The old diary
wants nothing to do with me
now that it is full
– Clark Strand
I want to stop running away from everything. I want to find something to run toward.
– Hannah Harrington
The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I create it.
– James Baldwin
Consequently we should also not use the other for our own supposed redemption. The other is no stepping stone for our feet. It is far better that we remain with ourselves.
– @RedBookJung
People should know that not only the neurotic, but everyone, naturally prefers never to seek the causes of any inconvenience in himself, but to push them as far away from himself as possible in space in time. Otherwise he would run the risk of having to make a change for the better.
– Carl Jung
To write well, to write passionately, to be less inhibited, to be warmer, to be more self-critical, to recognize the power of as well as the force of lust, to write, to love.
– John Cheever
The analyst must go on learning endlessly. It is his own hurt that gives the measure of his power to heal.
– CG Jung
Inhabiting
The places we love
inhabit us.
When you love a place
it loves you back.
Reciprocal inhabitation.
Collaborative fields of identity
essential to living systems.
keep me including otherness
in the construction of myself.
On a planet of living experiences
continually cocreating
through interactive perfusion
of one another,
the bestest “honeys”
in this world hive
are great gleanings of value
primarily measured
by how they feel
when holding them inside.
– George Gorman
In Shaker theology Jesus is male and female,
noted Edward Dahlberg.
every day there is a new god in town
and every moon is a new moon
you wake up in the morning
you meet the new god
and you start with him all over again.
hello god: what is your name?
nice to meet you. my name is mister
do you have any plans for today sir, god?
i really need your help with mine
i told all about it to yesterday’s god
and so you spend your new day
getting to know the new god
you wonder if he even noticed you.
then you go home and forget
about him for a while
then you sleep and you dream
of a better god tomorrow.
– hune margulies
writing something
tearing it up
missing someone
– Basho
Write beautifully what people don’t want to hear.
– Frederick Seidel
The way forward
You need to do more
than eat nourishing food,
exercise, and rest to feel your best
you also need to be around good people,
spend time healing your emotional history,
live in alignment with your values,
say no to people-pleasing,
stay open to growth,
and deeply embrace change
– yung pueblo
Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others.
– Picasso
The Buddha encouraged us to think of the good things done for us by our parents, by our teachers, friends, whomever; and to do this intentionally, to cultivate it, rather than just letting it happen accidentally.
– Ajahn Sumedho
I will examine their leaves as pages in a text and consider the bookish pigeons, students of winter.
– Edward Hirsch
I am so small walking on the beach at night under the widening sky.
– Edward Hirsch
Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second, and you can hop from one place to another.
– Federico Fellini
I’ve always felt that there’s a very thin membrane between madness, alcoholism, and/or destitution and being an OK American guy in a comfortable heated apartment with meatballs and a decent Sauvignon Blanc in the fridge.
– August Kleinzahler
Memory is not in the head / only.
– Margaret Atwood
The Sea will be the Sea, whatever the drop’s philosophy.
– Attar of Nishapur
Whoever marries
the spirit of a
generational will
be widowed by
the next.
– Leonard Cohen
As the saying goes:
The sign of true
learning is a
peaceful
temperament, and
the sign of having
meditated is fewer
afflictions.
– Dudjom Rinpoche
My imagination functions much better when I don’t have to speak to people.
– Patricia Highsmith
In poetry, the language of doubt must be written in doubt-free language.
– Bakhtin
To explain the pleasure I take/in loneliness, I speak of privacy.
– Chase Twitchell, Inland
Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read!
– William Faulkner
I was a ballot box stuffed full of everyone’s opinions except my own.
– Rudy Francisco
I know what they’d like, they’d like a blank they could fill in. A person already filled in disturbs them terribly.
– Patricia Highsmith
Aren’t we all self-educated, and of course our self-education never includes all of the things we would like to know or need to know.
– Elizabeth Hardwick
Astonishing, to watch our countrymen pretend they cannot hear the music of our people even as they dance to it.
– Sean Patrick Mulroy
Secretly, I get really nervous every time someone gets close enough to hear me breathe.
– Rudy Francisco
What do you need from others—except a little money—if you have satisfied the stern critic in yourself?
– Malcolm Cowley
The miracle about the theater is why people stay there. Why don’t they get up and go?
– Iris Murdoch
Ideally, art, pure, is of a sphere and of no country; the first real artists, always and everywhere, have either been importers or immigrants bringing the light with them.
– Oscar Florianus Bluemner
Everything you write is autobiographical, even science fiction, and the planet Ork. In some way even that is a reflection of you—who you are.
– Paula Fox
Art has always had a balancing effect on your mind; it is a reminder that you are more than a body and its accompanying grief.
– Carmen Maria Machado
I want to write a novel with no missed notes.
– Barry Hannah
Because survival is insufficient.
– Emily St. John Mandel
How sad it is when a luxurious imagination is obliged in self defense to deaden its delicacy in vulgarity, and riot in things attainable that it may not have leisure to go mad after things that are not?
– John Keats
If I can keep you I should want to live forever.
– Franz Kafka, 1912.
Let us riot in the unattainable!
– Dean Young
Indian Summer
blueberries burst
in the batter
– Jennie Townsend
I remember so many things
So many evenings rooms walks rages
So many stops in worthless places.
– Louis Aragon
Every poem holds the unspeakable inside it. The unsayable… The thing that you can’t really say because it’s too complicated. It’s too complex for us. Every poem has that silence deep in the center of it.
– Marie Howe
You must see the totality of your personality in the present—all the thoughts, desires, feelings, and dreams, which are continuous with your past. You may also see your personality, at all times continuous with the social structure around you, in all your relationships, the influence of your society on your personality, and so on. You will see that your ego activity is what connects you to the social network of personality, making you vulnerable to the various external influences that obscure the truth of who you are, and what reality is. When you see this completely, it is possible for the movement in you—that connects you with the rest of society—to stop. When it stops, you become pure, clarified personality, soul with no ego structure. This clarifies and heals the split from Being. The split simply is not there. In that instant you see that you and the supreme reality are one. For the first time, you can perceive the actual substance of the personality without the past. The basis of the personality, the underlying principle that makes it possible for you to be a person, the thing that you have rejected all this time, is nothing but the supreme reality as a person. The very substance of the personality is ultimately a substance which I call the Supreme Pearl, or the supreme person: pure personal presence with no qualities. It is just Being, pure and simple, but manifesting as a human person. So when the personality is completely clarified, and yet you feel you are a person, the personality doesn’t disappear; it is now the supreme person, the truest person. This is a sublime reality existing as you, the human individual.
– A. H. Almaas, Diamond Heart Book Four
Humor (is) the process that allows one to brush reality aside when it gets too distressing.
– André Breton
My most boomer take is that not everything needs to be a subscription service.
– Frances Klein
The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself.
– Maya Angelou
The big secret is the ability to stay in the room. The writer is the person who stays in the room.
– Ron Carlson
I’ll never go back to being what I may never have been….
– Fernando Pessoa
The king fears only the poet.
– African proverb
There were moments, of course. Those small spaces in time, too soon gone, when everything seems to stand still, and existence is balanced on a perfect point, like the moment of change between the dark and the light, and when both and neither surround you.
– Diana Gabaldon, Outlander
What we need is recklessness and an owl-shit outburst and a good smack upside the head every now and then. I, too, am creature of electrified lint; give me a doily, and I’ll blow my nose on it, and I mean that in the best possible way.
– Dean Young
…it’s not always easy to tell who the rightful narrators should be, unless we keep redefining with each page what it means to conquer and be conquered.
– Edwidge Danticat
Art is a harmony parallel to nature.
– Paul Cézanne
Without walking I would be dead. [. . .]
– Robert Walser
If you operate out of “what is” instead of living mired in your projections, you can begin to work your way out of any dilemma. When reality is honored, you are speaking from a divine place.
– Robert A. Johnson, Jerry M. Ruhl, Contentment
Something changed in the world. Not too long ago, it changed, and we know it. We don’t know how to explain it yet, but I think we all can feel it, somewhere deep in our gut or in our brain circuits. We feel time differently. No one has quite been able to capture what is happening or say why. Perhaps it’s just that we sense an absence of future, because the present has become too overwhelming, so the future has become unimaginable. And without future, time feels like only an accumulation. An accumulation of months, days, natural disasters, television series, terrorist attacks, divorces, mass migrations, birthdays, photographs, sunrises. […] Perhaps if we found a new way to document [the world], we might begin to understand this new way we experience space and time.
– Valeria Luiselli
We watch the pitiful little ferry boats that ply between this world and that other one touched to flame by sunset.
– Denis Johnson, Night
Men tire themselves in pursuit of rest.
– Laurence Sterne
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
But the sky slips a coin in the slot between two buildings.
– Denise Levertov, Suburban Dusk
I cringe when critics say I’m a master of the popular novel. What’s an unpopular novel?
– Irwin Shaw
If you can’t tell whose imagination you’re living in, you’ll interiorize someone else’s worldview, limitations, fears, and desires, thinking they’re What Reality Is Like. Imaginal literacy is a core competency
– River Kenna
My glass is filled, my pipe is lit, My den is all a cosy glow; And snug before the fire I sit, And wait to feel the old year go.
– Robert W. Service
Men often bore, books often bore, all things human can bore; nature, never.
– John Fowles
The acid of modernity has taken away many things. But what will not disappear is passion, because we live in bodies, because we have eyes and ears and tongues and noses and fingers and skin. What will not disappear is joy, to the extent that children are born, and to the extent that there is something that brings us closer to ‘nature’, and to the extent where there is literature and art and music and dance. (… ) What will not go away will be human evil.
– Susan Sontag
When I first read the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.
– Steven Wright
The children laugh at us. The children hear what we will not.
– Penina Ava Taesali
Lightning
anchors the hard dry rice field
to the evening sky
– Yosa Buson (tr. Allan Persinger)
I, like any decent person, often tire of my point of views.
– Arno Schmidt
The effect of life in society is to complicate and confuse our existence, making us forget who we really are by causing us to become obsessed with what we are not.
– Chuang Tzu
“I’m not saying that you have to be a reader to save your soul in the modern world,” Walter Mosley said. “I’m saying it helps.”
…it’s a worm in the brain, solitude is.
– Edith Wharton
In a nation of sex-obsessed saints and greedy selfish liberals, in a nation approaching a racial chasm grounded on growing poverty and a rampant lack of compassion, there seems to be a deep need to determine if someone else’s thoughts are proper rather than well stated, or true, or funny, or felt.
Edward Abbey was not cut out for such a world. He will never be what you approve of, though he will be what you secretly think but are afraid to say or admit to. And he will most often act out the one thing you dream of but cannot do: live your life regardless of the opinions of others.
– Charles Bowden
The sadness is real whether you say it or not.
The sadness is only a hydra if you call it one.
– Patrick Roche
If the desire to write is not accompanied by actual writing, then the desire must be not to write.
– Hugh Prather
The cause of happiness is rare, And many are the seeds of suffering! But if I have no pain, I’ll never long for freedom; Therefore, O my mind, be steadfast!
– Shantideva
A library is not only a place of both order and chaos; it is also the realm of chance. Books, even after they have been given a shelf and a number, retain a mobility of their own. Left to their own devices, they assemble in their own formations; they follow secret rules of similarity, unchronicled genealogies, common interests and themes.
– Alberto Manguel
Today’s real college is a collection of books.
– Thomas Carlyle
Authoritarianism and democracy are not compatible. Authoritarian systems need to have everything spelled out in terms of clear-cut causes and effects (who has the power and who doesn’t). A machine is the perfect metaphor authoritarianism. While it tries to make us into interchangeable machines, democracy invites us to more fully become our unique and unpredictable selves. Authoritarianism tends to make human society less like the natural world while democracy makes us more like natural ecosystems.Authoritarianism restricts communication in favor of pre-established rules while democracy – like biological evolution – uses communicational influence and adaptation to evolve the rules.
Though we are only starting to recognize the full ramifications of what switching from a coercive to a communicational paradigm could mean for human experience, this has been implicit in the idea of democracy from the beginning. And now that new biological discoveries about communicational proteins in the body (peptides) and evolution through alliance (symbiogenesis) are showing that biological complexities are not entirely comprehensible in mechanistic terms, the natural wilderness appears to be a messy but functional democracy.
– George Gorman
And now I know
Why comes the snow:
The bare black places lie
Too near the sky.
– Charles Bertram Johnson
The Narrow Way
Believe not those who say
The upward path is smooth,
Lest thou shouldst stumble in the way,
And faint before the truth.
It is the only road
Unto the realms of joy;
But he who seeks that blest abode
Must all his powers employ.
Bright hopes and pure delights
Upon his course may beam,
And there, amid the sternest heights
The sweetest flowerets gleam.
On all her breezes borne,
Earth yields no scents like those;
But he that dares not grasp the thorn
Should never crave the rose.
Arm—arm thee for the fight!
Cast useless loads away;
Watch through the darkest hours of night,
Toil through the hottest day.
Crush pride into the dust,
Or thou must needs be slack;
And trample down rebellious lust,
Or it will hold thee back.
Seek not thy honor here;
Waive pleasure and renown;
The world’s dread scoff undaunted bear,
And face its deadliest frown.
To labor and to love,
To pardon and endure,
To lift thy heart to God above,
And keep thy conscience pure;
Be this thy constant aim,
Thy hope, thy chief delight;
What matter who should whisper blame,
Or who should scorn or slight?
What matter, if thy God approve,
And if, within thy breast,
Thou feel the comfort of His love,
The earnest of His rest?
– Anne Brontë
[The will to see oneself as fragile]
The will to see oneself as
fragile, fallible,
liable to fail.
To consider a stranger and
hear, in the mind’s ear,
one’s true voice
insisting: I must change.
Ordinary people do this
Patient urgent work
alone and together
day upon day upon day.
Like my mother, once,
leading her ailing mother
back through the maze
of our suburban scrawl,
past ache, past haze,
past confusion and rage
toward a neat room
where waited prayer,
fear, forgiveness,
grief, grace. This
is a poem about kin
and neighbors and nations
adrift, in error, under siege.
This is a ceasefire poem.
– Tracy K Smith
What a shame it is to hear someone declare that things lose their beauty at night ! All lustre, ornamentation and brilliance come into their own at night.
– Yoshida Kenko
Thought experiment: What if your deepest wound were caused by jealousy of you? That could be a person, or a spirit, a family or a culture. Let yourself imagine it is true, just for a moment. – who do you see? – What about you are they jealous of? (be free here to believe what comes up) – How does this change the way you relate to your wounds? Thinking about wounds these days; hope this short experiment opens a dream door into your healing.
– David Bedrick
I Am Happy Living Simply
by Marina Tsvetaeva
Translated by Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine
I am happy living simply:
like a clock, or a calendar.
Worldly pilgrim, thin,
wise—as any creature. To know
the spirit is my beloved.
To come to things—swift
as a ray of light, or a look.
To live as I write: spare—the way
God asks me—and friends do not.This
is a poem about kin
and neighbors and nations
adrift, in error, under siege.
This is a ceasefire poem.
– Tracy K. Smith
Because I know
Now: how it feels
To sip that small space
Between becoming
And being found.
– Camonghne Felix
In the Woods of Language, She Collects Beautiful Sticks
by Valzhyna Mort
like a snail with a shell of sticks
— she loads them on her back —
Like a camel with a hump of sticks
— on her back, on her back —
Like a horse with a knight of sticks and a stick for a sword
Where is she taking this load of sticks?
— on her hump, on her hump —
She has no house, where is she taking the house she doesn’t have?
— in the fire she is taking it in the fire —
In the fire she is making a poem entirely out of sticks on fire and it goes like this
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
so weird when people read a novel looking for answers. novels are questions. question after question after question.
– Isle McElroy
Observing language’s soaring and moving autonomy, I used to tell myself: it’s not me who writes this, it’s the Night.
– Hélène Cixous
I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.
– Virginia Woolf
there are two wolves inside each of us, one is always hungry and the other one is always sleepy.
– Kristof Smeyers
The entire continent of Africa is responsible for less than 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
– Vanessa Nakate
INTER-BEING
If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper “inter-are”…
If we continue to look into this sheet of paper, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. Without the sunshine nothing can grow, not even us. So we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. Looking more deeply, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. We also see the wheat. We know that the logger cannot exist without his daily bread. So the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. The logger’s father and mother are in the paper as well. Without all of these other things, there would be no sheet of paper at all.
Looking even more deeply, we can see we are also in the paper. This is not difficult to see, because when we look at a sheet of paper, the sheet of paper becomes the object of our perception. It is becoming more and more clear to neuroscientists that we cannot exactly speak of an objective world outside of our perceptions, nor can we speak of a wholly subjective world in which things exist only in our mind. Everything – time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat, and even consciousness – is in that sheet of paper. Everything coexists with it. To be is to inter-be. You cannot just be by yourself alone; you have to inter-be with every other thing. This sheet of paper is, because everything else is.
Suppose we try to return one of the elements to its source. If we returned the sunshine to the sun, would the sheet of paper still be possible? No, without sunshine the tree cannot be. If we returned the logger to his mother, then we wouldn’t have a sheet of paper either. Looking in this way, we see that this sheet of paper is made up entirely of “non-paper elements” and if we were to return any one of these non-paper elements to their source, there would be no paper at all. As thin as this sheet of paper is, it contains everything in the universe. So the one contains the all.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
The world we live in is vastly different
from the world we think we live in.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The wind has blown a warm yellow moon up over the sea; a bulbous moon, which sprouts in the soiled indigo sky, and spills bright winking petals of light on the quivering black water.
– Sylvia Plath
Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them.
– Flannery O’Connor
He was not dogmatic enough to believe that you must
have boards and footlights to be within the theater; he carried the stage with him in his heart.
– Isak Dinesen
Is no one inspired by our present picture of the universe? This value of science remains unsung by singers: you are reduced to hearing not a song or poem, but an evening lecture about it. This is not yet a scientific age.
– Richard Feynman
The first poets were gods. Poetry began with the bicameral mind. The god-side of our ancient mentality, at least in a certain period of history, usually or perhaps always spoke in verse. This means that most men at one time, throughout the day, were hearing poetry (of a sort) composed and spoken within their own minds.
– Julian Jaynes
When we manage a flash of mercy for someone we don’t like, especially a truly awful person, including ourselves, we experience a great spiritual moment, a new point of view that can make us gasp. It gives us the chance to rediscover something both old and original, the sweet child in us who, all evidence to the contrary, was not killed off, but just put in the drawer. I realize now how desperately, how grievously, I have needed the necessary mercy to experience self-respect. It is what a lot of us were so frantic for all along, and we never knew it. We’ve tried almost suicidally for our whole lives to shake it from the boughs of the material world’s trees. But it comes from within, from love, from the flow of the universe; from inside the cluttered drawer.
– Anne Lamott, Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy
The world did not begin with me
it will not end with me
I am one pulsebeat in the throbbing river
– Octavio Paz
This activist, conservative majority has already dealt significant blows to the power of the executive branch to regulate wetlands, securities and student loans. And extremist judges are already attacking the authority of the FDA, including its approval of critical abortion medications like mifepristone. If the Court proceeds to overrule Chevron, this could upend the field entirely, and we would enter an entirely new and uncharted world of conservative judicial activism.
– Jay Kuo
Times without number I have asked myself how it could have come to that. Now, from a distance of thirty years, I see the answer clearly: little by little.
– Mary Lawson
It’s much easier to integrate a lunch counter than it is to guarantee an annual income, for instance, to get rid of poverty for Negroes and all poor people. It’s much easier to integrate a bus than it is to make genuine integration a reality and quality education a reality in our schools. It’s much easier to integrate even a public park than it is to get rid of slums.
– Martin Luther King
I believe in progress through movement. In moving you find the answers, or at least I do. I didn’t know what the [Harold] Pinter plays meant until I was in rehearsal and then in performance: I didn’t spend time reading theories or looking for clues. The answers come from doing. With plays, with life, with friends, with children–you keep moving and doing and the answers come. Or they don’t come. But you’re moving and learning. You’re of use.
– Frances Sternhagen
The real difference between God and human beings, he thought, was that God cannot stand continuance. No sooner has he created a season of a year, or a time of the day, than he wishes for something quite different, and sweeps it all away. No sooner was one a young man, and happy at that, than the nature of things would rush one into marriage, martyrdom or old age. And human beings cleave to the existing state of things. All their lives they are striving to hold the moment fast….Their art itself is nothing but the attempt to catch by all means the one particular moment, one light, the momentary beauty of one woman or one flower, and make it everlasting.
– Karen Blixen
Brother! I’m not despondent and I haven’t lost heart. Life is everywhere, life is in us ourselves, not outside. There will be people by my side, and to be a human being among people and to remain one forever, no matter in what circumstances, not to grow despondent and not to lose heart — that’s what life is all about, that’s its task. I have come to recognize that. The idea has entered my flesh and blood. Yes its true! The head that created, lived the highest life of art, which recognized and got used to the exalted needs of the spirit, that head is already cut off from my shoulders. There was a memory and images created and not yet embodied by me.
– Fëdor Mikhailovich Dostoevskiy
The knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, whole, simply there and original; it is always constructed and stitched together imperfectly, and therefore able to join with another, to see together without claiming to be another. Here is the promise of objectivity: a scientific knower seeks the subject position, not of identity, but of objectivity, that is, partial connection.
– Donna Haraway, Situated Knowledges
Tending my inner garden went splendidly this winter. Suddenly to be healed again and aware that the very ground of my being — my mind and spirit — was given time and space in which to go on growing; and there came from my heart a radiance I had not felt so strongly for a long time… You tell me how you are able to feel fully alive every moment of the day and that your inner life is brimming over; you write in the knowledge that what you have, if one looks at it squarely, outweighs and cancels all possible privations and losses that may later come along. It is precisely this that was borne in upon me more conclusively than ever before as I worked away during the long Winter months: that the stages by which life has become impoverished correspond with those earlier times when excesses of wealth were the accustomed measure. What, then, is there to fear? Only forgetting! But you and I, around us and in us, we have so much in store to help us remember!
– Rainer Maria Rilke
The kind of hope I often think about I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul; it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but, rather, an ability to work for something that is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper the hope is. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. In short, I think that the deepest and most important form of hope, the only one that can keep us above water and urge us to good works, and the only true source of the breathtaking dimension of the human spirit and its efforts, is something we get, as it were, from “elsewhere”. It is also this hope, above all, which gives us the strength to live and continually to try new things, even in conditions that seem hopeless as ours do, here and now.
– Vaclav Havel
Intellectual, spiritual, and artistic initiative is as dangerous to totalitarianism as the gangster initiative of the mob, and both are more dangerous than mere political opposition. The consistent persecution of every higher form of intellectual activity by the new mass leaders springs from more than their natural resentment against everything they cannot understand. Total domination does not allow for free initiative in any field of life, for any activity that is not entirely predictable.
Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.
– Hannah Arendt, On Totalitarianism
Totalitarian regimes seem to have an intuitive awareness that it becomes hard for people to change after a certain age, which is why so much effort is made to indoctrinate the young from an early age.
– Norman Doidge
Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real.
– Nora Ephron
I don’t think anyone really knows how a story takes shape.
– Elena Ferrante
I’m so compelled by fiction, too, because it pushes me much more quickly and readily than nonfiction to construct work that’s entirely voice, and not in marriage to another person’s story or voice.
– Hilton Als
Jung did not believe that authentic religiosity was expressed in these peak experiences. Rather he advised people to turn towards their fears, much as the mystics welcomed the dark night of the soul. This shadow is experienced as a foe, but it is really a friend because it contains clues as to what the individual lacks, rejects and distrusts.
– Mark Vernon
Artistic originality has only its own self to copy.
– Vladimir Nabokov
From the time, some tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago, that language invaded and colonized our cerebrums, we have increasingly lost touch with the reality of things. Reality has been replaced with relation, a mapping of things-as-they-are to things-as-we-believe-them-to-be.
– Mark Pesce
In a holographic universe there are no boxes to think outside of.
– Nassim Haramein
He had developed a superstitious fear of the instant, that tiny hole through which all the time available to human beings must pass.
– César Aira
There are a few things in life so beautiful they hurt: swimming in the ocean while it rains, reading alone in empty libraries, the sea of stars that appear when you’re miles away from the neon lights of the city, bars after 2am, walking in the wilderness, all the phases of the moon, the things we do not know about the universe, and you.
– Beau Taplin
There are beautiful wild forces within us. Let them turn the mills inside and fill sacks that feed even heaven.
– St. Francis of Assis
The gods are true in the way poetry is true.
– Joseph Campbell
Dr. Jung once told me that any man who comes into your consulting room will either be 21 or 45 years of age no matter his chronological age because his problems will be that he can’t get into life or can’t get out of life. Those are the only two problems a man ever has.
– Robert A. Johnson
In your career, the most valuable currency is not how much you know. It’s how well you learn.
In a stable world, success depended on building expertise. In a changing world, it hinges on evolving expertise.
Potential is no longer defined by ability. It’s a function of agility.
– Adam Grant
Maybe we need to change the word Buddhism to Buddhist practice, or Buddhist-inspired practice. Then it has to be engaged, because it’s about our meeting with the world and in the world and our embodiment of the world.
– Stephen Fulder
this minute perhaps i am above the stars, with a thousand systems round about me, looking forward into a vast abyss, and losing my whole comprehension in the boundless space of creation; the next moment i am below all trifles
– alexander pope, letters
a good proverb the devonshire people have: walk fast in snow, in frost walk slow, and still as you go, tread on your toe: when frost and snow are both together, sit by the fire and spare shoe leather.
– jonathan swift, letters
in these deep solitudes and awful cells, where heav’nly-pensive contemplation dwells and ever-musing melancholy reigns; what means this tumult in a vestal’s veins? why rove my thoughts beyond this last retreat why feels my heart its long-forgotten heat?
yet, yet i love!
– alexander pope
Sometimes it is different
in my head than when
I write it out,
the old monk admitted.
– The Old Monk
Photographers, insurance salesmen, and funeral directors are the worst forms of life.
– Elizabeth Bishop
passages which, when I wrote them, were so colorless in comparison with my thought, so complicated and opaque in comparison with my harmonious and transparent vision, so full of gaps which I had not managed to fill
– Marcel Proust
My contention is this: more people know Dublin is on the Liffey than Belfast is on the Langan.
– Richard Coles
The ancient philosophers, Chinese, Hindu, Persian, and Greek, were a class than which none has been poorer in outward riches, none so rich inward.
– Henry David Thoreau
Sometimes I tremble like a storm-swept flower,
And seek to hide my tortured soul from thee,
Bowing my head in deep humility
Before the silent thunder of thy power.
– Claude McKay
Lovingkindness or love is not an emotion from the presence of a lovable person, but a heart quality making no distinction among beings.
– Ayya Khema
Old traps disappear and new ones emerge. Safe spots become impassable… That’s the Zone… It is what we made it with our condition.
– Andrei Tarkovsky
wolf moon
I decide to become
vegetarian
– @AdLibby1
I believe that life is hateful when you simply accept the natural order of things: When you submit. We must contribute. We must anticipate. Do you remember how glorious life was on Friday afternoons? How grisly on Sunday nights? You know what I mean. Expectation. The glorious, colorful life comes to those who expect it, dream it. Remember how grand life was when the circus or the fair was imminent? Colors changed. More dramatic than the change of seasons was the change of attitudes. So expect the circus, always. Be the circus.
– Tennessee Williams
The dwelling is intimate, immediate, a resonant chamber, a mirror of the self, opening up in infinite perspectives, depth, and reflection. Soul, body, and dwelling are but expansions and projections of each other. For the house is not merely walls, doors, and windows, but a doorway to things beyond, a ‘capacity’ of the senses and spirit. Finally, there is no distinction between outward and inward. We dwell in the home; the home dwells in us.
– Anne Troutman
There was a smell of Time in the air tonight. He smiled and turned the fancy in his mind. There was a thought. What did time smell like? Like dust and clocks and people. And if you wondered what Time sounded like it, it sounded like water running in a dark cave and voices crying and dirt dropping down upon hollow box lids, and rain. And, going further, what did Time look like?
Time look like snow dropping silently into a black room or it looked like a silent film in an ancient theater, 100 billion faces falling like those New Year balloons, down and down into nothing. That was how Time smelled and looked and sounded. And tonight – Tomas shoved a hand into the wind outside the truck – tonight you could almost taste time.
– Ray Bradbury
W Edwards Deming, the man credited with almost single-handedly transforming the economy of post-war Japan, once said that a bad system will beat a good person every time. It wasn’t an attempt to get people to give up trying – it was a attempt to get people to understand the importance of the system and the futility of trying to focus on blaming people for failures.
– Fix The System Problem, Not The People Problem
Source: paulitaylor.com
St. Cyril of Jerusalem, in instructing catechumens, wrote: “The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.” No matter what form the dragon may take, it is of this mysterious passage past him, or into his jaws, that stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell, and this being the case, it requires considerable courage at any time, in any country, not to turn away from the storyteller.
– Flannery O’Connor
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
– George Orwell, 1984
To progress in life you must give up the things you do not like. Give up doing the things that you do not like to do. You must find the things that you do like. The things that are acceptable to your mind.
– Agnes Martin
There is among them an abundance of the vengeful disguised as judges, who constantly bear the word “justice” in their mouths like poisonous spittle, always with pursed lips, always ready to spit upon all who are not discontented but go their own way in good spirits…The will of the weak to represent some form of superiority, their instinct for devious paths to tyranny over the healthy – where can it not be discovered, this will to power of the weakest!
– Nietzsche
Work hard in silence, let your success be your noise.
– Frank Ocean
In order to realize our dreams, we must decide to wake up.
– Josephine Baker
Study your craft and know who you are and what’s special about you. […] Ask questions and listen. Make sure you live life, which means don’t do things where you court celebrity, and give something positive back to our society.
– Paul Newman
The gates of hell are open night and day;
Smooth the descent, and easy is the way:
But to return, and view the cheerful skies,
In this the task and mighty labor lies.
– Virgil
Arithmetic
by Carl Sandburg
Arithmetic is where numbers fly like pigeons
in and out of your head.
Arithmetic tells you how many you lose or win
if you know how many you had
before you lost or won.
Arithmetic is seven eleven all good children
go to heaven — or five six bundle of sticks.
Arithmetic is numbers you squeeze from your head
to your hand to your pencil to your paper
till you get the answer.
Arithmetic is where the answer is right
and everything is nice and you can look
out of the window and see the blue sky — or the
answer is wrong and you have to start all over
and try again and see how it comes out this time.
If you take a number and double it and double it again
and then double it a few more times, the number
gets bigger and bigger and goes higher and higher
and only arithmetic can tell you what the number is
when you decide to quit doubling.
Arithmetic is where you have to multiply —
and you carry the multiplication table in your head and
hope you won’t lose it.
If you have two animal crackers, one good and one bad,
and you eat one and a striped zebra
with streaks all over him eats the other,
how many animal crackers will you have if somebody
offers you five six seven and you say No no no and you say
Nay nay nay and you say Nix nix nix?
If you ask your mother for one fried egg for breakfast and
she gives you two fried eggs and you eat both of them,
who is better in arithmetic, you or your mother?
If I get frustrated, I’ll go eat something, I’ll go open another Diet Coke, I’ll go to the barn, I’ll distract myself, and then the parts in my brain that were working click and I get an idea.
– Jane Smiley
Humans don’t undergo biological metamorphosis, which may explain our limited notion of growth as becoming a larger or more developed version of the same thing, rather than transforming into something else.
– Diana Calthorpe Rose
Plato is boring. In reality, my distrust of Plato is fundamental. I find him so very much astray from all the deepest instincts of the Hellenes, so steeped in moral prejudices, so pre-existently Christian…
Plato is a coward in the face of reality—consequently, he takes refuge in the ideal.
– Nietzsche
Your life is not going to be the same while you are writing.
– Chinua Achebe
Everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves.
– Adam Phillips
It really is
all one poem,
the old monk told
the poet.
Figure it out.
– The Old Monk
Every poet
needs a drum,
even if it’s just
a trash can,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
I’m writing to save my own life. I’m trying to create a narrative of survival, a way for me to see and sustain myself, and possibly others to see themselves, too.
– Tiana Clark
I use the signs I know —
doesn’t everybody,
the old monk asked
the semiotic linguist.
– The Old Monk
“The object of our search,” wrote Simone Weil, “should not be the supernatural, but the world.” The true pilgrim, she might have added, is the one walking deeper and still deeper into real life.
– Pico Iyer
What is wit
but a bit
of spit
and sugar,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
how are we supposed to convince media execs that journalism and criticism are important.
– Maris Kreizman
Where is the Poet
by Yone Noguchi
The inky-garmented, truth-dead Cloud—woven by dumb ghost alone in the darkness of
phantasmal mountain-mouth—kidnapped the maiden Moon, silence-faced,
love-mannered, mirroring her golden breast in silvery rivulets:
The Wind, her lover, grey-haired in one moment, crazes around the Universe, hunting
her dewy love-letters, strewn secretly upon the oat-carpets of the open field.
O, drama! never performed, never gossiped, never rhymed!
Behold—to the blind beast, ever tearless, iron-hearted, the Heaven has no mouth to interpret these tidings!
Ah, where is the man who lives out of himself?—the poet inspired often to chronicle these
things?
People label themselves with all sorts of adjectives. I can only pronounce myself as ‘nauseatingly miserable beyond repair.’
– Franz Kafka
Expression is desire’s work. That work is the trespass in which I betray myself. The I that speaks and the I that thinks are, potentially, quite different versions of “me.”
– Dan Beachy-Quick
[Burns’] person was strong and robust; his manners rustic, not clownish, a sort of dignified plainness and simplicity which received part of its effect perhaps from knowledge of his extraordinary talents.
– Walter Scott about Robert Burns
Let them grit their teeth until
their mouths are full of sand;
let them create a new beach
whenever they say our
names.
– Rudy Francisco
I must say that the God makes us sick. I experience the God in sickness. A living God afflicts our reason like a sickness.
– @RedBookJung
I think some of us contain more multitudes than others
– Francesca Leader
Pure poetry is hieroglyphic: decipherable only with the key of destiny.
– Cristina Campo
In the wet gap of the year,
Daubed with fresh lake mud,
I faltered near his power —
January God.
– Seamus Heaney
Princes have but their titles for their glories,
An outward honor for an inward toil;
And, for unfelt imaginations,
They often feel a world of restless cares.
– William Shakespeare
uncooperative
she never blooms in season
my Lenten rose
– Therese Sellers
We’re living in a civilization that doesn’t understand metaphor. So they tend to concretize everything, and not even know that that’s going on.
– Marion Woodman
it’s valid to not want kids. it’s also valid to not want a career. it’s valid to want a peaceful, child-free cabin in the woods where you make jam & never work again
– @ElyKreimendahl
Powerful people impress and intimidate by saying less.
– @RobertGreene
You know that the little upward bend
of the voice at the end of a question isn’t a waiting pause,
it’s a little hill cliff where we stop and look around …
– David M. deLeon
Jump into the colder pool. Walk instead of drive. Pick up the book instead of your phone. Take responsibility instead of hoping it goes unnoticed. In matters big and small, courage is choosing the more difficult option.
– @RyanHoliday
Renown is not to be sought, and all pursuit of it is vain. A person may, indeed, by skillful conduct and various artificial means, make a sort of name for himself; but if the inner jewel is wanting, all is vanity, and will not last a day.
– Goethe
“I’ve been thanking God for fear.”
“You have?”
This winter. One afternoon the bus was late with the children. My imagination was like a storm. I stood at the road, and I couldn’t get rid of all the terrible pictures. So I started thanking God for this fear, because it meant I love them so much. The sun was shining on the snow and pines, and I stood down there, thinking of what it would be like not to have that fear; not to love anyone so much you couldn’t imagine living on the earth without them […] I looked at all that beauty around me and I was grateful. I was still afraid, but the worst of it went out of me..
– Andre Dubus
Auschwitz is outside of us, but it is all around us, in the air. The plague has died away, but the infection still lingers and it would be foolish to deny it. Rejection of human solidarity, obtuse and cynical indifference to the suffering of others, abdication of the intellect and of moral sense to the principle of authority, and above all, at the root of everything, a sweeping tide of cowardice, a colossal cowardice which masks “Itself as warring virtue, love of country and faith in an idea.
– Primo Levi, If This Is a Man
Bohm believes that our almost universal tendency to fragment the world and ignore the dynamic interconnectedness of all things is responsible for many of our problems, not only in science but in our lives and our society as well. For instance, we believe we can extract the valuable parts of the earth without affecting the whole. We believe it is possible to treat parts of our body and not be concerned with the whole. We believe we can deal with various problems in our society, such as crime, poverty, and drug addiction, without addressing the problems in our society as a whole, and so on. In his writings Bohm argues passionately that our current way of fragmenting the world into parts not only doesn’t work, but may even lead to our extinction.
– Michael Talbot
The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.
– Flannery O’Connor
In the first place you can be so absolutely honest and so absolutely wrong at the same time that I think it is better to be a combination of cautious and polite
– Flannery O’Connor
All things share the same breath – the beast, the tree, the man. The air shares its spirit with all the life it supports.
– Chief Seattle
Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.
– Psalm 150:6
Love everything that breathes.
– Gurdjieff
Between a tyrant and a prince there is this single or chief difference, that the latter obeys the law and rules the people by its dictates, accounting himself as but their servant.
– John of Salisbury
I find most interesting the conspiracy of life in the desert to circumvent the death rays of the all-conquering sun. The beaten earth appears defeated and dead, but it only appears so…the desert, the dry and sun-lashed desert, is a good school in which to observe the cleverness and the infinite variety of survival under pitiless opposition. Life could not change the sun or water the desert, so it changed itself.
– John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley
From the Window by Iman Mersal
(Translated from the Arabic by Sam Wilder)
You can tell one who’s been destroyed before
from where you drink coffee and watch the passersby.
You can tell a person whose back has been set straight
or whose neck has been hinged back to his shoulders.
You can probably guess what the artery looks like
grafted from his wrist to his heart,
or catch a glimmer from the imported pins in his knee.
You’ll see the sincerity in his step.
It might be slow.
He walks, usually, in a straight line
never turning his eyes to you. He’s completely locked.
It’s easier with someone who’s been scattered.
The one who’s been scattered turns around
like he’s looking for a part still missing.
He may look sweet when he’s turning
because he’s glued together with paste.
Or he might be bitter, if he’s gone a bit too far
pouring mortar to fill the gaps between his organs.
I don’t think that behind the window you can tell
the ones who have been ripped before.
Nothing really tells them apart.
Maybe each one just resembles himself
like pressed seals torn from envelopes
ending up in the collections of the lovers of stamps.
I’m chasing myself
(I have been for years).
– Susan Sontag
Another late night
in the fiction department.
Somebody enters
an imagined world
and hovers there. Go further
or step back? The world
is spinning stories
it does not believe. The night
accepts everything.
Keep going, it says.
– George Szirtes
Riddle, Joyce never lets us forget, is the frequentive of read.
– Guy Davenport
Books leave gestures in the body; a certain way of moving, of turning, a certain closing of the eyes, a way of leaving, hesitations.
– Dionne Brand
My painting, I know what it is beneath its appearances, its violence, its perpetual plays of force, it is a fragile thing in the sense of the good, the sublime. It’s fragile like love. I believe, as much as I can control myself, I always try to make more or less decisive action of my possibilities as a painter and when I rush towards a large format canvas, when it becomes good, I always feel atrociously a too much chance, like vertigo […] and that always puts me in lamentable states of discouragement.
– Nicolas de Stael
Neither I nor any of these poets want to streamline or crystallize a single understanding of their place(s). The aim, rather, is constellatory, to assemble an array of bright voices in the landscape and let each reader find and follow a route to understanding.
– c.c. o’hanlon
The warrior’s duty is to generate warmth and compassion for others.
– Chögyam Trungpa
It was another era, almost another century,
I was going to say. The saint wept quietly
in her ebony pew. It was the thing to do.
– John Ashbery
if they remembered fear
or if they’d grown immune
so saturated with it
it had transformed into a fourth prayer
– Achy Obejas
Fuck / Borders
by Inua Ellams
The travellers of woods and waters who left by foot and paddle
/ who formed horse and saddle / rudder and sail / forged steam
and engine and reached the holy grail of flight / So instinctive was
collective strive / to boldly go / and yet go further / they wen off-
world / zoomed off-planet
The forestspiritchild in them who saw no borders in the sky / the
winged wondering wild within / is who we have ever been / In
time we’ll wake to see the lines/ these thin boundaries we have
drawn / as utter folly and call out why / and when / and who /
and how
Overcome by my own hypersensitivity, I had no choice but to turn fearless.
– Kim Gordon
Memory resonates with the cadences, the revelations, the opacities, and the poignancies of music.
– Jeremy Eichler
I want to fight your realism
with all the magic forces of
poetry.
– Anaïs Nin
You don’t read or overhear the voice in the poem, you are the voice in the poem. You stand behind the words and speak them as your own.
– Helen Vendler
By nature, the heart contains both love and hate. Diminishing hate and enlarging love is essential to experience lovingkindness.
– Ayya Khema
The tree was cut down
but the connections (remained),
Nasir,
all night long, the birds sat nearby
on the ground.
– Hasan Nasir
sometimes, our trauma forgets to wear us.
It doesn’t make it less of a skin. …
– @Olu_MideManuel
You have to surrender to the act of writing, give up to it, and trust that if you have anything, it will discover it for you.
– E.L. Doctorow
The Tiny Economies of Restraint
by Jennifer Robertson
I like not knowing your coldness
or the length of your shadow
or the haunted architecture of your face.
I do not want to know the names of cemeteries
you’ve been to, or how the dead walk on knives.
I like the tiny economies of restraint,
of not knowing the size of your fist
when the doorbell rings.
The relation of poet and Muse is contrasted, derisively, to the relation between real lovers [. . .]. Where real love is complex and organic, love of the Muse is unreal, devoid of complexity, devoid of life.
– Mark Fortier
I believe much more in truth now than I did. I do believe in the solidity of truth much more. Yes. I believe there is a truth, and that it’s knowable.
– Mary McCarthy
The person who has eaten his shadow spreads calmness and shows more grief than anger. If ancients were right that darkness contains intelligence and nourishment and even information, then the person who has eaten some of his shadow is more energetic as well as more intelligent.
– Robert Bly
The world will continue
to change dramatically,
but fighting and war can
destroy us utterly. What we
need now are techniques
of harmony, not those of
contention. The Art of Peace
is required, not the Art of War.
– O Sensei, Morihei Ueshiba
(Founder of Aikidō)
What we need now are new stories to share with each other, new tales to live into the world, which is to say, stories to make real by living our own versions of them.
– Bill Plotkin
Yearning for education was just part of the culture. My friends and I worshipped literature. We thought everything we would ever know or care about or be devoted to was to be found in literature.
– Vivian Gornick
Religion is a framing mechanism. It is a language of orientation that presents itself as a series of questions.
– Marilynne Robinson
You are free, and that is why you are lost.
– Franz Kafka
one knows that one will always have to begin again
– Derrida
Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.
– Jackson Pollock
He was part of a generation of politically persecuted intellectuals who exemplified this political dichotomy in society… Avant garde artists who had left to go abroad were not acknowledged.
– Helen Smith on the Greek composer, Iannis Xenakis
There is a great dragon of grandiosity within us and unconsciousness of that fact creates a very real enemy within. . . . It constantly tries to persuade us to forget our limits and forget that we need help, to forget that we need others.
– Robert L. Moore, Facing the Dragon
the thinking of love should learn to yield to this abandon: to receive the prodigality, the collisions, and the contradictions of love, without submitting them to an order that they essentially defy.
– Joshua M. Hall, Nancy and Neruda: Poetry Thinking Love
Your handwriting. The way you walk.
Which china pattern you choose.
It’s all giving you away.
Everything you do shows your hand.
Everything is a self portrait
Everything is a diary.
– Chuck Palahniuk
Soul is resonance. . . . We often use the language of soul phenomena without realizing we are doing so. We speak of ‘being in tune’ with someone, or ‘being on the same wavelength’. Something about a connection with another person just feels right. It clicks.
– Robert Sardello
In Buddha’s opinion, to train in staying open and curious—to train in dissolving our assumptions and beliefs—is the best use of our human lives.
– Pema Chodron
Forgive and forget those who have caused difficulties, viewing them as teachers about your own reactions, and make them your friends.
– Ayya Khema
Attachment and loss, attachment and loss — this is the human story. We lose parts of ourselves as we adapt to the demands of the world.
– James Hollis
Everybody will affirm your “right” to set boundaries– in the abstract. Until you set a boundary that inconveniences them.
Then their opinion often shifts to, “you only have a ‘right’ to boundaries I understand or agree with.”
It’ll happen. Don’t let it get in your head.
– Dr. Glenn Patrick Doyle
Seems like the only thing accelerating is the decline of the US.
– @antonio_paglino
Trying Too Hard to Write a Poem Sitting on the Beach
by Philip Whalen
Planted among driftwood
I watch the tide go out
It pulls the sundown with it
& across this scene & against the wind
Man on a motorbike white crash-helmet
His young son rides the gas tank before him
Slows down for the creek mouth
& not too fast up the beach north
Flat dull whistle buoy heard again
and though the wind is right the bell buoy is inaudible
Fat seagull picks at a new hake skeleton
Choosily—not hungry walks away
Returns a moment later,
Room for a few more bites inside
Here comes a family of five
Man prodding with a stick whatever the children test
with their fingers
Mama is bundled up naturally cold & yellow plastic bucket
Complaining a little “. . . kind of a long way from the car . . .”
The children explore ahead the beach goes on forever & they
Will see it all this evening they aren’t tired
Motorbike man coming back slows down for them
& for the creek mouth
Fog joined into fat clouds cover the sun
Move south stretching rivers & islands of blue
Fine moving sheets & shafts of light on the water horizon
I’m not making it, I’m cold, I go into the house.
what will poems become
when the breath departs
– Zbigniew Herbert
A daily practice of seiza helps nurture the nembutsu spirit to counter the turbulence of this world and the countless blind passions with which we run amok.
– Reverend Miki Nakura
In moments when attention is strong, because we deliberately cultivate awareness of inner states as they arise and pass away in the mind with wise or careful attention, we are far more able to notice what is going on.
– Andrew Olendzki
If your goal is to not,
you miss a lot of do,
the old monk told them.
– The Old Monk
I love snow, and all forms / Of the radiant frost; / I love waves, and winds, and storms, / Everything almost / Which is Nature’s, and may be / Untainted by man’s misery.
– Percy Bysshe Shelley
If we follow the history of a neurosis with attention, we regularly find a critical moment when some problem emerged that was evaded.
– CG Jung
If they’re here—all females in a winter hive—they’re clustered together inside (an oak tree), queen at the heart of their sisterhood. The fine, transparent wings they beat hard in summer’s heat—a constant buzzing fan to keep the hive from cooking—they hold, now, folded and still. The tiny muscles to which those wings are attached shiver. One honey bee shivering her flight muscles does not make much heat. But twenty thousand, huddled together, shivering, can keep the queen and the colony’s honey supply at their core at a tropical ninety-two degrees Fahrenheit, even as blizzard winds, inches away, flail the trunk.
– Gayle Boss
It is usual to speak of the Fascist objective as the “beehive state”, which does grave injustice to bees. A world of rabbits ruled by stoats would be nearer the mark.
– George Orwell
My tunes often deal with a moral crisis. I often feel myself a part of such a crisis and try to relate it in song. There’s a line in a poem I wrote that sums this up perfectly: ‘My betrayals are so fresh they still come with explanations.’
– Leonard Cohen
Human presence is a creative and turbulent sacrament, a visible sign of invisible grace…Friendship is the sweet grace that liberates us to approach, recognize, and inhabit this adventure.
– John O’Donahue
One knew of places in ancient Greece where the way led down to the underworld. Our waking existence likewise is like a land which, at certain hidden points, leads down into the underworld—a land full of inconspicuous. places from which dreams arise. All day long, we pass them by, but no sooner has sleep come than we are eagerly groping our way back to lose ourselves in the dark corridors.
– Walter Benjamin
You do not know how much they mean to me, my friends,
And how, how rare and strange it is, to find
In a life composed so much, so much of odds and ends,
(For indeed I do not love it … you knew? you are not blind! How keen you are!)
To find a friend who has these qualities,
Who has, and gives
Those qualities upon which friendship lives.
How much it means that I say this to you-
Without these friendships-life, what cauchemar!
– T.S. Eliot
I read that beauty has historically demanded replication. We make more of anything we find aesthetically pleasing, whether it’s a vase, a painting, a chalice, a poem. We reproduce it in order to keep it, extend it through space and time. To gaze at what pleases—a fresco, a peach-red mountain range, a boy, the mole on his jaw—is, in itself, replication—the image prolonged in the eye, making more of it, making it last. Staring into the mirror, I replicate myself into a future where I might not exist.
– Ocean Vuong
Things have gone rapidly downhill since the Age of Enlightenment, for, once this petty reasoning mind, which cannot endure any paradoxes, is awakened, no sermon on earth can keep it down. A new task then arises: to lift this still undeveloped mind step by step to a higher level and to increase the number of persons who have at least some inkling of the scope of paradoxical truth…. We simply do not understand any more what is meant by the paradoxes contained in dogma;…
– Carl Jung
…and there, in the background, the brite spring sky’s sediment had sunk to a dark band of blue. Ah, it mesmerized me…like the snow had done. All the woe of the words, “I am” seemed dissolved there, painlessly, peacefully. Hae-Joo announced, “The Ocean.”
– David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Whatever your eye falls on – for it will fall on what you love – will lead you to the questions of your life, the questions that are incumbent upon you to answer, because that is how the mind works in concert with the eye. The things of this world draw us where we need to go.
– Mary Rose O’Reilley
Deep peace of the Son of Peace to you, who, swift as the wave and pervasive as the air, quiet as the earth and shining like a star, breathes into us His Peace and His Spirit. Deep peace of the Son of Peace to you.
– Gaelic blessing
Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.
– T.S. Eliot
Sometimes a mortal feels in himself Nature–not his Father but his Mother stirs within him, and he becomes immortal with her immortality. From time to time she claims kinship with us, and some globule from her veins steals up into our own.
– Henry David Thoreau
Along a parabola life like a rocket flies, Mainly in darkness, now and then on a rainbow…
– Andrei Voznesensky
the
same thing may be said for all of us—that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand.
– Marianne Moore
When a novel is divided into named parts, I almost always miss the first part’s name, because I just flip to the first page of text and start there. It’s not until I hit Part Two that I even realize there was a Part One. Always makes me stop and reconsider what I’ve just read.
– Matt Bell
Love letters, we should be able to draw them, paint them, shout them
– Colette
imagination, then, as manifested in art, is a perceptive act; the perception of analogies and correspondences, whereby things which in ordinary consciousness led a separate existence are fused into unity ..
– William Blake
In the center of an empire, you can think of your experience as universal.
– Margaret Atwood
every day I grow more convinced that ‘centre-left’ parties are an elaborate psyop whose main purpose is to trick people into believing that they live in democratic societies.
– Ryan Ruby
Sometimes I see something so moving I know I’m not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave.
– Don DeLillo
We must be tender
with all budding things.
– W.B. Yeats
Stop trying. Stop forcing
reality. Learn the mystery
of surrender and trust,
and then it will be done
unto you, through you,
with you, in you and very
ofter, in spite of you.
– Richard Rohr
Perhaps noticing how often others misread us may remind us how wrong we usually are in our readings of others. The beauty of getting to know others is, surely, getting to see how little we’ll ever know of them–and how much we can count on anyone we care about to surprise us.
– Pico Iyer
Most of wars or military coups or invasions are done in the name of democracy against democracy.
– Eduardo Galeano
A book can teach you, a conversation can assure you, a poem can seduce you, a genius can inspire you but only you can save yourself.
– Anthony Anaxagorou
OF MERE BEING
The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor.
A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.
You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.
The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.
– Wallace Stevens
when we are old & our hearts have beat within us, let
us go back, & when we have buried our loves, & shed
our bodies piece by piece, & when we have danced
& broken our shoes, & danced, let us go back,
when we have gone mad, & when we have shut
the doors, dismantled our eyes & rifles, let us go back,
when we have drunk the wine & licked our lips
& put our tongues to the inside of the green glass bottle
& laid down our bodies old as trees, streets, let us go back,
when we have told our stories & forgotten our stories,
& set the tables & made the beds, let us go back,
& received other bodies into our bodies, let us go,
when we have entered, & opened,
& opened our mouths, let us go back,
[…] when the poem has been sung,
when the strings & tambourines,
when all the birds have gathered at the window, let us go,
let us go back there, let us go back
– Aracelis Girmay
What is precious
inside us does not
care to be known
by the mind
in ways that diminish
its presence.
– David Whyte
There’s no separation between the experience of the central nervous system and the function of memory in the body. The experience of the past has been fixed and retained by the neurons firing at that precise moment. Every muscle, nerve, and tissue participating in that experience has been affected and will ‘remember’ in its own fashion.
– Stokes and Whiteside
No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made.
– Flannery O’Connor
You can be a shoemaker or a poet, but when you really think about it, it becomes no longer a task or a job but a vocation that is invested with a spiritual intention.
– Ocean Vuong
I’ve begun to grow fatigued. I’ve learned that writing poems is possible and possibility diminishes exploration.
– Jan-Henry Gray
A newborn baby has a powerful
effect on character. But so does a
toddler. A child. A preteen. A
teenager. A mother changes with
every stage. Some stages are
within a mother’s skill set. Some
stages are like being told to scale
a cliff using a rope attached to
nothing.
– Louise Erdrich
Everything we write is, in a sense, translated from another language, from the chatter we hear inside our head, translated from that interior babble … into (what we hope will be) the clearer, more articulate language on the page.
– Francine Prose
To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.
– Victor Hugo
my adult life lover states
on what will end:
Libraries
Birds
Retirement
– Eunsong Kim
Some days
the sky is too bright.
– Kelli Russell Agodon
The Mona Lisa will survive.
The question is:
Will we?
– @ClimateDefiance
I’m going back to Kansas City.
– Jericho Brown
Time, friends, is an unruly
boss. Rhubarb and garbage,
rhubarb and garbage. The Dark
Ages never really went away,
they just got sent to their room
to think about what they’d
done.
– Andrea Cohen
My holy of holies are the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and the most absolute freedom, freedom from despotism and lies.
– Anton Chekhov
I am the farthest star
I am the cold of dawn
I am the roaring of the rain
I am the glitter on the crust of the snow
I am the long track of the moon in a lake.
– N. Scott Momaday
LISTEN TO YOUR LIFE
If I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything
I was trying to say, it would be something like this: Listen to your life.
See it for the fathomless mystery that it is.
In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness:
Touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it,
because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.
– Frederick Buechner
Real faith means holding ourselves open to the unconditional mystery which we encounter in every sphere of our life which cannot be compressed in any formula.
– Martin Buber
Some religious authorities have tried to recognize the divinity of Christ while ignoring the divinity of humanity. They have tried to make Christ different from what may be called human; but by doing so they have covered the main truth that religion had to give to the world, which was that divinity resides in humanity, that divinity is the outcome of humanity, and that humanity is the flower in the heart of which divinity was born as a seed. It is the development of humanity that culminates in divinity; thus Christ is the example of the culmination of humanity. It would be hiding the greatest human virtue to hide this secret, which is the key to the mystery of the whole universe.
– Hazrat Inayat Khan
If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less, but to dream more, to dream all the time.
– Marcel Proust
I’m not interested to believe in something, but to understand the people who believe.
– László Krasznahorkai
Healing does not require that you master the unreasonable side of your reason. Nor does healing require inner perfection of any order. A common trait shared by people who have healed is that they cease being unreasonable in ways that no longer matter in the greater scheme of life. Against the scale of life or death, how important is winning an argument? How important is holding a grudge? How important is anything other than how well we love others, how deeply we regard the value of the gift of life, and what we do with our life that makes this world a better place?
– Caroline Myss
Work on reversing your caught-up, self-important attitude and remain relaxed in this process. Instead of always being caught in a prison of self-absorption, look out and express gentleness to all things. Then just relax.
– Pema Chödrön
My heart has joined the Thousand, for my friend stopped running today.
– Richard Adams
The children should learn to develop the sounds from the external objects and from the way their own feelings are related to them. Everything should be derived from the feeling for language. In the word “roll” the child should really feel: r,o,l,l. It is the same thing for every word.
– Rudolf Steiner
At first she thought the writing would be easy. She was extremely confident in her ability to dream, to imagine, and she supposed that expressing her dreams in words, in writing, would be entirely natural, like drawing breath. She had read widely from the time she was a child, and she knew how to recognize something that was well written. She admired certain lines and passages so much that she had taken complete possession of them and committed them to memory. She could recite “The Gettysburg Address” and “The Twenty-Third Psalm.” She could recite “Jabberwocky” and Emily Dickinson’s “Further in summer that the birds” and Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning.” She knew by heart the final paragraph of Joyce’s “The Dead,” and if challenged she could say in whole the parts of both Romeo and Juliet. And she knew many Kiowa stories and many long prayers in Navajo. These were not feats of memory in the ordinary sense; it was simply that she attended to these things so closely that they became a part of her most personal experience. She had assumed them, appropriated them to her being.
But to write! She discovered that was something else again.
– N. Scott Momaday
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
continue practicing until you see yourself in the cruelest person on Earth, in the child starving, in the political prisoner. Practice until you recognize yourself in everyone in the supermarket, on the street corner, in a concentration camp, on a leaf, in a dewdrop. Meditate until you see yourself in a speck of dust in a distant galaxy. See and listen with the whole of your being.
If you are fully present, the rain of Dharma will water the deepest seeds in your consciousness, and tomorrow, while you are washing the dishes or looking at the blue sky, that seed will spring forth, and love and understanding will appear as a beautiful flower.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
High high in the hills , high in a pine tree bed.
She’s tracing the wind with that old hand, counting the clouds with that old chant,
Three geese in a flock
one flew east
one flew west
one flew over the cuckoo’s nest
– Ken Kesey
May my heart hold the earth all the days of my life.
And when I am gone to the farther camps, may my name sound on the green hills,
and may the cedar smoke that I have breathed drift on the canyon walls and among the branches of living trees.
May birds of many colors encircle the soil where my steps have been placed,
and may the deer, the lion, and the bear of the mountains be touched by the blessings that have touched me.
May I chant the praises of the wild and may my spirit range on the wind forever.
– The Earth Keepers, N. Scott Momaday
Robots are not cute. If you see a robot, smash it. It’s us or them.
– D. A. Powell
I could tell of the splintered sun. I could
Articulate the night sky, had I words.
– N. Scott Momaday
The agonized ego is a ring of defense around nothing.
– Alan Watts
PROBABILITY
Most coincidents are not
miraculous, but way more
common than we think –
it’s the shiver
of noticing being
central in a sequence
of events
that makes so much
seem wild and rare –
because what if it wasn’t?
Astonishment’s nothing
without your consent.
– Lia Purpura
DAYS
Each one is a gift, no doubt,
mysteriously placed in your waking hand
or set upon your forehead
moments before you open your eyes.
Today begins cold and bright,
the ground heavy with snow
and the thick masonry of ice,
the sun glinting off the turrets of clouds.
Through the calm eye of the window
everything is in its place
but so precariously
this day might be resting somehow
on the one before it,
all the days of the past stacked high
like the impossible tower of dishes
entertainers used to build on stage.
No wonder you find yourself
perched on the top of a tall ladder
hoping to add one more.
Just another Wednesday
you whisper,
then holding your breath,
place this cup on yesterday’s saucer
without the slightest clink.
– Billy Collins
What is homeland? To hold on to your memory – that is homeland.
– Mahmoud Darwish
To An Aged Bear
Hold hard this infirmity.
It defines you. You are old.
Now fix yourself in summer,
In thickets of ripe berries,
And venture toward the ridge
Where you were born. Await there
The setting sun. Be alive
To that old conflagration
One more time. Mortality
Is your shadow and your shade.
Translate yourself to spirit;
Be present on your journey.
Keep to the trees and waters.
Be the singing of the soil.
– N. Scott Momaday
There was a time when “man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent,” this New World, “commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” I would strive with all my strength to give that sense of wonder to those who will come after me.
– N. Scott Momaday
What are you thinking about?
I am thinking of an early summer. I am thinking of wet hills in the rain Pouring water.
– Jack Spicer
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
Don’t tell them too much about your soul.
They’re waiting for just that.
– Jack Kerouac
… to be under another
appearance … that,
I think, is poetry.
– Sean O’Riordan
it is not easy to depart
this cool green garden
for a dusty old road
– Basho
Optimists write badly. (Valéry) But pessimists do not write.
– Maurice Blanchot
One thing Jung is taught [in journey described in Red Book] in a hundred different ways, is the utter madness hiding at every turn behind reasonableness and reason. He is even shown how reason is a poison that has slowly infected and destroyed us all.
– Peter Kingsley
If you enlarge a detail in a picture, in a painting, you produce another painting,
– Roland Barthes
I always know what is coming next—the question. It is always the same question: “Have you really read all of these books?” My answer is always the same: “No. A library is not a sign of accomplishment. It is a sign of desire.” My guest is relieved.
– Jeffrey Kripal
A good memoir is about how one understands life, not the life itself.
– Ira Sukrungruang
You will burn and you will burn out;
you will be healed and come back again.
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The best readers actually quit a lot of books. Life is too short to read books you don’t enjoy reading.
– Ryan Holiday
God doesn’t damn us,
we god-damn ourselves,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
Suppose this poem were about you – would you
put in the things I’ve carefully left out:
descriptions of pain, and sex, and how shiftily
people behave toward each other?
– John Ashbery
Daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity.
– Gaston Bachelard
The universe is a system which, by means of living bodies, becomes aware of itself.
– Alan Watts
For you I undress down to the sheaths of my nerves.
I remove my jewelry and set it on the nightstand,
I unhook my ribs, spread my lungs flat on a chair.
I dissolve like a remedy in water, in wine.
I spill without staining, and leave without stirring the air.
I do it for love. For love, I disappear.
– Kim Addonizio
The Night Piece
by Thom Gunn
The fog drifts slowly down the hill
And as I mount gets thicker still,
Closes me in, makes me its own
Like bedclothes on the paving stone.
Here are the last few streets to climb,
Galleries, run through veins of time,
Almost familiar, where I creep
Toward sleep like fog, through fog like sleep.
What kind of God
has you build churches
instead of feeding the poor —
not my kind,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
Religions, Buddhism included, are almost entirely about symbolic meaning rather than facts.
– Rita M. Gross
I said that violence had no tongue. But the man punished for a reason he believes unfair cannot resign himself to silence–silence would imply acceptance. In their impotence many men make do with contempt mingled with hatred.
– Bataille
Give thanks for revelation.
Give thanks for confirmation.
Now you can move with clarity.
– Dr. Thema
If you don’t write the book you have to write, everything breaks.
– A.M. Homes
The most fatal thing about earlier affairs is that they often come up later.
– Johann Nestroy
shifting landscapes
my ancestors and I
behold the same sea
– James Welsh
let’s be each other’s oracles.
we can hold hands, craft a shrine in the gap
of our palms, in the ocean of our breaths
at the shore of our oil-shined flesh
– Destiny Hemphill
The world (mundus) is so named because it is always in motion (motus).
– Isidore of Seville
Now I understood that I was haunted by the problematic ratios of sex and art, of anger and sadness. I’ve never solved them.
– Lisa Robertson
… poets, with their choices, invent their audience. They may or may not ever call that audience into being.
– Robert Hass
Moses’s basket never
crashed on the rocks. Small horses walk
out of the flat landscape. Wind is blowing
from the Sierras. I go into people’s mouths head
first and kill them and give birth,
kill and give birth, because I write.
– Tomaz Salamun
It’s just a show, you know —
we’re putting on a show,
Taylor Swift told
the old monk.
– The Old Monk
my lifeworld
confined within the walls
of this rented room …
half-asleep, half-awake
I climb a ladder to the moon
– Chen-ou Liu
Tenured Professor = we invite you to a workshop, flights and hotel covered
PhD = we invite you to a lunch discussion. lunch not included
– Neil Renic
All obsessions are extreme metaphors waiting to be born.
– J. G. Ballard
Some thirty inches from my nose
The frontier of my Person goes,
And all the untilled air between
Is private pagus or demesne.
Stranger, unless with bedroom eyes
I beckon you to fraternize,
Beware of rudely crossing it:
I have no gun, but I can spit.
– W. H. Auden
In the end, you could read every book on Buddhism and every sutta and still know nothing, and you could do nothing but practice ardently and still know everything.
– Herman Schreuder
if only I could live the rest of my life in a new way! If I could only wake some still, bright morning and feel that life had begun again; the past forgotten, vanished like smoke. Oh, to begin life anew! Tell me, tell me how to begin again. What with?
– Anton Chekhov
The use of letters was invented for the sake of remembering things, which are bound by letters lest they slip away into oblivion.
– Isidore of Seville
Sometimes it isn’t the words,
it’s the beat that makes the poem,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
This Mighty Mudball of a world burdens us with a body, troubles us with life, eases us with old age, and with death gives us rest. We call our life a blessing, so our death must be a blessing too.
– Chuang Tzu, (tr. David Hinton)
As it turns out, if one person is praying for you, buckle up. Things can happen.
– Anne Lamott
Poetry is breath.
And always remember:
Everyone’s breaths are numbered.
– Santos Lopez
Craters of the Moon National Park
by Natasha Rao
Once again I found myself at the cusp
of everything I wanted. The two of us
pointing at lizards behind glass, Gila monster
flashing its blue belly. All it would take
was a few deliberate words. But each time
you looked at me, I could only blink
into my wrists. When you spoke of love
at the shuffleboard table, I should have
put down my drink and said it. All night
we slid disks through sand. Waking
the next morning, we jumped at the sound
of the unfamiliar insect, like a firecracker,
you said, or those small white pellets
children fling on asphalt. The crater we hiked
is small compared to the one you left.
As a girl, I coveted those powder-filled
pouches of tissue paper. How for once
it was effortless to make something happen
in the dark, turning nothing into noise.
She’s proud
and she’s being brave,
the old monk realized.
It was a revelation.
– The Old Monk
Wherever You Are
by Jeffrey Harrison
When I kissed you in the hall
of the youth hostel we fell
into the linen closet laughing
twenty years ago and I still
remember though not very often
the taste of cheap wine in your mouth
like raspberries the freckle
between your breasts and the next day
when we went to Versailles I hardly
saw anything because I was looking
at you the whole time your face I can’t
quite remember then I kissed you
good-bye and you got on a train
and I never saw you again just
one day and one letter long gone
explaining never mind but sometimes
I wonder where you are probably
married with children like me happy
with a new last name a whole life
having nothing to do with that day
but everybody has something like it
a small thing they can’t help
going back to and it’s not even about
choices and where your life might
have gone but just that it’s there
far enough away so it can be seen
as just something that happened almost
to someone else an episode from
a movie we walk out of blinded
back into our lives
A bear, however hard he tries,
Grows tubby without exercise.
Our Teddy Bear is short and fat,
Which is not to be wondered at.
But do you think it worries him
To know that he is far from slim?
No, just the other way about –
He’s proud of being short and stout.
– A. A. Milne
If it’s obvious
I tell them they should
figure it out,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
One must have courage to see what one does see and not to deny it for convenience.
– Javier Marías
Lift up your hitch-hiking heads
And no more fear the fever,
You fugitives, and sleepers in the fields,
Here is the hay-colored sun!
– Thomas Merton
If you are a scientist, certainly in industry or even in academia, there is no such thing like your work “speaking for itself.” Whether you like it or not, you have to effectively communicate your work, market and sell it, at a level different from the work itself.
– Ash Jogalekar
She preferred the page’s purity
to his restless hands. If he were a man made only
of words she’d give her whole self to him.
– Karina Borowicz, Reading Anna Karenina
The best writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone’s.
– Dorianne Laux
You say, dearest comrade, my love has grown
cold,
But you are mistaken, it burns as of old;
– Claude McKay
I give you a place void of brightness,
not the world I knew,
but a charcoaled likeness
– Ellen Renton
All desire—even the desire for wisdom—is the root cause of all our problems and suffering.
– Herman Schreuder
after Dotty Lasky
poets should get back to eating
crazy shit
poets should get back to cooking
crazy shit
poets should get back to growing
crazy shit
poets should lay off hating
crazy shit
dailies, 31.I.24
– Alec Finlay
within normal limits
the paper tiger
sleeps tonight
– @pauldavidmena
Song into holiness,
the sister has written her book—
nothing there of falsehood,
nothing invented by the poet.
– Jay Wright
The Master
No book is about
what it seems to be about,
argued the master.
Nor, for that matter,
am I, he continued. I
am about nothing
but the idea of
me. He took a cigarette
and twisted it round
one ear and lit it.
– George Szirtes
Novels help us resist the temptation to think of the past as deficient of everything that informs the present.
– Ian McEwan
When everything is social, suddenly nothing is.
– Jean Baudrillard
Sometimes language is
less than
And sometimes language is
more than
Occasionally language is
transcendent
– Rachel Newcombe
We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left.
– Mary Oliver
My response to any form of excitement about reading is to want to write.
– A. S. Byatt
clearing her voice
I still shrink before
my mother’s words
– @hegelincanada
the evidence for your non-enlightenment is always in the past.
– sam harris
Cultures cherish artists because they are people who can say, Look at that. And it’s not Versailles. It’s a brick wall with a ray of sunlight falling on it.
– Marilynne Robinson
I tell people, especially if I’m giving a reading, it’s okay to let the words wash over them, the way one experiences abstract art.
– Carl Phillips
When the winter chrysanthemums go,
There’s nothing to write about
But radishes.
– Matsuo Bashō | Shotei Takahashi
The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That – with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word ‘success’ – is our national disease.
