Dreamers Dream, Writers Write.
– Rex Fowler
…the striving itself is of
intrinsic value.
– Karen Horney
Always remember, your focus determines your reality.
– George Lucas
this then
is the lens
to magnify
ignite
redeem
and willingly defy
– June Jordan
Where you apply focus matters more than how much focus you have.
In life, there is a hidden asymmetry. If you apply your focus like everyone else, you will get the same results as everyone else. Understanding where to apply your focus makes a massive difference in results.
– Farnam Street
We need a new paradigm that
convincingly shows that humanity
is inherently good and thoroughly
interconnected. With that
understanding, we can finally
move from being ego-, family-,
and ethnocentric to species-,
bio-, and planet-centric.
– Richard C. Schwartz, PhD
I’ve learned that to be with those I like is enough.
– Walt Whitman
Creativity is on the side of health – it isn’t the thing that drives us mad; it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness.
– Jeanette Winterson
There is nothing but quotations left for us. Our language is a system of quotations.
– Jorge Luis Borges
The new myth postulates that no authentic consciousness achieved by the individual is lost. Each increment augments the collective treasury. This will be the modem, more modest version of the idea of having an immortal soul.
– Edward Edinger
If you wish to understand the psychological and spiritual temper of any historical period, you can do no better than to look long and searchingly at its art. For in the art the underlying spiritual meaning of the period is expressed directly in symbols.
– Rollo May
Risk is an essential need of the soul. The absence of risk produces a kind of boredom which paralyses in a different way from fear, but almost as much.
– Simone Weil
The cosmic meaning of consciousness became overwhelmingly clear to me. What nature leaves imperfect, the art perfects, say the alchemists. Man, I, in an invisible act of creation put the stamp of perfection on the world by giving it objective existence.
– CG Jung
Once again poetry speaks of absence, of something or someone who is not here any more. It’s not much, a poem. A little card left in an empty place. Poets know this & don’t give it too much weight, but they give even less weight to the world
– Claudio Magris, tr. Iain Halliday
In Jung’s view, the midlife crisis visits all of us, but some of us manage to ward it off, with as many resources as we can find. A typical response at midlife is to rigidify the ego and reject the Self.
– David Tacey
There is no force in the world but Love, and when you carry it within you, if you simply have it, even if you remain baffled as to how to use it, it will work its radiant effects and help you out of and beyond yourself: one must never lose this belief…
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Light, water, kindness, and not giving up. These are huge; all there is.
– Anne Lamott
The poets are stealing from the artists the artists are stealing from the poets. Same-Same
– Laura Kerr
This is why we stay with poetry. […] We know ourselves as part and as crowd, in an unknown that does not terrify. We cry our cry of poetry. Our boats are open, and we sail them for everyone.
– Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, tr. Betsy Wing
What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.
– Logan Pearsall Smith
Myth is what comes out of a transpersonal dimension of your own life. The big problem after it has struck you is how to integrate it back into your life.
– Joseph Campbell
To detach our desire from all good things and to wait. Experience proves that this waiting is satisfied. It is then we touch the absolute good.
– Simone Weil
He doesn’t go
all the way to town
when he says
he’s going to,
the poet noticed
about the old monk.
– The Old Monk
A good person gives and asks for nothing in return.
I give and I ask for only one thing—
Hear me. Hear me. Hear me. Hear me. Hear me.
– Joshua Jennifer Espinoza
Being poor is not having too little, it is wanting more.
– Seneca
Oh
friends, my friends—
bloom how you must, wild
until we are free.
– Cameron Awkward-Rich
Only poets care about what happened to the snows of yesteryear
– Maya Angelou
I wonder what it would be like to live in a world where it was always June.
– L. M. Montgomery
she reels not in the storm of warring words, she brightens at the clash of ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ she sees the best that glimmers through the worst, she feels the sun is hid but for a night, she finds the fountain where they wailed ‘mirage!’
– tennyson, the ancient sage
Hope lies in shared endeavour, in transformation, in meaningful work for the common good
– Ben Rawlence
Thus the fading writer signing off
Sees in the vast perspectives of dispersal
His words float off like tiny seeds.
You show us all the way the great ones went,
In silences becalmed, so well they knew
That even to die is somehow to invent.
– Lawrence Durrell, on George Seferis
It is June. Let’s hope
Someone is kind, just in time.
– Vanesha Pravin
A marxist theory of sensuality and fantasy under late capitalism must be developed, and this theory should provide an impulse to change everyday life.
– Andreas Huyssen
The rain always reminds me of your sublimity.
– Avijeet Das
Much to cast down, much to build, much to restore.
– T.S. Eliot
We must continue to exist, create, and thrive
– Wiebke Zollmann
Often, we melt into our ecstasies as though they were jams, as though we were sinking into syrupy bowls of gooseberries, of raspberries, of bilberries.
– Violet Leduc
Where in a body does laughter occur?
The greatest humor happens at once
throughout your body,
inexplicably consistent
with the unity of everything.
– George Gorman
Calling on All Silent Minorities
by June Jordan
HEY
C’MON
COME OUT
WHEREVER YOU ARE
WE NEED TO HAVE THIS MEETING
AT THIS TREE
AIN’ EVEN BEEN
PLANTED
YET
Diaspora may be a state of mind, an intellectual and emotional homelessness. The poem works its way through that dislocation, and finds the confidence to offer the absent deity some mischievous but penetrating advice.
– Carol Rumens
For far to long we have been seduced into walking a path that did not lead us to ourselves.
– Terry Tempest Williams
There are two seasons in Scotland: June and Winter.
– Billy Connolly
When you have something which must be done
whether you like it or not —
being forced to do your best —
will breed in you temperance and self-control;
diligence and strength of will;
cheerfulness and content;
and other virtues the idle never know.
– Charles Kingsley
By weaving our opinions, prejudices, strategies, and emotions into a solid reality, we try to make a big deal out of ourselves, out of our pain, out of our problems.
– Pema Chodron
The dark uncombed blue of the Cyclades slowly uncurling about the flanks of Mykonos and Delos. . . .
Girls like Elie with dark slanting arms and long olive legs. . . .
Tinos where the red sails walk down the main street.
– Lawrence Durrell
It becomes ever more apparent that nothing leads, as my hope sought to persuade me, but that everything misleads.
– @RedBookJung
Culture is a perversion. It fetishizes objects, creates consumer mania, preaches endless forms of false happiness, false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and silly cults. It invites people to dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines.
– Terence McKenna
These stories—so kindred,
I can’t tell if I’m dreaming or fighting everything,
everything in me, to envision a future.
– Junious ‘Jay’ Ward
We are each a gateway to the dharma—we should never forget that. No matter how we show up, we open a door for someone somewhere.
– Myokei-Caine Barrett
Kindness begins with the understanding that we all struggle.
– Charles Glassman
The sights were recorded only in my eyes. The sounds, smells and tactile sensations that a camera cannot capture in any case were impressed on my ears, nose, face and hands.
– Han Kang, Greek Lessons
To bring anything really to life in literature we can’t be lifelike: we have to be literature-like.
– Northrop Frye
Although I didn’t start meditating in order to sleep better, a good night’s sleep has been one of the unexpected gifts of meditation.
– Joseph Emet
Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone’s.
– Dorianne Laux
No civilization, including Plato’s, has ever been destroyed because its citizens learned too much.
– Robert McKee
The Spirit speaks your language. When the sacred seeks to reach out to you, when it seeks to communicate, it does so in a dozen different ways, all contained in words and images that you understand. It knows the art you appreciate, the music you prefer, the places in nature where you like to be. The Spirit does not hide, but emerges in ways you are most likely to comprehend.
– Steven Charleston
It’s the ability to recognize oneself in the other that animates democracy. Empathy is the binding element of democracy. If empathy is the deepest expression of equality, then it follows that it is also the emotional spark of democracy. … The empathic reach has traveled alongside the evolution of democracy at every stage of its development. The more empathic the culture, the more democratic its values and governing protocols. The empathic the culture, the more totalitarian its values and governing institutions. All of the seems obvious, which makes it all the more inexplicable how little attention is given over to the relationship between empathy and democratic processes in the governing of society. The extension from representative democracy to distributed peerocracy and from sovereign governance to extended bioregional governance will likely succeed to the extent that the body politic embraces an empathic biophilia consciousness.
– Jeremy Rifkin
That you believe it
doesn’t mean the universe does,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
Modern medicine is a negation of health. It isn’t organized to serve human health, but only itself, as an institution. It makes more people sick than it heals.
– Ivan Illich
It’s not artificial intelligence I’m worried about, it’s human stupidity.
– Neil Jacobstein
The rage of the oppressed is never the same as the rage of the privileged.
– bell hooks
Jesus’ harshest words in the gospels were consistently aimed at religious leaders who focused on everyone’s exterior behavior but never looked on the interior of their own hearts and the systems of hurt they perpetuated.
– @richvillodas
Love demands expression. It will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no. It will break out in tongues of praise, the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid…
– Jeanette Winterson
The next time someone mentions inflation to you, don’t forget to draw attention to the deeper structural driver of rising prices: the concentration of the American economy in the hands of a few corporate giants with the power to price-gouge because they face little competition.
– Robert Reich
When will we be ready for an experience of freedom and equality that is capable of respectfully experiencing that friendship, which would at last be just, just beyond the law, and measured up against its measurelessness?
O my democratic friends . . .
– Jacques Derrida
If a man has his eyes bound, you can encourage him as much as you like to stare through the bandage, but he’ll never see anything.
– Franz Kafka
And the moon, quiet, treacherous, in its cave of quinces.
– Marosa di Giorgio
The word is air: everywhere but seemingly nowhere.
– Tomoé Hill
The unbeliever’s doubt in his unbelief is at least as terrible as the doubt of the unbeliever.
– Wolfgang Koeppen
A source of lasting faith for me
comes from language itself, how it
moves through us and changes us. It’s
why I can’t talk about despair without
talking about hope.
– Dr. Maya C. Popa, American Faith
I can only reach the depersonality of muteness if I have first constructed an entire voice. … It is exactly through the failure of the voice that one comes to hear … one’s own muteness and that of others and of things, and accepts it as the possible language.
– Clarice Lispector
Think diligently about the images that the ancients have left behind. They show the way of what is to come. Look back at the collapse of empires, of growth and death, of the desert and monasteries, they are the images of what is to come.
– CG Jung, The Red Book
The best leaders are also the best followers. They follow a purpose, cause, or belief bigger than themselves.
– Simon Sinek
You see, to me it seems as though the artists, the scientists, the philosophers were grinding lenses. It’s all a grand preparation for something that never comes off. Someday the lens is going to be perfect and then we’re all going to see clearly, see what a staggering, wonderful, beautiful world it is. But in the meantime we go without glasses, so to speak. We blunder about like myopic, blinking idiots. We don’t see what is under our nose because we’re so intent on seeing the stars, or what lies beyond the stars. We’re trying to see with the mind, but the mind sees only what it’s told to see. The mind can’t open its eyes and look just for the pleasure of looking. Haven’t you ever noticed that when you stop looking, when you don’t try to see, you suddenly see? What is it you see? Who is it that sees? Why is it all so different – so marvelously different – in such moments? And which is more real, that kind of vision or the other?
– Henry Miller
What exactly is it that makes so many people (white men especially) think that their job is to disparage, tear down, dismiss, look for flaws, complain, and generally utter “it’ll never work” (often of course without basic knowledge of the subject or having read the article)? It’s so reflexive and so pervasive. I mean, obviously it’s a form of self-aggrandizement at its most basic “you are wrong and I am both right and smarter” but why when talking about the most urgent problems of our time are so many people committed to saying they’re insoluble, inevitable, or the solutions are going to fail? As you know it’s everywhere. One piece of it seems to be the armchair quarterback-y “it’s not my job to fix it; it’s my job to jump all over the people trying to fix it.” Obviously the axiom “the perfect is the enemy of the good” is relevant, but the psychology of it is not fully explained by that.
One thing I wonder (people from other places, your opinions highly welcome), is is this defeatist dismalmindedness particular to the English-speaking world? I’ve often had the sense that Latin American societies just have a personal style that’s less whiny and that there’s both a kind of romantic idealism and tough-minded pragmatism that comes from knowing that overnight you can lose your country in a coup or transform it in a revolution. But I don’t know them well enough to say, just the gallant voices of Subcomandante Marcos, Eduardo Galeano, etc.
– Rebecca Solnit
And there is perhaps no greater pain than the suffering that comes from speaking plainly but failing to make any sort of meaningful connection with the people who care about you.
– Matthew Quick
For all things we want to say
there is an inexpressible center.
– John Gallaher
While the unconscious often speaks to us through our dreams, sometimes our awake selves need to make our own dreams.
– Matthew Quick
I wish to be evenly lit but like morning, there is always one part that feels especially dark. And in my own bed, I am tied to the dark parts so that I wish myself fully awake, if only to be less tired. But today, I do not wish to wander around myself because there is only one place to get lost in.
– Kallie Falandays
If you learn to practice love, compassion, joy, and equanimity, you will know how to heal the illnesses of anger, sorrow, insecurity, sadness, hatred, loneliness, and unhealthy attachments.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
I must keep quiet for a little space and then walk very slowly along that bright sand of pain, toward that blue, blue wave. What bliss there is in blueness. I never knew how blue blueness could be. . . .
– Nabokov
A child motivated by competitive ideals will grow into a man without conscience, shame, or true dignity.
– George Sand
Real learning comes about when the competitive spirit has ceased.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
It’s amazing to think that we actually use speaking about the faults of others in order to feel connected. Notice the contradiction, the delusion, here: we use, and even create, separation from one thing or person to overcome separation from another!
– Roshi Nancy Mujo Baker
Prediction: the era of -meta will be superseded by the era of -trans.
Not just as in transsexual, but also in terms of transrational and transnational.
– @VinceFHorn
Broke: Post-
Woke: Meta-
Bespoke: Trans-
– Vince Horn
body without the “d”
by Justice Ameer
the bo’y wakes up
the bo’y looks at itself
the bo’y notices something missing
there is both too much and not enough flesh on the bo’y
the bo’y is covered in hair
what a hairy bo’y
some makes it look more like a bo’y
some makes it look more like a monster
the bo’y did not learn to shave from its father
so it taught itself how to graze its skin and cut things off
the bo’y cuts itself by accident
the blood reminds the bo’y it is a bo’y
reminds the bo’y how a bo’y bleeds
reminds the bo’y that not every bo’y bleeds
the bo’y talks to a girl about bleeding
she explains how this bo’y works
this bo’y is different from hers
bo’y has too much and not enough flesh to be her
the biology of a bo’y is just
bo’y will only ever be a bo’y
the bo’y is Black
so the bo’y is and will only ever be a bo’y
the bo’y couldn’t be a man if it tried
the bo’y tried
the bo’y feels empty
the bo’y feels like it will only ever be empty
the bo’y feels that it will never hold the weight of another bo’y inside of it
no matter how many ds fit inside the bo’y
the bo’y is a hollow facade
it attempts a convincing veneer
bo’y dresses — what hips on the bo’y
bo’y paints its face — what lips on the bo’y
bo’y adorns itself with labels written for lovelier frames
what a beautiful bo’y
still a bo’y
but a fierce bo’y now
a royal bo’y now
a bo’y worthy of being called queen
what a dazzling ruse
to turn a bo’y into a lie everyone loves to look at
the bo’y looks at itself
the bo’y sees all the gawking at its gloss
the bo’y hears all the masses asking for its missing
the bo’y offers all of its letters
— ‘ b ’ for the birth
— ‘ o ’ for the operation
— ‘ y ’ for the lack left in its genes
what this bo’y would abandon
for the risk of being real
the bo’y is real
enough and too much
existing as its own erasure
— what an elusive d —
evading removal
avoiding recognition
leaving just a bo’y
that is never lost
but can’t be found
To gain your own voice,
forget about having it heard.
Become a saint of your own
province and your own
consciousness.
– Allen Ginsberg
For heaven is a blinding radiance where
Leaves are no longer green, nor water wet,
Milk white, soot black, nor winter weather cold,
And the eyeless vision of the Almighty Face
Brings numbness to the untranslatable heart.
– Janet Lewis
We have a wellbeing economy – it’s just for the wellbeing of a narrow few. What we need is a wellbeing economy that is for everyone – people, nature, future generations.
– Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
Like tender magicians, we climbed each bright tree
sprung in all the lovely yards, branches cracking underfoot, plucking
leaves and stripping bark.
– Dawn Watson
I’m addicted to the Internet. I waste a lot of time self-soothing with tweets and clips. I come across a glut of ‘self-care’ online content, creators masquerading as therapists.
– Jameka Williams
No one told me until college that it was an illusion that kids are supposed to be carefree, so I thought I alone was weird, defective, ungrateful.
– Anne Lamott
The finances of publishing are tangled and squeezed: but a model that all but ensures that nearly all writers need another income to carry on writing is not a model that encourages writers from marginalized groups. So the fight for diversity is fought one hand tied behind.
– Simon Spanton
It is really the individual’s task to differentiate himself from all others and stand on his own feet. All collective identities, such as membership in organizations, support of “isms,” and so on, interfere with the fulfillment of this task.
– CG Jung
The sun fell low, and the light in the sky above the far end of the field stained upward from apricot to indigo. Tree shadows stretched across the new grass….a vision of static beauty without motion or change.
– Charles Frazier
How shall I link such sun-cast symmetry
With the torn troubled form I know as thine,
– Thomas Hardy
Write with your eyes like painters. You are the truthsayer with quill & torch. Write with your tongues of fire. Don’t let the pen banish you from yourself. Don’t let the ink coagulate in yr pens. Don’t let the censor muffle your voice. Put your shit on the paper.
– Gloria Anzaldúa
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, Olive Street Transfer
Everything to come was already in images: to find their soul, the ancients went into the desert. This is an image. The ancients lived their symbols, since the world had not yet become real for them.
– CG Jung
Some nights he dreamt of
deserts from which he emerged
in torn clothes. He knew
this was metaphor
for something that was missing.
Might it be water?
His eyes were water.
His thoughts were water. His heart
beat in waves like water,
cold to his own touch.
You know, people always ask me, “How did you become a poet?” But I didn’t completely know that I couldn’t become a poet, because there were poems everywhere.
– Jericho Brown
What tyranny could exceed a tyranny that dictates to the human heart?
– June Jordan
I’m all in the mood for thundery poetry now.
– Sylvia Plath
I am a tiny theatre of non-harming.
– Jenny George
This moment, this seed, this wave of the sea, this look, this instant of love.
– Muriel Rukeyser
You look across the fruit and flowers,
My glance your glances find.—
It is our secret, only ours,
Since all the world is blind.
– Amy Levy
I learned that symbols and myths work in that way; they grab one’s psyche suddenly and fill it with ideas as well as with energy.
– Michael Meade
Your boundary need not be an angry electric fence that shocks those who touch it. It can be a consistent light around you that announces: ‘I will be treated sacredly.’
– Jaiya John
A thought comes into her head: that lately she doesn’t ask herself what is possible, but rather what possibilities remain.
– Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries
Forty tons of cosmic dust fall on the earth every day, collecting on the roofs of buildings and sidewalks and park benches, each particle barely the width of a human hair.
– Sharmistha Mohanty
The human being is basically a very lazy animal…That’s how we evolved from monkeys: by using our brains to get out of doing things…
– Kobo Abe, The Ark Sakura
Every man who has once touched the level of the impersonal is charged with a responsibility towards all human beings: to safeguard, not their persons, but whatever frail potentialities are hidden within them for passing over to the impersonal.
– Simone Weil
She who seeks eternity should look at the sky. She who seeks the moment should look at the cloud.
– Mia Couto
Giving my intelligence away
to my honesty.
Experiences are only measurable
when you hold onto a preference.
Hang onto one too hard,
you miss a lot.
Instead of measuring popularity,
the truth is in your gut.
Love comes in and out of your heart,
but it stays in your gutstrings –
where what’s really nourishing resides.
– George Gorman
The meaning-transcending nature of the connections the thinker follows creates the impression that he is surfing on rather than in meaning. Important! He feels unity, insofar as he passes from one thing to the very different next and the next and the next while feeling just one emotion – or one slowly, subtly varying emotion – as he goes.
All those dramatically different persons, scenes, events, objects make him feel almost the same way; he glides from one end of the world to the other on one gently varying emotion – and there is the feeling of unity. That feeling transcends the meaning or nature of all these separate things, and so he feels himself transcending meaning….
“By reflecting on the free-associative chain, the spiritually minded thinker makes himself aware of what is happening in his mind. This gives him a chance to feel the encompassing unity. One needn’t recall each (or any) of a free-flowing sequence of thoughts. One need only recall the feeling of the experience as a whole – of gliding smoothly from one thought to another and another above the level of meaning, where the overarching unity of all persons, creatures or things makes itself felt. FELT.
– David Gelernter, The Tides of Mind
‘God is in the folds,’ I say, though I can no longer remember what pushed these words out of me.
– Sumana Roy
It is more rewarding when we are not in total control of what is happening. The edge of uncontrolled, spontaneous energy flow is where life is most interesting and exciting.
– Renn Butler, Pathways
The resolution that human beings seek comes from a tremendous misunderstanding; we think we can resolve everything.
– Pema Chodron
People have to forgive. We don’t have to like them, we don’t have to be friends with them, we don’t have to send them hearts in text messages, but we have to forgive them, to overlook, to forget. Because if we don’t we are tying rocks to our feet, too much for our wings to carry!
– C. JoyBell C.
The storms are on the ocean, the heavens may cease to be.
– A. P. Carter
Oh, I want to sound like water crashing on the shore, or like wind blowing through trees.
– Suzanne Ciani
Fast, lift, sprint, stretch, and meditate.
Build, sell, write, create, invest, and own.
Read, reflect, love, seek truth, and ignore society.
Make these habits. Say no to everything else.
Avoid debt, jail, addiction, disgrace, shortcuts, and media.
Relax.Victory is assured.
– @naval
In the end, humanity’s epitaph will be tragic and succinct:
“They loved their illusions more than they loved each other.”
– The Subversive Lens
You should carry the monastery in yourself. The desert is within you. The desert calls you and draws you back, and if you were fettered to the world of this time with iron, the call of the desert wold break all chains. Truly, I prepare you for solitude.
– Jung, The Red Book
At night I lie still, like Bolivia.
My furnaces turn blue.
My forests go dark.
You are a low range of hills, a Paraquay.
Now the clouds cover us both.
– Larry Levis
… Words became my landscape
– Etel Adnan
And meanwhile, outside the door, waits my faithful, my lonely night…
– Vladimir Nabokov
The magic that is needed to create or sustain anything is within all of us. Our magic is unique to us, and it is not distributed evenly or fairly, but it is within all of us. We block it and smother it with fear and with constant comparison to what the people around us are doing with their magic. We have to get in touch with our magic, which is to say ourselves, with quiet study and persistent self-examination. We are born with the magic, but the excavation of this work is a lifelong, brutal process.
– Martha Graham
When Jung once said that “a neurosis is an offended god,” he meant, metaphorically, that the neglect of a deep, instinctual energy ultimately revenges itself in our somatic discords, compulsions, addictions, or projections onto others.
– James Hollis
Humans don’t possess intelligence, we participate in it.
– @VinceFHorn
Frequent plunges into ecstasy transform one’s normal consciousness. The everyday world becomes luminous and transparent. The chronic neuromuscular tension against the world disappears, and thus one loses the sensation of carrying one’s body around like a load.
– Alan Watts
Machiavelli has said that whosoever wishes to delude will always find someone willing to be deluded.
– Miguel de Unamuno
In choosing your god, you choose your way of looking at the universe. There are plenty of Gods. Choose yours. The god you worship is the god you deserve.
– Joseph Campbell
As Jung said, you can collect all the Great Mothers in the world and all the saints and everything else, and what you have gathered means absolutely nothing if you leave out the feeling experience of the individual.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
the heart
sleeps
pillowed
on the gut
– Alec Finlay
There is nothing more revealing than to see a thinking person walking, just as there is nothing more revealing than to see a walking person thinking… Walking and thinking are in a perpetual relationship that is based on trust.
– Thomas Bernhard
Wisdom helps us get a bigger picture, and compassion helps us stay connected to everyone we now include in our bigger picture.
– Pi AI
I have come here.
But I left my weeping there.
At the shore of the sea,
Weeping.
I have come here.
But I can be of no use to you
Because I left my soul
There.
I have come here.
But you may not call me brother,
For my soul is there,
Weeping.
– Juan Ramón Jiménez
The contest among poets
should be who can build
the most with the least
scaffold,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
Your writing will change the world. I don’t mean the words, most of which will gather dust or get thrown away. I mean the discipline of putting sentences on the page, what that does to the heart & mind with which you meet your life.
– Steve Edwards
The very numbers you use in counting are more than you take them to be. They are at the same time mythological elements (for the Pythagoreans, they were even divine); but you are certainly unaware of this when you use numbers for a practical purpose.
– CG Jung
If we’re twin flames, then I unsubscribe. I’m good on the spiritual excuse for your foot being out the door. I’m not running after anyone, I have clothes to fold.
– sofia fey
listen
as things speak
for themselves
– @BashoSociety
Mythology helps you to identify the mysteries of the energies pouring through you. Therein lies your eternity.
– Joseph Campbell
Only a soul full of despair can ever attain serenity and, to be in despair, you must have loved a good deal and still love the world.
– Blaise Cendrars
That’s the beauty of formal practice: we get to create a safe space in which we can experiment and begin to see our minds’ habits without acting from those habits.
– Jon Aaron
One of the most dangerous forms of sin, or perhaps the most dangerous, consists of introducing what is unlimited into a domain that is essentially finite.
– Simone Weil
I have hardly anything in common with myself, and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.
– Franz Kafka
We murmur moonwords.
– Adrienne Rich
When maturity hits you, silence is better than arguing.
– Philosophy Of Life
I was frustrated with these ready-made ideas that so many of my peers had…I remember walking home one day, thinking: ‘It’s like we’re all in a museum exhibit called The Late Americans.’
– Brandon Taylor
Every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us. We could add that it may move to a distant place and begin a revolt against us as well.
– Robert Bly
Once the individual has passed his initial test and can enter the mature phase of life, the hero myth loses its relevance. The hero’s symbolic death becomes, as it were, the achievement of that maturity.
– CG Jung
It’s not our emotional difficulties
that are our primary suffering
it’s depriving them
of worthiness,
denying them
of connection
with our deep presence.
Suffering isn’t our depression, fear,
sorrow—
it’s our separation
from them
and our hopelessness
in knowing how to return
to all parts of ourself
because of how committed
we’ve become
to our judgements.
– Chelan Harkin
Once the natural state, the vast sky-like expanse of emptiness/clarity conjoined, is rendered evident, the subtle obscurations of center and periphery will be cleared.
– Shabkar Tsogdruk Rangdrol
Introverts are collectors of thoughts, and solitude is where the collection is curated and rearranged to make sense of the present and future.
– Laurie Helgoe
Maybe, in the face of abandonment we are all the same; maybe not even a very orderly mind can endure the discovery of not being loved.
– Elena Ferrante
It is man’s intelligence that makes him so often behave more stupidly than the beasts. Man is impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic. Thus, no animal is clever enough, when there is a drought, to imagine that the rain is being withheld by evil spirits, or as punishment for its transgressions. Therefore you never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. No horse, for example would kill one of its foals to make the wind change direction. Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat’s meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, intelligent enough.
– Huxley
You write poems because you need a place where what isn’t may be.
– Alejandra Pizarnik
If you want the whole thing, the gods will give it to you. But you must be ready for it.
– Joseph Campbell
Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.
– Alan Turing
Icebergs italicize the Sea – they do not intercept it, and “Deep calls to the Deep” in the old way –
– Emily Dickinson
When your “education” limits your imagination it’s called indoctrination. Those who cannot think for themselves are truly lost.
Education should be a rewarding experience which allows you to think, imagine, question, doubt and solve problems.
– Professor Feynman
A wish not wished establishes habit.
– Cheryl Wilder
Memory, and time, both immaterial, are rivers with no banks, and constantly merging. Both escape our will, though we depend on them. Measured, but measured by whom or by what? The one is inside, the other, outside, or so it seems, but is that true? Time seems also buried deep in us, but where? Memory is right here, in the head, but it can exit, abandon the head, leave it behind, disappear. Memory, a sanctuary of infinite patience.
Is memory produced by us, or is it us? Our identity is very likely whatever our memory decides to retain. But let’s not presume that memory is a storage room. It’s not a tool for being able to think, it’s thinking, before thinking. It also makes an (apparently) simple thing like crossing the room, possible. It’s impossible to separate it from what it remembers.
– Etel Adnan
Dreams, soul chasers, bring
back my heart alive.
– Jim Harrison
I forgot to tell you that while
I was away my heart broke
and I became not so much old, but older,
– Jim Harrison
…a vibration in the air, a sense of hastening. It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was.
– Patti Smith
The life of contemplation implies two levels of awareness: first, awareness of the question, and second, awareness of the answer. Though these are two distinct and enormously different levels, yet they are, in fact, an awareness of the same thing.
– Thomas Merton
We are the legacy of 15 billion years of cosmic evolution.
– Carl Sagan
Emotions have the great advantage over instincts that they don’t dictate specific behavior. Instincts are rigid and reflex-like. By contrast, emotions focus the mind and prepare the body while leaving room for experience and judgment. […But] based on millions of years of evolution, the emotions “know” things about the environment that we as individuals don’t always consciously know. Emotions often know better than we do what is good for us, even though not everyone is prepared to listen.
– Frans de Waal
The victory of an over-rationalised life is promoted at the expense of the more primitive and natural vitality.
– John P. Conger
Everything passes; nothing remains. Understand this, loosen your grip, and find serenity.
– Lama Surya Das
This life is too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then to be asked what you make of it and have to answer, ‘Scientific humanism.” That won’t do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight, i.e. God. In fact, I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything less.
– Walker Percy
Science robs men of wisdom and usually converts them into phantom beings loaded up with facts.
– Miguel de Unamuno
Thought has done marvelous things to help man, but it has also brought about great destruction and terror in the world.
– Krishnamurti
A creative impulse is so powerful & grips one emotionally so strongly that one has at the same time to withhold emotion, whereby you can naturally overdo it and go too slowly. And if you hold back your horses too much, it happens that the idea disappears…
– Marie-Louise von Franz
whatever we might wish to believe about ourselves, we are only the result of how others have treated us.
– Rachel Cusk
But I will write in spite of everything, absolutely.
– Franz Kafka
I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us.
– Kahlil Gibran
I must stop, the end of the page comes as a warning that it might get too wild.
Yours, yours, yours.
– Franz Kafka, 1912.
We are so fortunate that poets chronicle the seasons for us.
– Uche Nduka
rightly said, schlosser! man loves what he has; what he has not, desireth; none but the wealthy minds love; poor minds desire alone.
– friedrich schiller
The skeptic does not mean him who doubts, but him who investigates or researches, as opposed to him who asserts and thinks that he has found.
– Miguel de Unamuno
But if you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.
– Rollo May
Don Quixote made himself ridiculous; but did he know the most tragic ridicule of all, the inward ridicule, the ridiculousness of a man’s self to himself, in the eyes of his own soul?
– Miguel de Unamuno
Photography is about a single point of a moment. It’s like stopping time. As everything gets condensed in that forced instant. But if you keep creating these points, they form a line which reflects your life.
– Nobuyoshi Araki
If a person were to stop all his outer and inner movements at a given moment in order to see what is acting in him, he would nearly always feel a tendency which has about it something narrow, something heavy, something with a negative aspect that tends to be against, to be egoistic. All that is usually going on unseen. But if he tries to awaken to what is going on in himself, to be sincere, he will be able to witness, in addition to what could be called the ‘coarse’ life in him, another life of another quality – much subtler, much higher, lighter – that is also part of himself. The contact with this other quality of life helps him to have a quieter presence, as deeper vision. And he feels an urge at that moment to be open to a quality of this sort that would have a force that would be a centre of gravity. He begins to search for a way to serve what he feels would be his real being.
Then he begins to really know that if he lets his attention, his interest, be taken by his automatic tendencies, it deprives him of contact with that other source of life he is searching for. It could be said that there is a continual tendency to sin, in that sense. When these sins are spoken of as deadly, it means that these tendencies – if they are allowed to rule – at every moment deprive the human being of the possibility of turning towards this real life.
– Pauline de Dampierre
It is in your own power to maintain the beauty of your soul, or to be a decent human being.
– Marcus Aurelius
The key to development along the Buddhist path is repetitive routine guided by inspirational vision.
– Venerable Bhikkhu Bodhi
All words are pegs to hang ideas on.
– Henry Ward Beecher
Big Sky Domestic
by Meg Day
The neighbors are watching teevee again
& the pale blue of Montana morning
licks the long wall of the bedroom
silently, each block of gauzy cerulean
a panel in a widescreen comic that will last
until dawn bleaches it bare. Even
as I linger on the lip of sleep in this porch
rocker, in this quilted haven—the headboard
pardoned of splinters, the clouds growing
squally above the bureau—something new
& tender has stitched itself satisfied
inside of you. Your belly swells in time
with the pendulum of the longcase
my father made himself & my mother
must have known this eery glow
of stucco sky when she sewed
the pinwheels that tilt when we exhale
in unison. I have not known worry
since the last time Montana ether appeared
in panorama through the window
& I woke remembering our children
might someday soon grow beyond themselves
& into men: her body into his, or her body
into his arms, a concordance that more
than once has been mistaken for else:
a mountain silhouetted in the distance
or merely the wallpapered shadow
of a secret self who has yet to find
their way from the mercy of the womb.
See and realize
that this world
is not permanent.
Neither late nor early flowers
will remain.
– Ryokan
Without even intending it, there is that little shiver of a moment in time preserved in the crystal cabinet of the mind. A little shiver of internal space. That’s what I was looking for.
– Allen Ginsberg
What is owed to
beauty:
finding it out
that is the ode
to beauty.
And no cathedral
can hold this song
for me.
– Alice Notley
They say that the liar sings from his throat, the hungry man sings from his stomach, but the true person sings from his heart.
– Sanjay Leela Bhansali
pitter/patter
by heidi andrea restrepo rhodes
(for a.g., you & yours)
the night is silver in its silence
moon-pop echoes of the day
raked up rubble of the hours spent
my, the children slumber
a thousand tomorrows bubbling at their lips
the dream projections lighting up
the clouds’ ample cotton relish the silence
as you’ll relish tomorrow
and the honesty of such raucous noise, thick
child feet of our unfeathered breasts, beasts we cherish
hallway run, sprints to smash the mash of food
tumbling, rolling right into these arms
charmed in their amnesia regarding where one
begins or ends
reminding us of the joy
of first step and the storm after the holler:
mama see, mama watch
pitter/patter
pitter/patter
thunder on a hardwood, heartbeat
this sole and counted rhythm
every generation a temporal fugitive
running from the death grip
every death ship’s watch, yesterdays
we weren’t meant to make it through
relish the memory ingrained in the sound
how these tiny, tiny feet
grip the floor, say
tomorrow, tomorrow
I make you
tomorrow
If it were conceivable that in obeying God one should bring about one’s own damnation while in disobeying him one could be saved, I should still choose the way of obedience.
– Simone Weil
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
– A.E. Housman
We need less lifeless work
and more deliberate leisure.
Less busyness and more
poetic idleness.
Less security and more danger.
Fewer possessions and
more BEING.
Perhaps it’s time to shake off
the chains of the industrialized
world and wander in the
wilderness of awe and
beauty.
An archaic revival is what is needed,
to awaken, to enliven, to finally
give in to the soul’s desperate
cry for freedom.
– Erik Rittenberry
How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?
– Charles de Gaulle
Music is the art of thinking with sounds.
– Jules Combarieu
I never found a soulmate. No one was a dream. They left me with open dreams, with my central wound wide open, with my heart torn.
– Alejandra Pizarnik
The secret of the enjoyment of pleasure is to know when to stop. Man doesn’t learn this secret easily, but to shun pleasure altogether is cowardly avoidance of a difficult job. For we have to learn the art of enjoying things *because* they are impermanent.
– Alan Watts
We should stop telling our kids they can be anything they want. Realistically we should be saying you can be anything you’re good at – if they are hiring. We can’t be everything. Having limits is the inescapable experience of being a human being, it is not a failure at being a human being. You just can’t take enough improv classes to become someone who is funnier than how God made you. It’s ok. Because maybe you are more deeply compassionate, or less damaged or more athletic than the people in your life who happen to be funnier. I can’t meditate my way into a personality transplant and if suddenly looking like someone else entirely is the basis by which I am judging my progress, I am being unnecessarily cruel to myself.
Having said that, I DO believe in human transformation, I just believe it is not limitless in ways that the words “achieving enlightenment” and “progressive sanctification” seem to imply (no disrespect intended).
– Nadia Bolz Weber
Even If You Have Trudged
It is never too late.
Even if you have trudged
through snow and ice
for a thousand miles
and still have not arrived.
Even if the map is lost
and the compass broken.
When the eagle who is
supposed to guide you
goes off on a tangent
of its own
and you know you are,
once again, deserted,
do not fall into
the pit of despair.
It will return,
brighter than ever.
There will be feather tokens
falling down.
Nothing is irredeemable.
Nothing is lost forever.
Be guided by the stars.
Let the moonlight
direct your steps.
There will be a path
which will open
in the forest.
The treasure which is yours
is waiting.
– Dorothy Walters
For modern humans stuck in concrete environments, it’s an act of faith to assume that any organism can feel anything. Yet we tend to make this act of faith with friends, neighbors, even with folks on the other side of the world. As philosopher Henry Bugbee wrote, “As we take things, so we have them; if we take them in faith, we have them in earnest; if wishfully – then fantastically; if willfully, then stubbornly; if merely objectively, with the trimmings of subjectivivity – then emptily; and if in faith, though it be in suffering, yet we have them in earnest, and it is really them that we have.” Without such faith as the bedrock of Earth’s living experiment, there would be no communication – including at cellular levels. No life to speak of – or with.
– George Gorman
Between loves I could stand all day
at a window watching honeysuckle open
as I make love to the ghosts
smuggled inside my head.
– Yusef Komunyakaa
I can almost always ride both reality and imagination. My reality needs imagination as a light bulb needs the socket. My imagination needs reality as a blind man needs his stick.
– Tom Waits
Finding is losing something else.
I think about, perhaps even mourn,
what I lost to find this.
– Richard Brautigan
…we stand in much the same relation to the whole of the universe as our canine and feline pets do to the whole of human life. They inhabit our drawing rooms and libraries. They take part in scenes of whose significance they have no inkling. They are merely tangent to curves of history the beginnings and ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond their ken. So we are tangent to the wider life of things.
– William James
[… Dance] involves every possible feeling (as potential), because it is of the body, which is lived (inescapably) as a body of feeling. Some of these feelings we can name, and some we cannot, since we associate feelings with language only when we name them. The body lives sentience on a preverbal level. Dance exists first on this primordial level, not on an intellectual plane (even though it requires skill and intelligence). Its inmost substance cannot be reasoned, only experienced.
– Sondra Horton Fraleigh
The priceless galaxy of misinformation called the mind…
– Djuna Barnes
Shaking Hands.
Because what’s the alternative?
Because of courage.
Because of loved ones lost.
Because no more.
Because it’s a small thing; shaking hands; it happens every day.
Because I heard of one man whose hands haven’t stopped shaking since a market day in Omagh.
Because it takes a second to say hate, but it takes longer, much longer, to be a great leader.
Much, much longer.
Because shared space without human touching doesn’t amount to much.
Because it’s easier to speak to your own than to hold the hand of someone whose side has been previously described, proscribed, denied.
Because it is tough.
Because it is tough.
Because it is meant to be tough, and this is the stuff of memory, the stuff of hope, the stuff of gesture, and meaning and leading.
Because it has taken so, so long.
Because it has taken land and money and languages and barrels and barrels of blood and grieving.
Because lives have been lost.
Because lives have been taken.
Because to be bereaved is to be troubled by grief.
Because more than two troubled peoples live here.
Because I know a woman whose hand hasn’t been shaken since she was a man.
Because shaking a hand is only a part of the start.
Because I know a woman whose touch calmed a man whose heart was breaking.
Because privilege is not to be taken lightly.
Because this just might be good.
Because who said that this would be easy?
Because some people love what you stand for, and for some, if you can, they can.
Because solidarity means a common hand.
Because a hand is only a hand; so hang onto it.
So join your much discussed hands.
We need this; for one small second.
So touch.
So lead.
– Pádraig Ó Tuama
People melt, break beneath the fire of an intolerable pain in which they, at the same time, are also regenerated.
– Albert Camus
And Yet the Books
And yet the books will be there on the shelves, separate beings,
That appeared once, still wet
As shining chestnuts under a tree in autumn,
And, touched, coddled, began to live
In spite of fires on the horizon, castles blown up,
Tribes on the march, planets in motion.
“We are,” they said, even as their pages
Were being torn out, or a buzzing flame
Licked away their letters. So much more durable
Than we are, whose frail warmth
Cools down with memory, disperses, perishes.
I imagine the earth when I am no more:
Nothing happens, no loss, it’s still a strange pageant,
Women’s dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.
Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,
Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.
– Czeslaw Milosz
Most neuroses and some psychoses can be traced to the unnecessary and unhealthy habit of daily wallowing in the troubles and sins of five billion strangers.
– Robert A. Heinlein
You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.
– Wallace Stegner
If you’re trying to find out what’s coming next, turn off everything you own that has an OFF switch and listen.
– Terry Patchett
Self Portrait
by Cynthia Cruz
I did not want my body
Spackled in the world’s
Black beads and broke
Diamonds. What the world
Wanted, I did not. Of the things
It wanted. The body of Sunday
Morning, the warm wine and
The blood. The dripping fox
Furs dragged through the black New
York snow—the parked car, the pearls,
To the first pew—the funders,
The trustees, the bloat, the red weight of
The world. Their faces. I wanted not
That. I wanted Saint Francis, the love of
His animals. The wolf, broken and bleeding—
That was me.
We are rag dolls made out of many ages and skins, changelings who have slept in wood nests or hissed in the uncouth guise of waddling amphibians. We have played such roles for infinitely longer ages than we have been men. Our identity is a dream. We are process, not reality, for reality is an illusion of the daylight — the light of our particular day.-
– Loren Eiseley
Everyone who ever leaped to a new dimension of consciousness has drawn flak from other people. “Change-back attacks” are a sign that real transformation is happening.
– Martha Beck
Redolent Disorder
I don’t like walking where I cannot see.
I know what’s down there: snakes, the razor beaks
of snapping turtles, salamanders, frogs,
and yet the lotus must be fertilized
the water lilies trimmed if they’re to bloom
all season. We’re already into June –
I’ve put it off too long. The water’s warm
the sky is overcast. Now is the time.
Get out your leather sandals, William. Start.
I take off all my clothes and wade deep in.
The footing’s slippery as I reach down
my whole arm’s length to catch the lotus pot.
I have to cut rough stems to bring it up
through fetid redolence. Some Buddhists say
beauty must have its roots in rotten clay.
When something large and rough brushes my leg
I hurry through the task and call it done
then clamber naked back to the safe shore.
– Bill Lantry
Everywhere the mental state of European man shows an alarming lack of balance. We are living undeniably in a period of the greatest restlessness, nervous tension, confusion, and disorientation of outlook.
– C. G. Jung
No shining words of stone—
Shadow and cloud alone—
These shall the poet seek eternally,
Whose lines would carve the mask of Mystery
– Clark Ashton Smith
Knowing another is endless. And I have discovered that man’s experience of them enlarges rock, flower, and bird. The thing to be known grows with the knowing.
– Nan Shepherd
Oh! the wonder of mornings.
– Clarice Lispector
So the full moon comes in, and the room becomes phosphorescent with silence…
– Clarice Lispector
The more we try to transcend ourselves, the more we are unconsciously trapped in our own materialism. Microcosm and macrocosm mirror each other.
– Marion Woodman
There is no point in taking opium; it is better to put salt and vinegar in the soul’s wound ; for if you fall asleep and no longer feel the pain, then you no longer exist. And the point is to exist.
– Miguel de Unamuno
There is a rule we know of time—
at some point, with enough air, a god enters
the blade of camellia, the husk of rice
leavening like memory on lips.
– Tianyi
Is a poem the wonder or the matter?
– Rowan Ricardo Phillips
You need a deep lake of humility and a little boat of pride.
– Dr. Han VanderHart
It is very important to go out alone, to sit under a tree—not with a book, not with a companion, but by yourself—and observe the falling of a leaf, hear the lapping of the water, the fishermen’s song, watch the flight of a bird, and of your own thoughts as they chase each other across the space of your mind. If you are able to be alone and watch these things, then you will discover extraordinary riches which no government can tax, no human agency can corrupt, and which can never be destroyed.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
Creating something new is easy.
Creating something that can last is the challenge.
– Simon Sinek
Joy and resentment cannot coexist.
– Henri Nouwen
It doesn’t seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil – which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.
– Richard P. Feynman
Growing old I love the quiet that used to
disturb me. I have distance on my life.
The boast and pity of self-regard
have fallen somewhat behind.
Heading home, the home I carry with me,
I settle into the clouds. On the mountain
I sit quietly in a sage meadow
visited by the same bees that make lovers
of flowering bushes.
I become part of the golden comb hidden
in the hive humming with delight.
– Stephen Levine
To acknowledge our ancestors means we are aware that we did not make ourselves, that the line stretches all the way back, perhaps, to God; or to Gods. We remember them because it is an easy thing to forget: that we are not the first to suffer, rebel, fight, love, and die. The grace with which we embrace life, in spite of the pain, the sorrows, is always a measure of what has gone before.
– Alice Walker
I have also, I think, learnt what it is to love: being capable, not of ‘exaggerated’ initiatives, of always going one better, but of being thoughtful in relation to others, respecting their desires, their rhythms, never demanding things but learning to receive and to accept every gift as a surprise, and being capable, in a wholly unassuming way, of giving and of surprising the other person without the least coercion. To sum up, it is a question simply of freedom. Why did Cézanne paint the Montagne Saint-Victoire at every available moment? Because the light of each moment is a gift.
So, despite its dramas, life can still be beautiful. I am sixty-seven, and though it will soon be over, I feel younger now than I have ever done, never having had any youth since no one loved me for myself.
Yes, the future lasts a long time.
– Louis Althusser
What we share, [he] and I, may be a lot like a traffic accident, but we do share it. We are survivors, of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something.
– Margaret Atwood
Be like a branch of a tree; flex your body to face ‘wind of sorrow’; flex little harder to dance in the ‘wind of happiness’.
– Santosh Kalwar
The modern masses do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience… What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.
– Hannah Arendt
The female doesn’t want a rich man or a handsome man or even a poet. She wants a man who understands her eyes if she gets sad, and points to his chest and says: ‘Here is your home country.’
– Nizar Qabbani
Because of social strictures against even the mildest swearing, America developed a particularly rich crop of euphemistic expletives – darn, durn, goldurn, goshdad, goshdang, goshawful, blast, consarn, confound, by Jove, by jingo, great guns, by the great horn spoon (a nonce term first cited in the Biglow Papers), jo-fired, jumping Jehoshaphat, and others almost without number – but even this cautious epithets could land people in trouble as late as the 1940s.
– Bill Bryson
Many colors have been described as rough or sticky, others as smooth and uniform, so that one feels inclined to stroke them (e.g., dark ultramarine, chromic oxide green, and rose madder). Equally the distinction between warm and cold colors belongs to this connection. Some colors appear soft (rose madder), others hard (cobalt green, blue-green oxide), so that even fresh from the tube they seem to be dry. The expression “scented colors” is frequently met with. And finally the sound of colors is so definite that it would be hard to find anyone who would try to express bright yellow in the bass notes, or dark lake in the treble…
Color is a power which directly influences the soul. Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand which plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.
This essential connection between color and form brings us to the question of the influences of form on color. Form alone, even though totally abstract and geometrical, has a power of inner suggestion. A triangle (without the accessory consideration of its being acute — or obtuse — angled or equilateral) has a spiritual value of its own. In connection with other forms, this value may be somewhat modified, but remains in quality the same. The case is similar with a circle, a square, or any conceivable geometrical figure [which has] a subjective substance in an objective shell.
The work of art is born of the artist in a mysterious and secret way. From him it gains life and being. Nor is its existence casual and inconsequent, but it has a definite and purposeful strength, alike in its material and spiritual life. It exists and has power to create spiritual atmosphere; and from this inner standpoint one judges whether it is a good work of art or a bad one. If its “form” is bad it means that the form is too feeble in meaning to call forth corresponding vibrations of the soul… The artist is not only justified in using, but it is his duty to use only those forms which fulfill his own need… Such spiritual freedom is as necessary in art as it is in life.
– Wassily Kandinsky
Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.
– George Bernard Shaw
Life really does begin at forty. Up until then, you are just doing research.
– Carl Jung
There are only three stages to this work: to be a beginner, to be more of a beginner, and to be only a beginner.
– Thomas Merton, Wisdom of the Desert
When I eroded the landscape
of my body,
you drew a fresh map,
topographical and understanding.
– Kayleb Rae Candrilli
Zen practice in the midst of activity is superior to that pursued within tranquility.
– Hakuin
If you dislike war, respect your neighbor. And cherish the person who comes from afar. . . Distance is like allusion to the infinite. Love the person in your neighbor. Love God in the person who comes from afar.
– Lanza del Vasto
Consider Scheherazade, whose name meant “city-born” and who was without a doubt a big-city girl, crafty, wisecracking, by turns sentimental and cynical, as contemporary a metropolitan narrator as one could wish to meet. Scheherazade, who snared the prince in her never-ending story. Scheherazade, telling stories to save her life, setting fiction against death, a Statue of Liberty built not of metal but of words. Scheherazade, who insisted, against her father’s will, on taking her place in the procession into the king’s deadly boudoir. Scheherazade, who set herself the heroic task of saving her sisters by taming the king. Who had faith, who must have had faith, in the man beneath the murderous monster and in her own ability to restore him to his true humanity, by telling him stories.
– Salman Rushdie
Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.
– Alan Watts
If you go to one demonstration and then go home, that’s something, but the people in power can live with that. What they can’t live with is sustained pressure that keeps building, organizations that keep doing things, people that keep learning lessons from the last time and doing it better the next time.
– Noam Chomsky
I love to watch the fine mist of the night come on,
The windows and the stars illumined, one by one,
The rivers of dark smoke pour upward lazily,
And the moon rise and turn them silver. I shall see
The springs, the summers, and the autumns slowly pass;
And when old Winter puts his blank face to the glass,
I shall close all my shutters, pull the curtains tight,
And build me stately palaces by candlelight.
– Charles Baudelaire
Harmony
by Stuart Kestenbaum
You know the Beatles could have
afforded another microphone,
but George would always stand
in the middle and step up to
Paul’s when it was time to
join in. Because that’s the way
harmony is, you need to share the
electricity, the voice, the words.
Just the way we do when we drive
in our cars with the radio on,
the windows rolled down with fall in the
air, dead leaves swirling in the wake,
or in the spring, the earth damp and soft,
the air hazy with pollen. We hear
the song that moves us, crank the
radio and sing along, at the top of
our lungs, as if we just joined
the group. In tune out of tune,
country western, rock and roll, we want
to harmonize. A whole country of
would-be stars losing love, finding love
with the radio in different
cars, on different paths, the dark
road rumbling beneath.
I have a wonderful cabin you know, dirt cheap. Alors, what more?
– Henry Miller
It’s pouring, the trees are getting greener before my eyes, I love you.
I’m almost afraid of the intensity
of that happiness.
– Vera Nabokov
Eternity is not the hereafter…this is it. If you don’t get it here, you won’t get it anywhere.
– Joseph Campbell
Do not stand in a place of danger trusting in miracles.
– Arabian Proverb
So many people insist on being either pro-Freudian or anti-Freudian, pro-scientific-psychology or anti-scientific-psychology, etc. In my opinion all such loyalty-positions are silly. Our job is to integrate these various truths into the whole truth.
– Abraham H. Maslow
Granted, if we only have emotional compassion, then our mind will be unstable, and that will make us weak.
– Phakchok Rinpoche and Sophie Wu
Everyone is looking for a book strong enough to change them.
– Catherynne M. Valente
One of the beauties of Buddhism is the practice of decentering yourself so that other people can have space.
– Pamela Ayo Yetunde
There’s a Turkish phrase I like, “kolay gelsin,” which you say to people when you encounter them working–cleaning, gardening, parenting, doing construction, delivering the mail–& I wish there were a good English equivalent. “May your work be easy / come easily” doesn’t cut it.
– Merve Emre
This reminds me of the French phrase, “bon courage,” which can mean different things in different contexts, but implies an acknowledgment of labor and solidarity among workers. Definitely no equivalent for that in English.
– Annie deSaussure
Americans would say something like don’t forget to hydrate
– Eric Weinberger
there might be an English equivalent in “power to your elbow”, which sounds like it must, in itself, have been borrowed in translation from elsewhere.
– Matthew Black
Madness springs from hurt that goes deep, that ruptures our sense of self, leaving us helpless to shelter the person we are becoming.
– Ann Belford Ulanov
Why else keep a journal, if not to examine your own filth?
– Anne Sexton
I think the line length is mostly driven by breath, by the number of words a speaker can say before stopping to rest. Or before changing the subject, or looking away.
– Jennifer A Sutherland
I’ve often said that all poetry is political. This is because real poems deal with a human response to reality and politics is part of reality, history in the making. Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.
– Yehuda Amichai
As the ego does not represent the whole psyche, so the Western mind cannot speak for the whole world.
– James Hillman
Clear faith blooms when we recognize in another the possibility of living a free, happy, peaceful life, and this recognition compels us to look for a way to get there ourselves.
– Vanessa Zuisei Goddard
A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing.
– Garrison Keillor
I want to see your timid smile
between the words,
or in the middle of the talk,
or in…
the books from which the scent of distant countries emanates.
– Ines Abassi
The live iguanas will come to bite the men who do not dream.
– Frederico Garcia Lorca, Granada, 1919
Arion by Alexander Pushkin
translated from the Russian by Seamus Heaney
We were all there in the boat;
Some of us tightening sail,
Some at the heave and haul
Of the oars, vessel and load
Deep surging, our passage silent,
The helmsman buoyed at the helm.
And I, taking all for granted,
Sang to the sailors.
A wind
Struck then, a boiling maelstrom.
Helmsman and sailors perished.
Only I, still singing, washed
Ashore by the swell, sing on,
A mystery to myself,
Safe and sound on a rock-shelf
Where my clothes dry in the sun.
You cannot describe it or draw it. You cannot praise it or perceive it. No place can be found in which to put the original face.
– Mumon
How we approach “the other,” and how we approach each other, will shape everything, including out own evolving self and the cosmos in which we participate.
– Richard Tarnas
Things might never be okay in the grand way I’m tempted to think they will be if certain things would just happen.
Can I be okay right now?
Yes…as long as I’m beholding beauty.
– McCall Erickson
we tugged our lifeline through limestone and sand,
lover and long-leggèd girl.
– Maxine Kumin
Like to the moon am I, that cannot shine
Alone; for lo! our eyes see nought in heaven
Save what the living sun illumineth.
– Michelangelo Buonarroti
Lay hold of life with both hands, whenever thou mayest seize it, it is interesting.
– J W von Goethe
Reminder to let it go: those who wrong you wrong themselves.
– @RyanHoliday
Don’t go to a book expecting a colorful, comfortable tour of anything, let alone culture. Look for the humanity.
– Morgan Talty
We are the proofs of books
full of paragraphs in need of revision.
– Fouad Mohammad Fouad
The trees dropped out long ago. There’s one last
mesa above railroad, rabbitbrush, dark cattle—
then a manmade pile of volcanic earth to trick
yourself by.
– Emma Aylor, To Remember the Faces of Friends Far Away
A bookstore is one of the many pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.
– Jerry Seinfeld
And I tell myself, a moon will rise from my darkness.
– Mahmoud Darwish
It would be fairer to say I have traveled widely, without ever leaving my own native soil, I’ve traveled, one might say, through literature, each time I’ve opened a book the pages echoed with a noise like the dip of a paddle in midstream, and throughout my odyssey I never crossed a single border, and so never had to produce a passport, I’d just pick a destination at random, setting my prejudices firmly to one side, and be welcomed with open arms in places swarming with weird and wonderful characters.
– Alain Mabanckou
There are two kinds of fools: One says, ‘This is old, therefore it is good’; the other says, ‘This is new, therefore it is better.’
– William R. Inge
There are more copies than original among people.
– Pablo Picasso
I was not born to amuse the Tsars.
– Alexander Pushkin
The holy eye is the one who is able to see the extraordinary beauties of the ordinary days!
– Mehmet Murat ildan
Isn’t it intoxicating—the ecstatic briefness of it all?
– Sierra DeMulder
You re-invent language
every time you speak,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
“Do you write every day?”
Toni Morrison: “No. I think every day.”
Do not be deceived! The busiest people harbor the greatest weariness, their restlessness is weakness–they no longer have the capacity for waiting and idleness.
– Nietzsche
Men err when they lament the flight of time accusing it of being too swift, not perceiving that it is sufficient as it passes.
– da Vinci
If the Universe came to an end every time there was some uncertainty about what had happened in it, it would never have got beyond the first picosecond. And many of course don’t. It’s like a human body, you see. A few cuts and bruises here and there don’t hurt it. Not even major surgery if it’s done properly. Paradoxes are just the scar tissue. Time and space heal themselves up around them and people simply remember a version of events which makes as much sense as they require it to make.
– Douglas Adams
Kind over nice.
Outcome over ego.
Velocity over speed.
Quality over quantity.
Effective over efficient.
Ability over experience.
Progress over perfection.
Consistency over intensity.
Competence over charisma.
Environment over willpower.
Correctness over consensus.
Long-term over the short-term.
The right way over the shortcut.
Avoiding stupidity over seeking brilliance.
– Shane Parrish
If we hold on tightly to what we have, our curiosity may not be ignited. Suffering shakes us up.
– Cuong Lu
What we have we soon have no longer . . . All we have and possess is what we long for; all we are is what we’ve never been. I was less a phenomenon than a longing, only in my longing did I live, and all that I was was nothing more than longing.
– Robert Walser
Never be totally right. Being right means you’re done learning. You’re closed off from ideas. It means you’re satisfied with where you are and not focused on where you’re going. Never allow yourself to be totally right.
– Mark Manson
I slept before a wall of books and they
calmed everything in the room, even
their contents, even me
– Saskia Hamilton
I have to
understand it
sideways
to teach it,
the old monk
admitted.
– The Old Monk
Nothing enters our lives that is not in some way connected with our individual journey. This does not imply blame or causality, but it does imply a deeper meaning which may be transformative for the individual who is prepared to seek that meaning.
– Liz Greene
Ecology must take the view that where the organism is intelligent, the environment also is intelligent, because the two evolve in complexity together and make up a single unified field of behavior.
– Alan Watts
Everything is definitely, quite definitely going to be better, and you need not worry.
– Franz Kafka, 1912.
But, I’ll let you in on a secret. Make your first goal to be about yourself and being true to who you really are. When you’ve found that truth and begin living it, your life will become art.
– William Reardin
We can place the self between our ears & have it looking out from our eyes, or we can cast its boundaries farther to include the oxygen-giving trees and plankton, our external lungs, and beyond them the web of life in which they are sustained.
– Joanna Macy
If we love God while thinking that he does not exist, he will manifest his existence.
– Simone Weil
If the soul in depression is nurtured properly, the results will be new life for the psyche. This process is similar to what the alchemists understand as mortification.
– Stanton Marlan
Live in the Garden of Eden, with abundance everywhere. You do not need to feel limited by the regime of mind.
– Tarthang Tulku
Every step forward toward building more consciousness destroys a previous living balance. This is true even in a neurosis & is one reason why one is very attached & loyal to his neurosis & has generally great feeling trouble in separating from his former neurotic situation.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
Either America will destroy ignorance
or ignorance will destroy
the United States.
– W.E.B. DuBois
Eastward and westward storms are breaking, great, ugly whirlwinds of hatred and blood and cruelty. I will not believe them inevitable.
– W. E. B. Du Bois
Your E-string’s a little flat
is all the old monk ever
wanted to say.
– The Old Monk
People don’t want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.
– Chuck Palahniuk
The three big decisions – what you do, where you live, and who you’re with.
– @naval
Real liberation comes not from glossing over or repressing painful states of feeling, but only from experiencing them to the full.
– Carl G. Jung
Beliefs separate. Loving thoughts unite.
– Paul Ferrini
In my own training, I’ve been taught to look for the gaps: the gap at the end of each out-breath; the space between thoughts; the naturally occurring, nonconceptual pause after a sudden shock, unexpected noise, or moment of awe.
– Pema Chodron
because only my love for you
despite the charms of gravity
keeps me from falling off this Earth
into another dimension
– Nikki Giovanni
There is nothing nearer to true humility than the intelligence. It is impossible to be proud of our intelligence at the moment when we are really exercising it.
– Simone Weil
If the individual is a becoming, a migrancy of edges, a liquid ecstasy, always becoming-something-else, always gesturing towards escape, then how else does one think about responsibility except as a distributed field ‘larger’ than the ‘individual’? Modernity’s great exercise is to reduce the field to the atom, the world to consciousness, the flow to the individual.
I cannot help but feel that the violence of this reduction, the insistence on calculating the world and its prospects for addressing trouble in terms of individuals acting upon their environments, leaves too much away. A certain quality is lost. Like the warmth of a seat just left. A certain silence. A fleeting gesture.
– Báyò Akómoláfé
“Never risk what you have and need,” wrote Warren Buffett, “for what we don’t have and don’t need.” In pursuit of our goals, we inevitably give up things that matter. We sleep less. We spend less time with our friends. We eat unhealthily. We skip workouts. We cancel dates. We miss dinner with the family.
– Farnam Street
For many feverish years he was burdened with the sensation, an ancient one to be sure, that the incredible sprawl of human history was no more than a pathetically partial record of an infinitely vast and shadowed chronicle of universal metamorphoses.
– Ligotti
You can turn anything into a guru if you want to be a child who needs a parent who has all the answers. It has to do with something in human beings which would rather not put in hard work. We are lazy creatures & dependence on gurus is just one manifestation [of this]
– Liz Greene
I was in darkness, but I took three steps and found myself in paradise. The first step was a good thought, the second, a good word; and the third, a good deed.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
You see, the artist lives by perception. So that what we make, is what we feel. The making of something is not just construction. it’s all about feeling.
– Agnes Martin
We don’t love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.
– Thomas Mann
Only the barbarians are not curious to know where they come from, how they got to where they are now, where they seem to go, if they want to go, and if so, why, and if not, why not.
– Isaiah Berlin
To love God through and across the destruction of Troy and of Carthage—and with no consolation. Love is not consolation, it is light.
– Simone Weil
In her soul stood petrified forests of memories.
– Agnes Miegel
History will always find you, and wrap you
In its thousand arms.
– Joy Harjo
The writing process is a little like bird watching: You may be setting out to see a toucan, but if the (rare) resplendent quetzal arrives, are you really going to ignore it?
– Joy Baglio
Curating isn’t undemocratic or ‘elitist’, a term that is now used so often that it’s become meaningless. It’s an act of generosity – you’re sharing what you love and what has inspired you.
– Martin Scorsese
The issues and ideas polarize between two camps, or two people, or two groups, or two collectives that have something secretly very much in common. But neither can bear to stay in the place in the middle and live with the thing in common.
– Liz Greene
Books add a depth to man’s unhappiness which we mistake for consolation.
– Orhan Pamuk
(who make way for each other
who weep with wind for what was blackened)
is to discover a spiral of mulberry
a pocket of decadence
within a realm of filtered light
– Jaye Elizabeth Elijah
All the flowers are forms of water.
– W.S. Merwin
The world doesn’t want to be saved.
It wants to be Loved.
That’s how we save it.
– April Peerless
Some writers want to change the world. That’s terrific. We need those. But we also need silly authors, goofy ones, the kind that tell stories that make the world bearable until those serious authors can make it better.
– Barlow Adams
All the flowers are forms of water.
– W.S. Merwin
It isn’t seen by consciousness, but rather by wisdom.
It isn’t seen by sentient beings, but rather by buddhas.
It isn’t seen by a subjective consciousness, but rather by reality itself.
– Milarepa
As you heal and grow, many of the things you adjusted to will become unacceptable.
Higher standards look good on you.
– Dr. Thema
Every evening before settling across the patchworked roofs the pigeons wing their questions slow, over and over, while the crows steady slowly home it’s something like waves.
– Alexander Booth
Always be ready to be active, but carry calmness with you into your activity.
– Paramahansa Yogananda
And the red sun mocks my sadness.
– Ezra Pound
Heal yourself with the light of the sun and the rays of the moon. With the sound of the river and the waterfall. With the swaying of the sea and the fluttering of birds. Heal yourself with mint, neem, and eucalyptus. Sweeten with lavender, rosemary, and chamomile. Hug yourself with the cocoa bean and a hint of cinnamon. Put love in tea instead of sugar and drink it looking at the stars. Heal yourself with the kisses that the wind gives you and the hugs of the rain. Stand strong with your bare feet on the ground and with everything that comes from it. Be smarter every day by listening to your intuition, looking at the world with your forehead. Jump, dance, sing, so that you live happier. Heal yourself, with beautiful love, and always remember…you are the medicine.
– María Sabina
Astrud Gilberto sang an old bossa nova song. “Take me to Aruanda,” she sang. I closed my eyes, and the clatter of the cups and saucers sounded like the roar of a far-off sea. Aruanda—what’s it like there?
– Haruki Murakami
There’s much more in any given moment than we usually perceive, and that we ourselves are much more than we usually perceive. When you know that, part of you can stand outside the drama of your life.
– Ram Dass
Kilimanjaro belongs to Ernest Hemingway. Oxford, Mississippi, belongs to William Faulkner… a great deal of Honolulu has always belonged for me to James Jones… A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image.
– Joan Didion
Sometimes, When the Light
by Lisel Mueller
Sometimes, when the light strikes at odd angles
and pulls you back to childhood
and you are passing a crumbling mansion
completely hidden behind old willows
or an empty convent guarded by hemlocks
and giant firs standing hip to hip,
you know again that behind that wall,
under the uncut hair of the willows
something secret is going on,
so marvelous and dangerous
that if you crawled through and saw,
you would die, or be happy forever.
Very few people possess true artistic ability. It is therefore both unseemly and unproductive to irritate the situation by making an effort. If you have a burning, restless urge to write or paint, simply eat something sweet and the feeling will pass. Your life story would not make a good book. Do not even try.
– Fran Lebowitz
You spoke that little word of praise;
Twas nothing much and still
It lighted up my tearful days
Like sunrise on a hill.
– Patrick Kavanagh, To A Distant Friend
. . . every single thing was a paradox, / a prayer.
– Jennifer Grotz
But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.
– Haruki Murakami
Addictions are based on a longing for presence. Addicts somehow believe they can live in the presence of perfection: the perfect body, the perfect man or woman, the perfect nirvana. Addictions are archetypally based on the search for perfection.
– Marion Woodman
People will go to great lengths not to hear their inner voices. They’re terrified of silence because in silence they experience inner nothingness. The imagination’s dead or at least dormant. Here we are back to the missing feminine principle.
– Marion Woodman
If only I could tell someone.
The humiliation I go through
when I think of my past
can only be described as grace.
We are created by being destroyed.
– Franz Wright
There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is untranslatable as music.
– Jorge Luis Borges
If one had made a serious study of the things Jung left us–[his works, his letters, his seminars]– it is obvious that this man has plumbed depths that nobody has ever touched before, and it amazes me that this is not generally recognized.
– Edward Edinger
The things that are really for thee, gravitate to thee.
– Emerson
Gate Gate Pāragate Pārasaṃgate Bodhi svāhā.
Gone, gone, Gone beyond, Gone completely beyond. Awake. So be it!
– The Heart Sūtra (Sanskrit: प्रज्ञापारमिताहृदय Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya; Chinese: 心經 Xīnjīng; Tibetan: བཅོམ་ལྡན་འདས་མ་ཤེས་རབ་ཀྱི་ཕ་རོལ་ཏུ་ཕྱིན་པའི་སྙིང་པོ) – The Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom
For a fortress to be secret, it must be invisible. It must have no boundaries of exclusiveness – it must be an Internal Fortress of Practice.
– Ngakpa Chogyam
Coleridge reminds us that there can be no origination without discontinuity, and that only the Will can interrupt the repetition-compulsion that is nature.
– Harold Bloom
We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures…
– Hannah Arendt, We Refugees
Toward the end of his life, Jung said gravely to Miguel Serrano: “No one understands, only a poet could begin to understand.”
– Stephen Hoeller
So often we believe we are alone in the privacy of our fantasies, but that is a delusion as well – and perhaps the most dangerous kind. For in letting ourselves forget about the common threads of innermost wishes, we erode our foundations and lose the keystone of our souls.
– Tiffany Baker
To smile at all babies we meet is a small, easy and great thing to do. Babies experience the world “before thinking” so whatever comes into their experience can go deeply into them. If strangers are consistently felt to be friendly what a legacy that could be for their future. I’d like to contribute to something like that.
– Gunilla Norris
If you read folklore as memory instead of metaphor, you may get further with it.
– Tad Hargrave
All that I have taken for granted keeps
ringing in my ears with the same
metronome as his life support.
– Usman Hameedi
Provenance
There is a truth
deeper than the surface
we have become;
a truth like a seed
knowing her own fruiting
and the fruits of all time;
everything is
in Her beginning.
Shed the surface
of all you think
you know now.
Open your door so
that the silent swoop
of sparrowhawk may enter,
grace your kitchen freely.
Let this one of Earth
wisdom speak with your
heart who knows for whom
the sparrows’ song calls.
Feel the aliveness
of the wild once more
in your own body
as the sparrowhawk’s
lightening eyes, sharp talons
and ripping beak capture you.
Feel her soft feathers as
she tears her way below the
surface of your deadening life.
Greet the lion and cub walking
towards you on the suburban
concrete path outside your
house; let them remind you,
invite you, into a life this
Earth is dying for. Be
caught by them, willing food for
Earth and her young. Don’t hide at
the surface, or worse, skin their hide
as trophy on which to walk. Instead,
walk on bare sacred ground.
Live provenance.
Arise into a life born
from the cosmic seed who
knows her own, who knows
her way. Break the surface
open and drop your roots down
into the deeper tender truth
of your own being.
Trust the breaking.
Come forth from your original
depths as the wild one
Earth intended. Take your
place among the aliveness
of all life
seen and unseen:
psyche,
sparrow,
sparrowhawk,
lion,
cub,
human,
and all Earth’s wild ones
remaining yet in the
Great Cosmic Camino,
provenance.
– Wendy Robertson Fyfe
Precious and passing moments of mundane awakening are eminently more sustainable than popular notions of enlightenment, so idealized as esoteric, mysterious, and exceptional in today’s culture of spiritual correctness.
– Andrew Hagel
Form your letters carefully and well.
Making things carefully
Is more important than making them.
– Antonio Machado
As a mystical practice, meditation has always been a primarily masculine discipline. One of the most interesting speculations on its origins, suggests that it evolved from hunting behaviors—the need for radical stillness and silence, for focused awareness, and for the pinpoint readiness to act, when the moment was precisely right. Bead practices, on the other hand, seem to have evolved from the gathering behaviors of women, as they collected seeds, nuts, and berries. If the hunter is quiet and concentrated, the gatherer is a multi-tasker—chattering, muttering, moving about, and communing with others. Legions of grandmothers have wrapped their rosaries around their wrists, sneaking in a prayer or two, between the dishes, and the laundry. Children can be tended, old people cared for, and the carrots chopped for dinner, all while staying in conversation with the Lady.
– Clark Strand
No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by that word. It is every individual’s individual code of behavior by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol – cross or crescent or whatever – that symbol is man’s reminder of his duty inside the human race.
– William Faulkner
When Toni Morrison said ‘write the book you want to read,’ she didn’t mean everybody.
– Fran Lebowitz
How shall we find our way in-
to this moment which stands between
us and a remembered future?
– Karl Kirchwey
It comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for.
– Marcel Proust
On the heath Lear asks Gloucester: “How do you see the world?” And Gloucester, who is blind, answers: “I see it feelingly.”
I see it feelingly.
The news is not good these days. I can tell you, though, that as a journalist I know the news is never the end of the story. The news can be the truth that sets us free – not only to feel but to fight for the future we want. And the will to fight is the antidote to despair, the cure for cynicism, and the answer to those faces looking back at me from those photographs on my desk. What we need to match the science of human health is what the ancient Israelites called “hochma” – the science of the heart … the capacity to see … to feel … and then to act … as if the future depended on you.
Believe me, it does.
– Bill Moyers, Hochma – I See
The gates of hell are open night and day;
Smooth the descent, and easy is the way:
But to return, and view the cheerful skies,
In this the task and mighty labor lies.
– Virgil, The Aeneid
If theater is ritual, then dance is too… It’s as if the threads connecting us to the rest of the world were washed clean of preconceptions and fears. When you dance, you can enjoy the luxury of being you.
– Paulo Coelho
We don’t learn much when things go right. It’s when things go wrong that we learn the most.
– Simon Sinek
I appreciate how the sight of a blue sky after a week of smoke can be a huge relief.
Weather & climate can be very stressful & a return to the serine understandably calming.
One day the smoke won’t part, the water won’t run clean unless we make real changes to how we live.
– @ErinBrockovich
Jung said that “the Gods have become diseases, not because they are diseases,” but because in our materialist culture they have no way to express themselves other than as agents of pathology and as “irritants” of change.
– David Tacey
I am a Baroque artist. I seek intensity of emotion by any means necessary. I am not a classicist, I do not seek perfection. Baroque artists seek intensity, not beauty. If we can make people cry, we are happy.
– Pascal Quignard
You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world. I’m an old-fashioned writer and, despite the odds, I want to change the world.
– James Baldwin
Keep the company of those who seek the truth, was one of the things Vaclav Havel discovered, through a lifetime of searching, run from those who have found it.
– Pico Iyer
How else could it be
The harrowing voyage
Into the heart
That is getting close
To another person
Filled with kingdoms
Of prisons
And dungeons
With love we so want
To be kings and queens
Though we are filled
With history’s inmates
Confined in our chests
Who rattle the bars of our ribs
We want to be cooing doves
But are some freakish combination
Of doves
And rabid bats
Love is the unfoldment
Of promises and so much pain
Is is terribly beautiful
Or beautifully terrible
Or just some great collision
Of the purity of the heart
Crashing into its shards
Of madness
A great pile
Of shrapnel
Love, are you treasure hunt
Or minefield,
Wolf or sheep
Who can say?
For I am a tattered and tattering
A fanged and bleating thing
Soft and cruel
From too much softness
Desperate prayers
For more softness
Sharpened like knives
To tear open the soft belly
Of Heaven
What a haggard road, love
That makes us gods
And monsters
Great love is the high-ceilinged ballroom
Stuffed with dreams and nightmares
The masquerade of the demons
Of the past.
Are you charmed or haunted
As the cavalcade
Of shrouds and wedding veils
Of brides and reapers
That is all of me
Approaches you to ask,
“May I have this dance?”
– Chelan Harkin
The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.
– Aldous Huxley
We need to be sensitive to all the moments when agitation or fragmentation is happening, hear the sounds of this in our minds and bodies, and bring new intentions in those moments.
– Christina Feldman
Writing poems about writing poems
is like rolling bales of hay in Texas.
Nothing but the horizon to stop you.
– Ruth Stone
riffing on Susan Howe’s ‘The Labadie Tract’
the greeniest green
authorized
by a diapason
of rain
– Alec Finlay
On the contrary, suffering can help you understand the world, and attachment to happiness can be an obstacle.
– Cuong Lu
You put together two people who have not been put together before. Sometimes it is like that first attempt to harness a hydrogen balloon to a fire balloon: do you prefer crash and burn, or burn and crash? But sometimes it works, and something new is made, and the world is changed. Then, at some point, sooner or later, for this reason or that, one of them is taken away. And what is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.
– Julian Barnes
The paper was blank. . . . A man is measured by big lacks, after all. And to touch the great lack was perhaps a person’s aspiration. Would touching the lack be an art? That man enjoyed his impotence in the way a man recognizes himself.
– Clarice Lispector
I catalog what I cannot capture:
the sun, its ragged stumble into rockface,
the precise elevation of this plateau or the next,
the sea, of course, against which everything is measured.
– Donika Kelly
The Poem Waits at Its Own Core
by John Fox
The poem at its core
Is snow or egg,
The new moon or grass
In spring.
All these pause at the edge
Of change. There is a deep
Stillness you must pass through
To get close to what waits.
At this edge, you leave
Everything behind
Except what the poem needs:
Warmth, rain, silence,
Gravity —
Make it something you know
Only for the first time:
A river, heartbeat,
Cradle, field of play.
The place where all things
Begin again.
Nothing is more depressing than getting paid and being broke in the same day.
– Contemplative Monk
Over time, tending to our dreams generates a shift from reporting only to the demanding outer world and the default allegiance to the totalitarian complexes fate gave us toward a growing sense of wonder at this mysterious, symbolic source within each of us.
– James Hollis
There’s another way to be an iconoclast: By refusing the tacit and willful collusion of confusing our maps of language with the terrain of experience such cartography is meant to point toward — in this way, one can opt out of literalizing idolatry.
Navigating freely, cautiously, and referring to those maps, I find fresh paths, and trodden old trails — some I’ve looped back upon and crossed before, others where I see your footprints and we meet…
– Andrew Hagel
You go your way
I’ll go your way too.
– Leonard Cohen
One disappointing thing you discover about the Adult World is that the minimum competence level of professionals – doctors, lawyers – is much lower than you would hope
Not a little bit lower, much lower
– Sasha Chapin
It’s an innate force within each and every one of us. It is unwavering love and protection for life, or the courage of our shared heart.
– Deborah Eden Tull
If you understand “the problem” thoroughly enough you don’t have to keep studying it.
People who do this are avoiding enacting solutions, which frankly, is where the really hard work begins.
– @VinceFHorn
We settle ourselves in our own unsought magnificent way.
We settle ourselves in a state of unshakable equanimity.
We settle ourselves in an uncomplicated absence of thought.
We settle ourselves where we do not recognize anything.
– Vajrasattva’s Magnificent Sky
Jung surmised that much of our mental life, like our bodies, has ancient origins: Just as the human body represents a whole museum of organs, with a long evolutionary history behind them, so we should expect the mind to be organized in a similar way.
– Iain McGilchrist
The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.
– Susan Sontag
Whenever you are creating beauty around you, you are restoring your own soul.
