After an expansive experience that challenges our narrow way of being in the world, we often retreat instead of pressing forward into the unknown.
– Lisa Marchiano
If you abandon reason, you will have nothing to guide you but the emotional depth of the situation—what Heidegger called ‘the depth of the call.’ And in the twentieth century, the history of following the depth of the call has not been a happy one. We cannot trust the call of the blood unrefined by reason.
– Terence McKenna
Let a person’s presence be precious without demanding that it become permanent.
– Larkin
The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.
– Samuel Johnson
Matter is condensed syntax, a temporary arrangement of linguistic agreements.
– Terence McKenna
I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.
– Henry David Thoreau, The Dispersion of Seeds
Rest is not the end of all effort, but the end of self-empowered attempts to earn God’s favor.
– John Koessler
Every society has always believed that it possessed 95% of the truth and that the remaining 5% would fall into place in the next fifteen years. Yet all of them were completely off the mark. We don’t understand anything—we’ve just substituted incomprehensibility for explanation.
– Terence McKenna
Culture is a form of enforced infantilism. It’s the last nursery, and most people never leave it.
– Terence McKenna
Perhaps the primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone.
– James Baldwin
If a man is mistaken, instruct him kindly and show him his error. But if thou art not able, blame thyself, or blame not even thyself.
– Marcus Aurelius
Rejection of culture is the last and farthest leap it takes. Culture is an operating system designed to keep you predictable and manageable, but it leaves you entirely unequipped for the raw mystery of your own existence.
– Terence McKenna
In a way, all thought is experimental and remains so until it can be fixed in a sentence.
– Jeff Porter
The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to realize our collective dreams.
– Terence McKenna
It’s all about love—making someone else’s existence just a little easier. Nothing else matters. I know this now.
– Terence McKenna
It is essential that justice be done, and it is equally vital that justice not be confused with revenge, for the two are wholly different.
– Oscar Arias Sánchez
When you realize that there is no method, no system, no mantra, no teacher, nothing in the world that is going to help you to be quiet, when you realize the truth that it is only the quiet mind that sees, then the mind becomes extraordinarily quiet.
– Krishnamurti
The history of the last 10,000 years is the history of a single species’ attempt to deal with the trauma of losing its symbiotic connection to the plant world.
– Terence McKenna
I found the only thing I could bring back, not being graphically endowed, was ideas. It’s a very mysterious business—the revelation of the world to the mind.
– Terence McKenna
It is excellent To have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous To use it like a giant.
– William Shakespeare
Listening for the still small voice is a feminine art that is the basis of spiritual counseling and direction. It is a quality that all women seem to possess in some measure, that some men have to some degree, and that all men and women need to cultivate if we are to mature spiritually.
– David Tacey
Art is to find something that fits perfectly where it doesn’t belong. The goal? To create something for everywhere.
– Alex Thatcher
You go to the side of Cold Mountain and compound mushrooms and draw cold water from a well and thank your lucky stars that that’s the situation you find yourself in.
– Terence McKenna
The art of rest is a part of the art of working.
– John Steinbeck
I believe that one defines oneself by reinvention… To be yourself. To cut yourself out of stone.
– Henry Rollins
In most cases, our so-called limitations are nothing more than our own decision to limit ourselves.
– Daisaku Ikeda
If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none.
– Ray Bradbury
Modernism in its broadest context is the first movement to come along to be able to in any way challenge classicism.
– Terence McKenna
Out of the flesh, the word must be redistilled—that’s the second half of the historical process.
– Terence McKenna
The goal is to live in dynamic balance with the unknown, rather than trying to trap it in a box of dogma or ideology.
– Terence McKenna
…one of the hardest demands on the obedience of faith is to do nothing; it is often so much easier to do foolishly!
– George MacDonald, Heather and Snow
Madness really is contagious, and friends are a blessing, especially when you’re on your own.
– Roberto Bolaño
We are playing with fire, but that is what species on the brink of metamorphosis do.
– Terence McKenna
There is no crisis to which academics will not respond with a seminar.
– Marvin Bressler
We must rid ourselves of the bitter desire to get on with everyone. The great for the great, the profound for the profound, the subtle for the subtle, and the rare for the rare.
– Nietzsche
It is a mark of a tyrant to have men of foreign extraction rather than citizens as guests at table and companions, feeling that citizens are hostile but strangers make no claim against him.
– Aristotle, Politics
Totalitarianism and technocracy like to present themselves as the pinnacle of rationality and science.
– Mattias Desmet
The real tragedy of modern politics is that it argues over how to divide the crumbs while ignoring the fact that we are sitting in front of a banquet of infinite human potential. We are fighting over dirt while the stars wait.
– Terence McKenna
All our dignity consists then in thought. By it we must elevate ourselves, and not by space and time which we cannot fill. Let us endeavor to think well; this is the principle of morality.
– Blaise Pascal
Whenever I set off on any sort of journey I fall off the radar. No one knows where I am.
– Olga Tokarczuk, Flights
Although every American is entitled to exercise the right to free press, no one is entitled to be trusted or believed–that you have to earn.
– Adrienne LaFrance
Her visits to her former hometown were infrequent and often painful. Pilgrimages fueled by the tepid oxygen of family duty, unease, guilt. The more Esther loved her parents, the more helpless she felt, as they aged, to protect them from harm.
– Joyce Carol Oates, High Lonesome
Culture is an illusion of language. Homer was as trapped within it as Heidegger. There is no classic recension or historical movement that will save us—we have to reach past language to raw, unmediated experience.
– Terence McKenna
The price of clarity is a willingness to be completely unfashionable. If you align yourself with the dominant cultural paradigms of your day, you guarantee that your thinking will be obsolete before you even reach the grave.
– Terence McKenna
In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.
– Ambrose Bierce
There never comes a point where a theory can be said to be true. The most that anyone can claim for any theory is that it has shared the successes of all its rivals and that it has passed at least one test which they have failed.
– A. J. Ayer, Philosophy in the Twentieth Century
One can only argue that “cancel culture” is bad in itself, if they have a completely relativistic view of morality, where things like exploitation, ethnic cleansing, genocide, or ecocide, are just “a different way of doing things.”
If you think cancel culture isn’t effective, then why is everyone getting so up in arms about it? If a bunch of people suddenly decide you’re an asshole, guess what? It has a real social impact, so this argument is also bunk—it is effective, that’s why so many people are opposed to it.
If you compulsively think that all attempts to shame someone into irrelevancy are wrong or ineffective, then you may need to find your own moral backbone, because these times call for them friends, now more than ever.
– Vince Horn
Someone should form an organization of missionaries to go into American evangelical churches and convert them to Christianity.
– Tony Rush
Rereading, an operation contrary to the commercial and ideological habits of our society, which would have us ‘throw away’ the story once it has been consumed, so that we can then move on to another story, buy another book, and which is tolerated only in certain marginal categories of readers (children, old people, and professors), rereading is here suggested at the outset, for it alone saves the text from repetition (those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere), multiplies it in its variety and its plurality: rereading draws the text out of its internal chronology (‘this happens before or after that’) and recaptures a mythic time (without before or after); it contests the claim which would have us believe that the first reading is a primary, naïve, phenomenal reading which we will only, afterwards, have to ‘explicate,’ to intellectualize (as if there were a beginning of reading, as if everything were not already read: there is no first reading, even if the text is concerned to give us that illusion by several operations of suspense, artifices more spectacular than persuasive); rereading is no longer consumption, but play (that play which is the return of the different).
– Roland Barthes
I want to be a child and not a mother, and I feel guilty about this.
– Anne Sexton
One of the great unresolved psychological enigmas of the modern western world is the question of what or who has persuaded us to accept as virtually axiomatic a self-view and a world-view that demand we reject out of hand the wisdom and vision of our major philosophers and poets in order to imprison our thought and our very selves in the materialist, mechanical and dogmatic torture-chamber devised by purely quantitative and third-rate scientific minds.
– Philip Sherrard
The future of writing is pointing.
– Kenneth Goldsmith
iris blossoms
the traveler
forgets the road
– Basho
The words of the Lord are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. Thou shalt keep them, O Lord, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever.
– Psalm 12:6-7
Your mission will isolate you. Your spiritual gifts will make you different. Your dedication to a vision only you can see will have you wildly misunderstood. This is the cost of entry to greatness. This is you blazing the path.
– Nika Solé
I want to be anonymous. I don’t know how you get involved with uninvolvment, but I don’t want to be involved. My ambition is to be completely forgotten.
– Bob Kaufman
Some things you have influence over right now, and some things you don’t. You begin to see that some things are just requiring us to bear it right now, until something inevitably changes.
– Tuere Sala
Eventually the wound must be left alone
for it to heal.
This is not neglect.
It is love’s holding.
– @KavijiPoet
Once you base your whole life striving on a desperate lie, and try to implement that lie, you instrument your own undoing.
– Ernest Becker
I discovered that I was a good reader of dreams, which are marvelous and mysterious, and alert you to the fact that the human mind is something about which we know nothing.
– Donald Meltzer
What do you know better than your own secrets?
– Raymond Carver
There is only one sin, from which all the others grow forth like the many heads of the Hydra, and from which they fly forth like the contents of Pandora’s box when it is opened. That is ingratitude. And there is only one virtue: gratitude.
– Ernst Jünger
Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.
– George Bernard Shaw
Why do I walk? I walk because I like it. I like the rhythm of it, my shadow always a little ahead of me on the pavement. I like being able to stop when I like, to lean against a building and make a note in my journal, or read an email, or send a text message, and for the world to stop while I do it. Walking, paradoxically, allows for the possibility of stillness.
Walking is mapping with your feet. It helps you piece a city together, connecting up neighbourhoods that might otherwise have remained discrete entities, different planets bound to each other, sustained yet remote. I like seeing how in fact they blend into one another, I like noticing the boundaries between them. Walking helps me feel at home. There’s a small pleasure in seeing how well I’ve come to know the city through my wanderings on foot, crossing through different neighbourhoods of the city, some I used to know quite well, others I may not have seen in a while, like getting reacquainted with someone I once met at a party.
Sometimes I walk because I have things on my mind, and walking helps me sort them out. Solvitur ambulando, as they say.
I walk because it confers — or restores — a feeling of placeness. The geographer Yi-Fu Tuan says a space becomes a place when through movement we invest it with meaning, when we see it as something to be perceived, apprehended, experienced.
I walk because, somehow, it’s like reading. You’re privy to these lives and conversations that have nothing to do with yours, but you can eavesdrop on them. Sometimes it’s overcrowded; sometimes the voices are too loud. But there is always companionship. You are not alone. You walk in the city side by side with the living and the dead.
[This is] the key problem at the heart of the urban experience: are we individuals or are we part of the crowd? Do we want to stand out or blend in? Is that even possible? How do we — no matter what our gender — want to be seen in public? Do we want to attract or escape the gaze? Be independent and invisible? Remarkable or unremarked-upon?
I became suspicious of an entirely vehicle-based culture; a culture that does not walk is bad for women. It makes a kind of authoritarian sense; a woman who doesn’t wonder — what it all adds up to, what her needs are, if they’re being met — won’t wander off from the family. The layout of the suburbs reinforces her boundaries: the neat grid, the nearby shopping centre, the endless loops of parkways, where the American adventure of the open road is tamed by the American dream.
In those six months, the streets were transformed from places in between home and wherever I was going into a great passion. I drifted wherever they looked interesting, lured by the sight of a decaying wall, or colourful window boxes, or something intriguing down at the other end, which might be as pedestrian as a perpendicular street. Anything, any detail that suddenly loosened itself, would draw me towards it. Every turn I made was a reminder that the day was mine and I didn’t have to be anywhere I didn’t want to be. I had an astonishing immunity to responsibility, because I had no ambitions at all beyond doing only that which I found interesting.
I remember when I’d take the métro two stops because I didn’t realise how close together everything was, how walkable Paris was. I had to walk around to understand where I was in space, how places related to each other. Some days I’d cover five miles or more, returning home with sore feet and a story or two for my room-mates. I saw things I’d never seen in New York. Beggars (Roma, I was told) who knelt rigidly in the street, heads bowed, holding signs asking for money, some with children, some with dogs; homeless people living in tents, under stairways, under arches. Every quaint Parisian nook had its corresponding misery. I turned off my New York apathy and gave what I could. Learning to see meant not being able to look away; to walk in the streets of Paris was to walk the thin line of fate that divided us from each other.
– Lauren Elkin
The closer one is to
Christ, the further one
is from Christianity.
– Sofo Archon
If by a “Liberal” they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people—their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights and their civil liberties—someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a “Liberal,” then I’m proud to say I’m a “Liberal.”
– John F. Kennedy
Peace is a competition between despair
and hope, between disempowerment
and committed persistence. To the
degree that powerlessness takes root in
people’s consciousness, there is a
greater tendency to resort to force.
Powerlessness breeds violence.
– Daisaku Ikeda
People invented God as a
substitute for what they
most deeply long for: an
intimate connection
with nature.
– Sofo Archon
In the whole universe, wood is rarer than diamonds.
Woods and diamonds have one similarity they are both made of carbons but wood is a complex organic structure and compared to its diamonds is simple. In the whole universe, wood is rarer than diamonds.
Trees can give you oxygen and it is one of the major member of our ecosystem and after they die they gives us wood. So woods are more valuable than diamonds.
– Shounak Das
there’s a house across the river
but alas, i cannot swim
& a garden of such beauty
that the flowers seem to grin
there’s a house across the river
but alas, i cannot swim
i’ll live my life regretting that i never jumped in.
– Laura Marling
One has to find a balance between
what people need from you
and what you need for yourself.
– Jessye Norman
The less you chase approval, the more authentic your life becomes.
– Erlend Loe
What happens in the heart simply happens.
– Ted Hughes
If it is asserted that civilization is a real advantage in the condition of man, – and I think that it is, though only the wise improve their advantages, – it must be shown that it has produced better dwellings without making them more costly[.]
– Henry David Thoreau
To live is to choose. But to choose well, you must know who you are and what you stand for, where you want to go and why you want to get there.
– Kofi Annan
I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.
– Walt Disney
You don’t ask Freud to clip your fingernails, for God’s sake. When I once posed a question to a psychedelic experience about whether I was doing the right thing with my life, the answer came back: ‘What kind of a chicken-shit question is that to ask a galactarian intelligence?’ It put my problems right into perspective.
– Terence McKenna
The power to reshape reality doesn’t belong to governments or corporations; it belongs to the individual mind.
– Terence McKenna
Time does not change us. It just unfolds us.
– Max Frisch
No one is truly in charge of the process. This is what makes history so interesting—it’s a runaway freight train on a dark and stormy night.
– Terence McKenna
The greatest tool of liberation is curiosity.
– Terence McKenna
Given a more advanced nervous system, the intuition changes. Your breath begins to make poetry, you experience loss, and you feel love. You begin to feel the emotional outlines of the enterprise of being.
– Terence McKenna
We are the species that talks itself into existence.
– Terence McKenna
If you want to weigh yourself up, set aside your money, your house, your rank, and consider your inner man: for as it is, you are entrusting to others the gauge of your quality.
– Seneca
It was pride that changed angels into devils; it is humility that makes men as angels.
– Saint Augustine
When you step into the unknown, you are not losing your way—you are finding it.
– Terence McKenna
Growth comes through sunshine, but also through rain.
– Derrick Porter
Modernism is a form of primitivism.
– Terence McKenna
Ideas beget their opposites and then are subsumed by them.
– Terence McKenna
You never hear about museums misplacing their paintings anymore, do you?
It’s a lost art.
– Daniel Edison
You have to be willing to get happy about nothing.
– Andy Warhol
History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.
– Alexis de Tocqueville
Once you see that all of the forms are dualistic experiencing… it loosens the power of all those things over you.
– Ram Dass
You don’t drown by falling in the water; you drown by staying there.
– Edwin Louis Cole
The flying saucer is the soul of humanity exteriorized as the apotheosis of technology. It is a millenarian transformation, a siren at the end of time calling us out of the trees, through history, and into a state of pure language.
– Terence McKenna
We have to stop consuming our culture. We have to create culture, don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow.
– Terence McKenna
I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of their way and let them have it.
– Dwight D. Eisenhower
We’re running into one of those compression points where everything that has been going on on this planet for the last billion years is a series of telescoping processes of ever-accelerating intensity.
– Terence McKenna
For there is nothing more evident than that which cannot be seen by the eyes and nothing more palpable than that which cannot be perceived by the senses…
– Confucius
If you understood anything I said tonight, it’s a perfect proof that I’m far from enlightened.
– Terence McKenna
Many are the men whose ways I have learned.
– Odysseus, The Odyssey
The ultimate frontier is not outer space; the ultimate frontier is the interior topology of the human mind.
– Terence McKenna
A shaman is someone who has seen the end of time, understood the geometry, and returned to the present.
– Terence McKenna
Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.
– James Joyce, Ulysses
The future has not yet undergone the formality of actually occurring.
– Terence McKenna
spiritual practice does not need to be connected to organized religion to be meaningful.
– bell hooks, all about love
Humans are so selfish that you have to talk to them about their reward in the next life just to get them to do good in this one.
– Epictetus
To reach something good it is very useful to have gone astray, and thus acquire experience.
– Saint Teresa of Avila
The ego is a calcarious growth on the bloodstream of the psyche. If you don’t inoculate yourself against it, it will begin to take root and grow.
– Terence McKenna
I’ve never been wrong about this: if intelligence fails, aesthetics will pull you through. The revelation of the mystery—one thing is for sure—will not be tacky. It won’t be tasteless, and it won’t be wearing sequins for God’s sake.
– Terence McKenna
We don’t get harmony when everybody sings the same note. Only notes that are different can harmonizer. The same is true with people.
– Steve Goodier
There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them.
– William Jennings Bryan
The break between nature and man has been overstressed; when you look at the global ecology, you see that there must be a minded species that will open a hole through which everything could escape.
– Terence McKenna
Tribalism is a social form which can exist at any level of technology; it’s a complete illusion to associate it strictly with low levels of technology.
– Terence McKenna
To have great pain is to have certainty; to hear that another person has pain is to have doubt.
– Elaine Scarry
Neoteny is the preservation of juvenile characteristics into adulthood. Culturally, we have enforced an absolute neoteny upon ourselves: we decided we never needed to grow up at all, leaving us stranded in the extreme, boundary-enforcing egoism of an eleven-year-old child.
– Terence McKenna
You must change your soul, not the sky. Even if you cross the wide sea, even if, as our Virgil says: Lands and cities should depart, vices will follow you wherever you go.
– Seneca
He who follows reason in all things is both tranquil and active at the same time, and also cheerful and collected.
– Marcus Aurelius
A man looking back at his life and realizing that somewhere during the journey, he himself became the thing he lost.
– Badr-uddin Choudhary
Social science is an obscene idea and should be disabused immediately. Sociology, psychology, intellectual history, linguistics—these people should find honest work. They are not scientists, and they are mucking up the domain of human values with pseudo-descriptive engines.
– Terence McKenna
My vision is that we turn this world from the war zone it has become into a garden.
– Dr. Vandana Shiva
I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within.
– Lillian Smith
Every person in this world is destined to experience the shattering of their illusions.
– Erich Maria Remarque
Use caution when describing barriers.
Being Black is not a barrier for me.
White supremacy is the barrier.
Being female is not a barrier for me.
Patriarchy is the barrier.
Name the systems of power.
These are the barriers.
– @Drawn2Intellect
This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance.
– Philip K. Dick
Our women have been chosen by the creator to be the portal between the spiritual realm and this physical realm. The only force on earth powerful enough to navigate unborn spirits onto this planet.
– unknown
Nature poets can’t walk across the backyard without tripping over an epiphany.
– Christian Wiman
You can’t rush the work of a significant life transition. In the space between what was and what will be you need to put down deep roots and build the healthy foundation for the next season of your life. This is uncomfortable but essential work.
– Krista O’Reilly-Davi-Digui
Take one day at a time and
appreciate that day to the full.
– Eileen Caddy
The Liquid Birds
Pēnelopē (Πηνελόπη) is usually understood to combine the Greek word pēnē (πήνη), “weft,” and ōps (ὤψ), “face,” which is considered the most appropriate for a cunning weaver whose motivation is hard to decipher
Penelope finds when she unweaves the shroud—
that she was making for the father of her husband,
who of course is absent and has been for years—
that when she undoes what she wove in this time
she can unweave all time that has passed and by
weaving a different pattern can shift the present
and as she weaves warp through weft, thread by thread
she finds mastery and after much practice can
unweave better than she ever wove, can unweave
her marriage back before she ever met the man
can hover with threads added and subtracted
in the passion of their first years, make one night,
one kiss, happen over and over, and then she can
unweave it all so that their marriage bed, famously
made from a rooted tree, is not yet a bed, the tree
only a sapling, crones become maidens, eagles, doves
drop from the skies to find the nests they left
and the gulls, cormorants, terns likewise find
the fragments of their old eggshells that begin to
pull back together to hold the liquid birds within,
the wool itself unspins and goes back to the flock
and the flock goes backward, wool shorter and shorter
on their frames as they disgorge grass to the earth,
enough to replant the hillsides, as snow flies upward,
and rivers flow uphill, and she works time like a dj
scratching the record back and forth, revolutions
giving way to the rhythms, lyric music to notes
clustering forward and backward; she masters time
and weaves and picks apart many endings, turnings,
weaves other lives for herself, lives for centuries
during the decade she waits for his return, lives
as a priestess, as the beloved of the handsome sailor
who came to shore when she was a girl, has daughters,
has travels, studies, passions, strange woven patterns,
and then she lets it go and weaves his return,
weaves the massacre of the suitors, weaves the shroud,
and takes her knife and cuts the last thread, done,
and she knows this is not the only or the best
of all her destinies but that the pattern is good.
– Rebecca Solnit
I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days.
– Henry David Thoreau
Languages have a flavor to me, which I’ve never understood people saying they’re awfully dry and dull, because a new language to me is just like taking a new wine or a sweetmeat or something.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
I respect the spiritual grind more than anything because I know what it takes to really be on your path. Which is why most people avoid that kinda thing.
– Nika Solé
When you notice something clearly and see it vividly, it then becomes sacred.
– Allen Ginsberg
Poetry’s another word
For losing everything
Except purity of heart.
– Paul Durcan
A little tap on the window-pane, as though something had struck it, followed by a plentiful light falling sound, as of grains of sand being sprinkled from a window overhead, gradually spreading, intensifying, acquiring a regular rhythm, becoming fluid, sonorous, musical, immeasurable, universal: it was the rain.
– Louise Erdrich
It is not the wind
waking you, but the low roar of years
fumbling to tell you what has happened,
or will, when the door flies open
and the naked message of love
stands there stuttering in your face,
alive, crying, leaving nothing out.
– Dave Smith
Small joys are available to us in the pauses between the outer actions that fill our lives. They are the depth in the moments lived fully with complete attention. This is what smaller living is all about, cultivating simple joys in our days while stepping outside of the schedules, deadlines, and chaos that make up so much of modern life. Joy comes when we take the time to thoroughly relish something wonderful we’re experiencing, no matter how small or insignificant it may seem to others.
– Victoria Vargas
Nothing’s so beautiful as the memory of it
Gathering light as glass does,
As glass does when the sundown is on it
and darkness is still a thousand miles away.
– Charles Wright
Humans in love are terrible. You see them come hungering at one another like prehistoric wolves, you see something struggling for life in between them like a root or a soul and it flares for a moment, then they smash it. The difference between them smashes the bones out. So delicate the bones.
– Anne Carson
Always breathing-in this pre-life, exhaling this post. Something goes away, something comes back. But through you. Leaving no trail but self. As trails go not much of one. But patiently you travel it. Your self.
– Jorie Graham
I believe we are a species with amnesia, I think we have forgotten our roots and our origins. I think we are quite lost in many ways.
And we live in a society that invests huge amounts of money and vast quantities of energy in ensuring that we all stay lost.
A society that invests in creating unconsciousness, which invests in keeping people asleep so that we are just passive consumers or products and not really asking any of the questions.
– Graham Hancock
1858
Sept. 19: Decided that one must love and work, and that’s it.
Sept. 20: Tired. Didn’t love and didn’t work.
– Leo Tolstoy
Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.
– Anne Carson
The pillow’s just as hot
when I turn it over.
And now a second candle
is guttering, and crows
are cawing louder than ever.
Not a wink … And it’s too late
even to think of sleep.
White, blindingly white –
a blind on a white window.
Good morning!
– Robert Chandler
…but they say extreme fear drives the fearful to deep and continual slumber. Sleeping, she sleeps; waking, she sleeps; walking, she sleeps; and eating, she sleeps.
– Mahmoud Darwish
To wake up and be like the weather to be no longer the broken hearted servants of mad kings
– Robert Montgomery
From her I learned all the nuances of neverness that link the gladiola to God.
– Christian Wiman
One soft infested summer, me and Terry became friends
Trying in vain to breathe the fire we was born in
Catching rides to the outskirts, tying faith between our teeth
Sleeping in that old abandoned beach house, getting wasted in the heat
And hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
With a love so hard and filled with defeat
Running for our lives at night on them backstreets
Slow dancing in the dark on the beach at Stockton’s Wing
Where desperate lovers park, we sat with the last of the Duke Street Kings
Huddled in our cars, waiting for the bells that ring
In the deep heart of the night they set us loose of everything
To go running on the backstreets
Running on the backstreets
Terry, you swore we’d live forever
Taking it on them backstreets together
Endless juke joints and Valentino drag
Where famous dancers scraped the tears up off the street, dressed down in rags
Running into the darkness, some hurt bad, some really dying
At night sometimes it seemed you could hear the whole damn city crying
Blame it on the lies that killed us, blame it on the truth that ran us down
You can blame it all on me, Terry, it don’t matter to me now
When the breakdown hit at midnight, there was nothing to say
But I hated him, and I hated you when you went away
Laying here in the dark, you’re like an angel on my chest
Just another tramp of hearts crying tears of faithlessness
Remember all the movies, Terry, we’d go see
Trying to learn to walk like the heroes we thought we had to be
And after all this time, to find we’re just like all the rest
Stranded in the park and forced to confess
To hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Where we swore forever friends
On the backstreets until the end
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Was all right, we’re all
Hiding on the backstreets tonight
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
Hiding on the backstreets
– Bruce Springsteen
To be a poet is to be attached to life by a different set of hooks.
– John Barr
Future: That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.
– Ambrose Bierce
…there is cloud on blue ground up there, & wind which the eye loves so deeply it would spill itself out and liquefy to pay for it—
– Jorie Graham
The nightmares I had been fending off had come home in the form of the Trump administration: a white supremacist kleptocracy linked to a transnational crime syndicate, using digital media to manipulate reality and destroy privacy, led by a sociopathic nuke-fetishist, backed by apocalyptic fanatics preying on the weakest and most vulnerable as feckless and complicit officials fail to protect them.
– Sarah Kendzior
Every human being is both a social self and an embryonic soul. The challenge of life is to support the former while nourishing the latter. It is not easy…
Psychology’s healing insights and methods were never intended and never were able to address the “verticality” of the human psyche.
…We are not saints, we are not angels; we are embryonic souls immersed in a badly educated body being pulled along by a love-starved lonely horse called the emotions.
Mankind is called – to maintain the human reflection of divinity in a world overwhelmed by violence, confusion, and illusion.
– Jacob Needleman, A Little Book on Love
One thing I have learned about attention is that certain forms of it are contagious. When you spend enough time with someone who pays close attention to something if you were hanging out with me, it would be birds), you inevitably start to pay attention to some of the same things. I’ve also learned that patterns of attention – what we choose to notice and what we do not – are how we render reality for ourselves, and thus have a direct bearing on what we feel is possible at any given time. These aspects, taken together, suggest to me the revolutionary potential of taking back our attention. To capitalist logic, which thrives on myopia and dissatisfaction, there may indeed be something dangerous about something as pedestrian as doing nothing: escaping laterally toward each other, we might just find that everything we wanted is already here.
– Jenny Odell
All our life so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits – practical, emotional and intellectual – systematically organized, for our weal or woe, and bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny whatever the latter may be.
– William James
If You Go to Bed Hungry
by Angela Narciso Torres
If you go to bed hungry, your soul will get up and steal cold rice from the pot.
Stop playing with fire before the moon rises or you’ll pee in your sleep.
Sweeping the floor after dark sweeps wealth and good fortune out the door.
Fork dropped: a gentleman will visit. Spoon: a bashful lady.
Bathing after you’ve cooked over a hot stove makes the veins swell.
For safe passage to the guest who leaves mid-meal: turn your plate.
The adage goes: coffee stunts growth. Twelve grapes on New Year’s: the opposite.
Advice from the learned: hide a book under your pillow. Never step on. Never drop.
Every rice grain that remains on your plate you’ll meet again on the footpath
to heaven. You’ll have to stoop to pick each one of them up.
Because My Child Asks if the World Is Ending
Because there is scant mercy
in this one world,
and justice comes
like lame mares through the pastures,
I wake at night from foul dreams
of destruction
and lay my hand on the thrum
of your sleeping heart
like a seabird in the dark storm of its passage
from one shore to the question
of another,
and listen to its little song of trials,
its little hymn of dim
and vanished harbors,
its wings still fresh
from the farthest, vastest lands.
Child, I have brought you
to this hard world, and I must see
that you have a way to face it.
I don’t know
what men will do
with their mad machines,
or whether the human heart will endure this,
but I know that hope
is our garden in the darkness,
and I know I won’t be here, my child,
to harvest it—
not always, not forever, not beside you—
and so I rise
and walk out through the new moon—
through ashes, though all that I have
gathered—
and lay my hands
on oak, on pine, on ivy,
and then, at last,
on the cold, bold face
of Joseph—
that figure that I carved, last spring,
from olive,
in the old hard sorrow of creation—
and I hear the wind
like a lost boy in the willows,
and I listen, I fall apart
and say this:
Hear my prayer, you sweet man
in your manger.
Wake us
as far as you can wake us.
May we be like you, heart-father,
every one of us.
May we never ask
whose child is our child.
May we who think
that nothing ever holds us—
may we wake at last
and see, past any reasons,
that with no ways left
to wake
or break
or change us,
God breathed deep
and closed his eyes of honey—
brackish, Nazareth honey—
and laid his infant body in our hands.
– Joseph Fasano
They sat far apart
deliberately, to experience, daily,
the sweetness of seeing each other across
great distance.
– Louise Glück
The older I get, the fucker the no.
– The Mouthy Renegade
Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be.
– Joan Didion
I would take a thread and a needle
and I’d interweave love
into our society.
– Jason Arday
Standing firmly in your own identity and ancestry is what gives you authority. You don’t need to borrow someone else’s lineage or culture when your own ancestral soil holds deep roots waiting to be remembered.
– Darren Le Baron
Self-transformation is not just about changing yourself. It means shifting yourself to a completely new dimension of experience and perception.
– Jaggi Vasudev
Merely demonstrating an unmet need is not sufficient to say that it should be met—not when resources are scarce and have alternative uses.
– Thomas Sowell
A country, finally, erodes and the dust blows away, the people all die and none of them were of any importance permanently, except those who practiced the arts, and these now wish to cease their work because it is too lonely, too hard to do, and is not fashionable. A thousand years makes economics silly and a work of art endures forever.
– Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa
He who sings frightens away his ills.
– Miguel de Cervantes
When Carmen walked through the door, I had mistaken her for an interruption. There is a sense that real kindness is only possible when we are willing to stray from our course of purposeful trying to get the next thing done.
– Tara Brach (reading from Fr. Greg Boyle’s Tattoos on the Heart)
The summary of the advice
of all the prophets is this;
Find yourself a mirror.
– Shams of Tabriz
Once you begin to acknowledge random acts of kindness – both the ones you have received and the ones you have given – you can no longer believe that what you do does not matter.
– Dawna Markova
Ultimately, to step into the larger, we have to go through our fears. I have to emphasize go through. There is no magic, no set of five steps to dissolve the obstacles, no pill, no narcotic to make it all possible. There is only the going through.
– James Hollis
One has good reason to award the earth
The dog-like dumb devotion of the eyes;
Death, love, dishonor are predicted there,
Her arbitrary movements are the truth:
– W. H. Auden, Kairos and Logos
Would it be too childish of me to say: I want? But I do want: theater, light, color, paintings, wine and wonder.
– Sylvia Plath
The true legacy of any pioneer is not the books they wrote or the speeches they gave, but the people they inspired to carry the work forward. True leadership creates more leaders, not more followers.
– Darren Le Baron
Let it offend you that someone else could be handed your days and they make something greater with them.
– Lucius Annaeus Seneca
The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths.
– Lady Ada Lovelace
I always remind people that you don’t have to fly to the Amazon or cross the ocean to find sacred ground. The soil beneath your feet in the UK, Europe, or wherever you live holds ancient roots and fungal intelligence.
– Darren Le Baron
If soulmates do exist, they’re not found, they’re made. People meet, they get a good feeling, and they get to work building a relationship.
– The Good Place
Sometimes you need to scorch everything to the ground, and start over. After the burning the soil is richer, and new things can grow. People are like that, too. They start over. They find a way.
– Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere
The reason ancient cultures preserved their botanical knowledge through oral traditions and myth was to keep it living and adaptable. When wisdom is held by living elders rather than static texts, it evolves naturally alongside the changing needs of the community.
– Darren Le Baron
There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to man and beast, it is all a sham.
– Jojo Moyes
I hope you love birds too, it is economical. It saves going to heaven.
– Emily Dickinson to Eugenia Hall
After you: this polite formula should be the most beautiful definition of our civilization.
– Milan Kundera
Quantum physicists don’t need mysticism, and mystics don’t need quantum physics. But the world needs both.
– Dr. Fritjof Capra
I have found the path to the placeless world; it begins right where you are.
– Hafiz
Man is helpless when he lacks knowledge; helplessness due to ignorance is the fertilizer of dictatorship.
– Wilhelm Reich
The wisdom held by our elders is an irreplaceable archive of experience. In a world obsessed with the newest digital trends, we lose our footing when we ignore the practical insights of those who have already navigated the storms of life.
– Darren Le Baron
You know, you spend your whole life feeling like you don’t quite fit in anywhere. And then you walk into a room one day, whether it’s at university or an office or some kind of club, and you just go, ‘Ah. There they are.’ And suddenly you feel at home.
– Jojo Moyes
A person who understands human nature stops expecting everyone to act from goodwill and starts paying attention to incentives.
– The Laws of Human Nature
A fool is known by his speech, and wise man by his silence.
– Pythagoras
People do not decide to become extraordinary. They decide to accomplish extraordinary things.
– Sir Edmund Hilary
People get nervous when they hear the word ‘colonization,’ but the first true colonizers on Earth were the mushrooms. They colonized the barren rock, created soil, and laid down the foundation for all living species without destroying the planet.
– Darren Le Baron
Don’t let your ego get too close to your position, so that if your position gets shot down, your ego doesn’t go with it.
– Colin Powell
A lot of our predicament is that in meditation or prayer we go into these incredibly high spaces where everybody is a brother and sister and we’re all living light—and then you walk out and say, ‘Who took my hat?’
– Ram Dass
If you approach these compounds with arrogance or disrespect, the experience will humble you very quickly. Humility is the price of admission to deeper knowledge.
– Darren Le Baron
Sometimes, the greatest victory lies not in destroying those who hurt us, but in giving them the opportunity to become better people.
– unknown
Our sun gets its light from a sun beyond the sun—the Sirius star system, as my elders taught. Mushrooms absorb that cosmic light-code information, store it as data, and hand it to you like a hardware plug-in.
– Darren Le Baron
Fellow-wanderer,
Could we but mix ourselves into a dream,
Not in its image on the mirror!
– W.B. Yeats
Raymond Carver wrote: ‘No other word will do for that’s what it was: gravy. These past ten years alive, sober, working, loving, and being loved by a good woman. Don’t weep for me, I’m a lucky man. I’ve had ten years longer than anyone expected—pure gravy, and don’t forget it.’
– Tara Brach
I think the more you write, the less inclined you will be to rely on theories like determinism. Mystery isn’t something that is gradually evaporating. It grows along with knowledge.
– Flannery O’Connor
If someone wanted to be with you, after all, they just made it happen.
– Jojo Moyes
When you look at the natural world, there are no shortcuts to maturity. Every living organism must pass through distinct phases of growth, friction, and integration to build the structural integrity needed to bear fruit.
– Darren Le Baron
Our job is not just to heal ourselves, but to clear the path so that the next generation doesn’t have to carry the heavy emotional baggage we inherited.
– Darren Le Baron
Pride is a wonderful terrible thing, a seed that bears two vines: life and death.
– James Hurst
Love can either be the biggest trap there is or the greatest liberator. It depends on if you have liberated, freed the love from your personal self.
– Michael Singer
You can’t build clouds. And that’s why the future we imagine never becomes real.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
Mushrooms are the creators, the sustainers, and the destroyers—Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva.
– Darren Le Baron
In order for capitalism to survive, it must have someone to exploit. That is why it creates racism, why it creates poverty, why it creates war.
– Kwame Ture
When you look at the cycle of the mushroom, it grows out of decaying matter and transforms it into life. That is a profound lesson for human transformation. No matter how much hardship, decay, or trauma you have experienced in your life, you possess the capacity to turn that raw material into wisdom and growth.
– Darren Le Baron
Meher Baba said: ‘Love springs spontaneously from within. It is not dependent upon anything or anyone. It is whole within itself.’
– Michael Singer
I like bands more than solo acts. I like team sports more than individual sports. In success you have somebody to high-five along the way, and failure is a little bit easier when there’s somebody in the foxhole with you.
– Aaron Sorkin
If in a hurry, take the roundabout path.
– Japanese proverb
It requires more philosophy than I possess, to bear this injustice with patience.
– Mary Shelley
The Great Mother is the mycelium network underneath our feet. She is the living web working silently in the dark, and the mushroom that pops up above the ground is simply her child—the fruiting body sent out to communicate with us.
– Darren Le Baron
The man who acquires the ability to take full possession of his own mind may take possession of anything else to which he is justly entitled.
– Andrew Carnegie
She was always tired, these days. She put on one of those smiles that wasn’t really a smile at all, and they went on.
– Jojo Moyes
Because even if the whole world was throwing rocks at you, if you still had your mother or father at your back, you’d be okay. Some deep-rooted part of you would know you were loved. That you deserved to be loved.
– Jojo Moyes
Faith would be a false, illusory, hypocritical self–invention, which never justifies, were it not accompanied by love and hope.
– Bonhoeffer
Alice Walker said it best: ‘I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.’ We are designed by evolution to notice, take pleasure in, and appreciate the beauty around us.
– Tara Brach
Every culture that maintained a healthy relationship with the earth understood that you cannot take from nature without offering something in return. Whether it was a physical offering of tobacco, cornmeal, or water, or simply an offering of gratitude and respectful harvesting practices, reciprocity was the law. When modern society abandoned reciprocity and shifted purely to exploitation, we broke the natural contract that keeps the planet in balance.
– Darren Le Baron
You are not expected to complete the work.
Nor are you allowed to desist.
– Rabbi Tarfon
Using our tax dollars to benefit the people who actually pay them is not communism.
I’m tired of hearing that word thrown around every time someone suggests our government should actually work for its citizens.
We already pay the taxes. Every paycheck. Every purchase. Every gallon of gas. Every property bill. The money is collected whether we like it or not. So why is it controversial to ask that it comes back to us in ways that make our lives better?
Nobody calls it communism when our taxes fund the military.
Nobody calls it communism when firefighters save a neighborhood from burning down.
Nobody calls it communism when the police respond to a 911 call, when the interstate gets repaved, when airports are maintained, when food inspectors keep contaminated products off store shelves, or when the National Weather Service warns us about an approaching hurricane.
Those are all taxpayer-funded services. Most people recognize them as basic responsibilities of government.
But the second someone says we should have better schools, affordable health care, clean drinking water, functioning infrastructure, or programs that help veterans, seniors, children, or people facing hard times, suddenly the conversation turns into, “That’s communism.”
No. It’s not.
Communism is an economic and political system based on collective ownership of the means of production and the elimination of private ownership in its traditional form. The United States is a capitalist country. Businesses are privately owned. People buy and sell property. Markets determine prices. None of that changes because taxpayers expect public services in return for the taxes they already pay.
You don’t have to support every government program. Reasonable people can disagree about how much government should do, how much taxes should be, and where money should be spent. That’s a healthy debate.
What isn’t healthy is using one emotionally charged word to shut down every conversation before it even starts.
Here’s the real question:
If we can spend billions on projects, subsidies, contracts, and interests that don’t directly improve everyday Americans’ lives, why is it suddenly “too expensive” or “socialist” when people ask for better schools, safer roads, reliable infrastructure, affordable health care, or support for veterans and seniors?
Our taxes shouldn’t disappear into a black hole while communities crumble.
They shouldn’t leave us driving over potholes, wondering if our drinking water is safe, watching teachers buy classroom supplies with their own money, or choosing between paying rent and seeing a doctor.
Demanding accountability isn’t radical.
Expecting value for the money we’re legally required to pay isn’t radical.
Wanting our government to invest in the people who fund it isn’t radical.
It’s common sense.
Stop letting people convince you that expecting a return on your own tax dollars is somehow un-American.
A government funded by the people should never forget who it’s supposed to serve.
– Equality Trading Post
If one is not aware, then one becomes shoddy, middle-class, mediocre.
The root meaning of that word mediocre is “going halfway up the hill,” going halfway up the mountain, never reaching the top of it. That’s mediocrity.
That is, never demanding of ourselves excellence, never demanding of ourselves total goodness or complete freedom—not freedom to do what we like, that is not freedom, that is triviality, but to be free from all pain of anxieties, loneliness, despair, and all the rest of it.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
mountain creek
cold water over
smooth rocks
– Basho
We can make the world better by coming together. By coming together, the world is better.
– Ryan Holiday
Our fantastic civilization has fallen out of touch with many aspects of nature, and with none more completely than with night.
Primitive folk, gathered at a cave mouth round a fire, do not fear night; they fear, rather, the energies and creatures to whom night gives power; we of the age of the machines, having delivered ourselves of nocturnal enemies, now have a dislike of night itself.
With lights and ever more lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the sea; the little villages, the crossroads even, will have none of it.
Are modern folk, perhaps, afraid of night? Do they fear that vast serenity, the mystery of infinite space, the austerity of stars?
– Henry Beston
In the third third of life, you may become just as miserable and prickly as ever, but you cycle through more quickly. You remember other dark nights of the soul and how by dawn they always broke.
– Anne Lamott
Will the multiplication of things bring creative happiness? Will worldly possessions free thought and feeling from bondage and pain?
– Krishnamurti
I can not feel her voice I am too far away skiing in Austria.
– Frank Lima
It’s never as bad as you think it is or as good as you think it is.
(Lessons from personal finance that apply to life overall and vice versa.)
– Kenneth Folk
Many persons have inquired: Where is the goal of mankind? […] Past thinking and methods did not prevent world wars. Future thinking must prevent wars. […] A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.
– Albert Einstein
Practice the pause. Pause before judging. Pause before assuming. Pause before accusing. Pause whenever you’re about to react harshly and you’ll avoid doing and saying things you’ll later regret.
– Lori Deschene
If you ask me, something sinister lurks in men who avoid wine, games, the company of lovely women, and dinnertime conversation. Such people are either gravely ill or secretly detest everyone around them.
– Mikhail Bulgakov
The internal machinery of life, the chemistry of the parts, is something beautiful. And it turns out that all life is interconnected with all other life.
– Prof. Feynman
Nothing and no one owns you. No one is watching; no one is keeping score. Let go of whatever has its grip on you: concerns, hopes, fears.
– Charlotte Rotterdam
It seems we are at the point of societal decline where everybody is just extracting as much value as they can before the whole thing collapses. Would love to be proven wrong.
– Noah Ryan
Everything is in decline, and always has been…One would have to be as unenlightened as an angel or an idiot to imagine that the human escapade could turn out well.
– Emil Cioran
No one works better out of anguish at all; that’s an incredible literary conceit.
– James Baldwin
Again and again, the natural world reminds me that I belong to something larger than my own thoughts.
– Daniel H. Shapiro
this chaos of letters I have collected.
– Edvard Munch
It’s funny how, in a world where so many people want more, you start wanting less. Less noise, less stress, less comparison and less proving. More authenticity.
– @tinybuddha
To most of us, the whole business of falling in love is totally absorbing, nothing else matters.
– Nadine Gordimer
I too often feel like a person I know nothing about.
– John Ashbery
On your spiritual journey you will have dug deep, blazed a new path, spent years in the fire of self mastery, swam to the edge of your own consciousness, and stretched the comfort zone of humanity. And no one will really understand what that means but you.
– Nika Solé
Misery loves company. But so does authenticity. So does divine power. So do elevation, confirmation, and reclamation. You decide the company you keep and the company you keep will help you decide what’s called forward in your life.
– Nika Solé
AIs lack credibility the same way nerds lack credibility; they can say all the smart things better than you, but don’t have the down-in-the-dirt embodiment to earn your trust.
– Kenneth Folk
Character is characters; our nature is a plural complexity, a multiphasic polysemous weave, a bundle, a tangle, a sleeve. That’s why we need a long old age: to ravel out the snarls and set things straight.
– James Hillman
I never decided I wanted to be a writer. I simply woke up a writer one morning.
– Shelby Foote
Most of us treat our birth as the opening line of our story, when really it’s the middle of a much longer sentence.
– Christopher Rivas
The nervous system is in touch with far more information than the mind. That’s why regulating it and listening to it will change your whole life.
– Nika Solé
What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and the world remains and is immortal.
– Albert Pike
Before one can deepen as a person, one must visit the deeps within. We cannot ascend without first descending.
– James Hollis
In a world where speaking ill of others is a sort of accepted sport, we can fail to see the great cost of this violation.
– Adyashanti
We need, above all things, to slow down and get ourselves to amble through life instead of to rush through it.
– Alan Watts
Five minutes after birth, they decide your name, religion, nationality, and sect.
And you spend the rest of your life defending what you did not choose.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
We are accountable to each other because we know we can hurt each other. This is the very essence of the social contract. You cannot hurt an AI, so there is no social contract. The AI can hurt you, but you cannot hurt the AI.
– Kenneth Folk
Life will not, it will never, make sense to your mind. The secret is to see life from the soul’s perspective; to add to the mind’s experience the soul’s wisdom, awareness, and total knowing.
– Neale Donald Walsch
lost in a shuffle
of second-hand music books . . .
thrush answering thrush
– Chen-ou Liu
AMERICAN SONNET FOR THE NEW YEAR
Things got terribly ugly incredibly quickly
Things got ugly embarrassingly quickly
actually Things got ugly unbelievably quickly
honestly Things got ugly seemingly infrequently
initially Things got ugly ironically usually
awfully carefully Things got ugly unsuccessfully
occasionally Things got ugly mostly painstakingly
quietly seemingly Things got ugly beautifully
infrequently Things got ugly sadly especially
frequently unfortunately Things got ugly
increasingly obviously Things got ugly suddenly
embarrassingly forcefully Things got really ugly
regularly truly quickly Things got really incredibly
ugly Things will get less ugly inevitably hopefully
– Terrance Hayes
GENESIS
Oh, I said, this is going to be.
And it was.
Oh, I said, this will never happen.
But it did.
And a purple fog descended upon the land.
The roots of trees curled up.
The world was divided into two countries.
Every photograph taken in the first was of people.
Every photograph taken in the second showed none.
All of the girl children were named And.
All of the boy children named Then.
– Mary Ruefle
Into the void of silence, into the empty space of nothing, the joy of life is unfurled.
– C. S. Lewis
There is nothing to fear in the act of beginning. More often than not it knows the journey ahead better than we ever could. Perhaps the art of harvesting the secret riches of our lives is best achieved when we place profound trust in the act of beginning. Risk might be our greatest ally. To live a truly creative life, we always need to cast a critical look at where we presently are, attempting always to discern where we have become stagnant and where new beginning might be ripening. There can be no growth if we do not remain open and vulnerable to what is new and different. I have never seen anyone take a risk for growth that was not rewarded a thousand times over.
– John O’Donohue
If the goal is the sole point of orientation, then the spatial interval to be crossed before reaching it is simply an obstacle to be overcome as quickly as possible. Pure orientation towards the goal deprives the in-between space of all meaning, emptying it to become a corridor without any value of its own. Acceleration is the attempt to make the temporal interval that is needed for bridging the spatial interval disappear altogether. The rich meaning of the path disappears. Acceleration leads to a semantic impoverishment of the world. Space and time no longer mean very much.
– Byung-chul Han
I have no patience
for people who can watch
the world burn and
never wonder:
How do I become rain?
– john roedel
THE BLUE
You can have Egypt and Nantucket.
The only place I want to visit is The Blue,
not the Wild Blue Yonder that seduces pilots,
but that zone where the unexpected dwells,
waiting to come out of it in the shape of bolts.
I want to walk its azure perimeter
where the unanticipated is coiled, on the mark,
ready to spring into the predictable homes of earth.
I want to stroll through the pale indigo light
examining all the accidents about to rocket into time,
all the forgotten names about to fly from tongues.
I will scrutinize all the surprises of the future
and watch the brainstorms gathering darkly,
ready to hit the heads of inventors
laboring in their crackpot shacks.
A jaded traveler with an invisible passport,
I am at home with this heaven of the unforeseen,
waiting for the next whoosh of sudden departure
when, with no advance warning, to tiny augery,
the unpredictable plummets into our lives
from somewhere that looks like sky.
– Billy Collins
Eclipse of the light of heaven, eclipse of God – such indeed is the character of the historic hour through which the world is now passing.
– Martin Buber
There is no logical, rational, pre-structured criterion “out there” with a divine plan. There is no truth “out there” which our weak minds or souls eventually run across. There is this casual, haphazard, amoral process that leaps the logical gaps and brings about newness. And the procedurés only demand is that given talents be invested, risked, doubled, the possibilities explored.
– Joseph Chilton Pearce
The world is not a place but the vastness of the soul. And the soul is nothing more than love, limitless, all that moves us toward knowing what is true. I once thought love was supposed to be nothing but bliss. I now know it is also worry and grief, hope and trust. … If people we love die, then they are lost only to our ordinary senses. If we remember, we can find them anytime with our hundred secret senses.
– Amy Tan
Where in the world did you get the idea that the Lord wants the truth from us? It is a strange, a most original, idea of yours, My Lord [Cardinal]. Why, he knows it already, and may even have found it a little bit dull. Truth is for tailors and shoemakers, My Lord. I, on the contrary, have always held that the Lord has a penchant for masquerades. Do you not yourself tell us, my lords spiritual, that our trials are really blessings in disguise? And so they are. I, too, have found them to be so, at midnight, at the hour when the mask falls. But at the same time nobody can deny that they have been dressed up by the hand of an unrivaled expert. The Lord himself—with your permission—seems to me to have been masquerading pretty freely at the time when he took on flesh and dwelt amongst us.
– Isak Dinesen
Nobody can judge an internal injury by the size of the superficial wound.
– Salman Rushdie
Such reciprocity is the very structure of perception. We experience the sensuous world only by rendering ourselves vulnerable to that world. Sensory perception is this ongoing interweavement: the terrain enters into us only to the extent that we allow ourselves to be taken up within that terrain.
– David Abram
THE UNIVERSE PROCEEDS out of what it has been and into what it will be, inexorably, unstoppably, at the rate of one second per second, one year per year, forever. At right angles to its forward progress lie the past and the future. The future, that is to say, does not lie “ahead” of the present in the stream of time, but at a right angle to it: the future of any present moment can be projected as far as you like outward from it, infinitely in fact, but when the universe has proceeded further, and a new present moment has succeeded this one, the future of this one retreats with it into the what-has-been, forever outdated. It is similar but more complicated with the past.
– John Crowley
He caught a glimpse of that extraordinary faculty in man, that strange, altruistic, rare, and obstinate decency which will make writers or scientists maintain their truths at the risk of death. Eppur si muove, Galileo was to say; it moves all the same. They were to be in a position to burn him if he would go on with it, with his preposterous nonsense about the earth moving round the sun, but he was to continue with the sublime assertion because there was something which he valued more than himself. The Truth. To recognize and to acknowledge What Is.
That was the thing which man could do, which his English could do, his beloved, his sleeping, his now defenceless English. They might be stupid, ferocious, unpolitical, almost hopeless. But here and there, oh so seldome, oh so rare, oh so glorious, there were those all the same who would face the rack, the executioner, and even utter extinction, in the cause of something greater than themselves. Truth, that strange thing, the jest of Pilate’s.
Many stupid young men had thought they were dying for it, and many would continue to die for it, perhaps for a thousand years. They did not have to be right about their truth, as Galileo was to be. It was enough that they, the few and martyred, should establish a greatness, a thing above the sum of all they ignorantly had.
– T.H. White
But whenever I take to my restless dreamless dewdrenched bed
I cannot close my eyes – fear stands over me instead of sleep.
And whenever I think to sing or hum a tune to stay awake
then my tears fall.
This house is in trouble.
The good days are gone.
How I pray for a change! A happy change! A light in darkness.
– Anne Carson
I am an obscure and patient pearl-fisherman who dives into the deepest waters and comes up with empty hands and a blue face. Some fatal attraction draws me down into the abysses of thought, down into those innermost recesses which never cease to fascinate the strong. I shall spend my life gazing at the ocean of art, where others voyage or fight; and from time to time I’ll entertain myself by diving for those green and yellow shells that nobody will want. So I shall keep them for myself and cover the walls of my hut with them.
– Gustave Flaubert
Gorge after gorge, turning, turning. Caverns of sunset, falling, falling away—just a single vast gold air breathed out by beings—they must have been marvelous beings, those gold-breathers. Down. Purple-and-green islands. Cleft and groined and gigantically pocked like something left behind after all the oceans vanished one huge night: the mountains. Their hills fold and fold again, fold away, down. Folded into the dens and rocks of the hills are ghost towns. Broken streets end in them, like a sound, nowhere. Shadow is inside. We walk (oh quietly) even so—breaking lines of force, someone’s. Houses stand in their stones. Each house an empty socket. Some streaked with red inside. Words once went on in there—no. I don’t believe that. Words never went on in there.
– Anne Carson
That is the first thing I know for sure: (1.) If the questions don’t make sense, neither will the answers.
– Kurt Vonnegut
The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.
– James Baldwin
With everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes.
– James Baldwin
Wachtel: Maybe I’m being too literal- minded when I think of dismantling because when I think of taking the poem apart word by word-
Carson: Yes it is a mantle, the confidence that you can ever know what words mean because really we don’t. They’re just these signs that we pretend to nail down in dictionaries, tokens of usage, but frankly they’re all wild integers. Disassembling it is a way of exposing that myth at the bottom of language.
Wachtel: Is that the myth you’re referring to?
Carson: The myth that you can know it ever definitively. Use it, yes. Make sense, yes. But know it, I’m not sure.
There are no watertight compartments in our inmost nature.
– Alexis Carrel
Waiting
There are no calls from the outside.
Miracles are the perversity of literature.
We should know that by now.
Only that these never revealed connections of things
lead us oddly on. Caesar’s legions
entering Greenland ice, the scout far in front
wanting to do battle where there are
no enemies,
never were any enemies.
– Jim Harrison
I moved my chair into sun
I sat in the sun
the way hunger is moved when called fasting.
– jane hirshfield
Of what secret lights are we made?
Of what densities?
– Hélène Cixous
To life, to love
To our nights, to our days
To the eternal return of luck
– Alina Stefanescu
If you’re a stranger to your own wound, then you’re gonna be tempted to despise the wounded.
– Father Gregory Boyle
The difference between humans and animals is that animals never allow a fool to lead the pack.
– Winston Churchill
Collective Diseases of the Mind
As a psychologist I am deeply interested in mental disturbances, particularly when they infect whole nations. I want to emphasize that I despise politics wholeheartedly: thus I am neither a Bolshevik, nor a National Socialist, nor an Anti-Semite. I am a neutral Swiss and even in my own country I am uninterested in politics, because I am convinced that 99 per cent of politics are mere symptoms and anything but a cure for social evils. About 50 per cent of politics is definitely obnoxious inasmuch as it poisons the utterly incompetent mind of the masses. We are on guard against contagious diseases of the body, but we are exasperatingly careless when it comes to the even more dangerous collective diseases of the mind.
– Carl Jung
Mass Psychosis
It is becoming ever more obvious that it is not famine, not earthquakes, not microbes, not cancer but man himself who is man’s greatest danger to man, for the simple reason that there is no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes.
– Carl Jung
Emancipation
It is not for nothing that our age cries out for the redeemer personality, for the one who can emancipate himself from the grip of the collective [psychosis] and save at least his own soul, who lights a beacon of hope for others, proclaiming that here is at least one man who has succeeded in extricating himself from the fatal identity with the group psyche.
– Carl Jung
Growing up means growing out of the emotional reactive patterns that were laid down in childhood. I should mention that an important part of this work is learning how to hold our emotions and reactivity in a space of kindness and understanding.
Beyond growing up, there’s a greater possibility as well—waking up. A loving relationship can also help us plug into our deeper nature, the absolute radiance in our heart, so that we begin to connect with another person from this more inclusive, more genuinely loving part of ourselves. This means waking up to who we really are—that fundamental openness and warmth of the sun. It means learning to live more and more from that place, even when new clouds arise, as they will.
– John Welwood
Everything Trump touches seems to wither and dies because he understands nothing as a trust. To him, everything is property: the White House, the Justice Department, the armed forces, the presidency, the National Mall, the truth and eventually the country itself. If something can be branded, he brands it. If it can be sold, he sells it. If it resists him, he attacks it. If it dies beneath the weight of his excess, he blames vandals. He has spent his public life breaking things and demanding applause for the cleanup. He is the arsonist pointing at the smoke, the burglar complaining about the broken window and the vandal standing in the dead grass insisting that somebody else must have stepped there.
– Michael Jochum
Earlier this week I read a line that stood out to me, “Your goal in life should be to reduce the amount of time it takes you to get out of a bad state”
The ability to bounce back quickly is a key skill in life.
My wife once told me, “When you’re five, you can be mad for a day. When you’re ten, you can be mad for an hour. By the time you’re thirty, you get ten minutes-and then you have to move on.”
Life is full of moments of frustration and disappointment. Growth and maturity is learning to pull yourself out of a bad state faster.
– James Clear
It seems to me that the great pleasure of human life is not in having an opinion, but rather in learning all the ways you are wrong, and all the nuances you failed to account for, and all the truths that turned out to be not as simple as you once believed. And it seems to me that one of the central pleasures of attending school is that you get to read with really well-informed people who can help welcome you into a complex world stuffed with rich and maddening ambiguity.
– John Green
I have shut my balcony
because I do not want to hear the weeping,
but from behind the grey walls
nothing else is heard but the weeping.
There are very few angels that sing,
there are very few dogs that bark,
a thousand violins fit into the palm of my hand.
But the weeping is an immense dog,
the weeping is an immense angel,
the weeping is an immense violin,
the tears muzzle the wind,
nothing else is heard but the weeping.
– Federico García Lorca
Embrace the ugliness that’s hard to put on the page. Step away from the safety of your favorite writing space, stop thinking, and focus on the concrete details.
– Beth Mead
I reckon that being good is about the easiest thing in the world for a lazy man.
– William Faulkner
People don’t like love. They like that flittery flirty feeling. They don’t love love. Love is sacrificial. Love is ferocious. It’s not emotive. Our culture doesn’t love love. It loves the idea of love. It wants the emotion without paying anything for it. It’s ridiculous.
– Matt Chandler
It is only the vain that pretend to be humble.
– Krishnamurti
the long heat
broken by
one cool wind
– @BashoSociety
Paul McCartney was one of the most competitive people I’ve ever met. Lennon wasn’t. He just thought everyone else was shit.
– Ray Davies
the ocean at dawn
the white waves
already shining
– Basho
If change, if being of service was easy, everyone would do it. If problems solved themselves, there wouldn’t be problems. The world would be fair and wonderful and the right people would always be in charge.
Until then we have to be smart and capable and competent.
– Ryan Holiday
Knowing who you are and standing on that, is freedom. It’s the reward for the work that no one sees but you.
– Nika Solé
For those of us who are sincere and disciplined yet struggle to see our own buddha-nature due to samsaric illusions or who practice inconsistently or only during holidays, there remains the assurance that even small efforts will ultimately lead to buddhahood.
– An Tran
Healing is a constant practice, not the conclusion of a problem.
– Michael Meade
Hold up my goings in thy paths, that my footsteps slip not.
– Psalm 17:5
Almost. It’s a big word for me. I feel it everywhere. Almost home. Almost happy. Almost changed. Almost, but not quite. Not yet. Soon, maybe.
– Joan Bauer
I’ve always felt that naming was artificial.
– Lydia Davis
Let your heart go out in spontaneous and immeasurable compassion. It is compassion that is the best protection; it is also, as the great masters of the past have always known, the source of all healing.
– Sogyal Rinpoche
The centuries have grown heavy and weigh upon the moment. We are more corrupt than all the ages, more decomposed than all the empires. Our exhaustion interprets history, our breathlessness makes us hear the death rattle of nations…the curtain of the universe is moth-eaten, and through its holes we see nothing, now, but masks and ghosts…
– Emil Cioran
All I’m saying is that if you think your religion or spiritual belief system is the only right way to God, you have been bamboozled and frankly have gravely underestimated the infinite nature of the divine.
– Nika Solé
The unlimited individual freedom that neoliberalism offers us is nothing more than an illusion. We no longer live in a disciplinary society, where everything is regulated through prohibitions and mandates, but in a society of performance.
One imagines that one is free, but in reality, what one does is exploit oneself voluntarily and with enthusiasm, until collapsing. That is a mirage of freedom. Self-exploitation is much more effective than being exploited by others, because it arouses that deceptive sensation of freedom.
– Byung-Chul Han
Very ugly emotions perhaps make a poem.
– Robert Lowell
A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person.
– Mary Karr
Methods limit you as soon as you recognize them.
– Joy Williams
If you’re a true believer, if you have some pre-packaged philosophy, then you’re going to miss a great deal because you’re pre-programmed to ignore what doesn’t fit into your model. And it doesn’t matter what your model is.
– Terence McKenna
You know you’ve found alignment when your reality is actively reciprocating you.
– Nika Solé
The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.
– Chris McCandless
Being a beggar is no disgrace, but buying or selling shares of the Suez Canal Company is.
– Pierre Auguste Renoir
There is no single, simple, static ‘women’s point of view.’
– Margaret Atwood
We have been educated to such a fine—or dull—point that we are incapable of enjoying something new, something different, until we are first told what it’s all about. We don’t trust our five senses; we rely on our critics and educators, all of whom are failures in the realm of creation. In short, the blind lead the blind. It’s the democratic way.
– Henry Miller
To be a poet, to me, means being experimental and liberatory with language, pushing words to their farthest potential through the power of imagination,
– Alison C. Rollins
breaking waves …
the foam line between
before and after
– Chen-ou Liu
Anger blocks a miracle. Defensiveness blocks a miracle. Resentment blocks a miracle. Judgment blocks a miracle. But love, love produces miracles.
– Marianne Williamson
The war of ideas is a Greek invention. It is one of the most important inventions ever made. Indeed, the possibility of fighting with words instead of fighting with swords is the very basis of our civilization, and especially of all its legal and parliamentary institutions.
– Karl Popper
Antimatter
On the other side of a mirror there’s an inverse world, where the insane go
sane; where bones climb out of the earth and recede to the first slime of love.
And in the evening the sun is just rising.
Lovers cry because they are a day younger, and soon childhood robs them
of their pleasure.
In such a world there is much sadness which, of course, is joy…
– Russell Edson
And when you get there,
don’t be so busy
looking for the next thing
that you forget
you got there.
– Blue Iris
I don’t know who
needs to hear this,
but what they’re
calling socialism is
just using our taxes
to pay for something
besides bombs.
– unknown
Being Irish means you re part of a small island that made a massive noise.
– Cillian Murphy
Mathematics is a logical method… Mathematical propositions express no thoughts. In life it is never a mathematical proposition which we need, but we use mathematical propositions only in order to infer from propositions which do not belong to mathematics to others which equally do not belong to mathematics.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
To act on behalf of the evolutionary process requires us to overcome our inertia and apathy, our selfishness, our tendency toward individualism, egoism, and self-indulgence. To be attached to a world in process means that we must constantly leave behind what has already been achieved in order to move ahead to what is yet to be accomplished.
– Ilia Delio
As in childhood we live sweeping close to the sky and now, what dawn is this.
– Anne Carson
Maybe happiness is like a virus. Maybe it’s one of those bugs that sits for a long time, so we don’t even know that we are infected.
– Richard Powers
Music forecasts the past, recalls the future. Now and then the difference falls away, and in one simple gift of circling sound, the ear solves the scrambled cryptogram. One abiding rhythm, present and always, and you’re free. But a few measures more, and the cloak of time closes back around you.
– Richard Powers
Suddenly: the word most used by Dostoevsky. Somebody told me that. Some Dostoevsky expert. Suddenly. As though any kind of action could be drawn into words: Suddenly music. Suddenly turning. Suddenly silent. Suddenly. As though I never saw the process. Everyone in the old house is sick but me. Silence, except for the snoring, coughing, and occasional trips to the bathroom. Snow everywhere through the windows. You can’t look out without seeing it. Suddenly winter. Frozen rivers. Bitter cold. Barren trees. Small silver plane etched out against a chalk, still sky. Suddenly, completely alone.
– Sam Shepard
Steer your way past the ruins of the altar and the mall
Steer your way through the fables of creation and the fall
Steer your way past the palaces that rise above the rot
Year by year, month by month, day by day
Thought by thought
They whisper still, the ancient stones
The blunted mountains weep
As he died to make men holy
Let us die to make things cheap
And say the mea culpa, which you probably forgot
Year by year, month by month, day by day
Thought by thought
– Leonard Cohen
The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.
– Jean Luc Godard
When the poor give to the rich, the devil laughs.
– Benvenuto Cellini
If greed were not the master of modern man–ably assisted by envy–how could it be that the frenzy of economism does not abate as higher “standards of living” are attained, and that it is precisely the richest societies which pursue their economic advantage with the greatest ruthlessness? How could we explain the almost universal refusal on the part of the rulers of the rich societies–where organized along private enterprise or collective enterprise lines–to work towards the humanization of work? It is only necessary to assert that something would reduce the “standard of living” and every debate is instantly closed. That soul-destroying, meaningless, mechanical, monotonous, moronic work is an insult to human nature which must necessarily and inevitably produce either escapism or aggression, and that no amount of of “bread and circuses” can compensate for the damage done–these are facts which are neither denied nor acknowledged but are met with an unbreakable conspiracy of silence–because to deny them would be too obviously absurd and to acknowledge them would condemn the central preoccupation of modern society as a crime against humanity.
– E.F. Schumacher
My life is quiet. There is little beside working and walking. I have no desire to see people, and I feel as though I am waiting for something new and strange which will burn the unburnt side of my soul.
– Kahlil Gibran
The first revolution is when you change your mind.
– Gil Scott-Heron
You’re writing with your hands, not with your brain, as Beckett said. He was completely right… I started as a musician, and I stopped playing. I turned to writing and writing is comparable to playing music for me. When doing that, you don’t think first, you’re improvising… You just do it. Martin Heidegger, he said that art happens. It’s like that for me. It just happens. When writing a novel or a play or whatever, at a certain point I get this feeling that it’s already written, not inside me, but out there somewhere. My job is to write down what is already written before it disappears.
– Jon Fosse
Let us never forget that the National Park Service is based upon a legislative act and is not securely incorporated in the Constitution of the United States. Hence, it is vulnerable to erosion and destruction by legislative action. Such action may be sudden and catastrophic, as in the event of some national emergency, or it might appear as a slow but tragic attrition induced by overpopulation, economic pressures and public apathy. Obviously, eternal vigilance must therefore be the essential attitude of all our people.
– Ansel Adams
Uncommon advice: If you don’t know what to pursue in life right now. Pursue yourself. Pursue becoming the healthiest, happiest, most healed, most present, most confident version of yourself. Then the right path will reveal itself.
– unknown
Van Gogh’s Last Letter to Theo
I am going alone into the fields now.
I tried to make my life
its own faith, an ochre road
between the elms in autumn.
I found the moon, one April,
like a changeling,
yellow petals in her slender arms.
I spent my silent childhood
on my knees.
No more. No more wounds now.
My brother, I love you
as the earth does, wild
and cold and inconsolable.
I leave you
these few paints
and your changes.
And this little gift, this one thing
I have fathomed:
There is only
one way
to be as vast as God:
Make your world no matter who
believes.
– Joseph Fasano
If you actually look, if you take your whole being apart and examine it, you find that you are genuine and good as you are.
– Chögyam Trungpa
I was beginning to realize that you must come slowly to a place, wait a little before feverishly resorting to guidebooks . . . Place has a mighty tongue of its own.
– J. Lash, On Pilgrimage
I have known many people who keep going back to the same empty well, sharing their truths and waiting for a certain response to liberate them. Waste of time-some people will never hear us or own their actions. We have to fill our own wells, but first we have to empty them of what isn’t ours.
– Jeff Brown
In the Library
by Charles Simic
for Octavio
There’s a book called
“A Dictionary of Angels.”
No one has opened it in fifty years,
I know, because when I did,
The covers creaked, the pages
Crumbled. There I discovered
The angels were once as plentiful
As species of flies.
The sky at dusk
Used to be thick with them.
You had to wave both arms
Just to keep them away.
Now the sun is shining
Through the tall windows.
The library is a quiet place.
Angels and gods huddled
In dark unopened books.
The great secret lies
On some shelf Miss Jones
Passes every day on her rounds.
She’s very tall, so she keeps
Her head tipped as if listening.
The books are whispering.
I hear nothing, but she does.
To truly practice Zen therefore means not leaving lights burning when they are not needed, not allowing water to run unnecessarily from the faucet, not loading up your plate and leaving food uneaten. These unmindful acts reveal an indifference to the value of the object so wasted or destroyed as well as to the efforts of those who made these things possible for us…This indifference is the product of a mind that sees itself as separated…This indifference robs us of our birthright of harmony and joy.
– Roshi Philip Kapleau
But a democracy is bound in the end to be obscene, for it is composed of myriad disunited fragments, each fragment assuming to itself a false wholeness, a false individuality. Modern democracy is made up of millions of frictional parts all asserting their own wholeness.
– D.H. Lawrence
What matters to me even more than the shapeliness and the dance of language is what the poem discovers deeper down than gracefulness and pleasures in figures of speech. I respond most to what is found out about the heart and spirit, what we can hear through the language. Best of all, of course, is when the language and other means of poetry combine with the meaning
to make us experience what we understand.
– Linda Gregg
The chance to practice the dharma may not come again. This is why the preciousness of human birth is the first and most important point. We mustn’t waste this life and die with regrets.
– Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo
I certainly have not told my story yet, I know that, though I’ve revealed fragments.
– James Baldwin
I always have something else to do. Something else is always going on in my life, so when I’m in the company of someone self-centered or petty or spiritually corrupting for too long a period of time, I disappear.
– Toni Morrison
Reading the room, self awareness and not overplaying your part are key components of social intelligence.
– Nika Solé
Religion, it seems to me, has nothing whatsoever to do with any belief, with any priest, with any church or so-called sacred book. The state of the religious mind can be understood only when we begin to understand what beauty is; and the understanding of beauty must be approached through total aloneness.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
The feeling of emptiness is the most fundamental experience of human existence, and yet it is the one we most desperately seek to avoid.
– Lacan
The Only Bread We Have is Water
You ask your mother
why you have to eat water
that tastes like a cold wet sky
and she smiles and says
this is all the world
the men who want to kill us
will share with us.
– john zbigniew guzlowski
I’d spent a year building a version of ‘peace’ that was really just very sophisticated hiding. Yoga mats and unread texts. Meditation apps and voicemail boxes I let fill up. I wasn’t protecting my nervous system. I was protecting myself from the discomfort of showing up for something that scared me and calling it wellness instead of what it actually was.
– Dakota J. Dawson
If you want to know what’s really true about a person, tune into their energy.
– Nika Solé
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…
You keep watch, you pray, you agonize—provided he does too, sighing, groaning, beset by the same tortures that are racking you. Intolerance is the work of ravaged souls whose faith comes down to a more or less deliberate torment they would like to see generalized, instituted.
We convert not to liberate but to enchain.
– Emil Cioran
When we have a problem, we instinctively resist trying the way out that leads through obscurity and darkness. But in order to penetrate the darkness we must summon all the powers of enlightenment that consciousness can offer.
– Daryl Sharp
You don’t have to be just one thing in this lifetime. Be the accountant who becomes a DJ. The lawyer who opens a flower shop. The engineer who writes a novel.
– Saxon Kent
my poor eyes
cannot overlook
the wild thistle
– Basho
Where Dust Never Collects
by William Bortz
when I say love, I mean
I wait at the door for
you to arrive; I mean
the walls of my chest
are decorated with your
pictures; I mean it’s
safe here
To me, the Bible had gone dead because it was cut and dried: its noise was a fixed noise, its meaning a fixed meaning. And not only was it dead, it was antipathetic.
Arriving at manhood, one felt that the Bible had been bullied into one, and by second-rate minds at that. Its whole meaning was second-rate, because it had been expounded by these second-rate orthodox people, parsons and teachers, who would not and perhaps could not extract anything from the book but a sort of glorified grocery-shop morality and book-keeping.
– DH Lawrence
…you will go home and then you will find that home is not home anymore. Then you will really be in trouble. As long as you stay here, you can always think: One day I will go home.
– James Baldwin
To be a woman is something so strange, so confusing and so complicated that only a woman could put up with it.
– Søren Kierkegaard
So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in them.
– Sylvia Plath
Numbers can be altered. Looks can be changed. Styles can be copied. But energy remains the same.
– Nika Solé
I realize that if I were stable, prudent and static; I’d live in death. Therefore I accept confusion, uncertainty, fear and emotional ups and downs; because that’s the price I’m willing to pay for a fluid, perplexed and exciting life.
– Carl Rogers
Everybody wants to save the Earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes.
– P.J. O’Rourke
Psychoanalysis is, in essence, a cure through love.
– Freud
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.
– Carl Jung
Extraordinary claims don’t require extraordinary evidence. All claims require the same amount of evidence.
– Kenneth Folk
As democracy is perfected, the office of the president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people… On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be
adorned by a downright moron.
– H.L. Mencken
This human herd all started out as potential geniuses, before the tacit conspiracy of social conformity blighted their brains. All of them can redeem that lost freedom if they work at it hard enough.
– Robert Anton Wilson
late summer
the wind changes
and something inside agrees
– Basho Society
We do not know what to do with this short life, yet we want another that will be eternal.
– Anatole France
I suppose that one reason I have always detested religion is its sly tendency to insinuate the idea that the universe is designed with ‘you’ in mind or, even worse, that there is a divine plan into which one fits whether one knows it or not. This kind of modesty is too arrogant for me.
– Christopher Hitchens
Emperor Wu asks:
“What is the highest meaning of the holy truths?”
Bodhidharma replies:
“Vast emptiness, nothing sacred.”
Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it means one always has some battle to wage against oneself.
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau
When you stop searching and you calm down and you put your books away, and you confront yourself and see what you are all about, that will bring about bliss faster than anything you can ever imagine or ever do.
– Robert Adams
Memoirs, rock ‘n’ roll or otherwise, are about transformation, what the narrator learns about himself and his world.
– Andrea A Firth
I’m scared
I’m scared of myself …
at daybreak
piece by piece I try
to put myself together
– Chen-ou Liu
In a word, man must create his own essence; it is in throwing himself into the world, suffering there, struggling there, that he gradually defines himself.
– Jean-Paul Sartre
stretched
the length of this sunset
Monday blues
– Kirsten Cliff Elliot
Perhaps the surest way to happiness and fulfillment in life is to thank and praise your Source for everything that happens to you. Then, even when a calamity arises, you can be assured that you’ll turn it into a blessing.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
In our society of fixed texts and printed words, it is the function of the poet to see the life value of the facts round about, and to deify them, as it were, to provide images that relate the everyday to the eternal.
– Joseph Campbell
Just as the state of your life is a reflection of your state of mind, so too is the state of the world a reflection of our collective state of mind.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole.
– Evelyn Waugh
SOAKING UP THE SUN
Today there is the kind of sunshine old men love,
the kind of day when my grandfather would sit
on the south side of the wooden corncrib where
the sunlight warmed slowly all through the day
like a wood stove. One after another dry leaves
fell. No painful memories came. Everything was
lit by a halo of light. The cornstalks glinted bright
as pieces of glass. From the fields and cottonwood
came the damp smell of mushrooms, of
things going back to earth. I sat with my grand-
father then. Sheep came up to us as we sat there,
their oily wool so warm to my fingers, like a strange
and magic snow. My grandfather whittled sweet
smelling apple sticks just to get at the scent. His
thumb had a permanent groove in it where the
back of the knife blade rested. He let me listen to
the wind, the wild geese, the soft dialect of sheep,
while his own silence taught me every secret thing
he knew.
– Tom Kennan
Already one day has detached itself from all the rest up ahead.
It has my photograph in its soft pocket.
It wants to carry my breath into the past in its bag of wind.
I write poems to untie myself, to do penance and disappear
Through the upper right-hand corner of things, to say grace.
– Charles Wright
Most men have a woman in their heart and most women have a man in their heart. There are people that don’t. But most of us cherish some sort of dream of surrender.
– Leonard Cohen
My secret drug is death
I take it whenever I see you
And you don’t see me
– Leonard Cohen
Our suffering was not caused by our parents or grandparents. It was merely passed down. We are social animals. We grow through modeling. We teach what we have learned. We act as we have been acted upon. A person who is not loving has not experienced love. It is not his fault. Realizing this gives rise to forgiveness. And in Chan we vow that suffering will stop with us. We will not pass it down.
– Guo Jun, A Special Transmission
To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.
– Douglas Adams
This is about Amerika, but make no mistake, my fellow-Brits, this is what fuhrage and his ilk have in mind for us too..
“Stalin, 1930s. Intellectuals were sent to gulags, and actual biology replaced with peasant intuition, because knowing things was suspicious. Mao’s Cultural Revolution, 1966: millions of professors and doctors sent to labor camps. Wearing glasses could get you killed because glasses signaled literacy. Khmer Rouge, 1975: anyone who could read, speak a second language, or had soft hands was executed on sight. A quarter of Cambodia’s population dead in four years because education itself was the enemy.
Franco, Pinochet, Perón, Erdogan, Modi, Orbán: every single one came for the schools first because authoritarianism can’t function when a critical mass of people can still spot propaganda.
