Journal XVII

Save your creative soul:

make something beautiful without the intention of monetizing it.

– McCall Erickson

Every time I try to take an even remotely challenging hike, I have to remind myself that I have other skills and qualities.
– Jane Huffman

…she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.
– Milan Kundera

Home is everything you can walk to.
– Rebecca Solnit

IF WORDS COULD, IF…

We Irish are too Poetic to be poets…We are a nation of brilliant failures.
But we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.
– Oscar Wilde

If talk could exalt a nation I
If a stanza a river long
could sink a battle ship
If a run on sentence
taking a hearer through the mess u ages
could make a regiment
charging through a city street
drop their rifles.
If a tail end
of a narration
could disable a tank
Wheels falling
with each change
each embellishment
If an O’Carolan Concerto
Could misdirect a Cavalry
Put their commanders in a trance
If pipers could melt swords
would Ireland be free?
Would it ever have been conquered?
If master fiddlers could make clergy
and officials scatter their thoughts
Dance like there were no floor director
Would Ireland imprison Wild Earnest Men?
Force young Women into work houses
for being young woman like?
or victims? Tell them their sins
are washed down the sink?
Ban novels that win international awards?
Or would the state and the church
be more well rounded
like the Ethiopian and Celtic crosses.

– Jerry Pendergast

The Poet of Ignorance
by Anne Sexton

Perhaps the earth is floating,
I do not know.
Perhaps the stars are little paper cutups
made by some giant scissors,
I do not know.
Perhaps the moon is a frozen tear,
I do not know.
Perhaps God is only a deep voice,
heard by the deaf,
I do not know.
Perhaps I am no one.
True, I have a body
and I cannot escape from it.
I would like to fly out of my head,
but that is out of the question.
It is written on the tablet of destiny
that I am stuck here in this human form.
That being the case
I would like to call attention to my problem.
There is an animal inside me,
clutching fast to my heart,
a huge crab.
The doctors of Boston
have thrown up their hands.
They have tried scalpels,
needles, poison gasses and the like.
The crab remains.
It is a great weight.
I try to forget it, go about my business,
cook the broccoli, open and shut books,
brush my teeth and tie my shoes.
I have tried prayer
but as I pray the crab grips harder
and the pain enlarges.
I had a dream once,
perhaps it was a dream,
that the crab was my ignorance of God.
But who am I to believe in dreams?

You wanted more time with family…you got it
You wanted to deepen your faith…you got it
You wanted to declutter your home…you got it
You wanted time off work…you got it
You wanted to finish reading/writing that book…you got it
You wanted to start a new business…you got it
You wanted to be of service to humanity…you got it
You wanted to see who your real friends are…you got it
You wanted to practice more gratitude…you got it
You wanted to know the power of relationships…you got it
You wanted to practice making your own meals…you got it
You wanted to practice equanimity…you got it
You wanted to face your fears…you got it
You wanted to tell people you love them…you got it
You wanted to learn how to be healthy…you got it
You wanted to work from home…you got it
You wanted a less polluted planet…you got it
You wanted to sleep more…you got it
You wanted more time to reflect on life…you got it
You wanted to serve thy neighbour…you got it
You wanted to mend your relationships…you got it
You wanted to know the power of your thoughts…you got it
You wanted to witness the power of God…you got it
– Sachin Patel

There are hundreds of cognitive biases, but most of them stem from a failure to recognize that our beliefs are subject to biases.

Defending our views stalls learning. Questioning them stimulates growth.

The only belief worth cherishing is the belief that you might be wrong.

– Adam Grant

Inner gifts do not find their way to creatures without just respect. If a man or woman flails about, he not only smashes his house, he burns the whole world down.
– Robert Bly’s translation of Rumi and Kabir

Trying to Write Poetry

There is a wren sitting in the branches
of my spirit and it chooses not to sing.
It is listening to learn its song.
Sits in the Palladian light trying to decide
what it will sing when it is time to sing.
Tra la, tra la the other birds sing
in the morning, and silently when the snow
is slowly falling just befoe evening.
Knowing that passion is not a color
not confused by energy. The bird will sing
about summer having its affair with Italy.
Is frightened of classical singing.
Will sing happily of the color fruits are
in the cool dark, the wetness inside
overripe peaches, the smell of melons
and the briars that come with berries.
When the sun falls into silence,
the two birds will sing. Back and forth,
making a whole. Silence answering silence.
Song answering song. Gone and gone.
Gone somewhere. Gone nowhere.

– Jack Gilbert

You were such a great joy to me that it almost seems like our time together was a lie. It’s as if I dreamed it. It’s like a dream and not like an actual lived experience.
– Gabriela Mistral

We create the world that we perceive, not because there is no reality outside our heads, but because we select and edit the reality we see to conform to our beliefs about what sort of world we live in. The man who believes that the resources of the world are infinite, for example, or that if something is good for you then the more of it the better, will not be able to see his errors, because he will not look for evidence of them. For a man to change the basic beliefs that determine his perception—his epistemological premises —he must first become aware that reality is not necessarily as he believes it to be. We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong, [but] sometimes the dissonance between reality and false beliefs reaches a point when it becomes impossible to avoid the awareness that the world no longer makes sense. Only then is it possible for the mind to consider radically different ideas and perceptions.
– Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind

The only thing that makes life worth living is the possibility of experiencing now and then a perfect moment. And perhaps even more than that, it’s having the ability to recall such moments in their totality, to contemplate them like jewels.
– Paul Bowles

Years of love lines and what does he have to show for them? … A loving silence.
– Greg Sellers

She fitted in my arms, she always had, and the shock of holding her caused me to feel that my arms had been empty since she had been away.
– James Baldwin

What a terrible thing it is to wound someone you really care for and to do it so unconsciously.
– Haruki Murakami

All poetry is the voice given to death. May our decay praise, celebrate. May our defeat shine, resound.
– Philippe Jaccottet

I think we’re all in conversation on the page with that which came before us, or even during us. We inherit whatever canon we’re in the midst of, a great collective influenza.
– Lucie Brock-Broido

We are the bright new stars born of a screaming black hole, the nascent suns burst from the darkness, from the grasping void of space that folds and swallows – a darkness that would devour anyone not as strong as we. We are oddities, sideshows, talk show subjects. We capture everyone’s imagination.
– Dave Eggers

The Key

The key to courage
is no key at all
because, despite
what they’ve done
to us, only you can
lock your heart up.
Courage is no thief, no
common con, either.
She won’t dip her lips
in honey or coat her
tongue in sweetest silver
to whisper everything
you’ve ever longed to hear.
She’ll simply invite you to
the desert in early spring
to teach you thirst
is a beautiful thing.
Hummingbirds will kiss
the red chuparosas
who offer them their
first drink north of Sonora.
The breeze will caress seas
of bright lupine to life
from dust and dry sand
until they stand strong,
scattering their seeds
to the west wind
so next spring all of this
can happen again.
Courage will not
strike your sternum
with a sledgehammer
or cave your chest in
with a crowbar.
She’ll just offer you
wild spaces, sunrises,
sunshine, and sunsets,
the scent of rain on
sage brush, the soft song
melting mountain snow
sings in March’s warm embrace.
It all might be
as slow as a trickling
ephemeral stream,
but that blood stirring
in your parched heart
is the turning of the key.

– Will Falk

Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way.
– Kingsley Amis

The most courageous decision that you can make each day is to be in a good mood.
– Voltaire

Poets are born to be witnesses, but sometimes we forget that that also means witnessing our own lives in a way that is unflinching and often painful. Our truths are harder than most truths, because we have the tools to find and deconstruct them.
– Patricia Smith

Despite the forecast, live like it’s spring.
– Lilly Pulitzer

Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another.
– John Muir

Desire narrows our awareness till we see only what we crave; mindfulness helps us see other possibilities.
– Sandra Weinberg

Stress means we have committed adultery with regard to our marriage with time.
– David Whyte

Without Unceasing Practice nothing can be done. Practice is Art. If you leave off you are lost.
– William Blake

Today
Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!
You really are beautiful! Pearls,
harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! all
the stuff they’ve always talked about
still makes a poem a surprise!
These things are with us every day
even on beachheads and biers. They
do have meaning. They’re strong as rocks.
– Frank O’Hara

Though I am just one remembering
alone, my account, I think, is honest.
– Dan DeVaughn

What if what gives me the capacity for mercy
Is knowing what I’d give to leave memory?
– Julian Randall

I heard
a voice I faintly recognized
or remembered from a dream I had
but no, it was only the old implacable
din of silence waiting for me to enter
and replenish its empty bowl
– Peter Everwine

Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing…..there at the end.
– Mark Strand

Once you overcome the hatred within your mind, you will discover that in the world outside, there is no longer any such thing as even a single enemy.
– Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

The crown of literature is poetry. It is the end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty.
– W. Somerset Maugham

I still lack a political, religious and philosophical world view – I change it every month – and so I’ll have to limit myself to descriptions of how my heroes love, marry, give birth, die, and how they speak.
– Anton Chekhov

None of us is entirely whole. But if we at least envision ourselves as whole then we don’t abandon ourselves to other people and expect them to make us happy.
– Marion Woodman

As human beings we share an ineffable commonality and have spiritual gifts that require nurturing and training. The world’s wisdom traditions contain resources and techniques used to cultivate body, mind, and soul awareness.
– Emily Horn

Laughter is a holy thing. It is as sacred as music and silence and solemnity, maybe more sacred. Laughter is like a prayer, like a bridge over which creatures tiptoe to meet each other. Laughter is like mercy; it heals.
– Ted Loder

I rejoice in the knowledge of my biological uniqueness and my biological antiquity and my biological kinship with all other forms of life. This knowledge roots me, allows me to feel at home in the natural world, to feel that I have my own sense of biological meaning, whatever my role in the cultural, human world.
– Oliver Sacks

Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.
– Henry David Thoreau

Forgetfulness
The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of,
as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
Long ago you kissed the names of the nine muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,
something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.
Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue
or even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.
It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.
No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.
– Billy Collins

In March the Earth remembers its own name.
Everywhere the plates of snow are cracking.
The rivers begin to sing. In the sky
the winter stars are sliding away; new stars
appear as, later, small blades of grain
will shine in the dark fields.
And the name of every place
is joyful.
II.
The season of curiosity is everlasting
and the hour for adventure never ends,
but tonight
even the men who walked upon the moon
are lying content
by open windows
where the winds are sweeping over the fields,
over water,
over the naked earth,
into villages, and lonely country houses, and the vast cities
III.
because it is spring;
because once more the moon and the earth are eloping –
a love match that will bring forth fantastic children
who will learn to stand, walk, and finally run
over the surface of earth;
who will believe, for years,
that everything is possible.
IV.
Born of clay,
how shall a man be holy;
born of water,
how shall a man visit the stars;
born of the seasons,
how shall a man live forever?
V.
Soon
the child of the red-spotted newt, the eft,
will enter his life from the tiny egg.
On his delicate legs
he will run through the valleys of moss
down to the leaf mold by the streams,
where lately white snow lay upon the earth
like a deep and lustrous blanket
of moon-fire,
VI.
and probably
everything
is possible.
– Mary Oliver, Worm Moon

Behold the turtle. He only makes progress when he sticks his neck out.
– James Bryant Conant

Only in academia do you get “invited” to do more work.
– @raf_walk

Every day I observe more and more the folly of judging of others by ourselves; and I have so much trouble with myself, and my own heart is in such constant agitation, that I am well content to let others pursue their own course, if they only allow me the same privilege.
– Goethe

It is not easy in this world for one person to understand the next one.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Every reader, if he has a strong mind, reads himself into the book, and amalgamates his thoughts with those of the author.
– J. W. V. Goethe

listen I love you joy is coming
– Kim Addonizio

Goddammit
everybody in the world wants
an explanation for your acts
and for your very being.
– Jack Kerouac

These are the powers that make you afraid and conquer you; these have been your Gods and your rulers since time immemorial: yet you can put them in your pocket. What is blasphemy compared to this?
– @RedBookJung

The soul that sees beauty
may sometimes walk alone.
But, we are our own devils;
we drive ourselves out
of our Edens.
– Goethe

Being against evil doesn’t make you good.
– Hemingway

While we believe we are thinking creatures who feel, we are actually feeling creatures who think.
– Jill Bolte Taylor, My Stroke of Insight

Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. “Lighthouses” as the poet said “erected in the sea of time.” They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.
– Arthur Schopenhauer

Unless you refresh the mind from time to time you cannot always remember or believe how deep the inscape in things is.
– Gerard Manley Hopkins

… it’s not enough to simply travel. In fact, travel can be a distraction. As Huang-po Hsi-Yun said … “You cannot meet today. You cannot meet this moment, if you just wander around consuming smelly secondhand truths.
– Matsuo Bashō, translated by Gail Sher

Recognizing nothing beyond ourselves, we become both inflated and diminished: inflated because we behave with god-like omnipotence; diminished because we are imprisoned in an image of reality which, like Plato’s famous cave, limits and constricts our growth.
– Anne Baring

There is a bird and a stone
in your body. Your job is not
to kill the bird with the stone.
– Victoria Chang

We, as human beings, are landed with memories which have fallibilities, frailties, and imperfections – but also great flexibility and creativity. Confusion over sources or indifference to them can be a paradoxical strength: if we could tag the sources of all our knowledge, we would be overwhelmed with often irrelevant information. Indifference to source allows us to assimilate what we read, what we are told, what others say and think and write and paint, as intensely and richly as if they were primary experiences. It allows us to see and hear with other eyes and ears, to enter into other minds, to assimilate the art and science and religion of the whole culture, to enter into and contribute to the common mind, the general commonwealth of knowledge. Memory arises not only from experience but from the intercourse of many minds.
– Oliver Sacks, The River of Consciousness

Reconnecting to culture does not mean you have to profit from it.
– Jayden Kohoko-Autio

Being a sensitive person can be a confusing, complicated thing in this still harsh world. It feels intuitively right to open, to feel, to enhearten our daily life, but the world is still vibrating at a more armored and edgy place. It is not yet attuned to the ways of the open heart. So what to do? We don’t want to deaden our capacity to feel, but if we feel too much, we get run over by an often heartless world. I have found my best answer in three places: (1) Selective Attachment; that is- carefully discerning between positive and negative individuals and environments, and only attaching to those people and places that can hold our tender heart safe; (2) Strong energetic boundaries; that is- being physically and emotionally charged, so that we can more effectively repel unwelcome energies; (3) Conscious Armoring; that is- learning how to put on armor when necessary to manage the world and difficult situations, and, consciously removing it when it is no longer needed. If we cultivate these practices, we stand a much better chance of preserving our sensitivity. Once we lose it, we lose our connection to the moment altogether. Here’s to a sensitive way of being! What a courageous path.
– Jeff Brown

I am relieved to know that enlightenment cannot be found in a tape or a book, at a workshop or a refuge, on a yoga mat or a meditation cushion. It can’t be found by witnessing the pain body or feigning forgiveness. It isn’t waiting for us at the next spiritual conference or the next empowerment weekend. It isn’t living in the excesses of positive thinking, nor is it waiting on the outskirts of the world, safely above the fray. I am also relieved to know that those who claim they have arrived at its illusory shores, are, by definition, delusional, for anyone who begins to awaken immediately recognizes how many paths await, still undiscovered. Although it is tempting to imagine that there is a method, or a human, who will take us there, it is simply not true. No one can take you where they have not been. Enlightenment is a relative experience- every awakening leads to another to another to another. We get glimpses- to be sure- but it takes time and a steadfast commitment to the path before we can integrate and sustain them. What has helped me along is to stop looking for it all out there, and to focus, instead, on the next step I am ready to take. One step at a time is perfect.
– Jeff Brown

The Xer is aware that he or she is skilled at making fun of everything and is simultaneously concerned that this skill contributes zilch when it comes to changing or improving the things that he or she is making fun of,” he says. “But ask yourself: What’s more effective, a picket sign or an expertly calibrated joke?
– Jeff Gordinier, X Saves the World

Against a stupidity that is in fashion, no wisdom compensates.
– José Ortega y Gasset

People are looking for ways of living whereby they don’t live this fragmented, abstract, work-life that is completely cut off from all the rest of their truly human associations. And so we are facing a very big revolution in which our young people want to return to reality.
– Alan Watts

We spend our life, it’s ours, trying to bring together in the same instant a ray of sunshine and a free bench.
– Samuel Beckett

In the Grail Legend, Parsifal asks the wounded Grail King, What ails thee? It seems appropriate to ask this question of our culture.
– Anne Baring, The Dream of the Cosmos

When we stop resisting sadness—trying to sweeten it with phone calls, distractions, or pleasures—and just let ourselves feel it in all its heaviness, darkness, and pain, it disappears by itself, and even transforms into delight.
– David Edwards

Dukkha Bubbles
Popping on the
Sands of Emptiness
– @VinceFHorn

each petunia
a complete universe
in itself ~
– Rosie Mann

It’s not a joke, but the whole

world’s taking it badly. Meanwhile

I sit here pretending to be a flame

in a thrown bottle. I pretend

that curved horns grow out of my ears

when I hear of injustices.

– Gail Wronsky

SONGS FOR AN IMPOSSIBLE FUTURE

Look at all this death.
I will plant teeth in the dust and
Water them with my blood
And dry water; with feathers,
With laughter and songs.

When there is nothing left,
I’ll pick flowers that grow nowhere
And place them at the doors of dead people.
I’ll speak impossible names into an inconsolable night,
Sing words for things that don’t even exist
Or have yet to be born into this world
Of yearning and love.

I will not be a slave to the literal,
Not a cog or a brick or a stone.
I was born with wide wings and feet
That stretch for fathoms into the earth.
Everything is extraordinary.
Look at all this death and the lamenting,
The dying, the darkness, the dirge.
I will sing songs for an impossible future
And I will grow a garden out of these bones.

– Tom Hirons

The world is full of holy mystery that we too often dismiss as common & ordinary. How lightly we tread on miracles.
– Elliott Blackwell

Cry Out in Your Weakness

A dragon was pulling a bear into its terrible mouth.
A courageous man went and rescued the bear.
There are such helpers in the world, who rush to save
anyone who cries out. Like Mercy itself,
they run toward the screaming.
And they can’t be bought off.
If you were to ask one of those, “Why did you come
so quickly?” He or she would say, “Because I heard
your helplessness.”
Where lowland is,
that’s where water goes. All medicine wants
is pain to cure.
And don’t just ask for one mercy.
Let them flood in. Let the sky open under your feet.
Take the cotton out of your ears, the cotton
of consolations, so you can hear the sphere-music. . . .
Give your weakness
to One Who Helps.
Crying out loud and weeping are great resources.
A nursing mother, all she does
is wait to hear her child.
Just a little beginning-whimper,
and she’s there.
God created the child, that is, your wanting,
so that it might cry out, so that milk might come.
Cry out! Don’t be stolid and silent
with your pain. Lament! And let the milk
of Loving flow into you.
The hard rain and wind
are ways the cloud has
to take care of us.
Be patient.
Respond to every call
that excites your spirit.
Ignore those that make you fearful
and sad, that degrade you
back toward disease and death.

– Rumi, The Essential Rumi

We are the footnotes of the footnotes.
– Sandra Cisneros, On the search for Latina heroines

Each of us sees clarity only in those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own.
– Proust

In this country … if you’re an artist, you’re guilty of a crime: not that you’re aware, which is bad enough, but that you see things other people don’t admit are there.
– James Baldwin

People come, people go – they’ll drift in and out of your life, almost like characters in a favorite book. When you finally close the cover, the characters have told their story and you start up again with another book, complete with new characters and adventures. Then you find yourself focusing on the new ones, not the ones from the past.
– Nicholas Sparks, The Rescue

When every inch of the world is known, sleep may be the only wilderness we have left.
– Louise Erdrich

I have found that moving the body and releasing emotional holdings is what brought me into a more naturally meditative and connected state. Not sitting on the cushion, passive like a sloth. The patriarchal spiritualists have been telling us that ‘meditation’ and ‘contemplation’ and ‘reflection’ are THE path to calm mind for centuries, and many of them are still crazy in their personal lives. Nothing changed. They dance in the witness- essentially a mind function- and addict to meditative practice, like a drug. And the moment they have to really deal with the world, their unresolved material re-emerges, always present. If you have to participate in a practice hours every day to calm yourself, that suggests that something is not working. We are built for presence, so long as we activate our natural abilities to clear and re-open. And that’s often a body alive path. It’s been my experience that the monkey mind is transformed within the heart itself- not from within the mind. And that the heart is cleared through somatic activation and energized release. A great many people are walking around feeling ‘inadequate’ and ‘unenlightened’ because they don’t like to meditate. Let that go. Meditation is a tool, but it is not the only path home. There are trillions of ways to touch the moment.
– Jeff Brown

Letting people be wrong about you or a situation while keeping your peace and focus is the most misunderstood power move you will ever make.
– Morgan Richard Oliver

DIRECTIONS
First you’ll come to the end of the freeway.
Then it’s not so much north on Woodland Avenue
as it is a feeling that the pines are taller and weigh more,
and the road, you’ll notice,
is older with faded lines and unmown shoulders.
You’ll see a cemetery on your right
and another later on your left.
Sobered, drive on.
Drive on for miles
if the fields are full of hawkweed and daisies.
Sometimes a spotted horse
will gallop along the fence. Sometimes you’ll see
a hawk circling, sometimes a vulture.
You’ll cross the river many times
over smaller and smaller bridges.
You’ll know when you’re close;
people always say they have a sudden sensation
that the horizon, which was always far ahead,
is now directly behind them.
At this point you may want to park
and proceed on foot, or even
on your knees.
– Connie Wanek

There are no stupid children; there is nothing but imbecilic education. Forcing students to heave themselves up onto the top of the heap contributes to the laborious progress of animal rage and cunning, but surely not to the development of a creative and human intelligence.
– Raoul Vaneigem, A Warning to Students of All Ages

The human mind’s ability to rationalize its own shortcomings into virtues is unlimited, and I am no exception.
– Jubal Harshaw

I wish I could leave you certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am. Well, but again, this life has its own mortal loveliness. And memory is not strictly mortal in its nature, either. It is a strange thing, after all, to be able to return to a moment, when it can hardly be said to have any reality at all, even in its passing. A moment is such a slight thing, I mean, that its abiding is a most gracious reprieve.
– Marilynne Robinson

god is a future, a safety
that exists against all odds
where we all stay alive
and can be together. god is
a city where we each have
a home that doesn’t cost
too much.
– Amy Bornman

Christian tradition sweeps away the notion of the useless person, of time without meaning, of the purely banal act. In the Christian perspective, each one of a person’s actions is for the whole world. Each act assumes a cosmic dignity … from washing dishes to guiding the Church, from caring for a child to governing a country. In this perspective, the person is free from circumstance. Chance does not determine her value. She can be great, she can journey to perfection, even under the worst or the most humble of conditions.
– Luigi Giussani

Like all esoteric beings, Tiepolo said nothing about his secret. He merely displayed it. He knew that in all probability it would not have been recognized, and it wasn’t.
– Roberto Calasso

Most of them speak what they
have been taught, not what
they have learned.
– Bukowski

It really is easier to experience spiritual connection when your life is in the process of coming apart.
– Anne Lamott

Spring’s hesitant splendor had given way
to steady rains. The sky kept crumbling
and the laurels whitened and everywhere
a ripeness was visible. Nature was okay.
For me it had its place, a scaffolding and
backdrop to the stage on which people
ruined and saved themselves, played out
who they were.
– Stephen Dunn

There are people who have never been destroyed by love and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration that they walk among us —the untouched— practical as sieves.

Sometimes these people are highly intelligent and sometimes they simply don’t feel deeply enough so when the opportunity comes, they don’t even notice.

– Sandra Simonds

Sometimes dreams move with such vivid symbolic intensity, with such glorious surprise and symmetry, they read like poems.

– Dana Levin

night kayaking
never quite reaching
the moon
– Vanessa Proctor

Fascination arises when the unconscious has been moved.
– CG Jung

the world must be romanticized. this yields again its original meaning. romanticizing is nothing else than a qualitative potentization; raising to a higher power. lower self is identified with the better self in this operation. this operation is still entirely unknown
– novalis

Respect an active spirit in the beast:
Each flower is a soul open to Nature;
In metal dwells a mystery of love;
“All things are sentient!” And mold your being.
– Gérard de Nerval

I was infatuated with you; I am still. No one has ever heightened such a keen capacity of physical sensation in me. I cut you out because I couldn’t stand being a passing fancy. Before I give my body I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren’t having any of those.
– Sylvia Plath

Illness is the means by which an organism sheds what is foreign to it; all that needs to be done is to assist it in being sick, to have the complete illness, and then to escape from it, for that constitutes its progress.
– Rilke

You don’t have to go looking for suffering…
– Bill Hamilton

Some people are responding to the stories they heard about you.

Others are responded to the stories they created about you.

Instead of reacting to their narrative, keep living the truth.

– Dr. Thema

When I was growing up, I was taught two things: always be polite, and never make a film more than two hours long.
– @Aiannucci

That experience of learning how to write—that was what I felt I was doing—it was like learning Latin or something. I really, really learned it.
– Rachel Cusk

All the elements for your happiness are already here. There’s no need to run, strive, search or struggle. Just be.
– Thich Nhat Hanh

once upon a time there was a triangle
it had three sides
the fourth it kept hidden
in its burning centre.
– vasko popa

So much of the world’s collective unease and discomfort is essentially just emotional constipation.

People are out here spending their whole lives clogged up.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

– @jessicamalonso

If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.
– Ursula K. Le Guin

Transformation occurs only when we remember, breath by breath, year after year, to move toward our emotional distress without condemning or justifying our experience.
– Pema Chodron

He tried to read, but good books were too good, and bad books were too bad
– Virginia Woolf

Wherever you fly across the world in a plane, and the landscape suddenly begins to look rectangular, where there are straight lines & clear triangles, or clear circles, you know human beings have been around. Where they haven’t been around, the outlines of everything are wiggly.
– Alan Watts

Some mornings have wheels
that spin quick, refreshed
by the tidal flow, estuary
of sleep, deep fjord of night.
– Robert Kelly

Jung says of the visions, texts, and paintings in The Red Book that they were the decisive experiences of his entire life and he spent all his remaining years putting them forth into the world.
– Ann Belford Ulanov

If you were wondering how badly we’re doing on communicating the climate crisis to regular people, I talked to a woman yesterday who fully knew climate change was a clear and present danger and she turned to me and asked, in all sincerity, “so what do you think is causing it?”
– Mary Annaïse Heglar

You have the sea at your disposal now. F**k the landlubbers’ ways. Drift, baby, drift.
– @schweben_weben

We no longer can easily separate the latent from the manifest. As an editorial in a recent advertising journal explains; “Consumers don’t need an unconscious, only better medication. An unexamined life shops.”
– Norman Klein, Freud in Coney Island and Other Tales

Silence is the sand of noise.
– Ponge

Creation is not satisfied with itself as things are. There has to be upheaval, suffering, strife and conflict. The old has to die so that the new can be born, and the rhythm of creation follows a threefold pattern: unity, disunity and unity regained.
– David Tacey

It took but a moment and I was your bonfire.
– Tomaž Šalamun, To Read: To Love

A myth is not only a story; it is a statement made in symbols. The language of the unconscious is symbolic. A symbol speaks directly and immediately to the soul, and it is understood by the soul—even when consciousness does not understand.
– Alfred Ribi

And if it’s true we are alone,
we are alone together,
the way blades of grass
are alone, but exist as a field.
Sometimes I feel it,
the green fuse that ignites us,
the wild thrum that unites us,
an inner hum that reminds us
of our shared humanity.
Just as thirty-five trillion
red blood cells join in one body
to become one blood.
Just as one hundred thirty-six thousand
notes make up one symphony.
Alone as we are, our small voices
weave into the one big conversation.
Our actions are essential
to the one infinite story of what it is
to be alive. When we feel alone,
we belong to the grand communion
of those who sometimes feel alone—
we are the dust, the dust that hopes,
a rising of dust, a thrill of dust,
the dust that dances in the light
with all other dust, the dust
that makes the world.
– Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Are dreams the flotsam of our waking lives, washed up on the shores of consciousness, or are dreams, like pain, meaningful messages from our bodies?
– Katie Farris

The tree, by the end of the poem, becomes a symbol not only of the poet’s joyous childhood but also, through an extension in time and space, of the poet’s longing for permanence and eternity.
– Philip K. Jason and Frank N. Magill

This sense that something
went wrong.
The sense that we have fallen
and taken the world down with us.
The sense that all
might have turned out better
had she not made some
colossal mistake
in the beginning.
The sense that nature
disapproves, and every
flower is shouting about
the impending cataclysm
because a dark mother
tasted the fruit of
unbearable joy.
Dear friend, don’t you know
that humans hesitate and
cower before uncertainty
age after age, inventing
this story again and again?
It’s how we feel when we
don’t know how to breathe,
when we don’t know how to
pause between heartbeats,
to savor the delicate bouquet
of this moment.
Some say heaven will appear
when this tribulation is over.
I say heaven is an infinitesimal
grain of silence
at the tip of your exhalation,
just before you receive
the gift of another breath.
Meet me here.
We’ll dance barefoot
in the garden where nothing
ever went wrong,
and there was only
one tree, whose roots
went deep into the loam,
whose branches bent down
with clusters of ripening
sweet stars,
and a sparkling serpent spiraled
up the spine of the Goddess.
The serpent was Wisdom.
The Goddess was Eve.
She marveled at the dust
in the palm of her hand,
blew upon it,
and created a Man.
– Fred LaMotte

“We finally have advanced ai!! Let’s ask it how to improve society!!”

> your environment is terrible, humans need more soil and plants

“Amazing! Now that we’ve done that, how to cure diseases?”

> gotta get everyone moving regularly and eating natural foods

“So smart”

– @the_wilderless

“News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read,” a seasoned journalist explains to a journalist who’s starting out, in Scoop.
– Pico Iyer

I hope to define my life, whatever is left,
by migrations, south and north with the birds
and far from the metallic fever of clocks,
the self staring at the clock saying, “I must do this.”
I can’t tell the time on the tongue of the river
in the cool morning air, the smell of the ferment
of greenery, the dust off the canyon’s rock walls,
the swallows swooping above the scent of raw water.
– Jim Harrison

We live in a creative Universe that is itself a work of cosmic art. Nature is more like a flowing living symphony than a material “thing.” And everything is connected, everything is energy.

Van Gogh expressed this beautifully with his art, William Blake with poetry, and Einstein with science..

Mystical traditions and individuals have been expressing this understanding for centuries. Life is sacred, life is art.

Be mindful. See the beauty that exists everywhere, the creative mystery that we are. Be aware of your presence and connection to everything.

Know that behind your social persona and cultural identity you are the child of a Creative Cosmos.

– Christopher Chase

Insight or incite?
– Mark Seiler

We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
– Adrienne Rich

Poetry, metaphor, mythology are highly realistic and down to earth. It is logic and mathematics which are the imaginative and fantastical exercise.

– Elizabeth Sewell, The Orphic Voice

I am not a writer I am a pattern maker.
– Laura Kerr

I’ve often noticed that we are not able to look at what we have in front of us, unless it’s inside a frame.
– Abbas Kiarostami

The wound that never healed but learned to sing.
– Franz Wright

Each day I listen for it in the night.
I too have a song to say alone,
– Franz Wright

The hero’s journey has been compared to a birth: it starts with being warm and snug in a safe place; then comes a signal, growing more insistent, that it is time to leave. To stay beyond your time is to putrefy. Without the blood & tearing & pain, there is no new life.
– Joseph Campbell

We do not stop to think that nothing would exist, there would be no culture in the world, if it were not for active imagination; it is always the forerunner, everything springs from it.
– CG Jung

Most communication in the psyche begins in conflict. The unconscious parts of our personalities have to fight for “equal time,” for some recognition, against the dominant attitudes and power systems of the conscious mind.
– Robert A. Johnson

Keep awake, alive, new. Perform the paradox of being hard and yet soft. Survive without calcification of the tender membranes. Be a poet. Be alive.
– Tennessee Williams

Jung often warns that life-giving and replenishing symbols appear first in ambiguous or dubious form. They have to be “kissed” into life, a motif that is often found in fairy tales.
– David Tacey

A poet technically is supposed to be a “thief of fire” but as easily as anyone else he becomes a working stiff who drinks too much on late Friday afternoons.
– Jim Harrison

When I first got to grad school, I was stunned that everyone seemed to know a special word that I had never heard in my life, “polemical”
– @PhDhurtBrain

Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.
– Thomas Hardy

Be quiet, work hard, and stay healthy. It’s not ambition or skill that is going to set you apart but sanity.
– Ryan Holiday

wherever you find people
you find flies and
you find Buddhas
– Issa

Lessons in watercolour—
how you can take away, but not erase;
how you can add darker pigment,
but still dilute. And life, how we learn
to stop colouring inside the lines.
– @modernirish

The reason Gen X is forgotten is because Boomers erased us in order to retain power way beyond their expiration date.
– @gabehudson

Our true occupation is to manufacture from the raw material of life the fabric of happiness; and if we are ever to set about our work we must make up our minds to risk something.
– A.E. Housman

Bugger the biography, read the poetry.
– Ezra Pound

It’s the dilemma of the lower middle class when it sends its children off to be educated, often at great expense. Their naive hope (they don’t see it as unreasonable) is that the kids they send off will return more affluent but otherwise unchanged.
– Russo

how vivid
was my dream
a field of irises
– Shushiki

“i should build up the technical skills so that I can use them creatively” is very precisely backward.
– @the_wilderless

don’t mistake physical awareness for somatic resonance
– @the_wilderless

What might happen if musicians made poets their opening acts?
– Sara Moore Wagner

We are not living in a dark age. We are living in the dawn of light. Even though there could be more goodness and altruism, even though greed, injustice, and aggression cause tremendous suffering every day, we must take some time to reflect on what is going right.
– Dzigar Kongtrul

A writing career is not a sprint. It is also not a marathon. A writing career is one of those wilderness survival challenges where they dump you in the woods without a map or a compass or food and whoever finds their way out wins.
– Carlos Greaves

Many think they can dispense with theory altogether, which of course only means that they want their own theory, underlying their own statements, to be accepted as gospel truth.
– Hannah Arendt

My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.
– Jack Kerouac

Openings come quickly, sometimes, like blue space in running clouds.
A complete overcast, then a blaze of light.
– Tennessee Williams

Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest.
– Herman Hesse

There always comes a moment when people stop fighting and tearing each other apart and finally agree to love each other for who they are.
– Albert Camus

I’m smart enough to know that I’m dumb.
– Richard Feynman

Our culture is not an apology. Thunder our ancestry, let them hear our music. Let them know: we are here. We will not be quiet.
– Usman Hameedi

Our Father-Mother God
Holds us in Love’s embrace,
We cannot stumble, fear, nor fail
While in this cherished place;

But glow with noontide glory
Reflecting radiant Soul,
Immortal, perfect, beautiful,
God’s man—divinely whole!
– Dilys Bell

finally free!
no bondage, no dependency
an open calm sea
– Tesso

I had an inheritance from my father,
It was the moon and the sun.
And though I roam all over the world,
The spending of it is never done.
– Ernest Hemingway

when I write, it’s because I’m confounded or angry. I don’t write that much when I’m happy. But when I need to get on the other side of something, my first refuge is the page.
– Patricia Smith

Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.
– Robert Frost, Directive

The strength of a person’s spirit
would then be measured
by how much ‘truth’ he could tolerate,
or more precisely, to what extent he needs
to have it diluted, disguised, sweetened,
muted, falsified.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

Getting a taste of samadhi should be part of basic education. It’s one of the most beautiful things in this world, and it’s sad that it’s obscure knowledge. It’s something that has to be experienced, proof that the richness and clarity of the world can vary dramatically via internal changes. I’d far rather spend a weekend living in an empty room in samadhi than in the most beautiful house without it. The former is much more beautiful.
– @nickcammarata

The human organism is a stream of energy. It’s never the same for two seconds. Only, we’ve been taught to watch that thing, and to cherish it, and value it, and it matters, dammit! And yet, it’s going to wear out. And yet, it’s going to get sick. And yet, it’s going to die.
– Alan Watts

May no fate willfully misunderstand me.
– Frost

People are always getting ready for tomorrow.
I didn’t believe in that.
Tomorrow wasn’t getting ready for them.
It didn’t even know they were there.
– Cormac McCarthy, The Road

When people do not ignore what they should ignore, but ignore what they should not ignore, this is known ignorance.
– Chuang Tzu

Semaphores by Peter Halstead

Far be it for the world to mimic
What is merely metonymic,
Although it must be one of nature’s goals
To show just bits of giant wholes,
And replace the impenetrable arts
With more fathomable parts,
Straightforward means and ends
That a sailor comprehends
To be not simile or metaphor,
But what the heavens really stand for,
So a corner of the greater sky
Fills the anxious searching eye
With all the comets, trees, and land
The intellect can understand,
As what we see is what we get,
The entire world’s silhouette,
Not the planet, just the cave,
The titanic ocean wave by wave—
Leaving it to some on shore
To suspect there might be more.

Kailua
November 6th, 2002

When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong.
– Richard Dawkins

PHOENIX

Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled,
made nothing?
Are you willing to be made nothing?
dipped into oblivion?

If not, you will never really change.

The phoenix renews her youth
only when she is burnt, burnt alive, burnt down
to hot and flocculent ash.
Then the small stirring of a new small bub in the nest
with strands of down like floating ash
shows that she is renewing her youth like the eagle,
immortal bird.

