. Meanwhile, a new world is emerging. A new paradigm that will be led by those who have built themselves brick by brick, as leaders of the new.
– Nika Solé
This morning, I was assailed by such sadness at the velocity of life, the distance I’ve travelled from my own youth, the persistence of the old regrets, the new regrets, the ability of failure to freshen itself in novel forms, that I almost crashed the car.
– Denis Johnson
The citizen and the novelist in me are always at war, and that can be enormously productive, as long as neither of them wins.
– Javier Cercas
First of all we must rescue our language from the generalizers, the categorizers, the classifiers, the reducers of things to ideas, the mongers of stereotypes and clichés, the ‘clerks’ of the universities.
– Wendell Berry
TURNING
Hep cats turning hip
Was it one chord change at a time?
The flip of a hip on a dance floor?
Was it by someone in a record store
holding an LP?
Body remembering parts of tunes
one bar at a time.?
The slip
of backbones, shoulders
Dancers swinging low
Zuit suits lifted away
by split notes
Flash traded for greater mobility.
Accents changing on
steps, phrases.
Bass or drums
Leading more often?
Instruments a beat behind
a stanza with rhyme?
Intensifying with pauses
between lines
in and out
side the meter?
“Wrong notes”
Carefully placed
Where rhyme was anticipated?
Paint scattered
on the canvass,
Or strategically placed?
for our eyes and ears
to connect the dots, blots
and curved lines?
Inspired by unfamiliar scales?
Mags turning to zines
with the flip of a page
A mix of rage
and coolness from
fingers, breath, voices
Funk edging it’s way in.
Choices
Expanding then narrowing
again.
New and long time fans
sounding off about what’s really
Jazz
Blues
Folk
About
Miles’
back turned
Duke’s move to pack up
“I think that working with you gentlemen
would have been a pleasure” said he
to T.V. execs who said
a mixed band could not all go on together
Sam Cooke’s demand to
“take the rope down”
Undividing a young audience.
About the impurity
of fusion
Rocking some Jazz
Jazzing some rock
Invoking the name
in the next frame
of Charlie Parker.
No idea how much not really
Jazz he played.
Does some sage
say turn the page
the zine now a mag
Is the next step
from hip back to hep?
– Jerry Pendergast
Poetry is one thing. Imagine walking around with symphonies in your head?
– Sean Thomas Dougherty
What has become alien to men is the human component of culture, its closest part, which upholds them against the world… The great works of art and philosophical constructions have remained uncomprehended not through their too great distance from the heart of human experience, but the opposite.
– Theodor W. Adorno
I could feel the certainty of a reality leeching out of me like calcium from a bone. I was starving my mind into obliqueness. I felt less and less. Words came and I spoke them in my head, then nestled in on the sound of them, got lost in the music.
– Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Whatever the circumstance, bodily movement or stillness, feeling well or distressed, with good concentration or scattered attention, everything can be brought back to awareness.
– Kittisaro
God be thanked for books.
– James Baldwin
Reading was like an addiction; I read while I ate, on the train, in bed until late at night, in school, where I’d keep the book hidden so I could read during class. Before long I bought a small stereo and spent all my time in my room, listening to jazz records. But I had almost no desire to talk to anyone about the experience I gained through books and music. I felt happy just being me and no one else. In that sense I could be called a stack-up loner.
– Haruki Murakami
first love
at one time
when I was 14
the creators brought me
my only feeling of
chance.
my father disliked
books and
my mother disliked
books (because my father
disliked books)
especially those I brought back
from the library:
D.H. Lawrence
Dostoevsky
Turgenev
Gorky
A. Huxley
Sinclair Lewis
others.
I had my own bedroom
but at 8 p.m.
we were all supposed to go to sleep:
“Early to bed and early to rise
makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise,”
my father would say.
“LIGHTS OUT!” he would shout.
then I would take the bed lamp
place it under the covers
and under the heat and hidden light
I would continue to read:
Ibsen
Shakespeare
Chekov
Jeffers
Thurber
Conrad Aiken
others.
they brought me chance and hope and
feeling in a place of no chance
no hope, no feeling.
I worked for it.
it got hot under the covers.
sometimes the sheets would begin to smoke
or the sheets–there would be a
burning;
then I’d switch the lamp off,
hold it outside to
cool.
without those books
I’m not quite sure
how I would have gone
then:
raving; the
murder of the father;
idiocy; imbecility
drab hopelessness.
when my father shouted
“LIGHTS OUT!”
I’m sure he feared
the well-written word
that appeared with gentleness
and reasonableness
in our best and
most interesting
literature.
and it was there
close to me
under the covers
more woman than woman
more man than man.
I had it all
and
I took it.
– Charles Bukowski
It’s not like some other fields.
If you’re an artist, you’re always an artist.
– Suchitra Mattai
poetry isn’t therapy.
therapy asks how you’re feeling.
poetry already fucking knows.
and still wants you anyway.
– Christopher Sexton
August is the month
of reckoning.
Of standing in
the field with arms open,
seeing what you have grown,
and what has withered.
– Clarissa Pinkola Estés
It was her habit to build laughter out of inadequate materials.
– John Steinbeck
Underneath all the drama, the restlessness, the hopes and fears, behind the narratives we weave about ourselves, and even before we’ve thought of ourselves as ourselves, lies a simple, unadorned awareness.
– Andrew Olendzki
POEM
My heart in pieces like the bits
Of traffic lost in the blue
Rain confused I roar off into
To learn how to build a ladder
With air in my lungs again
To be with you in that region
Of speed and altitude where our bodies
Sail off to be kissed and changed
By light that behaves like a hand
Picking us up in one state and putting
Us down in a different one every time
– Tom Clark
Many have thought that individuation is a form of narcissistic preoccupation. Rather the enlarged person, the one who undertakes and returns from the quest, serves the tribe through challenge, redemption and reinvigoration.
– James Hollis
I have done all I could. I have done my best.
– Evelyn Waugh
YOUR BRAIN IS NOT A PRISON!
by Sasha Debevec-McKenney
A prison is the only place that’s a prison.
Maybe your brain is a beehive—or, better:
an ants nest? A spin class?
The sand stuck in an hourglass? Your brain is like
stop it. So you practice driving with your knees,
you get all the way out to the complex of Little League fields,
you get chicken fingers with four kinds of mustard—
spicy, whole grain, Dijon, yellow—
you walk from field to field, you watch yourself
play every position, you circle each identical game,
each predictable outcome. On one field you catch.
On one field you pitch. You are center field. You are left.
Sometimes you have steady hands and French braids.
Sometimes you slide too hard into second on purpose.
It feels as good to get the bloody knee as it does to kick yourself in the shin.
You wait for the bottom of the ninth to lay your blanket out in the sun.
Admit it, Sasha, the sun helps. Today,
the red team hits the home run. Red floods every field.
A wasp lands on your thigh. You know this feeling.
It can be hard to tell which issues can be solved by filling a hole, and which ones are bottomless holes that can’t be filled
eg- i knew someone w touch starvation most of their life who said they spent most of a year addicted to physical touch, and that just… filled the reservoir, fixed the need for touch. Moved on to other stuff
On the other side, I think we’ve all probably met someone who’s trying to fill a bottomless hole — there’s never enough money or power or love or sex or food or whatever else; constantly filling it is more of an act of maintenance than healing
I’m feeling that a lot of this is skill issue?
In a few different ways,
One of which is that if you’re trying to fill the hole but you’re also numbing yourself so that you can’t actually *feel* the pleasure/safety/whatever that the love/power/sex/etc is giving you (however fleetingly), then of course you aren’t filling the hole. You’re shoveling representations of the need into your system, but you aren’t letting your system feel and register them.
The other skill issue is becoming more aware of the hole and what caused it, what it *wants*, and the ways that the things you’re filling it with aren’t actually all that connected with those wants. Trying to make up with a lack of love by eating food is a classic one.
Soooo I guess i’m leaning towards a view where there aren’t actually bottomless holes of need inside any of us. There’s just normal holes that are perfectly addressable if we start… actually addressing them. From a place of presence and consciousness. Instead of numbness, denial, distortion, craving, etc.
– River Kenna
Delta
by Arthur Bull
You stood up and walked away,
taking your coffee. I stayed
to finish mine, not smiling,
remembering that late flight
over the Mackenzie Delta:
Look down: ten thousand
streams, all contrarimindedness
and contradiction—each little river
its own thought or circumstance,
each one saying—I was here first
deal with me. You can try and count
them as they cut through the green
unknown of the summer tundra.
No one has ever done it.
I know you have entered me
to the farthest blue capillary.
All you need to know is this:
The mighty Mackenzie River
flows into the Arctic Ocean.
It has nowhere else to go.
I am alive. It hurts so much. It is extraordinary.
– Alina Stefanescu
Panhandle
by Jesse Nathan
Bang it all, Jack Spicer
there can be but the one Mellow Yellow
rolling out from that Victorian on Fell
into lusty fog
gusting cold enough to take the hair off a polar bear
just at the moment a wishbone of eucalyptus
crashes through the tree’s branches
letting something go
from a restless head of light.
Only by a slight margin—five yays, six nays—
did Sue Bierman hold off the powers
and principalities who had for years licked their lips
to pave this corridor of green
to make two freeways meet
in orgies of commerce and congestion,
Sue Bierman, city planner, who’d come from Nebraska
fought through the tedium of meetings
so that I—you or anyone—could rest on a bench
Mellow Yellow wafting
on our walk through early twenty-first century
airy graces of the Panhandle,
who brought with her from the prairie an assurance
as urbane as rural—an idea of breathing
married to an idea of space—
who would one day vote against a Saks
to be installed at Union Square because it was
she said a lumpy thing to look at.
…I was never obliged to teach anything except what I loved (and do) with an inextinguishable enthusiasm.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
the point of literature is not to be put into capsules, a trick good only for pharmaceutical manufacturers.
– Yiyun Li
I made slow Riches but my Gain
Was steady as the Sun
And every Night, it numbered more
Than the preceding
One All Days, I did not earn the same
But my perceiveless Gain
Inferred the less by Growing than
The Sum that it had grown.
– Emily Dickinson
This is how I’ve come to understand the Buddhist path in a practical world: Planning is necessary. But clinging is optional.
– Tony Collins
Let’s not whore ourselves to nitwit ideologies. Let’s not give our control over to the least among us.
Rather, you know, claim your place in the sun and go forward into the light. The tools are there; the path is known; you simply have to turn your back on a culture that has gone sterile and dead, and get with the program of a living world and a re-empowerment of the imagination.
– Terence McKenna
Wanting to reform the world without discovering one’s true self is like trying to cover the world with leather to avoid the pain of walking on stones and thorns. It is much simpler to wear shoes.
– Ramana Maharshi
All it takes is one thing within you to change, for everything around you to change.
– Nika Solé
In the future (so now) we will all travel via our imaginations. Some will travel great lengths others will remain exactly where they are.
– Laura Kerr
Time will say nothing but I told you so,
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.
– W. H. Auden
It takes months to years to get in shape.
It takes weeks to months to get out of shape.
– Dan Go
We all just want the hard work to pay off
– @ThePhDPlace
Fasting is the greatest remedy, the physician within.
– Philippus Paracelsus
“Go,” said Hope, “and live again…”
– Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
The Friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others.
– C.S. Lewis
even the moon
over my hometown
brings tears
– Issa
When the attention has revealed the contradiction in something on which it has been fixed, a kind of loosening takes place. By persevering in this course we attain detachment.
– Simone Weil
We were all four of us an arrangement around a missing centerpiece, as incoherent as a verb-less sentence.
– Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn
One feels as much weariness counting up the number of enjoyments that one will never have, whatever one does, as calculating those one has already had. If one could embrace everything, in fact, really, would there be weariness?
– Albert Camus
If you have really worked on your complexes, you become more or less untouchable and you are no longer influenced by poisonous gossip. As long as poisonous talk can get to you, it means there is some shadow element around that isn’t yet integrated.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
But the spirit of the depths said: No
one can or should halt sacrifice.
Sacrifice is not destruction; sacrifice is
the foundation stone of what is to
come. Have you not had monasteries?
Have not countless thousands gone
into the desert?
You should carry the monastery in
yourself. The desert is within you.
– CG Jung, The Red Book
If I fall, I’ll fall five feet four inches forward in the fight for freedom. I’m not backing off.
– Fannie Lou Hamer
You know, once they’re declaring a renaissance, my God, that means that some dark age will be fast upon us.
– Tobias Wolff
In journalism, there has always
been a tension between getting
it first and getting it right.
– Ellen Goodman
The stars incline; they do not bind.
– Ptolemy
Everything that exists is locked in thesis–antithesis–synthesis.
– Ray Ann Bucu
The world may be mean, but people don’t have to be, not if they refuse.
– Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad
You need to have a latticework of mental models in your head.
– Charlie Munger
THE TICKET
On the night table
beside my bed
I keep a small
blue ticket
One day I found it
In my pocket book
I don’t know how
It got there
I don’t know
What it’s for
On one side
there’s a number
98833
And
INDIANA TICKET COMPANY
And on the other side
The only thing it says
Is KEEP THIS TICKET
I keep it carefully
Because I’m old
Which means
I’ll soon be leaving
For another country
Where possibly
Some blinding-bright
enormous angel
Will stop me
At the border
And ask
To see my ticket.
– Anne Porter
I did not know him,
I knew my idea of him.
– Sharon Olds
Sixty two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth.
– Brave New World
If there are infinite worlds, this proves the infinite ingenuity of the Engineer of our Universe, but then there is no limit to this Poet. He can have created inhabited worlds everywhere, but inhabited by ever-different creatures. Perhaps the inhabitants of the sun are sunnier, brighter, and more illuminated than are the inhabitants of the earth, who are heavy with matter, and the inhabitants of the moon lie somewhere in between. On the sun live beings who are all Form, or all Act, if you prefer, while on the earth beings are made of mere Potentials that evolve, and on the moon they are in medio fluctuantes, lunatics, so to speak…
– Umberto Eco
I always behave — I insist upon behaving, whatever I am told and whatever my own discouragements may be, as if love someday might be fulfilled, as if the Sovereign Good were possible.
– Roland Barthes
As summer thickens the garden gets
explosive, almost angry: tall, weepy
coils, psychotic
vegetables. You could break
a hard-won sobriety
just by looking at it. Look
somewhere else, for God’s sake,
look up. Which cloud
does God live on? The one
in the foreground, the gold one, the one
by all the mottled blue. In the morning
when we could finally see
you said you were trying to understand
my face. Or maybe it’s
the marbled one, the one that looks like Earth
as seen from outer space
– Maggie Nelson, Which cloud
What l look back at is how people realize the commonality and collective strength and collective love of our country. We love our country. And the thing about that experience is exactly what propels me to think about this moment and the future and not look back too much. Which is those same people – they are still here. They still know joy in their hearts. They still know how to have a sense of optimism, faith, and in the future and to believe and to fight for that. And that hasn’t gone away.
I just think it’s really important that we never let a circumstance, situation, or person defeat our spirit. You can’t let that happen. You can’t give up your belief in what can be and what can be better. In spite of that – you know I talked about the day after the election and again I talked about it in the book. That was a rough bleeping day for me and it was important to me in that speech I gave the next day after the election to remind people to not give up.
I am so aware of the joy that was there and the hope and the enthusiasm and I just think we have to remember that it was not just a candidate that gave that. It came from the people who naturally have that and this election cannot take that away but let’s be clear eyed about it. Let’s be clear eyed about what is going on. That is why people are taking to the streets, people are organizing, and people are talking to each other and talking about the issues and they are articulating what we know is wrong and what it should be. So let’s just not be defeated, right. Let’s just not be defeated.
– Kamala Harris on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
Hauntings are only integrated when we turn on the light of awareness and see the nothing that is there, the invisible that is present, allied with the challenge to take part in the construction of our story with a more differentiated consciousness. Hauntings may move us from fugitive pathology to summons when we stop running and turn and face our spectral visitants. Hauntings are transformed when we bring the unfolding mystery that we are to engage the mystery to which they invite us. As surrealist poet Paul Éluard observed, there is another world, and it is in this one. When we grasp his dictum, we know that here, in us, between you and me, is the meeting place of both the visible and the invisible worlds, the permutating movement of spirits that in the end are one. Both worlds wait upon our showing up, being present in this visible world while remaining mindful of the silent ministries of the invisible one as well.
– James Hollis
We find our own origins in the ancient arts. Loss of the ancient means loss of the realization of the timeless in the present time, whenever an old tree is cut, whenever an old landmark is razed. When the place of one’s personal roots are destroyed the roots of the individual wither.
– Robert Aitken, A Zen Wave
One of the places that you can get to with poetry is this understanding that you’re participating in an endeavor that goes back to the beginning of the species. And at certain points, things start to get written down, but poetry predates writing. There’s this whole fabric that you bind yourself to. It’s one of the things that can keep you going. You’re taking permission, and then you’re creating permission. But for her, it’s talking to and listening to and communing with the dead as much as the living. The living are not ever out of the picture in the work, but maybe the dead are underrepresented. There’s more of them than there are of us.
– Anselm Berrigan
There are, you see, two ways of reading a book, each grounded in a different image of thought. In the first, the book is treated as a vessel of representation—an object containing a signified essence, to be deciphered and interpreted in accordance with a logic of recognition. This is the reading of mediation, where concepts are extracted, one after another, as if each were a determination subordinated to the generality of meaning. The book becomes a nesting doll of other books, each enfolded within or enclosing the last. Annotation, commentary, exegesis—all fall under this regime, governed by the law of the Same and the model of resemblance. This is reading as infinite deferral within the dogmatic image of thought.
But there is another way, an intensive reading that operates transversally, machinically. Here, the book is no longer a container but an intensive multiplicity, a divergent series, a system of singularities in flux. One no longer asks what does it mean? but how does it function?—how does it connect, what circuits does it form, what thresholds does it cross? The book works or it doesn’t, like an experiment that either produces a singular event or fails to effect any difference. In this mode, reading is no longer representational but productive, diagrammatic. It ceases to be a hermeneutic act and becomes an act of involution, of folding and unfolding between heterogeneous series. This is reading as encounter, as becoming: where the book is torn from itself and forced into conjunction with other machines—bodily, political, material, affective. And in this tearing, this love of proximity and experimentation, reading becomes an ethics of immanence: not interpretation, but participation.