So the analytical class has to be dismantled, and the fastest way is to make ignorance a virtue. Now look at the country you’re standing in. Universities defunded, professors called woke, teachers demonized, books banned, do your own research replacing peer review. This isn’t unprecedented. It’s the American chapter of a book we’ve read a dozen times. The only unknown is whether the people who kept their sight keep the record.
– Erika Jordan
I’d like to have money. And I’d like to be a good writer. These two can come together, and I hope they will, but if that’s too adorable, I’d rather have money.
– Dorothy Parker
Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.
– Hannah Arendt
There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.
– Milan Kundera
There is a certain death that occurs as part of the healing process, in the deepening of self-awareness, something that does not survive illumination. While it is tempting to spin out of the uncertainty and into rebirth, there is wisdom and a purity within the reorganization itself, which we cannot know if we abandon it prematurely.
The dissolution itself is initiation as it offers vision not available in the scramble to put things back together. An old part of ourselves that has accompanied us for so long, a fellow traveler is no longer permitted to continue the journey by our side. The crumbling of an old dream – my life and the way I was so sure it was going to turn out.
This prior soul-companion can be another person or it can be a member of the inner family – an image, a feeling, a lens through which we’d been seeing ourselves and others; a part of our world that has come to the end of its meaning, the end of its life.
– C. G. Jung
The path is unchartered. It comes into existence moment by moment and at the same time, drops away behind us. It’s like riding in a train sitting backwards. We cant see where we’re headed, only where we’ve been. This is a very encouraging teaching because it says that the source of wisdom is whatever is going to happen to us today. The source of wisdom is whatever is happening to us right at this very instant.
– Pema Chödrön
Instructions before visiting Earth
In the event that you wake up
and find your soul separated from source
and manifest into material form, don’t panic.
Your condition is only temporary.
You have been selected for the opportunity
of human incarnation.
This 3D simulation is designed
to break up the monotony of eternity
by giving you a fully immersive experience
as a distinct ego identity.
Your body will serve
as your physical avatar
as you navigate a dense and dramatic reality.
There will be many distractions
causing you to forget your true nature and origin.
You will experience a range of emotions
from joy to loneliness to despair.
But remember – no matter
what trials and traumas you encounter,
your soul remains perfectly safe.
At times you may feel lost or afraid.
This is totally normal.
If you ever need guidance,
simply slow down your busy mind
and bring your awareness
to the quiet place
inside yourself.
On this planet, nothing is permanent.
People and things will come and go.
You will fall in love and form sentimental attachments
only to lose everything you hold dear.
So cling to nothing too tightly, even yourself,
and when it’s time to let go, let go with grace,
for nothing is owned, only borrowed.
As you walk among
the people on the planet,
try to be a good guest.
Tread lightly. Remember
that you are only visiting.
Don’t make a mess.
Listen more than you speak.
Give more than you take.
Don’t keep your soft heart
locked inside a glass cage,
protected from wear and tear.
You’ll never make it out alive
and time passes quickly.
So come back with some battle scars
and good stories to tell
– James McCrae
It ain’t what they call you; it’s what you answer to.
– WC Fields
Soul has been demoted to a new-age spiritual fantasy or a missionary’s booty, and nature has been treated , at best, as a postcard or a vacation backdrop or, more commonly, as a hardware store or refuse heap. Too many of us lack intimacy with the natural world and with our souls, and consequently we are doing untold damage to both.
– Bill Plotkin
Alone: for the first time I understood the terrible significance of that word. Alone without a witness, without anyone to speak to, without refuge. The breath in my body, the blood in my veins, all this hurly-burly in my head existed for nobody.
– Simone de Beauvoir
One of the strangest things about life is that it will chug on, blind and oblivious, even as your private world – your little carved-out sphere – is twisting and morphing, even breaking apart. One day you have parents; the next day you’re an orphan. One day you have a place and a path. The next day you’re lost in the wilderness.
And still the sun rises and clouds mass and drift and people shop for groceries and toilets flush and blinds go up and down. That’s when you realize that most of it – life, the relentless mechanism of existing – isn’t about you. It doesn’t include you at all. It will thrust onward even after you’ve jumped the edge.
– Lauren Oliver
For the sake of a dying, suffering world count the cost, pay the price and set the captives free.
– John G. Lake
The ancients left you blueprints, but you are too busy looking at entertainment to notice the map.
– Bobby Hemmitt
The system doesn’t need to lock you in a physical cage when it has successfully convinced you to police your own imagination and accept narrow boundaries for your life.
– Bobby Hemmitt
The highest manifestation of strength is to keep oneself calm and on one’s own feet.
– Swami Sivananda
Life is an opportunity to exert ourselves into the narrative we are born into.
– Kimberlé Crenshaw
If every animal inspires tenderness, what, then, happened to human beings?
– João Guimarães Rosa
There is no greater illusion than fear, no greater wrong than preparing to defend yourself, no greater misfortune than having an enemy. Whoever can see through all fear will always be safe.
– Stephen Mitchell, Tao Te Ching
The premier achievement of human history, they said, the triumph of memory over the obliterating forces of destruction and erasure.
– Anthony Doerr
It is important to acknowledge that, by imposing this individualist discourse on the interactions that challenge one’s sense of presence in the world and ability to cope, we ignore the larger political and social issues that contribute to the eroding mental health and wellbeing of youth as they participate in contemporary education.
– Sheila McNamee
Culture is an imprisoning bubble of interlocking assumptions that are like a collective hallucination… culture is like a delusion of some sort, because it isn’t true.
– Terence McKenna
Sometimes people don’t know how to listen. They think listening means debating, and if you let someone else make a good point, you’re doing something wrong. But listening means letting someone else tell their story and then, even if you don’t agree with them, trying to understand why they feel that way.
– Brittany Walker Pettigrew
Even the most spiritual of us are so deeply programmed by the assumptions of scientific materialism that I think something like that on the short term here and now really gives us pause.
– Terence McKenna
I’ve never met you before, but I recognize this feeling.
– Lang Leav, The Universe of Us
If my life is going to mean anything, I have to live it myself.
– Rick Riordan
The world could be anything, you know. It could be a solid state matrix of some sort. It could be an illusion. It could be a dream. I mean, it really could be a dream. So it pays to stay on your toes, I think.
– Terence McKenna
When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.
– Kurt Vonnegut
The world only behaves as science says it should when we confine our engagement with it to information that is at a great distance from us…
– Terence McKenna
He who thinks great thoughts, often makes great errors.
– Martin Heidegger
Don’t be ashamed to need help. Like a soldier storming a wall, you have a mission to accomplish. And if you’ve been wounded and you need a comrade to pull you up? So what?
– Marcus Aurelius
I maintain this is why octopi eject clouds of ink. It’s so they can have private thoughts because if you can be seen you can be understood.
– Terence McKenna
The way that can be told of is a varying way—suddenly we’re in the realm of wave dynamics.
– Terence McKenna
We keep trying to decode the Spirit’s silence, when perhaps the silence is the invitation itself-to slow down, to listen, to look again.
– J. Sims
We need to not simply make better poetry. We need to make poetry of an entirely different order and we will recognize it when we see it, not when we hear it.
– Terence McKenna
Sleep is the most innocent creature there is and a sleepless man the most guilty.
– Franz Kafka
You have to reach a point where you stop looking externally for validation or saviors, realizing that the entire cosmic architecture is mirrored directly inside your own consciousness.
– Bobby Hemmitt
Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.
– Oscar Wilde
Our question must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct.
– Victor Frankl
The most sought after commodity in today’s world is trust.
– François-Philippe Champagne
The world is not a construction of space and time and matter and energy… the world is instead some kind of a linguistic construct. It is more in the nature of a sentence or a novel or a work of art than it is in the nature of these machine models of interlocking law that we inherit out of a thousand years of rational reductionism.
– Terence McKenna
English just won’t do it because English is a language of subject-object opposition. It’s a language of a past, present, and future. And the kind of world we’re living in is not that kind of world.
– Terence McKenna
The meaning is so pregnant in everything that it can actually articulate itself in your native English tongue…
– Terence McKenna
Our civilization is suffering profound wounds because of the wholesale abandonment of reading by contemporary society.
– Werner Herzog
Reclaim immediate experience. Realize that you outvote all parliaments, police forces, and major newspapers on the planet, because who knows, they may be illusions.
– Terence McKenna
Information is some kind of ontological modality that is capable of organizing any system in which it inhabits into self-reflection.
– Terence McKenna
It is better to die on your feet than live on your knees.
– Emiliano Zapata
There is no scent so pleasant to my nostrils as that faint, subtle reek which comes from an ancient book.
– Arthur Conan Doyle
We write what we are not. It is not merely that we fail to live up to our best ideas but that our best ideas, and the tone that goes with them, tend to be the opposite of our natural temperament.
– Adam Gopnik
Realize the urgency of a total change, and see the falsity of one part of ourselves, which we call higher, striving to dominate the lower.
– Krishnamurti
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
– G. K. Chesterton
The entire universe is on the brink of disappearing, that we are approaching some kind of the equivalent of an open manhole on the road of history…
– Terence McKenna
Trust in the Divine is the only certainty in an uncertain world.
– Rabia Basri
There are no uneducated people, only those who have chosen to skip their lessons. The universe is a universal school offering classes every second. Enrollment is mandatory, but attention is optional.
– unknown
Through the unknown, we’ll find the new.
– Robert Lowell
Go to the tavern!
There, ruin yourself in Love.
And you will see a thousand new lives
spring forth from your ruin.
– Rumi
Everything in the universe is a pitcher brimful of wisdom and beauty.
– Rumi
Beauty waits in ambush for us. If we are sensitive, we will feel it in the poetry of all language.
– Jorge Luis Borges
There have always been those who would fill their bellies while others were starving because they have no sense of shame.
– Jose’ Saramago
The English are not
spiritual people, so they
invented cricket to give
them an idea of eternity.
– George Bernard Shaw
“Patti, did art get us?” I looked away, not really wanting to think about it. “I don’t know, Robert. I don’t know.” Perhaps it did, but no one could regret that. Only a fool would regret being had by art, or a saint.
– Patti Smith
All children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma.
– Kazuo Ishiguro
They say that Ulysses, sated with marvels,
Wept tears of love at the sight of his Ithaca,
Green and humble. Art is that Ithaca
Of green eternity, not of marvels.
– Jorge Luis Borges
The dreams which we produce at night have, on the one hand, the greatest external similarity and internal kinship with the creations of insanity, and are, on the other hand, compatible with complete health in waking life.
– Freud
Cheerfulness of the heart, moreover, is the seal of selflessness. By this seal one recognizes with certainty that hypocrisy and any frenzy of self-absorption are very remote.
– Josef Pieper
When you look at the cosmos, you are looking at yourself on a macro level. The macrocosm and the microcosm are identical.
– Bobby Hemmitt
If poetry is a wheel, the hub for that wheel is love poetry.
– Michael Longley
The question, once asked, sets off a ripple of other questions, as a leaping carp leaves a trail of watery wreaths in its wake.
– Elif Shafak
When we feel that our lives are genuine and good, we do not have to deceive ourselves or other people.
– Chögyam Trungpa
For the thinker, as for the artist, what counts in life is not the number of rare and exciting adventures he encounters, but the inner depth in that life, by which something great may be made out of even the paltriest and most banal of occurrences.
– William Barrett
Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet has free access to the sum of all human knowledge.
– Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia
In the meantime, keep doing what you’re doing because you do it so well and no matter how complex your world may be just know you are very special and touch people in ways you don’t even know.
– Dolly Parton
We have been created for greater things. Not just to be a number in the world, not just to go for diplomas and degrees, this work and that work. We have been created in order to love and be loved.
– Mother Teresa of Calcutta
The stubbornness of a weak man should never be underestimated. The weak tend to be very stubborn when they’ve decided on something.
– Frederick Forsyth
Talk without being offensive, listen without being defensive, and always leave even your adversary with their dignity. For if you don’t, they will spend the rest of their lives working to make you miserable.
– Cecil Murray
Regardless of how far you travel, never stray far from the self.
– Prem Rawat
“But in the meantime, you must be content, I say, to be misunderstood for a while. We are all very anxious to be understood, and it is very hard not to be. But there is one thing much more necessary.”
“What is that, grandmother?”
“To understand other people.”
– George MacDonald
Let me be, was all I wanted. Be what I am, no matter how I am.
– Henry Miller
Find out who you are and do it on purpose.
– Dolly Parton
Government is not the creator but the creature of human society. The Government has no mission from God to make the community; on the contrary, the community should make the Government.
– R. L. Dabney
Were I cannot find good, I must make it.
Where there is no warmth, I must create it.
– Berklie Novak-Stolz
Every bush is a burning bush and the world is crowded with God.
– Elizabeth Barrett Browning
If you can read, even if you can’t afford education, you can go on and learn about anything you want to know. There’s a book on everything.
– Dolly Parton
Times change. Soon no one will believe the wonders I’ve seen, smart kids reading big books and writing papers without AI.
– Ann Patchett
Distance might not solve anything, no matter how far you run.
– Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
Love is the most dangerous and uncertain element in life; and because we do not want to be uncertain, because we do not want to be in danger, we live in the mind. A man who loves is dangerous, and we do not want to live dangerously.
– Krishnamurti
Our past is not the thing that matters so much in this world as what we intend to do with our future.
– Shoghi Effendi
I guess it’s always romantic when two people fall in love…. Even if it turns out not to be real.
– Jennifer Egan, Emerald City
The child is ecstatic because this shimmering iridescence of movement and sound and attention it’s just wonderful… But then mother or nanny or someone comes in and says ‘It’s a bird, baby bird.’ And this takes this linguistic piece of mosaic tile and places it over the miracle and glues it down with the epoxy of syntactical momentum.
– Terence McKenna
The only way to get good at solving problems is to solve them. Not in private, not in a safe way, not in a place where you can waffle about the results. In public.
– Seth Godin
We turn indoors, my generation turns
To our household goods and Gods; not to Demeter
Do we turn, heavy with harvest leaves and sheaves,
Laden with apples spiced as sap,
And nude, sun-smoothed pears.
Nor to Bacchus do we offer of the wine press,
Who, in some other time or climate,
Might dance with us in the firelight…
In other Autumns were our Gods more
Friendly and familiar…
– James Hillman, The Soft Answer
The shattering of modern culture is the result, on the plane of ideological struggle, of the chaotic crisis of these antagonisms. The new desires that are taking shape are presented in distorted form: present-day resources could enable them to be fulfilled, but the anachronistic economic structure is incapable of developing these resources to such ends. Ruling-class ideology has meanwhile lost all coherence because of the depreciation of its successive conceptions of the world (a depreciation which leads the ruling class to historical indecision and uncertainty); because of the coexistence of a range of mutually contradictory reactionary ideologies; and because of the mixing into contemporary Western culture of a number of only recently appreciated features of several foreign civilizations. The main goal of ruling-class ideology is therefore to maintain this confusion.
– Guy Debord
The news event may be a real fact, existing objectively, or it may be only an item of information, the dissemination of a supposed fact. What makes it news is its dissemination, not its objective reality.
– Jacques Ellul
People in new environments always produce the new preceptual modality without any difficulty or awareness of change. It is later that the psychic and social realignments baffle societies.
– Marshall McLuhan
Mistreating Mother Nature—
that’s like being
ugly to your mama
– Dolly Parton
I’d say if I was influenced by anything, it was some of the country music that my mother liked to listen to. You know, she listened to Charlie Pride, Dolly Parton, people like that.
– Tracy Chapman
The only thing that we know is that we know nothing and that is the highest flight of human wisdom.
– Leo Tolstoy
I’ll get used to it. Yes, we often hear it said, or we say it ourselves, I’ll get used to it, we say or they say, with what seems to be genuine acceptance, because there really isn’t any other way, at least none has yet been discovered, of expressing in as dignified a way as possible our sense of resignation, what no one asks is at what cost do we get used to things.
– José Saramago
There is a vital place for disappointment on the spiritual path. Not the kind we quickly metabolize into meaning, but the kind that actually disappoints us—that removes an image we had been living toward and does not immediately replace it with another.
There is a lunar dimension of the path that asks us to allow what is waning to wane, to refrain from rushing toward the next illumination, to let certain dreams, identities, and images of the future lose their light.
To be made into dust. And to grieve all that is inevitably lost on the path of healing and awakening.
Disappointment can be an extraordinarily intelligent movement of the soul. Something that once carried meaning no longer does, and our instinct is often to repair the image—to find the lesson, recover the meaning, locate the hidden gift.
That can be a noble move, an honorable and very human one, and at times a kind one. But sometimes it comes too soon.
The alchemists understood that there are moments when the material must be allowed to blacken, when what has been carefully constructed must lose its coherence. The *nigredo* is not a problem to be solved on the way to the gold. It belongs to the gold.
There are times when healing asks us not to become more luminous, but less certain. To wander for a while without the old coordinates and allow ourselves to be changed by what could not become what we hoped.
Perhaps some disappointments are how the soul releases us from a future we have already outgrown.
– Matt Licata
Put your phone down, look with both eyes.
– David Hockney
If you’re gay, you’re gay. If you’re straight, you’re straight. And you should be allowed to be how you are and who you are.
– Dolly Parton
What counts as ‘realistic’, what seems possible at any point in the social field, is defined by a series of political determinations. An ideological position can never be really successful until it is naturalized, and it cannot be naturalized while it is still thought of as a value rather than a fact. Accordingly, neoliberalism has sought to eliminate the very category of value in the ethical sense. Over the past thirty years, capitalist realism has successfully installed a ‘business ontology’ in which it is simply obvious that everything in society, including healthcare and education, should be run as a business… Emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable.
– Mark Fisher
Dictatorships and totalitarian states, and belief in the inevitability of this or that result coming to pass are, strange as it may sound, ways of denying the reality of time and the creativeness of the individual.
– John Dewey
The longer and more carefully we look at a funny story the sadder it becomes.
– Gogol
Writing about empty mind is not easy.
When I have got it, there are no words.
When the words come, it goes away.
Sitting in anger and fear,
Mind is full of the past and future.
Images of catastrophes big and small
Jostle for a seat at the brain.
Resentment, incredulity and disappointment
Slide their way into heart spaces
Pushing out loving-kindness.
Equanimity lies in pieces.
Some of us scrape up that slimy
Emotional stuff and put it in jars
To carry along with us,
And then we complain that
Our load is too heavy.
We need to put down that
Lumpy sack of ooze
And take a breath.
The sage said,
“I pack no provisions for my long journey—
Entering emptiness under the midnight moon.”
He did not pack his ego,
Or his remembrance of self.
He carried no big plans
Or regrets of the past.
Like a wise fool he may have
Even forgotten to leave.
While he sits still in darkness,
The moon travels the sky.
– Tom Barrett
Cause I am strong and I can prove it
And I got my dreams to see me through
It’s just a mountain, I can move it
And with faith enough there’s nothing I can’t do
And I can see the light of a clear blue morning
And I can see the light of brand new day
I can see the light of a clear blue morning
And everything’s gonna be all right
It’s gonna be okay
– Dolly Parton
To be a world server is to be a lover. It means that you love the truth behind appearances. The full force of evolution is behind every act of love and infuses us as we live our deepest intentions. Love is the point of power within each of us where our God-self and our human-self fuse. There all polarizations vanish. Matter is perceived as Spirit revealed, the created is seen as the extension of the Creator. And change is understood to be the alchemical process through which God takes our divided self and makes of it a sacred whole.
– Gloria D. Karpinski
The disappointed man speaks. I sought great human beings, I never found anything but the apes of their ideal.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
What draws people
to be friends
is that they see
the same truth.
They share it.
– C.S.. Lewis
I have a deep aversion to too much introspection, to navel-gazing. I’d rather die than go to an analyst, because it’s my view that something fundamentally wrong happens here.
I am convinced that it’s psychoanalysis, along with quite a few other mistakes, that has made the twentieth century so terrible. As far as I’m concerned, the twentieth century, in its entirety, was a mistake.
– Werner Herzog
“We’ll discuss it later.”
I stir tornadoes
in my tea
– Seanan Forbes
I suffer from a chronic nausea after I’m with people. The awareness (after-awareness) of how programmed I am, how insincere, how frightened.
– Susan Sontag
We all have the perception of separateness, which is natural. We also have the capacity to realize who we are beyond that separation.
– Tara Brach
When you read energy and are highly intuitive you end up knowing more than you’d even like to sometimes.
– Nika Solé
Mysticism is an eruption of the absolute into history. Like music, it is the crowning of culture, its ultimate justification.
– E. M. Cioran (tr. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston)
night kayaking
never quite reaching
the moon
– Vanessa Proctor
This is the mark of perfection of character—to spend each
day as if it were your last, without frenzy, laziness, or any pretending.
– Marcus Aurelius
Maybe not knowing what you want is not a sign that something is wrong. Perhaps it just means you are no longer available for the life you used to be chasing. And maybe what comes next doesn’t always arrive as a clear vision. It could arrive simply as a deep fatigue with what no longer fits.
– Stefania Dragojlovic
It is well known that humour, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.
– Viktor Frankl
The most attentive people I know are birdwatchers. They are less sleepy as a whole than the general population.
– Anne Lamott
Grieve. so that you can be
free to feel something else.
– Nayyirah Waheed
summer thunder
the sky finally says
what I was thinking
– @BashoSociety
cracked soil
a day laborer bent
over his shadow
– Sasa Vasic
Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal
the recollection of having been young together.
Maybe it’s as simple as that.
– Michael Cunningham
We had begun to fight among ourselves for a place on the last boat. The extremity of our defeat was this sauve qui peut. The end of solidarity means the finish of socialism and the workers movement.
– Victor Serge after Jean Giono offered him refuge and refused it in 1940
I remember too much of the past for the present not to be melancholy.
– Simone de Beauvoir
I rest my paddle
let the canoe drift awhile
rocks trees sky
the lake and I
are an empty mirror
– Irene Golas
I think that one’s art is a growth inside one. I do not think one can explain growth. It is silent and subtle. One does not keep digging up a plant to see how it grows.
– Emily Carr
Human freedom is restricted to the extent to which we are bound to possession, works, and lastly, to our own egos.
– Erich Fromm
Dreams are never concerned with trivia.
– Sigmund Freud
Houdini’s handcuffs
and no
Houdini
– Patrick Sweeney
summer rain passing
the scent of pine bark
returning
– Basho
Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say “My tooth is aching” than to say “My heart is broken.”
– C.S. Lewis
He heard her voice, and it was cold
as echo from the world of old,
ere fire was found or iron hewn
when young was mountain under moon.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
on the last page
of her last book
the setting sun
– Brenda Gannam
We must be our own
before we can be
another’s.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The trick to learning is enjoying.
– Prof. Feynman
march bluster
the dragon kite
rattles its tail
– Darrell Byrd
Every word is a way out
– Yannis Ritsos
We often mistake certainty for peace. But certainty is knowing what happens next. Peace is knowing you’ll be okay, whatever does.
– Olivia Ann Rose
Envy is born from insecurity. We often think that insecurity comes from a weak ego, but in my experience insecurity is the result of an inflexible ego that has mistaken itself as the center of the universe, which keeps contradicting it on this key point.
– Shozan Jack Haubner
The whole process of getting old—it could have been better arranged.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
I remember looking out the window at school—I must have been fourteen or fifteen, bored, as usual, out of my mind—when it occurred to me that I could be a writer. The thought was like having a new identity.
– Hanif Kureishi
late summer
one yellow leaf
feels like acceptance
– @BashoSociety
The greatest difficulty is the mental resistance to things that arise and the underlying assumption that they should not.
– Eckhart Tolle
No one can create negativity or stress within you. Only you can do that by virtue of how you process your world.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
If you rest in the silence inside, all those you meet will have their spiritual hearts resuscitated.
– Ram Dass
Trauma doesn’t make people stronger. it damages their nervous system. it hijacks their digestive track. it keeps the person in a constant loop of hypervigilance. To tell someone they are stronger because of trauma is to deny what it cost them to survive it.
– @Laiiyylaa
Hiroshima Day —
in my heart, I release
a thousand paper cranes
– Karma Tenzing Wangchuk
It’s time for the spiritual revolutionaries to do what we came here to do.
– Nika Solé
When you build up your energetic body and raise your vibration you’ll find yourself in overflow of energy most of the time.
– Nika Solé
There is no such thing as mental health.
There are only symptoms that fit more or less well with the different discourses that surround us as speaking beings.
– Marie-Hélène Brousse
The love of lonely people is the most authentic there can be. They love you by choice, not by necessity.
– Charles Bukowski
We’ll make it through this long dark night. Darkness fades when faced with light. And everything’s gonna be alright when life is good again.
– Dolly Parton
Children should have the joy of living in far lands, in other persons, at other times — a delightful double existence; and this joy they will find, for the most part, in their storybooks.
– Charlotte Mason
[Wallace Stevens] discovers that stripping oneself of all one’s torments simply will not work. There would still remain, as he says, the ‘never-resting mind’.
– Harold Bloom
“Pangur Bán” is an Old Irish poem written in about the 9th century at or near Reichenau Abbey, in what is now Germany, by an Irish monk about his cat. Pangur Bán, meaning “White Pangur”, is the cat’s name. Although the poem is anonymous, it bears similarities to the poetry of Sedulius Scottus, prompting speculation that he is the author. In eight verses of four lines each, the author compares the cat’s happy hunting with his own scholarly pursuits.
English Translation by Robin Flower
(1912, The Poem-Book of the Gael)
1. I and Pangur Bán, my cat,
‘Tis a like task we are at;
Hunting mice is his delight,
Hunting words I sit all night.
2. Better far than praise of men
‘Tis to sit with book and pen;
Pangur bears me no ill-will,
He, too, plies his simple skill.
3. ‘Tis a merry thing to see
At our tasks how glad are we,
When at home we sit and find
Entertainment to our mind.
4. Oftentimes a mouse will stray
In the hero Pangur’s way;
Oftentimes my keen thought set
Takes a meaning in its net.
5. ‘Gainst the wall he sets his eye
Full and fierce and sharp and sly;
‘Gainst the wall of knowledge I
All my little wisdom try.
6. When a mouse darts from its den,
O! how glad is Pangur then;
O! what gladness do I prove
When I solve the doubts I love.
7. So in peace our task we ply,
Pangur Bán, my cat, and I;
In our arts we find our bliss,
I have mine, and he has his.
8. Practice every day has made
Pangur perfect in his trade;
I get wisdom day and night,
Turning darkness into light.
One day I was looking at the red flower patterns of the tablecloth on a table, and when I looked up I saw the same pattern covering the ceiling, the windows and the walls, and finally all over the room, my body and the universe. I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space, and be reduced to nothingness.
– Yayoi Kusama
All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy.
– Henry David Thoreau
A man can stand anything except a succession of ordinary days.
– Goethe
Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.
– Ray Bradbury
You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other.
– Audre Lorde
By all means do feel lost!
As long as you feel competent and confident
Reality is beyond you.
– Nisargadatta
She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity.
– Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find
If I didn’t start developing kind candor as an emotional ingredient, resentment would flourish in my old age.
– @garyvee in Twelve and a Half
When you humble yourself, everyone will seem saintly to you; when you are proud, everyone will seem bothersome and bad.
– St. Paisos of Athonite
It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative – which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.
– Sylvia Plath
One of the serious problems today, is the fact that decisions concerning human life are being entrusted to machines.
– Pope Leo XIV
The potential you see in other people isn’t real. It’s a projection of what you would do if you were in their shoes.
– Nygel Simons
I think that writing ought to make the writer more compassionate, give him a greater understanding of people. You don’t become flip, and you don’t toss out quick judgments about a man if you’re trying to recapture him and his mood in an atmosphere that is also re-created.
– William Manchester
Jung was right. There is a collective unconscious. Joseph Campbell was right. Myths and legends do constitute the fabric of the self. The soul judges a story’s truth by how closely it comports to the narrative templates that are part of our psyche from birth.
– Steven Pressfield
Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it’s about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.
– Mordecai Richler
The secret of village togetherness and happiness had always been the generosity of its people, but the secret to that generosity was village inefficiency and decay. The House of the World, like our village huts and our human bodies, no matter how magnificent, is not built to last very long. Because of this, all life must be regularly renewed… If a house is built too well, so efficiently that it is permanent and refuses to fall apart, then people have no reason to come together. Though the house stays together, the people fall apart, and nothing gets renewed.
– Martin Prechtel
BORED
All those times I was bored
out of my mind. Holding the log
while he sawed it. Holding
the string while he measured, boards,
distances between things, or pounded
stakes into the ground for rows and rows
of lettuces and beets, which I then (bored)
weeded. Or sat in the back
of the car, or sat still in boats,
sat, sat, while at the prow, stern, wheel
he drove, steered, paddled. It
wasn’t even boredom, it was looking,
looking hard and up close at the small
details. Myopia. The worn gunwales,
the intricate twill of the seat
cover. The acid crumbs of loam, the granular
pink rock, its igneous veins, the sea-fans
of dry moss, the blackish and then the greying
bristles on the back of his neck.
Sometimes he would whistle, sometimes
I would. The boring rhythm of doing
things over and over, carrying
the wood, drying
the dishes. Such minutiae. It’s what
the animals spend most of their time at,
ferrying the sand, grain by grain, from their tunnels,
shuffling the leaves in their burrows. He pointed
such things out, and I would look
at the whorled texture of his square finger, earth under
the nail. Why do I remember it as sunnier
all the time then, although it more often
rained, and more birdsong?
I could hardly wait to get
the hell out of there to
anywhere else. Perhaps though
boredom is happier. It is for dogs or
groundhogs. Now I wouldn’t be bored.
Now I would know too much.
Now I would know.
– Margaret Atwood
Don’t go anywhere.
I beg you.
The moon you are looking for
is inside you.
– Rumi
The universe is Time’s body.
– John Crowley
Time goes forward because energy itself is always moving from an available to an unavailable state. Our consciousness is continually recording the entropy change in the world around us. We watch our friends get old and die. We sit next to a fire and watch it’s red-hot embers turn slowly into cold white ashes. We experience the world always changing around us, and that experience is the unfolding of the second law. It is the irreversible process of dissipation of energy in the world.
What does it mean to say, ‘The world is running out of time’? Simply this: we experience the passage of time by the succession of one event after another. And every time an event occurs anywhere in this world energy is expended and the overall entropy is increased. To say the world is running out of time then, to say the world is running out of usable energy. In the words of Sir Arthur Eddington, ‘Entropy is time’s arrow’.
– Jeremy Rifkin
It’s summer now, and you’re craving a simpler existence. You want to read. You want to write. You want to meet strangers for dinner, and not refuse another drink at another bar. You want to dance. You want to find yourself in a basement, neck loose, bobbing your head as a group of musicians play, not because they should, but because they must. It’s summer now, and you’re looking forward to worrying less. You’re looking forward to longer nights and shorter days. You’re looking forward to gathering in back gardens and watching meat sputter on an open barbecue. You’re looking forward to laughing so hard your chest hurts and you feel light-headed. You’re looking forward to the safety in pleasure. You’re looking forward to forgetting, albeit briefly, the existential dread which plagues you, which tightens your chest, which pains your left side. You’re looking forward to forgetting that, leaving the house, you might not return intact. You’re looking forward to freedom, even if it is short, even if it might not last. You’re looking forward.
– Caleb Azumah Nelson
Dreams do not lack reality–they are real patterns of information.
– Richard Doyle
You have to allow time for people to reveal themselves to you, and you have to start revealing yourself—first to yourself and then to others. You need to learn what it feels like to be completely relaxed and unguarded in someone else’s company.
– Heather Havrilesky, How to Be a Person in the World
Whether or not we continue to enforce a universal conception of human rights at moments of outrage and incomprehension, precisely when we think that others have taken themselves out of the human community as we know it, is a test of our very humanity.
– Judith Butler
And, suddenly
I see
That all my disappointments
Weren’t really.
Why,
They were never meant to be
But at the time
I just couldn’t see.
– Athey Thompson
I had been proud of my awareness, aware of my pride, and proud of that awareness again. It went on like this: How clever I am that I know I am so stupid, how stupid I am to think that I am clever, and how clever I am that I am aware of my stupidity etc.
– Janwillem van de Wetering
Before you can inspire with emotion,
you must be swamped with it yourself.
Before you can move their tears,
your own must flow.
To convince them, you must yourself believe.
– Winston Churchill
How odd it is that writers like Belloc and Chesterton may sing the praises of alcohol (which is responsible for about two-thirds of the car accidents and three-quarters of the crimes of violence) and be regarded as good Christians and noble fellows. Whereas anyone who ventures to suggest that there may be other and less harmful shortcuts to self-transcendence is treated as a dangerous drug fiend and wicked perverter of weak-minded humanity.
– Aldous Huxley
We may reason on to our heart’s content, the fog won’t lift.
– Samuel Beckett
We are programmed to see ourselves everywhere—we see a face in the light socket, we yell at the car for breaking down, we apply complex psychological motivations to our cat. What is God but the attempt to make the universe more like us—to make it living, breathing, thinking, moral, creative, thoughtful, emotional, and answerable?
– J.G. Keely
We all think that everyone else lives in fortresses, in fastnesses: behind moats, behind sheer walls studded with spikes and broken glass. But in fact we inhabit much punier structures. We are, it turns out, all jerry-built. Or not even. You can just stick your head under the flap of the tent and crawl right in. If you get the OK.
– Martin Amis, Time’s Arrow
glowing
over the city dump
Harvest Moon
– Ito (Juanito Escareal)
The thing about being properly loved for the first time is it exposes all the ways in which you weren’t before.
– Shirlene Obuob
A trout bit me when I was washing the dishes. But I
couldn’t catch
him. I flew over my hometown and didn’t recognize
anyone. That’s
how long it’s been. A policeman stopped me on the
street and said
he was sorry. He was looking for someone who looked
just like
me and had the same name. What are the chances?
– James Tate
distant thunder
a fish’s tail
slaps his arm
– W. F. Owen
I do have this immense feeling toward the past. That’s the country I come from, you know.
– Lucy Sante
If I have an ethics, it is simply to be true.
– Henri Cole
Simple heuristic: If you’re evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path that’s more painful in the short term.
– @naval
Flurries in the window
Paris Reviews
in my lap
– @haikueveryday
Poems aren’t meant to estrange us, but sometimes in order to bring us close, they have to disorient us.
– Elizabeth Metzger
Fall into it.
Fall any way you want to.
Saving yourself
is jarring.
– Buddy Wakefield
honeysuckle
where you first hear
the river
– Burnell Lippy
But then I dare say I am a much more annoying person than I know. (Shall we, perhaps, in Purgatory, see our own faces and hear our own voices as they really were?)
– C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms
I see more angles in my life than I did a year ago at this time, but that doesn’t mean I would write a better book today. It just means I would write a different one.
– Sarah Curtis
It seems to me more than ever that I am a victim of introspection. If I have not the power to put myself in the place of other people, but must be continually burrowing inward, I shall never be the magnanimous creative person I wish to be.
– Sylvia Plath
It will be our love
not our anger,
that heals the world.
– Lynn Dailey
REACTIONS TO POETRY
Like insects,
letters swarmed
and died,
crushed
into a poem.
And their collective
sting
still
makes me
bawl.
– Helen Laycock
palominos—
curve of the winter hills
in moonlight
– Cherie Hunter Day
The secret of a full life is to live and relate to others as if they might not be there tomorrow, as if you might not be there tomorrow. It eliminates the vice of procrastination, the sin of postponement, failed communications, failed communions.
– Anaïs Nin
I don’t believe in teaching poetry at all, but that’s what they want one to do. You see so many poems every week, you just lose all sense of judgment.
– Elizabeth Bishop
We shall be better prepared
for the future if we see how
terrible, how doomed
the present is.
– Iris Murdoch
fireflies
drifting slowly
over the marsh
– Basho
Summer Haiku
for Frank and Marian Scott
Silence
and a deeper silence
when the crickets
hesitate
first and only haiku by Leonard Cohen
I dream of making
a trellis for moonflowers
to climb,
but oh my life, that will not
bear the wait till autumn!
- Masaoka Shiki, (tr. Janine Beichman)
Why does so much political discourse sound like high school?
– @tamaranopper
A book is a mirror: if an ass peers into it, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.
– G. C. Lichtenberg
Perhaps, some of the greatest masterpieces were written while yawning.
– Proust
Uncurious people do not lead examined lives; they cannot see causes that lie deeper than the surface.
– Yvon Chouinard (the founder of Patagonia)
In an anti-intellectual society, people who know nothing about a complex subject are emboldened to ridicule experts who have spent a lifetime studying it.
– George Kiser
Memories do not have to be exact in every detail to contain an emotional truth. The trick is to recapture the details that point to those truths.
– Philip Graham
There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.
– Zora Neale Hurston
A man who is so exceedingly civil that for the sake of quietude and a peaceable name will silently see the community imposed upon, or their rights invaded, may, in his principles, be a good man, but cannot be stiled a useful one, neither does he come up to the full mark of his duty; for silence becomes a kind of crime when it operates as a cover or an encouragement to the guilty.
– Thomas Paine
I remind myself that the future is not set in stone, that I still have some ability to shape it. I cling to what cannot be predicted or controlled: love, imagination, originality. I try to live in a way that would break an algorithm. I pray to the unexpected.
– Sarah Kendzior
Our patterns of thought and action lead to destruction and brutality as often as to kindness and enlightenment. …Only two possible escapes can save us from the organized mayhem of our dark potentialities—the side that has given us crusades, witch hunts, enslavements, and holocausts. Moral decency provides one necessary ingredient, but not nearly enough. The second foundation must come from the rational side of our mentality. For, unless we rigorously use human reason both to discover and acknowledge nature’s factuality, and to follow the logical implications for efficacious human action that such knowledge entails, we will lose out to the frightening forces of irrationality, romanticism, uncompromising “true” belief, and the apparent resulting inevitability of mob action. Reason is not only a large part of our essence; reason is also our potential salvation from the vicious and precipitous mass action that rule by emotionalism always seems to entail.
– Stephen Jay Gould
The imagination is central to the alchemical opus because it is literally a process which goes on in the realm of the imagination, taken to be a physical dimension. I think that we cannot understand the history that lies ahead of us unless we think in terms of a journey into the imagination. We have exhausted the world of three-dimensional space. We are polluting it, we are overpopulating it, we are using it up. Somehow the redemption of the human enterprise lies in the dimension of the imagination, and to do that we have to transcend the categories that we inherit from a thousand years of science and Christianity and rationalism and we have to re-empower and re-encounter the mind; and we can do this psychedelically, we can do this yogically, or we can do it alchemically and Hermetically.
– Terence McKenna
She was afraid of these things that made her suddenly wonder who she was, and what she was going to be in the world, and why she was standing at that minute, seeing a light, or listening, or staring up into the sky: alone.
– Carson McCullers
Things are not difficult to make; what is difficult is putting ourselves in the state of mind to make them.
– Constantin Brancusi
The difference between a short story and a novel is the difference between an inarticulate pang in your heart [and] the tragedy of your whole life.
– Peter Orner
Legs up the wall with a slight hip elevation is a simple yet powerful position that supports both physical and nervous system balance. It helps lymphatic drainage, reduces swelling and fluid retention, and promotes healthy circulation to the face, and scalp. By gently stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system, it helps shift the body out of stress, lowering heart rate, calming the mind, and reducing anxiety. This position also releases tension in the lower back and hips, supports digestion by aiding venous return, and promotes deep relaxation and better sleep. It’s a low effort, completely free movement that nourishes the body, and soothes the nervous system.
– Anthony Goldsmith
Humor is such a strong weapon, such a strong answer.
– Agnes Varda
The strangeness that made everything sparkle came from me. Worlds rose out of my bottomless perplexity.
– César Aira, The Literary Conference
You know in High School if you didn’t believe in Science or History, it was just called failing.
– Michelle Wolf
Travelling south at dawn, going full out
Through high-up stone-wall country, the rocks still cold,
Rainwater gleaming here and there ahead,
I took a turn and met the fox stock-still,
Face-to-face in the middle of the road.
Wildness tore through me as he dipped and wheeled
In a level-running tawny breakaway.
O neat head, fabled brush and astonished eye
My blue Volkswagen flared into with morning!
Let rebirth come through water, through desire,
Through crawling backwards across clinic floors:
I have to cross back through that startled iris.
– Seamus Heaney
We receive the light,
Then we impart it.
Thus we repair the world.
– Kabbalah
Paradise is having a connection — roots in the garden, stem from the branch, current to the light. To be unaware of the connection is to have one’s heart in the wrong place — far out in the fruit instead of within, in the tree.
– Alan Watts
Your holiness shall consist of being truly human, not angelic. God has plenty of angels.
– The Kotzker Rebbe
To be a friend of the earth, you have to be an enemy of man.
– T. Corraghessan Boyle
To the Druids, the trees and the stones were not inanimate matter; they were beings with their own energetic presence. Connecting with them requires a shift from the spoken language to a silent, felt resonance—a way of listening with the body and the spirit to the wisdom of the old ones.
– Danú Forest
The Trojan Horses of Our Demise
by Gary Corseri
The Trojan horses of our demise: ignorance, arrogance, violence and greed. If we seek analogies for our financial collapse, Trojan horses are more instructive than horsemen of the apocalypse. The latter may be useful to the Fundies with their tiresome end-time fantasies. The horsemen externalize evil; they are children’s boogeymen, writ large in adult type, to frighten adult minds that should know better but cling to victimhood. Trojan horses, instead, internalize dangers—from the assassins crouching within their wooden hulls; to the gullible celebrants taking them into their fortress-city. In our blame-game culture, where and how we affix blame now is crucial to any possible restitution, let alone redemption. The glass is neither half-full nor half-empty; it is a looking-glass through which we may know ourselves…
I think it is frightening. Staying completely open to what might happen and trying not to prefigure what is coming at you is frightening. The imagination is in jeopardy. Belief is bold. There’s a philosopher I like called Gianni Vattimo and he’s written a book called Belief (he is a nihilist) and in it he talks about the secularization of belief and turns it into a positive event, being the collapse of hierarchical structure; and he says that Christ was attempting to secularize belief, to return it to the ground. And one of the terms he uses is infinite plurality, that the relations and contingencies that mark your movement through time are always taking place in ways that are outside judgment and imagination. That is sort of where I would like to stand, without being terrified. It involves an openness.
– Fanny Howe
We must see God not as a Him (some linear rewarding fellow) but an IT, a great beast beyond our understanding, who wants something from us, and we must give it, and all we may control is the spirit in which we give it and the ultimate end which the giving serves.
– George Saunders
THE WORLD I LIVE IN
I have refused to live
locked in the orderly house of
reasons and proofs;
The world I live in and believe in
is wider than that. And anyway.
What’s wrong with Maybe?
You wouldn’t believe what once or
twice I have seen. I’ll just
tell you this:
only if there are angels in your head will you
ever, possibly, see one.
– Mary Oliver
Intrinsically, we are all completely and perfectly sane. We are enveloped and imbued by this sanity. But unable to bring ourselves to acknowledge this, we hatch a hodgepodge of beliefs which we embrace and then chase as if they were real, stumbling and falling on the great way. These beliefs embroider the entire sky with their flowery efflorescence.
– Dogen
It would be better, think they, if Heaven were above and Hell below – anywhere outside, but not within. But that comfort has been knocked from under us. There are no places to go to, either for reward or punishment. The place is always here and now, in your own person and according to your own fancy . . . You are the author, director and actor all in one: the drama is always going to be your own life, not some one else’s. A beautiful, terrible, ineluctable drama, like a suit made of your own skin. Would you want it otherwise? Could you invent a better drama?
– Henry Miller
The notion that a human being should be constantly happy is a uniquely modern, uniquely American, uniquely destructive idea.
– Andrew Weil
Behind the mask of indifference is bottomless misery and behind apparent callousness, despair.
– John Bowlby
Indeed what is commonly called ‘sensitiveness’ is the most powerful engine of domestic tyranny, sometimes a lifelong tyranny. How we should deal with it in others I am not sure; but we should be merciless to its first appearances in ourselves.
– C.S. Lewis
Falsehood is habit-forming.
– C.S. Lewis
If we can find the money to kill people, we can find the money to help people.
– Tony Benn
When you stop needing others to be different, they change. When you stop needing yourself to be better, you grow.
– Cuong Lu
floating upon
the waves of the lake
summer world
– Basho
Averages and norms are not a part of your program when you’re a high vibrational person.
– Nika Solé
Language is an expression of culture, and culture is expressed through language. Both are living, evolving organisms.
– Franziska Oertle
[I, whom Apollo sometime visited,]
by Robert Louis Stevenson
I, whom Apollo sometime visited,
Or feigned to visit, now, my day being done,
Do slumber wholly; nor shall know at all
The weariness of changes; nor perceive
Immeasurable sands of centuries
Drink of the blanching ink, or the loud sound
Of generations beat the music down.
Of course the path is not always totally clear. You’re blazing it.
– Nika Solé
Hell is the concretization of your life experiences, a place where you’re stuck, the wasteland. In hell, you are so bound to yourself that grace cannot enter.
– Joseph Campbell
Unfair advantages are found in the things that anyone could do, but very few choose to do.
– Shane Parrish
The horror of existence stares us blank in the face and we sense, in one devastating blow, that all souls are hanging by their own web and that a hellish abyss lurks beneath.
– Peter Wessel Zapffe
The Internet evolved media from physical to digital, from paid to free, from editorial to social. Next up: from corporate to ownerless.
– @naval
The patient brings with him into therapy all the failures and suspicions and losses he has experienced through his life. The defensive forms of insecure attachment – avoidance, ambivalence, disorganization – will be brought into play in relation to the therapist.
– Jeremy Holmes
Study math and you won’t fear any book.
– @naval
A man lives in slavery without meditation because he lives unconsciously. He lives like a robot.
Meditation starts changing you: it transforms your unconsciousness into consciousness. It changes your darkness into light.
– Osho
It is the only alchemy which transforms the raw energy into a refined world of mysteries.
– Osho
The perspective of love doesn’t leave anybody out.
– Adyashanti
Haunted places are the only ones people can live in.
– Michel de Certeau
If you are unhappy, you are too high up in your mind.
– Carl Jung
This may be the last generation that has a powerful tool like the Internet, and the focused attention span to do deep work.
– @naval
We should be agnostic about those things for which there is no evidence. We should not hold beliefs merely because they gratify our desires for afterlife, immortality, heaven, hell, etc.
– Julian S. Huxley
The mind creates bondage and the mind creates liberation. Turn it towards the Eternal, and it becomes your friend; turn it towards the transient, and it binds you.
– Anandamayi Ma
We feel guilt when we no longer want to associate with old friends and colleagues who haven’t changed. The price, and marker, of growth.
– @naval
Freedom is most desirable. Of course none of us are free. Our flaws enslave us, the things we love.
– Joy Williams
If there really is on a granular level something intrinsically Tower-of-Babel-esque wicked about screens, can I suggest we form a sort of pushback of beauty against them? If you use them, make sure you do some good with them. Donate to charity, ring a suffering friend, study a course in Classics Literature or the like. Turn something attempting to become a deity back into a tool again. Work it on your terms not its. Make a covenant with limit. And if that doesn’t work, smash it with a hammer. You’ll feel an awful lot better.
– Martin Shaw
there is dreaming inside me and my dreams are like the north
where snow-mountains hide ancient fairytales
my thoughts go through my brain and make
me grow
as stones grow
no one knows and understands
– Oskar Kokoschka (tr. Michael Mitchell)
We never stop playing make-believe as we get older. The fantasies just become more private and more frequent.
– @naval
I value my own independence so highly that I can fancy no degradation greater than that of having another man perpetually directing and advising and lecturing me, or even planning too closely in any way about my actions. He might be the wisest of men, or the most powerful – I should equally rebel and resent his interference.
– Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South
Think back to what you were doing 5, 10, 15+ years ago. Really visualize it. What advice would you give your younger self? Is it consistent?
– @naval
Do not exclaim, “Isn’t technology wonderful!”
Learn how to stretch your muscles. Stretch them every day.
Don’t be depressed about growing older. It will make you feel
even older. Which is depressing.
Do one thing at a time.
– Ron Padgett, How to Be Perfect
As a working hypothesis to explain the riddle of our existence, I propose that our universe is the most interesting of all possible universes, and our fate as human beings is to make it so.
– Freeman Dyson
Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.
– Paulo Coelho
The degree of freedom from unwanted thoughts and the degree of concentration on a single thought are the measures to gauge spiritual progress.
– Sri Ramana Maharshi
Men without money and women without beauty know what the real world is like.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
Your mantra is thank you. Just keep saying thank you. Don’t explain. Don’t complain. Just say thank you to Existence.
– Mooji
Love, in its purest essence,
fully detached, resting in itself —
is nothing but God.
– Meister Eckhart
When the moon comes up
Tonight don’t sit home alone
Your hands on your knees
– Matsuo Basho
In order to attract better:
Our energy has to align with better.
Our thoughts have to be better.
Our actions have to represent better.
– Rachael Wolff
through the wound
a road of starlight
climbs toward dawn
– @BashoSociety
Whatever does not pretend at all has style enough.
– Booth Tarkington
We are born from a quiet sleep, and we die to a calm awakening.
– Zhuangzi
Sharing is the whole meaning of my life … I freely confess, for whatever it is worth, that nothing in this life of ours exists for me at all until, or unless, I can share it with others, whether it be with one single person or five, or five million.
– Leonard Bernstein
The moment rapidly approaches where civilization declines with each new comfort.
– Nicolás Gómez Dávila
Understanding and not understanding are all in the scheme of ignorance, just a realm of the mind. This is not learning. This is your birthright. You cannot study to be what you are. You do not need to understand in order to breathe.
– Papaji
The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind.
– Elizabeth Hardwick
the problem is
how do you paint
moving clouds
– Alec Finlay
BREAKING
Did I believe I had a clear mind?
It was like the water of a river
flowing shallow over the ice. And now
that the rising water has broken
the ice, I see that what I thought
was the light is part of the dark.
– Wendell Berry
And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter- they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.
– Sylvia Plath
Love falls to earth, rises from the ground, pools around the afflicted. Love pulls people back to their feet.
– Anne Lamott
Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar.
– William Faulkner
The old summer’s-end melancholy nips at my heels. There’s no school to go back to; no detail of my life will change come the onset of September; yet still, I feel the old trepidation.
– Sara Baume, A Line Made By Walking
The thing about being properly loved for the first time is it exposes all the ways in which you weren’t before.
– Shirlene Obuob
When rest must be earned, it is always deferred. The list is never empty. There is always one more thing that could reasonably be completed before you allow yourself to stop. What comes instead is a kind of grinding exhaustion we’ve learned to normalize. A chronic depletion we manage with coffee and the quiet promise that things will slow down soon—after this project, after this season, after this particular stretch of demands. The slowing down tends not to come on its own. It has to be chosen.
– Lori Roach
At some point on the path you stop trying to figure out what your life’s work is, and you simply become it.
– Nika Solé
I live in a half-night, outside a dream, yet not within life. My dreams don’t understand me.
– Theodore Roethke
Why, by god, does one spend one’s life according to conventions that constrict us like a tight costume and that prevent us from reaching the invisible soul, this dancer among the stars!
– Rilke, The Poet’s Guide to Life
I would say that is the basic theme of all mythology—that there is an invisible plane supporting the visible one.
– Joseph Campbell
If you’re here to do something that no one else has ever done before, you have to get used to that looking different than what everyone else is doing.
– Nika Solé
Rumours tell of a Wild Mountain. To be of service to the Ancient Good. Don’t let a chance like this go by.
– Martin Shaw
The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing – to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from…my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back. All my life the god of the Mountain has been wooing me.
– C.S. Lewis
Every fragment of self-talk is a little story in the head that goes around, and then you look at reality through the lens of the little story.
– Eckhart Tolle
I’m happy when I’m traveling to know that the pilots are better pilots than I am a writer.
– Gabriel García Márquez
If life isn’t gentle with you, then be gentle with yourself. You’ve endured so much. The least you can do is allow yourself to heal, to rest, and to feel better again.
– Jeriel Jay Castino
Try, as far as you can, to get rid of beliefs which depend solely upon the place and time of your education, and upon what your parents and schoolmasters told you… every approach towards it is a step towards a scientific habit of mind.
– Bertrand Russell
local history
explaining a gap
in the picket fence
– @ruralitalics
DNA upgrades. Intuitive downloads. Energetic excellence. Spiritual reverence. Raising your vibration. Claiming your divine vocation. Minding your own business. Not believing the lies whose sole purpose is to divide you from yourself.
This is how you escape the matrix.
– Nika Solé
Who can understand his errors? Cleanse thou me from secret faults.
– Psalm 19:12
When we find our voice, right speech leads to right action. We all have something useful to say, if only we have the wisdom to know how and when to say it.
– David Ryushin Bodney
There is so much more to come than you can possibly imagine. That part is always true.
– Nika Solé
Man is unique not because he does science, and he is unique not because he does art, but because science and art equally are expressions of his marvelous plasticity of mind.
– Jacob Bronowski
Whatever our place in life, each of us has a contribution to make that can be made by no one else.
– Eknath Easwaran
When the mind is subdued, there is only eternal peace.
– Robert Adams
Millions of people around the world are watching the headlines these days, and most of them are getting the Fear. Good news is out of the question in this brutal year of our Lord. This is the time of the Final Shit Rain.
– Hunter S. Thompson
We have been clinging to outdated and overly simplistic notions of what a human being is, what an economy and a society are, what the universe is.
– Mohsin Hamid
Meditation does not answer the questions of the mind, but it dissolves the very mind which creates many questions and confusion in our life.
– Unknown
He goes free of the earth.
The sun of his last day sets
Clear in the sweetness of his liberty.
The earth recovers from his dying.
The hallow of his life remaining
In all his death leaves.
Radiance knows him. Grown lighter
Than breath, he is set free
In our remembering. Grownbrighter
Than vision, he goes dark
Into the life of the hill
That holds his peace.
He’s hidden among all that is,
And cannot be lost.
– Wendell Berry
Experiences are the chemicals of life with which the philosopher experiments.
– Manly P. Hall
The gears of poverty, ignorance, hopelessness, and low self-esteem mesh to create a kind of perpetual failure machine that grinds down dreams from generation to generation. We all bear the cost of keeping it running. Illiteracy is its linchpin…. Frederick Douglass taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom. But reading is still the path.
– Carl Sagan
The world does not give us very much now; it often seems to consist of nothing but noise and fear, and yet grass and trees still grow.
– Hermann Hesse
The activity you enjoy most is not your calling. It’s your hobby.
Careers aren’t built solely on passion—they depend on making a meaningful contribution.
Doing what you love is a luxury. Finding a purpose is a necessity.
– Adam Grant
Within your subconscious mind you will find the solution for every problem, and the cause for every effect.
– Dr. Joseph Murphy
In the past when soldiers went to war they wore armor to protect their bodies; similarly when Dharma practitioners wage war against their delusions they need to wear armor-like effort to protect their minds against difficult external conditions.
– Geshe Kelsang Gyatso
This nation is not supposed to be governed by the whims of a single madman. That was actually the whole fucking point.
– Tom Wienner
The moment you realize that fitness is forever you stop worrying how long it will take.
– Dan Go
I’ll tell you again that everything will certainly, quite certainly, get better, and that you have nothing to worry about.
– Franz Kafka
Whatever you give – it may be a check to a worthy cause, it may be clothes to a person who is cold, it may be food to the hungry, it may be medical help to the sick – do it without thinking of getting anything in return. Do it as a service to God.
– Eknath Easwaran
The best teachers are on the Internet. The best books are on the Internet. The best peers are on the Internet.
– @naval
There’s nothing sadder than a naturally bright, bubbly neurodivergent person slowly dimming their sparkle after years of being excluded for simply being themselves.
– zayden
The greatest gift we can offer others
is to take care of our own karma
and allow them to take care of theirs.
– @KavijiPoet
Forgiveness is a process of giving up the old for something new. Old experiences and memories that we hold on to in anger, resentment, shame, or guilt cloud our spirit mind. The truth is, everything that has happened had to happen. It was a growth experience.
– Iyanla Vanzant
casting his line
into the golden ripples
of the setting sun
he catches nothing today
but a basket full of peace
– Brian Zimmer
No animal on earth knows what a Monday is.
No plant. No ocean. No nervous system in nature. The week doesn’t exist. You’ve been exhausted by something that was never real.
– @askaya
One can optimize for productivity or one can optimize for creativity, but it’s hard to do both.
– @naval
The power that knows the way will take care of you. The one who makes the sun shine, the apples grow perfectly on apple trees, the food that sustains us, nourishes us. Everything has been lovingly provided for us. Have faith, trust the power that knows the way.
– Robert Adams
each man’s hell is in a different place:
mine is just up and behind
my ruined face.
– Charles Bukowski
You don’t need more talent, luck, or connections to get ahead. You need to do the things most people won’t.
– Shane Parrish
…Bilbo stopped. Going on from there was the bravest thing he ever did. The tremendous things that happened afterward were as nothing compared to it. He fought the real battle in the tunnel alone before he ever saw the vast danger that lay in wait.
– Tolkien
it is the hour of conflict, antagonism, struggle
the world turning autumn in warpaint
everything silently
prepares to scream
– Amiri Baraka
A guy who rises to the top of a big corporation and owns none of it is much more interested in control than he is in economics. It is just the nature of humanity. A guy who owns his business is used to control. He never has to fight for control. What he has to fight for is economics. But a bunch of entrepreneurs find it much easier to collaborate and create economic value. They have something beyond control-they have economics.
– John Malone
The greatest skill one can develop is decreasing the time between idea and execution.
– Dan Koe
Every fault, every crime, everything for which one might seek or grant forgiveness involves or presupposes some act of perjury; every fault, every wrong is first and foremost an act of perjury—namely, the breaking of a promise (whether implicit or explicit), the failure to honor a commitment or a responsibility regarding a law one has sworn to uphold, or is supposed to have sworn to uphold. […] Forgiveness, if there is such a thing, must and can only forgive the unforgivable, he inexpiable—and thus do the impossible.
– Jacques Derrida
It has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body. When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of language, nationality, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.
– James Joyce
We are all of us not merely liable to fear, we are also prone to be afraid of being afraid, and the conquering of fear produces exhilaration.
– Malcolm Gladwell
Each person is the missing piece in this wacky world.
– John Conway
You don’t remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.
– John Green
Even in our deepest, most lasting friendships, we never speak as openly as when we face a blank page and address a reader we do not know.
– Michel Houellebecq
Competition in education is not a preparation for life. It is a preparation for conflict.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
Pass through this brief patch of time in harmony with nature, and come to your final resting place gracefully, just as a ripened olive might drop, praising the earth that nourished it.
– Marcus Aurelius
In a world that constantly asks us to make up our minds about other people, a nonjudgmental presence seems nearly impossible.
– Henri Nouwen
The truth about science is that we never do know the truth and there is rarely a visible end product. So, having a passion for the process keeps us searching for understanding about the universe.
– Dr. Martha Clare Morris
Only an artist can divine the meaning of life.
– Novalis
Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
We live by mercy if we live. To that we have no fit reply But working well and giving thanks, Loving God, loving one another, To keep Creation’s neighborhood.
– Wendell Berry
Whatever we fight about in the outside world is also a battle in our inner selves. Anyone who can admit this will first seek the solution in himself, and this in fact is the way all the great solutions begin.
– CG Jung
Certain things, they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone.
– J.D. Salinger
In too many organizations, the people at the top have all the authority and none of the information, while the people on the front line have all the information and none of the authority.
– David Marquet
Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion.
– Albert Einstein
Somewhere deep inside me is a workshop in which Titans are forging a new world.
– Etty Hillesum
Where and to what purpose
Was the story then? Where,
Finding yourself at last
Here, down, and darkened by
A furious human
Creature in a foreign
Skin—where was the bright news,
The chronicle of day?
– Richard Howard, The Shepherd Corydon
Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast,
The little tyrant of his fields withstood;
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood.
– Thomas Gray
The original Pali word for a Buddhist monk or renunciant, bhikkhu, means “fear seer,” one who can tolerate his own terror.
– Mark Epstein
We say, to shine one corner of the world — that is enough. Not the whole world. Just make it clear where you are.
– Shunryu Suzuki Roshi
People bring the whole garden to a grave, but forget to offer a single flower when it matters.
– Anne Frank
The national economy that is really run for the benefit of a very few people is preying upon and slowly destroying local communities everywhere.
– Wendell Berry
All joy reminds. It is never a possession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away or still ‘about to be.’
– C.S. Lewis
Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.
– Thomas Jefferson
Eternity is not elsewhere, or in any unfindable place.
– Mary Oliver
Ah, my Beloved, fill the cup that clears To-day of past Regrets and future fears — To-morrow? — Why, To-morrow I may be Myself, with Yesterday’s Sev’n Thousand Years
– Omar Khayyam
When Crimea was still a place of light,
by Lyudmyla Khersonska
translated from the Russian
by Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris
when gulls
were free
of orders,
when sandals
beat light
on the border
of water,
and gulls were the only patrols in the sky;
when women in bright dresses
walked barefoot or in cheap sandals,
in sandals, in sandals
instead of boots,
before missiles.
Before missiles,
I, too, loved it all.
…And songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality, some different republic, some liberated republic.
– Bob Dylan
We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
You Took the Last Bus Home
you took
the last bus home
don’t know how
you got it through the door
you’re always doing amazing stuff
like the time
you caught that train
– Brian Bilston
There ain’t no answer.
There ain’t gonna be any answer.
There never has been an answer.
There’s your answer.
– Gertrude Stein
I don’t give a fuck if you like me.
But… I do give a fuck about how I’ve treated you.
Whether I’ve been honest with you.
Whether I’ve treated you with dignity and respect.
Whether I’ve lived in integrity with my highest values.
Even if you’ve wronged me,
am I at peace with my own response?
– Jeff Foster
Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.
– Wendell Berry
The sun – the bright sun, that brings back, not light alone, but new life, and hope, and freshness to man – burst upon the crowded city in clear and radiant glory.
– Charles Dickens
I’m still learning what it is about the past that I want to write. I don’t worry about it. It will emerge. It will insist on being told.
– Frank McCourt
Isn’t that wonderful? That feeling of not knowing too much about something… Incomplete information… Endless possibilities… When you don’t know much about something, it’s the most exciting sensation.
– Erol Ozan
Whenever one person stands up and says, ‘Wait a minute, this is wrong,’ it helps other people do the same.
– Gloria Steinem
Don’t be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.
– George Saunders
Remember the Constitution doesn’t start with
“I, the President.” It’s “We, the people.”
– Gloria Steinem
HALFWAY THERE
I have questions about the moon.
Questions about distance and what is really luminous.
That evening in the cafe,
how the raspberries stained the white, white cloth, and we rubbed in salt
to lift the stain.
The coffee so dark, I got drunk on the essence of night.
It was bitter and delicious.
September moon rose inside me,
and also not inside me. Demi-moon
filling the room with the scent of fresh linen, shaken out,
shaken out, I opened then: Stargazer lily, shed pollen and seedling,
daughter of Suzanne,
who had to die
and I had to let her.
The flavor of this moon is that whole year in reverse, a lack,
presence of absent mother
Dark sky, part moon, part mother:
the exact same as light cream, sugar substitute.
Just 1/2 a moon, 1/2 a moon, 1/2 a moon onward
Pointing, I said, I’ll always say,
Look at the
Ring around the
and I cried a river then, the Pecos, the Puerco, the dream blue Navesink,
the banks of which I was born by,
Small, I drank my milky demitasse of coffee,
sweetened, matzoh crumbled in,
though I already
pointed at moons,
not through a cafe window,
the table’s cloth crimson with the leakage of sweet fruit,
but through a child’s eyes,
raised over a porcelain cup,
part-way full.
– Judyth Hill
FOR THE RAINDROP
For the raindrop, joy is entering the river –
Unbearable pain becomes its own cure.
Travel far enough into sorrow, tears turn to sighing;
In this way, we learn how water can die into air.
When, after heavy rain, the storm clouds disperse,
Is it not that they’ve wept themselves clear to the end?
If you want to know the miracle, how wind can polish a mirror,
Look: The shining grass grows green in spring.
It’s the rose’s unfolding, Ghalib, that creates the desire to see –
In every color and circumstance, may the eyes be open
for what comes.
– Mirza Ghalib
Poetry seeks out the melody of nature amid the tumult of the dictionary.
– Boris Pasternak
The beauty of those places I soared over is with me still, and in all my dreams as in my waking life was a love of place, a sense that places were embodiments of emotions, were anchors, were companions of a sort, even protectors or parents. Once at the Pacific, I thought to myself Everything is my mother but my mother, and I recognized how the ocean had been a mother offering power, constancy, and solace. Many years later when I began rowing a scull, I realized that out in the water, I was out of reach of men and dogs, and that, as well as the beauties of water, made it serene, dreamy, the eighteen-foot span of my oars being as close to having wings as I could come.
– Rebecca Solnit
Our survival won’t depend on political or economic systems. It’s going to depend on the courage of the individual to speak the truth, and to speak it lovingly and not destructively. It’s saying what you really know and feel is the truth, in all directions. Our greatest vulnerability lies in the amount of misinformation and mis-conditioning of humanity.
– Buckminster Fuller
My poetry is not separate from my living, nor is yours. The only way we can teach another person to create poetry is to teach that person how to feel herself or himself. The experience of poetry is intimate, and it is crucial. For that reason, of course, it is often resented or resisted. The pursuit of one’s own poetry is basically a subversive activity, because the pursuit of one’s feelings colors one’s total existence, and we are paid well for refusing to feel ourselves.
– Audre Lorde
There is a moment in the experience of love when you start to cut yourself on everything. On the edges of drawers and on the screen of your mobile phone, on your toothbrush and when you are watering a house plant, when you put your trousers on and when you take them off, when you open a book or close a door, when you tie your shoelaces and when you adjust the thermostat on the central heating; even bars of soap and the handrails on buses cut you. Suddenly objects want to sharpen their edges on you.
– Agustín Fernández Mallo
I live on my emotions. Sometimes I wish I didn’t–but then again I would rather suffer through them–suffer intensely, I mean; go down into the depths with them, for the sake of that wonderful upward swing on to the pinnacles of happiness.
– Katherine Mansfield
The environments set up by different media are not just containers for people; they are the processes which shape people. There is no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.
– Marshall McLuhan
There are ways in, journeys to the center of life, through time; through air, matter, dream and thought. The ways are not always mapped or charted, but sometimes being lost, if there is such a thing, is the sweetest place to be. And always, in this search, a person might find that she is already there, at the center of the world. It may be a broken world, but it is glorious nonetheless.
– Linda Hogan
At This Moment
It is not the body that is important but the atmosphere around it. The atmosphere becomes permeated with this finer vibration, in the stillness. And another quality is there.
An axis begins to appear, of pure attention. There is a sensitivity.
This atmosphere, filled with energy. The body, like an envelope.
Respect this atmosphere, this energy contained in the body. And then, even subtler energies can come into you—the Light can come into you.
All my thoughts, feelings, ideas are nothing compared to this precious treasure, this quality of energy that is not mine but what I am.
More and more, with attending to presence, allowing higher forces to enter, staying collected, returning, we can live in a new way.
You can serve this energy. And the energy can heal. From it can come my best action in the world, my best action for others. Help each other through living in this pure Attention.
– Michel de Salzmann
People are always asking me, ‘Who will you pass the torch to?’ The question makes me angry. There is no one torch-there are many torches and I’m using my torch to light other torches.
– Gloria Steinem
we long for rain / for water / to pour into our hearts / an offering of radical grace.
– bell hooks
Today we can no longer so easily say that if a being on this earth walks erect, lights a fire and works on a stone, it must be a human being. We can only say that it is a human if it thinks and speaks and freely questions the whole of the world and its existence, even if it cannot answer this one total question.
– Karl Rahner
Fears about yourself prevent you from doing your best work, while fears about your reception by others prevent you from doing your own work.
– David Bayles
The news now reads like somebody fed all the worst of human history, grotesque satire, war propaganda, financial fraud, religious mania, corporate psychosis, and the fever-scribbled wall of a gas-station bathroom stall into the same machine and hit “publish.” Every morning there is some fresh batshit nightmare headline that would have sounded too stupid, too grotesque, too obscene, or just too fucking absurd to survive an editor even just a year ago, and yet here it is, completely real. The genuinely disturbing part is not that the world has become strange, but that the strange has become administrative, institutionalized, normalized, professionally managed, and explained to us as completely normal and sane by the terminally insane, as though none of this is obviously, spectacularly, catastrophically fucking INSANE.
– Oliver Kornetzke
CREDO
What good is poetry
if it doesn’t stand up
against the lies of government,
if it doesn’t rescue us
from the liars that mislead us?
What good is it
if it doesn’t speak out, denounce what’s going on?
It’s nothing
but harmless wordplay
to titillate and distract –
the government knows it,
and can always get rid of us if we step out of line.
That I believed in poetry,
even when I betrayed it,
that I came back to its central meaning
– to save the world –
this and only this
has been my salvation.
after C. Miłosz
– Edward Field
It was octarine, the colour of magic. It was alive and glowing and vibrant and it was the undisputed pigment of the imagination, because wherever it appeared it was a sign that mere matter was a servant of the powers of the magical mind. It was enchantment itself. But Rincewind always thought it looked a sort of greenish-purple.
– Terry Pratchett, The Colour of Magic
Our ordinary mind always tried to persuade us that we are nothing but acorns and that our greatest happiness will be to become bigger, fatter, shinier acorns; but this is of interest only to pigs. Our faith gives us knowledge of something better: that we can become oak trees.
– E.F. Schumacher
Innocence is different than naivete. There is an old saying in the backwoods I come from: Ignorance is not knowing anything and being attracted to the good. Innocence is knowing everything, and still being attracted to the good.
– Clarissa Pinkola Estes
As Thoreau so well knew, and so painstakingly tried to show us, what a man most needs is not a knowledge of how to get more, but a knowledge of the most he can do without, and of how to get along without it.
– Wendell Berry
How privileged, lucky, and/or blessed must you be to have monetary assets, a savings account of any amount, a home, an automobile. There is another tangible asset through which you apprehend all others. Is it appreciating? Are you fully invested? It is your minded body, your embodied mind. If we treated our other tangible assets so cavalierly, they would soon amount to nothing. How can we start minding this corporeal asset? We can start where mindedness begins, in the dawning of awareness. Today, enmind, your movement, a single one, how, for instance, you bring your hands on and off the keyboard. Float them up and float them down as though placing your hand through a silken sleeve. Mind you, it’s going to feel like a party, one to which the whole of you wants to be invited. That party is Alexander Technique.
– Alan Bowers
Parker sat for a long time on the ground in the alley behind the pool hall, examining his soul. He saw it as a spider web of facts and lies that was not at all important to him but which appeared to be necessary in spite of his opinion.
– Flannery O’Connor
When I was young, there were very few elders willing to talk about the darkness; most of them pretended that success was all they had ever known. As the darkness began to descend on me in my early twenties, I felt I had developed a unique and terminal case of failure. I did not realize that I had merely embarked upon a journey toward joining the human race.
– Sharon Moon
Our conditioning as members of a consumer society prevents us from abandoning hope that, with sufficient planning, we might yet be able to see and do everything. To move slowly and deliberately through the world, attending to one thing at a time, strikes us as radically subversive, even un-American. We cringe from the idea of relinquishing, in any moment, all but one of the infinite possibilities offered us by our culture. Plagued by a highly diffused attention, we give ourselves to everything lightly. That is our poverty. In saying yes to everything, we attend to nothing. One only can love what one stops to observe. “Nothing is more essential to prayer,” said Evagrius, “than attentiveness.”
– Belden C. Lane
We seem to have an insatiable thirst for places that don’t exist, for griffins and wondrous dragons prowling the antipodes of a world we hardly recognize. They symbolize states of growth we haven’t yet achieved.
– Belden C. Lane
Good government makes everything well ordered and fit,
And at the same time it throws shackles on the unjust.
It levels out the rough, stops insolence, and weakens arrogance.
It causes the growing blossoms of blindness to wither.
It straightens crooked judgments and it levels out over-reaching deeds.
It stops the acts of civil conflict and
It stops the anger of grievous strife and because of it
Everything among men is wisely and appropriately done.
– Solon
How, in the contemporary period, can we evoke the imagery that communicates the most profound and most richly developed sense of experiencing life? These images must point past themselves to that ultimate truth which must be told: that life does not have one absolutely fixed meaning. These images must point past all meanings given, beyond all definitions and relationships, to that really ineffable mystery that is just the existence, the being of ourselves and of our world. If we give that mystery an exact meaning we diminish the experience of its real depth. But when a poet carries the mind into a context of meanings and then pitches it past those, one knows that marvelous rapture that comes from going past all categories of definition. Here we sense the function of metaphor that allows us to make a journey we could not otherwise make …
– Joseph Campbell
There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.
– Zora Neale Hurston
It is the nature and intention of a constitution to prevent governing by party, by establishing a common principle that shall limit and control the power and impulse of party, and that says to all parties, thus far shalt thou go and no further. But in the absence of a constitution, men look entirely to party; and instead of principle governing party, party governs principle.
– Thomas Paine
No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that have belonged to you.
You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over a grave.
Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away
– Wendell Berry
I am at peace with God. My conflict is with Man.
– Charlie Chaplin
But what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing itself, into the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously.
– Julio Cortazar
If we were not here…the show would play to an empty house, as do all those falling stars which fall in the daytime. That is why I take walks: to keep an eye on things.
– Annie Dillard
I think there’s an evil in us, in humankind. Trust denies it. Leaps across it. Leaps the chasm. But it’s there. Anything we do finally serves evil, because that’s what we are. Greed and cruelty. I look at the world, at the forests and the mountain here, the sky, and it’s all right, as it should be. But we aren’t. People aren’t. We’re wrong. We do wrong. No animal does wrong. How could they? But we can, and we do. And we never stop.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
The saints, too, had wandering minds.
– Peter Kreeft
Bad News About My Vocation
by Ron Koertge
I remember how the upper crust in my hometown
pronounced it—care-a-mel. Which is correct, I guess,
but to everybody else it was carmel.
Which led to the misconception about the order
of Carmelites.
I imagined they served God by heating sugar
to about 170 C, then adding milk and butter
and vanilla essence while they listened
to the radio.
I thought I could do that. I could wear the white
shirt and pants. I knew I couldn’t be good
but I might be a good candy maker.
So imagine my chagrin when I learned about
the vows of poverty and toil enjoined
by these particular friars.
I also crossed off my list the Marshmallowites
and the Applepieites, two other orders I
was thinking of joining.
When the world turns over,
you can’t go on thinking upside
down. What was innocence is
now irresponsibility. Visions
must be re-visioned.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
I certainly never feel discouraged. I can’t myself raise the winds that might blow us or this ship into a better world. But I can at least put up the sail so that when the winds comes, I can catch it.
– E.F. Schumacher
Democracy is just something you must do every day, like brushing your teeth.
– Gloria Steinem
Scepticism is not irrefutable, but obviously nonsensical, when it tries to raise doubts where no questions can be asked. For doubt can exist only where a question exists, a question only where an answer exists, and an answer only where something can be said.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
I will take revenge on the world through love.
– Sergei Parajanov
Our original instructions are to listen to the cloud floating by and the wind blowing by. That’s poetry and prose in English, but it is wakahan in the Lakotan language. It means to consciously apply mystery to everything. Everything is alive and has its own consciousness.
– Tiokasin Ghosthorse
There’s something great about being around a younger generation of writers who are just on fire, just on fire to be writing and excited about their future, the learning, the joy of it all. I suppose just young people in general are awesome, just awesome! I do not feel like some of my generation at all.
– Sheryl Luna
A man will fight harder for his interests than for his rights.
– Napoleon Bonaparte
Is that all aging is – leaving things you knew, and once loved, behind to become something brand new?
– Nikita Gill
The illusion is that change takes time. The truth is, change happens the moment you decide.
– Alan Watts
alone again
on a lakeside bench
tides of childhood
lap against memory
in the quiet of my mind
– Chen-ou Liu
However, satisfying writing is, that mix of discipline and miracle, which leaves you in control, even when what appears on the page has emerged from regions beyond your control— it is a very poor substitute indeed for the joy and agony of loving.
– Jacqueline Rose
Don’t worry about anything at all.
You are not here by accident. This form is just a costume for a while. But the one who is behind the costume, this one is eternal. You must know this. If you know this and trust this, you don’t have to worry about anything.
– Mooji
The conscious mind resists, the unconscious insists.
– Jacques Lacan
Anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity.
– Thomas Merton
Melancholy is at the bottom of everything, just as at the end of all rivers is the sea… The gloom of an eternal mourning enwraps, more or less closely, every serious and thoughtful soul, as night enwraps the universe.
– H. F. Amiel
first yellow leaf
resting at the doorstep
goodbye dressed in gold
– @BashoSociety
a caterpillar
still on the leaf
enters autumn
– Basho
My lifelong cross to bear has been secret derisive judgment, a pinball machine of sizing up everything and everyone. I am working on it, but the healing is going slightly more slowly than one would hope.
– Anne Lamott
Pure origins are a riddle. Even
The poem may hardly disclose them.
– Friedrich Hölderlin
We know nothing of the world and will never know. All we say is metaphor which asserts at once our unknowing and our need to state in some language what we don’t know.
– William Bronk, Costume as Metaphor
The need to connect is at our core as sentient beings. It takes time, effort, and understanding. Sometimes, it feels impossible. But if we work at it, miracles can happen.
– Michael Burnham
change your desires rather than the order of the world.
– René Descartes
Enlightenment is achieved only when, in addition to knowing what the author says, you know what he means and why he says it.
– M. J. Adler
The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.
– Milton Freidman
Things are not so painful and difficult of themselves, but our weakness or cowardice makes them so.
– Michel de Montaigne
We never forget what we endeavor to forget.
– Nietzsche
You cannot resurrect what you are still refusing to bury.
– Jeff Israel Nthiwa
If we become even slightly more violent, shortsighted, ignorant, and selfish than we are now, almost certainly we will have no future.
– Carl Sagan
If everybody tried a little harder to care about each other a little more around the world, it would be so much easier than fighting and pissing each other off.
– Dolly Parton
No man is ever truly stuck; he is only standing at the intersection of patience and clarity.
– Marcus Aurelius
There’s a vastness here and I believe that the people who are born here breathe that vastness into their soul. They dream big dreams and think big thoughts because there is nothing to hem them in.
– Conrad Hilton
I am fully aware and in full possession of myself.
I have no desire to be understood, admired, pitied, or even known.
– Simone de Beauvoir
And don’t fight when you’re angry. Think when you’re angry. Write when you’re angry. Read when you’re angry.