– William James
The afternoons now have an elongated pallid look, as if it were neither winter nor spring.
– Virginia Woolf
The need for more accurate and complete histories is what drives me.
– Dr. Taylor Byas
After abuse, it’s common to build a life that is centered around surviving rather than living. Only until there is distance from that pain can a survivor know they want something different. This isn’t something to be ashamed of. It’s them taking their life back. Sending peace.
– Nate Postlethwait
New Words
by Christopher Rubio-Goldsmith
I just want to invent some new words
because the words I have now do not work.
They just crash around into walls and
sleeping dogs. When I say them in a dark room
it remains that way and outside the wind blows
them down the alley. I want new words that
bring the sky to the shore. Words that bring
one edge to the other edge and create
a surface everyone can walk over and find
that one big daring whatever. That una cosa que es lleno
and stays lleno. These new words will fix any
cracks and allow mysteries that help compose
songs and paintings that hang and remind us all
of all of us and our future as us. A new dance
at a shore or in a canyon under the lush.
I want these new words to string out
in the sky; rainbows of letters, comets
of meaning, stars that shape the way we
attend rituals. A new type of security
blanket. A new way to swim in a rushing
river or navigate a trail through a selva.
These words that will guide us all
when we discover our fate
piling up against our will.
a tiny flower
even in its smallness
the world
– @YourMoonliness
Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.
– Donna Tartt
If you don’t know what to do, there’s actually a chance of doing something new.
– Philip Glass
making a ladder
to climb to the purple moon…
never growing up
– @lafcadiopoetry
Alasdair MacIntyre cut out the metaphysics: all we need to know, he said, is that morality is, as a matter of historical fact, woven into the fabrics of mutual understanding that bind us to our communities and give structure to our lives.
– Jonathan Rée
And [words of gratitude] make people feel nice; words don’t pay bills. Words don’t pay rent. Words don’t pay car payments. Words don’t pay groceries.
– Lance Ingwersen
I have never understood the obsession in philosophy with death. My obsession is with new beginnings. . . . I want to do more things.
– Bernstein
Nourish beginnings,
let us nourish beginnings.
– Muriel Rukeyser
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
– Philip Larkin
I think of two faces Janus. Two faces that look at the past and the future at once. The ancient god of the threshold, of beginnings and endings.
– Jhumpa Lahiri
I like to think of your silence
as the love letters you will not write me.
– Clifton Gachagua
death cannot harm me
more than you have harmed me,
my beloved life.
– Louise Glück
Taking care of oneself is essential for writers to maintain both physical and mental well-being. Prioritize self-care activities like exercise, meditation, spending time with loved ones, pursuing hobbies, and getting ample rest.
– Keidi Keating
Occasionally I have a full-on case of insomnia (all night or less than an hour). Am starting to realize this is sometime an “aura” before a bout of poeming. Maybe. (Trying to look on bright side.)
– Alicia E. Stallings
Yucking someone’s yum = maybe the worst saying of modern times
– Steven Hyden
Our metaphorical rivers are something we discover along the way … We don’t impose them on the work; most often they reveal themselves to us.
– Dinty W. Moore
I do not know what literature means to you outside of networking and grants. To me it means, first and foremost, an unwavering love for human beings and the sanctity of human life.
– Lana Bastašić
what will truly unite us all is when Gen Z discovers The Good Wife
– Sam Adams
how it shines
white on the ground
the fresh snow …
I will step
into this new year
– Kozue Uzawa
Nothing
in the world
is usual today.
This is
the first morning.
– Izumi Shikibu
Does knowing the intricacy of moral complications mean no heroism is possible?
– Joan Silber on Alice McDermott’s Absolution
The stars had only one task: they taught me how to read.
They taught me I had a language in heaven
and another language on earth.
– Mahmoud Darwish
The easiest way to descend from a cherished moment is to describe it.
– David Chadwick
All art is a confession
– Gaston Lachaise
Only echoes answer me.
– Anton Chekhov, Swan Song
The soul is ‘harmonical’.
– Oliver Sacks
The love of things is so sad; things do not know that one exists.
– Jorge Luis Borges
Listen: I always
return to myself.
– Vesna Parun, tr. by Vasa D. Mihailovich
A Return to the Tree of Time
You have to want it —
I’m not going to
push it at you,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
What Is The Greatest Gift?
by Mary Oliver
What is the greatest gift?
Could it be the world itself — the oceans, the meadowlark,
the patience of the trees in the wind?
Could it be love, with its sweet clamour of passion?
Something else — something else entirely
holds me in thrall.
That you have a life that I wonder about
more than I wonder about my own.
That you have a life — courteous, intelligent —
that I wonder about more than I wonder about my own.
That you have a soul — your own, no one else’s —
that I wonder about more than I wonder about my own.
So that I find my soul clapping its hands for yours
more than my own.
I am constantly losing things which means I am constantly finding things.
– D. A. Powell
Does anybody know what a universe where entropy is always decreasing might look like?
– Clark Roberts
Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies do divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can.
– Jane Austen
Midlife: when the Universe grabs you by the shoulders and tells you, I’m not fucking around, use the gifts you were given.
– Brené Brown
landscape painting
my perspective on
life still twisted
– @coffeeandhaiku
Let’s stop glorifying burnt-out, and dysregulated nervous systems, and instead start promoting balance and rest without calling people lazy.
– Dr. Jen Wolkin
Until you’re ready to look foolish, you’ll never have the possibility of being great.
– M.C. Escher
You need a busload of faith to get by…
– Lou Reed
So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
– 2 Corinthians 4:18
I thought I understood your longing—it looked so much like mine.
– Rebecca Lindenberg
My love / I dreamed of you as someone dreams / of the rose and the wind, / you the purest, alive, an alignment / of the stars, but I am in the night / and cannot shelter you.
– Alda Merini
The Hindus were deeper than the thinkers of Europe, because their interpretation of the world was internal and intuitive, not external and intellectual; the intellect divides everything, intuition unites everything; the Hindus saw that the “I” is a delusion; that the individual is merely phenomenal, and that the only reality is the Infinite One- “That art thou.
Whoever is able to say this to himself, with regard to every being with whom he comes into contact, is certain of all virtue and blessedness, and is on the direct road to salvation.
– Schopenhauer
One of the reasons why we make such a mess
with technology is that the shareholders in any
given corporation want to make a fast buck.
Now, there’s nothing wrong, you see, in
wanting to be rich. There’s nothing at all wrong
in being rich. In fact, I think the world without
rich people would be extraordinarily boring
The point is, you have to understand what
riches are. And they are not money. Riches are
land, clothes, food, housings, intelligence,
energy, skill, iron, forests, gardens. Those are
riches. But when you’re concentrating, you see,
only on making the buck, it doesn’t occur to
you that you’re not really getting rich, you’re
just impoverishing yourself.
– Alan Watts
And finally (hff), a secret
about this raft: that it is built for two. It carries me
as much as it carries you.
– Erica Reid
The writer should climb down from the “ivory tower” and join the “forum.” The point of view of intellectuals should be easily grasped by anyone who is interested in their work …
– Max Blecher
Didn’t I have too many fears to reasonably / survive in this world.
– T. De Los Reyes
A wonderful thing about true laughter is that it just destroys any kind of system of dividing people.
– John Cleese
Each citizen was given a small apology to take home.
– Mike Topp
the mars lander
calls home
an ancient river
– @coffeeandhaiku
Obscenity is a moral concept in the verbal arsenal of the establishment, which abuses the term by applying it, not to expressions of its own morality but to those of another.
– Herbert Marcuse
WHEN YOU ARE OLD
by William Butler Yeats
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
INSIGHT
Above all, be at ease, be as natural and spacious as possible. Slip quietly out of the noose of your habitual anxious self, release all grasping, and relax into your true nature. Think of your ordinary emotional, thought-ridden self as a block of ice or a slab of butter left out in the sun.
If you are feeling hard and cold, let this aggression melt away in the sunlight of your meditation. Let peace work on you and enable you to gather your scattered mind into the mindfulness of calm abiding, and awaken in you the awareness and insight of clear seeing. And you will find all your negativity disarmed, your aggression dissolved, and your confusion evaporating slowly like mist into the vast and stainless sky of your absolute nature.
– Sogyal Rinpoche
Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, So what. That’s one of my favorite things to say. So what.
– Andy Warhol
The dream of my life
Is to lie down by a slow river
And stare at the light in the trees
To learn something by being nothing
A little while but the rich
Lens of attention.
– Mary Oliver
Meditation is done by our mind. But in zazen, we don’t do anything with our mind. We don’t count breath. We don’t watch breath. We don’t chant mantra. We don’t contemplate anything. We don’t try to concentrate our mind on any particular object. We have no techniques. We really just sit with both body and mind. We sit in an upright posture, breathe through the nose quietly, deeply, and smoothly from our abdomen. We keep our eyes open. Even when we sit in this posture, our mind is functioning. Our heart is beating; our stomach is digesting food. Each and every organ in our body continues to function. There is no reason that our brain stops working in our zazen. The function of our brain is to secrete thoughts. Thoughts well up in our mind moment by moment. But we refrain from doing anything with our thoughts. We just let everything come up freely and go away freely. We don’t grasp anything. We don’t try to control anything. We just sit.
This is such a simple practice. To be simple does not mean to be easy. It is very difficult and it is very deep practice. In zazen, we accomplish nothing. As Sawaki Roshi said, zazen is good for nothing. But zazen is itself Buddha Dharma. Refraining from doing anything, the self is illuminated and verified by all things. Just sitting is not our personal practice. But we let go of our karmic self that always wants to be satisfied.
– Shohaku Okumura
You see, I am alive, I am alive
I stand in good relation to the earth
I stand in good relation to the gods
I stand in good relation to all that is beautiful
I stand in good relation to the daughter of Tsen-tainte
You see, I am alive, I am alive
– N. Scott Momaday
Here is the wind bending the reeds westward,
The patchwork of morning on gray moraine:
Had I words I could tell of origin,
Of God’s hands bloody with birth at first light,
Of my thin squeals in the heat of his breath,
Of the taste of being, the bitterness,
And scents of camas root and chokecherries.
And, God, if my mute heart expresses me,
I am the rolling thunder and the bursts
Of torrents upon rock, the whispering
Of old leaves, the silence of deep canyons.
I am the rattle of mortality.
I could tell of the splintered sun. I could
Articulate the night sky, had I words.
– N. Scott Momaday
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
A bit beyond perception’s reach
I sometimes believe I see
That life is two locked boxes
Each containing the other’s key.
– Piet Hein
Spanish is a language that tends toward exuberance, proliferation, profusion.
– Mario Vargas Llosa
My films are not a personal expression but a prayer. when I make a film, it’s like a holy day. As if I were lighting a candle in front of an icon, or placing a bouquet of flowers before it.
– Andrei Tarkovsky
The Weary Blues
by Langston Hughes
Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
He did a lazy sway . . .
He did a lazy sway . . .
To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody.
O Blues!
Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
Sweet Blues!
Coming from a black man’s soul.
O Blues!
In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone
I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan—
“Ain’t got nobody in all this world,
Ain’t got nobody but ma self.
I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’
And put ma troubles on the shelf.”
Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
He played a few chords then he sang some more—
“I got the Weary Blues
And I can’t be satisfied.
Got the Weary Blues
And can’t be satisfied—
I ain’t happy no mo’
And I wish that I had died.”
And far into the night he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped playing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.
Just one of the reasons I love teaching. My students are soul-savers. Some people are inclined to see decline in every new generation, but I see newness and humor and creativity and hope.
– Joseph Fasano
Gather out of star-dust
Earth-dust,
Cloud-dust,
And splinters of hail,
One handful of dream-dust
Not for sale.
– Langston Hughes
Now they were as strangers; worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted.
– Jane Austen
I go out to take a walk, I see something, I take a picture.
– Saul Leiter
I didn’t have much experience with anything, but I had my thoughts. I believed stories should have a purity and not be about what was going on—and there was a lot going on, of course, in my life.
– Joy Williams
The creative self looks out for us—if we look out for it. If we do our work, invest our time in ourselves and our art and our imagination, keep our mind clear for stretches of time just to rest it, balance ourselves between blankness and stimulation, get enough sleep, read, write, think. If we honor that thing that provides us with so much, it just might help us out one day. After the rain stops, it shows up. Quietly slips a solution to a plot problem into your head, for example, and cracks open the narrative of your book. Makes us feel good and sunny and proud and able to communicate with the world.
– Jami Attenberg
Each novel must invent its own form. No recipe can replace this continual reflection. The book makes its own rules for itself, & for itself alone. The stammering newborn work will always be regarded as a monster, even by those who find experiment fascinating.
– Alain Robbe-Grillet
Writing is fifty years behind painting.
– Brion Gysin
Well, I have a weakness for the manifesto, as we have said, and that’s partly because I have a weakness for strongly worded and irresponsible sentences. Which is to say, on the level of style, I like it.
– Andrea Long Chu
Many times I heard him (Gurdjieff) use the phrase: become an adult for oneself, and its reference to our lineage; it made us feel the bond with our relatives, our responsibility towards our parents, our grandfathers, our whole bloodline – that has influenced us all…… through this work we help our parents and the people around us.
He took great importance to this and said we had to become the parents of our parents by becoming adults for ourselves.
– Solange Claustres, Talking about Gurdjieff
the blessing of the old woman, the tulip, and the dog
by alicia ostriker
To be blessed
said the old woman
is to live and work
so hard
God’s love
washes right through you
like milk through a cow
To be blessed
said the dark red tulip
is to knock their eyes out
with the slug of lust
implied by
your up-ended skirt
To be blessed
said the dog
is to have a pinch
of God
inside you
and all the other
dogs can smell it
Coyotes have the gift of seldom being seen; they keep to the edge of vision and beyond, loping in and out of cover on the plains and highlands. And at night, when the whole world belongs to them, they parley at the river with the dogs, their higher, sharper voices full of authority and rebuke. They are an old council of clowns, and they are listened to.
– N Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn
The gospel is not a doctrine of the tongue, but of life. It cannot be grasped by reason and memory only, but it is fully understood when it possesses the whole soul and penetrates to the inner recesses of the heart.
– John Calvin
Being born is like this:
The sunflowers slowly turn their corollas toward the sun.
The wheat is ripe.
The bread is eaten with sweetness.
My impulse connects to that of the roots of the trees.
– Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star
“You know,“ Daddy said, “it’s some that can live their whole life out without asking about it and it’s others has to know why it is, and this boy is one of the latters. He’s going to be into everything!”
– Flannery O’Connor
Human history can be viewed as a shared dawning awareness that we are members of a larger ecosystem. Initially our loyalties were to ourselves and our immediate family, next, to bands of wandering hunter-gatherers, then to tribes, small settlements, city-states, and nations.
Now we have broadened the circle of those we love. We have organized ourselves into super-powers… larger groups of people from divergent ethnic and cultural backgrounds working in some sense together… surely a humanizing and character building experience.
But if we are to survive much longer on this planet, our loyalties must be broadened further, to include the whole of humanity and the whole of planet Earth. Many of those who run our nations will find this idea unpleasant. They will fear the loss of power. We will hear much about treason and disloyalty. Rich nation-states will have to share their wealth with poor ones. But the choice, as H. G. Wells once said, is clearly… the universe or nothing.
– Carl Sagan
Such a book was a city held in the hand, a portable labyrinth. Every plot was also a geography…. The words were a diagram. To read them was to advance into different spaces, sensing a continuity of passageways from one book to another.
– Geoffrey O’Brien
Our life is like a jaunt in the mountains with unexpected views, turns in the way, resting-places, and a goal we do not know.
– La Rochefoucauld
No poet has done more for American culture, world art and daily living than Langston Hughes
– D.A. Powell
Where there is a desert heart,
There is a vivid oasis.
– Ujjal Halder
a wisp of snow
curls in from the door —
the bookstore cat
settles at last
in the poetry section
– Michael Dylan Welch
Art is the pleasure of a spirit that enters nature and discovers that it too has a soul.
– Auguste Rodin
Garden, I choose you,
you are the time
I want to lose.
– @FadyJoudah
in search of peace
an introvert retreats
into his shell
– Paul Callus
When you walk, you walk to some things and you walk away from some things.
– @coffeeandhaiku
Putting myself back together with fewer pieces.
– @thismomentonly
a lover of the country winds, you were. the silver-skimming rain you took. loved the floodings of the brook, dew, frost, mountains, fire and seas. tumultuary silences. winds that in darkness fifed a tune; and racy flavour of the wood. around you still the curlew sings.
– stevenson
Parenthetically. In the desert, where he is right now, it’s very cold at night.
– Donald Barthelme, The Temptation of St. Anthony
I never let myself
be excluded
from myself.
– Alda Merini
In my experience poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response. Like lightning. Like falling in love.
– J. M. Coetzee
This scattered mind
is somewhere in-between
griefs
reality
and
make believe.
– Elizabeth Tap
We are surrounded by poetry on all sides…
– Vincent Willem van Gogh
The root of our modern problem with time is neither technological, sociological, economic nor psychological. It is metaphysical. It is a question of the meaning of human life itself.
– Jacob Needleman
Instead of the music of former days, strong, inspired and dear to the gods, [the moderns] introduce into the theaters *an effeminate twittering*.
– De Musica, maybe Plutarch
DEATH IS SMALLER THAN I THOUGHT
My Mother and Father died some years ago
I loved them very much.
When they died my love for them
Did not vanish or fade away.
It stayed just about the same,
Only a sadder colour.
And I can feel their love for me,
Same as it ever was.
Nowadays, in good times or bad,
I sometimes ask my Mother and Father
To walk beside me or to sit with me
So we can talk together
Or be silent .
They always come to me.
I talk to them and listen to them
And think I hear them talk to me.
It’s very simple –
Nothing to do with spiritualism
Or religion or mumbo jumbo.
It is imaginary. It is real. It is love.
– Adrian Mitchell
There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It maybe conceded to the mathematician that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one.
– G.K. Chesterton
Who can free himself from achievement
And from fame, descend and be lost
Amid the masses of men?
He will flow like Tao, unseen.
He will go about like Life itself
With no name and no home.
Simple is he, without distinction.
To all appearances he is a fool.
His steps leave no trace. He has no power.
He achieves nothing, has no reputation.
Since he judges no one
No one judges him.
Such is the perfect man:
His boat is empty.
The way you can go
isn’t the real way.
The name you can say
isn’t the real name.
Heaven and earth
begin in the unnamed:
name’s the mother
of the ten thousand things.
So the unwanting soul
sees what’s hidden,
and the ever-wanting soul
sees only what it wants.
Two things, one origin,
but different in name,
whose identity is mystery.
Mystery of all mysteries!
The door to the hidden.
– Chuang Tzu, (trans. Thomas Merton)
All has been consecrated.
The creatures in the forest know this,
the earth does, the seas do, the clouds know
as does the heart full of love.
Strange a priest would rob us of this
knowledge
and then empower himself
with the ability
to make holy what
already was.
– Saint Catherine of Siena, (trans. Daniel Ladinsky)
Behold
People wake up in the middle of the night.
No, not in the middle. Deep in their brains.
They know the present, the little braveries.
We lock our doors from the inside.
We want to be delivered.
We want the patience of mirrors.
We want not to be torn in two by a brown river.
We want the courage to dive
Off the high board into human eyes.
Behold the door.
The lock’s alive.
– Stan Rice
The tipoff for me is somatic. Whenever a project comes to me, one that is right, that is genuine, I feel a kind of “shiver” in my body, and that tells me that it corresponds to something very deep in me, and that I need to pursue it. That has been my guide with literally every book I wrote. Trusting this kind of visceral reaction means that you are willing to let life “come and get you.” It means who you are is defined from the inside, not the outside. In terms of what’s really important, we don’t have much choice, and that’s as it should be. The decision is made by a larger energy or unconscious process, and when it’s right, you know it… Goethe wrote: “Man errs as long as he strives.” Sit still, meditate, just let the answer arise from the body. (It may take a while.)
– Morris Berman
A question I’m often asked is, “How have you balanced these various pursuits?” And the word “balance” always implies that I have balanced them, and of course I haven’t. It’s been difficult and sometimes a struggle to keep it all going… to find time for it all. I’ve known writers — I think it’s true also of other artists — who thought that you had to put your art before everything. But if you have a marriage and a family and a farm, you’re just going to find that you can’t always put your art first, and moreover that you shouldn’t. There are a number of things more important than your art. It’s wrong to favor it over your family, or over your place, or over your animals.
– Wendell Berry
We must get rid of the pestilent, deadly notion that the amount of things we get through is the standard. The steadiness with which we radiate God is the standard.
– Evelyn Underhill
what’s more important, thunder or lightning?
– Jorge Santiago Perednik, The Shock of the Lenders
Cities in the sky have also been seen in Alaska and other regions of polar ice. In the late 1880s an American prospector named Willoughby photographed a mysterious floating city that, according to Native American legends, appeared each summer near Mount Fairweather on the border between Alaska and Canada’s Yukon Territory. The photograph clearly shows the city’s home fronts and church steeples. Willoughby’s vision was confirmed by other observers. In 1889 the New York Times quotes L.B. French as having seen houses, streets and large buildings, either mosques or cathedrals, near Mount Fairweather. That same weather The Times reported that the city in Willoughby’s photograph had been identified as Bristol in England, more than 4,000km away!
– The Atlas of Lost Cities: Legendary Cities Rediscovered
Creativity and ego cannot go together. If you free yourself from the comparing and jealous mind, your creativity opens up endlessly. Just as water springs from a fountain, creativity springs from every moment. You must not be your own obstacle. You must not be owned by the environment you are in. You must own the environment, the phenomenal world around you. You must be able to freely move in and out of your mind. This is being free. There is no way you can’t open up your creativity. There is no ego to speak of. That is my belief.
– Zen Buddhist nun, Jeong Kwan
THE REMAINS
I empty myself of the names of others. I empty my pockets.
I empty my shoes and leave them beside the road.
At night I turn back the clocks;
I open the family album and look at myself as a boy.
What good does it do? The hours have done their job.
I say my own name. I say goodbye.
The words follow each other downwind.
I love my wife but send her away.
My parents rise out of their thrones
into the milky rooms of clouds. How can I sing?
Time tells me what I am. I change and I am the same.
I empty myself of my life and my life remains.
– Mark Strand
You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw – but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realize that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of – something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap clap of water against the boat’s side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it – tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest – if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say “Here at last is the thing I was made for.” We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.
– C.S. Lewis
Despite everything, we are good people, who can hardly live in this world that continues almost entirely at our expense. The best thing is to keep on moving arms and legs, and watch the waves, almost as though moving forward. In this way, despair turns quickly over to happiness, and back to despair again. And, if you reach the beach, walk back across it like everything is fine, toward your family who would not like to see the abyss you have just swum over.
– Joanna Walsh
A Fresher Wind
Eberhard Arnold
The first believers experienced the kingdom of God as the revolution of all things and the revaluation of all values. They experienced the complete transformation of all conditions and all possibilities, the re-ordering of all relationships in business, state, society, and everywhere. An utterly new scale of values took effect, quite different from what had existed so far. Christ replaced all other sovereignty; he swept away the power of lying, of impurity, and of murder and instead of them, the peace of God took hold and held sway.
This was the expectation and experience of the original church-community, and it stands in sharp contrast to our Christianity today. Anyone can sense that at that time a fresher wind blew and purer water flowed, a stronger power and a more fiery warmth ruled.
Isn’t this what people search for today? “The revolution of all things and the revaluation of all values.” It is the ultimate act of creation, this. Isn’t this the kingdom that we hope will come? I have been so fascinated by politics and political blogs ; which is out of character for me , in terms of how I have conducted my life to date. It seems to me that underlying all of the dialogue, and lack of it, there is this anguish regarding our communal position in the world. How can we talk and be together across this great gulf of misunderstanding? How can we evidence compassion and real work in our lives? What matters? When one side feels that the other side has wrong priorities , or doesn’t “get it”, there is rage, betrayal, impatience — and the layers deepen and deepen. This transformation is what we are all here for. The good news of the new testament leaves hints that this is what the early church and the disciples experienced. That evidence is enough to keep thousands of aspirants hopeful for generations. This reading indicates to me to keep on the lookout from unlikely places and sources. Nothing is as it seems. Isn’t it outrageous to read that “the kingdom of God” is at hand, somehow, in the midst of the opposite?
Only after weeks had passed did I begin to think that I had, rather absent-mindedly, passed through what mystics call “the dark night of the soul,” or “crossing the abyss.” Whatever one calls it, I reached a depth of despair and deliberately decided to love the world instead of pitying myself; and, afterwards, I was no longer afraid of anything.
– Robert Anton Wilson
She was not listening at the level of language but beneath it, in the deep recesses of the imagination.
– N. Scott Momaday
You go though a period of immense pain when reality meets the dream.
– Charlotte Rampling
Hell is the concretization of your life experiences, a place where you’re stuck, the wasteland. In hell, you are so bound to yourself that grace cannot enter.
– Joseph Campbell
You must learn to be comfortable with psychological disturbance. If your mind becomes hyperactive, just watch it. If your heart starts to heat up, let it go through what it must. Try to find the part of you that is capable of noticing. That part is your way out.
– Michael Singer
We do crazy things when
we’re wounded, everyone’s
a bit insane.
– Tom Waits
The unwavering truth of the psyche is: change or wither into resentment; grow or die within.
– James Hollis
Archetypes are like riverbeds which dry up when the water deserts them, but which it can find again at any time.
– C.G. Jung
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
Remember, remember,
this is now,
and now, and now.
Live it, cling to it.
– Sylvia Plath
What memory loves is eternal. I love you with memory, imperishable.
– Adélia Prado
Divided in fourteen segments roughly the length of lines, the poem drips sonnet.
– Adrienne Raphel
Can we just stay here in the space where our loud laughing
won’t disturb the mausoleum of St. Peter
– Afaa Michael Weaver
exploring a cave
my shadow is curious
about its past
– James Welsh
My…friends & I have run out of good ideas on how to fix the unfixable, when we finally stop trying to heal our own sick, stressed minds with our sick, stressed minds, when we are truly at the end of our rope and just done, we say the same prayer. We say, ‘Help.’
– Anne Lamott
If environmental protest movements behaved like the farming unions, governments across Europe would have banned them by now as “terrorist organisations” or “organised crime”. The double standards in the application of the law are simply gobsmacking.
– George Monbiot
fishing village
a rumor of blues running
through the café
– Jim Kacian
But maybe he wasn’t looking back at all. Maybe time bent and undulated around him, like the flight of a woodpecker, and he gazed momentarily into his future—into an extension of the natural world he knew so well.
– Deb Werrlein
The conscious mind is a tribe, the unconscious is the jungle
The tribe lives in, tends to, learns the patterns of, and re-shapes the jungle
The jungle supports, challenges, and gives rise to the tribe
The jungle can survive without the tribe, but not vice versa
The tribe needs a very particular attitude and skill set to survive and thrive in the jungle — including a recognition that they’re not the only ones in there
The tribe isn’t homogeneous, the members have a variety of different ideas on their relationship to the jungle, and how they ought to treat it
Ultimately, there is only the jungle — the tribe is just one of the expressions of the jungle, albeit an expression with a unique ability to understand, navigate, and shape the jungle.
The tribe can never master the jungle, but they can be responsible stewards of it.
Things quickly go awry when the tribe starts to think they are more important than the jungle, and that they can suppress, destroy, manipulate, and extract from the jungle without consequence.
– River Kenna
indicted
more times than Al Capone
this big-mouthed man
on the trail and on trial
thronged by his wannabes
– Chen-ou Liu
Jesus came to subvert all stories of violence and harm, not to repeat them,” explains Gareth Higgins, “Instead of advocating escapist stories [Jesus] sent his followers into the world to be agents of positive change.
– Richard Rohr
I have put in so many riddles and puzzles that the novel will keep professors busy for centuries, arguing about what I meant. That’s the only way to ensure immortality.
– James Joyce
I know writers who make things easy for their readers and they’re all cowards.
– @robop_style
The least of us is improved by the things done by the best of us, because if we are not able to land at least we are able to follow.
– Walter Cronkite
In the dead of night, a Sufi began to weep.
He said, “This world is like a closed coffin, in which
We are shut and in which, through our ignorance,
We spend our lives in folly and desolation.
When Death comes to open the lid of the coffin,
Each one who has wings will fly off to Eternity,
But those without will remain locked in the coffin.
So, my friends, before the lid of this coffin is taken off,
Do all you can to become a bird of the Way to God;
Do all you can to develop your wings and your feathers.
– Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār
What is the meaning of life? That was all – a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come.
Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.
– Virginia Woolf
Yogi Berra Explains Jazz:
Interviewer: Can you explain jazz?
Yogi: I can’t, but I will. 90% of all jazz is half improvisation. The other half is the part people play while others are playing something they never played with anyone who played that part. So if you play the wrong part, its right. If you play the right part, it might be right if you play it wrong enough. But if you play it too right, it’s wrong.
Interviewer: I don’t understand.
Yogi: Anyone who understands jazz knows that you can’t understand it. It’s too complicated. That’s what’s so simple about it.
Interviewer: Do you understand it?
Yogi: No. That’s why I can explain it. If I understood it, I wouldn’t know anything about it.
Interviewer: Are there any great jazz players alive today?
Yogi: No. All the great jazz players alive today are dead. Except for the ones that are still alive. But so many of them are dead, that the ones that are still alive are dying to be like the ones that are dead. Some would kill for it.
Interviewer: What is syncopation?
Yogi: That’s when the note that you should hear now happens either before or after you hear it. In jazz, you don’t hear notes when they happen because that would be some other type of music. Other types of music can be jazz, but only if they’re the same as something different from those other kinds.
Interviewer: Now I really don’t understand.
Yogi: I haven’t taught you enough for you to not understand jazz that well.
The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand. It makes no difference whether the actors be many or one, a tyrant or a mob. A mob is a society of bodies voluntarily bereaving themselves of reason, and traversing its work. The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast. Its fit hour of activity is night. Its actions are insane like its whole constitution. It persecutes a principle; it would whip a right; it would tar and feather justice, by inflicting fire and outrage upon the houses and persons of those who have these.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
At Once I Was Irish, At Least
by Thomas Whitehead
There was no one with me, so
I took my hot baked potato
and while I ate the other
portions of my uncomplicated dinner,
held the potato inside my jacket
and right over my heart,
and you should know, before
we part, how I was better for it.
To Goethe: A Complaint
by W. H. Auden
How wonderfully your songs begin
With praise of Nature and her beauty,
But then, as if it were a duty,
You drag some god-damned sweetheart in.
Did you imagine she’d be flattered?
They never sound as if they mattered.
Mist In The Morning
Mist In The Morning, Nothing Around Me
But Sand And Roses
Was I lost? No question.
did I know where I was? Not at all.
Had I ever been happier in my Life? Never
– Mary Oliver
You
by Jorge Luis Borges
Translated from the Spanish by Alastair Reid
In all the world, one man has been born, one man has died.
To insist otherwise is nothing more than statistics, an impossible
extension.
No less impossible than bracketing the smell of rain with your
dream of two nights ago.
The man is Ulysses, Abel, Cain, the first to make constellations
of the stars, to build the first pyramid, the man who contrived
the hexagrams of the Book of Changes, the smith
who engraved runes on the sword of Hengist, Einar Tamberskelver
the archer, Luis de León, the bookseller who
fathered Samuel Johnson, Voltaire’s gardener, Darwin
aboard the Beagle, a Jew in the death chamber, and, in
time, you and I.
One man alone has died at Troy, at Metaurus, at Hastings, at
Austerlitz, at Trafalgar, at Gettysburg.
One man alone has died in hospitals, in boats, in painful solitude,
in the rooms of habit and of love.
One man alone has looked on the enormity of dawn.
One man alone has felt on his tongue the fresh quenching of
water, the flavor of fruit and of flesh.
I speak of the unique, the single man, he who is always alone.
Whereas the first half of life is, in the nature of things, governed and determined by expansion and adaptation to outer reality, the second is governed by restriction or reduction to the essential, by adaptation to the inner reality.
– Jolande Jacobi
wild iris—
the blazed trail stops
short of the meadow
– Carolyn Hall
I wrote this poem as a reflection on what it feels like to be cajoled, coerced, seduced, and even bullied into adopting hypermasculine norms as a right of passage into Black manhood.
– Brad Walrond
Calculus I, II, III
man hooded masquerade
a museum erected out of paper-mâché stone,
blue cotton candied walls hung thick and long
with rooms full of master’s Egos
copied Cats
cut and paste
plantation’s hegemony
onto trace paper canvas
young guns born too brown for they britches
pen-in to kindergarten’s cage
where boys are convinced, this calculus
—how one body
relates to another—
that disturbs all the peace
is the same as learning
their one two threes
evidence contrary to belief
our boys learn fast
science must be, I guess?
a hyper masculine story
washed brains don’t rinse so simple
in and out of class
the curriculum writes itself
soft boys die hard
hot head & class clown grow contagious;
broad shoulders & differential equations
caliber inches into glocks
every where we look
Our highest dimensions
Learn their limits
Without degrees
– Brad Walrond
Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.
– James Joyce
Ye orators of point and pith,
Who force the world to heed you,
What skeletons you’ll journey with
Ere it is forced to feed you.
– Joseph Seamon Cotter Sr.
The reasons for peace, the definitions of peace, the very idea of peace have to be invented, and invented again.
– Maxine Hong Kingston
How magnificent Irish mountains could be, if once again cloaked in rich living ecosystems like rainforest, instead of grazed to the bone by sheep or deer.
– Eoghan Daltun
The real meaning of wealth is knowing how to create a goldlike situation in your life.
– Chögyam Trungpa
At a moment when everything in America seemed to be accelerating, Thoreau … came up with a counterproposal: slow down.
– Costica Bradatan
In an age of calendars, alarm clocks, and schedules that standardize the way we experience time…the variance in the rhythms of unmedicated periods remains something of a stubborn throwback.
– Laura Kolbe
What’s my guilty pleasure? The thing is, I don’t feel guilty about my pleasures.
– Tom Hiddleston
Don’t look away. Look straight at everything. Look it all in the eye, good and bad.
– Henry Miller
I am living in fragments in spite of a greater wholeness, greater stability, greater confidence, lessened anxiety, lessened fears.
– Anaïs Nin
I look forward to the days that
I’m going to look back on.
– Jacob Holguin
I was still in that stage of leaping appetite, of voracity close to anguish.
But one complication had been added since childhood—it seemed that I had to be a writer as well as a reader.
– Alice Munro
Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create fake gods, he then feverishly adopts them: his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike. His power to adore is responsible for all his crimes: a man who loves a god unduly forces other men to love his god, eager to exterminate them if they refuse.
– Emil Cioran
“The problem for a Transcendentalist,” as Anthony Lane memorably wrote of the often brilliant Terrence Malick, “is that you run out of things to transcend.”
– Pico Iyer
Women seem to understand best that abstraction is so often (as maybe here) a kind of folly posing as wisdom.
– Pico Iyer
Nothing ever sums itself up in the way that we like to dream about. The off-center, in-between state is an ideal situation, a situation in which we don’t get caught and we can open our hearts and minds beyond limit.
– Pema Chödrön
red pagoda
in swirling snow
the muffled gong
– Denis M. Garrison
poetry put / a light / under / my rib
– CAConrad, There Is No Prison Named Love
Trying to convince my shadow that I am someone worth following.
– Rudy Francisco
It’s the last overcast dawn for days, they say, so I try to find something to savor in the cold gloom, among the rumbles of distant machines and the one-note whistles of dove wings.
– Dave Bonta
childhood scrapbook
the life expectancy
of Scotch tape
– Carolyn Hall
To me, the Bible had gone dead because it was cut and dried: its noise was a fixed noise, its meaning a fixed meaning. And not only was it dead, it was antipathetic.
Arriving at manhood, one felt that the Bible had been bullied into one, and by second-rate minds at that. Its whole meaning was second-rate, because it had been expounded by these second-rate orthodox people, parsons and teachers, who would not and perhaps could not extract anything from the book but a sort of glorified grocery-shop morality and book-keeping.
– DH Lawrence
fish jumping
all night
shooting stars
– Helga Harle
I think there is a magic to writing, but I also think there is a toolkit.
– Allison K Williams
Things are not as easily understood nor as expressible as people usually would like us to believe. Most happenings are beyond expression; they exist where a word has never intruded.
– Rilke
The Mote In God’s Eye
She digs herself a hole in the yard, under a blanket of night, under a sky littered with stars. She remembers her mother telling her once that the stars were motes in the eyes of God. She had imagined, as she prayed, her hands held in supplication, that those motes, were angels, or saints, or little children who had died and gone straight to heaven, asking them to bless her and her family, to give her gold stars on her spelling tests, to stop the neighbor boy from teasing her about her wig, to one day be rich and famous. She knows those were selfish prayers, but she doesn’t know what else to pray for. She guesses as her hands begin to bleed, the blood dripping into the hole, smearing her skin as she continues to dig, she could have prayed for world peace. That wouldn’t have been selfish. Then again, maybe it would have been.
– Melissa Llanes Brownlee
There are prophets, there are guides, and there are argumentative people with theories, and one must be careful to discriminate between them.
– Peter Brook
By observing dreams, visions, and hallucinations, etc., modern man can now for the first time look in an unprejudiced way at the phenomena of the unconscious. What comes from the unconscious can be observed through individuals.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
The bright hero is a little too bright, a little too invulnerable, and a little too far away from ordinary human suffering and ordinary human longing to perform his appointed task of redemption. He can be injured only from behind, implying that the bright heroic stance can deflect anything in life but the shadow, the unconscious.
– Liz Greene
Clear-cut rules are easy to remember even when your emotional level is high—and that’s precisely when you need them most.
– Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Before houses
seaweed mastered the shore
volcanoes belched fire
no one stood shouting
from a cliff
Before I was born
a faint outline
some call fate existed
that carried me
like a tossing boat
Before I felt love
I wandered
from island to island
calling the wind
by your name
– Mark Gordon
At the end, let them say of me:
he lived in this world
and he never became bitter.
Until the end he tried to make it song.
– @stars_poem
Life
For him
Must be
The shivering of
A great drum
– Langston Hughes
How do you make people see that everyone’s story is now a part of everyone else’s story? It’s one thing to say it, but how can you make a reader feel that is their lived experience?
– Salman Rushdie
The comment section is a microcosm of the world. It can be a wasteland of worthless words or a refuge of thoughtful exchange. Choice is key.
– Frederick M. Ranallo-Higgins
I didn’t choose poetry, poetry chose me.
– Philip Larkin
I often consider myself as a figure in a foggy painting: faltering lines, insecure distances, and a merging of greys and blacks. An emotion or a mood—a mere wisp of color—is shaded off and made to spread until it becomes one with all that surrounds it.
– Virginia Woolf
The convent taught me only that if you spit on a pencil eraser it will erase ink.
– Dorothy Parker
One wants to keep one’s hand in every type of poem, serious and frivolous and proper and improper.
– T. S. Eliot
There is nothing concrete to grasp in
looking into the morning sky
– Ed Roberson
The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic, failed musician, short-sighted, color-blind.
– Anthony Burgess
The people we love are built into us.
– May Sarton
What if there were no sense… other than the sense that is lost, the pre-sense that is found always already before us?… it is always too late for the question of sense, too late or too soon, it comes down to the same.
– Tombeau de Trakl
He liked the grand size of things in the woods, the feeling of being lost and far away, and the sense he had that with so many trees as wardens, no danger could find him.
– Denis Johnson
The Tomato Episode
by Gilbert Sorrentino
He had been, for many years, intrusive, selfish, callous, controlling, petty, and childish, and given to prevarication, forgetfulness, and maddening self-justification. An almost intolerable clod of a husband, whose smug egotism made him a good target for his wife’s occasional, unexpected, and thoroughly justified countermeasures. One night, when his wife asked him to slice a tomato for their supper, he took a large, ripe tomato out of the refrigerator, and noticed that there was a half-tomato there as well, covered tightly in shrink wrap. He took that out, too. He had sliced this half-tomato and was beginning to slice the whole tomato, when his wife asked him why, why he’d sliced the half-tomato when she had expressly asked him to slice a tomato, a whole tomato. With the counterfeit, smug patience that often causes brutal assaults and even murders to be committed upon those who pretend its possession, he explained that he’d sliced the half-tomato and would now slice half of the whole tomato, so that they could “use up,” was his phrase, the older, so to speak, half-tomato, and save half of the newer, so to speak, whole tomato. He indeed employed the phrase, “so to speak,” in itself a maddened attacker’s defensible justification for battery.
He quietly noted that if it was her heart’s desire, he would slice the entire whole tomato, should she feel that a tomato and a half would not be too much for supper, considering, no, knowing of the wonderful meal that she was certainly preparing. She asked him why he thought, why in Christ’s name did he think, what gave him the goddamned idea that she wanted him to slice the goddamned half-tomato to begin with. Huh? He said, almost bloated with reasonableness, that it seemed a perfectly reasonable “operation to perform,” yes, he said that, that is: to “use up” the half a tomato that had been in the refrigerator since the day before yesterday, losing flavor and juiciness and vitamins and fucking minerals, whatever the hell they have, to eat the thing, made perfect sense to him. Did he ever, ever, ever, she asked, stop to think that maybe she was saving that half a tomato for something, that she had plans for it? Plans? he said. Plans? Plans? He said that if she indeed had, ah, plans, big plans for the fucking half a fucking tomato, could she not use the half-tomato that would be left after he finished slicing the whole tomato? Couldn’t she? She told him that it wasn’t his business to decide for her which half a tomato she wanted to use. To use, he said, to implement your big plans. She said that her decisions were her decisions and that if she wanted to take all the miserable goddamned tomatoes and throw them out the window, it was her business!
He said that he hadn’t intended to make decisions for her, God forbid, he simply thought that blah blah and sensible blah, that he thought that it was something that she herself would do, blah. You have no idea, you have no idea, you don’t have any idea what I’d do about it, you have no idea what I’d do about anything, that’s the trouble, that’s always been the trouble, and wasn’t, she added, wasn’t it about time that he seriously started looking for a job? with his Master’s in sociology? And did it ever occur to him while he watched the ball game that she didn’t feel like eating a stale tomato, a dried-out tomato, that she wanted a fresh tomato? Or was the ball game too intellectually demanding? She said that when she asked him to do something she wished that he would, just once, do it, and not do something else and then spend three hours trying to convince her that that’s what he thought she wanted him to do. I ask you to cut a tomato, cut a tomato! At which, with a small, hapless smile, he asked her, whining, whether she wanted him to continue slicing the whole tomato, or just half of it, and what about the sliced half-tomato now? He stood, slightly slumped, as if crushed in spirit, unmanned, impotent, a posture which his arrogant sneer belied. She said that he could do what he wanted to do, the king of the kitchen, the reader of minds, the weaver of dreams, he could slice, not slice, stick the tomatoes up his ass slice by slice, send them to the goddamned stupid millionaire bastard Pittsburgh Cubs. As for her, she didn’t want any tomatoes or any supper, for that matter! She washed and dried her hands and walked out of the kitchen. What about the chicken? he asked. What about the chicken? I said, what about the chicken? And the rice? The sliced tomato on the cutting board had the placid look of all blameless objects that have been swiftly carried across time so as to bewilder and confound.
There is no logical, rational, pre-structured criterion “out there” with a divine plan. There is no truth “out there” which our weak minds or souls eventually run across. There is this casual, haphazard, amoral process that leaps the logical gaps and brings about newness. And the procedurés only demand is that given talents be invested, risked, doubled, the possibilities explored.
– Joseph Chilton Pearce
People are icebergs […]. Beneath the surface lies a huge mass of unspoken words, pains and secrets. No one is really what they seem.
– Bernard Minier
People aren’t just healing from traumatic events they endured. They’re healing from the life lived in survival mode. They’re healing from the judgement of how they think and feel. They’re healing from grief of what could’ve been had they never been traumatized to begin with.
– Nate Postlethwait
You are under no obligation to write comfortable stories or poems.
– Ijeoma Umebinyuo
Most of the process of writing for me is discarding things. I think, Just get rid of this, just tear it to the ground and start with something more fundamental, vital, and unformulated. Really try to see what’s in front of you.
– Deborah Eisenberg
Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.
– Rita Dove
It’s the words that are hungry. I’m not hungry for words, but they have a hunger of their own.
– Herta Müller
It’s time to start living the life you’ve imagined.
– Henry James
One can hardly talk about the Apollonian oppression of women without recognizing that men have been at least equally oppressed by this ruling spirit of our times. The Feminine in both men and women is suffering. The liberation of the Feminine, rather than of women, is really what is needed.
– Connie Zweig
As a rule, the man who first thinks of a new idea is so much ahead of his time that every one thinks him silly, so that he remains obscure and is soon forgotten. Then, gradually, the world becomes ready for the idea, and the man who proclaims it at the fortunate moment gets all the credit.
– Bertrand Russell
Nothing is so charming as the colouring reflection of happiness on a garret.
– Les Misérables
As I actualize, I uncover.
– Martin Buber, I and Thou
To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.
– George Eliot
We journey towards a home that does not halo our head with a special sun. Mythical women applaud us. A sea for us, a sea against us.
– Mahmoud Darwish
There, at a depth to which divers would find it difficult to descend, are caverns, haunts, and dusky mazes, where monstrous creatures multiply and destroy each other. Huge crabs devour fish and are devoured in their turn. Hideous shapes of living things, not created to be seen by human eyes wander in this twilight. Vague forms of antennae, tentacles, fins, open jaws, scales, and claws, float about there, quivering, growing larger, or decomposing and perishing in the gloom, while horrible swarms of swimming things prowl about seeking their prey.
To gaze into the depths of the sea is, in the imagination, like beholding the vast unknown, and from its most terrible point of view. The submarine gulf is analogous to the realm of night and dreams. There also is sleep, unconsciousness, or at least apparent unconsciousness, of creation. There in the awful silence and darkness, the rude first forms of life, phantomlike, demoniacal, pursue their horrible instincts.
– Victor Hugo
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
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
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
I lost a God once. It’s easier done than people think. Forget a prayer once in a while or simply grow grief in your kitchen window along with the basil and rosemary. Somewhere inside my heart, I misplaced my faith, misunderstood my own origin story, became a person half tragedy, more misery, and I started to relish it.
– Nikita Gill
Too often in the past our approach to truth has been to assume that we have it and others do not. Consequently, we have thought that our role is to tell people what to believe. We are being invited instead into a new humility, to serve the holy wisdom that is already stirring in the hearts of people everywhere, the growing awareness of earth’s interrelatedness and sacredness.
– John Philip Newell
Worse than dying is not living.
– Gurdjieff
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.
– Abraham Joshua Heschel
Where in the world did you get the idea that the Lord wants the truth from us? It is a strange, a most original, idea of yours, My Lord [Cardinal]. Why, he knows it already, and may even have found it a little bit dull. Truth is for tailors and shoemakers, My Lord. I, on the contrary, have always held that the Lord has a penchant for masquerades. Do you not yourself tell us, my lords spiritual, that our trials are really blessings in disguise? And so they are. I, too, have found them to be so, at midnight, at the hour when the mask falls. But at the same time nobody can deny that they have been dressed up by the hand of an unrivaled expert. The Lord himself—with your permission—seems to me to have been masquerading pretty freely at the time when he took on flesh and dwelt amongst us.
– Isak Dinesen
Each time you feel the beginning of weakness, relax and then think seriously: “I wish the result of my weakness to become my own strength.” This will accumulate in you for your future work. Each man knows which weakness he has in him. Each time this weakness appears in you, stop yourself and do this exercise.
– Gurdjieff
The canoe is incredibly wobbly,
even when you sit on your heels.
A balancing act.
If you have the heart on the left side
you have to lean a bit to the right,
nothing in the pockets,
no big arm movements, please, all rhetoric
has to be left behind.
Precisely: rhetoric is impossible here.
The canoe glides out over the water.
– Tomas Tranströmer
Painted into a corner, caught in a cul-de-sac, out on that final last-chance limb, life scrabbles around, searching for a new way out.
– Joseph Chilton Pearce
Choose to be a
contributor, not just a
consumer of knowledge.
– unknown
If you don’t have ideas, read.
I you have ideas, but can’t
articulate them., write.
If you have ideas, and
have the clarity to execute, build.
– Dan Koe
ancient meteor
on reaching the atmosphere
makes light of itself
– Clark Strand
I go on as best as I can, if it begins to mean something I can’t help it.
– Samuel Beckett
If you only know one language, it is natural to assume the universe breaks neatly into the verbs and nouns of your limited vocabulary.
When people begin to learn a second language, they are often surprised to realize how differently the world is described by different cultures.
Something similar can happen if we know only one religion. Most Americans know nothing about any other religion besides Christianity, Judaism or Islam. They have no idea that there are non-theist or non-patriarchal ways of looking at the world.
Until you learn a second language, you may mistakenly believe you are taking a religious text more seriously when you take it literally. You may even mistakenly come believe that people who’ve actually studied a scripture in the original language are twisting its meaning.
The only escape from our inherited cultural narcissm is to learn to listen to world views outside our bubble. We must learn to look at our world from other viewpoints. Eventually, we will outgrow our discomfort and realize our world is enriched by learning various vocabularies for describing it.
If religion is to be anything more than a cultural trance it is helpful to listen to those who sing the cosmic hymn differently. If religion has a purpose it must be to aid us in living and loving. Our goal must never be religion itself. We must continually outgrow our starting places until religion becomes a lifelong call to expand beyond any nation or religious sect, to live kindly and courageously, and to learn to feel at home in the mysterious and mulitfarious world we all share.
– Jim Rigby
A mind that is full of conclusions is a dead mind, it is not a living mind. A living mind is a free mind, learning, never concluding.
– Krishnamurti
In each of us is another whom we do not know. He speaks to us in dreams and tells us how differently he sees us from the way we see ourselves.
– C.G. Jung
These are those well-known people who always think they are in the right, who in their own eyes are quite blameless and wonderful, but always find everybody else difficult, malicious, hateful, and the source of all their troubles.
– Jolande Jacobi
God doesn’t care
which day of the week it is
but how you treat each other,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
We need true mystics who see with all three sets of eyes, not eccentrics, fanatics, or rebels. The true mystic is always both humble and compassionate, for she knows that she does not know.
– Richard Rohr, The Naked Now
There, in the depths, and with the help of the strong light of consciousness, is found the “treasure hard to attain”, “the precious hoard” — designations for the Self — which the hero must bring back to the light of day.
– Jolande Jacobi
In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration.
– Ansel Adams
I don’t believe we shall ever again have any form of society in which men will be free. One should not hope for it. One should not hope for anything. Hope is invented by politicians to keep the electorate happy.
– Pier Paolo Pasolini
The precepts of right speech are not to shackle the unruly but to unchain ourselves from our basest impulses.
– Frederick M. Ranallo-Higgins
You can claim anything —
that doesn’t mean
it’s yours,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
ocean currents
the wayward river
returns home
– James Welsh
Art can speak its own language only as long as the images are alive which refuse and refute the established order.
– Herbie Marcuse
There is no reason to believe that each part of a person matures in unison. Western society has leaped forward in its capacity for nuclear destruction and medical prolongation of life, but our ethical maturation has lagged behind.
– James Hollis
Thinking about how Mark Fisher said pop has the capacity to absorb and gut almost every counterculture yes of course the billionaire should redistribute that money so she can truly savor the precarity of poetry departments.
– Alina Stefanescu
The world itself, all I read, the people, the art, the weather I encounter, they all belong in a poem that I am not writing, a poem that contains me too, a poem that slowly reveals its generous and surprising connections. I think I cannot write that poem. I can only live in it.
– Heather Christle
You live through that little piece of time that is yours, but that piece of time is not only your own life, it is the summing-up of all the other lives that are simultaneous with yours… . What you are is an expression of History.
– Robert Penn Warren
Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.
– William S. Burroughs
Only connect – a phrase capturing the essence of spiritual life by fostering connections that transcend self-concern.
– Andrew Cooper
Keep awake, alive, new. Perform the paradox of being hard and yet soft. Survive without calcification of the tender membranes. Be a poet. Be alive.
– Tennessee Williams
We learn through pain that some of the things we thought were castles turn out to be prisons, and we desperately want out, but even though we built them, we can’t find the door.
– Anne Lamott
the life we know we live
is simply not enough
– Richard Howard
Maybe you are
going too far,
the old monk finally
told the poet.
– The Old Monk
I’m sorry, but not everything needs to sound so goddamn clever or charming or likeable all the time. Sometimes we need to be able to say things to one another. We need to hear things.
– Dr Randall Mindy
Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.
– Anthony Burgess
Everything in buddhadharma is here to help us connect with a more unlimited sense of being, a more open, spacious, boundless way of being.
– Scott Tusa
The fruits of soulless, atomizing modernity. The coming integral age, should we make it, will include prosperity and deep community.
– Jeff Salzman
today i am a black woman in america
& i am singing a melody ridden lullaby
– Mahogany L. Browne
OLD GEEZER
The quickest
way
to change
the
world is
to
like it
the
way it
is.
– A. R. Ammons
That humanity at large will ever be able to dispense with Artificial Paradises seems very unlikely. Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul.
– Aldous Huxley
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
Being by the sea is like a permanent baptism; the light and air hypnotizes, and your soul is washed by vastness.
– Iain Pears
People have always wondered at the saints, that they are able to walk around serene, whatever happens. But that is because they can choose where they’ll be. They don’t have to be angry. You see the difference between having scattered emotions and having a fully vibrating, controlled emotional body. This body is made from energy created from choice, from the effort involved in making choices. But it is necessary to practice; then something is possible.
– Beryl Pogson, The Work Life
People do not realize that when they work, conscious forces come to their aid… Conscious forces are trying to help you. You are not alone.
– Christopher Fremantle
It has taken half a life to turn back and see what it was I left behind.
– Rick Barot
Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you—even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers, and triumphs over all opposition. Religions are places to stand and look and act, vantage points from which to view the world. So none of this is happening. Such things could not occur. Never a word of it is literally true.
– Neil Gaiman
And this tree, which will grow underneath the cluster bomb,
will hold up the pomegranate to the blue sky.
– Raza Ali Hasan
You say you’re not going to make the same mistakes your parents made. But I didn’t realize how many other mistakes were available.
– Sharon Olds
A poet becomes a visionary through a long, systematic autotune of the senses.
– Taylor Swift
It is certainly not in the cinema environment that I usually “find” my friendships. Ultimately, I don’t “bond” much with the inhabitants of the so-called world of entertainment.
– Charlotte Rampling
Schools will be pushed to clean
bookshelves of the white-washed lessons of their
past. The NAACP opens minds like games of chess,
and all excuses for hiding a country’s checkered
past will be dismissed.
– A. Van Jordan
We are mosaics – pieces of light, love, history,
stars – glued together with magic and music
and words.
– Anita Krishan
Maybe this disarray is how we put ourselves back together after the fall.
– Dr Minx Marple
It appears the Tracy Chapman of this generation is Tracy Chapman.
– Louis Virtel
No night is long enough for us to dream twice.
– Mahmoud Darwish
You should have a ritual for your life. All a ritual does is concentrate your mind on the implications of what you are doing.
– Joseph Campbell
“I suppose you do love me, in your way,” I said to him one night close to dawn when we lay on the narrow bed. “And how else should I love you—in your way?” he asked. I am still thinking about that.
– Anne Carson
Beauty does not indeed lie in things, but in the feeling that we give to them.
– C.G. Jung
To be wonderstruck when you’re young becomes an everlasting event.
– Susana Medina
We are intellectually concerned with the idea of awareness . . . yet not actually aware of what is taking place.
– Krishnamurti
Our differences matter, but not as much as our shared need to connect, a core principle for spiritual growth and understanding.
– Andrew Cooper
My speech is neither light nor dark, since it is the speech of someone who is growing.
– C.G. Jung
There is little to analyze anymore.
– masha gessen
Quantum Mechanics demands uncertainty in your worldview.
– Robert Matthews
Let the terrible
politicians practice / their terrible politics.
At my kitchen table, all will be fed. I turn
the radio to a classical station, maybe Vivaldi.
All we have are these moments: the golden trees,
the industrious bees, the falling light. Darkness
will not overtake us.
– Barbara Crooker
A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet “for sale”, who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence – briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing – cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society.
– Erich Fromm
What we learn, of value, we get indirectly, largely unconsciously. It is too often stressed, in my opinion, that we learn through sorrow and suffering. I do not deny this to be true, but I hold that we also learn, and perhaps more lastingly, through moments of joy, of bliss, of ecstasy. Struggle has its importance, but we tend to overrate it. Harmony, serenity, bliss do not come from struggle but from surrender.
– Henry Miller
I believe it is important to study our inner ecology so that we can recognize when we are on the edge, in danger of slipping from health into pathology. And when we do fall into the less habitable regions of our minds, we can learn from these dangerous territories. Edges are places where opposites meet. Where fear meets courage and suffering meets freedom. Where solid ground ends in a cliff face. Where we can gain a view that takes in so much more of our world. And where we need to maintain great awareness, lest we trip and fall. Our journey through life is one of peril and possibility – and sometimes both at once. How can we stand on the threshold between suffering and freedom and remain informed by both worlds? With our penchant for dualities, humans tend to identify either with the terrible truth of suffering or with freedom from suffering. But I believe that excluding any part of the larger landscape of our lives reduces the territory of our understanding.”
[…]
I have come to see the profound value of taking in the whole landscape of life and not rejecting or denying what we are given. I have also learned that our waywardness, difficulties, and ‘crises’ might not be terminal obstacles. They can actually be gateways to wider, richer internal and external landscapes. If we willingly investigate our difficulties, we can fold them into a view of reality that is more courageous, inclusive, emergent, and wise – as have many others who have fallen over the edge.
– Joan Halifax
The poet existed among the cave men; he will exist among men of the atomic age, for he is an inherent part of man. Even religions have been born from the need for poetry, which is a spiritual need, and it is through the grace of poetry that the divine spark lives forever in the human flint.
– Saint-John Perse
I was suddenly made aware of another world of beauty and mystery such as I had never imagined to exist, except in poetry.
It was as though I had begun to see and smell and hear for the first time. The world appeared to me as Wordsworth describes with “the glory and freshness of a dream.” The sight of a wild rose growing on a hedge, the scent of lime-tree blossoms caught suddenly as I rode down a hill on a bicycle, came to me like visitations from another world. But it was not only my senses that were awakened. I experienced an overwhelming emotion in the presence of nature, especially at evening. It began to have a kind of sacramental character for me. I approached it with a sense of almost religious awe and , in a hush that comes before sunset, I felt again the presence of an almost unfathomable mystery. The song of the birds, the shape of the trees, the colors of the sunset, were so many signs of the presence, which seemed to be drawing me to itself.
– Bede Griffiths
Out of this wood do not desire to go.
Thou shalt remain here, whether thou wilt or no.
I am a spirit of no common rate,
The Summer still doth tend upon my state.
And I do love thee; therefore go with me.
I’ll give thee fairies to attend on thee,
And they shall fetch thee jewels from the deep,
And sing while thou, on pressèd flowers, dost sleep,
And I will purge thy mortal grossness so
That thou shalt like an airy spirit go.
Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Mote, and Mustardseed!
– William Shakespeare
We have these earthly bodies. We don’t know what they want. Half the time, we pretend they are under our mental thumb, but that is the illusion of the healthy and the protected. Of sedate lovers. For the body has emotions it conceives and carries through without concern for anyone or anything else. Love is one of those, I guess. Going back to something very old knit into the brain as we were growing. Hopeless. Scorching. Ordinary.
– Louise Erdrich
There is nowhere that a person can find a more peaceful and trouble-free retreat than in his own mind…So constantly give yourself this retreat, and renew yourself.
– Marcus Aurelius
The individual activity of one man with backbone will do more than a thousand men with a mere wishbone.
– William Boetcker
Many people think they’re bad problem solvers when in fact they’re bad problem anticipators.
– Shane Parrish
Genius is nothing but a greater aptitude for patience.
– Benjamin Franklin
Greatness comes from humble beginnings; it comes from grunt work. It means you’re the least important person in the room—until you change that with results.
– Ryan Holiday
Problems with Hurricanes
by Victor Hernández Cruz
A campesino looked at the air
And told me:
With hurricanes it’s not the wind
or the noise or the water.
I’ll tell you he said:
it’s the mangoes, avocados
Green plantains and bananas
flying into town like projectiles.
How would your family
feel if they had to tell
The generations that you
got killed by a flying
Banana.
Death by drowning has honor
If the wind picked you up
and slammed you
Against a mountain boulder
This would not carry shame
But
to suffer a mango smashing
Your skull
or a plantain hitting your
Temple at 70 miles per hour
is the ultimate disgrace.
The campesino takes off his hat—
As a sign of respect
toward the fury of the wind
And says:
Don’t worry about the noise
Don’t worry about the water
Don’t worry about the wind—
If you are going out
beware of mangoes
And all such beautiful
sweet things.
We cried about ‘Fast Car’ because we know they don’t make it.
– Ryan Ruby
If Taylor Swift is so great, why won’t she write even a single song in Yiddish?
– Samuel Spinner
o sweet incendiary! upon this carcass of a cold hard heart; let all thy scatter’d shafts of light that play among the leaves of thy large books of day, combined against this breast at once break in, and take away from me myself.
– richard crashaw
hold back them tears
all those sentimental stories
cooked uptown
if you can
hold it for after
– Victor Hernández
Sometimes the stillness
is so great you don’t
notice,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
This place is a dream. Only a sleeper considers it real. Then death comes like dawn, and you wake up laughing at what you thought was your grief.
– Rumi
I’m Rooting for Everybody Black
by Cortney Lamar Charleston
—Issa Rae
Everybody Black is my hometown team. Everybody Black
dropped the hottest album of the year, easy. Everybody Black
is in this show, so I’m watching. Everybody Black is in this movie,
so I’m watching. Everybody Black wore it better, tell the truth.
Everybody Black’s new book was beautiful. How you don’t
know about Everybody Black?! Everybody Black mad
underrated. Everybody Black remind me of someone I know.
I love seeing Everybody Black succeed. I hope Everybody Black
get elected. Everybody Black deserves the promotion more than
anybody. I want Everybody Black to find somebody special.
Everybody Black is good peoples. Everybody Black been through
some things. Everybody Black don’t get the credit they’re due. I met
Everybody Black once and they were super chill and down-to-earth.
I believe in Everybody Black. There’s something about Everybody Black.
Insanity is possession by an unconscious content that, as such, is not assimilable to consciousness, nor can it be assimilated since the very existence of such contents is denied.
– CG Jung
The academic path…..
Undergrad –> PhD –> Postdoc –> PI –> bakery shop owner
– @hapyresearchers
howling wind —
an autumn note within
the bamboo flute
– Kala Ramesh
The nice thing about this bass is
the notes find you,
the old monk said about
his instrument.
– The Old Monk
When jarred, unavoidably,
by circumstance, revert at
once to yourself, and don’t
lose the rhythm more
than you can help.
– Marcus Aurelius
spring evening—
the puppy wags his tail
in his sleep
– Ce Rosenow
The mob must always be dismissed as something as insane as a river full of vomit. Once you put the mob in the wastebasket where it belongs you’ve got a chance….
– Charles Bukowski
El Poema de lo Reverso
by Victor Hernández Cruz
In which everything goes backwards
in time and motion
Palm trees shrink back into the ground
Mangos become seeds
and reappear in the eyes of Indian
women
The years go back
cement becomes wood
Panama hats are seen upon skeletons
walking the plazas
Of once again wooden benches
The past starts to happen again
I see Columbus’s three boats
going backwards on the sea
Getting smaller
Crossing the Atlantic back to the
ports of Spain Cadiz Dos Palos Huelva
Where the sailors disembark
and go back to their towns
To their homes
They become adolescents again
become children infants
they re-enter the wombs of their mothers
till they become glances
Clutching a pound of bread
through a busy plaza
that becomes the taste
of the sound of church bells
in reverberation.
semi-retirement
kicking a pine cone
down the road
– @pauldavidmena
in fact, all the creative ways our people greet each other may be the icing on this flaming trash cake hurtling through the ether.
– Eve L. Ewing
If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man. The objective world remains what it was, but, because of a shift of emphasis within the subject, is beheld as though transformed.
– Joseph Campbell
That, I think is the power of ceremony: it marries the mundane to the sacred. The water turns to wine, the coffee to a prayer.
The material and the spiritual mingle… What else can you offer the earth which has everything? What else can you give but something of yourself? A homemade ceremony, a ceremony that makes home.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer
Democracy is, after all, the belief the world can be better.
– masha gessen
If you write what you yourself sincerely think and feel and are interested in, the chances are very high that you will interest other people as well.
– Rachel Carson
Too much joy, I swear, is lost in our desperation to keep it.
– Ocean Vuong
I have been able to say to
you many things with my
pen, that I could never have
uttered with my tongue.
– Sally Campbell Preston McDowell
A story can be like a mad, lovely visitor, with whom you spend a rather exciting weekend.
– Lorrie Moore
Taste is first and foremost distaste, disgust and visceral intolerance of the taste of others.
– Pierre Bourdieu
Every academic needs friends who have no idea what you research and don’t care.
– Neil Renic
We are in a better position than our ancestors to integrate the wisdom of the transcendental if we make use of the profound wisdom of the psychological
– Victoria Nelson
I hardly do any preplanning, just fretting and wheel spinning.
– Geoff Dyer
I am always walking toward something, somewhere…the road doesn’t end, as if one place dreams of another.
– Linda Hogan
And as the night wears on,
The dim allegory of ourselves
Unfolds, and we
Feel dreamed by someone else,
A sleeping counterpart,
Who gathers in
The darkness of his person
Shades of the real world.
– Mark Strand, Dreams
…, imagine a loamy earth that starts with genocide, then adds a mix of further disease, wars, hurricanes, murder, great fires, dueling, insurrection and slavery, just to name a few of the many instances of tragedy. What dark seed would take root in such a disturbed and twisted soil?
– James Caskey
Make sustained contact with something undomestic, sacred,and tremendously powerful. Something for the good. Something filled with bone. Fall in love with it. This first covenant supplies energy, rapture, joy. Less heaven, less hell, more luminous reality.
– Martin Shaw
If time is a circle, as the Indigenous world view presumes,the knowledge we need is already within the circle.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer, Ancient Green
There are great cycles – in not only our individual lives, but in the greater lives of countries, civilizations, and even the world itself. Cycles come and go. Like the tides, you can’t really control them, though you can sometimes direct their energies. Your best option is to recognize them and adapt with them. However, no matter the severity of the challenges placed by a new cycle, it is always an opportunity to practice compassion. We still weather challenges better as a community than we do isolated and fearful of one another. No person is an island- no person stands alone. Amidst the challenges faced by the current cycle, don’t lose your conscience- as in the end, it is still the best aspect of who you are, and it will always be your best compass throughout any storm or cycle of turbulence. This cycle will come, and it will go, but don’t lose your true self in the process of it…
– Timothy Hogan
How do you move on? You move on when your heart finally understands that there is no turning back.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost?
– Quentin Crisp
What is madness but nobility
of soul at odds with
circumstance.
– Theodore Roethke
There is a place in the soul where you’ve never been wounded – that neither time nor space nor no created thing can touch …..
– Meister Eckhart
I once received another piece of life-changing advice […] My classmate in Paris, the novelist-to-be Jean-Olivier Tedesco, pronounced, as he prevented me from running to catch a subway, “I don’t run for trains.”
Snub your destiny. I have taught myself to resist running to keep on schedule. This may seem a very small piece of advice, but it registered. In refusing to run to catch trains, I have felt the true value of elegance and aesthetics in behavior, a sense of being in control of my time, my schedule, and my life. Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you are seeking.
You stand above the rat race and the pecking order, not outside of it, if you do so by choice.
Quitting a high-paying position, if it is your decision, will seem a better payoff than the utility of the money involved (this may seem crazy, but I’ve tried it and it works). This is the first step toward the stoic’s throwing a four-letter word at fate.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.
– Charles Dickens
Every man has a quiet place in his soul, where everything is self-evident and easily explainable, a place to which he likes to retire from the confusing possibilities of life, because there everything is simple and clear, with a manifest and limited purpose. About nothing else in the world can a man say with the same conviction as he does of this place: “You are nothing but…” and indeed he has said it.
And even this place is a smooth surface, an everyday wall, nothing more than a snugly sheltered and frequently polished crust over the mystery of chaos. If you break through the most everyday of walls, the overwhelming stream of chaos will flood in. Chaos is not single, but an unending multiplicity. It is not formless, otherwise it would be single, but it is filled with figures that have a confusing and overwhelming effect due to their fullness.
– Carl Jung
The creative process takes place not under the burning rays of the sun but in the cool, reflected light of the moon when the darkness of unconsciousness is great: night, not day, is the time for begetting. Darkness and stillness, secrecy, remaining mute and veiled, are a part of it. For this reason the moon as lord of life and of growth is opposed to the death character of the devouring sun. The nocturnal moistness of the moon-night is the time of sleep, but also that of healing and recovery. …The power of sleep that regenerates the body and its wounds and the restoration that runs its course in darkness belongs to the night domain of the healing moon, as do the happenings in the soul that let a person ‘grow beyond’ an insoluble crisis through the dark processes perceived only by the heart.
– Erich Neumann
If there’s anything I aspired to do with this book as a material object in the world, it’s along the lines of praying.
– Sarah Ghazal Ali
Whatever pain you feel, take it in, wishing for all beings to be free of it. Whatever pleasure you feel, send it out to others. In this way, our personal problems and delights become a stepping-stone for understanding the suffering and happiness of all beings.
– Pema Chödrön
She began to stand around the gate and expect things. What things? She didn’t know exactly. Her breath was gusty and short. She knew things that nobody ever told her. For instance, the words of the trees and the wind…
She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether. She knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the sun and emerge from the gray dust of its making.