– Gilles Deleuze
There’s an infinity of ways in which you can move from that spot over there to here. But do your movements allow us to feel your spirit? Have you figured those movements out in your head? Or are we seeing your soul in motion?…. the essential thing is that your movements, even when you’re standing still, embody your soul at all times.
– Ohno Kazuo
One of the roles of philosophy is to play the fool, or idiot. From its inception, philosophy has been closely tied to idiotism. Every philosopher who has brought forth a new idiom – a new language, a new way of thinking – has necessarily been an idiot. Only the idiot has access to the wholly Other. […] Socrates knows only that he does not know; he is an idiot. Likewise, Descartes – who casts doubt on everything – is an idiot. Cogito ergo sum is idiotic. It takes an inner contradiction of thinking to make a new beginning possible.
– Byung-chul Han, Psychopolitics
Accidents ambush the unsuspecting … just like love.
– Andrew Davidson
There’s an exercise I do with my students where I ask them to draw a sort of blueprint of the house they grew up in and place a few things they remember around the house. And then, using those things, write a sentence about each of them, finally turning those sentences into a sort of poem of reminiscence. For me, the physical place—especially as it lives in memory—is an avenue into emotion and idea. It’s a doorway through which you can apprehend those other things. Without that, I think I’d find it a lot harder to find my way to emotion, epiphany, whatever it is that’s going to happen in a poem. The best poem is almost always the one that is unplanned. You’re fretful throughout, thinking, “This one’s going to crap out like they usually do.” But then something wonderful and unexpected happens and part of the answer is place is an avenue to get to these other things.
– Frederick Smock
A paste of blue cloud untangled itself on the red sky over the harbor.
– Anne Carson
The skeleton was as happy as a madman whose straightjacket had been taken off. He felt liberated at being able to walk without flesh. The mosquitoes didn’t bite him anymore. He didn’t have to have his hair cut. He was neither hungry nor thirsty, hot nor cold. He was far from the lizard of love.
– Leonora Carrington
Stay young, always,
in the theater of
your mind.
– Mary Oliver
There’s no vocabulary for love within a family, love that’s lived in but not looked at, love within the light of which all else is seen, the love within which all other love finds speech. This love is silent.
– T.S. Eliot
Worried my love’s not worth much, but I always
come when called. Ain’t my name your favorite
command?
– Saeed Jones
oh wait, it’s dumb to try and keep yourself balanced during transformative process
like, by definition the thing that looks like ‘balance’ to you is going to be a stunting return to your old self
the thing you’re trying to move towards (and the process of getting there) will look very “unbalanced” from where you are now
– River Kenna
Foole, said my Muse to me, looke in thy heart and write.
– Sir Philip Sidney
Why are vampires afraid of the Scots?
They use Gaelic.
As a result of practice,
people recognize their
dignity, and everybody
is brilliant and glowing
– Chögyam Trungpa
SLOW LIVING
Slow living, I have come to understand, opens up the prospect of slow love, the most sustaining sort of love I have ever known – a love that comes of an unhurried and focused attention to the simplest things, available to all of us, at any time, should we choose to engage: family, friendship, food, music, art, books, our bodies, our minds, our souls, and the life that blooms and buzzes all around us.
Perhaps even more importantly, slow love comes out of the quiet hours, out of learning from the silence that is always there when we want it.
– Dominique Browning
The river and everything I remembered about it became a possession to me, a personal, private possession, as nothing else in my life ever had. Now it ran nowhere but in my head, but there it ran as though immortally. I could feel it – I can feel it – on different places on my body…. In me it still is, and will be until I die, green, rocky, deep, fast, slow, and beautiful beyond reality.
– James Dickey
I am not an artist, nor do I wish to be: I am only a witness of my era.
– Gianni Berengo Gardin
When Jesus Christ was nailed to a cross, he said, “Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do.” What kind of a man was that? Any real man, obeying the Code of Hammurabi, would have said, “Kill them, Dad, and all their friends and relatives, and make their deaths slow and painful.”
If Christ hadn’t delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn’t want to be a human being.
I would just as soon be a rattlesnake.
Revenge provokes revenge which provokes revenge which provokes revenge — forming an unbroken chain of death and destruction linking nations of today to barbarous tribes of thousands and thousands of years ago.
We may never dissuade leaders of our nation or any other nation from responding vengefully, violently, to every insult or injury. In this, the Age of Television, they will continue to find irresistible the temptation to become entertainers, to compete with movies by blowing up bridges and police stations and factories and so on…
But in our personal lives, our inner lives, at least, we can learn to live without the sick excitement, without the kick of having scores to settle with this particular person, or that bunch of people, or that particular institution or race or nation. And we can then reasonably ask forgiveness for our trespasses, since we forgive those who trespass against us. And we can teach our children and then our grandchildren to do the same — so that they, too, can never be a threat to anyone.
– Kurt Vonnegut
For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture.
I mean, if you’ve ever spoken to someone with two heads, you know they know something you don’t.
A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know.
Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.
One thing that struck me early is that you don’t put into a photograph what’s going to come out. Or, vice versa, what comes out is not what you put in.
Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding.
If you scrutinize reality closely enough, if in some way you really, really get to it, it becomes fantastic.
I tend to think of the act of photographing, generally speaking, as an adventure.
My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.
I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.
– Diane Arbus
And until we understand that the forms projected at us by our technology are greatly more informative than the verbal messages they convey we are going to go on being helpless illiterates in a world we made ourselves.
– Marshall McLuhan
If I was dead,
and my bones adrift
like dropped oars
in the deep, turning earth;
or drowned,
and my skull
a listening shell
on the dark ocean bed;
if I was dead,
and my heart
soft mulch
for a red, red rose;
or burned,
and my body
a fistful of grit, thrown
in the face of the wind;
if I was dead,
and my eyes,
blind at the roots of flowers,
wept into nothing,
I swear your love
would raise me
out of my grave,
in my flesh and blood,
like Lazarus;
hungry for this,
and this, and this,
your living kiss.
– Carol Ann Duffy
Others disapproved of him because he devoted his whole life to art, and they saw he was not a genius. For them, the nobility of that persistence passed unnoticed.
– John Berger
And then how tame and weak has life itself become during the last two shabby centuries. Where do we now meet an original nature? and where is the man who has the strength to be true, and to show himself as he is? This, however, affects the poet, who must find all within himself, while he is left in the lurch by all without.
– Goethe
Altogether, the style of a writer is a faithful representative of his mind; therefore, if any man wish to write a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.
– Goethe
The poet nailed on
the hard bone of this world,
his soul dedicated to silence
is a fish with frog’s eyes,
the blood of a poet flows
out with his poems, back
to the pyramid of bones
from which he is thrust
his death is a saving grace
creation is perfect
– Bob Kaufman
The unreliability of perceptions in general means that the knowledge and vision that constitutes awakening can’t be mediated by perceptions.
– Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Love Song
How shall I hold on to my soul, so that
it does not touch yours? How shall I lift
it gently up over you on to other things?
I would so very much like to tuck it away
among long lost objects in the dark.
in some quiet, unknown place, somewhere
which remains motionless when your depths resound.
And yet everything which touches us, you and me.
takes us together like a single bow,
drawing out from two strings but one voice.
On which instrument are we strung?
And which violinist holds us in his hand?
O sweetest of songs.
– Rainer Maria Rilke, (tr. Cliff Crego)
Always remain open
to turns and surprises along
the way. Welcome the
unexpected.
– Rick Rubin
Bees Were Better
by Naomi Shihab Nye
In college, people were always breaking up.
We broke up in parking lots,
beside fountains.
Two people broke up
across a table from me
at the library.
I could not sit at that table again
though I did not know them.
I studied bees, who were able
to convey messages through dancing
and could find their ways
home to their hives
even if someone put up a blockade of sheets
and boards and wire.
Bees had radar in their wings and brains
that humans could barely understand.
I wrote a paper proclaiming
their brilliance and superiority
and revised it at a small café
featuring wooden hive-shaped honey-dippers
in silver honeypots
at every table.
Night is a history of longing, and you are my night
– Mahmoud Darwish
A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world – and might even be more difficult to save.
– C.S. Lewis
Love should be like breathing. It should be a quality in you. Wherever you are, with whomsoever you are, or even if you are alone, love goes on overflowing from you. It is not a question of being in love with someone. It is a question of being love.
– Osho
sunlight threads
its way through the web
so much still
held together
by the thinnest strand
– @NituYumnam
There are poisons that blind you,
and poisons that open your eyes.
– August Strindberg
When you think you’ve been injured, apply this rule: If the community isn’t injured by it, neither am I. And if it is, anger is not the answer. Show the offender where he went wrong.
– Marcus Aurelius
Someone I love died. The love didn’t die, and I had to tend it.
– Miguel Murphy
liberation from the world
means that one’s mind is
not concerned with the opinions of the world
– Dogen
If you’re not exercising you’re not as intelligent as you think.
– Dan Go
To write is to defend the solitude that one inhabits…
– María Zambrano
i cannot overstate how big the difference is between
a – learning a map, then venturing into the territory, and
b – venturing through the territory, then finding out there are maps
– River Kenna
Don’t be pushed around by the fears in your mind. Be led by the dreams in your heart.
– Roy T. Bennett
If [a story] moves, delights, instructs, enthrals, seizes, and compels us, it does so as itself, not as an assemblage of component parts, an analogue…of Dr Frankenstein’s monster… riveted together from the hacked or discarded limbs of other entities.
– Raymond Edwards
Ease your spirit until there is clear cause for alarm.
– Coll (Lloyd Alexander, The High King)
We awaken continually. Cultivating lasting emotional stability requires a willingness to look and look again.
– Jessica Angima
So much of the poet’s task is contained in this small freak (or is it a resonant pattern?) of language. The poet sifts through the detritus of language and notices something that gleams.
– Essay: On Chloe García Roberts by Anthony Domestico
lengthening days…
even the morning glory
turns a shade bluer
– John Wisdom
We must, all of us together, dig the grave in which colonialism will finally be entombed.
– Frantz Fanon
Fiction writers really expect to be heard. Whereas poets don’t. Poets go into writing poetry knowing it’s speculation.
– Fanny Howe
There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.
– Jean-Paul Sartre
People do these things to other people. Not just in Nazi concentration camps and in Abu Ghraib…Americans, too, do them […] When they are told or made to feel that those over whom they have absolute power deserve to be mistreated, humiliated, tormented.
– Susan Sontag
When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.
– Dom Helder Camara, Brazilian Archbishop
As the anglophone tradition ascended, other national literatures shrank to become increasingly local.
– Vincenzo Latronico
When we reject our innate
predisposition for spirituality,
we deny ourselves the tools to
navigate the anxieties of this
historic moment of disruption.
– Aarianna Huffington
The press should be the critic of the government and it’s very important they do that with a lot of responsibility.
– Katharine Graham
You want to understand why America is like this, why Trump happened, why the rot keeps spreading, why cruelty isn’t a bug but the feature?
It’s not a mystery. It’s the oldest story we’ve never told honestly. And until we face it, we will keep collapsing into darker versions of ourselves.
This country was not founded on freedom.
It was founded on stolen land, cleared by slaughter, and built by stolen people, broken by force.
That is the foundational transaction.
Everything else is decoration.
We did not reckon with the genocide of Native peoples.
We mythologized it. We made Westerns about it.
We named football teams after the dead.
We paved over bones and called it destiny.
We did not reckon with slavery.
We declared it over, and then immediately wrote new laws to replace chains with prison bars.
We never paid for the centuries of free labor, for the children sold, for the torture, for the theft of time and breath and lineage.
We made a new America, but left the engine intact.
The Confederacy lost the war but won the memory.
We let them rewrite history in marble.
The monuments didn’t go up in 1865.
They went up in the 1950s.
Not as remembrance, but as warning.
We never cleansed the institutions.
The racists became sheriffs.
The sheriffs became senators.
And the logic of white supremacy adapted, changing shape, changing code, but never losing its grip.
That’s why America elects racists.
Not in spite of our history, but because of it.
When the mask slips and the candidate says the quiet part out loud, it doesn’t alienate the country.
It clarifies it.
Trump didn’t invent any of this.
He just said it without shame.
And for millions, that was the fantasy: a man who would take every buried cruelty and wear it like a crown.
This is why they’re banning books.
Why they’re rewriting curricula.
Why the very mention of “racism” or “history” now sets off alarms.
Because they know what we’d find if we looked too closely:
A country terrified of its own reflection.
Reparations aren’t radical. They’re overdue.
Truth telling isn’t divisive. It’s the only way out.
And if we don’t learn from Germany, if we don’t enshrine what happened, criminalize its symbols, and build laws that make it unrepeatable, then we are telling the future exactly what we’re willing to tolerate again.
America doesn’t confront its breaking points.
It buries them.
Calls it pride. Wraps it in anthem and flag.
But buried things don’t disappear, they grow back meaner.
And we are running out of time to break the cycle.
– Lyle Fass
The great humanity is the deck-passenger on the ship
third class on the train
on foot on the causeway
the great humanity.
The great humanity goes to work at eight
marries at twenty
dies at forty
the great humanity.
There is enough bread for all except the great humanity
it is the same for rice
for sugar
for cloth
for books
there is enough for all except the great humanity.
The great humanity has no shade on his soil
no lamp on his road
no glass on his window
but the great humanity has hope
you can’t live without hope.
– Nâzim Hikmet
There is nothing you have ever grown that isn’t music. You are the bamboo in Coltrane’s saxophone reed. The mulberries that fed the silkworms that made the slippers for the ballet.
– Andrea Gibson
Autistics often see social constructs
as random things we made up and
can change at any time instead of as
immutable laws of nature.
It’s one of the more useful skills we have.
It’s also why we often annoy people
who don’t have that skill.
– Jeff Brown
Shouldn’t we attempt to care for the city and its citizens with the aim of making the citizens themselves as good as possible? For without this … it does no good to provide any other service if the intentions of those who are likely to make a great deal of money or take a position of rule over people or some other position of power aren’t admirable and good.
– Socrates
Are we done with life?
I am still so into it.
I like to drink and read and use my mouth
our bodies constellating in the smothering heat
as the trucks slam by, the song of a siren
has a sort of infinity in it, so too the poof
of dove on the sill, dropcloth of sheets, a drench,
the coming dusk, drizzle of sky
its fading and spanning—
days become decades and then—
(We belong to a generation of hideous inattention
clutching our rectangles of light like—
who am I talking to?)
– Deborah Landau
Love for our neighbor, being made of creative attention, is analogous to genius.
– Simone Weil
delicate hands are important. everywhere, even between your every finger there’s a tiny universe. you should treat it carefully.
– Kazuo Ohno
I think immigrant kids—first-generation children—feel this a lot: like, the psychic energy from ancestral baggage while going through your teens or twenties. For me, everything is tied to my parents, and yet so much of my instability comes from their unwillingness to talk about my/their complexities, what pains us, etc.—how do you move forward if you can’t have a conversation that heals you? How do you move forward if everyone is in denial?
– @TheHairpin, Self Care & Depression: A Conversation
Parachutes, My Love, Could Carry Us Higher
by Barbara Guest
I just said I didn’t know
And now you are holding me
In your arms,
How kind.
Parachutes, my love, could carry us higher.
Yet around the net I am floating
Pink and pale blue fish are caught in it,
They are beautiful,
But they are not good for eating.
Parachuted, my love, could carry us higher
Than this mid-air in which we tremble,
Having exercised our arms in swimming,
Now the suspension, you say,
Is exquisite. I do not know.
There is coral below the surface,
There is sand, and berried
Like pomegranates grow.
This wide net, I am treading water
Near it, bubbles are rising and salt
Drying on my lashes, yet I am no nearer
Air than water. I am closer to you
Than land and I am in a stranger ocean
Than I wished.
We have come to a point where any insistence on expecting others to care for our needs and vice versa [is seen] as being both unrealistic and burdensome. A lot of people don’t see themselves as individuals worth fighting for, even in their private lives and have allowed that to influence how they view themselves within a larger context.
Allowing things to just happen to you or others in your community in the face of unrelenting cruelty or even just small discomfort isn’t a sign of maturity as much as it is a sign of a person stripped of their ability to have full access to their humanity. Rage, anger, sadness, frustration, and disappointment are a part of what keeps us agile, along with rest and joy. An unwillingness to engage with those emotions only leads to a reality where one day you realize the only thing you’ve let them do is turn you into a feeble, rigid thing.
– Hanna Phifer, No Actually, We Shouldn’t Let Them
Does weather matter to poetry. Is it always night. Can we count on a sluggish ooze of light. Dream’s mildew. Linda Norton wrote that she “walked into poetry / in search of a place to rest, / a place to suffer formally”; Jack Gilbert remarked that poetry helps you to suffer more efficiently. Some comfort can be found in that. Does poetry protect anything from anyone or any one from any thing. Water seeks to get in as does poetry. True or false. Compose a self-portrait in fewer than 12 lines. Fewer than 9. Fewer than 3.
– C.D. Wright
But sometimes illumination comes to our rescue at the very moment when all seems lost; we have knocked at every door and they open on nothing until, at last, we stumble unconsciously against the only one through which we can enter the kingdom we have sought in vain a hundred years – and it opens.
– Marcel Proust
In my country today there are people who are wondering if the Resistance had a real military impact on the course of the war. For my generation this question is irrelevant: we immediately understood the moral and psychological meaning of the Resistance. For us it was a point of pride to know that we Europeans did not wait passively for liberation. And for the young Americans who were paying with their blood for our restored freedom it meant something to know that behind the firing lines there were Europeans paying their own debt in advance.
– Umberto Eco
I think everybody’s looking for something they’ve never seen before. You work on your songs, but your songs also work on you. So you absorb and you excrete and in some way you retain, and slowly you start to become some place that songs are passing through. I’d like to think that they enjoy blowing through you. There’s something electric about you, maybe, some kind of a force left behind by music that passes through you. Like everybody likes to be around someone who does something well and loves doing it, so songs would be no different, right? Like ‘Let’s blow down there and see that guy’.
