Integration is
more important
than acceleration.
– Darion Gracen
Every collaboration helps you grow.
– Brian Eno
There is reason after all, that some people wish to colonize the moon, and others dance before it as an ancient friend.
– James Baldwin
Sometimes you need a
“stop doing” list as badly
as you do a “to do” list.
– varun singhal
In Ojibwe and Cree
culture, “leadership”
didn’t mean power;
it meant caring.
– Tanya Talaga
Wonder is my second favorite condition to be in, after love—and I sometimes wonder whether there’s even a difference: maybe love is just wonder aimed at a beloved. Wonder is like grace, in that it’s not a condition we grasp: wonder grasps us. We do have the freedom to elude wonder’s grasp. We have the freedom to do all sorts of stupid things. By deploying cynicism, [hyper]rationalism, fear, arrogance, judgmentalism, we can evade wonder nonstop, all our lives.
– David James Duncan
Science rushes headlong, without selectivity, at whatever is knowable, in the blind desire to know all at any cost. Philosophical thinking, on the other hand, is ever on the scent of those things which are most worth knowing, the great and the important insights.
– F. Nietzsche
Map
by Linda Hogan
This is the world
so vast and lonely
without end, with mountains
named for men
who brought hunger
from other lands,
and fear
of the thick, dark forest of trees
that held each other up,
knowing fire dreamed of swallowing them
and spoke an older tongue,
and the tongue of the nation of wolves
was the wind around them.
Even ice was not silent.
It cried its broken self
back to warmth.
But they called it
ice, wolf, forest of sticks,
as if words would make it something
they could hold in gloved hands,
open, plot a way
and follow.
This is the map of the forsaken world.
This is the world without end
where forests have been cut away from their trees.
These are the lines wolf could not pass over.
This is what I know from science:
that a grain of dust dwells at the center
of every flake of snow,
that ice can have its way with land,
that wolves live inside a circle
of their own beginning.
This is what I know from blood:
the first language is not our own.
There are names each thing has for itself,
and beneath us the other order already moves.
It is burning.
It is dreaming.
It is waking up.
To maintain a deep, sustained practice of mindfulness is to consistently disidentify with the experience of self as willing agent, to let go of the obsessive need to discriminate, judge, and choose.
– C. W. Huntington Jr.
We’ve learned that people are impossible, even the ones we love most—especially the ones we love most: they’re damaged, prickly and set in their ways. Also, they’ve gotten old and a little funny, which can be draining.
– Anne Lamott
TAKING SIDES
Today I am taking sides.
I am taking the side of Peace.
Peace, which I will not abandon
even when its voice is drowned out
by hurt and hatred,
bitterness of loss,
cries of right and wrong.
I am taking the side of Peace
whose name has barely been spoken
in this winnerless war.
I will hold Peace in my arms,
and share my body’s breath,
lest Peace be added
to the body count.
I will call for de-escalation
even when I want nothing more
than to get even.
I will do it
in the service of Peace.
I will make a clearing
in the overgrown
thicket of cause and effect
so Peace can breathe
for a minute
and reach for the sky.
I will do what I must
to save the life of Peace.
I will breathe through tears.
I will swallow pride.
I will bite my tongue.
I will offer love
without testing for deservingness.
So don’t ask me to wave a flag today
unless it is the flag of Peace.
Don’t ask me to sing an anthem
unless it is a song of Peace.
Don’t ask me to take sides
unless it is the side of Peace.
– Irwin Keller
I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape — the loneliness of it; the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.
– Andrew Wyeth
Whoever is versed in the jargon does not have to say what he thinks, does not even have to think properly. The jargon takes over this task and devalues thought.
– Theodor Adorno
To write is to surrender oneself to the fascination of the absence of time.
– Blanchot
HOW COULD I
how could I
how could I
do such things
living in this hideous world
subject to its laws
toying with its laws.
I need God, so that He may forgive me
I need a God of mercy.
– Czesław Milosz
The same media conglomerates that sell us empire fantasy stories have a little to say about the real world truth of imperial violence. And they have nothing to say about the way empires of shaped the intimate worlds of our families.
– Héctor Tobar, Our Migrant Souls
My wish is to stay always like this,
living quietly in a corner
of nature.
– Claude Monet
I feel the almond in the shell, the water in the earth, the fire in the stone.
– Joseph Joubert, (tr. Paul Auster)
My read is that so many people have only been in therapy and such because the world has become more hostile and ill-fitting for psycho-emotional homeostasis,
so this is the time people finally noticed we have to get good at helping people cope with an environment that we were never meant to live in,
And a) we’re just not very good at it yet,
b) the currently extant modalities of psychotherapy, healing, etc mostly came out of war and post-war environments (wwi, wwii, & Vietnam come to mind), and those foundational assumptions seem less well-suited to the problems of an abundant society whose problems are less “a series of horrifying events have happened to me” and more “a constant unending trickle of noise pollution, circadian chaos, and biological disruption has never not been with me, and it’s accompanied by weird status stuff and childhood complexes from being restrained to a desk and so on”
C) the people and institutions working on these problems are THEMSELVES traumatized and mis-shapen, trying to earn society’s approval by figuring out not how to make people happy and whole, but by trying to make people functional and productive enough to satisfy some metrics and keep the money flowing
D) again, we’re just not very good at this. We lost a lot of our practical knowledge about making and keeping souls whole, and our supposed replacements are supposed to be physical understandings of brain chemicals and the nervous system and such… and our understanding of those is pretty much at the level medicine was at back when leeches and humours were all the rage, so. Not expecting amazing things from that front for awhile.
– River Kenna, @the_wilderless
You don’t have to turn this into something. It doesn’t have to upset you.
– Marcus Aurelius
And no one will listen to us until we listen to ourselves.
– Marianne Williamson
You should be angry… So use that anger, yes. You write it. You paint it. You dance it. You march it. You vote it.
– Maya Angelou
We’re all scared most of the time. Life would be lifeless if we weren’t. Be scared, and then jump into that fear. Again and again. Just remember to hold on to yourself while you do it.
– Emma Hooper
The artist is not a catechist.
– Thomas Merton
The highest purpose of art is to inspire. What else can you do? What else can you do for anyone but inspire them?
– Bob Dylan
Healing feels less like an end point or a static place of arrival and more like a way of being—a way of being in deeper conversation with what I can’t control.
– McCall Erickson
Be loved, be admired, be necessary; be somebody.
– Simone de Beauvoir
It will never not be amazing when the exact right word appears in a story draft and thus rearranges your understanding of the material by its presence. One of the moments of surprise and awe I’m always writing toward, but also almost impossible to force.
– Matt Bell
I’m terrified at the moral apathy, the death of the heart, which is happening in my country. These people have deluded themselves for so long that they really don’t think I’m human… And this means that they have become, in themselves, moral monsters.
– James Baldwin
When distance is measured on foot
stars appear closer.
– E. V. Ramakrishnan
The mountain is
what the mountain
is, and you
adjust,
the old monk told
his students.
– The Old Monk
You must tell yourself, ‘No matter how hard it is, or how hard it gets, I’m going to make it.’
– Les Brown
Stories are a technology that have always allowed us to hold things larger than ourselves.
– Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee
I am thankful for my struggle because without it, I wouldn’t have stumbled upon my strength.
– Alexandra Elle
The days so short, the nights so quick to flee, The world so wide, so deep and dark the sea, So dark the sea;
– Willa Cather
I cannot wrench something out of nothing … I am beneath language, underwater.
– Rebecca M Johnson
When I was young, I was attracted to sorrow. It seemed interesting. It seemed an energy that would take me somewhere. Now I am older, if not old, and I hate sorrow. I see that it has no energy of its own, but uses mine, furtively. I see that it is leaden, without breath, and repetitious, and unsolvable. And now I see that I am sorrowful about only a few things, but over and over.
– Mary Oliver
Nil desperandum (never despair).
— Horace
We may be only one of millions of advanced civilizations. Unfortunately, space being spacious, the average distance between any two of these civilizations is reckoned to be at least two hundred light-years, which is a great deal more than merely saying it makes it sound. It means for a start that even if these beings know we are here and are somehow able to see us in their telescopes, they’re watching light that left Earth two hundred years ago. So, they’re not seeing you and me. They’re watching the French Revolution and Thomas Jefferson and people in silk stockings and powdered wigs – people who don’t know what an atom is, or a gene, and who make their electricity by rubbing a rod of amber with a piece of fur and think that’s quite a trick. Any message we receive from them is likely to begin “Dear Sire,” and congratulate us on the handsomeness of our horses and our mastery of whale oil. Two hundred light-years is a distance so far beyond us as to be, well, just beyond us.
– Bill Bryson
Our minds abandon an opinion either willingly or unwillingly. Willingly, when we realize it’s false, unwillingly, when it’s true.
– Alain Badiou
Once grounded, there’s nowhere left to race to, nothing left to pine after, and no more imagined perfections to fall short of.
– Mark Nepo
The Prophets sought to convey: that morally speaking, there is no limit to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings, that indifference to evil is worse than evil itself, that in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.
– Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel
To live well in the Anthropocene, I find understanding complexity extremely valuable. It differs so much from my previous way of understanding the world – mechanical, linear, controllable, knowable, purposeless – that it’s not only a knowledge system but informs another way of being and acting in the world.
– Jessica Böhme
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves..
– William Shakespeare
You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know.
A private faith that does not act in the face of oppression is no faith at all.
Let it not be said that I was silent when they needed me.
If to be feelingly alive to the sufferings of my fellow-creatures is to be a fanatic, I am one of the most incurable fanatics ever permitted to be at large.
Accustom yourself to look first to the dreadful consequences of failure; then fix your eye on the glorious prize which is before you; and when your strength begins to fail, and your spirits are well-nigh exhausted, let the animating view rekindle your resolution, and call forth in renewed vigour the fainting energies of your soul.
– William Wilberforce
Can I learn to control resentment and hostility, the ambivalence, born somewhere far below the conscious level? If I cannot, I shall lose the person I love. There is nothing to be done but go ahead with life moment by moment and hour by hour – put out birdseed, tidy the rooms, try to create order and peace around me even if I cannot achieve it inside me. Now at ten thirty there is such a radiant light outside that the house feels dark. I look through the hall into the cozy room, all in darkness, right through to the window at the end, and a transparent sheaf of golden and green leaves. And here in my study the sunlight is that autumn white, so clear, it calls for an inward act to match it . . . clarify, clarify.
– May Sarton
Oh my. I think I’ve found my spiritual motto.
“Ad Maiorem Matris Gloriam — For the Greater Glory of the Mother”
– James Ford
I could smell the curves of the river beyond the dusk and I saw the last light supine and tranquil upon tideflats like pieces of broken mirror, then beyond them lights began in the pale clear air, trembling a little like butterflies hovering a long way off.
– William Faulkner
I think that the cornerstones of my practice are the two koans my teacher continues to bring up to me. The first is: “What’s happening now and what is it to practice with it?
The second is: “This very mind is Buddha.” Not some mind in the future, when I have perfect Samadhi or perfect compassion, but this very mind, in this very now. What is it to practice with that?”
– via Sweeping Zen
Your voice can be the key to unlocking your posture, and your posture the key to unlocking your voice. Working from one to the other creates the most nurturing, productive synergy in which a singer, speaker, business person, or homemaker can engage.
– Alexander Technique Manhattan
The fading away of the Tao is when openness turns into spirit, spirit turns into energy, and energy turns into form. When form is born, everything is thereby stultified. The functioning of the Tao is when form turns into energy, energy turns into spirit, and spirit turns into openness. When openness is clear, everything thereby flows freely.
Therefore ancient sages investigated the beginnings of free flow and stultification, found the source of evolution, forgot form to cultivate energy, forgot energy to cultivate spirit, and forgot spirit to cultivate openness.
When openness turns into spirit, spirit turns into energy, energy turns into form, and form turns into vitality, then vitality turns into attention. Attention turns into social gesturing, social gesturing turns into elevation and humbling. Elevation and humbling turn into high and low positioning, high and low positioning turns into discrimination.
Discrimination turns into official status, status turns into cars. Cars turn into mansions, mansions turn into palaces. Palaces turn into banquet halls, banquet halls turn into extravagance. Extravagance turns into acquisitiveness, acquisitiveness turns into fraud. Fraud turns into punishment, punishment turns into rebellion. Rebellion turns into armament, armament turns into strife and plunder, strife and plunder turn into defeat and destruction.
– Bill Scheffel
In a season of lengthening shadows, let us not just pray for peace, but breathe peace. Breathe peace from the heart of Being. Let us not resist the dark, but embrace it with our groundless depth. I say again, darkness is not the opposite of light, darkness is the womb of light. Be a golden leaf. And as you pass through the thin sacred threshold of Samhain, remember that in ancient Eire this holy time was the New Year, the beginning. Time to bathe the dead in tears of Presence, and bear back the bones of your Autumn ancestors into seeds of Spring. A time for weeping, and a time for laughter. But between, and ever between, a season of silence.
– Fred LaMotte
Only all human beings taken together make up humanity, only all the forces taken together make up the world. These are often in conflict with each other, and in seeking to destroy, they hold nature together and restore it. From the least animal artisan impulse to the highest exercise of the most intellectual art, from the child’s elation and exultation to the most excellent utterance of the orator and singer, from the first bellows of the boys to the monstrous institutions through which countries are preserved and conquered, from the lightest benevolence and the most fleeting love to the fiercest passion and the most serious covenant, from the purest sense of the sensible present to the faintest inklings and hopes of the farthest spiritual future, all this and much more lies in man and must be trained; but not in one, but in many. Every facility is important and it needs to be developed. If one person only promotes the beautiful and the other only the useful, then both together make up one person. The useful carries itself, for the crowd produces it, and all can not do without it; the beautiful must be promoted, because few represent it, and many need it.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
At no other time (than autumn) does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more honeysweet where you feel it touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Persistence—the ability to hang in there with something difficult without turning away, to be willing to simply wait when waiting is what’s called for—is not a throwaway virtue, and it is not simply a form of passivity. Persistence is a powerful and positive virtue that can be cultivated and developed. It’s a key practice for nurturing all the qualities of maturity that we value: stability, responsibility, self-acceptance, a loving heart—all require that we persist with what we are up to, that we stick with steadfastly, without glancing off or running away.
– Norman Fischer
After a diligent inquiry, I can discern four principal causes of the ruin of Rome, which continued to operate in a period of more than a thousand years. I. The injuries of time and nature. II. The hostile attacks of the Barbarians and Christians. III. The use and abuse of the materials. And, IV. The domestic quarrels of the Romans.
– Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
The next time there’s no ground to stand on, don’t consider it an obstacle. Consider it a remarkable stroke of luck. We have no ground to stand on, and at the same time it could soften us and inspire us. Finally, after all these years, we could truly grow up.
– Pema Chodron
In the land of lies
every lie is true. When rain
falls the soil stays dry.
In the land of truth
each truth is a lie. When sun
shines everything burns.
In the land of life
how many lie dead and breathe
the air of mourning
in this or that land?
– George Szirtes
I wait for those lights, I know some of you do too, wherever you are, I mean when you are standing by an ocean, alone, within the calmness of your spirit. Be planetary.
– Etel Adnan, Shifting the Silence
TO LICINIUS (Horace, Odes II, 10)
You’ll do better, Licinius, not to spend your life
Venturing too far out on the dangerous waters,
Or else, for fear of storms, staying too close in
To the dangerous rocky shoreline. That man does best
Who chooses the middle way, so he doesn’t end up
Living under a roof that’s going to ruin
Or in some gorgeous mansion everyone envies.
The tallest pine shakes most in a wind storm;
The loftiest tower falls down with the loudest crash;
The lightning bolt heads straight for the mountain top.
Always expect reversals; be hopeful in trouble,
Be worried when things go well. That’s how it is
For the man whose heart is ready for anything.
It’s true that Jupiter brings on the hard winters;
It’s also true that Jupiter takes them away.
If things are bad right now, they won’t always be.
Apollo isn’t always drawing his bow;
There are times when he takes up his lyre and plays,
And awakens the music sleeping upon the strings.
Be resolute when things are going against you,
But shorten sail when the fair wind blows too strong.
– David Ferry
Theory does not contain answers to everything; it reacts to the world, which is faulty to the core.
– Adorno
We are not powerless. We are indispensable despite all the atrocities of state and corporate policy to the contrary. At minimum, we have the power to stop cooperating with our enemies.
– June Jordan
What if every rejection included a cool animal fact?
“Declined, but did you know hummingbirds are the only known birds that can fly backward?”
– Will Musgrove
If you find yourself struggling with a lot of distractions, you can use every distraction as an object of meditation. Then they cease to be distractions and become supports for your meditation practice.
– Mingyur Rinpoche
Every day you move farther outside
the outlines, kinder, more dangerous.
Where will you be going.
Who will the others be.
– Jean Valentine
The lives of the poor and the sick
are recorded in the history of lines.
So many millions upon millions have gone
to their deaths in lines, waited for bread in lines.
You will not find the names of wealth
and power in the history of lines.
– Eugene Ruggles
It is this capacity to separate awareness from the common reflex of continual judging that can be transformative.
– Andrew Olendzki
For an expression to be beautiful it must say more than is necessary while nevertheless saying precisely what it must … there must be abundance and economy … The sound must be brief and the meaning infinite.
– Joseph Joubert, (tr. Paul Auster)
sky gazing with dog
Bethlehem star shining
over a broken jerusalem
– Joan Halifax
Personal suffering begins when we are crucified between these opposites. If we try to embrace one without paying tribute to the other, we degrade paradox into contradiction. Yet both pairs of opposites must be equally honored. To suffer one’s confusion is the first step in healing.
– Robert A. Johnson
Joseph Campbell observes that the quester is precisely a person who has failed, because his or her life does not work. Interior difficulties force questers to reorganize their life on a higher level, to become, out of necessity, adept at the art of living.
– Bud Harris
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. But the challenge has always been to individuate. And part of what it means is to face our inner divisions, to see how we are divided inside and to find ways to tolerate the inner tension.
– Michael Meade
I’ve Listened to Buddha
I’m waiting on a train
It’s New Year’s Day and everybody’s changed
Oh God I hate this day
We’re so alive but I’m standing still in a way
I’ve been laughing my ass off
’cause there’s so much more to be
I’ve listened to Buddha
and now guess what I can see
A light I haven’t seen before
but now it’s shining right through my door
I’m glad to understand the meaning of romance
It makes me wanna break this chain
’cause it’s driving me insane
How did we come this far
losing all of our hearts
Just some can understand
why I choose to walk the longest road
Well it makes my skin a little bit thicker
so I can use it as a warm coat
No I still don’t know why I said good bye
to the people that I love the most of all
I just listened to Buddha
’cause I don’t want to fall
A light I haven’t seen before
but now it’s shining right through my door
I’m glad to understand the meaning of romance
It makes me wanna break this chain
’cause it’s driving me insane
How did we come this far
losing all of our hearts
– Stevie Ann
LAKE AND MAPLE
I want to give myself
utterly
as this maple
that burned and burned
for three days without stinting
and then in two more
dropped off every leaf;
as this lake that,
no matter what comes
to its green-blue depths,
both takes and returns it.
In the still heart,
that refuses nothing,
the world is twice-born—
two earths wheeling,
two heavens,
two egrets reaching
down into subtraction;
even the fish
for an instant doubled,
before it is gone.
I want the fish.
I want the losing it all
when it rains and I want
the returning transparence.
I want the place
by the edge-flowers where
the shallow sand is deceptive,
where whatever
steps in must plunge,
and I want the ones
who come in secret to drink
only in early darkness,
and I want the ones
who are swallowed.
I want the way
the water sees without eyes,
hears without ears,
shivers without will or fear
at the gentlest touch.
I want it the way it
accepts the cold moonlight
and lets it pass,
the way it lets
all of it pass
without judgment or comment.
There is a lake,
Lalla Ded sang, no larger
than one seed of mustard,
that all things return to.
O heart, if you
will not, cannot, give me the lake,
then give me the song.
– Jane Hirshfield
why
is what I ask myself
maybe it is the afrikan in me
still trying to get home
after all these years
but when i wake up to the heat of morning
galloping down the highway of my life
something hopeful rises in me
rises and runs me out into the road
and i lob my fierce thigh high
over the rump of the day and honey
i ride i ride
– Lucille Clifton
The Net of Indra is a vast, bejeweled matrix spanning and encompassing the whole universe. From every knot hangs a jewel, and each jewel reflects all the other jewels within the net. My father’s life was one jewel hanging from a knot in that infinite web, and in that jewel was reflected my life, and my brothers’ lives, and my mother’s life.
– Eugene Richards
We are not transparent to ourselves. We have intuitions, suspicions, hunches, vague musings, and strangely mixed emotions, all of which resist simple definition. We have moods, but we don’t really know them. Then, from time to time, we encounter works of art that seem to latch on to something we have felt but never recognized clearly before. Alexander Pope identified a central function of poetry as taking thoughts we experience half-formed and giving them clear expression: “what was often thought, but ne’er so well expressed.” In other words, a fugitive and elusive part of our own thinking, our own experience, is taken up, edited, and returned to us better than it was before, so that we feel, at last, that we know ourselves more clearly.
– Alain de Botton, Art as Therapy
Maybe tomorrow will be the day
everyone wakes up to write a poem.
Or maybe just you and me,
fallen asleep on duty,
fallen asleep to duty forever.
No one knows what will happen,
but you and I at least,
while the music of the murmur invents us,
will have no part in anyone’s war,
we will waste nothing,
a signal going through us,
like an inkling of god
or a hunger for strawberries
or the indisputable fact of love.
– Dean Young
And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being.
– John G. Neihardt
KINSHIP
by Ursula K. Le Guin
Very slowly burning, the big forest tree
stands in the slight hollow of the snow
melted around it by the mild, long
heat of its being and its will to be
root, trunk, branch, leaf, and know
earth dark, sun light, wind touch, bird song.
Rootless and restless and warmblooded, we
blaze in the flare that blinds us to that slow,
tall, fraternal fire of life as strong
now as in the seedling two centuries ago.
There is, then, a world immune from change. But I am not composed enough, standing on tiptoe on the verge of fire, still scorched by the hot breath, afraid of the door opening and the leap of the tiger, to make even one sentence. What I say is perpetually contradicted. Each time the door opens I am interrupted. I am not yet twenty-one. I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens. I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness; I am also a girl, here in this room.
– Virginia Woolf
Hate begets hate. Force begets force. Violence begets violence. Toughness begets toughness. And it is all a descending spiral ending in destruction for everybody. And so Jesus is right. Love is the answer. The other point is this: that we should love our enemies because hate damages the personality and injures the soul. So often we talk about what hate does to the hated person or to the hated group, and we think of the damages that we find in the hate process as it moves toward the object of hate. So when we look in our nation and we look in the South in particular, we began to talk about how much it damages the Negro for the white man to hate him, and what this hate on the part of the white group is doing to destroy the Negro, and what it is doing to destroy the physical comfort, and the individual’s freedom, and the collective freedom of the Negro. And that is true, it does destroy this. But so often we overlook the fact that hate is as damaging to the subject of hate as it is to the object of hate. Hate damages a white man, in many instances, more than it damages the Negro, for it does something to the personality; it does something to the soul. And this is why I say that our struggle in the United States today is not merely a struggle to free the Negro, but it is a struggle to free our white brothers from their fears, from their prejudices, from their hate, and all of those attitudes that destroy and damage the soul.
– Martin Luther King Jr.
We can grow beans, parse syllables, whistle old tunes, name ten fine novels and 20 fine poems, eat with chopsticks, and when the wind is south, south-east, we know a hawk from a handsaw.
– David Rollison
The sunrise will be the same
for those who wake
and those who never will.
– Dunya Mikhail
Those who are near me do not know that you are nearer to me than they are
Those who speak to me do not know that my heart is full with your unspoken words
Those who crowd in my path do not know that I am walking alone with you
Those who love me do not know that their love brings you to my heart
– R. Tagore
Body and Soul II
by Charles Wright
for Coleman Hawkins
The structure of landscape is infinitesimal,
Like the structure of music,
seamless, invisible.
Even the rain has larger sutures.
What holds the landscape together, and what holds music together,
Is faith, it appears—faith of the eye, faith of the ear.
Nothing like that in language,
However, clouds chugging from west to east like blossoms
Blown by the wind.
April, and anything’s possible.
Here is the story of Hsuan Tsang.
A Buddhist monk, he went from Xian to southern India
And back—on horseback, on camel-back, on elephant-back, and on
foot.
Ten thousand miles it took him, from 629 to 645,
Mountains and deserts,
In search of the Truth,
the heart of the heart of Reality,
The Law that would help him escape it,
And all its attendant and inescapable suffering.
And he found it.
These days, I look at things, not through them,
And sit down low, as far away from the sky as I can get.
The reef of the weeping cherry flourishes coral,
The neighbor’s back porch light bulbs glow like anemones.
Squid-eyed Venus floats forth overhead.
This is the half hour, half-light, half-dark,
when everything starts to shine out,
And aphorisms skulk in the trees,
Their wings folded, their heads bowed.
Every true poem is a spark,
and aspires to the condition of the original fire
Arising out of the emptiness.
It is that same emptiness it wants to reignite.
It is that same engendering it wants to be re-engendered by.
Shooting stars.
April’s identical,
celestial, wordless, burning down.
Its light is the light we commune by.
Its destination’s our own, its hope is the hope we live with.
Wang Wei, on the other hand,
Before he was 30 years old bought his famous estate on the Wang River
Just east of the east end of the Southern Mountains,
and lived there,
Off and on, for the rest of his life.
He never travelled the landscape, but stayed inside it,
A part of nature himself, he thought.
And who would say no
To someone so bound up in solitude,
in failure, he thought, and suffering.
Afternoon sky the color of Cream of Wheat, a small
Dollop of butter hazily at the western edge.
Getting too old and lazy to write poems,
I watch the snowfall
From the apple trees.
Landscape, as Wang Wei says, softens the sharp edges of isolation.
Clouds are some of the best storytellers. Leaping hares, dancing embers, ancient gods presenting themselves through rays of light—all gone within a brief moment. Transforming, reshaping into their new forms for an audience of trillions on the earth below.
– E. Noélle Campbell
The Fairy Queen has sent you to do brave deeds in this world. That High City that you see is in another world. Before you climb the path to it and hang your shield on its wall, go down into the valley and fight the dragon that you were sent to fight.
– Margaret Hodge
Light is a power. A great power, by which we exist, but which exists beyond our needs, in itself. Sunlight and starlight are time, and time is light. In the sunlight, in the days and years, life is. In a dark place life may call upon the light, naming it. But usually when you see a wizard name or call upon some thing, some object to appear, that is not the same, he calls upon no power greater than himself, and what appears is an illusion only. To summon a thing that is not there at all, to call it by speaking its true name, that is a great mastery, not lightly used. Not for mere hunger’s sake. Yarrow, your little dragon has stolen a cake.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
This mere existence, that is, all that which is mysteriously given to us by birth and which includes the shape of our bodies and the talents of our minds, can be adequately dealt with only by the unpredictable hazards of friendship and sympathy, or by the great and incalculable grace of love, which says with Augustine, ‘Volo ut sis (I want you to be),’ without being able to give any particular reason for such supreme and unsurpassable affirmation.
– Hannah Arendt
A lot of people who decided to run the university like a business are discovering that they can no longer lead it like a community.
– Ted McCormick
The news, which used to inform, now turns every event into a war-zone in the heart, the mind, the neighborhood and the nation. The 24/7 news cycle works to ensure we’re enraged–and divided–at every moment, almost regardless of the issues of the day.
– Pico Iyer
My Heart
by Frank O’Hara
I’m not going to cry all the time
nor shall I laugh all the time,
I don’t prefer one “strain” to another.
I’d have the immediacy of a bad movie,
not just a sleeper, but also the big,
overproduced first-run kind. I want to be
at least as alive as the vulgar. And if
some aficionado of my mess says “That’s
not like Frank!,” all to the good! I
don’t wear brown and grey suits all the time,
do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,
often. I want my feet to be bare,
I want my face to be shaven, and my heart—
you can’t plan on the heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open.
Each initiatory passage requires we become lost to all we know. The keys that unlock the doors of wisdom have to be found in the darkness or else fashioned from some loss. If the keys were in the light everyone would have already found them.
– Michael Meade
Poets are never unemployed, just underpaid.
– Kathy Skaggs
The feeling that any task is a nuisance will soon disappear if it is done in mindfulness.
– Thich Nhat Hah
The mountain makes
its own weather,
the old monk told
his students.
Dress accordingly.
– The Old Monk
I’m not at all worried that I myself might not, some day, take on some form, but I want to put off forming myself as long as possible. And then it would be best if this came about of its own accord, unintentionally.
– Robert Walser, (tr. Susan Bernofsky)
My heart is filled with wild battle.
– @RedBookJung
There’s a rough intimacy you get from keeping the poem close to the moment and place of its birth. You get to keep the roots on, a bit of the dirt too.
– Andew Schelling
Art relies on surprise. In order to engage the reader (and yourself as a writer), you have to braid. You can’t be confusing, but you can’t spell it all out, either. The human mind, when it reads, needs something to figure out.
– Heather Sellers
Hoping for the best, prepared for the worst, and unsurprised by anything in between.
– Maya Angelou
This
beauty that collects
dry leaves in pools
and pockets and goes
freezingly, just able
still to swiftly flow
it goes, it goes.
– James Schuyler
Here’s a quick reminder that we all live in the varying shades of a dystopian nightmare set in paradise. If you’re not living at the edge of some kind of breaking point, that’s nice, but most people are at that point or beyond. One script of the nightmare tells us that we should aim for comfort, that success looks like ‘what nightmare? life is great. I love this bubble.’ Can I suggest that we aim instead for communion – with the under-structure of paradise, with each other, with the life-force that pushes between the cracks in the dystopian pavement. Love one another. Be relentless in your resistance to atomisation. There’s gold everywhere. Hold fast, with love.
– Tom Hirons
There are no exact guidelines. There are probably no guidelines at all. The only thing I can recommend at this stage is a sense of humor, an ability to see things in their ridiculous and absurd dimensions, to laugh at others and at ourselves, a sense of irony regarding everything that calls out for parody in this world. In other words, I can only recommend perspective and distance. Awareness of all the most dangerous kinds of vanity, both in others and in ourselves. A good mind. A modest certainty about the meaning of things. Gratitude for the gift of life and the courage to take responsibility for it. Vigilance of spirit.
– Václav Havel
Two dippers and Orion—I forget The rest or never learned or failed to see Anything but the stars scattered on our scale Of pulse and breath. I want him to show me Archer, bear, lion; I want marble busts Of myth to form above us like pillars.
– Gary Fincke, Naming the Sky
“May it be granted to me that my body doesn’t survive my soul!” The prayer of Wittgenstein as he grew older.
– Pico Iyer
The grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere.
– John Muir
Some things are more precious because they don’t last long.
– Oscar Wilde
The Sleeper’s Song
I climb the seven levels
Of the dream—
In the dream you are
An elegy to the departed
An image of censorship
I go up
The seven levels of the dream—
All of them.
Nothing happens.
Nothing ends.
– Ghassan Zaqtan
raindrops dripping
off a barbed-wire fence
town people walk past
as if nothing happened
on the other side
– NeverEnding Story, April 15, 2018
rows of tents
behind chain-link fencing
and razor wire–
the boy flies a paper plane
into his sky of dreams
– Take 5ive, Plight of Refugees
Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.
– Anne Sexton
Linda Norton wrote that she “walked into poetry / in search of a place to rest, / a place to suffer formally”; Jack Gilbert remarked that poetry helps you to suffer more efficiently. Some comfort can be found in that.
– C.D. Wright
Longing has a country, a family, and an exquisite taste in arranging wildflowers. It has a time chosen with divine care, a quiet mythical time in which figs ripen slowly and the gazelle sleeps next to the wolf in the imagination of a boy who never witnessed a massacre.
– Mahmoud Darwish
As soon as the amphora assumes the shape of its bearer, the stars shall lie harmoniously in the soul’s ephemeris.
– Gustaf Sobin
Too long I’ve owed you this apology
For the apparently unmeaning sorrow
You were afflicted with in those old days.
But it was of the essence of the trial
You shouldn’t understand it at the time.
– Robert Frost, God’s Speech to Job
The more they try to subtract from you, the more you will multiply.
– Dr. Thema
As a person, I am neither good nor bad. I waver between the two, so to speak. So I have never really done harm to anyone — nor good, come to that. All the same, I have plenty of enemies — loyal enemies, of course.
– Erik Satie
Creatives have reputations for floating in unreality. It’s true that what they espouse hints of magic and mystery, having little to do with what the larger world calls real. People like [this] are labeled ‘hermit,’ ‘madman,’ ‘eccentric.’ Because they don’t live as others live, or accept the routine that makes the world go round, they are blamed, ridiculed, barely accepted as members of society. They are driven […] to greater extremes and further isolation, and rarely helped to do what they are born to do. Some do it anyway, and anyone who doubts the groundedness necessary for such a life should try it. To face each day supported, not by the dictates of a reliable outer framework, but by a chosen obedience to an inner necessity, one has to have one’s feet on the ground.
– Leif Anderson
Error arises not merely because of ignorance of essential facts, but also because one undertakes to judge without having learned the essential process for the formation of valid judgments.
Irrtümer entspringen nicht allein daher, weil man gewisse Dinge nicht weiß, sondern weil man sich zu urteilen unternimmt, ob man gleich noch nicht alles weiß, was dazu erfordert wird.
– Immanuel Kant
Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for.
– Maya Angelou
Beneath every behaviour there is a feeling. And beneath each feeling is a need. And when we meet that need rather than focus on the behaviour, we begin to deal with the cause, not the symptom.
– Ashleigh Warner
Why does one write, if not to put one’s pieces together? From the moment we enter school or church, education chops us into pieces: it teaches us to divorce soul from body and mind from heart. The fishermen of the Colombian coast must be learned doctors of ethics and morality, for they invented the word sentipensante, feeling-thinking, to define language that speaks the truth.
– Eduardo Galeano
I stood in the back corner watching them. They resembled three veterans who had met once more on a cold day after years of separation, and had lit a fire to warm themselves. I had pricked up my ears to overhear what they said, but none of them opened his mouth. You felt the air between them was vibrating and that a string of unspoken words was being unwound from mouth to mouth. Without the slightest doubt, this was how the angels spoke in heaven. How long did their silence last—how many hours? It seemed to me time had come to a standstill, that one hour and one century were of the same length.
– Nikos Kazantzakis, St. Francis
Christianity is a lifestyle—a way of being in the world that is simple, nonviolent, shared, and loving. However, we made it into an established religion (and all that goes with that) and avoided the lifestyle change itself. We could be warlike, greedy, racist, selfish, and vain throughout most of Christian history and still believe that Jesus is our personal Lord and Savior or continue, in good standing, to receive the sacraments. The world has no time for such silliness anymore. The suffering on earth is too great.
– Richard Rohr
The tragedy of life is not death but what we let die within us while we live.
If something comes to life in others because of you, then you have made an approach to immortality.
– Norman Cousins
This is sacred to Memory: when you are about to die, you will find yourself at the House of Hades; on the right there is a spring, by which stands a white cypress. Descending there, the souls of the dead seek refreshment. Do not even approach this spring; beyond you will find from the Pool of Memory cool water flowing; there are guards before it, who will ask you with cool penetration, what you seek from the shades of murky Hades. Say: “I am a son of earth and star-filled Heaven, I am dry with thirst and dying; but give me swiftly cool water flowing from the Pool of Memory.” And they will take pity on you by the will of the Queen of the Underworld, and they will give you water to drink from the Pool of Memory; and moreover, you will go on the great Sacred Way along with the other famed initiates and baccants make their way.
Μναμοσύνας τόδε ΕΡΙΟΝ· ἐπεὶ ἂμ μέλληισι θανεῖσθαι εἶς Ἀΐδαο δόμους εὐηρέας, ἔστ ̓ ἐπὶ δεξιὰ κρήνα, πὰρ δ ̓ αὐτὰν ἑστακῦα λευκὰ κυπάρισσος· ἔνθα κατερχόμεναι ψυχαὶ νεκύων ψύχονται. ταύτας τᾶς κράνας μεδὲ σχεδὸν ἐνγύθεν ἔλθηις. πρόσθεν δὲ εὑρήσεις τᾶς Μναμοσύνας ἀπὸ λίμνης ψυχρὸν ὕδωρ προρέον· φύλακες δ ̓ ἐπύπερθεν ἔασι. οἳ δέ σε εἰρήσονται ἐνὶ φρασὶ πευκαλίμασι ὅττι δὲ ἐξερέεις Ἄϊδος σκότος ἠερόεντος εἶπον· Γῆς παῖς ἠμι καὶ Οὐρανοῦ ἀστερόεντος. δίψαι δ ̓ ἠμὶ αὖος καὶ ἀπόλ λυμαι· ἀλλὰ δότ ̓ ὦκα ψυχρὸν ὕδωρ πιέναι τῆς Μνηνοσύνης ἀπὸ λίμνης. καὶ δή τοι ἐρέουσιν ὑποχθονίωι βασιλῆι καὶ δή τοι δώσουσι πιεῖν τᾶς Μναμοσύνας ἀπὸ λίμνας, καὶ δὴ καὶ σὺ πιὼν ὁδὸν ἔρχεαι ἅν τε καὶ ἄλλοι μύσται καὶ βάκχοι ἱερὰν στείχουσι κλεεινοί.
– Text on a Gold Foil found in Hipponion (c 400 BCE)
Honor to the soldier and sailor everywhere, who bravely bears his country’s cause. Honor, also, to the citizen who cares for his brother in the field and serves, as he best can, the same cause.
– Abraham Lincoln
This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.
– Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
– John McCrae
Who among us does not spend the greater part of his life in the shadow of an event that has not yet taken place?
– Robert Musil, (Diaries, tr. Payne)
The eye altering, alters all.
– William Blake
KANYE WEST IS NOT PICASSO
Kanye West is not Picasso
I am Picasso
Kanye West is not Edison
I am Edison
I am Tesla
Jay-Z is not the Dylan of anything
I am the Dylan of anything
I am the Kanye West of Kanye West
The Kanye West
Of the great bogus shift of bullshit culture
From one boutique to another
I am Tesla
I am his coil
The coil that made electricity soft as a bed
I am the Kanye West Kanye West thinks he is
When he shoves your ass off the stage
I am the real Kanye West
I don’t get around much anymore
I never have
I only come alive after a war
And we have not had it yet
– Leonard Cohen
I can do everything with my language. but not with my
body. What I hide by my language, my body utters. I can
deliberately mold my message, not my voice. By my voice,
whatever it says, the other will recognize “that something
is wrong with me.” I am a liar (by preterition), not an
actor. My body is a stubborn child, my language is a very
civilized adult . . .
– Roland Barthes
When you go home
tell them of us and say.
For your Tomorrow,
We Gave our Today.
– Joe Becignuil
Only is silence the word,
only in dark the light,
only in dying life :
bright the hawk’s flight
on the empty sky.
– Ursula K. Le Guin, The Creation of Ea
The Death of the Self
by Linda Pastan
Like discarded pages
from the book
of autumn, the leaves
come trembling down
in red and umber,
each a poem
or story,
an unread letter.
Think of the fires
in ancient Alexandria,
the voluminous smoke
of parchment burning.
Open your arms
to the dying colors,
to the fragile
beauties
of November.
Deep in the heart
of buried acorns,
nothing is lost.
Most people are like robots. Millions of people never analyze themselves. Mentally they are mechanical products of the factory of their environment, preoccupied with breakfast, lunch, and dinner, working and sleeping, and going here and there to be entertained. They don’t know what or why they are seeking, nor why they never realize complete happiness and lasting satisfaction. By evading self-analysis, people go on being robots, conditioned by their environment. True self-analysis is the greatest art of progress.
– Paramahansa Yogananda
To define is to limit.
– Oscar Wilde
A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.
– Bertrand Russell
Sometimes we’re so desperate for an answer, a solution, that we don’t see the next step our soul is calling us to take.
The answer we’re looking for may very well be a process – a river we follow into an answer that we can’t see YET.
– David Bedrick
There are fires that will not go out. Fires that sing with invisible mouths. Touchable fires in the hearts of the beings who are singing the long and the short of it. Telling the why and wherefore of it. Laughing and crying till nobody knows. Birthing and dying till nobody knows. Making the evidence and eating up the evidence. Making up conflicts and eating them too. Gnawing with doubt in the hearts of some. Roaring with truth in the hearts of others. Whispering glad seductions. Murmurings of what’s too far to run to. Feelings of that which is too close to hold. All from the fires that will not go out in the hearts of the living.
– George Gorman
Don’t abandon yourself. Not when you’re sick. Not when you’re tired. Not when you’ve lost the thread, the thought, or the thing you thought defined you. You will die many times in one life and create yourself anew. This is natural. This is a gift. I’ve died a few times now here in this world. The person I was: gone. Throw that older skin into the water. Give it to the sky. Step into what wants to emerge now. Nothing can hold you back when you are willing to be Yourself.
– Jeannette Encinias
In general, humanity is not well developed in its capacity for personal relating. We have a lot of trouble with violence, aggression, misunderstanding, disappointment, pain, wounding, and so on—all of it because we are not good at relationships. It is very easy to misunderstand somebody and get angry and become aggressive, or feel hurt, withdraw, and run away. But to remain in a relationship, to be real and interact in a way that not only avoids contraction or pain but that opens things up, that generates more richness, creates more openness and more freedom, is something that human beings are just beginning to learn. Throughout history, some people have been very good at that, but as a race, we are still immature. Humanity is just beginning to wake up to the importance of relationship and its amazing potential. This potential is immense, both for creating peace in the world and for personal actualization of human completeness.
– A.H. Almaas, The Power of Divine Eros
The cry I bring down from the hills belongs to a girl still burning inside my head.
– Yusef Komunyakaa
I spend my time dreaming of a universe where man would not come to the world among strangers but among his brothers.
– Milan Kundera
It is always psychologically dangerous to get caught in a duality. A duality is a good, and sometimes necessary, starting point, but ultimately it needs to be transcended.
– Yoram Kaufmann, The Way of the Image
I have never seen so few poppies in London as today. Two on the train home. And no poppy sellers. Is that a freak or a major change in the British consciousness.
– George Szirtes, On Veterans Day 2023
Facing our dark sides is painful. It is easier to know so much and no more. It is easier to turn away from our own swamp of anguish and aggression and say, “It doesn’t matter. I’ve got friends. I’m well adjusted to my job. Everyone likes me.”
– Marion Woodman
Learning to forgive takes time, sometimes years. So be patient as you weave a little forgiveness into your daily routine as a way of strengthening your capacity to forgive.
– Mark Coleman
midway on a journey
in the center of the sky
clouds of snow
– Basho
Delight in itself is the approach of sanity.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Nothing in my view is more reprehensible than those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position, which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take.
– Edward Said
I prefer the scurry
and song of blackbirds
to the usual blather
of men and women.
– Seamus Heaney
In all this inky black void, the Earth was there with this beautiful blue hue to it. The blue marble.
– Frank Borman
You have to really be broken in order to be a poet. It’s a very bad thing to tell a young person, but it’s true. Poetry comes out of all the places where you break.
– Alice Notley
Travel and tell no one,
live a true love story and tell no one,
live happily and tell no one,
people ruin beautiful things.
– Kahil Gibran
Fragment
The last block is closed in April. You
See the intrusions clouding over her face
As in the memory given you of older
Permissiveness which dies in the
Falling back toward recondite ends,
The sympathy of yellow flowers.
Never mentioned in the signs of the oblong day
The saw-toothed flames and point of other
Space not given, and yet not withdrawn
And never yet imagined: a moment’s commandment.
These last weeks teasing into providential
Reality: that your face, the only real beginning,
Beyond the gray of overcoat, that this first
Salutation plummet also to the end of friendship
With self alone. And in doing so open out
New passages of being among the correctness
Of familiar patterns. The stance to you
Is a fiction, to me a whole. I find
New options, white feathers, in a word what
You draw in around you to the protecting bone.
This page only is the end of nothing
To the top of that other. The purity
Of how hard it is to choose between others where
The event takes place and the outside setting.
Day covers all this with leaves, with laughter and tears.
But at night other sounds are heard
Propositions hitherto omitted in the heat
Of smoke. You can look at it all
Inside out for the emblem to become the statue
Of discipline that rode in out of the past.
Not forgetting either the chance that you
Might want to revise this version of what is
The only real one, it might be that
No real relation exists between my wish for you
To return and the movements of your arms and legs.
But my inability to accept this fact
Annihilates it. Thus
My power over you is absolute.
You exist only in me and on account of me
And my features reflect this proved compactness.
That coming together of masses coincides
With that stable emptiness, detaining
Where this energy, not yet or only partially
Distributed to the imagination creates
A claim to the sides of early autumn.
Suffocating, with remorse, and winking with it
To table lands of disadumbrated feeling
Treetops whose mysterious hegemony concerns
Merely, by opening around factors of accident
So as to install miscellaneous control.
The part in which you read about yourself
Grew out of this. Your interpretation is
Extremely bitter and can serve no profitable end
Except continual development. Best to break off
All further choice. In
This way new symptoms of interest having a
Common source could produce their own ingenious
Way of watering into the past with its religious
Messages and burials. Out of this cold collapse
A warm and near unpolished entity could begin.
Although beyond more reacting
To this cut-and-dried symposium way of seeing things
To outflank next mediocre condition
Of storms. The hollow thus produced
A kind of cave of the winds; distribution center
Of subordinate notions to which the stag
Returns to die: the suppressed lovers.
Then ghosts of the streets
Crowding, propagating the feeling into furious
Waves from the perfunctory and debilitated sunset.
Yet no one has time for its preoccupation.
Our daily imaginings are swiftly tilted down to
Death in its various forms. We cannot keep the peace
At home, and at the same time be winning wars abroad.
And the great flower of what we have been twists
On its stem of earth, for not being
What we are to become, fated to live in
Intimidated solitude and isolation. No brother
Bearing the notion of responsibility of self
To the surrounding neighborhood lost out of being.
Slowly as from the center of some diamond
You begin to take in the world as it moves
In toward you, part of its own burden of thought, rather
Idle musing, afternoons listing toward some sullen
Unexpected end. Seen from inside all is
Abruptness. As though to get out your eye
Sharpens and sharpens these particulars; no
Longer visible, they breathe in multicolored
Parentheses the way love in short periods
Puts everything out of focus, coming and going.
Thus your only world is an inside one
Ironically fashioned out of external phenomena
Having no rhyme or reason, and yet neither
An existence independent of foreboding and sly grief.
Nothing anybody says can make a difference; inversely
You are a victim of their lack of consequence
Buffeted by invisible winds, or yet a flame yourself
Without meaning, yet drawing satisfaction
From the crevices of that wind, living
In that flame’s idealized shape and duration.
Whereas through an act of bunching this black kite
Webs all around you with coal light: wall and reef
Imbibe and the impossible saturation,
New kinds of fun, is an earnest
Of the certain future. Yet the spores of the
Difference as it’s imagined flower
In complicated chains for the eyebrow, and pre-delineate
Phantom satisfaction as it would happen. This time
You get over the threshold of so much unmeaning, so much
Being, prepared for its event, the active memorial.
And more swiftly continually in evening, limpid
Storm winds, commas are dropped, the convention gapes,
Prostrated before a monument disappearing into the dark.
It would not be good to examine these ages
Except for sun flecks, little, on the golden sand
And coming to reappraisal of the distance.
The welcoming stuns the heart, iron bells
Crash through the transparent metal of the sky
Each day slowing the method of thought a little
Until oozing sap of touchable mortality, time lost and won.
Like the blood orange we have a single
Vocabulary all heart and all skin and can see
Through the dust of incisions the central perimeter
Our imaginations’ orbit. Other words,
Old ways are but the trappings and appurtenances
Meant to install change around us like a grotto.
There is nothing laughable
In this. To isolate the kernel of
Our imbalance and at the same time back up carefully;
Its tulip head whole, an imagined good.
The sense of that day toward its center
Is perforated or crisscrossed with rewards
As though the stumbling that stranded me here were
The means of some spontaneity. But upper pressures
Lifted the direction of the prevailing winds
Allowing an awaited entrance down below.
Yet all is different metric system
Flapping from grace to intense surprise.
As in a tub. No candle is lit. No theory
Strap it to the maturity of surroundings.
Its landscape puts toward a pointed roof
Continuing inquiry and reappraisal of always new
Facts pushing past into bright cold
As from general spindles a waterfall of data
Is absorbed above by command. Whether construed
As lead or gold it leaves a ring
On the embellished, attendant time. The farms
Knew it, that is why they stood so still.
The gold might reverse them to fields
Of flowering sand or black, ancient and intimate.
The volcanic entrance to an antechamber
Was not what either of us meant.
More outside than before, but what is worse, outside
Within the periphery, we are confronted
With one another, and our meeting escapes through the dark
Like a well.
Our habits ask us for instructions.
The news is to return by stages
Of uncertainty, too early or too late. It is the invisible
Shapes, the bed’s confusion and prattling. The late quiet.
This is how it feels.
The pictures were really pictures
Of loving and small things. There was a winter scene
And half-hidden sketches of the other three seasons.
Autumn was a giant with a gray woollen cap.
Near him was spring, a girl in green draperies
Half sitting, half standing near the trunk of an old tree.
Summer was a band of nondescript children
Bordering the picture of winter, which was indistinct
And gray like the sky of a winter afternoon.
The other pictures told in an infinity of tiny ways
Stories of the past: separate incidents
Recounted in touching detail, or vast histories
Murmured confusingly, as though the speaker
Were choked by sighs and tears, and had forgotten
The reason why he was telling the story.
It was these finally that made the strongest
Impression, they shook you like wind
Roaring through branches with no leaves left on them.
The vagueness was bigger than life and its apotheosis
Of shining incidents, colored or dark, vivid or serious.
But now the tidings are dark in the
Expected late afternoon suddenly dipping into
Reserves of anxiety and restlessness which dutifully
Puff out these late, lax sails, pennants;
The vertical black-and-white-striped weather indicator’s
One sign of triumph, a small one, to stand
For universal concessions, charters and deeds to
Wilderness or the forested sea, cord after cord
Equaling possession and possessiveness
Instantaneously extending your hesitation to an
Empire, back lands whose sparsely populated look is
Supreme dominion. It will be divided into tracks
And these be lived in the way now the lowered
Angles of this room. Waxed moustache against the impiety
Of so much air of change, but always and nowhere
A cave. Gradually old letters used as bookmarks
Inform the neighbors; an approximate version
Circulates and the incident is officially closed
And I some joy of this have, returning to the throbbing
Mirror’s stiff enclave, the sides of my face steep and overrun.
So many ways grew over to this
Mild decline. The grave of authority
Matches wits with upward-spinning lemon spirals
Telling of the influences of night, so many decisions
Not to act accruing to the outward stretches.
The civilities of day also creep
To extremities, fly on a windowpane, sweeping
The changed refuse under the rug. Just one step
Takes you into so much outside, the candor
Of what had been going on makes you pause momentarily,
A bag of October, without being able to tell it
To the others, so that it loses silence.
I haven’t made clear that I want it all from you
In writing, so as to study your facial expressions
Simultaneously: hesitations, reverse darts, the sky
Of your plans run through with many sutured points.
Only in this way can a true basis for understanding be
Set up. But meanwhile if I try to turn away
Looking for my own shadow in the excess
Like quarreling jays our heads fall to in agreement.
It exposed us on a moving gangway.
Leaning from an upper story
We should not separate in misunderstanding.
Where you were going was the key to
Saturday afternoon spent in shopping and washing dishes
Just right so the newly strengthened land would
Disinter the music box what keeps happening to
The photo of a baby girl disguised as an old man
With a long white beard. What comes after
The purge, she not mentioning it yet.
This meant (and the tone voice, repeating
“He’s hurt real bad” worked up the wall of celerity
To inaudible foam) all divers and all speechless
Apostrophes of solar unit stay on the bottom.
At last there was a chance to explore the forest,
Shadow of yawning magnetic poles, in which the castle
Had been inserted like an afterthought-bare walls
With somewhere a center and even further, a widening
To accommodate eventual reaction, such as ropes,
Pikes, chains of memory, of sleep, and an end of board.
The apotheosis had sunk away
As wind incarnates its glass cone
Aiming where further identifications should
Not be worked for, are reached. The whole
Is a mound of changing valors for some who
Live out as under a dome, are participated in
As the ordinary grandeur of a dome’s the thing that
Keeps them living so that additional grace
Is eternal procrastination, not to be considered
Unless a description of the actual scene.
Shedding perennial beauty on angles
Of questions asked and often answered in a
Given period. It all moves more slowly, yet
The change is more complete than ever before:
A pessimistic lighting up as of autumn woods
Demanding more than ever to be considered, for full
Substance. For the calculable stutter of a laugh.
Returning late you were not surprised to meet
This gray visitor, perpendicular to the weather.
Quiet ambition of the note variously sounded.
All space was to be shut out. Now there was no
Earthly reason for living; solitude proceeded
From want of money, her quincunxes standing
To protect the stillness of the air. Darkness
Intruded everywhere. This was the first day
Of the new experience. The familiar brown trees
Stirred indifferent at their roots, deeply transformed.
Like a sail its question disappeared into
An ocean of newsprint. To be precipitated
In desire, as hats are handed. Awnings raised.
Coming in the phaeton to the end of the
Day that had served on previous occasions
An orchard diminishes the already tiny
Notion of abstract good and bad qualities
Pod of darkness which goes vociferating early
Unchangeables that next in time’s mire have hid weapons.
Past waterfalls wooden huts open places
Assaulted by the wind, the usual surroundings chafed
Foreknowledge of the immense journey, as the sea
Flattens, uncritical, beyond wide docks.
To persist in the revision of very old
Studies, as though mounted on a charger,
With the door to the next room partly open
To the borrowed density, what keeps happening to
So much dead surprise, a weight of spring.
An odor of explosives hangs over the change,
Now at its apogee. This presupposes a will
To carry out all instructions, dotting the last i
Though cancelling with one stroke of a pen all
The provisions, revisions and so on made until now.
But why should the present seem so particularly urgent?
A time of spotted lakes and the whippoorwill
Sounding over everything? To release the importance
Of what will always remain invisible?
In spite of near and distant events, gladly
Built? To speak the plaits of argument,
Loosened? Vast shadows are pushed down toward
The hour. It is ideation, incrimination
Proceeding from necessity to find it at
A time of day, beside the creek, uncounted stars and buttons.
We talked, and after that went out.
It was nice. There was lots of time left
And we could always come back to it, and use it later
But the flowers dropped in the conservatory
For this was the last day of the year
Conclusion of many ups and downs, it had begun
To be foreshadowed, leaning out into novelty
As into a bank of subtraction. The night
A dull varnish muffled the comic eagerness
Of those first steps, halted for all eternity.
Then the accounts must be reexamined,
Shifting ropes of figures. Expressions of hope
Too late, a few seconds before. Only normal
Transparent width separated them from the smaller,
Flame-colored phenomena of each settled day.
This information was like a road no one ever took
Perhaps because the end was widely known, a collection
Of ceiling fumes, inert curiosity, attacked
Rarely, and out of compunction, by millionaires
Bent on turning everyday affairs into something tragic.
Thus there was a time for all activity
As memory of regret not made known
Except as illegal pilfering on the furthest
Sketchy place of the course of a day
Which scarcely matters even for anxious
Gendarmes of these late, recent hours, now
So frequently referred to. Thus floods,
Surprising us, seem to subside
When scarcely begun. Yet so much in time for
What arrives, unnoticed our separate, parallel thought.
It is that the moment of sinking in
Is always past, yet always in question, on the surface
Of the goggles of memory. Nothing is stationary
Nor yet uncertain; a rhythm of standing still
Keeps us in continual equilibrium, like an arch
That frames swiftly receding clouds, never
Getting deeper. The shouts of children
Penetrate this motion toward, as a drop of water
Slides under a lens. Soon all is shining, mined,
Tears dissolving laughter, the isolated clouds spent.
It is appropriate that this extension is,
Has been, and always should be independent
Of elaborate misgivings concerning the future status
Of a hostile address toward each other.
Not being able to see one’s way clear to
Approving ecstatic, past projects is
Equivalent to destruction of all these myths,
Wiped, like dust, from the lips. So
The weather of that day, and scalloped
Appearance of those who went by you
Are changed like mist. You see, it is
Not wrong to have nothing. But
It is important that the latter be not just
The points of disappearance, signs of the
Reduction of the little that was left, which
Disappeared all the faster because it was so little.
This part of the game keeps you for old ostracism
Long mixed with wrinkles of that horrible, blatant day
To be avoided at all costs because already known
And perhaps even more because, unlike carelessness, avoidable.
That hole, towering secret, familiar
If one is poking among the evening rubbish, yet how
Square behind you in the mirror, so much authority
And intelligence in such a miserable result.
Could it bind you because of the simplicity
Or could you in fact escape because of that limp frame,
Those conditions tumbling upward, like piles of smoke?
In that way any disorderly result is often seen
As the result of the general’s fixed smile, calipers,
Moustache, and the other way was closed too.
Out of this intolerant swarm of freedom as it
Is called in your press, the future, an open
Structure, is rising even now, to be invaded by the present
As the past stands to one side, dark and theoretical
Yet most important of all, for his midnight interpretation
Is suddenly clasped to you with the force of a hand
But a clear moonlight night in which distant
Masses are traced with parental concern.
After silent, colored storms the reply quickly
Wakens, has already begun its life, its past, just whole and sunny.
Thus reasoned the ancestor, and everything
Happened as he had foretold, but in a funny kind of way.
There was no telling whether the thought had unrolled
Down to the heap of pebbles and golden sand now
Only one step ahead, and itself both a trial and
The possibility of turning aside forever. It was the front page
Of today, looming as white as
The furthest mountains, and oh, all kinds of things
Caught in that net and shaken, so often
The way people respond to things.
It had grown up without anybody’s
Thinking or doing anything about it, so that now
It was the point of where you wanted it to go.
The fathers asked that it be made permanent,
A vessel cleaving the dungeon of the waves.
All the details had been worked out
And the decks were clear for sensations
Of joy and defeat, not so closely worked in
As to demolish the possibility of the game’s ever
Becoming dangerous again, or of an eventual meeting.
But it was not easy to tell in what direction
The permanence tended, whether it was
Easy decline, like swallows after the rough
Business of the long day, or eternal suspension
Over emptiness, dangerous perhaps, in any case
Not the peaceful cawing of which so much had been
Made. I can tell you all
About freedom that has turned into a painting;
The other is more difficult, though prompt-in fact
A little too prompt: therein lies the difficulty.
And still not satisfied with the elder
Version, to see the painting as pitch black
Was no cause for happiness among those who surround
The young, and had expected contaminated
Fires lit by the setting sun, and sunken boats.
It seemed the only honorable way, and fertile
If darkness is ever anything else. But the way
Of that song was to be consumed, corrosive;
A surprise dragging the signs
Of no peace after it, into the disquiet of early accidents.
The head notwithstanding. A narrow strip of land
Coinciding with the riders to where
Illusion mattered no more than the rest. Flat
Walls only surrounding only abating memory.
On this new area ideas kept the same
Distance, with profiles spent into the sparse
Immediacy of excavation, land and gulls to be explored.
It was time to compare all past sets of impressions
Slowly peeling these away so that the mastered
Impression of servitude and barbarism might shrink to
allegorical human width.
A moment of addition, then one hidden look
At it all, but it is scattered, not the outline
Of your famous openness, but kind of the sleeves
In the weather time after the doubtful present saluted.
All that ever came of it was words
To indicate any kind of barrier, with the land
Lasting beyond hope or scruple, both cell and vortex.
Further on it is a forest of mud pillars. Determined
To live, so that you and your possessions
May be dealt with at last, you forgot the other previous
station.
If there was no truth in it, only pleasure
In the telling, might not others set out
Across impossible oceans with this word whose power
Was the opposite reverence to secret deities
Of shame? Or absent-mindedness? Because the first memory
Now, like patches, was worn, only as the inadequate
Memento of all that was never going to be? Its
Allusion not even blasphemous, but truly insignificant
Beside that lake opening out broader than the sun!
This, then, was indifference: it was what it always had been.
The boat stood hieratically still
On the unread page of water. No moon punching
With ideas of the majesty of crowds. A universal infamy
Became the element of living, a breath
Beyond telling, because forgetful of the
Chaos whose expectancy had engendered it, and so on,
through
Popular speech down to the externals of present
Continuing”-incomplete, good-natured pictures that
Flatter us even when forgotten with dwarf speculations
About the insane, invigorating whole they don’t represent.
The victims were chosen through lightness in obscurity.
A firm look of the land, old dismissals
And the affair was concluded in snow and also in
The satisfaction of the outline formulated against the sky.
People were delighted getting up in the morning
With the density that for once seemed the promise
Of everything forgotten, and the well-being
Grew, at the expense of whoever lay dying
In a small room watched only by the progression
Of hours in the tight new agreement.
And they now too seem invaded, though before it was
The dancers who anticipated making unnecessary
The curtailment of one to the other. And yet,
As though this were strict premonition, their chance
Is canceled out by earlier claims, a victim perhaps
Of its earnestness. The dance continues, but darker, and
As if in a sudden lack of air. And as one figure
Supplants another, and dies, so the postulate of each
Tires the shuffling floor with slogans, present
Complements mindful of our absorbing interest.
One swallow does not make a summer, but are
What’s called an opposite: a whole of raveling discontent,
The sum of all that will ever be deciphered
On this side of that vast drop of water.
They let you sleep without pain, having all that
Not in the lesson, not in the special way of telling
But back to one side of life, not especially
Immune to it, in the secret of what goes on:
The words sung in the next room are unavoidable
But their passionate intelligence will be studied in you.
But what could I make of this? Glaze
Of many identical foreclosures wrested from
The operative hand, like a judgment but still
The atmosphere of seeing? That two people could
Collide in this dusk means that the time of
Shapelessly foraging had come undone: the space was
Magnificent and dry. On flat evenings
In the months ahead, she would remember that that
Anomaly had spoken to her, words like disjointed beaches
Brown under the advancing signs of the air.
– John Ashbery
Were beauty under twenty locks kept fast, Yet love breaks through and picks them all at last.
– Shakespeare
Heed not the darkness round you, dull and deep; The clouds grow thickest when the summit’s nigh.
– Paul Laurence Dunbar
Sometimes you must persevere in the face of a huge motor disturbance that settles on a whole city’s brain like a big black bowl
– Kenward Elmslie
Spirit, rehearse the journeys of the body
that are to come, the motions
of the matter that held you.
Rise up in the smoke of palo santo.
Fall to the earth in the falling rain.
Sink in, sink down to the farthest roots.
Mount slowly in the rising sap
to the branches, the crown, the leaf-tips.
Come down to earth as leaves in autumn
to lie in the patient rot of winter.
Rise again in spring’s green fountains.
Drift in sunlight with the sacred pollen
to fall in blessing.
All earth’s dust
has been life, held soul, is holy.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
Sainthood is transfigured physiology, maybe even divine
physiology. Every bodily function becomes a movement
towards the sky.
– e.m. cioran
Born from the shadow of a breath
We wander in abandonment
And are lost in the eternal, …
– George Trakl
PLEASE DON’T THANK ME FOR MY SERVICE THIS VETERAN’S DAY
NOV 11, 2023
by TCinLA, That’s Another Fine Mess
Please don’t thank me for my “service.” I was in the military, not the “Service.” Service is doing something good. Service is what the person does who fixes your car. When the word “service” is applied to the military, it helps to justify violence as a method for conflict resolution. Like “defending our freedom,” or “bringing democracy,” the word “service” is used to lower the barriers of aggression. The military solution to conflict is death and destruction. That’s not “service.” Call it what it is – the military. If you have to hurt someone to solve a problem, you are the Problem. – Arnold Stieber, US Army Veteran, 1970
I have absolutely no problem understanding exactly what Mr. Stieber wrote above, “back in the day,” with the white-hot heat of youth and the thorough pissed-offness of someone who had seen the side of life nobody ever wants to see. It’s the attitude I came home with from that same war, five years before he did.
I’ve never really gotten used to the new tradition of the past 30 years, for civilians – on discovering they are in the presence of someone who served in the military, – to say “Thank you for your service.” I have very mixed emotions about that. On the one hand, it’s nice that maybe a fourth of them have a clue why they’re saying what they are, that it isn’t merely the mouthing of polite words. On the other hand, I’m not sure why anyone would want to thank someone who served in the war I served in, or the ones that followed.
The war in Vietnam made everything in America worse. For just one thing, it harmed the economy when the government adopted a policy of both “guns” and “butter,” which led to the severe inflation of the 1970s, which gave companies looking for any way to reduce costs to start taking a hard line on employee compensation, which leaves us in the condition where the average American working stiff now makes less in terms of buying power than they did 50 years ago, I don’t know about you, but I’m not up to thanking anyone for that.
Of course, thinking further on this leads one to the obvious conclusion that it wasn’t the kids who got drafted who did any of that. They weren’t sitting in the halls of government thinking about how to distract the citizenry from the fact that this particular imperial war was going bad in all ways, and coming up with the idea of keeping taxes down in a period of increased government spending for things that go “BOOM!” while making sure they could get that new car every three years like they always did. Those decisions are the ones that led to the situation I mentioned above. Made by guys who mostly never got shot at, even in the war they did serve in.
In my experience during my time in the Navy and the years after knowing other vets and working with them, there were very few of us who “wanted” to go to war. Most of my fellow sailors were in the Navy because they figured joining the Navy and getting trained for a good job and “seeing the world” beat the daylights out of being in the Army, so much so it was worth a couple extra years over the two years a draftee served. Ditto the Air Force. Even the Marines were forced to start taking draftees after 1966, when they ran low on guys who believed what John Wayne told them in “Sands of Iwo Jima.”
As close as anyone got to “wanting” to go was when those of us who had joined before the war received the first orders sending us to the war. As my friend Phil Caputo wrote in “A Rumor of War” (a “Vietnam book” you should read), when he learned he and his fellow Marines were headed to DaNang in South Vietnam in 1965, “I thought to myself that when it was over and I went home, I’d be able to look my Tarawa-veteran father in the eye.” I know many others – including me, son of the guy who survived the Kamikazes – the sons of the “greatest generation” who had grown up with all the stories about our father’s “good war,” who “played war” with the cast-off gear from that war, who had similar thoughts.
Vietnam was the last war fought with draftees, and you can bet your bottom dollar today’s leaders will never go back to that system. The draft made everyone think about the war, whether they had to worry about getting drafted out of whatever working class job they had (or didn’t have); even the kids with student deferments had to think about the war when they didn’t work hard enough to keep their grades up and maintain their 2-S status. Mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters and friends all had to worry about someone they knew and loved going off to that war. Whether they “supported the president” or came to understand that the war wasn’t worth the loss of that life they knew and loved, they came in the middle of the night to hate the war. And eventually that made itself known in politics. The makers of war became constrained in the war they could make by the lack of support from those who gave them their jobs with their votes.
I’ll tell you something. After I came back, I did all I could to end that draft. But I would be very happy to see it brought back today.
No deferments. The sons and daughters of the rich serve right alongside the sons and daughters of the poor – like they did in World War II. It’ll make the entitled little shits into something better. And it really does unify – it’s hard to hate people you know by name.
But mostly I’m in favor of that because it makes it almost impossible for “They” to decide to fight a 20 year war in Afghanistan, or Iraq. They can’t do it because too many people will be paying attention. And getting pissed off at them. And voting.
But no, for exactly the reasons I am for the draft, the “all-volunteer” army is here to stay. You can’t fight 20-year wars in hellholes nobody knows without it. That way, only about 1-2 percent of the population ever has to think about the war – the kids who join up because they don’t have a future that looks better than what the military offers, their families, their friends – not a big enough group that if they got upset they could muster any political changes, unlike all those folks 50 years ago.
Most of all, if you’re going to thank me or any of us for our service, don’t try to honor us as “heroes.” For one thing, most of us aren’t, and for another, if you haven’t been in the military you really have no idea what being a hero in that context actually is.
It’s not what you think it is.
An old Navy Chief once explained “being a hero” to me: “When you’re so terrified that your brain is so frozen you can’t think, and you’ve pissed your pants and shit your drawers, and you just know you’re going to die, and you still do your job – THAT is being a hero.”
Not the definition too many in our society nowadays want to hear.
“But, Tom,” you say, “don’t you write all these best-selling books about wars and heroes? You must really love war to think about it so much.”
If you have gotten anything even remotely like that from reading any of my books, you really need to reconsider that decision not to take that remedial course in reading comprehension.
Yes, I do honor those out there in the mud and the blood and the ooze. And I appreciate knowing the ones who were out there in the mud and the blood and the ooze and survived to come back to the world of the living. That’s because their willingness to do that has a lot to do with why there is that world of the living to come back to.
Or at least that’s true in the World War II books. That’s the last war that could be divided into the Good Guys and the Bad Guys.
Except it kind of can’t. I’ve known too many guys who served on “the other side” who are just as nice – if not nicer – than anyone I have met from “the good side.”
In fact some of them must be better than anyone who served on this side. That’s a small list. But every guy who served in Vietnam and then had the opportunity to later meet the people they were trying to kill at the time, has met people who have been willing to forgive them for My Lai and Agent Orange and Rolling Thunder and all the rest of it, and offer friendship. And the ones on that side who I have been privileged to meet are definitely honorable men.
A late friend of mine who was a leading ace in “the good war” once told me when we were at a convention of those guys and the honored guests at the event were the guys who they’d been out to kill: “The secret nobody knows is, we always thought the guys we were fighting were the only ones who knew what we were going through. We actually thought we were closer to them than to the other people who were on our side.” I’ve heard similar sentiments from former infantrymen as well as former fliers, so it’s not some “guild of the elite” or “honorable brotherhood.”
Although it probably is an “honorable brotherhood.” The brotherhood of people who were willing to do what it took to defend what they loved – and believe it or not that even applies to the Germans; most of them knew as much about the “larger issues” going on, the terrible things, as any young guy in the US military did in the war I fought. And when they did find out, they were shocked too. The people who did the terrible things tried to keep them secret from everyone else, because they knew they were doing terrible things.
My friend Jim Wright, who’s become well-known in social media in recent years for some straight-shooting talk from a retired Chief Warrant Officer, wrote:
“Mostly we veterans are just people who came when called and did our best under terrible circumstances.”
I’ll end with a quote from a guy who did know what it took to do all that stuff:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.”
– Dwight D. Eisenhower
What To Pray For
by Abraham Joshua Heschel
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.
This kindness, this stupid kindness, is what is most truly human in a human being.
– Vassily Grossma
[Sober people] taught me that I would often not get my way, which was good for me but would feel terrible, and that life was erratic, beautiful and impossible. They taught me that maturity was the ability to live with unresolved problems.
– Anne Lamott
whoever stays
until the end
must tell the story
of what happened
dailies, 12.XI.23
– Alec Finlay
Myth says there are implications to your suffering that may never be revealed to you. Worlds within worlds. So it is and always was. You are allowed to be wrecked, you are allowed to be blank, you are allowed to be empty. No one is a full moon all the time.
– Dr. Martin Shaw
The ugliest thing in America is greed, the lust for power and domination, the lunatic ideology of perpetual Growth – with a capital G. ‘Progress’ in our nation has for too long been confused with ‘Growth’; I see the two as different, almost incompatible, since progress means, or should mean, change for the better – toward social justice, a livable and open world, equal opportunity and affirmative action for all forms of life. And I mean all forms, not merely the human. The grizzly, the wolf, the rattlesnake, the condor, the coyote, the crocodile, whatever, each and every species has as much right to be here as we do.
– Edward Abbey
INNER HISTORY OF A DAY
No one knew the name of this day;
Born quietly from deepest night,
It hid its face in light,
Demanded nothing for itself,
Opened out to offer each of us
A field of brightness that traveled ahead,
Providing in time, ground to hold our footsteps
And the light of thought to show the way.
The mind of the day draws no attention;
It dwells within the silence with elegance
To create a space for all our words,
Drawing us to listen inward and outward.
We seldom notice how each day is a holy place
Where the eucharist of the ordinary happens,
Transforming our broken fragments
Into an eternal continuity that keeps us.
Somewhere in us a dignity presides
That is more gracious than the smallness
That fuels us with fear and force,
A dignity that trusts the form a day takes.
So at the end of this day, we give thanks
For being betrothed to the unknown
And for the secret work
Through which the mind of the day
And wisdom of the soul become one.
– John O’Donnohue
Love is the only bow on Life’s dark cloud. It is the morning and the evening star. It shines upon the babe, and sheds its radiance on the quiet tomb. It is the mother of art, inspirer of poet, patriot and philosopher. It is the air and light of every heart — builder of every home, kindler of every fire on every hearth. It was the first to dream of immortality. It fills the world with melody — for music is the voice of love. Love is the magician, the enchanter, that changes worthless things to Joy, and makes royal kings and queens of common clay. It is the perfume of that wondrous flower, the heart, and without that sacred passion, that divine swoon, we are less than beasts; but with it, earth is heaven, and we are gods.
– Robert G. Ingersoll
I like philosophy the way some people like politics, or football games, or UFOs.
– John Gardner
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
There are four stories at the heart of western imperial civilization [that] have profound ecological implications. There is the ‘prosperity story’ which promotes worship of material acquisition and money, the ‘biblical story’ which focuses on the afterlife rather than the world around us, the ‘security story’ which builds up the military and police to protect relationships of domination, and the ‘secular meaning story’ which reduces life to matter and mechanism. […T]he most dangerous story that we live by is ‘the story of human centrality, of a species destined to be lord of all it surveys, unconfined by the limits that apply to other, lesser creatures’.
These are not, however, stories in the usual sense of narratives. They are not told in novels, read to children at bedtime, shared around a fire, or conveyed through anecdotes in formal speeches. Instead they exist behind and between the lines of the texts that surround us — the news reports that describe the ‘bad news’ about a drop in Christmas sales, or the ‘good news’ that airline profits are up — […] underneath common ways of writing and speaking in industrial societies are stories about unlimited economic growth as being not just possible but the goal of society, of the accumulation of unnecessary goods as a path towards self-improvement, of progress and success defined narrowly in terms of technological innovation and profit, and of nature as something separate from humans, a mere stock of resources to be exploited.
– Arran Stibbe, Ecolinguistics
A culture cannot evolve without honest, powerful storytelling. When a society repeatedly experiences glossy, hollowed-out, pseudo-stories, it degenerates. We need true satires, tragedies, & comedies that shine a clean light into dingy corners of the human psyche & society.
– Robert McKee
I love language because when it succeeds, for me, it doesn’t just tell me something. It enacts something. It creates something. And it goes both ways. Sometimes it’s violent. Sometimes it hurts you. And sometimes it saves you.
– Claudia Rankine
In the end, the glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than the glorification of the splendid system that makes them.
– Adorno
A poem is done when it stops bothering me. That is my definition of doneness.
– Mary Ruefle
If you don’t live it, it won’t come out your horn.
– Charlie Parker
Once I had a relationship in which I came pretty much to the verge of self surrender. That happened to me once, but it won’t happen again.
– Fassbinder
Stories and roads have something in common,
an important delusion:
that this is the only way to get there.
– Anne Carson
This November there seems
to be nothing to say.
– Anne Sexton
There is also, in spite of everything, a life for the future — plans, possibilities, prospects.
– Franz Kafka, 1920.
The imperfect project you actually complete is worth more than the perfect project you never finish.
– @JamesClear
One should use
common words
to say uncommon
things.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Push gaily on, strong heart! The while
Be gone a while before,
Be now a moment gone before,
Yet, doubt not, soon the seasons shall restore
Your friend to you.
– Robert Louis Stevenson
A person can be in love and also unprepared to care for that love
– Yung Pueblo
No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.
– Virginia Woolf
Let’s not be narrow, nasty, and negative.
– T. S. Eliot
You cannot dream yourself into a character: you must hammer and forge yourself into one.
– Henry David Thoreau
If an individual is lopsided and overdeveloped in one direction and frozen and twisted and underdeveloped in another, then the eruption of the unconscious brings up the lopsided shadow with it.
– Liz Greene
I am sure that we’ll have to walk through the desert for a generation before […] indignation grows strong enough to invent new ways of thinking.
– Hélène Cixous
There are always a few such people who demand the utmost of life and yet cannot come to terms with its stupidity and crudeness.
– Hermann Hesse
We’re here for a little window. And to use that time to catch and share shards of light and laughter and grace seems to me the great story.
– Brian Doyle
I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.
– Robert Louis Stevenson
Humbled by how readily you place your life into the hands of random strangers, often without a second thought — trusting the restaurant to check its expiration dates, trusting a construction crew not to cheap out on the materials, trusting thousands of other drivers to stay in their lane — people who you may never meet but whose well being you’re deeply invested in, whether you know it or not.
– John Koenig
Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve—hopelessly he writes in the hope that he might serve—not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace which knows us.
– Joy Williams
Toads Talking by a River
by James Tate
A book can move from room to room
without anyone touching it. It can climb
the staircase and hide under the bed. It
can crawl into bed with you because it knows
you need company. And it can read to you
in your sleep and you wake a smarter person
or a sadder person. It is good to live
surrounded by books because you never know
what can happen next: lost in the inter-
stellar space between teacups in the cupboard,
found in the beak of a downy woodpecker,
the lovers staring into the void and then
jumping over it, flying into their beautiful
tomorrows like the heroes of a storm.
I wish in the city of your heart
you would let me be the street
where you walk when you are most
yourself. I imagine the houses:
It has been raining, but the rain
is done and the children kept home
have begun opening the doors.
– Robley Wilson
When you really get a poem, don’t you feel like you’re remembering it?
– W.S. Merwin
Does the conflict of opposites belong to the inescapable conditions of life?
– @RedBookJung
If the language of commerce is a parade, then the language of the poem is that of a hive where one may be stung into recognition by words that have the power to create images strong enough to change our own lives as we imagine and live them.
– Tess Gallagher
I spend a lot of time thinking about this simple idea:
The person who aligns themselves with the general principles of the world goes further and faster than the person who doesn’t.
– Shane Parrish
Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party— however numerous they may be— is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.
– Rosa Luxemburg
What should I do if I don’t find anyone to talk to, to whom should I give my words, and who will share with me my silence?
– Mahmoud Darwish
God will not look you over for medals degrees or diplomas, but for scars.
– Elbert Hubbard
Instructions for Living
No one can tell another
how to live—so be wary
of anybody selling that particular
brand of promise. There is no way
you’ll get your money’s worth.
Rather, go get some seeds,
or a pair of snowshoes, or adopt
a creaturely companion to keep you
company on the trail—anything
that gets you outside, interacting
with wild things like soil and snow
and your own breath meeting air
as you move through the woods—
anything that reminds you you’re alive
and it’s time to pay attention
to the path you’re on.
– Heidi Barr
Have you ever had it happen that someone tells you that something you said or did meant a lot to them and made a difference? You’ll scratch you head because you don’t remember anything about it. Small kind things we do naturally are the cement that holds the bricks together for others and us.
– Gunilla Norris
We live in a kind of dark age, craftily lit with synthetic light, so that no one can tell how dark it has really gotten. But our exiled spirits can tell. Deep in our bones resides an ancient singing couple who just won’t give up making their beautiful, wild noise. The world won’t end if we can find them.
– Martín Prechtel
All war is unmetabolized grief.
– Martín Prechtel
That’s what makes you a human being—that willingness to sing another one free.
– Martin Prechtel
God must be a smell, one of those delicious dreamy aromas that float into the soul on the warm hopeful days of spring. What is God must be one of those smells that beguile and inebriate the mind, who like a fine drunken horse of water the heart now rides, galloping wild in every direction like a river flooding right through the topsoil of your youth, cutting and eroding a groove that will be your life, a canyon sunk deep into the virgin plains and unsawn forests of your early days.
– Martin Prechtel
The power of music to integrate and cure. . . is quite fundamental. It is the profoundest non-chemical medication.
– Oliver Sacks
FRIEND
Full of trust you left home,
and soon learned to walk the Path—
making yourself a friend to everyone
and making everyone a friend.
When the whole world is your friend,
fear will find no place to call home.
And when you make the mind your friend,
you’ll know what trust
really means.
Listen.
I have followed this Path of friendship to
its end.
And I can say with absolute certainty—
it will lead you home.
– Mitta
In this world, time has three dimensions, like space. Just as an object may move in three perpendicular directions, corresponding to horizontal, vertical, and longitudinal, so an object may participate in three perpendicular futures. Each future moves in a different direction of time. Each future is real. At every point of decision, the world splits into three worlds, each with the same people, but different fates for those people. In time, there are an infinity of worlds.
– Alan Lightman
Nothing ever really ends. That’s the horrible part of being in the short-story business—you have to be a real expert on ends. Nothing in real life ends. ‘Millicent at last understands.’ Nobody ever understands.
– Kurt Vonnegut
I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty—and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine. Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.
– Kurt Vonnegut
Health rests on three pillars: the body, the psyche and the spiritual connection. To ignore any one of them is to invite imbalance and dis-ease.
– Gabor Maté
Everybody comes
from the same source.
If you hate another human being,
you’re hating part of yourself.
– Elvis Presley
What one does, one is. Not what one says nor thinks one is, but what one does.
– Irene Claremont de Castillejo
I can only hope and wish that no one becomes “Jungian.” I stand for no doctrine, but describe facts and put forward certain views which I hold worthy of discussion. . . I proclaim no cut-and-dried doctrine and I abhor “blind adherents.”
– CG Jung
Jung’s contribution was so massive and significant because, as far as I was then aware, no one since Plotinus (3rd CE) and Marsilio Ficino in Renaissance Italy had explored the soul as a living cosmic entity rather than an abstract concept.
– Anne Baring
when you lie awake in the evenings
counting your birthdays
turn the blood that clots on your tongue
into poems. poems.
– Lucille Clifton
Some of us make our own light: a silver leaf like a path no one can use.
– Louise Glück, The Wild Iris
Poetry is the unshakable ally of the victim, and it can only find a ground of understanding with history on the basis of this fundamental principle.
– Mahmoud Darwish
All attachments are optimistic. When we talk about an object of desire, we are really talking about a cluster of promises we want someone or something to make to us and make possible for us.
– Laurent Berlant
When we look into our own hearts and begin to discover what is confused and what is brilliant, what is bitter and what is sweet, it isn’t just ourselves that we’re discovering. We’re discovering the universe.
– Pema Chödrön
A little less hypocrisy and a little more self-knowledge can only have good results in respect for our neighbor; for we are all too prone to transfer to our fellows the injustice and violence we inflict upon our own natures.
– CG Jung
But we must learn to live in others, no matter how abortive or unfriendly their cold, piecemeal renderings of us: they create us.
– John Ashbery
It’s on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly.
– Claude Monet
Here is surplus of sun, ocean
of excess, remaindered song.
Whose hands wash this sky?
– Jason Magabo Perez
You’re my celebratory day. And when I visit you in my dreams, I always have flowers in my hair.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Only time will heal the inarticulate.
– Mae Moore
We can keep ourselves so busy, fill our lives with so many diversions, stuff our heads with so much knowledge, involve ourselves with so many people and cover so much ground that we never have time to probe the fearful and wonderful world within . . . By middle life most of us are accomplished fugitives from ourselves.
– John Gardner
It’s good to have an “unproductive” interest as an adult. Dare to “waste” some time reading up on ancient Egypt or space ships or bugs or dinosaurs like kids do, for the sheer joy of learning.