– Zora Neale Hurston
I was the cat who comforted you among the houses of the dead. I was the lion who drove the jackals from you while you slept.
– C.S. Lewis
I have often noticed that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress other people even slightly. I am horribly apt to approach some innocent at a gathering, and like the ancient mariner, fix him with a wild, glitt’ring eye and say, “Do you know that in the head of the caterpillar of the ordinary goat moth there are two hundred twenty-eight separate muscles?” The poor wretch flees. I am not making chatter; I mean to change his life.
– Annie Dillard
I know that what you call ‘God’ really exists, but not in the form you think; God is primal cosmic energy, the love in your body, your integrity, and your perception of the nature in you and outside of you.
– Wilhelm Reich
Molecules form and dissolve, returning to the primordial soup of atoms. But consciousness survives the death of the molecules on which it rides. What was once a bundle of energy in a sunbeam turns into a leaf, only to fall and change again into soil. The change of state crosses many boundaries. A sunbeam is invisible, whereas leaves and soil are visible.A leaf is alive and growing, whereas sunbeams aren’t.the colors of light, leaf, and soil are different, and so on.
But all these transformations exist as constructs of the mind.The actual energy present in the sunbeam experiences no change at all.
– Deepak Chopra
The Voice of God
by Mary Karr
Ninety percent of what’s wrong with you
could be cured with a hot bath,
says God from the bowels of the subway.
but we want magic, to win
the lottery we never bought a ticket for.
(Tenderly, the monks chant, embrace
the suffering.) The voice of God does not pander,
offers no five-year plan, no long-term
solution, nary an edict. It is small & fond & local.
Don’t look for your initials in the geese
honking overhead or to see thru the glass even
darkly. It says the most obvious crap—
put down that gun, you need a sandwich.
winter withering
everything one color
the roar of the wind
– Basho
Wittgenstein in Ireland
by Seán Dunne
He could only think clearly in the dark
So he came to Ireland, scouring Dublin
And Wicklow for sheller where thought would sprout in the night, a frail mushroom.
Near Arklow he wrote in a sunlit ledger. A girl eavesdropped on pages and found Only long words, the schauung and ich Of whatever it was he was up to. In Connemara, he fOWld me last pool
Of darkness in Europe-,~(Y in stone Reached like the root of a stubborn word. Clear as theorems, sentences formed.
On my first dictionary, I wrote his truth:
The limits of my language are the limits Of my world, and think of it now,
His silence a homeland I make my own.
The body 𝘪𝘴 the shadow insofar as it contains the tragic history of how the spontaneous surging of life energy is murdered and rejected in a hundred ways until the body becomes a deadened object.
– John P. Conger
“Three million malware-infected smart toothbrushes” would have instantly broken the spell, had I somehow been able to include them in Neuromancer.
– William Gibson
If you want to get to heaven
take someone with you,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
As it is with the love of the body, so with the friendship of the mind, the full is only reached by admittance to the most retired places. Here are the pudenda of my psyche.
– Samuel Beckett
The capitalist is hoarding money and property at the expense of others. The books have said that they are evil, and yet we are doing that.
– Krishnamurti
Writing at the airport bar in a terminal full of writers, seated with my back to the wall like an Old West gunslinger unwilling to be taken by surprise…
– Matt Bell
Doing a PhD is like arguing every day with a dumb lab mate, but that lab mate is you four years ago.
– Isabel Pochet-Pimentel
old pond
another floater
in my right eye
– Scott Mason
I had thought, like other foolish young people, that everyone had friends, and it was only when I grew into the world that I found out how many people had none, but only daily acquaintances.
– Joyce Cary
Do not look at me with such love in your eyes—
I fear that my desire would become young again.
– Hafeez Jalandhari
Reading aloud binds us together in unanticipated ways. It brings us home.
– Kate DiCamillo
the passenger pigeon returns
on a cancelled stamp
– Scott Mason
And like no other sculpture in the history of art, the dead engine and dead airframe come to life at the touch of a human hand, and join their life with the pilot’s own.
– Richard Bach
Every flight begins with a fall…
– George R.R. Martin
Don’t ask God
what God asks you,
the old monk advised.
– The Old Monk
To connect across differences is to build bonds of affection, understanding, and support, embodying the essence of Buddhist practice.
– Andrew Cooper
sandstorm
searching for an address
among skyscrapers
– N P Shameer
Grand ideas kill first efforts. Begin with something in your range. Then write it as a secret.
– Louise Erdrich
In the funerary darkness, she lets her chest expand in concert with her conscience like old wood dilating during summertime. She sings, and there is no dead, there is no death.
– Avra Margariti
Poetry is not about language but about what happens when language gets impossible.
– Alice Oswald
Wounds which do extensive bone and nerve damage are not good for writers, nor anybody else.
– Ernest Hemingway
Every morning, I have woken up knowing that I will never run out of books to read.
– Kenzaburo Oe
Today, more than ever, we could use more translations of the past that engage seriously with it, rather than just riffing on it or reducing it to a colorful but empty spectacle.
– David A. Bell
old photos
on my desk–
bleeding hearts in bloom
– Ellen Grace Olinger
If anger gave you cancer, we’d all be dead.
– James Marcus, Late Father’s Words
I keep scraping at myself
emerging bit by bit
weary beyond rest
– David Ignatow
splendid Saturday
a long line
at the deli counter
– @pauldavidmena
visiting France
surprised by the fluency
of bird song
– @AdLibby1
Degrowth is not radical.
It’s the bare minimum starting point to tackle the ecological crisis.
What’s truly radical (in the sense of “extreme”) is the idea that growth can continue.
– Max Wilbert
Your song
of songs in the hard
February-sparks of clamping
half-demolished
jaws.
The one mile
still to go of
melancholy.
– Paul Celan, tr. Joachim Neugroschel
Good writing, transformative writing, is not about innate talent; it’s about labor, about a temporal investment in the work.
– @ElizabethaRush
Remaking the world by attending to all its seemingly inconsequential detail is an ethical proposition
– Josef Albers
Neurodegeneration is a very hard problem, probably harder than clogged arteries…. There will almost certainly not be a single silver pill that gives most of us a nimble mind well into the tenth decade of life.
– Natalie de Souza
whiskey glass
brimming with a moonless sky
the smell of winter rain
– Chen-ou Liu
A silent poet is like a bird fluttering in the woods.
Don’t pressure him with singing.
That would be caging him.
– Ida Gramcko
The road where I lived went in a circle. / Inside the road circle was a circle of grass. / Inside the circle of grass was the matter I looked through / And looked at, waiting for whatever moved in from the edges . . .
– Lindsay Turner
The New Old Normal
we don’t ask for the moon
but for the occupation to end…
fireball after fireball
the blood moon
tangled in half-burnt trees
bits of clothing
smoky ruins…
each day a new battle
for water and food
– Chen-ou Liu
or teachers, guides whose gestures I recall better than
names
so much I’ve been taught I have yet to know
– Kwoya Fagin Maples
Tuesday I became clouds. Possibly a defensive measure – everyone loves clouds…
– Anne Carson
I am here today because I made a choice not to let someone’s duplicitous actions and the unfortunate events of life shatter me forever. Loss can break you or it can help you grow. You get to choose. Always.
– Leigh Burns
This was an important idea for me—that an artist was someone who worked, not some special being exempt from the claims of ordinary life.
– Tobias Wolff
Destiny had other plans.
Life has no pity,
It moves forward.
– Victor Hernández Cruz
I close
the valves of my heart
to the world of red dust
solitude and I
are now of the same race
– Chen-ou Liu
I have studied loss.
I sliced it thin and fed it
through a microscope.
I knew it’s shape, and all it fed on but,
when I met it in the wild,
it ate me up.
– Edward Alport
Solitude is not aristocratic disdain nor any affective state, but a structural ideal: the hypothesis of a simplicity subtracted from every situation.
– R.K. Hegelman
shade in books, shade of clouds running over a distant landscape, shade on bales in the barn, shade in the pantry, shade in the icehouse (the smell of shade), shade under runner blades, shade along branches, shade at night (a difficult research)
– Anne Carson
Many people romanticize art claiming it’s their right of passage from decades of being and decades of learning. Nah it is far too varied to be that simple.
– Laura Kerr
When the sky is blue, I think of God
in a secret language which I speak only in my heart,
and the wound isn’t made out of light,
but from love. I am brave but not yet forgiven.
When God gave us language, he made us immortal.
I lie to people that I am a poet, the truth is
I am writing the same poem over and over
again—your name on every page.
I try to hold onto the shape of us,
the world keeps prying it away.
I should have known that God isn’t in the books
they translate, in the buildings made out
of false promises, he is in us.
And there is a dream I don’t tell anyone about where
I have a love that doesn’t feel like it burns
when I hold it in my arms.
– Aiman Tahir Khan
“The remembering self is the one that keeps score,” observes Daniel Kahneman, after sixty years of observing humans scientifically.
– Pico Iyer
The deepest feeling always shows itself in Solitude]. Solitude has its roots in the great silence of eternity .
– Kent Nerburn
LETTER TO SOMEONE LIVING FIFTY YEARS FROM NOW
Most likely, you think we hated the elephant,
the golden toad, the thylacine and all variations
of whale harpooned or hacked into extinction.
It must seem like we sought to leave you nothing
but benzene, mercury, the stomachs
of seagulls rippled with jet fuel and plastic.
You probably doubt that we were capable of joy,
but I assure you we were.
We still had the night sky back then,
and like our ancestors, we admired
its illuminated doodles
of scorpion outlines and upside-down ladles.
Absolutely, there were some forests left!
Absolutely, we still had some lakes!
I’m saying, it wasn’t all lead paint and sulfur dioxide.
There were bees back then, and they pollinated
a euphoria of flowers so we might
contemplate the great mysteries and finally ask,
“Hey guys, what’s transcendence?”
And then all the bees were dead.
– Matthew Olzmann
WHAT THE LIVING DO
Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up
waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through
the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,
I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.
What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.
– Marie Howe
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
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
‘Enshittification’ is coming for absolutely everything
Last year, I coined the term “enshittification” to describe the way that platforms decay. That obscene little word did big numbers; it really hit the zeitgeist. The American Dialect Society made it its Word of the Year for 2023 (which, I suppose, means that now I’m definitely getting a poop emoji on my tombstone). So what’s enshittification and why did it catch fire? It’s my theory explaining how the internet was colonised by platforms, why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, why it matters and what we can do about it. We’re all living through a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It’s frustrating. It’s demoralising. It’s even terrifying.
I think that the enshittification framework goes a long way to explaining it, moving us out of the mysterious realm of the “great forces of history”, and into the material world of specific decisions made by real people; decisions we can reverse and people whose names and pitchfork sizes we can learn. Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It’s not just a way to say “things are getting worse”, though, of course, it’s fine with me if you want to use it that way. (It’s an English word. We don’t have ein Rat für englische Rechtschreibung. English is a free-for-all. Go nuts, meine Kerle.) But in case you want to be more precise, let’s examine how enshittification works. It’s a three-stage process: first, platforms are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, there is a fourth stage: they die. Let’s do a case study. What could be better than Facebook?
Facebook arose from a website developed to rate the fuckability of Harvard undergrads, and it only got worse after that. When Facebook started off, it was only open to US college and high-school kids with .edu and K-12.us addresses. But in 2006, it opened up to the general public. It effectively told them: Yes, I know you’re all using MySpace. But MySpace is owned by a billionaire who spies on you with every hour that God sends. Sign up with Facebook and we will never spy on you. Come and tell us who matters to you in this world.
That was stage one. Facebook had a surplus — its investors’ cash — and it allocated that surplus to its end users. Those end users proceeded to lock themselves into Facebook. Facebook, like most tech businesses, had network effects on its side. A product or service enjoys network effects when it improves as more people sign up to use it. You joined Facebook because your friends were there, and then others signed up because you were there.
But Facebook didn’t just have high network effects, it had high switching costs. Switching costs are everything you have to give up when you leave a product or service. In Facebook’s case, it was all the friends there that you followed and who followed you. In theory, you could have all just left for somewhere else; in practice, you were hamstrung by the collective action problem. It’s hard to get lots of people to do the same thing at the same time. So Facebook’s end users engaged in a mutual hostage-taking that kept them glued to the platform. Then Facebook exploited that hostage situation, withdrawing the surplus from end users and allocating it to two groups of business customers: advertisers and publishers.
To the advertisers, Facebook said: Remember when we told those rubes we wouldn’t spy on them? Well, we do. And we will sell you access to that data in the form of fine-grained ad-targeting. Your ads are dirt cheap to serve, and we’ll spare no expense to make sure that when you pay for an ad, a real human sees it. To the publishers, Facebook said: Remember when we told those rubes we would only show them the things they asked to see? Ha! Upload short excerpts from your website, append a link and we will cram it into the eyeballs of users who never asked to see it. We are offering you a free traffic funnel that will drive millions of users to your website to monetise as you please. And so advertisers and publishers became stuck to the platform, too.
Users, advertisers, publishers — everyone was locked in. Which meant it was time for the third stage of enshittification: withdrawing surplus from everyone and handing it to Facebook’s shareholders. For the users, that meant dialling down the share of content from accounts you followed to a homeopathic dose, and filling the resulting void with ads and pay-to-boost content from publishers. For advertisers, that meant jacking up prices and drawing down anti-fraud enforcement, so advertisers paid much more for ads that were far less likely to be seen. For publishers, this meant algorithmically suppressing the reach of their posts unless they included an ever-larger share of their articles in the excerpt. And then Facebook started to punish publishers for including a link back to their own sites, so they were corralled into posting full text feeds with no links, meaning they became commodity suppliers to Facebook, entirely dependent on the company both for reach and for monetisation.
When any of these groups squawked, Facebook just repeated the lesson that every tech executive learnt in the Darth Vader MBA: “I have altered the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.” Facebook now enters the most dangerous phase of enshittification. It wants to withdraw all available surplus and leave just enough residual value in the service to keep end users stuck to each other, and business customers stuck to end users, without leaving anything extra on the table, so that every extractable penny is drawn out and returned to its shareholders. (This continued last week, when the company announced a quarterly dividend of 50 cents per share and that it would increase share buybacks by $50bn. The stock jumped.)
But that’s a very brittle equilibrium, because the difference between “I hate this service, but I can’t bring myself to quit,” and “Jesus Christ, why did I wait so long to quit?” is razor-thin.
– Cory Doctorow
Something of our relationship to the earth is determined by the particular place we stand at a given time. If you stand still long enough to observe carefully the things around you, you will find beauty, and you will know wonder. If you see a leaf carried along on the flow of a river, you might ponder its journey. Where did it begin, and where will it end? What will be the story of its passage? You will discover a thousand ways in which the leaf is connected to the water, the banks, the near and farther distances, the sky and the sun. Your mind, your spirit will be nourished and grow. You will become one with what you see. Consider what is to be seen.
– N. Scott Momaday
Transcendental Etude
No one ever told us we had to study our lives,
make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history
or music, that we should begin
with the simple exercises first
and slowly go on trying
the hard ones, practicing till strength
and accuracy became one with the daring
to leap into transcendence, take the chance
of breaking down the wild arpeggio
or faulting the full sentence of the fugue.
—And in fact we can’t live like that: we take on
everything at once before we’ve even begun
to read of mark time, we’re forced to begin
in the midst of the hard movement,
the one already sounding as we are born.
– Adrienne Rich
He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.
– Cormac McCarthy
Overheard in New York. May 2019. Man in his thirties:
I’m very suspicious of the people who loved high school. It’s a real red flag for me.
The victorious ones have said
That emptiness is the relinquishing of all views.
For whomever emptiness is a view,
That one has achieved nothing.
– Nāgārjuna, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way
Tears, sorrow, and disappointment are bitter, but wisdom is the comforter in all psychic suffering.
– Carl G. Jung
As Jung saw it, it is not only the single individual who is liable to psychic illness, as a result of a wrong attitude toward the unconscious; the same thing can also happen to nations as a whole.
– Marie Louise von Franz
Preserve the memory of flight.
The bird shall one day die.
– Forugh Farrokhzad, (tr. Sholeh Wolpé)
It’s no good closing your eyes, you must leave them open in the dark, that is my opinion. I am not speaking of sleep, I am speaking of what I believe is called waking.
– Samuel Beckett
When life is empty, with respect to the past, and aimless, with respect to the future, the vacuum is filled by the present.
– Alan Watts
you often don’t need *more* information
you need a different *relationship* to the info you already have
– River Kenna
We have to be careful not to think that meditation is about getting rid of thoughts. On the contrary, I would say that meditation helps us to creatively engage with our thoughts and not fixate on them.
– Martine Batchelor
and when he talks, he talks of childhood,
remembering some slight or conundrum
as if it is a score to be retailed
– Anthony Walton
Inside eternal hours
one can fix lifeless eyes
on the smoke of a cigarette,
on a cup’s form,
the carpet’s faded flowers,
or on imaginary writings on the wall.
– Forugh Farrokhzad, (tr. Sholeh Wolpé)
I had insisted on my body’s joy and little else.
I will not remember, only transcribe.
This is the first time I’ve really wanted to be
accurate.
– Lisa Robertson
A poem is a mind that holds contraries.
– Andrew Schelling
she says it’s like
you know all
these years spent
in vinegar
and what now
we’re out the jar
dailies, 8.II.24
– Alec Finlay, (dailies)
an Icelandic landscape as described by Anne Carson:
You see horses standing in the fields so soaked with emptiness they can’t move, they’ve been there for years, they might as well be waterfalls.
Everywhere is a storehouse of literary material. If a true artist were born in a pigpen and raised in a sty, he would still find plenty of inspiration for his work. The only need is the eye to see.
– Willa Cather
When I see the rough drafts of certain of my writer friends, where everything is revised, everything’s changed, moved around, and there are arrows all over the place . . . no no no.
– Julio Cortazar
I always find that I’m a lot more interested in the things I don’t understand than the things I do understand.
– Ian Williams
I’m living absolutely like an oyster. My novel is the rock I’m attached to, and I know nothing of what is happening in the world.
– Gustave Flaubert
I know something that doesn’t die can’t be beautiful.
– Danez Smith
What I’m writing to you is not for reading – it’s for being.
– Clarice Lispector
One must have courage to see what one does see and not to deny it for convenience.
– Javier Marías
We come to understand ourselves by remembering…
– Rachael de Moravia
Let’s say I am so charmed by the radiance of my own anarchy, I invite myself in for tea, and when I’m not looking, I sneak the steam from the kettle into my pocket so the next time I’m missing the coast of Maine I can gift myself the fog.
– Andrea Gibson
GLASGOW’S FULL OF POETS
glasgow’s full of artists
they’re three feet tall
and eat sherbet dabs
– Alan Jackson
glasgow’s full of poets
five foot two
drink irn bru
glasgow’s full of poets
transcendental
pure mental
glasgow’s full of poets
know the score
the hampden roar
glasgow’s full of poets
give it laldy
pure bobo balde
glasgow’s full of poets
no lacuna
the full bhuna
glasgow’s full of poets
could be
see me?
– Alan Spence, Glasgow Zen
Equanimity implies a posture of dignity even in a whirlwind of change.
– Sharon Salzberg
As the Buddha described life, he spoke of pleasure and pain, gain and loss, praise and blame, fame and disrepute, often described as “the eight worldly winds.” It’s just how life is. There is no one who experiences only pleasure and no pain. There is no act that elicits only praise and no blame. Appreciating this fact is not a call for apathy or depression. We can recognize the truth of things, accept them as the inevitable fabric of life, and understand that the best way to work for change is not to be freaked out, or in denial, or anxious with the ups, lest they dissolve, and plummet with the downs, fearing they won’t. Equanimity implies a posture of dignity even in a whirlwind of change. It implies being able to breathe. It implies complete presence. It implies being able to come to peace. If we take the time to reflect on the inevitable turnings of life, it will build our equanimity. If we practice fully experiencing the joy of certain moments without fearfully clinging to them, it will build equanimity. If, as Joanna Macy says, we look at the pain and keep breathing, it will build equanimity. All of it will build a quality of radiant calm that is intricate, shifting, alive.
– Sharon Salzberg
BREAD
Bread for myself is a material question.
Bread for my neighbor is a spiritual question.
– N.A. Berdyaev
The world is a totality in itself. It has its own muscles, its own brain, its own limbs, and its own circulation. We are not talking about the totality of the world in the sense that everything should be good and perfect and fantastic, and nobody should acknowledge anything bad. We are talking about reality, in which good is made out of bad and bad is made out of good. Therefore, the world can exist in its own good/bad level, its self-existing level of dark and light, black and white, constantly. Whatever is there, favorable or unfavorable, is workable: it is the universe.
– Chögyam Trungpa
What we really are is a community of mind, knitted together by codes and symbols, intuitions, aspirations, histories, hopes. The invisible world of the human experience is far more real to us than the visible world, which is little more than a kind of screen or stage upon which we move.
– Terence McKenna
The beginning of wisdom, I believe, is our ability to accept an inherent messiness in our explanation of what’s going on. Nowhere is it written that human minds should be able to give a full accounting of creation in all dimensions and on all levels. Ludwig Wittgenstein had the idea that philosophy should be what he called “true enough.” I think that’s a great idea. True enough is as true as can be gotten. The imagination is chaos. New forms are fetched out of it. The creative act is to let down the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended and then to attempt to bring out of it ideas.
– Rupert Sheldrake
A sense of reverence is necessary for psychological health. If one has no sense of reverence, no feeling that there is anyone or anything that inspires awe, it generally indicates an ego inflation that cuts conscious personality from nourishing springs of unconscious.
– RA Johnson
for JRM
and then the elite rose up
against the elite and
with one voice condemned
their years of failure
demanding they be re-
elected so as to sweep
away the poor and ill
who had let them fail
– Alec Finlay
You don’t ever know
how much God is
helping,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
it is the clouds, really
that make a sunrise glow
– Andy Perrin
Friday doesn’t solve
all the world’s problems
but breaths do seem
a bit less pressured
– Andy Perrin
Sometimes
you reach a point
where anything
is too much,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
Philosophy hasn’t made any progress? If somebody scratches the spot where he has an itch, do we have to see some progress?
– Wittgenstein
Read to escape reality . . . Write to embrace it.
– Stephanie Connolly
fast-moving clouds
this longing
to fly back home
– Nitu Yumnam
Heed not the darkness round you, dull and deep;
The clouds grow thickest when the summit’s nigh.
– Paul Laurence Dunbar
They have the guns; we have the poets. Therefore, we will win.
– Howard Zinn
At middle age, I appreciate
the orchid’s beauty: its shy blooms
burst from a dead stick:
nodes of growth emerge
as tender youth did once.
– Cherise Pollard
Our ordinary mind always tried to persuade us that we are nothing but acorns and that our greatest happiness will be to become bigger, fatter, shinier acorns; but this is of interest only to pigs. Our faith gives us knowledge of something better: that we can become oak trees.
– E.F. Schumacher
That humanity at large will ever be able to dispense with Artificial Paradises seems very unlikely. Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul.
– Aldous Huxley
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
Transient emotions are lower emotions. Lasting emotions are higher emotions.
– George Gurdjieff
man has two wings: one wing is his own will and the other wing is the will of God. Man has to learn to fly using both of them. Without using the wing of God’s will, his flight is erroneous, erratic, it has no momentum.
– Orage Alfred
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
The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.
– William James
We now know that human transformation does not happen through didacticism or through excessive certitude, but through the playful entertainment of another scripting of reality that may subvert the old given text and its interpretation and lead to the embrace of an alternative text and its redescription of reality.
– Walter Brueggemann
Faith is not in conflict with reason, nor is it a substitute for reason. Faith chooses the grade of significance or Level of Being at which the search for knowledge and understanding is to aim. There is reasonable faith and there is unreasonable faith. To look for meaning and purpose at the level of inanimate matter would be as unreasonable an act of faith as an attempt to “explain” the masterpieces of human genius as nothing but the outcome of economic interests or sexual frustration.
– Ernst F. Schumacher
my thoughts turn to black people—
the hysterical strength we must
possess to survive our very existence,
– Nicole Sealey
Since I was a child I had a
pathological horror of
country people.
– Brendan Behan
Poem without Angel Food
by C. D. Wright
Well, a great many things have been said
in the oven of hours. We have not been
shaken out of the magnolias. Today was another
hard day. And tomorrow will be harder. Well,
that sounds like our gong. But we’ll have
the boy’s birthday and we will have
music and cake. Well, I will think only
good thoughts and go up and talk to the rock.
I dream of a powerful international network of activists, lawyers, academics, coders, organisers, writers, doctors, journalists, politicians and more, all fighting for the universal application of justice and the protection of human rights for *everyone*.
Can this be built?
– @ecomarxi
Old age, sickness, and death are unavoidable facts… you have no choice but to explore the state you’re in, hopefully with some patience, gentleness, and curiosity.
– Randall Ryotan Eiger
I think writing really helps you heal yourself. I think if you write long enough, you will be a healthy person. That is, if you write what you need to write, as opposed to what will make money, or what will make fame.
– Alice Walker
And now we have the phenomenon of the M.F.A. novel, which can often be a beautifully confected product. There are no rough edges.
– Arundhati Roy
In Cavafy’s Panhellenic world, there is one great object of love and loyalty of which defeat has not deprived them, the Greek language.
– W.H. Auden
A group of words, a phrase, may find its way into my head like something floating in the sea, and presently it attracts other things to it. I do tend to “feel” my way into a poem.
– Elizabeth Bishop
I see I am getting away from the question, but the question was not very interesting.
– Ernest Hemingway
His profession remained opaque to his mother. All through his MFA, she’d thought he was doing an MBA, and all through his PhD, she’d thought he was an apprentice librarian.
– @BobuqSayed
The most exciting thing is to read a poem out loud for the first time.
– Eileen Myles
to turn the ground over
to shovel and sift
until history
rewritten resurrected
returns to its rightful owners
– bell hooks
It’s hard to know what might work: 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
Yes, we are the 99%
all of us
refusing to forget
each other
– Alice Walker
stirring maps of existence
un-topiary vital sanctuary:
everything, everyone, everywhere
colossal furtive networks
veins, pulsing capillaries
stories bountiful in multitudes
– Alicia Sometimes, Traversal
When you’re tired,
remember
even breathing
is a great song.
– Joseph Fasano
Only the word puts us in contact with mute things.
– Giorgio Agamben
If sin is the theological name for the essential ontological indebtedness of the self, then love is the experience of a countermovement to sin that is oriented to a demand that exceeds the capacity or ability of the self.
– Simon Critchley
I am afraid I will love you forever and we will never be in the same room again.
– Clementine von Radics
To be humane, we must ever be ready to pronounce that wise, ingenious and modest statement ‘I do not know’.
– Galileo
It used to be
the west was farther,
the old monk said.
It was three weeks
from Omaha
to Denver.
– The Old Monk
Good motion
makes a circle,
the old monk noticed.
– The Old Monk
A wind from another geological age moves through the forests and groves, inconsolable, it creates waves on the rivers.
– Sharmistha Mohanty
How might we as individuals get in touch with the child that lives within us? By killing the dragon ‘Thou shalt’. By choosing not to live by other people’s rules? Right. Respecting them, but not living by them.
– Joseph Campbell
When I’m dead, I don’t want to be remembered as someone who bore her ills and never complained. I like complaining. It’s invigorating.
– Gillian O’Shaughnessy
The text is always written under the sweet pressure of love. My only torment, my only fear, is of failing to write as high up as the Other, my only chagrin is of failing to write as beautifully as Love.
– Hélène Cixous
what’s the best thing in the world?
—something out of it, i think.
– elizabeth barrett browning
Has everyone been in love? Not on the basis of the evidence. If they have, they’ve forgotten it. If everyone had been in love they’d treat their children differently. They’d treat each other differently.
– James Baldwin
i do not know much about gods; but i think that the river is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable, patient to some degree, at first
– t. s. eliot
Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour, and is not reminded of the flux of all things.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Each person’s grief journey is unique as a fingerprint or a snowflake.
– Earl A. Grollman
Those who share their love quietly, with no thought of reward, they are the heart of the world.
– Rabbi Tzvi Freeman
I allow myself to hope that the world will emerge from its present troubles, that it will one day learn to give the direction of its affairs, not to cruel swindlers and scoundrels, but to men possessed of wisdom and courage. I see before me a shining vision: a world where none are hungry, where few are ill, where work is pleasant and not excessive, where kindly feeling is common, and where minds released from fear create delight for eye, ear and heart. Do not say this is impossible. It is not impossible. I do not say it can be done tomorrow, but I do say that it could be done within a thousand years, if only men would bend their minds to the achievement of the kind of happiness that should be distinctive of man.
– Bertrand Russell, Human Society in Ethics and Politics
Yesterday I had a letter from a young woman who is living alone, a film maker of some reputation. She wants to do a film on people who live alone, and will come next week to talk about her plans. I gather she has some doubts about the solitary life. I told her that I feel it is not for the young (she is only thirty-three). I did not begin to live alone till I was forty-five, and had “lived” in the sense of passionate friendships and love affairs very richly for twenty-five years. I had a huge amount of life to think about and to digest, and, above all, I was a person by then and knew what I wanted of my life. The people we love are built into us. Every day I am suddenly aware of something someone taught me long ago — or just yesterday — of some certainty and self-awareness that grew out of conflict with someone I loved enough to try to encompass, however painful that effort may have been.
– May Sarton
Because traumatized people often have trouble sensing what is going on in their bodies, they lack a nuanced response to frustration. They either react to stress by becoming “spaced out” or with excessive anger. Whatever their response, they often can’t tell what is upsetting them. This failure to be in touch with their bodies contributes to their well-documented lack of self-protection and high rates of revictimization and also to their remarkable difficulties feeling pleasure, sensuality, and having a sense of meaning.
– Bessel van der Kolk
…it is necessary to abandon the used clothes, which already have the shape of our body and to forget our paths, which takes us always to the same places. This is the time to cross the river…if we don’t dare to do it, we will have stayed, forever beneath ourselves.
– F. Pessoa
The interior life is often stupid. Its egoism blinds it and deafens it … The trick of reason is to get the imagination to seize the actual world—if only from time to time.
– Annie Dillard
How surely gravity’s law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of the smallest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.
Each thing–
each stone, blossom, child–
is held in place.
– Rilke
Could it be that consciousness is an equally important part of the consistent picture of our world, despite the fact that so far one could safely ignore it in the description of the well-studied physical processes? Will it not turn out, with the further development of science, that the study of the universe and the study of consciousness are inseparably linked, and that ultimate progress in the one will be impossible without progress in the other?
– Physicist Andrei Linde (father of inflation theory)
It is not only my dreams, my belief is that all these dreams are yours as well. The only distinction between me and you is that I can articulate them. And that is what poetry or painting or literature or filmmaking is all about… and it is my duty because this might be the inner chronicle of what we are. We have to articulate ourselves, otherwise we would be cows in the field.
– Werner Herzog
The day has long passed when a university degree was a guarantee of experience in the humanities, or of literacy beyond its barest meaning of being able, after a fashion, to read and write.
– Robertson Davies
God can dawdle
and still get things
done,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
He made a desert in her mind. That’s where his ideas blossom.
– Canetti
pre-existing
thunderstorms
post-traumatic
sunsets
– Alec Finlay
Whether you like it or not, you are a child of fire. You descend from the Dragon, descend from the Phoenix.
– C. Dale Young
True design lies in a realm counter to trends.
– Sori Yanagi
I’m so envious of people who can actually imagine themselves doing a task and then just perform it – I think and think about the thing I have to do and I simply cannot imagine doing until the last possible minute when I fool myself by accidentally starting it.
– Amber Sparks
See where they come,
thy people,
so humbly appealing,
From the ancient lands
where the olden faiths
had birth.
– Albert Rice
Our culture tends to produce humans that are so far off from clarity that they don’t even know it exists.
– Daniel Thorson
Eldorado
by Edgar Allan Poe
Gaily bedight,
A gallant knight,
In sunshine and in shadow,
Had journeyed long,
Singing a song,
In search of Eldorado.
But he grew old—
This knight so bold—
And o’er his heart a shadow—
Fell as he found
No spot of ground
That looked like Eldorado.
And, as his strength
Failed him at length,
He met a pilgrim shadow—
‘Shadow,’ said he,
‘Where can it be—
This land of Eldorado?’
‘Over the Mountains
Of the Moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,’
The shade replied,—
‘If you seek for Eldorado!’
Maybe life is a series of crashes, climbs, and smiling for pictures.
– Rudy Francisco
Lies are sharp weapons. I will not die from lies.
– Cynthia Atkins
The inability to think critically often stems from failure to interrogate one’s own beliefs and assumptions. An ethics that cannot fathom its own monstrosity is ornamental and peripheral to the stakes of a future shared by humans. Praxis cannot be thoughtless.
– Alina Stefanescu
It is clear that ‘higher’ always means and implies ‘more inner,’ ‘more interior’, ‘deeper’, ‘more intimate’; while ‘lower’ implies ‘more outer’, ‘more external’, ‘shallower’, ‘less intimate’ … the more interior a thing is, the less visible it is likely to be. The progression from visibility to invisibility is just another facet of the great hierarchy of Levels of Being … we do not understand that life, before all other definitions of it, is a drama of the visible and the invisible.
– E.F. Schumacher
Everything can be seen directly except the eye through which we see.
– E.F. Schumacher
Let the slave grinding at the mill run out into the field;
Let him look up into the heavens and laugh in the bright air;
Let the enchanted soul shut up in darkness and in sighing,
Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years,
Rise and look out; his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open.
– William Blake
Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
– Robert F. Kennedy
In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.
– Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
Vowels ploughed into other: opened ground.
The mildest February for twenty years
Is mist bands over furrows, a deep no sound
Vulnerable to distant gargling tractors.
Our road is steaming, the turned-up acres breathe.
– Seamus Heaney
the plum blossom scent
has chased away the
return of the cold
– Basho
The spread of the ripples
Is not due to its size
But is proportionate
To the hidden power
In the stone thrown in the pool.
– Kenneth Rexroth
If you’ve been around for a while, you know that much of the time, if you are patient and are paying attention, you will see that God will restore what the locusts have taken away.
– Anne Lamott
Not sure if I’ll ever be able to quit this place; born on the left, raised on the right, back living in the middle.
– Natasha Carthew, On Cornwall
When I think of the men I’ve been with, every one of them stood between me and my writing.
– Sigrid Nunez
Oh, Poet of our Race,
We reverence thy name
As thy hist’ry we retrace,
Which enfolds thy widespread fame.
– Maggie Pogue Johnson
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!
– Countee Cullen
…And the winter river bed, the long,
slow ache I carry inside, briefly fills
with the singing of spring melt.
– Sheri Benning
“diction” is a word literature students use but professional critics almost never do; it seems to function primarily as a sign to professors that one is writing for an assignment.
– Dan Sinykin
hopscotch drawn
in yesterday’s snow
spring fever
– @hegelincanada
her voice was like what we are promised in the photo-telephone of the future; the visual image was clearly outlined in the sound.
– Marcel Proust
star gazing
not a single minute
wasted
– @hegelincanada
Poets and objects may be nothing more than the hosts poems pass through before sprouting the wings of language.
– Lee Seong-bin, (tr. Anton Hur)
nothing is everything there is to say.
– Stanley Cavell
The possible and the impossible are both in the world.
– Bataille
A voyage without love is rather sterile.
– James Salter
In order to love, we must be here, and then our presence will embrace the presence of the other person. Only then will they have the feeling of being loved.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
I was out of sorts. They are deep, my sorts, a deep ditch, and I am not often out of them.
– Samuel Beckett; tr. Patrick Bowles
If you read my story, and you’re disturbed by what you read, then think about where you spend your money. And don’t let one inspirational commercial or marketing campaign make you forget what you read.
– Kara Goucher
Chicago, where I only spent three years, gave me my first American identity. Everything that happened to me there made a huge impression on me.
– Charles Simic
I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found the story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?
– Virginia Woolf, The Waves
I think I live in poetry, rather than visit it occasionally. By that I mean I reside in other’s poems as well as my own. And that makes the creative process much easier. And reading other is an utter joy. I don’t understand how anyone only cares about their own work.
– Anna Saunders
I had just read that repetition is the reality and the seriousness of life, that repetition is the daily bread of everyday life, its blessing fills you up.
– Vigdis Hjorth, (tr. by Charlotte Barslund)
in winter darkness
just the thought of a lily
rising fleshly white
– Catherine Baker
The blood jet is poetry,
There is no stopping it.
– Sylvia Plath
We don’t write letters now, we telephone. And one of these days we are going to have TV sets which lonely people can talk to and get answers back. Then no one will read anymore.
– Henry Green
A big part of why I left Twitter is because, in theory, it’s the platform for writers, but, in practice, it’s the place where no one reads.
– @MaryHeglar
you know how wild it is to want to be a writer when everyone’s losing their ability to read?
– Skyler Higley
We regret the things we didn’t do more than the things we did.
The pain of trying and failing may be intense but at least it tends to be over quickly.
The pain of failing to try is less intense, but never really goes away.
– @ShaneAParrish
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
A fool throws a stone into the sea and a hundred wise men cannot pull it out.
– Cypriot Greek proverb
We warned you about this Climate Crisis. Now it’s here
The planet is desperate for visionary leadership. The planet is desperate for policy that creates an equitable transition away from FossilFuels, and into climate emergency mode as a society.
– @ProfStrachan
let ruin end here
let him find honey
– Danez Smith
I sometimes think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own.
– Sylvia Plath
We fight and we argue because we have complexes. So learn about your own psychology. That’s the best thing we can do.
– Laura London
I prefer the sort of freedom whereby everyone enjoys the dignity it provides, and not the sort where only the people who used to enjoy that freedom in the olden days still get to.
– Andy Perrin
my book to literary critics: well, despite appearances, I’m really a work of philosophy
my book to philosophers: well, despite appearances, I’m really a work of literary criticism
– V. Joshua Adams
The appropriation of ends has revealed itself to be an appropriations of the wealth produced by a technics emancipated from all horizons other than that of its own expansion. Never has poverty been more blatant, nor wealth more repugnant.
– Jean-Luc Nancy
Throughout history, poets have helped us examine ourselves and our responsibilities to each other.
– Ricardo Maldonado
Delay is natural to a writer. He is like a surfer—he bides his time, waits for the perfect wave.
– E. B. White
Catalan poet Joan Margarit:
Making a poem is much more difficult than dying. No one can do it—a poem. Dying is available to everyone.
Conversation is when you don’t know what the next thing the person you are with is going to say.
– John Cage
All of us can be reactive in small and big ways. The ego likes to be “the one” that is always right. What if we could hold still in those uncomfortable situations instead? It could been of the bravest thing we can do and be. Holding still gives us time to ask, “What would love do here?” It gives us a chance to act from our hearts instead of from habit.
– Gunilla Norris
Change is the new,
improved
word for god,
lovely enough
to raise a song
or implicate
a sea of wrongs,
mighty enough,
like other gods,
to shelter,
bring together,
and estrange us.
Please, god,
we seem to say,
change us.
– wendy videlock
How much more beautiful the Mona Lisa would be if we couldn’t see it!
– Fernando Pessoa
Take as much
as God gives you
and give some
to others,
the old monk instructed.
– The Old Monk
Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I’d rather boast about the ones I’ve read.
– Jorge Luis Borges
Leave one spot, only one spot without blood, so I can explain to the children tomorrow what the color of the sand was like […]
– Khaled Juma, Palestinian poet
Every viewpoint of reality, whether religious or scientific, is a system of ordering and relating to things. But probably just because it is a system for ordering the surrounding chaos, both the inner and the outer chaos which our ego complex confronts, the ordering process has limitations; which probably explains why after some time order is felt as a prison.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
The shadow plunges man into the immediacy of situations here and now, and thus creates the real biography of the human being, who is always inclined to assume he is only what he thinks he is. It is the biography created by the shadow that counts.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
People are born every minute of their lives, and what they are in each of those minutes is what they are completely.
– Rachel Kushner
Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge.
– Alberto Manguel
Politics is disappointing. Most young people turn their backs on politics, not because of the lack of excitement of politics as it is practiced, but because of the shallowness, venality, and image-making as these are perceived through the media – one of the technology’s greatest achievements.
– Walker Percy
At first a yogi feels his mind
Is tumbling like a waterfall;
In mid-course, like the Ganges
It flows on slow and gentle;
In the end, it is a great
Vast ocean, where the Lights
Of Son and Mother merge in one.
– Tilopa
So much of people’s symptoms are related to an up-regulated sympathetic response. Our limbic system by design is monitoring our environment to meet threats. This is the survival strategy that the root is vigilance.
At the time of a perceived danger/ trauma, called the Event, all the neurological markers from our sensor systems are embedded in the association and memory. When sensory stimulus occurs, the limbic system looks for past experiences to utilize as a response strategy.
Our breathing apparatus is part of this sensory system. That is why people change breathing strategies so as not to continue to stimulate those past experiences. However, the association runs like a movie playing in the non conscious background.
We have to lean in and feel into those memories and associations to remove the charge that keeps up tethered to a particular event or events. While we can not change the past, we can change how we are responding to the past in the present moment.
– Joseph Schwartz
It never really goes away, the longing for the life not lived, because isn’t that part of how we come to know ourselves too? Through what we lack as much as what we have, all we dream but do not hold. Some desires have no resolution.
– Madelaine Lucas
The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twister pride in cynicism; there are many who confine themselves to criticism of the way others do what they themselves dare not even attempt. There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes to second achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticize work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life’s realities — all these are marks, not as the possessor would fain to think, of superiority but of weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear their part painfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the affection of contempt for the achievements of others, to hide from others and from themselves in their own weakness. The role is easy; there is none easier, save only the role of the man who sneers alike at both criticism and performance…
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat…
The man who does nothing cuts the same sordid figure in the pages of history, whether he be a cynic, or fop, or voluptuary. There is little use for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of great and generous emotion, of the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty enthusiasm, of the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder.
– Theodore Roosevelt
Those who are too weak to make a stand against reality have no choice but to obliterate themselves by identifying with it. They are never rationally reconciled to civilization. Instead, they bow to it, secretly accepting the identity of reason and domination, of civilization and the ideal, however much they may shrug their shoulders. Well-informed cynicism is only another mode of conformity. These people willingly embrace or force themselves to accept the rule of the stronger as the eternal norm.
– Max Horkheimer
I can hear the sizzle of newborn stars, and know anything of meaning, of the fierce magic emerging here. I am witness to flexible eternity, the evolving past, and I know we will live forever, as dust or breath in the face of stars, in the shifting pattern of winds.
– Joy Harjo
The alchemists stressed that their opus requires a container, the alchemical vessel. Psychologically this vessel is an inner attitude of commitment to confront and accept whatever is found within oneself…
– Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Jung observed that a neurosis is always found in the flight from authentic suffering. Naturally, no one wants to suffer, but Jung’s observation suggests that there is a distinction between authentic and inauthentic suffering.
– James Hollis
If your mind wanders here and there, you must be more mindful. You must always learn to go to the root (yoni).
– Bhante Henepola Gunaratana
redwood trees
seeking the unknown
among the clouds
– James Welsh
…the brightness washed over me in unending waves and connected me to the earth, the water, the trees, the air, as I opened up and kept on opening.
– Jeff VanderMeer
So how could you neglect gradual cultivation simply because of one moment of awakening? After awakening, you must be constantly on your guard. If deluded thoughts suddenly appear, do not follow after them. Then and only then will your practice reach completion.
– Joseph Goldstein
The children were asking
a thousand questions about why
the sky was blue and grass was green
when suddenly their tongues
were stilled by an answer they
never saw.
– Chard deNiord
They thought that all that was needed was independence from external tyrannies; the internal tyrants, far more harmful to life and growth… were left to take care of themselves.
– Emma Goldman
Politics is made up of two words:
“Poli,” which is Greek for “many,” and “tics,”
which are bloodsucking insects.
– Gore Vidal
The poetic image is a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche
– Gaston Bachelard
Even when silvery fish after fish
comes back belly up, and the country plummets
into a crepitating crater of hatred, isn’t there still
something singing?
– Ada Limón
We are not complaining about our students. We are complaining about what has been taken from them.
– Adam Kotsko
On my tongue
the bitter taste of patience:
Who’s sweet enough to wipe it off?
– Abbas Kiarostami
…as consumers rely on national outlets, their political polarization increases.
– Clare Malone
I try to avoid divisive political or activist narratives that condescend to underserved people. What if we immerse readers in slowness rather than the spectacle of disaster?
– Kerri Arsenault
She who cannot dance will say, the drum is bad.
– African Proverb
Every book you read for pleasure is a victory. You are fighting the idea that education is only worthwhile if it benefits your career, that all your free time should be monetized, and that you should be too busy hustling to nurture your curiosity. Keep reading.
– @iconawrites
People will never understand what we are doing if they can’t feel. All art is abstract. All music is abstract. But it’s all real…
– Joan Mitchell
Suffering is the sandpaper of our incarnation. It does its work of shaping us.
– Ram Dass
She became involved in leftist and anarchist activism and literature, from participating in clandestine abortion clinics to joining the editorial board of avant-garde journals.
– Léon Pradeau, On the career of French poet Liliane Giraudon
An aesthetic reading of a photograph, of the way it is offered to the gaze, is not opposed to other readings.
– Ariella Azoulay, Getting Rid of the Distinction Between the Aesthetic and the Political
Satan, on the contrary, is thin, ascetic and a fanatical devotee of logic. He reads Machiavelli, Ignatius of Loyola, Marx and Hegel; he is cold and unmerciful to mankind, out of a kind of mathematical mercifulness. He is damned always to do that which is most repugnant to him: to become a slaughterer, in order to abolish slaughtering, to sacrifice lambs so that no more lambs may be slaughtered, to whip people with knouts so that they may learn not to let themselves be whipped, to strip himself of every scruple in the name of a higher scrupulousness, and to challenge the hatred of mankind because of his love for it–an abstract and geometric love.
– Arthur Koestler
It is wonderful how much time good people spend fighting the devil. If they would only expend the same amount of energy loving their fellow men, the devil would die in his own tracks of ennui.
– Helen Keller
Education which fails to clarify our central convictions is mere training or indulgence. For it is our central convictions that are in disorder, and, as long as the present anti-metaphysical temper persists, the disorder will grow worse. Education, far from ranking as man’s greatest resource, will then be an agent of destruction.
– E.F. Schumacher
A guru is a spiritual vehicle; an entrance way. He’s a pure mirror. He isn’t anybody at all.
– Ram Dass
NIGHT’S MARDI GRAS
Night is the true democracy. When day
Like some great monarch with his train has passed,
In regal pomp and splendor to the last,
The stars troop forth along the Milky Way,
A jostling crowd, in radiant disarray,
On heaven’s broad boulevard in pageants vast.
And things of earth, the hunted and outcast,
Come from their haunts and hiding-places; yea,
Even from the nooks and crannies of the mind
Visions uncouth and vagrant fancies start,
And specters of dead joy, that shun the light,
And impotent regrets and terrors blind,
Each one, in form grotesque, playing its part
In the fantastic Mardi Gras of Night.
– Edward J. Wheeler
INACTION OF SHOES
There are many things to be done today
and it’s a lovely day to do them in
Each thing a joy to do
and a joy to have done
I can tell because of the calm I feel
when I think about doing them
I can almost hear them say to me
Thank you for doing us
And when evening comes
I’ll remove my shoes and place them on the floor
And think how good they look
sitting? . . . standing? . . . there
Not doing anything
– Ron Padgett
More and more I find I want to be living in a Big Here and a Long Now.
– Brian Eno
Never hide yourself unless concealment is complete. Be alone. [….] What is, is now, must have the quivering intensity of an arrow thudding into a tree. […] Persist, endure, follow, watch.
– J.A. Baker
Once we are completely familiar with the negative aspects of the state of our being then we know the “way out” automatically.
– Chögyam Trungpa
We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.
– Jane Austen
You will have a story to tell, which is salvation that again and again saves us, the way Jesus saves some people, or the way sobriety does. Stories to tell or hear—either way, it’s medicine.
– Anne Lamott
A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.
– Isaac Bashevis Singer
Stop wanting it
the moment before
you let it go,
the old monk advised.
– The Old Monk
If we allow this brazen slaughter to continue, even as it is livestreamed into the most private recesses of our personal lives, we are complicit in it. Something in our moral selves will be altered forever.
– Arundhati Roy
To keep it all
from colliding,
that’s what God’s
computer’s for,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
In the beginning was the Other.
– Schism Blue
The vast mass are these middling souls. They have no aristocratic individuality, such as is demanded by Christ or Buddha or Plato. So they skulk in a mass and secretly are bent on their own ultimate self-glorification.
– DH Lawrence
Ceasefire
The brain of one human child
will hold over 2.5 quadrillion bytes
of information
2.5 quadrillion memories
that will never be again—
(Sunday morning, father in the orange trees,
the way the stars appeared only to her.)
When you kill a child you kill all the stars in the world.
– Joseph Fasano
The language marches in step with the executioners. Therefore we must get a new language.
– Tomas Tranströmer
When you write a book, you get to make things last in a way that they don’t in the real world.
– Kelly Link
May I never
say a thing
so well as Yeats.
To be badly remembered
and endlessly repeated
by fools
with bovine confidence.
– Kenneth Folk
You’ll notice that I haven’t talked about love. Or about happiness. I’ve talked about becoming – or remaining – the person who can be happy, a lot of the time, without thinking that being happy is what it’s all about. It’s not. It’s about becoming the largest, most inclusive, most responsive person you can be.
– Susan Sontag
To listen is to continually give up all expectation
and to give our attention, completely and freshly,
to what is before us, not really knowing
what we will hear or what that will mean.
In the practice of our days, to listen is to lean in,
softly, with a willingness to be changed by what we hear.
– Mark Nepo
Give me two hours a day of activity, and I’ll take the other twenty-two in dreams.
– Luis Buñuel
The sun will stand as your best man
And whistle
When you have found the courage
To marry forgiveness
When you have found the courage
to marry
Love.
– Hafiz
Only we two are one, not you and night,
Nor night and I, but you and I, alone,
– Wallace Stevens
The basic story of the hero journey involves giving up where you are, going into the realm of adventure, coming to some kind of symbolically rendered realization, and then returning to the field of normal life.
– Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss
Summit of Corrie Etchachan
by Nan Shepherd
But in the climbing ecstasy of thought,
Ere consummation, ere the final peak,
Come hours like this. Behind, the long defile,
The steep rock-path, alongside which, from under
Snow-caves, sharp-corniced, tumble the ice-cold waters.
And now, here, at the corrie’s summit, no peak,
No vision of the blue world, far, unattainable,
But this grey plateau, rock-strewn, vast, silent,
The dark loch, the toiling crags, the snow;
A mountain shut within itself, yet a world,
Immensity. So may the mind achieve,
Toiling, no vision of the infinite,
But a vast, dark and inscrutable sense
Of its own terror, its own glory and power.
So there I lie on the plateau, under me the central core of fire from which was thrust this grumbling, grinding mass of plutonic rock, over me blue air, and between the fire of the rock and the fire of the sun, scree, soil and water, moss, grass, flower and tree, insect, bird and beast, wind, rain, and snow – the total mountain. Slowly I have found my way in.
– Nan Shepherd
Thirty years in the life of a mountain is nothing – the flicker of an eyelid. Yet in the thirty years since this book was written many things have happened to the Cairngorms, some of them spectacular things, things that have won them a place in the Press. … Now, an old woman, I begin tidying out my possessions and reading it again and I realize that the tale of my traffic with a mountain is as valid today as it was then. That it was a traffic of love is sufficiently clear; but love pursued with fervour is one of the roads to knowledge.
– Nan Shepherd
Embodiment
There is no substance but light.
The visible worlds
Are light
Undergoing the process of creation
Into some vision
that a god thought out in light
And that in consummation
Will shine as pure light.
We are this substance,
We are too near it,
As the god wrests it and strains it,
To see it for what it is.
We are the knots and tangles
In a god’s vision,
The thrawn refusals
Of material to become form.
– Nan Shepherd
Part of finding your soul is to wake up to this habit of thinking like others and go your own way. It may be painful to separate from those people who have given you a sense of belonging and purpose, but your soul is at stake.
– Thomas Moore
Our expressions have too much God in them, too much cloud, too much blood on nail, too much arrow, too much quiver.
– Ira Sadoff
…love is the most sacred of anxieties !
– Ivan Goncharov
Passivity increases exponentially as the educational system turns out ‘products’.
– Robert Bly, Iron John
An empty man is full of himself.
– Edward Abbey
Sin is not the adult bookstore on the corner. It is the hard heart, the lack of generosity, and all the isms, racism and sexism and so forth.
– Anne Lamott
It is important to understand that you are not separate from the dynamics that create supernovas, stars, galaxies, universes, and the structure of space-time on the Planck scale. You are an integral part of this flow of information. And what you call your body and the complexity of the biology around you, the fractal nature of trees, plants, etc., all emerge from this information flow. All of that emerges from that stream of information, including what you think of as your consciousness.
– Nassim Haramein, physicist
You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another’s interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that – well, lucky you.
– Philip Roth
I need to be alone for certain periods of time or I violate my own rhythm.
– Lee Krasner
disappointment must attend him, if he speaks without speaking to the purpose, or without describing things with that fire, with that force, and with that energy; bold thought, untiring imagination, softness and harmony, make a true poem.
– ming-chung
I think life is a process. You wake up. Then you wake up some more. One self dies. Another is born. It’s an evolution of consciousness. If you look at the way God created the world, it’s always about a seed and a sprout and a flower. And then it goes back to the seed. It’s always about process and unfolding. We’re on a journey of greater and greater consciousness, becoming more compassionate, more loving, and that is a lifelong spiraling process.
– Sue Monk Kidd
Poetry is everywhere;
it just needs editing.
– James Tate
We are living in a time where two unfortunate dynamics are dovetailing together. We have the rise of artistic populism, where every kind of story is now presumed to have the sole purpose of providing escapism, of helping people avoid the depravations of the real world. And we have a progressive political movement that has become so addicted to judgment – the constant sorting of all people into Good and Bad, where every new person declared Bad serves to make the people who consider themselves Good that much more rarefied. Liberals have, to a remarkable degree, given up on forgiveness, which is another way of saying that they have given up on hope. Star Wars is a tale from an earlier era, where redemption was the presumed pursuit of all good people, rather than our own era where the most fiercely guarded right is the right to judge. Star Wars is from an earlier, more romantic, more humane time.
– Fredrik deBoer
The realization that every act, every word, every thought of ours not only influences our environment but for some mysterious reason forms an integral and important part of the Universe, fits into it as if by necessity so to say, in the very moment we do, or say, or think it – is an overwhelming and even shattering experience. The tremendous responsibility of it is terrifying. If all of us only knew that the smallest act of ours, or a tiny thought, has such far-reaching effects as to set in motion forces which perhaps could shatter a galaxy…If we know it deeply and absolutely, if this realization becomes engraved permanently on our hearts, on our minds, how careful we would act and speak and think. How precious life would become in its integral oneness.
– Irina Tweedie
The land of healing lies within, radiant with the happiness that is blindly sought in a thousand outer directions.
– Swami Vivekananda
Buddhism offers a skillful means for relieving feelings of outrage, by shifting the perspective from how outraged one feels to the question of who feels outraged.
– Mark Epstein
Disappointment is the inevitable consequence of endless ambition, and bitterness a common refrain when things do not work out.
– Mark Epstein
Listen, I’ve got something very obvious to tell you. You’re not allowed to give up. If they decide to kill me, it means that we are incredibly strong.
– Alexei Navalny
All of my favorite friends
Are the people who move
In and out
They derail
They derailed
The mind is not the rational
It is the irrational
It is the irrational
That is worth living for
You think that knowledge is ordered
But you are sadly wrong
Knowledge is the divine
Unordered thing
– Dorothea Lasky, The Mind Thing
What is it we are questing for? It is the fulfillment of that which is potential in each of us. Questing for it is not an ego trip; it is an adventure to bring into fulfillment your gift to the world, which is yourself.
– Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss
Mental sluggishness is one great factor in closing the mind to new ideas. The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alteration of old beliefs.
– John Dewey
Of all the causes which conspire to blind
Man’s erring judgement, and misguide the mind,
What the weak head with strongest bias rules,
Is pride, the never-failing vice of fools.
– Alexander Pope
a little learning is a dang’rous thing; / drink deep, or taste not the piërian spring: / there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, / and drinking largely sobers us again.
– alexander pope
When we ‘find our voice,’ what’s really happening is that we’re choosing a voice from among the many voices we’re able to ‘do,’ and we’re choosing it because…of all the voices we contain, it’s the one, so far, that has proven itself to be the most energetic.
– George Saunders
I want for us to want
to patch every heart
and pave every road
and destroy every system
that has ever left us
broken.
– Jordan Jace
are there really people who want to read essays only about other people behaving perfectly & responsibly at all times because if so I recommend reading……….no, I can’t actually think of anyone sorry, that is not a recognizable person.
– R.O. Kwon
The first service one owes to others in a community involves listening to them. Just as our love for God begins with listening to God’s Word, the beginning of love for others is learning to listen to them.
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again.
– Paul Auster
Why do we not consider what contradictions we find in our own judgments; how many things were yesterday articles of our faith, that to-day appear no other than fables ?
– Montaigne
The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it.
– Jules Renard
Have you witnessed the ocean
Moving with so much gust and life
Have you witnessed the river
Still waters bubbling the rebirth of school
Have you witnessed your body
– Mahogany L. Browne
When it comes to revolutionaries, trust only the sad ones. The enthusiastic ones are the oppressors of tomorrow.
– William T. Vollmann
If your reason for sitting or doing postmeditation practice or any other kind of practice is self improvement, it is like eating poisonous food.
– Chögyam Trungpa
If you get rid of qualities you don’t like by denying them, you become more and more unaware of what you are, you declare yourself more and more non-existent, and your devils will grow fatter and fatter.
– CG Jung
Write towards your spark. Write towards the trouble.
– Ana Maria Spagna
We should rather examine, who is better learned, than who is more learned.
– Montaigne
When we wake up to how human life on this planet actually is, and stop running away or building walls in our heart, then we develop a wiser motivation for our life.
– Ajahn Sucitto
You know you’re growing when instead of contemplating stepping out of the box occasionally, you live outside of the box consistently.
Get free. Stay free.
– Dr. Thema
All the great persons I have ever met are characterized by what I would call “radical humility.”
– Richard Rohr
My editor calls the neglected novel the sacrificial twin. Eventually, one pulls ahead.
– Alice McDermott
Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.
– Werner Herzog
And strangely enough, these experiences of the six realms – gods, jealous gods, human beings, animals, hungry ghosts, and hell – are ‘space’, different versions of space. It seems intense and solid, but in actual fact it isn’t at all. They are different aspects of space – that’s the exciting or interesting part. In fact, it is complete open space, without any colors or any particularly solid way of relating. That is why they have been described as six types of consciousness. It is pure consciousness rather than a solid situation – it almost could be called unconsciousness rather than even consciousness. The development of ego operates completely at the unconscious level, from one unconscious level to another unconscious level. That is why these levels are referred to as loka, which means ‘realm’ or ‘world’. They are six types of ‘world’. Each is a complete unit of its own. In order to have a world, you have to have an atmosphere; you have to have space to formulate things. So the six realms are the fundamental space through which any bardo experience operates. Because of that, it is possible to transmute these spaces into six types of awakened state, or freedom.
– Chögyam Trungpa
And then I asked myself whether originality did indeed prove that great writers were gods, ruling each one over a kingdom that was his alone, or whether all that was not rather make-believe, whether the differences between one man’s book and another’s were not the result of their respective labours rather than the expression of a radical and essential difference between two contrasted personalities.
– Marcel Proust
To travel internationally is to become increasingly unnerved by the way American culture pervades the world. […] We shake our heads at the sight of a McDonald’s on Tiananmen Square or a Nike factory in Malaysia. The visual landscape of the world has become depressingly familiar. […] We have the uneasy feeling that our influence over the rest of the world is coming at a great cost: loss of the world’s diversity and complexity. For all our self-incrimination, however, we have yet to face our most disturbing effect on the rest of the world. Our golden arches do not represent our most troubling impact on other cultures; rather, it is how we are flattening the landscape of the human psyche itself. We are engaged in the grand project of Americanizing the world’s understanding of the human mind.
[….] Particularly telling are the changing manifestations of mental illnesses around the world. A few mental illnesses identified and popularized in the United States now appear to be spreading across cultural boundaries and around the world with the speed of contagious diseases. Indigenous forms of mental illness and healing are being bulldozed by disease categories and treatments made in the USA. […] In the past two decades, for instance, eating disorders have risen in Hong Kong [and] PTSD has become the common diagnosis, the lingua franca of human suffering, following wars and natural disasters. In addition, a particularly Americanized version of depression is on the rise in countries across the world. Over the past thirty years, we Americans have been industriously exporting our ideas about mental illness.
[…] We should worry about this loss of diversity in the world’s differing conceptions and treatments of mental illness in exactly the same way we worry about the loss of biological diversity in nature. Modes of healing and culturally specific beliefs about how to achieve mental health can be lost to humanity with the grim finality of an animal or plant lapsing into extinction. And like those plants and animals, the diversity in the human understanding of the mind can disappear before we’ve truly comprehended its value. Biologists suggest that within the dense and vital biodiversity of the rain forest are chemical compounds that may someday cure modern plagues. Similarly, within the diversity of different cultural understandings of mental health and illness may exist knowledge that we cannot afford to lose. We erase this diversity at our own peril.
– Ethan Watters
Paradise consists of reality looked at from a different consciousness. This seems a let-down at first. It does not come when you have earned it, but when you can stand it.
– Robert A. Johnson
Formally, the poem must work as a complete piece, and each stanza must work as its own individual poem. It’s what I call a broken sonnet…
– Niki Herd
For them I have woven a wide shroud
from the humble words I heard among them.
I remember them always, everywhere,
I will never forget them, whatever comes.
– Anna Akhmatova, Epilogue
The known universe has one
complete lover and that is the
greatest poet.
– Walt Whitman
…poetry is the language of redemption, revolution, revelation.
– Michellan Sarile-Alagao
I’ll let the earth / do with me / what it will / when / there’s nothing / left to fight for / I too will rush / to become / undone
– Ty Chapman
This is one superpower of being old: You know that things are probably going to work out without your tense, controlling input. Maybe you won’t get your way, which I hate, but the roiled ponds of misunderstanding and hurt will settle.
Older age gives us the knowledge of how powerless we are — not helpless so much but with little control over life’s results. I don’t love this. You come to forks in the road where you think, I can’t bear this, I can’t do this, I can’t fix this; I see no reason for hope. Plus, what if Iran gets involved, and what if there’s a nuclear exchange, and what if this is the end?
But then, if you are old, you remember countless other falling-outs, other miserable patches with people you love, where peace was restored. I believe in the resiliency of relationships, even if I struggle not to be initially devastated every time I disappoint someone.
This is the main advice I give younger people who get troubled and stuck. I say, “Yes, it sounds really awful. Just do one good thing, and then another, and breathe. You’re going to be okay.” I tell them what John Lennon said: “Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.”
– Anne Lamott
One of the most wicked destructive forces, psychologically speaking, is unused creative power… If someone has a creative gift and out of laziness, or for some other reason, doesn’t use it, the psychic energy turns to sheer poison. That’s why we often diagnose neuroses and psychotic diseases as not-lived higher possibilities.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
To ask, every day, “What matters, in the end?” is to create the possibility of differentiated choice, the potential to overthrow the tyranny of our history, so as to honour something in us that has always been there, waiting for our courage.
– James Hollis
I became a psychotherapist because I so love the imagination. William Blake says: “The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself” For me, psychotherapy is essentially an affair of images – of how we imagine and, more important, reimagine ourselves.
– Vannoy Adams
Anything psychic is Janus-faced—it looks both backwards and forwards. Because it is so evolving, it is also preparing the future. Were this not so, intentions, aims, plans, calculations, predictions, and premonitions would be psychological impossibilities.
– Carl G. Jung
Most people are not looking for provable truths. As you said, truth is often accompanied by intense pain, and almost no one is looking for painful truths. What people need is beautiful, comforting stories that make them feel as if their lives have some meaning.
– Haruki Murakami
The dagger wounds someone else—
But it is I who feels the lacerations,
Ameer,
Is it true that all the world’s pain is inside of you?
– Ameer Minai
Choose not to be harmed‚ and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed‚ and you haven’t been.
– Marcus Aurelius
I will not remain calm. I will become insufferable at times. I will not hold you responsible for my moods. I will transmute my shit. I will be human. I will always soften.
– McCall Erickson
Humans were not cast out of a Garden of Eden
We thrust ourselves out of a warm and plentiful sea
And onto the rocky shores
A magnet for evolution and pain
– Nomenclature
Everything in life is a story just waiting to be written.
– M.G. Marsh, Letters
Trees at Night
by Helene Johnson
Slim Sentinels
Stretching lacy arms
About a slumbrous moon;
Black quivering
Silhouettes,
Tremulous,
Stencilled on the petal
Of a bluebell;
Ink sputtered
On a robin’s breast;
The jagged rent
Of mountains
Reflected in a
Stilly sleeping lake;
Fragile pinnacles
Of fairy castles;
Torn webs of shadows;
And
Printed ’gainst the sky—
The trembling beauty
Of an urgent pine.
She does not know
Her beauty,
She thinks her brown body
Has no glory.
– Waring Cuney
Humor comes from the surprise release of some buried tension.
– Lorrie Moore
A world of dust–
airborne over the sea,
chalk cliffs and loess hills
– Voima Oy
Neruda adored life. He was wild about everything.
– Mario Vargas Llosa
Everything changes when you start to emit your own frequency rather than absorbing the frequencies around you, when you start imprinting your intent on the universe rather than receiving an imprint from existence.
– Barbara Marciniak
wanted to tell you
saturday before world stirs
the music has gone
– @haiku366
beyond ideas
of right and wrong…
tonight’s stars
– Michele Harvey
The Making of Sand
by Ayaz
Empty pages
Flap in the wind
In the sovereign silence
There is no history
There is only the cracking
And polishing of stones
by the sun
You see the making of sand
Is a long business
Shaped and re shaped
By surrender
What if silence
is much more than
the absence of noise
is a rooting down
is a looking way up
is a quality of being
that isn’t free of sound
but rather a space to exist
more fully grounded
in the possibility of who
you truly are, a way to witness
your full self being born?
– Heidi Barr
Thank You
Thank you for the coffee, thank you for the cup
Thank you for the morning and for waking me up
Thank you for the sugar, thank you for the cream
Thank you that the night was only but a dream
Ooooh, thank you
Thank you for the traffic and the menial job
For my baby crying and the craziest dog
For making me a button that says undo
Thank you for the way we make babies too
Ooooh, thank you
O mercy, O mercy
You are everywhere
You were always as close
As a whispering prayer
O mercy, O mercy
When the world doesn’t care
Be my bosom of Abraham
Be my rocking chair
Thank you for the rope that won’t ever let me go
Thank you for the yes when everybody else said no
Thank you for the seesaw, thank you for the swing
Thank you for the gloves in the boxing ring
Ooooh, thank you
O mercy, O mercy
You are everywhere
You were always as close
As a whispering prayer
O mercy, O mercy
When the world doesn’t care
Be my bosom of Abraham
Be my rocking chair
Thank you for a love that can overcome regret
Thank you for the joy that I haven’t found yet
Thank you for the apple, thank you for the tree
And thank you for dancing in the dark inside of me
Ooooh, thank you
– Tom Prasada-Rao
What was passed is present, what will be future is past, and what can never be might return time and time again.
– Andre Aciman, In Freud’s Shadow: Part One
How much we lose in gaining this truer vision of ourselves… How much smaller I have become, I said to myself, through an erosion necessary to survival perhaps and perhaps still to be regretted, I’ve worn myself down to a bearable size.
– Garth Greenwell, Mentor
My naive obsession was to shape something so true, energized, and hilarious, it would necessarily outlive me. The goal was not becoming known, it was becoming useful.
– Allan Gurganus
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
– Li-Young Lee
When I am old and infirm
I fear I shall no longer
Be able to roam among
The beautiful mountains.
Clarifying my mind,
I shall meditate on mountain
Trails which wander in vision.
– Tsung Ping, (tr. Kenneth Rexroth)
We need a much broader, more expansive sense of life—perhaps a more playful and mischievous sense of vitality.
– David Abram
It is always easy to be logical. It is almost impossible to be logical to the bitter end.
– Albert Camus
Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life. This is what makes us human. But it comes with a costly price: the wound of mortality. Our existence is forever shadowed by the knowledge that we will grow, blossom, and, inevitably, diminish and die.
– Irvin D. Yalom
Dems keep winning elections they’re not supposed to win and trump owes $450,000,000 he doesn’t have.
Again, I have zero clue what will happen, but there’s absolutely no basis for the dominant narrative being that the democrats are screwed.
It’s just weird.
– Ethan Nichtern
You do not command things to appear by your words or loud affirmations. Such vain repetition is more often than not confirmation of the opposite. Decreeing is ever done in consciousness.
– Neville Goddard
A just society is a society that if you knew everything about it, you’d be willing to enter it in a random place.
– John Rawls
I hope, among you, it will make hours of pleasure and sunshine. Let us pull together, with this our motto: Envy no man who progresses honestly, but earnestly strive to oppose those who oppress.
– Julius C. Wright
Also, it was one of those days when you do something, it works out, and then you wish that you’d known in advance that it was going to work, so you could have enjoyed it while it was happening.
– Julian Cope
As long as there are human beings about
there is never going to be any peace
for any individual upon this earth
(or anywhere else they might escape to).
All you can do is maybe grab ten lucky minutes
here or maybe an hour there.
– Charles Bukowski
Thoughts will lead you in circles. Silence will bring you back to your centre.