Most songs have meager beginnings. You wake up in the morning, you throw on your suspenders, and you subvocalize and just think. They seem to form like calcium. I can’t think of a story right off the bat that was that interesting. I write things on the back of my hand, usually, and sing into a tape recorder. I don’t know.
“You kind of go into the world of a song,” says Waits. “They’re not necessarily autobiographical, sometimes you inhabit the lives of others. Or it’s just a daydream. Songs kind of write themselves sometimes. It’s like you’re kind of walking out on the diving board and you keep walking until you fall in the water and every line keeps you in the air and if you come up with a bad line you fall into the water. I don’t know how it works. If I did I’d probably stop doing it.
– Tom Waits, Mojo Magazine
If, after spending time with a person, you feel as though you’ve lost a quart of plasma, avoid that person in the future.
– William S. Burroughs
The dark ages still reign over all humanity, and the depth and persistence of this domination are only now becoming clear. This Dark Ages prison has no steel bars, chains, or locks. Instead, it is locked by misorientation and built of misinformation.
– Buckminster Fuller
As the idea develops, does it live up to or surpass the promise of the spark that
originally got you excited?
– Rick Rubin
Any knowledge that doesn’t lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.
– Wisława Szymborska
I am against revolutions because they always involve a return to status quo. I am against the status quo both before and after revolutions.
I don’t want to wear a black shirt or a red shirt. I want to wear the shirt that suits my taste. And I don’t want to salute like an automaton either.
I prefer to shake hands when I meet someone I like. The fact is, to put it simply, I am positively against all this crap which is carried on first in the name of this thing, then in the name of that. I believe only in what is active, immediate and personal.
– Henry Miller
My poems do not deliver mere images and metaphors; but deliver landscapes, villages and fields, deliver a place. It makes that which is absent from geography present in its form, that is, able to reside in the poetic text, as if residing on his land. I don’t think that a poet is entitled to a greater happiness than that some people seek refuge in his lines of poetry, as if they were real houses. Indeed, in Arabic, there is a nice and unusual homonymy. Both the poetic verse and the house are said ‘bayt.’ As if a man can reside there.
– Mahmoud Darwish
A bird calls
announcing the difference
between heaven and hell.
– Dogen Zenji
25 And the Lord spake unto the Angel that guarded the eastern gate, saying ‘Where is the flaming sword that was given unto thee?’
26 And the Angel said, ‘I had it here only a moment ago, I must have put it down some where, forget my own head next.’
27 And the Lord did not ask him again.
– Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
A man walks down the street.
It’s a street in a strange world.
Maybe it’s the third world.
Maybe it’s his first time around.
He doesn’t speak the language.
He holds no currency.
He is a foreign man.
He is surrounded by the sound,
sound of cattle in the marketplace,
scatterlings and orphanages.
He looks around,
around he sees angels in the architecture
spinning in infinity and he says,
“Amen” and “Hallelujah!”
– Paul Simon
I was walking among the fires of Hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius; which to Angels look like torment and insanity.
– William Blake
“Peace!” the angel announced. But peace is as much task as gift. Only if we become calm as earth, fluid as water, and blazing as fire will we able to rise to the task of peacemaking, and the air will stir with the rush of wings of angels arriving to help us. This is why I wish you that great inner stillness which alone allows us to speak, even today, without irony, of ‘peace on earth’ and, without despair, to work for it.
– Brother David Steindl-Rast
INTERVIEWER: Do you feel you ask a good deal of the reader in Never?
GRAHAM: I do worry considerably about a reader’s patience—how much mental or emotional space they have in their life in this crushingly full world to give to the reading of a poem. Many of today’s readers prefer fast poems with stated conclusions, partly because they can fit them into their day. Who can blame them? They have precious little time. They want the Cliff Notes to the overwhelmingly huge novel. Of course, it is poetry’s job to try to provide the very opposite—to recomplicate the oversimplified thing. This doesn’t require going on at length—lord knows some of the more complex acts of human awareness occur in Basho. At any rate, it’s not hard to see where the shortened attention span has gotten us, the desire for speed, for the quick rush or take or fix …
INTERVIEWER: Is there some way poetry can combat that?
GRAHAM: If you were to ask me now what poems need to be doing in our era, I would be right back there with Eliot insisting that fighting the dissociation of feeling from thinking is still our priority, as working artists. Especially as artists writing in America, in American, in a language polluted to the brim with “political” or “economic” speech—by military fake-speech, sales-speech. How are we to speak, let alone sing, in the language of the culture that is terrifying the whole globe?
INTERVIEWER: So how would you respond now to Auden’s comment that “poetry makes nothing happen”?
GRAHAM: I’d say poetry wants to be contagious, to be a contagion. Its syntax wants to pass something on to an other in the way that you can, for example, pass laughter on. It’s different from being persuasive and making an argument. That’s why great poems have so few arguments in them. They don’t want to make the reader “agree.” They don’t want to move through the head that way. They want to go from body to body. Built in is the belief that such community—could one even say ceremony—might “save” the world.
– Jorie Graham
Now we have to get back the cosmos, and it can’t be done by a trick. The great range of responses that have fallen dead in us have to come to life again. It has taken two thousand years to kill them. Who knows how long it will take to bring them to life.
When I hear modern people complain of being lonely then I know what has happened. They have lost the cosmos. — It is nothing human and personal that we are short of. What we lack is cosmic life, the sun in us and the moon in us.”
– D.H. Lawrence
When the bell rings she hurries up to me with more than twenty sheets of paper. She’s Indian—Hidatsa, maybe, or Sioux—and the other children let her pass as if she were invisible. The morning star dances in a red circle, singing a song about his girlfriend Sheila; the angel Gabriel stands before Mary, his blue wings ablaze with stars. His mouth is open wide and notes are coming out, each one a different color. A woman with green hair holds her hands up to the sky and says: These are secret words, Say them after me. May all the plants and flowers rise And all people rise from death.
I look up from the paper: a dusty shelf, a starfish in a jar caked with dust beside dusty petri dishes. I see shades of blue: the globe cerulean, the sky bleached out. And out the window, above the children’s heads, topsoil, the residue of ancient oceans, swirling like a thumbprint in the playground, wind pushing the empty swings. “So many poems,” I say, smiling at the girl. “You must love to write.” She shifts from foot to foot and weaves her hands in air. “I don’t have paper at home,” she says, “so I keep them in my head. That’s where they live until I write them down.”
– Kathleen Norris
Although I speak in tongues
Of men and angels
I’m just sounding brass
And tinkling cymbals without love
Love suffers long
Love is kind!
Enduring all things
Love has no evil in mind
If I had the gift of prophecy
And all the knowledge
And the faith to move the mountains
Even if I understood all of the mysteries
If I didn’t have love
I’d be nothing
Love never looks for love
Love’s not puffed up
Or envious
Or touchy
Because it rejoices in the truth
Not in iniquity
Love sees like a child sees
As a child I spoke as a child
I thought and I understood as a child
But when I became a woman
I put away childish things
And began to see through a glass darkly
Where as a child I saw it face to face
Now I only know it in part
Fractions in me
Of faith and hope and love
And of these great three
Love’s the greatest beauty
Love
Love
Love
– Joni Mitchell, Love
we now know some angels are more terrifying than others our enemies are replaceable their stones behind their teeth glow in moonlight
– Kaveh Akbar
When you forget your carefully assembled fiction of who you are, you can find a natural delight in people, in the planet, the stones, and the trees. There is no observable limit to this beauty, and no one is excluded from it. Then, if you are fighting an enemy, you may be fighting them as well as you can, but you won’t be a true believer. You will know that an enemy is not truly other and that the fighting is some kind of misunderstanding. The worries that lead to quarrels may still be present, but they are not the main thing. Your problems could be a kind of dream, very powerful when you are in it, and yet a dream. You might notice that, even deep in dreaming, you are near to waking up. And the more you are awake, the kinder the world might seem.
– John Tarrant
There is a mystical fool in me that proved to be stronger than all my science … in the blackest night even, and just there, by the grace of God, I could see a Great Light. Somewhere there seems to be a great kindness in the abysmal darkness of the deity…
– C.G. Jung
As there is one soul in all the members, which operates aloft in the brain, and also moves the feet beneath, so the Godhead contains all creatures, the heavenly, and those under the bottomless pit, and is everywhere fulfilled in the creation, although it transcends the creatures, because it is infinite and incomprehensible.
– St Macarius the Great
Every organic complexity works by the delegation of authority. Every organic unity is a system of love—that is to say: of mutual trust. It says: “Thank god I’ve got you around!”
– Alan Watts
It’s worth trying many
different methods with
this in mind: there’s no
way to know in advance
whether any of them
will work.
– Rick Rubin
Souls love. That’s what souls do. Egos don’t, but souls do. Become a soul, look around, and you’ll be amazed-all the beings around you are souls. Be one, see one.
– Ram Dass
Don’t take it so to heart.
Maybe I enjoy not-being as much
as being who I am. Maybe
it’s time for me to practice
growing old. The way I look
at it, I’m passing through. . .
– Stanley Kunitz
“In proportion as our inner life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post office.” Thoreau’s observation of 150 years ago seems more relevant than ever now that the post-office has come to our screens.
– Pico Iyer
Once you gain an object of desire, another one will be there. One fulfilled, and another is waiting. Even kings are not happy. ‘No-desire’ is absolute bliss. And when you are bliss, then there is peace. When there is peace, then there is stillness of mind.
– Papaji
When thinking leads to the unthinkable, it is time to return to simple life. What thinking cannot solve, life solves, and what action never decides is reserved for thinking.
– CG Jung
I start with something that bugs me, some philosophical problem, and then I look for a way to explore it.
– Percival Everett
sometimes i just fall asleep and dream about furniture. like a nice desk. a beautiful bookcase
– @chenchenwrites
The spiritual journey will never fail you. It’ll test you. It’ll correct you. It’ll drag you through the fire, burning away all that you are not. But it will not fail you. It will only ever invite you into more of who you are.
– Nika Solé
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
– William Shakespeare
Poetry doesn’t provide answers, but frames questions beneath a marbled sunset.
– Antonia Wang
If the dream is a translation
of waking life, waking life is also
a translation of the dream.
– René Magritte
Laziness means more work in the long run.
– C.S. Lewis
three drops of rain
a greeting card from heaven
midsummer heat
– Issa
Celan said a poem is a handshake. Tranströmer—a meeting place. But isn’t a poem a kind of soup dumpling? Deceptively small, seemingly simple. Containing a juicy secret about existence. Or maybe a poem’s a soup dumpling spot, where people meet & shake hands, yes. & slurp together
– @chenchenwrites
When your vibe is so right that people trust you off of your energy alone. That’s when you know.
– Nika Solé
Through the years I have found this gift of poetry to be life-sustaining, life-enhancing, and absolutely unpredictable. Does one live, therefore, for the sake of poetry? No, the reverse is true [. . .].
– Stanley Kunitz
If being with me makes you feel happy and good, wonderful; if not, then so be it. The important thing is that love allows us to hold things gently instead of grasping tightly.
– Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo
the moon is as high
as the prices in
this market
– Basho
Sometimes I think we will
perish just there
under that sign
at the appointed time
when nothing points back
so that what is held
is exactly not
between this that, that this
in the traffic of hours
the knotted cage
where nothing is kept
the hinges of hope
thin coordinates
matter as shadow
fossil imprint
untitled light.
– Ann Lauterbach
You are not wrong, Jon Ossoff,
but I am so tired of men in tweed
telling me how to be better.
– Christy Prahl
The Madman knows that once God is dead, man must live like a god: man must go beyond the limits of his own being, leave his own nature behind and assume the burden, the risk, and the pleasure of divinity.
– Octavio Paz
How to Live
Depravity begins with thinking of love
as a radical act. I quit loving
with difficulty. I love
easy now. Two parakeets on my shoulders.
They’ll fly away if I move. So I move.
I love flight. I love cages
left wide open. I am not a window.
I could be a window. Open me,
you’ll find a dense wood,
children wandering inside it.
Not lost children. They know the way.
They live the way horses run.
If they each had a bird in hand
they would open their hands.
– Todd Dillard
Digesting all weapons from the enemy as life force energy because that’s what an alchemist does.
– Nika Solé
If you hold anything dear outside of your own reasoned choice, you will have destroyed your capacity for choice.
– Epictetus
the earth shakes
there is no solid ground
feel the tremors
– Voima Oy
I’d decided the campus was just a place to hide. There were some campus freaks who stayed on forever.
The whole college scene was soft. They never told you what to expect out there in the real world.
They just crammed you with theory and never told you how hard the pavements were. A college education could destroy an individual for life.
Books could make you soft.
When you put them down, and really went out there, then you needed to know what they never told you.
– Charles Bukowski
What has happened to our ability to honor the lives of those who paid attention to ours? The act of looking away, of ignoring, is the antithesis of art. It undermines the charter of every person who has ever attempted to create.
– Anthony Anaxagorou
I’m always intoxicated. No drink, no substance. There’s a way to create blissfulness from within.
– Sadhguru
The Embrace
by Mark Doty
You weren’t well or really ill yet either;
just a little tired, your handsomeness
tinged by grief or anticipation, which brought
to your face a thoughtful, deepening grace.
I didn’t for a moment doubt you were dead.
I knew that to be true still, even in the dream.
You’d been out—at work maybe?—
having a good day, almost energetic.
We seemed to be moving from some old house
where we’d lived, boxes everywhere, things
in disarray: that was the story of my dream,
but even asleep I was shocked out of the narrative
by your face, the physical fact of your face:
inches from mine, smooth-shaven, loving, alert.
Why so difficult, remembering the actual look
of you? Without a photograph, without strain?
So when I saw your unguarded, reliable face,
your unmistakable gaze opening all the warmth
and clarity of —warm brown tea—we held
each other for the time the dream allowed.
Bless you. You came back, so I could see you
once more, plainly, so I could rest against you
without thinking this happiness lessened anything,
without thinking you were alive again.
Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.
– Hannah Arendt
two to five a.m.
looking for serenity
in insomnia
– @hegelincanada
The image of perfection is what keeps you from seeing it.
– @naval
No thief, however skillful, can rob one of knowledge, and that is why knowledge is the best and safest treasure to acquire.
– L. Frank Baum
Every moment of awareness is a hammer stroke on this chain of conditioning. Striking it with the force of wisdom and awareness, the chain gets weaker and weaker until it breaks.
– Joseph Goldstein
You cannot negotiate with people who say what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is negotiable.
– President John F. Kennedy
When you’re feeling
about as
bad as your
average
English translation
of Goethe you must
go see the
Parrot of Penance
and he will
say unto you
“Way around it?
Way around it?
There’s never been any
way around it”
– Anselm Hollo
The way cotton candy falls to its knees
at the suggestion of rain is the only thing
I’ve found to describe remembering,
after you’ve just been happy,
all the things that make you less
alive.
– Neil Hilborn
Love is nature’s second sun.
– George Chapman
Roman aqueducts were a technological marvel.
Then they lined them with lead and poisoned their own minds.
This is where we are with the internet, social media, smartphones, and so-called “AI.”
– Drew Dellinger
All is illusion except the witnessing consciousness: All is dream except the witnessing Consciousness….
– Mooji
Level of consciousness is measured in the degree by which you have journeyed through yourself.
– Nika Solé
The world does not know
what to do with the
rapid rush of me. / the sky.
– Meg Ford
Look around you. Everything changes. Everything on this earth is in a continuous state of evolving, refining, improving, adapting, enhancing…changing. You were not put on this earth to remain stagnant.
– Steve Maraboli
You must refuse to join them
You must remain yourself
You must open the curtains
or the blinds, or the windows,
or the gentle light to joy
– Charles Bukowski
The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.
– Thomas Jefferson
How fragile it all was, the myths we lived by: advice and consent, checks and balances, the constitution. The lower case c is intentional: shredded in three months by a used car salesman, a wannabe philosopher-king and their fundamentalist tribal supporters.
– Clifton Lee
All these demagogues substitute means for ends. They prate about “this great movement,” about their organization, about a general American revival they hope to bring about, but they very rarely say anything about what such a movement is supposed to lead to, what the organization is good for or what the mysterious revival is intended positively to achieve. Here is a typical example of a redundant description of the revival idea by one of the most successful West Coast agitators:
My friend, there is not but one way to get a revival and all America has got to get that revival, all of the churches. The story of the great Welsh revival is simply this. Men become desperate for the holiness of God in the world, and they began to pray, and they began to ask to send a revival!) and wherever men and women went the revival was on.
The glorification of action, of something going on, simultaneously obliterates and replaces the purpose of the so-called movement. The end is “that we might demonstrate to the world that there are patriots, God-fearing Christian men and women who are yet willing to give their lives to the cause of God, home and native land. “
Since the entire weight of this propaganda is to pro- mote the means, propaganda itself becomes the ultimate content. In other words, propaganda functions as a kind of wish-fulfillment. This is one of its most important patterns. People are “let in,” they are supposedly getting the inside dope, taken into confidence, treated as of the elite who deserve to know the lurid mysteries hidden from outsiders.
– Adorno, 1946
It’s natural for people to help each other, and this should be done without self-interest.
– Venerable Sayadaw U Pandita
Work on it, word by word, phrase by phrase.
– Larissa Volokhonsky
Success is the enemy of learning. It can deprive you of the time and the incentive to start over. Beginner’s mind also needs beginner’s time.
– @naval
In light, we all were ailing from separation and homesickness. In light, we had to find a way to settle down, as my mother said. In light, we lived like birds.
– Don Mee Choi, Wings of Return
Let us have our old heroes – men caught in a net of fate, or torn between duties equally sacred, and dying with back to the wall against human enemies.
– J.R.R. Tolkien, Beowulf and the Critics
To regard asylum seekers as predators is to forget one crucial truth: no one wants to be a refugee.
– Caroline Moorehead
Meditation is not something to be done once or twice a day – it’s s full-time spiritual ambiance that ideally permeates every moment of our lives.
– John Selby
Your soul is the whole world.
– Hermann Hesse
morning glory:
even when painted poorly,
it has pathos
– Basho Matsuo
In a word, the old [education] was a kind of propagation–men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda.