– @iconawrites
The forest does not change its place, we cannot lie in wait for it and catch it in the act of change. Whenever we look at it, it seems to be motionless. And such also is the immobility to our eyes of the eternally growing, ceaselessly changing history, the life of society moving invisibly in its incessant transformations.
– Boris Pasternak
Some people spend their lives in search of truth or an answer. I hope to spend my life in the full embrace of not knowing. Poetry, I think, is a way of turning toward indeterminacy.
– Natalie Scenters-Zapico
Visuality is not simply looking. It is a regime of seeing and being, and any so-called neutral position is a position of power that refuses to recognize itself as such.
– Christina Sharpe
The universe will show you
where to break your lines,
the old monk told the poet.
– The Old Monk
I try to forget what happiness was,
and when that don’t work, I study the stars.
– Derek Walcott
I’m plagued with poetry […] utterly consuming. I grow obsessive with the way I fall apart; the stitches that once held me together, rip at the seams of my skin […] I used to write poetry without the realization that I–myself, am the very breath of it.
– Kelsey Gustafsson
I cannot stand repetition: routine divides me from potential novelties within my reach.
– Clarice Lispector
You have every cause for anxiety. We are on the threshold of a more searching, more honest, more open society.
– László Krasznahorkai
All too frequently there is the temptation to find answers, to break through the unknown, instead of letting ourselves stand the tension of unrevealed possibilities and be worked by what we do not know.
– Fred Gustafson
Condemn none: if you can stretch out a helping hand, do so. If you cannot, fold your hands, bless your brothers, and let them go their own way.
– Swami Vivekananda
Irresolution is a difficult position to write from, though it’s the only one that makes sense to me.
– Momtaza Mehri
Quit picking or they won’t heal
was really good advice,
the old monk remembered.
– The Old Monk
these tears are not proof / of our defeat they are proof / of our humanity.
– Suheir Hammad
Any literature must make space for dissent, for principled stands against the status quo. Any political entity—nation or otherwise—must.
– @garybarwin
Some of us have
a little Jesus
with the Buddha,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
Doubt what I am saying and doubt your own reactions to it. Have doubt, the seed of doubt; not what you doubt but the seed. Let it move, flower, grow until it finds the truth.
– Krishnamurti
In November you begin to know how long the winter will be.
– Martha Gellhorn
When I paint, I never think of selling.
People simply fail to understand
that we paint in order to experiment
and to develop ourselves
as we strive for greater heights.
– Edvard Munch
the best antidote to an increase in damaging insular attitudes the world over is surely friendship and networking.
– @booksirelandmag
Interest is the most important thing in life; happiness is temporary, but interest is continuous.
– Georgia O’Keefe
All generosity is valuable. When asked by King Pasenadi of Kosala, ‘To whom should a gift be given?’ the Buddha replied, ‘To whomever it pleases your mind.’
– Andrew Olendzki, The Wisdom of Giving
To love a book is, above all, to love its author: we want to meet them again, we want to spend our days with them.
– Michel Houellebecq
The really important stuff
has little do with numbers,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
When you have learned
something from nothing,
you’re a poet,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
When you’re sitting with different states of mind arising and it seems interminable, trust that this process works. In some ways visibly, in other ways invisibly. Like the invisible melting of the snow, beneath the crust of ice.
– Ayya Medhanandi Bhikkhuni
The output of a human life is essentially the expression of our repeated habits.
– Dr. Gio Valiante.
People suffer when they pursue a life or chase a dream that doesn’t belong to them.
– Caroline Myss
The more light you allow within you, the brighter the world you live in will be.
– Shakti Gawain
The To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.
– Georgia O’Keeffe
What would your life be about if it weren’t about you?
– Kenneth Folk
I don’t mean to
alarm you,
the old monk said,
but you’re all going
the wrong direction.
– The Old Monk
Women who are inclined to write poetry at all are inspired by being mad at something.
– Amy Clampitt
My definition of art has always been the same. It is about freedom of expression, a new way of communication. It is never about exhibiting in museums or about hanging it on the wall. Art should live in the heart of the people.
– Ai Weiwei
Wake up, my soul.
I don’t know where you are,
where you’re hiding,
but wake up, please,
we’re still together,
the road is still before us,
a bright strip of dawn
will be our star.
– Adam Zagajewski, (Tr. by Clare Cavanagh)
I want to go with the one I love.
I don’t want to calculate what it will cost.
I don’t want to think about whether it’s good.
I don’t want to know if he loves me.
I want to go with the one I love.
– Bertolt Brecht
I wanted to be chosen,
maybe loved.
I wanted out of my life,
out of my skin…
– Susan Abulhawa
Writing derives its power by noticing the unspeakable and going there.
– Sonja Livingston
The real struggle is not between East and West… but between education and propaganda.
All real living is meeting.
The world is not an obstacle on the way to God; it is the way.
When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.
The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable: through the embracing of one of its beings.
– Martin Buber
You are not illegal.
You are human.
A soul connected
to a source.
– Natasha T. Miller
So what can they tell us, the writers of dream books,
the scholars of oneiric signs and omens,
the doctors with couches for analyses –
if anything fits,
it’s accidental,
and for one reason only,
that in our dreamings,
in their shadowings and gleamings,
in their multiplings, inconceivablings,
in their haphazardings and widescatterings
at times even a clear-cut meaning
may slip through.
– Wisława Szymborska
Maybe tomorrow will be the day
everyone wakes up to write a poem.
Or maybe just you and me,
fallen asleep on duty,
fallen asleep to duty forever.
No one knows what will happen,
but you and I at least,
while the music of the murmur invents us,
will have no part in anyone’s war,
we will waste nothing,
a signal going through us,
like an inkling of god
or a hunger for strawberries
or the indisputable fact of love.
– Dean Young
I tell my students to write like their lives depend on it. Most of the time, it doesn’t. But once in a while, it is not your own life that depends on it, but the memory of someone else’s. When the only way you can conjure someone is through words, when the only life someone you loved can embody is through memories you give voice to, you give it. And you give it with all you’ve got.
– Daphne Gottlieb
Millions of people can believe in you, and yet none of it matters if you don’t believe in yourself.
– Bernajoy Vaal
There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns.
If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself.
What we call chaos is just patterns we haven’t recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can’t decipher. what we can’t understand we call nonsense. What we can’t read we call gibberish.
There is no free will.
There are no variables.
– Chuck Palahniuk
Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.
– Harry S Truman
An integrated individual is one who carries his own dark shadow of undesirable qualities, frees those around him from his projections, and by so doing actually transforms a fraction of the evil in the world.
– Irene Claremont de Castillejo
What does emptiness offer
that you don’t already have,
the old monk asked.
Nothing.
– The Old Monk
All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.
– Eckhart Tolle
The appearance of things changes according to the emotions; and thus we see magic and beauty in them, while the magic and beauty are really in ourselves.
– Kahlil Gibran
At this point in higher education there’s no strong correlation between academic stratification and talent. There’s no question that top ranked programs produce top work. Yet I’m persistently reading important work emulating from every conceivable institution.
– Josh Shepperd
To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.
– Aldo Leopold
Spirituality is a daily practice of preparing to be with and care for others.
– David Dault
existence is of little interest save on days when the dust of realities is mingled with magic sand, when some trivial incident becomes a springboard for romance.
– Marcel Proust
Who placed us with eyes / between a microscopic and a telescopic / world?
– Ronald Johnson
Gather up whatever is
glittering in the gutter,
whatever has tumbled
in the waves or fallen
in flames out of the sky,
for it’s not only our
hearts that are broken,
but the heart
of the world as well.
Stitch it back together.
Make a place where
the day speaks to the night
and the earth speaks to the sky.
Whether we created god
or god created us
it all comes down to this:
In our imperfect world
we are meant to repair
and stitch together
what beauty there is, stitch it
with compassion and wire.
See how everything
we have made gathers
the light inside itself
and overflows? A blessing.
– Stuart Kestenbaum
You cannot save anyone. You can be present with them, offer your groundedness, your sanity, your peace. You can even share your path with them, offer your perspective. But you cannot take away their pain. You cannot walk their path for them. You cannot give answers that are right for them, or even answers they can digest right now. They will have to find their own answers.
– Jeff Foster
You see, when the world becomes too solid for nuance, when it hardens up and crystallizes into a binary that forces you to pick a side, compelling you to become intelligible to the hardness that creeps on its once loamy surfaces, cracks become the first responders.
We need a politics of tenderness more than ever. Not tenderness as capitulation to particular conclusions that have already been made. Not tenderness as “if you don’t see the world as I do, there’s something wrong with you.” But tenderness as the nurturing of grace that allows something different, something even beautiful, to be born in the midst of the fires.
– Báyò Akómoláfé
I’m thinking of how Brooklyn is New York city too how odd I usually think of it as something all its own.
– Ted Berrigan
Writers often give advice they don’t follow to the letter themselves. And so I tend to receive their commandments warily. I don’t have a lot of advice to give.
– Tobias Wolff
People can’t explain
the reason they’re so crazy
the two evil birds on top of their heads
the three poison snakes inside their hearts
one or the other blocks the way
making things hard to handle
raise your hands and snap your fingers
Homage to the Buddha
– Hanshan (translated by Red Pine)
I am not well;
I could have built the Pyramids
with the effort it takes me to cling
on to life and reason.
– Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice
Because, this morning, I made a list of all of my top priorities. I am one of them.
– Rudy Francisco
Between the comet’s tail
& the ‘Horsehead’ with dandelion eyes,
all is
pellucid, green, & very shining.
– Ronald Johnson
Despair has the accent of irrevocability not because things cannot improve, but because it draws the past too into its vortex.
– Theodor W. Adorno
It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats.
Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid.
When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion–its message becomes meaningless.
– Abraham Joshua Heschel
The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever.
– Jacques Cousteau
The man is, as it were, born deaf and dumb, and dedicated to a narrow and lonely life. Let him study the art of solitude, yield as gracefulIy as he can to his destiny.
– Emerson
Fallen leaves lying on the grass
in the November sun bring more
happiness than the daffodils
– Cyril Connolly
All night on the mountain
you sing the only song you know,
the old monk told his students.
– The Old Monk
Don’t worry about things. Don’t push. Just do your work and you’ll survive. The important thing is to have a ball, to be joyful, to be loving and to be explosive. Out of that comes everything and you grow.
– Ray Bradbury
Only when we can accept that we are fragile guests on this Earth, only then will we ever be at home wherever we are.
– Mark Nepo
Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth’s mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result – eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly – in you.
– Bill Bryson
Praying for peace entails believing that peace begins with you, and aligning yourself with peacefulness. Peace is understood in the Christian tradition as tranquillitas ordinis, the quietness of order, the calm that comes with harmony. And order is arranging things so that each gives to the other its proper place. Even God must do this. In the Jewish tradition it is said that, in order to create the world, God had to step back.
– David Steindl-Rast
Becoming aware
That the burning bush
Is a continuing reality
Changes everything.
– Stuart
I, Bertolt Brecht, was born in difficult times.” But you, who will survive the tide in which we perished, remember that also hatred against lowliness hardens the features, that also anger against injustice makes the voice grow. We who wanted to prepare the way for goodness could not be kind, but you who will live at the moment when man will be a friend of man, try to remember us with indulgence.
– Bertolt Brecht
The trees drop more leaves, love, each time it rains. I eat my meals with the TV turned on, but softly so the neighbors won’t complain.
– G. E. Patterson
This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.
– Leonard Bernstein
who dreamt blue snow and froze in dreaming
– Michael Donaghy
the color of the sky
has changed into
winter clothes
– Issa
No influences are more pervasive, or determinative, than those of which one is unaware. We inherit not only the Zeitgeist of our fated time and place, but also the implicit world-view of the tribe and the family of origin.
– James Hollis, Creating a Life
Our lives are gradual paths of groundlessness. When we can accept that people and things are always shifting and changing, our hearts can open.
– Zenju Earthlyn Manuel
Here’s the true secret of life: We mostly do everything over and over.
– Anne Lamott
Because our status quo is self-expression, sometimes all artists have left is to refuse. So I refuse. I won’t write about poetry alongside the ‘reasonable’ tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to unreasonable suffering. No more ghoulish euphemisms. No more sanitized hell-worlds. No more warmongering lies.
– Anne Boyer
And having more memories than yearnings, searching in unnameable spaces, Sicily’s orchards or Lebanon’s thinning waters, I reach a land between borders, unclaimed, and stand there, as if I were alone, but the rhythm is missing.
– Etel Adnan
The ‘right’ to travel the world, eating, buying & doing whatever you want.
This consumerist fantasy of ‘freedom’ is actually planet-devouring-exploitation in disguise.
Real freedom is understanding we’re part of a complex web of life, & living in a way which preserves that web.
– @ClimateDad77
Somewhere
by R.S. Thomas
Something to bring back to show
you have been there: a lock of God’s
hair, stolen from him while he was
asleep; a photograph of the garden
of the spirit. As has been said,
the point of travelling is not
to arrive, but to return home
laden with pollen you shall work up
into the honey the mind feeds on.
What are our lives but harbours
we are continually setting out
from, airports at which we touch
down and remain in too briefly
to recognise what it is they remind
us of? And always in one
another we seek the proof
of experiences it would be worthy dying for.
Surely there is a shirt of fire
this one wore, that is hung up now
like some rare fleece in the hall of heroes?
Surely these husbands and wives
have dipped their marriages in a fast
spring? Surely there exists somewhere,
as the justification for our looking for it,
the one light that can cast such shadows.
Forgiveness is the name of love practiced among people who love poorly. The hard truth is that all people love poorly. We need to forgive and be forgiven every day, every hour increasingly. That is the great work of love among the fellowship of the weak that is the human family.
– Henri Nouwen
You’re sad because you’re sad.
It’s psychic. It’s the age. It’s chemical.
Go see a shrink or take a pill,
or hug your sadness like an eyeless doll
you need to sleep.
Well, all children are sad
but some get over it.
Count your blessings. Better than that,
buy a hat. Buy a coat or pet.
Take up dancing to forget.
Forget what?
Your sadness, your shadow,
whatever it was that was done to you
the day of the lawn party
when you came inside flushed with the sun,
your mouth sulky with sugar,
in your new dress with the ribbon
and the ice-cream smear,
and said to yourself in the bathroom,
I am not the favourite child.
My darling, when it comes
right down to it
and the light fails and the fog rolls in
and you’re trapped in your overturned body
under a blanket or burning car,
and the red flame is seeping out of you
and igniting the tarmac beside your head
or else the floor, or else the pillow,
none of us is;
or else we all are.
– Margaret Atwood, The Sad Child
Do what the Roman
poets did — count
the wide vowels,
the old monk told
the poet.
– The Old Monk
these days I think
I can find truth in song
as if it started inside me
– Morgan Parker
The act of writing a poem is nothing more than a starter.
The main course is when that poem reaches the reader.
The delicious dessert is when it resonates with them.
– Matthew Stewart
Wide enough but not too wide,
tall enough but not too tall,
big enough to stop a sword,
that’s what you want in a shield,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
They’ll slice even the simplest of names until it fits their mouth.
– Dave Harris
I think she always nursed a small mad hope.
– Nabokov, Pale Fire
Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don’t think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn’t stop you from doing anything at all.
– Richard Feynman
It’s either the universe
or the abyss –that’s
the proposition
before us,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
I am living permanently in my dream, from which I make brief forays into reality.
– Ingmar Bergman
Repose and vertigo
In diluvial light,
In terrible evenings of study.
– Rimbaud
Each soul has its own rhythm and pace
Trying to live faster than your soul will strain you
Living slower than your soul will pain you
Can you feel the pace of your soul?
– @the_wilderless
I heart with my eyes.
– Mahmoud Darwish, Visible music
Integrate to the point of peace.
– McCall Erickson
Imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know in life.
– John Ruskin
Words were not given to man in order to conceal his thoughts.
– José Saramago
If one imagined a crowd of young people, each one wishing, one would find out by means of the wishes to what extent there was something deeper in the individual’s soul, because there is no mirror as accurate as the wish.
– Søren Kierkegaard
Live in the nowhere that you come from,
even though you have an address here.
– Rumi
“Master,” said Ged, “I cannot take your name from you, not being strong enough, and I cannot trick your name from you, not being wise enough. So I am content to stay here, and learn or serve, whatever you will: unless by chance you will answer a question I have.”
“Ask it.”
“What is your name?”
The doorkeeper smiled, and said his name; and Ged, repeating it, entered for the last time into that House.”
– Ursula K. Le Guin
All of life is just a narrow bridge….
– Joan Halifax
Many of the great humanitarian and environmental campaigns of our time have been to make the unknown real, the invisible visible, to bring the faraway near, so that the suffering of sweatshop workers, torture victims, beaten children, even the destruction of other species and remote places, impinges on the imagination and perhaps prompts you to act. It’s also a narrative art of explaining the connections between your food or your clothing or your government and this suffering far from sight in which you nonetheless play a role. The suffering before you, in your own home or bed or life, can be harder to see, sometimes, as is the self who is implicated. The self is also a creation, the principal work of your life, the crafting of which makes everyone an artist. This unfinished work of becoming ends only when you do, if then, and the consequences live on. We make ourselves and in so doing are the gods of the small universe of self and the large world of repercussions.
– Rebecca Solnit
A just peace becomes humans just as raging anger is a trait of wild beasts.
– Publius Ovidius Naso
On the hero’s journey ~ kindness is the path
– John Roedel
After the Gold Rush
Well, I dreamed I saw the knights in armor coming
Sayin’ something about a queen
There were peasants singin’ and drummers drumming
And the archer split the tree
There was a fanfare blowin’ to the sun
That was floating on the breeze
Look at mother nature on the run in the nineteen seventies
Look at mother nature on the run in the nineteen seventies
I was lyin’ in a burned-out basement
With a full moon in my eyes
I was hopin’ for replacement
When the sun burst through the sky
There was a band playin’ in my head
And I felt like getting high
I was thinkin’ about what a friend had said
I was hopin’ it was a lie
Thinkin’ about what a friend had said
I was hopin’ it was a lie
Well, I dreamed I saw the silver spaceships lying
In the yellow haze of the sun
There were children crying and colors flying
All around the chosen ones
All in a dream, all in a dream
The loading had begun
Flyin’ mother nature’s silver seed
To a new home in the sun
Flyin’ mother nature’s silver seed
To a new home
– Neil Young
Symphony in Yellow
by Oscar Wilde
An omnibus across the bridge
Crawls like a yellow butterfly,
And, here and there, a passer-by
Shows like a little restless midge
Big barges full of yellow hay
Are moored against the shadowy wharf,
And, like a yellow silken scarf,
The thick fog hangs along the quay.
The yellow leaves begin to fade
And flutter from the Temple elms,
And at my feet the pale green Thames
Lies like a rod of rippled jade.
Proust described the ‘heart’s intermittences’. We must now describe the intermittences of being.
– Jacques Rivière to Antonin Artaud
a child who sometimes lived in cars, taught himself to play guitar, discovered bioluminescence, unearthing a tender aptitude for the mining of his own light.
– Nikky Finney
The Earthlings
The Earthlings arrived unannounced, entered
without knocking, removed their shoes
and began clipping their toenails.
They let the clippings fall wherever.
They sighed loudly as if inconvenienced.
We were patient. We knew our guests
were in an unfamiliar environment; they needed
time to adjust. For dinner, we prepared
turkey meatloaf with a side of cauliflower.
This is too dry, they said.
This is not like what our mothers made.
We wanted to offer a tour of our world,
demonstrate how we freed ourselves
from the prisons of linear time.
But the Earthlings were already spelunking
our closets, prying tools
from their containers and holding them
to the light. What’s this? they demanded.
What’s this? What’s this? And what’s this?
That’s a Quantum Annihilator; put that down.
That’s a Particle Grinder; please put that down.
We could show you how to heal the sick, we said.
We could help you feed every nation, commune
with the all-seeing sentient energy that palpitates
through all known forms of matter.
Nah! they said. Teach us to vaporize a mountain!
Teach us to turn the moon into revenue!
Then the Earthlings
left a faucet running and flooded our basement.
– Matthew Olzmann
Of all of hauntings, the greatest is the one we alone produce: the unlived life. None of us will find the courage, or the will, or the capacity to completely fulfill the possibility invested in us by the gods. But we are also accountable for what we do not attempt.
– James Hollis
Once the theoretical mind is untethered from the body . . . in which it’s grounded and which receives its intuitions, there’s no longer any solid base for discriminating truth from untruth.
– Iain McGilchrist
Recognizing the goodness of human life is not based on suppressing or overlooking negativity.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Jung says: If God is dead … then God appears in the place where one would expect to find him least, and that is in the shadow, and the negative qualities of a god denied become the armour of a new and more terrible god.
– Russell Lockhart, Words as Eggs
I don’t go up to the air-raid shelter any more. … I’ve taken a chair out to the garden and I’m reading. I have firmly resolved to carry on reading when the bombs come. The Stundenbuch is already creased and smudged. It’s my only comfort. And Baudelaire!
Perhaps it’s sinful just to sit and look at the sun. But I can’t go back down in the shelter any more. … I find the idea of perhaps perishing down there with the lot of them… horrifying. At least in the garden. At least in the sunshine.
– Ingeborg Bachmann
Because of Us
This morning I learned
The English word gauze
(finely woven medical cloth)
Comes from the Arabic word […] Ghazza
Because Gazans have been skilled weavers for centuries
I wondered then
how many of our wounds
have been dressed
because of them
and how many of theirs
have been left open
because of us
– Emily Berry
I do not know how to rid the world of evil, or whether one is simply supposed to endure it. But you are there and are having an effect, and the poems have an effect of their own and help to protect you—that is the answer and a counterbalance in this world.
– Bachmann to Celan
I wanted to know people. I wanted to love. But I didn’t realize how badly I had been hurt. I didn’t realize that my habit of distance had become so unconscious and deep that I didn’t know how to be with another person. I could only fix that person in my imagination and turn him this way and that, trying to feel him, until my mind was tired and raw.
– Mary Gaitskill, Veronica
Our mind always wants to get an aerial view, while our heart wants to put our hands in the soil of whatever is at hand. We live in the felt realm in between.
– Mark Nepo
Funny how you
have to wrestle
every line,
the old monk told
the poet.
– The Old Monk
It’s hard to listen without judgment, to tolerate ambiguity, paradox, and, in some cases, ignorance. But if we are ever to experience any measure of true peace, this is something we will all need to learn.
– Tina Lear
Always, as a maker of poems, I have been witness to the images, have been led by the poem as it speaks into and with itself and opens out of its contradictions to engage the reader.
– Tess Gallagher, The Poem as Time Machine
For my true thoughts have spent more time in your company than in anyone else’s, these last two or three months, and where my thoughts are, there I am, in truth.
– A.S.Byatt
The size of the place that one becomes a member of is limited only by the size of one’s heart.
– Gary Snyder
Weeble: What is your greatest challenge as a Buddhist meditation teacher?
Zen Master Pink: The embarrassment that arises upon seeing that one of my peers hasn’t yet encountered an understanding that has become baseline for me.
W: You should stop telling the truth.
ZMP: I know.
– Kenneth Folk
People on here like it much better when I talk about abstract dharmic concepts then when I talk about real-world suffering & responding to it.
This observation reminds me why I’m a dharma teacher, because y’all have a lot to learn about what non-duality actually means.
– @VinceFHorn
Honour to those who in their lives
resolved to defend some Thermopylae.
– C.P. Cavafy
The highest of the gods
is the god who sorts things,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
I have always had
a northern soul,
the old monk admitted.
– The Old Monk
Many Asked Me Not to Forget Them
by Naomi Shihab Nye
Where do you keep all these people?
The shoemaker with his rumpled cough.
The man who twisted straws into brooms.
My teacher, oh my teacher. I will always cry
when I think of my teacher.
The olive farmer who lost every inch of ground,
every tree,
who sat with head in his hands
in his son’s living room for years after.
I tucked them into my drawer with cuff links and bow ties.
Touched them each evening before I slept.
Wished them happiness and peace.
Peace in the heart. No wonder we all got heart trouble.
But justice never smiled on us. Why didn’t it?
I tried to get Americans to think of them.
But they were too involved with their own affairs
to imagine ours. And you can’t blame them, really.
How much do I think of Africa? I always did feel sad
in the back of my mind for places I didn’t
have enough energy to worry about.
Weary from being Othered
Often misunderstood
Adults almost didn’t see
Their beauty
In an Otherwordly psyche
– Rachel Newcombe
November frost
will I ever feel fully
accepted?
– @hegelincanada
Advice to Everyone
If you know
where you’re going
sit down and take a break,
have some coffee.
If you don’t know
where you are going
you need to hurry up.
– john zbigniew guzlowski
Our houses stay on stilts but we no live near the ocean. Our daddies they wen tell us the lava rock no like foundations, so it stay better to build with the land
– @lumchanmfa
We’re being told we can solve climate & ecological breakdown by recycling plastic bottles and driving an EV when we should be being told that we will lose everything & everyone we love unless we come together and rapidly build a completely new kind of civilization.
– @ClimateDad77
To be human is to be fallible, is to be coming up short even at our shiny best, is to need grace, is to realize grace isn’t earned but inherent in every breath of life, is to receive life…a gift so wild and achingly beautiful.
– McCall Erickson
Later on, faced with the self-evident lie, or seized by an anxious doubt, I would endeavor to recall it; but in vain; my memory had not been warned in time; it had thought it unnecessary to keep a copy.
– Marcel Proust
When we agree to (or get tricked into) being part of something bigger than our own wired, fixated minds, we are saved. When we search for something larger than our own selves to hook into, we can come through whatever life throws at us.
– Anne Lamott
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.
– Naomi Shihab Nye
The Week
by Charles Simic
Monday comes around with a new tattoo
It won’t show us and here’s Tuesday
Walking its latest nightmare on a leash
And Wednesday blind as the rain tapping
On a windowpane and Thursday sipping
Bad coffee served by a pretty waitress
And Friday lost in a confusion of sad
And happy faces and Saturday flashing
Like a pinball machine in the morgue
And Sunday with a head of crucified Christ
Hanging sideways in a bathroom mirror
We take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious.
– W.G. Sebald
That moment I realize someone is not my idea of them, and I face the choices: To punish and write them off? To disregard their humanity, their complexity, their actuality? To relate to them through curiosity as the wild and multifaceted wonder they are?
– McCall Erickson
A great snarled ball and a thousand small knots, all artfully tied, intertwined, truly, a human brain!
– @RedBookJung
There is always
something you can do to
help, no matter what.
That’s why we have an
imagination!
– trudy goodman
There is always
something you can do to
help, no matter what.
That’s why we have an
imagination!
– trudy goodman
When asked what enlightenment was, a contemporary Zen master once said: Small moments, many times.
– Tracy Cochran
It is often said that anarchists live in a world of dreams to come, and do not see the things which happen today. We do see them only too well, and in their true colors, and that is what makes us carry the hatchet into the forest of prejudice that besets us.
– Peter Kropotkin
Oppressed peoples are always being asked to stretch a little more, to bridge the gap between blindness and humanity.
– Audre Lorde
In my experience the most forceful and aggressive mothers are always the least inspired, the most unmusical of souls, all of them profoundly unsuccessful women who wear their daughter’s image on their breast like a medal, like a bright deflection from their own unshining selves.
– Eleanor Catton
Marcel Proust died 101 years ago, and still, he remains, as Mihail Sebastian called him, the creator of worlds. “It will be Proust’s most enduring title of glory, that of being able to create people. Not Proustian psychology, not Proustian aesthetics, not philosophy…
To love is nothing more than to need the presence of someone. Proust never ceased to be present for us.
– Christina Tudor-Sideri
When I seek another word for ‘music’, I never find any other word than ‘Venice.’
– Friedrich Nietzsche
If this resignation leaves a hole in the news the size of poetry, then that is the true shape of the present.
– Anne Boyer
I wanted to be a Poet and a Poem.
– Antonia S. Byatt
The ego and most institutions demand a tit-for-tat universe while the soul swims in a sea of abundance, grace, and freedom, which cannot always be organized.
– Richard Rohr
I don’t want to party like it’s 1999. I want to go grocery shopping like it’s 1999.
– @AbbyHiggs
It is for the sake of digression and parentheses that I prefer writing in the form of letters to friends; one can then write without embarrassment whatever comes into one’s head.
– Alexander Herzen to Turgenev, 1862
Being clear about our motivation at the outset is very important for the long term. We can never exlude others. To say “May I attain enlightenment” without adding “for the benefit of all sentient beings” would be self-centered.
– Dzigar Kongtrul
Enriching the Earth
To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass
to grow and die. I have plowed in the seeds
of winter grains and of various legumes,
their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth.
I have stirred into the ground the offal
and the decay of the growth of past seasons
and so mended the earth and made its yield increase.
All this serves the dark. I am slowly falling
into the fund of things. And yet to serve the earth,
not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness
and a delight to the air, and my days
do not wholly pass. It is the mind’s service,
for when the will fails so do the hands
and one lives at the expense of life.
After death, willing or not, the body serves,
entering the earth. And so what was heaviest
and most mute is at last raised up into song.
– Wendell Berry
There is a pattern to the universe and everything in it, and there are knowledge systems and traditions that follow this pattern to maintain balance, to keep the temptations of narcissism in check. But recent traditions have emerged that break down creation systems like a virus, infecting complex patterns with artificial simplicity, exercising a civilizing control over what some see as chaos. The Sumerians started it. The Romans perfected it. The anglosphere inherited it. The world is now mired in it. The war between good and evil is in reality an imposition of stupidity and simplicity over wisdom and complexity.
– Tyson Yunkaporta
Knot by knot I untie myself from the past
And let it rise away from me like a balloon.
What a small thing it becomes.
What a bright tweak at the vanishing point…
– Charles Wright
The writer feeds his book, he strengthens the parts of it which are weak, he protects it, but afterwards it is the book that grows, that designates its author’s tomb and defends it against the world’s clamour and for a while against oblivion.
– Marcel Proust
Someone told me that young people aren’t going out to clubs as much these days, among many reasons there’s a thing where people film your silly dancing and post it on the internet, and that breaks my heart. I feel like I caught this experience of youth by the skin of my teeth.
– Christina Riley
Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.
– Marcel Proust
Notes on Poverty
by Hayden Carruth
Was I so poor
in those damned days
that I went in the dark
in torn shoes
and furtiveness
to steal fat ears
of cattle corn
from the good cows
and pound them
like hard maize
on my worn Aztec
stone? I was.
If you have mindfulness enabling you to read yourself and understand yourself, craving will have a hard time forming. In whatever guises it arises, you can read it, know it, extinguish it, let it go.
– Upasika Kee Nanayon
If you are capable of living deeply one moment in your life, you can learn to live the same way all the other moments of your life.
– @JoshBulriss
She lives in a world where invisible moths gobble the venomous envy of others, brightening her wattage, now she doesn’t have to dim her light.
Finally, her glow shines freely.
– Rachel Newcombe
The quickest way I know to break a person is to give him or her two sets of contradicting values—which is exactly what we do, in modern culture, with our Sunday and Monday moralities.
– Robert A. Johnson
Jesus is everyone
you exclude. And
everyone you
exclude is Jesus.
– James Martin, SJ
Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.
– Henry David Thoreau
(the heaven in the sky is, most likely, quite boring – and there is so much fluff there – seraphims’ – that, they say, smoking is forbidden. Sometimes, though, angels themselves smoke – in their sleeves. But when the archangel goes by, they throw their cigarettes away: this is what falling stars are).
– Vladimir Nabokov
There were no signs of panic. The stalls still had their display of goods and the shops were open, but there was no one around. There were a lot of birds in the air, circling the aerials. Somewhere in the distance a radio had been left on. Across the street a goat wandered around the roots of a tree. The cocks didn’t crow. After a while all I heard inside me was a confused droning, my incomprehension. Something had been creeping on us all along and now that the street was empty I couldn’t even see what it was. I sat outside, fighting the mosquitoes, till it became dark. Then it dawned on me that something had happened to time. I seemed to be sitting in an empty space without history. The wind wasn’t cooling. And then suddenly all the lights went out. It was as if the spirit of the world had finally died. The black-out lasted a long time.
– Ben Okri, Worlds that Flourish
It matters little how small I am in the pool
of another’s eye. It’s awe or indifference
I crave. I want to be seen clearly or not at all.
– Ama Codjoe
Queerness is on the side of a different future, because heterosexuality is so tightly imbricated with social and material forms of property— that is, with the preservation of sameness.
– Alva Gotby, They Call It Love
I kinda do sense you gotta deal with your whole ancestral consciousness
if you wanna go beyond it like you gotta
become and surpass your inner animist
become and surpass your inner pagan
become and surpass your inner christian
become and surpass your inner atheist
become and surpass yo
whatever your soul is wanting to build on, you have to actually re-experience and re-integrate the foundations it stands on
– River Kenna
From The Monastery of Work and Love
If you believe nothing is always what’s left
after a while, as I did,
If you believe you have this collection
of ungiven gifts, as I do (right here
behind the silence and the averted eyes)
If you believe an afternoon can collapse
into strange privacies, which it has-
how in your backyard, for example,
the shyness of flowers can be suddenly
overwhelming, and in the distance
the clear goddamn of thunder
personal, like a voice
If you believe there’s no correct response
to death, as I do,
If you believe that in grief there are
small corners of joy (where I have sat
making plans)
If your body sometimes is a light switch
in a house of insomniacs,
If you can feel yourself straining
to be yourself every waking minute,
If, as I am, you are almost smiling …
– Stephen Elliot Dunn
off the breath’s blue spools unravel the planets.
– Gustaf Sobin
I NEVER FOUND THE TEACHER When I was young I desperately sought the one religious teacher or text that could put my life together.
As a philosophy major in college I tried to find the one genius who could make sense of it all. I studied Western and then Eastern teachers. Although each teacher had a gift to give, none could explain away the cavernous depths of confusion I was feeling.
From time to time I would find a genius who seemed to explain everything; but, after a time, I would come to see the limitations and frailties of their system.
I never found the teacher. I did come to understand my loneliness and futility were the result of a mistaken perception that I was a separate being. I realized I was not the center of the universe and so I could never make sense of life in terms of my own little drama. Instead I had to give myself to the larger life.
I eventually realized life itself is the teacher. I realized “God” was not a magical being who was hiding from me, but one symbol of an experience of something deeper and more mysterious. I realized the “word” is not so much a book as the creative principles that gave birth to art, science and religion. I realized every being I meet is like an angel from the “source.” The sacred was not hiding far away in some hidden supernatural realm but was fully available in my ordinary moments whenever I was fully present.
What I found was not one teacher, but more like ten thousand fireflies each giving just enough illumination to take the next step. I am grateful to know a depth of being that does not have to be begged or bribed. I am glad to be taught by insects and trees instead of by dead saints and philosophers.
Most of all, I am grateful that I never found the teacher.
– Jim Rigby
I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion
Has broken Nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle,
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An’ fellow-mortal!
– Robert Burns
If nothing else, one day you can look someone straight in the eyes and say ‘But I lived through it. And it made me who I am today.’
– Iain Thomas
He stitches the world
to the underworld.
Mythical realm to
musical reality.
– Sophie Strand
You are music / and rivers, palaces, angels, and skies, / an endless rose, infinite and intimate,
– Jorge Luis Borges
I describe myself as a patternist, and believe that if you put matter and energy in just the right pattern you create something that transcends it. Technology is a good example of that: you put together lenses and mechanical parts and some computers and some software in just the right combination and you create a reading machine for the blind. It’s something that transcends the semblance of parts you’ve put together. That is the nature of technology, and it’s the nature of the human brain. Biological molecules put in a certain combination create the transcending properties of human intelligence; you put notes and sounds together in just the right combination, and you create a Beethoven symphony or a Beatles song. So patterns have a power that transcends the parts of that pattern.
– Ray Kurzweil
…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
It Comes Unadorned
It comes
Unadorned
Like a phrase
Strong enough to cast a spell;
It comes
Unbidden,
Like the turn of sun through hills
Or stars in wheels of song.
The jeweled feet of women dance the earth.
Arousing it to spring.
Shoulders broad as a road bend to share the weight of years.
Profiles breach the distance and lean
Toward an ordinary kiss.
Bliss.
It comes naked into the world like a charm.
– Toni Morrison
The Dreaming is now. The Dreaming is always; forever; it circles around and around. It never ends. It’s always happening, and us mob, we’re part of it, all the time, everywhere, and every-when too.
– Kate Constable
(…)Mankind is accursed because our existence on this earth does not tolerate any well-defined and stable hierarchy, everything continually flows, spills over, moves on, everyone must be aware of and be judged by everyone else, and the opinions that the ignorant, dull, and slow-witted hold about us are no less important than the opinions of the bright, the enlightened, the refined. This is because man is profoundly dependent on the reflection of himself in another man’s soul, be it even the soul of an idiot.
I absolutely disagree with my fellow writers who treat the opinions of the dull-witted with an aristocratic haughtiness and declare: odi profanum vulgus. What a cheap and simplistic way of avoiding reality, what a shoddy escape into specious loftiness! I maintain, on the contrary, that the more dull and narrow-minded they are, the more urgent and compelling are their opinions, just as an ill-fitting shoe hurts us more than a well-fitting one.(…)
– Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke
Energy has been a great preoccupation of Man and synergy has been overlooked. Synergy is to energy as integration is to differentiation. Energy is differentiating out and synergy is integrating.
– Buckminster Fuller
Fortunate is the person who assembles a wealth of divine understanding, but a miserable wretch is he who tries to manipulate his fellow humans with his conjectures about the gods.
– Empedokles
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
But feel, to the very end, the triumph of being alive!
– Ingmar Bergman
There is a dual will to happiness, a dialectics of happiness: a hymnic and an elegiac form. The one is the unheard-of, the unprecedented, the height of bliss; the other, the eternal repetition, the eternal restoration of the original, the first happiness.
– Walter Benjamin
Western cultures have bred a type of human being who feels strongly alienated from everything which is not his own consciousness. He is a stranger both to the external world and to his own body, and in this sense he has lost his connection with the surrounding universe. He does not know that the “ultimate inside” of himself is the same as the “ultimate inside” of the cosmos, or that, in other words, his sensation of being “I” is a glimmering intimation of what the universe itself feels like on the inside. He has been taught to regard everything outside human skins as so much witless mechanism which has nothing whatsoever in common with human feelings and values. This style of man must therefore see himself as the ghastly and tragic accident of sensitive and intelligent tissue caught up in the cosmic toils like a mouse in a cotton gin.
– Alan Watts
When meditators and spiritual types say “your body knows the answer” or “drop that question into your body,” it can sound like gibberish to some people.
But it really is this straightforward.
– River Kenna
Real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.
– Alan W. Watts
There are new myths:-comic books, science fiction, movies. You would think that metaphor was obsolete in the culture until you begin to see it slipping in the back door in so many areas. If you take away food of the soul (metaphor), it’ll come slipping in someplace else.
– Mariom Woodman
even in snow
this flower does not wither
in the noonday sun
– Basho
though attending to what we hate in common is too often all the rage (and it happens to be very big business), noticing what we love in common, and studying that, might help us survive.
– Ross Gay
Nothing is merely a means to an end, nothing is merely a step on the path to somewhere else. Every moment, everything, is absolutely foundational in its own right.
– Barry Magid
Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realize how much it owes to them and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.
– Marcel Proust
From Ashes
by Caroliena Cabada
I am not grieving, even
underneath the forest canopy
though the edges of my life have curled
where the leaf litter crumbles
like paper set on fire, charred and turned
into decay that feeds
a more precious nature due to its
brush with death and more
tinder-like qualities: dry, brittle, catches with
abundantly close
vigor, burns long enough to release
carbon and other chemicals that
heat and light and
catch onto dry roots nearby to
start a bigger fire,
make a little life.
Never thought I’d be back here half-living.
– Ellen O’Leary, Ticket to Oblivion
We acquire a particular quality by constantly acting in a particular way.
– Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
Aesthetic barbarism today is accomplishing what has threatened intellectual formations since they were brought together as culture and neutralized. To speak about culture always went against the grain of culture.
– Adorno and Horkheimer
The poet’s first obligation is survival. No bolder challenge confronts the modern artist than to stay healthy in a sick world.
– Stanley Kunitz
Sometimes it’s wanting
that destroys you
and sometimes it’s having,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
I cannot overstate how much writing about what you believe and what you’ve experienced
Forever changes how you read other writers on what they believed and what they’ve experienced
– @the_wilderless
Conditionals
If we love the same things, that makes us friends.
If we hate the same things, that makes us friends.
If we dream in the same language, that makes us friends.
If we flinch from the same hands, that makes us friends.
If we eat breakfast before ten, that makes us friends.
If we agree on the same lies, that makes us countrymen.
– Momtaza Mehri
The only Psyche now recognized by science is a decapitated frog whose writhings express deeper truths then your weak-minded poets ever dreamed.
– William James
We are the makers of one another. And we could learn collectively to act like it.
– Sophie Lewis
I Have News for You
by Tony Hoagland
There are people who do not see a broken playground swing
as a symbol of ruined childhood
and there are people who don’t interpret the behavior
of a fly in a motel room as a mocking representation of their thought process.
There are people who don’t walk past an empty swimming pool
and think about past pleasures unrecoverable
and then stand there blocking the sidewalk for other pedestrians.
I have read about a town somewhere in California where human beings
do not send their sinuous feeder roots
deep into the potting soil of others’ emotional lives
as if they were greedy six-year-olds
sucking the last half-inch of milkshake up through a noisy straw;
and other persons in the Midwest who can kiss without
debating the imperialist baggage of heterosexuality.
Do you see that creamy, lemon-yellow moon?
There are some people, unlike me and you,
who do not yearn after fame or love or quantities of money as
unattainable as that moon;
thus, they do not later
have to waste more time
defaming the object of their former ardor.
Or consequently run and crucify themselves
in some solitary midnight Starbucks Golgotha.
I have news for you—
there are people who get up in the morning and cross a room
and open a window to let the sweet breeze in
and let it touch them all over their faces and bodies.
Underground, marble
starts its ascent to service,
though it hides its name.
– Jay Wright
If we are to do beautiful pictures, we ought to be free of family conventions and ties. Enough of this. I think the family has had its day. Don’t you think so? We don’t go to heaven in families now, but one by one.
– Gwen John, letter to Ursula, 1911
We are all witnesses, archives, archivists. Whether you choose to look at any of this doesn’t change the fact that the shrapnel of a colonial world is embedded within you. Will you work to remove the shards and or pretend they don’t exist, allowing scar tissue to grow over them?
– Guérin Asante
Hell isn’t other people. Hell is yourself.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
Build a good name. Don’t make compromises, don’t worry about making money or being successful — be concerned with doing good work and make the right choices and protect your work. And if you build a good name, eventually, that name will be its own currency.
– Patti Smith
Your very bones are butterflies—
I am sorry this world is full of nets.
Your sweet skin is a wolf’s howl,
every kiss feels like the moon.
– Siaara Freeman
Ishmael
I’m not prepared to measure grief
like grains of darkness
Who suffers more?
The man who sits in the rubble of his home weeping for his wife
or the grandmother who walks by
holding a broken doll?
The night sky is filled with menace
At dawn tanks roll by
Who can measure sorrow?
Where is the boundary of mercy?
Which child is not ours?
– Michael Simms
The desire for symmetry and, for balance, for rhythm in form as well as in sound, is one of the most inveterate of human instincts.
– Edith Wharton
Crisscross
Meandering across a field with wild asparagus,
I write with my body the characters for grass,
water, transformation, ache to be one with spring.
Biting into watermelon, spitting black seeds
onto a plate, I watch the eyes of an Armenian
accordion player, and before dropping a few
euros into his brown cap, smell sweat and fear.
I stay wary of the red horse, Relámpago, latch
the gate behind me; a thorned Russian olive
branch arcs across the path below my forehead,
and, approaching the Pojoaque River, I recall
the sign, beware pickpockets, find backhoe tracks,
water diverted into a ditch. Crisscrossing
the stream, I catch a lightning flash, the white-
capped Truchas peaks, behind, to the east, and in
the interval between lightning and thunder,
as snow accumulates on black branches,
the chasm between what I envision and what I do.
– Arthur Sze
these days I think
I can find truth in song
as if it started inside me
– Morgan Parker
the brain is an unlit synagogue.
– Sam Sax
I have news for you— there are people who get up in the morning and cross a room and open a window to let the sweet breeze in and let it touch them all over their faces and bodies.
– Tony Hoagland
This society is not kind to those whose lives are organized around endless movement, although it’s an ancient human instinct.
– Nancy Campbell
Fish swim. They die. They rise to the surface. It is their way of falling.
– Frank Kuenstler
How often it happens that I emerge like chaos from my room…
– Rilke
A kind of joyous hysteria moved into the room, everything flying before the wind, vehicles outside getting dented to hell, the crowd sweaty and the smells of aftershave, manure, clothes dried on the line, your money’s worth of perfume, smoke, booze; the music subdued by the shout and babble through the bass hammer could be felt through the soles of the feet, shooting up the channels of legs to the body fork, center of everything. It is the kind of Saturday night that torches your life for a few hours, makes it seem like something is happening.
– Annie Proulx
Spell To Be Said Against Hatred
by Jane Hirshfield
Until each breath refuses they, those, them.
Until the Dramatis Personae of the book’s first page says,
“Each one is you.”
Until hope bows to its hopelessness only as one self bows to another.
Until cruelty bends to its work and sees suddenly: I.
Until anger and insult know themselves burnable legs of a useless table.
Until the unsurprised unbidden knees find themselves bending.
Until fear bows to its object as a bird’s shadow bows to its bird.
Until the ache of the solitude inside the hands, the ribs, the ankles.
Until the sound the mouse makes inside the mouth of the cat.
Until the inaudible acids bathing the coral.
Until what feels no one’s weighing is no longer weightless.
Until what feels no one’s earning is no longer taken.
Until grief, pity, confusion, laughter, longing know themselves mirrors.
Until by we we mean I, them, you, the muskrat, the tiger, the hunger.
Until by I we mean as a dog barks, sounding and vanishing and
sounding and vanishing completely.
Until by until we mean I, we, you, them, the muskrat, the tiger, the hunger, the lonely barking of the dog before it is answered.
Words do have power. Names have power. Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it.
– Ursula Le Guin
I ask god to send a swordsman
and god says ‘look at your hands’
– Melissa Broder
My friends, to those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them we are 172 years late. To those who say that this civil-rights program is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this: The time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights. People—human beings—this is the issue of the 20th century. People of all kinds—all sorts of people—and these people are looking to America for leadership, and they’re looking to America for precept and example.
– Hubert H. Humphrey
Life is a series of passages. In every passage there is a death of some sort, the death of naïveté, the death of a dependency, the death of an understanding of self and world. And, after that death, there is often a terrible “in-between,” sometimes lasting years.
– James Hollis
the world isn’t disenchanted, that’s not a thing
it’s been misenchanted
– River Kenna
Irish people sure do write a lot. There’s no denying that.
– @IrishLitTimes
People disagreeing everywhere you look
makes you wanna stop and
read a book.
– Bob Dylan
Silly me. I thought
we were here to live.
– Chelsea Dingman
northern hills
the summer begins
its long goodbye
– Bill Kenney
The poet does not merely sing out of a welling up of a need for expression; the need for expression comes from the grounding sphere of those who wait and listen, those who have made their way in the darkness toward the poet.
– Susan Stewart
You have to have confidence in your ability, and then be tough enough to follow through.
– Rosalyn Carter
All I need to do is work, break open the deep mines of experience and imagination, let the words come and speak it all, sounding themselves and tasting themselves.
– Sylvia Plath
If you don’t stare dazedly into the middle distance for half an hour after finishing a book, did you really read it?
– India Holton
In the light. I will never give up.
– Audre Lorde
Definitions can’t be the basis of meaning for all words, or we’d go forever in a circle. Eventually we must get to some words which have meaning directly.
– Thomas Nagel
I had the ability to ask the question, but not to hear the answer. No, I had not even known how to ask the question. Yet the answer had imposed itself upon me since I was born. … So I had got lost in a labyrinth of questions, and asked questions at random, hoping that one of them would occasionally correspond to the answer, and that I could then understand the answer.
– Clarice Lispector
Misery won’t touch you gentle. It always leaves its thumbprints on you; sometimes it leaves them for others to see, sometimes for nobody but you to know of.
– Edwidge Danticat
I write to find what I have to say. I edit to figure out how to say it right.
– Cheryl Strayed
There is nothing stronger in the world than tenderness.
– Han Suyin
All your fury is to hide a fragile heart.
– Ghassan Kanafani
Poet: When you write your poetry, do you feel generations standing behind you, and do you hope that you are a conduit for them?
– G. E. Schwartz
It is almost ridiculous to ask, “Why meditate?” as if it were going out of one’s way to do something bizarre, like lying on a bed of nails. Why look at the stars or watch clouds? Why go sailing to no fixed destination? Nothing is really explained by its cause or motivation, for we find only causes behind causes until we can pursue them no longer.
– Alan Watts
Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens. Most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers.
– Ray Bradbury
old friends—
I place more wood
on the campfire
– Ray Rasmussen
People have the right to resist annihilation.
– Arundhati Roy
The people I meet, everyone on TV & the radio. All of them act as if this consumption-fest of a society will just continue forever.
It will not.
Science is telling us billions will die, our civilization won’t survive the coming decades.
This mass, wilfull ignorance is insanity.
– @ClimateDad77
The bringing out of our little book was hard work. As was to be expected, neither we nor our poems were at all wanted.
– Charlotte Brontë on indie publishing in the 1840s.
good harvest—
a new shirt
for the scarecrow
– Greg Schwartz
Consider just how often mainstream economists get things wrong – not only small things, but very big ones.
– James K Galbraith, Why Mainstream Economics Got Inflation Wrong
If you’re reading this, if there’s air in your lungs on this November day, then there is still hope for you. Your story is still going. And maybe some things are true for all of us. Perhaps we all relate to pain. Perhaps we all relate to fear and loss and questions. And perhaps we all deserve to be honest, all deserve whatever help we need. Our stories are all so many things: Heavy and light. Beautiful and difficult. Hopeful and uncertain. But our stories are not finished yet. There is still time, for things to heal and change and grow. There is still time to be surprised. We are still going, you and I. We are stories still going.
– Jamie Tworkowski
Are you the experiences or
are you the presence that lies within,
the sweet calm, the one who knows,
the one who rests in the arms of the eternal,
the source of everlasting shine?
– Jack Kornfield
I went back to di Prima’s declaration in her famous “Rant.” Further down, the poem continues:
There is no way out of the spiritual battle
There is no way you can avoid taking sides
There is no way you can not have a poetics
no matter what you do: plumber, baker, teacher
you do it in the consciousness of making
or not making yr world
Rebecca Solnit
Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.” I’d like to show how “intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members” connects with “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.” I’d like to have a word for “the sadness inspired by failing restaurants” as well as for “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.” I’ve never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I’ve entered my story, I need them more than ever.
– Jeffrey Eugenides
If we think about what it means to “concentrate” or “pay attention” at an individual level, it implies alignment: different parts of the mind and even the body acting in concert and oriented toward the same thing. To pay attention to one thing is to resist paying attention to other things; it meant constantly denying and thwarting provocations outside the sphere of one’s attention. We contrast this with distraction, in which the mind is disassembled, pointing in many different directions at once and preventing meaningful action. It seems the same is true on a collective level. Just as it takes alignment for someone to concentrate and act with intention, it requires alignment for a “movement” to move. Importantly, this is not a top-down formation, but rather a mutual agreement among individuals who pay intense attention to the same things and to each other. I draw the connection between individual and collective concentration because it makes the stakes of attention clear. It’s not just that living in a constant state of distraction is unpleasant, or that a life without wilful thought and action is an impoverished one. If it’s true that collective agency both mirrors and relies on the individual capacity to “pay attention”, then in a time that demands action, distraction appears to be (at the level of the collective) a life-and-death matter. A social body that can’t concentrate or communicate with itself is like a person who can’t think and act.
– Jenny Odell
The injustices and indignities that you are now confronting certainly leave you in trying moments. I hope, however, that you will gain consolation from the fact that in your struggle for freedom and a true Christian community you have cosmic companionship. God grant that this tragic midnight of man’s inhumanity to man will soon pass and the bright daybreak of freedom and brotherhood will come into being.
– Martin Luther King Jr
Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure, you are called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem, do I dare? And then if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, and the fulfilment or the fiasco.
– Joseph Campbell
a winter rain
falling on me
so what?
– Basho
Can anyone be anything
but a rebel in a conventional
world like this?
– Jack Kerouac
The problem with
imagination is
the real world,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
Even flying / is born / out of nothing.
– Li-Young Lee:
The language I speak must be ambiguous, must have two meanings, in order to do justice to the dual aspect of our psychic nature. I strive consciously and deliberately for ambiguity of expression, because it is superior to unequivocalness and reflects the nature of life.
– CG Jung
Distance has the same effect on the mind as on the eye.
– Samuel Johnson
Remember our rule of thumb: The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.
– Steven Pressfield
On the verbal level everything is relative. Absolutes should be experienced, not discussed.
– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
When you encounter suffering that you can’t stop no matter how hard you try, you need equanimity to avoid creating additional suffering and to channel your energies to areas where you can be of help.
– Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Your words should be as
water over rocks in the river,
the old monk told the poet.
– The Old Monk
so many lawyers, advocates, so many tribunals, so little justice; so many laws, yet never more disorders; the tribunal a labyrinth (…) what’s the world itself but a theatre of hypocrisy, a shop of knavery, a scene of babbling? a warfare.
– robert burton
Some of his quips
might be aphorisms,
the poet said,
and some are the sayings
of his people.
– The Old Monk
Ceasefire Haiku
Such weakness: You kill
Journalists, kidnap poets,
Steal even God’s rain.
– Faisal Mohyuddin
I am besieged by land and air and sea and language.
– Mahmoud Darwish
If your music
is louder than
my crickets,
I don’t want
to hear it,
the old monk told
the composer.
– The Old Monk
Just as a tower surmounts the summit of a mountain on which it stands, so I stand above my brain, from which I grew.
– @RedBookJung
When it starts to look
like it’s laid out for
a computer screen
instead of the page,
I start to worry,
the old monk told
the poet.
– The Old Monk
How can we combine the old words in new orders so that they survive, so that they create beauty, so that they tell the truth? That is the question.
– Virginia Woolf
With assonance
they all go the same direction —
with dissonance,
they don’t,
the old monk told the poet.
– The Old Monk
The easiest thing in the world for me is to pay attention.
– Susan Sontag
Love will heal
What language fails to know
– Eavan Boland
just two stories for Americans: “rags to riches”–“decline & fall.”
– Joyce Carol Oates
Pity the nation that has to silence its writers for speaking their minds.
– Arundhati Roy
A poem can give you a map for a certain kind of desire. Sometimes writing poems leads you to where you need to be.
– Terrance Hayes
Writing poetry sometimes feels like making sculpture to me. There’s a spatial element that is almost three-dimensional. The way we break these lines, we’re carving with words.
– Maureen Langloss
The faculty revolts
Screams and chants
‘You sniveling sycophant’
Oleaginous headmaster quivers
School board applauds
Wrongs are righted
– Rachel Newcombe
Only the good has depth and can be radical.
– Hannah Arendt to Gershom Scholem, 24 July 1963
The god who gave me a poet’s heart
Will know how to forgive me
– Forough Farrokhzad
It is difficult to free fools
from the chains
they revere.
– Voltaire
Sometimes
what’s left at the end
is just your stink,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
Come, months, come away,
From November to May,
In your saddest array.
– Percy Bysshe Shelley, Autumn: A Dirge
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.
– Tennyson
A small novel crammed with big ideas, This Plague of Souls is at once thought-provoking and deeply satisfying.
– Mick Herron
But we who serve Art,
sometimes with the mind’s intensity
can create pleasure that seems almost physical.
– C.P. Cavafy
Language is the house for all that is no more.
– Quignard
What attaches us to people are the countless roots, the innumerable threads which are our memories of last night, our hopes for tomorrow morning, the continuous weft of habit from which we can never free ourselves.
– Proust
Great art helps you use your own mind.
– Cat Power
Sometimes the
best healing
happens when
you realize
nothing’s really
changed but
you can no
longer let that
keep you from
living.
– McCall Erickson
A vigorous truth
tastes better
than the sweetest
lie
– Amadeus Wolfe
Caregiving is happening within most families in every community. It’s the connective tissue that makes us thrive, both individually and collectively.
– Arianna Huffington
Daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity.
– Gaston Bachelard
and then the light
changes and we move on …
– Mather Schneider
On Living
by Nâzim Hikmet
I
Living is no laughing matter:
you must live with great seriousness
like a squirrel, for example—
I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
I mean living must be your whole occupation.
Living is no laughing matter:
you must take it seriously,
so much so and to such a degree
that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
your back to the wall,
or else in a laboratory
in your white coat and safety glasses,
you can die for people—
even for people whose faces you’ve never seen,
even though you know living
is the most real, the most beautiful thing.
I mean, you must take living so seriously
that even at seventy, for example, you’ll plant olive trees—
and not for your children, either,
but because although you fear death you don’t believe it,
because living, I mean, weighs heavier.
II
Let’s say we’re seriously ill, need surgery—
which is to say we might not get up
from the white table.
Even though it’s impossible not to feel sad
about going a little too soon,
we’ll still laugh at the jokes being told,
we’ll look out the window to see if it’s raining,
or still wait anxiously
for the latest newscast. . .
Let’s say we’re at the front—
for something worth fighting for, say.
There, in the first offensive, on that very day,
we might fall on our face, dead.
We’ll know this with a curious anger,
but we’ll still worry ourselves to death
about the outcome of the war, which could last years.
Let’s say we’re in prison
and close to fifty,
and we have eighteen more years, say,
before the iron doors will open.
We’ll still live with the outside,
with its people and animals, struggle and wind—
I mean with the outside beyond the walls.
I mean, however and wherever we are,
we must live as if we will never die.
III
This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet—
I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
in pitch-black space . . .
You must grieve for this right now
—you have to feel this sorrow now—
for the world must be loved this much
if you’re going to say “I lived”. . .
But where is the buzzard, I wondered,
and how is he going to navigate
toward breakfast in this gale?
– Marilyn Robertson
This is the force of faith. Nobody gets what they want.
– Jorie Graham
Each book has to teach you how to write it.
– Salman Rushdie
Poets speak the truth rarely heard elsewhere (hence prophecy), and they use allegory & metaphor to blind the censors—speaking directly in their rhythms to the hearts of people. This is absolutely outrageous. It says everything about the occupying force that they are afraid of poets.
– Zeeshan Pathan
They keep underestimating you because they forget your roots grew in impossibility.
Hard ground and dry seasons have never been the end of your story.
– Dr. Thema
To survivors:
There are those who don’t want to see you healed, whole, happy, and free.
They are not your compass.
You’re worthy of a full life.
– Dr. Thema
What kind of schools and what kind of streets and what kind of parks and what kind of privacy and what kind of beauty and what kind of music and what kind of options would make love a reasonable, easy response?
– June Jordan
When the radio was a rope and someday was a lifeline to a place that wasn’t a place, but could’ve been, we were good.
– @pdforan
I say weather but I mean / a form of governing that deals out death / and names it living.
– Claudia Rankine
(Kenyon later clarified that it was not God she doubted but organized religion). As she worked to establish a relationship with God on her own terms, she discovered poetry, “a safe place always, refuge,” as she called it.
– Jane Kenyon
He discovered sleep came when he was mildly befuddled, not content or brilliant. Staring at the ceiling, he tried to focus on imponderables. His mind would wander.
– Bruno Nelson
I want a life shaped like you
– Boris Vian, tr. Maria Freij
Does desire ramify like language? Who will ever know which one starts things off? Does narrative ramify like desire, desire like language, the latter like consciousness and all of them together like time?
– Serres
Praises are the breathings of interior love
– Traherne
This magnetic field,
a fourth estate, effigy
set by tidal suns
leaves what cannot disappear
– a participating light.
– Jay Wright
to have two names / is very good // when death calls you, my friend, / by one of them / run with the other.
– Ahlam Bsharat
The Totem Pole
Somewhere within you there is a totem pole
yawning and stretching in the first rays of
morning sunlight streaming
in yellows, golds, and blues
through splayed branch-fingers
into a quiet redwood forest glen.
Deeply grounded in plush mossy Earth,
this pole rises eighteen totem faces tall
to convene with the Sky Gods and
your Highest Self.
Ancients carved the pole from
The Great Tree
with intent and ancestral DNA
as fires and sage burned
and prayers that you would
one day understand
were offered
in abundance.
Paints of clay, shell, charcoal, and fish egg
leave little impression,
offer barely a hint
to the eye.
They once gleamed with meaning.
Much time has passed.
But this is a new day
and a new year in the relationship
of the Sun and his beloved Moon.
It is the day arrived
when prayers
will be answered.
Oh how The Great Carvers will rejoice!
It has been written –
the eyelids of even the most
weary-eyed Seer
can be opened by the heart-moistened
lips of Gratitude.
Alternating from
animal to man,
top to bottom,
the totems speak.
Raven, looking below, says:
“Thank you, I am honored
by your strength and devotion.”
Man, looking up, says:
“Trust that you are supported.”
Man, looking down, says:
“Thank you, I am honored
by your strength and devotion.”
Sea Turtle. looking up, says:
“Trust that you are supported.”
Sea Turtle, looking down, says:
“Thank you, I am honored
by your strength and devotion.”
Man, looking up, says:
“Trust that you are supported.”
Man, looking down, says:
“Thank you, I am honored
by your strength and devotion.”
Hawk, looking up, says:
“Trust that you are supported.”
Hawk, looking down, says:
“Thank you, I am honored
by your strength and devotion.”
Man, looking up, says:
“Trust that you are supported.”
Man, looking down, says:
“Thank you, I am honored
by your strength and devotion.”
Wolf, looking up, says:
“Trust that you are supported.”
Wolf, looking down, says:
“Thank you, I am honored
by your strength and devotion.”
Man, looking up, says:
“Trust that you are supported.”
Man, looking down, says:
“Thank you, I am honored
by your strength and devotion.”
Frog, looking up, says:
“Trust that you are supported.”
Frog, looking down, says:
“Thank you, I am honored
by your strength and devotion.”
Man, looking up, says:
“Trust that you are supported.”
Man, looking down, says:
“Thank you, I am honored
by your strength and devotion.”
Hummingbird, looking up, says:
“Trust that you are supported.”
Hummingbird, looking down, says:
“Thank you, I am honored
by your strength and devotion.”
Man, looking up, says:
“Trust that you are supported.”
Man, looking down, says:
“Thank you, I am honored
by your strength and devotion.”
Salmon, looking up says:
“Trust that you are supported.”
Salmon, looking down, says:
“Thank you, I am honored
by your strength and devotion.”
Man, looking up, says:
“Trust that you are supported.”
Man, looking down, says:
“Thank you, I am honored
by your strength and devotion.”
Heron, looking up, says:
“Trust that you are supported.”
Heron, looking down, says:
“Thank you, I am honored
by your strength and devotion.”
Man, looking up, says:
“Trust that you are supported.”
Man, looking down, says:
“Thank you, I am honored
by your strength and devotion.”
Bear, looking up, says:
“Trust that you are supported.”
“Bear, looking down, says:
“Thank you, I am honored
by your strength and devotion.”
Man, looking up, says:
“Trust that you are supported.”
Man, looking into the eyes
of their Mother, says:
“Thank you, I am honored
by your strength and devotion.”
And She replies with words that
she has longed for you to
truly hear:
“Trust that you are supported.”
And She looks into your eyes.
Now, it is your turn.
– Jamie K. Reaser
SHEATH
Before I knew its name, I knew the laurel bush
By its gnarled branches, as bent as my grandmother’s hands,
The space it made for a three-year-old’s fort.
I knew its flowers were hexagonal and sweet.
But not for eating. A complicated flower
Blooms in my chest.
You can eat the roots of the grass, though,
Pulling, slow and careful, the blade from its sheath
To draw the sweet white nectar between your teeth
Look—I can still show you how.
– Nerissa Nields
Forgiveness is the final form of love.
– Reinhold Niebuhr
The Words Under the Words
for Sitti Khadra, north of Jerusalem
My grandmother’s hands recognize grapes,
the damp shine of a goat’s new skin.
When I was sick they followed me,
I woke from the long fever to find them
covering my head like cool prayers.
My grandmother’s days are made of bread,
a round pat-pat and the slow baking.
She waits by the oven watching a strange car
circle the streets. Maybe it holds her son,
lost to America. More often, tourists,
who kneel and weep at mysterious shrines.
She knows how often mail arrives,
how rarely there is a letter.
When one comes, she announces it, a miracle,
listening to it read again and again
in the dim evening light.
My grandmother’s voice says nothing can surprise her.
Take her the shotgun wound and the crippled baby.
She knows the spaces we travel through,
the messages we cannot send—our voices are short
and would get lost on the journey.
Farewell to the husband’s coat,
the ones she has loved and nourished,
who fly from her like seeds into a deep sky.
They will plant themselves. We will all die.
My grandmother’s eyes say Allah is everywhere, even in death.
When she talks of the orchard and the new olive press,
when she tells the stories of Joha and his foolish wisdoms,
He is her first thought, what she really thinks of is His name.
“Answer, if you hear the words under the words—
otherwise it is just a world with a lot of rough edges,
difficult to get through, and our pockets full of stones.”
– Naomi Shihab Nye
You must grieve for this right now —
you have to feel this sorrow now—
for the world must be loved this much
if you’re going to say “I lived”. . .
– Nâzim Hikmet
Love doesn’t follow rules.
It mocks boundaries.
Love doesn’t care if dreams
dissolve the strings.
Happy to look beyond
everything that is known,
love is where living thrives.
– George Gorman
And it will be our love, not our anger, that heals the world.
– Lauren Fortenberry
I think the uncanny is at the heart of literary nonfiction. The places where the real slip-slides with something unrecognizable, where the familiar and the strange switch places.
– Mary Cappello
I used to be a spiritual teacher. I had to quit when I realised there was no such thing. Or rather, everything is a spiritual teacher. The cat. The carpet. A chair. A tree. A mountain. My dad with dementia. Heartache. Joy. My own. Yours. The man sleeping on the pavement. The breathtaking night sky. It’s all a teacher. It’s all a guru. And I am just a mouthpiece, as we all are. I am just a friend, sharing my heart. I am just a bird, singing my song. I quit as a spiritual teacher, I quit as any kind of authority, and I became a real human being, authentic, embodied, honest and true. And there I found my true peace and enlightenment. In the temple of the ordinary. In the sanctuary of the mundane. In the holy heart of the uncovered moment.
– Jeff Foster
Seneca, Missouri—soft wash of casino jangle seeps through the Pontiac’s cracked window.
– Laura Da’
Displaced
In memory of Edward Said
I am neither in nor out.
I am in between.
I am not part of anything.
I am a shadow of something.
At best,
I am a thing that
does not really
exist.
I am weightless,
a speck of time
in Gaza.
But I will remain
where I am.
– Mosab Abu Taha
This world has no marks, signs, or evidence of existence, nor the noises in it, like accident of wind or voices or heehawing animals, yet listen closely the eternal hush of silence goes on and on throughout all this, and has been going on, and will go on and on. This is because the world is nothing but a dream and is just thought of and the everlasting eternity pays no attention to it.
At night under the moon, or in a quiet room, hush now, the secret music of the Unborn goes on and on, beyond conception, awake beyond existence. Properly speaking, awake is not really awake because the golden eternity never went to sleep; you can tell by the constant sound of Silence which cuts through this world like a magic diamond through the trick of your not realizing that your mind caused the world.
– Jack Kerouac
If language was given to men to conceal their thoughts, then gesture’s purpose was to disclose them.
– Iain McGilchrist
After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on – have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear – what remains? Nature remains.
– Walt Whitman
Gods suppressed become devils, and often it is these devils whom we first encounter when we turn inward.
– Joseph Campbell
For a long time, she held a special place in my heart. I kept this special place just for her, like a ‘Reserved’ sign on a quiet corner table in a restaurant. Despite the fact that I was sure I’d never see her again.
– Haruki Murakami
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
We all desire
“more” and “better,”
– Albert Goldbarth
Will be no more a datum than the words
You link false inference with, the ‘Since’ & ‘so’
That, true or not, make up the atom-whirl.
– George Eliot
The ancient world was settled so sparsely that nature was not yet eclipsed by man. Nature hit you in the eye so plainly and grabbed you so fiercely and so tangibly by the scruff of the neck that perhaps it really was still full of gods.
– Boris Pasternak
Sometimes it seems as though each new step towards AI, rather than producing something which everyone agrees is real intelligence, merely reveals what real intelligence is not.
– Douglas Hofstadter
For his readers, his books were events in our lives, monuments…. He was not merely a central figure in the literary life of Ireland, but in its emotional life, in its dream life, in its real life.
– Colm Tóibín, on Seamus Heaney
They made poetry the archive of their history, their wisdom, and their nobility . . .
– Ibn Khaldûn,
The Muqaddimah
(tr. Franz Rosenthal)
There is no formula to cope with the pain of betrayal. An archetypal perspective can help us to look at things differently, but the pain cannot be rationalised away. But there is a difference between blind pain and pain that is accompanied by understanding.
– Liz Greene
Travel is about the gorgeous feeling of teetering in the unknown.
– Anthony Bourdain
She had a way
of embroidering life
with stars
– L.M. Montgomery
He didn’t know how to act
His kindness was real
His fears unfurled
His joys immense
But we discovered
Too late
His loneliness
was concealed
– Rachel Newcombe
A complete alphabet
Not enough letters
To describe loss
– Rachel Newcombe
Relationships can be just like that. When one is sick, trying to save it can poison your everything.
– Jared Singer
I wanted to create a little possibility for us within our big impossibility.
– Ilana Shmueli on Paul Celan; tr. Susan H. Gillespie
Life itself is the most wonderful fairy tale.
– H.C. Andersen
The superior man thinks of virtue; the small man thinks of comfort. The superior man thinks of righteousness; the small man thinks of material advantages he may gain for himself.
– Confucius
We give thanks for our friends.
Our dear friends.
We anger each other;
We fail each other.
We share this sad earth, this tender life,
this precious time.
Such richness. Such wildness.
Together we are blown about.
Together we are dragged along.
All this delight.
All this suffering.
All this forgiving life.
We hold it together.
– Michael Leunig
There is nothing more important to true growth than realizing that you are not the voice of the mind – you are the one who hears it.
– Michael A. Singer
We do not “feel” our knowledge. Nothing could better illustrate the flaw at the heart of our civilization… Knowledge without feeling is not knowledge and can lead only to public irresponsibility and indifference, and conceivably to ruin.
– Archibald MacLeish
A great work of art is never simply (or even mainly) a vehicle of ideas or of moral sentiments. It is, first of all, an object modifying our consciousness and sensibility, changing the composition, however slightly, of the humus that nourishes all specific ideas and sentiments.
– Susan Sontag, One Culture and the New Sensibility
Poets, like the blind, can see in the dark.
– Jorge Luis Borges
For some unfortunate reason, complaining, rejecting, or fearing something strengthens your sense of ego and makes you feel like you are important. You contract back into your small and false self, and from there, unfortunately, it becomes harder and harder to reemerge.
– Richard Rohr, The Naked Now
The forest is its own thanksgiving.
– David St. John
To live the life of a poet… ‘What this meant to me was a life outside the law; it would include disobedience and uprootedness. I would be at liberty to observe, drift, read, travel, take notes, converse with friends and struggle with form.’
– Fanny Howe
There is no level of ‘seniority’ where we get a break from self-reflection, not even after many practices and retreats. Such an expectation shows that we are on the wrong track. We may be tired and not wish to go any further or we may think that we’ve already arrived. But the passion to look should never cease. It should deepen and increase. This is itself a sign of accomplishment. On the path of self-reflection, you are the ultimate assessor of the beginning, middle,, and end of your journey. Only you know what work needs to be done, and only you can do it. This is easy once you know how to assess yourself clearly.
– Dzigar Kongtrul, It’s Up to You
Erysichthon
by Ovid
translated by Ted Hughes
Some are transformed just once
And live their whole lives after in that shape.
Others have a facility
For changing themselves as they please.
I ask questions. I watch the world. And what I have discovered is that the parts of my fiction that people most tell me are ‘unbelievable’ are those that are most closely based on the real, those least diluted by my imagination.
– Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Until you know who you are you can’t write.
– Salman Rushdie
To be wild is not to be crazy or psychotic. True wildness is a love of nature, a delight in silence, a voice free to say spontaneous things, and an exuberant curiosity in the face of the unknown.
– Robert Bly
Pay careful attention to the things that everyone knows but pays no attention to.
– Shane Parrish
The more time you spend with people, the more likely you start to think and act as they do.
– Farnam Street
Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.
– Susan Sontag
That’s how I imagine my heart,
my hood, my synapses: this
quivering slice of cranberry sauce
on a very cheap, very loved plate.
– Siaara Freeman
The point of loving seems clear enough, even if we might think it absurd, irrational or unhealthy; the point of friendship is harder to grasp, and perhaps that makes it more attractive still.
– Geoffrey Bennington, Interrupting Derrida
I thought of Jung basically as what I call a noetic archeologist, someone who goes with toothbrush and pick to dig away the detritus from the bones of vanished idea systems.
– Terence Mckenna
What was the purpose of our pilgrimage?
To make a new intelligence prevail.
– Wallace Stevens
My love for you was greater than my wisdom.
– Euripides
Rejoice always, pray constantly,
and in all circumstances give thanks.
– The Desert Fathers
Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center. […] Big, undreamed-of things–the people on the edge see them first.
– Kurt Vonnegut
There should be a word for the microscopic spark of hope that you dare not entertain in case the mere act of acknowledging it will cause it to vanish, like trying to look at a photon. You can only sidle up to it, looking past it, walking past it, waiting for it to get big enough to face the world.
– Terry Pratchett
Life forms a surface that acts as if it could not be otherwise, but under its skin things are pounding and pulsing.
– Robert Musil, (tr. Wilkins and Pike)
It is just possible that once you have got past all the gods that we have created with big beards and many human traits, just beyond all that, on the other side of physics, there just may be the ordered structure from which everything flows.
– Terry Pratchett
If I could believe in myself, why not give other improbabilities the benefit of the doubt?
– David Sedaris
Jung realized that the problems of our time are rooted not only in the grip that the mechanistic philosophy of scientific materialism has on our culture, but above all in the loss of a living myth which would give meaning to our lives. He saw that the dissociation of the conscious ego from what he called the primordial or instinctual soul presented a growing and unperceived danger to humanity. The more we emphasized reason and the supremacy of the rational mind, the greater the danger that instinct — whose power we have failed to acknowledge or understand — would drive, possess, delude and overwhelm us and the more we would fall victim to secular and religious ideologies and utopian goals which could ultimately lead us to destroy ourselves. The paramount goal we need to focus on is reconnecting our conscious mind with the deeper dimension of the soul.
– Anne Baring, The Dream of the Cosmos: A Quest for the Soul
Surround yourself with the dreamers and the doers, the believers and thinkers, but most of all, surround yourself with those who see the greatness within you, even when you don’t see it yourself.
– Edmund Lee
The current generation now sees everything clearly, it marvels at the errors, it laughs at the folly of its ancestors, not seeing that this chronicle is all overscored by divine fire, that every letter of it cries out, that from everywhere the piercing finger is pointed at it, at this current generation; but the current generation laughs and presumptuously, proudly begins a series of new errors, at which their descendants will also laugh afterwards.
– Nikolai Gogol
Without darkness, nothing comes to birth, As without light, nothing flowers.
– May Sarton
It is necessary to realize that technology itself is not the cause of our problem of [not having enough] time. Its influence on our lives is a result, not a cause – the result of an unseen accelerating process taking place in ourselves, in our inner being. Whether we point to the effect of communication technology (such as e-mail) with its tyranny of instant communication; or to the computerization, and therefore the mentalization of so many human activities that previously required at least some participation of our physical presence; or to any of the other innumerable transformations of human life that are being brought about by the new technologies, the essential element to recognize is how much of what we call “progress” is accompanied by and measured by the fact that human beings need less and less conscious attention to perform their activities and lead their lives.
The real power of the faculty of attention, unknown to modern science, is one of the indispensable and most central measures of humanness – of the being of a man or a woman – and has been so understood, in many forms and symbols, at the heart of all great spiritual teaching of the world. The effects of advancing technology, for all its material promise they offer the world (along with the dangers, of course) is but the most recent wave in a civilization that, without recognizing what it was doing, has placed the satisfaction of desire above the cultivation of being.
The deep meaning of many rules of conduct and more principles of the past – so many of which have been abandoned without our understanding their real roots in human nature – involved the cultivation and development of the uniquely human power of attention, its action in the body, heart and mind of man. To be present, truly present, is to have conscious attention. This capacity is the key to what it means to be human.
It is not, therefore, the rapidity of change as such that is the source of our problem of time. It is the metaphysical fact that the being of man is diminishing.
– Jacob Needleman
I didn’t know that the war was still inside you, that there was a war to begin with, that once it enters you it never leaves—but merely echoes.
– Ocean Vuong
The first step is to ‘learn to listen,’ to wish to listen, to wish to drop the chaos in oneself in the same way that we drop the body at physical death. This step means that we won’t interfere any longer, will not change anything (in the beginning not even ourselves); that we will not quarrel, that we have no opinion to insist upon; that we will not translate what we hear into our automatic daily language—which would be equal to letting it go out the other ear. This step means that one stays quietly apart from the million-fold army of attacking thoughts and feelings and physical associations…
– Louise March
The first step, I think… is to make us love the world rather than to make us fear for the end of the world. Make us love the world… and then begin to take better care of it.
– Gary Snyder
Using indigenous science, the human and the plant are linked as co-creators…The plant innovates and the people nurture and direct that creativity. They are joined in a covenant of reciprocity, of mutual flourishing.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer
I’ve seen academic life destroy the best writers of my generation.
– Susan Sontag
Don’t try to behave as though you were essentially sane and naturally good. We’re all demented sinners in the same cosmic boat – and the boat is perpetually sinking.
– Aldous Huxley
a great part of friendship rests on humiliation.
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky
To prove that I love you, I would carry you anywhere, / I would follow any bus down the worst road. / I would even forget you, if that would convince you.
– Saskia Hamilton
I have always seen mountains as the most generous of landscapes. You stand on them and they give you the world.
– Angi Gjika
it’s hard to follow a mind-dominant path while maintaining depth and connection
it’s hard to follow a heart-dominant path while maintaining discernment and judgement
it’s hard to follow a body-dominant path while maintaining swiftness and hot-bloodedness
– River Kenna
All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.
– Noam Chomsky
When explicitly asked if he wanted to terrify people with his writing, Elias Canetti said: “Yes. Everything around us is terrifying. There is no longer a common language. No one understands anyone else. I believe no one wants to understand.”
For dinner is cookin’,
An’ baby is lookin’
An’ laughin’; she knows dat her pa owe no debt.
– Claude McKay
When the angel
gives you a poem
you take it,
the old monk told
the poet.
– The Old Monk
God gave us cats
because he had too many,
the old monk said.
That happens with cats.
– The Old Monk
It doesn’t matter if when love calls
I am dead.
I’ll come.
I will always come
if ever
love calls.
– Alejandra Pizarnik
i will dance and resist and dance and persist and dance. this heartbeat is louder than death.
– Suheir Hammad
Let’s explore the accident, and not fix the mistake.
– Paul McCartney
A way of understanding truth . . . is something acquired through embodied experience rather than by maximally abstracting oneself from embodied experience.
– Iain McGilchrist
When I write a poem
I don’t have a destination,
I just head off in some
general direction,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
There’s a lot
certainty
doesn’t know,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
On nights like these, all cities are alike.
– Rilke
The world rests in the night. Trees, mountains, fields, and faces are released from the prison of shape and the burden of exposure. Each thing creeps back into its own nature within the shelter of the dark. Darkness is the ancient womb. Nighttime is womb-time. Our souls come out to play. The darkness absolves everything; the struggle for identity and impression falls away. We rest in the night.
– John O’Donohue
Jane Kenyon embodied a spirit of resurrection, having often experienced a miraculous return to sanity. Her rejections of dogma and her own discomforts led to gentleness on the page, giving a shape and a reprieve to suffering through writing.
– Maya C. Popa
We can be sure, when a dead Christ
rises, breaks out of His mutilated body,
body made Sacrificial Lamb, that when
He descends into the dark center of
Hades,
before rising, to confront the evil one,
to snatch
the keys away, to vanquish—death,
we can be
sure,
the Seraphim, the Cherubim, all heaven breaks
into strongsong, something like victory sounding,
breaking
into Light—Christ, our Atlas, carrying the world—on his flogged and fleshy back,
after three days dead, quiet, in the grave, silent—waiting, in fleshly form—and
unform,
after the terrible suffering Pilate wanted nothing of.
That Christ, who bore the weight of the world, in and on
His body,
who, as promised, did, and does, on day
three, in the burial garden—rise, while no
one is looking. Roll the stone away! We—can be sure, horns and trumpets—
Michael, himself,
choirs of all angels, sounded—that Beethoven,
anointed to praise, later touched
by this
Grandeur
of God, heard, though unhearing, the sound
of that flaming light, “like shining
from shook foil!”
Blinded,
the two women, who came, early that alpha
morning, to the tomb—taken aback by Light,
how much
more, did the risen Christ, exude—white fire
—in his powerful resurrection, ascending. Why seek
ye the living,
among the dead? angels asked.
Confounded. Convinced.
The women ran to tell, to knock
at the upper room
chamber door,
their own flesh tearing—with the power of a secret, eager to tell—Peter, with lost
and heaving breath,
“He’s alive!” frantic, almost-afraid, “He’s alive!” The overwhelming promise, to
complete—made final. And the earth
that shook—three days before, now
covered—in this Light
– Marian Haddad
Happy “Unsubscribe” Day. A day where I carefully remove myself from any and all mailing lists that do not interest me. It’s the most wonderful day of the year…
– Amy Collins, On Black Friday
If you can’t find
something that needs
fixing you aren’t
looking very hard,
the old monk told
his students.
– The Old Monk
The good wood
wants to split,
the old monk noticed.
– The Old Monk
Most people don’t die until the last moment; others start twenty years in advance, sometimes more. Those are the unfortunates.
– Louis-Ferdinand Céline
When you no longer agree with the world, neither in thought nor in heart, run and don’t stop, so that the rhythm of the steps surrounds you and makes you forget that nature is made of tears. Otherwise you will be a suicide gardener again.
– Emil Cioran
Who were you to decide that our innings was over?
– Michael Rosen
the dream of my soul
being picked up
by a butterfly
– Buson
Eat bread and understand comfort.
Drink water, and understand delight.
Visit the garden where the scarlet trumpets
are opening their bodies for the hummingbirds
who are drinking the sweetness, who are
thrillingly gluttonous.
For one thing leads to another.
Soon you will notice how stones shine underfoot.
Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in.
And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper
Oh let me, for a while longer, enter the two
Beautiful bodies of your lungs…
The witchery of living
is my whole conversation
with you, my darlings.
All I can tell you is what I know.
Look, and look again.
This world is not just a little thrill for your eyes.
It’s more than bones.
It’s more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse.
It’s more than the beating of a single heart.
It’s praising.
It’s giving until the giving feels like receiving.
You have a life–just imagine that!
You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe
still another…
We do one thing or another; we stay the same, or we
change.
Congratulations, if
you have changed.
Let me ask you this.
Do you also think that beauty exists for some
fabulous reason?
And, if you have not been enchanted by this adventure–
your life–
what would do for you?
What I loved in the beginning, I think, was mostly myself.
Never mind that I had to, since somebody had to.