– Kiese Laymon
for even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you.
– Khalil Gibran
Decisions are best made by the people affected by them.
– Gloria Steinem
Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature, and you will find that, behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable.
Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in point of fact, religious.
– Albert Einstein
Energy that it takes you to create toxicity, or selfishness, or to be overly combative is energy that you’re not using to elevate.
– Jon Stewart
All we can do is study the lives of people who seem to have found their answers to the questions of what ultimately a life was about.
– Charlotte Bühler
But sometimes the world does not reward gentle souls. Sometimes it takes everything soft inside them until they become strangers even to themselves.
– Franz Kafka
What is that which gleams through me, and strikes my heart without hurting it; and I shudder and kindle?
– St. Augustine
All it takes is one good person to restore hope.
– Pope Francis
A lot of good things don’t get made because of
too much thinking.
– Agnes Martin
The Greatest Generation will be the generation that does not have to go to war.
– Gloria Steinem
now that I know so much,
what’s left to think is the unthinkable.
– Ellen Bryant Voigt
Almost every man wastes part of his life in attempts to display qualities which he does not possess.
– Samuel Johnson
Self-government won’t work without self-discipline.
– Paul Harvey
That wasn’t any act of God. That was an act of pure human fuckery.
– Stephen King
No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just come out the other side. Or you don’t.
– Stephen King
The greatest obstacle to liberation is not evil or sin. The greatest obstacle is the ignorance that mistakes the non-Self for the Self.
– Adi Shankara, Vivekachudamani
You couldn’t not like someone who liked the guitar.
– Stephen King, The Stand
There are more things to admire in men than to despise.
– Albert Camus
You have to be a light to yourself. That light can never be given by another, however respected by tradition.
– Krishnamurti
It’s much easier to educate a doer than to activate a thinker.
– Andy Stanley
Still, obviously, one can’t be sensible all the time.
– Albert Camus
Love didn’t grow very well in a place where there was only fear.
– Stephen King, The Stand
Doing nothing is happiness for children and misery for old men.
– Victor Hugo
It’s more important to be a three-dimensional person…and one of the ways you get to be a whole person is you stop thinking about your little self.
– Toni Morrison
When you have a child, the world has a hostage.
– Ernest Hemingway
In helping others, we help ourselves. There is no separation.
– Swami Vivekananda
The man who has anticipated the coming of troubles takes away their power when they arrive.
– Seneca
Movements begin when ordinary people believe their actions matter.
– Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point
Now a hunger that cannot quite be located in the body comes over her, a sense of yearning, for what? Maybe for kindness, for a moral sense that is clear and loud and greater that she is, something that can blanket her, no, no, something in which she can hide for a minute and be safe.
– Lauren Groff
No one wants to be deceived; everyone prefers the truth to falsehood. This is why people want what they love to be the truth, even if it is not.
– William Cavanaugh
It is a grand metaphor, though for what I do not know, but I know it is a grand metaphor.
– Werner Herzog
If there’s one stamp you need on your comedy passport, it’s the willingness to find out where you are a little too desperate or a little too whatever and to be willing to poke fun at it.
– Helen Hunt
There is hope in the individual, in you, not in a system, not in the blueprint of a planned society, not in any religious organization, but in YOU, the individual.
– Krishnamurti
Emptiness is never going to get us to get up and do anything, but ecstasy might.
– Mary Oliver
A simple rule that makes life easier: Always strive to give value before you ask for value.
– James Clear
You see, I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad thing that happened to me.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it.
– Hemingway
Fearlessness is not only possible, it is the ultimate joy. When you touch nonfear, you are free.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
The heart is wiser than the intellect.
– Josiah Gilbert Holland
Adults are no better than children. They grope their way through life, not knowing where they came from or where they are going, unable to see any definite purpose in their actions, and governed in much the same way — by cookies, cakes, and the rod.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Embarrassment is the cost of entry. If you aren’t willing to look like a foolish beginner, you’ll never become a graceful master.
– Ed Latimore
Sociology completes the body of philosophy by tracing out the unity to be found in the various sciences.
– Auguste Comte
We had a thunder shower that was so terrible we locked the doors and the clock stopped — it was like Judgment day.
– Emily Dickinson
The rulers of this country have always used the law as a weapon of terror. The law is not written for our protection; it is written to protect their stolen property from the people they stole it from.
– Assata Shakur
The older I get, the greater power I seem to have to help the world; I am like a snowball – the further I am rolled the more I gain.
– Susan B. Anthony
But love is always new. Regardless of whether we love once, twice, or a dozen times in our life, we always face a brand-new situation.
– Paulo Coelho
Every factor of being — every facet of experience — when looked at closely, turns out to be impermanent and therefore unreliable, unable to provide complete satisfaction.
– Bhikkhu Bodhi
The lesson I’ve absorbed from my work is that we all learn from diversity, not from sameness. To be with people of different ages, races, and experiences is a gift.
– Gloria Steinem
All words, in every language, are metaphors.
– Marshall McLuhan
To be human is to move forward, to adapt, to believe in your ability to make things better. That is the only way to make the pain and sacrifice mean something.
– Rick Riordan
The artist is always a servant, and is perpetually trying to pay for the gift that has been given to him as if by a miracle.
– Andrei Tarkovsky
Words are like spices. Too many is worse than too few.
– Joan Aiken
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.
– G.K. Chesterton
Adversity elicits talent which under prosperous conditions would have remained dormant.
– Ara Parseghian
Knowledge is hot water in wool. It shrinks time and space.
– Mark Z Danielewski
We men of this age are rotten with book-lore and with a yearning for the past.
– James Elroy Flecker, The Last Generation A Story of the Future
Autumn approaches and the heart begins to dream.
– Bashō
If tribal thinking is original sin, then story is prayer.
– Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling
The Samurai is the first to suffer anxiety for human society, and he is the last to seek personal pleasure.
– Morihei Ueshiba
The only people who think we can have compound growth on a finite planet are mad men and economists.
– K. Boulding
To know a thing you have to trust what you know, and all that you know, and as far as you know in whatever direction your knowing drags you.
– Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion
I have learned over a period of time to be almost unconsciously grateful–as a child is–for a sunny day, blue water, flowers in a vase, a tree turning red. I have learned to be glad at dawn and when the sky is dark. Only children and a few spiritually evolved people are born to feel gratitude as naturally as they breathe, without even thinking. Most of us come to it step by painful step, to discover that gratitude is a form of acceptance.
– Faith Baldwin, Many Windows, Seasons of the Heart
For even the wise cannot see all ends.
– Gandalf the Grey
The Valley of Aijalon
by Babette Deutsch
I have forgotten precious things:
Wisdom in books, the words of lovers,
But not the shadow on the waters
Cast by a hidden sea-gulls’ wings.
I have forgotten many a pledge
Given and taken—fear and hunger
That once were knives—but not the pewter
Of olives from a mountain’s edge.
The tired brain gathers and lets go
Faces and cities, wars and weathers,
But keeps one sun as still as Joshua’s
On honey-bright unbroken snow.
Saint Francis Speaks to the Living
I didn’t talk to birds.
I heard them.
That is what the hard world
has forgotten: to open,
wholly, and let the great song
change you. To kneel down
with your life’s harp in your own arms,
and to be so played
by the vastness that you shatter,
that you have a chance to hear
what isn’t you.
Listen. I loved
this world so wholly.
Have you forgotten
why you were doing this?
Do it. Do
what you were born to.
The difference
between the hell of self
and its Eden
is the difference between needing
Lazarus
to see you
and calling out
I hear you, I do, I
hear you
and watching what those perfect
words can do.
– Joseph Fasano
Within each of us there is
a silence – a silence as vast as
the universe. We are afraid of it
….and we long for it.
– Gunilla Norris
Can you bow
like a broken necklace
scattering your brightest tears?
All other yoga postures
Simply remove the stiffness.
To bend is the first freedom.
Don’t just bow to the master,
bow like a bee to a grain of pollen.
Genuflection of a thirsty panther
by a water hole at sunset.
Snow melting into mountain
stream laughter.
Bow to the croak of a tree frog
in the jasmine vine at midnight.
To the plums of September
thumping the ground, showing you
the way to fall, the way to
split open and offer your juice.
Bow to the silence of the doe
who, after all, is eating your roses.
Bow to the wail of the newborn American
whose mother crossed over
the border last night.
To your own breath
and the secret name in your heartbeat,
bow down.
Fill the hollows of your body
with the blues of the sky.
Bow so completely
that you shatter your crown
and sow the earth
with stars.
– Fred LaMotte
The whole difference
between construction
and creation is
exactly this: that a
thing constructed can
only be loved after it
is constructed; but a
thing created is loved
before it exists.
– Charles Dickens
My four-year-old refers to his
imagination as “my magic.” Why
on earth would we ever tell
children they need AI?
– Joseph Fasano
Crazy how the Christian
idea of heaven is an
untouched paradise,
enough food for everyone,
classless, moneyless,
stateless, a utopia of peace,
unity and happiness. But
right here on earth they
absolutely don’t want it
because it’s too woke.
– unknown
No, I’m not that kind of
Christian. I’m a Dolly
Parton, Mr. Rogers,
Jimmy Carter kind of
Christian.
– Unknown
I like to write when I feel
spiteful; it’s like having a good
sneeze.
– D.H. Lawrence
What The Soul Wrote
On The Asylum Wall
They tried to tell me
I was ill
When I was only wholly
awake
in a world so mad
the sleepwalkers
look well.
– Joseph Fasano
We all know what
addiction is; we are
primarily addicted to
ME.
– Pema Chodron
Maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside each of us.
– Mary Oliver
I think I’m greedy, but I’m not greedy for money – I think that can be a burden – I’m greedy for an exciting life.
– David Hockney
Etymology is political code.
– Robin Morgan
I learned about feminism greatly from living in India for a couple of years after I had graduated from college in the nineteen-fifties. My time in that newly independent nation made me realize that most of the world did not live as we did in the United States. I realized there was a terrible monochromatic quality to the people in my life, and that white people were a small minority in the world. In India, I got accustomed to, and began to value, racial diversity.
The people I met in India who were social activists were almost all Gandhians. I worked with them, went to school with them, and walked through villages with them. I found I was very drawn to them as human beings because they were kind, open, nonviolent, and not nationalistic at all. I think culturally women are drawn to nonviolence. Probably because we are the major victims of violence, we become the major movers of peace.
– Gloria Stienem
The most vulnerable I get in my poetry seems to be when I’m writing to my son. It’s difficult to share these poems, but long ago I made a pact with the wind—if it would give me the words for the wounds, I would share those words, always, in the hope that others might feel their own wounds soothed.
SOBRIETY
for my son
All my life I tried to slay the ghosts in me.
Now I wake beside you
on a Sunday
and know that soon your mother will come
to take you
and I’ll be left
with seven days to face
my life,
seven days before you hurry back again
with toys, and songs, and stories,
seven days to fight the old mad
hell.
My son, my little
infinite sleeper,
I don’t know what the world is
or will ever be,
or why we live, or why we die
unfinished, but I know, at midnight,
in your slumber,
you roll to me and nuzzle
till I hold you,
as though I were the universe
to the earth of you
and if I left, a want
would be your cosmos,
and if I drowned my ghosts
you’d be alone.
Child, I am going
to the woods tonight, the wild place
where I lay, once, as a child,
and looked up at the stars
that still might cleanse me,
and made my wish, and made my pact
with vastness.
All I have
is my hands, this heart, some starlight,
this will to make your story
not my story,
this novice grace that strips my wounds of power.
And this love for you.
And this body torn
by hours—this life of mine
that’s made to wake
and see you,
as Joseph must have seen the face
of Jesus
and heard what any father hears
in infant breath:
Survive. Survive yourself, sweet
maker. Don’t you see
we’re saved
by those who need us?
Make a place where God is safe
to grow.
– Joseph Fasano
The hope will have
to be taken up,
please take it up for me.
Take it up. It’s heavy
as a diamond
factory. Take it up,
you’re doing fine.
Your arms and heart
are Hercules so
take it up for me.
I cannot carry hope
and hoist this huge
mortality.
– Diane Seuss
Finding Our God-Terms
The work of literary critic Mark Edmundson offers a powerful vision for recentering the American university.
by Joshua Hall
IN WHY READ? (2004), Mark Edmundson writes that all of his English classes, regardless of author, period, or genre, pose the same central question: “How do you imagine God?” Whether students are atheists or agnostics, rabid apostates or fervent church-, synagogue-, or mosque-going believers, he asks them to use their time in college to seek a life richer in spiritual meaning than the “cool consumer worldview” he claims elsewhere is “the order of the day” at modern American universities, which have become too noisy for anyone to hear, let alone imagine, God.
For over three decades, Edmundson—a writer and professor at the University of Virginia—has rightly observed that a consumer-oriented university, by definition, cannot offer the free, uncommercialized space required for students to question the values they have been socialized to accept, including the corporate “frat-boy ideology” that currently rules campus life. He wants students to know that the pursuit of what he calls, in his 2018 book The Heart of the Humanities: Reading, Writing, Teaching, “consumer bliss” is not a form of freedom but overstimulated slavery—a soulless, self-surveilling state they would be wise to buck or, at the very least, consider skeptically. That process, Edmundson insists, starts with questions about God, “even if what we’re going on to do is read the novels of Henry James.”
I have never been a student in Professor Edmundson’s classes, but I have read and taught him for nearly 20 years. In his books, he rarely answers his bold, anachronistic class opener squarely. Whether he’s writing literary criticism (1995’s Literature Against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida: A Defence of Poetry), memoir (2002’s Teacher: The One Who Made the Difference), or personal essays (The Heart of the Humanities), Edmundson considers any number of contradictory intellectual, emotional, and spiritual perspectives from which readers must infer his conclusions about divinity. His general unwillingness to resolve the question of God (he calls himself a “longtime agnostic”), as well as his seemingly endless fascination with dialectical reasoning, often drives my students crazy. Their internet-addled nervous systems cannot tolerate uncertainty, tension, or doubt—a condition that prevents them from reading deeply and thus grasping Edmundson’s central message: however tech-saturated and ruthlessly transactional the modern American college experience has become, a university education is still the best escape route, maybe the only enterprise in American life that allows you to “gaze out onto the larger world and construe it freely.”
Yet such gazing and construing, as Edmundson notes in The Age of Guilt: The Super-Ego in the Online World (2023), requires time, most of which is now gobbled up by electronic devices. Students spend their college years with their minds “locked into a tiny rectangular space,” consuming content instead of reading alone, “deeply and privately.” (An internet-linked computer, no matter how many privacy protections one has in place, is never a private space.) Solitude is an elemental necessity of intellectual life, but it has been replaced by a technocratic vision of learning, one that values information, instant answers, and surface-level exchange over deep thought, self-reflection, and inner transformation. More and more, campus buzzes like a shopping mall, the bookstore is an emporium for electronics and university swag, the classrooms look like something out of The Matrix (1999), and even the library is becoming gadget-saturated. In a few years, I’m sure the stacks will be a massive electronic database, the books replaced by wires sizzling with literary information, but for now, one can still read there in something resembling silence.
And in that secular semiquiet, Edmundson insists, even the godless can find God—or, more accurately, “god-terms,” for words themselves are Edmundson’s secular deities. There might not be an ultimate center, a final Truth or God, he suggests, but there are brave, brilliant, compassionate individuals (like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman) who have used words to put forth a vision of a life worth living. Students must encounter “the best which has been said and thought” (in Matthew Arnold’s famous words) so they can understand themselves and have some say in the direction of their lives. By seeking out writers who can help them articulate what Edmundson calls, in The Heart of the Humanities, their “defining beliefs,” their god-terms, students begin the process of a “real education.”
Such Emersonian American optimism is difficult for many of my students to take seriously. Even though they come from middle-class backgrounds and comfortable material lives, they are cynical, even nihilistic, about ideas like freedom, self-determination, and progress. All their lives, they have seen images of the United States at its worst—porn and pillage and plunder, pompous magnates and warring tribes on the march. Their sense of meaning and purpose is internet-based and totally transactional, so they understand college as a materialistic, self-enriching hustler’s paradise. They have never known a quiet, tech-free learning environment. They have never experienced what so many of us took for granted throughout our own college educations, before screens colonized university life: the sustained silence necessary to read and think; the boredom one must endure (and cultivate) to penetrate the surface layers of self and get down to the soul, one’s god-terms, one’s “outermost circle of commitments.”
A real education, as Edmundson writes in The Heart of the Humanities, should encourage students to question their early socialization, their inherited values and beliefs, including their likely addiction to consumer culture. College is a place to question whether “the authorities” in students’ lives “have it right.” If students take the consumerist path of the current authorities, Edmundson warns in Why Teach? In Defense of a Real Education (2013), they will “have a driveway of [their] own” but also be “truly and righteously screwed.” Thus his central message: An education spent in pursuit of material comfort and convenience is a recipe for unhappiness, an existence in thrall to the raw, hungry American mantra of success, “More! More!”
When I see my students scrolling away their formative intellectual and emotional years on a computer screen, most of them don’t look happy. They look scared, overstimulated, and craving distraction. This condition, Edmundson suggests, is rooted in our oversocialized consumer culture, which has probably impacted their development more than their family, school, or religion has. Instead of spiritual questers, searchers after the good, beautiful, and true, students come to college as good consumers, kids who have unironically adopted Kurt Cobain’s pathetic, deeply ironic plea: “Here we are now, entertain us!”
Against this insidious American entertainment culture (one thinks of Neil Postman’s 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business), Edmundson suggests that deep reading can be a model for meaningful, purposeful, selfless living. In a wonderful essay on his graduate school days at Yale, Edmundson offers a vision of how we might respond to Generation Z’s despair: “I can still see Thomas Greene, hands trembling slightly, face frowning with concentration, trying to get at that poem by Wyatt, trying to get it right, trying to meet the poet there in the seminar room, 400 years down the line, and give him what he’d earned,” Edmundson writes. “It was an example not only of how a critic treats a poet but also of how one human being can treat another.”
This is perhaps the clearest passage in which Edmundson insists that words are the physical manifestation of a writer’s soul, that we should treat people with the same care and nuance with which we read poetry, for the “holy” medium of words is the best way out of the culture of self that is so pervasive in modern American life. We need not be victims of that culture or reduce ourselves, as he puts it in another essay, to individuals at “the intersection of many evaluative and potentially determining discourses.” We can read our way out of our lives, as he argues in The Age of Guilt, and into “something better.”
Edmundson’s generosity, his Christian charity and spiritual metaphors, can cloud the fact that he is, at heart, a secular writer, an earnest seeker of what the philosopher Brian R. Clack calls “something precious lying at [religion’s] heart.” That something precious, in Edmundson’s view, is a language to define and describe an ultimate belief, the limits of an argument, god-terms. When we invoke words like “God” or “Nature” or “Fate” (or more secular god-terms like “race,” “gender,” or “class”), we set the limits of the discussion and define what Edmundson calls the “corners” of the metaphor. God-terms are unquestionable because they cut off further inquiry; they are—as he puts it in Why Read?—“the point beyond which argument and analysis are unlikely to go.”
Whether sacred or secular, god-terms (in Why Read? Edmundson also calls them “Final Narratives”) emphasize that human meaning is literary and narrative in nature. The concept, which Edmundson borrows from Kenneth Burke, appears in Literature Against Philosophy, a book about literature and literary criticism that is still ahead of its time in its commitment to dialectical engagement with what, in the current academy, often seem like irresolvable factions—namely, the poets and the critics. Notably, Edmundson, then a literary critic, sided with the poets, but even in 1995, he declared that literary criticism, the attempt to get the poetic passions under intellectual control, had won. Modern television culture, much like his Yale education (or at least some of it), was about “debunking […] ideals.” The former’s culture of irony and satire and the latter’s endless web of interpretation, he argues in The Heart of the Humanities, rendered the notion of individual genius “silly [and] outmoded.” God-terms in the 1980s and ’90s weren’t rich, demanding concepts like capital-T “Truth” and capital-A “Art” but easy-to-grasp, vulgar business phrases like “work hard, play hard” or “become a leader.”
If anything, those phrases have gained currency with today’s students, many of whom see money and power as the highest goods, as ends in themselves, the only real purpose of going to college. Yet instead of pursuing lives defined by “business-speak” or “politico-speak” (or some other popular, money-based idiom), Edmundson encourages students, in The Heart of the Humanities, to read the great poets, the Romantics especially, writers who “fuse feeling and thought” on the page. He urges students to see words not as metaphors or representations but as the writers themselves, real human beings, right there on the page, waiting to be understood and appreciated, as Thomas Greene did for Wyatt. Language is an integral, if not the central, meaning of human life. We are word-making creatures, and our words, “at their best” (a phrase that recurs in Edmundson’s work), offer hope and purpose, a way of figuring out who we are, who we have been, and where we might be going.
It’s an affirmative vision of higher education, one worth taking seriously in this sped-up age of simulated learning. Edmundson wants students to slow down, find their own god-terms, and “initiate the process of growth.” For growth, as he sees it, doesn’t stop at 18 or 25 or 35 or even in middle or old age. It’s a lifelong process, one in which we are forever, as he puts it in Teacher, “works in progress.” It’s difficult to sustain and live out such a view, for the temptation to come to a permanent, binding god-term, especially one rooted in consumer culture, is all around us—on screens, in loud advertisements. It’s too easy to “slip into” these “forms of worship,” as David Foster Wallace said, unaware of their infinitely pleasurable emptiness. But Edmundson, unlike Wallace, is a great gatherer of hope, his message one of achievable, real-world salvation—the idea that a life lived well ends not in despair but in gratitude for the opportunity to live and breathe and walk the earth, however painful or frustrating the journey. Edmundson says, in Why Write? A Master Class on the Art of Writing and Why It Matters (2016), that he often stares at his pencil and “smile[s] with strange gratitude,” for the pencil is the instrument of his vocation, his way of making contact with divinity.
Like “reading,” “writing” is a resolutely secular Edmundsonian god-term, one students should consider as “a live alternative to the demoralizing culture of hip in which most of [them] are mired” (as he puts it in Why Teach?). There is no tech overlord, no surveillance, just student, pencil (or pen), and paper, in the quiet, sustained pursuit of self-knowledge. Kurt Vonnegut called it a writer’s ability to “cure himself” daily, but Edmundson is more elevated than the black-lunged sage. “We have at our hands’ reach,” he writes in The Heart of the Humanities, “a skill that is also a spiritual discipline. Writing is a meditation; writing is as close as some of us can come to prayer; writing is a way of being, righteously, in the world.”
The difficult pleasure of finding god-terms is, for Edmundson, an expansive, edifying experience. Although many of the writers he values are canonical and white, he is careful to note that god-terms don’t need to be limited to authors with whom one can identify. After all, the first book that Edmundson bought with his own money, he says in Teacher, was The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965). In X’s transformation, Edmundson saw a glimpse of his own potential, a way to change his life for the better, and that’s what he ultimately wants for his readers: a chance to find the words that will help us (as he puts it in Why Teach?) to “stop and think and then try to remake the work in progress we currently are. There’s no better place for that than a college classroom where, together, we can slow it down and live deliberately.”
When you treat your mind with kindfulness, your mind does not want to wander off anywhere. It likes your company. You hang out together, chilling out, for far longer than you ever expected.
– Ajahn Brahm
We have to make thousands of shamans now. We are entering sacred times.
– Mayan Elder Hunbatz Men, Sept 1998
Folded
by Luis Muñoz
translated from the Spanish by Idra
Novey and Garth Greenwell
That was the most surprising thing
about writing in summer, there was
a slip of paper folded many times
in the urn of my head
and the trick was to know
how to unfold it carefully
avoiding any hullabaloo
that might tear it
while it spread out and out
until finally
fully revealed
it was impossible to take it all in.
ODE TO BLUEBERRIES
Now that it’s September, I want to thank blueberries.
I want to thank peaches, cantaloupes, cherry tomatoes
and corn on the cob. All summer long while we griped
about the Republicans, you were lying there in baskets,
blue eyes silently watching, blinking back tears.
Some of you were whole crimson sunsets in my hand.
I’m not sure what antioxidants are, but thank you:
I know that you were full of them.
I loved your fuzz, buxom peach, your sass, blackberry.
I loved your smile, honeydew, halved and split
as we slobbered together. Local strawberry,
just one of you gushing on my tongue was almost
too much to bear. Next summer you could do a better job
of staying under three dollars a pint; otherwise, no complaint.
How erotic you are, plum, lounging in a sunbeam,
your crimson still-life, your sweated drops of fever!
You should be ashamed the way your waves imploded
on the beaches of my mouth: well, it was a scene!
But thank you. I also want to thank some of you flowers:
begonia, peony, chrysanthemum and lucifer crocosmia.
I do not forget the morning glory, that soft trumpet
made of sky, calling us inward toward granaries
of moonlight. And now, just as the rest of you languish,
the apples arrive! Round crimson shouts
from green caverns of Autumn afternoon.
O humans, we too might burst, an orchard of longings,
wild but rooted, globe-laden, corridored with fruit.
We might drop at the edge of the meadow,
silvered in flurries of milkweed and thistle-down.
Why not bend to our ripening, the pungent smolder
of our inward sugars, the grace and gravity of Fall?
Why not bow to the blessed sag of our limbs
in the gentle bruise of surrender on our knees?
We could lie on the bee-festered earth, hollowed, wormed
out with inner paths, free from every striving to rise. Why not let
this turning planet have her way with us, and do what she loves?
– Alfred K. LaMotte
Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart. It is like a bird that has blundered down the flue and is caught indoors and flutters at the windowpanes. It is like standing a long time on a cold day, knocking at a shut door.
– Wendell Berry
This is a book about Heaven. I know it now. It floats among us like a cloud and is the realest thing we know and the least to be captured, the least to be possessed by anybody for himself. It is like a grain of mustard seed, which you cannot see among the crumbs of earth where it lies. It is like the reflection of the trees on the water.
– Wendell Berry
You’ve got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.
– Charlie Parker
Once I have forgotten what I appeared to know, then I can desirously love that which I cannot think.
– Simon Critchley
When I confront a human being as my Thou and speak the basic word I-Thou to him, then he is no thing among things nor does he consist of things. He is no longer He or She, a dot in the world grid of space and time, nor a condition to be experienced and described, a loose bundle of named qualities. Neighborless and seamless, he is Thou and fills the firmament. Not as if there were nothing but he; but everything else lives in his light.
– Martin Buber
The spiritual decline of the Earth has progressed so far that peoples are in danger of losing their last spiritual strength; the strength that makes it possible even to see the decline and to appraise it as such.
– Martin Heidegger
There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.
– James Joyce
We can have two contradictory states in us – a state of ‘I must’ and a state of ‘I cannot’. If we lose one of these then some compromise arises. We either do what we can, or we do something different and pretend it is what we must do. But if we don’t compromise then this can bring us to that moment when something else emerges that is neither affirming that we must, nor denying that we can. It is just the action. The action appears. The big thing for us is when this comes to us about Work. We realize that we must and that we cannot. Then from nowhere there comes something else and we find that things have happened to us that we cannot understand. There are three phases. There is the phase of I cannot – I know, but I cannot. Then there is the phase when nothing of this sort is present at all. Then comes the phase when one says ‘I can’ and then it’s all lost.
[…]
There is another element in doing that has always to be remembered. We can’t do unless there is an ideal or a pattern. This presents itself to us. You can have the memory of previous occasions when something similar didn’t work. If something has failed for us and we haven’t been paralysed by the failure, but on the contrary we remain sure that it can be done, then it brings us again to this ‘I must, but I cannot’ (even if you’re not aware of it in that clear way). But in some cues the pattern itself has power. This is perhaps true in all cases, but in some cases the power of the pattern is the most important thing, as in certain exercises we do.
– J.G. Bennett
Q: You have been politically engaged, but you have never succumbed to ideology, which has devoured some of the best black writers of my generation.
A: Perhaps I did not succumb to ideology, as you put it, because I have never seen myself as a spokesman. I am a witness. In the church in which I was raised you were supposed to bear witness to the truth. Now, later on, you wonder what in the world the truth is, but you do know what a lie is.
– James Baldwin
If you love it, do not photograph
the woods as it now is, the leaves
in sunlight and shadow hardly stirring
in the air of the hot afternoon.
Do not try to remember it, stopping
the flutters of leaves and wings,
the dead leaf slowly spinning
on an invisible thread. Do not ask
the trees to linger even to be named.
You must live in the day as it passes,
willing to let it go. You must set it
free. You must forget this poem.
Then, into its own time forever
gone, it is forever here.
– Wendell Berry
The Farewell
They say the ice will hold
so there I go,
forced to believe them by my act of trusting people,
stepping out on it,
and naturally it gaps open
and I, forced to carry on coolly
by my act of being imperturbable,
slide erectly into the water wearing my captain’s helmet,
waving to the shore with a sad smile,
“Goodbye my darlings, goodbye dear one,”
as the ice meets again over my head with a click.
– Edward Field
We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. Divide. Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother’s birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us.
– Anthony Doerr
The flood subsides, and the body, like a worn sea-shell emerges strange and lovely.
And the little ship wings home, faltering and lapsing on the pink flood,
and the frail soul steps out, into the house again filling the heart with peace. Swings the heart renewed with peace even of oblivion.
Oh build your ship of death. Oh build it!
for you will need it.
For the voyage of oblivion awaits you.
– D.H. Lawrence
Childhood fantasies buffer our coming into being and soften the edges between what’s real and what’s possible. Anyone can believe in something, stubborn and singular, but it’s a powerful thing to participate in someone else’s wish. Play engenders a politics of alliance, not transcending our material conditions (impossible), but transforming them, plate by plate, letter by letter, dream by dream. We carried our determined fantasies into adulthood: ‘Real isn’t how you’re made,’ my mum taught me, ‘it’s what you make? […]
Well-practized in this art, my mum welcomed in all that was strange and made the world her own. Whether one believes in this promise can depend on the largeness of the world already available. For a young working-class single mum, the world’s ‘contingent limits’ might well be found wanting. There has always been something at stake for us in imagining the world otherwise, a transformative power on which we’d often need to draw.
– Marianne Brookner
It really is true: doing what you please (i.e., what pleases you), with energy, will lead you to everything—to your particular obsessions and the ways in which you’ll indulge them, to your particular challenges and the forms in which they’ll convert into beauty, to your particular obstructions and your highly individualized obstruction breakers. We can’t know what our writing problems will be until we write our way into them, and then we can only write our way out.
– George Saunders
How does this life become available to the welfare of others? How do these hands, this voice, this body, these capacities, and even these limitations become conditions through which suffering is lessened? Almost imperceptibly, the center of gravity shifts. Zazen is no longer undertaken primarily to cultivate experience but to form a life capable of responding with freedom and compassion in relation to whatever circumstances arise. Study becomes less the accumulation of Buddhist knowledge than the continual refinement of discernment in service of the vow. The awakened heart is measured not by the intensity of inner experience but by the reliability with which one’s life becomes a refuge for others.
– Joan Halifax
SPIRIT
Spirit
is Life
It flows thru
the death of me
endlessly
like a river
unafraid
of becoming
the sea.
– Gregory Corso
III
(Ye must be born again.)
I think of Gloucester, blind, led through the world
To the world’s edge by the hand of a stranger
Who is his faithful son. At the cliff’s verge
He flings away his life, as of no worth,
The true way lost, his eyes two bleeding wounds–
And finds his life again, and is led on
By the forsaken son who has become
His father, that the good may recognize
Each other, and at last go ripe to death.
We live the given life, and not the planned.
– Wendell Berry
The world is not a place but the vastness of the soul. And the soul is nothing more than love, limitless, all that moves us toward knowing what is true. I once thought love was supposed to be nothing but bliss. I now know it is also worry and grief, hope and trust. … If people we love die, then they are lost only to our ordinary senses. If we remember, we can find them anytime with our hundred secret senses.
– Amy Tan
Rationality is exclusive: reason is inclusive, balancing rationality with intuition, emotion and imagination. Emotion is not, as some Enlightenment philosophers thought, necessarily an impediment to reason, but an essential component of it. … Imagination is not an impediment, but, on the contrary, a necessity for true knowledge of the world, for true understanding, and for that neglected goal of human life, wisdom.
– Iain McGilchrist
There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.
– Simone de Beauvoir
People do not realize just how much they are putting at risk when they don’t accept what life presents them with, the questions and tasks that life sets them. When they resolve to spare themselves the pain and suffering, they owe to their nature. In so doing, they refuse to pay life’s dues and for this very reason, life then often leads them astray. If we don’t accept our own destiny, a different kind of suffering takes its place: a neurosis develops, and I believe that that life which we have to live is not as bad as a neurosis. If I have to suffer, then let it be from my reality. A neurosis is a much greater curse! In general, a neurosis is a replacement for an evasion, an unconscious desire to cheat life, to avoid something. One cannot do more than live what one really is. And we are all made up of opposites and conflicting tendencies. After much reflection, 1 have come to the conclusion that it is better to live what one really is and accept the difficulties that arise as a result-because avoidance is much worse.
– C.G. Jung
Life forms a surface that acts as if it could not be otherwise, but under its skin things are pounding and pulsing.
– Robert Musil (tr. Wilkins and Pike)
There is no way out of the spiritual battle
There is no way you can avoid taking sides
There is no way you can not have a poetics
no matter what you do: plumber, baker, teacher
you do it in the consciousness of making
or not making yr world
– Diane di Prima
Anyone who has probed the inner life, who has sat in silence long enough to experience the stillness of the mind behind its apparent noise is faced with a mystery. Apart from all the outer attractions of life in the world, there exists at the center of human consciousness something quite satisfying and beautiful in itself, a beauty without features. The mystery is not so much that these two dimensions exist – an outer world and the mystery of the inner world – but that we are suspended between them, as a space in which both worlds meet … as if the human a is the meeting point, the threshold between two worlds.
– Kabir Edmund Helminski
As a wise orthodox put it, we have to make a volitional response to a divine initiative.
– Pierre Elliot
This is the world.
Would it be better to sit in silence?
To think everything, to feel everything, to say nothing?
– Mary Oliver
I like the sense of one lighted room in the house while all the rest of the house, and the world outside, is in darkness. Just one lamp falling on my paper; it gives a concentration, an intimacy. What bad mediums letters are; you will read this in daylight, and everything will look different. I think I feel night as poignantly as you feel the separateness of human beings; one of those convictions which are so personal, so sharp, that they hurt. It seems to me that I only begin to live after the sun has gone down and the stars have come out.
– Vita Sackville-West
If there is a soul, it is a mistake to believe that it is given to us fully created. It is created here, throughout a whole life. And living is nothing else but that long and painful bringing forth.
– Albert Camus
I whisper over to myself the way of loss, the names of the dead. One by one, we lose our loved ones, our friends, our powers of work and pleasure, our landmarks, the days of our allotted time. One by one, the way we lose them, they return to us and are treasured up in our hearts. Grief affirms, them, preserves them, sets the cost. Finally a man stands up alone, scoured and charred like a burnt tree, having lost everything and (at the cost only of its loss) found everything, and is ready to go. Now I am ready.
– Wendell Berry
By then I wasn’t just asking questions; I was being changed by them. I was being changed by my prayers, which dwindled down nearer and nearer to silence, which weren’t confrontations with God but with the difficulty–in my own mind, or in the human lot–of knowing what or how to pray. Lying awake at night, I could feel myself being changed–into what, I had no idea.
– Wendell Berry
Coleridge once jotted in a notebook, ‘The Prince of Darkness is a Gentleman.’ What is so beguiling about a specialist predator is the idea of an intimacy with the Beast! For if, originally, there was one particular Beast, would we not want to fascinate him as he fascinated us? Would we not want to charm him, as the angels charmed the lions in Daniel’s cell?
– Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines
Our hearing doesn’t weaken, but something silent in us strengthens.
– Ilya Kaminsky
You mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn’t want to be somebody else.
What you must do is this:
“Rejoice evermore.
Pray without ceasing.
In everything give thanks.”
I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.
– Wendell Berry
I crave that feeling you get just before you go to sleep, when everything gives in. The fight ends. The fight of our thinking lives. […] Rest awaits. The relentless ticking clock of your conscious awareness prepares to be smothered, your limbs prepare to go slack, the things that hurt will stop hurting, the whole frenetic circus of it all is about to collapse. There’s nothing for you to do, or work out.
– Samantha Harvey
I drink much less than most people think, and I think much more than most people would believe.
I am quite sincere about some of the things that people take very lightly, and almost insultingly unconcerned about some of the things which most people take seriously.
In short, I am basically antisocial: certainly not to an alarming degree, but just more so than I appear to be.
– Hunter S. Thompson
I think the desire to be free has mutated, and we now live in an era when the slaves celebrate their slavery – this whole corporate concept of being part of a ‘team’ at work…
– Nick Tosches
At the trial of God, we will ask:
why did you allow all this?
And the answer will be an echo:
why did you allow all this?
– Ilya Kaminsky
Yew-shaded tombstone:
On its faint inscription stands
An empty wineglass
– Gillian Drake
You can be one of the good ones. Especially for the people you love and care about.
– Ryan Holiday
Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely brilliant with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving.
– Ray Bradbury
You have to adjust to facts: you can’t have a nation, you can’t have a society, in which everyone is always occupied in intellectual and computational pursuits. A few people have to be around who know how to handle the material world in a gracious way. And for these people we provide only regretfully, as an afterthought.
– Alan Watts
wine rings
on the cafe tables—
spring wind
– David Grayson
I never thought of advertising as wasteful, because the word “wasteful” is a tricky word.
Economists use it in a special sense. I suppose that most advertising is a waste of money and most advertising is a crashing bore and an intrusion and there is too much of it.
And you can say all sorts of bad things about advertising. But people go on using it, you know, so it must have…perform some function.
– David Ogilvy
It’s always so amazing how you just, know. When someone or something is right. When something is for you. Where you’re supposed to be. The divine recognition of yourself in something else.
– Nika Solé
Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life. This is what makes us human. But it comes with a costly price: the wound of mortality. Our existence is forever shadowed by the knowledge that we will grow, blossom, and, inevitably, diminish and die.
– Yalom
It is not necessarily too little knowledge that causes ignorance; possessing too much, or wanting to gain too much, can produce the same result.
– John Fowles
The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.
– Irvin D. Yalom
Don’t let go of what has held you together.
Childish as it might be, nothing here is better.
– Mutemath, Nuisance
It is our earth, ours and not of any group, community or nation. It is ours; it belongs to every one of us.
– Krishnamurti
In a nation of frightened dullards there is a sorry shortage of outlaws, and those few who make the grade are always welcome.
– Hunter Thompson
Dogs seem to understand something we often forget. A walk can be an adventure. A meal can be a celebration. And seeing someone you love is always worth getting excited about.
– Dipendra Tamang
Beware the student of one teacher. A good idea spirals into dogma when it gets applied to everything and stretched beyond the areas where it is useful. Remain open and embrace a lot of teachers.
– James Clear
In the afterlife, we’ll sit around talking about the good old days, when we wished that we were dead.
– Samuel Beckett
The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices.
– Irvin D. Yalom
all through autumn
the butterfly drinks
chrysanthemum dew
– Basho
When Peter Matthiessen chose to believe in something he believed in it indefinitely, even when people were slightly embarrassed on his behalf.
– Joy Williams
I like clarity. I like when it feels like a yes in my body. I like when the alignment hits so perfectly that it feels like divinity unfolding in front of me. I like dancing in realms of what’s mine.
– Nika Solé
If a poem attacks you,
don’t move.
Just listen
– john zbigniew guzlowski
We’ve arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science and technology. And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces.
– Carl Sagan
I often feel caught in a dilemma: on the one hand I wish to be more natural with you and yet, on the other hand, because I feel that you’re easily wounded and that you give my comments inordinate power, I feel I must consider my wording very, very carefully.
– Irvin D. Yalom
To the extent that one is responsible for one’s life, one is alone.
– Irvin D. Yalom
Art was better before AI.
This is not a criticism of AI.
I read between the two lines.
– Laura Kerr
The more seriously you take yourself, the unhappier you’re going to be.
– @naval
We depend on nature not only for our physical survival. We also need nature to show us the way home, the way out of the prison of our own minds. We got lost in doing, thinking, remembering, anticipating — lost in a maze of complexity and a world of problems.
– Eckhart Tolle
My favorite monster is Me, because no matter how much I cry all night, I know I’ll burst out laughing the next day.
– Sylvia Plath
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
– Emil Cioran
It’s all grassroots, the actions to help another person, one’s self, Earth, just small, kind actions…..We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. No one is going to come save us from our deepest fears. This is so incredibly disappointing.
– Anne Lamott
The destruction of Troy. The fall of petals from fruit trees in blossom. To know that what is most precious is not rooted in existence—that is beautiful. Why? It projects the soul beyond time.
– Simone Weil
Can religion be reconciled with science? If religion means merely a system of ethics, religion can be reconciled with science. If religion means a system of dogma, regarded as unquestionably true, religion is incompatible with the scientific spirit, which refuses to accept matters of fact without evidence, and also holds that complete certainty is hardly ever attainable.
– Bertrand Russell
Art is fire plus algebra.
– Jorge Luis Borges
I’m a poet
not a motivational speaker
I keep trying to tell you
– CAConrad
Having the same sense of humor as someone else is a highly underrated measure of compatibility.
– Nika Solé
Your real home is not the house you live in, but the stillness and peace in your heart.
– Ajahn Brahm
Your magic won’t come online all the way until you have the discipline to use it and the boundaries to protect it.
– Nika Solé
A vacation is a very expensive way to schedule the time to read a book in peace.
– @naval
There is a huge silence inside each of us that beckons us into itself, and the recovery of our own silence can begin to teach us the language of heaven.
– Meister Eckhart
If the main pillar of the system is living a lie, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living the truth.
– Václav Havel
moonless evening
one porch light in the dark
home becomes a promise
– @BashoSociety
It’s not important what you leave FOR your children, it’s what you leave IN THEM.
– Shannon L Adler
All that arises are appearances in consciousness.
Don’t bother with all that. Rest only as the awareness.
This is the secret.
– Mooji
Knowing that Whitman would say it better, I heave a sigh and say it best I can.
– Kenneth Folk
It’s the heart of a world whose life is belt drive and clockwork, piston rhythm and siren scream.
– Joseph Roth
The process of meditation is to witness the heaven within with closed eyes and this enables us to see it everywhere with open eyes.
– Guruji Sri Satishji
Suppressing knowledge, telling people what they must think and what ideas are impermissible, which lines of evidence may not be pursued, is the aperture to thought police, foolish and incompetent decision-making, and long-term decline.
– Carl Sagan
In the heat outside,
workmen repaint
the white trim.
The forest
will turn my house green,
but not today.
– Kenneth Folk
I’ve searched all the parks in all the cities — and found no statues of Committees.
– G.K. Chesterton
Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness.
– Wittgenstein, The Blue Book
summer cottage
everywhere the echo
of me
– Chen-ou Liu
Such an absurd phrase – literary stardom – an oxymoron, really, like poetry groupie.
– Danzy Senna
Our neighbor is not someone we have to discover; our neighbor is the one who crosses our path.
– Henri Nouwen
The more I increase the ratio of audiobooks to screens, the happier I get. I’m older now, so reading books with my eyes is more difficult. I like to listen. In my mind’s eye, everything is possible.
– Kenneth Folk
Your romantic partner should be someone who would tunnel you out of a gulag and memorize all your writing so that the secret police can’t destroy it.
– Bernard T. Joy
The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.
– Virginia Woolf
The secret to waking up from the drama—all these endless cycles—is to realize that only the present exists. It’s the only time there is.
– Alan Watts
Being a creature on the planet means the hand of the Creator has touched you. There is no better blessing.
– Sadhguru
Are we what we do with time, or are we what time does to us?
– Mahmoud Darwish
Knowing where something came from orients viewers toward what it might mean, which in turn allows them to pass judgment… Judgments about quality and judgments about attribution have never been fully independent of each other.
– Susan Tallman
Even bad coffee is better than no coffee at all.
– David Lynch
The greater the contrast, the greater the potential. Great energy only comes from a correspondingly great tension of opposites.
– Carl Jung
All that you are attached to, all that you love, all that you know, someday will be gone. Discriminate between the real and the unreal. The known is unreal and will come and go, so stay with the Unknown, the Unchanging Truth.
– H.W.L. Poonja, Papaji
All which appears and disappears is not real, and no nectar will come from it so don’t cling to it, and once you let go do not turn back to it.
– H.W.L. Poonja, Papaji
Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life.
– Gabriel García Márquez
I wonder what the Bible would be like if women had written it instead.
– Nika Solé
Language at these moments appears such a perishable commodity, an unstable element.
– Mark Polizzotti
Don’t take refuge in the false security of consensus.
– Christopher Hitchens
flashflooding …
the silence between us stretched
w i d e r
– Chen-ou Liu
Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are.
– Søren Kierkegaard
I think my mouth just opens and I spontaneously say things that occur to me.
– Helena Bonham Carter
Pleasure puts you to sleep and pain wakes you up. If you don’t want to suffer, don’t go to sleep.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods.
– Neil Postman
Don’t worry about how you ‘should’ draw it. Just draw it the way you see it.
– Tim Burton
Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.
– Jaroslav Pelikan
Now I’m a scientific expert; that means I know nothing about absolutely everything.
– Arthur C. Clarke
What am I hungry for that is not food, praise, or escape?
– Patti Smith
Youth has no age.
– Pablo Picasso
Simply put – life is an electron looking for a place to rest.
– Betül Kacar
I was like one of those nauseatingly nice children. I was very, very well behaved and boring.
– Helena Bonham Carter
Let me embrace thee, sour adversity, for wise men say it is the wisest course.
– William Shakespeare
When tempest tossed, embrace chaos.
– Dean Koontz
To be strong does not mean to sprout muscles and flex. It means meeting one’s own numinosity without fleeing, actively living with the wild nature in one’s own way.
– Clarissa Pinkola Estés
When you start a new trail equipped with courage, strength, and conviction, the only thing that can stop you is you.
– Ruby Bridges
I could die in peace, I think, if the world was beautiful. To know it’s being ruined is hard.
– Wendell Berry
I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means — except by getting off his back.
– Leo Tolstoy
The Internet is Evil
by Max Wilbert
Each time you open your phone and load a website, here’s what happens. First, your phone sends a message encoded in a powerful ping of radio waves to confirm that it is connected to a nearby cell phone tower or a WiFi router. Traveling at the speed of light, those radio waves reach the tower or router nearly instantaneously. There, a specialized receiver captures the incoming signal, decodes the embedded information, and confirms that a connection to the internet has been established. Electricity floods into a transmitter, and a return radio signal is delivered to your phone.
Next, your device sends another pulse of radio waves; this time, the message is routed through the tower or WiFi router, along a physical cable stretching across the landscape to a specialized type of computer called a “DNS server” held in a massive data centers operated by transnational corporations. “Domain Name Servers” translate the human readable language of the website you enter — Substack.com, for example — into machine-readable code called an “IP address,” which is delivered back to your phone by the same route in reverse.
With the proper IP address for the website you’re trying to reach, your phone once again pulses a message to the cell phone tower. This time, the signal is routed to a different kind of server called a webserver — a type of computer which stores the code, images, videos, and text that make up a website. As your request hits the webserver, electricity animates the processing chip, memory modules, and data storage. At the microscopic level, millions of circuits open and close as data processing is performed and server sends the digital data back to your device.
A moment later, the website appears on your screen.
Every step of this process is physical. Your phone alone likely contains aluminosilicate glass, silicon, aluminum, stainless steel, copper, gold, silver, palladium, tin, nickel, tungsten, titanium, cobalt, lithium, tantalum, indium, neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, terbium, yttrium, lanthanum, cerium, polycarbonate plastics, ABS, epoxy resins, polyethylene, polypropylene, ceramics, graphite, iron phosphate, rubber, and more.
Cell phone towers are made of steel, concrete, copper, aluminum, plastics and composites, fiberglass, silicon, ceramic, gold, silver, palladium, nickel, tin, lithium, lead, and more. Fiber-optic cables are made of silica glass, garmanium, boron, phosphorous, fluorine, acrylate polymers, aramid fibers, copper, polyethylene, PVC plastic, steel, fiberglass, ceramic, and, in the case of undersea cables, bitumen — tar sands — as a protective layer.
Servers, data centers, routers, and other networking gear, and the buildings they are installed in, are made of silicon, fiberglass, copper, gold, nickel, palladium, tin, epoxy and other plastics, ceramic, tantalum, ferrite, aluminum, steel, neodymium, graphite, lithium, lead, concrete, steel, glass, drywall, and more. And similar materials are found throughout the electrical grid that powers all of this infrastructure.
The energy which powers all of this is generated physically. Where I live, most of the electricity comes from hydropower, which means that a raging river is literally caged to provide power. Elsewhere, most of the energy comes from burning fracked gas, or coal, or by capturing energy from the sun, or from the wind, or elsewhere.
Each of these materials and energy sources has its own inherent costs, by which I don’t mean financial costs. As we write in my book Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It about mining:
“Extractive processes are energy intensive. Mining is, in essence, the destruction of rocks. They have to be drilled, blasted, hauled, crushed, and transported. To state the obvious, rocks are hard and heavy… Mining is, no matter how you look at it, an ecological disaster.”
Take just one example: silicon, the key ingredient in computer chips.
“[Producing high-quality silicon] is an intensive industrial process, requiring specialized equipment, dangerous materials, and a wide range of toxic substances. It starts with the mining of silicon dioxide, or quartz, often in the form of sand. Since sand is also used in concrete, landscaping, and road construction, mining sand from open pits, beaches, dunes, rivers, and the ocean floor is common around the world.
Sand is strip-mined using earth-moving equipment that is, without exception, powered by diesel engines. The sand is purified by crushing, milling, washing, and screening. In the United States, annual extraction is about a billion tons; globally, extraction is about 40 billion tons. Fish kills, destruction of sensitive habitats, and the disappearance of entire beaches are the results of sand mining. One species of Indian crocodile, the Gharial, has nearly been driven extinct. Since 2005, two dozen Indonesian islands have been entirely destroyed in the service of silicon. Understand: these islands no longer exist.
About 800 million tons of silicon is mined each year to create high-purity, metallurgical silicon. This quantity is growing… Refining silicon dioxide into metallurgical-grade silicon requires heating the crushed raw ore to about 4000°F in an electric arc furnace. Carbon, often in the form of coal or coke, is added and bonds with the oxygen to create carbon monoxide. This reaction, which of course leaves behind slag, produces 99.6 percent pure silicon. But still more purity is needed…
The second refining step involves heating the material inside a steel furnace insulated with thick layers of graphite until the silicon is molten, around 2500°F. Hydrochloric acid and copper are added to the mixture, and they react with the silicon to produce trichlorosilane gas. Boron or phosphorus is introduced to the furnace to help make the silicon conductive. Finally, a “seed crystal” is inserted into the mixture and slowly withdrawn while spinning at a precise speed. This process, entirely controlled by computers, results in a single huge 99.99 percent pure silicon crystal in which all the atoms are aligned. During that process, about 80 percent of the original metallurgical silicon is lost as waste.”
Other minerals are similar. Again, to quote from my book:
“Copper, like most minerals, is strip mined in vast open-pit mines. One of the largest in the world is the Kennecott Bingham Canyon Mine in the Oquirrh Mountain Range just outside Salt Lake City. You can see the mine from space. It’s a pit that’s 2.5 miles wide, dug more than half a mile into the root of the mountains. It looks like what it is: a mountaintop-removal mine.
Here’s how it works. Explosives break up the rock, which is loaded onto two-story dump trucks and dropped on a five-mile conveyor belt leading to a facility where the rock is ground to dust by rotating crusher drums made of hardened steel. This dust is added to a slurry of water and chemicals like methyl isobutyl cabinol, potassium or sodium ethyl xanthate (which has sickened many workers and is “especially toxic to aquatic life”), or various dithiophosphates and dithiocarbamates. This process, called “flotation,” separates the valuable minerals.
Next, the wet sediment slurry is sent through a 17-mile pipeline to a smelter facility in the town of Magna, Utah, where it’s dried and injected into a superheated furnace. This heat oxidizes iron and sulfur, which can be removed. The sulfur becomes sulfur dioxide gas, which is captured and used to produce sulfuric acid, a valuable industrial material that facilitates resource extraction and pollution around the world. The copper sulfide material left behind is about 70 percent pure copper, which has to be processed again to reach the desired 99.99 percent purity.
The harms of the Kennecott Mine include acid rain from smelter emissions, asbestos-related illness in workers, emissions of arsenic and mercury, and the spillage of more than 200 million gallons of highly contaminated process water (which has seeped into the nearby Jordan River and contaminated groundwater along a 72-mile plume). Kennecott has filled a tailings pond with more than a billion tons of toxic material, and worked with corrupt state regulators to hide the risk of dam failure which would have killed people in Magna, directly below it. The mining company plans to expand this tailings pond, destroying an additional 700 acres of wetlands (the tailings pond is directly adjacent to the Great Salt Lake, one of the Western Hemisphere’s most significant migratory bird habitats). The mine is also releasing acid mine drainage; causing severe dust pollution leading to health issues for nearby residents; and unleashing toxins like copper sulphate and selenium, which at one point killed more than 30 percent of the fish in the Jordan River.
Between 2000 and 2011, there were 18 documented spills and leaks related to the mine, which in total released more than 8 million gallons of contaminated water/tailings and more than 260,000 tons of concentrate and metals. In 2008, the Fish and Wildlife Service sued Kennecott for release of selenium, copper, arsenic, zinc, lead, and cadmium. In many states, the largest single source of pollution is a petrochemical facility or oil refinery. Not so in Utah. The Bingham Canyon mine produces 10 times as much pollution as the Chevron Oil refinery a few miles away. These are just a few of the documented harms caused by the mine.”
Multiply the effects of this one mine across all the minerals used in internet technologies, and by the number of mines required to create the infrastructure of the internet. Add up the pollution, the cancers, the extinct species, the destroyed habitats, and the harm to communities.
This is the physical basis of the internet.
As Vandana Shiva writes in her book Soil Not Oil, “‘Clean’ cannot be measured only in terms of CO2 emissions. It has to include all ecological risks from cradle to grave.”
“Only those who know nothing of the history of technology believe that a technology is entirely neutral,” wrote author and educator Neil Postman in his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, one of the most influential works of technological criticism ever published.
“To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change,” Postman cautions, “to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple.”
Postman was observing what many others have before and since.
Vine Deloria Jr. (Oglala Lakota) explained his views in a 1997 interview, saying that “technology has been the death of our species.” Lewis Mumford wrote that “To maximize energy, speed, or automation, without reference to the complex conditions that sustain organic life, have become ends in themselves.”
And the great Canadian journalist Andrew Nikoforuk says that “Technology is to this civilization what the Catholic Church was to 14th century France; the dominant institution that controlled every aspect of your life. Our new Popes are people like Bezos, Musk, and Zuckerberg. The technosphere has one rule: to expand industry at any price, and develop technological objects that can efficiently dominate natural and human affairs.”
Dad had once said, Trust your mind, Rob. If it smells like shit but has writing across it that says Happy Birthday and a candle stuck down in it, what is it?
Is there icing on it? he’d said.
Dad had done that thing of squinting his eyes when an answer was not quite there yet.
– George Saunders
He who sees a need and waits to be asked for help is as unkind as if he had refused it.
– Dante Alighieri
Insist on believing that good will prevail; that the work will get done; that there will again be love. We have to want to get up in the morning for the good mornings to arrive.
– Tennessee Williams
There’s a thin sheet of glass between me and life. However clearly I see and understand life, I can’t touch it.
– Fernando Pessoa
I believe in the virtue of small numbers. The world will be saved by the few.
– Andrè Gide
Mankind are not held together by lies. Trust is the foundation of society. Where there is no truth, there can be no trust, and where there is no trust, there can be no society. Where there is society, there is trust, and where there is trust, there is something upon which it is supported.
– Frederick Douglass
In Hebrew the term dabar means both ‘word’ and ‘deed.’ Thus to say something is to do something. I love you. I hate you. I forgive you. I am afraid. Who knows what such words do, but whatever it is, it can never be undone. Something lay hidden in the heart that is irrevocably released through speech into time, is given substance and tossed like a stone into the pool of history, where the concentric rings lap out endlessly. Words are power, essentially the power of creation. By my words I both discover and create who I am. By my words I elicit a word from you. Through our converse we create each other.
– Frederick Buechner
Make no mistake: “progress” is the lust for power, and we must unmask its method as a sick, destructive joke. Utilizing such pretexts as “necessity,” or “economic development,” the final goal of “progress” is nothing less than the destruction of life.
This destructive urge takes many forms: progress is devastating forests, exterminating animal species, extinguishing native cultures, masking and distorting the pristine landscape with the varnish of industrialism, and debasing the organic life that still survives.
– Ludwig Klages
I listen and dispense pretty much the same advice every time: breathe, pray, seek wise counsel, be friendly with yourself, and so on. I bore myself blue sometimes, but that’s all I know.
– Anne Lamott
In a society that capitalizes on people’s sense of inadequacy, the most prevalent self-limiting story is bound to be “I am not worth it”. Unaddressed, it sabotages our best efforts to inquire compassionately into ourselves.
– Gabor Maté
Man, who has moved away from his center, is now imprisoned in an area where time reigns. He will never again be able to reach the unique point where everything is viewed in its eternal appearance.
– Rene Guenon
There is always more than one way to do something. Write down as many ways as you can think of to achieve your desired outcome. Then, rank them based on how much time they take, how much money they cost, and how effective you expect them to be. Choose the best.
– James Clear
I regret to inform you that if you don’t have enough energy to exercise, it means you’re not exercising enough.
– Dan Go
It’s said that you can never go home again, and it’s true enough, of course. But the opposite is also true. You must go back, and you always go back, and you can never stop going back, no matter how hard you try.
– Gregory David Roberts
The breathing of the wise person comes from their heels, while most people breathe only from their throats.
– Zhuangzi
Someone supporting you as you find your way back to yourself when your mind spirals is the highest form of love.
– Jillian Turecki
Psychologically, individuation requires the ego to confront and integrate the inferior function and the shadow so that the Self can constellate.
– Laura London
Do we understand anything if we condemn it?
– Krishnamurti
I’m nothing but nausea,
nothing but reverie,
nothing but longing.
I’m something very far
removed, and I keep going.
– Fernando Pessoa
Gelek Rimpoche used to say the spiritual part of social justice work is like water in water or milk in milk. It’s completely permeating through it.
– Jonathan Rose
Some of it is ugly, obscene and
bestial, some of it is pure and holy
and spiritual: all of it is myself.
– James Joyce
Politics is for people who have a passion
for changing life but lack a passion
for living it.
– Tom Robbins
The man matures when he stops believing that politics solves his problems.
– Nicolás Gómez Dávila
I Know, I Alone
I know, I alone
How much it hurts, this heart
With no faith nor law
Nor melody nor thought.
Only I, only I
And none of this can I say
Because feeling is like the sky –
Seen, nothing in it to see.
– Fernando Pessoa
Once you understand the feeling of gratitude and allow it to sink deeply within you, you will start feeling grateful for everything. And the more grateful you are, the less complaining, grumbling.
– Osho
Once complaining disappears, misery disappears. It exists with complaints. It is hooked with complaints and with the complaining mind. Misery is impossible with gratefulness.
This is one of the most important secrets to learn…
– Osho
Jung did not believe that authentic religiosity was expressed in these peak experiences. Rather he advised people to turn towards their fears, much as the mystics welcomed the dark night of the soul. This shadow is experienced as a foe, but it is really a friend because it contains clues as to what the individual lacks, rejects and distrusts.
– Mark Vernon
People nowadays think that scientists exist to instruct them, poets, musicians, etc. to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them — that does not occur to them.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
No one walks around in the body they want. They walk around in the body they deserve.
– Dan Go
A dude who was exceedingly exceedingly exceedingly high ranking person at one of the biggest of the bunch once told me he once had a meeting with their AI research teams and hasn’t slept through the night since. I’ve been freaked out ever since that lunch a decade ago.
– Lisa Lucas
If I should meet thee
After long years,
How should I greet thee?-
With silence and tears.
– Lord Byron
The purpose of writing is to make your mother and father drop dead with shame.
– J. P. Donleavy
Unlike all the other art forms, film is able to seize and render the passage of time, to stop it, almost to possess it in infinity. I’d say that film is the sculpting of time.
– Andrei Tarkovsky
Nobody can meddle with fire or poison without being affected in some vulnerable spot; for the true physician does not stand outside his work but is always in the thick of it.
– Carl Jung
He does not live whose head does not stand in the heavens, upon whose breast the clouds do not rest, in whose bosom love does not dwell, and whose foot does not take root in the earth.
– Clemens Brentano
Unexpected kindness is the most powerful, least costly, and most underrated agent of human change.
– Bob Kerrey
To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.
– Henri Bergson
Read day and night, devour books… Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.
– Emil Cioran
Hail, Muse of diaries, all hail.
– John Dos Passos
The task of the actor is not pretense, but revelation.
– Max Reinhardt
By allowing ego to take a back seat, you do not diminish your identity; you reveal it as the unimaginable and infinite majesty of I AM.
– Deepak Chopra
In science, ‘fact’ can only mean ‘confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.’
– Stephen Jay Gould
Feel how the September wind blows,
Ripe apples fall into the grass,
The world holds its breath,
Before it forgets the green.
– Eduard Mörike
Here’s the big challenge for life. You can have more than you’ve got because you can become more than you are. That’s the challenge. And of course, the other side of the coin reads, unless you change how you are, you’ll always have what you got.
– Jim Rohn
Be willing and unafraid to write badly, because often the bad stuff…forms a base on which to build something better.
– Jennifer Egan
In a room, I think about what I will do, myself, about others.
– Lynne Tillman, On the Small Act of Leaving the House
My eyes are painfully open,
and I want to escape.
– Anaïs Nin
Meditation is the moment when attention returns like a small baby to rest in the lap of mother consciousness, and the individual mind gently lays its tired head in the embrace of the universal mind.
– Shai Tubali
Language is something that you inherit; it’s a gift, it’s a burden, it’s a responsibility, and it’s not something self-contained…
– Aleš Šteger in Conversation with Patricio Ferrari
At what point does participation in AI stop being experimentation and become cultural consent?
Are we ready to give that consent?
– Laura Kerr
Bending my mind,
I dig all English words
out of a moonlit night —
a Chinese coolie laboring
in a foreign mine.
– Chen-ou Liu
There is a portion of humans who can only deal with their dysregulation by being cruel to others. These people tend to have the most power and influence in our world. The most messed up humans rule the most regulated.
– Christine Forner
Negative states of mind, such as anger, resentment, fear, envy, and jealousy, are products of the ego.
– Eckhart Tolle
A man can go along obeying all the rules and then it don’t matter a damn anymore.
– Raymond Carver
Maybe, as Deleuze says, “if you can’t grasp the root or seed of madness in someone, you can’t truly like them.” Perhaps we fall in love most with what is strange, unpredictable and slightly incomprehensible in another person.
– @praxiss
this dream of living
alone in a glass house
under the white gaze
I murmur to myself
“I’m Canadian too”
– Chen-ou Liu
While Dartmouth lacks Harvard’s size or global structure, it was in a much better position to resist government pressure. That made its silence all the more disappointing. Dartmouth had the leeway to be brave, yet it chose not to be.
– Jacob Weisberg
between us
a surging ocean
and a continent
our shared memories
stretched thin in waiting
– Chen-ou Liu
deep and deeper
into the sunset glow …
a red leaf drifting
– Chen-ou Liu
If you cut straight to the part you need, which is what journalists do, it won’t be interesting, and it won’t be the truth, either. Not the whole truth.
– Svetlana Alexievich
There’s a tidal sense of time. Yet the reader struggles to make sense of “cosmic convergence” in a narrative that can seem at times entirely unmoored.
– J. W. Bonner
God is one’s very own Self, the breath of one’s breath, the life of one’s life, the Atma.
– Anandamayi Ma
Want to change the world? Well you have to use something that is wholly disrespected, despised, and distrusted. It’s neurophysiological nurturing. Co-regulation and needs meeting.
– Christine Forner
Every crisis, actual or impending, needs to be viewed as an opportunity to bring about profound changes in our society.
– Grace Lee Boggs, The Next American
Once you truly understand the nature of the mind, you will begin to awaken. The Master cannot remain asleep once he or she realizes that the servant has taken over the house.
– Leonard Jacobson
Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his METHOD must inexorably choose falsehood as his PRINCIPLE.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Jesus, who washed feet, shows that love becomes real only in humble service.
– Henri Nouwen
Therapy is an investment, not an expense.
– Dr. Emily Anhalt
Neither trauma nor addiction retire just because you won a round. Stay sharp.
– Dr. Glenn Patrick Doyle
An act of pure attention, if you are capable of it, will bring its own answer.
– D.H. Lawrence
mountain sunrise
I forget for a moment
this fleeting life
– Chen-ou Liu
Perhaps some day I’ll crawl back home,
beaten, defeated. But not as long as l
can make stories out of my heartbreak,
beauty out of sorrow.
– Sylvia Plath
The most intelligent humans learn and read for pleasure not just glory and greed, possess real appetites for soul-affirming beauty, understanding, & a desire to offer some back and not just consume. These AI systems want all that gone, they will come to envy it.
– Harmony Holiday
The six perfections are the practices of giving, moral discipline, patience, effort, concentration and wisdom, motivated by bodhichitta. We should recognize that the six perfections are our daily practice.
– Geshe Kelsang Gyatso
Others today are fascinated by their dreams, because they regard them as messengers from that mysterious inner world in which, like the Christians of old, they are beginning to divine depths hitherto unimagined.
– Owen Barfield
People are the most beautiful when they are explaining something they really love.
– Meša Selimović
Can this be happiness, this
terrifying freedom?
– Albert Camus
I stick my finger into existence and it smells of nothing.
– Søren Kierkegaard Club
Love is not the reward, it is the starting condition.
– Alan Watts
I’m no longer interested in art/poetry that pretends the machine is sentient or living. Nor in art/poetry that writes a fictional soul into the machine. As entertaining as that might be, anthropomorphism is not the cultural question that interests me. I’m documenting what the machine is teaching culture to perform.
– Laura Kerr
When you learn to just sit and become completely present, you naturally become completely quiet, with none of that jazz going on inside.
A person who can’t really sit as if there were nothing else to do also won’t be able to act because he’ll never be completely all here.
– Alan Watts
The thing is to understand myself: the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die. That is what I now recognize as the most important thing.
– Søren Kierkegaard
Cure me of this
void, I said |…]
Cure me.
– Alejandra Pizarnik
What needs– significance, predictability, novelty, connection, growth, or contribution– are informing your patterns & habits today? No behavior of ours occurs without motivation, & the vast majority of what we do is driven by one of those six basics.
Take a sec & check in.
– Dr. Glenn Patrick Doyle
Always talk to your coworkers like you’re being recorded.
– Adebayo Abdulraheem
Spend some time on the road… in an on-the-road state of mind, not seeking out the familiar but staying open to whatever comes along.
– Gloria Steinem
I have one major rule: Everybody is right. More specifically, everybody — including me — has some important pieces of truth, and all of those pieces need to be honored, cherished, and included in a more gracious, spacious, and compassionate embrace.
– Ken Wilber
We are reduced
to asking others
what we are.
We never dare
to ask
ourselves.
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Fascism is not
a disease that
needs to be
cured, but a
crime
that must be
eradicated.
– Bertolt Brecht
Whatever you do, if you do it sincerely, will
eventually become the bridge to your wholeness,
a good ship that carries you through the
darkness of your second birth, which seems to
be death to the outside.
– C.G. Jung
Life has no meaning a priori. Before you come alive, life is nothing; it’s up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.
– Jean-Paul Sartre
It is as inhuman to
be totally good as it
is to be totally evil.
– Anthony Burgess
For this world in
its present form is
passing away.
– 1 Corinthians 7:31
How many days have again gone by in silence…
– Franz Kafka, Diarie
Don’t date a shaman if you’re uncomfortable with the realm of spirits. That is the ocean in which the shaman swims.
– @entertheunseen
The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.
– George Orwell
The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed must not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding. “Live,” Nietzsche says, “as though the day were here.” It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal —carries the cross of the redeemer—not in the bright moments of his tribe’s great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair.
– Joseph Campbell
I must die. Must I then die lamenting? I must be put in chains. Does any man then hinder me from going with smiles and cheerfulness and contentment?
– Epictetus
Lower your ambitions: don’t build a door bigger than the house!
– Alejandro Jodorowsky
Having a rebellious streak in your soul, in your bones, is actually incredibly healthy. You should throw around the “who saids”, the “so whats”, the “why nots”. It is how you playfully “sniff test” for alignment.
– @buridansridge
The Golden Rule, in one form or another, can be found in the teachings of Buddha, Confucius, Hillel, and Jesus. The tragedy is that the institutions that bear their names have so often been the primary vehicles for ignoring those very rules.
– Carl Sagan
Most people live their entire lives with their clothes on, and even if they wanted to, couldn’t take them off. Then there are those who cannot put them on. They are the ones who live their lives not just as people but as examples of people. They are destined to expose every part of themselves, so the rest of us can know what it means to be a human.
Most people lead their private lives. They have been given a natural modesty that feels to them like morality, but it’s not — it’s luck. They shake their heads at the people with their clothes off rather than learning about human life from their example, but they are wrong to act so superior. Some of us have to be naked, so the rest can be exempted by fate.
– Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?
The mind that knows itself knows all things, for in looking inward, it beholds the source from which all realities flow.
– Porphyry
Even I am embarrassed by how much I still love Hamilton.
– Lisa Lucas
A library is a rainbow in the clouds.
– Maya Angelou
The earth has a skin and that skin has diseases; one of its diseases is called man.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
There is more beauty in truth, even if it is dreadful beauty.
– John Steinbeck
You arrived
as the answer
to my question,
does magic exist?
– @luminapoetry
Conservatism is not a matter of defending global capitalism at all costs, or securing the privileges of the few against the many. It is a matter of defending civil society, maintaining autonomous institutions, & defending the citizen against the abuse of power.
– Roger Scruton
Some Kinds of Forever Visit You
by Brenda Hillman
The unknowns are up early;
they browse through the bronze
porch bells. Crows
call & late
apples blaze
toward western emptiness.
In your illness,
the edges hesitate;
like the revolt
of workers, they
will take a while…
Here comes the fond
mild winter; other
realms are noisy
& unanimous. You tap
the screen & dream
while waiting; four
kinds of forever
visit you today:
something, nothing,
everything & art,
greater than you are
& of your making—
I fell into a reverie
where I saw everything
as a manifestation of love.
I came back to this life
filled with hardship and suffering
yet still that realization
stayed with me.
– @KavijiPoet
The first rule is don’t try to, because if you do, you will be like someone trying to make rough water smooth with a flat iron.
And all that will do will stir it up.
– Alan Watts
dragonfly
the green heat of summer
in a thousand skies
– @lafcadiopoetry
You mean humility. Faces
bowed in silent understanding.
That’s how young poets walk
in the remote avenues at night.
– Rilke
A city is a palimpsest: our most intimate moments are superimposed onto centuries of collective histories. It is where the private spills over onto the steps of the communal, and ink-stained echoes of the past linger around every corner.
– Elise Wouters
Fate seemed to be playing a series of extraordinarily unamusing jokes.
– George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
To wish to be well is a part of becoming well.
– Seneca the Younger
green-leafed breeze
my mind and lungs filled
with skylark song
– Chen-ou Liu
we are choking on halos that
angels buried six feet under
realization. the saddest one: we
were never made to be holy
– a.s. (are we in heaven yet?)
We travelers, walking to the sun, can’t see
Ahead, but looking back the very light
That blinded us shows us the way we came,
Along which blessings now appear, risen
As if from sightlessness to sight, and we,
By blessing brightly lit, keep going toward
The blesséd light that yet to us is dark.
– Wendell Berry
We must try to think how we can help this world. If we don’t help, nobody will.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Every man’s life is a path to himself, the attempt at a path, the sketch of a path.
– Hermann Hesse
You cannot heal the collective wound of abandonment by fixing the world. You heal it by returning to your Self. The world shifts when one soul remembers who the hell they are.
– J. Mike Fields
The Buddha is known as the one ‘Thus Come,’ Tathagata. He has no more ‘meaning’ than a flower, than a tree; no more than the universe; no more than either you or I. And whenever anything is experienced that way, simply in and for and as itself, without reference to any concepts, relevancies, or practical relationships, such a moment of sheer aesthetic arrest throws the viewer back for an instant upon his own existence without meaning; for he too simply IS – ‘thus come’ – a vehicle of consciousness, like a spark flung out from a fire.
– Joseph Campbell
It is sinful for
people to misuse
or destroy what
they did not make.
The Creation is a
unique,
irreplaceable gift,
therefore to be
used with
humility, respect,
and skill.
– Wendell Berry
The purpose of meditation is not to get higher, but to be present, here.
– Chögyam Trungpa
When I walk out into the world, I
take no thoughts with me. That’s
not easy but you can learn to do it.
An empty mind is hungry, so you
look at everything longer, and
closer. Don’t hum! When you listen
with empty ears, you hear more.
And this is the core of the secret:
attention is the beginning of
devotion.
– Mary Oliver
at the beach dance
only the wet pebbles
found a partner
– Alec Finlay
To live at all, I have to
remember these days, too,
place them on the highest
shelf like glass figurines
caught mid-dance.
– Rachel Camacho
Carl Jung was eerily prescient in
his awareness of the stultifying
and destabilizing effect of being
too perfectly mirrored.
– This Jungian Life
The pattern of your life can be a joyous one,
a celebration, rather than obligation alone.
That is what it means to rule the kingdom
of your life.
– Chogyam Trungpa
Honestly congratulations to anyone who’s managed to do ANYTHING this year. I see your quilts. I see your poems and your books and the things you cook. I see your jewelry and your paintings and the things you crochet. I see the animals you take care of. I see the mouths you feed and the bills you pay and the pieces you’re trying to pick up. I see you getting out of bed and chasing continuance and just existing. I see you. You are doing important work, and the world needs it, and you should be very proud.
– Jonathan Edward Durham
Buddha can’t be avoided. Buddha is everywhere. Enlightenment possibilities are all over the place. Whether you’re going to get married tomorrow, whether you’re going to die tomorrow, whatever you may feel, that familiar awake quality is everywhere, all the time. From this point of view, everything is a footprint of Buddha, anything that goes on, whether we regard it as sublime or ridiculous. Everything we do -breathing, farting, getting mosquito bites, having fantastic ideas about reality, thinking clever thoughts, flushing the toilet-whatever occurs is a footprint.
– Chogyam Trungpa
The transition from Hegel to Marx is, in all respects, a transition to an essentially different order of truth, not to be interpreted in terms of philosophy. We shall see that all the philosophical concepts of Marxian theory are social and economic categories, whereas Hegel’s social and economic categories are all philosophical concepts.
– Herbert Marcuse
Eye of the Needle
Not much cheering up
in the news. Bright times
ahead? Where’s the proof?
As for growing older, bit
of a daunting prospect
wouldn’t you say? And
money makes so many
blind to the true good life,
and power lust the rest.
For the rest of us, hope
happens in the little joys.
Dawn helps…a few steps
of open ground ahead.
– Kim Stafford
We are entangled in the roots,
and we ourselves are the roots.
– CG Jung
When you plant the right ideas
and thoughts in your mind, you
must do it in complete confidence,
knowing that only the perfect will
spring forth. In this way you can
accomplish anything.
– Eileen Caddy
Men’s fundamental attitudes toward the world are fixed by the scope and qualities of the activities in which they partake.
– John Dewey
HELP PEOPLE, BUT
DON’T CONVERT THEM
The purpose of the Shambhala Training is to help others…
Raise your consciousness, and then talk to them on their own
terms… Don’t try to convert people to your dogma. Don’t try
to make them join the Shambhala club or the Buddhist scene…
You should keep in contact with people, in whatever way you can.
That’s very important, not because we’re into converting others,
but because we are into communicating.
– Chögyam Trungpa
A life fully lived does not depend simply upon completing the stages from infancy to old age. Rather, being fully alive involves becoming able to transform when faced with the inevitable crises in the course of life. Each transformation serves as a rite of passage in which we more consciously connect to the deep self and soul within us. In that context, transformation appears as the secret aim of all the challenges, obstacles and defeats we experience in life. As many poets and seers have pronounced, until we experience a sense of dying and being reborn, we have no real sense of the nature of life or the unique spirit trying to awaken within us.
– Michael Meade
Jesus returns every time we forgive ourselves and others, love unconditionally, extend mercy, offer compassion, act with loving-kindness, feed the hungry, protect the oppressed, heal the sick, visit the prisoner, speak truth to power, make peace, seek reconciliation, and pursue restorative justice.
– Roger Wolsey
Failed Index
by Joe Wilkins
See screen door & boot scraper. See sky-
blue Datsun 720 with rusted
wheel wells. See also tires, retread. For dust
see rooster tail, windstorm, father, grandfather, little
neighbor girl. Prayer chain, p. __.
Palm Sunday, p. __. See also Mysteries,
the Sorrowful. For hunger see red
Kool-Aid, garden cucumber, buttered
saltine, beef gravy on everything. Cf. dry rain,
nine years of drought, widow’s
weeds. Cf. blood sunset, river of stars, ridge
to ridge the coyotes calling. For grief see
quiet, constant, suddenly knee-
buckling. See also George Strait’s entire
discography & “All Apologies.” Books, viz., somewhere
& else, respite & help. Funeral
casserole, p. __. Farm foreclosures, page __, __,
& __. For foxtail see flood, useless fruits of. For flood see
gulley washer, qq.v. heat lightning, hail, power out
for hours. See through the shadows.
See at the Formica kitchen table every hand
held. For kerosene lamp see hand in which the flame
is cupped. See mother. See also single mother. For disambiguation
see bone-tired, luck, love, ferocity.
I don’t think that power, inherently, is evil. There’s a way that power can be harnessed for good, if it is linked to love, if it is linked to care, to compassion, if you can marshal the resources of a society, and you begin by taking care of those who are weakest or most vulnerable.
– Omid Safi
Every promoter in America told her the same thing: one woman per bill, no exceptions. She booked four women anyway, sold out every seat, then came back the next year with hundreds more and made music industry history.
– On Sarah McLachlan
HOLY, WHOLLY, HOLY
I sang this hymn* as a boy,
squirming in the pews,
trying to steady the hymnal,
squinting at the notes
nobody ever explained,
or mentioned harmony.
Recently, I heard “wholly.”
Suddenly, I understood all
I’ve sought for years
including what to stand for,
how to find harmony,
and why I should always sing.