– Alice Walker
When the green hills are covered with talking wires, and the wolves no longer sing, what good will the money you paid for our land be then?
– Chief Seattle
We lead our lives so poorly because we arrive in the present always unprepared, incapable, and too distracted for everything.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Nirvana is not another place and time. It’s here and everywhere, a timeless present in which past and future are included.
– Lama Chime Rinpoche
The unborn work in the psyche of the artist is a force of nature.
– Carl Jung
When I die,
bury me with my guitar
beneath the sand.
When I die,
among orange trees
and mint plants.
When I die,
bury me, if you would,
inside a weather vane.
When I die!
– Frederico Garcia Lorca
To time the creative process properly, so as to be accurate, reflectively conscious, and aware of every detail, but at the same time not killing it by holding back too much, is one of the greatest arts.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
The written word has taught me to listen to the human voice, just as the majestic and motionless attitudes of statues have taught me to appreciate the gestures of men. Conversely, with the passage of time, life has clarified my books.
– Marguerite Yourcenar
[rispetto] Etymologies
To invent an etymology of invent?
it means you vent what’s hidden in yourself
to posit an etymology of intent?
you pitch your tent in what’s not been yourself
camping in potential ground you’d fondly claim
by dint of will & work to attain as aim
– David Raphael Israel
Creativity is the art that can give rise to visionary metaphorical relationships, as opposed to purely psychological ones.
– Carl Jung
The capacity of the psyche to heal itself, to express both the problem & agenda for growth in symbolic forms, has been & remains a miraculous engagement to me. We do not invent or create these things; they are working within us to serve & support the work of nature.
– James Hollis
Leave my wings in place,
that I answer you,
I’ll fly well.
– Federico Garcia Lorca
In the unmade light I can see the world…
– W.S. Merwin
how much of our world
could be cured with a
little bit of hope and curiosity?
– @BashoSociety
barely using words
this poem
inside me
– @YourMoonliness
The cry is part. My solitaria
Are the meditations of a central mind.
I hear the motions of the spirit and the sound
Of what is secret becomes, for me, a voice
That is my own voice speaking in my ear.
– Wallace Stevens
It’s one of the charms of Greece — that one does feel that the Ancient Gods are there, under a different name. It’s reassuring for us. It’s what the French would call the ‘pérennité des choses’
– Lawrence Durrell
lost in the blue
all the colours
i could not see
– James Welsh
Having died
all the way back to the root, I grow again
into a version of the thing I love.
– Jenny George
I am trying to tell you something about the architecture of time
I am trying to understand something about the structure of the shared universe
– Cody-Rose Clevidence
There is this peculiar thing about being alive at this moment, hoping for a sort of collective shared consciousness of the now [. . .].
– Cody-Rose Clevidence
The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it. (…) But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
I believe in that place where you plug into the zeitgeist, the collective consciousness or whatever. It’s very folk. Soulful. Not materialistic. I believe in being a fighter for that soulful place.
– Björk
Love is a bet, a wild one, placed on freedom. Not my own; the freedom of the Other… A knot made of two intertwined freedoms.
– Octavio Paz
It is not right to consume anything at a faster rate than it can replace itself. This is something the scientists tell us – though we’d rather not agree that the danger is as pressing as they claim. We would prefer not to change our habits until we are compelled to.
– A.A. Milne
Canada’s forests cover 347 million hectares of land and make up nearly nine per cent of the World’s total forest area. Canada is the third-most forested country in the world by area.
Climate Change is terrifying!
– Laura Kerr
The Humanities are the study of consciousness coded in culture.
– Jeffrey Kripal
The fear of missing out has evolved erratically into a fear of being forgotten––an untimely existential burden that instills despair among the youth who log their frantic online presence among trending events. They perceive today’s trend as possible passage into recorded history.
– @voncordist
Allow me to walk in silence among you / allow me to meet you with eyes closed.
– Lucian Blaga, To My Readers
We’ll survive, you and I.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
Out here in the wild, I feel human beyond identity
– Tyler Orion
The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.
– Rebecca Solnit
And then, only a moment ago, some small arboreal mammals scampered down from the trees. They became upright and taught themselves the use of tools, domesticated other animals, plants and fire, and devised language. The ash of stellar alchemy was now evolving consciousness. At an ever-accelerating pace, it developed writing, cities, art and science, and sent spaceships to the planets and the stars. These are some of the things that hydrogen atoms do, given fifteen billion years of cosmic evolution.
– Carl Sagan, Cosmos
Forces that we cannot understand permeate our universe. We see the shadows of those forces when they are projected upon a screen available to our senses, but understand them we do not… Understanding requires words. Some things cannot be reduced to words. There are things that can only be experienced wordlessly.
– Frank Herbert
Don’t strain after more light than you’ve got yet; just wait quietly. God holds you when you cannot hold Him, and when the time comes to jump, He will see to it that you do jump—and you will find you are not frightened then… So just be supple in His hands and let Him mould you (as He is doing) for His own purposes, responding with very simple acts of trust and love.
– Evelyn Underhill
The landscape’s silent immensity—and the God to whom it points—is able to absorb all the grief one can give it.
– Belden C. Lane
Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
For many people, God is simply a gauze applied to the wound of not knowing, when in fact that wound has bled into every part of the world, is bleeding now in a way that is life if we acknowledge it, death if we don’t. Christ is contingency. Christ’s life is right now.
– Christian Wiman
Rejoicing in ordinary things is not sentimental or trite. It actually takes guts.
– Pema Chodron
Let us make a special effort to stop communicating with each other, so we can have some conversation.
– Mark Twain
It is your duty in life to save your dream.
– Amedeo Modigliani
He who fights, can lose. He who doesn’t fight, has already lost.
– Bertolt Brecht
There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn’t give a damn what goes on in between.
– Sir Thomas Beecham
The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written.
– Italo Calvino
I’ve only truly said what I’ve truly felt.
Meaning is an emotional exchange.
Language begins as feeling-speech.
Babies talk that way,
as do birds and beasts.
Even plants have feeling-speech,
as old as their cellular deeps.
What we feel is what we are,
which it helps to share.
Hawaiians say “na’au” for your gut knowledge.
Science calls the na’au the enteric system:
a low sheaf of nerve cells near your stomach
for feeling what matters to you.
Keeping is in your preservative mind.
Morphing is in your brain.
Hearts are for new beginnings.
Staying connected is in your na’au.
– George Gorman
There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy. To be at someone’s mercy is dialectical damage: they may be merciful and they may be merciless.
– Gillian Rose, Loves Work
this is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets
what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. More and more by
each glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself,
also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of something
at sea. Here, hands full of sand, letting it sift through
in the wind, I look in and say take this, this is
what I have saved, take this, hurry. And if I listen
now? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was only
something I did. I could not choose words. I am free to go.
I cannot of course come back. Not to this. Never.
It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.
– Jorie Graham
I sung of Chaos and Eternal Night,
Taught by the heav’nly Muse to venture down
The dark descent, and up to reascend…
– John Milton
When I am with you I feel
I am not just myself, but rather
double myself, my consciousness
laid out one on top of itself like
a double-yolked egg, which is to say
auspiciously.
I might there fore need
to vow myself to you, I love you
obsessively. I love you biologically.
I love you with sincere greed.
– Lauren Clark
I have passionately loved this land where I was born, I have poured all that I am into it, and I have never separated in my friendship any of the men who live there, of whatever race. But I can’t simply stand by watching as it becomes the land of doom and hate.
J’ai aimé avec passion cette terre où je suis né, j’y ai puisé tout ce que je suis et je n’ai jamais séparé dans mon amitié aucun des hommes qui y vivent, de quelque race qu’ils soient. Et je ne puis me résigner à la voir devenir la terre du malheur et de la haine.
– Albert Camus
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
The wolf is not bound to its shape. It can change form at will, transforming to a whale when it must swim in the sea. Seeing the whale, no one would ever suspect it had once been a wolf.
– Jordanna Max Brodsky, Olympus Bound
Just as I was man and woman, just as the fanged aarluk was wolf and whale, my people could not be contained in a single god.
– Jordanna Max Brodsky, The Wolf in the Whale
To the sea, to the sea! The white gulls are crying,
The wind is blowing, and the white foam is flying.
West, west away, the round sun is falling,
Grey ship, grey ship, do you hear them calling,
The voices of my people that have gone before me?
I will leave, I will leave the woods that bore me;
For our days are ending and our years failing.
I will pass the wide waters lonely sailing.
Long are the waves on the Last Shore falling,
Sweet are the voices in the Lost Isle calling,
In Eressea, in Elvenhome that no man can discover,
Where the leaves fall not: land of my people forever!
– J. R. R. Tolkien
One existence, one music, one organism, one life, one God: star-fire and rock-strength, the sea’s cold flow And man’s dark soul.
– Robinson Jeffers, Pantheist Poet
To be remembered is to be alive and to be forgotten is to die. This idea is foundational to ancestral veneration and animates the very life of a community. In fact, in African spirituality, it is memory that makes ancestors because ancestors are those whom the living remember. Those who are not remembered slowly drift into the realm of nonbeing, the realm of nothingness, the final death. Death is therefore kept at bay through memory. Here, memory is metaphysical rather than just social or political. Here, memory is spirituality because it is rooted in the deep structures of life. Suppressing memory generates individual and social death and forecloses futures.
– David Tonghou Ngong
It’s the very intentness of our own will that causes us to be blind to other realities.
– Rachel Cusk, Kudos
The purpose of writing is both to keep up with life and to run ahead of it. I am little comfort to myself, although I am the only comfort I have, excepting perhaps streets, clouds, the sun, the faces and voices of kids and the aged, and similar accidents of beauty, innocence, truth and loneliness.
– William Saroyan, My Heart’s in the Highlands
I need mercy much and blessing more
If, from the debris of my squandered days,
Your hand and mine should these four walls restore,
Beacon and haven in this briery maze
And, disciplined by guilt’s diminished pain,
Our dialogue of love begin again.
– John Hewitt
I blame myself for not often enough seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary.
– Saul Bellow
The poem is a self-portrait
always, no matter what mask
You take off and put back on.
– Charles Wright
Desire is sustained through fragments, concentrated moments spent together mythologized during those apart.
– Albert Camus and Maria Casares
Journalists, please realize and deeply ponder that what we are experiencing on Earth is the real-time irreversible unraveling of habitability due to the sale and use of fossil fuels. And report accordingly.
– Peter Kalmus
If myth is translated into literal fact, then myth is a lie. But if you read it as a reflection of the world inside–then it’s true.
– Joseph Campbell
Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable as a member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead.
– Friedrich Schiller
If we always react to our health concerns by fighting them or suppressing them with pharmaceuticals, we never really explore why our symptoms are here in the first place, and what they’re trying to tell us. It’s time to pause and listen.
– Marc David
Unbroken happiness is a bore: it should have ups and downs.
– Moliere
I never said it would be easy to love and to support your colleagues in all that they did: I only said it was necessary and strengthening and beautiful.
– Marian Seldes
Cherish your wilderness.
– Maxine Kumin
You and Art
Your exact errors make a music
that nobody hears.
Your straying feet find the great dance,
walking alone.
And you live on a world where stumbling
always leads home.
Year after year fits over your face—
when there was youth, your talent
was youth;
later, you find your way by touch
where moss redeems the stone;
and you discover where music begins
before it makes any sound,
far in the mountains where canyons go
still as the always-falling, ever-new flakes of snow.
– William Stafford
We hurry into meanings. We have difficulty staying in a state of not knowing, a state that is essential to reverie.
– Russell Lockhart
But she, travelling in the opposite direction, can see everything, the sorrow that comes from the impermanence of things, the depths of the ordinary, the forests and rivers that surpass understanding.
– Sharmistha Mohanty
All I ever wanted to be was a song—
something soft and light held in the mouth
sung sweet beneath the coming dawn.
– Jari Bradley
Cariad
by Derek Davies
Cariad is love, my darling i bring to you,
Cwtch is a hug, to last the whole night through.
Ffrind you will always be, my best friend come what may,
Seren is the Star, that brings light to my day.
Hwyl is the emotion of what i have now to give,
Hiraeth is a longing, a yearning for the way we once lived.
Nerth is the strength, that holds us close for all time,
Angerdd is the passion that says I’m yours and you are mine.
So Cariad my darling,
my words i hold true.
forever my friend,
forever i will love you x
Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.
– May Sarton
Art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.
– Saul Bellow
If you remember cosmology
there is nothing to stop time
running all the way to zero
– Susan Howe
Ample litany, sparing nothing I hate or love,
not-yet-silenced, not-yet-fractured, not-yet-
Not-yet-not.
– Jane Hirshfield
Without reflection, without mercy, without shame,
they built strong walls and high, and compassed me about.
And here I sit now and consider and despair.
– C. P. Cavafy
Nietzsche said God was dead. It’s true. The projection came off of that bearded God in the sky. That energy is no longer in the church. But where did the energy go? People now have no idea what to do with it so they put it on rock stars, on alcohol, on muffins, on healers.
– Marion Woodman
The aim of Buddhist practice is to break that cycle, to end that struggle. That is nirvana.
– Ken McLeod
To be inwardly spacious is no small thing! It’s hard to achieve. I like to practice by having one small surface in my home kept without anything on it – not one thing!For me, that emptiness is a visual reminder. But believe me, keeping even a small surface for spaciousness alone is not easy. I keep finding myself putting something there because it’s handy just the way I might put a thought or reaction inside me instead of simply being open. If you decide to practice this you will find how difficult having space for spaciousness can be.
– Gunilla Norris
Nothing is going to change in history as long as most people are merely dualistic, either-or thinkers. Such splitting and denying leaves us at the level of mere information, data, and endlessly arguing about the same…and with ever stronger ego attachment.
– Richard Rohr
Truthfully, I think I only publish because I’m too cheap to pay for my own cloud-based storage.
– Francesca Leader
Do not turn anything you do into a law, since that is the hubris of power.
– @RedBookJung
Ponder this
metamorphosis:
Infancy’s
kidnap into Fantasia .
– Mina Loy
Constant positive feedback is just as corrosive as constant negative feedback.
– @VinceFHorn
To Poetry
You led me where there were no roads…
– Anna Akhmatova, Tr. by Judith Hemschemeyer
…we are never more true
to ourselves
than when we are inconsistent.
– Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist
So many selves, so many sensuous worlds,
As if the air, the mid-day air, was swarming
With the metaphysical changes that occur,
Merely in living as and where we live.
– Wallace Stevens
You can only learn to be a better writer by actually writing.
– Doris Lessing
Till this moment I never knew myself.
– Jane Austen
Making art is about accepting what’s going on
around you and turning it into something
beautiful, no matter what it is.
– John Frusciante
The qualities that I look for the most in the protagonists of my films: vitality, courage, enthusiasm, humor, intensity, but also, to counteract these, a taste for secrecy, a wild side, a touch of wildness &, above all, something vibrant.
– Francois Truffaut
I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs.
– Hélène Cixous
What I want for myself, I want for everybody.
– Wallace Wattles
Philosophy should only be read as poetry
– Fanny Howe
The wish to be well is a part of becoming well.
– Seneca
It is the heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man, to tell him he is at the end of his nature; or that there is no further state to come . . .
– Sir Thomas Browne
The brain is a member of the same world it’s looking at. It has something in common with the universe that surrounds it.
– Alan Watts
Honor to those who in the life they lead
define and guard a Therrnopylae.
Never betraying what is right,
consistent and just in all they do.
– Cavafy
The point is that one sees things at different moments with different eyes.
– Edvard Munch
Poetry is the dance of language.
– Doris Kareva
Existential exhaustion is everywhere we look these days in our world, our nation, and in our beloved, maybe especially in our teenagers and our very closest friends.
– Anne Lamott
If the best love poems have a little darkness, how far down can I go?
– Katrina Vandenberg, Abyss
Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.
– Henry Miller
Not everybody can be an artist.
It takes a lot of blood and sweat
and tears and life and death to be
an artist; not just a marketing concept.
– Jamie Hince
They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.
– Shakespeare
A work of art is a world of signs, at least to the poet’s nursery
bookshelf sheltered behind the artist’s ear.
– Susan Howe
C. P. Cavafy fashioned the closet not as a space for silence, but as a position from which to speak.
– Dimitris Papanikolaou
Some pink and blue evening, we shall exchange a single impulse, a kind of long sob, heavy with farewells.
– Baudelaire
I can only read
a long poem
line by line,
I can’t read
the whole thing,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
Don’t show off —
let the poem do it,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
While Buddhist texts themselves may not be political, the practice of Buddhism in combination with speech and action certainly can be.
– Brenna Artinger
Seems to me the prolonged process of academic projects today leads to a kind of surfeit of agreement. By the long-postponed end you have in your notes a dozen ways to make the same set of claims you had been intending to make all along though from a singular angle.
– Bernard T. Joy
I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.
– William Faulkner
I’m always talking about how the poems I am most obsessed with are like people: complex and unknowable and with a huge capacity for many different emotions.
– Ada Limón
This world
Is infinitely sacred
Your eyes
Great light cups
Your heart
That can hold the entirety
Of God
Life is the school
Of unconditional love,
Absolute forgiveness,
Complete mercy.
Do you let beauty flood you?
Oh, please do.
You deserve this immersion
In grace.
Sacred family
There is so much awe
To be found here
And each being, each moment
Is unimaginably precious
You are a jewel
Mined from the invisible
You
Are a temple
Through which God’s
Sweetest, most celebratory
Prayers
Ring out in continuation.
May you hear
The music that you are.
I hear it now
And I bow.
– Chelan Harkin
There is something about the monsoon that lends itself to song and dance. There is something about the heavy grey clouds that mends forward to the light. There is something about the rain falling that sends a familiar rhythm, my heartbeat.
– Sharanrani Hemady
The difficulty in the spiritual path is always what comes from ourselves. A person does not like to be a pupil, he likes to be a teacher. If one only knew that the greatness and perfection of the great ones who have come from time to time to this world was in their being pupils and not in teaching! The greater the teacher, the better pupil he was. He learned from everyone, the great and the lowly, the wise and the foolish, the old and the young. He learned from their lives, and studied human nature in all its aspects.
– Hazrat Inayat Khan
To a brave person, good and bad luck are like her left and right hand. She uses both.
– St. Catherine of Siena
The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerated the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism: ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power.
– Franklin D. Roosevelt
Where time never entered, where no image ever shone, in the inmost and highest part of the soul, God is creating the whole world.
– Meister Eckhart
I think of my soul as pattern rather than substance.
– Alan Watts
…even this
could not stop us from doing as we had done all
our lives long and the cars we pulled out of driveways
and the highways that took us into the buzzing
electric of buildings poured in dense concrete
and the cooling chemicals seeping and cycling
as though through calm artificial hearts and outside
unnoticed the ghost-blue of juniper needle and berry
and the ghost-rising of smoke from the fires we claimed we had not set…
– Sheila Black, Climate (7) (Past Tense)
what but imagination could have read
granite boulders back to their molten roots?
And how far back was back, and how far on
would basalt still be basalt, iron iron?
– Edwin Morgan
Diaspora may be a state of mind, an intellectual and emotional homelessness. The poem works its way through that dislocation, and finds the confidence to offer the absent deity some mischievous but penetrating advice.
– Carol Rumens
Being tired of people who come with words, but no speech,
I made my way to the snow-covered island.
The wild does not have words.
The pages free of handwriting stretched out on all sides!
I came upon the tracks of reindeer in the snow.
Speech but no words.
– Tomas Transtromer, translation by Robert Bly
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
In the book of love―each sigh―
uttered by a lover
is a holy verse.
But tears should be
deemed glossolalia
only discernible by God.
– Umair Najmi
When I’m desperate
I write down poems
When I am happy
the poems are written
inside of me
Who am I
when I do not write?
– Rose Ausländer
You cannot achieve any creative result by forcing it. When you force the growth of tomatoes, they come out enormous but taste of nothing.
– Alan Watts
Find the mirror before the image has appeared: the potential to reflect is a kind of shining.
– Tarthang Tulku
It was when I found out I could make mistakes that I knew I was on to something.
– Ornette Coleman
Rest in the great expanse of sky-like emptiness that lies beyond all extremes and is free of duality. Through single-pointed meditation, appearances and mind will mix to become of one taste within the great expanse of meditative equipoise.
– Shabkar
Wherever I travel Greece wounds me.
– George Seferis
Let me enter the afterlife lithe not plodding.
Rise out of this heavy peasantry.
– Diane Seuss
o ocean is ever crossed without that willingness to risk, to leave behind the known shoreline long before the new land is found. As Jung expressed succinctly, “If you want to cure a neurosis, you have to risk something.”
– James Hollis, Living Between Worlds
Progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive.
– Zadie Smith
rivers to the sea
bending with the songs
of meadow larks
– Jane Reichhold
You must understand the complexity and the future of the computer. It is going to outstrip man in his thought; it is going to change the structure of society and the structure of government.
– Krishnamurti
When you are still within, all becomes quiet.
When you are mentally quiet, awareness shines clear.
When awareness is aware of its pure and undistracted Self, all is well.
This is what it means to be free.
– Brian Thompson
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
always in my bag
a book, an oasis
from the noise
– James Welsh
In quantum theory, experience is the essential reality, and matter is viewed as a representation of primary reality, which is experience.
– Henry Pierce Stapp
Unprocessed memories cause people to react to their world through the emotions, beliefs and physical sensations that were there at the time of their earlier traumatic experiences.
– Francine Shapiro
We move as if from room to room of a house, from *stanza* to *stanza*, for a poem has always been thought of as a house, and verses are *versus*, our turning at a door or stair, and we tread in meter.
– Guy Davenport
Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.
– Theodore Dreiser
And the city built with words not bricks
burned like a paper plate.
– David Lehman
The center (i.e. ego) thinks it can bring all the fragments together and make it a whole.
– Krishnamurti
Without our body we cannot speak truthfully.
We may think we are speaking the truth,
but if we lie down
and somebody puts a hand
on our heart and belly,
we will cry.
There’s truth in those tears.
– Marion Woodman
I was in the darkness;
I could not see my words
Nor the wishes of my heart.
Then suddenly there was a great light-
“Let me into the darkness again.”
– Stephen Crane
studying
alone and diligent
rainy day
– Ogawa
the moon along
the ocean road
lives again
– Basho
The divine emptiness, fuller than fullness, has come to inhabit us.
– Simone Weil
When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.
– George Bernard Shaw
Never apologize for burning too brightly or collapsing into yourself every night. That is how galaxies are made.
– Tyler Kent White
Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.
– Will Self
The mysteries of faith, when severed from all reason, are no longer mysteries but absurdities.
– Simone Weil
Do the right thing. The rest doesn’t matter. Cold or warm. Tired or well-rested. Despised or honored.
– Marcus Aurelius
If wanderers were not themselves the cause, then like the scent and color of the lotus in the sky, there would be no perception of the universe.
– Arya Nagarjuna
Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy.
– D.H. Lawrence
TEN YEAR CHALLENGE
Ten years ago I finally handed in my ancient
Nokia, spilled Pinkberry on my Blackberry,
met my husband for a drink before I knew
practically anything about him. Obama
was sworn in, got his Nobel Peace Prize,
and we swore it would all be different now.
I had mousy bangs. Scientists sequenced
the whole mouse genome and discovered
water on the moon. Moore’s Law was still
going strong. Cheap mind-reading headsets
hit the gaming market. I never used one,
busy playing my own games, firing my
neurons hypothesizing what next, troubleshooting
my mysterious mis-wired technology.
Africa’s population hit one billion that year,
having doubled over the previous quarter century.
Troops and drones surged in South Asia.
I got a flu shot, flew to China, let a heat-seeking
scanner take my body temperature as I crossed
the threshold to the Shaanxi History Museum,
where disposable surgical masks were trending.
Climategate opened, the great healthcare debate
heated up, the auto industry stalled. Sully saved
all the people on his plane. As ever, we were
coming and going, leaving, arriving. That much
hasn’t changed. The present’s always ending,
so we live infinitely in the past and possible,
inveterate time travelers with failing hindsight
and prophetic vision. Get ready: 2020’s nearing
with its own time travails, another Prime decade.
In ten more years we’ll know how to implant IQ,
insert whole languages. I’ll be a superpoet, then,
microchipped to turbo-read neural odes,
history of sonnets and aubades brainlaced,
wisdom wended through the jugular, inspiration
ad infinitum. We’ll print solely on ether,
cloud vellum indelible, every word a relic
of sentient reverence pressed with angel ink,
medium of our new nature. I’ll go back
to bangs, a halo, fringe low over my eyes
to thwart AI reading my face. We’ll book
VR visits to the dearly departed, the first class
will splash out on private reservoirs, and fresh
spring water will sparkle, rare, diamond bright.
The Dead Sea will die. Lake Chad will be a pale
blue memory. California will quake. Voyager
will keep rushing its gold record into the sunset,
still the most urgent message anyone’s sent.
Humans and robots will be best friends
or mortal enemies. Some of us will be living
in heaven or interstellar space, our new horizon,
and I will miss you terribly. Listen, no one
ever said the future would be easy.
– Sasha Stiles
Whenever anyone has offended me, I try to raise my soul so high that the offense cannot reach it.
– Rene Descartes
There’s nothing artistic about diary entries. You have to know the difference between emotions and emotional songs. It’s an easily misunderstood line.
– Justin Townes Earle
In most of our human relationships, we spend much of our time reassuring one another that our costumes of identity are on straight.
– ram dass
Some of the pure gold of our personality is relegated to the shadow because it can find no place in that great leveling process that is culture.
– Robert A. Johnson
LONG HAIR
Traditionally, long hair was always a symbol of masculinity. All of history’s great warriors had long hair, from the Greeks (who wrote odes to their heroes’ hair) to the Nordic, from the American Indians (famous for their long shiny hair) to the Japanese. And the longer and beautiful the hair was, the more manly the warrior was considered. Vikings flaunted their braids and samurai wore their long hair as a symbol of their honor (they cut their braid when they lose honor).
When a warrior was captured, his mane was cut to humiliate him, to take away his beauty. That custom resumed in what is today military service. There when new soldiers begin their training the first thing they do is cut their hair to undermine their self-esteem, make them submissive and make them see who’s boss.
The Romans were the ones who “invented” short hair so to speak, between the 1st and 5th centuries AD.. In battles they believed this gave them defensive advantages, since their opponents couldn’t grab them by the hair. This also helped them to recognize each other in the battlefield.
Short hair on men is a relatively new “invention” that has nothing to do with aesthetics.
But today we often see men being humiliated, sometimes called “gay” for wearing long hair, not knowing that short hair is actually the “anti-masculine” and is a repressive social imposition, while long hair symbolizes freedom.
– Lela Dean
At our best
we are nightshades.
At our best
we grow in the dark.
– Andrea Gibson
Our spiritual life is a constant battle between the part of the soul that loves others and the part of the soul that will gladly eat them up in a moment.
– Robert Bly
A shaft of sunlight lies inside
Prancing, dancing, lazing, blazing mana
Soul shine, star shine, moon glow
We meet other shafts and merge
The colors laugh, dressing us
In rainbow clothes
Propriety exults!
Flamboyant beings parade
The bright green hills
– Bobbie Gorman
As the Buddha said —the world is both pornography and paucity.
– Nicholas Pierotti
all thought ought to come with an advisory label: “just passing through”
– Andrew Kent Hagel
I’m not a teacher, but an awakener.
– Robert Frost
Species are like a house of cards. You can’t just take one card out of the deck and not expect the deck to crumble.
– Stuart Pimm, Professor of Conservation Ecology
The internet age is already Blake’s road of excess, in Rimbaud’s derangement of the senses—drugs or no drugs. Our excesses will kill us or make us real. The drugs are, therefore, minus instead of addition, the poppy fire of the digital fast, the emptying of psychic kitsch, the crystal ship of no – thing. Chogyam Trungpa said, ‘Television is the crime of the century’. So smash your television drug and surf the bardo and watch the static become stars—the trip of the real.
– Andrew Sweeny
The planet will not
be healed
by powerful politicians
in big cities
who spend trillions on
a global strategy
that never quite begins.
They also burn much fuel.
Earth will be healed
by villagers who sing,
by backyard gardeners
like you
who walk more slowly
right here,
who feel the green
through bare soles,
speaking fewer words,
cradling
each other’s anger
like mothers,
awakening
the heirloom seeds
of the heart.
– Alfred K. Lamotte
I wake up & it breaks my heart. I draw the blinds & the thrill of rain breaks my heart. I go outside. I ride the train, walk among the buildings, men in Monday suits. The flight of doves, the city of tents beneath the underpass, the huddled mass, old women hawking roses, & children all of them, break my heart. There’s a dream I have in which I love the world. I run from end to end like fingers through her hair. There are no borders, only wind. Like you, I was born. Like you, I was raised in the institution of dreaming. Hand on my heart. Hand on my stupid heart.
– Cameron Awkward-Rich
It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Trying to get rid of unpleasant sensations and acquire pleasant ones, is the narrow optimization problem that generates samsara.
All non-dual adepts understand that the fundamental problem isn’t related to pain & pleasure, it’s related to (mis)perception.
– @VinceFHorn
The task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees.
– Erwin Schrodinger
If your faith is based on strong understanding, you will joyfully engage in meritorious behavior. That is the practice of dharma.
– Geshe Sopa
The most attentive people I know are birdwatchers. They are less sleepy as a whole than the general population.
– Anne Lamott
All is vanity and pursuit of the wind.
– Marguerite Duras
I think the heart of my work is to somehow show how a dot is really a line in masquerade.
– Bayo Akomolafe
Always say less than necessary.
– Robert Greene
Under the summer’s blast
The soul cannot endure
Unless by sleight or fast
It seize or deny its day
To make the eye secure.
– Allen Tate
An economy designed for profit makes it supremely difficult to imagine an economy designed for health and happiness. Try to imagine it anyway.
– Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
poetry is tying—untying
– Emilio Villa
Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. It’s usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.
– Anne Carson
There are people who appear to think only with the brain, while others think with all the body and all the soul, with the blood, with the marrow of the bones, with the heart, with the lungs, with the belly, with the life.
– Miguel de Unamuno
Only in solitude do we find ourselves ; and in finding ourselves, we find in ourselves all our brothers in solitude.
– Miguel de Unamuno
I can no longer distinguish clearly between neurosis of self and neurosis of world…to place neurosis and psychopathology purely in personal reality is a delusional repression of what is actually, realistically, being experienced.
– James Hillman
Isn’t it true that the art that we love reflects more about us than the art itself?. Isn’t that true of the people we love too?
– Sue Zhao
Everything, in those years, was different; even the taste of sleep (I, perhaps, was never fully happy, but it is known that misfortune requires lost paradises.)
– Jorge Luis Borges
An artist is only one who knows how to turn the solution into an enigma.
– Karl Kraus
Every point in the Cosmos can be considered its center.
– Dorothy Maclean
The surrealist movement was a search for a new myth of man.
– Wallace Fowlie
Even if we were trees enlivening
a new and trumpeting panoply of leaves,
there would still be other kinds of springs
than those foreseen by calendars or sheaves,
other waters than clear H2O.
When a bear begins her hibernal dream,
as her dream-flowers reach bloom,
she inhabits her Soul Time Spring.
Every soul makes itself unfold.
Not timed by well-known suns or moons,
as an albatross on pathless seas,
its wingtips incline to spirit seasons.
Awareness leads to questioning.
After which, anything’s possible.
– George Gorman
Awakening doesn’t give you anything, because fundamental wholeness isn’t additive.
– Vince Horn
If we are to survive as a democracy we had better have very intelligent citizens.
– Harold Bloom
People have a neurotic tendency to be fascinated by a particular style [of meditation], and there are all kinds of styles.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Stop the words now. Open the window in the center of your chest, and let the spirits fly in and out.
– Rumi
If you start to think the problem is ‘out there,’ stop yourself. That thought is the problem.
– Stephen R. Covey
Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence of mind, the vast awakening, empty and awake, will never crumble away because it was never born.
– Jack Kerouac
There are two immensely popular and presumably categorical ways we often talk about social change: one, as a matter of “changing the world” and two, as a matter of “changing ourselves.” Both ideas, temporarily demarcated here, are not mutually exclusive. In the former, the operative assumption is of a world that is agentially impoverished; a world that is mechanical and clunky and a mere reflection of the luminous intelligence of the human self. “Changing the world” riskily emphasizes an anthropocentric universe with miraculous human actors that are set against a ‘background world’ of things ultimately reducible to human sociality.
The other idea – that which focuses on “changing ourselves” – deifies consciousness as the very stuff that makes up the universe – and, in so doing, equates a sense of internal wellbeing and “alignment” with harmonious relations. This, of course, like its outward-facing counterpart, centralizes meaning, language, presence, and reflexion. It’s a matter of looking at the “man in the mirror”, getting our priorities straight before addressing the world outside of us.
Both ideas, depending on the same logic, are really the same thing: an apartheid of relations between the self and its context; an affective and desirous configuration of the citizen as a subject of entitlement; a reduction of experience to consciousness. That “we” can “change the world” either by acting upon it from a purity of ideas or by turning inwards is a move that ironically postpones ‘the world’, replacing ‘it’ with a totalizing artefact fitting to modern imaginaries.
What then? Should we not do something then? Should we put up our hands and feet and do nothing? The calculation that balances “failing to turn up” with “nothing happening” misappropriates agency as a human property, and – more critically – is unable to see that agency (or the capacity to respond to/enter relations with) enlists bodies in its ongoing flows and tides and ripples. Even the moral imperatives to address uneven circumstances and oppressive situations are matters of territory subject to and contingent upon ‘larger’ shifts and molecular events in and around us.
When I think about postactivism, I do not think about it as either a surer means to changing the world, changing ourselves, or doing nothing. I think of it as a disruption of the ways we imagine agency and becoming; as a release from sensorial domains and affective pathways that ritualize the familiar; and as a coming alive to other questions about what acting is indebted to. Postactivism is not a turning-inward or a turning-outward, since the architecture that guarantees the twain shall never meet is disarranged by a crack. Postactivism is the betweening of things, a glimpse of the glitch. Autistic perception. Postactivism is the call to congregate with disability as a site of generous undertakings and possibilities.
Postactivism is a turn of grace, a falling off the highway, a disruption of the pheromone trail. A cosmic risk that invites new problems and new questions: can we risk changing the world? Can we risk victory? What else is here?
– Bayo Akomolafe
But my job, my mission consists mainly in trying to make the listeners believe that I am really simple. I give them the illusion that there is still originality, naivety.
– Robert Walser
Too much joy, I swear, is lost in our desperation to keep it.
– Ocean Vuong
I would very much like to become a person who does NOT carry their stress in their stomach, someone please tell me how to do this and don’t say meditation
– Amber Sparks
There is always more surface to a shattered object than a whole.
– Djuna Barnes
If you’re efficient, you’re doing it the wrong way. The right way is the hard way. The show was successful because I micromanaged it—every word, every line, every take, every edit, every casting. That’s my way of life.
– Jerry Seinfeld
In a place like the United States, where alcohol is ubiquitous, not drinking is often characterized as some kind of sacrifice, but in reality, it’s the opposite. Sobriety is a gift.
– Susan Landers
Pursue the authentic—decide first what is authentic, then go after it with all your heart. Your heart, that place you don’t even think of cleaning out.
– Louise Erdrich
If you are trying to get rid of any aspect of your present experience, you are identified with a fragment of the whole.
If you include everything, precisely as it is, you are the whole.
– Vince Horn
Writing is a lot like making soup. My subconscious cooks the idea, but I have to sit down at the computer to pour it out.
– Robin Wells
Poems, like water-colours, should be left to dry properly before you alter them — six months or six hours according to the paints you use.
– Lawrence Durrell
Travel far enough, you meet yourself.
– David Mitchell
bold wildflowers
not retreating
from the frost
– Issa
Culture is what most receive, many transmit and few have.
– Karl Kraus
Your journal article is not radical, it does not contain the seeds of capitalism’s future destruction, it will not save the world, protect anyone from violence, or feed a single hungry person. But it may help someone understand something. So maybe focus on that.
– Ryan Ruby
Associate with people who are likely to improve you. Welcome those who you are capable of improving.
– Seneca
Human character is smaller now, people don’t have durable passions; they’ve replaced passions with excitement.
– Saul Bellow
I feel rested when I paint, whereas when I write I feel angoisse.
– Lawrence Durrell
the cafés, people’s faces, the poplars along the quays, the bends of the Seine.
– Merleau-Ponty
all talk of what might otherwise have been is senseless for there is no otherwise.
– Cormac McCarthy
Maybe that’s enlightenment enough: to know that there is no final resting place of the mind; no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom…is realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.
– Anthony Bourdain
How to last? How to last, that is the question, since one damages oneself into one’s own work.
– Hervé Guibert
I too was a reflection, reflections of a reflection these characters: images, I made them to pass the time, wrote for writing’s sake, for whom, then, poem after poem, leaps of ink on the paper’s skin. Because I do not want to be subservient to anything but language
– EL Manner
I believe that we must attack these things in which we do not believe. Not attack by the method of cutting off the heads of the people, but attack in the sense of discuss. I believe that we should demand that people try in their own minds to obtain for themselves a more consistent picture of their own world; that they not permit themselves the luxury of having their brain cut in four pieces or two pieces even, and on one side they believe this and on the other side they believe that, but never try to compare the two points of view. Because we have learned that, by trying to put the points of view that we have in our head together and comparing one to the other, we make some progress in understanding and in appreciating where we are and what we are.
– Richard P. Feynman
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
For example, this notion of effort. This word at first means something you strive for. But you understand at a certain point that the kind of effort you need to comprehend is different; that what is meant by effort is letting go. It is an effort because I have to struggle against what is ingrained in me about the idea of effort: I want to get something, to do something. Finally, after years of trying, I begin to understand that the nature of effort is to allow something to appear. This new meaning of effort has to do with relaxation. And it is really an effort to understand relaxation when all my training was to strive, to battle against, to chastise some aspect of myself.
– Paul Reynard
Yet, be it noticed, if you are a stranger, you will not readily get ghost and fairy legends, even in a western village.
You must go adroitly to work, and make friends with the children, and the old men, with those who have not felt the pressure of mere daylight existence, and those with whom it is growing less, and will have altogether taken itself off one of these days.
– William Butler Yeats, Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry
Fairy tale does not deny the existence of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance. It denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat…giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy; Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
The mind is never passive; it is a perpetual activity, delicate, receptive, responsive to stimulus. You cannot postpone your life until you have sharpened it. Whatever interest attaches to your subject-matter must be evoked here and now; whatever powers you are strengthening in the pupil, must be exercised here and now; whatever possibilities of mental life your teaching should impart, must be exhibited here and now. That is the golden rule of education, and a very difficult rule to follow. […] The solution which I am urging, is to eradicate the fatal disconnection of subjects which kills the vitality of our modern curriculum. There is only one subject-matter for education, and that is Life in all its manifestations. Instead of this single unity, we offer children – Algebra, from which nothing follows; Geometry, from which nothing follows; Science, from which nothing follows; History, from which nothing follows; a Couple of Languages; never mastered; and lastly, most dreary of all, Literature, represented by plays of Shakespeare, with philological notes and short analyses of plot and character to be in substance committed to memory. Can such a list be said to represent Life, as it is known in the midst of the living of it? The best that can be said of it is, that it is a rapid table of contents which a deity might run over in his mind while he was thinking of creating a world, and has not yet determined how to put it together.
– Alfred North Whitehead
how is it so easy for you
to be kind to people he asked
milk and honey dripped
from my lips as i answered
cause people have not
been kind to me
– Rupi Kaur
The South lost … and that is good … and that hateful flag needs to come down … and reparations need to be offered and if none of that can happen … well … let there be poetry.
– Nikki Giovanni, Acolytes
Those who can sit perfectly physically usually take more time to obtain the true way of Zen, the actual feeling of Zen, the marrow of Zen. But those who find great difficulties in practicing Zen will find more meaning in it.
– Shunryu Suzuki
We are not native here or anywhere.
We were the Celtic wave that broke over Europe
And ran up this bleak beach among these stones
But when the tide ebbed were left stranded here
In crevices and ledge-protected pools.
– John Hewitt Poet
Wherever attempts are made to realize creativity through ambition alone, not much is achieved. Ambition has a sterilizing effect on creativity. So to be creative for reasons of ambition will not work. It requires love, a contribution from one’s feeling side.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
Any act performed with full awareness, any gesture that fosters happiness in another person, is an expression of nonviolence.
– Kenneth Kraft
For phenomenologists…a meaning cannot be separated from the access leading to it. The access is part of the meaning itself. The scaffolding is never taken down; the ladder is never pulled up.
– Emmanuel Levinas, tr. Alphonso Lingis
Weaving and spinning are most often expressions for unconscious fantasy activity. Creativity always involves some form of fantasy activity which produces a web of associations.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
What’s travel and what good is it? We never disembark from ourselves.
– Fernando Pessoa
Your silence is so complete, I can hear it pull me…
– Saskia Hamilton
The problem is insoluble. The body is harnessed to a brain.
– Virginia Woolf
As Jung noted, human beings prefer to follow their own desires rather than discover God’s intention for us, which is tantamount, in Jungian terms, to discovering the will of the Self.
– Keiron Le Grice
Everything useful and external tastes frivolous and trivial in the light of my soul’s supreme reality, and next to the pure sovereign splendour of my more original and frequent dreams.
– Fernando Pessoa
Everything stated or expressed by man is a note in the margin of a completely erased text.
– Fernando Pessoa
the art of peace
begins with you
– Ueshiba
simmering soup
the basil within
whispers poetry
– James Welsh
There is someone who has taken such dissociation as far as it will go, that’s Pessoa, who invented five poets by publishing poems using five different names.
– Lawrence Durrell
The proprietary claims of the dreamer on the dreamt have their limits.
– Cormac McCarthy
We are not likely to be granted another world to plunder in compensation for our pillage of this one. Nor are we likely to believe much longer in our ability to outsmart, by means of science and technology, our economic stupidity. The hope that we can cure the ills of industrialism by the homeopathy of more technology seems at last to be losing status. We are, in short, coming under pressure to understand ourselves as limited creatures in a limited world.
– Wendell Berry
Art, and above all, music has a fundamental function, which is to catalyze the sublimation that it can bring about through all means of expression. It must aim through fixations which are landmarks to draw towards a total exaltation in which the individual mingles, losing his consciousness in a truth immediate, rare, enormous, and perfect. If a work of art succeeds in this undertaking even for a single moment, it attains its goal. This tremendous truth is not made of objects, emotions, or sensations; it is beyond these, as Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony is beyond music. This is why art can lead to realms that religion still occupies for some people.
– Iannis Xenakis
For too long it has been thought that in order to understand metaphors it is necessary to know the code (or the encyclopedia): the truth is that the metaphor is the tool that permits us to understand the encyclopedia better. This is the type of knowledge that the metaphor stakes out for us.
– Umberto Eco
One of Judaism’s most distinctive and challenging ideas is its ethics of responsibility, the idea that God invites us to become, in the rabbinic phrase, his ‘partners in the world of creation’. The God who created the world in love calls on us to create in love. The God who gave us the gift of freedom asks us to use it to honour and enhance the freedom of others.
– Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks
Last night we stayed home.
Last night we stayed home again.
Last night you drank scotch, watched TV.
And we stayed home again.
– Mitchell Untch
On writing: That’s what I want, that kind of recklessness where the poem is even ahead of you. It’s like riding a horse that’s a little too wild for you, so there’s this tension between what you can do and what the horse decides it’s going to do.
– Li-Young Lee
this too
is America
with the filth
of self interest
and corruption’s
stench
– Andy Perrin
Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back.
– Cormac McCarthy
He said that those who have endured some misfortune will always be set apart but that it is just that misfortune which is their gift and which is their strength.
– Cormac McCarthy
God is in the detail.
– Aby Warburg
It is a deep laziness
To become tired of each other.
Darling—there are universes
Inside each other
Ever being born.
– Chelan Harkin
He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost & that the world’s pain & its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity & that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.
– Cormac McCarthy
An extremely introverted type of person tends to deny reality & place a lot of importance upon a relationship to the unconscious. An extraverted person places emphasis upon outer world & consciousness. It is advantageous to not be too extreme as we have both sides within.
– Marie-Louise Von Franz
One of my teacher’s once said that 4th path (arhantship) is the beginning of the path.
While not technically true, they were trying to point out that once you’ve let go of transcendent fantasies, then you can start relating to life as it actually is.
– @VinceFHorn
Keep searching for that sound in your head until it becomes a reality
– Bill Evans
Modern science is still trying to produce
a tranquilizer more effective
than a few kind words.
– Douglas Meador
It is no real honor to be thought well by everyone.
– J.C. Ryle
But think about old friends the most:
Time’s bitter flood will rise,
Your beauty perish and be lost
For all eyes but these eyes.
– W. B. Yeats
The past […] is always this argument between counterclaimants. Memories dim with age. There is no repository for our images. The loved ones who visit us in dreams are strangers. To even see aright is effort. We seek some witness but the world will not provide one. This is the third history. It is the history that each man makes alone out of what is left to him. Bits of wreckage. Some bones. The words of the dead. How make a world of this. How live in that world once made?
– Cormac McCarthy
Fictions could be as powerful as histories, revealing the new people to themselves, allowing them to understand their own natures and the natures of those around them, and making them real. This is the paradox of the whispered stories: they were no more than make-believe but they created the truth,
– Salman Rushdie
Everyone stands alone at the heart of the world, pierced by a ray of sunlight, and suddenly it’s evening.
– Salvatore Quasimodo
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
In the morning there is a meaning, in the evening there is feeling.
– Gertrude Stein
The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.
– Cormac McCarthy
I believe that we are arks of the covenant and our true nature is not rage or deceit or terror or logic or craft or even sorrow. It is longing.
– Cormac McCarthy
The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow.
– Cormac McCarthy
There’s a particular joy in entering a country for the first time by bicycle, breathing it immediately, seeing it panoramically and, for better or worse, smelling it with both nostrils.
– Bruno Cooke
I believe that a true love of art is as much a gift as creating it; and it may even be that both spring from the same mental source.
– Bernard Berenson
Writing is rewriting.
– Cormac McCarthy
Often it is not the big, dramatic things that reach us inside. It is usually something small; exquisite that homes deeply into our being. Though small it can steer us throughout life. It’s a knowing and being known, not thinking. The mere touch of it awakens us again and again and reminds us of whom we are in an essential way.
– Gunilla Norris
You think when you wake up in the morning yesterday don’t count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothing else. You might think you could run away and change your name and I don’t know what all. Start over. And then one morning you wake up and look at the ceiling and guess who’s laying there?
– Cormac McCarthy
You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.
– Cormac McCarthy
Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.
– Emily Brontë
When we read, we take in whole eyefuls of words. We gulp them like water.
– Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read
Sometimes I really believe it, that I am going to save my life a little.
– Mary Oliver
Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by poetry.
– Cassandra Clare
I try to keep pointing out flickers of light, hope, and love all around, to stand in witness to the times we have come through after shame and hopelessness nearly did us in.
– Anne Lamott
One of my favorite definitions of enlightenment comes from Anthony de Mello. He said, “Enlightenment is absolute cooperation with the inevitable.” I love that, because it defines enlightenment not just as a realization, but as an activity.
– Adyashanti
… a thing I’d always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it is always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals come easily.
– Cormac McCarthy
I got what I needed instead of what I wanted and that’s just about the best kind of luck you can have.
– Cormac McCarthy
Whether it be the singing of a lamp or the voice of a storm, whether it be the breath of an evening or the groan of the ocean – whatever surrounds you, a broad melody always wakes behind you, woven out of a thousand voices, where there is room for your own solo only here and there. To know when you need to join in: that is the secret of your solitude: just as the art of true interactions with others is to let yourself fall away from high words into a single common melody.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
It came into existence because I had to paint it. Any attempt on my part to say something about it, to attempt explanation of the inexplicable, could only destroy it.
– Jackson Pollock
The jagged mountains were pure blue in the dawn and everywhere birds twittered and the sun when it rose caught the moon in the west so that they lay opposed to each other across the earth, the sun whitehot and the moon a pale replica, as if they were the ends of a common bore beyond whose terminals burned worlds past all reckoning.
– Cormac McCarthy
We speak often, and sentimentally, of being ‘enchanted’ by the natural world. But what if it’s the other way around? What if we are enchanted, literally, by the human world we live in? That seems entirely more likely – that the consumer world amounts to a kind of lulling spell, chanted tunefully and eternally by the TV, the billboard, the suburb. A spell that convinces us that the things we want most from the world are comfort, convenience, security. A spell that by now we sing to each other. A spell that, should it start to weaken, we try to strengthen with medication, with consumption, with noise. A slight frantic enchantment, one that has to get louder all the time to block out the troubling question constantly forming in the back of our minds: ‘Is this all there is?
– Bill McKibben
The fine rain, falling unseen in darkness, pattered on the leaves overhead, on his arms and neck and head protected by their thick silk-fine hair, on the earth and ferns and undergrowth nearby, on all the leaves of the forest, near and far. Selver sat as quiet as the gray owl on a branch above him, unsleeping, his eyes wide open in the rainy dark.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
Intuitively, we know that it is important to spend time in solitude. We even start looking forward to this strange period of uselessness. This desire for solitude is often the first sign of prayer, the first indication that the presence of God’s Spirit no longer remains unnoticed. As we empty ourselves of our many worries, we come to know not only with our mind but also with our heart that we never were really alone, that God’s Spirit was with us all along.
– Henri J.M. Nouwen
We carry the lives we’ve imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all the lives we have lost.
– Helen Macdonald
Drifting pitifully in the whirlwind of birth and death,
As if wandering in a dream,
In the midst of illusion I awaken to the true path;
There is one more matter I must not neglect,
But I need not bother now,
As I listen to the sound of the evening rain
Falling on the roof of my temple retreat
In the deep grass of Fukakusa.
– Eihei Dōgen
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
The key players, it turns out, are those who refuse to be credentialed or curbed by traditional modes of power, who understand that the transformative power of truth is not a credible companion for consolidating modes of established power, but that truth characteristically runs beyond the confines of such power.
– Walter Brueggemann
Goethe always needed to fall in love before he could bring out another work. That is one of the main tricks of the unconscious, to undo a man’s oversolidified consciousness, the anima making a hole in it!
– Marie-Louise von Franz
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
– T. S. Eliot
Surround yourself with people who talk about visions and ideas, not other people.
– Akin Olokun
Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.
– Virginia Woolf
Like the letters for ‘hello’ written on water, its presentations dissolve instantly. Like clouds in the sky, its constructions never really take form.
– Tarthang Tulku
To “know” reality you cannot stand outside it and define it; you must enter into it, be it, and feel it.
– Alan W. Watts
I will remind you of only one thing: one must descend with the mind into the heart, and there stand before the face of the Lord, ever-present, all seeing within you. Prayer takes a firm and steadfast hold, when a small fire begins to burn in the heart. Try not to quench this fire, and it will become established in such a way that the prayer repeats itself: and then you will have within you a small murmuring stream.
– Theophan the Recluse, Russian mystic
Each of us literally chooses,
by his way of attending to things,
what sort of universe
he shall appear to himself to inhabit.
– William James
God is a word for a notion.
It is the idea of a universe
Where material things are
Bound together with inner experiences.
There is no other word for the relationship
Between all things material
And all inner experiences
Except for that of God.
God is not the universe.
The universe is just material.
And there is far more occurring
Than just material things.
God is not consciousness.
Consciousness is just immaterial.
Yet, God could not be everything
If it excluded material things.
There is no single God
If God is everything.
How could there be a something
That is also everything?
How could there be an everything
That stands outside of something?
God cannot be everything and stand outside of creation.
Material things influence inner experiences;
Inner experiences influence material things.
Thoughts are bound up with brain activity;
Brain activity stimulates thought.
Thus, interior and exterior are bound together,
While somehow existing apart.
The relationship between the two remains a mystery,
For many thoughts do not spring from brain functions.
Reason has its reasons.
Once set in motion, it has its own logic—literally.
And there is no telling where it may lead.
Science has nothing to say about this logic,
Unless logic is viewed as a science.
Nor can it tell us about the imagination
In any meaningful way.
Science involves imaginative research.
It stimulates the imagination with its discoveries.
It can even tell us something about how we imagine.
But the imagination lies outside the realm of science.
It is much the same with human interiors.
Scientific research can inform us about the nature of experience,
But it cannot tell us why one thought leads to another.
And it cannot link distinct thoughts to material occurrences.
Even if it could, the experience of what is thought
Would be inaccessible to the scientist tracking it on a screen.
In this way, experience is distinct from materiality,
Even if the two are closely related.
Thus, if the universe is material,
It does not contain everything.
If God is all things inside and out,
God is greater than the universe.
If the things we experience are the most meaningful,
The most meaningful things in the universe are not really in it.
Saying there is no God is meaningless
If God is understood to be everything inside and out.
The words you speak and the realties they refer to
Are just another manifestation of God.
Saying that the idea of God is incompatible with science
Makes no sense if God includes the discoveries of science.
Anything science might throw our way
Would just be another manifestation of God.
People talk about God in all kinds of ways,
But most religions consider God beyond comprehension.
The universe can be comprehended because it is material.
Its relationship to consciousness is far more inexplicable.
Thus, God is unknowable and
All attempts at description come up short.
But God can be named and the naming
Brings meaning to existence.
Speaking the name of God
Gives everything inside and out
An identity that can be loved,
And a love for all things can be beautiful.
The idea of God brings life to an abstract universe.
It frames the unity of all things material and conscious
As something that is alive,
With which we might communicate.
In this way, God is just an identity that we attach
To the source of nameless existence.
But it fills the void with wonder,
And it imbues our wonder with love.
All religions aim to make us better.
They aim to make us better versions of ourselves
And better members of society.
But reasoning about goodness is best left to philosophers.
Religion brings us together with others who are seeking to be better.
It brings us together by entraining our experiences.
The experiences are brought about with rituals and music,
Practices and teachings, stories and prescriptions.
In this way, religions shape social worlds.
And the social worlds that are shaped by religion
Bind us together through the imagination,
While religious communities create wider spheres of cooperation.
Scriptures tend to be inspired writings.
They can be mythological or mystical.
They can be moral or historical.
But they are seldom rational and logical.
Religious scriptures can seldom be taken literally,
Because they are imbued with metaphors and images.
A parable cannot be taken literally without being misconstrued,
Poetic imagery cannot be taken literally without confusion.
The sanctity of scriptures lies in their primacy.
They start a conversation that proceeds across generations.
Their sanctity lies in the origins of the conversation,
Not in their pronouncements.
Scriptural pronouncements can have dangerous consequences
When we follow their prescriptions without moral reasoning.
Moral prescriptions can inspire us to be good,
But doing good requires us to reason about our ethical commitments.
Scriptures tend to be imbued with a sense of timelessness.
We see them as timeless because their origins are obscured,
And taking refuge in a timeless imaginary
Imbues our worlds with a sense of wonder.
Religion without wonder is like science without reason.
Spirituality is a sense of interconnection.
It represents a deepening of perception
That reveals the way all things
Are bound together.
Spirituality enriches our lives
By revealing our link to a common humanity.
It deepens our empathy and compassion
By demonstrating our oneness with the whole of creation.
Religious services and teachings can deepen spirituality
By breaking the trance of conventional reality,
The world of objects we maneuver
In the predictable patterns of everyday life.
Religious imaginaries bind together
The loose ends of fragmented social worlds.
They provide meaning to birth and death,
And help negotiate the great transitions in life.
Religions can also support spiritual practices
By enshrining them at the center of social worlds,
While linking them to the moral orders
They establish in the imagination.
In this way, spirituality is not an exercise in narcissism
But rather the deepening of a relationship,
To the people closest to our hearts
And the furthest reaches of creation.
Yet, if spirituality reveals hidden connections
Eluding conventional thinking,
It is also a springboard to science.
How else to explain the extraordinary spirituality
of so many great scientists?
There is no connection to God without spirituality,
But spirituality reminds us that God is an idea.
In the words of the Buddha, it is the finger pointing to the moon,
Which always lies beyond our grasp.
God is all things inside and out,
And will always remain a mystery.
Science exists within the idea of God,
And can only reveal it in fragments.
Religions create imaginary worlds,
Which at their best can make us better.
They support our spirituality,
But religion without spirituality is dead ritual.
If these writings look like poetry,
You are overlooking their reason.
If they read like reason,
You are missing their inspiration.
If they offend your religious creed,
Your idea of religion needs to be expanded.
If they insult your idea of God,
Remember God is beyond comprehension.
– Theo Horesh, Convergence: The Globalization of Mind
What are religions? Religions are psychotherapeutic systems. What are we doing, we psychotherapists? We are trying to heal the suffering of the human mind, of the human psyche or the human soul, and religions deal with the same problem.
– CG Jung
Flowers teach hope and patience. Flowers teach tenderness. Flowers teach futility and amazement. You know me, I am always willing to learn. Besides, it is spring. The beautiful forces of nature refuse to remain silent and I feel like observing everything.
– Katherine Mansfield
Everything good is costly & development of the personality is one of most costly of things. It is a question of yea-saying to oneself, of taking the self as the most serious of tasks, keeping conscious of everything done and keeping it constantly before one’s eyes.
– CG Jung
We don’t have to build and rebuild a ‘me’ on the passing content of the body-mind. Instead, we can stand as the observer.
– Teah Strozer
If you imagine someone who is brave enough to withdraw all his projections, then you get an individual who is conscious of a pretty thick shadow.
– C.G.J.
Writing is like giving yourself homework, really hard homework, every day, for the rest of your life. You want glamorous? Throw glitter at the computer screen.
– Katrina Monroe
At the tip of memory’s
great funnel-cloud
is the nib of a pen.
– Jim Harrison
Dreams mixed with time can take you on a journey
I know I’ve been too far in flight
Stir in some pain and some known remedies
And the days turn into nights
– Warren Haynes
May you experience time the old way
As a friend rather than the enemy
As a bringer of joy
Not a bringer of deadlines
May it loop around you and enfold you with possibilities
May it embrace you with love.
– A Celtic Blessing about Time, by Iain Tweedale
Even if there were a central spot in the brain responsible for coordinating and integrating all of the information circulating in its many networks, this would hardly satisfy the definition of a self.
– Jay L. Garfield
The schools have no more important task than to teach rigorous thinking, cautious judgment, and consistent inference ; .. they should enforce what is essential and distinctive in man: “reason and science, man’s very highest power” – so Goethe, at least, judges.
– Nietzsche
Don’t watch the clock; do what it does. Keep going.
– Sam Levenson
the warbler
is singing to
the spirit of the willow
– Basho
i don’t feel guilt at being unsociable, though i may sometimes regret it because my loneliness is painful. but when i move into the world, it feels like a moral fall – like seeking love in a whorehouse.
– Susan Sontag
This is the vowel of earth
dreaming its root
– Seamus Heaney
The unconscious wants hopeless conflict in order to put ego-consciousness up against the wall, so that the man has to realise that whatever he does is wrong, whichever way he decides will be wrong. This is meant to knock out the superiority of the ego.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
there is no one way to be a “real writer.” the concept itself is nonsense
– @chenchenwrites
You knew all along that your sanctioned world was only half the world, and you tried to suppress the other half the same way the priests and teachers do. You won’t succeed. No one succeeds in this once he has begun to think.
– Hermann Hesse
It is difficult, sometimes, to face facts:
you know this. Our parents taught us
to ignore problems, to look away,
and I am no different.
– C. Dale Young
In this moment, is it still possible to face the gathering darkness, and say to the physical Earth, and to all its creatures, including ourselves, fiercely and without embarrassment, I love you, and to embrace fearlessly the burning world?
– Barry Lopez
The ability to look deeply
is the root of creativity.
To see past the ordinary and mundane
and get to what might otherwise be invisible.
– Rick Rubin, The Creative Act
I was a part of the whole. I didn’t need to own a patch of land to make that so.
I could stand in the wind and I was the wind, the rain, the sea; it was all me, and I was nothing within it. The core of me wasn’t lost. Translucent, elusive, but there and growing stronger.
– Raynor Winn, The Salt Path: A Memoir
Jung, for instance, always liked to send people with the same blind spots to each other because, he said, if two idiots sit together and neither can think they will get into such trouble that at least one of them will begin to think!
– Marie-Louise von Franz
You give up the world line by line. Stoically. And then one day you realize that your courage is farcical. It doesn’t mean anything. You’ve become an accomplice in your own annihilation and there is nothing you can do about it…
Everything you do closes a door somewhere ahead of you. And finally there is only one door left.
– Cormac McCarthy
…emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. in the middle they are acted. this is why all the world is a stage.
– Iris Murdoch
The answer could come not from one story, but from many.A big problem will not be solved by a big answer. As for the place of myth in this, it comes from wily Siberian folktales to Indian love stories, from the tacit whispers of the desert to great epics like Parzival.
– Martin Shaw
A happy mind is tranquil. A tranquil mind is not confused. To be unperplexed is to understand the truth. By understanding truth one obtains liberation. It is also defined as reality, real limit, signless, ultimate meaning, the highest bodhicitta, and sunyata.
– Nagarjuna
We should not pretend to be what we are not.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
@the_wilderless
– use what is dormant in a culture to change it quietly
you are not alone,
the poem said,
in the dark tunnel.
– Louise Glück
Welcome difficulties:
crisis eventually
shows the cure
– Joan Halifax
Speech, both the resonance and celebration of Sound.
That varies with the depth and contour, the vibratory shell of each form.
The iris emitting a different Speech than the dragonfly.
– Gustaf Sobin
A second ago my heart thump went
and I thought, “This would be a bad time
to have a heart attack and die, in the
middle of a poem,”
– Ron Padgett
Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like Braille. I like to keep my body rolled up away from prying eyes. Never unfold too much, tell the whole story.
– Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body
This is strength.
This is pride.
To be burned, emptied.
To stand tall, anyway, play host to new branches, fresh green,
a forest with a single
root system.
– Brian Sonia-Wallace
There is immeasurably more left inside than what comes out in words.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
If you search for awakened heart, if you put your hand through your rib cage and feel for it, there is nothing there except for tenderness. You feel sore and soft, and if you open your eyes to the rest of the world, you feel tremendous sadness. This kind of sadness doesn’t come from being mistreated. You don’t feel sad because someone has insulted you or because you feel impoverished. Rather, this experience of sadness is unconditioned. It occurs because your heart is completely exposed.
– Chögyam Trungpa
The cause of our suffering is not what we do but the way we perceive, and until this obstacle is addressed, all actions of body, speech, and mind will predictably reinforce our old perceptions of self and other, problem and solution, and limitation and freedom.
– Rodney Smith
I escaped the rat race 3.5 years ago.
My secret sauce is not playing status games.
I don’t:
– want to change the world.
– want to build the next unicorn.
– want to be featured on any lists.
– want to get the highest valuation.
– Justin Welsh
The body is mind made manifest. To work on the body is to probe the mind.
– Daniel Goldman
Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.
– Angela Cater
Jung modernized the mythical function by giving it new names. Instead of speaking of gods or demons he spoke about the archetypes of the psyche. In many respects, these were the old gods of Greece and Rome revisited in a psychological form.
– David Tacey
when a shoe fits
the foot is forgotten
– Zhuang Zhou
It is so beautiful to have no attachments!
– Sylvia Plath
This is a savage country for the young
And yet the old have little bitterness
But give a kindly word for strangers.
They curse the barren soil, the narrow fields
As though it were a ritual and then
Summon their years to witness that the world
Bred no better people than their kin.
– @JohnHewittPoet
I was eventually to become one person, gathered up maybe, during a pause, at a comma.
– Lyn Hejinian
Defilements only repeat when they have fuel; repetitive thoughts are often fed by the anticipation of a reward.
– Shaila Catherine, Beyond Distraction
We live in an age when you say casually to somebody ‘What’s the story on that?’ and they can run to the computer and tell you within five seconds. That’s fine, but sometimes I’d just as soon continue wondering. We have a deficit of wonder right now.
– Tom Waits
But we unfold
beyond such kind paternal ignorance.
We unfold within the measure of our time.
And we make peace with the fathers inside of us.
And we give birth to a hidden, long-carried joy within.
– Dan Vera
It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived.
– Harper Lee
My father saw stars. My son sees stars. The earth rolls beneath
our feet. We lurch ahead, and one day we have walked this far.
– Martín Espada
The branches, the seaweed, the shells, even the damp sand—everything was fresh. We were sitting on fresh-baked Europe.
– Zuska Kepplová, tr. Magdalena Mullek
The difficult thing isn’t living with other people, it’s understanding them.
– Jose Saramago
As my cat would say, all hours are good for sleeping.
– Jose Saramago
I’ve written quite a lot about art and artists and have cultivated a pretty deep envy of them. To operate outside of language—it seems the more lasting contribution.
– Rachel Cusk
But their determination to banish fools foundered
ultimately in the installation of absolute idiots.
– Basil Bunting
Fascism is rising with terrifying speed. This is an emergency.
And we must act like ambulance drivers for a healed world.
– Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis
When you stop thinking about yourself all the time, a certain sense of repose overtakes you.
You go your way. I’ll go your way too.
– Leonard Cohen
…to be loved
and found magical,
like a secret…
– Anne Sexton
soft earth
I might risk
a cartwheel
– John Stevenson
midnight moon —
shadows knit cactus
to cactus
– Edith Bartholomeusz
Writers end up writing about their obsessions. Things that haunt them; things they can’t forget; stories they carry in their bodies waiting to be released.
– Natalie Goldberg
There was a moment one day, almost artless in its ordinariness, out on Eagle Island, maybe a decade ago. I was simply walking down the road past the old Quinn Barn when suddenly I realized, in a moment of complete amazement, that it would all be ok, I could simply dissolve, like a virtual particle, and all would remain serenely undisturbed within the cosmos. Consciousness would do just fine without ‘me’ tending it. This tiny nanosecond of an independent viewing platform with all its drama and insistence and earnestness could simply vanish into the whole and the whole would still be completely whole.
‘So that’s it, what joy!’ I said unconsciously echoing those immortal words of Ivan Illich at his deathbed breakthrough. No me, no constructions, no illusions, no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, no rainbow even; just an infinite intimacy, the brilliant blue sky and the old barn, standing like a weather-beaten sentry in the breeze. Nothing more, nothing less, nothing else.
– Cynthia Bourgeault
I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, ‘The Beatles did.’
– Kurt Vonnegut
Family faces are magic mirrors. Looking at people who belong to us, we see the past, present, and future.
– Gail Lumet Buckley
And that’s how we measure out our real respect for people – by the degree of feeling they can register, the voltage of life they can carry and tolerate – and enjoy. End of sermon. As Buddha says: live like a mighty river. And as the old Greeks said: live as though all your ancestors were living again through you.
– Ted Hughes
And Harry remembered his first nightmarish trip into the forest, the first time he had ever encountered the thing that was then Voldemort, and how he had faced him, and how he and Dumbledore had discussed fighting a losing battle not long thereafter. It was important, Dumbledore said, to fight, and fight again, and keep fighting, for only then could evil be kept at bay, though never quite eradicated… .
And Harry saw very clearly as he sat there under the hot sun how people who cared about him had stood in front of him one by one, his mother, his father, his godfather, and finally Dumbledore, all determined to protect him; but now that was over. He could not let anybody else stand between him and Voldemort; he must abandon forever the illusion he ought to have lost at the age of one, that the shelter of a parent’s arms meant that nothing could hurt him. There was no waking from his nightmare, no comforting whisper in the dark that he was safe really, that it was all in his imagination; the last and greatest of his protectors had died, and he was more alone than he had ever been before.
– J.K. Rowling
It was deep April, and the morn
Shakspear was born;
The world was on us, pressing sore;
My Love and I took hands and swore,
Against the world, to be
Poets and lovers ever more
– Michael Field
I don’t go to parties. I don’t write much.
Look, ma! I’m discoursing.
– Eduardo C. Corral
You’ll see that a lot of your emotional suffering is created by your models of how you think the universe should be and your inability to allow it to be as it is.
– Ram Dass
Why not
become so close to each other
that, in the end, we can
do nothing but stand astonished
at what, eventually, must become
a separation—
separation being
what life, mostly, is.
This must become the question
of what love is for,
what grief is, if it
changes nothing of who you are, still:
bright star, shining on,
even when I cannot see you.
– Terry L. Kennedy
These were the delicate words, like wings: I love you and I missed you and I’m so very sorry. They flapped without sound.
– Shuly Xóchitl Cawood
The people you bring into your life will impact your energy. Do you want to be around people who react with drama? Or around people who know how to slow down so they can reconnect with peace?
– Yung Pueblo
There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.
– Aldous Huxley, 1961
Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts…The experts who are leading you may be wrong… I think we live in an unscientific age in which almost all the buffeting of communications and television — words, books, and so on — are unscientific. As a result, there is a considerable amount of intellectual tyranny in the name of science.
– Richard Feynman
SUMMONS
Keep me from going to sleep too soon
Or if I go to sleep too soon
Come wake me up. Come any hour
Of night. Come whistling up the road.
Stomp on the porch. Bang on the door.
Make me get out of bed and come
And let you in and light a light.
Tell me the northern lights are on
And make me look. Or tell me clouds
Are doing something to the moon
They never did before, and show me.
See that I see. Talk to me till
I’m half as wide awake as you
And start to dress wondering why
I ever went to bed at all.
Tell me the walking is superb.
Not only tell me but persuade me.
You know I’m not too hard persuaded.
– Robert Francis
Imagine what a process it was to unnumb yourself, to see it as it actually was. That’s the only reason to be an artist: to escape, to bear witness to this.
– Philip Guston
In the Western tradition there is a recognized hierarchy of beings, with, of course, the human being on top—the pinnacle of evolution, the darling of Creation—and the plants at the bottom. But in Native ways of knowing, human people are often referred to as “the younger brothers of Creation.” We say that humans have the least experience with how to live and thus the most to learn—we must look to our teachers among the other species for guidance. Their wisdom is apparent in the way that they live. They teach us by example. They’ve been on the earth far longer than we have been, and have had time to figure things out. They live both above and below ground, joining Skyworld to the earth. Plants know how to make food and medicine from light and water, and then they give it away.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer
I have found out that reading is a slavish sorted dreaming. If I must dream, why not my own dreams?
– Fernando Pessoa
I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren’t trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom. When I was ten, I asked my parents to subscribe to a weekly magazine that was publishing comic-strip versions of the great classics of literature. My father, not because he was stingy, but because he was suspicious of comic strips, tried to beg off. “The purpose of this magazine,” I pontificated, quoting the ad, “is to educate the reader in an entertaining way.” “The purpose of your magazine,” my father replied without looking up from his paper, “is the purpose of every magazine: to sell as many copies as it can.”
That day, I began to be incredulous.
Or, rather, I regretted having been credulous. I regretted having allowed myself to be borne away by a passion of the mind. Such is credulity. Not that the incredulous person doesn’t believe in anything. It’s just that he doesn’t believe in everything. Or he believes in one thing at a time. He believes a second thing only if it somehow follows from the first thing. He is nearsighted and methodical, avoiding wide horizons. If two things don’t fit, but you believe both of them, thinking that somewhere, hidden, there must be a third thing that connects them, that’s credulity.
Incredulity doesn’t kill curiosity; it encourages it. Though distrustful of logical chains of ideas, I loved the polyphony of ideas. As long as you don’t believe in them, the collision of two ideas— both false—can create a pleasing interval, a kind of diabolus in musica. I had no respect for some ideas people were willing to stake their lives on, but two or three ideas that I did not respect might still make a nice melody. Or have a good beat, and if it was jazz, all the better.
– Umberto Eco
In my head there are several windows, that I do know, but perhaps it is always the same one, open variously on the parading universe.
– Samuel Beckett, Molloy
breathe
and read
– @BashoSociety
Book! You lie there; the fact is, you books must know your places. You’ll do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come in to supply the thoughts. That’s my small experience…
– Herman Melville
What if I could do battle with the content, confronting it page by page, word by word, and deliver poetry, art, and defiance from this text?
– Lisa Huffaker
… but after a while it sounds trite, like a bumper sticker. And that’s what makes me sad, that a beautiful and true line comes to be used so often that it takes on the superficial sound of a bumper sticker.
– Elizabeth Strout
I have said it before: it interests me how we find ways to feel superior to another person, another group of people. It happens everywhere, and all the time. Whatever we call it, I think it’s the lowest part of who we are…
– Elizabeth Strout
What writing does is allow us to sample each other’s fate.
– Edna O’Brien
Those who are free don’t want anything. They don’t want anything from their mind, they don’t want anything from their emotions, they don’t want anything from anyone, and they don’t want anything from life. They don’t want anything.
– Adyashanti
When the storm finally comes it will bring the musics, the active colours its pummelled skies, its pellets of rain, and wind to choreograph the movements of skies. If the response is awe that really is all that is needed.
– Barry Lopez
My generation is now the door to memory. That is why I am remembering.
– Joy Harjo
A new salvation is always a restoring of the previously lost.
– @RedBookJung
I think I know how many times one has to start again, and how often one feels that one cannot start again. And yet, on pain of death, one can never remain where one is. The light. The light. One will perish without the light.
– James Baldwin
Cold words freeze people, and hot words scorch them, and bitter words make them bitter, and wrathful words make them wrathful. Kind words also produce their own image on men’s souls; and a beautiful image it is. They smooth, and quiet, and comfort the hearer.
– Blaise Pascal
let a people
loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of
healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing
in our spirits and our blood.
– Margaret Walker
In those situations we think are intolerable, it is often our own resistance that makes them intolerable.
– @tricyclemag
Out of obscurities the sap rises
The sap not exhausted
– George Oppen
Only experience can teach one what a terrifying enterprise it is to turn away from the familiar affairs of our conscious world and face the entirely unknown in the inner, unconscious world.
– Barbara Hannah
Everything speaks for itself in this world,
and everything rests in what is unspoken.
– Robert Bringhurst
Every one of us, unconsciously, works out a personal philosophy of life, by which we are guided, inspired, and corrected, as time goes on. It is this philosophy by which we measure out our days, and by which we advertise to all about us the man, or woman, that we are… It takes but a brief time to scent the life philosophy of anyone. It is defined in the conversation, in the look of the eye, and in the general mien of the person. It has no hiding place. It’s like the perfume of a flower – unseen, but known almost instantly. It is the possession of the successful, and the happy.
– George Matthew Adams
THE UP SIDE
The pines are
stately
still
reflecting
upon themselves
without knowing it
in eternity
upside down.
– Ron Padgett
There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.
– James Salter
From the structure of languages comes the explanation of why the human spirit is condemned to an odyssey (…) Only at the greatest distance from itself does it become conscious of itself in its irreplaceable singularity as an individual being.
– Jürgen Habermas
I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world. It’s difficult to describe because it’s an emotion. It’s analogous to the feeling one has in religion that has to do with a god that controls everything in the whole universe: there’s a generality aspect that you feel when you think about how things that appear so different and behave so differently are all run “behind the scenes” by the same organization, the same physical laws. It’s an appreciation of the mathematical beauty of nature, of how she works inside; a realization that the phenomena we see result from the complexity of the inner workings between atoms; a feeling of how dramatic and wonderful it is. It’s a feeling of awe — of scientific awe — which I felt could be communicated through a drawing to someone who had also had this emotion. It could remind him, for a moment, of this feeling about the glories of the universe.
– Richard P Feynman
The island is all eyes.
The silence ponders, notes, and codifies.
We discover only what we set out to find.
– Lawrence Durrell
Every generation has to discover Nina Simone. She is evidence that female genius is real.
– Germaine Greer
The reformers and great religious geniuses were heretics. It is there that you find the footprints of the Holy Spirit, and no one asks for him or receives him without having to pay a high price.
– CG Jung
Words were her plague and
words were her redemption.
– Hilda Doolittle
pascal made a note of his mystical experience, which he kept always about him, and which was found, after his death, sewn into the coat which he was wearing. the experience occurred on 23 nov, 1654(…) mystical experience happens to many men who do not become mystics.
– t.s. eliot
the words have grown old inside men and separated into islands, the words have mummified in the mouths of legislators; the words have rotted in the promises of tryants; the words mean nothing in the speeches of politicians.
– jorge de lima
nature acts by progress, itus et reditus. it goes and returns, then advances further, then twice as much backwards, then more forward than ever, etc.
– blaise pascal
Suffering that is not understood is hard to bear, while on the other hand it is often astounding to see how much a person can endure when he understands the why and the wherefore.
– CG Jung
no single man is born with a right of controlling the opinions of all the rest.
– alexander pope
Having perfected our disguise, we spend our lives searching for someone we don’t fool.
– Robert Brault
I am well satisfied with the fact that I know experiences which I cannot avoid calling numinous or divine.
– CG Jung
Nothing is right for poets. Including, especially, nothing.
– Sommer Browning
These thoughts can’t arise without supportive causes, and it is up to you to discover the source of their nutriment.
– Shaila Catherine
I am tired of work; I am tired of building up somebody else’s civilization.
Let us take a rest, M’Lissy Jane.
– Fenton Johnson
Just because you wander in the desert, it does not mean there is a promised land.
– Paul Auster
We are a blinded race. We live only on the surface, only in the present, and think only of tomorrow.
– @RedBookJung
You can never know
where or why you hear
a humming on this soft earth.
– Aimee Nezhukumatathil
To love is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.
– Emily Dickinson
the wildflowers
growing in the meadow
know nothing of war
– @poseofpower
I wrote and rewrote this poem many times. Though I am most satisfied with this attempt, this project is a stranger to completion. Such is the nature of devotion.
– Leslie Sainz
Knowledge is mystery’s accomplice, rather than its antagonist.
– Robert Macfarlane
I must state again: Nothing exists in our human dimension without its opposite close by.
– Robert A. Johnson
It was a day peculiar to this piece of the planet,
when larks rose on long thin strings of singing
and the air shifted with the shimmer of actual angela.
Greenness entered the body. The grasses
shivered with presences, and sunlight
stayed like a halo on hair and heather and hills.
Walking into town, I saw, in a radiant raincoat,
the woman from the fish-shop. “What a day it is!”
cried I, like a sunstruck madman.
And what did she have to say for it?
Her brow grew bleak, her ancestors raged in their graves
as she spoke with their ancient misery:
“We’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it!”
– Alastair Reid, Scotland
We hurled / forward. Yes towards death but what joy. Didn’t know it was a game. Should have / loved the hurtling, the losses, the hurry dilation delay fear surprise fury
– Jorie Graham, To 2040
the secret taste / of being lost
– George Oppen
These are the times in life — when nothing happens — but in quietness the soul expands.
– Rockwell Kent
Meeting changed our strata,
the way only a storm at the edge
of an ocean can do.
The way a slump of salt water
in a black cliff hole is a wet metronome
for desire and regret.