That was many years ago.
Since then I have gone out from my confinements,
though with difficulty.
I mean the ones that thought to rule my heart.
I cast them out; I put them on the mush pile.
They will be nourishment somehow (everything is nourishment
somehow or another).
And I have become the child of the clouds, and of hope.
I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is.
I have become older and, cherishing what I have learned,
I have become younger.
And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know?
Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.
– Mary Oliver
Great Sizzle
by Terence Winch
Pour me another one, please.
I raked all the leaves in the rain and now I’m sore.
My primal fear involves living in a dark forest
made up of half-sentences and embryonic cabbages.
I was frolicking with my fairy godmother the other night
when we were suddenly seized by a chronic inflammation of unbelief.
The old postage stamps are licked. The eggs are beaten.
I look for redemption in comfort food and the second coming of Elvis.
A line was forming outside the darkened auditorium last night
just as the faithful began to chant, “The worst is yet to come!”
I focus on the flowers in the vase in the living room stinking
………up the house,
knowing sooner or later our source network will expose our files.
There is no way to get your secret back from the secret-stealer.
The soul is mysterious, they tell me. Put it in front of a camera
…….and it explodes.
Recognising one’s own darkness appears to be a necessary prerequisite not only for self-knowledge, but also for knowledge and acceptance of others. Like everything else in the unconscious, the shadow, if it is not brought into the light, will be projected.
– Liz Greene
We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.
– Denis Diderot
I’m not trying to hide from the truth but to balance it, to remind myself that there are other truths, too. I need to remember that the earth, fragile as it is, remains heartbreakingly beautiful.
– Margaret Renkl
I’m only asking for strength for my days. Teach me the art of small steps.
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
All that writers can do is keep trying to say what is deepest in their hearts.
– Llyod Alexander
Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, ‘This is the real me,’ and when you have found that attitude, follow it.
– William James
The goal of my therapy is eccentricity, which grows out of Jungian notion of individuation. Jung says, “You become what you are.” and nobody is square. We all have, as the Swiss say, a corner knocked off.
– James Hillman, We’ve had 100 Years of Psychotherapy and World is getting Worse
The stray lovers have gone home. The house is cold. There is nothing on TV. She must write poems.
– Sandra Cisneros, The Poet Reflects on Her Solitary Fate
Geniuses are like thunderstorms. They go against the wind, terrify people, cleanse the air.
– Søren Kierkegaard
Let me, O let me bathe my soul in colours; let me swallow the sunset and drink the rainbow.
– Khalil Gibran
The things you do for yourself are gone when you are gone, but the things you do for others remain as your legacy.
– Kalu Ndukwe Kalu
Be not swept off your feet by the vividness of the impression, but say, ‘Impression, wait for me a little. Let me see what you are and what you represent. Let me try you.’
– Epictetus, Discourses
Jazz is a white term to define black people. My music is black classical music.
– Nina Simone
The rarest of all human qualities is consistency.
– Jeremy Bentham
That mind of yours,
demands the care of
ten thousand orchids,
and could command
even Titan’s oceans.
I am damned, I know this.
– Kara Bakos
That you overslept is surely a sign of good health.
– Franz Kafka, 1914.
Philosophy [nature] is written in that great book which ever is before our eyes — I mean the universe — but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written. The book is written in mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it; without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.
– Galileo
Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.
– P. J. O’Rourke
These two people are hard to find in the world. Which two? The one who is first to do a kindness, and the one who is grateful and thankful for a kindness done.
– Buddha Shakyamuni
I don’t want to go into a church to draw closer to the rational things in life.
– Nick Cave
Discoveries
We are fine, even though we don’t feel well.
Gaza is okay, although it has nothing to make her feel that way.
In Gaza, the sun shines and the moon flirts with the leaves of the orange trees;
However, Gaza’s people come and go empty-handed:
No good news to give to their children,
no candy to sweeten their pale mouths,
and no light to read by.
– Mosab Abu Taha
bumper cars
all facing the same way
summer’s end
– Dan McCullough
Translation is amazing, because it presumed that there is something that needs to be carried from one place to another. But where is that thing?
– Renee Gladman
When out of fear you twist the lesser evil into the lie that it is something good, you eventually rob people of the capacity to differentiate between good and evil.
– Hannah Arendt
When you know that
everything you know
comes to nothing,
you’re ready,
the old monk said.
Let’s begin.
– The Old Monk
The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
On any given night, even with history against you in any hardscrabble place, beauty walks in. The ruin of history visited on a people does not wipe out the steadfastness of beauty.
– Dionne Brand
Days of 1903
by Constantine P. Cavafy
I never found them again — the things so quickly lost….
the poetic eyes, the pale
face…. in the dusk of the street….
I never found them again — the things acquired quite by chance,
that I gave up so lightly;
and that later in agony I wanted.
The poetic eyes, the pale face,
those lips, I never found again.
Tell me which infinity attracts you, and I will know the meaning of your world. Is it the infinity of the sea, or the sky, or the depths of the earth, or the one found in the pyre?
– Gaston Bachelard
The past has already been lived. It doesn’t have to be relived. To sacrifice the present and the future by reliving past injuries is not the way of the sages.
– Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche
[A writer is] a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.
– James Joyce
Conversation strives toward silence.
– Walter Benjamin, Metaphysics of Youth
Now the barriers are dissolving, the stone fences
in shambles. I want to have my life
in cloud shapes, water shapes, wind shapes …
– Jim Harrison
Few islands are surrounded by
more than one ocean,
the old monk said.
That takes a continent.
– The Old Monk
Memory’s Voice
by Anna Akhmatova
For O. A. Glebova-Sudeikina
‘What do you see, on the wall, dimly alive,
At that hour when the sunset eats the sky?
A seagull, on a blue cloth of waters,
Or perhaps it’s those Florentine gardens?
Or is it Tsarskoye Seloe’s vast view,
Where terror stepped out before you?
Or that one who left your captivity,
And walked into white death, freely?’
No, I see only the wall – that shows
Reflections of heaven’s dying glow.
You will mispronounce
words in front of a crowd. It cannot be
avoided. But your poems, with all of their
deficiencies, products of lifelong observation
and asymmetric knowledge, will be your own.
– Diane Suess
a poem
is nothing more than a few words
that one has wanted, and they change
place over time, and now
they are nothing more than a stain
– Eliseo Diego
I don’t know what happens if you don’t say ‘cows’ when you see cows while driving on the highway, but I am not about to find out.
– Patricia Correll
My mother never knitted
after the war.
Digging for frozen beets
in the fields of Germany
left her fingers bent,
twisted like broken straw.
She used to watch me writing,
my fingers quick and sliding,
& would nod her head
& tell me I was lucky.
That’s all she’d say.
– john zbigniew guzlowski
plentiful
in the night sky
the light of dead stars
– James Welsh
My mother said: Write this down.
For the sake of my future, my mother sacrificed everything.
I must make myself worthy of her.
Everything I write will be true.
– Athena Farrokhzad
If civilization is ever going to be anything but a grandiose pratfall, anything more than a can of deodorizer in the shithouse of existence, the people are going to have to concern themselves with magic and poetry.
– Tom Robbins
The dread and resistance every natural human being experiences when it comes to delving too deeply into himself is, at bottom, the fear of the journey to Hades.
– CG Jung
The modern world is desacralized, that is why it is in a crisis. Modern man must rediscover a deeper source of his own spiritual life. To do this, he is obliged to struggle with evil, to confront his shadow, to integrate the devil.
– CG Jung
Saturday. The collapse of all senses. Rain, lilac salts, whispered poetry. As Rilke puts it, quoted by Bachelard, one feels as though one is on the verge of being written.
– Christina Tudor-Sideri
the way an orchid
tenderly curls homewards
into it’s own heart
– @DeepSouldiver
All the arguments that we find so near at hand when it is a matter of avoiding pain and negativity, from which no truth today can be separated, are nothing but so many acts of self-defense.
– Adorno
prime real estate
a busker
in Harvard Square
– @pauldavidmena
Notebooks
by Allison Joseph
What good are notebooks?
– Talking Heads, “Life During Wartime”
I crave them as if craving something carnal,
blankness of pages erotic, clean with sensual
possibilities and ready to be dampened
by my insistent ink, swirls of language
made plain on thin blue lines taut
as tightrope. I collect them like other women
collect shoes or boyfriends, fingering pristine
pages while standing hushed in aisles
of bookstores and stationery shops,
stroking plush-covered ones with a single
finger, loving floral-print ones more
than actual flowers, needing another and
another until my house is overrun
with them, and they start arranging
cocktail hours and support groups—
for the ones I have not written in
grow lonely, and the ones managing
the burden of my desperate handwriting
need someone to talk to, peers to confide in
about these dog-eared secrets and semi-scribbled
imaginings, covert half-truths, outright lies.
How they congregate around my bed,
waiting for me to pick one up, start
another hazy page of scrawls and arrows,
cross-outs and restarts, confessions
that will never be confessions until
I judge them fit for judgment. Sometimes
when fate has flattened me with its one
hard fist, only the black-and-white
composition notebooks of childhood
will do, marbled covers unchanged
from when I first learned cursive—
one letter reaching for the next
in the crazy tilting of my untested hand.
Only those wide-ruled lines will do,
those patient beginnings.
I believe that in order to see well, and particularly to see wild nature, you need to be comfortable within your own solitude.
– Sara Maitland
Without trying to do something, we simply practice, in the same way as when we are hungry, we eat; when we are tired, we rest.
– Maurine Stuart
Red-winged blackbird
defending his territory
with a song
– Garry Gay
We learn words by rote, but not their meaning; that must be paid for with our life-blood, and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves.
– George Eliot
The shattered peace of one becomes the shattered peace of everyone.
– Frank Inzan Owen
…At the end there may be no answers
and only a few very simple questions: did I love,
finish my task in the world? Learn at least one
of the many names of God? At the intersections,
the boundaries where one life began and another
ended, the jumping-off places between fear and
possibility, at the ragged edges of pain,
did I catch the smallest glimpse of the holy?
– Jeanne Lohmann
Of Enoch, who walked with Elohim, it is told that he had become one of the angels who was all eyes and wings. Thus is the poet. Everything in him perceives the things, and everything in him flies past the things. He is wholly in the one thing that he experiences, and yet is already and still in all the others at the same time.
– Martin Buber
Thanks Robert Frost
Do you have hope for the future?
someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end.
Yes, and even for the past, he replied,
that it will turn out to have been all right
for what it was, something we can accept,
mistakes made by the selves we had to be,
not able to be, perhaps, what we wished,
or what looking back half the time it seems
we could so easily have been, or ought…
The future, yes, and even for the past,
that it will become something we can bear.
…Hope for the past,
yes, old Frost, your words provide that courage,
and it brings strange peace that itself passes
into past, easier to bear because
you said it, rather casually, as snow
went on falling in Vermont years ago.
– David Ray
We huge many-celled creatures have to coordinate millions of different oscillation frequencies, and interactions among frequencies, in our bodies and our environment. Most of the coordination is effected by synchronising the pulses, by getting the beats into a master rhythm, by entrainment… Being in sync—internally and with your environment—makes life easy.
Getting out of sync is always uncomfortable or disastrous. Then there are the rhythms of other human beings. Like the two pendulums, though through more complex processes, two people together can mutually phase-lock. Successful human relationship involves entrainment—getting in sync. If it doesn’t, the relationship is either uncomfortable or disastrous…
Listening is not a reaction, it is a connection. Listening to a conversation or a story, we don’t so much respond as join in—become part of the action.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
And so, early in the morning, seeing the books piled on my table, I say my voracious reader’s prayer to the god of reading: ‘Give us this day our daily hunger.’…
– Bachelard, tr. Gaudin
if only i could scale mountains of thoughts the way i have scaled this mountain of ice, if i could stand atop the pyramid of thoughts and knock my head against the clouds of misconceptions-to think such thoughts and not be able to? that is hell!
– juliusz słowacki, tr. k.p-ladzińska
Are you a lumper or a splitter? Each represents a tendency toward thinking about categories in a particular way. Lumpers generally seek similarities between things, while Splitters focus on identifying differences. You may have observed this distinction in conversations with others. Here’s an example of a lumper statement:
“Sacrifice is love; the light from the sun is love because it sacrifices hydrogen to create light. The light is then sacrificed to the plants, which, in turn, sacrifice themselves to the animals, and so forth. The same principle applies to the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. The universe is love all the way down.”
On the other hand, a splitter might respond:
“What distinguishes the sacrifice of hydrogen, the sacrifice of a plant, and the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross? Are there various types of sacrifice? Does the concept of love apply uniformly to each?”
People may exhibit a bias toward lumping or splitting. Does this preference depend on the situation, personality, or something else? What are the advantages and disadvantages of Lumped categories vs Split ones? Do lumped categories take us further away from reality or help us determine what is essential about reality? It starts to get weird when we do splitting because we use categories to split apart categories. “What is the difference between a claw and a finger nail? Claws are sharp. Sharp is a category what constitutes sharpness? etc.”
This topic delves into the fundamental ways we perceive and organize categories, exploring how well these categories map to reality. For example the taxonomy of animals which has been upset by genetics in the last few decades. What happends when we are more mindful about when we are lumping and splitting in our own thinking?
– Trident Philosophy Cub Topic
I wonder how many people in this city
live in furnished rooms.
Late at night when I look out at the buildings
I swear I see a face in every window
looking back at me,
and when I turn away
I wonder how many go back to their desks
and write this down.
– Leonard Cohen, The Spice-Box of Earth
On this immediate level of life and structure, myths offer life models. But the models have to be appropriate to the time in which you are living, and our time has changed so fast that what was proper fifty years ago is not proper today. The virtues of the past are the vices of today. And many of what were thought to be the vices of the past are the necessities of today. The moral order has to catch up with the moral necessities of actual life in time, here and now. And that is what we are not doing. The old-time religion belongs to another age, another people, another set of human values, another universe. By going back you throw yourself out of sync with history. Our kids lose their faith in the religions that were taught to them, and they go inside.
– Joseph Campbell
This barrier cannot be broken because it is not there. This is what the oriental philosopher calls avidya — ignorance or maya — illusion. It is not as though ‘this’ is an illusion. It is not there, and yet I am thoroughly convinced it is there, and therefore I cannot get rid of it. The difficulty is that the more I struggle to get rid of it, the firmer it becomes established. Therefore we return to a very beautiful expression found both in the Yoga Vasistha and the Bhagavad Gita: ‘Only Grace can help you, nothing else can.’ The more you struggle, the worse the problem becomes, and yet Grace compels you to struggle. It is a strange phenomenon. You struggle and struggle, and if you do not struggle, then it means you have not experienced Grace. Grace makes you restless, and restlessly struggling against this non-existent obstacle, you despair. You realise that struggle does not get you anywhere, and you realise that you cannot help struggling. It is a whole mess. Then suddenly Grace reveals, ‘This is what it is.’
– Swami Venkatesananda
The roar of the traffic, the passage of undifferentiated faces, this way and that way, drugs me into dreams; rubs the features from faces. People might walk through me.
And what is this moment of time, this particular day in which I have found myself caught? The growl of traffic might be any uproar – forest trees or the roar of wild beasts. Time has whizzed back an inch or two on its reel; our short progress has been cancelled.
I think also that our bodies are in truth naked. We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.
– Virginia Woolf
Somewhere, out at the edges, the night
Is turning and the waves of darkness
Begin to brighten the shore of dawn.
The heavy dark falls back to earth
And the freed air goes wild with light,
The heart fills with fresh, bright breath
And thoughts stir to give birth to colour.
– John O’Donohue, Anam Cara
Nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves. All people live in their own dream, in their own mind. They are in a completely different world from the one we live in. When we take something personally, we make the assumption that they know what is in our world, and we try to impose our world on their world. Even when a situation seems so personal, even if others insult you directly, it has nothing to do with you. What they say, what they do, and the opinions they give are according to the agreements that they have in their own minds.
– Don Miguel Ruiz
Elections belong to the people. It’s their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters.
– Abraham Lincoln
From an integral perspective egocentric fascism is on the rise because we don’t have sufficiently healthy sociocentric values that bind us together & suppress unhealthy egocentrism. Healthy & mature pluralism would be able to include all people, regardless of race, gender, class, etc. Unhealthy pluralism doesn’t recognize it’s own unhealthy sociocentrism (tribalness) and the way it prevents genuinely inclusive solutions. Part of the solution is for Pluralists to own their sociocentrism. To remove it from shadow and make it part of themselves. Yes, you too have a part of you which is deeply ethnocentric, tribalistic, and who looks at the world in terms of US v. THEM. It’s not all bad.
– @VinceFHorn
The self cannot be found in books. You have to find it for yourself, within yourself.
– Ramana Maharshi
this is the summit but i am afraid to gaze into the dark abyss of the world. i’ll look; no! sky above and sky below! enclosed in a crystal ball; and if this spike of ice could float with me high i would not feel adrift. here i’ll unfurl the black wings of my thoughts.
– słowacki
They should listen to the unsaid words that resonate around the edge of the poem.
– Gary Snyder
I love when I’m writing and I’m cringing
because I know I’m doing something right.
– Zoe Cassavetes
Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions, whereas other colors are not.
– Yves Klein
We can change the world, definitely. The problem is that we don’t smile when chaos occurs to us. When chaos occurs, even within that chaos, we can smile which cures confusion and resentment. Do you understand?
– Chögyam Trungpa
I see a word that advances towards the sea. It is not the word heaven, nor the word earth; it is not even the word salt or seed; but the word Nothing, the word Nothingness. And I tell myself that salt, grain, earth and heaven are in this word.
– Edmond Jabes
What a mess we are, I thought. But this is usually where any hope of improvement begins, acknowledging the mess.
– Anne Lamott
I write to find out what I’m thinking.
– Julia Alvarez
The dragon, as well as the snake or the salamander, or even the frog, are representations of that part of the psyche which is immediately below our higher animal psyche. The dragon represents the inhuman, cold-blooded part of our psychology.
– CG Jung
All you have is what you are, and what you give.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
Well, maybe it started that way. As a dream, but doesn’t everything. Those buildings. These lights. This whole city. Somebody had to dream about it first. And maybe that is what I did. I dreamed about coming here, but then I did it.
– Roald Dahl
Amsterdam
by Megan Fernandes
Sometimes the mythologies of a city are true—
like when I see a blond man bob for red apples
in the street selling records side by side with a black cat
wound in a cushion, deep in dream. Josh says
he does not want to go see Anne Frank, that this kind of tourism
depresses him, the one where the demonstration of grief
is like a voyeuristic tug at suffering
that is not yours to possess. How do you eat after that,
he seems sad today. How do you stay alive.
When he was young, he visited Auschwitz and told
me not to go because it had a gift shop and that
made him angry and nobody knows how to grieve
in public, how to make public space for loss
unless you can make money off of it but really
there is something else to his anger, the child
abandoned, the residue of a young girl’s life turned
into a petting zoo—this he cannot take.
I have become like my mother where I don’t
need sleep in a new city anymore, immune to
time shifts, I just wander and buy fruit
and almonds and a good loaf
of bread and today, some fresh juice, skipping museums
though I want to go back to see Anne Frank’s
house this time, because this time,
I am a woman and last time, I was a girl
and when you are a girl, all you see is another girl
and when you are a woman, all you see is history
careening towards a girl who you cannot protect.
In my Amsterdam apartment, I find a ceramic plate
with its rim edge folded in five places where a violet petal
has been painted at its compression. In it, I pour
some olive oil and a little bit of salt and sit
on the white couch overlooking the new
neon green blooms gathering on a branch
outside the large window directly facing an apartment
of a bookish couple, the kind who forget
they have bodies and think they are better
than those who are bodily which is most everyone else
in the world but the girl in the couple is lying
and misses the small animal inside her
crying for her breakfast.
What she needs is food, not Yeats.
What she needs is your fingers.
The apartment has tulips and pink depression glass
and cacti of all heights like reptilian skyscrapers.
I am thinking of Harlem in Amsterdam.
Sometimes I go there to hide.
I go there to eat at a bistro owned by a lady
named Fay. Fay is older with light eyes and her whole
family works this place and her grandson
is behind the bar and he’s just seventeen and a soccer
player and this week got into Dartmouth and I ask
her if she thinks he’ll be happy, being a black
kid at Dartmouth, but Fey is Queen Fey
and knows better than to answer questions
about race at dinner time especially in front
of all these nice people.
In Amsterdam, the cold sunlight of April
grows the dandelions in the gutter and when
you get to 263 to see Anne Frank’s house (only
from the outside) the building is not as tall
as you remember and you wonder what the ceilings
were like for a young girl and you imagine
her face, I imagine her face and think
maybe something bad happened to Josh
when he was a kid and you see her
face in the window, her face lit up in story,
her face in love and in fear, and you are in Amsterdam
when the American president bombs Syria.
You say American president as if you are not
an American and as if he is not your president.
You promised that he would not make his way
into any poem, but here he is bombing
Syria and here is he is in your poem
and here is her face spreading all over
Europe and here is your face, Anne,
spreading all over Europe and
here is your face, your face, your face.
The mind wraps itself around a poem. It is almost sensual…You can turn the poem round and about and upside down, dancing with it a kind of bolero of two snakes twisting and coiling, until the poem has found its right and proper shape.
– Marge Piercy
Spiritual practice should be a laxative, not a sedative.
– Chögyam Trungpa
One learns to not blab about all this
except to yourself or the typewriter keys
who tell no one until they get brave
and crawl off onto the printed page.
– Anne Sexton
All books should not be read in the same way. Novels, for instance, are there to be devoured.
– Walter Benjamin
Have you forgiven
if you don’t forget,
the old monk wondered.
– The Old Monk
Rest isn’t just about recovering the physical body. It’s about untangling the compulsive mind drive and activating the soul, dropping into the deep well that moves beyond words and reason. Rest is space for the creative, numinous, imaginal body to play.
– McCall Erickson
There are certain things which enter the minds of even people without one.
– Eugene Ionesco
The well-differentiated person can respond from an open acceptance of her own emotions, which are not tailored either to match someone else’s expectations or to resist them. She neither suppresses her emotions nor acts them out impulsively.
– Gabor Maté
Patience does not mean biding your time and trying to slow down. Patience has a sense of dignity and forbearance.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Mindfulness can refashion the links in the chain of actions and consequences. In doing so, it unchains us, frees us, and opens up new directions for us through the moments we call life.
– Jon Kabat-Zinn
A flooded field
Perfect image of the sky
Walking after rain
– @hoshigenari
In the past, the navigator who crossed “the line,” the zero parallel, was under the impression that he found himself at an exceptional moment..
– Maurice Blanchot
Shall we be later similar to those craters where volcanoes no longer erupt and where the grass yellows on its stem?
– René Char, (tr. Cid Corman)
To Jung, the unconscious is “everything of which I know, but of which I am not at the moment thinking; everything of which I was once conscious but have now forgotten; everything perceived by my senses, but not noted by my conscious mind.”
– Valerie Estelle Frankel
As soon as one wants to seize virtue, it becomes a caricature . . . as a result of its musical nature, virtue exists only in escaping us.
– Vladimir Jankélévitch
his eyes speak
before his tongue
one more lie
– Kala Ramesh
So one stirs in sleep,
in love, out of love, part lost
part found, here, alone,
everything sinking
and struggling to swim or float.
Where is this deep sea?
How did it emerge
and rise? You will never know.
Dreaming and waking.
Sinking and swimming.
– George Szirtes
The Wolf’s Tale
No story is one
story. The wolf at the door
will tell it his way
as the wolf story
but his pelt is not his own
and he wears nine masks
like any liar.
The hunters too are disguised.
Best not to believe
the tellers of tales.
– George Szirtes
On the other hand, what I like my music to do to me is awaken the ghosts inside of me. Not the demons, you understand, but the ghosts.
– David Bowie
If you splash enough
they’ll find you,
if that’s what you want,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
We could all stop buying fast fashion, fast food & other consumerist bullshit.
Most people could give up flying and go vegan.
Many of us could get rid of our cars.
A corrupt politics & corporate greed are burning our futures. But they won’t change unless we’re prepared to change.
– @ClimateDad77
Castnet Seafood
by Karisma Price
for Uncle Kenny and Cousin Jeremy
According to the local news station,
the blue crawfish is a rare thing to find,
yet it watches us from the tank of the market,
spared from a boiled, seasoned death
unlike its red friends. My uncle says joy
is the opposite of running
into a dagger, and I realize I am not
the most poetic family member
who has pain. J and I crack the spines of
the crawfish not lucky enough to be blue.
The deeper the blues, The more I see
black played above my head at the chiropractor
the day before. Stubborn I call my back,
subluxation the medical journal says.
Three times a week, my chiropractor
calls the forceful moving of my misalignment
a healthy crack. Like bullies hemorrhaging
power, we look forward to making me
almost break. I love my family, unlike my back.
Before we got here, J threaded amber and jade
and lapis into a necklace he made for me
to match the cover of the book where I’ve written
my pain. He moves, outside his box, newly freed.
He loves movement, says he understands
that toxic masculinity means to want
to pinch your claws around any smaller crustation.
I am the third most poetic in this family. He loves
the neon of the crawfish. We google what makes it
blue and we suck the sadness out of our conversation.
Like luck, blues can spare any life if you wear
it, but it will leave you as lonely as the crawfish
in the tank. I wonder what family the mudbug
came from. Were they a proud bunch? Had the brightest
shells in their swamp? Did this little blue bug love
his looks, or did he burrow deeper into the mud
because he couldn’t handle the attention his hue
attracted? We chew the back meat of the unlucky things,
stew in the love that surrounds us like a pot with our
spines and heads still attached. Look at what the
brain makes the muscle do: remember.
Joy is the membrane covering us, the tissue that keeps
a family situated around a table when they could
be running from one another. My uncle taps the murky
glass to make the orphaned thing move. He turns to us:
Could you imagine us living like that?
All hard on the outside with an exoskeleton?
No, no I can’t. There’s so much
in us. We’d fall apart.
Rhyme is the public truth of language, sound paced out in the shared places, the echoes are no-one’s private property or achievement.
– Prynne
tension is generative,
but like, what are you generating?
– @the_wilderless
you make nature blind, that she might be your guide! (…) you would have dominion over nature, and you bind your own hands and feet with your stoicism, so that in your poetic miscellanies you may sing falsetto on the diamond fetters of fate all the more movingly.
– johann hamann
Who is more foolish, the fool or the fool who follows him?
– Obi-Wan Kenobi
I seem to recuperate something in the silence and solitude.
…with the snow and the crows and the exercise book that opens like a door and lets me far down into the now friendly dark.
– Samuel Beckett
Sometimes it’s like drum practice,
trying to write,
the old monk told the poet.
– The Old Monk
In WW1, Virginia Woolf wrote in her journal, ‘The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be.’
Dark, Woolf seems to say, as in inscrutable—not as in terrible.
– Rebecca Solnit | Hope in the Dark
He turned our disgrace into grace, our petty hatreds into epic generosity, our dull clichés into questioning eloquence, the leaden metal of brutal inevitability into the gold of pure possibility.
– Fintan O’Toole, On Seamus Heaney
Willful stones might even offer us a new beginning, one without blueprint, one in which the capacity not to be compelled by others is made into the promise of a queer thing.
– Sara Ahmed
And I will, I must and so I will
Dwell beneath the desert still
For there’s no safety to be acquired
Riding streetcars named desire
– Sinéad O’Connor
We are all contemplatives of an ongoing apocalypse.
– Etel Adnan
poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race, as the garden is older than the ploughed field; painting, than writing; song, than declamation; parables, than logical deduction; barter, than commerce (…) all the wealth of human knowledge and happiness consists in images.
– hamann
I’m sorry that I tried to change you, my body my home.
– Billie Maree
Never forget this: The forces undermining our democracy, polluting our planet, and stoking hatred are counting on you to give up. Cynicism is how they win.
– Robert Reich
texting a dead person; eating hashbrowns; returning books to the library; leaving senators voicemails; reading one line per poem; looking at the blue sky; thinking about “comfort”
– @GabrielleBates
To speak of sorrow works upon it moves it from its crouched place barring the way to and from the soul’s hall.
– Denise Levertov
I’ve already restarted the playlist. I readjust my earphones. I skip the song called forgiveness, then I go back & play it again.
– Topaz Winters
You put your hands
in your lap
and think of where
your hands end and
your lap beings —
that’s how you
meditate,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.
– Henry David Thoreau
You never need to apologize for how you chose to survive.
– Clementine von Radics
You cannot be wise and in love at the same time.
– Bob Dylan
The Four Great Bodhisattva Vows
Creations are numberless, I vow to free them.
Delusions are inexhaustible, I vow to transform them.
Reality is boundless, I vow to perceive it.
The awakened way is unsurpassable, I vow to embody it.
Living Your Golden Now
Come dance the seven heavens
And walk upon the seas
Come camp in mountain meadows
With starlight through the trees
We are all sleeping mystics
Caught up in the grind of life
Now’s the time to dream
And wake into the light
Come walk into your being
With cosmic eyes to see
For we are surely stardust
Awakening the deep
Our old world order is slowly imploding.
Our future changes when we do.
You are the guru you’ve been waiting for.
Let the heavens guide you.
Let the Spirit restore your heart and soul.
– Bob Holmes
No theory is kind to us that cheats us of seeing.
– Henry James
No one admits to it —
we all do it —
we talk to the sky,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
A dictatorship means muzzles all round, and consequent stultification.
Science can flourish only in an atmosphere of free speech.
– Albert Einstein
If you think about something at three in the morning and then think about it again the next day at noon, you come to different conclusions.
– Charles M. Schulz
A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.
– Annie Dillard
It is difficult in life to be good, and difficult in art to portray goodness.
– Iris Murdoch
MONEY AND POETRY
by Jack Foley
“Money IS poetry,”
said Wallace Stevens,
who had plenty
of both.
So did Peyton
Houston
who had Stevens’
talent
but lacked
his fame
or influence:
I was told,
“Only you
talk about
Peyton
Houston.”
And my friend
Dana,
plenty of talent
and money too
and fame
and a loving family.
Have you ever been
so down & out
that lunch
(if you were lucky)
was a chocolate bar?
I was once
but am not
anymore.
And you,
hoping to keep
your long-established
poetry press
afloat,
how can you function
without the long green stuff
for your leaves of grass?
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
– Wallace Stevens
The world asks of us only the strength we have and we give it. Then it asks more, and we give it.
– Jane Hirshfield
I’d wrestled against the inner voice of my mother, the voice of caution, of duty, of fear of the unknown, the voice that said the world was dangerous and safety was always the first measure and that often confused pleasure with danger, the mother who had, when I’d moved to the city, sent me clippings about young women who were raped and murdered there, who elaborated on obscure perils and injuries that had never happened to her all her life, and who feared mistakes even when the consequences were minor. Why go to Paradise when the dishes aren’t done? What if the dirty dishes clamor more loudly than Paradise?
– Rebecca Solnit
“We need a definition of spirit and spirituality that is separate from religion and religious education,” writes Amelia Richardson Dress.
Spirit is the thing within us that makes us us. Spirituality is the way we connect our ‘inner us’ to everything else, including other people’s inner ‘usness.’ This understanding helps us think creatively about how to approach spirituality while respecting a child’s home culture. It also enables us to clearly identify our goal, in order to determine if we are achieving it. While it is extremely difficult to measure the ‘spirit’ of a child in the same way we might measure physical or academic growth, there are indicators of spirituality that we can look for in our classrooms and the children. “It is my belief that the thing which we should cultivate in our teachers is more the spirit than the mechanical skill of the scientist.
– Maria Montessori
While on the trail the wayfarer is always somewhere, yet every ‘somewhere’ is on the way to somewhere else. The inhabited world is a reticulated meshwork of such trails, which is continually being woven as life goes on along them.
– Tim Ingold
Don’t worry about things. Don’t push. Just do your work and you’ll survive. The important thing is to have a ball, to be joyful, to be loving and to be explosive. Out of that comes everything and you grow. All you should worry about is whether you’re doing it every day and whether you’re having fun with it. If you’re not having fun, find the reason. Perhaps you should be doing something else.
– Ray Bradbury
You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.
– Terence Mckenna
As more and more therapists come to understand that the body does not lie, while words often do, reading the body is becoming the new royal road to the unconscious, and to all the other beliefs, feelings, and memories that shape and organize behavior.
– Daniel Goldman
From Jung I took courage to tell my patients not to put their faith in abstract concepts. Put your faith in your own unconscious, your own dreams.
– Robert A. Johnson
Man’s main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is.
– Erich Fromm
We live in a moment of grace. Through the hedges of our divisions we are beginning to glimpse again the beauty of life’s oneness. We are beginning to hear…the essential harmony that lies at the heart of the universe. And we are beginning to understand…that we will be well to the extent that we move back into relationship with one another, whether as individuals and families or as nations and species. The time is right. The time is desperately right.
– John Philip Newell, A New Harmony
I grow gnomic. It is the last phase.
– Samuel Beckett
I am an expert on frost crystals
and the silence of crickets, a confidant
of the stinking shore, the stars in the mud –
there is an immanence in these things
which drives me, despite my scepticism,
almost to the point of speech…
– Derek Mahon
Gerontion
by T. S. Eliot
Thou hast nor youth nor age
But as it were an after dinner sleep
Dreaming of both.
Here I am, an old man in a dry month,
Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
I was neither at the hot gates
Nor fought in the warm rain
Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,
Bitten by flies, fought.
My house is a decayed house,
And the Jew squats on the window sill, the owner,
Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,
Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.
The goat coughs at night in the field overhead;
Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.
The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea,
Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter.
I an old man,
A dull head among windy spaces.
Signs are taken for wonders. ‘We would see a sign!’
The word within a word, unable to speak a word,
Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year
Came Christ the tiger
In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas,
To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk
Among whispers; by Mr. Silvero
With caressing hands, at Limoges
Who walked all night in the next room;
By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians;
By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room
Shifting the candles; Fräulein von Kulp
Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door. Vacant shuttles
Weave the wind. I have no ghosts,
An old man in a draughty house
Under a windy knob.
After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What’s not believed in, or is still believed,
In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon
Into weak hands, what’s thought can be dispensed with
Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think
Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.
These with a thousand small deliberations
Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,
Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,
With pungent sauces, multiply variety
In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do
Suspend its operations, will the weevil
Delay? De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled
Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear
In fractured atoms. Gull against the wind, in the windy straits
Of Belle Isle, or running on the Horn,
White feathers in the snow, the Gulf claims,
And an old man driven by the Trades
To a sleepy corner.
Tenants of the house,
Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.
On Raglan Road
On Raglan Road on an autumn day I met her first and knew
That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue;
I saw the danger, yet I walked along the enchanted way,
And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day.
On Grafton Street in November we tripped lightly along the ledge
Of the deep ravine where can be seen the worth of passion’s pledge,
The Queen of Hearts still making tarts and I not making hay –
O I loved too much and by such and such is happiness thrown away.
I gave her gifts of the mind I gave her the secret sign that’s known
To the artists who have known the true gods of sound and stone
And word and tint. I did not stint for I gave her poems to say.
With her own name there and her own dark hair like clouds over fields of May
On a quiet street where old ghosts meet I see her walking now
Away from me so hurriedly my reason must allow
That I had wooed not as I should a creature made of clay –
When the angel woos the clay he’d lose his wings at the dawn of day.
– Patrick Kavanagh
You whose mouth is made in the image of God’s Mouth that is order itself
Be indulgent when you compare us
To those who were the perfection of order
We who seek adventure everywhere
We are not your enemies
We want to give you vast and strange domains Where mystery in bloom offers itself to whoever wants to pick it.
– Guillaume Apollinaire, The Pretty Redhead
Keep a little fire burning.
However small.
However hidden.
– Cormac McCarthy
Let your mind and heart release all that disturbs you.
Let your body be still,
and all the frettings of your body, and all that surrounds it –
let the earth and sea and air be still, and heaven itself;
and then think of spirit
as streaming, pouring, rushing, and shining
into you, through you, and out from you in all directions while you sit quiet.
– Plotinus
If a cursory study of somatics shows that we think with our entire body, then how much better could we think, if we thought with our entire web of wild kin? I want to think and feel and weep and grieve with my whole multi-species, poly-nucleated mind. I want to let the yolk of my small desires slide into otherness. I want to nucleate a symbiotic quest for a better future. Throw open all the doors in my cells. Let my river run both ways.
– Sophie Strand
Many people consider the things government does for them to be social progress but they regard the things government does for others as socialism.
– Earl Warren
Taking away people’s rights is not conservative – it’s reactionary.
And that is exactly what the current reactionary, anti-democracy, authoritarian and essentially un-American incarnation of the Republican Party is doing, while constantly campaigning on the idea of “freedom” – taking away the rights many generations of Americans had fought for hard over decades and centuries: abortion rights, contraception rights, rights of African-Americans, LGBT community’s rights, Americans’ right to read books… and on and on. With grim determination, driven by fear and resentment, greed and ignorance, Republicans are erasing the history of progress in America.
– Mikhail Iossel
In the point of rest at the centre of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable.
– Dag Hammarskjöld
It all matters. That someone turns out the lamp, picks up the windblown wrapper, says hello to the invalid, pays at the unattended lot, listens to the repeated tale, folds the abandoned laundry, plays the game fairly, tells the story honestly, acknowledges help, gives credit, says good night, resists temptation, wipes the counter, waits at the yellow, makes the bed, tips the maid, remembers the illness, congratulates the victor, accepts the consequences, takes a stand, steps up, offers a hand, goes first, goes last, chooses the small portion, teaches the child, tends to the dying, comforts the grieving, removes the splinter, wipes the tear, directs the lost, touches the lonely, is the whole thing. What is most beautiful is least acknowledged. What is worth dying for is barely noticed.
– Laura McBride
From the moment I held the box of colors in my hands, I knew this was my life.
– Henri Matisse
Good Being is knowing who in fact we are; and in order to know who in fact we are, we must first know, moment by moment, who we think we are and what this bad habit of thought compels us to feel and do. A moment of clear and complete knowledge of what we think we are, but in fact are not, puts a stop, for the moment, to the Manichean charade. If we renew, until they become a continuity, these moments of the knowledge of what we are not, we may find ourselves all of a sudden, knowing who in fact we are.
– Aldous Huxley
In what we call thinking the mind isn’t ‘directed’ but suspended. You don’t give it rules. You teach it to receive. You don’t clear the ground to build unobstructed: you make a little clearing where the penumbra of an almost-given will be able to enter and modify its contour.
– Jean-Francois Lyotard
The hardest ground to plow was living fully without worry, not in the past gone on or future yet to come—but in the present hardpan now.
– J. Drew Lanham
I think the American people expect more from us than cries of indignation and attack. The times are too grave, the challenge too urgent, and the stakes too high to permit the customary passions of political debate. We are not here to curse the darkness, but to light the candle that can guide us through that darkness to a safe and sane future.
The life of the arts, far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of a nation, is very close to the center of a nation’s purpose and is a test of the quality of a nation’s civilization.
Let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths and encourage the arts and commerce.
– John F. Kennedy
Back then, in 1967, wizards were all, more or less, Merlin and Gandalf. Old men, peaked hats, white beards. But this was to be a book for young people. Well, Merlin and Gandalf must have been young once, right? And when they were young, when they were fool kids, how did they learn to be wizards? And there was my book.
– Ursula K Leguin
Chance in a million, might as well try
Chance in a million to do it or die
Chance in a million to call your own shot
Better believe it, it’s all that you’ve got
Opportunity don’t really knock
Just ticks loud like a dynamite clock
Chance in a million, stay with the beat
Get all I got, it was coming to me
Nine hundred ninety nine thousand goodbyes
Don’t make one hello, you got to improvise
One in a million to turn it around
Follow that hunch, baby, follow that sound
Star-struck, hazy, caught up in lies
Burned out, crazy, tears in my eyes
Chance in a million’s better than none
Sink into madness or reach for the sun
Certain as sunshine after the rain
Certain as solace after the pain
Chance in a million, when all’s said and done
Chance in a million is better than none
Nine hundred ninety nine thousand goodbyes
Don’t make one hello, you got to improvise
One in a million to turn it around
Follow that hunch, baby, follow that sound
Chance in a million, winner take all
Chance in a million to follow that call
Better than zero divided by one
Chance in a million is better than none
Star-struck, hazy, caught up in lies
Burned-out, crazy, tears in my eyes
Chance in a million’s better than none
Sink into madness or reach for the sun
Certain as sunshine after the rain
Certain as solace after the pain
Chance in a million, when all’s said and done
Chance in a million is better than none
Chance in a million
Chance in a million
Chance in a million
– Robert Hunter, Zero
Jung believed that when religion is disregarded waters of the unconscious crash in, dissolving consciousness and extinguishing the light. Being mindful of the gods is a matter of psychic hygiene, not a matter of piety, social conformity or religiosity.
– David Tacey
It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.
– Charlie Munger
At every instant to have lost, having to find one’s vocabulary, having to start over from the most common vocabulary, crude, earth to earth …
As there are piles of pebbles collected in places to regravel the roads, surely there are words. One must go and search for them.
– Francis Ponge (tr. Jonathan Larson)
Fortunately, some are born with spiritual immune systems that sooner or later give rejection to the illusory worldview grafted upon them from birth through social conditioning. They begin sensing that something is amiss, and start looking for answers. Inner knowledge and anomalous outer experiences show them a side of reality others are oblivious to, and so begins their journey of awakening. Each step of the journey is made by following the heart instead of following the crowd and by choosing knowledge over the veils of ignorance.
– Henri Bergson
Scientists have identified a virulent strain of humans who are virtually immune to any form of verifiable knowledge.
– Andy Borowitz
Sometimes you play with words
and sometimes you play with ideas
and sometimes you wonder
what’s the difference,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
Tis the season to opt out of culturally-sanctioned, consumeristic, stress-inducing frenzies and spend my precious time, energy, and resources cultivating connection, peace, and creative spaciousness in my body, heart, soul, and relations.
– McCall Erickson
And the word epiphany had no place in the lexicon of the enlightenment, even though it was a modality of light.
– Roberto Calasso
In time, we come to see that we don’t have to pursue our light, but simply inhabit it.
– Mark Nepo
When the heart is at peace for and against are forgotten.
– Chuang Tzu
The songs of unseen birds make me look up and around, make me notice the patches of blue sky between the dense branches. Maybe this is what grace is, the unseen sounds that make you look up.
– Anne Lamott
HIDDEN IN OUR CHESTS
What is the body?
Endurance.
What is love?
Gratitude.
What is hidden in our chests?
Laughter.
What else?
Compassion.
Don’t ask what love can make or do.
Look at the colors of the world.
– Rumi
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 have even a name. The story on the other hand can never be lost from its place in the world for it is that place.
– Cormac McCarthy
My soul was an old horse
Offered for sale in twenty fairs…
I cried, ‘Who will bid me half a crown?’
From their rowdy bargaining
Not one turned. ‘Soul,’ I prayed,
‘I have hawked you through the world
Of Church and State and meanest trade.
But this evening, halter off,
Never again will it go on.
On the south side of ditches
There is grazing of the sun.
No more haggling with the world….’
As I said these words he grew
Wings upon his back. Now I may ride him
Every land my imagination knew.
– Patrick Kavanagh
Jung’s conviction is that the most effective way to redeem or transform the world is first of all to transform the little piece of it that is oneself.
– Edward Edinger
I know you
never want to
say Whoa
but isn’t this
about enough,
the poet asked
the old monk.
– The Old Monk
I know that I have died before —
once in November.
– Anne Sexton
One must never look to the things that ought to change. The main question is how we change ourselves.
– Carl G. Jung
Meditation is a social and political act. Listening and not-doing are actions far more powerful than most of us have yet begun to realize.
– Joan Tollifson
America is
A shallow hell where evil
Is an easy joke, forgotten
In a week.
– James Wright
Love is the most dangerous and uncertain element in life; and because we do not want to be uncertain, because we do not want to be in danger, we live in the mind. A man who loves is dangerous, and we do not want to live dangerously.
– Krishnamurti
I have known for a long time that one does not go anywhere. It is the cities or the countries that come or do not come to you. Cities are fateful letters. They only arrive lost. They only arrive posthumously.
– Hélène Cixous
Great Compassion isn’t exhaustible.
Empathy is, because it’s a dualistic mind state, where there’s a self & an other.
It’s ok to be burnt out, but that’s not “compassion fatigue”, it’s “empathy fatigue”.
– Vince Fakhoury Horn
Sometimes we are blessed with being able to choose the time, and the arena, and the manner of our revolution, but more usually we must do battle where we are standing.
– Audre Lorde
The wind can’t sough
without the pines,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
Snow
by Louis MacNeice
The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.
World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.
And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes—
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one’s hands—
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.
Fidelity in the translation of individual words can almost never fully reproduce the meaning they have in the original. For sense in its poetic significance is not limited to meaning, bur derives from the connotations conveyed by the word chosen to express it.
– Walter Benjamin
. . .this inner refuge is also something we can cultivate in communities where everyone is learning to return to the true home that’s there in each of us, and that we as a collective can empower in each individual.
– Kaira Jewel Lingo
The days you play music
it’s hard to think about words,
the old monk told the poet.
– The Old Monk
The question is really a kind of apathy and ignorance, which is the price we pay for segregation. That’s what segregation means. You don’t know what’s happening on the other side of the wall, because you don’t want to know.
– James Baldwin
If what you want to do
is pretend
that’s an option,
but not my first choice,
the old monk told
the poet.
– The Old Monk
Illusions are important. What you remember can be as important as what really happens.
– Javier Marías
If what you’ve come to do
is undo
you’ve come to the wrong place,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
Literature is a game, but it’s a game one can put one’s life into.
– Julio Cortazar
Why everyone isn’t out fighting for the Earth is mindboggling
– Peter Kalmus
I … have always felt the priority of intellectual, rather than national or tribal, consciousness, no matter how solitary that made one.
– Edward Said
Poetry dissolves the being of others in its own.
– Novalis
You carry the most important things in you for forty or fifty years before you venture to articulate them. For this very reason, you cannot reckon what is lost with those people who die early. All people die early.
– Elias Canetti
Limit yourself to the present.
– Marcus Aurelius
Poetry remakes and prolongs language; every poetic language begins by being a secret language, that is, the creation of a personal universe, of a completely closed world. The purest poetic act seems to re-create language from an inner experience that … reveals the essence of things.
– Mircea Eliade
Will I be something? Am I something? And the answer comes: You already are. You always were. And you still have time to be.
– Anis Mojgani
To read is to cover one’s face. And to write is to show it.
– Alejandro Zambra
Perhaps I would not be so disheartened if I did not dream of poems.
– Anna Margolin
I find everything poetic, and it’s in the corners of my heart which are sometimes mysterious that I catch a glimpse of poetry… I feel a sensation that leads me into a poetic state.
– Paul Gauguin
When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
– William Shakespeare
It is possible to move through the drama of our lives without believing so earnestly in the character that we play. That we take ourselves so seriously, that we are so absurdly important in our own minds, is a problem for us.
– Pema Chodron
Writers end up writing about their obsessions. Things that haunt them; things they can’t forget; [poems and] stories they carry in their bodies waiting to be released.
– Natalie Goldberg
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
– Aldous Huxley
The individual cannot detach himself from his connection with society; responsibility toward oneself always includes responsibility toward the whole. One can perhaps even risk the statement: Whatever consciousness the individual struggles for and is able to transmit benefits the collective. By coming to terms with the archetypal adversary he is able to sense collective moral problems and anticipate emerging values.
– Connie Zweig
We are one blink of an eye away from being fully awake.
– Pema Chodron
Harmony is inclusive. Perfection is exclusive. When we are with an individual who is living from the centre, we instinctively sense that they are a whole person.
– Liz Greene
Just as the body reacts purposively to injuries or infections or any abnormal conditions, so the psychic functions react to unnatural or dangerous disturbances with purposive defense-mechanisms. Among these purposive reactions we must include the dream. . .
– CG Jung
On the last page of [Jung’s] the Red Book, only one word appears: Möglichkeit (possibility). No period, no comma, only this: Möglichkeit. The page is exactly like all the other pages except that but for this lone word it is blank . . .
– Ursula Wirtz
Those who have been chased out, and those whom there are plans to chase out, are inseparable from the land’s living pulse. Without them, this dust will have no soul. That’s not a figure of speech, it’s the gravest warning.’
– John Berger, Ramallah, 2003
According to the Taoists, yang and yin, light and shadow, useful and useless are all different aspects of the whole, and the minute we choose one side and block out the other, we upset nature’s balance.
– Connie Zweig
Poetry can find a use for storms.
– Osip Mandelstam
So what is true dharma? It is experiencing things as they are. It’s nothing fancier than that. It’s very plain.
– Chögyam Trungpa
The problem in most situations is not a lack of calling; but a fear of responding to the call. Besides the issue of leaving everything behind there is also the fear of being inadequate and the terror of being overwhelmed. Under the banner of practicality, most of life becomes arranged to obscure and distract us from what called us to come to life in the first place. People easily misplace their deepest longings and tune themselves to someone else’s idea of life.
– Michael Meade
When the mind appears, reality disappears. When the mind disappears, reality appears.
– Bodhidharma
Love, it turns out, is as undemocratic as money, so it accumulates around people who have plenty of it already: the sane, the healthy, the lovable.
– Nick Hornby
Every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
One can tell a great deal about a country by what it chooses to remember: by what graces the walls of its museums, by what monuments are venerated, and by what parts of its history are embraced. One can tell even more by what a nation chooses to forget: what memories are erased and what aspects of its past are feared. This unwillingness to understand, accept, and embrace an accurate history, shaped by scholarship, reflects an unease with ambiguity and nuance—and with truth.
– Lonnie G. Bunch III
Art in Digital Art isn’t in the final result, that many can ‘machine’ accomplish,
it’s in the process.
– Laura Kerr
To move, to breathe, to fly, to float,
To gain all while you give,
To roam the roads of lands remote,
To travel is to live.
– Hans Christian Andersen
You have caught me at the tail end of life. I thought I would snatch the fire from the gods but each time came away with a piece of wood that only smoldered a little.
– James Salter
I feel the November
of the body as well as of the calendar.
– Anne Sexton
When I raise my head
at dawn
it is a palpable heart
thunderous
suffocating
occupying the entire room by itself.
– Miyó Vestrini
… poetry both frees us to find words in unexpected places, and imposes a duty of using them in as truthful a way as we can, never saying more than we mean.
– Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
Pleasure and pain
are equal in a clear heart
For no mountain hides the moon.
– Ikkyu
In the monastery of your heart and body, you have a temple where all buddhas unite.
– Milarepa
What I tell my students, when they feel singularly unfortunate to be born in this moment, is this is your moment, the moment your soul showed up incarnate. In this world. It is an astonishing moment to be alive. You could have been born into a lull – instead you were born into a tipping point. It’s your one life and you’ve entered it at a flexion point – a point when everything you do matters. How often in history does a soul get to live in such an era? Don’t waste it. Show up for it. With everything you’ve got. Some will invent, some will organize, some will witness, some will grieve, some will console. Live this life now. Even if in fury and grief, live it. You don’t want to die not having lived. It’s incredibly easy to find a way around experience rather than through it. But you will have cheated yourself out of your only possession: your life. You are here now. Now is the time to live fully, not hide, not escape.
– Jorie Graham
I unlatched the shutters. The light was as intense as a love affair. I was blinded, delighted, not just because it was warm and wonderful, but because nature measures nothing. Nobody needs this much sunlight. Nobody needs droughts, volcanoes, monsoons, tornadoes either, but we get them, because our world is as extravagant as a world can be. We are the ones obsessed by measurement. The world just pours it out.
– Jeanette Winterson
After examining the philosophies, the theories, and the practiced methods of influencing human behavior, I was shocked to learn the simplicity of that one small fact: You will become what you think about most; your success or failure in anything, large or small, will depend on your programming – what you accept from others, and what you say when you talk to yourself.
It is no longer a success theory; it is a simple but powerful fact. Neither luck nor desire has the slightest thing to do with it. It makes no difference whether we believe it or not. The brain simply believes what you tell it most. And what you tell it about you, it will create. It has no choice.
– Shad Helmstetter
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. And it can be greatly embellished by the absorption of ideas and experiences of the useful of this earth.
– George Matthew Adams
If you can awaken
inside the familiar
and discover it strange
you need never leave home.
– Ted Kooser
Autobiography of Eve
Wearing nothing but snakeskin
boots, I blazed a footpath, the first
radical road out of that old kingdom
toward a new unknown.
When I came to those great flaming gates
of burning gold,
I stood alone in terror at the threshold
between Paradise and Earth.
There I heard a mysterious echo:
my own voice
singing to me from across the forbidden
side. I shook awake-
at once alive in a blaze of green fire.
Let it be known: I did not fall from grace.
I leapt
to freedom.
– Ansel Elkins
Every in-group requires an out-group. Whereas the nasty people think they are the real far-out people, whereas those people, those hillbillies, are squares. And they wouldn’t be able to feel far-out unless there were squares. See? These things simply go together. But when that is not seen we play the games of ‘getting on top of things’ all the time, and so we are in a constant state of competition. As to—if it’s not I’m stronger than you, it’s I’m wiser than you, I’m more loving than you, I’m more tolerant than you, I’m more sophisticated than you. It doesn’t matter what it is, but this constant competition is going on.
In terms of that competition we can, of course, lose place and—in that sense—make mistakes. But what a Zen student is, is a person who is not involved in the status game. That’s the real meaning of a monk. He is not ‘keeping up with the Jones,’ and to be a master he must get to the point where he’s not trying to be a master. The whole idea of your being better than anybody else simply doesn’t make any sense at all; it is totally meaningless.
The trouble with the human being is like the trouble with certain animals. Like the dinosaur, who evolved to the point where he was so big that he’d have to have two brains—a higher self in the head and a lower self in the rump. And the difficulty was to get these two brains coordinated. But we have exactly the same trouble, and we are suffering from a kind of ‘jitters’ that comes from being two-brained. Now, you see, I’m not saying that that jitters is bad—it’s a potential step in evolution and an opportunity of growth.
Zen cannot be explained. You have to make, as it were, a jump from the valuation game of ‘better people’ and ‘worse people,’ ‘in-groups’ and ‘out-groups,’ and you can only make it by seeing that they all are mutually interdependent. So if we take this situation—let’s say I would be talking to you and saying, Look, I have some very special thing that you’ve got to take notice of. Therefore I am the in-group, and I’m the teacher and you are the out-group. I know perfectly well that I cannot be the teacher unless you come here, and so that my status and my position is totally dependent on you. It isn’t something, you see, therefore I have first and then you get. These things arise mutually. So if you wouldn’t come, I wouldn’t talk. I wouldn’t know what to say, because I borrowed your language. So that is the insight: that things go together. Liberated people have to be very cool. Otherwise, in a society which doesn’t believe in equality and cannot possibly practice it, they would be considered extremely subversive. And therefore, great Zen masters wear purple and gold and carry scepters and sit in thrones, and all this is carried on to cool it. The outside world knows, They’re alright, they have discipline, they have order, they are perfectly fine.
– Alan Watts
Already one day has detached itself from all the rest up ahead.
It has my photograph in its soft pocket.
It wants to carry my breath into the past in its bag of wind.
I write poems to untie myself, to do penance and disappear
Through the upper right-hand corner of things, to say grace.
– Charles Wright
And anyone who doubts the groundedness necessary for such a life should try it. To face each day supported, not by the dictates of a reliable outer framework, but by a chosen obedience to an inner necessity, one has to have one’s feet on the ground.
– Leif Anderson
I feel inhabited by a consciousness that looks out through the eyeholes in my face and this doesn’t seem to have originated with me. I feel like a receiver made for a transmission that was going on long before I arrived.
– Russell Hoban
No human being on the face of the earth, no government is going to take from me my right to speak, my right to protest against wrong, my right to do everything that is for the benefit of mankind.
– John Maclean
The narratives
from the bewildered
cacophony on my past
I shall no longer heed.
There is a deeper channel
of pure light
that flows through my center
unwounded, untarnished,
true.
It denies not the garbled
bruises of my past
but embraces them fully
in the fluency of Life’s flow
making them of it.
This is the place
from which I shall take communion,
this is the only authority
that makes sense.
– Chelan Harkin
I respect poetry in the very same way that religious people respect religion.
– Forough Farrokhzad
Use the commonplace to escape the commonplace.
– Yosa Buson
I said to myself that I shall try to make my life like an open fireplace, so that people may be warmed and cheered by it and so go out themselves to warm and cheer.
– George Matthew Adams
The process of making art is the process of becoming a person with agency, with independent thought, a producer of meaning rather than a consumer of meanings that may be at odds with your soul, your destiny, your humanity.
– Rebecca Solnit
That’s right, wordshit, bury me, avalanche, and let there be no more talk of any creature, nor of a world to leave, nor of a world to reach, in order to have done, with worlds, with creatures, with words, with misery, misery.
– Samuel Beckett, Texts for Nothing
Don’t discuss yourself, for you are bound to lose; if you belittle yourself, you are believed; if you praise yourself, you are disbelieved.
– Michel de Montaigne, Essais
I’ve called you a mistake
but you are not, never have been,
never could be on the worst day.
Body: you are a good, good body.
– Desireé Dallagiacomo
Learning ensues
through not fully knowing
Instead of seizing up by classifying,
uncertainties bypass naming.
It’s so tempting
to know anything.
Love shakes its head,
as the qualities multiply.
– George Gorman
Every person needs to take one day away. A day in which one consciously separates the past from the future. Jobs, family, employers, and friends can exist one day without any one of us, and if our egos permit us to confess, they could exist eternally in our absence. Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for. Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us.
– Maya Angelou
If anything is to be protected, it is that vulnerability which allows us to be otherwise.
– Báyò Akómoláfé
Begin doing what you want to do now.
We are not living in eternity.
We have only this moment,
sparkling like a star in our hand,
and melting like a snowflake…
– Francis Bacon
The practice of all the bodhisattvas is never to speak ill
Of others who have embarked upon the greater vehicle,
For if, under the influence of destructive emotions,
I speak of other bodhisattvas’ failings, it is
I who am at fault.
– Gyelse Tokme Zangpo
Myth is metaphor. The imagery of mythology is symbolic of spiritual powers within us: when these are interpreted as referring to historical or natural events which science in turn shows could not have occurred, then you throw the whole thing out. You see, myths do not come from a concept system; they come from a life system; they come out of a deeper center. We must not confuse mythology with ideology. Myths come from where the heart is, and where the experience is, even as the mind may wonder why people believe these things. The myth does not point to a fact; the myth points beyond facts to something that informs the fact.
When you think, for instance, ‘God is thy father,’ do you think he is? No, that’s a metaphor, and the metaphor points to two ends: one is psychological–that’s why the dream is metaphoric; the other is metaphysical. Now, dream is metaphoric of the structures in the psyche, and your dream will correspond to the level of psychological realization that you are operating on. The metaphysical, on the other hand, points past all conceptualizations, all things, to the ultimate depth. And when the two come together, when psyche and metaphysics meet, then you have a real myth. And when that happens the sociological and the cosmological aspects of your life have to be re-visioned in terms of these realizations.
– Joseph Campbell
The function of science fiction is not always to predict the future, but sometimes to prevent it.
– Frank Herbert
I consider a tree.
I can look on it as a picture: stiff column in a shock of light, or splash of green shot with the delicate blue and silver of the background.
I can perceive it as movement: flowing veins on clinging, pressing pith, suck of the roots, breathing of the leaves, ceaseless commerce with earth and air—and the obscure growth itself.
I can classify it in a species and study it as a type in its structure and mode of life.
I can subdue its actual presence and form so sternly that I recognize it only as an expression of law — of the laws in accordance with which a constant opposition of forces is continually adjusted, or of those in accordance with which the component substances mingle and separate.
I can dissipate it and perpetuate it in number, in pure numerical relation.
In all this the tree remains my object, occupies space and time, and has its nature and constitution.
It can, however, also come about, if I have both will and grace, that in considering the tree I become bound up in relation to it. The tree is now no longer It. I have been seized by the power of exclusiveness.
To effect this it is not necessary for me to give up any of the ways in which I consider the tree. There is nothing from which I would have to turn my eyes away in order to see, and no knowledge that I would have to forget. Rather is everything, picture and movement, species and type, law and number, indivisibly united in this event.
Everything belonging to the tree is in this: its form and structure, its colors and chemical composition, its intercourse with the elements and with the stars, are all present in a single whole.
The tree is no impression, no play of my imagination, no value depending on my mood; but it is bodied over against me and has to do with me, as I with it — only in a different way.
Let no attempt be made to sap the strength from the meaning of the relation: relation is mutual.
– Martin Buber
At certain periods a nation may be oppressed by such insupportable evils as to conceive the design of effecting a total change in its political constitution; at other times the mischief lies still deeper, and the existence of society itself is endangered. Such are the times of great revolutions […]. But between these epochs of misery and of confusion there are periods during which human society seems to rest, and mankind to make a pause. This pause is, indeed, only apparent, for time does not stop its course for nations any more than for men; they are all advancing towards a goal with which they are unacquainted.
– Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction
by Ursula K. Le Guin
If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably do much the same again — if to do that is human, if that’s what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely, gladly, for the first time.
…
So, when I came to write science-fiction novels, I came lugging this great heavy sack of stuff, my carrier bag full of wimps and klutzes, and tiny grains of things smaller than a mustard seed, and intricately woven nets which when laboriously unknotted are seen to contain one blue pebble, an imperturbably functioning chronometer telling the time on another world, and a mouse’s skull; full of beginnings without ends, of initiations, of losses, of transformations and translations, and far more tricks than conflicts, far fewer triumphs than snares and delusions; full of space ships that get stuck, missions that fail, and people who don’t understand. I said it was hard to make a gripping tale of how we wrested the wild oats from their husks, I didn’t say it was impossible. Who ever said writing a novel was easy?
Man upon this earth would be vanity and hollowness, dust and ashes, vapour and a bubble, were it not that he felt himself to be so.
– Jean Paul
December has the clarity,
the simplicity, and the silence
you need for the best fresh
start of your life.
– Vivian Swift
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
The first novel in the English language in which a passion for thinking is fully presented.
– Seamus Deane on Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist
The People of Scotland’s Address to World Leaders
curated by Makar Kathleen Jamie
i
I saw a dead child today, in rubble, on TV;
his cold blue hand –
meanwhile she burns, weeping, the mother city
eòin iarainn, a’ leigeil dubh-shìl, an nimh is fuath
(iron birds, scatter their blackseed, their hate-laden poison)
Iverie year it’s getting waur:
old men and your ancient feuds,
empires still drilling for gas and oil,
your false promise of eternal growth.
Whit the hell dae ye mean,
expecting us to accept the unacceptable?
No peace.
Do the ghosts of children haunt you in your sleep?
You’re never more important than
our children’s laughter.
We demand a warld oor weans
and weans’ weans can bide in:
no gates, no watchtowers, no fences, no walls.
– Your cold hard eyes, and cold hearts:
let them go. Forget your egos.
In the depths of darkness
heed your guiding stars, your hearts,
be servants to this wee blue speck
whirling through outer darkness.
Its woods are hushed, the silence terrifying;
a broken world…
The creatures won’t come to our cities to plead
elephants, polar bears, worms, honey bees…
Listen to the breath of the whale
tangled in net.
You fail our planet.
ii
I look through my soul’s window,
searching for hope.
I am done with apologies.
Some days we are stones, more often
the leaf that blows. Listen: pause,
breathe in, breathe out, shhh. Listen:
a harmony of voices sounds a refrain:
‘What a world we could create, if we allowed
ourselves to dream.’
iii
I look at the sky and see geese flying
above the mountains.
I wish everyone could see this
instead of bombs flying over.
You, your heads up in the clouds,
drones and bombs there too –
you are flesh and blood, same as us,
not above or below.
The morning wind is bitter.
Do you care?
Forced migrations should lead to refuge,
a welcoming home, solace in a new embrace.
The children of the world should laugh and play,
not placed in a communal grave.
Explain yourselves.
Your words stick in oor craw.
Ban wars, famine, suicide bombers
end poverty: hud awa wi yur rockets.
We have enough here for all.
Only with peace can there be justice.
iv
You may not know my face,
the sma’ fowk
We are the ordinary people.
We can only watch.
All we have is hammer and hurt,
we are thumb and nail.
You are the world’s leaders,
we are the Unimpressed.
We’re aw wee sauls, hairts brekin..
Ye hae nae dane as ye ought.
You can do better than this.
v
‘Blessed are the peacemakers’,
seo crìonadh sìth,
(this withering peace)
There is no courage in hatred or revenge
so still your breath and listen:
can you hear the river’s call?
Sky and sea must be shared and free.
We are watching you and we will remember.
Trust is a revolutionary act.
One act of kindness from each of us
would be enough.
Wir auld warls’s deein
You let this happen.
Let’s create a dream vision.
Let the world be born anew.
Will you love me in
December
as you do in
May?
– Jack Kerouac
In the body, tranquility is like a deep, clear lake with a wide, still surface. In the mind, it’s like the soft, quiet, fresh air over the lake at dawn.
– Gil Fronsdal
So when people say that poetry is a luxury, it is irrelevant. A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to to say how it is.
It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.
– Jeanette Winterson
it’s called queering congress actually.
– Kristen Arnett
The Embrace
by Mark Doty
You weren’t well or really ill yet either;
just a little tired, your handsomeness
tinged by grief or anticipation, which brought
to your face a thoughtful, deepening grace.
I didn’t for a moment doubt you were dead.
I knew that to be true still, even in the dream.
You’d been out—at work maybe?—
having a good day, almost energetic.
We seemed to be moving from some old house
where we’d lived, boxes everywhere, things
in disarray: that was the story of my dream,
but even asleep I was shocked out of the narrative
by your face, the physical fact of your face:
inches from mine, smooth-shaven, loving, alert.
Why so difficult, remembering the actual look
of you? Without a photograph, without strain?
So when I saw your unguarded, reliable face,
your unmistakable gaze opening all the warmth
and clarity of —warm brown tea—we held
each other for the time the dream allowed.
Bless you. You came back, so I could see you
once more, plainly, so I could rest against you
without thinking this happiness lessened anything,
without thinking you were alive again.
I think what counts is inner courage, and what matters, most of all, is a sense of being whoever you wish to be and having as less regrets as possible.
– Juliette Binoche
Auden said a poem should be more interesting than anything that might be said about it. If you take the theme out of a poem and talk about that theme, there should still be some residual being left in the poem that goes on ticking, something like, why not say it, color, something that has an effect on your central nervous system. It is not what a poem says with its mouth, it’s what a poem does with its eyes.
– Mary Ruefle
To me, real love, the move from power to love, involves immense suffering. Any creative work comes from that level, where we share our sufferings, just the sheer suffering of being human. And that’s where the real love is.
– Marion Woodman
What experience and history teach is this — that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.
– Hegel
But poets are not here to do the job of historians. It is the emotional state of the situation that poetry can enter. When Eliot says, in Four Quartets,”We had the experience but missed the meaning”, he is closing in on the problem of modern life – too fast, too surface, void of the emotional understanding that balances our dependence on practical reality and rational thought. We need our emotions as a navigation towards meaning, and that is what poetry allows.
– Jeanette Winterson
It has been said that the poet is the great therapist. In that sense, a poet’s task is to exorcise, expel, and, in addition, repair. To write a poem is to repair a fundamental wound, a tear. Because we are all injured.
– Alejandra Pizarnik
Some of my worst wounds have healed into poems.
– Lorna Goodison
Just feeling is a subversive act. Expressing it is rebellious.
– Jeff Buckley
Marginalized individuals, when expressing their support for a cause, must assuage the anxiety of their peers before speaking up. They must promise that they aren’t a threat, must be exceptionally articulate, must cover all their bases, and even when all these conditions are meticulously met, punishment can come anyway.
– Melissa Barrera
Love is a climate small things find safe to grow in…
– Amy Clampitt
On the Passing of Shane MacGowan
I woke up in the early morning to the news about Shane, and immediately thought, for some reason, about the way he spoke of his childhood years in Tipperary, where his extended family lived in a small cottage without running water that doubled as an IRA safe house.
Here in rural Ireland young Shane lived in an atmosphere of myth and magic, faerie and saints, rosaries and revolution, beer and whiskey, profanity, prayers and intense familial love. He was drinking beer, betting on horses, and praying to the angels and saints at five years old – that is when he wasn’t romping around in the muddy fields or the deep green woods. He spoke of these times with an aching, tender longing.
When he won a literary scholarship and left to live permanently in England, the sense of dislocation was intense. To hear him tell, it was as though he had left a tribal society with deep roots and traditions to be thrust into an alien, industrial hell, faceless and without love. Then of course there was the explicit anti-Irish racism of the time. The end result was a total breakdown, institutionalization, tranquilizers and electric shock therapy. I guess they might have thought he was just another crazy Paddy who would slip between the cracks and never be heard from again. They were wrong and what rose up would spit in their faces and overtake them with its ferocious and unyielding beauty.
The Pogues were his answer to this dislocation, a cry of rage and pride, an assertion of worth and a visionary mission. By taking Irish music into the nascent punk movement, he was both a preservationist and a radical innovator. But it wouldn’t have meant so much without his songwriting. At one point there was a website that annotated his lyrics, so rife are they with allusions to Lorca and Genet, Irish revolutionary politics and ancient Celtic myth, pop culture, history and geography. Shane was a literary genius, and those who paid attention knew. But most of all his songs had heart, and a longing – a longing in the deep heart’s core. I feel perhaps it was a longing for home, a home that in some ways no longer existed.
You’ll hear a lot of talk in the press about the drinking and drugs. Fair enough. He did a lot of both. But honestly you can walk into any dive bar worth its salt and find some old man who has been relentlessly abusing himself for fifty years. It’s not really anything to talk about – unless he’s also written some of the greatest songs of all time.
These days, everything is medicalized. And of course Shane was an addict and alcoholic. But he always claimed that derangement of the senses was his path to creative inspiration and frankly it’s bullshit to say that never works. It does however have a price and I mourn that his final couple of decades seem to have been bereft of songs. He burned hard and bright until there didn’t seem to be much left to burn. That was his choice. His final years seem to have been spent in a wheelchair watching television. Occasionally Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen would stop by to meet their hero.
But I can’t complain about what he left us. We weren’t entitled to any of it: he gave it freely.
He gave it as a poet, a singer, a bard.
A shaman, an exorcist, a druid.
A rebel, a lover, a scholar.
An Irishman.
Before Rome’s disastrous intervention and Britain’s colonization, there was an Irish Christianity that grew organically in Ireland and had pagan roots. The Christ of this tradition was different from the Christ of Europe. He was a Druidic Christ who rode the winds, who howled with the wolves in the wildwood, who spoke with spirits by secret brooks – and also a Christ of the hearth, the fire, the mug of ale shared between friends. He was a holy trickster, a magician, a storyteller, and God.
It’s this Christ I like to imagine welcoming Ireland’s greatest son home tonight, to a heaven that looks a lot like Tipperary.
– Will Stenberg
December
by Christopher Pearce Cranch
No more the scarlet maples flash and burn
Their beacon-fires from hilltop and from plain;
The meadow-grasses and the woodland fern
In the bleak woods lie withered once again.
The trees stand bare, and bare each stony scar
Upon the cliffs; half frozen glide the rills;
The steel-blue river like a scimitar
Lies cold and curved between the dusky hills.
Over the upland farm I take my walk,
And miss the flaunting flocks of golden-rod;
Each autumn flower a dry and leafless stalk,
Each mossy field a track of frozen sod.
I hear no more the robin’s summer song
Through the gray network of the wintry woods;
Only the cawing crows that all day long
Clamor about the windy solitudes.
Like agate stones upon earth’s frozen breast,
The little pools of ice lie round and still;
While sullen clouds shut downward east and west
In marble ridges stretched from hill to hill.
Come once again, O southern wind,—once more
Come with thy wet wings flapping at my pane;
Ere snow-drifts pile their mounds about my door,
One parting dream of summer bring again.
Ah, no! I hear the windows rattle fast;
I see the first flakes of the gathering snow,
That dance and whirl before the northern blast.
No countermand the march of days can know.
December drops no weak, relenting tear,
By our fond summer sympathies ensnared;
Nor from the perfect circle of the year
Can even winter’s crystal gems be spared.
You have to let go of the lesser to receive the greater. You have to relinquish the little world of the ego in which you were master and ruler in order to enter the larger world of the greater psyche in which you are a rank novice, knowing nothing.
– Keiron Le Grice
Only in a world where there are cranes and horses,
wrote Robert Graves, “can poetry survive.”
Or adept goats on crags. Epic
follows the plow, meter the ring of the anvil;
prophesy divines the figurations of storks, and awe
the arc of the stallion’s neck.
– Derek Walcott
May and October,
the best-smelling months?
I’ll make a case for December; evergreen, frost,
wood smoke, cinnamon.
– Lisa Kleypas
When your soul hurts,
Put a bandage on it.
– john zbigniew guzlowski
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
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
Come, come thou bleak December wind,
And blow the dry leaves from the tree!
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I have forgotten much, but still remember The poinsettia’s red, blood-red in warm December.
– Claude McKay
Western cultures believe we must be alive for a purpose: to work to make money. Indigenous cultures believe we’re alive just as nature is alive: to be here to be beautiful and strange. We don’t need to achieve anything to be valid in our humanness.
– Melanie Italian Lau
In Aboriginal worldviews, relationships are paramount in knowledge transmission. There can be no exchange or dialogue until the protocols of establishing relationships have taken place. Who are you? Where are you from? Where are you going? What is your true purpose here? Where does the knowledge you carry come from and who shared it with you? What are the applications and potential impacts of this knowledge on this place? What impacts has it had on other places? What other knowledge is it related to? Who are you to be saying these things?
In our world nothing can be known or even exist unless it is in relation to other things. Most importantly, those things that are connected are less important than the forces of connection between them. We exist to form these relationships, which make up the energy that holds creation together. When knowledge is patterned within these forces of connection it is sustainable over deep time.
– Tyson Yunkaporta
One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds. Pain linked to pain, fragility to fragility. There is no silence without a cry of grief, no forgiveness without bloodshed, no acceptance without a passage through acute loss.
– Haruki Murakami
Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up. But a child’s purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn’t disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into the each moment. We don’t value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last. Life’s bounty is in its flow, later is too late. Where is the song when it’s been sung? The dance when it’s been danced? It’s only we humans who want to own the future, too. We persuade ourselves that the universe is modestly employed in unfolding our destination. We note the haphazard chaos of history by the day, by the hour, but there is something wrong with the picture. Where is the unity, the meaning, of nature’s highest creation? Surely those millions of little streams of accident and wilfulness have their correction in the vast underground river which, without a doubt, is carrying us to the place where we’re expected! But there is no such place, that’s why it’s called utopia. The death of a child has no more meaning than the death of armies, of nations. Was the child happy while he lived? That is a proper question, the only question. If we can’t arrange our own happiness, it’s a conceit beyond vulgarity to arrange the happiness of those who come after us.
– Tom Stoppard
I elbowed my way into the grubby café, bought a pie that tasted of shoe polish and a pot of tea with cork crumbs floating in it, and eavesdropped on a pair of Shetland pony breeders. Despondency makes one hanker after lives one never led. Why have you given your life to books, TC? Dull, dull, dull! The memoirs are bad enough, but all that ruddy fiction! Hero goes on a journey, stranger comes to town, somebody wants something, they get it or they don’t, will is pitted against will. “Admire me, for I am a metaphor.
– David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
The secrets of evolution are death and time—the deaths of enormous numbers of lifeforms that were imperfectly adapted to the environment; and time for a long succession of small mutations.
– Carl Sagan
I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse… I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist.
– Leonora Carrington
One leaf can disrupt a whole army of ants
And can leave them all scared and confused
And it takes just one word, even one from a stranger
To render our self-esteem bruised
It takes just one flick of a switch in a light room
To promptly turn everything black
And it only takes one hand to push us too far
Just one straw to break our camel’s back
It takes just a moment when all is aligned
For the sunshine to blot out the moon
And it takes just one foot to kick us whilst we’re down
Just one sprinkle of salt in the wound
And yet when we think of ourselves as the one
Then we think we’ve no power at all
That we won’t make a difference when this world’s so big
And we feel so incredibly small
But it takes just one leaf to announce spring is coming
One seed for a flower to grow
And it takes just one hand to stop someone from falling
Which might mean far more than you know
It takes just a word to make somebody’s day
Just one switch to turn dark into light
And it takes just one foot to stand up for someone,
Just one sunrise to soften the night
So harness the power of one for yourself
It’s a power you’ve held all along
Yes, I know that you think you can’t change the whole world
But you can change the world for someone.
– Becky Hemsley
Enlightenment is intrinsically disruptive.
It is the disruption of delusion.
If you believe enlightenment is about feeling peaceful, good, or expansive, get ready to be disillusioned.
– @VinceFHorn
everyone should set aside an hour or two each week to feel into, think about, discuss, question, and/or write about their metaphysics
(and maybe double it for anyone who’s adopting an external metaphysics, whether via religion or philosophy or podcasts or whatever)
– River Kenna
Doing the readings and working out can have a similar purpose: Not to dominate, but to keep moving with strength and ease.
As Ruth Wilson Gilmore said, “The power of literacy to make us fit for struggle should be exercised like a muscle, not waved around like a membership card.”
– tamara k. nopper
Don’t let the force of an impression when it first hit you knock you off your feet; just say to it: Hold on a moment; let me see who you are and what you represent. Let me put you to the test.
– Epictetus
I’ve noticed something about people who make a difference in the world: They hold the unshakable conviction that individuals are extremely important, that every life matters. Sometimes they even transform cities and nations, and yes, the world.
— Beth Clark
I remember that brief period of hyphenation.
When separate cups held each of our toothbrushes,
and they bowed to one another honorably from across the vanity.
– Megan Sexton
Everyone must destroy their life. According to the way they do it, they’re either triumphants or failures.
– Emil Cioran
I always rejoice in the achievement of women.
– Susan Sontag
Imagine a world where we’ve transformed our epidemic of loneliness & isolation into one overflowing with connection & wholeness.
– @VinceFHorn
If we like any of it, we’d better feel tenderness for all of it.
– George Saunders, ultimate environmentalism
When war turns whole populations into sleepwalkers, outlaws don’t join forces with alarm clocks. Outlaws, like poets, rearrange the nightmare.
– Tom Robbins
old poem
new attitude
words transform
– @SheilaBDuncan
A Poet is a person translated into words.
– Anna Kamieńska
An act of pure attention, if you are capable of it, will bring its own answer.
– D.H. Lawrence
I carry a place in the palm of my hands
each finger tip
rings the very grain of my desert life
covers my palms
windswept ripples of sand
their very lines connect the earth to my life
time is telling in my palms
connected by lines
I carry this all in my heart
in the desert
I am poetry
– Beez Laine
I remember. How their songs drew us up through the warming earth just for the joy of hearing them. How we stretched in the sun and turned air into sugar, my sisters and I, leaves and roots entwined.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer
All novelists are eavesdroppers—we listen like mad.
– Penelope Lively
Writing teaches writing.
– John McPhee
Conflict cannot survive without your participation.
– Wayne Dyer
Of all the months of the year there is not a month one half so welcome to the young, or so full of happy associations, as the last month of the year.
– Charles Dickens
Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.
– Haruki Murakami
And once (when? that too is forgotten):
felt the barb
where my pulse dared the counter-beat.
– Paul Celan
If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.
– Sylvia Plath
Deep down, nature is inherently peaceful, calm and beautiful. The universe as a whole is perfect. The chaos is on the surface.
– Amit Ray
What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?
– George Eliot
If a work is created and not experienced by other human beings, can it still succeed in its mission? The answer is quite shocking. En Sof registers everything. All of our thoughts, words, and deeds register indelibly, no matter what consequences transpire. If the work is pure, then even if it is instantly consumed by fire and washed away by water, the act triumphs. The act echoes as a dream within an all-knowing infinity. This is impossible for the nihilistic materialist to understand. We do it for divinity alone and no other reason. This is why the true practitioner does not need any contact with the culture whatsoever.
– David Chaim Smith
Never be so focused on what you’re looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find.
– Ann Patchett
Don’t give people what they want. Give them what they never knew they wanted.
– Diana Vreeland
We have a whole life that wants to unfold and it’s already in us. And many of us feel a huge amount of pressure to do something, to find out who we are, to try to figure out why we’re here. All of that is our own life wanting to happen.
Our problem as human beings in the modern world is that the view of the human being is so degraded that it’s very hard for us to give birth to ourselves. And in fact much of what we do — particularly in our education system, but also in the workplace, and even in families — is to develop techniques and strategies for forgetting who we are; for forgetting the inner creativity of life.
So the practice of meditation is temporarily pulling the plug on our continual effort to be somebody else. It’s really strange but that’s all we have to do. We have to figure out a way to not keep avoiding ourselves; to not keep running away. And the Buddha came up with it: the practice of meditation.
– Reggie Ray, Dharma Ocean Foundation
Hydrogen is a colorless odorless gas that when given enough time, changes into people. How much time? 13.7 billion years
– Andrew Hagel
MOYERS: So the one great story is our search to find our place in the drama?
CAMPBELL: To be in accord with the grand symphony that this world is, to put the harmony of our own body in accord with that harmony.
– Joseph Campbell
For in the depth of every serious doubt and every despair of truth, the passion for truth is still at work. Don’t give in too quickly to those who want to alleviate your anxiety about truth. Don’t be seduced into a truth which is not really your truth, even if the seducer is your church, or your party, or your parental tradition. Go with Pilate, if you cannot go with Jesus; but go in seriousness with him!
– Paul Tillich
I was a woman alone in the sea.
Don’t tell anybody, I tell myself.
Don’t try to remember this.
Don’t document it.
Remember: write down to not-document it.
– Brenda Shaughnessy
Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.
– G.K. Chesterton
Do not pray exclusively to the ancestors of the land; make room also for the spirits of the fault line, the new gods that scream through cracks with musical notes of worlds to come.
– Dr. Bayo Akomolafe
The sun had not yet stood out from the orient, but his precedent light shone through the translucent blue. Yet it was not blue, nor is there any word, nor is a word possible to convey the feeling unless one could be built up of signs and symbols like those in the book of the magician, which glowed and burned to and fro the page. For the blue of the precious sapphire is thick to it, the turquoise dull, these hard surfaces are no more to be compared to it than sand and gravel. They are but stones, hard, cold, pitiful, that which gives them their lustre is the light. Through delicate porcelain sometimes the light comes, and it is not the porcelain, it is the light that is lovely. But porcelain is clay, and the light is shorn, checked, and shrunken. Down through the beauteous azure came the Light itself, pure, unreflected Light, untouched, untarnished even by the dew-sweetened petal of a flower, descending, flowing like a wind, a wind of glory sweeping through the blue. A luminous purple glowing as Love glows in the cheek, so glowed the passion of the heavens.
Two things only reach the soul. By touch there is indeed emotion. But the light in the eye, the sound of the voice! the soul trembles and like a flame leaps to meet them. So to the luminous purple azure his heart ascended.”
– Richard Jefferies
The most difficult patients are the so-called intellectuals. They cultivate a “compartment psychology.” Anything can be settled by an intellect that is not subject to the control of feeling and yet the intellectual still suffers from a neurosis if feeling is undeveloped.
– CG Jung
we’re small / and flawed, but I want to be / who I am, going where / I’m going, all over again.
– Ada Limón
With tremendous deception, we create samsara — pain and misery for the whole world, including ourselves.
– Chögyam Trungpa
the profanation of the word love rose to its height. the french naturalists borrowed it from the sentimental novelists: the swedish and english philosophers took the contagion; and the muse of science condescended to seek admission into the saloons of frivolity.