– D. H. Lawrence

The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one’s own..
– Willa Cather

Most important act for the future is to become aware of our darkness, to lower our moral sights, resist the desire to be perfect, recognize our complexity, become critical of conventional morality and search for a new balance that includes our dark side as well as the light.
– David Tacey

That’s what we’re all doing, all the time, whether we know it or not. Whether we like it or not. Creating something on the spur of the moment with the materials at hand. We might just as well let the rest of it go, join the party, and dance our hearts out.
– Alan Arkin

When I write sentences, I am at home. When I make shapes. When I do not, I am damned, doomed, homeless; I know this well—restless, roaming; the actual places I’ve lived become unrecognizable, and I, too, monstrous, am unrecognizable to myself. In the gloating, enormous strangeness and solitude of the real world, where I am so often inconsolable, marooned, utterly dizzied—all I need do is to pick up a pen and begin to write—safe in the shelter of the alphabet, and I am taken home. Back into the blinding waves, the topaz light, the fire. Or far off into the enthralling, voluptuous dark.
– Carole Maso, Break Every Rule

Man’s feeling of homelessness, of alienation has been intensified in the midst of a bureaucratized, impersonal mass society. He has come to feel himself an outsider even within his own human society. He is trebly alienated: a stranger to God, to nature, and to the gigantic social apparatus that supplies his material wants.
But the worst and final form of alienation, toward which indeed the others tend, is man’s alienation from his own self. In a society that requires of man only that he perform competently his own particular social function, man becomes identified with this function, and the rest of his being is allowed to subsist as best it can – usually to be dropped below the surface of consciousness and forgotten.
– William Barrett

There are some moments in the heart
so stark and unmanageable
where loneliness—that listless gray sea—
is un-enterable and yet
grows in my avoidance,
stalking my light.

I am so tired
of the fatigue of flattery,
moving about to please and placate
old ghosts

And yet as I go through
the hollow idols
of my self-neglect
I am unable to toss out any.

The worship
of my old god
is a sort of Stockholm syndrome,
I prostrate to my indentured smallness—

Let me waste all my prayers on you.

Anything is better than contending
with the question
of all I might truly be.

– Chelan Harkin

We die in another world when we are born into this one. We are born into another world when we die in this one.
– Robert Moss

I think we lose so much by only knowing one language.
– Min Jin Lee

That is the demise of the Gods: man puts them in his pocket.
– @RedBookJung

In the book of life, the answers aren’t in the back.
– Charlie Brown

Propaganda ceases where simple dialogue begins.
– Jacques Ellul

Even a musician with the most modest career in some local bar is to me more glamorous than the most glamorous writer.
– Mary Gaitskill

The life-blood of philosophy is argument and counter-argument. Plato and Aristotle thought of this occurring in what they called dialectic — discussion. Today, it might be argued that our is just the same, except that it operates upon a much wider scale, both historically and geographically. Argument and counter-argument in books and journals is the modern version of dialectic.
– DW Hamlyn

You have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.
– Flannery O’Connor

there was no hope of funneling knowledge into fools.
– C.G. Jung

For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured – disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui – in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable. And all the while a meter is running inside and there is no hand that can reach in there and shut it off.
– Henry Miller

Everything is a gift. The degree to which we are awake to this truth is a measure of our gratefulness. 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.

Eyes see only light, ears hear only sound, but a listening heart perceives meaning. Everything is a gift. Grateful living is a celebration of the universal give-and-take of life, a limitless yes to belonging. A lifetime may not be long enough to attune ourselves fully to the harmony of the universe. But just to become aware that we can resonate with it – that alone can be like waking up from a dream.

Gratefulness is the key to a happy life, because if we are not grateful, then no matter how much we have we will not be happy – because we will always want to have something else or something more.

– Brother David Steindl-Rast

… I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple – or a green field – a place to enter, and in which to feel. Only in a secondary way is it an intellectual thing – an artifact, a moment of seemly and robust wordiness – wonderful as that part of it is. I learned that the poem was made not just to exist, but to speak – to be company. It was everything that was needed, when everything was needed.
– Mary Oliver

Neil Armstrong went to the moon and walked on it, and then he returned to earth, and went to his bed and slept. The next morning he got up and walked into his bathroom, looked into the mirror, and saw the face of Neil Armstrong looking back at him, and despite having walked on the moon, he had the same question he had had before he left the earth, ‘Who is this man? Who generates the life inside this body? Why is Neil Armstrong here?’
– John Waters

The poem, the song, the picture, is only water drawn from the well of the people, and it should be given back to them in a cup of beauty so that they may drink – and in drinking understand themselves.
– Federico Garcia Lorca

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

For there are moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.
– Rainer Maria Rilke

A LETTER TO SU TUNG-P’O
Almost a thousand years later
I am asking the same questions
you did…
I do not know any more now
than you did then about what you
were asking as I sit at night
above the hushed valley thinking
of you on your river that one
bright sheet of moonlight in the dream
of the waterbirds and I hear
the silence after your questions
how old are the questions tonight
– W.S. Merwin

A few beings are neither in society nor in a state of dreaming. They belong to an isolated fate, to an unknown hope. Their open acts seem anterior to time’s first inculpation and to the skies’ unconcern. It occurs to no one to employ them. The future melts before their gaze. They are the noblest and the most disquieting.
– René Char

The Bible knows nothing of solitary religion.
– John Wesley

God is the great mysterious motivator of what we call nature, and it has often been said by philosophers, that nature is the will of God. And I prefer to say that nature is the only body of God that we shall ever see.
– Frank Lloyd Wright

So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve.
– Ursula K. Le Guin

We cannot, of course, save the World because we do not have authority over its parts. We can serve the world though. That is everyone’s calling, to lead a life that helps.
– Barry Lopez

… if a mirror ever makes
you sad
you should know
that it does
not know
you.
– Kabir

For me, walking in a hard Dakota wind can be like staring at the ocean: humbled before its immensity, I also have a sense of being at home on this planet, my blood so like the sea in chemical composition, my every cell partaking of air. I live about as far from the sea as is possible in North America, yet I walk in a turbulent ocean. Maybe that child was right when he told me that the world is upside-down here, and this is where angels drown. Listening to the voice of the sky, I wonder: how do we tell our tales, how can we hope to record them? I’d like to believe that deep in our bones the country people of Dakota, like poets, like monks, are, as Jean Cocteau once said of poetry, “useless but indispensable.”
– Kathleen Norris

The Tao that cannot be named is the intelligence of the universe; whatever is happening right now.The mind that realizes this is the don’t – know mind, which is opened to all possibilities because it doesn’t believe it’s own thoughts. What more is there to say. Except that there is a radiance about people who have settled into the depths of not- knowing.You can see it in their eyes.It doesn’t depend on what happens or doesn’t happen. They have found the inexhaustible treasure , in the most obvious place of all.
– Stephen Mitchell, The Second Book of the Tao

Remember that these things are mysteries and that if they were such that we could understand them, they wouldn’t be worth understanding. A God you understood would be less than yourself.
– Flannery O’Connor

There is no less holiness at this time – as you are reading this – than there was on the day the Red Sea parted, or that day in the 30th year, in the 4th month, on the 5th day of the month as Ezekiel was a captive by the river Cheban, when the heavens opened and he saw visions of god. There is no whit less enlightenment under the tree at the end of your street than there was under Buddha’s bo tree. In any instant the sacred may wipe you with its finger. In any instant the bush may flare, your feet may rise, or you may see a bunch of souls in trees.
– Annie Dillard

America is a very sick nation. I suspect that racism, mass killings, corruption, gang culture, the election of bad people to high office, drugs, extreme poverty, homelessness and all the other ailments it suffers from to a far greater degree than any other democratic nation in the world, are not individual illnesses but the symptoms of a deeply engrained malaise that absolutely refuses to respond to treatment. Most Americans who are aware of their country’s infirmities blame them on the sins of the past. As with most nations, these sins are numerous but my guess is that they make America vulnerable to infection rather than being the illness itself.

What is the virus that courses through the veins of the United States attacking every part of its being, laying it low in wave after wave after wave?

I’m not a doctor but I think it may be hubris.

– Jonathan Hagger

A journey is like marriage.
The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.
– John Steinbeck

The things we really need come to us only as gifts, and in order to receive them as gifts, we have to be open. In order to be open we have to renounce ourselves, in a sense we have to die to our image of ourselves, our autonomy, our fixation upon our self-willed destiny. We have to be able to relax the psychic and spiritual cramp which knots us in the painful, vulnerable, helpless ‘I’ that is all we know of ourselves.
– Thomas Merton

The greatest peril of misplaced worry is that in keeping us constantly tensed against an imagined catastrophe, it prevents us from fully living.
– Seneca

Dangerously close. Beautifully close. And uncomfortably close is exactly where we need to be if we want to transform this culture of scarcity and fundamental distrust. Distance is a liar. It distorts the way we see ourselves and the way we understand each other… I have learned that the best way to find light in the darkness is not by pushing people away but by falling straight into them.
– Brené Brown

I’m not sure it is possible to articulate grief through language. You can say, I was so sad I thought my bones would collapse. I thought I would die. But language always falls short of the body when it comes to the intensity of corporeal experience. The best we can do is bring language in relationship to corporeal experience—bring words close to the body—as close as possible. Close enough to shatter them. Or close enough to knock a body out. To bring language close to the intensity of experiences like love or death or grief or pain is to push on the affect of language. Its sounds and grunts and ecstatic noises. The ritual sense of language. Or the cry.
– Lidia Yuknavitch, from The Chronology of Water

And how should we behave during this Apocalypse? We should be unusually kind to one another, certainly. But we should also stop being so serious. Jokes help a lot. And get a dog, if you don’t already have one.
– Kurt Vonnegut

As for me, I see both the beauty and the dark side of things; the loveliness of cornfields and full sails, but the ruin as well. And I see them at the same time, at once ecstatic at the beauty of things, and chary of that ecstasy. The Japanese have a phrase for this perception: mono no aware. It means “beauty tinged with sadness,” for there cannot be any real beauty without the indolic whiff of decay. For me, living is the same thing as dying, and loving is the same thing as losing, and this does not make me a madwoman; I believe it can make me better at living, and better at loving, and, just possibly, better at seeing.
– Sally Mann

He lost himself in the words and images conjured in his mind and for a while forgot … He found himself flying among stars and planets …
– Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Each dance was a rehearsal for escape. […]
On the dance floor it was clear that existence was not only a struggle, but a beautiful experiment too. It was an inquiry about how to live when the future was foreclosed.
– Saidiya Hartman

When we use this term ‘basic goodness’ it indicates some fundamental possibility. Life is possible. Situations are possible. And anybody can start to gain some kind of insight and appreciation of their lives. That’s what we call ‘sacred’. It doesn’t mean something dramatic, but something very simple. There’s a sacredness… to everyone’s life. In order to relate to it, you have to build confidence. Because of this need to build confidence, we speak of ‘warriorship’. There’s a tremendous amount of fear in people’s lives. I think it’s based on not wanting to reveal oneself. You’re always protecting yourself. So the journey of meditation and the journey of Shambhala is: ‘One has to be fearless. One has to be brave. One must break out of the world which is comfort-oriented.’.
– Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche

HOW ANGELS SLEEP. Unsoundly. They toss and turn, trying to understand the mystery of the living. They know so little about what it’s like to fill a new prescription for glasses and suddenly see the world again, with a mixture of disappointment and gratitude … Also, they don’t dream. For this reason, they have one less thing to talk about. In a backward way, when they wake up they feel as if there is something they are forgetting to tell each other. There is disagreement among the angels as to whether this is a result of something vestigial, or whether it is the result of the empathy they feel for the Living, so powerful it sometimes makes them weep. In general, they fall into these two camps on the subject of dreams. Even among the angels, there is the sadness of division.
– Nicole Krauss

When botanists go walking the forests and fields looking for plants, we say we are going on a foray. When writers do the same, we should call it a metaphoray, and the land is rich in both. We need them both; scientist and poet Jeffrey Burton Russell writes that “as the sign of a deeper truth, metaphor was close to sacrament. Because the vastness and richness cannot be expressed by the overt sense of a statement alone.”
– Robin Wall Kimmerer

Cresting the ridge releases me into an explosion of light and space and wind.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer

We have advantages. We have a cushion to fall back on. This is abundance. A luxury of place and time. Something rare and wonderful. It’s almost historically unprecedented. We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to.
– Dave Eggers

If a coin comes down heads, that means that the possibility of its coming down tails has collapsed. Until that moment the two possibilities were equal.
But on another world, it does come down tails. And when that happens, the two worlds split apart.
– Philip Pullman

I’m a big believer in winging it. I’m a big believer that you’re never going to find perfect city travel experience or the perfect meal without a constant willingness to experience a bad one. Letting the happy accident happen is what a lot of vacation itineraries miss, I think, and I’m always trying to push people to allow those things to happen rather than stick to some rigid itinerary.
– Anthony Bourdain

There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, ‘Consume me’.
– Virginia Woolf

I describe myself as a patternist, and believe that if you put matter and energy in just the right pattern you create something that transcends it. Technology is a good example of that: you put together lenses and mechanical parts and some computers and some software in just the right combination and you create a reading machine for the blind. It’s something that transcends the semblance of parts you’ve put together. That is the nature of technology, and it’s the nature of the human brain. Biological molecules put in a certain combination create the transcending properties of human intelligence; you put notes and sounds together in just the rightcombination, and you create a Beethoven symphony or a Beatles song. So patterns have a power that transcends the parts of that pattern.
– Ray Kurzweil

We have found that no modern prescriptions heal the human heart so fully or so well as the prescription of the Ancient Ones. “To the hills,” they would say. To which we would add, “To the trees, the valleys, and the streams, as well.” For there is a power in nature that man has ignored. And the result has been heartache and pain.
– Anasazi Foundation

Serendipity means Inadvertently sampling the non obvious. When we stop worshipping the obvious, surprise occurs.
– Wildcat

Everybody has a little bit of the sun and moon in them. Everybody has a little bit of man, woman, and animal in them. Darks and lights in them. Everyone is part of a connected cosmic system. Part earth and sea, wind and fire, with some salt and dust swimming in them. We have a universe within ourselves that mimics the universe outside. None of us are just black or white, or never wrong and always right. No one. No one exists without polarities. Everybody has good and bad forces working with them, against them, and within them.
– Suzy Kassem

But I love your feet only because they walked upon the earth and upon the wind and upon the waters, until they found me.
– Pablo Neruda

he thought no more of performing the lesser arts of magic than a bird thinks of flying. Yet a greater, unlearned skill he possessed, which was the art of kindness.
– Ursula K. Le Guin

Until the storm of conceptual thinking subsides and the mind learns to rest in a fasting state, one’s true nature must remain unknown and inaccessible.
– Ramesh S. Balsekar

We also recognize that imagination has to struggle with the dragon of time afresh each day. Poetry must be written, continued, risked, tried, revised, erased, and tried again as long as we breathe and love, doubt and believe.
– Adam Zagajewski

Here is what the sea smells like. It is more texture than scent, because the sea is primarily made of two substances that have no smell of their own: water and salt. Salt has no smell, but makes the air sting, and so all of the other smells of the sea are layered upon the pang of salt. Water has no smell but instead a comfort. We feel moisture as life and so the smells of the ocean are layered upon the contentment of the water. Salt is treble and water is bass. I don’t know how I know this is true, but I know it is true. The sea smells like old wood and wet leaves. Like cold mud and warm stone. Like every creature who has ever lived in it, a churning graveyard and nursery. Like winds from the inland carrying the hot circulation of life and winds from the ocean carrying the distant froth of waves against ships and islands. Like gray, only more so. Like blue, only less so.
– Joseph Fink & Jeffrey Cranor

Why Some People Do Not Read Poetry

Because they already know that it means
stopping and without stopping they know that
beyond stopping it will mean listening
listening without hearing and maybe
then hearing without hearing and what would
they hear then what good would it be to them
like some small animal crossing the road
suddenly there but not seeming to move
at night and they are late and may be on
the wrong road over the mountain with all
the others asleep and not hitting it
that time as though forgetting it again

– W.S. Merwin

I open my journal, write a few
sounds with green ink,
and suddenly
fierceness enters me, stars
begin to revolve, and pick up
alligator dust from under the ocean.
The music comes, I feel the bushy
tail of the Great Bear
reach down and brush the sea floor.
– Robert Bly

It was as though her soul were neatly removed by a drinking straw and siphoned into the green pool of quiet that lay beneath the rippling cascade of notes.
– Louise Erdrich

Not creating delusions is enlightenment.
– Bodhidharma

Although one might wish otherwise, in dreams what is important is not the images. What matters is the impression produced by the dream. The images are minor; they are effects.
– Jorge Luis Borges

Silence illuminates our soul.
whispers to our heart
and brings them together.
Silence separates us from ourselves,
makes us sail the firmament of Spirit
and brings us closer to Heaven.
It makes us feel that bodies are no
more than prisons and that the world
is only a place of exile.
– Kahil Gibran

I speak of the Creator. He has walked with me often in my journeys, and it has been by learning to walk with Him that I have learned to walk forward.
– Anasazi Foundation

The secret of the mountains is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself. Yet the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no meaning, they are meaning; the mountains are. I ring with life and the mountains ring and when I can hear it, it is a ringing we share. I understand all this in my heart knowing how meaningless it is to try to capture what cannot be expressed, knowing that only words will remain when I read it again another day.
– Peter Matthaissen

Don’t be afraid. There are exquisite things in store for you. This is merely the beginning.
– Oscar Wilde

All storytellers know that two types of time exist: one is the twenty-four hours, the school run, the bill-paying, forever catching-up time of our everyday world; but behind that looms the energies of mythic time, the great cycles that pulse from generation to generation. These great wheels infuse the everyday with nourishment, ‘eternity in a grain of sand.’ The philosopher Plotinus suggested that while the body favors a straight line, the soul hankers for the circle. This mythic, circular time, (which is really no kind of time at all) laughs at the straight line and the alarm clock. Without it—even with all the riches of the world—we can enter the arena of the meaningless. As markets collapse and the world heats up, we would do well to see Coyote’s claws opening holes between the two. We live in an era of tremendous possibility.
– Martin Shaw

I think its good to take the time to fix something rather than throw it away. Its an antidote to wastefulness and to the need for immediate gratification. You get to see a whole process through, beginning to end, nothing abstract about it. You’ll always notice the fabric scar, of course, but there’s an art to mending. If you’re careful, the repair can actually add to the beauty of the thing, because it is a testimony to its worth.
– Elizabeth Berg

It’s not what a movie is about, it’s how it is about it.
– Roger Ebert

Under the influence of great fear, almost everybody becomes superstitious.
Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity towards those who are not regarded as members of the herd.
Fear generates impulses of cruelty, and therefore promotes such superstitious beliefs as seem to justify cruelty.
Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.
– Bertrand Russell

The mind can go either direction under stress—toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training.
– Frank Herbert

The sun was hot but the ceaseless wind cooled the sweat on her face and arms. She leaned back on her hands and thought of nothing, sun and wind and sky and sea filling her, making her transparent to sun, wind, sky, sea. But her left hand reminded her of its existence
– Ursula K. Le Guin

Defy the law! –
Write the heartbroken
poetry of the World!
– Jack Kerouac

If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you’d be doomed. You’d be ruined as God. You’d be a stone. You’d never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You’d never love anyone, ever again. You’d never dare to.
– Margaret Atwood

I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is really only one logical conclusion. I need darkness as much as I need light.
– Barbara Brown Taylor

You need to have a community. You need to have meaningful values, not the junk values you’ve been pumped full of all your life, telling you happiness comes through money and buying objects. You need to have meaningful work. You need the natural world. You need to feel you are respected. You need a secure future. You need connections to all these things. You need to release any shame you might feel for having been mistreated.
– Johann Hari

The world itself, all I read, the people, the art, the weather I encounter, they all belong in a poem that I am not writing, a poem that contains me too, a poem that slowly reveals its generous and surprising connections. I think I cannot write that poem. I can only live in it.
– Heather Christle, Crying in the Library

a blue came over us a blue cloud
whose brown shadow goose-fleshed the sea
the ship after a little rush stopped moving
the wind with a swivelling sound began to rise
and here I am still divided in my decision
whether to heave-to or keep going under half-sail
but the water is in my thinking now
I remember the mast-pole broken by a gust
severed my two minds separate
and my body flopped like a diver over the side
then came the invisible then the visible rain
then icy and razor-sharp then green then dawn
who always wakes behind net curtains
and her watercolour character changes shade quickly like new leaves
she is excitable then shy then coppery pink
and raking her fingers around finds bits of clothing and bones
How strange she says among those better worlds underwater
where the cold of swimming is no different from the clear of looking
there are people still going about their work
unfurling sails and loosening knots
it’s as if they didn’t know they were drowned
it’s as if I blinded by my own surface
have to keep moving over seemingly endless yellowness
have to keep moving over seemingly endless yellowness
– Alice Oswald

They won’t listen. Do you know why? Because they have certain fixed notions about the past. Any change would be blasphemy in their eyes, even if it were the truth. They don’t want the truth; they want their traditions.
– Isaac Asimov

I wish that one day
you’ll make it home to
a place you belong,
a person you love, or
a passion you may die for.
Where your heart is cherished,
your mind sleeps in peace,
and your soul is simply understood.
– Samiha Totanji

Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don’t like – then cultivate it. That’s the only part of your work that’s individual and worth keeping.
– Jean Cocteau

One thing: you have to walk, and create the way by your walking; you will not find a ready-made path. It is not so cheap, to reach to the ultimate realization of truth. You will have to create the path by walking yourself; the path is not ready-made, lying there and waiting for you. It is just like the sky: the birds fly, but they don’t leave any footprints. You cannot follow them; there are no footprints left behind.
– Osho

If God’s peace is in our hearts, we carry it with us, and it can be given to those around us, not by our own will or virtue, but by the Holy Spirit working through us. We cannot give what we do not have, but if the spirit blows through the dark clouds, and enters our hearts, we can be used as vehicles of peace, and our own peace will be thereby deepened. The more peace we give away, the more we have.
– Madeline L’Engle

I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.
Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.
– Oliver Sacks

To see ten thousand animals untamed and not branded with the symbols of human commerce is like scaling an unconquered mountain for the first time, or like finding a forest without roads or footpaths or the blemish of an axe. You know then what you had always been told — that the world once lived and grew without adding machines and newsprint and brick-walled streets and the tyranny of clocks.
– Beryl Markham Sunbeams

The struggle to exist, to not disappear in this moment, is the advancing root of the struggle to exist throughout the whole passage of time. We need to help each other in this struggle. You by asking, I by struggling to respond. This is the law of love, which rules the universe.
– Jacob Needleman

The law of progress holds that everything now must be better than what was there before. Don’t you see if you want something better, and better, and better, you lose the good. The good is no longer even being measured.
– Hannah Arendt

Men tend to have the beliefs that suit their passions. Cruel men believe in a cruel God, and use their belief to excuse their cruelty. Only kindly men believe in a kindly God, and they would be kindly in any case. The reasons for the ethic that, in common with many whose beliefs are more orthodox, I wish to see prevail, are reasons derived from the course of events in this world. We have seen a great system of cruel falsehood, the Nazi system, lead a nation to disaster, at immense cost to its opponents. It is not by such systems that happiness is to be achieved; even without the help of revelation, it is not difficult to see that human welfare requires a less ferocious ethic. More and more people are becoming unable to accept traditional beliefs. If they think that, apart from these beliefs, there is no reason for kindly behaviour, the results may be needlessly unfortunate. That is why it is important to show that no supernatural reasons are needed to make men kind and to prove that only through kindness can mankind achieve happiness.
– Bertrand Russell

Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center. […] Big, undreamed-of things–the people on the edge see them first.
– Kurt Vonnegut

How intense can be the longing to escape from the emptiness and dullness of human verbosity, to take refuge in nature, apparently so inarticulate, or in the wordlessness of long, grinding labour, of sound sleep, of true music, or of a human understanding rendered speechless by emotion!
– Boris Pasternak

Although there were still great blank spaces in their understanding, they knew some part of each other by now.
– Denton Welch

And there are those small love letters penned but not sent, the ones cramped between the lines in a notebook that will take its place with every other notebook, and all the other cramped love letters between the lines. The clandestine—but still small—love letter, the kind that could at any moment grow disproportionately large, the one that regenerates itself as it’s being wedged between the words on the page, suffocating with the absence of ink. Smothered, this secret small love letter might smolder. In its ashes, an interminable shudder of longing.
– Kim Dana Kupperman

Contemplation seems to be about the only luxury that costs nothing.
– Dodie Smith

In every life we would find continents, islands, deserts, swamps, overpopulated territories and terrae incognitae. We could draw the map of such a memory and extract images from it with greater ease (and truthfulness) than from tales and legends.
– Chris Marker, Immemory

If a man is contradicted by himself and does not know it, he is an illusionist, but if he knows that he contradicts himself, he is individuated.
– C.G. Jung

Wait a while, small voyager
On the shore, with seapinks and shells.

The boat
Will take a few summers to build.
That you must make your voyage in.

– George Mackay Brown

I feel completely detached from
any country, any group.
I am a metaphysically
displaced person.
– Emil Cioran

Inside every brick
a letter from the fire
– Robert Kelly

But I don’t hate anybody.
I have tenderness for the world.
– Tennessee Williams

The problem isn’t a lack of money, food, water or land. The problem is that you’ve given control of these things to a group of greedy psychopaths who care more about maintaining their own power than helping mankind.
– Bill Hicks

Jung sees he must accept “the repressed part of the soul, he must love his inferiority, even his vices, so that what is degenerate can resume development.” This goes against the grain, for what we have developed “represents our best and highest achievement.”
– Ann Belford Ulanov

Even though we have experienced timelessness, we don’t throw away our watches.
– Ross Bolleter

Very few people do anything creative after the age of thirty-five. The reason is that very few people do anything creative before the age of thirty-five.
– Joel Hildebrand

The city’s a heart, I said, and in that a heart and a city were sutured into a third thing, a heartish city, and cities are heart-stained, and hearts are city-stained too.
– China Miéville, Embassy Town

There was nothing left for me but to remember the wise saying that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of. Anyone who would succeed in eliminating his preexisting convictions even more thoroughly could no doubt discover even more things.
– Freud

All the cities which haunt one are life-size, built to human scale.

London and Paris have grown this way — out of affection and intimacy: one loves little pieces of them now, not the whole.

– Lawrence Durrell

Poetry is no less a mystery than anything else on earth. One or two felicitous lines can hardly stir our vanity, since they are but gifts of Chance or of the Spirit; only the mistakes belong to us.
– Jorge Luis Borges, tr. Norman Thomas di Giovanni

Much that is beautiful must be discarded
So that we may resemble a taller

Impression of ourselves.

– John Ashbery

Buddhism says that the purpose of life is to know oneself, because without that internal self-realization, all other goals will be thwarted. This is the lesson that we all need to learn.
– Lama Surya Das

the stars
quivering in
the early morning cold
– Taigi

mist rising
from the river
spring sunset
– Chora

I found myself thinking back to my own early youth, to the first shock of my encounter — at about twenty years of age — with Paris.

It was like a sudden unpremeditated chord on the piano — a chord I had never struck before.

– Lawrence Durrell

What had the City to do with all this — an Aegean spring hanging upon a thread between winter and the first white puffs of almond blossom?

It was a word merely, and meant little, being scribbled on the margins of a dream.

– Lawrence Durrell

Thinking highly of yourself is less of a problem if you think highly of others too.
– @RomeoStevens76

Queerness gave me the language for everything I know about liberation and freedom.
– @ZenChangeAngel

Letting go is the most magic filter. All the things that have been sapping your energy, the mismatches that never quite manage to bear fruit, finally get to fall away. And what’s truly meant for you bounces right back, even stronger than before.
– Kristin Posehn

The lives of these people, the aimlessness, the way they live. One goes from one to another, and it’s all the same. One never gets what one wants out of any of them.
– Virginia Woolf

The struggle ends
when the gratitude begins.
– Neale Donald Walsch

Between sunrise and sunset —

I cannot walk through all realms —
I carry a yearning I cannot
bear alone in the dark —

What shall I do with all this heartache?

– Joy Harjo

In “He”, Robert Johnson suggests that most moderns, no longer at home in the old mythic systems, have transferred their needs of the soul to romantic love. Images of the beloved are carried within each of us & projected onto one who can receive our unconscious material.
– James Hollis

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.
– L. Wittgenstein

To be modern is to rummage in the incurable.
– Eugene Ionesco, citing E. M. Cioran

such is my landscape, dear friend. half memory, half intuition, surrounds me now, may gradually rhyme itself into space and really encircle me, still and sure, like something that has existed forever and for which my eyes have only just become sufficiently strong.
– Rilke, letters

Freedom would be not to choose between black and white, but to abjure such prescribed choices.
– Theodor W. Adorno

I am flattered that several aspiring poets have lately tried to hire me to work with them, but all the advice I have I’ll give away for free:

Don’t be boring.

Don’t do what’s expected.

– Aaron Poochigian

In the Spring, I have counted 136 different kinds of weather inside of 24 hours.
– Mark Twain

There are certain things which enter the minds of even people without one.
– Eugene Ionesco

I don’t emotionally regulate, I just eat Nutella from the jar with a spoon.
– Dr Claire Askew

The supreme trick of mass insanity is that it persuades you that the only abnormal person is the one who refuses to join in the madness of others, the one who tries vainly to resist.
– Eugène Ionesco

ambition can mean doing a few things deeply rather than doing a lot of things constantly
– @chenchenwrites

There is a sense then in which the self is a lifelong project, as long as we remember that it is a project that requires as much passivity as activity both receptivity and taking hold, yin and yang.
– John Loudon

The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.
– Thomas Hardy

Jung explored the psyche, saw what it was expressing, and what he saw has been vindicated. He knew perfection could no longer be upheld as a viable ideal and that wholeness would replace it…
– David Tacey

Thank you Emahoy Tsegue Maryam Guèbrou

Nine years ago, I was walking through the sleepy town of Red Hook, drunk on first love and springtime, drunk on dusk and the philosophy books in my knapsack weighing down my shoulder blades like wooden wings, drunk on the sycamore leaves shifting shyly across the street lamps, drunk on the blooming pear trees, the procession of interiorities leaking out of each house I passed, each window a portal into a dinner party, an herb-misted kitchen, a room with a white desk on which was placed a blue notebook and a blue bottle with one tangerine ranunculi vertical and luminous as a flame. And as I crossed the road, nearing my boyfriend’s home, I heard it. Although to say I heard it underplays the physical sensation. I prickled and reverberated with it. I stood still as my blood went backwards and then forwards – a momentary hitch when every molecule in me turned over. It was music. Although my synesthesia almost saw it. Periwinkle vasculature through the gloaming. A hundred eyelashes growing from the open window of a ramshackle Victorian. It was piano music. As tremulous and tender as I’d imagine the translation of a star’s language might be. I felt as if I’d heard the sound of a mother’s voice I’d forgotten.

Without any thought that it might be impolite, I ran up to the open window and peered into the living room to see a group of upper classmen sprawled around a deflated green couch and a record player.

“What is this music?”

“It’s Emahoy Tsegue Maryam Guèbrou,” said a doe-eyed girl on the floor, flicking the blue ash fromi her cigarette into a cracked teacup.

“What?” I leaned in further as if I could taste the music. “No, write it down.”

She groaned and came to the window, taking a pen from my knapsack and writing the name down on my arm.

When I went home and looked her up, I wasn’t surprised that the song I’d heard was called “Homesickness”. It summoned that feeling I’d had for years of wanting to return to a land that no longer existed. For me that land was the childhood violence had stolen from me. And for former prisoner of war Guèbrou, forced from her home country, that feeling of homesickness was not abstract. Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1923, Guèbro studied music until a war against Italian colonizers interrupted her life. She was forced, after imprisonment, to take up her studies again in Cairo. Finally landing in Jerusalem she entered a monastery and began to compose music, releasing it with the profit going entirely to the musical education of other children. The album of piano compositions for which she is most well-known is hard to classify. They break rules of music theory. Momentarily whimsical and then so keenly sober that each note strikes the listener like a knife.

I wrote my first novel to Guèbrou. And then my second book. I listened to Guèbrou after I miscarried. At dawn. At dusk. On nights when I was so alone that I did not even think there was a home to be sick about. Her music is my liturgy. It is also the soundscape of all my creative work.

Today, at the age of 99, Guèbrou passed away in Jerusalem. And today I plant her in my pantheon of secular saints. Her music has kept me alive. Kept me oriented towards open windows. I think your music has the musical ability to dilate time, to reorganize a psyche. Thank you for reorganizing me.

– via Sophie Strand

You Fixed It
by Zeina Hashem Beck

And if the compass broke you fixed it, fastened
the pencil to it with a rubber band,
and if there was no hot water you fixed it, learnt
to sit on that plastic stool in the bathroom
and count, and if it was too cold outside
you fixed it, and there was the smell of burnt
lemon on the brazier, or the click
click click of the gas heater.
And if you were bored you fixed it, learnt how to cut
paper and color the scraps, learned to write
on the walls, and if you wrote on the walls you
fixed it, scrubbed them with your mom who yelled
at your big brother who what on earth
was he doing just watching? And if the TV blurred
you fixed it, adjusted the antenna to catch
those Japanese cartoons translated into Arabic
on the Syrian channel, and if the cartoons
hadn’t begun you fixed it, danced
to those nationalistic Syrian songs about Hafez, repeated
ya hala ya hala ya hala heh. And if you didn’t have enough
books you fixed it, read that French-Arabic dictionary the size
of your torso, stared at the words crépuscule and
And if you tripped on the missing tile you fixed it,
learnt to count your steps in the dark
afternoon without electricity, gauged
how dark it was by whether or not you could see
your thumb, and if you couldn’t see your thumb
you fixed it, got the candle from under the sink,
and if the sink was leaking you fixed it, tied
a cloth to the pipe, and if the pipe burst
you fixed it, pressed your palms
against the hole in the wall until
Mom called the grocer to call the butcher to call
the plumber next to him, and if there was a hole
in your sock you fixed it, learnt to fold it
under your big toe. And if your window shattered
you fixed it, taped cardboard to the frame,
and if someone died you fixed it by telling stories
about how crusty their lahm bi ajeen was,
and if the lahm bi ajeen was too crusty
you fixed it by dipping it in the tahini,
and if your sorrow hardened you fixed it
by dipping it in sea water, and if your country
hardened, if your country hardened you fixed it
by dipping it in song.

The irony that trying to impress another is inevitably unimpressive while trying to impress yourself leads to impressing others.
– @Obliquities

There is nothing else to be realized that is higher than the indivisibility of emptiness and awareness.
– Lerab Lingpa

…we know that it is the people who do not know enough about their own shadow and their own dark side who are most likely to fall victims to evil influences.

If one knows the evil possibilities within oneself, then one develops a kind of second sight or capacity for getting a whiff of the same thing in other people.

A jealous woman who has realized her own jealousy will always recognize jealousy in the eyes of another woman. The only way, therefore, not to walk through the world like an innocent well-brought-up fool , protected by father and mother from the evils of this world, and therefore cheated and lied to and stolen from at every corner, is to go down into the depths of one’s own evil, which enables one usually to develop the instinctual recognition of corresponding elements in other people.

– Marie-Louise Von Franz

I don’t want to be the moon,
I said to Dick on the casting
couch: I want to be a flower
no one can touch without dying
of hope of touching it again.
– Virginia Konchan

Patience is a hard discipline. It is not just waiting until something happens over which we have no control: the arrival of the bus, the end of the rain, the return of a friend, the resolution of a conflict. Patience is not waiting passively until someone else does something. Patience asks us to live the moment to the fullest, to be completely present to the moment, to taste the here and now, to be where we are.

When we are impatient, we try to get away from where we are. We behave as if the real thing will happen tomorrow, later, and somewhere else. Be patient and trust that the treasure you are looking for is hidden in the ground on which you stand.