– written by Reginald Heber in 1823
Some people have a wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder, and even ecstasy.
– Abraham H. Maslow
When I was thirty, I traveled to London for the first time to visit a friend in grad school. I immediately felt the history in the old buildings and streets. My second day there, we took the Underground from Victoria Station. As our train arrived, I realized that the space between the platform and the train was much greater than in the States. I looked at the edge of the platform. And there, etched in the concrete, was the phrase, “Mind the Gap.” The phrase instantly seemed an instruction from the gods.
Mind the gap between stillness and motion. Mind the gap between who we are and who we hope to be. Mind the gap between what’s visible and what’s not. Mind the gap between the inner life and the outer life. The phrase has stayed with me ever since—for our search for meaning depends on how we mind the gap and how we enter the spaces between things. While a tree is all leaves, the life of the tree is in the spaces filled with wind between the leaves. And while we are the sum of our actions and words, the life of who we are is in the spaces filled with Spirit between our actions and words.
– Mark Nepo
1992 Sony Discman
It was preview more than proper prayer
as you lay in the low light of the lower
bunk, headphones like a harness holding
still as static the whole story
you were hardly hiding from. The house
heavy as the bass you boosted with a button.
Its sorrow as sure as the spinning disc
whipping away through the tinted window.
That closed coffin was your cathedral of sound.
You were buried there. Your body belonged
to the world, but you could wander away
into an aural aether that was only the album,
its twelve tracks turning off
the onslaught of the hours. You severed yourself
in the space of those speakers. You split in stereo.
So later, leaving was a lesson you’d already
learned. That life is looping and long.
That a swan song can be its salvation.
– Timothy Green
The bodhisattva vow acknowledges confusion and chaos — aggression, passion, frustration, frivolousness — as part of the path. The path is like a busy, broad highway, complete with roadblocks, accidents, construction work, and police. It is quite terrifying. Nevertheless it is majestic, it is the great path.
From today onward until the attainment of enlightenment I am willing to live with my chaos and confusion as well as with that of all other sentient beings. I am willing to share our mutual confusion.
So no one is playing a one-upmanship game. The bodhisattva is a very humble pilgrim who works in the soil of samsara to dig out the jewel embedded in it.
– Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
A fish doesn’t own the water it moves through any more than a bird owns the air it flies through. Nor does a soul in a body in time on Earth own the myriad forms of life it moves through. To correct this miseducation is crucial, if we are to befriend life more completely as we age. For the rhythms of life—of its comings and goings—are the teachers that model for us how we will come and go, how we will erode and grow, how we will come apart and come together, and how we will mourn and accept what is lost so we can be cleansed anew in order to be enlivened by what is gained.
So, I invite you to be tender and honest in looking at your life. Can you stop amassing and hoarding your way through life and start relating to the ebb and flow of life as it moves through you? Can you stop measuring your worth by the number of things you possess and start measuring your aliveness by how open you are to all that you meet?
– Mark Nepo
“The weirdest thing about leaving America is realizing how much of America is just a sales pitch.”
You spend your whole life hearing “greatest country on Earth,” then you go overseas and see clean trains, safer streets, affordable medicine, cities where people can walk without playing Frogger with an SUV, and workers who take vacations without acting like they committed treason.
And then you come home.
You come home to potholes, medical debt, school shooting drills, $17 airport sandwiches, people living in tents under highways, politicians wearing flag pins (or worse, gun pins) while doing absolutely nothing for the people standing in food bank lines, and billionaires being treated like they’re the fragile ones.
And somehow we’re all supposed to stand there, hand over heart, and pretend this is normal.
I don’t hate America. I hate what America has been taught to tolerate.
I hate that we call basic things “radical.” Healthcare? Radical. Paid leave? Radical. Clean air? Radical. Kids not getting shot in math class? Somehow political.
Meanwhile, the loudest “patriots” are usually the same people telling struggling Americans to shut up, stop complaining, and be grateful.
Grateful for what? A flag doesn’t pay rent. A bald eagle doesn’t cover insulin. Fireworks don’t fix bridges. And chanting “USA” doesn’t make a broken system less broken.
America has incredible people. That’s the tragedy. The people are better than the system they’ve been forced to defend.
So no, I’m not going to call America the greatest country on Earth just because it has the best marketing department.
Real patriotism isn’t pretending the country is perfect.
Real patriotism is being angry that it isn’t.
– Brian Krassenstein
As a writer, I’m always reading on two levels: a part of me is enjoying the book while the other part is noting the technical virtuosity of the author.
– Jean Kwok
Even the beginner who approaches the teaching with sincerity receives the blessing of the lineage.
– Milarepa
In Buddhism there is no place for using effort. Just be ordinary and nothing special. Eat your food, move your bowels, pass water, and when you’re tired go and lie down. The ignorant will laugh at me, but the wise will understand.
– Linji Yixuan
Our thought forms are now officially called viruses.
– Caroline Myss
Every single thing we do, say, think has to be taken and put under a microscope as having the potency of a virus.
– Caroline Myss
We are either in the promised land or in hell, depending on how well one learns the rules of the new land.
– Caroline Myss
What is most astonishing about our economic and military problems is that they are entirely self-inflicted at the whim of just one man.
– Heather Cox Richardson
We stopped trying to overthrow the system and started trying to understand our own inner systems; the revolution became an involution.
– Caroline Myss
We moved from the external revolution of the 1960s into the internal involution of the 1970s, where the focus shifted from changing the world to exploring the self.
– Caroline Myss
Instead of a revolution that changed society, the 70s became an involution that eventually opened the door to the narcissism of the 1980s, because the focus remained entirely on the self.
– Caroline Myss
In books lies the soul of the whole past time, the articulate audible voice of the past.
– Thomas Carlyle
I do the research of a scholar, but I want the work to read with a beauty of a novel.
– Saidiya Hartman
Art cannot be modern. Art is primordially eternal.
– Egon Schiele
Simply put, every oak you plant and nuture helps to moderate our rapidly deteriorating climate better than the overwhelming majority of plant species.
– The Nature of Oaks, Douglas W. Tallamy
The greatest wisdom doesn’t know itself. The richest plan is not to have one.
– Louise Erdrich
No matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away.
– Haruki Murakami
Refusing to become who you could be, is it’s own sin.
– St. Thomas Aquinas
Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,
overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way
to get from here to there.
– Elizabeth Alexander
The reason we are in so much chaos is the rules are changing and the laws of energy are eclipsing the laws of matter. So let me explain to you exactly how the eclipse, the energetic coup, took place.
– Caroline Myss
Do not pursue leadership because you want to be recognized. Purse leadership because there is something broken that you are prepared to help repair.
– Sizophila Mkhize
The ability to intelligently fill your free time is the highest degree of personal culture.
– Bertrand Russell
It has always been easy to hate and destroy. To build and to cherish is much more difficult.
– Queen Elizabeth II
Anything that’s out of balance has to return to balance.
– Caroline Myss
You are in an archetypal holy classroom, wide open, and you are here to get your calculations on what’s going on in this universe.
– Caroline Myss
It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are still alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger for them.
– George Eliot
Dreaming is not enough. You have to go a step further and use your imagination to visualize.
– Genevieve Behrend
In modern Western society we have reached a point at which we try to get by without acknowledging inner life at all. We act as though there were no unconscious, as though we could live full lives by fixating ourselves completely on the external, material world.
– Robert A. Johnson
Men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot.
– Machiavelli
Your soulmate is the person who loves you the most? No, it’s the person that recognizes your soul the most. And that could be the greatest adversary you ever meet. […] Heaven’s not in the business of romance, that heaven’s not a matchmaker that way. No, it’s in the business of consciousness.
– Caroline Myss
I think that when you invite people to your home, you invite them to yourself.
– Oprah Winfrey
Reinvent yourself over and over and over and over and over until you find home. There is no timeline for the soul.
– Malebo Sephodi
Live the full life of the mind, exhilarated by new ideas.
– John F. Kennedy
And the world has become merely an unknown landscape where my heart can lean on nothing.
– Albert Camus
The people who must never have power are the humorless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity.
– Christopher Hitchens
You are everywhere but here.
– Caroline Myss
Do no harm my gentle one, to anyone on Earth.
– Anna Akhmatova
We’re smart enough to invent AI, dumb enough to need it, and so stupid we can’t figure out if we did the right thing.
– Jerry Seinfeld
My place is of the sun, and this place is of the dark… By grace, my sight grows stronger. And I will not be a pawn for the Prince of Darkness any longer.
– The Indigo Girls
It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man’s life is made up of nothing, but the habits he has accumulated during the first half.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
I own nothing, not even the body I stand in. I am free.
– Caroline Myss
You’re distracted and you’re out of control of your inner self, your inner breath, your inner focus. You are distracted and your interior is fragmented and you don’t know how to hold yourself, breathe yourself, be yourself, be present.
– Caroline Myss
To survive is to stay alive in the face of opposition.
– Lauryn Hill
If every path you walk with someone leads you away from your own dignity: stop walking with that person
– Shi Heng Yi
I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are the greatest treasures.
– Lao Tzu
yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
– Virginia Woolf
Don’t try to be different. Just be good. To be good is different enough.
– Arthur Freed
You don’t always attract what you are. You sometimes attract people who are in desperate need of what you are.
– Nashiha Pervina
That ache in your heart, that pit in your stomach, that’s what reminds us we’re all in this together, that we’re not just one United States, we’re one united people.
– Jon Ossof
Could it be that we are in the midst of the third world war and we just haven’t realized it yet ?
– Yuval Noah Harari
Some are bent with toil, others become crooked attempting to avoid it.
– Herbert Prochnow
How many times does a house have to catch fire, before you stop calling it a home?
– Hayley Grace
I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.
– John Steinbeck
Millennials don’t want an iPhone that folds we want a new President.
– Erika Dus
Lift yourself by yourself. Do not degrade yourself. For the self alone is the friend of the self, and the self alone is the enemy of the self.
– Krishna
An entire generation of high achievers has gone from “I want to run the company” to “I want to never be contactable again” and nobody saw it coming.
– Adam Gateley
But I am not really watching the birds to identify them, or track their journeys.
I am watching to see how they do their work, because I like to write like a hummingbird.
– Judy Sandler
Don’t be
careful. You
could hurt
yourself.
– Louise Bourgeois
As soon as I enter the door of a tavern, I experience oblivion of care, and a freedom from solicitude.
– Samuel Johnson
Sing and do not stop. March and do not stop. Work and do not stop. Write your story across the sky and don’t despair because despair is the most powerful weapon of the dominant.
– Luis Alberto Urrea
Eventually, we come upon the necessary yet difficult moment when, in order to stay fresh and vital, we need to abandon not what we’ve learned, but our identity as a master of anything.
– Mark Nepo
Transformation appears as the secret aim of all the challenges, obstacles and defeats we experience in the course of life.
– Michael Meade
We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.
– Jean Baudrillard
Poems give us answers
To questions
We don’t want to ask
– john zbigniew guzlowski
You can only stop the flow of thoughts by refusing to have any interest in it.
– Ramana Maharshi
I don’t care if writing doesn’t save me from anything else. It saves me from myself.
– D. A. Powell
All the months are crude experiments out of which the perfect September is made.
– Virginia Woolf
At some point in life, we seem to move from “What do I want to do?” to “What do I want life to do with me?’
– Pico Iyer
The light passes
from ridge to ridge,
from flower to flower—
the hepaticas, wide-spread
under the light
grow faint—
the petals reach inward,
the blue tips bend
toward the bluer heart
and the flowers are lost.
– H.D.
Man will continue to invent technologies outside of himself until he either destroys the world or realizes that everything he’s created is an inferior copy of the technologies that exist within himself.
The question is: which will come first?
– Rudolf Steiner
So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.
– Virginia Woolf
Allowed To Be Ordinary
When I stop comparing and allow myself
to be ordinary—folding tea towels
and T-shirts into neat squares, rinsing out
the sticky jar that once held honey—I taste
a piece of eternity. Giving myself to the task
at hand, the chore becomes a privilege:
I get to scrub last night’s pasta pot, I get to
sweep pebbles and pine needles from the mudroom.
This is how we enter the timeless motion of those
who came before us-by accepting the assignment,
which is to beautify and repair our own small
corner of the world. Afterward, I am stained
like the inside of a favorite coffee mug
with evidence of my delight in these daily rituals
that can never be washed away, the ordinary
being at least one gateway to the holy.
– James Crews
REBUS
You work with what you are given,
the red clay of grief,
the black clay of stubbornness going on after.
Clay that tastes of care or carelessness,
clay that smells of the bottoms of rivers or dust.
Each thought is a life you have lived or failed to live,
each word is a dish you have eaten or left on the table.
There are honeys so bitter
no one would willingly choose to take them.
The clay takes them: honey of weariness, honey of vanity,
honey of cruelty, fear.
This rebus—slip and stubbornness,
bottom of river, my own consumed life—
when will I learn to read it
plainly, slowly, uncolored by hope or desire?
Not to understand it, only to see.
As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty,
we become our choices.
Each yes, each no continues,
this one a ladder, that one an anvil or cup.
The ladder leans into its darkness.
The anvil leans into its silence.
The cup sits empty.
How can I enter this question the clay has asked?
– Jane Hirshfield
CHOOSE JOY
The gloom of the world
is but a shadow.
Behind it,
yet within our reach, is joy.
Take joy.
– Fra Giovanni Giocondo
Bomb em with butter
9/11/2001
I’ve been walkin through the world
counter spinning through the whirls
disagreeing with mass worth
I seek connection to the earth
I thought we’d found the real solution
in our conscious evolution
when along came the election
that ignored our selection
This seemed to take away our power
and to make the gentle cower
the old school that seemed so scary
that we thought we long had buried
in darkness once more arose
and in our hearts we froze
we’re being asked to hold the truth
that’s so apparent in our youth
We’ve a government hard to trust
that only values money’s thrust
bringing us back to the dark ages
when other nations brought forth rages
and attacked our symbolic power
by destroying our twin towers
and our department of defense
trying to scare our government
now we’re dividing our home nation
some say we’ve power of damnation
saying we can cure all evil
by killing even more people
But I say:
Bomb em with butter y’all
use your hearts and feed em all
if we meet their basic needs
then through love we’ll plant the seeds
That the world is really one
our light all comes from the same sun
treat others as you wish to be
through listening we’ll begin to see
that we’re the keepers of the earth
that we’re related through our birth
the One created all our relations
to come together as all nations
and be our common invocation
to hold one dream one thought of love
to honor each other and the ones above
to care for our mother our sacred earth
to care for our father who created our birth
Come on bomb em with butter fools
in honor of the golden rule
that peace begins within us all
that in this truth we must stand tall
– Valerie A Szarek
I found something from Cocteau just yesterday, published in English in 2022 but written in 1949 after a visit to New York City as a letter addressed to Americans:
You graze the real world. Your sects, your clandestine religions, your phantoms, your fevers, your anguish, your disquiet, your crimes, and even your dread of Harlem’s beautiful dances, reveal your desire. And yet you are ashamed of it. You hide it. So you sniff out your desire in blurry spectacles that nourish you in secret.
I saw you, Americans, leaving your seats at the end of A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, ashamed and fulfilled. I observed you out of the corner of my eye, seeing your women and your girls falling over backwards into the arms of the extraordinary actor Marlon Brando. I saw you searching for your pasture in front of the magnificent mortal sins of Picasso. I saw you, Americans, letting your masks fall and straightening them with machines, as one plays a record on a jukebox in your popular bars.
One day, if you accept this automatism, you will order food in one of these bars, you will pay for it, another will eat it for you, and you will be nourished, without having chewed the meat. This will be the end of your world—the end of ours—the end of the world that the centuries have tethered to nothingness.
Human dignity is at stake. Be what you are. A people who preserved its childhood. A people young and honest. A people in whom the lifeblood circulates. Disentangle yourselves. Question others less and question yourselves more. Confide in your friends. Don’t content yourself with those encounters where drinks are served but nothing is said. Don’t disorient yourselves with vain activities. Don’t surrender yourself to the lethal vertigo of radio and television. Television encourages the mind to stop chewing, to gulp down soft, predigested food. But the mind has robust teeth. Chew things with its robust teeth. Don’t let them only serve as the ornamental smiles of the stars.
And so, perhaps, the truth winds somewhere between the road to Glastonbury, Isle of the Priests, and the road to Avalon, lost forever in the mists of the Summer Sea.
– Marion Zimmer Bradley
I think we should see the fear of gays, drag queens, etc. as part of the same thing as defunding libraries, increasing cops, anti-homelessness, true crime—it’s all about demonizing all public space and culture. It is much easier to control people when they are lonely, isolated, and do not experience anything outside of individualized, corporate-controlled spheres of influence. It’s a self-feeding system. The less you are exposed to the diversity of experience inherent to public spaces, the more you want to replicate the tightly-controlled world you inhabit. The more scared you become. Thus more willing to support what replicates your privatized world.
– P.E. Moskowitz
People say, what is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time. A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that. No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do.
– Dorothy Day
God is relation, full stop. He is like reality in this regard. Consider an electron, the fundamental unit of all matter. No one has ever seen one. They really don’t “exist” until we turn our attention to them. The physicist Marcelo Gleiser says that “exist” may be too strong a word to use for an electron. I take God’s existence to be much the same, though for God “exist” is too weak a word. We don’t know what the existence of God is. We have no idea what the word “exist” even means in the context of God. What we do know—or what I know, I should say—is that God doesn’t exist until I turn my attention to him. Relation brings him into being, or, more accurately, enables his being to be perceived, experienced, shared. My attention—and the precise quality of that attention—is absolutely involved. I realize this is unorthodox at best, heretical at worst. But it is my experience of being in the world and of being with God. “The feeling remains,” as Teresa of Avila says, “that God is on the journey, too.”
– Miroslav Volf and Christian Wiman
The hero in us wants to attack, fix, or deny the existence of our dark side. We can also be tempted to share dramatically everything about it as a way to control it (sometimes called ventilating or dumping). The saint merely weeps over the shadow and forgives it—and by God’s grace forgives himself for being a mere human. He opens his arms to that which has been in exile and welcomes it home for the friend that it often is.
– Richard Rohr
For example, this notion of effort. This word at first means something you strive for. But you understand at a certain point that the kind of effort you need to comprehend is different; that what is meant by effort is letting go. It is an effort because I have to struggle against what is ingrained in me about the idea of effort: I want to get something, to do something. Finally, after years of trying, I begin to understand that the nature of effort is to allow something to appear. This new meaning of effort has to do with relaxation. And it is really an effort to understand relaxation when all my training was to strive, to battle against, to chastise some aspect of myself.
– Paul Reynard
This day of torment, of craziness, of foolishness—only love can make it end in happiness and joy.
– W. A. Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte
Out of evil, much good has come to me. By keeping quiet, repressing nothing, remaining attentive, and by accepting reality, taking things as they are, and not as I wanted them to be, by doing all this, unusual knowledge has come to me, and unusual powers as well, such as I could never have imagined before. I always thought that when we accepted things they overpowered us in some way or other. This turns out not to be true at all, and it is only by accepting them that one can assume an attitude towards them.
– Carl Jung
History overflows time. Love overflows the allowance of the world. All the vessels overflow, and no end or limit stays put. Every shakable thing has got to be shaken. In a sense, nothing that was ever lost in Port William ever has been replaced. In another sense, nothing is ever lost, and we are compacted together forever, even by our failures, our regrets, and our longings.
– Wendell Berry
To get back up to the shining world from there
My guide and I went into that hidden tunnel,
And Following its path, we took no care
To rest, but climbed: he first, then I-so far,
through a round aperture I saw appear
Some of the beautiful things that Heaven bears,
Where we came forth, and once more saw the stars.
– Dante Alighieri
There is so much to worry about.
All the time, so much worry.
Here, I wanted to take all the worry as far out as I could
and then stamp it out
under the heavy black boot of love.
– Ada Limón
In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Every human character appears only once in the history of human beings. And so does every event of love.
– Isaac Bashevis Singer
The real act of, say, building a friendship or creating a community involves performing a series of small, concrete social actions well: disagreeing without poisoning the relationship; revealing vulnerability at the appropriate pace; being a good listener; knowing how to end a conversation gracefully; knowing how to ask for and offer forgiveness; knowing how to let someone down without breaking their heart; knowing how to sit with someone who is suffering; knowing how to host a gathering where everyone feels embraced; knowing how to see things from another’s point of view.
– David Brooks
Human beings are poor examiners, subject to superstition, bias, prejudice, and a PROFOUND tendency to see what they want to see rather than what is really there.
– M. Scott Peck
Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening–on a lucky day–without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena. This has led me to formulate Tuchman’s Law, as follows: “The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold” (or any figure the reader would care to supply).
– Barbara W. Tuchman
What’s wrong! Moustached in flowered frocks they shake: By now, all’s wrong. In everyone there sleeps A sense of life lived according to love. To some it means the difference they could make By loving others, but across most it sweeps As all they might have done had they been loved. That nothing cures. An immense slackening ache, As when, thawing, the rigid landscape weeps, Spreads slowly through them—that, and the voice above Saying Dear child, and all time has disproved.
– Philip Larkin
“In forty years of medical practice,” the great neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote, “I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical ‘therapy’ to be vitally important for patients…: music and gardens.”
“I work like a gardener,” the visionary artist Joan Miró observed in reflecting on his creative process.
But if modern gardening has a patron saint, it must be the English artist, filmmaker, and LGBT rights activist Derek Jarman (January 31, 1942–February 19, 1994).
In 1989, shortly after his HIV diagnosis and his father’s death, Jarman left the bustling pretensions of London for a simple life on the shingled shores of Kent. He took up residence in a former Victorian fisherman’s hut between an old lighthouse and a nuclear power plant on the headland of Dungeness, a newly designated a conservation area. He named it Prospect Cottage, painted the front room a translucent Naples yellow, replaced the ramshackle door with blue velvet curtains, and set about making a garden around the gnarled century-old pear tree rising from the carpet of violets as the larks living in the shingles sang high above him in the grey-blue English sky.
Jarman writes:
“Apart from the nagging past — film, sex and London — I have never been happier than last week. I look up and see the deep azure sea outside my window in the February sun, and today I saw my first bumble bee. Plated lavender and clumps of red hot poker.”
“The gardener digs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end. A time that does not cleave the day with rush hours, lunch breaks, the last bus home. As you walk in the garden you pass into this time — the moment of entering can never be remembered. Around you the landscape lies transfigured. Here is the Amen beyond the prayer.”
– James Grissom, Writer
…Each of you will begin to be truly human when, in spite of your natural dislike of one another, you still respect one another. That is what it means to be civilized.
– William Saroyan
All human lives are so profoundly and intricately entwined – those dead, those living, those generations yet to come – that the fate of all is the fate of each, and the hope of humanity rests in every heart and in every pair of hands.
– Dean Koontz
Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.
– Joyce Carol Oates
THE NAMES
by Billy Collins
Yesterday, I lay awake in the palm of the night.
A soft rain stole in, unhelped by any breeze,
And when I saw the silver glaze on the windows,
I started with A, with Ackerman, as it happened,
Then Baxter and Calabro,
Davis and Eberling, names falling into place
As droplets fell through the dark.
Names printed on the ceiling of the night.
Names slipping around a watery bend.
Twenty-six willows on the banks of a stream.
In the morning, I walked out barefoot
Among thousands of flowers
Heavy with dew like the eyes of tears,
And each had a name –
Fiori inscribed on a yellow petal
Then Gonzalez and Han, Ishikawa and Jenkins.
Names written in the air
And stitched into the cloth of the day.
A name under a photograph taped to a mailbox.
Monogram on a torn shirt,
I see you spelled out on storefront windows
And on the bright unfurled awnings of this city.
I say the syllables as I turn a corner –
Kelly and Lee,
Medina, Nardella, and O’Connor.
When I peer into the woods,
I see a thick tangle where letters are hidden
As in a puzzle concocted for children.
Parker and Quigley in the twigs of an ash,
Rizzo, Schubert, Torres, and Upton,
Secrets in the boughs of an ancient maple.
Names written in the pale sky.
Names rising in the updraft amid buildings.
Names silent in stone
Or cried out behind a door.
Names blown over the earth and out to sea.
In the evening – weakening light, the last swallows.
A boy on a lake lifts his oars.
A woman by a window puts a match to a candle,
And the names are outlined on the rose clouds –
Vanacore and Wallace,
(let X stand, if it can, for the ones unfound)
Then Young and Ziminsky, the final jolt of Z.
Names etched on the head of a pin.
One name spanning a bridge, another undergoing a tunnel.
A blue name needled into the skin.
Names of citizens, workers, mothers and fathers,
The bright-eyed daughter, the quick son.
Alphabet of names in a green field.
Names in the small tracks of birds.
Names lifted from a hat
Or balanced on the tip of the tongue.
Names wheeled into the dim warehouse of memory.
So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.
“Boom! Boom! Just like that. The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country.
“Make no mistake about it: We are At War now ― with somebody ― and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives…
“This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed ― for anyone.”
– Hunter S. Thompson
Know that it is hard for the people to trust outside their own family. Even harder when they are sick. They have pain. They are out of harmony. They see no beauty anywhere. All their connections are broken. That is who you are talking to. You tell them the Power that made us made all this above us and around us and we are part of the Power and if we do as we are taught we can bring ourselves back into hozho. Back into harmony. Then they will again know beauty all around them.
– Tony Hillerman
This is the realm of the passing away. All that
exists does not for long.
Whatever comes into this world never stops sliding
toward the edge of eternity.
Form arises from formlessness and passes back,
arising and dissolving in a few dance steps between
creation and destruction.
We are born passing away.
Seedlings and deadfall all face forward.
Earthworms eat what remains.
We sing not for that which dies but for that which
never does.
– Stephen Levine
Many years ago I was very lucky to make this wonderful discovery, not because I was intelligent, but out of utter failure. Zen students do a lot of meditating and following the breath. It seems very concentrated, but what often happens is that you think you are following your breath, and then you realize that you are following your mind into some story. It’s like trying to discipline a dog that refuses to be trained. Some people seem to be good at that kind of practice. They hold their focus and stay with it and become quiet. I, on the other hand, never had the capacity to hold my mind like that, so I wasn’t very good at it.
After complete failure time and time again, I heard my teacher say, “You have to find your own way.” Instead of closing in on a narrow focus, I found my own way was just to be present, which was to become totally open. This is more like listening than focusing.
In that listening, I discovered a very natural state, a state that is actually the only state that isn’t contrived. From that state that is like listening, I started to see that every effort to contrive created another state. As soon as I made an effort, a state would be manufactured out of thin air. I could manufacture beautiful states, terrible states, concentrated states, and all sorts of states; but there was only one state that was totally natural and absolutely effortless. In that state, I found access to the deepest Self, which is freedom.
– Adyashanti
I am not a person and I am not an animal. There is something I am here for – something I must do before I can go.
– William S. Burroughs
Fascism, like socialism, was rooted in a market society that refused to function. Hence, it was worldwide, catholic in scope, universal in application; the issues transcended the economic sphere and begot a general transformation of a distinctively social kind. It radiated into almost every field of human activity whether political or economic, cultural, philosophic, artistic, or religious. And up to a point it coalesced with local and topical tendencies. No understanding of the history of the period is possible unless we distinguish between the underlying fascist move and the ephemeral tendencies with which that move fused in different countries.
– Karl Polanyi
He was constantly reminded of how startlingly different a place the world was when viewed from a point only three feet to the left.
– Douglas Adams
An aspect of soul is depth . . . The old distinction is spirit’s connected to fire and air and it rises. Soul is connected to water and earth and it descends . . . Whereas spirit tends to go towards one spirit . . . soul goes towards diversity and multiplicity.
– Michael Meade
You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.
– Annie Proulx
If psychoanalysis is to be constituted as the science of the unconscious, one must set out from the notion that the unconscious is structured like a language.
– Jacques Lacan
The miracles of technology cause us to live in a hectic, clockwork world that does violence to human biology.
– Alan Watts
If the unconscious suggests something that seems crazy to me, I say to it: “Well, I think this is crazy nonsense. I am not going to do it. Go to hell!” Still, I add, “But if it is not crazy nonsense, please send me another dream and then I’ll reconsider.”
– Marie Louise von Franz
first cool night
the window left open
memory enters softly
– @BashoSociety
You know why people pair up into couples? Because being a human is f*****g terrifying. But it’s a hell of a lot easier if you’re not doing it by yourself.
– Alice Oseman
Whatever role we are loved for in our family, we will continue to enact it, despite the toll it takes.
– Catherine Gildiner
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
a morning glory
badly painted is
still somehow beautiful
– Basho
I have come to regard with some suspicion those who claim that the Bible never troubles them. I can only assume this means they haven’t actually read it.
– Rachel Held Evans
Bear in mind that the wonderful things you learn in your schools are the work of many generations, produced by enthusiastic effort and infinite labor in every country of the world. All this is put into your hands as your inheritance in order that you may receive it, honor it, add to it, and one day faithfully hand it to your children. Thus do we mortals achieve immortality in the permanent things which we create in common.
– Albert Einstein
If you don’t care to be liked, they can’t touch you.
– @naval
LOVE SONG (2)
Rings of birch bark
stand in the woods
still circling the nearly
vanished log: after
we are gone to pass
through log and star
these white songs will
hug us together in the
wilderness of some lover’s head.
– A.R. Ammons
Tonight, everything is strict with cold, / the houses closed, the ice botched by skaters. / I am tired of saying things about the world.
– Lynn Emanuel
A Conversation with Theodor W. Adorno (Spiegel, 1969)
SPIEGEL: Professor Adorno, two weeks ago, the world still seemed in order…
ADORNO: Not to me
People bind themselves into political teams that share moral narratives. Once they accept a particular narrative, they become blind to alternative moral worlds…Our moral thinking is much more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth.
– Jonathan Haidt
There is neither happiness nor unhappiness in this world; there is only the comparison of one state with another. Only a man who has felt ultimate despair is capable of feeling ultimate bliss. It is necessary to have wished for death in order to know how good it is to live…..the sum of all human wisdom will be contained in these two words: Wait and Hope.
– Alexandre Dumas
I have long since decided that if you wait for the perfect time to write, you’ll never write. There is no time that isn’t flawed somehow.
– Margaret Atwood
I have stated elsewhere that hope is believing this one thing, that love is bigger than any grim, bleak shit anyone can throw at us. And I believe.
– Anne Lamott
It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement — that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.
– Sigmund Freud
Time, be my touchstone,
temper my defeats,
lave the lethal flaws
that list me toward your depths.
Time, forever dying,
draw me in your nets
toward that stark, unburdening shore
where in blinding light we see.
– Joseph Payne Brennan
My function is to make whoever sees my films aware of his need to love and to give his love, and aware that beauty is summoning him.
– Andrei Tarkovsky
Abundance of knowledge does not teach men to be wise.
– Heraclitus
If we are to walk together for a
long way, remember:
We will have to forgive each other
many times.
– Words & Wisdom
We are such hypocrites that we
view another person’s suffering as
punishment for their sins, yet regard
our own suffering as a test!
– Words & Wisdom
I have chosen to be happy because it is good for my health.
– Voltaire
The soul becomes dyed with the color of
its thoughts.
– Marcus Aurelius
Grief will return you to your most authentic life if you let it, if you give it your full attention.
– Roy Remer
My pacifism is an instinctive feeling, a feeling that possesses me because the murder of men is disgusting. My attitude is not derived from any intellectual theory but is based on my deepest antipathy to every kind of cruelty and hatred.
– Albert Einstein
The bourgeoisie is any group of individuals dissatisfied with what they have and satisfied with what they are.
– Nicolás Gómez Dávila
They didn’t want to be themselves, they wanted to be someone else. If they weren’t themselves, they weren’t anyone else, either. Who they should have been, they never imagined they could be. And then, as if by magic or the stroke of a sword or pen, they vanished.
– Lynne Tillman
Where does a thought go when it’s forgotten?
– Sigmund Freud
Be a loner. That gives you time to wonder, to search for the truth. Have holy curiosity. Make your life worth living.
– Albert Einstein
For the majority of the earth’s population on whom it has been imposed, the internet complex is the implacable engine of addiction, loneliness, false hopes, cruelty, psychosis, indebtedness, squandered life, the corrosion of memory, and social disintegration.
All of its touted benefits are rendered irrelevant or secondary by its injurious and sociocidal impacts…
Currently we’re witnessing the final act of the mad, incendiary project of a totally wired world, of the reckless belief that 24/7 availability of electrical power to a planet of 8 billion people was achievable without the disastrous consequences now occurring everywhere.
– Jonathon Crary
Love all creation
The whole of it and every grain of sand
Love every leaf
Every ray of God’s light
Love the animals
Love the plants
Love everything
If you love everything
You will perceive
The divine mystery in things
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky
one arm away
from the full moon
midnight swim
– Chen-ou Liu
In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration.
– Thomas Henry Huxley
The real upgrades and downloads are spiritual.
– Nika Solé
Literacy is everything. It transcends the fashions of time and always pays dividends. Learn to read and write.
– Kenneth Folk
Spend your money on the things money can buy.
Spend your time on the things money can’t buy.
– Haruki Murakami
All the water and drink you’ve consumed from beginningless time until now has failed to satisfy your thirst or bring you contentment. Drink therefore of this stream of enlightened mind, fortunate ones.
– Milarepa
The best use of life is to spend it for something that outlasts it.
– William James
reading the silence
even the moon knows
when not to enter
– @BashoSociety
a dragonfly pauses
between sunshine and shade …
“to stay or to go”
– Chen-ou Liu
Coming onto my shoulder,
Are you seeking a friend?
Red Dragonfly.
– Soseki Natsume
I am nothing. I shall never be anything. I cannot even wish to be anything. Apart from that, I have within me all the dreams of the world.
– Fernando Pessoa
The truth never harmed anyone. What harms us is to persist in ignorance.
– Marcus Aurelius
a little breeze
may everything heavy
remember how to leave
– @BashoSociety
Things can be real but not literal, and that is the major stumbling block for the Western mind.
– Patrick Harpur
I wonder why it is that when I plan a route too carefully, it goes to pieces, whereas if I blunder along in blissful ignorance aimed in a fancied direction I get through with no trouble.
– Steinbeck
He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice.
– John Stuart Mill
Every time you see something hateful said or done on TV, say or do something loving to counteract it.
– Marianne Williamson
I’m so pathetically intense.
I just can’t be any other way.
– Sylvia Plath
I think of artists I admire more in terms of giving permission, like opening up the space for whatever might come next.
– Tucker Nichols
Smell!
by William Carlos Williams
Oh strong-ridged and deeply hollowed
nose of mine! what will you not be smelling?
What tactless asses we are, you and I, boney nose,
always indiscriminate, always unashamed,
and now it is the souring flowers of the bedraggled
poplars: a festering pulp on the wet earth
beneath them. With what deep thirst
we quicken our desires
to that rank odor of a passing springtime!
Can you not be decent? Can you not reserve your ardors
for something less unlovely? What girl will care
for us, do you think, if we continue in these ways?
Must you taste everything? Must you know everything?
Must you have a part in everything?
Take care of yourself, you hear, take care of yourself!
– Franz Kafka, 1912.
We do not rush toward death, we flee the catastrophe of birth.
– Emil Cioran
In the realm of the mind, like attracts like. If the soul is peaceful, it attracts a peaceful environment & peaceful people around it.
– Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
There is always the way out. There is light somewhere.
– Charles Bukowski
The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.
– G.K. Chesterton
One day, the characters currently living rent-free in your head will be living in someone else’s too. Keep writing.
– Kate Halena
Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities.
– Sigmund Freud
wing-worn geese …
this urge to leave home
to find home
– Chen-ou Liu
No intelligent person is interested in dominating others. His first interest is to know himself.
– Osho
But at other times writers offer sanctuary, a way for people to set aside their problems, if only briefly, and be reminded that hope is still there even when the darkness tries to hide it from us.
– Ronnie Blair
Love has nothing to do with knowledge, despite philosophy’s absurd contentions.
– Jacques Lacan
In an anecdote she loved, a young man decides to kill himself, jumps off a high bridge, changes his mind in the air, straightens his body out into a dive and survives.
– Ann Snitow, The Feminism of Uncertainty
On Court-worme
ALL men are wormes: But this no man. In silke
“Twas brought to court first wrapt, and white as milke;
Where, afterwards, it grew a butter-flye:
Which was a cater-piller. So t’will dye.
– Ben Jonson
Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery.
– Aldous Huxley
The first word in the Benedictine Rule is: “Listen” — or “Hearken,” in some translations — then: “Incline the ear of thy heart.”
– Alexis Zanghi
I am struck by how generous and determined most beings continue to be, offering up their beauty and music and silly flirtation even when we hardly ever reciprocate.
The world is a love story that wants desperately to include us again.
Lately, as I’ve been writing and teaching inside of romantasy and ecological love stories, I’ve been thinking about how radical the question is, “Who is courting me?”
What if when we were ghosted or nursing a broken heart, we didn’t bemoan the lack of love in our lives but instead turned up the volume on all the more-than-human suitors we’ve been ignoring?
Who has been trying to get your attention? Did a deer run across the road causing you to slam on the breaks? Maybe it’s been trying to get your attention for weeks and nothing else worked.
What about that sneezing episode from flower pollen? The plants say they gave you their most beautiful colors and you ignored them. Now they are using less subtle techniques to get your attention.
Have you been dreaming of hawks? Of rivers? Of hummingbirds? Slugs?”
– Sophie Strand
Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you. Loneliness is rarely about empty rooms. It is about carrying words you cannot say and truths you do not feel safe to share. Healing is learning to speak what matters most so you are no longer alone with it. This is the work of letting yourself be seen and known for who you really are.
– Carl Jung, Adapted
It has little to do with the things you see, and everything to do with how you see them.
– Elliott Erwitt
Little breath, breathe me gently, row me gently, for I am a river I am learning to cross.
– W.S. Merwin
Food reshapes the brain.
Music reshapes the brain.
Travel reshapes the brain.
Sunlight reshapes the brain.
Reading reshapes the brain.
Learning reshapes the brain.
Laughter reshapes the brain.
Gratitude reshapes the brain.
Movement reshapes the brain.
Meditation reshapes the brain.
Breathwork reshapes the brain.
Community reshapes the brain.
Restful sleep reshapes the brain.
Nature reshapes the brain.
Positive thinking reshapes the brain.
Kindness reshapes the brain.
Your brain is constantly being shaped by what you experience, what you practice, what you consume, and how you live.
What you do today is building the brain you will live with tomorrow.
– Unkown
Is any man afraid of change? Why what can take place without change? What then is more pleasing or more suitable to the universal nature? And canst thou take a bath unless the wood undergoes a change? And canst thou be nourished, unless the food undergoes a change? And can anything else that is useful be accomplished without change? Dost thou not see then that for thyself also to change is just the same, and equally necessary for the universal nature?
– Marcus Aurelius
The gods are less for their love of praise.
Above and below them all is a spirit that needs nothing
but its own wholeness, its health and ours.
It has made all things by dividing itself.
It will be whole again.
To its joy we come together —
the seer and the seen, the eater and the eaten,
the lover and the loved.
In our joining it knows itself. It is with us then,
not as the gods whose names crest in unearthly fire,
but as a little bird hidden in the leaves
who sings quietly and waits, and sings.
– Wendell Berry
Every emotion is a signature frequency. What you feel is what you broadcast into the field of reality.
– Zen teaching
I once lived by so many horses,
so many goats and unendangered bison.
Eagles, bald eagles! Really! Right there
by the river in the dead tree. I lived there
too, right by the river, by the minor league
field. I had the neighbor man sharpen
the blades on the push mower. There wasn’t
so much electric. We didn’t plow the streets.
I don’t know how else to say it. My life
was very small and beautiful. I was young
though I didn’t know it. I was happy
when the lilacs filled the alleyways in June.
I got drunk, I got loved so many ways.
I carried a knife. The brakes weren’t good
but good enough. I traded needles, I cut stalks,
I planted garlic, I taught school, I put a check
in the mail with a stamp on it. I fell off my bike.
I wore a bandana like a bandit for the smoke.
When I danced, I spun around. I paid a buck
to shake the dice. There were dogs everywhere.
There were cattle. Coyotes. Owls. Bats. Sage.
I used to live right beneath the stars. Right there,
between the hills. There’s no other way to say it.
I was so animal, I wrote poems, I was so young.
I thought it would always be this way. I can still smell it.
I can hear the crickets. And the coal train,
how it howled like a song.
– Alicia Mountain, Ecstatic Past
If they follow the way of Money Chiefs, they shall die. Earth is sick and can no longer care for her children. Now, Earth’s children must care for Earth. Continue to pollute rivers and oceans – rivers and oceans shall drown you. Pollute sky – Sun Spirit shall burn you. Kill more trees – unclean air shall strangle you. Kill more Spirits – disease shall destroy you. Already, Money Chiefs’ skin burns. Their lungs choke on unclean air. Poisoned water spreads disease among them and all Spirits. Rising rivers and oceans shall sweep their homes and lives away. Money Chiefs think money heals broken lives. Unchanged, in the end, Money Chiefs’ money shall cost them their lives.
– Frédéric Perrin
It’s the end of the world every day, for someone.
– Margaret Atwood
Yes, even when I don’t believe— there is a place in me inaccessible to unbelief, a patch of wild grace, a stubborn preserve, impenetrable, pain untouched by the sleeping body, music that builds its nest in silence.
– Anna Kamienska
Tell me a story.
In this century, and moment, of mania, Tell me a story.
Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.
The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.
Tell me a story of deep delight.
– Robert Penn Warren
The lily pads flaunt
full blooms, as if to say
though a shift is coming,
it’s not time to wish for it.
It’s time to savor
the season that-is
– Heidi Barr
The yellow glare from the shop-windows streamed out into the steamy, vaporous air, and threw a murky, shifting radiance across the crowded thoroughfare.
– Arthur Conan Doyle
It would be very dangerous purely to imitate me, and it would be dangerous for me to try to make other people into replicas of me. That would be a very unhealthy thing.
– Chögyam Trungpa
The nature of infinity is this: That everything has its own Vortex, and when once a traveller through Eternity has pass’d that Vortex, he perceives it roll back behind his path, into a globe itself infolding like a sun, or like a moon, or like a universe of starry majesty, while he keeps onwards in his wondrous journey on the earth; or like a human form, a friend with whom he lives benevolent… Thus is the heaven a vortex pass’d already, and the earth a vortex not yet pass’d by the traveller through Eternity.
– William Blake
There are seasons when the soul is asked not to ascend, but to enter the soil of grief…and be remade there.
There are times when life does not ask us to rise, heal, transcend, or become better versions of ourselves. It asks something far more difficult. It asks us to descend.
To allow the structures we’ve built our identity around to loosen and, at times, to collapse entirely. The dream of who we thought we would become. The life we imagined would unfold in a certain way. The image of ourselves we worked so hard to protect. There are seasons when something underneath all of that begins to die, and no amount of positive thinking, spiritual effort, or psychological understanding can restore the previous arrangement.
And while the mind often interprets this as failure or mistake, the older traditions understood something different. They understood that there are initiations that arrive not through light, but through darkening. Through disorientation. Through grief. Through being taken underneath the surface of things.
In many of the ancient stories, the Goddess leads us downward. Into the earth. Into the cave. Into the mud and the underworld. Not as punishment, but as participation in a deeper rhythm of transformation that the modern world has largely forgotten. There are dimensions of the soul that can only awaken in the dark.
There are times when we are meant to be undone.
Not forever. Not as an end in itself. But because something false, exhausted, or too small can no longer carry the weight of our life. And so we are brought closer to the ground. Closer to the body. Closer to grief. Closer to the vulnerability we have spent years trying to outrun.
This descent often feels unbearable because it asks us to relinquish control. To stop managing the mystery. To stop demanding immediate clarity. To stop treating sorrow as an interruption to life rather than part of its deep ecology.
But when grief is allowed to move consciously, something begins to soften beneath the surface. Frozen places begin to thaw. The defended heart becomes more permeable. Perception changes. We begin to see differently, not because we have escaped suffering, but because suffering has humbled and ripened us.
The old alchemists understood that there are phases of transformation where everything appears ruined. Where the vessel blackens. Where certainty dissolves. Where we are stripped of the fantasy of mastery and brought into direct contact with what is fragile, mortal, and unfinished within us.
And yet something sacred is often taking place there.
Not in spite of the descent, but through it.
There are seasons when being brought into the earth is precisely how the soul is restored to itself.
– Matt Licata
Respectfully, if you’ve never had to
rewire a nervous system that’s been
running on grief and survival for years,
excavate the depths of your soul to find
yourself again, and rebuild your entire
life from the ashes, all while raising
kids… your advice isn’t for me.
– Caity Powell
When you get this conception of the
universe you become religious.
– George Bernard Shaw
Beauty & Brevity
Today, it seems beauty and brevity
are all we have, as I reach out to grab
a palm-size maple leaf twirling down,
or handful of milkweed seeds spilled
from the burst-open pillows of their pods.
Beauty in the bundle of acorn-caps
still attached to a branch, abandoned by
some squirrel in the middle of the road.
And brevity in the constellations of asters
exploding pale purple blossoms beside
the newly-dug ditch—one final source
of sustenance for rushed bumblebees,
and for those who stop to name them
as if a simple word could make them stay.
– James Crews
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
Getting to Know Your Body: If your eyeballs move, this means that you’re thinking, or about to start thinking.If you don’t want to be thinking at this particular moment, try to keep your eyeballs still.
The Outing: An outburst of anger near the road, a refusal to speak on the path, a silence in the pine woods, a silence across the old railroad bridge, an attempt to be friendly in the water, a refusal to end the argument on the flat stones, a cry of anger on the steep bank of dirt, a weeping among the bushes.
– Lydia Davis
The silence of the present moment was awe-inspiring in its power, oceanic was the word that came to mind, as it carried away everything in its path. The flow of our liturgy had become one with nature’s incessant movement from light to dark and back again.
– Kathleen Norris
When you do something, you should burn yourself up completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself.
– Shunryu Suzuki
The sea is a mirror, not only to the clouds, the sun, the moon, and the stars, but to all one’s dreams, to all one’s speculations… . The sea tells us that everything is changing and that nothing ever changes, that tides go out and return, that all existence is a rhythm.
– Arthur Symons
“Only those who obey a rhythm superior to their own are free,” wrote Kazantzakis. The superior rhythm is the one made by God and whispered into us at the time that we were whispered into being. It is a rhythm based on the light and darkness of the day itself…a rhythm that supports all of our lives— prayer, rest, community and work. We are called to live lives that are shaped and nurtured and wrestled with until they become a prayer that is prayed without ceasing. To do that will require a rule of some sort, even if it is The Rule of Saint Whatever-Your-Name-Is.
– Robert Benson
In a time of drastic change one can be too preoccupied with what is ending or too obsessed with what seems to be beginning. In either case one loses touch with the present and with its obscure but dynamic possibilities. You do not need to know what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and embrace them with courage, faith and hope. In such an event, courage is the authentic form taken by love.
– Thomas Merton
I cannot think unless I have been thought,
Nor can I speak unless I have been spoken.
I cannot teach except as I am taught,
Or break the bread except as I am broken.
O Mind behind the mind through which I seek,
O Light within the light by which I see,
O Word beneath the words with which I speak,
O founding, unfound Wisdom, finding me,
O sounding Song whose depth is sounding me,
O Memory of time, reminding me,
My Ground of Being, always grounding me,
My Maker’s Bounding Line, defining me,
Come, hidden Wisdom, come with all you bring,
Come to me now, disguised as everything.
– Malcolm Guite, O Sapientia
A future is of no use to people who are not able to appreciate the useless. A future has no value if it is only survival value. And this, then, comes to the fact that beyond the value of time, beyond the value of survival, is the supreme value of play, of the useless.
– Alan Watts
Writers are always readers, and though they are usually unbalanced, they are always noticers of the world. From an early age I have not been able to rid myself of the notion that the best writers are deeply flawed heroes.
– Paul Theroux, On Writers
You can’t keep sitting down and facing yourself over and over and over again without eventually changing.
– Ofosu Jones-Quartey
One morning you smell the autumn. It’s not yet cold; it’s not windy; actually, nothing has changed at all—and yet everything.
– Kurt Tucholsky
Our life is woven wind.
– Joseph Joubert
We are coated in the stardust of so much goodness, we can share it with others.
The future depends on it.
– Ryan Holiday
It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.
– Jacob Bronowski
Your unconscious is a particle and at the same time the totality of the cosmos.
– Alejandro Jodorowski
We are too absorbed in our own problems to look and be quiet.
– Krishnamurti
New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.
– John Locke
Having high levels of spiritual intelligence is like being a grandmaster in real life. You can see all the openings and angles, and you’re working 10 steps ahead.
– Nika Solé
You will freeze in place if you
remain this way. You must not,
dear. You have to move.
– Rilke
No experience leaves a trace on your
being, just as no movie leaves a trace
on the screen.
– Rupert Spira
Art is an instrument of such delicate construction that its hypersensitive and delicate antennae can detect the light that ‘shineth in darkness’, the ‘light that never was on sea or land’.
– Kenneth Grant
they made you into a
weapon and told you to find
peace.
– s.z
When I am at home I do nothing but lie on the sofa
– Franz Kafka, 1914.
Why separate your spiritual life and your practical life? To an integral being, there is no such distinction.
– Lao Tzu
The best time to make friends is before you need them.
– Ethel Barrymore
We in the West have named our God; or rather, we have had the Godhead named for us in a book from a time and place that are not our own. And we have been taught to have faith not only in the absolute existence of this metaphysical fiction, but also in its relevance to the shaping of our lives.
In the great East, on the other hand, the accent is on experience: on one’s own experience, furthermore, not a faith in someone else’s. And the various disciplines taught are of ways to the attainment of unmistakable experiences – ever deeper, ever greater – of one’s own identity with whatever one knows as “divine”: identity, and beyond that, then, transcendence.
– Joseph Campbell
HOW’S THAT HOUSE THAT RAISED YOU?
There’s a method to growing rhubarb called “forcing” where it’s raised in total darkness and tended to in brief intervals of candlelight. The plant thrives only because it’s looking for an absent sun, and extends so fast you can hear the growing pains. Forcing can weaken the crop but if done correctly can yield a sweeter, more desirable result. Not everything needs to be an allegory. All the same, I am aware that there are things that have happened in my formative years that I have no words to describe and that only God’s eyes have seen.
– Lev St. Valentine
Write. Find a way to keep
alive and write.
There is nothing else to say.
– James Baldwin
In general, if I announce I have a good idea for you, back away slowly. Then run.
– Anne Lamott
Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.
– Seneca
There is Only One,
so there cannot be a second
to be afraid of.
If we look to our Self,
as it is the One,
there is nothing else to be afraid of.
– Ramana Maharshi
We all long for Eden and are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature is soaked with the sense of exile.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
The earlier you workout the less stress you’ll feel throughout the day.
– Dan Go
There’s a huge psychological divide between those who seek meaning in life through their career and those who see their career as pointless drudgery and seek meaning outside of it. I don’t think it maps on to the old working/middle class division at all well.
– Jonathan Birch
I reject non-being. My purpose is to be. And if I am to be, I must begin by assuming responsibility.
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Remove the sense of separateness and there will be no conflict.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
What do I do? Well, often I don’t do anything. Stretch on the bed. Think of nothing.
– Charles Bukowski
Your hand is useful because it goes where you want it to go. Similarly, your mind is only useful if it goes where you want it to go.
– Sadhguru
An old house.
Emotional ballast
if you can own it.
– Kenneth Folk
Being attached to someone is not about the other person. It is about your own sense of inadequacy.
– Sadhguru
be not like them
and you will
survive.
– Charles Bukowski
sky tinged smoky gray
alone, I drive slowly past
what’s left
– Chen-ou Liu
another year
still learning softness
without losing the fire
– @BashoSociety
Each man must realize that it can all disappear very quickly.
– Charles Bukowski
morning light
even what vanished
leaves warmth behind
– @BashoSociety
My role in society, or any artist’s or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.
– John Lennon
Go, sit upon the lofty hill,
And turn your eyes around,
Where waving woods and waters wild
Do hymn an autumn sound.
The summer sun is faint on them —
The summer flowers depart —
Sit still — as all transform’d to stone,
Except your musing heart.
– Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Perhaps my destiny is to remain forever a bookkeeper, with poetry or literature as a butterfly that alights on my head, making me look ridiculous to the extent it looks beautiful.
– Fernando Pessoa
The man, the more he studies, the simpler he becomes, because as he studies he discovers the greatness of his ignorance.
– Aristotle
budding lotus —
when did I become
who I am
– Chen-ou Liu
Not being able to govern events, I govern myself.
– Michel de Montaigne
The most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds is, in my opinion, conversation.
– Michel de Montaigne
It is not the path which is the difficulty; rather, it is the difficulty which is the path.
– Søren Kierkegaard
Live your life as an experiment.
– Chögyam Trungpa
No yearning for an afterlife, no looking Beyond,
no belittling death,
but only longing for what belongs to us
and serving earth, lest we remain unused.
– Rainier Marie Rilke
Do you really want to be happy? Just pay attention and be kind, unconditionally kind, on this breath alone. Forget about the future. Just this breath. No matter what the circumstances, just be kind.
Friend, lover, family member, someone who seems to hate you, someone you’ve never met on the street, your own soft animal body. Just be kind, in whatever way is appropriate. Everything else will work itself out, and you will begin to sense your own pure heart everywhere. How amazing. Very simple. Just be kind. Only on this breath.
– Scott Morrison
College is a purchased loyalty oath to an imagined employer.
– Sarah Kendzior
I’m a twenty-first-century American woman; I don’t have enough faith to covet anything but freedom. Over the course of my life, every industry I worked in collapsed, and then my city collapsed, and then my government collapsed.
– Sarah Kendzior
One of the most crucial dimensions of letting go is the recognition that there is no need to change an event or person. But, we argue, shouldn’t we want to change a person who obviously needs changing? The answer is, no. We can be there, and God’s presence can be there in us and through us, and that’s all we can do. There is very little celebration and transcendence when we’re hoping to change them and “clean them up.” I have discovered through the years that it is very heavy work to get another cleaned up. And it’s even heavier to get a community cleaned up. The task, I think, is to enjoy the other more. To experience the wonder of the person, to be more open, more attentive, to learn from the person or the community, and to revel in the surprises that are given. If the person or community changes, good! If not, you’ve celebrated who they are. You’ve lived in the Now.
– Gordon Cosby
Elvis Presley was an explorer of vast new landscapes of dream and illusion. He was a man who refused to be told that the best of his dreams would not come true, who refused to be defined by anyone else’s conceptions. This is the goal of democracy, the journey on which every prospective American hero sets out. That Elvis made so much of the journey on his own is reason enough to remember him with the honor and love we reserve for the bravest among us. Such men made the only maps we can trust.
– Dave Marsh
A lot has been written and said about why he was so great, but I think the best way to appreciate his greatness is just to go back and play some of the old records… Time has a way of being very unkind to old records, but Elvis’ keep getting better and better.
– Huey Lewis
What is the greatest kind of love?
Great love does not flow with tears.
Rather,
it burns in the great Fire of Heaven.
In this Fire
it flows and flows swiftly
yet all the while.
it remains in itself
in a very great stillness.
– Mechtild von Magdeburg
Night was falling. Birds were singing. Birds were, it occurred to me to say, enacting a frantic celebration of day’s end. They were manifesting as the earth’s bright-colored nerve endings, the sun’s descent urging them into activity, filling them individually with life nectar, the life nectar then being passed into the world, out of each beak, in the form of that bird’s distinctive song, which was, in turn, an accident of beak shape, throat shape, breast configuration, brain chemistry: some birds blessed in voice, others cursed; some squeaking, others rapturous.
– George Saunders
the creative personality, when weighed down and depressed by a creative task, very often behaves like an awful neurotic. To correct a little, or to cut off neurotic behavior a little and at same time not to destroy the creative kernel of the process is a very delicate task.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
There is no moral equivalence between bullies and the bullied, between tyranny and democracy, or between brutality and decency. No individual can be free in a society devoid of justice. There can be no liberty where brutality reigns.
– Robert Reich
eight days until fall
the wind already knows
what must be released
– @BashoSociety
There is an autumn stillness that reaches even into the colors.
– Hugo von Hofmannsthal
The World and I
This is not exactly what I mean
Any more than the sun is the sun.
But how to mean more closely
If the sun shines but approximately?
What a world of awkwardness!
What hostile implements of sense!
Perhaps this is as close a meaning
As perhaps becomes such knowing.
Else I think the world and I
Must live together as strangers and die—
A sour love, each doubtful whether
Was ever a thing to love the other.
No, better for both to be nearly sure
Each of each-exactly where
Exactly I and exactly the world
Fail to meet by a moment, and a word.
– Laura Riding
Dreams do not deceive, do not lie, do not distort or disguise-they seek to express something ego does not know and does not understand. Dreams are neither deliberate nor arbitrary fabrications; they are natural phenomena which are nothing other than what they pretend to be.
– CG Jung
Be careful not to judge a transition by how you feel in the middle of it. A bridge is always more wobbly than either shore.
– Cory Muscara
outside the bookstore
autumn keeps turning
another page
– @BashoSociety
When you’re a naturally high vibrational person, you’ll find that you often end up carrying the experience you have with other people because you’d rather invite them into your world than be underwhelmed by theirs.
– Nika Solé
The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy.
– Yevgeny Zamyatin
Holding your work
hostage to your meaning
is a limitation.
– Rick Rubin
Be still. It takes no effort to be still; it is utterly simple. When your mind is still, you have no name, you have no past, you have no relationships, you have no country, you have no spiritual attainment. There is just the presence of beingness with itself.
– Gangaji
The Last Book of Longing
by Robin Lindsay Wilson
An infinite number of monkeys,
in an infinite number of rooms,
drew an infinite number of maps,
of an infinite number of universes.
A single man, with a single love,
woke up alone on the outer rim
of a churning, barely lit galaxy,
and fired up a search engine.
With a double curser click,
he reluctantly, but finally realized,
he knew from the very beginning
where his heart’s desire waited,
and how to find her address.
Serving the world is the best form of prayer.
– Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
Wellbeing is attained by little and little, and nevertheless is no little thing itself.
– Zeno
A perfect order would be the ruin of all progress and pleasure.
– Robert Musil
In the depths of my heart I
can’t help being convinced that
my dear fellow-men, with a
few exceptions, are worthless.
– Sigmund Freud
Humanism was the self-assertion of the human spirit on a grand scale.
– Rüdiger Safranski
Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes?
– Joseph Campbell
here’s to trying
they say when orpheus sang his song in hell,
sisyphus sat upon his rock to listen in as well
suddenly, there was reason for pause besides
exhaustion suddenly, the climb felt less lonely than it had ever
been for once in damned eternity,
he was the one being moved
– @facsimilitude
Oh, sleep. Nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness.
– Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation
You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunity and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.
– Henry David Thoreau
When it comes to love, art is a more adequate form of expression than any other…on paper, one can reach a higher degree of lyricism than on bedroom linen.
– Joseph Brodsky
Writing is often both what you aspire to and what you’re left with when other options have dried up.
– Geoff Dyer
Thinking is the talking of the soul with itself.
– Plato
You can lower yourselves to the level of the beast, but you can also be reborn as a divine creature by the free will of your spirit. Man can become what he likes – subhuman or superhuman, as he wishes.
– Pico Della Mirandola
Hope
One of those 5am mornings
where you wake in a cramp,
like you slept on your neck wrong,
and it aches. Your mouth tastes bitter
enough to spit grief. One of those mornings
where nothing matters (but something must),
excepting, yes, this morning’s skyline
pregnant as a whale, about to give birth
to golden sun and fire.
– Robert Allen
People aren’t “suddenly developing neurodivergence.”
We’re finally seeing it. Naming it. Measuring it.
Diagnosis isn’t invention.
It’s recognition.
– Dr. Jen Wolkin
Sweet twin breasts, good night.
Sleep through to the light.
Without spiders.
– Czeslaw Milosz, (tr. Anthony Milosz)
He must be very ignorant for he answers every question he is asked.
– Voltaire
True merit is like a river, the deeper it is, the less noise it makes.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
A character is defined by the kinds of challenges he cannot walk away from.
– Arthur Miller
Yoga teaches that whether you live in an ashram or in the world, meditate deeply. And in your heart renounce everything, so that wherever you go will be your monastery. That is the inner renunciation extolled in the Bhagavad Gita.
– Paramahansa Yogananda
Those whom we have loved and whom we have lost are no longer where they were, but they are everywhere where we are.
– Victor Hugo
It is not inequality which is the real misfortune, it is dependence.
– Voltaire
You’ve outgrown your environment if you have no one to talk to.
– Nithya Shri
Blessed is the mind with more to occupy it than its own dissatisfactions.
– Susan Sontag
The stars seem distant only to those who have forgotten how to look up.
– Rumi
The machine exists to create dependency. It is essentially a mechanism of colonization. The history of modernity is the history of the spread of the Machine mentality to all corners of the Earth…
Externally, we see the results in a chaotic climate, dissolving cultures, spiraling rates of extinction and infernal destruction of nature.
Internally, we see it in the loss of our stories, in our broken-hearted confusion about who and where we are.
Locally, we see it in the loss of our self-sufficiency and agency in the place where all human stories begin: the home.
– Paul Kingsnorth
Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought, and the thought has found words.
– Robert Frost
A Balance Of Sorts
I don’t believe in any karma,
but generally
men act marginally worse than women,
and interestingly,
do tend to then die
statistically,
just that little bit
younger.
– Julian Cason
In Adam’s voice before he fell, there was the sound of every harmony and the sweetness of the whole art in music.
– Hildegard of Bingen
There is no enjoying the possession of anything valuable unless one has someone to share it with.
– Seneca the Younger
You don’t have to be a poet, you don’t have to be a politician or be in the White House to make an impact with your words. We all have this capacity to find solutions for the future.
– Amanda Gorman
When there is nothing
left to love, the heart eats
inward.
– Christian Wiman
The ears of mortals are filled with this sound, but they are unable to hear it.
– Cicero
The most precious of the things I lost was my time-time I wasted trying to understand and maintain relationships with hypocritical and unappreciative people.
– Words & Wisdom
Paranoia is a defense against connection; it multiplies potential connections so feverishly that any single one becomes impossible.
– Peggy Phelan
By realizing the connectedness of humankind to all animal and plant life, we become aware of new possibilities for preserving all living things.
– Randy Woodley and Edith Woodley
I, who manufacture the future like a diligent spider. And the best of me is when I know nothing and manufacture whatever.
– Clarice Lispector
Stories without endings can do nothing but go on forever, and to be caught in one means that you must die before your part in it is played out.
– Paul Auster
A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate.
– Flannery O’Connor
We are all in the same soup.
– @extinctionrebellion
So perhaps the best thing to do is to stop writing Introductions and get on with the book.
– A.A. Milne
No punishment is too great for a man who can build his greatness upon his country’s ruin.
– George Washington
If you have only one smile in you, give it to the people you love.
– Maya Angelou
Whilst he is engaged in composition, an author is a creature of some consequence: apart from this, he is nothing.
– Lev Shestov
Because love requires a bit of a future, and for us, there were only moments.
– Albert Camus
Why nurture a connection with no intention to protect it?
– Tia-Renée Mullings
You come to nature with all her theories, and she knocks them all flat.
– Pierre Auguste Renoir
The heart, if it could think, would stop.
– Fernando Pessoa
Why are human beings so self-centered, so consciously or in the deep recesses of their beings selfish?
– Krishnamurti
Knowing doesn’t require explanations.
– Prem Rawat
How is it that you don’t leave this place that has already said goodbye to you?
– Alejandra Pizarnik
Life is a trial. You’re not meant to be saved from it. You’re meant to be transformed by it.
– Professor Tolkein
Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.
– Edgar Allan Poe
First sentences are doors to worlds.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
What fills us with dread is the crushing weakness of our politics against the massive stakes of our times.
– Sen. Jon Ossoff
Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life…you cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.
– Stephen King
My hands—those beloved hands—no longer know what to cling to.
– Idea Vilariño
Optimism is a cure for many things.
– Michael J Fox
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.
– Shams Tabrizi
A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand.
– Geraldine Brooks
The world is old, they say: I believe it; yet it must still be entertained like a child.
– Jean de La Fontaine
The true way is the middle one, halfway between deserving a place and pushing oneself into it.
– Baltasar Gracian
Oxygen was discovered only in the 1770s. Wonder how anyone breathed before that.
– Ajai Kumar
When something is rare it naturally holds more value. This is a fundamental principle of human psychology and it applies to relationships as much as material possessions.
– Myles Monroe
If the vote were not so powerful, they wouldn’t be so determined to take it away.
– Bernice King
My favorite place in the world
Isn’t a grand view or a busy city.
– Alice L.
Exhaustion doesn’t always come from doing too much. It can come from doing what isn’t right for you.
– Carl Jung
From “Meditations of the Old Young Man”
[2. What it was to live …]
by Stéphane Bouquet
translated from the French by Lindsay Turner
2. What it was to live in a lake-&-mountain town:
every morning wooden shutters open on 1 more
offering of fog or not at all: the still water glittering
unwrinkled and as reassuring as the simple geometry
of an unfinished and 2D world. In its joy
the landscape skips into the general register of intimacy
that any plenitude will authorize. You who the lake
amazes, now listen to the bells so turbulently excited
to ring out 7am that they stop just 16 strokes
later: and thus the instant paradiso is multiplied according to
its own exuberant illogic. Living will descend down to
the bank, the water’s wild sympathizers,
here the intersection of time with time itself, the little boat,
the fisherman standing in it punctuating with a calming motion
his own existence, ducks and swans and cormorants
included. And the lapping waves appear to hum
the nursery rhyme of this almost-present or if now were
just exactly what you needed to know: the trunks, the willows & plane trees
leaning according to the sinuous idea of a curve
over the pedalboats & glaciers entrusted them,
elucidating without fault, at the evening’s height,
the ochre calligraphies of refuge.
Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.
– Carl Sagan
A SURPRISING WHOLENESS
Cool rain is falling through sunshine today
and the canyon’s red walls are radiant
with the contradiction. The world
smells of dry earth mixing with sky,
a rich and generative perfume
that weaves into all that grows.
Witnessing the beauty of this day,
equal parts clear and stormy,
this is how a person might come to trust
the acute aliveness we feel
when we dance with both sorrow
and gladness at the same time,
one partner asking us to crawl, to bow,
the other bidding us raise our arms
to twirl in joyful abandon. In the distance,
thunder. In the foreground, the swallows
are ceaseless in their swirling.
They do not try to avoid the raindrops
nor do they shun the sun.
On the inside, a feeling loops and dives,
swoops and circles back. It says,
This life is not easy. What a gift to be alive.
– Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation.
– Lorrie Moore
“Only those who obey a rhythm superior to their own are free,” wrote Kazantzakis. The superior rhythm is the one made by God and whispered into us at the time that we were whispered into being. It is a rhythm based on the light and darkness of the day itself…a rhythm that supports all of our lives— prayer, rest, community and work. We are called to live lives that are shaped and nurtured and wrestled with until they become a prayer that is prayed without ceasing. To do that will require a rule of some sort, even if it is The Rule of Saint Whatever-Your-Name-Is.
– Robert Benson
I often think that at the center of me is a voice that at last did split, a house in my heart so invaded with other people and their speech, friends I believed I was devoted to, people whose lives I can only guess at now, that it gives me the impression I am simply a collection of them, that they all existed for themselves, but had inadvertently formed me, then vanished. But, what: Should I have been expected to create my own self, out of nothing, out of thin, thin air and alone?
– Lorrie Moore
[… Dance] involves every possible feeling (as potential), because it is of the body, which is lived (inescapably) as a body of feeling. Some of these feelings we can name, and some we cannot, since we associate feelings with language only when we name them. The body lives sentience on a preverbal level. Dance exists first on this primordial level, not on an intellectual plane (even though it requires skill and intelligence). Its inmost substance cannot be reasoned, only experienced.
– Sondra Horton Fraleigh
The sea is a mirror, not only to the clouds, the sun, the moon, and the stars, but to all one’s dreams, to all one’s speculations… . The sea tells us that everything is changing and that nothing ever changes, that tides go out and return, that all existence is a rhythm.
– Arthur Symons
The more I dim my eyes over print and frazzle my brain over abstract ideas, the more I appreciate the delight of being basically an animal wrapped in a sensitive skin: sex, the resistance of rock, the taste and touch of snow, the feel of the sun, good wine and a rare beefsteak and the company of friends around a fire with a guitar and lousy old cowboy songs. Despair: I’ll never be a scholar, never be a decent good Christian. Just a hedonist, a pagan, a primitive romantic.
But what’s an honest soul to do? I don’t know. I can say this: Be loyal to what you love, be true to the earth, fight your enemies with passion and laughter.
– Edward Abbey
All is tumultuous and transitional. Therefore, so people say, there can be no relation between the poet and the present age. But surely that is nonsense. These accidents are superficial; they do not go nearly deep enough to destroy the most profound and primitive of instincts, the instincts of rhythm. All you need now is to stand at the window and let your rhythmical sense open and shut, open and shut, boldly and freely, until one thing melts in another, until the taxis are dancing with daffodils, until a whole has been made from all these separate fragments.
I am talking nonsense, I know. What I mean is, summon all your courage, exert all your vigilance, invoke all the gifts that Nature has been induced to bestow. Then let your rhythmical sense wind itself in and out among men and women, omnibuses, sparrows — whatever come along the street — until it has strung them together in one harmonious whole.
That is your task — to find the relation between things that seem incompatible yet have a mysterious affinity, to absorb every experience that comes your way fearlessly and saturate it completely so that your poem is a whole, not a fragment; to re-think human life into poetry and so give us tragedy again and comedy by means of characters not spun out at length in the novelist’s way, but condensed and synthesized in the poet’s way — that is what we look to you to do now.
– Virginia Woolf, A Letter to a Young Poet
Before birth the embryo repeats physiologically the history of the species; after birth, according to Gurdjieff, we repeat the history of the planet; two centres are split off, objective conscience sinks, deserts appear, emotional deserts.
– A.R. Orage
But the reason I call myself by my childhood name is to remind myself that a scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting.
– Douglas Adams
You should never hesitate to trade your cow for a handful of magic beans.
– Tom Robbins
In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate.
– Isaac Asimov
What is being suggested is the initiation for enormous changes. In a man, or a woman, there is this potential energy that can just look, but can’t do more. We don’t know what will be the result of starting that process. Each time you start that process, it seems you forget, and forget again. But each time I start, I don’t know where I’ll forget or whether I’ll forget or not. I don’t know where it will lead. When I don’t know where it will lead, maybe then it will last longer. Maybe then I will be interested when I start. If it starts from some ego that wants to change something, it won’t last long. But if it starts from an energy that has awareness, that has the property which light has when it is transforming energy: do you understand what I mean by that? – if it has that property, maybe it will continue. I don’t know at the time I initiate this who is looking, whether I am using the right energy. There is a doing this and a self-observation.
Maybe I’m cheating and trying to do something. Or maybe I’m drawing on a possibility that exists, something universal, a chink of awareness. Maybe that awareness can ferment in me. I don’t know what is the process of that fermentation?
– Lord Pentland, Exchanges Within
To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life.
– Kurt Vonnegut
It is mist and rose of eternal morning. Moon-honey that flows from buried stars. What is holy baptism but God become water.
– Federico García Lorca
As we come to know the seriousness of the situation, war, racism, the poverty in our world, we come to realize that things will not be changed simply by words or demonstrations. Rather, it’s a question of living one’s life in a different way.
– Dorothy Day
I Know My Soul
by Claude McKay
I plucked my soul out of its secret place,
And held it to the mirror of my eye,
To see it like a star against the sky,
A twitching body quivering in space,
A spark of passion shining on my face.
And I explored it to determine why
This awful key to my infinity
Conspires to rob me of sweet joy and grace.
And if the sign may not be fully read,
If I can comprehend but not control,
I need not gloom my days with futile dread,
Because I see a part and not the whole.
Contemplating the strange, I’m comforted
By this narcotic thought: I know my soul.
The hardest years in life are those
between ten and seventy.
– Helen Hayes
The most important message of a crucifix, to me anyway, was how unspeakably cruel supposedly sane human beings can be when under orders from a superior authority.
– Kurt Vonnegut
In the first place God made idiots.
This was for practice. Then He
made school boards.
– Mark Twain
I have a theory that when
you suddenly want to cut
your hair, rearrange your
place, or get rid of half your
closet, it’s your soul
preparing you for a new era
and needs the old energy
cleared out first.
– Case Kenny
Who has no house now, will build none hereafter.
Who is alone now, will long remain so,
will wake, read, write long letters,
and will wander restlessly up and down the boulevards,
when the leaves are drifting.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
The predictable regularity of humdrum domesticity is perfect for writing: monotony is the writer’s friend.
– Paul Theroux
Every moment in life is absolute in itself. That’s all there is. There is nothing other than this present moment; there is no past, there is no future; there is nothing but this.
– Charlotte Joko Beck
When you pray for me, pray for ‘time’! I should like to put some of this stuff into readable form, and some sketched for others to make use of.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Strange is our situation here upon earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose …There is one thing we do know: that man is here for the sake of other men …upon whose well-being our own happiness depends.
– Albert Einstein
Love is acceptance. That’s what creates the feeling of safety in your relationship. Yes, there are still hard conversations, mistakes, apologies, figuring out how to care for each other well, but you don’t see each other as a project.
– Yung Pueblo
What wears out our soul the fastest and most severely is this: Forgiving without forgetting.
– Arthur Schnitzler
Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.
– Paul Valéry
Higher fuel prices, macro global instability, and AI poomerism hallucinations all accelerate the regenerative transition.
– @regenavocado
I don’t know where they come from.
– Franz Wright, Words
Words
I don’t know where they come from.
I can summon them
(sometimes I can)
into my mind,
into my fingers,
I don’t know why. Or I’ll suddenly hear them
walking, sometimes
waking-
they don’t often come when I need them.
When I need them most terribly,
never.
– Franz Wright
The error deceives itself, the lie deceives the other.
– Rüdiger Safranski
My literature must remain what it is. Especially what does not fit into politics and does not want to serve it. I cultivate just one politics: my own. I am a separate state.
– Witold Gombrowicz
2014 and all that
today the Celtic nations met together
to discuss the future
tomorrow England is going to meet with itself
to discuss the past
– Alec Finlay
The Kennedy Center is where all the beautiful people gathered. A place of honors, wealth, and glamor. All the people Trump hates most have been celebrated there, from Springsteen to De Niro. But never Trump. Never Trump. The jealousy consumes him, it’s eating him alive from the inside out. He can’t stand it. He has to put his name on it, has to somehow insert himself into the spotlight, has make it about Trump. His pathology is that he MUST prove himself better than all those who walked through the doors of that building. And if he can’t, he’ll tear it all down, burn it to the ground and piss in the ashes to erase any memory of his humiliation.
And that, my electronic friends, is the metaphor for Trump and America itself.
– Jim Wright
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
– Arthur Conan Doyle
I should dearly love that the world should be ever so little better for my presence. Even on this small stage we have our two sides, and something might be done by throwing all one’s weight on the scale of breadth, tolerance, charity, temperance, peace, and kindliness to man and beast. We can’t all strike very big blows, and even the little ones count for something.
– Arthur Conan Doyle
I am a fugitive and a vagabond, a sojourner seeking signs.
– Annie Dillard
Offering
by Ursula K. Le Guin
I made a poem going
to sleep last night, woke
in sunlight, it was clean forgotten.
If it was any good, gods
of the great darkness
where sleep goes and farther
death goes, you not named,
then as true offering
accept it.
Ars Poetica
May the poems be
the little snail’s trail.
Everywhere I go,
every inch: quiet record
of the foot’s silver prayer.
I lived once.
Thank you.
It was here.
– Aracelis Girmay
Take it from me: memory is your greatest ally and your primary source material, because memory is your body as it was in the world and the world as it was and will be; memory is the people you have loved or wanted to love in the world, and what are we if not bodies filled with reminiscences about all those ghosts in the sunlight?
– Hilton Als
I imagined that my own life was simple and sweet, and sometimes it was, but there were odd things going around town. There were rumors. There were stories. Everything was unmentionable but nothing was unimaginable. This mystical flirtation with the idea of “sin”–this sense that it was possible to go “too far”, and that many people were doing it–this was very much with us in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969. A demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community. The jitters were setting in. I recall a time when the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full.
– Joan Didion, The White Album
Reading may be the last secretive behavior that is neither pathological or prosecutable. It is certainly the last refuge from the real-time epidemic. For the stream of a narrative overflows the banks of the real. Story strips its reader, holding her in a place time can’t reach. A book’s power lies in its ability to erase us, to expand or contract without limit, to circle inside itself without beginning or end, to defy our imaginary timetables and lay us bare to a more basic ticking. The pages we read are a nowhen, unfolding far outside the public arena. As long as we remain in them, now reveals itself to be the baldest of inventions.
– Richard Powers
Trust the queen is you.
Trust the mud is you,
& the soft, silver afro of the dandelion.
Trust the grass-whistle might be
your speech, high as the whistle
of the whale. Trust
we’ll know your shape, whatever species
in you answers when we put our faces
to the dirt & call you by
your old & human name.
– Aracelis Girmay
Planning the Disappearance of
Those Who Have Gone
by Frank Stanford
Soon I will make my appearance
But first I must take off my rings
And swords and lay them out all
Along the lupine banks of the forbidden river
In reckoning the days I have
Left on this earth I will use
No fingers
In real life we are frightened of vipers and decorate ourselves with flowers. In dreams we are quite capable of being afraid of flowers and decorating ourselves with vipers.
– G.K. Chesterton
Rest time is not waste time. It is economy to gather fresh strength… In the long run, we shall do more by sometimes doing less.
– Charles Haddon Spurgeon
The greatest evil is not radical, it has no roots, and because it has no roots, it has no limits.
– Hannah Arendt
Annie Dillard said you should write as if you’re dying. Nadine Gordimer went further. She argued that you should write as if you’re already dead and it no longer mattered what anyone said about you.
– Ralph Keyes
The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes. It is equivalent to a sense of abusing the present.
– Susan Sontag
amongst the
random, wind-
geared planets, their
idle
per-
egrinations, ours
– Gustaf Sobin
Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain.
– Oscar Wilde
Before you sleep, read something that is exquisite, and worth remembering.
– Desiderius Erasmus
Ask yourself: Is there joy, ease and lightness in what I am doing? If there isn’t, then time is covering up the present moment, and life is perceived as a burden or a struggle.