– samuel taylor coleridge
The point melts. The sources gush. Upland bursts.
And below, the delta turns green. The song of the
frontiers spreads to within sight of the lowlands.
Pleased with so little is the pollen of the alder.
– René Char, (tr. Gustaf Sobin)
The fact is, that the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.
– Oscar Wilde
December is a simple wish
that brings spectacular moments.
– Unknown
Blue Moon
I’m too much in love to have
a one-sided conversation
– Alan Summers
Is the mind capable of experiencing anything new, or must it always continue in the pattern of the old, however modified?
– Krishnamurti
On Working Remotely & No Longer Commuting with Chronic Pain
by Camisha L. Jones
the train leaves the station without me / so does the bus / the sidewalks stay empty of my steps—the rushed ones, the ones pierced with pain, the its-too-late-at-night to still be walking ones / i keep my cash / it doesn’t load my metro card and then another card when the first one’s lost / i don’t panic in the car about leaving late—least not as much / when winter comes, i don’t sit on the cold, cold bench waiting and waiting, clutching a pair of my stockpiled hand warmers / i don’t bundle myself up in oppressive layers / or unravel in the late night, releasing the day’s pressure like a punctured balloon / instead i sit / and continue to sit / in this chair then that one / look out the window to escape the screen’s demands / wonder how i ever had fuel for those past travels / i rest / and i rise / and listen to the body that’s carried me here as it whispers the way forward
Assata Shakur said she thought it important “to develop a style of writing and a style of work that is contra-arrogant” and that our work should be “anti-racist, anti-arrogant, anti-imperialist.”
– tamara k. nopper
My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel–it is, before all, to make you see.
– Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
frozen river
all the things we forgot
to say in time
– @hegelincanada
Pharmaceutical wonders are at work
but I believe only in this moment
of well-being.
– Jane Kenyon
Reading was an interior exile, so that I didn’t have to look away from home, as you put it, just further in.
– Richard Howard
the site the only place
containing our best holy song:
I will live. I will live. I will keep living.
– Leslie Contreras Schwartz
There are but few persons, in comparison with the whole of mankind, whose experiments, if adopted by others, would be likely to be any improvement on established practice. But these few are the salt of the earth; without them, human life would become a stagnant pool.
– John Stuart Mill
A colorless ice stands
between us
enclosing us in soul winter
We rustle inside our cabins
fumbling
for a way to reach each other
Lighting each match
after match
after vain match
Standing on a burnt
match mountain convinced
we can melt it
But we’re trapped inside
a box of lies
pounding our fists til they bleed
When we should be
on our calloused knees
praying for holy fire
– Sara Dean
I speak peace for December.
I speak clarity for December.
I speak abundance for December.
I speak health for December.
I speak blessings for December.
I speak growth for December.
– Britany Henry
It doesn’t exist, even the most enlightened haven’t seen it.
It’s not existent, because it’s the basis of both everything and nothing.
This is not a contradiction, because it’s the apex of the middle way.
May we realize the true nature of mind, free from all limitations and extremes.
– Rangjung Dorje
As great a poet as Dante might have been, I wouldn’t have had the slightest wish to have known him personally. He was a terrible prima donna.
– W. H. Auden
To find inner peace, or happiness, you must go through the spiritual growing up, you must leave the self-centered life and enter the God-centered life—the life in which you see yourself as part of the whole and work for the good of the whole.
– Peace Pilgrim
The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.
– Robert Louis Stevenson
i write fiction because history is not enough.
– Ulrica Hume
There are hundreds of paths up the mountain, all leading to the same place, so it doesn’t matter which path you take. The only person wasting time is the one who runs around the mountain, telling everyone that his or her path is wrong.
– Hindu Proverb
Plots are for dead people’, but voice – oh, voice is how you know you’re alive.
– Amitava Kumar
I make drawings of the natural world, transient moments of grace and beauty in an age of disappearance.
– Rebecca Clark
We are trying to halt a suicide, the death of everything that is alive, everything that exists. We are avoiding the omnicide of the world, of planet Earth. There is no other formula, no other path. Everything else is an illusion.
– Gustavo Petro
When did you last praise a younger person, perhaps someone of your gender?
Praising is a form of activism.
– David Bedrick
Poem after poem, book after book, the ante is upped. I think this could be why it takes most of us so long between books. The poet is working harder each time to go deeper, farther, layering on or stripping away to find the exact color or texture, the core or the root, the frail light or the watery dark… I write to add my voice to the sum of voices, to be part of the choir. I write to be one sequin among the shimmering others, hanging by a thread from the evening gown of the world.
– Dorianne Laux
I long for a large room to myself.
with books and nothing else,
where I can shut myself up,
and see no one.
and read myself into peace.
– Virginia Woolf
I would like a December
with Christmas lights off
and people’s lights on.
– Bukowski
It ended up saying something else beyond
the arc of unsaying …
– Dante Di Stefano
To create one’s world in any of the arts takes courage.
– Georgia O’Keeffe
Be as you wish to seem.
– Socrates
Reality is not simply there, it does not simply exist : It must be sought out and won.”
– Paul Celan
It’s easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren’t writers and very little harm comes to them.
– Julian Barnes
every flower
a victory
in a field of wild grass
– Basho
To my mind, war is always wrong, always horror, always a moral and humanitarian failing – and one of the reasons, among many, is that when people have decided which “team” they’re on, as if it were a sporting event, they will excuse any atrocity as necessary. War is a horror.
– Amber Sparks
The more we try to elaborate perfectly foolproof methods of arranging our lives, the more we find ourselves encumbered with impossible details. That’s the fallacy of too much law.
– Alan Watts
It matters what stories we use to make sense of the world.
– Merlin Sheldrake
To abstract means to free oneself, to become disentangled.
– Henri Michaux, (tr. Gustaf Sobin)
No longer to imitate, but signify nature. By strokes, darts, dashes.
Ascesis of the immediate, of the lightning bolt.
– Henri Michaux, Ideograms in China, (tr. Gustaf Sobin)
A mind that is caught in tradition, that is merely the instrument of memory, living in the pattern of many yesterdays, is incapable of finding out what is true.
– Krishnamurti
This business of having been issued a body is deeply confusing—it’s another thing I’d like to bring up with God. Bodies are so messy, and disappointing.
– Anne Lamott
When my soul touches yours a great chord sings!
How shall I tune it then to other things?
– Rainer Maria Rilke
When our projection hits the Other and bounces back, we experience a kind of resonance, an imitation of wholeness, and this is a form of homecoming simply because we are reconnecting with, falling in love with, ourselves.
– James Hollis
there is only room
in one’s life
for one poem
about rhubarb jam
this is it
– Mandy Macdonald
Information is not knowledge.
Knowledge is not wisdom.
Wisdom is not truth.
Truth is not beauty.
Beauty is not love.
Love is not music.
– Frank Zappa
Once we get used to listening to our dreams, our whole body responds like a musical instrument.
– Marion Woodman
The great discovery of meditation: You don’t have to act on your thoughts.
– Jeff Foster
Humility amounts to an understanding that the world is not divided into good and bad people, but rather it is made up of all manner of individuals, each broken in their own way, each caught up in the common human struggle and each having the capacity to do both terrible and beautiful things. If we truly comprehend and acknowledge that we are all imperfect creatures, we find that we become more tolerant and accepting of others’ shortcomings and the world appears less dissonant, less isolating, less threatening.
– Nick Cave
THE WORD
Down near the bottom
of the crossed-out list
of things you have to do today,
between “green thread”
and “broccoli” you find
that you have penciled “sunlight.”
Resting on the page, the word
is beautiful. It touches you
as if you had a friend
and sunlight were a present
he had sent you from some place distant
as this morning—to cheer you up
and to remind you that,
among your duties, pleasure
is a thing
that also needs accomplishing.
Do you remember
that time and light are kinds
of love, and love
is no less practical
than a coffee grinder
or a safe spare tire?
Tomorrow you may be utterly
without a clue
but today you get a telegram,
from the heart in exile
proclaiming that the kingdom
still exists,
the king and queen alive,
still speaking to their children,
— to any one among them
who can find the time
to sit out in the sun and listen.
– Tony Hoagland
Forgetfulness is like a song
That, freed from a beat and measure, wanders.
Forgetfulness is like a bird whose wings are reconciled,
Outspread and motionless,—
A bird that coasts the wind unwearyingly.
Forgetfulness is rain at night,
Or an old house in a forest,—or a child.
Forgetfulness is white,—white as a blasted tree,
And it may stun the sybil into prophecy,
Or bury the Gods.
I can remember much forgetfulness.
– Hart Crane
Quo magis in dubiis hominem spectare periclis
convenit adversisque in rebus noscere qui sit;
nam very voces tum demum pectore ab imo
eliciuntur et eripitur persona, manet res.
So it is more useful to watch a man in times of peril,
and in adversity to discern what kind of man he is;
for then at last words of truth are drawn from the depths of his heart,
and the mask is torn off, reality remains.
– Titus Lucretius Carus
Body like a Mountain.
Heart like the Ocean.
Mind like the Sky.
– Dogen
Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become the next moment. By the same token, every human being has the freedom to change at any instant.
– Viktor Frankl
Although it’s true that the raft of the noble eightfold path is abandoned on reaching the farther shore, you still have to hold on to it while you’re crossing the river. Otherwise, you’ll be swept downstream.
– Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Imaginary Career
by Rainer Maria Rilke
At first a childhood, limitless and free
of any goals. Ah sweet unconsciousness.
Then sudden terror, schoolrooms, slavery,
the plunge into temptation and deep loss.
Defiance. The child bent becomes the bender,
inflicts on others what he once went through.
Loved, feared, rescuer, wrestler, victor,
he takes his vengeance, blow by blow.
And now in vast, cold, empty space, alone.
Yet hidden deep within the grown up heart,
a longing for the first world, the ancient one…
Then, from His place of ambush, God leapt out.
Reading The Hobbit With Sister Theresa
by Corey Farrenkopf
At your Catholic School, they don’t believe in IEPs or learning disabilities. They do believe in extra reading time with the nuns on Saturday. The nuns don’t have degrees in education, or any other certification, but they do have Jesus and full possession of your weekend. They rarely wear their habits, but when they do, you pretend you’re being instructed by a hooded Gandalf, or that other wise wizard in the Hobbit, which your father reads to you before bed.
Your reward at the end of multiple hours of mispronouncing saint names is a bookmark with a golden crucifix tied to the top, the perfect gift for a child who can barely read. They never give a name to why your paragraphs never progress, for why pages turn so slow. Enough prayer and practice and he’ll be reading the Bible like an old apostle. But you don’t want to read the Bible like an old apostle. You just want to read the Hobbit, with your dad, and not stumble over every third word. You want to be able to hum the songs with him, trade off dialogue so the voices match. Smash the dishes, crack the plates, and all that.
“Do you think he can skip next week?” your mother asks when she picks you up, knowing your father has promised to take you to see the Fellowship of the Ring on the condition you finish your remedial work. You aren’t thirteen yet, so this is a big deal.
You clutch the prayer book you’ve been using to sound out the words for Sunday hymns close to your chest, the golden crucifix dangling from eight pages in.
“No, next week we’ll need him here. And the week after that. It won’t last forever, but we can’t ease up now,” the nun will say, patting your shoulder.
Maybe your father will take you to a Sunday showing, you tell yourself as you drift down the front steps to the parking lot, the spire of the church across the street casting a black shadow across the parking lot. But you know that won’t happen. Sundays are for mass, not Mordor. You’ll want to argue this point, but you’re afraid your father might stop reading to you all together, and how are you going to get through the trilogy on your own?
“The book’s always better than the movie,” your father will say. “You’ll understand someday.”
If a person ends up speaking therapy language, then the treatment has failed and must be called indoctrination.
– Adam Phillips
Are martyrs still martyrs when everyone is suffering?
– George Murray
Go Back to Your Own Country
by Jane Zwart
Let me tell you about countries: nobody has their own
and where we come from moves. Our mothers’ wombs
aren’t where we left them. Continents calve. Jerusalem holds
a tray full of glasses that a scrum of men take
and put back, take and put back, unworried for the weight
she must shift. Let me tell you: some of our countries
aren’t where we left them. Someone pulls a string and six
tumble from Yugoslavia’s pocket. Someone halves
Sudan like a branch over their knee. Someone crumbles
a bailey between Berlins and Germany is one place
again. Only Adam had his own country, and he could not
go back. A country is land that’s learned to disown.
I am Buddha, the pure mind of God.
I am Jesus, the pure heart of God.
I am Lao Tzu, the way of God in the world.
Do not be a Christian.
Be a Christ.
Do not be a Buddhist.
Be a Buddha.
– Leonard Jacobson
I realize that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.
– Edith Cavell, nurse and humanitarian
Well, I know now. I know a little more how much a simple thing like a snowfall can mean to a person.
– Sylvia Plath
who called it anxiety and not frettuccine afraido?
– sarah clark
If we can enter the church day & night & implore God to hear our prayers, how careful we should be to hear & grant the petitions of our neighbors in need.
– St. Francis
The past was like a bad dream; the future was all happy holiday as I moved Southwards week by week, easily, lazily, lingering as long as I dared, but always heeding the call!
– Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
Silent gratitude isn’t very much to anyone.
– Gertrude Stein
Education consists in being afraid at the right time.
– Angelo Patri
In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes.
– Theodor Adorno
I want to offer that it is the time to construct our personal and collective Noah’s ark of narrative. We need to decide what ecological information specific to our locations – what information about climate change and lovemaking and ritual and survival – we want to place in our arks. Each person will have different species they want to include. Each person will build a different boat with different words. Most likely our books and our computers will not survive what is to come. And neither may we. But our stories will ride the wind and sail the oceans. If we nest our vital information in compelling enough narratives – narratives with gods and plants and high drama – they may be able to travel across stormy oceans for thousands of years to come. We might be able to remember them and tell them to someone else one day.- able to transmit the memory of our flowers, our landscapes, our kin that have gone extinct. How do we create the narrative soil that will sprout stories freshly adapted to our current conditions? The mythmaking we are called to do now is probably somewhere closer to composting.
– Sophie Strand
The Old Ones say, ‘You are the greatest miracle on earth. Not because it is you, but because you are living.’ And do you know what? It is true: you are the greatest miracle on earth. Because you live now and here. Millions of people have lived before you. But you are living now – in these times of change. What a miracle, what a gift to live in these times.
– Angaangaq Angakkorsuaq
who did i fail, who
did i cease to protect
that i should wake each morning
facing the cold north?
– Lucille Clifton
Anyone who writes is a seeker. You look at a blank page and you’re seeking. The role is assigned to us and never removed. I think this is an unbelievable blessing.
– Louise Glück
All art intuitively apprehends coming changes in the collective unconsciousness.
– Carl Jung
What makes the ego grow, according to Jung, is what he calls “collisions.” In other words, conflict, trouble, anguish, sorrow, suffering. These are what lead the ego to develop.
– Murray Stein
Daily exercise may produce excellent bodies, but those bodies may live quite cut off from feeling and thought.
– Marion Woodman & Elinor Dickson
There is this tendency to think that you must understand everything, or that a thing must be proven, to enjoy it or derive serious meaning from it. This mistake is at the heart of the disembodied rationalist worldview.
– Simon Sarris
Prophets are never just talking to someone over there, or me, or you. They are prophets because they howl to the whole world. It’s heard by people; it’s heard by nature. It wakes the living. It stirs the dead.
– Peter Kingsley, Catafalque
Deprogram yourself from the idea that the more intense an experience is, the more healing it must be.
– River Kenna
We can see Spirit made visible when people are kind to one another, especially when it’s a really busy person, like you, taking care of a needy, annoying, neurotic person, like you. In fact, that’s often when we see Spirit most brightly.
– Anne Lamott
If the mind is to discover something totally new, it must come to the point when it is in a state of not knowing.
– Krishnamurti
In the beginning, there was your mouth
– Donika Kelly
Love will grow plain with all its mysteries;
Nor shall we need to fetch from over seas
Wisdom or wealth or pleasure safe from pain.
– Christina Rossetti
You worry me as if I was a proverb you were trying to turn into an epigram.
– W Somerset Maugham
Restoring land without restoring relationship is an empty exercise. It is relationship that will endure and relationship that will sustain the restored land… . It is medicine for the earth.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer
Maybe tomorrow will be the day everyone wakes up to write a poem. Or maybe just you and me, fallen asleep on duty, fallen asleep to duty forever. No one knows what will happen, but you and I at least, while the music of the murmur invents us, will have no part in anyone’s war, we will waste nothing, a signal going through us, like an inkling of god or a hunger for strawberries or the indisputable fact of love.
– Dean Young
How close does the dragon’s spume
have to come? How wide does the crack
in heaven have to split?
What would people look like
if we could see them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?
– Ellen Bass
I prefer to say: I know that I am a human being, and I know that I have not understood the system.
– Søren Kierkegaard
Since modern man experiences himself both as the seller and the commodity to be sold on the market, his self-esteem depends on conditions beyond his control. If he is ‘successful,’ he is valuable; if he is not, he is worthless. The degree of insecurity which results form this orientation can hardly be overestimated. If one feels that one’s own value is not constituted primarily by the human qualities one possesses, but by one’s success on a competitive market with ever-changing conditions, one’s self-esteem is bound to be shaky and in constant need of confirmation by others.
– Erich Fromm
Then the fairest flower of youth gathers to see your play, and listens to the revelation. Then every gentle mind sucks melancholy nourishment for itself from your work; then as first one and then another emotion is stimulated, each person sees exactly what he carries in his heart.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
You don’t ask what a dance means, you enjoy it. You don’t ask what the world means, you enjoy it. You don’t ask what you mean, you enjoy yourself; or at least, so you do when you are up to snuff.
“But to enjoy the world requires something more than mere good health and good spirits; for this world, as we all now surely know, is horrendous. ‘All life,’ said the Buddha, ‘is sorrowful’; and so, indeed, it is. Life consuming life: that is the essence of its being, which is forever a becoming. ‘The world,’ said the Buddha, ‘is an ever-burning fire.’ And so it is. And that is what one has to affirm, with a yea! a dance! a knowing, solemn, stately dance of the mystic bliss beyond pain that is at the heart of every mythic rite.
– Joseph Campbell
Changes
by David Bowie
I still don’t know what I was waiting for
And my time was running wild
A million dead-end streets
And every time I thought I’d got it made
It seemed the taste was not so sweet
So I turned myself to face me
But I’ve never caught a glimpse
Of how the others must see the faker
I’m much too fast to take that test
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
(Turn and face the strange)
Ch-ch-changes
Don’t want to be a richer man
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
(Turn and face the strange)
Ch-ch-changes
Just gonna have to be a different man
Time may change me
But I can’t trace time
I watch the ripples change their size
But never leave the stream
Of warm impermanence and
So the days float through my eyes
But still the days seem the same
And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations
They’re quite aware of what they’re going through
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
(Turn and face the strange)
Ch-ch-changes
Don’t tell them to grow up and out of it
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
(Turn and face the strange)
Ch-ch-changes
Where’s your shame
You’ve left us up to our necks in it
Time may change me
But you can’t trace time
Strange fascination, fascinating me
Changes are taking the pace
I’m going through
Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
(Turn and face the strange)
Ch-ch-changes
Oh, look out you rock ‘n rollers
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
(Turn and face the strange)
Ch-ch-changes
Pretty soon now you’re gonna get older
Time may change me
But I can’t trace time
I said that time may change me
But I can’t trace time
….What is hell. The
imagination of what is
coming is hell. The light of my monitor
blinks. What will the readout
tell us. Who is us. How will us change
when the readout
arrives, the ice-core update, the new temps for the
arctic depth-sounds, bone scans, outposts on
stars, on cells…
– Jorie Graham, The Quiet
Now is the time to invest
in the Treasury of Silence.
It is not like other banks.
They will fail, overgrown
by the grace of the ancient forest.
But there is a bank
that will never fail,
and we own it.
We are the board of trustees.
There are billions of us
sharing one abundance,
credit unbounded,
never-ending equity.
The portal to the vault
is always wide open.
Anyone can enter, to draw
on the Mother’s endowment,
the Father’s annuity.
Strange that so few of us
step through the door.
Come,
leave the mind of penury,
drop the chain of old stories,
receive the inheritance
of a quiet heart.
There’s a gateway to this fortune
in each cell of your body.
Enter the golden darkness
of God’s abysmal trust.
If your mind won’t come,
leave it on the front steps,
begging.
– Fred LaMotte
I was wrong
apogee would yield a warp we’d ride—
how love is a nest of heft
and God is not a weapon.
– Lindsay Rockwell
even by day
the moon has
silvered my beard
– lessethereal@threads.net
While they wished to look out for each other, and to keep tabs on each other, staying in touch took a toll on them, serving as an unsettling reminder of a life not lived, and also they grew less worried each for the other, less worried that the other would need them to be happy, and eventually a month went by without any contact, and then a year, and then a lifetime.
– Mohsin Hamid, Exit West
Awareness is silent and choiceless, in which comparison and judgement have ceased.
– Krishnamurti
What
keeps me here?
Only my heart
that won’t give up.
– Gregory Orr
The fact remains that you can’t approve new fossil fuel projects, max out North Sea oil and gas and roll back vital green policies while staying committed to our climate targets – it’s one road or the other.
– Danny Gross, Friends of the Earth
The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard observed that the most common form of despair is that of not being who we really are, adding that an even deeper form of despair stems from choosing to be someone other than oneself.
– Howard Sasportas
Everyone I know who has a significant awakening experience immediately starts plotting to help other people swim in the beautiful and interesting water they’ve stumbled upon.
It’s a fortune that you want to share immediately as much as you can
– Sasha Chapin
Not having anything around to read is dangerous: you have to content yourself with life itself, and that can lead you to take risks.
– Michel Houellebecq, Platform
I believe that the arts have been the saving grace of a world rotten with power, war and politics since the beginning of time.
– Robert Redford
Common people: I’m going to bed.
Shakespeare: I shall retire to the chamber of slumber, there to rest mine weary bones and dream the sweet dreams of Morpheus.
This is the way I look at the world. I don’t see it as a collection of objects, but as a vast and mysterious organism. I see the beauty in the smallest things, and I find wonder in the most ordinary events. I am always looking for the hidden meaning, the secret message. I am always trying to understand the mystery of life.
I know that I will never understand everything, but that doesn’t stop me from trying. I am content to live in the mystery, to be surrounded by the unknown. I am content to be a seeker, a pilgrim, a traveler on the road to nowhere.
– Henry Miller
A heart glows in
me. A heart.
– Ana Božičević
“I am one of those who like to stay late at the cafe,” the older waiter said. “With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night.”
“I want to go home and into bed.”
“We are of two different kinds,” the older waiter said. He was now dressed to go home. “It is not only a question of youth and confidence although those things are very beautiful. Each night. I am reluctant to close up because there may be someone who needs the cafe.
– Ernest Hemingway, A Clean Well Lighted Place
Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music.
– Marcel Marceau
Act so that there is no use in a center.
– Gertrude Stein
Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality. I have been for many years a teacher of languages. It is an occupation which at length becomes fatal to whatever share of imagination, observation, and insight an ordinary person may be heir to. To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.
– Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes
What is the opposite of a Prince?
A frog must be the answer, since,
As all good fairy stories tell,
When some witch says a magic spell,
Causing the prince to be disguised
So that he won’t be recognized,
He always ends up green and sad
And sitting on a lily pad.
– Richard Wilber
The sun fired the bone-white coral of the frosted hedges with a cold & sullen glow.
Nothing moved…till the rime melted & steamed in the sun, & trees began to drip through the misty cave that boomed and blurred with voices.
– JA Baker, The Peregrine
You owe reality nothing and the truth about your feelings everything.
– Richard Hugo
a cherry tree
blooming in old age
is something to never forget
– Basho
Many people restrict their breathing because deep breathing energises the organism and leads to feeling. The most immediate way to block a feeling is to hold one’s breath.
– Alexander Lowen
In order to begin to see life as it is we need some method of cutting through the speed and deception in our lives.
– Chögyam Trungpa
We don’t get to choose whether or not to live in an interconnected system. We just do. What we get to choose is whether to work with that interconnection or to ignore and fight it. One of the ways to choose to work with interconnection (i.e. work with reality) is to multisolve.
– Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
The capitalist world economy has never been epitomised by skyscrapers in Manhattan or London, but by coltan mines in the DRC and bombed-out refugee camps in Gaza—places where people are exploited and dispossessed in order to maintain regimes of accumulation and imperial hegemony.
– Jason Hickel
There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen to write.
– William Makepeace Thackeray
Stop drifting… Sprint to the finish. Write off your hopes, and if your well-being matters to you, be your own savior while you can.
– Marcus Aurelius
The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close up.
– Chuck Palahniuk
The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. No virtuous man — that is, virtuous in the Y.M.C.A. sense — has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading.
– H.L. Mencken
There is no place for nationalism in planetary regeneration. Fundamentals are incompatible. Nations are not designed to cooperate only to compete to consume perceived scarcity. Only interoperable bioregions collaborating gives us a chance to coordinate regeneratively as a planet.
– @antonio_paglino
As I was writing this novel, I really came to understand something I already knew and it sounds boring to say, but human beings are really, really complicated.
– Salar Abdoh
Schools, libraries, mosques, churches, and cultural centers are not just buildings; they are sanctuaries of knowledge, bastions of cultural identity, and beacons of intellectual and artistic freedom. Libraries in particular safeguard cultural heritage and history….
… For many in Gaza, they represented places to gather, to celebrate, and to learn. To see such cultural institutions in ruins represents a tragic loss for their communities.
– Liesl Gerntholtz
It is the oven my mother used to bake bread and
roast chicken before a bomb reduced our house
to ashes.
– Mosab Abu Toha, What is Home?
The impossible attracts me because everything possible has been done and the world didn’t change.
– Sun Ra
Waking at Night
by Jack Gilbert
The blue river is grey at morning
and evening. There is twilight
at dawn and dusk. I lie in the dark
wondering if this quiet in me now
is a beginning or an end.
We need another way of thinking about the world, another way of coming into understanding agreement, becoming with it, that doesn’t depend on knowing it in this kind of destructive, domineering way.
– James Bridle
The poet is a servant of forces that he does not understand. He must keep the house clean. His progress can only be moral.
– Jean Cocteau
Teaching the Ape to Write Poems
by James Tate
They didn’t have much trouble
teaching the ape to write poems:
first they strapped him into the chair,
then tied the pencil around his hand
(the paper had already been nailed down).
Then Dr. Bluespire leaned over his shoulder
and whispered into his ear:
“You look like a god sitting there.
Why don’t you try writing something?”
crane
by crane
autumn
moves on
– Julie Schwerin
You lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner’s pick, a woodcarver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject?
– Annie Dillard
The Cosmological Eye
by James Merrill
Vivid to the myopic is the blue
Bewilderment prismed in his looking-glass.
He muses on glassed vistas imprecise
And asks his vision why blurred things should be
Still blurred, why on the clear ideal surface
An inch away a parallel vagueness lies.
An inch removed is spread out the appearance
Of sea and sunlight. The sharp elegance
That is birds flying, however, he never knew.
His cloven gaze withdraws and all at once
Upon the pure expanse of dream begins,
Fluent in the idiom of blue.
The sky is realest: the sky cannot
Be touched and in the mirror it cannot
Be touched. He is enchanted. The rare azur
Is flawless; happily blurred blue is no whit
Less exquisite than blue unblurred. And what
He misses he would never know was there.
The mirror and the rare azur alas
Are not the same. The keen-eyed have seen this
And tell of birds, foam, subtleties of blue,
Smoke, bone, a sail, blue shells that are of less
Being to him than ideal blues. It is
His proud despair that he will never, now,
Turn to the broad unbleached experience: Sea,
That as an egg belies complexity;
Blue of horizons made of yes and no
Clasps him from his fulfillment, from seeking wet
Shells and a blue wet feather. Nor is it
The mirror that numbs him. It is his ultimate eye.
No one gets used to absence. Another sun is not your sun even if it shines on you.
– Mario Benedetti
Highway 90
An owl lands on the side
of the road. Turns its head
to look at me going fast,
window open to the night
on the desert. Clean air,
and the great stars.
I’m trying to decide
if this is what I want.
– Linda Gregg
Some parents don’t get to know their children
Not because they don’t want to, because they don’t know how.
A shocking amount of families never really ask anything about each others desires, dreams, or opinions.
This makes emotional intimacy very uncomfortable as an adult.
– Dr. Nicole LePera
The river flowing past its other shore
– W.S. Merwin
Another day another reminder that the literary in so-called the “literary community” does not inherently mean thoughtful, reflective, or insightful.
– Gregory Howard
Two-Headed Calf
by Laura Gilpin
Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.
But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass. And
as he stares into the sky, there are
twice as many stars as usual.
For a long time I thought peace was a quality of being undisturbed and quiet. But now I believe being at peace is muscular, is a readiness to be present no matter what.
– Gunilla Norris
Premature babies, archives, universities, poets, doctors, schools, bakeries, refugee camps, children, and olive trees, all of these people and places and living things made targets for annihilation. What horror.
– Myriam Gurba Serrano
The place where we become ourselves seems to be the place where we find our friends for life. Or is it the other way round?
– Pico Iyer
While you’re alive and able be good.
– Marcus Aurelius
Process is nothing; erase your tracks. The path is not the work. I hope your tracks have grown over; I hope birds ate the crumbs; I hope you will toss it all and not look back.
– Annie Dillard
You want a poem to register in every mind the way it did in yours. Then you discover this never happens. Still, it is what you strive for.
– Louise Glück
Once I stop shaping reality into a theatrical performance with myself at its center, mindfulness allows the world to surprise me. The universe becomes delightfully open-ended.
– Belden Lane
The great adventure is seeing something unknown emerge, every day, in the same face. It’s bigger than all the trips around the world.
– Alberto Giacometti
People don’t need to be saved or rescued. People need knowledge of their own power and how to access it.
– Caroline Myss
Leaving capitalist consumerism and market economics as the dominant stewards of the only known civilization in the universe will most likely seem, in retrospect, to have been a terrible idea.
– Greta Thunberg
Of all the hokum with which this country is riddled the most odd is the common notion that is free of class distinctions.
– Maugham
Your enemies can be more useful to you than your friends, because your friends can often pardon your weaknesses, but your enemies notice them and attract your attention to them. Do not neglect the opinion of your enemies.
– Leo Tolstoy
Slowly the evening strips from his finest cloth,
that for him a circle of ancient trees holds up …
– Rilke (tr. Frank Garrett)
Whoever reads Nietzsche without laughing, and laughing heartily and often and sometimes hysterically, is almost not reading Nietzsche at all.
– Deleuze
I don’t blame
any particular
ethnic group
for the world’s
problems.
The problem
is much
simpler
than that.
The problem
is that
some people
project
apoplectic shadow
onto others
and some
project it back.
– Gabe Valentine
When you stop overextending yourself, you learn to observe people who demand more than you’re willing to offer. Them needing more is not a problem, and it’s also not your problem. It means someone else can meet them there, but with clarity & peace intact—it never needs to be you.
– Nate Postlethwait
Some minds who love mystery want to believe that objects retain something of the eyes that looked at them.
– Marcel Proust
Rich mindset: Go broke investing
Poor mindset: Go broke shopping
– Fiona Smith
The political self-censorship that must be practiced by everyone who does not wish to be ruined, or at least completely sidelined, has an immanent and probably irresistible tendency to slip into an unconscious censorship mechanism and from there into stultification.
– Adorno, 1960
Writing is something you do alone. It’s a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story [and share a poem] but don’t want to make eye contact while doing it.
– John Green
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
If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible.
– Søren Kierkegaard
One way to make something disappear is to place it, like a grain of sand in the desert, in a mass of supposed likeness.
– Berel Lang
By the mouth for the ear: that’s the way I’d like to write.
– William Gass
Blue is the color of the mind in borrow of the body; it is the color consciousness becomes when caressed; the dark inside of sentences.’
– William Gass
We have a funny notion in our heads that truly spiritual people are made of cast iron, that they are not sensitive, so that if you bang them about it won’t affect them. But as the great Sixth Patriarch of China pointed out, you must learn to distinguish between a living Buddha and a stone Buddha, because if a buddha was simply one who was not affected by anything, then lumps of wood and pieces of stone would be Buddhas. And perhaps they are in their own way, but that wasn’t the point he was making. His point was that if you think that the greatest ideal in life is to be invulnerable, then you are on your way to becoming geological rather than spiritual.
This kind of spiritual geology is very prevalent if you know spiritual people as well as I do. I perpetually hear tales of people insisting that “my guru’s better than yours.” This goes on insufferably, whether it is my minister, my church, my society, or my own organization. I have heard all the reasons why, and I have heard people putting down other teachers and gurus, saying how dreadful it is that such and such a Zen master made them do so-and-so. Or we hear of the yogi who is a drunk, or sleeps with his students, or gambles, or drives cars too fast.
A great many spiritual people in this country are actually crypto-Protestants and still believe strongly in the Protestant ethic. Therefore they pass all of these judgments, despite the fact that the founder of the Christian religion said, “Judge not that you be not judged.”
– Alan Watts
Part of the maturation is to realize that you don’t just give up the negative perceptions, you give up the positive ones, too. You give up the whole framework that was used to tell you who and what you are.
– Adyashanti, Emptiness Dancing
Wisdom can teach us to separate people’s actions from who they are. We can agree or disagree with their actions but remain balanced in our relationship with a person.
– Sayadaw U Pandita
It’s almost as if whenever there’s a telephone call in a dream, you know there’s a complex on the other end calling you away from this moment to an old place, an old value.
– James Hollis
It seemed to me that all of us are trying to climb Mount Everest.
– Anaïs Nïn
Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that’s wrong. They know less, that’s why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.
– Margaret Atwood
The End of Lake Superior
by Kōan Brink
IT WAS
cool and dark,
azalea in bloom
at the edge
of the forest.
The raw silk of it
peeking out
from its
heavily ironed
dress shirt.
Still more surface
area than flowing
water, it was
hard to live by glacial
repose alone.
The visible saints
drifting again
into imitation,
into the world’s late
afternoon.
We buried ourselves
at her bequest.
As a poet your whole arena is the failure of language and trying to do things to make language adequate . . . There is no hurry for this stuff. The only thing is to get it right. Very often the difference between the great line, the really great line, and the pretty good line is almost nothing.
– Don Paterson
You must read. What is reading? I do not refer to the reading of books.
But just as books give us knowledge about external matters and help even an ignorant child turn into a learned scholar, so is there a book within each of us. Try to read that book. On reading that you will be left with no doubts on any subject nor will any questions arise in your mind.”
– Anandamayi Ma
Sometimes art finds a way to preserve / the pleasures of consciousness // but more often it’s the same bars of Chopin / over and over until the mind is dust
– Kevin Prufer
Psychoanalysis is a remedy for ignorance; it has no effect on bullshit.
– Jacques Lacan
Those who cannot help ought also not advise: in an order where every mousehole has been plugged, mere advice exactly equals condemnation.
– Theodor Adorno, To the armchairs
None who profit by the profit system may exist within it without shame, and this deforms even the undeformed joys.
– Theodor Adorno
How fast the stream flows from January to December! We are swept on by the torrent of things grown so familiar that they cast no shadow. We float, we float …
– Virginia Woolf
Let us go to another country,
Not yours or mine, And start again…
Hope would be our passport; the rest is understood
– William Plomer
Something should join men together, something should be a bridge.
– @RedBookJung
All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore.
– Ray Bradbury
It is important to know the stories and histories of things, even if all we know is that we don’t know.
– Ali Smith
Look at the birds. Even flying
is born
out of nothing. The first sky
is inside you, friend, open
at either end of day.
The work of wings
was always freedom, fastening
one heart to every falling thing.
– Li-Young Lee
The more we give our best, the more we are able to receive other people’s worst. Isn’t that great?
– Chögyam Trungpa
When anything, even a good thing, becomes one-sided and excludes its opposite, the demonic enters in. Even goodness can be demonic.
– James Hollis
Writing without revising is the literary equivalent of waltzing gaily out of the house in your underwear.
– Patricia Fuller
The light of a candle
is transferred to another candle—
spring twilight.
– Yosa Buson
To discover / something primordial and holy. / To have the smell of the earth / welcome you to everywhere.
– Matthew Olzmann
In the dream where I am an island, I grow green with hope. I’d like to end there.
– Jericho Brown
You are here; you are living; let it be that way-that is mindfulness. Let every beat of your heart, every breath, be mindfulness itself.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Novels are searching vehicles. They are not about providing answers.
– Nicole Krauss
Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.
– Simone Weil
All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.
– Simone Weil
Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete.
– Paul Kalanithi
Wise men have regarded the earth as a tragedy, a farce, even an illusionist’s trick; but all, if they are truly wise, and not merely intellectual rapists, recognize that it is certainly some kind of stage in which we all play roles, most of us being very poorly coached and totally unrehearsed before the curtain rises. Is it too much if I ask, tentatively, that we agree to look upon it as a circus, a touring carnival wandering about the sun for a record season of four billion years and producing new monsters and miracles, hoaxes and bloody mishaps, wonders and blunders, but never quite entertaining the customers well enough to prevent them from leaving, one by one, and returning to their homes for a long and bored winter’s sleep under the dust?
– Robert Anton Wilson
I thought of a remark … that the United States is like a ‘gigantic boiler. Once the fire is lighted under it there is no limit to the power it can generate.’ Being saturated and satiated with emotion and sensation, I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.
– Winston S. Churchill
When love is lost there’s not much to say
Except life will never again be miraculous
I see the young woman in this café,
Alone, her eyes luminous
With tears, I wish for a way
To tell her: You’re not alone.
You’re not alone.
What you feel now we too have known,
Hundreds of us.
The one you lost is gone so here you are
Living in a sad movie but it has an end
When you will see: the sky is very forgiving,
The moon rising wants to be your friend.
You will be embraced by summer rains,
The chittering of birds in the trees,
The luxury of tall grasses remains,
And the persistence of our species.
Listen to them as they pass,
People chattering on the phone,
Little kids released from class,
The lovers walking hand in hand,
The ballet lady posing on the grass,
The long line at the ice cream stand,
We are yours, we are your own,
Find your place in the marching band.
You are not alone.
Don’t be alone.
– Garrison Keillor
Alone, like a verse from a lyric with no beginning and no end. Alone, like the cry of a heart in the wilderness.
– Mahmoud Darwish
A human being in action cannot represent perfection. The moment you take action, you are imperfect: you have decided to act that way instead of that other way. That’s why people who think they are perfect are so ridiculous.
– Joseph Campbell
What is called the philosophy of art usually lacks one of two things: either the philosophy or the art.
– Friedrich Schlegel
I write by the light of what is not revealed in what I express.
– Edmond Jabès
It’s more fun to be a fan than a critic. I’m not looking to spend my life tearing things down, when it can be so satisfying to build things up.
– James Clear
sundown . . .
the mason jars
empty again
– Christopher Herold
winter’s dreams
arrive on shifting winds
monochromatic
layers are simply lain
hope upon hope upon hope
– Andy Perrin
hints of autumn
at last the hour has come
to board the train
– John Stevenson
The cat sat on the mat’ is not the beginning of a story, but ‘the cat sat on the god’s mat’ is.
– John le Carré
The goal of psychotherapy, all turf-battles aside, is to rattle our patient’s certitude about his conclusions.
– Mary Jo Peebles
Maybe we are broken. But we put ourselves back together. We survived. That’s what makes us so powerful.
– V.E. Schwab
Art must be and wants to be utopia, and the more utopia is blocked by the real functional order, the more this is true; yet at the same time art may not be utopia in order not to betray it by providing semblance and consolation.
– Theodor Adorno
The poetry of winter’—yes, that was poetry, the breath of the gods,—light glowing and changing…
– Richard Aldington
I imagine the sky only occupied by birds and swollen clouds.
– Mosab Abu Toha
Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.
– Neil Postman
Poetry is one of the largest, most beautiful, most intimate and most effective ways of participating. It’s a dream language that we had centuries ago, so that when we speak poetically, or write a poem about what’s going on, a real difficult issue that’s facing our communities, people listen.
– Juan Felipe Herrera
Without elders, much of our history has been formed by juniors reacting, overreacting, and protecting their own temporary privilege, with no deep-time vision like the Iroquois Nation, which considered, What would be good for the next seven generations?
– Richard Rohr
The key remains the same for everyone—complete sincerity. You must give your all. Holding on to nothing, you must become your practice.
– Tangen Harada Roshi
Sometimes we have to use diplomacy or deflection to work with our wily mind. Sometimes we have to be our own cheerleaders, other times tough taskmasters. The most important thing is to watch and respond.
– Vanessa Zuisei Goddard
The wise attend to the inner truth of things and are not fooled by outward appearances. They ignore matter and seek the spirit.
– Lao Tzu
Reminders
‘The peace garden is opposite the War Memorial,’
Said the old soldier.
‘We had to fight to make peace
Back in the good old days.’
‘No, the War Memorial is opposite the peace garden,’
Said the old pacifist.
‘You’ve had so many wars to end all wars,
Still millions are dying from the wars you left behind.’
‘Look,’ said the old soldier.
‘You chickens stuck your peace garden
In front of our War Memorial to cause non-violent trouble.
This War Memorial is necessary,
It reminds us that people have died for our country.’
‘Look,’ said the old pacifist,
‘In the beginning was peace
And the peace was with God
And the peace was God,
This peace garden is unnecessary but
It reminds us that people want to live for our country.
– Benjamin Zephaniah
I want to be cured
Of a craving for something I cannot find
And of the shame of never finding it
– T.S. Eliot
This golden light you see is all dust.
– Ranjit Hoskote
Each religion has helped humankind. Paganism increased in human the light of beauty, the largeness and height of his life, his aim at a many-sided perfection; Christianity gave him some vision of divine love and charity; Buddhism has shown him a noble way to be wiser, gentler, purer; Judaism and Islam how to be religiously faithful in action and zealously devoted to God; Hinduism has opened to him the largest and profoundest spiritual possibilities. A great thing would be done if all these God-visions could embrace and cast themselves into each other; but intellectual dogma and cult-egoism stand in the way.
All religions have saved a number of souls, but none yet has been able to spiritualize humankind. For that there is needed not cult and creed, but a sustained and all-comprehending effort at spiritual self-evolution.
– Sri Aurobindo
I don’t aim to be a person of note. I aim to be a person of whole journals filled with stories about hitchhiking the Atlantic coast.
– Andrea Gibson
What exhausts itself is the West itself.
– Jean-Luc Nancy
There is beauty to be found in the pain. Life is brutal, but it’s also beautiful. Life is Brutiful.
– Glennon Doyle
On the mountain
the question of where
you cross the river
is how,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
Sadness and fury bit into each other like two warring serpents in my stomach.
– Stephanie Foo
I have no place left to live but in my own heart.
– Anne Enright
Our problem isn’t that we’re individualists. It’s that our individualism is static rather than dynamic. We value what we think rather than what we do. We forget that we haven’t done, or been, what we thought; that the first function of life is action, just as the first property of things is motion.
– Fernando Pessoa
In the West, we like to give the impression that Christianity fell straight from the sky with no prior history. That is inaccurate, historically. The main contents of Christianity, which is rich in philosophical thought, were actually already present in this extraordinarily broad and to an extent very conscious constellation characterized on the one hand by Gnosticism and on the other hand by Neoplatonic philosophy. That in turn goes back to Pythagoras, Plato, and so forth.
– C. G. Jung, Ignatius Loyola Spiritual Exercises
Christianity very ancient. Goes back to pre-sand Egypt.
– Gurdjieff
What Christianity most has to offer the world now is not moral guidance or activism or yet another social program; it is a mystical connection to the Source of life. Cultivating that divine-human love affair seems to me the only hope left. Not as some kind of opiate-of-the-people escape from our problems, but as a nonlinear path that leads us deeper into them. Christianity has no exclusive claim on this relationship. It does have a two-thousand-year-old history full of reliable matchmakers: the Desert Fathers and Mothers, Isaac of Syria, Teresa of Avila, Howard Thurman, Simone Weil, Oscar Romero, Thomas Merton . . . the list is long. We can choose our guides. The inner journey into love is taken not for the self, but on behalf of all life.
“The purpose of the early desert hermits”, Merton wrote, “was to withdraw into the healing silence of the wilderness . . . not in order to preach to others but to heal in themselves the wounds of the entire world”
From seventh-century Ninevah, in what is now Iraq, Saint Isaac of Syria wrote: “An elder was once asked, “What is a compassionate heart?” He replied: “It is a heart on fire for the whole of creation, for humanity, for the birds, for the animals, for demons and for all that exists.”
Christianity will truly come into its own in the Anthropocene, I believe, when it fully embraces that path to compassion, when it refuses to look away from the ecological Good Friday we are inflicting on the world. Only then will our actions, humbled and chastened, flow from compassion rather than from guilt. This requires a shift in vision, a redirecting of our gaze back to the One who loved the world into being and who sustains its every breath.
– Fred Bahnson
When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
What is God? God is a motion – a perpetual motion. The spontaneous motion of the human body is always continuing.
– Sri Jibankrishna or Diamond
Before this is all over. Before they close the house and sell the furniture and give away the books. Before the cosmetics and shoes are handed out. Before they throw the pans in the trash. Before they empty the cupboards, before they take away the spices, the noodles. Before the happy days and Sunday afternoons end. Before the last of the mornings. Before the end of the anguish. Before sex without love and love without sex are over. Before the clothes rot in the closets. Before they take down the paintings and cover the armchairs with canvases and close the windows forever. Before they burn the photos. Before the doormats dry out, before the curtains rust on their tracks. Before curiosity is over, the bones, the liver and the corneas. Before all the plants on the balcony dry out. Before there is no more snow, no colors, no tropics. Before the end of all the jungles, of all the seas, of all the reflections in the water. Before the last poem. From the end of the sidewalks and streets. The end of all walks.
Before goodbye to all the airports and all the planes, all the cities and all the cafes with steamed up windows. Before the cancellation of all the discussions, of all the arguments, of all the fury, of all the contempt. Of all the metallic anxieties. Before the end of the screams, the desolation and the guilt. Before the last agenda, the last Friday, the last bar, the last dance. Before all the domes and all the screens go out. Before the moths eat the remains of the wool and the pillow. Before the end of pets. Before, much before: you have to live.
But how? As? “How admirable / he who does not think “life flees” / when he sees lightning,” Basho wrote. Admirable those who are in time without thinking about it.
– Leila Guerriero, Theory of Gravity
So come what may I’ll not upset
My cheerful happiness of mind.
Dejection never brings me what I want;
My virtue will be warped and marred by it.
– Shantideva
Happiness is not ever found in getting what we want.
We’ve got the wrong formula.
Real happiness and freedom come from
learning to adapt the heart to the way things are.
– Ajahn Amaro
Here is the most telling fact: you who wish to possess me.
Here is another fact: I loved you and let you think you could.
– Louise Erdrich
The music was more than music- at least what we are used to hearing. The music was feeling itself. The sound connected instantly with something deep and joyous. Those powerful moments of true knowledge that we have to paper over with daily life. The music tapped the back of our terrors, too. Things we’d lived through and didn’t want to ever repeat. Shredded imaginings, unadmitted longings, fear and also surprisingly pleasures. No, we can’t live at that pitch. But every so often something shatters like ice and we are in the river of our existence. We are aware. And this realization was in the music, somehow, or in the way Shamengwa played it.
– Louise Erdrich
Nothing is ever lost. If you have moved over vast territories and dared to love silly things, you will have learned even from the most primitive items collected and put aside in your life. From an ever-roaming curiosity in all the arts, from bad radio to good theatre, from nursery rhyme to symphony, from jungle compound to Kafka’s Castle, there is basic excellence to be winnowed out, truths found, kept, savored, and used on some later day. To be a child of one’s time is to do all these things.
– Ray Bradbury
I really do believe that all of you are at the beginning of a wonderful journey. As you start traveling down that road of life, remember this: There are never enough comfort stops. The places you’re going to are never on the map. And once you get that map out, you won’t be able to re-fold it no matter how smart you are.
So forget the map, roll down the windows, and whenever you can pull over and have picnic with a pig. And if you can help it never fly as cargo.
– Jim Henson
Goodtime Jesus
by James Tate
Jesus got up one day a little later than usual. He had been dreaming so deep there was nothing left in his head. What was it? A nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled back, skin falling off. But he wasn’t afraid of that. It was a beautiful day. How ’bout some coffee? Don’t mind if I do. Take a little ride on my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.
Writing to you, for me, is writing…
– Marguerite Duras
Refuse to wear uncomfortable pants, even if they make you look really thin. Promise me you’ll never wear pants that bind or tug or hurt, pants that have an opinion about how much you’ve just eaten. The pants may be lying!
– Anne Lamott
Beyond sea, crests seen over dune
Night sea churning shingle,
To the left, the alley of cypress.
– Ezra Pound
If we are full of rage
we have to get it out of our body.
We have to express it—
to ourselves—
or it will take another form,
perhaps illness.
– Marion Woodman
i have put passion into my books. passion of hate, passion of disdain, passion of contempt very often—i don’t deny it […] yes, love makes me antipathetic, a greater and purer love than that delusive sympathy which some people urge me to seek after.
– miguel de unamuno, (tr. crawford flitch)
It’s no use trying to be different than you are.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Disease . . . is not a simple result of some external attack but develops in a vulnerable host in whom the internal environment has become disordered.
– Gabor Maté
Over the years I have tried not to write too small, and I want to believe I have tried not to live too small, either.
– Kent Haruf
The question is —
do you want to
write every poem
or one poem,
the old monk told
the poet.
– The Old Monk
I think the most I’ve ever written in one go is four pages. I can’t remember the last time that happened.
– Mary Gaitskill
Robot intelligence —
as much as they’re
letting us see,
imagine what they’ve got,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
Words lie in a crystalline sleep. Each word is a relic, like an image on the retina of the dead.
– Hans Jürgen von der Wense
(translated by Kristofor Minta & Herbert Pföstl)
Snow squall and flurry,
We are bundled in layers,
Walking a blank page.
– @Hermiteveryday
… the artist exists because the world is not perfect. Art would be useless if the world were perfect, as man wouldn’t look for harmony but would simply live in it. Art is born out of an ill-designed world.
– Andrei Tarkovsky
There are some things
I want to understand
before I die,
and then I’m fine,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
My aim is to bring about a psychic state in which my patient begins to experiment with his own nature—a state of fluidity, change and growth, in which there is no longer anything eternally fixed and hopelessly petrified.
– CG Jung
An artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times. I think that is true of painters, sculptors, poets, musicians. I choose to reflect the times and the situations in which I find myself. That, to me, is my duty. At this crucial time in our lives, when everything is so desperate, when every day is a matter of survival, I don’t think you can help but be involved.
– Nina Simone
In the isolated valley
they forgot the old language
and they speak a new one,
the old monk noticed.
– The Old Monk
In the oldest known cosmology of my native lands, it wasn’t a skybound old man with a beard who made and shaped this world. It was an old woman. A giant old woman, who has been with us down all the long ages, since the beginning of time.
‘When I was a young lass, the ocean was a forest, full of trees,’ she says, in some of the stories about her – stories that are still told today, firmly embedded in the oral tradition.
This mythology is from right here. From the islands of Britain and Ireland, strung out along the farthest western reaches of Europe where I was born, and where I still live today. In the lands where my feet are firmly planted. Although a lot of attention has been paid to the question of whether ancient European cultures honored a ‘Great Mother’ goddess, in these islands we were actually honouring a Great Grandmother. Her name in the Gaelic languages of Scotland and Ireland is the Cailleach: literally, the Old Woman. There are traces of other divine old women scattered throughout the rest of the British Isles and Europe; they’re probably the oldest deities of all.
How thoroughly we’ve been taught to forget. Today, we don’t see these narratives as remnants of ancient belief systems – rather, they’re presented to us as folk tales intended merely to entertain, as oddities of primitive history, the vaguely amusing relics of more superstitious times or bedtime stories for children.
Whatever we’ve been taught they are – they’re not. They are remnants of pre-Christian cosmologies – cosmologies that are firmly embedded in the land, the sea, the sky, and the human, animal and plant-populated cultures to which we belong. Cosmologies in which old women mattered.
– Sharon Blackie
In life you need colors.
– Bob Ross
The petit bourgeois is the man who has preferred himself to all else.
– Maxim Gorky
The petit bourgeois is a man unable to imagine the other.
– Roland Barthes
If you just want
information,
you’ve come to
the wrong place,
the old monk told
his students.
– The Old Monk
promising to watch
the moon together
two midwinter stars
– Ogawa
I breathe,
I close both eyes,
loneliness dissipates,
and I let the song drive me home.
Maybe all the things we’ve been through exist somewhere inside a melody.
– Rudy Francisco
People will come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
– Neil Postman
The real index of civilization is when people are kinder than they need to be.
– Louis de Bernieres
Here is what the sea smells like. It is more texture than scent, because the sea is primarily made of two substances that have no smell of their own: water and salt. Salt has no smell, but makes the air sting, and so all of the other smells of the sea are layered upon the pang of salt. Water has no smell but instead a comfort. We feel moisture as life and so the smells of the ocean are layered upon the contentment of the water. Salt is treble and water is bass. I don’t know how I know this is true, but I know it is true. The sea smells like old wood and wet leaves. Like cold mud and warm stone. Like every creature who has ever lived in it, a churning graveyard and nursery. Like winds from the inland carrying the hot circulation of life and winds from the ocean carrying the distant froth of waves against ships and islands. Like gray, only more so. Like blue, only less so.
– Joseph Fink & Jeffrey Cranor
For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn’t give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
it is only too evident that the invisible agitations of the kingdoms within us are arbitrarily set on foot by the thoughts we shelter. our myriad intuitions are the veiled queens who steer our course through life.
– maurice maeterlinck, (tr. alfred sutro)
If you don’t know
how much you have
you have too much,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
Poverty is not natural, poverty is man-made. Poverty is a political weapon.
– @OgbeniDemola
I was too self-absorbed and neurotic to do the research.
– Edmund White on family trees and lineage
List of things to banish
Can include words, people, theoretical apparatuses
Can take the form of a grocery list, a scientific experiment, or a manifesto
Can read like a personal ad of unwanting
– Mia Kang
If we try to solve society’s problems without overcoming the confusion and aggression in our own state of mind, then our efforts will only contribute to the basic problems, instead of solving them.
– Chögyam Trungpa
A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well—this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
It’s actually possible to get a better life for individuals [through technologies] and I have frequently inanimated new technologies, but I love cell phones. I see people so happy and proud, walking around. Gesturing, you know. I’m like Karl Marx, I’m up for anything that makes people happy.
– Kurt Vonnegut
I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one… . Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil… . There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?
– John Steinbeck, East of Eden
… I offer you that kernel of myself that I have saved, somehow (…) I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart. I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.
– Jorge Luis Borges
Atheism and agnosticism signify the rejection of certain images and concepts of God or of truth, which are historically conditioned and therefore inadequate. Atheism is a challenge to religion to purifiy its images and concepts and come nearer to the truth of divine mystery.
– Bede Griffiths
Somewhere in his journals, Dostoyevsky remarks that a writer can begin anywhere, at the most commonplace thing, scratch around in it long enough, pry and dig away long enough, and soon he will hit upon the marvelous.
– Saul Bellow
You live in a cage of your own projections pretending to be somebody. Still, the door is always open.
– Robert Adams
Many people seem to think it foolish, even superstitious, to believe that the world could still change for the better. And it is true that in winter it is sometimes so bitingly cold that one is tempted to say, ‘What do I care if there is a summer; its warmth is no help to me now.’ Yes, evil often seems to surpass good. But then, in spite of us, and without our permission, there comes at last an end to the bitter frosts. One morning the wind turns, and there is a thaw. And so I must still have hope.
– Vincent Van Gogh
Know that your precious, infinitely beloved, and irreplaceable self will dissolve like a sand castle, grain by grain—and what a relief it is to know. You exist in a great space of knowing, filled with the shared ephemerality of all things.
– Sallie Tisdale
The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.
– R.D. Laing
Brecht perceived the epic content of everyday life superbly: the hardness of actions and events, the necessity of judging. To this he added an acute awareness of the alienation to be found in this same everyday life. To see people properly we need to place them at a reasonable, well-judged distance, like the objects we see before us. Then their many-sided strangeness becomes apparent: in relation to ourselves, but also within themselves and in relation to themselves. In this strangeness lies their truth, the truth of their alienation. It is then that consciousness of alienation – that strange awareness of the strange – liberates us, or begins to liberate us, from alienation. This is the truth. And at the moment of truth we are suddenly disorientated by others and by ourselves. To look at things from an alien standpoint – externally and from a reasonable distance – is to look at things truly.
– Henri Lefebvre
I’ve wrestled with alligators,
I’ve tussled with a whale.
I done handcuffed lightning
And throw thunder in jail.
You know I’m bad.
just last week, I murdered a rock,
Injured a stone, Hospitalized a brick.
I’m so mean, I make medicine sick.
– Muhammad Ali
I picked up a camera because it was my choice of weapons against what I hated most about the universe: racism, intolerance, poverty. I could have just as easily picked up a knife or a gun, like many of my childhood friends did… most of whom were murdered or put in prison… but I chose not to go that way. I felt that I could somehow subdue these evils by doing something beautiful that people recognize me by, and thus make a whole different life for myself, which has proved to be so.
– Gordon Parks
I will not tire of declaring that if we really want an effective end to violence we must remove the violence that lies at the root of all violence: structural violence, social injustice, exclusion of citizens from the management of the country, repression. All this is what constitutes the primal cause, from which the rest flows naturally.
– St. Óscar Romero
They [the San Bushmen] regard language as the invention of trickster—it is the narrating and interpreting mind that likes to name, categorize, know, and explain… Bushmen value their body sensations more than mental calculations and logical arguments when making decisions and evaluations… Trickster discourse… can get caught inside the interactions of abstractions and can easily become dissociated from the web of relationships, where life is lived and experienced.
– Bradford Keeney, Way of the Bushman
the poem begins not where the knife enters but where the blade twists.
– Hanif Abdurraqib
Most of the Warriors
by James Kavanaugh
Most of the warriors I knew
Have settled down to gardening, and the morning Times,
Tired of stalking ghosts
and the melody of secret rhythms
above the sound of traffic
and other monotonous voices,
Finally content to stare and wonder.
Most of the warriors I knew
Have unsaddled stallions and built a fence in the backyard,
Weary of studying the clouds
And the shadows creeping across mountains
beyond the flash of neon
and other pretentious symbols,
Finally content to stare and wonder.
Most of the warriors I knew
Have died before their time and are forgotten
Save in the memory of their sons
And the dreams they seldom share
beyond the taint of time
and other unimportant measures
Finally content to stare and wonder.
The Hinds
Walking in a waking dream
I watched nineteen deer
pour from ridge to glen-floor,
then each in turn leap,
leap the new-raised
peat-dark burn. This
was the distaff side;
hinds at their ease, alive
to lands held on long lease
in their animal minds,
and filing through a breach
in a never-mended dyke,
the herd flowed up over
heather-slopes to scree
where they stopped, and turned to stare,
the foremost with a queenly air
as though to say: Aren’t we
the bonniest companie?
Come to me,
you’ll be happy, but never go home.
– Kathleen Jamie
It Was A Time
Some of us just wanted to drop out, go far away
from integrity’s demands. Others sought strange
consultations with their almost vanished selves.
And the brave, they would meet somewhere
in zero weather to subvert the drift of the land.
It was a time to link arms, or cross the boarder.
And who were you, and who was I?
Such questions seemed like a lifelong job.
We put the world on notice, and world
hardly noticed. When we occupied the offices
of people who just wanted to do their jobs
and go home, we thought we’d done something
historical, bold. We desired to be as compelling
as Belmondo with a cigarette. Monica Vitti
looking just so. But always the familiar banalities
would return—-an existential day followed
by a comfortable night, the rhapsodies
of achievement, then a great smalling down.
No one could be sure what was true. In time
we become people we only occasionally knew
– Stephen Dunn
Because of things not even remembered
we are here
listening to the water
– W.S. Merwin
The mind always functions from the known to the known. If the mind is to discover the unknowable, it must be free from the known.
– Krishnamurti
Our capacity to meet and dissolve habits is awakened and sustained by applying active capacities to “go beyond”—generosity, ethical conduct, patient endurance, diligence, contemplative cultivation, and discerning wisdom.
– Steven D. Goodman
I am the Dark Cavalier; I am the Last Lover:
My arms shall welcome you when other arms are tired;
I stand to wait for you, patient in the darkness,
Offering forgetfulness of all that you desired.
– Margaret Widdemer
There is so much authority that comes out of the primary mystical experience that it can be threatening to existing hierarchical structures.
– Michael Pollan [quoting Roland Griffiths], How to Change Your Mind
The square root of a number,
like pi and polkas,
could go on forever,
the old monk told
the mathematicians.
– The Old Monk
coming to the mountains
they will stand in their song
and all the trees of the field
will clap their hands
––after Isaiah
– Ian Buckley
Whether I laugh or weep,
Some inner silences are at my heart.
– Léonie Adams
A tyrant institutionalizes stupidity, but he is the first servant of his own system and the first to be installed within it.
– Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetitiod
There’s a lot of backstory,
but who has time for it,
the old monk asked the poet.
– The Old Monk
alone
in the autumn night
the home run ball.
– Mathew Spano
Words should not seek to please, to hide the wounds in our bodies, or the shameful moments in our lives. They may hurt, give us pain, but they can also provoke us to question what we have accepted for thousands of years.
– Nawal El Saadawi
Coincidences? There aren’t any.
– Julio Cortazar
But no nation is all victim all the time or all perpetrator all the time. To think like this is to enable and even perpetuate the very worst kinds of violence we can upon each other.
– Masha Gessen
The universe, for fear it gain
Its freedom from my cube of brain.
Yet dust bears seeds that grow to grace
Behind my crude-striped wooden face.
– Edith Sitwell
I don’t want the poem to be a skinny, flat line that goes from A to Z. I don’t like narrative poetry. I want fresh water to always be flowing into the poem, changing what came before, like in a spring-fed lake.
– Henri Cole
I quote others only in order the better to express myself.
– Michel de Montaigne
In quoting others, we cite ourselves.
– Julio Cortazar
jazz
in the long cool evening
the sound of geese leaving
– Marje A. Dyck
the brash souls of youth
now tempered
by consequences
and experience
time unfolds us
into something
we never expected
and here we are
our souls
singing dreams
of tomorrow
as time shortens
in front of us
– Mark Seamer
tantric music
raindrops slide upward
on the windshield
– Origa
Each arrow you shoot off
carries its own target
into the decidedly
secret
tangle.
– Paul Celan
There’s nothing more debauched than thinking. This sort of wantonness runs wild like a wind-borne weed on a plot laid out for daisies.
– Wisława Szymborska
Penultimaticity: the theory and method of being the one permanently before the last in the great chain of storytelling constitutive of worldly affairs, violence and horror being especially prone to story and repetition.
– Michael Taussig
There’s a kind of innocence you see in some poets, that comes from imagining language as some sort of pure indigenous expression of experience. They haven’t yet fully realized writing poetry is mainly about recognizing and negotiating the failures inherent to language.
– Ben Wilkinson
time is of the essence
be kind
be merciful
be open
– @everettpoetry
Not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being in the world, and there are kinds and grades of each. There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy; the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face; the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul, whence emerge new thoughts; the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, “This… this…”; the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity; the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear; the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination, loud and subvocal speech but sullen to say it; baffled silence; the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos.
– Paul Goodman
I still believe there is one life and there are no individuals. There are iterations of the one, God separating itself into pieces so it can play, because you can’t play when you’re in complete harmony.
– Lisa Carver
Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot? That Pozzo passed, with his carrier, and that he spoke to us? Probably. But in all that what truth will there be? He’ll know nothing. He’ll tell me about the blows he received and I’ll give him a carrot. (pause) Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener. At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on. (Pause.) I can’t go on! (Pause.) What have I said?
– Samuel Beckett
PAINTING VS. POETRY
Painting is a person placed
between the light and a
canvas so that their shadow
is cast on the canvas and
then the person signs their
name on it whereas poetry
is the shadow writing its
name upon the person.
– Bill Knott
I like poems with direct metaphors that cut out self-conscious, cluttering language. Her heart felt like a bodhran beating in her chest? The bodhran beating in her chest. The moon was a giant nickel in the sky? The giant nickel in the sky. Don’t explain away the magic.
– Leah Callen
I’ve never written the things I’d like to write that I’ve admired all my life. Maybe one never does.
– Elizabeth Bishop
My heart has bled in my Preludes, but I have also vibrated with complete satisfaction.
– Frederic Chopin
Even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination.
– Hannah Arendt
Oh, beloved, and there is nothing but shadows where you accompany me in your dreams and tell me the hour of light.
– Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets
Books, the children of the brain.
– Jonathan Swift
Overexplanation separates us from astonishment.
– Eugene Ionesco
A soulful life is not a perfect life; it is one that enjoys and suffers the myriad complexities that make us both vulnerable and strong.
– Veronica Goodchild and Dianne Skafte
Like plants, so men also grow, some in the light, others in the shadows. There are many who need the shadows and not the light.
– CG Jung
Anybody can become angry, that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way, that is not within everybody’s power, and is not easy.
– Aristotle
Shortly after the projection has occurred, it is followed by transference. Transference happens when I respond to that person in an old familiar way: How did I act in the past that may have seemed productive or protective or helpful in some way? Transference points to our tendencies to employ the old stratagems of the old stories because they are what we bring to the table.
– James Hollis
These poems they are things that I do in the dark reaching for you whoever you are and are you ready? These words they are […]
– June Jordan
You seem to be under the impression that there is a special breed of bad humans. There is no such thing as a stereotype bad man in this world. Under normal conditions, everybody is more or less good, or, at least, ordinary. But tempt them, and they may suddenly change. That is what is so frightening about men.
– Natsume Soseki, Kokoro
Your will is free means: it was free when it wanted the desert, it is free since it can choose the path that leads to crossing the desert, it is free since it can choose the pace, but it is also unfree since you must go through the desert, unfree since every path in labyrinthine manner touches every foot of the desert’s surface.
– Franz Kafka
When we think of the past it’s the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.
– Margaret Atwood
The Irish, as a rule, tend to be aesthetes of chat.
– Mark O’Connell
Eden
Two people—
already the whole problem.
– J-T Kelly
Isn’t it moving to think that it is by putting it in contact with limited and superficial reality that we help our inner world, full of desires, to come true?
– Lou Andreas-Salomé
Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.
– Oscar Wilde
Be not too hasty to trust or admire the teachers of morality; they discourse like angels but they live like men. At this point, a grotesque understatement.
– James Marcus
We only have two hours to change people’s lives.
– John Cassavetes
It is psychology’s job to find logos for psyche, to provide soul with an adequate account of itself.
– Hillman
they tell me there are four seasons
but I live in a fifth one
which is your space
and your time
– Etel Adnan
Liminal Land
You drive without talking,
one hand pointing to the vanishing mountain,
the other cradling three thousand years of trouble,
— in case the Earth shatters at a wrong turn.
In silence, we find excuses to travel closer
— like it might be home.
I’d remake myself here for you too.
Take off the history of this galvanized mask
which weighs a crude approximation of death.
Let things break the limits. Stain the headlights.
Falter where the chords drop an octave to our ancestors’ voices.
It’s that dreaded storm again. The one which brings
the scent of violets that shouldn’t be in bloom.
Because the road ahead is black silk,
you always long to see where it falls away
— where the limbs of a woman end on any given winter.
When the white sheet thrown over her beauty might be lifted.
Any man would want to know —
why breathing over ice changes the state of the matter.
And why, beneath the great freeze,
the orange carp strangled in seagrass,
is still searching for the bait.
– Vikki C.
It has been very dfificult to record beauty, to transfer beauty, to share beauty, to create without seeing the reality. The truth. Without heart ache, without crying for humanity, without seeking, dreaming for justice.
– Rezia Wahid MBE
perfect summer sky —
one blue crayon
missing from the box
– Evelyn Lang
We come in Peace
all languages
all frequencies
– Voima Oy
Poetry / isn’t revolution but a way of knowing / why it must come.
– Adrienne Rich
It is only through attention to words that we can hope to become less naively susceptible to the seductions of words.
– Rachel Eisendrath
How
can I sleep in peace
when time does not stop for a second
even in a dream?
– Abbas Kiarostami
To the memory of Gertrude Stein & William Carlos Williams.
I WANT THE WHOLE THING, the moment
when what we thought was rock, or
sea
became clear Mind, and
what we thought was clearest Mind really
was that glancing girl, that
swirl of birds. . .
( all of that )
AND AT THE SAME TIME that very poem
pasted in the florist’s window
(as Whalen’s I wanted to bring you this Jap Iris was)
carefully retyped and
put right out there on Divisadero St.
just because the florist thought it
pretty,
that it might remind of love,
that it might sell flowers . . .
The line
Tangled in Samsara!
Mount Tamalpais 1970
– Lew Welch
All things are one body. If you are benevolent and righteous, Heaven and Earth will respond to you with benevolence and righteousness. If you are cruel and violent, Heaven and Earth will respond to you with cruelty and violence.
– Wang Yangming
I’ve heard it in the chillest land, And on the strangest sea; Yet, never, in extremity, It asked a crumb of me.
– Emily Dickinson
Academia mostly has the same problems as everywhere else.
– Dr. Solomon Wakeling
Our libraries are portals into other lives, other ways, into shape-shifting time travel – keep using them, they’re priceless.
– Raynor Winn
If everyone, everywhere, truly accepted that seven million Jews and seven million Palestinians are not going anywhere, and that any possible future has to include and encompass both, the whole energy around this conflict would change. There, and even more so around the world.
– Ami Dar
Now do you see how people misuse my words against each other to validate their hatred and judgment? Now do you see how they take my words [in the Bible] and use them as weapons to make others feel bad? I never meant for that to happen.
– Mary Terhune
I would also come to know that all the pain of my life, for whatever reason, had to happen the way it did in order for my soul to ripen. It was out of suffering that I would develop a deep compassion for myself and others; it was out of suffering that I came to see that all people suffer, all people carry guilt and shame. It was also out of suffering that my mind finally stopped in a paralyzing state of despair, and the divine swooped in to reclaim itself.
– Mary Terhune
Raven: “You’re an ideologue.”
I: “Dumb raven, be gone!”
– @RedBookJung
watching
a rainbow paint
a poet’s vision
– Meisetsu
Whenever you’re not willing to experience a particular emotion, your life is run by your resistance to that emotion. You make choices that are about avoiding the feeling… Emotional resistance, therefore, is the one thing holding you back.
– Raphael Cushnir
Immediate self-observation is not enough, by a long way, to enable us to learn how to know ourselves. We need history, for the past continues to flow through us in a hundred channels.
– James Hillman
Practice even what seems impossible.
– Marcus Aurelius
It no longer makes me cry and die and tear myself to see her go because everything goes away from me like that now — girls, visions, anything, just in the same way and forever and I accept lostness forever.
– Jack Kerouac
Message from a liberation psychologist:
Check your heart, words, and behaviors so you don’t take on the very characteristics you’re seeking to dismantle.
Liberation is calling you.
Don’t let jealousy, insecurity, frustration, ego direct your path.
– Dr. Thema
There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons—
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes—
– Emily Dickinson
Hitting first has always been the mark of evil. I don’t think one great religious or spiritual thinker has ever said otherwise.
– Anne Lamott
Even if the centers of power don’t acknowledge it, even if the flashy events don’t acknowledge it, the world has always been and always will be an indivisible whole. No one wins if other peoples or other species sink into climate devastation.
– Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative – which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.
– Slyvia Plath
it’s worth asking yourself, if relevant,
why is it so important to me that dreams be nothing more than meaningless brain-static, a random defragging output with nothing to learn from?
– River Kenna
Not all our children’s pleas and women’s fears
Could steer us from this hell. And now God knows
His whole green sky is dying as it flares.
– Carolyn Kizer
In the union of form and emptiness, our bodies and minds and the whole phenomenal world are not rejected but rather are found to be direct expressions of the sacred.
– Aura Glaser
Love gives us something to do. It ties our days together, as if a composer had linked all the elements of the score with lightly curving legato marks, swooping from note to note like telephone wires.
– Edmund White
Eyes closed to news we’ve chosen to ignore,
We’d rather excavate old memories,
Disdaining age, ignoring pain, avoiding mirrors.
– Carolyn Kizer
Unresting water, there shall never be rest
Till the last moon droop and the last tide fail,
And the fire of the end begin to burn in the west;
– Arthur Symons
When you sleep, in Spanish, English, and German, you “have” dreams, like cherished treasures. In French, you “make” them like delicate pastries. In Japanese, you “watch” them, like movies. Then, when you’re awake, dreams are something you “chase”. Aren’t languages fascinating?
– Javier Santana
I still love the people I’ve loved
even if I cross the street
to avoid them.
– Uma Thurman
The practice of art is extremely private, yet it brings you into the world.
– Sigrid Nunez
There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.
– James Baldwin
When will we go, over mountains and shores, to hail the birth of new labor, new wisdom, the flight of tyrants and demons, the end of superstition, to be the *first * to adore … Christmas on earth!
– Rimbaud’s report, written a year after the Paris Commune
In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood—
– Theodore Roethke
You can just spot a musician who’s got the goods. You can sense it in an almost tribal way. Rick Danko had it.
– Robbie Robertson
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.
– T.S. Eliot
Society behaves just as exclusively as the state, but it makes it so uncomfortable for you that you go out of your own will.
– Marx and Engels
To the student who called me “eccentric” on the course evaluation, I would say this:
Eccentricity requires wealth, and novelists/professors don’t make enough to be considered wealthy.
The word you’re looking for is weird.
– Aaron Gwyn
Poetry asks its readers for a species of double vision, as two things become a third and yet continue to remain themselves.
– Ann Townsend, A Mind for Metaphors
In the woods, … I feel that nothing can befall me in life, – no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes) which nature cannot repair.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
A line in which the not-said (but nonetheless sensed, like a musical overtone) fully participates in the rhythm.
– Cole Swenson
Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Life often gets so out of balance that unless you are rescuing yourself or others from difficulty, it’s easy to imagine you must be a contributor to the suffering all around you.
– @mattkahn
Most writers before this century had far more time to see ; that is, they were steeped in objects to a degree we cannot imagine – the very word “contemplate” is archaic now.
– John Fowles
There is more light in a glass doorknob than gravity in Jerusalem.
– Arthur Russell
If you aren’t familiar with mystical experience or at least contemplative practice and you’re writing about psychology, it’s like being a virgin and writing about romantic relationships
– Sasha Chapin
Let us wash our faces in the wind and forget the strict shapes of affection.
– @ilya_poet
last night’s poetry
barely a mention of love
– @YourMoonliness
I’m getting big “start over” vibes,
I’ve said before, somatic resonance and imaginal literacy aren’t a big lofty goal, they’re a starting point.
I’m feeling like I’ve done nearly everything I needed to do getting myself a firm foundation there,
time to re-start as a beginner.
– River Kenna
A drop that knows itself, knows the Ocean.
– Kabir Helminski
The terms “right” and “left” are unsavory byproducts of the French Revolution. They are an excuse for not thinking (failing to evaluate every issue on its own merits) and should never be used.
– Joel Atallah
I like the feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art.
– Eudora Welty
Dear world, language cannot carry these numbers. And these numbers cannot do justice to these humans.
– Alina Stefanescu
It is inside myself that I must create someone who will understand.
– Clarice Lispector
I have always been delighted at the prospect of a new day, a fresh try, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning.
– J. B. Priestley
You left me boundaries of pain
Capacious as the sea,
Between eternity and time,
Your consciousness and me.
– Emily Dickinson
Sometimes with the Heart
Seldom with the Soul
Scarcer once with the Might
Few—love at all.
– Emily Dickinson
Shakespeare’s sonnets seem to show that he felt profoundly betrayed both by a man and by a woman, both of whom he had loved. And I think that gets into the plays also.
– Harold Bloom
Never blame another person for your personal choices – you are still the one who must live out the consequences of your choices.
– Caroline Myss
It is, of course, much easier to love these sweet parts. Easier to understand a boy who never cries or asks for much of anything.
– Sean Patrick Mulroy
We may reflect that the poetry of every country and every language would decline and perish, were it not nourished by poetry in foreign tongues.
– T. S. Eliot
years end
my list of unread books
grows longer
– @jennfel
first sunrise
my resolution list
longer than last year’s
– Chen-ou Liu
In concrete terms, the shadow will out, whether in unconscious acts, projections onto others, depression or somatic illness.
The shadow embodies all the life which has not been allowed expression. It embodies all lost sensitivity, which denied, breaks through in sentimentality. It represents our creativity, which abandoned, locks us into ennui and enervation. It embodies our spontaneity, which suppressed, routinizes and stultifies our lives. It represents a life force greater than our conscious personality has yet utilized, and its blocking leads to diminished vitality.
– James Hollis
I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go.
My own wisdom and that of all about me seemed insufficient for that day.
I am rather inclined to silence, and whether that be wise or not, it is at least more unusual nowadays to find a [person] who can hold his tongue than to find one who cannot.
– Abraham Lincoln
Some of us think better
standing on one leg
and some of us don’t,
the old monk admitted.
– The Old Monk
I rarely actually feel what a line says. I get interested in the words, which seem to come from nowhere.
– Louise Glück
When I say I was lucky in my childhood and with the parents I had, I don’t want to imply that everything was easy: I’ve had nightmares and setbacks and all the frustrations and fears that are a necessary part of growing up. And lucky I was–and lucky we are–to have those. They force us to grow up and face the world–or fail. Look, life is a test. The whole way. I’m going to ace my test. What you do is entirely up to you. Most people seem to be happy just passing, just getting by. That is, for me, hell.
– Katharine Hepburn
It is useless to attempt to preserve a living species unless the kind of land or water it requires is also preserved. So delicately interwoven are the relationships that when we disturb one thread of the community fabric we alter it all — perhaps almost imperceptibly, perhaps so drastically that destruction follows.
– Rachel Carson, Lost Woods
We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.
– Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices
We are here
On this earth
In this time and place
In our homes,
On our lands,
In the cities,
With our families,
laughing loudly,
cooking together,
protecting each other.
– Rainy Dawn Ortiz
The angels were made out of peacock’s sweat.
– Avigdor Aptowitzer
Let the small parts define you. Let the little things be why you are who you are. Let them teach you to be so open to the beautiful that the ugly can exist. but can’t survive.
– L.E. Bowman
You can’t hate people unless you love them
– Shane MacGowan
There Is Another Sky
by Emily Dickinson
There is another sky,
Ever serene and fair,
And there is another sunshine,
Though it be darkness there;
Never mind faded forests, Austin,
Never mind silent fields—
Here is a little forest,
Whose leaf is ever green;
Here is a brighter garden,
Where not a frost has been;
In its unfading flowers
I hear the bright bee hum:
Prithee, my brother,
Into my garden come!
The feeding of the Muse then, which we have spent most of our time on here, seems to me to be the continual running after loves, the checking of these loves against one’s present and future needs, the moving on from simple textures to more complex ones, from naïve ones to more informed ones, from nonintellectual to intellectual ones. Nothing is ever lost. If you have moved over vast territories and dared to love silly things, you will have learned even from the most primitive items collected and put aside in your life. From an ever-roaming curiosity in all the arts, from bad radio to good theatre, from nursery rhyme to symphony, from jungle compound to Kafka’s Castle, there is basic excellence to be winnowed out, truths found, kept, savored, and used on some later day. To be a child of one’s time is to do all these things.
– Ray Bradbury
WITH THANKS
for Ross Gay
If you asked me to describe
delight,
to list the things or events
that bring this feeling, which some might
call pleasure with the scent
of joy, and others might call
joy with a tinge of magic,
then I might describe it as a divine moment
where all
you want is here, and you’re in the thick of it,
time stopping to take
a breather, to close its weary eyes
for a few seconds and drowse off
while your heart smiles
and shakes.
– D. L. James
It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society.
It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid.
When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion–its message becomes meaningless.
The greatest problem is not how to continue but how to exalt our existence.
The call for a life beyond the grave is presumptuous, if there is no cry for eternal life prior to our descending to the grave. Eternity is not perpetual future but perpetual presence. He has planted in us the seed of eternal life. The world to come is not only a hereafter but also a here-now.
– Abraham Joshua Heschel
It is because so much happens. Too much happens. That’s it. Man performs, engenders, so much more than he can or should have to bear. That’s how he finds that he can bear anything. That’s it. That’s what is so terrible. That he can bear anything, anything.
– William Faulkner
I am not a slow learner
I am a quick forgetter
such erasing makes one voracious
if you teach me something beautiful
I will name it quickly before it floats away
– Kaveh Akbar
The old people came literally to love the soil, and they sat or reclined on the ground with a feeling of being close to a mothering power. It was good for the skin to touch the earth, and the old people liked to remove their moccasins and walk with bare feet on the sacred earth. Their tipis were built upon the earth and their altars were made of earth. The soil was soothing, strengthening, cleansing, and healing. That is why the old Indian still sits upon the earth instead of propping himself up and away from its life-giving forces. For him, to sit or lie upon the ground is to be able to think more deeply and to feel more keenly; he can see more clearly into the mysteries of life and come closer in kinship to other lives about him.
– Lakota Chief Luther Standing Bear
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
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
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
The very moment you change your perception, you re-write the biochemistry of your body. Our emotions directly influence the amount of active coding sites in the double helix of your DNA, thus changing the gene’s expression and altering our physiology. One of the greatest scientific discoveries of our time is that Biology and Belief are direct reflections of one another.
What you think, what you feel, and what manifests in your body and the experiences you attract are always a match, 100% of the time, no exceptions. There is nothing random about evolution and DNA alterations, animals evolve and adapt to their environments based on their perceptions relative to their habitat.
– Dr. Bruce H. Lipton
“What can any one person do?’ he said. ‘Each person does a little something,’ I said, ‘and there you are.”
– Kurt Vonnegut
By keeping quiet, repressing nothing, remaining attentive, and by accepting reality – taking things as they are, and not as I want them to be – by doing all this, unusual knowledge has come to me, and unusual powers as well, such as I could never have imagined before. I always thought that when we accept things they over powered us in some way or other. This turns out not to be true at all, and it is only be accepting them that one can assume an attitude towards them. So now I intend to play the game of life, being receptive to whatever comes to me, good and bad, sun and shadow forever alternating, and, in this way, also accepting of my own nature with its positive and negative sides. Thus everything becomes more alive to me.
– By an former patient of Jung
It is a mistake to believe that the crucial moments of a life when its habitual direction changes forever must be loud and shrill dramatics, washed away by fierce internal surges. This is a kitschy fairy tale started by boozing journalists, flashbulb-seeking filmmakers and authors whose minds look like tabloids. In truth, the dramatics of a life-determining experience are often unbelievably soft. It has so little akin to the bang, the flash, of the volcanic eruption that, at the moment it is made, the experience is often not even noticed. When it deploys its revolutionary effect and plunges a life into a brand-new light giving it a brand-new melody, it does that silently and in this wonderful silence resides its special nobility.
– Pascal Mercier
You don’t know how to take off your suit of armor. You have no idea how to conduct yourself without the reference point of your own security. The challenge of warriorship is to step out of the cocoon, to step out into space, by being brave and at the same time gentle. You can expose your wounds and flesh, your sore points. You can be completely raw and exposed with your husband or your wife, your banker, your landlord, anyone you meet.
– Chögyam Trungpa
I cannot follow any word through its changes. I cannot follow any thought from present to past. I do not stand lost, with tears in my eyes remembering home; or lie, crumpled among the ferns, staining my pink cotton green, while I dream of plants that flower under the sea, and rocks through which the fish swim slowly. I do not dream.