– Henri Nouwen

Human beings have a strong dramatic instinct toward binary thinking, a basic urge to divide things into two distinct groups, with nothing but an empty gap in between. We love to dichotomize. Good versus bad. Heroes versus villains. My country versus the rest. Dividing the world into two distinct sides is simple and intuitive, and also dramatic because it implies conflict, and we do it without thinking, all the time.
– Hans Rosling

Cool means being able to hang with yourself. All you have to ask yourself is ‘Is there anybody I’m afraid of? Is there anybody who if I walked into a room and saw, I’d get nervous?’ If not, then you’re cool.
– Prince

Our consciousness is programmed. We see things a certain way from a young age – we’re programmed to keep doing them that way. Then you have to spend adulthood learning how to overcome it, to read out the programs. Try to create. I want to tell people to create. Just start by creating your day. Then create your life.
– Prince

It’s been so lonely without you here. Like a bird, without a song. Nothing can stop these lonely tears from falling. So tell me baby, where did I go wrong?
– Prince

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

We are so accustomed to the old opposition of reason versus passion, spirit versus life, that the idea of passionate thinking, in which thinking and aliveness become one, takes us somewhat aback.
– Hannah Arendt

A beginner’s mind always says, “I’m a learner. I’ve got more to learn.” It has to do with humility before reality, and never assuming that I understand. If there are fifty thousand levels of the mystery, maybe I’m at level forty-five. Maybe there’s more that needs to show itself to me. Can you imagine what a different world it would be if we all lived with that kind of humility?
– Richard Rohr

How many nights must it take
one such as me to learn
that we aren’t, after all, made
from that bird that flies out of its ashes,
that for us
as we go up in flames, our one work
is
to open ourselves, to be
the flames?
– Galway Kinnell

The truth is, a writer’s voice is made from other writers’ voices. Pieced together, picked and chosen, stumbled into, uninformed: influence seems like an involuntary series of contagions that eventually turns into a sort of vessel, or transportation system. As we acquire a sense of taste, and perhaps a sense of vocation, our reading becomes more directed and targeted, but we are bent and shaped and destined to be changed by the genius of others. Compare it to the theory behind cannibalism, if you like. One eats the heart of the admired one and becomes them. The remarkable news is that this pastiche of voices results in the incarnation of a new poet, a new hybrid distillation of voice, capable of telling the story of experience in new, valuable ways. [. . .] Each strong new writer is a deep student of what he or she has read and an amalgam of preexisting sentences and styles that have never been combined like that before. The idea that writerly originality appears from nowhere, or exists as something in isolation, a thing to be guarded and protected from influence, is lunacy. Anyone who doesn’t school themselves by deep, wide, and idiosyncratic reading is choosing aesthetic poverty.
– Tony Hoagland

Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination. I had been damaged and a very important part of me had been destroyed – that was my reality, the facts of my life; but on the other side of the facts was who I could be, how I could feel, and as long as I had words for that, images for that, stories for that, then I wasn’t lost.
– Jeanette Winterson

When the prison guards burned his manuscripts, Nguyễn Chí Thiện couldn’t stop / laughing—the 283 poems already inside him
– Ocean Vuong

What we can or cannot do, what we consider possible or impossible, is rarely a function of our true capability. It is more likely a function of our beliefs about who we are.
– Albert Camus

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.
– Hermann Hesse

History is the in-rushing toward what the Buddhists call the realm of the densely packed, a transformational realm where the opposites are unified.
– Terence McKenna

It is not possible to explain intellectually how sensations of the physical world are converted into ideas, how the leap-over from nervous vibrations into consciousness occurs, and how a neurosis becomes a psychosis. No one has ever explained this, nor will any scientist ever succeed in doing so. Truth alone can dispose of this poser by pointing out that sensations never really occur, but that the Self merely projects ideas of them; just as a man sees a mirage and mistakes it for real water merely by his mental projection, so people regard the world as real when they are merely transferring their own mental ideas to the world.
– Paul Brunton

A dragon, or corrupted aspect of the self, will not always transform, even once it is identified. It takes active work, in the three realms of body, mind, and spirit.
– Marlene Seven Bremner

Jesus was not killed by atheism and anarchy. He was brought down by law and order allied with religion, which is always a deadly mix. Beware those who claim to know the mind of God and who are prepared to use force, if necessary, to make others conform. Beware those who cannot tell God’s will from their own. Temple police are always a bad sign. When chaplains start wearing guns and hanging out at the sheriff’s office, watch out. Someone is about to have no king but Caesar.
– Barbara Brown Taylor

If you write, write about what you do and who you are, and you can’t be wrong. Don’t lie about anything. You are very similar to everybody else in the world. You love, you hate, you have friends, you have enemies. Be who you are.
– Carl Reiner

Most people live, whether physically, intellectually, or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul’s resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.
– William James

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. Nature does utter a peep – just this one. The birds and insects, the meadows and swamps and rivers and stones and mountains and clouds: they all do it; they all don’t do it. There is a vibrancy to the silence, a suppression, as if someone were gagging the world. But you wait, you give your life’s length to listening, and nothing happens. The ice rolls up, the ice rolls back, and still that single note obtains. The tension, or lack of it, is intolerable. The silence is not actually suppression: instead, it is all there is.
– Annie Dillard

I devoted my interest to the church’s mysterious world of low arches, thick walls, the smell of eternity, the colored sunlight quivering above the strangest vegetation of medieval paintings and carved figures on ceilings and walls. There was everything that one’s imagination could desire — angels, saints, dragons, prophets, devils, humans.
– Ingmar Bergman

I am no philosopher, he thought, fumbling for a cigarette, but if continuity is anything, it is in this. Bright pictures in the dark of the mind, each an echo of something, but still unique.
– Eva Figes

Where does it all lead? What will become of us? These were our young questions, and young answers were revealed. It leads to each other. We become ourselves.
– Patti Smith, Just Kids

Why can’t I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply.
– Patti Smith

When you enlarge your mind and let go of it,
When you relax your [qi 氣] vital breath and expand it,
When your body is calm and unmoving:
And you can maintain the One and discard the myriad disturbances.
You will see profit and not be enticed by it,
You will see harm and not be frightened by it.
Relaxed and unwound, yet acutely sensitive,
In solitude you delight in your own person.
This is called “revolving the vital breath”:
Your thoughts and deeds seem heavenly.
– Guan Zhong, Guanzi

…words are not of this world, they are a world unto themselves…
– Hugo von Hofmannstahl

How is it that the more able man becomes to manipulate the world to his advantage, the less he can perceive any meaning in it? This is a paradox that has often been noted, and has sometimes been attributed to a fundamental perversity in human nature.
– Owen Barfield

The great paradigm shift that lies at the core of modernism is the loss of mythic connection to the cosmos. The incarnation of meaning, once carried by myth & myth-sustaining institutions, has gone within, from Olympus to the solar plexus, from worship to psychopathology.
– James Hollis

As we do not know what it is to think rightly, deeply and profoundly, our solutions, political or religious, are in no way going to produce a sane and balanced world.
– Krishnamurti

If you know wilderness in the way that you know love, you would be unwilling to let it go…. This is the story of our past and it will be the story of our future.
– Terry Tempest Williams

Peace does not mean the suppression of all differences, but their coexistence and fruitful collaboration. Peace does not consist in one man, one party, one nation, crushing and dominating everyone else. Peace exists where men who have the power to be enemies are, instead, friends by reason of the sacrifices they have made in order to meet one another on a higher level, where the differences between them are no longer a source of conflict.
– Thomas Merton

[I Wrote A Good Omelet]

I wrote a good omelet…and ate
a hot poem… after loving you
Buttoned my car…and drove my
coat home…in the rain…
after loving you
I goed on red…and stopped on
green…floating somewhere in between…
being here and being there…
after loving you
I rolled my bed…turned down
my hair…slightly
confused but…I don’t care…
Laid out my teeth…and gargled my
gown…then I stood
…and laid me down…
To sleep…
after loving you

– Nikki Giovanni

If a man doesn’t know how he is wounded, he can deny the pain of others and the tragedies of this life. If a man doesn’t know how he is wounded he can’t see that others are wounded as well.
– Michael Meade

The human mind is not limited to the intellect. Where the intellect stops intuition picks up. We can sense truth even if we cannot articulate it in words or derive it from logical schemes. Unreliable as this sense may be, it is our only link to a broader reality.
– Bernardo Kastrup

From the errors of others, a wise man correct his own.
– Publilius Syrus

A million zeros joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one. Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but our fatally shortsighted age thinks only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations, though one would think that the world had seen more than enough of what a well-disciplined mob can do in the hands of a single madman. Unfortunately, this realization does not seem to have penetrated very far – and our blindness is extremely dangerous.
– C.G. Jung

Our problem is not that as children our needs were unmet, but that, as adults, they are still unmourned! In fact, neediness itself tells us nothing about how much we need from others; it tells us how much we need to grieve the irrevocably barren past and evoke our own inner source of nurturance. What was missed can never be made up for, only mourned and let go of. We are grieving the irretrievable aspect of what we lost and the irreplaceable aspect of what we missed. Only these two realizations led to resolution of grief because only these acknowledge, without denial, how truly bereft we were or are. From the pit of this deep admission that something is irrevocably over and gone we finally stand clear of the insatiable need to find it again from our parents or partner. To have sought it was to have denied how utter was its absence.
– David Richo

Our culture cannot yet give an appropriate response to the collective inundation caused by the overspilling of the psyche. The professions of psychiatry and psychology have little understanding of the numinous since they have subscribed to a narrow materialism.
– David Tacey

hoping that the flowers
burst out in laughter
spring wind
– Basho

The religious system is broken because too much psychic reality had been excluded. In particular, the dark side and the feminine principle were pressing toward recognition.
– David Tacey

We’ve all led raucous lives,
some of them inside, some of them out.
But only the poem you leave behind is what’s important.
Everyone knows this.
The voyage into the interior is all that matters,
Whatever your ride.
Sometimes I can’t sit still for all the asininities I read.
Give me the hummingbird, who has to eat sixty times
His own weight a day just to stay alive.
Now that’s a life on the edge.
– Charles Wright

How does one think of nothing? How to think of nothing without automatically putting something round that nothing, so turning it into a hole, into which one will hasten to put something, an activity, a function, a destiny, a gaze, a need, a lack, a surplus . . . ?
– Georges Perec

But my marriage was never the same after that poem.
– Maggie Smith

Towards all that we have forgotten—the inner pilgrimage that this eternal presence of spring urges upon us.
– Emil Cioran

No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.
– Mario Vargas Llos

You have to let other people be right…
It consoles them for not being
anything else.
– André Gide

The only way one can speak of nothing is to speak of it as though it were something, just as the only way one can speak of God is to speak of him as though he were a man … and as the only way one can speak of man … is to speak of him as though he were a termite.
– Samuel Beckett

Everything is Going to be All Right

How should I not be glad to contemplate
the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window
and a high tide reflected on the ceiling?
There will be dying, there will be dying,
but there is no need to go into that.
The poems flow from the hand unbidden
and the hidden source is the watchful heart.
The sun rises in spite of everything
and the far cities are beautiful and bright.
I lie here in a riot of sunlight
watching the day break and the clouds flying.
Everything is going to be all right.

– Derek Mahon

I hope you get old.
I hope time is heavy on your bones, draped over you like an embrace from God.
I hope the backs of your hands become deep maps—
Of all the places you have been.
Dark stains where your fingers dipped into clay and dirt and mud.
I hope you get old.
I hope time fills your heart with joy and triumph.
I hope you have enough obstacles to teach you character and empathy and enough challenges to bestow you with uniqueness.
I hope pain shows you how strong you are and the value of a true friend.
I hope you’ve been alone enough to know yourself.
I hope you find quiet more than you find chaos.
I hope you get old.
That time wraps around your legs like a desperate lover.
I hope you can look into the faces of people you have loved and cherished and that you leave behind echos of grief,
Because you were loved in turn.
I hope you give thanks for every waking moment,
For what you have and for what you have not.
I hope you get old.
I hope you make things that last.
I hope you’ve inspired people.
I hope you’ve helped someone.
I hope grace rests at your feet.
I hope.
You forgive everything,
You did.
Not
Get
Quite.
Right.
– Jann Arden

Somewhere in his journals, Dostoyevsky remarks that a writer can begin anywhere, at the most commonplace thing, scratch around in it long enough, pry and dig away long enough, and soon he will hit upon the marvelous.
– Saul Bellow

There are prophets, there are guides, and there are argumentative people with theories, and one must be careful to discriminate between them.
– Peter Brook

I dream of a quiet man…
by Wendell Berry

I dream of a quiet man
who explains nothing and defends
nothing, but only knows
where the rarest wildflowers
are blooming, and who goes,
and finds that he is smiling
not by his own will.

Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as it is for the body. Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead. Consistent intellectualism and spirituality may be socially valuable, up to a point; but they make, gradually, for individual death. And individual death, when the slow murder has been consummated, is finally social death. So that the social utility of pure intellectualism and pure spirituality is only apparent and temporary. What is needed is, as ever, a compromise. Life must be lived in different ways at different moments. The only satisfactory way of existing in the modern, highly specialized world is to live with two personalities.
– Aldous Huxley, Wordsworth in the Tropics

Praise by R. S. Thomas

I praise you because
you are artist and scientist
in one. When I am somewhat
fearful of your power,
your ability to work miracles
with a set-square, I hear
you murmuring to yourself
in a notation Beethoven
dreamed of but never achieved.
You run off your scales of
rainwater and sea water, play
the chords of the morning
and evening light, sculpture
with shadow, join together leaf
by leaf, when spring
comes, the stanzas of
an immense poem. You speak
all languages and none,
answering our most complex
prayers with the simplicity
of a flower, confronting
us, when we would domesticate you
to our uses, with the rioting
viruses under our lens.

Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life’s sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.
– Ursula K. Le Guin

I read the poem of a student and in the poem God wandered through a room picking up random objects – a pear, a vase, a shoe – and in bewilderment said, ‘I made this?’. Apparently God had forgotten making anything at all. I awarded this poem a prize, because I was a judge of such matters. I was not really awarding the student, I was awarding God; I knew someday the student would pick up his old poem and say in bewilderment, ‘I made this?’, and at that moment his whole world would be lost in the twilight, and when you are finally lost in the twilight you can not judge anything.
– Mary Reufle

When a culture is no longer centered in a living and continually renewed relational process, it freezes into the It-world which is broken only intermittently by the eruptive, glowing deeds of solitary spirits. From that point on, common causality, which hitherto was never able to disturb the spiritual conception of the cosmos, grows into an oppressive and crushing doom. Wise, masterful fate which, as long as it was attuned to the abundance of meaning in the cosmos, held sway over all causality, has become transformed into demonic absurdity and has collapsed into causality.
– Martin Buber

I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.
– C. S. Lewis

With the arrival of electric technology, man has extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism.
– Marshall McLuhan

Electric circuitry has overthrown the regime of “time” and “space” and pours upon us instantly and continuously the concerns of all other men. It has reconstituted dialogue on a global scale. Its message is Total Change, ending psychic, social, economic, and political parochialism. The old civic, state, and national groupings have become unworkable. Nothing can be further from the spirit of the new technology than “a place for everything and everything in its place.” You can’t go home again.
– Marshall McLuhan

I suppose that’s the way we humans are, thinking too much and listening too little. Paying attention acknowledges that we have something to learn from intelligences other than our own. Listening, standing witness, creates an openness to the world in which the boundaries between us can dissolve in a raindrop. The drop swells on the tip of a cedar and I catch it on my tongue like a blessing.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer

He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life.
– James Joyce

The art of living well is not to get our every desire. It’s to be well and whole regardless of what arises.
– Anne Rudloe

It is the best joke there is, that we are here, and fools—that we are sown into time like so much corn, that we are souls sprinkled at random like salt into time and dissolved here, spread into matter, connected by cells right down to our feet, and those feet likely to fell us over a tree root or jam us on a stone. The joke part is that we forget it. Give the mind two seconds alone and it thinks it’s Pythagoras. We wake up a hundred times a day and laugh.
– Annie Dillard

Transcendental Etude

No one ever told us we had to study our lives,
make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history
or music, that we should begin
with the simple exercises first
and slowly go on trying
the hard ones, practicing till strength
and accuracy became one with the daring
to leap into transcendence, take the chance
of breaking down the wild arpeggio
or faulting the full sentence of the fugue.
—And in fact we can’t live like that: we take on
everything at once before we’ve even begun
to read of mark time, we’re forced to begin
in the midst of the hard movement,
the one already sounding as we are born.

– Adrienne Rich

We can starve together or feast together. All flourishing is mutual.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer

They lived and laughed and loved and left.
– James Joyce

BODHIDHARMA:

Through endless ages, the mind has never changed. It has not lived or died, come or gone, gained or lost. It isn’t pure or tainted, good or bad, past or future, true or false, male or female.
It isn’t reserved for monks or lay people, elders to youths, masters or idiots, the enlightened or unenlightened. It isn’t bound by cause and effect and doesn’t struggle for liberation.
Like space, it has no form.You can’t own it and you can’t lose it. Mountains,rivers or walls can’t impede it. But this mind is ineffable and difficult to experience. It is not the mind of the senses. So many are looking for this mind, yet it already animates their bodies.
It is theirs, yet they don’t realize it.

– Red Pine (translator), Bill Porter

The work of preservation demands that the feelings playing about in one’s guts not be turned into action. Just watch their passing like cherry blossoms.
– Maxine Hong Kingston

The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer…And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.
– Hannah Arendt

On the edge of the prairie, where the sun had gone down, the sky was turquoise blue, like a lake, with gold light throbbing in it. Higher up, in the utter clarity of the western slope, the evening star hung like a lamp suspended by silver chains – like the lamp engraved up the title-page of old Latin texts, which is always appearing in new heavens and waking new desires in men.
– Willa Cather

They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.
There I was, way off my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.
– Eugène Ionesco

With a healthy mindset, you can go further than you dreamed possible. View setbacks as opportunities for growth, writing block as an excuse to push forward, success as something to be thankful for. Having a healthy mindset makes it much easier to have a healthy career.
– Keidi Keating

No dogma taught by the present civilization seems to form so insuperable an obstacle in the way of a right understanding of the relations which culture sustains to wildness as that which regards the world

as made especially for the uses of man.

Every animal, plant, and crystal controverts it in the plainest terms. Yet it is taught from century to century as something ever new and precious, and in the resulting darkness the enormous conceit is allowed to go unchallenged.

I have never yet happened upon a trace of evidence that seemed to show that any one animal was ever made for another as much as it was made for itself.

Not that Nature manifests any such thing as selfish isolation. In the making of every animal the presence of every other animal has been recognized.

Indeed, every atom in creation may be said to be acquainted with and married to every other, but with universal union there is a division sufficient in degree for the purposes of the most intense individuality; no matter, therefore, what may be the note which any creature forms in the song of existence, it is made first for itself, then more and more remotely for all the world and worlds.

The scenery of the ocean, however sublime in vast expanse, seems far less beautiful to us dry-shod animals than that of the land seen only in comparatively small patches; but when we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.
– John Muir

Our lifelong complex resounds like a musical theme with countless variations, playing itself throughout our life. It is a 21st century version of our ancestor whom we cannot disregard without peril of being held hostage by compulsions that repeat over decades.
– Ann Belford Ulanov

and if the fire burns us, we shall not put it out merely for that reason
– André Gide

On January 18, 1915 […] Woolf wrote in her journal, ‘The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think.’ Dark, she seems to say, as in inscrutable, not as in terrible.
– Rebecca Solnit

Poetry is a lightning rod that transmits epiphanies.
– Lawrence Ferlinghetti

train journey
the spreadsheet
of city lights
– Alan Summers

at the confluence
of two rivers
a swirling pair of swans
– @pauldavidmena

A shattered moon gradually reaccumulates.
– Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot

A large portion of our individual and collective problems arise from a false perception of deficit; a deficit about ourselves, a deficit about our lives. When we can see reality with truly clear eyes, we comprehend the enormity of the fullness within us and around us.
– dona Rio de Gracian

Lifetime-After-Lifetime Lover

She has never
ever
been the jealous type.

She knows my spirit is true
…and
who I choose to go home with
at the end of the night.

Of all my lovers,
and there have been a few,
she was the secure one;
so sure of herself,
sure of me,
sure of the true nature of reality.

Even though
she has many lovers,
I do not cling.

Letting-Go Heart-Mind
has been her greatest teaching
to me.

When the season gets heavy,
she saunters by —
white kimono bright;
she drops renewal onto my shoulders
in a cloak of shimmering forest light.

In early Spring, I pour her a drink
and try to make her laugh
until her cheeks turn sakura-pink.

Eventually, though,
it is Her time to go.

I grow quiet
and bow low.

But, like all other lovers
who have ever parted company,
some part of Her
stays with me

and some part of me
travels with Her
into the fading light of memory.

– Frank Inzan Owen

Magical thinking always leaves one feeling unfulfilled, empty, unmet; which explains why modernistas are always searching after more.
– DKG

“Take your oars out of the water and enjoy life a bit.” I’ll never forget that piece of advice….
– Evan Sanders, The Better Man Project

She is a funny creature and earnest,
and she is doing what she can to survive.
– Ada Limón

a world full of desires and our parents still in it / cracking a door open, warning us to leave it that way.
– Maya C. Popa

I think that’s the job of each of us: to show our best toys and our best tricks that lift us and our friends to higher and higher levels. And there is no end to this bootstrapping process. The future of the human mind and body and the future of humans together is endlessly bright.
– Terence McKenna

Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.
– William Faulkner, Light in August

Tell your story.
Shout it. Write it.
Whisper it if you have to.
But tell it.
Some won’t understand it.
Some will outright reject it.
But many will
thank you for it.
And then the most
magical thing will happen.
One by one, voices will start
whispering, ‘Me, too.’
And your tribe will gather.
And you will never
feel alone again.
– L.R. Knost

I am from places where
once you’re from there,
they change you and
they never leave you.
– Usman Hameedi

We must learn to keep the balance. Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance. Having choice, we must not act without responsibility.
– Ursula K Le Guin

I am no longer so fond of making journeys. But the journey visits me. Now when I am more and more pushed into a corner, when the annual growth rings multiply, when I need reading glasses. Always there is much more happening than we can bear. There is nothing to be surprised at.
– Tomas Tranströmer

According to Buddhism, the root of suffering is neither the feeling of pain nor of sadness nor even of meaninglessness. Rather, the real root of suffering is this never-ending and pointless pursuit of ephemeral feelings, which causes us to be in a constant state of tension, restlessness and dissatisfaction. Due to this pursuit, the mind is never satisfied. Even when experiencing pleasure, it is not content, because it fears this feeling might soon disappear, and craves that this feeling should stay and intensify.

People are liberated from suffering not when they experience this or that fleeting pleasure, but rather when they understand the impermanent nature of all their feelings, and stop craving them. This is the aim of Buddhist meditation practices. In meditation, you are supposed to closely observe your mind and body, witness the ceaseless arising and passing of all your feelings, and realise how pointless it is to pursue them. When the pursuit stops, the mind becomes very relaxed, clear and satisfied. All kinds of feelings go on arising and passing – joy, anger, boredom, lust – but once you stop craving particular feelings, you can just accept them for what they are. You live in the present moment instead of fantasizing about what might have been.

The resulting serenity is so profound that those who spend their lives in the frenzied pursuit of pleasant feelings can hardly imagine it. It is like a man standing for decades on the seashore, embracing certain ‘good’ waves and trying to prevent them from disintegrating, while simultaneously pushing back ‘bad’ waves to prevent them from getting near him. Day in, day out, the man stands on the beach, driving himself crazy with this fruitless exercise. Eventually, he sits down on the sand and just allows the waves to come and go as they please. How peaceful!

– Yuval Noah Harari

I would like not minding, whatever travels my heart. To follow it all the way into leaf-form, bark-furl, root-touch, and then keep walking, unimaginably further.
– Jane Hirshfield, Metempsychosis

Do the stars sing?
Yes
In which language?
They sing in every language. Even the ones we don’t know.
– David Lee

In this world where everyone dies, where every song ends, where every achievement is undone, where every treasure is lost, all of us are left behind. All of us leave. But everywhere and always there is the hum of continuing. Though always incomplete, always there is the sound of love, forever and at the core unfinished.
– Douglas Penick

I think it’s very frustrating and if I were God I would have a completely different system. I would have a magic wand and I would touch people with it, and help them be struck well. But nobody cares about what would work for me spiritually. My experience is that grace is never in the direction you are looking for it and it never even vaguely resembles what you think decent grace might look like. It’s like a shift, it’s like a breath, it’s like a pause. But then an hour later or three days later real life rears its ugly head again and it’s dicey, life is, and it’s a mess.
– Annie Lamott

If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.
– Ray Bradbury

Sometimes it was hard to say things. Things were so complicated. People might resent what you said. They might use your remarks against you. They might take you seriously and act upon your words, actually do something. They might not even hear you, which perhaps was the only thing worth hoping for. But it was more complicated than that. The sheer effort of speaking. Easier to stay apart, leave things as they are, avoid responsibility for reflecting the world and all its grave weight. Things that should be simple are always hard. But hard things are never easy.
– Don DeLillo

It is in the brain that everything takes place…. It is in the brain that the poppy is red, that the apple is odorous, that the skylark sings.
– Oscar Wilde

Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.
– George Orwell

I know there is no straight road
No straight road in this world
Only a giant labyrinth
Of intersecting crossroads
– Federico García Lorca

Forget about what’s happened;
don’t keep going over old history.
Be alert, be present. I’m about to do something brand-new.
It’s bursting out! Don’t you see it?
There it is! I’m making a road through the desert,
rivers in the badlands.
Wild animals will say ‘Thank you!’
– Isaiah 43:19

The brain is a belief engine… It relies on two processes: patternicity and agenticity. It finds meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless data. It infuses patterns with meaning, and imagines intention and agency in inanimate objects and chance occurrences… We believe before we reason. Once beliefs are formed, we seek out confirmatory arguments and evidence to justify them. We ignore contrary evidence or make up rationalizations to explain it away. We do not like to admit we are wrong. We seldom change our minds…
– Michael Sherman

Warriors are not what you think of as warriors. The warrior is not someone who fights, because no one has the right to take another life. The warrior, for us, is one who sacrifices himself for the good of others. His task is to take care of the elderly, the defenseless, those who cannot provide for themselves, and above all, the children, the future of humanity.
– Sitting Bull

Some books seem like a key to unfamiliar rooms in one’s own castle.
– Franz Kafka

Human beings

are made of water

we were not designed
to hold ourselves together

rather run freely
like oceans
like rivers

– Beau Taplin

To be able to live with ambiguity and ambivalence is a sign of a healthy person.
– Moshe Feldenkrais

A recent study published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience demonstrated that while most forms of exercise slow down age-related decline, dancing has even more profound benefits. Considered a psychosocial intervention, dancing combines the mood-elevating effects of increased social interaction with improvements in brain function, cardiac fitness, and overall quality of life. Mastering new rhythms, steps, and formations, in combination with increased social engagement, provides a boost to brain activity that creates additional cognitive benefits.
– Sayer Ji

stirring my tea
as a prayer
spring dawn
– Ogawa

The motto of Paracelsus was “He who can be his own, should not be another’s…”
– Stephan Hoeller, The Gnostic Jung

I want to raise up
the magic world
all around me and
live strongly and
quietly there.
– Virginia Woolf

Salvation is not flight from the wrath of God; it is accepting and reciprocating the love of God. Salvation is not separation. It is the beginning of union with all that is or has been or will ever be.

It is impossible to claim salvation and also believe that, in this life or in any life to come, one is better than another.

Or let me try to put it another way. Salvation is as real, as mighty, and as impersonal as the rain, and it is yet as private as the rain in one’s face. It is never accomplished; it is to be reaffirmed every day and every hour. There is absolutely no salvation without love: this is the wheel in the middle of the wheel. Salvation does not divide. Salvation connects, so that one sees oneself in others and others in oneself. It is not the exclusive property of any dogma, creed, or church. It keeps the channel open between oneself and however one wishes to name that which is greater than oneself.”

– James Baldwin

This occurred in the retelling,
under the present image:
a smiling woman clutching her scarf
in front of blue mountains
and scant drifting clouds. It seemed
something had happened to give her joy.
– Ann Lauterbach

After the wintry pain,
And the long, long sorrow,
Sing, heart!—for thee again
Joy comes with the morrow.
– Ina Coolbrith

May you have an encounter that awakens you and your gifts.

May you come out of hiding.

May you refuse to spend another season in spaces that lack growing room.

– Dr. Thema

Free yourself from explanations; neither Nature nor the Universe believe in them.
– Pico Iyer

There is a renewed interest in myth, in part because we feel that, as Blaise Pascal noted, “we wander in times which are not ours,” or we share Hamlet’s sense that “the time is out of joint,” or agree with Rilke that “we are not much at home in the world we have created.”
– James Hollis

To be liberated is to be able to see human life in the same way as you see all other life. And to do that you have to be able to live, as it were, on two levels: the level of involvement and the level of detachment.
– Alan Watts

And to the bullies who need / the musty air of / the clubhouse / All to themselves: / I am a brick in a house / that is being built / around your house.
– Cornelius Eady

Far too many words
in their mouths. Could they eat them?
What of their flavour?

Speaking them brought no
joy, spat out in the kitchen
and scattered everywhere

then cleared up. As if
language could be swept away
like dirt off someone’s

disgusting table.

– George Szirtes

And anyway, it’s the same old story—
a few people just trying,
one way or another,
to survive.

Mostly, I want to be kind.

– Mary Oliver

Each generation wants new symbols, new people, new names. They want to divorce themselves from their predecessors.
– Jim Morrison

Be planetary.
– Etel Adnan

I have an inalienable mistrust of the great ones of the earth and a thorough disbelief in any security with people who have no imaginations.
– Henry James

In you
there is an enormous intelligence
that can transmute your fear into
awareness. into endless
possibilities.
I say to you,
turn within.
– Guthema Roba

Each person has inside a basic decency and goodness. If he listens to it and acts on it, he is giving a great deal of what it is the world needs most. It is not complicated but it takes courage. It takes courage for a person to listen to his own goodness and act on it.
– Pablo Casals

I learned a world from each
one whom I loved
– Allen Ginsberg

The Mediterranean is an absurdly small sea; the length and greatness of its history makes us dream it larger than it is.
– Lawrence Durrell

Queer world-making is now a prevalent and increasingly useful coinage: a projection of affinities into a system that can and will hold you.
– Brian Blanchfield

Great melancholies and sorrows full of tedium can exist only in an atmosphere of comfort and solemn luxury.
– Fernando Pessoa

alone on the beach
watching whitecaps and seagulls
merge with greyness
while thinking of summer
and you … both gone
– Natalia Kuznetsova

the scent
of dappled sunlight
redwood hike
– Chen-ou Liu, Canada

I wanted to grow up and just be a reader, just someone who read. Even then I knew that wasn’t a job.
– Lydia Davis

How often will I think of you, until
our dying steps forget this light, forget
that we ever knew the happy glen,
or that I ever said, We must jump into the sun,
and we jumped into the sun.
– Edwin Morgan

When a thought arises, it brings another with it, and then another, in an endless sequence. It is this chain which has deceived us from beginningless time, and if we do not break it, it will continue to deceive us in the future.
– Dudjom Rinpoche

A discovery is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind.
– Albert von Szent-Gyorgyi

The Somebody Else’s Problem Field … can be run for over a hundred years on a single flashlight battery. This is because it relies on people’s natural predisposition not to see anything they don’t want to, weren’t expecting or can’t explain.
– Douglas Adams

Refuse to be used.

Protect yourself from vultures.

They’re counting on your confidence being dead.

You’re very much alive.

– Dr. Thema

To meditate does not mean to fight with a problem. To meditate means to observe. Your smile proves it.
– Thich Nhat Hanh

There are only two people who can tell you the truth about yourself – an enemy who has lost his temper and a friend who loves you dearly.
– Antisthenes

Mothers are all slightly insane.
– J.D. Salinger

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

“The softest thing in the universe,” said the Ancient Sage,
“Overcomes the hardest thing in the universe.
The stiff and unbending is the disciple of death,
The gentle and yielding is the disciple of life.
A tree that is unbending is easily broken.
The hard and the strong will fall.
The soft and weak will overcome.”

If a painful experience comes upon a humble soul,
She bends and thus remains whole.
Straightway she goes against herself,
Straightway she accuses herself,
And she does not set about accusing anyone else.
Thus she goes. on her way,
Untrouble, undepressed, in complete peace of mind,
Having now cause to be angrrey or to anger anyone.

Therefore, said the sage:
“Mix with all this humble as dust.
This is called the Original Harmony.
It cannot be made intimate, nor can it be alienated.
It cannot be benefited, nor can it be harmed.
It cannot be exalted, nor can it be debased.
For this very reason it is the highest, most valuable thing in
the world.”

The humble soul, at one with the dust of the earth,
Knows the power behind saying, “Forgive me.”
She is among the strongest in the world,
For nothing is more powerful than lowliness.

– Hieromonk Dasmascene. Christ the Eternal Tao

Relativity and quantum mechanics—for all their seeming abstruseness—are merely attempts to accurately describe the physical properties of the world in which you and I live. Yet they seem to describe the same world that mystics encounter inside themselves.
– Robin Robertson

To see the major complex, like a theme of music, playing us throughout our lives, even up to death, is to know firsthand the humiliation of being caught in a force beyond our control.
– Ann Belford Ulanov

Personality is the supreme realization of the innate idiosyncrasy of a living being. It is an act of high courage flung in the face of life, the absolute affirmation of all that constitutes the individual, the most successful adaptation to the universal conditions of existence coupled with the greatest possible freedom for self-determination. To educate a man to this seems to me no light matter. It is surely the hardest task the modern mind has set itself. And it is dangerous too.
– C.G. Jung

in the break room
she and i sit, eating snacks
on opposite sides
of the long table
we don’t say a word
– @TankaDaily

Your mouth was a torment to me
and I came within a hair
of telling you so.

– Dana Roeser

What I love about life. There’s no maniacal master plan. It’s just unfolding.
– Cate Blanchett

When the ego invests itself in its knowing, it is convinced that it has the whole picture. At that point, growth stops. The journey stops. Nothing new is going to happen to us after that point. The term we’re using here, “beginner’s mind,” comes from Buddhism. For Buddhists, it seems to refer to an urgent need to remain open, forever a student. A beginner’s mind always says, “I’m a learner. I’ve got more to learn.” It has to do with humility before reality, and never assuming that I understand. If there are fifty thousand levels of the mystery, maybe I’m at level forty-five. Maybe there’s more that needs to show itself to me. Can you imagine what a different world it would be if we all lived with that kind of humility?
– Adapted from Richard Rohr, Beginner’s Mind

BREATH

When you see them
tell them I am still here,
that I stand on one leg while the other one dreams,
that this is the only way,

that the lies I tell them are different
from the lies I tell myself,
that by being both here and beyond
I am becoming a horizon,

that as the sun rises and sets I know my place,
that breath is what saves me,
that even the forced syllables of decline are breath,
that if the body is a coffin it is also a closet of breath,

that breath is a mirror clouded by words,
that breath is all that survives the cry for help
as it enters the stranger’s ear
and stays long after the world is gone,

that breath is the beginning again, that from it
all resistance falls away, as meaning falls
away from life, or darkness fall from light,
that breath is what I give them when I send my love.

– Mark Strand

Muad’Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It’s shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad’Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson.
– Frank Herbert, Dune

He remembered the old Chinese proverb, sometimes ascribed to Confucius: If you sit by the river for long enough, the body of your enemy will float by.
– Salman Rushdie

I saw the dove come down, the dove with the green twig, the childish dove out of the storm and flood. It came toward me in the style of the Holy Spirit descending. I had been sitting in a cafe for twenty-five years waiting for this vision. It hovered over the great quarrel. I surrendered to the iron laws of the moral universe which make a boredom out of everything desired. Do not surrender, said the dove. I have come to make a nest in your shoe. I want your step to be light.
– Leonard Cohen

And then the kicker is this: in passing from the real to the imagined, in following that trail, you learn that both sides have a little of the other in each, that there are elements of the imagined inside your experience of the ‘real’ world – rock, bone, wood, ice – and elements of the real – not the metaphorical, but the actual thing itself – inside stories and tales and dreams.
– Rick Bass

There is no such thing as a neutral educational process. Education either functions as an instrument that is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes “the practice of freedom,” the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world. The development in an educational methodology that facilitates this process will inevitably lead to tension and conflict within our society.
– Paulo Freire

Mans desires are limited by his perceptions; none can desire what he has not perceived.
– William Blake

Discipline is a bad word in our culture. People associate it with having to do what they’re told. But discipline is quite a lovely word. It comes from the same root as disciple, and it means seeing yourself through the eyes of the teacher who loves you.
– Marion Woodman

Simplicity is complexity resolved.
– Constantin Brancusi

When I get really frustrated with a poem I start saving the document as ‘title millionth draft 1’ and ‘title millionth draft 2’ etc, which makes me feel better about the endlessness.
– Caroline Bird

Freud & Jung found that they had to evolve a new language, a new way of relating to the sufferings of their patients. They realized they were treating those who had fallen between the cracks opened by the erosion of institutional religion & limitations of medical science.
– James Hollis

There is a solitude in this world
I cannot pierce. I would die for it.
– Ada Limón

I seek new perfumes, ampler blossoms, untried pleasures.
– Joris-Karl Huysmans

Keep your love of nature, for that is the true way to understand art more and more.
– Vincent Van Gogh

A great fire burns within me, but no one stops to warm themselves at it, and passers-by only see a wisp of smoke.
– Vincent Van Gogh

I think about my name,
how it is the first gift I gift
to a stranger, the first thing
that was mine I ever gave
willingly to the world.
– Porsha Olayiwola

But just one question still remains
To which we must respond
Two roads lead from where we are
Which side are you on
– Arlo Guthrie

Blessed are you, embrace of the falling, foundation of the light, master of the human accident.
– Leonard Cohen, Book of Mercy

Three Rules To Write By

Write naked.
That means to write what you would never say.

Write in blood.
As if ink is so precious you can’t waste it.

Write in exile
as if you are never going to get home again, and you have to call back every detail.

– Denis Johnson

Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do
– Anne Carson

I don’t think that people accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense. I think it makes people terribly uncomfortable.
– David Lynch

The curse of memory is that
the facts alone don’t add up.
The stories of most actions
are short a few marbles.
It’s why history
takes the easy side of
the wrong loud,
while difficult truth
waits alone in the quiet.
The hills and the rocks,
the birds flying past,
those heard and saw
what we missed:
you and I
walking together
between the chances
that we had.
– Steve S. Saroff

The Perfect World
by Kahlil Gibran

God of lost souls, thou who are lost amongst the gods, hear me:

Gentle Destiny that watchest over us, mad, wandering spirits, hear me:

I dwell in the midst of a perfect race, I the most imperfect.