– C. S. Lewis
My younger brother was afraid of thunder,
lightning. My father bought a recording of storms,
put it on the stereo, and rocked on the love seat
with my brother over and over,
until the sound meant comfort, warmth.
– Bob Hicok
MY STAY AT A MOUNTAIN WITH A MOON
– Chiao Jan (Monk in T’ang Dynasty, c. 785-805 )
Night after night I sit on this mountain
under the moon alone.
Yet tonight you are with me
and the moon and mountain disappear.
What we are trying to do influences what becomes salient to us. If you are looking for a friend in a crowd, faces become salient to you, faces that would have otherwise passed you by. If you are making videos, you will notice patterns in the videos you watch. If you’re not, you can watch a thousand videos and have them pass through your head cleanly, without leaving a mark. Your memory will have little use for the information, and so discards it. You can’t just feed your brain information if you want to learn effectively; you also need a serious project.
– Henrik Karlsson
YOU NEED A SERIOUS PROJECT
This cuts a couple different ways, in that
A) choosing a well-aligned project can be jet fuel for moving your life and soul to unfold in the right direction,
B) choosing a soulless or empty project will inflect your awareness w soulless nada
– River Kenna
His Holiness the Abbot
His Holiness the Abbot
is shitting
in the withered fields.
– Buson
doesn’t seem like a coincidence that there’s been a rise in “college isn’t worth it” discourse and general degradation of higher education institutions right as a nonwhite group starts to outcompete whites…
– Matthew Zeitlin
it’s ok to be creative just for the pleasure of it. delightful, joyous, a lovely gift to yourself and those around you
that said, if you want to be Serious and go pro, my core recommendation is to define a compelling creative expedition for yourself
– Visakan Veerasamy
The actual value of taking one year to treat a deep goal as your main concern
Is that after that year, you won’t be able to tolerate a life that isn’t driven by purpose anymore
– River Kenna
Everyone should spend one year going all in on one specific goal. Spend every free hour you have doing the thing which moves you closer to the goal. Read every book you can get your hands on. Treat it like it’s your profession. The actual goal doesn’t matter as long as it’s meaningful to you. It could be creating art, learning a new skill or preparing to run a marathon. You’ll come to the conclusion that one year of living with intention trumps 40 years of just getting by.
– Eddy Quan
A person is, by his nature, out of touch with his own subjectivity. Thus one cannot find out what it is like for a person to be just by asking.
– Jonathan Lear
Man is but the words that live on after him, so let those be worthy in the eyes of those who take note.
– Muḥammad al-Tūnisī
Music brings a warm glow to my vision, thawing mind and muscle from their endless wintering.
– Haruki Murakami
Your mind’s peaceful content
is prior to separation into language.
Learn to abide there.
– David Shinzen Nelson
We need to learn that the people we fear are the people we need!
– Roger Wolsey
It’s funny, but when I’m doing nothing, I get this feeling like I’m fighting something… It never goes away, even when I’m in bed, even when I’m walking around.
– Mieko Kawakami
When I am conscious of the vivid, transient reality of the moment, my attunement is part of the nonlocal awareness of the whole. It can’t be otherwise. The currents of life I find myself in the midst of are also part of that awareness. It suffuses everything. We live in the mindful Present, as a fish lives in water.
– Philip Shepherd
When Siddhartha left the palace to search for enlightenment, it wasn’t because he had such strong faith in a particular religion, met a charismatic guru, or received a calling from God. He didn’t leave because he was trading one belief system for another, like the Christian who becomes a Hindu or a Republican who becomes a Democrat. His journey began with his desire to know the truth about life’s meaning and purpose. He was searching without knowing what it was he was seeking.
– Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche
Isn’t that what intimacy so often is? Supposing you understand, conveying that you do, because you feel in theory that you could understand, and you want to, and yet secretly you don’t?
– Rachel Kushner
Depression is also smaller than you. Always, it is smaller than you, even when it feels vast. It operates within you, you do not operate within it. It may be a dark cloud passing across the sky but – if that is the metaphor – you are the sky. You were there before it. And the cloud can’t exist without the sky, but the sky can exist without the cloud.
– Matt Haig
Anything that disappears from your psychological inventory is apt to turn up in the guise of a hostile neighbor, who will inevitably arouse your anger and make you aggressive.
– CG Jung
Breath and emotion are linked. When you are shocked, your breathing changes. When you are full of rage or passion of any kind, your breathing changes. When you are at rest, your breathing changes. So, the goal here is to make your breathing regular, to calm the mind.
– Joseph Campbell
Straighten up your body, unify your vision, and the harmony of Heaven will come to you. … Virtue will be your beauty, the Way will be your home, and stupid as a newborn calf, you will not try to find out the reason why.
– Zhuangzi
Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person’s life.
– Eavan Boland
Buddhahood exists without meditation, whether we encounter it or not.
– Zenju Earthlyn Manuel
What you suppress today, you carry tomorrow.
– Brad Schipke
One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting everyone else to give it up. That is not the Christiain way.
– C.S. Lewis
Much of the work of midlife is to tell the difference between those who are dealing with their issues through you and those who are really dealing with you.
– Richard Rohr
Language was weaving around my house like a cat through chair legs. At age 12, I memorized ‘Prufrock.’
– Mary Karr
Choose your spiritual teachers wisely.
They can lead you to your highest self or make you believe in absolutely ridiculous and irrelevant ideas.
– @cbmeditates
Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.
– Robert Louis Stevenson
And when many villages so entirely join themselves together as in every respect to form but one society, that society is a city, and contains in itself, if I may so speak, the end and perfection of government: first founded that we might live, but continued that we may live happily.
– Aristotle
Transitions are critically important. I want the reader to turn the page without thinking she’s turning the page. It must flow seamlessly.
– Janet Evanovich
You go up, always up. There is something higher, brighter, more saturated in colour, more perfect in shape, different from yesterday, although it’s the same mountain every day. The dogs are by your side, they too are astonished by this moving picture and sometimes when you walk, you feel so light that your feet barely touch the ground, and you realise that these are some of the happiest days of your life.
– René Daumal
It was a soothing monastic monotony, a balm for troubled souls, to know your purpose, follow an itinerary and bring the gang back, tired and satisfied after another day of fulfilling your mission. The days were beads in a rosary that passed through your fingers and you felt their texture and shape. The same, but different.
Morning prayer: milk the sheep and take the flock to pasture. Midday prayer: pladnina. Evening vespers: bring the flock home, feed the dogs. Have a humble supper, lie on your hard bed, then rise early and morning prayer.
Drink your coffee, lace up your shoes, strap on your rucksack, take your stick and in sickness and in health, in rain and sunshine, go. The dogs are waiting. The flock is waiting. The hills are waiting. You are needed.
– Kapka Kassabova
I have no face or body when I lie like this on the boundless bed of the hills, I have nothing at all. I am a vessel through which passes the breath of the world.
– Kapka Kassabova
The higher you went, the harder physical survival became, the more equal you felt to everything. Personas disappeared and essence remained. There is just one essence in all of life. Anima.
– Kapka Kassabova
All our lives, we try to arrive somewhere. Where are my ambitions now? I can’t find them. They were never real. How can something unreal take up so much of my time on earth when the only thing that’s real is this mountain? I can’t fathom it. Pirin was named after the old divinity of thunder and fertility, Perun, who is covered in dragon scales. I can see why humans worshipped mountains when they wandered over nine mountains with their flocks. Thunder Peak is the original cathedral. When Notre Dame burns, Thunder Peak is here every morning.
– Kapka Kassabova
All our lives we perform tasks while waiting for something to click into place. For somewhere to put our love.
– Kapka Kassabova
If one day something shifted
And the world around us changed
So that we saw the weights
That people carry every day
Perhaps we’d notice burdens
Round the shoulders of a friend
Or watch a stranger pull a train of grief
That never ends
Perhaps we’d see that someone
On the bus can barely stand
Because of all the heaviness
They hold within their hands
Perhaps we’d see a colleague
Carrying a box around
And watch them – as the day goes by –
Stoop closer to the ground
We’d recognize the load of things
We’re never normally shown
We’d see that people carry
So much heaviness alone
And maybe if we saw it all
We’d stop a little while
We’d load our words with kindness
And we’d speak them with a smile
For maybe all our judgement
Would be softened into grace
And all our empathy would make
The world a better place
Yes, perhaps we’d move more gently,
Speak compassion to the air
If just for once, our eyes could see
The weights that others bear
– Becky Hemsley
A man with one watch knows what time it is; a man with two watches is never quite sure.
– Lee Segall
In the beginning there’s something very nebulous, a state of alert, a wariness, a curiosity.
– Mario Vargas Llosa
Most standard medical textbooks attribute anywhere from 50 to 80 percent of all disease to stress-related origins.
– Stanford Medicine, Stress and Cancer
Neither can one day, nor a brief space of time, make a man blessed and happy.
– Aristotle
Worry is a call to solve, not a sentence to suffer.
– Psychology Today
To be able to fill leisure intelligently
is the last product of civilization.
– Arnold Toynbee
Nietzsche once said that before the path can be followed, one must first have found the lantern. And the lantern can only be found after a conscientious submission of ego sovereignty and a purgatory of fear and trembling.
– James Hollis
It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.
– Mark Twain
Teach your children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.
– Walter Scott
Amidst the radical changes and polarization of modern life something ancient and knowing keeps trying to catch up to us.
– Michael Meade
If a day goes by that don’t change some of your old notions for new ones, that is just about like trying to milk a dead cow.
– Woody Guthrie
If the map don’t agree with the ground, then the map is wrong.
– Gordon Livingston
It is a false idol that has taken the transcendent idea of the promised land – a metaphor for human liberation that has traveled across multiple faiths to every corner of this globe – and dared to turn it into a deed of sale for a militaristic ethnostate.
– Naomi Klein
Often things which we think are very unfortunate turn out to be the best thing which happened. And likewise, things which we think are great actually didn’t lead to anything much. So we shouldn’t therefore always judge things in accordance with whether they’re comfortable or uncomfortable for our ego, but we should ask ourselves, “What can I learn from this, what is this going to teach me?”
– Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo
You are like a traveler in this life. Do not build a castle where you are just resting a while. You won’t be here for long. Practice now without delay.
– Chatral Rinpoche
Do you want to do something to help the world situation? Then look within, for never forget that it all starts in the individual.
– Eileen Caddy
My mission is to kill time; its mission is to kill me. We understand each other well, like assassins.
– Emil Cioran
I try to get rid of people who always confidently answer questions about which they don’t have any real knowledge.
– Charlie Munger
…everyday life is already a disaster of sorts, one from which actual disaster liberates us.
– Rebecca Solnit
Enlightened statesman will not always be at the helm.
– James Madison
I cannot, lose your sleep for you; so instead, I will lose mine.
When I said, I was not afraid; it was true then, the courage of dew.
My chest aches, with a bursting prayer; awaiting the sun, of tomorrow.
– @AmericanSijo
That writing memoir is about living to find the plot, and if we’re lucky, it will take us a lifetime.
– Michele Cantos Garcia
The gap between the poetry she wrote and the poetry she contained was, for Natalie, something unsolvable.
– Shirley Jackson
Poetry is everywhere—
in the pause before a match strikes,
in a key that no door remembers,
in the way clouds rearrange
just to frame the sun.
– Thalia Clem
ON MEDITATING, SORT OF
Meditation, so I’ve heard, is best accomplished
if you entertain a certain strict posture.
Frankly, I prefer just to lounge under a tree.
So why should I think I could ever be successful?
Some days I fall asleep, or land in that
even better place – half-asleep – where the world,
spring, summer, autumn, winter –
flies through my mind in its
hardy ascent and its uncompromising descent.
So I just lie like that, while distance and time
reveal their true attitudes: they never
heard of me, and never will, or ever need to.
Of course I wake up finally
thinking, how wonderful to be who I am,
made out of earth and water,
my own thoughts, my own fingerprints –
all that glorious, temporary stuff.
– Mary Oliver
Out of this darkness a new world can arise, not to be constructed by our minds so much as to emerge from our dreams. Even though we cannot see clearly how it’s going to turn out, we are still called to let the future into our imagination. We will never be able to build what we have not first cherished in our hearts.
– Joanna Macy
To increase desires to an unbearable level whilst making the fulfillment of them more and more inaccessible: this was the single principle upon which Western society was based.
– Michel Houellebecq
Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?
– Lawrence Durrell
Hungry to know, I read another book,
ask another question,
soak up more information.
At least I’m not compelled like some
to read cereal boxes.
It is easier to go on collecting knowledge,
losing myself in the grand pursuit
of others’ thoughts and work,
so much there is to know.
Except sometimes I wonder why it is
The psalmist’s cry is
for wisdom taught on one’s secret heart.
Or why wisdom has its beginning
by being awestruck
with the Divine?”
– Geoffrion and Nagel
(The Labyrinth & the Ennegram)
Therefore, the places in which we have experienced day dreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as day-dreams these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all the time.
– Gaston Bachelard
Knowing What You Know Now,
Would You Choose To Be Born?
by Anya Krugovoy Silver
Don’t say no out loud. Don’t admit
that gold-sponged April isn’t enough,
that the first milky sip of coffee or fuchsia
bougainvillea on a Greek patio don’t provide
moments that make life worth its worry.
Such reflection belies the plaques in each
cheap beachside shop that remind us
to be merry, or what fun we should feel,
even about the small, sappy ways we go wrong.
The world demands our sloppy awe.
I’ve been struck down too many times.
Stuck, poisoned, drained, radiated fourteen years.
Truly, if not for love, I would choose oblivion.
Sweet love, a stone jammed in my jaw.
One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.
– Carl G. Jung
Liberal education, which consists in the constant intercourse with the greatest minds, is a training in the highest form of modesty, not to say of humility. It is at the same time a training in boldness: it demands from us the complete break with the noise, the rush, the thoughtlessness, the cheapness of the Vanity Fair of the intellectuals as well as of their enemies. It demands from us the boldness implied in the resolve to regard the accepted views as mere opinions, or to regard the average opinions as extreme opinions which are at least as likely to be wrong as the most strange or the least popular opinions. Liberal education is liberation from vulgarity. The Greeks had a beautiful word for “vulgarity”; they called it apeirokalia, lack of experience in things beautiful. Liberal education supplies us with experience in things beautiful.
– Leo Strauss
In quiet moments in my study, or outdoors, this deeper voice convinced me that the prospects are bleak unless we can once again relate to the Earth not as a thing or as a machine, but as a strange creature that improvises it’s own unfolding in the cosmos through the ongoing creativity of evolution and self-transformation.
– Stephan Harding
[…] for it was the approaching dawn that held him in its spell, that ‘promise kept each morning’ that the earth, along with the town and his own person, would emerge from beneath the shadow of the night, and that the delicate glimmer of dawn would yield to the bright light of day…
– László Krasznahorkai
From the time we are born, there is a wildish urge within us that desires our souls lead our lives, for the ego can only understand just so much. Imagine the ego on a permanent and relatively short leash; it can only go so far into the mysteries of life and spirit. Usually, it becomes frightened. It has a bad habit of reducing all numinosity to a ‘nothing but’. It demands facts that are observable. Proofs that are of a feeling or mystical nature do not very often sit well with the ego. That is why the ego is lonely. It is very limited in its constructs in this way; it cannot fully participate in the more mysterious processes of soul and psyche.
– Clarissa Pinkola Estés
A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn’t there. A theologian is the man who finds it.
– H.L. Mencken
The problem isn’t just that we crave. It’s that we grasp—habitually, mentally, endlessly.
– Anshin Devin Ashwood
If tobacco companies get in trouble for selling products that give people cancer, then universities should get in trouble for selling student debt to students with worthless degrees.
– @naval
“Most of the problems we have,” writes Shunryu Suzuki in Becoming Yourself, “are homemade problems.” Which makes looking for others to blame a form of tilting against windmills.
– Pico Iyer
The whole world has been completely misunderstood: for it has been looked at with a spotlight called consciousness so narrow in scope that it was all but impossible to see how things are actually related.
– Alan Watts
Time is short. If tenderness approaches, run to it.
– Henri Cole
A benefit should be kept like a buried treasure, only to be dug up in necessity…
– Seneca
mountain moon
never so clear
in smoggy old Tokyo
– Basho
We think the physical world is full of problems, and we have thought as a valuable instrument to enable us to solve them. And it’s true: thought is a valuable instrument. But valuable (we might ask) for whom? Valuable for those who can use it.
– Alan Watts
The rational soul is stronger than any kind of fortune‚ from its own share it guides its affairs here or there, and is itself the cause of a happy or miserable life.
– Seneca
But poetry that thinks is in truth
the topology of Being.
This topology tells Being the
whereabouts of its actual
presence.
– Heidegger
It won’t feel confusing. They’ll make your path lighter and brighter. They’ll be clear and intentional with you. That’s how you’ll know.
– Nika Solé
If you want the truth, I’m prouder of that, that I’ve quit drinking, than I am of anything in my life.
– Raymond Carver
Maybe our knowledge is bitter, too bitter, like the gray cold waves of the northern seas that has swallowed up so many ships, but stays hungry.
– Adam Zagajewski
IN THE PHANTOM KINGDOM
In the phantom kingdom
We conquered the deceptive rulers
With my sword and arrow
We have achieved the kingdom of co-emergent wisdom.
– Chögyam Trungpa
The notion of Emptiness engenders Compassion.
– Milarepa
An ancient Buddha said “A painted rice cake does not satisfy
hunger.” Dogen comments:
There are few who have even seen this ‘painting of a rice cake and
none of them has thoroughly understood it.
The paints for painting rice cakes are the same as those used for
painting mountains and waters.
If you say the painting is not real, then the material phenomenal
world is not real, the Dharma is not real.
*Unsurpassed enlightenment is a painting. The entire phenomenal
universe and the empty sky are nothing but a painting.
Since this is so, there is no remedy for satisfying hunger other
than a painted rice cake. Without painted hunger you never
become a true person.
– Dogen
To be an artist, you don’t have to compose music or paint or be in the movies or write books. It’s just a way of living. It has to do with paying attention, remembering, filtering what you see and answering back, participating in life.
– Viggo Mortensen
The Wall
by Donald Justice
for J.B.