– Virginia Woolf, The Waves
everywhere is within walking distance if you have the time.
– steven wright
The job of feets is walking, but their hobby is dancing.
– Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words
Maybe Heaven is an eternal film studies class with all the best films endlessly playing and fresh free popcorn with hot butter. And root beer.
– Leah Callen
To know your history is to carry all your pieces, whole and shattered, through the wilderness. And feel their weight.
– Sabrina Orah Mark
If we believe we are doing anyone a favour by remaining in our outworn identities or shallow shell without risking descent, we are wrong. When we refuse a sacrifice, a descent beneath our ordinary way of going, we also hold others back.
– Monika Wikman
Some things cannot be fixed or cured, only managed with great care, persistence, compassion, and love.
– McCall Erickson
A good person dyes events with his own color . . . and turns whatever happens to his own benefit.
– Seneca
I think talent is like a water table under the earth—you tap it with your effort and it comes through you.
– Natalie Goldberg
Indeed consolation would be one of the many diversions, a distraction, hence at bottom, something frivolous and unfruitful. For even time does not console… at most it arranges, sets in order,—-
– Rilke to Margot Sizzo
It is a world without spaciousness; men live there on top of each other. The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light.
– Frantz Fanon
I tell my students, who believe passionately in explaining the work they’re sharing, ‘You know, when you’re dead, you can’t go around explaining this thing—it has to be right there on the page.’
– Louise Glück
My fatherland is dead
they buried it
in the fire
I live
in my motherland—
words.
– Rose Ausländer
It’s better to conquer grief than to deceive it.
– Seneca
We cannot assuage our cravings by pursuits in the material world, no matter what their nature and scope. Nothing short of the experience of mystical unity with the divine source will quench our deepest longing.
– Stanislav Grof
Most of us are psychologically dependent, not only on people but on property, on beliefs, on dogmas. Are we conscious of that fact?
– Krishnamurti
There’s so much
to cross out
I’ll never get it
written,
the old monk
told the poet.
– The Old Monk
Repeatedly turn the mind toward what is known: all things are of nature to change. Our only inheritance is impermanence and the truth that conditions will rise and fall.
– Jessica Angima
James Baldwin said, “The vote by itself does not mean anything if you don’t know how you’re going to eat and if you don’t know how you’re going to get a job in an age of cybernation. And how can you talk of a War on Poverty if you’re not really doing something about disarmament?”
– tamara k. nopper
Awareness itself is the primary currency of the human condition, and as such it deserves to be spent carefully.
– Andrew Olendzki
I open in myself a theater
where a false sleep is playing
– Bataille
Life is very short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future.
– Seneca
Don’t scare yourself silent
before you sit down to write,
the old monk told the poet.
– The Old Monk
I approach poetry; but only to miss it.
– Bataille
no thoughts—
one chickadee lands
on the feeder
– @lafcadiopoetry
On the Third Day
On the third day of creation,
as the Lord was putting the first touches on dry land,
I picked out an apartment filled with books.
I acted before all the tyrants could
and did their work for them:
I sent myself into exile.
– Najwan Darwish
None of us can exist in isolation. Our lives and existence are supported by others in seen and unseen ways… To be aware of these connections, to feel appreciation for them, and to strive to give something back to society in a spirit of gratitude is the proper way for human beings to live.
– Daisuke Ikeda
No aspect of the human psyche can live in a healthy state unless it is balanced by its complementary opposite. If the masculine mind tries to live without its “other half,” the feminine soul, then the masculine becomes unbalanced, sick, and finally monstrous. Power without love becomes brutality. Feeling without masculine strength becomes woolly sentimentality.
– Robert A, Johnson
The point of warriorship is to become a gentle and tamed human being who can make a genuine contribution to the world.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Explore, and explore, and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry. Neither dogmatise yourself, nor accept another’s dogmatism.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson, Literary Ethic
I heard someone from the music business saying they are no longer looking for talent, they want people with a certain look and a willingness to cooperate. I thought, that’s interesting, because I believe a total unwillingness to cooperate is what is necessary to be an artist.
– Joni Mitchell
I have a million nightingales
On the branches of my heart
Singing the song of liberation.
– Mahmoud Darwish, Defiance
Remember who checks on you when you get a little quiet. Those are your people.
– Brandi L. Bates
Maybe the problem with society is the Gloom and Doom News Pipelines we’ve built, and maybe we should try to fix those” is not a crazy proposal, if your society seems beset with a tidal of wave of historically inexplicable gloom and doom!
– Will Stancil
autumn fog
unable to see
the point
– @pauldavidmena
Sports is not
sport —
poetry is,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
Every day is a good day to remember that Stuart Hall said, “Politicians always think they know what people feel. It’s a fallacy, because there is no such thing as ‘the people’. It is a discursive device for summoning the people that you want. You’re constructing the people…”
– @tamaranopper
A ghostly sunset: smears of pale pink to the east and to the north the edges of everything softened by blue-grey mist, obscuring the boundaries between sea, land, and sky.
– c.c. o’hanlon
Smog Alert
Throughout our listening
light pollution. Evening haze
drifts down from some secret smelter
depending on which wind blows. Small
particulate matter fills the air, fills our lungs
with tiny lumps that hang there undetected
except we can no longer fully breathe.
Cosmic clouds descend upon us. Below
breath. Below thought. Below bellow.
Probability of precipitation. Mixed rain
and thunder showers. Severe weather
warning. War in heaven, warming
torrents into twisters. Forecast unforeseen.
The radio calls for showers. Fog patches.
Clouds clog the mind, crowding thought.
Now calm come… clear of cloud…
I’m thinking stars. Or stars are thinking me.
Where are they? Beyond the veil, still
twinkling, emitting their own dust trails.
– Penn Kemp
You can’t know
where it came from —
if you know
where it came from,
it’s not a poem,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
Alberta Clipper
the evening contrails
slip sideways
– George Hawkins
Love is the synergetic marriage of radiation and gravity.
– R. Buckminster Fuller
Experience is a truer guide than the words of others.
– Leonardo da vinci
The outside world will trivialize you for almost anything if it wants to. You may as well be who you are.
– Grace Paley
But who can live for long
In a euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.
– W. H. Auden
One might say I decided to marry the silence of the forest.
– Thomas Merton
I watched him even then as he fell, his face undefeated, his eyes still proud.
– Neil Gaiman
In order to mount to heaven, you used the Inferno to give you momentum. “The further down you gain your momentum,” you often used to tell me, “the higher you shall be able to reach. The militant Christian’s greatest worth is not his virtue, but his struggle to transform into virtue the impudence, dishonor, unfaithfulness, and malice within him. One day Lucifer will be the most glorious archangel standing next to God; not Michael, Gabriel, or Raphael—but Lucifer, after he has finally transubstantiated his terrible darkness into light.
– Nikos Kazantzakis, Saint Francis
You are sending off energy, emitting energy, right now, from the center of your being in all directions. This energy, which is you, moves outward in wave patterns. The energy leaves, moves through walls, over mountains, past the moon, and into Forever. It never, ever stops.
– Neale Donald Walsch
Ken Burns: … the next question I was going to ask you. What do we find when we search?
Bill Segal: Again, it may sound presumptuous, but being an old man I can say that one finds a network of unity, of oneness. I am not separated from you, or from the animals, from the insects, or even from the stone, from nature. One finds truly a oneness with all things. But I don’t know whether these are just words, “I am,” this wonderful phrase, “I am.” Just this is-ness is wonderful. I don’t have to say I am something-I am. That’s enough. One finds this “I am-ness” through the silence. The silence is, the nothingness is filled with everything. I can’t answer some questions. Words are not very adequate to express what one might find. One finds this moment. One finds your smile.
– Parabola
snowy day
connecting houses
the mailman’s footprints
– Peggy Heinrich
You seek the path. I warn you away from my own. It can also be the wrong way for you. May each go his own way.
– CG Jung
Any poem should be translated as many times as possible, even by the same translator over the years. Only fundamentalists believe in a definitive translation.
– Eliot Weinberger
When I was born
two tears were put
into my eyes
so that I could see
the enormity of my people’s pain.
– Humberto Akʼabal
I’m fascinated by the ways in which secrets are kept and revealed in families, how sometimes what can’t be acknowledged doesn’t drop out of sight so much as it becomes ambient, atmospheric.
– Nancy Kuhl
A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it.
– Rabindranath Tagore
The body knows, at most, an octave
of desire that meets the air sometimes
for nothing.
– Deborah Digges, To Science
Fate is not governed from elsewhere, but is in your character, the way you bear yourself each day.
– Heraclitus, James Hillman, and Brooks Haxton, Fragments
Some of us are born chasing poetry.
– Sarah Kay
…On TV they don’t mention it — the situation inside the earth, nor the situation beyond the conversation. There will be no commentaries — Absolutely none.
– Anastasia Afanasieva, Ukraine poet
Once more, the sounds of us, our beat and our heat and our breath, weave themselves back into everything else around us.
– Kerri ní Dochartaigh
One piece of advice I have is: Want something else more than success. Success is a lovely thing, but your desire to say something, your worth, and your identity shouldn’t rely on it, because it’s not guaranteed and it’s not permanent and it’s not sufficient. So work hard, fall in love with the writing.
– Veronica Roth
The more we recognize [the earth], the more our ability to be in a space of attentiveness to her changes.
– Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee
You do not need to leave your room.
Remain sitting at your table and listen.
Do not even listen.
Simply wait.
Do not even wait.
Be quiet, still and solitary.
The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked.
It has no choice.
It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
– Franz Kafka
pulling me down and
down into the
oldest countries of my
body where I ate my first fig
from the hand of a man who escaped his country by swimming through the night.
– Ross Gay
I have fought for environmental cases for a long time now and learned the hard way it is important to harness the energy of activism into reality and guide its flow to legal laws or places where it actually changes things for good. Not just, ‘preach for the choir,’ or go all sassy mad on social media. That is too easy. It needs to change our systems!
– Björk
Anxiety starts to spread like mold in the walls, and there’s nothing to stop it in the culture. There’s a lot to stop it in nature, but not in the culture.
– Martha Beck
When the blood of your veins returns to the sea and the dust of your bones returns to the ground, maybe then will you remember that this earth does not belong to you, you belong to this earth.
– Sweetgrass, Native American Prophet
The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists.. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.
– Banksy
The Mind
The mind is a hotel with a thousand rooms. When I tilt my head a certain way, I think about certain things. When I tilt my head another way, I think about other things. If I sleep on the right side of my face, for example, I’d dream of a pale rose, the future, or a continental diner in Passaic, New Jersey. When I sleep on the left side of my face, I’d dream that a hand is squeezing my heart, that I’m in prison, or that I’m watching hockey at an airport bar, about to miss a flight.
– Linh Dinh
The dead tree leaves aren’t falling fast enough to suit me. One by one, I pick them off. The mindset of the revolutionary.
– Mark Bittner
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.
– Carl Sagan
tell the law nothin of substance; tell the people everything you can.
– Darius Simpson
the whistle
of a whale ..nothing
but a tale
– @beezknez
If I know that a certain path does not lead anywhere, I do not walk on that path. There is no question of how not to walk on it. If I know that no escape, no amount of running away will ever resolve inward emptiness, I stop running.
– Krishnamurti
The machines keep going round and round and the ranks of the unemployed keep swelling, as though the machines were just manufacturing unemployed.
– Georges Bernanos, Diary of a Country Priest, 1937.
This morning I drove over a pothole that was deeper than my mistrust of people who don’t like The Beatles.
– Simon Barber and Brian O’Connor
Do not ask after the morrow, sufficient unto you is the day.
– @RedBookJung
The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn’t the way things go.
– Richard Hamming
Perhaps I am a bear, or some hibernating animal underneath, for the instinct to be half asleep all winter is so strong in me.
– Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Stop anesthetizing change with hopium. We’re in danger from global heating. Getting out of that danger, to the extent this is now possible, requires collectively accepting that we’re in danger.
– Peter Kalmus
You can write about anything, and if you write well enough, even the reader with no intrinsic interest in the subject will become involved.
– Tracy Kidder
I am often struck by the dangerous narcissism fostered by spiritual rhetoric that pays so much attention to individual self-improvement and so little to the practice of love within the context of community.
– bell hooks
Not Nothing
A map on tissue. A mass of wire. Electricity of the highest order.
Somewhere in this live tangle, scientists discovered—
like shipmates on the suddenly-round earth—
a new catalog of synaptic proteins
presenting how memory is laid down:
At the side of the transmitting neuron
an electrical signal arrives and releases chemical packets.
What I had imagined as “nothing” are a bunch of conversing
squirts
remaking flat into intimate.
– Kimiko Hahn
Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I’ve ever known.
– Chuck Palahniuk
I experience love as completely timeless and universal. It is not born; it is the ground state of eternal awareness. Within my experience of love, the dignity and grandeur of the unbounded knower is always found. The knower and love are inseparable. It is the complete participation of the heart and body that creates the connectedness that is the love story of Self-actualization, where even God and Mother Nature finally find a suitable, infinitely spacious and beautifully decorated, heavenly dwelling place.
No words measure up when describing love. Looking closer, this warm softness of silent bliss extends all around me with no discernible limit to its expansion. This expansion is full of a kind of silent, ringing majesty of a devata heaven of abstract, luminous splendor. This divine sight, as the localized value in daily life of universal bliss, spans the spaces between all the layers of my awareness while incorporating the entire value of cosmic universality.
– Harri Aalto, Universal Consciousness is Profoundly Personal
It is as if I am submerged in a raining, divine warmth and light of united of united, cosmic senses. It looks like an intelligence-filled, universal, golden sphere, which is like our own blazing sun in the vault of the sky, except that this sphere is the dome of my heart and mind. I see these all-containing points of heaven’s bounty that make up the wonderful, unbounded shimmer of my heart, and they are booming, expanding forth and pouring in, creating, supporting, and maintaining the play between my individual and cosmic existence.
– Harri Aalto, Universal Consciousness is Profoundly Personal
Though I look back on those days in search of solace, I am left only with the vague impression of a crowd moving through darkness .
– Orhan Pamuk
When you don’t know yourself, you think others can know you, but when you know what you are, you realize no one can know you. No one can grasp the magnificence of that which you truly are.
– Mooji
Everyone needs their turn
and they need it on their own terms,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.
– Colin Powell
downcast in
their singularity
snowflakes
– @jennfel
We thought that they were so overwhelmed by their lives and so inept at living them that they believed everything might work out if they could control what went into their mouths.
– Edmund White, Californians
You pick things up like a person leaving a burning house, which means you do it very randomly.
– W. G. Sebald
didn’t we learn this early?
to look at white spaces
& find the color
thank god o thank god for
you
are here.
– Elizabeth Acevedo
My beloved son’s eyes are full of stars. A drowning breath in his throat. Take this map of rainbows and fly, fly, child.
– Laura Tohe
It is as though a poem gave the reader as he left it a single, new word, never before spoken and impossible to actually enunciate, but self-evident as an active principle in the reader’s consciousness henceforward.
– Hart Crane
Be very clear about this: A fool sees himself as another, but a wise man sees others as himself. As an ancient teacher has said: Two-thirds of our days are already over, And we have not practiced clarifying who we are. We waste our days in chasing satisfaction, So that even when called, we refuse to turn around. How regrettable.
– Dōgen
Only one thing
made him happy
and now that
it was gone
everything
made him happy.
– Leonard Cohen
Oddly enough, the very word ‘Person’ is in Latin ‘Persona’, that through which sound passes. It refers to the megaphone mask worn by actors in Greco Roman drama. The dramatis personae, the list of the characters to appear in the play, was originally the list of masks that were to be worn. Therefore Your Person, Your Personality, IS Your Mask. So the question is, What is behind the mask?
– Alan Watts
And so, perhaps, the truth winds somewhere between the road to Glastonbury, Isle of the Priests, and the road to Avalon, lost forever in the mists of the Summer Sea.
– Marion Zimmer Bradley
Avalon will always be there for all men to find if they can seek the way thither, throughout all the ages past the ages. If they cannot find the way to Avalon, it is a sign, perhaps, that they are not ready.
– Marion Zimmer Bradley
Beyond the River of the Blessed, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Avalon. Our swords were shattered in our hands and we hung our shields on the oak tree. The silver towers were fallen, into a sea of blood. How many miles to Avalon? None, I say, and all. The silver towers are fallen.
…waters,where the stars shone like bonfires at night and the green of day was always the green of spring. Youth, love, beauty-I knew them in Avalon. Proud steeds, bright metal, soft lips, dark ale. Honor…
– Roger Zelazny
Of all creatures that breathe and move upon the earth, nothing is bred that is weaker than man.
– Homer, The Odyssey
The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life, seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another. Avarice over-rates the difference between poverty and riches: ambition, that between a private and a public station: vain-glory, that between obscurity and extensive reputation. The person under the influence of any of those extravagant passions, is not only miserable in his actual situation, but is often disposed to disturb the peace of society, in order to arrive at that which he so foolishly admires. The slightest observation, however, might satisfy him, that, in all the ordinary situations of human life, a well-disposed mind may be equally calm, equally cheerful, and equally contented. Some of those situations may, no doubt, deserve to be preferred to others: but none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardour which drives us to violate the rules either of prudence or of justice; or to corrupt the future tranquillity of our minds, either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly, or by remorse from the horror of our own injustice.
– Adam Smith
In the brain research over the last thirty years there is found a phenomenon in the functioning of our brains: We take continuously into us more information. Simultaneously there are less and less connections between these separate pieces of information. We have a hunger for “still more knowledge”, and at the same time the splitting of contents in our awareness is proceeding at an alarming tempo. The way to inner integration demands exactly the opposite: the connections between separate contents of our psychic structure. This concerns not only the new pieces of information that we receive in life through discussions, readings, pictures and experiences, but particularly of the contents that at each moment are stored in us – consciously or unconsciously.
– Agnes Hidveghy
If you know a view as a view, you can be free of that view. If you know a thought as a thought, you can be free of that thought.
– Zoketsu Norman Fischer, Beyond Language
Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to do this.
– Thomas Huxley
The two then talk of love:
its grief; also its grace.
– Simon Armitage
It is essential to cultivate inquiry in meditation as well as concentration. This is the quality of the mind that sees clearly into the impermanent and conditioned nature of reality.
– Martine Batchelor
when I wrote of the god,
fragmented, exiled from himself, his life, the love gone
down with song,
it was myself, split open, unable to speak, in exile from
myself.
– Muriel Rukeyser
The formula for originality is very simple—put together two things that were not together before.
– Orhan Pamuk
Deep authenticity sometimes requires strategy
– @the_wilderless
Delight is more occasional; joy is more ever-present and waiting.
– Ross Gay
To love only what happens… No greater harmony.
– Marcus Aurelius
If your choices are beautiful, so too will you be.
– Epictetus
There is no way to preserve life.
Drugs of Immortality are instruments of folly.
I would gladly wander in Paradise,
But it is far away and there is no road.
– Tao Yuanming, translated from the Chinese by Arthur Waley
What do I know of man’s destiny? I could tell you more about radishes.
– Samuel Beckett
The very people and institutions that are supposedly dedicated to waking us up are doing exactly the opposite. They are lulling us into a more comfortable sleep.
– Jed McKenna
We must all either wear out or rust out, every one of us. My choice is to wear out.
– Theodore Roosevelt
I spit out my words
as if they were my own teeth.
One hand wipes the lips.
Another the poem.
– María Montero
How do you walk heavily with subject matter on your back, without trampling all the meadows?
– Victoria Chang
How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?
– Roland Barthes
The decadence of the Greek world began with the assassination of Socrates. And we killed a lot of Socrates in Europe.This is an indication that the Socratic spirit of indulgence towards others and rigor towards oneself is dangerous for the civilizations of murder.
– Albert Camus
You may think
silence is enough
but it’s only the start,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
If by Godot I had meant God I would have said God, and not Godot.
– Samuel Beckett
Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women.
– Leo Tolstoy
I breathed the book before I saw it; tasted the book before I [wrote] it.
– Paul Harding
As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it.
– Albert Einstein
We always seemed to be chasing the sun.
– Margo Durrell
A poem is a meteor.
– Wallace Stevens
It is the sign of a good book when the book reads you.
– Soren Kierkegaard
I BELIEVE
I believe any God needing to be protected from heresy has been made up by the orthodox to defend dogma too weak to stand on its own.
Likewise, I believe any God who gets offended at the human condition has been made up by moralists to frighten us into conformity.
I believe any religion based on saving us from an invisible threat is probably a sham.
I believe all nondemocratic religious hierarchies are privilege garbed in velvet piety.
Likewise, I believe dogma that cannot be questioned is usually superstition in sanctimonious disguise.
I believe healthy religion does not call us to find scapegoats for our problems but to present ourselves as living sacrifices for the common good.
I believe true saviors do not call us to love themselves but to recognize our kinship with all humankind and the web of life.
I believe the exclusiveness to which true religion calls us is not loyalty to any sect, but commitment to universal love and justice.
– Jim Rigby
So come what may, I’ll not upset My cheerful happiness of mind. Dejection never brings me what I want; My virtue will be warped and marred by it.
– Shantideva, The Way of the Bodhisattva
I see a lot of posts around absolutist philosophy saying things like, “as long as there’s the perception of a self, there’s conflict.” What these folks don’t understand is that conflict can be beautiful. It’s not the conflict that is the issue, it’s how it’s handled. Conflict is the friction that when beautifully handled, leads to deeper intimacy. Conflict awakens deeper understanding. Well handled conflict is the primary way we develop trust. We do have “the perception of the self,” if we want to call it that. I would call it a collection of tender old wounds that need to be handled with tenderness, acceptance, wisdom and love. And conflict is the invitation to learn how to beautifully respond to its once unmet needs that the whole being might mature and find deeper connection with itself.
– Chelan Harkin
A blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it.
– Marcus Aurelius
I’m a pretty sensitive person and I have to feel my poems in my body. I have to observe what’s around me and really feel what I want to say so the poetry is never far from that intimate connection… This is what I know and feel. I think realism stems from this ensuing intimacy—between the personal and the social and therefore between the writer and the reader.
– Sandra Simonds
Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.
– William Hazlitt
What writing does is allow us to sample each other’s fate.
– Edna O’Brien
The world loves to be amused by hollow professions, to be deceived by flattering appearances, to live in a state of hallucination; and can forgive everything but the plain, downright, simple, honest truth.
– William Hazlitt
we don’t even ask happiness, just a little less pain.
– Charles Bukowski
If you feel history at an emotional level, you’re doing it right.
– Andy Perrin
The task is to take the structure apart, dismantle the projections, and know fear directly as it is, a movement of emotional energy.
– Ken McLeod
He who lives wisely to himself and to his own heart looks at the busy world through the loopholes of retreat, and does not want to mingle in the fray. He hears the tumult, and is still.
– William Hazlitt
Many creative people start their creativity with terrific depression. They have such a well-constructed and strong ego consciousness that the unconscious must use very strong means—send them a hellish depression—before they can loosen up enough to let things happen.
– Marie Louise von Franz
Write to write. Write because you need to write. Write to settle the rage within you. Write with an internal purpose. Write about something or someone that means so much to you, that you don’t care what others think.
– Nick Miller
You, poetry incarnate, must know, after all, that your very name is a poem.
– Marina Tsvetaeva
Music is a necessity. After food, air, water, [poetry, literature] and warmth, music is the next necessity of life.
– Keith Richards
I hope I haven’t already driven past my greatest moments. I hope there is something beautiful on the horizon that’s just as impatient as I am. Something so eager, It wants to meet me halfway.
– Rudy Francisco
According to Eastern medicine be it Indian, Chinese, Tibetan or Thai, the left side of the body is totally different from the right side. Even some Buddhist monastic traditions include within their precepts for monks to sleep on their left side. Although it sounds weird resting and sleeping on the left side has many health benefits.
The lymph drains to the left.
The left side of the body is the dominant side of the lymphatic system. Most of the lymph drains down to the thoracic duct which is located on the left side. In its path the lymph transports proteins, glucose metabolites and waste products that are purified by the lymph nodes to be drained to the left side.
Derived from the above it is common to deduct in Eastern medicine that the diseases of the left side of the body may be due to chronic congestion of the lymphatic system.
The priorities of the body.
According to ayurveda congestion occurs in the body following certain priorities. If the lymphatic system is digested, the liver and blood are subsequently saturated with toxic substances. Primary symptoms of congestion present on the left side of the body before moving to the right side where they make their later appearance.
Feeling bored after a meal?
The Indian suggestion is that if you take a break after eating, do it lying on your left side. The rest should not exceed 10 minutes and is different from the evening nap which is usually 20 minutes or more.
Stomach and pancreas hanging to the left side. When you lie on your left side both naturally hang allowing for optimal and efficient digestion. Food is driven to move naturally through the stomach and pancreatic enzymes are secreted in a paulatin way and not in a single stroke, which happens if you lie down on the right side.
Laying on your left side your liver and gallbladder hang from your right side. Resting on the left side allows them to hang and secret their precious enzymes into the digestive tract, emulsifying fats and neutralizing stomach acids.
When the digestive system is stimulated this way your digestive cycle is shorter and doesn’t leave you stranded for the rest of the afternoon. Try resting 10 minutes on your left side after eating.
Feel energized and not tired after eating.
Try to eat in a relaxed way mid-day and don’t forget to rest on your left side and check that you will feel more energized and with better digestion.
Sleeping magic from the left side.
Best elimination.
The small intestine flushes toxins through the ileocecal valve (VIC) on the right side of the body at the start of the large intestine. The large intestine travels down the right side of your body, crosses your stomach and descends down the left side.
Through the VIC, sleeping on the left side allows gravity to stimulate bodily waste into the large intestine from the small intestine more easily.
As the night passes and continue sleeping on your left side the debris moves more easily toward the downward column and morning removal will be easier.
Best cardiac function.
More than 80% of the heart is located on the left side of the body. If you sleep on the left side the lymph drained to the heart will be driven by gravity taking work out of your heart while you sleep.
The aorta, which is the largest artery in the body, comes out from the upper part of the heart and is arched left before going down to the abdomen. By sleeping on the left side, the heart pumps blood more easily into the downing aorta.
Sleeping on the left side allows the intestines to move away from the cava vein that brings blood back to the heart. Noticeably the cava vein rests on the right side of the thorn, so when you lie down on the left side the viscera move away from the cava veina. Again gravity makes the heart job easier.
The sparrow is on the left side.
The spleen is part of the lymphatic system and is also on the left side of the body. Its function is that of a large lymph node which filters the lymph and additionally filters the blood. When you lie on the left side the fluids return to the basin is easier and is more easily produced by gravity.
The lymphatic system drains all cells in the body through contractions and muscle movement and not by heart pumping. Helping the lymph drain into the pelvis and heart with gravity is a simple way to purify your body.
And while there are no scientific protocols on it, sleeping on the left side does make sense. Understanding ancestral wisdom based on knowledge of modern anatomy clears up many doubts about the reasons that exist in the east to sleep a certain way.
– Dr. John Doull
A drop of water has the tastes of the water of the seven seas: there is no need to experience all the ways of worldly life. The reflections of the moon on one thousand rivers are from the same moon: the mind must be full of light.
– Hung Tzu-ch’eng
The Law of Maintenance:
What goes unfed weakens; what gets fed grows stronger. Either the intellectual-emotional complex feeds on the attention and grows stronger, while the attention grows weaker, is caught by every easy breeze, easily distracted and taken by every stray thought // emotion; or the attention feeds on the intellectual-emotional complex and grows stronger, more stable, able to hold steady for longer periods of time, able to avoid distraction, able to remain free and stable in the midst of the fiercest intellectual // emotional storms.
The aim for the mature soul is a free and stable attention even in the moment of the body’s death. The soul is attention; It does not pay attention, it IS attention (consciousness). I am attention.
– Red Hawk
Ten Thousand Idiots
It is always a danger
to aspirants on the Path
when they begin
to believe and act
as if the ten thousand idiots
who so long ruled and lived inside
have all packed their bags
and skipped town
or
died.
– Hafiz
Climate Science Basics:
It’s warming.
It’s us.
We’re sure.
It’s bad.
We can fix it.
– 350.org
I love your silence. It is so wise. It listens. It invites warmth. I love your loneliness. It is brave. It makes the universe want to protect you. You have the loneliness that all true heroes have, a loneliness that is a deep sea, within which the fishes of mystery dwell. I love your quest. It is noble. It has greatness in it. Only one who is born under a blessed star would set sail across the billowing waves and the wild squalls, because of a dream. I love your dream. It is magical. Only those who truly love and who are truly strong can sustain their lives as a dream. You dwell in your own enchantment. Life throws stones at you, but your love and your dream change those stones into the flowers of discovery. Even if you lose, or are defeated by things, your triumph will always be exemplary. And if no one knows it, then there are places that do. People like you enrich the dreams of the world, and it is dreams that create history. People like you are the unknowing transformers of things, protected by your own fairy-tale, by love.
– Ben Okri, Astonishing the Gods
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
Menders of all times and places have taught that silencing the thoughts in our heads and opening to the experiences of the body and emotions is the basis for all healing. It’s the only means by which we can reclaim our true nature or feel the subtle cues telling us how to find our way through life.
– Martha Beck
—for it was not knowledge but unity she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge—
– Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
This is the earth? Then
I don’t belong here.
Who are you in the lighted window,
shadowed now by the flickering leaves
of the wayfarer tree?
Can you survive where I won’t last
beyond the first summer?
All night the slender branches of the tree
shift and rustle at the bright window.
Explain my life to me, you who make no sign,
though I call out to you in the night:
I am not like you, I have only
my body for a voice; I can’t
disappear into silence—
And in the cold morning
over the dark surface of the earth
echoes of my voice drift,
whiteness steadily absorbed into darkness
as though you were making a sign after all
– Louise Glück
If you can accept your body, then you have a chance to see your body as your home. You can rest in your body, settle in, relax, and feel joy and ease. If you don’t accept your body and your mind, you can’t be at home with yourself. You have to accept yourself as you are. This is a very important practice. As you practice building a home in yourself, you become more and more beautiful.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Sacred space is within us. Not in our body or brain cells but in the volume of our consciousness. Wherever we go we bring the sacred within us to the sacred around us. We consecrate locations and studies by the presence of this awareness, not just the other way around. Why should the sites of stone temples and wonderful cathedrals be more sacred than a rocky desert or concrete city street if we bring holy consciousness to each of them? Awareness is the ultimate sacred wonder. Why endow objects outside ourselves as sacred and ignore the same source within us?
– Michael S Schneider
There is a dualism inherent in democracy–opposing forces pushing against each other, always. Culture clashes. Different belief systems. All coming together to create this country. But this balance takes a great deal of energy.
– Libba Bray, The Diviners
Our great temptations are boredom and bitterness. When our good plans are interrupted by poor weather, our well-organized careers by illness or bad luck, our peace of mind by inner turmoil, our hope for peace by a new war, our desire for a stable government by a constant changing of the guards, and our desire for immortality by real death, we are tempted to give in to a paralyzing boredom or to strike back in destructive bitterness. But when we believe that patience can make our expectations grow, then fate can be converted into a vocation, wounds into a call for deeper understanding, and sadness into a birthplace of joy.
– Henri Nouwen
The beauty of the world is the mouth of a labyrinth. The unwary individual who on entering takes a few steps is soon unable to find the opening. Worn out, with nothing to eat or drink, in the dark, separated from his dear ones, and from everything he loves and is accustomed to, he walks on without knowing anything or hoping anything, incapable even of discovering whether he is really going forward or merely turning round on the same spot. But this affliction is as nothing compared with the danger threatening him. For if he does not lose courage, if he goes on walking, it is absolutely certain that he will finally arrive at the center of the labyrinth. And there God is waiting to eat him.
– Simone Weil, Waiting for God
Actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Words are perhaps the worst. Words are merciless…
– Oscar Wilde
The whole course of human history may depend on a change of heart in one solitary and even humble individual – for it is in the solitary mind and soul of the individual that the battle between good and evil is waged and ultimately won or lost.
– M. Scott Peck
Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation’s heart, the excision of its memory.
– Alexander Solzhenitsyn, novelist, Nobel laureate
I would like you to show me, if you can, where the line can be drawn between an organism and it’s environment. The environment is in you. It’s passing through you. You’re breathing it in and out. You and every other creature.
– Wendell Berry
No matter how hard you try to be what you once were, you can only be what you are here and now. Time hypnotizes. When you are nine, you think you’ve always been nine years old and will always be. And then when you turn seventy, you are always and forever seventy. You’re in the present, you’re trapped in a young now or an old now, but there is no other now to be seen. You’re only you, here, now – the present you.
– Ray Bradbury
Ode to Ironing
Poetry is white:
it comes from the water covered with drops,
it wrinkles and piles up,
the skin of this planet must be stretched,
the sea of its whiteness must be ironed,
and the hands move and move,
the holy surfaces are smoothed out,
and that is how things are made:
hands make the world each day,
fire becomes one with steel,
linen, canvas, and cotton arrive
from the combat of the laundries,
and out of light a dove is born:
chastity returns from the foam.
– Pablo Neruda, (translated by Stephen Mitchell)
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
– Douglas Adams
The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand. It is the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.
– Eric Schmidt, Chairman, Google
Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. Good mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if anything is thrust among them suddenly which tends to stop them or reverse their motion. A weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself; stupidity often saves a man from going mad.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
In Greek, whose color lexicon did not stabilize for many centuries, the words most commonly used for blue are glaukos and kyaneos. The latter probably referred originally to a mineral or a metal; it has a foreign root and its meaning often shifted. During the Homeric period it denoted both the bright blue of the iris and the black of funeral garments, but never the blue of the sky or sea. An analysis of Homer’s poetry shows that out of sixty adjectives describing elements and landscapes in the Iliad and Odyssey, only three are color terms, while those evoking light effects are quite numerous. During the classical era, kyaneos meant a dark color: deep blue, violet, brown, and black. In fact, it evokes more the “feeling” of the color than its actual hue. The term glaukos, which existed in the Archaic period and was much used by Homer, can refer to gray, blue, and sometimes even yellow or brown. Rather than denoting a particular color, it expresses the idea of a color’s feebleness or weak concentration. For this reason it is used to describe the color of water, eyes, leaves, or honey.
– Michel Pastoureau, Blue: The History of a Color
We’re designed to be fascinated by our real life missions – and nothing else.
– Martha Beck
People are supposed to keep us sane at difficult times. But sometimes things are better at saving us. Your afternoon cup of hot tea with rum, a beautiful poem someone sent, or the train trip where there was nothing to do but stare out the window while your mind worked its way out of the sad-swamp. Mundane things that through some kind of small quiet magic, firmly ground or hold us when we feel everything else slipping away.
– Jonathan Carroll
You cannot reason someone out of something they were not reasoned into.
– Jonathan Swift
The whole process of getting old—it could have been better arranged. But you do learn some things just by doing them over and over and by getting old doing them. And one of them is, you really need less. And I’m not talking minimalism, which is a highly self-conscious mannerist style I can’t write and don’t want to. I’m perfectly ready to describe a lot and be flowery and emotive, but you can do that briefly and it works better. My model for this is late Beethoven. He moves so strangely and quite suddenly sometimes from place to place in his music, in the late quartets. He knows where he’s going and he just doesn’t want to waste all that time getting there. But if you listen, if you’re with it, he takes you with him. I think sometimes about old painters—they get so simple in their means. Just so plain and simple. Because they know they haven’t got time. One is aware of this as one gets older. You can’t waste time.
– Ursula LeGuin
It is better to entertain an idea than to take it home to live with you for the rest of your life.
– Randall Jarrell
Hiking – I don’t like either the word or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains – not hike! Do you know the origin of that word ‘saunter?’ It’s a beautiful word. Away back in the Middle Ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going, they would reply, ‘A la sainte terre,’ ‘To the Holy Land.’ And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not ‘hike’ through them.
– John Muir
There is the story of the infant Krishna, wrongly accused of eating a bit of dirt.
His mother, Yashoda, coming up to him with a wagging finger scolds him: “You shouldn’t eat dirt, you naughty boy.”
“But I haven’t,” says the unchallenged lord of all and everything, disguised as a frightened human child.
“Tut! Tut! Open your mouth,” orders Yashoda.
Krishna does as he is told. He opens his mouth and Yashoda gasps. She sees in Krishna’s mouth the whole complete entire timeless universe, all the stars and planets of space and the distance between them, all the lands and seas of the earth and the life in them; she sees all the days of yesterday and all the days of tomorrow; she sees all ideas and all emotions, all pity and all hope, and the three strands of matter; not a pebble, candle, creature, village or galaxy is missing, including herself and every bit of dirt in its truthful place.
“My Lord, you can close your mouth,” she says reverently.
In any part of the universe there is a whole universe – Hamlet saw infinite space in a nutshell; William Blake saw a world in a grain of sand, a heaven in a wild flower, and eternity in an hour.
– Albarrán Cabrera
It is only the way it is until we discover the new way it is, and then that is the way it is until we discover the new way it is, and so it goes, until the world is no longer flat.
– Bella Baxter, Poor Things
To know someone here or there with whom you can feel there is understanding in spite of distances or thoughts expressed — That can make life a garden.
– Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Wounds heal.
Love lasts.
We remain.
– Kristin Hannah, The Nightingale
Reading books, visiting museums, or simply stopping short before the vast, gold umbrella of some chestnut tree in mid-autumn, aren’t we always, in a sense, looking for ourselves?
– Gustaf Sobin
Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.
– Anne Sexton
Although the wind blows terribly here, the moonlight also leaks between the roof planks of this ruined house.
– Izumi Shikibu
May the space between where I am and where I want to be inspire me.
– Tracee Ellis Ross
A fool is always pleased with what he says, and, besides, he always says more than he needs to.
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Adolescent
It’s the little things that find us out, the little things we refuse to do in order to avoid doing the big things that can save us.
– Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth
I don’t hold the hands of those who are artistic in breaking souls.
– Areeba
Friends save us, service to others saves us. Books, nature, community, and music save us.
– Anne Lamott
The Buddha didn’t call what he was doing “Buddhism.” He described a path, an art, and a way of life in which we cultivate our innate capacity to be awake and aware.
– Sister Dang Nghiem
As we shift focus, like we shift stations on a radio dial, we alter our vibrations, frequency and move into divine resonance. Old realities fade and new realities sharpen. To shift consciousness is to accept and integrate new versions of ourselves. They all exist simultaneously. Infinite realities unfold right now.
– Liara Covert
let anxious innocent ones pant till dawn. for my part, i’m awake. all pale and drawn, a wonder, moist with unshed tears, i come forth from an absence in a mortal form, lulling itself and breaking this calm tomb, lean on my elbows, nervous but supreme.
– paul valéry, (tr. j.schreiber)
I was grateful for this stranger who understood me / who asked of me nothing /left as much empty space in that silver sedan as he could for the music / the medicine.
– Sabrina Benaim
In you somewhere is still that teenager with the rough and bloody voice, angry with the radio on, driving nowhere, and where would that loud idiot go if he knew he would one day turn into you?
– Neil Hilborn
When you start to live outside yourself, it’s all dangerous.
– Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden
SNOW
Walking through a field with my little brother Seth
I pointed to a place where kids had made angels in the snow.
For some reason, I told him that a troop of angels
had been shot and dissolved when they hit the ground.
He asked who had shot them and I said a farmer.
Then we were on the roof of the lake.
The ice looked like a photograph of water.
Why he asked. Why did he shoot them.
I didn’t know where I was going with this.
They were on his property, I said.
When it’s snowing, the outdoors seem like a room.
Today I traded hellos with my neighbor.
Our voices hung close in the new acoustics.
A room with the walls blasted to shreds and falling.
We returned to our shoveling, working side by side in silence.
But why were they on his property, he asked.
– David Berman
Many people are seeking deeper meaning in their life and looking for what they value most. By relying on body awareness, an avenue to inner knowledge of the emotions and the spirit is created. This helps people find their true direction and purpose in life.
– Marion Rosen, P.T.
The true light never hides the darkness but is born out of the very center of it, transforming and redeeming. So to the darkness we must return, each of us individually accepting his ignorance and loneliness, his sin and weakness, and, most difficult of all, consenting to wait in the dark and even to love the waiting…
– Helen M. Luke
If men possessed wisdom, which stands in the same relation to the form of man as the sight to the eye, they would not cause any injury to themselves or to others, for the knowledge of the truth removes hatred and quarrels, and prevents mutual injuries.
– Maimonides
The Devil is not the Prince of Matter; the Devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt. The Devil is grim because he knows where he is going, and, in moving, he always returns whence he came.
– Umberto Eco
I believe in aristocracy, though — if that is the right word, and if a democrat may use it. Not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos. Thousands of them perish in obscurity, a few are great names. They are sensitive for others as well as for themselves, they are considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but the power to endure, and they can take a joke.
– E M Forster
These too are of a burning color–not orange, not gold, but if pure gold were liquid and could raise a cream, that golden cream might be like the color of the poppies.
– John Steinbeck, East of Eden
This is the hardest time to live, but it is also the greatest honor to be alive now, and to be allowed to see this time. There is no other time like now. We should be thankful, for creation did not make weak spirits to live during this time. The old ones say ‘this is the time when the strongest spirits will live through and those who are empty shells, those who have lost the connection will not survive.’ We have become masters of survival -we will survive- it is our prophecy to do so.
Humanity must shift from living “on” the earth, to living with her.
– Tiokasin Ghosthorse
When Jung spoke of “The Self’ he was referring to the indescribable. The Self is the total personality, the sum of all the aspects, all parts & all bits of us. It contains victim/victimiser/ego/shadow. It cannot be understood by intellect alone; it is beyond definition.
– David Freeman
We are always seeking something from the outside and forgetting that our fundamental well-being and strength depend on how we relate to our own minds.
– Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche
Egolessness is a flexible identity. It manifests as inquisitiveness, as adaptability, as humor, as playfulness. It is our capacity to relax with not knowing, not figuring everything out, with not being at all sure about who we are, or who anyone else is, either.
– Pema Chodron
Eloquence, when at its highest pitch, leaves little room for reason or reflection; but addressing itself entirely to the fancy or the affections, captivates the willing hearers, and subdues their understanding.
– David Hume
Activists are going to jail for trying to preserve a livable planet. I say this with all the force I can, with words as literal as they can be: It is the fossil fuel executives and lobbyists who must go to jail, not the activists.
– Peter Kalmus
The Rock Garden at Ryoanji
This is the ultimate subtlety of art
The marrow in the bones:
A rectangle of raked gravel
And a few stones.
– Lindley Williams Hubbell
rainbow
the ripest pomegranate
too high to reach
– Bob Lucky
Be sure and let your readers know that every sentence can be read in an almost infinite number of ways! That is the secret of the book. No one will ever know what it really means.
– David Hawkes
spring evening—
the puppy wags his tail
in his sleep
– Ce Rosenow
The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!
– Edith Wharton
The struggle is great, the task divine—to gain mastery, freedom, happiness, and tranquility.
– Marcus Aurelius
The spiritual dimension is an extremely significant dimension in the human psyche and also in life. If we suppress it, the way Western culture has been doing it, we will be paying a very serious toll for it. We are really acting against our deepest nature.
– Stanislav Grof
My Father At 85
by Robert Bly
His large ears hear
everything.
A hermit wakes
and sleeps
in a hut underneath
his gaunt cheeks.
His eyes blue,
alert, dis-
appointed and suspicious
complain
I do not bring him
the same sort of jokes
the nurses do.
He is a small bird
waiting to be fed,
mostly beak,
an eagle or a vulture
or the Pharoah’s servant
just before death.
My arm on the bedrail
rests there,
relaxed, with new love.
All I know of the Troubadours
I bring
to this bed.
I do not want
or need
to be shamed
by him
any longer.
The general of shame
has discharged him
and left him in this
small provincial
Egyptian town.
If I do not wish
to shame him, then
why not
love him?
His long hands,
large, veined, capable,
can still retain
hold of what he wanted.
But is that
what he desired?
Some powerful
river of desire
goes on flowing
through him.
He never phrased
what he desired,
and I am
his son.
In the old days, it was not called the Holiday Season; the Christians called it Christmas and went to church; the Jews called it Hanukkah and went to synagogue; the atheists went to parties and drank. People passing each other on the street would say ‘Merry Christmas!’ or ‘Happy Hanukkah!’ or (to the atheists) ‘Look out for the wall!’
– Dave Barry
QUIET PLACE
Are you looking for a quiet place?
Friend, you are already here.
Your blood’s repose between pulsations.
Secret chamber in your chest
where you have no enemies,
no one to blame,
and the endless journey has not begun.
The place where prayers for peace
need no speaking.
Simply disperse
into the finer element you are
before you breathe.
Be the sparkling sky
in the lungs of a hummingbird,
smoke of sage in desert air,
aureole in emptiness
where the flame just blew out.
Burn away and remember
that your body is made of vanished stars.
Stumble and fall
into your own rhythm, which feels
like you are not moving at all
because your mind is at rest
in flesh that needs
no discipline of stillness.
You are a nest inside the egg,
a mother’s womb that carries
her own savior.
You are the seed of what you
have always been seeking.
Now flower on a Winter night.
– Alfred K. LaMotte
Only by welcoming uncertainty from the get-go can we acclimate ourselves to the shattering wonder that enfolds us. This animal body, for all its susceptibility and vertigo, remains the primary instrument of all our knowing, as the capricious earth remains our primary cosmos.
– David Abram
The body remembers, the bones remember, the joints remember, even the little finger remembers. Memory is lodged in pictures and feelings in the cells themselves. Like a sponge filled with water, anywhere the flesh is pressed, wrung, even touched lightly, a memory may flow out in a stream.
– Clarissa Pinkola Estes
is it worse if we invented
sadness or if it was
here all along
waiting for the earth to
grow a creature
capable of detecting it
- Kimmy Walters
Pride is a stubborn insistence of being what we are not and never were intended to be. Pride is a deep, insatiable need for unreality, an exorbitant demand that others believe the lie we have made ourselves believe about ourselves.
– Thomas Merton
On solstice dawn I’m an old brat
lifting a hundred mental bandages.
Mt. Everest is covered with climbers’ junk
and a golf club was left behind on the moon,
the East suffocates in malice and the West
in pink cotton candy. Sixty years ago
my brother told me that the rain was angel piss
and that turtles might kill me when I swam.
The solstice says “everything on earth is True.”
– Jim Harrison, In Search of Small Gods
They say that in the second before our death, each of us understands the real reason for our existence, and out of that moment, heaven or hell is born.
– Paulo Coelho
Gorgeous, amazing things come into our lives when we are paying attention: mangoes, grandnieces, Bach, ponds. This happens more often when we have as little expectation as possible. If you say, ‘Well, that’s pretty much what I thought I’d see,’ you are in trouble. At that point, you have to ask yourself why you are even here. And if I were you, I would pray ‘Help.’ Astonishing material and revelation appear in our lives all the time. Let it be. Unto us, so much is given. We just have to be open for business.
– Anne Lamott
white egret landing
skimming the gloss of my eye
I see my own ghost
– Catherine Baker
We have become more cerebral, and retreated more and more from the senses—especially from smell, touch and taste—as if repelled by the body; and sight, the coolest of the senses, and the one most capable of detachment, has come to dominate all.
– Iain McGilchrist
My role in society, or any artist’s or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.
– John Lennon
Why write a book
when pointing will do,
the old monk asked himself.
– The Old Monk
The danger that faces us today is that the whole of reality will be replaced by words. This accounts for that terrible lack of instinct in modern man, particularly the city-dweller. He lacks all contact with the life and breath of nature.
– Carl G. Jung
Marcel Proust revealed that even the least adventurous life can be rendered mythological. In a personal mythology the events do not come already glowing with a nimbus but must be haloed by the writer usually through repetition, insistence and elevated language.
– Edmund White
Night has sung its song
It is now the windows’ turn
– Sohrab Sepehri
To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.
– Lawrence Clark Powell
It is double pleasure to deceive the deceiver.
– Nicole Machiavelli
The practices taught by the Buddha don’t create qualities in our minds that were not already present. If we didn’t innately possess wisdom and the tender heart, there would be no way for us to develop them. Wisdom and tsewa are not like goods we can import. The Dharma is not an import system; rather it works by clearing away all that obscures our enlightened mind and its potential. Therefore, the principal method of the Dharma is to remove impediments.
– Dzigar Kongtrul, Training in Tenderness
For her the ocean was more than a dream, it was a place she needed to visit to find herself and when she returned to the city, you could see the sun in her eyes, the wind in her hair, and taste the infinite salt on her lips.
– Jose Chaves
In this strife-ridden world it is of utmost importance to discover the magic of forget and forgive. Be the river that absorbs all and flows past all the rocks. Chase your dream unabashedly.
– arvinder kaur
Originality requires the aptitude for exile.
– Jane Hirshfield
Contemplation seems to be about the only luxury that costs nothing.
– Dodie Smith
I am not as strong as my words pretend to be. Not as quiet as these caesuras promise. This heart is a patchwork quilt of people that leave different shades of blue inside of me.
– Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being
Sometimes you find your path, sometimes it finds you.
– Max Brooks
When you grieve deeply, you are shown your abounding capacity to love.
– Mimi Zhu
reading
an ancient epic
on an endless night
– Ogawa
the flame circling the stone
and within the stone
a steady flame
– Kim Dorman
It was a rainy night. It was the myth of a rainy night.
– Jack Kerouac, On the Road
Unwarmed by any sunset light
The gray day darkened into night
– John Greenleaf Whittier
The true test of our understanding is not that it gives our ordinary selves more to talk about, but that it enables us to create these higher worlds within ourselves, to enter into the higher worlds which, until then, must remain for us only words. And to make this entry, we may find that we have to learn how to empty ourselves of all that we ordinarily acclaim as our ‘riches’, all our ‘understanding’, ‘attitudes’, ‘opinions’ and all the rest of the material that has become fixed in us over the course of our lives. If we can empty ourselves, can be empty inwardly, then everything can enter into us. We can have everything if we can learn to separate from our ordinary selves, learn how to get out of the way. It is the hardest thing to empty oneself, but if we can once learn how this is to be done, then everything can come.
– J.G. Bennett
It’s harder to talk about, but what I really, really, really want for Christmas is just this: I want to be 5 years old again for an hour. I want to laugh a lot and cry a lot. I want to be picked up or rocked to sleep in someone’s arms, and carried up to bed just one more time. I know what I really want for Christmas: I want my childhood back.
Nobody is going to give me that. I might give at least the memory of it to myself if I try. I know it doesn’t make sense, but since when is Christmas about sense, anyway? It is about a child, of long ago and far away, and it is about the child of now. In you and me. Waiting behind the door of our hearts for something wonderful to happen. A child who is impractical, unrealistic, simpleminded and terribly vulnerable to joy.
It’s just this: that there are places we all come from – deep-rooty – common places – that makes us who we are. And we disdain them or treat them lightly at our peril. We turn our backs on them at the risk of self-contempt. There is a sense in which we need to go home again – and can go home again. Not to recover home, no. But to sanctify memory.
– Robert Fulghum
Christmas is doing a little something extra for someone.
– Charles M. Schulz
The instruction is to notice what’s happening, to be with what’s happening, to relax with what’s happening, and to not have a problem with what’s happening, as best we can…
When there are difficulties, we stay alert to them and feel their impact, but we also want to be able to say, at any time, “This is what’s happening, so what’s the best thing I can do now? What can I do in my life to not make things worse? May my response to this moment not create suffering for myself or anybody else.”
– Sylvia Boorstein
Everything is determined…by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust—we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.
– Albert Einstein
A prudent man imbued with the scientific spirit will not claim that his present beliefs are wholly true, though he may console himself with the thought that his earlier beliefs were perhaps not wholly false. I should regard an unchanging system of philosophical doctrines as proof of intellectual stagnation. Philosophical progress seems to me analogous to the gradually increasing clarity of outline of a mountain approached through mist, which is vaguely visible at first, but even at last remains in some degree indistinct.
– Bertrand Russell
The strangest and most fantastic fact about negative emotions is that people actually worship them.
– P.D. Ouspensky
Now that you’re on the dance floor, understand that the path to proficiency is long — it rambles over dunes of ugliness, stumbles among boulder-sized re-dos, and falls into perfectionist back-eddies. The pain of doing it poorly is part of the activity of learning. The elation of doing it well is the hard-won result of beginning this activity in the first place. Begin now. “If you wait,” said Mario Andretti, “all that happens is that you get older.
– Sara Genn
You owe it to all of us to get on with what you’re good at.
– W. H. Auden
Buddhism neither tells me the false nor the true: It allows me to discover myself.
– Chögyam Trungpa
I am drawn to any story
that makes me want to read
from one sentence to the next.
I have no other criterion.
– Jhumpa Lahiri
How are we supposed to live without a meteor bearing down on us? How are we supposed to find the best parts of humanity without a brutal regime at the door? How are we supposed to tell the people we love that we love them if we’re not five minutes from being destroyed?
That’s the challenge of being alive.
– R. Eric Thomas
When you’re at peace, you embrace the eternity.
When you’re confused, you be dazzled by doomsday.
– Toba Beta
You cannot be taught to write. You have to spend a lifetime in love with words.
– Craig Claiborne
The ego will do whatever it can to make itself more comfortable; but the soul is about wholeness & this makes the ego even more uncomfortable. Wholeness is not about comfort, or goodness, or consensus—it means drinking this brief, unique, deeply rooted vintage to its dregs.
– James Hollis
only a fool believes that the sound at the end of the world would be sweet.
– Hanif Abdurraqib
Monetization
The advert said
MONETIZE YOUR FOLLOWERS
so he thought
he would respond;
by painting them
in the changing light,
like waterlilies
in a pond.
– Brian Bilston
Thomas Berry said it so succinctly: The human is derivative, Earth is primary. Earth must be the primary concern of every human institution, profession, program and activity.
– Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
I learned a great deal about the principles of human society from the wisdom of my mother.
– Chögyam Trungpa
I am troubled
in the depths of my soul.
But that will pass,
I hope.
– George Sand
Walking the path toward the complete ending of clinging and suffering is the noblest thing a person can do. It opens the fist of the mind, and allows a person to walk in the world with gift-bestowing hands.
– Gil Fronsdal
All relationship is a mirror in which the mind can discover its own operations.
– Krishnamurti
I wish you a great big garden and blue skies.
– Franz Kafka, 1921.
If something is allowed to grow the way it was designed to, it works. When we try to get it to conform to the supposedly more efficient image we have of it, we get grotesqueries, imbalances.
– Anne Lamott
I go to sleep
when the crickets do,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
I don’t read poems to know the future. I read them to hold the future at bay.
– Kamran Javadizadeh
Poetry is a fire, well banked-down that it may warm survivors in the even-colder nights to come.
– Hugh Maxton
There’s a point where psychology becomes a spiritual journey. You have to rebuild rotten foundations, deal with the negative mother & negative father. But once the depths are reconstructed, you can’t go on wallowing in negativity. That’s not only boring, it’s destructive.
– Marion Woodman
If I’m transformed by language, I am often crouched in footnote or blazing in title. Where in the body do I begin?
– Layli Long Soldier
We are so used to releasing words, we don’t know what to do with them if they stay. No matter how many times we let them go, they come back. The words that matter always stay.
– David Levithan
Art exists because life is not enough.
– Ferreira Gullar
What is Art? Like a Declaration of Love.
– Andrei Tarkovsky
The Most Poetic Thing
by Jose Hernandez Diaz
At 6 a.m., I read Lorca’s Poema del Cante Jondo. I take a photo
Of “La Lola” in the sunlight and post it on Facebook and Instagram.
The talented poet Dara Wier likes it. That makes my day.
Then, I submit poems to a literary magazine and prepare
My submissions for August 1st, when a few more journals open.
Also, I edit a prose poem about a dragon and a horse rider.
In the evening, when I’m finishing up some work on the computer
At the local library, an O.G. from the neighborhood with gang tattoos
Covering his body and face, walks in the library with his daughters
And helps them look for books. They tell him the names of the books
And he says “let’s look for them alphabetically.” I can’t help but smile,
As one of the toughest guys in the barrio is in the children’s section
Of the library looking for books with his kids. Much respect, though,
I keep thinking: that’s the most poetic thing I’ve seen all day.
The pain
that made you
the odd one out
is the story
that connects you
to a healing world.
– Tanya Markul
Samsara is mind turned out, lost in its projections. Nirvana is mind turned in, recognizing its true nature.
– Tulku Urgyen
I wish I could say the coming dark was taking me by surprise.
– Charles Rafferty
Stay, season of calm love and soulful snows! There is a subtle sweetness in the sun
– Claude McKay
Some days dance in the bracken. Some days go out wide and warm on bad roads to collect the dispossessed and offer them homes.
– Richard Hugo
Basically, you say goodbye to something every day without even knowing it.
– Lion Feuchtwanger
BEFORE SLEEP I GO OUTSIDE
What is more beautiful than Orion and the stars
seen through the bare limbs of an oak?
What too is more beautiful than winter clouds in a rush
over the face of the moon, when the mind gives way
and the supple body slows, the heart grown ready
to make the experiment: to be lifted and stretched
by measureless new dimensions? All that I have said
and heard recedes, pulled into space where there are no
words, my head quiet and at rest, leaning back
against a corner of the garage, under this night sky
and the far stars where my thirsty eyes drink as from
a pitcher that pours and pours and does not empty.
– Jeanne Lohmann
Everything has its wonders,
even darkness and silence,
and I learn,
whatever state I may be in,
therein to be content.
– Helen Keller
“You are fettered,“ said Scrooge, trembling. “Tell me why?”
“I wear the chain I forged in life,” replied the Ghost. “I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.”
– Charles Dickens
It was a pretty sight, and a seasonable one, that met their eyes when they flung the door open. In the fore-court, lit by the dim rays of a horn lantern, some eight or ten little field-mice stood in a semicircle, red worsted comforters round their throats, their fore-paws thrust deep into their pockets, their feet jigging for warmth. With bright beady eyes they glanced shyly at each other, sniggering a little, sniffing and applying coat-sleeves a good deal. As the door opened, one of the elder ones that carried the lantern was just saying, “Now then, one, two, three!” and forthwith their shrill little voices uprose on the air, singing one of the old-time carols that their forefathers composed in fields that were fallow and held by frost, or when snow-bound in chimney corners, and handed down to be sung in the miry street to lamp-lit windows at Yule-time.
– Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
Most of us are asleep. I mean by asleep, we have taken shelter, refuge in our ideologies; we have defences, and we want to be safe and secure. We want to be safe in our religions, in our beliefs, in our dogmas, in our relationships and in our activities. This breeds gradual, sleepy, mechanical conditioning. Then a challenge comes to wake us up. The importance of a challenge is to wake us up, but when we wake up, we respond from a background and therefore create more problems. Being unable to solve the problems, we go back to sleep again.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
Winter Love
by Linda Gregg
I would like to decorate this silence,
but my house grows only cleaner
and more plain. The glass chimes I hung
over the register ring a little
when the heat goes on.
I waited too long to drink my tea.
It was not hot. It was only warm.
Man sees the morning as the beginning of a new day; he takes germination as the start in the life of a plant, and withering as its end. But this is nothing more than biased judgment on his part. Nature is one. There is no starting point or destination, only an unending flux, a continuous metamorphosis of all things.
– Masanobu Fukuoka
Concentration does not mean to concentrate on an external object; it is concentration upon life itself. It is a power of knowing, an intuitive mystical power which is not obtained by language. It is obtained by keeping your awareness upon the subtle actions that occur inside your thoughts, inside your body, inside the immediate ten inches or so that surround you, and inside your environment. With this mystical intuitive power, you know everything, including the sufficiency of your spiritual nature.
– Hua-Ching Ni
… over the heart an anchor
and above the anchor a star
and above the stars the wind
and above the wind the sail!
– Rafael Alberti
Your identity should be so secure that when someone walks away from you they don’t take you with them.
– Unknown
What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world. We get into the habit of thinking, this is the world, but that’s not true at all. The real world is a much darker and deeper place than this, and much of it is occupied by jellyfish and things.
– Haruki Murakami
Translation is a very modest miracle, but one of the greatest on Earth.
– Borges
More and more we embody and incorporate external images that have no inner resonance. In our efforts to accept the roles that society imposes, we live a life of images, ungrounded in our nature.
– Stanley Keleman
If you do not write your book the result is simple: you are cursed to see fragments of it everywhere, piecemeal, for the rest of your life.
– Bernard T. Joy
If you really want to piss people off, you can do two things: Attain some happiness or tell the truth.
– Tennessee Williams
No greater torment than to reread oneself.
– Cioran
Time feels so short in midlife, I’ve started eating standing up.
– Elisa Gabbert
a traveler’s
faded backpack
first snowfall
– Basho
For a time I tried a normal life-style, but all too soon I came to feel its sad consequences on my body and my soul, and I decided to start leading an unsensible life before it was too late…
– Karl Kraus
If you can’t tell
an E from a C
you should be
playing drums,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
your dream
of lilacs
has come true
– Akari
We open the book of what happened.
– Walter Benjamin
I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men.
– H.P. Lovecraft
If heaven is tolerant and writers are allowed (bunch of liars though they are), I wonder if they gather for coffee to ponder the prose they should have written instead.
– Lori Lansens
Get back up when you fail. Celebrate behaving like a human.
– Marcus Aurelius
If you can’t tear
two in half,
one dies,
the old monk told
the mathematicians.
– The Old Monk
A poet’s violence cannot be long-lived. Joan of Arc wasn’t around for long.
– Jean Cocteau
On every world, wherever people are, in the deepest part of the winter, at the exact mid-point, everybody stops and turns and hugs. As if to say, ‘Well done. Well done, everyone. We’re halfway out of the dark.’
– Kazran Sardick
Nothing can compare to books and writing while it’s raining.
– C.S. Lewis
With a pencil and paper, I
could revise the world.
– Alison Lurie
I let the size of the sound
determine the length of the line,
the old monk told the poet.
– The Old Monk
He was alone in the far fields of his life.
– James Salter, Cowboys
Free spirits don’t run in packs.
– Marty Rubin
I finally began to think, that is to say, to listen louder.
– Samuel Beckett
A teacher is one who can show you the way to yourself.
– Erwin Chargaff
The observer stands outside the landscape, for were this not the case it would not be possible for nature to become a landscape at all.
– Gyorgy Lukacs
Survival in the present of an ordinary collective life suffused with a historic and historical crisis to which we are always catching up is the way we live now.
– Lauren Berlant
poetry is
a unique
sort of
tired
– Andy Perrin
The madman is not the man who has lost his reason.
The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.
– Chesterton
I was smitten. I went back to my dormitory and told everyone that I’d met the man I want to be with forever. I was completely taken by his gestalt.
– Elsa Rush
On the firm wet sand at low tide your footprints register clearly before the waves come and devour all trace of passage. I like to see the long line we each leave behind, and I sometimes imagine my whole life that way, as though each step was a stitch, as though I was a needle leaving a trail of thread that sewed together the worlds as I went by, crisscrossing others’ paths, quilting it all together in some way that matters even though it can hardly be traced. A meandering line sutures together the world in some new way, as though walking was sewing and sewing was telling a story and that story was your life.
– Rebecca Solnit
This is the night
when you can trust
that any direction
you go,
you will be walking
toward the dawn.
– Jan Richardson
THE CHRISTMAS LETTER
Wherever you are when you receive this letter
I write to say we are still ourselves
In the same place
And hope you are the same.
The dead have died as you know
And will never get better,
And the children are boys and girls
of their several ages and names.
So in closing I send you our love
And hope to hear from you soon.
There is never a time
Like the present. It lasts forever
Wherever you are. As ever I remain.
– John N. Morris
Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximizing scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.
– Katherine May
We pay too much attention to the most confident voices—and too little attention to the thoughtful ones. Certainty is not a sign of credibility. Speaking assertively is not a substitute of thinking deeply. It’s better to learn from complex thinkers than smooth talkers
– Adam Grant
Before the fields have finished,
Before the Christmas tree,
Wonder upon wonder
Will arrive to me!
– Emily Dickinson
The peace off yesterday is gone. The peace of tomorrow has no guarantees. But the peace of the moment when fully embraced is beyond time.
– Gunilla Norris
Angels caged // in what I see, / externity in gauged / antiphony.
– Ronald Johnson
She was unstoppable. Not because she did not have failures or doubts, but because she continued on despite them.
– Beau Taplin
I prayed for wonders instead of happiness, and You gave them to me.
– Abraham Joshua Heschel
LIGHT TURNOUTS
Dear ghost, what shelter
in the noonday crowd? I’m going to write
an hour, then read
what someone else has written.
You’ve no mansion for this to happen in.
But your adventures are like safe houses,
your knowing where to stop an adventure
of another order, like seizing the weather.
We too are embroiled in this scene of happening,
and when we speak the same phrase together:
“We used to have one of those,”
it matters like a shot in the dark.
One of us stays behind.
One of us advances on the bridge
as on a carpet. Life — it’s marvelous —
follows and falls behind
– John Ashbery
This is the solstice, the still point
of the sun, its cusp and midnight,
the year’s threshold
and unlocking, where the past
lets go of and becomes the future;
the place of caught breath, the door
of a vanished house left ajar
– Margaret Atwood
What we crave, what we want to see in others’ eyes, is that servile expression, an unconcealed infatuation with our gestures and our lucubrations, the avowal of an ardor without second thoughts, an ecstasy before our nothingness.
– Cioran
When we try to get difficulties to conform to our way of thinking, we often push them toward being fancier, and thus absurd. We strip away the grace of what is real, and true, and maybe even lovely.
– Anne Lamott
The world has already been filmed. The point now is to change it.
– Guy DeBord
We write the same book over and over.
– Mary Lee Settle
Don’t look for meaning in the words.
Listen to the silences…
– Samuel Beckett
Every traveller has a home of his own, and he learns to appreciate it the more from his wandering.
– Charles Dickens
When we approach the world with a sense of wonder, it becomes numinous and we are enriched by our participation in it. When we try to reduce it to something we can fully understand, we ourselves are reduced in the process.
– Robin Robertson, Jung and Frodo
Naturally, without a capacity for introspection, one is doomed to live in a world created by projection and, no surprise, find one’s fantasy, and worst fears, reflected back. Ever and always, what we have not owned within will be projected without.
– James Hollis
This is become our unregretted home. A world. Corcyra.
– Lawrence Durrell
I find myself wondering now and again what the Buddha would be doing right now, how he would move in this globalized world.
– Gavin Milne
All the books of the world
will not bring you happiness,
but build a secret path
toward your heart.
– Hermann Hesse
If one believes in the Prince of Peace one must stop committing crimes in the name of the Prince of Peace.
– James Baldwin
The trickster…always breaks in, just as the unconscious does, to trip up the rational situation. He’s both a fool and someone who is beyond the system. And the trickster represents all those possibilities of life that your mind hasn’t decided it wants to deal with.
– Joseph Campbell
It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.
– Victor Hugo
The happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear their burden in silence. Without this silence, happiness would be impossible.
– Anton Chekhov
Do anything, but let it produce joy.
– Walt Whitman
I resist, I cannot accept this hollow nothing that I am. What am I? What is my I? I always presuppose my I.
– @RedBookJung
As Freud put it once at the end of a lecture, our task is to move from neurotic misery to the normal misery of life.
– James Hollis
It is essential to the sanity of mankind that each one should think the other crazy – a condition with which the cynicism of human nature so cordially complies, one could wish it were a concurrence upon a subject more noble.
– Emily Dickinson
“Yes” said Queen Lucy. “In our world too, a stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world.”
– C.S. Lewis
In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
– Christina Rossetti
Snowdrops like the snow would chill me;
Nightshade would caress and kill me;
Crocus like a spear would fright me;
Dragon’s-mouth might bark or bite me;
– Christina Rossetti
firefly lights–
how very black and close
the mountains
– Yamashita Chizuko
We may think we are individuals, but actually our beliefs, our traditions, our values, our ways of life, are those of the collective.
– Krishnamurti
As long as you have not grasped that you have to die to grow, you are a troubled guest on the dark earth.
– Mircea Eliade
The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or a new thing in an old way.
– Richard Harding Davis
“When will you return?” I asked.
“Never,” the beloved replied.
My watch stopped.
– Abbas Kiarostami
Whatever is rightly done, however humble, is noble. (Quidvis recte factum quamvis humile praeclarum.)
– Sir Henry Royce
Angela Y. Davis said, “Anyone who’s interested in making change in the world also has to learn how to take care of herself, himself, their selves. For a long time, activists did not necessarily think that…” Yes. And activist labor politics and organizational cultures matter.
– tamara k. nopper
The longed-for Christmas vacation is now here!
– Franz Kafka, 1912.
But amid all our differences, Eastern Europeans share one other legacy in common, and that is a gift for seeing comedy amidst tragedy.
– Jacob Mikanowski
and the largest cookie,
which I had saved for last, lay
solitary in the tin with a nimbus
of crumbs around it.
– Jane Kenyon
If we enter into it, that chaos can resurrect us into a higher wisdom, rooted in the wisdom of the creative process. The chaos that we fear is the very thing that can free us.
– Marion Woodman
Nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.
– Leo Tolstoy
Let us walk in the white snow
In a soundless space;
With footsteps quiet and slow,
At a tranquil pace,
Under veils of white lace.
– Elinor Wylie
The world is of glass.
And disappearance is within us.
– Paul Celan
The work is hard, the perks are few, the pay is terrible, and the product, when it’s finally finished, is pure joy.
– Mary Lee Settle
Nietzsche once said that before the path can be followed, one must first have found the lantern. And the lantern can only be found after a conscientious submission of ego sovereignty and a purgatory of fear and trembling.
– James Hollis
Reading
It’s nice
after dinner
to walk down to
the beach
and find
the biggest
thing on earth
relatively calm.
– A.R. Ammons
Gratitude to Old Teachers
When we stride or stroll across the frozen lake,
We place our feet where they have never been.
We walk upon the unwalked. But we are uneasy.
Who is down there but our old teachers?
Water that once could take no human weight—
We were students then—holds up our feet,
And goes on ahead of us for a mile.
Beneath us the teachers, and around us the stillness.
– Robert Bly
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
We fret about words, we writers. Words mean. Words point. They are arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality. Writers are emblems of the persistence (and the necessity) of individual vision. It is the job of the writer to depict the realities. the foul realities: the realities of rapture.
– Susan Sontag
We were Romantics. We didn’t just read poetry, we let it drip from our tongues like honey. Spirits soared, women swooned and gods were created, gentlemen.
– John Keating
I just try to always remember where that initial spark came from, and it’s like a pilot light, and I try to make sure that thing doesn’t go out.
– Eddie Vedder
Your whole imaginative vocabulary of sounds is already buried in you by the time you’re nineteen or twenty years old and you’re just following these little paths through the summer grasses that other people have walked.
– Robert Hass
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.
– G.K. Chesterton
The extraordinary thing that is about to happen is matched only by the extraordinary moment just before it happens. Advent is the name of that moment.
– Frederick Buechner
Then, too, I would argue that poetry is where human language retains, resuscitates, protects, and extends its natural origins. Poetry is both nerve and notion, instinct and abstraction. The tectonic volatilities and more-than-conscious calms of its soundscapes can reach way, way back—and powerfully, paradoxically forward—in both time and mind. Poetry makes nothing happen? Might as well say nature makes nothing happen.
– Christian Wiman
Christmas hath a darkness
Brighter than the blazing noon,
– Christina Rossetti
Imagine viewing Christmas as an occasion to enjoy,
and not something that must be endured.
For that matter, imagine feeling that way
about the rest of the year.
– John Tottenham
‘How much progress shall I make?’ you ask.
Just as much as you try to make.
– Seneca
There are those who seek knowledge for the sake of knowledge; that is Curiosity.
There are those who seek knowledge to be known by others; that is Vanity.
There are those who seek knowledge in order to serve; that is Love.
– Bernard of Clairvaux
What kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for?
– Salman Rushdie
winter moon –
to some questions, there are
no answers ~
– Rosie Mann
You ironically have to have a very strong ego structure to let go of your ego. You need to struggle with the rules more than a bit before you throw them out. You only internalize values by butting up against external values for a while.
– Richard Rohr
A lovely thing about Christmas
is that it’s compulsory,
like a thunderstorm,
and we all go through it together.
– Garrison Keillor
You can’t think yourself out of a writing block; you have to write yourself out of a thinking block.
– John Rogers
Tonight, our hearts are in Bethlehem, where the Prince of Peace is once more rejected by the futile logic of war, by the clash of arms that even today prevents him from finding room in the world.
– Pope Francis
Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.
– Thomas Gray
Just win me or lose me
It is this that the darkness is for
– Lady Midnight
They say that she who flies highest, falls farthest… But we can’t forget that she who doesn’t flap her wings, never flies at all.
– Hunter S. Thompson
Every moment is a poem if you hold it right.
– Lauren Zuniga
Ark
by Ed Madden
Christmas 1966
The small box is filled with little beasts—
a barn that’s a barge, a boat—the ark’s
ridged sides like boards, a plastic plank,
a deck that drops in fitted slots, but lifted
reveals that zoo of twos—heaped beasts
to be released beneath a glittering tree,
its dove-clipped limbs. Dad’s asleep
in his reclining seat, and crumpled waves
of paper recede as Mom circles the room.
The humming wheel throws light across the walls.
bedtime cocoa
i unfriend the ghost
of christmas past
– Roberta Beary
and all the noise of the universe stills / to an oboe hum, the given note of a perfect / music…
– John F. Deane, Canticle
Journey of the Magi
A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins,
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
– T. S. Eliot
There is a manger,
But it is buried under
The rubble of war.
– @cross_mouse
Europe, the narrowing western peninsula of Eurasia, is a fish trap. Migrating peoples have poured into it for millennia,…struggling as they find they can go no farther. It’s also a paradox: a quadrilateral with only three sides.
– Neal Ascherson
All of us have to ask this simple but piercing question of our relationships, affiliations, professions, politics and our theology: “Does this path, this choice, make me larger or smaller?” Usually we know the answer immediately because we always intuitively know and yet are afraid of what we know and even more afraid of what it may ask of us.
– James Hollis
Christmas at Melrose
by Leslie Pinckney Hill
Come home with me a little space
And browse about our ancient place,
Lay by your wonted troubles here
And have a turn of Christmas cheer.
These sober walls of weathered stone
Can tell a romance of their own,
And these wide rooms of devious line
Are kindly meant in their design.
Sometimes the north wind searches through,
But be shall not be rude to you.
We’ll light a log of generous girth
For winter comfort, and the mirth
Of healthy children you shall see
About a sparkling Christmas tree.
Eleanor, leader of the fold,
Hermione with heart of gold,
Elaine with comprehending eyes,
And two more yet of coddling size,
Natalie pondering all that’s said,
And Mary with the cherub head—
All these shall give you sweet content
And care-destroying merriment,
While one with true madonna grace
Moves round the glowing fire-place
Where father loves to muse aside
And grandma sits in silent pride.
And you may chafe the wasting oak,
Or freely pass the kindly joke
To mix with nuts and home-made cake
And apples set on coals to bake.
Or some fine carol we will sing
In honor of the Manger King
Or hear great Milton’s organ verse
Or Plato’s dialogue rehearse
What Socrates with his last breath
Sublimely said of life and death.
These dear delights we fain would share
With friend and kinsman everywhere,
And from our door see them depart
Each with a little lighter heart.
It being Christmas eve, there was, as I had forseen, a great deal of revelry and what not.
– P.G. Wodehouse
setting sun
in my hands
sea pebbles
– Hifsa Ashraf
one good thing about a poetry book:
you can squeeze it
into a tightly packed bookshelf
– Wayne Koestenbaum
THE TRUTH IS A NIMBLE LITTLE CREATURE
Gratitude, too.
The only flippin’ truth
is everything moves
says the moon, hovering
over every mantra,
every sparrow,
every dollar, every
Congo, every nation,
every little good intention.
The more difficult the world
the greater the imperative
toward blame,
toward distraction,
toward impossible heights
and humble strings
of twinkle lights.
My love, let us vow
that through the winter
we shall pause by the river
where below the frozen surface
surely tiny fish are feeding.
Let us make a practice
of coming to bear
the weather,
of gathering by the fire,
of reading to one another
as the sparrow wears
her feather, as the moon
resolves to move,
as the body knows
surrender, as the leaves
believe September,
as rhyme succumbs
to reason, as the pause
to remember
descends upon the season.
– Wendy Videlock
Once the climate crisis has gotten your attention, you can’t look away. Once you fully understand the magnitude of the problem, you can’t erase it.
– @GretaThunberg
We love what we have, no matter how little,
because if we don’t, everything will be gone.
– Mosab Abu Toha
slow waking
outside the window
winter fog
– @HaikuDiem
as the end of year approaches all I can think is I can’t believe I have to pay taxes to this war/mongering children-killing fascist theocracy we call a “democracy”
– Brian Tierney
Nothing happens unless first we dream.
– Carl Sandburg
I cannot tell you
how the light comes.
What I know
is that it is more ancient
than imagining.
That it travels
across an astounding expanse
to reach us.
That it loves
searching out
what is hidden,
what is lost,
what is forgotten
or in peril
or in pain.
That it has a fondness
for the body,
for finding its way
toward flesh,
for tracing the edges
of form,
for shining forth
through the eye,
the hand,
the heart.
I cannot tell you
how the light comes,
but that it does.
That it will.
That it works its way
into the deepest dark
that enfolds you,
though it may seem
long ages in coming
or arrive in a shape
you did not foresee.
And so
may we this day
turn ourselves toward it.
May we lift our faces
to let it find us.
May we bend our bodies
to follow the arc it makes.
May we open
and open more
and open still
to the blessed light
that comes.
– Jan Richardson
There are a vast number of people who are uninformed and heavily propagandized, but fundamentally decent. The propaganda that inundates them is effective when unchallenged, but much of it only goes skin deep. If they can be brought to raise questions and apply their decent instincts and basic intelligence, many people quickly escape the confines of the doctrinal system and are willing to do something to help others who are really suffering and oppressed. This is naturally less true of the better-educated and “more sophisticated” (that is, more effectively indoctrinated) groups who are both the agents, and often the most deluded victims of the propaganda system.
How it is we have so much information, but know so little?
– Noam Chomsky
This is the way I look at the world. I don’t see it as a collection of objects, but as a vast and mysterious organism. I see the beauty in the smallest things, and I find wonder in the most ordinary events. I am always looking for the hidden meaning, the secret message. I am always trying to understand the mystery of life.
I know that I will never understand everything, but that doesn’t stop me from trying. I am content to live in the mystery, to be surrounded by the unknown. I am content to be a seeker, a pilgrim, a traveler on the road to nowhere.
– Henry Miller
Wise men have regarded the earth as a tragedy, a farce, even an illusionist’s trick; but all, if they are truly wise, and not merely intellectual rapists, recognize that it is certainly some kind of stage in which we all play roles, most of us being very poorly coached and totally unrehearsed before the curtain rises. Is it too much if I ask, tentatively, that we agree to look upon it as a circus, a touring carnival wandering about the sun for a record season of four billion years and producing new monsters and miracles, hoaxes and bloody mishaps, wonders and blunders, but never quite entertaining the customers well enough to prevent them from leaving, one by one, and returning to their homes for a long and bored winter’s sleep under the dust?
– Robert Anton Wilson
America’s aggression and hostility and violence and brutality did come home. Along the way, it cost it dearly. How much did America spend on building history’s most perfect killing machine — a system of drones that can assassinate anyone anywhere on earth within minutes, with laser-guided perfection? Enough, anyways, that the average American was left too poor to afford their own healthcare, retirement, and so on. When it came to fighting endless wars, America had an endless amount of money — but when it came to malign social investments, America had none. These things aren’t a coincidence. They’re not just substitutes, either — military spending over social spending. Rather, they’re ideology: America was busy fighting against communism, against socialism — so how could Americans ever understand they would need social investments in public goods of their own? They never did, and that is why today they don’t have any public goods. Almost uniquely in the world, apart from hardcore failed states, Americans have almost nothing. No public healthcare, retirement, higher education, income, and so forth. And then they die in $62,000 of debt. That’s not a coincidence, either: it’s a relationship.
– umair haque
When religion does not give people an inner life or a real prayer life, it is missing its primary vocation. Let me sum up, then, the ways Jesus and the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous are saying the same things but with a different vocabulary: we suffer to get well; we surrender to win; we die to live; we give it away to keep it. This counterintuitive wisdom will forever be resisted as true. It will be denied and avoided until it is forced upon us by some reality over which we are powerless, and if we are honest, we are all powerless over the presence of full reality.
– Richard Rohr
The greatest achievement is selflessness.
The greatest worth is self-mastery.
The greatest quality is seeking to serve others.
The greatest precept is continual awareness.
The greatest medicine is the emptiness of everything.
The greatest action is not conforming with the world’s ways.
The greatest magic is transmuting the passions.
The greatest generosity is non-attachment.
The greatest goodness is a peaceful mind.
The greatest patience is humility.
The greatest effort is not concerned with results.
The greatest meditation is a mind that lets go.
The greatest wisdom is seeing beyond appearances.
– Atisa
Are you willing to stoop down and consider the needs and desires of little children; to remember the weaknesses and lonliness of people who are growing old; to stop asking how much your friends love you, and to ask yourself if you love them enough; to bear in mind the things that other people have to bear on their hearts; to trim your lamp so that it will give more light and less smoke, and to carry it in front so that your shadow will fall behind you; to make a grave for your ugly thougts and a garden for your kindly feelings, with the gate open? Are you willing to do these things for a day? Then you are ready to keep Christmas!
– Henry Van Dyke
There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world, lit or unlit as the light allows.
– Annie Dillard
Christmas is a mood, a quality, a symbol. It is never merely a fact. As a fact it is a date on the calendar — to the believer it is the anniversary of an event in human history. An individual may relate (themselves) meaningfully to the fact or the event, but that would not be Christmas.
The mood of Christmas — what is it? It is a quickening of the presence of other human beings into whose lives a precious part of one’s own has been released.
It is a memory of other days when into one’s path an angel appeared spreading a halo over an ordinary moment or a commonplace event. It is an iridescence of sheer delight that bathes one’s whole being with something more wonderful than words can ever tell. Of such is the mood of Christmas
– Howard Thurman, The Growing Edge
Nativity
by Li-Young Lee
In the dark, a child might ask, What is the world?
just to hear his sister
promise, An unfinished wing of heaven,
just to hear his brother say,
A house inside a house,
but most of all to hear his mother answer,
One more song, then you go to sleep.
How could anyone in that bed guess
the question finds its beginning
in the answer long growing
inside the one who asked, that restless boy,
the night’s darling?
Later, a man lying awake,
he might ask it again,
just to hear the silence
charge him, This night
arching over your sleepless wondering,
this night, the near ground
every reaching-out-to overreaches,
just to remind himself
out of what little earth and duration,
out of what immense good-bye,
each must make a safe place of his heart,
before so strange and wild a guest
as God approaches.
Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steadily falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.
– Dylan Thomas, A Childs’s Christmas in Wales
Black Elk’s phrase, “The center is everywhere,” is matched by a statement from a hermetic, early medieval text, The Book of the 24 Philosophers (Liber XXIV philosophorum): “God is an infinite sphere, whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.”
– Joseph Campbell
They kept asking me, ‘What does the poem mean? What does the poem mean?’ And it was frustrating me because poems don’t mean. They suggest. They enact. They provoke.
– Richard Siken
They were my dreams—
The ones that you snatched away.
Songs that withered on my lips
Those were my songs.
– Saleem Gilani
Red Brocade
The Arabs used to say,
When a stranger appears at your door,
feed him for three days
before asking who he is,
where he’s come from,
where he’s headed.