– Rasheed Ogunlaru
I must learn the dregs of my thought, my dreams, are the speech of my soul.
– C.G. Jung
You can be in paradise only when you do not know what it is like to be in paradise. As soon as you know, paradise is gone. No effort of thought can take you back, for thought – the conscious awareness of yourself as a mortal being – is the Fall. In the Garden of Eden, the primordial human pair are clothed in ignorance of themselves. When they come to self-awareness, they find they are naked. Thinking of yourself is the gift of the serpent that cannot be returned.
– John Gray
Eternity has nothing to do with time. Time is what shuts you out from eternity. Eternity is now. It is the transcendent dimension of the now to which myth refers.
– Joseph Campbell
Students should have multiple mentors. An amazing mentor will make sure that you have that. This will help the student get a variety of guidance especially leaning on those that have been around longer to see the progression of a field. It takes a community to help a student.
– Ashley Lindalía
Everything happens. Nobody has something forever. This is how we have to live.
– Haruki Murakami
God mostly likes it
when I make fun of him,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
All the time you have to
read books is not enough,
the old monk complained.
– The Old Monk
pine-needled path
slowly I step
out of my mind
– Kay F. Anderson
The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.
– Gore Vidal
Some newcomers open stores and earnestly try to understand the town. They’ve replaced the funkiness but not the poverty, the drugs and alcoholism, a high suicide rate and a low minimum wage. Others complain about restaurant service without comprehending the inequality: their waiter can no longer afford to live here. A separate new sense of entitlement has less to do with wealth than the Christian right, with their own private Idaho spreading inexorably south and east from northwest Montana, where rejiggered library boards have scrubbed their shelves.
Montana in a single sentence: “In this place you will be happy; in this place you will find it incredibly hard to make a living.”
– Jamie Harrison
This is the one thing all fools have in common, according to Seneca.
“They are always getting ready to live.”
They are always thinking that they have plenty of time. They are always saying that they’ll be able to get to it later.
Do it now. Stop putting stuff off.
– Ryan Holiday
Where nobody speaks her tongue,
the aging tourist speaks to flowers
– Mark Weiss
The Black unicorn is restless
the Black unicorn is unrelenting
the Black unicorn is not
free.
– Audre Lorde
If you just sit down in front of the screen and read what you wrote yesterday, that’s enough. Writing is all about the unconscious, and the unconscious should be checking in with the story every day.
– Walter Mosley
I feel like I could see clearly what I’d already glimpsed in Cervantes—that madness, risk, and wisdom could go together.
– Enrique Vila-Matas
The difficulty about England is the cultural life—it was certainly dim, and I suspect it still is. In a sense it’s the same difficulty one faces with some kinds of family life. I love my family very dearly, but I don’t want to live with them.
– W. H. Auden
Busyness, distraction, and stress have all led to the shrinking of the modern mind.
I realize that’s a strange thing to say. Most of us don’t think of our mind as something with space in it, as a thing that can either be big or small, expensive or claustrophobic.
But just think about the last time you felt overwhelmed, stressed, or out of control. Chances are, you might not even have to think that hard. You might be experiencing that state right now as you read these words.
What happens in these moments?
First, our mind wanders. It spins through all sorts of random thoughts about the past and the future. As a result, we lose touch with the direct experience of present time.
Second, we lose perspective. We can’t see the big picture anymore. Instead, it’s like we’re viewing life through a long and narrow tunnel. We become blind to possibility, fixated on problems.
Put these two together and you’ve got the perfect recipe for eradicating space in the mind. The landscape of the mind begins to feel like a calendar jammed with so many meetings, events, and obligations that these neon colored boxes cover-up even the smallest slivers of white space.
So it could be nice for our partner, for our kids, and, mostly, for our ourselves to consider: how can we create more space in the mind?
– Nate Klemp
We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
– Toni Morrison
A group of words, a phrase, may find its way into my head like something floating in the sea, and presently it attracts other things to it. I do tend to “feel” my way into a poem.
– Elizabeth Bishop
The frame of the novel and of the world is anthropocentric. But if I have to choose between the universe without a frame and mankind with a frame, I would choose mankind.
– László Krasznahorkai
Jung did not believe, as many sociologists do today, that symbols are social constructs. Like the Neoplatonists …he perceived symbols as ‘encountered’ or ‘discovered’, rather than generated by human activity to provide a form of social cohesion.
– Liz Greene
One of the things that makes science difficult is that it takes a lot of imagination. It’s very hard to imagine all the crazy things that things really are like.
– Richard Feynman
Genesis acknowledges a crucial variable that is not present in the Babylonian epics—human culpability. To have been too noisy is more anodyne, even, than to have tasted an apple. But Adam and Eve disobeyed, doubted, tried to deceive. These are all complex acts of will. The old Christian theologies spoke of felix culpa, the fortunate fall. This is, in effect, another name for human agency, responsibility, even freedom. If we could do only those things God wills, we would not be truly free—although to discern the will of God and act on it is freedom. Our human nature as fallen and our human nature as divine have a dynamic, asymptotic relation with each other. The centrality of humankind in the creation myth of Genesis is from the beginning an immeasurable elevation of status, made meaningful in the fact of our interacting with God even at the level of sacred history. This is unique to the Bible and central to both Testaments. Could Moses really have refused to return to Egypt? Might Judas have refused to betray Jesus, who knew he must be betrayed? All this is related to the fact that the Bible does not exist to explain away mysteries and complexities but to reveal and explore them with a respect and restraint that resists conclusion.
– Marilynne Robinson
Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.
– Toni Morrison
The way to read a poem is in the light of all the other poems ever written. We may begin anywhere.
– Robert Frost
A person needs a little madness, or else they never dare cut the rope and be free.
– Nikos Kazantzakis
The Things You Do Not Have To Say
by William Stafford
The things that you do not have to say make you rich.
Saying the things that you do not have to say weakens your talk.
Hearing the things you do not need to hear dulls your hearing.
The things you know before you hear them,
these are you and this is the reason that you are in the world.
Academic jobs pay terribly, but don’t panic, you have no chance of getting one.
– Neil Renic
and there will be no body left
to listen
and our labor
has become more important
than our silence
– Audre Lorde
You put what you have
in and only take
out what you need,
you will be okay,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
I do not know why
But it is as though
There were a cliff
Inside my head
From which, every day,
Clods of earth fall.
– Ishikawa Takuboku
(tr. Kenneth Rexroth)
if you lack the rigor for philosophy and the sensibility for the study of literature and art, you can always do something that requires neither and become a philosopher of aesthetics.
– katie kadue
My greatest asset is that I am constantly evolving.
– Jane Fonda
as my heartbeats flow
through ocean air
I breathe a little deeper
I think a little longer
I keep my dreams
in a bay of words
where I know
they won’t be broken.
– Will Watters
Love isn’t something natural. Rather it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith and the overcoming of narcissism. It isn’t a feeling, it’s a practice.
– Erich Fromm
Yesterday
by W. S. Merwin
My friend says I was not a good son
you understand
I say yes I understand
he says I did not go
to see my parents very often you know
and I say yes I know
even when I was living in the same city he says
maybe I would go there once
a month or maybe even less
I say oh yes
he says the last time I went to see my father
I say the last time I saw my father
he says the last time I saw my father
he was asking me about my life
how I was making out and he
went into the next room
to get something to give me
oh I say
feeling again the cold
of my father’s hand the last time
he says and my father turned
in the doorway and saw me
look at my wristwatch and he
said you know I would like you to stay
and talk with me
oh yes I say
but if you are busy he said
I don’t want you to feel that you
have to
just because I’m here
I say nothing
he says my father
said maybe
you have important work you are doing
or maybe you should be seeing
somebody I don’t want to keep you
I look out the window
my friend is older than I am
he says and I told my father it was so
and I got up and left him then
you know
though there was nowhere I had to go
and nothing I had to do
I wish I was a pen: the one snuggling behind your ear, or caught between your teeth or cloistered in your pocket or trembling in your hand.
– Alysia Harris
Mothers have often been prominent in activist groups. Our moral authority is often presumed, especially when our children are under threat.
– @emilyraboteau
Sitting in sombras, the Village piper contemplates
an honest death, full, a music that penetrates
a soul once given to fears it now tolerates.
The piper must see the benevolence the day
allows, how it turns upon a debt he must pay.
– Jay Wright
People make mistakes in life
through believing too much,
but they have a damned dull
time if they believe too little.
– James Hilton
I can find nothing
to give myself to:
everything is
magnificent with existence
– A. R. Ammons
One drop of midnight in the dawn of life’s pulsating stream
Marks her an alien from her kind, a shade amid its gleam.
– Georgia Douglas Johnson
Those who thought they were subtracting from you have accelerated your multiplication.
Open hands. Open heart. Open ears.
Doors are opening.
– Dr. Thema
“An intellectual hatred is the worst,” Yeats wrote in a prayer for his young daughter, “so let her think opinions are accursed.”
– Pico Iyer
The physics of the unconscious is the physics of the exception.
– Gaston Bachelard
All goes onward and outward….and nothing collapses, And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.
– Walt Whitman
Every well-functioning association of common interest is a Round Table process of mutual tolerance and coexistence. The consent is not usually about specific purposes or goals but about allowing, even respecting, the great differences between the participants, without losing faith in the power of being together. And since every living environment or society is a diversely collaborative field of awareness through which different individuals and groups coexist in fields of shared value, the consensual processes of a living association of bacteria, blackbirds, coral reef dwellers, or functional humans isn’t just held together by chemistry. Such agreements depend on feelings of shared value-direction. Every creature dependent on a pond or a field loves that common ground of shared value. Such coexistence is a basic kind of consent. And the consent in a living association, whether in a flock of blackbirds, a healthy coral reef, or a fulfilling human association depends not only on beliefs but on shared feelings. Such fields of shared resonance are the psychological ground of each associative environment. Our minds, like plants, attach themselves to the emotionally rich soils of our habitats, families, and cultures. Thanks to such shared common grounds, the living can cooperate well through what feels important to all.
– George Gorman
From Bobbie: Justice as we know it is a trap of revenge. We don’t see the whole picture. As Laurens van der Post said, we must accept the mystery. Do we keep coming back to earth to get justice once and for all? Wouldn’t that be a laugh. Without Guilt and Justice, Walter Kaufmann’s book, is an interesting stab at how our world would be with a step beyond guilt and justice. There’s something so self-righteous and mean about justice and fairness in our culture. We think we’ve finally evened the score and it can never stay even. Evenness is stasis. Any dynamic process would crash in the event of perfect balance. So why do we have such a childish idea of fairness? Because we fear change?
It’s hard to even think about letting go of guilt and justice since these are the controls we attempt to live by. These are our sacreds, the icons of a “sane” society. Two absolute controls, yet their shadows are enormous. Isn’t it our belief in fairness and guilt that keeps us stuck in our own particular co-ex systems? The coercive paradigm rests on the two pillars of guilt and justice. So our criminal system does nothing but foster more guilt and justice.
Religion also rests on these pillars. But I don’t think animals who get eaten think, “This is so unfair! I was just going along minding my own business when I was cruelly murdered.” The worst thing I can do to myself is to believe that life has given me a raw deal. This sours me on life and makes me want to die.
So much rage and violence are caused by the false belief in imposed forms of justice. Heaven and hell are ridiculous attempts at an absolute justice. The reward and punishment system for behavior entrenches this life. Maybe the true twin pillars are choice and chance. Life is built on a system of choice and chance, of billions of choices and billions of chances all interacting and interconnecting. Life is the butterfly effect squared. Herein lies its mystery and its mystique. We are in the mystery and I like it like this.
– via George Gorman
Octopuses, crabs, corals, and even microbes have their identities, their societies, and physical chemistries which change in tandem with their qualitative motives, as ours do. Why should such important processes of experience that are so dependent upon emotional dynamics in humans be seen as entirely devoid of emotional factors in many other life forms? Life doesn’t work that way. Life puts the same fundamental elements together in different ways to give rise to a stunning variety of living experiences based on the common fundamentals of being alive.
– George Gorman
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.
– George Gorman
Laughter and loving are omni-radiant, omni-embracing, topologically coordinate phenomena. Love synergetically integrates metaphysical radiation and metaphysical gravity, whose interpulsative, intercomplementry oppositeness regenerates life.
– R. Buckminster Fuller
Reasoning is important. But any form of reasoning that refuses to give way to intuition is akin to choosing not to scrape the ice off the windshield before driving to work in the morning.
– Thomas Soames
each man must realize that it can all disappear very quickly…
– Charles Bukowski
Respect for a person doesn’t mean respect of beliefs. I can be kind, treat you the same way as everyone else, and want good for you, and still think your beliefs are wrong and not want anything to do with said belief or lie to you that your beliefs are great and good for you.
– Katie E Slatter
‘I don’t see why […] the thing I draw from memory should take precedence over the thing I imagine. What counts is only that this thing, whose character hardly matters, resembles me’
– Michel Leiris, (trans. Christine Pichini)
No matter what the problem is, no matter where it is, no matter whom it concerns, you have no one to change but yourself, and you have neither opponent nor helper in bringing about the change within yourself.
– Neville Goddard
A work of art can only come from the interior of man. Art is the form of the image formed from the nerves, heart, brain and eye of man.
– Edvard Munch
The world needs people who cannot be bought, whose word is their bond, who put character above wealth, who possess opinions and a will, who are larger than their vocations, who do not hesitate to take chances, who will not lose their individuality in a crowd, who will be as honest in small things as in great things, who will make no compromise with wrong, whose ambitions are not confined to their own desires, who will not say they do it “because everybody else does it,” who are true to their friends through good report and evil report, in adversity as well as prosperity, who do not believe that shrewdness, cunning, and hardheadedness are the best qualities for winning success, who are not ashamed or afraid to stand for the truth when it is unpopular, who can say “no” with emphasis, although all the rest of the world says “yes”.
– Ted W. Engstrom
Ideological polarization is based on reason. Affective polarization is based on feelings. But false polarization? That’s just based on a lie.
– Monica Guzman, I Never Thought of it That Way
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.
They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
– David Foster Wallace
PRICELESS GIFTS
An empty day without events.
And that is why
it grew immense
as space. And suddenly
happiness of being
entered me.
I heard
in my heartbeat
the birth of time
and each instant of life
one after the other
came rushing in
like priceless gifts.
– Anna Swir
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
What is meant by “reality”? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable—now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech—and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly. Sometimes, too, it seems to dwell in shapes too far away for us to discern what their nature is. But whatever it touches, it fixes and makes permanent. That is what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left of past time and of our loves and hates.
– Virginia Woolf
MOSES ON THE MESA
Sometimes it seems God could be
the eye of a horse that holds
a darkened lake, some boat of light
upon wind swept grain. And here
among the opened white scroll
of clouds trapped inside a water trough
lies a baptism without some doctrine.
– Greg Sellers
If people are too sensitive, too easily frightened, and say things like, “If anybody shouts at me, I can’t stand it,” then you may be quite sure that they themselves are tremendously aggressive in their shadow side. And, vice versa, the people who explode in aggression all the time are simply cowards. They constantly explode because they are afraid.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
We stand eternally in judgment, siding first with one side, then with the other, but rarely undertaking the terrible task of integrating all this into a whole. If we have the courage to look with open minds at some of the instincts and energy systems within that we have been so ashamed of, we almost always find that they can also be positive strengths – and that they are merely normal parts of a total human character. As with all our inner contents, they need to be acknowledged, honored, and lived on an appropriate and constructive level. Our path leads straight ahead, not around the duality but through it to a consciousness of its underlying oneness.
– Robert A. Johnson
One must not content oneself with small demands but must rise to the thought that all living creatures have to be redeemed. One must not be trivial and irresponsible in heart, but must strive to make deeds prove one’s words.
– Richard Wilhelm
An impression of oneself is an organic phenomenon that is not at all intellectual. How is it that at one moment I don’t vibrate and at another, I do? How is it that I receive or do not receive a current of energy, allow it to feed me or not to feed me? How do I sing with it, or resonate with it like a musical instrument? Life keeps hitting us, producing only a dull sound. Yet suddenly, there is a pure, crystalline sound. How does that come about?
– Michel Conge, Inner Octaves
It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone’s fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I’m one of Us. I must be. I’ve certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We’re always one of Us. It’s Them that do the bad things.
– Terry Pratchett, Jingo
If a neuropsychologist had to choose three things to characterize most clearly the functional contribution of the right hemisphere, they would most probably be the capacity to read the human face, the capacity to sustain vigilant attention, and the capacity to empathize.
– Iain McGilchrist
Healing is impossible in loneliness; it is the opposite of loneliness. Conviviality is healing. To be healed we must come with all the other creatures to the feast of Creation.
– Wendell Berry
Alone in the history of the “epic,” Beowulf takes place in the “real,” tangible, recognizable world. Not in Heaven, Albion, or Middle Earth. That, in fact, is part of the point of Beowulf. Its author[s] want us to see its setting and characters and situations as real, as actually happening. And yet the magic is there – in Gendel, in Beowulf himself – in the capacity to find a redeeming reply to a superhuman evil, a transcendent answer to the void.
– Stephen R. Donaldson
Everything will be all right. And, even if it won’t be, we’ll have the consolation of having lived honest lives.
– Alexei Navalny
Fiction is meant to illuminate, to explode, to refresh.
– John Cheever
‘Finding yourself’ is actually returning to yourself. An unlearning, an excavation, a remembering who you were before the world got its hands on you.
– Emily McDowell
Purebred genres don’t interest me much. The novel is no Aryan.
– Gaustine
I am a stranger
learning to worship the strangers
around me.
– June Jordan
We split the silence and mended it.
– Maya C. Popa
How many words do frost giants have for snow, anyway? These were the questions that obsessed me as a child.
– Christopher Livaccari
I pierce; infinity passes through there, light passes through, no need to paint.
Instead, everyone thought I wanted to destroy: but that’s not true I built, not destroyed.
– Lucio Fontana
they don’t tell you this when you adopt an animal but you will find yourself singing songs with titles like “who’s the little baby in the ring today?” and “who is the softest boy in the world?” and the answers to those questions will always surprise your animal.
– Sarah Osment
We are torn between nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.
– Carson McCullers
The thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination.
– Carson McCullers
Spring has gone berserk, bees are buzzing, nameless scents waft through the air, as if the world has just been created, without a past, without a future, a world in all its innocence, before chronology.
– Georgi Gospodinov
Myth is the nothing that is everything.
– Fernando Pessoa
By working with your mind, you understand Karma works in many mysterious ways, and you are not able to figure all that out. All you can do is actually let go, and let go not only for the sake of others, but for the sake of your own well-being also.
– Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche
On climate, our goal isn’t to have the world paralyzed by anxiety but rather galvanized for action. And for that, we need hope; not false hope that all will be well (it won’t be, if we don’t act) but hope based on the conviction that if we do something, it WILL make a difference.
– Prof. Katharine Hayhoe
The act of reading a poem—even silently—must be bodily before it’s intellectual.
– Donald Hall
To open the heart is not a soft
Or schmaltzy thing
To open the heart
Is first
To encounter
Every war,
Every shield,
Every excuse,
Every hiding place,
Every pride
That has kept it closed
And choose with indomitable
Strength
To lay all of that down
For the possibility
Of love.
– Chelan Harkin
I want to remember that what I think doesn’t fit also fits. Why make the world smaller when it is totally scary and wonder-filled, too, when I can be God-smacked daily as the Irish put it?
– Gunilla Norris
Your smile
trips breakers.
The entire grid goes dark,
Only for light to reemerge,
brighter.
– Ashley J.J. White
It’s simple:
Equanimity results from inclusion.
Dissociation results from exclusion.
– @VinceFHorn
A lot of people teach dissociation and call it enlightenment.
Yes, it feels good to numb out, because then you don’t have to feel how richly painful this all is.
But that ain’t enlightenment friend, it’s called hiding.
– @VinceFHorn
Seven Steps to Heaven Haiku
If every bomb
Appeared in the sky a dove
Shrapnel into rain
If vengeance vanquished
From the cursed lips of weak men
An idea never taking root
If every tank vanished
If by chance a miracle
Peace reclaims the land
If laughter broke out
Like wars fought with satire’s
Pugilist punning
What room would there be
For anger what bitter root
Not allowed to stretch
Its tentacles
Through the hearts of men hardened
By indifference
What will we bequeath
Our children if not a world
Evermore human
– Tony Medina
Choose life instead of those prisms with no depth even if their colors are purer.
– André Breton
Poetry is translation. You take an emotion, an idea, a concept, and you turn it into an image, a memory, a story. You take a signal, and you build it a body.
– Guante (Kyle Tran Myhre)
Never underestimate the power of mind. How you work with things really can transform what seems to be. Working with the inner has the ability to transform the outer—though not in any linear way you can put your finger on.
– Pema Chödrön
It’s often pointed out how much will-power and discipline it takes to make yourself something. But to make yourself nothing? It often requires even more.
– Pico Iyer
The purpose of the first half of life is to give the ego a sense of security, and to make it believe in its achievements. The ego is the agent of incarnation, and if it does not feel grounded the Self cannot begin its work.
– David Tacey
I’m a daytime writer, but since I waste the morning I’ve become an afternoon writer.
– Italo Calvino
You should not serve your personal devil. That leads to superfluous pain.
– C.G. Jung
Of course the early Buddhists thought escaping suffering was the goal.
They were trapped in a cosmological dualism.
They hadn’t yet realized the deep implications of their own teachings on co-depending arising.
– @VinceFHorn
stop as the hare does
at the edge of a ploughed field
the air smells of stone
– Catherine Baker
We always ask the elderly about death
As if they have so much more
To teach us than the recent
Arrived baby who can
Describe the great
Nothing with
Tremendous
Alarm
– Nomenclature
butterfly
scattering silence
with its wings
– Zvonko Petrović
jet-black tunnel
the sudden blast
of autumn color
– Jerry Kilbride
Idealism bereft of pragmatism is waste.
– @VinceFHorn
writing a letter,
he stood awhile to see
the full moon
– Demosthenes Kerasides
Somehow things happen
without anyone meaning
them to. Collisions,
meetings, some stray words
in a book or on a sheet
of paper. Pick up
life and drop it. Stand
on this corner or the next.
Breathe the air. Look there!
It’s you looking back.
– George Szirtes
sundown . . .
the mason jars
empty again
– Christopher Herold
The right ones will want to amplify your dreams not erase them.
The right ones will understand you rise together – your ascensions are interwoven.
The right ones will find you inspiring not threatening.
That’s how you will know.
– Dr. Thema
People are much freer than they imagine.
– Marilynne Robinson
There’s a rule, either you do spiritual practices, or the unconscious will force you to act them out in pseudo-ritual ways. I really believe that a lot of the addictions and compulsive behaviors are unconscious rituals.
– Robert Moore, Facing the Dragon
But she emerged from her madness determined to work; to write, and in this she was successful.
– Olivia Laing on Virginia Woolf
The Gentlemen who are styled Advocates in this country, are almost innumerable; for every man who has nothing to do, and no better name to give himself, is called Advocate.
– Edward Topham, Letters from Edinburgh
When Bruce Told Me He’d Brought You Your Hearing Aids
by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
I thought, good, he can hear what the ICU nurses say.
Then I began to wish for another kind of hearing—
wished you could hear the faithful pumping
of your own loyal heart. Wished you could hear
the snow as it fell outside your window reminding you
of the silence beyond the beeps and alarms
of the hospital room. Wished you could hear
the hundreds of prayers being raised
and chanted for you. Wished you could hear my voice
as I whisper into the candle beside me
saying again and again your name, your name,
wished you could hear all the love rising for you
the way dawn rises, inevitable and beautiful,
the way sorrow gives rise to song.
To a large extent, creativity is self-generated in areas of the mind beyond or beneath the individual’s willful, conscious control. All he can do is discipline his consciousness to accommodate the needs of the creative process.
– Ingo Swann
In your life, you meet people. Some you never think about again. Some, you wonder what happened to them. There are some that you wonder if they ever think about you. And then there are some you wish you never had to think about again. But you do.
– C.S Lewis
Our job is to love people. When it hurts. When it’s awkward. When it’s uncool and embarrassing. Our job is to stand together, to carry the burdens of one another and to meet each other in our questions.
– Jamie Tworkowksi
Never let yourself be persuaded that any one Great Man, any one leader, is necessary to the salvation of America. When America consists of one leader and 158 million followers, it will no longer be America. Truly American leadership is not of any one man. It is of multitudes of men—and women.
– Dwight D. Eisenhower
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
– T. S. Eliot
Why is it that we understand playing the cello will require work, but we attribute writing to the magic of inspiration?
– Ann Patchett
We sit comfortably at home, and, out of 100 details, can choose to linger over which offer a special thrill.
– Elias Canetti, Crowds
the color of the wind
planted randomly
in a field of reeds
– Basho
I’ve discovered that offering welcome helps a lot, especially to the deeply unpleasant or weird. The offer heals you both. What works best is to target people in the community whom no one else seems to want. Voilà: now welcome exists in you.
– Anne Lamott
Good writing takes place at intersections, at what you might call knots, at places where the society is snarled or knotted up.
– Margaret Atwood
What we observe,’ quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg notes, ‘is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.’
– Keiron Le Grice
The pain that inheres in the gap between what we would like to be and what we are asks less for self-mastery, it seems to me, than it does for the support of others.
– Andrew Cooper
the gods had given me almost everything. but i let myself be lured into long spells of senseless ease. i amused myself with being a dandy. desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. i ruined myself, and nobody can be ruined except by his own hand.
– oscar wilde
people who use phrases without wisdom talk of suffering as a mystery. it is really a revelation. one discerns things one never discerned before. what one had felt dimly, through instinct, about art, is realized with absolute intensity of apprehension.
– oscar wilde
We must keep building more tables where all can sit to eat in peace. Humanity can’t let one man create mayhem.
– Chef Jose Andres
I wanted to grow up and just be a reader, just someone who read. Even then I knew that wasn’t a job.
– Lydia Davis
She has found a language for civilization’s current discontents, if not ecstasies, the wearing off of the anesthetic.
– Deborah Landau
I want this love to be resilient
I want this love to be resilient
as crabgrass cracking the interstices
of paving stones until the sidewalks burst. Its ease
is difficulty, rough when crossed, ebullient
in adversity, still new, unruly,
intermittenly stormy, rolling with June thunder.
We’re getting over, rootlings pushing under
ramshackle walls, knocking them down. A brilliant
midsummer sky, cleaner than metaphors,
blazes above the river. We are three
month old since midnight, appropriately
cheered on a French map, then under the sheet.
I lie beside you now, absorbing heat,
light, currents of cold air, the season’s, yours.
– Marilyn Hacker
After a while you begin to understand that writing well is not a promised reward for being virtuous.
– Tobias Wolff
protestants are so anxious and depressed because they don’t have a third place to go that’s not heaven or hell.
– katie kadue
My faith in the reader is profound.
– Paul Yamazaki
It’s all about developing a conversation between the books.
– Paul Yamazaki
If you’re burdened by a classic idea of the artist as a figure to whom everything is owed and whose prerogatives are enormous and can never be challenged, forget it. That sort of person can have only a servant for a partner.
– Helen Garner
The rain began again. It fell heavily, easily, with no meaning or intention but the fulfilment of its own nature, which was to fall and fall.
– Helen Garner
tai chi
an invisible thread
suspends the spider
– Michael Henry Lee
I don’t owe anyone more joy than I owe myself.
– Roya Marsh
The relationship between time spent on social media and one’s personal wellbeing is an inverse relationship for almost every single person I’ve
ever talked to about their experience of these platforms.
– Ethan Nichtern
In democracy, journalism’s job is not the introduction of multiple opinions. it is to deliver citizens clear information and clear understanding of policy issues of maximum importance to the widest audience. This idea that journalism is supposed to give you opinions you don’t want to hear is a ridiculous premise. We just need the facts , and specifically the facts about policy, for democracy to work, and then it is the citizens job—not the journalists—to debate those facts.
– Ethan Nichtern
There’s so much we can do, not through giving things up but by actively laying hands on our own power and possibility—and by connecting with other people.
– Rebeca Solnit
I love sharing poetry. I love being inside the poem. Poetry is my breath, my hands, my sky, my window, my tongue, & my dream. How can we share poetry day after day & not talk about all the hearts & bodies being annihilated in Gaza now?
How can we pretend that life just goes on?
– Zeeshan Jaanam
Recognizing the cycle is one thing.
Breaking it is another.
May you have the courage and freedom to walk a new path.
New destinations require new decisions.
– Dr. Thema
I shrink a little
every step of the journey
to my mom’s table
– @hegelincanada
Try pausing right before and right after undertaking a new action, even something simple like putting a key in a lock to open a door. Such pauses take a brief moment, yet they have the effect of decompressing time and centering you.
– David Steindl-Rast
NO MUD, NO LOTUS
Lately, it feels like we have been traipsing for miles through the mud with our boots growing heavy and the muddle of the world weighing down our ankles. This has been a time of real mud-slinging —there is the mud of politics, the mud of war, the mud of AI generated deepfakes, and the mire of conspiracy theories.
Personally, you may experience marital mud, the mudded mind of a loved one with dementia, the caked mud of aging arthritic joints, or the dregs of some trauma. None of us likes being mud bound. It can gunk up our insides and weigh down our spirits. However, no one gets through life without doing some version of the mud-asana. What we tend to forget is how the mud of today is nutritive for change and growth tomorrow. In order to transform, decay and decomposition is valuable, yea necessary, for new growth. In the wisdom teaching this is known as “no mud, no lotus”. Know that all muck settles with time and becomes fertile ground for the germination of new seeds. If you are not careful, you may get sucked into some vortex of Big Mud thinking, “Oh, this is terrible, oh, we are in real doomsday.” Change and growth involve a strange alchemy whereby awakening depends on suffering, just as blossoming depends on mire.
So the next time you find yourself unable to move, congealed by the woes of loss, hardship, pain and misfortune, remember that it is only a matter of time. Let your mud settle, for buried there is the promise of a new life.
– Tias Little
Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
– Susan Sontag
Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. When someone says ‘science teaches such and such’, he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn’t teach anything, experience teaches it.
– Richard Feynman
We cannot, for example, draw a line around the eyes that is not necessarily arbitrary. There is no point at which the eyes begin or end, either in time or in space or conceptually. The eye bone is connected to the face bone, and the face bone is connected to the head bone, and the head bone is connected to the neck bone, and so it goes down to the toe bone, the floor bone, the earth bone, the worm bone, the dreaming butterfly bone. Thus, what we call our eyes are so many bubbles in a sea of foam. This is not only true of our eyes but of our other powers of sensation as well, including the mind.
– Red Pine
I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness―in a landscape selected at random―is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern―to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.
– Vladimir Nabokov
We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
– William Faulkner
Myth is a kind of knowledge that you can’t look directly at and when you do you destroy it.
– Iain McGilchrist
The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the whole moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook on life.
– C.G. Jung
After all, it matters but little whether the clouds be golden or gloomy that yonder float over the plain ; the traveller is glad to have reached the eminence whence his eye may at last repose on illimitable space.
– Maurice Maeterlinck
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
Don’t make decisions based only on the stories being told. There might be stories that aren’t being told that are just as important.
The experiences of those who aren’t around are necessary if we want an accurate understanding of the world.
– Farnam Street
the best definition for dakini I thought was from the poet Rilke who said -who basically was talking about angels-: ‘angels are those who break us out of who we think we are’.
– Ian Baker
once did i read how the oracle of apollo gave as answer to the roman deputies, when they asked what they must do to rule their subjects in peace, this only, “nosce teipsum,” which signifieth, “let each man know himself.”
– @infinita_fiori
Nobody is going to save you from your own mind. Nobody can get into the heart of your experience and fix anything for you. If you want to make your own internal experience more hospitable, only you can do that work.
– Ethan Nichtern
I wish that every human life might be pure, transparent freedom.
– Simone de Beauvoir
today i tried to explain the entire publishing industry to new therapist
she did not get it
to be fair, i’m not sure i get it either
– Emily Maloney
A traumatic state is in fact an ecosystem, with each element of the trauma environment predicated on the other. When one element in the environment changes, the entire ecosystem goes through an avalanche of radical transformation.
– Robert Bosnak
Generally people enjoy living in the world of confusion because it is much more entertaining.
– Chögyam Trungpa
I don’t care how old I ever get, seeing a concert on a school night will always thrill me.
– Paisley Rekdal
The universe needs
my wisdom,
the old monk
insisted.
– The Old Monk
A sentence should be read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.
– Henry David Thoreau
I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a single word: Home.
– Mahmoud Darwish
It seems that lately all I want to write are the middles of stories, which are widely acknowledged as the hardest parts? But man, middles are wild: no duty to launch a fictional dream, no narrative threads to gather, just fun and games for as long as you can keep it going.
– Matt Bell
mid-winter
i dreamed
i was young again
– @YourMoonliness
1.9 million people displaced, essential civilian infrastructure decimated, refugee camps bombed, widespread famine, malnutrition, infant dysentery, people reduced to eating animal feed…
And the US government vetoes a ceasefire. It is pure depravity and everyone can see it.
– Jason Hickel
One of the great paradoxes in romantic love is that it never produces human relationship as long as it stays romantic. It produces drama, daring adventures, wondrous, intense love scenes, jealousies, and betrayals; but people never seem to settle into relationship with each other as flesh-and-blood human beings until they are out of the romantic love stage, until they love each other instead of being “in love.”
– Robert A. Johnson, We
The reproach most frequently leveled against Jung is that individuation is an asocial, egocentric exercise. This is by no means the case. The human being, in his instinctual nature, is a social being, and when this nature is rescued from unconsciousness and related to consciousness he becomes more socially fit and better related to his fellow men.
– Marie-Louise von Franz, C.G. Jung
Nietzsche said a century ago: When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered quered long ago.
– Irvin D. Yalom
Home isn’t where you’re from, it’s where you find light when all grows dark.
– Pierce Brown
Anchor the eternity of love in your own soul… Lean toward the whispers of your own heart… Release the need to hate, to harbor division, and the enticement of revenge… But when it is your time don’t be afraid to stand up, speak up, and speak out against injustice.
– John Lewis
When young, one is confident to be able to build palaces for mankind, but when the time comes one has one’s hands full just to be able to remove their trash.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I am not bothered by the fact that I am unknown. I am bothered when I do not know others.
– Confucius
The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not “the thinker.”
The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated.
You then begin to realize that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence.
You also realize that all the things that truly matter – beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace – arise from beyond the mind. You begin to awaken.
– Eckhart Tolle
Design is not the act of amazing an audience with the novelty of forms or materials; it is the originality that repeatedly extracts astounding ideas from the crevices of the very commonness of everyday life.
– Kenya Hara
Love requires a tremendous effort of differentiation of self and of refinement of Self, else it mostly remains mere sentiment or contaminated with unexamined collective views. But the reward of falling into love’s dark shadows and thereby becoming world is to participate in an abundant life where one’s inner state is increasingly in harmony with the cosmos, in a world that glows with a pregnant wonder and awesome mystery.
– Veronica Goodchild
He was a secret agent, and still alive thanks to his exact attention to the detail of his profession.
– Ian Fleming
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
A community is only being created when its members accept that they are not going to achieve great things, that they are not going to be heroes, but simply live each day with new hope, like children, in wonderment as the sun rises and in thanksgiving as it sets. Community is only being created when they have recognized that the greatness of man is to accept his insignificance, his human condition and his earth, and to thank God for having put in a finite body the seeds of eternity which are visible in small and daily gestures of love and forgiveness. The beauty of man is in this fidelity to the wonder of each day.
– Jean Vanier
The smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction. From such nets of souls societies, the social world, human life springs.
– Tony Kushner
In stillness one has a sense of being opened to a more subtle cognition. It is a sensation akin to the one that comes when one is in communication with nature, with great music and art.
Sometimes one experiences this energy in the presence of a man or woman with Being, or when an unexpected moment of grace, of sorrow, of shock frees one from routine associations. Suddenly there is an opening to another energy – the unmistakable taste of something higher and truer.
– William Segal
The true men of action in our time, those who transform the world, are not the politicians and statesmen, but the scientists. Unfortunately poetry cannot celebrate them, because their deeds are concerned with things, not persons, and are, therefore, speechless. When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.
– W H Auden
May you experience time the old way
As a friend rather than the enemy
As a bringer of joy
Not a bringer of deadlines
May it loop around you and enfold you with possibilities
May it embrace you with love.
– A Celtic Blessing about Time, by Iain Tweedale
To live headlong, at ground level, without being able to pause (stand outside the immediate push of time) and rise (in space) is to be like an animal; yet to float off up into the air is not to live at all – just to be a detached observing eye. One needs to bring what one has learned from one’s ascent back into the world where life is going on, and incorporate it in such a way that it enriches experience and enables more of whatever it is that ‘discloses itself’ to us (in Heidegger’s phrase) to do just that.
– Iain McGilchrist
Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can’t mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has.
– William S. Burroughs
If you’re sick or injured and healing or growing a new life inside you or just worn out, please notice that that thing known as ‘doing nothing’ is when you’re doing the utterly crucial and precious work of growing and healing and restoring, and this also goes for everyone who’s just worn down, exhausted, dispirited, and who’s not that right now? I’m not the Nap Ministry but I’m for the power of rest and the holiness of respite and the you that is your cells and circulatory system and all those inner workings that are so mysterious and necessary and regenerative if we let them be. The psyche too does most of its work out of sight, and the imagination, and so creative work too benefits from rest and respite.
Take refuge in that beautiful stillness in which everything is happening in all the ways that nothing is happening in busyness. Everything happening in the depths, like deep water under a reflective surface. A pond reflecting clouds with schools of fish doing their things in the depths. Sitting still as zazen or just daydreaming or watching clouds is an act of outright revolt against the shouts that we should be doing something/do more/do more faster that are all around us. This might be another face of peace in our times with stillness the ceasefire in which spring comes again.
– Rebecca Solnit
The ultimate answer to the question “Why read?” is that only deep, constant reading fully establishes and augments an autonomous self. Until you become yourself, what benefit can you be to others?
– Harold Bloom
In diversity is life and where there’s life there’s hope, was the general sum of his creed, a modest one to be sure.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
But even the most unmissionary soul, unless he pretend he has no emotions, is sometimes faced with a choice between commission and omission. ‘What are they doing?’ abruptly becomes, ‘What are we doing?’ and then, ‘What must I do?
– Ursula K. Le Guin
You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It’s their mistake, not my failing.
– Richard Feynman
If you met someone who insisted they hated poetry, what poem would you read to them to change their mind?
– Hannah Grieco
To build means to fight against emptiness, to hypnotize space.
– Osip Mandelstam
Lovers are always waiting. They hate to wait; they love to wait. Wedged between these two feelings, lovers come to think a great deal about time, and to understand it very well, in their perverse way.
– Anne Carson
You need both
Radical uncertainty about what is going on and what to do about it
Radical certainty that every choice, relationship, perception, profoundly matters
– Daniel Thorson
Hold to your own truth
at the centre of the image
you were born with.
– David Whyte
I don’t believe in the death penalty except for radio DJs who play “Friday I’m in love” on the Thursday morning commute.
– Frances Klein
True scientists look for evidence to disprove their hypotheses, but pseudoscience looks for evidence to support it.
– Karl Popper
Some poems require months of steeping and careful adjustments before they’re ready to be released. But some poems just come out of you, whole, and the wonder of a poem essentially birthing itself, while the poet looks on, is one of my favorite experiences.
– Francesca Leader
If you want to rise, the combination of being trustworthy, determined, and focused is nearly unstoppable.
– Shane Parrish
Again and again my mind breaks at the same spot as though it is a fracture that never fully heals: I fear taking you–you, my life, and all that makes it worth living–seriously.
– Yiyun Li
In spite of exceedingly complex technology, we miss the obvious signs of soul: a physical complaint, an animal in a dream, a witch in a fairy tale, a god in mythology, a tear in laughter and sadness, the lead weight of a depression.
– Thomas Moore
I need a kind heart, not a bullet.
– Mahmoud Darwish
The blank page gives the right to dream.
– Bachelard
Inflation is going to impoverish all of us before people get pissed off enough to realize that all of the last hundred years of economic progress was actually a shell game to create billionaires, while the great masses of people saw their standard of living eroded and destroyed.
– Terence McKenna
I can’t exactly describe how I feel,
but it’s not quite right.
And it leaves me cold.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
If you know what you want
you don’t need to have it,
the old monk said.
There’s no lesson in it for you.
– The Old Monk
I’m praying for people who are discouraged, who’ve lost hope, who are drained and weary.
I pray that your hearts are rejuvenated and that your heads are lifted.
And that we rise collectively to change the conditions that contribute to and cause despair.
– Bernice King
You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.
– George Bernard Shaw
oriño ka-n-an manbo emalé
by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
teach them early
to breathe in the dust
swirl it into their lungs
teach your children
that the opposite of a secret
is a drink
teach them
by example
to drink air
*
send your daughters
where the earth is soft
they’ll come back
and tell you life is hard
send your daughters
off the planet now
show them how
to do their dirt
in space
send your daughters
to the sky
for clay
practiced as they are
at leaving earth
teach your daughters
that the only world they’ll have
will be the one they shape
by hand
and foot
*
train your daughters
how to dance in mud
cleanse them
of the myth
of solid ground
show them that
the mark they make
is evidence of body
not of word
is evidence of soil
and not of breath
teach your daughters
how to outrun death
Every child knows more than his parents—until he finds he doesn’t.
– Pico Iyer
The silence of the unsaid is always working surreptitiously with another silence, which is that of the unsayable.
– John Berger
It has never occurred to me to wish for empire or royalty, nor for the eminence of those high and commanding fortunes. My aim lies not in that direction; I love myself too well.
– Montaigne
We are all footnotes, many of us will never have the chance to be read, all of us in an unrelenting and desperate struggle for our lives, for the life of a footnote, to remain on the surface before, in spite of our efforts, we are submerged. Everywhere we leave constant traces of our existence, of our struggle against vacuity. And the greater the vacuity, the more violent our
struggle.
– Dubravka Ugresic
I was very careful not to tell my students to only write about what you know, because I couldn’t define what they knew. That’s where the question really begins. How to define what you know.
– Paula Fox
Forgive my native tongue that tastes the air of one place
season after season to learn it.
– Rachel White
Conformity bores me, as does predictability. I want stability in my life, sure, but on my own terms. And I don’t go to poems for that stability.
– Carl Phillips
Shadows are two-dimensional, but they are cast by three-dimensional objects —tracings of opacity, not gradations of it. This suggests that phenomenologically the idea of two-dimensionality is an idea of either transparency or outline. Projected images are not shadows; rather, one might say, they are shades.
– Stanley Cavell
To say that a thing is imaginary is not to dispose of it in the realm of mind, for the imagination, or the image making faculty, is a very important part of our mental functioning. An image formed by the imagination is a reality from the point of view of psychology; it is quite true that it has no physical existence, but are we going to limit reality to that which is material? We shall be far out of our reckoning if we do, for mental images are potent things, and although they do not actually exist on the physical plane, they influence it far more than most people suspect.
– Dion Fortune
Getting annoyed at persistent thoughts while you meditate is like getting annoyed by the weights you’re lifting at the gym. Like lifting the weight, repeatedly letting go of the thought is what builds your practice.
– John Flynn
When you’re just singing a beautiful melody with a story that’s true to the heart, you don’t need a lot of embellishment.
– Emmylou Harris
The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.
– Barbara Kingsolver
… and all versions of me—at fifteen, at eighteen, at thirty, today—are conflating love and want, grasping for both …
– Nikoletta Gjoni
I wish the idea of time would drain out of my cells and leave me quiet even on this shore.
– Agnes Martin
The infinite suits you.
– Edmond Jabès
The intimacy I feel with what my home once was cannot be reconciled with what downtown has become.
– Emma Dries
In my best moments I think “Life has passed me by” and I am content.
– Agnes Martin
Words left unspoken and unwritten are at times, still under construction, waiting for the right time and place to be revealed.
– R.A. Ashby
Shakespeare is so much larger than any other poet, any other writer. Larger than Plato, infinitely larger than Freud. You’d have to take the whole of the Bible together to get any representation of consciousness as wide as Shakespeare’s.
– Harold Bloom
our children will never believe that there were once good websites
– @biblioklept
If you’re afraid to write it,
that’s a good sign.
I suppose you know you’re writing the
truth when you’re terrified.
– Yrsa Daley Ward
The end of a poem, like the end of a life, releases language into the sovereignty of abdication.
– Susan Howe
How to Eat a Poem
Make firm eye contact—
Fold in half. Dip in black vinegar—
Proceed to digest.
– @olicketysplit
In no other science, in effect, is one as solitary as in philosophy
– Hegel
We do not merely study the past: we inherit it, and inheritance brings with it not only the rights of ownership, but the duties of trusteeship.
Things fought for and died for should not be idly squandered. For they are the property of others, who are not yet born.
– Sir Roger Scruton
October rain —
the boulevard paved
in red and gold
– Denis M. Garrison
Getting lost is possibly the first step toward finding new systems.
– Steve Paxton
He who has mastered the true nature of life does not labor over what life cannot do. He who has mastered the true nature of fate does not labor over what knowledge cannot change.
– Zhuangzi
The way of cowardice is to embed ourselves in a cocoon, in which we perpetuate our habitual patterns. When we are constantly recreating our basic patterns of habits and thought, we never have to leap into fresh air or onto fresh ground.
– Chogyam Trungpa
I’m a child in that respect: able to live, physically speaking, on a crumb of anticipation for weeks at a time, but always in danger of crushing the waited-for event with the freight of my excessive hope.
– Zoë Heller
Stability isn’t just a state of mind, it’s a balance of body chemistry.
Just like the roots of a tree, our inner working—hormones, nutrients, enzymes—are what truly hold us steady.
But how do you nourish your roots for true, unwavering stability?
You dive deep. You test, not guess.
By understanding the complex interplay of biomarkers, we can ensure the part we don’t see is just as strong as what we do.
– Function Health
Recognizing the cycle is one thing.
Breaking it is another.
May you have the courage and freedom to walk a new path.
New destinations require new decisions.
– Dr. Thema
If something is wrong, fix it now. But train yourself not to worry, worry fixes nothing.
– Ernest Hemingway
What happens in our workplaces, where exposures tend to be highest, often presages what happens in our society as a whole.
– Jim Morris
the life of la fontaine was, so to speak, only one of continual distraction. in the midst of society, he was absent from it. regarded almost as an imbecile by the crowd, this clever author, this amiable man, had few books and few friends.
– david widger
Children learn more from what you are than what you teach.
– W. E. B. Du Bois
when a website is shuttered the library of congress should be legally required to archive the content, as they do with print publications.
– Ryan Ruby
Something magical happens when books and writing and education all meld together.
– @JosephACoelho
night sky conjunction
the brother
I never had
– Lee
Indeed, the world is not unlike a vast, shapeless Rorschach blot which we read according to our inner disposition, in such a way that our interpretations say far more about ourselves than about the blot.
– Alan Watts
Tonight, the lion of contentment
has placed a warm, heavy paw
on my chest.
– Billy Collins
Consider the Hands That Write This Letter
Consider the hands
that write this letter.
The left palm pressed flat against the paper,
as it has done before, over my heart,
in peace or reverence
to the sea or some beautiful thing
I saw once, felt once: snow falling
like rice flung from the giants’ wedding,
or the strangest birds. & consider, then,
the right hand, & how it is a fist,
within which a sharpened utensil,
similar to the way I’ve held a spade,
match to the wick, the horse’s reins,
loping, the very fists
I’ve seen from the roads to Lima & Esteli.
For years, I have come to sit this way:
one hand open, one hand closed,
like a farmer who puts down seeds & gathers up
the food that comes from that farming.
Or, yes, it is like the way I’ve danced
with my left hand opened around a shoulder
& my right hand closed inside
of another hand. & how
I pray, I pray for this
to be my way: sweet
work alluded to in the body’s position
to its paper:
left hand, right hand
like an open eye, an eye closed:
one hand flat against the trapdoor,
the other hand knocking, knocking.
– Aracelis Girmay
The chief beauty about time
is that you cannot waste it in advance.
The next year, the next day, the next hour are lying ready for you,
as perfect, as unspoiled,
as if you had never wasted or misapplied
a single moment in all your life.
You can turn over a new leaf every hour
if you choose.
– Arnold Bennett
Higher aims are in themselves more valuable, even if unfulfilled, than lower ones quite attained.
– J. W. von Goethe
Only a life lived in a certain spirit is worth living. It is a remarkable fact that a life lived entirely from the ego is dull not only for the person himself but for all concerned. The fullness of life requires more than just an ego; it needs spirit.
– Carl G. Jung
There is no reason to believe that each part of a person matures in unison. Western society has leaped forward in its capacity for nuclear destruction and medical prolongation of life, but our ethical maturation has lagged behind. So, too, Faust develops his role in the outer world most successfully, but the inner life is neglected. His anima is unconscious and primitive compared to his intellect, so she appears as a simple peasant girl. The urge for renewal, which initially takes a quasi-religious form, is really the need to bring the neglected feminine into consciousness. How difficult it is for any of us to recognize that what is demanded is inner healing. It is so much easier to seek solace or satisfaction in the outer world.
– James Hollis
Each man has to seek out his own special aptitude for a higher life in the midst of the humble and inevitable reality of daily existence. .. It is only by the communications we have with the infinite that we are to be distinguished from each other.
– Maurice Maeterlinck
It seems that everything that has ever happened to us is still alive somewhere in the depths of our psyche.
– James Hollis
Don’t slip on the banana peel
of nihilism, even while listening
to the roar of Nothingness.
– Lawrence Ferlinghetti
We are not yet attuned to language of soul; we are not comfortable thinking metaphorically.
– Thomas Moore
I am an eternal spirit and the things I make
are but ephemera, yet I endure:
Yea, and the little earth crumbles beneath our feet
and we endure.
– Ezra Pound
The inner world is truly infinite, in no way poorer than the outer one. Man lives in two worlds. A fool lives here or there but never here and there.
– CG Jung
I am dizzy
in my own becoming.
– Marina Carreira, What the Water Gave Me
The audience has grown hardened in recent years: it can watch everything. Except it’s own ruined position.
– Serge Daney
The moonlight that haunted Althusser at Tsinghua University or the Sorbonne: the workers don’t need our science, but our revolution: threat of a serious job crisis on the philosophical market.
– Jacques Ranciere
Stay out of town —
it’s graduation weekend,
the old monk warned.
– The Old Monk
It is impossible to create a sane world when our feet do not even touch the earth
– Llyn Roberts
Discouraged to hear that while many have had bad experiences with banks no one has reported a good experience.
I have had only good experiences with CIAA-CREF.
– Joyce Carol Oates
Tolerance for divergence is essential for creativity.
Creating something new is hard when anything that looks a little different is automatically disregarded.
This goes for organizations, people, books, and everything else.
– @farnamstreet
The beauty of writing for children and young adults is that their minds are still open.
– Malorie Blackman
You dance inside the snow
Slush beneath your boots
We talk philosophy and hardcover books
Sometimes i find the heart you took and carry
It around
– jessica Care moore
I don’t think age has much to do with writing. I think it’s something that can certainly improve in time, but there’s no age limit on how old you need to be to write well.
– Sandy Hall
Your mania for sentences has dried up your heart.
– Flaubert’s mother, to Flaubert
All writers feel struck by the limitations of language. All serious writers.
– Margaret Atwood
I love your laughter arrogant and bold.
You are too splendid for this city street.
– Helene Johnson
I abandon myself to joy—
I laugh—I sing.
Too long have I walked a desolate way,
Too long stumbled down a maze
Bewildered.
– Clarissa Scott Delany
I’m the opposite of a writer with a quick gift, you know, someone who gets it piped in. I don’t grasp it very readily at all … I often get on the wrong track and have to haul myself back.
– Alice Munro
I think of literary tradition as a single, large depository.
– Elena Ferrante
This love that wants to be
may soon be;
but when will it return
what has just happened?
Today is a far cry from yesterday.
Yesterday is dreamland!
– Antonio Machado
I know you believe you understand what you think I said, but I’m not sure you realize what you heard is not what I meant.
– Alan Greenspan
Become an alchemist. Transmute base metal into gold, suffering into consciousness, disaster into enlightenment.
– Eckhart Tolle
The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes. Every man who tries to tell it is unpopular, and even when, by the sheer strength of his case, he prevails, he is put down as a scoundrel.
– H.L. Mencken
Gwendolyn Brooks
by Haki R. Madhubuti
she doesn’t wear
costume jewelry
& she knew that walt disney
was/is making a fortune off
false-eyelashes and that time magazine is the
authority on the knee/grow.
her makeup is total-real.
a negro english instructor called her:
“a fine negro poet.”
a whi-te critic said:
“she’s a credit to the negro race.”
somebody else called her;
“a pure negro writer.”
johnnie mae, who’s a senior in high school said:
“she and Langston are the only negro poets we’ve
read in school and i understand her.”
pee wee used to carry one of her poems around in his
back pocket;
the one about being cool. that was befo pee wee
was cooled by a cop’s warning shot.
into the sixties
a word was born . . . . . . . . BLACK
& with black came poets
& from the poet’s ball points came:
black doubleblack purpleblack blueblack beenblack was
black daybeforeyesterday blackerthan ultrablack super
black blackblack yellowblack niggerblack blackwhi-te-
man
blackthanyoueverbes ¼ black unblack coldblack clear
black my momma’s blackerthanyourmomma pimpleblack
fall
black so black we can’t even see you black on black in
black by black technically black mantanblack winter
black coolblack 360degreesblack coalblack midnight
black black when it’s convenient rustyblack moonblack
black starblack summerblack electronblack spaceman
black shoeshineblack jimshoeblack underwearblack ugly
black auntjimammablack, uncleben’srice black
williebest
black blackisbeautifulblack i justdiscoveredblack negro
black unsubstanceblack.
and everywhere the
lady “negro poet”
appeared the poets were there.
they listened & questioned
& went home feeling uncomfortable/unsound & so-
untogether
they read/re-read/wrote & rewrote
& came back the next time to tell the
lady “negro poet”
how beautiful she was/is & how she helped them
& she came back with:
how necessary they were and how they’ve helped her.
the poets walked & as space filled the vacuum between
them & the
lady “negro poet”
u could hear one of the blackpoets say:
“bro, they been calling that sister by the wrong name.”
As best you can, you surrender to the waves. I am a boat, you say. I am a wave. I am a whale. I am a whale’s iris.
– Sarah M. Sala
One must have courage to see what one does see and not to deny it for convenience.
– Javier Marías
Doing as others told me, I was blind. Coming when others called me, I was lost. Then I left everyone, myself as well. Then I found everyone, myself as well.
– Rumi
You are who I love, you reciting Darwish, then June Feeding your heart, teaching your parents how to do The Dougie, counting to 10, reading your patients’ charts.
– Aracelis Girmay
I sang a song that broke my own heart more than once—mind you, that’s even when I didn’t hit the right notes.
– Junious ‘Jay’ Ward
Human beings are not born identical. There are many different temperaments and constitutions; and within each psycho-physical class one can find people at very different stages of spiritual development.
– Aldous Huxley
I love your laughter arrogant and bold. You are too splendid for this city street.
– Helene Johnson
If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
– Henry David Thoreau
There might not be any point of it—except for those few short hours every day that you get to spend your life doing what you want with it. Some of us weed the garden. Some of us wish we’d shot more hoops. Some of us write down what we saw.
– Sarah Carson
If we pay attention to our dreams, instead of living in a cold, impersonal world of meaningless chance, we may begin to emerge into a world of our own, full of important and secretly ordered events.
– CG Jung
Sometimes the art of not saying things is just as powerful as the art of saying the right thing at the right time. Sometimes what is needed is witness.
– David Whyte
Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
In Wagner’s Ring Cycle, the dragon-giant who guards the gold and the Ring of the Niebelungs does nothing with them. He lies asleep on top of his hoard, and would do so unto eternity. The solar gold is a human potential, common to us all, but if it is buried in the unconscious, it remains forever potential.
– Liz Greene
I’m not sure what we’re running from. Nobody. Or the future. Fate. Growing up. Getting old. Picking up the pieces. As if running we won’t have to get on with our lives.
– Chuck Palahniuk
We’re not only Buddhas fully free from attachment and suffering—we’re also humans fully free to get attached, to experience personal love, and to suffer. What great freedom is this!
– Santiago Santai Jiménez
On the contrary, I’m a universal patriot, if you could understand me rightly: my country is the world.
– Charlotte Brontë
Look how clouds dance
under the wind’s wing, and leaves
delight in transience.
– Basil Bunting
Envy is hyperopia of the soul, an inability to see what is closest to us. We fail to see the necessity and value in our own lives.
– Thomas Moore
A work of art is a prophetic loan, drawn on fugitive premises; the artist acts on it, and, presumably, sustains some faith that others will do so too, or at least could.
– Lyn Hejinian
Poetry is the shortest distance between two humans.
– Lawrence Ferlinghetti
People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.
– Steve Jobs
Feeling good is a poor measure of a life, but living meaningfully is a good one, for then we are living a developmental rather than regressive agenda. We never get it all worked out anyway. Life is ragged, and truth is still more raggedy.
– James Hollis
The body should be treated more rigorously, so that it may not be disobedient to the mind.
– Seneca
I hardly ever go to the movies. I don’t want to go see films out of simple curiosity; to form my own idea, I have to be told that there is something essential to discover.
– Chantal Ackerman
…to reach behind that, and again behind that, into the unclear brine of the mind itself.
– Lyn Hejinian
Satire is people as they are; romanticism, people as they would like to be; realism, people as they seem with their insides left out.
– Dawn Powell
Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.
– Francis Bacon
I want to read my book, but I really don’t feel like writing it.
– Caleb Robinson
I am not very bright or very witty or very inventive after the sun goes down.
– Toni Morrison
Sit forward, let the screen reveal
Your heritage, the logic of your destiny.
– Weldon Kees
Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things.
– G.K. Chesterton
If we fail to nourish our souls, they wither, and without soul, life ceases to have meaning. The creative process shrivels in the absence of continual dialogue with the soul. And creativity is what makes life worth living.
– Marion Woodman
Practice in the use of the rule also shows what is a mistake in its employment.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
Academia, in all kinds of ways, demands a degree of overwork situated in and bolstered by ableism, and I just find that I hate it and want nothing to do with it.
– Matt Dowell
I was eventually to become one person, gathered up maybe, during a pause, at a comma.
– Lyn Hejinian
How tiny the world
becomes in poems. Yet look,
ambiguities
jostle in the soil:
Earthworms, ants, beetles and grubs.
Out of these we build
poetry. One dropped
glove seeks missing fingers. Lost
languages gather
in dark choruses.
– George Szirtes
It is as if we and the world had a joint stake in keeping ourselves stupid. . . .This poses … the specific difficulty of philosophy and calls upon its peculiar strength, to receive inspiration for taking thought from the very conditions that oppose thought.
– Stanley Cavell
Whether poetry is accentual or syllabic, rhymed or rhymeless, formal or free, it cannot afford to lose its contact with the changing language of common intercourse.
– T. S. Eliot
When we resolve something with mindfulness, we can let it go and free ourselves from its power. The resolution of such a conflict leads us to contemplate what life is about.
– Ajahn Sumedho
There has always only been one day, and with it we are developing a lifelong relationship.
– Lyn Hejinian
When you’re young, you think everything is to do with your career. Eventually you realize that your career is only a part of it.
– Kazuo Ishiguro
There a tiny little diamond spots of renewal everywhere you look, if you care to look closely.
– Lisa Lucas
to see your local shadow, just ask yourself: who are you not allowed to understand?
– @the_wilderless
Our anxieties lead us to grasp at certainties. Certainties lead to dogma; dogma leads to rigidity; rigidity leads to idolatry; idolatry always banishes the mystery and thus leads to spiritual narrowing.
– James Hollis
How all becomes clear and simple when one opens an eye on the within, having of course previously exposed it to the without, in order to benefit by the contrast.
– Samuel Beckett
To migrate is to stay alive. Trees know this. Birds know this. And more and more people are reckoning with the same, often callous truth.
– Lauren Markham.
…the very commonness of common sense makes it unlikely to have any appeal to the anointed. How can they be wiser and nobler than everyone else while agreeing with everyone else?
– Thomas Sowell
Let very old things come into your hands. Let what you do not know come into your eyes… May the spring of a foreign river be your navel. May your soul be at home where there are no houses. Walk carefully, well loved one, walk mindfully, well loved one, walk fearlessly, well loved one. Return with us, return to us, be always coming home.
– Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home
The facts were told not to speak and were taken away. The facts, surprised to be taken, were silent.
– Jane Hirshfield
The kiss, at night, burns sense into language
– Jean-Luc Nancy
I did not feel, with him, that same sense of giddy infinitude.
– Leslie Jamison
Saw a random undergrad in an elevator carrying a cool bag, so I googled it because I thought I wanted one. It costs more than my rent, and about half what I get paid to teach a course. This is not Dark Academia, this is Pitch Black academia.
– @saintsoftness
When we envy we almost always miss what is our own, for we are never at the place where we are but only where the other is. Moreover, we see others falsely, distorting them by reducing them to their envied parts.
– Ann and Barry Ulanov
The only way to store data long term, like proper long term, is in…intergenerational narratives that can last for forty, fifty, sixty, thousand years.
– Tyson Yunkaporta, Deep Time Diligence
The spaces / between / things began / speaking.
– Jorie Graham
the idea that we are a brain in a body is a holdover from the idea that we are a soul in the body
– Laura London
The manner in writing is a sort of mask behind which the heart makes faces as it pleases.
– Wittgenstein
Being alone in my room provides the greatest relief, there I restore my equilibrium. . . The best state for me is the state of enthusiasm because it consumes the ridiculous thoughts at least partially and renders them harmless.
– Wittgenstein
Each one of us, ontologically speaking, is next to nothing.
– Robert Pogue Harrison
Much more of the brain is devoted to movement than to language. Language is only a little thing sitting on top of this huge ocean of movement.
– Oliver Sacks
I’ve been thinking about who is allowed the privilege of nostalgia, what comprises an individual sense of nostalgia versus a collective one, and in what ways the slippery question of power morphs and changes over time due to a tendency to look at the past through rose-colored glasses.
– Em Dial
Somewhere along the line—it became obvious by the Middle Ages—the church made a very bad mistake. Now not only were some actions evil, but fantasies were evil, too. You were a bad person simply by having fantasies about evil; adultery was a sin, and thinking about adultery was a sin, too. Both had to be confessed and forgiven. As a result, people began to deny and repress their fantasy life, and the shadow was driven even further underground. The split became greater.
– Connie Zweig
But they could neither of them persuade me, for there is nothing dearer to a man than his own country and his parents, and however splendid a home he may have in a foreign country, if it be far from father or mother, he does not care about it.
– Homer
Everything in life is triage.
– Leah Callen
Deeply ingrained in the infantile psyche is the conscious or unconscious assumption that the cure for depression is to replace it with pleasant, happy feelings, whereas the only valid cure for any kind of depression lies in the acceptance of real suffering.
– Helen M. Luke
It isn’t by getting out of the world that we become enlightened, but by getting into the world…by getting so tuned in that we can ride the waves of our existence and never get tossed because we become the waves.
– Ken Kesey
No one can prove that God does or doesn’t exist, but tough acts of forgiveness are pretty convincing for me.
– Anne Lamott
The devil doesn’t come dressed in a red cape and pointy horns. He comes as everything you’ve ever wished for.
– Tucker Max
The television is ‘real’. It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and blasts it in. It must be right. It seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn’t time to protest, ‘What nonsense!’.
– Ray Bradbury
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
To some extent, each sentence has to be the whole story.
– Lyn Hejinian
The flock is carving open space up into the most complex geometrical volumes, and you have to ask yourself, How do they do that? The answer is, No one’s giving anyone else instructions. … It’s an aggregate of birds, and to behold them is to take in something…in which there’s no leader,no hero,no driver. That to me is the way around the dilemma of scale [we humans face]: a much greater level of coordination and reference toward others. You must rid yourself of the idea that only one person knows, and understand that genius might be manifested in one man or woman in a particular moment, but that the quality of genius that characterizes humanity is actually possessed by the community.
– Barry Lopez
Form is not a fixture but an activity.
– Lyn Hejinian
Obviously the life has to change. You need to feel everything, be sensitive to everything, so the intelligence of your heart can function.
How could your life not change?
– Daniel Thorson
There is only one page left to write on. I will fill it with words of only one syllable. I love. I have loved. I will love.
– Dodie Smith, I Capture The Castle
Dawn oversees percolating coffee
and the new wreckage of the world.
– Parneshia Jones
To the wise, a storm of difficulty may be a school.
The slaps of waves resemble the slaps of a master.
– Mirza Ghalib
He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often came back with two.
– Victor Hugo
If you don’t write when you don’t have time for it, you won’t write when you do have time for it.
– Katerina Stoykova Klemer
I am carried in my shadow like a violin in its black case
– Tomas Transtromer
A coolheaded musical sun god; a balanced hexameter dream.
– Amit Majmudar
Being a writer is like being an individual proprietor or a taxi driver: You don’t like the way I do things, get out of my shop.
– Peter Carey
Pride in our own competence can be our largest obstacle to fully experiencing reality.
– Grace Schireson
One image cannot critique another image.
– Serge Daney
Now it is my contention and my basic metaphysical axiom that existence – the physical universe – is basically playful. There is no necessity for it whatsoever. It is not going anywhere; that is to say, it does not have some destination at which it ought to arrive. It is best understood by analogy with music because music as an art form is essentially playful. We say, “You play the piano.” You do not work the piano.
– Alan Watts
The touch of an infinite mystery passes over the trivial and the familiar, making it break out into ineffable music… The trees, the stars, and the blue hills ache with a meaning which can never be uttered in words.
– Rabindranath Tagore
We actually contain a built-in ability to rise above restriction, incapacity, or limitation and, as a result of this ability, possess a vital adaptive spirit that we have not yet fully accessed. While this ability can lead us to transcendence, paradoxically it can lead also to violence; our longing for transcendence arises from our intuitive sensing of this adaptive potential and our violence arises from our failure to develop it.
– Joseph Chilton Pearce
If the Great Spirit had desired me to be a white man he would have made me so in the first place. He put in your heart certain wishes and plans, and in my heart he put other and different desires. It is not necessary for eagles to be crows.
– Sitting Bull
Organism is opposed to chaos, to disintegration, to death, as message is to noise. To describe an organism, we do not try to specify each molecule in it, and catalogue it bit by bit, but rather to answer certain questions about it which reveal its pattern: a pattern which is more significant and less probable as the organism becomes, so to speak, more fully an organism.
– Norbert Wiener
You once told me that the human eye is god’s loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing. The eye, alone in its socket, doesn’t even know there’s another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty.
– Ocean Vuong
And here, according to Trout, was the reason human beings could not reject ideas because they were bad: “Ideas on Earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enmity
– Kurt Vonnegut
Slipping
On my shoes.
Boiling water,
Toasting bread,
Buttering the sky:
That should be enough contact
With God in one day
To make anyone
Crazy.
– Hafiz
The model we choose to use to understand something determines what we find.
– Iain McGilchrist
I was thinking how amazing it was that the world contained so many lives. Out in these streets people were embroiled in a thousand different matters, money problems, love problems, school problems. People were falling in love, getting married, going to drug rehab, learning how to ice-skate, getting bifocals, studying for exams, trying on clothes, getting their hair-cut and getting born. And in some houses people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered.
– Jeffrey Eugenides
Projections change the world into the replica of one’s unknown face.
– Carl G. Jung
The face you look out of
is never the face
your lover looks into.
– Jim Harrison
… sometimes in sleep I find myself walking on a map-like space, searching for a place I can at last call my own. But it always sends me to another one, similar to it, but further away. Lonely people have always a map in their head.
– Etel Adnan
there ain’t no gun
ever put out a flame
– Alec Finlay
We live in toppled times under a feat of tyranny; let’s not
fake getting lost, let’s do it
– Lyn Hejinian
For let us not deceive ourselves: most of the minds we associate with are housed in heads that have little more to offer than overgrown potatoes, stuck on top of whining and tastelessly clad bodies and eking out a pathetic existence that does not even merit our pity.
– Thomas Bernhard
To have a migraine while attending an artist’s retreat felt like a special kind of theft [. . .]. I wanted to capture the tension between the migraine’s will and my own. . .
– Teri Ellen Cross Davis
One way of measuring ego-strength and maturity of personality is to assess a person’s capacity to tolerate ambivalence. This capacity is closely related to the ability to feel empathy. It is all about tolerating otherness.
– Heidi M. Kolb
All my life, men with blackened insides
have fought to keep
the flutter of a white egret in my chest
from bursting into flight, into glory.
– Chris Abani
The work of art offers an experience of contradictions and incommensurabilities – these are much better than truths.
– Lyn Hejinian
I bit sweet power to the core. How can I say what it was like? The taste! The taste undid my eyes.
– Toni Morrison
If you feel stale in your ideas or in your approach, start carrying a notebook around and recording things that surprise you. It seems to me we lose originality when we stop being curious.
– Brooke Warner
the same name
as my dead dog
spring sky
– Sema Yōko
There’s nothing, but this sailboat inside me,
slowly trying to catch a wind …
– Ada Limón
Borges would come out of the dining room where they were writing and laughing, and say, Today we made significant progress—we wrote one full line.
– Luisa Valenzuela
Academics are funny because they want to be taken seriously but they’re wearing a little backpack.
– Neil Renic
forgotten requests
all the glittering coins
in the fountain
– @hegelincanada
Rules for When the Coin Toss Ends in a Tie
All players must immediately call their wives and beg forgiveness. The top scorers have to donate their statistics to the less fortunate. Team captains kiss each other on the cheek and say one thing they admire about the other. It can’t be about their physical strength or muscle tone. Something real. Fathers have to imagine who they’d be if they had better fathers. All the old-time greats are allowed to climb out of their graves. They get to drink a beer and eat a hot dog. Then they have to go back. Every fan gets a time-out to take home. Some use it when the world is too much, others when the world is exactly right. The roar of the crowd is bottled and saved for later, a day when we might really need it.