The wall surrounding them they never saw;
The angels, often. Angels were as common
As birds or butterflies, but looked more human.
As long as the wings were furled, they felt no awe.
Beasts, too, were friendly. They could find no flaw
In all of Eden: this was the first omen.
The second was the dream which woke the woman.
She dreamed she saw the lion sharpen his claw.
As for the fruit, it had no taste at all.
They had been warned of what was bound to happen.
They had been told of something called the world.
They had been told and told about the wall.
They saw it now; the gate was standing open.
As they advanced, the giant wings unfurled.
When we see that each moment is the coming together of causes and conditions, it is clear that there is no need to hate or grasp what is going on. When craving and aversion do not arise, suffering ceases.
– Chan teacher Rebecca Li
The antidote to stress isn’t rest. It’s walking.
Walking is restorative. It’s calming. It removes the stress from the brain and diverts it into the body.
When in doubt, go for a walk.
– Dan Go
I cringe whenever I see something about the “recreational” use of marijuana. That cheapens it. I’ve never used it for recreation. I use it to boost my awareness. Some people might think that’s a delusion. When I was a musician, I’d smoke it, and my playing and singing would improve dramatically. The audience confirmed it.
– Mark Bittner
When I was in middle school, I learned there are two genders.
When I did my Bachelors in Biology, I learned that there are people who are intersex and the importance of the SRY gene.
When I completed my Masters in Neuroscience, I learned that sex is hard to define and gender is both in the brain and social, making everything much more complex.
When people say “it’s basic biology,” it’s clear they’re telling you they haven’t made it past middle school.
– Rebecca Helm
The last time he called, our friendship lacked
insulation. Each of us drafty
– Mickie Kennedy, Glandscapes
If you’re sick or injured and healing or growing a new life inside you or just worn out, please notice that that thing known as ‘doing nothing’ is when you’re doing the utterly crucial and precious work of growing and healing and restoring, and this also goes for everyone who’s just worn down, exhausted, dispirited, and who’s not that right now? I’m not the Nap Ministry but I’m for the power of rest and the holiness of respite and the you that is your cells and circulatory system and all those inner workings that are so mysterious and necessary and regenerative if we let them be. The psyche too does most of its work out of sight, and the imagination, and so creative work too benefits from rest and respite.
Take refuge in that beautiful stillness in which everything is happening in all the ways that nothing is happening in busyness. Everything happening in the depths, like deep water under a reflective surface. A pond reflecting clouds with schools of fish doing their things in the depths. Sitting still as zazen or just daydreaming or watching clouds is an act of outright revolt against the shouts that we should be doing something/do more/do more faster that are all around us. This might be another face of peace in our times with stillness the ceasefire in which spring comes again.
– Rebecca Solnit
But though the masters make the rules
For the wise men and the fools
I got nothing, Ma, to live up to.
For them that must obey authority
That they do not respect in any degree
Who despise their jobs, their destiny
Speak jealously of them that are free
Do what they do just to be
Nothing more than something
They invest in.
While some on principles baptize
To strict party platforms ties
Social clubs in drag disguise
Outsiders they can freely criticize
Tell nothing except who to idolize
And say “God Bless him”.
But I mean no harm nor put fault
On anyone that lives in a vault
But it’s alright, Ma, if I can’t please him.
Old lady judges, watch people in pairs
Limited in sex, they dare
To push fake morals, insult and stare
While money doesn’t talk, it swears
Obscenity, who really cares
Propaganda, all is phony.
While them that defend what they cannot see
With a killer’s pride, security
It blows the minds most bitterly
For them that think death’s honesty
Won’t fall upon them naturally
Life sometimes
Must get lonely.
My eyes collide head-on with stuffed graveyards
False goals, I scoff
At pettiness which plays so rough
Walk upside-down inside handcuffs
Kick my legs to crash it off
Say okay, I have had enough
What else can you show me?
– Bob Dylan
The holy person welcomes all that is earthly.
– Hildegard von Bingen
In one of the most mind-blowing wildlife observations ever caught on film, dolphins have been seen possibly getting high, using pufferfish toxin as a kind of recreational substance. Captured by BBC filmmakers, this incredible behavior shows young dolphins carefully handling pufferfish, gently chewing on them to release small, controlled amounts of tetrodotoxin, a powerful neurotoxin. Then, in a stunning display of social interaction, they pass the fish around, almost like they’re sharing an underwater joint.
Unlike their usual prey, which they rip apart in seconds, the dolphins treat the pufferfish with extreme precision and care, spending 20 to 30 minutes in what looks more like a ritual than a feeding session. What follows is even stranger: the dolphins were observed floating just beneath the surface, seemingly mesmerized by their own reflections, moving slowly and dreamily, behavior scientists describe as trance-like.
The toxin in pufferfish, tetrodotoxin, is incredibly potent, it’s about 1,200 times more deadly than cyanide. In humans, even trace amounts can cause paralysis or death. But dolphins appear to instinctively know how much to handle. While some researchers are cautious, suggesting this may just be playful behavior, others see it as potential evidence of intentional recreational drug use in the animal kingdom.
If true, this not only highlights the astonishing intelligence of dolphins, but also their complex social lives and ability to experiment and explore altered states. It’s one of those rare moments where animal behavior crosses into something profoundly human-like, the urge to share experiences, to explore, and perhaps, to feel something different.
– National Geographic
my mother sacrificed her dreams
so i could dream
– Rupi Kaur
When you transform your consciousness into divine consciousness so that you feel for everyone else’s well-being as you feel for yourself, when all the world becomes your greater self, you will become completely dissociated from the sufferings of your little body.
– Yogananda
I don’t believe that the meek will inherit the earth: The meek get ignored and trampled. They decompose in the bloody soil of war, of business, of art, and they rot into the warm ground under the spring rains…
– Sylvia Plath
Life truly is a single player game. Nobody stays by your side forever.
– @naval
Most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness.
– Thomas Ligotti
The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum and that as long as the sun shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.
– Michael Pollan
We waste precious time on absurd clues and pass by the truth without suspecting it.
– Marcel Proust
Wisdom is the understanding of ‘what is’ from moment to moment, without the accumulation of experience and knowledge.
– Krishnamurti
I feel sick that we are all just meant to passively accept a world with more deadly summers, less defined seasons, more wildfires and floods, more suffering of animals and humans – all because of the greed of the richest people in the world.
– Matthew Todd
This is the part where everything that cannot come with you to the next level is burning away. Tower moment times. It feels like parts of you are dying. Like life is prying comfort from your hands. Which is a part of the plan. It’s from here that you rise.
– Nika Solé
Admitting powerlessness…is the scariest part of getting sober. Finally, if you are lucky, the Gift of Desperation gives you the insight that you’re in no position to dicker over how or by whom your sorry ass is going to be saved.
– Anne Lamott
Failures of love make their ghosts
Which float out from every object
– W. S. Graham
The poet offends the brainwashed millions who are the majority in any country. His words, his free manner of living are a constant irritation to the repressed, the fearful, the self satisfied, and the incurious.
– Irving Layton
Though feelings of isolation can compound our suffering and sense of being overwhelmed or inadequate, the bedrock truth is that we are not separate. The separation we feel in our daily lives is artificial, a construct of our minds.
– Brother Phap Xa and Brother Phap Luu
Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigor; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth?
– Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
little butterfly
let me ask you
about poetry
– Basho
A lot of stepping into your power is unlearning all of the things that have kept you out of it.
– Nika Solé
It is not possible to live well today unless you treat it as your last day.
– Musonius Rufus
Take no act in hand aimlessly or otherwise than in accordance with the true principles perfective of the art.
– Marcus Aurelius
Outlast the heartbreak.
Grieve. Gather yourself.
Begin writing your next chapter.
You deserve better than these stale pages.
– Dr. Thema
Each person comes into this world with a specific destiny he or she has something to fulfill, some message that has to be delivered, some work that has to be completed. You are not here accidentally-you are here meaningfully. There is a purpose behind you.
– Osho
In the language of poetry, where every word is weighted, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it.
– Wislawa Szymborska
Reading a book isn’t a race – the better the book, the slower it should be absorbed.
– @naval
Beowulf seems to have realized the nature of dragons: that their power grows to match power, so they can destroy hosts and are usually only to be defeated by lonely courage. He was a king, but he refused to take an army.
– Tolkien, Dragons
A big reason we’re seeing a ton of emotionally stunted unhinged takes on the internet is because 88% of the population is metabolically unhealthy.
It’ll be hard to be mentally healthy when your body is full of toxic fat.
– Dan Go
All the sorrows of life are bearable if only
we can convert them into a story.
– Isak Dinesen
The tools for learning are abundant. It’s the desire to learn that’s scarce.
– @naval
a moth flutters
lazily past my window
nowhere to go
– @lafcadiopoetry
Too busy traveling the astral and weaving the fabric of reality to worry about what the matrix is doing.
– Nika Solé
The mystery of endless worlds and innumerable hearts’ desire
In a perfect moment’s vision lit by flicker of Eternal Fire
– J.R.R. Tolkien
sunrise
washing over
the summer mountains
– Issa
summer sunset
no one notices
the wildflowers
– Issa
Guilt is wasted energy. It changes nothing but your ability to grow. Forgive yourself. Learn the lesson. Then rise up and move forward in love.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
The foundation of learning is reading.
– @naval
My Life as an Avant-Garde Painter
I paint mostly on stop signs. The word, ‘Go!’
I’m a menace to the suburbs, I should grow up.
Thave a canvas the size of the Capitol Records building.
I drip blue paint on it like wind on a mountain.
When I go to the grocery store, I buy an assortment of colours:
Oranges, blueberries, papayas, mangoes.
The teller tells me to have a great day. I buy four lottery tickets.
I’m not really waiting to be discovered. I’ve learned
To appreciate those who are already here.
Autumn leaves, my dog, a sunset: these are a few
Of my favourite things to paint. The greats:
Van Gogh, Picasso, Kahlo: they all sought change.
I remember this every day that I paint.
– Jose Hernandez Diaz
Spirituality has nothing to do with the atmosphere you live in. It’s about the atmosphere you create within yourself.
– Sadhguru
Not everyone is allotted the chance to become a personality; most remain types, and never experience the rigor of becoming an individual.
– Hermann Hesse
and what is important to me above the intrusions
of incident and accidental relationships
which have nothing to do with my life
– Frank O’Hara
mistaking me
for a high place:
firefly
– George Hawkins
The whole illuminates the parts as much as the parts can illuminate the whole… The world we experience — which is the only one we can know — is affected by the kind of attention we pay to it.
– Iain McGilchrist
My twenties weren’t terribly productive. I wasted a lot of time. I had a mental deadline that I would finish a book by the time I turned thirty. I blew the deadline.
– Nicholson Baker
It’s a funny thing about life, once you begin to take note of the things you are grateful for, you begin to lose sight of the things that you lack.
– Germany Kent
Rainbow is the language
at the tip of the storm,
like love is an expression
of silent acceptance
at the edge of a heartbeat.
Thus I bathe in the calm,
I clothe myself in the storm,
and become a poem—
wordless, yet implicit.
– @chandanas
The ‘humanities’ are so difficult because they re-mark and recall the end of the particular, its only partial passage into a general and ideal humanity.
– Peggy Kamuf, The Division of Literature
An epic analysis of 5,000 years of civilization argues that a global collapse is coming unless inequality is vanquished.
– Luke Kemp, Goliath’s Curse, Guardian
To be with the one I love and to think of something else: this is how I have my best ideas, how I best invent what is necessary to my work.
– Barthes
Before people spoke of cancellation, before ‘selling out,’ before the slight drift to the right that is the fate of many who develop a taste for public discourse, there was ‘literary limbo.’
– Chloë Clifton-Wright
When you learn to be alone and not feel lonely is when you learn to be free.
– Hanna Shebar
No amount of belief makes something a fact.
– James Randi
It would be nice if academics didn’t feel the need to constantly shit on other academics’ disciplines and epistemologies.
The exception, of course, is economics. If you’re shitting on econ please, by all means, proceed.
– Sheila Liming
All the energy you put into things you can’t control comes at the expense of things you can control.
– Shane Parrish
If it fell into my eye
that cloud of tears
that circled your black eyes,
I will then bear all the earth’s sadness
as a cross
on which martyrs grow
as the earth grows small
and as your tear drops water
the sands in children’s poems.
– Mahmoud Darwish
The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive the instant when incompatibility becomes unquestionable. For a man and a woman, as such, are incompatible.
– G.K. Chesterton
Reality is invented for you by people who design it like a choreography; there’s definitely an office somewhere in Washington, with people you’ve never heard of, that designs reality.
It’s not just about what will be the next event to come up but rather what will be the interpretation of a given international event.
And this must be distributed everywhere through the media, without anyone asking questions about it.
– Frank Zappa
cool breeze–
from Buddha’s direction
it blows a blessing
– Kobayashi Issa
I think the Constitution also. You’ll see it disappear in bits, and then Grok or whatever will tell you those bits never existed.
– Alicia E. Stallings
Question your thoughts. Question your stories. Question your assumptions. Question your opinions. Question your conclusions. Question them all into utter emptiness, stillness, and joy. The keys to freedom are in your hands. Use them.
– Adyashanti
When you cross the entrance arch to the temple of dreams, there, right there, there is the sea…
– Luis Sepúlveda
It has always seemed obscene to me, this idea of digging up what was buried in a past so long gone, just to be able to turn on the lights, I can’t help seeing those black rocks as wonders, messengers from a world we have forgotten.
– Jori Lewis
All compounded phenomena is undergoing continuous change, and will one day come apart. Such as our body, possessions and relationships. The deeper that we can accept this fact of reality, the weaker our attachment will be. Therefore, the less suffering that we will have when it happens.
– Chamtrul Rinpoche
Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly follow the madman.
– Aldous Leonard Huxley
Anchorage
by Michelle Shocked
I took time out to write to my old friend
I walked across that burning bridge
Mailed my letter off to Dallas
But her reply came from Anchorage, Alaska
She said: Hey girl it’s about time you wrote
It’s been over two years you know, my old friend
Take me back to the days of the foreign telegrams
And the all-night rock ‘n rollin’
Hey Chel, we was wild then
Hey Chel, you know it’s kinda funny
Texas always seems so big
But you know you’re in the largest state in the Union
When you’re anchored down in Anchorage
Hey girl I think the last time I saw you
Was on me and Leroy’s wedding day
What was the name of that love song you played?
I forgot how it goes
I don’t recall how it goes
Anchorage
Anchored down in Anchorage
Leroy got a better job so we moved
Kevin lost a tooth, now he’s started school
I got a brand new eight month old baby girl
I sound like a housewife
Hey Chel, I think I’m a housewife
Hey girl what’s it like to be in New York?
New York City, imagine that!
Tell me, what’s it like to be a skateboard punk rocker?
Leroy says, “Send a picture”
Leroy says, “Hello!”
Leroy says, “Aw, keep on rocking girl”
Yeah, keep on rocking
Who can explain the fires?
The waters of dream are gray.
Yet souls have bent their desires
around this distant day.
Though we are covered with ashes
and even the children mourn,
the heavens are lifting their sashes
and are soon to be taken by storm.
Praise to this aching promise!
Balm to the fierce and true,
flame to the old gray premise,
sprout in the ash of doom.
Nothing but shoots and flowers,
only the signs of spring.
Among the crumbling towers
we lift our hearts and sing.
– George Gorman
Unlike philosophy
which closes doors,
poems can sneak through alchemies
of impulsive communiqués –
outgrowing sophic
cathedrals of knowledge
by suggesting more
than any monologue
through asking you to join in too.
– George Gorman
May our broken hearts
fuel us to fix our world.
– Cleo Wade
The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things with words.
– Elliott Erwitt
Man is a tool-using animal. Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.
– Thomas Carlyle
Forty-some years I’ve
Lived in the mountains,
Ignorant of the world’s
Rise and fall.
Warmed at night by a stove
Full of pine needles;
Satisfied at noon by a bowl
Of wild plants;
Sitting on rocks
Watching clouds and empty thoughts;
Patching my robe in sunlight;
Practicing silence
Till someone asks
Why Bodhidharma came east,
And I hang out my wash.
I live far off in the wild
Where moss and woods are thick and plants perfumed.
I can see mountains rain or shine
And never hear market noise.
I light a few leaves in my stove to heat tea.
To patch my robe I cut off a cloud.
Lifetimes seldom fill a hundred years.
Why suffer for profit and fame?
This body’s existence is like a bubble’s
may as well accept what happens
events and hopes seldom agree
but who can step back doesn’t worry
we blossom and fade like flowers
gather and part like clouds
worldly thoughts I forgot long ago
relaxing all day on a peak.
My Ch’an hut leans at the summit
Clouds sail back and forth
A waterfall hangs in front
A mountain ridge crests in back
On a rock wall I sketched three buddhas
For incense there’s plum branch in a jar
The fields below might be level
But can’t match a mountain home free of dust.
I searched creation without success
Then by chance found this forested ridge
My thatch hut cuts through heaven’s blue
A moss-slick trail through dense bamboo
Others are moved by profit and fame
I grow old living for Ch’an
Pine trees and strange rocks remain unknown
To those who look for mind with mind
You’re bound to become a buddha if you practice
If water drips long enough even rocks wear through
It’s not true thick skulls can’t be pierced
People just imagine their minds are hard.
Standing outside my pointed-roof hut
Who’d guess how spacious it is inside
A galaxy of worlds is there
With room to spare for a zazen cushion.
Becoming a buddha is easy
But ending illusions is hard
So many frosted moonlit nights
I’ve sat and felt
The cold before dawn.
– Shih-wu
A man that I saw manifest real wisdom on several occasions once told me that if someone on the other side of town gets mugged, his or her fear will enter the pool of vibes that is the general well-being of which we all partake. When ICE invades a business and starts arresting people, we all experience their terror. At that level, it doesn’t matter if they’re “legal citizens” or not. They’re Homo sapiens with nervous systems. I’ve been thinking how earlier today, when I saw the people on the streets looking lost and afraid, it coincided with Trump announcing his takeover of the city of Washington DC. They didn’t have to know about it. It’s like entangled quantum elements. It doesn’t require direct awareness, and it’s instantaneous. Awareness, no doubt, compounds the anxiety. But it happens even without it.