That way, he’ll have strength
enough to answer.
Or, by then you’ll be
such good friends
you don’t care.
Let’s go back to that.
Rice? Pine nuts?
Here, take the red brocade pillow.
My child will serve water
to your horse.
No, I was not busy when you came!
I was not preparing to be busy.
That’s the armor everyone put on
to pretend they had a purpose
in the world.
I refuse to be claimed.
Your plate is waiting.
We will snip fresh mint
into your tea.
– Naomi Shihab Nye
I hate “winning”
against my enemy.
It always involves
a split in my heart
where I pretend my enemy
isn’t me
and I persuade myself
to go insane and delusional
in a socially acceptable way
stomping myself down lower
while another part
twistedly gloats.
– Chelan Harkin
My magic words have turned out to be ‘I don’t know.’
– Rachel Naomi Remen
And numerous indeed are the hearts to which Christmas brings a brief season of happiness and enjoyment.
– Charles Dickens
Great writing can make you face the truth around you and within yourself.
– Elizabeth Alexander
Outside my window
it keeps reciting itself—
the snowflake sutra.
– Jan Häll
Nobody on this earth which has lots of people could speak as willingly about ‘morality’ as he, based on a code that is personal but implacably strict. His morality: a circle of fire, and at the center, the poet.
– Jean Cau on Jean Genet
People with a repressed shadow – that is, with a heavy lid on their un-lived life have various giveaways. The first giveaway is that they will be heavy and serious and lacking a sense of humor. They see everything as a moral issue. Such people can’t lighten up.
– Richard Rohr
Once it realizes that it does not have an absolute starting point and must abandon the assumption of a view from nowhere, philosophy can only secure its independence of judgement through a historical self-reference. However, this self-reference must go beyond a short-winded reflection on how current thinking is always tied to the historical context of its social references and political challenges. The historical self-assurance of philosophy must be wider in scope and include a reconstruction of both strands of the philosophical heritage. It is only in the light of the heritage from which philosophy in its postmetaphysical guise has detached itself that we can comprehend the heritage it has assumed: the emancipation to use one’s rational freedom means at once liberation and normative obligation. Only an understanding of the reasons that have compelled the philosophy of the subject since the Reformation to undertake an anthropocentric shift in perspective, and above all to embrace the postmetaphysical rejection of belief in a restitutive or ‘redemptive’ justice, will open our eyes to the degree of willingness to cooperate that communicatively socialized subjects must demand of the use of their rational freedom.
– Jűrgen Habermas
My whole psychology is such that it can be accepted only by someone who is ready for it.
– CG Jung
Habitable Nebula
by Timothy Donnelly
The long night reminds me that so much of what it means
to be a person shines through obscurity, like odd condiments
bought on impulse, tested once, then pushed to the back
of the refrigerator in their smartly labeled bottles and jars.
It’s like a birth of stars, or nights an actor plays their part
so flawlessly, the audience gives no thought to gastroenteritis
or its various causes (viruses, bacteria, bacterial toxins,
parasites and so forth) till hours after the last act is dust.
But setting aside all that small stuff, there’s still the entirety
of the past, invisible or visible only in traces, as among the blur
that sets in during speeches, or when speeding to the launch
past signage that tries to communicate but by habit we ignore.
I still can’t say what life is for, but it can’t be to pretend
that every part of it is knowable, or that what appears to be
to the naked eye or in the middle ground or documented on paper
approximates a person any better than a daisy does our sun.
When at a loss for what I am, I know I must be feeling it
deep in the layers, where a turbulence gives rise to clouds
so massive they collapse in a bliss of gravity, condensing into this
music I can daisy into morning as it daisies me into morning.
Mallarmé’s … realization that nothing is producible of which we can say that “flower” is the name … That the word, not anything the word is tied to, is the only substantiality to be discovered in a poem gave [him] ecstatic shivers …
… to command words’ potencies was to oversee magic; to let them take the initiative was to set in motion glitterings “like a trail of fire upon precious stones.”
– Hugh Kenner
For outlandish creatures like us, on our way to a heart, a brain, and courage, Bethlehem is not the end of our journey but only the beginning – not home but the place through which we must pass if ever we are to reach home at last.
– Frederick Buechner
The spider is a repairer. If you bash into the web of a spider, she doesn’t get mad. She weaves and repairs it.
– Louise Bourgeois
blue of the ink
on my middle finger–
a butterfly is born
– Yamashita Chizuko
We do not ask for what useful purpose the birds do sing, for song is their pleasure since they were created for singing. Similarly, we ought not to ask why the human mind troubles to fathom the secrets of the heavens. The diversity of the phenomena of nature is so great and the treasures hidden in the heavens so rich precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking in fresh nourishment.
– Johannes Kepler
I think sometimes I am not a woman, but the light that falls on this gate, on this ground. I am the seasons, I think sometimes, January, May, November; the mud, the mist, the dawn.
– Virginia Woolf
I will light candles this Christmas.
Candles of joy, despite all the sadness.
Candles of hope where despair keeps watch.
Candles of courage where fear is ever present.
Candles of peace for tempest-tossed days.
Candles of grace to ease heavy burdens.
Candles of love to inspire all of my living.
Candles that will burn all the year long.
– Howard Thurman, Meditations Of The Heart
To contemplate comes from ‘templum, temple, a place, a space for observation, marked out by the augur*.’ It means, not simply to observe, to regard, but to do these things in the presence of a god. And to meditate is “to keep the mind in a state of contemplation”; its synonym is “to muse,” and to muse comes from a word meaning “to stand with open mouth”—not so comical if we think of “inspiration”—to breathe in.
So—as the poet stands open-mouthed in the temple of life, contemplating his experience, there come to him the first words of the poem: the words which are to be his way in to the poem, if there is to be a poem. The pressure of demand and the meditation on its elements culminate in a moment of vision, of crystallization, in which some inkling of the correspondence between those elements occurs; and it occurs in words.
– Denise Levertov
I believe in song. … I believe in the beauty of the singing whale … the whole range of song that the wolf makes when the moon appears, or neighborhood dogs make … and this is the wonder of life on earth, and I in great humility wish to join this.
– Stan Brakhage
Hope, neuroscientists say, resides in the orbitofrontal cortex, one of the most confounding parts of the human brain, which somehow directs our decision-making and expectation and memory and emotional behaviors and our hedonic experiences —which is to say, what devastates us and what makes our life worth living. It is located just above out eyes: it dictates how we see the world. I wonder if this is why, to envision a hoped-for beyond or to focus better on a hopeful wish or a prayer, we close our eyes, or look up.
– Anna Badkhen
Stress is an alarm clock that lets you know you’ve attached to something not true for you.
– Byron Katie
Always keep your foes confused. If they are never certain who you are or what you want, they cannot know what you are like to do next.
– George R.R. Martin
Our most emotionally active life is lived in our dreams, and our cells renew themselves most industriously in sleep. We reach highest in meditation, and farthest in prayer. In stillness every human being is great; he is free from the experience of hostility; he is a poet, and most like an angel.
– Leonard Bernstein
There have been men whose names are unknown because they cared little for fame, and truth radiated from them without knowing it. There have been revealers who were unaware of the revelation that was in them; modest sages who mingled their wisdom with their daily life . . . We have all of us met, at least once in our lives, one of these unheralded initiators, and received from them a priceless gift, by a kindly word, a certain look of sadness, a sincere expression in the eyes.
– Maurice Magre
Weak and narrow are the powers implanted in the limbs of men; many the woes that fall on them and blunt the edge of thought; short is the measure of the life in death through which they toil; then are they borne away, like smoke they vanish into air, and what they dream they know is but the little each has stumbled on in wandering about the world; yet boast they all that they have learned the whole—vain fools! For what that is, no eye has seen, no ear has heard, nor can it be conceived by the mind of man. You, then, since you have fallen to this place, shall know no more than human wisdom may attain. But, gods avert the madness of those babblers of my tongue, and cause the stream of holy words to issue from my lips. And you, great muse of memory, maiden with the milk-white arms, I pray to you to teach me things that creatures of a day may hear.
– Empedokles
There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns. If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself. What we call chaos is just patterns we haven’t recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can’t decipher. what we can’t understand we call nonsense. What we can’t read we call gibberish. There is no free will. There are no variables.
– Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor
I wish I knew no astronomy when stars appear
– Joseph Brodsky, A Song
Hey you, expecting results without effort! So sensitive! So long-suffering! You, in the clutches of death, acting like an immortal! Hey, sufferer, you are destroying yourself! Now that you have met with the boat of human life, cross over the mighty river of suffering. Fool, there is no time to sleep! It is hard to catch this boat again.
– Śāntideva, Bodhicaryāvatāra
The current generation now sees everything clearly, it marvels at the errors, it laughs at the folly of its ancestors, not seeing that this chronicle is all overscored by divine fire, that every letter of it cries out, that from everywhere the piercing finger is pointed at it, at this current generation; but the current generation laughs and presumptuously, proudly begins a series of new errors, at which their descendants will also laugh afterwards.
– Nikolai Gogol
Where refugees seek deliverance that never comes,
And the heart consumes itself, if it would live,
Where little children age before their time,
And life wears down the edges of the mind,
Where the old man sits with mind grown cold,
While bones and sinew, blood and cell,
go slowly down to death,
Where fear companions each day’s life,
And Perfect Love seems long delayed.
Christmas is waiting to be born:
In you, in me, in all of humankind.
– Howard Thurman
Unmindful people go after sensory objects and get bewildered. Those who are mindful, on the other hand, want to find the root of the entire process.
– Bhante Gunaratana and Julia Harris
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, Iron John
Is it wholeness I want?
Or fission? Frisson of, its
frequency, its pitch?
– Susan Mitchell
To make the candle ready for its flame.
– Dante
One could spend his entire life on it.
– Bachelard
I shall continue to spend Christmas sleeping, daydreaming, and idling.
– Franz Kafka, 1913.
The 26th of December
by Galway Kinnell
A Tuesday, day of Tiw,
god of war, dawns in darkness.
The short holiday day of talking by the fire,
floating on snowshoes among
ancient self-pollarded maples,
visiting, being visited, giving
a rain gauge, receiving red socks,
watching snow buntings nearly over
their heads in snow stab at spirtled bits
of sunflower seeds the chickadees
hold with their feet to a bough
and hack apart, scattering debris
like sloppy butchers, is over.
Irregular life begins. Telephone calls,
Google searches, evasive letters,
complicated arrangements, faxes,
second thoughts, consultations,
e-mails, solemnly given kisses.
If you can’t
do what you live for
you die,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
Remember, if Christmas isn’t found in your heart, you won’t find it under a tree.
– Charlotte Carpenter
‘How do you do it?’ said night.
‘How do you wake and shine?’
‘I keep it simple’, said light.
‘One day at a time’.
– Lemn Sissay
a bridge between
snow-covered mountains
white egrets
– Basho
In the deepest sense we all dream not out of ourselves but out of what lies between us and the other.
– C. G. Jung
I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas.
– Sylvia Plath
It is too much. You steadfastly love and serve everyone, see people through tribulation, savor the relief, and give thanks. Then boing—a new setback. It’s like tucking an octopus into bed at night: new arms keep popping out.
– Anne Lamott
Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
– Mark Strand
Opening up your sense of self to also consist of relationships reveals how the self is constructed through interconnectedness.
– Sumi Loundon Kim
When we meditate, we develop a creative awareness that enables us to see that we are a flow of inner conditions meeting outer conditions. We begin to discover the fallacy in reducing our identity to any one of the conditions that form us.
– Martine Batchelor
The world will entangle you in projections and oppressions, twisting your shape through fear of unsafety, the promise of recognition or belonging and lucre.
No on gets by without bruises in need of more than soothing, but the soul-healing that invites the labor of a lifetime or life times.
But the treacherous trick of all is this: When this twisting of our shape (a literal shape-shifting) goes unnoticed, we come to mistake the disfigurement that we have become as our own shape.
This falsehood, some would call the creation of the false-self, can steal a life and injure all those connected to that life (meaning all life).
Friends: Carve out of the hunk of marble you were given a shape that is yours, however painful the resistance to norms is, however sacrificial you must be of seductions and promises, however long your night is, however chapped your hands are. Believe me, you are needed; you are as intimate with ocean waves as water.
– David Bedrick
In writing and art we do not force the words, or the brush or the guitar. We do not push. We flow alongside the medium with ease. The medium pulls US when it is flowing, and pouring. We bend. We lean. We allow. Become the water. It surrenders. It is fluid. It is the way of creation. It is the way of discovery.
– Victoria Erickson
your dream
of lilacs
has come true
– Akari
Returning. Twilight sky.
Vishnu’s conch painted on a wall
between the crossroads.
– Kim Dorman
Sometimes I go backwards and
backwards go I, sometimes,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
The electric lightbulb will never provoke in us the reveries of this living lamp. We have entered an age of administered light. Our only role is to flip a switch. We are no more than the mechanical subject of a mechanical gesture. We cannot take advantage of this act to become, with legitimate pride, the subject of the verb “to light”.
– Gaston Bachelard
The more insecure the ego, the less it can tolerate differences, bear ambivalences. Thus fundamentalisms and militant groups of all kinds are fed by streams of fear and a violent need to dissociate from the otherness that lies within each of us.
– James Hollis
a path through time
old family recipes
– James Welsh
The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can’t help it.
– Leo Rosten
Christmas Poem
Money, if drones are bombing eight countries right now.
Money, if drones are bombing seven countries right now.
Guns, if we are saturating the world with guns, and if the war is always invisible to me.
If the world is warming because of fossil fuel consumption, so that
winter will disappear, then I don’t love my own babies.
If Rikers is putting children into solitary confinement for years, then I
am not capable of love.
If crude oil begins to flow in pipes beneath sacred waters, then I am
not capable of love.
The empire bends her head over her cup of coffee. One baby is 101.2.
The boy is 103.2.
Snow falls softly outside. The fire is burning. Something is baking.
There is a pretty rug in front of the fire I—
my father wasn’t alive on earth this Christmas. Incomprehensible to
me that he is no longer on earth.
In order to think clearly, I need something that I don’t have.
– Sarah Vap
There was a time when people felt as if structure in most forms were a constraint and they attacked it, which in a culture is like an autoimmune problem: the organism is not allowing itself the conditions of its own existence.
– Marilynne Robinson
But there are the others, the others within us, I grant you, and we can do nothing about it.
– Jacques Derrida
Inner strengths are fundamental to a happy, productive, and loving life. They also strengthen your immune system, protect your heart, and foster a healthier and longer life.
– Rick Hanson
Writing is about generosity, passing on to other people what you’ve had the misfortune of having to find out for yourself.
– Fay Weldon
I will train myself to look deeply to see your true nature: you are my loving mother, a living being, a great being—an immense, beautiful, and precious wonder.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Consciousness is a very recent acquisition of nature, and it is still in an “experimental” state. It is frail, menaced by specific dangers, and easily injured.
– CG Jung
We all are born whole and, let us hope, will die whole. But somewhere early on our way, we eat one of the wonderful fruits of the tree of knowledge, things separate into good and evil, and we begin the shadow-making process; we divide our lives.
– Robert A. Johnson
The Girl Who Felt Colors
by Skaidrite Stelzer
The house had nowhere to go.
I let it hold me.
Turning sixteen, I knew
Already that things keep on
Looking the same.
They don’t rub off,
I thought.
Closing my eyes
I started to feel the blue
Like little crosses.
The orange different,
Wanting to draw my fingers in.
It stuck.
The Crimea is a hard place.
I turned my eyes off.
The Ural Mountains’ grey sledges
Turning in on themselves,
Holding all hues.
I wanted to draw them out
Through my fingers.
Embroidery thread yellow
Is soft and smooth
Like gliding through air.
They are taking me to Moscow
Where the professors
Sort spools in their black bag.
I reach my hand inside.
“What color?” they ask.
I wonder if I should open my eyes.
If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.
– C.G. Jung
Do not speak to me about your love. What you call love oozes with self-interest and desirousness.
– @RedBookJung
We are all primed to find the joy around us.
– Stew Sinclair
Christmas is a holiday that persecutes the lonely, the frayed, and “the rejected.”
– Jimmy Cannon
The doomed generation takes a final step forward, ignoring all the signs that state the obvious, and leaps into a trip no drug known to man could ever encompass.
– Hunter S. Thompson
and rare and losing out richly, not playing any longer soon won’t be playing, forlorn,
But still alive here absolutely covered with prophetic eyes.
– Hélène Cixous
If you can fall in love again and again… if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical… you’ve got it half licked.
– Henry Miller
Seek not the good in external things; seek it in yourselves.
– Epictetus
But in this mutual disenchantment from their secret, they attain a new and more blessed life, neither animal nor human.
– Georgio Agamben
He that hopes to look back hereafter with satisfaction upon past years, must learn to know the present value of single minutes, and endeavour to let no particle of time fall useless to the ground.
– Samuel Johnson
It takes one durable person to believe that fantasy is as potent as reality. Seeing too far into others’ lives can make you cynical.
– Alan Gurganus
And Siobhan says people go on holidays to see new things and relax, but it wouldn’t make me relaxed and you can see new things by looking at earth under a microscope or drawing the shape of the solid made when 3 circular rods of equal thickness intersect at right angles. And I think that there are so many things just in one house that it would take years to think about all of them properly. And also, a thing is interesting because of thinking about it and not because of it being new.
– Mark Haddon
When The Shoe Fits
by Chuang Tzu
Translated by Thomas Merton
Ch’ui the draftsman
Could draw more perfect circles freehand
Then with a compass.
His fingers brought forth
Spontaneous forms from nowhere. His mind
Was meanwhile free and without concern
With what he was doing.
No application was needed
His mind was perfectly simple
and knew no obstacle.
So, when the shoe fits
The foot is forgotten,
When the belt fits
The belly is forgotten,
When the heart is right
“For” and “against” are forgotten.
No drives, no compulsions,
No needs, no attractions:
Then your affairs
Are under control.
You are a free man.
Easy is right. Begin right
And you are easy.
Continue easy and you are right.
The right way to go easy
Is to forget the right way
And forget that the going is easy.
A light appeared and the place brightened
the way the sky does when heaven’s candle
is shinning clearly.
– Seamus Heaney
My lifetime ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form.
– Milan Kundera
You spend a lot of time thinking about how to write a book, you probably shouldn’t be talking about it. You probably should be doing it.
– Cormac McCarthy
As we face a very uncertain future, the answer is not to do better what we’ve done before. We have to do something else. The challenge is not to fix this system but to change it; not to reform it but to transform it.
– Sir Ken Robinson, Creative Schools
Healthy religion gives us a foundational sense of awe. It re-enchants an otherwise empty universe… Only with such reverence do we find confidence and coherence. Only then does the world become a safe home.
– Richard Rohr
Place and mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered
– Nan Shepherd
Poetry is pure risk. Really good poetry, that is. If you’re not afraid of writing it, something’s wrong.
– Robin Coste Lewis
america says if youre not working yourself to the bone then youre not worth a shit—but art requires exile and cunning, silence and retreat, long fallow periods of inactivity, sometimes years outside the light of attention. the capacity to follow your internal compass.
– @MrHWM
I was never going to become anything but myself.
– Patti Smith
Peace has hidden her lovely face
And turned in tears away.
Yet the sun, through the war-cloud, sees
Babies asleep on their mother’s knees.
While there are love and home—and these—
There shall be Christmas Day.
– Joyce Kilmer
A man walks down the street.
It’s a street in a strange world.
Maybe it’s the third world.
Maybe it’s his first time around.
He doesn’t speak the language.
He holds no currency.
He is a foreign man.
He is surrounded by the sound,
sound of cattle in the marketplace,
scatterlings and orphanages.
He looks around,
around he sees angels in the architecture
spinning in infinity and he says,
“Amen” and “Hallelujah!”
– Paul Simon
In no small way, all big forests are home to Indigenous peoples. By no accident, 40% of the world’s most intact ecological systems, including over one-third of the best remaining large-scale forests on Earth, or intact forest landscapes, are on lands managed and loved by Indigenous peoples in relationship with plants and animals of their territories for millennia. In contrast to the concept of untrammeled wilderness, many of the most life-sustaining ecosystems on Earth are, in part, engineered and designed across generations by Indigenous peoples.
– Valerie Courtois and Chris Filardi
Listen to the air. You can hear it, feel it, smell it, taste it. Woniya wakan—the holy air—which renews all by its breath. Woniya, woniya wakan—spirit, life, breath, renewal—it means all that. Woniya—we sit together, don’t touch, but something is there; we feel it between us, as a presence. A good way to start thinking about nature, talk about it. Rather talk to it, talk to the rivers, to the lakes, to the winds as to our relatives.
– John (Fire) Lame Deer
What I have known with respect to myself, has tended much to lessen both my admiration, and my contempt, of others.
– Joseph Priestley
The spiral in psychology means that when you make a spiral you always come over the same point where you have been before, but never really the same, it is above or below, inside, outside, so it means growth.
– Carl Gustav Jung
I open my journal, write a few
sounds with green ink,
and suddenly
fierceness enters me, stars
begin to revolve, and pick up
alligator dust from under the ocean.
The music comes, I feel the bushy
tail of the Great Bear
reach down and brush the sea floor.
– Robert Bly
Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
– David Foster Wallace
Then spoke Gangleri: ‘If norns determine the fates of men, they allot terribly unfairly, when some have a good and prosperous life, and some have little success or glory, some a long life, some short.’
High said: ‘Good norns, ones of noble parentage, shape good lives, but as for those people that become the victims of misfortune, it is evil norns that are responsible.
– Anthony Faulkes, Edda: Skaldskaparmal
When God wants to drive a person insane, he grants that person’s every wish.
– Paulo Coelho
The purpose of man is to develop from this essence a certain type of reason, which will constitute him one of the permanent brain cells of all life.
God is both the creator and an evolving being. He aims at developing by developing his brain cells. As we develop will, consciousness and individuality we become more ready to take our place as one of the brain cells of the universe. It is a necessity for the universe taken as a whole to develop individuals having these three functions. At about the age of twenty-five George Bernard Shaw had a realisation that nature aims at brains. All his paradoxes and plays flow from this mechanically. But let us define “brains” more clearly. Ponder for a moment the thought that nature aims at individuals having will, consciousness and individuality. A realisation of this will draw together all other knowledge and ideas, as opposed to modern attempts to find a unity of thought. It is like lifting a tent-pole with the canvas which had before lain shapeless on the ground.
– A.R. Orage
Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology. He would be better advised to abandon exact science, put away his scholar’s gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart through the world. There in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling-halls, in the salons of the elegant, the Stock Exchanges, socialist meetings, churches, revivalist gatherings and ecstatic sects, through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer stores of knowledge than text-books a foot thick could give him, and he will know how to doctor the sick with a real knowledge of the human soul.
– Carl Gustav Jung
nightshining
round earth
a wanderer with borrowed light
– Parmenides, (tr. Stanley Lombardo)
I often say to schizoid people that their madness does not consist in what they see and believe, but in telling it to the wrong people.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
I must dream myself
back into my own world.
– Virginia Woolf
I never sleep anymore, only in the late morning. Who would want to sleep inside a forest of the night, so full of questions? With my hands clasped behind my head, I lie awake in the night and think how happy I was…
– Ingeborg Bachmann, (tr. Philip Boehm)
The true world — we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Reaching people is mighty important, I know, but reaching the best of me is most important right now.
– Anne Sexton
To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.
– Wallace Stevens
And the truth? By what right would others have access to the truth? By what injustice would it be revealed to them, who are worth less than ourselves? Have they striven, have they lain awake to deserve it?
– Cioran, History and Utopia
Curb your desire—don’t set your heart on so many things and you will get what you need.
– Epictetus
I’ve never known / a law to rewind a bullet / or a bomb, to unwind / a spine too busy wrapped / around grief.
– Tariq Luthun
Here and There
I sit and meditate—my dog licks her paws
on the red-brown sofa
so many things somehow
it all is reduced to numbers letters figures
without faces or names only jagged lines
across the miles half-shadows
going into shadow-shadow then destruction
the infinite light
here and there cannot be overcome
it is the first drop of ink
– Juan Felipe Herrera
young artists—you don’t have to be activists too. you don’t have to be 17 things. its enough to be an artist and your art does not have to be overtly political to matter. your art should be beautiful tho. adding beauty to this world—one of the most important tasks we have.
– @MrHWM
…poetry is the language of redemption, revolution, revelation.
– Michellan Sarile-Alagao
I know I have lived over a thousand years and I am yet to be
born.
– Mona Saudi, tr. by Kamal Boullata
A LIFE
The year relents, and free
Of work, I climb again
To where the old trees wait,
Time out of mind, I hear
Traffic down on the road,
Engines high overhead.
And then quiet comes,
A cleft in time, silence
Of metal moved by fire;
The air holds little voices,
Titmice and chickadees,
Feeding through the treetops
Among the new small leaves,
Calling again to mind
The grace of circumstance,
Sabbath economy
In which all thought is song,
All labor is a dance.
The world is made at rest,
In ease of gravity.
I hear the ancient theme
In low world-shaping song
Sung by the falling stream.
Here where a rotting log
Has slowed the flow: a shelf
Of dark soil, level laid
Above the tumbled stone.
Roots fasten it in place.
It will be here a while;
What holds it here decays.
A richness from above,
Brought down, is held, and holds
A little while in flow.
Stem and leaf grow from it.
At cost of death, it has
A life. Thus falling founds,
Unmaking makes the world.
– Wendell Berry
IF ANYWHERE IN these hills around me there is a dreamer, or two dreamers together, looking at the sunset or listening to the rain on the roof, with no words, with no idea of what the next day will be — that’s where ecstasy is, and not in any of the forms we cling to as we try to identify what cannot be named.
– Thaddeus Golas
If those who lead you say, ‘See, the Kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. Rather, the Kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the children of the living Father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty.
– Jesus
It’s not ‘natural’ to speak well, eloquently, in an interesting articulate way. People living in groups, families, communes say little–have few verbal means. Eloquence–thinking in words–is a byproduct of solitude, deracination, a heightened painful individuality.
– Susan Sontag
Darkness comes early
This time of year
Making it hard
To recognize familiar faces
In those of strangers.
– Charles Simic
run your finger along your no-moss mind
that’s not a thought that’s soot
– Frank O’Hara, Song
I would love to dream of time, of the hours that flow and those that fly, if only I could combine candle and hourglass in my imagined cell.
– Gaston Bachelard
There are things that need to be forgotten if you want to keep on living.
– Jim Thompson
The blood jet is poetry,
There is no stopping it.
– Sylvia Plath
The De-spirated One is never depicted through visible or tangible features in the early Buddhist monuments … Footprints on the ground and a slight hollowing of the cushion betray his presence …
– Heinrich Zimmer
I’m searching? / the sentences mutually destroy each other / (it would be well to adorn the moment with flowers) / I’m searching?
– Zuzanna Ginczanka, (trans. Alex Braslavsky)
We cannot tell whether God and the unconscious are two different entities. Both are border-line concepts for transcendental contents. But empirically it can be established, with a sufficient degree of probability, that there is in the unconscious an archetype of wholeness.
– CG Jung
All night the words arrive like horses, horses
that are gone, and then it’s morning.
– Roo Borson
Weathering Hate
by Harryette Mullen
The way, exposed to weather, a body is worn. Velvet threads begin to wither, rapid ripened beyond the burst bloom. Vibrant strands, cut short, fray, unweaving faded fabric. Sun-struck, rain-warped, storm-blasted, rough-sanded in whipping wind that whittles rock.
Small, torturous fractures opened in stone where water freezes in the pores with grains of salt. Cracks in the surface pried apart by unrelenting pressure. With incessant freezing and thawing, shock and fatigue speed rugged stress to ultimate breakdown. Intemperate weather, abrading edges, gradually disintegrates resolute minerals.
A boulder, even a mountain, will wear down. So will bodies, bent and broken under toilsome burdens, caving beneath unbearable weight, in adverse climate, exposed to harsh elements, caustic rains.
Whenever one finds himself in a state of conflict with someone or with a situation, he should entertain the hypothesis that the psyche has propelled him into that situation in order to generate consciousness.
– Edward Edinger
Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.
– Steve Jobs
Once you’re old enough to recognize
a hole in yourself it’s too late for
the hole to be filled.
– Susan Choi
If I could spend Christmas writing and sleeping, dearest, that would be wonderful!
– Franz Kafka, 1912.
Those hot stoves —
trying to stay warm,
the old monk remembered.
– The Old Monk
No harm’s done to history by making it something someone would want to read.
– David McCullough
So Katafalaki rose up against himself, stripped himself of all his posts, and began to search for other ways of manifesting and making sense of his existence.
– Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
I have thrown away my lantern, and I can see the dark.
– Wendell Berry, A Native Hill
The moon is both divided & multiplied
by water: as chance, as the plural of chant.
– Andrew Joron
last hours of autumn
hazy low sun
in a cold sky
– KathyWatts
I won’t begin or end anything on a Friday.
– Truman Capote
The amateur does not know what to do.
The master knows what not to do.
– James Clear
The shortness of life,
so often lamented,
may be the best
thing about it.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
– Susan Sontag
We need solitude, because when we’re alone, we’re free from obligations, we don’t need to put on a show, and we can hear our own thoughts.
– Tamim Ansary
What’s the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as-you-were?
– Mary McCarthy
Tonight, I lie
by the window, my body still
humming like a long dial tone
in the dark.
– Jackleen Holton
There is nothing wrong with wanting to be known as a good poet, but the desire to write good poems is more fruitful in the long run.
– Delmore Schwartz
5.40 p.m.
In a gold light over the paddy fields
blue-tailed bee-eaters
collect on wires, diving into
the still evening air
to feast on dragonflies.
– Kim Dorman
An apparent confusion if lived with long enough / may become orderly.
– Charles Ives
Be as a tower firmly set; Shakes not its top for any blast that blows.
– Dante Alighieri
Why is there such a vast self-help industry in this country? Why do all these selves need help? They have been deprived of something by our psychological culture. They have been deprived of sense that there is…some purpose that has come with them into world.
– James Hilllman
And marbled clouds go scudding by / the many-steepled London sky.
– John Betjeman
All our ideas are nothing but copies of our impressions, or, in other words … it is impossible for us to think of anything, which we have not antecedently felt, either by our external or internal senses.
– David Hume
The Bodhisattvas do not act in a premeditated way, they just communicate.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Don’t crawl up your own ass and disappear.
– Lama Lena
Do we see the world we cannot see through art,
use vision’s virtue, particular
emotions creating sight -Drawn with light
so that the image perfects itself
in our seeing it -Drawn out from dark to make
Bright images of life in our living it
lucidity, clear fire.
– Robert Adamson
Rocks, trees, water, snow. These things, constantly rearranged, made up the scene six months ago, outside the train window on a morning between Christmas and New Year’s.
– Alice Munro
With my pocket money I began to buy the works of the great poets. At times, I could hardly read the lines for excitement, ecstasy.
– Shirley Hazzard
Sure baby, mañana. It was always mañana. For the next few weeks that was all I heard––mañana, a lovely word and one that probably means heaven.
– Jack Kerouac
Intermediaries may need other intermediaries to set them off. That is the new way of looking at the world, as a series of minute interactions in the presence of others. It means that force is no longer in total command. It means that the humble or the timid can contribute to great adventures without being too concerned as to who is superior to whom: a minute ingredient can have as much effect as a large one.
– Theodore Zeldin, An Intimate History of Humanity
A closed mind alway convinces itself it is right. A closed heart always convinces itself it has been harmed more than it has harmed. A enclosed sense of identity always assume itself to be the exception to rules it would impose on everyone else.
– Jim Rigby
The number of cells in living things exceeds the estimated number of sand grains on Earth by a factor of a trillion. It’s 1 million times larger than all the stars in the universe.
– Science.org
‘Cause love’s such an old-fashioned word
And love dares you to care for
The people on the edge of the night
And love dares you to change our way of
Caring about ourselves
This is our last dance
This is our last dance
This is ourselves
– Bowie & Mercury
Let me but live my life from year to year,
With forward face and unreluctant soul;
Not hurrying to, nor turning from, the goal;
Not mourning for the things that disappear
In the dim past, nor holding back in fear
From what the future veils; but with a whole
And happy heart, that pays its toll
To youth and age, and travels on with cheer.
– Henry van Dyke
The fixation of the flesh interferes with the energy flow that is the essence of life.
– Ida Rolf
Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way.
– Kingsley Amis
Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.
– Marcus Aurelius
An Indigenous person is a member of a community retaining memories of life lived sustainably on a land base, as part of that land base.
– Tyson Yunkaporta
Aboriginal peoples, like the ancients, were not so concerned with the science of matter, but rather with the science of the mind. For to them, the universe was mind, and all that existed as physical reality was the product of mind and spirit. Everything physical and material was in essence, manifested thought.
– Kenneth Meadows
The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events. A stone is prototypical ‘thing’: we can ask ourselves where it will be tomorrow. Conversely, a kiss is an ‘event’. It makes no sense to ask where the kiss will be tomorrow. The world is made up of networks of kisses, not of stones. On closer inspection, in fact, even the things that are most ‘thing-like’ are nothing more than long events.
– Carlo Rovelli
Language , the home and dwelling of beauty and meaning , itself begins to think and speak for man and turns wholly into music, not in the sense of outward audible sounds but by virtue of the power and momentum of its inward flow.
– Boris Pasternak
We live in a world that is not perfectible, a world that always presents you with a sense of something undone, something missing, something hurting, something irritating. From that minor sense of discomfort to torture and poverty and murder, we live in that kind of universe. The wound that does not heal—this human predicament is a predicament that does not perfect itself.
But there is the consolation of no exit, the consolation that this is what you’re stuck with. Rather than the consolation of healing the wound, of finding the right kind of medical attention or the right kind of religion, there is a certain wisdom of no exit: this is our human predicament and the only consolation is embracing it. It is our situation, and the only consolation is the full embrace of that reality.
– Leonard Cohen
stay
and watch the next set of possibilities
arise
and fall away
what have you got to lose
but everything
piece by piece
everything
day by day
– Sam Shepard
Just the other day, I was in my neighborhood Starbucks, waiting for the post office to open. I was enjoying a chocolatey cafe mocha when it occurred to me that to drink a mocha is to gulp down the entire history of the New World. From the Spanish exportation of Aztec cacao, and the Dutch invention of the chemical process for making cocoa, on down to the capitalist empire of Hershey, PA, and the lifestyle marketing of Seattle’s Starbucks, the modern mocha is a bittersweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention, and consumerism served with whipped cream on top. No wonder it costs so much.
– Sarah Vowell
You keep asking questions and posing situations, and I keep thinking of my father: A man whose sink had on it one big bar of durable, good soap. And that bar of soap was used for cleaning, shaving, and brushing his teeth. It worked fine; it was fast; it was economical. He could then get on with his day. I think we clutter our minds and our lives in a way people would have liked for my father to clutter his toilet. There is too much clutter and too much thinking and too much devising. I think you need to be true to your work and your friends–these should be small circles. People who have too many friends tend to have too few ideas, I find, and they cover up their disappointment with parties and chatter and movement. Focus on working well and being there for you, your work, and your friends. One bar of soap. Taught me a lot.
– Katharine Hepburn
Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.
– Helen Keller
Love, the World exists nowhere but within.
Our life is lived in transformation.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Everything that happens to us, properly understood, leads us back to ourselves; it is as though there were some unconscious guidance whose aim it is to deliver us from all ties and all dependence and make us dependent on ourselves.
– Carl G. Jung
We have grown very poor in threshold experiences. Falling asleep is perhaps the only such experience that remains to us. (But together with this, there is also waking up.)
– Walter Benjamin
In every moment, we can be mindful, compassionate. The mind can touch these qualities again, come to know them again.
– Sharon Salzberg
Trauma is caused when we are unable to release blocked energies, to fully move through the physical/emotional reactions to hurtful experience. Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.
– Peter Levine and Gabor Mate
What surrounds us, here and now, is not guaranteed. It could just as well not exist—and so man constructs poetry out of the remnants found in ruins.
– Czeslaw Milosz, Ruins and Poetry
Regret is great…for three seconds. Then…move on!
– Chögyam Trungpa
Blessed are those
who break off from separateness
theirs is wild
heaven.
– Jean Valentine
That dream which I never glimpsed
stole away my sleep.
That pain which never arose ate
away at the heart.
– Shohrat Bukhari
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
Dear December,
Teach me the art of holding
endings so lightly.
– Kamilla Tolnoe
Writing comes more easily if you have something to say.
– Sholem Asch
Is that what it means,
the students asked.
Yes, the old monk said,
that is what it means —
mountain means mountain.
– The Old Monk
When ego is gone, you wake up in the middle of the circle and now you’re a part of — not apart from — Life, Good, God.
– Chuck C.
Before words can run out, something in the heart must die.
– Alejandra Pizarnik, (trans. Yvette Siegert)
The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.
– Marcus Aurelius
Poetry sustains life…It restored me, allowed me to come back from the space of woundedness and sadness to a recognition of beauty.
– bell hooks
Naturalized
Can I pull the land from me like a cork?
I leak all over brunch. My father never learned to swim.
I’ve already said too much.
Look, the marigolds are coming in. Look, the cuties
are watching Vice again. Gloss and soundbites.
They like to understand. They like to play devil’s advocate.
My father plays soccer. It’s so hot in Gaza.
No place for a child’s braid. Under
that hospital elevator. When this is over.
When this is over there is no over but quiet.
Coworkers will congratulate me on the ceasefire
and I will stretch my teeth into a country.
As though I don’t take Al Jazeera to the bath.
As though I don’t pray in broken Arabic.
It’s okay. They like me. They like me in a museum.
They like me when I spit my father from my mouth.
There’s a whistle. There’s a missile fist-bumping the earth.
I draw a Pantene map on the shower curtain.
I break a Klonopin with my teeth and swim.
The newspaper says truce and C-Mart
is selling pomegranate seeds again. Dumb metaphor.
I’ve ruined the dinner party. I was given a life. Is it frivolous?
Sundays are tarot days. Tuesdays are for tacos.
There’s a leak in the bathroom and I get it fixed
in thirty minutes flat. All that spare water.
All those numbers on the side of the screen.
Here’s your math. Here’s your hot take.
That number isn’t a number.
That number is a first word, a nickname, a birthday song in June.
I shouldn’t have to tell you that. Here’s your testimony,
here’s your beach vacation. Imagine:
I stop running when I’m tired. Imagine:
There’s still the month of June. Tell me,
what op-ed will grant the dead their dying?
What editor? What red-line? What pocket?
What earth. What shake. What silence.
– Hala Alyan
If something is humanly possible, it’s attainable by you too.
– Marcus Aurelius
Two of the hardest words in the language to rhyme are life and love. Of all words! In Italian, easy. But not English.
– Stephen Sondheim
Think of yourself as dead, you have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly.
– Marcus Aurelius
Had reason ever created a poem, or a symphony, or a painting? If rationality can’t see things like the secret commonwealth, it’s because rationality’s vision is limited. The secret commonwealth is there. We can’t see it with rationality any more than we can weigh something with a microscope: it’s the wrong sort of instrument. We need to imagine as well as measure …
– Philip Pullman, The Secret Commonwealth
Jung noted, any real shift in a person’s psychological frame will require of the ego a significant if not apocalyptic change of attitude.
– James Hollis
I’m not sure that anything brings me more calm than just sitting and listening to music.
– Andrew Quist
I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering…. but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are.
– James Baldwin
The Cabbage Butterfly
by Minnie Bruce Pratt
The human brain wants to complete—
The poem too easy? Bored. The poem too hard?
Angry. What’s this one about? Around the block
the easy summer weather, the picture-puff clouds
adrift in the blue sky that’s no paint-by-numbers.
In the corner garden, the cabbage butterfly
bothers the big leafy heads, trying to complete
its life cycle by hatching a horned monster to
chew holes in the green cloth manufactured so
laboriously by seed germ from air, water,
light, dirt. There’s no end to this, yes, no end.
Even when we want to stop, stop, stop! Even
when someone else calls us monster. Even when
we fear and hope that we will not have the final
word.
I dance to a silent tune. I am the symphony of stars.
– Rumi
WAITING AND WATCHING
by C. Wade Bentley
what we are to do, however,
with our hearts
waiting and watching—truly
I do not know.
—Mary Oliver
We are allowed some tasks at the edges
of the estate: puttering in the potting
sheds; deadheading hollyhocks, petunias,
delphiniums; gathering windfall apples
for the horses and goats. In return,
there are sandwiches and tea, soft seats
near a warm fire. We are not barred
from the ballroom or the fine dining
rooms, of course—“wander where you
will, father”—but perhaps there is
a subtle herding, an unseen dog working
us, under orders to “walk on.” Meanwhile,
our language is no longer taught
in the schools, so we only smile and blink
in the bright noise of children on the pitch,
wave as they hurry past. They will not
have noticed the owl stirring in the dark
line of trees, waking for the night, but
lord love them, look at them run.
Cézanne did not think he had to choose between feeling & thought, as if he were deciding between chaos and order. He did not want to separate the stable things which we see and the shifting way in which they appear.
– Maurice Merleau-Ponty
A winter without winter
Children walk through the forest
Searching for cold.
If there is no winter
Will there be a spring?
– john zbigniew guzlowski
Besides, I’m not in the mood for all this today. I have no desire to demonstrate, surprise, amuse, or persuade. My goal is absolute rest. To know nothing, to teach nothing, to want nothing, to sense nothing, to sleep, and then to sleep more.
– Charles Baudelaire
Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with land surveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.
– Gilles Deleuze
I make something of my sadness
I dream I am writing lines, perfecting an unvarying sentence
I write no less carefully for its being illegible. The world where
I strive in my sleep is diferent: I do not know its alphabet. And
the same: I am building a museum from the roof down.
I write no less carefully for its being illegible, the world where
day breaks. Those of us who cannot name the light write, Just
the same, I am building. A museum, from the roof down,
is the home where lines break. Thus, as should be obvious,
day breaks those of us who cannot name the light. Write just
one line and call it a refrain: I will make something of my sadness.
The home is where lines break thus, as should be obvious by now.
I dream I am, writing lines, perfecting an unvarying sentence.
– Jane Zwart
Edit your life frequently and ruthlessly. It’s your masterpiece after all.
– Nathan W. Morris
two birds
bound by friendship
sharing a home in the same tree
– Issa
i just got finished with an entire year and now you want me to do another one?!
– Emma Bolden
Even though your suffering feels eternal, unrelenting, the new year is full of promise, and it is coming fast.
– Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House
What locked my voice box is also
what taught me how to carve keys from poetry,
and now my words are so good at coming to my own rescue,
fire trucks pull over to let my voice through.
– Andrea Gibson
We Are Orphans
by Avra Margariti
Sometimes they call themself Wendy,
Mother of unwanted changelings and daemons
Fallen out of prams, lost in an eat-or-be-eaten world.
Other times they’re Peter,
King of the land that never was,
Leader of the dead child-spirits seeking a purpose, a home.
Lately, they’re skull-and-crossbones-tired.
Whenever the children—onesies and animal masks—
Fall asleep in trilling treehouse hideouts,
The ruler of Neverland wanders their domain.
“Peter,” the fairies scold, glitter smeared on his skin,
“You need to look after yourself better.”
“Wendy,” the mermaids caution, shells braided through her hair,
“What will become of your children
If you succumb to illness, exhaustion?”
They forget, sometimes, that they’re an orphan too.
“Surprise!” young voices shriek back in arboreal hideouts.
The spider daemons? Have spun the softest hammock.
The dragonfly sprites? Have captured blackberries and shooting stars.
The lost children? They stole meat pies from pirate hold.
“For you,” the children say, dancing a lullaby in motion
Around their dewy-eyed ghost; their guardian
Who recalls what it’s like to be mother, orphan, king.
“We learn speech from men,” as Plutarch noted, “silence from the gods.”
– Pico Iyer
The more one learns of this intricate interplay of soil, altitude, weather, and the living tissues of plant and insect…, the more the mystery deepens. Knowledge does not dispel mystery.
– Nan Shepherd
If you want change, build a strong coalition. Focus on the cause and don’t alienate people. Untether the cause from a specific ideology, or you’ll lose everyone who doesn’t subscribe to that ideology.
– Joel Atallah
Thinking is my fighting.
– Virginia Woolf
baiting one fish
with another
autumn dawn
– Carolyn Hall
the stars –
mirroring men’s minds
for eternity.
– Pure Land Haiku
Awakening is to Chocolate as Enlightenment is to Vanilla.
Awakening will always be a more popular word, but some weirdos just prefer Enlightenment.
– Vince Fakhoury Horn
the old preacher
walking by the mountains
head down
– Allan Burns
stand brave, life-liver
– Joanna Newsom
There’s always the primordial dot: that spark of goodness that exists even before you think. We are worthy of that.
– Chögyam Trungpa
If, while hurrying ostensibly to the temple of truth, we hand the reins over to our personal interests which look aside at very different guiding stars, for instance at the tastes and foibles of our contemporaries, at the established religion, but in particular at the hints and suggestions of those at the head of affairs, then how shall we ever reach the high, precipitous, bare rock whereon stands the temple of truth?
– Arthur Schopenhauer
We live entirely in the past, nourished by dead thoughts, dead creeds, dead sciences. And it is the past which is engulfing us, not the future. The future always has and always will belong to — the poet.
– Henry Miller
The poems can be meta. Thinking about thinking, a practice of practice. See, “A smallness, to travel. An insignificance. Travel writing, I hate you. It suffers so much at the surface.” The self too large for carry-on but has been brought along anyway. “Sustained artifice, and fruity drinks. No postcards: no reason to think of any place but here.”
– Pearl Pirie and Rob Mclennan
More Than Something Else
by Rainy Dawn Ortiz
Something Else.
Some one else
Some where else
That place is here,
In my home,
We are here.
I am brown,
Brown hair,
Brown eyes,
Like cookies Feather tells me, and I like to think it’s perfectly
cooked Pueblo cookies.
My kids are something else,
9 different shades of brown,
All beautiful.
My grandkids are something else,
4 brown eyes, 2 blue eyes,
All Native,
Definitely something else, as I watch them be rowdy, be loving,
be here in this world.
We are here
On this earth
In this time and place
In our homes,
On our lands,
In the cities,
With our families, laughing loudly, cooking together, protecting
each other.
We are something else
With our songs
Our dances.
We pray with corn meal,
Eagle feathers,
Medicine bundles,
Burn some sage, make sure to acknowledge the four directions,
as the sun comes up.
We are the something else,
Who were here,
To greet Christopher Columbus
We were born from
This earth,
Crawled out of the center,
Of our mother’s womb, we are important, we are strong.
We are something else,
We are Pueblo people, Plains people, Forest People, Desert
people, Nomadic people, Cliff dwellers, Ocean fishers, Lake and
river fishers, hunters, medicine collectors, horse riders, artists,
speakers, lawyers, doctors, teachers, we are human beings.
We are something else,
We are Native People,
Indigenous to this land.
We are a proud,
Something else.
Humor may not be laughter, it may not even be a smile; it is primarily a point of view, an attitude toward experience– a tangent. It requires a certain quality of objectivity– the inspired ability to step aside and see one’s self go by.
To take in the total view is to establish perspective, and many things fall into place. What is extra, what does not belong, becomes the source of the overtone, the chuckle that restores the balance.
There is nothing superficial here; there is no cruelty, as is indicated when humor becomes a weapon to embarrass and attack persons. True humor is a weapon, but it is used creatively when it is held firmly in the hands of a man who uses it against himself and his own antics. All the gods of depression, gloom and melancholy must shriek with alarm when there rings down the corridor the merry music of the humorous spirit.
It means that fear is in rout, that there is deep understanding of the process of life and an expansive faith which advises the spirit that, because life is its own restraint, life can be trusted. What a deadly religion if it has no humor– what a dreary life where that precious venture has not emerged.
Thank God for humor!
– Howard Thurman
I love this time – the in-between time, the time after all the gatherings and lights, the time before we swing back into the regular routines of the new year. It is the crack between the worlds, the place where dreaming can unfold and then spiral into being quickly and quietly. It is a place where, if we want them to, solitude and silence can surround us and the soul-hungers we have abandoned can find us once again. It is a time to listen deeply, to stay with stillness open to the impulse to move from the deepest part of what we are.
– Oriah Mountain Dreamer
The Lights Of Kabbalah
The Baal Shem Tov teaches that at the moment right before a person is given a test from the Heavens, one loses all of their previous knowledge and enters a state of Katnus Hamochin, a “small mindedness” – facing the test with only our basic instincts. Meaning it’s not when we know what to do that we get tested, but exactly at the time where we feel we’ve lost everything we once knew. That is how The Most High can really see if we’ve grown.
Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him. It was music. I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization.
– Kurt Vonnegut
The illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths.
– Anton Chekhov
All I do is lose my way. But I have a chance to find myself again if I keep retracing my footsteps, instead of taking the first step, if I return to the explosion of the first image, there where words express nothing but light. I find myself again, and understand myself only where words, faces, figures, walls, myself are no longer to be understood, where sounds are strangers and strange, with meanings dislocated by a very powerful light in which definitions and forms melt, like the shadow that makes light disappear. It is from this silence that speech is born again.
– Eugène Ionesco
During the war, I hungered for the beautiful. I therefore drowned myself in the world of Japanese traditional beauty. I perhaps wanted to flee from reality, but through these experiences I learned and absorbed more than I could ever express.
– Akira Kurosawa
The gods do not protect fools.
Fools are protected by more capable fools.
– Larry Niven
But if you are a true poet you will pay no attention to good advice. You will make your own mistakes in your own peculiar way and so discover your own wisdom.
– James Broughton
For the moment, look at cinema as a mystery religion.
Going to the movies is a group ceremony. One enters the darkened place and joins the silent congregation. Like mass, performances begin at set times. You may come and go but you must be quiet, showing proper respect and awe, as in the Meeting House or at Pueblo dances. Up there at the alter space a rite is about to be performed, which we are expected to participate in.
Then comes the beam of light out of the shadows: the Projector, the Great Projector up there behind us!
Turn out the little lights so that the big light can penetrate the darkness!
Ah, behold the unreeling of the real reality of practically everything: our dreams, our idiocies and raptures, our nativity, passion and death.
– James Broughton
Don’t be the best. Be the only.
– Kevin Kelly
I thought I was recording the dreams I was having; I have realized that it was not long before I began having dreams only in order to write them.
– Georges Perec
Poetry should be written so that if you throw a poem at the window, the glass will shatter.
– Daniil Kharms
wine rings
on the cafe tables—
spring wind
– David Grayson
I Go Back
Tara Shea Burke
I douse myself
in faucet water, water
from well
to faucet, from well
to hose. I wear
my girl skin, let loose
cotton underpants hang from
our wooden swing set, built
by the only men who’ve ever
loved me. No one is here now
so I wear hose water, I hose
myself down, open my mouth
open my legs I taste our mountain
from inside out. I dress in water,
hints of metal, all the well picks up
deep earth of family taken like weight,
all pressure against this rusted metal ring.
Green plastic hose, I rope myself. I drink
I hose I wrap my lips around it, fill
my cheeks until I feel the want, my skin
craving burst, my mouth so open so full
so dripping I choke I laugh I cry no one
is here to hear me. To mirror me affirm
me I am not seen so I dress in well
water I dress this wrinkled skin in metal
bits earth bits O I want the well, its depth—
I cry into it, the hose my mouth all
choked tears all tongue and mineral
and bare I want to wear water wear
mountain I want it all back—give me
a family I can fix. I drink her in I stay
this way until I leak laughter, become all
I wanted. Spent, I take my full self
to the tub, I wear the faucet, open myself
to the faucet I leave the door open I wear
the door and while I’m at it I wear my parents
yes.
I wear it all. I live like this alone: a cackle
a scream a body full and waking, all water.
Most people’s first books are their best anyways. It’s the one they wanted most to write.
– Josephine Tey
The idea is to turn flesh and blood into literary characters and literary characters into flesh and blood.
– Philip Roth
This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
– Sylvia Plath
Matter-of-factness between people, doing away with all ideological ornamentation between them, has already itself become an ideology for treating people as things.
– Theodor Adorno
When jarred, unavoidably, by circumstance revert at once to yourself and don’t lose the rhythm more than you can help. You’ll have a better grasp of harmony if you keep going back to it.
– Marcus Aurelius
Bless the things I’ve lost, the people that
have left, and the loneliness they all
traded places with. It forced me to build
a home in the gravity of their absence.
Now, I treat my visitors so much better.
– Rudy Francisco
You are drawing a map to forgiveness. Where you live, where you already are, you just don’t know it yet.
– Sierra DeMulder
Ensure your spiritual perspective Is brave enough To include your wounds.
– Chelan Harkin
Our universities fail to guide us down the easiest paths to wisdom… Rather than teaching a sense of awe, they teach the very opposite: counting and measuring over delight, sobriety over enchantment, a rigid hold on scattered individual parts over an affinity for the unified and whole. These are not schools of wisdom, after all, but schools of knowledge, though they take for granted that which they cannot teach — the capacity for experience, the capacity for being moved, the Goethean sense of wonderment.
– Hermann Hesse
The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.
– J.D. Salinger
Poetry is everywhere and everybody has it. Often we direct our deepest feelings toward this unspeakable thing and call it poetry.
– Dong Li
The year’s doors open
like those of language,
toward the unknown.
Last night you told me:
tomorrow
we shall have to think up signs,
sketch a landscape, fabricate a plan
on the double page
of day and paper.
Tomorrow, we shall have to invent,
once more,
the reality of this world.
– Octavio Paz
(translated by Elizabeth Bishop)
What’s your story? It’s all in the telling. Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story.
Which means that a place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller’s art, and then a way of traveling from here to there. What is it like to be the old man silenced by a stroke, the young man facing the executioner, the woman walking across the border, the child on the rollercoaster, the person you’ve only read about or the one next to you in bed?
We tell ourselves stories in order to live, or to justify taking lives, even our own, by violence or by numbness and the failure to live, tell ourselves stories that save us and stories that are the quicksand in which we thrash and the well in which we drown, stories of justification, of accursedness, of luck and star-crossed love, or versions clad in the cynicism that is at times a very elegant garment. Sometimes the story collapses, and it demands that we recognize we’ve been lost, or terrible, or ridiculous, or just stuck; sometimes change arrives like an ambulance or a supply drop. Not a few stories are sinking ships, and many of us go down with these ships even when the lifeboats are bobbing all around us.
In The Thousand and One Nights, known in English as The Arabian Nights, Scheharazade tells stories in order to keep the sultan in suspense from night to night so he will not kill her. The premise of the vast thicket of stories is that the sultan caught his queen in the embrace of a slave and decided to sleep with a virgin every night and slay her every morning so that he could not be cuckolded again. Scheherazade volunteered to try to end the massacre and did so by telling him stories that carried over from one night to the next for nights that stretched into years.
She spun stories around him that kept him in a cocoon of anticipation from which he eventually emerged a less murderous man. In the course of all this telling she bore three sons and delivered a labyrinth of stories within stories, stories of desire and deception and magic, of tranformation and testing, stories in which the action in one freezes as another storyteller opens his mouth, pregnant stories, stories to stop death.
Do you tell your story or does it tell you? Often, too often, stories saddle us, ride us, whip us onward, tell us what to do, and we do it without questioning. The task of learning to be free requires learning to hear them, to question them, to pause and hear silence, to name them and then to become the storyteller. Those ex-virgins who died were inside the sultan’s story; Scheharazade, like a working-class hero, seized control of the means of production, and talked her way out.
– Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
What could he say that might make sense to them? Could he say love was, above all, common cause, shared experience? That was the vital cement, wasn’t it? Could he say how he felt about their all being here tonight on this wild world running around a big sun which fell through a bigger space falling through yet vaster immensities of space, maybe toward and maybe away from Something? Could he say: we share this billion-mile-an-hour ride. We have common cause against the night. You start with little common causes.
Why love the boy in a March field with his kite braving the sky? Because our fingers burn with the hot string singeing our hands. Why love some girl viewed from a train bent to a country well? The tongue remembers iron water cool on some long lost noon. Why weep at strangers dead by the road? They resemble friends unseen in forty years. Why laugh when clowns are hit by pies? We taste custard we taste life. Why love the woman who is your wife? Her nose breathes the air of a world that I know; therefore I love that nose. Her ears hear music I might sing half the night through; therefore I love her ears. Her eyes delight in seasons of the land; and so I love those eyes. Her tongue knows quince, peach, chokeberry, mint and lime; I love to hear it speaking. Because her flesh knows heat, cold, affliction, I know fire, snow, and pain.
Shared and once again shared experience. Billions of prickling textures. Cut one sense away, cut part of life away. Cut two senses; life halves itself on the instant. We love what we know, we love what we are. Common cause, common cause, common cause of mouth, eye, ear, tongue, hand, nose, flesh, heart, and soul. But … how to say it?
– Ray Bradbury
And this is the old myth of Narcissus. The word Narcissus means narcosis, numbness, a drug; and Narcissus was drugged into thinking that that image outside himself was somebody else. Narcissus did not fall in love with his own image, he thought it was somebody else. And the same with us, in our technology and gadgetry and gimmickry and so on, we don’t think that is merely a part of our own physical organism extended out there, we’re like Narcissus, completely numb.
Now when we put out a new part of ourselves, extend a new part of ourselves by technology into the environment, we protect ourselves by numbing that area. The more I looked at this the more I had difficulty explaining why people ignored it.
– Marshall McLuhan
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
Man literally drives himself into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madness, but madness all the same.
– Ernest Becker
For I am not so enamored of my own opinions that I disregard what others may think of them. I am aware that a philosopher’s ideas are not subject to the judgment of ordinary persons, because it is his endeavor to seek the truth in all things, to the extent permitted to human reason by God. Yet I hold that completely erroneous views should be shunned. Those who know that the consensus of many centuries has sanctioned the conception that the earth remains at rest in the middle of the heaven as its center would, I reflected, regard it as an insane pronouncement if I made the opposite assertion that the earth moves.
– Nicolaus Copernicus
However, this is a magical operation in the sense of the wisdom of the Kabbala, namely that it arises not from magic, but from nature taking its natural and subtle course.
– Paracelsus
For when one considers the universe, can anyone be so simple-minded as not to believe that the Divine is present in everything, pervading, embracing and penetrating it?
– St. Gregory of Nyssa
You are accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not seek for anything. Do not perform anything, do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted.
– Paul Tillich
moon and snow
ignoring each other
last night of the old year
– Basho
Brand New Day (2020)
by Tom Prasada-Rao
It’s been four long years in the wilderness
Four long years in the dark
Four years blinded by ignorance
Running from a cold cold heart
But now it’s time to get back to work
To say goodbye to that horrible jerk
And raise a cup of cheer
To a happier new year
Have no fear
Hop the train
Take the tears
And make it rain
Praise the lord
Say amen
And make love
Into love again
Cause it’s a brand new day
Just because you end up winning a fight
Doesn’t mean you’ve won the war
Doesn’t make everything turn out right
Doesn’t make it like it was before
It won’t be easy, it’s gonna hurt
That’s what it takes for what it’s worth
But in case I wasn’t clear
I’m so glad we’re here
Have no fear
Hop the train
Take the tears
And make it rain
Praise the lord
Say amen
And make love
Into love
Again and again and again
Better than we did back then
Been four long years in the wilderness
Four long years in the dark
Four years blinded by ignorance
Running from a cold cold
Running from a cold cold heart
But it’s a brand new day
Yes it’s a brand new day!
Recurrence
by Dorothy Parker
We shall have our little day.
Take my hand and travel still
Round and round the little way,
Up and down the little hill.
It is good to love again;
Scan the renovated skies,
Dip and drive the idling pen,
Sweetly tint the paling lies.
Trace the dripping, piercèd heart,
Speak the fair, insistent verse,
Vow to God, and slip apart,
Little better, little worse.
Would we need not know before
How shall end this prettiness;
One of us must love the more,
One of us shall love the less.
Thus it is, and so it goes;
We shall have our day, my dear.
Where, unwilling, dies the rose
Buds the new, another year.
Resolutions
The sky: forgive yourself
for being blue. It’s ok
to be blue in a blue world.
The sea: keep breathing,
no matter how hot it gets.
The seasons: be unique.
maintain boundaries.
summer in december
isn’t as cool as it sounds.
The stars: workout more.
become stronger than
those city-light impostors.
The sun: don’t stop moving.
don’t burn out. sunburn
isn’t your fault.
The moon: return responsibility
for human personalities to…
humans. the tides are
heavy enough.
The earth: survive
and keep the kids alive.
me: act like you remember,
you are all of these.
– Will Falk
Rain, New Year’s Eve
The rain is a broken piano,
playing the same note over and over.
My five-year-old said that.
Already she knows loving the world
means loving the wobbles
you can’t shim, the creaks you can’t
oil silent—the jerry-rigged parts,
MacGyvered with twine and chewing gum.
Let me love the cold rain’s plinking.
Let me love the world the way I love
my young son, not only when
he cups my face in his sticky hands,
but when, roughhousing,
he accidentally splits my lip.
Let me love the world like a mother.
Let me be tender when it lets me down.
Let me listen to the rain’s one note
and hear a beginner’s song.
– Maggie Smith
All men are liars, certainly. I just let them sit in that chair and lie till they get tired of lying. Then they begin to tell the truth.
– CG Jung
the pine tree is perfect
Walking in the snowhills the trail goes just right
Eat snow off pine needles
the city’s not so big, the
hills surround it.
– Gary Snyder
It sat there on the branch for a few minutes. / Then picked up and flew beautifully / out of my life.
– Raymond Carver
I have seen your greatness
The strength of your will
What it took you to get this far
Is what will take you further still.
– Lemn Sissay
If you do not have a mystic dimension you do not have a mythology, you have an ideology.
– Joseph Campbell
Thank you for your champagne.
It arrived. I drank it, and I was gayer.
– Marilyn Monroe
If what you know
doesn’t make you ask
questions, it’s useless,
the old monk said.
– @TheOldMonk
If poetry does not carry a lantern from house to house,
if the poor do not know what it ‘means’
we had better discard it!
It is better that we seek immortal silence.
– Mahmoud Darwish
Desire distorts clarity and prevents the extraordinary quality of love.
– Krishnamurti
If it is not right, do not do it. If it is not true, do not say it.
– Marcus Aurelius
When you can
prove it
going both ways,
you know it’s right,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
If we are unduly absorbed in improving our lives we may forget altogether to live them.
– Alan Watts
Poetry, Robert Frost says, is what is lost in translation. To this, Octavio Paz responds: Poetry is what is found in translation. How so? Because the reader suddenly realizes that image is an international language, it crosses boundaries of time and space. . .
– Ilya Kaminsky
The unlived life must be given a chance to express itself and it can only do this if the ego is displaced, as Jung writes: A neurosis is truly removed only when it has removed the false attitude of the ego. We do not cure it – it cures us. A man is ill, but the illness is nature’s attempt to heal him, and what the neurotic flings away as absolutely worthless contains the true gold we should never have found elsewhere.
– David Tacey
In your own life, you may be the ruler. In the Greater Society, you are an integral part of the whole Mandala In your own life, you may be the ruler. In the Greater Society, you are an integral part of the whole Mandala.
– Chögyam Trungpa
The point is not to convert anyone to our view, but rather to help people wake to their own view, their own sanity.
– Chögyam Trungpa
My imagination functions much better when I don’t have to speak to people.
– Patricia Highsmith
People who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief.
– Marshall McLuhan
The history of the world, the street fears, is not layer upon layer, but sequential, where things simply replace one another. Now, the ones who come most frequently are those with long, battered iron carts who take away broken and useless things.
– Sharmistha Mohanty
What can I say about that nectar
which is poison to my lips?
Woe to the oppressor’s fist
that hits my mouth!
– Nadia Anjuman
above the jazz
on my radio
the familiar horn
of geese . . .
long year’s end
– @ruralitalics
Let this be the year you don’t surrender your song.
Lip syncing will not free you.
Honor your voice.
– Dr. Thema
I’ve never been able to put my ideas in order, to follow an idea without noticing another on its way.
– Marguerite Duras, translated by Alta Ifland & Eirenne Nealand
Faithful to the experience of hearing a person speak out of great emotion, the poet here implies that the emotional pressure defies any sort of auditory or rhythmical regularity.
– David T. Porter
Clearances that suddenly stood open.
High cries were felled
and a pure change happened.
– Seamus Heaney
There is an eloquent silence: it serves sometimes to approve, sometimes to condemn; there is a mocking silence; there is a respectful silence.
– François de La Rochefoucauld
But the future ——
who knows? It’s here soon enough.
Why grieve in advance?
Whatever turns up,
I hope it’s happy ——
– Anne Carson
i am not done yet
as possible as yeast
as imminent as bread
a collection of safe habits
a collection of cares
less certain than i seem
more certain than i was
a changed changer
i continue to continue
what i have been
most of my lives is
where i’m going
– Lucille Clifton
“Do you still pray to Isis?” I asked quietly. “Do you still pray to the Goddess?”
“Miriam,” she said with a laugh like frantic frogs signaling the first frost. The cold rains. “What do you think?”
“I don’t know . . .” I admitted. “Who do you pray to, Salome?”
She was a young woman. And then an old woman. Her skin darkened and her hair curled. And then, for just a moment, she looked like me. How could she be so many different things at once? Was it a dream?
She answered finally. “Miriam, I am old enough now to know there is no one god or goddess. I pray to every blade of grass. Every flower. Every person I meet. Every person I hate. But most of all I pray to the women. All of us. For it is we who give birth to the world.”
We sat in the woods for a long time, holding each other, completely silent, praying to those tiny insects churning the air, splitting through the sunshine with their bladed wings.
– Sophie Strand excerpted from The Madonna Secret
It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.
– William Shakespeare
I’m living my dream, and I still dream about this dream, and I still have a lot of dreams within this dream. And also just my evolution as a human being, and the people I meet, and the connection I have with myself and others, is getting stronger and stronger.
– Marion Cotillard
I drank coffee and read old books
and waited for the year to end.
– Richard Brautigan
To look at something as though we had never seen it before requires great courage.
– Henri Matisse
Dreamers make the best drivers, always. They are not afraid of unknown routes, they do not complain about the bumps in the road, and they like the feel of the machine roaring down the dark highways. They seldom if ever get lost because wherever they find themselves is part of what they were seeking.
– Charles Bowden
The existence of exquisite organization apprehensible by living psyches throughout the biosphere shows that psychological self-organization is inherent in a living planet. Yet this order must not be confused with predictability. As the dissonance of shorter term patterns of awareness represents their uniqueness, the continuity of more longlasting fields of awareness depends on their generality. Yet the general is far less exact. And when all events are connected, anything can happen. The limits we take for granted, the assumptions and expectations of what’s possible, are based on a limited range of assumptions about time. If experience were only a matter of short term processes, such limits could be dependable. Rapid events participate in more ongoing stories, so the “size” of an event becomes more uncertain as it becomes more meaningful. But with more of a sense of the continuity between our own experience and the rest of the living we can stop boxing ourselves into a corner. Even with less grounds for certainty, we have more reason for hope. Now we’re finally realizing that the health of living systems depends on how their autonomy goes hand-in-hand with their interdependence. Infringe upon the one and the other will suffer too. So I’m not proposing that business should be made subservient to government, or religion, or any partial aspect of human experience. Instead, let’s focus on the kinds of cooperative autonomy that enable all human skills and character types to vibrantly collaborate without stepping on each others’ toes – more systems of natural checks and balances that, like these natural living systems, do not require supervisory top dogs to compulsively control them. Being a being is like being a wave. As the contents in a wave are conditioned by the ever-changing unity of its own kind of identity, the contents of a life are ongoingly refined by the experiential continuity of an identity extending through time. And the raucous diversity of a lifetime’s experience would be sheer chaos, without any hope of organization, without the unbreakable continuity of one’s own experienced events, no matter how far apart in space and time. Self-interest in the wild functions best in collaboration with matrices of coexistence, whether social or ecological. The living coexist well because this serves their freewheeling self-interests at the same time as they’re participating in the coexistence of the living team of their environment. There is so much sympathetic collaboration going on that we have barely begun to glimpse the enriching creative possibilities of life’s penchant for creation-through-affiliation
– George Gorman
Each life is a whisper
passed between trees
in a forgotten tongue
with a thousand paths
of dual reception –
one ear in the world
and one inside your mind
– George Gorman
The New Year comes—fling wide, fling wide the door Of Opportunity!
– Carrie Williams Clifford
The present issues from the past, and the future from the present. Everything is made one by this continuity. Time is like a circle, where all the points are so linked that one cannot say where it begins or ends, for all points precede and follow one another for ever.
– Hermes Trismegistus
Woodshadows floated silently by through the morning peace from the stairhead seaward where he gazed. Inshore and farther out the mirror of water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet. White breast of the dim sea. The twining stresses, two by two. A hand plucking the harpstrings, merging their twining chords. Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide.
– James Joyce, Ulysses
The Brain is a Universe Unto Itself: Our eyes are not transparent windows to the outside world, despite evolution’s brilliant illusion. When we think we’re walking the streets of a city, we’re really strolling the neural paths of our brains. Everything that appears to be outside is really inside. For all intents and purposes, there is no outside. The brain is a universe unto itself: billions of twinkling neurons, dendrites splayed like fingers reaching for the beginning of time, chemical messengers leaping across the mindless darkness of deep intracranial space.
– Amanda Gefter
The Loneliest Job in the World
by Tony Hoagland
As soon as you begin to ask the question, Who loves me?
you are completely screwed, because
the next question is How Much?
and then it is hundreds of hours later,
and you are still hunched over
your flowcharts and abacus,
trying to decide if you have gotten enough.
This is the loneliest job in the world:
to be an accountant of the heart.
It is late at night. You are by yourself,
and all around you, you can hear
the sounds of people moving
in and out of love,
pushing the turnstiles, putting
their coins in the slots,
paying the price which is asked,
which constantly changes.
No one knows why.
Time is the wisest of all things that are; for it brings everything to light.
Σοφώτατον χρόνος· ἀνευρίσκει γὰρ πάντα.
– Thales of Miletus
It may well be on such a night of clouds and cruel colors that there is brought forth upon the earth such a portent as a respectable poet. You say you are a poet of law; I say you are a contradiction in terms. I only wonder there were not comets and earthquakes on the night you appeared in this garden.
– G.K. Chesterton
All our social conditioning tends to foster conformity, for thereby one is most likely to have one’s needs met, find security, even love. But with every adaptation there is a concomitant risk that the soul will be violated.
– James Hollis
The quicker you stop denying inconvenient truths and start responding to difficult realities, the better.
– Shane Parrish
I feel time racing like a film at the Cinema. I try to stop it. I prod it with my pen. I try to pin it down.
– Viriginia Woolf
The new year is tossing our demands
out the window like laundry, and here we are,
catching them like the birds they are not
– Abby E. Murray
We don’t read the poets to understand the moment. We read poets to understand ourselves.. .The purpose of the state is to numb the senses. The purpose of a lyric poet is to wake them up.
– Ilya Kaminsky
The most beautiful letters in the world, more beautiful than all literatures, I began by tearing them up on the banks of the Seine…
– Jacques Derrida, The Post Card
I try to write a certain amount each day, five days a week. A rule sometimes broken is better than no rule.
– Herman Wouk
Writing is a way of thinking, & of performing […] I don’t discard these workings out.
– Claire-Louise Bennett
Everything is Exactly the Same as it Was the Day Before
by Ina Cariño
New Year on my mountain
mama says: long noodles, long life,
so I slurp them loud, drink gingery
broth—polka-dot beads of sweat
forming as my nose hovers over
the soup’s steam. circles for luck.
circles on my dress. papa says:
make a lot of noise! so the children
bang on pots & pans to hush
yesterday’s demons. later, in the cold,
the family plods up the hill to wonder
at the fireworks, sky like a warzone lit
with spraying flames from Roman Candles—
fire on the ground from Watusi whips snaking
& coiling, sizzling our feet.
I feel it all in my chest—
a drumming,
a warning, a spell.
back in the yard, granny doles out rice
& meat, pineapple liquor, glass bottles
of Sprite. but I am snoring by midnight,
my sisters & I still swathed in red chiffon.
by morning, I cry because I missed it.
I cry because they say I’m not alone.
I cry because home is a warning,
its pulse a whiff of flint in the dark.
Sufficiently advanced mysticism detours deeply into literalism
– River Kenna
What was passed is present, what will be future is past, and what can never be might return time and time again.
– Andre Aciman
You know if
no one gets us,
the old monk told
the poet,
I’m still happy.
– The Old Monk
Do not speak badly of yourself. For the Warrior within hears your words and is lessened by them.
– David Gemmell
arctic tundra
an old owl
speaks to the stars
– James Welsh
TO THE ROARING WIND
What syllable are you seeking,
Vocalissimus,
In the distance of sleep?
Speak it.
– Wallace Stevens
Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come, Whispering ‘it will be happier.’
– Alfred Lord Tennyson
In my view, ‘liberation’ is a fruit of integrating your awakening… you can have all these awakenings, but if they aren’t integrated into your life and expression, that’s not liberation.
– Christopher Wallis
Hope is the chasm
between things as
they are and things as
they could be
– Deborah Frances-White
all day the windows
reflected on the clouds’ work
of water and light
and when we closed the curtains
cloud-dreams still trailed across them
– Catherine Baker
tantric music
raindrops slide upward
on the windshield
– Origa
There is a huge abyss within every mind. When we belong, we have an outside mooring to prevent us from falling into ourselves.
– John O’Donohue
In the web of existence, one often finds themselves ensnared in the threads of the past.
– Cuong Lu
I write to annoy God, to make Death laugh. I write because I can’t get it right. I write because I want every woman in the world to fall in love with me.
– Charles Simic
We repeat about 40% of our behavior almost daily, so our habits shape our existence, and our future. If we change our habits, we change our lives.
– Gretchen Rubin
Ideals have curious qualities, one of which is that they suddenly turn into absurdity when one tries to strictly conform to them.
– Robert Musil
The poet, the one you’d expect to have faith in language, knows that naming alone does nothing to dispel mystery. For them a word is a gesture in the direction of reality, and does not limit or circumscribe; the poet knows that nothing at all is settled by the word.
– Mark Doty
the bonfire embers
smouldering on to sundown
honking geese
– Matthew Paul
I wish you benevolent demons for the New Year.
– Walter Benjamin
The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind. In the midst of winter you can feel the inventions of spring.
– Lawrence Durrell
Alarmed, today is a new dawn,
and that affair recurs daily like clockwork,
– Brenda Shaughnessy
To access wonder, find ways to be naturally mindful and curious. Pay complete attention, like a child observing a butterfly for the first time.
– Oren Jay Sofer
the creaks that once
disturbed me
have begun to sound like home
– Daily Haiku
It is no bad thing to celebrate a simple life.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
higher this time
frozen moon turning
sand dunes to snow
– Jessica Davis
If Night You Were a City
by Adam Wiedewitsch
I would return to you in a jacket of gold leaves
drawn tight
against the city wind
whipping around corners through button holes over
cobbled streets park lanes
cordoned-off barbarian herds
of steel and glass and concrete ground zero for crowds
of absence. We’d lift off beyond the brick
toward choked stars, moons outshined by neon
and by anxious day, moons perched on dark spires
golden lions
we’d wrap our naïve wings around
to embrace the artifice of it all
and the reality: the heat here is unbearable
and I miss the need to be warm, that need to look
forward to nights alone with you with no morning on our minds
no time
no need to claw through
restaurants packed with bridge and tunnel drunk
on the filth and the beauty.
For here
there is no comparison
no autumn as autumn no snow to justify
a hot drink or a fat meal the fish is delicious
and the beer even better but not the same.
Some say the grass
is greener as if it’s law
and more
that I try to recreate
metropolis each time a baobab drops a beetle
to flee every time winter floods the sand
to mute the night—
boats eclipsing the mainland sprawl
trading with another language transformed before my ears:
tell me how you lived
your dream and I will tell you who you are
every night, every single night and with a wingspan
I resurrect in a cold sweat
and off in the distance
there are drums
drums beating the island
We leave traces of ourselves on one another. They don’t always have to be scars from saber duels.
– Heimito von Doderer, (tr. Vincent Kling)
You and I don’t manifest in the universe as meaning, we manifest as living human beings. We’re not here to represent something else.
– Lin Jensen
Consolation: nature has no opinion of me.
– Hans Jürgen von der Wense; tr. Kristofor Minta and Herbert Pföstl
It is the first day of the year again, this time
in the quiet absence of Portlandia, we have
our own quiet way of entering the spaces
between the seconds of life, where time fades.
– Afaa Michael Weaver
I have in my mind five hundred examples of novels that have given me pleasure, and I try to do work that gives back some of what those five hundred books have given me.
– Jonathan Franzen
We have a responsibility to the words we employ, since, as poets, language is in our care, our keeping.
– Edward Hirsch
It’s not unusual for science to catch up to art, eventually. Nor is it unusual for art to catch up to the spiritual.
– Rick Rubin, The Creative Act
Poetry surprises us with what we already know.
– John Fuller
Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control, they frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit—in state, in church or mosque, in party congress, in the university or wherever..
– Chinua Achebe
ANOTHER CHANCE
This is how life comes to us: over and over again, so we can refresh ourselves into open-mindedness, so we can practice being alive. Another chance to let it go, another chance to let it be, another chance to see how it goes this time…
Here it comes again; another start of another day. What a reprieve. You have incalculable chances to change the ending. To change your attitude. To be the new you. Whether you know it or not, you already are the new you. Forget what you think, lose the foregone conclusion, and just be new.
– Karen Maezen Miller
A page, turning, is a wing lifted with no twin, and therefore no flight. And yet we are moved.
– Ocean Vuong
Sometimes I feel like if you just watch things, just sit still and let the world exist in front of you – sometimes I swear that just for a second time freezes and the world pauses in its tilt. Just for a second. And if you somehow found a way to live in that second, then you would live forever.
– Lauren Oliver
You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.
– Philip K. Dick
“You mean old books?”
“Stories written before space travel but about space travel.”
“How could there have been stories about space travel before –” “The writers,” Pris said, “made it up.”
– Philip K. Dick
Immensity is not in itself a good thing. A living man is worth more than a lifeless galaxy. But immensity has indirect importance through its facilitation of mental richness and diversity. Things are of course only large and small in relation to one another. To say that a cosmos is large is only to say that, in relation to it, some of its constituents are small. To say that its career is long is merely to say that many happenings are contained within it. But though the spatial and temporal immensity of a cosmos have no intrinsic merit, they are the ground for psychical luxuriance, which we value. Physical immensity opens up the possibility of vast physical complexity, and this offers scope for complex minded organisms. This is at any rate true of a cosmos like ours in which mind is conditioned by the physical.
– Olaf Stapledon, A Note On Magnitude, Star Maker
I have right here on my cancer chair an essay that praises Job as “a work of profound theology adorned with poetry,” which is so spectacularly wrong that I’ve not yet been able to read the rest of the man’s argument. As if the poetry were beside the point. The poetry is the point. When Job needs to scream his being to God, it’s poetry he turns to. When God finally answers out of the whirlwind, his voice is verse so overwhelming that Job is said to “see” it. The speech is a reprimand, yes, but God also allows that Job has “spoken right”. It’s not obvious what God is referring to here. Job has said a lot of things. But the one thing that he has truly hammered home is that cry of dereliction, destruction, and profane (yet not faithless) rage. Whether Job has torn a rift in the relation of man and God, or simply pointed out one that was really always there, it now can never be altogether repaired or ignored. “Nowhere else in the Bible,” writes Carol Newsom, “is such an unrestrained demolition of the traditional image of God carried out as in Job’s speeches, words that once let loose have continued to resonate for millennia.” The demolition, though, is also a resurrection. God’s being, which extends from the center of the atom to the burning edge of the universe and beyond beyond, is what Job must accept. But Job’s being, and the rage that now ramifies through the centuries (“I will wreak that hate upon him…”), is part of that creation, and thus a part of what God must accept. Jack Miles points out that in the Hebrew Bible this speech of God’s is the last word God utters. Through the dreams of Daniel and the joys of Esther, the lamentations of Lamentations and the mighty prayers of Nehemiah, through Chronicles, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs: no new word. God hasn’t silenced Job. Job has silenced God.
– Christian Wiman
My belief is that if we live another century or so — I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals — and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky, too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves; if we look past Milton’s bogey, for no human being should shut out the view; if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down.
– Virginia Woolf
Direct the world in which you act towards that which is good, and the measured and peaceful course of time will bring about the results. You have given it this direction if by your teaching you raise its thoughts towards the necessary and the eternal; if, by your acts or your creations, you make the necessary and the eternal the object of your leanings. The structure of error and of all that is arbitrary must fall, and it has already fallen, as soon as you are sure that it is tottering. But it is important that it should not only totter in the external but also in the internal man. Cherish triumphant truth in the modest sanctuary of your heart; give it an incarnate form through beauty, that it may not only be the understanding that does homage to it, but that feeling may lovingly grasp its appearance. And that you may not by any chance take from external reality the model which you yourself ought to furnish, do not venture into its dangerous society before you are assured in your own heart that you have a good escort furnished by ideal nature. Live with your age, but be not its creature; labor for your contemporaries, but give them what they need, and not what they praise. Without having shared their faults, share their punishment with a noble resignation, and bend under the yoke that they find is as painful to dispense with as to bear. By the constancy with which you will despise their good fortune, you will prove to them that it is not through cowardice that you submit to their sufferings. See them in thought such as they ought to be when you must act upon them; but see them as they are when you are tempted to act for them. Seek to owe their suffrage to their dignity; but to make them happy keep an account of their unworthiness; thus, on the one hand, the nobleness of your heart will kindle theirs, and, on the other, your end will not be reduced to nothingness by their unworthiness. The gravity of your principles will keep them off from you, but in play they will still endure them. Their taste is purer than their heart, and it is by their taste you must lay hold of this suspicious fugitive. In vain will you combat their maxims, in vain will you condemn their actions; but you can try your moulding hand on their leisure. Drive away caprice, frivolity, and coarseness, from their pleasures, and you will banish them imperceptibly from their acts, and length from their feelings. Everywhere that you meet them, surround them with great, noble, and ingenious forms; multiply around them the symbols of perfection, till appearance triumphs over reality, and art over nature.
– Friedrich Schiller
I wanted to stand with those who clearly see G-d’s holy broken world for what it is, and still find the courage or the heart to praise it.
– Leonard Cohen
The first step to peace is to stand still in the Light.
– George Fox
It is easy to know the beauty of inhuman things, sea, / storm and mountain; it is their soul and their meaning. / Humanity has its lesser beauty, impure and painful; we / have to harden our hearts to bear it.
– Robinson Jeffers
I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.
– Fernando Pessoa
I am not eccentric. It’s just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of catfish.
– Edith Sitwell
Literature is that which [one] can not read without pain, without choking on truth.
– Roland Barthes
lifting your eyes
take the small voyage
out to the horizon
and back again
– Thomas A Clark
I think the only way we can grow and get on in this world is to accept the fact we’re not perfect and live accordingly.
– Ray Bradbury
Let us imagine the last remaining writer, upon whose death, without anyone realizing it, the minor mystery of writing would also be lost.
– Blanchot
The earth is on fire, but the young are on fire, too. Boy, the young are angry at us. Good. This is what usually changes the world, although it’s a new experience to be the us the young are mad at.
– Anne Lamott
The world was hers for the reading.
– Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Direct experience is the evasion, or hiding place, of those devoid of imagination.
– Fernando Pessoa
Could you do me a favour and put all that in an email?
Translation: I haven’t been listening and I want to escape.