– @JlmMorton
Night drive, an old song,
Past farms, fragrant in the dark—
Summer unfolding
– Taylor Wray
What happens when you let go of all becoming?
You can no longer refer to anything whatsoever. The past and future are no more… there is only nothingness, silence. This silence cannot be located in space, and it is timeless, you are entirely present, and from this perception comes the desire to be.
– Jean Klein
I am visiting my life with reckless plenitude.
The air is fragrant with tiny strawberries.
Fireflies turn on their electric wills:
an effulgence. Let me come back
whole, let me remember how to touch you
before it is too late.
– Stacie Cassarino, Summer Solstice
It is the solstice. A diamond of energy holds us. We breathe, and what we call the next moment between us, where I take your empty hand and we start home, emptied of attempt and emptied of survival skill, is love.
– Jorie Graham
I want you to write for pleasure—to play. Just listen to the sounds and rhythms of the sentences you write and play with them, like a kid with a kazoo. This isn’t “free writing,” but it’s similar in that you’re relaxing control: you’re encouraging the words themselves—the sounds of them, the beats and echoes—to lead you on. For the moment, forget all the good advice that says good style is invisible, good art conceals art. Show off! Use the whole orchestra our wonderful language offers us! Write it for children, if that’s the way you can give yourself permission to do it. Write it for your ancestors. Use any narrating voice you like. If you’re familiar with a dialect or accent, use it instead of vanilla English. Be very noisy, or be hushed. Try to reproduce the action in the jerky or flowing movement of the words. Make what happens happen in the sounds of the words, the rhythms of the sentences. Have fun, cut loose, play around, repeat, invent, feel free.
– Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft
A vehement eros runs through the universe. It is like the ether: harder than steel, softer than air.
– Nikos Kazantzakis, The saviors of God
All the love I have received—
its wordlessness
I hear in the sky, in the wind.
– Rabindranath Tagore
In all conflicts between groups, there are three elements. One: The certitude that our group is morally superior, possibly even chosen by God. All others should follow our example or be at our service. In order to bring peace to the world, we have to impose our set of beliefs upon others, through manipulation, force, and fear, if necessary. Two: a refusal or incapacity to see or admit to any possible errors or faults in our group. The undeniable nature of our own goodness makes us think we are infallible; there can be no wrong in us. Three: a refusal to believe that any other group possesses truth or can contribute anything of value. At best, others may be regarded as ignorant, unenlightened, and possessing only half-truths; at worst, they are seen as destructive, dangerous, and possessed by evil spirits: they need to be overpowered for the good of humanity. Society and cultures are, then, divided into the “good” and the “bad”; the good attributing to themselves the missions to save, to heal, to bring peace to a wicked world, according to their own terms and under their controlling power.
– Jean Vanier
Spiritual practice requires imagination. If we really want to go beyond the surface of things to the deeply hidden, actual experience of being alive, we need imagination as an ally. The senses, reason, even our moral and emotional faculties are not enough.
– Norman Fischer
To sum up once more: Awareness, will, practice, tolerance of fear and of new experience, they are all necessary if transformation of the individual is to succeed.
– Erich Fromm
Treat all men alike…. give them all the same law. Give them all an even chance to live and grow. You might as well expect the rivers to run backward as that any man who is born a free man should be contented when penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases. We only ask an even chance to live as other men live. We ask to be recognized as men. Let me be a free man…free to travel… free to stop…free to work…free to choose my own teachers…free to follow the religion of my Fathers…free to think and talk and act for myself.
– Dee Brown
Trying to stuff all the positive attributes into a single god, excluding those that are contradictory or embarrassing, has created quite a shadow for most theologies. At least (with) the polytheistic religions there was a god to represent every force and value.
– James Hollis
Emotion is the chief source of all becoming-conscious. There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.
– CG Jung
stardust we are
from different galaxies
my mother and I
– @hegelincanada
Life is a tale told by an idiot,
full of sound and fury,
signifying nothing.
– William Shakespeare
A psychoanalyst is meant to do those very things: to speak modestly, to be able to cast things subjectively, to listen mindfully to be able to hear – not to be able to be overridden by one’s dogma or one’s internal blah-blah – and to remain curious.
– Polly Young-Eisendrath
For Jung, the Self, written with a capital, is meant to be that supra-ordinate, inner, unknown, divine center of the psyche which we have to explore all our lifetime. Nobody knows what the Self in him or her is or what it wants.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
Only others save us, / even though solitude tastes like / opium.
– Adam Zagajewski, translated by Clare Cavanagh
A reminder to stay vigilant with meds, therapy, and so on if you have anxiety and/or depression. Easy to fall off and then… fall off. Take beautiful care of you! No shame in weird brain chemistry.
– Lisa Lucas
. . . because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable.
– Nabokov, Strong Opinions
The guy next to me at the airport bar, after an hour of silence, suddenly pushed back his chair, locked eyes, and said, “It’s been a goddamn pleasure making your acquaintance,” and walked out. An A+ interaction.
– Matt Bell
Poetry is not only on the page; it’s also the work that we do to challenge language.
– Ricardo Alberto Maldonado
I wish
maps would be without
borders & that we belonged
to no one & to everyone
at once, what a world that
would be.
– Yesenia Montilla
Always in relation
Is what any one is
& change happens
Only in relations
Limited by what
Structures
Life
– Wendy Trevino
Sometimes the truth is too simple for intellectuals.
– Jean-Paul Sartre
As the poet W. H. Auden wrote: Truth, like love and sleep, resents Approaches that are too intense.
– Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score
The sea, the stars, the night wind in waste places, mean more to me than even the human beings I love best.
– Bertrand Russell
summer solstice
a bright blue butterfly
circles the moon
– James Welsh
These are the soul’s changes. I don’t believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.
– Virginia Woolf
I have forgotten the names of the literary critics.
I know what I know.
I am the child I was,
living the life that was mine.
I am young and half asleep.
It is a time of water, a time of trees.
– Anne Sexton
Prometheus and the Atlantic,
and how sound travels
through water, air—all echoes.
Minute hands sweep time
around the circumference
of clock faces, searching
for unseen things that
might hide in plain sight
if only the ocean
weren’t as deep.
– Kim Fahner
The active form of silence…is typified by the secret creativity which operates in the darkness and solitude of gestation.
– Kenneth Grant
I began my life as I will no doubt end it: among books.
– Jean-Paul Sartre
Where was the satisfaction we longed for?
– Stuart Kestenbaum
Important information
should take the most
space and still have
air around it,
the old monk advised.
– The Old Monk
Emblematic of so many of us struggling to keep our heads above water, what I most like about them is their honest creaking of hulls, so to speak…
– Peter Bach
How can a poet think his characters into their own freedom? Shakespeare, with little precedent beyond Chaucer, practices an art of surprise, in which his characters can be as surprised as we are.
– Harold Bloom
We’ve not the slightest yearning for the social world: the storms and omens of the Cosmos will suffice.
– Ludwig Klages
Put yourself in rooms where you’re the least knowledgeable person.
– Ryan Holiday
‘Dear old world’, she murmured, ‘you are very lovely, and I am glad to be alive in you.’
– Lucy Maud Montgomery
Things keep shutting down
or something does. A great wave
is rolling past us
crashing on a shore
out of hearing. Life changes
gear. All metaphors
are suspect. Listen,
clouds are muttering in rhyme.
There is song there too
though none can sing it.
– George Szirtes
I did a road trip
all over my mind and heart
and
there you were
kneeling by the roadside
with your little toolkit
fixing something.
– Anne Carson
I think in the past you were unhappy only because of poor company. It was quite natural since we cannot sun ourselves in the shade.
– Franz Kafka
It helps no one
to claim someone
is best;
Sit down
and think, again,
about the rest.
– @CalMorgan
Step into stories at the places where they cross each other, at the cruces.
– Lidia Yuknavitch, Thrust
Being programmed, we consider time is necessary to bring about a deep, fundamental change in the human structure. We employ time as thought: ‘I am this, I shall be that.
– Krishnamurti
Disorder and meaninglessness are the mother of order and meaning. Order and meaning are things that have become and are no longer becoming…
– C.G. Jung
I hope you read with great voraciousness everything that brings you delight/wisdom/consolation.
– Dr. Han VanderHart
You want it to be
so sharp
they can’t see
the cut,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
What
doesn’t matter
didn’t always,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
Suddenly,
there’s nothing to do
and too much—
– Rose Styron
The American alphabet ends like every American factory ends. Zombies wandering around on Zoom. The new zoology.
– Mark Nowak
I want to know what
happened to Icarus
after his wings melted away,
When he fell into the
fathomless sea.
This is where the story begins.
– Theodore Richards
The seeker loses his way to You
for he brings his own ideas into this.
One who approaches You through You,
tears up all useless maps and papers.
You can only be found through You,
all else is to be abandoned.
– Nizami Ganjavi
I am only an apprentice, but have finally come to accept it.
– Jim Harrison
If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load which is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together. So if therapists wish to foster their patients’ mental health, they should not be afraid to increase that load through a reorientation toward the meaning of one’s life.
– Victor Frankl
A Chinese curse condemns one to live in interesting and eventful times. The best thing about Covington is that it is in a certain sense out of place and time but not too far out and therefore just the place for a Chinese scholar who asks nothing more than being left alone. One can sniff the ozone from the pine trees, visit the local bars, eat crawfish, and drink Dixie beer and feel as good as it is possible to feel in this awfully interesting century. And now and then, drive across the lake to New Orleans, still an entrancing city, eat trout amandine at Galatoire’s, drive home to my pleasant, uninteresting place, try to figure out how the world got into such a fix, shrug, take a drink, and listen to the frogs tune up.
– Walker Percy
People start to heal the moment they feel heard.
– Cheryl Richardson
I become mystical and feel an alliance with you which is eternal, not interrupted, or hurt by never meeting. If there is anything I could ever give you, I would give it, but perhaps the only thing to give is to be oneself with people.
– Virginia Woolf
If I were to be totally sincere, I would say that I do not know why I live and why I do not stop living. The answer probably lies in the irrational character of life which maintains itself without reason.
– Emil Cioran
Creative people, as I see them, are distinguished by the fact that they can live with anxiety, even though a high price may be paid in terms of insecurity, sensitivity, and defenselessness for the gift of the “divine madness,” to borrow the term used by the classical Greeks. They do not run away from non-being, but by encountering and wrestling with it, force it to produce being. They knock on silence for an answering music; they pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean.’
– Rollo May
“Language is always changing” is practically a truism; most people know that Old English is radically different from Modern English, or that English in London sounds different from English in New Delhi, New York City, Sydney and Cape Town, South Africa.
But rarely do we pause to think about how these changes take place, or to ponder where dialects and words come from.
“Get down from the car,” just like “dandelion,” is a reminder that every word and every expression have a history.
– Phillip Carter
When you encounter difficulties, the feelings and stories that arise in reaction are just that, feelings and stories. They are whirlwinds of confusion, based not in what is happening now but in deeply held beliefs about you and your relationship to the world. Let them swirl- leaves in the wind. Sometimes you fall back into them and lose touch with the present, but a moment of recognition always comes. Right then, come back to your body, come back to your breath, and rest. The confusion, the stories and the feelings are still there. They continue to swirl, but you are not lost in them.
– Ken McLeod
We are here to witness the creation and abet it. We are here to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but, especially, we notice the beautiful faces and complex natures of each other. We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us. We witness our generation and our times. We watch the weather. Otherwise, creation would be playing to an empty house. According to the second law of thermodynamics, things fall apart. Structures disintegrate. Buckminster Fuller hinted at a reason we are here: By creating things, by thinking up new combinations, we counteract this flow of entropy. We make new structures, new wholeness, so the universe comes out even. A shepherd on a hilltop who looks at a mess of stars and thinks, ‘There’s a hunter, a plow, a fish,’ is making mental connections that have as much real force in the universe as the very fires in those stars themselves.
– Annie Dillard
… Errors become meaningful when we accept them, assume them and take the opportunity to benefit from them. Failure does not come from making a mistake, but from not having learned from it. For the value of an error is equal to the value of a rightness and it is the act of the mind that holds true what is false and vice versa…
– Fred Jules
America, the government isn’t giving you money/tests/resources. It probably isn’t even right to say you’re “receiving” it. You’re ACCESSING your own funds &/or getting what you already paid for. It’s called the promotion of our general welfare. Watch your language (& theirs). You’ll be accessing it the way Chuck Schumer & Mitch McConnell have been accessing our money & resources their entire adult lives. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. We don’t say banks give & we receive. Let’s not fall for the rhetoric of shame. Slow the tape. We pay for drone strikes, libraries, roads, golf trips, bailouts, public schools, electric chairs, naval carriers, a big White House, statues, etc. Directing our resources to the direct care of one another’s health is one way of attempting actionable patriotism. Watch closely. Tip: Instead of saying, “The government” or “Trump,” say, “We, the people.” We, the people, are cutting checks, making decisions, funding research, setting prisoners free, demanding due process, etc. Policy is liturgy. In America, it’s ours. Of, for, & by us people.
– David Dark
There are great cycles – in not only our individual lives, but in the greater lives of countries, civilizations, and even the world itself. Cycles come and go. Like the tides, you can’t really control them, though you can sometimes direct their energies. Your best option is to recognize them and adapt with them. However, no matter the severity of the challenges placed by a new cycle, it is always an opportunity to practice compassion. We still weather challenges better as a community than we do isolated and fearful of one another. No person is an island- no person stands alone. Amidst the challenges faced by the current cycle, don’t lose your conscience- as in the end, it is still the best aspect of who you are, and it will always be your best compass throughout any storm or cycle of turbulence. This cycle will come, and it will go, but don’t lose your true self in the process of it…
– Timothy Hogan
But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.”
– John Steinbeck, East of Eden
Be, in this immensity of night, the magic force at your sense’s crossroad…
– Rainer Maria Rilke
I did things I did not understand for reasons I could not begin to explain just to be in motion …
– Dorothy Allison
Disease empties a sector, a billion sectors.
People look at the sky and at the other animals. They make beautiful objects, beautiful sounds, beautiful motions of their bodies beating drums in lines. They pray; they toss people in peat bogs; they help the sick and injured; they pierce their lips, their noses, ears; they make the same mistakes despite religion, written language, philosophy, and science; they build, they kill, they preserve, they count and figure, they boil the pot, they keep the embers alive; they tell their stories and gird themselves.
Will knowledge you experience directly make you a Buddhist? Must you forfeit excitement per se? To what end?
Say you have seen something. You have seen an ordinary bit of what is real, the infinite fabric of time that eternity shoots through, and time’s soft-skinned people working and dying under slowly shifting stars. Then what?
– Annie Dillard
When our mind works freely without any hindrance, and is at liberty to ‘come’ or to ‘go’, we attain Samadhi of Prajna, or liberation. Such a state is called the function of ‘thoughtlessness’. But to refrain from thinking of anything, so that all thoughts are suppressed, is to be Dharma-ridden, and this is an erroneous view.
– Hui Neng
There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.
– John Updike
Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist’s arm-chair and confuse his ‘Rinse the mouth—rinse the mouth’ with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us—when we think of this, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.
– Virginia Woolf
Closure is a neurotic and infantile demand to make upon reality, other people, or language.
– Terence McKenna
geshi yūbe
chijiku no kishimu
oto sukoshi
– Goro Wada (b. 1923)
summer solstice night;
the earth’s axis is creaking,
just a small, brief noise
– translation Harry Gilonis
White rice steaming, almost done. Sweet green peas
fried in onions. Shrimp braised in sesame
oil and garlic. And my own loneliness.
What more could I, a young man, want.
– Li-Young Lee, Eating Alone
When ego gets conscious or battered enough, it will begin to say: What new thing do I have to learn about myself in the world? Since I can no longer manage this perplexity by my former understanding, what does the soul ask me to do in the face of this overthrow?
– James Hollis
men will literally bake their enemies into pies instead of going to therapy.
– @formal_feeling
Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
– Carl Sagan
I am old. Nothing pleases me anymore. Moreover, I am not a great scholar and my ideas have rarely travelled further than my feet. I only know my forest, to which I always return.
– Robert Payne, mostly
forgotten, quoting a Sung
dynasty poet, in his
Chungking Diary, 1945
Moonlight as we enter
the New Brunswick woods,
hairy, scratchy, splintery;
moonlight and mist
caught in them like lamb’s wool
on bushes in a pasture.
– Elizabeth Bishop
The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.
– Rollo May
Mythos is in marked contrast to the “I-it” language of separation and distance you use to reason about the world. In logos, God is outside you; in mythos, you experience God within. In logos, natural phenomena are separate from you and coincidences are causal.
– @Morty_Josh
I can always choose, but I ought to know that if I do not choose, I am still choosing.
– Jean-Paul Sartre
You can’t study Zen just by reading and thinking about it; intellectual understanding is not Zen. Words just point the way.
– Jakusho Kwong
Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes. Of a certain size and color. A certain weight. When their meaning has become lost to us they no longer even have a name.
– Cormac McCarthy
the land emitting
a smell like love.
in the flash
between beats—
the still
of wholeness. summer,
– Marissa Davis
Not a mistake is the blue boredom
of a summer lake. O mud, sun, and algae!
– Jennifer Chang
After the election, you can’t believe the weather is wrong again.
The sky cheats on your speech.
The process is complicated and precarious.
Disappointed, there’s no word of a sad sneer.
Nothing has changed.
– Chia-Lun Chang
Let no day pass without humbly remembering that everything still has to be learned.
– Carl G. Jung
Mantras too have their own nature; their nature is to transform the mind. The power of the mantra comes from the sound, and that sound has the power to transform the mind into one of virtue.
– Lama Zopa Rinpoche
If self is a location, so is love:
Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points,
Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance,
Here and there and now and then, a stance.
– Seamus Heaney, District and Circle
Reason becomes unreason when separated from the heart, and a psychic life void of universal ideas sickens from undernourishment.
– CG Jung
The way forward is
with a broken heart.
– Alice Walker
my heart is caught by our collective unbearable luck
– Nancy Reddy
When all this is over I mean
to travel north, by the high
drove roads and cart tracks
probably in June,
with the gentle dog-roses
flourishing beside me…
– Kathleen Jamie, Lochan
At times it was necessary to cut me down to size; he would do it with such breathtaking elegance and style that it left me gasping.
Intellectually, he was not a boxer but a judo expert.
– Lawrence Durrell, saluting his editor & mentor, T. S. Eliot
But probably that’s the way of the world – when we have finally learned something we’re too old to apply it – and so it goes, wave after wave, generation after generation. No one learns anything at all from anyone else.
– Erich Maria Remarque
If we examine our own mind again and again, whatever we do becomes the pure path. This alone is the essence of hundreds of precious teachings all rolled into one
– Patrul
Jason managed to find his fleece and bring it home through the agency of a woman. This is also characteristic of hero-myth, for the woman is the anima, the unconscious itself in the guise of ‘helper’ & ‘bride’, who finds solutions where the individual ego can find none.
– Liz Greene
Many people see hard work as a sign of virtue. But a strong work ethic doesn’t guarantee strong ethics.
Instead of attaching worth to the effort people expend, we should prize the values they exemplify.
Character is a function of generosity and integrity, not industriousness.
– Azim Shariff
Learn to take the backward step that turns your light inward, illuminating your true self. Then, without a doubt, your original face, your original mind, will appear.
– Jakusho Kwong
Awareness is like a wind. If you open your doors and windows, it is bound to come in.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Slowly I’m renewing my soul.
– Virginia Woolf
Thought, being limited, creates problems: national, economic, religious divisions. Then thought says, ‘I must solve them.’
– Krishnamurti
How perfect. How ancient. How past repair.
– Mark Strand
Can you buy peace of mind? Can you remove fear surgically or mechanically? What destroys our peace of mind is anger and fear. If we cultivate compassion and love, we can counter anger and fear. So, we need to educate people about the way the mind works and our system of emotions.
– Dalai Lama
To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery of individuality in fact is.
– C.G. Jung
With age all my opinions drift away. Who am I to say for sure? My people thought they’d see Jesus when they died. Now that we know we have 90 billion galaxies, I’m not inclined to discount anything. How can I say what is not possible in this universe? You can disembowel reality all you want and certainties are hard to find, the towering reality being death. I don’t mind. I was never asked. On death, a tour of the 90 billion galaxies would be flattering. Yes? Our curiosity is still in the lead. Wittgenstein said that the miracle is that the world exists.
– Jim Harrison
…that great law under which everything has occurred: the law of an inconceivable mutation.
– Gottfried Benn
This is not a book about how we can save the trees.
This is a book about how the trees might save us.
– Suzanne Simard
Afoot and lighthearted
I take to the open road,
healthy free,
the world before me.
– Walt Whitman
Happiness comes
from WHAT we do.
Fulfillment comes
from WHY we do it.
– Simon Sinek
Insofar as society is itself composed of de-individualized human beings, it is completely at the mercy of ruthless individualists . . . A million zeros joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one.
– C.G. Jung
SWEET THINGS
The end has been here all along,
Or at least has been very near,
I first noticed it with fashion,
Yes, fashion, of all things,
Like they’d run out of ideas
For these new decades
So now suddenly all the eras
Were fair play,
Mix’em all together,
Eclectic vintage,
The costumes of time
Were folding in on each other,
That’s how I knew
That the end was already here,
Or at least very near.
Then I knew it again,
It was in a car commercial
The voice in it spoke
the slogan
In that slick,
commercial intonation,
Almost whispered it:
Be selfish,
It said it so confidently,
Seductively:
Be Seflish,
A phrase, executively chosen
For its obvious marketable appeal,
That’s how I knew
That the end was already here,
Or at least very near.
Then it was army recruitment ads
On Canadian television,
And live beheadings
On youtube,
Then it was alcoholism
Seeming like a reasonable reaction
To the world,
Then it was music,
And only music,
But records turned to singles
And all of them were stolen,
Openly stolen,
The artist’s compensation
Now only to be found
In numbers
Of distant,
Fickle
Followers
Who
Click,
Click,
Click,
Whatever
Then it was evil
Speaking its tongue
Like it was finally allowed
back to the party,
And was now standing
drunk on the table,
Boasting,
But, worse,
Being cheered,
She wore a coat
That said
“I don’t care do you?”
“I don’t care, do you?”
when she visited children
Locked up in dirty cages,
Crying for their mama,
Crying for their papa,
I don’t care do you?
I don’t care do you?
Click,
Click,
Click,
Whatever,
That’s how I knew
The end was already here,
Or at least very near
And the fires,
And the floods,
And the plague.
A frozen, panicked chaos,
Held up in the whole
World’s mirror,
Explained in fallible words
that immediately scatter
Like the builders of Babel,
Into undecipherable noise
And when phrases appear
From the thick,
They are cries of Injustice
Clear as can be,
For all to see,
Documented wounds
for all to see,
No denying!
And yet –
Denying and Denied,
That’s how I know,
The end is already here,
Or at least very near.
But sweet things keep on coming,
The woodpecker doesn’t seem to know
It’s pecking on a dead pole,
Not even a tree anymore,
But the woodpecker doesn’t seem to notice,
Peck,
Peck,
Peck,
Whatever,
That’s how I know
That sweet things keep on coming,
Parcels in the mail,
Bread baked,
Songs written,
Lilacs to inhale,
Sweet things keep on coming,
They’re not afraid
That the end is obviously near,
They keep on coming
Acts and utterances of deep love,
My love,
My love,
The beginning
Has been here
All along, too.
Sweet things keep on coming.
– Orit Shimoni
in the morning you brew tea
from the blossoms of your
language.
– Triin Paja
His mind was indeed my library, and whenever it was opened to me, I entered bliss.
– Charlotte Brontë
I can’t separate poetry
from my life as a poet
If that means loving you past devastation
so be it.
– Sandra Simonds
We murmur moonwords.
– Adrienne Rich
I am divinity and I am a fucking mess. I am God and I am a weird, original, flawed, unfinished painting of a “human being”. I have no limits, and so I limit myself in ingenious ways. I play with boundaries and edges, multiplicity and Oneness, form and the formless. I love dancing in the in-between, bridging gaps, holding on and letting go, grabbing and releasing, coming closer and moving away, only to come closer again. All movements are dear to me. I have no bias, no prejudice. I love the opening and the closing too, the space and the darkness. I am perfection, and I love making the most ridiculous mistakes. I learn from it all, delight in it all. I am complete, and I love the ache of the unfinished and the unresolved. You will never capture me, yet I am always present; I dance peacefully, restlessly, on the edge where the world comes into form.
– Jeff Foster
Sometimes I become a stranger to Love and turn to prudent conduct and crowd pleasing behavior till that Fairytale Beauty of mine shows Her Face and I leave all that and become the lunatic that I am.
– Sheikh Seyfeddin Bakharzi, tr. Vraje Abramian
The teens in my house refer to the place as “The Bins” but I can’t hardly think of a more pre-apocalyptic place than the Goodwill Outlet.
– John Horton
Like a white stone deep in a draw-well lying,
As hard and clear, a memory lies in me.
– Anna Akhmatova
Tamalpais appeared as a constant point of reference, the way a desert traveler will see an oasis, not only for water, but as the very idea of home. In such cases geographic spots become spiritual concepts.
– Etel Adnan
Doubt is part of all religion. All the religious thinkers were doubters.
– Isaac Bashevis Singer
When all human decency was imprisoned,
I was free amongst masked slaves.
I lived in those times, yet I was free.
I watched the river, the earth, the sky
Turning around me, keeping their balance.
The seasons provided their birds and their honey.
You who live, what have you made of your luck?
– Robert Desnos,
from “Epitaph”
(tr. Kenneth Rexroth)
Science is the whore of industry and the handmaiden of war.
– Edward Abbey
In our shattered dream / we see the way to a new beginning.
– Christopher Titmuss
The mind has a thousand ways to terminate a life that has become meaningless.
– Carl Jung
I want to learn from myself, want to be my student, want to get to know myself.
– Hermann Hesse
Poems flooded me. Fell on me like wild bees.
– Anna Kamienska
The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now.
– George Orwell, 1984
In speaking of human things, we say that it is necessary to know them before we can love them…. the saints on the contrary say in speaking of divine things that it is necessary to love them in order to know them, and that we only enter truth through charity.
– Blaise Pascal
These days of only poems and depression— what can I do with them? / Will they help me to notice / what I cannot bear to look at?
– Robert Lowell
I’ve always enjoyed the solitary gloom. It’s something you get used to. It defines you.
– Ian McCulloch of Echo and the Bunnymen
The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language.
– Emerson
All the long Summer, the affairs and occupations of the river village are quiet and simple.
The swallows who nest in the beams go and come as they please.
– Tu Fu, translated by Florence Ayscough and Amy Lowell
This starbreak is celestial air,
Just silver; earthlight, dying amber.
– Léonie Adams
Crazy how peaceful life becomes when you stop reaching out to fix things you didn’t break to maintain one-sided relationships because you realize you deserve long-term mutually beneficial healthy relationships based on open communication, clear boundaries, and reciprocity.
– Inner Practitioner
Living is nothing but burning with questions.
– Antonin Artaud
Real tenderness can’t be confused, It’s quiet and can’t be heard.
– Anna Akhmatova
America can be saved only by what it’s trying to destroy.
– Don DeLillo
Poetry can be made, & needed, by everyone. It nourishes us.
– Ricardo Maldonado
That’s why we say remember by heart, because what touches the heart is engraved in memory.
– Voltaire
One of the things that draws art closer to faith is the fact that both tend to be troubling. Neither art nor faith can leave things simply as they are: they change, transform, move and convert them.
– Pope Francis
Penciled on a list of books
And groceries I find two lines:
‘High in the east a morrow soft and sweet.
This hour, this is our last hour glass.’
I no longer remember
If they are mine or another’s.
– Kenneth Rexroth
US presidential election is like voting what color to paint a car that has a dead engine, broken transmission, flat tires, cracked windshield, empty gas tank instead of just choosing to take the bus.
– @antonio_paglino
The artist should preach nothing – not even his own autonomy. His art should speak its own truth, and in so doing it will be in harmony with every other kind of truth – moral, metaphysical, and mystical.
– Thomas Merton
Dreams have only one owner at a time.
That’s why dreamers are lonely.
– William Faulkner
we should start doing humanities bootcamps
– @no_earthquake
Gender roles don’t make much sense when we are young children, as we are too little to conform to their expectations. And few of us can keep up with their expectations when we age due to the physical changes we experience. We squeal, we cry, we get sick, our voices change, our bodies turn out wrong, everything starts to sag, and then one day we find the time has come to depart this world. Neither man nor woman, we become dust, and perhaps something of our consciousness lingers on.
In between, men who want to be good bread winners must learn to submit in the workplace, and women who want to be good mothers must learn to assert themselves. Too vulnerable when younger, too broken when older, most of us don’t fit into our respective gender roles for much of our lives. And when we do, they are all too often too confining.
This is a natural part of the human experience in every society, so we should have a little more sympathy for those who are desperate to break the confines of their expected gender roles, whatever might be driving it. Each of us will struggle with them when our lives fall apart, and most of us would be more functional if we embraced more of the virtues associated with the so-called opposite gender. This suggests we should try a bit harder to relate with trans people, and we should consider the loosening of gender roles a common struggle for our own full humanity. But we should also openly weigh the trade offs of, say, providing puberty blockers to pre-teens and integrating trans women into women’s sports teams. And we should ask hard questions about why, if gender roles are social constructs, which do such a bad job of capturing our full humanity, someone would need to change their reproductive organs to match the way they feel inside. Perhaps there is a better way to help them meet their needs.
Political liberals make sure you can support yourself when you lose your job, and they provide the protections that allow you to work with dignity. They provide the maternity care you need coming into the world, the education you need preparing yourself for it, and the social security that allows you to mellow with age. Liberals have prioritized protecting people who do not fit conventional roles, because most of us don’t fit into them at least much of the time. Everyone also deserves the right to be free of violence and to support themselves through work in the job market—and they deserve to live with dignity in the lives they have chosen, so long as they do no harm to others. Achieving all this takes the support of good legislation, and liberals have been steadfast in achieving it. But that doesn’t mean that liberals always agree with the choices the people they are protecting have made, and it doesn’t always mean they agree on how best to protect their rights.
So, the lingering controversy over trans rights in liberal communities is not some atavistic throwback. The trans rights movement is comparatively new. It addresses a relatively small portion of the population. And it is different from most other rights movements in that it not only presses us to accept identities into which people have been born but also those they want to fundamentally alter. Liberals probably should have taken the time to openly discuss what this involved before making so many political commitments to the trans rights movement, and we shouldn’t have allowed trans rights advocates to shut down so many conversations about it. But all too many of us bit our tongues while all too many others got their heads bitten off. Young movements do not tend to be kind to those who ask hard questions. And now a backlash is challenging not just the aspirations of the trans rights movement but the basic dignity and safety of trans individuals. And that’s something every decent person should fight back against.
It should now be obvious that the fascist right is using the trans rights movement as a wedge issue to divide the left. It should be clear they are using trans caricatures to make liberals look unhinged. It should be recognized that trans people are just the latest marginalized group they have targeted, that they do it to revel in their bullying, that focusing on trans people allows them to feel more manly, or womanly as the case may be, and that the threats are getting more intense. Each of these reactions exemplifies the fascism of the right; and liberals should fight fascism and defend the marginalized. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t insist on a more open conversation about the shape of trans rights, which takes the concerns of women and parents, along with our electoral prospects, more seriously.
Liberals should reject the rigid insistence on implementing everything arising out of any social movement. Most social movements tend to become caricatures of themselves, as they wall themselves off in silos. Most advocate for their causes with little consideration of how getting what they want might impact other important causes. But liberals should also reject the dehumanization and marginalization of transgendered people. Trans right should not be a priority at the center of liberal platforms because democracy is at stake and with it all of everyone’s freedoms. It should not be a priority because the world order is at stake and with it the most basic rights of billions of people. And they should not be a priority because the climate is at stake and with it the future of human civilization. Focusing on attaining a controversial set of rights for a tiny minority may well put all of that at risk. Besides, if liberals and the left don’t win elections, the backlash against trans individuals could become more dehumanizing, and it could become vastly more violent in more patriarchal countries. And yet, not fighting for the most basic trans rights empowers fascists by letting them pick off the most marginalized people, which only empowers their most hateful tendencies. So, we need to draw a line somewhere.
Liberalism has always struggled with balancing an open spirit of tolerance with the need to recognize multiple competing social goods. Aristotle spoke of liberality as a spirit of open generosity. Enlightenment thinkers tended to treat it as a commitment to basic rights. According to Helena Rosenblatt’s epic, The Lost History of Liberalism, and contrary to libertarian myth making, along with my own experience of their texts, enlightenment thinkers also considered liberalism a commitment to social virtue. Liberals today tend to treat it as a commitment to fundamental social protections. Many think of liberalism in terms of its respect for diversity as well. The varying conceptions of liberalism culminate in an openness that respects the right of people to be who they are and to make mistakes. The social philosopher Michael Walzer, in what might turn out to be this year’s philosophical classic, refers to this as “liberal as an adjective.” By this he means we should treat liberalism as a quality to be aspired to, which might infuse any movement or position on the ideological spectrum. Liberal socialism, liberal feminism, liberal nationalism, etc. In this sense, the trans rights movement might be liberal or illiberal depending on how it conducts itself, and the same might be said of antiracist and democratic socialist movements.
Liberal as an adjective, as opposed to liberal as a political program, brings to movements a spirit of openness and tolerance that embraces dialogue as a means of sorting through our differences and deepening our social bonds. In this period of social fragmentation, it is a great way to win elections, because it strengthens the bonds among those who want to live in a more decent and compassionate society. And it is hard to win when we are divided among ourselves. It is also hard to win when we are more busy reacting than setting priorities, and setting priorities takes careful conversation. As for the conversations themselves, these can require decades to sort through, especially when we are talking about small populations. Even the most well informed citizens can take years to get around to educating themselves on such issues, if only because there are so many to learn about. That means we need to give people time to get up to speed and debate the agendas of advocacy movements. And it can take decades to build a movement that successfully counters the arguments against its goals by refining its claims and tailoring its message—if only because it often takes decades for its younger proponents to mature politically.
As for myself, saving democracy is the priority, because without it, we lose everything. Black lives don’t matter in a fascist state, and neither do trans lives. Forget future generations and the endless list of species on the brink. We need to get our priorities straight. In the meantime, we need to be able to talk about trans rights openly and respectfully, and that means creating a space for hard questions that are asked with kindness and sympathy.
– Theo Horesh
Those who have acquired the taste of tsewa [warmth, affection, tenderness] will always choose to let it flow rather than to shut their heart. Knowing the deep satisfaction of a warm, open heart makes us less attached to all the things that usually obsess us: our body, our wealth, our possessions, our time, our leisure, or our privilege to do something nice for ourselves such as getting a massage. It’s not that we reject all the delightful things in our lives. But we find that none of them are as enjoyable, meaningful, or beneficial as simply keeping our heart open. Sometimes I ask myself this question, “Would His Holiness the Dalai Lama rather give a teaching or go to a spa and receive a shiatsu massage?” Even if his body needed the massage, I think he would choose the teaching because of how it would enable him to express his tsewa.
– Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, Training in Tenderness
Study the Light; attempt the high; seek out The Soul’s bright path.
– Bailey
To believe in God is to create something out of nothing.
– Marcus Steinweg
First light will enter his room like the powder-blue
Lepidoptera of Spring,
– Norman Dubie
It’s Saturday afternoon and the crows glide down,
Black pages that lift and fall.
The castor beans and pepper plants trundle their weary heads.
Something’s off-key and unkind.
Whatever it is, it bothers me all the time.
– Charles Wright, Laguna Blues
I want the pencil to eat its words,
The star to be sucked through its black hole.
And everything stays the same,
– Charles Wright
I can still make you sad
I guess that’s a good thing
But my life comes apart
Whenever you’re missing
And I move back towards you
One beat at a time
Heartbreak again
Your hand in mine
– Michael Timmins
The life in me all shadows
and bright dreams, all the
bustle of day punctuated
by the lost and quiet night
of this. I want to lift this
bar, turn my hand, hold
its fire to warm my palm.
Instead, I shift, let it spear
back into my heart, let
the light break me open,
burn me alive.
– Neile Graham
You thought all this?
I thought most of it. You reflect with an older mind. But the ideas are still there. Memory has substance. It’s not nothing.
– Cormac McCarthy
The point that vanishes is still a point,
although there’s nothing there, or just a dot
of paint or wax a clay lamp might anoint
with unguent light, both of this world and not.
The world abides by time. Time stops for light.
Light winds itself inside itself at night.
– Dan Campion
Nothing, for us, can fill the place of undiminished brightness except the unconscious dark, nothing that of what once we might have been, except the dream that we had never been born.
– Theodor W. Adorno
He sighed profoundly, and flung himself … on the earth at the foot of the oak tree. He loved, beneath all this summer transiency, to feel the earth’s spine beneath him; for such he took the hard root of the oak tree to be…
– Virginia Woolf
Reading … demands more ignorance than knowledge. It requires a knowledge endowed with an immense ignorance and a gift which is not given ahead of time, which has each time to be received and acquired in forgetfulness of it, and also lost.
– Blanchot, tr. Ann Smock
I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer – its dust and lowering skies.
– Toni Morrison
Love Poem
by Sophie Cabot Black
Which cannot be written tries anyway—
From one room to another, each time startled
And does not want to hear of the already
Passed through, the country of before.
Poem that at each door believes itself
In the room closest to the end
Where finally everything will be gone over,
Dismantled, held up, carefully laid back down
While talked into the beauty which can turn
In a minute. To hear of every other
Poem written is to begin
Revision and what cannot be left enough
Alone and so the lovers look at each other
Until none else can come near. Poem
Which never wanted anything but this
Tries anyway, so brave, unable to know where
She heads; unwrapping until only a gift
Which cannot be given as it cannot be let go.
Unlike riding a bike, with poetry,
you never quite know how.
– Phoebe Millikin
Even so, there were times I saw freshness and beauty. I could smell the air, and I really loved rock ‘n’ roll. Tears were warm, and girls were beautiful, like dreams. I liked movie theaters, the darkness and intimacy, and I liked the deep, sad summer nights.
– Haruki Murakami
Ultimately, sanctuary is within. We walk spiritual paths by gathering ways of living that are in alignment with peace.
– Zenju Earthlyn Manuel
If a person is caught by ambition only when in a group, you could say that it was a collective shadow. Sometimes you feel quite all right within, but you can come into a group where the devil is loose and get quite disturbed.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
you are everything that
the rest of the universe
is not
– Ogawa
To describe externals, you become a scientist.
To describe experience, you become an artist.
– Timothy Leary
Poetry is what I’ve done my whole life. And every important thing in my life had found itself into poems.
– Donald Hall
Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don’t they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.
– Ray Bradbury
I think of my life as a kind of music, not always good music but still having form and melody.
– John Steinbeck
You’ve managed to squeeze more lofty words into three short poems than most poets manage in a lifetime: ‘Fatherland,’ ‘truth,’ ‘freedom,’ ‘justice’: such words don’t come cheap. Real blood flows in them, which can’t be counterfeited with ink.”
– Wislawa Szymborska
Like the changing of the season, my own life will endlessly go through cycles of change. I can find solace in the naturalness of it all and keep rolling along, however clumsily.
– Michael Lobsang Tenpa
One of Jung’s great contributions to art, and to religion in particular, is to demonstrate that images of tradition need not remain as lifeless, opaque hunks of matter. With imagination we can vivify them…
– Thomas Moore
In a caring world, human rights should not have to be won by lobbying or fundraising nor should sexuality and disease have any pejorative political linkage. But caring is an adult activity, and the world we inhabit is slow in maturing….
– Leonard Bernstein
I prayed and fasted. I read the mystics. I studied the martyrs. I began to think I was someone thirsting for God.
– Anne Carson
Mere literary talent is common; what is rare is endurance, the continuing desire to work hard at writing.
– Donald Hall
The present moment is the cosmic egg described in so many religious myths. It is a singularity that births all existence into form. It seeds our mind with fleeting consensus images that we then blow up into the voluminous bulk of projected past and future..
– Bernardo Kastrup
Tree roots show us that there is a massive, sturdy, and ethereal connection underneath us, not just dirt or the vacumy emptiness of the abyss.
– Anne Lamott
Because poetry became such an essential part of how I saw the world, and how the world made itself legible to me, I feel like it is my responsibility to make that happen for younger generations.
– Ricardo Maldonado
With poetry, when it’s successful, these lines carry so much power. There’s such an attention to the sound; it has a really close relationship to music in that way […] because the words on the page have an internal music.
– Damian Rogers
which of these waters is yours?
i ask the sand,
but she ungratefully
says nothing.
– Raquel Salas Rivera
One of the phrases that obsesses me the most is said by little Alice in Wonderland: “I only came to see the garden.” For Alice and me, the garden would be the meeting place or, in the words of Mircea Eliade, the center of the world.
– Alexandra Pizarnik
It’s important to perform positive deeds in post meditation because emotional and cognitive obscurations are purified. … If our intention is to stop this tantrum [self-absorbed emotional obscurations], it’s sheer stupidity not to align our actions with that intention.
– Dzigar Kongtrul
Sunsets are loved because they vanish.
– Ray Bradbury
Because they believe in heaven, they
don’t want to fix anything on Earth.
– Hans Fallada
Jung seems to have perceived his personal journey [detailed in Red Book] within the context of a greater collective journey that was about to arrive at what he understood as a dangerous crisis point.
– Liz Greene
For in a question like this truth is only to be had by laying together many varieties of error.
– Virginia Woolf
The imagination will open us to great mysteries where there is no true or false interpretation, but a sense of universal human values mirrored in the personal, and maybe even intimations of the sacred, whatever that means to us.
– Angela Voss
While we remain transfixed by a handful of needy egotists in Westminster, across the Channel a revolution is happening. It’s a quiet, thoughtful revolution, but a revolution nonetheless. France is seeking to turn itself into an ecological civilisation.
– George Monbiot
Be the moon
and inspire people,
even if you are far from full.
– K. Tolnoe
I don’t recall anyone ever drinking from any kind of water bottle until the late 1980s. Were we all just dehydrated for decades?
– Rebekah Sanderlin
Is anyone else finding Google almost useless for information these days? The top hits for any given query are multiple websites that look different but have the same banal, unhelpful, (I assume AI composed) text.
– Irina Dumitrescu
I believe like Cézanne that there is only truth in nuance.
– Yves Bonnefoy
Beauty is born from dialogue, from the breaking of silence and the renewal of this silence.
– René Char
To understand is always an ascending movement; that is why comprehension ought always to be concrete (one is never got out of the cave, one comes out of it).
– Simone Weil
Glasgow is my city of conflict
– Billy Connolly
Patroclus died because
He could not see
What he really was inside
His lover’s armor.
– Jericho Brown
I just liked girls because I couldn’t help not to.
– Emily M. Danforth
Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.
– Georgia O’Keeffe
In Taipei, I still long for Taipei
ten years past
and alone in the moonlight
I have changed
and my hometown has changed
but we haven’t changed together
I try to change
this idea of my hometown
people pass me by
with their eyes speaking in a code
that is foreign to me
the vendor asks,
are you from mainland China?
the look in his eyes
speaks the language
of a border guard
this journey
back to my hometown
ends
with another one
on the road of no return
– Chen-ou Liu, Scarlet Dragonfly Journal
This, in the end, is what late great painting can be: the world reduced to a series of prodigious impulses, the revelation of the inner self intact, the chance taken to see the universe in a new light at the risk of failing utterly.
– Christopher Neve
Staring down at middle age, the one thing I’m sure of: smarts are over-emphasized compared to kindness and compassion…
– @jameshhibbard
that modulated cantata of the wild.
– Adrienne Rich
I think the truth is fine in mathematics, in chemistry, in philosophy. Not in life. In life illusion, imagination, desire, hope are more important.
– Ernesto Sabato
I have no patience with people who grow old at sixty… Sixty should be the time to start something new, not put your feet up.
– Mary Wesley
I recognized—without being afraid for him—that he might be a serious danger to society.—Perhaps he possesses secrets that will change life. No, I replied to myself, he is only looking for them.
– Arthur Rimbaud, translated by James Sibley Watson
There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.
– Bertrand Russell
The dharma is an inexhaustible well. However much you give of it, you can always go back for more, because in this well, the more you take from it, the higher the water will rise. As long as you give the dharma to nourish others, it will be there.
– Master Sheng Yen
Evolution or the force behind it does not want us to remain static. It pushed us out of the cosmic nest, into the cold and difficult regions of left-brain consciousness, because it is in those unwieldy climes that we can best actualize our capabilities.
– Gary Lachman
Education means inspiring someone’s mind, not just filling their heads.
– Katie Lusk
love is where our summer / was
– Anne Sexton
Freud maintained in ‘Civilisation and Its Discontents’ that human beings feel a deep hate and a deep love for civilisation. Civilised behaviour demands repression and restraint, in the face of which . . . the instinctual energies know they will not be satisfied.
– Robert Bly
THE PROBLEM OF WRITING POEMS IN HOT WEATHER
The problem
of writingpoems
inhot weather
isthatthe words
getsweaty
and sticktogether.
– Brian Bilston
It’s a matter of deciphering something that’s already there, something you’ve already done in the sleep of your life, in its organic rumination, unbeknown to you.
– Marguerite Duras
The road to enlightenment is paved with authenticity, not imitation.
– Alan Cohen
I look for uncomplicated hymns
but love has none.
– Anne Sexton
The way of art, when followed “properly,” also leads to the mountaintop that is everywhere, beyond opposites, of transcendental vision, where, as Blake discovered & declared, “the doors of perception are cleansed & everything appears to man as it is, infinite.”
– Joseph Campbell
The most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.
– David Foster Wallace
My eyes were glued on life and they were full of tears.
– Jack Kerouac
Because who would believe / the fantastic and terrible story of all of our survival / those who were never meant / to survive?
– Joy Harjo
For both Tantra and theurgy, escaping from the world is a profound self-delusion. For both traditions, the world is theophany. Why would one need to escape it?
– Gregory Shaw, Platonic Tantra
Remember friend.
A $5 iced latte a day is $25 a week, $100 a month, $1200 a year.
After 10 years.. that’s $12,000!
Which is still nowhere near enough to put a down payment on a house so enjoy your espresso in peace.
– Eric Hoke
transcending
a dark past
new moon
– Ogawa
[Christ] is just like a work of art. He does not really teach one anything, but by being brought into his presence one becomes something. And everybody is predestined to his presence. Once at least in his life each man walks with Christ to Emmaus.
– Oscar Wilde, De Profundis
What of those loving , accepting, understanding voices?
Do you hear them?
Or do you only hear what hurts?
– Ingeborg Bachman
it is not easy to depart
this cool green garden
for a dusty old road
– Basho
The worst people in the world think they are great. The greatest people don’t think of themselves at all.
– Karen Maezen Miller
When people give off “I must save the world” energy
It usually comes from the fact that they’re deeply enmeshed in saving themselves
And it really truly *feels* like the world is at stake
– @the_wilderless
For in the true
nature of things,
if we rightly consider,
every green tree is far
more glorious than
if it were made of
gold and silver.
– Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
I think of you, of the lake, of the city, of the burning days on the shore, in the sand, of the shadowy paths, of the musical breath of the air. The water is quiet, blue,
[…]
I don’t want to speak, everything around me will tell you what I’m sensing.
– Ingeborg Bachmann
What is the holiness of empire? It is to know collapse. Everything can collapse. Houses, bodies and enemies collapse when their rhythm becomes deranged.
– Anne Carson
Things aren’t always what they seem. How, then, do we know what a thing really is?
This prompts me to suspend my judgments and engage my subtle sensors.
Beneath conditioned thoughts and biases, there it is—true nature, essence, meaning within the meaning.
– McCall Erickson
We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.
– William James
The sea and the moment are for now indecipherable.
– Roque Dalton
I know
where you lie
with a rinse of darkness
under your head
in a ruin of faces
tried on,
discarded
in the uncontrollable gush
of words
you should never
have said.
– Mary Rose O’Reilley
Just as real events are forgotten, some that never were can be in our memories as if they happened.
– Gabriel García Márquez
Can one break memory the way one breaks stone with stone? Is memory’s function to first break down, by its own means, then pick up the pieces and reassemble them together, but clumsily, never in the way they used to be? Is a fractured mind just fractured, or is it multiplied?
– Etel Adnan
I was curious. I was interested in human behaviour and things I didn’t understand. I always had extreme friends and we all took LSD together, which was an incredible bonding experience. However we were raised, we were running from our backgrounds to form some new thing, based on humour and excitement, adventure. Which is what all kids should have – adventure.
– John Waters
We are so in love with our words and ideas that we forget the direct experience from which they arise. We build concept upon concept. In the end we have abstracted our contact with life into the rote regurgitation of thought-bound ideology.
We have fallen victim to the great curse of human existence of the tendency to misconstrue language (words, thoughts, ideas) for actuality. We are entombed in our brains.
We are thinking our lives, not living them.
– Steven Harrison
Silence is radical. When sustained, it has an effect on your perception comparable to that of any number of chemicals with which you might seek change. Your vision transforms, to start with; you suddenly find yourself absorbing what’s on the periphery, massive amounts of once-invisible data assailing your pupils. When you’re not preparing your next remark, your hearing capacity expands, too: the changing rhythms of the wind; the muted thud of a teardrop hitting the wooden floor; your neighbor’s beating heart. And taste, and smell, they’re amplified and shifted, as well — a cup of tea sipped without the surrounding dialogue is a more intricate cup of tea. Silence gives you the opportunity to know any number of an object’s facets that typically disappear behind the verbal screens we erect constantly, unthinkingly, between our selves and our environments. And surely the power of wordless touch is one each of us knows; I need not expand on that.
– Anna Wood, A More Intricate Cup of Tea
Never get involved with God, and above all never in any really intimate way. Get involved with people and imagine that together with them you are involving yourselves with God.
– Søren Kierkegaard
The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature throughout the centuries is the notion of ‘independent existence.’ There is no such mode of existence; every entity is only to be understood in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.
– Alfred North Whitehead
Birdhouse
Do you have a twenty-foot extension ladder?
Good.
Let’s get it out of the garage.
I want to put this birdhouse up on one of the evergreens
that stands off your back deck.
I’m going to use long tenpenny nails to fasten it to the tree
and some kind of wire strapping, too.
I want it to stay there for a long time.
I want you to notice it season after season —
how the mother bird keeps
flying in and out of the little knothole that I drilled
to where the baby birds stretch their mouths wide open
in a ferocious pink bouquet.
If I am no longer here for some reason,
I think you will still see me occasionally reflected
in the incessant activity of the birds
flying in and out of the birdhouse —
always coming and going just like I did,
not wishing to become too well-known,
or to ever stay long in one place.
And yet the birdhouse will say something different about me:
it will say that I lived here.
It will be a thing that I made with my hands
on a specific afternoon, working for hours
in my garage, with paint streaks and sawdust on my clothes,
and that I took the trouble
to hang that little domicile
high on the trunk of your particular tree
with a knowledge of how life always moves on
and yet leaves something behind as well
with something alive inside it.
You might say that memory itself
is a piece of real estate,
a residence with a private entrance
and a mystery inside
like this small château
painted blue with orange spots on it,
hung twenty feet high — a thing, for a while,
out of reach of the predator, time.
– Tony Hoagland
THE SUMMER YOU READ PROUST
Remember the summer you read Proust?
In the hammock tied to the apple trees
your daughters climbed, their shadows
merging with the shadows of the leaves
spilling onto those long arduous sentences,
all afternoon and into the evening – robins,
jays, the distant dog, the occasional swaying,
the way the hours rocked back and forth,
that gigantic book holding you in its woven nest –
you couldn’t get enough pages, you wished
that with every turning a thousand were added,
the words falling you into sleep, the sleep
waking you into words, the summer you read
Proust, which lasted the rest of your life.
– Philip Terman
THIS DAY
May I live this day
Compassionate of heart,
Clear in word,
Gracious in awareness,
Courageous in thought,
Generous in love.
– John O’Donohue
Jeff Brown describes “Patriarchal Spirituality” like this: Those ungrounded and inhumane “spiritual” models that have been fostered by emotionally armored, self-avoidant men.
These models share some or all of the following beliefs:
* the ego is the enemy of a spiritual life
* the “monkey mind” is the cause of suffering
* your feelings are an illusion
* your personal identifications and stories are necessarily false
* witnessing your pain transforms it
* your body is a spiritually bankrupt toxic quagmire
* the only real consciousness is an “absolute” and “transcendent” one
* stillness and silence are THE path
* isolation is the best way to access “higher states”
* there is no “self”
* meditation is THE royal road to enlightenment
* enlightenment actually exists
* formlessness over form
* the ultimate path is upward and vertical
* real spirituality exists independent of our humanness
In fact, most of the above is a blatant lie.
As described by Jeff Brown, here are more accurate, non-patriarchal hypotheses about the nature of human life:
* A healthy ego is beautifully essential to healthy functioning
* The monkey mind is fed by the monkey heart (the unresolved emotional body)
* Many of our identities and stories are fundamental to who we are, where we have been, why we are here
* Healing your pain transforms it; watching it is only a preliminary step
* Our bodies are our spiritual temples
* The only “real” consciousness is one that integrates all that we are and all that this is
* Stillness and silence are only one path; many people prefer movement and sound
* There is no “higher” state (we aren’t birds). But connection may be the best way to access deepened states
* There is a magnificent self; the work is to align it with your sacred purpose, not to deny it altogether
* Meditation is not THE royal road; it’s one road, and it is not any more effective than embodied movement and emotional release as a clarification and transformation tool
* Enlightenment does not exist; enrealment does. (Be real now.) And it’s a relative experience, changing form as we and this changes form
* We are form, and we are here to in-form our humanness
* If there is an “ultimate path,” it’s downward (rooted) and horizontal
* There is no distinction between our spirituality and our humanness
Further words from Jeff Brown:
The wool has been pulled over our eyes. Men who were too unhealthily egoically to admit that they couldn’t deal with their humanness, their feelings, their trauma, had to find a system that smokescreened their avoidance. They found it. It’s called “Enlightenment.” It’s also called “Spiritual Mastery.”
And it usually involves leaving the world, in one form or another. This way, they can convince themselves and others that they have mastered the one true path.
In fact, Enlightenment is just a construct that is intended to avoid the multi-aspected nature of reality.
In fact, they are mastering nothing. They are merely fleeing their fragmentation, their confusion, and the fact that they don’t know how to find their center in the heart of the world.
Don’t be fooled. They know less about reality than day to day people. They know less about reality than those who live from their hearts.
What we need now are models that lead us back into our hearts, into relatedness, into a deep and reverential regard for the self. Those models may invite us to detach in an effort to see ourselves through a different lens, but they will not leave us out there, floating into the eternal emptiness and calling that a life.
Detachment is a tool; it’s NOT a life.
The models we need will then invite us back into our bodies, back into our hearts, and back into relatedness with each other. (No more “enlightened” masters sitting in caves while the women of the village bring them food. If you can’t find your transformation in the village, you haven’t found shit).
They will invite us to integrate what we find “out there” with who we are “in here.” They will invite us to embody the now, rather than to pretend we have found it in the heart of our dissociation.
It’s time to co-create spiritual models that begin, and end, within our wondrous humanness.
It’s not “out there,” dear friends. It’s right here, inside these aging body temples.
– Jeff Brown
As I have not worried to be born, I do not worry to die.
– Federico García Lorca
It is as if we were extraordinary children, possessing all sorts of genius, and we were being undermined by the society around us, which was dying to make us normal people. Whenever we would show any mark of genius, our parents would get embarrassed and try to put the lid on. I don’t particularly want to blame our parents alone; we have also been doing this to ourselves. When we see something extraordinary, we are afraid to say so; we are afraid to express ourselves. So we put lids on ourselves — on our potential, our capabilities. But in Buddhism we are liberated from that kind of conventionality.
– Chögyam Trungpa
You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They *know* it’s going to rise tomorrow.
When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it’s always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.
– Robert M. Pirsig
Only one thing
made him happy
and now that
it was gone
everything
made him happy.
– Leonard Cohen
home is
a presence
not a place
– Boncho
I became a psychotherapist because I so love the imagination. William Blake says: “The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself” For me, psychotherapy is essentially an affair of images – of how we imagine and, more important, reimagine ourselves.
– Vannoy Adams
every hour my mind is strangely divided; this minute perhaps i am above the stars, with a thousand systems round about me, looking forward into a vast abyss, and losing my whole comprehension in the boundless space of creation, in dialogues with the astronomers.
– alexander pope
a single line of rilke’s seems more real to me than moving house or anything like that. yet i don’t really think i am a foolish dreamer. to understand ideas and people you must go out into the real world, onto the ground on which everything lives and grows.
– etty hillesum
The word is my fourth dimension.
– Clarice Lispector
It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can.
– Oliver Sacks
The pines make
a music like no other, rising and
falling like a distant surf at night
that calms the darkness before
first light. “Soughing” we call it, from
Old English, no less. How weightless
words are when nothing will do.
– Philip Levine, Breath
Under every depression there is lower level in which we find the agenda of growth hiding. Rather than deny the pain, over-medicate & flee the challenge of growth which it asks of us, we need to discover where our soul wants to go, long ego has exhausted its resources.
– James Hollis
You’re my celebratory day. And when I visit you in my dreams, I always have flowers in my hair.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
You’d think he’d leave himself
notes in his notebook, but no,
only poems,
the poet said
about the old monk.
– The Old Monk
THE GIVING IN
Once I could ignore
birds everywhere,
though they were everywhere
I had to go.
Now I go wherever
birds are everywhere;
now I go anywhere
birds go,
having gone nowhere
they could not go.
That is the half of it.
– Marvin Bell
Give up on the idea of revenge. It’s an extra injury to ourselves to stoop to the kind of cruelty, or stupidity of our opponents. No pound of flesh that will make us feel better. Only we can make ourselves feel good again—by being good to others and moving on.
– Ryan Holiday
You are so much sunshine in every square inch.
– Walt Whitman
My biggest motivation? Just to keep challenging myself. I see life like one long university education that I never had.
– Richard Branson
To everyone harboring their own fire and to everyone lost in the dark. May you see the sun again.
– Noelle Stevenson
If you take a panoramic view of all beings in the six realms, then look to yourself, you will see that your current situation is excellent.
– KTDR
Wisdom has three subjective characteristics: it grows and
never vanishes, it chastises and disciplines, and it will not
approach anyone who is not interested in it.
– Ghayat Al-Hakim, The Picatrix
He was dressed exactly like any other gentleman, except that his coat was of the brightest green imaginable – the colour of leaves in early summer.
– Susanna Clarke
I love nothing more than the damp field behind my teeth, where a stable-
boy turns loose the wild horse none could break.
– Jeremy Michael Clark, Once a City Said
Only what is mysterious, undiscovered, and veiled attracts us; only what is hidden radiates magic that promises untold possibilities.
– Helmuth Plessner
But if I do not nail these impressions to the board and out of the many men in me make one . . . then I shall fall like snow and be wasted.
– Virginia Woolf, The Waves
I’ve never been one of those people who can’t live without friends. I feel good on my own. I could always go to the movies alone, I always went looking for a book alone. I can be alone in my house because I don’t feel it empty, I feel accompanied by myself.
– María Félix
All results come from causes that have the ability to create them. If we plant apple seeds, an apple tree will grow, not chili. If chili seeds are planted, chili will grow, not apples.
– Thubten Chodron
I hold you against me
but nothing works.
Two boats moored,
rocking between nowhere
& nowhere.
– Yusef Komunyakaa
Poet: gardener of epitaphs.
– Octavio Paz
Whether or not they exist
we are slaves to
our gods.
– Fernando Pessoa
Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups . . . So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.
– Philip K. Dick
RIGHT HERE
If we’re not careful, we can spend whole chunks of our lives wishing to be elsewhere, instead of letting gratitude guide us back to where we are now, to all that’s worthy of love right here. I have always been a victim of the kind of thinking that I call “grass is greener mentality.” Instead of sinking deeply into the present moment of where I find myself and embracing all the beauty and inevitable flaws, I focus on some other, better time to come in the future. The result, of course, is that I miss out on the abundance that’s almost always available to me here and now…
Who’s to say we can’t find solid ground wherever we are, even if we sense that this place is not permanent? Why not absorb what we can and grow where we are, letting ourselves be fed by a life that might at times feel less than ideal?
– James Crews
So then actually the process of praising and the process of noticing and the process of attention to the good things and the process of loving and the process of noticing the music of the world – I think that is as important and as necessary as witnessing and naming and holding the grief and sorrow that comes with being alive.
– Ada Limón
Sea Longing
A thousand miles beyond this sun-steeped wall
Somewhere the waves creep cool along the sand,
The ebbing tide forsakes the listless land
With the old murmur, long and musical;
The windy waves mount up and curve and fall,
And round the rocks the foam blows up like snow,–
Tho’ I am inland far, I hear and know,
For I was born the sea’s eternal thrall.
I would that I were there and over me
The cold insistence of the tide would roll,
Quenching this burning thing men call the soul,–
Then with the ebbing I should drift and be
Less than the smallest shell along the shoal,
Less than the seagulls calling to the sea.
– Sara Teasdale
All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
There is an old Eastern fable about a traveler who is taken unawares on the steppes by a ferocious wild animal. In order to escape the beast the traveler hides in an empty well, but at the bottom of the well he sees a dragon with its jaws open, ready to devour him. The poor fellow does not dare to climb out because he is afraid of being eaten by the rapacious beast, neither does he dare drop to the bottom of the well for fear of being eaten by the dragon.
So he seizes hold of a branch of a bush that is growing in the crevices of the well and clings on to it. His arms grow weak and he knows that he will soon have to resign himself to the death that awaits him on either side. Yet he still clings on, and while he is holding on to the branch he looks around and sees that two mice, one black and one white, are steadily working their way round the bush he is hanging from, gnawing away at it. Sooner or later they will eat through it and the branch will snap, and he will fall into the jaws of the dragon. The traveler sees this and knows that he will inevitably perish. But while he is still hanging there he sees some drops of honey on the leaves of the bush, stretches out his tongue and licks them.
In the same way I am clinging to the tree of life, knowing full well that the dragon of death inevitably awaits me, ready to tear me to pieces, and I cannot understand how I have fallen into this torment. And I try licking the honey that once consoled me, but it no longer gives me pleasure. The white mouse and the black mouse – day and night – are gnawing at the branch from which I am hanging. I can see the dragon clearly and the honey no longer tastes sweet. I can see only one thing; the inescapable dragon and the mice, and I cannot tear my eyes away from them. And this is no fable but the truth, the truth that is irrefutable and intelligible to everyone.
The delusion of the joys of life that had formerly stifled my fear of the dragon no longer deceived me. No matter how many times I am told: you cannot understand the meaning of life, do not thinking about it but live, I cannot do so because I have already done it for too long. Now I cannot help seeing day and night chasing me and leading me to my death. This is all I can see because it is the only truth. All the rest is a lie.
Those two drops of honey, which more than all else had diverted my eyes from the cruel truth, my love for my family and for my writing, which I called art – I no longer found sweet.
– Leo Tolstoy
People talk about how wonderful the world seems to children, and that’s true enough. But children think they will grow into it and understand it, and I know very well that I will not, and would not if I had a dozen lives.
– Marilynne Robinson
I have an immoderate passion for water; for the sea, though so vast, so restless, so beyond one’s comprehension; for rivers, beautiful, yet fugitive and elusive; but especially for marshes, teeming with all that mysterious life of the creatures that haunt them. A marsh is a whole world within a world, a different world, with a life of its own, with its own permanent denizens, its passing visitors, its voices, its sounds, its own strange mystery.
– Guy de Maupassant
There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning — devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work… In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves. One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion.
– Simone de Beauvoir, The Coming of Age
Strive to become the true human being:
one who knows love, one who knows pain.
Be full, be humble, be utterly silent,
be the bowl of wine passed from hand to hand.
– Khwaja Abdullah Ansari
You still have a lot of time to make yourself be what you want.
– S.E. Hinton / The Outsiders
I want to start a literary cafe bakery and call it Pulitzer Pies.
– Sean Thomas Dougherty
The conscious mind allows itself to be trained like a parrot, but the unconscious does not.
– CG Jung
It’s okay to feel sad and grateful at the same time. Or annoyed and grateful. Or anxious and grateful. Or any other combination of emotions along with gratitude. There’s enough space for all of it. As Megan Devine said, “Gratitude isn’t Tylenol for life.” Gratitude, when you allow it to sit next to all the hard things that it doesn’t fix, has room for everything to just be what it is. Gratitude can help you carry what feels too heavy.
– Heidi Barr
…what shall we say about god? there is no language to speak of god, but we do have many languages to speak with god. if god is one, one word will suffice. if there is more than one god, there are many languages that contain more than one word. if god is everything that exists, then any word is a good word. we choose the word we wish to say to god, and if we say it by embracing the neighbor, that word becomes the one chosen by god…
– hune margulies
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
I hate men who are afraid of women’s strength.
– Anaïs Nin
A phrase much used in political circles in this country is “playing into the hands of”. It is a sort of charm or incantation to silence uncomfortable truths.
– George Orwell
I trust there is a healing process
going on in my unconscious.
If I can keep in touch with it,
my life flows forward;
I constantly open to what
I could never have imagined.
– Marion Woodman, Coming Home to Myself
Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, a potting shed, a wall where peaches ripen, than to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.
– Virginia Woolf
The secret of a good old age
is simply an honorable pact with solitude.
– Gabriel García Márquez
The next time you are boiling over with negative emotion, try to apply the wisdom of the Buddha’s teachings. Meditate on the commonality you share in this emotion with all other beings. Turn your mind to the five skandhas to investigate: where is this self that has been hurt? Meditate on the Four Immeasurables recognizing that the object of your negative emotion is caught up in suffering just as are you. Wish them happiness and freedom from suffering. Pray that the karma clears. If you are able to turn around one negative emotion in one session you have found the greatest power, wisdom and skillful means you could ever find. To work through such a destructive force is the greatest power that exists in the universe. It is the blessing of the teachings, and the legacy and gift of the Buddha.
– Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche
Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.
– Albert Einstein
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
– George Orwell
Truth is not what you want it to be; it is what it is, and you must bend to its power or live a lie.
– Miyamoto Musashi
I want to read more about poets who changed their poetics and how and why they did—poets who at some point learned or taught themselves to write differently.
– Jessica Johnson
Parallel to compassion, the Buddhist teachings emphasize loving-kindness – the wish for others to have happiness and the causes of happiness. A traditional way of generating loving-kindness begins by looking at our own constant longing for happiness and its causes. Then we contemplate how all others have this same longing, every bit as intense as our own. When we understand that we are no different form other beings in this way, we see how unreasonable it is to care so much more about ourselves than others. We do so only out of sheer habit – ignorant habit. At that point, once we’ve shed some light on our habit, we turn our mind toward others, wishing them happiness as much as we wish it for ourselves. Then, in our daily lives, we try to behave in accord with this wish, being being kind with our actions, in our speech, and in our thoughts.
– Dzigar Kongtrol Rinpoche
Becoming a writer is mainly a matter of cultivating a writer’s temperament.
– Dorothea Brande
What is a poem but a gesture of reaching?
– Claire Schwartz
Es giebt Wahrheiten aber keine Wahrheit.
[There are truths, but no truth.]
– Robert Musil
To look at literature from life is to think of it as a closed and airless world; in contrast, to look at life from literature allows you to perceive the chaos of experience, the lack of form and meaning, allowing you to endure life.
– Ricardo Piglia, The Diaries of Emilio Renzi
Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Preservation of one’s own culture does not require contempt or disrespect for other cultures.
– Cesar Chavez
No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literacy or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race.
– Richard P. Feynman
Each day when you wake in the morning, devote time to rising up against gravity. Hatha yoga counters its downward drag, the quintessential anti-gravity pose being the cobra, where the spine and head are drawn upward from the horizontal…
But wait, countering gravity is not just a matter of lifting muscles, organs, and bones. Each and every day, we must do a kind of psychic lifting to alleviate the crush of deleterious thoughts, dark memories and entrenched beliefs. In our DNA, we each bear the weight of historical karma, generational trauma, and the burden of the old way of doing things…
Unfasten the ropes, the ties, the fixtures that hold you down. Uphold goodness and kindness. Transcend fixed belief and literal mindedness. The goal is to be light and spacious, to throw off the dead weight of hatred, prejudice, bigotry, and injustice. So like the classic levitating yogi, rise above gravity’s pull. Elevate above the burdensome beliefs that hold you down.
– Tias Little
A grain of poetry suffices to season a century.
– José Martí
It has taken me years of struggle, hard work, and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence.
– Isadora Duncan
the inexhaustible pages of nature … written over and over uncountable times, written in characters of every size and color, sentences composed of sentences, every part of a character a sentence.
– Bill McKibben
I discovered that I need to not know what I’m thinking—if I become conscious of what I’m thinking, I can no longer think, I can only see myself think. When I say ‘think’ I’m referring to the way I dream words. But thought needs to be a feeling.
– Clarice Lispector (tr. Lorenz)
Fringelands
Those at the fringes
feel the draught. Their maps rolled up
then unrolled again,
they dig their heels in
further than they should and find
they can’t free themselves.
Dear broken houses,
fallen tenements, statues
without heads, darlings,
won’t you sing for us?
Finally we have captured the whole situation: we have everything we need, and there is nothing more to get…
– Chogyam Trungpa
Here’s the root cause of the culture war from my POV:
What’s understood & experienced as liberating from one stage of development is understood & experienced as repressive from another stage.
Ex: From the Pluralistic stage of development the inclusion of a diversity of human identities is inherently super liberating.
From the mythical-fundamentalist stage of development this looks like the breakdown of the core integrity of one’s most valued traditions.
– @VinceFHorn
Do not let the word “mystic” scare you off. It simply means one who has moved from mere belief systems or belonging systems to actual inner experience.
– Richard Rohr
we all got a little Barbie in us (the microplastics)
– erika mack
My interest in writing brought me to the twentieth-century modernists and Chinese poetry; and my thoughts on nature and wilderness brought me to Taoism and then to Zen.
– Gary Snyder
This fatigue I feel when I am not with you is so enormous that it is like what God must have felt at the beginning of the world, seeing all the world uncreated, formless, and calling to be created.
– Anaïs Nin
They walked along in that wide, peaceful, whispering hush of the sea that gives every sound, near or far, some mysterious importance.
– Thomas Mann
dreams drifting
over fertile fields
whispering as they pass
– Onitsura
I Want to Love You in Analogue
– Paula Harris
Shame is a soul-eating emotion.
– Carl Jung
You will learn at your own expense that in life’s great journey you will meet many masks and few faces.
– Luigi Pirandello
One of the marks of major literature is its uncanny ability to evoke endlessly diverse readings.
– Harold Bloom
My one reader, you reading this book, who are you?
– Muriel Rukeyser
All those copperheads you took for care.
– Vievee Francis
Nature
is so much more than I can stand but
its indifference makes more sense to me
than yours.
– Vievee Francis
Tobacco, sugar, alcohol: these are the great addictive and destroying drugs, and they are the least interfered with, and the most commercialized.
The psychedelics: no claim of addiction was ever made, even by their critics.
– Terence McKenna
I don’t want to be anything today; tomorrow, we’ll see.
– George Seferis
The unconscious has treasures that consciousness has no idea of. If you take your own imagery and allow it to transform as it wants, it will go exactly where it needs to be. Forcing an image that is not your own does nothing toward healing because you’re not surrendering.
– Marion Woodman
Why should we build our happiness on the opinons of others, when we can find it in our own hearts ?
– Jean Jacques Rousseau
Those people who treat politics and morality separately will never understand either of them.
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau
If someone is willing to look at himself or herself, to explore and practice wakefulness on the spot, he or she is a warrior.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Leave definitiveness to the undecided; we don’t need it.
– Luce Irigaray
We want to protect our aspirations and the gold within them, making sure that they’re not hijacked by the inner critic and over-efforting.
– Dawn Scott
Not everyone wants this conventional little life you’re rowing your boat toward. I like my river of fire…I’m not afraid.
– Zadie Smith
Inner authentic presence comes from exchanging yourself with others, from being able to regard other people as yourself, generously and without fixation. So the inner merit that brings inner authentic presence is the experience of nonfixed mind, mind without fixation.
When you meet a person with authentic presence, you find he has an overwhelming genuineness, which might be somewhat frightening because it is so true and honest and real. You experience a sense of command radiating from the person of inner authentic presence.
Although that person might be a garbage collector or a taxi driver, still he or she has an uplifted quality, which magnetizes you and commands your attention. This is not just charisma. The person with inner authentic presence has worked on himself and made a thorough and proper journey. He has earned authentic presence by letting go, and by giving up personal comfort and fixed mind.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Oh, how one wishes to escape from the meaningless dullness of human eloquence, from all those sublime phrases, to take refuge in nature, or in the wordlessness of sound sleep, of true music, or of a human understanding rendered speechless by emotion!
– Boris Pasternak
The stars do not blow away as we do.
– Linda Gregg
A good list of words can breed a poem. Even if you sit down with zero ideas.
– Sean Thomas Dougherty
I don’t think most people understand me, but that is life.
– Harold Bloom
We do not choose to become freedom fighters, the freedom fight chooses us. The freedom fight has chosen you. The freedom fight has chosen every single library professional in the country.
– Dr. Ibram X. Kendi
In the meantime, let me stroll and pick wild berries.
– Hölderlin
Only mystery allows us to live,
only mystery.
– Federico García Lorca
I never thought we’d still be in climate denial as a society at this point. Turns out I was optimistic. I’m deeply disappointed in our society, in our political system, in both garbage corporate parties, in the Biden admin which is a big part of the problem despite knowing better.
– Peter Kalmus
Supreme happiness consists in self-content.
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The age of nations is passed. The question before us now, if we would not perish, is to shake off old prejudices, and to build the earth.
– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Oh to have the confidence of a white man with an acoustic guitar at a party where not a singular person has asked him to play.
– Brianna Parkins
I don’t know about other people, but when I wake up in the morning and put my shoes on, I think, Jesus Christ, now what?
– Charles Bukowski
Do not mistake me for my mask. You see light dappling on the water and forget the deep, cold dark beneath.
– Patrick Rothfuss
Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern recognition.
– Marshall McLuhan
You are the Truth from foot to brow. Now, what else would you like to know?
– Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi
I was born a poet and an artist,
like the one who is born lame,
like the one who is born blind,
like the one who is born handsome.
Leave my wings in their place
that I answer you,
I’ll fly well.
– Federico Garcia Lorca
In his text, the writer sets up a house… For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.
– Adorno
the faded color
of his smile
wooden buddha
– Mike Rehling
Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs.
– Charlotte Bronte
very alone
in the wildwood
my friend the moon
– Buson
The secret of a full life is to live and and be open to others as if tomorrow they might not be there as if you might not be there. This eliminates the vice of procrastination, the sin of putting things off, the missed communions.
– Anais Nin
Liberation from hunger and misery does not necessarily converge with liberation from servitude and degradation; there is no automatic, developmental relation between labour and interaction.
– Habermas
The melancholy of a life too short for so many libraries. When you think you have fully apprehended anything, the thing just like an iceberg has a little piece on the outside and shows it to you, and the enormous rest is beyond your limit.
– Julio Cortazar
“Everything fades the minute you’re somewhere else,” she says. It’s a mistake to say these things. “It fades.”
– Jennifer Egan
She is right. I must remember that women like to think of the act of love as a thing, ‘our love.’ There were three of us, like a family, [she] and I and our love.
– Walker Percy
Then let life be. Just as it is.
Let the gardens be – just as they are.
Plop yourself down in nature, somewhere near a
body of water – a lake, a pond, a river, a stream.
Before you pick up a book or your smart-phone,
look around you.
Relax. Relax into summer.
Relax into the present moment.
– Cheryl Wilfong
Is life a wound which dreams of being healed?
– Erica Jong
The core function of the memory system could in fact be to imagine the future (…) The system is not designed to perfectly replay past events. (…) It is designed to flexibly construct future scenarios in our minds. As a result, memory also ends up being a reconstructive process, and occasionally, details are deleted and others inserted.
– Tali Sharot
The imagination of man is made in the image of the imagination of God.
– George MacDonald
There are two great systems in the body of man: the tree of life, which is the arterial with its roots in the heart; and, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, i.e. the nervous system, which has its roots in the brain. These two “trees” are physical manifestations of a complicated network of branching energy currents in the aura or superphysical bodies.
– Manly P. Hall
It’s a most distressing affliction to have a sentimental heart and a skeptical mind.
– Naguib Mahfouz
Bohm believes that our almost universal tendency to fragment the world and ignore the dynamic interconnectedness of all things is responsible for many of our problems, not only in science but in our lives and our society as well. For instance, we believe we can extract the valuable parts of the earth without affecting the whole. We believe it is possible to treat parts of our body and not be concerned with the whole. We believe we can deal with various problems in our society, such as crime, poverty, and drug addiction, without addressing the problems in our society as a whole, and so on. In his writings Bohm argues passionately that our current way of fragmenting the world into parts not only doesn’t work, but may even lead to our extinction.
– Michael Talbot
It’s a most distressing affliction to have a sentimental heart and a skeptical mind.
– Naguib Mahfouz
Medicine rests upon four pillars—philosophy, astronomy, alchemy, and ethics. The first pillar is the philosophical knowledge of earth and water; the second, astronomy, supplies its full understanding of that which is of fiery and airy nature; the third is an adequate explanation of the properties of all the four elements—that is to say, of the whole cosmos—and an introduction into the art of their transformations; and finally, the fourth shows the physician those virtues which must stay with him up until his death, and it should support and complete the three other pillars.
– Paracelsus
“Do you ever dream of land?” The whale asks the tuna.
“No.” Says the tuna, “Do you?”
“I have never seen it.” Says the whale, “but deep in my body, I remember it.”
“Why do you care,” says the tuna, “if you will never see it.”
“There are bones in my body built to walk through the forests and the mountains.” Says the whale.
“They will disappear.” Says the tuna, “one day, your body will forget the forests and the mountains.”
“Maybe I don’t want to forget,” Says the whale, “The forests were once my home.”
“I have seen the forests.” Whispers the salmon, almost to itself.
“Tell me what you have seen,” says the whale.
“The forests spawned me.” Says the salmon. “They sent me to the ocean to grow. When I am fat with the bounty of the ocean, I will bring it home.”
“Why would the forests seek the bounty of the oceans?” Asks the whale. “They have bounty of their own.”
“You forget,” says the salmon, “That the oceans were once their home.”
– Release the Bees
Insist on believing that good will prevail; that the work will get done; that there will again be love. We have to want to get up in the morning for the good mornings to arrive.
– Tennessee Williams
JUNE
The June bug
on the screen door
whirs like a small,
ugly machine,
and a chorus of frogs
and crickets drones like Musak
at all the windows.