I, a human chaos, a nebula of confused elements, I move amongst finished worlds—peoples of complete laws and pure order, whose thoughts are assorted, whose dreams are arranged, and whose visions are enrolled and registered.

Their virtues, O God, are measured, their sins are weighed, and even the countless things that pass in the dim twilight of neither sin nor virtue are recorded and catalogued.

Here days and night are divided into seasons of conduct and governed by rules of blameless accuracy.

To eat, to drink, to sleep, to cover one’s nudity, and then to be weary in due time.

To work, to play, to sing, to dance, and then to lie still when the clock strikes the hour.

To think thus, to feel thus much, and then to cease thinking and feeling when a certain star rises above yonder horizon.

To rob a neighbour with a smile, to bestow gifts with a graceful wave of the hand, to praise prudently, to blame cautiously, to destroy a sound with a word, to burn a body with a breath, and then to wash the hands when the day’s work is done.

To love according to an established order, to entertain one’s best self in a preconceived manner, to worship the gods becomingly, to intrigue the devils artfully—and then to forget all as though memory were dead.

To fancy with a motive, to contemplate with consideration, to be happy sweetly, to suffer nobly—and then to empty the cup so that tomorrow may fill it again.

All these things, O God, are conceived with forethought, born with determination, nursed with exactness, governed by rules, directed by reason, and then slain and buried after a prescribed method. And even their silent graves that lie within the human soul are marked and numbered.

It is a perfect world, a world of consummate excellence, a world of supreme wonders, the ripest fruit in God’s garden, the master-thought of the universe.

But why should I be here, O God, I a green seed of unfulfilled passion, a mad tempest that seeketh neither east nor west, a bewildered fragment from a burnt planet?

Why am I here, O God of lost souls, thou who art lost amongst the gods?

To speak
is
to separate.

One word cannot be another—
A stone is not a tree.
Love is different from pain.
I am just I, and nothing else.

And yet this is a lie, because
all things are one; love turns to pain,
makes hardened hearts break into leaf,
form seeds that fall to earth as stones
and burst with love. I am this tree.

How can my words come back to truth?

Keep open eyes, and never say
‘That cannot be.’

It can, it can.

– Lory Widmer Hess

Under usual conditions, we tend to glide through the world without paying much attention to its intricate texture. Meeting the demands of the day often requires that we temporarily disregard our surroundings; we procure our everyday efficiency by suspending our connection to those parts of the world that do not serve our practical concerns. One of the amazing powers of love is that it offers a potent remedy to such carelessness. When we fall in love, dimensions of the world that have remained blurry or marginal suddenly click into focus for us. Neglected aspects of our environment clamor for notice. Facets of life that we normally ignore take on a heightened significance. Through an openness to those shades of our surroundings that usually remain eclipsed, we become keenly attentive to the myriad details of our lives.
While our ordinary preoccupations take place in the world, they also, in some ways, distance us from it. They distract us from the worldness of the world, as it were, because they are designed to allow us to make use of the world rather than to become fully and passionately immersed within its folds. In this sense, navigating the routine tasks and liabilities of life is not at all the same thing as being in touch with the pulse of the world. What is so wonderful about love is that it reconnects us to this pulse. It cuts through the din of our regular concerns so that we feel uncompromisingly real, aligned with the roundedness and timelessness of being. Yet we also feel firmly anchored in the here and now, embedded in the concrete materiality of the world. In a way, we are able to touch the sublime without ever leaving the world behind
– Mari Ruti

Let it come
like wildflowers,
suddenly, because the field
must have it: wildpeace.

– Yehuda Amichai (tr. from Hebrew by
Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell)

A lot of people worship the so-called “enlightenment” of psychopathic spiritual teachers.

I think the Stoics got it right. If a psychopath can be enlightened, then enlightenment is of no real value at all.

What is actually valuable? Being a good person.

– Duff McDuffee

Adrift
Let my dreams while I’m wide-awake
loose. Let me be drowned, baptized,
in the light given me. Day comes around,
night, fall, winter, spring,
summer. Leaves overhead, underfoot.
Waves arrive, buffets from friends
offended, enemies. Let it all come:
this is my way, this is the canoe I’m in.
– William Stafford
The Answers Are Inside the Mountain

At that time, truly, I say, the vital spirit, which dwells in the innermost chamber of the heart, started to tremble so powerfully that its disturbance reached all the way to the slightest of my pulses.
– Dante

Kafka (in a letter): “A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.”

As we cannot revivify myths that once moved generations, so we cannot afford the potential disasters of projecting those energies unconsciously. Through the projection of the shadow onto a Fuerher, a whole world may burn.
– James Hollis

Someone who lives in a group in which everybody suffers the same defect will be prone to accept his group’s values as normal.
– Erich Fromm, The Art of Being

The transcendent function is not something one does oneself; it comes rather from experiencing the conflict of opposites.
– CG Jung

If people can be educated to see the shadow-side of their nature clearly, it may be hoped that they will also learn to understand and love their fellow men better. A little less hypocrisy and a little more self-knowledge can only have good results in respect for our neighbor.
– CG Jung

I like people whose beauty entails something individually captivating; People whose beauty is as pure as tears. Oh how glorious the human heart can be! How terrifying, if it is also linked to the soul (for the heart alone does nothing for me).
– Anaïs Nin

There is a victim in each of us, a part which is hurt or damaged, which is afraid and begging for protection. It can, if it remains unconscious, tyrannize both ourselves from within and those around us from without.
– David Freeman

Whether a plot in a yard or pots in a window, every politically engaged person should have a garden.
– Camille Dungy, Soil

I must become something my enemies can’t eat, don’t have
a word for yet
– Taylor Johnson

Love unseats us, but we thread ourselves slowly back into the dull wood of our egos. It is hard to sustain a constant awe, as Lao Tzu importuned, and so tragedy befalls us. We fail to construct a lifelong state of wonder. And yet artistic and spiritual endeavors inspire our efforts to do so, as though the efforts themselves were all important.
– Forrest Gander

Spiritual awakening is the difficult process whereby the increasing realization that everything is as wrong as it can be flips suddenly into the realization that everything is as right is it can be. Or better, everything is as It as it can be.
– Alan Watts

I walked passed you on the way to the next thing… all of us were in a rush as usual. Not time for the organized halls of eco investment.

Wha?

You were someone unknown to me. We sideways assessed each other in our passing by. And in an unorthodox instant we decided though eye glance human-ness– not to give vibe to the ripping violence of competition, instead, in non-verbal gesture we chose to see one another as YES — I will clap for you. I will catch the sun for you. I will shine for you. I will hold you if you flicker. My up is not your down. My up is your up.

Picture if you can a realm of good will -of I will, –of we will– be ready with the next needed response to our chaos. I will sit with you.

I am not down with the step-overs, the what-about me’s…
or any of the other elbow jabbing BS.

Just hanging in. Some days we get to tomorrow by biting our fingernails.

And that is fine.

This is the moment when “your call is not really important to us Please push one for more information” And in the meantime after you have pushed 6 for an agent 9 times– I intend to be exactly the opposite. Real, and groping and lost with you. But here.

So take this for the lost ones. Who will likely never be re-humanized… we are still her. We are a long way from getting our shit together… but still we try daily.

– Nora Bateson

oh khusrau, the river of love
runs in strange ways.
one who enters it drowns,
and one who drowns, gets across.
– amīr khusrau

[A patient’s insoluble problem] was not solved logically in its own terms, but faded out when confronted with a new and stronger life urge. It was not repressed and made unconscious, but merely appeared in a different light, and so really did become different.
– CG Jung

… your new home is a mast, not an anchor.
– Neil Hawkesford

Initiation is the creative, artful container that helps each young person hear the call of spirit. In order to hear the call, a small death must come between parents and their child.
– Michael Meade

This World
by Czeslaw Milosz

It appears that it was all a misunderstanding.
What was only a trial run was taken seriously.
The rivers will return to their beginnings.
The wind will cease in its turning about.
Trees instead of budding will tend to their roots.
Old men will chase a ball, a glance in the mirror–
They are children again.
The dead will wake up, not comprehending.
Till everything that happened has unhappened.
What a relief! Breathe freely, you who have suffered much

Signals swarm through Mimi’s phone. Suppressed updates and smart alerts chime at her. Notifications to flick away. Viral memes and clickable comment wars, millions of unread posts demanding to be ranked. Everyone around her in the park is likewise busy, tapping and swiping, each with a universe in his palm. A massive, crowd-sourced urgency unfolds in Like-Land, and the learners, watching over these humans’ shoulders, noting each time a person clicks, begin to see what it might be: people, vanishing en masse into a replicated paradise.
– Richard Powers, The Overstory

That’s the trouble with people, their root problem. Life runs alongside them, unseen. Right here, right next.
– Richard Powers, The Overstory

My understanding from being a gardener is: Earth is magic. Whoever claims otherwise is blind. Earth is not a resource, not a mere means to achieve human ends. Our relationship to nature today is not determined by astonished observation, but solely by instrumental action. The Anthropocene is precisely the result of total subjugation of Earth/nature to the laws of human action. It is reduced to a component of human action. Man acts beyond the interpersonal sphere into nature by subjecting it entirely to his will. He thereby unleashes processes that would not come about without his intervention, and lead to a total loss of control.

It is not enough that we now have to be more careful with Earth as a resource. Rather, we need a completely different relationship with Earth. We should give it back its magic, its dignity. We should learn to marvel at it again. Natural disasters are the consequences of absolute human action. Action is the verb for history. Walter Benjamin’s angel of history is confronted with the catastrophic consequences of human action. In front of him, the heap of debris of history grows towards the sky. But he cannot remove it, because the storm from the future called progress carries him away. His wide eyes and open mouth reflect his powerlessness. Only an angel of inaction would be able to defend himself against the storm.
– Byung-Chul Han, I Practise Philosophy as Art

Starfish

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, Last night,
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.

And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.

Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life’s way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won’t give you smart or brave,
so you’ll have to settle for lucky.) Because you
were born at a good time. Because you were able
to listen when people spoke to you. Because you
stopped when you should have and started again.

So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.

– Eleanor Lerman

Life is a hard battle anyway. If we laugh and sing a little as we fight the good fight of freedom, it makes it all go easier. I will not allow my life’s light to be determined by the darkness around me.
– Sojourner Truth

At times poetry is the vertigo of bodies and the vertigo of speech and the vertigo of death;
the walk with eyes closed along the edge of the cliff, and the verbena in submarine gardens
– Octavio Paz

I am in urgent need of having my lips sealed with kisses.
– Franz Kafka, 1912.

She lost herself in the trees, among the ever-changing leaves. She wept beneath the wild sky as stars told stories of ancient times. The flowers grew towards her light, the river called her name at night. She could not live an ordinary life with the mysteries of the universe hidden in her eyes.
– Christy Ann Martine

She was stronger alone; and her own good sense so well supported her, that her firmness was as unshaken.
– Jane Austen

In his face there came to be a brooding peace that is seen most often in the faces of the very sorrowful or the very wise. But still he wandered through the streets of the town, always silent and alone.
– Carson McCullers

O wounded body
wounded soul
Admit you’ve been happy
Just between us
admit it

– Abdellatif Laâbi, from Life
(translated by Andre Naffis- Sahely)

It is obvious that the only interesting people are interested people, and to be completely interested is to have forgotten about “I.”
– Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

It’s amazing how lovely common things become, if one only knows how to look at them.
– Louisa May Alcott

…the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe.
– G.K. Chesterton

The world is not simple.
Anyone will tell you.
– Jenny George

Almost without exception, great spiritual teachers will always have strong direct guidance about love and suffering. If you never go there, you will not know the essentials. You’ll try to work it all out in your head, but your mind alone can’t get you there.
– Richard Rohr

The first archetypal figure we meet, according to Jung, is no shining angel of light, but the shadow. The paradox of Jung’s psychology is that to get to the source of light, the Self, we have to go via the darkness of the unconscious with its repressed instincts and drives.
– David Tacey

I don’t know if any poem can really stand up to virality. A poem only wants to be perceived up to a point and if you over-scrutinize it will undergo a structural collapse as revenge.
– Elisa Gabbert

To s Poet in Despair

“wild to be wreckage forever”
– James Dickey

Look at her,
the swan caught
on the fishing line,
wrecking herself into splendor.

And haven’t you done that with your one life?
And haven’t you done that with your name?

Though the changes
come
and undo you,
though your life
is ruined
to be loosened,
there is still one thing
you can do with it:

Make the ruin great.

– Joseph Fasano

The spiritual journey is not glamorous, despite what New Age shops tell us, with their dolphins, incense and sunsets. Like Jacob at the ford, we are forced to wrestle with the angel as we attempt to cross the river of life to a new landscape.
– David Tacey

Every spoken word double-crosses us. The only tolerable form of communication is the written word, since it isn’t a stone in a bridge between souls but a ray of light between stars.
– Pessoa

So went he as with light about his head,
And in the joyous travail of the year
Grew April-hearted; since nor grief nor fear
Can master so a young man’s blood so long
That it shall move not to the mounting song
Of that sweet hour when earth replumes her wings. . . .
– Swinburne

Is anyone anywhere happy? No, not unless they are living in a dream or in an artifice that they or someone else has made.
– Sylvia Plath

Dance dance otherwise we are lost.
– Pina Bausch

Those who are not enthusiastic about anything grow cold and begin to die. You have to start to really desire. To grasp life with both hands so that it does not slip away, if you understand what I mean. Otherwise, all is lost.
– Amos Oz

An hour is not an hour, but a vase filled with perfumes, sounds, projects and climates.
– Marcel Proust, Time Regained

When you have worked on for so long you never know when you are done.
– Jericho Brown

Absent Place ― an April Day ― Daffodils a-blow Homesick curiosity To the Souls that snow ―
– Emily Dickinson

Cheers for spring; for life; for a growing soul.
– Sylvia Plath

You exist as an idea in your mind.
– Shunryu Suzuki Roshi

I’m an early riser. I get up between five & six, have coffee, & read for a couple of hours before everyone else gets up
– David Bowie

Ships make you thick. Your brain rots away because you’re always thinking about which direction the wind’s coming from.
– Jacques Brel

Love is the longing
for the half of ourselves
we have lost.
– Milan Kundera

How to live in a world with which you disagree ? How to live with people when you neither share their suffering nor their joys ? When you know that you don’t belong among them ? Our century refuses to acknowledge anyone’s right to disagree with the world…
– Milan Kundera

Art is partly communication, but only partly. The rest is discovery.
– William Golding

love life day by day, color by color, touch by touch, because you’ve got a body & mind to exercise, and that is your lot, to exercise & use it as much as you can, never mind whose got a better or worse body & mind, but stretch yours as far as you can.
– Sylvia Plath

And I sit here without identity: faceless. My head aches. There is history to read – centuries to comprehend before I sleep, millions of lives to assimilate before breakfast tomorrow.
– Sylvia Plath

Do not let your happiness depend on something you may lose.
– C. S. Lewis

My shame in this world
will soon be forgotten—
springtime journey.
– Shokei

Let’s face it: I’m scared, scared and frozen. First, I guess, I’m afraid for myself…the old primitive urge for survival. It’s getting so I live every moment with terrible intensity.
– Sylvia Plath

In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia.
– Milan Kundera

There is a fine Jewish proverb: Man thinks, God laughs.[…] It pleases me to think that the art of the novel came into the world as the echo of God’s laughter. But why does God laugh at the sight of man thinking? Because man thinks and the truth escapes him.
– Milan Kundera

Ah! Now I’ve done Philosophy,
I’ve finished Law and Medicine,
And sadly even Theology:
Taken fierce pains, from end to end.
Now here I am, a fool for sure!
No wiser than I was before.
– Faust

We cannot possibly adjust enough to please the fanatics, and it is degrading to make the attempt.
– Christopher Hitchens

Equanimity dampens feedback loops, and most of our sensory field arises from feedback loops. Equanimity doesn’t just make it easier to weather the storm, it practically removes the storm.
– @nickcammarata

If meditation had an easier on-ramp people would talk about little else.
– @nickcammarata

INVOCATION

The day hanging by its feet with a hole
In its voice
And the light running into the sand

Here I am once again with my dry mouth
At the fountain of thistles
Preparing to sing.

– W.S. Merwin

More than anything, memory resembles a library in alphabetical disorder, and with no collected works by anyone.
– Joseph Brodsky

Nations are but names; and continents but shifting sands.
– Herman Melville

The sweet small clumsy feet of april came into the ragged meadow of my soul.
– e. e. cummings

Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence… I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them.
– Emerson

LV.

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmear’d with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword, nor war’s quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
‘Gainst death, and all oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the judgment that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.

– William Shakespeare

Just as madness lurks in our creativity and threatens to make dead its aliveness, so does creativity lurk in our madness. That is an astounding and heart-supporting fact.
– Ann Belford Ulanov, Madness and Creativity

Whenever we are caught in a literal view, a literal belief, a literal statement, we have lost the imaginative metaphorical perspective to ourselves and our world.
– James Hillman

THE KEYS TO LIBERATION ARE IN THE WORDS OUR MASTERS FORBID

Imagine you are at a gambling casino. You just lost thirty hands in a row. You suspect the cards are marked, but the casino has a rule stating you can only talk about the front of the cards but never the back. Because the system is being done systemically, a rule that you can only consider the cards individually hides the scam. In a nutshell, that is what the war on critical theory is all about. In this land where people are propagandized into unjust hierarchies of race class and gender, waking up to systems of domination is heresy.

We should be very suspicious when politicians tell us that even though our nation enslaved Black people for centuries we are not racist nation and it should be illegal for teachers to even discuss the topic. White supremacy is not simply about the personal prejudices of individuals. White supremacy is a collective system of power. To like People of Color so long as they affirm the traditional white version of history and do not question the fairness of an economic system crafted by and for slaveholding white people. Very few white people would be comfortable affirming white supremacy right out loud, but that is precisely what we are doing when we silence the historic voices of People of Color, and defend economic injustice by refusing to reshuffle the current deck of wealth and power so they can be shared more fairly with those white supremacy has historically left out.

We should also be very suspicious when clergy from patriarchal religions tell us women should be forbidden from exercising dominion over their own bodies. How can anyone honestly claim this is a nation with gender justice when it cannot even pass an equal rights amendment? Only a minority of men are going to embrace patriarchy out loud. It is much more effective to oppose equal rights in the name of family, religion or of the nebulous term “life.”

Systems of domination rely on never stepping back to get the big picture. The more unconscious this trance is, the more power it holds. If we want break the trances of white supremacy, patriarchy and colonial capitalism, it is important to be willing to swim upstream. We must be willing to be unpopular and to be laughed at by the powers that be. To stay “woke” means to stay aware and to question the mindless vocabulary of the ruler class.

Going back to the casino metaphor, critical theory means looking at the front AND back of the cards to get a sense of the power relationships that do not show up if we consider each card individually. The keys to human liberation are often found in the words, thoughts and actions the powerful would forbid.

– Jim Rigby

?does the question mark have to be at the end
– @the_wilderless

There are several really great ways to stop being intimidated by advanced degrees:

-read some actual dissertations
-find out which kinda-dumb folks from your own past now have PhDs
-start out on that track yourself and realize it’s about endurance/obedience, not intelligence

– @the_wilderless

Ancient Greek word hamartia, means “error,” from the verb hamartano, “to miss the mark.” Centuries later, the same word—hamartia—came to mean “sin”. [Greek] tragedies depict characters making mistakes, rather than inherent flaws in character.
– Bryan Doerries

Mystery and mysticism come from the same root. So they are associated with a sense of darkness, with going into a realm where you don’t see very clearly, where things are more obscure and will remain obscure. It is also a realm of silence rather than wordy thought.
– Karen Armstrong

What they are ー
I don’t know.
But they’re all blooming.
– Santoka

You don’t wait to be kind. The world needs your kindness right now, all the time. There will be a place for your kindness: Provide it. You also don’t wait to be a writer or an actor: You study and you prepare and you respect the ground on which you might not yet walk. You are whatever you need to be before anyone else makes the judgment that you’re ready for public display. Craft yourself into a kind and giving and curious person. That is something the world needs, and there will be no unemployment and a lifetime of riches.
– Julie Harris

Already, he was dreaming of a refined solitude, a comfortable desert, a motionless ark in which to seek refuge from the unending deluge of human stupidity.
– Joris-Karl Huysmans

Literature has always allowed me to understand life. But precisely for that reason it leaves me outside of it.
– Enrique Vila-Matas

I am torn between a multitude of conflicting emotions and insights.
– Sylvia Plath

Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.
– G.K. Chesterton

I fall down in order to stay faithful to
the light, in order to make the world ambiguous, fascinating, changeable, dangerous, in
order to announce the steps beyond.
– Adonis

This, I believe, is the great Western truth: that each of us is a completely unique creature and that, if we are ever to give any gift to the world, it will have to come out of our own experience and fulfillment of our own potentialities, not someone else’s.
– Joseph Campbell

Such stillness~
the hum of the air conditioner
drowns out the traffic.
– Dave Bonta

listening to
the sacred flute
shaded by green leaves
– Basho

[Jonathan] Williams … began his avant-garde press while still a student … naming it “Jargon” not only for its meaning of personal idiom, but after the French spring pear, “jargonelle,” and the French “jargon,” meaning the twittering of birds.
– Jeffery Beam

I had always worked with the temperamental conviction that at bottom there are no insoluble problems and experience justified me insofar as I have often seen patients simply outgrow a problem that had destroyed others.
– CG Jung

We should never identify ourselves with reason, for man is not a creature of reason alone. The irrational cannot be and must not be extirpated. There seems to be something in the human psyche, and that if this is not the idea of God, then it is the belly.
– CG Jung

It takes, as a rule, a very long time — many years, usually — before the two sides of the personality, represented by conscious and unconscious, can be brought into Tao.
– Barbara Hannah

We understand math, but we don’t understand understanding. … In addition to exploring distant star systems, we might also imagine that in the future we’ll find ways to know each other better. Since we’re fundamentally creative, that process would never end. … I would sometimes call it the empathy ramp. As we ascend, empathy would have more and more of a chance.
– Jaron Lanier, The Dawn of Everything

Sheer, bright-shining spring, spring as it used to be,
Cold in the morning, but as broad daylight
Swings open, the everlasting sky

Is a marvel to survivors.

– Seamus Heaney

We are like books.
Most people only see our cover, the minority read only the introduction, many people believe the critics.
Few will know our content.
– Émile Zola

A poem is a gesture toward home.
It makes dark demands I call my own.
– Jericho Brown

For a fully enlightened being, the difference between what is neurosis and what is wisdom is very hard to perceive, because somehow the energy underlying both of them is the same.
– Pema Chodron

Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when beliefs wither, when their articles and their precepts slacken, when their rules collapse. Every period’s ending is the mind’s paradise, for the mind regains its play and its whims only within an organism in utter dissolution.
– Emil Cioran

What I want, really, is an escape from argument altogether.
– Garth Greenwell

Conceptually, I am open to mistakes -errors, actually. I do play lots of wrong notes while I am making some music & a mistake or a wrong note is like a gift for me: ‘Oh, wow an unknown sound or an unknown harmony. I didn’t know about this.
– Ryuichi Sakamoto

“One world” is becoming a hideous possibility and I wish to celebrate our differences for as long as is possible.
– Donald Richie

Hardly touching, I hold / What I can only think of / As some deepest of memories in my arms, / Not mine, but as if the life in me / Were slowly remembering what it is.
– Galway Kinnell

I wait here for you every night, all night,
my back strong, my hands resting,
my eyes staring straight ahead, unseeing.
They think I am meditating,
They watch me every night, yearning, praying;
– Eabhan Ní Shuileabháin

Remember when you’d lie spread-eagle
looking at the sky,
and it was there for you;
rushed to meet you,
close as an embrace
– Marjorie Moorhead

In the book of our hours,
we are being written, revised.
– Martin Willitts Jr

I emptied the cup and then
poured out the emptiness
but then I looked in and
there was still more
– Maija Haavisto

There is no metaphor for the spring’s disgrace, / No matter how much the rose leaves look like bronze dove hearts, / No matter how much the plum trees preen in the wind.
– Charles Wright

I wanted to tell the man that everyone alive on this fluke little planet was on the spectrum. That’s what a spectrum is. I wanted to tell the man that life itself is a spectrum disorder, where each of us vibrated at some unique frequency in the continuous rainbow.
– Richard Powers

We can lead our life so as to become more awake to who we are and what we’re doing rather than trying to improve or change or get rid of who we are or what we’re doing. The key is to wake up, to become more alert, more inquisitive and curious about ourselves.
– Pema Chodron

It must be pointed out that just as the human body shows a common anatomy over and above all racial differences, so, too, the human psyche possesses a common substratum transcending all differences in culture and consciousness.
– CG Jung

even the
thorn brush
is blooming!
– Issa

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean…
– Jack Gilbert

The way the night knows itself with the moon, be that with me.
– Rumi (trans. Coleman Barks)

If people can
just love each other
a little bit,
they can be so happy.
– Émile Zola

The primary question in speaking of personality, as of individuation, is always, ‘Do you know who you are? Are you living your own way, your own truth?’ The answer is seldom found without conscious effort.
– Daryl Sharp, Jungian analyst, Eyes Wide Open

the news
of an old lover’s death,
long into the night
the click
clicking
of sewing needles
– John Wisdom

Not even those who once lived before us,
the demigods, sons born from our lords, the gods,
brought to completion a life without toil or decline or danger,
and arrived at old age.
– Simonides, translated by Jenny Strauss Clay

What does a person of Kitezh, still in the world and capable of speaking, owe to the people who did not flee the sunken city? Only a pine branch. The rhododendrons and the yellowing fields. The verses others would have written down or spoken.
– Jennifer A Sutherland

Everything without exception which is of value in me comes from somewhere other than myself, not as a gift but as a loan which must be ceaselessly renewed.
– Simone Weil

April this year, not otherwise
Than April of a year ago,
Is full of whispers, full of sighs,
Of dazzling mud and dingy snow;
– Edna St. Vincent Millay

There’s an almost sumptuous element
in coming out of denial.

After all, you gain access
to new, rolling hillsides,
vast, stretching expanses
of your own soul

And while the reason for denial
is always the avoidance of pain
that you now must face and claim,
a courage too is found
that allows you to finally stand
on the crags of yourself,
face the storm
and say,

“I am ready to face
old nightmares.

I am ready to meet old ghosts.

I am ready to know
my compressed power.

I am ready to see
all the ways I have distorted myself
and why.

I am ready to meet the full range
of my voice
I once thought
would get me into so much trouble.

I am ready to face the brightness
of my gifts
I once feared would blind people.

Break down what will.
Hand me my full allotment of pain,
the full spectrum of my fear—
I am ready for the full inheritance
of myself.
Make me unbearably humble or grand.

I am ready for anything
but to continue to be complicit
in my soul’s silencing.

– Chelan Harkin

Something we were withholding made us weak until we found it was ourselves.
– Robert Frost

leaving him was like
watching my heart escape my chest
and finding it
in my own hands
– Reagan Myers

The creativity of consciousness may be jeopardized by religious or political totalitarianism, for any authoritarian fixation of the canon leads to sterility of consciousness.
– Erich Neumann

“Alaha” meant Unity and God in the Aramaic that Jesus used. Interesting how close it is to the Hawaiian word Aloha.
– George Gorman

The key concept is to open your ears. Music can be here and there, anywhere surrounding you.
– Ryuichi Sakamoto

Find contentment at the level of the heart, and if you are discouraged, be refreshed by the image of your original nature.
– The Gospel of Mary Magdalene

When we’re trying to change ourselves or change the other, we’re essentially rejecting what is arising in the present moment. & if we reject it, we can’t really meet it. & if we can’t meet it, we can’t allow the space for understanding…
– Laura Bridgman

in my withered field
the surprise of
flowering grass
– Buson

People wish to be poets more than they wish to write poetry, and that’s a mistake. One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated.
– Lucille Clifton

what unites us is the tearing apart of thought to the boundaries of the unthought; the impossibility of saying and of being said.
– edmond jabès

My city
I lost it when I was
almost a child.
I don’t know where I put it
or where inside me it’s hurting.
– Angelina Gatell, poet from Barcelona

This isn’t a secret; I have failed
to love

… I have failed
to forget love is one of many
higher choruses

– Steven Leyva

White violets
have no place
on your hot brow;
how can I bring you
what the spring must bring?
– H.D

Having curiosity is the only way to learn.
– Nnedi Okorafor

I have had to learn the simplest things
last. Which made for difficulties.
– Charles Olson

The beginning of wisdom, I believe, is our ability to accept an inherent messiness in our explanation of what’s going on. Nowhere is it written that human minds should be able to give a full accounting of creation in all dimensions and on all levels. Ludwig Wittgenstein had the idea that philosophy should be what he called “true enough.” I think that’s a great idea. True enough is as true as can be gotten. The imagination is chaos. New forms are fetched out of it. The creative act is to let down the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended and then to attempt to bring out of it ideas.
– Rupert Sheldrake

The older you get, the louder you should sing.
– Dame Judi Dench

They can be like a sun, words. They can do for the heart what light can for a field.
– John of the Cross

If people come together, they can even mend a crack in the sky.
– Somali proverb

Kansas coos me into its wheat.
Done with direction, I follow the lightning,
God’s arrows insisting even the desolate
can be a destination.

In the black and white of a winter dawn
a train zippers the wet land
to a sky clouded with intention.
It looks more like a photograph

than a photograph resembles the moment
it captures, its frame diverting, its filter
slanting truths. Say I make of this a photo—
what would the evidence show?

– Erin Adair-Hodges, Unmappable

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
– Albert Camus

Funny

What’s it like to be a human
the bird asked

I myself don’t know
it’s being held prisoner by your skin
while reaching infinity
being a captive of your scrap of time
while touching eternity
being hopelessly uncertain
and helplessly hopeful
being a needle of frost
and a handful of heat
breathing in the air
and choking wordlessly
it’s being on fire
with a nest made of ashes
eating bread
while filling up on hunger
it’s dying without love
it’s loving through death

That’s funny said the bird
and flew effortlessly up into the air

– Anna Kamienska

The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.
– Stephen Jay Gould

To receive the light
and return it…
– Jorie Graham

THE LAST WORD IS THE CAPTAIN

Because my head hasn’t grown
since I stopped growing, and my memories
have piled up inside me,
I have to assume they’re now in my belly
and my thighs, and legs. A sort of walking archive,
an orderly disorder, a cargo hold weighing down
an overloaded ship.

Sometimes I want to lie down on a park bench:
that would change my status
from Lost Inside to
Lost Outside.

Words have begun to abandon me
as rats abandon a sinking ship.
The last word is the captain.

– Yehuda Amichai

INVENTORY OF ESSENTIAL DISTRACTIONS

Titmouse at the thistle feeder.
Wing-beat of geese
navigating by the moon.
Exultation of a turquoise moth
who will die before sunrise.
The baby’s ancient gaze
from a supermarket shopping cart.
Honor the essential distractions
that make you whole.

Gifted by the mist at dawn,
shards of sunbeam trembling
in the open fingers of a fern.
Elegant cracks in a hand-made tea bowl.
Choir upon choir of empyrean petals
in a fallen camellia.
Are we not redeemed by the sure
sweet vision of particulars?
What else is faith?

Glistening spider’s web
in the withering hyssop.
The motionless explosion of a rose.
Every flame-tipped thing conspiring
in a ceaseless whisper of revelation,
“Yes, you are here.”
Waves dissolving on sand.
Silence between raindrops.
This breath.

– Alred K. Lamotte

I was good with words, you with the gods.
– Dave Smith

What can it hurt to feel all again, to hear
love’s tale of aches on dream’s flesh-eating shore?
– Dave Smith

Dream spirit, muse I loved! Let me tell you
her skills, and how perfect her parts to me,
that red-mouthed, lank, straw-topped girl who
played me, witty as wind, heron sleek.
– Dave Smith

All that I wrote was a hymn to desire,
To the semblances and stages of bliss. My poems
Bore only a passing likeness to the life
Of which they were the miraculous part.
– Mark Strand

I must have wanted then what I want now,
a quiet room’s forgiveness for what’s been
done or not done.
– Dave Smith

Plato explained that before our soul got encased in the material vessel of our body, it enjoyed the company of the gods. Having been asked to drink from the river of Lethe (of forgetfulness) prior to settling into its human host, it does not explicitly recall this, yet it retains an intuitive connection to the celestial domain it has lost. More specifically, the feverish desire we experience when we fall in love signifies that our soul is yearning to rise to the transcendent realm from which it has been exiled by its earthly existence. The fact that the person we love incarnates ideal beauty on Earth stimulates our longing to reunite with divine beauty. We may not be consciously aware of this nebulous affiliation between earthly and divine beauty. Yet our insistent craving for the company of our beloved is a sign that our soul is enthusiastically preparing for its upward flight toward the incandescent province of divine splendor.

In one of his most famous similes, Plato portrays the soul as a winged entity awaiting the reviving jolt of eros. He specifies that while earthly existence causes the feathers on the surface of the soul’s wings to wither away from lack of use, falling in love softens and revitalizes the passages from which the feathers grow, allowing new feathers to shoot. The strange agitation that we feel in love is thus, metaphorically speaking, an indication that our soul is refeathering its wings so as to better soar to the heights. Plato depicts this state of the soul as one of mingled pleasure and pain that renders us irrational, tumultuous, and even a bit insane. As he posits, ‘the soul of a man who is beginning to grow his feathers has the same sensation of pricking and irritation and itching as children feel in their gums when they are just beginning to cut their teeth.’

The restlessness of the lover is hence expressive of the soul’s impatience to recapture a divine domain. Eros, in a sense, bridges the human and the divine. Plato’s parable implies that if there is something about human life that makes it difficult for us to remain cognizant of the transcendent dimensions of life, eros insists on animating those dimensions; it insists that we look beyond the daily grind. The fact that we may not be able to name or accurately describe this experience does not dilute its power to move us. In the same way that the wings of the soul swell with the regrowth of feathers, love makes us feel as if we were able to reach beyond the familiar topography of our everyday reality. We attain a stirring sensation of coming to our own, arriving, as it were, at a loftier sense of life’s possibilities.

– Mari Ruti

Easter mist rises
dogwoods remember the cross
blooms believe briefly
– Greg Sellers

If you feel safe and loved, your brain becomes specialized in exploration, play, and cooperation; if you are frightened and unwanted, it specializes in managing feelings of fear and abandonment.
– Bessel van der Kolk

It was an uncertain spring. The weather, perpetually changing, sent clouds of blue and purple flying over the land.

But in April such weather was to be expected.