– VeryBritishProblems
Despair is the only cure for illusion. Without despair we cannot transfer our allegiance to reality – it’s a kind of mourning period for our fantasies. Some people do not survive this despair, but no major change within a person can occur w/out it.
– Philip Elliot Slater, Earthwalk
There is no purification at the end of her novels laden with disease, no heightened sense of wellbeing, no promise of a beyond…
– Julia Kristeva on Marguerite Duras
Did you kill the sparrow?
Then why is its song still in the tree?
– Khaled Juma
can’t spell conspiracy without piracy
– Kristen Arnett
People with great passions, people who accomplish great deeds, people who possess strong feelings, even people with great minds and a strong personality, rarely come out of good little boys and girls.
– Lev S. Vygotsky
The Reservation
If you don’t understand
your homeland
hunger makes it all clear
– Nathalie Handal
Just because you are soft doesn’t mean you are not a force. Honey and wildfire are both the color gold.
– Victoria Erickson
The cognitive faculty of resonating with qualitative otherness is at the root of not only thought and language but of all purposeful action. This kind of inner “kenning” is dependent on the sentient capacity for recognizing sympathies, differences and antipathies in every facet of experience. Not that all qualitatively comprehended interrelations with others are exactly describable, yet these are real players in the interactional dynamics of every experience.
– George Gorman
How insufficient is all wisdom without love.
– Henry David Thoreau, Journals
It is your duty in life to save your dream.
– Amedeo Modigliani
If I had a nickel for every time I hated myself sober, I could buy my parents’ house back.
– Matt Coonan (Ttam Nanooc)
It’s a new year, but that doesn’t mean you need to create a ‘new you’— there is no new you, there is just who you are, an imperfect human creature that’s whole already. There are embers glowing in the rubble of even the hardest years.
The more beautiful world is rising, and it needs you to be what you already are, not what the marketing executives decide will lead to the most profit. You don’t need a 10 step program to ____, or an app to _____.
You do need to be fully yourself, to go outside more than you think you should, and to look for ways to add to the healing of the collective. And no one but you gets to decide what exactly that means.
– Heidi Barr
The world was ablaze so you opened your good wine without any occasion.
– Topaz Winters
MY SYMPHONY
To live content with small means.
To seek elegance rather than luxury,
and refinement rather than fashion.
To be worthy not respectable,
and wealthy not rich.
To study hard, think quietly, talk gently,
act frankly, to listen to stars, birds, babes,
and sages with open heart, to bear all cheerfully,
do all bravely, await occasions, hurry never.
In a word, to let the spiritual,
unbidden and unconscious,
grow up through the common.
This is to be my symphony.
– William Ellery Channing
No such thing as a man and a woman. That’s over with. Everybody on this planet is a god.
– Sun Ra
The most dangerous psychological mistake is the projection of the shadow onto others; this is the root of almost all conflicts.
– C.G. Jung
The mentioned ‘particular need’ of theirs (to ‘teach others sense and ‘put them on the right road’) arises in them, in its turn, thanks to another particular property of theirs which is that from the very moment when each of them acquires the capacity of distinguishing between ‘wet’ and ‘dry,’ then, carried away by this attainment, he ceases forever to see and observe his own abnormalities and defects, but sees and observes those same abnormalities and defects in others.
– Gurdjieff
When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
– Virginia Woolf
If nothing saves us from death, at least love should save us from life.
– Pablo Neruda
Having a place means that you know what a place means… what it means in a storied sense of myth, character and presence but also in an ecological sense… Integrating native consciousness with mythic consciousness.
– Gary Snyder
life is but a journey in search of those 800 pages of writing that came to you all at once one morning at 4am.
– Christina Tudor-Sideri
Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all of the tricks and has nothing to say.
– Raymond Chandler
In the meantime, cling tooth and nail to the following rule: not to give in to adversity, not to trust prosperity, and always take full note of fortune’s habit of behaving just as she pleases.
– Marcus Aurelius
Men who offer laudatory speeches to the rich … are insidious because, although mere abundance is by itself quite enough to puff up the souls of its possessors, and to corrupt them, and to turn them aside from the way by which salvation can be reached, these men bring fresh delusion to the minds of the rich by exciting them with the pleasures that come from their immoderate praises, and by rendering them contemptuous of absolutely everything in the world except the wealth which is the cause of their being admired. In the words of the proverb, they carry fire to fire, when they shower pride upon pride, and heap on wealth, heavy by its own nature, the heavier burden of arrogance.
– St Clement of Alexandria
Never wish them pain.
That’s not who you are.
If they caused you pain
they must have pain inside.
Wish them healing.
– Najwa Zebian
January
by William Carlos Williams
Again I reply to the triple winds
running chromatic fifths of derision
outside my window:
Play louder.
You will not succeed. I am
bound more to my sentences
the more you batter at me
to follow you.
And the wind,
as before, fingers perfectly
its derisive music.
In this culture we display a compulsive avoidance of difficult matters and an obsession with distraction. Because we cannot acknowledge our grief, we’re forced to stay on the surface of life.
– Francis Weller
It is said that awakening is an accident, and when we keep practicing, we become more accident-prone… know that you can never go back, because there’s now a crack in self-preoccupation, and the crack is where the light gets in.
– Nikki Mirghafori
Only those whose image of life is a journey toward perfection can be wholly thrown by its cyclic movement.
– Sallie Nichols
It’s my sincerest wish that I am able to let go in that moment with some modicum of grace and acceptance.
– Vanessa Zuisei Goddard
Modern people…have simply forgotten what a human being really is, so we have men like Nietzsche, Freud and Adler, who tell us what we are, quite mercilessly. We have to discover our shadow. Otherwise we are driven into a world war in order to see what beasts we are.
– CG Jung
Trees to blame
What no one has mentioned is that trees and cars do not mix.
Collisions with trees make up a quarter of road deaths and
serious injuries.
This includes trees which have fallen onto cars. I have had a
narrow escape from a falling tree, an acquaintance was killed
that way and I have witnessed a death in a car and tree
collision.
Like most people, I love trees for their beauty and the good of
our environment but not planted a few meters from vehicles
traveling close to them and traveling from 50 km/h to 100
km/h.
I would go so far as to say the councils who plant trees along
road edges, or leave existing trees there’s, are adding to the road
toll in a big way.
– Martin Corke, Sheffield, Tas
wallflowers
a darker red
now the sun’s gone
– Cyril Childs
Every beginning
is only a sequel, after all,
and the book of events
is always open halfway through.
– Wisława Szymborska
Happiness divides the butterflies in half, and all the lovebirds. First I start to love a creature, and then I try to recreate everything. Go to Italy, get curious about pertnesses, sanction everything, etc.
– Brandon Brown
swallowtail . . .
weeds in bloom
about St. Francis
– Robert Gilliland
I’m glad you stopped chasing and clutching.
I’m glad you stopped pretending mediocre was sufficient.
I’m glad you stopped dishonoring yourself.
– Dr. Thema
And then, my soul, be wide, be wide.
That you may succeed in life,
Spread out like a party dress
About thoughtful things.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
I need to write down my observations. Even the tiniest ones; they’re the most important.
– Tove Jansson
I don’t think good work ever makes one cry … If one sees King Lear, one doesn’t cry. One doesn’t have to.
– W. H. Auden
The background noise never ceases; it is limitless, continuous, unending, unchanging.
– Michel Serres
waiting
for the rice to boil
winter moon
– Bruce Ross
She who writes immerses her hands in the soft sign. A link so subtle that it is attached to nothing, a knot so tenuous that it is already passing into another order.
– Michel Serres
When I was in grad school, I memorized a poem a week.
– Barry Hannah
This fear is what is the ruin of us all. And some dominate us; they take advantage of our fear and frighten us still more. Mark this: as long as people are afraid, they will rot like the birches in the marsh. We must grow bold; it is time!
– Maxim Gorky
taking a left
when I should have gone right
spring drizzle
– Stephen A. Peters
Change requires betrayals.
– Jeffrey F. Barken
Change is not betrayal. Transformation is not complacent. Growth is not limited.
Embracing change and transformation as a person doesn’t mean you have to completely abandon your entire identity. It’s about acknowledging your values and beliefs while also being open to new perspectives and experiences that can enhance your growth and development.
– Yvonne Jackson
Jakarta, January
by Sarah Kay
After Hanif Abdurraqib & Frank O’Hara
It is the last class of the day & I am teaching a classroom of sixth graders about poetry & across town a man has walked into a Starbucks & blown himself up while some other men throw grenades in the street & shoot into the crowd of civilians & I am 27 years old which means I am the only person in this room who was alive when this happened in New York City & I was in eighth grade & sitting in my classroom for the first class of the day & I made a joke about how mad everyone was going to be at the pilot who messed up & later added, how stupid do you have to be for it to happen twice? & the sixth graders are practicing listing sensory details & somebody calls out blue skies as a sight they love & nobody in this classroom knows what has happened yet & they do not know that the school is in lockdown which is a word we did not have when I was in sixth grade & the whole class is laughing because a boy has called out dog poop as a smell he does not like & what is a boy if not a glowing thing learning what he can get away with & I was once a girl in a classroom on the lucky side of town who did not know what had happened yet & electrical fire is a smell I did not know I did not like until my neighborhood smelled that way for weeks & blue skies is a sight I have never trusted again & poetry is what I reached for in the days when the ash would not stop falling & there is a sixth grade girl in this classroom whose father is in that Starbucks & she does not know what has happened yet & what is a girl if not a pulsing thing learning what the world will take from her & what if I am still a girl sitting in my classroom on the lucky side of town making a careless joke looking at the teacher for some kind of answer & what if I am also the teacher without any answers looking back at myself & what is an adult if not a terrified thing desperate to protect something you cannot save? & how lucky do you have to be for it to miss you twice? & tomorrow a sixth grade girl will come to class while her father has the shrapnel pulled from his body & maybe she will reach for poetry & the sky outside the classroom is so terribly blue & the students are quiet & looking at me & waiting for a grown-up or a poem or an answer or a bell to ring & the bell rings & they float up from their seats like tiny ghosts & are gone
blue moon . . .
I hide behind these
onion tears
– Kirsten Cliff
We must always, with respect to each moment, conduct ourselves as if it were eternal and relied on us to become ephemeral again.
– Blanchot
All my work comes from perceiving. I kept seeing things that were brooding in me.
– Ellsworth Kelly
Art is art. Everything else is everything else.
– Ad Reinhardt
I wish life was not so short. Languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.
– J. R. R. Tolkien
… how uncapturable December was…
– Delmira Agustini
I see now that I was lucky to work in the record business during that brief interlude between the time when they bought your songs outright from you for fifty bucks or the keys to a Cadillac, and now, when everything is supposed to be free.
– Elvis Costello
What I didn’t know before was how horses simply give birth to other horses.
– Ada Limón
She loved me for the dangers I had pass’d,
And I loved her that she did pity them.
– William Shakespeare, Othello
Be an encourager, not a discourager. Someone who wants the best for others and celebrates when they win. Be an encourager, not a discourager. Someone who sees the light in those around them and reminds them of it when they fall.
– Rebecca Campbell
If you sit on the door-step long enough..you will think of something.
– spoken by Bilbo, J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
Try to Praise the Mutilated World
by Adam Zagajewski
Translated by Clare Cavanagh
Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June’s long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You’ve seen the refugees going nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.
You sing in my poem
– Alejandra Pizarnik, Your Voice
Somebody interrupted his daydreaming. He seems quite put out.
– Edmond Jabès; tr. Rosmarie Waldrop
My films are basically silent films. The dialogue just adds some weight.
– Sergio Leone
The Index
In the beginning there was darkness,
then a bunch of other stuff—and lots of people.
Some things were said and loosely interpreted,
or maybe things were not communicated clearly.
Regardless—there has always been an index.
That thing about the meek—how we
shall inherit the earth; that was a promise
made in a treaty at the dawn of time
agreed upon in primordial darkness
and documented in the spiritual record.
The nature of the agreement was thus:
The world will seemingly be pushed past capacity.
A new planet will be “discovered” 31 light-years away.
Space travel will advance rapidly,
making the journey feasible. The ice sheets will melt.
Things will get ugly. The only way to leave
will be to buy a ticket. Tickets will be priced at exactly
the amount that can be accrued
by abandoning basic humanity.
The index will show how you came by your fortune:
If you murdered, trafficked or exploited the vulnerable,
stole, embezzled, poisoned, cheated, swindled,
or otherwise subdued nature to come by wealth
great enough to afford passage to the new earth;
if your ancestors did these things and you’ve done nothing
to benefit from their crimes yet do nothing to atone
through returning inherited wealth to the greater good
you shall be granted passage. It was agreed.
The meek shall stay, the powerful shall leave.
And it all shall start again.
The meek shall inherit the earth,
and what shall we do with it,
but set about putting aside our meekness?
– Rena Priest
I’m intact, and I don’t give a damn.
– Arthur Rimbaud
War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.
– Don DeLillo
Everybody thinks that they are the victim of receiving emails…my siblings in Christ you are also sending the emails.
– @roryisconfused
MARRIED TO AMAZEMENT
The man I married sat next to me
after our wedding, October light pouring in
over dusty pews as he loosened his tie
and sipped from a cup of apple cider,
closing his eyes to savor the taste.
Now I think I didn’t marry him so much
as his amazement for the everyday,
the way he still gasps each time we see
something new—baby painted turtle
plodding through a stream in the quarry,
or a neon-orange caterpillar inching
across crisp leaves on the trail,
how he kneels to film it from every angle
while I crouch beside him, in awe
of his awe, learning all that I can.
– James Crews
AVANT-GARDE
by Courtney Kampa
A man slouches before a uni-colored canvas
with the perplexity of a stumped technician
gaping at the unremittingly blank screen
of a television. He adjusts his stance,
a double antenna, in search for reception.
Its artist has spread the blackest paint—probably
in fistfuls with her bare hands—until every inch
was filled, or emptied, with dark. “A negation
of art,” spouts a museum curator, but by now our guy
has stopped listening. Maybe the artist felt a wound
deserves a close-up. The threaded color
of sutures—dark stitches laid down like train tracks
across a forehead. Maybe she wants answers
but isn’t getting any. She’s in the tomb on Good Friday, before
the stone’s rolled back. Or maybe it’s feminine—
like pantyhose, or the womb. Something about birth.
Or death—that dark hound curled up at her feet.
Could be she has a black lab, and just really likes
her dog. Or it’s the view from inside a chamber
of the heart that has sealed itself off. Or it’s cancer.
Maybe she’s ruptured, and knows first hand
what a rip looks like, having watched the hole of herself
stretching even wider. It’s possible she’s been jilted
and has an axe to grind, and that this is a portrait
of her ex, that anatomical hole, himself.
Perhaps it’s a memory of being kissed—kissed well.
The lashes on a smolder-eyed man. Maybe it’s motherhood:
the charred casserole, smudges across the leather
in the back seat of her car, a sugary space a first-lost
tooth creates. Maybe the money’s gone
and she’s got kids in college. Maybe she’s divorced
and this is the hue of lost custody. Maybe it’s the bald-spot
in the ozone, and she wants her climate back. What if
she’s painted sacrifice: the gap plowed into Adam’s side
to create a second life; the rib removed from a girl named Eve
to create a wasp-like waist. Maybe it’s an un-filled cavity,
or the huge, open pores on her dentist’s nose.
Perhaps something very personal occurred here.
Steam-rolled asphalt. A star-scrubbed sky.
Either she wants to say nothing, or say too much.
Either her world keeps ending, or it’s always beginning.
Whatever it is, the man’s face awakens with what looks like an answer.
Taking two steps back in his trainers, he reaches
into his jeans for a ballpoint pen—a moment of light
before this work?—and inks onto his hand:
buy eggs.
I have a theory that people who don’t read much before the age of fourteen never fully develop areas in the brain that process text into images or experiences.
– Olga Tokarczuk
I want to work in revelations, not just spin silly tales for money. I want to fish as deep down as possible into my own subconscious in the belief that once that far down, everyone will understand because they are the same that far down.
– Jack Kerouac
Kopfkino
(n.) the act of playing out an entire
scenario in your mind; a head cinema
/kof-kee-noh/ german
And the strange night-wonder is upon us,
The leaves hold our wonder in their flutterings,
The wind fills our mouths with strange words
For our wonder that grows not old.
– Ezra Pound
The Buddha said that everything we need to guide us on this path to being fuller, more compassionate human beings is right here in the body. Right now.
– Shannon Gibney
I hardly do any preplanning, just fretting and wheel spinning.
– Geoff Dyer
The last story I tell
will be about
a late summer day.
A slight wind.
Cool.
I am sitting on a park bench
in San Francisco on a hill
overlooking the Pacific.
The ocean is alive
for ever and ever.
And so am I
– john zbigniew guzlowski
Let nothing disturb you. Let nothing upset you… God alone is unchanging.
– Teresa of Ávila
Somatic exercise— move it through and out of your nervous system
– Francesca Leader
In a world where vows are worthless. Where making a pledge means nothing. Where promises are made to be broken, it would be nice to see words come back into power.
– Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby
I have never written a line for the pleasure of writing, but only to express something that struck my heart.
– Marcel Proust
You can never laugh too much or have too many orgasms.
– Michael Faudet
We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.
– B.F. Skinner
all night the sound
of mountain rain
winter seclusion
– Issa
Nothing is more powerful and creative than emptiness. Nothingness is really like the nothingness of space, which contains the whole universe.
– Alan Watts
To read a poem in January is as lovely as to go for a walk in June.
– Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
Our mission is not to unpetal the rose’s layered secret. / Maybe our mission is to float, drunk on the mystery of the rose. / Let’s pitch our tents on the other side of the hill from Knowing.
– Sohrab Sepehri, translated by Kazim Ali
Absence is the figure of privation; simultaneously, I desire and I need. Desire is squashed against need: that is the obsessive phenomenon of all amorous sentiment
– Barthes
Poetry is my love, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face.
– Anne Sexton
A minute freed from the order of time has re-created in us, to feel it, the man freed from the order of time.
– Marcel Proust
Amá, I leave because
I feel like an unfinished
poem, because I always try
to bridge the difference.
– Erika L. Sánchez
damnable cycles
of human greed
and advancement
in grinding gears
and rust flakes
hope flickers – fades
– Andy Perrin
Sometimes you’re doing really well,
then, after three or four years,
everything inexplicably crashes
like a house of cards
and you have to rebuild it.
It’s not like you get to a point
where you’re all right
for the rest of your life.
– Patti Smith
From Rilke:
I believe in what’s not yet said.
In frozen feelings becoming free.
What no one else has wanted or dared
spontaneously coming from me!
If this is a test, may the gods forgive.
I really need to say to you
that I will be strong in what I love –
without frustration, without gloom.
Like when you’re playing with kids.
– via George Gorman
Are men our enemy? Yes.
Do we argue with men? We do.
Are men annoying? Yes.
Do we like being annoyed by men? We do.
– Clarice Lispector, Sept. 9, 1967
HE: It seems unfair to be lumped in with *them*.
ME: Who?
HE: The men.
ME: But you are stained by the same structural misbehavior. You share their ineptitudes. You were actively involved in the Baseball Card Industrial Complex.
– Alina Stefanescu
Understand yourself, and you will be sufficiently understood.
– @RedBookJung
Wit is so often a dandy who constructs a golden palace and then locks himself within it, careless of the key.
– Pico Iyer
I would like this to signal the end of ‘wasted angst’ in my life.
– Italo Calvino
The perpetuation of the Ancient Wisdom is the most glorious work which a human being can accomplish. Noble thinkers have struggled, suffered and died so that you might have this knowledge.
– Manly P. Hall
There is a whole series of forms of critical or activist art that are caught up in this police logic of the equivalence of the power of the market and the power of its denunciation.
– Jacques Ranciere
I’m through with you bourgeois boys
All you ever do is go back to ancestral comforts
Only money can get — even Catullus was rich
– Bernadette Mayer
The Fascination of What’s Difficult
by William Butler Yeats
The fascination of what’s difficult
Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of my heart. There’s something ails our colt
That must, as if it had not holy blood
Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud,
Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt
As though it dragged road metal. My curse on plays
That have to be set up in fifty ways,
On the day’s war with every knave and dolt,
Theatre business, management of men.
I swear before the dawn comes round again
I’ll find the stable and pull out the bolt.
This was never about plagiarism, or Harvard, and certainly not antisemitism (today’s right is the embodiment of bigotry in all its forms). It’s about taking down academia, the largest remaining obstacle to their fascist remaking of America.
– Prof Michael E. Mann
Addiction is the negative side of spiritual seeking. We are looking for an exultation of the spirit; but instead of fulfillment we get a short-lived physical thrill that can never satisfy the chronic, gnawing emptiness with which we are beset.
– Robert A. Johnson
To include all people and all conditions in your experience is the congruence taught by the dharma. You are acknowledging the truth of interdependence and non-separateness or, as Thich Nhat Hanh says, that we ‘inter-are.’
– Phillip Moffitt
Pain is an unflagging teacher. And I may have learned, finally, what it teaches. We twist in turbulence on the edges of pain; in the eye of pain is stillness.
– Joan E. Chapman
My daughter and I invented “Clown-itation” last night, which is when a couple of clowns get together and pretend to meditate.
– Ethan Nichtern
What does a writer need? Well, he needs to read good writing. He needs to write. And he needs to rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite his own sentences until they say as precisely and as economically as he can make them what he intends them to say. He needs to acquire respect, even reverence, for the English language. And while he is working, he cannot be conscious of any of this.
– John Bartlow Martin
Buddhism has in many ways been more concerned with the future than the present, more about the next world than this one.
– Donald S. Lopez Jr.
Beyond the clouds, the sun never stops shining.
– Gavin Pretor-Pinney
He who does not weep does not see.
– Victor Hugo
Life is a sum of all your choices. So, what are you doing today?
– Albert Camus
Only to my doubt can I appeal
for news of what is false and what is real.
– Anne Stevenson
When we know one Ryōkan,
we know hundreds of thousands
of Ryōkans in Japanese hearts.
– D.T. Suzuki
The Buddha taught for many years, but the dharma he explained wasn’t about acquiring knowledge; it was about changing the mind. It doesn’t take a lifetime of study. We all practice as we learn, all at our own rates.
– Stephen Schettini
In a world as weird and cruel as this one we have made for ourselves, I figure anybody who can find peace and personal happiness without ripping off somebody else deserves to be left alone. They will not inherit the earth, but then neither will I . . . And I have learned to live, as it were, with the idea that I will never find peace and happiness, either. But as long as I know there’s a pretty good chance I can get my hands on either one of them every once in a while, I do the best I can between high spots.
– Hunter S. Thompson
Everything we need is here in us. Everything for fuller being. There is a kind of sacred descent of attention that can bring this about. Seeing the obstacles, thoughts, feelings, yes, perhaps a pressure that keeps me from it. But if I can relax inside, just allow the pure attention to flow in, be in that. Very natural. It is what we are.
Attention: a sacred energy coming into me. Be sensitive to it. Recognize again and again that it is there. Be touched by it, link with it, something real in you. Not thoughts, techniques, not the head, but that touch. Can I liberate myself from all my concerns and enter the mystery?
Stay just exactly as I am. There is an intelligence in me that can accept. Like the sun. It does not care if an ant is crawling across the rug. The sun radiates with life. The whole of me becomes sensitive to this intelligence, listening for it. We were made for it. When very quiet inside–need an atmosphere of sensitivity–aware of breathing–become more interested in that, in this connection with something precious, so ego and vanity and judgment melt away.
We cannot change ourselves, but when we are related to this energy inside us, the goodness of it pours through me and changes everything. From it can come my best action in the world, my best action for others. There is a calm, a quietness. A look upon me, not from my ordinary self, but from that which sees objectively as it is. If you keep looking, prefer that look upon you no matter what is taking place, you will be able to become stable in this attention, and a new freedom and possibility will appear.
You are not alone. There is a network always, actively working, since the dawn of humanity. Offering reminders. And you can come near to it. Create a link with this network of influence. This energy creates love in you, creates consciousness in you. But it needs your care, your full care.
– Michel de Salzmann
Grey Headed School Children.
by Charles Simic
Old men have bad dreams,
So they sleep little.
They walk on bare feet
Without turning on the lights,
Or they stand leaning
On gloomy furniture
Listening to their hearts beat.
The one window across the room
Is black like a blackboard.
Every old man is alone
In this classroom, squinting
At that fine chalk line
That divides being-here
From being-here-no-more.
No matter. It was a glass of water
They were going to get,
But not just yet.
They listen for mice in the walls,
A car passing on the street,
Their dead fathers shuffling past them
On their way to the kitchen.
Prayer just for itself, just for the act of praying, is a way of connecting to the deep ocean of being that we all are. It is a way of offering our bows, our incense, our flowers, to the ineffable reality of the moment, to the absolute reality of this experience.
– Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara
Self-justification is a universal destroyer of harmony and of love. It sets man against man, nation against nation. By it, every form of folly and violence can be made to look right, and even respectable. Of course it is not for us to condemn. We need only investigate ourselves.
– Bill Wilson
Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience; to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of the moon and the colors of the dawn and dusk.
– N. Scott Momaday
When we wake up in bed on Monday morning and think of the various hurdles we’ve got to jump that day, immediately we feel sad. Bored and bothered. Whereas actually we’re just lying in bed.
– Alan Watts
… to replace all negative attitudes towards the existing world with a feeling of confidence and love towards the new world that is being born, towards the still unborn child that is the future man. To arouse in oneself constantly this love for mankind. Every time one has a feeling of negativity, take this as a reminder that we human beings live on this earth in order to serve, particularly to serve the future. And to serve with love, with hope, with confidence, so that it is possible for mankind to be born again.
– J.G. Bennett
The path of a man’s life is straight, straight, straight, until the moment when it isn’t anymore, and after that it begins to meander around aimlessly, and then get tangled, and then at some point the path gets so confusing that the man’s ability to move around in time, his device for conveyance, his memory of what he loves, the engine that moves him forward, it can break, and he can get permanently stuck in his own history.
– Charles Yu
Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.
– Frank Herbert
When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!
– Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
It is much more important to be oneself than anything else. Do not dream of influencing other people…Think of things in themselves.
– Virginia Woolf
The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place.
– Milan Kundera
Human time, you know, passes like a dream.
– Kobo Abe
Man was made for joy and woe
Then when this we rightly know
Through the world we safely go.
Joy and woe are woven fine
A clothing for the soul to bind.
– William Blake
Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and the heart has turned to stone.
– Thomas Merton
So attend wholly to the one thing before you. And the radiance of the entire universe will dwell in that one small thing.
– Gerald Grow
Adverse conditions are your spiritual teacher; Demons and possessor spirits, the Buddha’s emanations; Sickness is a broom for negative karma and defilements; Sufferings are displays of ultimate reality’s expanse—
– Serlingpa
Trying to become a Buddha is easy
but ending delusions is hard
how many moonlit nights
have I sat and felt the cold before dawn
– Shiwu (Stonehouse), tr. Red PIne
Creativity is the love of something, having so much love for something whether a person, a word, an image, an idea, a land or humanity that all that can be done with the overflow is to create. It is not a matter of wanting to, not a singular act of will, one solely must.
– Clarissa Pinkola Estés
And why’s your heart not lightsome, little one?
Are all your great hopes blown to the skies?
That you should stand in tears, the path upon.
– Patrick Kavanagh
To the Linear
by Myronn Hardy
You lead me to that place
where addicts give themselves up.
I have given myself to the linear to
the straight line.
No longer turning.
No longer considering
that which could
have occurred.
I’m a rocket blasting into
the unknowable.
No more pondering forever
heavy forever sick with it.
No longer booming fados.
Or sitting in rooms with suicidal
guitarists plucking sunrise.
No more addiction among addicts.
I’m confessing this to them.
They are moaning.
They are asking me to leave.
I leave you here.
When the Soul wishes to experience something, she throws out an image in front of her and then steps into it.
– Meister Eckhart
Putting aside the fact that fossil fuels have destroyed the world, cars have meant freedom and intimacy since I first got my learner’s permit fifty years ago. (That can’t be right.) Sorry about the melting permafrost, but cars can be mobile churches or mosques.
– Anne Lamott
Eventually your instrument
shows you how to play it,
the old monk told the band.
– The Old Monk
Divination oracles, to my mind, are attempts to contact the dynamic load of an archetypal constellation and to give a reading pattern of what it is.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
The truth is this:
my love for you is the only empire
I will ever build.
– Mindy Nettifee
tired of
the cold wind
and of this winter life
– Basho
A trite word is an overused word which has lost its identity like an old coat in a second-hand shop. The familiar grows dull and we no longer see, hear, or taste it.
– Anaïs Nin
This is a free show
but tip your waiter,
the old monk told
his followers.
– The Old Monk
The problem is that we all too often have socialism for the rich and rugged free enterprise capitalism for the poor. That’s the problem.
– Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Sometimes I feel bad and I do emotional processing and journal and meditate and then I take a nap and feel better and I remember that I am not so different from an infant.
– Daniel Thorson
It is high time we realized that it is pointless to praise the light and preach it if nobody can see it. It is much more needful to teach people the art of seeing.
– CG Jung
You should look inward and ask why you have cops in your heart. That’s what you should be worrying about.
– Brandon Taylor
New goals don’t deliver new results. New lifestyles do. And a lifestyle is a process, not an outcome. For this reason, all of your energy should go into building better habits, not chasing better results.
– James Clear
Offer a guarantee and disaster threatens.
– Ancient inscription at the Oracle of Delphi
Authors do not supply imaginations, they expect their readers to have their own, and to use it.
– Nella Larsen
There is something profoundly lost in analytic philosophy’s insistence on writing in such exclusively mechanical tone. Knowledge takes on a different shape when guided by feeling… I don’t understand why or when we decided that’s a bad thing.
– Kara Slagell
Desire is sustained through fragments, concentrated moments spent together mythologized during those apart.
– Albert Camus
The physical world is true and real; the inner world is also true and real. It is when we muddle them, when we fail to live the inner world as symbol, when we try to locate it in literal people, that the illusory world is created.
– Robert A. Johnson
We Learn to Fly
The finicky fire of concentration –
trail of the hunger that finds its prey;
ravenous mask of need and cerebral
care, whose power is not to stray –
has unmade worlds for the sake of making
a snaky dance on a sliver of time,
just to catch us here in the act of evening
up the odds with a simmering rhyme.
We – who are burning together, excluding
all that has been for us ground and grail;
caring for nothing but strong collusions,
even beyond the cradles and graves –
still climb the trees of sheer unknowing
and sing what fervently has not died.
Even mammals have wings of true desire.
We hear and tremble. We learn to fly.
– George Gorman
When you find beautiful depth with someone, nothing else will ever do. Nothing else will ever be good enough. Because you have been awakened to the fact that mere moments in the abyss holds more intimacy than years on the surface, and once you become conscious to that there is no going back to sleep.
– JM Storm
The war was a collective epidemic of madness, in which the participants projected their unconscious upon one another. It showed the limitation of rationality and the will, and the linkage between individual and collective psychology.
– CG Jung
Own YOUR VOICE. Write in the voice that comes naturally to you, not the voice you wish came naturally to you.
– Gayle Forman
The mind I love must have wild places.
– Katherine Mansfield
Reminder that, if you aren’t disabled at the moment, you’re living in a *temporarily* abled body.
– Molly Spencer
It is the “wellness” of the surface that devastates me. It is the abyssal idiocy of such wellness that perverts sociality.
– Alina Stefanescu
To create today is to create dangerously. Every publication is an act and this act exposes us to the passions of a century that forgives nothing.
– Albert Camus
Let Me Begin Again
by Major Jackson
Let me begin again as a quiet thought
in the shape of a shell slowly examined
by a brown child on a beach at dawn
straining to see their future. Let me begin
this time knowing the drumming in my dreams
is me inheriting the earth, is morning
lighting up the rivers. Let me burn
my vanities: old music in the pines, sifters
of scotch, a day moon like a signature
of night. This time, let me circle
the island of my fears only once then
live like a raging waterfall and grow
a magnificent mustache. Let me not ever be
the birdcage or the serrated blade or
the empty season. Dear Glacier, Dear Sea
of Stars, Dear Leopards disintegrating
at the outer limits of our greed; soon we will
encounter you only in motivational tweets.
Reader, I should have married you sooner.
This time, let me not sleep like the prophet who
believes he’s seen infinity. Let me run
at break-neck speeds toward sceneries
of doubt. I have no more dress rehearsals
to attend. Look closer: I am licking my lips.
To you who is perhaps downtrodden, to
you who is in ill company, to you who
may feel unaccomplished; look not to
that which has consumed your life, but
instead to that which has encouraged it.
In all you do, you are worthy. In this
New Year, deliver yourself from all that
has robbed you and live a life that
glitters not of gold, but of purpose.
– Victoria Lopez
Whatever the content at hand, it’s really the shape and quality and rhythm of one’s attention that is eventually on display.
– Maggie Nelson
Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, the power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless.
– Salman Rushdie
UNTITLED ODE TO THE WONDER OF LIFE
I stand at the seashore, alone, and start to think. There are the rushing waves… mountains of molecules, each stupidly minding its own business… trillions apart… yet forming white surf in unison.
Ages on ages… before any eyes could see… year after year… thunderously pounding the shore as now. For whom, for what?… on a dead planet, with no life to entertain.
Never at rest… tortured by energy… wasted prodigiously by the sun… poured into space. A mite makes the sea roar.
Deep in the sea, all molecules repeat the patterns of one another till complex new ones are formed. They make others like themselves… and a new dance starts.
Growing in size and complexity… living things, masses of atoms, DNA, protein… dancing a pattern ever more intricate.
Out of the cradle onto the dry land… here it is standing… atoms with consciousness… matter with curiosity.
Stands at the sea… wonders at wondering… I… a universe of atoms… an atom in the universe.
– Richard Feynman
AIR
All you can do for another person
is be an environment in which
if they wanted to come up for air,
they could.
– Ram Dass
It is good to love again;
Scan the renovated skies,
Dip and drive the idling pen,
Sweetly tint the paling lies.
– Dorothy Parker
The solution to your problem is to see who has it.
– Ramana Maharshi
A lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt as dangerous.
– Alfred Adler
The Story of Rumi and the Goldsmith:
Once, a man came to Rumi, distraught and complaining about the hardness of his heart. He felt that the world had made him harsh and unfeeling, and he was unable to find any joy or love within himself. Rumi listened and then told him to visit a goldsmith.
The man was puzzled but did as Rumi advised. He went to the goldsmith and observed him at work. The goldsmith took a piece of hard, unyielding gold and placed it in the fire. The man watched as the gold softened in the intense heat. Then, the goldsmith took it out, placed it on his anvil, and began to hammer it, shaping it into a beautiful piece of jewelry.
After observing this, the man returned to Rumi, who explained, “Like the gold, your heart has become hard. But when it is placed in the fire of trials and difficulties, it becomes soft. It can then be molded and shaped into something beautiful. Do not fear the hardships of the world; let them transform you into someone who can spread kindness and love.
– Rumi and Sufi Community
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. He was uprooted and hovered above the earth, and therefore he succumbed to exaggeration and irreality.
– CG Jung
a potential saint can be a very difficult person: i suspect that simone weil could be at times insupportable. one is struck, here and there, by a contrast between an almost superhuman humility and what appears to be an almost outrageous arrogance.
– t.s. eliot
The contents of someone’s bookcase are part of their history, like an ancestral portrait
– Umberto Eco
Heart’s Needle
by W. D. Snodgrass
For Cynthia
When Suibhe would not return to fine garments and good food, to his houses and his people, Loingseachan told him, “Your father is dead.” “I’m sorry to hear it,” he said. “Your mother is dead,” said the lad. “All pity for me has gone out of the world.” “Your sister, too, is dead.” “The mild sun rests on every ditch,” he said; “a sister loves even though not loved.” “Suibhne, your daughter is dead.” “And an only daughter is the needle of the heart.” “And Suibhne, your little boy, who used to call you ‘Daddy’ he is dead.” “Aye,” said Suibhne, “that’s the drop that brings a man to the ground.”
He fell out of the yew tree; Loingseachan closed his arms around him and placed him in manacles.
– after The Middle-Irish Romance, The Madness of Suibhne
1
Child of my winter, born
When the new fallen soldiers froze
In Asia’s steep ravines and fouled the snows,
When I was torn
By love I could not still,
By fear that silenced my cramped mind
To that cold war where, lost, I could not find
My peace in my will,
All those days we could keep
Your mind a landscape of new snow
Where the chilled tenant-farmer finds, below,
His fields asleep
In their smooth covering, white
As quilts to warm the resting bed
Of birth or pain, spotless as paper spread
For me to write,
And thinks: Here lies my land
Unmarked by agony, the lean foot
Of the weasel tracking, the thick trapper’s boot;
And I have planned
My chances to restrain
The torments of demented summer or
Increase the deepening harvest here before
It snows again.
2
Late April and you are three; today
We dug your garden in the yard.
To curb the damage of your play,
Strange dogs at night and the moles tunneling,
Four slender sticks of lath stand guard
Uplifting their thin string.
So you were the first to tramp it down.
And after the earth was sifted close
You brought your watering can to drown
All earth and us. But these mixed seeds are pressed
With light loam in their steadfast rows.
Child, we’ve done our best.
Someone will have to weed and spread
The young sprouts. Sprinkle them in the hour
When shadow falls across their bed.
You should try to look at them every day
Because when they come to full flower
I will be away.
3
The child between them on the street
Comes to a puddle, lifts his feet
And hangs on their hands. They start
At the Jive weight and lurch together,
Recoil to swing him through the weather,
Stiffen and pull apart.
We read of cold war soldiers that
Never gained ground, gave none, but sat
Tight in their chill trenches.
Pain seeps up from some cavity
Through the ranked teeth in sympathy;
The whole jaw grinds and clenches
Till something somewhere has to give.
It’s better the poor soldiers live
In someone else’s hands
Than drop where helpless powers fall
On crops and barns, on towns where all
Will burn. And no man stands.
For good, they sever and divide
Their won and lost land. On each side
Prisoners are returned
Excepting a few unknown names.
The peasant plods back and reclaims
His fields that strangers burned
And nobody seems very pleased.
It’s best. Still, what must not be seized
Clenches the empty fist.
I tugged your hand, once, when I hated
Things less: a mere game dislocated
The radius of your wrist.
Love’s wishbone, child, although I’ve gone
As men must and let you be drawn
Off to appease another,
It may help that a Chinese play
Or Solomon himself might say
I am your real mother.
4
No one can tell you why
the season will not wait;
the night I told you I
must leave, you wept a fearful rate
to stay up late.
Now that it’s turning Fall,
we go to take our walk
among municipal
flowers, to steal one off its stalk,
to try and talk.
We huff like windy giants
scattering with our breath
gray-headed dandelions;
Spring is the cold wind’s aftermath.
The poet saith.
But the asters, too, are gray,
ghost-gray. Last night’s cold
is sending on their way
petunias and dwarf marigold,
hunched sick and old.
Like nerves caught in a graph,
the morning-glory vines
frost has erased by half
still scrawl across their rigid twines.
Like broken lines
of verses I can’t make.
In its unraveling loom
we find a flower to take,
with some late buds that might still bloom,
back to your room.
Night comes and the stiff dew.
I’m told a friend’s child cried
because a cricket, who
had minstreled every night outside
her window, died.
5
Winter again and it is snowing;
Although you are still three,
You are already growing
Strange to me.
You chatter about new playmates, sing
Strange songs; you do not know
Hey ding-a-ding-a-ding
Or where I go
Or when I sang for bedtime, Fox
Went out on a chilly night,
Before I went for walks
And did not write;
You never mind the squalls and storms
That are renewed long since;
Outside, the thick snow swarms
Into my prints
And swirls out by warehouses, sealed,
Dark cowbarns, huddled, still,
Beyond to the blank field,
The fox’s hill
Where he backtracks and sees the paw,
Gnawed off, he cannot feel;
Conceded to the jaw
Of toothed, blue steel.
6
Easter has come around
again; the river is rising
over the thawed ground
and the banksides. When you come you bring
an egg dyed lavender.
We shout along our bank to hear
our voices returning from the hills to meet us.
We need the landscape to repeat us.
You Jived on this bank first.
While nine months filled your term, we knew
how your lungs, immersed
in the womb, miraculously grew
their useless folds till
the fierce, cold air rushed in to fill
them out like bushes thick with leaves. You took your hour,
caught breath, and cried with your full lung power.
Over the stagnant bight
we see the hungry bank swallow
flaunting his free flight
still; we sink in mud to follow
the killdeer from the grass
that hides her nest. That March there was
rain; the rivers rose; you could hear killdeers flying
all night over the mudflats crying.
You bring back how the red-
winged blackbird shrieked, slapping frail wings,
diving at my head—
I saw where her tough nest, cradled, swings
in tall reeds that must sway
with the winds blowing every way.
If you recall much, you recall this place. You still
live nearby—on the opposite hill.
After the sharp windstorm
of July Fourth, all that summer
through the gentle, warm
afternoons, we heard great chain saws chirr
like iron locusts. Crews
of roughneck boys swarmed to cut loose
branches wrenched in the shattering wind, to hack free
all the torn limbs that could sap the tree.
In the debris lay
starlings, dead. Near the park’s birdrun
we surprised one day
a proud, tan-spatted, buff-brown pigeon.
In my hands she flapped so
fearfully that I let her go.
Her keeper came. And we helped snarl her in a net.
You bring things I’d as soon forget.
You raise into my head
a Fall night that I came once more
to sit on your bed;
sweat beads stood out on your arms and fore-
head and you wheezed for breath,
for help, like some child caught beneath
its comfortable wooly blankets, drowning there.
Your lungs caught and would not take the air.
Of all things, only we
have power to choose that we should die;
nothing else is free
in this world to refuse it. Yet I,
who say this, could not raise
myself from bed how many days
to the thieving world. Child, I have another wife,
another child. We try to choose our life.
7
Here in the scuffled dust
is our ground of play.
I lift you on your swing and must
shove you away,
see you return again,
drive you off again, then
stand quiet till you come.
You, though you climb
higher, farther from me, longer,
will fall back to me stronger.
Bad penny, pendulum,
you keep my constant time
to bob in blue July
where fat goldfinches fly
over the glittering, fecund
reach of our growing lands.
Once more now, this second,
I hold you in my hands.
8
I thumped on you the best I could
which was no use;
you would not tolerate your food
until the sweet, fresh milk was soured
with lemon juice.
That puffed you up like a fine yeast.
The first June in your yard
like some squat Nero at a feast
you sat and chewed on white, sweet clover.
That is over.
When you were old enough to walk
we went to feed
the rabbits in the park milkweed;
saw the paired monkeys, under lock,
consume each other’s salt.
Going home we watched the slow
stars follow us down Heaven’s vault.
You said, let’s catch one that comes low,
pull off its skin
and cook it for our dinner.
As absentee bread-winner,
I seldom got you such cuisine;
we ate in local restaurants
or bought what lunches we could pack
in a brown sack
with stale, dry bread to toss for ducks
on the green-scummed lagoons,
crackers for porcupine and fox,
life-savers for the footpad coons
to scour and rinse,
snatch after in their muddy pail
and stare into their paws.
When I moved next door to the jail
I learned to fry
omelettes and griddle cakes so I
could set you supper at my table.
As I built back from helplessness,
when I grew able,
the only possible answer was
you had to come here less.
This Hallowe’en you come one week.
You masquerade
as a vermilion, sleek,
fat, crosseyed fox in the parade
or, where grim jackolanterns leer,
go with your bag from door to door
foraging for treats. How queer:
when you take off your mask
my neighbors must forget and ask
whose child you are.
Of course you lose your appetite,
whine and won’t touch your plate;
as local law
I set your place on an orange crate
in your own room for days. At night
you lie asleep there on the bed
and grate your jaw.
Assuredly your father’s crimes
are visited
on you. You visit me sometimes.
The time’s up. Now our pumpkin sees
me bringing your suitcase.
He holds his grin;
the forehead shrivels, sinking in.
You break this year’s first crust of snow
off the runningboard to eat.
We manage, though for days
I crave sweets when you leave and know
they rot my teeth. Indeed our sweet
foods leave us cavities.
9
I get numb and go in
though the dry ground will not hold
the few dry swirls of snow
and it must not be very cold.
A friend asks how you’ve been
and I don’t know
or see much right to ask.
Or what use it could be to know.
In three months since you came
the leaves have fallen and the snow;
your pictures pinned above my desk
seem much the same.
Somehow I come to find
myself upstairs in the third floor
museum’s halls,
walking to kill my time once more
among the enduring and resigned
stuffed animals,
where, through a century’s
caprice, displacement and
known treachery between
its wars, they hear some old command
and in their peaceable kingdoms freeze
to this still scene,
Nature Morte. Here
by the door, its guardian,
the patchwork dodo stands
where you and your stepsister ran
laughing and pointing. Here, last year,
you pulled my hands
and had your first, worst quarrel,
so toys were put up on your shelves.
Here in the first glass cage
the little bobcats arch themselves,
still practicing their snarl
of constant rage.
The bison, here, immense,
shoves at his calf, brow to brow,
and looks it in the eye
to see what is it thinking now.
I forced you to obedience;
I don’t know why.
Still the lean lioness
beyond them, on her jutting ledge
of shale and desert shrub,
stands watching always at the edge,
stands hard and tanned and envious
above her cub;
with horns locked in tan heather,
two great Olympian Elk stand bound,
fixed in their lasting hate
till hunger brings them both to ground.
Whom equal weakness binds together
none shall separate.
Yet separate in the ocean
of broken ice, the white bear reels
beyond the leathery groups
of scattered, drab Arctic seals
arrested here in violent motion
like Napoleon’s troops.
Our states have stood so long
At war, shaken with hate and dread,
they are paralyzed at bay;
once we were out of reach, we said,
we would grow reasonable and strong.
Some other day.
Like the cold men of Rome,
we have won costly fields to sow
in salt, our only seed.
Nothing but injury will grow.
I write you only the bitter poems
that you can’t read.
Onan who would not breed
a child to take his brother’s bread
and be his brother’s birth,
rose up and left his lawful bed,
went out and spilled his seed
in the cold earth.
I stand by the unborn,
by putty-colored children curled
in jars of alcohol,
that waken to no other world,
unchanging, where no eye shall mourn.
I see the caul
that wrapped a kitten, dead.
I see the branching, doubled throat
of a two-headed foal;
I see the hydrocephalic goat;
here is the curled and swollen head,
there, the burst skull;
skin of a limbless calf;
a horse’s foetus, mummified;
mounted and joined forever,
the Siamese twin dogs that ride
belly to belly, half and half,
that none shall sever.
I walk among the growths,
by gangrenous tissue, goiter, cysts,
by fistulas and cancers,
where the malignancy man loathes
is held suspended and persists.
And I don’t know the answers.
The window’s turning white.
The world moves like a diseased heart
packed with ice and snow.
Three months now we have been apart
less than a mile. I cannot fight
or let you go.
10
The vicious winter finally yields
the green winter wheat;
the farmer, tired in the tired fields
he dare not leave will eat.
Once more the runs come fresh; prevailing
piglets, stout as jugs,
harry their old sow to the railing
to ease her swollen dugs
and game colts trail the herded mares
that circle the pasture courses;
our seasons bring us back once more
like merry-go-round horses.
With crocus mouths, perennial hungers,
into the park Spring comes;
we roast hot dogs on old coat hangers
and feed the swan bread crumbs,
pay our respects to the peacocks, rabbits,
and leathery Canada goose
who took, last Fall, our tame white habits
and now will not turn loose.
In full regalia, the pheasant cocks
march past their dubious hens;
the porcupine and the lean, red fox
trot around bachelor pens
and the miniature painted train
wails on its oval track:
you said, I’m going to Pennsylvania!
and waved. And you’ve come back.
If I loved you, they said, I’d leave
and find my own affairs.
Well, once again this April, we’ve
come around to the bears;
punished and cared for, behind bars,
the coons on bread and water
stretch thin black fingers after ours.
And you are still my daughter.
Tanka
all those things
I would have changed
the raw winds blow
the gnarled knots
in the ancient oak
– John Wisdom
Snow
by Anna Akhmatova
Upon the hard crest of a snow-drift
We tread, and grown quiet, we walk
On towards my house, white, enchanted;
Our mood is too tender for talk.
And sweeter than music, this dream now
Come true, the low boughs of the firs
That sway as we brush them in passing,
The slight silver clink of your spurs.
There is no better place for hiding a secret than an unfinished novel.
– Italo Calvino
The labyrinth represents the world allegorically … Spacious for the one entering, but extremely narrow for the one returning.
– Umberto Eco
The Fates guide the person who accepts them and hinder the person who resists them.
– Cleanthes
Will the AI ever understand
that somtimes a bucket of sand
is just a bucket of sand,
the old monk wondered.
Not everything is symbol.
– The Old Monk
We never observe totally, with all the sensory responses. We each respond somewhat specially, divided. Is it possible to respond totally with all one’s senses?
– Krishnamurti
I don’t believe in craft in the abstract—each individual novel is its own rule book, training ground, factory, and independent republic.
– Zadie Smith
What I have finally learned this morning from writing 13 books:
Other people are having WAY more fun in their lives than I am.
– Paisley Rekdal
The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.
– Rebecca Solnit
A poem is built on silences as well as sounds. And it imposes a silence audible as a laugh, a sigh, a groan.
– Robert Hayden
Literature is produced by writers, yes, but also by communities that shape them.
– Kwame Anthony Appiah
It will take two generations to build enough cultural capital to operate at bioregional scale, and 7 generations to rebuild the spiritual capital to transcend the need for penny pinching and bean counting altogether
– @antonio_paglino
That which is threatening to the ego is liberating for the heart.
– Amaro Bhikkhu
simone weil, i maintain this now, is the only great spirit of our times (…) i served to make known and disseminate her work whose full impact we have yet to measure.
– albert camus
If I knew I was going to live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself.
– Mickey Mantle
Right or wrong, it’s very pleasant
to break something from
time to time.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
Jesus in the Wilderness
by Malika Booker
1.Temptation
I know you were weary those forty days
in the wilderness. What was that wilderness like—
dry dust, and swirling wind, no colour,
as the devil’s flowers do not give birth
to seeds here? What is it to live in the forest
of devil’s yarn, like a goat wild and yearning,
tempted, strong of will yet weak of mind?
What is it to want? What is temptation but yielding
of flesh. How fast did your heart beat against
ribcage in anger at these tantalising abominable
lies. No one talks about limbs weakening,
or rats gnawing your belly, lice in your hair,
like in the belly of the ship, no one speaks
about that. To build a saint, one needs to gloss
over the body’s ordinariness, one needs
to forget there is mess and nastiness in the gut,
the dry throat swallowing saliva. The ache of spit
sliding along cracked lips and down your
neck back. The way the stomach contracts,
its punch all uneven, each like a xxx of fists.
2. How not to drown in desire
day stretched like a bending river
day stretched and curled like a meandering river
when days began to stretch
when his days began to curl
when his days became a meandering river
it’s undertow dragging him
when the days became deceptive, a river
meandering. It’s undertow
when his days became a meandering river
when his days began to curl into a river
when his days stretched and curled
when his days stretched, curling into a river
whose undertow dragged him weary to the surface
3. Sufferation
When his days stretched, curling into a river
whose undertow ripped his skin right to the soul
he who believed, stood firm in dry dust,
where flowers do not give birth from seeds,
where wild goats stroll. No one talks
of his trembling limbs, the gnawing rats
in his gut, the fleas congregating to party
in his hair. No one talks of the reptile’s guffaw
as the Devil sucked succulent orange over forty
days and nights, while he who believed stitched
then unpicked the stitches from his bloody lips
how the taunt of the orange juice ached
his neck back in the ripe stench of the boat’s belly.
How they gripe, the dry heaves scraping
his neck back his belly swelling pregnant with emptiness.
Since those days we fast in our thirst for salvation,
long forgotten, the bloodied scar on his nailed palm.
I think the main problem with my generation is that we were taught Dungeons and Dragons is evil but Monopoly isn’t.
– Paul Crenshaw
I shall dance all my life. . . . I would like to die, breathless, spent, at the end of a dance.
– Josephine Bake
Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.
– David Bowie
Fear is a product of the mind. And danger can be met without fear. Surely soldiers in battle know about this. There is no greater enemy than fear.
– Joel Agee
A poet or a poem alone, reflection alone, can’t bring a community together—it’s the two-way dialogue that brings the community together.
– Shin Yu Pai
Someone can be looking at you and still not see you.
– @inapineforest
There is more to life than what we can see at the surface. Some of us prefer to leave these depths to poets and prophets, and as T. S. Eliot reminded us, “human kind cannot bear very much reality”.
– David Tacey
Love comes like lightning, and disappears the same way. If you are lucky, it strikes you right.
– Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
So long as I have questions to which there are no answers, I shall go on writing.
– Clarice Lispector
I learned to dream through reading, learned to create dreams through writing, and learned to develop dreamers through teaching. I shall always be a dreamer. Come dream with me.
– Sharon Draper
Remember: There is nothing natural or inevitable about extreme inequality; it’s the result of an economic system that values wealth and power over human dignity and justice.
– Robert Reich
I say it again: we make things holy by the kind of attention we give them. In a time when we are begging for a new story, it may be the stories we need are supporting us right now, if only we would lower our gaze.
– Martin Shaw
Besides the major currents of the world, there still exist individualities anchored in the “Real estate”. They are, at most, strangers who keep themselves out of all the trivialities of notoriety and modern culture. They hold peak lines, they don’t belong to this world – despite being scattered across the earth and often ignoring each other, they are invisibly united and form an unbreakable chain in the traditional spirit. This nucleus does not work— It only has the function that corresponds to the symbolism of the “Everlasting Fire”. By virtue of them, Tradition is present in spite of everything, the flame burns invisibly, something always connects the world to the superworld. — They are the ones watching.
– Julius Evola
Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone;
For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
But has trouble enough of its own.
Sing, and the hills will answer;
Sigh, it is lost on the air;
The echoes bound to a joyful sound,
But shrink from voicing care.
Rejoice, and men will seek you;
Grieve, and they turn and go;
They want full measure of all your pleasure,
But they do not need your woe.
Be glad, and your friends are many;
Be sad, and you lose them all,—
There are none to decline your nectared wine,
But alone you must drink life’s gall.
Feast, and your halls are crowded;
Fast, and the world goes by.
Succeed and give, and it helps you live,
But no man can help you die.
There is room in the halls of pleasure
For a large and lordly train,
But one by one we must all file on
Through the narrow aisles of pain.
– Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Letting people know you too well is like the commercial for a telephone company with the hapless person trying to find decent reception: ‘Can you hear me now?’….Yes, I’m odd, endlessly judgmental, secretly antisocial. Can you love me now?
– Anne Lamott
So many relationships end with, “You’re not who I thought you were.” But what if that’s where we started?—with curiosity & wonder stemming from an understanding that every alive thing is a continual mystery unfolding beyond our limited notions & imaginings.
– McCall Erickson
Accumulate, then distribute. Of the mirror of the universe be the part that is densest, most useful and least apparent.
– René Char
frosty evening —
the smell of a book
just arrived
– Ion Codrescu
I get deeply tired because
everything touches me,
I am never indifferent.
Indifference or passivity are
impossible to me.
– Anais Nin
I very much agree with Carl Jung, who said that transformation at the deeper levels happens in the presence of images much more than through concepts.
– Richard Rohr, Things Hidden
Chaos is what we’ve lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control.
– Terence McKenna
cracked soil
a day laborer bent
over his shadow
– Sasa Vasic
the primary process of intellectual, social and practical life is no more and no less than rearrangement. sorting things. putting different things next to each other.
– Noreen Masud
The whole universe is summed up in the Human Being. Devil is not a monster waiting to trap us, He is a voice inside. Look for Your Devil in Yourself, not in the Others. Don’t forget that the one who knows his Devil, knows his God.
– Shams Tabrizi
No, the wild tulip shall outlast the prison wall
no matter what grows within.
– John Wieners
Ash Wednesday
as I dust the piano
faint notes
– Marianne Bluger
Poems —
you want to get them
by the end,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
black and white
a penguin poses
in watercolour
– James Welsh
I keep thinking the world has gone completely mad, but actually I think it’s worse than that, I think the world (Western world) has revealed itself – where the power lies, and what they’re willing to do to hold onto it.
And, it is MUCH worse that I could have ever imagined.
– Sam Missingham
I am selling something
that cannot be bought;
I am buying something
that cannot be sold.
– Abbas Kiarostami
I am the People, the Mob
by Carl Sandburg
I am the people—the mob—the crowd—the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world’s food and clothes. I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons come from me and the Lincolns. They die. And then I send forth more Napoleons and Lincolns.
I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me. I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted. I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and makes me work and give up what I have. And I forget.
Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red drops for history to remember. Then—I forget.
When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer forget who robbed me last year, who played me for a fool—then there will be no speaker in all the world say the name: “The People,” with any fleck of a sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of derision.
The mob—the crowd—the mass—will arrive then.
The act of reading a poem—even silently— must be bodily before it’s intellectual.
– Donald Hall
A man should never earn his living,
if he earns his life he’ll be lovely
– D. H. Lawrence
Diversity + Inclusion does not = Discrimination.
When systems, policies, and practices have been violently and oppressively imbalanced for hundreds of years, there must be strategic efforts to create equity and to honor equality.
Only people threatened by justice oppose it.
– @BerniceKing
a butterfly chasing
poetic dreams
under the sun
– Ogawa
Give me hunger, O you gods that sit and give The world its orders.
– Carl Sandburg
The path of truth is profound and so are the obstacles and possibilities for self-deception.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Equanimity is said to be an anchor. It protects you against the “worldly winds”—pleasure and pain, praise and blame, gain and loss, fame and disrepute.
– Daisy Hernández
Many writers, self-included, stay away from social media for long stretches or cut their activity to retain their sanity. If you do that, you will really have to work at re-developing your presence when you have a book coming. That’s why you should stay on social media and engage as much as possible every day.
– Kurt Baumeister
The trouble with those who find a better way is that they can so easily come to believe it’s the only way; if life could be solved, somebody would have come up with the answer long ago.
– Pico Iyer
Another word for “fixating” is “samadhi.”
– @VinceFHorn
I realized that I was looking into the eyes of Chuang Tzu, my favourite philosopher — the Groucho Marx of Taoist philosophy.
– Lawrence Durrell
There are qualities of darkness, the darkness of gray silk stretched taut to form the sky, watered by city lights, the darkness of black quartz boiling to make a river, and the penciled figures of men in the distance, minute figures on—is that a second story?
– Edmund White
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
– Carl Sandburg
Our consciousness revolves around the unconscious, not the other way around. The center of a human being lies in the unconscious. It was an error of 19th century to say: center of the world is the ego. The ego is, so to speak, a clown acting as if it were the leading actor.
– CG Jung
The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace.
– Jhumpa Lahiri
Small books bearing great burdens, the Moomins contain the whole arsenal of Western literature, and so it is strange that they are associated with an entirely homespun Finnish whimsy.
– Frances Wilson
The textures of the world are an outline of the infinite. [Wallace] Stevens said, or at least I seem to remember that he said, the thing seen becomes the thing unseen. He also said that the reverse way was impossible. [Theodore] Roethke wrote that all finite things reveal infinitude. What we have, and all we will have, is here in the earthly paradise. How to wring music from it, how to squeeze light out of it, is, as it has always been, the only true question. I’d say that to love the visible things in the visible world is to love their apokatastatic outline in the invisible next.
– Charles Wright
This is the time to be slow,
Lie low to the wall
Until the bitter weather passes.
Try, as best you can, not to let
The wire brush of doubt
Scrape from your heart
All sense of yourself
And your hesitant light.
If you remain generous,
Time will come good;
And you will find your feet
Again on fresh pastures of promise,
Where the air will be kind
And blushed with beginning.
– John O’Donohue
We walked where the ancient pier juts into the sea.
Stood on the rim of the pool, by the circle
of black boulders. No one saw we were there
and everyone who had ever been there stood
silently in air.
Where else do we ever have to go, and why?
– Naomi Shihab Nye, Isle of Mull
Perhaps the most liberating moment in my life was when I realized that my self-loathing was not a product of my inadequacy but, rather, a product of my thoughts.
– Vironika Tugaleva
Home wasn’t a set house, or a single town on a map. It was wherever the people who loved you were, whenever you were together. Not a place, but a moment, and then another, building on each other like bricks to create a solid shelter that you take with you for your entire life, wherever you may go.
– Sarah Dessen
And right below me was the miraculous stream. I knelt down and plunged my hands in to scoop up the water. When I held them in front of me, my palms were covered in rose petals…
– Yoko Ogawa, The Memory Police
Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling too upon every part of the lonely churchyard where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
– James Joyce
The “veil upon veil” that opens endlessly forever—this is 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 [Carlo] 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
I am a Christian because once when I was suffering terribly and near death Christ came to me—in my mind, in my heart, through the minds and hearts of others, through what I was reading and what I was touching and tasting and seeing, he seemed everywhere dammit—and was present in my soul. Was my soul.
I’ve fallen so far from that time. I don’t relish, and often don’t even recognize, “Christianity.” And still, my Christ has led me from that moment to this one, has patiently waited while I have thought and fought my way through all these disconnected fragments, both in this entry and in this book. My Christ, I think, is disappointed that I still think I can think my way through such things. That through is even the preposition that should occur to me here.
– Christian Wiman
Then he showed me a small thing, the size of a hazelnut, nestled in the palm of my hand. It was round as a ball. I looked at it with the eyes of my understanding and thought, ‘What can this be?’ And the answer came to me: ‘It is all that is created.’ I was amazed that it could continue to exist. It seemed to me to be so little that it was on the verge of dissolving into nothingness. And then these words entered my understanding: ‘It lasts and will last forever because God loves it. Everything that is has its being through the love of God.’
– Julian of Norwich
The secret is that “other” eventually turns out to be you. I mean, that’s the element of surprise in life: when suddenly you find the thing most alien. We say now: what is most alien to us? Go out at night and look at the stars, and realize that they are millions and millions and billions of miles away. Vast conflagrations out in space. And you can lie back and look at that. Whew! Say, “Well! Surely I hardly matter. I’m just a tiny, tiny little peekaboo on this weird spot of dust called Earth. And all that going on out there. Billions of years before I was born. Billions of years after I will die.” And nothing seems stranger to you than that, more different from you. But there comes a point (if you watch long enough) when you’ll say, “Why, that’s me!” It’s the “other” that is the condition of your being yourself, as the back is the condition of being the front. And when you know that, you know you never die.
– Alan Watts
This, then, is the human problem: there is a price to be paid for every increase in consciousness. We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.
– Alan Watts
By dialoguing with our shadow we lift enormous projections of animosity or envy off of others. It is hard enough to live our own lives, and everyone is better served if we concentrate on our own individuation rather than getting stuck in the agendas of others.
– James Hollis
For progress there is no cure.
If you have lost all four corners then you have lost.
If you have secured all four corners then you have lost.
– Benjamin Labatut
For anyone who does not submit to tyranny.
There, there waits the ark.
– Kamelya Omayma Youssef
You’ll never be happy or fulfilled if you hand over your agency and identity to a politics
…don’t fret though, medieval religious councils from Japan and Tibet don’t count as political institutions anymore, statute of limitations
– River Kenna
I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods meeting the unmarked strip of light — ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise: I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear. And I won’t tell you where it is …
– Adrienne Rich
But warm, eager, living life – to be rooted in life – to learn, to desire to know, to feel, to think, to act. That is what I want. And nothing less. That is what I must try for.
– Katherine Mansfield
from the fragment one slips to the journal
– Roland Barthes; (tr. Richard Howard)
The most dangerous form of short-term thinking convinces us that just because results are not visible doesn’t mean they are not accumulating.
Thinking long-term helps us see how the accumulation of tiny gains or losses moves us toward or away from our intended future.
– Shane Parrish
People change and forget to tell each other.
– Lillian Hellman
and I lay in my bed by the open window listening
to that world being born out there
– Anis Mojgani
The limitations
of artificial intelligence
lie in its
bias for order,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
Right hemisphere cosplay is a left hemisphere activity
– River Kenna
Writing is like going underwater – thank you for being there when I come back up.
– Ali Shaw
Let us justly appreciate the old opportune Belgian motto: ‘Light bursts forth from the collision of ideas’.
– James Ensor to Albert Einstein
Never Said
by Melissa Stein
the fawns had leapt the fence
into the mountain lion’s maw
or that the falcon arrowed past,
a vole pierced in its talons,
releasing the most wrenching
cry. I said I cared for you
and had for a long time. Not
that the shoulder of the wolf
was broken when she fell
from the ravine and her pack
began to shy away. That the sundew
had caught the damselfly
in its sticky pearls and it was
lose a leg or die. I simply said
in slanting evening light
I’d like to have a child.
LION
Split dandelion, peeled down its silvery stalk, split head
eyeing two directions. In one, I’m headed west in a
Volvo stationwagon held together by a filigree of rust. In
the other, I’m drowning in the bath, pristine and
lavender. Either way the path rolls up behind me. I could
dazzle in the volts of the car battery. I could rise,
fragrant and redeemed. A relief to know it’s always
earlier someplace else. Somewhere—dear lion, dear
crown, my dear sweet resting place—the ruin I’ve made
is in one piece.
– Melissa Stein
city street
the darkness inside
the snow-covered cars
– Cor van den Heuvel
The exhilarative truth-telling and wit, the poems that walk the page with a humble gait, and those that ego-strut, the foundational voices and the newly arrived, remind me of what poetry has been in similarly oppressive times, its capacity for liberative endurance.
– Diane Seuss
@wandrstruckpoet:
Dear self,
Get your life together. Get your life together. Get your life together.
Get your life together.
Get your life together.
Get your life together.
Get your life together.
Get your life together.
Thanks,
your self
Jung said to me: You can’t analyze people really if you don’t know how they live. If you haven’t gotten a whiff of the country in which they live, if you haven’t gotten a feeling of the atmosphere in which they normally live, you can’t understand them.
– Marie Louise von Franz
Your best friends are the ones who don’t care where you are on the roller coaster of fame & disrepute, pleasure & pain, gain & loss, praise & blame. They’re with you through thick and thin.
– @VinceFHorn
morning sun
not a moment to spare
on hate
– @jane_ross_
Being authentic isn’t about sharing all of who+how you are, nor is it about sharing your fullest expressions at all times. It’s about being aware & true to yourself in each & every moment. And sometimes being true to yourself means leaving the room & not sharing any of yourself.
– Nyle Beck
That’s my principal message to writers: for God’s sake, keep your eyes open.
– William S. Burroughs
when we wake the world
is already beginning
small songs of low light
– Catherine Baker
Nobody talked ideas. It wasn’t an ideas bunch.
– William Gass
Today I am perhaps the happiest man in the world
I have everything I don’t want
And the only thing in life I do want is what every turn of the propeller brings me closer to
And maybe I will have lost everything when I get there.
– Blaise Cendrars
Solitude is the soul’s holiday, an opportunity to stop doing for others and to surprise and delight ourselves instead.
– Katrina Kenison
the connection brings you together, but the
emotional maturity is what makes it work
– young pueblo
If a mathematician calculated π exactly, the world would disappear, because we would have the common measure for all possible dimensions of space
– René Daumal
just more questions
with every answer –
get it
– Mueder Krieger
Where there is no hope, it is incumbent on us to invent it.
– Albert Camus
He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels.
– Leonard Cohen, on Charles Bukowski
salmon run—
the bridge clogged
with people
– Tanya McDonald
into the new year
I read our future
in frozen breath
– @hegelincanada
Often when I am very tired, just before going to bed, while washing my face and brushing my teeth, my mind gets very clear … and produces a line for the next day’s work, or some idea way ahead.
– Joseph Heller
Katherine Mansfield complained that although ‘there are many people that I like very much,’ she didn’t know how to reach them: ‘They call me false, and mad, and changeable.’
– Deborah Friedell
Oh, to know what the dawn-wind murmurs
In chapels of pines to the ashen moons;
– Sadakichi Hartmann
the way the sun
shines through an icicle —
small epiphanies
– @hegelincanada
January
The gate wide open; chairs on the lawn;
Circular verandahs; a narrow kitchen;
High-ceilinged rooms; arches; alcoves, skylights.
My house luminous; my day burnt to ash.
– Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
crescent moon
the air we breathe
is propaganda
– Martin Lucas
I think if you want to be more charismatic, these are the lowest-hanging fruit:
1) Make other people the center of attention, stay “out there”
2) Talk with your body, including social touch if appropriate
3) Be frank and forthright and include emotion in your communication
– Sasha Chapin
Do not allow them to take away your creativity.
– Maria Callas
Facts of Life: Winter
December, when so many religions
converge, the season of hocus pocus,
and all the various potentates dress up
with their jewelry, funny hats, and robes. It’s
consoling to remember that, no matter
how many fictitious saints’ bones we
may kiss, the northern hemisphere
is just tilting gently away from the sun for
a while until, as we orbit, the tilt
faces the light again, bringing
warmth and new growth and love and
maybe, some days, even hope.
All the gods and all the miracles are
matters of faith, of course, and they
may bring comfort to some, but the billions
of galaxies and trillions of microbes,
the optic nerve and the orcas,
the roots of trees and the giant squids,
the wonders of the winds and waves,
these are matters of fact on our tiny
planet hurtling through the void
in our brief visit,
enough to keep us stunned,
grateful, hungry for more.
– Gary Tapp
Because whatever has happened to humanity, whatever is currently happening to humanity, it is happening to all of us. No matter how hidden the cruelty, no matter how far off the screams of pain and terror, we live in one world.
– Alice Walker
I started looking down and looking closely, walking slowly, audaciously rejecting the constant internalized demand for doing. What I discovered was life teeming, reproducing, blossoming, rotting, literally singing, dying and resurrecting beneath my feet. I started noticing and collecting unglamorous bits of earth—weeds with interesting or beautiful patterns, fungi in crazy shapes, seeds or leaves in subtle colors. I felt like the earth was trying to speak to me in a tiny voice, like God was providing a one-on-one tutorial on the beatitudes.
– Deborah Potter
When people come to you for help, do not turn them off with pious words, saying, ‘Have faith and take your troubles to God.’ Act instead as though there were no God, as though there were only one person in the world who could help – only yourself.
– Martin Buber
The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.
– Kurt Vonnegut
There it is, there it is, the treasure I seek,
On the barren sands of a desolate creek
– Henry David Thoreau
I’m forever mindful of Jung’s oft-quoted admonition: “Learn your theories as well as you can, but put them aside when you touch the miracle of the living soul. Not theories, but your creative individuality alone must decide.
– Hadley Fitzgerald
I wanted to begin drinking wine. “It’s now or never,” someone murmured from the screen hanging on the wall. “It’s not now and not never,” someone corrected.
– Renee Gladman
The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
– Cynthia Ozick
It’s often a matter of sitting in front of the computer and worrying. It’s what writing comes down to–worrying that things aren’t going to work out.
– Khaled Hosseini
We last
only as long
as our
fictions.
– Emil Cioran
Morning Song
by Naomi Shihab Nye
For Janna
The tiny journalist
will tell us what she sees.
Document the moves, the dust,
soldiers blocking the road.
Yes, she knows how to take a picture
with her phone. Holds it high
like a balloon. Yes, she would
prefer to dance and play,
would prefer the world
to be pink. It is her job to say
what she sees, what is happening.
From her vantage point everything
is huge—but don’t look down on her.
She’s bigger than you are.
If you stomp her garden
each leaf expands its view.
Don’t hide what you do.
She sees you at 2 a.m. adjusting your
impenetrable vest.
What could she have
that you want? Her treasures,
the shiny buttons her grandmother loved.
Her cousin, her uncle.
There might have been a shirt . . .
The tiny journalist notices
action on far away roads
farther even than the next village.
She takes counsel from bugs so
puffs of dust find her first.
Could that be a friend?
They pretended not to see us.
They came at night with weapons.
What was our crime? That we liked
respect as they do? That we have pride?
She stares through a hole in the fence,
barricade of words and wire,
feels the rising fire
before anyone strikes a match.
She has a better idea.
The eye, like a strange ballon, mounts toward infinity.
– Odilon Redon
The piece that elevates metta to the terrain of connection with each other, the universe, nature, so that we are not separate from any of it, is compassion.
– Dara Williams
There is a time in life when you just take a walk:
And you walk into your own landscape.
– Willem de Kooning
Perhaps in this world it doesn’t matter what you want, but you have to want something.
– Katherine Mansfield
If all that has been done and learned over centuries is eclipsed by what happened just now, we’re not living in the moment but only in thall to it.
– Pico Iyer
The dead are not dead.
until they persuade themselves
they are. Then they start
quietly packing
their thoughts and gestures, their words
and ever fainter
presences. And yet
they inevitably leave
certain belongings
behind, unaddressed.
– George Szirtes
Things feel partial. My love for things is partial.
– Diane Seuss
A film is never really
good unless the camera
is the eye of a poet.
– Orson Welles
I wish for that level of certainty, to know the grass will always be green because generational wealth grew gardens.
– Usman Hameedi
THE MAP
The failure of love might account for most of the suffering in the world.
The girl was going over her global studies homework
in the air where she drew the map with her finger
touching the Gobi desert,
the Plateau of Tiber in front of her,
and looking through her transparent map backwards
I did suddenly see,
how her left is my right, and for a moment I understood.
– Marie Howe
THE WAY TO START A DAY
The way to start a day is this: Go outside and face the east and greet the sun with some kind of blessing or chant or song that you made yourself and keep for early morning.
The way to make the song is this: Don’t try to think what words to use until you’re standing there alone. When you feel the sun you’ll feel the song, too. Just sing it…
A morning needs to be sung to. A new day needs to be honored…
Your song will be an offering and you’ll be one more person in one more place at one more time in the world saying hello to the sun, letting it know you are there. If the sky turns a color sky never was before just watch it. That’s part of the magic. That’s the way to start a day.
– Byrd Baylor
Invisible fish swim this ghost ocean now described by waves of sand, by water-worn rock. Soon the fish will learn to walk. Then humans will come ashore and paint dreams on the dying stone. Then later, much later, the ocean floor will be punctuated by Chevy trucks, carrying the dreamers’ descendants, who are going to the store.
– Joy Harjo
They can be like a sun, words. They can do for the heart what light can for a field.
– John of the Cross
Your cure is in you, but you are unaware,
And your illness is from you, but you do not see.
And you consider yourself to be a small mass
While within you lies the greatest world.
And you are the clear book
Whose letters make manifest the hidden.
– Amīr al-Mu’mineen, Imam Ali (ع)
our life should be magic
we should live in a new and ever-
changing world there should
be wonders
mountains
unexplored villages
with small golden people
our clothing simple
a foreign language
which we speak
and just understand
– Richard Donnelly, New Country
When I use the word spiritual, I am not contradistinguishing it from the material. I have little patience with any philosophy or religion that seeks to transcend the material realm. Indeed, the separation of the spiritual from the material is instrumental in our heinous treatment of the material world. So when I speak of meeting our spiritual needs, it is not to keep cranking out the cheap, generic, planet-killing stuff while we meditate, pray, and prattle on about angels, spirit, and God. It is to treat relationship, circulation, and material life itself as sacred. Because they are.
– Charles Eisenstein
If you keep a sense of humor, and a mistrust of the rules laid down around you, there will be success.
– Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
Sometimes it was hard to say things. Things were so complicated. People might resent what you said. They might use your remarks against you. They might take you seriously and act upon your words, actually do something. They might not even hear you, which perhaps was the only thing worth hoping for. But it was more complicated than that. The sheer effort of speaking. Easier to stay apart, leave things as they are, avoid responsibility for reflecting the world and all its grave weight. Things that should be simple are always hard. But hard things are never easy.
– Don DeLillo
The Highwomen
Crowded Table
You can hold my hand
When you need to let go
I can be your mountain
When you’re feeling valley-low
I can be your streetlight
Showing you the way home
You can hold my hand
When you need to let go
I want a house with a crowded table
And a place by the fire for everyone
Let us take on the world while we’re young and able
And bring us back together when the day is done
If we want a garden
We’re gonna have to sow the seed
Plant a little happiness
Let the roots run deep
If it’s love that we give
Then it’s love that we reap
If we want a garden
We’re gonna have to sow the seed
Yeah I want a house with a crowded table
And a place by the fire for everyone
Let us take on the world while we’re young and able
And bring us back together when the day is done
The door is always open
Your picture’s on my wall
Everyone’s a little broken
And everyone belongs
Yeah, everyone belongs
I want a house with a crowded table
And a place by the fire for everyone
Let us take on the world while we’re young and able
And bring us back together when the day is done
And bring us back together when the day is done
I have often been asked from where I draw my energy. I often think of all the refugees whom I met in camps, in villages, in reception centres, in shantytowns. I believe that what has kept me going is the conviction that our collective efforts can turn the terror and pain of exile into the safety and unity of family and friends.
– Sadako Ogata
Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally.
– Fernando Pessoa
I have made mysterious Nature my religion. I do not believe that a man is any nearer to God for being clad in priestly garments, nor that one place in a town is better adapted to meditation than another. When I gaze at a sunset sky and spend hours contemplating its marvelous ever-changing beauty, an extraordinary emotion overwhelms me. Nature in all its vastness is truthfully reflected in my sincere though feeble soul. Around me are the trees stretching up their branches to the skies, the perfumed flowers gladdening the meadow, the gentle grass-carpeted earth, …and my hands unconsciously assume an attitude of adoration. …To feel the supreme and moving beauty of the spectacle to which Nature invites her ephemeral guests! …that is what I call prayer.
– Claude Debussy
My motto has always been: “Always merry and bright.” Perhaps that is why I never tire of quoting Rabelais: “For all your ills I give you laughter.” As I look back on my life, which has been full of tragic moments, I see it more as a comedy than a tragedy. One of those comedies in which while laughing your guts out you feel your inner heart breaking. What better comedy could there be? The man who takes himself seriously is doomed…
There is nothing wrong with life itself. It is the ocean in which we swim and we either adapt to it or sink to the bottom. But it is in our power as human beings not to pollute the waters of life, not to destroy the spirit which animates us.
The most difficult thing for a creative individual is to refrain from the effort to make the world to his liking and to accept his fellow man for what he is, whether good, bad or indifferent.
– Henry Miller
I discovered that when I believed my thoughts, I suffered, but that when I didn’t believe them, I didn’t suffer, and that this is true for every human being. Freedom is as simple as that. I found that suffering is optional. I found a joy within me that has never disappeared, not for a single moment. That joy is in everyone, always.
– Byron Katie
It is in the brain that everything takes place…. It is in the brain that the poppy is red, that the apple is odorous, that the skylark sings.
– Oscar Wilde
Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.
– George Orwell
The blue mountain is the father of the white cloud. The white cloud is the son of the blue mountain. All day long they depend on each other, without being dependent on each other. The blue mountain is always the blue mountain. The white cloud is always the white cloud.
– Unknown
I’ve got lots of sensibility and no common sense;
isn’t it better to lie low while the universe bombards
to ride out the pendulation of the seasons
straining not so often to embrace the moon. but more
to render it embraceable; isn’t it enough
that one branch, rocking before a storm, can gather
the lines of twilight like threads in cool fresh sheets;
and isn’t it enough that all creeks flow seaward;
isn’t it enough that riverbanks come in pairs?
– Diane Ackerman
Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.
– Chuck Klosterman
Rare are those who give helpful advice,
rarer still are those who follow them.
A skilled physician is hard to find,
Those who heed his advice are few.
– Sakya Pandita
Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. It strikes us when we feel that our separation is deeper than usual, because we have violated another life, a life which we loved, or from which we were estranged. It strikes us when our disgust for our own being, our indifference, our weakness, our hostility, and our lack of direction and composure have become intolerable to us. It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage.
Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: ‘You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!’
If that happens to us, we experience grace. After such an experience we may not be better than before, and we may not believe more than before. But everything is transformed. In that moment, grace conquers sin, and reconciliation bridges the gulf of estrangement. And nothing is demanded of this experience, no religious or moral or intellectual presupposition, nothing but acceptance,
– Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations.
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
The problem in middle life, when the body has reached its climax of power and begins to decline, is to identify yourself, not with the body, which is falling away, but with the consciousness of which it is a vehicle. This is something I learned from myths. What am I? Am I the bulb that carries the light? Or am I the light of which the bulb is a vehicle?
One of the psychological problems in growing old is the fear of death. People resist the door of death. But this body is a vehicle of consciousness, and if you can identify with the consciousness, you can watch this body go like an old car. There goes the fender, there goes the tire, one thing after another— but it’s predictable. And then, gradually, the whole thing drops off, and consciousness, rejoins consciousness. It is no longer in this particular environment.
– Joseph Campbell
Ideological thinking ruins all relationship with reality.
– Hannah Arendt
Jung was not concerned with repairing broken lives to fit into an insane social order, but had to reverse the directions of psychiatry and argue that society was mad and, as such, individual madness is to be expected as a product of a more general madness.
– David Tacey
There’s no sense
in telling you my particular
troubles. You have yours too.
Is there value
in comparing notes?
– Diane Seuss
some of you need to go back to ipod nanos at least until you get your mind right and you’re finally ready to go online again
– Kristen Arnett
His students get
harder lessons
than his followers,
the master said
about the old monk.
– The Old Monk
on the reader’s eye
all poems are done
but the old writer’s
torment cannot be
– Andy Perrin
The most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening.
– Rosa Luxemburg
I wrote another play, and nobody liked it. And then another. But still, I thought, These people are crazy, I’m going to devote my life to theater.
– Wallace Shawn
I am too tired to hold up this heavy self.
Of selfhood I worked so hard to earn. Of work I worked so hard
to avoid. Of the working class. My class.
– Diane Seuss
I spend ninety percent of my time in revision. It’s a craziness. There are sometimes maybe thirty variants of the lineation of a stanza.
– Jorie Graham
how many times
have I chased the thought
of writing to you,
of catching the poem where
it cannot leave,
of knocking open the door to a grief
we all hold,
– Afaa Michael Weaver
The mind I love must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody’s fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind.
– Katherine Mansfield
And the whole galaxy gaping there
and the centuries whining like gnats—
you, to teach me to see it, to see
it with you, and to offer somebody
uncomprehending, impudent thanks.
– William Meredith
I like exiled voices. They are some of the wisest in literature, any literature.
– Zeeshan Jaanam
Human beings can withstand a week without water, two weeks without food, many years of homelessness, but not loneliness. It is the worst of all tortures, the worst of all sufferings.
– Paulo Coelho
What can memory be in these terrible times? Only instruction. Not a dwelling.
– Diane Seuss
You have to grow
Into it, your legs stretching out along
The floor and farther beyond as you
Fall asleep in the best chair you got.
– Jericho Brown
LOVE EVERYTHING
Once we have learned to discern the real, disguised nature of both good and evil, we recognize that everything is broken and fallen, weak and poor, while still being the dwelling place of God – you and me, your country, your children, your churches, even your marriage. That is not a put-down, but finally a freedom to love imperfect things!
In this, you may have been given the greatest recipe for happiness for the rest of your life. You cannot wait for things to be totally perfect to fall in love with them or you will never love anything. Now, instead, you can love everything.
– Richard Rohr
Patanjali, in his classic work on yoga, formulates in his first sentence the practical and theoretical essence of yoga—the “first arcanum” or the key of yoga—as follows: Yoga citta vritti nirodha (Yoga is the suppression of the oscillations of the mental substance, Yoga Sutras 1.2) —or, in other terms, the art of concentration. For the “oscillations” (vritti) of the “mental substance” (citta) take place automatically. This automatism in the movements of thought and imagination is the opposite of concentration. Now, concentration is only possible in a condition of calm and silence, at the expense of the automatism of thought and imagination.