– Jeffrey Hermann
The door slammed and someone came home and low voices could be heard, the single lilt of a question as it rose, “How was it?” or “Are you hungry?” Something plain and necessary, yet extra, with care, a voice like those tiny roofs over the phone booths along the train tracks, the ones made from the same shingles used for houses, except only four rows wide—just enough to keep the phone dry. And maybe that’s all I wanted—to be asked a question and have it cover me, like a roof the width of myself.
– Ocean Vuong
Justice is children are hungry and not cold. Justice is that my babies are alive. I brought them into the world on a joyful earth. The sea provided the water for their baptism. They don’t need any other riches. I ask nothing for them but daily bread and sleep for the poor. It’s nothing and yet this is what you refuse. And if you deny the unfortunate their bread, it is not luxury, nor beautiful language, nor mysterious promises that you never forgive.
Justice means that children eat as much as they need and are not cold. Justice means that my little ones live. I gave birth to them in a land of joy. The sea provided the water for their baptism. They need no other riches. I ask nothing for them but daily bread and the sleep of the poor. It’s nothing, and yet that’s what you refuse. And if you deny the unfortunate their bread, there is no luxury, no beautiful language, no mysterious promises that will ever provide a basis for forgiveness.
– Albert Camus
One of the heaviest lessons I’ve learned with age is that what I thought was “life” when I was growing up turned out to be a very temporary state of affairs.
– Steve Silberman
Unconventional thinking and reverse psychology are like secret weapons in our battle against aggression and fear. When we come to adopt the attitude of seeing all adverse circumstances as blessings, we have nothing to fear or reject. There is no longer anything to worry about because we can turn whatever happens to us into a means of growing further. This gives us tremendous confidence as we go through life.
– Dzigar Kongtrul, Peaceful Heart
Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul.
– Toni Morrison
Sometimes when, through shock, dispersed attention is suddenly collected, one comes to an abrupt awakening, glimpses the relationship between energy and attention. Impressions are received differently, perceptions are wider and sharper. Unexpectedly, another side of oneself is revealed. The value of existence of all living things, takes on new meaning.
– William Segal
Why do we care about singers? Wherein lies the power of songs? Maybe it derives from the sheer strangeness of there being singing in the world. The note, the scale, the chord; melodies, harmonies, arrangements; symphonies, ragas, chinese operas, jazz, the blues: that such things should exist, that we should have discovered the magical intervals and distances that yield the poor cluster of notes, all within the span of a human hand from which we can build our cathedrals of sound, is as alchemical a mystery as mathematics, or wine, or love. Maybe the birds taught us. Maybe not. Maybe we are just creatures in search of exaltation. We don’t have much of it. Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many painful ways deficient. Song turns them into something else. Song shows us a world that is worthy of our yearning, it shows us our selves as they might be, if we were worthy of the world.
– Salman Rushdie
Lux spent the ride dialing the radio for her favorite song. “It makes me crazy,” she said. “You know they’re playing it somewhere, but you have to find it.
– Jeffrey Eugenides
I am a child of the Milky Way. The night is my mother. I am made of the dust of stars. Every atom in my body was forged in a star. When the universe exploded into being, already the bird longed for the wood and the fish for the pool. When the first galaxies fell into luminous clumps, already matter was struggling toward consciousness. The star clouds of Sagittarius are a burning bush. If there is a voice in Sagittarius, I’d be a fool not to listen. If God’s voice in the night is a scrawny cry, then I’ll prick up my ears. If night’s faint lights fail to knock me off my feet, then I’ll sit back on a dark hillside and wait and watch. A hint here and a trait there. Listening and watching. Waiting, always waiting, for the tingle in the spine.
– Chet Raymo
I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.
– John Steinbeck
We are meaning-seeking creatures and, unlike other animals, fall very easily into despair if we cannot find significance and value in our lives.
– Karen Armstrong, The Great Transformation
before my eyes
just as is it is
poetry
– Basho
The Buddha addressed his disciples’ immediate situation rather than quoting ancient texts because the experience of liberation can occur only as the epiphany of the present moment in all its fullness.
– Reggie Ray
I know now why confusion in government is not only tolerated but encouraged. I have learned. A confused people can make no clear demands.
– John Steinbeck
The beginning of forgiveness is often exhaustion. You’re pooped; thank God.
– Anne Lamott
One dull man, dulling and uxorious.
– Ezra Pound
When I Am Asked
by Lisel Mueller
When I am asked
how I began writing poems,
I talk about the indifference of nature.
It was soon after my mother died,
a brilliant June day,
everything blooming.
I sat on a gray stone bench
in a lovingly planted garden,
but the day lilies were as deaf
as the ears of drunken sleepers
and the roses curved inward.
Nothing was black or broken
and not a leaf fell
and the sun blared endless commercials
for summer holidays.
I sat on a gray stone bench
ringed with the ingenue faces
of pink and white impatiens
and placed my grief
in the mouth of language,
the only thing that would grieve with me.
Don’t mess with
perfection
is what God is
trying to tell us,
the old monk
realized.
– The Old Monk
While the Emperor eats ice cream, infants in Gaza die of starvation.
– @ZeeshanJaanam
We need to publish more Zines!
Cheap Artsy and Cool.
And cheaper to ship.
– Laura Kerr
And this I believe : that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for : the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected.
– John Steinbeck
I think today if we forbade our illiterate children to touch the wonderful things of our literature, perhaps they might steal them and find secret joy.
– John Steinbeck
We spend our life, it’s ours, trying to bring together in the same instant a ray of sunshine and a free bench.
– Samuel Beckett
… You were a visionary, a dreamer – but you possessed the relentless determination to realize your visions and your dreams.
– Letter to Gustav Mahler from Oscar Fried
Now we know why James Baldwin lived abroad for years and years. Because home (America) was the darkest thought.
– Zeeshan Jaanam
The way to change a tragic drama back into a heroic one is to open the secret, speak of it to someone, write another ending, examine one’s part in it and one’s attributes in enduring it. These learnings are in equal parts pain and wisdom. The having lived through it is a triumph of the deep and wild spirit.
– Clarissa Pinkola Estés
Though artists generally aren’t aware of it, that end work is a by- product of a greater desire. We aren’t creating to produce or sell material products. The act of creation is an attempt to enter a mysterious realm. A longing to transcend. What we create allows us to share glimpses of an inner landscape, one that is beyond our understanding. Art is our portal to the unseen world.
– Rick Rubin
Rudeness is the weak person’s imitation of strength.
– Eric Hoffer
The quality of our relationships, the quality of our parenting, the quality of our citizenship, and the quality of our life’s journey can never be higher than the level of personal development we have attained.
– James Hollis
The bardo can act as a boundary that divides and separates, marking the end of one thing and the beginning of another; but it can also be a link between the two…
– Francesca Fremantle
The attempt to destroy credentials creates another credential.
– Chögyam Trungpa
A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants.
– Laurence Durrell
No two persons ever read the same book.
– Edmund Wilson
Man did not enter into society to become worse than he was before, nor to have fewer rights than he had before, but to have those rights better secured.
– Thomas Paine
There are some great writers who are great talkers, but there are more great writers who are not great talkers.
– Fran Lebowitz
I’d gone through life believing in the strength and competence of others; never in my own. Now, dazzled, I discovered that my capacities were real. It was like finding a fortune in the lining of an old coat.
– Joan Mills
I don’t dream of houses, the ronin said. My home is everywhere. My bowl is a night full of stars, a blue table of the summer sky.
– Voima Oy
Ferlinghetti on poetry: It is private solitude made public.
Our perfunctory reading of nonsense habituates us to be careless and remiss with all our reading, even of good books.
– Wisdom of Carson
everything matters
nothing is interchangeable
– River Kenna
YOU CANNOT ADAPT TO EXTINCTION.
– Vanessa Nakate
I am not pristine, I am not good, / I am in no way Jesus, I am in no way even the bad Mary / let alone the good.
– Diane Seuss
…To stop and pay attention to the moment is one way of snapping out of these mindscapes, and is a definition of meditation. This awareness is a process of deepening self-acceptance. Whatever it observes, it embraces. There is nothing unworthy of acceptance.
– Stephen Batchelor
I am yours. Give me a field, give me a big sky. A mountain. Give me your mouth. I’m just looking for a quiet place that I could die inside of.
– Anis Mojgani
A mystical experience would be wasted on me. Ordinary things have always seemed numinous to me.
– Marilynne Robinson
… redo and read it more than once relieve brilliant slop acres room is just arctic infolding darkstar and dawnrise on tarnrake lips from singular fold loop fourteener or leave it say goodbye and part a sunset …
– @clickblackburn
Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups . . . So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.
– Philip K. Dick
Decision takes us into a different experience of time. In Creative Time the end reaches back and pulls the beginning towards it. The decision to engage at any stage in a process puts us in contact with all the other stages in a process. In the world where a decision is taken, the action has already taken place. The decision then moves into ordinary time where an act, a cause, leads to an effect…
– Robert Fripp
The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I believe our future depends powerfully on how well we understand this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.
– Carl Sagan
The sun is perfect and you woke this morning. You have enough language in your mouth to be understood. You have a name, and someone wants to call it. Five fingers on your hand and someone wants to hold it. If we just start there, every beautiful thing that has and will ever exist is possible. If we start there, everything, for a moment, is right in the world.
– Warsan Shire
Somewhere a Pure Act Is Saving Us
Somewhere a pure act is saving us.
Prayer reaches high,
a song reaches higher.
In every capital, a mother’s love
for her child redeems the world
for one more day.
In a room without furniture,
a violin is lifted from its case,
and for the hour between shifts
we are saved.
The poet climbs the sentence,
stumbles, falls, gets up again.
He does something to the loose
rocks on top and suddenly
there is a place to stand.
For this no one thanks him
but by this act we live.
The floor is scrubbed
until its face shines like Christ
because the old woman
never questioned life.
– Sy Safransky
Inside, we are ageless and when we talk to ourselves, it’s the same age of the person we were talking to when we were little. It’s the body that is changing around that ageless center.
– David Lynch
You want to protect your child from pain, and what you get instead is life, and grace. And while theologians insist that grace is freely given, the truth is that sometimes you pay through the nose. And you can’t pay your child’s way.
– Anne Lamott
Outward passivity and inner secrecy poison our relationships. Consciously or unconsciously we sustain our rage and defiance under a cloak of smiles in a two-dimensional world, too frightened to express our true feeling.
– John P. Conger
If you say that you love fish, what usually happens? You eat it. So you see, you don’t love the fish; you love yourself.
– Khenpo Sherab Sangpo
We haven’t begun to grapple with the dynamics at play when evolution becomes optional.
– River Kenna
I think there’s a kind of desperate hope built into poetry that one really wants, hopelessly, to save the world. One is trying to say everything that can be said for the things that one loves while there’s still time.
– W. S. Merwin
Jung was drawn to alchemy, not as an exotic solipsistic fancy, but as a world of endless parallels to the processes of human individuation.
– Ann Ulanov
The word is not the thing. The word ‘God’ is not God, and therefore the term is independent of God, though you may call it God.
– Krishnamurti
Most of those
who write about God
have never met her,
the old monk said.
She is the Great Mother,
Receiver and Giver.
– The Old Monk
I wish more people would write
poetry or prose.
Writing is good for the soul.
It teaches you
that it’s hard to make sense
but good to try.
– john zbigniew Guzowski
The neurotic opts out of life because he is having trouble maintaining his illusions about it, which proves nothing less than that life is possible only with illusions.
– Ernest Becker
It is because we are all
imposters that we
endure each
other.
– Emil Cioran
I looked up from my solitary
suffering. I learned the history
of men.
– Cameron Awkward-Rich
Teachers who make physics boring are criminals
– Walter Lewin
One moment of kindness is greater than a hundred years of ordinary life. One moment of perfect attention is greater than a hundred years of kindness.
– Kate Lila Wheeler
I have spent my life waiting for something to happen, and I have come to understand that nothing will. Or it already has, and I blinked during that moment and it’s gone. I don’t know which is worse — to have missed it or to know there is nothing to miss.
– Tracy Chevalier
The oldest, shortest words— “yes” and “no”— are those which require the most thought.
– Pythagoras
Like any other member of for-profit political media, Kornacki’s salary/renown depends not on accuracy, but on close, dramatic elections. The special and primary election results are showing Republicans to be in a significantly worse position than the media model wants them to be in to deliver that drama. If the model fails, he himself becomes less relevant, the same way color commentators would be disappointed if the NBA finals or Super Bowl weren’t close. His job is structured the same way.
– Ethan Nichtern
Capitalism is when you’re more familiar with brands of bottled water than the names of local rivers.
– Joan Westenberg
I went home inside myself too. The world became so small.
– Joy Priest
If you want to think for yourself, you can’t have someone always whispering in your ear. If you want space to think, you need quiet and calm, not a bunch of people throwing out new ideas.
– Farnam Street
Mundus vult decipi: the world loves to be deceived.
– Martin Buber
The everyday raid
on the inarticulate
results in something
like a voice that might
start speaking or singing or
reciting. Come out
of that deep lake. Stand
briefly on the shore, gasping.
What’s that in your hand?
Whose voice in your mouth?
– George Szirtes
My soul “rouses a relentlessness that can’t be quieted until the pilgrimage commences traveling”
– frederick fajardo
That so few now dare to be eccentric,marks the central challenge of the time.
– John Stuart Mill
These days, I’m very rarely jealous of another writer’s style; instead, I’m often jealous of their vocabulary. I know how to line up the words. I just want better ones to play with.
– Matt Bell
A haiku is a short walk in the sun
that stays with you
all your life
– john zbigniew guzlowski
What will you do with your one wild and precious Leap Day?
– James Tate Hill
My biggest trouble is that people look at me and think that no serious trouble has ever troubled my little head. They seldom realize the chaos that seethes behind my exterior.
– Sylvia Plath
The exceeding beauty of the earth, in her splendor of life, yields a new thought with every petal. The hours when the mind is absorbed by beauty are the only hours when we really live, so that the longer we can stay among these things so much the more is snatched from inevitable Time.
[…]
These are the only hours that are not wasted — these hours that absorb the soul and fill it with beauty. This is real life, and all else is illusion, or mere endurance. Does this reverie of flowers and waterfall and song form an ideal, a human ideal, in the mind? It does; much the same ideal that Phidias sculptured of man and woman filled with a godlike sense of the violet fields of Greece, beautiful beyond thought, calm as my turtle-dove before the lurid lightning of the unknown. To be beautiful and to be calm, without mental fear, is the ideal of nature.
– Richard Jefferies
Before the corner becomes distorted remember:
one more time inhale deep. inhale memory to include
the bad & terrible beauty just beneath the living.
– Randall Horton
Starting from nothing
to where we are,
is farther than the farthest star.
And farther than the farthest star,
is where we’re going from where we are.
– Eyvind Earle
the waters wash
over toes
first
then waves push
pebbles along
sand
as friction smooths
shards of
glass
to tiny gemstones
along hushed
walks
memories swim
while skipping
stones
wave, to wave
to wave
– Andy Perrin
Boundaries play an interesting and sometimes complicated role in developing compassion. They are like the stake and wires that are used to help keep young trees rooted and growing straight.
– Lorne Ladner
Book publishing to me should be done by failed writers—editors who recognize the real thing when they see it.
– Robert Giroux
It seemed that good manners, to her, were not about doing polite things to make life more pleasant but were things of divine origin.
– Hebe Uhart
Why have they erased their private life from their work?
– Derrida
This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals. In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not.
– Philip K. Dick
In the West, you find the idea that only humans have language. I never believed that. We know bacteria sing to each other, that even subatomic particles are self-aware and communicate and tangle with one another. So, for me, the universe is itself language; everything is speaking to everything else, in particular chemical, sonic, and territorial languages. There are sorts we can’t even imagine, yet together they form part of what we as humans can sense and perceive. We can talk about things as if we know what we are talking about. That’s the most fascinating thing in the world because in truth we don’t know much at all. What we don’t know composes 99.9 percent of the real. That possibility of sensing what we cannot name makes language what it is—a reaching for what cannot be said.
– Cecilia Vicuña
I don’t want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don’t tell the truth, I tell what ought to be the truth. And it that’s sinful, then let me be damned for it!
– Tennessee Williams
When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.
– John Muir
Basing his work on the strange legend that Ts’ui Pên had intended to construct an infinite labyrinth and on a cryptic letter from Ts’ui Pên himself stating, “I leave to several futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths,” Doctor Albert realized that the “garden of forking paths” was the novel and that the forking takes place in time, rather than space.
In most fictions, a character chooses one alternative at each decision point and eliminates all of the others. In Ts’ui Pên’s novel, however, all possible outcomes of an event occur simultaneously, all of which themselves lead to further proliferations of possibilities. Albert further explains that the constantly-diverging paths sometimes converge again but as the result of a different chain of causes.
– J.L. Borges
The greatest force in the human body is the natural drive of the body to heal itself – but that force is not independent of the belief system, which can translate expectations into physiological change. Nothing is more wondrous about the fifteen billion neurons in the human brain than their ability to convert thoughts, hopes, ideas, and attitudes into chemical substances. Everything begins, therefore, with belief. What we believe is the most powerful option of all.
– Norman Cousins
For all healing, mental or material, is attuning each atom of the body, each reflex of the brain forces, to the awareness of the divine that lies within each atom, each cell of the body.
– Edgar Cayce
The best defenses against the terrors of existence are the homely comforts of love, work, and family life, which connect us to a world that is independent of our wishes yet responsive to our needs.
– Freud
Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.
– Andre Gide
Mental associations are living things. They are formations of energy assembled into invisible structures, through processes quite as valid and complicated as the organization of any group of cells.
Comparing them with cells, they are of briefer duration, generally speaking… But your thoughts form structures as real as the cells. Their composition is different in that no solidity is involved in your terms.
As living cells have a structure, react to stimuli and organize according to their own classification, so do thoughts. Thoughts thrive on association. They magnetically attract others like themselves, and like some strange microscopic animals they repel their ‘enemies,’ or other thoughts that are threatening to their own survival.
Using this analogy, your mental and emotional life forms a framework composed of such structures, and these act directly upon the cells of your physical body.
– Jane Roberts, The Nature of Personal Reality
We are not to be saved by the captain, but by the crew.
– Federick Douglass
Modern man is a mass man, he is highly “socialized,” but he is very lonely. Modern man is alienated from others and confronted with a dilemma: He is afraid of close contact with another and equally afraid to be alone and have no contact.
– Erich Fromm
In the winter, you feel as if you were upstairs, above the clouds; it is cold and crisp, as if you were flying in the sky.
– Chögyam Trungpa
I’m climbing out of this season, fingernails ragged, belly soft.
– Tamiko Beyer
The joy of poetry is that it will wait for you. Novels don’t wait for you. Characters change. But poetry will wait.
– Sonia Sanchez
It’s terrible for me to live in a time where I have nothing to say to human beings except, “Stop killing.”
– Fr. Daniel Berrigan
As days turn to weeks, weeks to months, and months to years, tiny repeatable choices compound.
Working out tomorrow won’t change your physique all that much, but working out every day for the next year will increase your chances of staying in shape.
– @farnamstreet
What is seen can be abolished by the eyelids, can be stopped by partitions or curtains . . . What is heard knows neither eyelids, nor partitions . . . Undelimitable, it is impossible to protect oneself from it … Sound rushes in. It violates.
– Hillel Schwartz, Making Noise
God’s patience is like a
worn denim jacket,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
You have seen me like this before, such a strange / version of the person you thought you knew.
– Matthew Siegel
It is no worse, because I write of it. It would be no better, if I stopped my most unwilling hand. Nothing can undo it; nothing can make it otherwise than as it was.
– Charles Dickens
We’re all one beat away from becoming elevator music.
– Don Delillo
What is wisdom?
What decreases it?
What increases it?
Please tell me.
– @incrediblefolly
Ultimately, you have to develop
A huge crush
On the God
Inside of yourself.
Really, there’s no other way.
– Chelan Harkin
If you want to be as clear and refreshing as
the breath of the morning breeze,
be like the sun – have nothing but warmth and light
for everyone.
– Shaikh Abu-Saeed Abil-Kheir
Either we live in terror of fate because we have not yet found any sense of genuine individuality, or we repudiate the very idea of fate for precisely the same reason.
– Liz Greene
out of a great nebula of night and storm, borne upon a great void within our space, my soul was formed; out of that silence where there is no form.
the silent ecstasy of hours
life, like abandoned flowers,
thought, like a forlorn grace.
– fernando pessoa
under the breath of the wind, while the star of fate listeneth. ship that are not anywhere, sail or sail not… seem, to sail. where? ship that i dream and fades.
in my dreams distance, go
there are happier glades
beyond where i know
but this is today
– fernando pessoa
there is a higher reason which transcends all human minds. it is far and near. it permeates all the worlds and at the same time is infinitely higher than they.
– upanishads
It is our unexpressed sorrows, the congested stories of loss, that, when left unattended, block our access to the soul. To be able to freely move in & out of the soul’s inner chambers, we must first clear the way. This requires finding meaningful ways to speak of sorrow.
– Francis Weller
The lies we tell about our duty and our purposes, the meaningless words of science and philosophy, are walls that topple before a bewildered little ‘why’.
– John Steinbeck
Every day the world presents you with the wrong battles, designed to waste your energy so you don’t fight the right ones.
– Joseph Fasano
Poetry is the most intimate of all writing. I want to speak first from me to myself and then from me to you.
– Ellen Bass
Sometimes
I catch my mind
circling for you with glazed eye—
my lost love hunting
your lost face.
– Robert Lowell
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
high-tech hotel room
I don’t know how
to turn myself off
– @pauldavidmena
These are dark and dehumanizing times. And it sure feels like we have nowhere to turn.
– Maureen Langloss
Music is about as physical as it gets: your essential rhythm is your heartbeat; your essential sound, your breath. We’re walking temples of noise, and when you add tender hearts to this mix, it somehow lets us meet in places we couldn’t get to any other way
– Anne Lamott
I am who I say I am. I shape my existence with curiosity and intention.
– Rachel E. Cargle, A Renaissance of Our Own
Bight blue sky – I see
that everyone deserves
to be happy
even you, even me
despite this dark burning world
– Kris Lindbeck
The Writer
by Richard Wilbur
In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.
I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.
Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.
But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which
The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.
I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash
And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark
And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,
And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,
It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.
It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.
A hero is someone who can take off the armor, who can be vulnerable and show up anyway, experiencing what is really happening without trying to resist or run away. I saw that an act of heroism can be an action that happens on the inside without anyone else noticing.
– Tracy Cochran
Times of great transition are, in fact, the best opportunities to renew the search for meaning. As our old stories fall away, we begin to see new possibilities. When most empty, we’re most able to be filled anew.
– Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft
It’s good to remember how to forget. I’m interested in the oral tradition: what keeps the poems alive is a little forgetting. In Homer you get the sense that anything could happen because the poet might not remember.
– Alice Oswald
To be more revolutionary than a nun
is our desire, to be secular and intimate as, when sighting a redcoat, you smile and pull the trigger.
– Frank O’Hara
You were painting a picture of your life.
Someone came along and punched a hole in it.
The hole is not you.
You’re so much more than that.
Reclaim your brush.
You’re still a masterpiece.
– Dr. Thema
Better to base a character on someone you’ve known for ten minutes than someone you’ve known for ten years, because you want them to be plastic, to be malleable.
– Martin Amis
The vacation gone wrong in Paris is almost always because people try to do too many things. Most of us are lucky to see Paris once in a lifetime. Please, make the most of it by doing as little as possible. Walk a little. Get lost a bit. Eat. Catch a breakfast buzz. Have a nap. Try and have sex if you can, just not with a mime. Eat again. Lounge around drinking coffee. Maybe read a book. Drink some wine. Eat. Repeat. See? It’s easy.
– Anthony Bourdain
We do not belong to those who have ideas only among books, when stimulated by books. It is our habit to think outdoors – walking, leaping, climbing, dancing, preferably on lonely mountains or near the sea where even the trails become thoughtful.
– Nietzsche
at the molecular level it becomes clear that you are made of trillions of cathedrals.
– Romeo Stevens
If the proof is correct then no other recognition is needed.
– Grigori Perelman
I write for the future
because my present is demolished.
– Fady Joudah
Blue through the window burns the twilight; Heavy, through trees, blows the warm south wind.
– Amy Lowell
Let your loyalty to another human being come about in this way: there will be moments — quickly passing by — when he will seem to you filled and illumined by the true, primal image of his spirit.
Then can come, yes, will come, long stretches of time when your fellow-being seems clouded, even darkened. But learn at these times to say to yourself: The spirit will strengthen me; I will remember the true, unchanging image that I once saw. Nothing at all — neither deception nor disguise — can take it away from me.
Struggle again and again for the true picture that you saw. The struggle itself is your faithfulness.
And in those efforts to be faithful and to trust, a human being will come close to another as if with an angel’s power of protection.
– Rudolf Steiner
The teacher pretended that algebra was a perfectly natural affair, to be taken for granted, whereas I didn’t even know what numbers really were.
– C.G. Jung
On one dark winter day when the wind was blowing violently outside, people were talking in a room. Then, a bird entered the room through one window and flew out of it through another window. Where did the bird come from and where did it go? The people in the room agreed that human life was exactly like that.
– Kitaro Nishida
If better is to come, good must step aside.
– Carl G. Jung
You just have to walk in the room and be fearless. Never let people think for a minute that you couldn’t totally take them down.
– Stevie Nicks
Is it possible to characterize anything but individuals? … Aren’t all systems individuals just as all individuals are systems at least in embryo and tendency? Isn’t every real entity historical? Aren’t there individuals who contain within themselves whole systems of individuals?
– Friedrich Schlegel
Makes me wonder if, despite the common belief in mindfulness as a panacea, it’s being a crankypants that actually helps you live longer?
– Ren Powell, Mad Orphan Literature
Better to know a few things which are good and necessary than many things which are useless and mediocre.
– Leo Tolstoy
No man can learn what he has not preparation for learning, however near to his eyes is the object. Our eyes are holden that we cannot see things that stare us in the face, until the hour arrives when the mind is ripened.
– R.W. Emerson
The symbolic life in some form is a prerequisite for psychic health. Without it the ego is alienated from its suprapersonal source and falls victim to a kind of cosmic anxiety. Dreams often attempt to heal the alienated ego by conveying to it some sense of its origin.
– Edward F. Edinger
In order to be conscious of myself, I must be able to distinguish myself from others. Relationship can only take place where this distinction exists.
– C.G. Jung
palest windtorn clouds
the light that comes down to us
timeworn dishcloth frail
– Catherine Baker
Each man has his own vocation.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
without sunlight
a winter flower
blooms
– Issa
Blue and pewter Sunday skies, showers of light, the sea an old tarnished mirror.
– Annie O’Garra Worsley
As we mature, we acquiesce to the truth
that some desires cannot — and
perhaps even should not — be met. This
is to be initiated into holy longing which
converts itself into divine creative
energy. Longing cultivates the kind of
creativity that plumbs the depths and
connects us to source.
– Carly Mountain
It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobbledstreets silent and the hunched courters’-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.
– Dylan Thomas
“You talked about the first principle again, but I still don’t know what it is,” I said to Suzuki. “I don’t know,” he said, “is the first principle.”
– David Chadwick
We are
Born like this
Into this
Into these carefully mad wars
Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness
Into bars where people no longer speak to each other
Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings
Born into this
Into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die
Into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty
Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed
Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes.
– Charles Bukowski
What is the nature of mind like?
Imagine a sky, empty, spacious,
and pure from the beginning;
its essence is like this.
Imagine a sun, luminous, clear,
unobstructed, and spontaneously present;
its nature is like this.
Imagine that sun shining out impartially
on us and all things, penetrating all directions;
its energy, which is the manifestation of compassion, is like this:
Nothing can obstruct it, and it pervades everywhere.
– Sogyal Rinpoche
It has become apparent to me over the years that what I wish for my being is to make of it a continuous prayer, a live connection between points of need and what is needed. This quote speaks to that aspiration:
Man prays and prayer fashions man. The saint has himself become prayer, the meeting place of Earth and Heaven; and thereby he contains the universe and the universe prays with him. He is everywhere where Nature prays and he prays with her and in her: in the peaks which touch the void and eternity, in a flower which scatters its scent or in the carefree song of a bird. He who lives in prayer has not lived in vain.
– Frithjof Schuon
…and there, in the background, the brite spring sky’s sediment had sunk to a dark band of blue. Ah, it mesmerized me…like the snow had done. All the woe of the words, “I am” seemed dissolved there, painlessly, peacefully. Hae-Joo announced, “The Ocean.”
– David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
As I age in the world it will rise and spread,
and be for this place horizon
and orison, the voice of its winds.
I have made myself a dream to dream
of its rising, that has gentled my nights.
Let me desire and wish well the life
these trees may live when I
no longer rise in the mornings
to be pleased with the green of them
shining, and their shadows on the ground,
and the sound of the wind in them.
– Wendell Berry
We should not be simply fighting evil in the name of good, but struggling against the certainties of people who claim always to know where good and evil are to be found.
– Tzvetan Todorov
We disliked the rigours of existence, the unfulfilled longings, the enshrined injustices of the world, the labyrinths of love, the ignorance of parents, the fact of dying, and the amazing indifference of the Living in the midst of the simple beauties of the universe. We feared the heartlessness of human beings, all of whom are born blind, few of whom ever learn to see.”
– Ben Okri
It is more difficult to love than to die. It is not death that human beings are most afraid of, it is love. The heart is bigger than a mountain. One human life is deeper than the ocean. Strange fishes and sea-monsters and mightly plants live in the rock-bed of our spirits. The whole of human history is an undiscovered continent deep in our souls.
– Ben Okri
There are certain directions in which you cannot go. Choose one in which you can move as far as you want.
– Samuel R. Delany
I have had to experience so much stupidity, so many vices, so much error, so much nausea, disillusionment and sorrow, just in order to become a child again and begin anew. I had to experience despair, I had to sink to the greatest mental depths, to thoughts of suicide, in order to experience grace.
– Hermann Hesse
I wish grace and healing were more abracadabra kind of things. Also, that delicate silver bells would ring to announce grace’s arrival. But no, it’s clog and slog and scootch, on the floor, in the silence, in the dark.
– Anne Lamott
Hope devoted to despair,
despair delivered from hope.
The leaves of this sea scattered,
its only tree
buffeted by a gale
that blew from an ancient manuscript.
The sea: hope embroidered with despair,
despair distilled from hope.
– Najwan Darwish
You project your chemistry on other people and your relations with them are a result.
Your unconscious manifestations are more powerful and get more results than your so called ‘conscious.’
You receive what you evoke.
– Kathryn Hulme
“Driftglass,“ I said. “You know all the Coca-Cola bottles and cut-crystal punch bowls and industrial silicon slag that goes into the sea?”
I know the Coca-Cola bottles.“
They break, and the tide pulls the pieces back and forth over the sandy bottom, wearing the edges, changing their shape. Sometimes chemicals in the glass react with chemicals in the ocean to change the color. Sometimes veins work their way through in patterns like snowflakes, regular and geometric; others, irregular and angled like coral. When the pieces dry, they’re milky. Put them in water and they become transparent again.”
– Samuel R. Delany
And there are never really endings, happy or otherwise. Things keep going on, they overlap and blur, your story is part of your sister’s story is part of many other stories, and there is no telling where any of them may lead.
– Erin Morgenstern
Then she spotted in the corner, glowing wonderfully, a Wurlitzer jukebox. ’Holy shit!’ It was like being on a commuter train through the Bronx and seeing among the piles of crushed cars a pasture with a lone white horse.
– Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire
You know, Jews, when they drop a prayer book are supposed to kiss it. This is what they teach you when you’re very little. It seemed entirely reasonable to me that you would do that. When I was a child I would kiss any book I dropped. When I was a very little child, after I’d read a book I really liked, I’d kiss it. Love is really the word. I think Children’s books are a human emotional experience rather than an intellectual one. You have a human relationship with them. Children have emotional relationships with inanimate objects, which it would be wise to carry on into adulthood. The way a child makes a person out of a doll, which I never did, I made people out of books.
– Fran Lebowitz
Enlightenment is the departure of a human being from the immaturity he has imposed on himself. Immaturity is the incapacity to use one’s intelligence without the guidance of another. Such immaturity is self-caused if it is not caused by lack of intelligence, but by lack of determination and courage to use one’s intelligence without being guided by another. Sapere Aude! Have the courage to use your own intelligence!
– Immanuel Kant
Reason cannot regard its former shapes merely as useful preludes to itself.
– Hegel
The body lives in the present. The body exists right now. But an addict is not in the body, so the body suffers. Uninhabited. And there’s where that terrible sense of starvation comes from. To be in the now is to be full.
– Marion Woodman
Many have felt a tangible fear of being answered from within, a mode of message reception so archaic to us as to seem like mental illness.
– Philip Trussell
If we believe that literature and poetry *shape* and socialize consciousness, surely we believe that tabloids, advertisements, billboards, and reality TV do the same? Surely learning happens continuously, endlessly, constantly with little regard to site (ie library, classroom)?
– Alina Stefanescu
Stay away from the machinery of the modern world. It will ruin your imagination.
– William Gass
Do not be deceived! The busiest people harbor the greatest weariness, their restlessness is weakness–they no longer have the capacity for waiting and idleness.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
sitting in traffic
under high white streaming clouds
a moment’s silence
– Catherine Baker
Each spring will be a sword you’ll sharpen.
– Anne Sexton
Does anyone else find that as a poet they learn stuff that they wouldn’t ordinarily? I am currently reading about the Younger Dryas glaciation in the Lake District, and Tundra flower species. All for a poem!!
– @Pocket_rhyme
Water knows how to speak,
a wave takes a wave by the hand
– Ingeborg Bachmann, (tr. Peter Filkins)
The kind of wisdom which can be put in the form of specific directions amounts to very little. Most of the wisdom which we employ in everyday life never came to us as verbal information.
– Alan Watts
“We do not receive wisdom,” the painter Elstir tells Proust’s Narrator; “we must discover it for ourselves after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us.” Or, as others might put it, “No wilderness, no wisdom.”
– Pico Iyer
Compassion, in and of itself, is decidedly not a happy feeling. It is explicitly and unquestionably uncomfortable.
– Constance Kassor
Maybe the ultimate purpose of literature is to humble us to our knees, to that know-nothing place.
– Joy Harjo
DAILY dawns another day;
I must up, to make my way.
– Dorothy Parker
Cling to the soul with love, fear, contempt, and hate, and don’t let her out of your sight.
– @RedBookJung
The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people – people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behavior, just as money frees people from work.
– George Orwell
when the snow melts
it is still snow
only melted.
when god died
it was still god
only dead.
– hune margulies
I don’t believe in “original sin.” I don’t believe in “guilt.” I don’t believe in villains or heroes – only right or wrong ways that individuals have taken, not by choice but by necessity or by certain still-uncomprehended influences in themselves, their circumstances, and their antecedents.
This is so simple I’m ashamed to say it, but I’m sure it’s true. In fact, I would bet my life on it! And that’s why I don’t understand why our propaganda machines are always trying to teach us, to persuade us, to hate and fear other people on the same little world that we live in.
– Tennessee Williams
TEMPLE
O body, cracked bell
that still sings when struck,
O leaky cup,
O broken stem,
I love you, body,
your crooked path,
your crumbling walls,
your faulty math.
I love the way
you stopped believing
you could ever
hold it all,
how you began
to let yourself
become the one
that’s being held.
I love the graffiti
on your inner halls—
scrawled names of all
who shaped you.
O body, my wreck,
my holey glove,
my street worn sole,
my crumpled page,
forgive me for years
of trying to fix you,
for believing the fable
of whole,
you, my perfect
wounded heart,
my stuttered hymn,
my sacred
begging bowl.
– Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
People associate the “evil eye” with the Egyptians. But belief in the evil eye originated in Greece, and was referenced by Hesiod, Callimachus, Plato, Diodorus Siculus, Theocritus, Plutarch, Heliodorus, Pliny the Elder, Aulus Gellius, and countless others. Walcot’s “Envy and the Greeks” (published in 1978) listed more than one hundred works by these and other authors mentioning the evil eye.
– Scott Horton
May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house.
– George Carlin
I think of soul as anything’s ultimate meaning which is held within. Soul is the blueprint inside of every created thing telling it what it is and what it can become. When we meet anything at that level, we will respect, protect, and love it.
– Richard Rohr
A fish-trap is for catching fish; once you’ve caught the fish, you can forget about the trap. A rabbit-snare is for catching rabbits; once you’ve caught the rabbit, you can forget about the snare. Words are for catching ideas; once you’ve caught the idea, you can forget about the words. Where can I find a person who knows how to forget about words so that I can have a few words with him?
– Chuang Tzu
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
Words… They’re innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they’re no good any more… I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.
– Tom Stoppard
Emotional healing does not depend on the process of figuring something out. It does not depend on conceptual understanding, but rather on a return of the feeling life to a natural biological rhythm. Emotional healing involves allowing the feelings to enter into the basic pulsations of the body. This is accomplished, in part, by separating those feelings from the arrhythmic clutch of thought.
The feeling life is not a conceptual experience. Feelings are not ideas, but subtle physical experiences. They take place in the body. They are not inherently meaningful in the way they seem to be when we apply our thoughts and beliefs to them. Feelings are part of the rhythm, the giving and receiving, the nourishment, and the interdependent ecology of our experience here.
– Stephen R. Schwartz
I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.
– Salman Rushdie
In any case a metaphor does not have to be new: in fact the best ones never can be. They are like the language of love, as old as the hills and yet fresh with every new lover. The trick of the poet is to make what seemed feeble, old, dead come back to life. True metaphor is a union like love; perhaps, to use another old metaphor:
a durable fire
In the mind ever burning;
Never sick, never old, never dead,
From itself never turning.
– From “Pilgrim to Pilgrim,” by Sir Walter Ralegh
Ange Mlinko and Iain McGilchrist, This Is Your Brain On Poetry
The main condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one’s narcissism. The narcissistic orientation is one in which one experiences as real only that which exists within oneself, while the phenomena in the outside world have no reality in themselves, but are experienced only from the viewpoint of their being useful or dangerous to one. The opposite pole to narcissism is objectivity; it is the faculty to see other people and things as they are, objectively, and to be able to separate this objective picture from a picture which is formed by one’s desires and fears.
– Erich Fromm
Let’s hope we are learning more about the ‘arts of noticing.’ This kind of attention is not about relationships between the human brain and ‘the world out there’ but is all about immersion in living ecologies. Aboriginal people I have worked with learn about it from their elders. As children they are not encouraged to ask questions, just to be attentive. After a while they know. It is know-how more than knowledge. When an Aboriginal tracker sees things in the environment that the rest of us fail to notice, this is not a matter of a specialised psychology, but a matter of intergenerational attunement in a particular world. Noticing one thing may also depend on being attuned to many others: the sun, the wind and the way finches flock in that part of the country. It’s an art, but not necessarily an individual one. It comes in bursts, or in waves.
– Stephen Muecke, Academia Letters
In this metallic age of barbarians, only a relentless cultivation of our ability to dream, to analyse and to captivate can prevent our personality from degenerating into nothing or else into a personality like all the rest.
– Fernando Pessoa
To be a Flower, is profound
Responsibility
– Emily Dickinson
The holy person welcomes all that is earthly.
– Hildegard von Bingen
When we study the lives of the buddhas and bodhisattvas of the past, we find that they all had the mental agility to make good use of difficult circumstances and suffering. It is said in the teachings that peacocks can eat food that is poisonous for other beings. Instead of making them sick, the poison makes their feathers brilliant. In the same way, when bodhisattvas encounter the seventy-two types of disturbing food . . . the practices they apply make their patience brilliant. This leads them out of the suffering of samsara and into the peace and bliss of enlightenment.
– Dzigar Kongtrul, Peaceful Heart
Buddhism has nothing to teach. Nothing whatever. All it has to do is to get rid of illusions, and then the experience happens when the illusions are gone, just like the sun comes out when the clouds go away. But if you try to manufacture the sun before the clouds have gone away—you see what I mean?—and you paint the sun on this side of the clouds, it’s not the real sun. So, in this way, the speculation as such, ideation as such, does not lead to the awakening experience.
– Alan Watts
You should act not on the other but on yourself, unless the other asks for your help or opinion.
– @RedBookJung
To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.
– Gaston Bachelard
Poetry is a way of living in the world. I don’t produce texts. I don’t do it to be studied. It’s a way of trying to come to peace with the world. It’s not about answers. It’s about questions. You come to poetry not out of what you know, but out of what you wonder.
– Lucille Clifton
Jung rediscovered method of experiencing the imaginal realms, but it is an ancient one known to both the Sufis & the alchemists. Active imagination consists of quieting the mind and allowing images to arise. Once these images have arisen, the ego interacts with them.
– Jeffrey Raff
Since the natural gradient of the psyche is toward wholeness, the Self will attempt to push the neglected part forward for recognition. It contains energy of the highest value, the gold in the dung.
– Marion Woodman
Dancing in space, Clad in clouds, Eating the sun and holding the moon, The stars are my retinue.
– Chögyam Trungpa
The broken heart loses its plumes
And hides in the earth until
It can learn to swim in the sea.
Empty the heart and peace will fill it.
– Kenneth Rexroth
I absolutely don’t buy into the current mania for tidiness and decluttering. For a writer, piles of papers and notes are a fertile field.
– Anne Lamott
nebulous
the morning air
above my tea cup
– James Welsh
To go out of your mind at least once a day is tremendously important. Because by going out of your mind, you come to your senses.
– Alan Watts
Words should be an intense pleasure to a writer just as leather should be to a shoemaker.
– Evelyn Waugh
forgive like a comet
is about to hit
hug like the hourglass
is about empty
sing like your voice
is about to go mute
kiss like the candle
is about to burn out
howl like the moon
is about to be stolen
dance like the ground
is about to break open
write like the ink is
about to run dry
treat others today like they
are about to be gone tomorrow
pray like the world
is about on its final spin
laugh like your tears
are about to return
give like Heaven
is about to audit you
watch a sunrise like
you’re about going blind
hold someone like
you’re about to become a ghost
– it’s all about time
be desperate to
live and to
love a little bit recklessly
caution is a luxury
for those who have
endless days to be patient
– we don’t
everything is temporary
the calendar is flipping
so fast that it’s become
a wind tunnel
it’s all about time
– that’s what makes
it such an adventure
fall into this sacred moment
– it’s really all we have
spend every second
as if you are stargazing
from a hospice bed
fall into this sacred
moment with me
no more unspoken words
no more unmentioned mercies
no more unthawed hearts
no more unforgivable sins
no more unopened eyes
no more unfelt tendernesses
no more unlit candles
no more unkind comments
no more unattended gardens
no more unfinished poems
no more unheard pardons
no more unremarkable kisses
no more unbelieved compliments
no more unaware ignorance
no more unappreciated miracles
no more unopened doors
no more unhealthy relationships
no more unrecorded songs
no more unclimbed mountains
no more understated sentiments
no more unwritten love letters
no more unfollowed dreams
no more unheralded angels
no more unrealized opportunities
no more untouched conversations
no more unthought wishes
no more unuttered prayers
no more untrue sermons
no more unneeded desires
no more unnecessary worry
no more unused dancing shoes
no more unlocked vaults
no more unthoughtful insults
no more untied knots
no more unhappy compromises
no more unread psalms
no more unsealed tombs
no more untaken journeys
no more unseen wonderment
– no more
these seconds
are racing by
let’s not waste
any more of them
sit with me now
and wrap your
legs between mine
and let’s laugh
together wildly
under this beautiful
falling sky
fall into this sacred
moment with me
it’s really all we have
it’s all about time
– John Roedel
I have dreamed of my film making itself as it goes along under my gaze, like a painter’s eternally fresh canvas.
– Robert Bresson
Life is no likelier to be constantly kind to us than any other boss, partner or colleague.
– Pico Iyer
Create community.
Expand your circle.
Deepen your connections.
We don’t have to walk alone.
– Dr. Thema
rock-fringes of coral
and the inmost chamber
of my island palace
and my own gifts
and the whole region
of my power and magic
for your glance.
– H.D.
To write by shreds, by storm clouds, by visions, by violent chapters, in the present as in the archpast, in pre-vision, in the true chaos of verbal tenses, crossing over years and oceans at a god’s pace.
– Hélène Cixous, (tr. Eric Prenowitz), Stigmata, Writing Blind
The eyes transmit thoughts, therefore I shut them from time to time, in order to stop having to think. When one is just there like this and doing nothing, one suddenly feels how painful existence can be.
– Robert Walser; tr. Christopher Middleton
he dared not
besmudge
its lily white pages
– Daily Haiku
What will your life be? Who will visit your room?
Who will uncover that beauty? Whom will you love?
Whose girl will you be? Whom kiss? whose lips bite?
Enough! Break, Catullus, against the past.
– Catullus
Yes I know what you think of me, you never shut up
– Tori Amos
While the dharma rain falls equally on each of us, we must do the work—through our practice, or right endeavor—to grow into the best versions of ourselves.
– Mark Herrick
At school, our teacher tells us we must flee from the tornado, but I want to ride it. I want to be eaten by this tailed beast and swallowed into another reality.
– K-Ming Chang
Always try to write about others more than you write about yourself. It’s how a narrator looks at the world surrounding him or her, what and who they look at, that ultimately interests a reader.
– Kim Dana Kupperman
Notice many layers or dimensions of reality exist. Different versions of us exist. Each decision creates a trajectory through the ethers. Our understanding of self and innerstanding of energy flow shape our changing perception and degrees of remembering. What crosses our scope echoes our vibration and consciousness, and innersight into octaves of creation.
– Liara Covert
If you quietly accept and go along no matter what your feelings are, ultimately you internalize what you’re saying, because it’s too hard to believe one thing and say another. I can see it very strikingly in my own background. Go to any elite university and you are usually speaking to very disciplined people, people who have been selected for obedience. And that makes sense. If you’ve resisted the temptation to tell the teacher, “You’re an asshole,” which maybe he or she is, and if you don’t say, “That’s idiotic,” when you get a stupid assignment, you will gradually pass through the required filters. You will end up at a good college and eventually with a good job.
– Noam Chomsky
You have to remember that it is impossible to commit a crime while reading a book.
– John Waters
Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work, a future. To be courageous, is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences.
To be courageous is to seat our feelings deeply in the body and in the world: to live up to and into the necessities of relationships that often already exist, with things we find we already care deeply about: with a person, a future, a possibility in society, or with an unknown that begs us on and always has begged us on. To be courageous is to stay close to the way we are made.
– David Whyte
For who among men knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of the man, which is in him?” In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable—which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.
– Marilynne Robinson
Here shall my soul find its true repose
Under a sunset sky of dreams
Diaphanous, amber and rose.
– Sarojini Naidu
Passing the visions, passing the night,
Passing, unloosing the hold of my comrades’ hands,
Passing the song of the hermit bird and the tallying song of my soul,
Victorious song, death’s outlet song, yet varying ever-altering song,
As low and wailing, yet clear the notes, rising and falling, flooding the night,
Sadly sinking and fainting, as warning and warning, and yet again bursting with joy,
Covering the earth and filling the spread of the heaven,
As that powerful psalm in the night I heard from recesses,
Passing, I leave thee lilac with heart-shaped leaves,
I leave thee there in the door-yard, blooming, returning with spring.
I cease from my song for thee,
From my gaze on thee in the west, fronting the west, communing with thee,
O comrade lustrous with silver face in the night.
Yet each to keep and all, retrievements out of the night,
The song, the wondrous chant of the gray-brown bird,
And the tallying chant, the echo arous’d in my soul,
With the lustrous and drooping star with the countenance full of woe,
With the holders holding my hand nearing the call of the bird,
Comrades mine and I in the midst, and their memory ever to keep, for the dead I loved so well,
For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands—and this for his dear sake,
Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,
There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.
– Walt Whitman
Ah God! to see the branches stir
Across the moon at Grantchester!
To smell the thrilling-sweet and rotten
Unforgettable, unforgotten
River-smell, and hear the breeze
Sobbing in the little trees.
Say, do the elm-clumps greatly stand
Still guardians of that holy land?
The chestnuts shade, in reverend dream,
The yet unacademic stream?
Is dawn a secret shy and cold
Anadyomene, silver-gold?
And sunset still a golden sea
From Haslingfield to Madingley?
And after, ere the night is born,
Do hares come out about the corn?
Oh, is the water sweet and cool,
Gentle and brown, above the pool?
And laughs the immortal river still
Under the mill, under the mill?
Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies, and truths, and pain? . . . oh! yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?
– Rupert Brooke
Her love is the world. She embraces this enormous earth. The earth knows that she loves it and it bestows on her its care. That’s why her life is filled to the brim and her state, wherever she’ll be, will be plentiful. She roams on the paths of her love and, wherever she is, she is complete.
– Don Juan Matus
Being a body narrows you. Genetics predetermine the star of your face, the hills and valleys nourished below. I cannot be all things, as a body. As a mind, I can bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, endure all things. But my body is a full stop, a contained space, an impermanent expression of creative energy.
– Kara VanderBijl, Above Corruption
Ditch The Raft
What does “ditch the raft” mean? The Buddha likened his teachings to a raft used to cross a river, the river representing suffering. His teachings would help one cross to the other shore, or free oneself from suffering. But once on that other shore, would you carry the raft with you? No. So you have to ditch the raft.
When you write late at night
it’s like a small fire
in a clearing, it’s what
radiates and what can hurt
if you get too close to it.
– Stephen Dunn
To the ancient Israelite, the heart was not, as we fancy it today, the source of emotion. Rather, it was the seat of the mind. Just as important, it was regarded as the place of the imaginative faculty. Over and over, the Scriptures remind us, God desires the heart. God wants us to use our imagination to see the world with divine eyes: to look beyond the obvious, to see past the ephemera of one’s surroundings and detect the hidden essence, to imagine the unseen center of things. And indeed, the imaginings of the heart occupy a unique place in Judaism, for imagination is a key to coping with the great enigma of exile, which occupies the center of the Jewish experience. It is the key because imagination thrives in an absence. If we cannot go home, we can imagine home, and our imagination comforts us in our separation. It certainly has been a comfort to Jews, who have constructed in our hearts a spiritual, and therefore enduring, reality for all we have lost, personally and collectively. This is imagination’s salvific function.
– Geoffrey W. Dennis
The practice of dharma is not a human invention. For that matter, human life isn’t a human invention. When we practice the true dharma, we are in relationship with a certain energy.…You can try to stay in control, but if you decide you really want to practice the dharma – meaning you want to work on yourself at the deepest level – then you have to get another force involved in the conversation, and that’s known as lineage.
– Reggie Ray
It grieves them more to own a bad house than a bad life, as if it were man’s greatest good to have everything good but himself.
– (City of God, 3.1)
Pray
So let us pick up the stones
over which we stumble, friends,
and build altars.
Let us listen to the sound of breath in our bodies.
Let us listen to the sounds of our own voices,
of our own names, of our own fears.
Let’s claw ourselves out from the graves we’ve dug.
Let’s lick the earth from our fingers.
Let us look up and out and around.
The world is big and wide and wild
and wonderful and wicked,
and our lives are murky, magnificent,
malleable, and full of meaning.
Oremus.
Let us pray.
– Pádraig Ó Tuama
Solar
On a gray day, when the sun
has been abducted, and it’s chill
end-of-the-world weather,
I must be the sun.
I must be the one
to encourage the young
sidetracked physicist
working his father’s cash register
to come up with a law of nature
that says brain waves can change
the dismal sky. I must be the one
to remind the ginger plant
not to rest on the reputation
of its pungent roots, but to unveil
those buttery tendrils from the other world.
When the sky is an iron lid
I must be the one to simmer
in the piquant juices of possibility,
though the ingredients are unknown
and the day begins with a yawn.
I must issue forth a warmth
without discrimination, and any guarantee
it will come back to me.
On a dark day I must be willing
to keep my disposition light,
I have to be at the very least
on stray intact ray
of local energy, one small
but critical fraction
of illumination. Even on a day
that doesn’t look gray
but still lacks comfort or sense,
I have to be the sun,
I have to shine as if
sorry life itself depended on it.
I have to make all the difference.
– Thomas Centolella
…history has shown that the most terrible crimes against love have been committed in the name of fanatically defended doctrines.
– Paul Tillich
Alchemy begins before we enter the mine, the forge, or laboratory. It begins in the blue vault, the seas, in the mind’s thinking in images, imaging ideationally, speculatively, silveredly, in words that are both images and ideas, in words that turn things into flashing ideas and ideas of little things that crawl, the blue power of the word itself, which locates this consciousness in the throat of the visuddha cakra whose dominant color is a smoky-purple-blue.
– James Hillman
There are things that cannot be expressed. And yet they show themselves.
– Wittgenstein
Time passes, and the system turns on you. When
all is sacred, nothing is safe: silent lampposts suddenly
pipe up in irresistible colloquy a tone too high, the sky
calls you but does not want your replies, and
water-bound birds decline pronouns in Latin. It is a hotbed
that cannot stand the addition of an offending
presence; it whispers until you are well on your way.
– Rachel Wetzsteon
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
NECESSARY SKILLS
You need some skills in order to live well in this world. You need to know how to cook and sew on a button — if you can’t hem something, you need to know that scotch tape will hold a hemline through one wearing, until you can get the garment to someone who can. You need to be able to add and multiply and subtract and divide — and you need to be able to read a traditional clockface, not just a digital readout of the time, so that later you will understand fractions more easily. You need to know a few simple knots — a square and a bowline are enough for most of us, though more are better. You need to know how to light a fire and keep it going. You need to know how to perform CPR and the Heimlich Maneuver; also, how and when to apply a tourniquet. You need to know how to read.
You can see that this list is not in either ascending or descending order of importance — if it were, reading would probably be first.
You also need to know how to delay gratification of your desires, or even to set them aside altogether, if it becomes necessary for the survival of something more important. And so you need to be able to distinguish between what is truly important and what is merely urgent — they are not the same.
You need to know the direction of your delight — that activity that will satisfy and interest you for a lifetime. If you are very fortunate, this will also be the way you earn your living, If not, you need to know how to find the time to feed your devotion.
You need to know how to ask for help.
And you need to know how to admit error. Maybe that should have been first.
– via Geranium Farm
The problem is, God does not take up residence on this or any other spectrum. Love finds no steady home in psychological health. I am sure God wants us to be whole and healthy in every way possible, but love neither depends upon these things nor ends with them. In fact, blessings sometimes come through brokenness that could never come in any other way. In reflecting on my own life, I have to conclude that grace has come through me more powerfully sometimes when I have been very dysfunctional and maladjusted. Love transcends all possible adjustments and continually invites us through and beyond them. God invites us to a communion of divine and human desire that cannot be located in any concept or model. We must go beyond the spectrum entirely.
– Gerald G. May M.D.
After that for many days, without wind in her shrouds or foam at her bows, across a waveless sea, the Dawn Treader glided smoothly east. Every day and every hour the light became more brilliant and still they could bear it. No one ate or slept and no one wanted to, but they drew buckets of dazzling water from the sea, stronger than wine and somehow wetter, more liquid, than ordinary water, and pledged one another silently in deep draughts of it. And one or two of the sailors who had been oldish men when the voyage began now grew younger every day. Everyone on board was filled with joy and excitement, but not an excitement that made one talk. The further they sailed the less they spoke, and then almost in a whisper. The stillness of that last sea laid hold on them.
– C. S. Lewis
Suffering is by no means a privilege, a sign of nobility, a reminder of God. Suffering is a fierce, bestial thing, commonplace, uncalled for. It is intangible; no one can grasp it or fight against it; it dwells in time—it is the same thing as time.
– Cesare Pavese
Everyone knows bees sting and ghosts haunt and giving your robes away humiliates your rivals. That the enemies are barbarians. That wise men swim through the rock of the earth; that houses breed filth, airstrips attract airplanes, tornadoes punish, ancestors watch, and you can buy a shorter stay in purgatory. The black rock is holy, or the scroll; or the pangolin is holy, the quetzal is holy, this tree, water, rock, stone, cow, cross, or mountain, and it’s all true. The Red Sox. Or nothing at all is holy, as everyone intelligent knows.
– Annie Dillard
I think if I’ve learned anything about friendship, it’s to hang in, stay connected, fight for them, and let them fight for you. Don’t walk away, don’t be distracted, don’t be too busy or tired, don’t take them for granted. Friends are part of the glue that holds life and faith together. Powerful stuff.
– Jon Katz
All over the world people are taking notes as a way of postponing, putting off and standing in for.
– Geoff Dyer
I am a complicated person with a simple life.
– Charlotte Eriksson, You’re Doing Just Fine
And if every step taken is a step well-lived but a foot
towards death, every pilgrimage a circle, every flight-path
the tracing of a sphere: I will give myself over and over.
– Luke Davies
Never get involved with God, and above all never in any really intimate way. Get involved with people and imagine that together with them you are involving yourselves with God.
– Søren Kierkegaard
There is a thought in your mind right now. The longer you hold on to it, the more you dwell upon it, the more life you give to that thought. Give it enough life, and it will become real. So make sure the thought is indeed a great one.
– Ralph Martson
We must frame life so
that at some future hour,
facts and dreams meet.
– Victor Hugo
No Makeup
by Sharon Olds
Maybe one reason I do not wear makeup is to scare people.
If they’re close enough, they can see something is different with me,
something unnerving, as if I have no features,
I am embryonic, pre-eyebrows, pre-eyelids, pre-mouth,
I am like a water-bear talking to them,
or an amniotic traveller,
a vitreous floater on their own eyeball,
human ectoplasm risen on its hind legs to discourse with them.
And such a white white girl, such a sickly toadstool,
so pale, a visage of fog, a phiz of
mist above a graveyard, no magenta roses,
no floral tribute, no goddess, no grownup
woman, no acknowledgment
of the drama of secondary sexual characteristics, just the
gray matter of spirit talking,
the thin features of a gray girl in a gray graveyard—
granite, ash, chalk, dust.
I tried the paint, but I could feel it on my skin, I could
hardly move under the mask of my
desire to be seen as attractive in the female
way of 1957,
and I could not speak. And when the makeup came off I felt
actual as a small mammal in the woods
with a speaking countenance, or a basic
primate, having all the expressions
that evolved in us, to communicate.
If my teen-age acne had left scars,
if my skin were rough, instead of soft,
I probably couldn’t afford to hate makeup,
or to fear so much the beauty salon or the
very idea of beautyship.
And my mother was beautiful—did I say this?
In my small eyes, and my smooth withered skin,
you can see my heart, you can read my naked lips.
One of the strongest feelings I remember from my childhood is, precisely, of being humiliated; of being knocked about by words, acts, or situations. Isn’t it a fact that children are always feeling deeply humiliated in their relations with grown-ups and each other? I have a feeling children spend a good deal of their time humiliating one another. Our whole education is just one long humiliation, and it was even more so when I was a child. One of the wounds I’ve found hardest to bear in my adult life has been the fear of humiliation, and the sense of being humiliated. Every time I read a review, for instance — whether laudatory or not — this feeling awakes. To humiliate and be humiliated, I think, is a crucial element in our whole social structure.
– Ingmar Bergman
Weakness is a great thing, and strength is nothing. When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible. When he dies, he is hard and insensitive. When a tree is growing, it’s tender and pliant. But when it’s dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death’s companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being. Because what has hardened will never win.
– Andrei Tarkovsky
If we are to recover our balance—and our humanity—we need to unblock the flow of communication between the limited world of our self-consciousness that is linear, finite, two-dimensional, static, and dead, and our core silence—our deep mind—that is global, infinite, dynamic, and multi-dimensional. It is a mistake to say that the former is “rational” and the latter “irrational.” Too often the word rational is used when linear is meant. Both are rational ways of knowing, both are necessary; but the world of self-consciousness is rational only in the artifice of two dimensions, it can only reify; while the rationality of the deep mind is global, holistic, holographic, alive, and perceives directly. If we are to be human, we need to seek and sustain a flow between these two aspects of knowing, between deep, multidimensional, interior silence, and the superficial linearity with which we negotiate what appears to be the exterior world, so that the two ways of knowing inform each other.
We need to acknowledge that it is not our discriminating and reflexive self-consciousness that makes us human, but rather the ability to move beyond this self-consciousness to engagement and beholding, the irruption of our core silence into everyday life. Robert Bringhurst notes, “If you divide the world into them and us, and history into ours and theirs, or if you think of history as something only you and your affiliates can possess, then no matter what you know, no matter how noble your intentions, you have taken one step toward the destruction of the world.” Life really does hang in the balance in every moment. It hovers horizontally between the past, which cannot be changed, and the future, which is refulgent with potential but fraught with our projections. It is poised vertically between self-conscious rationality, which is the source of these projections, and deep silence, where we touch reality directly. We need to recover the ability to live at the intersection: in the present moment, energized by the upwelling from deep silence where, in Christian terms, our shared nature with God becomes manifest.
– Maggie Ross
One of the oldest meanings in Hebrew for salvation is being freed from a trap. God releases us from the traps we make for our selves when our self-consciousness shuts itself off from the deep mind, and gives us hope.”
– Maggie Ross
You must love the crust of the earth
on which you dwell. You must be
able to extract nutriment out of a
sandheap. You must have so good
an appetite as this, else you will live
in vain.
– Thoreau
Once in a lifetime
The power is ours
But we’d rather stare at our phones
Talking about nothing
Heads in the clouds
Might as well leave it alone
– Aoife O’Donovan & Anaïs Mitchell
I’m still thinking and hoping there’s an opportunity for people to have better lives and that significant change can occur.
– Tracy Chapman
When you have a brilliant sun, which is a source of vision, the light from the sun shines through every window of the house, and the brightness of its light inspires you to open all the curtains. In the vision of the Great Eastern Sun, no human being is a lost cause.
– Chögyam Trungpa
The first time I visited
the Grand Canyon
I was in a shame-deadened
terrible mood, and saw nothing
but a hole in the dry-boned earth.
Left cursing that overrated
wonder of our world.
The next time I visited
the Grand Canyon I was high
on having just discovered poetry,
but rolled up to that place
expecting to see the same
mediocrity I’d seen before.
Instead my jaw dropped
five thousand feet
to the flushed face
of a primrose blooming
beside a river that was
licking six millions years
of tectonic plates serving
the best meal my eyes
had ever been served.
I didn’t know what
had happened until
many years later when
I heard Anaïs Nin say—
“We do not see this world how it is.
We see it how we are.”
Regularly reminding myself
of this sentiment has changed my life
for the better in so many ways.
“We do not see the world how it is.
We see it how we are.”
– Andrea Gibson
The ideologies of the rulers are by their nature more changeable than the ideas of the oppressed. For not only must they … adapt each time to the situation of social conflict, but they must glorify that situation as fundamentally harmonious.
– Walter Benjamin
spring O spring!
leaving the window open
all day long
– Asakawa Yoshinao
What i just don’t understand about people who want to write using AI is this: I write because the inside of my head is filled with angry bees; how do these people get rid of their bees if they don’t just fucking sit down and write?
– Amber Sparks
rain on the beach
putting out
a bonfire
– Issa
For when man’s spirit acknowledges earlier errors, it is cleansed and freed from them : and herein lies the highest value of man’s existence on earth.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
May we outlast the eclipse.
These shadows don’t have the final say.
– Dr. Thema
If you [think] you can rescue [your nearest and dearest] with your good ideas and your checkbook, or get them to choose a healthy, realistic way of life, that mistake will make both of you much worse than you already are.
– Anne Lamott
We will be spiritually nourished by this world or we will be starved for spiritual nourishment. No other revelatory experience can do for the human what the experience of the natural world does.
– Thomas Berry
THAT SONNET
You are the thunderstorm I watch from my
screen porch, the river that steals my canoe,
the song with a great hook, an inside straight.
I am a doorknob wrapped in rubber bands,
the top drawer full of hammers and lightbulbs,
garlic bread hoping to go up in flames.
You are the clear lake ice I’m too afraid
to skate on with weak ankles and chapped
lips. I’m a 15 percent tip, the lost jumper
cables in the garage, coiled and cracked.
Please become my hammock that doesn’t flip.
You can join n my flying dream — we won’t
have to jump off the roof or run flapping
down the sidewalk to get up there, airborne.
– Gretchen Berg
I’m tired of the news. I’m tired of the way it makes things spectacular that aren’t, and deals so simplistically with what’s truly appalling. I’m tired of the vitriol. I’m tired of anger. I’m tired of the meanness. I’m tired of selfishness. I’m tired of how we’re doing nothing to stop it. I’m tired of how we’re encouraging it. I’m tired of the violence that’s on its way, that’s coming, that hasn’t happened yet. I’m tired of liars. I’m tired of sanctified liars. I’m tired of how those liars have let this happen. I’m tired of having to wonder whether they did it out of stupidity or did it on purpose. I’m tired of lying governments. I’m tired of people not caring whether they’re being lied to anymore.
– Ali Smith
There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it’s not really there.
– Bill McKibben
…this notion of effort. This word at first means something you strive for. But you understand at a certain point that the kind of effort you need to comprehend is different; that what is meant by effort is letting go. It is an effort because I have to struggle against what is ingrained in me about the idea of effort: I want to get something, to do something. Finally, after years of trying, I begin to understand that the nature of effort is to allow something to appear. This new meaning of effort has to do with relaxation. And it is really an effort to understand relaxation when all my training is to strive, to battle against, to chastise some aspect of myself.
– Paul Reynard
If the gods do a shameful thing, they are not gods.
– Euripides
Irreverence is a most necessary ingredient of religion. Not to speak of its importance in philosophy. Irreverence is the only way left to us for testing our universe.
– Frank Herbert
No longer in a merely physical universe, man lives in a symbolic universe. Language, myth, art and religion are parts of this universe. They are varied threads which weave the symbolic net, the tangled web of human experience. No longer can man confront reality immediately; he cannot see it, as it were, face to face. Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man’s symbolic activity advances. Instead of dealing with the things themselves man is in a sense constantly conversing with himself. He has so enveloped himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by the interposition of this artificial medium.
– Ernst Cassirer
I believe, in fact I am certain, that many men never give out the whole of themselves, their deepest truth. They live on the surface, and yet, so rich is the soil of humanity that even this thin outer layer is able to yield a kind of meager harvest which gives the illusion of real living.
– Georges Bernanos
To be a good citizen is a form of art. To be a good friend is a form of art. There is artistry in doing well whatever it is you are needed or forced or delighted to do. In my worst forms of penury, I was a glorious artist at whatever I needed to do to have a little food and a room and some shoes. I was grateful to live and to work and to grow.
We have to be ruthless in our standards, and we have to adhere to what it is we want and demand, but we must be utterly open and democratic in understanding that everyone is working out some artistic plan, that everyone desires and deserves a means of expression, and all of us are on someone else’s list of lower orders.
Wear yourself out. Aim high.
– Martha Graham
When faced with economic or any other kind of injustice, it is totally wrong for a religious person to remain indifferent. Religious people must struggle to solve these problems.
– The Dalai Lama
Your absence from the syntax of my life is not a fact to be changed by written words.
– Anne Carson
You’re remarkable.
The nightmares you have survived have not diminished your ability to dream.
– Dr. Thema
I like where I am now
in the mountains
but I know I’ll go.
– Elizabeth Arnold
Jung was always ready to accept intelligent criticism but he hated stupid criticism, based on a total misunderstanding of what he had meant. He used to say that if civilization perished it would be more due to stupidity than evil.
– Barbara Hannah
You can go to hell without moving an inch, just focus on what you lack.
You can taste heaven without leaving earth, just rejoice in what you have.
– James Clear
If we hate each other,
I assure you my hate has a trace of love
with a dash of hope.
– Carmen Giménez
Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.
– Angelo Manguel
Political campaigns are designedly made into emotional orgies which endeavor to distract attention from the real issues involved, and they actually paralyze what slight powers of cerebration man can normally muster.
– James Harvey Robinson
I saw newspapers in London retailing lies, and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various “party lines”
– George Orwell, Looking Back on the Spanish War
The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray, and the advantage of Science is that it is not emotional.
– Oscar Wilde
and you are, in my memory,
the essence of the horizon, a fragile dream.
– Efraín Huerta
Every four years the naive half who vote are encouraged to believe that if we can elect a really nice man or woman President everything will be all right. But it won’t be.
– Gore Vidal
on a stone bridge
fishing for the crescent moon
– James Welsh
It appears to me to be the grandest symptom of an immortal spirit, when even that bedimmed and overwhelmed spirit recked not of its own immortality, still to seek to be,—to be a mind, a will.
– Coleridge
What’s left of blue is woven dark
in iron lines
– César Vallejo, translated by Yvette Siegert
Dandelion greens fuzz
up my apathy. A flower
dares itself to bloom
amongst my most quiet
scars.
– Ra Malika Imhotep
Godard & I, never thought the films would be so famous for so long. We were just happy to do things. It was more bohemian. We knew we were doing something we liked and it was not like everyone else. It was a happy world.
– Anna Karina
Chekhov is one of us—so close to today’s world, to my mind, and very close to the South.
– Eudora Welty
ectopic
by Tyler Mills
In diagrams, there’s one on either side of
the uterus. But they float
around the coral pouch, tangle up,
the surgeon said.
Cilia sway like seagrass,
the tube wall pulsing with waves
of hairs to push the genetic scribble
through, out—
Though not for me. I think of prior women knifed open
to first acquire this knowledge.
I think of vespers
mumbled over their noses and cheeks
while the last few stars
of thought punctuated the mind.
Blood smelled the same in the sixteenth
century. Rain on flagstones, clay and spit.