– Virginia Woolf

The shadow has too often been split off in Western thinking and we know, psychologically, that whatever is split off re-insinuates itself through behavioral eruptions or projections onto others.
– James Hollis

All of us, in some part or other, are loathsome. We all harbour a crime we’ve committed, or a crime our soul is begging us to commit.
– Fernando Pessoa

When W. H. Auden was asked by Barbara Walters in a 20/20 interview why he wrote poetry, he replied: ‘To save the words.’
– Bryan Doerries

a butterfly
softly landing
in my tea kettle
– Issa

Jung’s concept of soul derives more from Athens than Jerusalem and is imbued with Greek philosophy. Jung’s idea of soul has a relationship with eternity, but his interest in soul is as an experience in this life, rather than an afterlife.
– David Tacey

the butterfly I passed
two miles back
is ahead now
– Issa

The purpose of the descent into the Underworld is to gain something that is missing in the upper world, some piece of information, some wisdom. This is symbolized at times by a jewel or other object of value.
– Edward Edinger

Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
– T. S. Eliot

God expects but one thing of you, and that is that you should come out of yourself in so far as you are a created being and let God be God in you.
– Meister Eckhart

The cosmos is a vast living body, of which we are still parts. The sun is a great heart whose tremors run through our smallest veins. The moon is a great nerve center from which we quiver forever. Who knows the power that Saturn has over us, or Venus? But it is a vital power, rippling exquisitely through us all the time.
– D. H. Lawrence

Oh what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and equinox. This is what is the matter with us. We are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table.
– D. H. Lawrence

We procrastinate about things that make us feel uncomfortable. Medical imaging studies have shown that mathphobes, for example, appear to avoid math because even just thinking about it seems to hurt. The pain centres of their brains light up when they contemplate working on math. But there’s something important to note. It was the anticipation that was painful. When the mathphobes actually did math, the pain disappeared. Procrastination expert Rita Emmett explains: “The dread of doing a task uses up more time and energy than doing the task itself.” […] Procrastination is a single, monumentally important “keystone” bad habit. A habit, in other words, that influences many important areas of your life. Change it, and a myriad of other positive changes will gradually begin to unfold. And there’s something more – something crucially important. It’s easy to feel distaste for something you’re not good at. But, the better you get at something, the more you’ll find you enjoy it.
– Barbara Oakley

Vanity of vanities, says the King James translation of Ecclesiastes, and the word that was translated as vanity was the Hebrew word hevel. It meant breath or vapor, or something as transient as a breath, as fleeting as vapor.
– Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

The real difference between God and human beings, he thought, was that God cannot stand continuance. No sooner has he created a season of a year, or a time of the day, than he wishes for something quite different, and sweeps it all away. No sooner was one a young man, and happy at that, than the nature of things would rush one into marriage, martyrdom, or old age. And human beings cleave to the existing state of things. All their lives they are striving to hold the moment fast, and are up against a force majeure. Their art itself is nothing but the attempt to catch by all means the one particular moment, one mood, one light, the momentary beauty of one woman or one flower, and make it everlasting. It is all wrong, he thought, to imagine paradise as a never-changing state of bliss. It will probably, on the contrary, turn out to be, in the true spirit of God, an incessant up and down, a whirlpool of change. Only you may yourself, by that time, have become one with God, and have taken to liking it.
– Isak Dinesen, The Monkey

The loss of feminine energy, with its warm vitality, is not difficult to document. It is evident in our culture’s mythic traditions, in our linguistic poverty, in our lack of feeling for human relationships, and finally in our hunger for meaning.
– Robert A. Johnson

No man is free who is not master of himself… Is freedom anything else than the power of living as we choose ?
– Epictetus, Discourses

We have within us deeply rooted weaknesses, passions, and defects. These can not all be cut out with one sharp motion, but patience, persistence, care and attention. The path leading to perfection is long. Pray to God so that He will strengthen you. Patiently accept your falls and having stood up, immediately run to God, not remaining in that place where you have fallen. Do not despair if you keep falling into your old sins. Many of them are strong because they have received the force of habit. Only with the passage of time and with fervor will they be conquered. Don’t let anything deprive you of hope.
– Saint Nektarios of Aegina

I’ve been to the tops of the mountains and to cabins in the valley and to golden chambers where wisdom runs like water. I’ve prayed with the wise men. I’ve read leaves and auras and beads. Finally, I had a dream, and a man came to me–a blunt, rude man just like my father, and he called me an ass and a fool. He told me that while I had been climbing up the mountain and packing to visit the golden chambers, there had been people in my own home and my own neighborhood who had needed food and kind words and comfort. He also told me I was a fat man sitting in a chair perfumed by pretension and the farts of a glutton. Who spoke to me? The spirit of my father? God? My own wisdom? I’m not sure, but you don’t have to climb a mountain to do some good and to find some peace.
– Marlon Brando

Everyone has two natures. One wants us to advance and the other wants to pull us back. The one that we cultivate and concentrate on decides what we are at the end.
– Theron Q. Dumont

So long as I remain alive and well, I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.
– George Orwell

I have a sweet tooth, perhaps several. When I was a kid, my mother often hid the sweet stuff away so I wouldn’t find it; then each of my three sisters did it. Then my wife did it, and still does it. Today, Alethea, my daughter, hid sumptuous pies away so Dada wouldn’t get to it. I feel surrounded and supported by this intergenerational village, this feminist conspiracy to keep me fit.
– Bayo Akomolafe

At the back of our brains, so to speak, there is a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life is to dig for this sunrise of wonder.
– G.K. Chesterton

I never found a genuine way
to heal until I was genuinely
rooting for everybody’s healing,
including the people whose poor
decisions I was healing from.
– Andrea Gibson

Why this need
to document change,
to reverse a mood,
to carry forward the time
when magnolias bloom?
– Sally Van Doren

The function of mythological symbols is to give you a sense of “Aha! Yes. I know what it is, it’s myself.” This is what it’s all about, and then you feel a kind of centering, centering, centering all the time.
– Joseph Campbell

You should not be afraid of someone who has a library and reads many books;
You should fear someone who has only one book;
And he considers it sacred, but he has never read it.
– Nietzsche

Suppose the stars are just our grief reflected back to us, proof that grief sometimes forgets its source, that it can find dead things no matter how distant.
– Victoria Chang

I do not approve the maxim which desires a man to know a little of everything. Superficial knowledge, knowledge without principles, is almost always useless, and sometimes harmful knowledge.
– Vauvenargues

Your power is proportional to your ability to relax.
– David Allen

The Buddha generally presented himself as more physician than metaphysician: if an arrow is sticking out of your side, he famously said, don’t argue about where it came from or who made it; just pull it out. You make your way to happiness not by fretting about it or trafficking in New Age affirmations, but simply by finding the cause of your suffering, and then attending to it, as any doctor (of mind or body) might do.
– Pico Iyer, The Doctor is Within

Always start out with a larger pot than what you think you need.
– Julia Child

Blue is a mysterious color, hue of illness and nobility, the rarest color in nature. It is the color of ambiguous depth, of the heavens and the abyss at once; blue is the color of the shadow side, the tint of the marvelous and the inexplicable, of desire, of knowledge, of the blue movie, of blue talk, of raw meat and rare steak, of melancholy and the unexpected (once in a blue moon, out of the blue).

It is the color of anode plates, royalty at Rome, smoke, distant hills, postmarks, Georgian silver, thin milk, and hardened steel; of veins seen through skin and notices of dismissal in the American railroad business. Brimstone burns blue, and a blue candle flame is said to indicate the presence of ghosts.

[…] Paradoxically, it is the only one of all the colors which can be legitimately seen as a close neighbor to, as well as essentially symbolic of, dark and light both, oddly black in the night and almost white at the horizon by day. (“… deep blue air that shows,” observes Philip Larkin, “Nothing, and nowhere, and is endless …”) It can darken, it can obscure, it may float to and fro like a mist, evoking serenity and power. Mirroring each other, the sea takes its color from the sky.

As Helen Hunt Jackson observes in “My Lighthouses,

“I look across the harbor’s misty blue,”
And find and lose that magic shifting line
Where sky one shade less blue meets sea …

It might be said to be not so much a color as a state of the light. It is also the Void: primordial simplicity and infinite space which, being empty, can contain everything or nothing. […] Incidentally, blue water is invariably salty, warm, and deep and speaks of the tropics […]. Green water, on the other hand, is cool, pale with particles, thin with river and rain, often shallow. […] Water is always mysterious.

“I used to wonder why the sea was blue at a distance and green close up and colorless for that matter in your hands,” writes Sr. Miriam Pollard in The Listening God. “A lot of life is like that. A lot of life is just a matter of learning to like blue.”

– Alexander Theroux, The Primary Colors: Three Essays

he became less “star” and more a small
part of an unknown galaxy, warm in the night sky.
– Dick Westheimer

If these words can do anything
if these songs can do anything
I say bless this house
with stars.
– Joy Harjo, The Creation Story

The power of the mind, the
Power and weight
Of the mind which
Is not enough, it is nothing
And does nothing

Against the natural world,
Behemoth, white whale, beast
They will say and less than beast,
The fatal rock

Which is the world –

– George Oppen

O if the streets
Seem bright enough,
Fold within fold
Of residence …

Or see thru water
Clearly the pebbles
Of the beach
Thru the water, flowing
From the ripple, clear
As they have ever been

– George Oppen

After the invention of printing, poetry becomes vertical, does not fill the white space completely, it is rich in new paragraphs and repetitions.
– Eugenio Montale

Stop asking people to self-care their way out of social inequity.
– T.H.

The word love: there it is again…
– Martín Espada

Just where you are
searchingly, wholly
go toward the moment
this tremendous new moment
no you, no not you
the pure point
everywhere, always.
Go further where
there is nowhere,
no-one,
no coming, no going
no place knowable
the place where
you are now.
In the nearness
the Silence surrounds
beckons the burden body
soothing the errant mind
freeing the heart.
Beyond body and mind
transcending all the Silence,
But can the silence know itself?
Its undreamed necessities?
It is through the body that sits here
that I go to my true nature.
– William Segal

What is the source of this pattern? Why is the world so beautiful? It could so easily be otherwise: flowers could be ugly to us and still fulfill their own purpose. But they’re not.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer

Which is the deeper
The more impenetrable of the two?
The ocean or the human heart?
– Comte de Lautréamont

The last thing you know about yourself is your effect.
– William Boyd

Science and the rationality of the city have granted us insights into the working of ‘nature’, while simultaneously obscuring other relations to the stabilized image we effortlessly christen “nature”.
– Bayo Akomolafe

These people have learned not from books, but in the fields, in the wood, on the river bank. Their teachers have been the birds themselves, when they sang to them, the sun when it left a glow of crimson behind it at setting, the very trees, and wild herbs.
– Anton Chekhov

Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation.
– W.H. Auden

Every man who rises above the common level has received two educations: the first from his teachers; the second, more personal and important, from himself.
– Edward Gibbon

One never knows what is going to happen. It keeps you continuously in wonder. Don’t call it uncertainty—call it wonder. Don’t call it insecurity—call it freedom.
– Osho

I remember awakening one morning and finding everything smeared with the color of forgotten love.
– Charles Bukowski

So many things I had thought forgotten
Return to my mind with stranger pain:
Like letters that arrive addressed to someone
Who left the house so many years ago.
– Philip Larkin

Desire is a moment with no way out.
– Anne Carson

nomads
charting their courses
by the moons and stars
– Ogawa

A single individual might thus be the one, or one of many, that is the catalyst for a revitalisation, renewal, and transformation of the wider culture, perhaps even the entire civilisation.
– Keiron Le Grice, The Rebirth of the Hero

We have forgotten how to relate emotionally to art: we treat it like editors, searching in it for that which the artist has supposedly hidden.
– Andrei Tarkovsky

Getting an idea should be like sitting on a pin; it should make you jump up and do something.
– E. L. Simpson

Who Haven’t You Known?

Somehow we’ve had the magic squeezed out of us.

The one when we know we’re seeing what we’re seeing.

These times have become like a vice pressing inward.

Our infinite individualities

have taken to splitting

being muffled

like raindrops on a windshield.

The Infinite Oneness

— that we also are —

gets forgotten in the maelstrom of words, ashes, losses;

bombs dropping,

daily shootings,

tumbling wreckage of whole towns,

both fast and slow.

Thankfully, the Great Lantern still shines.

Thankfully, there are many lanterns lit from the One.

Thankfully, one of the lights that still radiates

glows from behind your own lattice of bones.

– Frank Inzan Owen

Show Up Fully

There is a way of looking deeper.

Deeper into the heart, deeper into the soul.

We don’t need someone else for that

but sometimes a Fellow Traveler can be helpful.

You don’t need another teacher or a guru.

You already know.

Your own heart-mind

your own soul

your own Earth Body being a body

is the guru.

– Frank Inzan Owen

Maybe all these poems are a way to say I want to belong to beauty.
– Steven Leyva

the bicycle is
a balance machine

the more you pedal
the more balanced
the machine
and you

left pedal
right pedal
left pedal

balance

the lungs
the heart
the soul

balance

each pedal stroke
builds strength
and carries you
further

in balance

– Andy Perrin

What a strange machine man is! You fill him with bread, wine, fish, and radishes, and out comes sighs, laughter, and dreams.
– Nikos Kazantzakis

Love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom. Relationships fail not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining.
– James Hillman

It is not exactly
subscription drugs
that heal you —
it is messages
you send to
your body and mind,
how much
kindness
you spill into
yourself.
What truly heals
you is how honestly
you have forgiven
your past.
how willing you are to
stop blaming
yourself and others
for everything that
went wrong.
Yes dear one,
what heals you
is your own
willingness
to heal.
– Guthema Roba

He had already arrived at the great good place, a center of peace and unformulated happiness, reborn beneath a dark sky and brilliant moon of utter beauty and benign indifference. There was nothing more he could ask for. There was nothing more to expect. This was it. He was here. It was now. He had arrived.
– Alexis Levitin

If Jesus of Nazareth had preached the paper-thin version of what passes for the “gospel” today – a shrunken down, postmortem promise of going to heaven when you die – Pilate would have shrugged his shoulders and released the Nazarene, warning him not to get mixed up in the affairs of the real world. But that’s not what happened.
– Brian Zahnd

A professor of mine went to go hear Derrida speak once. The entire talk was about cows; everyone was flummoxed but listened carefully, and took notes about…cows. There was a short break, and when Derrida came back, he was like, “I’m told it is pronounced ‘chaos.’”
– Phil Gentry

We’ve known for a long time that it was no longer possible to overturn this world, nor reshape it, nor head off its dangerous headlong rush. There’s been only one possible resistance: to not take it seriously.
– Milan Kundera

I am a storyteller, for better and for worse. I suspect that a feeling for stories, for narrative, is a universal human disposition, going with our powers of language, consciousness of self, and autobiographical memory. The act of writing, when it goes well, gives me a pleasure, a joy, unlike any other. It takes me to another place – irrespective of my subject – where I am totally absorbed and oblivious to distracting thoughts, worries, preoccupations, or indeed the passage of time. In those rare, heavenly states of mind, I may write nonstop until I can no longer see the paper. Only then do I realize that evening has come and that I have been writing all day.vOver a lifetime, I have written millions of words, but the act of writing seems as fresh, and as much fun, as when I started it nearly seventy years ago.
– Oliver Sacks

Loneliness is the feeling that one is not complete alone. What if it turns out nothing is missing at all? What if nothing changes when another person is near?
– Sallie Jiko Tisdale

There is an old Jewish legend that in any point of history, there are 36 pure souls on whom the fate of the world depends, and they don’t know who they are. These 36 people hold up and support the world just as the foundations of a building support it. It’s likely these are unknown and unsung people, who do extraordinary things that go unnoticed.

There are always 36 good people. Who save the world. One of them could be you.

– Jim Palmer

Not *how* but *that* the world is, that is the mystical.

– Ludwig Wittgenstein, tr. Alexander Booth

having read a few books in common is a force more binding than blood.
– Cormac McCarthy

If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.
– Ernest Hemingway

I find that a Christian view of history is clarified if one considers reality as more or less like the world portrayed in the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. We live in the midst of contests between great and mysterious spiritual forces, which we understand only imperfectly and whose true dimensions we only occasionally glimpse. Yet, frail as we are, we do play a role in this history, on the side either of the powers of light or of the powers of darkness. It is crucially important then, that, by God’s grace, we keep our wits about us and discern the vast difference between the real forces for good and the powers of darkness disguised as angels of light.
– George M. Marsden

Sophia is the wisdom of all things and, like the Chinese Tao, reveals the path most in tune with an individual’s nature. If individuals follow her bidding they discover who they are and how best to express themselves in the world.
– Jeffrey Raff

Poetry is spiritual food.
– Joy Harjo

Why am I a writer? Because I have a debt. Because a book saved my life.
– Dorothy Allison

I was in high regions of beautiful world and life,
I visited the extreme palaces, stroked the glowing air,
Went up through hitched forests to a gold plateau
– Richard Eberhart

By observing dreams, visions, and hallucinations, etc., modern man can now for the first time look in an unprejudiced way at the phenomena of the unconscious. What comes from the unconscious can be observed through individuals.
– Marie-Louise von Franz

Readers, book by book, build up for themselves, the way a novelist does, a chronology. Reading is a comprehensive act, adding skills, increasingly creative as it goes. To become a ‘good reader’ one must give oneself over to a regime of concentrated pleasure.
– Michael Schmidt

Desires come by the thousands and each one eats up a whole life.
– Mirza Ghalib

We pretend endless economic growth is advantageous on a finite planet.

We pretend complex ecosystems are resources to be exploited consequence-free.

We pretend unlimited consumption, fuelled by grotesque exploitation, is a God given right

We’re pretending ourselves to death.

– @ClimateDad77

Next to the gifts of the mind and of art, those of nature are the only ones that never leave us in the lurch when things get really serious.
– Hermann Hesse

For Jung, reaching to the “spiritual East” was not a replacement of Western culture but rather a filling of gaps in both it and ourselves, “a symbolic expression of the fact that we are entering into connection with the elements in ourselves which are strange to us.
– Claire Dunne

to remember you
I carve true words
in stone
– Ejo

It is too serious a matter for us to accept a man as a genuine prophet. Every respectable prophet strives against the unconscious pretensions of his role. When a prophet appears at moment’s notice, we would be better advised to contemplate a possible psychic disequilibrium.
– Jung

If the world is right, if this music of the cafés, these mass enjoyments and these Americanised men who are pleased with so little are right, then I am wrong, I am crazy. I am in truth the Steppenwolf that I often call myself…
– Hermann Hesse

When was the last time you just sat by yourself. Watched it get dark. Watched it get light. Thought about your life.
– Cormac McCarthy

We can only defend life if we experience a revival of this feeling of solidarity with nature.
– Octavio Paz

The highest form of thinking is non-comparative, non-competitive, and in cultivating that, you will find that it produces its own effects without your being concerned with results.
– Krishnamurti

The Wildest Kind of Love
(Even in a year like this)

Maybe you’re lost
far from home
unsure if home even exists
afraid that home is no longer there.
Many are disoriented.
Routes are long and hard.
Uncertainty abounds.
What felt stable & safe can vanish
in a blink of an eye
as a stiff wind gusts from the west
in a year that is already
beating you down.
Sorrow and fear are real
in a year like this.
Anxiety and anger are real
in a year like this.
It’s normal to long to return
to what feels like home
especially when what you knew as home
might not be where you left it.
It’s not easy to remember home
is with you always—a wildness
etched in your bones,
coursing through your veins,
an ancient agreement of shadow
& light, a raw embodiment of love
capable of weathering
any firestorm.
But it is.
Even in a year like this.

– Heidi Barr

You dance love, and you dance joy, and you dance dreams. And I know if I can make you smile by jumping over a couple of couches or running through a rainstorm, then I’ll be very glad to be a song and dance man.
– Gene Kelly

chaos in the cosmos
modern man in the pepperpot
– Yusef K

I felt in need of a great pilgrimage
So I sat still for three days.
– Hafiz

oh holy be
the maiden name
on the tongue of
a liberated woman.
– Darius Simpson

This is the most important
time of all, the age of divestment,
knowing what we leave behind is
like the fragrance of blossoming trees
that grows stronger after
you’ve passed them,
– Dorianne Laux

When interpreting the Bible, filter it through the larger biblical theology of “God is love.” If your interpretation ends up excluding, belittling, is violent, ignores those in need, or allows you to feel superior to others, it is not loving, it is not from love, it is not of God.
– Rev. Dr. Mark Sandlin

Human beings from the moment of entry into language are ready to become dreamers and fiction-makers, not to mention liars, fetishists, and perverters of the real. Our fiction-making capacity may be foundational of our search for truth in our selves and in the world, but it does not guarantee it, nor assure our mental stability. The vehicles of truth and untruth are the same. But fiction-making does seem to be crucial to the ability to carve out a space within reality for attempts at understanding and reflection.
– Peter Brooks

I should construct my book, I dare not say ambitiously like a cathedral, but quite simply like a dress.
– Marcel Proust

Poets, like all artists, continually emerge from the privacy of their own anomalies into a collective space, which makes poems inherently hopeful for human connection
– Matthew Zapruder

after my sea swim
i sit in the sunny room
blinking clouds
– oyoguhito

Consciousness is an end in itself. We torture ourselves getting somewhere, and when we get there it is nowhere, for there is nowhere to get to.
– D. H. Lawrence

When, while writing, you come upon something that surprises you, trust it.
– Richard Bausch

I love you, I wish there was some more
original way of saying it.
– Sandra Lim

Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.
– Alain de Botton

April, café tables
set with cups of rain
no one ordered
– Ian Buckley

I look up from a book of poems.
There is tenderness, rage,
irony, and wit.
Red kites float over the harbor.
I’m beginning to understand
the Indian sensibility.
– Kim Dorman

his favourite colour—the waves of the sea
– Andrei Tarkovsky

The jonquils. They come back. They split the earth with
their green swords, bearing cups of light.
The forsythia comes back, spraying its thin whips with
blossom, one loud yellow shout.
The robins. They come back. They pull the sun on the
silver thread of their song.
The irises come back. They dance in the soft air in silken
gowns of midnight blue.
The lilacs come back. They trail their perfume like a scarf
of violet chiffon.
And the leaves come back, on every tree and bush, millions
and millions of small green hands applauding your return.
– Barbara Crooker

If one understands eternity as timelessness,
and not as an unending timespan,
then whoever lives in the present lives for all time.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein

you prefer the long eloquent silence
of a tango

the long languid ledge
of a wordless day

you wait patiently on the veranda
to hold hands
with the cool side of midnight

– Connie Post

Did you still not miss me yet,
The day before we finally met?
– Iris Smyles

The cicadas paused at his very thought of her, as if they, too, could not tell her how they felt.
– Greg Sellers

Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.
– Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Sand

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.
– Gustave Flaubert

Gnostics, like psychologists, do not aim at the transformation of the world but at the transformation of the mind, with its natural consequence–a changed attitude toward the world.
– Stephan Hoeller

My art is rebellious, heterogeneous, full of contradiction, unacceptable to specialists of art, culture, morality. But it does have the ability to enchant my accomplices: poets, pataphysicians and a few illiterates.
– Max Ernst

Classic Buddhism emphasizes even more strongly than Old & New Testaments the central importance of giving up craving for possessions of any kind, including one’s own ego, the concept of a lasting substance, and even the craving for one’s perfection.
– Erich Fromm

Intellectual understanding and aestheticism both produce the deceptive, treacherous sense of liberation and superiority which is liable to collapse if feeling intervenes. Feeling always binds one to the reality and the meaning of symbolic contents.
– CG Jung

I know not what I am; I am not what I know;
A thing and not a thing, a point and circle’s flow.
– Angelus Silesius

The individual begins to find his own path and primary mask is gradually thrown off. This is known as the left-hand path. The right-hand path is living in the context of the ideology & persona system – of one’s local village The left-hand path is that of individual quest.
– Joseph Campbell

The danger of artificial intelligence is not that machines take over one day but that we are becoming like machines right now. Humans aspire to dance like machines, be cool, and lead meaningless lives where love and community are nothing in comparison to input and output. People are fed information with their heads spinning… Life is becoming less human by the minute.
– Andrea Polard

My mouth and my mind,
two people with no rhythm,
trying to teach the other
how to dance.
– Rudy Francisco

Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph.

Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.

– T. S. Eliot

Faith is not a belief. Faith is what is left when your beliefs have all been blown to hell.
– Ram Dass

Every thing looks permanent until its secret is known.
– Emerson, Circles

Birth is a torn ticket stub, a sugar

cone wrapped in a paper sleeve, the blackest
ice.

– Ama Codjoe

I am worried about you, Ingeborg (…) you are not within your own heart (where I expect you to be), you are… in literature.
– Paul Celan to Ingeborg Bachmann

Toni Wolff: People can analyze for twenty years, and nothing below the neck is aware that anything is going on! You have to do something about it.
– Robert A. Johnson

the days still grow longer
but spring has
reached its limit
– Buson

Good God, if our civilization were to sober up for a couple of days, it’d die of remorse on the third…
– Malcolm Lowry

I am my own
geology, strata on strata
of the imagination, tufa
dreams, the limestone mind
honeycombed by the running away
of too much thought. Examine
me, tap with your words’
hammer, awaken memories
of fire. It is so long
since I cooled.
– R. S. Thomas

If I am to be raised from the earth, I want to draw everything to me.
– Hugo Ball

I can relate
to a warm, slow, spring
sunrise

no rush

the work will be done

even in winter
it warms

– Andy Perrin

She goes to the sea, she comes from the sea, and tiny seas grow calm in the warmth of her chest, sleeping like doves. / […] / She is all air, all gentle waters. A memory of salt, of lost horizons, and the soaking of every wave. The foam left by a shipwreck clings to her waist and the tips of wings send a shiver up her spine.
– Dulce María Loynaz, tr. James O’Connor

I have no ideology, but if I had to identify myself with one, it would be that the beauty of art is in its unmasking of falsehood; in educating; in planting in people’s minds the suspicion that reality is something more complex than it appears to be; in giving people the pleasure of suspicion, not just the burden of doubt; in keeping them from feeling too protected by taboos, concepts, ideologies.
– Federico Fellini

One of the hardest things in the world is to convey a meaning accurately from one mind to another.
– Lewis Carroll

How do we move the collective needle towards a true Christ consciousness if we continue to choose security over truth, power over service, condemnation over compassion?
– Jeff Brown

Science will get us out of this, but art will get us through it.
– Mo Willems

Do not ask your children
to strive for extraordinary lives.
Such striving may seem admirable,
but it is the way of foolishness.
Help them instead to find the wonder
and the marvel of an ordinary life.
Show them the joy of tasting
tomatoes, apples and pears.
Show them how to cry
when pets and people die.
Show them the infinite pleasure
in the touch of a hand.
And make the ordinary come alive for them.
The extraordinary will take care of itself.
– William Martin, The Parent’s Tao Te Ching

A kind of light spread out from her. And everything changed color. And the world opened out. And a day was good to awaken to. And there were no limits to anything.
– John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Psalm by Kiki Petrosino

Dear Lord, Dear High Remembrancer

Providential Love—have mercy.

Have mercy, thou Surveyor of Wildflowers, Assessor of Royal

& Exquisite Bee-Realms. Have mercy, Ledger

Who Tracks Us in the Night, Who Measures Without Speaking

Our Dark Trespasses. For nothing here survives—

not the gold-legged deer, browsing the bleached office park at dawn

nor the minute finch on her branch of long division—

but thou thou thou absorb it, all. O, Gazer, be kind in thy absorbing

calculus. Won’t be long before thy reckoning curve

arrives at the junction of our error. How, beneath thy Mineral Eye

we walk abroad, forgetting thee, Cartographer of Sparrows.

If we had the right words, if we had the language, we would need no weapons.
– Ingeborg Bachmann

My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.
– Virginia Woolf

when you open the door
to samsara
a flurry of blossoms
– Mari

Such stillness –
a spring, its water
whirling up grains of sand
– Masaoka Shiki, tr. Watson

I have to come to terms with things that don’t make me look cool or don’t paint me in the best light….I think controlling your image is the opposite of creating art.
– @JasonIsbell

spring storm
a wounded bird
unable to fly
learns to swim
across the sky
– @BarryGoodmann

With social media and worldwide conversations on every imaginable topic, more people are likely to recognize other people’s shadows and failures. Whether we can recognize our own is still in question.
– Robert Bly

Life hasn’t just begun. Art never had a beginning. Always, until the moment of its stopping, it was constantly there. It is infinite. It is here, at this moment, behind me and inside me, and, as if the doors of an Assembly Hall were suddenly flung open, I am immersed in its fresh, headlong omnilocality and omnitemporality, as if an oath of allegiance were to be sworn without delay. No genuine book has a first page. Like the rustling of a forest, it is begotten God knows where, and it grows and it rolls, arousing the dense wilds of the forest until suddenly, in the very darkest, most stunned and panicked moment, it rolls to its end and begins to speak with all the treetops at once.
– Boris Pasternak

Good editors are really the third eye. Cool. Dispassionate. They don’t love you or your work.
– Toni Morrison

Men want to be Kings so bad, but few are worthy. It’s the ones who don’t want it that are usually more qualified. The Dalai Lama is just another Godjectified faux master. Nothing new there. Men have been pulling this spiritual lineage con for centuries. The deeper question is why did we choose to believe he was something that he isn’t? Why do humans glorify strangers and soulebrities when their time would be better spent evolving their own consciousness? What could our species become if we stopped buying all the nonsense the patriarchy tells us, and find our own answers? And what will become of us if we don’t?
– Jeff Brown

The idea of a ‘vanguard’ in literature has never had much acceptance in this country, though it’s a commonplace on the Continent. The English Channel is a pretty narrow strip of water, but it’s remarkable what an effective barrier it has been to the passage of ideas.
– Edwin Morgan

Whoever wants to become a Christian must first become a poet…
– St. Porphyrios

I assumed this must be what angels look like—huge, fearsome, severely gorgeous.
– Peter Himmelman

To love one’s neighbor is inconceivable. Does one ask a virus to love another virus?
– Emil Cioran

While most of the flowers in the garden had rich scents and colors, we also had two magnolia trees, with huge but pale and scentless flowers. The magnolia flowers, when ripe, would be crawling with tiny insects, little beetles. Magnolias, my mother explained, were among the most ancient of flowering plants and had appeared nearly a hundred million years ago, at a time when “modern” insects like bees had not yet evolved, so they had to rely on a more ancient insect, a beetle, for pollination. Bees and butterflies, flowers with colors and scents, were not preordained, waiting in the wings – and they might never have appeared. They would develop together, in infinitesimal stages, over millions of years. The idea of a world without bees or butterflies, without scent or color, affected me with a sense of awe.
– Oliver Sacks

In time of silver rain
the earth
puts forth new life again,
green grasses grow
and flowers lift their heads,
and over all the plain
the wonder spreads
of life,
of life,
of life!

In time of silver rain
the butterflies
lift silken wings
to catch a rainbow cry,
and trees put forth
new leaves to sing
in joy beneath the sky
as down the roadway
passing boys and girls
go singing, too,
in time of silver rain
when spring
and life
are new.

– Langston Hughes

Becoming a person of the plants is not a learning process, it is a remembering process. Somewhere in our ancestral line, there was someone that lived deeply connected to the Earth, the Elements, the Sun, Moon and Stars. That ancestor lives inside our DNA, dormant, unexpressed, waiting to be remembered and brought back to life to show us the true nature of our indigenous soul.
– Sajah Popham

The power of what art can do, what a timeless painting can do… is change a mood, change a mental state, change an afternoon, a week, a life.
– Dominic Quagliozzi

Narcissus wasn’t as beautiful as he thought.
His creators trapped him in his reflection

[ … ]

Suppose he’d been able to see someone other than himself
and could have seen the love of a girl gazing at him
forget the stags running between the lilies and daisies…
if he’d been just a fraction cleverer
he’d have smashed the mirror
and seen how much he was like to others
Yet if he’d been free

he wouldn’t have become a myth…

– Mahmoud Darwish

You’ve got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body’s sermon on how to behave.
– Billie Holiday

WOUNDED BULLIES

The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves.
– bell hooks

In a hierarchical culture, usually without even knowing it, many people learn bullying as a form of false self-esteem. The bullying of patriarchy is disguised as “morality.”

The bullying of economic exploitation is disguised as “entrepreneurship.” The bullying of Imperialism is disguised as “patriotism.” Theocratic bullying is disguised as “evangelism.”

In addition to our duty to protect those being bullied, we might also realize that every bully is internally wounded, for we cannot numb ourselves to the oppression of others without losing the capacity to feel the depths of our own hearts. Even if a bully wins all the tinsel trophies of the culture, those who cannot empathize with the suffering of others live out their days in the smallest prison cell of them all- a frozen heart.

– Jim Rigby

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone…
– John Keats

To lose the earth you know, for greater knowing; to lose the life you have for greater life; to leave the friends you loved, for greater loving; to find a land more kind than home, more large than earth.” We have to “lose” and “leave”—“unless the grain of wheat dies …” The kinship of God won’t come unless we shake things up—to “lose the earth you know”—to bark up the wrong tree, and to propose something new.
– Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again

my darkening brain,
they are nothing.
I am the same boy
my mother used to kiss.’
– Mark Strand

For years I dug in the earth
trying to discover the blue sky
deeper and deeper I tunnelled
until one night
I made stones and tiles fly into the air
with no effort I broke the bone of the void
– Musō Soseki, translated by W. S. Merwin

we must cease the practice of holding spiritual masters as infallible and perfect beings. we must cease to regard them as beings endowed with supreme wisdom and rigorous saintliness. beliefs of this sort are themselves a measure of spiritual infantilism, and when promoted by the religion itself it is a clear sign of doctrinal fraud.
– hune margulies

Egolessness is a flexible identity. It manifests as inquisitiveness, as adaptability, as humor, as playfulness. It is our capacity to relax with not knowing, not figuring everything out, with not being at all sure about who we are, or who anyone else is, either.
– Pema Chodron

Perhaps writing means overcoming all resemblances within the very heart of resemblance, being finally like yourself, like nothing.
– Edmond Jabès

[…] he lit the spark which would lead to my becoming obsessed with Scottish literature.
– Alistair Braidwood, On Carl MacDougall

To write from the margins is to write from the perspective of the whole—to see the world from both the margins and the center.
– Zoë Bossiere and Erica Trabold

Light…
when my tears reach you,
the purpose of my eyes
won’t be to cry anymore,
but to see instead.
– León Felipe

Dear poet,

You have it all within you.

Every word.

Every line.

Every verse.

You are everything & more.

– @DNicholeAndrews

A bulldozer grinding and slobbering
Sideslipping and belching on top of
The skinned-up bodies of still-live bushes
In the pay of a man
From town.
– Gary Snyder

A truly curious person is rarely curious about specific topics only.

An adult which has managed to keep their curiosity intact is usually curious about many things as well.

– Kunal Shah

A truth seeker is looking to alter their beliefs.

Someone who is not interested in changing their beliefs actively, cannot be a truth seeker.

Changing beliefs is very uncomfortable; making truth-seeking a rare trait.

– Kunal Shah

To wash and rinse our souls of their age-old sorrows,
We drained a hundred jugs of wine.
A splendid night it was . . . .
In the clear moonlight we were loath to go to bed,
But at last drunkenness overtook us;
And we laid ourselves down on the empty mountain,
The earth for pillow, and the great heaven for coverlet.
– Li Po

The process of “emptying the heavens” does not mean that archetypal personages have disappeared completely, but rather that it is no longer possible to project them in the ancient manner.
– Luigi Zoja

national anthem–
in the heat of the morning
I keep silent
– Ikeda Sumiko

Welcome whatever you find alien within yourself, extend that same welcome to whatever you find alien in the outer world.
– Parker Palmer

I like to think that what literature can do that op-ed pieces and other communications don’t do is describe felt experience, the flickering, bewildered places that people actually inhabit.
– Maggie Nelson

All the wine and cheese shops in the world can’t hide the sound of your crumbling empire.
– graffito, Haight Street, SF, early 1980s.

The people who don’t know how to age are the same people who didn’t know how to be young.
– Marc Chagall

I’m moderately fond of how our minds smooth out the zigzags, wind arounds, miscellaneous false starts, and various sidesteps of our lives and our memories smooth it all and invite a sense of some inevitability taking us to this moment. In all its glorious weirdness…
– James Ford

Real silence, dhyāna, is stopping talking to yourself inside your head; is to get *real* mental silence. Now, that doesn’t mean that you have a blank mind. You are vividly aware of what is, only you don’t give it any name.
– Alan Watts

Anyone who does not know that today’s headline is simply a passing variation on an old, old story is simply not very well educated in the human narrative. The same passages, the same stupidities, the same delusions, the same inflations and deflations, and the same returns to earth play themselves out over and over. The past is not past. The present is haunted by the archetypal dynamics which remind us that any story untold is an unconscious present. An unconscious present is a story which will insist on being told and will spill into our biographies. … Told or untold, the archaic stories ineluctably manifest through our unconscious choices, our aversions, our preoccupations, our projections, and our agendas and replay themselves in the recognizable patterns which constitute the human story.
– James Hollis, Ph.D.

Wrack dances on its warps as the wind backs to the south and freshens.
– c.c. o’hanlon

Some of my poems begin in joy and beauty, and some begin with anger. I don’t remember what exactly inspired this poem, but reading it, I feel it gnaw at the bottom of my stomach.
– José Olivarez

yes, the business folk rush thru midtown.
they talk math that equates to foreclosures.
yes, the trash has to be taken out
& dinner chewed.
– José Olivarez

Tonight, in Oakland

I did not come here to sing a blues.
Lately, I open my mouth

& out comes marigolds, yellow plums.
I came to make the sky a garden.

Give me rain or give me honey, dear lord.
The sky has given us no water this year.

I ride my bike to a boy, when I get there
what we make will not be beautiful

or love at all, but it will be deserved.
I’ve started seeking men to wet the harvest.

Come, tonight I declare we must move
instead of pray. Tonight, east of here,
two boys, one dressed in what could be blood

& one dressed in what could be blood
before the wound, meet & mean mug

& God, tonight, let them dance! Tonight,
the bullet does not exist. Tonight, the police

have turned to their God for forgiveness.
Tonight, we bury nothing, we serve a God

with no need for shovels, we serve a God
with a bad hip & a brother in prison.

Tonight, let every man be his own lord.
Let wherever two people stand be a reunion

of ancient lights. Let’s waste the moon’s marble glow
shouting our names to the stars until we are

the stars. O, precious God! O, sweet black town!
I am drunk & I thirst. When I get to the boy

who lets me practice hunger with him
I will not give him the name of your newest ghost

I will give him my body & what he does with it
is none of my business, but I will say look,

I made it a whole day, still, no rain
still, I am without exit wound

& he will say Tonight, I want to take you
how the police do, unarmed & sudden

& tonight, when we dream, we dream of dancing
in a city slowly becoming ash.

– Danez Smith

wood-whispered and lone,
this meal of heart, this ruin
of ghost-bottled words
– Erin Coughlin Hollowell

Our human senses are not knives. They’re not hooks. They are the soft ball of the eye, the delicate drum of the ear, the soft skin on the tips of the fingers and on the body. It is through these delicate receptive things that we basically receive our knowledge of the world. And therefore it is through a kind of weakness and softness that it is possible for knowledge to come to us.
– Alan Watts

Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.
– Rebecca Solnit

Now it’s April, and the whales have come home. The finbacks and the humpbacks and the rare right whales, arriving along the coast, coming into the bay, sometimes into the harbor, their massive length and weight churning and breaching as though they, like us, know playfulness. He maketh the deep to boil like a pot, he maketh a path to shine after him, said Job, who, I fear, could not know that there is also a reasoning and a gentleness in these mountains of flesh. Once a whale tangled in line came into the harbor with another swimming just alongside, a companion that would not leave the roped animal but lingered, while brave men went out in little boats and were able to cut the entangling line away. The eye of the humpback is like all the darkness and hope and pain one sees in the eye of the elephant, in whose brain, it is avowed by those who know, nothing is ever forgotten. It is an eye deeper than the deepest well.
– Mary Oliver

Did you hear that winter’s over?
The basil and the carnations
cannot control their laughter.