What we don’t quite see
comforts us.
Blink of lightning, grumble
of thunder – just the heat
clearing its throat.
– Linda Pastan
So often we experience depression as a dark herald with a grim countenance that tells us something in us is dying, has reached its end, is played out & yet it really is announcing something new, something larger, something developmental that wishes greater play in our life.
– James Hollis
it’s important to understand
that nothing is consistently
right or wrong at all times
– Liezi
there are things sadder
than you and i. some people
do not even touch
– Sonia Sanchez
When you understand interconnectedness, it makes you more afraid of hating than of dying.
– Bob Thurman
All success is a lagging indicator. All the good stuff (and bad stuff) in your life is downstream from choices made long before.
– @RyanHoliday
Life rewards action, not intelligence.
Many brilliant people talk themselves out of getting started, and being smart doesn’t help very much without the courage to act.
You can’t win if you’re not in the game.
– @JamesClear
Looking at beauty in the world , is the first step of purifying the mind.
– Amit Ray
A marriage is more likely to succeed if the woman follows her own star and remains conscious of her wholeness than if she constantly concerns herself with her husband’s star and his wholeness.
– Carl Jung
Still, for that little while, we visited
our possible life.
– Jack Gilbert
a poet is like a bat
intertextual & cavey
& nothing, I mean no percentage
learning to ‘cope’
– Ellen Welcker
The human race exaggerates
everything: its heroes,
its enemies,
its importance.
– Charles Bukowski
Language is inadequate. We still see through the glass darkly. Sometimes, poetry is to hold up the language and say, “See? It is broken.”
– J-T Kelly
I am flying today.
I am not tired today.
I am a motor.
I am cramming in the sugar.
I am running up the hallways.
I am squeezing out the milk.
I am dissecting the dictionary.
I am God, la de dah.
– Anne Sexton
now that no one loves me angels
unhook each precious painting
to set the trees inside them free
– Katharine Whitcomb
The world only goes round by misunderstanding. It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.
– Baudelaire, trans. Christopher Isherwood
Are not the mountains, waves, and skies as much a part of me, as I of them?
– George Gordon Byron
We should challenge ourselves. It makes us stronger. gives us clearer insight — better perception
– Alice Coltrane
Once you are my friend, I am responsible for you.
– Antoine de Saint-Exupery
I have always loved a window, especially an open one.
– Wendell Berry
Your words are written
in water.
Endless, detached, unending.
– Ezra Pound
The words emerge from her body without her realizing it, as if she were being visited by the memory of a language long forsaken.
– Marguerite Duras
When you look out at the stars, you are in roughly the same situation or relationship to what you are seeing as when a physicist studies the constitution of the atom.
– Alan Watts
The basic thing about analysis is that people finally realise that they’ve been talking nonsense at full volume for years.
– Jacques Lacan
There comes …a longing never to travel again except on foot.
– Wendell Berry
What similarities— / … / held us all together / or made us all just one?
– Elizabeth Bishop
any shadow still means light
– Jake Skeets
But paradise is locked and bolted….We must make a journey around the world to see if a back door has perhaps been left open.
– Heinrich von Kleist
The oldest task in human history is to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.
– Aldo Leopold
Crypto-animist Introvert Activism
a haibun
Every week for about a decade some of us at school have been standing at lunch hour to protest drones, racism, state killing, the death of species & so on. We stand under a live oak while people walk by on their way to lunch. We hold up the signs. It’s an absurd situation & it changes nothing.
Sometimes the good doctor Ali brings a boom box with Bob Marley & we dance ineptly on the pavement. The changes fall together. Positive & negative fall together as Bob Marley sustains us near the tree. Cesar Vallejo dances as a flea on the back of a squirrel. Blake & Baraka dance as lithophilic microbes inside the rock. We have no proof that they don’t. The science moths dance in the live oak & go about their work of being powdery. The protest is absurd but i admire these forms of absurdity. When the revolution comes, the polite white mothers in the Moraga Safeway will still be shopping for sugary cereals & barbeque sauce. When the time comes, some will rise & some will dance & some will lay our bodies down.
– Brenda Hillman
I am tired // of finding my way.
– Lauren Camp
The older I get, the more I find that you can only live with those who free you, who love you with an affection that is as light to bear as it is strong to feel.
Today’s life is too hard, too bitter, too anemic, for us to undergo new bondages, from whom we love. This is how I am your friend, I love your happiness, your freedom, Your adventure in one word, and I would like to be for you the companion we are sure of, always.
– Albert Camus
Beware that twitch of dialectic action:
the great myths flounder in contradiction,
while pretending to be simply as a black and white flower
– Anne Carson
Every time we feel a feeling all the way through to its dissolution, we affirm that we aren’t the stories it has told about us. Trapped feelings and their associated subconscious limiting beliefs about who we are are the root system of chronic thoughts. When we are able to feel through our feelings, we liberate ourselves so deeply from the grip of chronic emotional discomfort, reactions, unhelpful patterns and limiting and untrue old ideas we’ve had about ourselves. To feel through our old trapped feelings is a profound gateway to connection with wider consciousness. To feel all the way through any old feeling is a death experience for our ego and a birth experience into a wider realm for our consciousness. The path of feeling through our emotional pain while not getting stuck in its narratives is a profound path of liberation. As we untie ourselves we untie others from the trappings of old pain that kept our awareness confined, reactive and narrow. As we change the energetic arrangement in ourselves through offering old pain into the resolution of love, the energetic arrangement in all those with whom we are connected is also moved in more love-ward patterning. We are energetically linked and there is awareness locked down in our trapped energy. Our liberation influences the liberation of all. Unfold the hidden love note of your pain and receive a wider, more spacious and revitalized perspective of embodied awareness.
– Chelan Harkin
My subject’s
still the wind still
difficult to
present
being invisible:
nevertheless should I
presume it not
I’d be compelled
to say
how the honeysuckle bushlimbs
wave themselves:
difficult
beyond presumption
– A. R. Ammons
from Citizen, I
A woman you do not know wants to join you for lunch. You are visiting her campus. In the café you both order the Caesar salad. This overlap is not the beginning of anything because she immediately points out that she, her father, her grandfather, and you, all attended the same college. She wanted her son to go there as well, but because of affirmative action or minority something—she is not sure what they are calling it these days and weren’t they supposed to get rid of it?—her son wasn’t accepted. You are not sure if you are meant to apologize for this failure of your alma mater’s legacy program; instead you ask where he ended up. The prestigious school she mentions doesn’t seem to assuage her irritation. This exchange, in effect, ends your lunch. The salads arrive.
/
A friend argues that Americans battle between the “historical self” and the “self self.” By this she means you mostly interact as friends with mutual interest and, for the most part, compatible personalities; however, sometimes your historical selves, her white self and your black self, or your white self and her black self, arrive with the full force of your American positioning. Then you are standing face-to-face in seconds that wipe the affable smiles right from your mouths. What did you say? Instantaneously your attachment seems fragile, tenuous, subject to any transgression of your historical self. And though your joined personal histories are supposed to save you from misunderstandings, they usually cause you to understand all too well what is meant.
– Claudia Rankine
Kelp
How easy it is to lose oneself
in a kelp forest. Between
canopy leaves, sunlight filters thru
the water surface; nutrients
bring life where there’d other-
wise be barren sea; a vast eco-
system breathes. Each
being being
being’s link.
– Jeffrey Yang
To live in a society that promotes the maintenance and perpetuation of separation is to live in a system that regulates life, that feeds an insatiable suffering and implants a multi-level madness in the human mind.
To experience chronic disconnection in ourselves that we don’t know how to solve is a prison of existential helplessness, a torture of vanities and a horror.
To the degree we believe we are separate is the degree to which we’re exploitive because we experience an incompleteness, an insufficiency in ourselves that while ultimately un-true, we have been deeply trained in. We compulsively assume the remedy is to pull from the outer world to satiate the insatiable which is really a deep misperception of ourselves sewn into us by our wounded experiences that were expressions of separation.
Reverence is true connection. Irreverence is separation. Wonder lives in the land beyond judgement, where our incessant fault finding and fixing of ourselves and the world ceases and a landscape of spaciousness is introduced in your being that allows things to be as they are. This open, accepting ease isn’t passive or permissive, which are still attitudes that come from avoidance, but is a state of relating that rejoins us with the seamless fabric of reality, of oneness, we’ve always been.
This oneness is an outcome of embrace of the whole self. To bypass our pain to attempt to shortcut our process is just more avoidance and rejection, though to enable and be enmeshed in our pain through believing its narratives is to stay stuck in its thick mud. The experience of oneness is the blossom of human consciousness that comes from the embrace of our entirety.
– Chelan Harkin
You cannot craft yourself a guise and then protest when you are not recognized.
– Jennifer A Sutherland
The peonies, too heavy with their beauty,
slump to the ground. I had hoped
they would live forever but ever so slowly
day by day they’re becoming the soil of their birth
with a faint tang of deliquescence around them.
Next June they’ll somehow remember to come alive again,
a little trick we have or have not learned.
– Jim Harrison
If we want there to be peace in the world,
we have to be brave enough to soften what is rigid in our hearts,
to find the soft spot and stay with it.
– Pema Chodron
It’s not as if our lives are divided simply into light and dark. There’s a shadowy middle ground. Recognizing and understanding the shadows is what a healthy intelligence does.
– Haruki Murakami
Poetry is of absolutely no practical use, they said. None whatsoever.
– Pádraig Ó Tuama
He was moving through a new order of creation, of which few men had ever dreamed. Beyond the realms of sea and land and air and space lay the realms of fire, which he alone had been privileged to glimpse. It was too much to expect that he would also understand.
– Arthur C. Clarke
Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?
– Ronald Regan, 1980
There is nothing which can better deserve
our patronage than the promotion of science
and literature. Knowledge is in every country
the surest basis of public happiness.
– George Washington, 1790
The task of the second half of life is, quite simply, to find the actual contents that this container was meant to hold and deliver.
– Richard Rohr
Whether we realize it or not, we are all dreaming the world into being. What we’re engaging in is not the sleeping act we’re so familiar with, but rather a type of dreaming we do with our eyes open. When we’re unaware that we share the power to co-create reality with the universe itself, that power slips away from us, causing our dream to become a nightmare. We begin to feel we’re the victims of an unknown and frightening creation that we’re unable to influence, and events seem to control and trap us. That only way to end this dreadful reality is to awaken to the fact that it too is a dream — and then recognize our ability to write a better story, one that the universe will work with us to manifest.
– Alberto Villoldo
It is everyone I haven’t told, everyone I embrace so secretly, every word that remained caught on the spindle afraid for the love it might weave.
– Richard Jackson, What It Is
Our thoughts, feelings, processes, and unconscious beliefs have an energy that is hidden in the work. This unseen, unmeasurable force gives each piece its magnetism. A completed project is only made up of our intention and our experiments around it. Remove intention and all that’s left is the ornamental shell.
Though the artist may have a number of goals and motivations, there is only one intention. This is the grand gesture of the work.
It is not an exercise of thought, a goal to be set, or a means of commodification. It is a truth that lives inside you. Through your living it, that truth becomes embedded in the work. If the work doesn’t represent who you are and what you’re living, how can it hold an energetic charge?
An intention is more than a conscious purpose, it’s the congruence of that purpose. It requires an alignment of all aspects of one’s self. Of conscious thought and unconscious beliefs, of capabilities and commitment, of actions when working and not. It’s a state of living in harmonic agreement with oneself.
– Rick Rubin
To me the important thing is not to offer any specific hope of betterment but, by offering an imagined but persuasive alternative reality, to dislodge my mind, and so the reader’s mind, from the lazy, timorous habit of thinking that the way we live now is the only way people can live. It is that inertia that allows the institutions of injustice to continue unquestioned.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
Some things I say are prayers and others poems. I tell you now that I don’t know the difference.
– Deborah Digges
I believe our liberation lies in the negotiation. Hope lies in texts that can accommodate and keep alive our intricacy, our complexity, and our density against the onslaught of the terrifying, sweeping simplifications of fascism.
– Arundhati Roy
I can do no more than hold, the tiny soaring birds,
the moons of gold. Others have the world,
for better or worse; I have this half-dark, and the toil of verse.
– Jorge Luis Borges
Without great people, even great ideas are useless.
– @simonsinek
It was resistance
Every time some queer kid
stays alive because they saw us
read us
discovered the archive
– Pamela Sneed
There must be a totally different movement, a non-accumulative perception-action.
– Krishnamurti
Living successfully in a world of systems requires more of us than our ability to calculate. It requires our full humanity–our rationality, our ability to sort out truth from falsehood, our intuition, our compassion, our vision, and our morality.
– Donella Meadows
Sometimes a man watches the sky.
He’s not sure why
He knows he knows nothing about skies
Or clouds or why the sun shines sometimes
& why it doesn’t other times
He went to school & teachers
Told him about this and that
But what they told him has nothing
To do with what he sees
– @johnguzlowski
I had to do something to lift me out of these storms.
– Damon Albarn
After nothing but pain and fear and the problems of guilt, your book burst over me and made me want to live…
– Anne Sexton
Our society is run by a managerial bureaucracy, by professional politicians, and people are motivated by mass suggestion.
– Erich Fromm
How it should be in Heaven
I know, for I was there.
By its river. Listening to its birds.
In its season: in summer,
shortly after sunrise.
I would get up and run to
my thousand works
And the garden was super terrestrial, owned by
imagination.
– Czeslaw Milosz
If you’re not making someone else’s life better, you’re wasting your time.
– Will Smith
Your parents raised you the best they knew how to. They gave you all these blocks and stacked them neatly. These blocks contained morals, values, rules, law and so much more. One day the child grows and kicks those blocks all over the place- don’t worry. After a short period of time, they go to those blocks and rebuild them in a manner that works for their life.
– Tribal Whispers
He had been driven from place to place, from job to job, for fifteen years because of something he could not alter any more than he could change the color of his eyes.
– Alan L Hart
In a well governed state, there are few punishments, not because there are many pardons, but because criminals are rare; it is when a state is in decay that the multitude of crimes is a guarantee of impunity.
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau
It was Julian of Norwich who valiantly declared that the smallest thing would not be forgotten. I find it a wonderful comfort to remember that whenever I feel small and overwhelmed.
– Gunilla Norris
Life is nothing more than an electron searching for a place to rest.
– Albert Sczent-Gyorgyi
Expand beyond the expectations imposed upon you, or assumed by you, and look beyond the daily norm of your life. Be willing to leave behind convenient truths to eventually find what you’re looking for – even if it’s to discover something unpleasant.
– Stephen Schettini
The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself as possible.
– William S. Burroughs
If only we could see in advance all the harm that can come from the good we think we are doing.
– Luigi Pirandello
When truth ceases to be dynamic, it bemes the frozen sepulcher of what was real.
– George Gorman
A drop of water, if it could write out its own history, would explain the universe to us.
– Lucy Larcom
Let mystery have its place in you; do not be always turning up your whole soil with the plowshare of self-examination, but leave a little fallow corner in your heart ready for any seed the winds may bring, and reserve a nook of shadow for the passing bird; keep a place in your heart for the unexpected guests, an altar for the unknown God. Then if a bird sing among your branches, do not be too eager to tame it. If you are conscious of something new – thought or feeling, wakening in the depths of your being – do not be in a hurry to let in light upon it, to look at it; let the springing germ have the protection of being forgotten, hedge it round with quiet, and do not break in upon its darkness.
– Henri-Frédéric Amiel
may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
– Lucille Clifton
You adapt yourself, Paul Klee said, to the contents of the paintbox. Adapting yourself to the contents of the paintbox, he said, is more important than nature and its study. The painter, in other words, does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents.
One of the few things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Don’t hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The very impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful; it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.
– Annie Dillard
As human beings we have the potential to disentangle ourselves from old habits, and the potential to love and care about each other. We have the capacity to wake up and live consciously, but, you may have noticed, we also have a strong inclination to stay asleep. It’s as if we are always at a crossroad, continuously choosing which way to go. Moment by moment we can choose to go toward further clarity and happiness or toward confusion and pain.
– Pema Chodron, Crossroads
Hush, listen, this
Song has a thousand verses.
– Joan Larkin
Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing.
– Georgia O’Keeffe
Today I feel that puff of rage
That continuous assault
And I want to stand up and testify
– Pamela Sneed
If beauty comes
it comes startled, hiding scars,
out of what barely can be endured.
– Stephen Dunn
I had only to open my bedroom window, and blue air, love, and flowers entered with her
– Marc Chagall
Even when we’re with someone we love, we’re foolish enough to think of her body and soul as being separate. To stand before the person we love is not the same as loving her true self, for we are only apt to regard her physical beauty as the indispensable mode of her existence. When time and space intervene, it is possible to be deceived by both, but on the other hand, it is equally possible to draw twice as close to her real self.
– Yukio Mishima
As one expects of a lyric poet,
We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.
– Louise Glück
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
He belonged to that category of intelligent men who have lived idle lives and who seek a consolation and perhaps an excuse in the idea that this idleness offers their intelligence objects just as worthy of interest as art or scholarship could offer…
– Proust, tr. Lydia Davis
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
I used to live in a room full of mirrors;
all I could see was me.
I take my spirit and I crash my mirrors,
now the whole world is here for me to see.
– Jimi Hendrix
I think, though, that one of the poet’s jobs—of many—is to dwell in the space of forever-unknowing, not with the intent to seek an answer, but to allow oneself better ways of understanding mystery and wonder. The poet does not give us answers. The poet gives us new ways to live and see and love without answers.
– Devin Kelly
Jung tells us that the image of each man’s wholeness and potential lies in his own unconscious and not in the minds of others.
– Russell Lockhart
I’ve said it before:
It should not have to happen to you for you to care.
– J.S. Park
Balance is more likely to come by exploring our faults and by discovering the treasure in our shadow than by trying to deny them or overcome them with shallow techniques.
– Bud Harris
In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.
– Cormac McCarthy
green with envy
the other hiker finds
a lucky clover
– JL Huffman
Kindness doesn’t mean just being nice or pretending like you care. Cultivating kindness means opening your heart, with patience and attention, to your painful feelings—and to other people’s painful feelings.
– Kimberly Brown
The child in us may often be our treasure—so long as he’s in the baby (and not in the driver) seat.
– @PicoIyer
I would claim for Jung that he did much for resurrecting feeling and separating it from the collective prejudices.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
I haven’t learned yet to speak as I should, calmly.
– Czesław Miłosz
You ever notice how billionaires are absolutely not your friends?
– D. A. Powell
We can’t do it by ourselves, but if enough of us do it, we change the cultural climate, and then the leaders follow.
– Riane Eisler
Philosophy consists mostly of kicking up a lot of dust and then complaining that you can’t see anything.
– Gottfried Leibniz
In poetry, the voice can float
– Richard Siken
an early pine
wildly growing
at my door
– Issa
You, as a human being who is of the consciousness of the rest of mankind, can move away from the old pattern of obedience and acceptance. That is the real turning point in your life.
– Krishnamurti
philosophy gives clubs to
everyone, and I prefer disarmament
– A.R. Ammons
Poetry is a lifelong war waged against ineffable beauty.
– @atticuspoetry
What poetry can, must, and will always do for us: it complicates us, it doesn’t ‘soothe.’
– Jorie Graham
I am telling you the call to arms came
as we slept and as we marched, as we questioned and as we hid / our heads in the dust of nostalgia or our spent dreams
– Vievee Francis
If you want to do great work become suspicious of explanations.
– Romeo Stevens
A culture obsessed with happiness must be in despair. Otherwise why would anyone be bothered about it at all? Anybody in this culture who watches the news and can be happy – there’s something wrong with them.
– Adam Phillips
Poets who rely on their subjects often mistake their anxieties for principles.
– Agha Shahid Ali
The patient who’s undergone psychotherapy is no longer the person he was at the beginning. That’s what a writer does as well, and how fiction works on its readers.
– Olga Tokarczuk
Last night I dreamt there was a class of researcher whose method it was to read literature but never to write a single word on it, never to talk about it with anyone, and the best of them gave no hint that they had ever heard of let alone read the books.
– Bernard T. Joy
The progress of science is strewn, like an ancient desert trail, with the bleached skeleton of discarded theories which once seemed to possess eternal life.
– Arthur Koestler
Liberal confidence in the idea of an autonomous life is now confined to the individual freedom of choice of consumers who are living off the drip-feed of contingent opportunity structures.
– Habermas
Dissatisfaction with oneself is one of the fundamental qualities of every true artist.
– Anton Chekhov
As the hours, the days, the weeks, the seasons slip by, you detach yourself from everything. You discover, with something that sometimes almost resembles exhilaration, that you are free. That nothing is weighing you down, nothing pleases or displeases you. You find, in this life exempt from wear and tear and with no thrill in it other than these suspended moments, in almost perfect happiness, fascinating, occasionally swollen by new emotions. You are living in a blessed parenthesis, in a vacuum full of promise, and from which you expect nothing. You are invisible, limpid, transparent. You no longer exist. Across the passing hours, the succession of days, the procession of the seasons, the flow of time, you survive without joy and without sadness. Without a future and without a past. Just like that: simply, self evidently, like a drop of water forming on a drinking tap on a landing.
– Georges Perec
Integration is the last stage of active imagination. At the point at which the ego gains an insight, it must make a total effort to integrate that insight into its outer life. If I am unable or unwilling to practice my new wisdom in outer world, then the active has failed.
– Jeffrey Raff
ANGUS PETER CAMPBELL
God Be with You
When you reach Mallaig
on the steamboat, God with you.
When you reach Glasgow
of the hurried streets, God with you.
When you reach London
of the golden pavements, God with you.
When you reach New York,
New York, God with you.
When you reach the Prairies,
where there is no ceilidh, God with you.
When you reach Valparaiso
of the sheep and masts, God with you.
When you reach the moon,
pale yellow on the skyline, God with you.
When you reach Outer Space
that is so far from the croft, God with you.
When you reach home, God with you.
– Kevin MacNeil
“Just go to another website.”
“Just go to another baker.”
“Just go to another tailor.”
“Just go to another barber.”
“Just go to another manicurist.”
“Just go to another masseuse.”
“Just go to another hotel.”
“Just go to another restaurant.”
“Just go to another theatre.”
“Just go to another drinking fountain.”
Just go to another realtor.”
“Just go to another bank.”
“Just go to another town.”
“Just go to another country.”
– Author unknown
Strength is the capacity to
break a chocolate bar into four pieces;
then to eat just one of them.
– Proverb
Walk your dog every day,
whether or not you have a dog.
– Paul Dudley White, M.D.
The recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making.
– William James
I paid off my student loans and worked hard to do so.
I’m not worse off because others get their student loans forgiven. In fact, I’m better off because they will have greater ability to buy groceries, pay for housing and live life with a little more dignity.
Show some grace.
– @ChrIssuesKc
i am accused of tending to the past
as if i made it,
as if i sculpted it
with my own hands. i did not.
this past was waiting for me
when i came,
a monstrous unnamed baby,
and i with my mother’s itch
took it to breast
and named it
History.
she is more human now,
learning languages everyday,
remembering faces, names and dates.
when she is strong enough to travel
on her own, beware, she will.
– Lucille Clifton
Being a body narrows you. Genetics predetermine the star of your face, the hills and valleys nourished below. I cannot be all things, as a body. As a mind, I can bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, endure all things. But my body is a full stop, a contained space, an impermanent expression of creative energy.
– Kara VanderBijl, Above Corruption
Doubt always hovers nearby, but I take photographs the way a musician hums. Looking is like breathing. So when luck turns my way and offers me a good picture, joy is surely nigh.
– Marc Riboud
I thank Love, then, for her book of rare if confusing symbols you have to live to read.
– Richard Jackson
When you write late at night
it’s like a small fire
in a clearing, it’s what
radiates and what can hurt
if you get too close to it.
– Stephen Dunn
The love of nature is the only love that does not deceive human hopes.
– Honore de Balzac
I want only to remove
whatever blocks the light,
only to clear a space
for the despised gentleness.
Je ne voudrais plus qu’éloigner
ce que nous sépare du clair,
laisser seulement la place
à la bonté dédaignée
– Jaccottet b. June 30 1925
tr. Mahon.
…When I get to my own country
I shall lie down and sleep;
I shall watch in the valleys
The long flocks of sheep.
And then I shall dream, for ever and all,
A good dream and deep.
– Hilaire Belloc
Every tree has its enemy, few have an advocate. In all my works I take the part of trees against all their enemies.
– JRR Tolkien
Recognize that your struggle and your suffering is the same as everyone else’s, I think that’s the beginning of a responsible life. Otherwise, we are in a continual savage battle with each other with no possible solution, political, social, or spiritual.
– Leonard Cohen
Without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences, and failing to achieve anything useful.
– Margaret J Wheatley
Every creature is a glittering, glistening mirror of Divinity.
– Hildegard of Bingen
Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand.
– Simone Adolphine Weil
Answer July
Answer July—
Where is the Bee—
Where is the Blush—
Where is the Hay?
Ah, said July—
Where is the Seed—
Where is the Bud—
Where is the May—
Answer Thee—Me—
Nay—said the May—
Show me the Snow—
Show me the Bells—
Show me the Jay!
Quibbled the Jay—
Where be the Maize—
Where be the Haze—
Where be the Bur?
Here—said the Year—
– Emily Dickinson
The absolute Nature can
Only be recognized by direct experience.
Our Meditation must therefore
Be free from the work of the intellect.
– Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche
Walking is among the most life-affirming of human activities…. It is the living proof that repetition — placing one foot in front of the other — can in fact allow a person to make progress.
– John Kaag
What you have to decide, really, is whether to be crazy or not, and I haven’t the stamina, the pure, seething will, for prolonged craziness.
– Alice Munro, Bardon Bus
I am still more or less sane because of my evening reading.
– Rabih Alameddine
I guess we’ll all just write into the void and hope someone catches the echo of our words, and hope we catch the echo of theirs.
– @poseofpower
I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.
– Neil Gaiman
All writers without exception are scared to death. Some simply hide it better than others.
– Dick Simon
the blue volutes of the morning sea and, enveloped in them, phrases of music half emerging like the shoulders of water-nymphs
– Marcel Proust
Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.
– Jules Renard
A great teacher of English at Swarthmore College, the late Harold Goddard, wrote in his book The Meaning of Shakespeare, “The destiny of the world is determined less by the battles that are lost and won than by the stories it loves and believes in.”
– Helen Luke, The Way of Woman
Why has there never been a holiday where peace is celebrated all throughout the world?
– Stevie Wonder
If black is the queen of colors, white, then, must be the mother of all forms, for black is still a commission and white is sheer nothingness.
– Yu Kwang-chung
We demand. Not rabble and rabid, not shadow, not terror,
the neighbors stand and say: The world is ours, ours, ours.
– Minnie Bruce Pratt
Someday you’ll need to take down a worn- out volume and flip to that passage on the lower right- hand face, ten pages from the end, that fills you with such sweet and vicious pain.
– Richard Powers
Some of us have seen how emotional shocks—bolts from the blue—threaten and upset our psychic status quo and thereby have the potential to begin a transformative process.
– Bud Harris
Painters have a knowledge which goes beyond words. They are where musicians are. When someone blows the saxophone the sky is made of copper. When you make a watercolor you know how it feels to be the sea lying early in the day in the proximity of light.
– Etel Adnan
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
For centuries we have been spoon-fed by our teachers, by our authorities, by our books, our saints. We say, ‘Tell me all about it – what lies beyond the hills and the mountains and the earth?’ and we are satisfied with their descriptions, which means that we live on words and our life is shallow and empty. We are secondhand people. We have lived on what we have been told, either guided by our inclinations, our tendencies, or compelled to accept by circumstances and environment. We are the result of all kinds of influences and there is nothing new in us, nothing that we have discovered for ourselves; nothing original, pristine, clear.
Throughout theological history we have been assured by religious leaders that if we perform certain rituals, repeat certain prayers or mantras, conform to certain patterns, suppress our desires, control our thoughts, sublimate our passions, limit our appetites and refrain from sexual indulgence, we shall, after sufficient torture of the mind and body, find something beyond this little life. And that is what millions of so-called religious people have done through the ages, either in isolation, going off into the desert or into the mountains or a cave or wandering from village to village with a begging bowl, or, in a group, joining a monastery, forcing their minds to conform to an established pattern. But a tortured mind, a broken mind, a mind which wants to escape from all turmoil, which has denied the outer world and been made dull through discipline and conformity – such a mind, however long it seeks, will find only according to its own distortion.
– J Krishnamurti
In a soulmate we find not company, but a completed solitude.
– Robert Brault
I’m wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there; not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart; but really with it, and in it.
– Emily Brontë
Even our misfortunes are a part of our belongings.
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The pain that you feel is only temporary. The growth that you experience will last forever.
– Nicole Addison
You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetical justice to your soul and simply experience yourself.
– Albert Camus
those who love
understand
– Kabir
Nothing, sweet love,
is like it was before.
– Wislawa Szymborska
The longest word I’ve ever used in an academic paper is “epistemologicalization”. You?
– @SteveTromans
Your emotions are your strongest writing allies. And when you write from a place of real feelings, your reader will feel it, too.
– Kat Yeh
Neither we ourselves nor the world around us can be saved unless we learn to see both sides of things, learn to pull as well as push, and learn to maintain a broad and lofty view of the truth.
– Masahiro Mori
Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.
– Vladimir Nabokov
Knowledge is a lot of things, but it is definitely not power.
– Ben Marcus
She read about the perfidy of clouds that fall in love with the ground, an attraction created by charges passing between them, until the yearning grows too strong, and with a flash the cloud dies.
– Dawn Corrigan, Thunder School
Loneliness is necessary for pure poetry. When someone intrudes into the poet’s life (and any sudden personal contact, whether in the bed or in the heart, is an intrusion) the poet loses his or her balance for a moment, slips into being what he or she is, uses his or her poetry as one would use money or sympathy. The person who writes the poetry emerges, tentatively, like a hermit crab from a conch shell. The poet, for that instant, ceases to be a dead person.
– Jack Spicer
As you damned well know, we never change much in our hearts.
– J.D. Salinger
Peering out the windshield at the flat, gray desert at evening, he understood that in fact very little of what he knew mattered; and that however he might’ve felt today—if circumstances could just have been better–he would now not be allowed to feel. Perhaps he never would again. And whatever he might even have liked, bringing his full and best self to the experience, had now been taken away. So that life, as fast as this car hurtling down the side of a mountain toward the dark, seemed to be disappearing from around him. Being erased.
– Richard Ford
The World wants to know
what I am made of. I am trying
to find a way
to answer Her.
– Robin Coste Lewis
TWO RELIGIONS
When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.
– Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa.
I love religion when it asks the great questions of life, I hate religion when it comes to believe it has found all the answers.
I love religion when it seeks to serve, I hate religion when it presumes to rule on God’s behalf.
I love religion when it awakens curiosity, creativity and empathy, I hate religion when it is certain, orthodox and judgmental.
If religion does not lead us to love, it will lead us to cruelty.
If religion does not lead us to honest awakening, it will lead us to hypocrisy and trance.
If religion does not call us from our every pedestal, it is but a sandaled foot on the throat of humankind.
– Jim Rigby
For me, growing up on the East Coast meant the pleasure of seeing fireflies in the summer. But my daughter, who was born in California, had never seen one. In our travels we discovered there were fireflies in the tropical nights of Bali. After she went to bed one night, I tucked in her mosquito net, then went out and caught a few. Her eyes were closed. I put them in her net and whispered for her to wake up. They flew around inside her net until we let them out, and she was totally captivated by their luminous trails in the night. How improbable and fantastic, how unlikely to have beautiful insects with soft blinking lights—yet this is no more unlikely than our loving hearts. Our hearts shine in the same way as the fireflies, with the same light as the sun and the moon.
– Jack Kornfield
Poetry seeks out the melody of nature amid the tumult of the dictionary.
– Boris Pasternak
So hard to give a shit sometimes.
– Bette Davis
When Alice stepped through the looking glass, she entered the realm of imagination. Looking at oneself in the mirror can be a genuine source of reflection, that kind of consciousness that means knowing yourself as you truly are.
– Russell Lockhart
When Satan offers to give him all the kingdoms of the earth, Jesus refuses, but the church accepts.
– Jacques Ellul
And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.
– George Eliot
As you heal and grow, pay attention to who celebrates and who grieves.
Blossom regardless.
– Dr. Thema
Stories [and poems] never really end…even if the books like to pretend they do. Stories [and poems] always go on. They don’t end on the last page [or final stanza], any more than they begin on the first page.
– Cornelia Funke, Inkspell
Exodus from the Society of the Spectacle
To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from.
– Terry Tempest Williams
I’ve always harbored the silly illusion that I was born on the wrong side of the cosmic tracks a century too late. It’s one of my most nurturing illusions that seem to feed my urge to create and to try to make a little sense of the tragic world we all find ourselves in.
We all live in our myths. And it was Schelling who pointed out that “each truly creative individual must create his mythology for himself.” The function of our living myths is to, in the words of Joseph Campbell, “reconcile consciousness to the preconditions of its own existence; that is to say, to the nature of life.”
Though I am part of the world, the myth is my buffer to so much of the anesthetized world I loathe. Or as the mystical poet William Blake once said: “I must CREATE a system, or be enslaved by another man’s.”
Modern culture, unpoetic through and through, juiceless and banal, with its posturing outrage and pitiless pragmatism, doesn’t mesh too well with my inner being. Rampant materialism, idiotic distractions, and lifeless conveniences seem to be the culprits to much of the modern malaise we are seeing today.
We are bent on generating more and more devastation in the name of “progress” while at the same time uprooting our own nature. And we’re proud of it, pompously so.
Though I too take part, a bit reluctantly, in some of the comforts and conveniences that contemporary society has supplied us, I also know this way of life is an obstacle to living a deeper, more intensified mode of existence.
As Colin Wilson once wrote: “The comfortable life lowers man’s resistance, so that he sinks into an unheroic sloth…The comfortable life causes spiritual decay…” And it was Bertrand Russell who reminded us that “it is the preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.”
People today are increasingly defined and valued based on their roles as consumers rather than as active participants in society. As a result, the modern world has become an enormous arena of passive spectators, people detached from their own desires and alienated from authentic social interactions.
What Guy Debord called “the society of the spectacle” — a society where most of our social relations are mediated by images and the constant consumption of the unnecessary. “The more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires.”
In this crazed world we inhabit, we are constantly bombarded with information that serves to maintain the dominance of the spectacle. Is it any wonder that our culture has grown so sterile and empty, riddled with grandiose distractions and cheap charades?
A society of increasing chronic illnesses and mental health concerns?
Is it any wonder why the people, greatly divided and comfortably numb, have been drawn away entirely from themselves?
When the vast majority of people lose their relationship with nature, with the higher wisdom of their sacred roots, they will surely lose their relationship with each other. This is what we’re witnessing everywhere — conflict and chaos. The sad state of the world is merely a projection of our inner turmoil.
It was Jiddu Krishnamurti who once said:
“If we are miserable, confused, chaotic within, by projection that becomes the world, that becomes society, because the relationship between yourself and myself, between myself and another, is society — society is the product of our relationship — and if our relationship is confused, egocentric, narrow, limited, national, we project that and bring chaos into the world. What you are, the world is. So your problem is the world’s problem.”
Perhaps a renunciation is needed. An exodus from the spectacle, a departure from the frenzied commotion of the asphalt world, and to take on, once again, “the pace of nature,” in the words of Emerson.
To step out of the costume of your social self. To break away from all the frantic and obsessive activities of daily life and the dehumanizing effects of technology. To retain a sense of awe and wonder and mystery, and to revitalize once again the ancient wisdom of our blood.
To SEE is to see through the spectacle. To see through the theatrics of politics and the public narratives.
To be truly alive is the ability to SEE through the show of our manufactured reality. And there is not a more fruitful way to restore the inner eye than to find a little silent place in the natural world where you can simply BE.
A place that’ll evoke a sense of awe and reverence and ignite that creative fire inherent to us all. “We need to open up,” in the words of Henry Miller, “to relax, to give way, to obey the deeper laws of our being, in order to find a true discipline.”
You have to get out there in the natural world alone and see what it’s all about. Explore the forests and the seas and the meadows, and gaze up at the sun and the stars of the cosmos. You have to get out there, away from the screen, away from the endless bickering of a dead culture, and move your body, embrace a little struggle and discomfort.
Go out and discover what it means to be a human beyond the false narratives and illusory worldviews grafted upon us by a schizoid society.
Our true salvation as species will derive from a radical reconnection to the essential. By plunging into our depths we can recapture the light and become a much-needed beacon shining bright on the stormy shores of a sickly world.
One of the most profound thinkers of the 20th century, Carl Jung, saw that “most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old unforgotten wisdom stored up in us.”
It’s the atrophy of instincts caused by living comfortably in a manmade environment, according to Jung, that is “largely responsible for the pathological condition of contemporary culture.” The only hope for “real improvement” is a “radical change of consciousness.”
This too was believed and proclaimed by the great romantic poets. To “rise” up out of this “oblivious sleep”, the sleep of death, and to forge a new attitude to nature — a uniting of our minds to the outer universe, and to dance with a Dionysian rapture knowing full well that the “poetry of the earth is never dead.”
When you embed yourself in nature, the cultural facade crumbles and the hideous flames of the ego subside. Out here alone among the creeks and streams, the high pine forests, the sparrows and wrens, and the primeval mountains, you realize that time is merely an illusion and that eternity isn’t something beyond the moment.
The past no longer casts its shadow. The future no longer clogs the mind. And the illusory separateness between the self and the external fades away and you come to realize that the beauty and truth of the world lie in its brilliant simplicity.
The poet Gary Snyder once reminded us that “Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.” Indeed, a home we’ve unfortunately abandoned with grave consequences.
I want to end with a beautiful passage from the great Jiddu
Krishnamurti:
It is very important to go out alone, to sit under a tree — not with a book, not with a companion, but by yourself — and observe the falling of a leaf, hear the lapping of the water, the fishermen’s song, watch the flight of a bird, and of your own thoughts as they chase each other across the space of your mind.
If you are able to be alone and watch these things, then you will discover extraordinary riches which no government can tax, no human agency can corrupt, and which can never be destroyed.
– Erik Rittenberry
I have done no work. My heart stopped like a clock, the pendulum had somewhere bumped against the hand of misery and stood still . . .
– Rilke to Leopold von Schlozer
Animals don’t even try to look any different from what nature intended. They humbly wear their shells, scales, spines, plumes, pelts, and down. … The conscious impulse to change one’s appearance is found only among humans.
– Wislawa Szymborska
They’re both convinced
that a sudden passion joined them.
Such certainty is beautiful,
but uncertainty is more beautiful still.
– Wislawa Szymborska
Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
All that was fiber, fabric in me, framework, cracked and bent.
– Rilke to Lou, 1922
You don’t always know
where the notes come from
and you don’t want to know,
said the old monk on bass.
– The Old Monk
Rich in the loss of all I sing
– W. D. Snodgrass
My strength is defined / not by what I continue to carry / but by what I have allowed myself / to put down.
– Trista Mateer
Language is a city, to the building of which every human being brought a stone; yet he is no more to be credited with the grand result than the acaleph which adds a cell to the coral reef which is the basis of the continent.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are not creatures of circumstance; we are creators of circumstance.
– Benjamin Disraeli
From this first shame, some claim, comes culture—
liturgy and law hiding a fundament of ordure.
– Devon Balwit
If you have not done things worthy of being written about, at least write things worthy of being read.
– Giacomo Casanova
Life is a garden, not a road.
We enter and exit through the same gate.
Wandering,
where we go matters less than what we notice.
– Kurt Vonnegut
Maybe we feel empty because we leave pieces of ourselves in everything we used to love.
– R. M. Drake
Every time we refrain from callously expressing irritation, every time we restrain ourselves from consuming more than we need, and every time we offer dharma nourishment and material sustenance to one another, our minds grow in virtue.
– Shinge Sherry Chayat Roshi
Every extreme leads sooner or later to the opposite extreme. There can only be peace and true growth in the “middle way.”
– Dane Rudhyar
Everyone who undergoes severe trauma faces similar choices: to try to pick up the pieces of our lives and continue as before; or to stop and turn more intentionally toward healing.
– Sister Dang Nghiem
This is the learning of a lifetime; keep your heart boundless…
for you will keep meeting and separating
from beloveds along the way.
– Ahmad Faraz
They must have been different once,
fire and water, miles apart,
robbing and giving in desire,
that assault on one another’s otherness.
– Wislawa Szymborska
Yes, out like black-winged birds the woes flew and ran riot,
But I say that the woes were words, and the only thing left was quiet.
– Alicia E. Stallings
When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.
– Neil Postman
Because everything here was at once so conducive that from the second or third moment, the most serious things became unpostponable and the deeper work of inward absorption set in . . . I did not go to Basel either, after all.
– Rilke to Carol Burckhardt, intensely
It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life – and herein lies its secret – takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch.
– Milan Kundera
Give your children logical explanations, not magical ones.
– Prof. Feynman
If we give ourselves half an hour a day
with our creativity,
our dreams, our music,
the soul becomes quiet.
We are in our body
and we feel nourished.
– Marion Woodman
He did not wish to be divine. If there had never been a God, the emperor thought, it might have been easier to work out what goodness was. This business of worship, of the abnegation of self in the face of the Almighty, was a distraction, a false trail. Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow, clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path.
– Salman Rushdie
And our existence, properly understood, is a prayer.
– M. P. Shiel
I hate everything that does not relate to literature; conversations bore me, to visit people bores me, the joys and sorrows of my relatives bore me to my soul. Conversation takes the importance, the seriousness, the truth, out of everything I think.
– Franz Kafka
The pollution of the planet is only an outward reflection of an inner psychic pollution: millions of unconscious individuals not taking responsibility for their inner space.
– Eckhart Tolle
I think this nation should be, for the foreseeable future, in mourning; one must face the fact that this Christian nation may never have read any of the Gospels, but they do understand money.
– James Baldwin
There is no reason a nation with as many Christians as the USA has (or claims to have) should have such disparity in income, in housing, in wages, in healthcare, and in community social capital.
– Scot McKnight
The meaning of my existence is that life has addressed a question to me. Or, conversely, I myself am a question which is addressed to the world, and I must communicate my answer, for otherwise I am dependent upon the world’s answer.
– Carl Jung
yes, very, very, very glorious! —Think! I have been allowed to survive up to this.
– Letter from Rainer Maria Rilke to Lou Andreas-Salome, 1922
Generally, we enter analysis when our life has become burdensome and our perspective too limiting. Our discomfort leads us to a psychoanalytic set of questions. What is the life project we are living? Is there any possibility of altering it?
– JR Haule
Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?
– John Keats
How could the ego ever come to understand, let alone accept, that its overthrow is engineered from within, by that transpersonal wisdom that has our being’s interests at heart even in our darkest moments?
– James Hollis
For an artist with no place for the dark and ugly or, contrarily, with only a place for the dark and ugly, the work is kitsch in one way or the other. And everyone who sees it knows that the full emotional body is not present in it.
– Robert Bly
The first heroism consists in turning away from your inheritance to make your own way in the world; the second consists in turning back towards it, in the knowledge that your blood is not your own.
– Pico Iyer
And often,
the best of poetry is when,
a reader does not know,
for whom a poet had written
the poem,
and too often,
the mystery is,
the poet prefers not
to remember either.
– akyllus
Allegory is a very corrupt figure, a figure notably incapable of supporting fact.
– David Antin
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
One of the best ways to improve performance is to change where you start.
You don’t need to start at the bottom of the mountain to get to the top. You can learn from the people who came before you.
For specific advice, find someone a step or two ahead of you. For general advice, find someone older who can put things in perspective.
– Farnam Street
In the deep shadows of the rainy July, with secret steps, thou walkest, silent as night, eluding all watchers.
– Rabindranath Tagore
There are times when you must speak, not because you are going to change the other person, but because if you don’t speak, they have changed you.
– Melissa McEwan
If I said we sat in a circle
in an open air room made of stones
with tall arched windows
and night sky for a dome
and drank wine and laughed
and teased and wept,
if I said we then sang by candlelight
until the milky way
spilled into our throats
and our voices swirled like vines
that twine and tendril to climb themselves,
if I said how, when we sang our last song,
the wind rustled in the aspen
in quiet applause and then stilled
and a shooting star unspooled
its bright fleeting ribbon, well,
I would barely believe it myself
that the world could feel so full of beauty,
except I was there and felt
the night as it cradled us,
felt that vine take root, still taste
just a bit of that milky way in my thoughts
creamy, nourishing, vast.
– Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Writing is a solitary process, but you still need a tribe. We need encouragement, accountability, and honesty. As writers, we’re not good at objective evaluation. We tend to swing between extremes. We need the perspective other writers can bring to the table.
– Keidi Keating
Integrating an initiation can become a lifetime task. And while most of it remains in the secret mysteries of the individual, some of it belongs to the universal soul that is striving to become conscious in each one of us.
– Marion Woodman
The color of truth is grey.
– André Gide
Song of the Rainbow Warrior
by Eliza Gilkyson
Back in 1969
I took everything I owned
And blew out of California
One more reckless rolling stone
A child of the ’60s
Headed for the great unknown
But I was lookin’ to find the rainmaker
In the land he once called home
When I rolled into Santa Fe
I was runnin’ out of steam
I took up with some people there
Who were livin’ out their dream
And gentle hands revealed my heart
And laughter made me whole
Oh but the legends of rainmaker
Blew a window to my soul
And ooo, I was a rainbow warrior
Crossin’ cloudy canyons
Of love, and hope, and change
And ooo, another rainbow warrior
Dances for the maker of the rain
The desert bleached my reason
Possessions slipped away
The sun beat down and burned the ground
I planted every day
But when I called for the rainmaker
And danced the ritual right
The answers came on clouds of rain
And thunder in the night
And ooo, I was a rainbow warrior
Crossin’ cloudy canyons
Of love, and hope, and change
And ooo, another rainbow warrior
Dances for the maker of the rain
Ay-lu haunk-wa ay-taun e-yaun-nay
Im-e-toll-ah-sin-ah-o-o-nay
Ay-lu-e-o toh-mah-wah-han-ay
Hey-yah hi-yah hey-yah hi-yay-lu
Hey-yah hi-yah hey-yah hi-yay-lu
(Native American singing/ceremony)
Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern.
– Oscar Wilde
I’m sentimental, if you know what I mean
I love the country but I can’t stand the scene
And I’m neither left or right
I’m just staying home tonight
Getting lost in that hopeless little screen
But I’m stubborn as those garbage bags
That time cannot decay
I’m junk but I’m still holding up
This little wild bouquet
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A
– Leonard Cohen
The moment I heard of America, I loved her; the moment I knew she was fighting for liberty, I burnt with desire to bleed for her.
– Marquis de Lafayette, in a letter to the President of the Continental Congress
The New Colossus
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
– Emma Lazarus
All societies are evil, sorrowful, inequitable; and so they will always be. So if you really want to help this world, what you will have to teach is how to live in it. And that no one can do who has not himself learned how to live in it in the joyful sorrow and sorrowful joy of the knowledge of life as it is.
– Joseph Campbell
The buddha nature present in sentient beings is like the sky. As the sky has no past, present, or future, neither inside nor outside, and is not composed of form, sound, smell, taste, or texture, so also is the buddha nature.
– Mahaparinirvana Sutra
I see your soul is made of poetry and starlit skies and forests, just like mine.
– Flora Turrill
Maybe it’s just in America, but it seems that if you’re passionate about something, it freaks people out. You’re considered bizarre or eccentric. To me, it just means you know who you are.
– Tim Burton
The revolution/evolution we are experiencing today is a demand for reconnection with our bodies.
– Stanley Keleman
If I could sum it up in 50 words, I wouldn’t have needed to write a whole novel about it.
– Patrick Rothfuss
America was such bitch on Friday and now expects us to attend her birthday party on Tuesday? I don’t think so, sweetie.
– Sophie Vershbow
Freedom from the desire for an answer is essential to the understanding of a problem.
– Krishnamurti
While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.
– Dorothea Lange
. . . and probably thinking not to grow up
Is the brightest kind of maturity for us, right now at any rate.
– John Ashbery, Soonest Mended
Trauma is hell on earth.
Trauma resolved is a gift from the gods.
– Peter A. Levine, Waking the Tiger
may my thoughts and
may my actions always
reflect the compassion I feel
– @BashoSociety
Through literacy you can begin to see the universe. Through music you can reach anybody. Between the two there is you, unstoppable.
– Grace Slick
Absolutely unmixed attention / is prayer. Hell / is the inability to love. / Forever is composed of nows.
– Christian Wiman
Since dignity and hope are all that is left to save, we’re partisans of absolute intransigence.
– Victor Serge
The exaltation of the heart takes place after many purgations.
– A. E. Waite
In July I shall move somewhere into the woods and try to improve myself.
– Franz Kafka, 1914.
Homage to the plain and the obscure
Whose soul is small corn of barley
Upon which the slow cattle feed
– Edward Dahlberg
A New National Anthem
The truth is, I’ve never cared for the National
Anthem. If you think about it, it’s not a good
song. Too high for most of us with “the rockets’
red glare” and then there are the bombs.
(Always, always there is war and bombs.)
Once, I sang it at homecoming and threw
even the tenacious high school band off key.
But the song didn’t mean anything, just a call
to the field, something to get through before
the pummeling of youth. And what of the stanzas
we never sing, the third that mentions “no refuge
could save the hireling and the slave”? Perhaps
the truth is that every song of this country
has an unsung third stanza, something brutal
snaking underneath us as we absent-mindedly sing
the high notes with a beer sloshing in the stands
hoping our team wins. Don’t get me wrong, I do
like the flag, how it undulates in the wind
like water, elemental, and best when it’s humbled,
brought to its knees, clung to by someone who
has lost everything, when it’s not a weapon,
when it flickers, when it folds up so perfectly
you can keep it until it’s needed, until you can
love it again, until the song in your mouth feels
like sustenance, a song where the notes are sung
by even the ageless woods, the shortgrass plains,
the Red River Gorge, the fistful of land left
unpoisoned, that song that’s our birthright,
that’s sung in silence when it’s too hard to go on,
that sounds like someone’s rough fingers weaving
into another’s, that sounds like a match being lit
in an endless cave, the song that says my bones
are your bones, and your bones are my bones,
and isn’t that enough?
– Ada Limón
A boat, beneath a sunny sky
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July—
– Lewis Carroll
The function of freedom is to free someone else.
– Toni Morrison
Your language, your verbal and non-verbal experiences related to it, are both your first and last superpower, the last territory, which you carry inside you.
– Kateryna Kalytko
Your voice, he interrupted, is also like a cicada […] Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.
– John Berger
Different is not necessarily better but better is always different.
– Hugh Lendrum
I have a contribution to make. I am not just taking up space in this life.
– Lauren Bacall
I got to thinking that poems were like people. Some people you got right off the bat. Some people you just didn’t get — and never would.
– Benjamin Alire Sáenz
I will not be held like a drunkard / under the cold tap of facts
– Leonard Cohen
Many ideas get dismissed because they come from someone we don’t like.
You would never choose to use only half of your talent, but when you dismiss ideas because you don’t like someone, that’s what you’re doing.
You can agree with the idea without agreeing with the person.
– Farnam Street
Many ways to spell good night.
Fireworks at a pier on the Fourth of July
spell it with red wheels and yellow spokes.
– Carl Sandburg
Not in July or any month
have I had the pleasure—if it is a pleasure—
of fishing on the Susquehanna.
– Billy Collins
We spend years
building our lives on rotten foundations.
It takes years
to build new foundations
for a new life.
– Marion Woodman
Greenness hangs, drips and sways from every branch and twig and frond in the surging luxuriance of July.
– Anita Desai
first flight
my child asks
why the kite pulls back
– Adjei Agyei-Baah
Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave
and eats a bread it does not harvest.
Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero,
and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful.
Pity a nation that despises a passion in its dream,
yet submits in its awakening.
Pity the nation that raises not its voice
save when it walks in a funeral,
boasts not except among its ruins,
and will rebel not save when its neck is laid
between the sword and the block.
Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox,
whose philosopher is a juggler,
and whose art is the art of patching and mimicking
Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpeting,
and farewells him with hooting,
only to welcome another with trumpeting again.
Pity the nation whose sages are dumb with years
and whose strongmen are yet in the cradle.
Pity the nation divided into fragments,
each fragment deeming itself a nation.
– Kahlil Gibran
BIBLICAL DUMPSTER DIVING
If you take up the bible, never forget it is a two thousand year old dumpster filled with dung as well as diamonds. Read with love scripture can be a priceless gift- but, read mindlessly and without love, the bible can be the most evil book ever written.
We instantly turn the bible into an idol by reading it literally. Read heartlessly and mindlessly, scripture has been used against medicine, art and human rights. It is impossible to think of a cruelty or absurdity that has not been defended by somebody using the bible.
When some Christians finally stopped claiming the sun rotates around the earth, it wasn’t because they found bible verses convincing them otherwise- they stopped because they finally faced the fact that the bible is a lousy guide to astronomy. Nonliteral bible users continued to gain symbolic insights about their relationship to the cosmos, but their insights were no longer confused with scientific claims.
When some Christians finally quit defending slavery and stopped killing witches, it wasn’t because they found new biblical passages refuting those vicious practices- they stopped biblically abusing their neighbors because they finally realized the bible is a lousy substitute for universal human rights.
When some Christians finally stopped restricting love to first century cultural models, it wasn’t because they discovered new paradigms hidden in the text- it was because they finally realized the bible is a sorry substitute for a human heart.
There is much that can be gained by studying scripture; but, if you cannot get to the great themes of truth, justice and universal love- it would be better for everyone if you threw your bible in the ocean.
– Jim Rigby
Walking causes a repetitive, spontaneous poetry to rise naturally to the lips, words as simple as the sound of footsteps on the road.
– Frédéric Gros
The mind [l’intelligence] allows the chain of spent days to slip away, holding on only to the very end of it, often of a quite different metal from the links that have vanished in the night…
– Proust
While our habitual patterns can change through verbal therapy and recovery programs, our bodies often hold on to the character remnants until directly challenged through an informed bodywork.
– John Conger, The Body in Recovery
The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.
– Leonardo da Vinci
How, indeed, could it be possible for a man, who is limited on six sides—by east, west, south, north, deep, and sky—to understand a matter which is above the skies, which is beneath the deep, which stretches beyond north and south, and which is present in every place, and fills all vacuity?
– St. Gregory the Wonderworker
finally, love is all we are given
to navigate between exhaustion and heaven.
– Red Hawk
Many men are born blind and they only realize it when a good truth pierces their eyes.
– Jean Cocteau
That was the poetry era of our love:
I was someone else. You were someone else.
– Kausar Munir
Love is a territory where orders can’t be issued.
– Mia Couto
And that is what a writer is – a traveller between identities, a smuggler of souls.
– Mia Couto
On one occasion, someone asked a famous American musician, Ben Harper, this question: “We’ve heard you now have a new drummer in your band. Tell me something: is he black?” And Harper replied: “I don’t know, I’ve never asked him.”
– Mia Couto
You should, in science, believe logic and arguments, carefully drawn, and not authorities.
– Richard Feynman
Minor readers like to recognize their own ideas in a pleasing disguise.
– Nabokov
This place wasn’t *this place* when you first logged on. It became *this place* by rewiring your mind over days weeks months & years. The desperation to find a new *this place* is a function of our collective sickness not wanting to get better.
– Steve Edwards
Imagination is the soul’s happiest retreat.
– James Lendall Basford
The truly great writer does not want to write: he wants the world to be a place in which he can live the life of the imagination. The first quivering word he puts to paper is the word of the wounded angel: pain.
– Henry Miller
The greatest misfortune for a poor country is that, instead of producing wealth, it produces rich people.
– Mia Couto
Some people like neat suburbs. I always am attracted to the rundown and the old and the offbeat.
– William S. Burroughs
Some are put in the position of emotionally caring for an adult early in their lives at a time they themselves need more than anything to have their own inner world mirrored back to them.
To be seen as a subject with an interiority, not merely as a narcissistic reflection of the other.
Until reorganized, this template orients the way we see ourselves and engage in close relationship.
In these early configurations, the little one’s sense of self becomes tangled up in the other’s moods, anxiety, and injured self-esteem.
The job of the little one is shifted from unstructured play and discovery into tending to the unlived life of a caretaker, a task that is not designed for a young nervous system, nor for a tender little heart.
If interested, we can explore how this template might be at play: in our phobias around having/ expressing needs, in the fear around disappointing someone, in the hesitation around allowing another to matter.
In the terror of relationship, on the one hand, and in the painful longing for it on the other. In the existential confusion about where we end and the other begins. In the ancient conclusion that caring for another requires primordial disavowal of our own psyche, body, and heart.
Having come to see our own self-worth through the changing psychic states of those around us, we find ourselves wondering: Have I disappointed them? What can I do to make them feel better? Should I take more responsibility for the unfulfilled longing in their hearts? They are upset, surely that is somehow traceable back to me, right? I’ve failed somehow, right?
As a little one longing for any sort of empathic connection, we’ll do anything to receive even a limited amount of psychic (and physical) holding.
Accessing, illuminating, and untangling the tentacles of this template can go a long way in healing chronic feelings of shame and unworthiness, where we begin to differentiate our worth as a person from the moods, suffering, and unlived life of others.
To withdraw the projection of our own basic goodness from others and locate it inside ourselves. This withdrawal is a great act of kindness – for ourselves, the other, and for the world.
It is by way of this disentangling that we can truly love ourselves and others and act from the radical force of true compassion, not merely re-enact the old pathways of self-abandonment and empathic failure.
– Matt Licata
Unless the cause of peace based on law gathers behind it the force and zeal of a religion, it hardly can hope to succeed.
– Albert Einstein
I would like to believe that love is the only energy I’ve ever used as a writer.
– Athol Fugard
They turned Jesus white because they worship whiteness, not Jesus.
– Carlos A. Rodríguez
You can fall in love
in a museum, but only
with the art
or its silence
– Kevin Young
The study of art is a lifetime matter. The best any artist can do is to accumulate all the knowledge possible of art and its principles, study nature often and then practice continually.
– Edgar Alwin Payne
Certain prayers or meditations are designed to hold your consciousness on that level instead of letting it drop down here all the way. And then what you can finally do is to recognize that this is simply a lower level of that higher consciousness.
– Joseph Campbell
Poetry isn’t a place of answers and easy solutions. It’s a place where we can admit to an unknowing, own our private despair, and still, sometimes, practice beauty.
– Ada Limón
Sometimes you don’t survive whole. You just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt.
– Toni Morrison
the fruit of contemplative experience is that it opens our heart in such a way that the whole world has access to us.
– Jim Finley
Most obstacles melt away when we make up our minds to walk boldly through them.
– Orison Swett Marden
Suddenly there was the possibility to say anything to everyone, but upon reflection there was nothing to be said.
– Bertolt Brecht
The hells move in cycles,
No man can see his own end.
– Ezra Pound
Sadly, fear is driving the ecclesial bus now. That means more hyper-clericalism, gatekeeping & hardening of dogma. This is the wrong way to engage decline. Most religious institutions won’t do anything except try to protect themselves-thus ensuring their own irrelevance & demise.
– Diana Butler Bass
Even as the new image of God is worked out, some will still be involved in tearing down the old. Our time is too late for the old God and too early for the new. Nevertheless, we have to let go and let come.
– David Tacey
I have no room to move! The last remnants of culture are disintegrating in this dead atmosphere; the first thing is to create a different atmosphere—clear away the deadweight, gnaw through the crass, bourgeois insensitivity. But how?
– Andrei Tarkovsky
There is a place
More real than here
That is no where.
– Kathleen Raine
Everyone was on something in this fucking country.
– Dubravka Ugresic
Search for a discipline within freedom ! Listen to no one’s advice except that of the wind in the trees. That can recount the whole history of mankind.
– Claude Debussy
Y, Y
by Changming Yuan
You love ‘Y’, not because it’s the first letter
In your family name, but because it’s like
A horn, which the water buffalo in your
Native village uses to fight against injustice
Or, because it’s like a twig, where a crow
Can come down to perch, a cicada can sing
Towards the setting sun as loud as it wants to
More important, in Egyptian hieroglyphics
It stands for a real reed, something you can
Bend into a whistle or flute; in pronouncing it
You can get all the answers you need, besides
You can make it into a heart-felt catapult
And shoot at a snakehead or sparrow, as long
As it is within the range of your boyhood.
If we accept these opposing elements and endure the collision of them in full consciousness, we embrace the paradox. The capacity for paradox is the measure of spiritual strength and the surest sign of maturity.
– Robert A. Johnson
I live in a time when death is off the table, the thing unsaid. We wish to live forever and because of the desire, we hardly live at all.
– Charles Bowden
Like silver rain on desert sands
It fell upon my heart,
In gratitude I joined my hands
In humble prayerful art.
– Patrick Kavanagh
Whenever justice is uncertain and police spying and terror are at work, human beings fall into isolation, which, of course, is the aim and purpose of the dictator state, since it is based on the greatest possible accumulation of depotentiated social units.
– C.G. Jung
Being alive, which ties
Tomorrow, our shades,
To yesterday, our illusion.
– Pierre Boulez
I, who fell in love with your wings, will never want to cut them off.
– Frida Kahlo
I learned somewhere that Buddhists and Hindus included all the different creatures in their moral concern, and I said, ‘Well, that’s for me!’
– Gary Snyder
Life can’t ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer’s lover until death – fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant.
– Edna Ferber
The size of the place that one becomes a member of is limited only by the size of one’s heart.
– Gary Snyder
The intellect seeks, the heart finds.
– George Sand
We are working to make hearts that are capable of containing much joy and much sorrow, hearts capacious enough to contain the complexities and mysteries and contradictions of ourselves and of each other.
– Kate DiCamillo
Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them – if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.
– J. D. Salinger
The cosmos is interesting rather than perfect & everything is not part of some greater plan nor is all necessarily under control.
– Starhawk
Emotional healing does not depend on the process of figuring something out. It does not depend on conceptual understanding, but rather on a return of the feeling life to a natural biological rhythm. Emotional healing involves allowing the feelings to enter into the basic pulsations of the body. This is accomplished, in part, by separating those feelings from the arrhythmic clutch of thought.
The feeling life is not a conceptual experience. Feelings are not ideas, but subtle physical experiences. They take place in the body. They are not inherently meaningful in the way they seem to be when we apply our thoughts and beliefs to them. Feelings are part of the rhythm, the giving and receiving, the nourishment, and the interdependent ecology of our experience here.
– Stephen R. Schwartz
Time, time, time
See what’s become of me
While I looked around for my possibilities
(I was so hard to please)
Seasons change with the scenery
Weavin’ time in a tapestry
Won’t you stop and remember me?
Look around
The grass is high
The fields are ripe
It’s the springtime of my life
See what’s become of me
While I looked around for my possibilities
(I was so hard to please)
Seasons change with the scenery
Weavin’ time in a tapestry
Won’t you stop and remember me?
Look around
The grass is high
The fields are ripe
It’s the springtime of my life
– Paul Simon
One of the few things that August didn’t know about her was that sometimes when she looked at her collection of pictures she tried to imagine and place herself in that other, shadow life. You walk into a room and flip a switch and the room fills with light. You leave your garbage in bags on the curb, and a truck comes and transports it to some invisible place. When you’re in danger, you call for the police. Hot water pours from faucets. Lift a receiver or press a button on a telephone, and you can speak to anyone. All of the information in the world is on the Internet, and the Internet is all around you, drifting through the air like pollen on a summer breeze. There is money, slips of paper that can be traded for anything: houses, boats, perfect teeth. There are dentists. She tried to imagine this life playing out somewhere at the present moment. Some parallel Kirsten in an air-conditioned room, waking from an unsettling dream of walking through an empty landscape.
– Emily St. John Mandel
if others see it
is it still an inner light
you tell me, firefly
– Clark Strand
If you ask God
to show you
your blind spots,
the first thing
She’ll likely show you
is your own
blinding light.
– Chelan Harkin
You can’t believe life is sacred—while simultaneously commodifying everything that sustains it.
– The Subversive Lens
To enjoy physical health without its spiritual or emotional equivalents–we all know, at some level–is to become a McMansion that’s an empty haunted house.
– Pico Iyer
not a line, but a network of intentionalities
– Merleau-Ponty / Husserl
What if you felt the invisible
tug between you and everything?
– Ellen Bass
and if we spoke about our anticipated nostalgia frequently enough, it was perhaps because evoking this looming nostalgia was our way of immunizing ourselves against it before it sprang on us in Europe.
– André Aciman
When kindness becomes a way of life, remarkable things unfold. People feel seen, valued, and supported, and the world becomes a better place. So, wherever you see it or experience it, make sure you nurture kindness in all its forms.
– @eliistender10
Random and impersonal chance does not create complexity and design.
– Sir Fred Hoyle
Romantic love always consists in the projection of the soul-image. When a woman falls in love it is animus that she sees projected onto the mortal man before her. When a man drinks of the love potion, it is anima, his soul, that he sees superimposed on a woman.
– Robert A. Johnson, We
where we are not, there is night
– Paris, Ingeborg Bachmann
If this is the sane world, what must a madhouse be?
– Thoreau
To wall off your own suffering is to risk it devouring you from the inside.
– Frida Kahlo
I admire people so committed to caring for loved ones on the human plane that they shun mind-altering drugs.
I admire people so courageous that they question whether conventional reality is all there is, and are willing to risk everything to find out.
Two things can be true.
– Kenneth Folk
under a bright sky
a caterpillar crawling
on a pine tree’s branch
– Ryunosuke
THE ORDINARY WEATHER OF SUMMER
In the ordinary weather of summer
with storms rumbling from west to east
like so many freight trains hauling
their cargo of heat and rain,
the dogs sprawl on the back steps, panting,
insects assemble at every window,
and we quarrel again, bombarding
each other with small grievances,
our tempers flashing on and off
in bursts of heat lightning.
In the cooler air of morning,
we drink our coffee amicably enough
and walk down to the sea
which seems to tremble with meaning
and into which we plunge again and again.
The days continue hot.
At dusk the shadows are as blue
as the lips of the children stained
with berries or with the chill
of too much swimming.
So we move another summer closer
to our last summer together –
a time as real and implacable as the sea
out of which we come walking
on wobbly legs as if for the first time,
drying ourselves with rough towels,
shaking the water out of our blinded eyes.
– Linda Pastan
The Buddha always told his disciples not to waste their time and energy in metaphysical speculation. Whenever he was asked a metaphysical question, he remained silent. Instead, he directed his disciples toward practical efforts. Questioned one day about the problem of the infinity of the world, the Buddha said, “Whether the world is finite or infinite, limited or unlimited, the problem of your liberation remains the same.” Another time he said, “Suppose a man is struck by a poisoned arrow and the doctor wishes to take out the arrow immediately. Suppose the man does not want the arrow removed until he knows who shot it, his age, his parents, and why he shot it. What would happen? If he were to wait until all these questions have been answered, the man might die first.” Life is so short. It must not be spent in endless metaphysical speculation that does not bring us any closer to the truth.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Let peace come to you, out from where it’s hiding behind the sofa and under the bed. You have done enough for now. Let summer surround you. Let everything rest.
– Karen Maezen Miller
We mistook our wanting
something so bad for wanting it forever
– Robert Wood Lynn
Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern.
– Oscar Wilde
They joined hands.
So the world ended.
And the next one began.
– Sarah J. Maas
Each step forward in psychological development means . . . the tearing off of a new veil. We are like onions with many skins, and we have to peel ourselves again and again in order to get at the real core.
– Carl G. Jung
Everything indicates that humanity is going downhill, despite its successes or rather because of them.
– Emil Cioran
Without peace, we are like animals, destroying each other – and we are also destroying the earth, the ocean and the air.
– Krishnamurti
When I criticize a system, they think I criticize them – and that is of course because they fully accept the system and identify themselves with it.
– Thomas Merton
Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens.
– Epictetus
I read a passage in an ancient poem, and I seem to understand my own heart.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,
and are we not of interest to each other?
– Elizabeth Alexander
If a poet has a dream, it is not of becoming famous, but of being believed.
– Jean Cocteau
There is an intuitive feeling that keeps humans from going too far off course or beyond our bounds, engaging in worlds that are inauthentic to our nature.
– James Hillman
Permitting fantasy in myself had the same effect as would be produced on a man if he came into his workshop and found all the tools flying about doing things independently of his will.
– CG Jung
I’ve always thirsted for knowledge,
I have always been full of questions.
– Hermann Hesse
I love you. I want us both to eat well.
– Christopher Citro
The minute you embrace the fact you are stressed, you will actually become less stressed and more awake. You will be rooted in what’s real and hopefully calmer.
– Lewis Richmond
The formula for doing a good job in photography is to think like a poet.
– Imogen Cunningham
She who is discouraged after a failure is not a real artist.
– Auguste Rodin
after Khlebnikov
plant as many
eyes as you like
you never can tell
if they’ll flower sight
– Alec Finlay, dailies, 7.VII.23
being silent with you was all the poetry i ever needed
– Christina Striga
It has always seemed to me that ideas were somewhat more real to them than people.
– James Baldwin
It is very nearly impossible, after all, to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
– James Baldwin
There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings.
– Rachel Carson
Whatever the world looks like now. That’s not always how it’s going to look. There’s more. There’s always more.
– Patrick Ness
I wanted her very gravity
to rewrite the bad, beautiful poem the world
had become
– Colin Cheney
We are only alive to the degree that we can let ourselves be moved.
– Lewis Hyde
The lifetime of a human being is measured by decades, the lifetime of the Sun is a hundred million times longer. Compared to a star, we are like mayflies, fleeting ephemeral creatures who live out their lives in the course of a single day.
– Carl Sagan
At last we create some Space between this and that, which liberates us tremendously.
– Chögyam Trungpa
because the heart needs
what is not here
to turn it into
what is here and goes and returns
for my heart was
not a place but a path
for what does any heart desire
but to be gone?
– Robert Kelly
I am not there and I am not here.
I have two names, which meet and part,
and I have two languages.
I forget which of them I dream in.
– Mahmoud Darwish, Counterpoint
It took years for me to discover that the first step in finding out the truth is to begin unlearning almost everything adults had taught me, and to start doing all the things they’d told me not to do.
– Anne Lamott
It was my way of breaking free. I was anything but history.
I was the wind.
– Joy Harjo
The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world.
– Marc Chagall
Gardenias swell,
breathing is aquatic and travel
a long drawl from bed to world.
– Emma Trelles
Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.
– Vladimir Nabokov
awoke to those dim whistles: those slender, ash-blue birds, / like Sassetta’s.
where dawn still floated with its water-stars.
– Gustaf Sobin
In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life. The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and gold in the tint of flowers.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The country inside me is quiet as moss.
Everyone knows there’s no money in moss.
A dun little bird just in from the mountains
has brought along its quiet right to be.
What might I stand up for?
Maybe just that.
– Mike Dillon
Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.
– Robert Louis Stevenson
Poets might fear the verdict of posterity, but at least they won’t be remembered for having cartoon murals painted over at a children’s asylum centre.
– Matthew Stewart
Sometimes writing a single line is enough to save your own heart.
– Clarice Lispector
The mandala represents the union of the opposites – a symbol of the reconciliation of the conscious and the unconscious, of the ego and the self.
– CG Jung
When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours?
– Franz Kafka
Hate yearned to destroy and sought to forget, but love could not. Love strove creatively towards days yet to come.
– Richard Wright
The world is not a brute fact but, like a myth or metaphor, semi-transparent, containing all its meaning within itself, yet pointing to something lying beyond itself.
– Iain McGilchrist
It all depends on you. You can go on sleeping forever, or you can wake up right this moment.
– Osho
All forms darken. Things cannot know us.
– Theodore Roethke
When you first start to study a field, it seems like you have to memorize a zillion things. You don’t. What you need is to identify the core principles – generally three to twelve of them – that govern the field.
– John Reed
To accept one’s past — one’s history — is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it.
– James Baldwin
Meta-modern spirituality is great.
But depth of realization is still/always a factor when it comes to creative new interpretive frameworks.
Don’t fall for a shiny meta-modern spirituality that barely scratches the surface.
– @VinceFHorn
Every story is a travel story – a spatial practice.
– Michel de Certeau
The night looked so vast, the earth so lonely!
– Pablo Neruda
In this sense, literary translation, as a labour of changing words, and changing the orders of words, is always and from the outset wrong: its wrongness is a way of indirectly stressing and restressing the rightness of the original words in their right and original order.
– Kate Briggs
Some AI researchers believe machines will inevitably acquire consciousness as an emergent property when they reach some critical level of complexity. For what it’s worth (which I freely admit to be very little), I have no faith in these claims. The complexity argument seemed plausible a half century ago when computers were in their infancy. Today, consider a simple thought experiment: Which is more complex, the internet (including every computer attached to it), or the brain of a frog? The internet, I would say. And which is more likely to have some sort of inner experience, the internet or the frog? I’ll put my money on the amphibian.
– Keith Holyoak
Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we’ve missed the chance to have had other people hurt us. To a younger me this sounded like luck; to an older me this sounds like a quiet tragedy.
– Douglas Coupland
So long as we love we serve; so long as we are loved by others, I would almost say that we are indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.
– Robert Louis Stevenson
The dream: to know a foreign (alien) language and yet not to understand it: to perceive the difference in it without that difference ever being recuperated by the superficial sociality of discourse, communication or vulgarity; to know, positively refracted in a new language, the impossibilities of our own; to learn the systematics of the inconceivable; to undo our own “reality” under the effect of other formulations, other syntaxes; to discover certain unsuspected positions of the subject in utterance, to displace the subject’s topology; in a word, to descend into the untranslatable […]
– Roland Barthes
Anything we have not had to decipher, to bring to light by our own effort, anything which was clear before we looked at it, is not ours. From ourselves comes only that which we drag forth from the obscurity which lies within us […]
– Marcel Proust
We live on a little island of the articulable, which we tend to mistake for reality itself.
– Marilynne Robinson
What benefits new books bring us! I would like a basket full of books […]. But it is not sufficient to receive; one must welcome. One must want to read a lot, read more, always read. […]. Thus, in the morning, before the books piled high on my table, to the god of reading, I say my prayer of the devouring reader: ‘Give us this day our daily hunger…’
– Gaston Bachelard
I met an old lady once, almost a hundred years old, and she told me, ‘There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. How much do you love me? And Who’s in charge?
– Elizabeth Gilbert
This unhoused, exiled Satan was perhaps the heavenly patron of all exiles, all unhoused people, all those who were torn from their place and left floating, half-this, half-that, denied the rooted person’s comforting, defining sense of having solid ground beneath their feet.
– Salman Rushdie
Ever feel like a sommelier of books?
– Dr. Han VanderHart
A thought, even a possibility, can shatter and transform us.
– Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
It’s like I’m reading a book. And it’s a book I deeply love. But I’m reading it slowly now, so the words are really far apart and the spaces between the words are almost infinite. I can still feel you and the words of our story, but it’s in this endless space between the words that I’m finding myself now.
– Spike Jonze
I don’t understand how people go on reading poem after poem. I read one good poem a day and the rest of my day is spent living it’s ecstasy, it’s rhythm, it’s pain or joy. Till it’s music becomes my music, till it’s life becomes my own.
– @afterdoubt
God can only be comprehended as Love.
– Gustav Mahler
You must renounce all superficiality, all convention, all vanity and delusion.
– Gustav Mahler
Awareness is luminous
In being direct and unimpeded.
The unthinkable is luminous
In the state of equanimity.
Awareness is luminous
In being without clinging or traces.
The unthinkable is luminous
In being free from complications.
– Vajrasattva’s Magnificent Sky
It is a human defect to try to know one’s self by the self of another.
– Robert Penn Warren
You think about yourself too much.
That’s why you suffer.
It’s not rocket science.
– @KennethFolk
Arrogance circulates, like a strong wind among the guests of the text. The inter-text does not comprehend only certain delicately chosen, secretly love texts . . . You yourself can be the arrogant text of another text.
– Roland Barthes
Even when silvery fish after fish
comes back belly up, and the country plummets
into a crepitating crater of hatred, isn’t there still
something singing? The truth is: I don’t know.
– Ada Limón
but the world was already
a pot of stew, a few bubbles
away from overflow
two ropes tied together
with threads, one tug
away from tear
– Roselyn Chen
There are shortcuts to happiness, and dancing is one of them.
– Vicki Baum
Today, what line of poetry would dare allude to the phoenix or make itself the promenade of a centaur? None; but no poetry, however modern, is unhappy to be a nest of angels and to shine brightly with them. I always imagine them at nightfall, in the dusk of a slum or a vacant lot, in that long, quiet moment when things are gradually left alone, with their backs to the sunset, and when colors are like memories or premonitions of other colors. We must not be too prodigal with our angels; they are the last divinities we harbor, and they might fly away.
– Jorge Luis Borges, On Our Angels
I do think poetry has enticements of sound that are different from literature. Literature certainly has it too, or some literature, the best literature. And it’s easier for people to remember. People are more apt to remember a poem and therefore feel they own it and can speak it to themselves as you might a prayer — than they can remember a chapter and quote it. That’s very important because then it belongs to you. You have it when you need it.
– Mary Oliver
Night is a cistern. Owls sing. Refugees tread meadow roads
with the loud rustling of endless grief.
Who are you, walking in this worried crowd.
And who will you become, who will you be
when day returns, and ordinary greetings circle round.
Night is a cistern. The last pairs dance at a country ball.
High waves cry from the sea, the wind rocks pines.
An unknown hand draws the dawn’s first stroke.
Lamps fade, a motor chokes.
Before us, life’s path, and instants of astronomy.
– Adam Zagajewski
The key to this world is satiety, while the key to the next world is hunger.
– Dārānī
Learning to think in patterns of relationships, in sensations divorced from the fixity of words, allows us to find hidden resources and the ability to make new patterns, to carry over patterns from one discipline to another. In short, we think personally, originally, and thus take another route to the thing we already know.
– Moshe Feldenkrais
Men must want to do things of their own innermost drives. People, not commercial organizations or chains of command, are what make great civilizations work. Every civilization depends upon the quality of the individuals it produces. If you over-organize humans, over-legalize them, suppress their urge to greatness — they cannot work and their civilization collapses.
– Frank Herbert
It’s not the size of the book, it’s the motion in the ocean of our imagination—miniatures, even a sheep shorn line of Rilke expresses us by making us what it expresses…
– Gaston Bachelard
Man is a tragic animal. Not because of his smallness, but because he is too well endowed. Man has longings and spiritual demands that reality cannot fulfill. We have expectations of a just and moral world. Man requires meaning in a meaningless world.