Gabriele Falloppio also studied the labyrinth
of the ear. Held the tiny drum
lightly in his palm. But the pink string
I saw in my surgeon’s photograph
resembles a trumpet—the pipes
pumped as though by a mouth.
Pucker, kiss. Tuba uteri.
We say tube. Flared opening releasing
a breath of something. A legislated
cell. There are raw edges to everything
if you look
closely. My stowaway was
a silkworm caught in the grass, gathering
red fibers in a squashed hell.
My forehead cold. And my hands. My face
a wooden figurehead growing mold
fixed to the bow of a smashed ship.
Nautical needle spinning between
North and South. Where was I? Where
was I? Pinned and saved. In the photo,
the surgeon’s tool lifts the strand:
it bulges like a snake.
Cracks caulked with blood. Ripping open.
The organs around what’s missing and their red
verbena will shift in the cavity. Are shifting now. The veined
purse settles. Absence filling in.
I do not feel
that work except that
I do.
He enjoyed going downtown, where he’d be recognized. He said he wished fame were like a light bulb—that it could be turned on and off.
– Gabriel García Márquez
Trial and error – I don’t know of any other way to write.
– Carys Davies, Notes on Craft
The proper subject-matter of poetry is spiritual interests, not the sun, mountains, woods, landscapes, or constituents of the human body like nerves, blood, muscles, etc.
– Hegel
Up to the dreary mountain-top,
I’ll tell you all I know.
– Wordsworth
Cartoonists and craftspeople—we sit at the children’s table.
– Roz Chast
They try to tell us stories of hatred.
But I know a better one:
Once, I dreamed I carried love & temperance
alone through the sand toward your direction.
But I never made it, did I?
– via Joseph Fasano, Peace Prompt
Sometimes I dream of a remote and vaporous love like the schizophrenia of a perfume.
– Cioran, All Gaul is Divided, (tr. Richard Howard)
When connections are real, they simply never die. They can be buried, or ignored or walked away from, but never broken. If you deeply resonated with another person, the connection remains despite any distance, time, situation, lack of presence, or circumstance. Real connections live on forever.
– Victoria Erickson
We are incredibly heedless in the formation of our beliefs, but find ourselves filled with an illicit passion for them when anyone proposes to rob us of their companionship. It is obviously not the ideas themselves that are dear to us, but our self-esteem.
– James H. Robinson
Universal compassion toward all sentient beings, without exception, is cultivated through maitri or lovingkindness.
– Constance Kassor
The writers who survived are hungry; the ones who did not were delicious.
– Richard Bausch
Eaten or rotten, I am all mouth.
– Sylvia Plath
Yearning for education was just part of the culture. My friends and I worshipped literature. We thought everything we would ever know or care about or be devoted to was to be found in literature.
– Vivian Gornick
Wall Street didn’t build this country. The middle class did. And unions built the middle class, says Joe Biden.
He’s right.
– Robert Reich
Turns out that the mythical belief in heroic individuals is about as stupid as the mythical belief in supreme beings.
– @VinceFHorn
her tongue was growing tiny roses. At least, that was his best guess. A floral taste, the prick of thorns. All it took was a few days without sun. Indoors, away from all the windows.
– @lindymbiller
As people of color, we can hear, we can feel, when the language is weaponized against us.
– Claudia Rankine
Plights, over backwards.
Flowerless.
– Clark Coolidge
Pass the Equality Act, and my message to transgender Americans: I have your back!
– President Biden
Do not use your energy to worry. Use your energy to believe, to create, to learn, to think and to grow.
– Prof Feynman
Laughter is the the opposite of a piece of wood, it’s something inflammatory, something that strikes matches inside you.
– Robert Walser, (tr. Christopher Middleton)
One thing that’s surprised me about leaving academia:
All the unlearning I’ve had to do.
I’ve had to unlearn extreme self-reliance.
I’ve had to unlearn expectations of criticism.
I’ve had to unlearn unhealthy power dynamics
– Ashley Ruba, PhD
I saw an old couple in the supermarket using walkie talkies to communicate with each other from different aisles so you can no longer convince me that we have nothing to learn from previous generations.
– Real Life Mommy
Her heart was made of liquid sunsets.
– Virginia Woolf
There’s something very comforting about looking back at difficult seasons of our lives and being able to clearly see, in retrospect, how the forces & tensions that would eventually give way to positive change were already perculating under the surface, largely unbeknownst to us.
– Heidi Priebe
My melancholy is the most faithful mistress I have known; what wonder, then, that I love her in return.
– Søren Kierkegaard
for Georgia O’Keeffe, painter of “Ladder to the Moon,”who remarked, Nothing is less real than realism.
my lifeworld
confined within the walls
of this rented room …
half-asleep, half-awake
I climb a ladder to the moon
– NeverEnding Story, Chen-ou-Liu
When I step into the sea, I don’t do so with the intent of mastering it. That’s an impossible task. The tides, temperature, current, and sea life shift every day. All I can do is pay attention and adapt,..
– Samantha Ladwig
In the end you are weary of this ancient world.
– Apollinaire
i often think about things past
and no,
i don’t think that’s senseless.
i neatly list my regrets
one by one on a white paper without lines.
i separate sadness from joys
nights of love from days of wonder.
but when it comes to smiles
i am slightly less organized.
i list my smiles on papers with black lines
but the lines are erased.
and after i’m done writing
i read the entire list once more
and promptly light my firewood with the papers.
and no,
i don’t think that’s senseless.
hune margulies
One thing collaboration gives is the frequent if not constant feeling of being surprised, of being led where one had no idea one was going, and finding that being there one has something interesting to say.
– Kenneth Koch
On Earth, everyone loved butterflies, but I trusted the caterpillars more. I trusted the ones who knew they were not done growing.
– Andrea Gibson
the art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings.
– Kakuzo Okakura
Whenever I see someone with an abundance of empathy I want to ask what heartbreak they have endured, for compassion is often birthed in the valley of despair.
– Zoe Clark-Coates
Feminism isn’t about making women stronger. Women are already strong; it’s about changing the way the world perceives that strength.
– GD Andersen
words are the loom of the stars.
– Cecilia Vicuña
One difference between naming a feeling (“I feel terrible”) and expressing it (“Ohh ….”) is the response you get: “Why?” or
“What’s the matter?” By naming a feeling in order to give vent to it —a practice very much promoted by psychoanalysis-you make a co-reasoner out of your consoler.
– Susan Sontag
Certainty
by Octavio Paz
If the white light of this lamp
is real, and the hand that writes
is real, then are the eyes that
observe what I write also real?
From one word to another
what I say evaporates.
I know that I am alive
between two parentheses.
One of the main things lacking in the spiritual world is wise discernment.
If you’re a spiritual practitioner, of any kind, please considering reading “Saints & Psychopaths” by Bill Hamilton.
Learn from those who’ve walked before you. We don’t need to make the same exact mistakes.
– @VinceFHorn
The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.
– C.G. Jung
What if we just wrote our little poems and didn’t try to squash other poets?
– Hannah Grieco
I have no idea about anyone. Like, seriously. I barely have an idea about myself most of the time. Human beings are the vastest mysteries. I remain curious.
– McCall Erickson
I’ve been silent for a long time
but I never forgot the melody
I couldn’t stop whispering.
The songs that spring from my heart
They remind me that someday
I will break free from this cage.
– Nadia Anjuman
In America you can say anything you want – as long as it doesn’t have any effect.
– Paul Goodman
He was by no means the solitary, unneighborly hermit, occult with meditation. He was as natural, as genial, as homely as Lincoln.
– Witter Bynner on Lao Tzu
All my life I’ve liked weeds.
Weeds are botanical
poets, largely unwanted.
You can’t make a dollar
off them.
– Jim Harrison
Genuine compassion is uncomfortable. It’s difficult. It’s maybe even a little bit scary.
– Constance Kassor
I don’t like stories that hinge entirely on a lack of communication
This constant dance where the readers know what each character is thinking and doing, but the characters are all misreading each other
Stories that wouldn’t exist if everyone had like one good conversatio
– River Kenna
Time for reappraisal, close attention: ‘A wren on a fence in the rain; inky clouds at sunset; a white breast feather falls from the sky. Boom of rising wind in the chimney … saw sickle moon’. This is the higher vagrancy, in tune with an older reality.
– Aidan Higgins, Dog Days
We have to free half of the human race, the women, so that they can help to free the other half.
– Emmeline Pankhurst.
FOR A STUDENT WHO USED AI
TO WRITE A PAPER
Now I let it fall back
in the grasses.
I hear you. I know
this life is hard now.
I know your days are precious
on this earth.
But what are you trying
to be free of?
The living? The miraculous
task of it?
Love is for the ones who love the work.
– Joseph Fasano
Take me to the Seine, let us gaze into it until we become little fishes and recognize each other again.
– Ingeborg Bachmann to Paul Celan
If you have ever wondered what colonization was like—the violence, the dispossession, the massacres, the genocide, the displacement, the famine, the dehumanization, the racism—you are watching it in real time. It is among the most depraved of all possible acts.
– Jason Hickel
It’s worth looking at the trajectory of your life and asking yourself “who does it seem like the gods want me to be?
– River Kenna
Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should allow you to find values which will be your roadmap through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important, how to live and how to die.
– John Taylor Gatto
The essence of true friendship is to make allowance for another’s little lapses.
– David Storey
i need to know their names
those women i would have walked with
– Lucille Clifton
Looking for your light,
I went out:
it was like the sudden dawn
of a million million suns,
a ganglion of lightnings
for my wonder.
O Lord of Caves,
if you are light,
there can be no metaphor.
– Allama, (tr. A.K. Ramanujan)
But the semblance of tender.
let nothing but my flexed
foot, toeing childhood, tell
the night-eyed, who know
how to look, what lies within.
– Evie Shockley
empty farmhouse
a sapling
at the back door
– @ruralitalics
They’ll always be wrong about peace when they’re wrong about justice…
Were you wrong, were you right, insisting about the dark times?
– Marilyn Hacker
I tap out a rhythm on shale, a skitter of stones accompanies the beat, the sky vibrates in sympathy.
– @mmorethanapage
I found love in arms extended toward another. / In the pebbles of a long walk. The stumble of my legs, / still moving to reach the hilltop.
– Mariam Barghouti
A poem has a body, just as sculpture and painting have bodies.
– Donald Hall
It’s like refusing to admit you have a favorite child, but I had never encountered a hungry tree eating stars before, and was just enchanted…
– Diane Gottlieb
For a writer every day is a nervous breakdown.
– John Banville
“Mantra for Anxiety: This is not you.” This is something moving through you. It can leave out of the same door it came in.
– James Clear
The Dalai Lama says that the seven billion human beings on the planet is seven billion opportunities for joy.
– Jaya Rudgard
from the reeds
from the mist
the call of plovers
– Simon Hanson
just a whisper
a flock of plovers
takes flight
– Issa
Each stage in our cultural ecosystem stands for a basic truth
Tribal: My family is me
Warrior: I am somebody
Traditional: We are servants of God
Modernist: Our potential for progress is unlimited
Postmodern: We must liberate the victims
Post-postmodern: We are agents of evolution
– Steve McIntosh
slow creek
purling atop
my latte
– Andy Perrin
And why do our lives continue to be oceanic?
– Jason Allen Paisant
My illustrious lordship, I’ll show you what a woman can do.
– Artemisia Gentileschi
It is not my way to bother my brains with what does not concern me. My notion of things is simple enough.
– Jane Austen
New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.
– Kurt Vonnegut
The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector.
– Ernest Hemingway
The vibration of Spirit is at such an infinite rate of intensity and rapidity that it is practically at rest — just as a rapidly moving wheel seems to be motionless.
– The Kybalion
Irresistibly attracted, he advanced slowly, pace by pace, down the lane.
– The War of the Worlds, H. G. Wells
Advice from a 14 year old Syrian refugee that set me free
by Deepak Ramola
When in war-like situations in life, he told me, grief overflows and hope has lost its map, one must refuse to offer more energy to angst but rather channelize it to help the wounds of the next injured person. No swords can ever suffice to cut through the pain, but no amount of help is ever wasted to heal from its clutches.He taught me that we are what happened to us yesterday but we also are what happens to us tomorrow.
And much it grieved my heart to think What man had made of man.
– William Wordsworth
Creative people, as I see them, are distinguished by the fact that they can live with anxiety, even though a high price may be paid in terms of insecurity, sensitivity, and defenselessness for the gift of the “divine madness,” to borrow the term used by the classical Greeks. They do not run away from non-being, but by encountering and wrestling with it, force it to produce being. They knock on silence for an answering music; they pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean.
– Rollo May
From which stars have we fallen to meet each other here?
– Friedrich Nietzsche
A society that has no respect, no regard for its bards, its historians, its storytellers, is a society in steep decline, a society that has lost its very soul and may never find its way.
– Laurence Overmire, The Ghost of Rabbie Burns
But if you want to go your individual way, it is the way you make for yourself, which is never prescribed, which you do not know in advance, and which simply comes into being of itself when you put one foot in front of the other. If you always do the next thing that needs to be done, you will go most safely and sure-footedly along the path prescribed by your unconscious.
– Carl Jung
With no regard
for human design,
spring blossoms arrive
in their own due time.
– Fa Hsing Jeff Miles
Our language is all screwed up. A radical is not an extremist. The Latin root of “radical” means, literally, of the root, that is, “in the center.” It goes deep. A radical is a moderate who goes deep. When we describe someone now as a “moderate,” what we really mean is that he or she is shallow. We’re uncomfortable with depth. Moderates believe that somehow or another everything is going to be okay if people would just stop being so “weird.”
– Mark Bittner
… but then he was filtering through the halls, sandwiched between his classmates, just another head bobbing in a rapid of bodies, no longer finding comfort in the singular…
– Tommy Dean
You could be seduced to think that art could redeem the world. It cannot.
– Anselm Kiefer
To me. art almost always speaks more forcefully when it appears in an imperfect, accidental, and fragmentary way, somehow just signaling its presence, allowing one to feel it through the ineptitude of the interpretation. I prefer the Chopin that reaches me in the street from an open window to the Chopin served in great style from the concert stage.
– Witold Gombrowicz
Don’t be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.
– Arthur Miller
Gather a shell from the strewn beach,
And listen at its lips; they sigh
The same desire and mystery,
The echo of the whole sea’s speech.
– Dante Gabriel Rossetti
We bring to books impossible desires, and this often personal book is a love letter to that form, even if the subject is the violence books have endured.
– Adam Smyth
They never said “I don’t know.” They said, instead, “I’m not sure,” which did not give any information but still suggested the possibility of knowledge.
– Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
As for us: We must uncenter our minds from ourselves. We must unhumanize our views a little and become confident as the rock and ocean that we are made from.
– Robinson Jeffers
The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.
– Hannah Arendt
It’s not anywhere in the rules that you can’t smooch a book.
– catapult
May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out.
– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
long stretch
of country road
the setting sun
reaches the horizon
before we do
– @ruralitalics
did it ever occur to you
that my children
flee their home
convene in isolation,
shield themselves with bladed rocks
because you are the dangerous ones?
– Assétou Xango
Nothing that was not already stable will stabilize.
– Lama Lena
don’t let them kill you with their stare
don’t let them closet you with no air
– Sonia Sanchez
Inside her, my grit and timbre, my reckless.
– Carmen Giménez, The Daughter
Trouble is the common denominator of the living. It is the great equalizer.
– Søren Kierkegaard
does canada have any significant exports outside of alice munro
– sṫǔttsiiso’ōḱǎasim
i won’t tolerate leonard cohen erasure.
– Sheera Talpaz
You learn for yourself not for others, not to show off, not to put the other one down/ learning is your secret, it is all you have, it is the only thing you can call your own. nobody can take it away…
– Louise Bourgeois
(Am always initially in a state of shock with US television and all the awful dystopic ads for weird drugs with fatal side effects, horrible plastic gadgets, and edible non-foods.)
– Alicia E. Stallings
hilltop abbey
a midsummer mass
of fireflies
– Tim Gardiner
the length
of our silence …
hill-top moon
– Chen-ou Liu
The ongoing assertion that Democrats must eternally placate and please Republicans and never ever the other way around is an arrangement that often makes me think of a bad/trad marriage with, of course, Democrats as the wife….
– Rebecca Solnit
PILGRIM BELL
I demand.
To be forgiven.
I demand.
A sturdier soul.
Every person I’ve ever met.
Has been small enough.
To fit.
In my eye.
– Kaveh Akbar
I am not there and I am not here…
I have two names, which meet and part,
and I have two languages.
I forget which of them I dream in.
– Mahmoud Darwish
Gave up calling old friends for new addresses, the last excuse not to lose them.
– Robert Wood Lynn
I try to treat whoever I meet as an old friend.
This gives me a genuine feeling of happiness.
It is the practice of compassion.
– Dalai Lama
Well, I think we are rapidly growing into what I call a religion of the imagination, where we transcend individual archetypes and begin instead to realize that the mystery can take any form, and that a higher religion is a religion then which dispenses with the symbolic forms, the presentational modes of the mystery, and concentrates on the mystery itself as a kind of ineffable center of being that constellates everything around it to have meaning.
– Terence McKenna
Sound is the medium through which we can stir emotions in the easiest way. When we hear the clock ticking, we immediately know and feel that something is passing and a certain thing is measuring something. I also want to present sounds, which exist around us but which we cannot hear. These sounds are outside of our presence – our body is not able to perceive them.
– Alicja Kwade
Perfect Yin is stern and frigid;
Perfect Yang is bright and glittering.
The sternness and frigidity come forth from
Heaven, the brightness and glitter emerge
From the earth; the two mingle, penetrate,
Come together, harmonize,
and all things are born therefrom
– CHUANG-TZU
We are programmed to see ourselves everywhere—we see a face in the light socket, we yell at the car for breaking down, we apply complex psychological motivations to our cat. What is God but the attempt to make the universe more like us—to make it living, breathing, thinking, moral, creative, thoughtful, emotional, and answerable?
– J.G. Keely
But what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing itself, into the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously.
– Julio Cortazar
Whenever we give up, leave behind, and forget too much, there is always the danger that the things we have neglected will return with added force.
– Carl Jung
She was always waiting, it seemed to be her forte.
– D. H. Lawrence
A Matter of Days
There is an ache
in each of us
A remoteness
An unsettled absoluteness
that embraces no variant
In the end, it figures closely
to the self’s semblance
Part caution
Part allure
It is distinctly
our vigilant core
– Pan Rehm
All human beings throughout the world are conditioned. It is an obvious and undeniable fact. Yet, many of us are unaware of this fact of our conditioning. We are unaware of the ways in which our culture influences our minds and shapes our perception of reality. We do not realize that most of our thoughts, opinions, and beliefs are not really our own, but were simply inherited by our family and the society that we were raised in. To remove our beliefs is to open ourselves up to the possibility that everything we know about reality is untrue.
– Joseph P. Kauffman
If I, also, could be lifted into the sky, / I’d wish to be blown apart; for love, I’d dance and shoot straight up. / Anyone can go wild in this moonlight, / when the moon’s drenched in its own bliss.
– Arthur Sze
If you want your life to have true value, bring a gift to the world. Bring your love, not your fear. Bring your compassion, not your hatred. Bring your joy, not your suffering. Bring your optimism, not your doubt. Bring your beautiful, already free, smiling presence. Bring your open loving heart so that all beings everywhere will feel your goodness, and when you pass they too will smile and share their joy. Some things are better left sleeping while other things will nourish the universe. If you want your life to have value, bring the best part of you to the world.
– Michael Kewley
Place and the scale of space must be measured against our bodies and their capabilities.
– Gary Snyder
Wisdom, like compassion, often seems to require of us that we hold multiple realities in our consciousness at once.
– Richard Tarnas, Comos and Psyche
What does one feed intuition so that it is consistently nourished and responsive to our requests to scan our environs? One feeds it life—one feeds it life by listening to it. What good is a voice without an ear to receive it?
– Clarissa Pinkola Estés
Emotions are physical. Our bodies are the only place they can ever be found.
– Raphael Cushnir
I’ve yet to feel worse after exercising
– Shane Parrish
People trying to make all art and literature safe are destroying it.
– Leah Callen
So you see, they were
wrong, the ones
who called me unrequited. I
was in his throat…
– Heliotrope
It is not who I sleep with that defines the quality of these acts, not what we do together, but what life-statements I am led to make as the nature and effect of my erotic relationships percolate throughout my life and my being.
– Audre Lorde
In academia we don’t say ‘I love you’ we say ‘no corrections required’, and I think that’s beautiful.
– @ThePhDPlace
As we develop love, appreciation, and forgiveness for others over time, we may accidentally develop those things toward ourselves, too. While you might think it’s a trick, having affection for one’s goofy, crabby, annoying, lovely self is home.
– Anne Lamott
Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.
– Hermann Hesse
my hands are bright / pink like I have been applauding you for hours.
– Heather Christle
To have a present, you have to know which things to forget and which things to remember.
– Elias Khoury
These are the late poems.
Most poems are late
of course: too late,
like a letter sent by a sailor
that arrives after he’s drowned.
– Margaret Atwood
Being a spiritual idealist is one of the most beautiful and dangerous things in the world.
Beautiful, because it inspires us to be more.
Dangerous, because we confuse our ideals with reality.
– @VinceFHorn
Being funny was a way of being powerful. If you were an attention-needing little kid, and was I ever, you could get a lot of cred from verbal performance.
– George Saunders
I am only resolved to act in that manner, which will, in my own opinion, constitute my happiness, without reference to you, or to any person so wholly unconnected with me.
– Jane Austen
I know about me. I am the moons sister, a tidal child stranded on land. The sea always in my ear, a surf of eternal discontent in my blood.
– Keri Hulme
Weird things happen when humans try to cast off the shackles of linear time and assume the vantage of eternity.
– Meghan O’Gieblyn
inside the time-loop
spooling and unspooling
our past decisions
– @hegelincanada
Things get passed around so easily on the Internet. Fact becomes fiction and fiction becomes fact.
– Hilary Mantel
You can write down all the equations of fluid dynamics and still be surprised by a tornado.
– @JamesGleick
A world without dust would be a world without movement, without friction, without change of any sort—a world that doesn’t spin or orbit or even belong to this dusty universe.
– Verlyn Klinkenborg
Riding The High Stool
Christy Moore
I was riding the high stool, expandin’ and expoundin’,
On the price of rice in Sierra Leone and the height of the beef mountain.
As to where did Jack Doyle meet Movita. How many wives did the Aga Khan.
Dismountin’ from my high horse, I couldn’t find the handle of the bar room door!
Yeah sure I knew it all then up again’ the counter,
I’d weigh you up in ten seconds flat.
Ya see I was a great judge of character, my instincts always tellin’ me exactly what kinda guy I got.
‘Til I turned to go that is, whereupon I couldn’t tell my arse from my well-bent elbow.
I was heading down the streets of Laredo singin’ Red Sails in the Sunset,
Sure it was no wonder, we knew it all then.
Twas like drinkin’ porter off a sore leg sez Ber Murphy.
“Would ye ever ask me bollix”, sez Kenny Barry.
I showed them the colour of me money when I got back from Katanga,
There’s no business like show business sez Titch Maher in Flood’s bar.
After snaggin’ turnips for the Holy Fathers,
But after it got dark, much later; down by the pinkeen bridge. I cried buckets in the river,
When Mickser sang “Oh gentle Swallows”…….oh gentle swallows
For knowin’ it all is a lonely place to be. Yet still I found it very hard to say,
“Hey man, this load is too much for me, til I was completely terrified.
Whereupon a light ship came upon my way, and caught me in its beam.
Before I went under, yet again, for the very last time.
I was ridin’ the high stool, expandin’ and expoundin’.
Swimming in the wine lakes and climbing the beef mountains.
Ridin’ the high stool expandin’ and expoundin’,
On the price of rice in Siera Leone and the height of the beef mountain.
Ridin’ the high stool expandin’ and expoundin’….
Recently, I learned about a term
called a “glimmer,” which is the
opposite of a trigger. Glimmers
are any moments in your day
that bring you joy, happiness,
peace, gratitude, or love, making
you feel good. The more you
look out for them, the more
you’ll notice, and the fewer
triggers you’ll encounter. We
tend to see what we actively seek.
– Roger Wolsey
It wasn’t so much that we
worried about what people thought or about keeping it real
but that we knew this was our moment.
– Camille T. Dungy
Things outside you are projections of what’s inside you, and what’s inside you is a projection of what’s outside. So when you step into the labyrinth outside you, at the same time you’re stepping into the labyrinth inside.
– Haruki Murakami
The world suddenly vanished from view like a morning mist. I was left alone with Reality.
– Paul Brunton
when we are old & our hearts have beat within us, let
us go back, & when we have buried our loves, & shed
our bodies piece by piece, & when we have danced
& broken our shoes, & danced, let us go back,
when we have gone mad, & when we have shut
the doors, dismantled our eyes & rifles, let us go back,
when we have drunk the wine & licked our lips
& put our tongues to the inside of the green glass bottle
& laid down our bodies old as trees, streets, let us go back,
when we have told our stories & forgotten our stories,
& set the tables & made the beds, let us go back,
& received other bodies into our bodies, let us go,
when we have entered, & opened,
& opened our mouths, let us go back,
[…] when the poem has been sung,
when the strings & tambourines,
when all the birds have gathered at the window, let us go,
let us go back there, let us go back
– Aracelis Girmay
A miracle is when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A miracle is when one plus one equals a thousand.
– Frederick Buechner
Today, all time-consuming practices, such as trust, loyalty, commitment and responsibility, are disappearing. […] I think trust is a social practice, and today it is being replaced by transparency and information. Trust enables us to build positive relationships with others, despite lacking knowledge. In a transparency society, one immediately asks for information from others. Trust as a social practice becomes superfluous. The transparency and information society fosters a society of distrust.
– Byung-Chul Han
It’s the old idea that the only way to experience faith is through active doubt. You have to undertake the encounter with the “monument,” and it has to remain essentially unknowable. The desire to apprehend it, the act or attempt at apprehension, description – and the failure of that attempt – is the beginning, as [Elizabeth Bishop] says, of imagination, of art.
– Jorie Graham
America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, ‘It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.’ It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: ‘if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?’ There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.
Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.
– Kurt Vonnegut
When the governing class isn’t chosen for quality it is chosen for material wealth: this always means decadence, the lowest stage a society can reach.”
– Isha Schwaller de Lubicz
There’s a space at the bottom of an exhale, a little hitch between taking in and letting out that’s a perfect zero you can go into. There’s a rest point between the heart’s muscle’s close and open – an instant of keenest living when you’re momentarily dead. You can rest there.
– Mary Karr
The human eye has three kinds. One type excels at detecting red and associated wavelengths. One is tuned to blue. The other optimally perceives light of two colors: purple and yellow. The human eye is superbly equipped to detect these colors and send a signal pulsing to the brain. This doesn’t explain why I perceive them as beautiful, but it does explain why that combination gets my undivided attention. I asked my artist buddies about the power of purple and gold, and they sent me right to the color wheel: these two are complementary colors, as different in nature as could be. In composing a palette, putting them together makes each more vivid; just a touch of one will bring out the other. In an 1890 treatise on color perception, Goethe, who was both a scientist and a poet, wrote that “the colors diametrically opposed to each other . . . are those which reciprocally evoke each other in the eye.” Purple and yellow are a reciprocal pair.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer
Northern Lights. Something in the cold, wet atmosphere brought them out. I grabbed Lipsha’s arm. We floated into the field and sank down, crushing green wheat. We chewed the sweet grass tips and stared up and were lost. Everything seemed to be one piece. The air, our faces, all cool, moist, and dark, and the ghostly sky. Pale green licks of light pulsed and faded across it. Living lights. Their fires lobbed over, higher, higher, then died out in blackness. At times the whole sky was ringed in shooting points and puckers of light gathering and falling, pulsing, fading, rhythmical as breathing. All of a piece. As if the sky were a pattern of nerves and our thought and memories traveled across it. As if the sky were one gigantic memory for us all.
Or a dance hall. And all the world’s wandering souls were dancing there. I thought of June. She would be dancing if there was a dance hall in space. She would be dancing a two-step for wandering souls. Her long legs lifting and falling. Her laugh an ace. Her sweet perfume the way all grown-up women were supposed to smell. Her amusement at both the bad and the good. Her defeat. Her reckless victory. Her sons.
– Louise Erdrich
However apparently insignificant the event, whether it be the ring of tobacco ash surrounding the table, the direction from which the wild geese first appeared, or a series of seemingly meaningless human movements, he couldn’t afford to take his eyes off it and must note it all down, since only by doing so could he hope not to vanish one day and fall a silent captive to the infernal arrangement whereby the world decomposes but is at the same time constantly in the process of self-construction.
– László Krasznahorkai
Addressed Humorously to Tu Fu – Li Po
Translated by Shigeyoshi Obata
Here! is this you on the top of Fan-ko Moutain,
Wearing a huge hat in the noonday sun?
How thin, how wretchedly, you have grown!
You must have been suffering from poetry again.
His country was language,
His culture escritura,
In the frontiers
Of concrete imagination mask
He pursued his ‘identity.’
– Victor Hernández Cruz
See to it
That you acquire nothing—
There is nothing
To be gained
In this life.
That doesn’t mean
That you do nothing
But that increasingly
You do it
And are moved
By true love.
The highest achievement
That can be awarded
In this life
Is to live in a way
That helps hearts
Dilate
And helps light return
To people’s eyes.
– Chelan Harkin
my people my people
the long years we’ve survived the long
years yet to come I see you map
my sky the light your lantern long
ahead & I follow I follow
– Fatimah Asghar
According to Jung, genuine loving never involves trying to force yourself or your feelings on a beloved; if you are doing so, then it is not love. It is power pretending to be love.
– Henry Abramovitch
Agency is what it’s called when you get really good at doing what the gods demand of your soul.
– River Kenna
No matter what the practice or teaching, ego loves to wait in ambush to appropriate spirituality for its own survival and gain.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Many men go fishing all of their
lives without knowing that it
is not fish they are after.
– Henry David Thoreau
Alongside the physical universe of people and everything that’s going on there is another universe that we have invented—of words and signs and numbers—that represent the physical world. And we are very, very preoccupied with this symbolic world, and we very often confuse it with what it represents.
– Alan Watts
We yearn to experience through others what we fail to bring to realisation within ourselves.
– Edward C. Whitmont
Literature is the only place I can hide everyone I love.
– Oscar Hokeah
The moment you look at the falseness of things and see clearly the false as the false, that perception is the beginning of intelligence.
– Krishnamurti
But nothing makes a room feel
emptier than wanting someone in it.
– Calla Quinn
There it is again, that ‘slisk’, that sharp sliver of light along the horizon, below the sun, this afternoon. Under a moody sky. Fabulous.
– Alison Dunlop
But if we understand anything of the unconscious, we know that it cannot be swallowed. We also know that it is dangerous to suppress it, because the unconscious is life and this life turns against us if suppressed, as happens in neurosis.
– CG Jung
LIGHT
Light on the walls of old houses,
June.
Passerby, open your eyes.
– Adam Zagajewski, En Route
the world
drowning in poetry
first winter rain
– Issa
I desired always to stretch the night and fill it fuller and fuller with dreams.
– Virginia Woolf
What War is Like
A woman walks out the door
Or a man walks out the door
And you never know
If you’ll see them again.
Or if they will see you.
– john zbigniew guzlowski
the older I get
the more sure
I become that
I’ll never know
who I am
– Andy Perrin
photosynthesis
bright morning light
becomes a poem
– James Welsh
I rejoice life. I’m not complicated but I rejoice everything: Love, courage, beauty. And also: anger, blood, sweat and tears.
– Ed van der Elsken
You are never going to know which night’s mouth is sacredly reciting
and which night’s recitation is secretly mere wind—.
– Kazim Ali
Where
it was written
erased by the flood.
– Jeffrey F. Barken
Life is short
pad it with
sweetness
– Louise Glück
the same
broken branches
in the park . . .
I think again
of calling
– @OwenTrail
snow geese
unzip the morning sky
my journey starts
– Chen-ou Liu
the all night cafe
waitresses called me “honey”
now they just say “sir”
– @BruceJewett
May you gain the clarity, confidence, and courage to deny access to those that lack the capacity to meet you where you are.
– Dr. Thema
And I was fain to bear to you
A portion of its mild relief,
That it might be as healing dew,
To steal some fever from your grief.
– Maria White Lowell
Normally one does rhyme. Deciding not to is much harder.
– Philip Larkin
Without
Maps
Internal
sea_steed
Guides
Me
– Rachel Newcombe
I’m not sure if the sea was angry today, but it sure was working some stuff out.
– Andy Perrin
fast-moving clouds
this longing
to fly back home
– Nitu Yumnam
only an american
Just like the Brits to rename our country
with a P: a letter we don’t have, a sound
our tongues wrestle to say. It’s not Palestine
like old buddy, old pal, old friend, but Falastin.
They’d know Arabic is phonetic if they could
read, but that’s an occupier for you—unwelcome
guest. We have names impossible to mispronounce
& yet they expect the world to say it their way.
In their new country, my grandparents
give their children “good American names”
impossible to mispronounce by the native-born
of this land. They called their first child, a daughter,
Patricia—with a P. Because who would believe
an umma & baba from Falastin would name their
child with a letter their mouths refused to speak,
damned to a lifetime calling her Badrisha.
Only an American would do that.
– Mandy Shunnarah
We can easily come to believe that dukkha is a sign of our failure or unworthiness. However, if we can learn to find the confidence to turn toward dukkha, many of the agitations in our life will calm.
– Christina Feldman and Chris Cullen
More important than whether I like something or don’t like it, or whether someone else likes something or doesn’t like it, is context.
– Hannah Goldfield
The impulse to defend the novel, to defend the turf, is stronger than ever. But the foes change with the times.
– Jonathan Franzen
Those who are truly decrepit, living corpses, so to speak, are the middle-aged, middle-class men and women who are stuck in their comfortable grooves and imagine that the status quo will last forever or else are so frightened it won’t that they have retreated into their mental bomb shelters to wait it out.
– Henry Miller
Some tune was playing
On the radio. He listened
but did not know it.
He kept listening
until a familiar
pattern emerged. Rain
was falling. A scratch
on a record. Time was old
as was the music.
So that was the tune.
– George Szirtes
All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present. Not to stay look what they did then, but rather look at what we do now. Our film shows where dehumanization leads.
– Remi Kanazi, Before the Next Bomb Drops: Rising Up from Brooklyn to Palestine
The first line, the first sentence, the first paragraph, all have to compel you.
– James Salter
Curl
by Diane Seuss
No longer at home in the world
and I imagine
never again at home in the world.
Not in cemeteries or bogs
churning with bullfrogs.
Or outside the old pickle shop.
I once made myself
at home on that street,
and the street after that,
and the boulevard. The avenue.
I don’t need to explain it to you.
It seems wrong
to curl now within the confines
of a poem. You can’t hide
from what you made
inside what you made
or so I’m told.
amazing to
reach middle age
blossoming spring
– Issa
He spake, and to confirm his words, out-flew
Millions of flaming swords, drawn from the thighs
Of mighty Cherubim.
– John Milton
I think it’s ok to swing the pendulum really hard for a while when you’re coming out of years of habit. It may be necessary.
But I think it’s also pretty likely that real truth and goodness and peace will not be found at the other end of that pendulum either.
– @SeishinWrites
I guess theres a lot of folks bad mouthing collectives and people with points of view.
Makes sense. Our US model of authorship is individualistic and prestige-centered.
Start a press, form a collective, do some damage to the status quo.
– Johannes Göransson
I was convinced my neighbors were Trumpers & they assumed I was too.
Electricity was out on our block yesterday which forced us out of our homes. It started w/ simple chatting then subtly about politics which ended in all of us agreeing Trump is a psychopath & dangerous.
– @FeminineWild
Recognizing what you
do not know may be your
greatest strenght
– Rick Rubin
Virtue lies only in the interminable act of erasing yourself.
– Melissa Febos
This is an adventure that every human being must go through — to learn to be anxious in order that he may not perish either by never having been in anxiety or by succumbing to anxiety. Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.
– Søren Kierkegaard
True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it.
– Karl Popper
It is a thorny undertaking, and more so than it seems, to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind, to penetrate the opaque depths of its innermost folds, to pick out and immobilize the innumerable flutterings that agitate it.
– Michel de Montaigne, Essais
I like to create a world and then I get to live in it and be
somebody new every two or three years. Who wants to be
themselves all the time?
– St. Vincent
We believe in a world changed through community and collaboration in the arts.
– David Talley
I viewed the fellowship as laying an imaginary literary net.
– Francisco Font Acevedo
Artifact
by Haley Winans
You are not a yellowing map
under his thumb. Or a hoe
left to rust in wax
bean fields sheathed
in snow. You are a terrain
of moments older. A cartographer’s
nightmare. The lithosphere’s shifting
sister. Tectonic plate heart
beat shaking the bed. Seismic
orgasm. River snaking
through a city remembrance. You grow skyscraper
cynical with every hotter winter. Your voice
is not an engine revving or a bald eagle
cry in a bruise blue sky. You are not a machine
full of fingers trying to fix
a faulty screw. He’s got a smokestack
mouth, factory hands, flat earth
gullibility, microplastic mind, Mt. Rushmore
face, flammable brain that flickers
candle soft. Bleats like a gull when the ocean licks
his toes. Wears sneaks on the beach. Thick sheet
of sunscreen blankets his metallic
sheen. Your riptide made him move
to the Midwest and hunt. He’s drowning in corn
and the remnants of manifest
destiny. The moon is a magnet pulling us
towards ourselves. When you reduce yourself
to urn, you can’t become ash.
SIGNS YOU MIGHT BE THE HEROINE OF A ROM-COM NOVEL
by Bryn Donovan
You’re an author with writer’s block, so your agent sends you to her villa in Tuscany for a month-long vacation to help you find your inspiration.
Your great-aunt died and bequeathed her apple farm to both you and an attractive stranger. You think this must be a mistake. The attorney says: “I assure you, it is not.”
You have a quarrel with an attractive stranger who turns out to be a member of royalty. The name of their tiny kingdom sounds like the name of a prescription drug.
With your awkward yet free-spirited ways, you struggle to fit in as a guest at the palace in the kingdom of Boniva.
You just exhaled a breath you didn’t realize you were holding.
The fate of many depends on the pumpkin festival.
Your best friend has two hobbies: pushing you to date and pushing you for every detail of any date that ensues. It would be indelicate, though perhaps accurate, to label this a kink.
You do not believe in the idea of soulmates.
Once, you made a very specific wish about love, but now you know that the world is a hard place and wishes never come true.
An attractive veterinarian gently chides you for giving your dog too many treats.
Your dog keeps wandering over to visit the attractive neighbor down the street.
You talk at length about your love life to your cat.
You are pretending to be someone’s girlfriend for dubious reasons. It’s an elaborate ruse that takes up several hours of every day.
You work in an office at the top of a very tall building in Manhattan and are secretly unfulfilled.
Your parents love you and frequently let you know how disappointed they are in you.
Your parents got divorced when you were a child, which is why you decided love is bullshit and you will never date anyone, ever.
You’ve gone viral for doing something not especially remarkable. Someone recorded you on their phone and put the video on social media. It got 200,000 views in three minutes.
Your sister informs you that you’ve gone viral. After you say no, you’re not sick, she explains what “going viral” means. You are twenty-seven years old and know nothing of social media.
You talk at length to your Lyft driver about finding your sense of purpose.
Your Lyft driver gives you surprisingly wise advice.
Your Lyft driver may or may not be Santa Claus.
You do not believe in the magic of Christmas.
After being fired from your big-city job, you have no money and buy a small-town bakery.
You make a very good living selling homemade cupcakes in a town with a population of four thousand.
You admire a beautiful vista. “So beautiful,” your companion agrees in a murmur, staring at you.
You put little thought into your appearance, unlike your beloved’s ex-girlfriend, whose hair and makeup are always perfect because she’s a shallow bitch.
In a rush to get to your new job, you rear-end a car and blame the other driver. When you reach your workplace, you learn the other driver is your boss.
You decide to write a novel, and one year later, it’s in the front window of your local bookstore.
Someone has invited you along on a trip to Paris, but you’re sure it’s only a gesture of friendship and nothing more.
You are far too obsessed with your career to even think about dating.
There is only one bed.
A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages, to deserve the word.
– Jane Austen
Between a word and a thing / you only encounter yourself, /
lying between each as if next to someone ill…
– Ingeborg Bachmann, (tr. Peter Filkins)
1. The last time you made the mistake of making a home out of a pair of arms and a soft smile, you learned the hard way that anything that moves, that can blame, that can cause ache does not deserve such an elevated status in your heart. Still, you are an anomaly, a wild thing hoping for a home. A sailor wishing to leave the ocean and return.
2. I still remember a day when your father had lifted you in his arms and told you that you are loved, more than you ever know. It was two days before the plane crash that took him. It was two days before I saw death dance in your broken eyes for the first time. I don’t think it ever stopped dancing there.
3. Yesterday, someone asked you, “who do you trust most in the world?” And you felt that your lips were sewn shut. Everybody you should love and trusts’ names felt rough and raw on your tongue like they were in a foreign language that you had become too ancient to learn. So instead you whispered your own name like a secret into the abyss and hoped no one saw the sadness that had crawled it’s way along with your name out of your mouth.
4. A summer ago, you asked me what it was like to not need a place to call home. I know you asked this from a place of trauma, that your trauma has convinced you it will all be okay once you find a home. But it is lying, because what you need up find is your healing. And I told you that wanderlust had etched itself so ornately into my bones that I had no choice but to travel till it had sated itself. You looked at me with envy, even as I thought of all the people who would love to make a home of your heartbeat. You however were looking for a certain kind of love that you would call your very own. A kind of love that would never abandon you the way everyone you have ever loved has.
5. Something about you glowed bigger and better than all the stars we gazed at in the night sky. And even then, even when you had everything, you longed for a human to belong in. But everytime you laid the foundations for something good, they came crashing and tumbling down on your head. Because your trauma is a perfectionist and no one could quite become what you needed and wanted at the same time.
6. I wish I had told you then what I told you in that very last letter before I left. That child, why did no one ever teach you that you cannot turn people into homes? People are rivers, ever changing, ever flowing. They will disappear with everything you put inside them. Still, that home you are hunting for does have a heartbeat. But it isn’t one locked in anyone else’s chest. Just look inside your own.
– Nikita Gill, People Aren’t Homes
Consider the difference between the two types of globe maps of planet Earth, the physical and the political. The first is a marvelous wiggly affair, blue, green, brown, yellow, and occasionally white. The second, especially on the North American continent, is angrily scratched across with straight lines, and the one earth (and we should not forget the one air) covered with patches of contrasting colors to identify the domains of differing bands of gangsters. Which of the two more closely resembles Earth as seen from outer space?
– Alan Watts
DON’T HESITATE
If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world. It could be anything,
but very likely you notice it in the instant
when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the
case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid
of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.
– Mary Oliver
A creature who has spent his life creating one particular representation of his selfdom will die rather than become the antithesis of that representation.
– Frank Herbert
…cultures around the world, especially before the homogenising dominion of globalisation, have maintained very different spatial worlds for probably as long as human beings have organised themselves into different cultures. Australia is particularly rich with highly non-Western ways of understanding space. Among the Thaayorre of the northern coast, for instance, there is no word for ‘left’ or ‘right’; instead all orientation is done according to compass points, so that you might tell someone, ‘Your southeast shoe is untied.’ Furthermore, in the Thaayorre language, the usual way to greet someone translates as ‘Which way are you going?’ and the proper response is along the lines of ‘West-northwest, in the middle distance,’ so that if you don’t know which way you’re pointed, you can’t even negotiate ‘hello’.
– Nathanael Bonnell
The passage into mystery always refreshes. If, when we work, we can look once a day upon the face of mystery, then our labor satisfies. We are lightened when our gifts rise from pools we cannot fathom. Then we know they are not a solitary egotism and they are inexhaustible.
– Lewis Hyde
That what could become harmonious, that is a man who can strike a chord, and such a chord can sing through the rest of the Universe, and actually affect everything as if that what is the rate of vibration, and set going by him will return thousand times in all overtones of the world.
– W. Nyland
When you see a truck bearing down on you,
by all means jump out of the way.
But spend some time in meditation too.
Learning to deal with discomfort is the only way you’ll be ready
to handle the truck you didn’t see.
– B.H. Gunaratana
Talking Dog For Sale.
A guy is driving around the backwoods of Montana and he sees a sign in front of a broken down shanty-style house: ‘Talking Dog For Sale.’
He rings the bell and the owner appears and tells him the dog is in the backyard.
The guy goes into the backyard and sees a nice looking Labrador Retriever sitting there.
“You talk?” he asks.
“Yep” the Lab replies.
After the guy recovers from the shock of hearing a dog talk, he says, “So, what’s your story?”
The Lab looks up and says, “Well, I discovered that I could talk when I was pretty young. I wanted to help the government, so I told the CIA. In no time at all they had me jetting from country to country, sitting in rooms with spies and world leaders, because no one figured a dog would be eavesdropping, I was one of their most valuable spies for eight years running… but the jetting around really tired me out, and I knew I wasn’t getting any younger so I decided to settle down. I signed up for a job at the airport to do some undercover security, wandering near suspicious characters and listening in. I uncovered some incredible dealings and was awarded a batch of medals. I got married, had a mess of puppies, and now I’m just retired.”
The guy is amazed. He goes back in and asks the owner what he wants for the dog.
“Ten dollars” the guy says.
“Ten dollars? This dog is amazing! Why on Earth are you selling him so cheap?”
“Because he’s a liar. He’s never been out of the yard.”
– Ian Sanders
And all the time — such is the tragi-comedy of our situation — we continue to clamor for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more “drive”, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or “creativity”. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
– C S Lewis
Everything had changed suddenly–the tone, the moral climate; you didn’t know what to think, whom to listen to. As if all your life you had been led by the hand like a small child and suddenly you were on your own, you had to learn to walk by yourself. There was no one around, neither family nor people whose judgment you respected. At such a time you felt the need of committing yourself to something absolute–life or truth or beauty–of being ruled by it in place of the man-made rules that had been discarded. You needed to surrender to some such ultimate purpose more fully, more unreservedly than you had ever done in the old familiar, peaceful days, in the old life that was now abolished and gone for good.
– Boris Pasternak
It’s cold today, but in a spring way, and I love you.
– Vladimir Nabokov
…and do not think that I could ever really love a woman who had not, at some time or other, been up on a broomstick.
– Isak Dinesen
Intrinsically, we are all completely and perfectly sane. We are enveloped and imbued by this sanity. But unable to bring ourselves to acknowledge this, we hatch a hodgepodge of beliefs which we embrace and then chase as if they were real, stumbling and falling on the great way. These beliefs embroider the entire sky with their flowery efflorescence.
– Dogen
It would be better, think they, if Heaven were above and Hell below – anywhere outside, but not within. But that comfort has been knocked from under us. There are no places to go to, either for reward or punishment. The place is always here and now, in your own person and according to your own fancy … You are the author, director and actor all in one: the drama is always going to be your own life, not some one else’s. A beautiful, terrible, ineluctable drama, like a suit made of your own skin. Would you want it otherwise? Could you invent a better drama?
– Henry Miller
Don’t set sail!
Tomorrow the wind will have dropped;
And then you can go,
And I won’t trouble about you.
– Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
Things You’ve Never Seen
When I tell it, the first time
I saw hail, I say
it was in a desert and knocked
a man unconscious
then drove a woman into my arms
because she thought the end was near
but I assured her
this wasn’t the case.
When he tells it,
he smiles, says the first winter
after their exodus
was the coldest.
Rare snow
came down, and his mother,
who knew what the fluff was
but until then had never seen it,
woke him and said, Look outside,
what do you see?
She called his name twice.
It was dark. Snow fell
a paragraph to sum up
decades of heat. He had
no answer. She said,
this is flour from heaven.
When he tells it,
he’s an old man returning
to his mother.
– Fady Joudah
All this noisy commotion isolated a fairly small universe of nothing special.
– Prageeta Sharma
If we go too deep into the dark, we can’t tolerate the light. We have to slowly work our way back.
– Robin Robertson
To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.
– Victor Hugo
the vibes aren’t off but they aren’t on either, it’s like someone toggled the dimmable light switch on this vibe.
– Kristen Arnett
i have no wit, no words, no tears; my heart within me like a stone is numb’d too much for hopes or fears; look right, look left, i dwell alone; i lift mine eyes, but dimm’d with grief no everlasting hills i see; my life is in the falling leaf.
– christina rossetti
For the elites, the priority remains: keep people enclosed within the augmented unrealities of the internet complex, where experience is fragmented into a kaleidoscope of fleeting claims of importance, of never-ending admonitions on how to conduct our lives, manage our bodies, what to buy and who to admire or to fear.
– Jonathan Crary, Scorched Earth
in the outermost sense, if art isn’t about high beauty, which is another way of saying its about resisting the destruction wrought by time, whats it about? like really. what is it aiming for.
– sṫǔttsiiso’ōḱǎasim
Such a long walk
from the door to the table.
– Louise Glück
…there is a solidarity whose horizon is assimilation, and there is a solidarity whose horizon is liberation…The former is hierarchical…The latter is citational. It names those it loves.
– Fady Joudah
Metta is that sense of openness when we feel connected to everyone and everything in the world.
– Kevin Griffin
dust settles
the storied old creek
becomes a car park
– James Welsh
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
We have a right, in various ways, to act upon our unfavourable opinion of any one, not to the oppression of his individuality, but in the exercise of ours… We have a right, and it may be our duty, to caution others against him, if we think his example or conversation likely to have a pernicious effect on those with whom he associates.
– John Stuart Mill
She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.
– Jean-Paul Sartre
We always love….despite; and that ‘despite’ covers an infinity.
– Emil Cioran
democritus, whilst he all science taught, was by his foolish neighbours thought distracted in his wits; who call his speculative flights, his solitary walks in starry nights, but wild and frantick fits. bless me, each cries, from such a working brain!
– anne finch
Years do odd things to identity.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
Choose Different
O soft reciprocity
palms cupping foreheads
moss underfoot
O napping under open sky
dragonflies tickling
prayers into our ears
O humans knowing
indelible goodness
in each other
ourselves
O imbibing with joy
the fat of the land
trusting
sharing
O filled up to our outlines
aligned and home
each piece welcome
at ease in the All
O dwell with me love
we chose to be here
let’s choose again
choose different
– Rena Branson
Batter my heart, transgender’d god, for yours
is the only ear that hears:
– Meg Day
Speculation, rumination, direct address to the reader are entirely indigenous to the novel form.
– Susan Sontag
When I stop and think about what it’s all about I do come up with some answers, but they don’t help very much.
– Joe Brainard
Dear Edie,
I have a lot of things to teach you now, in case we ever meet, concerning the message that was transmitted to me under a pine tree in North Carolina on a cold winter moonlit night. It said that Nothing Ever Happened, so don’t worry. It’s all like a dream. Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don’t know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky ways of cloudy innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect. We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere, or one universal self. Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes through everything, is one thing. It’s a dream already ended. There’s nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. I know this from staring at mountains months on end. They never show any expression, they are like empty space. Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence of mind, the one vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, will never crumble away because it was never born.
The world you see is just a movie in your mind.
Your eternal old man,
Jack
YOUR MOMENT TO SHINE
The moment is here,
the moment you step
forward from fear
into light, the moment
that your soul takes flight.
Burrow no more in darkness
and despair. Dare to show
your radiant self,
the miracle of awakened
energy giving you wings
and the courage to be
human and divine
at the same time.
With this breath, you are
initiated into the depths
of freedom and love,
into the peril and perfection
of the moment as it truly is,
and you are right with it,
open, refusing to close down
or cower no matter what
challenges find you inside
or outside. This is your
moment to shine.
– Danna Faulds
He dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her. Petra Cotes, for her part, loved him more and more as she felt his love increasing, and that was how in the ripeness of autumn she began to believe once more in the youthful superstition that poverty was the servitude of love. Both looked back then on the wild revelry, the gaudy wealth, and the unbridled fornication as an annoyance and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude. Madly in love after so many years of sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of living each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out people they kept on blooming like little children and playing together like dogs.
– Gabriel García Márquez
I sat upon a stone / covered one leg with the other / and set my elbow on them / I nestled in my hand / my chin and one of my cheeks / In this position I started pondering / How one should live in the world.
– Walther von der Vogelweide
Science does not have a moral dimension. It is like a knife. If you give it to a surgeon or a murderer, each will use it differently.
– Robert B. Seidensticker
Science, like any tool, is neutral in morality. Its impact depends on the hands that wield it — whether for healing or harm, enlightenment or destruction.
– Carl Sagan
We have sought security in illusions – in God, in ideas, in relationships, in concepts, prejudices, conclusions and convictions. None of these have given human beings inward security.
– Krishnamurti
One is never afraid of the unknown; one is afraid of the known coming to an end.
– Krishnamurti
The best response is often, “You might be right.” The next time someone disagrees with you or criticizes you, just shrug your shoulders and say, ‘you might be right,’ and watch the energy change. If you care about the outcome, focus on what’s right, not who is right.
– Farnam Street
Know that the daimons would like to inflame you to embrace their work, which is not yours.
– @RedBookJung
One is always inclined to lay the blame on external circumstances, but nothing could explode in us if it had not been there.
– Carl Jung
Writing is a job, a talent, but it’s also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon.
– Ann Patchett
And the blue sea stretches away into the distance—just a slightly darker shade than the sky—such a wonderful blue, and the air seems as if it is painted with naphthalene.
– Edvard Munch, (tr. Jennifer Lloyd)
The Western mind has no word for Tao. The Chinese character is made up of the sign for “head” and the sign for “going, ” “Head” can be taken as consciousness and “going” as traveling a way, and the idea would then be: to go consciously, or the conscious way.
– CG Jung
You can’t hurry love, as the song goes. You can’t hurry grief, either.
– Sigrid Nunez
One flower
on the cliffside
Nodding at the canyon
– Jack Kerouac
Who will prefer the
jingle of jade pendants
if he once has heard
stone growing in a cliff!
– Lao Tzu
(tr. Witter Bynner)
a comforting tick —
marking springtime at his own rate, a singing chiffchaff
– James Gilbert
All my books are still in print, in hardback as well as paper, because people go back and say, Let me read that. Did she really say that?
– Maya Angelou
Imitators can’t answer questions at a deeper level. Specific knowledge is earned, not learned, so imitators don’t fully understand the ideas they’re talking about. Their knowledge is shallow. As a result, when you ask about details, or first principles or nonstandard cases, they don’t have good answers.
– Shane Parrish
Enthusiasm dies, curiosity lives.
– Bhargav Chaudhari
The loss of feminine energy, with its warm vitality, is not difficult to document. It is evident in our culture’s mythic traditions, in our linguistic poverty, in our lack of feeling for human relationships, and finally in our hunger for meaning.
– Robert A. Johnson
Perhaps the whole of ‘Zarathustra’ may be classified as music—I am sure that one of the conditions of its production was a renaissance in me of the art of hearing.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
If anything speaks, let it be the new & perfect organ
– torrin a. greathouse
When it’s right, it will flow spontaneously and serendipitously and it will guide you through a series of coincidences too meaningful to truly be coincidental in the first place. When it’s right, you’ll look back and realize that so many steps you took were leading you right to this one, that the signs were really there all along. You will know that it is right for you because it will just happen — even despite your fear and disbelief. You will know that it is right for you because it feels like a surprise and a certainty all at once. When it’s right, the things you love will love you back.
– Brianna Wiest
Cooperation depends on the sentient activities of group processes based on mutual awareness, trust, and an associative kind of intelligence not easily condensed into logical proposals. Elephants and wolf-packs are excellent examples of beings coordinating significant shared intentions in ways that involve both intentions and understandings – both immediate initiatives and longer term considerations – while participating in what’s currently happening. The choices we make together produce shared group identities shaped by free cooperation and the consequences. No rule of force can take the place of agreed-upon collaborative cocreations working together from the get-go.
– George Gorman
I who have been staring down so long
see no reason for the sorrows humans make.
– Naomi Shihab
The weight of centuries lies on children, I’m sure of it.
– Flannery O’Connor
(for never
had the heart moved
through
such wilderness; never
in holding had
we
held less).
– Gustaf Sobin
Writers often talk about their research, but it’s always felt completely alien to what I’m doing.
– Geoff Dyer
I SUPPOSE IT’S POINTLESS TO THINK OF YOU AT ALL
Parliament Hill Fields, Sylvia Plath
Little one, I must spool it all back, the birth story,
the first feed, your sister holding you
in her sweet arms, the picture of you both
wearing matching dresses on my WhatsApp
profile picture, her loving you, the new branch reaching out
on the family tree for her to catch, to swing from.
Sweet Jesus, the loneliness,
a lump of coal in my stomach. All those Christmases
deleted too. How to figure out who I am
without you —
I project your minuscule squally body.
A secret showing, an intimate screening
that I can replay, and replay, and replay
until the lights flicker out.
Together, the declining confidence in higher education and rising support for organized labor point to a significant change in the way that young people view their economic futures.
– David Wallace-Wells
You could not be born at a better period than the present when you have lost everything.
– Simone Weil
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
– Roger Scruton
I tremble lest the darkness teach
Me that nothing matters
– Langston Hughes, Teacher
I don’t have a plan / I have a voice.
– Alice Notley
Zen is not some kind of excitement, but concentration on our usual everyday routine.
– Shunryu Suzuki
Either everything in man can be traced as a development from below, or something must come from above.
– T. S. Eliot
Why love what you will lose?
There is nothing else to love.
– Louise Glück
I used to find ways to save a paragraph or a sentence, maybe by relocating it. Now I look for ways to discard things. … The instinct to discard is finally a kind of faith.
– Don DeLillo
Writing is a struggle against silence.
– Carlos Fuentes
Once, women who lived unconventional lives were seized as witches and burned. Now people just say to them, ‘You look tired.’
– Sandra Newman
“What a delightful library you have at Pemberley, Mr. Darcy!” “It ought to be good,” he replied, “it has been the work of many generations.” “And then you have added so much to it yourself, you are always buying books.”
– Jane Austen
I hadn’t been in proper school in three years. My parents were my two best friends. My third best friend was an author who did not know I existed.
– John Green
The vital center was never vital, and its hegemony could only be secured by the silencing and erasure of the radical left, and the absorption of the radical right.
– @BL_Balthaser
One of the most impressive discoveries was the origin of the energy of the stars, that makes them continue to burn. One of the men who discovered this was out with his girl friend the night after he realized that nuclear reactions must be going on in the stars in order to make them shine. She said “Look at how pretty the stars shine!” He said “Yes, and right now I am the only man in the world who knows why they shine.” She merely laughed at him. She was not impressed with being out with the only man who, at that moment, knew why stars shine. Well, it is sad to be alone, but that is the way it is in this world.
– Richard Feynman
Today I am happy to find myself sitting on the ground wanting nothing to do – no, not even wanting it, simply accepting that I am enveloped in nothing to do.
I begin to understand how nothing to do is its own state of grace, difficult to find deliberately, nearly impossible to recognize. Nothing to do means I can sit and look and let my mind wanter, then emtpy, then fill again, with wonder or with grief, with anything or with nothing at all.
“Nothing to do” is not the same as “Nothing can be done.” One is hopeless; the other, the place from which hope becomes possible.
– Dominique Browning
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 throught the world. There in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling-hells, 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 Jung
As it fantasizes, poetry comes across nature. The real, living world is the only project of the imagination which has once succeeded and which still goes on being endlessly successful. Look at it continuing, moment after moment a success. It is still real, still deep, utterly absorbing. It is not something you are disappointed in next morning. It serves the poet as example, even more than a sitter or a model.
– Boris Pasternak
These were desperate times, the two men agreed; it was easy to stay at home and pull the bedcovers over your heads, but if nothing was done, someone would rip the bedcovers from your face and tug you naked into the street.
– Edward Carey
I was happy three days ago. Today I’m depressed. What happened? Nothing. An inner crutch slipped. Some poorly suppressed memory rose to the surface.
– Mihail Sebastian, (tr. Phillip Ó Ceallaigh)
Well, God give them wisdom that have it; and those that are fools, let them use their talents.
– William Shakespeare
The worst is not death but being blind, blind to the fact that everything about life is in the nature of the miraculous. The language of society is conformity; the language of the creative individual is freedom. Life will continue to be a hell as long as people who make up the world shut their eyes to reality.
– Henry Miller
When the Rainbow Comes
C’mon pack your bags, clear the floor
Let’s step out through the open door
Leave a note that says goodbye
Build a new house down by the sea
Get to the place we were meant to be
You’ll know it when you smile
Up at the window, searchin’ the sky
Looking for the rainbow and don’t ask my
I wanna see the rainbow come
Hey
We’ll be leaving on all sides, hmmm
When the rainbow comes
Mr. Postman, look and see
If there’s a message in your bag for me
Could be a bomb or it could be a letter
It don’t matter, it can only get better
Mr. Postman, look and see
If there’s a message in your bag for me
You know it’s been such a long, long time
Since I could laugh at this world of mine
Yeah, yeah
Slippin’ and slidin’ around in your head
It’s be-bop-a-lula then baby you’re dead
So c’mon make a bright new day
I need a prayer here, need a blessing
Cast an eye back as you run
Turn around boy, see the rainbow come
Hey
You’ll be leaving on all sides
When the rainbow comes
When the rainbow comes
See the world from all sides
When the rainbow comes
When the rainbow comes
Hey
– Karl Edmond De Vere Wallinger
It was really the profound cause of my break with philosophy. I realized that in moments of great despair philosophy is no help at all […] And so I turned to poetry and literature, where I found no answers either, but states that were analogous to my own.
– Cioran
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
The people who didn’t do any work at home never did any work in the office. They’re just easier to identify when they work from home.
Hard workers are hard workers no matter where they operate.
– @farnamstreet
If you tuck the name of a loved one
under your tongue too long
without speaking it
it becomes blood.
– Naomi Shihab Nye
The first rule of any university website is to make sure that all content is out-of-date, locked, or missing.
– @AcademicChatter
Exhaustion took me away / until the way back disappeared.
– Ghassan Zaqtan
pagoda
the rain falls
from each level
– James Welsh
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
– J. R. R. Tolkien
Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the good writer is death.
– William Faulkner
Every human life includes moments of rage at unrecognition. We’re all injustice collectors.
– Jonathan Lethem
Storytelling is at the heart of life…In finding our own story, we assemble all the parts of ourselves.
– Marion Woodman
Oh guardian of syllables, flash dancer in the supermarket aisle / of anxiety where the only things left are musky bottles of Mountain Dew.
– Kendra DeColo
A romantic painting shows a heap of icy debris in a polar light; no man, no object inhabits this desolate space; but for this very reason, provided I am suffering an amorous sadness, this void requires that I fling myself into it; I project myself as a tiny figure, seated on a block of ice, abandoned forever.
– Roland Barthes
Learn to be done with people.
Not mad. Not upset. Not angry.
Just done.
– paulachristii@
Yet any attempt to manufacture equality by the same means that this society manufactured inequality has faced fierce and powerful resistance.
– Nikole Hannah-Jones
In order to write well about something, one shouldn’t be interested in it any longer. To express an idea with due circumspection, one must have relegated it wholly to one’s past; one must no longer be preoccupied with it. As long as the artist is in the process of discovery and inspiration, he is in a state which, as far as communication is concerned, is at the very least intolerant.
– Friedrich Schlegel
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
– James Baldwin
The first thing a writer has to do is find another source of income. Then, after you have begged, borrowed, stolen or saved up the money to give you time to write and you spend all of it staying alive while you write, and you write your heart out, after all that, maybe no one will publish it, and if they publish it, maybe no one will read it. That is the hard truth, that is what it means to be a writer.
– Ellen Gilchrist
While we sleep here, we are awake elsewhere, and in this way every man is two men.
– Jorge Luis Borges
broken windmill . .
still, the slow turning
of seasons
– @ruralitalics
In Alabama
Stars hang down so low,
So low, they purge the soul
With their infinity.
– Jessie Redmon Fauset
Brother! I’m not despondent and I haven’t lost heart. Life is everywhere, life is in us ourselves, not outside. There will be people by my side, and to be a human being among people and to remain one forever, no matter in what circumstances, not to grow despondent and not to lose heart — that’s what life is all about, that’s its task. I have come to recognize that. The idea has entered my flesh and blood. Yes its true! The head that created, lived the highest life of art, which recognized and got used to the exalted needs of the spirit, that head is already cut off from my shoulders. There was a memory and images created and not yet embodied by me.
Брат! я не уныл и не упал духом. Жизнь везде жизнь, жизнь в нас самих, а не во внешнем. Подле меня будут люди, и быть человеком между людьми и остаться им навсегда, в каких бы то ни было несчастьях, не уныть и не пасть — вот в чем жизнь, в чем задача ее. Я сознал это. Эта идея вошла в плоть и кровь мою. Да правда! та голова, которая создавала, жила высшею жизнию искусства, которая сознала и свыклась с возвышенными потребностями духа, та голова уже срезана с плеч моих.
– Fëdor Mikhailovich Dostoevskiy
I can tell you that events were incremental, that the unbelievable became the believable and, ultimately, the normal.
– Ralph Webster
Whenever possible, give someone the benefit of the doubt. That itself is a meaningful act of generosity. A world in which everyone takes a cynical view of others’ motivations quickly turns dark.
– Chris J. Anderson
The paradox of our practice is that the most effective way of transformation is to leave ourselves alone. The more we let everything be just what it is, the more we relax into an open, attentive awareness of one moment after another.
– Barry Magid
What is wise is silence: the nerves will speak.
– Harold Brodkey
broken windmill . .
still, the slow turning
of seasons
– @ruralitalics
O Thou bright jewel in my aim I strive
To comprehend thee.
– Phillis Wheatley
First of all, a poet must be a human being. Second, he must be a human being. Third, he must be a human being.
– Ishikawa Takuboku
When one tries desperately to be good, wonderful, perfect, then all the more the shadow develops a will to be black, evil and destructive.
– CG Jung
How karma actually happens is that within one’s own mental continuum, the good karma is less ignorant, feels more positive, and is the result of good intention. There is less ignorance in the sense that if I have a strong compassionate feeling, this compassionate feeling is less ignorant because I understand the suffering nature. I am not ignorant of my own suffering nature and thus have an awareness of relative responsibility for other people’s suffering, so it’s a pleasurable feeling even though it’s sad to see other people suffering. To have the vision to seize other people’s mental suffering is naturally very joyful. And then when you help somebody to get out of suffering, such as giving them money or food, such acts always present a good fruition. The nature of that mind as awareness, the feeling as joy, and the act that arises from it will always present you with good fruition. Therefore, compassion and generosity are always positive. Whatever happens in your mental continuum will carry forward in your mind. Your mental continuum will experience that act; you won’t miss it.
– Dzigar Kongtrul, The Bee Story
NEVER OF YOU
I never have the courage to speak of you
vast sky of my neighborhood
nor you roofs holding off cascades of air
lovely downy roofs the hair of our homes
Nor you chimneys laboratories of sorrow
spurned by the moon stretching out necks
Nor of you windows opened and closed
which burst when we are dying overseas
I cannot even describe the house
which knows all my escapes and my returns
though so small it stays under my shut eyelid
nothing can render the smell the green curtain
the creak of stairs I ascend carrying a lit lamp
nor the greenery over the gate
In fact I want to write of the house’s gate latch
of its rough handshake and its friendly creaks
but although I know so much about it
I use only a cruelly common litany of words
So many feelings fit between two heartbeats
so many objects can be held in our two hands
Don’t be surprised we can’t describe the world
and just address things tenderly by name
– Zbigniew Herbert
Dress for the job you want, they say.
So you sit still enough, long enough
to allow dawn’s late winter fog
to seep deep into your pores, rolling
across the water to adorn you like a second skin.
You wait to move
until the sun crests the eastern tree line,
great orange orb of energy rising swiftly
to become a cloak of light.
Sandhill cranes and geese offer you scarves of sound
voices calling a greeting as wings beat overhead,
as the last of the lake ice melts
gifting you just enough acquiescence
to be here now, wearing the wild.
– Heidi Barr
Instead of realizing that there is a conspiracy, conducted by a handful of men, the people reason – or are manipulated into reasoning – that the entire population must have its freedom restricted in order to protect the leaders. The people agree that they themselves can’t be trusted.
– Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea
MIND
The mind’s nature is
vivid as a flawless piece of crystal:
intrinsically empty, naturally radiant,
ceaselessly responsive.
– Shabkar Tsodruk Rangdrol Rinpoche
The real difference between God and human beings, he thought, was that God cannot stand continuance. No sooner has he created a season of a year, or a time of the day, than he wishes for something quite different, and sweeps it all away. No sooner was one a young man, and happy at that, than the nature of things would rush one into marriage, martyrdom or old age. And human beings cleave to the existing state of things. All their lives they are striving to hold the moment fast….Their art itself is nothing but the attempt to catch by all means the one particular moment, one light, the momentary beauty of one woman or one flower, and make it everlasting.
– Karen Blixen
If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, of self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God’s name, it was bad theology.
– Karen Armstrong
Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together […]. As soon as we put something into words, we devalue it in a strange way. We think we have plunged into the depths of the abyss, and when we return to the surface the drop of water on our pale fingertips no longer resembles the sea from which it comes. We delude ourselves that we have discovered a wonderful treasure trove, and when we return to the light of day we find that we have brought back only false stones and shards of glass; and yet the treasure goes on glimmering in the dark, unaltered.
– Maurice Maeterlinck, The Treasure of the Humble
The three rules of the Librarians of Time and Space are: 1) Silence; 2) Books must be returned no later than the last date shown; and 3) Do not interfere with the nature of causality.
– Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!