– Mark Bittner
The majority of men have no opinions… their opinions must be pumped into them from the outside, like lubricants into machinery.
– José Ortega y Gasset
Looking for people that feel Ecclesiastes deep in their soul.
– @laisofealdwine
Meter is as natural as breathing or the heartbeat. I think my childhood asthma had a lot to do with my consciousness of the breath unit—in a sense I’ve never really taken breathing for granted.
– Carolyn Kizer
shooting after shooting,
what’s the use of poetry
in daily life?
between finger and thumb my pen
tucked snug as a gun
– Chen-ou Liu
lost in the valley …
listening for the river
to guide us home
– Rachel Sutcliffe
Hansel or Gretel
by Natalie Shapero
I can’t claim to have been too surprised on hearing that my past
was on fire and I could only
save one thing. I couldn’t decide
between the time I read about an actor dying at the peak
of her earning potential and the time
we were all invited to join our employer’s annual
NO GAIN CHALLENGE, which incentivized remaining
within one percent of one’s weight each holiday season.
I couldn’t decide between how my boss
used to hover in the lunchroom, clocking the contents
of my sandwich, and the time you
called me HANSEL OR GRETEL, whichever got assigned
by the gingerbread witch to the cage; you could
never remember. At one lunch everyone was talking
about a pop star who would alter
her look all the time through color or cut. Often she wasn’t
recognizable right away. I’M HER RIGHT NOW,
I wanted to say and then rip off my face
for the reveal, like in Mission: Impossible. But I wasn’t her,
though I too was always changing.
I was like the Ship of Theseus, if the rate of replacement
of the planks on the Ship of Theseus
was under one percent per holiday season, which it certainly might
have been; I never checked. The local industrial
smokestack vomited steam. The air was dry. The sun
was like an oven. Go on and get inside.
Voice—as opposed to plot, character, and situation—depends entirely on the sound and shape, the rhythm, the refrain, of each sentence.
– Alice McDermott
I’ll never understand those who go to a museum, snap a cell-phone pic of a painting, and rush away. Today I watched hundreds of people do this with Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, and not one paused to experience the image. Art is waiting to change us, if we slow down and let it.
– Joseph Fasano
Life is hard & sharp & it hurts, but there are some who wear it lightly, & mindfully, & with class, & are frank yet wise yet light, & if our recipe is right our household shall be one of the hardy & cheerful ones. Life is often lonely & sad & unfair, but if we are lucky we shall work hard & earn our luck, & when we are hit broadside we shall return fire as we sail away with the wind at our backs, & trouble will find it is bored with us.
– Waylon Lewis
I don’t wish to make a lover with cloth; I want something warm that won’t feel shame lying over me.
– Akosua Afiriyie-Hwedie
It’s so funny to me that conservatives try to paint California as un-American or like some foreign land. Literally 1 in 8 Americans are Californians. California is arguably the most American state in the country.
– Brendan North
Look How Far
by Bruce Cockburn
… On this rooftop where we’re sitting
In the rays of the setting sun
Glasses of wine on a crate between us
Catch the light, seem to glow from within
… And there’s a laugh
Hanging in the air
And there’s no
Desperation anywhere
… So many miles, so many doors
Some need patience, some need force
All fall open in their own due course
To allow us this time
… And your limned
In light, golden and thin
Looks to me
Like you’re lit up from within
… And look how far the light came
Look how far the light came
Look how far the light came
To paint you
This way
… And I picture us in this light
Friendship a fine silver web
Stretched across golden smoky haze
And this is simple
And this is grace
… And this light
Is a guest from far away
Passing through
The last whisper of day
… And look how far the light came
Look how far the light came
Look how far the light came
To paint you
This way
Of all people only those are at leisure who make time for philosophy, only those are really alive. For they not only keep a good watch over their own lifetimes, but they annex every age to theirs.
– Seneca
I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer
Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
It establishes the universal ideas in language,
And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice
With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.
It puts what should be above things as they are,
Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope.
It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master,
Giving us the estate of the world to manage.
It saves austere and transparent phrases
From the filthy discord of tortured words.
It says that everything is new under the sun,
Opens the congealed fist of the past.
Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia
And poetry, her ally in the service of the good.
As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth,
The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.
Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit.
Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction.
– Czesław Miłosz
Speak, leaders of every nation, leaders of every faith, speak, let the world hear your voice, speak, against the violence and the greed, against the bullying and the power grab, speak, let your voice call others to freedom, speak, so that silence will not bury us in the shadows of history, speak and speak now, before the time for speaking is past.
– Rt. Rev. Steven Charleston
Individual acts of ethical courage: spreading like wildflowers in every direction. That is what will turn the tide: the faithful persistence of those who will not be compromised. One by one, truth by truth, sacrifice by sacrifice, the relentless march of justice will continue, until the abettors of chaos have no more room to maneuver.
– Rt. Rev. Steven Charleston
I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind… At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme, I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy, and wise in spite of themselves.
– Robertson Davies
It is time for all the heroes to go home
if they have any, time for all of us common ones
to locate ourselves by the real things
we live by.
Far to the north, or indeed in any direction,
strange mountains and creatures have always lurked-
elves, goblins, trolls, and spiders:-we
encounter them in dread and wonder,
But once we have tasted far streams, touched the gold,
found some limit beyond the waterfall,
a season changes, and we come back, changed
but safe, quiet, grateful.
Suppose an insane wind holds all the hills
while strange beliefs whine at the traveler’s ears,
we ordinary beings can cling to the earth and love
where we are, sturdy for common things.
– William Stafford, Allegiances
I would love to have lived out my years
in a cottage a few blocks from the sea,
and to have spent my mornings painting
out in the cold, wet rocks, to be known
as “a local artist,” a pleasant old man
who “paints passably well, in a traditional
manner,” though a person of limited
talent, of limited palette: earth tones
and predictable blues, snap-brim cloth cap
and cardigan, baggy old trousers
and comfortable shoes, but none of this
shall come to pass, for every day
the possibilities grow fewer, like swallows
in autumn. If you should come looking
for me, you’ll find me here, in Nebraska,
thirty miles south of the broad Platte River,
right under the flyway of dreams.
– Ted Kooser
The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain one person, for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, and invisible guests come in and out at will.
– Czeslaw Milosz
Why worry about the loaves and fishes?
If you say the right words, the wine expands.
If you say them with love
and the felt ferocity of that love
and the felt necessity of that love,
the fish explode into many.
Imagine him, speaking,
and don’t worry about what is reality,
or what is plain, or what is mysterious.
If you were there, it was all those things.
If you can imagine it, it is all those things.
Eat, drink, be happy.
Accept the miracle.
Accept, too, each spoken word
spoken with love.
– Mary Oliver
You need not see what someone is doing
to know if it is his vocation,
you have only to watch his eyes:
a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon
making a primary incision,
a clerk completing a bill of lading,
wear the same rapt expression,
forgetting themselves in a function.
How beautiful it is,
that eye-on-the-object look.
– W.H. Auden
As night descends on a nation intent upon ruin, upon destruction, blind, deaf to protest, crafty, powerful, unintelligent. It is necessary to be alone, to be not part of this, to be in the exile of silence, to be in a manner of speaking a political prisoner. No matter where in the world he may be, no matter what may be his power of protest, or his means of expression, the poet finds himself ultimately where I am. Alone, silent, with the obligation of being very careful not to say what he does not mean, not to let himself be persuaded to say merely what another wants him to say, not to say what his own past work has led others to expect him to say.
– Thomas Merton
Paths are the habits of a landscape. They are acts of consensual making. It’s hard to create a footpath on your own…Paths connect. This is their first duty and their chief reason for being. They relate places in a literal sense, and by extension they relate people.
Paths are consensual, too, because without common care and common practice they disappear: overgrown by vegetation, ploughed up or built over (through they may persist in the memorious substance of land law). Like sea channels that require regular dredging to stay open, paths NEED walking.
– Robert MacFarlane
To have humility is to experience reality, not in relation to ourselves, but in its sacred independence. It is to see, judge, and act from the point of rest in ourselves. Then, how much disappears, and all that remains falls into place.
In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable.
– Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings
Spiritual change is precisely a process that is bigger than you. You don’t control it. You surrender to it. You don’t reinvent yourself through spiritual work. You face yourself, and then you must let go of all the ghastly things you find. But there is no end to these ghastly things. They keep coming. The ego is a bottomless pit of suckiness. And so you finally let go of the self that clings to itself (one definition of ego). True freedom comes when ego goes.
– Jack Haubner
…kindness is the only non-delusional response to everything.
– George Saunders
The more I let go of my life, the more it seems to make sense to me. The less I try to control, the more things seem to come within my grasp. The fewer things I own, the more satisfied I seem to feel. Spirituality is an irony. It is based on the counter-intuitive principle that less is more, that giving away is gaining, that being able to bend is the best way to stand tall. These lessons are learned by experience and intuition, by seeing and listening. They are not dogma, but common sense. The more I realize I do not know, the more I learn.
– Steven Charleston
To see takes time, like having a friend takes time. It is as simple as turning off the television to learn the song of a single bird. Why should anyone do such things? I cannot imagine—unless one is weary of crossing days off the calendar with no sense of what makes the last day different from the next. Unless one is weary of acting in what feels more like a television commercial than a life. The practice of paying attention offers no quick fix for such weariness, with guaranteed results printed on the side. Instead, it is one way into a different way of life, full of treasure for those who are willing to pay attention to exactly where they are.
– Barbara Brown Taylor
Discernment is key to every wisdom tradition. It’s about sorting out the stuff of life — the experiences we have, the people we walk with, the “signs and signals” we pick up — by asking good questions about their meaning and importance in the living of our lives.
Is this my problem, or does it belong to someone else?
Is this something from which I can learn, or have I already been there and done that?
Is this life-giving for me and those around me, or is it death-dealing in ways small or large?
Is this something to which I can give myself, or must I let it go?
– Parker J. Palmer
Doubt is vital to the way we grow. Uncertainty is the medium in which empathy flourishes. Confidence, on the other hand, is too often an echo chamber.
– Katherine May
Like the ancient prophets, we are dispatched back to the good work entrusted to us. It is the work of peace-making. It is the work of truth-telling. It is the work of justice-doing. It is good work, but it requires our resolve to stay it, even in the face of the forces to the contrary that are sure to prevail for a season. We are in it for the long run, even as the Holy One is in it for the very long haul, from everlasting to everlasting. We do not ease off because it is hard.
– Walter Brueggemann
It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.
Even in this
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.
That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books—
Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.
– Jane Hirshfield, Tree
Right-mindedness: a mind in place,
in right relation to Nature and
its neighbors. Thoughts, instructions,
stories, songs enter from outside, and some
of these are needed, can be made welcome,
but nothing replaces the living
geography, topography, ecology, history,
the mind’s waking at home in its creaturely
household, which is its work, its burden,
its privilege, its intimate reference, its way
to find at need, against the time’s perilous
leanings, the unshifting star.
– Wendell Berry
I did not recite, “with liberty and justice for all” every morning at 7 a.m. only to grow up and be called radical for actually wanting liberty and justice for all.
– Emily Ameck, Democracy in Retrograde
The first principle of nonviolent action is that of non-cooperation with everything humiliating.
– Mahatma Gandhi
We were made to understand it would be
Terrible. Every small want, every niggling urge,
Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind.
Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful
Dream. The worst in us having taken over
And broken the rest utterly down.
A long age
Passed. When at last we knew how little
Would survive us—how little we had mended
Or built that was not now lost—something
Large and old awoke. And then our singing
Brought on a different manner of weather.
Then animals long believed gone crept down
From trees. We took new stock of one another.
We wept to be reminded of such color.
– Tracy K. Smith, An Old Story
Everyone has a responsibility to not only tolerate another person’s point of view, but also to accept it eagerly as a challenge to your own understanding. And express those challenges in terms of serving other people.
– Arlo Guthrie
Acorns Are a Good Place to Start
Look into the acorn;
find the order of the cosmos,
telos unrestrained
in a fall to earth, the molder,
the fusion of coded matter with
loamy humus. Look into the
center of the mortal soul lost
to its creaturely cipher. We
strive in wild myth-making, in
sanctioned form of astral-projection,
without the will to perish within our
bags of bones, to decay, the denial of
death is everywhere. As much as
we would call ourselves the
crown jewel, we are yet
flung into a vague corner of
our galaxy more as a seed
than a diamond. We are buried
deep in unbound darkness. O, how
great the gift of faith appearing on
the night the stars arranged so
random.
– James Scott Smith
Summertime, oh summertime, pattern of life indelible, the fade proof lake, the woods unshatterable, the pasture with the sweet fern and the juniper forever and ever, summer without end; this was the background, and the life along the shore was the design, the cottages with their innocent and tranquil design, their tiny docks with the flagpole and the American flag floating against the white clouds in the blue sky, the little paths over the roots of the trees leading from camp to camp and the paths leading back to the outhouses and the can of lime for sprinkling, and at the souvenir counters at the store the miniature birch-bark canoes and the post cards that showed things looking a little better than they looked. This was the American family at play, escaping the city heat, wondering whether the newcomers at the camp at the head of the cove were “common” or “nice,” wondering whether it was true that the people who drove up for Sunday dinner at the farmhouse were turned away because there wasn’t enough chicken.
– E.B. White
Responsible choice involves consequences, not the least of which are relinquishments all along our way.
– Marsha Sinetar
I and this mystery here we stand.
– Walt Whitman
I make the most of all that comes and the least of all that goes.
– Sara Teasdale
It is plain to me that a line ought to be drawn without fail wherever it can be drawn easily. And it ought to be easy (though many do not find it so) to refuse to buy what one does not need…And yet, if we are ever again to have a world fit and pleasant for little children, we are surely going to have to draw the line where it is not easily drawn. We are going to have to learn to give up things that we have learned (in only a few years, after all) to “need”. I am not an optimist; I am afraid I won’t live long enough to escape my bondage to the machines. Nevertheless, on every day left to me I will search my mind and circumstances for the means of escape. And I am not without hope. I knew a man who, in the age of chainsaws, went right on cutting his wood with a hand saw and an axe. He was a healthier and saner man than I am. I shall let his memory trouble my thoughts.
– Wendell Berry
Writers think. And disseminate ideas, and say the quiet words out loud. This is why we need them.
– Hope Edelman
They must find it difficult, those who have taken authority as truth, rather than truth as authority.
– Gerald Massey
Definition
Illegal Alien, adj. / n.
A term by which
An invading colonial force
Vilifies
Indigenous cultures
By identifying them as
An invading colonial force.
– Luis Alberto Urrea
I TALK TO MY BODY
My body, you are an animal
whose appropriate behavior
is concentration and discipline.
An effort
of an athlete, of a saint and of a yogi.
Well trained,
you may become for me
a gate
through which I will leave myself
and a gate
through which I will enter myself.
A plumb line to the center of the earth
and a cosmic ship to Jupiter.
My body, you are an animal
for whom ambition
is right.
Splendid possibilities
are open to us.
– Anna Swir
I thought my dance alone through worlds of
odd and eccentric planets that no one else knew
would sustain me.
– Joy Harjo
Mostly, I just recall sitting on the back step of the house away from everyone and smoking and feeling the roaring body shock of it, like this alien force was going to burst out the ends of my fucking fingers. I remember feeling like I was physically detonating, like if I made any sudden moves I’d literally explode, so stuffed was my body with despair. And then sitting next to the bed, with Susie lying completely still in the dark, like a stone, her eyes closed, and saying, ‘I am here, babe, I’m here,’ but really I’m not, I’m not there at all, I’m in a million fucking pieces, everywhere else, all over the place.
– Nick Cave
But I have yet to see an octopus, or any sort of animal, for that matter, which wasn’t entirely content to pass its time on earth as a food gatherer, to shun the experiments with unlimited greed and ambition performed by humankind.
– Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
The self is a repeatedly reconstructed biological state.
– Antonio R. Damasio
The mind seems to grow fidgety and uncomfortable cooped up in a body 24/7. Mentally, dreaming is like taking off a pair of tight shoes at the end of the day: the liberated mind is no longer constrained by somatic sensory and motor processes. Dreaming unfetters the mind from the world of matter; and, having vacated the body, consciousness is free to pandiculate, ponder and play. The dreaming mind stretches, yawns and reawakens in a strangely familiar place where it can time travel, dialogue with demons, get trapped in a mundane loop of doing dinner dishes or soar with angels.
– Rubin Naiman
I am dancing a single dance throughout my whole life. My dance is identical with the everlasting revolution. I recovered my language through dancing, and saw politics through dancing. I will live up to ethics through dancing, and perceive the map of history through dancing. I gained courage to stand against power through dancing. I am re-scrutinizing the ‘instinct’ through dancing. I want to know God through dancing. I want to encounter matter through dancing. A dancer, in essence, is an anonymous lightning, a medium of the place. This is how I want to be. The endless performance/dance. An attempt to verify dance from the minimal to the maximal by rendering my body as an example. Or an attempt to discover and initiate dance in all places.
– Min Tanaka
You presume you are a small entity. But within you is enfolded the entire universe. You are indeed the evident book, by whose alphabet the hidden becomes manifest.
– Iman Ali Ibn Abi Taleb
Only the ironwork will bring us money,
ornamental sofas overlooking graves,
black-flowered fences planted in marble,
occasionally an urn or a bronze star.
But if there is time
we shatter the hourglasses,
slaughter lambs asleep on children’s graves,
break the blades off stone scythes,
the marble strings on silent lyres.
Only the angels are here to stop us, and they have grown
too weak to wrestle.
We break their arms and leave them wingless,
leaning over graves like old men lamenting their age.
– David Bottoms
“I suppose you do love me, in your way,” I said to him one night close to dawn when we lay on the narrow bed. “And how else should I love you —in your way?” he asked. I am still thinking about that.
– Anne Carson
At this moment, now, a doubt overtakes me. God, or whatever You are called: I now ask only one bit of help: but it is that you help me, not in the obscure way in which you are me but now openly, in plain sight.
For I need to know precisely this one thing: am I feeling what I am feeling, or am I feeling what I wanted to feel? or am I feeling what I would need to feel?