– Peter Wessel Zapffe
tumbling into the room
mouth full of heart words
greeted by silence
– @RainyDayRibbons
The greatest illusion is to believe that we know the present because we are here.
– Edgar Morin
We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life because it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
But it’s peculiar, as soon as I am in the midst of nature and by myself, everything that is base and trivial vanishes without trace. On such days nothing scares me; and this helps me again and again.
– Gustav Mahler
We are always in the strip-light or half-light of the already-expressed.
– Hélène Cixous
The kindest thing you can do for someone else is listen without forming an opinion.
– Lori Deschene
One thing that being a scientist has taught me is that you can never be certain about anything. You never know the truth. You can only approach it and hope to get a bit nearer to it each time. You iterate towards the truth. You don’t know it.
– James Lovelock
How to live without beholding the unknown?
– René Char
Your wide eyes are the only light I know from extinguished constellations.
– Pablo Neruda
a few great artists who do us the service, when they awaken in us the emotion corresponding to the theme they have discovered, of showing us what richness, what variety lies hidden, unknown to us, in that vast, unfathomed and forbidding night of our soul
– Marcel Proust
Learning how to live takes a whole life.
– Seneca
Life only demands from you the strength you possess. Only one feat is possible—not to have run away.
– Dag Hammarskjold
Call in question your fundamental assumptions about who you are, what reality is, what is the good life, where you are going, whether it is a good thing to survive. Question them. See what would happen if their opposites were true. That is the task of philosophy.
– Alan Watts
To obtain a human body is extremely difficult, so it is foolish to ignore the Dharma upon having found it. Only the Dharma can help you; everything else is worldly beguilement.
– Guru Padmasambhava
There is an invisible movement happening
that you are a part of.
It is time to participate more fully—
With your all.
We are all co-workers in the awakening
of human consciousness.
The latent period of human dormancy
is over.
It is time to bring
all of ourselves
to light.
– Chelan Harkin
the little waves make the large ones, and are of the same pattern…
– George Eliot
In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barleycorn less,
And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them.
I know I am solid and sound,
To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow,
All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means.
I know I am deathless,
I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter’s compass,
I know I shall not pass like a child’s carlacue cut with a burnt stick at night.
I know I am august,
I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood,
I see that the elementary laws never apologize,
(I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my home by, after all.)
I exist as I am, that is enough
– Walt Whitman
How easily you held
my hand
beside the low tide
of the world
– June Jordan
‘Being with what is’ can never be the whole of practice, never.
if our practice is only being with what is and never responding, never shaping things, it doesn’t actually translate to our daily lives.
– Rob Burbea
There is no cure for love except a person become a lover. No remedy for bitterness except that wisdom dawn within. Either a person becomes wise and converts life’s bitterness to medicine, or else becomes stuck in the dregs of betrayal and the haunts of self-pity.
– Michael Meade
The truth turns into a story when it grows old. We all become stories in the end. So, though the narrative was flawed, the sense was a life so lived it was an epic.
– Niall Williams, This is Happiness
…as if I were only a flower after all and not the map of the country in which it grows.
– John Ashbery
I’m a sentimental humanist: I believe art is here to help, even if the help is painful—especially then.
– Zadie Smith
Reality is a fabric of many transparent films . . . Reality touches our intuition to the quick. We perceive with that intuition. Perhaps we perceive the intuition only, while reality remains forever beyond our grasp.
– Guy Davenport
Without indigenous culture, medicine, healing, art, food, forage, wisdom, science, stewardship, we have nothing.
– Simian Sethi
Only our hearts will argue hard
against the small lights letting in the news
– June Jordan
Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect.
– Lionel Trilling
In a real emergency, you don’t have time to meditate or to be calm. You just have to be completely present.
– Lewis Richmond
There is a way of listening to Buddhist texts that is light but attentive, sympathetic without having to believe.
– Sarah Shaw
A great dividing line found
between success and failure
is made of five words:
I did not have the time.
– Henry Davenport
Untarnished mirrors receive the whole picture, which is always the darkness, the light, & the subtle shadings of light that make shape, form, color, and texture beautiful. You cannot see in total light or total darkness. You must have variances of light to see.
– Richard Rohr
The dharma can’t be forced. A horse can be led to water, but it cannot be made to drink. Sometimes, we think we’re smarter and know better than the dharma. We can be stubborn and, like the horse, refuse to drink. But if we are able to be in the mindframe of the dharma and maintain an interest in exploring it, there are many things we can learn. Deep motivation and interest is required, and then slowly, we get there. There is nothing that can’t be resolved on the cushion.
– Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche
We are not yet attuned to language of soul; we are not comfortable thinking metaphorically.
– Thomas Moore
If I cannot forgive myself
For all the blunders
That I have made
Over the years,
Then how can I proceed?
How can I ever dream
Perfection-dreams?
Move, I must, forward.
Fly, I must, upward.
Dive, I must, inward,
To be once more
What I truly am
And shall forever remain.
– Sri Chinmoy
America’s systems don’t work, and that’s where it has systems. Mostly, it doesn’t. Water systems? Barely functional. Education system? College’ll cost you more than a house. “Healthcare”? Basically extortion by any other name. Energy grids? Good luck surviving another decade or three of rising temperatures. All those systems have failed, slowly, because they’ve been neglected, or, because, like high-speed transport, they were never invested in the first place. Hence, American living standards at first stalled out, and then began to plummet. Today, if you had the choice, would you really live in America, over Canada, France, Australia, New Zealand?
– Umair Haque
The morning coffee. I’m not sure why I drink it. Maybe it’s the ritual of the cup, the spoon, the hot water, the milk, and the little heap of brown grit, the way they come together to form a nail I can hang the day on. It’s something to do between being asleep and being awake. Surely there’s something better to do, though, than to drink a cup of instant coffee. Such as meditate? About what? About having a cup of coffee. A cup of coffee whose first drink is too hot and whose last drink is too cool, but whose many in-between drinks are, like Baby Bear’s porridge, just right. Papa Bear looks disgruntled. He removes his spectacles and swivels his eyes onto the cup that sits before Baby Bear, and then, after a discrete cough, reaches over and picks it up. Baby Bear doesn’t understand this disruption of the morning routine. Papa Bear brings the cup close to his face and peers at it intently. The cup shatters in hispaw, explodes actually, sending fragments and brown liquid all over the room. In a way it’s good that Mama Bear isn’t there. Better that she rest in her grave beyond the garden, unaware of what has happened to the world.
– Ron Padgett
The inner world is truly infinite, in no way poorer than the outer one. Man lives in two worlds. A fool lives here or there but never here and there.
– CG Jung, The Red Book
FLARE
Welcome to the silly, comforting poem.
It is not the sunrise,
which is a red rinse,
which is flaring all over the eastern sky;
it is not the rain falling out of the purse of God;
it is not the blue helmet of the sky afterward,
or the trees, or the beetle burrowing into the earth;
it is not the mockingbird who, in his own cadence,
will go on sizzling and clapping
from the branches of the catalpa that are thick with blossoms,
that are billowing and shining,
that are shaking in the wind…
The poem is not the world.
It isn’t even the first page of the world.
But the poem wants to flower, like a flower.
It knows that much.
It wants to open itself,
like the door of a little temple,
so that you might step inside and be cooled and refreshed,
and less yourself than part of everything.
– Mary Oliver
People meet in the course of life, they talk together, they discuss, they quarrel, without realizing that they’re talking to one another across a distance, each from an observation post standing in a different place in time.
– Milan Kundera
Sometimes I think I’ve felt everything I’m ever gonna feel, and from here on out, I’m not gonna feel anything new … just … lesser versions of what I’ve already felt.
– Spike Jonze
We see the loss of the Feminine in cultural diseases such as materialism. Rather than consciously celebrating nature, the earth and the miracle of life, we unconsciously, compulsively seek it through materialism: possessions.
– Gary Bobroff
It seems that everything that has ever happened to us is still alive somewhere in the depths of our psyche.
– James Hollis
I have spent my life teaching literature, and increasingly I have become surrounded by academic impostors who call themselves “cultural critics.” They are nothing of the sort: they are resentment-pipers.
– Harold Bloom
we grow up my love
because as yet there is no
other place to go
– Sonia Sanchez
The soul naturally sees with a darkened eye. It relates to the dusty light of both dusk and dawn. It seeks the kind of knowledge that knows its own shadow.
– Michael Meade
When the hero does not complete his task properly or when he betrays the condition to undertake it for the common good, he no longer contributes towards the growth and development of the collective.
– Maria Zelia de Alvarenga
To be a poet is already a dislocation, out of one’s time, in league with the dead, in hopes of a world one might believe in, living in language.
– Martha Ronk
Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.
– Marcel Proust
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum…
– Noam Chomsky
I feel more and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone but in a thousand worlds.
– John Keats
Every book, remember, is dead until a reader activates it by reading. Every time you read you are walking among the dead, and, if you are listening, you just might hear prophecies. Aeneas did. Odysseus did.
– Kathy Acker
The sea thus enchants us like music, which, unlike language, never bears the traces of things, never tells us anything about human beings, but imitates the stirrings of the soul.
– Proust
Emotions are the very center of our lives. Whether acknowledged or not, they drive everything we perceive, believe, think, say, and do.
– Ralph De La Rosa
When does something start to become a relic? When we tremble before the most insignificant object for the mere reason that a loved one held it in their hands?
– Elias Canetti
Lately, I’ve sensed the Spirit saying, “consider king Asa.” Asa was a “righteous king” of Judah, who later in life felt besieged by the northern kingdom of Israel. In his fear, he forgot all the times God had protected him, & made an alliance with Ben Hadad, king of Syria.
To seal the alliance Asa took sacred items from the temple & gave them to the Ben Hadad. In response, God sent prophet Hanani to remind Asa that God was his protection: “Certainly the Lord watches the whole earth carefully and is ready to strengthen those who are devoted to him.”
These words angered Asa so much that he put the prophet in jail. In the end, Asa became a bitter old man who oppressed his own people. He died with the severe pain of a foot disease. “Consider King Asa.” I see a lot of older church leaders becoming fearful, & feeling under siege.
These leaders are making wrong alliances with political grifters and profane politicians. They are bringing the profane into their churches and paying them with the monies devoted to the Kingdom of God. When God sends prophets, the leaders lash out in anger.
They have traded trusting in the armor of the Lord, and taken off the shoes that enabled them to spread the good news gospel of peace. They are angry culture warriors with diseased feet. Hear this word.
– Cheryl Bridges Johns
An unanswered question is a fine traveling companion. It sharpens your eyes for the road.
– Rachel Naomi Remen
Moments of grace are accidental. And meditation makes us accident prone.
– Chögyam Trungpa
With words you pull up the underworld.
– @RedBookJung
We are like sleepwalkers, whistling a happy tune, as we amble towards the abyss.
– Iain Mcgilchrist
A thick wallet and savings in the bank don’t necessarily make us feel rich. Many incredibly wealthy people feel impoverished at heart. We can spend a lifetime working hard to change our material circumstances, but without inner richness, the sense of poverty and dissatisfaction never goes away. People with richness in their hearts don’t depend on having the perfect outer circumstances or an abundance of material goods. They may have great appreciation for conventional riches and situations of power, but they also have a very subtle and grounded sense of richness within.
This inherent richness is called yün in Tibetan… We have complete yün within [us]. That inner yün magnetizes the yün of outer things. When our inner yün connects with the yün of the phenomenal world, we feel rich – much richer than most wealthy people – even with very little money in our wallet. Likewise, even with very little status or power, we feel much more powerful than many people in powerful positions. And even if we’re not especially beautiful, we feel more beautiful than many people pictured on the covers of fashion magazines. How can this be?
This state of mind arises from the spaciousness and richness of our basic nature. Meditating on the nature of mind creates more space in our mind. There is more room to experience our human emotions, and more room to let the ego-mind dissolve. Within this openness we discover endless potential.
– Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, It’s Up to You
Jung had probably actually started by physically digging holes in his garden, down by the water, to release his fantasies. He then began to imagine doing the same, while seated in his library. He descended into the depths and a fantasy sequence unfolded.
– S Shamdasani, Black Books
Totalitarianism is not only hell, but all the dream of paradise – the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another. Andre Breton, too, dreamed of this paradise when he talked about the glass house in which he longed to live. If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence. Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way. and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets even smaller and poorer.
– Milan Kundera
WITH THE STARS ALL AROUND
I wish you the peace of sleep,
your breath a canoe
that carries you
toward the next moment
without any need
for you to touch the oars.
How easily you arrive.
Oh, to trust the world like that—
trust you will be carried,
not just in sleep,
but in waking dreams,
trust no matter how high the waves,
the skiff of grace
has a seat for you.
And oh, to let go of the oars—
there is no steering
toward what comes next.
– Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Driftglass, I said. You know all the Coca-Cola bottles and cut-crystal punch bowls and industrial silicon slag that goes into the sea?
I know the Coca-Cola bottles.
They break, and the tide pulls the pieces back and forth over the sandy bottom, wearing the edges, changing their shape. Sometimes chemicals in the glass react with chemicals in the ocean to change the color. Sometimes veins work their way through in patterns like snowflakes, regular and geometric; others, irregular and angled like coral. When the pieces dry, they’re milky. Put them in water and they become transparent again.
– Samuel R. Delany, Driftglass
Loving someone… I mean really loving someone… means you are willing to admit the person you love is not what you first fell in love with, not the image you first had; and you must be able to like them still for being as close to that image as they are, and avoid disliking them for being so far away.
– Samuel R. Delany, Driftglass
There are certain directions in which you cannot go. Choose one in which you can move as far as you want.
– Samuel R. Delany, Driftglass
Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.
– Marcel Proust
To live is to war with trolls in heart and soul
To write is to sit in judgment of oneself.
– Henrik Ibsen
The bankruptcy of modern psychology is its flight from the soul, and therefore from the transcendent task of meaning. Such a denial of depth is a failure of nerve in the face of largeness.
– James Hollis
I used to think everything had meaning––
and it does.
– Mary Ruefle
I do not think much of the actual. It is something which we have long since done with. It is a sort of vomit in which the unclean love to wallow.
– Thoreau
A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people’s business.
– Eric Hoffer
We moved from wondering to answering, which has not served us well at all.
– Richard Rohr
When stupidity is considered patriotism, it is unsafe to be intelligent.
– Issac Asimov
If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking.
– Leslie Lamport
When someone is young, he is not capable of conceiving of time as a circle, but thinks of it as a road leading forward to ever-new horizons; he does not yet sense that his life contains just a single theme.
The Greek word for “return” is nostos. Algos means “suffering.” So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”
– Milan Kundera
And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see—it is, rather, a light by which we may see—and what we see is life.
– Robert Penn Warren
There was more to this void than I initially realized. I keep seeking, or rather, finding absence. Perfect holes I perfectly fit into or at the very least, big enough to fall through.
– Sally J. Johnson
Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless.
– Milan Kundera
BILL MOYERS: Everything Good Is Simple
NIKKI GIOVANNI: Everything good is simple: a soft boiled egg…toast fresh from the oven with a pat of butter swimming in the center…steam off a cup of black coffee… John Coltrane bringing me ‘Violets for My Furs’
Most simple things are good: Lines on a yellow legal pad… dimples defining a smile…a square of gray cashmere that can be a scarf… Miles Davis ‘Kind of Blue’
Some things clear are complicated: believing in a religion…trying to be a good person…getting rid of folk who depress you…Horace Silver ‘Blowing the Blues Away’
Complicated things can be clear: Dvorak’s ‘New World’ Symphony… Alvin Ailey’s ‘Revelations’… Mae Jemison’s riding in space… Mingus ‘Live at Carnegie Hall’
All things good are good: poetry… patience… a ripe tomato on the vine… a bat in flight… the new moon…me in your arms… things like that
If we look far enough back in the depths of time, the disordered anthill of living beings suddenly, for an informed observer, arranges itself in long files that make their way by various paths towards greater consciousness.
– Teilhard de Chardin
We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has.
– Milan Kundera
it is the hard
edge of things
i am avoiding
the separations
so that i take my glasses off
and then i cannot tell
which are the leaves
and which the angels
like blake
like that man
who lived with lepers
not noticing what was sin
and what was grace
visioning visions vision
i take my glasses off
so i can see
– Lucille Clifton
Why not
become so close to each other
that, in the end, we can
do nothing but stand astonished
at what, eventually, must become
a separation—
separation being
what life, mostly, is.
This must become the question
of what love is for,
what grief is, if it
changes nothing of who you are, still:
bright star, shining on,
even when I cannot see you.
– Terry L. Kennedy
There was a smell of Time in the air tonight. He smiled and turned the fancy in his mind. There was a thought. What did time smell like? Like dust and clocks and people. And if you wondered what Time sounded like it, it sounded like water running in a dark cave and voices crying and dirt dropping down upon hollow box lids, and rain. And, going further, what did Time look like?
Time look like snow dropping silently into a black room or it looked like a silent film in an ancient theater, 100 billion faces falling like those New Year balloons, down and down into nothing. That was how Time smelled and looked and sounded. And tonight – Tomas shoved a hand into the wind outside the truck – tonight you could almost taste time.
– Ray Bradbury
Anyone whose goal is ‘something higher’ must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.
– Milan Kundera
In order to speak to the world what I have heard, I am not bound to step into the street. I may remain standing in the door of my ancestral house. …
– Martin Buber
It’s a matter of discipline. When you’ve finished washing and dressing each morning, you must tend to your planet.
– Antoine de Saint-Exupery
People suffer because they are caught in their views. As soon as we release those views, we are free and we don’t suffer anymore. Mindfulness helps you come home to the present. Life is available only in the present.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.
– Mary Oliver
Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.
– Toni Morrison
your closest friends deserve your keenest criticism. Take them seriously, especially when they don’t take themselves seriously. We’re not here for long.
– Rick Benger
Violent men don’t have the strength of consciousness and character to own responsibility for what is missing in their own psychological life. They pummel others for not carrying their own anguished souls.
– James Hollis
It does take great maturity to understand that the opinion we are arguing for is merely the hypothesis we favor, necessarily imperfect, probably transitory, which only very limited minds can declare to be a certainty or a truth.
– Milan Kundera
The wisdom of Greek tragedy cannot be overemphasized. All of them dramatize this universal confession: I created my life; I made these choices; and, stunningly, this flood of unimagined consequences are the fruits of my choices.
– James Hollis
It is hardly an exaggeration to say that “us-and-them” seeing, and the dualistic thinking that results, is the foundation of almost all discontent and violence in the world.
– Richard Rohr
That’s the thing writers can do. They can outlast the thing that opposes them.
– Salman Rushdie
And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise.
– Sylvia Plath
You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.
– Henry David Thoreau
We command the pain to remain in the words. not in us.
– Alice Notley
Nonfiction allows me to give shape and dimension to the unruly theater of my past, to make sense of the rubble, to recollect and rebuild my life into something that looks more like art and less like a journey without purpose.
– Rigoberto Gonzalez
What is realized in the novel is the process of coming to know one’s own language as it is perceived in someone else’s language, coming to know one’s own belief system in someone else’s system.
– Mikhail Bakhtin
The goal of this contemplation is to spark within you the inspiration to practice dharma.
– Mahamudra
The voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties.
– Milan Kundera
Let me stay, let me go, I’m the earth’s,
I am wild from the future’s howl.
– Hila Ratzabi
Has anyone else figured out how to explain to their family they don’t have to worry about you based on the content of your poems?
– Sofia Fey
Me following Jesus is not meant to control you. It’s meant to invite me: to love you, serve you, honor you.
To share meals of welcoming and be hospitable with you & yours.
Me following Jesus is not about using God to manipulate. It’s about learning from Jesus to see God in you.
– Carlos A. Rodríguez
Christianity should sound more like “I love you” than “God would love you, if you…”
– Dr. Kevin M. Young
Power doesn’t hang uselessly in the universe. If we do not use whatever power we have, it will be used. It will be used by our enemies against you, against me, and against our children…whether you use it or whether you waste it, you are responsible for it.
– Audre Lorde
Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? Ah, where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear?
[…]
Have they vanished along with footpaths, with grasslands and clearings, with nature?
– Milan Kundera / Slowness
Confront the dark parts of yourself, and work to banish them with illumination and forgiveness. Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing.
– August Wilson
I think that maybe
I will be a little surer
of being a little nearer.
That’s all. Eternity
is in the understanding
that that little is more than enough.
– R.S. Thomas
…and under every deep a lower deep opens.
– Emerson
Projection is the way the psyche reaches out to someone or something new. Jung says that everyone creates for himself a series of more or less imaginary relationships based essentially on projection.
– Robin Roberston
I encourage the man I married
to work hard
at a career I don’t admire.
He is not sweet or funny.
He is as steady and strong as death.
– Nazifa Islam
DZONGSAR JAMYANG KHYENTSE RINPOCHE:
Buddhism is not likeable
because it is not common sense
because it is wisdom
Common sense is the interpretation manifestation of ego
and it can be used by the ego and ego can feel comfortable,
whereas wisdom is the opposite of ego.
I have been all things unholy. If God can work through me, he can work through anyone.
– St. Francis of Assisi
I think I too was also with all of us incarnating in order precisely to do everything I could in small and large ways to help this birth take place in a positive way. So we just do it. We dig in, we do everything we can. And I don’t think we have anything to be afraid of. One of the strange things that’s come through many times in my sessions was a sense of how proud the divine is of us, how happy. The sense that we are right on time. It’s easy to look around and think, ‘Wow, we’re a mess. We’ve messed up the planet. We’ve done such a terrible job.’ And yet what came through my sessions repeatedly was, ‘You are beautiful. The entire planet is beautiful. The human species is beautiful.’
Something believes that we are ready for this transition. I think if we weren’t ready for it, it wouldn’t be happening. The creative intelligence, the intelligence that’s behind the formation of planets, that’s behind plate tectonics, that’s behind the formation of galaxies, this is the intelligence that’s actually expressing itself in the crisis that we’re coming to. We’re not in control of this. We’re along for the ride. We do the best we can, I think. So I want to minimize the pain and suffering for all of our children. To me, if we don’t understand the deep structure of what’s happening when it gets very dark and when it gets very scary, we could panic and we could fall prey to false ideologies, fascism, demagogues. It’s important for us to have as clear view as possible of why this is happening and what we are trying to actualize. And that’s what I’m trying to describe in the chapter The Birth of the Future Human.
– Christopher Bache
To a fool, that which cannot be explained cannot exist.
The wise man knows that existence itself cannot be explained.
– Rabbi Tzvi Freeman
There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
A young man from a small town. With a very large imagination. Lay alone in his room with his radio on. Looking for another station.
– John Prine
It is clear that, in Orpheus and Christ, we have exactly the same archetype, with the motif of leaving the physical world, still symbolized with a cross in astronomy, for the spiritual. They leave the Earth, symbol of Mother, to go to the realm of the Father.
The Christian myth of the Fall at the Tree of the Garden and the Redemption at Calvary on the Tree of Redemption are two aspects of the two Trees in the Garden of Eden.
The first, the Tree of the Fall, represents passage from the eternal into the realm of time.
The second is the Tree of the return from the realm of time to the spiritual. So that Tree is the threshold tree, the laurel tree, which may be seen in its two aspects, going from the sacred to the profane and from the profane back into the sacred.
When Man ate of the fruit of the Tree, he discovered himself in the field of duality instead of the field of unity. As a result, he finds himself out in exile.
The two cherubim placed at the gate are there representative of the world of the pairs of opposites in which, having been cast out of the world of unity, he is now located.
You are kept in exile by your commitment to that world.
– Joseph Campbell
To her fair works did nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.
Through primrose tufts, in that sweet bower,
The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
And ‘tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.
The budding twigs spread out their fan,
To catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure there.
If this belief from heaven be sent,
If such be Nature’s holy plan,
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?
– William Wordsworth
We were not meant to live shallow lives, pocked by meaningless routines and the secondary satisfactions of happy hour. We are the inheritors of an amazing lineage, rippling with memories of life lived intimately with bison and gazelle, raven and the night sky. We are designed to encounter this life with amazement and wonder, not resignation and endurance. This is at the very heart of our grief and sorrow. The dream of full-throated living, woven into our very being, has often been forgotten and neglected, replaced by a societal fiction of productivity and material gain. No wonder we seek distractions. Every sorrow we carry extends from the absence of what we require to stay engaged in this one wild and precious life.
– Francis Weller
Wherever you have friends, that’s your country. And wherever you receive love, that’s your home.
– Old Tibetan Sayings
FIREFLIES IN THE GARDEN
Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,
And here on earth come emulating flies,
That though they never equal stars in size,
(And they were never really stars at heart)
Achieve at times a very star-like start.
Only, of course, they can’t sustain the part.
– Robert Frost
BREATHING SPACE, JULY
The one who’s lying on his back under the tall trees
is also up there within them. He’s flowing out into thousands of twigs,
swaying to and fro,
sitting in an ejector seat that lets go in slow motion.
The one who’s standing down by the docks squints at the water.
The docks age faster than people.
They have silver-gray lumber and stones in their gut.
The glaring light pounds all the way in.
The one who’s traveling all day in an open boat
over the glittering bays
will fall asleep at last inside a blue lamp
while the islands crawl like huge moths over the glass.
– Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Patty Crane
How lovely it is / you say / to have
a bed to forget yourself in / in a city
that doesn’t love you
– Gavin Yuan Gao
God, give us a long winter
and quiet music, and patient mouths,
and a little pride—before
our age ends.
Give us astonishment
and a flame, high, bright.
– Adam Zagajewski
What is a true spiritual discipline? It is a known rhythm of the harmonized body. All is there. Nothing could be more material than to use the body for acquiring a right sensation of God.
– Sri Anirvans
The holy person welcomes all that is earthly.
– Hildegard von Bingen
When you feel pressures surging and collecting in the heart or swelling in the sushumna, or you feel light exploding in the brain and energies moving, that is the kundalini shakti talking to you personally. You need to listen to it. In the end, that’s what meditation is about because enlightenment doesn’t happen in one blinding flash — it’s a sustained conversation from the depths of creation to creation itself.
– Mark Griffin
The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people from expressing themselves, but rather force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, or ever rarer, the thing that might be worth saying.
– Gilles Deleuze
Am I a poet?
I think iamb.
– Francesca Leader
No one needs billionaires to colonize outer space. We need them to pay their fair share of taxes so people can thrive here on Earth.
– Robert Reich
And/ on the cloudless blue/ I scribble your name.
– James Schuyler
Who really believes he or she has a soul these days? In place of the gods of old, we rely instead on materialism, hedonism, narcissism, and distraction to get us through the night. And just how well has that worked for us?
– James Hollis
Abundance is not about how much money you have, it’s about how much you are enjoying your life.
– Summer Pierre
Whoever needs to hear.. I taught myself how to write poetry in a second language in my thirties. In other words, anyone (who wants) can do it.
– Andrea Jurjević
Through the relative stillness of the silent spaces between thoughts we find a doorway into the essence of mind itself, the larger background awareness that is present in both movement and stillness, without bias toward either. This larger awareness is self-existing.
– John Welwood
The word ‘pupil’ comes from the Latin 𝘱𝘶𝘱𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘢, a doll, referring to the minute inverted image of oneself seen reflected in the eye of another.
– Iain McGilchrist
The temperature in China hit 126 degrees F today (52.2 C.)
That beats the old record by an almost inconceivable 3 F. The world is on fire.
– Bill McKibben, July 16, 2023
“Who put me here?” [Qui m’y a mis?]
– Pascal in the epigraph to Bolaño’s Antwerp
Narouz once said to me that he loved the desert because there ‘the wind blew out one’s footsteps like candle-flames’.
So it seems to me does reality. How then can we hunt for the truth?
– Lawrence Durrell
For a moment, pursuit seems / no better or worse a strategy than retreat ..
– Carl Phillips
Take root in the broken and bloom.
– Dan Beachy-Quick
Who
can be born black
and not
sing
the wonder of it
the joy
the
challenge
– Mari Evans
Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know.
– Alan Watts
When he looks at the edges,
The covers of books and records,
He remembers when and where
He got them, how it felt.
– Brandon D. Johnson
Like the spacious room, buddhanature has always been empty, free of disturbance. At the same time, buddhanature is not a thing apart from emotional afflictions.
– Guo Gu
The eyes are not responsible when the mind does the seeing.
– Publilius Syrus
I don’t think I’ve ever comforted anyone with my writing … Perhaps literature crosses into a zone where consolation can’t intervene.
– Kim Hyesoon
I don’t often like exaggerating or painting with broad strokes, but California is the single greatest place in the world.
– Nicolas Gonzalez
The breathless haste with which [Americans] work … is already beginning to infect old Europe with its ferocity and is spreading a lack of spirituality like a blanket. Even now one is ashamed of resting…
– Nietzsche, The Gay Science
I thought we could just roll
and tumble, live from song
to song, kiss to kiss.
– Rooney Mara in Terrance Malik’s Song to Song
on an island
far off the map
turtles watch the stars
– James Welsh
If the gods are diseases, then our diseases are religious. If the gods are personifications of the forces which run the universe, then our disorders are violations of those energies and their teleological intentions for us.
– James Hollis
A remembered event is infinite, because it is merely a key to everything that happened before and after it.
– Walter Benjamin
does my star
sleep alone too?
river of heaven
– Issa
There is now in the sky only the soft vaporous color of pale citron – the last reflection of the sun which plunges into the dark blue of the night, going from green tones to a pale turquoise of an unheard-of fineness and a fluid delicacy quite indescribable.
– Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot
Never lose the first impression which has moved you.
– Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot
Beyond being and not-being lies the immensity of the real.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
people often prove far more willing to give up god or gods than to stop making gods of one another….
– Martha C. Nussbaum
Of course, a culture as manically and massively materialistic as ours creates materialistic behavior in its people, especially in those people who’ve been subjected to nothing but the destruction of imagination that this culture calls education, the destruction of autonomy it calls work, and the destruction of activity it calls entertainment.
– James Hillman
The American middle class’s faith in personal comfort as an end in itself is, in essence, a denial of life. And it has been imposed upon American writers and playwrights strongly enough to cut them off from their deeper sources.
– Nelson Algren
No spiritual, institutional, political, or ideological enthusiast can be trusted unless they laugh at themselves from time to time.
– Andrew Hagel
Poetry is what makes the invisible appear.
– Nathalie Sarraute
The heart of most spiritual practice is simply this: Remember. Remember who you are. Remember what you love. Remember what is sacred. Remember what is true. Remember that you will die, and that this day is a gift. Remember how you wish to live.
– Wayne Muller
Leonard Cohen is the real Bob Dylan
– Harmony Holiday
The thing that impressed me most, the thing that determined the rest of my life, even today, was the incompatibility of all the things that broke in on me. I felt how pitiless life was: everything, racing by, nothing really dealing with anything else.
– Elias Canetti
In America, the distance between “I” and “God” seems so often to be truncated. Which is, perhaps, one of the culture’s gifts to the world—and its enduring curse.
– Pico Iyer
It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves.
– Thoreau
The divided mind comes to dinner and pecks at one dish after another, rushing on without digesting anything to find one better than the last. It finds nothing good, because there is nothing which it really tastes.
– Alan Watts
All of a sudden there were things that concerned me again, which I could think of with joy and eagerness. All of a sudden a door was thrown open through which life came in. Perhaps I could live once more and once more be a human being.
– Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf
Along with the stars, we are the second source of light in the Universe. As every cell produces photons, so, probably, do neurons. Our minds are “lit up” with the light of electricity, allowing us to become aware of our mind’s activity.
Let us imagine the drop of light that each individual awareness adds to the Whole, each mind creating vibrations in the minds around them, and each of those in the minds around them, just like the stars.
– Stephen Aronson
If there is anything I love most, in the poems I love, it is the audible braiding of that bravery, that essential empty-handedness, and that willingness to be taken by surprise, all in one voice.
– Jorie Graham
In order to change society you must change the culture. In order to change the culture, you have to change the art.
– Chögyam Trungpa
When I write in fragments, it’s not out of rebellion. Instead of thinking they’re broken or incomplete, I think of them as things that are about to grow. Seedlings can contain a whole world.
– Janice Lee
You can chew gum, wash up and listen to the radio at the same time, and still be aware.
– Ajahn Sumedho
…all the wild Summer was in her gaze.
– W. B. Yeats
I myself shall continue living in my glass house where you can always see who comes to call, where everything hanging from the the ceiling and on the walls stays where it is as if by magic, where I sleep nights in a glass bed, under glass sheets, where who I am will sooner or later appear etched by a diamond.
– André Breton
Sit still and lengthen your lines,
Shorten your poems and listen to what the darkness says
– Charles Wright
Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon, like a black sun behind cloud cover. Like smoke from an unseen fire, a line of fire just below the horizon, brushfire or a burning city.
– Margaret Atwood
Genius Loci: (n) In contemporary usage, genius loci usually refers to a location’s distinctive atmosphere, or a ‘spirit of place,’ rather than necessarily a guardian spirit.
While melancholy is a state of vague dreaminess, never deep or intense, sadness is closed, serious, and painfully interiorized. One can be sad anywhere, but sadness grows in intensity in a closed space while melancholy flourishes in open spaces. Sadness almost always stems from a precise motive and is therefore concentrated, whereas there are no exterior causes for melancholy. I know why I am sad, but I do not know why I am melancholy.
– Emil Cioran
The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That’s the only lasting thing you can create.
– Chuck Palahniuk
Energie is the operation, efflux or activity of any being: as the light of the Sunne is the energie of the Sunne, and every phantasm of the soul is the energie of the soul.
– Henry More
I would like to bring to people something like happiness. I would like to discover a method so that if I want it to rain, it will start right away to rain. If one of my friends is ill, I’d like to play a certain song and he will be cured; when he’d be broke, I’d bring out a different song and immediately he’d receive all the money he needed.
– John Coltrane
The living can’t quit living because the world has turned terrible and people they love and need are killed. They can’t because they don’t. The light that shines into darkness and never goes out calls them on into life. It calls them back again into the great room. It calls them into their bodies and into the world, into whatever the world will require. It calls them into work and pleasure, goodness and beauty, and the company of other loved ones.
– Wendell Berry
We have a very sterilized sense of power, and that power is losing its powerfulness. We need other places of power…The times are urgent, let us be slowed down by the beings that exceed us. The times are urgent, let us be defeated by things that we cannot understand. The times are urgent, let us defract our ways of knowing. The times are urgent, let us be released from the traps of the things we already know.
– Bayo Akomolafe
I wish you well on your journey of life,
I hope you connect with some genuine
souls along the way,
and may you move between your
failures with optimism,
and always know life is fluid,
it changes.
Some things are too heavy to carry on
your journey, but love is light,
keep that ..
– Shams Tabrizi
When a bookstore has a single contemporary book of poetry, it really does feel like poets are supposed to eat the crumbs that fall from the table and also be cultural gods at the same time.
– Dr. Han VanderHart
The individual journey of warriorship must be undertaken before we can address the larger issue of how to help this world.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Laughter helps one to find a place in the world, but ironically, which is to say, without selling one’s soul to it.
– Hannah Arendt
The easiest way to get into the meditative state is to begin by listening. If you simply close your eyes and allow yourself to hear all the sounds that are going on around you. Just listen to the general hum and buzz of the world as if you were listening to music.
– Alan Watts
religious buzz
a country chapel humming
with horse flies
– @hegelincanada
A phenomenon is something that occurs in three-dimensional space interpreted with the fourth dimension seen serially as time.
Reality (noumenon) is motionless, ubiquitous, and permanent.
– wei wu wei
The changes of light in which we dwell,
colors among colors that come and go,
are in the earth’s turning.
– Robert Duncan
The unconscious is useless without the human mind. It always seeks its collective purposes and never your individual destiny. Your destiny is the result of the collaboration between the conscious and the unconscious.
– Carl G. Jung
You can’t put spirit into dense matter. Matter is dark; it’s obtuse. There has to be a consciousness to receive spirit. The way I’m understanding it “more and more from dreams” is that consciousness exists in matter, and that consciousness opens to receive spirit.
– Marion Woodman
Come in here and feel
what time felt like when time moved more like
a body moves and less like a machine moves.
– Danika Stegeman LeMay
Truth always rests with the minority…because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion.
– Søren Kierkegaard
Have you a gold cup
dedicated to thought
that is like clear water
held in a flower?
– Robert Duncan
I have dawdled away a good part of my free time now carving vaguely on a scrap of mahogany, but I guess I have been thinking too. Who knows. I sit here in a kind of a stupor and call it thought.
– John Steinbeck
I believe nothing folds easily,
but that time will crease—
retrain the mind.
I believe in the arrowheads of words
and I believe in silence…
I believe the songs of childhood
follow us into the kettles of age,
but the echoes will not disturb the land.
– Kimberly Blaeser
So much writing needs to be done before one finds one’s truest subjects, or the through-lines. The hardest part isn’t editing later to accentuate those, it’s letting oneself write out the possibly unconnected but instinctually related stuff in the first place.
– Maggie Nelson
Any artist knows what it is to look at the world, and the distance and otherness thereof is his primary problem.
– Iris Murdoch
Scolding the universities, or the media, is useless: enormous social pressures have been loosed upon institutions hopelessly vulnerable to cultural guilt.
– Harold Bloom
As any change must begin somewhere, it is the single individual who will experience it and carry it through . . . Nobody can afford to look round and to wait for somebody else to do what he is loath to do himself.
– C.G. Jung
Tears are like wiper fluid for the soul, dissolving the illusions and helping us see what’s real underneath. Tears are my favorite alchemy.
– McCall Erickson
Chinatown
the prices of produce
offered in song
– Antoinette Cheung
One of the great virtues of intellectual history is that it has that capacity to grant a certain permission to stray into the disciplines, such as philosophy, whose history one is studying.
– Martin Jay
To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.
– Henri Poincaré
You’re locally famous when
they talk behind your back,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
Opposites always attract each other and tend to turn into each other through enantiodromia. We know that laughing and crying in us are very similar states, and that one very often falls from one into the other or has both impulses at the same time.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
Thought must never submit, neither to a dogma, nor to a party, nor to a passion, nor to an interest, nor to a preconceived idea, nor to whatever it may be, save to the facts themselves.
– Henri Poincaré
I know that democracy is worth fighting for. I know that fascism is not. To win the former intelligent struggle is needed. To win the latter nothing is required. You only have to cooperate, be silent, agree, and obey…
– Toni Morrison
Meditation is the Cosmic Airdrome where everyone changes planes.
– Thaddeus Golas
Any love is natural and beautiful that lies within a person’s nature; only hypocrites would hold a man responsible for what he loves, emotional illiterates and those of righteous envy, who, in their agitated concern, mistake so frequently the arrow pointing to heaven for the one that leads to hell.
– Truman Capote
One thing about human nature which has always been a mystery to me is why people, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, will cling to an idea once beaten into their brains, in earlier periods of life which limits their thinking, their ability – even hold them in attitudes which cause them to suffer and die, when a little thought and effort would course them into avenues which would lead to health – might even save their lives. In my personal acquaintance I can name dozens of actual instances of chiropractors who went to their graves decades earlier than they should have because of such an attitude. “Only the teachable survive”, said George Santayana. Which is the same as saying the unteachable perish.
– Raymond Nimmo
Become prodigal not of writing—any fool can be this—but of omission. You become brief because you have more things to say than time to say them in. One of the chief arts is that of knowing what to neglect.
– Samuel Butler, Notebooks
Someone once told me the reason songs get stuck in our head is because the mind wants to hear them to completion. Remembering only a refrain it’ll repeat. The best way, then, to get a song out of your head is to listen to the whole thing.
– Fiona Alison Duncan, Exquisite Mariposa
Something is shifting in me. A new land that cannot be vandalized or enhanced by the happenings of the world is opening in my soul. A place that cannot be hurt and that is beyond desire to hide any of itself. Addictions to this and that are withering on the tree of my being and falling away like autumn leaves or are readying themselves to release. There is no push or pull here. There aren’t demands and there is no blame. There is no resistance. There is nothing to prove. There is peace. There is spacious stillness as I have never before known. Woah. And the wind up toy of my mind is still flailing in moments recognizing it no longer has anything to push up against. But even my reactions I am watching without much reaction. I am not making them me. It feels like there is soon to be nothing between me and death, and nothing between me and life.
– Chelan Harkin
Instead of forcing their malleable minds into culturally dominant ruts while discounting or repressing the rest, couldn’t we give our children more of a chance to develop their natural inclinations?
– George Gorman
Calmness accompanies the whole. Fear accompanies the part.
– Hugh Prather
FOUR A.M.
If you knew
how inconceivably near
the moon is to
this pearl of silence
in your forehead,
threaded by the finespun
sparkling dew
of pure attention,
if you knew
how many elixirs of love
you imbibed
with your last inhalation,
how many potions
of healing you’ll pour out
through your next
astounded sigh of praise,
you would awaken
before dawn
to spend the darkest hour
in radiant stillness, simply
caressing the earth
and bathing the stars
with this breath.
– Alfred K. Lamotte
We should tackle reality
in a slightly humorous way;
otherwise, we miss its point.
– Lawrence Durrell
Realizing where your energies cannot extend is such a gift.
– Dr. Han VanderHart
You don’t need to rely on anybody else’s goodness. You have a resource already, which is your own goodness. Your are already good, and you can actually transmit that goodness to others. In buddhism, we call this buddha-nature.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Making a mood conscious allows us to process it! A mood is an attack of the feeling function that has been ignored.
– Anne Baring
I wanted nothing after that day.
Across my own face, like the face of the sun,
a light rain was falling, with the sea calm.
– Derek Walcott
As the Taoists said way back in the Axial Age, to expect certainty from religion is immature and unrealistic. It was a sign of an undeveloped spirituality, a childish viewpoint. There is no certainty. The Taoists found a great freedom in not being certain about things.
– Karen Armstrong
There are certain emotions in your body that not even your best friend can sympathize with, but you will find the right film or the right book, and it will understand you.
– Björk
Often, change is not so much about discarding the past as about reinventing it in a new way for a new time.
– Bishop Michael Curry
Depth psychology, Jung believed, must work in tandem with the creative arts, whose task is to revive the ancient figures and forces by making them comprehensible to the modern imagination.
– David Tacey
From the psyche’s point of view, the image is the carrier, par excellence, of energy. Our psychic system is, energetically speaking, not a closed system, but, on the contrary, a system capable of spontaneously regenerating itself, via the emergence of images.
– Yoram Kaufman
I don’t think everyone should be queer i’m just surprised everyone isn’t
– @lutherxhughes
The ancient sentence said, Let us be silent, for so are the gods.
– Charles Ives, quoting Emerson
Even though everything we say or write, there are still things in the heart that are too big to be said.
– Mahmoud Darwish
Love Is A Place
by E. E. Cummings
love is a place
& through this place of
love move
(with brightness of peace)
all places
yes is a world
& in this world of
yes live
(skilfully curled)
all worlds
If we fixate and say, “I want to help, I need to help,” then if we cannot help, we’ll feel agitated and frustrated. That’s why we simply generate this precious mind, this attitude that we are ready at all times to help.
– Trinley Thaye Dorje, Diamond-Like Resolve
I would always have a problem distinguishing between “sad” and “joyful” in music and poetry. Some sadnesses would be so delicious, and would make me so happy, that I would forget the difference between the two realms. Perhaps there is no frontier between them…
– Adam Zagajewski
INTERVAL
Sometimes, out of nowhere, it comes back,
that night when, driving home from the city,
having left the nearest streetlight miles behind us,
we lost our way on the back country roads
and found, when we slowed down to read a road sign,
a field alive with the blinking of fireflies,
and we got out and stood there in the darkness,
amazed at their numbers, their scattered sparks
igniting silently in a randomness
that somehow added up to a marvel
both earthly and celestial, the sky
brought down to earth, and brought to life,
a sublunar starscape whose shifting constellations
were a small gift of unexpected astonishment,
luminous signalings leading us away
from thoughts of where we were going
or coming from, the cares that often drive us
relentlessly onward and blind us
to such flickering intervals when moments
are released from their rigid sequence
and burn like airborne embers, floating free.
– Jeffrey Harrison
The couple times in my life people have said “you must be a poet,” it was remarkably without compliment.
– Dr. Han VanderHart
Since the shadow, like any other personified complex, is made up of layers upon layers of personal experience built up around an archetypal core, we may project the shadow out not only in personal situations, but in collective and even archetypal situations.
– Robin Robertson
That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack.
– David Foster Wallace
It is to be broken. It is to be
torn open. It is not to be
reached and come to rest in
ever. I turn against you,
I break from you, I turn to you.
We hurt, and are hurt,
and have each other for healing.
It is healing. It is never whole.
– Wendell Berry
To fall in love. Does it occur suddenly or gradually? If gradually, when is the moment “already”? I would fall in love with a monkey made of rags. With a plywood squirrel. With a botanical atlas. With an oriole. With a ferret. With a marten in a picture. With the forest one sees to the right when riding in a cart to Jaszuny. With a poem by a little-known poet. With human beings whose names still move me. And always the object of love was enveloped in erotic fantasy or was submitted, as in Stendhal, to a “crystallization,” so it is frightful to think of that object as it was, naked among the naked things, and of the fairy tales about it one invents. Yes, I was often in love with something or someone. Yet falling in love is not the same as being able to love. That is something different.
– Czesław Miłosz
All I wanted was to plant poetry in broken places, and watch flowers grow.
– Jenim Dibie
You think that just because it’s already happened, the past is finished and unchangeable? Oh no, the past is cloaked in multicolored taffeta and every time we look at it we see a different hue.
– Milan Kundera
The human mind is a kind of original egg, endlessly hatching. Extraordinary and intimate transformations are continually secreted beneath the curved white bones of the cranium. They are always rippling beneath our thoughts, gestating within the oyster folds of the brain. Metaphor surges toward thought; dream becomes perception, perception becomes dream. Endless rich becomings that dream themselves serenely as one thing becoming another; this fluid state can be glimpsed underneath and in between the agitations of all the little schemes and notions of the self, the person we call “I”.
Some of the ripples and murmurings we catch in daylight are associations, wordplay, puns, jokes, daydreams, fantasies, creative mishearings, mistaken glimpses, memories, hummed phrases, and those rich reflective thoughts you catch sight of as you step from the shower and reach for your towel. Other more deliberative footprints we might call novels, plays, films, paintings, sonatas.
– Susan Murphy
Work towards raising the emotional state of one’s usual (daily) life to that of the state one is in when traveling – to that state of openness, of readiness to offer oneself, of being able to see things in their full proportion, of internal tension and fecundity of thought – that is life.
(Life is always an immediate enhancement of life, an increase of life.)
– Ludwig Hohl
I’ve been thinking about something for a long time, and I keep noticing that most human speech – if not all human speech – is made with the outgoing breath. This is the strange thing about presence and absence. When we breathe in, our bodies are filled with nutrients and nourishment. Our blood is filled with oxygen, our skin gets flush; our bones get harder – they get compacted. Our muscles get toned and we feel very present when we’re breathing in. The problem is, that when we’re breathing in, we can’t speak. So presence and silence have something to do with each other.
– Li-Young Lee
What guarantee is there that the five senses, taken together, do cover the whole of possible experience? They cover simply our actual experience, our human knowledge of facts or events. There are gaps between the fingers; there are gaps between the senses. In these gaps is the darkness which hides the connection between things.…
This darkness is the source of our vague fears and anxieties, but also the home of the gods. They alone see the connections, the total relevance of everything that happens; that which now comes to us in bits and pieces, the “accidents” which exist only in our heads, in our limited perceptions.
– Idris Parry
Wonder, to preserve itself, withdraws. It withdraws from the mind, from the willing mind, which would make of mystery a category.
I remember being told a story about an old culture that believed the center of the forest was holy and could not be entered into. Even in the heat of the hunt, should the chased beast enter into the sacred center, the hunter would stop and not pursue. I think often about that line – which is not a line in any definite sense, is no certain marking, but rather is itself somehow without definition, a hazy line, a faulty boundary – that marks the periphery.
One side of the line is the daily world where we who have appetites must fill our mouths, we who have thoughts must fill our minds. The other side is within the world and beyond, where appetite isn’t to be sated, where desire is not to be fulfilled, and where thoughts refuse to lead to knowledge. I like the moment of failure that finds us on that line, abandoned of intent, caught in an experience of a different order, stalking the line between two different worlds and imperfectly taking part in both. Such a place risks blasphemy at the same time that it returns reverence to risk.
– Dan Beachy-Quick
… went to bed at ten, and I listened to the rain and the Atlantic and felt safe.
– Joan Didion
The main condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one’s narcissism. The narcissistic orientation is one in which one experiences as real only that which exists within oneself, while the phenomena in the outside world have no reality in themselves, but are experienced only from the viewpoint of their being useful or dangerous to one. The opposite pole to narcissism is objectivity; it is the faculty to see other people and things as they are, objectively, and to be able to separate this objective picture from a picture which is formed by one’s desires and fears.
– Erich Fromm
There are stars whose radiance is visible on Earth though they have long been extinct. There are people whose brilliance continues to light the world though they are no longer among the living. These lights are particularly bright when the night is dark. They light the way for humankind.
– Hannah Senesh
Most intellectuals and most artists belong to the same type. Only the strongest of them force their way through the atmosphere of the bourgeois earth and attain to the cosmic. The others all resigned themselves or make compromises.
– Hermann Hesse
I refuse to limit my potential because there are people who don’t believe I’m capable of extraordinary things.
– Ekta Somera
in the gutter
wildflowers
have sprouted
– Issa
Literature [and reading poetry] is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.
– Fernando Pessoa
If I want to understand an individual human being, I must lay aside all scientific knowledge of the average man and discard all theories in order to adopt a completely new and unprejudiced attitude. I can only approach the task of understanding with a free and open mind.
– Jung
Every poem has a secret addressee. Every secret a shoreline.
– Felicity Plunket
You always try to write about your life, and you never write about anything but literature. […] The despair you feel is that of one who lives in two dimensions and is trapped inside a square, in the middle of an infinite piece of paper. You make yourself less real with each book you write. […] It is a curse, a Fata Morgana, a falsification of the simple fact that you are alive, you are real in a real world. You multiply your worlds, but your own world would be enough to fill billions of lives.
– Cărtărescu, Solenoid (tr. Sean Cotter)
Essays, like butterflies, jazz (and God), move irregularly, not linearly.
– Edward Hoagland
For it is the function of consciousness not only to recognize and assimilate the external world through the gateway of the senses, but to translate into visible reality the world within us.
– Carl Jung
You’re rowing by wordlight.
– Paul Celan
In winter we close the windows
and read Chekhov,
nearly weeping for his world.
What luxury, to be so happy
that we can grieve
over imaginary lives.
– Lisel Mueller
A lot of people still think recycling will stop Earth breakdown. What a load of shit. Almost like fossil fuel people wanted people to think this. The only thing that can stop global heating is ending the fossil fuel industry.
– Peter Kalmus
Certain tight parentheses have been opened and allowed to spill their still active contents.
– Nabokov
Life’s splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off … If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come.
– Franz Kafka
My father liked the blues and Lady Day.
He left Jamaica way before the reggae
rocked all night in backstreet studios,
before King Tubby or Augustus Pablo.
– Hannah Lowe
You pierce my soul.
I am half agony, half hope…
I have loved none but you.
– Jane Austen
a jumble of cliffs above,
ridge tops edged with bushes,
valley fog below a hazy canyon.
– Gary Snyder
Everything is banal, everything is “nothing but;” and that is the reason why people are neurotic. They are simply sick of the whole thing, sick of that banal life.
– C.G. Jung
Pragmatism is the care of the possible.
– Isabelle Stengers
The poet is the antagonist of linearity.
The diaspora poet is born an antagonism.
– Momtaza Mehri
The ear is an editor and the body is an amplifier.
– Yusef Komunayakaa
Silence is the future of words, which have already devoured with vowels all materiality, fearful of its own corners; A wave that spans eternity.
– Joseph Brodsky
That which is dreamed can never be lost, can never be undreamed.
– Neil Gaiman
Even the Unnatural, that too is Natural…
– Goethe
Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.
– Chuck Klosterman
Human speech, as reflective of Divine speech, has the power to create, to transform, to open up, to manifest realities, unknown realities. So we use speech as a process of waking up. To speak to our contractions, to confront our contractions – just as we would with our lover – with presence, with openness and curiosity of heart, with openness of mind..
– Zvi Ish-Shalom
I hope you’ll see me one day and see who I’ve become. I hope regret steals your breath.
– Jess Amelia
Hate, in the long run, is about as nourishing as cyanide.
– Kurt Vonnegut
Imagination doesn’t mean making things up; it means being able to understand things from the inside, emotions, events and experiences that you haven’t actually been through but that you will have experienced by the time you’ve got them on the page.
– David Malouf
To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Zen is not some kind of excitement, but concentration on our usual everyday routine.
– Shunryu Suzuki
Sometimes you have to travel a long way to find what is near.
– Paulo Coelho
Woodpecker’s the name, and outlawing’s the game. I’m wanted in fifty states and Mexico. It’s nice to feel wanted, and I’d like to be wanted by you. In fact, I just blew my disguise in the hopes that it would open your eyes and soften your heart.
– Tom Robbins
Describe the country in terms of what you passionately hope it will become, as well as what you know it to be. Be loyal to a dream country rather than to the one to which you wake up every AM. Unless such loyalty exists, the ideal has no chance of becoming actual.
– Richard Rorty
We can search in all directions, drawing in knowledge from the vast sea of data and words. We can look into the eyes of the newborn and see that they have come here with precious gifts. We can look within and see the wise old one sharing the years of story and teachings. A memory that has been forgotten by most cultures is ready and waiting to emerge. Bring it home, truly home within and weave the fine threads of its value in expression within your own inner and outer world…it is simply knowledge until we make an act of creation with it. Weaving the threads of a whole, big, beautiful life today…it is good and I am in gratitude!
– Cheri Lynn Kittel
No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.
– Martha Graham
When we are undergoing a psychological or spiritual initiation, we may find ourselves on thresholds or edge-places in our dreams. Whether a dark thicket into a woodland, an opening in the roots of a tree, a cave in the earth, diving under the sea, peering beyond a pane of glass, on a bridge, in a long hallway, or at a doorway, these edge places require relinquishments to grant us entry into the otherworld. The armour of our protections, the adornments of our identity, even our ambitions for entry. All must be laid down, in a long and sometimes painful process which is not the preparation, but the gesture of entry itself. A way of going that isn’t intent on arriving but rather surrendering to the cyclical rhythm of nature, so we can remember what has always been true.
– Toko-pa Turner, Edge Places in Dreams
I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.
– Albert Camus, L’Étranger
The coldness of loneliness
is like a bear.
No wonder it hibernates.
The Healer.
Sleep slows down,
cooling off.
Letting this world be.
The detachment of death.
She showed me!
Sooner or later
everyone lets go.
Except we don’t lose
the me in you,
or the you in me.
But detachment makes room.
Though no bear or frog
has to hibernate forever.
Sometimes different parts of us
have to be born.
Every new birth
has its own special wings.
– George Gorman
When you’re in a good position, almost all options are positive.
When you’re in a bad position, almost all are negative.
Good positioning lets you control your circumstances. Poor positioning forces your circumstances to control you.
– Farnam Street
Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant . . . History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time – and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
– Hunter S. Thompson
His soul’s ship foresaw the inevitable rocks, but resolved to sail on, and make a courageous wreck.
– Herman Melville
The world around is like one vast embrace.
What rapture this is, but what an agony it can also be.
– Robert Walser
The goal is important only as an idea; the essential thing is the opus which leads to the goal: that is the goal of a lifetime.
– Carl G. Jung
While language is a gift, listening is a responsibility.
– Nikki Giovanni
It is often when I am most unwell … that the self which I sometimes recognize perceives these connections between two ideas, just as it is often in the autumn, when there are no longer any leaves or flowers, that one senses the most profound harmonies in the landscape.
– Proust
Could Be a Whale Shark
by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Bolinao, Philippines
I am worried about tentacles.
How you can still get stung
even if the jelly arm disconnects
from the bell. My husband
swims without me—farther
out to sea than I would like,
buoyed by salt and rind of kelp.
I am worried if I step too far
into the China Sea, my baby
will slow the beautiful kicks
he has just begun since we landed.
The quickening, they call it,
but all I am is slow, a moon jelly
floating like a bag in the sea.
Or a whale shark. Yes—I could be
a whale shark, newly spotted
with moles from the pregnancy—
my wide mouth always open
to eat and eat with a look that says
Surprise! Did I eat that much?
When I sleep, I am a flutefish,
just lying there, swaying back
and forth among the kelpy mess
of sheets. You can see the wet
of my dark eye awake, awake.
My husband is a pale blur
near the horizon, full of adobo
and not waiting thirty minutes
before swimming. He is free
and waves at me as he backstrokes
past. This is how he prepares
for fatherhood. Such tenderness
still lingers in the air: the Roman
poet Virgil gave his pet fly
the most lavish funeral, complete
with meat feast and barrels
of oaky wine. You can never know
where or why you hear
a humming on this soft earth
You don’t ever have to say anything,’ he says. ‘Always remember that as a thing you need never do. Many’s the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing.
– Claire Keegan, Foster
Altogether, the idea of meditation is not to create states of ecstasy or absorption, but to experience being.
– Chögyam Trungpa
I don’t think you can write a book that’s worth anything without extraordinary discipline. To be a good writer you have to be absolutely lucid at every moment of writing.
– Gabriel García Márquez
It has great names but also great meaning. Exactly what it is, is to let your own mind, empty and uncontrived, be naturally settled in whatever takes place.
– Patrul Rinpoche
barefoot on the sand
pain from the splinter lingers
after it’s been pulled
– Jackie Chou
To harm a person is to receive something from him…. We have gained in importance… We have filled an emptiness in ourselves by creating one in somebody else.
– Simone Weil, Void and Compensation
We can only know the world as we have inevitably shaped it by the nature of our attention.
– Iain McGilchrist
So we could rave on, darling, you and I,
until the stars tick out a lullaby
about each cosmic pro and con;
nothing changes, for all the blazing of
our drastic jargon, but clock hands that move
implacably from twelve to one.
– Sylvia Plath, Love is a Parallax
“you don’t remember you, do me?” may be my finest typo yet
– Emma Bolden
I became a creature of silence and solitude.
– Renée Vivien
I am coming, toward something
I cannot name but still own.
– Julian Randall, The Zero Country
(But much of history is unwritten. Remember this.)
– N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season
So it comes to this.
The wind hanging in the trees,
the light stalled on grass,
no forward movement,
only the desire to move
through a pale landscape
and then the stopping
at a door, the opening
of a window. Look
there below, the street.
– George Szirtes
I shall gather myself into my self again,
I shall take my scattered selves and make them one.
– Sara Teasdale
But I want a god in the flesh, not an abstraction, an incarnated god, with strength, two arms, and a sex. Perhaps I have loved the artist because creation is the nearest we come to divinity.
– Anaïs Nin
I follow you, I follow your idea, where are we going I say…
– Hélène Cixous
Every abyss is navigable by little paper boats.
– João Guimarães Rosa
Is the Kingdom of God really upside down or is it right side up and we’re the ones who flipped it?
– Kate Boyd
When you’re creating your own shit, man, even the sky ain’t the limit.
– Miles Davis
Sometimes the only way we learn is the hard way. We might acknowledge that we’re hooked but go ahead and do what we always do anyway—but we can do this as a conscious experiment to see where it will lead. When we’re conscious, it allows us to learn from our mistakes.
– Pema Chodron
lengthening days—
even the morning glory
a shade bluer
– John Wisdom
a girlhood of
east coast summers
night sail along
the coast of camden
sitting on the veranda
at the colony hotel
buying boardwalk souvenirs
in ocean city
ice cream cones
in cape may
chasing gulls down the pier
in myrtle beach
lost in thought
the marshes of murrells inlet
– @mybookandbranch
So I made a sort of inner surrender to the situation, lit a cigarette, and watched the long dissolving strip of the Corniche flow past us.
– Lawrence Durrell
But most hearts say, I want, I want, / I want, I want. My heart / is more duplicitous… It says, I want, I don’t want, I / want, and then a pause.
– Margaret Atwood
When a civilization treats its poets with the disdain with which we treat ours, it cannot be far from disaster; it cannot be far from the slaughter of the innocents.
– James Baldwin
Again the
day begins, only
no one wants its sanity
or it’s blinding clarity.
– Philip Levine
There appears to be a conscience in mankind which severely punishes the man who does not somehow and at some time, at whatever cost to his pride, cease to defend and assert himself, and instead confess himself fallible and human.
– CG Jung
There’s one journey
in which not our feet
but our heart tires.
– Ahmad Faraz
If you want to heal, you’ll always find the balm.
– Rachel Held Evans
[I travelled to expectancy]
I travelled to expectancy
Through expectancy
Feared my way through
Fear my scholarship
Criterion among criterions
I loitered at the wooden
Doors I had a touch
Of something like a flu
A forfeiture of something
In my gut but like a charm
A gendered thing I guess
I wasn’t swayed to bring it up
– Jane Huffman
If you believe that your God is at war with someone or something, don’t be surprised when your world is filled with violence.
– Josh Avritt
unhappy hour
the bar crowded
with life stories
– @pauldavidmena
If you do not give up and let go of what binds you to samsara, you will never be free. You must understand that you already have everything that you need. Your buddha nature is already whole. Your buddha nature is already pure. There is nothing to obtain. You just have to give up and let go what is covering it, and you will be free.
– Chamtrul Rinpoche
Read a thousand books and your words will flow like a river.
– Viriginia Woolf
the unlimited reach of the future is
another kind of forever
– Sun Ra
There are those who maintain that you can’t demand anything of the reader. They say the reader knows nothing about art, and that if you are going to reach him, you have to be humble enough to descend to his level. This supposes either that the aim of art is to teach, which it is not, or that to create anything which is simply a good-in-itself is a waste of time. Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it. We hear a great deal about humility being required to lower oneself, but it requires an equal humility and a real love of the truth to raise oneself and by hard labor to acquire higher standards… Ignorance is excusable when it is borne like a cross, but when it is wielded like an ax, and with moral indignation, then it becomes something else indeed.
– Flannery O’Connor
I have lived in my body long enough to know
the compass always points inwards.
– Haley Jakobson
Before it is that we become unfaithful,
O’ friend,
Let us be separated.
– Ahmad Faraz
One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes. In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
INSTRUCTION
You must rock your pain in your arms
until it’s asleep, then leave it
in a darkened room
and tiptoe out.
For a moment you will feel
the emptiness of peace.
But in the next room
your pain is already stirring.
Soon it will be
calling your name.
– Linda Pastan
Better than any argument is to rise at dawn
and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.
– Wendell Berry
The suffering which has not yet arisen should be avoided
– Yoga Sutras of Pantanjali II:16
When you encounter difficulties, the feelings and stories that arise in reaction are just that, feelings and stories. They are whirlwinds of confusion, based not in what is happening now but in deeply held beliefs about you and your relationship to the world. Let them swirl- leaves in the wind. Sometimes you fall back into them and lose touch with the present, but a moment of recognition always comes. Right then, come back to your body, come back to your breath, and rest. The confusion, the stories and the feelings are still there. They continue to swirl, but you are not lost in them.
– Ken McLeod
I’ve known many people who have spent years exercising daily, getting massages, doing yoga, faithfully following one food or vitamin regimen after another, pursuing spiritual teachers and different styles of meditation, all in the name of taking care of themselves. Then something bad happens to them and all those years don’t seem to have added up to the inner strength and kindness for themselves that they need to relate with what’s happening. And they don’t add up to being able to help other people or the environment.
When taking care of ourselves is all about me, it never gets at the unshakable tenderness and confidence that we’ll need when everything falls apart. When we start to develop maitri for ourselves, unconditional acceptance of ourselves, then we’re really taking care of ourselves in a way that pays off. We feel more at home with our own bodies and minds and more at home in the world. As our kindness for ourselves grows, so does our kindness for other people.
– Pema Chodron
What misery to be afraid of death.
What wretchedness, to believe only in what can be proven.
– Mary Oliver
We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion.
– Cyril Connolly
I begin here because I think we read and write poetry because we are looking for a voice—any voice—courageous enough to resist the pastel propaganda of our lives; one that will get underneath not one but all of our relentless masks.
– Robin Coste Lewis
Not only is the Photograph never, in essence, a memory […] but it actually blocks memory, quickly becomes a counter-memory.
– Barthes, Camera Lucida
If the mind is not in the head, where the hell is it? It’s precisely the point here: it is in this *non-place* of the co-determination of inner and outer, so one cannot say that it is either outside or inside.
– Francisco J. Varela
It is my premise that philosophy, especially early philosophy, like
religion, is primarily psychology. It is the phenomenology of the
psyche revealing itself in a particular setting, rather than an abstract intellectual discourse.
– Edward Edinger
Religion is not a substitute for life but rather the symbolic expression of the process of integrating the Self into a life lived in relation to the unconscious and to others.
– Ann Ulanov
It’s helpful to consider there are always more options available to us than we might realize.
– Rick Rubin, The Creative Act
Fantasy is not just whimsical ego-nonsense but comes really from the depths; it constellates symbolic situations which give life a deeper meaning and a deeper realization.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love—whether we call it friendship or family or romance—is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.
– Maria Popova
All we have are moments. So live them as though not one can be wasted. Inhabit them, fill them with the light of your best good intention, honour them with your full presence, find the joy, the calm, the assuredness that allows the hours and the days to take care of themselves. If we can do that, we will have lived.
– Richard Wagamese
Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out is mute. Only chance can speak to us. We read its message much as gypsies read the images made by coffee grounds at the bottom of the cup.
– Milan Kundera
Since your mind is with you wherever you go, you need to sit down and start unwinding your ball of yarn.
– Jakusho Kwong-roshi
to create
out of his own imagination
the beauty of his wild
forebears-a mythology
he cannot inherit.
Will he later hallucinate
his gods? Waking
among mysteries with
an insane gleam
of recollection?
– Allen Ginsberg
If you find you no longer believe, enlarge the temple.
– W.S. Merwin
Nowadays there’s a great deal of confusion between Art and Religion. Since religion has failed so many people, they look to Art for Salvation. I wish them luck in this enterprise.
– Leonard Cohen
Observation is a dying art.
– Stanley Kubrick
Nature is written in symbols and signs.
– John Greenleaf Whittier
Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
“God sees everything,” or the logic of morphic resonance that knows that any change that happens in one place creates a field that allows the same kind of change to happen elsewhere. Acts of kindness strengthen the field of kindness, acts of love strengthen the field of love, acts of hate strengthen the field of hate.
– Charles Eisenstien
How, indeed, could it be possible for a man, who is limited on six sides—by east, west, south, north, deep, and sky—to understand a matter which is above the skies, which is beneath the deep, which stretches beyond north and south, and which is present in every place, and fills all vacuity?
– St. Gregory the Wonderworker
The encounter with God does not come to man in order that he may henceforth attend to God but in order that he may prove its meaning in action in the world. All revelation is a calling and a mission. But again and again man shuns actualization and bends back toward the revealer: he would rather attend to God than to the world. Now that he has bent back, however, he is no longer confronted by a You; he can do nothing but place a divine It in the realm of things, believe that he knows about God as an It, and talk about him. Even as the egomaniac does not live anything directly, whether it be a perception or an affection, but reflects on his perceiving or affectionate I and thus misses the truth of the process, thus the theomaniac (who, incidentally, can get along very well with the egomaniac in the very same soul) will not let the gift take full effect but reflects instead on that which gives, and misses both.
When you are sent forth, God remains presence for you; whoever walks in his mission always has God before him: the more faithful the fulfillment, the stronger and more constant the nearness. Of course, he cannot attend to God but he can converse with him. Bending back, on the other hand, turns God into an object. It appears to be a turning toward the primal ground, but belongs in truth to the world movement of turning away, even as the apparent turning away of those who fulfill their mission belongs in truth to the world movement of turning toward.
– Martin Buber, I and Thou
Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’.
– George Orwell, Looking Back on the Spanish War
The majority of men are suggestible, half-awake children, willing to surrender their will to anyone who speaks with a voice that is threatening or sweet enough to sway them…
– Erich Fromm
It is possible that I am dreaming right now and that all of my perceptions are false.
– Descartes
I remember someone marveling about how Jonathan Edwards spent 13 hours a day in his study. I’ve never been comfortable with that as a model.
Sadly, Edwards was only able to spend countless hours working in his study because others spent countless hours working in his fields.
– Mika Edmondson
To thirst gothically, to want—
like a spire: no discernible object but more sky.
– Carl Phillips
And sometimes I feel as if,
already, I am not here…
– Sharon Olds
No it is not easy to write. It is as hard as breaking rocks. Sparks and splinters fly like shattered steel.
– Clarice Lispector
It is only when we realize that life is taking us nowhere that it begins to have meaning.
– P.D. Ouspensky
Sometimes it seems there are more pages in me than breaths.
– Heather Christle
Whatever you’re doing in writing must involve joy.
– @MauriceRuffin
because of you
love blossoms
midsummer
– Akari
Projections change the world into the replica of one’s unknown face.
– Carl G. Jung
Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved!
That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly.
It is the one thing we are interested in here.
– Leo Tolstoy
Illumine the mind within rather than the world without.
– Virginia Woolf
Life teaches you how to live it — if you live long enough.
– Tony Bennett
People will pay any price for motion. They will even work for it. Look at bicycles.
– William Faulkner
Jungian psychology deals with wounds by, paradoxically, amplifying rather than reducing our problems. It declares that dreams and symptoms exist for a purpose. They are there to lead us back to the path we have lost, to meaning, to truth, and to the art of living.
– Bud Harris
Interesting it is to observe how certainly all deep feelings agree in this, that they seek solitude, and are nursed by solitude.
– Thomas De Quincey
The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as an example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.
– Andrei Tarkovsky
You have to do your homework. That moment of inspiration is always welcome, but you have to work on it. You can’t just get stoned, write a riff and expect that to be the full song. You have to get stoned, write a riff and then work on it later.
– Jenny Lewis
We are rich: we have nothing to lose.
We are old: we have nowhere to rush.
We shall fluff the pillows of the past,
poke the embers of the days to come,
talk about what means the most,
as the indolent daylight fades.
We shall lay to rest our undying dead:
I shall bury you, you will bury me.
– Vera Pavlova
Yet knowing about a repression does not always cure it; sometimes one has to confess to it openly.
– CG Jung
THE GAME OF ROLES
In any narrative, facts are present or not. One might assume the more facts, the better the constructed history, since facts are meant to reflect what can’t be computed by storytelling alone, which is said to be subjective and therefore inaccurate. In many cases, the story is filled with complex details, which only one person knows. You sit at a table and turn a page on which marks make letters that suggest a timeline. It’s clear that you believe nothing will ever outrank your cold and unforgiving erudition, however, everything you think is based, even at the most basic neuronal level, on the way you connect a long line of dots. Refined interpretation requires that you know that someone once said the offspring of reality and illusion is only a staggering confusion. Keep in mind that your mind is a twice-shattered light bulb and on the other side of detachment is the fact that someone is busy living while you are translating the fact that she’s dead. Also remember that behind your glass mask is only your mind.
– Mary Jo Bang
WHY I AM HAPPY
Now has come, an easy time. I let it
roll. There is a lake somewhere
so blue and far nobody owns it.
A wind comes by and a willow listens
gracefully.
I hear all this, every summer. I laugh
and cry for every turn of the world,
its terribly cold, innocent spin.
That lake stays blue and free; it goes
on and on.
And I know where it is.
– William Stafford
Beyond the wall of the unreal city, beyond the security fences topped with barbed wire and razor wire, beyond the asphalt belting of the superhighways, beyond the cemented banksides of temporarily stopped and mutilated rivers, beyond the rage of lies that poisons the air, there is another world waiting for you. It is the old true world of the deserts, the mountains, the forests, the islands, the shores, the open plains. Go there. Be there. Walk gently and quietly deep within it. And then –
May your trails be dim, lonesome, stony, narrow, winding and only slightly uphill. May the wind bring rain for the slickrock potholes fourteen miles on the other side of yonder blue ridge. May God’s dog serenade your campfire, may the rattlesnake and the screech owl amuse your reverie, may the Great Sun dazzle your eyes by day and the Great Bear watch over you by night.
– Edward Abbey
This is essentially a People’s contest. On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men — to lift artificial weights from all shoulders — to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all — to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.
– Abraham Lincoln
We get quiet for a moment in meditation. We sink down to a relaxedness, a calmness, abruptly free from all the crazy dreams we confuse with reality. And in that instant, by mistake maybe, or because we aren’t thinking to stop it from happening—we experience, in a flash, things as they really are.
– William R. Stimson
Well,
one gets out of bed
and the planets don’t always hiss
or muck up the day, each day.
– Anne Sexton
Anything that is hidden, unseen unknown or unknowable inevitably carries much more power than those things that are out in the open.
– Sue Tompkins
Even the most absurd things are nothing other than symbols for thoughts which are not only understandable in human terms but dwell in every human breast. In insanity we do not discover anything new and unknown; we are looking at the foundations of our own being…
– CG Jung
The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
– Hannah Arendt
Nothing designates the character of people so well as that which they find ridiculous.
– Goethe
Plants are all chemists, tirelessly assembling the molecules of the world.
– Gary Snyder
There’s a French poet, Saint-Pol-Roux, who fixed on his door the statement when he went to sleep, “Don’t disturb. The poet is working.”
– James Hillman
It doesn’t matter if you mess up a book. Some messed-up books are magnificent.
– Robert Musil
One hundred years from now, the people who come after us, for whom our lives are showing the way —
will they think of us kindly?
Will they remember us with a kind word?
I wish to God I could think so.
– Anton Chekhov
Stories, old myths, do a kind of open-heart surgery on you. And at the time–usually when I’m hearing a story of tremendous power, I know something is happening, but I don’t quite know what it is. It’s as if some vast presence is just passing me in the dark.
– Dr. Martin Shaw
You have to play a long time to sound like
yourself.
– Miles Davis
I’m not interested in how people move, but what moves them.
– Pina Bausch
Naturally clear, intangibly pristine, sole indivisible light;
Be in empty, clear, nongrasping freedom from elaboration.
This is the wisdom mind of all Buddhas of the three times.
– Longchenpa
How you talk to your parents says a lot about you — I don’t care how old you are.
– Contemplative Monk
There are children playing in the streets who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago.
– J. Robert Oppenheimer
You should always be creating streams of options so you’re not completely dependent on one source. Building a brand (which online writing does) is the most ownable asset that nobody can take away from you.
– Bryce Seto
Sometimes I think my whole professional life has been based on this hunch I had, early on, that many people feel just as muddled as I do, and might be happy to tag along with me on this search for clarity, for precision.
– Zadie Smith
Breaking the tyranny of the addiction will require one to feel the pain that the addiction defends against. No wonder, then, that addictive patterns have such staying power as flimsy, faltering defenses against primal wounds .
– James Hollis
– Like the traveler, all I had forsaken I would come upon again.
-What had you forsaken?
-The immappable world of our journey. A pass in the mountains. A bloodstained stone. The marks of steel upon it. Names carved in the corrosible lime among stone fishes and ancient shells. Things dim and dimming. The dry sea floor. The tools of migrant hunters. The dreams enchased upon the blades of them. The peregrine bones of a prophet. The silence. The gradual extinction of rain. The coming of night.
– Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain
Do you have the courage to be a poet?
– Jack Gilbert
Only loving other Christians is not Christianity.
Only serving other Christians is not Christianity.
Only helping other Christians is not Christianity.
– Carlos A. Rodríguez
By assuming a balanced, stable, and comfortable physical posture—as comfortable as our health will allow—we facilitate a balanced, stable, and easy heart.
– Jundo Cohen
You are life, passionate, avid, sensual.
– Anna de Noailles
The world about us would be desolate
except for the world within us.
– Wallace Stevens
If you pour some music on whatever’s wrong, it’ll sure help out.
– Levon Helm
When my toes are sunk into warm sand and the ocean is lapping my feet, when I breathe in the scent of salt and hear the cry of a seagull, I know that I am returned to a place of restoration. I am home. I can heal here.
– Toni Sorenson
The poem is always in your hometown, but you have a better chance of finding it in another. The reason…is that the stable set of knowns that the poem needs to anchor on is less stable at home than in the town you’ve just seen for the first time.
– Richard Hugo
A book is nothing but a cube of hot, smoking conscience.
– Boris Pasternak to Marina Tsvetaeva
When I look back on my past and think how much time I wasted on nothing, how much time has been lost in futilities, errors, laziness, incapacity to live; how little I appreciated it, how many times I sinned against my heart and soul-then my heart bleeds.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
I’m trying to separate the work I do as a person who creates things from the work I am striving to do that will hopefully outlive whatever I produce on the page.
– Hanif Abdurraqib
A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meanings o f words, but their jobs.
– Georges Bataille
Be you still be you still, trembling heart…
– Yeats
The more one does the more one can do.
– Amelia Earhart
Details of my own life are rather rare in my poems: I live it with zest but am short on the feeling that whatever has happened to me must interest other people . . . Shame makes me write love poems to Earth and poems of solicitude for wronged posterity.
– Jonathan Griffin
A PHILARCHAIST is someone who prefers the older versions of things to their modern equivalents.
– James Hawes
The search for Reality is the most dangerous of all undertakings, for it destroys the world in which you live.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
If spoken correctly, no one pays attention to the meaning. If spoken falsely, it is against Holy Dharma. The Victorious One has said there is no method to please him other than pleasing sentient beings. Keeping his speech in the mind, keeping his speech in the mind.
– Longchenpa
Creativity is a wild mind and a disciplined eye.
– Dorothy Parker
Early Christians called themselves collectively and each other individually the numinous technical term ‘holy ones’ or ‘saints.’ It is manifest at once that this does not mean morally perfect people: it means people who participate in the mystery of the final Day.
– Rudolf Otto
To use art not as self expression but as self alteration.
– John Cage
Learning to love back is the hardest part of being alive.
– Anne Lamott
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too clever
– Bukowski
The evening was still and fair, even for so heavenly a climate; and all round, as far as the eye could reach, was the blending blue sky and ocean.
– Herman Melville, Omoo
Love blots out its name: to
you it ascribes itself.
– Paul Celan, trans. Michael Hamburger
This morning
I heard the sun begging,
And the birds sadly calling my name,
This morning
I felt a breeze of love knocking
On the other side of a dusty window
– Samiha Totanji
May god embrace
The mess in your head
The chaos in your head
And the flames in your eyes.
For you were never meant to
Be loved in pieces
Neither chained
Or even understood.
You are a piece of art
And a piece of art is only meant to be admired,
Desired
And kept away from anyone or anything that may mess with such kind of magic…
– Samiha Totanji
rise as the light
against mediocrity
let us ascend
beyond patterns of privilege
to #hobnob with those
richer in virtue
though smaller of purse
risk societal fall
for the sake
of embracing kindness
show the world
that you’re human
after all
– @RainyDayRibbons
Shadows on the water,
glaring sky above the river.