Art is standing with one hand extended into the universe and one hand extended into the world, and letting ourselves be a conduit for passing energy.”
– Albert Einstein
We are presently dealing with the accumulation of a whole society that has worshiped its light side and refused the dark, and this residue appears as war, economic chaos, strikes, racial intolerance. The front page of any newspaper hurls the collective shadow at us.
– Robert A. Johnson
These two feelings, this knowledge of a world so awful, this sense of a life so extraordinary — how am I to resolve them?
– Richard Flanagan
Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community … but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It’s the invasion of the idiots.
– Umberto Eco
The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity.
– C.G. Jung
I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren’t trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.
– Umberto Eco
It’s really disappointing when you call someone on the phone and they answer.
– VeryBritishProblems
If the word is a sign, it means nothing. But if the word is a symbol, it means everything.
– CG Jung
the day after something shattering: always so mundane, so earthly, yet always such a wonder.
– Christina Tudor-Sideri
Everything one has forgotten
cries for help in the
dream.
– Elias Canetti
To a Daisy
by Alice Meynell
Slight as thou art, thou art enough to hide,
Like all created things, secrets from me,
And stand a barrier to eternity.
And I, how can I praise thee well and wide
From where I dwell—upon the hither side?
Thou little veil for so great mystery,
When shall I penetrate all things and thee,
And then look back? For this I must abide,
Till thou shalt grow and fold and be unfurled
Literally between me and the world.
Then shall I drink from in beneath a spring,
And from a poet’s side shall read his book.
O daisy mine, what will it be to look
From God’s side even of such a simple thing?
Blasphemous Praise
The poet is a prophet:
a fisher of souls,
a human sacrifice,
sent to save you
an undoer of knots,
your sworn advocate,
a life-long listener,
a reminder when you forget
your unknown friend,
a helper in affliction,
and with your consent,
a trusted healer.
– Yahia Lababidi
Fibonacci series
a sudden craving
for fiddleheads
– @pauldavidmena
I know it rarely feels that way, but there is no other person on the planet, dead or living, who can give you anything better than what’s sitting there quietly, right now, inside your own hands.
– Robin Coste Lewis
There is no peace in the world, and no government, of whatever country, is capable of bringing it about.
– Krishnamurti
The main affliction of civilization is that we don’t know how to handle suffering inside and so we try to cover it up with all kinds of consumption.
– Thích Nhất Hạnh
Through the words a little daylight still passed.
– Blanchot
You said “Beware the ides of March on days we’re distant
from bees and flowers.”
– Fady Joudah
To pay close attention to and mostly accept your life, inside and out and around your body, is to be halfway home.
– Anne Lamott
America is no place for an artist: to be an artist is to be a moral leper, an economic misfit, a social liability. A corn-fed hog enjoys a better life than a creative writer, painter or musician. To be a rabbit is better still.
– Henry Miller
A good book is an event in my life.
– Stendhal
I promise your face hewn into lost history.
– Tala Khanmalek
I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse… I was too busy rebelling…
– Leonora Carrington
Are we done with life? I am still so into it.
– @landaudeborah
A man is not complete when he lives in a world of statistical truth. He must live in the world of his mythological truth, and that is not merely statistics. It is the expression of what he really is, and what he feels himself to be.
– CG Jung
Sadly, there’s no Buddhist equivalent of saying “Jesus, take the wheel.” Sometimes I wish there was.
The problem is if you say “Buddha, take the wheel,” then the Buddha says back to you:
“Ok, you’re the Buddha. Where are we going?”
– Ethan Nichtern
I was talking to a friend about how ridiculously violent the phrase “kill two birds with one stone” is and she said that she and her kids changed it to:
“We can feed two birds with one scone.”
Thought that was sheer awesomeness so I’m passing it along.
– Ethan Nichtern
The core of many a fairy tale is the search for the missing anima, the elusive essence of soul and life. The king’s stiffened heart, or the barrenness of the country, reflect a lack of vitality, a need for soul and renewal.
– Erel Shalit
We definitely shouldn’t be banning Tik Tok before we ban assault rifles.
– Ethan Nichtern
Each of you is reserved a special person. Sometimes you’re reserved two or three, even four. They can belong to different generations. To reunite with you, they travel across the oceans of time and sidereal spaces. They may take different forms, but your heart recognizes them. Your heart has already welcomed them as part of itself in other places and times, under the full moon of the deserts of Egypt or in the ancient plains of Mongolia. You rode together in the armies of condottieri forgotten by history, you lived together in the caves covered in the sand of our ancestors. Between you there is a bond that goes through times: you will never be alone.
– Brian Weiss
Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love. At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge.
– Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
I try to make
a space that loss
won’t occupy.
– Sara Luisa Kirk
I protect the holy source so that no God can seize it for himself.
– @RedBookJung
dreaming during
a melancholy night
while wearing warm socks
– Buson
In the end it’s all about finding a way to live in this world,
to create your own structure.
– Rinus Van de Velde
from up on the hill
willows’ unworldly new green
shows me the river
– Catherine Baker
Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.
– Albert Camus
We moved among delicate instruments
Taking for a theme the sovereign light,
The scrimshaw, the parliament of water.
We then sought a division between things.
Once divided, truth divides forever.
– Marius Kociejowski
How could I have expected that after a long life I would understand no more than to wake up at night
and to repeat: strange, strange, strange, o how strange,
how strange. O how funny and strange.
– Czesław Miłosz; tr. Robert Haas
I chewed into the wreck of the world,
into the neckbone of the past that pursued me.
– Tina Chang
I don’t want to live in the kind of world where we don’t look out for each other. Not just the people that are close to us, but anybody who needs a helping hand. I cant change the way anybody else thinks, or what they choose to do, but I can do my bit.
– Charles de Lint
For a long time, I’ve felt that the biographer’s job is to recover the outtakes, the unsmiling, unflattering, off-kilter photos not preserved in the family album.
– Stacy Schiff
We leave our marks behind us like a snail.
– Henry Green
I hope we all escape from grind culture.
– @TheNapMinistry
Reading dreams. That’s what started her walking down the road. Every day she’d walk a little further: a mile, and come home. Two miles, and come home. One day, she just kept on.
– Truman Capote
Who do you think is the poet laureate of Nothing/Nothingness?
– Mathias Svalina
The poets are all writing novels now(!), the novelists are writing poems(!!), & I am just over here tinkering with a semicolon.
– @mag_gabbert
The poems that most persuade me of their authority are those that leave room for further uncertainty once they’re over.
– Carl Phillips
chevy me along
i won’t always be alone
spring wind in my sails
– @haiku366
Thinking about that undergrad who cited “Jazeera, Al.”
– Britt H Young
But I’m glad that virtue exists/so when I stray from it/I can feel as good as this/
– Z. R. Ghani
send my roots rain.
– Gerard Manley Hopkins
Today, all time-consuming practices, such as trust, loyalty, commitment and responsibility, are disappearing. […] I think trust is a social practice, and today it is being replaced by transparency and information. Trust enables us to build positive relationships with others, despite lacking knowledge. In a transparency society, one immediately asks for information from others. Trust as a social practice becomes superfluous. The transparency and information society fosters a society of distrust.
– Byung-Chul Han
You want to know what it was like? It was like my whole life had a fever. Whole acres of me were on fire. The sun talked dirty in my ear all night. I couldn’t drive past a wheat field without doing it violence. I couldn’t even look at a bridge. I used to go out in the brush sometimes, so far out there no one could hear me, and just burn. I felt all right then. I couldn’t hurt anyone else. I was just a pillar of fire. It wasn’t the burning so much as the loneliness. It wasn’t the loneliness so much as the fear of being alone. Christ look at you pouring from the rocks. You’re so cold you’re boiling over. You’ve got stars in your hair. I don’t want to be around you. I don’t want to drink you in. I want to walk into the heart of you and never walk back out.
– Nico Alvarado, Tim Riggins Speaks of Waterfalls
The opposite of poverty isn’t property. The opposite of both poverty and property is community. For in community we become rich: rich in friends, in neighbours, in colleagues, in comrades, in brothers and sisters. Together, as a community, we can help ourselves in most of our difficulties. For after all, there are enough people and enough ideas, capabilities and energies to be had. They are only lying fallow, or are stunted and suppressed. So let us discover our wealth; let us discover our solidarity; let us build up communities; let us take our lives into our own
hands, and at long last out of the hands of the people who want to dominate and exploit us.
– Jürgen Moltmann
The longer I have lived with this new hope, the clearer it has become to me: our true hope in life doesn’t spring from the feelings of our youth, lovely and fair though they are. Nor does it emerge from the objective possibilities of history, unlimited though they may be. Our true hope in life is wakened and sustained and finally fulfilled by the great divine mystery which is above us and in us and round about us, nearer to us than we can be to ourselves. It encounters us as the great promise of our life and this world: nothing will be in vain. It will succeed. In the end all will be well! It meets us too in the call to life: ‘I live and you shall live also.’ We are called to this hope, and the call often sounds like a command – a command to resist death and the powers of death, and a command to love life and cherish it: every life, the life we share, the whole of life.
– Jürgen Moltmann
The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers & cities; but to know someone who thinks & feels with us, & who, though distant, is close to us in spirit, this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.”
– Goethe
The characteristic note of our time is the dire truth that, the mediocre soul, the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be mediocre, has the gall to assert its right to mediocrity, and goes on to impose itself where it can.
– Jose Ortega y Gasset
I am terrified at the moral apathy, the death of the heart which is happening in my country.
– James Baldwin
But the world is sleeping in ignorance and error, sir, and we must be crowing cocks, and singing larks, and a raising sun to awake her.
– Emily Dickinson
The ‘eternal child’ in man is an indescribable experience, an incongruity, a handicap, and a divine prerogative; an imponderable that determines the ultimate worth or worthlessness of a personality.
– C.G. Jung
life is an adventure to be embraced with an open mind and loving heart.
– Bernardine Evaristo
I no longer have inspirations. Only recollections.
– Marcello Mastroianni
I have called this wholeness that transcends consciousness the self.
– C.G. Jung
If you’re chronically ill or living with a disability, that is another form of training.
– Sarah Fleming
disposable world
cherry blossom weeping
on a broken phone
– James Welsh
At every step one has to wrestle for truth; one has to surrender for it almost everything to which the heart, to which our love, our trust in life, cling otherwise. That requires greatness of soul: the service of truth is the hardest service.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
The Lessons of Writing #1
The poem you wrote today
Is not the poem you wrote
Yesterday.
And who knows what
You’ll write
– john zbigniew guzlowski
I have gotten lost in the politics of
undressed mud …
– Lynne Thompson
Enlightenment is to see and touch the big mystery, the big pattern, the Big Real. Jesus called it the Reign of God; Buddha called it enlightenment. Philosophers might call it Truth. Many of us see it as a Foundational Love.
– Richard Rohr
Follow the ships. Follow the routes plowed by worn, melancholy vessels. Don’t stop. Avoid even the humblest anchorage. Sail up the rivers, down the rivers. Lose yourself in the rains that flood the savannas. Deny all shores.
– Álvaro Mutis
Every move we make on a physical level has spiritual significance.
– Chogyam Trungpa
It is man’s intelligence that makes him so often behave more stupidly than the beasts. Man is impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic. Thus, no animal is clever enough, when there is a drought, to imagine that the rain is being withheld by evil spirits, or as punishment for its transgressions. Therefore you never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. No horse, for example would kill one of its foals to make the wind change direction. Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat’s meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, intelligent enough.
– Aldous Huxley
You can feel like a basket case, but that feeling is your wealth, not something to be thrown out or improved upon.
– Pema Chodron
LIFE: THE PRICE OF ADMISSION
You will emerge, bloody, broken,
bruised, but alive.
They will tell you you’re on a planet called Earth.
They will give you a name.
Somebody else’s name.
They will teach you what they think is true.
You will speak a particular language,
not of your choosing.
You will be taught their beliefs,
values, codes of conduct.
(Don’t take these as absolute truth,
it’s just their version of truth.)
They will praise you or blame you.
Support you or not.
The will give you gifts or take gifts away.
They will call you good, the best, wonderful, a genius, their saviour.
They will call you bad, wrong, bad, selfish, evil.
Don’t buy into their names, their judgements, good or bad.
You are alive.
You cannot be contained or controlled.
Or defined by words.
You will love and lose love.
Your heart will break, often.
You will touch the greatest ecstasy,
the depths of melancholy.
Those you love will die.
You will question your reality.
You will sometimes feel that you cannot go on. You will go on.
You will wonder about your purpose.
Find a purpose, lose it.
Inhabit a role, shed it.
Trust someone, and the trust will be broken.
Or will remain unbroken.
Or you will fall to your knees.
And stand. And fall. And stand again.
And keep going.
You will taste all of life, the dark and the light.
All of life will surge through you,
the joy and the sorrow,
the boredom and the bliss,
the certainty and the doubt,
great excitements and the terrors of the deep.
You will touch others, and be touched in return.
You will dance and sing and crumble in despair.
You will weep and laugh and fall into the Mystery.
And in the end you will cry out:
I HAVE LIVED!
I HAVE LIVED!
– Jeff Foster
We work in the dark. We do what we can. We give what we have. Our doubt is our passion. Our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.
– Henry James
Pleasure in the beautiful consists, to a large extent in the fact that, when we enter the state of pure contemplation, we are raised for the moment above all willing, above all desires and cares.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
The only grievance I have of Life
is that I found you too late in Life.
If only you would start some game of Love,
I have the strength to withstand defeat.
I seek a lifetime’s beloved, not a mob.
Even one traveler is a caravan for me.
– Ahmad Faraz
childhood scrapbook
the life expectancy
of Scotch tape
– Carolyn Hall
paddle at rest
beads of water slide
from the loon’s bill
– Paul W. MacNeil
What people forget is that this is not a goal-oriented operation.
– Jim Harrison
Tomorrow is a lease I have to sign every morning.
– Neil Hilborn
Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.
– Carlos Ruiz Zafón
You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t.
– Ray Bradbury
When you imagine nature apart from humans this is a fantasy. It’s the same exact fantasy that has led us to being so destructive to the environment we depend upon. Back-to-naturists and techno-modernists are being run by the same program. Think about it.
– @VinceFHorn
An artist has to evolve some standards, because nobody’s asking you to do this.
– Jim Harrison
The world is a mist. And then the world is
minute and vast and clear.
– Elizabeth Bishop
I figured, I can’t sell this understanding, or smoke it, so I will write a novel.
– Robert Stone
If the pain was deep, you will have to let it go many times.
– Yung Pueblo
Man is a strange, inauthentic creature who has very little contact with real Existence. Intellectuals cut themselves off from reality by trapping themselves in a world of concepts; ordinary men are cut off from reality because they are so self-absorbed, so involved in the pettiness of everyday existence. They live in a meaningless world because they find it so difficult to mean anything.
– Colin Wilson
The algorithms think I am looking for alternatives to coffee and alcohol. Actually, no.
– Jessica Johnson
Corrective to reproachful criticisms (from pop-spiritual culture) against science’s “nothing but” reductionism: The oft heard indictment that science is guilty of reducing the mystery and majesty of life, the universe, and all that is sublime to nothing but mere matter is misplaced and woefully misleading.
I genuinely desire to understand precisely what complainants mean by “nothing” and “mere.” If by “nothing” and “mere” they mean ‘of base value’ or ‘lacking mystery,’ then it seems they are ironically guilty of the very charge they cry foul of — i.e., demeaning and minimizing a deep mystery’s profundity.
Such depreciation of matter’s profundity betrays a significant misjudgment (if not outright ignorance) around the intrinsic complexity of matter — with its beautiful structures, cells, molecules, and atoms; its properties of mass, charge, symmetry and spin; the implacable forces and evanescent fields that play between its constituents: the electromagnetic, strong and weak nuclear forces; gravity, the Higgs field, Quantum Chromodynamics (“Color” charge between Quarks) — not to mention its asymmetric compliment of anti-matter.
Why science should regard matter as being “nothing but…” or “mere” in this context thoroughly escapes me. If the problem is that “mere matter” isn’t profound enough —not transcendent or mysterious enough by itself— then the problem isn’t with science: the problem is in the limitations, education, and imagination of those that regard science as such. After all, matter’s properties, forces and processes are far more profound than our delimiting language even begins to denote.
Saying that science attributes matter with being “nothing but” perhaps originates from an apprehensive or lower science literate population — it may be seen as plaintiffs standing upon a moral soap box while charging science’s allies and practitioners with embodying a character of lesser appreciation for the quality, mystery, and profundity of life and our wondrous universe.
I assure you —as a life-long enthusiast and practitioner— we lovers of science couldn’t be further from such a debased caricature of myopic nihilism — for in our hearts and minds, matter (in all its glory) is not merely “nothing but” —it is everything and more.
– Richard Phillips Feynman
Lips, words, and you snare them, Dreams, words, and they are as jewels, Strange spells of old deity, Ravens, nights, allurement: And they are not; Having become the souls of song.
– Ezra Pound
Here, time moves slowly, longing has a home, and the presence of birds is celebrated.
– Nachiket Sharma
People get rid of plenty when they move — sometimes they’re changing not just places but personalities.
– Colson Whitehead
Every scientific fulfillment raises new questions; it asks to be surpassed and outdated.
– Max Weber
All I know is that my life is better when I assume that people are doing their best. It keeps me out of judgment and lets me focus on what is, and not what should or could be.
– Brené Brown
Design is not for philosophy, it’s for life.
– Issey Miyake
The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love – whether we call it friendship or family or romance – is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.
– James Baldwin
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
Contemplating a loving God strengthens portions of our brain — particularly the frontal lobes and the anterior cingulate — where empathy and reason reside. Contemplating a wrathful God empowers the limbic system, which is ‘filled with aggression and fear.’ It is a sobering concept: The God we choose to love changes us into his image, whether he exists or not.
– Michael Gerson
There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.
– Milan Kundera
Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation. We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer, together exist, and forever will recreate each other. Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love!
– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
She had what the Councillor knew, in the technical language of the ballet, as “ballon”, a lightness that is not only the negation of weight, but which actually seems to carry upwards and make for flight, and which is rarely found in thin dancers – as if the matter itself had here become lighter than air, so that the more there is of it the better it works.
– Karen Blixen
Real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness to understand it.
– Barry Lopez
The cost of distraction is the person you could’ve become.
– Matt Gray
strange and penetrating dream: an unknown woman, whom i love, who loves me well, who does not every time quite change, nor yet quite dwell the same,— and knows me as i am. my heart, clear as a crystal beam to her alone; ceases to be inscrutable, to her alone
– paul verlaine
Why are women… so much
more interesting to men
than men are to
women?
– Virginia Woolf
If your life has not three dimensions, if you don’t live in the body, if you live on the two-dimensional plane in the paper world that is flat and printed, as if you were only living your biography, then you are nowhere.
– CG Jung
Both God and man are disappointed victims of deception, blessedly blessed, powerlessly powerful.
– @RedBookJung
But if the doctor wishes to help a human being he must be able to accept him as he is. And he can do this in reality only when he has already seen and accepted himself as he is.
– CG Jung
To fling myself into a book, to be carried away to another world while being at my most grounded, on my butt or in my bed or favorite chair, is literally how I have survived being here at all.
– Anne Lamott
That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.
– Jhumpa Lahiri
Arise. You are all accused.
– Francis Picabia
Beauty is something that burns the hand when you touch it.
– Yukio Mishima, Forbidden Colors
I made every mistake my parents warned me against. What’s strange, though, is that they’re dead and I’m living. Despite everything, I’m still here.
– Allegra Hyde
Always say less than necessary.
– Robert Greene
The light of your memories—
let them remain with me.
Who knows in which alley the
evening of a lifetime begins?
– Bashir Badir
What colour would you call this hair
under the rubble?
– Tishani Doshi
Once more the storm is howling, and half hid
Under this cradle-hood and coverlid
My child sleeps on..
– W. B. Yeats
If you are one of those people who has the ability to make it down to the bottom of the ocean, the ability to swim the dark waters without fear, the astonishing ability to move through life’s worst crucibles and not die, then you also have the ability to bring something back to the surface that helps others in a way that they cannot achieve themselves.
– Lidia Yuknavitch
We’re in a period, in terms of history, of the end of national and tribal consciousness. The only consciousness that is proper to contemporary life is global. Nevertheless, all popular thinking is in terms of loyalties to the local communities to which all are members. Such thinking is now out of date.
What we face is a challenge to recognize one community on this earth, and what we find in the face of this challenge is everybody pulling back into his own in-group. I don’t want to name the in-groups, but we all know pretty well what they are. In our country we call them pressure groups. They are racial groups, class groups, religious groups, economic groups, and they are all tangling with each other.
For any people to say, ‘We are it and the others are other’— these are dangerous people. And there are religions still doing this. The new thing that is very difficult for people to realize is our society is the human race. And our little suburb is the globe. Spaceship Earth.
– Joseph Campbell
If nothing were substituted for everything, it would still be too much and too little.
– Maurice Blanchot
Anything Can Happen
by Seamus Heaney
Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter
Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head
Before he hurls the lightning? Well, just now
He galloped his thunder cart and his horses
Across a clear blue sky. It shook the earth
And the clogged underearth, the River Styx,
The winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself.
Anything can happen, the tallest towers
Be overturned, those in high places daunted,
Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune
Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one,
Setting it down bleeding on the next.
Ground gives. The heaven’s weight
Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle-lid.
Capstones shift, nothing resettles right.
Telluric ash and fire-spores boil away.
good fortune
peony flowers
beneath the blue sky
– James Welsh
I’ve meant to tell you many things about my life,
& every time the moment has conquered me.
– Alice Notley
Any book that is any good must be, to some extent, autobiographical, because one cannot and should not fabricate emotions.
– Edna O’Brien
The Little Waves of Breffny
by Eva Gore-Booth
The grand road from the mountain goes shining to the sea,
And there is traffic in it and many a horse and cart,
But the little roads of Cloonagh are dearer far to me,
And the little roads of Cloonagh go rambling through my heart.
A great storm from the ocean goes shouting o’er the hill,
And there is glory in it and terror on the wind,
But the haunted air of twilight is very strange and still,
And the little winds of twilight are dearer to my mind.
The great waves of the Atlantic sweep storming on their way,
Shining green and silver with the hidden herring shoal,
But the Little Waves of Breffny have drenched my heart in spray,
And the Little Waves of Breffny go stumbling through my soul.
Come Let Us Be Friends
by Sarah Lee Brown Fleming
Come, let us be friends, you and I,
E’en though the world doth hate at this hour;
Let’s bask in the sunlight of a love so high
That war cannot dim it with all its armed power.
Come, let us be friends, you and I,
The world hath her surplus of hatred today;
She needeth more love, see, she droops with a sigh,
Where her axis doth slant in the sky far away.
Come, let us be friends, you and I,
And love each other so deep and so well,
That the world may grow steady and forward fly,
Lest she wander towards chaos and drop into hell.
Love is neither superior nor inferior. Love is on the level with every living thing.
– McCall Erickson
signs of Spring
a hungry mosquito
bites me twice
– @pauldavidmena
Good fiction is partly a bringing of the news from one world to another.
– Raymond Carver
A Green Dream
Winter frock
marigold robe
between brownstones
where yearning
confesses its nature
when the mail
makes you happy
even
when this circle
begs to be part
of a square
it’s madness
to hate the visitation
of grackles
Yes. Ask potential therapists about their religions views. And consider seeking therapists from your race and/or diaspora. Therapy is not science: it is relational. Cultural differences matter and therapy rooted in US norms is not “superior to” other ways of being.
– Alina Stefanescu
Greenland’s rate of melt in summer was something that we knew about, and it was gradually increasing, then suddenly it’s multiplied itself by about 8 times; this is 30,000,000 tons an hour.
– Sarah Connor
JUICE
no one doubts if
I’ve got
what poetry takes
more than
editors
when I don’t
hardcore cuss
because
the syllables
bleed feeble
don’t go
Dita Von Teese
don’t get
how I don’t
squeeze juice
from
catfish tits
no one doubts
more
than
when I say
another poem
got picked up
today
did you make any money,
he says
no, I say
or yes when Every Day Poets
tosses a dollar
into the till
let me know
when we’re rich,
he says
– Wanda Morrow Clevenger
I want to think with my belly.
I want to name all the stars animals
flowers birds rocks in order to forget
them, start over again. I want to
wear the seasons, harlequin, become
ancient and etched by weather. I
want to snow pulse, ruminating
undulating, pebble at the bottom of the
abyss, candle burning darkness rather
than flame. I want to peer at things,
shameless, observe the unfastening,
that stripping of shape by dusk.
– Robert MacLean
BE LIGHT
In a dream I am walking joyfully up the mountain. Something breaks and falls away, and all is light. Nothing has changed, yet all is amazing, luminescent, free. Released at last, I rise into the sky…
This dream comes often. Sometimes I run, then lift up like a kite, high above earth, and always I sail transcendent for a time before awaking. I choose to awake, for fear of falling, yet such dreams tell me that I am a part of things, if only I would let go, and keep on going.
“Do not be heavy,” Soen Roshi says. “Be light, light, light – full of light!”
– Peter Matthiessen
In spite of all apparent tiredness, when one takes the right course one finds that inner energy increases, new force appears and it begins to be easier to make new efforts.
– Thomas de Hartmann
For the mind that is silent, noise is as direct a spoke into the hub of silence as are birdsong, wind, and waves. It requires nothing more than to meet noise with stillness and not commentary.
– Martin Laird
But the ultimate reason for our hope is not to be found at all in what we want, wish for and wait for; the ultimate reason is that we are wanted and wished for and waited for. What is it that awaits us? Does anything await us at all, or are we alone? Whenever we base our hope on trust in the divine mystery, we feel deep down in our hearts: there is someone who is waiting for you, who is hoping for you, who believes in you. We are waited for as the prodigal son in the parable is waited for by his father. We are accepted and received, as a mother takes her children into her arms and comforts them. God is our last hope because we are God’s
first love.
– Jürgen Moltmann
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
There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up; holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship’s, smooths and contains the rocker. It’s an inside kind–wrapped tight like skin. Then there is a loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive, on its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one’s own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.
– Toni Morrison
TIME PASSES TIME does not pass. Time all but passes. Time usually passes. Time passing and gazing. Time has no gaze. Time as perseverance. Time as hunger. Time in a natural way. Time when you were six the day a mountain. Mountain time. Time I don’t remember. Time for a dog in an alley caught in the beam of your flashlight. Time not a video. Time as paper folded to look like a mountain. Time smeared under the eyes of the miners as they rattle down into the mine. Time if you are bankrupt. Time if you are Prometheus. Time if you are all the little tubes on the roots of a gorse plant sucking greenish black moistures up into new scribbled continents. Time it takes for the postal clerk to apply her lipstick at the back of the post office before the supervisor returns. Time it takes for a cow to tip over. Time in jail. Time as overcoats in a closet. Time for a herd of turkeys skidding and surprised on ice. All the time that has soaked into the walls here. Time between the little clicks. Time compared to the wild fantastic silence of the stars. Time for the man at the bus stop standing on one leg to tie his shoe. Time taking Night by the hand and trotting off down the road. Time passes oh boy. Time got the jump on me yes it did.
– Anne Carson
You have heard of flying with wings, but you have never heard of flying without wings. You have heard of the knowledge that knows, but you have never heard of the knowledge that does not know. Look into that closed room, the empty chamber where brightness is born! Fortune and blessing gather where there is stillness.
– Zhuangzi
Around us, life bursts forth with miracles—a glass of water, a ray of sunshine, a leaf, a caterpillar, a flower, laughter, raindrops. If you live in awareness, it is easy to see miracles everywhere. Each human being is a multiplicity of miracles. Eyes that see thousands of colors, shapes, and forms; ears that hear a bee flying or a thunderclap; a brain that ponders a speck of dust as easily as the entire cosmos; a heart that beats in rhythm with the heartbeat of all beings. When we are tired and feel discouraged by life’s daily struggles, we may not notice these miracles, but they are always there.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
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
About this time I had a dream which both frightened and encouraged me. It was night in some unknown place, and I was making slow and painful headway against a mighty wind. Dense fog was flying along everywhere. I had my hands cupped around a tiny light which threatened to go out at any moment. Everything depended on my keeping this little light alive. Suddenly I had the feeling that something was coming up behind me. I looked back, and saw a gigantic black figure following me. But at the same moment I was conscious, in spite of my terror, that I must keep my little light going through night and wind, regardless of all dangers. When I awoke I realized at once that the figure was…my own shadow on the swirling mists, brought into being by the little light I was carrying. I knew, too, that this little light was my consciousness, the only light I have. My own understanding is the sole treasure I possess, and the greatest. Though infinitely small and fragile in comparison with the powers of darkness, it is still a light, my only light.
– C.G. Jung
Medicine rests upon four pillars—philosophy, astronomy, alchemy, and ethics. The first pillar is the philosophical knowledge of earth and water; the second, astronomy, supplies its full understanding of that which is of fiery and airy nature; the third is an adequate explanation of the properties of all the four elements—that is to say, of the whole cosmos—and an introduction into the art of their transformations; and finally, the fourth shows the physician those virtues which must stay with him up until his death, and it should support and complete the three other pillars.
– Paracelsus
The canyon is a ladder to the plain. The valley is pale in the end of July, when the corn and melons come of age and slowly the fields are made ready for the yield, and a faint, false air of autumn—an illusion still in the land—rises somewhere away in the high north country, a vague suspicion of red and yellow on the farthest summits. And the town lies out like a scattering of bones in the heart of the land, low in the valley, where the earth is a kiln and the soil is carried here and there in the wind and all harvests are a poor survival of the seed. It is a remote place, and divided from the rest of the world by a great forked range of mountains on the north and west; by wasteland on the south and east, a region of dunes and thorns and burning columns of air; and more than these by time and silence.
– N. Scott Momaday
They say a swan loves only once and will return to where its love was won to die.
– Armen Davoudian
Crescent
by C. D. Wright
In recent months I have become intent on seizing happi-
ness: to this end I applied various shades of blue: only
the evening is outside us now propagating honeysuckle:
I am trying to invent a new way of moving under my
dress: the room squares off against this: watch the water
glitter with excitement: when we cut below the silver
skin of the surface the center retains its fluidity: do I still
remind you of a locust clinging to a branch: I give you
an idea of the damages: you would let edges be edges:
believe me: when their eyes poured over your long body
of poetry I also was there: when they laid their hands on
your glass shade I also was there: when they their
whole trust in your grace I had to step outside to get
away from the cravenness: we have done these things to
each other without benefit of a mirror: unlike the hon-
eysuckle goodness does not overtake us: yet the thigh
keeps quiet under nylon: later beneath the blueness of the
trees the future falls out of place: something always hap-
pens: draw nearer my dear: never fear: the world spins
nightly toward its brightness and we are on it
Pain in this life is not avoidable,
but the pain we create
avoiding pain is
avoidable.
– R.D. Laing
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
Kanikonna blossoms
against blue sky,
mosquitoes buzzing in the heat,
a white net covers our
restless sleep …
– Kim Dorman
In one form or another all my films have made the point that people are not alone and abandoned in an empty universe, but are linked by countless threads with the past and the future; that as each person lives his life he forges a bond with the whole world.
– Tarkovsky
becoming
a tea lover among
the wild blooming grass
– Issa
morning fog
on the coastal route
wild mustard
– Deborah P. Kolodji
The word is not the actual thing, but the word has its own verbal significance, and behind the word is its sound. The sound contains the deeper significance of the word.
– Krishnamurti
To understand a myth we have to enter into it, recognizing a deeper dimension to human consciousness that transcends the scheming will.
– @Nagapriya
by the trackside
gorse in flower––the world
may yet not fall
– anon
Let us proceed further in the search for (and not the elucidation of) that enigma that becomes all the darker as we pretend to bring it to the light of day…
– Blanchot, (tr. Pierre Joris)
When I’m reading a book, someone else is doing the living for me, and all I have to do is let their stories, humor, knowledge, and images—some of which I’ll never forget—flow through me, even as I forget to turn off the car when I arrive at my destination.
– Anne Lamott
the greatest
capacity of
humanity is to
willfully share
– Andy Perrin
Symbols exist in the gap between what is and what is not.
– Warren Colman
The real test of writing is not in the reading but in the rereading.
– Edna O’Brien
One continually finds the word critique, if it is tolerated at all, accompanied by the word constructive.
– Adorno
As Theodore Zeldin says about Quakers in his beautiful An Intimate History of Humanity:
Probably the most successful experiment in mixed friendship which yielded the most practical results, was that of the Society of Friends (alias the Quakers). It was based on the principle that individuals must make up their own minds about how they lived: it had no doctrines, no book of rules, no priests, and in its marriage ceremony there was no promise of obedience. Run on democratic lines, its members said what they thought at meetings in which no decision was taken until everyone was agreed. They ignored rank and status, calling everyone Thou. Their way of dealing with their persecutors was to meet them personally and talk with them face to face, which surprisingly did sometimes work even with fierce opponents and even though they were challenging the very foundations of society. The explanation of their success was a friendship between their founder, George Fox (1624-91), a shoemaker’s apprentice, and Margaret Fell, the wife of a judge. Equality between the sexes was a basic belief, reinforced by equal education, so that the society produced some very remarkable women….
….Quakers set up the first anti-slavery society, which led to the first law challenging slavery: any slave who set foot in England became a free person. They were the first to organise a boycot, in the eighteenth century, against products originating from slave-owning countries. They were the first people in the world to plead for the abolition of the death penalty. In the eighteenth century, John Belley proposed a free national health service, as well as a study of Indian and American medicine to complement that of Europe. Elizabeth Fry (1780-1845) was one of the earliest instigators of prison reform: the Friends did not argue that humans were basically good, or bad, but that one should try to draw out what good there was in them, irrespective of the crimes they had committed. They invented the idea of offering humanitarian help to civilians devastated by war: in 1870-1 they brought food, clothing and medicine to both sides in the Franco-Prussian War. They went to jail in 1914 to establish the rights of conscientious objectors. Four of the five leaders of the feminist movement in 19th century America were Friends, a third of the pioneers of prison reform, 40 percent of the abolitionists. The wrote the Equal Rights Amendment. Amnesty International is their child….
The experience of the Quakers, whose tolerance of internal disagreement is outstanding, suggests that there is no need for friends to think alike, if friendship is seen as an exploration, rather than a search for security, and if each partner is recognized as having an equal dignity. While making up their minds for themselves, they made listening to the opinions of their friends an essential part of their method, and it was particularly important that these friends were of both sexes.
I got up to get us a drink of water and as I stood in the kitchen in the early morning light, running the water out of the tap, I looked out at the hills at the back of the town, at the trees on the hills, at the bushes in the garden, at the birds, at the brand new leaves on a branch, at a cat on a fence, at the bits of wood that made the fence, and I wondered if everything I saw, if maybe every landscape we casually glanced at, was the outcome of an ecstasy we didn’t even know was happening, a love-act moving at a speed slow and steady enough for us to be deceived into thinking it was just everyday reality.
– Ali Smith
Your job and your joy
is to trust yourself and
what you find yourself knowing.
Pause. Ask. Listen.
Feel the answer.
And then dare to do it.
When you do this,
you become the place
where love flows through.
– Erich Schiffmann
Happiness is simply a temporary condition that proceeds unhappiness. Fortunately for us, it works the other way around as well. But it’s all a part of the carnival, isn’t it?
– Federico Fellini
I cannot do anything with a dancer–and I include myself–if the mind is not as conditioned, as limber, as obedient as the body. The body reveals what the mind is doing, where it is going, what it loves. The world reveals to you what you most want, and the conditioned mind heads toward what it most needs. Think and respond intelligently. If you entertain the notion of limitation or failure, it will rest comfortably in your company, and it will become a familiar location. I am not talking about the failure of risk: I am talking about the failure of imagination; the failure of faith. No one is looking at you; no one cares what you are doing. Get over this vain sense of observation and devote yourself to life and to others and to your work. You have no audience yet, but you have your soul and your fate, hovering overhead to see how you’re going to husband both.
– Martha Graham
AFTER YOU DIE
Just so you know
after you die
I will not wonder
why you didn’t do
your dishes or
how long it’s been
since you
cleaned your
oven or microwave or
mopped your floors
or why there were
dust bunnies under
the bed and
behind the door
After you’re gone
I will not wonder
how you could
have allowed the
piles of old mail to
accumulate or
why you saved so
many bits and pieces
of this and that or
why you weren’t
more goal-oriented and
well-organized or
why your refrigerator
contained so many
expired condiments
When you are
absent from all your
familiar places
I vow to avoid wondering
why you didn’t
eat less and
exercise more or
why you waited so
long to stop smoking
or drinking or
whatever else was
simultaneously
soothing and
deadly or
why you took
whatever risk may
seem to have hastened
your exit or why
you left so much unsaid
unfinished or
unresolved
I will only wonder
if you knew how much
you mattered to me
just as you are
as you were when we
met in our temporary
human disguises and
laughed in the
dressing room of the
world at how funkily
our skin suits fit
at times
I will wonder and
hope you knew
you were beloved
I will wonder when
we last hugged
and whether you
felt how our
heartbeats
converged
and our bellies
bumped like boats
and then we
both sighed
– Marva Lee Weigelt
And at certain moments time is obliterated in the presence of somebody you love; there seems to be a transcendence of time in love. Or I believe that there is. I carry a lot of people with me that aren’t here anymore. And so love transcends time. The normal markers of the day, the month, the year, as you get older those very fearsome markers… in the presence of love – they lose some of their power. But it also deals with the deterioration of your physical body. It drifts away, it’s just a part of your life. But beauty remains. It’s about two people and you visit that place in each other’s face. Not just the past and today, but you visit the tomorrows in that person’s face now. And everybody knows what that holds.
– Bruce Springsteen
All the things taking place around our world, all the irritations and all the problems, are crucial. Without others we cannot attain enlightenment – in fact, we cannot even tread on the path. If there is no noise outside during our sitting meditation, we cannot develop mindfulness. If we do not have aches and pains in the body, we cannot attain mindfulness; we cannot actually meditate. If everything were lovey-dovey and jellyfish-like, there would be nothing to work with.
– Chogyam Trungpa
A genuine warrior has a lot of resources within herself, resources that are always there. Although you feel that you’ve run out of ideas, you’re not really running out of anything. You’re being attacked by your own cowardice. You can go beyond that and find further resources within yourself. Banks and banks of inspiration unfold constantly.
– Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
Hell is a state of mind – ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind – is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly. For all that can be shaken will be shaken and only the unshakeable remains.
– C.S. Lewis
The illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths.
– Anton Chekhov
The poet is, etymologically, the maker. Like all makers, he requires a stock of raw materials — in his case, experience. Now experience is not a matter of having actually swum the Hellespont, or danced with the dervishes, or slept in a doss-house. It is a matter of sensibility and intuition, of seeing and hearing the significant things, of paying attention at the right moments, of understanding and co-ordinating. Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. It is a gift for dealing with the accidents of existence, not the accidents themselves. By a happy dispensation of nature, the poet generally possesses the gift of experience in conjunction with that of expression. What he says so well is therefore intrinsically of value.
– Aldous Huxley
If I miss one day of practice, I notice it.
If I miss two days, the critics notice it.
If I miss three days, the audience notices it.
– Ignacio Jan Paderewski
…I can say almost anything about you,
O Big Idea, and with each epithet,
Create new reasons to believe or doubt you,
Black Hole, White Hole, Presidential Jet.
– Mark Jarman
Sometimes when I’m asked to describe the Buddhist teachings, I say this: Everything is connected; nothing lasts; you are not alone. This is really just a restatement of the traditional Three Marks of Existence: non-self, impermanence, and suffering.
– Lewis Richmond
Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.
– Philip Roth
Is it possible that existence
is our exile
and nothingness
our home?
– Cioran
To investigate what intelligence really is, we must first negate what it is not.
– Krishnamurti
Yes, I deserve a spring.
I owe nobody nothing.
– Virginia Woolf
The 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.
If you succeed in remembering yourself, if you succeed in making a difference between yourself and that outburst of passion, then you discover the self; you begin to individuate.
– CG Jung
Kafka tries to wish us well.
Tolstoy tries to wish us well
but they have no idea the empire
we’re dealing with. Its spill-overs
clot, its geysers rot into a million Bibles,
its ash is ash. Who wouldn’t rather
start over. The tree meditates as it burns.
– Dean Young
Admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie is the whole of the holy life.
– Tara Anand
Sometimes I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there’s no room for the present at all.
– Evelyn Waugh
Psychoanalysis was probably more useful to me as a writer than as a neurotic.
– Philip Roth
Spring gets you every time. Every year it sucks me in, but then, I’m easy—a few cool blue skies, new grass, wildflowers, and I’m in love.
– Anne Lamott
Monotheistic religions themselves have, to a large extent, regressed into idolatry. Man projects his power of love and of reason unto God; he does not feel them any more as his own powers, and then he prays to God to give him back some of what he, man, has projected unto God…Every act of submissive worship is an act of alienation and idolatry.
– Erich Fromm
Spring is like a perhaps hand (which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)
– e. e. cummings
The two of you have always talked, that is what defines you somehow, and for all these years you have been living inside the long, uninterrupted conversation that started the day you met.
– Paul Auste
You can tell your troubles to God
but you’ve got to get yourself out
of what you got yourself into,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
Phase One was waking up to somatic-imaginal competence
Phase Two is merging with the Genius, the Daimon, the Deep Self
Phase Three will become clear to whoever I become
– River Kenna
Consciousness requires breaking away from conventionality rather than following the normative responses.
– Susan Schwartz, Ph.D.
I’ve decided to rebrand as someone smart and capable. Thank you for your understanding during this transition.
– @Evie_Writer
The Forest
by Susan Stewart
You should lie down now and remember the forest,
for it is disappearing–
no, the truth is it is gone now
and so what details you can bring back
might have a kind of life.
Not the one you had hoped for, but a life
–you should lie down now and remember the forest–
nonetheless, you might call it “in the forest,”
no the truth is, it is gone now,
starting somewhere near the beginning, that edge,
Or instead the first layer, the place you remember
(not the one you had hoped for, but a life)
as if it were firm, underfoot, for that place is a sea,
nonetheless, you might call it “in the forest,”
which we can never drift above, we were there or we were not,
No surface, skimming. And blank in life, too,
or instead the first layer, the place you remember,
as layers fold in time, black humus there,
as if it were firm, underfoot, for that place is a sea,
like a light left hand descending, always on the same keys.
The flecked birds of the forest sing behind and before
no surface, skimming. And blank in life, too,
sing without a music where there cannot be an order,
as layers fold in time, black humus there,
where wide swatches of light slice between gray trunks,
Where the air has a texture of drying moss,
the flecked birds of the forest sing behind and before:
a musk from the mushrooms and scalloped molds.
They sing without a music where there cannot be an order,
though high in the dry leaves something does fall,
Nothing comes down to us here.
Where the air has a texture of drying moss,
(in that place where I was raised) the forest was tangled,
a musk from the mushrooms and scalloped molds,
tangled with brambles, soft-starred and moving, ferns
And the marred twines of cinquefoil, false strawberry, sumac–
nothing comes down to us here,
stained. A low branch swinging above a brook
in that place where I was raised, the forest was tangled,
and a cave just the width of shoulder blades.
You can understand what I am doing when I think of the entry–
and the marred twines of cinquefoil, false strawberry, sumac–
as a kind of limit. Sometimes I imagine us walking there
(. . .pokeberry, stained. A low branch swinging above a brook)
in a place that is something like a forest.
But perhaps the other kind, where the ground is covered
(you can understand what I am doing when I think of the entry)
by pliant green needles, there below the piney fronds,
a kind of limit. Sometimes I imagine us walking there.
And quickening below lie the sharp brown blades,
The disfiguring blackness, then the bulbed phosphorescence of the roots.
But perhaps the other kind, where the ground is covered,
so strangely alike and yet singular, too, below
the pliant green needles, the piney fronds.
Once we were lost in the forest, so strangely alike and yet singular, too,
but the truth is, it is, lost to us now.
Although I hide it
My love shows in my face
So plainly that he asks me,
“Are you thinking of something?”
– Taira No Kanemori | Toshikata Mizuno
A Prayer in Spring
by Robert Frost
Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.
Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,
Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;
And make us happy in the happy bees,
The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.
And make us happy in the darting bird
That suddenly above the bees is heard,
The meteor that thrusts in with needle bill,
And off a blossom in mid air stands still.
For this is love and nothing else is love,
The which it is reserved for God above
To sanctify to what far ends He will,
But which it only needs that we fulfil.
I feel just worthless today. I have to drive myself. I have used every physical excuse not to work except fake illness. I have dawdled, gone to the toilet innumerable times, had many glasses of water. Really childish.
– John Steinbeck
On the Good Ship Elijah McClain
by Nikky Finney
“Black skin is an accelerant.”
– Malcolm Gladwell
In Shiatsu the high seas of pressure points woo him,
how touch restores, relieves, cures, resets the knee,
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.
At the Aurora hotel where he lived with his family,
he forecasted his dream board to his mother,
Work on a Cruise ship, Give free massage, Heal the world.
While waiting for his figment freighter Elijah played
first violin to abandoned cats in shelters, silky moiré
strings fracturing their leonine loneliness.
10 pm. Just before they contort him into twin carotids,
his brother dreams of iced tea. A young man with light
aptitude has no fear of moving through the blueberry
leaves of night. Elijah ups his ski mask, earphones, sea
lion aura, he is back inside his wetsuit, the cats back at
the shelter glance towards the door for the man with the
long gliding stick, who curtseys to them before playing
for them. He dives into his starlight, swimming beyond
his lungs, his far-sightedness, his anemia, frightened off.
He is salt warm, piquant, his blood thicker, the blue
green algae of his mind perfuming his hybrid lungs,
krill and seaweed inhaled, mixing with the microfibers
around his bashful mouth. The red ringed octopus
that swims with him whenever he ventures out this late
lightly touches Elijah’s face with the tip of his fifth arm.
His terrestrial anxiety lifts as he descends to his mud
bottom land. A hunter-gatherer, safely behind the
safety glass of his window, is already on the phone
turning Elijah in, reporting a sea monster in black
ski mask walking by, his ten arms waving “sketchy”
in the night air. Elijah McClain has no man-made
weapons, nothing but his dark sea urchin skin,
soft silvery scales, two shimmering nocturnal eyes,
a shark skin boy, cooing to himself, headed back
to the Aurora hotel after scoring his brothers iced
tea. Elijah is now his own deep. The first one yells
for him to stop. His Black boy gills tingle with his
endangeredness. The sea is the authority. He keeps
his arms moving. His skinny legs send one final
memo up to the mouth of his ski mask: Once upon
a time, 10 million years before, feet were fins. Behind the
mask Elijah smiles into a long hanging stalactite
of prehistoric memory, the hunter-gatherers have
surrounded him, his black skin beneath his black
mask is their favorite red meat, beating their chests,
their body cameras drop-disappear into ancient
fjords. These HG’s know nothing of the sea from
whence they came, rock-hard terrestrials needing
their pressure points attended to — topple him.
It’s five against one when the whale hook is force fed
into his arm. Elijah’s glittering sea horse veins are hosed
down, 1963 Birmingham, a Niagara Falls of Ketamine,
the treble clef tattoo on Elijah’s right shoulder bugles
the alarm, a netting of squid ink lassoes out to protect
his gentle collagen carapace. Elijah’s heart is up in arms,
his lungs and liver are foaming at the mouth, in utter
disbelief, the great inaccuracy, the intentional historical
disregard, the human they have coupled with for twenty-
three years, his royal kindness, his dream of free massage
for all, now gasping for breath. Elijah enters the slippery
river rocks of semi-unconsciousness. His toes wiggle for
nitrogen, bouncing against the boulders of the white
waters of the Colorado River. His heart signs for him
to push his voice up through his gurgling organ pipes,
“I am an introvert…please…”
(he tenders)
“Respect the boundaries….please…”
(he sets forth)
“I’m just different, that’s all…”
(he proffers)
“Leave me alone…please…”
(he insists)
“I have no gun. I intend to take my power back…”
(he speaks his motion)
“I have a right to where I am going…”
(he overtures)
“I’m so sorry.”
The kindest man on earth apologizes, unable to
control his spewing, everything they have gorged
him with now hurling through the August air.
ii
One day, on the Good Ship Elijah McClain,
after checking into our deep-sea cabins, black
ski masks handed out with tangerine life savers,
we will find ourselves on deck bowing, curtseying
to each other. At first, it will all feel so silly, the
gravitational surrender of our upper bodies and
knees to the maritime mystery of someone we
do not know, just to be sure and say before the
day is done, I watched your glass octopus dancing down
the dark wet street last night and I am no longer afraid
for you to know how shamelessly your sonata for Manx
and Maine Coon turned me inside out.
I’ve done what I know how to do. Then people opine.
– Louise Glück
I seldom know where I’m headed, but if the story is meant to be, you cross over to the other side—you’re inside it, and there’s an engine.
– Jhumpa Lahiri
Just the idea that someone—in these times—could say, ‘I love you, but I don’t know you,’ simply touched my heart. Almost immediately, I began to think of my own innocence, much of it lost in adolescence.
– Tim Seibles
A modern philosopher who has never once suspected himself of being a charlatan must be such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading.
– Leszek Kolakowski
Once you’ve taken a nap with a dog in the middle of the day, how can you continue to believe in capitalism even a little bit.
– @AlissaNutting
Every form is difficult, no one is easier than another. They all kick your ass.
– James Baldwin
Naïve
by Tim Seibles
I love you but I don’t know you
– Mennonite Woman
When I was seven, I walked home
with Dereck DeLarge, my arm
slung over his skinny shoulders,
after-school sun buffing our lunch boxes.
So easy, that gesture, so light—
the kind of love that lands like a leaf.
It was 1963.
We were two black boys
whose snaggle-toothed grins
held a thousand giggles.
Remember? Remember
wanting to play
every minute, as if that
was why we were born?
Those hands that bring us
shouting into this life
must open like a fanfare
of big band horns.
Though this world is nothing
like where we’d been,
we come anyway, astonished
as if to Mardi Gras in full swing.
There must be a time
when a child’s heart builds
a chocolate sunflower
while katydids burnish the day
with their busy wings.
This itching fury that
holds me now—this knowing
the early welcome
that once lived inside me
was somehow sent away:
how I talk myself back
into all the regular disguises
but still walk these streets
believing in the weather
of the unruined heart.
My friends, with crow’s feet
edging their eyes,
keep looking for a kinder
city, though they don’t
want to seem naïve.
When was the last time
you wrapped your arm
around someone’s shoulder
and walked him home?
Joseph
My name means too create
and so I had to.
I tried to teach my son
the common wonders:
nail, and join,
and hammer;
with twisted heartwood,
level, bend, and shore it.
Now I kneel
and look up
at my broken son.
Father, father,
fathers,
make more creators than destroyers.
Make more creators than destroyers.
– Joseph Fasano
DŌGEN’S DREAM
What happens when the god of spring
meets spring? He thinks for a moment
of great whales traveling from the bottom
to the top of the earth, the day the voyage
began seven million years ago
when spring last changed its season.
He enters himself, emptiness
desiring emptiness. He sleeps
and his sleep is the dance of all the birds
on earth flying north.
– Jim Harrison
Normally we have so little control over our emotions – and we feel our vulnerability as a tight knot in our chests. People talk about needing armor, particularly around their chests, to protect themselves when they go to war. Even bugs have shells to protect themselves. But no physical armor can protect us from what disturbs us inside. We cannot hide ourselves in a box in order to insulate ourselves from our own minds. The only real protection we have is the practice of nonviolence.
In Tibetan, the term for nonviolence is ‘tsema zopa.’ ‘Zopa’ is translated as patience, tolerance, or endurance. Inherent in ‘zopa’ is a feeling of positive disgust, or renunciation, that comes from knowing the negative result of anger. This disgust is similar to the disgust we might experience from eating the same greasy food again and again, day after day. Through constantly getting burnt by our own aggression, we will lose our taste for anything that feeds it and instead turn toward the virtues of practicing patience. With this kind of intelligence, we can endure anything. But more important, as we establish patience, we cultivate merit in this life and the next.
– Dzigar Kongtrul, Light Comes Through
I accept that my love
is a poisonous flower,
routinely fatal.
– Nisha Atalie
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn, Would scarcely know that we were gone.
– Sara Teasdale
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!
– Matthew Olzmann
Appreciate yourself.
You passed the retest.
When the foolishness reappeared with a different costume, you recognized it for what it was.
– Dr. Thema
How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me,
my savage, solitary soul.
– Pablo Neruda
We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art–we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones.
– Anaïs Nin
Intuitive persons notice the most remarkable things. The most pronounced degree of intuition – what the Scots call “second sight” – occurs in so-called clairvoyants, who are able to divine incredibly much.
– Carl Jung
In my experience, everyone will say they want to discover the Truth, right up until they realize that the Truth will rob them of their deepest held ideas, beliefs, hopes, and dreams. The freedom of enlightenment means much more than the experience of love and peace. It means discovering a Truth that will turn your view of self and life upside-down. For one who is truly ready, this will be unimaginably liberating. But for one who is still clinging in any way, this will be extremely challenging indeed. How does one know if they are ready? One is ready when they are willing to be absolutely consumed, when they are willing to be fuel for a fire without end.
– Adyashanti
No one has a single flaw anymore.
It is the flaws the flawless are missing.
– Robert Walser
The goal isn’t to be happy with my voice. What I want is simply to have one.
– Jhumpa Lahiri
Separation once more comes to the agonizingly united and yoked. Endless multiplicity takes the place of what has been forced together, since only diversity is wealth, blood, and harvest.
– @RedBookJung
I wanted to start a revolution, using art to build the sort of society I myself envisioned.
– Yayoi Kusama
In western culture, there’s been a long held view that our ability to reason should be placed above our emotions. But the hard truth is that our emotions are there and they’re non-negotiable— and If you don’t know how to work with them, they can own you.
– Shinzen Young
Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon write:
A relationship is a physiologic process, as real and as potent as any pill or surgical procedure.
[…]
Total self-sufficiency turns out to be a daydream whose bubble is burst by the sharp edge of the limbic brain. Stability means finding people who regulate you well and staying near them.
You hold me in your hands
and you read me like a book.
You know what I don’t know
and you tell me the things that I don’t tell myself.
I learn more from you than from myself.
– Jaime Sabines
The university campus is rapidly becoming a locus of infantilizing social control that any independent-minded student should seek to escape
– Arts & Letters Daily
My present view of wisdom is akin to “existential wayfinding,” finding one’s way and finding the way repeatedly.
– @peternlimberg
maybe a PhD is a small price to pay for avoiding adulting for as long as you can
– Ananya
I knew it hardly mattered either way, that I could have curled up in Sylvia Plath’s unwashed sheets and it wouldn’t make me a better writer.
– Gráinne O’Hare
Our best way to beat the algorithm and continue to build our writing community is to repost!
– Tommy Dean
We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us
– Adrienne Rich
Good did not triumph. Evil did not triumph. The two resolved, destroyed each other, and created new evils, new goods that slew each other in their turn.
– Eric Ambler
You don’t speak for Jesus, you speak for the damned.
– @OhMelodylane
It horrifies me to consider the ways I might lose you infinitely.
– Terri Linn Davis and Daniel Derock
vast sky—
where do we
begin
– @moscowdandelion
The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. A higher paradox confounds emotion as well as reason and there are long periods in the lives of all of us, and of the saints, when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive. Witness the dark night of the soul in individual saints. Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.
– Flannery O’Connor
Regained cool peaceful air in wonder— Why speak they not of comrades that went under?
– Wilfred Owen
the best relationship advice I ever received was just that mostly what makes for a great couple is you both enjoy doing absolutely nothing together
– Mike Solana
Now there’s William. He comes pecking, like a bird, at my heart. His eyebrows are like the feathers of a wren. His ears are little seashells. I would keep him always in my mind’s eye.
Soon enough he’ll be tall, walking and conversing; he’ll have ideas, and a capricious will; the passions will unfold in him, like greased wheels, and he will leap forward upon them.
Who knows, maybe he’ll be an athlete, quick and luminous; or a musician, bent like a long-legged pin over the piano’s open wing; or maybe he will stand day after day over a draftsman’s desk, making something exquisite and useful – a tower or a bridge.
Whatever he does, he’ll want the world to do it in. Maybe, who knows, he’ll want this very room which, only for convenience, I realize, I’ve been calling mine. I feel myself begin to wilt, like an old flower, weak in the stem.
But he is irresistible! Whatever he wants of mine – my room, my ideas, my glass of milk, my socks and shirts, my place in line, my portion, my world – he may have it.
– Mary Oliver
I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try.
– Roger Ebert
The more time you spend thinking about yourself, the more suffering you will experience.
– Dalai Lama
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
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
Solitude is strength; to depend on the presence of the crowd is weakness. The man who needs a mob to nerve him is much more alone than he imagines.
– Paul Brunton
The only homeland, foreigner, is the world we live in; a single Chaos has given birth to all mortals.
– Meleager of Gadara (1st century BCE)
The only thing to do is quite painfully unmask.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Selfhood is always a constructive process in poetry… We see the speaker becoming a self before our very eyes. Indeed, we collaborate in the construction of that self. It is a participatory imaginative achievement.
– Edward Hirsch
Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer.
– Carl Jung
Life cannot be made to conform to a system, it cannot be forced into a framework, however nobly conceived; and a mind that has merely been trained in factual knowledge is incapable of meeting life with its variety, its subtlety, its depths and great heights.
– Krishnamurti
Yearning for others’ accomplishments is a way of avoiding the hard work of developing one’s own potential. What one desires in others is an unlived aspect in oneself that needs attending.
– Rose-Emily Rothenberg
We are killing perpetually, not only nature but ourselves; our brains are degenerating.
– Krishnamurti
The more you can free yourself from your internalization of the gaze of others, the more liberated you feel.
– Thanissaro Bhikkhu
A novelist is someone who confuses his own life with that of his characters.
– Alain Robbe-Grillet
One thing I think about how humans work—the only thing that can replace one story is another story.
– Yuval Noah Harari
Poets sing the abyss into substance
– Steven Leyva
History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
– Theodor Adorno
Only when you finish the story do you learn how sad she was when he said that.
– Zhanar Irgebay
the only advice i have after years of teaching writing is to break all the rules.
– Caroline Hagood
where did you go
on your journey
back to me?
– Issa
I can’t breathe where you place me, please not so high, don’t ever bring anyone else up here where the air is so thin, take my advice, learn your lesson!
– Ingeborg Bachmann, (tr. Philip Boehm)
I am but too conscious of the fact that we are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously, and I live in terror of not being misunderstood.
– Oscar Wilde
She Passed This Way
by Djuna Barnes
Here where the trees tremble with your flight
I sit and braid thin whips to beat you down.
How shall we ever find you who have gone
In little dresses, lisping through the town?
Great men on horses hunt you, and strong boys
Employ their arrows in the shallow air.
But I shall be heard whistling where I follow
Braiding long wisps of grass and stallion’s hair.
And in the night when thirty hawks are high
In pendent rhythm, and all the wayside loud;
When they are burning field and bush and hedge,
I’ll steal you like a penny from the crowd.
In a poem,
Mars is always a metaphor for someplace
unexplored—the soul, or the soul’s
asylum.
– Amber Adams
Leave the World Behind
by Jane Zwart
The more leisurely the disaster, the more laden
the displaced. The more leisurely the disaster,
the brisker the grocers’ business, the brusquer
the gas station attendants. And the slower it is—
whatever is coming—the more likely the evacuees
are to have reservations: at motels miles inland,
about whether it is really necessary to go.
In other instances, of course, our abandon
is instant: we flee, no coat, no purse, no going back
for the shoes others trampled from our feet.
Sometimes we have practiced. Sometimes
cops direct traffic; sometimes there are helicopters,
hellbent on mercy. Sometimes leaflets flutter
to earth, promising bombs, advising innocents
to depart, a study in friction, in resistance, in the sky
being other than a vacuum where physicists race
hammers and feathers. Whoever owns the sky,
the leaflets say refuge is a function of time.
These are the variables: what is coming, what might
come. By these we distinguish one scene of evacuation
from another. But until the cataclysm—or at least
until the drill, the dress rehearsal—we call it scenery.
becoming dawn
one by one —
turtles slide into the sea
– John Wisdom
Spring in New Hampshire (To J. L. J. F. E.)
by Claude McKay
Too green the springing April grass,
Too blue the silver-speckled sky,
For me to linger here, alas,
While happy winds go laughing by,
Wasting the golden hours indoors,
Washing windows and scrubbing floors.
Too wonderful the April night,
Too faintly sweet the first May flowers,
The stars too gloriously bright,
For me to spend the evening hours,
When fields are fresh and streams are leaping,
Wearied, exhausted, dully sleeping.
Everyday mystics are people who commune with the presence of God, receive guidance through prophetic visions, voices, and dreams, and commit themselves to living for God rather than solely for themselves.
– Lerita Coleman Brown
You cannot observe people through an ideology. Your ideology observes for you.
– Philip Roth
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.
– Kahlil Gibran
Intuition is neither a feeling, an inspiration nor a disorderly sympathy but a fully developed method.
– Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism
Don’t take it personal, they said;
but I did, I took it all quite personal –
the breeze and the river and the color of the fields;
the price of grapefruit and stamps,
the wet hair of women in the rain –
And I cursed what hurt me
and I praised what gave me joy,
the most simple-minded of possible responses.
– Tony Hoagland
Endless and infinite waves of vibration lap upon the shores of our bodies. We float in a sea of frequencies as fish in those waters, and we are rarely if ever conscious of the fact. Instead we assemble a world by transforming those frequencies into a vision that exists in the uniqueness of our mind’s eye only, and then we believe with great insistence that what we see is real, and deserving the stamp of “truth,” without pausing to consider the alternative realities held equally dear by our fellow fish. How to pierce the veil and see what actually is, as opposed to the creations of our minds? I’m not even remotely sure to be honest! The mechanics of “seeing” guarantee that “how I see it” must be different than how another does. So perhaps “reality” is more of a composite to be assembled with the help of the whole school of us~ Or perhaps it is an alternative altogether different from anything a shared vision might come up with, given our capacity to witness it with our senses is ultimately inadequate. Either option is cause for humility. Just thinking out loud here!
– Gil Hedley
The creation of a single world
comes from a huge number
of fragments and chaos.
– Hayao Miyazaki
Behold
People wake up in the middle of the night.
No, not in the middle. Deep in their brains.
They know the present, the little braveries.
We lock our doors from the inside.
We want to be delivered.
We want the patience of mirrors.
We want not to be torn in two by a brown river.
We want the courage to dive
Off the high board into human eyes.
Behold the door.
The lock’s alive.
– Stan Rice
That the Druids held in trust secrets of science and mystic lore we know. Persecution by the ignorant and the superstitious slew, and drove into hiding the wise and the understanding, and robbed the lands of the Kelts of music and poesy, of art and grace, save that which was interwoven in the soul of the people and made them what they were.
– Annie Besant
London is filled with so many hidden treasures namely springs. And when you come across a spring in the city, it truly is a jewel to be looked after and caretaken.
London in essence is a water city, built ontop of an underground lake, with 21 river flowing through the city as well and into the River Thames. It’s original name is Llyn Din which means ‘the town of the lake’ or ‘the city of the waters.’
When I used to live in London I got to know the city very well through connecting to the water ways. Tracking where these rivers would start as bubbling springs, & seeing where they flowed & what direction they took through the city. Connecting to water in London helped keep me grounded & feel connected to the wider city as a whole.
It is through mapping out the springs, and rivers in London – that connected me to the ways of pilgrimage. Because in essence most old pilgrimage routes are directly connected to the water ways. Because water is life. And our ancestors would visit them for survival in quenching one’s thirst; and to venerate the life giving source that is water.
Working with the element of water in the city is a deeply beautiful, powerful & healing experience.
I have arranged private access to this spring in the centre of the city (seen in this pic from a previous pilgrimage I hosted) which originates from a bubbling spring on Hampstead Heath! And I tell you these waters are crisp cold, pure & strong. It’s such a wonderful mystery as these waters are far from its source in the north.
– Charlotte Pulver
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by waters.
– Norman Maclean
Loneliness is like sitting in an empty room and being aware of the space around you. It is a condition of separateness. Solitude is becoming one with the space around you. It is a condition of union. Loneliness is small, solitude is large. Loneliness closes in around you; solitude expands toward the infinite. Loneliness has its roots in words, in an internal conversation that nobody answers; solitude has its roots in the great silence of eternity.
– Kent Nerburn
One of the causes of war is nationalism, which is glorified tribalism: my country, my space, my people, my tradition, my God. All such activity is the action of stupidity, not intelligence.
– Krishnamurti
white peartree blossom
the woman by moonlight
reads a letter
– Yosa Buson
Jung observed that everyone has a pathological secret, something so scary, so shameful, so humiliating, that one will protect it at nearly any cost. As long as such secrets remain buried, they will continue to percolate their invisible toxins into world of conscious life.
– James Hollis
northern latitudes
childhood stars
in harmony
– James Welsh
I have but one religion: Bach.
– Cioran
Don’t expect results so soon. Results come after a long process. You are like a small boy in the garden who digs up carrots to see if they are growing.
– Sophie Grigorievna Ouspensky
What limits people is lack of character. What limits people is that they don’t have the fucking nerve or imagination to star in their own movie, let alone direct it.
– Tom Robbins
Life feeds anyone who is open to taste its food, wonder, and glee—it’s immediacy.
– Anne Lamott
Man has to cope with the problem of suffering. The Oriental wants to get rid of suffering by casting it off. Western man tries to suppress suffering with drugs. But suffering has to be overcome, and the only way to
overcome it is to endure it.
– CG Jung
Human beings may separate things into as many piles as we wish — separating spirit from flesh. writes. But we should not be surprised when God does not recognize the distinctions we make between the two.
– Barbara Brown Taylor
Maybe because my dad died young, my great leading question through life has been what stays, what doesn’t die? The closest I’ve come to an answer is poetry.
– Diane Seuss
Some people get addicted to chain-smoking their problems. They spend all day going from sorrow to sorrow. It doesn’t have to be that way. You can live each day going from joy to joy—like a sunflower that turns to face the sun as it moves across the sky. It’s not about having a problem-free life, but about focusing on the light. Sunflowers still have shadows, but they are always behind them.
– James Clear
Most of them speak what they
have been taught, not what
they have learned.
– Bukowski
We must allow ourselves music at least,
an hour alone with the Calculus of Bach,
a little concentration, just one side
of one record, one chapter, one poem.
– Christopher Bakken
The canopy above, a testament to the skyward aspirations of mankind.
– Ian Bowman
We never talk about our glow down stories but everyone’s got one. That phase where you start sleeping in, gaining weight, losing focus, stop caring. It’s not rock bottom but everyday it feels like you’re losing grasp and watching yourself fall apart from the corner of your room.
– Sherry Ming
The mysterious man erased the mistake with one foot, bent down, and wrote the correct rhythmic notation in the sand.
– Wesley Wehr
If you have an idea that you genuinely think is good, don’t let some idiot talk you out if it.
– Stan Lee
Awakening means a fundamental shift takes place. It is a shift from looking for ourselves outside in the ten thousand things to recognizing that our true nature is beyond definition.
– Kittisaro
You passed yourself
coming and going, went through
one loop, then another,
– Susan Stewart
…every human being is…
equally unfree, that is, we…
create out of freedom,
a prison…
– Otto Rank
I am waiting for the poem
That will finally write me,
Finish me the way I need
To be finished — in all my wonder,
In all my breath, in all
My hope and fear.
– john zbigniew guzowski
You might get
a little Jesus
on the mountain
but mostly he
liked the water,
the old monk
reported.
– The Old Monk
This is when you discover agency, like health, or say, freedom of movement, is something you never consider till it’s gone.
– Kathryn Aldridge-Morris
Friendship isn’t a big thing – it’s a million little things
– Ben Rendle
Cézanne never wanted to let the logic of the painting take precedence over the continuity of perception. After each brushstroke he had to re-establish his innocence as perceiver.
– John Berger
If we only stop when we are finished w/our work, we will never stop, because our work is never completely done. With every accomplishment, there arises a new responsibility. Sabbath dissolves artificial urgency, because it liberates us from the need to be finished.
– Wayne Muller
first one lace then the other,
first nistru then prut. I have made my
boots out of blackest soil.
– Emilian Galaicu-Paun
Affliction is a treasure,
and scarce any man hath enough of it.
– John Donne
Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.
– Sigmund Freud
It’s the class system. No one is quite sure who they are or what they are or how to behave. It makes us all edgy. The best English people always live outside England. Now I’ve got out, I’ll never go back.
– David Hockney
Don’t just promise to remember, promise to actively resist, to cite your resistance as present and not future. Resist right now. Protest. Boycott. Pressure your politicians. Take part in direct action, civil disobedience.
– Omar Sakr
I think that’s avant-garde—the meeting of need and language.
– Eileen Myles
Our brains are wired for connection, but trauma rewires them for protection. That’s why healthy relationships are difficult for wounded people.
– Ryan North
“Is God a magnet?” I wondered, and then had to put down the book and get some air.
– Erin Maglaque
Now my charms are all o’erthrown
And what strength I have’s mine own.
– Shakespeare, The Tempest
It is now in full flower again and growing and when I have the pleasure— as I don’t doubt I shall— of boozing with you in Mannheim in the the spring, you will be amazed at its glory.