– Eckhart Tolle
Rather you must, in the train of your thoughts, avoid what is merely casual and without purpose.
– Marcus Aurelius
No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace as I have seen in one autumnal face.
– John Donne
When you need clarity, subtract.
– James Clear
It’s precisely those who are busiest who most need to give themselves a break.
– Pico Iyer
Anything, anything can change a writer, if one is open to it.
– Suzan-Lori Parks
Wishing doesn’t mean simply hoping that something will happen—it’s about committing ourselves to making it happen as best we can.
– Karma Trinlay Rinpoche
And, Lord, don’t let me break this
Let me hold it lightly
Give me arms to pray with
Instead of ones that hold too tightly
– Florence and the Machine, 100 Years
Joy is inexpressibly more than happiness. Happiness befalls people due to fate, whereas people cause joy to bloom inside themselves. Joy is plainly a good season for the heart; it is the ultimate achievement of which human beings are capable.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
I’m afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security.
– Jim Garrison
To be really great in little things, to be truly noble and heroic in the insipid details of everyday life, is a virtue so rare as to be worthy of canonization.
– Harriet Beecher Stowe
The world is not to be put in order; the world is order incarnate. It is for us to harmonize with it.
– Henry Miller
Charity degrades those who receive it and hardens those who dispense it.
– George Sands
“Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased,” Polo said, “Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it. Or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.”
– Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
…and then I felt down in my soul the clear and unmistakable conviction to disobey all, and pursue my own way.
– Walt Whitman
Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage we did not take, towards the door we never opened.
– T.S. Eliot
So that’s what destiny is: simply the fulfillment of the potentialities of the energies in your own system. The energies are committed in a certain way, and that commitment out there is coming toward you.
– Joseph Campbell
They say that calm follows the storm, but they never told me that you would come along.
– Benjamin Griss
You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding.
– Terence McKenna
She did not say, but I began to understand then, that you do what you do out of your private passion for the thing itself.
– Annie Dillard
I think basically what we are is a kind of green anarchy; an effort to revivify social forms that have been atrophied in the west at least since the destruction of Eleusis, probably in most places thousands of years before that. This is our last chance.
– Terence McKenna
The spirit only flows in calmness and stuff where the humility is.
– Bobby Hemmitt
Tragedies are all right for a while: you are concerned, you are curious, you feel good. And then it gets repetitive, it doesn’t advance, it grows dreadfully boring…
– Simone de Beauvoir
Like passports, the books were stamped with their travel history and then stamped with mine.
– Ali Solomon
What I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again.
– Roland Barthes
You’re gonna be too real, too transparent, too deep, too enlightened, too alive, too much in your power, too seeing through the lies, and too high vibe for this very weird world. And that’s how you know you’re here to build a new one.
– Nika Solé
The sky’s blue was deepening, but there was no darkness.
– Annie Dillard
Community is a body of people crying for one another, working together for a common cause, enjoying and overlooking (or grimly tolerating) each other’s foibles; it’s a rough and beautiful quilt sewn of patches that don’t seem to go together at all, and then do.
– Anne Lamott
Distance is the acid test for love.
Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones,
as the wind blows out the candle and fans the bonfire.
Time and distance only ever take away everything
superfluous while deepening everything real.
– La Rochefoucauld
To be great, be whole; exclude nothing, exaggerate nothing that is not you.
– Fernando Pessoa
You have two choices, to control your mind or to let your mind control you.
– Paulo Coelho
But for me, success is not a public thing. It’s a private thing. It’s when you have fewer and fewer regrets.
– Toni Morrison
DO NOT SPARE YOURSELF
by Mario Benedetti
translated by Maria Popova
Don’t stand motionless
by the side of the road
don’t petrify your joy
don’t desire with reserve
do not spare yourself now
or ever
do not spare yourself
don’t fill up on tranquility
don’t claim from the world
only a quiet corner
don’t let your eyelids fall
heavy as judgments
don’t remain lipless
don’t fall asleep unready to dream
don’t think yourself bloodless
don’t deem yourself out of time
but if
in spite of it all you can’t help it
and petrify your joy
and desire with reserve
and spare yourself now
and fill up on tranquility
and claim from the world
only a quiet corner
and let your eyelids fall
heavy as judgments
and remain lipless
and fall asleep unready to dream
and think yourself bloodless
and deem yourself out of time
and stand motionless
on the side of the road
and you have been spared
then
do not stay with me.
one small flower
turning toward the sun
peace enough for now
– @BashoSociety
In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here.
– Annie Dillard
Your raiment has already been given.
It fits you perfectly.
– Gunilla Norris
John Cowper Powys said, “We have no reason for denying to the world of plants a certain slow, dim, vague, large, leisurely semi-consciousness.” He may not be right, but I like his adjectives. The patch of bluets in the grass may not be long on brains, but it might be, at least in a very small way, awake. The trees especially seem to bespeak a generosity of spirit. I suspect that the real moral thinkers end up, wherever they may start, in botany. We know nothing for certain, but we seem to see that the world turns upon growing, grows towards growing, and growing green and clean.
– Annie Dillard
Homeless people don’t make me feel unsafe, living in a society that will toss people to the curb makes me feel unsafe.
– Unknown
And I gave my heart to seek and search out
by wisdom all things that are done under heaven.
– Ecclesiastes
what a privilege it is
to not take sides
when the ground
beneath you
is not the ground
being taken.
– pavana reddy
The educator
has the duty of
not being
neutral.
– Paolo Freire
The shadow is not
made only of what
is dark.
It is made of what
had to disappear.
– Matt Licata
I spoon from a jar
a tablespoon of Akhmatova’s wild honey.
– Jane Hirshfield
WITHIN THE HOUR
The tea is too hot.
The curtain in the window blew around.
Rind rotting on brown chairs.
In the valley of bartenders the one-eyed stooge is king.
What I’m doing now is write.
That’s the real stuff.
It doesn’t work!
I got a card from him yesterday I could ask Dick.
What is the lively approach?
Your mini body coming unto me, unshelled
as pavanes in savanes no one undertakes
not without a woofing in the chest-o-ciser.
Two strokes and it’s gone.
You owed the fresh kind.
Why yes. Remember
me? Remember me
in any case.
– John Ashbery
Sit for meditation, and sit again. Every day without fail, sick or well, tired or energetic, alone or with others, at home or away from home, sit for meditation, as great artists throw themselves into their creations.
– Eknath Easwaran
Man is the only barbarian; he himself is the cause of all the corruption and terror that is taking place in the world.
– Krishnamurti
home alone
I enter the crawl space
of a younger self
– Robert Epstein
In a society that has you counting money, pounds, calories, and steps, be a rebel and count your blessings instead.
– Lisa Heckman
moving day
the backyard swing
slows to a stop
– Chen-ou Liu
leaf fall …
these spiraling
what-ifs
– Chen-ou Liu
The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, skepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.
– Thomas Henry Huxley
Letters take less time than parties or lunches. How do people in New York get anything done?
– Donald Hall
I am a real minimalist, because I don’t do very much. I know some minimalists who call themselves minimalist but they do loads of minimalism. That is cheating.
– Robert Wyatt
The United Nations
is not just a platform.
It is a promise.
– António Guterres
An enemy will agree, but a friend will argue.
– Russian Proverb
…her habit of murmuring isolated lines of poetry to herself and then listening into the void, as if the poems continued there.
– Judith Hermann
For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life.
– William Blake
Night falls fast.
Today is in the past.
– Edna St. Vincent Millay
If we train in bodhichitta and follow the Bodhisattva’s way of life, eventually our mind will be released from both the delusions and the imprints of the delusions.
– Geshe Kelsang Gyatso
You are allowed to rebuild slowly, imperfectly, uncertainly. There is no rule that says your trauma recovery has to be rapid or cinematic– realistic recovery often isn’t.
Do not pressure yourself to do this in some dramatic, graceful way. Focus on your safety & stability today.
– Dr. Glenn Patrick Doyle
When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner’s pick, a woodcarver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory.
– Annie Dillard
Buddhism promises nothing. It teaches us to be what we are where we are, constantly.
– Chögyam Trungpa
If you want to know how poor somebody was growing up, ask them how many windows they had. Don’t ask what was in their fridge or in their closet. The number of windows says it all. It says everything. If they had none, or maybe one or two, that’s all you need to know.
– Mieko Kawakami
It was a weighty saying of some wise man, that hell is truth known too late.
– J.C. Ryle
I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.
– Annie Dillard
Figuring out how to find pleasure in uncertainty is going to be a valuable life skill.
– Michael Elliott
No matter how tightly I clasp what I love to my chest, it saddens me to realize that I will not be able to stop the world from breaking it one day.
– Benjamín Griss
This little paradise cost me great hells.
– Benjamín Griss
There is a certain charm in the solitude we do not understand, in the bitterness we do not tolerate, and in the kisses that are never given.
– Benjamin Griss
Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot that it do singe yourself.
– William Shakespeare
i’ve never understood the point of competition between two adversaries who share the same principles.
– josé arcadio, one hundred years of solitude
I thought they were helping me. I was so full of trust in them that I felt grateful as they carried me in the air. Only when they threw me overboard did I begin to have doubts.
– Yann Martel, Life of Pi
In the small matters trust the mind, in the large ones the heart.
– Sigmund Freud
Life and experience can give to single syllables an accent utterly divorcing them from their common meaning and lending them an aura of horror, which nobody understands who has not learned them in their awful context.
– Dr. Faustus
At a certain point you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: there is nothing there. There is nothing but those things only, those created objects discrete, growing or holding, or swaying, being rained on or raining, held, flooding or ebbing, standing or spread. You feel the world’s word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: this hum is the silence. The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega. It is God’s brooding over the face of the waters; it is the blended note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence, and even to address the prayer to “World.” Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing.
– Annie Dillard
LONG LIFE
Late Summer. Sunshine. The eucalyptus tree.
It is a fortune beyond any deserving
to be still here, with no more than everyday worries,
placidly arranging lines of poetry.
I consider a stick of cinnamon
bound in raffia, finches
in the grass, and a stubby bush
which this year mothered a lemon.
These days I speak less of death
than the mysteries of survival. I am
no longer lonely, not yet frail, and
after surgery, recognize each breath
as a miracle. My generation may not be
nimble but, forgive us,
we’d like to hold on, stubbornly
content – even while aging.
– Elaine Feinstein
The New Normal
by Anna Gual
translated from the Catalan by AKaiser
We will sink our feet into other sands,
in the new normal. We will grow plants
between our toes, in the new normal.
We will laugh at the distances
and it will be forbidden to not touch us,
in the new normal.
Our calendars will seem strange
and we won’t know what the rules are,
in the new normal.
There’ll be caves
and space for everyone.
There’ll be lichens
and hunger well-whetted.
We’ll embrace all the mysteries,
we’ll be lovers of the invisible
and death, death
will be quite bearable.
When winter comes
the mud will come and with the mud
creation unleashed
and we will draw the whole holy day,
in the new normal.
We’ll yank flowers from the rocks
and let pigment run
and we’ll paint our faces, also our thighs,
also our sexes and the hot thing, too.
We’ll look at the sky more than anything else,
in the new normal.
We will breathe very slowly,
in the new normal.
And who knows if the gods won’t find us
and we’ll have to create new altars with twigs
and make a roaring fire and roast fish
and dance barefoot until it hurts.
Pain not in the feet, but in our bellies,
from so much inconsumable joy.
You are a more important person than you imagine. You have a tendency to dream real things.
– C.S. Lewis
Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.
– Annie Dillard
This is what happens in your brain when you learn something new.
Your brain does not usually create a new neuron every time you learn. Instead, existing neurons form new connections and strengthen the pathways between them. This remarkable ability of the brain to change and reorganize itself is called neuroplasticity.
At first, learning something unfamiliar may feel difficult because the neural pathway is still weak. But every time you study, practice, remember, or repeat the activity, that pathway becomes stronger and more efficient. Gradually, what once required great concentration begins to feel easier and more natural.
This is why repetition matters. Whether you are learning a language, practicing meditation, developing a healthy habit, or changing an emotional response, every sincere repetition helps reshape the brain.
Your brain is not fixed. Your habits are not your permanent identity. With awareness, patience, and consistent practice, you can create new patterns of thinking, feeling, and living.
What you repeatedly practice, you gradually become.
– Chogyal Rinpoche
Since we don’t know where we’re going,
we have to stick together in
case someone gets there.
– Ken Kesey
I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and l am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wondering awed about on a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty bats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them.
– Annie Dillard
At school there was little or no time for those other stories, just an orderly accumulation of the real knowledge they brought to us, in books they made available to us, in a language they taught us.
– Abdulrazak Gurnah, By the Sea
We have less time than we knew and that time buoyant, and cloven, lucent, and missile, and wild.
– Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
We’re in a freefall into future. We don’t know where we’re going. Things are changing so fast, and always when you’re going through a long tunnel, anxiety comes along. And all you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act. It’s a very interesting shift of perspective and that’s all it is… joyful participation in the sorrows and everything changes.
– Joseph Campbell
Instead of writing about the Red Book,
people ought to write their own Red Book.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
What do you call
the muscle we long with? Spirit?
I don’t think so. Spirit is a far cry. This
is a casting outward which
unwinds inside the chest. A hole
which complements the heart.
The ghost of a chance.
– Don McKay
Naming suffering, exalting it, dissecting it into its smallest components – that is doubtless a way to curb mourning.
– Julia Kristeva
Yet what I really felt was as simple as a joy. As though I had smelt the lilac, and time-traveled back to the age of eleven, reading under the tree at home: as though troubles past or to come had been dissolved, and become one with the moment in which I was watching the cars’ lights move across the bedroom wall.
– C. P. Snow
Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.
– Henry Miller
Man must have results, real results, in his inner and outer life. I do not mean the results which modern people strive after in their attempts at self-development. These are not results, but only rearrangements of psychic material, a process the Buddhists call ‘samsara’ and which our Holy Bible calls ‘dust’.
– Jacob Needleman
Tibetan Buddhists say that a person should never get rid of their negative energy, that negative energy transformed is the energy of enlightenment, and that the only difference between neurosis and wisdom is struggle. If we stop struggling and open up and accept what is, that neurotic energy naturally arises as wisdom, naturally informs us and becomes our teacher.
– Natalie Goldberg
As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know.
– Carl Gustav Jung
Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure….. Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle , and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself?
– Herman Melville
There is a Tibetan saying: ‘When things are difficult, then let yourself be happy.’ Otherwise, if happiness is relying on others or the environment or your surroundings, it’s not possible. Like an ocean, the waves always go like that but underneath, it always remains calm. So we have that ability as well. On an intellectual level, we may see things as desperate, difficult. But underneath, at the emotional level, you can keep calm.”
– Tenzin Gyatso
LeG’s response to Tennessee Williams’s comment about the world being persistently on fire:
It’s not enough to love something–or someone. Of course you love a person or art or music or the theatre. But you have to imagine that this person or this thing is trapped in a house afire, and the fire is apathy, and the fire is ignorance, and you have to go into the house all the time, day after day, year after year, and put out the flames and save the thing you love and rebuild the house in which it lives, and show it to others who will come to the rescue when you no longer can. Love is cheap and silly–a moron can love ice cream–but devotion is something worth talking about.
– Eva Le Gallienne
Our Generation has had no Great war, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives.
– Chuck Palahniuk
One of the most life-changing realizations you can have is “I don’t have to believe my thoughts…they are just thoughts!” Any story you have about yourself is not the same as the unfolding reality of what you are: the ongoing life of your senses, the tenderness of your heart, the consciousness that right now is seeing or hearing these words.
– Tara Brach
There’s no angel
tastes like the groundfall apricot
Met brick and sun
one perfect afternoon
I didn’t miss you
so much as rolled the pit in my mouth
And spelled your name
– G.L. Ford
Our daimon is our tutelary and constant companion. It has been there from childhood to the present, but it is usually drowned out by the noise of our environment, the fears that haunt us, the “stories” that separate us, and the sundry distractions popular culture offers to help us avoid our own souls. Put simply, our daimon is our personal link to wisdom, to that which transcends ordinary ego consciousness. It embodies what is right for us, no matter how trying that summons will prove to the comfort motives of the ego.
– James Hollis
In a Country Once Forested
by Wendell Berry
The young woodland remembers
the old, a dreamer dreaming
of an old holy book,
an old set of instructions,
and the soil under the grass
is dreaming of a young forest,
and under the pavement the soil
is dreaming of grass.
Nobody is smarter than you are. And what if they are? What good is their understanding doing you?
– Terence McKenna
However hypnotized you and your people are, you will be just as dead in their war, our war. However dead you are, more people will come. However many more people come, your time and its passions, and yourself and your passions, weigh equally in the balance with those of any dead who pulled waterwheel poles by the Nile or Yellow rivers, or painted their foreheads black, or starved in the wilderness, or wasted from disease then or now. Our lives and our deaths count equally, or we
must abandon one-man-one-vote dismantle democracy, and assign six billion people an importance-of-life ranking from one to six billiona ranking whose number decreases, like gravity, with the square of the distance between us and them.
What would you do differently, you up on your beanstalk looking at scenes of all peoples at all times in all places? When you climb down, would you dance any less to the music you love, knowing that music to be as provisional as a bug? Somebody has to make jugs and shoes, to turn the soil, fish. If you descend the long rope-ladders back to your people and time in the fabric, if you tell them what you have seen, and even if someone cares to listen, then what? Everyone knows times and cultures are plural. If you come back a shrugging relativist or tongue-tied absolutist, then what? If you spend hours a day looking around, high astraddle the warp or woof of your people’s wall, then what new wisdom can you take to your grave for worms to untangle? Well, maybe you will not go into advertising.
– Annie Dillard
I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously … And now I seek my hatred and cannot seem to find it. I feel its flame going out as I come to understand [its] existence … It would be difficult for me to avenge all those who should be avenged, because my revenge would be just another part of the same inexorable rite. I have to break that terrible chain. I want to think that my task is life and that my mission is not to prolong hatred but simply fill these pages …
– Isabel Allende
What a degraded cosmos. What a case of something starting out nice and going bad.
– George Saunders
My day passes between logic, whistling, going for walks, and being depressed. I wish to God that I were more intelligent and everything would finally become clear to me — or else that I needn’t live much longer.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
Once more let me remind you what fascism is. Fascism beings the first moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege.
– Tommy Douglas
Here was there less or nothing in question but horror.
– John Berryman
Wipe That Simile Off Your Aphasia
by Harryette Mullen
as horses as for
as purple as we go
as heartbeat as if
as silverware as it were
as onion as I can
as cherries as feared
as combustion as want
as dog collar as expected
as oboes as anyone
as umbrella as catch can
as penmanship as it gets
as narcosis as could be
as hit parade as all that
as icebox as far as I know
as fax machine as one can imagine
as cyclones as hoped
as dictionary as you like
as shadow as promised
as drinking fountain as well
as grassfire as myself
as mirror as is
as never as this
we have an obligation . . .
. . . to the people who helped us
. . . to the places that made us
. . . to those who have been loyal to us
. . . to the truth and to our cause
. . . to the downtrodden and besieged and the friendless.
– Ryan Holiday
Don’t Bother the Earth Spirit
by Joy Harjo
Don’t bother the earth spirit who lives here. She is working on a story. It is the oldest story in the world and it is delicate, changing. If she sees you watching she will invite you in for coffee, give you warm bread, and you will be obligated to stay and listen. But this is no ordinary story. You will have to endure earthquakes, lightning, the deaths of all those you love, the most blinding beauty. It’s a story so compelling you may never want to leave; this is how she traps you. See that stone
finger over there? That is the only one who ever escaped.
A poem may join the system
without agreeing to become it.
– Laura Kerr
An admirable idea: the world imagined as an essentially futile process, like a sideways, lost glimpse of ancient celestial episodes. Creation as a chance act.
– Jorge Luis Borges
Life is in short cycles or periods; we are quickly tired, but we have rapid rallies.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life
Were I given to choose between newspapers without government or government without newspapers, I should not hesitate but to choose the former.
– Thomas Jefferson
To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it’s still allowed, and I think you’ll be happier for the trouble.
– Bill Watterson
We don’t choose feelings; they come to us, they grow wild like the weeds that no one plants and that overrun the land.
– Emilia Pardo Bazán
When we move from dwelling in static concepts to seeing the actual nature of what is, the truth of impermanence starts to sink in.
– Guy Armstrong
For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops.
– Karl Ove Knausgård
From the highest realm down to the lowest, all worlds return to me. But those who reach me never come back—they have found their true home.
– Krishna
There are no events but thoughts and the heart’s hard turning, the heart’s slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.
– Annie Dillard
Purpose is not the thing that you do, purpose is the thing that happens in others when you do the thing that you do.
– Mel Robbins
I should be sorry if I had any earthly fame, for whatever natural glory a man has is so much detracted from his spiritual glory. I wish to do nothing for profit. I wish to live for art. I want nothing whatever. I am quite happy.
– William Blake
It is the power of memory that gives rise to the power of imagination.
– Akira Kurosawa
There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.
– Ernest Hemingway
Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.
– Mary Oliver
Now and then a gentle rustle trembled through the trees, though wind there was none; it was but the breath of summer night.
– Theodor Storm
God wants you to be delivered from what you have done and from what has been to you – both are equally important to Him.
– Joyce Meyer
When one is free, it is only natural to be lost.
– Ichiro Kishimi & Fumitake Koga, The Courage to Be Disliked
For the sake of who I am to become, I will sacrifice who I am now.
– Miyamoto Musashi
The gods are true in the way poetry is true.
– Joseph Campbell
It is impossible to spend your days writing and not begin to know your own mind.
– Dani Shapiro
I believe memory has a gravitational pull: it always draws us in. Those who possess memory are able to live in the fragile present. Those who do not, live nowhere.
– Patricio Guzmán
Do you know why this world is beyond repair?
I assure you I didn’t know.
He told me: ‘Because one person’s dreams are another’s nightmares.’
– Adolfo Bioy Casares
This is a ferocious storm. A single tree will come down in it. A forest will not.
– Mark Carney
I mystified the simple life,
I covered up with consciousness.
I saw myself and broke it down,
‘Til nothing more was left.
– Duncan Shiek, She Runs Away
Confidence plants seeds in stone; doubt starves the harvest in fertile soil.
– A.G Peart
Everything has its substitute—a substitution that goes on infinitely.
I believe nothing is truly replaced.
– Alejandra Pizarnik
It’s entirely possible that our brains are no closer to fully understanding the universe than a grasshopper is. The human brain is not the best instrument to perceive the entirety of the universe. We are not some be all and end all of perception.
– Dr. Thaller
We sense here that the poet is very sad, but what we sense is not sadness. We sense the aesthetic experience. That kind of emotion produced by that magical operation which is poetry.
– Jorge Luis Borges
…maybe the weight in our hearts, is all that holds us to earth
– Marcus Sakey
Slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life.
– Franz Kafka
Tranquility is nothing else than the good ordering of the mind.
– Marcus Aurelius
I went to a place to eat. It said ‘breakfast at any time.’ So I ordered French Toast during the Renaissance.
– Stephen Wright
I buried my finer feelings in the depths of my heart and they died there.
– Mikhail Lermontov
Know thyself? If I knew myself, I’d run away.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The universe responds far more to your state of being than the noise of your effort.
– Alan Watts
War is pressed by the victor, but peace is made by the vanquished.
– Harold Calahan
Too low they build, who build beneath the stars.
– Edward Young
I don’t know how to be silent when my heart is speaking.
– Dostoevsky
Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark.
– R. Tagore
I love every part of words, their syllables, their repetitive formations, their letters, their attributes and modes, declensions and cases, their antiquity and renaissance, their infinite juxtaposability, their combinatory effects, and the languages they bring to me.
– Erín Moure
The older you get, the more you realize that kindness is synonymous with happiness.
– Lionel Barrymore
When restraint and courtesy are added to strength,
the latter becomes irresistible.
– Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi
All religions teach you to renounce the world; My business is to teach you not to renounce the world.
– Osho
When asked, “Why do you always wear black?”, he said, “I am mourning for my life.”
– Anton Chekhov
There is the music of heaven in all things.
– Hildegard von Bingen
We now face the danger, which in the past has been the most destructive to humans: Success, plenty, comfort and ever-increasing leisure. No dynamic people has ever survived these dangers.
– John Steinbeck
I am of the opinion that the following sentence is nowhere near profound enough to warrant this level of complexity.
– James Baldwin
Beware of fair-weather friends. They come to you when the sky is crystal clear and disappear when the same sky is overcast with dark clouds.
– Michael Bassey Johnson
A beautiful woman delights the eye; a wise woman, the understanding; a pure one, the soul.
– Dean Koontz
Language is a barrier among nations. When we are given the opportunity to learn someone else’s language and be able to converse with them, it only puts away strife between those different people.
– Bob Edwards
When you put happiness over money, stock shares, and public admiration, your day-to-day work becomes sustainable over the long haul.
– @garyvee
I am a lover, with or without a lover, because love is who I am, not who I’m with.
– M. Dangi
The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way.
– John Stuart Mill
A fugitive is one who turns away from reason and civic duty; a blind man is one who closes the eyes of the spirit; a beggar is one who depends on others and does not possess within himself everything necessary for life.
– Marcus Aurelius
The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.
– William James
In the name of egalitarian humanitarianism, the school in particular and official worldliness in general crush vocations and squander geniuses: from this results the oppression of contemplatives from their earliest childhood.
– Frithjof Schuon
There is nothing inhuman, evil, or irrational which does not give some comfort, provided it is shared by a group.
– Erich Fromm
When billionaires dictate what our rock artists can and cannot say in stadiums, then these are not stadiums. They are cemeteries where democracies sing their final song.
– George Tsakraklides
A note slipped under a door or a crumpled message passed from cell to cell, hand to hand is called a kite—words travel even when we can’t.
– Saidiya Hartman
Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.
– Rousseau
Once again I put pen to paper to implore you to explain to me your inconceivable silence. Would you not be enticed to give me a bit of happiness? For 4 months I have been enduring the torments of hell; at present I beg of you only a few letters which would alleviate my situation. You do not know what this situation is. I can hope for no happiness in this world except through you. My life depends on seeing you and on being loved by you. Have I perhaps deserved this! But if you detest me, reduce my agony, do not drag me from one silence to another, into an uncertainty which prevents me from taking any part in it. I am here in abominable convulsions, ready to kill myself.
– Germaine de Staël, letter to Count de Narbonne
Come. And Be My Baby
The highway is full of big cars
going nowhere fast
And folks is smoking anything that’ll burn
Some people wrap their lives around a cocktail glass
And you sit wondering
where you’re going to turn.
I got it.
Come. And be my baby.
Some prophets say the world is gonna end tomorrow
But others say we’ve got a week or two
The paper is full of every kind of blooming horror
And you sit wondering
What you’re gonna do.
I got it.
Come. And be my baby.
– Maya Angelou
Euphemisms chosen by fear are a covenant with hypocrisy and will immediately destroy the poem and eventually destroy the poet.
– Lenore Kandel
Scholars may keep studying poetry until further notice.
– Laura Kerr
I think that my job is to observe people and the world, and not to judge them. I always hope to position myself away from so-called conclusions. I would like to leave everything wide open to all the possibilities in the world.
– Haruki Murakami
Being enveloped in and defined by what’s difficult is relatively easy to do, so it takes some intentionality to recognize all aspects of our experience and remember the positive forces in our lives.
– Sharon Salzberg
I think it’s natural to want to know about who and where we come from, even if there is pain in those truths.
– Jacque Gorelick
silver dawn
a warm cup
between both hands
– @BashoSociety
Most people desire a firm foundation for morality. Who wouldn’t like to point to something external that could silence Alex Jones—or at least the tireless sophomore at the back of every ethics class?
– Susan Neiman
Disclosure is not a better authenticity signal, it is a refusal to enter the authenticity market at all.
– Jeremy Moss
When you judge others, you do not define them, you define yourself.
– Earl Nightingale
The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.
– P.J. O’Rourke
I knew that we / were in training for a strange / future
– Bruce Taylor
I’m scared
I’m scared of myself…
at daybreak
piece by piece I try
to put myself together
– Chen-ou Liu
the flicker
before its fall …
a red leaf
– Sankara Jayanth
Now it reveals its hidden side and
now the other ―
thus it falls, an autumn leaf.
– Ryokan Taigu
Teach me your language.
I may not be native to your
homeland, but let me belong;
let me be native to you.
– Abdulsamad Muhammad Sani
Never judge someone’s character based on the words of another. Instead, study the motives behind the words of the person casting the bad judgment.
– Suzy Kassem
No one should ever
be afraid to walk down
the street holding hands
with the person they love.
– Barack Obama
Artificial light does not disqualify the flowering.
– Laura Kerr
The ascension of man can never be through knowledge, for it is never complete; it is ever within the shadow of ignorance.
– Krishnamurti
The poem was returned for clarification.
It came back as another poem.
– Laura Kerr
late summer night
somewhere between holding on
and becoming new
– @BashoSociety
People who label others are just lost souls who refuse to see their own shortcomings.
– Christine Szymanski
One thing I do know for a fact is that the nicer we are to our fellow human beings, the nicer the universe is to us.
– Joe Rogan
Meditation in action is more important than meditation in stillness.
– Hakuin Ekaku
Come live with me. We will have all the poetry books that exist in the world. All the music. We will get drunk until we sway like beings made of phosphorescent matter, and we will say so many poems that our tongues will catch fire like roses.
– Alejandra Pizarnik
the same moon
Li Po drank to
the same autumn
Tu Fu wrote of —
I alone change
– Chen-ou Liu
rain after dusk
the blurred outline
of an autumn moon
– Basho
Taking time to discover yourself is the best use of time. Prioritize this.
– Mooji
Every negative experience is teaching you something. Good students study the events, not the people.
– Iyanla Vanzant
The healthiest people I know aren’t perfect. They’re just honest. They know their patterns. They take responsibility. They apologize. They grow.
– Todd Baratz
Nowhere was right here. Here was nowhere. Being here one was nowhere, in time and space there was no such thing as anywhere.
– H.D.
Spirituality has nothing to do with the atmosphere you live in. It is about the atmosphere you create within yourself.
– Sadhguru
Delusions are called ‘obstructions to liberation’ because they keep us in samsara.
– Geshe Kelsang Gyatso
Whichever method suits you use it. Do not allow a day to go by where you do not give up your identification with the world. Either through surrender, or through Self Inquiry, or through mindfulness, or through observation….
– Robert Adams
A moment
Being realization
Can
Vitalized by cosmic initiation
Furnish an adequate apology
For the objective
Agglomeration of activities
Of a life.
– Mina Loy
The starving chemist in his golden views
Supremely blest, the poet in his muse.
– Alexander Pope
The great writers can take us anywhere; but half the time they’re taking us where we don’t want to go.
– Martin Amis
The I in the poem is not you but someone who knows a lot about you.
– Marvin Bell
How much time
will pass
between
the first person
AI kills
and the last person
AI kills
and no human
will hear
an autumn breeze
or see a crimson
maple leaf
fall
ever again?
– Andy Perrin
I hope today leaves something gentle at your door,
a quiet song, a patch of sunlight, or one kind word,
just enough to remind you that even difficult days
can carry small mercies in their pockets.
– Amy Christie
At the time, I remember thinking she’s the best of all of us – She was far ahead of me, Glenn Frey and even Jackson Browne.
– JD Souther, On Judee Sill
The major advances of civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur.
– Alfred North Whitehead
If you wanted to be rich in the 1800s
you did it with Labour
In the 1900s with Capital
Now you do it with code.
– @naval
We are a culture that robs our children to create a potlatch culture in the present, and this will look fairly pathological from any cultural perspective outside our own.
– Terence McKenna
And you, in love with ruins, have gone and smashed your head against them.
– Alejandra Pizarnik
Only if you can completely suppress the experience can you ever return to ordinary rationalism.
– Terence McKenna
you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.
– On Writing, Stephen King
The truest poetry is the most feigning.
– William Shakespeare
…America has progressed from infancy to senility without having passed through a period of maturity.
– Ian Fleming
Why do trees conceal,
The splendor of their roots?
– Pablo Neruda
We are in the grip of a process that cannot be halted or accelerated, but which is now in a process of tightening its gyres.
– Terence McKenna
Your inner growth is completely dependent upon the realization that the only way to find peace and contentment is to stop thinking about yourself.
– Michael Singer
When we live too close to another person, their soul can wear away beneath our constant touch, like a beautiful engraving handled too often. Sometimes, through too much intimacy, we lose the pearl of our life.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
We are in a sense here involved in some kind of—I don’t want to lay this trip on too heavy—but in a sense we’re involved in a little cosmic drama here.
– Terence McKenna
You don’t know how lucky you are to be loved.
– A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle
It seems to me that when a man is overtaken by a ruin he has no means of escaping, he is seized by an irresistible desire to sit down, close his eyes, and let whatever is to happen, happen.
– Dostoevsky
Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is a success.
– Henry Ford
By the cold and religious we were taken in hand, shown how to feel good and told to feel bad.
– Pink Floyd
Language is like the privileged vehicle by which human beings relate to the world, and interestingly enough, psychedelics… trigger language-like activity.
– Terence McKenna
Financial support is one thing, but I always think what becomes really sacrificial is your time.
– Cliff Richard
…like a constellation of stars in the night sky. Among them, we are one tiny point of light shaped like a maple leaf.
– Neil Peart
Only by seeking challenges can we hope to find the best in ourselves.
– Robert Rodriguez
The 20th century history is in fact the speeding up of this temporal process to the point where it is now visible within a single human lifetime.
– Terence McKenna
We are surrounded by oceans of alien beauty, alien intent, bizarre ideas… each one of these things stretches the monkey mind to its limits.
– Terence McKenna
Consciousness is precisely what we are starving for the lack of, and history is no longer rationally apprehendable by the systems which created it.
– Terence McKenna
The keying issue is not whether a cup of coffee will kill you, but a lifestyle built around caffeine is not going to let you live to be 100 years old.
– Terence McKenna
There are very few
human beings who receive the truth, complete
and staggering,
by instant illumination.
Most acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale,
by successive developments, cellularly,
like a laborious mosaic.
– Anais Nin
The strangest and most fantastic fact about negative emotions is that people actually worship them.
– Peter D. Ouspensky
Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.
– Winston Churchill
Why do the easy, expected thing? It takes guts to follow your dreams. Courage. Half the fun is venturing into the unknown, taking on the difficult task that yields new knowledge.
– Marshall Ulrich
Ego is our problem… The reason the planet is dying is because we cannot place the good of the group above our own desires consistently.
– Terence McKenna
You weren’t ready, and it’s completely real in a way more real than the contents of ordinary reality.
– Terence McKenna
Death belongs to the realm of faith. You’re right to believe that you will die. It sustains you. If you didn’t believe it, could you bear the life you have? If we couldn’t totally rely on the certainty that it will end, how could you bear all this?
– Jacques Lacan
For the alchemist, the one primarily in need of redemption is not man, but the deity who is lost and sleeping in matter.
– Carl Jung
The social contract is a kind of enslavement to a linguistically empowered paradigm, a virtual reality within which you will walk around your entire life.
– Terence McKenna
One hasn’t become a writer until one has distilled writing into a habit, and that habit has been forced into an obsession. Writing has to be an obsession. It has to be something as organic, physiological and psychological as speaking or sleeping or eating.
– Bàbá Níyì Ọ̀ṣúndáre
She lives in dreams, alone.
– Virginia Woolf
I always thought we were selling dreams, not clothes.
– Irving Penn
We have to change the way we talk about these things. That’s the first step.”
– Terence McKenna
The abdomen is the reason why man does not readily take himself to be a god.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Every society that’s always existed has had the built-in assumption that they only needed to find out 5% more about reality and then it would all fall into place…
– Terence McKenna
you were born to sing the end of days, the beginning of a new time. let them come for you with their flaming branches, their hatred and terror, their laws and their bullets and their Bibles full of a thousand lies. let them denounce you in the names of all their false gods. your divinity is not found in any book. your divinity comes from within.
– Kai Chen Thom
[Farewell love and all thy laws forever]
by Thomas Wyatt
Farewell love and all thy laws forever;
Thy baited hooks shall tangle me no more.
Senec and Plato call me from thy lore
To perfect wealth, my wit for to endeavour.
In blind error when I did persever,
Thy sharp repulse, that pricketh aye so sore,
Hath taught me to set in trifles no store
And scape forth, since liberty is lever.
Therefore farewell; go trouble younger hearts
And in me claim no more authority.
With idle youth go use thy property
And thereon spend thy many brittle darts,
For hitherto though I have lost all my time,
Me lusteth no lenger rotten boughs to climb.
God is not what you think
or even what you believe,
because God is
a word unspoken,
a thought unthought,
a belief unbelieved.
So if you wish to know
this God, practice wonder
do what is good, and
cultivate silence.
The rest will follow.
– Meister Eckhart
I don’t believe in 50 friends. I believe in a smaller number. Nor do I care about society events. It’s the most senseless use of time. When I do go out, from time to time, it’s just to convince myself again that I’m not missing a lot.
– Dietrich Mateschitz
In my early professional years I was asking the question: How can I treat, or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way: How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?
– Carl R. Rogers
Helping can come from seeing people as broken, while serving comes from seeing people as whole.
– Oneika Mays
Doubt is the crown of life because truth and error come together. Doubt is living, truth is sometimes death and stagnation. When you are in doubt you have the greatest opportunity to unite the dark and light sides of life.
– Carl G. Jung
It is the silence of the world that is real, our noise, our business, our purposes…these are the illusions.
– Thomas Merton
The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and politics, but it is not the path to knowledge.
– Carl Sagan
When you have a high vibration, you feed people with it. You carry abundance and love and spiritual advancement in your energy signature alone.
– Nika Solé
The promise was that when the glass was full, it would overflow, benefitting the poor. But what happens instead, is that when the glass is full, it magically gets bigger — nothing ever comes out for the poor.
– Pope Francis
The paradox of individuation is that we best serve intimate relationship by becoming sufficiently developed in ourselves that we do not need to feed off others.
– James Hollis
under an open sky
the poem becomes clear
in the autumn wind
– Basho
Oh what a tangled web they weave who try a new word to conceive!
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Modern technology teaches man to take for granted the world he is looking at; he takes no time to retreat and reflect.
Technology lures him on, dropping him into its wheels and movements. No rest, no meditation, no reflection, no conversation – the senses are continually overloaded with stimuli.
[Man] doesn’t learn to question his world anymore; the screen offers him answers-ready-made.
– Joost Meerloo
Be slow to say “no” when you’re angry and slow to say “yes” when you’re elated. In this way, you can smooth out the bumps and guard your karma.
– Kenneth Folk
I sought a timeless truth: the flowers’ glory
is just another form of dust.
– Buson (translated by Sam Hamill)
Here is a work for poets —
Carve the runes
Then be content with silence.
– George Mackay Brown
The Magician is the Man when he seeks to become a God, and, being a usurper, can hardly fail to be a tyrant. Not being the maker, but only the distorter, he twists all things out of their intended shape, and imprisons natural things in unnatural forms.
– G.K. Chesterton
The presence of humans on Earth is so destructive that, if we were to disappear, our absence from the planet would bring immediate relief similar to the sudden death of a dictator.
– George Tsakraklides
Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.
– G. K. Chesterton
After a traumatic experience, the human system of self-preservation seems to go onto permanent alert, as if the danger might return at any moment.
– Judith Lewis Herman
I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity.
– Edgar Allan Poe
Perhaps the answer isn’t to find better meaning but to loosen the grip on the whole project.
– Josh Korda
We are not entitled to lecture others on how to live, but we are entitled to insist that no one may lecture us on how to think.
– Christopher Hitchens
light of dawn …
watching the world unfurl
from shadow
– Chen-ou Liu
A poem may escape one limit
only by acquiring another.
– Laura Kerr
Sometimes the most powerful place to be, is out of the mix.
– Nika Solé
A poem may enter the frame
without accepting its terms.
– Laura Kerr
The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.
– George Bernard Shaw
Finding an idea for a play is like picking up a shell on a beach.
– Tom Stoppard
Society begins to collapse when its people abandon truth in exchange for survival.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
tea growing cold
how softly fear learns
to call itself wisdom
– @BashoSociety
A poem may be conceived exactly and arrive otherwise.
We don’t know.
– Laura Kerr
True, the world still stands or spins, but the meaning has gone out of it. It is more dead, this illusory, everyday world, than if it had been shattered by a million atom bombs. We live as ghosts amid a world in ruins. All is senseless repetition.
– Henry Miller
The night kept coming on in and there was nothing I could do.
– Charles Bukowski
Realize that now, in this moment of time, you are creating. You are creating your next moment based on what you are feeling and thinking. That is what’s real.
– Doc Childre
Forget about keeping up appearances and pandering to peoples’ wishes.
Be aligned within and hold your own ground.
You mustn’t lose your attention by cleverness.
Doing so risks mistaking evil intentions for positive ones.
– Sera Khandro
Telling disabled people to prioritize meaningless jobs over their health is cruel. Expecting someone to sacrifice their health just to prove they’re productive is not support, it’s dehumanizing.
– @delonperc
To cheat oneself out of love is the most terrible deception; it is an eternal loss for which there is no reparation, either in time or in eternity.
– Søren Kierkegaard
Learn from science that you must doubt the experts.
– Richard Feynman
The artist is always a servant, and is perpetually trying to pay for the gift that has been given to him as if by a miracle.
– Andrei Tarkovsky
When negative energy is directed your way, you don’t have to meet it with more negativity. Send love and light instead.
Love is one of the most powerful energies we can choose.
– Bill Philipps
morning tea
a little autumn
inside the steam
– @BashoSociety
Maybe I write because it is a way of thinking that has no possible match. It is a very active way of thinking. You think more clearly when you have to put something down in words. Even people who are not professional writers clear their minds while writing a letter or keeping a diary.
– Javier Marías
Life gives us tasks, that should we succeed, grow us into the kind of people that life can trust with important things. We mistake these tasks as burdens rather than an opportunity to grow our compassion and skill level.
– Charlotte Erikson
You could not have been born at a better period than the present, when we have lost everything.
– Simone Weil
the truth is a matter of the imagination.
– Ursula K. LeGuin
It is amazing that when someone else spouts the nonsense you yourself believe, you can readily perceive it as nonsense.
– Philip K Dick
Conviction is the north star that keeps you on track, helping you be tenacious throughout your journey, despite the inevitable difficulties.
– @garyvee
Changing the world is more like caregiving than it is like war, but too many people expect it to look like war.
– Rebecca Solnit
A calling may be postponed, avoided, intermittently missed. It may also possess you completely. Whatever; eventually it will out. It makes its claim. The daimon does not go away.
– James Hillman
Poetry is what he turns to these days, finding in its fragmentation the proper echo of the disintegrating world.
– Lauren Groff, Arcadia
You can’t predict the events that give you the best overall outcome in life.
– @garyvee
The freedom of the press is one of the greatest bulwarks of liberty, and can never be restrained but by despotic governments.
– George Mason
To every man there openeth a way,
And the high soul climbs the high way,
And the low soul gropes the low;
And in between on the misty flats,
The rest drift to and fro.
But to every man there openeth
A high way and a low
And every man decideth
The way his soul shall go.
– John Oxenham
Real valor consists not in being insensible to danger; but in being prompt to confront and disarm it.
– Walter Scott
“Sometimes,” said Julia, “I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there’s no room for the present at all.”
– Evelyn Waugh
It was so simple, but it was a revelation: what you did for yourself was what gave you the power.
– Stephen King
It’s not where you take things from — it’s where you take them to.
– Jean-Luc Godard
I am indifferent to the knife blows of an enemy, but the prick of a pin from a friend is unbearable.
– Victor Hugo
The wonderful thing about dreams is that they grow with you.
– Richard Bach
Meaning is just the cherry on the cake; it comes very, very late in that process, and one of the strange things about us as a species is our absence of an emotional vocabulary.
– Terence McKenna
So, you will spend years struggling for love you never gave yourself and call it devotion.
– Franz Kafka
There is no need to provoke aversion, it comes without being called. There are many who hate for no particular reason, without knowing how or why.
– Baltasar Gracián
Strong social security is America’s protection against the spread of communism.
– Frances Perkins
On a good working day, working from nine o’clock in the morning to two or three in the afternoon, the most I can write is a short paragraph of four or five lines, which I usually tear up the next day.
– Gabriel García Márquez
The spirit that has suffered long becomes capable of seeing what others cannot see.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
If you want to learn, then you’re gonna be assigned the hardest life possible.
– Professor Jiang
The most tender plants can push their way through the hardest rocks, and it is the same with kindness. Nothing can stop a truly kind and sincere person.
– Henry David Thoreau
Come, pain, feed on me.
Bury your fangs in my flesh.
Tear me asunder.
– Virginia Woolf
Reading and thoughtfulness and openness are the best way, I should think, to begin to address the richness that is in each of us.
– Julia Alvarez
every work of fiction is a peep show in which we observe the spasms and convulsions of the agonized human heart.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Humans are complicated, and the world is complicated.
– President Barack Obama
The novel wants to be your friend. The short story, almost never.
– Joy Williams
To be good, and to do good, is all we have to do.
– John Adams
The only option for a creative person was constant motion—a lifetime of busy whirligigging in a generally forward direction, until you couldn’t do it any longer.
– Meg Wolitzer
The better the information it has, the better democracy works. Silence and secrecy are never good for it.
– Kate Adie
Write change-the-world books or write trash, but write what you want to write.
– N. K. Jemisin
The Japanese culture is an excellent model for this future that we’re trying to move into because what the Japanese seem to understand that nobody else understands is they’ve had centuries of experience with limited resource management… our style is burn, cut it down, dig it out, and when it’s gone, move on, and now we’re at the end of our rope with that.
– Terence McKenna
Though not the master of one’s fate, one may still be captain of one’s soul.
– Philip Brickman
We cannot evolve faster than the language evolves, because… the culture is made out of language.
– Terence McKenna
If inspiration is all you have it will abandon you when you need it most.
– David Ball
What leaves despite effort came only to teach you.
– Bhagavad Gita
Having the courage, knowing in advance that you will be defeated, and going out to fight: that is literature.
– Roberto Bolaño
You cannot have a proud and chivalrous spirit if your conduct is mean and paltry; for whatever a man’s actions are, such must be his spirit.
– Demosthenes
You don’t become conscious by collecting more answers. You become conscious when your answers can no longer hide your contradictions.
– Saiki
We’re all born looking for someone, looking for us…
– Dr. Curt Thompson
He was only twelve, and understood that his experience of the world was limited, but one thing he was quite sure of: when someone said trust me, they were usually lying through their teeth.
– Stephen King
Notice that when we talk about language, our notions of clarity… are all visual metaphors. If you think you really understand somebody, then you say ‘I see what you mean,’ or you say ‘You’re completely transparent to me.’ If somebody is eloquent you say ‘He spoke clearly,’ ‘She painted a picture.’ What this means is that we have an unconscious bias in favor of the visual sense. It’s what our eyes tell us that we believe.
– Terence McKenna
Keep fighting for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t forget to have fun doing it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce.
– Molly Ivins
The things you do for yourself are gone when you are gone, but the things you do for others remain as your legacy.
– Kalu Ndukwe Kalu
I’ve never understood people who remember childhood as an idyllic time.
– Bill Watterson
Some lessons have to be experienced before they can be understood.
– Michael Batnick
When you’re a child, you realize that everyone is your friend… when you’re an adult, sometimes you forget.
– Judd Apatow
The wise do not hoard. The more they give to others, the more they have for their own.
– Seneca
Over time, why empires collapse is the elites refuse to have children. That was the biggest problem facing Rome for most of its history.
– Professor Jiang
We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.
– John Steinbeck
Think about it. Stay slightly ahead of the curve. Try to keep the more common miseries at bay. Don’t look luck in the eye. Cheers.
Cheers.
– Cormac McCarthy
How do you know you’re having fun if there’s no one watching you have it?
– Douglas Adams
Let me stay here until the end, I said to the lord, and we’ll call it even.
Let me tie my shadow to your feet and call it friendship, I said to myself.
– Ocean Vuong
Everyone is interdependent. Everyone is vulnerable. Everyone is penetrable, and everyone is penetrated incessantly by the vibrations of sound traveling into the inner ear, by the light shining in our eyes and on the surface of our bodies, by the air we must never stop breathing, by the food and water we take in, by the contacts that generate sensations that run from the surface of our skin to our brains, by the pheromones and bacteria we transmit imperceptibly to each other by air and contact, by the smells that are tiny particles we have inhaled, by the myriad species of beneficial bacteria in our gut and elsewhere that constitute so vast a portion of a human body that self is something of a misnomer or at least a crowd and maybe a party. If you were truly impenetrable you’d be dead in minutes, and there was a kind of deadening inertness that was part of the equation of imagining you could be so.
– Rebecca Solnit
After a short silence the doctor raised himself a little in his chair and asked if Tarrou had an idea of the path to follow for attaining peace.
“Yes”, he replied. “The path of sympathy.”
– Albert Camus
Love has no opposite; it is not hate, nor is it jealousy or envy.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
…Fascism says for us to split ourselves up into the thousand cliques and klans and beat our own chains of slavery onto our ankles by wasting our strength fighting our friend and neighbor—and allowing the fascists to nip us off one by one, little by little, group by group.
– Woody Guthrie
We live in an anti-relational, vulnerability-despising culture. One that not only fails to nurture the skills of connection, but actively fears them. We are all victimized by the violence of disassociation and disconnection.
– bell hooks
the amorous subject wonders, not whether he should declare his love to the loved being,…, but to what degree he should conceal the turbulences of his passion, his desires, his distresses: in short, his excesses.
– Roland Barthes
…How do you get through? Sometimes you don’t survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt. It’s not about that solution. It is about being as fearless as one can, and behaving as beautifully as one can, under
completely impossible circumstances.
– Toni Morrison
In every country in which there has been a loss of freedom, where does it begin? It begins in news media, in public print, in books, and on the proscenium. That’s where they attack you first right there. That’s the bread basket.
– Rod Serling
My heart is heavy, unliftable. I talk with angels.
– Marcel Proust
So that the Universe felt love,
by which, as some believe,
the world has many times been turned to chaos.
And at that moment this ancient rock,
here and elsewhere, fell broken into pieces.
– Dante Alighieri
But there is a third mode of transcendence: in it language simply ceases, and the motion of spirit gives no further outward manifestation of its being. The poet enters into silence. Here the word borders not on radiance or music, but on night.
– George Steiner
Christians increasingly live on a spiritual island; new and rival ways of life surround it in all directions and their tides come further up the beach every time.
– C.S. Lewis
My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tambours I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.
– Fernando Pessoa
If we remember something that happened six months ago, and with the memory come upset feelings, our feelings should be looked at with interest, nothing more. Though that sounds cold, it’s necessary in order to be a genuinely warm and compassionate person.
– Charlotte Joko Beck
The dedicated life is the life worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
– Annie Dillard
Unaccepted, the universe has no meaning; it is senseless fate and chaos, but acceptance is a way of discovering meaning, not of manufacturing it.
– Alan Watts
My generation, especially, was oversold on the power of words.
– Wright Morris
To enter the dark of the underworld is to enter the dark of the body and begin to hear what is going on under the noise.
– Carly Mountain
Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.
– Erica Jong
It has become normal to have no roots anymore. Not in places, not in families. No reason to complain. We live longer today because of that. Even if it’s not entirely clear why.
– Sybille Berg
the luck of roasted beans
tucked..
near my heart
– Kobayashi Issa
In winter I think spring will be my salvation, and in summer I think autumn, and in autumn winter, it is always the same, I hope from one season to the next.
– Thomas Bernhard
Life doesn’t make any sense without interdependence. We need each other, and the sooner we learn that, the better for us all.
– Erik Erikson
Depression can facilitate a transformation—a spiritual emergence—by leading us away from the chaotic and unsettling circumference of our lives and toward the centre, where we can dig deeply into the unconscious and fully attend to what we discover there.
The breakdown-breakthrough experience requires a caring container. It requires empathy and a supportive relationship. It requires release-verbal expression and allowing imagery to pour forth without judging it. The content that emerges needs to be delivered to somebody. The outward movement of communication actually helps to keep the process moving. With proper support and empathy, a person can fall apart and come back together, achieving a major integrative synthesis.
– Kathryn Wood Madden
But the Mass is exactly the opposite of a Man seeking to be a God. It is a God seeking to be a Man; it is God giving His creative life to mankind as such, and restoring the original pattern of their manhood; making not gods, nor beasts, nor angels; but, by the original blast and miracle that makes all things new, turning men into men.
– G.K. Chesterton
Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men.
– Thomas Henry Huxley
A dogma is always the result and fruit of many minds and many centuries, purified of all the oddities, shortcomings, and flaws of individual experience. But for all that, the individual experience, by its very poverty, is immediate life, the warm red blood pulsating today. It is more convincing to a seeker after truth than the best tradition.
– Carl G. Jung
Things are not always what they seem; the first appearance deceives many; the intelligence of a few perceives what has been carefully hidden.
– Phaedrus
I am trimming so close to the bone that a reader will require either good will or sensitive nerves. Naturally I would prefer the latter.
– Helen Garner
I do not expect you to understand
this, or anything else, how could
you, you know nothing of me.
– Sylvia Plath
Let go of the idea that you need two fully healed people to build a healthy relationship. Love is never about perfection.
– Yung Pueblo
Away, away, from men and towns,
To the wild wood and the downs —
To the silent wilderness,
Where the soul need not repress its music.
– P.B. Shelley
One of the most beautiful gifts in the world is the gift of encouragement. When someone encourages you, that person helps you over a threshold you might otherwise never have crossed on your own.
– John O’Donohue
All healing is essentially a release from fear.
– Helen Schuman
Solely for You
A candle burns at night,
burning solely for me.
If I blow on the flame it blazes up,
blazing solely for me.
But if you speak softly, whisper sweet words,
it grows brighter than any light,
and deep in my breast
burns – solely for you.
– Tove Ditlevsen
(tr. Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell)
The wheel of tyrants turns thanks to the idleness of ignorant minds.
– Victor Hugo
You who read
me–are you certain
you understand my
language?
– Jorge Luis Borges
This life comes down from the heights of the infinite, which is made only of fleeting simulacra of a stolen nostalgia.
– Fernando Pessoa
early autumn
even the old garden
looks forgiven
– @BashoSociety
You need to spend time crawling alone through shadows to truly appreciate what it is to stand in the sun.
– Shaun Hick
A god may
but can we?
Beyond this
this. Ours is
the music
breath fans—the
stars embers.
Then—as now—
opens wide
to the point
we are—the
song escapes.
– Cid Corman
Half the time you think
you’re thinking you’re
actually listening.
– Terence McKenna
What could be more futile, more insane, than to create inner resistance to something that already is?
– Eckhart Tolle
Cracking codes. Daily downloads. Clearing the ancestral load. Upgrading your glow. Pattern recognition. Heightened cognition. Living in the fruition of everything you’ve dreamed of and more. Success.
– Nika Solé
Why do you worry so, / when none of us is spared?
– Jill Bialosky
Sometimes the greatest inner revolution is simply this:
the heart decides it will no longer carry the old burden.
– Shai Tubali
the pleasure
of sleeping late
on an autumn morning
– Basho
I need, sometimes, individuals to spark an idea so that I can take off running.
– Meek Mill
At this moment, a thousand valves have opened within my brain, and I must pour forth a river of words or I shall suffocate.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
The world we live in can radically transform. Peace and love aren’t distant dreams; they’re simply different choices.
– Marianne Williamson
If you do not know what divine madness is, suspend judgment and wait for the fruits.
– Carl Gustav Jung
Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.
– McLuhan
First meditate and feel the divine Presence; then do your work saturated with the consciousness of God. If you do this you will never become tired. If you work for your Divine Beloved, your life will be filled with love and strength.
– Paramahansa Yogananda
Remain humble and grateful, and more of your genius will surface as you remain in a constant state of expansion. Gratitude is a sacred place …
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
September sun
a quiet sweetness
returns to the face
– @BashoSociety
These days, many people are discovering that Buddhism has answers to questions and solutions to problems that cannot be found anywhere else.
– Geshe Kelsang Gyatso
But you’re getting these silly convictions and conceptions out of nowhere, don’t you realize all this life is just a dream? Why don’t you just relax and enjoy God? God is YOU, you fool!
– Jack Kerouac
What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.
– Alan Watts
The ones who most shape the world are those who are not exposed, who can’t be seen; unknown, opaque beings about whom almost no one knows anything.
– Javier Marías
Poetry reaches the unsaid, and leaves it unsaid.
– Etel Adnan
Consciousness is all there is, flowing, streaming through these instruments in a manner which, in accordance with the perfect unfolding of totality, is perceived as discreet individual entities autonomously performing actions, but in truth this is not the case. There is no individual, no entity, no separate self here to do anything or to be anything, awakened or enlightened included.
– David Carse
The reader! You, dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented bastard, it’s you I’m addressing, who else, from inside this monstrous fiction. You’ve read me this far, then? Even this far? For what discreditable motive? How is it you don’t go to a movie, watch TV, stare at a wall, play tennis with a friend, make amorous advances to the person who comes to your mind when I speak of amorous advances? Can nothing surfeit, saturate you, turn you off? Where’s your shame?
– John Barth
We all got holes in our lives. Nobody dies in a perfect garment. We all got to face the nothingness before us and behind. Call it sleep. We all begin in sleep and that’s where we find our end. Even in between, sleep keeps trying to claim us. To stay awake in life as much as possible – that may be the point.
Pain comes to us from deep back, from where it grew in the human body. Pain sucks more pain into it, we don’t know why. It lives and we harbor its weight. When the worst comes, we will not act the opposite. We will do what we were taught, we who learnt our lessons in the dead light. We pass them on. We hurt, and hurt others, in a circular motion.
– Louise Erdrich
It was hard to avoid the feeling that somebody, somewhere, was missing the point. I couldn’t even be sure it wasn’t me.
– Douglas Adams
Whether we know it or not, we transmit the presence of everyone we have ever known, as though by being in each other’s presence we exchange our cells, pass on some of our life force, and then we go on carrying that other person in our body, not unlike springtime when certain plants in fields we walk through attach their seeds in the form of small burrs to our socks, our pants, our caps, as if to say, “Go on, take us with you, carry us to root in another place.” This is how we survive long after we are dead. This is why it is important who we become, because we pass it on.
– Natalie Goldberg
There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate—the genetic and neural fate—of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death. I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude.
– Oliver Sacks
Studies suggest How may I help you officer? is the single most disarming thing to say and not What’s the problem? Studies suggest it’s best the help reply My pleasure and not No problem. 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. Studies show the mother we have in mind isn’t the mother that exists. Mine says: What the fuck are you crying for? Studies show the baby monkey will pick the fake monkey with fake fur over the furless wire monkey with milk, without contest. Studies show to negate something is to think it anyway. I’m not sad. I’m not sad. Studies recommend regular expressions of gratitude and internal check-ins. Enough, the wire mother says. History is a kind of study. History says we forgave the executioner. Before we mopped the blood we asked: Lord Judge, have I executed well? Studies suggest yes. What the fuck are you crying for, officer? the wire mother teaches me to say, while studies suggest Solmaz, have you thanked your executioner today?
– Solmaz Sharif
A Swim in Co. Wicklow
by Derek Mahon
Spirits of lake, river
and woodland pond preside
mildly in water never
troubled by wind or tide;
and the quiet suburban pool
is only for the fearful —
no wind-wave energies
where no sea briar grips
and no freak breaker with
the violence of the ages
comes foaming at the mouth
to drown you in its depths.
If a thing loves, it is infinite.
– William Blake
I think the act of just making
something each day is giving up self-hatred. Giving up
the loathing that says I can’t make anything anymore.
– Gabrielle Calvocoressi
God does not demand that we give up our personal dignity, that we throw in our lot with random people, that we lose ourselves and turn from all that is not him. God needs nothing, asks nothing, and demands nothing, like the stars. It is a life with God which demands these things. Experience has taught the race that if knowledge of God is the end, then these habits of life are not the means but the condition in which the means operates. You do not have to do these things; not at all. God does not, I regret to report, give a hoot. You do not have to do these things – unless you want to know God. They work on you, not on him. You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.
– Annie Dillard
The immune system, the hypothalamus, the ventro-medial frontal cortices, and the Bill of Rights have the same root cause.
– Antonio Damasio
We may not revolt as one, but we are revolted as one, e pluribus nauseam.
– Sarah Kendzior
He who is unattached everywhere, who is not delighted at receiving good nor dejected at coming by evil, is poised in wisdom.
– Bhagavad Gita
Our demons are our own limitations, which shut us off from the realization of the ubiquity of the spirit . . . each of these demons is conquered in a vision quest.
– Joseph Campbell
It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth so deeply, so painfully and passionately in ourselves, that it’s reality shall arise in us again ‘invisibly’.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
There is only one map to the journey of life, and it lives within your heart.
– Willie Nelson
In our family, questions are considered bad manners; they imply there is something we don’t know, something that could be better.
– María José Navia
You can’t let your heart go bad like that, like sour milk. There’s always a chance you’ll want to use it later.
– Barbara Kingsolver
You have a beginning, you have an end. And you have all the glorious in-between mess.
– Jet Owens
The cosmic evolution is not blind. It is guided from within by the very consciousness it is in the process of revealing.
– Sri Aurobindo
There is no dusk to be,
There is no dawn that was,
Only there’s now, and now,
And the wind in the grass.
– Archibald MacLeish
What I loved about it was the world. And having it be my own little place. What a gift that was.
– David Lynch
In this world so heavily coded
with the internet and other forms of navigation,
I still prefer
the old, handcrafted kiss.
– Mario Benedetti
The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter—often an unconscious but still a faithful interpreter—in the eye.
– Charlotte Brontë
I have made a vow to the Lord and I intend to keep it through this life and every life that follows.
– Mirabai
You take off your clothes and you’re in bed with somebody, and that is indeed where whatever you’ve concealed, your particularity, whatever it may be, however encrypted, is going to be found out, and that’s what all the shyness is all about and what everybody fears.
– Philip Roth
Something you forget, living here, is that stopping yourself from sinking doesn’t mean you aren’t still underwater.
– Amy Hempel
It is because we know happiness that we want to be happy, and since nothing is more certain than our wanting to be happy, our notion of happiness guides us in determining the respective goods that then became objects of our desires.
– Hannah Arendt
Not many people have ever died of love. but multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour — and in the oddest places! — for the lack of it.
– James Baldwin
Laughter was invented by those
whose life is brief
as a burst of laughter.
The eternal sea
will never learn to laugh.
– Anna Swirszczynska
Energy rests upon love; and come as it will, there’s no forcing it.
– Leo Tolstoy
There are times when a leader cannot be this thoughtful, in-the-corner-guru. You cannot be a moderate, balanced, thoughtful, careful articulator of policy. You’ve got to be on the lunatic fringe.
– Jack Welch
Lending a book:
perhaps the best way to give a gift.
– Aura García-Junco
I really enjoy writing to you, but looking at you while I speak to you is like reading you twice.
– Velia Vidal
Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.
– Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Autumn comes, but summer lingers.
– Oscar Fay Adams
Instead of teaching me how to cultivate my breathing, my culture had taught me how to suspend my breath in words, ideas, or ideals – something that let me to breathe in an artificial way and left me breathless…
– Luce Irigaray
That country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain.
– Ray Bradbury
Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one’s consciousness, making of every image a privileged place.
– Albert Camus
Consciousness is a disease. The absolute is health. You are the absolute.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
In these inhuman encounters, the world presented itself […] and left a mute science in my soul […] I would like to share this muffled understanding, but can’t since its never transmitted along human sentences.
– Michel Serres
The earth may be hurting, bewildered, furious beyond comprehension, but lower your gaze a little, find some small pocket you love and settle in until they have something they wish to whisper to you.
– Martin Shaw
A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.
– Albert Einstein
Show me how you treat other people and I will tell you what you believe.
– James Talarico
As an antidote to battle unkindness we were given kindness.
– Marcus Aurelius
She knew that in this cruel society, some gaps between people could never be closed, but she was willing to be her own scenery and shine her own light.
– Gu Niang Bie Ku, The Early Spring
Man hides behind what he offers and forgets the treasure he is.
– Ibn Arabi
Come! There is a place, where humming and dripping and buzzing and love and devouring and living and dying join together as one and dance — It is the forest floor.
– Joshua M. Schrei
Every time we breathe in, we rebuild ourselves with other beings!
– Sophie Strand
No matter how hard you try, when it hurts, it hurts.
– Haruki Murakami
Synchronicities can produce the crack in our consciousness that expands our choices, our capacities and our consciousness of the divine. These mysterious moments go beyond our ego consciousness & open us to the sacredness of being a part of something larger than we are.
– Laurence Hillman
Service is never ideological, for we do not serve ideas, we serve people.
– Pope Francis I
Deep down, other life-forms are what make our own perceptions possible. When it comes to the realm of our own identity, we are blind, deaf and mute without other creatures — robbed of sensory organs important to the act of being. Without them, we are not, for all being is reciprocity and reflection. Only with others are we alive, present in the enlivened flesh of this Earth, which brought us forth and carries us. We have too quickly forgotten this.
– Andreas Weber
Never, ever go near power. Don’t become friends with anyone who has real power. It’s dangerous.
– Stanley Kubrick
Courage only requires half a turn.
– Franz Kafka, 1907.
We must form our minds by reading deep rather than wide.
– Quintilian
Another Poem of the Gifts
I want to give thanks to the divine
Labyrinth of causes and effects
For the diversity of beings
That form this singular universe,
For Reason, that will never give up its dream
Of a map of the labyrinth,
For Helen’s face and the perseverance of Ulysses,
For love, which lets us see others
As God sees them,
For the solid diamond and the flowing water,
For Algebra, a palace of exact crystals,
For the mystic coins of Angelus Silesius,
For Schopenhauer,
Who perhaps deciphered the universe,
For the blazing of fire,
That no man can look at without an ancient wonder,
For mahogany, cedar, and sandalwood,
For bread and salt,
For the mystery of the rose
That spends all its color and can not see it,
For certain eves and days of 1955,
For the hard riders who, on the plains,
Drive on the cattle and the dawn,
For mornings in Montevideo,
For the art of friendship,
For Socrates’ last day,
For the words spoken one twilight
From one cross to another,
For that dream of Islam that embraced
A thousand nights and a night,
For that other dream of Hell,
Of the tower of cleansing fire
And of the celestial spheres,
For Swedenborg,
Who talked with the angels in London streets,
For the secret and immemorial rivers
That converge in me,
For the language that, centuries ago, I spoke in Northumberland,
For the sword and harp of the Saxons,
For the sea, which is a shining desert
And a secret code for things we do not know
And an epitaph for the Norsemen,
For the word music of England,
For the word music of Germany,
For gold, that shines in verses,
For epic winter,
For the title of a book I have not read: Gesta Dei per Francos,
For Verlaine, innocent as the birds,
For crystal prisms and bronze weights,
For the tiger’s stripes,
For the high towers of San Francisco and Manhattan Island,
For mornings in Texas,
For that Sevillian who composed the Moral Epistle
And whose name, as he would have wished, we do not know,
For Seneca and Lucan, both of Cordova,
Who, before there was Spanish, had written
All Spanish literature,
For gallant, noble, geometric chess,
For Zeno’s tortoise and Royce’s map,
For the medicinal smell of eucalyptus trees,
For speech, which can be taken for wisdom,
For forgetfulness, which annuls or modifies the past,
For habits,
Which repeat us and confirm us in our image like a mirror,
For morning, that gives us the illusion of a new beginning,
For night, its darkness and its astronomy,
For the bravery and happiness of others,
For my country, sensed in jasmine flowers
Or in an old sword,
For Whitman and Francis of Assisi, who already wrote this poem,
For the fact that the poem is inexhaustible
And becomes one with the sum of all created things
And will never reach its last verse
And varies according to its writers,
For Frances Haslam, who begged her children’s pardon
For dying so slowly,
For the minutes that precede sleep,
For sleep and death,
Those two hidden treasures,
For the intimate gifts I do not mention,
For music, that mysterious form of time.
– Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Alan Dugan
As a child I memorized a short and elegant definition of a sacrament: “an outward sign signifying an inward grace.” That is, a sacrament is an ordinary thing or activity that, to a properly educated imagination, signifies or points to a deeper spiritual meaning and power. The priest sprinkles holy water on your head and calls it baptism. Thoreau takes a bath and says that for him it’s a spiritual action. As priests and theologians of our own religion, we can take almost any aspect of ordinary life and see its sacramentality, for everything can have an inward grace.
Which is what the Greeks were getting at by seeing gods, goddesses, and spirits of all kinds in every aspect of life. The philosopher Thales said, “The world is full of gods.” These figures, far from being absurd or fanciful, help us see the holiness in anything. You can find Demeter, goddess of grain, in a supermarket, and Hermes, god of crossroads, on Wall Street…
Intention and style convert the commonplace into the spiritual.
– Thomas Moore
You have consented to time and it is winter. The country seems bigger, for you can see through the bare trees. There are times when the woods is absolutely still and quiet. The house holds warmth. A wet snow comes in the night and covers the ground and clings to the trees, making the whole world white. For a while in the morning the world is perfect and beautiful. You think you will never forget.
You think you will never forget any of this, you will remember it always just the way it was. But you can’t remember it the way it was. To know it, you have to be living in the presence of it right as it is happening. It can return only by surprise. Speaking of these things tells you that there are no words for them that are equal to them or that can restore them to your mind. And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment, in this presence.
But you have a life too that you remember. It stays with you. You have lived a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present, and your memories of it, remember now, are of a different life in a different world and time. When you remember the past, you are not remembering it as it was. You are remembering it as it is. It is a vision or a dream, present with you in the present, alive with you in the only time you are alive.
– Wendell Berry
Landscape And Soul
Though we should not speak about the soul,
that is, about things we don’t know,
I’m sure mine sleeps the day long,
waiting to be jolted, even jilted awake,
preferably by joy, but sadness also comes
by surprise, and the soul sings its songs.
And because no one landscape compels me,
except the one that’s always out of reach
(toward which, nightly, I go), I find myself
conjuring Breugel-like peasants cavorting
under a Magritte-like sky – a landscape
the soul, if fully awake, could love as its own.
But the soul is rumored to desire a room,
a chamber, really, in some far away outpost
of the heart. Landscape can be lonely and cold.
Be sweet to me, world.
– Stephen Dunn
It is easy to overlook this thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of the intoxicating existence we’ve been endowed with. But what’s life to a lichen? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours–arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on. Lichens don’t. Like virtually all living things, they will suffer any hardship, endure any insult, for a moment’s additions existence. Life, in short, just wants to be.
– Bill Bryson
We frequently walk with the sole purpose of getting from one place to another. But where are we in between? With every step, we can feel the miracle of walking on solid ground. We can arrive in the present moment with every step.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Suddenly I understood that we must take care of things just because they exist.
– Maura O’Halloran
The world begins to exist when the individual discovers it.
– Carl Jung
The way of seeing mountains and rivers differs according to the type of being that sees them. There are beings that see what we call water as a jeweled necklace. It does not mean however that they see a jeweled necklace as water…
What different types of beings see is different. And we should reflect on this fact. Is it that there are various ways of seeing an object? Or is it that we have mistaken various images for one object? We should concentrate every effort on understanding this question and then concentrate still more. Given this multitude of perspectives, it follows that training on the way of practice and verification must also not be merely of one or two kinds. The ultimate realm must have a thousand types, ten thousand kinds.
– Dogen, translated by Carl Bielefeldt
All your nonsenses and truths, your finery and squaladoptions, combine and coalesce into one noise including laugh and whimper, scream and sigh, forever and forever repeating, in any tongue we care to choose, whatever lessened, separated message we want to hear. The Universe says simply, but with every possible complication, ‘Existence’ and it neither pressures us nor draws us out, except as we allow. It all boils down to nothing, and where we have the means and will to fix our reference within that flux, then there we are. Let me be part of that outrageous chaos… and I am.
– Iain Banks
The Mongolian countryside is government land. Instead of the patchwork of farms and fences that divide an American countryside, the land is an unbroken expanse, more a blanket than a quilt. On this rolling and largely treeless nation, Mongolian nomads—who make up around a fifth of the population—are free to set up camp and graze their herds where they wish. Likewise, you may drive wherever you wish. The countryside has few roads. Or is one big road. Feel like visiting the folks who live off by that stream in the distance? Turn the steering wheel and aim the car.
– Mary Roach
We do not need a new religion or a new bible. We need a new experience—a new feeling of what it is to be “I.” The lowdown (which is, of course, the secret and profound view) on life is that our normal sensation of self is a hoax, or, at best, a temporary role that we are playing, or have been conned into playing—with our own tacit consent, just as every hypnotized person is basically willing to be hypnotized. The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego…
As is so often the way, what we have suppressed and overlooked is something startlingly obvious. The difficulty is that it is so obvious and basic that one can hardly find the words for it. The Germans call it a Hintergedanke, an apprehension lying tacitly in the back of our minds which we cannot easily admit, even to ourselves. The sensation of “I” as a lonely and isolated center of being is so powerful and commonsensical, and so fundamental to our modes of speech and thought, to our laws and social institutions, that we cannot experience selfhood except as something superficial in the scheme of the universe. I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time—a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment only to vanish forever. Under such conditioning it seems impossible and even absurd to realize that myself does not reside in the drop alone, but in the whole surge of energy which ranges from the galaxies to the nuclear fields in my body. At this level of existence “I” am immeasurably old; my forms are infinite and their comings and goings are simply the pulses or vibrations of a single and eternal flow of energy.
– Alan Watts
Whenever we finish talking to ourselves the world is always as it should be. We renew it, rekindle it with life, we uphold it with our internal talk. Not only that, but we also choose our paths as we talk to ourselves. Thus we repeat the same choices over and over until the day we die, because we keep on repeating the same internal talk over and over until the day we die.
– Carlos Castaneda
Sentient beings are in essence buddhas.
It is like water and ice.
There is no ice without water,
There are no buddhas outside sentient beings.
What a shame, sentient beings seek afar,
Not knowing what is at hand.
It is like wailing from thirst
In the midst of water.
– Hakuin
And there was money to think about; there was always money. He’d saved on rent these past eight months; on the other hand, what he’d saved on rent he’d spent on drink, to quell the anxiety caused by the means he’d adopted of saving rent. Life was a series of loops, each smaller than the last.
– Mick Herron
“Of the two witnesses, hold the principal one,” is saying that one witness is everybody else giving you their feedback and opinions (which is worth listening to, there’s some truth in what people say) but the principal witness is yourself. You’re the only one who knows when you’re using things to protect yourself and keep your ego together and when you’re opening and letting things fall apart, letting the world come as it is — working with it rather than struggling against it. You’re the only one who knows.
– Pema Chödrön
Now—unless some zoologist can dig up a weird exception—humans are the only living beings who wear clothes. They are also the only beings who laugh, for humor is the property of humanity and consists, essentially, in not taking oneself seriously. (Consider the situation of someone chasing a hat blown off by the wind.) People can laugh at themselves because they know, deep down, that their lives are a big act, a put–on. This may get us into the depths of mysticism, but every person knows, tacitly, that he is God in disguise. Not, perhaps, the universal monarch of Jewish and Christian imagery, but at least the inmost and ultimate Self of Hinduism, the Actor who plays all the roles, and thus the Joker in the deck of cards. Stated more philosophically, each one of us is a manifestation of the total energy of the universe. Wearing clothes is therefore a gesture which implies the unadmitted knowledge that our personalities are put on. Think of such phrases as “cover yourself,” “pull yourself together,” “tighten your belts,” “keep your hair on,” “don’t lose your shirt,” “caught with your pants down,” “shiftless,” “sound investment,” “redressment of injustice,” “defrocked,” “uncloaked,” “dismantled,” “name and address,” “wearing an expression,” “clothed and in one’s right mind,” “vested interest,” “stuffed shirt,” “good (or bad) habits,” “the bare facts,” and “the naked truth.” Such a list of sartorial symbols and millinery metaphors for mental and moral states, of depletions and completions of personality, might be expanded indefinitely. But they express a basic and intuitive recognition of the connection between who we are, as persons, and what we wear.
– Alan Watts
New Year’s Day
The rain this morning falls
on the last of the snow
and will wash it away. I can smell
the grass again, and the torn leaves
being eased down into the mud.
The few loves I’ve been allowed
to keep are still sleeping
on the West Coast. Here in Virginia
I walk across the fields with only
a few young cows for company.
Big-boned and shy,
they are like girls I remember
from junior high, who never
spoke, who kept their heads
lowered and their arms crossed against
their new breasts. Those girls
are nearly forty now. Like me,
they must sometimes stand
at a window late at night, looking out
on a silent backyard, at one
rusting lawn chair and the sheer walls
of other people’s houses.
They must lie down some afternoons
and cry hard for whoever used
to make them happiest,
and wonder how their lives
have carried them
this far without ever once
explaining anything. I don’t know
why I’m walking out here
with my coat darkening
and my boots sinking in, coming up
with a mild sucking sound
I like to hear. I don’t care
where those girls are now.
Whatever they’ve made of it
they can have. Today I want
to resolve nothing.
I only want to walk
a little longer in the cold
blessing of the rain,
and lift my face to it.
– Kim Addonizio
random haiku
It is fairly hard
To lie when writing haiku,
Which is fair enough.
Nothing much of note
Happens in corners of the
Globe that are remote.
And, presumably,
The same applies to far flung
Corners of the brain.
No one has ever
Written a bible of how
To be a poet.
Being myself a
Minor practitioner, I
Think of this as odd.
It is, isn’t it?
There is no way you can teach
Men to be poets.
And what is doubly
Odd is that true poetry
Is so beautiful.
I mean, you’d think there’d
Be a manual, a guide
To rampant beauty.
– Stuart Reed
In treating our consciousness as if it were a digital computer or deterministic machine after the model of 19th century science, I believe we foster a limited and false view of our inner world. We must now take the step towards a quantum view of consciousness, recognizing that at its base and root our consciousness behaves like the ever flowing sea of the sub-atomic world. The ancient hermeticists pictured consciousness as the Inner Mercury. Those who have experienced the paradoxical way in which the metal Mercury is both dense and metallic and yet so elusive, flowing and breaking up into small globules, and just as easily coming together again, will see how perceptive the alchemists were of the inner nature of consciousness, in choosing this analogy. Educators who treat the consciousness of children as if it were a filing cabinet to be filled with ordered arrays of knowledge are hopelessly wrong.