– Clarice Lispector
There is a time for any fledgling artist where one’s taste exceeds one’s abilities. The only way to get through this period is to make things anyway.
– Gabrielle Zevin
You see the first thing we love is a scene. For love at first sight requires the very sign of its suddenness; and of all things, it is the scene which seems to be seen best for the first time: a curtain parts and what had not yet ever been seen is devoured by the eyes: the scene consecrates the object I am going to love. The context is the constellation of elements, harmoniously arranged that encompass the experience of the amorous subject…
Love at first sight is always spoken in the past tense. The scene is perfectly adapted to this temporal phenomenon: distinct, abrupt, framed, it is already a memory (the nature of a photograph is not to represent but to memorialize)… this scene has all the magnificence of an accident: I cannot get over having had this good fortune: to meet what matches my desire.
The gesture of the amorous embrace seems to fulfill, for a time, the subject’s dream of total union with the loved being: The longing for consummation with the other… In this moment, everything is suspended: time, law, prohibition: nothing is exhausted, nothing is wanted: all desires are abolished, for they seem definitively fulfilled… A moment of affirmation; for a certain time, though a finite one, a deranged interval, something has been successful: I have been fulfilled (all my desires abolished by the plenitude of their satisfaction).
– Roland Barthes
To try to write love is to confront the muck of language; that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive (by the limitless expansion of the ego, by emotive submersion) and impoverished (by the codes on which love diminishes and levels it).
– Roland Barthes
Maybe the reason all the powerful instruments pointed at the sky have not yet been able to detect high-tech alien civilizations is that these unsustainable societies don’t last long enough to leave a cosmic trace. An unsettling thought.
– Tyson Yunkaporta
Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal… To hope is to give yourself to the future – and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.
– Rebecca Solnit
In a tiny corner of the human brain, smaller than the head of a pin, lies a universe. A universe that, for the first time, has been mapped with detail that borders on the unimaginable. A team led by researcher Alexander Shapson-Coe decided to focus their gaze—and the full power of electron microscopy—on just one cubic millimeter of the temporal cortex. The result: a nano-resolution map that reveals not only neurons, but synapses, vessels, connections, and patterns previously invisible to the eye of science. That tiny piece of brain generated 1.4 petabytes of information. To put it into perspective: it’s more than a thousand times the amount of data stored in an entire library. What’s incredible is that they didn’t just observe… they also shared. They created a free tool for anyone—from neuroscientists to knowledge enthusiasts—to explore this cerebral microcosm. What’s published in the journal Science isn’t just a technological feat. It’s a new door opened to the secrets of the human mind. A map that not only shows what we are… but what we still have to understand.
– [SCIENCE] [WIRED]
Here is what I love about the brain: How it remembers.
How it sews what soft it can into a blanket
for the nights when I am cold with trouble.
- Sean Patrick Mulroy
If we do not at least aspire to a genuine spiritual practice & path, we can easily be swallowed up by our ignorance, our self-absorption, and our (possibly misguided) projections of the world & others. These can bring us great suffering & confusion.
– Dzigar Kongtrul, Diligence
We don’t need a psychic to tell us what our future experience will be—we need only look at our own minds. If we have a good heart and helpful intentions toward others, we will continually find happiness.
– Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche
When there is poetry,
it is Orpheus singing. He lightly comes and goes.
Isn’t it enough if sometimes he can stay
with us a few days longer than a rose?
– Rainer Maria Rilke t. by Stephen Mitchell
Most people in the course of their lives come to realize that they cannot control the external world, but fairly few become conscious that inner psychic processes are not subject to ego control either.
– Murray Stein
I find with a lot of my work that I get a notion or something pulls at me, and then I go at it that way. I don’t have a game plan or a method, particularly. It’s a mysterious phenomenon, this creating things.
– Ed Ruscha
I am this eternally abstracted self,
For ever walking beside its own way.
One day my soul’s departed, the next,
I will awake in an ancient city.
– Antonin Artaud (translated by Victor Corti)
Kindness anywhere gives me hope; it changes us. Those who were sober never gave up on anyone—I am exhibit A—and so I don’t, either, ever.
– Anne Lamott
the person who cares will almost always beat the person who’s just doing their job.
– Shane Parrish
When suffering knocks, don’t invite it to stay by reacting. Just recognize it and let it pass.
– Dawn Scott
The spiritual growth’s an oscillatory thing: we move by shivers in the world’s tumultuous spine.
– Theodore Roethke
The awake are infiltrating the system like we never have before. We’re in all infrastructures and seated at every table, taking the world back from the inside out.
– Nika Solé
Prosody is the analysis of what is there, linguistically and…phonetically, especially in its relation to the artificial pattern. In which, of course, the nature of the language itself, and of the idiosyncrasies of a given person will inevitably be concerned.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
I Have Been Living
by Jane Mead
I have been living
closer to the ocean than I thought—
in a rocky cove thick with seaweed.
It pulls me down when I go wading.
Sometimes, to get back to land
takes everything that I have in me.
Sometimes, to get back to land
is the worst thing a person can do.
Meanwhile, we are dreaming:
The body is innocent.
She has never hurt me.
What we love flutters in us.
Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never one but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading. . .
– William Faulker
In mathematics the art of asking questions is more valuable than solving problems.
– Georg Cantor
If I knew that it was fated for me to be sick, I would even wish for it; for the foot also, if it had intelligence, would volunteer to get muddy.
– Chrysippus
people, places, things
do not exist in time
they are time
– Dogen
My shortest poem was three words long.
It took me months to write.
Poetry isn’t about length it’s about weight.
– Kapil Dev
And yet, even the place where someone once stood, replaced by another place where many others have stood, still held a kind of reverence. We felt, briefly, connected, seeing what those creators saw, hearing what they might have heard.
– Allison K Williams
According to metre a master can tell a pupil that a line ‘does not scan’ – which is not the same thing as saying that it is phonetically unpleasant or that it is not capable of phonetic analysis.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Most people who consider themselves to be “night owls” just have bad habits that prevent them from getting to sleep on time.
– Dan Go
The fog has lifted.
The density has dissolved.
It’s time to shine bright my love.
– Nika Solé
A great deal (not all) of our literature was made to be read lightly, for entertainment. If we do not read it, in a sense, ‘for fun’ and with our feet on the fender, we are not using it as it was meant to be
used.
– C.S. Lewis
Loss isn’t loud—it doesn’t shout.
It walks in slowly, then sits it out.
It borrows light, it dims the day,
and hides in things we meant to say.
– Muneera Mun
The knowledge that life is worthless is the flower of all wisdom. The worthlessness of life is the easiest truth, but at the same time it is the one that is the hardest to know, because it appears concealed by countless veils.
– Philipp Mainländer
I write to hold what slips away,
A face, a name, a certain day.
The page remembers what I forget—
And carries what I can’t just yet.
– Muneera Mun
Not exercising is toxic to your brain, mood, and energy levels.
– Dan Go
Below is a list of countries that did not receive AID from the American taxpayers.
1. America
– C3
“Decorative tears” make us
more beautiful to our lovers, said Virgil.
Thus were tears made into marks
of beauty & so it wasn’t long
before women were told to fake-cry
if they couldn’t real-cry.
Are you serious, Ovid?
I am so ugly when I cry
this will not work
– Allison Titus
flash flood —
a deluge of sorrow
I didn’t expect
– @lafcadiopoetry
I hope that…you will…make a firm distinction between, as I should say, metre and prosody, whatever names you give to the two distinct things. For me metre is the conscious learned pattern, the rules…
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Once you have read
a book you care about,
some part of it is always with you.
– Louis L’Amour
Once, as a child, out in a field of sheep,
Thomas Hardy pretended to be dead
And lay down flat among their dainty shins.
In that sniffed-at, bleated-into, grassy space
He experimented with infinity.
His small cool brow was like an anvil waiting
For sky to make it sing the perfect pitch
Of his dumb being, and that stir he caused
In the fleece-hustle was the original
Of a ripple that would travel eighty years
Outward from there, to be the same ripple
Inside him at its last circumference.
– Seamus Heaney
Nothing proves
I’m alive.
There is only the
rain, the rain is
endless.
– Louise Glück
All languages, large and small, have a lot to contribute to our common humanity if freed from linguistic feudalism. Education policies should be devised on the basis that all languages are treasuries of history, beauty & possibility.
– Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
THE LOST LOVE POEMS OF SAPPHO
The poems we haven’t read
must be her fiercest:
imperfect, extreme.
As it is with love, its nights, its days.
It stands on the top of the mountain
and looks for more mountain, steeper pitches.
Descent a thought impossible to imagine.
– Jane Hirshfield
an umbrella shaped flower
has bloomed during
the short summer night
– Issa
A sudden pour
and I was drenched
with memories
from another rainy day.
– Muneera Mun
I never want to arrive at a sweetened language
– Omar Sakr
Once you see the peace and light within you, your perception is changed. You see that peace, that light everywhere. When you see that bliss in you, you don’t see anything else outside. You see everybody as your own Self.
– Swami Satchidananda
Sometimes I shrink from your knowing what I have felt for you, and sometimes I am distressed that all of it you will never know.
– Thomas Hardy
God is on the side of him who wrestles with him.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Misery is the river of the world –
everybody row!
– Tom Waits
Society is now one polish’d horde, form’d of two mighty tribes, the Bores and Bored.
– Lord Byron
100 summer days
of writing poetry
mindfulness
– Buson
The natural healing force within each of us is the greatest force in getting well.
– Hippocrates
we are smaller
than the smallest thing
we can imagine
– Andy Perrin
There isn’t one kind of happiness, there’s all kinds. Decision is torment for anyone with imagination. When you decide, you multiply the things you might have done and now never can.
– Penelope Fitzgerald
Self-Portrait as a Wild Extrovert
by Chen Chen
I have 600 dear friends.
I hug each of them
daily. I never need a mint
but am always ready to offer one
or 600. I love & know a lot
about biking/baking. I love & know
a lot about Celine Dion,
thanks to my mom, who is, if I
absolutely had to pick one—but
who am I kidding, of course
she’s my best friend.
Once, every five years, I might
feel a smidge of sadness.
& when I do, I just
sit down, maintaining impeccable,
approachable posture, & breathe.
I breathe like the very well-
organized, very wall-less
ad agency I’ve run
since birth. I breathe
like breathing is my oldest
dear friend named Daphne
Daphne, whom I still call every night
before bed to say, You are
an incandescent multiverse—don’t you
forget it, & that never
fails to do the trick.
climb to the top
of the hill on the right
and there’s blue sky
– Koyama Takako
Humans
do not possess
the power to
destroy earth.
However, we also
do not possess the power
to stop destroying
our ability to
exist here.
– Andy Perrin
Most of us can’t help but live as though we’ve got two lives to live, one is the mockup, the other the finished version, and then there are all those versions in between.
– André Aciman
Above all,
a man’s thought is his nostalgia…
– Albert Camus
Let’s remember why we’re doing this: to transform society so that everyone can live in dignity.
– Jeremy Corbyn
If you want to use your life to change the world, it all begins within.
– Robin Sharma
“Twenty years from now, will we be a country of Democrats and Republicans taking turns on who’s in power?” Pete Buttigieg asked recently. “I’m not so sure… I think that both parties should examine the chances of their survival.”
– David Wallace-Wells
Cavafy identified with the entire Hellenic world, from Homeric times up through the dynasty of the Seleucids and Byzantium, incarnating himself in them, so that his journey through time and space was also a journey into his own interior realm.
– Czeslaw Milosz
People with hearts filled with love, peace, and compassion live in heaven.
– Debbie Ford
Dumbledore turned back to Snape, and his eyes were full of tears. “You’re still writing your PhD, after all this time?”
“Always,” said Snape.
– @ThePhDPlace
THE POEM
Coming late, as always,
I try to remember what I almost heard.
The light avoids my eye.
How many times have I heard the locks close
And the lark take the keys
And hang them in heaven.
– W.S. Merwin
I HAD NO TIME TO HATE
by Emily Dickinson
I had no time to hate, because
The grave would hinder me,
And life was not so ample I
Could finish enmity.
Nor had I time to love, but since
Some industry must be,
The little toil of love, I thought,
Was large enough for me.
The difference between
undiscovered knowledge
and secret knowledge
is whether or not
someone’s blocking our path.
– Fa Hsing
I was writing stories when I was five. I don’t know what I did before that. Just loafed I suppose.
– P. G. Wodehouse
the Perseids peak …
the lives I dreamed in my teens
but never lived
– Chen-ou Liu
Fulfill me, make me happy, make me feel safe, tell me who I am. The world cannot give you those things, and when you no longer have such expectations, all self-created suffering comes to an end.
– Eckhart Tolle
floating lantern
I let the river
carry my prayer
to the other shore
– Mingmar Sadhana
The devil sleeps not but labours strenuously for your perdition; and will you slumber when your eternal happiness is at stake?
– St. Augustine
For he, that once hath missed the right way,
The further he doth goe, the further he doth stray.
– Edmund Spenser
Language can be a form of counterhistory. … Let language shape the world. Let it break the faith of conventional re-creation. Language lives in everything it touches and can be an agent of redemption, the thing that delivers us, paradoxically, from history’s flat, thin, tight and relentless designs, its arrangement of stark pages, and that allows us to find an unconstraining otherness, a free veer from time and place and fate.
– Don Delillo
It breaks me. It breaks me how much science and technology is used for evil now. How much we invest in death rather than life.
– Alina Stefanescu
The symbol aims inward; language outward.
– Marie Louise von Franz
I very rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards.
– Albert Einstein
For me, music was a matter of survival. I survived the troubles of life with music. Music was my consolation, my friend, my everything.
– Suni Paz
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.
– Karl Marx
The Human Abstract
by William Blake
Pity would be no more,
If we did not make somebody Poor;
And Mercy no more could be,
If all were as happy as we;
And mutual fear brings peace;
Till the selfish loves increase.
Then Cruelty knits a snare,
And spreads his baits with care.
He sits down with holy fears,
And waters the ground with tears:
Then Humility takes its root
Underneath his foot.
Soon spreads the dismal shade
Of Mystery over his head;
And the caterpillar and fly,
Feed on the Mystery.
And it bears the fruit of Deceit,
Ruddy and sweet to eat;
And the raven his nest has made
In its thickest shade.
The gods of the earth and sea
Sought thro’ Nature to find this Tree,
But their search was all in vain:
There grows one in the Human Brain.
I have never belonged wholeheartedly to a country, a state, nor to a circle of friends, nor even to my own family.
– Albert Einstein
In an earlier age, the absence of language was used as an argument against the existence of thought in other species. Today I find myself upholding the position that the manifest reality of thinking by nonlinguistic creatures argues against the importance of language.
– Frans de Waal
Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language. Such ideas cannot be grasped singly, one by one in isolation. They require that mankind advances in its apprehension of the general nature of things, so as to conceive systems of ideas elucidating each other. But the growth of generality of apprehension is the slowest of all evolutionary changes.
– Alfred North Whitehead
I liked the idea that
a poem was small enough
that it could get inside of
you and stay.
– Tracy K. Smith
babe, you don’t need
a “breakthrough.”
you need a break.
– Yasmine Cheyenne
Instead of saying how
you were related to the dead
say what died with them. I lost my
morning laughter, my love of letters,
my belief that nothing is beyond saving.
– Jared Singer
Age is no more near than youth
To the scepter and the crown.
Vain the wisdom, vain the truth;
Do not lay thy rapture down.
– George Russell
No man was ever yet a great poet, without at the same time being a profound philosopher.
– Samuel Coleridge
My friend… care for your psyche… know thyself, for once we know ourselves, we may learn how to care for ourselves.
– Socrates
Teachers spark us to grow, to expand our perspective and deepen our integration of all we experience. Teachers move us beyond our resistance toward Wholeness.
– Mark Nepo
INTENTION
by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
To wonder. To wonder with no plan
for where it might lead. No strategy
for arrival. No finish line. No pot
of gold. No perfect score. No striving for.
To wonder. To wonder the way a small child
might wonder when seeing a roly poly for the first time —
oh, look at all those legs. Look at how
it curls! Look how it moves again. Feel
how light it is in the palm. Feel how
it tickles as it moves. Imagine
an awareness that new meeting a life form that old.
Can I be that new as I meet this infinite world?
To wonder not just with my mind
but with my belly. To let every neuron
spark. To notice where there is a channel
and imagine the great wing of life
is scraping it clean so the stream might flow
in new ways. To wonder beyond the edge
of the known, and in that spaciousness, play.
We do not really know what draws a human being out into the world. Is it curiosity? A hunger for experience? An addiction to wonderment? The man who ceases to be astonished is hollow, possessed of an extinguished heart. If he believes that everything has already happened, that he has seen it all, then something most precious has died within him—the delight in life.
– Ryszard Kapuściński
Chess is indeed a war, but an institutionalized, regulated, coded war with a front, a rear battles. But what is proper to Go is war without battle lines, with neither confrontation nor retreat, without battles even: pure strategy, whereas chess is semiology.
– Gilles Deleuze and Féliz Guattari
I do like clarity and exact thinking and I believe that very important to mankind because when you allow yourself to think inexactly your prejudices, your bias, your self interest comes in ways you don’t notice and you do bad things without knowing that you are doing them: self deception is very easy. So that I do think clear thinking immensely important.
– Bertrand Russell
Perfection doesn’t sustain change. Self-compassion does.
– Marc David
CHANGING RHYTHM
At the edge
of the field
was the bank
where the boy
used to stand
and throw rocks
for the joy
of the splash
and now
his mom
stands there
alone
sometimes
she throws
a rock,
surprised
each time
when the joy
of the splash
is still there.
– Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
By the earth we fall down,
By the earth we stand up.
– Shunryu Suzuki
Sometimes a gift is given and neither giver nor recipient knows what its true dimensions are, and what it appears to be at first is not what it will be in the end. Like beginnings, endings have endless recessions, layers atop the layers, consequences that ripple outward.