The nightingale, back from his wandering,
has been made singing master over the birds.

The trees reach out their congratulations.
The soul goes dancing through the king’s doorway.

Anemones blush
because they have seen the rose naked.

Spring, the only fair judge, walks in the courtroom,
and several December thieves steal away,
Last year’s miracles will soon be forgotten.

New creatures whirl in from non-existence,
galaxies scattered around their feet.
Have you met them?

Do you hear the bud of Jesus crooning in the cradle?
A single narcissus flower has been appointed
Inspector of Kingdoms.

A feast is set.
Listen: the wind is pouring wine!
Love used to hide inside images: no more!
The orchard hangs out its lanterns.
The dead come stumbling by in shrouds.

Nothing can stay bound or be imprisoned.
You say, “End this poem here,
and wait for what’s next.”

I will.
Poems are rough notations
for the music we are.

– Rumi

I want to be honest. I swear. I can only say what I mean. I mean my face is your face. My country is your country. I want this to be true.
– Elane Kim

There is an old saying: ‘Let go, let God’, and this is the secret of mystical experience. The essence of meditation is to be taken into a will which is not one’s own, and yet, paradoxically, the basis of one’s true identity.
– David Tacey

Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life.
– William Somerset Maugham

The patterns you have adopted in the first half of life are reference points, providing a baseline for organizing your experience. Too often they become obstacles to further development.
– Robert A. Johnson, Living Your Unlived Life

I try to write
something deep in the sand
but a wave
takes my words
far away
– Barry Goodmann

We are still in the body and thus under the rule of heavy matter. Also it is equally true that matter not moved by the spirit is dead and empty.
– CG Jung

When Jung looked at paintings his eye would involuntarily sweep past all the signs of disintegration in search of whatever content there might be which would reveal the new and the psychologically creative.
– Marie-Louise von Franz

traveling
to a strange land
just to watch the sunset
– Ogawa

A psychic experience that has no links with an archetypal theme does not vibrate with sufficient intensity to make it viable or to allow it much impact on the individual or collective psyche-the experience lacks a deeper echo.
– Luigi Zoja

He mourned ahead of time, years in advance; he mourned her ever since he was born, long before he knew her; he got to know her in order to know the reason for his mourning.
– The Secret Heart of the Clock, Elias Canetti; tr. Joel Agee

Many of us realize that what we call ‘spirituality’ has limitations: it can be about seeking, doing, questing. This can become exhausting and run out of energy. Many of us seek but do not find, and why? Because to find we have to allow ourselves to be found.
– David Tacey

To be ourselves causes us to be exiled by many others, and yet to comply with what others want causes us to be exiled from ourselves. It is a tormenting tension and it must be borne, but the choice is clear.
– Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes

I am ashamed of my century,
but I have to smile.
– Frank O’Hara

I knew that one can never read a novel without giving its heroine the form and features of the woman one loves. But however happy the book’s ending may be, our love has not advanced an inch
– Marcel Proust

Is this any more sensible Eliezer Sobel?

Living minds are always integrating new perceptions, questions, insights or other experiences which feel the most nourishingly pleasing or meaningful to oneself. Whether such a preferred “goodness” comes to one physically, emotionally, mentally or all together, this is felt as a valued quality which can be psychologically incorporated as a part of one’s identity or environing context. Thanks to this innately pre-verbal sense of qualitative excellence unique to each mind, different aspects of experience are sorted into groupings which hang together (as with one’s sense of “trustworthy people” or “good recipes”). Some of these may be associated with words, yet the most feeling-based long-term aspects of experience are only somewhat verbally accessible, if at all. A young human begins to distinguish its family and friends from strangers long before it can form words with feelings directing one’s chosen focuses much more than articulate ideas. And the ears of a dolphin or the petals of a rose are as concerned with their own nourishments as any human activity. Essential to fulfilling one’s goals are such powers of focusing on what is most appreciated by oneself. Deprive any being of the freedom to pursue its own pleasures and you would take away those powers through which it finds fulfillment.

As Katherine Peil Kauffman writes in the essay Human Values and the Biology of Emotion (Part 1):
“We remain generally unaware that each feeling does something and means something – both moving the body and in-forming the mind in ways that keep us optimally integrated, balanced, and healthy. They are complex subjective servants of an ancient evaluative guidance system, one conserved across our vast evolutionary history, performing many of the same functions that the old vitalists attributed to some nonphysical force or identity component such as spirit or soul. Together our pleasurable and painful categories of feeling serve as universal ecological biovalues, they encode an ancient evolutionary logic, undergirding all semantic language and human value systems. They – quite literally – build the deepest foundations of ‘mind’ in living systems….

– via George Gorman

Everything is Real
– Gary Snyder

Its dark here inside the whale.
– Nicholas Pierotti

MILES OF QUIET

When words we hear don’t fit the day,
when we worry
what we did or didn’t do,
what if we close our eyes,
say any word we love
that makes us feel calm,
slip it into the atmosphere
and rise?

Creamy miles of quiet.
Giant swoop of blue.

– Naomi Shihab Nye

Jung’s work argued that the dead God would be reborn from below, from the dark and womb-like chambers of the earth. The God ‘above’ has collapsed, and the idea of God, Jung felt, will re-emerge from below, from the ground of the unconscious mind.
– David Tacey

The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.
– Flannery O’Connor

Eating Poetry

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.

I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

– Mark Strand

Myths which day has forgotten continue to be told by night, and powerful figures which consciousness has reduced to banality … are recognized again by poets and prophetically revived; therefore they can also be recognized “in changed form” by the thoughtful person.
– CG Jung

Written In Green Ink

Green ink creates gardens, jungles, meadows,
foliage where the lyrics sing,
words that are trees,
phrases that are constellations in green

Let my words, oh white, descend and cover you
like a shower of leaves to a field of snow,
like the ivy to the statue,
like ink to this page.

Arms, waist, neck, breasts,
the forehead pure as the sea,
the nape of the forest in autumn,
the teeth that bite a blade of grass.

Your body is constellated with green signs
like the body of the sapling tree.
Don’t mind so many little luminous scars:
look at the sky and his green tattoo of stars.

– Octavio Paz

She tore
a hole in me the size of God
so heavy with gravity not even light
escapes me.
– Daniel Stewart

Anything Can Happen

Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter
Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head
Before he hurls the lightning? Well, just now
He galloped his thunder cart and his horses

Across a clear blue sky. It shook the earth
And the clogged underearth, the River Styx,
The winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself.
Anything can happen, the tallest towers

Be overturned, those in high places daunted,
Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune
Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one,
Setting it down bleeding on the next.

Ground gives. The heaven’s weight
Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle-lid.
Capstones shift, nothing resettles right.
Telluric ash and fire-spores boil away.

– Seamus Heaney

In the spring, air returns to us, wide, with a sense of windows, and our ruinous virtues sparkle once more like old cans in a ditch…
– Iain Crichton Smith

The nearest I have to a rule is a Post-It on the wall in front of my desk saying ‘Faire et se taire,’ which I translate for myself as ‘Shut up and get on with it.’
– Helen Simpson

it is possible to outgrow a name
to grow out of its small, tight seams
you know that, right?

but also, it is possible to grow into a thing
perhaps, a healing
and you, never quick enough to get to the water
it isn’t easy, i should tell you this
some of us have been given the weight
of old failures, and stories
that were crafted by bodies who would not look
to the left, or to the right
for fear that they might break wide open
and you, with your apple-blossom hands, your plump little legs
not yet knowing what is yours, and what isn’t
you might be the hidden hope of your grandmothers
you might be the one who turns, who says
‘no more’ and really means it

haven’t we all said it and then fallen over our own feet

here, let me tell you something true

if you see a name that you want to grow into, a name
that wasn’t give to you, but the soft shape of it calls
across the stories that you were given, the things that
you have picked up and started to believe
as the only way out, the only truth
—the shadow of them always hovering

this is a small truth that i eat from every day, how there is light
but we get to choose whether we want to inch closer
towards the fire, and the warmth of it, or away from it
even on the edges, the periphery of a life

although, we also get to choose whether we open the circle wider
for others to crawl closer

still, here you are with your hands full of impossible dreams

who knows which of your ancestors yearned to be called, ‘peace’
and failed to step into it

and now there is you, tomorrow’s hope

listen, take off your old clothes, lift the corners
of what you want for your life
and climb inside

there is nobody to stop you, you can pull it over your head
stretch your arms into the sleeves of it
and turn

this is a courage, and you are
brave

now, it needs watering, and a kindness
that you might still be teaching yourself how to be

don’t be afraid, where there is life inching towards the light
there is always grace, and you
with your new name, your brazen refusal
to be what you were never called to be, to shed
what has slipped through the ages, what keeps being born
and keeps being born, and keeps being born
in the stories of your people

look at you, healer, keeper of the scars

here you are pulling the sheets off of the heavens, calling to the clouds, asking for the rain with your stubborn faith
slaking the thirst of all the soft bodies who carry your name,
all the soft bodies who died wandering the desert.

– Liezel Graham

The sculptor must learn to reproduce the surface, which means all that vibrates on the surface: spirit, soul, love, passion, life… Sculpture is thus the art of hollows and mounds, not of smoothness, or even polished planes.
– Auguste Rodin

It was not the privileged and the fortunate who took in the Jews in France. It was the marginal and damaged, which should remind us that there are real limits to what evil and misfortune can accomplish. If you take away the gift of reading, you create the gift of listening. If you bomb a city, you leave behind death and destruction. But you create a community of remote misses. If you take away a mother or a father, you cause suffering and despair. But one time in ten, out of that despair rises as indomitable force. You see the giant and the shepherd in the Valley of Elah and your eye is drawn to the man with sword and shield and the glittering armor. But so much of what is beautiful and valuable in the world comes from the shepherd, who has more strength and purpose than we ever imagine.
– Malcolm Gladwell, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

Torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president’s pen or a vainglorious general’s sword.
– David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

The future was supposed to free up our time from work so we could spend it on higher pursuits. Instead we created AI that makes art while we work.
– Halli

Like now. Take the love medicine. I don’t know where she remembered that from. It came tumbling from her mind like an asteroid off the corner of the screen. But when she mentions them love medicines, I feel my back prickle at the danger. These love medicines is something of an old Chippewa specialty. No other tribe has got them down so well. But love medicines is not for the layman to handle. Before you get one, even, you should go through one hell of a lot of mental condensation. You could really mess up your life grinding up the wrong little thing.
– Louise Erdrich

I like the feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art.
– Eudora Welty

Crossed the border laughing
Never know what to expect
They wanted to know what church I’m in
And what things I collect
They’re trying to plug holes in the hull
While flames eat up the deck
The captain and his crew
Don’t seem to get the disconnect
Passing through the iris of the world
Passing through the iris of the world

I will always love you
On a boulder by the shoulder
The paint will likely outlive
Both the feeling and the holder
In the age of global warming
When all things are growing colder
It’s beautiful the writer
Opened up his heart and told her
Passing through the iris of the world
Oh, passing through the iris of the world

I’m good at catching rainbows
Not so good at catching trout
I’m good at blowing holes in things
And ranting in self doubt
I’ve got a way with time and space
But numbers freak me out
I’ve mostly dodged the dogmas
Of what life is all about
Passing through the iris of the world
Oh, passing through the iris of the world

I’m talking in strange voices
To myself the way I do
The road under the half moon sky
Rolls out in shades of blue
I’m raw anticipation
Of our rhythmic rendezvous
Loving the gift of the loving I get
And the loving I give to you
Passing through the iris of the world
Passing through the iris of the world

– Bruce Cockburn

I Long For the Rhyme of Health

I long for the rhyme of health
a small fresh syllable
a poultice of words
to put the soul right
and make the body strong.

I long for a rhyme
to put the soul right.

– Caitlín Maude
tr. by Pearse Hutchinson

In the Delta the sunsets were reddest light. The sun went down lopsided and wide as a rose on a stem in the west,
and the west was a milk-white edge, like the foam of
the sea.
– Eudora Welty

Spring day–
in my mind
Nothing
– Jack Kerouac

Consider the hands
that write this letter.
Left palm pressed flat against paper,
as we have done before, over my heart.
– Aracelis Girmay

I don’t deny that there should be priests to remind men that they will one day die. I only say that at certain strange epochs it is necessary to have another kind of priests, called poets, actually to remind men that they are not dead yet.
– G. K. Chesterton

STREAM


Everywhere
the stream
of life goes on,
and I try to
go with it,
non-swimmer,
paddler in a leaky
canoe.

– Linda Pastan

As I age in the world it will rise and spread,
and be for this place horizon
and orison, the voice of its winds.
I have made myself a dream to dream
of its rising, that has gentled my nights.
Let me desire and wish well the life
these trees may live when I
no longer rise in the mornings
to be pleased with the green of them
shining, and their shadows on the ground,
and the sound of the wind in them.
– Wendell Berry

Dreams are shores where the ocean of spirit meets the land of matter. Dreams are beaches where the yet-to-be, the once-were, the will-never-be may walk awhile with the still are.
– David Mitchell

April.
Again a long period has elapsed in which I have been unable to pull myself together for the least little thing—I shall now try to get going again.
– Søren Kierkegaard

In the point of rest at the centre of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable.
– Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings

I know,
you never intended
to be in this world.
But you’re in it all the same.

So why not get started immediately.

I mean, belonging to it.
There is so much to admire,
to weep over.

– Mary Oliver

Hero worship evolves into a search for our missing pieces by worshipping a soul mate. It is a painful fact that a good deal of what passes for romance is actually our own unlived life reflected back to us.
– Robert A. Johnson

Everything around me is evaporating.
My whole life,
my memories,
my imagination…
But I have in me
all the dreams in the world.
– Fernando Pessoa

Enantiodromia occurs when an extreme, one-sided tendency dominates conscious life; in time an equally powerful counterposition is built up in unlived life. At first it interferes with conscious performance, but in time it breaks through conscious control.
– Robert A. Johnson

All we are not
stares back
at what we
are.
– W.H. Auden

It is the function of art to carry us beyond speech to experience.
– Joseph Campbell

Although we can understand the meaning of symbols with our minds, our understanding is made immeasurably deeper and more concrete when we feel the symbols with our bodies and our feelings.
– Robert A. Johnson

Already in Greek philosophy and again in Gnosticism and in medieval tradition, the human psyche has been attributed a middle place between the opposites.
– Marie-Louise von Franz

Writing is one of the most ancient forms of prayer. To write is to believe communication is possible, that other people are good, that you can awaken their generosity and their desire to do better.
– Fatema Mernissi

If people can be open-minded and magnanimous, be receptive to all , take pity on the old and the poor, assist those in peril and rescue those in trouble, give of themselves without seeking reward , never bear grudges, look upon others and self impartially, and realize all as one, then people can be companions of heaven. If people can be flexible and yielding, humble, with self-control, entirely free of agitation, cleared of all volatility, not angered by criticism, ignoring insult, docilely accepting all hardships, illnesses, and natural disasters, utterly without anxiety or resentment when faced with danger or adversity, then people can be companions of earth.

– Awakening to the Tao by Liu I-ming
Translated by Thomas Cleary

There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work and learning from failure.
– Colin L. Powell

I have lived
in my body
for years
and still need
maps and lights
to find my way
to how I feel.
– Michelle K.

Surviving Love
I work hard at managing, grateful
and spare. I try to forgive all trespasses
and give thanks for the desert. Rejoice
in being alive here in my simple world.
Each evening I walk for an hour, paying
attention to real things. The plover
sweeping at my face to get me away from
its ground nest. An ant carrying the wing
of a butterfly like a flag in the wind.
A grasshopper eating a dead grasshopper.
The antelope close up, just staring at me.
Back in the house, I lie down in the heat
for a nap, realizing forgiveness is hard
for the wounded. Near the border,
between this country and the next one.
– Linda Gregg

Poetry as Robust Vulnerability: Language Against Which We Have No Defenses: Poetry is a break for freedom. The discipline of poetry is in overhearing yourself say difficult truths from which it is impossible to retreat. In a sense, all poems are good; all poems are an emblem of courage and the attempt to say the unsayable. Yet only a few are able to speak to something universal yet personal and distinct at the same time; to create a door through which others can walk, into territory that previously seemed unobtainable, in the passage of a few short lines.
– David Whyte

Normality is the Great Neurosis of civilization.
– Tom Robbins

I love to delete stuff.
I love to empty the trash.
It thrills me to drag files,
official documents, last year’s
tax returns, my online
life coach certificate,
whole folders, even
my curriculum vitae
to the Recycle Bin,
then click “Empty.”
I love to drag pictures of
loved ones, politicians,
gurus, even old photos of
myself to the ominous can
and hear the sound of things
crinkle up and whoosh away.

But first, I like to hear my computer
get nervous and ask me,
“Do you really want to do this?”
Oh yeah, I do.”
“This action cannot be reversed.
It is like time itself.
You will permanently un-create
all your information, life’s labor,
perhaps the whole world
cast into outer darkness,
dropped in the black hole
at the center of the galaxy,
reduced to less than a byte
for a hundred billion years
until the next big bang,
when dazed naked goddesses
and boy gods stumble out
into the unimaginable
blue light of a new creation,
holding hands, innocently
paired in Gnostic sygyzies,
binary memes of Depth
and Silence, Mind and Truth,
Nothingness and Wonder,
children of the one clear
immaculate Desk Top…”
But I don’t answer, I just watch
the squirm and pulse
of the ancient server, who says,
“I won’t ask you this again.”
“That’s right, Mac, don’t ask me again.”
“Are you sure? Really?”
I savor the silence,
the flicker of cool
suddenly vulnerable
incandescence.
Then I tap, “Yes.”

A moment later
I breathe
real slow, real empty.
I am still alive, a survivor.
I still Am, even though
I have deleted
everything.

– Fred LaMotte

The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.
– G.K. Chesterton

Alcohol in Latin is spiritus and you use the same word for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison. The helpful formula therefore is: spiritus contra spiritum…
– CG Jung

Unfathomable mind,
now beacon,
now sea.
– Samuel Beckett

We are born into bodies that are fluid and free. Yet for most of us, this state of grace is sadly short lived. Judgement, emotional wounds, fear and loss become stored deep inside our muscles and bones, leaving us with shoulders that sag, hips that are locked, arms that can’t reach out, hearts that beat behind a stone wall. When we move our bodies we shake up firmly rooted systems of thought, old patterns of behavior and emotional responses that just don’t work anymore. Rhythm, breath, music and movement become tools for seeing, then freeing, the habits that hold us back. When we free the body, the heart begins to open. When the body and the heart taste freedom, the mind won’t be far behind. And when we put the psyche into motion, it will start to heal itself.
– Gabrielle Roth

I love the subtle worlds
weightless and gentle,
like soap foam.

I like to see them paint themselves
sun and scarlet, fly
under the blue sky, tremble
suddenly and burst…

– Antonio Machado

If a cursory study of somatics shows that we think with our entire body, then how much better could we think, if we thought with our entire web of wild kin? I want to think and feel and weep and grieve with my whole multi-species, poly-nucleated mind. I want to let the yolk of my small desires slide into otherness. I want to nucleate a symbiotic quest for a better future. Throw open all the doors in my cells. Let my river run both ways.
– Sophie Strand

Jung came more and more to the conclusion that the unconscious is not only a response system… but that it can, of itself, and for no outer or biographical reason, produce something new. In other words, it is creative in the essential sense of the word.
– Marie-Louise von Franz

There is a constant growth of autonomous contents in the unconscious, which can become destructive if man does not concern himself with them.
– Marie-Louise von Franz

Dwelling apart in the depths of the woods are the various kinds of mountaineers, —hunters, prospectors, and the like, —rare men, ‘queer characters,’ and well worth knowing.
– John Muir, Picturesque California

Call me when there is nothing left to make beautiful.
– C.T. Salazar

Love makes you see a place differently, just as you hold differently an object that belongs to someone you love. If you know one landscape well, you will look at all other landscapes differently.
– Anne Michaels

Schiller says that man is at his highest level only when he plays, when he has no conscious purpose. Creativity through play is such a well-known and essential factor that one does not need to point it out, but we see again and again that if we try.
– Marie-Louise von Franz

Nothing can be more useful to a man, than a determination not to be hurried.
– Thoreau

I love the old questions.
[With fervour.]
Ah the old questions, the old answers, there’s nothing like them!
– Beckett

my bicycle is a
time machine

it exists only
in the present

can remove
the past

rolls to
tomorrow

– Andy Perrin

Christ, as a light
illumine and guide me.
Christ, as a shield
overshadow me.
Christ under me;
Christ over me;
Christ beside me
on my left and my right.
This day be within and without me,
lowly and meek, yet all-powerful.
Be in the heart of each to whom I speak;
in the mouth of each who speaks unto me.
This day be within and without me,
lowly and meek, yet all-powerful.
Christ as a light;
Christ as a shield;
Christ beside me
on my left and my right.
– Canticle from the Northumbria Community Prayer Book

Openings

Eternity has closed its doors—
good riddance! I didn’t want

forever forever—just this
pear tree, branches

backlit and the fruits
I can’t get to.

– Andrea Cohen

Even if you don’t understand all the nuances of poverty, why is it hard to understand that if you increase the cost of living in a place it will create a homeless population? No amount of investment in “services” will fix the problems gentrification causes.
– @Dalai_Mama_

Our picture of reality is never fixed but can always be elaborated and made more accurate. And this changes us.
– A. S. Byatt

violin player
the shape of the sound
in her arms
– Raffael de Gruttola

I forgive you. For growing
a capacity for love that is great
but matched only, perhaps,
by your loneliness. For being unable

to forgive yourself first so you
could then forgive others and
at last find a way to become
the love that you want in this world.

– Dilruba Ahmed, Phase One

I’ve carried my desire in bucket-shaped words,
in a hardened knot of muscle braced against the past.
– Alfred Fournier

The heart of a poet,
a friend says, should murmur
to weave a bracelet of words,
and, like the probe against my chest,
its sounds image the soul’s content.
– Stella Nesanovich

There is nothing to prevent us from paying adequate wages to schoolteachers, social workers and other servants of the public to insure that we have the best available personnel in these positions which are charged with the responsibility of guiding our future generations. There is nothing but a lack of social vision to prevent us from paying an adequate wage to every American citizen whether he be a hospital worker, laundry worker, maid or day laborer. There is nothing except shortsightedness to prevent us from guaranteeing an annual minimum—and livable—income for every American family. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from remolding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.
– Martin Luther King

Making a Fist
by Naomi Shihab Nye

We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.
– Jorge Luis Borges

For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.

“How do you know if you are going to die?”
I begged my mother.
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,
“When you can no longer make a fist.”

Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with our unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand.

You only know where you are by remembering exactly how you got there.
– Wade Davis

I have come to feel that the more fully the individual is understood and accepted, the more he tends to drop the false fronts with which he has been meeting life, and the more he tends to move in a direction which is forward.
– Carl Rogers

We cannot say goodbye to a problem until at first we have said hello.
– Namgis elder Gerry Oleman

Look for truths that re-appear in every context.

Universal Truths.

– @VinceFHorn

I seduce myself with my hope.
– Susan Sontag

Poetry is the nearest thing we have to enchantment made real, and comes closest to undoing damnation.
– María Zambrano

BLESSING

May you live a loved life.
May you never diminish your mind
or limit your heart.
May you stand calm in a wide moment
between sky that lifts you and gravity that grounds you.
May you let loving unfurl you
then give you away.
May you remember
you are nest,
harbor,
garden.
May you pass Life forward
so that which came from those before you,
and that which grows in those next to you,
go on to those who will follow you.

– Dawna Markova

Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand and melting like a snowflake.
– Marie Beynon Ray

Even with all our technological accomplishments and urban sophistication, we consider ourselves blessed, healed in some manner, forgiven, and for a moment transported into some other world, when we catch a passing glimpse of an animal in the wild: a deer in some woodland, a fox crossing a field, a butterfly in its dancing flight southward to its wintering region, a hawk soaring in the distant sky.
– Thomas Berry

A wind rose, quickening; it invaded my nostrils, vibrated my gut. I stirred and lifted my head. No, I’ve gone through this a million times, beauty is not a hoax… Beauty is real. I would never deny it; the appalling thing is that I forget it.
– Annie Dillard

I don’t know who God is exactly. But I’ll tell you this. I was sitting in the river named Clarion, on a water splashed stone and all afternoon I listened to the voices of the river talking. Whenever the water struck a stone it had something to say, and the water itself, and even the mosses trailing under the water. And slowly, very slowly, it became clear to me what they were saying. Said the river I am part of holiness. And I too, said the stone. And I too, whispered the moss beneath the water.
– Mary Oliver

Time is more complex near the sea than in any other place, for in addition to the circling of the sun and the turning of the seasons, the waves beat out the passage of time on the rocks and the tides rise and fall as a great clepsydra.
– John Steinbeck

Elephant feet are covered in a soft padding that helps to support their weight, as well as preventing them from slipping and dulling the sound of their footsteps. As a result, elephants can walk almost silently, despite their huge weight. Furthermore, elephants use their feet to listen to the sub-sonic rumblings made by other elephants through vibrations in the ground. They have been observed to listen by putting their trunks on the ground and carefully positioning their feet.
– Stephen Currie

I’ve long argued that Americans would be better informed, and simply more interested in the news, and reporters would feel more energized, engaged, and useful, if 90% of today’s political press corps were re-deployed on other beats. And if 90% of the airtime and online emphasis were given to other topics.
– James Fallows

Things have gone rapidly downhill since the Age of Enlightenment, for, once this petty reasoning mind, which cannot endure any paradoxes, is awakened, no sermon on earth can keep it down. A new task then arises: to lift this still undeveloped mind step by step to a higher level and to increase the number of persons who have at least some inkling of the scope of paradoxical truth…. We simply do not understand any more what is meant by the paradoxes contained in dogma;…
– Carl Jung

Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.
– T.S. Eliot

Dead Butterfly
by Ellen Bass

For months my daughter carried
a dead monarch in a quart mason jar.
To and from school in her backpack,
to her only friend’s house. At the dinner table
it sat like a guest alongside the pot roast.
She took it to bed, propped by her pillow.

Was it the year her brother was born?
Was this her own too-fragile baby
that had lived—so briefly—in its glassed world?
Or the year she refused to go to her father’s house?
Was this the holding-her-breath girl she became there?

This plump child in her rolled-down socks
I sometimes wanted to haul back inside me
and carry safe again. What was her fierce
commitment? I never understood.
We just lived with the dead winged thing
as part of her, as part of us,
weightless in its heavy jar.

We walked at night towards a cafe blooming with Japanese lanterns and I followed your white shoes gleaming like radium in the damp darkness.
– Zelda Fitzgerald

Poetry looking in the mirror sees art,
and art looking in a mirror sings poetry.
– Aberjhani

The things which the child loves remains in the domain of the heart until old age. The most beautiful thing in life is that our souls remain hovering over the places where we once enjoyed ourselves. I am one of those who remember those places regardless of time and place.
– Kahlil Gibran

A Poem to Remind Myself of the Natural Order of Things
by Donika Kelly

This time I won’t say, little kangaroo
because this kangaroo is swole as fuck.

Chest thicker than my father’s,
bicep resting on the mastiff’s skull,
forearm cradling the carotid, the jugular.

A tense tableau to be sure.

Whatever might have happened between them
is unknown, interrupted by the man
eating the distance in panic and deliberation
to square up and stun the kangaroo with his temerity.

I lied.

Sweet friend, little kangaroo, thank you
for showing me how to shake my head
against the blow I saw coming.

a caretaker of dreams lives in two worlds: the one we think we see and the one that is always possible.
– Ulrica Hume

Great works of art pass through us like storm-winds, flinging open the doors of perception, pressing upon the architecture of our beliefs with their transforming powers.
– George Steiner

It’s all so predictable once you’ve been through it.
– @VinceFHorn

There is nothing you can do to be genuine. The more you do, the phonier you are.
– Alan Watts

Love men and women not for their strength but [for] their softness, not for their fullness but their hunger, not for their plenty but their need.
– Anais Nin

I don’t believe in tame poetry. When poetry hears its own name, it runs, flies, swims off for fear of its own life… Jean Cocteau said a poet rarely bothers about poetry. Does a gardener perfume his roses?
– Frank Stanford

Stripped of audience, originality would be much less at ease with itself.
– Yiyun Li

He was talking about the random
axe of God, his hand slamming
the table like a battle axe, and though
I was a nonbeliever, I believed
– Andrea Cohen

If people are living the same as always, with their bellies full of food, they’ll just go on the same way. If they get hungry and unhappy enough, something happens.
– Paul Bowles

If we enter the levels of personal existence which have been rediscovered by depth psychology, we encounter the past, the ancestors, the collective unconscious, the living substance in which all living beings participate.
– Paul Tillich

Summer Haibun
by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

To everything, there is a season of parrots. Instead of feathers, we searched the sky for meteors on our last night. Salamanders use the stars to find their way home. Who knew they could see that far, fix the tiny beads of their eyes on distant arrangements of lights so as to return to wet and wild nests? Our heads tilt up and up and we are careful to never look at each other. You were born on a day of peaches splitting from so much rain and the slick smell of fresh tar and asphalt pushed over a cracked parking lot. You were strong enough—even as a baby—to clutch a fistful of thistle and the sun himself was proud to light up your teeth when they first swelled and pushed up from your gums. And this is how I will always remember you when we are covered up again: by the pale mica flecks on your shoulders. Some thrown there from your own smile. Some from my own teeth. There are not enough jam jars to can this summer sky at night. I want to spread those little meteors on a hunk of still-warm bread this winter. Any trace left on the knife will make a kitchen sink like that evening air

the cool night before
star showers: so sticky so
warm so full of light

That’s where the path really begins–with the realization that the only light which is going to be of genuine use or value to us is the light we manage to bring, like a new sun, out from the darkness inside ourselves.
– Peter Kingsley

I recently learned that a caterpillar liquifies before becoming a butterfly. On that same energy, I’m calling my current stage of life my goo era. A period of great change, embrace of stickiness, and choosing mystery over certainty.
– Annika Hansteen-Izora

I dream of a language
whose words, like fists,
would fracture jaws.
– Emil Cioran

To starve or kill a language is to starve and kill a people’s memory bank.
– Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

We have arrived at an ‘Eastern’ moment in the West, and as an alternative to turning literally to the East and abandoning our Western culture, we might consider cultivating a more introverted pathway to divine reality.
– David Tacey

The best ideas are common property.
– Seneca

The main point of the Buddhist teachings is to dissolve the dualistic struggle, our habitual tendency to struggle against what’s happening to us or in us. The teachings instruct us to move toward difficulties rather than backing away.
– Pema Chodron

The light of a candle
is transferred to another candle—
spring twilight.
– Yosa Buson

I stare at the memory
until the flame is clear
– Takada Rozan

Analysis might be defined as an attempt to become more conscious through a continuous act of self-criticism: a slow labour of deconstruction on all the ingenuous attitudes of omnipotence that we carry within ourselves.
– Luigi Zoja

small talk
between songs
a tuning mandolin
– Ben Gaa

Sometimes all she heard was the wind and the sea and she felt calm.
– Cormac McCarthy

The normal symbols of our desires and fears become converted, in [the] afternoon of the biography, into their opposites; for it is then no longer life but death that is the challenge.
– Joseph Campbell

Isn’t it wonderful how much we all know about one another in a town like this.
– Sinclair Lewis, Main Street

Only in the agony of parting
do we look into the depths of love.
– George Eliot

Of all the pursuits open to men, the search for wisdom is most perfect, more sublime, more profitable and more full of joy.
– Aquinas

yesterday a coyote trotted across
my headlights and turned his head
but didn’t break stride; that’s how
I want to live on this planet:

alive to a rabbit at a glass door—
and flower where there is no flower.

– Arthur Sze

I am no longer performing the charity service of forcing out words about nonverbal experiences to people who only believe in experiences they can process verbally.
– @taalumot

Nearly every life can be summed up in a few words: man was shown heaven—and thrown into the mud. We are all ascetics—voluntary or involuntary. Here on earth dreams and hopes are only awakened, not fulfilled. And he who has endured most suffering, most privation, will awaken in the afterwards most keenly alive.
– Lev Shestov

Dream Nest
by Dana Levin

More like a basket
of twig and hair,
surprisingly
tall


and deep—


in a tree
outside my bedroom
window.


I knew
something lived in there
you wouldn’t assume
lived in a nest.

Then I knew:
a human lived there.


And once I knew—
the nest, nearly


disintegrated,
still in the tree.


It wasn’t about trauma, the perfect
and then the broken


nest
in which a human
lived—


Born and lit and broken
comes I.

The most important thing is to look ahead. The past is your anchor.
– Maxime Lagacé

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. … Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness.
– George Orwell

He was almost there – if there were such a place.
– Philip K. Dick

Leave greatness to others. Become so small that no one can see you. This conviction results from growing devotion to the supreme reality.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj

The eye should learn
to listen before
it looks.
– Robert Frank

The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure but from hope to hope.
– Samuel Johnson

Scientists are people of very dissimilar temperaments doing different things in very different ways. Among scientists are collectors, classifiers and compulsive tidiers-up; many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers; some are artists and others artisans. There are poet-scientists and philosopher-scientists and even a few mystics.
– Peter Medawar

Support writers!

It isn’t just about writing.

It’s about the value of work in a hyper-capitalist society, and how we have to commit to a level playing field and dignity for everyone.

– Marianne Williamson

Be out of sync with your times for just one day, and you will see how much eternity you contain within you.
– Rainer Maria Rilke

Perhaps, a writer is someone who knows that after we disappear, what will remain is our lies.
– @PoetKimHyesoon

one flies in
two fly out
garden butterflies
– Issa

driftwood
returning from
a long journey
– Ogawa

I closed
my mouth
and spoke to you
in one hundred
silent ways~
– Rumi

when a prayer
becomes a poem
cathedral of stars
– @YourMoonliness

Bush Philosophy: Rivers and Pools
Heraclitus said you can never
step in the same river twice,
but his mate and arch-
rival Parmenides
may have been right.
You may not be able to
tiptoe into the same runnel
to double your money,
but you can sidle
as many times as you like
into the sleepy waters
of a moment of peace.
It is always
the same billabong.
– Richard James Allen

Truly, all things are vanity, and life is but a shadow and a dream. For in vain doth everyone born of earth disquiet himself.
– St. John of Damascus

Life is a very bad novelist. It is chaotic and ludicrous.
– Javier Marías

I never knew anyone who had a passion for words who had as much difficulty in saying things as I do and I very seldom say them in a manner I like. If I do it’s because I don’t know I’m trying.
– Marianne Moore

: when the nearest light is miles away yet
and adorned on the night is a lightning bug
as in a jarred cactus plant
an open book without commas

: when the only thing you can touch is a plastic raft
and drenched between the hours is a cutting board
as in a place for garlic
and onions the face of early sky

: when water undresses into tar sands
and to one long tune acacia trees dance some
as in alder reach
anything is worth the rain

: when above more and more narrow miracles
and answers set to stone by a single hand
as in a chorus of them
any shadow still means light
– Jake Skeets

Appreciate yourself enough to stop sitting in shaky chairs.

They can’t hold your weight and they’re not doing anything to strengthen themselves.

– Dr. Thema

Snow from the mountains
Of my heart instantly melts
In your warm Blackness.
– Etheridge Knight

One poetry editing tip that I give to mentees is to remember the reader is coming to your work with no context. They cannot see inside your head. Imagine yourself coming to your work without knowing you, would you understand what was happening?
– Wendy Pratt

Your bloodthirsty tiger growls softly, your poisonous serpent hisses secretly, while you, conscious only of your goodness, offer your human hand to me in greeting.
– @RedBookJung

MONK MOMENTS

Right and wrong notes, phrases
Heavy on opening, steady stride
Rapid ascent/decent tempo quickens
Full body swinging on the bench
Light on the keys and the petals

Could be quiet
or even silent
for mile of trumpet
or a surge from the sax.

Could play pretty
Could play heavy on low keys
introducing
a tenor sax barrage.
Could trade phrases
or weave them in.

Striding with
bass/drums
Vocals occasionally.
or close ahead
close behind them.

Could solo
with wide range
basic and complex
a hint of funk

Rapidly painting
the air canvas
low key phrases
worked in for grounding

Often Bluesy
Familiar yet new
Hint of Swing
Always Monk.

– Jerry Pendergast

You are not meant to understand (a story, poem, essay) in an intellectual, abstract way. You are meant to thrum, like a string on a stringed instrument.
– Robert Olen Butler

We linger in the realms of potentiality, until we are ready to actualize our callings. It can be a great test of faith, particularly if we have a great number of internal blocks and external challenges to overcome first. Most of us do, at this stage of human development. The key is to not get so discouraged that you stop doing the work to align your inner world with the life you long for. You must go on, patiently working the threads, healing the remnants, constructing your wholly weave. It can take years, decades, to clear enough debris before you see the light. But you can, and you will, if you continue to sculpt dutifully. And then, one day, you will notice that it has all shifted. Your potentiality has morphed into actuality, and your sacred purpose has become all that you are.
– Jeff Brown

Humanitarian values should replace economic values as the governing principle of our society.
– Marianne Williamson

To kiss away from your forehead all the headaches, from the dimmest past to your golden future.
– Franz Kafka, 1912.