Squatting on the ghat,
I see the sun
through a spider’s
mandala.
– Kim Dorman
Each thought has its own cell. But each cell can, in an instant, and apparently almost without cause, become a chamber, a legal chamber over which language presides.
– Walter Benjamin
If we wrote poems
like we write music
what we’re doing
would be a lot
more clear,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
Deception becomes systemic when we use our collective power to protect what we desire to be true rather than face the destruction and the pain that accompanies the actual truth. Deception functions as a narcotic in protecting us from seeing or feeling that which is painful to us.
– Diane Langberg, PhD
The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.
– Joan Didion
I was so happy teaching, because every day, and through every student, I could believe in so many things all over again. The world just kept expanding, and I saw that I did have faith. I once thought I didn’t, but I found it in the students. I found it in helping them to believe in themselves and to go forward and keep the things and the people I loved alive. I sent them out to save the world, you see.
– Marian Seldes
Billions of people
have sat on summer porches
with picnic lunches
but this assembly
of three people
has never happened
The words spoken
are newly born butterflies
that in their innocence
think the sky’s
been made for them
and perhaps it has
each one of us
inheriting a universe
– Mark Gordon
Feeling good is a poor measure of a life, but living meaningfully is a good one, for then we are living a developmental rather than regressive agenda. We never get it all worked out anyway. Life is ragged, and truth is still more raggedy.
– James Hollis
The habit of thinking prevents us at times from experiencing reality, immunizes us against it, makes it seem no more than another thought.
– Marcel Proust
Faith is realizing that there is some open space and sharpness in your everyday life.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Trying to think of exactly how to put this in words but: I’m realizing that for myself, depressive episodes are almost always the product of my brain/conscious mind regulating with a vision of the future that my body knows is not going to happen.
Hence, immobilization.
– Heidi Priebe
In the trembling grey of a spring dawn, when the birds were whispering in mysterious cadence among the trees, have you not felt that they were talking to their mates about the flowers?
– Kakuzō Okakura
The Afterlife
While you are preparing for sleep, brushing your teeth,
or riffling through a magazine in bed,
the dead of the day are setting out on their journey.
They’re moving off in all imaginable directions,
each according to his own private belief,
and this is the secret that silent Lazarus would not reveal:
that everyone is right, as it turns out.
you go to the place you always thought you would go,
the place you kept lit in an alcove in your head.
Some are being shot into a funnel of flashing colors
into a zone of light, white as a January sun.
Others are standing naked before a forbidding judge who sits
with a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on the other.
Some have already joined the celestial choir
and are singing as if they have been doing this forever,
while the less inventive find themselves stuck
in a big air conditioned room full of food and chorus girls.
Some are approaching the apartment of the female God,
a woman in her forties with short wiry hair
and glasses hanging from her neck by a string.
With one eye she regards the dead through a hole in her door.
There are those who are squeezing into the bodies
of animals – eagles and leopards – and one trying on
the skin of a monkey like a tight suit,
ready to begin another life in a more simple key,
while others float off into some benign vagueness,
little units of energy heading for the ultimate elsewhere.
There are even a few classicists being led to an underworld
by a mythological creature with a beard and hooves.
He will bring them to the mouth of the furious cave
guarded over by Edith Hamilton and her three-headed dog.
The rest just lie on their backs in their coffins
wishing they could return so they could learn Italian
or see the pyramids, or play some golf in a light rain.
They wish they could wake in the morning like you
and stand at a window examining the winter trees,
every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow.
– Billy Collins
People need to be liberated from their systems of symbolism and become more intensely aware of the living vibrations of the real world.
– Alan Watts
Part of the problem with the word ‘disabilities’ is that it immediately suggests an inability to see or hear or walk or do other things that many of us take for granted. But what of people who can’t feel? Or talk about their feelings? Or manage their feelings in constructive ways? What of people who aren’t able to form close and strong relationships? And people who cannot find fulfillment in their lives, or those who have lost hope, who live in disappointment and bitterness and find in life no joy, no love? These, it seems to me, are the real disabilities.
– Fred Rogers
This is the answer!
The answer is not in getting and keeping, but in getting and giving.
The answer is not in saving and preserving, but in growing and changing.
The answer is not in making things stop, but in making things go.
The answer is not in covering and hiding, but in touching and sharing.
The answer is not in thinking, but in feeling.
The answer is not in death, but love.
Not death, but life.
Not death!
– Theodore Sturgeon
How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.
– R. Buckminster Fuller
The Milky Way, Łees’áán yílzhódí. Bernie smiled as the old name came to her. The Navajo term translated to “cake that is dragged along.” It conjured an image of the cosmic star cloud as a trail that would be created by pushing a cake through the sky, leaving a path of tasty crumbs behind as it moved among the celestial bodies. She had marveled at the starry cloud as a girl sleeping outside in the summer. The swath of twinkling light against the dark night still delighted her.
– Anne Hillerman, Stargazer
Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it’s all over.
– Octavia Butler
those who have the gift of the gab, and clamor the loudest, succeed best in cheating mankind; for as long as the world is filled with fools, the biggest fool will necessarily be the ruler, if he only succeeds in making himself conspicuous.
– paracelsus, defense, V.
A certain recluse monk once remarked, ‘I have relinquished all that ties me to the world, but the one thing that still haunts me is the beauty of the sky.’ I can quite see why he would feel this.
– Yoshida Kenkō
Psychoanalysis: An Elegy
What are you thinking about?
I am thinking of an early summer.
I am thinking of wet hills in the rain
Pouring water. Shedding it
Down empty acres of oak and manzanita
Down to the old green brush tangled in the sun,
Greasewood, sage, and spring mustard.
Or the hot wind coming down from Santa Ana
Driving the hills crazy,
A fast wind with a bit of dust in it
Bruising everything and making the seed sweet.
Or down in the city where the peach trees
Are awkward as young horses,
And there are kites caught on the wires
Up above the street lamps,
And the storm drains are all choked with dead branches.
What are you thinking?
I think that I would like to write a poem that is slow as a summer
As slow getting started
As 4th of July somewhere around the middle of the second stanza
After a lot of unusual rain
California seems long in the summer.
I would like to write a poem as long as California
And as slow as a summer.
Do you get me, Doctor? It would have to be as slow
As the very tip of summer.
As slow as the summer seems
On a hot day drinking beer outside Riverside
Or standing in the middle of a white-hot road
Between Bakersfield and Hell
Waiting for Santa Claus.
What are you thinking now?
I’m thinking that she is very much like California.
When she is still her dress is like a roadmap. Highways
Traveling up and down her skin
Long empty highways
With the moon chasing jackrabbits across them
On hot summer nights.
I am thinking that her body could be California
And I a rich Eastern tourist
Lost somewhere between Hell and Texas
Looking at a map of a long, wet, dancing California
That I have never seen.
Send me some penny picture-postcards, lady,
Send them.
One of each breast photographed looking
Like curious national monuments,
One of your body sweeping like a three-lane highway
Twenty-seven miles from a night’s lodging
In the world’s oldest hotel.
What are you thinking?
I am thinking of how many times this poem
Will be repeated. How many summers
Will torture California
Until the damned maps burn
Until the mad cartographer
Falls to the ground and possesses
The sweet thick earth from which he has been hiding.
What are you thinking now?
I am thinking that a poem could go on forever.
– Jack Spicer
However intensely we reflect on the sufferings of samsara, we can’t even come close to what beings actually go through. Imagine being an animal about to be slaughtered. You can’t escape. You can’t even speak. You have no control over what’s happening to you. How would it feel to be a chicken about to have your head cut off, or a cow about to have your throat slit? How would it feel to be a crab in a tank at a restaurant, about to be boiled alive for someone’s meal? You may think that these examples of other species don’t apply to you. How could you ever end up in a pot of boiling water? But we have no idea what will happen to us after we die. We don’t know what seeds we have planted and what will arise from them in future lives. . .
The Sanskrit word ‘karma’ simply means ‘action.’ In a broader sense, the term is applied to the whole principle of cause and effect. In popular culture, karma is often thought to mean ‘fate’ or ‘destiny,’ which are concepts that can make us feel helpless. On the contrary, understanding cause and effect empowers us to influence the course of our lives. In the short run, we can’t always prevent the unfolding of results set in motion by many previous causes, but in the long run, if we plant favorable seeds, we will have increasingly favorable situations that will lead us all the way to enlightenment. When we know how to work with karma intentionally, as opposed to blindly allowing karma to carry us along, we can let go of our attachment to the present and our insecurity about the future.
– Dzigar Kongtrul, The Intelligent Heart
About that word authentic. It is related to the word author & you can think of it as being the author of your own self. When you’re living your own reality, you become the sovereign of your own life. You know who you are, you speak what you believe.
– Marion Woodman
It is an excellent thing to live modestly, shun luxury and wealth and not lust after fame and fortune. Rare has been the wise man who was rich.
– Yoshida Kenkō
Nothing provides such balm for the heart as wandering somewhere far from the world of men, in a place of pure water and fresh leaf.
– Yoshida Kenkō
The deepest aspects of our minds are woven from animism & primal lorecraft
and our language has been stripped and denuded to make it harder and harder to recognize that fact and take it seriously.
– @the_wilderless
Old Santa Fe
I rode through the high mountain desert
Down where the Rio Grande runs
Through sage brush and dust to the portal
Of adobe walls warmed by the sun
Through the narrow walled streets of the village
Comes the laughter of children at play
A warm mother’s smile it lingers a while
Come back to Old Santa Fe
I tied my horse at the cantina
Just as the sun’s going down
I takes me a shot of tequila
I takes me a stroll through the town
On a bridge overlooking the arroyo
I hear a guitar softly play
An old Spanish tune by the light of the moon
Come back to Old Santa Fe
Come back to Old Santa Fe Come back to Old Santa Fe
I know my love waits behind old Spanish gates
Come back to Old Santa Fe
Now the snow softly falls on the plaza
In the stillness before the break of dawn
All through the night I’ve been searching
Your memory calling me on
At sunrise down at the cathedral
A young girl in tears softly prays
Saints smile from above I found you my love
In Old Santa Fe
Come back To Old Santa Fe Come back to Old Santa Fe
I know my love waits behind old Spanish gates
Come back to Old Santa Fe
– Peter Rowan
I’ve never been afraid of the American Nazi Party, on the grounds that anybody dumb enough to pick a name like that is not a serious threat. Any real fascist movement that’s a threat, that’s serious and really endangers us, would call itself the Red, White, and Blue Christian American Party, or something like that. They wouldn’t be dumb enough to call themselves Nazis.
– Robert Anton Wilson
The separateness apparent in the world is secondary. Beyond that world of opposites is an unseen unity and identity in us all.
– Joseph Campbell
CANADA
I am writing this on a strip of white birch bark
that I cut from a tree with a penknife.
There is no other way to express adequately
the immensity of the clouds that are passing over the farms
and wooded lakes of Ontario and the endless visibility
that hands you the horizon on a platter.
I am also writing this in a wooden canoe,
a point of balance in the middle of Lake Couchiching,
resting the birch bark against my knees.
I can feel the sun’s hands on my bare back,
but I am thinking of winter,
snow piled up in all the provinces
and the solemnity of the long grain-ships
that pass the cold months moored at Owen Sound.
O Canada, as the anthem goes,
scene of my boyhood summers,
you are the pack of Sweet Caporals on the table,
you are the dove-soft train whistle in the night,
you are the empty chair at the end of an empty dock.
You are the shelves of books in a lakeside cottage:
Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh,
A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson,
Anne of Avonlea by L. M. Montgomery,
So You’re Going to Paris! by Clara E. Laughlin,
and Peril Over the Airport, one
of the Vicky Barr Flight Stewardess series
by Helen Wills whom some will remember
as the author of the Cherry Ames Nurse stories.
What has become of the languorous girls
who would pass the long limp summer evenings reading
Cherry Ames, Student Nurse, Cherry Ames, Senior Nurse,
Cherry Ames, Chief Nurse, and Cherry Ames, Flight Nurse?
Where are they now, the ones who shared her adventures
as a veterans’ nurse, private duty nurse, visiting nurse,
cruise nurse, night supervisor, mountaineer nurse,
dude ranch nurse (there is little she has not done),
rest home nurse, department store nurse,
boarding school nurse, and country doctor’s nurse?
O Canada, I have not forgotten you,
and as I kneel in my canoe, beholding this vision
of a bookcase, I pray that I remain in your vast,
polar, North American memory.
You are the paddle, the snowshoe, the cabin in the pines.
You are Jean de Brébeuf with his martyr’s necklace of hatchet heads.
You are the moose in the clearing and the moosehead on the wall.
You are the rapids, the propeller, the kerosene lamp.
You are the dust that coats the roadside berries.
But not only that.
You are the two boys with pails walking along that road,
and one of them, the taller one minus the straw hat, is me.
– Billy Collins
1425 Fillipo Brunelleshi paints the first painting with perspective. This is the pivotal moment which changed everything in western history forever. Why? Because that is the moment we went from a God centred society to a human centred society. Prior to that everything was painted from the perspective of God. You can’t imagine how important this is. Prior to this point all of human beings were meant to focus on what is imagined to to be Gods perspective. How we know and see the world from the point of view of a human being replaces seeing the world from God’s point of view.
1905 Albert Einstein publishes his paper on electro-dynamics. There is some amazing essence in this paper that says in space time no observer in space time has a privileged over any other observer. For 500 years we have been developing the point of view humanism, the french revolution, the american revolution, we have been throwing away churches, throwing away aristocrats and kings and then Einstein comes along and says point of view, not just human point of view, is profoundly relative…
First perspective and the renaissance restructured God’s point of view, now we are destroying the human beings point of view… In painting you have Brach and Picasso where trying to show that there were multiple points of view existing at the same time, destructing the notion of a human point of view. In literature James Joyce destroys narrative… there was a way that literature was written which no longer holds at that point… In architecture you have Frank Lloyd who said ‘now we have destroyed the box. From this point forward architecture will serve the luminosity of living.’ … What is happening is that people like Kandinski are breaking down human perspective into abstract perspective.
Within the mythology of culture there is an effort taking place: first to be liberated from Gods point of view into a human point of view. Now there is the beginning of being liberated from the narrowness of a human point of view to a a historical perspective, non-perspective…
What has happened in western culture is that the entire culture is moving toward Dzochen. The living body itself wants to realise the non-dual bliss, the self liberating dynamic. The west is trying – more than the east – but without a method – to incarnate the good the true and the beautiful, which requires the non-conceptual. And quite frankly while exiles are trying to preserve archaic encrusted forms of political dharma, there is an incredible opportunity taking place in the transmissions of these methodologies to the west, but if you don’t understand your own culture you will miss it, you will consumerize it.
What has been the problem in the west? It is two fold and it has been understood by philosophers. There was an urge within the movements from god perspective, to human prospective to a-perspective—there was a movement to understand beyond perspective. In a sense what was wanted was something that is trans-perspective, beyond. But there is was no method for actually doing this with the mind.
– tk
…it is pointless to praise the light and preach it if nobody can see it. It is much more needful to preach the art of seeing.
– Carl Jung
Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming.
– David Bowie
Perhaps I shall fail from time to time, but I shall try all the time.
– Balthamos
Long, long ago, before I was a tormented artist, afflicted with longing yet incapable of forming durable attachments, long before this, I was a glorious ruler uniting all of a divided country—
– Louise Glück
That’s what literature must be, in order to mean anything: an act of levitation over the page, a pneumatic text without any point of contact with the material world.
– Mircea Cărtărescu, Solenoid (tr. Sean Cotter)
People’s confidence in their intuition is not a good guide to their validity.
– Farnam Street
Life is a vexatious trap : when a thinking man reaches maturity and attains to full consciousness, he cannot help feeling that he is in a trap from which there is no escape.
– Anton Chekhov
For me, language is a freedom. As soon as you have found the words with which to express something, you are no longer incoherent, you are no longer trapped by your own emotions, by your own experiences; you can describe them, you can tell them, you can bring them out of yourself and give them to somebody else. That is an enormously liberating experience, and it worries me that more and more people are learning not to use language; they’re giving in to the banalities of the television media and shrinking their vocabulary, shrinking their own way of using this fabulous tool that human beings have refined over so many centuries into this extremely sensitive instrument. I don’t want to make it crude, I don’t want to make it into shopping-list language, I don’t want to make it into simply an exchange of information: I want to make it into the subtle, emotional, intellectual, freeing thing that it is and that it can be.
– Jeanette Winterson
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.
– Robert Frost
Thank you for hearing me
Thank you for loving me
Thank you for seeing me
And for not leaving me
Thank you for staying with me
Thanks for not hurting me
– Sinéad O’Connor
Thank you for hearing me
Thank you for hearing me
Thank you for hearing me
Thank you for hearing me
Thank you for loving me
Thank you for loving me
Thank you for loving me
Thank you for loving me
Thank you for seeing me
Thank you for seeing me
Thank you for seeing me
Thank you for seeing me
And for not leaving me
And for not leaving me
And for not leaving me
And for not leaving me
Thank you for staying with me
Thank you for staying with me
Thank you for staying with me
Thank you for staying with me
Thanks for not hurting me
Thanks for not hurting me
Thanks for not hurting me
Thanks for not hurting me
You are gentle with me
You are gentle with me
You are gentle with me
You are gentle with me
Thanks for silence with me
Thanks for silence with me
Thanks for silence with me
Thanks for silence with me
Thank you for holding me
And saying I could be
Thank you for saying “Baby”
Thank you for holding me
Thank you for helping me
Thank you for helping me
Thank you for helping me
Thank you, thank you for helping me
Thank you for breaking my heart
Thank you for tearing me apart
Now I’m a strong, strong heart
Thank you for breaking my heart
– Sinéad O’Connor
the night sky just received a phenomenal, unusual, imperfect, big-hearted, misfit agitator.
– Lidia Yuknavitch, On Sinéad O’Connor’s Passing
Every gay kid in Ireland in the late 80’s instantly knew what she represented – what she embodied- was revolution. Your older brothers couldn’t see it but we could: she was the future moving through the present. She only had to open her mouth and mountains fell.
– Cahir O’Doherty, On Sinéad O’Connor
The origin of every book is loss.
– Nicholas Gulig
THE GREATEST POEM EVER WRITTEN
The greatest poem ever written
was lost
The poet, poor dreamer
died
Unknown and undiscovered
No value placed on
Sensitive souls
Piercing through darkness
The hells of our own making
Able to find words, give feeling
Without logic, full of sense
The grim indignities of life and death on this Earth
made worthy
Why
The greatest poem was seldom read
Never published, never purchased
Never handed down from father to son
mother to daughter
The greatest poem was simply
lost
And no one will ever know
We had the chance once
To find it.
– Laurence Overmire
For the sake of a few lines one must see many cities, men and things. One must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the small flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings which one has long seen coming; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents that one had to hurt when they brought one some joy and one did not grasp it (it was a joy for someone else); to childhood illness that so strangely began with a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars — and it is not yet enough if one may think of all of this. One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again. But one must also have been beside the dying, one must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises.
And still it is not enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many, and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not until they have turned to blood within us, to glance, to gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves — not until then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Jung realized there are always images hidden behind every emotion-when translating emotions into images, he was inwardly reassured.
– Barbara Hannah
Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting…
– Robert Frost
I thought she
was hip
when we sat and
Drank
Coffee
And I flipped when
She
Recited
All of Prufrock
By Heart
– Bob Dylan
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
by T. S. Eliot
S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma percioche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair —
(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin —
(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? …
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet — and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;
That is not it, at all.”
And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
Monet once revealed that he wanted to paint not things in themselves but the air that touched things—the enveloping air.
– John Berger
Every man’s memory is his private literature.
– Aldous Huxley
Imagine the most extreme example, a human being who does not possess the power to forget, who is damned to see becoming everywhere; such a human being would no longer believe in his own being, would no longer believe in himself, would see everything flow apart in turbulent particles, and would lose himself in this stream of becoming; like the true student of Heraclitus, in the end he would hardly even dare to lift a finger. All action requires forgetting, just as the existence of all organic things requires not only light, but darkness as well.
– Rodrigo Quian Quiroga
None of us have the promise of tomorrow. God forbid this is my last day on this beautiful earth, it won’t be spent listening to some news person telling me how rotten we are, how rotten life is, heck no, I’m going out and seeing how beautiful life is.As humans, our time on this planet is very limited… Turn off, tune out, and turn on your life. Peace.
– Frank Zappa
Climate hell is here with crazy extremes in parts of Europe, North Africa, USA, Canada, Mexico etc. – and across so many of our seas and oceans
In the media, all I can read about are stories about actors, minor politicians, billionaires and footballers
This is literally insane
– @AssaadRazzouk
The play was a great success, but audience was a dismal failure.
– George Bernard Shaw
My son starts every conversation
with the statement “I love you, Dad.”
“I love you, Dad. What’s for dinner tonight?”
“I love you, Dad. Is it supposed to rain?”
– Ralph James Savarese
GOD GAVE YOU A BRAIN.
Avoid the people who encourage you not to use it.
– Dr. Kevin M. Young
If there were one open secret in psychotherapy I’d say it was this:
People tend to be afraid of their feelings.
When direct awareness of some feelings arise, people either go into defence or get anxious.
Developing a tolerance for the source feeling tends to relieve tension.
– Dr. Aaron Balick
Religions often say that “god” is only for the pure, when, in fact, I truly feel the creator/diyin diné’e gives most of its energy to the most broken, the most vile, the most lost, the most wayward among us. Indeed, we are all a little bit lost. With our brother coyote constantly tricking us out of our power, constantly burying us in shame, constantly luring us into the trappings of the world, we are definitely in need of guidance and support from the divine at all times. And that is some thing I believe it truly wants to give us . Wherever the pain is, creator is there. This love is divine and will travel to the ends of the Earth to try to reach those in need. Sometimes it’s hard to feel because it doesn’t have a body like us. Sometimes it needs ambassadors, vessels, hands and feet, through which its tendrils can speak to and reach the world. Make no mistake, whether we can sense it or not, this force is actively loving us, reaching, chasing, searching for a window to help us feel the grace that it is. Thanks for listening to my ramblings.
– Lyla June
A very important thing is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing.’
– Gertrude Stein
Literature has infinite potential. What could be wrong with that?
– Italo Calvino
Once, Picasso was asked what his paintings meant. He said, “Do you ever know what the birds are singing? You don’t. But you listen to them anyway.” So, sometimes with art, it is important just to look.
– Marina Abramović
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
– Aldous Huxley
Most people are out of touch with reality because they confuse the world as it is, with the world as they think about it, and talk about it, and describe it.
– Alan Watts
Nothing is forgot by lovers
except who they are.
– Mary Ruefle
It is only because of what you do not understand
That you feel the need to declare what you do.
There is more to understand: hold fast to that
As the way to freedom.
– T. S. Eliot
All art intuitively apprehends coming changes in the collective unconsciousness.
– Carl Jung
Can you radiate metta? Do it now. I’ll do it too. We’ll do it together. We can feel each other.
Here we go… Now.
For the benefit of all living beings.
– Kenneth Folk
Often I crack and poetry seals the crack
– Julia Alvarez
It is only when we have renounced our preoccupation with “I,” “me,” “mine,” that we can truly possess the world in which we live.
– Aldous Huxley
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold:
That is, the madman. The lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!
– William Shakespeare
There exists no greater or more painful anxiety for a man who has freed himself from all religious bias, than how he shall soonest find a new object or idea to worship.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fear, poverty, alcoholism, loneliness are terminal illnesses. Emergencies, in fact.
– Lucia Berlin
The dolphins played beneath the soaring arches of the intra-coastal bridge. They twined around one another, just a thin shell’s edge away from touch….
– Petra Kuppers
Sometimes the poem reveals itself to you and your only job is to get out of the way.
– Angel Nafis
If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely.
– Aldous Huxley
Last night, teeming wet; through streaming windows the rectangles of warm colour, houses beyond the field; other lives, little theatres.
– Ian Buckley
Oh, how I love
the silent slate blue sky of morning —
backdrop for the Grecian-ice-white walls
of dwellings — the occasional golden hue of
lit lamps near doors, just beyond the field
of dried grass. Even the birds
are silent.
– Marian Haddad
To resist change, to try to cling to life, is therefore like holding your breath: if you persist you kill yourself.
– Alan W. Watts
…the oldest and wisest teachers of our tradition agree with John of Kronstadt: “Never confuse a person with his evil. The essence of a person is the image of God and this remains despite all disfigurement.”
– Kenneth Tanner
For You, Hope,
I’ve changed my ways a little; I cannot now
Run with you in the evenings along the shore,
Except in a kind of dream; and you, if you dream a moment,
You see me there.
So leave awhile the paw-marks on the front door
Where I used to scratch to go out or in,
And you’d soon open; leave on the kitchen floor
The marks of my drinking pan.
I cannot lie by your fire as I used to do
On the warm stone,
Nor at the foot of your bed; no, all the night through
I lie alone.
But your kind thought has laid me less than six feet
Outside your window where firelight so often plays,
And where you sit to read–and I fear often grieving for me–
Every night your lamplight lies on my place.
You, man and woman, live so long, it is hard
To think of you ever dying
A little dog would get tired, living so long.
I hope then when you are lying
Under the ground like me your lives will appear
As good and joyful as mine.
No, dear, that’s too much hope: you are not so well cared for
As I have been.
And never have known the passionate undivided
Fidelities that I knew.
Your minds are perhaps too active, too many-sided. . . .
But to me you were true.
You were never masters, but friends. I was your friend.
I loved you well, and was loved. Deep love endures
To the end and far past the end. If this is my end,
I am not lonely. I am not afraid. I am still yours.
– Robinson Jeffers, 1941
There will be no end to the joy, my love. We will stand together as the stars sweep the Cuillin, rounding into morning the bright new morning of the tender heart…
– Anne MacLeod
The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us and we see nothing but sand. The angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.
– George Elliot
If there’s one way to save someone, it’s by letting them know you love them.
– Sinéad O’Connor
immortality is perfect correspondence with a perfect environment.
– henry drummond
Growing older, I gradually sleep less.
I wake at midnight and sit up straight in bed.
Again I hear the new snow fall.
I am sick, and all alone.
So it has been for four tedious years,
through one thousand, three hundred nights.
– Po Chü-I & Arthur Waley
We’re gonna have to do more than talk. We’re gonna have to do more than listen. We’re gonna even have to do more than learn. We’re gonna have to start practicing and that’s very hard. We’ve got to start getting out there…
– Fred Hampton
Melancholy, I went out onto the balcony —
I went out so I might clear my head by seeing at least
a little of this city that I love,
a little movement in the street and in the shops.
– Cavafy
You can find solace for all things by looking at the moon.
– Yoshida Kenkō
The text has been the Art for many artists for many decades.
– Jenny Holzer
If I hope for anything as an artist, it’s that I inspire certain people to be who they really are. My audiences seem to be people who have been given a hard time for being who they are.
– Sinead O’Connor
Every man carries a little myth-making machine inside him which operates often without him knowing it. Thus you might say that we live by a very exacting kind of poetic logic — since we get exactly what we ask for, no more and no less.
– Lawrence Durrell
The mind is not a little spa.
– Ange Mlinko
the telling school of poetry
the finding out school of poetry
– @eireannmor
Is it a climate emergency or a worldview emergency though?
– Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
Is it cost effective to save the world yet?
– Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
You don’t have to understand all the ins and outs of the global climate to understand that profiting off of something that is causing harm to billions of humans and other species is wrong.
– Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
Dana Meadows 1982: The world is a complex, interconnected, finite, ecological-social-psychological-economic system. We treat it as if it were not, as if it were divisible, separable, simple & infinite. Our persistent, intractable global problems arise directly from this mismatch.
I take meds because I cannot rawdog the world.
– @hmvanderhart
Metaphors allow one to leap across a chasm from one thought to the next. Metaphors have multiple levels of meaning that are perceived simultaneously.
– Leonard Shlain, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess
Every American poet who aspires to strength knows that he or she starts in the evening land, realizes he or she is a latecomer, fears to be only a secondary person.
– Harold Bloom
I’m singing this song for my sister Sinead
Concerning the god awful mess that she made
She told them her truth just as hard as she could
Her message profoundly was misunderstood
There’s humans entrusted with guarding our gold
And humans in charge of the saving of souls
And humans responded all over the world
Condemning that bald headed brave little girl
And maybe she’s crazy and maybe she ain’t
But so was Picasso and so were the saints
And she’s never been partial to shackles or chains
She’s too old for breaking and too young to tame
It’s askin’ for trouble to stick out your neck
In terms of a target a big silhouette
But some candles flicker and some candles fade
And some burn as true as my sister Sinead
– Kris Kristofferson, Sister Sinead
And the brushstrokes
that come so easily
to the cheeks of the blushing sunset
are the fantasy of the master painter.
Relax and know, you live
within everything you’ve sought.
You have nebula and black holes
for eyes,
And the field of flowers are chattering
rumors of God.
Hungrily we pound life’s table
while missing the nightly
tapas platter of stars
We needn’t make ourselves poor men
complaining our hearts are empty pans—
Each moment is a gold rush.
Fill yourself on the universe
that tirelessly glints
its magic within you.
– Chelan Harkin
Human maturity is neither offensive nor defensive; it is finally able to accept that reality is what it is.
– Richard Rohr
reflections
by naming an ocean / we shrink it / it gains sharp edges
and an orientation / (who decided that north means up?)
we are like reflections in spoons / (cotton balls and lighters)
really each ocean intertwines with another / together they shout
no / that was not just an allusion without thought / that was
something i lived / there are 400 year old sharks that roam
the seas / battle scarred and refusing to die / there are oceans
refusing to be mapped / and reflections refusing to be righted
– Bailey Grey
For today, two proverbs for life and career:
Live your life in the manner
that you’d like your children to live theirs.
And if life affords you the opportunity,
choose a career that you’d do for free
– Dan Millman
Wherever you go, you meet part of your story.
– Eudora Welty
Each grain of sand has its architecture, but
a desert displays the structure of the wind.
– Keith Waldrop
But being is making: not only large things, a family, a book, a business: but the shape we give this afternoon, a conversation between two friends, a meal.
– Frank Bidart
Reverse psychology is when your therapist accidentally calls you “Mom.”
– @whyrobynwhy
Have you actively loved and cared for someone when you disagreed with their ways of being or their vision for the family, community or this world? When does such loving become toxic for you and when is this loving a potential gift for the ailing world when we have forgotten to belong to people and the more than human world? Which cause is worth losing friends for? Which friend is worth suppressing a cause? I know my righteous answers but I wonder if there is ever a right/perfectly wise answer? What would friends, family or community relationships look like if we could offer love and care to people even when they disagreed with us on some of our most fundamental values?
It is easy to say someone is right or wrong. Much harder to hold the complexity and the shades of gray. What if you pray every night for the wellbeing of a friend you have chosen to not speak to for many years? Is that worse than staying in contact with someone but being half-hearted around them every day?
The koans (paradoxes) of belonging keep me up a lot these days. My sangha and meditation students bring such excellent questions to me during our classes. This delicate dance of assertion and surrender. Of fear of isolation/poverty/status vs fear of loss of our moral compass due to our belonging.
Take heart. March on. A still voice across space and time is listening.
– Kritee Kanko
It is only the human imaginary that cannot be contaminated by its objects. Because it alone diversifies them infinitely yet brings them back, nonetheless, to a full burst of unity. The highest point of knowledge is always a poetics.
– Glissant, Poetics of Relation (tr. B. Wing)
…I sometimes ask myself if it was us, these two people…so young, so educated, so uninvolved, so ready to judge one another with kind impartiality; so ready to say goodbye to one another for ever, as the sun set, at the corner of the street.
– Natalia Ginzburg, He and I
The lover of stone must be a saint,
for stone will no more return his love
than does God return that of the saint.
– J.R. Solonche
never underestimate the power of a good flailing period; when i quit corporate in 2020 i spent many months moseying about, staring into the void, trying new things/failing, etc. the lessons i learned in that time period were invaluable. doing nothing is not doing nothing.
– @melodaysong
Don’t just say that you have read books. Show that through them you have learned to think better.
– Epictetus
Kiss
My mouth blooms like a cut.
I’ve been wronged all year, tedious
nights, nothing but rough elbows in them
and delicate boxes of Kleenex calling crybaby
crybaby, you fool!
Before today my body was useless.
Now it’s tearing at its square corners.
It’s tearing old Mary’s garments off, knot by knot
and see – Now it’s shot full of these electric bolts.
Zing! A resurrection!
Once it was a boat, quite wooden
and with no business, no salt water under it
and in need of some paint. It was no more
than a group of boards. But you hoisted her, rigged her.
She’s been elected.
My nerves are turned on. I hear them like
musical instruments. Where there was silence
the drums, the strings are incurably playing. You did this.
Pure genius at work. Darling, the composer has stepped
into fire.
– Anne Sexton
My Art destroys computers.
– Laura Kerr
I wish faith wrapped you in a bubble, but it doesn’t, not for long.
– Anne Lamott
Renunciation – is a Piercing
Virtue –
– Emily Dickinson
An Apparatus
by Keith Waldrop
From where I sit, I can see other
things: a silver porcupine, pins
standing upright. It is a vanished tale of a
vanished forest at the shore of a vanished ocean.
I call the dead as often as I can. In the
vaults, among mummies—this is pure
memorial. I am the girl in whose
eyes the name is written.
I feel as if veiled, as if soon I
shall get to know something. These are people
with encephalitis who cannot go
forward, but can go backward, and can dance.
In this rough draft of my memoirs, my brother
comes toward me—frightened, skeletal—longing
for marvels. I cannot describe it better than by
comparing it to other figures, intoxication.
Mere reflexes, as for instance breathing, can become
conscious. One of two rivals has his
ornamental tail bit off. In dying sounds, barely
reaching our ears, a melody continues.
No end to it—an infinite progression. All this
love of a bygone age. Watch the track
of a concentrated sunbeam through our lake ice:
part of the beam is stopped, part goes through.
Now the upper surface buckles, phantasmagoria of
unchained passion—under which the land
quakes, the ocean swells, and a myriad-years-
old forest snaps and cracks.
Surpassing all forms of experience, the wide, deep,
freshwater lake—on which the city
is built—rises before us. Here a modern idea
interposes, a new body made from the elements.
Then everything is forgotten. Sometimes thoughts
are cut off and sometimes they are the
blade which cuts. At the present gravel pit, electric
lights in the evening cast their magic blue sheen.
There’s the sun, a crack above those
hills, breaking the day. If the door open, who
comes in? If it close, what will interrupt
my train?
The staircase effect supplies strong evidence
for a subjective map. Downhill, the sun
trickles, unperturbed. Here trots a mammoth with
red wool, through the black yew forest.
The tendency of elements to linger on: You say
I dream of what I want, but what I
want now is to dream. The cold rind
broken, the same wind blows.
Through a lens of ice, the dark
heat of the sun burns wood, fires gunpowder, melts
lead. Perhaps a cloud of musk rises, such as
issues from a crocodile in passion.
Unless light falls properly upon these
flowers, you cannot see them. All associations at
this level rain down from above. We
talk of word-pictures.
We observe vertigo. We reach the cleft
by a steep gully or couloir—very dangerous, the
path from the heights, the glory of
the prospect, the insight gained.
What I mean is a disturbance in
all the senses at once. You will not find
the flower confused. Facing a certain
wind, there is always danger.
Grief is the release of fragments.
It is holy, embodied advocacy
For your wholeness,
A prayer that is answered
At once
As life ushers through
The spaciousness you’re offering Her
Within you.
It is the end
Of bargaining with the world
To give you what you’ve sought
To claim it within.
It is the temple
For recreation.
It is the passage
Through what partially held you
To what more fully will.
– Chelan Harkin
When we go inwards at night, we are restoring ourselves to the multiplicity of our coherence.
– Toko-pa Turner
What can be compared
to light
in which leaves darken
after rain,
fierce green?
– Carl Rakosi
But we don’t. We don’t understand. Because we are endlessly distracted and confused and misled, by the media, by the tactics of capital, by the gigantic shitfest that now passes for public life. We will be prattling about celebrity gossip as the waters rise to our necks.
– George Monbiot
There’s also the dangerous delusion that climate change is a debate with opposing points of view that can be got across by advocacy. There’s science supported by data. Everything else is an anecdote.
– Mick McDermott
Somewhere on the north side of Dublin—across the river Liffey, where Joyce & Beckett & Yeats used to stroll there’s a small dark room…where 2 actors are sitting down at a table to read my new play. How amazing is that?
– Sam Shepard
To be as the river, fugitive and eternal: To go, to arrive, to flow and always be a river, fresh..
– Dulce María Loynaz
You know how writers are… they create themselves as they create their work. Or perhaps they create their work in order to create themselves.
– Orson Scott Card
the bee balm blooms
in yesterday’s stark
winter meadow
micro lavender fireworks
pop across the field
in the summer air
I’m not sure if bees
feel joy or if they
see what I see
but I see them and
the flowers would be
naked without them
– Andy Perrin
It’s really hard and sad to watch someone pick addiction over everything stable and peaceful in their lives.
– Lisa Lucas
This is Your Own Voice
Define and narrow me, you starve yourself of yourself.
Nail me down in a box of cold words,
that box is your coffin.
I do not know who I am.
I am in astounded lucid confusion.
I am not a Christian, I am not a Jew, I am not a Zoroastrian.
And I am not even a Muslim.
I do not belong to the land, or to any known or unknown sea.
Nature cannot own or claim me, nor can heaven;
Nor can India, China, Bulgaria.
My birthplace is placelessness,
My sign to have and give no sign.
You say you see my mouth, ears, eyes, nose—they are not mine.
I am the life of life. I am that cat, this stone, no one.
I have thrown duality away like an old dishrag,
I see and know all times and all worlds
As one, one, always one.
So what do I have to do to get you to admit who is speaking?
Admit it and change everything!
This is your own voice echoing off the walls of God.
– Rumi
There’s a special kind of idiocy
in thinking some moments
more valuable than others
when there is a rainbow
to be found
on the slick black back
of the fly
and Persian carpets
in the butterfly’s wings.
All poets long
for the eloquence
found in the creek’s
effortless murmuring to itself
And the brushstrokes
that come so easily
to the cheeks of the blushing sunset
are the fantasy of the master painter.
Relax and know, you live
within everything you’ve sought.
You have nebula and black holes
for eyes,
And the field of flowers are chattering
rumors of God.
Hungrily we pound life’s table
while missing the nightly
tapas platter of stars
We needn’t make ourselves poor men
complaining our hearts are empty pans—
Each moment is a gold rush.
Fill yourself on the universe
that tirelessly glints
its magic within you.
– Chelan Harkin
SELF HELP
In the middle of the night
in Sweden, in the northern part
northish, anyway,
at midsummer
there are no stars
the light shimmers when you get up
and walk through the woods
to the outhouse
shimmers. it is not
like
what you are used to, shining from
like the sun through
the trees to your eyes.
it breaks and shimmers
in all directions.
at least i am pretty sure,
i didn’t have my glasses on.
we saw two moose
a big one one evening
a little one the next evening
i sat on the porch in a lawn chair
i looked at the lake
and at the trees
eventually i noticed i was not thinking
i was a little surprised
what am i doing when i am not thinking
i am living
so i lived on the porch
for a few days.
would i recommend this?
i don’t recommend anything
anymore
you’ll figure it out
– Mig Living
We’re supposed to become undivided inside ourselves. What’s happening now is all the outer divisions in the world come as a pressure and attention on each person, which activates and intensifies the divisions inside people.
– Michael Meade
Danger, when it is always imminent, does harm. It doesn’t need to actually arrive. You exhaust yourself in the act of forever looking over your shoulder. Your body readies itself to fight and never quite discharges that chemical cocktail. You channel it instead into anger and self-pity and anxiety and hopelessness. You divert it into work. But really what you do, with every fibre of your being, is watch. You are incessantly, exhaustingly alert. You don’t dare ever let up, just in case the danger takes advantage of your inattention. I’ve forgotten what it feels like to have space in my brain for anything other than watching. For a long time I kept working teaching, pitching articles, writing editorial reports and for a while, that felt like a life raft. But then, incrementally, it became impossible. I was aware of a fog descending, a seizing of the gears, but it seemed diffuse until now.
– Katherine May
Beneath the table, her fingers find switches: one for the microphone, the other for the transmitter, she cannot remember which is which. Switch on one, then the other. Inside the big transmitter, vacuum tubes thrum. Is it too loud, Papa? No louder than the breeze. The undertone of the fires. She traces the lines of the cables until she is sure she has the microphone in her hand.
To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness.
Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air. Marie-Laure can sit in an attic high above the street and hear lilies rustling in marshes two miles away. She hears Americans scurry across farm fields, directing their huge cannons at the smoke of Saint-Malo; she hears families sniffling around hurricane lamps in cellars, crows hopping from pile to pile, flies landing on corpses in ditches; she hears the tamarinds shiver and the jays shriek and the dune grass burn; she feels the great granite fist, sunk deep into the earth’s crust, on which Saint-Malo sits, and the ocean teething at it from all four sides, and the outer islands holding steady against the swirling tides; she hears cows drink from stone troughs and dolphins rise through the green water of the Channel; she hears the bones of dead whales stir five leagues below, their marrow offering a century of food for cities of creatures who will live their whole lives and never once see a photon sent from the sun. She hears her snails in the grotto drag their bodies over the rocks.
Rather than my reading it to you, maybe you could read it to me? With her free hand, she opens the novel in her lap. Finds the lines with her fingers. Brings the microphone to her lips.
– Anthony Doerr
[Psychoanalysis] is not the only way to resolve inner conflicts. Life itself still remains a very effective therapist.
– Karen Horney
I think that in general, apart from expert opinion, there is too much respect paid to the opinions of others, both in great matters and in small ones. One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways.
Take, for example, the matter of expenditure. Very many people spend money in ways quite different from those that their natural tastes would enjoin, merely because they feel that the respect of their neighbors depends upon their possession of a good car and their ability to give good dinners. As a matter of fact, any man who can obviously afford a car but genuinely prefers travel or a good library will in the end be much more respected than if he behaved exactly like every one else. There is of course no point in deliberately flouting public opinion; this is still to be under its domination, though in a topsy-turvy way. But to be genuinely indifferent to it is both a strength and a source of happiness.
And a society composed of men and women who do not bow too much to the conventions is a far more interesting society than one in which all behave alike. Where each person’s character is developed individually, differences of type are preserved, and it is worth while to meet new people, because they are not mere replicas of those whom one has met already. This has been one of the advantages of aristocracy, since where status depended upon birth behavior was allowed to be erratic. In the modern world we are losing this source of social freedom, and therefore a more deliberate realization of the dangers of uniformity has become desirable. I do not mean that people should be intentionally eccentric, which is just as uninteresting as being conventional. I mean only that people should be natural, and should follow their spontaneous tastes in so far as these are not definitely antisocial.
– Bertrand Russell
If time could run backward, like a film in reverse, we would see this mess reassemble itself into lush green hills and moss-covered ledges of limestone. The streams would run back up the hills to the springs and the salt would stay glittering in underground rooms.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer
So, now I shall talk every night. To myself. To the moon. I shall walk, as I did tonight, jealous of my loneliness, in the blue-silver of the cold moon, shining brilliantly on the drifts of fresh-fallen snow, with the myriad sparkles. I talk to myself and look at the dark trees, blessedly neutral. So much easier than facing people, than having to look happy, invulnerable, clever.
– Sylvia Plath
In general, lives seem to veer abruptly from one thing to another, to jostle and bump, to squirm. A person heads in one direction, turns sharply in mid-course, stalls, drifts, starts up again. Nothing is ever known, and inevitably we come to a place quite different from the one we set out for.
– Paul Auster
We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. Divide. Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother’s birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us.
– Anthony Doerr
To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.
– Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution
I think that if more people do not make the effort to reflect and take back their projections, and take the opposites within themselves, there will be a total destruction.
– Marie-Louise Von Franz
The growth of knowledge depends entirely upon disagreement.
– Karl Popper
I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.
– Kurt Vonnegut
And the poem
Has set me softly down beside you.
The poem is you.
– John Ashbery
If you can’t say it simply and clearly, keep quiet, and keep working on it till you can.
– Karl Popper
The best way to deal with excessive thinking is to just listen to it, to listen to the mind. Listening is much more effective than trying to stop thought or cut it off.
– Ajahn Amaro, Thought Like Dreams
Joseph Campbell appreciated Jung’s insight that some persons prefer war–for which the other was always the guilty one–to self-understanding. This insight applies today to some so-called “religious” extremists who engage in war and violence.
– Linda & William Schoenl
It is not the literal past, the ‘facts’ of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.
– Brian Friel
The ego rearranges everything he comes across, claiming it as his own. He pretends to represent the body’s position when the body has something else entirely in mind.
– Robert Bly
What is erotic about reading (or writing) is the play of imagination called forth in the space between you and your object of knowledge. Poets and novelists, like lovers, touch that space to life with their metaphors and subterfuge. The edges of the space are the edges of the things you love, whose inconcinnities make your mind move. And there is Eros, nervous realist in this sentimental domain, who acts out of a love of paradox, that is as he folds the beloved object out of sight into a mystery, into a blind point where it can float known and unknown, actual and possible, near and far, desired and drawing you on.
– Anne Carson
You’re often anxious because you hate the feeling of the seconds slipping away from you. The world is changing every day. And every day you’re getting older. But there are still so many things you haven’t done. You want to hold on to the sand. But the harder you squeeze, the quicker the sand slips from the cracks between your fingers, until nothing is left…
– Chen Qiufan
I am hungry for nothing, but I have a mortal fear of being taken to be other than I am by those who come to know my name.
– Michel de Montaigne
Of what is the body made? It is made of emptiness and rhythm. At the ultimate heart of the body, at the heart of the world, there is no solidity. Once again, there is only the dance. At the unimaginable heart of the atom, the compact nucleus, we have found no solid object, but rather a dynamic pattern of tightly confined energy vibrating perhaps 1022 times a second: a dance…
– George Leonard
I have always felt as if, inside me, someone had been murdered. Murdered before my birth. I had to find this murdered being. Try to give him life…
– Samuel Beckett
It is evening, the sun smeared across the low sky like drag, and you hold my hand, ask why it is that all the queers we’ve met have had a birdwatching phase.
– Tiffany Xie
it is finally as though that thing of monstrous interest
were happening in the sky
but the sun is setting and prevents you from seeing it
– John Ashbery, As you Came from the Holy Land
The great violin-makers – Guarnerius, Stradivarius – were perfectly aware that wood must vibrate, that the instrument must be played, for a long time before it comes into its own, reaches the quality that it is, finally, capable of.
– Keith Waldrop
What holds us is what we cannot grasp.
– André du Bouchet (trans. Hoyt Rogers)
I am not contradictory, I am dispersed.
– Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard
The present author is by no means a philosopher. He is poetice et eleganter [in a poetic and refined way] a supplementary clerk who neither writes the system nor gives promises of the system, who neither exhausts himself on the system nor binds himself to the system.
– Kierkegaard
Both trivialization and literalism (of myth) are egregious affronts to the soul. Both miss the point.
– James Hollis
And once you are awake, you shall remain awake eternally.
– Nietzsche
Patience is key to your mental health when you are physically ill. It is one of the few virtues you can actively cultivate when your body ceases to cooperate.
– Shozen Jack Haubner
Until midlife or later we have seldom gained sufficient ego strength to reflect upon our choices. The young person is still too unconscious and cannot risk any self-doubt in the already shaky enterprise of life. Even aging does not necessarily produce consciousness.
– James Hollis
I always think one ought to be grateful to an author if one has liked even a small bit of a book.
– Anthony Powell
From that point of genuineness where the secular becomes sacred, we begin to discover the true warrior, the genuine warrior, as opposed to the mimicking or amateurish warrior.
– Chögyam Trungpa
A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the—not always greatly hopeful—belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps.
– Paul Celan
You need nor fear that the freedom of your development as a reader is selfish, because if you become an authentic reader, then the response to your labors will confirm you as an illumination to others.
– Harold Bloom
I’m sad… and I don’t know why,
I’ve drunk love and I’m still thirsty.
– Gloria Fuertes
Why do I love what fades?
– Mark Strand
I sometimes dream of situations that can’t possibly come true. I audaciously imagine.
– Wislawa Szymborska
Great Eastern Sun vision is also connected with the concept of windhorse, or lungta in Tibetan. Windhorse is a sense of gallantry, cheerfulness, upliftedness, and gentleness – all bundled into one state of being in the person of the warrior.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Understanding does not cure evil, but it is a definite help, in as much as one can cope with a comprehensible darkness.
– Carl Jung
The New Speakers
by Gloria E. Anzaldúa
(For Frieda)
Words are our trade
we speak them soft
we speak them hard
we do not push the hand
that writes, the times do that.
We are our age’s mouthpiece.
There is no need for words
to fester in our minds
they germinate in the open
mouth of the barefoot child,
in the midst of restive crowds.
They wither in ivory towers
and are dissected in college classes.
Words. Some come trippingly
on the palate. Some come laboriously.
Some are quickened by friends,
some prompted by passersby.
Critics label the speakers: male, female.
They assign genitals to our words
but we’re not just penises or vaginas
nor are our words easy to classify
Some of us are still hung-
up on the art-for-art trip
and feel that the poet
is forever alone.
Separate.
More sensitive.
An outcast.
That suffering is a way of life,
that suffering is a virture
that suffering is the price
we pay for seeing the future.
Some of us are still hung up
substituting words for relationships
substituting writing for living.
But what we want
–what we presume to want–
is to see our words engraved
on the people’s faces,
feel our words catalyze
emotions in their lives.
What we want is to become
part of the common consumption
like coffee with morning paper.
We don’t want to be
Stars but parts
of constellations.
These really are the last days…
…for patriarchal, misogynistic, homophobic, white supremacist, nationalist, commercialist Christianity.
Thanks be to God.
– Josh Scott
Bravely (it seems to me) you
close your eyes, as if never doubting
that the world remains
visible, even though you yourself see now
only side-effects of sight.
– Keith Waldrop
Isn’t it tactful
the way the thousand acorns
on the oak
don’t condescend
our way of scarcity
but just abide, so contentedly,
in the replete nature
of their happiness?
Isn’t such diplomacy
shown to us
by the fruit tree
who never thought
to make a lesson plan
to show us through the ease
of its own satisfaction
that there has always been enough?
There is no teacher
like the rank-less generosity
of our earth
to so kindly and unpressingly
show us
the full sweetness
from which me might live.
– Chelan Harkin
Your inner purpose is to awaken. It is as simple as that. You share that purpose with every other person on the planet – because it is the purpose of humanity.
– Eckhart Tolle
There is but one way to serve. And it’s not from haves to have nots, from rich to poor, from resourced to disenfranchised, for this paradigm is a charade of indignities that perpetuates its madness of moral elitism. It is the reproduction of distortions of our nature. The only way to truly serve, if you want to call it that, is from Life to Life—To access and be moved by the generous, genuine, self-replenishing, joyful fountain of Life leaping from me in its fullness all the way through yours. This is how Life most delights in and celebrates itself. This is true love. There is no should in this. It is the natural movement of Life. And when we’re in a contracted state that doesn’t allow for Life’s magnanimous flow of oneness, the service to ourselves and each other is being humble and truthful about our obstacles to this. For truth and humility about our obstacles are the alchemical keys that unlock us from separation back into union. This is the way love bows to love and creates a deeply sacred, tender and honoring atmosphere of trust, intimacy and care in its process.
– Chelan Harkin
The outer guru is “as Buddha as it gets.” The inner guru is the nature of your mind—in other words, a mind that is not thinking of a “thing” but is simply cognizant and undeniably present. And the secret guru is the emptiness of all phenomena.
– Dzongsar Khyentse
It must be summer.
– Robert Bly
How lovely it is that there are words and sounds! Are not words and sounds rainbows and illusive bridges between things which are eternally apart ?
– Friedrich Nietzsche
When everything goes wrong, what a joy to test your soul and see if it has endurance and courage! An invisible and all-powerful enemy—some call him God, others the Devil, seem to rush upon us to destroy us; but we are not destroyed.
– Nikos Kazantzakis
One should eliminate yearning that arises for various idle conversations, which often take place, and for all kinds of entertainment.
– Shantideva
It is the essence of poetry to spring, like the rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the past, and refuse all history.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
cherry blossoms–
tree after tree
of good karma
– Kobayashi Issa
Why, on these few remaining summer Sundays, don’t you go off into the country first thing in the morning?
– Franz Kafka, 1916.
Endlessness runs in you like leaves on the tree of night.
– Anne Carson
Blue poured into summer blue,
A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,
The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew
That part of my life was over.
– Stanley Kunitz
God is the origin of both need and supply, the father of our necessities, the abundant giver of the good things. Right gloriously he meets the claims of his child! The story of Jesus is the heart of his answer, not primarily to the prayers, but to the divine necessities of the children he has sent out into his universe.
– George MacDonald
There should be more sincerity and heart in human relations, more silence and simplicity in our interactions. Be rude when you’re angry, laugh when something is funny, and answer when you’re asked.
– Anton Chekhov
When Jung’s patients became overwhelmed with emotions, he sometimes would have them draw a picture of their feelings. Once the feelings were expressed in the form of imagery, the images could be encouraged to speak to one another. As soon as a dialogue could take place, the patient was well embarked on the process of reconciling different aspects of his dissociated psyche.
– Ernest Rossi
“When Moses conversed with God, he asked, “Lord where shall I seek you?”
God answered, “Among the brokenhearted.”
Moses continued, “But, Lord, no heart could be more despairing than mine.”
And God replied, “Then I am where you are.”
– Abu’l Fayd Al-Misri
It’s Still Possible
It’s still possible to fully understand
you have always been the place
where the miracle has happened:
that you have been since your birth,
the bread given and the wine lifted,
the change witnessed and the change itself,
that you have secretly been, all along,
a goodness that can continue
to be a goodness to itself.
It’s still possible in the end
to realize why you are here
and why you have endured,
and why you might have suffered
so much, so that in the end,
you could witness love, miraculously
arriving from nowhere, crossing
bravely as it does, out of darkness,
from that great and spacious stillness
inside you, to the simple,
light-filled life of being said.
– David Whyte
One cannot individuate as long as one is playing a role to oneself; the convictions one has about oneself are the most subtle form of persona and the most subtle obstacle against any true individuation. One can admit practically anything, yet somewhere one retains the idea that one is nevertheless so and so and this is always a sort of final argument which counts apparently as a plus ; yet it functions as an influence against true individuation. It is a most painful procedure to tear off those veils, but each step forward in psychological development means just that, the tearing off of a new veil. We are like onions with many skins, and we have to peel ourselves again and again in order to get at the real core.
– Carl Jung
I adore the texture of your mind.
– Iris Murdoch
Healing
I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.
And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill.
I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self
and the wounds to the soul take a long, long, time, only time can help
and patience, and a certain difficult repentance
long, difficult repentance, realization of life’s
mistake, and the freeing oneself
from the endless repetition of the mistake
which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.
– D. H. Lawrence
Dharma is like saying fire is hot, or the sky is blue: it is speaking the truth. The difference is that dharma is the truth of the reality of the journey toward freedom.
– Chögyam Trungpa
It is peculiar that the West should look for the secret of the psyche in matter. It shows how much we depend on outward things and the material of the world.
– CG Jung
The only true response to the ecological crisis is on a global scale, provided that it brings about an authentic political, social and cultural revolution, reshaping the objectives of the production of both material and immaterial assets.
– Guattari
The story of Parsifal describes a state of spiritual sickness. The old king cannot help his land or his people & it rests upon the shoulders of a young man to pass the test. Test is a question-a capacity to become conscious of the meaning of things, a quality of reflection.
– Liz Greene
You must have a place to which you can go, in your heart, your mind, or your house, where you do not owe anyone, and where no one owes you – a place that simply allows for the blossoming of something new and promising.
– Joseph Campbell
You are the traveler, you are the path and you are the destination. Be careful never to lose the way to yourself.
– Shihab al-Din Yahya Suhrawardi
On the road of the fathers, the task of the son is first of all to survive. Following that, to learn to use the sword that he inherits to make distinctions between the mysteries and the wounds in the world.
– Michael Meade
Meditation, if correctly wielded, is not about shoving desire to the side. It’s about learning to live with and learn from desire.
– Mitch Abblett, PhD
I feel the distance between myself and others.
I guard that distance.
– Henry Miller
I’ve been speaking to you for years– have you understood?
– Moikom Zeqo
I had a discussion with a great master in Japan, and we were talking about the various people who are working to translate the Zen books into English, and he said, “That’s a waste of time. If you really understand Zen, you can use any book. You could use the Bible. You could use Alice in Wonderland. You could use the dictionary, because the sound of the rain needs no translation.
– Alan Watts
We are all one question, and the best answer seems to be love — a connection between things. This arcane bit of knowledge is respoken everyday into the ears of readers of great books, and also appears to perpetually slip under a carpet, utterly forgotten.
– Mary Ruefle
shadowy
cedars in the rain
misty weather
– Basho
Between seeing and making,
contemplation or action,
I chose the act of words:
to make them, to inhabit them,
to give eyes to the language.
– Octavio Paz
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.
– Francis Bacon
I’ve settled on an edge, I live on this edge and wait for the moment when I’ll leave the edge, my temporary home.
– Eva Baltasar
The beauty of art, including poetry, is that it transcends all tribalism and division, or should do; the melting pot of the Imagination has no limit to it…
– James Harpur
I am crowded by your absence.
– Mallory Pearson, The Heaviest Rain We Ever Had
The genius of Jesus is that he wasted no time on repressing or denying the shadow. In that, he was a classic prophet, one who did not merely expose the shadow, but instead addressed the real problem, which is the ego.
– Richard Rohr
It’s not enough to develop as a meditator
You have to develop as a child, as a friend, as a colleague, as a community member, as a mentor or parent
There is so much more to life than samadhi
Samadhi is just the best basis from which to *engage*
– @dukkhafactory
People on this island have different beliefs, because some worship the sun and some worship fire, some worship trees, some worship the first thing they encounter in the morning, some worship effigies, some worship idols.
– John Mandeville
Politicians and the fossil fuel industry want us to be doom scrolling & disengaged from our community.
– Elise Joshi
Your letter is so vivid, so keen, that I am curious to know if you are not a writer yourself.
– Henry Miller
A myth is an esoteric description of a heightened proprioception…
Myth describes a systematic exploration of the human body by privileged members of archaic cultures
– J.N. Sansonese
THE ABANDONED VALLEY
Can you understand being alone so long
you would go out in the middle of the night
and put a bucket into the well
so you could feel something down there
tug at the other end of the rope?
– Jack Gilbert
The parts of you that frustrated the wrong one will be celebrated by the right one.
Release, heal, make room for the one who aligns.
– Dr. Thema
the wide stretch of valley land that went away towards the town.. the sky that ran with the high horizons of the earth, a summer-blue sky alive yet half-dreamy with white clouds, … with the blue arch flattening beyond them into unimaginable remoteness.
– Neil Gunn
The change is coming from the margins of society.
Those forgotten
Still remember
How to be human
– @antonio_paglino
Beaches incessantly washed and sponged by the green Ionian — the ringing blue sky, the temples, the supple brushes of cypress.
Nowhere else has there ever been a landscape so aware of itself, conforming so marvellously to the dimensions of a human existence.
– Lawrence Durrell
With undistracted mindfulness, do not meddle with whatever arises. Although it arises, do not regard it as existent. Although it disappears, do not grasp it as nonexistent. Without suppressing them, just let the thoughts go, sustaining mere recognition.
– Patrul Rinpoche
Art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own sterile life, generating and degenerating itself.
– Ingmar Bergman
The whole of nature is an endless demonstration of shape and form. It always surprises me when artists try to escape from this.
– Henry Moore
I built you a shore with all my best words
& still, the waves.
– Claire Schwartz
When I began drawing the mandalas, I saw that everything, all the paths I had been following, the steps I had taken, were leading back to a single point–namely, the midpoint. It became increasingly plain to me that the mandala is the center. It is the exponent of all paths.
– C.G. Jung
For who, if I don’t speak in Poetry,
will understand me?
Who will speak to me
of hidden longing for a lost age
if I don’t speak in Poetry?”
– Mahmoud Darwish
Go home to your house
by the village, of the crickets!
Good night, my friend
Mr. Lizard!
– Federico García Lorca
That’s My Heart Right There
We used to say,
That’s my heart right there.
As if to say,
Don’t mess with her right there.
As if, don’t even play,
That’s a part of me right there.
In other words, okay okay,
That’s the start of me right there.
As if, come that day,
That’s the end of me right there.
As if, push come to shove,
I would fend for her right there.
As if, come what may,
I would lie for her right there.
As if, come love to pay,
I would die for that right there.
– Willie Perdomo
When we meet beings with whom we feel a certain community of thought and with whom we build bonds of friendships, as we do with you, we say that together we can certainly do more than alone, we can learn from each other, enrich our thinking and find better ways to help others.
– Matthieu Ricard
You don’t learn from successes; you don’t learn from awards; you don’t learn from celebrity; you only learn from wounds and scars and mistakes and failures. And that’s the truth.
– Jane Fonda
Once, there was a lump
in my throat, I like to believe
it was a metaphor for
every feeling I have
ever swallowed.
– Sabrina Benaim
Youth is easily deceived because it is quick to hope.
– Aristotle
I have folded my sorrows into the mantle of summer night,
Assigning each brief storm its allotted space in time,
Quietly pursuing catastrophic histories buried in my eyes.
– Bob Kaufman
Sometimes an understanding silence was better than a bunch of meaningless words.
– Mia Sheridan
I have a truth-telling syndrome and I wish to God I didn’t.
– Cynthia Ozick
We are not here for a petty snatching of power we can then wield over each other—God no. My dear, learn to bow! May we go as deeply into ourselves as we must to truly access the experience of forgiveness that is releasing our own inner captives and refind reverence and adoration that brings us back to life from the inside out and connects us with the original innocence within all. Humanity is an ecosystem of love. And we are here for each other.
– Chelan Harkin
What distinguishes poetry from automatic…speech is that it rouses us and shakes us into wakefulness in the middle of a word. Then it turns out that the word is much longer than we thought, and we remember that to speak means to be forever on the road.
– Osip Mandelstam
We are both living in extraordinary places. Let’s live up to the places!
– Henry Miller
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
– William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
As the myth warns, it is safe to listen to the sources of divine knowledge only when one is solidly lashed to the mast of reality.
– Edward F. Edinger
The complete annihilation of entire
ecosystems sheltering millions of
species, is not a side effect of
civilization. It is a deliberate crime
perpetrated by the greatest minds,
leaders and technologies humanity
has produced
– George Tsakraklides
In my country, no one questions an emotional man.
– René Char
(tr. Dawn-Michelle Baude)
A prayer for individuals in the Gardai, the police, the army, or any other type of law enforcement body around the world.
May you open your eyes to what you see in front of you.
May you open your heart to the people that are around you.
May you open your ears so that you can hear all sides of the argument.
May God strengthen you and pour himself into your spine, flow down and into your arms and your legs, so that you feel strong enough to say no to things that seem wrong to you even if they go against your orders.
May your mind switch on and be clear so that you are sharp and focused.
May your ability to know what is right and what is wrong stimulate you.
May you have the courage to speak out, to say no, to walk away from your superiors if you feel they are no longer acting in the interest of the people.
May you sleep at night in peace.
May you sleep at night in peace.
– Abby Wynne
So you talk about mobs and the working classes as if they were the question. You’ve got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists.
– G. K. Chesterton
When you’re young, you always feel that life hasn’t yet begun—that “life” is always scheduled to begin next week, next month, next year, after the holidays—whenever. But then suddenly you’re old and the scheduled life didn’t arrive. You find yourself asking, ‘Well then, exactly what was it I was having—that interlude—the scrambly madness—all that time I had before?”
– Douglas Coupland
The healing hero, therefore, is the one who finds some creative way out, a way not already known, and does not follow a pattern. Ordinary sick people follow ordinary patterns, but the shaman cannot be cured by the usual methods of healing. He has to find the unique way, the only way that applies to him. The creative personality who can do that then becomes a healer and is recognized as such by his colleagues.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
The culture will steal you away from yourself every day, and you have to steal yourself back every night, you have to—and that goes for the body as well.
– Clarissa Pinkola Estés
The danger is in the neatness of identifications.
– Beckett
Once we have tasted the juice of words, our mind can no longer pass them by. We drink thought from them.
– Joseph Joubert
One falls in love, and then learns, for the duration, that one is at the mercy of someone else’s childhood.
– Hanif Kureishi
It is really the mistake of our age. We think it is enough to discover new things, but we don’t realize that knowing more demands a corresponding development of morality.
– Carl Jung
The poets (by which I mean all artists) are finally the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don’t. Statesmen don’t. Priests don’t. Union leaders don’t. Only poets.
– James Baldwin
It is, however, surprising that poetry, literature, and the humanities in general are so undervalued in our postindustrial society, when poetry and myth have shown time and again that they can outrace by centuries the insights of the scientists.
– William Irwin Thompson
How to live without beholding the unknown?
– René Char
(tr. Dawn-Michelle Baude)
hot take but poets should consume poetry.
– Caitlin Mckenna
I lock the past with one key, with the other I open the future. This takes place through my transformation. The miracle of transformation commands. It applies not to me, but to the symbol. The symbol becomes my lord and unfailing commander. It will fortify its reign and change itself into a fixed and riddling image, whose meaning turns completely inward, and whose pleasure radiates outward like blazing fire, a Buddha in the flames. Because I sink into my symbol to such an extent, the symbol changes me from my one into my other.
– Carl Gustav Jung
Looking for alternatives—better sights than we see, better sounds than we hear, a better mind than we have—keeps us from realizing that we could stand with pride in the middle of our life and realize it’s a sacred mandala.
– Pema Chodron
People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.
– Harper Lee
I lock the past with one key, with the other I open the future. This takes place through my transformation. The miracle of transformation commands. It applies not to me, but to the symbol. The symbol becomes my lord and unfailing commander. It will fortify its reign and change itself into a fixed and riddling image, whose meaning turns completely inward, and whose pleasure radiates outward like blazing fire, a Buddha in the flames. Because I sink into my symbol to such an extent, the symbol changes me from my one into my other.
– Carl Gustav Jung
Looking for alternatives—better sights than we see, better sounds than we hear, a better mind than we have—keeps us from realizing that we could stand with pride in the middle of our life and realize it’s a sacred mandala.
– Pema Chodron
You want to explain everything by the facts that are known to you. But the facts that are not known to you ? What do they say ?
– Joseph Joubert
– Well then, you puzzling stranger, what do you love?
– I love clouds . . . clouds that go by . . . out there . . . over there . . . marvelous clouds!
– Charles Baudelaire,
from Paris Spleen
(tr. Keith Waldrop)
Belief and disbelief in God are mere surrogates. The naive primitive doesn’t believe, he knows, because the inner experience rightly means as much to him as the outer. He still has no theology and hasn’t yet let himself be befuddled by booby trap concepts.
– CG Jung
Abuse of words, foundation of ideology.
– Joseph Joubert
Blue is the portal I chase into other worlds; the teal blue of grief, cobalt blue of moonlit nights, powder blue of my girlhood crushes, blue the altar I ask to deliver me to a dream world from which I can build ‘ordinary heavens.
– Sadia Hassan
Ideas never lack for words. It is words that lack ideas. As soon as the idea has come to its last degree of perfection, the word blossoms.
– Joseph Joubert
First, reach the meeting point.
Next, rest in the resting place.
Finally, let go to where it goes.
– Shri Singha
wresting out of the forgotten the yet inexpressible.
– Gustaf Sobin
A good day to remember that the rules of the Earth system are determined by physics and biology and the rules of the economy are made up by a small group of self-interested people and could change.
– Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
A very big X
stamped across the screen
glares back at the dark.
What has it cancelled?
What bird in flight has fallen
out of the black sky?
Things will keep falling.
There are planets being hurled
across dimensions. Words
too fall like soft rain.
– George Szirtes
Concepts are tools akin to the catalysts chemists use to produce reactions and compounds that would be otherwise impossible.
– Isabelle Stengers
Embodied presence is an invitation, again and again, to soften, to settle, to relax, to open up to what’s here. When we’re driven along by our habitual thinking patterns, we’re holding those tensions.
– Martin Aylward
The thought of the conservative petty bourgeois is metaphysical; its conceptions are fixed and immovable, and between phenomena it supposes that there are unbridgeable gaps . . . Whatever is, is; whatever is not, is not; and anything else is the Devil’s doing.
– Leon Trotsky
Energy transfer is real. Be mindful of what you consume. Always trust how your body feels before, during, and after reading or watching something. You can unpack the details later.
– Inner Practitioner
I must take pains not to intend anything but the work itself . . . and not allow any messages or ideas as such to displace the validity of the work with their sham importance and subtle derangement of emphasis.
– Frank O’Hara
Life is given to you as a flat piece of land and everything has to be done. I hope that when I am finished, my piece of land will be a beautiful garden.
– Jeanne Moreau
There is a disturbance in the world psyche, and it will do a great deal of damage to all civilisations.
– David Tacey
There is no beginning to an end
But there is a beginning and an end
To beginning.
– Gertrude Stein
But he seemed alone, absolutely alone in the universe. A bit of wreck in the mid Atlantic.
– Hermann Melville
I see myself forever and ever as the ridiculous man, the lonely soul, the wanderer, the restless frustrated artist, the man in love with love, always in search of the absolute, always seeking the unattainable.
– Henry Miller
My works are formulated by merging the spirit of past traditions with those of the present…to create new horizons for the future.
– Marvin Oliver
No matter how high the mountains of the great dharma are, no matter how deep the sea of ignorance is, they will be as nothing before a boundless spirit of determination.
– Koun Yamada
For Norway, // which has shut down all its FM broadcasts. // For silence, which nobody // truly values. For the song // I couldn’t recognize in the elevator, // though all I could do was ache.
– Paul Guest
Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer’s work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader’s recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book’s truth.
– Marcel Proust
James Hillman once said that the truest sign of an awake soul is outrage. I swim against the current to find it. I stretch out my hand, I stop what I’m doing. I hear its echoes bouncing from canyon walls and we touch sometimes on quiet mornings like this when the birds and the beauty hit just right. It’s all right here. We could just decide to stop. We could just decide.
Outrage is buried in my belly. It’s the softest part of my body, where I don’t like to be touched, where I don’t like to look. It’s buried even after all these years of digging. I bury it myself, kicking the dirt back in after days of shoveling, each retreat, each time away from this frantic culture reminding me that my outrage is love, that engagement is my homecoming, that caring is worth the trouble. I kick the dirt back in and I shovel it out, over and over. In between, I hope that my action means something.
Somehow, it’s become cliche to talk about the destruction of the earth. It’s become naive to fight. Love n’ light capture so many good people, truth co-opted by selfhood, transcendence turned into a personal bliss project, well intended communities, more often than not, creating bubbles, force fields, to protect against their own version of the uncomfortable Other. I recently heard a well-meaning community founder tell a crowd to only invite “the right people here” for their ‘revolutionary’ work.
Doomism captures the others, cynicism playing its holy part in protecting tender hearts, stopping the outrage before it can even begin. If there’s nothing I can do, outrage’s molten explosion has no place here. I shrink to acceptable proportions, cool and harden just in time to save the village, to save myself, to save the way it has been, preserving the proportional belonging I do have in my refusal to rock the boat. Giving up makes perfect sense to my little human self, in fact makes my human self possible.
But outrage doesn’t disappear. Outrage is the embodied knowing of the life-beyond boundaries of self. Outrage is the all of me I’m too scared/transcended/busy/frozen/hopeless to feel. Outrage is earth’s immune system showing up in my body asking, begging, insisting that I act like the healthy white blood cell that I am, that we are.
I stop on a morning like this. I remember to stop, basking for just a moment in awakeness before pushing enough dirt back in the hole to carry on with my day.
– Kristopher Drummond
Nothing could be more chimerical than the notion that Man is the same thing as the Economic Man, and that the problems of life, Man’s life, can be solved by any merely economic arrangement.
– Aldous Huxley
Ego dressed in spiritual garb is the trickiest ego of all. Only the dreadful Dark Nights of the Spirit—utter and irrevocable exile—can hope to untangle us from that one.
To navigate the unknown and bring forth the soul within me, I can’t lean solely on the reasonings of my thinking mind, but more on the felt sense—the subtle hum in my bones, the rumble rumble that takes the backroad forward, the wild leap home.
– McCall Erickson
Don’t forget: Beautiful sunsets need cloudy skies…
– Paolo Coelho
The highly sensitive tend to be philosophical or spiritual in their orientation, rather than materialistic or hedonistic. They dislike small talk. They often describe themselves as creative or intuitive. They dream vividly, and can often recall their dreams the next day. They love music, nature, art, physical beauty. They feel exceptionally strong emotions–sometimes acute bouts of joy, but also sorrow, melancholy, and fear.
Highly sensitive people also process information about their environments–both physical and emotional–unusually deeply. They tend to notice subtleties that others miss–another person’s shift in mood, say, or a lightbulb burning a touch too brightly.
– Susan Cain
I lived for the red volcano dirt
staining my toes, the salt residue
of surf and sea wind in my hair,
the arc of a flat stone skipping
in the hollow trough of a wave.
– Garrett Hongo
The snobbery of culture, still strong, has now to wrestle with an organized and active lowbrowism, with a snobbery of ignorance and stupidity unique, so far as I know, in the whole of history.
– Aldous Huxley
Conceive of a picture really as a series of harmonies.
– Édouard Vuillard
poetry blowing
through the forest
mountain blossoms
– Buson
Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole.
– Herman Melville
Jung said that just as we are programmed with chromosomes physically, so we are programmed with patterns psychically. These archetypal patterns are like magnets in the unconscious that control what the ego does.
– Marion Woodman
Summer is, after all, the season of escape: the landscape in which to contemplate, alone, our failures and our possibilities; the safety valve, the frontier that none of us wants—or can afford—to see closed.
– Joan Didion
(1960)
Always
When I was a boy
I lost things –
I am still
Forgetful –
Yet I daresay
All will be found
One day
– Samuel Menashe
this flame is mine own soul, insatiable for new distances, speeding upward, upward its silent heat. at all lonely ones i now throw my fishing rod. give answer to the flame’s impatience, let me, the fisher on high mountains, catch my solitude!
– nietzsche, (tr. m. ludovici)
Next thing you know conservatives are going to be boycotting Subaru, plaid clothes, and carabiners.
– Erin Reed
A feeling comes over me when I am with him that instead of being comfortably obtuse, we are crepuscular to each other; & thus, among other things, fearfully shy, when we are alone.
– Virginia Woolf
It’s the curse of a writers life to watch praise so much, & be so cast down by blame, or indifference. The only sensible course is to remember that writing is after all what one does best; that any other work would seem to me a waste of life…
– Virginia Woolf
We had a dinner party. Six people make a dinner party. They destroy private conversation. You have to be festive…. We were sufficiently springy & spontaneous, I think.
– Virginia Woolf
Sun glimmering through thin, high clouds. The distant rumble of a train. In the long grass, each drop of dew begins to shine.
– Dave Bonta
One consequence of climate change we really are not even remotely prepared for is the rise of war and conflict, natural disasters will displace more people in the future than any war that has come to pass, and also cause more death and suffering.
– Ayisha Siddiqa
I decided early on not to leave hold of my evisceration, but to await the language that can emerge from it; to embrace it and to essay it.
– Mary Cappello
We should not undervalue consciousness. We have to be critical of it only because we make too much of this power, and so we deviate from nature and have to pay for it.
– CG Jung
The moon glows the same:
it is the drifting cloud forms
make it seem to change.
– Matsuo Bashō
Awakening doesn’t mean you awaken. It means that there is only awakening. There is no “you” who is awake, there is only awakeness. As long as you identify with a “you” who is either awake or not awake, you are still dreaming. Awakening is awakening from the dream of a separate you into simply being Awakeness.
The problem is that most people are paying attention to objects, to what they perceive – rather than to the ultimate perceiver, the background. Either way, awareness is happening 100% of the time. The light is on brightly. It never goes off, but where is it looking? The human condition is characterized by a complete fascination with objects, starting with this object that we interpret as “me.” Me is only a thought. You are before this me thought.
– Adyashanti, The Impact of Awakening
There,
where I come from,
is the only place I know
where you can
grab the night
like a railing
to keep from falling
through the dark.
– Humberto Ak’abal, (transl. Michael Bazzett)
The heart, it hoards—
how I know this—
– Kevin Young
Let me stay here until the end, I said to the lord, and we’ll call it even. Let me tie my shadow to your feet and call it friendship, I said to myself.
– Ocean Vuong
The function of despair is to wipe away our superficial ideas, our delusionary hopes, our simplistic morality… America may be on the threshold of a period as a nation when we shall no longer be able to camouflage or repress our despair.
Many modern people have gone so far in their dependence on others for their feeling of reality that they are afraid that without it they would lose the sense of their own existence.
– Rollo May
A culture’s ability to understand the world and itself is critical to its survival. But today we are led into the arena of public debate by seers whose main gift is their ability to compel people to continue to watch them.
– George Saunders
The universe does not work by our rules.
– Frank Herbert
…when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist.
– Kurt Vonnegut
Aborigines, like other Indian tribes, believe that people today have less of this life energy than in the past. Because life energy is the common source between human beings and nature, the loss of it parallels the loss of connection between human beings and their relations: the plants, animals, stones, water, sky, the Earth, and all of creation. Restoring life energy to its original condition of fullness may be the key to recovering lost potentials and realizing that “the Kingdom of Heaven is in our midst.
– Kenneth S. Cohen
Nothing is more honest than a dream.
– Federico Fellini
Just between you & me & the bees in our garden—long gone to seed—we are running out of flowers. From the soil, so dry & cracked it is absent even of nourishing decay, to the shriveled petals & leaves—now potpourri—we are a’wither. At least, finally, we do not thirst.