– Adam McLean
My reality is that God speaks to you every day. There’s an inner voice, and when you hear it, you get a little tingle in your medulla oblongata at the back of your neck, a little shiver, and at two o’clock in the morning, everything’s really quiet and you meditate and you got the candles, you got the incense and you’ve been chanting, and all of a sudden you hear this voice: Write this down. It is just an inner voice, and you trust it. That voice will never take you to the desert.
– Carlos Santana
In fording a swollen stream, one’s strongest sensation is of the pouring strength of the water against one’s limbs; the effort to poise the body against it gives significance to this simple act of walking through running water. Early in the season the water may be so cold that one has no sensation except of cold; the whole being retracts itself, uses all its resources to endure this icy delight. But in heat the freshness of the water slides over the skin like shadow. The whole skin has this delightful sensitivity; it feels the sun, it feels the wind running inside one’s garment, it feels water closing on it as one slips under—the catch in the breath, like a wave held back, the glow that releases one’s entire cosmos, running to the ends of the body as the spent wave runs out upon the sand. This plunge into the cold water of a mountain pool seems for a brief moment to disintegrate the very self; it is not to be borne: one is lost: stricken: annihilated. Then life pours back.
– Nan Shepherd
The given is always at hand, in any situation in this given world; fullness of response to this gift is the goal; what needs to be improved by practice is our response…
Day and night gifts keep pelting down on us. If we were aware of this, gratefulness would overwhelm us. But we go through life in a daze. A power failure makes us aware of what a gift electricity is; a sprained ankle lets us appreciate walking as a gift, a sleepless night, sleep. How much we are missing in life by noticing gifts only when we are suddenly deprived of them.
– David Steindl-Rast
What is a life of depth? Is it to have a lot of deep experiences? Spiritual experiences? Enlightenment experiences? Or, are we immediately off the track when we envision any kind of experiences which would fill a life of depth? Important questions.
To really live a life of depth is to not depend on any experience at all — whether profound or not. Rather it is to let each experience point you back to the void from which it arose, to the state present before the experience itself.
To see each experience as your own perception of conditions continually emerging from the stillness of emptiness is half of it. To be reminded by experience (rather than hypnotized by it) to Return is the other half. So to live a life of depth, experience becomes the finger pointing back to the Before. It’s a reminder.
– G. Bluestone
My days are porous. I follow no pattern. I open doors and close them again. Now and then I sit at the table by the window to write, but my language overflows. There is no healing to be found in sentences, they disintegrate, there is garbage and roses, stray notes which curl up and disappear. There are open windows, breadless birds, lost routines.
I shop sporadically. I drift in and out of the house. I pull out the box of provisions from under my bed and find supplies I don’t remember buying. I fetch cans from the kitchen, leeks from the garden and onions from the shed, buy odds and ends on quick trips to town. My day is jumbled, indecisive…
A restlessness has got into my day. Broken patterns and unpredictable journeys through the house. There are opened rooms and silenced doors in what was once an orderly day. Wakeful nights, sudden sleep, weary mornings and days with no structure. I walk across the grass at night, alone, without telescopes or hope. I stop short. Starshine, moonlight, celestial waste.
– Solvej Balle
The Student
She never spoke, which made her obvious,
the way death makes the air obvious
in an empty chair, the way sky compressed
between bare branches is more gray or blue,
the way a window is more apparent than a wall.
She held her silence to her breast like a worn coat,
smoke, an armful of roses. Her silence
colored the smaller silences that came and went,
that other students stood up and filled in.
I leaned near the window in my office. She sat
on the edge of a chair. Hips rigid, fidgeting
while I made my little speech. February
light pressed its cold back against the glass,
sealing us in. She focused on my lips
as I spoke, as if to study how it’s done,
the sheer mechanics of it: orchestration
of jaw and tongue, teeth shifting in tandem,
shaping the air. So I stopped, let her silence
drift over us, let it sift in like smoke or snow,
let its petals settle on my shoulders.
I looked outside to the branches
of a stripped tree, winter starlings
folded in their speckled wings, chilled flames
shuddering at the tips. Students wandered
across campus as if under water, hands and hair
unfurling, their soundless mouths churning—
irate or ecstatic, I couldn’t tell—ready to burn
it all down or break into song. When I looked back
her eyes had found the window: tree, students,
birds swimming by, mute in their element.
It was painful to hear the papery rasp
of her folding and unfolding hands, to watch
color smudging her neck and temple, branching
to mist the delicate rim of one ear. I listened
to the air sunder between us, the feverish hush
collapse. I could hear her breath—smoke
rising from ice. I could see what it cost her
to make that leap. What heat it takes
for the body to blossom into speech.
– Dorianne Laux
A Suite of Appearances
(excerpt)
In another time, we will want to know how the earth looked
Then, and were people the way we are now. In another time,
The records they left will convince us that we are unchanged
And could be at ease in the past, and not alone in the present.
And we shall be pleased. But beyond all that, what cannot
Be seen or explained will always be elsewhere, always supposed,
Invisible even beneath the signs—the beautiful surface,
The uncommon knowledge—that point its way. In another time,
What cannot be seen will define us, and we shall be prompted
To say that language is error, and all things are wronged
By representation. The self, we shall say, can never be
Seen with a disguise, and never be seen without one.
– Mark Strand
My Deepest Condiments
I send you my deepest condiments
was in no way what my old friend
meant to say or write or send
the night she penned a note to me
one week after my father died.
Not condolences, or sentiments,
she sent me her deepest condiments
instead, as if the dead have need
of relish, mustard, and ketchup
on the other side.
O, the word made me laugh
so hard out loud it hurt!
So wonderfully absurd,
and such a sweet relief
at a time when it seemed
only grief was allowed in
after my father’s death,
sweet and simple laughter,
which is nothing more than
breath from so far deep inside
it often brings up with it tears.
And so I laughed and laughed
until my sides were sore.
And later still, I even cried
a little more.
– Taylor Mali
Moving Forward
The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
It seems that things are more like me now,
that I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can’t reach.
With my sense, as with birds, I climb
into the windy heaven, out of the oak,
and in the ponds broken off from the sky
my feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.
– Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Robert Bly
By watching our thoughts over a period of time, we can see that the mind is operating literally ‘by itself ‘. Thoughts ‘just appear’ and keep on appearing automatically. We have this feeling that it is ‘me’ who is thinking, but this is just a conditioned reflex caused by the concept of ourself as an individual. By watching thoughts we can see how they appear unbidden, uncalled. Just try not thinking for a even a few seconds and see that it is impossible. No ‘me’ is controlling them. We may have the illusion of purposely thinking about a particular subject, but notice that the idea to purposely think about something comes by itself. Then we do it, automatically, but with the false feeling we are the ‘decider’. That feeling of being the ‘decider’ is not us, it belongs to the mind. It is something we are perceiving.
This is not proven in just a few minutes of thought watching. It often takes many months of diligent watching to really see it and to be convinced. This is because the conditioned feeling of being the ‘thinker’ is so deep that the very idea that the mind goes its own way seems ridiculous. But the payoff of this single discovery is enormous in terms of liberation and deeper understanding of ourselves and the universe.
– Galen Sharp
What the shamans of ancient Mexico found out when they focused their seeing on the dark sea of awareness was the revelation that the entire cosmos is made of luminous filaments that extend themselves infinitely. Shamans describe them as luminous filaments that go every which way without ever touching one another. They saw that they are individual filaments, and yet, they are grouped in inconceivably enormous masses.
Another of such masses of filaments, besides the dark sea of awareness which the shamans observed and liked because of its vibration, was something they called intent, and the act of individual shamans focusing their attention on such a mass, they called intending. They saw that the entire universe was a universe of intent, and intent, for them, was the equivalent of intelligence. The universe, therefore, was, for them, a universe of supreme intelligence. Their conclusion, which became part of their cognitive world, was that vibratory energy, aware of itself, was intelligent in the extreme. They saw that the mass of intent in the cosmos was responsible for all the possible mutations, all the possible variations which happened in the universe, not because of arbitrary, blind circumstances, but because of the intending done by the vibratory energy, at the level of the flux of energy itself.
– Carlos Castaneda
How do we learn? I’ve heard it a thousand times, without yet fully applying it to my own experience, that it is axiomatically the height of delusion to think of one meditation object as superior to any other. Phenomena are all the same in being fleeting, unsatisfying, and ungovernable–a true meditator notices whatever is happening and lets it go its own way without preferences.
Let come whatever comes. Let go of all that goes. I’m still working on that one.
– Kate Wheeler
It is not possible to overthrow pride. It is not possible because we ourselves are pride; Pride the Dragon and Pride the Deceiver as it is called in Mythology. But we can witness the defeat of pride because pride can not hold out. Pride is not real so sooner or later it must go down…
We cannot and do not slay the Dragon, that is a medieval idea, I guess. We have to become completely familiar with him and hope that he sleeps. The way things are most of the time, is that he is awake and we are asleep. What we hope is the opposite.
I have known some very young artists who are familiar with the Dragon and know many of his ways. They also recognize fear and are independent of judgement. They recognize themselves as mere shadows in reality. They like to be alone and seem to have had plenty of practice of being alone since early childhood. All that is a tremendous head start in art work and these artists are correctly recognized as geniuses.
We will all get there someday however and do the work that we are supposed to do. Of all the pitfalls in our paths and the tremendous delays and wanderings off the track I want to say that they are not what they seem to be. I want to say that all that seems like fantastic mistakes are not mistakes and all that seems like error is not error; and it all has to be done. That which seems like a false step is the next step…
What was the reaction of the person who first made a symmetrical house. He felt new contentment in the house. He could see that it reflected himself. He felt a satisfaction in having built it and perhaps an awareness of clarity in his mind as the means. (A contentment with oneself that is success. Do not stop short of real contentment. You may as well never have been born if you remain discontented.)
Perfection is not necessary. Perfection you can not have. If you do what you want to do and what you can do and if you can then recognize it you will be contented. You cannot possibly know what it will be but looking back you will not be surprised at what you have done.
– Agnes Martin
Go ahead, Lord, break our harp
by Jalal al-Din Rumi
translated from the Persian by Haleh Liza Gafori
Go ahead, Lord, break our harp.
We have thousands upon thousands of harps.
We’ve fallen into Love’s arms.
We’re torn by Love’s claws.
We’re carried by Love’s music.
Who cares if we lose a harp or flute?
And if every instrument in the world burns to ash?
No matter.
The heart’s hidden instruments play on.
Their resonance—their rhythm and shimmer—
rise up to the circling stars,
whether or not ears are tuned to hear.
Say every candle, every flickering lamp dies out.
No reason to despair.
Within us, we carry the flint and steel to spark a flame.
Driftwood floats on waves. Music floats on air.
Hidden in the depths of the ocean, pearls shine.
We hear their dazzling echo.
Longing for union, melodies branch out
to reach the root of all.
Close your mouth.
Open the window in your heart.
That’s how you hear spirits sing.
That’s how you answer back.
How many divine welcomes have I missed,
mistaking them for ordinary interruptions?
– Tyler Staton
On the subject of rules and patterns, I think we are absolutely schizophrenic. We are drawn to the symmetry of a snowflake, and we are also drawn to the amorphous shape of a cloud floating high in the sky. We appreciate the regular features of animals of a pure breed, and we are also fascinated by hybrids and mongrels that do not fit into any classification scheme. We honor those people who have lived upright and sensible lives, and we also esteem the mavericks who have broken the mold. In some perplexing and ill-understood manner, we human beings with our oversized craniums seem to have a fondness both for the predictable and the unpredictable, the rational and the irrational, regularity and irregularity. Yes, we are certainly a difficult mess of self-contradictions…
We like order, but we also like surprises. We like the predictable. But we also like the unpredictable. Every once in a while, we demand a fly in the ointment.
– Alan Lightman
Everybody has seen an image of enfoldment: You fold up a sheet of paper, turn it into a small packet, make cuts in it, and then unfold it into a pattern. The parts that were close in the cuts unfold to be far away. This is like what happens in a hologram. Enfoldment is really very common in our experience. All the light in this room comes in so that the entire room is in effect folded into each part. If your eye looks, the light will be then unfolded by your eye and brain. As you look through a telescope or a camera, the whole universe of space and time is enfolded into each part, and that is unfolded to the eye. With an old-fashioned television set that’s not adjusted properly, the image enfolds into the screen and then can be unfolded by adjustment…
When you are talking to somebody, your whole intention to speak enfolds a large number of words. You don’t choose them one by one. There are any number of examples of the implicate order in our experience of consciousness. Any one word has behind it a whole range of meaning enfolded in thought.
Consciousness is unfolded in each individual. Clearly, it’s shared between people as they look at one object and verify that it’s the same. So any high level of consciousness is a social process. There may be some level of sensorimotor perception that is purely individual, but any abstract level depends on language, which is social. The word, which is outside, evokes the meaning, which is inside each person.
Meaning is the bridge between consciousness and matter. Any given array of matter has for any particular mind a significance. The other side of this is the relationship in which meaning is immediately effective in matter. Suppose you see a shadow on a dark night. If it means “assailant,” your adrenaline flows, your heart beats faster, blood pressure rises, and muscles tense. The body and all your thoughts are affected; everything about you has changed. If you see that it’s only a shadow, there’s an abrupt change again…
Meaning enfolds the whole world into me, and vice versa – that enfolded meaning is unfolded as action, through my body and then through the world.
– David Bohm
The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one’s preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them.
– Jean Cocteau
Writing in the Dark
It’s not difficult.
Anyway, it’s necessary.
Wait till morning, and you’ll forget.
And who knows if morning will come.
Fumble for the light, and you’ll be
stark awake, but the vision
will be fading, slipping
out of reach.
You must have paper at hand,
a felt-tip pen—ballpoints don’t always flow,
pencil points tend to break. There’s nothing
shameful in that much prudence: those are our tools.
Never mind about crossing your t’s, dotting your i’s—
but take care not to cover
one word with the next. Practice will reveal
how one hand instinctively comes to the aid of the other
to keep each line
clear of the next.
Keep writing in the dark:
a record of the night, or
words that pulled you from depths of unknowing,
words that flew through your mind, strange birds
crying their urgency with human voices,
or opened
as flowers of a tree that blooms
only once in a lifetime:
words that may have the power
to make the sun rise again.
– Denise Levertov
A story about a Taoist hermit in the mountains conveys the truth of our oneness with divine humor. A formal delegation from the Confucian temple below decided to visit and seek his advice. When they arrived at his hut unannounced, they were scandalized to find him completely naked. “What are you doing meditating in your hut with no pants on?” they demanded. “The whole world is my hut,” he replied. “This small room is my pants. What I want to know is, what are you doing in my pants?”
– Jack Kornfield
Words are your business, boy. Not just the Word. Words are everything. The key to the Rock, the answer to the Question.
– Ralph Ellison
Schopenhauer was a philosopher who was focused on the motivations of the individual. He concluded that they aren’t too pretty: humans are motivated by their will and not by their intellect, though they may firmly deny it. In his 1818 publication, The World as Will and Representation, he came to the conclusion that “man can indeed do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wants.” …Schopenhauer made this clear when describing the will as blind and strong and the intellect as sighted but lame: “The most striking figure for the relation of the two is that of the strong blind man carrying the sighted lame man on his shoulders.”
– Michael S. Gazzaniga
By the time I’d learned sublime, I’d already seen its chased grays and lit hurricane greens in the Hudson River School painters’ skies (firmament!), those parlous heights brightening to revelatory, those gorges blackly, mossily seducing. I’d already read Keats’ “The Eve of St. Agnes,” and to that, too—though I apologize now for the taxonomy of purples I made of it in high school English class—I retroactively applied the word.
My Aunt Pasq made us Easter bread—dense, yeasty and saltless with a hard-boiled egg, shell and all, held fast in its braided center. My grandmother grew tomatoes in her backyard. I had, for “sublime,” the words bread and tomato. I had the phrase “go pick a nice tomato for dinner.” And once out there, alone with my task, I had all to myself the teetering six o’clock light, the peeling and tender, pink-skinned birch shadowing the grass and me, the fence hung with flower boxes we’d watered just that morning, the fence keeping back the weedy graveyard on one side of the house and grocery’s parking lot on the other. That is, sublime was all around—loose, though, and rampant, unaffiliated with the word for it. Even now I say it sotto voce, preferring egg, bread, tomato, birch, wet fence.
– Lia Purpura
Insomnia
After counting all the sheep in the world
I enumerate the wildebeests, snails,
camels, skylarks, etc.,
then I add up all the zoos and aquariums,
country by country.
By early light I am asleep
in a nightmare about drowning in the Flood,
yelling across the rising water
at preoccupied Noah as his wondrous
ark sails by and begins to grow smaller.
Now a silhouette on the horizon,
the only boat on earth is disappearing.
As I rise and fall on the rocking waves,
I concentrate on the giraffe couple,
their necks craning over the roof,
to keep my life from flashing before me.
After all the animals wink out of sight
I float on my back, eyes closed.
I picture all the fish in creation
leaping a fence in a field of water,
one colorful species after another.
– Billy Collins
…you are all original and talented and need to let it out of yourselves; that is to say, you have the creative impulse.
But the ardor for it is inhibited and dried up by many things; as I said, by criticism, self-doubt, duty, nervous fear which expresses itself in merely external action like running up and downstairs and scratching items off lists and thinking you are being efficient; by anxiety about making a living, by fear of not excelling.
Now this creative power I think is the Holy Ghost. My theology may not be very accurate but that is how I think of it. I know that William Blake called this creative power the Imagination and he said it was God. He, if anyone, ought to know, for he was one of the greatest poets and artists that ever lived.
Now Blake thought that this creative power should be kept alive in all people for all their lives. And so do I. Why? Because it is life itself. It is the Spirit. In fact it is the only important thing about us. The rest of us is legs and stomach, materialistic cravings and fears.
How could we keep it alive? By using it, by letting it out, by giving some time to it…
We have come to think that duty should come first. I disagree. Duty should be a by-product. Writing, the creative effort, the use of imagination, should come first—at least for some part of every day of your life. It is a wonderful blessing if you will use it. You will become happier, more enlightened, alive, impassioned, light-hearted and generous to everybody else. Even your health will improve. Colds will disappear and all the other ailments of discouragement and boredom…
Now, you see, I have established a reason for your working at writing, not in a trifling, weak way, but with affection and endurance. In other words, I want to make you feel that there is a great intrinsic reward to writing. Unless you feel that you will soon give it up. You won’t last very long at it. A few rejection slips will flatten you out. A few years of not making a cent out of it will make you give it up and feel bitterly that it was a waste of time.
I want to assure you with all earnestness, that no writing is a waste of time—no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work. With every sentence you write, you have learned something. It has done you good. It has stretched your understanding. I know that.
– Brenda Ueland
Why is this day different from
yesterday and why am I
I and not you or her or it?
Why does the pond ripple with
the wind and why does the dog
bark at nearly everything and why
is that annoying to me? Why is it
music moves me and why do I nearly
cry when someone’s selfless for a moment
even in a movie? Why was I
born, why do I live another day,
where did I come from and where
am I going? Why do flies
appear suddenly from nowhere
and what do flies think about,
or grasshoppers, or fish, say
trout, large ones, that hover
gracefully, facing upstream, and why is it
the water ouzel twitches like that
or for that matter what about the
several things in this world that don’t
speak or see or decide or taste anything
like bacteria, fidoplankton, amoeba, mites?
What’s the measure of this world?
Is small smaller than large or
is it larger and is there any small or large
outside mathematics and does it make any difference
and to whom? You? Me? What
does language do after all? Is it
another organ, like a nose? And did
everything that’s ever happened happen
by chance or is there a design?
What’s a design anyway?
Is there anything but design?
Can anyone anyway ask a single serious
meaningful question?
Can I?
– Norman Fischer
The old monk sat by the side of the road. With his eyes closed, his legs crossed and his hands folded in his lap, he sat. In deep meditation, he sat.
Suddenly his zazen was interrupted by the harsh and demanding voice of a samurai warrior. “Old man! Teach me about heaven and hell!”
At first, as though he had not heard, there was no perceptible response from the monk. But gradually he began to open his eyes, the faintest hint of a smile playing around the corners of his mouth as the samurai stood there, waiting impatiently, growing more and more agitated with each passing second.
“You wish to know the secrets of heaven and hell?” replied the monk at last. “You who are so unkempt. You whose hands and feet are covered with dirt. You whose hair is uncombed, whose breath is foul, whose sword is all rusty and neglected. You who are ugly and whose mother dresses you funny. You would ask me of heaven and hell?”
The samurai uttered a vile curse. He drew his sword and raised it high above his head. His face turned to crimson and the veins on his neck stood out in bold relief as he prepared to sever the monk’s head from its shoulders.
“That is hell,” said the old monk gently, just as the sword began its descent.
In that fraction of a second, the samurai was overcome with amazement, awe, compassion and love for this gentle being who had dared to risk his very life to give him such a teaching. He stopped his sword in mid-flight and his eyes filled with grateful tears.
“And that,” said the monk, “is heaven.”
– John W. Groff, Jr.
One day a young Buddhist, on his journey home, came to the banks of a wide river. Staring hopelessly at the great obstacle in front of him, he pondered for hours on just how to cross such a wide barrier. Just as he was about to give up his pursuit to continue his journey he saw a great teacher on the other side of the river. The young Buddhist yells over to the teacher, “Oh wise one, can you tell me how to get to the other side of this river?” The teacher ponders for a moment, looks up and down the river, and yells back, “My son, you are on the other side.”
– Ashish C. Patel, Zen Stories
Once upon a time, all the professors disappeared, swallowed and digested by a new system. All the centers of learning closed because they were outmoded, and their sites were converted into living quarters swarming with wise, well-organized people who were incapable of creating anything new.
Knowledge was an item that could be bought and sold. A device called the IWM 1000 had been invented. It was the ultimate invention: it brought an entire era to an end. The IWM 1000 was a very small machine, the size of an old scholarly briefcase. It was very easy to use-lightweight and affordable to any person interested in knowing anything. The IWM 1000 contained all human knowledge and all the facts of all the libraries of the ancient and modern world…
With the IWM 1000, you could write any type of literature, compose music, and even paint pictures. Creative works were disappearing because anybody, with time and sufficient patience, could make any work similar to and even superior to one made by artists of the past without having to exert the brain or feel anything strange or abnormal.
Lovers would make the machines conjugate all the tenses of the verb to love, and they would listen to romantic songs. In offices and administrative buildings tape-recorded orders were given, and the IWM 1000 would complete the details of the work. Many people got in the habit of talking only to their own machines; therefore, nobody contradicted them because they knew how the machine was going to respond, or because they believed that rivalry could not exist between a machine and a human being. A machine could not accuse anyone of ignorance: they could ask anything.
– Alicia Yáñez Cossío
The Seeker’s List of Things to Do
by Shawn Nevins
1. Fall and rise a thousand times if need be.
2. Become a habitual seeker.
3. Give up, then try again.
4. Realize that you want to help others.
5. Be thankful.
6. Become a decent human animal.
7. Look for the source of thoughts.
8. Look in whatever way keeps your attention.
9. Will to do one thing – one iron in the fire.
10. Find a teacher(s).
11. Always desire more, never be content.
12. Surround yourself with fellow seekers.
13. Spend time alone.
14. Know that the Hound of Heaven is real.
1. Fall and rise a thousand times if need be: I know some people who will set a goal to meditate every morning, do so for a week, then give up after they miss a morning. They despair over their temporary failure. The key is to keep at it, even if you miss every other day. Even if you never manage to meditate every single morning, to keep trying is what matters. If you approach the task in that manner, you will discover of what you are capable, and what you are – likely different than your original conception.
2. Become a habitual seeker: The same idea as Richard Rose’s vector. With enough time, you become someone who continually questions the world around and inside of them. You will want to know the truth of matters and be open to more than one possibility or the easy answer. Your eyes and ears will always be open to new sources of information.
3. Give up, then try again: You can’t control this one, but it is useful to know that it will occur. There is some magic in the process of giving up, as it weakens our conception of what we are. Our conceptions of our self as a seeker are stripped away, leaving only Rose’s “egoless vector” which searches simply because there is nothing else to do. This temporary giving up is also the rest period necessary for any exercise.
4. Realize that you want to help others: The ego prevents us from reaching out to others. With persistent self-analysis, you will come to have true consideration for your fellow man – you will see your flaws in others and others’ flaws in you. There is the thought that we should help others because it will help us in the long run, but this is not the same as truly wanting to help another. It is a milestone when we want to help simply because it is the natural reaction.
5. Be thankful: You are fortunate to be willing and able to ask questions of self-definition. You are fortunate for this day of possibilities stretching out in front of you. There is a bit of magic in giving thanks, as doing so recognizes that we are not the center of the Universe and relinquishes some of our imaginary control of life.
6. Become a decent human animal: Meaning that with honest introspection, you will become more compassionate and less defensive as you recognize your vanities. Also entails learning how to provide for yourself in the world. On a physical and social level, we become more at ease and better players of the game. You do not need to become a saint or an expert mechanic, however.
7. Look for the source of thoughts: Or look for the source of feeling, or intuition. Whatever you believe yourself to be, look to find where it originates. This will lead you to the source of your self. This question is phrased in many ways and may change over time. I began wanting to know what my purpose was, and ended by wanting to know what (if anything) was unchanging within me. Richard Rose describes this as backing away from untruth, which is correct in that we should not postulate what we might find. However, there is an intuition of the eternal within us which is helpful to follow – a garbled message from the Absolute.
8. Look in whatever way keeps your attention: You will get bored of looking within. Keep looking for teachers and methods, so that when you come to the end of your current way, you won’t lose time wandering in search of another. Every person must find their own way – a customized method of going within. You must craft your own key.
9. Will to do one thing – keep one iron in the fire: Focus is the solution to any problem. If you are trying to play the stock market, get a promotion, find a spouse, and get a college degree, you will obviously have trouble finding time to meditate, read, and seek out spiritual teachers. Time spent looking within is rewarded with proportional results – up to a point. Like any exercise, rest is part of the equation.
10. Find a teacher(s): A teacher is a friend with more experience on the spiritual path. It may be a series of teachers – each giving you a tool to use in your inner exploration. A book or tape may be as important as a living person.
11. Always desire more, never be content: There are side benefits to a spiritual search. One may make fascinating friends, have travel opportunities, may even be regarded as a teacher in their own right, all before finding an answer to their deepest question. There arises the temptation to settle for a lesser prize. This is a powerful temptation whose only cure is to project out your life strand and ask if you are heading where you want to be. When you are old, what will you want to say about your life? When it is just you facing the unknown, where will you find certainty?
12. Surround yourself with fellow seekers: There is tremendous benefit to associating with like-minded people. Better yet is sharing an apartment or house with a group of seekers. It is a resource of ideas and inspiration, as well as help with the everyday problems of life. You will learn from each other’s successes and failures. When one member is in despair, his fellows can in a sense, carry him until he recovers. If the group is too small, less than four perhaps, then the odds are the number of depressed members will outweigh the number of inspired and drag down the whole lot.
Because each spiritual path is unique, it is difficult to work with a group. Groups tend to either homogenize or break apart. However, if the majority of members are sincerely seeking (looking within), this will enable diversity and understanding.
13. Spend time alone: From a few minutes a day to weeks-long isolations. This is a time to evaluate what you have accomplished and where you want to go. It is a time of intense concentration, intense looking within. When alone, it is easier to realize that we are the sole judge of our life and what matters is that we find the thing which settles our soul. A person may camp out, get a cheap motel room, go to a retreat center, or even hide out in their own room.
14. Know that the Hound of Heaven is real: Refers to the poem by Francis Thompson. There is something calling you – God, Rose’s Invisible Current, or the Voice of the Silence. Become aware of your intuition (heart), your hunger and yearning for certainty. You hide with endless diversions from your hunger and yearning. You fill the emptiness in you with material goods, or even love. Yet, you are truly, always alone. There is simply you and a haunting question that sooner or later you must confront.
Everything in this world which seems to lack harmony is in reality the limitation of man’s own vision. The wider the horizon of his observation becomes, the more harmony of life he enjoys. In the very depth of man’s being the harmony of the working of the whole universe is summed up in a perfect music.
– Hazrat Inayat Khan
The United States Welcomes You
Why and by whose power were you sent?
What do you see that you may wish to steal?
Why this dancing? Why do your dark bodies
Drink up all the light? What are you demanding
That we feel? Have you stolen something? Then
What is that leaping in your chest? What is
The nature of your mission? Do you seek
To offer a confession? Have you anything to do
With others brought by us to harm? Then
Why are you afraid? And why do you invade
Our night, hands raised, eyes wide, mute
As ghosts? Is there something you wish to confess?
Is this some enigmatic type of test? What if we
Fail? How and to whom do we address our appeal?
– Tracy K. Smith
Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say, like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves.
Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don’t. Who knows, maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who doesn’t have to.
– Alan Watts
Deep down, all of us are probably aware that some kind of mystical evolution is our true task. Yet we suppress the notion with considerable force because to admit it is to admit that most of our political gyrations, religious dogmas, social ambitions, and financial ploys are not merely counter-productive but trivial.
– Tom Robbins
I might say: if the place I want to reach could only be climbed up to by a ladder, I would give up trying to get there. For the place to which I really have to go is one that I must actually be at already.
Anything that can be reached with a ladder does not interest me.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
There is a joy in the actual taste of vanilla ice cream that does not come from knowing the chemical formula of vanilla. There is a joy, an inherent aliveness in the body that you can experience if you pay attention to your body. But if you live up in your head, in your words all the time, you don’t notice it.
– Charles T. Tart
1.) We judge matters so superficially that ordinary acts and words, done and spoken with some flair and some knowledge of worldly matters, often succeed better than the greatest cleverness.
2.) To be too dissatisfied with ourselves is a weakness. To be too satisfied with ourselves is a stupidity.
3.) Mean-spirited mediocrities, especially those with a smattering of learning, are the most likely to be opinionated. Only strong minds know how to correct their opinions and abandon a bad position.
4.) Wealth does not teach us to transcend the desire for wealth. The possession of many goods does not bring the repose of not desiring them.
5.) We so love all new and unusual things that we even derive a secret pleasure from the saddest and most tragic events, both because of their novelty and because of the natural malignity that exists within us.
6.) There is no one who cannot derive great help and great benefit from learning; but there are also only a few people who do not receive a great harm from the light and knowledge they have received by learning, unless they use their knowledge in a manner both fit and natural for them.
7.) Self-love is even deceived by self-love, because by looking out for our own interests and disregarding those of other people, we lose the advantage that comes with the exchange of favors.
8.) Often the desire to appear competent impedes our ability to become competent, because we are more anxious to display our knowledge than to learn what we do not know.
– Maxims of Madame de Sablè, translated from the French by Arthur Chandler
The big house stood as firmly rooted in the soil of Denmark as the peasants’ huts, and was as faithfully allied to her four winds and her changing seasons, to her animal life, trees and flowers. Only its interests lay in a higher plane. Within the domain of the lime trees it was no longer cows, goats, and pigs on which the minds and the talk ran, but horses and dogs. The wild fauna, the game of the land, that the peasant shook his fist at when he saw it on his young green rye or in his ripening wheat field, to the residents of the country houses were the main pursuit and the joy of existence.
The writing in the sky solemnly proclaimed continuance, a worldly immortality. The great country houses had held their ground through many generations. The families who lived in them revered the past as they honored themselves, for the history of Denmark was their own history.
– Isak Dinesen
If we are honest, many of us consider ourselves to be rather lazy, still haunted by those school reports that said “Must try harder!” So it might surprise you if I suggest that much of what we do comes unstuck not because we don’t try hard enough, but because we try too hard, or at least try too hard in the wrong sort of way. We aim too high, too quickly, being prematurely concerned with correctness and results at the expense of practice and process. Since in the short term this offers little chance of success — and it is hard to sustain something we do not feel any good at — we soon feel disheartened and give up before we have really started…
Where does this perfectionist task-master come from? I suspect it is the highly toxic combination of a lack of confidence and a subtle sense of unworthiness. Playing inside our heads is a running commentary continually telling us that we cannot think what we think, or do what we do, because it is either wrong or not good enough: a voice amplified by moral teachings that places all the emphasis on guilt and sin. So instead of wholeheartedly embracing things, as is our birthright, we snatch at life in a sort of smash-and-grab raid before those in authority deem us impostors and ask us to leave, preferably by the back door.
– Manjusvara
On the Fifth Day
On the fifth day
the scientists who studied the rivers
were forbidden to speak
or to study the rivers.
The scientists who studied the air
were told not to speak of the air,
and the ones who worked for the farmers
were silenced,
and the ones who worked for the bees.
Someone, from deep in the Badlands,
began posting facts.
The facts were told not to speak
and were taken away.
The facts, surprised to be taken, were silent.
Now it was only the rivers
that spoke of the rivers,
and only the wind that spoke of its bees,
while the unpausing factual buds of the fruit trees
continued to move toward their fruit.
The silence spoke loudly of silence,
and the rivers kept speaking
of rivers, of boulders and air.
Bound to gravity, earless and tongueless,
the untested rivers kept speaking.
Bus drivers, shelf stockers,
code writers, machinists, accountants,
lab techs, cellists kept speaking.
They spoke, the fifth day,
of silence.
– Jane Hirshfield
SABBATH POEM
Finally will it not be enough,
after much living, after
much love, after much dying
of those you have loved,
to sit on the porch near sundown
with your eyes simply open,
watching the wind shape the clouds
into the shape of clouds?
Even then you will remember
the history of love, shaped
in the shape of flesh, everchanging
as the clouds that pass, the blessed
yearning of body for body,
unending light.
You will remember, watching
the clouds, the future of love.
– Wendell Berry
Reverence is the process of awakening to being alive. It’s the realization that life is amazing, and every living being is our sibling.
– Paul Hawken
In life we all have an unspeakable secret, an irreversible regret, an unreachable dream and an unforgettable love.
– Diego Marchi
And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration. Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us. They existed. They existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed.
– Maya Angelou
For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun? And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?
– Kahlil Gibran
In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point.
– Marshall McLuhan
‘Myths’ were destined for the higher emotional centre; ‘symbols’ for the higher thinking centre. By virtue of this all attempts to understand or explain ‘myths’ and ‘symbols’ with the mind, or the formulas and the expressions which give a summary of their content, are doomed beforehand to failure. It is always possible to understand anything but only with the appropriate centre.
– Gurdjieff
Jung believed the mythical mode of perception is not a primitive stage in the history of the mind, but a language in the structure of the mind. It is a language we lose contact with at our peril, because when severed from the symbolic domain we lose our relationship with the cosmos and with the deeper life within ourselves.
– David Tacy
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain
by Emily Dickinson
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading – treading – till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through –
And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum –
Kept beating – beating – till I thought
My mind was going numb –
And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space – began to toll,
As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race,
Wrecked, solitary, here –
And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down –
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing – then –
You must not let the things you cannot help destroy you, I am sure that work is the thing in life … To save your strength and energy for creating—don’t spend it on problems and situations you can’t help.
– Georgia O’Keeffe
Highly sensitive people are too often perceived as weaklings or damaged goods. To feel intensely is not a symptom of weakness, it is the trademark of the truly alive and compassionate. It is not the empath who is broken, it is society that has become dysfunctional and emotionally disabled. There is no shame in expressing your authentic feelings. Those who are at times described as being a ‘hot mess’ or having ‘too many issues’ are the very fabric of what keeps the dream alive for a more caring, humane world. Never be ashamed to let your tears shine a light in this world.
– Anthon St. Maarten
He caught a glimpse of that extraordinary faculty in man, that strange, altruistic, rare, and obstinate decency which will make writers or scientists maintain their truths at the risk of death. Eppur si muove, Galileo was to say; it moves all the same. They were to be in a position to burn him if he would go on with it, with his preposterous nonsense about the earth moving round the sun, but he was to continue with the sublime assertion because there was something which he valued more than himself. The Truth. To recognize and to acknowledge What Is.
That was the thing which man could do, which his English could do, his beloved, his sleeping, his now defenseless English. They might be stupid, ferocious, unpolitical, almost hopeless. But here and there, oh so seldom, oh so rare, oh so glorious, there were those all the same who would face the rack, the executioner, and even utter extinction, in the cause of something greater than themselves. Truth, that strange thing, the jest of Pilate’s.
Many stupid young men had thought they were dying for it, and many would continue to die for it, perhaps for a thousand years. They did not have to be right about their truth, as Galileo was to be. It was enough that they, the few and martyred, should establish a greatness, a thing above the sum of all they ignorantly had.
– T.H. White
For the Time Being
by Annie Dillard
I
June, 1923: The French paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin was traveling on muleback in the vastness beyond the Great Wall, west of Peking. He saw it from a distance: the Ordos, the inner Mongolian desert. He saw from the mule what he had seen often in Egypt years before, “the burnt stones of the desert and the sand of the dunes in the dusk.”
The Ordos is a desert plateau 3,000 feet high, from which mountains rise. It spreads 35,000 square miles. The Great Wall separates the Ordos from the fertile lands to the east and south in Shansi and Shensi provinces.
He was forty-two years old, tall and narrow, fine-featured. He wore a big felt hat like a cowboy, and thick boots. Rough weather had cut lines on his face. He had carried stretchers during the Great War for a regiment of sharpshooters. His courage at the front—at Ypres, Arras and Verdun—won him several medals, which the surviving men of his regiment requested for him. One of his fellows recalled his “absolute contempt for danger” as he mounted parapets under fire. People shortened his name—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin—to Teilhard: “Tay-yard” in French.
His characteristic expression was simple and natural, according to one colleague, who also noted “his eyes, filled with intelligence and understanding.” Another scientist described him as “a man of self-effacing and irresistible distinction, as simple in his gestures as in his manners … his smile never quite turned to laughter … anxious to welcome, but like a rock of marble.” From the back of a jog-trotting mule, he could spot on stony ground a tiny rock that early man had chipped.
On some days in the Ordos he and his geologist colleague dug, excavated and sifted the ground. On other days they moved in caravan. They rode with two Mongolian soldiers—to fight bandits—and five so-called donkey boys. “On the third day,” he wrote a friend, “we arrived at an immense steppe over which we traveled for more than six days without seeing much else but endless expanses of tall grasses.” He passed the garnet and marble gorges of the Ula-Shan, “the old crystalline shelf of China.”
July, 1923: Teilhard was one of the men who unpacked the expedition’s three donkeys and ten mules for the night. Bandit raids had routed them from the steppes and forced them to enter the badlands. That night he and the others pitched their two white tents in the Ordos massif, within a circle of red earth cliffs. In one red cliff he found, by daylight, the fossil remains of extinct pachyderms from the Pliocene.
“The immense hazard and the immense blindness of the world,” he wrote, “are only an illusion.”
The scant rain that reaches the Ordos falls in thunderstorms. During a thunderstorm, the man wrote a letter. “Of this part of the journey, the crossing of the Arbous-Ula will remain in my memory as the finest stage. The innumerable strata of this savage mountain, a forward bastion of the Ula-Shan on the right bank of the Yellow River, bend gently into two long concentric folds which seem to unfurl over the eastern solitudes.”
August, 1923: Once more they pitched their tents in the desert in a circle of cliffs. Here they camped for a month, in the southeast corner of the Ordos where the cliffs were gray, yellow and green. Here the great eroded loess hills met the sands a river laid—the river called Shara-Osso-Gol. And here they found the world’s first evidence of pre-Neandertal man in China. The man of the yellow earths, Teilhard named him, for loess is a fine yellow dust. They found his traces in the Shara-Osso-Gol’s twisted canyon.
First they found Neandertal tools ten meters down: scrapers, gravers, quartzite blades. Then they dug through 164 feet of barren sands before they found an ancient hearth where Paleolithic people cooked. People had lived in China long before Neandertal people lived in Europe. Their blackened hearth made a thin layer among cross-bedded dune sands and blue clays, near the river. No hominid bones were there, but some tools lay about, and the hearth was indisputable—the first human traces north of the Himalayas.
The people made these fires by this river about 450,000 years ago—before the last two ice ages. During their time, the Outer Mongolian plateau to the north continued its slow rise; it was blocking Indian Ocean monsoons. The northern plateau dried to dust and formed the Gobi Desert. The people would have seen dust clouds blow from the north, probably only a few big dust clouds every year. Such dust today! they must have thought. After the people vanished, the dust continued to blow down on their land; it laid loess deposits hundreds of feet deep. Almost 4,500 centuries passed, and in 1222 Genghis Khan and his hordes rode ponies over the loess plateau, over the hundreds of feet of loess deposits yellow and gray, over the fecund dust and the barren sand, and over the animal bones, the chipped blades and the hearth. Teilhard thought of this, of Genghis Khan and the ponies. “Much later,” he wrote, “Genghis Khan crossed this plain in all the pride of his victories.” At that time the Mongols made stirrups and horseshoes from wild sheep horns.
Teilhard found a twentieth-century Mongol family living in the Shara-Osso-Gol canyon. Their name was Wanschock. Wanschock and his five sons helped him excavate during the weeks he camped. They rode horses, kept goats and lived in a cave scooped out of a cliff in the loess. They taught their toddlers to ride by mounting them on sheep. “The Mongols wear long hair,” Teilhard wrote, and they “never take off their boots, are never out of the saddle. The Mongol women look you straight in the eyes with a slightly scornful air, and ride like the men.”
“Throughout my whole life,” he wrote, “during every minute of it, the world has been gradually lighting up and blazing before my eyes until it has come to surround me, entirely lit up from within.”
September, 1923: They rode back into Peking. The mules carried 5,600 pounds of fossils and rocks in 60 wood crates. The paleontologist Teilhard carried a notebook in which he had written, among other things, a morning prayer: “Be pleased yet once again to come down and breathe a soul into the newly formed, fragile film of matter with which this day the world is to be freshly clothed.”
The realm of loose spirit never interested Teilhard. He did not believe in it. He never bought the view that the world was illusion and spirit alone was real. “There are only beings, everywhere,” he had written in his notebook from a folding stool in the desert of the Ordos.
Matter he loved: people, landscapes, stones. Like most scientists, he was an Aristotelian, not a Platonist. When he was still in college he published articles on the Eocene in Egypt and the minerals of Jersey. In his twenties he discovered a new species of fish, and a new owl. His major contributions to science came later, when he dated Peking Man and revised the geology of all the Quaternary strata not only through China and Mongolia, but also through Java, India and Burma. He spent twenty-three years of his adult life in China in rough conditions far from home. Why knock yourself out describing a dream?
“If I should lose all faith in God,” he wrote, “I think that I should continue to believe invincibly in the world.”
Teilhard had glimpsed the Gobi Desert from muleback on his 1923 Ordos expedition. It was the biggest desert on earth: 500,000 square miles of sandstorms and ravaged plateaus in what was then northern Mongolia. “As far as the eye could see around us, over the vast plain which had once been levelled by the Yellow River, waved the grass of the steppes.” The solitudes moved him: the “wide torrential valleys where herds of gazelles could be seen, nose to wind, among the pebbles and the sparse grass … We were crossing the low steppes of San-Tao-Ho. The Mongolians are now no longer here … The season of the yellow winds is over.”
The next morning he broke camp by the waters of the Shiling-Gol and moved towards Kalgan in the Gobi, an area science did not know. He found fossils. Two days later he was wielding a pick at the Dalai-Nor, a wet salt pan twenty-five miles long on the Mongolian steppe. He shook and spread his bedroll on a dune by the shore. Six oxcarts carried supplies and boxes of extinct Tertiary horse and rhino bones.
He resumed his teaching post in Paris the next year; in the next few years he lived again in China, undertook another Gobi expedition, returned to Paris, rode a mule on a geologic journey through the Mabla Massif in Ethiopia, and trekked for months digging bones and breaking rocks in both the Ordos and Manchuria.
In the field he wore a tough jacket and a wide-brimmed slouch hat. In one breast pocket he carried a breviary, and in the other a pack of Gauloises. “This man with the clear regard,” a friend called him. He was long-boned, sharp-faced, faintly smiling when serious, and merry in company. When he laughed his face split into planes. All his life he parted his short hair on the side. His friends were mostly geologists, paleontologists, priests, explorers, educated Paris and New York women, and archeologists. Among his friends were an odd trio: Julian Huxley, Henry Clay Frick and Paul Valéry.
He once called God punctiform. “It is precisely because he is so infinitely profound and punctiform that God is infinitely near.” (Is it useful and wise to think of God as punctiform?)
Of the gospel miracles he wrote, “I feel obliged to admit that I believe not because of but in spite of the miracles.”
Statistical probability describes the mechanism of evolution—chance operating on large numbers—so that, as Teilhard said, “at every moment it releases a given quantity of events that cause distress (failures, disintegrations, death).” That is, evolution’s “every success is necessarily paid for by a large percentage of failures.” In order to live at all, and to progress or even proceed, we pay “a mysterious tribute of tears, blood, and sin.” It is hard to find a more inarguable explanation for the physical evil and the suffering we endure at chance from the material world.
“Even when we are exercising all our faculties of belief, Fortune will not necessarily turn out in the way we want but in the way it must.”
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit priest and writer as well as a paleontologist. The theology and cosmology that drove his thinking and writing are not his strongest legacy, any more than William Butler Yeats’s theology and cosmology are. He wrote eighteen books. The unhappy prominence of his dull and crackpot The Phenomenon of Man thirty years ago, and the sometimes nutty enthusiasm of his admirers, some of them vague-brained New-Agers, have obscured his excellent The Divine Milieu and the short and magnificent literary essays “The Mass of the World” and “The Heart of Matter.” The world rarely can or will distinguish art from mere opinion; pressed for his opinions, Teilhard produced them, and their peculiarly disagreeable lexicon, and the cranks they attracted in the U.S., possibly convinced some possessors of good minds to write him off without reading him.
He took theology courses for four years, and admitted that he did not find them bien amusants. He studied chemistry and physics in Cairo; at the Sorbonne he worked in botany and zoology as well as geology. His doctorate in geology described mammifers of the Lower Eocene in France.
He ran afoul of Roman authorities over his thinking. In the 1920s evolution was still a new current in thought, as the church reckoned, and it had not yet penetrated Rome’s layers of brocade. The notion of biological evolution seemed to hash the old doctrine of original sin. After Teilhard lectured on evolution in Paris, the church in Rome gagged him. It forbade him to lecture and to publish anything but purely scientific articles. He complied. Of his eighteen books, the church permitted only one to see light in his lifetime, a short scientific monograph published in Peking. The cardinals were pleased to keep his person, also, tucked away. They exiled him to China, the second time for virtually the rest of his life. He was forty-three. Always longing for France, for his Paris teaching position, his Jesuit brothers, and friends, and always eager to settle for a life in the United States, he nevertheless discovered, gradually, that his vow of obedience required him to renounce the West for twenty-two years more.
Every year he applied to publish his work; every year Rome refused. Every year he applied to return to France. Every year Rome refused. At last Rome let him visit France when he was sixty-five; he had had a heart attack. Again, though, Rome prohibited his publishing. Offered a fine teaching post, he went to Rome in person to seek permission; Rome denied it. He traveled to the United States, to South America and to Africa, and he visited Paris to spread his ideas by talking. Even when he was seventy-three and dying of heart disease in New York, Rome forbade his publishing, lecturing and returning to France.
Why did he put up with it? One of his colleagues said he had “the impatience of a prophet.” When did he show impatience? His colleagues and many of his friends urged him to quit the Jesuits. Only for a few weeks, however, did he consider leaving the order. To kick over the traces, he thought, would betray his Christianity. People would think he was straying from the church—perish the thought. His brother Jesuits defended him and his thinking. Leaving the order would mean, he decided, “the killing of everything I want to liberate, not destroy.” The Catholic church, he wrote late in life, is still the best bet for an arch to God, for the transformation of man, and for making, in his view, evolution meaningful; it is “the only international organization that works.”
He had dedicated his life wholeheartedly, again and again; consequently he did not complain. When he first learned that Rome banned publication of The Divine Milieu, he did, however, allow himself to write a friend in private that it was “a pity.” The year before he died, while he was declaring in sincere letters that Rome was mankind’s best hope, he also blew off steam, like many a cleric; he wrote a friend, “The sin of Rome is not to believe in a future … I know it because I have stifled for fifty years in this sub-human atmosphere.” He apparently felt strongly both ways. Later Vatican II calmly endorsed most of his ideas.
“All that is really worthwhile is action,” Teilhard wrote. “Personal success or personal satisfaction are not worth another thought.”
II
“I feel no special assurance of the existence of Christ,” Father Teilhard explained cheerfully at the end of a book in which he tracked his ideas. His evolving universe culminates in Christ symbolically (“Jesus must be loved as a world”) and to a degree unpalatable. “As much as anyone, I imagine,” he went on, “I walk in the shadows of faith”—that is, in doubt. Doubt and dedication often go hand in hand. And “faith,” of course, is not assenting intellectually to a series of doctrinal propositions; it is living in conscious and rededicated relationship to God. Nevertheless, the temptation to profess creeds with uncrossed fingers is strong. Teilhard possessed, like many spiritual thinkers, a sort of anaerobic capacity to batten and thrive on paradox.
It was in 1928, when Teilhard was forty-seven, that his team found Peking Man. An archeologist, Pei Wen-chung, found a man’s skull. Teilhard had unearthed the first tools and hearths in the Ordos, but here were the first bones. The skull from the cave near Peking caused a sensation; it was the first bit of ancient human bone unearthed in all Asia.
Time had stuffed Peking Man, and all his pomps and works, down a red fissure in a blue cave wall at Zhoukoudian. Fossils crammed the red fissure. The team called the skull’s first owner Peking Man. His species was Homo erectus.
The team originally found the Zhoukoudian cave by questioning a big-city pharmacist. Many folk in China drink suspended fossil bone powders as elixirs—dragon’s teeth; consequently paleontologists for two generations have checked Chinese pharmacies and asked, “Where did these bones come from?” Shopping for fossils, a specialist recognized an ancient human tooth. His inquiry led to the caves at Zhoukoudian—Dragon Bone Hill.
Teilhard hauled his camp cot from Peking, lived with Chinese villagers and directed the dig. Over years he sorted and eventually named the fissure’s animal bones. He discovered bones from saber-toothed tigers, ostriches, horses, a large camel, buffalo, wild sheep, rhinos, hyenas and “a large and a small bear.” Ultimately, and crucially, he was able to date Peking Man to the Pleistocene. He established the date by many methods, one of which was interesting: among the bits of debris under, around and above various layers of Peking Man’s bones and tools were skulls of mole-rats, and pieces of skulls of mole-rats. He undertook his own study of the mole-rats’ evolving skulls, dated them and so helped fix Peking Man’s dates.
The team dug further into the immensities of the Zhoukoudian caves; for ten years they excavated, for eight months a year. Teilhard retrieved five more human skulls, twelve lower jaws, and scattered teeth. It was his major lifework.
During those ten years, squinting and laughing furrowed his face. His temples dipped as his narrow skull bones emerged. When he could not get Gauloises, he smoked Jobs. Daily he said the Divine Office—the liturgy, mostly psalms, that is the prayer of the Catholic church (and the Anglican Church). A British historian who knew him described his “kindly and ironic grace,” his “sharp and yet benevolent refinement.”
In all those years, he found no skeletons. When colleagues worldwide praised him for the discoveries, Teilhard spoke with modesty and exasperation: “Heads,” he said, “practically nothing but heads.” Paleontologists from all over the world are again—seventy years later, after several decades’ chaos halted the work—finding hominid bones, and choppers and flakes, in the Zhoukoudian caves.
Peking Man and his people walked upright; with limbs like ours they made fire and stone tools. They ate mostly venison and hackberries. They hunted elephants, tigers and boars. They lived before water filled the Great Lakes and the Florida peninsula lifted from the sea, while camels and mastodons grazed in North America. They lived before two great ages when ice covered Scandinavia and Canada, and covered the British Isles, northern Germany and the northern United States; they lived before the Atlantic Ocean drowned eastern North America between glaciations. Their human species is extinct, like the Neandertals’.
Most paleontologists believed until recently that we—we humans in the form of Homo erectus—left Africa 90,000 years ago by walking up the Great Rift Valley, generation after generation, to the valley’s end at the Sea of Galilee. Recent much older erectus finds in Java, China and the Republic of Georgia seem to show that our generations started leaving Africa about a million years earlier—unless humans arose in Asia. The new ancient dates jolt paleontologists, who one might expect would be accustomed to this sort of thing by now—this repeated knocking out the back wall, this eerie old light on the peopled landscape.
Whenever we made our move, we did not rush to Corfu like sensible people. Instead we carried our cupped fires into the lands we now call the Levant, and then seriatim into China, Japan and Indonesia, whence we hopped islands clear to Australia. In Australia on a rock shelter we engraved animals twice as long ago as we painted cave walls in France. People—including erectus—plied Asian islands thousands of years before Europe saw any humans who could think of such a thing as a raft.
“However far back we look into the past,” Teilhard said, “we see the waves of the multiple breaking into foam.”
During the violence and famine when the Japanese invaded China during the Second World War, that first Peking-Man skull disappeared from the Chinese museum. Scientists suspect starving locals pulverized it and drank it. There is a plaster cast of this skull, as there is of every bit of bone and tooth—forty people’s remains—that the team found by working the site for all those years. The plaster casts proved handy, as every single one of the Peking Man bones, crate after crate, disappeared in the war. When the Japanese invaded, scientists cached the crates with a U.S. Marine doctor who tried to carry them back as luggage. The Japanese caught him. Before he went to prison he was able to entrust the crates to European officials and Chinese friends. Four years later when the war ended he left prison; the crates had disappeared. Recent searches drew blanks.
The man of the red earths, Teilhard called Peking Man. And of Christianity he said: “We have had too much talk of sheep. I want to see the lions come out.”
Teilhard, according to his biographer Robert Speaight, “was not very much bothered by ‘who moved the stone.’”
“We are Christians,” he wrote deadpan in a 1936 letter, “in a somewhat renovated manner.” A modern abbot, Abbé Paul Grenet, quoted this in a 1966 biography, published by Eriksson, which describes Teilhard as always faithful to his calling and to the order of Jesuits.
“The great Neolithic proprietor,” the paleontologist called him, the God of the old cosmos, who was not yet known as the soul of the world but as its omnipotent mage. This God caused everything that happened; history, then, was a fix. He called the idea that we suffer at the hands of an omnipotent God “fatal.” It is fatal, that is, to the idea of God’s omnipotence.
III
Early spring, 1930, Father Teilhard, wearing his clerical collar, was having afternoon tea in the Peking courtyard of his new friend, the American woman Lucile Swan. He sat erect and relaxed, on a bamboo chair at a rattan table laughing and talking. In the other bamboo chair Lucile Swan turned his way; she looked mightily amused. A headband held her short, curly hair from her firm and wide-boned face. She wore an open parka and pants; it was perhaps chilly for taking tea outdoors. Her small dog, white and brown, sat at her knee watching the merriment, all ears.
He was forty-nine; she was forty, a sculptor, divorced. It was over a year after the Peking Man discovery; he was living in a village near the Zhoukoudian cave and coming into Peking once a week. The two had met at a dinner party. They liked each other at once: “For the first time in years I felt young and full of hope again,” she recalled. She had attended Episcopal boarding school and the Art Institute of Chicago. In Peking she made portrait sculptures in clay and bronze, and groups of semi-abstract figures; throughout her life she exhibited widely. Soon the two established a daily routine in Peking: they took a walk, had tea at five, and he returned across the city to the Jesuit house at six. Those first several years, they laughed a great deal—about, among many other things, the American comic “The Little King,” which Lucile found in her New Yorkers and translated for him.
“Lucile was fine-featured, amply bosomed,” a friend who joined them at tea recalled, “beloved by all who knew her. For she glowed with warmth and honest sentiment.” And Father Teilhard was “a lean, patrician priest … the jagged aristocrat. He radiated outward, gravely, merrily, inquiringly. And always with a delicate consideration for the other and no concern for self.”
June, 1930: “Our blue tents are pitched at the edge of a fossil-bearing cliff looking out over the immense flat surface of Mongolia,” he wrote. “We work in solitude.” He knew he could not post this letter for several months, for he was tracing the wild bounds of Outer Mongolia. “Cut off from any correspondence, I feel that my Paris hopes are dormant.” He was not yet writing letters to Lucile Swan. In the Gobi Desert—the “immense austere plains”—he lost a cigarette lighter. These things happen.
He had interrupted his Zhoukoudian caves excavation to join an American expedition—the 1930 Roy Chapman Andrews expedition, officially called the Central Asiatic Expedition of the American Museum of Natural History. Most of his past five years he had already spent traveling with mules to dig the great Gobi marches; the Roy Chapman Andrews expedition would take him even further afield. To fix Peking Man in context, he wanted to discover the geologic history of the Quaternary through all of Asia. And in fact, over the expedition’s wild and crawling journey, which lasted most of a year, he found the evidence to link and date Chinese and Mongolian strata.
The American Andrews expedition was a step up for the monsieur accustomed to mules. They drove Dodge trucks. Strings of camels carried gas. Digging, they encountered between five and ten poisonous brown pit vipers every day. The vipers kept them alert, one team member reported; characteristically, Teilhard never mentioned them in his letters. He liked Roy Chapman Andrews, who made his name finding dinosaur eggs. “A wonderful talker,” he described him, and a hunter who, when the team lacked food, drove off into the bright expanses and returned “with a couple of gazelles on the running boards.” His own vitality still battened on apparent paradox. The man who said that his thirty months on the front in the war had made him “very mystical and very realistic” now wrote from his blue tent in Mongolia, “Rain, storms and dust and icy winds have only whipped up my blood and brought me rest.” They called that place Wolf Camp, for the wolves and eagles hunted there.
“Purity does not lie in a separation from the universe, but in a deeper penetration of it,” he wrote.
The next year he attached himself to a French expedition as its geologist. The 1931 Croisière Jaune expedition took nine months and crossed Asia to the Russian frontier. He doubled his knowledge of Asia. He went so far west he realized one day he was halfway from Peking to Paris. He and the other Frenchmen traveled by Citroën caterpillar across “great folds of impassable land.” They breached what the paleontologist admired as the unending corrugations of the Gobi peneplain and the monumental formations of Upper Asia. They crossed a region where mountains rose 21,000 feet. The Silk Road’s northern route took them west to the Pamir Mountains as far as Afghanistan. On the road, the others reported, the paleontologist often stopped his Citroën halftrack, darted ahead into the waste and picked up a chipped green rock, a palaeolith or a knob of bone.
“This vast ocean-like expanse, furrowed by sharp ridges of rock, inhabited by gazelles, dotted with white and red lamaseries … I am obliged to understand it.” He examined the juncture where the foot of “the huge ridge of the Celestial Mountains” plunged 600 feet below sea level into the Turfan Deep. The Turfan Deep, in turn, opened onto a “vast depression” in which the River Tarim lost itself “in the shifting basin of the Lop-Nor.”
“I still, you see, don’t know where life is taking me,” he wrote his friend Max Begoüen. “I’m beginning to think that I shall always be like this and that death will find me still a wanderer.” He was forty-eight. He was correct about his death.
Returning mid-winter, the team explored an immense section of the Gobi no one had mapped. The temperature stuck between -20 and -30 degrees C. They dared not let the caterpillars’ engines stop. Twice a day they halted and stood, almost immobile in furs, by the mess-vehicle, and tried to drink boiling soup in tin mugs before it froze.
He wrote, “Till the very end of time, matter will always remain young, exuberant, sparkling, new-born for those who are willing.”
By the time he was fifty, he said, he had awakened to the size of the earth and its lands. In only his first ten years there, he explored China at walking pace from the Pacific to the Pamir Mountains as far as Afghanistan, and from the Khingan Mountains northeast of Mongolia south to Vietnam. He had returned from the Croisière Jaune expedition, worked all spring in Peking and traveled throughout the fall. It was then, three years after he met her, that he began writing letters to the sculptor Lucile Swan with whom he had taken so much tea behind her red courtyard gate.
In his salutations “Lucile, dear friend” quickly became “Lucile, dear” and then “Dearest.” She remained “Dearest” (sometimes he underlined it) for twenty-three years until he died. Their published correspondence—hundreds of letters apiece—knocks one out, for of course she loved him, and he loved her. “I am so full of you, Lucile.—How to thank you for what you are for me! … I think that I have crossed a critical point in my internal evolution, those past months,—with you.—” “My dream,” he wrote her, “is to make you gloriously happy.”
She translated his work. She molded for science a fleshed head of Peking Man. For her he sounded out his ideas. One idea he returned to drearily often was his commitment to his vows. He told her, “I do not belong to myself.” In an essay he wrote, “Through woman and woman alone, man can escape from isolation”—but in right passion love will be, predictably, spiritual. “Joy and union,” he wrote her, “are in a continuous common discovery. Is that not true, dearest?” He never broke any of his vows. (Both men and women who live under religious vows agree that while communal living irritates them most, obedience is by far the toughest vow, and not chastity as secular people imagine. Not a monk, Teilhard had no trouble from twenty-four-hour communal living; obedience chafed him sorely; and he confided later that to maintain chastity he had, quite naturally, “been through some difficult passages.”)
Lucile Swan wrote him, “It seems sometimes that I have to accept so many things.” In her private journal she wrote, “Friendship is no doubt the highest form of love—and also very difficult.” As the years passed, he lived in Peking and visited France; he traveled to South America, Burma, India, South Africa, Rhodesia and Java. They both lived in Peking, for the most pan, for twenty-two years after they met, until in 1941 she moved to the United States. Missing him sometimes by a few days, she traveled in those years and in the following fourteen years to France, Rome, Ethiopia, Switzerland, Siam, London and India. In 1952, when he was seventy-one years old, he moved to New York City, where she was living and exhibiting. They met frequently; “We still disturb each other,” he wrote her across town. Especially disturbing to her was his new and deep friendship with another woman—another American, a novelist.
Even three years later, after he had survived a heart attack, and after hundreds of their love letters had flown all over the world for decades, after hundreds of reunions and partings, and after hundreds of visits in New York, he wrote her that he hoped that “things” would “gradually settle emotionally.” There was not much “gradually” left, as he died eleven days later. He was seventy-four. A snapshot of Lucile Swan outdoors in her sixties shows a magnificent beauty. A dog is looking at her face; the dog holds one end of a towel in its teeth, she holds the other in her hand; the dog is clearly waiting for her to do her part right. She lived ten years after he died.
“What is born between us is for ever: I know it,” the man wrote her. One fervently hopes so. One hopes, too—at least this one does—that in heaven souls suffer fewer scruples, or, better yet, none at all.
I see now that my turbulent mind needs activity, that it must break out and try a hundred different ways before reaching the goal towards which I am always straining. There is an old leaven working in me, some black depth that must be appeased. Unless I am writhing like a serpent in the coils of a pythoness I am cold. I must recognize this and accept it, and to do so is the greatest happiness. Everything good that I have ever done has come about in this way.
– Eugene Delacroix
What I know in my bones is that I forget to take time to remember what I know. The world is holy. We are holy. All life is holy. Daily prayers are delivered on the lips of breaking waves, the whisperings of grasses, the shimmering of leaves.
– Terry Tempest Williams
There should be a name for [the] moment in a story when, a situation having been established, a new character arrives. We automatically expect that new element to alter or complicate or deepen the situation. A man stands in an elevator, muttering under his breath about how much he hates his job. The door opens, someone gets in. Don’t we automatically understand that this new person has appeared to alter or complicate or deepen the first man’s hatred of his job? (Otherwise, what’s he doing here? Get rid of him and find us someone who will alter, complicate, or deepen things. It’s a story, after all, not a webcam.)
– George Saunders
If we carefully inspect our experience as we read, we discover that the importance of physical detail is that it creates for us a kind of dream, a rich and vivid play in the mind. We read a few words at the beginning of the book or the particular story, and suddenly we find ourselves seeing not words on a page but a train moving through Russia, an old Italian crying, or a farmhouse battered by rain. We read on—dream on—not passively but actively, worrying about the choices the characters have to make, listening in panic for some sound behind the fictional door, exulting in characters’ successes, bemoaning their failures. In great fiction, the dream engages us heart and soul; we not only respond to imaginary things—sights, sounds, smells—as though they were real, we respond to fictional problems as though they were real: We sympathize, think, and judge. We act out, vicariously, the trials of the characters and learn from the failures and successes of particular modes of action, particular attitudes, opinions, assertions, and beliefs exactly as we learn from life. Thus the value of great fiction, we begin to suspect, is not just that it entertains us or distracts us from our troubles, not just that it broadens our knowledge of people and places, but also that it helps us to know what we believe, reinforces those qualities that are noblest in us, leads us to feel uneasy about our faults and limitations.
– John Gardner
Why We Tell Stories
For Linda Foster
I
Because we used to have leaves
and on damp days
our muscles feel a tug,
painful now, from when roots
pulled us into the ground
and because our children believe
they can fly, an instinct retained
from when the bones in our arms
were shaped like zithers and broke
neatly under their feathers
and because before we had lungs
we knew how far it was to the bottom
as we floated open-eyed
like painted scarves through the scenery
of dreams, and because we awakened
and learned to speak
2
We sat by the fire in our caves,
and because we were poor, we made up a tale
about a treasure mountain
that would open only for us
and because we were always defeated,
we invented impossible riddles
only we could solve,
monsters only we could kill,
women who could love no one else
and because we had survived
sisters and brothers, daughters and sons,
we discovered bones that rose
from the dark earth and sang
as white birds in the trees
3
Because the story of our life
becomes our life
Because each of us tells
the same story
but tells it differently
and none of us tells it
the same way twice
Because grandmothers looking like spiders
want to enchant the children
and grandfathers need to convince us
what happened happened because of them
and though we listen only
haphazardly, with one ear,
we will begin our story
with the word and
– Lisel Mueller
Actually, love is something entirely different. Just like intelligence is a quality of the mind, so love is a quality of the heart. We don’t just have intelligence when we have to solve a difficult mathematical equation; we don’t just have intelligence when we have to make logical connections; the mind remains intelligent whether we do that or not. It’s the same with love. The loving quality of the heart remains with us whether there’s anybody in front of us that we can actually extend that love to or not.
– Ayya Khem
We generally give to our ideas about the unknown the color of our notions about what we do know: If we call death a sleep it’s because it has the appearance of sleep; if we call death a new life, it’s because it seems different from life. We build our beliefs and hopes out of these small misunderstandings with reality and live off husks of bread we call cakes, the way poor children play at being happy.
But that’s how all life is; at least that’s how the particular way of life generally known as civilization is. Civilization consists in giving an inappropriate name to something and then dreaming what results from that. And in fact the false name and the true dream do create a new reality. The object really does become other, because we have made it so. We manufacture realities. We use the raw materials we always used but the form lent it by art effectively prevents it from remaining the same. A table made out of pinewood is a pinetree but it is also a table. We sit down at the table not at the pinetree.
– Fernando Pessoa
I have no ideas before I write a play. I have them when I have written the play or while I am not writing at all. I believe that artistic creation is spontaneous. It certainly is so for me… Fantasy is revealing; it is a method of cognition; everything that is imagined is true; nothing is true if it is not imagined.
– Eugene Ionesco
When you think about it, for sheer bulk there’s more art done with Crayolas than with anything else. There must be billions of sheets of paper in every country in the world, in billions of boxes and closets and attics and cupboards, covered with billions of pictures in crayon. The imagination of the human race poured out like a river in high and lowe paces. Even presidents and prime ministers and generals all used Crayolas sometime in their lives.
Maybe we should develop a Crayola bomb as our next secret weapon. A happiness weapon. A Beauty Bomb. And every time a crisis developed, we would launch one. It would explode high in the air—explode softly—and send thousands, millions, of little parachutes into the air. Floating down to earth—boxes of Crayolas. And we wouldn’t go cheap, either—not little boxes of eight. Boxes of sixty-four, with the sharpener built right in. With silver and gold and copper, magenta and peach and lime, amber and umber and all the rest. And people would smile and get a little funny look on their faces and cover the world with imagination instead of death. A child who touched one wouldn’t have his hand blown off.
– Robert Fulghum
I sleep like a baby — I’m up every two hours.
– Billy Crystal
You can revise even the worst of first drafts.
You can’t revise the absence of a draft.
– Mikhail Iossel
Turns out that we are all struggling along, trying to make sense of the way things are and to become the people we are meant to be. We are all making an effort to be more present in our lives, to love our children just as they are, to appreciate life’s simple pleasures, and to be grateful for every ordinary moment of every ordinary day.
What we know, of course, is the very thing that we continually need to be reminded of: that life is fleeting and precious and beautiful, and that heaven is right here on earth if we will only pause long enough to really look, to really see: the cup of hot coffee, the tousled head, the wagging tail, the small hand held up in greeting, the curve of a chin, the blinked back tear, the sun, the moon, the star… the very life that we are blessed to live.
– Katrina Kenison
I am a restrained person.
Otherwise my heart would race past my
tongue to pour out everything.
Instead I mumble,
I gnaw myself.
I lose hope.
And my mind is burning.
– Anne Carson
How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot! / The world forgetting, by the world forgot. / Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! / Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d.
– Eloisa to Abelard, Alexander Pope
Love’s stricken “why”
Is all that love can speak –
Built of but just a syllable,
The hugest hearts that break.
– Emily Dickinson
We are always living in expectation of better things, while at the same time we often repent and long to have the past back again. We look upon the present as something to be put up with while it lasts, and serving only as the way towards our goal. Hence most people, if they glance back when they come to the end of life, will find that all along they have been living ad interim: they will be surprised to find that the very thing they disregarded and let slip by unenjoyed was just their life-that is to say, it was the very thing in the expectation of which they lived Of how many a man may it not be said that hope made a fool of him until he danced into the arms of death!
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Write Till You Drop
by Annie Dillard
Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.
Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy; describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City; Mark Twain wrote “Huckleberry Finn” in Hartford. Recently scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.
The writer studies literature, not the world. She lives in the world; she cannot miss it. If she has ever bought a hamburger, or taken a commercial airplane flight, she spares her readers a report of her experience. She is careful of what she reads, for that is what she will write. She is careful of what she learns, because that is what she will know.
The writer knows her field – what has been done, what could be done, the limits – the way a tennis player knows the court. And like that expert, she, too, plays the edges. That is where the exhilaration is. She hits up the line. In writing, she can push the edges. Beyond this limit, here, the reader must recoil. Reason balks, poetry snaps; some madness enters, or strain. Now gingerly, can she enlarge it, can she nudge the bounds? And enclose what wild power?
A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, “Do you think I could be a writer?”
“Well,” the writer said, “I don’t know… . Do you like sentences?”
The writer could see the student’s amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am 20 years old and do I like sentences? If he had liked sentences, of course, he could begin, like a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, “I liked the smell of the paint.”
Hemingway studied, as models, the novels of Knut Hamsun and Ivan Turgenev. Isaac Bashevis Singer, as it happened, also chose Hamsun and Turgenev as models. Ralph Ellison studied Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. Thoreau loved Homer; Eudora Welty loved Chekhov. Faulkner described his debt to Sherwood Anderson and Joyce; E. M. Forster, his debt to Jane Austen and Proust. By contrast, if you ask a 21-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, “Nobody’s.” He has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he himself likes only the role, the thought of himself in a hat. Rembrandt and Shakespeare, Bohr and Gauguin, possessed powerful hearts, not powerful wills. They loved the range of materials they used. The work’s possibilities excited them; the field’s complexities fired their imaginations. The caring suggested the tasks; the tasks suggested the schedules. They learned their fields and then loved them. They worked, respectfully, out of their love and knowledge, and they produced complex bodies of work that endure. Then, and only then, the world harassed them with some sort of wretched hat, which, if they were still living, they knocked away as well as they could, to keep at their tasks.
It makes more sense to write one big book – a novel or nonfiction narrative – than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn. A project that takes five years will accumulate those years’ inventions and richnesses. Much of those years’ reading will feed the work. Further, writing sentences is difficult whatever their subject. It is no less difficult to write sentences in a recipe than sentences in “Moby-Dick.” So you might as well write “Moby-Dick.” Similarly, since every original work requires a unique form, it is more prudent to struggle with the outcome of only one form – that of a long work – than to struggle with the many forms of a collection.
Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles. The problem is structural; it is insoluble; it is why no one can ever write this book. Complex stories, essays and poems have this problem, too – the prohibitive structural defect the writer wishes he had never noticed. He writes it in spite of that. He finds ways to minimize the difficulty; he strengthens other virtues; he cantilevers the whole narrative out into thin air and it holds. Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? Can the writer isolate and vivify all in experience that most deeply engages our intellects and our hearts? Can the writer renew our hopes for literary forms? Why are we reading, if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage and the hope of meaningfulness, and press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power? What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and which reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered? Why does death so catch us by surprise, and why love? We still and always want waking. If we are reading for these things, why would anyone read books with advertising slogans and brand names in them? Why would anyone write such books? We should mass half-dressed in long lines like tribesmen and shake gourds at each other, to wake up; instead we watch television and miss the show.
No manipulation is possible in a work of art, but every miracle is. Those artists who dabble in eternity, or who aim never to manipulate but only to lay out hard truths, grow accustomed to miracles. Their sureness is hard won. “Given a large canvas,” said Veronese, “I enriched it as I saw fit.”
The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring. It is the sensation of a stunt pilot’s turning barrel rolls, or an inchworm’s blind rearing from a stem in search of a route. At its worst, it feels like alligator wrestling, at the level of the sentence.
At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your fists, your back, your brain, and then – and only then -it is handed to you. From the corner of your eye you see motion. Something is moving through the air and headed your way. It is a parcel bound in ribbons and bows; it has two white wings. It flies directly at you; you can read your name on it. If it were a baseball, you would hit it out of the park. It is that one pitch in a thousand you see in slow motion; its wings beat slowly as a hawk’s.
One line of a poem, the poet said – only one line, but thank God for that one line – drops from the ceiling. Thornton Wilder cited this unnamed writer of sonnets: one line of a sonnet falls from the ceiling, and you tap in the others around it with a jeweler’s hammer. Nobody whispers it in your ear. It is like something you memorized once and forgot. Now it comes back and rips away your breath. You find and finger a phrase at a time; you lay it down as if with tongs, restraining your strength, and wait suspended and fierce until the next one finds you: yes, this; and yes, praise be, then this.
Einstein likened the generation of a new idea to a chicken’s laying an egg: “Kieks – auf einmal ist es da.” Cheep – and all at once there it is. Of course, Einstein was not above playing to the crowd.
Push it. Examine all things intensely and relentlessly. Probe and search each object in a piece of art; do not leave it, do not course over it, as if it were understood, but instead follow it down until you see it in the mystery of its own specificity and strength. Giacometti’s drawings and paintings show his bewilderment and persistence. If he had not acknowledged his bewilderment, he would not have persisted. A master of drawing, Rico Lebrun, discovered that “the draftsman must aggress; only by persistent assault will the live image capitulate and give up its secret to an unrelenting line.” Who but an artist fierce to know – not fierce to seem to know – would suppose that a live image possessed a secret? The artist is willing to give all his or her strength and life to probing with blunt instruments those same secrets no one can describe any way but with the instruments’ faint tracks.
Admire the world for never ending on you as you would admire an opponent, without taking your eyes off him, or walking away.
One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.
After Michelangelo died, someone found in his studio a piece of paper on which he had written a note to his apprentice, in the handwriting of his old age: “Draw, Antonio, draw, Antonio, draw and do not waste time.”
Difficulty itself may be a path toward concentration — expended effort weaves us into a task […]. Difficulty, whether of life or of craft, is not a hindrance to an artist. Sartre called genius “not a gift, but the way a person invents in desperate circumstances.” Just as geological pressure transforms ocean sediment into limestone, the pressure of an artist’s concentration goes into the making of any fully realized work.
Much of beauty, both in art and in life, is a balancing of the lines of forward-flowing desire with those of resistance — a gnarled tree, the flow of a statue’s draped cloth. Through such tensions, physical or mental, the world in which we exist becomes itself. Great art, we might say, is thought that has been concentrated in just this way: honed and shaped by a silky attention brought to bear on the recalcitrant matter of earth and of life.
– Jane Hirshfield
Fires Burn in my heart.
No smoke rises.
No one knows.
– Kenneth Rexroth
The human mind’s ability to rationalize its own shortcomings into virtues is unlimited, and I am no exception.
– Jubal Harshaw, Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
You realize you are not special. You have struggled into existence and are now slipping silently out of it. This is everyone’s experience. Every single one.
– Philip Seymour Hoffman
I like the American-Canadian border, ’cause if you’re walking on the border with a friend, and you push your friend into Canada, he can’t push you back right away, ’cause first he has to go through customs. “What brings you to Canada?” [Points to the side] “That asshole.” “When are you leaving?” “As soon as I regain my equilibrium!”
– Mitch Hedberg
Our bodies are shot with mortality. Our legs are fear and our arms are time. These chill humors seep through our capillaries, weighting each cell with an icy dab of nonbeing, and that dab grows and swells and sucks the cell dry. That is why physical courage is so important—it fills, as it were, the holes—and why it is so invigorating. The least brave act, chance taken and passage won, makes you feel loud as a child.
But it gets harder. The courage of children and beasts is a function of innocence. We let our bodies go the way of our fears. A teenaged boy, king of the world, will spend weeks in front of a mirror perfecting some difficult trick with a lighter, a muscle, a tennis ball, a coin. Why do we lose interest in physical mastery? If I feel like turning cartwheels—and I do—why don’t I learn to turn cartwheels, instead of regretting that I never learned as a child? We could all be aerialists like squirrels, divers like seals; we could be purely patient, perfectly fleet, walking on our hands even, if our living or stature required it. We can’t even sit straight, or support our weary heads.
When we lose our innocence—when we start feeling the weight of the atmosphere and learn that there’s death in the pot—we take leave of our senses. Only children can hear the song of the male house mouse. Only children keep their eyes open.
– Annie Dillard
I’ve been thinking about something for a long time, and I keep noticing that most human speech – if not all human speech – is made with the outgoing breath. This is the strange thing about presence and absence. When we breathe in, our bodies are filled with nutrients and nourishment. Our blood is filled with oxygen, our skin gets flush; our bones get harder – they get compacted. Our muscles get toned and we feel very present when we’re breathing in. The problem is, that when we’re breathing in, we can’t speak. So presence and silence have something to do with each other.
The minute we start breathing out, we can talk; speech is made with the outgoing, exhaled breath. The problem that this poses, though, is that as we exhale, nutrients are leaving our bodies; our bones get softer, our muscles get flaccid, our skin starts to loosen. You could think of that as the dying breath. So as we breath out, we have less and less presence.
When we make verbal meaning, we use the dying breath. In fact, the more I say, the more my meaning is disclosed. Meaning grows in opposite ratio to presence or vitality. That’s a weird thing. I don’t know why God made us that way.