It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.
– Oscar Wilde
Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place […] Nothing outside you can give you any place […] In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got.
– Flannery O’Connor
And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.
– Roald Dahl
It’s a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown I back, throat to the stars, “more like deer than human being.” To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.
– Donna Tartt
The road must be trod, but it will be very hard. And neither strength nor wisdom will carry us far upon it. This quest may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong. Yet it is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: Small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
And a softness came from the starlight and filled me full to the bone.
– W. B. Yeats
The primary reason we pay attention to dreams is that they do not arise from the ego.
– James Hollis
Poems don’t belong in long books of poems. They are best when slipped into a lunch bag, hung on a mirror, passed out in party invitations and enclosed in notes with booty shots and candy.
– D. A. Powell
When there is nowhere to go, you realize that most of the time you are racing purposefully from place to place, missing out on how wondrous it all is.
– Anne Lamott
It is not so much the meaning of life that we seek, but our aliveness. When we have that, the meaning of life is obvious.
– Anodea Judith
Integrate what you believe in every single area of your life.
– Meryl Streep
Spirituality does not consist of being told what to do. It consists of being reminded of who we are.
– John Philip Newell
This world is the only reality available to us, and if we do not love it in all its terror, we are sure to end up loving the ‘imaginary,’ our own self-deceits, the utopias of politicians, the futile promises of future reward which the misled call ‘religion’.
– Leslie Fiedler
Our feelings, emotions, and experiences—good, bad, or neutral—are genuine and a part of who we are. We won’t grow, transform, and awaken by running away from them; it is by embracing who we are that we awaken.
– Mark Herrick
Just thinking about how Boomers were never more wrong about Gen X than when they said we’d stop caring about new music – they never understood it wasn’t just that we liked our generation’s music, it’s that our generation made discovering music, new and old, our entire personality.
– Amber Sparks
Fear not. What is not real, never was and never will be. What is real, always was and cannot be destroyed.
– The Bhagavad Gita
stood before
the purity of birdsong
words fail.
– James Welsh
There are some people who never psychologically leave the Garden of Eden. They have never had to encounter the “law” that contradicts their original ego-Self identity and the inflation that goes along with it. Psychologically, they are unborn.
– Edward Edinger
Sometimes I write to say what I might know.
Sometimes I write to know what I might say.
– D. A. Powell
I remember walking to the studio one day and when I got there, they had to give me oxygen. They told me no one walks in LA.
– Natalie Merchant
It is better to be an outcast, a stranger in one’s own country, than an outcast from one’s self. It is better to see what is about to befall us and to resist than to retreat into the fantasies embraced by a nation of the blind.
– Chris Hedges
That’s the price
of being a postmodern hero, Beowulf, a pain I’m sure
you’ll never know. Go roast in peace in dragon breath;
we die amid the fumes of our uncertain words.
– Paul J. Willis, Letter to Beowulf
The Third must become the Fourth, because in this way it achieves the quaternity, a geometrical approximation to the circle which is, in turn, the symbol of wholeness or perfection. The sheer range of cultural references in #Jung’s prosecution of this case remains astonishing: if the collective unconscious is, as Shamdasani has suggested, ‘the library within’, then Jung’s Collected Works must surely be the ‘library without’! Yet aside from Jung’s repeated references to the Timaeus, there is another side to his engagement with Plato.
– Paul Bishop, Ph.D.
A little too abstract, a little too wise,
It is time for us to kiss the earth again,
It is time to let the leaves rain from the skies,
Let the rich life run to the roots again.
– Robinson Jeffers
I drive my powerful Audi three quarters of a mile across London to my flat. And there, unless I’ve got something else I have to do, I will sit down and write fiction for as long as I can.
– Martin Amis
What’s wild / will never / lie to you…
– Gabrielle Bates
come my sister
come with me to join our voices
against any who spit on
our roots
– Mikeas Sánchez
…the flowers you loved were weeds.
– Marni Ludwig
I once held on to a grudge for so long, I forgot how the conflict actually started.
– Rudy Francisco
Live in ignorance about what seems most important to your age. Between yourself and today lay the skin of at least three centuries.
– Nietzsche, Joyful Wisdom
Four Faults of Natural Awareness
So close you can’t see it.
So deep you can’t fathom it.
So simple you can’t believe it.
So good you can’t accept it.
– Kalu Rinpoche
Polarity, or action and reaction, we meet in every part of nature; in darkness and light; in heat and cold; in the ebb and flow of waters; in male and female; in the inspiration and expiration of plants and animals; in the systole and diastole of the heart; in the centrifugal and centripetal gravity … If the south attracts, the north repels. To empty here, you must condense there. The value of the universe contrives to throw itself into every point. If the good is there, so is the evil; if the affinity, so the repulsion; if the force, so the limitation … Thus is the universe alive. That soul which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The greatness of art is not to find what is common but what is unique.
– Isaac Bashevis Singer
I place my heart in a mason jar and screw the lid shut i button my shirt exit the bathroom and head down the escalator to my family.
– Porsha Olayiwola
IF
When people ask if I am a Christian, I have to ask them what kind of Christian they have in mind.
If by “Christian” you mean someone who deems Christianity as superior to other world views,
If by ‘Christian” you mean someone who fights against scientific discovery in the name of biblical inerrancy,
If by “Christian” you mean the kind of religion that focuses on getting into a hypothetical heaven while planet earth goes to hell,
-then the answer is “no.” If that is your definition of “Christianity” I want no part in it.
But,
If by “Christian” they mean a reverent love song that can be sung in harmony with my neighbors from other world views,
If, by “Christian” they mean a religion that calls us to build a fairer world where the poor, the weak and the outcast are lifted into full inclusion,
If by “Christian” they mean one culture’s version of the universal hymn to love,
-then the answer is “yes” because, whatever label is given to it, my highest aspiration is to grow into the kind of universal love exemplified by Jesus and all the other best friends of humankind.
– Jim Rigby
We all spend so much time not saying what we want, because we know we can’t have it. And because it sounds ungracious, or ungrateful, or disloyal, or childish, or banal. Or because we’re so desperate to pretend that things are OK, really, that confessing to ourselves they’re not looks like a bad move. Go on, say what you want . . . Whatever it is, say it to yourself. The truth will set you free. Either that or it’ll get you a punch in the nose. Surviving in whatever life you’re living means lying, and lying corrodes the soul, so take a break from the lies for just one minute.
– Nick Hornby
In spring there’s hope,
in fall the exquisite, necessary diminishing, in
winter I am as sleepy as any beast in its
leafy cave, but in summer there is
everywhere the luminous sprawl of gifts,
the hospitality of the Lord and my
inadequate answers as I row my beautiful, temporary body
through this water-lily world.
– Mary Oliver
May we all grow in grace and peace,
and not neglect the silence that is printed
in the center of our being.
It will not fail us.
– Thomas Merton
You alone have been made the image of the Reality that transcends all understanding, the likeness of imperishable beauty, the imprint of true divinity, the recipient of beatitude, the seal of the true light. When you turn to him you become that which he is himself.
– Gregory of Nyss
Our conscious motivations, ideas, and beliefs are a blend of false information, biases, irrational passions, rationalizations, prejudices, in which morsels of truth swim around and give the reassurance albeit false, that the whole mixture is real and true. The thinking processes attempt to organize this whole cesspool of illusions according to the laws of plausibility. This level of consciousness is supposed to reflect reality; it is the map we use for organizing our life.
– Erich Fromm
What men call the shadow of the body is not the shadow of the body, but is the body of the soul.
– Oscar Wilde
Love can happen in a split second. Bondedness can’t. That’s the thing we learn the hard way. That love is not the end of the story. It’s just the first chapter. The next chapters demand that we acknowledge our wounding, clear our emotional debris, strengthen our capacity for attachment, learn how to authentically relate, mature in the deep within. Chapter after chapter of refining our ability to meet love with a true heart. This is the work of a lifetime.
Dear hearts; heart awakening message for today: Love grows in all shapes and sizes…Love grows in an open heart… Love grows by sharing, giving… being Love. You are Love… let yourself grow and transform into the beautiful Loving heart that You already are…
A Friend: Without experiencing the deepest losses and the pinnacles of joy, one has very limited view of life’s greatest pageant.
– Analytical Psychology: Theory and Practice
Except:
Love is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision.
Love isn’t something natural. Rather it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith, and the overcoming of narcissism. It isn’t a feeling, it is a practice.
– Erich Fromm
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
A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn’t telling, or teaching, or ordering. Rather, he seeks to establish a relationship with meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all our live trying to be less lonesome. And one of our ancient methods is to tell a story, begging the listener to say, and to feel, “Yes, that’s the way it is, or at least that’s the way I feel it. You’re not as alone as you thought.” To finish is sadness to a writer, a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn’t really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done.
– John Steinbeck
Often when we are ill, the ‘call’ from deep within invites us not to try to ‘fix the problem’ but instead asks us to let go, retreat to our quiet cave, or nest and receive the incubating gift of patient warmth. Ancient Greek incubation caves where the sick reclined, let go and waited, were seen as places of access to the Underworld, the unconscious, dreaming depths of soul where warming energy and secretive alchemical work abound. To incubate, then, is to surrender to the therapeutic wisdom of Nature that resides deep within our bodies and souls. It is a phase of ’suspended animation’, when life is gently held, slowed and cocooned in sleep, rest and dreams that may cast light on the nature of the gifts that are embedded in our wounds. Sacred incubation is this devotional decision to be fully present in our woundedness, instead of struggling to be free.
– Maureen B. Roberts
When you are ill, your Work is to get well.
– Rina Hands
Joy is the ancestors
come before,
surviving the struggle,
staying strong
in the midst of withering storm
– J. Drew Lanham
Actually, I do happen to resemble a hallucination. Kindly note my silhouette in the moonlight.” The cat climbed into the shaft of moonlight and wanted to keep talking but was asked to be quiet. “Very well, I shall be silent,” he replied, “I shall be a silent hallucination.
– Mikhail Bulgakov
God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.
– Dag Hammarskjöld
Evening
by Rainer Maria Rilke
Slowly the west reaches for clothes of new colors
which it passes to a row of ancient trees. You look,
and soon these two worlds both leave you,
one part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth,
leaving you, not really belonging to either,
not so hopelessly dark as that house that is silent,
not so unswervingly given to the eternal as
that thing that turns to a star each night and climbs-
leaving you (it is impossible to untangle the threads)
your own life, timid and standing high and growing,
so that, sometimes blocked in, sometimes reaching out,
one moment your life is a stone in you, and the next, a star.
Truth; that long clean clear simple undeniable unchallengeable straight and shining line, on one side of which black is black and on the other white is white, has now become an angle, a point of view.
– William Faulkner
Now, god, as a rule, is spelled with a capital G, but not by me. Not when it’s coupled with “damn it,” which, by the time I could drive, was the only way I used it. As an adult — if pressed — I would describe god as something along the lines of “ultimate goodness, loving and light,” but it wasn’t attached to any “him,” nor did it have any sons. I distrusted religion, both organized and otherwise. I owned up to no relationship with any higher power. I did not kneel or turn things over to “him,” yet despite all this, I knew. Deep in the heart of wherever these certainties lie, I knew: god was the truth. I knew it, yet I neither sought it out nor embraced it — no, any possibility of that had been destroyed by the rabid demagogues who called themselves “Christian.”
– Heather Choate Davis
Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified. Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.
– Hanya Yanagihara
It is helpful to think about the person who is angry, the anger itself, and the object of that anger as being like a dream. We can regard our life as a movie in which we are temporarily the leading player. Rather than making it so important, we can reflect on the essencelessness of our current situation. We can slow down and ask ourselves, “Who is this monolithic me that has been so offended? And who is this other person who can trigger me like this? What is this praise and blame that hooks me like a fish, that catches me like a mouse in a trap? How is it that these circumstances have the power to propel me like a Ping-Pong ball from hope to fear, from happiness to misery?” This big-deal struggle, this big-deal self, and this big-deal other could all be lightened up considerably.
– Pema Chödrön
first of all, nothing will happen, and a little later nothing will happen again.
– Leonard Cohen
He’d always been a man who followed his head and not his heart.The heart was just a bloody motor.The head was meant to drive
– Mario Puzo
Mine ear is open,
and my heart prepared. The worst is worldly loss thou canst unfold.
Say, is my kingdom lost?
– Richard II by William Shakespeare
A mantra is basically a means of talking with your thoughts and feelings. It’s a time-honored method sometimes referred to as prayer, but really it’s an opening of a conversation between the heart and the mind.
– Tsoknyi Rinpoche
The Bewlay Brothers
by David Bowie
And so the story goes they wore the clothes
They said the things to make it seem improbable
The whale of a lie like they hope it was
And the Goodmen Tomorrow
Had their feet in the wallow
And their heads of Brawn were nicer shorn
And how they bought their positions with saccharin and trust
And the world was asleep to our latent fuss
Sighing, the swirl through the streets
Like the crust of the sun
The Bewlay Brothers
In our Wings that Bark
Flashing teeth of Brass
Standing tall in the dark
Oh, And we were Gone
Hanging out with your Dwarf Men
We were so turned on
By your lack of conclusions
I was Stone and he was Wax
So he could scream, and still relax, unbelievable
And we frightened the small children away
And our talk was old and dust would flow
Thru our veins and Lo! it was midnight
Back at the kitchen door
Like the grim face on the Cathedral floor
And the solid book we wrote
Cannot be found today
And it was Stalking time for the Moonboys
The Bewlay Brothers
With our backs on the arch
In the Devil-may-be-here
But He can’t sing about that
Oh, And we were Gone
Real Cool Traders
We were so Turned On
You thought we were Fakers
Now the dress is hung, the ticket pawned
The Factor Max that proved the fact
Is melted down
And woven on the edging of my pillow
Now my Brother lays upon the Rocks
He could be dead, He could be not
He could be You
He’s Chameleon, Comedian, Corinthian and Caricature
Shooting-up Pie-in-the-Sky
The Bewlay Brothers
In the feeble and the Bad
The Bewlay Brothers
In the Blessed and Cold
In the Crutch-hungry Dark
Was where we flayed our Mark
Oh, and we were Gone
Kings of Oblivion
We were so Turned On
In the Mind-Warp Pavilion
Lay me place and bake me Pie
I’m starving for me Gravy
Leave my shoes, and door unlocked
I might just slip away, hey
Just for the Day, Hey!
Hey, Please come Away, Hey!
Just for the Day, Hey!
Please come Away, Hey!
Please come Away, Hey!
Just for the Day
Please come Away
Please come Away
Please come Away
Please come Away
Away
(Away)
Away
Hey
In the blue night
frost haze, the sky glows
with the moon
pine tree tops
bend snow-blue, fade
into sky, frost, starlight.
The creak of boots.
Rabbit tracks, deer tracks,
what do we know.
– Gary Snyder
If we cannot find a way to make our wounds into sacred wounds, we invariably become cynical, negative, or bitter. This is the storyline of many of the greatest novels, myths, & stories of every culture. If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.
– Richard Rohr
Science is an all-pervasive energy, for it is at once a mode of thought, a source of strong emotion, and a faith as fanatical as any in history.
– Jacques Barzun
Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centres of life beyond the reach of vocabularies of reason and coercion.
– Joseph Campbell
Newton’s Law for the Digital Age: the less we know, the more readily we pass judgment.
– Pico Iyer
The world pushes you into poetry by withdrawing something, not giving it. The greatest poems are not written by the woman who got that last kiss; they are written by the woman who didn’t.
– Martin Shaw, Courting the Wild Twin
when i write down my thoughts, they do not escape me. this act reminds me of my strength, which i forget always. i strive only to understand the contradiction between my soul and nothingness. the heart of man is a book, which i have learned to prize.
– lautréamont, (tr. guy wernham)
My parents rang the bells of civil rights, endless meals with close friends, a heart for underdogs (such a beautiful bell), and this passionate love of the outdoors, which has saved me thousands of times over the years.
– Anne Lamott
The blue sky outside
is lying to me
I can feel the ice
on my fingers,
the snow blowing
across my face.
– john zbigniew guzlowski
The Scriptures have little use to those who understand them literally.
– Origen
we never shoulda stopped naming educational sites after like, neighborhoods and landmarks
Academy, Lyceum, Forum, Stoa… even salon,, they were all just named for places teachers & students hung out
we should keep coining new ones of those, instead of using the old ones
– River Kenna
And then, so as not be devoured by despair, with a smile on his lips, Querelle offered up this mistake, this error of his, to his guardian star.
– Jean Genet trans. by Anselm Hollo
The quality I appreciate the most about living in Sicily is it’s as close to base reality as you can get in the modern world. No pretense and no pressure.
Slowing down as fast as you can go.
Sane and healthy. Sano e sano.
– @antonio_paglino
Keep clear of the dupes that talk democracy
And the dogs that talk revolution,
Drunk with talk, liars and believers.
I believe in my tusks.
Long live freedom and damn the ideologies.
– Robinson Jeffers
Freedom – that word that the human spirit feeds: that no one can explain, and anyone who does, does not understand.
– Cecília Meireles
Scholarship has yielded to the irresistible pull that science exerts on our minds by its self-confidence and the promise of certified knowledge. But the objects of culture are not analyzable, not graspable by the geometric mind. Great works of art are great by virtue of …
… being syntheses of the world ; they qualify as art by fusing form and contents into an indivisible whole ; what they offer is not discourse about, nor a cipher to be decoded, but a prolonged incitement to finesse.
– Jacques Barzun, The Culture We Deserve
Art is Individualism, and Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value. For what it seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.
– Oscar Wilde
So the stone was silent too, and it was quiet in the mountains where they walked, himself and that one.
– Paul Celan
I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
– Umberto Eco
Something pervasive … that makes the difference between man and the robot, grows numb, ossifies and falls away like black mortified flesh when techne assails the senses and science dominates the mind.
– Jacques Barzun
I play with words. I lose, I win. It makes no difference. What matters is the emotion, the risk, the joy of undertaking this task, which is one of passion.
– Lygia Fagundes Telles
this history
is in the hard labor of hearts, thrusts
of piston and valve.
– Afaa Michael Weaver
You can only say yes. There is nothing to do other than for you to take care of your cause. If anything should happen, it can only happen on this way.
– @RedBookJung
You will wake beside your shadow
like a cello in its locked, black case.
And only you can learn to be its master.
– @stars_poem
smelling of vertigo and light, lonely in the sump amid white flags, cold below the serge, and the eyelids now yellow with love.
– Antonio Gamoneda
slipping silently
my sister never told me
she was dying
– Marilyn Ward
If you realize all things change than there is nothing to hold on to.
– Tao
Not all heroes wear capes, some do PhDs.
– @ThePhDPlace
My relatives say that they are glad I’m rich, but that they simply cannot read me.
– Kurt Vonnegut
Fantasy is probably the oldest literary device for talking about reality.
– Ursula K. Le Guinn
In the modern world one has to specialize, and we are asking whether, even so, it is possible to allow the brain to operate wholly, completely.
– Krishnamurti
If you have forgotten how to love the world
sit in the dark
and say the name of everyone you know.
– @stars_poem
Have you tried walking inside your own voice?
I was rooted at the vault door like a flag. Do you know
this is how some nights refuse to let you go
until the love you will die to hold turns to powder?
– Bola Opaleke
A work of art has never, to my knowledge, displaced another work of art. The living are no more in competition with the dead than they are with the living.
– Joyce Carol Oates
Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering, in order that they may have existence.
– Léon Bloy
Gertrude Stein
by Diane Seuss
I’d just brushed the dog, there on the dog’s couch.
I was wearing a black—well, to call it a gown is a criminal
overstatement—a black rag. It became clear to me—
and when I say clear I mean the moment went crystal cathedral—
I could see my life from—not a long shot—
but what they used to call an increment apart—a baby step
to the right or left of myself—about the width of a corrective
baby shoe. There I was, broad-shouldered, witch-shaped
without the associated magic—with my dog in my shack—
once mauve faded to pink—beyond sex or reason—
a numbness had set in—Gertrude Stein, Picasso’s portrait of her—
that above-it-all—or within-it-all—look on—not a face
but the planes that suggest a face—the eyes
aren’t really lined up right or the real eyes are peering
from behind the cut-out shapes of eyes. The couch
had been a sort of—not a gift—but a donation of sorts
from a person with plenty of money. When it was dragged
into my house it was already—stately—but with worn patches
and stains. A trinity of dogs over time had laid claim to it—
three egotists. To brush the dog meant I had to visit it
in its monarchy—and in that visit—that single prismatic
increment—I saw I’d become—maybe all arrive in their own time—
some before dying, some after—a draped artifact—
haystack or headstone rising out of the plains—
and then, with fascination—and a degree
of sadness and even objectivity—I loved—
as I once loved “Tender Buttons”—myself
It’s all the art of impersonation, isn’t it? That’s the fundamental novelistic gift.
– Philip Roth
Morning Glory
by Patricia Spears Jones
Sunlight softens helicopters hover
Skies above Brooklyn Presidential
Visit, murder investigation, matters little.
Noise in the skies, noise on the ground.
You should prune the morning glories
I tell my elderly neighbor.
She refuses. She likes the way the vine has
Curled around her fence with a ferocity
That cannot be so easily cut back. I get that.
Wildness is rare on a Brooklyn city block,
Old roses return late May as if to say, ha! you
Think we do not know the season? Squirrels
Roam the bricks of buildings, while the gleaners
Fight with raccoons for the spoils of left-out trash.
Huge green leaves for plants with names
Unknown to me sparkle on mornings bright
And dead tree leaves demand constant sweeping away.
The tabby is big, old, and tired—too many kittens
Not enough food—these are ungenerous cat lovers.
Neighbors greet each other and shake their heads
At the young men and women, mostly, but not
All Whitefolk running running—or their faces
Drowning in a pool of handheld devices.
You almost wish they smoked or cursed
Had personality—but they run and run and run
Thus, the joy of this vibrant morning-glory vine
Rooted in her garden’s disarray—happily dominating.
Oh, morning glory—purple, green
Leaves plump as Italian cookies, blossom
Your hearty display for all to see, hold your
Vine’s haven on Macon Street. Only
Winter, harsh winter will take your vines
Back to the ground your wildness calmed.
The world is getting weirder and weirder. Huge things are happening at speeds too high to measure, or even fathom, in the brain of a normal human. We are like moths in a blizzard.
– Hunter S. Thompson
The Night House
Every day the body works in the fields of the world
mending a stone wall
or swinging a sickle through the tall grass –
the grass of civics, the grass of money –
and every night the body curls around itself
and listens for the soft bells of sleep.
But the heart is restless and rises
from the body in the middle of the night,
and leaves the trapezoidal bedroom
with its thick, pictureless walls
to sit by herself at the kitchen table
and heat some milk in a pan.
And the mind gets up too, puts on a robe
and goes downstairs, lights a cigarette,
and opens a book on engineering.
Even the conscience awakens
and roams from room to room in the dark,
darting away from every mirror like a strange fish.
And the soul is up on the roof
in her nightdress, straddling the ridge,
singing a song about the wildness of the sea
until the first rip of pink appears in the sky.
Then, they all will return to the sleeping body
the way a flock of birds settles back into a tree,
resuming their daily colloquy,
talking to each other or themselves
even through the heat of the long afternoons.
Which is why the body – that house of voices –
sometimes puts down its metal tongs, its needle, or its pen
to stare into the distance,
to listen to all its names being called
before bending again to its labor.
– Billy Collins
Strange it is to be beside you
Many years the tables turned
You’d probably not believe me
If I told you all I’ve learned
And it is very, very weird indeed
To hear words like “forever”, fleets
Of ships run through my mind, I cannot cheat
It’s like looking in the teacher’s face complete
I can say nothing to you, but repeat
What I heard
That love is just a four-letter word.
– Joan Baez and Bob Dylan
We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together. And you can’t get rid of one without getting rid of the other.
– Carlos A. Rodríguez
I met my madness when I was seventeen.
I turned it into luminous music for you.
– @stars_poem
intrusive thought:
modernity is so generous – giving us each the option to keep our heads either in the dirt, in the clouds, or up our asses
– River Kenna
When will Americans grow up and realize this is not in their interest? You still don’t have health care, paid parental leave, 30 days paid holidays, children money, free college education or anything else all the other countries have. You just have wars that make a few men richer.
– @LexiAlex
Beware the stories you read or tell: subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.
– Ben Okri
The theologian Paul Tillich expressed it best when he defined grace as accepting the fact that we are accepted, despite the fact that we are unacceptable.
– James Hollis
We always try to do something with ourselves, rather than simply be with ourselves.
– Chögyam Trungpa
I’ll take it all to the mat: Yoga, Buddhism, my childhood faith in a Christ. I’ll take it in pieces and in juxtapositions, to try to work it out – to find a practical, ethical framework that will allow me to make sense of the world – to do good in the world. A bit of joy would be nice. I don’t care if it’s called Yoga. It’s yoga-ish.
– Ren Powell, Orphan Yogini-ish
Life does not get in the way; it is the way.
– Rebecca Li
Despite the common desire to rise to the top, moments of essential change can depend upon a willingness to descend. A deep connection may be drawn between those who face the truth in themselves and the discovery of valuable pearls in depths of the ocean. Those who desire pearls must dive into deep waters; they must crack the hard shell of their little-self and come to know themselves from the inside out.
– Michael Meade
The joke hanging in the air between us is the length of a sword.
– Grant Chemidlin
Sometimes you pick up a book and know one chapter in that it will change you as a reader and a person forever …
– Wulfe Wulfemeyer
Every time you think of calling a kid ‘attention-seeking’ this year, consider changing it to ‘connection seeking’ and see how your perspective changes.
– Dr. Jody Carrington
The human body is a complex spiritual instrument. Ordinary physical breathing is not only the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide, it is the link to our light body. With every inhale-exhale a parallel energy flow in our light body is occurring. Bringing attention to the outer breath cultivates a growing awareness of this inner breath, harmonizes these interpenetrating bodies, and quiets the mind. In breath the visible and the invisible worlds meet.
– Coleman Barks and Michael Green
My paintings have neither object nor space nor line nor anything – no forms. They are light, lightness, about merging, about formlessness, breaking down form. You wouldn’t think of form by the ocean. You can go in if you don’t encounter anything. A world without objects, without interruption, mak- ing a work without interruption or obstacle. It is to accept the necessity of the simple direct going into a field of vision as you would cross an empty beach to look at the ocean.
– Agnes Martin
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 have even a name. The story on the other hand can never be lost from its place in the world for it is that place.
– Cormac McCarthy
In what we call thinking the mind isn’t ‘directed’ but suspended. You don’t give it rules. You teach it to receive. You don’t clear the ground to build unobstructed: you make a little clearing where the penumbra of an almost-given will be able to enter and modify its contour.
– Jean-Francois Lyotard
This is the most beautiful place on earth. There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary. A houseboat in Kashmir, a view down Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, a gray gothic farmhouse two stories high at the end of a red dog road in the Allegheny Mountains, a cabin on the shore of a blue lake in spruce and fir country, a greasy alley near the Hoboken waterfront, or even, possibly, for those of a less demanding sensibility, the world to be seen from a comfortable apartment high in the tender, velvety smog of Manhattan, Chicago, Paris, Tokyo, Rio or Rome – there’s no limit to the human capacity for the homing sentiment.
– Edward Abbey
It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religion, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth.
– Joseph Campbell
When you are lost or caught up in an emotional storm or contracted in self-centeredness or plagued by obsessive thoughts, notice what happens when you step outside or go for a walk and pay attention to the sky, the air, the light, the movement of wind, the feel of grass under your feet.
– Mark Coleman
All these attempts suggest that it is an easy matter to recognize oneself. This is an illusion, a belief built on wishful thinking, and a positively harmful illusion at that. People who embark on that promised easy road will either acquire a false smugness, believing they know all about themselves, or will become discouraged when they are blocked by the first serious obstacle and will tend to relinquish the search for truth as a bad job. Neither result will happen so easily if one is aware that self-analysis is a strenuous, slow process, bound to be painful and upsetting at times and requiring all available constructive energies.
– Karen Horney M.D.
Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them. You simply say, “Here are the perimeters of our attention. If you prowl around under the windows till the crickets go silent, we will pull the shades. If you wish us to suffer your envious curiosity, you must permit us not to notice it.” Anyone with one solid human bond is that smug, and it is the smugness as much as the comfort and safety that lonely people covet and admire.
– Marilynne Robinson
I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at your desk and pick up your pen and finish writing when you put down your pen again; a writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing.
– Shirley Jackson
Most people are convinced that as long as they are not overtly forced to do something by an outside power, their decisions are theirs, and that if they want something, it is they who want it. But this is one of the great illusions we have about ourselves. A great number of our decisions are not really our own but are suggested to us from the outside; we have succeeded in persuading ourselves that it is we who have made the decision, whereas we have actually conformed with expectations of others, driven by the fear of isolation and by more direct threats to our life, freedom, and comfort.
– Erich Fromm
The Brain is a Universe Unto Itself: Our eyes are not transparent windows to the outside world, despite evolution’s brilliant illusion. When we think we’re walking the streets of a city, we’re really strolling the neural paths of our brains. Everything that appears to be outside is really inside. For all intents and purposes, there is no outside. The brain is a universe unto itself: billions of twinkling neurons, dendrites splayed like fingers reaching for the beginning of time, chemical messengers leaping across the mindless darkness of deep intracranial space.
– Amanda Getter
Why do we defile each other / with names?
– Chelsea Dingman
The implications of synchronicity will make you dizzy if you really reflect on them. They suggest that the psyche and the outer universe are not as unrelated as conventional psychology would have us believe. They mirror each other and are ultimately inseparable.
– Steven Forrest
She asked about the rippled water our footprints made in shallow puddles. We told her they were songs.
– Andrew Siegrist, Dusk
We come to the Lyric to rise, rejuvenate,
see ourselves win, watch ourselves lifted
up in lights, hit the home run, be hero
champion of the world.
– Nikky Finney
It is not yet the evening of days. The worst comes last.
– @RedBookJung
I’m not a writer. Ernest Hemingway was a writer. I just have a vivid imagination and type 90 WPM.
– Tiffany Madison
I get the rain
I get the snow
but wind?
– Andy Perrin
The cello’s long since ceased to urge her proud
commodious song. It is like a love story
that ends up tragic; or some common débâcle
heroic by decree.
– Sir Geoffrey Hill
Sometimes when I’m asked to describe the Buddhist teachings, I say this: Everything is connected; nothing lasts; you are not alone.
– Lewis Richmond
To avoid unhealthy choices, focus on immediate costs—not future consequences.
7 experiments: we skip junk food after considering risks now (fatigue, indigestion) not later (diabetes, obesity).
Delayed harm is easy to discount. Imminent regret saps the joy of guilty pleasures.
– Adam Grant
Those who can’t remember the past are condemned to have it resold to them forever.
– Mark Fisher
you don’t realize
how loud the electric hum
of your quiet house is
until the power goes out
and you can only hear
the thrumming electric
pulse of silence
between your ears
– Andy Perrin
The very purpose of ideology is to close off the possibility that anything could be different.
– Mark Fisher, Postcapitalist Desire
What remains? The language remains. I refused to lose my mother tongue.
– Hannah Arendt
I have found a new kind of pencil—the best I have ever had. Of course it costs three times as much too but it is black and soft but doesn’t break off. I think I will always use these.
– John Steinbeck
Hovering behind much sonic hauntology is the difference between analogue and digital.
– Mark Fisher
Sentient beings are not enlightened because they don’t meditate. Yogis are not enlightened because they do.
– Tsoknyi Rinpoche
Librarians have gone to war for me and my books. I will gladly do the same for them.
– Angie Thomas
The teachers of tomorrow are the rebels of today.
– @VinceFHorn
Our Black bodies, sacred.
Our Black bodies, holy.
Our bodies, our own.
Every smile a protest.
Every laugh a miracle.
– Renée Watson
But this is the kind of thing that fiction is: it’s the unlivable life, the strange room tacked onto the house, the extra moon that is circling the earth unbeknownst to science.
– Lorrie Moore
The hungry ghosts must come in contact with the ghostlike nature of their own longings in order to be free.
– Mark Epstein
It is the perspective of the sufferer that determines whether a given experience perpetuates suffering or is a vehicle for awakening.
– Mark Epstein
Sitting by the fire
Ikkyu listens to the wind
and hears the voices
of the dead.
They talk about
the same things
the living talk about:
the day after tomorrow
and the rice in their bowls.
– john zbigniew guzlowski
snowberries
punctuate the woodlands
in questions
– Andy Perrin
…for I have
so long a loneliness
(I think of all my time
compounded with all time)
that often it might cry
if it saw a lighted
window in the night.
– Hayden Carruth
If you think that a bald head brings you closer to your true nature, you couldn’t be more confused.
– @VinceFHorn
Love doesn’t stand
for injustice.
– Bernice A. King
“Zazen is enlightenment,” sure, but so is everything else, otherwise Dogen wouldn’t have gone on to say that, “enlightenment is intimacy with all things.”
– @VinceFHorn
For some people the day comes
when they have to declare the great Yes
or the great No. It’s clear at once who has the Yes
ready within him; and saying it,
he goes from honor to honor, strong in his conviction.
…
– C.P. Cavafy
Behind every word is a whole world.
– Heinrich Böll
A number of people have tried to convert me to Christianity in my life, but the only people who have ever made me entertain the idea are Bach, Milton, and Tarkovsky.
– Ryan Ruby
I am trying to pry open your casket / with this burning snowflake.
– James Tate
Neither national nor diasporic but a secret third thing (cosmopolitan)
– Ryan Ruby
And in time we come to see that not only are we on the sidelines of the universe but that it’s a universe of sidelines, that there is no centre, just a giddy mass of waltzing things, and that perhaps the entirety of our understanding consists of…
an elaborate and ever-evolving knowledge of our own extraneousness, a bashing away of mankind’s ego by the instruments of scientific enquiry until it is, that ego, a shattered edifice that lets light through.’
– Samantha Harvey
I fear those big words that make us so unhappy.
– James Joyce
FOR AN EARLY ITALIAN MUSICIAN
Listening now to his music, how
one wishes to have been the musician, and so
to be beautiful forever as his music is,
and he in it, who is now
only his music, which is his world.
How one always wishes for an end
— to be complete.
And there is also this:
that one wishes to last, that one needs to make
a world for survival, which cannot be done
simply, or soon, but by a slow
crystal on crystal accretion of a made
world, a world made to last.
One is nothing with now world.
– William Bonk
The Winter Woods
Go on thinking that this world is
barren. If you must. I shall walk
alone in the winter woods and
wonder at the stark beauty that
somehow – how does it keep
so great a vow? – manages to
remain, steadfast, in all of us.
– Jamie K. Reaser
Everyone must choose a name for the Absolute, a title that approximates its truth, power and beauty… in my heart of hearts, I call it My Beloved. Once held in her embrace, once dissolved into her radiant splendor, I was hers forever. I will be hers until my last breath, and after still… My god is the cosmos. I see all reality both physical and spiritual reality as the manifestation of a single intelligence and power whose nature is beyond our capacity to fully fathom, but not beyond our capacity to experience to some degree.
– Christopher M. Bache
We’re trying to equip and nourish students to go out and benefit society by bringing out their unique talents and gifts. It isn’t about producing cookie-cutter, assembly-line students. It’s about getting the best out of a student and then sending them out to do their own amazing, unique version of what it is they’re meant to be doing. The Buddha taught us to be a light on our own path and investigate direct experience for ourselves, not just rely on what somebody else has said or what is conventionally accepted. We want our students to be authentically themselves.
– Amelia Hall, Naropa Core Faculty
The old idea is that the only genuine healers are the wounded healers. And so as we deal with our own wounds, as we find ways to care for our own woundedness – even as we find ways to acknowledge our own woundedness – we become the wounded healers. We become sympathetic and compassionate to the wounds of others. And that’s a big step on the way to offering healing to others and helping to heal our own woundedness.
– Michael Meade
What Comes
by Carolyn Forché
J’ai rapporté du désespoir un panier si petit mon amour, qu’on a pu le tresser en osier.
I brought from despair a basket so small, my love, that it might have been woven of willow.
– Rene Char
to speak is not yet to have spoken.
the not-yet of a white realm of nothing left
neither for itself nor another
a no-longer already there, along with the arrival of what has been
light and the reverse of light
terror as walking blind along the breaking sea, body in whom I lived
the not-yet of death darkening what it briefly illuminates
an unknown place as between languages
back and forth, breath to breath as a calm
in the surround rises, fireflies in lindens, an ache of pine
you have yourself within you
yourself, you have her, and there is nothing
that cannot be seen
open then to the coming of what comes
The artist is an educator. He seizes upon unconscious images, presents them in a form that makes them acceptable to at least some of his contemporaries. He might touch material that future people will appreciate because his voice is beyond his time. He brings to the surface the thoughts of his time which have not been accepted into the general conscious atmosphere. Therefore the really creative artist is one who walks lonely, frightening, inspiring byways.
– Rix Weaver
Sometimes I feel like poems should come with the following disclaimers: “These statements have not been evaluated by the Academy of American Poets. Sublimity not guaranteed. Social utility sold separately. Side effects may include general irritability, mild disbelief, or pointless outrage.”
– Simeon Berry
The inescapable paradox of fire – of alchemy, of psyche, of intelligent living – consists in this double commandment: Thou shalt not repress / Thou shalt not act out.
– James Hillman, Alchemical Psychology
Can you conceive of
yourself, imaginatively,
as ‘some wild risk
about to break upon
the world’?
– David Whyte
Is it true
This idea
That you’ll never
Get what you want,
That you haven’t
Already?
Love wants
To swarm to you
To flock to you
In proliferation
To saturate you
And satisfy you.
Perhaps the reason
You’ll not yet
Have her
Is because you haven’t yet
Been willing to receive
Into dissolution
The pain beneath this idea
That you cannot have
What you want
To resist life
Is to control it
And often we’ve come to learn
That control is our only possibility
For receiving anything
The new paradigm
Is the renunciation
Of clutching to the crumbs
Control has given
And to open
To the rushing flow
Of authentic love
Ready to flow to you
So naturally
As you receive first
What has been in its way.
– Chelan Harkin
The underworld is dark and disturbing because it will not become familiar. It will not bend to your ego; it cannot be tamed. What lives there remains forever just beyond rational comprehension. It burns through you like a cleansing fire that brings you to greater humility.
– Robert Moss
I think art often presents the embodiment of certain kinds of ecstasies that the author both wants and does not want to be devoured by.
– Frank Bidart
When you were born and took your first breath,
different colors
and different kinds of wind entered through your
fingertips
and the whorl on top of your head. Within us, as we
breathe,
are the light breezes that cool a summer afternoon,
within us the tumbling winds that precede rain,
within us sheets of hard-thundering rain,
within us dust-filled layers of wind that sweep in
from the mountains,
within us gentle night flutters that lull us to sleep.
To see this, blow on your hand now.
Each sound we make evokes the power of these
winds
and we are, at once, gentle and powerful.
– Sáanii Dahataa
The path of a man’s life is straight, straight, straight, until the moment when it isn’t anymore, and after that it begins to meander around aimlessly, and then get tangled, and then at some point the path gets so confusing that the man’s ability to move around in time, his device for conveyance, his memory of what he loves, the engine that moves him forward, it can break, and he can get permanently stuck in his own history.
– Charles Yu
There are no telegraphs on Tralfamadore. But you’re right: each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message– describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.
– Kurt Vonnegut
Why throw money at problems? That is what money is for. Should the nation’s wealth be redistributed? It has been and continues to be redistributed to a few people in a manner strikingly unhelpful.
– Kurt Vonnegut
We live in a moment of grace. Through the hedges of our divisions we are beginning to glimpse again the beauty of life’s oneness. We are beginning to hear…the essential harmony that lies at the heart of the universe. And we are beginning to understand…that we will be well to the extent that we move back into relationship with one another, whether as individuals and families or as nations and species. The time is right. The time is desperately right.
– John Philip Newell
I’d rather live on my own than live with a face that looks at me with the wrong eyes.
– Jane Birkin
Out through night’s closed door
escape the very last dreams
as if by magic.
Here things disappear
up the magician’s dark sleeve
where things go missing,
like silk, like rabbits,
like perfectly trained white doves
until the door’s locked
with the missing key.
– George Szirtes
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
The doctor told me.
there’s a small hope in
my son getting better.
I left the hospital and
came back, and I didn’t
find the hospital,
the doctor, or my son.
– A father from Gaza
The problem is that I want to write about everything.
– David Hering
Almost all of us are the descendants of immigrants who fled persecution, or were brought to America under duress, or simply sought better lives for themselves and their descendants. The GOP is desperate for you to forget this. Do not.
– Robert Reich
“therapy doesn’t work for me” ok well I hate to break it to you but the mental illness isn’t working for you either.
– @jzux
Other people’s actions do not affect your karma.
Other people’s words do not affect your karma.
Other people’s thoughts do not affect your karma.
Other people’s emotions do not affect your karma.
Your karma is your intentional actions.
Guard your karma.
– @KennethFolk
Alex Katz once told me that it’s bad manners to make a lousy painting—it’s rude to bore your friends. As you made your way up the Guggenheim’s spiral ramp, it was one goddamned masterpiece after another, triumphs of point of view, of touch and color and composition. Of image. Of style.
– David Salle on Alex Katz
Clothes don’t simply provide an outline of the unclothed body. They tell us so much about the wearer’s engagement with their own arrangement of sinew and muscle, and the accommodations that they are obliged to make with the wider world.
– Kathryn Hughes
When Almaza Became the Earth
by Jessica Abughattas
Go find my great-grandmother’s grave in Bethlehem.
Go find her buried under rubble-entire cities,
all they contain: doctors and poets, the newly wed
and the newly born, a cavalcade of kisses.
Find them drinking coffee and smoking their Marlboros.
Tell them the news of their nonexistence.
Go find my great-grandmother’s grave in Bethlehem.
Go find my name in stone.
Tell her my hands take the same shape as her hands:
hands that held my grandmother as a baby,
hands that rolled taboon bread
hands that my grandmother kissed then folded
in a coffin when her mother became Earth.
Her hand’s her land.
Go and tell her the news: she is risen.
Time is not moving.
Some great Pause button
on the universal VHS player
has been pushed.
Headlights hang above the road
like lanterns.
– Matt Mason, Nebraska State Poet
The secret of life is to appreciate the pleasure of being terribly terribly deceived.
– Oscar Wilde
(If you) Don’t take care of self, (You) can’t take care of others.
– @VinceFHorn
Walter Benjamin wrote essays for the Youth Forum’s “Der Anfang” under the pen-name “Ardor”.
– @aliner
I think the task before us is to re-learn what it means to walk as if everywhere is a temple. To approach how we are in relationship to the Living Earth as if it were a temple.
– Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee
It is wretched to have an abundance of intentions and a poverty of action, to be rich in truths and poor in virtues.
– Søren Kierkegaard
We’re still living in a world wrought largely by the ideas of the European Enlightenment.
It’s the same world that’s shaking right now (potentially crumbling).
That’s a good reason to seek to understand both the Enlightenment & the Counter-Enlightenment.
– @VinceFHorn
What I do want to do, above all else, is to supply something, through the natural resources of the language, that hadn’t been there before in poetry, in any language. I’ll do that for whatever number of days I manage to live.
– Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill
The gods have hardly departed; they have simply gone underground and reappear as wounds, as inflations, as pathologies. Our contemporary suffering is not tragic, for we wrestle not with gods; rather it is pathetic, the suffering which is unconscious and invariably victimizing of self and others.
– James Hollis
The soul is not above catastrophe to get your attention.
– Dr. Martin Shaw
Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Playfulness is infectious. That is why, after all, many of us become poets – we see the poet as player, as performer, juggling with the scraps on their plate, and know that we could do that too.
– Jon Stone
there is no original perversity in the human heart.
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The pattern of the thing precedes the thing. I fill in the gaps of the crossword.
– Vladimir Nabokov
Nothing is wasted when you are a writer. The stuff that doesn’t work has to be written to make way for the stuff that might.
– Abigail Thomas
Comedians and jazz musicians have been more comforting and enlightening to me than preachers or politicians or philosophers or poets or painters or novelists of my time. Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.
– Kurt Vonnegut
American Christians, you may master the intricacies of the English language and you may possess the eloquence of articulate speech; but even though you speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love, you are like sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.
You may have the gift of scientific prediction and understand the behavior of molecules, you may break into the storehouse of nature and bring forth many new insights, you may ascend to the heights of academic achievement, so that you have all knowledge, and you may boast of your great institutions of learning and the boundless extent of your degrees; but, devoid of love, all of these mean absolutely nothing.
But even more, Americans, you may give your goods to feed the poor, you may bestow great gifts to charity, and you may tower high in philanthropy, but if you have not love, your charity means nothing. You may even give your body to be burned, and die the death of a martyr, and your spilled blood may be a symbol of honor for generations yet unborn, and thousands may praise you as one of history’s supreme heroes; but even so, if you have not love, your blood is spilled in vain. You must come to see that a man may be self-centered in his self-denial and self-righteous in his self-sacrifice. His generosity may feed his ego and his piety his pride. Without love, benevolence becomes egotism and martyrdom becomes spiritual pride.
– Martin Luther King Jr
Thank you my lifelong afternoon
late in this season of no age
thank you for my windows above the rivers
thank you for the true love you brought me to
when it was time at last and for words
that come out of silence and take me by surprise
and have carried me through the clear day
without once turning to look at me
[…]
thank you whole body and hand and eye
thank you for sights and moments known
only to me who will not see them again
except in my mind’s eye where they have not changed
thank you for showing me the morning stars
– W.S. Merwin
How much does your local church function as the clock of your community, as a site where the wider population can reset themselves to sacred time by joining its steady and patient rhythms? I know of some monasteries and convents that function in a faint echo of this, for those who know they are there, and city-centre cathedrals with enough footprint that their daily services still hint at a different timetable, but no local churches. We do not mark time communally by the bells for prayer but by the buzz of a device often strapped, or as good as strapped, to our individual bodies. Sacred time has evaporated because the church stopped living in it. Our age is secular because time itself has been emptied of the sacred. We have given up our custodianship and joined the headlong sprint of secular time. And in so doing we have made ourselves unnecessary.
– @comment.org, Keeping Sacred Time
Prosperity, pleasure and success, may be rough of grain and common in fibre, but sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things. There is nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought to which sorrow does not vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation.
– Oscar Wilde
The Jungian analyst Elizabeth Osterman, a great teacher, once told an analytic training seminar that I attended, “Watch what you hate—it’s pure gold.”
– John Beebe
I’ve always liked quiet people:
You never know if they’re dancing
in a daydream or if they’re carrying
the weight of the world.
– John Green
Here is what I know of love: Love is the gas station and the fuel, the air and the water. You might as well give up on keeping the gas cap screwed on tight, keeping love at bay, staying armored or buttressed, because love will get in.
– Anne Lamott
We are all the children of what
our former lives have been.
– Christine Potter
For the 352 active national emergencies, / send help.
– Mary-Alice Daniel
We are Black Dandelions who will NEVER be destroyed.
We grow the power of goodness for generations into the future!
– Semaj Brown
Regrowth is a better meme than degrowth
Just let nature nature
– @antonio_paglino
The beautifully shaped stone washed up by the sea is a symbol of continuity, a silent image of our desire for survival, peace and security.
– Barbara Hepworth
old friends—
I place more wood
on the campfire
– Ray Rasmussen
The books of discomfort said the “you” that you think you are is not the you that you are.
– Dionne Brand
Students come to psychology longing for the psyche; longing to understand their lives, to understand their suffering, to understand what’s going on and instead they get an awful lot of… I don’t know.
– James Hillman
The reason the press keeps writing poetry’s obituary is that poets do what the press only purports to do. It tells the truth.
– Djelloul Marbrook
The Lovers
by Timothy Liu
I was always afraid
of the next card
the psychic would turn
over for us—
Forgive Me
for not knowing
how we were
every card in the deck.
Learning to think, to reflect, to be precise, to weigh up the terms of one’s discourse (…), means being capable of dialogue, it’s the only way to curb the frightening violence that is rising around us. Speech is the bulwark against bestiality.
– Jacqueline de Romilly
When you clean your teapot, then the teapot wakes you up
– Chögyam Trungpa
…o philately, philately: you are a most strange goddess, a slightly foolish fairy, and it is you who take by the hand the child emerging from the enchanted forest in which Little Tom Thumb, the Blue Bird, Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf have finally gone to sleep side by side…
– Louis Aragon
Blue Moon
I’m too much in love to have
a one-sided conversation
– Alan Summers
the solution of the problem is not to be found in theories, which merely create further isolation. It is too be found only when the mind, which is thought, is not seeking to escape from loneliness.
– Krishnamurti
Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb:
It is the shut, the curfew sent
From there where all surrenders come
Which only make you eloquent.
– Gerard Manley Hopkins
I find what happens in reality very interesting and I don’t find a great need to make up things.
– Lydia Davis
The sweet magnolia
bows to all creation—
& you were saying?
– Don Wentworth
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
I know that I can’t get along without writing.
– Jorge Luis Borges
just a whisper
a flock of plovers
takes flight
– Issa
You don’t need to write a novel if you feel at home in the world.
– Andrea Barrett
the neon buddha
conjugates a verb
well I’ll be
– Michael Dylan Welch
The eighties was a very beautiful decade, but its beauty wasn’t linear. For me it was a period of constantly walking back and forth between hope and despair.
– Yu Hua
One doesn’t take in Proust or Canada on the basis of a single visit.
– Donald Barthelme
Something feels like it’s missing when I haven’t heard any music, and when I hear music, then I really feel like something is missing. That’s the best I can do in trying to describe music.
– Robert Walser
It’s helpful to entertain the idea that all of space is filled with Buddhas and bodhisattvas. That can help us feel inspired to really pay attention to what we’re doing.
– Sravasti Abbey
town under siege—
refugees feeding
the pigeons
– Mile Stamenković
From Montgomery to Memphis he marches
He stands on the threshold of tomorrow
– Margaret Walker
Christianity struck at the root of pagan tolerance of illusion. In claiming that there is only one true faith, it gave truth a supreme value it had not had before. It also made disbelief in the divine possible for the first time. The long-delayed consequence of Christian faith was an idolatry of truth that found its most complete expression in atheism. If we live in a world without gods, we have Christianity to thank for it.
– John Gray
Because symptoms lead to soul, the cure of symptoms may also cure away soul, get rid of just what is beginning to show, at first tortured and crying for help, comfort, and love, but which is the soul in the neurosis trying to make itself heard…
The right reaction to a symptom may as well be a welcoming rather than laments and demands for remedies, for the symptom is the first herald of an awakening psyche which will not tolerate any more abuse.
– James Hillman
Migrants mind our people, cure our sick, serve us food, drive our buses, start businesses, revitalize our culture scene.
– Brendan O’Connor
a land revolt
in the colonizer’s mouth
the first snowberry
– @hegelincanada
We must all face the fact that our leaders are certifiably insane or worse.
– William S. Burroughs
freezing the vote new lows in democracy
– Roberta Beach Jacobson
When we drop the project of meditation and suspend allegiance to a construct, we can rest in our immediate experience, just as it is, free from the filter of interpretation.
– Willa Blythe Baker
matcha green tea
the colour of pond algae —
covid recovery
– @MarkgZero
Soon I will leave you
For a rendezvous with a white night.
I know all her tricks —
How she shines without the sun.
What she conceals.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
It is for her to listen— and for me to keep still.
– Anna Akhmatova, (translated by Judith Hemschemeyer)
. . . and America is the sea sliding past me. America is the shallow lament of its heirs.
– Larry Levis
Some of our old ways are better forgotten, but not all of them.
– Nnedi Okorafor
ORCHIDS
Today the hospital is filling up with orchids.
Beyond the pink terraced house and the January trees
the clouds break apart
to illuminate curtain after curtain of great hail.
battering in fast across the bay,
and tall orchids have arrived in the dance wards.
magnificent as crinolined beauties
at the ball
before a battle.
– Moya Cannon
You, the only
reliable pronoun.
Even you
always know who it means.
– Robert Kelly
Thank you for your kind letter. I’m looking forward with greatest interest to learn about your hellenic dreams.
– Carl Jung, writing to Lawrence Durrell
The ancients called internal longing for wholeness “fate” or “destiny,” the “inner voice” or the “call of the gods.” It has an inevitability, authority and finality to it and was at the heart of almost all mythology. Almost all heroes heard an inner voice that spoke to them.
– Richard Rohr
Every hero needs to venture into the Belly of the Beast. It’s essential to be devoured at least once by the monster. The hero never begins as a hero. He becomes a hero, and that entails the annihilation of his own, unheroic, former self. The hero always undergoes a metamorphosis, from ordinary to extraordinary. The hero, like the snake, sheds its old skin and takes on a new form. To change, you must enter a sacred space, a transformational space. Nothing ever changes in the ordinary space. The familiar world keeps you the same. It has no alchemical power. If you are confined in the same old world, you remain the same old person. You must cross the threshold into the New World.
– David Sinclair
The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.
– Gustave Le Bon
Don’t waste your time with explanations: people only hear what they want to hear.
– Paulo Coelho
Rumour is a pipe
Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures
And of so easy and so plain a stop
That the blunt monster with uncounted heads,
The still-discordant wavering multitude,
Can play upon it.
– William Shakespeare
Men hate those to whom they have to lie.
Mirrors, those revealers of the truth, are hated; that does not prevent them from being of use.
Knowing exactly how much of the future can be introduced into the present is the secret of great government.
Humankind’s wounds, those huge sores that litter the world, do not stop at the blue and red lines drawn on maps.
– Victor Hugo
Night, however, succeeds to night. The winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally, evenly, with indefatigable fingers. They lengthen; they darken. Some of them hold aloft clear planets, plates of brightness. The autumn trees, ravaged as they are, take on the flesh of tattered flags kindling in the doom of cool cathedral caves where gold letters on marble pages describe death in battle and how bones bleach and burn far away in Indian sands. The autumn trees gleam in the yellow moonlight, in the light of harvest moons, the light which mellows the energy of labour […].
The nights now are full of wind and destruction; the trees plunge and bend and their leaves fly helter skelter until the lawn is plastered with them and they lie packed in gutters and choke rain pipes and scatter damp paths. Also the sea tosses itself and breaks itself […]. Almost it would appear that it is useless in such confusion to ask the night those questions as to what, and why, and wherefore, which tempt the sleeper from his bed to seek an answer.
– Virginia Woolf
He went down to the sea. […] Everything was blue. Not a dull, washed-out blue like the blue one sees in the sky or in paintings. But a deep blue, a living blue, which breathed, expanded, became lost in its own depths. An unknown, absolute blue without the least hint of pink or violet or green.
– Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio
The universe is represented in every one of its particles. Every thing in nature contains all the powers of nature. Every thing is made of one hidden stuff; as the naturalist sees one type under every metamorphosis, and regards a horse as a running man, a fish as a swimming man, a bird as a flying man, a tree as a rooted man. Each new form repeats not only the main character of the type, but part for part all the details, all the aims, furtherances, hindrances, energies, and whole system of every other. Every occupation, trade, art, transaction, is a compend of the world, and a correlative of every other. Each one is an entire emblem of human life; of its good and ill, its trials, its enemies, its course and its end. And each one must somehow accommodate the whole man, and recite all his destiny. The world globes itself in a drop of dew.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
An authentic teacher makes self-reliance a part of his program. A man who really knows is like one of those powerful ships that patrol icy seas. Having immense strength in his prow, the ship breaks through an ice field, making a trail of open water for other ships to follow. But there is something else. A man of real knowledge does not aim to make followers out of his listeners. He shows them how to become icebreakers themselves.
– Vernon Howard
You say you don’t understand Dylan Thomas? Yes, but your ganglion does, and your secret wits, and all your unborn children. Read him, as you can read a horse with your eyes, set free and charging over an endless green meadow on a windy day.
– Ray Bradbury
You must stop talking to yourself. Every one of us does that. We talk about our world. In fact, we maintain our world with our internal talk. Whenever we finish talking to ourselves, the world is always as it should be. We renew it, we kindle it with life, we uphold it with our internal talk. Not only that, but we also choose our paths as we talk to ourselves. Thus we repeat the same choices over and over until the day we die, because we keep on repeating the same internal talk over and over until the day we die. A warrior is aware of this and strives to stop his talking. This is the last point you have to know if you want to live like a warrior.
– Carlos Castaneda
Van Gogh writing his brother for paints
Hemingway testing his shotgun
Celine going broke as a doctor of medicine
the impossibility of being human
Villon expelled from Paris for being a thief
Faulkner drunk in the gutters of his town
the impossibility of being human
Burroughs killing his wife with a gun
Mailer stabbing his
the impossibility of being human
Maupassant going mad in a rowboat
Dostoevsky lined up against a wall to be shot
Crane off the back of a boat into the propeller
the impossibility
Sylvia with her head in the oven like a baked potato
Harry Crosby leaping into that Black Sun
Lorca murdered in the road by the Spanish troops
the impossibility
Artaud sitting on a madhouse bench
Chatterton drinking rat poison
Shakespeare a plagiarist
Beethoven with a horn stuck into his head against deafness
the impossibility the impossibility
Nietzsche gone totally mad
the impossibility of being human
all too human
this breathing
in and out
out and in
these punks
these cowards
these champions
these mad dogs of glory
moving this little bit of light toward
us
impossibly
– Charles Bukowski
Photography is not an art. Neither is painting, nor sculpture, literature or music. They are only different media for the individual to express his aesthetic feelings… You do not have to be a painter or a sculptor to be an artist. You may be a shoemaker. You may be creative as such. And, if so, you are a greater artist than the majority of the painters whose work is shown in the art galleries of today.
– Alfred Stieglitz
Oh, God, help me! And I walked faster, my thoughts pursuing me, and I began to run, my frozen shoes squealing like mice, but running didn’t help, the thoughts to the left and right and behind me. But as I ran, The Arm, that good left arm, took hold of the situation and spoke soothingly: ease up, Kid, it’s loneliness, you’re all alone in the world; your father, your mother, your faith, they can’t help you, nobody helps anybody, you only help yourself, and that’s why I’m here, because we are inseperable, and we’ll take care of everything.
– John Fante
Every being, every bit of matter, is at the center of its
universe. An endless plurality of centers overlap and
interact. We travel like turtles, our homes on our backs,
pulling a universe along with us.
When I enter your home, I bring mine in with me.
Treat everyone like an invited guest. Behave like an invited
guest. Help others meet their needs. Provide them with
comfort. Enter others’ spaces politely and respectfully.
Remove your shoes if asked. Help with the dishes. Play with
the children.
Wherever you are, remember, you are in someone’s home.
– Adam Michael Krause
How many of you believe you can quiet the mind through effort?
You can’t do that.
It’s not the effort that makes you quiet your mind.
It’s the intelligent understanding that you have no mind to begin with. Then you just keep still and everything takes care of itself.
– Robert Adams
I love your silence. It is so wise. It listens. It invites warmth. I love your loneliness. It is brave. It makes the universe want to protect you. You have the loneliness that all true heroes have, a loneliness that is a deep sea, within which the fishes of mystery dwell. I love your quest. It is noble. It has greatness in it. Only one who is born under a blessed star would set sail across the billowing waves and the wild squalls, because of a dream. I love your dream. It is magical. Only those who truly love and who are truly strong can sustain their lives as a dream. You dwell in your own enchantment. Life throws stones at you, but your love and your dream change those stones into the flowers of discovery. Even if you lose, or are defeated by things, your triumph will always be exemplary. And if no one knows it, then there are places that do. People like you enrich the dreams of the world, and it is dreams that create history. People like you are the unknowing transformers of things, protected by your own fairy-tale, by love.
– Ben Okri
The vessel traverses horizontally yet is meant to think vertically.
– Ahmed Salman
There is a dualism inherent in democracy–opposing forces pushing against each other, always. Culture clashes. Different belief systems. All coming together to create this country. But this balance takes a great deal of energy.
– Libba Bray
For me, the challenge is to play music that makes the audience imagine they are playing it too. Maybe they think or have been told that they are not artists and can’t perform. Then, when they hear music, they get the feeling that they can do what they had thought they couldn’t.
– Wayne Shorter
Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step. There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That’s the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.
And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You’ll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.
And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.
– Haruki Murakami
COMMON BOOK PILLOW BOOK
Long enough since the genre was popular
we’ve forgotten what to call it: weird mix of quotes and collectibles, private
thoughts and uncensored meditations in brief, like locks of hair and
child height charts of your considerations
and ponderings. An abandoned art, you practice it with care: each quote
equal to the other, simple entries like coordinates of unmarked
appearances
in the sky – twenty years, over
8,000 days – the weather is “what you make of sunshine,” and only
women “can
make a man successful,” haven’t you heard
“God is the messenger, and we are all brothers and sisters,” organizations
of hate “must be fought with the ultimate crest: humanity,” and you
note a quote with a love reserved
for precision and the unattained, and I
suspend like cracked meteors in the ether
of your common message: go to bed, what is truly important in this world
has already been said.
“When people deserve love the least
is when they need it the most,” we are the axis
of cliche, “like mother like daughter,” sign your name
on this one before I turn out the light
and resume my interrupted prayer.
– Priscila Uppal
Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible.
– David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
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
I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.
– Flannery O’Connor
It only takes two facing mirrors to build a labyrinth.
– Jorge Luis Borges
my god doesn’t exist in this language
– Sophia Holtz
People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates.
– Thomas Szasz
When sitting in meditation, say, “That’s not my business!” with every thought that comes by.
– Ajahn Chah
What keeps my heart awake is colorful silence.
– Claude Monet
Remember that this is not something we do just once or twice. Interrupting our destructive habits and awakening our heart is the work of a lifetime.
– Pema Chödrön
Have you been to the source of a river? It’s a very mystic place. You get dizzy when you stay for a while. An especially big river has several sources, and the real source, the farthest point which turns to the major stream, is moist and misty, with some kind of ancient smell, and you feel cold. You feel, “This isn’t the place to go in.” There is no springing water, so you don’t know where the source is. Actually, such a place exists in everyone; the center of us is like that. From such a place, the ancient call appears, “Why don’t you know me? Living so many years with me, why can’t you call my real name?”
The more your understanding of life becomes clearer and more exact and painfully joyful, the more you feel, “I’m so bad.” The one that appears and says, “No, you are not bad at all,” that is the way to go, that is your teacher.
Don’t misunderstand, this teacher is not always a person. It can embrace you like morning dew in a field, and you get a strange feeling, “Oh, this is it, my teacher is this field.”
– Kobun Chino
We have to learn how to live with our frailties. The best people I know are inadequate and unashamed.
– Stanley Kunitz
On a one-ton temple bell
a moonmoth, folded into sleep,
sits still.
– Taniguchi Buson
JAPAN
Today I pass the time reading
a favorite haiku,
saying the few words over and over.
It feels like eating
the same small, perfect grape
again and again.
I walk through the house reciting it
and leave its letters falling
through the air of every room.
I stand by the big silence of the piano and say it.
I say it in front of a painting of the sea.
I tap out its rhythm on an empty shelf.
I listen to myself saying it,
then I say it without listening,
then I hear it without saying it.
And when the dog looks up at me,
I kneel down on the floor
and whisper it into each of his long white ears.
It’s the one about the one-ton
temple bell
with the moth sleeping on its surface,
and every time I say it, I feel the excruciating
pressure of the moth
on the surface of the iron bell.
When I say it at the window,
the bell is the world
and I am the moth resting there.
When I say it into the mirror,
I am the heavy bell
and the moth is life with its papery wings.
And later, when I say it to you in the dark,
you are the bell,
and I am the tongue of the bell, ringing you,
and the moth has flown
from its line
and moves like a hinge in the air above our bed.
– Billy Collins
Neither I nor the poets I love found the keys to the kingdom of prayer and we cannot force God to stumble over us where we sit. But I know that it’s a good idea to sit anyway. So every morning I sit, I kneel, waiting, making friends with the habit of listening, hoping that I’m being listened to. There, I greet God in my own disorder. I say hello to my chaos, my unmade decisions, my unmade bed, my desire and my trouble. I say hello to distraction and privilege, I greet the day and I greet my beloved and bewildering Jesus. I recognise and greet my burdens, my luck, my controlled and uncontrollable story. I greet my untold stories, my unfolding story, my unloved body, my own love, my own body. I greet the things I think will happen and I say hello to everything I do not know about the day. I greet my own small world and I hope that I can meet the bigger world that day. I greet my story and hope that I can forget my story during the day, and hope that I can hear some stories, and greet some surprising stories during the long day ahead. I greet God, and I greet the God who is more God than the God I greet. / Hello to you all, I say, as the sun rises above the chimneys of North Belfast. / Hello.
– Pádraig Ó Tuama
Reality is a battle of opposing metaphors playing out/in the canvas of the collective mindscape.
– Miles Hingston
The most inspiring teaching of the Buddha is: Don’t believe anybody, including the experts, even if they’re angels. Open your eyes and look for yourself.
– Laurie Anderson
We cannot live only for ourselves.
A thousand fibers connect us
with our fellow men;
and among those fibers,
as sympathetic threads,
our actions run as causes,
and they come back
to us as effects.
– Herman Melville
Childhood is still running along beside us like a little dog who used to be a merry companion, but who now requires our care and splints, and myriad medicines, to prevent him from promptly passing on.
– Thomas Bernhard
I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided.
– Fernando Pessoa
Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
– Paul Valéry
Yom Kippur 1984
bu Adrienne Rich
I drew solitude over me, on the long shore.
– Robinson Jeffers, “Prelude”
For whoever does not afflict his soul through this day, shall be
cut off from his people.
– Leviticus 23:29
What is a Jew in solitude?
What would it mean not to feel lonely or afraid
far from your own or those you have called your own?
What is a woman in solitude: a queer woman or man?
In the empty street, on the empty beach, in the desert
what in this world as it is can solitude mean?
The glassy, concrete octagon suspended from the cliffs
with its electric gate, its perfected privacy
is not what I mean
the pick-up with a gun parked at a turn-out in Utah or the Golan Heights
is not what I mean
the poet’s tower facing the western ocean, acres of forest planted to
the east, the woman reading in the cabin, her attack dog suddenly risen
is not what I mean
Three thousand miles from what I once called home
I open a book searching for some lines I remember
about flowers, something to bind me to this coast as lilacs in the dooryard once
bound me back there—yes, lupines on a burnt mountainside,
something that bloomed and faded and was written down
in the poet’s book, forever:
Opening the poet’s book
I find the hatred in the poet’s heart: . . . the hateful-eyed
and human-bodied are all about me: you that love multitude may have them
Robinson Jeffers, multitude
is the blur flung by distinct forms against these landward valleys
and the farms that run down to the sea; the lupines
are multitude, and the torched poppies, the grey Pacific unrolling its scrolls of surf,
and the separate persons, stooped
over sewing machines in denim dust, bent under the shattering skies of harvest
who sleep by shifts in never-empty beds have their various dreams
Hands that pick, pack, steam, stitch, strip, stuff, shell, scrape, scour, belong to a brain like no other
Must I argue the love of multitude in the blur or defend
a solitude of barbed-wire and searchlights, the survivalist’s final solution, have I a choice?
To wonder far from your own or those you have called your own
to hear strangeness calling you from far away
and walk in that direction, long and far, not calculating risk
to go to meet the Stranger without fear or weapon, protection nowhere on your mind
(the Jew on the icy, rutted road on Christmas Eve prays for another Jew
the woman in the ungainly twisting shadows of the street: Make those be a woman’s footsteps; as if she could believe in
a woman’s god)
Find someone like yourself. Find others.
Agree you will never desert each other.
Understand that any rift among you
means power to those who want to do you in.
Close to the center, safety; toward the edges, danger.
But I have a nightmare to tell: I am trying to say
that to be with my people is my dearest wish
but that I also love strangers
that I crave separateness
I hear myself stuttering these words
to my worst friends and my best enemies
who watch for my mistakes in grammar
my mistakes in love.
This is the day of atonement; but do my people forgive me?
If a cloud knew loneliness and fear, I would be that cloud.
To love the Stranger, to love solitude—am I writing merely about privilege
about drifting from the center, drawn to edges,
a privilege we can’t afford in the world that is,
who are hated as being of our kind: faggot kicked into the icy river, woman dragged from her stalled car
into the mist-struck mountains, used and hacked to death
young scholar shot at the university gates on a summer evening walk, his prizes and studies nothing,
nothing availing his Blackness
Jew deluded that she’s escaped the tribe, the laws of her exclusion, the men too holy
to touch her hand; Jew who has turned her back
on midrash and mitzvah (yet wears the chai on a thong between her breasts) hiking alone
found with a swastika carved in her back at the foot of the cliffs (did she die as queer or as Jew?)
Solitude, O taboo, endangered species
on the mist-struck spur of the mountain, I want a gun to defend you
In the desert, on the deserted street, I want what I can’t have:
your elder sister, Justice, her great peasant’s hand outspread
her eye, half-hooded, sharp and true
And I ask myself, have I thrown courage away?
have I traded off something I don’t name?
To what extreme will I go to meet the extremist?
What will I do to defend my want or anyone’s want to search for her spirit-vision
far from the protection of those she has called her own?
Will I find O solitude
your plumes, your breasts, your hair
against my face, as in childhood, your voice like the mockingbird’s
singing Yes, you are loved, why else this song?
in the old places, anywhere?
What is a Jew in solitude?
What is a woman in solitude, a queer woman or man?
When the winter flood-tides wrench the tower from the rock, crumble the prophet’s headland, and
the farms slide into the sea
when leviathan is endangered and Jonah becomes revenger
when center and edges are crushed together, the extremities crushed together on which the world
was founded
when our souls crash together, Arab and Jew, howling our loneliness within the tribes
when the refugee child and the exile’s child re-open the blasted and forbidden city
when we who refuse to be women and men as women and men are chartered, tell our stories of
solitude spent in multitude
in that world as it may be, newborn and haunted, what will solitude mean?
You cannot not communicate.
– Paul Watzlawick
You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing’s sake, back home to aestheticism, to one’s youthful idea of ‘the artist’ and the all-sufficiency of ‘art’ and ‘beauty’ and ‘love,’ back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermuda, away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time—back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.
– Thomas Wolfe
Sadness is the matrix from which wit and irony spring; sadness is uncomfortable and creative, which is why consumer society cannot tolerate it.
– Germaine Greer
When one speaks of the soul’s desert, and says that the desert must be present in your life, you must not think only of the Sahara or the desert of Judea…If you cannot go into the desert, you must nonetheless “make some desert” in your life. Every now and then leaving men and looking for solitude to restore, in prolonged silence and prayer, the stuff of your soul. This is the meaning of ‘desert’ in your life…you must leave everything and everybody and retire, alone with God. If you don’t look for this solitude, if you don’t love it, you won’t achieve real contemplative prayer.
– Carlo Carretto
The illusion that you could get someone else to do it for you. To think for you. Even though the great emotions, the great truths, were universal; even though the mind of humanity was ultimately one mind, still, each and every single individual had to establish his or her own special, personal, particular, unique, direct, one-to-one, hands-on relationship with reality, with the universe, with the Divine. It might be a pain in the ass, it might be, most of all, lonely – but it was the bottom line. It was as different for everybody as it was the same, so everybody had to take control of their own life, define their own death, and construct their own salvation. And when you finished, you didn’t call the Messiah.
He’d call you.
– Tom Robbins
I do not want to talk about what you understand about this world. I want to know what you will do about it. I do not want to know what you hope. I want to know what you will work for. I do not want your sympathy for the needs of humanity. I want your muscle.
– Robert Fulgrum
Going down. Yes, I know what that may mean colloquially. But Moses, if you believe the spiritual, went down. And when in folk music we’re told to pray, it’s down by the river that it’s going to happen. Down is the requisite of up in philosophy and in physics and in our daily life and practice. In my volunteer work, I’m sometimes the only white guy around. So, last Saturday morning there’s an African-American volunteer sweeping the floor while I sit. I get up, take the broom politely from her and begin to sweep. She supervises. It feels good. Everybody seems to feel good. So, you too, when you want to go up, get down first, literally, let gravity work on, through, and with you. Go down. In business, get out find the lowest guy on the totem pole and learn from him. And when you want advancement in your career, make sure you’re down with that. Sweep the floor of your consciousness to rid it of all that would suggest superiority: of your work, or of the self, or of your medium. Get down, a little lower than the angels, maybe.
– Alan Bowers
If you’re making music, silence is your canvas… and you gotta make a mark on it. You don’t have to fill the whole canvas to get the depth… silence is our canvas, and when to use it … that gives you the 3-D on the thing… think about the silence being that canvas, and the sound that you put over it, it’s how you put the marks over the silence, it doesn’t mean you have to totally cover it all … it’s a matter of gradation.
– Keith Richards
The veils and skeins, the horns, the heart of life, the sweet imperishable forms.
– Theodore Roethke
Everything I learned in my life, I learned because I decided to try something new.
– David Lynch
We understand the world better if we tremble with it.
– Édouard Glissant
I want to get all the content down so that I can then move on to the fun part, which is sorting out the sentences.
– Geoff Dyer
Lovingkindness is a skill, not an inbred fault or ability. It’s about diminishing hate and enlarging love in our daily life.
– Ayya Khema
My whole desire is to run up and down the sea coast looking for you.
– John Cage
I wholeheartedly support the idea that poets have a lot of sex. Even more delicious is the notion that everybody knows it.
– Zoë Walkington, On merging her two identities as poet and criminal psychologist.
My Country,
I will build you again,
If need be,
with bricks made
from my life
– Simin Behbahani
I would recognise you in total darkness, were you mute and I deaf. I would recognise you in another lifetime entirely, in different bodies, different times. And I would love you in all of this, until the very last star in the sky burnt out into oblivion.
– Madeline Miller
Science will never be used chiefly to pursue truth, or to improve human life. The uses of knowledge will always be as shifting and crooked as humans are themselves. Humans use what they know to meet their most urgent needs – even if the result is ruin.
– John Gray
All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.
– Virginia Woolf
Walls turned sideways are bridges.
– Angela Davis
Poems also help us find beauty in the quotidian, the awkward, or the untested, to view the world through previously shuttered windows.
– Farnaz Fatemi
What Burns did was represent us and who we ordinary folk are.
– Eddi Reader
Poetry is this screaming madwoman. Everything seems poetry.
– Giannina Braschi, translated by Tess O’Dwyer
Narratives are powerful. They can act as prisons of the mind for a lifetime if we allow them to. Just because you believe your narratives with certainty does not mean they are true or that they represent reality. There is a way out. It is not an easy process. Most of the people around you won’t be cheering you on if you set out on the path of breaking free. It feels like a threat to them.
– Kent Burgess
I like how David addresses this situation here.
We take the pilgrim identity, we take the pilgrim path, in order to get out from under ourselves, and in order to escape the confining story we have been telling ourselves. Every human being is telling themselves some form of story to make sense of the world. And the great question is whether the story you are telling yourself is open to any outside influence and any outside revelation, or whether it’s a bulwark against revelation.
– David Whyte
To love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be.
The people they’re too exhausted to be any longer. The people they grew out of, the people they never ended up growing into. We so badly want the people we love to get their spark back when it burns out, to become speedily found when they are lost.
But it is not our job to hold anyone accountable to the people they used to be. It is our job to travel with them between each version and to honour what emerges along the way. Sometimes it will be an even more luminescent flame. Sometimes it will be a flicker that temporarily floods the room with a perfect and necessary darkness.
– Heidi Priebe
The next century would allow only two types, two constitutions, two forms of reaction: those that acted and aimed high and those that kept silent awaiting metamorphosis – criminals and monks, there would be nothing else.
– Gottfried Benn’s Ptolemian
I think having one’s own sound in a sense is the most fundamental kind of identity in music. But it’s a very touchy thing how one arrives at that. It has to be something that comes from inside, and it’s a long-term process. It’s a product of a total personality. I think sometimes the people I seem to like most as musical artists, are the late arrivers, the ones who have had to work a lot harder in a sense to get facility, to get fluency. Whereas you see a lot of young talents that have a great deal of fluidity and fluency and facility, and they never really carry it anyplace. Because in a way they’re not aware enough of what they’re doing.
– Bill Evans
My task is to make you hear, to make you feel, and, above all, to make you see. That is all, and it is everything.
– Joseph Conrad
This poem was written while looking for work, swimming in the vocabularies of potential utility to employers and overseers.
– Jordan Kapono Nakamura
It is said that there are four ways we can travel into the future: from light to light, from light to darkness from darkness to light, and from darkness to darkness. We have the option to be in the first category. We are already in a state of light because we have an innately tender heart and the knowledge and means to continue developing our tsewa [warmth, affection and tenderness]. Then, as we go into the future motivated by bodhichitta, the wish to attain enlightenment for the benefit of all beings, we can be sure that this light will only increase. And even when we do encounter hardships and misfortunes – such as the inevitable phases of old age, sickness, and death – our tsewa will give us the resilience to make the best of our suffering and use it to open our heart even further.
– Dzigar Kongtrul, Training in Tenderness
Limitless space where a sun would attest not to the day, but to the night delivered of stars, multiple night.
– Maurice Blanchot, (translated by Ann Smock)
reading on the train
a nearby commuter
on the same page
– @PaulDavidMena
Nature is glamorous to the point of confusion, let the artist be truly taciturn.
– Paul Klee
We are all future butterflies who think, wrongly, that we are just slugs. And we are evolving, whether we admit it or not, into something else. Something with wings.
– Jeffrey J. Kripal
Materials
A tree is writing
stick music
in equivalent phrases
of various lengths,
each ending
in a nib,
a sense
of satisfaction
skilfully produced
almost without
thinking.
*
What you call
souls, we call habits
of mind.
Souls are said
to be immaterial
as are habits, which
though involving objects,
are not
to be confused with them.
The orchid leans in
making faces.
– Rae Armantrout
is anyone else deeply affected by the way normality is being forcibly pedaled forward by an obviously narcotic and authoritarian-leaning state intent on dissociating from its own violent and seemingly unending complicities?
– Brian Tierney
we struggle to know
if we exist in origins
or nearer the ends
perhaps in the middle
such that we can’t see
knowing would only offer
false hope that we
somehow have control
– Andy Perrin
a hummingbird
sips from morning glory
and speeds off
my day starts at a pace
much slower with less drama
– Neal Whitman
Connections between unconnected things are the unreal reality of Poetry.
– Susan Howe
Listen—if I’ve learned anything from men, it’s that their tongues are bare and motherless, lapping the breast of brawn they mistake for a masculine God.
– Sarah Ghazal Ali
I feel like getting better as an artist often means learning what you’re good at and then not doing it.
– @RichieHof
…when I read, I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.
– Bohumil Hrabal
Do you think the dictionary ever says to itself I’ve got these words that mean completely different things inside myself and it’s tearing me apart?
– Dean Young
The greatest art — Beethoven’s soundless last note, Joyce’s snow, the Proustian sentence that enacts the paradox of time — peers squarely into the unfathomable: the mystery of not being there to know we’re already absent.
– Andre Aciman
the distance
between us bound
by a karmic tie
yet like a bottle adrift
i trust the waves of destiny
– Richa Sharma
I want to go to Seaford & walk back over the downs; to go & see the house at East Chiltington; to breathe in more light & air; to see more grey hollows & gold cornfields & the first ploughed land shining white, with the gulls flickering.
– VW / Diary
I wanted a life that was ninety per cent thinking about the complexities of consciousness, and just ten per cent buying pouches of purée.
– Leslie Jamison
How various are the ways of looking away!
– Samuel Beckett
Date an academic to access a world of knowledge. Pose any question and be amazed at them swearing they read about this somewhere, giving up in frustration, then remembering the answer 2 weeks later
– Neil Renic
Before you discover what you love: fewer commitments, more experiments.
After you discover what you love: fewer experiments, more commitments.
– James Clear
spring rain
silent conversation
under our umbrella
– Charlie Smith
Jung wrote of the fact that, in favorable cases, some people seem to outgrow a problem that would destroy others. They gain a new level of consciousness, as it were, from which they can see even the worst problem in a totally different light.
– Barbara Hannah
To be a Jew means always being with the oppressed and never the oppressors.
– Marek Edelman
If it’s what you say it is,
you’ll show us.
Please proceed,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
If you make it look
more like a poem,
maybe they would
think it was,
the poet told
the old monk.
– The Old Monk
Life, like a marble block, is given to all, A blank, inchoate mass of years and days.
– Edith Wharton
We stand a better chance of survival by walking together, by learning from each other, by listening to each other’s ideas, and by pulling each other as we move forward. There is a very old, old joy in this approach.
– Paul Salopek
Become a writer! There’s no way to sustain yourself doing it so become something else too!
– TBQuarterly
Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths?
– Edith Wharton
clicks of sleet
until nothing’s left to say
… peace talks
– Chen ou Liu
What if a sack of flour becomes a homeland?
– Khaled Juma, Palestinian poet
A long winter night.
Crowded against each other
old familiar books.
– Günther Klinge
a moth rises
searching for a twinkle
in the night sky
– James Welsh
bus stop—
the winter dance
of cold feet
– Adelaide B. Shaw
There’s a latent angel inside you who will only bloom into being in displays of wild-eyed competence and feral cunning against forces so vastly beyond you that they’re indifferent to your success or failure.
– River Kenna
fallen fences –
the bleakness of
winter wilds.
– Pure Land Haiku
pauper’s graveyard
only the long grasses
have names
– Eileen Sheehan
It’s green and blue
and needs some red,
the old monk advised
the artist.
– The Old Monk
It’s so easy to have religious awe when you’re outside at night.
– Anne Lamott
march bluster
the dragon kite
rattles its tail
– Darrell Byrd
Any time you identify a wasteland element in your life—illness, boredom, lethargy, alienation, emptiness, loss, addiction, failure, anger, or outrage—it is time to take a journey. You can be called to the quest by such dissatisfaction or simply by a desire for adventure.
– C Pearson
If you can’t say “no” you can’t say “yes”. You cannot affirm something unless you have the ability to deny it. Unless you have the ability to maintain your individuality by saying “no”, any “yes” that you may say is not a “yes”. It’s simply compliance and submission.
– S Keleman
Needless to say I support the forsythia’s war against the dull colored houses.
– Valencia Robin
Love, I don’t like to see so much pain So much wasted, and this moment keeps slipping away.
– Peter Gabriel
The starry vault of heaven is in truth the open book of cosmic projection.
– Carl Jung
when winter comes, i don’t sit on the cold, cold bench waiting and waiting, clutching a pair of my stockpiled hand warmers / i don’t bundle myself up in oppressive layers / or unravel in the late night, releasing the day’s pressure like a punctured balloon
– Camisha L. Jones
she gave man consciousness then watched him callously misplace credit yet she is undeterred by this denial of her for she knows she exists in their steps.
– Miya Coleman
Our parents expected a certain performance from us, and we tried to live up to their expectations. But when this happens, children learn to perform rather than be who they are, and the soul goes into hiding.
– Marion Woodman
Was it because I had caught but a fragmentary glimpse of her that I had found her so attractive?
– Marcel Proust
It seems that it is the purpose of evolution now to replace an image of perfection with the concept of completeness or wholeness. Perfection suggests something all pure, with no blemishes, dark spots or questionable areas. Wholeness includes the darkness.
– Robert A. Johnson
Yes. One can do anything with a fragment. The possibilities are endless and actuality is pliable.
– Alina Stefanescu
It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.
– Douglas Adams
But in the night of Skinner’s there were none of these adminicles, no loathing to love from, no kick from the world that was not his, no illusion of caress from the world that might be. It was as though the microcosmopolitans had locked him out.
– Samuel Beckett
A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.
– Virginia Woolf