Every journey is worth taking because in traveling a man finds himself.
– J.R.R. Tolkien

Instructions for the journey.
The self you leave behind
is only a skin you have outgrown.
Don’t grieve for it.
Look to the wet, raw, unfinished
self, the one you are becoming.
The world, too, sheds its skin:
politicians, cataclysms, ordinary days.
It’s easy to lose this tenderly unfolding moment.
Look for it as if it were the first green blade after a long winter.
Listen for it as if it were the first clear tone in a place where dawn is heralded by bells.
And if all that fails,
wash your own dishes.
Rinse them.
Stand in your kitchen at your sink.
Let cold water run between your fingers.
Feel it.
– Pat Schneider

I taste a liquor never brewed —
From Tankards scooped in Pearl —
Not all the Vats upon the Rhine
Yield such an Alcohol!
Inebriate of Air — am I —
And Debauchee of Dew —
Reeling — thro endless summer days —
From inns of Molten Blue —
When “Landlords” turn the drunken Bee
Out of the Foxglove’s door —
When Butterflies — renounce their “drams” —
I shall but drink more!
Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats —
And Saints — to windows run —
To see the little Tippler
Leaning against the — Sun —
– Emily Dickinson

On Angels
by Czeslaw Milosz
All was taken away from you: white dresses,
wings, even existence.
Yet I believe in you,
messengers.
There, where the world is turned inside out,
a heavy fabric embroidered with stars and beasts,
you stroll, inspecting the trustworthy seams.
Short is your stay here:
now and then at a matinal hour, if the sky is clear,
in a melody repeated by a bird,
or in the smell of apples at close of day
when the light makes the orchards magic.
They say somebody has invented you
but to me this does not sound convincing
for the humans invented themselves as well.
The voice — no doubt it is a valid proof,
as it can belong only to radiant creatures,
weightless and winged (after all, why not?),
girdled with the lightening.
I have heard that voice many a time when asleep
and, what is strange, I understood more or less
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue:
day draw near
another one
do what you can.

There is a crossway
in every moment
– Tomas Tranströmer

Zen is above all the liberation of the mind from conventional thought, and this is something utterly different from rebellion against convention, on the one hand, or adapting foreign conventions, on the other.
– Alan Watts

“You talked about the first principle again, but I still don’t know what it is,” I said to Suzuki.
“I don’t know,” he said, “is the first principle.”
– David Chadwick

Our modern world-view tragically misperceives and wrongly defines what it is to be human. We are conditioned by our society to believe happiness comes from pleasure, or from getting things or power over people or money or fame or even health and survival. None of these sometimes very good things can bring ultimate meaning to our lives. We are born to be deeply conscious, inwardly free and deeply capable of love. The longing for these things is the definition of what it means to be human.
– Jacob Needleman

How pure your longing
to be anything other than yourself
– Kim Addonizio

In a Time of Peace


Inhabitant of earth for forty something years
I once found myself in a peaceful country. I watch neighbors open


their phones to watch
a cop demanding a man’s driver’s license. When a man reaches for his wallet, the cop
shoots. Into the car window. Shoots.


It is a peaceful country.

We pocket our phones and go.
To the dentist,
to buy shampoo,
pick up the children from school,
get basil.

Ours is a country in which a boy shot by police lies on the pavement
for hours.

We see in his open mouth
the nakedness
of the whole nation.

We watch. Watch
others watch.

The body of a boy lies on the pavement exactly like the body of a boy.

It is a peaceful country.

And it clips our citizens’ bodies
effortlessly, the way the President’s wife trims her toenails.

All of us
still have to do the hard work of dentist appointments,
of remembering to make
a summer salad: basil, tomatoes, it is a joy, tomatoes, add a little salt.

This is a time of peace.

I do not hear gunshots,
but watch birds splash over the backyards of the suburbs. How bright is the sky
as the avenue spins on its axis.
How bright is the sky (forgive me) how bright.

– Ilya Kaminsky

I really was never any more than what I was -a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze.
– Bob Dylan

It is a great error to assume that the meaning of life is exhausted with the period of youth and growth… The afternoon of life is just as full of meaning as the morning, only its meaning and purpose is a wholly different one.
– CG Jung

snowflakes
falling into
a bonfire
– Hakuin

Riding the Coltrane
through interstellar space, turning
inward to earth’s core.
Exploring chords, scales, changes
outside familiar stations
before and after the rain
– Jerry Pendergast

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

After the collapse of the ‘highest value’, as Nietzsche called it, it is simply a matter of time before this archetypal idea expresses itself in new ways. The new image of God is often not recognized by the established religions, which continue to focus on the old image.
– David Tacey

I gang my own gait and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties I have never lost an obstinate sense of detachment, of the need for solitude.
– Albert Einstein

Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.
– Thomas Edison

If you keep seeking the jewel of understanding,
then you are a mine of understanding in the making.
If you live to reach the Essence one day,
then your life itself is an expression of the Essence.
Know that in the final analysis you are that
which you search for.
– Abu-Said Abil-Kheir, translated by Vraje Abramian

A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.
– William Faulkner

I will know you by your immortal
Silence.
– Cristina Campo

Books have their idiosyncrasies as well as people, and will not show me their full beauties unless the place and time in which they are read suits them.
– Elizabeth von Arnim

True wisdom is to know what is best worth knowing, and to do what is best worth doing.
– Edward Humphrey

Words can save
you when guns cannot
– Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Oh, how incomprehensible everything was, and actually sad, although it was also beautiful. One knew nothing. One lived and ran about the earth and rode through forests, and certain things looked so challenging and promising and nostalgic: a star in the evening, a blue harebell, a reed-green pond, the eye of a person or of a cow. And sometimes it seemed that something never seen yet long desired was about to happen, that a veil would drop from it all; but then it passed, nothing happened, the riddle remained unsolved, the secret spell unbroken, and in the end one grew old and looked cunning like Father Anselm or wise like Abbot Daniel, and still one knew nothing perhaps, was still waiting and listening.
– Hermann Hesse

If someone would like to apologize to me, for saying untruthful and hurtful things about me (and there has been a number of individuals doing exactly that, throughout the course of my life), by paying me $787.5 million, I guess that would be fine by me.I might (might) consider accepting a somewhat smaller sum, too.
– Mikhail Iossel

Every person, from morning till evening, is making invisible forms in space by what he says. He is creating invisible vibrations around him, and so he is creating an atmosphere.
– Hazrat Inayat Khan

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, Remembering

When we manage a flash of mercy for someone we don’t like, especially a truly awful person, including ourselves, we experience a great spiritual moment, a new point of view that can make us gasp. It gives us the chance to rediscover something both old and original, the sweet child in us who, all evidence to the contrary, was not killed off, but just put in the drawer. I realize now how desperately, how grievously, I have needed the necessary mercy to experience self-respect.

It is what a lot of us were so frantic for all along, and we never knew it. We’ve tried almost suicidally for our whole lives to shake it from the boughs of the material world’s trees. But it comes from within, from love, from the flow of the universe; from inside the cluttered drawer.
– Anne Lamott, Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy

Regardless of how many poems I may write/publish, I’m not sure I’ll ever get a book out of them . . . because my poems don’t really talk to each other. Like, my poems don’t even know each other. Like, how did they all even come from the same brain??
– Francesca Leader

Love shows itself more in adversity than in prosperity; as light does, which shines most where the place is darkest.
– Leonardo da Vinci

If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.
– Mikhail Bakunin

Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others.
– Jane Austen

There is no mystery in this association of woods and otherworlds, for anyone who has walked the woods knows, they are places of correspondence, or call and answer.
– Robert Macfarlane

Making one’s life into a meditation is different from using meditation to escape from life.
– Mark Epstein

I used to sit there
pulling arrows out of my heart.
– Louise Glück

And one day
There she was.
Sitting on the gray stoop
Like a little lost girl,
Head turned in my direction,
Wistful, “You were gone a long time.”
– Angela Jackson

Fix your eyes forward on what you can do, not back on what you cannot change.
– Tom Clancy

My dearest wish poets is that your dreams — the books you want to be published, the equitable jobs you want to get, the collaborations that lead to community projects— all of them become more and more possible, whether by inches or by the grand leaps poems are know for making.
– Steven Leyva

So, whatever form it takes, the function of the shadow is to represent the opposite side of the ego and to embody just those qualities that one dislikes most in other people.
– CG Jung

It’s not only the negative qualities that lie in your shadow and need to be retrieved and integrated. Your gold lies in the shadow as well.
– Béa Gonzalez

The heroes and leaders toward peace in our time will be those men and women who have the courage to plunder into the darkness at the bottom of the personal and corporate psyche and face the enemy within.
– Sam Keen

The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.
– Nabokov

WORD & CODE (Anag. FIRE & ICE)

Some say the Earth is made of words,
some say of code.
Since everything is so absurd,
I go with those who favour words:
The circuit for a finite ode;
the hot ink, fit with epic wit
and work. The final life I load.
A future lit
in lines that flowed.

– Anthony Etherin

Tasting Spring

Dandelions dot
a field full of butterscotch
spring sweetens the mind

– Amy Aves Challenger

Inquisitive curiosity into the lives of others extends our lives. This is not sharing; it is artful listening. The other person is a fount of lifeblood, which transfuses vitality into your soul if you can provoke the other with your listening.
– James Hillman

In the good old days poets were for the most part confined to garrets, which they left only for the purpose of being ejected from the offices of magazines and papers to which they attempted to sell their wares.
– P.G. Wodehouse

There is absolutely no salvation without love: this is the wheel in the middle of the wheel. Salvation does not divide. Salvation connects….It is not the exclusive property of any dogma, creed, or church. It keeps the channel open between oneself and however one wishes to name That which is greater than oneself. It has nothing to do with one’s fortunes or one’s circumstances in one’s passage through this world. It is a mighty fortress, even in the teeth of ruin or at the gates of death.
– Jimmy Baldwin

I have only my perplexities to offer you.
– Jorge Luis Borges

We pan for the moment
when the frumpy sky trauma bonds
with the butterscotch horizon.

I see you, lifetimes away next to me,
and my belly growls.

I swallow a whale of longing
& dive into the passive, massive past
to find your incorporeal silhouette–
to hold my breath.

– @tuttysan

A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what’s going on. A psychotic is a guy who’s just found out what’s going on.
– William S. Burroughs

Water is a mysterious element (because of its structure).
And it is very cinegenic.
It transmits movement, depth, changes.
Nothing is more beautiful than water.
– Andrei Tarkovsky

Whoever listens carefully to “Hallelujah” will discover that it is a song about sex, about love, about life on earth. The Hallelujah is not a homage to a worshipped person, idol or god, but the Hallelujah of the orgasm. It’s an ode to life and love.
– Jeff Buckley

Sex without actual, personal love is traumatising to the body, whether its branded as normal, casual, spiritual, neo-tantric, whatever
– @wholebodyprayer

As we follow the clues—stars, numbers, colors, plants, forms, verse, music, structures—a huge framework of connections revealed at many levels. One is inside an echoing manifold where everything responds and everything has a place and a time assigned to it.
– Giorgio di Santillana

If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle, or as it were, fondle them – peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them at any rate be your acquaintances. If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition.
– Winston S. Churchill

It’s a hard time to be human.
We know too much
and too little.
Does the breeze need us?
The cliffs? The gulls?
If you’ve managed to do one good thing,
the ocean doesn’t care.
But when Newton’s apple fell toward the earth,
the earth, ever so slightly, fell
toward the apple as well.
– Ellen Bass, The World Has Need of You

i live in music

i live in music
is this where you live?
i live here in music
i live on c# street
my friend lives on b-flat avenue
do you live here in music
sound
falls round me like rain on other folks
saxophones wet my face
cold as winter in st. louis
hot like peppers i rub on my lips
thinkin they waz lilies
i got 15 trumpets where other women got hips
& a upright bass for both sides of my heart
i walk round in a piano like somebody
else be walkin on the earth
i live in music
live in it
wash in it
i cd even smell it
wear sound on my fingers
sound falls so fulla music
ya cd make a river where yr arm is &
hold yrself
hold yrself in a music

– Ntozake Shange

Sometimes I flew to prove that I could. I was the girlfriend of the poet John Keats and I demonstrated I could fly among blackberry bushes whose fruit the size of street lamps suggested I was, we were, the size of songbirds. Other times I flew across the rooftops of the city and the view was dazzling, as was the sense of having all that space under you, like the sense of all that water when you swim in clear lakes. It was the beautiful spacious side of loneliness.

I wondered what this flying meant. Sometimes it seemed to be dreams’ impatience, a jump cut from here to there without filling in the space between. Sometimes it was escape. Sometimes it was a talent, and like talents sometimes do, it set me apart, usually literally, since I tended to fly alone, to be the only one who could fly, though sometimes I showed other people how to do it or carried them along.

It was an experience of not belonging to the ordinary world and not being bound to it. I thought sometimes that it might be about writing, about being a writer, and now I wonder why I didn’t think of it as reading, as that constant, chronic activity that had taken up so much of my waking hours since I’d learned to read, as being in a book, in a story, in the lives of others and invented worlds and not my own, unbounded by my own body and my own life and my own time and place.
I could fly, though now I wonder if the problem was how to come to earth.
– Rebecca Solnit

How strange and wonderful is our home, our earth, with its swirling vaporous atmosphere, its flowing and frozen liquids, its trembling plants, its creeping, crawling, climbing creatures, the croaking things with wings that hang on rocks and soar through fog, the furry grass, the scaly seas – how utterly rich and wild. Yet some among us have the nerve, the insolence, the brass, the gall to whine about the limitations of our earthbound fate and yearn for some more perfect world beyond the sky. We are none of us good enough for the world we have.
– Edward Abbey

Our lifetime friendships can be more steadfast and trustworthy than any marriage, and considerably more treasurable. Those few persons whom I gained as friends before the age of twenty-five, for example. Nothing they would ever say or do would diminish my love and esteem for them.
– Francine du Plessix Gray

Female Druids in medieval Irish legends were called Banduri or Bandorai.
The Druids were the intellectual elite. Being a Druid was a tribal function, but they were also poets, astronomers, magicians, and astrologers. It took them 19 years to gain the necessary knowledge and skills in alchemy, medicine, law, the sciences, and more. They organized intellectual life, judicial processes, had skills to heal people, and were involved in developing strategies for war. They were an oasis of wisdom and highly respected in their society.

According to Plutarch, female Celts were nothing like Roman or Greek women. They were active in negotiating treaties and wars, and they participated in assemblies and mediated quarrels. According to the ‘Pomponius Mela’, virgin priestesses who could predict the future lived on the island of Sena, in Brittany.

The term “Druid” comes from the Indo-European word “deru”, which means ’‘the truth” or “true’’

– Natalia Klimczak

The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience. It would be easy, however, to destroy that good conscience by shouting to them: if you want the happiness of the people, let them speak out and tell what kind of happiness they want and what kind they don’t want! But, in truth, the very ones who make use of such alibis know they are lies; they leave to their intellectuals on duty the chore of believing in them and of proving that religion, patriotism, and justice need for their survival the sacrifice of freedom. As if freedom, when it goes away somewhere, did not disappear the last, after all that made our reasons to live. No, freedom does not die alone. At the same time justice is forever exiled, the homeland agonizes, the innocent is re-crucified every day.
– Albert Camus

To keep our hearts open is probably the most urgent responsibility you have as you get older
– Leonard Cohen

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we are saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we are saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love.
– Reinhold Niebuhr

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
– Isaac Newton

There are days when I can’t live in this country. Not the whole thing at once, including the hateful parts, the misogyny, the brutal disregard of the powerful for the powerless. Sometimes I can only be a citizen of these trees, this rainy day, the family I can hold safe, the garden I can grow. A fire that refuses to go out.
– Barbara Kingsolver

The world is a totality in itself. It has its own muscles, its own brain, its own limbs, and its own circulation. We are not talking about the totality of the world in the sense that everything should be good and perfect and fantastic, and nobody should acknowledge anything bad. We are talking about reality, in which good is made out of bad and bad is made out of good. Therefore, the world can exist in its own good/bad level, its self-existing level of dark and light, black and white, constantly. Whatever is there, favorable or unfavorable, is workable: it is the universe.
– Chögyam Trungpa

The number one cause of atheism is Christians. Those who proclaim Him with their mouths and deny Him with their actions is what an unbelieving world finds unbelievable.
– Karl Rahner

‘The romantic imperative,’ Friedrich Schlegel wrote in 1797-1798, ‘demands the mixing of all genres. All nature and science should become art—[and all] art should become nature and science….Poetry should become ethical and ethics should be poetic.’ The attempt to bring together (to ‘mix’) various disciplines and ways of knowledge, to make philosophy poetical and poetry philosophical, to introduce poetic insight into ethical norms, to bring art and science together—these were the aims of the movement that has become known as *romanticism*. Science and art, philosophy and poetry, the romantics repeatedly proclaimed, should become one.
– Dalia Nassar

On entering the hut, it seemed to expand magically to the size of a high-ceilinged many-chambered tumbling-tome-filled used books store. Books and papers everywhere. You talk about dangerous. My father lighted the place at night with candles. He had a fireplace and plenty wood and paper. I was amazed he hadn’t burned the place down.
– Tom Foran Clark, Jacob’s Papers

Sometimes you have to travel a long way to find what is near.
– Paulo Coelho

We are Sun and Moon, dear friend; we are Sea and Land.
It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is: each the other’s opposite and complement.
– Hermann Hesse

Laid-back in orbit, they found their minds.
They found their minds were very clean and clear.
Clear crystals in swarms outside were their fireflies and larks.
Larks they were in lift-off, swallows in soaring…
– Edwin Morgan, A Home in Space

A Cairn
As by barren trackway
on a mountain crest
with view of scree and corrie,
ridge and col,
a traveller might pause,
take bearings, cast
in tribute to record:
“A man came here, went on,
left common token, shared
with those who went before
and shall come after.”
– Gael Turnbull

They were brilliant, widely read, incisive, and effortlessly effective analysts and programmers. Which is another reason why, ultimately, so many people died.
– Charles Stross, The Rhesus Chart

I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, & poetic than we currently believe. I wouldn’t be surprised if poetry filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs— is how the world works. The world isn’t logical, it’s a song.
– David Byrne

All you can give us is what life is about from your point of view. You are not going to be able to give us plans to the submarine. Life is not a submarine. There are no plans.
– Anne Lamott

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.
– Sylvia Plath

irises are where
that rainbow
begins
– Issa

The older I grow the more impressed I am by the frailty & uncertainty of our understanding & the more I take recourse to the simplicity of immediate experience so as not to lose contact w/ the essentials–the dominants which rule human existence throughout the millenniums.
– CG Jung

Something opens our wings. Something makes boredom & hurt disappear. Someone fills the cup in front of us: We taste only sacredness.
– Rumi

It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.
– Joseph Conrad

Unreadability of this
world. Everything doubles.

The strong clocks
agree with the fissure-hour,
hoarsely.

You, wedged into your deepest,
climb out of yourself
forever.

– Paul Celan

There is always a moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in …
– Graham Greene

every tree
has it’s calling card
spring buds
– Issa

The unconscious has a kind of absolute knowledge, but we cannot prove it is an absolute knowledge, because the Absolute, the Eternal, is transcendental.
– CG Jung

The worn leather
sandals by the entrance
to an old man’s hut
– Kim Dorman

To know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility.
– Flannery O’Connor

I have been trying, for some times now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I have been finding this hard to do.
– Maggie Nelson, Bluets

A person always finds when he begins to practice meditation that all sorts of problems are brought out. Any hidden aspects of your personality are brought out into the open, for simple reason that for first time you are allowing yourself to see your state of mind as it is.
– Ram Dass

Your ability to handle conflict will set the atmosphere for you to have authentic peace – not just silence, but peace.
– Dr. Thema

Nietzsche said, “the poets lie too much.” Hölderlin “yet what remains, the poets provide.” Do these two serious ideas contradict each other?
– Ludwig Hohl

but to look your hunger in the eye
and to stare it straight to zero
and then to learn to love the wait
till the love is in your marrow
– Steven Heighton, Ballad of the Slow Road

They’re banning books from their schools. We’re banishing hunger from ours.
– Governor Tim Walz

I look to many of our current poets to show me what poetry can do; it’s a rich time for the art. But only one or two keep teaching me what it IS. ⁦
– Jorie Graham

⁩

Two things are yet to be discovered. The first is the infinite gulf that separates us from one another. The second is the bridge that could connect us.
– @RedBookJung

It’s okay to miss someone and know better than to reach out to them.
– Natasha Carter

I can still see you: an echo, palpable with tactile words, at the parting ridge. Your face shies softly, when all at once it becomes lamplike bright in me, at the place where one most painfully says never.
– Paul Celan

Another catastrophe, that we never imagined,
suddenly, torrentially falls upon us.
– C.P. Cavafy

There was a secret
name inside every living thing,
a song underneath every song
– Jason Myers

We’re beginning to want our bodies back. And yet we’re simultaneously afraid to have them back and ignorant of how to get them back.
– Stanley Keleman, The Human Ground

But to say what you want to say, you must create another language and nourish it for years and years with what you have loved, with what you have lost, with what you will never find again.
– George Seferis

No one can tell the whole story.
– Jorie Graham

There must be a reason
why the beloved abruptly
ended our love affair.

The heart is reluctant
to believe that he was always unfaithful.

– Parveen Shakir

His Eye on The Sparrow
by Airea D. Matthews

– after hanif

I guess black people can write about flowers at a time like this since every
poem turns on itself. Starts one way to end another. We see
it in nature too. How seed turns to
leaf regardless of its earth or the thought inside my head
blossoms into a hyacinth with as sweet a scent. Even in dreams,
thought’s pretend cousin, I often see Mamie Till. She walks the
church aisle toward her son’s body while wisteria bloats the casket’s brim and
papered bougainvillea bracts emerge from where his eye once was. An
entire garden from the nutrients of once human. And not to mention all
those awed birds that circle Emmett’s pillowed corpse. So many in
the tabernacle. Not predators of the fleshly bloom or harbingers of his
God’s descent, not refugees fleeing his body exilic but eternity’s
messengers. We, who pull breath, confuse death’s irony. Whoever dies and is
remembered stays living.

Fragments
The welcoming light of fennel along the path. An impression that gets stronger with each encounter. A forgotten, insistent, sign from the plant world. But how to reply? Build a language in which silences would have the same gentleness, the same luminosity; in which there would be not partitioning off, no emptiness; in which it would suffice to be in order to speak.
– Pierre-Albert Jourdan, translated by John Taylor

More than any other author of the 20th century, Tolkien resuscitated the notion that the fantastic may tell us more about reality than do scientific facts. When the army asked Michael Tolkien to list his father’s profession, it should surprise no one that he answered “wizard.”
– Bradley J. Birzer

I really dislike when people treat me like a mirror.
– Nnedi Okorafor, PhD

To heal is to return
color to the forsythia,
texture to tree bark,
the fragment to the whole,
possibility to the heart.
To heal is to become
more sensitive
to the brushstrokes
of life,
to awaken amazement
with the way light rests
in the thicket,
to read the poetry
in the tangled calligraphy
of the briar patch.
As you heal, the world becomes
a reverse prayer flag.
Everything brightens
as reverence returns to it.
God emerges from the conceptual,
the separate
and becomes soluble
and saturated
in all things.
– Chelan Harkin

A little note for those of us interviewing folks for entry-level jobs: you’ll probably see candidates who either graduated into a pandemic or whose college years were disrupted by it. Be kind and understanding.
– Kate Tuttle

Literature is full of absolutely necessary useless things.
– Rose Montero

In all respects, we are told, life will be made simpler, more comfortable, less confusing once we offload undesirable tasks onto a set of adequately capable, massive, ‘living’ algorithms.
– Nicholas Russell

Mistakes Were Made (but Not By Me)
Dissonance theory also exploded the self-flattering idea that we humans…process information logically. On the contrary: If the new information is consonant with our beliefs, we think it is well founded and useful: “Just what I always said!” But if the new information is dissonant, then we consider it biased or foolish: “What a dumb argument!
– Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson

Ideals have remarkable qualities, among them that of suddenly turning into their opposite the moment one tries really to live up to them.

. . . she discovered that each eternal verity exists twice over and even in a multiplicity of forms.

– Robert Musil

trauma center
an old drum kit
in the basement
– @pauldavidmena

Only truthful hands write true poems. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem.
– Paul Celan

How bright you are, my unlived day…
– Magda Isanos

The difficulty lies not in solving problems but in expressing them correctly.
– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Some days I see it in the moment
the graffiti thickens near the tunnels,
or when the train stumbles
in the city’s shadow–when the light
we know becomes delicate and cruel–
and I see how fragile our eyes become.
– Ryan Ryan Teitman

So
temples still stand.
A star
probably still has light.
Nothing,
nothing is lost.
– Paul Celan

Dharma art is the principal way we are trying to create enlightened society, which is a society where there is no aggression, and where people could discover their innate basic goodness and enlightened existence, whether it is in a domestic or political or social situation.
– Chögyam Trungpa

The world was on fire and no one could save me but you.
– David Lynch, Wild at Heart

I had this frustration with the fixed pitch of a piano. You couldn’t bend notes. There was no vibrato, no flirt, no slide. All the other instruments — violins, guitars — they could do it. The human voice, too. That’s where the synthesizer came in. It was a keyboard, so it was already second nature to me and, through the controls, I could play melodies with slides and bends. To me, that was heaven. So that’s how I ended up finding my own voice on a synthesizer.
– Jan Hammer

His inventory of sounds was more like a rainforest than a library. His synthesizer lines whistled, gurgled, cackled, squished, snickered and belched; their pitches might wriggle, and their tones could bristle and bite. There was humor in them, along with ingenuity, defiance, raunch and joy.
– from Bernie Worrell’s New York Times obituary

Part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.
– Mark Twain

Can we stop pretending that humans are noble by default?

Humans are full spectrum beasts. If anything, we are more naturally disposed to spite, cruelty, & vengefulness than patience, forbearance, and kindness.

But we can learn and grow, and this is our superpower.

Let us grow.

– Kenneth Folk

The poet communicates with God; his voice has ramifications from beyond; that is why a poem cannot be penetrated with understanding, but through exaltation, like a morphine injection.
– Ilarie Voronca

Cheers to the edgelord of the all these blackberry blooms.
– Alina Stefanescu

I just can’t find the time
To write my mind
The way I want

it
to read

– Alina Stefanescu

Individualism, and the cultivation of the self and private well-being— featuring, above all, the ideal of *health*—are the values to which intellectuals are most likely to subscribe.
– Susan Sontag

In a way, the books were protection. An escape she would always have access to. A sanctuary, there for when she needed it.
– Cait Spivey

Belief systems that don’t acknowledge the fertile dark, that don’t appreciate how trauma and its pain persist in us and unconsciously govern our lives, also don’t grok that embodied emotional healing is a secret doorway into wholeness and regeneration.
– Jack Adam Weber

No one can live without a little exaggeration.
– Alejandro Zambra

The supreme thing to know is bodhicitta.
The supreme thing to learn is bodhicitta.
The supreme thing to practice is bodhicitta.
The supreme thing to meditate on is bodhicitta.
Bodhicitta transforms
afflictive emotions, suffering and fear,
and sickness and death
into a path to enlightenment.
If you are going, remember bodhicitta
If you are sitting, remember bodhicitta
If you are lying down, remember bodhicitta
If you are standing, remember bodhicitta.
It is because of bodhicitta that one gives up
the pleasure of meditative concentration,
and in order to relieve others of their suffering
goes down to the deepest hell
as if into a pleasure park.
Meditate upon bodhicitta
when afflicted by disease.
Meditate upon bodhicitta when sad.
Meditate upon bodhicitta
when suffering occurs.
Meditate upon bodhicitta
when you get scared.
Just like the lotus among flowers
is bodhicitta supreme
among all virtuous thoughts.
Since having it
brings immediate and final happiness,
one should make every effort to produce it.
With bodhicitta one enjoys happiness.
With bodhicitta one enjoys even sorrow.
With bodhicitta one enjoys what is there.
With bodhicitta one enjoys
even what is not there.
If one investigates to find
the supreme method for accomplishing
the aims of oneself and others,
it comes down to bodhicitta alone.
Being certain of this, develop it with joy.
– Khunu Rinpoche

Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy.
– C. S. Lewis

The limits of language are not the limits of the world.
– Uche Nduka

What we’re thinking about is a peaceful planet. We’re not thinking about anything else. We’re not thinking about any kind of power. We’re not thinking about any kind of struggles. We’re not thinking about revolution or war or any of that. That’s not what we want. Nobody wants to get hurt. Nobody wants to hurt anybody. We would all like to be able to live an uncluttered life. A simple life, a good life. And think about moving the whole human race ahead a step, or a few steps.
– Jerry Garcia

I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes.
– Vladimir Nabokov

For the first time in my life, I realized telling the truth was way different from finding the truth, and finding the truth had everything to do with revisiting and rearranging words.
– Kiese Laymon

I don’t know why people expect art to make sense. Life doesn’t make sense.
– David Lynch

health insurance isn’t even insurance in the US anymore

it’s like the most expensive cover charge just to get in the door to then pay unknown fees that will be deducted by unknown percentages at unknown time in the future.

– Paul Millerd

I don’t think it’s necessary to know exactly who I am. The main interest in life and work is that they allow us to become someone different than we were in the beginning. If you knew, when you start writing a book, what you’re going to say at the end, do you think you’d have the courage to write it? What goes for writing and for a love relationship goes for life too. The thing is only worth it to the degree we ignore how it will end.
– Michel Foucault

There are so many ways people show up for each other in art: with a poetics, with a story, with a “content,” with a politics, with a shape. We show up with languages and forms. We give each other permission. We say you can. It means something that we do this for each other.
– Jessica Johnson

The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive him mad: the more he read, the less he seemed to know — the greater the number of the books he read, the greater the immense uncountable number of those which he could never read would seem to be…. The thought that other books were waiting for him tore at his heart forever.
– Thomas Wolfe

I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see, and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
– Joan Didion

There is a difference between having intelligence and having knowledge. Intelligence is innate, knowledge is acquired.

Ignorance is a lack of knowledge. There are many intelligent people who are ignorant on many subjects in many areas of their lives. To assume that one knows more than the experts is an ignorant position to take.

– Laurence Overmire

Books act like a developing fluid on film. That is, they bring into consciousness what you didn’t know you knew.
– Clifton Fadiman

And from a poet’s side shall read his book.
O daisy mine, what will it be to look
From God’s side even of such a simple thing?
– Alice Meynell

A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself.
– May Sarton

Lots of people talk to animals…
Not very many listen though,
that is the problem.
– A.A. Milne

As long as we are determined
to move at our swift, logical pace,
our child remains hidden.
The soul-bird put away in a dark box in childhood
needs time, needs silence
to learn to trust again
– Marion Woodman

And when you think about it, poets always want us to be moved by something, until in the end, you begin to suspect a poet is someone who is moved by everything, who just stands in front of the world and weeps and laughs and laughs and weeps (the mysteries, said Aristotle, are the saying of many ridiculous and many serious things).
– Mary Ruefle

The person who cannot set himself down
on the crest of the moment,
forgetting everything from the past,
who is not capable of standing on a single point,
like a goddess of victory,
without dizziness or fear,
will never know what happiness is.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

In front of the breast lies the great world of activity; behind it, in the spinal cord, is the vast, illimitable, unfathomable ocean of consciousness, motionless and peaceful. The waves of the world are hurling themselves upon the breast, breaking there and sinking down into the deep peace of the ocean within.
– Sri Anirvan

Not to cherish both the angel and the animal, both the spirit and the flesh, is to renounce the whole interest and greatness of being human, and it is really tragic that those in whom the two natures are equally strong should be made to feel in conflict with themselves. For the saint-sinner and the mystic-sensualist is always the most interesting type of human being because he is the most complete.
– Alan Watts

In Greek the word means ‘the wounds of returning’. Nostalgia is not an emotion that is entertained; it is sustained. When Ulysses comes home, nostalgia is the lumps he takes, not the tremulous pleasures he derives from being home again.
– Hollis Frampton

The innocent mistake that keeps us caught in our own particular style of ignorance, unkindness, and shut-downness is that we are never encouraged to see clearly what is, with gentleness. Instead, there’s a kind of basic misunderstanding that we should try to be better than we already are, that we should try to improve ourselves, that we should try to get away from painful things, and that if we could just learn how to get away from the painful things, then we would be happy. That is the innocent, naïve misunderstanding that we all share, which keeps us unhappy.
– Pema Chödron

I walk alone, absorbed in my fantastic play, —
Fencing with rhymes, which, parrying nimbly, back away;
Tripping on words, as on rough paving in the street,
Or bumping into verses I long had dreamed to meet.
– Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal

Ideas are like dreams; they will disappear unless we record them.

Write a book, start a podcast, build a brand—anything that makes your ideas real.

– Simon Sinek

His two suitcases, which he left open on the floor, were never entirely unpacked. At that time nothing was unpacked, even in people’s heads. Everything was in store or in transit. Dreams were kept on luggage racks, in kitbags and in suitcases.
– John Berger

Don’t limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.
– Rabindranath Tagore

Man does not know he carries the stars hidden in himself and he is the microcosm and thus carries within him the whole firmament.
– Paracelsus

Thinking out of the box’ is exactly how a box would think.
– Báyò Akómoláfé

It is time, then, to consider a new kind of declaration. A declaration of responsibility, acknowledging what we have done and recognizing we were mistaken: a simple expression of collective responsibility for what is wrong.
– Hugh Roberts

We are living in a fake world. But we find reality in this fake world.
– Haruki Murakami

Life, believe, is not a dream
So dark as sages say;
Oft a little morning rain
Foretells a pleasant day.
– Charlotte Brontë

…it’s not necessary to stand by the sea to paint the sea, it is there, inside us, grafted into places — the temporal world cannot keep.
– Marian Haddad

You Can’t

Translated by Fady Joudah

They will fall in the end,
those who say you can’t.
It’ll be age or boredom that overtakes them,
or lack of imagination.
Sooner or later, all leaves fall to the ground.
You can be the last leaf.
You can convince the universe
that you pose no threat
to the tree’s life.

– Maya Abu Al-Hayyat

Always keep mint on your windowsill in August, to ensure that buzzing flies will stay outside, where they belong. Don’t think the summer is over, even when roses droop and turn brown and the stars shift position in the sky. Never presume August is a safe or reliable time of the year. It is the season of reversals, when the birds no longer sing in the morning and the evenings are made up of equal parts golden light and black clouds. The rock-solid and the tenuous can easily exchange places until everything you know can be questioned and put into doubt.
– Alice Hoffman, Practical Magic

In a fractured age, when cynicism is god, here is a possibly heresy: we live by stories, we also live in them. One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, or we are also living the stories we planted— knowingly or unknowingly—in ourselves. We live stories that either give our lives meaning or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives.
– Ben Okri

Surrender to the way things want to happen next, even though this often involves a vast and terrifying loss of control. Trust the magic that was born into your soul.
– Martha Beck, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World

What has been an ancient spiritual truth is now increasingly verified by science: We are all indivisibly part of one another. We share a common ancestry with everyone and everything alive on earth. The air we breathe contains atoms that have passed through the lungs of ancestors long dead. Our bodies are composed of the same elements created deep inside the furnaces of long-dead stars. We can look upon the face of anyone or anything around us and say—as a moral declaration and a spiritual, cosmological, and biological fact: You are a part of me I do not yet know.
– Valarie Kaur

Ode: We Are the Music Makers
by Arthur O’Shaughnessy

We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams;
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems

With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world’s great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire’s glory.
One man with a dream of pleasure
Shall go forth and conquer a crown,
And three with a new song’s measure
Can trample and empire down.

We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Ninevah with our sighing,
And Bable itself with our mirth;
And o’erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world’s worth;
For each age is a dream that it dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.