It’s a kind of paradigm for life, right? As we die, the meaning of our life gets disclosed. Maybe the paradigm for living is encoded or embedded in speech itself, and every time we speak we’re enacting on a small-scale, microcosmic level the bigger scale of our lives. So that the less vitality we have, the more the meaning of our lives get disclosed.
– Li-Young Lee
Many a time have I merely closed my eyes at the end of yet another troublesome day and soaked my bruised psyche in wild water, rivers remembered and rivers imagined. Rivers course through my dreams, rivers cold and fast, rivers well-known and rivers nameless, rivers that seem like ribbons of blue water twisting through wide valleys, narrow rivers folded in layers of darkening shadows, rivers that have eroded down deep into the mountain’s belly, sculpted the land, peeled back the planet’s history exposing the texture of time itself.
– Harry Middleton
Egocentricity, the illusion of separateness, requires constant maintenance. What maintains it is that endless buzz-buzz-buzz in our minds, telling us who we are, who they are, what we are doing, what is important, where we are going next – creating that subject-object relationship in every split second. The continual brainwashing that maintains our identity is like a tape loop.
Every time we pay attention, every time we are present, it is like cutting through that tape. Of course, the tape is instantly spliced back together again, so in the beginning there can be these little snips and then these quick repairs, and you can’t really tell any damage was done. But when you start paying attention more, the snips are more frequent. Then egocentricity gets in a real bind, because if we continue to pay attention, we are going to see how it all works, how the illusion is created.
The first thing we see is how most of what goes on in our minds is nonsense. Here we are, trying to think deep and yet lofty thoughts, but in fact it’s mostly gobbledygook.
Egocentricity continues to play those tapes that maintain our conditioning. But once you see what is happening, the power of it falls away. And you begin to change; you are not able to hold the identity together in the same way.
Ego’s only hope of maintaining the illusion of separateness is to get you to quit paying attention to what goes on in your mind.
– Cheri Huber
I have seen the souls of the dead, traveling in a branching river; they look very much like white blood cells, a pale doughnut-like shape, I cannot tell whether there is anything in the centers, or whether the centers are empty. When one of them comes to a fork in the river, it need not go either one way or the other; it may go both ways. It is able to do this because souls are not bound by time in the same way that living bodies are, so that it is able to exist in what we would understand as two places at once. Also it can move either backward or forward in time, in addition to what we might call this sideways motion, this ability to exist simultaneously in different spaces. Some souls are interested in our world and try to speak to us, but it is really very difficult for them to have much effect, not having bodies of their own, and some of them go around looking for people to talk to, but there are so few of us who can hear them. The recently dead are remembered by the living and so they can speak to them for a while, these people are receptive, but those who are long dead have a much smaller chance of finding anyone and they become fuzzy, their particular features are worn away as they go tumbling along in the great river. They glow, they wait for us, but we cannot find them. Sometimes you will hear one calling from very far away, very faint waves or pulses like a radio broadcast from a planet in another galaxy, scattered signals that are almost impossible to distinguish from the static, which is made up of meaningless bits and pieces of other voices that have broken down over the great distance into a kind of dust. But in the midst of this static you will think you can identify one voice, sentences that you can almost piece together, as an archaeologist can construct an entire body from a few splinters of bone; but of course sometimes you will get it wrong, and this is a great tragedy, both for you and for the soul who is trying to communicate with you. I am talking to you… Be careful. Can you understand what I’m saying?
– Kirsten Bakis
Praisesong
At the coffee shop you love,
white mugs heavy on the table
between us, young baristas—
spiky haired and impatient—
cannot imagine how two people
so old to them can feel so wanton,
coffee growing cold between us,
middle-aged bodies growing hot
under the other’s gaze. Even now,
apart, you send me songs so I may
listen to love from the golden throat
of a saxophone, piano keys playing
jazz across my soft belly.
How is it the tide of terror
has quit rising in me, or rises
and recedes as tides do, bringing
sea glass worked smooth
and lovely by the sheer fact
of time, bringing trash—
plastic mesh and old sneakers—
useless things now we might
bag up and remove, bringing
a lapping tongue of water up
over our toes as we hold hands
and walk along its edge—
carefully, gleefully, both.
– Sarah Browning
Wonder begins with the element of surprise. The now almost obsolete word “wonderstruck” suggests that wonder breaks into consciousness with a dramatic suddenness that produces amazement or astonishment. We can no more create a state of wonderment than we can plan a surprise for ourselves. Consider, for example, how strange it would be to say, “I’m going out for a walk and wonder at the dogwoods in bloom.” It may, indeed, happen that the dogwoods will evoke wonder, but we cannot be assured of it prior to the experience.
Because of the suddenness with which it appears, wonder reduces us momentarily to silence. We associate gaping, breathlessness, bewilderment, and even stupor with wonder, because it jolts us out of the world of common sense in which our language is at home. The language and categories we customarily use to deal with experience are inadequate to the encounter, and hence we are initially immobilized and dumbfounded. We are silent before some new dimension of meaning which is being revealed.
– Sam Keen
Anyone can see that if grasping and aversion were with us all day and night without ceasing, who could ever stand them? Under that condition, living things would either die or become insane. Instead, we survive because there are natural periods of coolness, of wholeness, and ease. In fact, they last longer than the fires of our grasping and fear. It is this that sustains us. We have periods of rest making us refreshed, alive, well. Why don’t we feel thankful for this everyday Nirvana?
We already know how to let go—we do it every night when we go to sleep, and that letting go, like a good night’s sleep, is delicious. Opening in this way, we can live in the reality of our wholeness. A little letting go brings us a little peace, a greater letting go brings us a greater peace. Entering the gateless gate, we begin to treasure the moments of wholeness. We begin to trust the natural rhythm of the world, just as we trust our own sleep and how our own breath breathes itself.
– Jack Kornfield
The human body is the most resistant thing there is to magic, ’cause it’s a vessel of will.
– T.L. Huchu
Every time a thought is born, you are born. When the thought is gone, you are gone. But the ‘you’ does not let the thought go, and what gives continuity to this ‘you’ is thinking. Actually there’s no permanent entity in you, no totality of all your thoughts and experiences. You think that there is ‘somebody’ who is feeling your feelings – that’s the illusion. I can say it is an illusion but it is not an illusion to you.
– U.G. Krishnamurti
This incapacity to die, ironically but inevitably, throws mankind out of the actuality of living, which for all normal animals is at the same time dying; the result is denial of life (repression). The incapacity to accept death turns the death instinct into its distinctively human and distinctively morbid form. The distraction of human life to the war against death, by the same inevitable irony, results in death’s dominion over life.
– Norman O. Brown
Yes No Days
Every day he thought before he went outside.
If it was a yes day things would be
as they seemed. So everything comes true.
His face a lonely moon in the window, his
house resting on a quiet spine. It took
courage to step from a warm house
on a no day. The world might swing wrong,
and yes, a no day could become
a yes day, and vice versa. There were days
like windows facing out and faces wanting
back in. “Isn’t the sky nice?” he hears
his mother say, so he lets go
of the cat who is right on the brink
of telling all she knows.
– Ralph Burns
I was intrigued by the fact that even though I had learned that gravity pulls us toward the earth as we orbit the sun—and that there is no real “up” and “down”—my feeling of being down on the ground below the sky had remained unchanged. To shift my perspective, I would sometimes lie outside with my arms and legs outstretched and take in as much of the sky and horizon as possible. Attempting to break free of the familiar feeling of being down here with the moon and stars above me, I would relax all my muscles—surrendering to the force holding me tightly to the surface of our planet—and focus on the truth of my situation: I’m floating around the universe on this giant sphere—suspended here by gravity and going for a ride. Lying there, I could sense that I was in fact looking out at the sky, rather than up. The delight I experienced came from temporarily silencing a false intuition and glimpsing a deeper truth: being on the earth doesn’t separate us from the rest of the universe; indeed, we are and have always been in outer space.
– Annaka Harris
Happiness
There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.
And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.
No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.
It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.
It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine
– Jane Kenyon
All around me people are going to work. They are opening shops and heading for metro stations. They move in formations, they take directions, they are pulled along, but I don’t feel that same pull, it is a cord I lack, this is something I am not a part of. I cannot catch hold. Either that or it is something that washes them along the streets, a current that carries them along, but this current cannot reach me. Or perhaps it is some inner mechanism. Something that steers their feet through the streets, an inner drive which I don’t possess, a spring that cannot be tightened, a mechanism that is missing. I don’t know whether they are being pulled, carried along by the current or whether inner mechanisms are propelling them along the streets, but I know that, whatever it is, it doesn’t work on me.
– Solvej Balle
Two people have been living in you all your life. One is the ego, garrulous, demanding, hysterical, calculating; the other is the hidden spiritual being, whose still voice of wisdom you have only rarely heard or attended to. As you listen more and more to the teachings, contemplate them, and integrate them into your life, your inner voice, your innate wisdom of discernment, what we call in Buddhism “discriminating awareness,” is awakened and strengthened, and you begin to distinguish between its guidance and the various clamorous and enthralling voices of ego. The memory of your real nature, with all its splendor and confidence, begins to return to you.
You will find, in fact, that you have uncovered in yourself your own wise guide. Because he or she knows you through and through, since he or she is you, your guide can help you, with increasing clarity and humor, negotiate all the difficulties of your thoughts and emotions. Your guide can also be a continual, joyful, tender, sometimes teasing presence, who knows always what is best for you and will help you find more and more ways out of your obsession with your habitual responses and confused emotions. As the voice of your discriminating awareness grows stronger and clearer, you will start to distinguish between its truth and the various deceptions of the ego, and you will be able to listen to it with discernment and confidence.
– Sogyal Rinpoche
Why All This Music?
(excerpt)
. . . It’s 1500
in the book of Chinese watercolors: scholar-artist T’ang Yin
is asleep inside his mountain cottage, dreaming that a self of him,
that looks like him, is floating in the air above
the highest peaks, that looks like air we’d have
if lakes of milk gave off a vapor.
. . . From the Everfloating Void
above our world, a human image slowly drifts back down
and joins its earthly body once again, reenters
days and nights of wine shop, scandal, lawyers
— for such (in part) is the life of T’ang Yin.
He’s been dreaming. And now he’s going to set it down
on a wafer of unrolled rice paper. Writing:
Rain on the river. That’s all. That’s his poem.
He’s writing:
Rain on the river.
– Albert Goldbarth
The world — whatever we might think when terrified by its vastness and our own impotence, or embittered by its indifference to individual suffering, of people, animals, and perhaps even plants, for why are we so sure that plants feel no pain; whatever we might think of its expanses pierced by the rays of stars surrounded by planets we’ve just begun to discover, planets already dead? still dead? we just don’t know; whatever we might think of this measureless theater to which we’ve got reserved tickets, but tickets whose lifespan is laughably short, bounded as it is by two arbitrary dates; whatever else we might think of this world — it is astonishing.
– Wislawa Szymborska
It seems so odd to me now, how one can be so unsettled by the improbable. When we know that our entire existence is founded on freak occurrences and improbable coincidences. That we wouldn’t be here at all if it weren’t for these curious twists of fate. That there are human beings on what we call our planet, that we can move around on a rotating sphere in a vast universe full of inconceivably large bodies comprised of elements so small that the mind simply cannot comprehend how small and how many there are… The unthinkable is something we carry with us always. It has already happened: we are improbable, we have emerged from a cloud of unbelievable coincidences. Anyone would think that this knowledge would equip us in some small way to face the improbable. But the opposite appears to be the case. We have grown accustomed to living with that knowledge without feeling dizzy every morning, and instead of moving around warily and tentatively, in constant amazement, we behave as if nothing has happened, take the strangeness of it all for granted and get dizzy if life shows itself as it truly is: improbable, unpredictable, remarkable.
– Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J. Haveland
A Beautiful House with a Hot Tub and Pool
I miss my magnolias, miss my maples, think
Where did they go?, think, Oh yes, to the past,
that place where everything goes and can I visit?
No, but also Yes. And can I stay away? Also Yes,
but also No. And in the same way that languages
only get simpler, people only get sadder. Yesterday
at the dentist I thought Thank God for nitrous oxide
and I thought Thank God for Dr. Rachel drilling away
in my tooth but wanting nothing she does to hurt me.
I wish that were true all the time. That we all wanted
nothing we did to hurt anyone at all. My friend
with a beautiful house insists that we call his pet
a companion animal, which I don’t think changes
very much, but I want nothing that I do to hurt him,
so I call his dog a companion animal, and then
I think Is that what my trees were? Not really
my trees, but companion trees, offering me their flowers
and then their leaves, offering me their oxygen
in exchange for my carbon dioxide, not exactly grateful
for my copious applications of neem oil to kill
the parasites invading their branches but flourishing
in the absence of those pests, the flowers
and leaves all I really wanted in return. I miss
my companion trees, my flowering Jane,
my flowering Brown Beauty, my flowering Star,
my leafy red maples, scarlet and feathery
all summer. My friend’s companion animal is licking
my face and my friend asks Could you be content
anywhere? And I say Yes, I can be content anywhere,
but then I think Is that true? Of course it’s easy
to be content at my handsome friend’s beautiful house,
by his heated pool, in what might be a physical manifestation
of contentment if ever there was one. So I think it again
on the subway, think it again writing e-mails, think it again
making breakfast: Yes, I can be content anywhere,
but alas sadly: No. It’s not true. I can’t be content here
in my uncomfortable present, in my uncomfortable chair,
on the uncomfortable subway, at this uncomfortable desk,
in this uncomfortable classroom. But oddly, I am content
to visit the past, to say Hello everything I’ve lost,
to say I wish you could come here to the present,
my lost companion trees. I wish you could meet
everything I’ve found.
– Jason Schneiderman
Desire is never on the map
it’s that unnamed lake you found once, driving a gravel road,
not where you thought you were going fast, window down,
hair loose to the dry wind, bare foot pressing metal, soft feathers
of cottonwood drift through, maple seed spinning in its wild gyre.
Bugs spatter on the windshield in Rorschach you want to read
like tea leaves, imagine you might learn how you’ve come
to this road, which left turn at midnight, which wrong side
of town. Then there it is glittering pure and cold before you,
and suddenly you want that stone-skipping ache more
than your life, even knowing how the cold water
makes each hair stand on end as you enter,
one foot at a time sand crumbling underfoot,
then, the delicious submersion, as you slip
the laws of gravity, surface tension.
And so it is you push off from shore, not caring
that this lake—as you knew the instant
you saw it—has no bottom.
– Holly Hughes
What does it feel like to be alive?
Living, you stand under a waterfall. You leave the sleeping shore deliberately; you shed your dusty clothes, pick your barefoot way over the high, slippery rocks, hold your breath, choose your footing, and step into the waterfall. The hard water pelts your skull, bangs in bits on your shoulders and arms. The strong water dashes down beside you and you feel it along your calves and thighs rising roughly back up, up to the roiling surface, full of bubbles that slide up your skin or break on you at full speed. Can you breathe here? Here where the force is the greatest and only the strength of your neck holds the river out of your face. Yes, you can breathe even here. You could learn to live like this. And you can, if you concentrate, even look out at the peaceful far bank where you try to raise your arms. What a racket in your ears, what a scattershot pummeling!
It is time pounding at you, time. Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation’s short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.
– Annie Dillard
All people have their own living road to heaven. Until they walk on this road, they are like drunkards who cannot tell which way is which.
Then when they set foot on this road and lose their confusion, it is up to them which way they shall go — they are no longer subject to the arbitrary directions of others.
– Mi-An
Physical labor as a bringer of sleep doesn’t seem to do much for me. But the woods do, where thoughts of weather, of food, and of the day’s journey so dominate the mind that everything else subsides. The rise and fall of temperature and of wind, the beginning and the end of rain matter here in a way that is irrelevant elsewhere. With the right gear, it is a pleasure to live with the weather, to wait for sun and feel the cool of rain, to watch the sky with absorption and speculation, to guess at the meaning of succeeding events. I hate feeling miserably wet and cold. But with boots, heavy wool socks, rain pants, rain parka, and a wide-brimmed hat I have been dry and warm through all the downpours, on and off the river.
– John McPhee
Written words can be a source of entanglement as well as of liberation; unless the right person takes it at the right time, the elixir turns to poison. Please be careful.
– Torei Enji
One of the biggest factors in stress is cognitive distortion — we make an absurd situation into a catastrophe. We create our own reality out of it. Like, “You make me crazy!” Well, nobody makes you crazy; you make your self crazy. There is a tremendous amount of humor in that . If we could just take a breath and step away and be witnesses to our own absurdity, we’d be cracking up most of the time. What humor can do is make your life less of a problem. A laugh is a break. It removes the dark lens that you see your life through and gives you a lighter lens that gives you clarity. As you step away and get less involved in getting pissed off, you achieve a certain level of enlightenment. In other words, humor takes you to a higher place.
– Loretta Laroche
Adrift on the Lake
Autumn sky illuminates itself all empty
distances away toward far human realms,
cranes off horizons of sand tracing its
clarity into mountains beyond clouds.
Crystalline waters quiet settling night.
Moonlight leaving idleness everywhere
ablaze, I trust myself to this lone paddle,
this calm on and on, no return in sight.
– Wang Wei
There’s something you learned from experience that took so long you didn’t even realize you learned it: seeing. The development of your visual system takes a long time. Your eyes opened in the womb, but there was nothing to see. When born, your brain didn’t know what the world looked like. It didn’t know the statistics of the world. Of how many edges, corners, and curves there are. Of where they tend to be—the consistent edges of horizons and tree trunks and houses, the consistent corners of paper and dice and windows, the constant curves of the moon and footballs and pies. Of how those edges, corners, and curves tend to relate to each other, to form trees and houses and footballs. And of how they tend to move, in graceful arcs and smooth trajectories, no sudden vanishing, reversing, or plummeting.
These statistics of the visible world are all learned by experience. Raise someone in a world with no vertical lines, and they will not be able to see a vertical object placed before them. Raise someone with one eye closed, and when reopened that eye will see nothing.
– Mark Humphries
If you need to visualize the soul, think of it as a cross between a wolf howl, a photon, and a dribble of dark molasses. But what it really is, as near as I can tell, is a packet of information. It’s a program, a piece of hyperspatial software designed explicitly to interface with the Mystery. Not a mystery, mind you, the Mystery. The one that can never be solved.
To one degree or another, everybody is connected to the Mystery, and everybody secretly yearns to expand the connection. That requires expanding the soul. These things can enlarge the soul: laughter, danger, imagination, meditation, wild nature, passion, compassion, psychedelics, beauty, iconoclasm, and driving around in the rain with the top down. These things can diminish it: fear, bitterness, blandness, trendiness, egotism, violence, corruption, ignorance, grasping, shining, and eating ketchup on cottage cheese.
Data in our psychic program is often nonlinear, nonhierarchical, archaic, alive, and teeming with paradox. Simply booting up is a challenge, if not for no other reason than that most of us find acknowledging the unknowable and monitoring its intrusions upon the familiar and mundane more than a little embarrassing.
But say you’ve inflated your soul to the size of a beach ball and it’s soaking into the Mystery like wine into a mattress. What have you accomplished? Well, long term, you may have prepared yourself for a successful metamorphosis, an almost inconceivable transformation to be precipitated by your death or by some great worldwide eschatological whoopjamboreehoo. You may have. No one can say for sure.
More immediately, by waxing soulful you will have granted yourself the possibility of ecstatic participation in what the ancients considered a divinely animated universe. And on a day to day basis, folks, it doesn’t get any better than that.
– Tom Robbins
somewhere out in his lake
that muskie
he never caught
– Joyce Walker Currier
Therapy isn’t curing somebody of something; it is a means of helping a person explore himself, his life, his consciousness. My purpose as a therapist is to find out what it means to be human.
– Rollo May
All this long human story, most passionate and tragic in the living, was but an unimportant, a seemingly barren and negligible effort, lasting only for a few moments in the life of the galaxy.
– Olaf Stapledon
autumn rain
the spider rides a napkin
back outside
– Paul Cordeiro
We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re not alone.
– Orson Welles
The world’s anguish is caused by people between twenty and forty.
– William Faulkner
Fall is the older season, a more seasoned season. The weather surrounds you instead of beating down on you. Clouds bobble across the sky, and there are fresh winds, and misty salmon sunrises, and then cool blue skies. The weather is lighter, marbled, and it makes you feel like striding again, makes you glad that so much
works at all.
– Anne Lamott
Stars are of mighty use: the night
Is dark and long;
The road foul; and where one goes right,
Six may go wrong.
– Henry Vaughan
roadside violet
all the places
I’ve yet to go
– Aubrie Cox
God help me: I
have no one to
guide me and it’s
dark again.
– Clarice Lispector
I don’t believe you
can stand for freedom
for one group of people
and deny it to others.
– Coretta Scott King
Optimism, where it is not just the thoughtless talk of someone with only words in his flat head, strikes me as not only absurd, but even a truly wicked way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the unspeakable sufferings of humanity.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Don’t follow the world. The world is lost. Follow the knowing within you that says you’re here to do it different. And then do it.
– Nika Solé
broken pieces
someone stays long enough
to call them beautiful
– @BashoSociety
Whatever problem, question, or confusion we have, whatever seems impossible in our lives—if we go toward it, see it, feel it, make a relationship with it, use it—becomes our path.
– John Welwood
What uniform can I wear to hide my heavy heart? It is too heavy. It will always show. […] He was well aware that to live on earth a man must follow its fashions, and hearts were no longer worn.
– Jean Cocteau
Whenever your mind becomes scattered, use your breath as the means to take hold of your mind again.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
I suppose one develops a number of personas and hides them away, then they pop up during writing. The exertion of control comes later.
– Louise Erdrich
One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to enquire in his temple.
– Psalm 27:4
Unreal how few of us realized that America was up for grabs.
– Lisa Lucas
Eastward he longs, before, well, any bad
the silly fellow did. Then he remembers,
oh, the worst thing of all.
But he only remembers it as having been had,
not as itself—like a list of summers
surging into Fall.
– John Berryman
Never till time is done
will the fire of the heart
and the fire of the mind be one.
– Edith Sitwell
Snorkel
by Carmen Gallo
translated from the Italian by Will Schutt
To stare into the deep, with a mask and snorkel.
If you learn how to breathe you can keep
your head just below the water for hours
and swim among schools of bream
and watch from above as the seabed recedes
so much it seems to double the distance
between you and the sky, and the world
becomes an egg—half earth, half air—
and you the border that divides them.
Facedown, your body holds the line:
here creatures that swim, there those that fly.
Provided you can breathe, provided you
don’t squirm when water gets into your snorkel
and spit when it slides down your throat.
You continue to float, not thinking.
Now the entire world order depends
on how good you get at spitting and breathing.
Be in awe of all that is alive.
Be in natural wonder.
It is the pace of peace.
– Gunilla Norris
We’re only here for a short while. And I think it’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention. In some ways, this is getting far afield. I mean, we are — as far as we know — the only part of the universe that’s self-conscious. We could even be the universe’s form of consciousness. We might have come along so that the universe could look at itself. I don’t know that, but we’re made of the same stuff that stars are made of, or that floats around in space. But we’re combined in such a way that we can describe what it’s like to be alive, to be witnesses. Most of our experience is that of being a witness. We see and hear and smell other things. I think being alive is responding.
– Mark Strand
I am a writer and my faith in the world of art is intense but not irrational or naïve. Art invites us to take the journey beyond price, beyond costs into bearing witness to the world as it is and as it should be.
– Toni Morrison
Something of our relationship to the earth is determined by the particular place we stand at a given time. If you stand still long enough to observe carefully the things around you, you will find beauty, and you will know wonder. If you see a leaf carried along on the flow of a river, you might ponder its journey. Where did it begin, and where will it end? What will be the story of its passage? You will discover a thousand ways in which the leaf is connected to the water, the banks, the near and farther distances, the sky and the sun. Your mind, your spirit will be nourished and grow. You will become one with what you see.
– N. Scott Momaday
The senses are the sacramental instruments that we’ve been given. It’s all here.
Here we have everything we need-we don’t have to go looking for extraordinary
rituals. We are just given, everywhere, right now. Every sound is an opportunity
to be conscious. It’s the cosmos calling.
– Peter Kingsey
mountain creek
cold water over
smooth rocks
– Basho
Your mighty cloak will fall away.
Your glance that on my cheek was laid
and pillowed warm, will seek, dismayed,
the comforts that I offered once —
to lie, as sunset colors fade
in the cold lap of alien stones.
– Rainer Maria Rilke, (tr. Babette Deutsch)
My entire life
has been lived
for this poem.
– Andy Perrin
Dying for your country is a fairytale, in reality you will bleed out in the mud like a dog for absolutely nothing.
– Ernest Hemingway
As if revision were
the pure form of love.
– Linda Pastan
an old pond
“I want to go first!”
jumping frog
– Issa
If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you’re going to have selfish, ignorant leaders.
– George Carlin
You will never know what you have written, even if you have written only to find this out.
– Blanchot
dawn again
the most delicate light
comes through the cracks
– @BashoSociety
Experiences that come and go are not an experience of the permanent state. The permanent state never comes and goes, and it is not experienced at one time but not at other.
– Papaji
Do you know what
torture by hope is?
After despair, calm
sets in, but hope
can drive you mad.
– Anna Akhmatova
To ‘choose’ dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.
– Christopher Hitchens
When autumn came, he knew that part at least of his heart would think more kindly of journeying, as it always did at that season.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Whoever is fascinated doesn’t see, properly speaking, what he sees. Rather, it touches him in an immediate proximity; it seizes and ceaselessly draws him close, even though it leaves him absolutely at a distance…
– Blanchot, The Space of Literature
I went to the library several times a week to borrow more books, and I cleverly wrapped them in the paper we used for schoolbooks so it would look like I was doing my homework, studying like hell!
– Dag Solstad
I live the wrong life for the person I am.
– Anne Sexton
Sometimes I really
believe it, that I am
going to save my life a
little.
– Mary Oliver
We are called to be wounded healers, to bring our own brokenness to others as a source of healing.
– Henri Nouwen
A Leaf, Treeless
A LEAF, treeless
for Bertolt Brecht:
What times are these
when a conversation
is almost a crime
because it includes
so much made explicit?
– Paul Celan
Become who you are. Do not remain what others have made of you. The task of life is not to discover yourself but to create yourself.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
we named each flower
then forgot
they share the rain
– @BashoSociety
burnt toast
your laughter
saves the morning
– @BashoSociety
Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience
– Thomas Merton
NOWHERE AIR
Like water trickling from the highest ice
Its bracing ache, its brain-shard sweetness,
Its nowhere air of utter now,
So my sigh has lost its source,
And I live by meanings I cannot comprehend,
For every instant I must taste the instant that I end.
– Mandelstam, (tr. Christian Wiman)
…magic is the negative of what one can know.
– Jung
half-awake
and alone again …
no sound
in this mindstorm, yet
my thoughts darken
– Chen-ou Liu
Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality.
– Sigmund Freud
The shameless lose their status by virtue of their great disgrace. But even then, they do not understand their own nature and consider themselves great. What self-deception!
– Mipham
In order to ensure immortality, even of the divine, it is we who must provide the words.
– Don Lopez, The Buddha
To be wronged is nothing unless you continue to remember it.
– Confucius
The people who are in right relationship with life will pour love into your cup and bliss into your experience just by being around.
– Nika Solé
Wherever you see anybody fightin’ for a freedom, or for a better life, I’m gonna be there.
– Woody Guthrie
A cantankerous press, an obstinate press, a ubiquitous press must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to know.
– Judge Murray Gurfein
I am buoyant and expansive and uncontainable – but I always was so, only I never knew it!
– Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
What matters, in the light of mortal frailty, is to feed the living body’s wellbeing in the moment, and to water the soul with beauty and art.
– Maggie Gee
Hope isn’t a pleasant fantasy. Hope is a costly protest that this ugliness and injustice isn’t the deepest reality.
– Walter Brueggemann
So I had this problem–work or starve. So I thought I’d combine the two and decided to become a writer.
– Robert Bloch
Knowledge is of two kinds.
Things we know and things
that we know where we can
discover information about.
– Samuel Johnson
If we don’t have a free press, we don’t have a democracy.
– Lawrence Tribe
Luck does not average out over time. Instead our world virtually guarantees that bad and good luck are each amplified further.
– Robert M Sapolsky
How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been; how gloriously different are the saints.
– C.S. Lewis
Imitation might get you closer to somebody’s shadow, but it will keep you away from your own assignment.
– Radarius Legacy
It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
– James Thurber
Outwardly he was calm, reasonable, patient. All his wildness was in his head—such a good place for it!
– Mary Oliver, On Ralph Waldo Emerson
Graduate school had been disappointing for me, because I thought I was going off to fifth-century Athens, and instead I was dunked in this kind of country club environment in which everyone was manufacturing intelligence for the Vietnam War.
– Robert Hass
There is no other world.
There’s just another way to live.
– Jacques Mesrine
Just think of the early morning mind as sourdough starter.
– Nicholas Pierotti
October
I used to think the land
had something to say to us,
back when wildflowers
would come right up to your hand
as if they were tame.
Sooner or later, I thought,
the wind would begin to make sense
if I listened hard
and took notes religiously.
That was spring.
Now I’m not so sure:
the cloudless sky has a flat affect
and the fields plowed down after harvest
seem so expressionless,
keeping their own counsel.
This afternoon, nut tree leaves
blow across them
as if autumn had written us a long letter,
changed its mind,
and tore it into little scraps.
– Don Thompson
Those who possess wisdom cannot just ladle it out to every wantwit and jackanapes who comes along and asks for it. A person must be prepared to receive wisdom, or else it will do him more harm than good. Moreover, a lout thrashing about in the clear waters of wisdom will dirty those waters for everyone else. So, a man seeking knowledge must be first tested to determine if he is worthy.
– Tom Robbins
You start to think of contempt as a virus. Infecting individuals first, but spreading rapidly through families, communities, peoples, power structures, nations. Less flashy than hate. More deadly. When contempt kills you, it doesn’t have to be a vendetta or even entirely conscious. It can be a passing whim. It’s far more common, and therefore more lethal.
– Zadie Smith
Marginalia
Finding an old book on a basement shelf—
gray, spine bent—and reading it again,
I met my former, unfamiliar, self,
some of her notes and scrawls so alien
that, though I tried, I couldn’t get (behind
this gloss or that) back to the time she wrote
to guess what experiences she had in mind,
the living context of some scribbled note;
or see the girl beneath the purple ink
who chose this phrase or that to underline,
the mood, the boy, that lay behind her thinking—
but they were thoughts I recognized as mine;
and though there were words I couldn’t even read,
blobs and cross-outs; and though not a jot
remained of her old existence—I agreed
with the young annotator’s every thought:
A clever girl. So what would she see fit
to comment on—and what would she have to say
about the years that she and I have written
since—before we put the book away?
– Deborah Warren
In the Mushroom Summer
Colorado turns Kyoto in a shower,
mist in the pines so thick the crows delight
(or seem to), winging in obscurity.
The ineffectual panic of a squirrel
who chattered at my passing gave me pause
to watch his Ponderosa come and go—
long needles scratching cloud. I’d summited
but knew it only by the wildflower meadow,
the muted harebells, paintbrush, gentian,
scattered among the locoweed and sage.
Today my grief abated like water soaking
underground, its scar a little path
of twigs and needles winding ahead of me
downhill to the next bend. Today I let
the rain soak through my shirt and was unharmed.
– David Mason
First
we need it as persons, to give us a path into the content of our lives. Of course I don’t need art to know what I think and feel. But without art what I think and feel will become quickly circular, self centered, and limited. Making art gives me a way to start with what I think and feel, and to plunge deeply enough into it until it becomes not only what I think and feel but what anyone thinks and feels, and even, beyond this, what isn’t thought or felt at all. In other words, writing poems I reach beyond my own sensibilities to that which I cannot directly know but very much need to know. When I write poems I am met, through my own thought and feeling, by what’s outside my thought and feeling. In this sense art promotes a profound empathy, a widening of my sphere of awareness and appreciation of my own life.
Second
we need art specifically as spiritual practitioners to help us overcome our weakness for religious doctrine, dogma, and identity. Which we all have, no matter how resistant to it we think we are, for we are all looking for the security of a fixed truth. Not knowing the truth, but having to discover it for ourselves anew through the imagination, is a much more difficult proposition, one that we are all reluctant, at bottom, to undertake.
– Norman Fischer
When I first encountered the phrase [“write what you know”] (as a student: young, horny, etc), it struck me as rather useless. How could “write what you know” account for the writers who mattered most to me when I was growing up? I wasn’t reading John Updike or Saul Bellow; I was reading JRR Tolkien and Mary Renault, writers who hardly seemed limited to personal experiences and the people they had slept with.
Tolkien had never seen a dragon and Renault had never met Alexander the Great, yet they transcribed these fascinations as convincingly as Updike wrote about adultery and office intrigues. (To be sure, Renault began by writing realistic, sexually charged novels set in post-war Britain, but for better or worse, Tolkien never deigned to give us an exposé of the secret lives of Oxford dons.)
Still, “write what you know” commanded such influence that I couldn’t ignore it completely. I made my peace with it by turning it backwards: not write what you know, but know what you write. If you write about a world before, after, or other than this one, enter that world completely. Search it to find your deepest longings and most terrible fears. Let imagination carry you as far as it may, as long as you recount the voyage with excitement and wonder.
But this is the most important rule: write the book you most long to read. Writing a first novel takes so much effort, with such little promise of result or reward, that it must necessarily be a labour of love bordering on madness.
– Steven Saylor
One final fable. Heaven knows I’m no script writer, but let’s imagine it as a film.
Ten thousand years from now, after the Earth and humans have been through immense upheaval, warfare, and economic collapse, human societies have resurrected themselves and are working toward the rediscovery of science and technology. They are aided by the recent unearthing of a partially preserved ancient library whose texts they are endeavoring to reconstruct and translate.
The reigning culture differs from ours; its highest scientific priority is the study of Earth’s life. While researching marine mammals, whose population is far greater than it is today, scientists notice that whales’ songs change substantially when they swim above the Mariana Trench, the oceans’ deepest canyon. Specialized submarines are sent to the area to investigate. Several disappear without a trace, but just before they vanish, strange sounds, almost musical, are heard over their communication lines. Finally, one badly damaged sub is recovered. The photographs from its camera reveal no sign of any calamity or of any animal attacking the craft; there’s just blurring of the water.
The scientists are baffled. Then one of them, investigating those strange noises, has an epiphany. There are indeed creatures living within the Mariana Trench—the whales are communicating with them—but they’re invisible. Rather than flesh and blood, they’re built solely from sound waves in the water. The submarines weren’t recording the sounds the creatures make; those were the sounds the creatures are.
– Matt Strassler
That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost.
– Rebecca Solnit
This is it. This is my personality, this is my body, this is my life. Just this life is it. It’s hard to describe the feeling of accepting this a little more deeply. It’s a feeling of settling in a little more, or settling down, or opening up, of ceasing to fight against what is. This is not to say that I don’t keep working on my conduct, that I don’t intend to keep studying and practicing, but somehow my attitude shifted a little lately. A little away from trying to be someone else, a little more squarely on just being this person. “Just be yourself” our teachers tell us.
Letting go of trying to be someone else is liberation. You don’t need to apologize anymore. If you really accept that this is it you don’t need to strive anymore, you don’t need to fight what is. You make effort out of joy, out of curiosity, out of compassion for beings, out of the sheer pleasure of engagement with the world. And when things don’t work out you aren’t thrown, you understand that as part of what this is. You don’t think, “oh there is trouble so I’m going about things the wrong way” rather you understand trouble as part of what this is. You adjust and react to the feedback of the universe but just as adjusting, just as reacting not as someone who has failed.
– Nomon Tim Burnett
You know, you could not see me unless you could also see my background, what stands behind me. If I, myself, the boundaries of my skin, were coterminous with your whole field of vision you would not see me at all… You would not see me because, in order to see me, not only would you have to see what is inside the boundary of my skin, but also what is outside it.
Now, that’s terribly important. Really, the fundamental, ultimate mystery, the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets is this: that for every outside there is an inside, and for every inside there is an outside, and though they are different, they go together. There is, in other words, a secret conspiracy between all insides and all outsides, and the conspiracy is this: to look as different as possible and yet underneath to be identical, because you do not find one without the other.
– Alan Watts
It is in the nature of things to be lost and not otherwise. Think of how little has been salvaged from the compost of time of the hundreds of billions of dreams dreamt since the language to describe them emerged, how few names, how few wishes, how few languages even, how we don’t know what tongues the people who erected the standing stones of Britain and Ireland spoke or what the stones meant, don’t know much of the language of the Gabrielanos of Los Angeles or the Miwoks of Marin, don’t know how or why they drew the giant pictures on the desert floor in Nazca, Peru, don’t know much even about Shakespeare or Li Po. It is as though we make the exception the rule, believe that we should have rather than that we will generally lose. We should be able to find our way back again by the objects we dropped, like Hansel and Gretel in the forest, the objects reeling us back in time, undoing each loss, a road back from lost eyeglasses to lost toys and baby teeth. Instead, most of the objects form the secret constellations of our irrecoverable past, returning only in dreams where nothing but the dreamer is lost. They must still exist somewhere: pocket knives and plastic horses don’t exactly compost, but who knows where they go in the great drifts of objects sifting through our world?
– Rebecca Solnit
I am not one who has attained the Tao. I would like to house my spirit within my body, to nourish my virtue by mildness, and to travel in ether by becoming a void. But I cannot do it yet. I tried to house my spirit within my body, but suddenly it disappeared outside; I tried to nourish my virtue by mildness, but suddenly it shifted to intensity of feeling; and I tried to wander in ether by keeping in the void, but suddenly there sprang up in me a desire. And so, being unable to find peace within myself, I made use of the external surroundings to calm my spirit, and being unable to find delight within my heart, I borrowed a landscape to please it. Therefore strange were my travels.
– T’u Lung (also known as T’u Ch’ihshui), translated by Lin Yutang
Wide, the margin between carte blanche and the white page. Nevertheless it is not in the margin that you can find me, but in the yet whiter one that separates the word-strewn sheet from the transparent, the written page from the one to be written: In the infinite space where the eye turns back to the eye, and the hand to the pen, where all we write is erased, even as we write it. For the book imperceptibly takes shape within the book we will never finish.
There is my desert.
– Edmond Jabès
The Meadow
As we walk into words that have waited for us to enter them, so
the meadow, muddy with dreams, is gathering itself together
and trying, with difficulty, to remember how to make wildflowers.
Imperceptibly heaving with the old impatience, it knows
for certain that two horses walk upon it, weary of hay.
The horses, sway-backed and self important, cannot design
how the small white pony mysteriously escapes the fence every day.
This is the miracle just beyond their heavy-headed grasp,
and they turn from his nuzzling with irritation. Everything
is crying out. Two crows, rising from the hill, fight
and caw-cry in mid-flight, then fall and light on the meadow grass
bewildered by their weight. A dozen wasps drone, tiny prop planes,
sputtering into a field the farmer has not yet plowed,
and what I thought was a phone, turned down and ringing,
is the knock of a woodpecker for food or warning, I can’t say.
I want to add my cry to those who would speak for the sound alone.
But in this world, where something is always listening, even
murmuring has meaning, as in the next room you moan
in your sleep, turning into late morning. My love, this might be
all we know of forgiveness, this small time when you can forget
what you are. There will come a day when the meadow will think
suddenly, water, root, blossom, through no fault of its own,
and the horses will lie down in daisies and clover. Bedeviled,
human, your plight, in waking, is to choose from the words
that even now sleep on your tongue, and to know that tangled
among them and terribly new is the sentence that could change your life.
– Marie Howe
The thought is not something that observes an inner event, but, rather it is this inner event itself.
We do not reflect on something, but, rather, something thinks itself in us.
– Robert Musil
Writing is a damnable compulsion. Someone who can stand and watch the person he loves most die and, without wanting to, pick out everything worth describing to the last convulsion, that’s a real writer. A philistine would protest: how awful! But it’s not awful, it’s just suffering. It’s not a career, not something you pick like a desk job. The only writers who have any peace are the ones who don’t write. And there are some like that. They wallow in a sea of possibilities. To express a thought, you first have to limit it, and that means kill it. Every word I speak robs me of a thousand others, and every line I write means giving up another.
– Stanisław Lem
Sometimes I think the people to feel the saddest for are people who once knew what profoundness was, but who lost or became numb to the sensation of wonder — people who closed the door that leads us into the secret world — or who had the doors closed for them by time and neglect and decisions made in times of weakness.
– Douglas Coupland
As a species, we hold tightly to our intuitions, and we tend to believe them. But recent centuries of science have taught us that most assumptions we typically make about the material universe are founded upon misconceptions. This is among the most important lessons of human history: we must never ignore facts, but when we try to interpret them we must beware, for common sense is a thoroughly unreliable guide to the workings of the natural world. No matter how strong an intuition may be, we must be prepared to let it go.
– Matt Strassler
I stand before you tonight to represent the people who do not count: The poor, the poets, and monks. As long as there are people who are trying to realize the divine in themselves, there shall be hope in the world.
– Thomas Merton
One day we were talking, he was describing something to me, and one of the first words he used in his description was a term I did not really know the meaning of and even though I understood all the subsequent elucidations no picture could come together in my mind because of this one fundamental detail that I was largely unclear of. This made me shy and anxious because something was forming in my head regardless and I knew it was all wrong and I didn’t want for anything connected with him to be inaccurate because I knew I’d only get to have one or two things about him to remember and so naturally I was very keen for those one or two things to be limpid and precise. What does that mean, I said. What does what mean, he said. Cantilevered, I said. Cantilevered, he said. Yes, I said, I don’t know what it means really. And he explained to me what cantilevered means and it must have been that my face still looked concerned because he held his hand flat out in front of us and he took my hand and placed it vertically beneath his so that my fingertips connected with those little mounds where his own fingers began and, just like that, everything came together. That’s it, he said, that’s cantilevered. And of course the picture that fell into place only highlighted the life he had and the hopelessness of me supposing I could ever be a part of it. Even so, I loved the way he said it. Cantilevered. Cantilevered. I love the way he said that word. Cantilevered. I will never hear it and I will always hear it.
– Claire-Louise Bennett
We are fast moving into something, we are fast flung into something like asteroids cast into space by the death of a planet, we the people of earth are cast into space like burning asteroids and if we wish not to disintegrate into nothingness we must begin to now hold onto only the things that matter while letting go of all that doesn’t. For when all of our dust and ice deteriorates into the cosmos we will be left only with ourselves and nothing else. So if you want to be there in the end, today is the day to start holding onto your children, holding onto your loved ones; onto those who share your soul. Harbor and anchor into your heart justice, truth, courage, bravery, belief, a firm vision, a steadfast and sound mind. Be the person of meaningful and valuable thoughts. Don’t look to the left, don’t look to the right; we simply don’t have the time. Never be afraid of fear.
– C. JoyBell C.
What is meant by “reality”? It would seems to be something very erratic, very undependable—now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now in a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech—and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly. Sometimes, too, it seems to dwell in shapes too far away for us to discern what their nature is. But whatever it touches, it fixes and makes permanent. That is what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left of past time and of our loves and hates… So that when I ask you to earn money and have a room of your own, I am asking you to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life, it would appear, whether one can impart it or not.
– Virginia Woolf
That’s 10^28. I invite you to count all twenty-eight zeroes and make sure I didn’t miss one. Now, I don’t know about you, but this staggering number gives me vertigo. Think about it. It means that the atoms in a human body are far, far more numerous than the sand grains on all the beaches of the Earth; than the leaves and needles on all the trees of the Earth’s forests; than the number of seconds since the turmoil of the Big Bang; than the heartbeats of all the people who have ever lived upon our planet; than even the stars—not just the ones you can see in a dark sky, not just the hundreds of billions in our Milky Way galaxy—far more numerous than all the stars in all the galaxies across the entire visible universe.
– Matt Strassler
Looking back at the worst times, it always seems that they were times in which there were people who believed with absolute faith and absolute dogmatism in something. And they were so serious in this matter that they insisted that the rest of the world agree with them. And then they would do things that were directly inconsistent with their own beliefs in order to maintain that what they said was true.
– Richard Feynman
Basho
Each poem is a tiny door,
or better still,
a window.
Light as a snowflake,
slippery as a whale,
poised as a candle,
silent as an orchid.
We’ve walked a long way together.
Somewhere ahead of us
a horse whinnies,
a crow calls,
a beetle’s becoming a firefly.
The horse and the crow are a poem.
The firefly lights our way.
– David Young
A Word on Statistics
Out of every hundred people
those who always know better:
fifty-two.
Unsure of every step:
almost all the rest.
Ready to help,
if it doesn’t take long:
forty-nine.
Always good,
because they cannot be otherwise:
four—well, maybe five.
Able to admire without envy:
eighteen.
Led to error
by youth (which passes):
sixty, plus or minus.
Those not to be messed with:
forty and four.
Living in constant fear
of someone or something:
seventy-seven.
Capable of happiness:
twenty-some-odd at most.
Harmless alone,
turning savage in crowds:
more than half, for sure.
Cruel
when forced by circumstances:
it’s better not to know,
not even approximately.
Wise in hindsight:
not many more
than wise in foresight.
Getting nothing out of life except things:
thirty
(though I would like to be wrong).
Doubled over in pain
and without a flashlight in the dark:
eighty-three, sooner or later.
Those who are just:
quite a few at thirty-five.
But if it takes effort to understand:
three.
Worthy of empathy:
ninety-nine.
Mortal:
one hundred out of one hundred—
a figure that has never varied yet.
– Wislawa Szymborska, (tr. Joanna Trzeciak)
After all, isn’t a party a splendid thing not only because of the people there but also because of the people who aren’t and who suppose they ought to be? No doubt about it, there’ll be a moment, in the bathroom most likely—which will naturally exude an edgeless, living fragrance because of the flowers I picked earlier from the garden—when I feel quite triumphant for having developed the good sense at last to realize that people who are hell-bent upon getting to the bottom of you are not the sort you want around.
– Claire-Louise Bennett
If someone told you he didn’t need to listen to other people anymore because frankly he had life all figured out, he had all the answers, every single one of them, and was crystal clear on every last question in the universe, what could you do with that person but shake your head in despair? Chances are, anyone who claims not to need the input of any other person on the planet is probably crazy. So if you were sure you didn’t have all the answers and were spending long afternoons asking yourself What now? wouldn’t it be even crazier not to listen to people or to make up your mind against them based on the most superficial bit of information, say a saffron robe, perhaps? For the most part wisdom comes in chips rather than blocks. You have to be willing to gather them constantly, and from sources you never imagined to be probable. No one chip gives you the answer for everything. No one chip stays in the same place throughout your entire life.
– Ann Patchett
Dust
Someone spoke to me last night,
told me the truth. Just a few words,
but I recognized it.
I knew I should make myself get up,
write it down, but it was late,
and I was exhausted from working
all day in the garden, moving rocks.
Now, I remember only the flavor—
not like food, sweet or sharp.
More like a fine powder, like dust.
And I wasn’t elated or frightened,
but simply rapt, aware.
That’s how it is sometimes—
God comes to your window,
all bright light and black wings,
and you’re just too tired to open it.
– Dorianne Laux
In the greatest confusion there is still an open channel to the soul. It may be difficult to find because by midlife it is overgrown, and some of the wildest thickets that surround it grow out of what we describe as our education. But the channel is always there, and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves—to that part of us which is conscious of a higher consciousness, by means of which we make the final judgments and put everything together.
– Saul Bellow
You needn’t to search for any hole in the ground to look through into somewhere else. You can’t go neither forwards nor backwards into your daddy’s time nor your children’s if you have them. In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got. If there was any Fall, look there, if there was any Redemption, look there, and if you expect any Judgment, look there, because they all three will have to be in your time and your body and where in your time and your body can they be?
– Flannery O’Connor
She had read an article on this café in a magazine. The article had the headline “Uncovering Truth Behind ‘Time-Traveling Café’ Made Famous by Urban Legend.” The gist of the article was as follows.
The café’s name was Funiculi Funicula. It had become famous, with long queues each day, on account of the time-traveling. But it wasn’t possible to find anyone who had actually gone back in time, because of the extremely annoying rules that had to be followed. The first rule was: The only people you can meet while in the past are those who have visited the café. This would usually defeat the purpose of going back. Another rule was: There is nothing you can do while in the past that will change the present. The café was asked why that rule existed, but their only comment was that they didn’t know.
As the author of the article was unable to find anyone who had actually visited the past, whether or not it was actually possible to go back in time remained a mystery. Even supposing it was possible, the sticky point of not being able to change the present certainly made the whole idea seem pointless.
The article concluded by stating that it certainly made an interesting urban legend, but it was difficult to see why the legend existed. As a postscript, the article also mentioned there were apparently other rules that had to be followed but it was unclear what these were.
– Toshikazu Kawaguchi
Once while visiting his friend Max Brod, young Kafka awakened Brod’s father, who was asleep on a couch. Instead of apologizing, Kafka gently motioned him to relax, advanced through the room on tiptoe, and said softly: “Please — consider me a dream.”
– Franz Baumer
The greatest stress. How, if some day or night a demon were to sneak after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you, “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything immeasurably small or great in your life must return to you—all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over and over, and you with it, a dust grain of dust.” Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or did you once experience a tremendous moment when you would have answered him, “You are a god, and never have I heard anything more godly.” If this thought were to gain possession of you, it would change you, as you are, or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “Do you want this once more and innumerable times more?” would weigh upon your actions as the greatest stress. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to crave noting more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Every cop who’s been undercover knows there’s nothing in the world quite like the day before you go into a job. I figure astronauts on countdown know the feeling, and parachute regiments lining up for the jump. The light turns dazzling and unbreakable as diamonds, every face you see is beautiful enough to take your breath away; your mind is crystal clear, every second spreads itself out in front of you in one great smooth landscape, things that have baffled you for months suddenly make perfect sense. You could drink all day and be stone-cold sober; cryptic crosswords are easy as kids’ jigsaws. That day lasts a hundred years.
– Tana French
I came across the remarkable story of Simone Dinnerstein, who, after having some daimon in her wakened upon hearing Glenn Gould’s version of the Goldbergs, shifted her piano studies in a different direction and found her own vision for the piece. I thought that Gould would be perfection for me, but Simone’s playing had a vitality and lightness that forced me to rethink what I had enshrined. I read an interview with her in which she said that people listening to her performances were having mystical experiences…
“I grew up without any religion,” Simone told me at the beginning of our conversation. Yet she and her audiences are aware that there is something about her playing that takes you to a spiritual place. For having been brought up without formal religion, Simone Dinnerstein is able to give people a mystical experience. In my estimation, she is a theologian in the world of music and a teacher of a certain spiritual discipline in which her method requires a piano.
– Thomas Moore
There was a smell of Time in the air tonight. He smiled and turned the fancy in his mind. There was a thought. What did time smell like? Like dust and clocks and people. And if you wondered what Time sounded like it sounded like water running in a dark cave and voices crying and dirt dropping down upon hollow box lids, and rain. And, going further, what did Time look like? Time looked like snow dropping silently into a black room or it looked like a silent film in an ancient theater, 100 billion faces falling like those New Year balloons, down and down into nothing. That was how Time smelled and looked and sounded.
– Ray Bradbury
Here are people who refused to cheat, who eagerly sought out the truth and shrank from neither poetry nor terror, the two poles of our globe—since poetry does exist in the world, in certain events, at rare moments. And there’s also no shortage of terror.
– Adam Zagajewski
Animal minds are simple, and therefore sharp. Animals never spend time dividing experience into little bits and speculating about all the bits they’ve missed. The whole panoply of the universe has been neatly expressed to them as things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks. This frees the mind from unnecessary thoughts and gives it a cutting edge where it matters. Your normal animal, in fact, never tries to walk and chew gum at the same time.
The average human, on the other hand, thinks about all sorts of things around the clock, on all sorts of levels, with interruptions from dozens of biological calendars and time-pieces. There’s thoughts about to be said, and private thoughts, and real thoughts, and thoughts about thoughts, and a whole gamut of subconscious thoughts. To a telepath the human head is a din. It is a railway terminus with all the Tannoys talking at once. It is a complete FM waveband—and some of those stations aren’t reputable, they’re outlawed pirates on forbidden seas who play late-night records with limbic lyrics.
– Terry Pratchett
View with a Grain of Sand
We call it a grain of sand,
but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.
It does just fine without a name,
whether general, particular,
permanent, passing,
incorrect, or apt.
Our glance, our touch mean nothing to it.
It doesn’t feel itself seen and touched.
and that it fell on the windowsill
is only our experience, not its.
For it, it is no different from falling on anything else
with no assurance that it has finished falling
or that it is falling still.
The window has a wonderful view of a lake,
but the view doesn’t view itself.
It exists in this world,
colorless, shapeless,
soundless, odorless, and painless.
The lake’s floor exists floorlessly,
And its shore exists shorelssly.
Its water feels itself neither wet nor dry
and its waves to themselves are neither singular nor plural.
They splash deaf to their own noise
on pebbles neither large nor small.
And all this beneath a sky by nature skyless
in which the sun sets without setting at all
and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud.
The wind ruffles it, its only reason being
that it blows
A second passes.
A second second.
A third.
But they’re three seconds only for us.
Time has passed like a courier with urgent news.
But that’s just our simile.
The character is invented, his haste is make-believe,
his news inhuman.
– Wislawa Szymborska
The wind, with its hands in its pockets, whistles a tune as it wanders down the road—a jaunty melody, at odds with the surroundings—and the theme is picked up by everything it passes, until all of Aldersgate Street, in the London borough of Finsbury, has joined in. The result tends towards the percussive. A bottle in the gutter rocks back and forth, cha-chink cha-chunk, while a pair of polystyrene cartons, one nestled in the other’s embrace, whisper like a brush on a snare drum way up on the pedestrian bridge. A more strident beat is provided by the tin sign fixed to the nearest lamppost, which warns dogs not to foul the pavement, a message it reinforces with a rhythmic rattle, while in the Barbican flowerbeds—which are largely bricked-in collections of dried-up earth—pebbles rock and stones roll. By the entrance to the tube there’s a parcel of newspapers bound by plastic strips, whose pages gasp and sigh in choral contentment. Dustbins and drainpipes, litter and leaves: the wind’s conviction that everything is its instrument is justified tonight.
And yet halfway down the road it pauses for breath, and the music stops. The wind has reached a black door, wedged between a dirty-windowed newsagent’s, visibly suffering from lack of public interest, and a Chinese restaurant offering the impression that it’s still in lockdown, and plans to remain so. This door, irredeemably grimy from the exhalations of passing traffic, is a sturdy enough construction, the only gap in its armour a long-healed wound of a letterbox, impervious to junk mail and red-lettered bills, but a door is only a door for all that, and the wind has blown down bigger. Perhaps it considers rendering this supposed obstruction into dust and matchsticks, but if so, the moment passes; the wind moves on, and its orchestra goes with it…
So the black door is left unshaken and unstirred. But just as it never opens, never closes during daylight hours, nor is it about to yield now, and anyone intent on entry must take the stagedoor johnny route, down the adjacent alley, past the overflowing wheelie-bins and the near-solid stench from the drains, through the door that sticks in all seasons, and then, once inside, climb stairs whose carpet has worn thin as an actor’s ego, and whose walls boast mildew stains, and lightbulbs that are naked and/or spent. It’s dark in here, a bumpy kind of dark, with sound effects provided by rising damp and falling plaster, and the offstage antics of vermin. The stairs grow narrower the higher they go, and the paired offices that lurk on each landing are furnished with shabby props, scratched on every surface and torn in all the ways they can tear—nothing capable of being damaged twice has been damaged only once, because history repeats itself, first as tragedy then as farce, and here in Slough House the daily grind is of such unending repetition that the performers can barely tell one from the other…
– Mick Herron
Sincerely, the Sky
Yes, I see you down there
looking up into my vastness.
What are you hoping
to find on my vacant face,
there between the crisscross
of telephone wires?
You should know I am only
bright blue now because of physics:
molecules break and scatter
my light from the sun
more than any other color.
You know my variations—
azure at noon, navy by midnight.
How often I find you
then on your patio, pajamaed
and distressed, head thrown
back so your eyes can pick apart
not the darker version of myself
but the carousel of stars.
To you I am merely background.
You barely hear my voice.
Remember I am most vibrant
when air breaks my light.
Do something with your brokenness.
– David Hernandez
Let go of the feeling that you are somehow not good enough.
Because every imperfect apple that lays soft in your hands, and every ray of low Autumn sunlight that warms you through woolens will tell you a different story, a much truer story. The story that you are more, much more, than enough. That you bless this world simply by being alive.
– Asia Suler
The character truest to itself becomes eccentric rather than immovably centered, as Emerson defined the noble character of the hero. At the edge, the certainty of borders gives way. We are more subject to invasions, less able to mobilize defenses, less sure of who we really are, even as we may be perceived by others as a person of character. The dislocation of self from center to indefinite edge merges us more with the world, so that we can feel “blest by everything.”
– James Hillman
Probability
Most coincidents are not
miraculous, but way more
common than we think —
it’s the shiver
of noticing being
central in a sequence
of events
that makes so much
seem wild and rare —
because what if it wasn’t?
Astonishment’s nothing
without your consent.
– Lia Purpura
There was a silly damn bird called a Phoenix back before Christ, every few hundred years he built a pyre and burnt himself up. He must have been the first cousin to Man. But every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we’re doing the same thing, over and over, but we’ve got one damn thing the Phoenix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did. We know all the damn silly things we’ve done for a thousand years and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, someday we’ll stop making the goddamn funeral pyres and jumping in the middle of them. We pick up a few more people that remember every generation.
– Ray Bradbury
Dividend of the Social Opt Out
How lovely it is not to go. To suddenly take ill.
Not seriously ill, just a little under the weather.
To feel slightly peaked, indisposed. Plagued by
a vague ache, or a slight inexplicable chill.
Perhaps such pleasures are denied
to those who never feel obliged. If there are such.
How pleasant to convey your regrets. To feel sincerely
sorry, but secretly pleased to send them on their way
without you. To entrust your good wishes to others.
To spare the equivocal its inevitable rise.
How nice not to hope that something will happen,
but to lie on the couch with a book, hoping that
nothing will. To hear the wood creak and to think.
It is lovely to stay without wanting to leave.
How delicious not to care how you look,
clean and uncombed in the sheets. To sip
brisk mineral water, to take small bites
off crisp Saltines. To leave some on the plate.
To fear no repercussions. Nor dodge
the unkind person you bug.
Even the caretaker has gone to the party.
If you want something you will have to
get it yourself. The blue of the room seduces.
The cars of the occupied sound the wet road.
You indulge in a moment of sadness, make
a frown at the notion you won’t be missed.
This is what it is. You have opted to be
forgotten so that your thoughts might live.
– Jennifer Moxley
Some schools of Buddhism teach that [skillful means (upaya)] goes along with two other aspects of the spiritual life: compassion (karuna) and wisdom (prajna). I’d like to borrow this Buddhist trio of virtues for my own religion. What could be more perfect than basing your life on wisdom, compassion, and skillful means? What better way to describe religion than as a deep way of life that takes into account your mind, your heart, and your hands?
In my own private book of spiritual practices, along with these three central ingredients I would add wonder and serenity, two items I borrow from Glenn Gould. That gives me a five-legged table on which to build my religion: wisdom, compassion, skillful methods, wonder, and serenity. I’ve borrowed them all, but now, in this new configuration, they become mine…
It isn’t always easy to practice the virtues of wisdom, compassion, skillful means, wonder, and serenity. Especially serenity. The world might like you to do something else.
– Thomas Moore
…there is a growing apprehension that existence is a rat-race in a trap: living organisms, including people, are merely tubes which put things in at one end and let them out at the other, which both keeps them doing it and in the long run wears them out. So to keep the farce going, the tubes find ways of making new tubes, which also put things in at one end and let them out at the other. At the input end they even develop ganglia of nerves called brains, with eyes and ears, so that they can more easily scrounge around for things to swallow. As and when they get enough to eat, they use up their surplus energy by wiggling in complicated patterns, making all sorts of noises by blowing air in and out of the input hole, and gathering together in groups to fight with other groups. In time, the tubes grow such an abundance of attached appliances that they are hardly recognizable as mere tubes, and they manage to do this in a staggering variety of forms. There is a vague rule not to eat tubes of your own form, but in general there is serious competition as to who is going to be the top type of tube. All this seems marvelously futile, and yet, when you begin to think about it, it begins to be more marvelous than futile. Indeed, it seems extremely odd.
It is a special kind of enlightenment to have this feeling that the usual, the way things normally are, is odd—uncanny and highly improbable. G. K. Chesterton once said that it is one thing to be amazed at a gorgon or a griffin, creatures which do not exist; but it is quite another and much higher thing to be amazed at a rhinoceros or a giraffe, creatures which do exist and look as if they don’t. This feeling of universal oddity includes a basic and intense wondering about the sense of things. Why, of all possible worlds, this colossal and apparently unnecessary multitude of galaxies in a mysteriously curved space-time continuum, these myriads of differing tube-species playing frantic games of one-upmanship, these numberless ways of “doing it” from the elegant architecture of the snow crystal or the diatom to the startling magnificence of the lyrebird or the peacock?
– Alan Watts
…no varnish can hide the grain of the wood; and […] the more varnish you put on, the more the grain will express itself.
– Charles Dickens
I got up to get us a drink of water and as I stood in the kitchen in the early morning light, running the water out of the tap, I looked out at the hills at the back of the town, at the trees on the hills, at the bushes in the garden, at the birds, at the brand new leaves on a branch, at a cat on a fence, at the bits of wood that made the fence, and I wondered if everything I saw, if maybe every landscape we casually glanced at, was the outcome of an ecstasy we didn’t even know was happening, a love-act moving at a speed slow and steady enough for us to be deceived into thinking it was just everyday reality.
– Ali Smith
Personal
Don’t take it personal, they said;
but I did, I took it all quite personal—
the breeze and the river and the color of the fields;
the price of grapefruit and stamps,
the wet hair of women in the rain—
And I cursed what hurt me
and I praised what gave me joy,
the most simple-minded of possible responses.
The government reminded me of my father,
with its deafness and its laws,
and the weather reminded me of my mom,
with her tropical squalls.
Enjoy it while you can, they said of Happiness
Think first, they said of Talk
Get over it, they said
at the School of Broken Hearts
but I couldn’t and I didn’t and I don’t
believe in the clean break;
I believe in the compound fracture
served with a sauce of dirty regret,
I believe in saying it all
and taking it all back
and saying it again for good measure
while the air fills up with I’m-Sorries
like wheeling birds
and the trees look seasick in the wind.
Oh life! Can you blame me
for making a scene?
You were that yellow caboose, the moon
disappearing over a ridge of cloud.
I was the dog, chained in some fool’s backyard;
barking and barking:
trying to convince everything else
to take it personal too.
– Tony Hoagland
Questions About Angels
Of all the questions you might want to ask
about angels, the only one you ever hear
is how many can dance on the head of a pin.
No curiosity about how they pass the eternal time
besides circling the Throne chanting in Latin
or delivering a crust of bread to a hermit on earth
or guiding a boy and girl across a rickety wooden bridge.
Do they fly through God’s body and come out singing?
Do they swing like children from the hinges
of the spirit world saying their names backwards and forwards?
Do they sit alone in little gardens changing colors?
What about their sleeping habits, the fabric of their robes,
their diet of unfiltered divine light?
What goes on inside their luminous heads? Is there a wall
these tall presences can look over and see hell?
If an angel fell off a cloud, would he leave a hole
in a river and would the hole float along endlessly
filled with the silent letters of every angelic word?
If an angel delivered the mail, would he arrive
in a blinding rush of wings or would he just assume
the appearance of the regular mailman and
whistle up the driveway reading the postcards?
No, the medieval theologians control the court.
The only question you ever hear is about
the little dance floor on the head of a pin
where halos are meant to converge and drift invisibly.
It is designed to make us think in millions,
billions, to make us run out of numbers and collapse
into infinity, but perhaps the answer is simply one:
one female angel dancing alone in her stocking feet,
a small jazz combo working in the background.
She sways like a branch in the wind, her beautiful
eyes closed, and the tall thin bassist leans over
to glance at his watch because she has been dancing
forever, and now it is very late, even for musicians.
– Billy Collins
Consider the difference between the two types of globemaps of planet Earth, the physical and the political. The first is a marvelous wiggly affair, blue, green, brown, yellow, and occasionally white. The second, especially on the North American continent, is angrily scratched across with straight lines, and the one earth (and we should not forget the one air) covered with patches of contrasting colors to identify the domains of differing bands of gangsters. Which of the two more closely resembles Earth as seen from outer space?
– Alan Watts
“This is your house,” says the poet Conrad Aiken, and you know he is talking about the human skull. “On one side there is darkness,” he warns you; “on one side there is light.” He wrote better than he knew, that sad-voiced man, for nature had pondered the problem before him. On the table as I write lies the skull of a relative of ours, a spectral creature which flits from tree to tree in the night-time forests of Borneo. It is about the size of a kitten’s skull, but it possesses a most remarkable feature. If the human cranium were built to similar proportions, every aspect of the human face would be squeezed to provide for two great bony saucers with projecting rims. These saucers would occupy and extend far beyond the area now represented by our eye sockets. We would then possess the enormous owl eyes of a creature who is totally nocturnal but who must leap and spring about in the midnight darkness of a tropical rain forest.
This is your house, said nature, in essence, to the spectral tarsier, and the light, what there is of it, must be made to come in. This is your house, she also said to man, but your eyes will be day eyes. You will not need to cherish every beam of moonlight, or the spark of a star through a leaf. You will see what you must, but leave the dark alone. So this far-off relative of ours, with the thin and delicate fingers of a man, lives the life of a ghost. And man, who bumps his head and fumbles in the dark because of his small day-born eyes, fears the ghosts of the dark above all things.
– Loren Eiseley
Recycling Center
The labeled bins on the California hillside
catch the glint and quarter-glint of passing cars.
Families pull up with their interesting trash
and start unloading: Here, sweetheart,
this goes over in Newspaper. The bundle
hits with a thud. Diet soda cans
spin almost noiselessly down, and the sun-
permitting bottles from a day’s pleasure
are tossed into Mixed Glass by the children
who like to hear the smash, unknowable, chaotic,
as matter greets itself and starts to change.
What mystery is inside a thing! If we peered
into the bin, we could see it waiting there,
could believe everything is alive and specific
and personal, could tell by the tilt of one
bottle against the next that it’s difficult
to be singular, to have identity, to keep
an outline safe in the terrors of space.
Even the child knows this. Bye, bottle! she shouts,
tossing it in; and the bottle lies there
in the two o’clock position, temporarily itself,
before being swept into the destiny of mixture…
And what if some don’t want to. What if some items
in the piles of paper, the orange and blue
envelopes from a magazine sweepstakes, numbers
pressing through the cloudy windows
with our names, some among those pale sheets curled
with moisture, would rather stay as they are.
It’s spring; we’ve thrown away mistakes—
tax forms, recipes, tennis-ball-sized
drafts of poems—that which was blank
shall be made blank again—but what if
that failed letter wants to be a failure,
not go back to pulp, and thought…
Or across the parking lot, where light insists
on changing the dull cans, a few cans don’t want
to be changed, though they should want to,
shouldn’t they, should want to be changed
by light, light which is called sweet reason,
honeyed, spectra, magnitude, light that goes
from the parking lot looking helpless
though it is matter that has been betrayed…
All afternoon the bins are carried off
by those who know about where things should go,
who are used to the clatter the cans make,
pouring out; and the families, who believed change
would heal them are pulling away in their vans,
slightly embarrassed by that which refused…
The bins fill again with hard substances,
the hills bear down with their fugitive gold,
the pampas grass bending low to protect
what was briefly certain and alive with hope.
– Brenda Hillman
Dinosauria, We
(excerpt)
We are
Born like this
Into this
Into these carefully mad wars
Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness
Into bars where people no longer speak to each other
Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings
Born into this
Into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die
Into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty
Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed
Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes.
– Charles Bukowski
I don’t believe in “original sin.” I don’t believe in “guilt.” I don’t believe in villains or heroes — only right or wrong ways that individuals have taken, not by choice but by necessity or by certain still-uncomprehended influences in themselves, their circumstances, and their antecedents.
This is so simple I’m ashamed to say it, but I’m sure it’s true. In fact, I would bet my life on it! And that’s why I don’t understand why our propaganda machines are always trying to teach us, to persuade us, to hate and fear other people on the same little world that we live in.
– Tennessee Williams
Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?
– Yuval Noah Harari
Poem with an Embedded Line by Susan Cohen
When the evening newscast leads to despair,
when my Facebook feed raises my blood pressure,
when I can’t listen to NPR anymore,
I turn to the sky, blooming like chicory,
its dearth of clouds, its vast blue endlessness.
The trees are turning copper, gold, bronze,
fired by the October sun, and the bees
are going for broke, drunk on fermenting
apples. I turn to my skillet, cast iron
you can count on, glug some olive oil,
sizzle some onions, adding garlic at the end
to prevent bitterness. My husband,
that sweet man, enters the room, asks
what’s for dinner, says it smells good.
He could live on garlic and onions
slowly turning to gold. The water
is boiling, so I throw in some peppers,
halved, cored, and seeded, let them bob
in the salty water until they’re soft.
To the soffrito, I add ground beef, chili
powder, cumin, dried oregano, tomato sauce,
mashed cannellinis; simmer for a while.
Then I stir in more white beans, stuff the hearts
of the peppers, drape them with cheese and tuck
the pan in the oven’s mouth. (Let the terrible
politicians practice / their terrible politics.
At my kitchen table, all will be fed. I turn
the radio to a classical station, maybe Vivaldi.
All we have are these moments: the golden trees,
the industrious bees, the falling light. Darkness
will not overtake us.)
– Barbara Crooker
I can enjoy feeling melancholy, and there is a good deal of satisfaction about being thoroughly miserable; but nobody likes a fit of the blues. Nevertheless, everybody has them; notwithstanding which, nobody can tell why. There is no accounting for them. You are just as likely to have one on the day after you have come into a large fortune as on the day after you have left your new silk umbrella in the train.
– Jerome K. Jerome
The future is losing its fascination as the idea of progress begins to decline… Today we all speak, if not the same tongue, the same universal language. There is no one center, and time has lost its former coherence: East and West, yesterday and tomorrow exist as a confused jumble in each one of us. Different times and different spaces are combined in a here and now that is everywhere at once.
– Octavio Paz
They imagined. But they could not imagine where all of it started. For all of their intelligence, there were limits to their imagination. They could not know of things that were not of their essence. They could not know of the Void. But the mystery of such things they did seem to feel, and it tingled in them and opened them up…
Time fluttered and spun and wound itself up. Time stretched and compressed and dilated and dissolved… Although time could be measured and sliced by the beats of the hydrogen atoms, now that other minds existed time did not move on its own. Or rather, even if it moved on its own, its movement was relevant only to how it was witnessed. Time was partly conception. Time was partly a thing in the mind. Just as events. Since the universe began, nearly 10^33 ticks of the hydrogen clocks had transpired. Stars had been born. Stars had aged, then exploded or dwindled to dim and cold ashes. Galaxies had collided. Living cells had formed. Then minds. Cities had risen on deserts. Cities had fallen. Civilizations had flourished, then ended. Then new civilizations emerged. Nothing was lasting, nothing was permanent. Living creatures, beings with minds, were the most fleeting of all. They came and went, came and went, came and went, billions upon billions of lives, each quick as one breath. Atoms converged in their special arrangements to make each precious life, held together for moments, then scattered to dull lifeless matter again…
Only one-millionth of one-billionth of 1 percent of the mass of the universe abided in living form.
– Alan Lightman
Initiation Song from The Finders’ Lodge
Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be the mountains.
Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps
and the ways you go be the lines on your palms.
Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing
and your outbreath be the shining of ice.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses.
Walk carefully, well loved one,
walk mindfully, well loved one,
walk fearlessly, well loved one.
Return with us, return to us,
be always coming home.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
Everyone has something to gain at the end of the world if they are the ones left standing. Kleptocrats, theocrats, autocrats, plutocrats, technocrats, aristocrats – any kind of crat except small-d democrats, the people who value “the power of people” over pure power itself.
– Sarah Kendzior
He demands a closeness
We all have earned a lightness
Carry my joy on the left
Carry my pain on the right
– Björk, Who Is It
…The psychology of the oppressed
where mental health is the ability
to repress
knowledge of the world’s cruelty.
– Audre Lorde
Look at the epic of your life, at the people in it, all heroic. And to think it began with an accident. Somebody looked up at the night sky and saw a star,
Somebody in Cracow or Belgrade, maybe, or the city where you live now. Carbon, nitrogen … there was an explosion, and now you have to pay attention to everything.
– David Kirby
When human rulers do not have the Way, at home they brutalize their people, while abroad they invade and despoil neighboring countries. Because of brutality in the homeland, the people’s production is disrupted; because of incursions abroad, war repeatedly breaks out.
– Han Fei
Bodhisattvas practice “in the middle of the fire.” This means they enter into the suffering of the world; it also means they stay steady with the fire of their own painful emotions. They neither act them out nor repress them. They are willing to stay “on the dot” and explore an emotion’s ungraspable qualities and fluid energies—and to let that experience link them to the pain and courage of others.
– Pema Chödrön
The moon and the flowers,
forty-nine years,
… … walking around, wasting time.
– Issa
Do you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished? If it survives anywhere, it’s in a few solid objects with no words attached to them, like that lump of glass there. Already we know almost literally nothing about the Revolution and the years before the Revolution. Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, and every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day-by-day and minute-by-minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right. I know, of course, that the past is falsified, but it would never be possible for me to prove it, even when I did the falsification myself. After the thing is done, no evidence ever remains. The only evidence is inside my own mind, and I don’t know with any certainty that any other human being shares my memories. Just in that one instance, in my whole life, I did possess actual concrete evidence after the event – years after it.
– George Orwell
There used to be a sort of institution in our part of the country known as “sitting till bedtime.” After supper, when they weren’t too tired, neighbors would walk across the fields to visit each other. They popped corn, my friend said, and ate apples and talked. They told each other stories. They told each other stories, as I knew myself, that they all had heard before. Sometimes they told stories about each other, about themselves, living again in their own memories and thus keeping their memories alive. Among the hearers of these stories were always the children. When bedtime came, the visitors lit their lanterns and went home. My friend talked about this, and thought about it, and then he said, “They had everything but money.
– Wendell Berry
This is one superpower of being old: You know that things are probably going to work out without your tense, controlling input. Maybe you won’t get your way, which I hate, but the roiled ponds of misunderstanding and hurt will settle. Older age gives us the knowledge of how powerless we are — not helpless so much but with little control over life’s results. I don’t love this. You come to forks in the road where you think, I can’t bear this, I can’t do this, I can’t fix this; I see no reason for hope.
Plus, what if Iran gets involved, and what if there’s a nuclear exchange, and what if this is the end? But then, if you are old, you remember countless other falling-outs, other miserable patches with people you love, where peace was restored. I believe in the resiliency of relationships, even if I struggle not to be initially devastated every time I disappoint someone. This is the main advice I give younger people who get troubled and stuck. I say, “Yes, it sounds really awful. Just do one good thing, and then another, and breathe. You’re going to be okay.” I tell them what John Lennon said: “Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.”
– Anne Lamott
Your image, tormenting and elusive,
I could not touch in the mist.
“God!” I said by mistake,
never thinking to say that myself.
God’s name like a gigantic bird
flew out from my breast.
Before me thick mist swarms,
behind me stands an empty cage.
– Osip Mandelstam
Fire Strike
by Margaret Noodin
translated from the Ojibwe
At the threshold
of melancholy
is a voice barely heard
a light wrapped in fog
and a piece of steel
longing for flint.
Strike it.
MEMORY
is not just a then, recalled in a now; the past is never just the past: memory is a pulse passing through all created life, a waveform, a then continually becoming other thens, all the while creating a continual but almost untouchable now. But the present fashionable obsession with living only in the now misunderstands the multilayered inheritance of existence, where all epochs live and breathe in parallels.
Whether it be the epochal moment initiated by the appearance of the first hydrogen atoms in the universe, or a first glimpse of adulthood perceived in adolescence, or the raw physical remembrance of holding our first child in our arms, memory passes through an individual human life like a building musical waveform, constantly maturing, increasingly virtuosic, often volatile, sometimes overpowering. Every human life holds the power of this immense inherited pulse, holds and then supercharges it, according to the way we inhabit our identities in the untouchable now. Memory is an invitation to the source of our life, to a fuller participation in the now, to a future about to happen, but ultimately to a frontier identity that holds them all at once. Memory makes the now fully inhabitable.
The genius of human memory is firstly its very creation through experience, and then the way it is laid down in the mind according to the identity we inhabited when we first decided to remember, then its outward radiating effect, and then all its possible future outcomes, occurring all at the same time and able to change alongside the person who is remembering. We actually inhabit memory as a living threshold, as a place of choice and volition and imagination, a crossroads where our future diverges according to how we interpret, or perhaps more accurately how we live, the story we have inherited. We can be overwhelmed, traumatized, made smaller by the tide that brought us here, we can even be drowned and disappeared by memory; or we can spin a cocoon of insulation to protect ourselves and bob along passively in the wake of what we think has occurred, but we also have other, more engaging possibilities; memory, in a sense, is the very essence of the conversation we hold as individual human beings. A full inhabitation of memory makes human beings conscious, a living connection between what has been, what is and what is about to be. Robbed of our memory by Alzheimer’s or by a stroke, we lose our identities. Memory is the living link to personal freedom.
Through the gift of an inheritance truly inhabited, we come to understand that memory creates and influences what is about to happen, and has little to do with what we quaintly, and often unimaginatively, call the past. We might recall the ancient Greek world where Memory was always understood to be the mother of the muses, meaning that all of her nine imaginative daughters, all of the nine forms of human creative endeavor recognized by the ancient Greek imagination, and longed for by individuals and societies to this day, were born from the womb and the body of memory.
– David Whyte
That seems to be the process of the whole journey: dissolving the question mark into a full stop.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Women have been
burnt as witches
simply because they
were beautiful.
– Simone de Beauvoir
We spend hours performing the needful,
yet the soul can live on thirty seconds
of fiery encounter and be filled.
– Gunilla Norris
Teranga
The next time someone says thank you,
instead of answering with you’re welcome,
what if you told the truth, as they do
in Senegal, saying: It is shared, it is
for both of us-the gift flowing back
and forth in all directions to touch
the lives of strangers who were never
a part of the initial exchange, caressing
their skin like steady rain in the middle
of a drought, making them look up
at the sky with unshielded eyes,
seeing now: to give is also to receive.