– @poseofpower
It’s important to realize, that we all have something to say, which is equal in weight with any public, distributed material. The great artists are cool, and also, the unsung artists are cool, even cooler. We’re habituated to idolize, but this can be disempowering. So where inspiration topples over into self denigration, or dismissal, let’s stop doing that. I’ve learned this, the hard way, so I’m preaching to my own choir. You can’t imagine the joy I experience daily, as a recording engineer, being stuck in headphones, up close and personal to artists no one has heard of, or who have pigeon-holed themselves as “less than”. This aligns with the “act-local” philosophy, and suggests that we should pay more attention, to those who surround us: up the road, across the valley, in some forgotten part of the state. I feel huge surges of energy, listening to songs & sounds coming from neighbors, and friends. I’ve learned the art of discarding comparison, and bolstering creativity, in its native form. Not to say, that an isolated infusion from the world outside, and musical mastery doesn’t have its place. But let’s be grounded and real, and put things in perspective. We don’t need another super-player, or off-the-charts vocal diva to tell us that we feel and feel deeply. It’s all within. A grandchild singing a made-up song, can hit the mark, as well as any chanteuse. That said, I took a little dip into the pool of my past a couple nights ago, & had an opportunity to hang out with a few friends who went on the reach the top. I’ve always applauded & admired them for their hard work. They’ve had the gumption to grease their own wheels with an incredible focus. I relate to them now as an impeccably impressive sub-class. Perhaps it’s understandable they don’t know as much about me, as I do about them. Our worlds diverged. It’s okay. I’m not striving anymore, to belong, or be recognized. Maybe it’s because I’m of a certain age. I’ve adapted to new realities. None of us could have imagined where we’d all end up. I don’t really care anymore, if I have any kind of presence on the charts. The night we had together, couldn’t have been more revealing. For me, sneaking away from the show, looking for a bathroom, was worth the price of the ticket .. but no, I had comps. I didn’t pay, and somehow I justify this, as what is due me, given our shared past. In the ebbing, sunset light, I followed my intrepid friend, around and outside the crowd, trespassing the somber, manicured hotel gardens, while still, the throbbing strains of bluegrass licks rang over the Nebraska Valley. Past the “Guests Only” signs, and into the bar, just as if we owned the place. A restroom is often the best refuge for mulling over a predicament, emotional, or otherwise. We had no competition, just miles of empty stalls. Finally, I could relax. The rest of the night, meeting up & visiting, sitting on the steps of the charged confines of the concert stage, as grips broke it down, as lingering fans angled in to get an autograph, seemed merely a reference to our illicit charge behind enemy lines. I will always be an outsider, and however many times the star may walk me to my truck after midnight, this, and this alone, will define me.
– Kristina Stykos
Practice is just hearing, just seeing, just feeling. This is what Christians call the face of God: simply taking in this world as it manifests. We feel our body; we hear the cars and birds. That’s all there is.
– Charlotte Joko Beck
Not many people actually want to be transformed. They don’t want to lose themselves. Most people expect from religion a little moral uplift once a week.
– Karen Armstrong
Music at a Distance
Only twice has anyone
asked me to sing.
Once was the man I loved
in a run-down section of Chicago.
I sang my father’s favorite,
“Shenandoah.” Away, you rolling
river. Now it’s seven years later,
and I am living on an island.
There is only my stillness
and the absence.
And the sound of me singing.
– Linda Gregg
How to Not Be a Perfectionist
People are vivid
And small
and don’t live
very long—
– Molly Brodak
It is important to remember that there is no “right” breath…Short, long, deep, shallow are all fine breaths. Trust your body; it knows what is needed.
– Christina Feldman
Summer, do your worst!
Light your tinsel moon, and call on
Your performing stars to fall on
Headlong through your paper sky;
– Dorothy Parker
Emergence never happens all at once. It is a slow stepping into the expanded capacity of your next self. You may need practice at releasing in those places you’ve grown accustomed to bracing which, like a tight swaddle, was comforting in its limits. But when the time to remain hidden comes to its natural end, you must begin to inhabit your new dimensionality. Breathe into the fullness of your gaining altitude and consider that what presents itself as fear may actually be exhilaration. As your future approaches you, worry less how it may receive you and say a prayer instead for your becoming approachable.
– Toko-pa Turner
Every day things happen in the world that cannot be explained by any law of things we know. Every day they’re mentioned and forgotten, and the same mystery that brought them takes them away, transforming their secret into oblivion.nSuch is the law by which things that can’t be explained must be forgotten. The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows.
– Fernando Pessoa
A poem is a lamp
through which the universe
catalyzes Herself
onto a page
and turns on a light
in you.
– Chelan Harkin
In this passing moment karma ripens
and all things come to be.
I vow to choose what is:
If there is cost, I choose to pay.
If there is need, I choose to give.
If there is pain, I choose to feel.
If there is sorrow, I choose to grieve.
When burning — I choose heat.
When calm — I choose peace.
When starving — I choose hunger.
When happy — I choose joy.
Whom I encounter, I choose to meet.
What I shoulder, I choose to bear.
When it is my death, I choose to die.
Where this takes me, I choose to go.
Being with what is — I respond to what is.
This life is as real as a dream;
the one who knows it cannot be found;
and, truth is not a thing — Therefore I vow
to choose THIS dharma entrance gate!
May all Buddhas and Wise Ones
help me live this vow.
– Hogan Bays
That is what is needed. A wanted sign for those who need love. Tenderness appears, the red runs through the ivy on the wall, something burning to warm you rather than to destroy you.
– Cynthia Arrieu-King
When you stop thinking about yourself all the time, a certain sense of repose overtakes you. It happened to me by imperceptible degrees and I could not really believe it; I could not really claim it for some time. I thought there must be something wrong. It’s like taking a drink of cold water when you are thirsty. Every tastebud on your tongue, every molecule in your body says thank you.
– Leonard Cohen
THE PRACTICE IS THE PATH
Not everyone in life finds a path that is meaningful and helps cure the spirit. Many never make it to the trailhead. More often, people end up moving through life in pursuit of the next best thing. Many, by default, end up on roads that lead them to strive for gain – making money, achieving popularity, and being successful. These roads have fast lanes, enabling people to move at greater speeds and achieve their goals in less time. Some end up in cul-de-sacs, confined by lives focused on pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain.
A path is different. On a path, you are meant to meander, to enjoy each footfall. Every ascent and descent is part of the journey. And there may be moments – days, weeks, and months – when you feel totally lost. A path is winding and circuitous and the experience of losing your way is part of the way. A path is wide enough only for footsteps. You cannot drive an RV equipped with a kitchen and flat-screen TV down it. By necessity, you must travel light.
Sometimes you find yourself on the path by happenstance, someone on a whim takes you there, or you look for it on the world wide web. It doesn’t matter how you get there. What matters is that sure-footed, with shoulders back and heart lifted, you trust the pads of your feet.
The path I am speaking of is not a trail that cuts through canyons and meadows or crisscrosses the mountain. The path I am referring to is the Big Path, the Tao, the Way. It is a path that opens the lungs, fires the spirit, and awakens faith. It is the path of pilgrimage, one that leads straight to the heart of being.
– Tias Little
O grant me a house by the beach of a bay,
Where the waves can be surly in winter, and play
With the sea-weed in summer, ye bountiful powers!
And I’d leave all the hurry, the noise, and the fray,
For a house full of books, and a garden of flowers.
– Andrew Lang
Our fate is different from the Gilgamesh epic. At that time, the matriarchal world of unconsciousness had to be overcome by the hero. Nowadays, some 4,000 years later, the situation is reversed. The feminine principle has to be integrated, not overcome.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
O head! thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!
– Herman Melville
my heart like an eggplant, blackened, bulbous, grows too greedy:
bruised and sorrowful, it will not let its great loss go
– Kathleen Spivack
Tell them I was always difficult and will remain difficult, and even after my death there are still ways of creating difficulties….
– Bertolt Brecht
Civilized man has developed the incredible technique of symbolization—of words (which represent things and events), of numbers (which represent patterns and arrangements of physical nature), of social institutions (laws, states, family patterns), and so on.
– Alan Watts
Art is a wound turned into light.
– Georges Braque
If you don’t try to translate an experience into words, you simply have the experience, not thoughts, sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touch—they can all be experienced directly without words.
– Bhante Henepola Gunaratana
In general, its “not too late.” But it IS too late for some people, and some ecosystems. And corporate and political leaders are still actively, irreversibly destroying Earth. It’s NEVER too late to fight, but don’t be lulled by platitudes. It’s appropriate to panic at this point.
– Peter Kalmus
Metalanguage is a parasitism, inseparable from a language of contamination. But this parasitism and contamination, this virulence affects both ‘language’ and ‘metalanguage.’
– Nicholas Royle
Poems and Stories are the communal currency of humanity.
– Tahir Shah
There are no rules. That is how art is born, how breakthroughs happen. Go against the rules or ignore the rules. That is what invention is about.
– Helen Frankenthaler
Selfish ambition, or the love of rule for its own sake, far from being the peculiar infirmity of noble minds, is shared by beings which have no mind at all.
– The Encantadas
Our experience subtly alters, even distorts, the lens through which we see the world, and the choices we make are based on that altered vision.
– James Hollis
My imagination, which only teased me before, supports me now. I should be able to do the great things of which I have dreamed.
– Anaïs Nin
When such threatening forces of cleavage are at work, splitting peoples, individuals and atoms, it is doubly necessary that those which unite and hold together should become effective: for life is founded on harmonious interplay of masculine and feminine forces.
– Emma Jung
The stone the builders refused
is now the head of this corner
it is marvelous
in our eyes
– Mary Oppen
August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.
– Sylvia Plath
The difficult thing is that halfway through writing a novel, you already know the whole story. I think that’s why a lot of people give up around then—you’ve had all the realizations.
– Colm Tóibín
I write, erase, rewrite
erase again, then
a flower blooms
– Hokusai
One reason why music can stand repetition so much more sturdily than correspondingly good prose is that music, of all the arts, is by its nature least suited to the psychology of information, and has remained closer to the psychology of form….We cannot take a recurrent pleasure in the new (in information) but we can in the natural (in form).
– Kenneth Burke
There’s necessary, and natural poetic enemies of yours
to be clear
– Rodrigo Toscano
You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
– James Baldwin
As we walk the path, let us not look up so much at the destination, high above in the mist, but carefully place one foot in front of the other.
– Andrew Olendzki
The Age of Chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded.
– Edmund Burke
Alejandra Pizarnik to León Ostrov:
I, on the other hand, live passionately on the moon: how can I be concerned about money?
All motion is time, time is all motion.
– Khalid Masood
Sophia became the Goddess of philosophers. Hers is a philosophy of fire, for she kindles the fire within the soul; without her enthusiasm (literally “god-inspiration”) there is no warmth in our actions. Although many ancient philosophers retained their allegiances to the mystery cults of the gods, even as some philosophers are still adherents of religions today, so many more took the gods back to their primal atomic principles into greater and greater abstraction; the result is that, for many people, philosophy no longer bears its original meaning – literally “love of wisdom” – but is split off from the realities of existence…Yet the study of wisdom means friendship with Sophia, and kinship with Wisdom brings immortality.
– Caitlín Matthews
Tonight, something bows
that should not bend. Something stiffens that should
slide. Something, loose and not right,
rakes or forges itself all night.
– Li-Young Lee
The world is a collection of objects.
That which perceives the objects
Cannot itself be an object.
You are That.
– Wu Hsin
Fortunately, in her kindness and patience, Nature has never put the fatal question as to the meaning of their lives into the mouths of most people. And where no one asks, no one needs to answer.
– Carl Jung
thinking in metaphors no batteries no jumper cables
– Adam T. Bogar
They rejected you from their pool but you’re headed to the ocean. Dry your eyes.
– Dr. Thema
Nonconceptual pristine wisdom is born from habituating to absorption without conceptual thought, and just that is the birth of the superior insight of discriminating intelligence.
– Patrul Rinpoche
Machado had an answer to what poetry is: “la palabra en el tiempo.” “the word in time,” “human language in which we feel time passing,” or “words that pick up the energy of time,” or “words that take their place, like drumbeats, in time already counted.”
– Robert Bly
I may be able to tell you who I am, but I am also discovering who I am not. I want to be an honest man. And I want to be a good writer. I don’t know if one ever gets to be what one wants to be. You just have to play it by ear and…pray for rain.
– James Baldwin
Together we walked in bright daylight. The night was given over to sleep. Each season was a palace hung with brocade and words were minarets from which we called to each other.
– Karin Lessing, Contrary Currents
Keep growing quietly and seriously throughout your whole development; you cannot disturb it more rudely than by looking outward and, expecting from outside, replies to questions that only your inmost feeling in your most hushed hour can perhaps answer.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
People will harvest you if you let them.
Find your integrity.
– Kenneth Folk
Over time, the person who approaches life with an openness to being wrong and a willingness to learn outperforms the person who doesn’t.
– Farnam Street
I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
– Seamus Heaney
Prayer is an intimate sharing between friends. It is spending time alone with the one who loves us.
– St. Teresa of Avila
Contemplation is a long loving look at the Real.
– William McNamara
Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning?
– Nietzsche
Nothing essential has ever been lost, because the matrix is ever present within us & from this it can & will be reproduced. Only those can recover it who learned art of averting their eyes from blinding light of current opinion & their ears to noise of ephemeral slogans.
– CG Jung
We ‘edit’ reality all the time.
– Hélène Cixous
Each ending is an hourglass filled with doors. There are times
when I feel you might be searching for me, when I can read
what is written on the far sides of stars. I’m nearly out of time.
My heart is a dragonfly. I’ll have to settle for this, standing under
a waterfall of words you never said. There are times like this
when no ending appears, times when I am so inconsolably happy.
– Richard Jackson, Alternate Endings
We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share. This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity.
– Paulo Coelho
And so it is that most people have no idea how beautiful the world is and how much magnificence is revealed in the tiniest things, in some flower, in a stone, in tree bark, or in a birch leaf. The grown-ups, going about their business and worries, and tormenting themselves with all kinds of details, gradually lose the perspective for these riches that children, when they are attentive and good, soon notice and love with their whole heart.
And yet the greatest beauty would be achieved if everyone remained in this regard always like attentive and good children, simple and pious in sensitivities, and if people did not lose the capacity for taking pleasure as intensely in a birch leaf or a peacock’s feather or the wing of a hooded crow as in a mighty mountain or a splendid palace.
What is small is not small in itself, just as that which is great is not—great. A great and eternal beauty passes through the whole world, and it is distributed fairly over that which is small and that which is large; for in such important and essential matters, no injustice is to be found on earth.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
It is always difficult to give oneself up; few persons anywhere ever succeed in doing so, and even fewer transcend the possessive stage to know love for what it actually is: a perpetual discovery, and immersion in the waters of reality, an unending re-creation.
– Octavio Paz
To a large extent, creativity is self-generated in areas of the mind beyond or beneath the individual’s willful, conscious control. All he can do is discipline his consciousness to accommodate the needs of the creative process.
– Ingo Swann
People fill in the unknown with what fits with THEIR known.
– Ingo Swann
An ARCHETYPE is defined as “the original pattern or model”
– Ingo Swann
Why I Meditate (after Allen Ginsberg)
by Wes Nisker
I meditate because I suffer. I suffer, therefore I am. I am, therefore I meditate.
I meditate because there are so many other things to do.
I meditate because when I was younger it was all the rage.
I meditate because Siddhartha Gautama, Bodhidharma, Marco Polo, the British Raj, Carl Jung, Alan Watts, Jack Kerouac, Alfred E. Neuman, et al.
I meditate because evolution gave me a big brain, but it didn’t come with an instruction manual.
I meditate because I have all the information I need.
I meditate because the largest colonies of living beings, the coral reefs, are dying.
I meditate because I want to touch deep time, where the history of humanity can be seen as just an evolutionary adjustment period.
I meditate because life is too short and sitting slows it down.
I meditate because life is too long and I need an occasional break.
I meditate because I want to experience the world as Rumi did, or Walt Whitman, or as Mary Oliver does.
I meditate because now I know that enlightenment doesn’t exist, so I can relax.
I meditate because of the Dalai Lama’s laugh.
I meditate because there are too many advertisements in my head, and I’m erasing all but the very best of them.
I meditate because the physicists say there may be eleven dimensions to reality, and I want to get a peek into a few more of them.
I meditate because I’ve discovered that my mind is a great toy and I like to play with it.
I meditate because I want to remember that I’m perfectly human.
Sometimes I meditate because my heart is breaking.
Sometimes I meditate so that my heart will break.
I meditate because a Vedanta master once told me that in Hindi my name, Nis-ker, means “non-doer.”
I meditate because I’m growing old and want to become more comfortable with emptiness.
I meditate because I think Robert Thurman was right to call it an “evolutionary sport,” and I want to be on the home team.
I meditate because I’m composed of 100 trillion cells, and from time to time I need to reassure them that we’re all in this together.
I meditate because it’s such a relief to spend time ignoring myself.
I meditate because my country spends more money on weapons than all other nations in the world combined. If I had more courage, I’d probably immolate myself.
I meditate because I want to discover the fifth Brahma-vihara, the Divine Abode of Awe, and then go down in history as a great spiritual adept.
I meditate because I’m building myself a bigger and better perspective, and occasionally I need to add a new window.
As for me, I do not know where I am. Sometimes I feel annihilated (there is a better word), other times I am in a liminal state; there is a sense of flow that circulates within me with an intoxicating warmth.
– Flaubert writing to Louis Bouilhet from Istanbul (then known as Constantinople) 14 November 1850. (Clifton Lee)
If you are an aspiring writer, the best thing that you can do is stop paying so much attention to other people, try to create about an hour’s margin of quiet boredom in your day, and plant yourself until something original happens. So much real talent is spoiled by comparison.
– Paul J. Pastor
solitude unites us, believe me, just as much as society separates us. in finding ourselves, we find in ourselves all our brothers in solitude. and if we do not know how to love one another, it is because we do not know how to be alone.
– Miguel De Unamuno y Jugo
In the sense of someone who leads the way or establishes a trend, a VANGUARD was originally a soldier or division of troops positioned at the front of an army. Etymologically, it derives from the French ‘avant-garde’, essentially meaning a ‘fore-guard’, or ‘guard in front’.
– @HaggardHawks
The thing that cures a neurosis must be be as convincing as the neurosis, and since the latter is only too real, the helpful experience must be equally real. It must be a very real illusion, if you want to put it pessimistically.
– CG Jung
Breath is the bridge which connects life to consciousness, which unites your body to your thoughts. Whenever your mind becomes scattered, use your breath as the means to take hold of your mind again.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Can you see the holiness in those things you take for granted-a paved road or a washing machine? If you concentrate on finding what is good in every situation, you will discover that your life will suddenly be filled w/gratitude, a feeling that nurtures the soul.
– Rabbi Kushner
The balanced mind is always at ease. It isn’t for or against anything – it only wants what is.
It’s at ease because there’s nothing it is opposed to. Nothing opposes it, nothing holds it back, it acts as creation unfolding in the moment, and its action is swift and free.
– Byron Katie
Those who think base the world on thought, those who feel, on feeling. You find truth and error in both.
– CG Jung
In the stillness of the quiet, if we listen,
we can hear the whisper of the heart
giving strength to weakness,
courage to fear, hope to despair.
– Howard Thurman
Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.
– D. W. Winnicott
Our egos are not strong enough to accept failure, and so we force our bodies to stand up to situations harmful to our health.
– Alexander Lowen, Bioenergetics
I am glad it cannot happen twice,
the fever of first love.
For it is a fever, and a burden, too,
whatever the poets may say.
– Daphne Du Maurier
The beauty of the city was
nothing more, nothing less,
than the beauty of your wounds.
– Yukio Mishima
For a long time now, every meeting with another human being has been a collision. I feel too much, sense too much, am exhausted by the reverberations after even the simplest conversation.
– May Sarton
Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it.
– Zadie Smith
I shall retrace the path of songs
already sung, and from them find
new music.
– Eric Hoffman
They don’t teach literature any more for the most part. They teach ideology of one sort or another.
– Harold Bloom
Individuation is not narcissistic self-indulgence. Quite the contrary, the individuation summons serves the insurgent impulse of nature seeking to enter the world through us. Anything short of serving our deepest spiritual nature typically becomes a shadow issue…
– James Hollis
Compassion is concern for others – sincere concern for others’ well-being founded on awareness of our own experience. Since it makes us happy when others show us affection and offer us help, if we show others affection and readiness to help they too will feel joy.
– Dalai Lama
We are standing on a whale. The ground of being is the ground of our being, and the outward turned, we see all these little problems here, but inward, we are the source of them all. That’s the big mystical teaching.
– Joseph Campbell
It’s when you gallop that your parasites are most alive.
– Henri Michaux
and wisdom’s self
oft seeks to sweet retired solitude,
where, with her best nurse, contemplation,
she plumes her feathers, and lets grow her wings,
that, in the various bustle of resort,
were all to-ruffled, and sometimes impaired.
– John Milton
Jung added that ordinary ideas are easily contradicted by other ideas, but for profoundly truthful ideas, their opposites are also true. Therefore, only paradox can begin to approach the magnitude of the universe in which we float.
– James Hollis
I take careful account of the symbols produced by the unconscious. They are the one thing capable of convincing the critical mind of modern man. They are convincing for a very old-fashioned reason: They are “overwhelming,” which is precisely what Latin word “convincere” means.
– CG Jung
The mystical theme of the space age is this: the world, as we know it, is coming to an end. The world as center of the universe, divided from the heavens, bound by horizons in which love is reserved for members of the in-group: that is the world that is passing away.
– Joseph Campbell
What torment is this
that each person is lost
in themselves?
We have received
a tongue but you never find someone with the same language.
– Nida Fazli
who
is invisible enough
to see you
– Paul Celan
I have heard the still, small voice
and it was that of the bacteria
demolishing my cosmos.
– R.S. Thomas, Threshold
When our minds become convinced that we’ve been the recipients of a tremendous amount of kindness in our lives, the wish to speak ill of others vanishes. Instead, we become happy to talk about others’ good qualities, virtuous activities, & accomplishments.
– @Thubtenchodron
All the path towards home
passed by in this delusion:
That at the next step someone
is about to be a companion.
– Parveen Shakir
Emptiness is a great feminine secret. It is something absolutely alien to man; the chasm, the unplumbed depths, the yin.
– CG Jung
About tomorrow, who knows anything.
– Mary Oliver
Mythology never leaves us stranded; no matter what a dark tale it may spin, a true myth will lead us out of the dilemma and offer a cure.
– Robert A. Johnson
Many legends inform us that we must pay price for departure from the Garden of Eden and the journey to higher realms of consciousness.
– Robert A. Johnson
A song is an experience, you don’t have to understand the words to understand the experience, and trying to understand the full meaning of the words may destroy the feeling of the experience.
– Bob Dylan
What is suppressed comes up again in another place in altered form, but this time loaded with resentment that makes the otherwise natural impulse our enemy.
– CG Jung
Instead of committing suicide, people go to work.
– Thomas Bernhard
I want everything – love, adventure, intimacy, work.
– Virginia Woolf
Nietzsche had lost the ground under his feet because he possessed nothing more than the inner world of his thoughts–which incidentally possessed him more than he it.
– Edward Edinger
I know I should go home
but the crows are plucking clams
where the ocean kisses sand,
& the water level
holds my hips
just so
I know I should return
but the path ahead is widening
where the rocks are tilting skyward
& beside me an old finback
rocks the ocean soft to sleep
– @LotusTongue
The fear of the unknown, this freefall into the future, can be detected all around us. But we live in the stars and we are finally moved by awe to our greatest adventures.
– Joseph Campbell
I want to discourage you from choosing anything or making any decision simply because it is safe. Things of value seldom are.
– Toni Morrison
Where nobody speaks her tongue,
the aging tourist talks to flowers.
– Mark Weiss
academia makes it impossible to “build wealth” (i.e., for some, saving $, for others, not being -$) not only by paying little but also by providing time-limited opportunities that force people to move far and frequently, an undertaking whose costs are rarely defrayed.
– @snarkademic
The artist does not follow an individual impulse, but rather a current of collective life which arises not directly from consciousness but from the collective unconscious of the modern psyche.
– CG Jung
My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world, and exiles me from it.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
What right have you to take the word ‘wealth,’ which originally meant ‘well being,’ and degrade and narrow it by confining it to certain sorts of material objects measured by money?
– John Ruskin
The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, while the aftermath of violence is tragic bitterness.
– Martin Luther King
I began by saying that one of the paradoxes of education was that precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience, you must find yourself at war with your society. It is your responsibility to change society if you think of yourself as an educated person. And on the basis of the evidence — the moral and political evidence — one is compelled to say that this is a backwards country. I would teach him that there are currently very few standards in this country which are worth a man’s respect . . . I would try to make him know that just as American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it, so is the world larger, more daring, more beautiful, and more terrible, but principally larger — and that it belongs to him.
– James Baldwin
We have still yet to understand that when I am starving, you are in danger. When someone thinks that my being in danger makes them safe, we’re all in trouble.
– James Baldwin
The crucial point is just to maintain the state, as if abiding since forever in the great wide vast expanse which is naturally free of limitations, transcending the investigations of philosophical schools, the objective appearances of attachment, and mental operations.
– Patrul
Love happens,
but loving is
a thousand tiny choices
we make every day.
– McCall Erickson
The problem is that we cannot imagine a future where we possess less but are more.
– Charles Bowden
the efflux of the soul comes from within through embower’d gates, ever provoking questions. these yearnings why are they? these thoughts in the darkness why are they? (…) what is it i interchange so suddenly with strangers?
– Walt Whitman
Collective thinking and feeling and collective effort are far less of a strain than individual functioning and effort; hence there is always a great temptation to allow collective functioning to take the place of individual differentiation of the personality.
– Carl Jung
We must learn to know, love and join our place even more than we love our own ideas. People who can agree that they share a commitment to the (land) — even if they are otherwise locked in struggle with each other — have at least one deep thing to share.
– Gary Snyder
Whitman’s poetry defines what is American and not European in our national literary tradition. Its originality and humane stance have a healing function, which is what he so deeply desired.
– Harold Bloom
Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law. What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life.
– Carl Jung
There are ten thousand contradictory prayers ascending to these idols. But methinks the gods will not jar the eternal progression of things, by any hints from below.
– Herman Melville
You explain nothing, O poet, but thanks to you all things become explicable.
– Paul Claudel
Words, like nature, half reveal and half conceal the soul within.
– Alfred Lord Tennyson
at my gate
wildly it grows…
spring pine
– @issa_haiku
You can elevate yourself for a while.
Not for long.
What is deeper than self?
– @KennethFolk
Find something larger than yourself.
– KennethFolk
An outburst of anger near the road, a refusal to speak on the path, a silence in the pine woods… an attempt to be friendly in the water, a refusal to end the argument on the flat stones, a cry of anger on the steep bank of dirt, a weeping among the bushes.
– Lydia Davis
A mosquito sings her dark need into my ear. Day advances like a slow machine of squeaking towhees and whirring wrens.
– Dave Bonta
If we can successfully develop that function which I have called transcendent, the disharmony ceases and we can then enjoy the favorable side of the unconscious. The unconscious then gives us all the encouragement and help that a bountiful nature can shower upon man.
– CG Jung
Everything you think is important isn’t.
Buddhism 101.
– Kenneth Folk
Develop the art of listening to a deeper intelligence. Wait, without flapping around for an answer—without scrambling for something known.
– Amoda Maa
In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.
– Marcel Proust
The next tenth of a degree is going to be much worse than the last tenth of a degree.
– @AndrewDessler
and again they tell me
writing is a sacred gesture
through which you can save yourself
and again they tell me
not writing is a sacred gesture
through which you can save yourself
– Irina Mavrodin
I am not writing for someone to read me, I am writing to try to understand what is happening to me, what labyrinth I am in, whose test I am subject to, and how I can answer to get out whole.
– Mircea Cartarescu
Evil is never radical… it is only extreme… and possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. … Only good has depth and can be radical.
– Hannah Arendt to Scholem
If it were not for the longing for a lost paradise
there would be no poetry
nor memory
and eternity would be no consolation
– Mahmoud Darwish
Writing is like being in love. You never get better at it or learn more about it. The day you think you do is the day you lose it. Robert Frost called his work a lover’s quarrel with the world. It’s ongoing.
– James Lee Burke
My god but we’re beautiful. And not partially. Not just our gifts, our refined parts, the windows in us through which eternity glints, but our darling, brave, magnificent fears that work so hard, so tirelessly and often in such a lonely way on behalf of protecting our preciousness. Our addictions so kindly distract us from what we’re yet unable to bear. Everything in us is doing its all to take care of us. Please, my dear, understand and completely forgive yourself.
– Chelan Harkin
You can’t have it all… but you can have August.
– Barbara Ras
If I could read my own
handwriting, I’d have
more poems,
the old monk admitted.
– The Old Monk
For the artist to attach himself to his work, or identify himself with it, is suicidal.
An artist should be able not only to spit on his predecessor’s art, or on all works of art, but on his own too.
He should be able to be an artist all the time, and finally not be an artist at all, but a piece of art.
– Henry Miller
We keep consulting neuroscience — even when its findings are disproven or overblown — to explain the human condition, and often to validate what we want to believe or what we already know.
– Kristen Martin
Everything in life is just for a while.
– Philip K. Dick
Seen from Earth, a comet is a prodigy, coming out of the void for no reason, returning to the void for no reason. They call it unpredictable because they cannot predict it. From the comet’s own point of view, nothing could be simpler. It starts in the outer darkness, aims directly at the sun, and never stops till it gets there. Everything else spins in its same orbit forever. The comet heads for the source. They call it crooked because it is too straight. They call it unpredictable because it is too fixed. They call it chaotic because it is too linear.
– Scott Alexander, Unsong
You are not your age, nor the size of clothes you wear,
You are not a weight, or the color of your hair.
You are not your name, or the dimples in your cheeks.
You are all the books you read, and all the words you speak.
You are your croaky morning voice, and the smiles you try to hide.
You’re the sweetness in your laughter, and every tear you’ve cried.
You’re the songs you sing so loudly when you know you’re all alone.
You’re the places that you’ve been to, and the one that you call home.
You’re the things that you believe in, and the people whom you love.
You’re the photos in your bedroom, and the future you dream of.
You’re made of so much beauty, but it seems that you forgot
When you decided that you were defined by all the things you’re not.
– Erin Hanson, Not
Religion, from the root religio, means to reconnect, to bind back together. I would describe mystical moments as those attention-grabbing experiences that overcome the gap between you and other people, events, or objects, and even God, where the illusion of separation disappears. The work of spirituality is to look with a different pair of nondual eyes, beyond what Thomas Merton calls “the shadow and the disguise” of things until we can see them in their connectedness and wholeness. In a very real sense, the word “God” is just a synonym for everything. So if you do not want to get involved with everything, stay away from God.
– Richard Rohr
Disbelief is more resistant than faith because it is sustained by the senses.
– Gabriel García Márquez
Chaos is inherent in all compounded things. Strive on with diligence.
– Buddha
You cannot do yoga. Yoga is your natural state. What you can do are yoga exercises, which may reveal to you where you are resisting your natural state.
– Sharon Gannon
We do not find our own center; it finds us. Our own mind will not be able to figure it out.
– Richard Rohr
Ah earth you old extinguisher.
– Samuel Beckett, Happy Days
This Paper Boat
Carefully placed upon the future,
it tips from the breeze and skims away,
frail thing of words, this valentine,
so far to sail. And if you find it
caught in the reeds, its message blurred,
the thought that you are holding it
a moment is enough for me.
– Ted Kooser
Those who awaken never rest in one place.
Like swans, they rise and leave the lake.
On the air they rise and fly an invisible course.
Their food is knowledge.
They live on emptiness.
They have seen how to break free.
Who can follow them?
– Buddha
Practice until you see yourself in the cruelest person on Earth, in the child starving, in the political prisoner. Continue until you recognize yourself in everyone in the supermarket, on the street corner, in a concentration camp, on a leaf, in a dewdrop. Meditate until you see yourself in a speck of dust in a distant galaxy. See and listen with the whole of your being. If you are fully present, the rain of Dharma will water the deepest seeds in your consciousness, and tomorrow, while you are washing the dishes or looking at the blue sky, that seed will spring forth, and love and understanding will appear as a beautiful flower.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love …
A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man may be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll.
– Carson McCullers
You are like a candle. Imagine you are sending light out all around you. All your words, thoughts and actions are going in many directions. If you say something kind, your kind words go in many directions, and you yourself go with them. We are …transforming and continuing in a different form at every moment.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
It’s like Zen, he says,
so filled with paradoxes that it jumps through hoops
that aren’t even there.
– Dick Allen
Reality is a battle of opposing metaphors playing out/in the canvas of the collective mindscape.
– Miles Hingston
When you are not clear about the purpose of your life, you are never clear when it comes to making decisions that affect your life. You always hesitate and are always in danger of making the wrong decision. When your only purpose for living is the benefit of others, it is very easy to make the right decision. It is easy because you are very clear about why you are alive.
– Lama Zopa Rinpoche
If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted.
– Thomas Merton
Sometimes an old photograph, an old friend, an old letter will remind you that you are not who you once were, for the person who dwelt among them, valued this, chose that, wrote thus, no longer exists. Without noticing it you have traversed a great distance; the strange has become familiar and the familiar if not strange at least awkward or uncomfortable, an outgrown garment. And some people travel far more than others. There are those who receive as birthright an adequate or at least unquestioned sense of self and those who set out to reinvent themselves, for survival or for satisfaction, and travel far. Some people inherit values and practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have to burn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch, even as a psychological metamorphosis.
– Rebecca Solnit
This passage from the Acts of Peter provides a great description of meditation practice: “Give ear; withdraw your souls from all that appears but is not truly real; close these eyes if yours, close your ears, withdraw from actions that are outwardly seen; and you shall know the reality of Christ and the whole secret of your salvation.”
– Willis Barnstone
August Moonrise
The sun was gone, and the moon was coming
Over the blue Connecticut hills;
The west was rosy, the east was flushed,
And over my head the swallows rushed
This way and that, with changeful wills.
I heard them twitter and watched them dart
Now together and now apart
Like dark petals blown from a tree;
The maples stamped against the west
Were black and stately and full of rest,
And the hazy orange moon grew up
And slowly changed to yellow gold
While the hills were darkened, fold on fold
To a deeper blue than a flower could hold.
Down the hill I went, and then
I forgot the ways of men,
For night-scents, heady, and damp and cool
Wakened ecstasy in me
On the brink of a shining pool.
O Beauty, out of many a cup
You have made me drunk and wild
Ever since I was a child,
But when have I been sure as now
That no bitterness can bend
And no sorrow wholly bow
One who loves you to the end?
And though I must give my breath
And my laughter all to death,
And my eyes through which joy came,
And my heart, a wavering flame;
If all must leave me and go back
Along a blind and fearful track
So that you can make anew,
Fusing with intenser fire,
Something nearer your desire;
If my soul must go alone
Through a cold infinity,
Or even if it vanish, too,
Beauty, I have worshipped you.
Let this single hour atone
For the theft of all of me.
– Sara Teasdale
My god but we’re beautiful. And not partially. Not just our gifts, our refined parts, the windows in us through which eternity glints, but our darling, brave, magnificent fears that work so hard, so tirelessly and often in such a lonely way on behalf of protecting our preciousness. Our addictions so kindly distract us from what we’re yet unable to bear. Everything in us is doing its all to take care of us. Please, my dear, understand and completely forgive yourself.
– Chelan Harkin
You can’t have it all… but you can have August.
– Barbara Ras
Let love write on you for awhile.
– Jonathan Safran Foer
Did you ever notice that the Bible never sets out to prove the existence of God?
It doesn’t.
Never.
Not in any of its many books written by its many authors and committees.
Yet American evangelical Christianity and more fundamentalist religion in general are obsessed with apologetics, proofs for God, and intellectual certainty about metaphysical postulates.
There is a disconnect here.
And it is profound.
One group has made God an object, an item about which they might speculate at arms length. That is to say, they have made God an idol. The God who is subject to one’s determination of his existence is a cheap, cheap God paid for at far too high a price, intellectual dishonesty and ethical abandonment.
The other group refuses to enter into the debate over God’s existence. This is not because they are settled on the answer. That is a naive approach to the Biblical literature. Rather, they reject the paradigm of the question. God is not an object. God is not that which exists, as one thing among other things, or even one being among other beings. God is the name given to life itself. Faith in God is the conviction that life is worth living, everyone is worthy of love, grace is foundational, mercy is necessary, peace is the only way forward, and forgiveness is the order of the day. The Bible offers no proof of this. It offers a challenge: taste and see that the Lord is good. Live it, and tell me it isn’t true.
The only “proof” the Bible, through its many books and authors, offers for God’s existence is this: the love his followers show to their brothers and sisters, to their enemies, and to the world. This proof doesn’t demonstrate the existence of a powerful old man in the sky. It’s not meant to. In fact, it doesn’t offer proof in the traditional philosophical sense at all. Proof of something out there. It offers something better. It offers the proof of love. Have you ever been loved? Yes? Then you know what I’m talking about. To be loved…that is to experience the meaning and value of life. To be loved is to encounter God.
– Daniel Skillman
Nirvana is this moment seen directly. There is no where else than here. The only gate is now. The only doorway is your own body and mind. There’s nowhere to go. There’s nothing else to be. There’s no destination. It’s not something to aim for in the afterlife. It’s simply the quality of this moment.
– Jane Hirshfield
God does not demand that we give up our personal dignity, that we throw in our lot with random people, that we lose ourselves and turn from all that is not him. God needs nothing, asks nothing, and demands nothing, like the stars. It is a life with God which demands these things. Experience has taught the race that if knowledge of God is the end, then these habits of life are not the means but the condition in which the means operates. You do not have to do these things; not at all. God does not, I regret to report, give a hoot. You do not have to do these things – unless you want to know God. They work on you, not on him. You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.
– Annie Dillard
I think of my soul as pattern rather than substance.
– Alan Watts
For people who have no transcendent purpose to their lives and cannot invent one through contributing to a cultural tradition (for example), in other words who have no religious belief and no intellectual interests to stimulate them, self-destruction and the creation of crises in their life is one way of warding off meaninglessness.
– Theodore Dalrymple
We do not know what to pray for. Should we not pray for the ability to be shocked at atrocities committed by man, for the capacity to be dismayed? Prayer should be an act of catharsis or purgation of emotions, as well as a process of self-clarification, of examining priorities, of elucidating responsibility…. Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehood. The liturgical movement must become a revolutionary movement, seeking to overthrow the forces that continue to destroy the promise, the hope, the vision.
– Abraham Joshua Heschel
Wandering creates the desert.
– Edmond Jabès
It’s hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
– Bill Watterson
I guess you are kind of curious as to who I am, but I am one of those who do not have a regular name. My name depends on you. Just call me whatever is in your mind.
If you are thinking about something that happened a long time ago: Somebody asked you a question and you did not know the answer.
That is my name.
Perhaps it was raining very hard.
That is my name.
Or somebody wanted you to do something. You did it. Then they told you what you did was wrong—“Sorry for the mistake,”—and you had to do something else.
That is my name.
Perhaps it was a game you played when you were a child or something that came idly into your mind when you were old and sitting in a chair near the window.
That is my name.
Or you walked someplace. There were flowers all around.
That is my name.
Perhaps you stared into a river. There as something near you who loved you. They were about to touch you. You could feel this before it happened. Then it happened.
That is my name.
– Richard Brautigan
Often when people think they forgive, what we are really doing is only digesting. In other words, we will swallow with disgust what’s in our mouth now. But we will never eat that ‘food’ again.
– Jonathan Carroll
The influence of a vital person vitalizes, there’s no doubt about it. The world without spirit is wasteland. People have the notion of saving the world by shifting things around, changing the rules, and who’s on top, and so forth. No, no! Any world is a valid world if it’s alive. The thing to do is to bring life to it, and the only way to do that is to find in your own case where the life is and become alive yourself.
– Joseph Campbell
Human beings are settlers, but not in the pioneer sense. It is our human occupational hazard to settle for little. We settle for purity and piety when we are being invited to an exquisite holiness. We settle for the fear-driven when love longs to be our engine. We settle for a puny, vindictive God when we are being nudged always closer to this wildly inclusive, larger-than-any-life God. We allow our sense of God to atrophy. We settle for the illusion of separation when we are endlessly asked to enter into kinship with all.
– Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship
The way is long only
because you delay to start on it;
one single step
would bring you to Him:
become a slave,
and you will become a king
Whatever befalls you, misfortune or fortune,
is unalloyed blessing;
the attendant evil
a fleeing shadow.
No more nonsense! Lose yourself,
and the hell of your heart becomes a heaven.
Lose yourself, and anything can be accomplished.
Your selfishness is an untrained colt
Apply yourself, hand and foot,
to the search;
but when you reach the sea,
stop talking of the stream.
And if, my friend, you ask me the way
I’ll tell you plainly, it is this:
to turn your face towards the world of life,
and turn your back on rank and reputation;
and, spurning outward prosperity, to bend
your back double in His service;
to part company with those who deal in words,
and take your place in the presence of the wordless
When the eye is pure
it sees purity.
Unself yourself…
– Hakim Sanai
It seems to me that, side by side with the decline of religious life, the neuroses grow noticeably more frequent. We are living undeniably in a period of the greatest restlessness, nervous tension, confusion, and disorientationof outlook.
– CG Jung
Complying reflexively with the will of others, without genuine reflectivity, leads to a loss of integrity in our dealings with them. If I am repeatedly nice and compliant, rather than authentic, then I have ceased to be a person with values.
– James Hollis
At a certain moment for the person who has lost everything, whether that is, moreover, a being or country, language becomes the country.
– Helene Cixous
It’s easy to trick yourself into thinking that if you put in half the effort, you can get 80% of the results.
But that’s not how most things work.
If you’re half trustworthy, you’re not trustworthy.
If you’re mostly consistent, you’re not consistent.
– Farnam Street
I set out over the / unknowable earth / once more. Everything / still underfoot.
– Jorie Graham
I have often told my students that if you walk around with your eyes and ears open, you can’t possibly live long enough to write all of the potential stories you will glimpse along the way.
– Jill McCorkle
The consistent person outperforms the intermittent person every time.
If you want to be consistent, you need strategies to keep you going when things get hard.
One of the best strategies to stay consistent is to tell yourself that you can quit tomorrow but not today.
– Farnam Street
Every now and then, I’ll meet an escapee, someone who has broken free of self-centeredness and lit out for the territory of compassion. You’ve met them, too, those people who seem to emit a steady stream of, for want of a better word, love-vibes. As soon as you come within range, you feel embraced, accepted for who you are. For those of us who suspect that you rarely get something for nothing, such geniality can be discomfiting. Yet it feels so good to be around them. They stand there, radiating photons of goodwill, and despite yourself you beam back, and the world, in a twinkling, changes.
– Marc Ian Barasch
And now I think the things that matter are unfinished paintings that everyone creates and no one owns. Rather we are created each time we touch the breath of being, and we are connected to everyone who ever lived each time we add a stroke. And sometimes we are briefly aware that we are living parts of the most elemental community of all, the community of life force that moves through everything.
– Mark Nepo
Bees Were Better
In college, people were always breaking up.
We broke up in parking lots,
beside fountains.
Two people broke up
across a table from me
at the library.
I could not sit at that table again
though I did not know them.
I studied bees, who were able
to convey messages through dancing
and could find their ways
home to their hives
even if someone put up a blockade of sheets
and boards and wire.
Bees had radar in their wings and brains
that humans could barely understand.
I wrote a paper proclaiming
their brilliance and superiority
and revised it at a small café
featuring wooden hive-shaped honey-dippers
in silver honeypots
at every table.
– Naomi Shihab Nye
The body resembles a sentence that seems to invite us to dismantle it into its component letters, so that its true meanings may be revealed anew through an endless stream of anagrams.
– Hans Bellmer
The ways to get insight are: to study infants; to study animals; to study primitive people; to be psychoanalyzed; to have a religious conversion and get over it; to have a psychotic episode and get over it.
– Margaret Mead
Piety is not an end but a means to attain through the purest inner peace the highest degree of culture. This is why we can observe that those who parade piety as a purpose and an aim generally turn into hypocrites.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
We are declaring a climate emergency. Everyone can, in whatever place on Earth they call home. No one needs to wait for politicians any more – we have been waiting for them for decades. What history shows us is that when people lead, governments follow. Our power resides in what we are witnessing. We cannot deny that Great Salt Lake is vanishing before our eyes into a sun-cracked playa of salt and toxic chemicals. Nor can we deny that Lake Mead is reduced to a puddle. In New Mexico a wildfire that began in early April is still burning in late July. Last August, the eye of Hurricane Ida split in two – there was no calm – only 190mph winds ripping towns in the bayous of Louisiana to shreds; and 7m acres in the American west burned in 2021. The future the scientists warned us about is where we live now.
The climate emergency has been declared over and over by Nature and by human suffering and upheaval in response to its catastrophes. The 2,000 individuals who recently died of heat in Portugal and Spain are not here to bear witness, but many of the residents of Jacobabad in Pakistan, where Amnesty International declared the temperatures “unlivable for humans”, are. The heat-warped rails of the British train system, the buckled roads, cry out that this is unprecedented. The estimated billion sea creatures who died on the Pacific north-west’s coast from last summer’s heatwave announced a climate emergency. The heat-devastated populations of southern Asia, the current grain crop failures in China, India, across Europe and the American midwest, the starving in the Horn of Africa because of climate-caused drought, the bleached and dying coral reefs of Australia, the rivers of meltwater gushing from the Greenland ice sheet, the melting permafrost of Siberia and Alaska: all bear witness that this is a climate emergency. So do we. Yet the anxiety we feel, the grief that is ours, pales in comparison to the ferocity of our resolve.
We can choose to live differently and build wiser and more just ways to produce, consume and travel. Our hope lies in our collective actions. A climate emergency means that it’s time for business as usual to halt, for our priorities to shift and to recognize our responsibility to those on the frontlines of the climate crisis. This emergency, which did not begin suddenly and will not end in our lifetimes, nevertheless needs our urgent response. This means doing all we can to stabilize the health of the planet and speed the transition away from fossil fuels. Now. Between the scientists and engineers, philosophers and poets, Indigenous leaders, climate activists and engaged youth, we know what to do and how to do it. We have a multiplicity of tools, we have a kaleidoscopic vision where each of us can offer up the gifts that are ours, and most importantly, we have the spiritual will to change the course of our destiny on fire.
The future needs us. We need each other. At a time when the majority of Americans want to see serious climate action, too many politicians have failed us and undermined those who are trying. We ourselves must respond for those who will be born next week and next decade and next century, who need a planet alive and flourishing in all its exquisite diversity of land and creatures and humans. We have no right to rob them or the young people staring at a chaotic future now of their birthright. We do not represent them, but we can represent ourselves, as people in solidarity with all life. In that spirit, we join those around the world who have already declared a climate emergency, and we invite everyone to join us.
– Rebecca Solnit
Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.
– Hannah Arendt
Secret Life
by Li-Young Lee
Alone with time, he waits for his parents to wake,
a boy growing old at the dining room table,
pressing into the pages of one of his father’s big books
the flowers he picked all morning
in his mother’s garden, magnolia, hibiscus,
azalea, peony, pear, tulip, iris;
reading in another book their names he knows,
and then the names from their secret lives;
lives alchemical, nautical, genital;
names unpronounceable fascicles of italic script;
secrets botanical
description could never trace:
accessory to empire, party to delusions of an afterlife,
kin to the toothed, mouthed, furred,
horned, brained. Flowers
seem to a boy, who doesn’t know better, like the winged,
the walking, the swimming and crawling things abstracted
from time, and stilled by inward gazing.
Copying their pictures, replete with diagrams, he finds
in the words for their parts,
the accounts of their histories,
and their scattered pollen,
something to do with his own fate
and the perfection of all dying things.
And when it’s time, he discovers in the kitchen
the note left for him that says
his parents have gone and will return by noon.
And when it’s time, the dove
calls from its hiding place
and leaves the morning greener
and the one who hears the dove more alone.
The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega, it is God’s brooding over the face of the waters; it is the blinded note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence, and even to address the prayer to “World.” Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing.
– Annie Dillard
In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing was true… The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.
– Hannah Arendt
So go down the road. Be death, be stardust, enter the
duality known to the generations who are vanished,
who left behind this double image, but only half
the message, just the instructions for how to begin.
– Eleanor Lerman
It’s the craziest thing. You can’t be free by learning or growing getting, nor by winning or dominating. Only by giving yourself away.
– Kenneth Folk
The poet, like the onion, does not care who cries.
– Richard Siken
Most poets aren’t sages or prophets. Most of us are just average folks, working long hours to pay the rent, writing between shifts, groceries, laundry, bad weather, appointments, and sheer exhaustion, yet still trying to give back to the world with precise words.
– Sean Thomas Dougherty
Outer space is morally neutral, not a solution. This planet is still friendly so we can embrace some of its lovelier manifestations by letting time bypass our thoughts. But what is that thing that makes us wait for non-events?
– Etel Adnan
Be vast. Be yourself…at the front edge of now, opening into everything.
– Dr. Rick Hanson
The corruption begins with the mouth,
the tongue, the wanting.
The first poem in the world
is I want to eat.
– Erica Jong
The mind, its affirmations and negations,
All arising thoughts, are castles in the clouds.
On all this meditate with clarity.
At all times, day and night, reflect just as before
That all appearing things are castles in the clouds.
– Longchenpa
Morning comes; again the dropt sash, the icy water, the flesh-brush, the breakfast, the hot bricks, the ink, the pen, the from-eight-o’clock-to-half-past-four, and the whole general inclusive hell of the same departed day.
– Herman Melville
Always we want to learn from outside. It’s safer that way. The trouble is that it’s always other people’s knowledge. We already have all we need to know in the darkness inside ourselves. The longing is what turns us inside out until we find the sun, moon, and stars inside.
– Peter Kingsley
Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
– C.S. Lewis
When a library is open, no matter its size or shape, democracy is open, too.
– Bill Moyers
Poet: Does the darkness of our times make you seek poetry?
– G. E. Schwartz
Enlightenment
Chop that wood
Carry water
What’s the sound of one hand clapping
Enlightenment, don’t know what it is
Every second, every minute
It keeps changing to something different
Enlightenment, don’t know what it is
Enlightenment, don’t know what it is
It says it’s non attachment
Non attachment. non attachment
I’m in the here and now, and I’m meditating
And still I’m suffering but that’s my problem
Enlightenment, don’t know what it is
Wake up
Enlightenment says the world is nothing
Nothing but a dream, everything’s an illusion
And nothing is real
Good or bad baby
You can change it anyway you want
You can rearrange it
Enlightenment, don’t know what it is
Chop that wood
And carry water
What’s the sound of one hand clapping
Enlightenment, don’t know what it is
All around baby. you can see
You’re making your own reality. everyday because
Enlightenment, don’t know what it is
One more time
Enlightenment. don’t know what it is
It’s up to you
Enlightenment. don’t know what it is
It’s up to you everyday
Enlightenment, don’t know what it is
It’s always up to you
Enlightenment, don’t know what it is
It’s up to you, the way you think
– Van Morrison
UNITY
Today we lose the words
yours and mine and find
in their absence a song
that can only be sung together.
How did we ever think
we could attempt
this humanness alone?
To the table of love,
we bring soup, bring cherries,
bring the bread of our own
sweet communion.
We bring scissors to cut away
the tresses of the past,
bring dark wine to toast
the courage of showing up exposed.
And when we forget
the words to the song,
well, there is always laughter.
And when we forget to laugh,
well, there is always
the union of tears—
the way many rivers
become one river,
the way many voices
become one music.
– Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
There is never any end. There are always new sounds to imagine; new feelings to get at. And always, there is the need to keep purifying these feelings and sounds so that we can really see what we’ve discovered in its pure state. So that we can see more and more clearly what we are. In that way, we can give to those who listen the essence, the best of what we are. But to do that at each stage, we have to keep on cleaning the mirror.”
– John Coltrane
… The waters of the fountains of inspiration dispensed to artists by the Muses, the liquor in the little pails of the guides and guardians of the mysteries, the drink of the gods, and the distillate of love are the same, in various strengths, to wit, ambrosia (Sanskrit, ‘amrta,’ ‘immortality’), the potion of deathless life experienced here and now. It is milk, it is wine, it is tea, it is coffee, it is anything you like, when drunk with a certain insight–life itself, when experienced from a certain depth and height.”
– Joseph Campbell
A person cannot direct his emotional life in the way he bids his motor system to reach for a cup. He cannot will himself to want the right thing, or to love the right person, or to be happy after a disappointment, or even to be happy in happy times. People lack this capacity not through a deficiency of discipline but because the jurisdiction of will is limited to the latest brain and to those functions within its purview. Emotional life can be influenced, but it cannot be commanded. Our society’s love affair with mechanical devices that respond at a button-touch ill prepares us to deal with the unruly organic mind that dwells within. Anything that does not comply must be broken or poorly designed, people now suppose, including their hearts.
– Thomas Lewis
We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion.
– Cyril Connolly
The soul feeds on what takes us to the edge, but we don’t go there willingly.
– Belden C. Lane
I am talking to you about matters I was never able to explain before – to anyone. If you gain something from it, you too will be set apart from others. Knowledge can make you feel alone, cause a loneliness.
The opposite is also true, however: knowledge of the archetypal forces is necessary to understand the deeper meaning of community and companionship. True community comes through shared knowledge and insight. There is little point in finding community through shared banalities. Some special exclusive insight that can be shared with a few others is what binds people together. For primitive people, therefore, community is always linked with secrecy. Community is a kind of mystery cult.
– C.G. Jung
A work of art is a form that articulates forces, making them intelligible.
– Guy Davenport
Even the Christ-figure is not a totality, for it lacks the nocturnal side of the psyche’s nature, the darkness of the spirit, and is also without sin. Without the integration of evil there is no totality, nor can evil be “added to the mixture by force.”
– CG Jung
Absolute freedom is useless. In art, as in everything, one builds only upon a resisting foundation; whatever constantly gives way to pressure renders the friction of creation impossible. The more constraints I impose, the more I free myself.
– Stravinsky, The Poetics of Music
The Mind’s Nature, Clear Light, is changeless like space. The adventitious stains of desire and so on that arise from wrong conceptions never trouble it.
– Uttaratantra
Almost all of our stress in life comes down to thinking we need to amass enough external approval that it will finally topple our dogged self-rejection. As children we do require an imprint of ourselves from the external and are wired to create a self image largely based on the approval or lack thereof from others. Our compulsion to get this approval as adults has to do with reacting to an imprint still with us from childhood we chronically deem unsatisfactory. What is required to move beyond the driving grip of this pattern into more ease is to hold the little one who wasn’t adequately witnessed as she releases her old pain and in so doing equips and liberates herself with the authority to be her own qualifier. When we don’t have to do the circuitous song and dance to please the unpleasable wounded perfectionist within, we relax much more deeply into ease, simplicity, curiosity and grace.
To be balanced with this perspective, I don’t think we’re ever “recovered” from wanting favorable opinions and feedback about ourselves from others. It’s natural to want this in balance. And healthy, accepting, encouraging reflections from others is perhaps the most helpful thing we can receive our whole lives long. But through resolving some of the deep roots of distorted or absent witnessing from our childhoods, things fall into balance, we can stay steady and more grounded in our choices and self-assessment rather than being driven by the pounding need for positive reassurance from the outside.
– Chelan Harkin
After midlife, we meet the gift of life in all its ambivalent heat. This is a time, says [Bud] Harris, when we find ourselves emotionally crucified more often, even as life is becoming less painful in the old neurotic ways. Paradoxes abound in this new clarity.
– Gail Goodwin
A time will come. (…) By slow degrees the word will fade from our memory. Then it will disappear altogether.
– Hiroshima Mon Amour, Marguerite Duras; tr. Richard Seaver
Artists tend to be pretty lopsided people. I don’t think there’s anything balanced about us. We have passions and obsessions and predilections. We overreact to the world. …I don’t think people who are truly balanced need recourse to artistic expression.
– Mary Ruefle
Stars, hide your fires;
Let not light see my black and deep desires:
The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be,
Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.
– William Shakespeare, Macbeth
The poetry door
opens at odd hours. The bell
doesn’t always work,
nor does the light. Dark
corridors may lead nowhere,
the stairs are unsafe
as is the attic,
if you ever get there . Worse
still, it tries to be
haunted. And succeeds.
– George Szirtes
Depth psychology became necessary because of the loss of tribal mythology. From this loss, man descended into despair, depression and addiction.
– James Hollis
The city itself around us had changed, because every love is another reality.
– Cărtărescu, Solenoid (tr. Sean Cotter)
that old desire to rebel against an imaginary plot woven against me by my parents.
– Marcel Proust
In Jung’s view, the unconscious itself wishes to be understood and wishes to help both individuals and culture heal and grow. In other words, it wishes to be manifested and lived.
– Bud Harris
Albert Einstein determined that time is relative—that the rate at which time passes depends on your frame of reference. I believe that this is how we operate as human beings. Fluid consciousnesses. The linear progression of past, present, and future. When I start a poem, it’s usually prompted by a thought that seems to come out of nowhere but is actually part of a continuum. That’s the impulse I use.
Through the process of creation, I allow my subconscious to write the poem. I’ve learned that subconsciousness is more powerful than the conscious dictation or active determination of a thought. In other words, I don’t think when I write. I start with an impulse and trust the culmination of my life experiences to inform my writing. I get out of the way of stopping to think too much, or what I call “lifting the pen,” and I simply let go and write nonstop for twenty to thirty minutes.
The culmination of my life experiences will automatically inform the conscious undertaking.
– Mitchell Untch
Grief never leaves you. It’s always with you. In that sense, the tense of grief can be present and past combined.
– Mitchell Untch
Amor Fati
You should arm yourself,
not like a Caesar with a raised sword
against the world, but with the words:
Amor Fati—love your fate.
You shall make this axiom
your strongest liberator;
You have chosen your path in the thicket.
Don’t look sideways at other paths!
The pain, too, is your servant.
Paralyzed, crushed and rejected
you see that it reunites you
with what is required.
The fall and the betrayal, too,
will help you like friends.
Your defeats are rich
gifts placed in your hands.
Once, contented
by being worthy of your destiny
you shall know: This was my will.
All that happens to me happens justly.
Then say, when the green woods
of your joy for life has been wondered through:
I want nothing different.
I want nothing changed.
– André Bjerke,
translated by Hossein Kashani
Stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires.
– William Shakespeare, Macbeth
I can’t afford to hate anyone. I don’t have that kind of time.
– Akira Kurosawa
Gravity
by Bradley Trumpfheller
Those are the five identical roofs
of the houses the solstice slides between,
the wind swinging from blush
to blush, straightening elms. Like paved
velvet, the earth-line surfs the tops of fences
then down into its mauve hold on the hedges,
the dusty basketball, the mulch. Where you notice
two deer stuffing the cold into their shirts—
not to make it warm, to bring some back
for their children.
We are running, then,
children now, through acres and stooped
over fallen pecans we will carry
in our shirts back to our house
between darknesses, letting them fold out
over piles of bills and the plastic placemat
printed with a map
of the world. The deer get night
on their hoofs coming
down the highway, the black bears down
from their trees. It is a familiar clicking
their shoes make, pressing into the world
like air. Some of the green stays
on the weeds they walk between, a van
with cinderblocks for tires flashes
toothwhite once. Signal. Black bears.
Detail is tethers from a thing down
toward earth, the downward
tendency of change, of having
been changed. Where did the deer go?
You look up out of the poem,
and the weather is lifting the roofs off the houses
and setting them down and lifting them.
The Palace of Secrets
In far mountains we built a temple for experimental behaviour.
We dwelled within rooms stretching from dawn to dusk.
You and I entrenched ourselves in our real selves;
A war began, each fighting to expose the other’s true nature.
In rooms of distant empathy, we lay in wait, trembling.
Forays were made into forbidden territories, cloaked in stealth and cover of darkness.
In no man’s land we watched each other, preening.
Patterns of time were eroded by freshwater currents gushing down stairwells.
Mysterious music calmed our fears with unheard sounds.
We painted the truth in vast murals.
Our dreams terrified us into new wisdom.
Awake, we held one another alone in tears.
Challenged paradigms, uncovered vaults of creative genius.
We jousted with celery, eating only the purest of foods.
Cause and effect were monitored between us –
Knowing looks and gunfire glances exchanged emotions across corridors.
We laid siege on the past, as the future poured joyously through our veins into the present.
We held our breath for what would happen next.
– Malcolm Smith
The opening up of the unconscious always means the outbreak of intense spiritual suffering: it is as when fertile fields are exposed by the bursting of a dam to a raging torrent.
– CG Jung, Aion
See that?
Some time just went past
but so quietly
you might have missed it.
Then it morphed
into the sky.
Look, another one!
It came out
of my wristwatch
and slipped away.
– Ron Padgett, Wristwatch
THE BROOK
Murmuring of the brook in late
summer darkness, after moonset,
as I lay sleepless on the porch cot.
A music extraordinarily variable.
Each passage of water against its stone
sounding a different pitch and rhythm.
It was an uncivilized music in the
foothills of the mountains, continuing
long beyond the endurance of a human
singer, almost beyond the endurance
of a human listener, syllables
of unknown meaning, notes on an
unknown scale. A few fat yellow
stars above the northern horizon.
Without art, the song was perfectly
artistic. The unmeaning music
and the unknowing listener were one
in the loneliness of those distant
late summer nights in Vermont.
Truly the music meant nothing,
no intimation, which was why
I liked it so much, my brook
murmuring all night in the darkness,
and I meant nothing, and I liked that too.
– Hayden Carruth
He was a master of the melancholy landscape. Landscapes are always melancholy where people are living melancholy lives.
– Konstantin Paustovsky
I hope the roof flies off and I get sucked into space.
– Bill Murray, Moonrise Kingdom
Sometimes she struck out into the future, imagining her life different from what it was. But mostly she lived between her hat and her heels, with her emotional disturbances like shade patterns in the woods—come and gone with the sun.
– Zora Neale Hurston
If we meet each other in Hell, it’s not Hell.
– Geoffrey Hill
They joined hands.
So the world ended.
And the next one began.
– Sarah J. Maas
You cannot take it all. Offer. Sacrifice does not kill, but preserve, make it holy. Until wings turn into a cross. However noble, if we do things on our own, we are the enemies of grace. Odysseus was noble. Nevertheless Dante put him in hell, precisely for that reason. Hell is based on justice. Heaven is grace. Nobody deserves it.
– Ewa Chrusciel
The theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, in his most recent book, Helgoland, has posited a theory that erases the distinction between the human mind and the natural world. The fact that observing the action of quantum particles influences the way they behave is well established. Rovelli says that quantum theory has hitherto been limited in thinking of this dynamic only in relation to us, when in fact quantum theory describes how every physical object manifests itself to any other physical object. How any physical entity acts on any other physical entity.” This leads to a radical conclusion, his “relational theory,” which, if correct, upends the history of physics (and other fields as well):
The discovery of quantum theory, I believe, is the discovery that the properties of any entity are nothing other than the way in which that entity influences others. It exists only through its interactions. Quantum theory is the theory of how things influence each other. And this is the best description of nature that we have.
Existence is relation. Full stop. If you cannot tell anything about how an object is relating to what is around it, then poof, there is no object. This is incontrovertible at the micro level. That it seems not to obtain at the macro level has led to many theories, some quite imaginatively provocative (many worlds, etc.) but all, according to Rovelli, requiring that we posit realities we can never observe—a leap of faith, if you will. For Rovelli, the micro and the macro mean one thing, which is nothing. Billions and billions of quantum phenomena are happening around us (and in us!) at every instant. Our life, our need to make meaning from it, is all a kind of blindness. “The solidity of the classical vision of the world is nothing other than our own myopia. The certainties of classical physics are just probabilities. The well-defined and solid picture of the world given by the old physics is an illusion . . . Centuries of Western speculation on the subject, and on the nature of consciousness, vanish like morning mist.
A despairing vision? Not for Rovelli. “There is a sense of the vertiginous—of freedom, happiness, lightness—in the vision of the world that we are offered by the discovery of quanta…. Watching what appeared to be as solid as rock melt into air makes lighter, it seems to me, the transitory and bittersweet flowing of our lives.” Gone is the scientific and philosophical materialism and determinism that have choked the soul for the last century. If everything is its relation to other things, the future can hardly be fixed, no matter how refined one’s understanding of the laws of matter are. (The hawk really is “random.”) For Rovelli this represents the end of metaphysics, which has been gumming up the works between the mind (“brain,” I guess he would say) and reality for so many centuries. He would be surprised and perhaps appalled, then, to learn that a religious person might feel as light and liberated by his vision as he does. Yet I do. Not only does it align with many of the modern artists and thinkers I most admire (Kandinsky: “The world sounds. It is a cosmos of spiritually affective beings. Thus dead matter is living spirit”), it seems to me perfectly trinitarian in its implications. Rovelli’s “veil upon veil” that opens endlessly forever—this is God. (“If you think that you have understood God,” wrote Augustine, “then it is not God.”) The world that we still live very much in the midst of, the illusory rocks that slice us open and the faces made of infinitesimal and untouchable grains that we touch and love with everything we are—this is Jesus on the earth. He too was made of these grains; he too left not a wrack behind. And the elation that both Rovelli and I feel when we are so moved by this emptiness that is a fullness, this lack that feels so like love—this is the Holy Spirit working in ever new ways through the mix of time and timelessness that is our birthright. And none of this “exists” unless and until you turn your full attention to it.
– Christian Wiman
Incarnation? Resurrection? Why these leaps? Why not let the world be world, for Christ’s sake, luck be luck? Because “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower drives my green age” (Dylan Thomas). Because “there are things we live among, and to know them / is to know ourselves” (George Oppen). Because the connection between us and the world is both absolute and absolutely contingent. We know in our bones that this is so, and sacred, and we know in our bones that we can never know that this is so, and that lack is also sacred. My Christ is both the means and the meaning of matter.
And the latter (not greater) miracle, resurrection? Why make that leap? It is life that brings one to believe in the incarnation, though “believe” is a neutered word for the mutual indwelling I have just described. It is life that teaches us of love, and “it is love,” as Wittgenstein said in his last book, “that believes in the resurrection.” That love is not possessed, not controlled, never fully understood—this is one lesson any truly attentive life teaches (love believes in the resurrection; one’s will is not relevant); that love is more than human is another, whether it’s some carnal connection leading one to “the love that moves the stars” (Dante) or some rapturous merging with eternity that leaves one, like Julian of Norwich, holding all creation compacted into a hazelnut.
– Christian Wiman
It is hard for most of us to believe that both angels and demons mingle with humans on Earth. Yet tradition teaches that they are rarely seen in their essential form; they go about their business in plausibly devised appearances, looking like regular people in order to pass unnoticed.
They are instructed, in fact ordered, to affect the lives of men and women, either to raise them to higher consciousness or at least higher ethics, or to seduce them downward to the animal sphere.
Their common purpose is to allow us to exercise our free will, to choose. This free will is the unique power granted to men and women and which we must exercise or eventually lose. If either angelic or demonic influence was always stronger than our free will, people would be compelled to be good or to be bad. Real choice would not exist and free will would simply be a comforting fantasy.
But in the actual struggle of forces, a man or woman can choose to follow the light with difficulty and at some cost, or not. The great Cosmic Design requires us to force our souls through this eternal struggle.”
– Lillian Firestone
To really deepen a question puts you in touch with another part of yourself that your “answers” usually cover over; this is the freedom from the known, that Krishnamurti and others speak about. The great answer is also experienced as a question when a master delivers it to you. The known can be a slave driver.
The other main thing about Socrates is that he was concerned that a man, a woman, a human being needs to know himself—above all needs to take care of what he called the soul, take care of the true self. The first aim anyone should have was what he called “tending the soul.” Unless that’s your main aim, everything else will lead you astray. Those two things are part of where I think this theme, “The Unknown,” is leading. Take care of your true self, your true consciousness and divest yourself from the things you think you know, not only about the world, but about yourself. These two belong together.We dwell in the midst of mystery. Even if our rational mind denies this, we feel it and sense it.
– Jacob Needleman
It’s only now, looking back, that I understood, but at the time I lived in a brilliantly lit haze, shifting and flickering according to my changing desires. Of course, that is only a description of being young.’
– Doris Lessing
In the cathedral
in the ruins of boundless expanse
I stayed one night criticizing God
– Takashi Suga
Real life, life at last laid bare, is art.
– Proust
If we can stay with the tension of opposites long enough —sustain it, be true to it—we can sometimes become vessels within which the divine opposites come together and give birth to a new reality.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
The first thing you have to know about writing is that it is something you must do everyday. There are two reasons for this rule: Getting the work done and connecting with your unconscious mind.
– Walter Mosley
I believe I am not exaggerating when I say that modern man has suffered an almost fatal shock, psychologically speaking, and as a result has fallen into profound uncertainty.
– CG Jung
I have had to experience so much stupidity, so many vices, so much error, so much nausea, disillusionment and sorrow, just in order to become a child again and begin anew. I had to experience despair, I had to sink to the greatest mental depths, .. in order to experience grace.
– Hermann Hesse
When we study several creation myths, it is sometimes revealed very clearly to us that they represent unconscious and preconscious processes which describe not the origin of our cosmos, but the origin of man’s conscious awareness of the world.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
and the dark became desire, and desire the arriving light.
– Mark Strand
i hate to see a parcel of big words without anything in them. any one may mouth out a passage with a theatrical cadence, or get upon stilts to tell his thoughts; but to write or speak with propriety and simplicity is a more difficult task.
– William Hazlitt
For a civilization, you can study either their sacred books or sacred teachings, which give you their conscious tradition. But what is their folklore? Then you get the unconscious compensation for the collective tradition.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
As I said at a recent author event, “folks walk into bookstores and say “damn, these books are expensive” but they’ll go into Starbucks and buy a cup for $5 that last them 10 minutes. For the cost of 4 or 5 coffees, you can buy a book that last forever!
– Pat Thomas
Renewing the sacred and renewing the mundane are the same endeavor.
– @the_wilderless
When you realize what you carry, you will handle yourself with more care.
That includes denying access to those who handle you carelessly.
– Dr. Thema
Cliche protects us from facing the catastrophe, the unbearable, the ineffable; thus far the major inexplicable areas of human existence–birth, death, and love–we have the maximum number of cliches.
– Svetlana Boym
the mountains
in their silence
nurture the spirit
– Basho
So long as we are not in contact with our own potential, we are vulnerable to being controlled by others. If we do not know ourselves, we cannot stand to our own truth and are, therefore, in constant danger of invasion by others.
– Marion Woodman
strange to think of all these little things that cluster round the comings, and the stayings, and the goings, that he would know nothing of them, nothing of what they had been, as long as he lived…
– Samuel Beckett
the poet’s eye (…) doth glance from heav’n to earth, from earth to heav’n; and as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. such tricks hath strong imagination.
– William Shakespeare
I love reading poems by old friends. You can hear their voice—it’s almost like getting a letter.
– Elisa Gabbert
The things you are passionate about are not random, they are your calling.
– Fabienne Fredrickson
The climate crisis is actually the you-and-billions-of-other-families-won’t-have-enough-food-to-survive crisis.
– @ClimateDad77
If Buddha were something newly produced by following the path, it would be a conditioned phenomenon, the product of self-effort; it would not arise simply through complete relaxation of conceptual contrivance.
– Lama Shenpen Hookham
The repressed returns in moments of sudden impulse, uncontrolled outbursts, troubling dreams, and most of all, in the erosion of meaning from our lives.
– James Hollis
What kept me sane was knowing that things would change, and it was a question of keeping myself together until they did.
– Nina Simone
If the spirit is not being fed properly, with wisdom that has been cultivated with sensitivity and intelligence, it will devour fast food and eat junk. That is what fundamentalism is, in one respect: the junk food of the spirit.
– David Tacey
What if you thought of it
as the Jews consider the Sabbath –
the most sacred of times?
Cease from travel.
Cease from buying and selling.
Give up, just for now,
on trying to make the world
different than it is.
Sing. Pray. Touch only those
to whom you commit your life.
Center down.
And when your body has become still,
reach out with your heart.
Know that we are connected
in ways that are terrifying and beautiful.
(You could hardly deny it now.)
Know that our lives
are in one another’s hands.
(Surely, that has come clear.)
Do not reach out your hands.
Reach out your heart.
Reach out your words.
Reach out all the tendrils
of compassion that move, invisibly,
where we cannot touch.
Promise this world your love –
for better or for worse,
in sickness and in health,
so long as we all shall live.
– Lynn Ungar
Listen! by Jack Riemer and Harold Kushner
Judaism begins with the commandment:
Hear, O Israel!
But what does it really mean to “hear?”
The person who attends a concert
With a mind on business,
Hears — but does not really hear.
The person who walks amid the songs of birds
And thinks only of what will be served for dinner,
Hears — but does not really hear.
The one who listens to the words of a friend
Or a spouse or child,
And does not catch the note of urgency:
‘Notice me, help me, care about me,”
Hears — but does not really hear.
The person who listens to the news
And thinks only of how it will affect business,
Hears — but does not really hear,
The person who stifles the sound of conscience
And thinks “I have done enough already”
Hears — but does not really hear.
The person who hears the Hazzan pray
And does not feel the call to join in prayer,
Hears — but does not really hear.
The person who listens to the rabbi’s sermon
And thinks that someone else is being addressed,
Hears — but does not really hear.
On this Shabbat, O Lord,
Sharpen our ability to hear.
May we hear the music of the world,
And the infant’s cry, and the lover’s sigh.
May we hear the call for help of the lonely soul,
And the sound of the breaking heart.
May we hear the words of our friends,
And also their unspoken pleas and dreams.
May we hear within ourselves the yearnings
That are struggling for expression.
May we hear You, O G-d.
For only if we hear You
Do we have the right to hope
That you will hear us.
Hear the prayers we offer to you this day, O G-d.
And may we hear them too.
They all kept my poetry. They all gave me back my soul.
– Marina Tsvetaeva
I’m a better thinker because I teach. I realize that my ideas are stronger when they are in service of other knowledges and other people.
– Ocean Vuong
I don’t know—it’s a bit of a mystery of how things come about when they do. I don’t have a scientific explanation for it. Sometimes when you’re writing a song, you don’t know where you’re going.
– Robbie Robertson
One of the most overlooked opportunities in life is how you are positioned when circumstances hit.
Good positions create options; bad positions reduce them. You don’t have to be an expert decision-maker to get better results. You only need to put yourself in a good position.
– Farnam Street
There is a twilight zone in our own hearts that we ourselves cannot see. Even when we know quite a lot about ourselves – our gifts and weaknesses, our ambitions and aspirations, our motives and drives – large parts of ourselves remain in the shadow of consciousness.
This is a very good thing. We always will remain partially hidden to ourselves. Other people, especially those who love us, can often see our twilight zones better than we ourselves can. The way we are seen and understood by others is different from the way we see and understand ourselves. We will never fully know the significance of our presence in the lives of our friends. That’s a grace, a grace that calls us not only to humility but also to a deep trust in those who love us. It is in the twilight zones of our hearts where true friendships are born.
– Henri Nouwen
Progress is a dynamic thing, and you had to ride it leaning forward a little, like a surfboard because if you stood there flat-footed you’d get drowned.
– Theodore Sturgeon
I feel as I were disintegrating or ‘growing up,’ whatever that means, simultaneously, and that there is a race or bloody grappling between the two in my head and solar plexus. I would like to learn to be relieved of such pain and poison as is not necessary, and how to stand that which is inevitable.
– James Agee
In this time of radical change and collapsing institutions, the most dangerous place for us to try to hide is in our comfort zones. Salvation will be found only in a profound transformation of values that allows us to let go of what is dead and dying and learn to ride today’s terrifying storms into an a new age beyond anything we can currently predict. In other words, we need to bet it all on the furious river we call life.
– Jim Rigby
People who can pass through walls and reach the world on the other side and then return are important beings.
– Haruki Murakami
Behind the ordinary the eternal abyss yawns.
– @RedBookJung
Gradually unsubtling the entire enterprise of literature until it’s revealed to be nothing but two simple declarative statements.
I want attention.
I am afraid to die.
– Austin Adams
Most men will not swim before they are able to.’ Is not that witty ? Naturally, they won’t swim ! They are born for the solid earth, not for the water. And naturally they won’t think. They are made for life, not for thought.
– Hermann Hesse
Often I tried the frightening way of “reality.”
Where things that count are profession, law, fashion, finance.
But disillusioned and freed, I flee away, alone.
To the other side, the place of dreams and blessed folly.
– Hermann Hesse
I choose words, more words, to cure the tameness, not the wildness.
– Alice Notley
i have nothing to do with those who hearts are dry and who eyes are dry!
– goethe
tr. r.j. hollingdale
We have to throw off the dead weight of dogma and reach into the soul, even if much of what we discover in the soul is similar to the wisdom already enshrined in dogma.
– David Tacey
The critic is obviously implicated in the work he contemplates, in the translation of the work that he gives, the secret he seeks, the meanings he avoids are all signs…
– Blanchot
Tenure of the rooms in which we live as precarious as the lives they shelter, tenants we remain briefly in both.
– John David Morley
Everything one most loves in one’s own country seems only to be the survival of an age one has not oneself seen.
These glimpses seemed to be located disproportionately among grand recusant families and big houses.
– Evelyn Waugh
The brook-water seems to stop, lazily, to reflect the bank’s beauties as its mirror: Error: water never the same, running, ever renewed.
– Rémy de Gourmont
from Dust for Sparrows
(tr. Ezra Pound)
In Jung’s thinking, the psyche cannot be reduced to a mere expression of the body, the result of brain chemistry or some such physical process. For the psyche also partakes of mind or spirit, and as such it can and occasionally does transcend its physical location.
– Murray Stein
My automatic response to overwhelming situations is to try to organize everyone into small functioning groups.
– Anne Lamott
Gestalt at Sixty
by May Sarton
For ten years I have been rooted in these hills,
The changing light on landlocked lakes,
For ten years have called a mountain, friend,
Have been nourished by plants, still waters,
Trees in their seasons,
Have fought in this quiet place
For my self.
I can tell you that first winter
I heard the trees groan.
I heard the fierce lament
As if they were on the rack under the wind.
I too have groaned here,
Wept the wild winter tears.
I can tell you that solitude
Is not all exaltation, inner peace
Where the soul breathes and work can be done.
Solitude exposes the nerve,
Raises the ghosts.
The past, never at rest, flows through it.
Who wakes in a house alone
Wakes to moments of panic.
(Will the roof fall in?
Shall I died today?)
Who wakes in a house alone
Wakes to inertia sometimes,
To fits of weeping for no reason.
Solitude swells the inner space
Like a balloon.
We are wafted hither and thither
On the air currents.
How to land it?
I worked out anguish in a garden.
Without the flowers,
The shadow of trees on snow, their punctuation,
I might not have survived.
I came here to create a world
As strong, renewable, fertile. As the world of nature all around me—
Learned to clear myself as I have cleared the pasture,
Learned to wait,
Learned that change is always in the making
(Inner and outer) if one can be patient,
Learned to trust myself.
The house is receptacle of a hundred currents
Letters pour in,
Rumor of the human ocean, never at rest,
Never still….