– Rebecca Solnit
The healing hero, therefore, is the one who finds some creative way out, a way not already known, and does not follow a pattern. Ordinary sick people follow ordinary patterns, but the shaman cannot be cured by the usual methods of healing. He has to find the unique way, the only way that applies to him. The creative personality who can do that then becomes a healer and is recognized as such by his colleagues.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
Your body is the ground metaphor of your life, the expression of your existence. It is your Bible, your encyclopedia, your life story.
– Gabrielle Roth
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.
– Bokonon
There’s a great deal to say about how we tend to see, and hear, only what has been pointed out to us … We are given words for those things that are pointed out to us. What about everything else? What are we missing?
– Pattiann Rogers
The road must be trod, but it will be very hard. And neither strength nor wisdom will carry us far upon it. This quest may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong. Yet it is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: Small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Stories can be helpful tools for surviving hardship and navigating complexity. That is, when we craft them as sturdy boats, built to our dimensions and desires. But many stories are bigger than our single lives and desires. Many stories are invisible: so big, so culturally ingrained, that we are blind to the ways in which they drive and constrain our lives.
One of the cultural stories we live inside, but have trouble recognizing, is a story about health and personal responsibility. It’s a story that’s tangled up with theology, anthropocentrism, colonialism, and capitalism. It has very little to do with the happiness and vitality of our actual bodies. The story goes like this: Health belongs to an individual. Health is both a possession and an external reflection of someone’s personal achievements or moral failings. Every individual is personally responsible for the ways in which their body changes, misbehaves, and deviates from the norm. The norm is usually measured against white bodies. Young bodies. European bodies. Male bodies.
We all recognize the narrative from the headlines that come up on our newsfeeds daily: Stress linked to cancer. Early trauma linked to obesity. Obesity linked to overeating. Overeating linked to poor impulse control. Ten ways you can detox your system. Ten ways you are harming your heart health. Ten diets that will prevent stroke.
It’s not just scientific reports and the medical establishment. This story encompasses both traditional and new age spirituality’s obsession with sin and purity. If we are sick, we might have done something wrong in a past life. If we were raped or abused, we probably invited in this “soul contract.” If our cancer isn’t going away, we are not drinking enough celery juice. If we can’t pay for the foods and medicines that might improve our autoimmune issues, it’s because we haven’t yet manifested enough wealth.
Are you feeling bad? It’s probably because somewhere, down the line, you made a mistake. And now everyone knows. Time to prove you can get back on track. Time to pour all your money and energy into getting better.
Getting sick, then, isn’t just a simple bodily experience. It comes with thousands of years of moral baggage. To get sick is to be impure. To get sick is to fail
– Sophie Strand
The geography of hell is still in the process of being mapped. The borders shift, the shore lines erode, coral islands appear complete with new sirens, but all the men who have been there speak with a similar voice.
– Wright Morris
There is, then, a world immune from change. But I am not composed enough, standing on tiptoe on the verge of fire, still scorched by the hot breath, afraid of the door opening and the leap of the tiger, to make even one sentence. What I say is perpetually contradicted. Each time the door opens I am interrupted. I am not yet twenty-one. I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens. I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness; I am also a girl, here in this room.
– Virginia Woolf
One cannot level one’s moral lance at every evil in the universe. There are just too many of them. But you can do something; and the difference between doing something and doing nothing is everything.
– Daniel Berrigan, SJ
I am not sure if my involvement in causes, benefits, marches, and demonstrations has made a huge difference, but I know one thing: that involvement has connected me with good people: people with live hearts, live eyes, live heads.
– Pete Seeger
Love causes magic.
It is the final purpose
Of the world story,
The Amen of the universe.
– Novalis
If you feel you ought to go, if I came to you at a moment when nothing could make you happy, if it’s necessary for you to leave me now so that you may some day come back to me at peace, then it is I who ask you to go…
– Alain-Fournier
In two weeks, despite these notes, I shall no longer believe in what I am experiencing now. One must leave behind a trace of this journey which memory forgets. One must, when this is impossible, write or draw without responding to the romantic solicitations of pain, without enjoying suffering like music, tieing a pen to one’s foot if need be, helping the doctors who can learn nothing from laziness.
– Jean Cocteau
I have work to do on the geography of volcanoes
From desolation to ruin
from the time of Lott to Hiroshima
As if I’d never yet lived
with a lust I’ve still to know
Perhaps Now has gone further away
and yesterday come closer
So I take Now’s hand to walk along the hem of history
and avoid cyclic time
with its chaos of mountain goats
How can my tomorrow be saved?
By the velocity of electronic time
or by my desert caravan slowness?
I have work till my end
as if I won’t see tomorrow
and I have work for today who isn’t here
So I listen
softly softly
To the ant beat of my heart….
– Mahmoud Darwish
To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the condition of the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertain and on a willingness to be exposed; it’s based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility.
– Martha Nussbaum
Our bodies are wild. The involuntary quick turn of the head at a shout, the vertigo at looking off a precipice, the heart-in-the-throat in a moment of danger, the catch of the breath, the quiet moments relaxing, staring, reflecting – all universal responses of this mammal body… The body does not require the intercession of some conscious intellect to make it breathe, to keep the heart beating. It is to a great extent self-regulating, it is a life of its own. The world is our consciousness, and it surrounds us.
There are more things in the mind, in the imagination, than ‘you’ can keep track of – thoughts, memories, images, angers, delights, rise unbidden. The depths of the mind, the unconscious, are our inner wilderness areas, and that is where a bobcat is right now. I do not mean personal bobcats in personal psyches, but the bobcat that roams from dream to dream. The conscious agenda-planning ego occupies a very tiny territory, a little cubicle somewhere near the gate, keeping track of some of what goes in and out, and the rest takes care of itself. The body is, so to speak, in the mind. They are both wild.
– Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild
SLEEPCHAINS
Who can sleep when she-
hundreds of miles away I feel that vast breath
fan her restless decks.
Cicatrice by cicatrice
all the links
rattle once.
Here we go mother on the shipless ocean.
Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.
– Anne Carson
You have traveled far, but the hardest part of a journey is always the next step.
– Jackie Morris
It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.
– Anne Carson
A woman may crave to be near water, or be belly down, her face in the earth, smelling the wild smell. She might have to drive into the wind. She may have to plant something, pull things out of the ground or put them into the ground. She may have to knead and bake, rapt in dough up to her elbows. She may have to trek into the hills, leaping from rock to rock trying out her voice against the mountain. She may need hours of starry nights where the stars are like face powder spilt on a black marble floor. She may feel she will die if she doesn’t dance naked in a thunderstorm, sit in perfect silence, return home ink-stained, paint-stained, tear-stained, moon-stained.
– Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Consider Scheherazade, whose name meant “city-born” and who was without a doubt a big-city girl, crafty, wisecracking, by turns sentimental and cynical, as contemporary a metropolitan narrator as one could wish to meet. Scheherazade, who snared the prince in her never-ending story. Scheherazade, telling stories to save her life, setting fiction against death, a Statue of Liberty built not of metal but of words. Scheherazade, who insisted, against her father’s will, on taking her place in the procession into the king’s deadly boudoir. Scheherazade, who set herself the heroic task of saving her sisters by taming the king. Who had faith, who must have had faith, in the man beneath the murderous monster and in her own ability to restore him to his true humanity, by telling him stories.
– Salman Rushdie
The truth is this:
My love for you is the only empire
I will ever build.
When it falls,
as all empires do,
my career in empire building will be over.
I will retreat to an island.
I will dabble in the vacation-hut industry.
I will skulk about the private libraries and public parks.
I will fold the clean clothes.
I will wash the dishes.
I will never again dream of having the whole world.
– Mindy Nettifee
There is no whole truth, but this is what we have,
And it goes on
Beyond impact, beyond reach, beyond recall…
– James Dickey
A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavor to do, he drowns…The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up…In the destructive element immerse.
– Joseph Conrad
Myths are stories about people who become too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into other lives or brush against gods. In crisis their souls are visible.
– Anne Carson
Every viewpoint is useful, and it takes a wide diversity of views for any group to navigate this universe, let alone to act as custodians for it.
– Tyson Yunkaporta
It is good to realize that falling apart is not such a bad thing. Indeed, it is as essential to transformation as the cracking of outgrown shells. Anxieties and doubts can be healthy and creative, not only for the person, but for the society, because they permit new and original approaches to reality.
– Joanna Macy
When night comes, something speaks from that soft, fragrant wilderness. It says, the heart is not a door. But it opens. We feel in the dark for the hinge.
– Carole Glasser Langille
This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival.
– Roland Barthes
I expect to die in a genuinely unique way.
– Meg Ford, Wild/Hurt
Be alone, that is the
secret of invention; be
alone, that is when
ideas are born.
– Nikola Tesla
What I Love about Writing
The thing I love about writing
is that it’s so lonesome,
just you and the memories and visions
in a world that doesn’t exist.
The quiet and slowness of time.
You can spend an hour
thinking about the difference
between this door and another.
– john zbigniew guzlowski
When we start to open up to the ways in which we feel joy, we realize that joy is so often readily available at our fingertips.
– Amanda Gilbert
What survived
may not be kind,
but it’s me.
– Unknown
I write to you
from the Icarus
in each of us, from the word
for existing
between aboveness
and asphalt.
– Alina Stefanescu
There is no sense talking about “being true to yourself” until you are sure what voice you are being true to. It takes hard work to differentiate the voices of the unconscious.
– Marion Woodman
Reading Rilke every night, perhaps I got used to the idea of angels being around.
– Wim Wenders
The most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds is, in my opinion, conversation.
– Michel de Montaigne
I had spent the day sunk in a low mood, [. . .]. It seemed that poems lay around half-formed, abandoned. The silted, sluggish heat made it hard for me to say what I wanted; I felt like its human host.
– Sandra Lim
In short I tried to think. I failed. My attention veered inexorably back to the specific, to the tangible, to what was generally considered, by everyone I knew then and for that matter have known since, the peripheral.
– Joan Didion
Modern man does not think about current problems; he feels them. He reacts, but does not understand them any more than he takes responsibility. One thought drives away another; old facts are chased by new ones. Propaganda cannot permit time for reflection.
– Jacques Ellul
When I read you, I breathe.
– Hélène Cixous
Sin is not just affairs, or porn shops, or drug cartels. It is also the ignorance and brokenness of the world, extreme self-centeredness, hoarding wealth, using others as objects, not caring.
– Anne Lamott
the first rain
by Yun Qin Wang
June rain draws a cross on the glass.
Alcohol evaporates.
If I come back to you,
I can write. My time in China
is an unending funeral.
Nobody cried. The notebook is wet.
I read an interview
with a Taiwanese porn actress
who dreams of becoming an object.
Now, by offering the whole of her body
and being assigned to different roles,
she thinks she’s closer to it.
Lately, I started to believe
the essential things about the self
lie in the exterior. That would explain
this feeling of searching.
Thin fabrics wrapping around my skin.
In many dreams I had in May,
I was looking for a classroom.
Something great was going to be born
in an English lecture hall.
I was in haste, at last ending up in a canteen
with seesaws and ice-cream.
I share the actress’s belief.
I have told you before
I hate my job as translator.
All things should be passed on in their original form.
But with this poet
who caught fire in a burning nightgown,
I wish to speak like her.
(6/22/22, for Yongyu)
It is not pornography that is obscene, it is hunger that is obscene.
– José Saramago
“Our people have forgotten,” the reliably wise and detached Henry Adams wrote, decades ago, “that any world exists outside America.”
– Pico Iyer
The end of the day is the death of all yesterdays, and in this death there is a rebirth, without the sadness of the past. Life is new in the immensity of silence.
– Krishnamurti
Have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time.
– Maya Angelou
Count your years and you’ll be ashamed to be wanting and working for exactly the same things as you wanted when you were a boy.
– Seneca
We can never judge the lives of others, because each person knows only their own pain and renunciation. It’s one thing to feel that you are on the right path, but it’s another to think that yours is the only path.
– Paulo Coelho
We long for happiness, but keep running toward what hurts us.
– Matthieu Ricard
…a man should keep his little brain-attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber-room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.
– Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Five Orange Pips)
beneath continents
of slow moving algae
my alcoholic father
– Mary Weiler
If it’s out of your hands, it deserves freedom from your mind too.
– Ivan Nuru
What man actually needs is not a tensionless state, but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.
– Viktor Frankl
Difference and every kind of variety of differentiation is the way through which unity is discovered.
– Alan Watts
from which star
will you come?
autumn wind
– Issa
I don’t like to be obvious or spell things out.
– Beryl Bainbridge
And he heard the mirth of the folk of Earth
And hearkened to their tears,
As the world dropped back in a cloudy wrack
On its journey down the years.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
what karma
lets these flowers
survive?
– Issa
Transcending the cycle of death and rebirth is
the real purpose of this life in human form.
– Amma
If it’s in your vibration it’ll always find you.
– Nika Solé
Of what happened so long before that
In some small town, one indifferent summer.
– John Ashbery
The slow moon draws
The shadows through the leaves
The change it weaves
Eludes design or pause.
And here we wait
In moon a little space,
And face to face
We know the hour grows late.
– Yvor Winters
Pre-digital, artists freely shared their process because craft knowledge + years of skill made copying nearly impossible. Now artists clam up at panels, giving the same vague talks regardless of how their work may be evolving.
The anxiety around revealing methods has made artist talks homogeneous – they talk around their work instead of through it. Meanwhile, we’re getting repetitive discussions despite seeing some genuinely diverse artworks.
The secrecy around using ChatGPT/AI tools seems disproportionate. These are tools built by billion-dollar tech companies, not something artists secretly developed. If they HAD built their own AI, that would be the wow headline that they would be leading their talk with!
It’s backwards: using existing AI tools is like admitting you use Photoshop, but we’ve somehow made it taboo. Are artists worried about market devaluation, or is this about deeper questions of what we consider “authentic” art?
– Laura Kerr
You were not surprised to feel yourself ill adapted to the world, but it did surprise you that the world had produced a being who now lived in it as a foreigner. Do plants commit suicide? Do animals die of hopelessness?
– Edouard Levé; tr. Jan Steyn
My Dream
by Han Yong-un
translated from the Korean by Younghill Kang
When you go walking through the clear dawn in the shade of trees,
my dream will become the few little stars
that are staying on over your head.
When during summer days you are sleeping a daytime sleep
unable to conquer the heat, my dream will become the clear winds
that are floating about your vicinage.
When in the still Autumn nights, you sit alone reading books,
my dream will become the voice of the cricket, crying
under your table, “chirrup, chirrup.”
I do strongly feel that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. Certain great artists can make out without it, Titian and others, but mostly you need ordeal.
– John Berryman
Equanimity is standing firm in the middle, even as the world spins.
– Chris Cullen
Never think in terms of who is doing better or worse than you. The only question is whether you are doing Your Best.
– Sadhguru
It doesn’t make sense to continue wanting something if you’re not willing to do what it takes to get it.
If you don’t want to live the lifestyle, then release yourself from the desire. To crave the result but not the process, is to guarantee disappointment.
– James Clear
the thoughts
spinning so fast
words can’t keep up
– @lafcadiopoetry
…if you have any idea for a poem, an exact grid of intent, you are on the wrong path, a dead-end alley, at the top of a cliff you haven’t even climbed. This is a lesson that can only be learned by trial and error.
– Mary Ruefle
Do not neglect this body. This is the house of God; take care of it, only in this body can God be realized.
– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives.
– Abraham Verghese, The Covenant of Water
In all my research I have never come across matter. To me the term matter implies a bundle of energy that is driven by an intelligent spirit.
– Max Planck
rolling up his sleeves,
the monk prepares
to read the gospel
– Susan Delphine Delaney
floating on
the waves of a lake
summer world
– Basho
Here is summertime.
The world was another several thousand years
older in an afternoon.
My mind sunk into the depths
of crummy fantasies which held it like concrete.
– Sandra Lim
I don’t think I have ever tried to ‘achieve’ anything in my writing except to produce a good book.
– Elena Poniatowska
winter night—
the taste of snow
on his lips
– Nancy Nitrio
I could go on. I go on.
This is why I love James Schuyler.
He doesn’t care
that “the plants against the light
which shines in”
is a dull observation. Or that
Trees, and trees, more trees”
is just the layered visual experience
we all have in the forest, waiting
to let ourselves take in the sign
to turn back, go home
and really hate someone.
– Emily Skillings, The Duke’s Forest
The Real God
If your God has a name,
he is not the real God.
If he has a religion,
he is not the real God.
If you can understand him,
he is not the real God.
If you can describe him
in less than a billion words,
he is not the real god.
– john zbigniew guzlowski
I just want to sit around and talk about God and literature.
– Shemaiah Gonzalez
We must try to slow life down,
to intensify it, thus giving it the richest
possible meaning. One must try to live
above one’s life, as a cloud above the sea.
– Grazia Deledda
I set out to learn everything on my own so that I could become a poet. That was my goal. I didn’t know another way.
– Edward Hirsch
In working with doubt, we can pay close attention to the effect of practice. As insight and ethical commitment deepen, confidence grows. We may eventually reach a point where our confidence in the dharma becomes so settled that there is no turning back.
– Doug Smith
If you think you’re not biased by your ethnicity you’re a self-deluded fool.
– @VinceFHorn
Enigma
At the Nile at night, at the Nile,
where the stars hang down into your mouth
and your dry heart is moist once again,
in the Egyptian night,
where you never have been before, but soon will be,
in order to give the Sphinx your answer.
In the blue night,
as in an eternally open mouth the desert’s tongue
seeks your moisture.
if it burns you up
your exhausted gasp
will resemble my answer.
Life of my life,
savage mouth
that takes the breath away
and no longer allows a memory,
let me be myself,
let me be with you.
– Ingeborg Bachmann, (t. by Peter Filkins)
ode to the words
that rub
off
worn pages
and margin spaces
that some of us read
– Laura Kerr
The True Rebel never advertises it ,
He prefers his joy to missionary work….
Church is Bureaucracy,
no more interesting than any post office.
Religion is Revelation
all the wonder of all the Planets striking
all your Only Mind.
Guard the Mysteries!
Constantly reveal them!
– Lew Welch
I have…devoted myself mainly to those things that I personally like… I have tried to awake liking, to communicate delight in those things that I find enjoyable.
– Tolkien, Valedictory Address to Oxford