Instead of running after patience, relax and let it come to you. Loosen the tension in your body; open your concentration and allow your emotional energy to flow. Let the warm, soothing energy of patience arise within you and flow through your body easily and freely. This practice is the act of patience.
– Tarthang Tulku

Often I imagine the earth
through the eyes of the atoms we’re made of—
atoms, peculiar
atoms everywhere—
no me, no you, no opinions,
no beginning, no middle, no end,
soaring together like those
ancient Chinese birds
hatched miraculously with only one wing,
helping each other fly home.
– Dan Gerber

Always show more kindness than seems necessary, because the person receiving it needs it more than you will ever know.
– Colin Powell

IT’S ON US
It’s the old grief again,
come today on Yom HaShoah,
day of Remembrance.
A day to rest, ourselves, our lands, our ancient hatreds.
A day for olives and honey, for figs and pomegranates,
for sweetness.
Who by heart, and who by soul, who by dream and who by drift,
Who by avodah, by prayer, by work,
Who by love and who by sorrow,
Who by peace and who by disaster
Homeseekers, Godwrestlers, journeymakers
Who by light and who by forest,
Today, all are called to stand at the gates of Auschwitz.
Rings and words sewn into our hem, hearts hid beneath suitcase lining,
Today we speak back the Word to the Giver,
shine Light back to Source of all Light.
We’ve been running on fumes. On coffee, on oil, on must and have-to –
Today we quit.
Today we bless and invite the white fire of silence the poem burns into, both whole and gone, an alef bet of peace.
Neruda said: Keep quiet, said:
If we …for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Love is the User Manual, on holy days & lonely days…
V’ahavta …and you shall love…
May our lives be a blessing
May we live each day to its fullest
for the sake of all that is life,
O New ear, that hears! O little sister, o my brother!
– Judyth Hill

the thing about loving people is that then they love people too and those people love people and all of a sudden you’re keeping half a city written in your heart. the names alone would take a night to pray.
– @eireannmor

Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant—there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing—and keeping the unknown always beyond you…
– Georgia O’Keeffe

Hearing about how much ‘boss’ type behavior is ok before it crosses into bullying sounds dated to me. Surely it’s not about where to draw the line but how we can just move on from this macho, oppressive style to something more collaborative & respectful of hearing different views?
– Charlie Jones

A thoroughly good relationship with ourselves results in being still, which doesn’t mean we don’t run and jump and dance about. It means there’s no compulsiveness. We don’t overwork, overeat, oversmoke, overseduce. In short, we begin to stop causing harm.
– Pema Chodron

At the edge of the forest—dream flowers chime.
– Arthur Rimbaud

And, if you ever did
Come back
To me
What, would I tell
Of the times you had missed
Or, the times I had missed you.
– Athey Thompson

It is very difficult to make meditation into a habit. Even though you’ve been doing it for twenty years, still there’s constantly a certain sense of struggle involved. This shows that meditation is different from the rest of habitual things. It requires some kind of challenge, constantly.
– Chögyam Trungpa

Writer friends: If we heal all the wounds that drove us to write in the first place, will we still have something to say?
– Bernadette Murphy

There is no past we can bring back by longing for it. There is only an eternal now that builds and creates out of the past something new and better.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The Island
by Langston Hughes

Wave of sorrow,
Do not drown me now: I see the island
Still ahead somehow.
I see the island
And its sands are fair: Wave of sorrow,
Take me there.

A synthesis of attitudes, developed from the aesthetics and economics of invention and problem solving, informs the formal making of all things.
– Simon Cutts

There is something I know, there is something I know, there is something . . . When still a child, living still in a canary-yellow, large, cold house […] I knew without knowing, I knew without wonder, I knew as one knows oneself, I knew what it is impossible to know.
– Nabokov

My God:

招招舟子、人涉卬否。 人涉卬否、卬須我友

The ferryman keeps beckoning; others cross with him, but I do not. Others cross with him, but I do not: I am waiting for my friend.

– via Aaron Poohigian

Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting.
– Edmund Burke

Learning without thought is labour lost; thought without learning is perilous.
– Confucius

If you want a new idea, read an old book.
– Ivan Pavlov

How far is night advanced, and when will day
Retinge the dusk and livid air with bloom,
And fill this void with warm, creative ray?
– Charlotte Brontë

A test of a people is how it behaves toward the old. It is easy to love children. Even tyrants and dictators make a point of being fond of children. But the affection and care for the old, the incurable, the helpless are the true gold mines of a culture.
– Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
– Mark Twain

The object isn’t to make art,
it’s to be in that wonderful state
which makes art inevitable.
– Robert Henri

Humans don’t mind hardship. In fact they thrive on it. What they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.
– Sebastian Junger

Do not go out seeking those who err. What do you know about their error? Perhaps it is sacred. You should not disturb the sacred.
– @RedBookJung

For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains. “Longing,” says the poet Robert Hass, “because desire is full of endless distances.”

In long-term relationships …we are called upon to navigate that delicate balance between separateness and connectedness …we confront the challenge of sustaining both–without losing either.
– Harriet Lerner

Most people are perfectly capable of figuring out their own “stuff” given time. If not, they probably don’t want to figure it out.
– Barrie Davenport

A poet is someone who has a
strong sense of self and feels
his life to be meaningful.
By insisting on that self and
refusing to become the socialized
article that bureaucrats, priests,
rabbis, and so-called educators
approve of, the poet offends the
brainwashed millions who are the
majority in any country.
His words, his free manner of
living are a constant irritation to
the repressed, the fearful, the
self satisfied, and the incurious.
– Irving Layton

Ultimately, our practice requires the implicit understanding that whatever situation or emotion we can’t say yes to is the exact direction of our path.
– Ezra Bayda, Zen Heart

The problem with the past is that it has no imagination; it can only repeat its script.
– James Hollis

I can’t do computer programming. I’ve tried for years to somehow find any goddamn paradigm that doesn’t make me want to jump off a cliff but it’s just not going to happen. It’s over, I give up, it’s too tedious and boring and frustrating and sad.
– Mikael Brockman

It’s never very pleasant in the morning to open The New York Times.
– W. H. Auden

We few left who listen to the radio leave
Ourselves available to surprise.
– Jericho Brown

Beware of those who seek constant crowds; they are nothing alone.
– Charles Bukowski

In an experiment revealing the importance of having friendships, social psychologists have found that perceptions of task difficulty are significantly shaped by the proximity of a friend. In their experimental design, the researchers asked college students to stand at the base of a hill while carrying a weighted backpack and to estimate the steepness of a hill. Some participants stood next to close friends whom they had known a long time, some stood next to friends they had not known for long, and the rest stood alone during the exercise. The students who stood with friends gave significantly lower estimates of the steepness of the hill than those who stood alone. Furthermore, the longer the close friends had known each other, the less steep the hill appeared to the participants involved in the study. In other words, the world looks less difficult when standing next to a close friend.
– Schnall, Harber, Stefanucci, and Proffitt, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

Watching our mind can be more enjoyable than watching a Hollywood movie. The screen, projector, story, characters and drama are all within our own experience, and all of samsara and nirvana is part of the show. Such a great theater production couldn’t be bought for millions of dollars. Our ticket into this theater is ‘seeing through’: seeing that phenomena do not exist as they appear.

Seeing through appearance – thoughts, emotions and outer objects – is very important. When we don’t see through appearance, we invest that which is fluid, changing and ungraspable with an existence it doesn’t have, and the world seems to either lure us in or threaten us. This makes peace of mind almost impossible.
– Dzitar Kongtrul Rinpoche, It’s Up to You

Intuition sees through borders and boundaries and finds what the intellect fails to see. Because the intellect fails to see certain realities, it assumes they do not exist and are invented by the imagination.
– David Tacey

It’s cold today, but in a spring way, and I love you.
– Vladimir Nabokov

There were none of the signs of spring…no budding woods or blooming gardens. There was only-spring itself; the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it everywhere: in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in the warm, high wind
– Willa Cather

Sometimes the ideas that least match our expectations are the most innovative. By definition, revolutionary ideas have no context. They invent their own.
– Rick Rubin

Once in a while I use a language of mine
I invent it, kneading it with the past
I don’t hand it over except in translation.
– Antonella Anedda, Languages, tr. P. Ceccagnoli and S. Stewart

my hometown
no longer in view
summer lark
– Issa

The worst thing you can try to do is cling to something that is gone, or to recreate it.
– Johnette Napolitano

The single sleeper lying here
Is neither lying nor asleep.
Bend down your nosey parker ear
And eavesdrop on him. In the deep
Conundrum of the dirt, he speaks
The one word you will never hear.
– George Barker, Epitaph for the Poet

All I want to say is: I made the best of a mediocre job. It was a good fight while it lasted. And so life goes.
– Sylvia Plath

Love is the emblem of eternity:
it confounds all notion of time:
effaces all memory of a beginning,
all fear of an end.
– Madame de Staël

Yes, a day is merely forever
In memory’s shiningness,
And a year but a gust or a gasp
In the summer’s heat of Time, and in that last summer
I was almost ready to learn
What imagination is—it is only
The lie we must learn to live by, if ever
We mean to live at all.
– Robert Penn Warren

But the greatest human problems are not social problems, but decisions that the individual has to make alone. The most important feelings of which man is capable of emphasize his separateness from other people, not his kinship with them. The feelings of a mountaineer towards a mountain emphasize his kinship with the mountain rather than with the rest of mankind. The same goes for the leap of the heart experienced by a sailor when he smells the sea, or for the astronomer’s feeling about the stars, or for the archaeologist’s love of the past.

My feeling of love for my fellowmen makes me aware of my humanness, but my feeling about a mountain gives me an oddly nonhuman sensation. It would be incorrect, perhaps, to call it ‘superhuman’; but it nevertheless gives me a sense of transcending my everyday humanity. Maslow’s importance is that he has placed these experiences of ‘transcendence’ at the centre of his psychology. He sees them as the compass by which man gains a sense of the magnetic north of his existence. They bring a glimpse of ‘the source of power, meaning and purpose’ inside himself. This can be seen with great clarity in the matter of the cure of alcoholics. Alcoholism arises from what I have called ‘generalised hypertension’, a feeling of strain or anxiety about practically everything. It might be described as a ‘passively negative’ attitude towards existence. The negativity prevents proper relaxation; there is a perpetual excess of adrenalin in the bloodstream. Alcohol may produce the necessary relaxation, switch off the anxiety, allow one to feel like a real human being instead of a bundle of over-tense nerves. Recurrence of hypertension makes the alcoholic remedy a habit, but the disadvantages soon begin to outweigh the advantage: hangovers, headaches, fatigue, guilt, general inefficiency. And, above all, passivity.

The alcoholics are given mescalin or LSD, and then peak experiences are induced by means of music or poetry or colours blending on a screen. They are suddenly gripped and shaken by a sense of meaning, of just how incredibly interesting life can be for the undefeated. They also become aware of the vicious circle involved in alcoholism: misery and passivity leading to a general running-down of the vital powers, and to the lower levels of perception that are the outcome of fatigue. ‘The spirit world shuts not its gates, Your heart is dead, your senses sleep,’ says the Earth Spirit to Faust. And the senses sleep when there is not enough energy to run them efficiently. On the other hand, when the level of will and determination is high, the senses wake up. (Maslow was not particularly literary, or he might have been amused to think that Faust is suffering from exactly the same problem as the girl in the chewing gum factory (described earlier), and that he had, incidentally, solved a problem that had troubled European culture for nearly two centuries).

Peak experiences are a by-product of this higher energy-drive. The alcoholic drinks because he is seeking peak experiences; (the same, of course, goes for all addicts, whether of drugs or tobacco.) In fact, he is moving away from them, like a lost traveler walking away from the inn in which he hopes to spend the night. The moment he sees with clarity what he needs to do to regain the peak experience, he does an about-face and ceases to be an alcoholic.

– Colin Wilson

Never be afraid to laugh at yourself. After all, you could be missing out on the joke of the century.
– Dame Edna Everage

We must not be frightened nor cajoled into accepting evil as deliverance from evil. We must go on struggling to be human, though monsters of abstractions police and threaten us.
– Robert Hayden

It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realise that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.
– George Orwell

We could say that practically all the problems of the human race are due to the fact that thought is not proprioceptive.
– David Bohm, On Dialogue

The autonomous individual is a political fiction. It takes a kind of sham gullibility, on our parts, too, to separate this mendacity from our daily lives even as we continue to project it onto politics. Every one of us begins within the body of a mother; every one of us would soon die after birth without constant attention and care; most of us begin our post-natal feeding directly from the body of a woman. All of us, at one point or another, even in our adult lives, passes through periods of vulnerability and dependence in sickness, injury, disability, and old age. No actual person can live without others. Mothers are a constant reminder that the emperor of “the autonomous individual” is as naked as that newborn.
– via azspot, Bio-libertarianism, Meat-Lego Gnosticism, and other matters

Landscape and spirituality are not, for us, inevitably interwoven. We experience no inescapable linkage between our “place” and our way of conceiving the holy, between habitat and habitus, where one lives and how one practices a habit of being. Our concern is simply to move as quickly (and freely) as possible from one place to another. We are bereft of rituals of entry that allow us to participate fully in the places we inhabit.

We have lost the ability even to heed the natural environment, much less perceive it through the lens of a particular tradition. Modern Western culture is largely shorn of attentiveness to both habitat and habitus. Where we live—to what we are rooted—no longer defines who we are. We have learned to distrust all disciplines of formative spiritual traditions, with their communal ways of perceiving the world. We have realized, in the end, the “free individual” at the expense of a network of interrelated meanings.
– Belden C. Lane

It’s really important to not force information in when you can’t receive. To accept all the things in our history that we have not been able to absorb. And to, little by little, allow information in that we don’t have to do anything about except to accept. And to sit with it.

And to choose the easy path. Because as information comes in that caused great tension, if we get into the membrane we can re-experience it in a way that doesn’t actually help us come through it, we just reenact it. But if we find the easy path and just go under the tone and say, “This bit I accept”. But don’t force anything in that causes more stress than you can process through sitting in the synapse.

– Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen

Because getting to know the world happens anyway, by living in it, as soon as you walk out the door you’re confronted with the world directly. With the whole world. With up and down, back and front, ugliness and beauty, perfectly normal. There’s no need to want this. It happens of its own accord. And if you never leave the house, the process is the same.
– Thomas Bernhard

Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.
– Toni Morrison

Let there be new flowering
in the fields let the fields
turn mellow for the men
let the men keep tender
through the time let the time
be wrested from the war
let the war be won
let love be
at the end
– Lucille Clifton

What we need, what we are ultimately groping toward, is the sensitivity required to understand and respond to the psychic energies deep in the very structure of reality itself.
– Thomas Berry

Don’t pay too much attention or take your emotions too seriously. What you feel is not who you are.
– Ariel Grunwald

Will I never rest in sunlight again – slow, languid & golden with peace?
– Sylvia Plath

When a culture is not mythologically instructed, not instructed in story that gives us a call, then we start looking for quasi-stories, little toxic stories that keep our selves alerted and spared until we find another story.
– Jean Houston

What has endured through human history are the stories. They are amazing trees of sound that grow inside the human memory and are fed by some longing for intimacy with others.
– Robert Bly

The Inheritance
I open the door to the world every morning,
anticipating, wondering
who will be the first to greet me
as I step onto the earth with eyes still soft
from dreaming.
Will it be pine, or pine warbler?
Who will be beside me
when I kneel at the pond,
walk through the wood,
cross the meadow?
Will I notice them?
Will they notice me?
Never are my days lived alone.
Never are my breaths less than
an exchange of breaths with some
other soul.
Everything wants to be known.
So, for awhile each day, I tend to this
mutual desire for belonging,
Saying, “Hello pretty girl,” to the doe.
stroking the pussy willows.
meditating beside a frog.
This is how I apprentice to love,
and learn to speak those forgotten words
that acknowledge every living thing
as a simple miracle.
When the day comes that my body
no longer needs to walk out the door
in order to know this fine world,
I pray that some young person is
stepping across their threshold,
taking a deep breath in the morning air,
and realizing,
this is my inheritance.
– Jamie K. Reaser

Our human conditioning makes the ego react against threats to survival. The experiencer experiences fear when the experiences disappear. That’s why there aren’t very many liberated beings—because you have to let go.
– Ram Dass

I am of that bit of earth. So I will not let it go. I show up in the small ways I can, which is talking to people, which is why I tell this to you.
– Lauren Stroh

The symbolic inner experiences which the shaman lives through during his period of initiation are identical with the symbolic experiences the man of today lives through during the individuation process.
– Marie-Louise von Franz

During individuation, one encounters the ‘gods’ not through any collective myth or mediated through the external forms of a religion, but directly, as powers to be experienced within one’s own being.
– Keiron Le Grice

Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.
– Toni Morrison

Mars is braw in crammasy,
Venus in a green silk goun,
The auld mune shak’s her gowden feathers,
Their starry talk’s a wheen o’ blethers,
Nane for thee a thochtie sparin’,
Earth, thou bonnie broukit bairn!
– But greet, an’ in your tears ye’ll droun
The haill clanjamfrie!
– Hugh MacDiarmid

Fianuis

Well, friend, we’re here again — 
sauntering the last half-mile to the land’s frayed end
to find what’s laid on for us, strewn across the turf — 
gull feathers, bleached shells,
a whole bull seal, bone-dry,
knackered from the rut
(we knock on his leathern head, but no one’s home).

Change, change — that’s what the terns scream
down at their seaward rocks;
fleet clouds and salt kiss — 
everything else is provisional,
us and all our works.
I guess that’s why we like it here:
listen — a brief lull,
a rock pipit’s seed-small notes.
– Kathleen Jamie

We dream of ourselves, we aliens from everywhere. Thieves stealing their way across the land.
– Lydia Millet, Elegy for an Altered Planet

The mountain is a sacred place … if you hear the twin sisters telling stories, you should listen.
– Greg Sarris

To be able to disaggregate and denote the elements of your home ground is not to practice an Adamic, possessive form of naming, but rather to sharpen perception—and to begin to honor the immense complexities, human and more-than-human, of a given landscape and its communities. Good place-language, well used, opens onto mystery, grows knowledge, and summons wonder. And in the absence of an exact and detail-giving lexis, the living world can blur into a generalized wash of green, becoming an easily disposable backdrop. Certainly, the nuances observed by specialized vocabularies of place-perception are evaporating from common usage, burnt off by capital, apathy, and virtualization.
– Robert Macfarlane on Barry Lopez

At the end of a world, there are no damned or saved souls, only people and other kin to share in the work of making life possible.
– Bathsheba Demuth

Walking back the way we came, everything was blurred. Tears are made of salt water and we drank them. Grief is love, I kept repeating under my breath. Whatever I have come to know of love and grief I have learned from Great Salt Lake.
– Terry Tempest Williams

We will not save this Earth and all the beings upon it because it’s a good idea. We will save this Earth and its beings because we love it.
– Jane Hirshfield in conversation with Ezra Klein

Poetry has always been massively international, and internationalist, regardless of political affiliations. We poets can make non-political connections. There are diplomats for politics. We’re diplomats for poetry, for literature, for humanity and culture.
– Kathleen Jamie

carrying you over
a river of stars
night rainbow
– Takada Rozan

Ah, he says, you are dreaming again

And I say then I’m glad I dream
the fire is still alive

– Louise Glück

The Dream Keeper

Bring me all of your dreams,
You dreamers,
Bring me all of your
Heart melodies
That I may wrap them
In a blue cloud-cloth
Away from the too-rough fingers
Of the world.

– Langston Hughes

We can never part
with matter,

the mind’s old
home:

as water to our
thirst,

so is rock, the
ground,

to our eyes, and
hands,

and feet.
It is firm water:

it is cold flame.

-after Emerson

– Kim Dorman

Other world?

There is no other world;
here or nowhere

is the whole fact.

-after Emerson

– Kim Dorman

. . . strange, strange are the mishaps of memory.
– Nabokov, The Gift

Be generous with kind words, especially about those who are absent.
– Goethe

We write to be in the reverb of word and world.
– Lauren Berlant & Kathleen Stewart, The Hundreds

The delicious soft, spring-suggesting air, – how it fills my veins with life! Life becomes again credible to me.
– Henry David Thoreau

surrounded
by wild roses
mountain home
– Issa

For a young person it is almost a sin. . . . to be too much occupied with himself; but for the aging person it is a duty and a necessity to give serious attention to himself.
– Carl Gustav Jung

I Don’t Know What Will Kill Us First:
The Race War or What We’ve Done to the Earth
by Fatimah Asghar

so I count my hopes: the bumblebees
are making a comeback, one snug tight
in a purple flower I passed to get to you;

your favorite color is purple but Prince’s
was orange & we both find this hard to believe;
today the park is green, we take grass for granted

the leaves chuckle around us; behind
your head a butterfly rests on a tree; it’s been
there our whole conversation; by my old apartment

was a butterfly sanctuary where I would read
& two little girls would sit next to me; you caught
a butterfly once but didn’t know what to feed it

so you trapped it in a jar & gave it to a girl
you liked. I asked if it died. you say you like
to think it lived a long life. yes, it lived a long life.

Characteristics of Life
by Camille T. Dungy

A fifth of animals without backbones could be at risk of extinction, say scientists.
– BBC Nature News

Ask me if I speak for the snail and I will tell you
I speak for the snail.
speak of underneathedness
and the welcome of mosses,
of life that springs up,
little lives that pull back and wait for a moment.

I speak for the damselfly, water skeet, mollusk,
the caterpillar, the beetle, the spider, the ant.
I speak
from the time before spinelessness was frowned upon.

Ask me if I speak for the moon jelly. I will tell you
one thing today and another tomorrow
and I will be as consistent as anything alive
on this earth.

I move as the currents move, with the breezes.
What part of your nature drives you? You, in your cubicle
ought to understand me. I filter and filter and filter all day.

Ask me if I speak for the nautilus and I will be silent
as the nautilus shell on a shelf. I can be beautiful
and useless if that’s all you know to ask of me.

Ask me what I know of longing and I will speak of distances
between meadows of night-blooming flowers.
I will speak
the impossible hope of the firefly.

You with the candle
burning and only one chair at your table must understand
such wordless desire.

To say it is mindless is missing the point.

crimson stigmata
an apple blossom
at the centre of the universe
– Wales Haiku Journal, Eiku

Everyone is isolated from everyone else. The concept of society is like a cushion to protect us from the knowledge of that isolation. A fiction that serves as an anesthetic.
– Paul Bowles

We fill pre-existing forms and when we
fill them we change them and are changed.
– Frank Bidart, Borges and I

Nobody in this nation feels safe, and I’m still a reason why.
– Jericho Brown, The Tradition

Anyone without a soul friend
is a body without a head.
– Celtic Saying

I cannot go on
restricting myself to images
because you think it is your right
to dispute my meaning:

I am prepared now to force
clarity upon you.

– Louise Glück, Clear Morning

My life, which seems so simple and monotonous, is really a complicated affair of cafés where they like me and cafés where they don’t…
– Jean Rhys

The human heart has hidden treasures, In secret kept, in silence sealed; The thoughts, the hopes, the dreams, the pleasures, Whose charms were broken if revealed.
– Charlotte Brontë

[Narrator] everything was going well until our hero found herself at a bar featuring a Jamiroquai cover band.
– Sheila Liming

I knocked, still knock
to be let in, beloved.
This is the oldest poem

the older poet said,
outside the door of the beloved
asking to be let in—

– Solmaz Sharif

to take an honest delight in another person’s wonder is the first prerequisite of being a good teacher.
– Matt Jugo

And this is what I learned,
that the world’s otherness is antidote
to confusion — that standing
within this otherness —
the beauty and the mystery
of the world, out in the fields
or deep inside books —
can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.

– Mary Oliver

So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant… A tough life needs a tough language — and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers — a language powerful enough to say how it is.
– Jeanette Winterson

Thank God someone
has loved words,
the old monk told
the poet.
– The Old Monk

The whole technological enterprise of the West (which is designed to control the universe by technological methods) is in the end not sufficiently conscious of itself to know where it’s going.
– Alan Watts

Every word is a code
until you break it,
the old monk told
the poet.
– The Old Monk

Poetry, like gunpowder
was first used to light up

the sky with every color outside
a summer window.

– Adrian Matejka

The more restrictions he could create for himself, the freer he could be in improvising his way to a solution.
– Olivia Laing

An Earth Song
by Langston Hughes

It’s an earth song,—
And I’ve been waiting long for an earth song.
It’s a spring song,—
And I’ve been waiting long for a spring song.
Strong as the shoots of a new plant
Strong as the bursting of new buds
Strong as the coming of the first child from its mother’s womb.
It’s an earth song,
A body song,
A spring song,
I have been waiting long for this spring song.

Indigenous rainbow prophecy says that:

There will come a day when people of all races, colors, and creeds will put aside their differences. They will come together in love, joining hands in unification, to heal the Earth and all her children. They will move over the Earth like a great Whirling Rainbow, bringing peace, understanding and healing everywhere they go.

Most of my life I’ve worked in coffee shops, cafeterias, fast-food joints. I like to go to public spaces and settle down to work. I’ve almost always started a poem while sitting in a coffee shop or walking.
– Edward Hirsch

the most
powerful force
in the universe is silence
– Tendo Shogaku

To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute.
– Vladimir Nabokov

If there is to be any peace it will come through being, not having.
– Henry Miller

In a place where sound cannot be heard
Because there is no air to move
Where invisible transmissions from stars in the night
Pass each other in silent waves
There exist the seeds of inspiration
We turn our electronic ears toward the heavens
And hear their very creation
The whirs and peals of exploding stars, collapsing galaxies, exploding nebulae
Echo and chant and in doing so stir our passion
To express the emanations of our affected souls
Music, art, scientific exploration
All become the expressions of our passion
And we dance through the expanse of time
We generate sounds to punctuate our existence
Hoping for their discovery in the greatness of space
– Richard P. Havens

Mythically, the center of one thing leads to the center of everything. Seen in this way, the illness of one person becomes the ailment through which all that ails a community can be addressed; the wound in one person can become the door through which everyone can find the center of life again. Thus, the afflicted one becomes the center of the community and the opportunity for everyone to commune with the origins of life. That is why people used to say that the afflicted are holy; they are one way through which holiness and healing keep trying to enter this world.
– Michael Meade

Travel while you are young, and still are free of responsibilities. See what a big, broad, beautiful land we have here, then maybe a foreign land or two. See that there are honest, hard-working people in every corner of the globe, all quite certain that their own way of living, their local geography, their music, etc. is most beautiful.
– Pete Seeger

Lullaby
by John James

for Wendell

Algae pushes north
and further north.
The plankton follows,
and with it, a biome

of multifarious
sea creatures: microbes,
mollusks. Charismatic
megafauna. All of them

now breed at higher latitude,
which means the things
that bred at that higher latitude
now breed elsewhere

and elsewhere
eat. I linger at the end,
the edge of it. I tread
the precipice

of the abyss. It is Friday,
early, and my son
is newly born. In the dark
he coos and grunts. The slowing

stream of morning
news murmurs in his ear.
It cradles him
in a sound, like some

object of history.
Outside, berry brambles
glisten in an almost
absent wind, here

and there starting up
to toss pollen from a node.
The starlings, always
starlings, tighten

like fists along a strand
of telephone wire.
My son, he’s sucking
on my finger. He’s looking

up at me with two bulbous
slate gray eyes that hardly
let me scrawl these words.
I think of the beluga

whale stitched on his shirt, the fishy
taste of the milk it feeds
its own young, born in warmer
waters, which push them

toward the pole. Here, sun
pummels the windows
and the exposed planks of the house,
summons tiny seedlings

from the mud. It desiccates
the herbs left hanging
on the porch. My son
writhes in my arm, a single

muscle almost, slacking
and contracting as he throws
another wail. The end, it’s moving
toward us. His future’s set

in an unreadable script.
Through glass
I watch starlings shuffle
and drift, displace

grubworms from the dirt.
My neighbor shaves
a bristlecone pine toppled
in the morning heat. He drops

the limbs in piles
and soaks the wood in flame.
Somewhere in the distance
plankton colonies dissolve.

Whales go with them.
The oak trees
burn in Spain. My son
rolls his eyes over curtains

and patterned sheets, gazes
at the azure
light of the TV. At his lips,
a milky bubble. He moves

his tiny head. He dozes
to the changeless whir
of the machine, gogging, I presume,
at its slow and secret ministry.

I only know that learning to believe in the power of my own words has been the most freeing experience of my life. It has brought me the most light. And isn’t that what a poem is? A lantern glowing in the dark.
– Elizabeth Acevedo

In your extended absence, you permit me
use of earth, anticipating
some return on investment.
– Louise Glück

Feelings:
oh, I have those; they
govern me.
– Louise Glück

When I want to return to Russia, I climb the mountains in pursuit of butterflies and there, at the edge of the forest, I find a place that looks like the Russia of my youth.
– Vladimir Nabokov

he was a wanderer, alone and lost in a marvelous world, completely indifferent toward him, in which butterflies danced, lizards darted, and leaves glistened.
– Vladimir Nabokov

the idea that ideas are solely to be judged by whether they are true or false is a powerful obstacle to understanding patterns in intellectual history.
– Jake Orthwein

waterfall
without the rush
of words
– Deb Koen

camping trip
she uses my old chapbook
to start the fire
– @NJBarico

We got tricked by science fiction into thinking a futuristic city is all about flying cars and crystal towers and hologram billboards but what it really looks like is nice apartment blocks, good mass transit, pedestrian zones with shade trees and safe bike lanes.
– Katie Mack

Late night, the moon-bleached prairie landscapes outside the scratched windows flowed and fled in the moonlight, no more substantial than the landscapes of dreams. I hardly slept, afraid I’d miss something.
– Charles Frazier

I wear my stomach on the outside
to spite the sea.
– R.S. Mengert

I have never believed that poetry is an escape from history, and I do not think it is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary.
– Adrienne Rich

I must follow the voice that speaks in my soul and not deceive myself by any talmudic or jesuitical rationalization, that I can attach and commit myself to any mass belief and tradition… I want to build my own altar.
– Susan Taubes

If you pray everyday,
if you practice yoga
and meditation for years
if you preach about God and
yet you continue to hurt
people in your life,
you continue to judge and blame,
you continue to compare and compete,
you continue to complain about this and that,
then you are still under ego grip. You are not liberated from self limiting beliefs.
– Guthema Roma

Love can happen in a split second. Bondedness can’t. That’s the thing we learn the hard way. That love is not the end of the story. It’s just the first chapter. The next chapters demand that we acknowledge our wounding, clear our emotional debris, strengthen our capacity for attachment, learn how to authentically relate, mature in the deep within. Chapter after chapter of refining our ability to meet love with a true heart. This is the work of a lifetime.
– Jeff Brown

Most people…are like a falling leaf that drifts and turns in the air, flutters, and falls to the ground. But a few others are like stars which travel one defined path: no wind reaches them, they have within themselves their guide and path.
– Hermann Hesse

These two feelings, this knowledge of a world so awful, this sense of a life so extraordinary — how am I to resolve them?
– Richard Flanagan

In our yearning to be perfect, we have mistaken perfection for wholeness. We think we cannot love ourselves until we and others meet some external standard. Depression, anxiety—in fact, most neuroses and compulsions—are ultimately a defense against loving ourselves without condition. We are afraid to look at the damp, dark, ugly yet exquisite roots of being that stretch deep into our survival chakra. We are fearful of finding that the spirit is not there, that our Home is empty, even as our outer home is empty. Yet it is in that place of survival, where the dark mother has been abandoned, that spirit longs to be embodied so that the whole body may become light. Ego wants to be the god of our own idealized projection; spirit wants to be incarnated in our humanity where it can grow in wisdom through experience.
– Marion Woodman

My Sad Self
by Allen Ginsberg

to Frank O’Hara

Sometimes when my eyes are red
I go up on top of the RCA Building
and gaze at my world, Manhattan—
my buildings, streets I’ve done feats in,
lofts, beds, coldwater flats
—on Fifth Ave below which I also bear in mind,
its ant cars, little yellow taxis, men
walking the size of specks of wool—
Panorama of the bridges, sunrise over Brooklyn machine,
sun go down over New Jersey where I was born
& Paterson where I played with ants—
my later loves on 15th Street,
my greater loves of Lower East Side,
my once fabulous amours in the Bronx
faraway—
paths crossing in these hidden streets,
my history summed up, my absences
and ecstasies in Harlem—
—sun shining down on all I own
in one eyeblink to the horizon
in my last eternity—
matter is water.
Sad,
I take the elevator and go
down, pondering,
and walk on the pavements staring into all man’s
plateglass, faces,
questioning after who loves,
and stop, bemused
in front of an automobile shopwindow
standing lost in calm thought,
traffic moving up & down 5th Avenue blocks behind me
waiting for a moment when …
Time to go home & cook supper & listen to
the romantic war news on the radio
… all movement stops
& I walk in the timeless sadness of existence,
tenderness flowing thru the buildings,
my fingertips touching reality’s face,
my own face streaked with tears in the mirror
of some window—at dusk—
where I have no desire—
for bonbons—or to own the dresses or Japanese
lampshades of intellection—
Confused by the spectacle around me,
Man struggling up the street
with packages, newspapers,
ties, beautiful suits
toward his desire
Man, woman, streaming over the pavements
red lights clocking hurried watches &
movements at the curb—
And all these streets leading
so crosswise, honking, lengthily,
by avenues
stalked by high buildings or crusted into slums
thru such halting traffic
screaming cars and engines
so painfully to this
countryside, this graveyard
this stillness
on deathbed or mountain
once seen
never regained or desired
in the mind to come
where all Manhattan that I’ve seen must disappear.

Our ego sings of illusions
While our true self, an instrument of spirit,
sings with the breath of God.
– Bob Holmes

The only insult I’ve ever received in my adult life was when someone asked me, ‘Do you have a hobby?’ A HOBBY?! DO I LOOK LIKE A FUCKING DABBLER?!
– John Waters

Buddhism has always been a religion that views itself as evolving and growing, and nowhere is this more evident than in its concept of “Three (or Four) Turnings.” The Third Turning, Vajrayana Buddhism, was the last major development over a thousand years ago, and it may be time for Buddhism to undergo another turn of the wheel in order to meet the challenges of our changing world. Ken Wilber summarizes some of the most important items that any new Turning of the Wheel of Dharma might want to seriously consider in his Fourth Turning of Buddhism teaching.
– Integral Life

Mr. or Mrs. Nobody
by William Stafford

Some days when you look out, the land
is heavy, following its hills, dim
where the road bends. There are days when
having the world is a mistake.
But then you think, “Well, anyway, it wasn’t
my idea,” and it’s OK again.
Suppose that a person who knows you happens
to see you going by, and it’s one of those days –
for a minute you have to carry the load
for them, you’ve got to lift the whole
heavy world, even without knowing it,
being a hero, stumbling along.
Some days it’s like that. And maybe
today. And maybe all the time.

Love is about expansion, not constriction. Becoming ourselves, not betraying ourselves. Writing love poetry isn’t simply about composing a stanza, it’s about composing a day… It’s about how we live, and I want to be a living love poem. Every day I ask myself, ‘How can I love harder?’ Love is my grounding force, it’s what gives my life shape and meaning; it anchors me to who I am and what I do. Love breaks through binaries—man and woman, us and them, you and me. I believe that everyone is worthy of love for being, not just for doing. Love means we believe in one another’s infinite capacity for transformation. It means we affirm one another’s complexity. And love also means we need each other…fundamentally and irrevocably.
– Alok Vaid-Menon

WHEN I KNOW……
When I look out my window in the early dawn & see horses romping around;
When I see the happiness on their faces when I give them their breakfasts, lunches & dinners;
When I see them nuzzling a volunteer;
When I see them happily walking with a two-legged friend of theirs;
When I hear them whinny, excitedly, when they know it’s their arena time;
When I see them snoozing in the afternoon sun;
When I see them waiting for me after dark, knowing that a treat or two is in the offing;
And then, when I see them gently take it from my hand.
When I listen out the window at night & hear nothing but the occasional soft snort, knowing they’re sleeping.
That’s when I know that all the hard work is paying off.
That’s when I know that we’re doing the right thing.
That’s when I know that they love their lives.
And that’s when I know that I love mine.
– Jim Gath

If want to wake up to your essential nature you must learn how to work with difficult situations and people in your life. Family members are good place to start. Saints don’t help for awakening and you cannot find them easily unless you become one.
– Guthema Roma

We’re constantly being bombarded by insulting and humiliating music, which people are making for you the way they make those Wonder Bread products.

Just as food can be bad for your system, music can be bad for your spiritual and emotional feelings. It might taste good or clever, but in the long run, it’s not going to do anything for you…

– Bob Dylan

Very few people are capable of true friendship, which requires courage and judgment: Most lack the former and distrust the latter, which they feel is taste or fashion, when it ultimately is character, the very moral spine of a person, and that is terribly rare.
– Edward Albee

When anger enters the mind, wisdom departs.
– Thomas A Kempis

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 looked up with a wild duck’s eye into the trees
waving as the wind rushed through them…
Suddenly I felt alone on earth,
as I do when lying on the damp ground in spring
to see the bloodroot raising its leaf sheath through the mold.
These moments are not rare.
I can summon them whenever I fee the need to retire into the
wilderness.
For this is my wilderness,
untouched by man,
of infinite grace and harmony.
– Harlan Hubbard

Under Taurus

We were on the pier, you desiring
that I see the Pleiades. I could see
everything but what you wished.

Now I will follow. There is not a single cloud: the stars
appear, even the invisible sister. Show me where to look,
as though they will stay where they are.

Instruct me in the dark.

– Louise Glück

I counted my years
and realized that
I have less time to live by,
than I have lived so far.
I have more past than future.
I feel like that boy who got a bowl of cherries.
At first, he gobbled them,
but when he realized there were only few left,
he began to taste them intensely.
I no longer have time to deal with mediocrity.
I do not want to be in meetings where flamed egos parade.
I am bothered by the envious,
who seek to discredit the most able,
to usurp their places, coveting their seats,
talent, achievements and luck.
I do not have time for endless conversations,
useless to discuss about the lives of others
who are not part of mine.
I no longer have the time to manage
sensitivities of people who despite their chronological age, are immature.
I hate to confront those that struggle for power,
those that ‘do not debate content, just the labels’.
My time has become scarce to debate labels,
I want the essence.
My soul is in a hurry …
Not many cherries in my bowl,
I want to live close to human people, very human,
who laugh of their own stumbles,
and away from those turned smug
and overconfident with their triumphs,
away from those filled with self-importance.
The essential is what makes life worthwhile.
And for me, the essentials are enough!
Yes, I’m in a hurry.
I’m in a hurry to live with the intensity that only maturity can give.
I do not intend to waste any of the remaining cherries.
I am sure they will be exquisite, much more than those eaten so far.
My goal is to reach the end satisfied
and at peace with my loved ones and my conscience.
And per Confucius “We have two lives
and the second begins when you realize you only have one.
– Mário de Andrade