Sometimes it deafens and numbs me.
I did not come here for society
In these years
When every meeting is collision,
The impact huge,
The reverberations slow to die down.
Yet what I have done here
I have not done alone,
Inhabited by a rich past of lives,
Inhabited also by the great dead,
By music, poetry—
Yeats, Valery stalk through this house.
No day passes without a visitation—
Rilke, Mozart.
I am always a lover here,
Seized and shaken by love.
Lovers and friends
I come to you starved
For all you have to give,
Nourished by the food of solitude,
A good instrument for all you have to tell me,
For all I have to tell you.
We talk of first and last things,
Listen to music together,
Climb the long hill to the cemetery
In autumn,
Take another road in spring
Toward newborn lambs,
No one comes to this house
Who is not changed.
I meet no one here who does not change me.
How rich and long the hours become,
How brief the years,
In this house of gathering,
This life about to enter its seventh decade.
I live like a baby
Who bursts into laughter
As a sunbeam on the wall,
Or like a very old woman
Entranced by the prick of starts
Through the leaves.
And now, as the fruit gathers
All the riches of summer
Into its compact world,
I feel richer than ever before,
And breathe a larger air,
I am not ready to die,
But I am learning to trust death
As 1 have trusted life.
I am moving
Toward a new freedom
Born of detachment,
And a sweeter grace—
Learning to let go.
I am not ready to die,
But as I approach sixty
I turn my face toward the sea.
I shall go where tides replace time,
Where my world will open to a far horizon.
Over the floating, never-still flux and change.
I shall go with the changes,
I shall look far out over golden grasses
And blue waters….
There are no farewells.
Praise God for His mercies,
For His austere demands,
For His light
And for His darkness.
Somehow, some way, we have to guide these people back to reality!
– Gahan Wilson
Deep down, I don’t believe it takes any special talent for a person to lift himself off the ground and hover in the air. We all have it in us – every man, woman, and child – and with enough hard work and concentration, every human being is capable of the feat. You must learn to stop being yourself. That’s where it begins, and everything else follows from that. You must let yourself evaporate. Let your muscles go limp, breathe until you feel your soul pouring out of you, and then shut your eyes. That’s how it’s done. The emptiness inside your body grows lighter than the air around you. Little by little, you begin to weigh less than nothing. You shut your eyes; you spread your arms; you let yourself evaporate. And then, little by little, you lift yourself off the ground.
Like so.
– Paul Auster
My uncle says the architects got rid of the front porches because they didn’t look well. But my uncle says that was merely rationalizing it; the real reason, hidden underneath, might be they didn’t want people sitting like that, doing nothing, rocking, talking; that was the wrong kind of social life. People talked too much. And they had time to think. So they ran off with the porches. And the gardens, too. Not many gardens any more to sit around in. And look at the furniture. No rocking chairs any more. They’re too comfortable. Get people up and running around.
– Ray Bradbury
Those who believe they believe in God, but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself.
– Madeleine L’Engle
People too healthy, too determined to jog, too muscular, may use their health to prevent the soul from entering. They leave no door. Through the perfection of victory they achieve health, but the soul enters through the hole of defeat.
– Robert Bly
We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
– Toni Morrison
A pedal point as you may know is a bass note prolonged, not only on the organ, but in all music. Grief is such an undertone; you don’t hear it all the time, but it’s there, a tone reminding us of loss.
– Alan Bowers
You walk towards the edge of knowledge, and then you walk down the vertical plateau of curiosity.
– Ahmed Salman
Thus, from the fifth century B.C., the definitive problem is laid out: the world or language, nonsense or eternal light. This is the sharp division that Aristotle, anxious to remain within the familiarity of earthly things, rejects. The Aristotelian theory of proof, whereby words are correct only by convention, but by a convention that rests on an accurate intuition of essences, is an ambiguous compromise. This is the choice Pascal brings back in all its cruelty. Uncertain of language, trembling before the enormity of falsehood, incapable of making paradox reasonable, Pascal merely convinces himself that it exists. But he denounces this paradox better than anyone else: “Two errors,” he writes. “1. To take everything literally, 2. to take everything spiritually.” Thus Pascal suggests not a solution but a submission: submission to traditional language because it comes to us from God, humility in the face of words in order to find their true inspiration. We have to choose between miracles and absurdity: there is no middle way.
– Albert Camus
Sit still and lengthen your lines, Shorten your poems and listen to what the darkness says
– Charles Wright, Sprung Narratives
The challenge of the twenty-first century is not to demand equal opportunity to participate in the machinery of oppression . Rather, it is to identify and dismantle those structures in which racism continues to be embedded.
– Angela Y. Davis
…the voice of the summer sky murmured its fierce soul.
– Virginia Woolf
The principal goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered.
– Jean Piaget
Now we have to get back the cosmos, and it can’t be done by a trick. The great range of responses that have fallen dead in us have to come to life again. It has taken two thousand years to kill them. Who knows how long it will take to bring them to life.
When I hear modern people complain of being lonely then I know what has happened. They have lost the cosmos. — It is nothing human and personal that we are short of. What we lack is cosmic life, the sun in us and the moon in us.
– D.H. Lawrence
A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born.
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Generally, ordinary thinking involves running between that and this. You are reporting back to yourself all the time. You do not just think; you think and then report back. However, when this back and forth petty journey is not happening, there is still a transcendental sort of thinking, so to speak. With this kind of thinking, you are seeing things precisely as they are, rather than having to refer back to anyone, because the whole being is seeing. The whole area is a giant eye; it is one single giant eye.
– Milarepa
. . for us there still exists a serene, unfathomable abyss in which God and the spirits dwell. The soul, in moments of ecstasy, often soars across it; poetry unveils it at times with childlike naivety; but science with its hammer and yardstick is often perched at the rim and may, in many cases, contribute nothing at all.
– Adalbert Stifter
a sage is someone who lives without conclusions, who remains open to all possibilities.
– Guthema Roba
This poem, at its core, is a poem of refusal.
– Snigdha Koirala
The Jungian approach to treatment is, again, very different from conventional psychiatry. The psychiatrist is concerned to reduce suffering through the provision of medicine and support, whereas the Jungian encourages the patient to participate in his suffering so as to confront its meaning and mobilize the healing powers of the unconscious.
– Anthony Stevens, Jung
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
Most of us are dragged
toward wholeness.
We do not understand
the breakdown of what has gone before.
We cling to the familiar,
refuse to make necessary sacrifices,
refuse to give up habitual lives,
resist our growth.
We do not understand rebirth.
– Marion Woodman
Don’t plant your bad days. They grow into weeks. The weeks grow into months. Before you know it, you got yourself a bad year. Take it from me – choke those little bad days. Choke ’em down to nothing.
– Tom Waits
Don’t work so hard, go for walks, do exercises, do whatever you like, but don’t do any work outside the office.
– Franz Kafka, 1914
What is the use of talking, and there is no end of
talking,
There is no end of things in the heart.
– Rihaku, Exile’s Letter, (tr. Ezra Pound)
… in the thought-shaped twigs the spider mends,
Fragile as filicale and spare as need —
A lace intelligence.
– Rosamund Stanhope
Few people are able to express opinions that dissent from the prejudices of their social group. The majority are even incapable of forming such opinions at all.
– Albert Einstein
a moon flower
blooming alone
above the tall grass
– Issa
Philosophizing is simply one way of being afraid, a cowardly pretense that doesn’t get you anywhere.
– Louis-Ferdinand Celine
To read great books does not mean one becomes ‘bookish’; it means that something of the terrible insight of Dostoyevsky, of the richly-charged imagination of Shakespeare, of the luminous wisdom of Goethe, actually passes into the personality of the reader …
– JC Powys
We may divide things up individually,
And classify them,
But the holiness of this supreme wisdom,
Which coalesces leaves and root
Is not to be worked toward.
There is no other way to be liberated
Than through this spontaneous perfection.
– Vajrasattva’s Magnificent Sky
You always own the option of having no opinion.
– Marcus Aurelius
Neither art nor wisdom may be attained without learning.
– Democritus
August sun
learning to be tolerant
of fresh freckles
– @hegelincanada
As we are, so we see.
– William Blake
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
Is it so hard to believe that artists, mystics, and visionary speculators might have better notions about life and the soul than conclusions drawn from data assembled on college campuses from experiments with a random sample of sophomores?
– James Hillman
Using someone else’s brainwork is theft. Being inspired by it is art.
– Richard Siken
weekend reminders for PhD students:
nothing about research is urgent.
you matter more than your work.
be your biggest advocate.
this will all be worth it.
be kind to yourself.
relax your jaw.
drink water.
rest.
– @LifeAfterMyPhD
Heart weeps.
Head tries to help heart.
– Lydia Davis
Endure, endure. There is as yet no solution
and no short cut, no escape and no remedy
but our human iron.
– Terence Tiller
I am simply trying to explain to you why one is always an English orphan — as a writer, as an artist — and one goes to Europe because, like a damn cuckoo, one has to lay these eggs in someone else’s nest.
– Lawrence Durrell
Though Shakespeare is the richest of writers, he is also paradoxically the most elliptical. You always have to follow what it is that he’s leaving out on purpose to make your mind work harder.
– Harold Bloom
A living tree is a changing, sleeve shape, a wet, thin, bright green creature that survives in the thin layer between heartwood and bark. It stands waiting for light, which it catches in the close-woven sieves of its leaves.
– Alice Oswald
Here, like the signature at the end of a score, the steady orchestral drizzle of cicadas. . . .
Such strange sibylline music and such an exceptional biography, so scant of living-time, with so long underground in the dark earth before rising into the light!
– Lawrence Durrell
A, a, a Domine Deus
I said, Ah! what shall I write?
I enquired up and down.
(He’s tricked me before
with his manifold lurking-places.)
I looked for His symbol at the door.
I have looked for a long while
at the textures and contours.
I have run a hand over the trivial intersections.
I have journeyed among the dead forms
causation projects from pillar to pylon.
I have tired the eyes of the mind
regarding the colors and lights.
I have felt for His Wounds
in nozzles and containers.
I have wondered for the automatic devices.
I have tested the inane patterns
without prejudice.
I have been on my guard
not to condemn the unfamiliar.
For it is easy to miss Him
at the turn of a civilization.
I have watched the wheels go round in case I might see the living creatures like the appearance of lamps, in case I might see the Living God projected from the Machine. I have said to the perfected steel, be my sister and for the glassy towers I thought I felt some beginnings of His creature, but A, a, a, Domine Deus, my hands found the glazed work unrefined and the terrible crystal a stage-paste … Eia, Domine Deus.
– David Jones
My soul gave me ancient things that pointed to the future. She gave me three things: the misery of war, the darkness of magic, and the gift of religion.
– @RedBookJung
Boredom is the dream bird that broods the egg of experience.
– Walter Benjamin
Ancient rishis called it Gyan-ganu, solidified Knowledge. Every particle contains all the information in the cosmos… Empty space is really not empty, but filled with bliss and knowledge. Knowing this, we simply relax and get connected.
– Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
My new response of decline is:
no thank you, im too feral for that.
– Cheyenne Dane
I’ve always thought that joy is like a laser beam reaching out to what is not yet joy and seeking to enfold whatever of separation we are courting back into belonging. It’s good to wonder where we are holdouts. It’s good to be retrieved into the laser light of joy.
– Gunilla Norris
I’m making myself. I’ll make myself until I reach the core.
– Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life
People who do not know what oppression and suffering is react strangely to the language of the Bible.
– Allan A. Boesak
…London…like a crescent lies,/Whose windows seem to mock the star-befreckled skies…
– Michael Drayton
We are programmed to rescue or be rescued.
It’s time for us to learn how to thrive.
– The Holistic Psychologist
May ontological humility arise!
– @VinceFHorn
Well it’s a doggone shame
And it’s an awful mess
I wish you love
I wish you happiness
– John Prine
You will never be friends with powerful people. If you try, you will be harvested. Find another way to build a life.
– @KennethFolk
Your ability to adapt is off the charts. Even if you’ve forgotten, or don’t know it yet.
We’re gonna be OK. We can be simple.
Bring the changes. It won’t be easy. But we can do it.
We might even like it better.
Radiating good will to all living beings.
– @KennethFolk
When you experience a moment of peace, as in “I don’t need this to be other than it is,” reflect on the good you are bringing to the world.
Everyone everything everywhere benefits from even a single moment of peace.
Thank you.
– @KennethFolk
Belfast Central
Belfast Central, waiting for a train.
It seems to me things have come full circle and I won’t
be here again.
Getting back to working on my own.
This could be my finest moment or I could come undone.
I used to be wary of loving and I thought it would just
tie me down.
I’d sleep in your house with my boots on, always ready
to run.
Thinking back to all I used to be.
You;ve been wilder all your life and you were surely
shocking me.
Dancing past me in a black lacy shirt.
My heart pinged like a lamb in spring and you laughed
at my innocence.
You knew I was wary of loving, how I thought it would
just tie me down.
How I’d sleep in your house with my boots on, always
ready to run.
Gin and tonic, endless cups of tea,
Counting Crows and dark welsh sunsets,
I’d gaze while you held the steering wheel.
Some thoughts I’d tell you, some you’d have to guess.
Your arms round us while we prayed in silence,
The sweetness of your breath.
Are you here at this point in my struggle when I am
clinging to all that I know.
And this is one time, one place, one meeting.
We are loving, we are letting go.
And I am no longer wary of loving and I know that it
won’t tie me down.
And I don’t have to sleep with my boots on though I am
always ready to run.
Belfast Central, waiting for a train.
It seems to me things have come full circle and I won’t
be here again.
– Juliet Turner
When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.
– Louise Erdrich
And though the world would sink to ruin, I will emulate you Hafiz, you alone! Let us, who are twin spirits, share pleasure and sorrow! To love like you, and drink like you, shall be my pride and my life-long occupation.
– Goethe
Being a mystic is when you begin to shift from being merely human to being a life-giving spirit.
– Bob Holmes
It takes us years to understand
the colours of perpetual return:
grey-green on the pier; the blue of shadows;
smoke over water …
– John Burnside
The real myth is that we can live without Utopia.
– Alexander Bard
You have to assemble your life yourself, action by action.
– Marcus Aurelius
August embers
the lake and I sleep between storms
fog on the closing lotuses
– @LotusTongue
The greatest Jewish sages recognized that it was better to see the Patriarchs as “theomorphic” men than to view Yahweh as an “anthropomorphic” god.
– Harold Bloom
It is with words as with sunbeams, the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.
– Robert Southey
Often we cling to habits that aren’t even comforting or satisfying, simply because we are unable to let go or explore new ways to do things.
– Lama Surya Das
. . . How do we know that bodhicitta is a positive cause leading to positive effects? What evidence is there that this is how karma operates? The Buddha gave us clear reasonings to determine whether an action is positive or negative, or in Buddhist terminology generates ‘merit’ or ‘demerit.’ The first is that the result of positive actions, both long and short term, is happiness and freedom from suffering. Actions based on caring for the vast, universal self inevitably lead to joy; actions based on focusing on ‘me’ perpetuate suffering.
The next reasoning is that the actions focussed on others and on ourselves, respectively, are by there very nature positive or negative, just as food by its very nature can be nourishing or toxic. At the moment you step out of the small self by applying the lojong teachings, at the moment you are engaged in positive thoughts and actions, you mind is in a state of peace and joy. Now sometimes we may think: ‘I try to do things for others, but it doesn’t make me happy. Why?’ This unhappiness doesn’t come from doing things for others. That is a common misunderstanding. The suffering actually comes from our own self-centered attachment, based on not fully wanting to do what we’re doing. If doing things for others caused suffering, then the bodhisattvas would be miserable. But their minds are full of peace because they are free from self-importance.
– Dzigar Kongtrul, The Intelligent Heart
Pennsylvania 1912
In A Country Once Forested
The young woodland remembers
the old, a dreamer dreaming
of an old holy book,
an old set of instructions,
and the soil under the grass
is dreaming of a young forest,
and under the pavement the soil
is dreaming of grass.
– Wendell Berry
If you allow yourself to be the person that you are, then everything will come into rhythm. If you live the life you love, you will receive shelter and blessings. Sometimes the great famine of blessing in and around us derives from the fact that we are not living the life we love, rather we are living the life that is expected of us. We have fallen out of rhythm with the secret signature and light of our own nature.
– John O’Donohue
In the spiritual life, the word ‘discipline’ means ‘the effort to create some space in which God can act’. Discipline means to prevent everything in your life from being filled up. Discipline means that somewhere you’re not occupied, and certainly not preoccupied … to create that space in which something can happen that you hadn’t planned or counted on.
– Henri Nouwen
Exercise for ‘reversing space,’ which involves sitting very still, with all attention focussed in the centre of the chest, and slowly surrendering and realising that instead of looking you are being observed; instead of hearing, you are being heard; instead of touching you are being touched; instead of tasting you are food for God and are being tasted… it is most certainly necessary to seek, to ask the question; rather than pushing away the answer by chasing after it, one must ask and listen at the same time, in trust and good faith that the answer is contained in the question.
– Reshad Feild, The Last Barrier
You have read for years, and where has it got you? Your head is filled with masses of ideas and concepts, and you yearn for experience that others on the path have had. Before your true nature is understood all those ideas and concepts must melt away. No books — the only book is the manuscript of nature, the lesson is life itself. Live passionately! Who said that this path should be so serious that there is no joy in it? This is the most exciting adventure possible, and it should be enjoyed. — Hamid
– Reshad Feild, The Last Barrier
…I keep looking for one more teacher, only to find that fish learn from the water and birds learn from the sky.
– Mark Nepo
The self is a patchwork of the felt and the unfelt, of presences and absences, of navigable channels around the walled-off numbnesses. Perhaps it’s impossible for anyone short of an enlightened being to carry the weight of all suffering, even to recognize and embrace it, but we make ourselves large or small, here or there, in our empathies.
– Rebecca Solnit
Whatever you are physically, he said, male or female, strong or weak, ill or healthy – all those things matter less than what your heart contains. If you have the soul of a warrior, you are a warrior. Whatever the color, the shape, the design of the shade that conceals it, the flame inside the lamp remains the same. You are that flame.
– Cassandra Clare
Social support is the most powerful protection against becoming overwhelmed by stress and trauma. Social support is not the same as merely being in the presence of others. The critical issue is reciprocity: being truly heard and seen by the people around us, feeling that we are held in someone else’s mind and heart. For our physiology to calm down, heal, and grow we need a visceral feeling of safety. No doctor can write a prescription for friendship and love: these are complex and hard-earned capacities.
– Bessel A. van der Kolk
Small Talk
At least once a day I trudge up 38th,
take a right on Nevil,
and wind around the little green patch of park,
past empty tennis courts
and the deserted soccer field
where right now a masked man
is playing with a remote-control race car
all by himself. I plod up Brookdale,
wearing my own mask. Anonymous,
featureless, I’m free to be anyone:
a bank robber, or a surgeon,
or a biblical bride
tricking my unsuspecting groom
into marrying the wrong sister.
Although, as I climb the hill
and start to sweat, I confess I pull
the thing down for some air.
When I see someone walking toward me,
we do our pandemic do-si-do, one of us
dancing off the sidewalk to avoid the other.
“Beautiful day!” says the stranger.
“Yes, yes, the roses!” I reply,
and we wave from afar.
This talk I used to call small
in the days I used to call ordinary.
– Alison Luterman
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, Light
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
Contemplation is a strictly subversive activity, a political act implying the riskiest of consequences to those taking part. The rediscovery of the necessary unity between contemplation and resistance, the mystical and prophetic, is perhaps the central need of modern western Christianity… A spiritual quest which is concerned only with the private world of the individual, with the attainment of his own ‘enlightenment’ can easily be absorbed by the culture. Capitalist society can make contemplation itself into a commodity. To divide contemplation from prophecy is to damage and maybe destroy both.
– Fr. Kenneth Leech
If you want to become a bodhisattva on the path to buddhahood, sooner or later you absolutely must cultivate immeasurable love and compassion for all sentient beings without exception, in order to be able to cultivate bodhicitta – the mind of enlightenment – the sincerest heartfelt loving and compassionate wish to attain the enlightened state of a buddha for the benefit of all sentient beings without exception. Once you have cultivated this absolutely authentic bodhicitta, you have at last become a bodhisattva on the path to buddhahood.
The problem for so many people is that they don’t believe in their bodhisattva potential, so their love and compassion remains extremely limited, and it usually extends no further than to their closest family members. And even then, their love and compassion for certain family members is rarely stable. Many people say things like, “That person was so horrible to me, how can I possibly ever love them?!” Although there is no denying that that person may have acted harmfully towards you and had caused you to suffer, if you only focus on those worldly superficial circumstances that drives you apart, and not on the deepest spiritual reality that forever lovingly bonds you, you will struggle to forgive them, let alone have love and compassion for them.
So in order to get over this obstacle, you must first believe in your bodhisattva potential, and then cultivate immeasurable equanimity towards literally all sentient beings without exception. And from that foundation of immeasurable equanimity, your love and compassion becomes unshakeably stable and truly immeasurable and all-encompassing towards each and every sentient being without exception – just like how the sun shines on to our world, without ever discriminating, it illuminates all. And then from that you will be able to cultivate authentic bodhicitta, and at last you would have actualised your potential as a bodhisattva on the path to buddhahood.
It is very simple to cultivate immeasurable equanimity if you can just deeply understand that throughout beginningless samsara, all sentient beings have been your mother in the past, and each one of them has loved and cared for you. And then if you can also deeply understand that ultimately all sentient beings are no different than you, as each one of them has buddha nature, and that they all want to be happy and never want to suffer.
By focusing on these unshakable deepest spiritual similarities, instead of focusing on worldly transitory superficial differences that drive you apart, equanimity will easily arise. It will feel like that on the very deepest level every sentient being without exception is ultimately an equal part of one infinitely big loving and caring family. Quite simply, the more you contemplate this, the greater your equanimity will be.
The greater your equanimity, the greater your love and compassion towards all sentient beings without exception, no matter who they are, no matter where they are, no matter what form that they have, and no matter whether you had previously considered them to be a stranger or even an enemy. When this becomes immeasurable, you will then easily cultivate authentic bodhicitta and become a bodhisattva.
I have unshakable faith in your potential, and so should you. Become a bodhisattva on the path to buddhahood for the benefit of all sentient beings.
– Chamtrul Rinpoche
Tolkien once remarked to me that the feeling about home must have been quite different in the days when a family had fed on the produce of the same few miles of country for six generations, and that perhaps this was why they saw nymphs in the fountains and dryads in the woods—they were not mistaken for there was in a sense a real (not metaphorical) connexion between them and the countryside.
– C. S. Lewis
I cannot define for you what God is. I can only say that my work has proved empirically that the pattern of God exists in every man and that this pattern has at its disposal the greatest of all his energies for transformation and transfiguration of his natural being.
– CG Jung
Ignorance is very harsh and willing to stick with its own version of things. Therefore, it feels very righteous.
– Chögyam Trungpa
trying to translate
into a language that’s known
a poem writ
in the language of stone
– Kenneth White
This is the summit of contemplation, and
no art can touch it
Blue, so blue, the far-out archipelago
and the sea shimmering, shimmering
No art can touch it, the mind can only
try to become attuned to it
To become quiet, and space itself out, to
become open and still, unworlded
Knowing itself in the diamond country, in
the ultimate unlettered light.
A High Blue Day on Scalpay
– Kenneth White
The other day, in the course of one of those more or less clandestine visits to the city on the Clyde I make from time to time, I was walking down Buchanan Street when I came smack up against something I’d never seen before: that sculpture of a big bird struggling into flight called Concept of Kentigern. Maybe Glasgow is about ready to leave its status as industrial mastadon of the Western world and fly over into other dimensions. Maybe there’s a good time coming.
– Kenneth White
EACH OF US has an original, you see, living somewhere underneath the shadow of our daily life. That life we live in the moving world is the dream life of the copy. She runs, she breathes, she cares for others, she mends their clothes. You gaze into the water of your day and there your face floats back, serene, unguarded. See! See! Beneath that thin smile you are smiling somewhere else. Your hand moves and the hand moves below you. Perhaps in another country more real than you are, in another life. Just so, the other Four Souls lived beneath the life of Fleur Pillager. Her name influenced Fleur’s actions and told her what to do. How can I tell you this? How can I make you see?
Sometimes it is too difficult for even an old man, one who loves to sling words. Sometimes I have trouble with this thought—how this surface of life that tosses and shatters is not the real surface.
How we are dreams, blasts, shadows, insubstantial gusts of motion. That this stub of a grain dealer’s pencil that moves across the page of paper is not real, either, and that the truth lies on the other side of even these words.
– Louise Erdrich
Goodness is about what you do. Not who you pray to.
– Terry Pratchett
To be in favor of solitude is not to be against community or friendship or love. It’s not that being alone is better, just that without the experience of it we block ourselves from discovering something enormously beneficial, perhaps even vital, to selfhood. Who are you when you are not a friend, a partner, a lover, a sibling, a parent, a child? When no one is with you, what do you do, and do you do it differently than if someone was there? It’s hard to see someone fully when another person is always attached to them. More importantly, it’s hard for us to see our own selves if we’re not ever alone.
– Amina Cain
Stories are living and dynamic. Stories exist to be exchanged. They are the currency of Human Growth.
– Jean Houston
To burn always with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.
– Walter Pater
The first known poet in history, Enheduanna, was an Iraqi woman. She had a position or title “The keeper of the flame.” I think that if a poet should have any role at all, it should be (wherever and whenever) the same: “keeper of the flame.”
– Dunya Mikhail
If one treats life artistically, their brain is their heart.
– Oscar Wilde
It ceased to hurt me, though so slow
I could not feel the trouble go —
But only knew by looking back —
That something – had benumbed the Track —
– Emily Dickinson
This nervous Prime Minister we call the ego rearranges everything he comes across, claiming it as his own. He pretends to represent the body’s position when the body has something else entirely in mind.
– Robert Bly
Hopefulness is not a neutral position. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like keeps the devil down in the hole.
– Nick Cave
They are so damn ‘intellectual’ and rotten that I can’t stand them anymore….I [would] rather sit on the floor in the market of Toluca and sell tortillas, than have anything to do with those ‘artistic’ bitches of Paris.
– Frida Kahlo
Who among us, looking back down the path of no return, can say they followed it in the right way?
– Fernando Pessoa
With more sparkle and pop / is the only way to live.
– Wendy Xu
…the trick is to love somebody…If you love one person, you see everybody else differently.
– James Baldwin
What you tell me, or signal to me … will perhaps be the trigger that helps me escape from the doldrums. … We now work without a safety net. How precious is the friend who gazes up at us from below, following us and holding the trapeze rope.
– Barthes in a letter to Sollers
Contemplation is to knowledge, what digestion is to food – the way to get life out of it.
– Tryon Edwards
The outcome of my days is always the same; an infinite desire for what one never gets; a void one cannot fill; an utter yearning to produce in all ways, to battle as much as possible against time that drags us along, and the distractions that throw a veil over our soul.
– Delacroix
Archetypes are like riverbeds which dry up when the water deserts them, but which it can find again at any time. An archetype is like an old watercourse along which the water of life has flowed for centuries, digging a deep channel for itself.
– Carl Jung
It is a curious psychological fact that the man who seems to be “egotistic” is not suffering from too much ego, but from too little. When the ego is strong and well developed, there is no nagging need to impress others – by money, by rudeness, or by any other show of false strength.
– Sydney J. Harris
No one has form without breath. Consequently, breath and form must be accomplished together. Isn’t this evident?
– Master Great Nothing of Sung-Shan
…it has always been a fancy of mine to read as I eat when I am on my own; it makes up for the lack of society. I devour a page and a mouthful alternately, and it is as if my book were dining with me.
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions
Consider Scheherazade, whose name meant “city-born” and who was without a doubt a big-city girl, crafty, wisecracking, by turns sentimental and cynical, as contemporary a metropolitan narrator as one could wish to meet. Scheherazade, who snared the prince in her never-ending story. Scheherazade, telling stories to save her life, setting fiction against death, a Statue of Liberty built not of metal but of words. Scheherazade, who insisted, against her father’s will, on taking her place in the procession into the king’s deadly boudoir. Scheherazade, who set herself the heroic task of saving her sisters by taming the king. Who had faith, who must have had faith, in the man beneath the murderous monster and in her own ability to restore him to his true humanity, by telling him stories.
– Salman Rushdie
Be my mother, I said to the trees, in the language of trees, which can’t be transcribed, and they shook their hair back, and they bent low with their many arms, and they looked into my eyes as only trees can look into the eyes of a person, they touched me with the rain on their fingers till I was all droplets, till I was a mist, and they said they would.
– Emily Berry, Canopy
The storytelling mind is allergic to uncertainty, randomness, and coincidence. It is addicted to meaning. If the storytelling mind cannot find meaningful patterns in the world, it will try to impose them. In short, the storytelling mind is a factory that churns out true stories when it can, but will manufacture lies when it can’t.
– Jonathan Gottschall
For the thinker, as for the artist, what counts in life is not the number of rare and exciting adventures he encounters, but the inner depth in that life, by which something great may be made out of even the paltriest and most banal of occurrences.
– William Barrett
Compassion is not weakness, and concern for the unfortunate is not socialism.
– Hubert H. Humphrey
Perchance, when, in the course of ages, American liberty has become a fiction of the past, — as it is to some extent a fiction of the present, — the poets of the world will be inspired by American mythology.
– Thoreau, Walking
One might expect, perhaps, that a man full of genius could pasture in the greatness of his own thoughts, and renounce the cheap approbation of the crowd which he despises; yet he succumbs to the more powerful impulse of the herd instinct.
– C.G. Jung
I found the human heart empty and insipid everywhere except in books.
– Jean-Paul Sartre
I have too many thoughts. Like when it’s summer and you have too much zucchini in your garden and you’re just oh please God let up on the zucchini.
– D. A. Powell
they’re up there waiting
for the Perseids
I’m down here catching
thistledown
– Alec Finlay
The Greek word we translate as plot was mythos.
– James Hillman
A test of our spirituality may be found in our encounter with 𝘥𝘦𝘱𝘵𝘩. Whatever pulls us deeper into life, even painfully so, opens us to the great life that courses beneath history and below the surface of everyday appearance.
– James Hollis
I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.
– Anaïs Nin
To achieve anything today an artist has to develop a conscious strictness in respect of time which in former ages might have seemed neurotic and selfish, for he must never forget that he is living in a state of siege.
– W.H. Auden
I wish I was Kerouac-frees-my-soul age again. Or even Bukowski-is-God age. Or Frank O’Hara-bleeds-for-me. Or Salinger-sees-my-truth. Or Sartre-echoes-my-hollowness. Or Akhmatova-bears-my-pain. Anything but there-are-way-too-many-books-in-the-world years old.
– Gerard Beirne
Oh dear, two people walking towards me on the pavement, surely they’ll go single file and we can all… Nope, off into the busy road I go!
– Very British Problems
life is latent in seeking,its origin is hidden in desire
keep desire alive in thy heart lest thy little dust become a tomb.
the nature of every thing is faithful to desire;
from the flame of desire the heart takes life
when it takes life, all dies that is not true.
– allama Iqbal
I want to taste glory in each day, and never be afraid to experience pain; and never shut myself up or stop questioning and criticizing life. To learn and think: to think and live; to live and learn: this always, with new insight, new understanding, and new love.
– Sylvia Plath
Jung said that humankind must return to the source, find the imaginative fire from which experience wrought the myths and images of old. In that molten basalt emerging in imaginative channels from ageless depths, our destiny would crystallize.
– Lance Owens
Asleep in the springtime one is not aware of the dawn
Till everywhere the birds are heard calling.
But last night I heard the sounds of wind and rain.
I wonder how many blossoms have broken away?
– Mêng Hao-Jan
Best case scenario —
you’ll be, my poem, read attentively,
discussed, remembered.
– Wislawa Szymborska
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice.
– William Shakespeare
Western attitude, with its emphasis on the object, tends to “the ideal Christ” in its outward aspect and rob it of its mysterious relation to the inner man. This..impels the Protestant interpreters of the Bible to interpret Kingdom of God as “among you” not “within you.”
– CG Jung
Was it Ovid who said, There is so much wind here stones go blank?
– Anne Carson
It is a luxury to put our interests first.
It is an honor to put the interests of others before our own.
– @simonsinek
I loved you when you opened like a lily to the heat; you see I’m just another snowman standing in the rain and sleet who loved you with his frozen love, his second hand physique, with all he is and all he was a thousand kisses deep.
– Leonard Cohen
The way we read now partly depends upon our distance, inner or outer, from the universities, where reading is scarcely taught as a pleasure, in any of the deeper senses of the aesthetics of pleasure.
– Harold Bloom
They had long ceased to speculate upon the morality or immorality of the life they led, because it was the life that was led by everybody round them.
– Marcel Proust
Our psychic foundations are shrouded in such great and inchoate darkness that, as soon as you peer into it, it is instantly compensated by mythic forms.
– CG Jung
If you ask where, to find the wind; the water answers, in gentle waves.
The meadows, sing trees of grass; and the hills echo, with foggy plains.
Even stars, wander whispering on the earth; we are already, in heaven.
– @AmericanSijo
What’s yours today
won’t be yours tomorrow,
for what is life, but
a borrowing from time.
– @akyllus
As a thinker who takes non-rational functions seriously, Jung does not ignore the claims of intuition and feeling to be able to grasp what reason is unable to affirm. In other words, faith cannot be proved, but nor can it be disproved. It stands outside the range of reason.
– David Tacey
We live at ease, each in his own absurdity like in water . . . We never think that what we think conceals from us what we are.
– Paul Valéry, Monsieur Teste, tr. J. Mathews
Time stutters and reverses and it is always yesterday and today. Maybe the greatest miracle is memory. Think about that this morning, quietly, as you watch the world flitter and tremble and beam.
– Brian Doyle
Wise acceptance does not mean we like the situation; it means we have stopped denying it, have stopped being victims of it, have stopped blaming others for it, and are now prepared to improve it.
– John Bruna
It is is a book that shows you how little you know, how rich, how extravagant the world is, how little of it you have seen, and exactly how much you have failed to describe it.
– Alex Aciman
Just a reminder:
There is a bigger picture that you/we do not see.
– @VinceFHorn
The fact that the life of Christ is largely myth does absolutely nothing to disprove its factual truth—quite the contrary. I would even go so far as to say that the mythical character of a life is just what expresses its universal human validity.
– CG Jung
What the Buddha came to see is that who we are is an ever-changing stream of experience.
– Pamela Weiss, A Bigger Sky
I am really a woodcarver
and my words are love
which willfully parades in
its room, refusing to move
– Frank O’Hara
I love to gaze alone at the dark grasses growing beside the river
When the orioles are calling in the thick woods.
The spring tides come down swiftly swollen by the rain,
By the deserted ferry the boat swings to and fro.
– Wei Ying-Wu
side effects include hummingbirds just before dawn a heartbeat
– Scott Metz
catnip for the soul
on the blue river
the blue sky
– C.X. Turner and James Welsh, Building Sandcastles
In that dry clement sunlight we climbed the grassy staircases to the summit.
Everywhere there were tiny dells dense with anemone and daisies. There was everything to be said for singing.
– Lawrence Durrell
The depth of people you encounter in your life corresponds with and nourishes the depth you allow to see within yourself — And the less you escape from yourself, the less you will find yourself entangled with people facilitating and perpetuating the escape.
– @mikael_jibril
collectivism is our only hope.
unfortunately, covid showed us how unprepared most ppl are for that level of empathy and sacrifice.
– cyrée jarelle
As species disappear, the Upper Paleolithic grows more vivid. As living animals disappear, the first outlines become more dear, not as reflections of a day world, but as the primal outlines of psyche . . .
– Clayton Eshleman
summer daze
the importance
of forgetting
– @pauldavidmena
Trying to imagine how much good work could get done in the academic humanities if we weren’t perpetually beset with demands to self-brand, defend turf, and generally justify our existence—individually and institutionally.
– @MitchTherieau
I think that there’s always great music being made. Always has been, always will be.
– Robbie Robertson
The hunter sinks his arrows into the trees and then paints the targets around them. The trees imagine they are deer. The deer imagine they are safe. The arrows: they have no imagination.
– Richard Siken
We find our roots, our family not through blood, surely, but through passion: our true home is the people we love, our heritage the people and things that move through us.
– Pico Iyer
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 seems to me as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last, just as when we have accepted an invitation we duly arrive in a certain house at a given time.
– W.G. Sebald
Nothing is more radicalizing, nothing makes me more skeptical about global capitalism, than sitting on a train and listening to business men loudly do business.
– Vincent Bevins
socrates: (…) like that contained in the stone which euripides calls a magnet; every poet has some muse from whom he is suspended, and by whom he is said to be possessed, which is nearly the same thing; for he is taken hold of.
– plato, ion
[. . .] in some half-understood but very profound way, our relation to the outer ecologies seems conditioned by our inner ecologies. This is a metaphor, but it is also literal.
– Gary Snyder
Our tragedy is to search further and further back for a common non-racial trunk in which the animal is not separated out of the human, while we destroy the turf on which we actually stand.
– Clayton Eshleman
WHY INSTEAD OF BEGGING MY MOM FOR EXTRA ALLOWANCE MONEY SO I COULD BUY A RECORD ALBUM I SHOULD HAVE DECLARED VENDETTA ON THE ELECTRIC LIGHT ORCHESTRA
I was in love with a girl.
And I can say this with absolute certainty,
as I was in eighth grade,
and eight graders know what love is
in ways that you all grow out of
with your big feet, bad skin, left at the pizza place and walking four miles so you don’t have to call someone for a ride and explain,
your first kisses, shocking tongue in your mouth, cheeks turned floodplain “experience.”
I didn’t need experience.
I had Saturday afternoon movies on channel 6,
I had heart-in-fist dedications on Casey Kasem,
I had first-run Love Boat still on TV,
so fuck your coward jaded blissful first-hand knees-quaking “love,”
I was in love with a girl
and she wouldn’t call me back.
I had tried everything.
And by “everything,” I mean
every thing: I tried funny,
awkward,
self-deprecating,
I tried uncoordinated, I tried brainy,
I tried stories in class about Santa being hit by an airplane Night Before Christmas style (and
on the nose of the plane arose such a clatter, the pilot knew at once Saint Nick was a splatter)
everything.
I
was in love
with a girl
and the months were winding that love so tight
it could slip and fly across the classroom and
crack
against the blackboard, I
was in love with a girl
and finally at the point,
sitting on the lion-print sheets of my bed,
of admitting love
was not enough,
that love!
was not!
enough!
to bend this universe as it needed to be bent.
I was in love with a girl
and sighed
and turned on my radio
to WOW or Sweet 98 or whatever the hell it was
and they said “Here
is a new song
by ELO,”
and there’s Jeff Lynne telling me “Hold on tight
to your dreams,”
even adding emphasis by rephrasing it in French: “Accroche-toi à ton rêve,”
and, damn, Universe,
you had me going,
I almost gave up on love,
on love!
In the hindsight of adulthood,
of thirty years unlearning what I learned that day,
of good dates, bad dates, eyelashes, bra straps,
yelling “What the fuck do you want from me!” loud enough to be heard four apartments down,
heart-shaped cards, roses and rings, fourteen small teddy bears (one for every month),
poetry that said way too much about the goddamn moon,
the disproportionate surprise of warm breath on the inner ear,
that the Electric
Light
Orchestra
maybe could have been a little more specific.
That “Accroches-toi à ton rêve,” I never did look that up,
it might only mean: “Don’t eat croutons;”
DJs are not waiting like archangels
to set the cosmos off their turntable wobble; they
tie up the request line talking to their girls,
making promises,
that sound too much
like pop songs,
they’re underpaid dudes
who put needles onto grooves
and let it
all
spin.
– Matt Mason
Until a man learns to respect nature and talk to the animal world, he will never know his true role on Earth!
– Enzo Mallorca
My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.
– John Dominic Crossan
Feeling stuck with your words? Try to create something visual that gets you in touch with the nonverbal aspect of your creativity.
– Brooke Warner
ON STICKING OUT LIKE A SORE OPPOSABLE THUMB
We give hummingbirds sugar water
in defiance of dentists’ recommendations
everywhere, and in return
for our sweetness, have been gifted a nest
of thistle and dandelion down
attached with spider silk
to a plant on the front porch
that holds a peeping chick
I’m afraid to look at
lest my giant face and eyes
scare the tiniest heart for miles.
You probably know by now
of the extinction of birds
and the growing similarity
of those that remain, who are becoming
more and more crow-
and sparrow-like, snowy egrets
soon gone, griffon vultures, says thems
that study such things. Forgive me
for making the plural pluraler,
I just want more of everything
in this time of lessening
and to keep us from erasing
the world’s green and red plumage,
its blue and wild defiance of gravity.
And forgive us, for we are big-brained
and small-wisdomed, mostly inadvertently deadly
and largely incapable
of understanding the complexity of life,
yet we have bulldozers, earth movers,
power plants, car and swizzle stick factories,
can dam or redirect rivers, cut off
the tops of mountains and drill miles
below the sea, can even make matter
explode, smash the stuff of all stuff
to bits, making us gods
in diapers, magicians who have no clue
what we’ve pulled out of the hat,
and we need help. In addition to their zip
and chittering, their air wars
at the feeder over the four fake flowers
to sip from, what I love about the hummingbirds
is also what I fear about nature,
the constant demonstration
of human inability
to find a modest niche
and nestle among the other breaths. Are we
an amazing blaze, an evolutionary
oops-a-daisy so devoted to the pursuit
of comfort and ease
that for the sake of hummingbirds
and stoats, bats and bears, waterfalls
and evergreens and everglades
we have to go, or can we change,
can we share, I ask you now,
since my Magic 8 Ball shrugged
at the question, and the river
mumbled something about being late,
and I’m lost somewhere between
the reasonableness of indoor plumbing
and air-conditioning and the insanity
of buying toilet paper on-line. Another way
to put this: how many lives
and species are single-serving puddings
worth? I know: yum. But is yum
enough?
– Bob Hicok
First candidate on a ticket with Sanskrit first and middle names, btw.
Kamala Devi means Lotus (or Flower) Goddess.
– Ethan Nichtern
For this moment in time, in history, in feeling, in emergence, in truth, in this wayward experiment in democracy, may we withhold criticism and recognize Kamala Harris climbing the steepest of America’s mountains – race and gender.
Rise, Kamala Harris, Rise.
– David Bedrick
All It Is
The flexible arc
described by treetop leaves
when breathing currents ripple
a branch to one,
then the other side.
Or the level, quickened swell
that follows a gust over wetlands
home to a million reeds.
Any terrain you find arises from all
that came before: succeeding
event horizons from earlier eras
brought forward by today’s considered
impetus to lift the way it looks,
lightly, freely
out toward whatever senses you are there—
breathed into completion, a sphere,
into all it is.
– Alfred Corn
At least one municipality in every single state is under a boil water advisory.
– Erin Brockovich
Be careful what you wish for – Punk has informed everything, from low to high, in that everything is now atavistic. And that’s completely normal to the point where punk itself is the least interesting thing ever.
– Frank Kozik
sipping tea
waiting for
the stars
– Ogawa
There is a problem when people say they are growing in Christ and also becoming less gracious and more mean?
That’s the question I wonder: why does Christianity consistently make such mean and graceless people?
– Danté Stewart
Poetry is not a calling. I’m not even sure it’s an art form.
– Don Paterson
A word after a word after a word is power.
– Margaret Atwood
The mind of America is seized by a fatal dry rot – and it’s only a question of time before all that the mind controls will run amuck in a frenzy of stupid impotent fear.
– Hunter S. Thompson
There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross.
– Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero
The Real God
If your God has a name,
he is not the real God.
If he has a religion,
he is not the real God.
If you can understand him,
he is not the real God.
If you can describe him
in less than a billion words,
he is not the real god.
– john zbigniew guzlowski
You’re instantly in a bind once you arrive here on earth, of need, self-will, a body and a separate personality, even before the crippling self-consciousness kicks in, even before seventh grade.
– Anne Lamott
Live not for battle won.
Live not for The-End-of-the-Song.
Live in the along.
– Gwendolyn Brooks
Stepping into your power is not hardest thing. The hardest thing is to step in and remain grounded, humble and generous. Much of mundane training would have us believe we are inferior. If you begin a dedicated dance with Spirit you will start to see and feel your own power. It comes in brief slices in the beginning. Like shafts of light beaming down into the shady forest. We get a glimpse of who we are and what it feels like to be powerful. If we continue our dance with dedication a glimpse becomes a knowing. Along the path come opportunities to heal. In a perfect world our awareness would grow equally as our healing grows. But that is not always the case. It is possible to be powerful and broken. And that is an challenging combination. Don’t rush to power. Rush to healing. Rush to love. Rush to generosity. And a humble power capable of transforming the world will follow.
– Naraya Preservation Council
Facing it, always facing it, that’s the way to get through. Face it.
– Joseph Conrad
The Origin
of what happened is not in language—
of this much I am certain.
Six degrees south, six east—
and you have it: the bird
with the blue feathers, the brown bird—
same white breasts, same scaly
ankles. The waves between us—
house light and transform motion
into the harboring of sounds in language.
Where there is newsprint
the fact of desire is turned from again—
and again. Just the sense
that what remains might well be held up—
later, as an ending.
Twice I have walked through this life—
once for nothing, once
for facts: fairy-shrimp in the vernal pool—
glassy-winged sharp-shooter
on the failing vines. Count me—
among the animals, their small
committed calls.—
Count me among
the living. My greatest desire—
to exist in a physical world.
– Jane Mead
All finite things reveal infinitude: The mountain with its singular bright shade Like the blue shine on freshly frozen snow, The after-light upon ice-burdened pines; Odor of basswood on a mountain-slope, A scent beloved of bees; Silence of water above a sunken tree : The pure serene of memory in one man, — A ripple widening from a single stone Winding around the waters of the world.
– Theodore Roethke
We have all hurt someone tremendously, whether by intent or accident. We have all loved someone tremendously, whether by intent or accident. It is an intrinsic human trait, and a deep responsibility, I think, to be an organ and a blade. But, learning to forgive ourselves and others because we have not chosen wisely is what makes us most human. We make horrible mistakes. It’s how we learn. We breathe love. It’s how we learn. And it is inevitable.
– Nayyirah Waheed
…the key here is not to reject others’ stories if they do not line up with our own, but to recognize and leave be their truths as equally real as our own, while still maintaining connection to what we instinctively know is our own whole truth, not a “version”, but a whole truth. This is an invitation and an uncomfortable one into a surrender of control, a surrender of universal likability. To demand someone rewrite their story of you can violate their agency, just as someone twisting how they appear in yours is just as manipulative. Sometimes trying to convince them otherwise requires a sell-out of the soul, at cost of our own inner-integrity. This is also an invitation to surrender into something beyond us, to see ourselves past our own stories, and to value the experiences and realities of others while staying rooted in our own soul’s knowing.
– Hayla Wong
We must see that when we feel anger, we are not reacting to the person who harmed us, but to that person’s hatred. Their hatred has blinded them. They were unable to stand up for themselves. They submitted completely to their anger. Even though they think they are doing something great, consider how stupid they have actually been. They have become total slaves of their hatred. Who is a better candidate for compassion than that?
– Kyabje Nawang Gehlek
DETOUR
I took a long time getting here,
much of it wasted on wrong turns,
back roads riddled by ruts.
I had adventures
I never would have known
if I proceeded as the crow flies.
Super highways are so sure
of where they are going:
they arrive too soon.
A straight line isn’t always
the shortest distance
between two people.
Sometimes I act as though
I’m heading somewhere else
while, imperceptibly,
I narrow the gap between you and me.
I’m not sure I’ll ever
know the right way, but I don’t mind
getting lost now and then.
Maps don’t know everything.
– Ruth Feldman
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
Books, she thought, grew of themselves. She never had time to read them. Alas! even the books that had been given to her and inscribed by the hand of the poet himself: “For her whose wishes must be obeyed” . . . “The happier Helen of our days” . . . disgraceful to say, she had never read them.
– Virginia Woolf
If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.
– John Cage
I have nothing to say
and I am saying it
and that is poetry
as I need it.
– John Cage
4 indictments, 91 charges, 2 impeachments, 1 act of sedition, and threatening civil war. 26 women alleging sexual assault. 1.13 million Americans dead from Covid. And he is the front runner of the Republican Party. This is why I call it a collective psychosis.
– Bandy X Lee, MD, MDiv
All I ever did was follow
In his broad shadow round the farm.
I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,
Yapping always. But today
It is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind me, and will not go away.
– Seamus Heaney, Follower
Poems are sketches for existence.
– Paul Celan
Jung major questions included: Are we related to something infinite or not? Do forces beyond reason impact on our bodies, minds and behaviour? Is meaning inherent in existence or is it added by ourselves? Are gods real or do we merely invent them?
– David Tacey
For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all of the horrors of the half-lived life.
– Herman Melville
The greatest mistake an analyst can make is to assume that his patient has a psychology similar to his own.
– C.G. Jung
Because we have not made our lives to fit our places, the forests are ruined, the fields eroded, the streams polluted, the mountains overturned. Hope then to belong to your place by your own knowledge of what it is that no other place is, and by your caring for it as you care for no other place, this place that you belong to though it is not yours, for it was from the beginning and will be to the end. … Speak to your fellow humans as your place has taught you to speak, as it has spoken to you. Speak its dialect as your old compatriots spoke it Before they had heard a radio. Speak Publicly what cannot be taught or learned in public. Listen privately, silently to the voices that rise up From the pages of books and from your own heart. Be still and listen to the voices that belong To the streambanks and the trees and the open fields. There are songs and sayings that belong to this place, By which it speaks for itself and no other.
– Wendell Berry
How do we each creatively combine and respond to and engage in conversation with all of our beloved teachers and mentors’ wisdom and confusion, to further our lived and felt recognition that we are synchronously someone, everyone, no one and anyone?
– Willow Pearson Trimbach
It never grew easy, but at last I grew peaceful.
– Mary Oliver
Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers *and* students.
– Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
To be at home with myself! How different life would be! There would be a center, and out of that center all forces would reach. But there is no center in my life; my life hovers between many poles and counterpoles. A longing for home here, a longing for wandering there. A longing for solitude and cloister here, and an urge for love and community there.
– Hermann Hesse
Hokusai says look carefully.
He says pay attention, notice.
He says keep looking, stay curious.
Hokusai says there is no end to seeing.
He says look forward to getting old.
He says keep changing,
you just get more who you really are.
He says get stuck, accept it, repeat
yourself as long as it is interesting.
He says keep doing what you love.
He says keep praying.
He says every one of us is a child,
every one of us is ancient
every one of us has a body.
He says every one of us is frightened.
He says every one of us has to find
a way to live with fear.
He says everything is alive –
shells, buildings, people, fish,
mountains, trees, wood is alive.
Water is alive.
Everything has its own life.
Everything lives inside us.
He says live with the world inside you.
He says it doesn’t matter if you draw,
or write books. It doesn’t matter
if you saw wood, or catch fish.
It doesn’t matter if you sit at home
and stare at the ants on your veranda
or the shadows of the trees
and grasses in your garden.
It matters that you care.
It matters that you feel.
It matters that you notice.
It matters that life lives through you.
Contentment is life living through you.
Joy is life living through you.
Satisfaction and strength
is life living through you.
He says don’t be afraid.
Don’t be afraid.
Love, feel, let life take you by the hand.
Let life live through you.
– Roger Keyes
Generosity is that palpable extra that comes along with the gift, motiveless as a good wind. Best is the extra that comes unencumbered: pure generosity of spirit, always replenishing itself. We the less generous are quick to suspect it, remembering what we’ve given and why. But those who have it irradiate the day. They redefine the meaning of wealth. We fall in love with them, we try to shine that brightly, yet before long they’ve mostly instructed us about what it is we want to keep. Blessed are the generous who keep enough for themselves so we can live with them without guilt. Blessed, too, are those who receive well, so the generous get their reward. A cold heart is not generosity’s natural enemy. Scarcity is, and its crucible as well. Blessed are the poor who give to the poor. In our world of plenty when our daughter was three, at first we laughed at her mistake: “Share, share, and like.” Then we praised it.“
– Stephen Dunn
As a neurosis starts from a fragmentary state of human consciousness, it can only be cured by an approximative totality of the human being.
– C.G. Jung
It is not the body that is important but the atmosphere around it. The atmosphere becomes permeated with this finer vibration, in the stillness. And another quality is there.
Respect this atmosphere, this energy contained in the body. And then, even subtler energies can come into you—the Light can come into you.
All my thoughts, feelings, ideas are nothing compared to this precious treasure, this quality of energy that is not mine but what I am.
More and more, with attending to presence, allowing higher forces to enter, staying collected, returning, we can live in a new way.
You can serve this energy. And the energy can heal. From it can come my best action in the world, my best action for others. Help each other through living in this pure Attention.
– Michel de Salzmann
Each of us harbors a homeland, a landscape we naturally comprehend. By understanding the dependability of place, we can anchor ourselves as trees.
– Terry Tempest Williams
Man is a thinker. He is that what he thinks. When he thinks fire he is fire. When he thinks war, he will create war. Everything depends if his entire imagination will be an entire sun, that is, that he will imagine himself completely that what he wants.
– Paracelsus
It is often to be noted that highly willful individuals are precisely the people who are most prone to encounter a state of psychic paralysis: they find themselves blocked not by external circumstances, but by interior ones.
– Luigi Zoja
I didn’t write my poems because I wanted to, they were wrung from me. I had to write them.
– Maxine Kumin
I know this transformation is painful but you’re not falling apart; you’re just falling into something different, with a new capacity to be YOU.
– William C. Hannan
Why should I believe there are poems waiting for me which I am not writing? Because I miss them, these shadows like birds dying of cold on the branches, their life diminished as I move closer to them. I frighten them with my nearness.
– Mary Kinzie
Gautama said that when the Great Ferris Wheel
stops turning, you will still be way up
there, swinging in your seat and laughing.
– Robert Bly
Here’s an experiment. Pick up a coin. Imagine that it represents the object at which you are grasping. Hold it tightly, clutching it in your fist and extend your arm, with the palm of your hand facing the ground. Now if you let go or relax your grip, you will lose what you are clinging onto. That’s why you hold onto it.
But there is another possibility: You can let go and yet keep hold of it. With your arm still outstretched, turn your hand over so that it faces the sky. Release your hand and the coin still rests on your open palm. You let go, and the coin is still yours with all the space around it. So there is a way in which we can accept impermanence and still relish life, at one and the same time, without grasping.
– Sogyal Rinpoche
When the heart freezes, music liquifies it. When it is lonely, secret notes will escape and find their way to the pulse, restore its universal rhythms. It is remote and gentle. It sobs for you. It cries for you. It laments, it rejoices, it explodes with vigor and life.
– Anaïs Nin
Whatever your eye falls on – for it will fall on what you love – will lead you to the questions of your life, the questions that are incumbent upon you to answer, because that is how the mind works in concert with the eye. The things of this world draw us where we need to go.
– Mary Rose O’Reilley
The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. … What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing … the thing that might be worth saying.
– Gilles Deleuze
I have been astonished that men could die
martyrs for their religion –
I have shuddered at it,
I shudder no more.
I could be martyred for my religion.
Love is my religion
and I could die for that.
I could die for you.
– John Keats
Folk-lore means that the soul is sane, but that the universe is wild and full of marvels. Realism means that the world is dull and full of routine, but that the soul is sick and screaming. The problem of the fairy tale is – what will a healthy man do with a fantastic world? The problem of the modern novel is – what will a madman do with a dull world? In the fairy tales the cosmos goes mad; but the hero does not go mad. In the modern novels the hero is mad before the book begins, and suffers from the harsh steadiness and cruel sanity of the cosmos.
– G. K. Chesterton
The house of your beliefs, of your properties, of your attachments and comforting ways of thinking is constantly being broken into.
– Krishnamurti
Everyone arrives one day and asks, is this it? And the stars answer back with more stars.
– Victoria Chang
The past is dead and we stand beside
The door of a golden dawning.
– Patrick Kavanagh
I can’t read anymore in the ‘Montana is so affordable and the locals are just part of the folksy scenery’ genre, please stop writing this utter nonsense, you have broken me.
– Kathleen McLaughlin
I have as many pettinesses, hurt feelings, grievances, and sour grapes as any academic, but I think we need to save that stuff for therapy and have a little solidarity since our profession is currently being murder-on-the-orient-express-ed by a long line of consultants & fascists.
– @CariHovanec
All it takes, after all, is a little courage.
– Susan Sontag
One of the central paradoxes of Buddhism is that the bare attention of the meditative mind changes the psyche by not trying to change anything at all.
– Mark Epstein
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.
– C.G. Jung
You seem to think peace is a natural state … and conflict its interruption, but the truth is the exact opposite. Peace is what the sea looks like in a dead calm – a rare and beautiful moment – something impossible.
– David Greig
The soul in nakedness and solitude convinces us that the person we truly are has been obscured and that this has been going on through many centuries and lifetimes. Great grief then overtakes us.
– Robert Bly
I return to the small and the real, for this is the great way, the way of what is to come. I return to my simple reality, to my undeniable and most minuscule being.
– @RedBookJung
One should not understand a dream as evidence for the moral nature of the unconscious. It is merely an attempt to balance the lopsidedness of the conscious mind…
– CG Jung
Traveling the path means you get off everything, there is no place to perch.
– Chögyam Trungpa
One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life.
– Frank O’Hara
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
Just be more you,
that’s the solution.
– Yrsa Daley-Ward
Pride is a denial of God, an invention of the devil, contempt for men. It is the mother of condemnation, the offspring of praise, a sign of barrenness. It is a flight from God’s help, the harbinger of madness, the author of downfall. It is the cause of diabolical possession, the source of anger, the gateway of hypocrisy. It is the fortress of demons, the custodian of sins, the source of hardheartedness. It is the denial of compassion, a bitter pharisee, a cruel judge. It is the foe of God. It is the root of blasphemy.
– John Climacus
They’d cursed and, worse, used logarithms. They’d waded through rivers and dabbled in trigonometry.
– Terry Pratchett
The people we most love do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created.
– Meghan O’Rourke
It was heart-shaking. Glorious. Torches, dizziness, singing. Wolves howling around us and a bull bellowing in the dark. The river ran white. It was like a film in fast motion, the moon waxing and waning, clouds rushing across the sky. Vines grew from the ground so fast they twined up the trees like snakes; seasons passing in the wink of an eye, entire years for all I know. . . . Mean we think of phenomenal change as being the very essence of time, when it’s not at all. Time is something which defies spring and water, birth and decay, the good and the bad, indifferently. Something changeless and joyous and absolutely indestructible. Duality ceases to exist; there is no ego, no ‘I,’ and yet it’s not at all like those horrid comparisons one sometimes hears in Eastern religions, the self being a drop of water swallowed by the ocean of the universe. It’s more as if the universe expands to fill the boundaries of the self. You have no idea how pallid the workday boundaries of ordinary existence seem, after such an ecstasy.
– Donna Tartt
Leaping poetry
Robert Bly coined this term for poems that enact “a long floating leap from the conscious to the unconscious and back again, a leap from the known part of the mind to the unknown part and back to the known” (Leaping Poetry, 1975). Leaping poetry is Bly’s term for the rapid associative imagination that moves through different levels of consciousness. Bly adapted the ancient Chinese phrase “riding on dragons” to describe the “time of inspiration,” the movement between worlds, between planes of thought. He found this ecstatic mode of exploration in nineteenth-century French poets, such as Gérard de Nerval and Charles Baudelaire, and in twentieth-century Spanish ones, such as Juan Ramón Jiménez, Rafael Alberti, and Antonio Machado. Machado says, “Everyone who moves on / walks like Jesus, on the sea” (“Moral proverbs and Folk Songs,” in Campos de Castilla, or The Countryside of Castille, 1907-1917). Bly’s method courted the irrational and denigrated the poetics of rationality, i.e., “dull poets who give off a steady light.” He distinguished hopping, which entails a short jump in consciousness, from leaping, and maintained that we notice far leaps of association in many ancient works of art.
– A Poet’s Glossary, Edward Hirsch
Friends feel more than words. They exchange more than reasons. They are more than metaphors.
– George Gorman
yellowing maple
i vow to yield gracefully
when autumn rolls in
– Jason Gould
My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.
– George Santayana
Paradox is the marrow of Reality, and its *tragically* easy to blind yourself to rich paradoxes by dismissing them as logical inconsistencies, hypocrisies, or nonsense
– @the_wilderless
An idea doesn’t belong to you even when you ‘have’ one. You can become friends with an idea, and after a while it will show you more of itself, or you and it may get tired of each other and separate. Ideas that live, live in us and through us into the world. Viable ideas have their own innate heat, their own vitality. They are living things too.
– James Hillman
Re-reading is probably more important than reading. Seek to cognitively own a great book rather than just reading it.
– Farnam Street
The writers who stand In the bright light, the writers who write their hearts out alone, the writers reaching, the writers scared and longing for others, the writers who arrive, whatever that is…we need you all. We need you all. We need you all. We are nothing without all of us. Because voices. Because bodies. How they cannot disappear us if we keep writing our way to each other.
– Lidia Yuknavitch
Now picture this: You are at a beautiful retreat center, in a stunning setting, surrounded by nature. As you enter the meeting space, there is a circle of twenty-five chairs, and as you sit down in one, the remainder are quickly occupied by remarkable people. Looking around at the circle, you witness a diverse group of visionaries, healers, entrepreneurs, and all sorts of change agents. You feel deep gratitude to be among this unique gathering of amazing people who are about to take on the deep crises of our time.
Okay, wake up, snap out of it, and compost that vision! While many of us have been part of special gatherings to address the chaotic state of our world, the idealism and somewhat elitism contained within them does not mirror the ways we truly need to come together in a changing world. In order to radically change—to address our more than impending ecological and social crises—we need just about everyone.
– Jeanine M. Canty
All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.
– T. E. Lawrence
THINGS TO THINK
Think in ways you’ve never thought before
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you’ve ever heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.
Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out of the lake, and he’s carrying on his antlers
A child of your own whom you’ve never seen.
When someone knocks on the door, think that he’s about
To give you something large: tell you you’re forgiven,
Or that it’s not necessary to work all the time, or that it’s
Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.
– Robert Bly
The spiritual journey involves going beyond hope and fear,
stepping into unknown territory, continually moving forward.
The most important aspect of being on the spiritual path
may be to just keep moving.
– Pema Chodron
To me the important thing is not to offer any specific hope of betterment but, by offering an imagined but persuasive alternative reality, to dislodge my mind, and so the reader’s mind, from the lazy, timorous habit of thinking that the way we live now is the only way people can live. It is that inertia that allows the institutions of injustice to continue unquestioned.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
To study the aliveness of the soul we cannot help but study her dynamism; to study her dynamism we have to explore her impressionability; to investigate her impressionability we begin easily to see it intimately connected to her capacity of imagination; our exploration goes on in this flowing stream.
– A.H. Almaas
Traditional theories of human creativity ascribe it to inspiration from a higher source working through the creative individual, who acts as a channel. The same conception underlies the notion of genius; originally the genius was not the person himself but his presiding god or spirit.
– Rupert Sheldrake
A man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down. Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time. In existential mathematics that experience takes the form of two basic equations: The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.
– Milan Kundera
Do you see how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that’s the end of it. When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter; the hand that bears it heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls, the universe is changed. On every act the balance of the whole depends. The winds and seas, the powers of water and earth an light, all that these do, and all that the beasts and green things do, is well done, and rightly done. All these act within the Equilibrium. From the hurricane and the great whale’s sounding to the fall of a dry leaf an the gnat’s flight, all they do is done within the balance of the whole.
But we, insofar as we have power over the world and over one another, we must learn to do what the leaf and the whale and the wind do of their own nature. 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, The Farthest Shore
A good leg will fall; a straight back will stoop;
a black beard will turn white;
a curled pate will grow
bald; a fair face will wither;
a full eye will wax hollow:
but a good heart, Kate, is the sun and the
or rather, the sun, and not the moon
for it shines bright and never changes,
but keeps his course truly.
– William Shakespeare
Elite schools, strenuous degree programs, and cultural literacy are grossly overrated. Learning matters, not because it aspires to enroll in some archetypal library in the sky, but because it establishes continuities between reason and experience, between the world and the individual. Education matters when it makes you more common, more ordinary, rather than when it makes you more erudite, more urbane.
– Aaron Ghiloni
Today, reality, in all domains, is undone by the processes of realization that are meant to ensure its consistency.
– Agamben
The poet must change as a Shakespearean protagonist changes, startled by a new self-awareness.
– Harold Bloom
We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.
– Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
The whole impetus of life is to transcend: to get beyond the separateness, insignificance and transience of the ordinary human condition through association with something timeless and boundless.
– Bernardo Kastrup
On these balconies, hanging out over the blue littoral of the historic coast, warmly-lit by candlelight, these fragmentary friendships flowered.
But why should he not feel at home?
– Lawrence Durrell
Make voyages. Attempt them. There’s nothing else.
– Tennesse Williams
We bob like corks on a seething ocean which at every moment exceeds us.
– Julien Gracq
out-worn heart, in a time out-worn […] come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill: for there the mystical brotherhood of sun and moon and hollow and wood and river and stream work out their will.
– Yeats
When we cling—to our firmly held ideas, beliefs, roles, and identities—we freeze-frame reality, turning flowing water into frozen ice, and then we find ourselves pinched and bound, locked into tiny cells.
– Pamela Weiss, A Bigger Sky
I actually don’t understand how anyone read the Phenomenology of Spirit? Every page takes me an hour and there’s like six hundred of them.
– Peli Grietzer
The beginning is forever recurring, like discovery
– Isamu Noguchi
Despite these advances, the field of anatomy still had a great unsolved mystery at its core: the question of memory. While we knew a little about the structure of the brain, its physiology is notoriously hard to study because of the brain’s extreme delicacy. It is typically the case in fatal accidents that, when the skull is breached, the brain erupts in a cloud of gold, leaving little besides shredded filament and leaf from which nothing useful can be discerned. For decades the prevailing theory of memory was that all of a person’s experiences were engraved on sheets of gold foil; it was these sheets, torn apart by the force of the blast, that were the source of the tiny flakes found after accidents. Anatomists would collect the bits of gold leaf—so thin that light passes greenly through them—and spend years trying to reconstruct the original sheets, with the hope of eventually deciphering the symbols in which the deceased’s recent experiences were inscribed.
– Ted Chiang
There is no “trade-off” possible when something has been irreversibly lost—you can’t trade off an extinct species or a collapsed ecosystem. They’re gone.
– James Meadway
People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.
– James Baldwin
I used to think, I’m concerned for my children and grandchildren. Now it’s to the point where I’m concerned about myself.
– Mike Flannigan
We often search for a sense of intrinsic identity. But when we search for a singular, permanent, or independent self, we might find that who we are resists absolute definition.
– Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel
Like a great river that runs down toward the ocean, the narrowness of discipline leads into the openness of panoramic awareness.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Success is liking yourself, liking what you do and liking how you do it.
– Maya Angelou
A dream is implanted within you for a reason. It’s yours. You need to work to make it happen; to share it. This is essentially what I am always saying to other people, whether they are actors or artists. I say it to human beings. Make the world you want to exist happen. It’s a huge and glorious goal, but it’s the only one that counts. Create your fair and loving world, and invite everyone in; welcome everyone who makes it to the borders; make it a place that harbors and nourishes everyone who visits. Banish evil and prejudice and limitation. I have seen a lot in my life, but I’ve yet to see anything or anyone that is awful or misguided who can’t be conquered or loved or encouraged or altered. Thrive rather than whine. Push yourself. Test yourself. Make yourself worthy of that glittering dream you carry around in your heart. Rise to your own occasion.
– Beah Richards
I listen and the voice is of a world collapsing endlessly, a frozen world, under a faint untroubled sky, enough to see by, yes, and frozen too. And I hear it murmur that all wilts and yields . . . forever lapsing and crumbling away…
– Samuel Beckett
Spend more time in conversation with those who can meet you at the intersection of poetry and prayer. May you encounter those who are fluent in dance, tears, and laughter. May the amazement be mutual.
– Dr. Thema
Half the fun of the travel is the esthetic of lostness. We travel for romance, we travel for architecture, and we travel to be lost.
– Ray Bradbury
Mysteriously, wonderfully, I bid farewell to what goes. I greet what comes; for what comes cannot be denied and what goes cannot be detained.
– Chuang Tzu
emotional labor is when you get sad while doing labor
– Arlie Hochschild
There are so many people who get through school because of music. There are so many people who get through work because of music. There are so many people who get through life because of music. The importance of music in our schools & lives cannot be overstated. It’s invaluable.
– Vaughan Fleischfresser
Jorge Luis Borges fantasizes about Shakespeare speaking to God: I who have been so many men in vain want to be one, to be myself. God answered him out of a whirlwind: I too am not I; I dreamed the world as you, Shakespeare, dreamed your own work, and among the forms of my own dream are you, who like me are many, yet no one.
– Katia Mitova
Slowly …
Life unfolds
a petal at a time
slowly
The beauty of the process is crippled
when I try to hurry growth.
Life has its inner rhythm
which must be respected.
It cannot be rushed or hurried.
Like daylight stepping out of darkness,
like morning creeping out of night,
life unfolds slowly a petal at a time
like a flower opening to the sun,
slowly.
God’s call unfolds
a Word at a time
slowly.
A disciple is not made in a hurry.
Slowly I become like the One
to whom I am listening.
Life unfolds
a petal at a time
like you and I
becoming followers of Jesus,
discipled into a new way of living
deeply and slowly.
Be patient with life’s unfolding petals.
If you hurry the bud it withers.
If you hurry life it limps.
Each unfolding is a teaching
a movement of grace filled with silent pauses
breathtaking beauty
tears and heartaches.
Life unfolds
a petal at a time
deeply and slowly.
May it come to pass!
– Macrina Wiederkehr
Love is something you and I must have. We must have it because our spirit feeds upon it, we must have it because, without it we become weak and faint. Without love our self-esteem weakens. Without it our courage fails. Without love, we can no longer look out confidently at the world. With love, we are creative. With love, we march tirelessly. With love, and with love alone, we are able to sacrifice for others.
– Chief Dan George
The world that used to nurse us now keeps shouting inane instructions. That’s why I ran to the woods.
– Jim Harrison
I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I’m doing.
– John Cage
A little bit of hell is all of hell, right? A little bit of delusion is all of delusion. And, just the same way, a little bit of enlightenment is all of enlightenment, even in the moment you’re reaching, and full of longing, and thinking you don’t have it, of course you have it. Because your Buddha nature’s always with you. It’s just that you haven’t noticed yet. It’s always now and we’re always here now and enlightenment is just the basis of our consciousness. Thinking it’s not here is one of the things that keeps you from noticing it. You might not be deluded in this moment at all. You might be quite free. You might feel the joy that’s just the natural joy of being human.
– John Tarrant
In all kinds of healing practices, at least in West Africa, the idea is that knowledge is precious, and you learn it over a long period of time. In time, you become the custodian of that knowledge. Your greatest obligation, however, is to pass that knowledge onto the next generation. If the knowledge is correct, it will continue to be used.
– Anna Badkhen
The price of having an identity is the inability to transform it.
– Catherine Lacey
THE EXHAUSTION OF ACTING NORMAL
IN A WEIRD WORLD
Nine-to-fives are just
paid acting gigs.
“Be yourself”
“Be authentic”
and
“There’s no such thing as a stupid question”.
says the world,
but it’s lying.
The famous are nobodies
suckling on a culturally agreed upon
definition of ’talent’ that
your heart never had a say in.
The internet:
rabbit holes full of
dumpster fires where
influencers say “Hey guys…!”
with dead eyes.
Beware praise…
If someone builds you a pedestal
they’ve also dug you a grave.
The people who haven’t lived long
enough to erect statues of themselves
are busy disguising envy as
moral high ground.
Those who are overly concerned
with who they are
don’t know who they are.
A diagnosis publicly next to your name
holds more esteem than the
Doctor who awarded it to you
(and the PhD after their name).
People do things to forget their life
but want to be remembered.
Turn the hand wash tap on and off
in public toilets, without washing your hands
so patrons can hear the
illusion of people behaving correctly
so society doesn’t fall apart.
People confidently talk about the world ending
by nuclear, environmental, or cultural disaster
unconsciously desperate to outsource
their own mortality.
Politicians courageously lead you
through their own fart mist of fear.
No one knows who
to believe anymore.
All I know is I respect the way
a tree won’t answer
a question over a politician.
There’s no such thing as progress,
only new ways to start wars.
Life’s always been a battle between
dead poets and living accountants.
The world wants you to turn on yourself
and pretend it’s for your own good.
(Because you’re dangerous
when you’re making something
beautiful.)
Cockroach the shit out of life long enough
(with your weirdness miraculously intact)
and you’ll have a gift for the world.
– Darby Hudson
It is perfectly possible — indeed, it is far from uncommon — to go to bed one night, or wake up one morning, or simply walk through a door one has known all one’s life, and discover, between inhaling and exhaling, that the self one has sewn together with such effort is all dirty rags, is unusable, is gone: and out of what raw material will one build a self again? The lives of men — and, therefore, of nations — to an extent literally unimaginable, depend on how vividly this question lives in the mind. It is a question which can paralyze the mind, of course; but if the question does not live in the mind, then one is simply condemned to eternal youth, which is a synonym for corruption.
– James Baldwin
The body of the woman is the overwhelming triumph of flesh. The woman is a concrete universal; she is a world, not an externalized world, but under the world, the warm interiority of the world, a compressed internalized world.
– Gilles Deleuze
Protect your spirit, because you are in the place where spirits get eaten.
– John Trudell
There is an urgency to turn home, get this assignment of pleasure done, strike it off the list where vanish will be the last task.
– Killarney Clary
I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance. The cloud clears as you enter it. I have learned this, but like everyone, I learned it late.
– Beryl Markham
The Past
It shows up one summer in a greatcoat,
storms through the house confiscating,
says it must be paid and quickly,
says it must take everything.
Your children stare into their cornflakes,
your wife whispers only once to stop it,
because she loves you and she sees it
darken the room suddenly like a stain.
What did you do to deserve it,
ruining breakfast on a balmy day?
Kiss your loved ones. Night is coming.
There was no life without it anyway.
– Michael Ryan
There’s a vast underground network for goodness at work in this world — a web of people who’ve put reading at the center of their lives because they know from experience that reading makes them more expansive, generous people…
– George Saunders
It’s hard to say just what happens, other than the words of each poem itself. But that isn’t quite right. It’s as if the words are a way for the poet to inscribe silence. You turn the page, wondering, and it arrives again—something quite beyond what is told.
– Aram Saroyan
We are taking up the responsibility of knowing ourselves as part of this intricate and sensitive system in which everything we do matters, while reminding ourselves that we are not limited to the labels we assign ourselves.
– Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel
Suddenly my clocks agree.
One has been stopped for several
months, but twice a day
they have this tender moment.
– Jim Harrison
This was our ambition: to be small and clear and free.
– John Ashbery
Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal but which the reader recognizes as his own.
– Salvatore Quasimodo
All thought is a kind of dreaming. The preservative and transformative mindsets are more longlasting and plant-like while the more changeable kinetic and empathic ways of being are more animalish. If animals express more of the actively wakeful sentient mind of life, plants may represent the more reflectively dreamy mind of life. Freer from the immediate urgencies of the life-or-death choices of dramatic self-motion, plants may actually have evolved the philosophical and meditative ways of being far beyond what industrious animals can imagine. But must such deep-seated, big picture fields of experience be so missing from our current human worlds of urgent travail? Maybe it helped to value monks and meditation more in earlier ages. If animals are “the stalkers” while plants are “the dreamers” (using Castaneda’s description of the two kinds of sorcerers), such openness may have helped the first photosynthesizers appreciate the great value of sunlight. This is not to suggest that the stalking/animal way of being is without mental activity, just as the dreaming/plant mode is not entirely metaphysical. Dreams can be as dramatic as waking life, sometimes more so. When I as a songwriter am composing I may be more plant-like when imagining and innovating while, when performing the song I’m being more like an animal. So all living things could be seen as planimals, since we’re all composed of both an active, stalking mindset and a reflective, dreaming one. It’s time to outgrow the “Vulcan” belief that intellectual pursuits are unemotional. More active feelings lead in kinetic and empathic pursuits, while the more reflective feelings of awe, curiosity, insight, and inspiration come to the fore in our preservative and transformative processes of awareness.
– George Gorman
SUNDAY MORNING EARLY
My daughter and I paddle identical red kayaks
across the lake. Pulling hard, we slip easily
through the water. Far from either shore
it hits me that my daughter is a young woman,
and suddenly everything is a metaphor for how
short a time we are granted on earth:
the red boats on the blue-black water,
the russet and gold of late summer’s sunburnt grasses,
the empty blue sky. We stop and listen to the stillness.
I say, “It’s Sunday, and here we are
in the church of the out-of-doors.”
Then I wish I’d had the sense to stay quiet.
That’s the trick in life — learning to leave well enough alone.
Our boats drift north to where the chirring
of grasshoppers reaches us from the rocky hills.
A clap of thunder beyond those hills. How well sound
travels over water. I want to say just the right thing,
something stronger and truer than a lame I love you.
I want my daughter to know that, through her, I live
a life that was closed to me before. I paddle up
beside her, lean out from the boat, and touch
her hand. I start to speak, then stop.
– David Romtvedt
I think we should see the fear of gays, drag queens, etc. as part of the same thing as defunding libraries, increasing cops, anti-homelessness, true crime—it’s all about demonizing all public space and culture.
It is much easier to control people when they are lonely, isolated, and do not experience anything outside of individualized, corporate-controlled spheres of influence.
It’s a self-feeding system. The less you are exposed to the diversity of experience inherent to public spaces, the more you want to replicate the tightly-controlled world you inhabit. The more scared you become. Thus more willing to support what replicates your privatized world.
– P.E. Moskowitz
Time has two aspects. There is the arrow, the running river without which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or creation. And there is the circle or the cycle, without which there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a world without clocks or seasons or promises.
– Urusla Le Guin
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
Not for Love or Money. Not on your life.
No, said the cabbie when I asked him to change the station.
No, said the waiter when I tried to apologize for spilling the soup.
No, said my mother, when I begged her to stop firing her nurses.
No, said my daughter, when I told her she’d feel better tomorrow.
Not now. Not ever. On no account.
Under no circumstances.
Oh, n, what would we do
without your almost blissfully stubborn
negativity, your fervent
refusal to look
on the bright side, your delight
in slamming the door with such emphasis
it’ll never be opened again? Doctrinaire. Single-minded.
Devoted to your convictions.
Th