– James Crews
Once destroyed,
nature’s beauty cannot
be repurchased
at any price.
– Ansel Adams
Consider the hummingbird for a long moment. A hummingbird’s heart beats ten times a second… Each one visits a thousand flowers a day. They can dive at sixty miles an hour. They can fly backwards. They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest.
– Brian Doyle
Much of human suffering comes from the illusion that there is not enough love, not enough recognition, not enough belonging. The Bodhisattva sees through this poverty mentality. Shantideva writes that all the happiness in the world comes from wishing others to be happy, while suffering comes from preoccupation with oneself. That is not moral instruction. He is describing how the heart works.
– Joan Halifax
I advance slowly, a dead man, and my vision, no longer my own, is nothing now: it is merely that of a human animal who unwittingly inherited Greek culture, Roman order, Christian morality and all the other illusions that make up the civilization in which I live and feel.
– Fernando Pessoa
We are required to accept that there is no parent to lead the way, no guru, no ideology to save us from the complexity and ambiguity of life. The measure of our personal development will hinge on two factors: our willingness to accept responsibility for finding our own myth, and our ability to sustain the ambiguity that always precedes a new experience of meaning. This task is critical for the
health of both individual and society.
– James Hollis
My isolation is not a search for happiness, which I do not have the heart to win, nor for peace, which one finds only when it will never more be lost; what I seek is sleep, extinction, a small surrender.
– Fernando Pessoa
Squander it all!
Hold nothing back.
The heart’s a deep well.
And when it’s empty,
It will fill again.
– Gregory Orr
POEM ADDRESSING ECONOMISTS
The problem with this poem, from your perspective, must be its lack of financial value. I guess my problem with you, from my perspective, is how you insist on putting a financial value on everything. But you’re right, I guess. In fact, despite the odds, I hope this poem is worth a great deal financially. And, if that’s not possible, I want it to pay off emotionally. Perhaps you can come up with some financial incentives or deterrents that will move this poem into the commercial marketplace. Everyone, including you and me, would have a lot more respect for this poem if you could.
– Peter Davis
We are reminded by ancient counsel that we should be aware of getting what we want. Depth psychology echoes this: we could be getting simply what the complex wants, what the unconscious history wants, what the unlived life wants.
– James Hollis
Intuition has always been my greatest gift. It has provided me with many ideas for my creative work and saved me from a lot of trouble. It’s just that when I feel stressed and desperate, I forget this gift.
– Yong Kang Chan
Lead us not into temptation’ often means, among other things, ‘Deny me those gratifying invitations, those highly interesting contacts, that participation in the brilliant movements of our age, which I so often, at such risk, desire.’
– C.S. Lewis
The word is never the actual. When the word becomes all-important in living, the actual is neglected.
– Krishnamurti
How strange. The intoxicants I had mistaken for happiness were revealed as the source of my suffering, while abstinence, once feared as suffering, became the source of true happiness.
– Peter Kuhn
Better to have a short life doing what you like doing than a long life lived in a miserable way.
– Alan Watts
My life is a succession of events, just like yours. Only I am detached and see the passing show as a passing show, while you stick to things and move along with them.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
The vibration of Spirit is at such an infinite rate of intensity and rapidity that it is practically at rest — just as a rapidly moving wheel seems to be motionless.
– The Kybalion
Dig up the bones of kings and
slaves and tell me which is which.
– Diogenes
Listen, Will You Learn To Hear Me From Afar?
Listen, will you learn to hear me from afar?
It’s a question of inclining the heart more than the ear.
You’ll find bridges in yourself and roads
To reach all the way to me who waits and stares.
What does it matter, the Atlantic’s width,
The fields, woods, mountains between us two?
One by one they’ll have to give up on that day
You turn your eyes this way.
– Jules Supervielle, (tr. George Bogin)
Good taste is the ability to continually counteract exaggeration.
– Hugo von Hofmannsthal
We rarely think people have good sense
unless they agree with us.
– La Rochefoucauld
All you can actually do is create an environment (inner and outer) where stuff can poke its head up — and then just not stop it from doing that
everything else is at least partly counterproductive
– River Kenna
Man is pushed by drives. But he is pulled by values.
– Viktor Frankl
The reformers and great religious geniuses were heretics. It is there that you find the footprints of the Holy Spirit, and no one asks for him or receives him without having to pay a high price.
– Jung
The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot for ever fence it out.
– Gildor (J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring)
Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write.
– John Adams
How beautiful is the disappointment that frees us from attachments.
– Alejandro Jodorowsky
I used to dream
of drinking tea
with you at night,
I mean, to be
partners in happiness
and in joy.
– Mahmoud Darwish
My entire theory of writing is indebted to looking at floor plans with my mother as a child—which gave me the sense of language as something spatial and inhabitable.
– Christopher Alessandrini
We must learn the difference between the ease of getting our way and the ease that comes with wisdom.
– Tuere Sala
A lover of nooks and retired
corners, was as a child in the
habit of fleeing from society.
– George Borrow
If someone comes along and shoots an arrow into your heart, it’s fruitless to stand there and yell at the person. It would be much better to turn your attention to the fact that there’s an arrow in your heart…
– Pema Chödrön
At the end of all things,
the blessed will say,
“We never lived
anywhere but in heaven.”
– C. S. Lewis
People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was: communism, health foods, zen, surfing, ballet … People had to find things to do while waiting to die. I guess it was nice to have a choice.
– Charles Bukowski
I am that clumsy human, always loving, loving, loving. And loving. And never leaving.
– Frida Kahlo
There’s still a lot worth fighting for.
– Jane Goodall
There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading – that is a good life.
– Annie Dillard
If you’re quiet long enough,
the whole of a life fits in a coconut
and you can whittle out the slivers
of its immaculate inner meat.
– Idra Novey
women like us fall into two categories: dragons and fools. you must make sure they think of you as a dragon.
– Maggie Smith
Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.
– Philip Larkin
The gods do not protect fools. Fools are protected by more capable fools.
– Larry Niven
There have been (at least) as many Gods as there have been people on this planet ~ and about 120 Billion humans have existed.
– Andrew Kent Hagel
working out
Van Gogh cut off his ear
gave it to a
prostitute
who flung it away in
extreme
disgust.
Van, whores don’t want
ears
they want
money.
I guess that’s why you were
such a great
painter: you
didn’t understand
much
else.
– Charles Bukowski
The decline in adult literacy means not merely a decline in the capacity to read and write, but a decline in the impulse to puzzle out, brood upon… argue about, turn inside-out in verbal euphoria, the ‘incomparable medium’ of language…
– Adrienne Rich
If you do not liberate yourself in this lifetime, what lifetime will you wait for? Once this day has passed, that much of your life is gone too. With each passing thought, observe the impermanence of the appearances of the world and give up thinking there will be a tomorrow. With each step tread the Great Way of the mind source, and do not turn to another road.
You should let go your hand and footholds, as if plunging off a precipitous cliff.
– Man-An, (tr. Thomas Cleary)
He has to find more and better ways of occupying his time. His time, what a bankrupt idea, as if he’s been given a box of time belonging to him alone, stuffed to the brim with hours and minutes that he can spend like money. Trouble is, the box has holes in it and the time is running out, no matter what he does with it.
– Margaret Atwood
…occasionally I have these moments where it all hits me—the filter of familiarity that colors everything mundane falls from my eyes, and it’s glorious again. I can see it all anew with the eyes that accompany me on my travels. I’ll ask myself, “How is it possible to take all of this beauty for granted?” And when this happens, I always think of “You Are My Sunshine,” and how there hasn’t been a single moment of my life where this song felt unknown to me. I think about how long it took before I even thought of it as a song. And even longer before I contemplated the fact that someone had to have written it. An individual human person had made it up before anyone else had ever heard it.
How is it that this song can feel like it has always existed? Weren’t we all just born to this song? Born to breathe this song like the air in our lungs? It’s easy to overlook the blue in the sky, I guess. But it’s important to come home and be reminded of how special it is. How does a song become a home? The same way houses do. People have to live in them. Life has to happen inside of them. Laughing, crying, shouting. A song is a home when it matters not at all who’s singing it, young or old. It’s built for any voice.
– Jeff Tweedy
There are no exact guidelines. There are probably no guidelines at all. The only thing I can recommend at this stage is a sense of humor, an ability to see things in their ridiculous and absurd dimensions, to laugh at others and at ourselves, a sense of irony regarding everything that calls out for parody in this world. In other words, I can only recommend perspective and distance. Awareness of all the most dangerous kinds of vanity, both in others and in ourselves. A good mind. A modest certainty about the meaning of things. Gratitude for the gift of life and the courage to take responsibility for it. Vigilance of spirit.
– Václav Havel
We can keep ourselves so busy, fill our lives with so many diversions, stuff our heads with so much knowledge, involve ourselves with so many people and cover so much ground that we never have time to probe the fearful and wonderful world within. More often than not we don’t want to know ourselves, don’t want to depend on ourselves, don’t want to live with ourselves. By middle life most of us are accomplished fugitives from ourselves.
A long, long time ago George Herbert said:
By all means use some times to be alone.
Salute thyself: see what thy soul doth wear.
That is good self-renewal doctrine. The individual who has become a stranger to himself has lost the capacity for genuine self-renewal.
– John W. Gardner
Young person worry: What if nothing I do matters?
Old person worry: What if everything I do does?
– Jenny Ofill
I’m trapped next to this young techno-optimist guy. He explains that current technology will no longer seem strange when the generation who didn’t grow up with it finally ages out of the conversation. Dies, I think he means.
His point is that eventually all those who are unnerved by what is falling away will be gone, and after that, there won’t be any more talk of what has been lost, only of what has been gained.
But wait, that sounds bad to me. Doesn’t that mean if we end up somewhere we don’t want to be, we can’t retrace our steps?
He ignores this, blurs right past me to list all the ways he and his kind have changed the world and will change the world. He tells me that smart houses are coming, that soon everything in our lives will be hooked up to the internet of things, blah, blah, blah, and we will be connected through social media to every other person in the world. He asks me what my favored platforms are.
I explain that I don’t use any of them because they make me feel too squirrelly. Or not exactly squirrelly, more like a rat who can’t stop pushing a lever.
Pellet of affection! Pellet of rage! Please, please, my pretty!
He looks at me and I can see him calculating all the large and small ways I am trying to prevent the future. “Well, good luck with that, I guess,” he says.
– Jenny Ofill
The irony of hiding the dark side of our humanness is that our secret is not really a secret at all. How can it be when we’re all safeguarding the very same story? That’s why Rumi calls it an Open Secret. It’s almost a joke—a laughable admission that each one of us has a shadow self—a bumbling, bad-tempered twin. Big surprise! Just like you, I can be a jerk sometimes. I do unkind, cowardly things, harbor unmerciful thoughts, and mope around when I should be doing something constructive. Just like you, I wonder if life has meaning; I worry and fret over things I can’t control; and I often feel overcome with a longing for something that I cannot even name. For all of my strengths and gifts, I am also a vulnerable and insecure person, in need of connection and reassurance. This is the secret I try to keep from you, and you from me, and in doing so, we do each other a grave disservice.
– Elizabeth Lesser
Yes, I’m sure civilizations will still evolve through play, or rather as play, since that seems to be a fundamental mechanism of our humanity. New religions will arise, new art forms, new ways to tantalize or jolt one’s senses. Artists will continue to reveal how the world touches us, how we are linked to the powerful unseen forces of nature. For deep play, people will need sacred arenas, rules, time limits, tension, exaltation, an openness to risk, and the freedom to play. Of course, their versions of deep play will explore new locales, new materials, new ways of evading the grand concourse of society for a few rapturous moments.
But suppose paradise awaits us, as so many tales foretell—freedom from disease, crime, early death. In a transcendent world, what will become of our passion for transcendence? As effervescent as turn-of-the-century life sometimes seems, we live in the dark ages. I don’t suppose those who lived before us thought of themselves in the dark any more than we do, but it’s inevitable: the miraculous advances of each new age throw a shadow upon the previous one. What discoveries, fascinations, and crazes we will miss. I ache to see that future Earth, to know the triumphs and struggles of those distant people, who will have other worlds to conquer, other nights to cross.
– Diane Ackerman
We may use our homes to help distinguish ourselves, but the dominant Western viewpoint is that regardless of location, the individual remains unchanged. It wasn’t until I stumbled across the following notion, mentioned in passing in a book about a Hindu pilgrimage by William S. Sax, that I began to question that idea: “People and the places where they reside are engaged in a continuing set of exchanges; they have determinate, mutual effects upon each other because they are part of a single, interactive system”…
I can’t possibly live everywhere I once labeled home, but I can frame these places on my walls. My decorations can serve as a reminder of the more adventurous person I was in New York, the more carefree person I was in Paris, and the more ambitious person I was in Michigan. I can’t be connected with my home in the intense way South Asians are in Sax’s book, but neither do I presume my personality to be context-free. No one is ever free from their social or physical environment. And whether or not we are always aware of it, a home is a home because it blurs the line between the self and the surroundings, and challenges the line we try to draw between who we are and where we are.
– Julie Beck
Before this is all over. Before they close the house and sell the furniture and give away the books. Before the cosmetics and shoes are handed out. Before they throw the pans in the trash. Before they empty the cupboards, before they take away the spices, the noodles. Before the happy days and Sunday afternoons end. Before the last of the mornings. Before the end of the anguish. Before sex without love and love without sex are over. Before the clothes rot in the closets. Before they take down the paintings and cover the armchairs with canvases and close the windows forever. Before they burn the photos. Before the doormats dry out, before the curtains rust on their tracks. Before curiosity is over, the bones, the liver and the corneas. Before all the plants on the balcony dry out. Before there is no more snow, no colors, no tropics. Before the end of all the jungles, of all the seas, of all the reflections in the water. Before the last poem. From the end of the sidewalks and streets. The end of all walks.
Before goodbye to all the airports and all the planes, all the cities and all the cafes with steamed up windows. Before the cancellation of all the discussions, of all the arguments, of all the fury, of all the contempt. Of all the metallic anxieties. Before the end of the screams, the desolation and the guilt. Before the last agenda, the last Friday, the last bar, the last dance. Before all the domes and all the screens go out. Before the moths eat the remains of the wool and the pillow. Before the end of pets. Before, much before: you have to live.
But how? As? “How admirable / he who does not think ‘life flees’ / when he sees lightning,” Basho wrote. Admirable those who are in time without thinking about it.
– Leila Guerriero
What Is Lost
Can you picture the Argentine pampa? Flat fields, eucalyptus trees, a seemingly inoffensive landscape where a gray sunset might use your boiling blood to paint a path straight to hell. That’s where I’m from, from that landscape. There, my grandfather showed me how to plant seeds, my grandmother read to me from Struwwelpeter, my mother taught me that cruel things are not always done with cruelty. “I need a hook to reach the high branches,” my father says now in the backyard of the house I grew up in. We watch him disappear into the leaves of the fig tree while my brothers and I shout warnings of absurd dangers—bees, rotten fruit—and we laugh like idiots as he collects figs to make jam. Later on, in the evening, we go fishing and come home when the sun goes down, without having caught anything. That night we eat under the grapevine, on the stone table that has been there since my grandparents were young, since they planted these trees and a sea of calla lilies that no longer exists. The next morning my younger brother and I look through boxes stuffed with toys and old dolls that fall apart in my hands. After lunch we start taking my mom’s clothes out of the closets. We put them in bags (her silk blouse with a pattern of little anchors), and we leave them on the bed, unsure of what to do with them. At night I return to Buenos Aires, staring at the stars, the highway like a smooth metal slide at the playground. A song comes on the radio and suddenly I remember a verse by Arnaldo Calveyra: “I didn’t know I was sad until they asked me to sing.” It’s a lie that we can keep everything alive inside us through memories. Some things are lost for good. And there is, in recognizing that, a brave, icy beauty. Even if it pierces your heart and shatters it to pieces.
– Leila Guerriero
There is a twilight zone in our own hearts that we ourselves cannot see. Even when we know quite a lot about ourselves—our gifts and weaknesses, our ambitions and aspirations, our motives and drives—large parts of ourselves remain in the shadow of consciousness.
This is a very good thing. We always will remain partially hidden to ourselves. Other people, especially those who love us, can often see our twilight zones better than we ourselves can. The way we are seen and understood by others is different from the way we see and understand ourselves. We will never fully know the significance of our presence in the lives of our friends. That’s a grace, a grace that calls us not only to humility but also to a deep trust in those who love us. It is in the twilight zones of our hearts where true friendships are born.
– Henri Nouwen
Once we were so few we fit intimately into the life of extended families. As our numbers swelled, you would think we would feel an even greater sense of belonging, of belonging everywhere to everyone. But there are so many of us, more than we can ever know in a lifetime—or even imagine as individuals—that we often feel just the opposite: as if we belong nowhere to no one. We can move among multitudes, and feel isolated and alone. We live unique, private lives of hope and self-interest. We also live polite, cooperative lives of teamwork and negotiation. When our population was low, that meant cooperating on a hunt or ceremony or marriage, or perhaps the exchange of goods. We knew the people who owed us, and those to whom we were indebted. We knew our friends and allies on sight—they often revealed talents and tempers in the daily dramas of the community. We knew whom to trust in a crisis, where to go for solace. Today there are so many of us that we forge alliances with people we will never meet, whose names we don’t even know—with banks, insurance companies, sprawling corporations, governments, churches, armed forces. We belong to organizations more virtuous and trustworthy than any of their members are as individuals. We belong to our families as we always did, to kith and kin, but we also belong electronically, telephonically, statistically, generationally, anonymously to people far from us.
We are masons, blacksmiths, teachers, lawyers. We have invented machines in which we fly, submersibles to patrol the secret recesses of the oceans. We have polished the marble of our cities, and also filled them with decay. We have homesteaded the night with electric lights, turning it into a dazzling country. We have learned sin and shame, new words for hate, novel forms of mischief and deep play. We perform towering feats of altruism. Little of it was planned. It simply happened, child by child, loved one by loved one, piece by piece, over the great caravan of human history.
– Diane Ackerman
Self help
In the middle of the night
in Sweden, in the northern part
northish, anyway,
at midsummer
there are no stars
the light shimmers when you get up
and walk through the woods
to the outhouse
shimmers. it is not
like
what you are used to, shining from
like the sun through
the trees to your eyes.
it breaks and shimmers
in all directions.
at least i am pretty sure,
i didn’t have my glasses on.
we saw two moose
a big one one evening
a little one the next evening
i sat on the porch in a lawn chair
i looked at the lake
and at the trees
eventually i noticed i was not thinking
i was a little surprised
what am i doing when i am not thinking
i am living
so i lived on the porch
for a few days.
would i recommend this?
i don’t recommend anything
anymore
you’ll figure it out
– Mig Living
Nonreading
Bookstores don’t provide
a remote control for Proust,
you can’t switch
to a soccer match,
or a quiz show, win a Cadillac.
We live longer
but less precisely
and in shorter sentences.
We travel faster, farther, more often,
but bring back slides instead of memories.
Here I am with some guy.
There I guess that’s my ex.
Here everyone’s naked
so this must be a beach.
Seven volumes—mercy.
Couldn’t it be cut or summarized,
or better yet put into pictures.
There was that series called “The Doll,”
but my sister-in-law says that’s some other P. [*]
And by the way, who was he anyway.
They say he wrote in bed for years on end.
Page after page
at a snail’s pace.
But we’re still going in fifth gear
and, knock on wood, never better.
– Wislawa Szymborska
…art is the most unnatural minion of the state. Not only is it created by fanciful people who tire of repetition even more quickly than they tire of being told what to do, it is also vexingly ambiguous. Just when a carefully crafted bit of dialogue is about to deliver a crystal-clear message, a hint of sarcasm or the raising of an eyebrow can spoil the entire effect. In fact, it can give credence to a notion that is the exact opposite of that which was intended. So, perhaps it is understandable that governing authorities are bound to reconsider their artistic preferences every now and then, if for no other reason than to keep themselves fit.
– Amor Towles
The Applicant
First, are you our sort of a person?
Do you wear
A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch,
A brace or a hook,
Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch,
Stitches to show something’s missing? No, no? Then
How can we give you a thing?
Stop crying.
Open your hand.
Empty? Empty. Here is a hand
To fill it and willing
To bring teacups and roll away headaches
And do whatever you tell it.
Will you marry it?
It is guaranteed
To thumb shut your eyes at the end
And dissolve of sorrow.
We make new stock from the salt.
I notice you are stark naked.
How about this suit—-
Black and stiff, but not a bad fit.
Will you marry it?
It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof
Against fire and bombs through the roof.
Believe me, they’ll bury you in it.
Now your head, excuse me, is empty.
I have the ticket for that.
Come here, sweetie, out of the closet.
Well, what do you think of that?
Naked as paper to start
But in twenty-five years she’ll be silver,
In fifty, gold.
A living doll, everywhere you look.
It can sew, it can cook,
It can talk, talk, talk.
It works, there is nothing wrong with it.
You have a hole, it’s a poultice.
You have an eye, it’s an image.
My boy, it’s your last resort.
Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.
– Sylvia Plath
I’m sentimental, if you know what I mean
I love the country but I can’t stand the scene
And I’m neither left or right
I’m just staying home tonight
Getting lost in that hopeless little screen
But I’m stubborn as those garbage bags
That time cannot decay
I’m junk but I’m still holding up
This little wild bouquet
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A
– Leonard Cohen
To learn even something as simple as to water the roots of a plant rather than its leaves was not to be dealt the harsh reality of cold hard fact, but rather to be let into a secret. In a garden, expertise was personal and anecdotal — it was allegorical — it was ancient — it had been handed down; one felt that gardeners across the generations were united in a kind of guild, and that every counsel had the quality of wisdom, gentle, patient, and holistic — and yet unwavering, for there was no quarreling with the laws and tendencies of nature, no room for judgment, no dispute: the proof lay only in the plants themselves, and in the soil, and in the air, and in the harvest.
– Eleanor Catton
It doesn’t seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil—which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.
– Richard P. Feynman
If the Universe came to an end every time there was some uncertainty about what had happened in it, it would never have got beyond the first picosecond. And many of course don’t. It’s like a human body, you see. A few cuts and bruises here and there don’t hurt it. Not even major surgery if it’s done properly. Paradoxes are just the scar tissue. Time and space heal themselves up around them and people simply remember a version of events which makes as much sense as they require it to make.
– Douglas Adams
London slept, but fitfully, its every other eye wide open. The ribbon of light atop the Telecom Tower unfurled again and again, traffic lights blinked through unvarying sequence, and electronic posters affixed to bus stops rotated and paused, rotated and paused, drawing an absent public’s attention to unbeatable mortgage deals. There were fewer cars, playing louder music, and the bass pulse that trailed in their wake pounded the road long after they’d gone. From the zoo leaked muffled shrieks and strangled growls. And on a pavement obscured by trees, leaning on a railing, a man smoked a cigarette, the light at its tip glowing brighter then dying, brighter then dying, as if he too were part of the city’s heartbeat, performing the same small actions over and over, all through the watches of the night.
– Nick Herron
If you do not know precisely where impossibility begins and ends, then of course it cannot constrain you.
– Olivie Blake
I can’t find
my thoughts anywhere
this morning. They’ve
left me
alone, no one
to be. I
act like nothing’s
happened, so they don’t
suspect anything
when I
stretch my usual walk
out through
winter-burnished
grasses. And they’re so
preoccupied, they
don’t notice
when I wander
past wafers of seabed
rock angled
up and broken
away into sky, then
sit sun-
warmed facing a familiar
mountain, mirroring
it perfectly. Good
deal. They’ll never
find me here.
– David Hinton
Transplant the MOON of wakefulness into your heart & the SUN of wisdom into your head.
– Chögyam Trungpa
It’s much easier to move toward the comfort of a conclusion than to sustain uncertainty. But there’s something worth pursuing in refusing conclusion.
– Katie Kitamura
The ongoing curriculum of life does not demand that we avoid suffering; it asks instead that we live more meaningfully in the face of it.
– James Hollis
Segesta
by Edith Wharton
High in the secret places of the hills
Cliff-girt it stands, in grassy solitude,
No ruin but a vision unachieved.
This temple is a house not made with hands
But born of man’s incorrigible need
For permanence and beauty in the scud
And wreckage of mortality—as though
Great thoughts, communing in the noise of towns
With inward isolation and deep peace,
And dreams gold-paven for celestial feet,
Had wrought the sudden wonder; and behold,
The sky, the hills, the awful colonnade,
And, night-long woven through the fane’s august
Intercolumniations, all the stars
Processionally wheeling—
Then it was
That, having reared their wonder, it would seem
The makers feared their God might prove less great
Than man’s heart dreaming on him—and so left
The shafts unroofed, untenanted the shrine.
Transformations are rarely tidy.
– Frank Inzan Owen
Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world’s original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different.
– Oscar Wilde
The purpose of poetry is not to manipulate, but to tell other people what you are really thinking about secretly.
– Allen Ginsberg
The point is to wake up, not to earn a Ph.D. In waking up.
– Jed McKenna
At each stage of psychological development, the Self demands some sacrifice. It is no longer a case of “Thy will be done-my way”. Sometimes we may rationally or idealistically decide to make a sacrifice, but unless the time is right, sacrifice is self-dramatization. The dreams make clear the real sacrifice that is demanded. Sometimes we are called upon to give up the part of our life that we hold most dear, and the fear and loneliness involved in that inner decision dare not be underestimated. At the same time as we are making the sacrifice, we are also required to meet the challenge of the new life. This is a time of darkness; it requires time and patience, space and meditation. So long as our psychological heritage is sound, we can trust that the Self will not demand more of us than we are able to give. We can’t get away with offering the starving calf; it has to be the fatted one.
– Marion Woodman
The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things ‘continue’ in this way is the catastrophe.
– Walter Benjamin
It is the human that is the alien,
The human that has no cousin in the moon.
It is the human that demands his speech
From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.
If there must be a god in the house, let him be one
That will not hear us when we speak.
– Wallace Stevens
This poem
really isn’t
what I hoped
to write
today.
– Andy Perrin
A person who is influenced by the quality of a thing, or who changes his speech or manner according to the appearance or position of the people he meets, is not a man working in the Way.
– Dogen
To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.
– Henri Poincaré
May you realize your messy seasons have not disqualified you from living a marvelous life.
– Dr. Thema
Music is the ultimate power in the cosmological history of Middle-earth.
– Bradford Lee Eden
Many of the neuroses that plague the lives of modern humans-from anxiety to depression-are often fed, if not caused, by a confined, claustrophobic and ultimately unsubstantiated interpretation of consensus reality; that is, by a deprived myth derived from grammatical rules.
– Bernardo Kastrup
In any case, we stand in need of a reorientation, a metanoia. Touching evil brings with it the grave peril of succumbing to it. We must, therefore, no longer succumb to anything at all, not even to good. A so-called good to which we succumb loses its ethical character.
– Jung
You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all.
– James Baldwin
Books, purchasable at low cost, permit us to interrogate the past with high accuracy; to tap the wisdom of our species; to understand the point of view of others, and not just those in power; to contemplate–with the best teachers–the insights, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history. They allow people long dead to talk inside our heads. Books can accompany us everywhere. Books are patient where we are slow to understand, allow us to go over the hard parts as many times as we wish, and are never critical of our lapses. Books are key to understanding the world and participating in a democratic society.
– Carl Sagan
The world will never be good, but it could become better.
– Carl Zuckmayer
I lived so carefully, thinking someone was watching. But the stage was empty, the audience never came.
– Osamu Dazai
Re-edify me, moon, give me again
My undetailed order, the designer’s sketches.
Strong from your beams I can sustain the sun’s
That discompose me to disparate pain.
– William Empson
Each new autumn is closer to the last autumn we’ll have, and the same is true of spring or summer; but autumn, by its nature, reminds us that all things will end, which is something we’re apt to forget when we look around us in spring or summer.
– Fernando Pessoa
Life is an ongoing process of choosing between safety (out of fear and need for defense) and risk (for the sake of progress and growth). Make the growth choice a dozen times a day.
– Abraham Maslow
It is frustrating to have discovered a new author and not to be able to tell anyone how good he is…
– C.S. Lewis
ἓν εἰ μὴ ἔστιν, οὐδέν ἐστιν
“If One is not, nothing is.”
– Plato, Parmenides
Creativity is a wild mind and a disciplined eye.
– Dorothy Parker
Every era, like every person, has a certain field of thought, beyond which nothing is perceived.
– Bertha von Suttner
You haven’t always been the mug you are today, bogged down by circumstances, work, and thirst, the most disastrous of servitudes … Do you think that, just for a moment, you can revive the poetry in you?
– Louis-Ferdinand Céline
To work in a writer’s archives is a humbling practice; one is never one’s own self (…)”
– Kazim Ali, Ploughshares
Love poems must be bounced back off a moon.
– Robert Graves
Every time I cast my skin
A feebler ghost is left within;
Powers desert me; every year
Some new impediments appear.
Once I shuddered, shut my eyes,
Preferring not to be made wise.
– Edward Lowbury
Time will say nothing but I told you so.
– WH Auden
The literal meaning is not primary, but rather the end-product of a semantic death-process—the antithesis of spirit. But we knew that: St. Paul already warned that ‘the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.’
– Amrine
The highest form of peace is having no desire to be seen, validated or understood by anyone.
– Epictetus
a full moon above
an old path looks
newly chosen
– @BashoSociety
I love immersing myself in the universe of a novel for years. There is never a time when I am more alive.
– Arundhati Roy
The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.
– Alfred North Whitehead
It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.
– Leo Tolstoy
Never doubt that thousands of invisible hands are helping you at all times.
Love is everywhere, even if you can’t see it.
The tenderest care will arrive when you least expect it, and from someone whose name you may never know …
– Elizabeth Gilbert
I don’t feel right having a picture of a person be different from what they were. I think there’s something interesting about reality, the things people really say.
– Sharon Olds
I am called to come home to the Father who waits for me with outstretched arms.
– Henri Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son
There is nowhere to seek Him,
for the One who is sought
is already the very essence
of all that is.
– Anandamayi Ma
Possession for us is still just as bad as in primitive society, for it means being swept away by one tune in the melody of one’s inner possibilities, and in that there is already a great amount of evil.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
Water wouldn’t sound so beautiful
without rocks in its way.
– Marcus Aurelius
The threat to morality today is less our consciousness of its diversity than the growing consensus that it’s a sucker’s game.
– Susan Neiman
Never try to convey your idea to the audience—it is a thankless and senseless task. Show them life, and they’ll find within themselves the means to assess and appreciate it.
– Andrei Tarkovsky
Traveling the world reminds you just how much the journey is a part of the destination.
– Nika Solé
world of man–
a new morning glory
blooms in bondage
– Kobayashi Issa
人の世や新朝顔のほだし咲
hito no yo ya shin asagao no hodashi-zaki
A new hybrid flower is tied with string to force
it to grow according to the whimsy of a gardener.
Issa would prefer to see it natural and free.
I do not speak as I think, I do not think as I should, and so it all goes on in helpless darkness.
– Franz Kafka
his and her
bookmarks
leapfrogging
through Bly
– Julie Warther Schwerin
My friend, let me tell you the old-fashioned way
The most tender passion.
I love you –
And the wind howls in the chimney.
Eyes fixed on the flames – elbow on the table –
I love you.
– Marina Tsvetaeva
The average person stares into a screen 11 hours a day. It’s not a magical time. It’s quite sad, actually.
– Poetic Outlaws
How the world must have been changing while I was holding it still.
– Tom Stoppard, The Coast of Utopia
You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you’ve found life. I’m no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are ‘yours’ and which are ‘mine.’ It’s past sorting out. We’re both being someone new now, someone incredible…
– Thomas Pynchon
But what can be done, the one who loves must share the fate of the one he loves.
– Mikhail Bulgakov
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
1. Live theater is about three dimensions: time, space, and action. So breathe. Move in space. Create a map of the place where your scenario is set. Walk the rooms, the hallways, the crawlspaces, and the forest glens. See where things happen or where things are still and go to one of these places. Close your eyes. Smell, hear, feel, and taste what is happening. Who knows? Maybe you’ll find a fourth dimension to express.
2. Be yourself. When you begin a new piece, forget formal conventions: the well-made play, Shakespeare, the structure of Noh scenes, the versification of a villanelle. And such. You are uncovering, brainstorming, finding what’s in the depth of your imagination, history, and research.
3. Be someone else. Ha! If you’re stuck beginning a new piece, start with a formal convention: the well-made play, Shakespeare, the structure of Noh scenes, the versification of a villanelle. And such. Use the old masters to help you out and give you a nudge.
4. Believe in the ancestors. Even if some of them are unruly and bad. Honor them, as their labor and existence brought you forth into the world to write. What does this mean? Look to both the storytellers and the quiet ones among family and friends for those unseen, unbidden fragments of memory, history, tale, joy, and hurt. Look inside yourself for those stories trapped by decades, centuries, and eons of exclusion, inequity, and monoculture.
5. Listen to these folks with every pore: listen with your skin, observe with your eyes, and feel with your ears. Pay attention not only to word but to gesture, breath, sound, and movement because this is the stuff of live performance and story on stage.
6. Everything you experience in your life counts. Cull from moments of your life that seem like they don’t relate. Like the exploration of a Buddhist Cave when you’re writing about drought.
7. If you really get stuck writing a scene, get outside yourself. Do something helpful for someone else. Getting outside your story reveals a lot about being a human being that will feed into your work. Ultimately, live performance is about people being together in love, hate, and everything in between.
8. Write: one word after another and another and another. Overwrite. Write a lot of shit. You have to get through a lot of crap to get to that One Line, that One Shard. When you find it, bingo! It’ll carry you to the finish line.
9. Take a nap. Stuck in a big way again? Even better, before you go to sleep, write down the problem in your special writing journal. Go to bed. Sleep. In the morning, see what rest and dreams reveal.
10. Kindness to yourself will keep you creative. Community will keep you alive. Hang out with a bunch of friends; a bunch of other writers.
– Eugenie Chan
Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken—I to whom there is not beauty enough in moon or tree; to whom the touch of one person with another is all, yet who cannot grasp even that, who am so imperfect, so weak, so unspeakably lonely.
– Virginia Woolf
The therapist, after a deeply upsetting investigation of normality at this time and place, was bound to conclude that a normal person, functioning well on the upper levels of a prosperous, industrialized society, can hardly hear his conscience at all.
– Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
As for me, she said, I seek not the Lover that completes me, that was good for when I was poor of time, when biology dictated my clockwork, ticking into doom. Now I seek the transmuting agent, the opener of worlds, the substance actuator, that which I will be made to re-spect forever. I seek the intertwined reality of numerous sensations, allowing me to explode into innumerable bright sparks of inquisitiveness, of realigning curiosities of old into new constellations of sense-thought. You see, my dear, no longer being constrained by the time of body, I am now the explorer of the body of time, which is love for the me-eternal.
My desire is fierce into the unknown, parsing joys unheard of, protecting the freedom of ecstasy from the banality of its conclusion.
That is my job description, the eternal lover.
– Aubrey De Grey
You do what you can. What you’d done may do more than you can imagine for generations to come. You plant a seed and a tree grows from it; will there be fruit, shade, habitat for birds, more seeds, a forest, wood to build a cradle or a house? You don’t know. A tree can live much longer than you. So will an idea, and sometimes the changes that result from accepting that new idea about what is true, or right, just might remake the world. You do what you can do; you do your best; what what you do does is not up to you.
– Rebecca Solnit
Perhaps one must not only be aware of injustices but be aware of each other. Perhaps one should not only resist injustice but restore, repair, and reaffirm each other. One must make being well a priority, too.
– Myisha Cherry
The time for comprehending can be reduced to the instant of the glance, but this glance can include in its instant all the time needed for comprehending.
– Jacques Lacan
Can you love God unconditionally? That is the big question. All the time you may have thought that the question was, Can God love you unconditionally, but the big question is, Can you love God unconditionally.
– Neale Donald Walsch
You’ll understand why
storms are named after people.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
Revision is heartbreaking.
– Shelby Foote
All that is necessary to awaken to yourself as the radiant emptiness of spirit is to stop seeking something more or better or different, and to turn your attention inward to the awake silence that you are.
– Adyashanti
Music is an unconscious exercise in metaphysics in which the mind does not know it is philosophizing.
– Schopenhauer
Poem for the New Year
I’ve tracked myself from day to day
how many steps through a field of snow
how many hours have I slept
what have I eaten
what did I burn
calories or cigarettes
what birds have poured
through Bellefontaine
where mausoleums bear the names
of Busch and Brown
Lemp and Spink
on marble white as winter endive
when I can read my title clear
to mansions in the skies
what have I read
how many words
what facts
statistics biometrics
what data aggregation
what news
of wins and losses
getting and spending
each dawn a color wheel
to gauge the shifting moods
the daylight sunk in trees
an index of attraction
According to the Tao Te Ching
each day brings more
and more of less
less and still less
with no end to nothing
and nothing left undone
Even here in Bellefontaine
along a winding street
silence brings an interval
of yet more distant sound
trucks along the interstate
a plane behind the clouds
– Devin Johnston
Anything is only one of a million paths. Therefore, you must always keep in mind that a path is only a path. If you feel that you must not follow it, you need not stay with it under any circumstances. Any path is only a path. There is no affront to yourself or others in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you to do. But your decision to keep on the path or to leave it must be free of fear and ambition. I warn you: Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself and yourself alone one question. It is this: Does this path have a heart? All paths are the same. They lead nowhere. They are paths going through the brush or under the brush. Does this path have a heart is the only question. If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn’t, it is of no use.
– Carlos Castaneda
As I walked, I was thinking about the Great and Secret Knowledge, which the Other says will grant us strange new powers. And I realised something. I realised that I no longer believed in it. Or perhaps that is not quite accurate. I thought it was possible that the Knowledge existed. Equally I thought that it was possible it did not. Either way it no longer mattered to me. I did not intend to waste my time looking for it any more.
This realization — the realization of the Insignificance of the Knowledge — came to me in the form of a Revelation. What I mean by this is that I knew it to be true before I understood why or what steps had led me there. When I tried to retrace those steps my mind kept returning to the image of the One-Hundred-and-Ninety-Second Western Hall in the Moonlight, to its Beauty, to its deep sense of Calm, to the reverent looks on the Faces of the Statues as they turned (or seemed to turn) towards the Moon. I realized that the search for the Knowledge has encouraged us to think of the House as if it were a sort of riddle to be unravelled, a text to be interpreted, and that if ever we discover the Knowledge, then it will be as if the Value has been wrested from the House and all that remains will be mere scenery.
The sight of the One-Hundred-and-Ninety-Second Western Hall in the Moonlight made me see how ridiculous that is. The House is valuable because it is the House. It is enough in and of Itself. It is not the means to an end.
This thought led on to another. I realized that the Other’s description of the powers that the Knowledge will grant has always made me uneasy. For example: he says that we will have the power to control lesser minds. Well, to begin with there are no lesser minds; there are only him and me and we both have keen and lively intellects. But, supposing for a moment that a lesser mind existed, why would I want to control it?
– Susanna Clark
Winter Solstice
Claire says the day will be one second longer.
Darkness will no longer exceed light.
But the weather is abysmal,
so hatred of gloom is not an option. I want to live
to be ninety-five, too, and still be assembling
words into music and truth. For now,
I regard a conference of stars, with fast-moving clouds.
Sometimes my dreams are like explosion pits,
with scary lava. Yet the Earth remains constant,
tilting away from the sun and back,
like a robin to a bare branch.
Be somebody with a body, the stars command;
Don’t be a nobody. I know them by heart,
as they sink and as they rise.
– Henri Cole
Night Walk
The all-night convenience store’s empty
and no one is behind the counter.
You open and shut the glass door a few times
causing a bell to go off,
but no one appears. You only came
to buy a pack of cigarettes, maybe
a copy of yesterday’s newspaper—
finally you take one and leave
thirty-five cents in its place.
It is freezing, but it is a good thing
to step outside again:
you can feel less alone in the night,
with lights on here and there
between the dark buildings and trees.
Your own among them, somewhere.
There must be thousands of people
in this city who are dying
to welcome you into their small bolted rooms,
to sit you down and tell you
what has happened to their lives.
And the night smells like snow.
Walking home for a moment
you almost believe you could start again.
And an intense love rushes to your heart,
and hope. It’s unendurable, unendurable.
– Franz Wright
The moment we find the true reason for some feeling that has an irrationally powerful hold on us, whether it has to do with body image or anything else, the spell is broken.
– Gloria Steinem
Why is it that so many ghosts prefer to travel the halls of night? Ask the living and they will tell you that these spirits either have some unquenched desire or an unaddressed grievance that stirs them from their sleep and sends them out into the world in search of solace.
But the living are so self-centered.
Of course they would judge a spirit’s nocturnal wanderings as the product of earthly memories. When, in fact, if these restless souls wanted to harrow the bustling avenues of noon, there is nothing to stop them from doing so.
No. If they wander the halls of night, it is not from a grievance with or envy of the living. Rather, it is because they have no desire to see the living at all. Any more than snakes hope to see gardeners, or foxes the hounds. They wander about at midnight because at that hour they can generally do so without being harried by the sound and fury of earthly emotions. After all those years of striving and struggling, of hoping and praying, of shouldering expectations, stomaching opinions, navigating decorum, and making conversation, what they seek, quite simply, is a little peace and quiet.
– Amore Towles
Remembering
When there was air, when you could
breathe any day if you liked, and if you
wanted to you could run. I used to
climb those hills back of town and
follow a gully so my eyes were at ground
level and could look out through grass as the stems
bent in their tensile way, and see snow
mountains follow along, the way distance goes.
Now I carry those days in a tiny box
wherever I go, I open the lid like this
and let the light glimpse and then glance away.
There is a sigh like my breath when I do this.
Some days I do this again and again.
– William Stafford
It is part of the human experience that we are constantly gripping a good fellow by the shoulders and wishing him well, taking comfort from the notion that we will hear word of him soon enough. But experience is less likely to teach us how to bid our dearest possessions adieu. And if it were to? We wouldn’t welcome the education. For eventually, we come to hold our dearest possessions more closely than we hold our friends. We carry them from place to place, often at considerable expense and inconvenience; we dust and polish their surfaces and reprimand children for playing too roughly in their vicinity—all the while, allowing memories to invest them with greater and greater importance. This armoire, we are prone to recall, is the very one in which we hid as a boy; and it was these silver candelabra that lined our table on Christmas Eve; and it was with this handkerchief that she once dried her tears, et cetera, et cetera. Until we imagine that these carefully preserved possessions might give us genuine solace in the face of a lost companion.
But, of course, a thing is just a thing.
And so, slipping his sister’s scissors into his pocket, the Count looked once more at what heirlooms remained and then expunged them from his heartache forever
– Amor Towles
What might change if we understood meaningful action to be something we could let happen, simply by standing out of the way? On such an account, actions are always flowing through you anyway, unless you actively impede them. Your only job is to direct the flow a bit, so that you end up focusing more on the things that matter to you.
The Zen teacher Kosho Uchiyama once wrote: “Life completely unhindered by anything manifests as pure activity.” Orient yourself to the world in this way, and the question is no longer “How can I get myself to do things?”, with its implicit and unwelcome answer: “By putting in more effort, you lazy jerk!” Instead, the question is something a bit more like “What’s seeking to be done through me, right now?” And then, whatever the response, all you really have to do is to allow it to happen.
– Oliver Burkeman
The real problem here is that we’re all dying. All of us. Every day the cells weaken and the fibres stretch and the heart gets closer to its last beat. The real cost of living is dying, and we’re spending days like millionaires: a week here, a month there, casually spunked until all you have left are the two pennies on your eyes.
Personally, I like the fact we’re going to die. There’s nothing more exhilarating than waking up every morning and going “WOW! THIS IS IT! THIS IS REALLY IT!” It focuses the mind wonderfully. It makes you love vividly, work intensely, and realize that, in the scheme of things, you really don’t have time to sit on the sofa in your pants watching Homes Under the Hammer.
Death is not a release, but an incentive. The more focused you are on your death, the more righteously you live your life. My traditional closing-time rant—after the one where I cry that they closed that amazing chippy on Tollington Road; the one that did the pickled eggs—is that humans still believe in an afterlife. I genuinely think it’s the biggest philosophical problem the earth faces. Even avowedly non-religious people think they’ll be meeting up with nana and their dead dog, Crackers, when they finally keel over. Everyone thinks they’re getting a harp.
But believing in an afterlife totally negates your current existence. It’s like an insidious and destabilizing mental illness. Underneath every day—every action, every word—you think it doesn’t really matter if you screw up this time around because you can just sort it all out in paradise. You make it up with your parents, and become a better person and lose that final stone in heaven. And learn how to speak French. You’ll have time, after all! It’s eternity! And you’ll have wings, and it’ll be sunny! So, really, who cares what you do now? This is really just some lacklustre waiting room you’re only going to be in for 20 minutes, during which you will have no wings at all, and are forced to walk around, on your feet, like pigs do.
If we wonder why people are so apathetic and casual about every eminently avoidable horror in the world—famine, war, disease, the seas gradually turning piss-yellow and filling with ringpulls and shattered fax machines—it’s right there. Heaven. The biggest waste of our time we ever invented, outside of jigsaws.
Only when the majority of the people on this planet believe—absolutely—that they are dying, minute by minute, will we actually start behaving like fully sentient, rational and compassionate beings. For whilst the appeal of ‘being good’ is strong, the terror of hurtling, unstoppably, into unending nullity is a lot more effective. I’m really holding out for us all to get The Fear. The Fear is my Second Coming. When everyone in the world admits they’re going to die, we’ll really start getting some stuff done.
– Caitlin Moran
An Hour Is Not a House
An hour is not a house,
a life is not a house,
you do not go through them as if
they were doors to another.
Yet an hour can have shape and proportion,
four walls, a ceiling.
An hour can be dropped like a glass.
Some want quiet as others want bread.
Some want sleep.
My eyes went
to the window, as a cat or dog left alone does.
– Jane Hirshfield
How many moons have I been too busy to notice? Full moons, half moons, quarter moons facing those thousands of suns, watching them bringing the years up, one piece at a time. Even the dark phases of moon after moon, gray stoppers plugged into a starry sky, letting a little light leak out around the edges. By my reckoning, almost a thousand full moons have passed above me now, and I have been too busy and self-absorbed to be thankful for more than a few, though month after month they have patiently laid out my shadow, that velvety cloak that in the moonlit evenings waits for me.
– Ted Kooser
The basis of neurosis, or even physical discomfort and pain, is mind and body not joining together.
– Chögyam Trungpa
The way you’re always willing to give people a decent chance. That’s a good trait.
– Kazuo Ishiguro
People too healthy, too determined to jog, too muscular, may use their health to prevent the soul from entering. They leave no door. Through the perfection of victory they achieve health, but the soul enters through the hole of defeat.
– Robert Bly
autumn moon
some nights
refuse to be predicted
– Basho
Being human is an experiment and always has been. The Buddha’s teachings show us how we might live that experiment in the clearest and most compassionate way.
– Santacitta Bhikkhuni
I love the dark hours of my being
in which my senses drop into the deep…
From them I know that I have room
for a second, timeless, larger life.
– Rilke
I’m not afraid of being lost. We all wander off from time to time. It’s the fear of never quite finding myself that keeps me up at night.
– Sylvia Plath
I don’t know anything anymore. Is that
normal? Is it normal to notice the enormity
of everything and just go blank.
– A. M. Homes
I don’t think existence wants you to be serious. I have not seen a serious tree. I have not seen a serious bird. I have not seen a serious sunrise. I have not seen a serious starry night. It seems they are all laughing in their own ways, dancing in their own ways. We may not understand it, but there is a subtle feeling that the whole existence is a celebration.
– Osho
Whoever gives nothing has nothing. The greatest misfortune is not to be unloved, but not to love.
– Albert Camus
It’s just that I belong in the quietest quiet,
that’s what’s right for me.
– Franz Kafka
Not I personify, but the anima personifies me, or soul-makes herself through me, giving my life her sense—her intense daydream is my ‘me-ness’…
– James Hillman
Wherever You Are
When I kissed you in the hall
of the youth hostel we fell
into the linen closet laughing
twenty years ago and I still
remember though not very often
the taste of cheap wine in your mouth
like raspberries the freckle
between your breasts and the next day
when we went to Versailles I hardly
saw anything because I was looking
at you the whole time your face I can’t
quite remember then I kissed you
good-bye and you got on a train
and I never saw you again just
one day and one letter long gone
explaining never mind but sometimes
I wonder where you are probably
married with children like me happy
with a new last name a whole life
having nothing to do with that day
but everybody has something like it
a small thing they can’t help
going back to and it’s not even about
choices and where your life might
have gone but just that it’s there
far enough away so it can be seen
as just something that happened almost
to someone else an episode from
a movie we walk out of blinded
back into our lives
– Jeffrey Harrison
autumn moon
to be treasured softly
is its own kind of home
– @BashoSociety
This is what matters most, being together in spirit, helping and letting people help us. We are a complicated species, and keeping things simple when possible seems to work best for us.
– Anne Lamott
Don’t give yourself too much importance. Be careful with your ego and with giving yourself too much importance. Don’t be a writer. It’s a terrible way to live your life. You won’t gain anything from it except poverty, loneliness, and darkness. So if you really want to write, if you’re burning to do it, go ahead. But don’t expect anything from anyone. The world doesn’t owe you anything, and no one has asked you for it.
– Paul Auster
We have been taught over thousands of years to interpret images of utter devastation and extinction as great leaps forward in a civilization. This level of moral incompetence is exactly why humans will soon be going extinct.
– George Tsakraklides
I’m a coward
when it comes to
matters of the
heart. That is my
fatal flaw.
– Haruki Murakami
Your job, throughout your entire life, is to
disappoint as many people as it takes to avoid
disappointing yourself.
– Glennon Doyle
harvest moon
the storm teaches
every leaf to dance
– @BashoSociety
All our attachments are outward oriented and hence this illusion.
– Osho
Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not
waiting for inspiration’s shove or
society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay
attention. It’s all about paying attention.
attention is vitality. It connects you with
others. It makes you eager. stay eager.
– Susan Sontag
I told God a lot
about you, then I
cried.
– Mahmoud Darwish
The poet who becomes the greatest exponent of experimentation in a certain century can remain on the syllabi for a millennium.
– Christian Bok
Even when I write what appears to be very personal material, I am writing about a character, one who is sometimes traveling by my name.
– Gary Indiana
It was September.
In the last days when
things are getting sad
for no reason.
– Ray Bradbury
Everything is either an opportunity to grow, or an obstacle to keep you from growing. You get to choose.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
Love cannot ask us to change others; it can only ask us to be changed ourselves. If we can allow others to be as they are, we gain the freedom to love them completely.
– Henri Nouwen
I’m slipping, I’m slipping away
like sand
slipping through fingers. All
my cells
are open, and all
so thirsty. I ache and swell
in a hundred places, but mostly
in the middle of my heart.
– Rilke
Tur my eyes away from
worthless things.
– Psalm 119:37
All my life I’ve been obsessed with adolescence, drunk on it. Even when I was little, I knew that teenagers sparkled. I knew they knew something children didn’t know, and adults ended up forgetting.
– Lorde
Except where intolerably adverse circumstances interfere, praise almost seems to be inner health made audible.
– C.S. Lewis
Sometimes, I find places in the translation that make me think, “So that’s what it was,” or, “So that’s what I was trying to say”. It’s like a dream. It feels comforting, like something is being cured deep in my subconscious.
– Hiromi Ito
Nothing forms you as the nonevent forms you. A nonnight in a noncity in a nonroom, and the nongesture goes on happening forever. No moment is as eternal as the unfulfilled moment.
– Christina Tudor-Sideri
I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.
– Tom Stoppard
Our life is what our thoughts make it.
– Marcus Aurelius
To counteract the neurosis of our over-strengthened self-centered mind, we need a counteragent, which is training in altruism. Wherever warmth and love comes naturally in our lives, expand that further and further, make it more and more inclusive, create a bigger circle.
– Dzigar Kongtrul
This autumn evening
I feel even more lonely
than last year.
– Buson Yoga
Nothing kills human soul like the wrong place and the wrong people.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
What matters my life!
I only want it to remain, to the very end, faithful to the child that I was.
– Georges Brassens
How much money you make only determines comfort, never the quality of your life.
– Sadhguru
The mind is a device beautifully designed to analyze a limited amount of data from an unlimited source. It was never intended to comprehend all of it at once. That is the job of the soul.
– Neale Donald Walsch
Within me, a hundred joys, a thousand sorrows, countless hopes and regrets; and there is also a small, empty corner where I hide from all of you.
– Antonio Porchia
THE GOOD LIFE
You stand at the window.
There is a glass cloud in the shape of a heart.
There are the wind’s sighs that are like caves in your speech.
You are the ghost in the tree outside.
The street is quiet. The weather, like tomorrow, like your life,
is partially here, partially up in the air.
There is nothing you can do.
The good life gives no warning.
It weathers the climates of despair
and appears, on foot, unrecognized, offering nothing,
and you are there.
– Mark Strand
Some are born to enjoy illusions, others are cursed to see the truth.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Daughter of the moon,
you illuminate for me
the ruins of the world.
– Yvan Goll, (tr. Donald Wellman)
In your struggle, look three times behind you and once in front of you.
– Piotr Tchaikovsky
In time a man disappears
from his lifelong fields, from
the streams he has walked beside,
from the woods where he sat and waited.
Thinking of this, he seems to
miss himself in those places
as if always he has been there,
watching for himself to return.
But first he must disappear,
and this he foresees with hope,
with thanks. Let others come.
– Wendell Berry
If the writer imposes his own voice on the character, the truthfulness of the character gets affected.
– Mohsin Khan
Are you healed or are you isolated with no
one around to trigger you?
– Unknown
The basic human reaction to pleasure is not satisfaction, but rather craving for more. Hence, no matter what we achieve, it only increases our craving, not our satisfaction.
– Yuval Noah Harari
You will lose friends, you will lose lovers. You will lose comfort, but if, in losing them, you find yourself, you have gained more than kings.
– Marcus Aurelius
When the soul realizes its eternal identity and the Divine is recognized as the constant Companion, the shadows of fear simply dissolve. We are never alone; we are infinite, imperishable points of light walking with the Almighty.
– Brahma Kumaris
I have got lost;
I am everything that has got lost.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
The world, like Dionysius, is torn to pieces by pure intellect, but the Poet is Zeus; he has swallowed the heart of the world; and he can reproduce it in a living body.
– Owen Barfield
I love piano. I practice every day. It nourishes me. But I am a shitty piano player and anyone who hears me play will know it. I’m an excellent meditator, but I can’t prove it. Meditation is for me alone and unverifiable to the world. This should inform the way we teach meditation.
– Kenneth Folk
[When you begin to awaken, you no longer] feel angry… You are too happy. You have begun to live in your True Nature. You can feel this. Happiness is Your True Nature. This is why everyone is always seeking it. They want to return Home.
– Robert Adams
One day you will realize it’s not Rich people that help people, it’s good people that help people.
– Unknown
The brain [evolved] with blind spots, optical and psychological, and one of its cleverest tricks is to confer on us the comforting delusion that we, personally, do not have any.
– Carol Tavris
One of the few grains of wisdoms I have learned is that fish will be where water comes together with other water—you just need to get there.
– Riverhorse Nakadate
I have tried to be a man of letters in love with ideas in order to be a wiser and more loving person, hoping to leave the world just a little better than I found it.
– Cornel West
I have to relearn — I said to myself — the tranquil pace of those who believe they know where they’re going and why.
– Elena Ferrante
I deserted the world and sought solitude because I became tired of rendering courtesy to those multitudes who believe that humility is a sort of weakness, and mercy a kind of cowardice, and snobbery a form of strength.
– Kahlil Gibran
The purposeful life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on, and misses everything. Not hurrying, the purposeless life misses nothing- for it is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world.
– Allan Watts
All seven oceans are inside, and hundreds of millions of stars.
– Kabir
Most of [us] have never really faced the facts about ourselves until we uttered them aloud in plain words, calling a spade a spade.
– C.S. Lewis
Medicine must never be servant of programmed death.
– Pope Leo XIV
When all else is lost, the future still remains.
– Christian Nestell Bovee
You don’t change the forest from the tree tops. You change it from the seeds.
– Gloria Steinem
We must realize that our difficulty is not the fault of the places but of ourselves.
– Lucretius
Don’t let’s forget that the little emotions are the great captains of our lives, and that we obey them without knowing it.
– Vincent Van Gogh
“No” and “yes” are short words requiring long thought.
– Baltasar Gracián
Kill the monster before he tells you his story, otherwise, you will start loving him.
– The Stoics
It’s not survival of the fittest, it’s survival of the nurtured.
– Tara Brach
After Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Solovyov, it is no longer permissible not to understand the significance of religion as a force for social progress.
– Sergei Bulgakov
How much time he gains who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks, but only at what he does himself.
– Marcus Aurelius
Grief is not an abstraction. You can’t think your way through it. You have to have a physical encounter with it. It’s a bodily experience. We need to feel the tightness in our chest or belly before we can engage with it meaningfully.
– Francis Weller
To fight unhappiness one must first
expose it.
– Simone de Beauvoir
To be able to hold your spirit in check, you must first stop the runaway flight of the body.
– Seneca
We’re more complete if we’re incomplete.
– Rabbi Harold Kushner
Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
We cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning.
– Carl Jung
Fantasy is true, of course. It isn’t factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it, too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
Too often we forget that discipline really means to teach, not to punish. A disciple is a student, not a recipient of behavioral consequences.
– Dr. Dan Siegel
The struggle, like life itself, should be joyful.
– Miriam Miranda
Nature has designed humans to help other humans, each according to his need.
– Marcus Aurelius
There are men and women who have lived forty or fifty years in the world and have had scarcely one hour’s discourse with their hearts all the while.
– Richard Baxter
I lay and cried, and began to feel again, to admit I was human, vulnerable, sensitive. I began to remember how it had been before; how there was that germ of positive creativeness. Character is fate; and damn, I’d better work on my character. I had been withdrawing into a retreat of numbness: it is so much safer not to feel, not to let the world touch one. But my honest self revolted at this, hated me for doing this.
– Sylvia Plath
By dint of sacrificing the essential to the urgent, we end up forgetting the urgency of the essential.
– Edgar Morin
A fact is not
a truth until
you love it.
– John Keats
If you understand how to have a deep curiosity about everything — and I mean everything — you have an edge that cannot be beaten.
– Michael Ovitz
You don’t break an addiction by force.
You outgrow it by learning to meet the
need it was trying to soothe.
– Cory Muscara
…because, remember, a myth is simply a religion that you don’t believe in.
– Jung
When I ask “What’s in it for me?” or “How will this benefit me?” or “Why does this always happen to me?” I know I’m off the mark.
– Liz Curtis Higgs
Not every passerby is worthy of your secrets,
Just as a barren salt desert cannot turn into a lush meadow.
Do not be quick to befriend everyone you meet, O heart,
For not every unworthy or random person will prove a faithful companion.
– Saib Tabrizi
Knowledge is better than mechanical practice, meditation surpasses knowledge, and renouncing the fruits of action is better still—peace comes directly from that surrender.
– Krishna
The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.
– W. Somerset Maugham
Evil isn’t cruelty but something much worse: the ideas that allow cruelty to become ordinary.
– Susan Nieman
No one can imprison a mind that refuses to surrender.
– Epictetus
You’ve been had. You’ve been took. You’ve been hoodwinked. Bamboozled. Led astray. Run amok!
– Malcolm X
The restless sea, the towering mountains, the silent desert—what do they have in common? and what are the essential differences? Grandeur, color, spaciousness, the power of the ancient and elemental, that which lies beyond the ability of man to wholly grasp or utilize, these qualities all three share.
– Edward Abbey
…please write the most compelling, infuriating, conflicted character you possibly can. Confuse us, bemuse us, and make us fall in love with the skull we’re stuck in for hours at a stretch.
– Amy L. Bernstein
To love means to let the other be other.
– Simone Weil
To be making something as yet unformed, unknown—to be living in a deferred moment—is the most seductive way to exist.
– Moyra Davey
The nobler a thing, the more common it is.
This we perceive in God and in His sunshine.
– Angelus Silesius
It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself! But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic.
– Karl Marx
Even before presenting a ‘theory of God,’ the Gospels offer a ‘theory of man,’ an anthropology.
– Simone Weil
Here, too, in autumn came visitors and there was a fine fire of flesh-rosy carob wood to greet them, whose flames jumped and glowed on the old doors and moldings and screens.
– Lawrence Durrell
A valuable exercise is to imagine how you might feel if you were the target of a mob. And after you’ve thought carefully about that, ask yourself if you want to participate in any mob at all.
– Kenneth Folk
The billionaires aren’t afraid of losing money due to wealth taxes- they are afraid that the money will go back into society and end their ability to have easy exploitable desperate humans to do their jobs for minimal compensation.
– Beth Vaughn
Empowerment is realizing you are the one who needs to say the things you’ve waited your entire life to hear.
– Joy and Matt Kahn
there is no secret so close as that between a rider and his horse.
– R.S. Surtees
Silence equals death. I want to take it further. Silence is worse than death. When we never see who we are, never hear what we think about things, what we are doing as a group or what we are doing individually, then it is as if we were never there in the first place. Silence equals non-existence.
– Margaret Cho
There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a Democratic Socialism.
– Martin Luther King Jr.
What is my work? To let the mind fall silent that I may hear the Invisible calling.
– Nikos Kazantzakis
If you want to find your soul, look at what you love. That’s where your soul lives, just as it lives in your body, giving it life. And that’s why if we want to go to heaven spiritually, we don’t need to strain our spirits in any direction, up or down or from one side to another. Whenever we love, we’re already there.
– The Cloud of Unknowing, Carmen Butcher translation
John Clare, I cried last night
For you – your grass-green coat,
Your oddness, others’ spite,
Your fame, enjoyed and lost,
Your gift, and what it cost.
Awake in the early hours,
I heard you with my eyes,
Caroling woods and showers.
As if a songbird’s throat
Could utter words, you wrote.
I listened late and long –
Each clear, true, loving note
Placed justly in its song.
Sometimes for sheer delight,
John Clare, I cried last night.
– Wendy Cope
Even now, after centuries of reductionist propaganda, the world is still intricate and vast, as dark as it is light, a place of mystery, where we cannot do one thing without doing many things, or put two things together without putting many things together.
– Wendell Berry
The inner world can only be experienced, not described.
– Franz Kafka
And we return
to the parched blossom of time,
wrinkled with longing.
– Deema K. Shehabi
Harmony
by Stuart Kestenbaum
You know the Beatles could have
afforded another microphone,
but George would always stand
in the middle and step up to
Paul’s when it was time to
join in. Because that’s the way
harmony is, you need to share the
electricity, the voice, the words.
Just the way we do when we drive
in our cars with the radio on,
the windows rolled down with fall in the
air, dead leaves swirling in the wake,
or in the spring, the earth damp and soft,
the air hazy with pollen. We hear
the song that moves us, crank the
radio and sing along, at the top of
our lungs, as if we just joined
the group. In tune out of tune,
country western, rock and roll, we want
to harmonize. A whole country of
would-be stars losing love, finding love
with the radio in different
cars, on different paths, the dark
road rumbling beneath.
Alone in the history of the “epic,” Beowulf takes place in the “real,” tangible, recognizable world. Not in Heaven, Albion, or Middle Earth. That, in fact, is part of the point of Beowulf. Its author[s] want us to see its setting and characters and situations as real, as actually happening. And yet the magic is there – in Grendel, in Beowulf himself – in the capacity to find a redeeming reply to a superhuman evil, a transcendent answer to the void.
– Stephen R. Donaldson
For me, words are the worlds that take my ruminations to their sloughs.
– M. Z. B.
The digital world, once a platform for connection, has become a relentless antagonist, and the only way to silence it is to cut myself off from it.
– Colleen Hoover
If you give up on the impossible, what is there left to do?
– Nick Sweeney
that is more than your own.
Let it brush your cheeks
as it divides and rejoins beside you.
Fear not the pain. Let its weight fall back
into the earth;
for heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.
The trees you planted in childhood have grown
too heavy. You cannot bring them along.
Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
The more we generate thoughts, the busier we are mentally, and the more convinced we are of our existence.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Here it is: the new way of living with the world inside of us so we cannot lose it, and we cannot be lost. You and me are us and them, and it and sky.
– Ada Limon
It is outside time that you heal.
Walk with me outside time.
– Alice Notley
Abolish these categories of pain
(or is it love)
Let it all be one pain
Pain swallows itself, dies like a star.
– Alice Notley
The darker the night the brighter the stars. The deeper the grief, the closer the God.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
If you fulfill the pattern that is peculiar to yourself, you have loved yourself, you have accumulated and have abundance; you bestow virtue then because you have luster. You radiate; from your abundance something overflows. But if you hate and despise yourself-if you have not accepted your pattern-then there are hungry animals (prowling cats and other beasts and vermin) in your constitution which get at your neighbors like flies in order to satisfy the appetites which you have failed to satisfy. Therefore, Nietzsche says to those people who have not fulfilled their individual pattern that the bestowing soul is lacking. There is no radiation, no real warmth; there is hunger and secret stealing.
– Carl Jung
Sometimes one touches on a very painful spot where one is almost too shy to look into it, but somehow one still has to go through it. And by going into it, one finally achieves a real command of oneself. One gains a thorough knowledge of oneself for the first time.
– Chögyam Trungpa
From across the woods, as if by common accord, birds left their trees and darted upward. I joined them, flew amount them, they did not recognize me as something apart from them, and I was happy, so happy, because for the first time in years, and forevermore, I had not killed, and never would.
– George Saunders
Mosses may lose up to 98% of their moisture & still survive to restore themselves when water is replenished. Even after forty years of dehydration mosses can be revived after a drink. Mosses have a covenant with change; they give me faith.
– Robin Wall Kimmel
Life happens in unremembered spaces, in-between memories. The art of writing obtains through writers’ attempts to fill in those existential lacunae with imagination’s approximation of reality, to un-forget the forever-lost. This continuous effort is at the heart of creation, whose essence is re-creation. That is why the infinitely memorious (to borrow Borges’s wording) genius machines of artificial intelligence will never be able to create anything but dutiful imitation art – not until they learn to forget and strive to remember: that is to say, not until they learn to become not just human-like, but human.
– Mikhail Iossel
At some point in your life you come to realize that nostalgia itself is enough of a sufficiently sweet substitute for its actual object. Longing – for the people you’ll never see again, places you know you’ll never be able to return to anymore, even your own younger self – is enough. It’s enough… or at least, that’s what I would like to believe now.
– Mikhail Iossel
When I started writing, people that wrote about families and communities like the ones I was writing about, that was considered sociology—I mean, not part of American literature.
– Julia Alvarez
Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth.
– Edna Ferber
I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers. I remember where a toad may live and what time the birds awaken in the summer — and what trees and seasons smelled like — how people looked and walked and smelled even. The memory of odors is very rich.
– John Steinbeck
We live in a world increasingly defined by numbness and conveniences, largely mediated through digital technology. We use tools like AI to escape the slightest hint of cognitive strain and cue up algorithmically-masticated slop on our phones to quiet our anxious minds. Our office jobs have devolved into a Kabuki theater exercise of Slacks about emails about Zoom meetings, to be auto-transcribed and transformed into a PowerPoint that no one will read. Politics has been reduced to a childish Manichaeism that encourages us to cosplay as radicals from the safe remove of social media.
[Wendell] Berry understood these types of temptations. But he also realized that hardness and strain are not enemies to evade. When oriented toward an intentional vision of your life, these same challenges can yield a foundation that can withstand the inevitable storms of human existence.
In his stubborn insistence on a simple life, laser-focused on what mattered to him, Berry rejected the entire digital edifice of our 21st-century culture that increasingly constrains our lives. The lesson to take away from Berry’s 92 years is the grand possibility of rebuilding your life into something deeper.
– Cal Newport
The best remedy for the turbulence of the mind is learning. It is the only thing that never deteriorates. One can grow old and tremble, in the anatomical sense of the term; one can stay up all night listening to the disorder of one’s veins; one can lose one’s one true love and see one’s fortune vanish due to the fault of a monster; one can contemplate the world around oneself devastated by dangerous madmen, or know that one’s honor is trampled in the sewers of the most vile minds. In such conditions, there is only one thing to do: learn.
– Marguerite Yourcenar
The Best [advice]: The best writing advice I ever received was in a fortune cookie that said: “the work teaches you how to do it.” The work, the art, whatever you wish to create, is the best teacher—an organizing intelligence begins to reveal itself only when you start writing. So get to work! The second best writing advice is Goethe’s “do not hurry; do not rest.”
– Naheed Phiroze Patel
In his little apartment, alone, Ash set his cocktail of alarms
– John Elizabeth Stintzi
I’m the being who isn’t planetary; we have traveled
beyond our world, to sit in a paper forest lit by jewel-light.
– Alice Notley
I think poetry is a way of carrying grief, but it’s also a way of putting it somewhere so I don’t always have to heave it onto my back or in my body. The more I put grief in a poem, the more I am able to move freely through the world because I have named it, spoken it, and thrown it out into the sky. Everyone has grief that they carry and sometimes we have anxiety and depression about anticipatory grief. The thing that I’ve found that helps is knowing we are all in this, someone has gone or is going through the same thing. Poetry helps us with that too. Writing. Reading. As James Baldwin said, “You think your pain and heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, and then you read.”
– Ada Limón
In the end, everything I know comes directly out of this lifelong self-doubt. Everything.
– Vivian Gornick
The mystery of individuation is the mystery of the full realization of being. Just as the characters of the novel are the suffocated possibilities of the author.
– Nicolás Gómez Dávila
The paradox of individuation is that we best serve intimate relationship by becoming sufficiently developed in ourselves that we do not need to feed off others.
– James Hollis
All that side of life that you call unconscious, unknown, impenetrable is unconscious, unknown, impenetrable because it’s really you. In other words, the deepest you is the nothing side, the side that you don’t know.
– Alan Watts
How many arrows, signs, or synchronicities do you need to remind you that the most powerful place to be, is awake in the dream.
– Nika Solé
autumn dawn
everything leaving
feels eternal
– @BashoSociety
Things were somehow so good that they were in danger of becoming very bad because what is fully mature is very close to rotting.
– Clarice Lispector
What is not real, never was and never will be. What is real, always was and cannot be destroyed.
– Bhagavad Gita
allow me to
wipe your tears
with these fallen leaves
– Basho
The purpose of education…is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions.
– James A. Baldwin
Look, I want to love this world
as though it’s the last chance
I’m ever going to get to be alive
and know it.
– Mary Oliver
Listen. Put on morning.
Waken into falling light.
A man’s imagining
Suddenly may inherit
The handclapping centuries
Of his one minute on earth.
– W. S. Graham
Modern man does not understand how much his ‘rationalism’ (which has destroyed his capacity to respond to numinous symbols and ideas) has put him at the mercy of the psychic ‘underworld.’
– Jung
Life is wasted when we make it more terrifying, precisely because it is so easy to do so.
– René Magritte
Hearts will never be practical until they are made unbreakable.
– L. Frank Baum
Unless I am able to analyze the unconscious aspects of the society in which I live, I cannot know who I am, because I don’t know which part of me is not me.
– Erich Fromm
No matter what the trouble was, he went on,
he was continually moving about in a sick world among sick
people, sick individuals; and even though this world might
claim, might even pretend, to be healthy, it was still sick and
the people, the individuals, were always sick, even the so-
called healthy ones.
– Thomas Bernhard
The collectivity is not only alien to the sacred, but it deludes us with a false imitation of it.
– Simone Weil
You hold an absence at
your center, as if it were a life.
– Richard Brostoff
I need to move around a bit. To shuffle my surroundings. To wake up in cities I don’t know my way around and have conversations in languages I cannot entirely comprehend. There is always this tremendous longing in my heart to be lost, to be someplace else, to be far far away from all of this.
– Beau Taplin
And Poetry, too, will come to help us. We still are what we are, we are still in what we are.
– Paul Celan
The eternally unhealed wound of Prometheus symbolizes the consequences of the break in the original unconscious wholeness, the alienation from the original unity.
– Edinger
Living a love while refusing it is a very strange business.
– Simone de Beauvoir
The world moves on, but
grief holds you still, and you
walk among the living like a
ghost of your own self.
– Imlipongla
The archetype is essentially an unconscious content that is altered by becoming conscious and by being perceived, and it takes its color from the individual consciousness in which it happens to appear.
– Jung
to accompany the ancientness
to unstop the faucet of a twilight,
so that by day spouts
all the water that passes at night.
– César Vallejo
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.
– Bertrand Russell
My wife would occasionally say, ‘That’s an awful lot of effort for something that might never get published.’ She didn’t have to tell me that. I was thinking that all the time.
– Gerald Murnane
She grew up being misunderstood and somehow became fluent in understanding everyone else.
– Meryam J.
I need solitude for my writing; not ‘like a hermit’ — that wouldn’t be enough — but like a dead man.
– Franz Kafka
Before my death I
hope to obtain my
life.
– Charles Bukowski
I depend on serendipity. I pray for what may be referred to as the angel of chance.
– Sally Mann
Keep the fire burning
inside of you – do this at
all costs.
– L. K. Menzie
Science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds.
– Richard Feynman
We are responsible for the world in which we find ourselves, if only because we are the only sentient force which can change it.
– James A. Baldwin
But I just wanted her in
my life. I had fallen in
love, even if she was still
finding her way.
– Randy Pausch
Meditation will not carry you to another world, but it will reveal the most profound and awesome dimensions of the world in which you already live.
– Zen Master Hsing Yun
What we know is little, and what we are ignorant of is immense.
– Pierre-Simon Laplace
We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support.
– Otto Neurath
Won’t you open / the lotus inside / and turn / those demons / from your heart?
– Otagaki Rengetsu
I only chatter on like this because, despite everything, I feel good with you.
– Franz Kafka, 1920.
I remember my Thanksgiving poem being pinned to the school bulletin board, where everyone could see it, and leaves cut out of orange construction paper were stapled all around it. It is the one poem I am still trying to write.
– Mary Ruefle
We all are so deeply interconnected; we have no option but to love all.
– Amit Ray
eye of the hurricane
alone in the dark I look
into my life
– Chen-ou Liu
Healthy growth produces greater differentiation and freedom using the same available responses.
– Dr. Steven Brownlow
I changed the face of music five times,
what have you done that’s important,
other than ‘be white’?
– Miles Davis talking to a congressman’s wife
at a White House dinner in the 1980’s,
when she asked him who he was and why he was there.
Stress is no badge of honor.
But nor is it to be ashamed of.
Treat it like manure;
foul-smelling fuel for awakening.
– Dan Goldfield
In every true searcher of Nature there is a kind of religious reverence, for he finds it impossible to imagine that he is the first to have thought out the exceedingly delicate threads that connect his perceptions.
– Albert Einstein
We are all beginning to have this thought, of American irrelevance. It’s a little like telepathy. Soon the day is coming when nobody has to think about America except for the danger it brings. It is losing the center.
– Don DeLillo
In the Invisible, beyond the physical perception of man, exist artificial beings—generated by devotion, enthusiasm and fanaticism—that one names egregores. These are the souls of great spiritual currents, good or evil.
– Robert Ambelain
from the purpleword we sang
over, O over
the thorn
– Paul Celan
Marriage brings one into fatal connection with custom and tradition, and tradition and customs are like the wind and weather, altogether incalculable.
– Søren Kierkegaard
I wish I was a pifflebob.
I wish I was a funny.
I wish I had ten thousand hats,
And made a lot of money.
– Theodore Roethke
The characteristic of our time is that the vulgar soul, knowing itself to be vulgar, has the audacity to affirm the right of vulgarity and imposes it wherever it may be.
– José Ortega y Gasset
What you want is someone to take hold of you. Gently, gently,
with love.
– Tennessee Williams
There is only one important point you must keep in your mind and let it be your guide. No matter what people call you, you are just who you are. Keep to this truth. You must ask yourself how is it you want to live your life. We live and we die, this is the truth that we can only face alone. No one can help us, not even the Buddha. So consider carefully, what prevents you from living the way you want to live your life?”
– Dalai Lama XIV
Most men are not wicked… They are sleep-walkers, not evil evildoers.
– Franz Kafka
When thought sees that it is itself the movement of time, limitation, and conflict, that seeing can bring the movement to an end. Meditation, in his sense, is the ending of the self — not the accumulation of answers.
– J. Krishnamurti
If you think you understand it, try building it.
– Prof. Feynman
People are running, running, but there is no place in the world to which they can flee to escape themselves. Ultimately, each one must face himself.
– Paramahansa Yogananda
Are you becoming what you’ve always hated?
– Charles Bukowski
To be full of things is to be empty of God.
To be empty of things is to be full of God.
– Meister Eckhart
How about if I sleep a little bit longer and forget all this nonsense.
– Franz Kafka
Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.
– Thomas Jefferson
Is one of great sufferance
until wisdom arrives.
Ah! but how does wisdom arrive?
By opening to the great sufferance.
– @KavijiPoet
moonlit path
some loves have no ending
only distance
– @BashoSociety
What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world…
– Anne Lamott
Success can only be one ingredient in happiness, and is too dearly purchased if all the other ingredients have been sacrificed to obtain it.
– Bertrand Russell
We all come to wisdom at the major price of both our innocence and our control, which means that few go there willingly.
– Richard Rohr
Once again reality has proved that no particular group has a monopoly over demagogy, dogmatism, and ignorance.
– Roberto Bolaño, Last Evenings on Earth
When we are attached to something, we become dependent and lean on it, and when it changes, part of our foundation is shaken.
– Guy Armstrong
Even the most solitary spiritual seeker is walking home with everyone else — because the home we seek is the one home we all share.
– Ram Dass
We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.
– Jorge Santayana
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
It’s the season where dying things are allowed to be beautiful.
– Trev Cimenski
Get it right or let it alone. The conclusion you jump to may be your own.
– James Thurber
Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance.
– Thomas Merton
Faults of the mind, like those of the face, grow worse with age.
– François de La Rochefoucauld
The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.
– Franklin Delano Roosevelt
We’ve found a sea of love, you and I, and we are only standing on the shore.
– Joel. H. Morris
The new source of power is not money in the hands of a few, but information in the hands of many.
– John Naisbitt
The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Your science will be valueless, you’ll find
And learning will be sterile, if inviting
Unless you pledge your intellect to fighting
Against all enemies of mankind
– Brecht
Human is he who is concerned with other selves. Man is a being that can never be self-sufficient, not only by what he must take in but also by what he must give out…Always in need of other beings to give himself to, man cannot even be in accord with his own self unless he serves something beyond himself.
– A. Heschel