– Friedrich Engels on his spring-style mustache, in 1841 letter to his sister Marie
the moon sailing
down the river of heaven
into a forest of stars
– Manyoshu
from “The Land”
Vita Sackville-West
That was a spring of storms. They prowled the night;
Low level lightning flickered in the east
Continuous. The white pear-blossom gleamed
Motionless in the flashes; birds were still;
Darkness and silence knotted to suspense,
Riven by the premonitory glint
Of skulking storm, a giant that whirled a sword
Over the low horizon, and with tread
Earth-shaking ever threatened his approach,
But to delay his terror kept afar,
And held earth stayed in waiting like a beast
Bowed to receive a blow. But when he strode
Down from his throne of hills upon the plain,
And broke his anger to a thousand shards
Over the prostrate fields, then leapt the earth
Proud to accept his challenge; drank his rain;
Under his sudden wind tossed wild her trees;
Opened her secret bosom to his shafts;
The great drops spattered; then above the house
Crashed thunder, and the little wainscot shook
And the green garden in the lightning lay.
The minute you convince yourself you could have done better without a margin of safety is exactly when you need it most.
– Shane Parrish, Clear Thinking
To wander in the fields of flowers pull the thorns from your Heart.
– Rumi
That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and
of the comfort of the Resurrection
by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows | flaunt
forth, then chevy on an air- Built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-
gangs they throng; they glitter in marches. Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, |
wherever an elm arches, Shivelights and shadowtackle in long | lashes lace,
lance, and pair.
I only have 26 letters of the alphabet; I don’t have color or music. I must use my craft to make the reader see the colors and hear the sounds.
– Toni Morrison
We all believe we are self-made people, living consciously, making right choices, meaning well, and only when the consequences pile up around us do we ever question this presumption. On those dolorous occasions we may even be driven to ask, What is really going on here?
– James Hollis
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
It is a hard thing to leave any deeply routined life, even if you hate it.
– John Steinbeck
People are almost always better than their neighbors think they are.
– George Eliot
The life span of any particular emotion is only one and half minutes. After that we have to revive the emotion to get it going again. We revive it by feeding it with an internal conversation about how another person is the source of one’s discomfort.
– Pema Chödrön
Time’s violence rends the soul; by the rent eternity enters.
– Simone Weil
Goodbye, little century.
Goodbye, riderless black horse that trots
From one side of the street to the other,
Trying to find its way
Out of the parade.
– Larry Levis
Don’t they ever stop migrating,
these bottle-blondes from the city,
flying down the highway, san souci?
– Erin O’Luanaigh
I love the rain when it
wraps me like a
river. grafts me to the clouds.
I share in properties
of the sky. I grow
like a tree
– Etel Adnan
when you begin to live in your truth, your intentions evict everything that isn’t meant for you, your energy becomes a placeholder for honesty and your spirit rejects anything that isn’t authentic, the locks to your heart become accessible only to those living in their truth too.
– billy chapata
Put the fun back into punishment.
Make a law that loves the one who breaks it .
– Larry Levis
My speech is imperfect. Not because I want to shine with words, but out of the impossibility of finding those words, I speak in images. With nothing else to express the words from the depths.
– C. G. Jung
Alone
by Tomaž Šalamun
Translated by Brian Henry
One finger is the tundra,
one finger is the Bodhisattva,
one finger is mother Slovenia.
Two fingers still remain, beckoning
and with awful force feeding me
seventeen hands with this arrangement.
Alone,
I’m alone on the roof of the world and drawing
so stars are created.
I’m spurting through the nose so the Milky Way is created
and I’m eating
so shit is created, and falling on you
and it is music.
I am God.
I am God and I’m dancing.
This table is a gift, this house is a gift,
this garden is a gift, these squirrels are a gift.
These human legs are murmuring mantras.
Alone,
alone.
Glug glug glug I drink gulps of light
and I brush.
So I shower and put myself back, alone.
I alone am the center of the world’s light, the Lord’s lamb.
I alone am all animals: a tiger, an ant, a deer,
a rabbit, a porcupine (a hedgehog), a butterfly, an insect,
a piranha, a baby rabbit, a daddy rabbit,
the god of ferrets, the straw hat of a sketched
puppy and his paws.
I alone am all plants: strawberries, birch, hazel,
pumpkin, fern, dandelion, juves (juves is a plant
with thin roots, resembling the roots
of parsley, but it has a nose and head like
a porcini cap and one birch’s hand,
sitting all day in a race car like a liana),
maple, oak, corn, alone.
I alone am all the people named in this book
and all the others: Joe, Janet, Agatha, Veronika,
Boris, Ivan, Italo, Pierre, alone.
I alone am the air, smoothly, the lining, two parallel tracks,
pot (to sweat), pot (the road),
the cause, the forceps, Lope de Vega, the streak,
the dot on the forehead, the dot in the air, alone.
Alone,
I alone am the air and the golden butter,
linden bark, the king, the sickle and hammer,
the Dalmatian, the saw, Armenia, the key,
alone.
Translated from the Slovenian
I finally win
playing solitary…
writer’s block
– @hegelincanada
I stored up the purest words
for making new silences.
– Alejandra Pizarnik
We all have to fall from grace. Just accept it. But it’s not really a fall from grace, it’s a fall from the lonely misery of facade into the retrieval of our authenticity.
– Chelan Harkin
I long for the day when
all that is dark in me
becomes light
– Mutsuo
It’s precisely because life’s so often difficult, for everyone, surely, that we have an obligation to be cheerful.
– Pico Iyer
& if that flame could speak,
And if it said to me: “You loved her, didn’t you?” I’d answer,
Hands in my pockets, “Yes.” And then I’d let fire & misfortune
Overwhelm my life
– Larry Levis
A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle.
– Kahlil Gibran
O poets, poets! The only true lovers of women.
– Marina Tsvetaeva
“the most dangerous game?” you mean an evening espresso?
– Lauren Theresa
Throw the old, the broken, the worn out, the unused, and the ruined into the melting pot, so that it will be renewed for fresh use.
– @RedBookJung
Language and everything coming in contact with it burns and this is no metaphor.
– Werner Hamacher
Hayden White: there is an “irreducible ideological component in every historical account of reality.”
We must venture into the thicket
with open corneas.
– Alina Ștefănescu
what can I do with a void—except fall into it?
– Christina Tudor-Sideri
A real building is one on which the eye can light and stay lit.
– Ezra Pound
Be a good and proactive and even somewhat desperate patient on your own behalf — seek out the most efficacious anti-selfishness medicines, energetically, for the rest of your life. Find out what makes you kinder, what opens you up and brings out the most loving, generous, and unafraid version of you — and go after those things as if nothing else matters. Because, actually, nothing else does.
– George Saunders
For some reason men have imagined that love for oneself is more natural and comprehensible than love for another. Why? Love for others is only a little-rarer, less widely diffused than love to oneself.
– Lev Shestov, All Things Are Possible
Elders are technologies of a prior generosity, a softer abundance, an invitation to consider that we are not alone. The effect of colonial clearings is to shroud and invisibilize these tentacular connections that exceed the orbits of the isolated citizen-subject. This is why white modernity has no elders; it has only experts.
– Bayo Akomolafe
The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learned from others; it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an eye for resemblance.
– Aristotle
Know that it is hard for the people to trust outside their own family. Even harder when they are sick. They have pain. They are out of harmony. They see no beauty anywhere. All their connections are broken. That is who you are talking to. You tell them the Power that made us made all this above us and around us and we are part of the Power and if we do as we are taught we can bring ourselves back into hozho. Back into harmony. Then they will again know beauty all around them.
– Tony Hillerman
It is only when human beings see themselves simply as human beings, no longer as gods, that they are in a position to perceive the wholly other nature of God. It is only when we cease to be unhappy supermen and pathetic mini-gods and permit ourselves to become human beings through and through again that we let God be God.
– Jurgen Moltmann
The Muse visits during the act of creation, not before. Don’t wait for her.
– Roger Ebert
To feed your Muse, then, you should always have been hungry about life since you were a child. If not, it is a little late to start.
– Ray Bradbury
…We talk
Ceaselessly to things that can’t respond
Or won’t respond. What are we talking for?
We’re talking to coax hope and love from zero.
We’re talking so the brain of the geode
Will listen like a garden heliotrope
And open its quartz flowers. We are talking
Because speech is a sun, a kind of making.
– Mark Jarman
The heart can think of no devotion
Greater than being shore to the ocean –
Holding the curve of one position,
Counting an endless repetition.
– Robert Frost
The literary form that the US will be remembered for is the sales pitch.
– Alina Stefanescu
‘Life is not a series of problems,’ said the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel, ‘it is a network of mysteries.’
– Alan McGlashan
It’s easy to be a naive idealist. It’s easy to be a cynical realist. It’s quite another thing to have no illusions and still hold the inner flame.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
And this? This is the most unscrupulous thing of all. These scratchings
all night,
These inquiries because you are not there, have become, simply, you,
white paper
Desiring the darkening effects of ink until, late at night, it is black trees,
White snow. A winter landscape, & the hush when I come back to it as bitter & serene
As coffee, solitude, the first snow grazing the streets. It is pure, the way
cruelty is pure.
I swear I’d give the whole thing up for you.
– Larry Levis
You can be converted from one belief to another, from one dogma to another, but you cannot be converted to an understanding of reality. Belief is not reality.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
The only man who behaved sensibly was my tailor: he took my measure anew every time he saw me, whilst all the rest went on with their old measurements and expected them to fit me.
– George Bernard Shaw
The sacred may manifest in stones or trees, but this does not involve worship cults of stone or tree … which attract veneration because they evidence something standing behind stone & tree––the sacred, the ‘ganz andere’.
– Mircea Eliade
But hearts of stone are forever.
– Alina Stefanescu
walking
to a poem party
under a spring moon
– Issa
standing up
for a closer look
at the stars
– Maurice Tasnier
Doesn’t seeking out a better life almost always involve accepting an imperfect one?
– Pico Iyer
And the room was full of cold night all the way into the corners
– Rilke
Now is a vast thing. Past and future can’t exist without now
– Chögyam Trungpa
Have we agreed to so many wars that we can’t
Escape from silence? If we don’t lift our voices, we allow
Others (who are ourselves) to rob the house.
How come we’ve listened to the great criers-Neruda,
Akhmatova, Thoreau, Frederick Douglass-and now
We’re silent as sparrows in the little bushes?
Some masters say our life lasts only seven days.
Where are we in the week? Is it Thursday yet?
Hurry, cry now! Soon Sunday night will come.
– Robert Bly, Call and Answer
I was born a bitch. I was born a painter.
– Frida Kahlo
Behind every beautiful
thing, there’s some
kind of pain.
– Bob Dylan
Bringing order to clutter, I begin to see, is not just about putting my spices in alphabetical order. It’s about balancing the twin poles of spiritual life: cherishing life and holding it sacred, while knowing that it will pass away.
– Anne Cushman
When the mind appears, reality disappears. When the mind disappears, reality appears.
– Bodhidharma
There was a muddy centre before we breathed.
There was a myth before the myth began,
Venerable and articulate and complete.
From this the poem springs: that we live in a place
That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves
And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.
– Wallace Stevens
I believe poetry, at its best, has the unique ability both to help uncover pain and to heal it.
– Sharon Kennedy-Nolle
The book is about two people who love one another. But who love one another unawares. It happens outside the book. (…) The essence of this love is that it can’t be written.
– Marguerite Duras, The Book. Practicalities. (tr. Barbara Bray)
Italy’s great gift to me is the voice that tells me that I don’t have to follow the rules.
– Jhumpa Lahiri
If you want momentum, you’ll have to create it yourself, right now, by getting up and getting started.
– @RyanHoliday
As specialists of apparent life, stars serve as superficial objects that people can identify with in order to compensate for the fragmented, productive specializations that they actually live.
– Guy Debord
And so may a slow / wind work these words / of love around you, / an invisible cloak / to mind your life.
– John O’Donohue
It is inevitable if you enter into relations with people on a regular basis…that you will grow to be like them. Place an extinguished piece of coal next to a live one, and either it will cause the other one to die out, or the live one will make the other reignite.
– Epictetus
Like an unhappy woman Earth frees herself
from the arms of Winter,
– Elsa Gidlow
My lifetime
is to love to endure to suffer the music
to set its portrait
up as a sheet of the world.
– Muriel Rukeyser
The truth is that all the things you think are difficult, are difficult only because you learned to think about them on difficult terms
– Wayne Dyer
Divine Wrath
by Adélia Prado
Translated by Ellen Doré Watson
When I was wounded
whether by God, the devil, or myself —I don’t know yet which — it was seeing the sparrows again and clumps of clover, after three days,
that told me I hadn’t died.
When I was young, all it took were those sparrows, those lush little leaves, for me to sing praises,
dedicate operas to the Lord. But a dog who’s been beaten is slow to go back to barking
and making a fuss over his owner
—an animal, not a person
like me who can ask:
Why do you beat me? Which is why, despite the sparrows and the clover,
a subtle shadow still hovers over my spirit.
May whoever hurt me, forgive me.
Which tense do you want to live in?
—I want to live in the imperative of the future passive participle—in the “what ought to be”.
– Osip Madelstam, The Noise of Time, (tr. Clarence Brown)
It isn’t true friendship until you’ve shared music.
– Jeffrey F. Barken
As an editor, I stand by my taste and not anyone else’s. Am prepared to run riot exercising my druthers.
– Gordon Lish
I’ve never sublimated. I’m never sublimating.
– Alice Notley
evening sun
I hang my dreams
on a rainbow
– @moscowdandelion
Perhaps this is one of the reasons poetry is so appealing. It’s a time of extreme permission—at least the way I teach it and practice it myself.
– Lauren Camp
Stand before the people you fear and speak your mind—even if your voice shakes.
– Maggie Kuhn
The hummingbird, for all we know, may be singing all day long. We had been in France where every word really was a bird, a thing singing.
– Lyn Hejinian
Why are the stars still waiting?
Because even gods die without love.
– Brendan Constantine & Andi Myles
And out of this worldwide festival of death, this ugly rutting fever that inflames the rainy evening sky all around—will love someday rise up out of this, too?
– Thomas Mann
wolf moon
another battalion
ships out
– Francine Banwarth
She loved me for the dangers I had pass’d,
And I loved her that she did pity them.
– William Shakespeare
I most treasure how writing wakes me up. The practice asks me to look closely at what is, to slow down, to sustain a lingering, curious relationship with my subject—to be fully present.
– Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew
Everyone should have themselves regularly overwhelmed by Nature
– George Harrison
When I say that I don’t want to work, people say: but you’ll get bored!
I don’t think those people read or write…
– @brecht_dp
Try turning off the radio, the phone, the computer, and the TV; sit comfortably in a quiet place, relaxing the body and mind; mindfully breathe in, mindfully breathe out, and abandon—just for now—any thought or response
– Andrew Olendzki
What makes the dharma relevant for our lives is its potential to point us in the direction of practice
– @MatthiasBirk
Winter? Spring? Who knows?
– Sadakichi Hartmann
Writing is only expressing something.
Not even half of communication.
Much of the rest is listening for
the sleek nourishment of appreciation.
Yet the third part is the miracle
of fluid unknowing exploring the flow.
Which is why I love time.
It may be evanescent,
like expressing yourself
or perceiving something,
but there is a feeling at the heart
of being anything at all,
that can never be taken apart,
in spite of this sonnet’s muse.
– George Gorman
A path is only a path, and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you. Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself alone, one question. Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn’t it is of no use.
– Carlos Castaneda
The Master allows things to happen.
She shapes events as they come.
She steps out of the way
and lets the Tao speak for itself.
– Tao Te Ching, (tr. Stephen Mitchell)
Movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul’s weather to all who can read it.
– Martha Graham
The truth, my children, is that we are, all of us, acting in a marionette comedy. What is important more than anything else in a marionette comedy, is keeping the ideas of the author clear. This is the real happiness of life, and now that I have at last come into a marionette play, I will never go out of it again.
– Isak Dinesen
The most important hour is always the present. The most significant person is precisely the one sitting across from you right now. The most necessary work is always love.
– Meister Eckhart
I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.
– E. B. White
The meaning of religion and art is positive and synthetic, not only in primitive cultures, but also in our own overconscious culture, precisely because they provide an outlet for contents and emotional components that have been too rigorously suppressed.
– Erich Neumann
the mountains
in their silence
nurture the spirit
– Basho
Natural life span of an emotion—the average time it takes for it to move through the nervous system & body—is only minute & a half. We need thoughts to keep the emotion rolling. We lock into painful emotional states [through] our own endless stream of inner dialogue.
– Tara Brach
If you notice an unconscious fantasy coming up within you, you would be wise not to interpret it at once. Do not say that you know what it is and force it into consciousness. Just let it live with you, leaving it in the half-dark.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
Haters want us to hate them, because hate is incapacitating. When we hate, we can’t operate from our real selves, which is our strength. Now that I think of it, this is such a great reason to give up our hate—as revenge, to deprive the haters of what they want.
– Anne Lamott
Every wholesome thought, every pure intention, every effort to train the mind represents a potential for growth along the noble eightfold path.
– Bhikkhu Bodhi
Criticism hurts only if you believe it.
– James Baldwin
May you be reconciled with those with whom you have had difficulties in your life. May all beings everywhere be reconciled. May the merit of your reconciliation practice be to the liberation of all beings.
– Phillip Moffitt
I wanted to be a catalyst. A fire starter. A link between [the community] and poetry.
– Joaquín Zihuatanejo
Only one journey is possible: the journey within. We don’t learn a whole lot from dashing about on the surface of the Earth. Neither do I believe that one travels so as to eventually return. Man can never reach back to the point of origin, because he has changed in the process. And of course we cannot escape from ourselves; what we are we carry with us. We carry with us the dwelling place of our soul, like the turtle carries its shell. A journey through all the countries of the world would be a mere symbolic journey. Whatever place one arrives at, it is still one’s own soul that one is searching for.
– Andrei Tarkovsky
Affirm everyone and everything.
Freely extend your goodwill and virtue in every direction, regardless of circumstances.
Embrace all things as part of the Harmonious Oneness, and then you will begin to perceive it.
– Lao Tzu
Faith comes and goes. It rises and falls like the tides of an invisible ocean. If it is presumptuous to think that faith will stay with you forever, it is just as presumptuous to think that unbelief will.
– Flannery O’Connor
An old alchemist gave the following consolation to one of his disciples: No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you.
– Carl Jung
You
I am sea-born, and sea-inclined; islanded
on this earth, dragged each-which-way, and tidal;
sense shifting as the sands shift, my soul
flotsam. Prisoned in time, and you, love,
are eternity, you are the current in my depths,
my promised short. And when I part from you,
taking my words to dry, sophisticated place, I am
tugged towards you, sweet desperation, this underwater storm.
– John F. Deane
You project your chemistry on other people and your relations with them are a result.
Your unconscious manifestations are more powerful and get more results than your so called ‘conscious.’
You receive what you evoke.
– Kathryn Hulme
Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one’s weakness. It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart.
– Mahatma Gandhi
The human heart is like a night bird. Silently waiting for something, and when the time comes, it flies straight toward it.
– Haruki Murakami
If You Are Lucky in This Life
a short poem by Cameron, 4th Grader
If you are lucky in this life
A window will appear on a battlefield between two armies.
And when the soldiers look into the window
They don’t see their enemies.
They see themselves as children.
And they stop fighting
And go home and go to sleep.
When they wake up, the land is well again.
There is a sense in which love’s truth is proved by its end, by what it becomes in us, and what we, by virtue of love, become. But love, like faith, occurs in the innermost recesses of a person’s spirit, and we can see only inward in this regard, and not very clearly when it comes to that. And then, too, there can be great inner growth and strength in what seems, from the outside, like pure agony or destruction. In the tenderest spots of human experience, nothing is more offensive than intellectualized understanding. “Pain comes from the darkness / And we call it wisdom,” writes Randall Jarrell. “It is pain.”
– Christian Wiman
Religion must remain an outlet for people who say to themselves, ‘I am not the kind of person I want to be.’ It must never sink into an assemblage of the self-satisfied.
– Frank Herbert, Dune
I sat upon a stone / covered one leg with the other / and set my elbow on them / I nestled in my hand / my chin and one of my cheeks / In this position I started pondering / How one should live in the world.
– Walther von der Vogelweide
I was brought up with the poisonous notion that you had to renounce love of the earth in order to receive the love of God. My experience has been just the opposite: a love of the earth and existence so overflowing that it implied, or included, or even absolutely demanded, God. Love did not deliver me from the earth, but into it. And by some miracle I do not find that this experience is crushed or even lessened by the knowledge that, in all likelihood, I will be leaving the earth sooner than I had thought. Quite the contrary, I find life thriving in me, and not in an aestheticizing Death-is-the-mother-of-beauty sort of way either, for what extreme grief has given me is the very thing it seemed at first to obliterate: a sense of life beyond the moment, a sense of hope.
– Christian Wiman
People want an easy path. Jung’s path of individuation is not easy.
– Laura London
i saw eternity the other night, like a great ring of pure and endless light, all calm, as it was bright; and round beneath it, time in hours, days, years, driv’n by the spheres like a vast shadow mov’d: in which the world and all her train were hurl’d.
– henry vaughan
The only defense against the world is a thorough knowledge of it.
– John Locke
We all have a shadow. Or does our shadow have us? Jung asked this question: “How do you find a lion that has swallowed you?”
– Connie Zweig
In fact, the path does not really exist unless you are available.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments.
– Neil Strauss
In Red Book Jung is [advocating] doing what Christ did; the following your myth, finding out what it is, going into the wilderness, experiencing suffering, experiencing your own wisdom and if you have to suffer on the cross, then so be it, that is what you do.
– Murray Stein
Never before have musicians tried so hard to communicate with their audience, and never before has that communication been so deceiving. Music now seems … a clumsy excuse for the self glorification of musicians & the growth of a new industrial sector.
– Jacques Attali
Did This Ever Happen to You
by Franz Wright
A marble-colored cloud
engulfed the sun and stalled,
a skinny squirrel limped toward me
as I crossed the empty park
and froze, the last
or next to last
fall leaf fell but before it touched
the earth, with shocking clarity
I heard my mother’s voice
pronounce my name. And in an instant I passed
beyond sorrow and terror, and was carried up
into the imageless
bright darkness
I came from
and am. Nobody’s
stronger than forgiveness.
I know it’s you; and that is what we will come to, sooner or later, when it’s even darker than it is now, when the snow is colder, when it’s darkest and coldest and candles are no longer any use to us and the visibility is zero: Yes. It’s still you. It’s still you.
– Margaret Atwood
Only the foolish, blinded by language’s conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at its melancholy rim, green in its envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in its greatest rages, black.
– Salman Rushdie
All insight, all revelation, all illumination, all love, all that is genuine, all that is real, lies in now — and in the attempt to create now we approach the inner precincts, the holiest part of life. For in time all things are seeking completion, but in now all things are complete.
– Maurice Nicoll
Several small clouds drifted through the sky. When one of them passed before the moon, the world’s filter changed. First my hands were silver and the ground was black. Then my hands were black and the ground silver. So we switched, as I walked, from negative to positive to negative, as the clouds passed before the moon.
– Robert Macfarlane
Sometimes I remind myself of a small, rather intelligent mouse trying to dig its way out from the center of a mountain of sand which has fallen upon it. The mountain of sand is my brain, and the mouse is me, whatever it is.
– Patricia Highsmith
Some of us are born a little mournful, and we spend our lives discovering new traditions for housing those ghosts we’ve long considered companions. Framing, I’d venture, is central to this urge. It gives memories a physique.
– Durga Chew-Bose
The affect of straight culture is marked not only by repressed anger and sadness but by a kind of emotional flatness, an antiflamboyance. Here, straight culture and WASP culture overlap, highlighting the ways that straight people of color, Jews, Muslims, people with disabilities, sluts, fat people, and white queers—to name a few—depart from the norms associated with straightness and/or whiteness. For example, a common straight critique of gay affect in the mid- and late twentieth century was that it was too flamboyant—too spectacular, too loud, too sexual, too confident, too animated, too exposed, and overall just too much. If we reverse the gaze, focusing on queer people’s assessment of the look and feel of straight life, we can see how straight people—especially straight white people—might seem to queers too passive, boring, unimaginative, and generally uninspired. If queerness is too much, then straightness is too little, the relational manifestation of lack.
– Jane Ward
For our Titanic purposes of faith and revolution, what we need is not the cold acceptance of the world as a compromise, but some way in which we can heartily hate and heartily love it. We do not want joy and anger to neutralize each other and produce a surly contentment; we want a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent. We have to feel the universe at once as an ogre’s castle, to be stormed, and yet as our own cottage, to which we can return at evening.
– G. K. Chesterton
Out of infinite longings rise finite deeds like weak fountains, falling back just in time and trembling. And yet, what otherwise remains silent, our happy energies—show themselves in these dancing tears.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Later I learned from a healer that there is a term for the seeming paradox of, at last, pitching yourself into a stable situation, only to self-sabotage or otherwise break-down. This, she said, is a healing crisis. The individual intent on healing, will, in the end, feel and express every information-packed wound. Past symptoms, repressed sensations, and unacknowledged trauma will rise up even as you prepare to relax. Living, she concluded, is not for the faint of heart. And then she laughed. She laughed so hard I felt embarrassed for her so I joined in. Then I was really laughing. Later that day I thought, for the first time in a long time, maybe there was hope for a person like me.
– Selah Saterstrom
The older I get, the less guilty I feel for having loved people who did not love me.
– Violette Leduc
When I take you to the Valley, you’ll see the blue hills on the left and the blue hills on the right, the rainbow and the vineyards under the rainbow late in the rainy season, and maybe you’ll say, “There it is, that’s it!” But I’ll say. “A little farther.” We’ll go on, I hope, and you’ll see the roofs of the little towns and the hillsides yellow with wild oats, a buzzard soaring and a woman singing by the shadows of a creek in the dry season, and maybe you’ll say, “Let’s stop here, this is it!” But I’ll say, “A little farther yet.” We’ll go on, and you’ll hear the quail calling on the mountain by the springs of the river, and looking back you’ll see the river running downward through the wild hills behind, below, and you’ll say, “Isn’t that the Valley?” And all I will be able to say is “Drink this water of the spring, rest here awhile, we have a long way yet to go and I can’t go without you.”
– Ursula K. Le Guin
It’s a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you’ve been to all the places you don’t need to be.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
Not to know yourself is dangerous, to that self and to others. Those who destroy, who cause great suffering, kill off some portion of themselves first, or hide from the knowledge of their acts and from their own emotion, and their internal landscape fills with partitions, caves, minefields, blank spots, pit traps, and more, a landscape turned against itself, a landscape that does not know itself, a landscape through which they may not travel. You see the not-knowing in wars in which the reality of death, the warm, messy, excruciating dismemberment of bodies, the blood and the screams, and the unbearable bereavement of survivors, is abstracted into collateral damage or statistics or overlooked altogether, or in which the enemy is recategorized as nonhuman.
– Rebecca Solnit
It is the act of an ill-instructed man to blame others for his own bad condition; it is the act of one who has begun to be instructed, to lay the blame on himself; and of one whose instruction is completed, neither to blame another, nor himself.
– Epictetus, The Enchiridion
The reason you can’t walk through that wall is not because the wall is solid, but because you are.
– Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche
The difference between real material poison and intellectual poison is that most material poison is disgusting to the taste, but intellectual poison, which takes the form of cheap newspapers or bad books, can unfortunately sometimes be attractive.
– Tolstoy
Cioran, reading your tweets: “If you’re suffering so much why haven’t you become lyrical?”
– Elisa Gabbert
Lots of people who are super identified with their cognitive minds are blown away by AI right now.
Most others are like “Great, the nerds broke society, more worse, guess I’ll go outside and put my feet in the grass whilst I can.”
– @VinceFHorn
I doubt there is a magical spark of consciousness that inhabits humans, but not other things.
More likely, consciousness inhabits or perhaps gives rise to everything, and so far the only things complex enough to talk about it are humans and AIs.
– @KennethFolk
West, above
black trees, moon
a gold coin
on purple cloth
– Kim Dorman
But now, as one wanders aimlessly on the rubble, one knows it. One knows that only the mind can provide warmth now & that one is not at all accustomed to being warmed by the mind.
– Wittgenstein; tr. Alfred Nordmann
I grew up in a place where everybody was a storyteller, but nobody wrote. It was that kind of Celtic, storytelling tradition: everybody would have a story at the pub or at parties, even at the clubs and raves.
– Irvine Welsh
The essence of liberalism is an attempt to secure a social order not based on irrational dogma, and insuring stability without involving more restraints than are necessary for the preservation of the community.
– Bertrand Russell
You could grow up in the city where history was made and still miss it all.
– Jonathan Lethem
The life so short, the craft so long to learn.
– Hippocrates
Profit is the payment you get when you take advantage of change.
– Joseph A. Schumpeter
Couscous is really a pasta and cucumber is really a fruit.
Nothing is as it seems in the matrix.
– Ethan Nichtern
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
If it came to be that each man did what he must, existence would be saved in each one without there being any need of dreaming of a paradise where all would be reconciled in death.
– Simone de Beauvoir
What I wish would come back: coffeehouses. People going to coffeehouses. Friends just going to just chat and have conversations. That, I miss.
– Jennifer Aniston
Like the Trees
You have been waiting for the body to say,
This is not an emergency, you are safe.
And when it finally does, in a whisper
you almost don’t believe, you can breathe
a full breath again, and then another,
at last trusting the open arms of trees,
even their menacing shadows at midnight.
Now you know everything that grows must
also feel pain, must fear and doubt until they
sense this same quickening, like sap rising
up in the trunk and spreading through
each limb. You have lived as if underground,
but now you are breaking open, breaking
free, becoming so vast and green, you make
a shady place for others to rest in.
– James Crews
God doesn’t want,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
Jesus is a homeless man,
the old monk told
the prosperity Christians.
– The Old Monk
What God is asking of you
isn’t much in the big scheme,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
You can
think about God
and be astounded
or you can
stay off the mountain,
the old monk told
his students.
– The Old Monk
But beware the monstrous tenderness, for out of it
The same blunt archives loom.
– John Ashbery
I have enormous sympathy for people who don’t want to do things
– Kelly Link
Did you notice that Ireland are replacing their 45-year old leader with a 37-year old? It’s not impossible to choose someone younger than 70.
– @MarkgZero
ABECEDARIAN FOR ALABAMA LIBRARIES
by Pamela Manasco
Alder to ash: what can be sacrificed,
boned, defanged, let it be. Burn it to
cinders to keep children civil.
Don’t end until not only paper’s
extinguished, but cards & computers, too.
Florida can’t win this heat. Don’t forget
gardens—sensory, learning—the kids’ tract,
hay mulched over marigold seeds
in the beds too early, and inside,
juried tables of books for belonging.
Keep matches to snuff out even
labels, hands that write, seed-like ideas—
maybe then it will be enough.
Never fix the broken down bridge
over Selma, unwalkable routes to food
pantries, potholes blowing tires, unfeeling,
quiet. Never pay the school lunch debts
rolling month to month. Why must we feed
starving children? Make sure they’re born,
that’s your job done. Do all in your power
until you have it all, so we look back with
vertigo at everything you took from us with
white noise. Don’t pay for college, for
Xanax, for unkillable hospital bills, and
years from now, we will not be 50th but
zero, praying daily at your altar.
Now, make a promise—
That you won’t ever part from me.
I’ll bear all your tantrums
If only you’d return and see.
– Mumtaz Mirza
The Changing Light
The changing light at San Francisco
is none of your East Coast light
none of your
pearly light of Paris
The light of San Francisco
is a sea light
an island light
And the light of fog
blanketing the hills
drifting in at night
through the Golden Gate
to lie on the city at dawn
And then the halcyon late mornings
after the fog burns off
and the sun paints white houses
with the sea light of Greece
with sharp clean shadows
making the town look like
it had just been painted
But the wind comes up at four o’clock
sweeping the hills
And then the veil of light of early evening
And then another scrim
when the new night fog
floats in
And in that vale of light
the city drifts
anchorless upon the ocean
– Lawrence Ferlinghetti
to you alone, whose more refined spirits out-wing these dull times, and soar above the drudgery of dirty intelligence, have i made sacred these fancies: i know the years, and what coarse entertainment they afford poetry.
– henry vaughan
My films are about ideals that clash with the world. Everytime it’s a man in the lead, they have forgotten about the ideals. And everytime it’s a woman in the lead, they take the ideals all the way.
– Lars Von Trier
We are Earth everything that gives us shelter and sustenance, all the objects we possess, indeed every atom and molecule of our flesh bound shells comes from Earth and will return to Earth. To know our home then is to know a part of ourselves.
– Robert Hazen
BACH IN THE DC SUBWAY
by David Lee Garrison
As an experiment,
the Washington Post
asked a concert violinist—
wearing jeans, tennis shoes,
and a baseball cap—
to stand near a trash can
at rush hour in the subway
and play Bach
on a Stradivarius.
Partita No. 2 in D Minor
called out to commuters
like an ocean to waves,
sung to the station
about why we should bother
to live.
A thousand people
streamed by. Seven of them
paused for a minute or so
and thirty-two dollars floated
into the open violin case.
A café hostess who drifted
over to the open door
each time she was free
said later that Bach
gave her peace,
and all the children,
all of them,
waded into the music
as if it were water,
listening until they had to be
rescued by parents
who had somewhere else to go.
Rest is a powerful mystery that fools entropy by seeming to surrender to it. Like plants in the winter and animals who hibernate, the resting cease from the conscious effort of physical action and perception in order to generate new energy instead of spending it. Rather than just turning off, our brains go into alpha and delta states associated with longer term brain waves. Freeing our minds from material concerns, we can look at the bigger pictures of our lives. Though we don’t consciously remember most of these experiences, they revive one’s enduring sense of a continuous identity. If we are not able to tap into this resource pool of ongoing purpose and value – whether through dreams, faith, or whatever matters to you – the stress of being purposefully in control is too exhausting.
While detachment helps us to sleep, to heal, and even to die, it also opens us to new possibilities. For every kind of a creature, the detachment of healing rhythms of rest and renewal are the most basic medicine for being alive. Whether you’re relieved to be finishing a job, releasing in orgasmic togetherness, or restfully nursing a wounded limb, a good sense of detachment comes in handy. This Healer within us not only enables our physical selves to relax and release, but also our mental and emotional ways of being. Whether detaching from dysfunctional habits, beliefs, or other kinds of stresses, such skills of detachment can restore us to life, on the one hand, or detach us from our bodies, on the other. One way or the other, the sweetness of release carries the great Sweet Medicine* of forgiveness that is crucial to renewal. Even the best parts of you can detract from how you feel, if you don’t give them a rest sometimes.
– George Gorman
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
Once, when I was describing to a friend from Syracuse, New York, a place on the plains that I love, a ridge above a glacial moraine with a view of almost fifty miles, she asked, “But what is there to see?” The answer, of course, is nothing. Land, sky, and the ever-changing light.
– Kathleen Norris
Unbound
The book, green leather,
gold letters,
kept its years in silence
in my book case,
until, in a quieter time,
I took it down,
and Epictetus spoke of Socrates,
and Socrates remembered a small debt,
and then the binding broke.
– Alan Smith Soto
All romantics meet the same fate some day.
Drunk and cynical and boring
someone in some dark cafe.
– Joni Mitchell
Color As Beginning
by Richard Brautigan
Forget love
I want to die
in your yellow hair
Why are scholars mean to each other?
– Julie Carr
Will you drop all your prejudices, all your opinions about what you are, what you are not, what you should be, so that you have a free, uncluttered mind?
– Krishnamurti
In the end he (the Buddha) came to the realization that suffering is not caused by ill fortune, by social injustice, or by divine whims. Rather, suffering is caused by the behavior patterns of one’s own mind.
– Yuval Noah Harari
…politicians are much slower
than the people they
want to lead.
– Hunter S. Thompson
WHILE YOU’RE AT IT
As long as you’re closing the Window of Vulnerability
would you mind shutting that door of paranoia
And while you’re at it, would you mind
sweeping the carpet of disdain.
And then there’s the container of trash to carry out
When you’re finished with that
You might go to the kitchen where you’ll find
the skillet of rashness. Uh,
just throw in a few slices of the bacon of compatibility
and fry well.
– Ed Dorn
Empaths seriously notice everything. Subliminal disses, changed energy, different tones, body language, shit they can even tell tone through texts. Can you?
– @Stopworkplacebu
The question here, really, is what have we done to democracy? What have we turned it into? What happens once democracy has been used up? When it has been hollowed out and emptied of meaning?
– Arundhati Roy
A day at the office:
nothing to remind me
it’s snowing
– Richard Tice
scent of rain
all the ways
we failed each other
– Nora Wood
a journey starts
with a single
google search
– Daily Haiku
silver-blue skies . . .
spring first comes
in name only
– @ruralitalics
I seldom know where I’m headed, but if the story is meant to be, you cross over to the other side—you’re inside it, and there’s an engine.
– Jhumpa Lahiri
I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing.
– Herman Melville
The proof of creation is laughter.
It is a marvel to feel the innumerable vibrations of the soul make themselves, collect themselves, crystallize themselves into words.
– Hélène Cixous
The wind decided nothing was more important than dragging the heady scent of wisteria into every uncovered nostril on my street.
– Alina Stefanescu
light rain
the postman’s bike
outside the shop
– Alison Williams
Inspiration is a sort of spontaneous combustion—the oily rags of the head and heart.
– Stanley Elkin
blackout—
nothing between me
and the night
– Adelaide B. Shaw
… since there’s blue inside the green, you know the novelty may leave, whatever the waves will bring, the shore receives, you can never be too much
– @MrJacobBanks
You can’t write poetry
when you’re thinking about music,
the old monk warned the poet.
– The Old Monk
earth hour…
threading beads
by moonlight
– Cynthia Rowe
Here are springs, O my beloved.
Here are springs;
– Ameen Rihani
Random reminder: You don’t grow the economy through trickle down economics.
You grow the economy by investing in workers: their education, health care, child care, transportation, and job training.
– Robert Reich
I respect the moon’s unwillingness to be photographed with a cell phone.
– @itsdbouts
gun-talk in the store-
i bought another paint-brush
to color flowers
– Amrao Gill
Vote! You deserve limbo, not war.
– Chia-Lun Chang
If it’s in gold letters
and spelled L_U_V
it probably isn’t
the real thing,
the old monk warned.
– The Old Monk
slow dance
the thin fabric
between us
– Tom Painting
If there’s nothing out the windows, look at books.
– Lyn Hejinian
I cannot become modest; too many things burn in me.
– Elias Canetti
The world is a staircase… Some go up and some come down. We must ascend.
– Annie Proulx
Like-mindedness makes friendship.
– Democritus
The blue arch beneath the smoky cloud.
The crisp ring of the ponies’ hooves . . .
The patter of dog pads.
The gentle flutter of our canvas shelter.
Its deep booming sound under the full force of a blizzard.
– Robert Falcon Scott
two lines in the water . . .
not a word between
father and son
– Randy M. Brooks
tall grass
both teams lose track
of the score
– Christopher Patchel
home alone
the teapot whistles
a single note
– @YourMoonliness
To the person who believes this – as the western world did up until a few centuries ago – this physical, sensible world is good because it proceeds from a divine source. The artist usually knows this by instinct; his senses, which are used to penetrating the concrete, tell him so.
The artist penetrates the concrete world in order to find at its depths the image of its source, the image of ultimate reality. This in no way hinders his perception of evil but rather sharpens it, for only when the natural world is seen as good does evil become intelligible as a destructive force and a necessary result of our freedom.
– Flannery O’Connor
I never wondered. I read. Dark signs
that crawled toward the edge of the page.
It took me years to grow a heart
from paper and glue. All I had
was a flashlight, bright as the moon,
a white hole blazing beneath the sheets.
– Dorianne Laux
You don’t need to believe in ghosts to balance spirit and live the right way in this world. You can use any metaphor you like—for example, ego, id, superego, and persona. Frontal lobe, monkey brain, neocortex, and lizard brain. Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and d’Artagnan. Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Malfoy. Monkey spirit, Pig spirit, Fish spirit, and Tripitaka. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Whatever stories your cultural experience offers you, you can still perceive spirit through metaphor and bring it into balance to step into your designated role as a custodian of reality. Some new cultures keep asking, “Why are we here?” It’s easy. This is why we’re here. We look after things on the earth and in the sky and the places in between.
– Tyson Yunkaporta
If you don’t hear the interval between the tones in music, you don’t hear the melody. You hear nothing but a succession of noises. So, in the same way, if you don’t hear the interval—that is to say, that aspect of life which is unconscious, that which is death, and so on—if you don’t see the importance of that, you become deaf and insensitive to the music of the spheres—that is to say, to the sense of life.
– Alan Watts
I never seemed to like the spring for what it was; I always loved it for what it might have been. In the head. In the heart of hearts. It is in my ability, I think, to love something fully only if I am naturally, compulsively, irrationally drawn to it.
– Anne Sexton
I have observed dreams and visions very carefully, and am now certain that the imagination has some way of lighting on the truth that the reason has not: its commandments, delivered when the body is still and the reason silent, are the most binding we can ever know.
– WB Yeats
Try to find the part of you that is capable of noticing that your mind is hyperactive… That part is your way out. There is no way out through building this model of yours. The only way to inner freedom is through the one who watches: the Self.
– Michael Singer
On a Passenger Ferry
in memory of Grace Paley
The deck is big, and crowded. In one corner,
an old woman, sick, on chemo, not in pain, is
writing in an elementary school notebook.
Nobody else saw her, but I saw her.
I had seen her before. Her round, kind face,
smiling and still as a photograph
outside a window—
– Jean Valentine
If you are ever tempted to look for outside approval, realize that you have compromised your integrity. If you need a witness, be your own.
– Epictetus
I like listening to music far away — you hear it wrong. You hear it mixed in with everything else. I usually try to step back so things are a little blurred like water stains on the wallpaper . . . You thought it was part of the design, but it’s not.
– Tom Waits
I am in the world, but I don’t desire the world.
I have passed by the bazaar, but I am not a customer.
– Akbar Allahabadi
We are, you and me,
Like two pine needles
Which will dry and fall
But never separate.
– Anon. (Kenneth Rexroth)
Finance represents command over our collective productive capacities. This power should absolutely be democratically controlled, and invested with the sole purpose of achieving urgent social and ecological goals.
– Jason Hickel
Conquer anger with lack of anger; bad with good; stinginess with a gift; a liar with truth.
– Tara Anand
Ode to Nicanor Parra
I don’t like long hikes,
I can stand the beach.
Not when it’s crowded.
Fine dining is for degenerates.
The Capitalist Orchestra
never did much impress me.
Winter is no reason to ice-skate
downtown. Keep away, I’ll do the same.
No, I don’t want to get coffee.
What good would that do?
Often, in red, in rainfall, I sit in the rain.
Once words were worth more
than management skills. Fame is
you got it all, why ask? Why pretend
to seek some sort of truth,
what good would that do?
– Jose Hernandez Diaz
If you’re not working in your traditional language, you are working in the colonial language, an automatic influence.
– Louise Erdrich
For a while
Let it be enough:
The responsive smile,
Though effort goes into it.
– Weldon Kees
Take a piece of paper. A pen. And draw your life. In most instances we draw a line, slicing the paper into a linear horizon, a thrust of causality, segmented by birthdays, achievements, graduations, marriages, illnesses. There’s a lot of talk about how in Western culture, we’ve discarded the rites of initiation that provide true transformation, instead enshrining capitalism’s weak substitutions like the buying of a car or a house. But our desire for real initiations still often depends on a clear demarcation of before and after. A syntactical structure where one word leads naturally to next, punctuation cleaves breath pinned to paper, leaving accumulated meaning in its wake. My life is not straight and it does not make sense read left to right. It is reticulated, queered by encounters and events that I could not plan for or understand with any human frame of reference. I like to think of my life as a territory that is being continually redrawn – where one event, no matter its location on a linear timeline, pulls all the other events into different topographical formations and physical elevations. Let me ask you again to draw your life but now with a slight shift in perspective. Do not draw a line. Draw a map of the encounters you have had with animals, insects, birds, weather systems, microbes that have metamorphically rearranged your matter. Draw a constellation of these encounters. What shape does your life take on when it is no longer articulated by the grammar of human progress?
– Sophie Strand
The sudden undertow of that which must be left behind.
– Sharmistha Mohanty
Keep awake, alive, new. Perform the paradox of being hard and yet soft. Survive without calcification of the tender membranes. Be a poet. Be alive.
– Tennessee Williams
My poems are meeting places.
– Tomas Tranströmer
The wind that names
the tumbleweed, names its purpose,
calls it by the way it moves.
– Iris Cushing
It is a special kind of enlightenment to have this feeling that the usual, the way things normally are, is odd – uncanny and highly improbable. G. K. Chesterton once said that it is one thing to be amazed at a gorgon or a griffin, creatures which do not exist; but it is quite another and much higher thing to be amazed at a rhinoceros or a giraffe, creatures which do exist and look as if they don’t. This feeling of universal oddity includes a basic and intense wondering about the sense of things. Why, of all possible worlds, this colossal and apparently unnecessary multitude of galaxies in a mysteriously curved space-time continuum, these myriads of differing tube-species playing frantic games of one-upmanship, these numberless ways of “doing it” from the elegant architecture of the snow crystal or the diatom to the startling magnificence of the lyrebird or the peacock?
– Alan Watts
The purpose of yoga is to facilitate a profound
inner relaxation that accompanies fearlessness.
The release from fear is what finally
precipitates a full flowering of love.
– Erich Schiffmann
Human history can be viewed as a shared dawning awareness that we are members of a larger ecosystem. Initially our loyalties were to ourselves and our immediate family, next, to bands of wandering hunter-gatherers, then to tribes, small settlements, city-states, and nations.
Now we have broadened the circle of those we love. We have organized ourselves into super-powers… larger groups of people from divergent ethnic and cultural backgrounds working in some sense together… surely a humanizing and character building experience.
But if we are to survive much longer on this planet, our loyalties must be broadened further, to include the whole of humanity and the whole of planet Earth. Many of those who run our nations will find this idea unpleasant. They will fear the loss of power. We will hear much about treason and disloyalty. Rich nation-states will have to share their wealth with poor ones. But the choice, as H. G. Wells once said, is clearly… the universe or nothing.”
– Carl Sagan
The road to wisdom? — Well, it’s plain
and simple to express:
Err
and err
and err again
but less
and less
and less.
Put up in a place
where it’s easy to see
the cryptic admonishment
T.T.T.
When you feel how depressingly
slowly you climb,
it’s well to remember that
Things Take Time.
– Piet Hein
From the wind, I learned a syntax for forwardness, how to move through obstacles by wrapping myself around them. You can make it home this way.
– Ocean Vuong
The angel is free because of his knowledge, the beast because of his ignorance.
Between the two remains the son of man to struggle.
– Rumi
Sometimes at the birth and death of a day, the opal sky is no color we have words for, the gold shading into blue without the intervening green that is halfway between those colors, the fiery warm colors that are not apricot or crimson or gold, the light morphing second by second so that the sky is more shades of blue than you can count as it fades from where the sun is to the far side where other colors are happening.
If you look away for a moment you miss a shade for which there will never be a term, and it is transformed into another and another. The names of the colors are sometimes cages containing what doesn’t belong there, and this is often true of language generally, of the words like woman, man, child, adult, safe, strong, free, true, black, white, rich, poor. We need the words, but use them best knowing they are containers forever spilling over and breaking open. Something is always beyond.
– Rebecca Solnit
Here’s what no one can teach–except time, I guess. Time can teach you this: The greatest asset you can have is a steely patience, an ever-present calm, as the money disappears; the studio caves; the star bails; the writer goes into hiding; the stock market collapses; your standing in the community withers. And you just calmly keep making notes or rehearsing or believing–whatever it is you do to maintain a belief in yourself and your work. And very few people have this, and I think that everyone who has had a long career–full of all this insanity and uncertainty–has this gift. It can be developed, but no one teaches it to you or tells you where to go buy it or study it. You have to dig it out of yourself.
– Arthur Penn
The moon is queen of everything. She rules the oceans, rivers, rain. When I am asked whose tears these are; I always blame the moon.
– Lucille Clifton
We are surrounded by those that, like the wolf, will use their jaws, if you give the elective franchise to the descendants of the traitors, and keep it from the black man.
– Frederick Douglass
A Prayer For Old Age
by William Butler Yeats
God guard me from those thoughts men think
In the mind alone;
He that sings a lasting song
Thinks in a marrow-bone;
From all that makes a wise old man
That can be praised of all;
O what am I that I should not seem
For the song’s sake a fool?
I pray — for word is out
And prayer comes round again —
That I may seem, though I die old,
A foolish, passionate man.
It’s easy to identify with all the places we’ve been hurt and abandoned, but can we identify with the timeless wholeness that weathers every condition? If we can’t, we may spend this life protecting ourselves and never risk really living.
– Bonnie Myotai Treace
When one hears about another person’s physical pain, the events happening within the interior of that person’s body may seem to have the remote character of some deep subterranean fact, belonging to an invisible geography that, how- ever portentous, has no reality because it has not yet manifested itself on the visible surface of the earth. Or alternatively, it may seem as distant as the interstellar events referred to by scientists who speak to us mysteriously of not yet detectable intergalactic screams’ or of “very distant Seyfert galaxies, a class of objects within which violent events of unknown nature occur from time to time.’ Vaguely alarming yet unreal, laden with consequence yet evaporating before the mind because not available to sensory confirmation, unseeable classes of objects such as subterranean plates, Seyfert galaxies, and the pains occurring in other people’s bodies flicker before the mind, then disappear. Physical pain happens, of course, not several miles below our feet or many miles above our heads but within the bodies of persons who inhabit the world through which we each day make our way, and who may at any moment be separated from us by only a space of several inches. The very temptation to invoke analogies to remote cosmologies (and there is a long tradition of such analogies) is itself a sign of pain’s triumph, for it achieves its aversiveness in part by bringing about, even within the radius of several feet, this absolute split
between one’s sense of one’s own reality and the reality of other persons.
– elaine scarry
To obtain the truth in life, we must discard all the ideas we were taught and reconstruct the entire system of our knowledge.
– Rene Descartes
What is your aim in philosophy? — To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.
– Wittgenstein
There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag — and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty — and vice versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.
– Doris Lessing
The sad truth is that musicals are the only public art form reviewed mostly by ignoramuses. Books are reviewed by writers, the visual arts by disappointed, if knowledgeable, painters and art students, concert music by composers and would-be composers. Plays, at least in this country, are reviewed by people who don’t know de Montherlant from de Ghelderode and couldn’t care less, whose knowledge is comprised of what they read in Variety and gossip columns, and who know nothing, of course, about music. Musicals continue to be the only art form, popular or otherwise, that is publicly criticized by illiterates.
Stephen Sondheim has stated that his original ambition was to become a mathematician and that he became a composer largely by chance. A big influence was the fact that famed lyricist Oscar Hammerstein (of Rodgers & Hammerstein) was a neighbor of his when Sondheim was a boy. When he wrote a musical for a school production, he showed it to Hammerstein who told him it was the worst musical he had ever read. However, Hammerstein also told him that nonetheless it showed a lot of latent talent and proceeded to tell him everything that was wrong with it and how to fix it, for which Sondheim was always grateful.
Oscar Hammerstein had urged me to write from my own sensibility, but at that time I had no sensibility, no take on the world. My voice snuck up on me. I started to develop an attitude in ‘Saturday Night,’ a laconic lyrical style in ‘Gypsy’ and a structurally experimental musical one in ‘Anyone Can Whistle.’ They all came together in full-throated fruition in ‘Company.’ ‘Oh,’ I thought at the end of the opening number, ‘that’s who I am.’ From then on I could afford to try anything, because I knew I had a home base that was mine alone and that would inform everything I would write, good and bad.
“ust before he died, he gave me a picture of himself and I asked him to inscribe it, which is sort of odd because he was a surrogate father to me, it’s like asking your father to inscribe a picture. And he thought for a minute, and he was clearly a little embarrassed. And then he got a smile on his face, like the cat had just eaten the cream. And he wrote something. And when he left the room, I looked at it. And it said ‘For Stevey, my friend and teacher.’ That’s a measure of Oscar. He wrote a lyric, as a matter of fact, in ‘The King and I’ -‘By your pupils, you are taught.’ He was a remarkable fellow.
A musical based on the memoirs of Gypsy Rose Lee was a project of producer David Merrick and actress Ethel Merman. Merrick had read a chapter of Lee’s memoirs in Harper’s Magazine and approached Lee to obtain the rights. Jerome Robbins was interested, and wanted Leland Hayward as co-producer; Merman also wanted Hayward to produce her next show. Merrick and Hayward approached Arthur Laurents to write the book. As he relates, Laurents initially was not interested until he saw that the story was one of parents living their children’s lives. Composers Irving Berlin and Cole Porter declined the project. Finally, Robbins asked Sondheim, who agreed to do it (Sondheim had worked with Robbins and Laurents on the musical “West Side Story”). However, Merman did not want an “unknown” composer, and wanted Jule Styne to write the music. Although Sondheim initially refused to write only the lyrics, he was persuaded by Hammerstein to accept the job.
“Gypsy” opened on Broadway in May of 1959, and is frequently considered one of the crowning achievements of the mid-twentieth century’s conventional musical theatre art form, often called the book musical. “Gypsy” has been referred to as the greatest American musical by numerous critics and writers, among them Ben Brantley (“what may be the greatest of all American musicals…”) and Frank Rich. The role of Mama Rose was played by Rosalind Russell in the 1962 film version; the closest Merman got to recreating her stage success on the big screen was in the hospital scene in “Airplane!” (1980) (she starts belting out “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” and has to be sedated).
Sondheim on the song ‘Everything’s Coming Up Roses’ from “Gypsy”: “The difficulty was to find a way to say ‘Things are going to be better than ever’ without being flatly colloquial on the one hand or fancifully imagistic on the other. I was proud of the solution, and especially so when I picked up the New York Times one morning in 1968 and read the first sentence in the leading editorial: ‘Everything is not coming up roses in Vietnam.’ I had passed a phrase into the English language.
– Cinema Shorthand Society
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
But when first the two black dragons sprang out of the fog upon the small clerk, they had merely the effect of all miracles – they changed the universe. He discovered the fact that all romantics know – that adventures happen on dull days, and not on sunny ones. When the cord of monotony is stretched most tight, it it breaks with a sound like song.
– G. K. Chesterton
Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)
– E. E. Cummings
A truly sensual woman is a multidimensional muse.
– Lebo Grand
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles
– Frank O’Hara
Be like water, not luxurious
but valuable for life.
– Thinking Minds
If you want to know how pathetically and willfully ignorant MAGA people are, they’re seriously out there asking people if they’re better off now than they were four years ago.
Yeah, bring back that -3% GDP and 14% unemployment.
Here’s our own personal story. Feel free to add yours in the comments.
Four years ago I got laid off two weeks before lockdown.
In addition, I lost my family’s health insurance seven days later when the end of the month arrived.
We had the option of COBRA or MassHealth, the least expensive of which cost $1600/mo for a family of four for less coverage than we had when I was employed, which was an awesome expenditure to pay for when you no longer have a job and are facing a global pandemic. Felt great. No stress at all.
Then, on March 11 of 2020, the President took to the airwaves with an address about the coronavirus. Literally everything that came out of his mouth was wrong. People in the room had to put out clarifications and corrections BEFORE THIS IDIOT EVEN STOPPED TALKING. Immediately following his speech, the Futures market absolutely cratered, taking about 30% of our retirement savings with it.
During his reign, my retirement investments never gained more than about 5% per year. 2020 was obviously MUCH worse, but it was NEVER great.
In 2023, my IRA made 14%. Over the course of the last three years, it has averaged much better than it did when Trump was in office, even with the shitty performance of 2022.
OH, and we got fucked on taxes because we are middle class people living in a blue state and his rich guy tax cuts came at our specific expense.
The only people that saw a cut here were those who made over $1 million, who enjoyed 51.6% of the tax cuts enacted by that asshole.
According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, whether you voted red, blue or Vermin Supreme, people in our state and income bracket experienced a 0.9% tax cut (equating approximately $100/mo) while those earning over $1 million got 7.3%.
Not long after Biden was sworn in, I got the best full-time gig of my career. Lisa also got a great job with the Commonwealth protected by a strong union, so we now have good health insurance whether I get laid off or not.
Beyond the xehophobia, racism, sexism, homophobia and flat out fascism, that fucking ignoramus personally cost my family about $40k during the time he was in office.
So yes, much better off. By every possible measure
– Craig Fitzgerald
Jung was primarily interested in where you were going to and Freud was primarily interested in where you came from.
– Joe Wheelwright
Recent emphasis on ego-cide or ego death is apt to miss the essential point, for these terms imply a consciously willed event. The truly transformative death comes usually unbidden if not unwelcome, happening to us and in spite of us. It is an autonomous and archetypal process, a movement of the spirit in the realm of myth and ritual. The nature of the archetypal centre [Self] is to undergo cyclic rounds of birth, death, and resurrection. People of ancient or archaic cultures understood this. Yet it has become alien to us moderns who are enamoured of linear progress [if there is any such thing] or of an abiding presence that somehow manages to avoid the cyclic world of nature.
– John Weir Perry
Or maybe people DO understand what’s happening, but they’re murmuring soothing denials to protect their children?
– Kenneth Folk
Not Horses
What I adore is not horses, with their modern
domestic life span of 25 years. What I adore
is a bug that lives only one day, especially if
it’s a terrible day, a day of train derailment or
chemical lake or cop admits to cover-up, a day
when no one thinks of anything else, least of all
that bug. I know how it feels, born as I’ve been
into these rotting times, as into sin. Everybody’s
busy, so distraught they forget to kill me,
and even that won’t keep me alive. I share
my home not with horses, but with a little dog
who sees poorly at dusk and menaces stumps,
makes her muscle known to every statue.
I wish she could have a single day of language,
so that I might reassure her don’t be afraid-
our whole world is dead and so can do you no harm.
– Natalie Shapiro
You don’t necessarily have to write to be a poet. Some people work in gas stations and they’re poets. I don’t call myself a poet, because I don’t like the word. I’m a trapeze artist.
– Bob Dylan
I have to surrender [hatred] every time I become aware of it. This will not go well, I know. But I don’t want my life’s ending to be that I was toxic and self-righteous, and I don’t know if my last day here will be next Thursday or in twenty years.
– Anne Lamott
Here
In the dark
(the new moon long set)
A soft grumble in the breeze
Is the sound of a jet so high
It’s already long gone by
some planet
Rising from the east shines
Through the trees
It’s been years since I thought
Why are we here?
– Gary Snyder
Every time I see some fucker driving a pick-up truck I’m reminded that our society has sold its soul & all the world’s children have been left to pay the price.
– Climate Dad
Unfortunately, we don’t carry things through to the very end. That is why we are all mediocre. Forgive me for saying this.
– Krishnamurti
A metaphor is a species of symbol. So it’s a lover.
– Anne Carson
Once we have burned our brains out, we can plunge
to Hell or Heaven—any abyss will do—
deep in the Unknown to find the new!
– Charles Baudelaire
But I was not made for the great light that devours, a dim lamp was all I had been given, and patience without end, to shine it on the empty shadows.
– Samuel Beckett
Sometimes you wake up from a dream and you have no idea what the metaphor means, but you feel whole because emotion, imagination & intellect have been brought together. The experience becomes a touchstone because you have experienced wholeness. That’s where healing begins.
– Marion Woodman
I don’t know why modern culture looks down on people who live a quiet life. We assume that those chasing constant adventures and new relationships and career changes have the most to teach. But maybe we have the most to learn from people who are satisfied with simple comforts.
– Freya India
Samuel Johnson is palmed off in classrooms as a harmless drudge of a lexicographer, yet open the Dictionary anywhere and find precision and eloquent plainness.
– Guy Davenport
Children react much less to what grown-ups say than to the imponderables in the surrounding atmosphere. The child unconsciously adapts himself to them, this produces in him correlations of a compensatory nature.
– C.G. Jung
arboretum
old words ripple
beneath an oak tree
– James Welsh
I never understood the big deal they make about being born in one place rather than another when there are so many nice places to call home.
– Charles Simic
I’m with you, I say. The only
exception is heartbreak;
when you’re deep in it
you just want a late-night
DJ to spin your pain.
– Erika Meitner
Decadence all over and plosions of petals on sidewalks. Spring doing its illustrious thing-ing everywhere. I gawk.
– Alina Stefanescu
grey autumn day
old toad is back
in the leaky shed
– Carla Sari
I touch you knowing we weren’t born tomorrow,
and somehow, each of us will help the other live,
and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.
– Adrienne Rich
I’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
– Seamus Heaney
As soon as you present a problem to me, I have some ready-made answer. Those ready-made answers get in the way of clear thinking, and we can’t help but have them.
– Daniel Kahneman
Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.
– Louis L’Amour
Seneca argued that rage cannot be useful, and indeed degrades the individual who suers it. He also opposed retributive punishments. But the Christian tradition rejected Seneca and accepted retribution and just anger.
– Frank Kermode
Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don’t I? I’m just like a pile of leaves.
– Frank O’Hara
The Fact of a Doorframe
means there is something to hold
onto with both hands
while slowly thrusting my forehead against the wood
and taking it away
one of the oldest motions of suffering
as Makeba sings
a courage-song for warriors
music is suffering made powerful
I think of the story
of the goose-girl who passed through the high gate
where the head of her favorite mare
was nailed to the arch
and in a human voice
If she could see thee now, thy mother’s heart would break
said the head
of Falada
Now, again, poetry,
violent, arcane, common,
hewn of the commonest living substance
into archway, portal, frame
I grasp for you, your bloodstained splinters, your
ancient and stubborn poise
—as the earth trembles—
burning out from the grain
– Adrienne Rich
SPRING
I call it exile, or being relegated.
I call it the provinces.
And all the time it is my heart.
My imperfect heart which prefers
this distance from people. Prefers
the half-meetings which cannot lead
to intimacy. Provisional friendships
that are interrupted near the beginning.
A pleasure in not communicating.
And inside, no despair or longing.
A taste for solitude. The knowledge
that love preserves freedom in always
failing. An exile by nature. Where,
indeed, would I ever be a citizen?
– Jack Gilbert
The thought of two things that merge, mutually altering each other, two things that, intermingled and interactive, become one thing that does not age, brings me to think of the nature of intimacy. Isn’t it often in our most intimate relations that we come to realize that our identity, all identity, is combinatory?
– Forest Gander
As a psychotechnology, zazen is starving the left hemisphere/ego/myopic grasping objectifying optimizing dualist mind of input. Over time, that lets the right hemisphere/holistic embedded nondual mind become the focal point of our experience.
– Iain McGilchrist
waking from a dream
of Sweden
the sound of geese
– Sandra Simpson
I’m not convinced people have to go to school. I’m not convinced people have to be literate. I’m sort of entirely against the educational system as it is at the moment.
– Alice Notley
above the noise
another poem
about silence
– @pauldavidmena
Great fullness seems empty.
– Tao Te Ching
behind the deli counter
my grandfather’s dreams
sliced thin
– S. M. Abeles
… and no matter how
this afternoon glows, the eye
fixes itself right there …
– @jackbedell
This Beautiful Planet
by Dorothea Lasky
Please tell me that I was a good child
And that I did everything right
And that the atmosphere was exactly certain
I want you to love me
In ways that you never have
So that I become a forgotten world
With rainbow sunrises over dark green trees
And the cooling of the day
Becomes normal again
We will sit and watch the body of water
That we once called a sort of death
You know even in my dreams
You say I’ll never get it right
This is not a dream
We are burning here with no escape
But no matter how many times
They talk about the moon
It does not take a poet
To know that the moon
Is still only an illusion
Only an illusion
The moon calls out to all of us
Come back, it says
But we don’t hear it
Already on our way
To somewhere
I sometimes wonder how we all get through this soap opera that is our life.
– Frank O’Hara
But blue will swallow black like a bell swallows silence to echo a grief that is hardly human.
– William H. Gass
Literature helps us give up mundanity. It allows us to sit with the shapeless morass of time by framing it on the page.
– Sarah Moorhouse
I am like a little anemone that I once saw in my garden in Rome. It had opened up so wide during the day that it could not close during the night!
– Rilke, (tr. Angela von der Lippe)
broken easel—
the front yard blue
with wildflowers
– Kathy Lippard Cobb
We assume that there are these smart people making AI, and therefore it’s right. But the reality is, there are going to be some really big errors. And unless we have ethics and verification helping us get through that layer of error, it’s going to create so much chaos in the world.
– Nicole Shanahan
winter stars
the fishing holes
left behind
– Yu Chang
the birds drew in my eyes
little cages
– Alejandra Pizarnik
Undergoing psychoanalytic treatment is, rather like reading a powerful work of literature, a leap into the relative dark.
– Adam Phillips
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.
To take up where you left off!
without a breath of separation
your new movement is begun.
The heart pulses on, developing
a future.
– Frank O’Hara
A poetry foundation is nothing without poets.
– Tara Skurtu
You don’t want to damn your characters, but you do keep quite a skeptical distance from them.
– Ann Beattie
Many of the migrants and refugees I’ve spoken to are unable to tell me precisely why they left; they believe their stories don’t really matter to others.
– Jérôme Tubiana
Everything he does is therapeutic.
– Nora Turato
There she is, a little woman polishing the stars, mopping up the spill of the Milky Way …
– Amber Burke
The real tragedy of the poor is the poverty of their aspirations.
– Adam Smith
If we cannot imagine, we cannot foresee…
– Gaston Bachelard
Blooming is falling open backwards
in a bright unknowing.
– David Bailey
I always found in myself a dread of the west and a love of the east.
– John Steinbeck
Dreams are communications from the Self—the guiding center of the personality. They let us know where we may be out of balance or have the wrong attitude. They speak to us in the mysterious language of image and metaphor.
– Lisa Marciano
When art dies, that’s when the world will ever come to an end.
– Frederick Phoenix
There is no time or space in the mind principle. Infinite mind or intelligence is present in its entirety at every point simultaneously.
– Dr. Joseph Murphy
He was quiet, but he held universes inside him. He was kind, but he knew all the words that did everlasting damage. He was a lover, but he had to fight self hatred—every, single, day.
– Frederick Phoenix
Age is not the flight of years; it is the dawn of wisdom in the mind of man.
– Dr. Joseph Murphy
A hateful or resentful thought is a mental poison. Do not think ill of another for to do so is to think ill of yourself. You are the only thinker in your universe, and your thoughts are creative.
– Dr. Joseph Murphy
Therapy is expensive, getting lost in the forest and becoming the thing that terrifies the townspeople is free.
– macabredarklingwanders@
In this busy old head of mine
Memories and rhymes get bound by twine,
And planted inside to grow as vine,
Blooming flowers of poetry.
– Mark Haptonstall
TODAY
by Frank O’Hara
Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!
You really are beautiful! Pearls,
harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! all
the stuff they’ve always talked about
still makes a poem a surprise!
These things are with us every day
even on beachheads and biers. They
do have meaning. They’re strong as rocks.
Now THAT I AM IN MADRID AND CAN THINK
by Frank O’Hara
I think of you
and the continents brilliant and arid
and the slender heart you are sharing my share of with the American air
as the lungs I have felt sonorously subside slowly greet each morning
and your brown lashes flutter revealing two perfect dawns colored by New York
see a vast bridge stretching to the humbled outskirts with only you
standing on the edge of the purple like an only tree
and in Toledo the olive groves’ soft blue look at the hills with silver
like glasses like and old ladies hair
it’s well known that God and I don’t get along together
it’s just a view of the brass works for me, I don’t care about the Moors
seen through you the great works of death, you are greater
you are smiling, you are emptying the world so we can be alone
Having met you [again]
it dawns on me o’ stranger, o’ friend
that you were my first love
and my final friend.
– Ahmad Faraz
Beauty in music is too often confused with some thing that lets the ears lie back in an easy chair. Mini sounds that we are used to do not bother us, and for that reason, we are inclined to call them beautiful.
– Charles Ives
an old argument . . .
scraping the burned rice
out of the pot
– Bob Lucky
You can be extremely smart but still have a very low level of consciousness. This is why it’s so dangerous to crown intellectual genius. What good is being super smart if you’re spiritually bankrupt and emotionally underdeveloped?
– Nika Solé
You do not have to be a catastrophe,
to prove that you are worth paying attention to
– Blythe Baird
Quite possibly there is no such thing as spiritual practice except stepping out of self-deception, stopping our struggle to get hold of spiritual states. Just give that up. Other than that there is no spirituality. It is a very desolate situation.
It is like living among snowcapped peaks with clouds wrapped around them and the sun and moon starkly shining over them. Below, tall alpine trees are swayed by strong howling winds and beneath them is a thundering waterfall. From our point of view, we may appreciate this desolation if we are an occasional tourist who photographs it or a mountain climber trying to climb to the mountain top.
But we do not really want to live in those desolate places. It’s no fun. It is terrifying, terrible. But it is possible to make friends with the desolation and appreciate its beauty.
Great sages like Milarepa relate to the desolation as their bride. They marry themselves to desolation, to the fundamental psychological aloneness. They do not need physical or psychological entertainment. Aloneness becomes their companion, their spiritual consort, part of their being. Where ever they go they are alone, whatever they do they are alone.
Whether they relate socially with friends or meditate alone or perform ceremonies together or meditate together, aloneness is there all the time. That aloneness is freedom, fundamental freedom. The aloneness is described as the marriage of shunyata and wisdom in which your perception of aloneness suggests the needlessness of dualistic occupation.
It is also described as the marriage of shunyata and compassion in which aloneness inspires compassionate action in living situations. Such a discovery reveals the possibility of cutting through the karmic chain reactions that recreate ego-oriented situations, because that aloneness or the space of desolation does not entertain you, does not feed you anymore.
– Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
Bigger than Jupiter
Bigger than the Sun
Delusion
– Unknown
The wrong partner
will set you back
Financially, Spiritually,
mentally, and physically.
– Unknown
You can be very wild and still be very wise.
– Yoko Ono
I would have called sooner
except there are too many lavender fields
balancing on my nose!
– Daniel Cyran
I think God is
wanting to be known
and my experience
of God wanting
to be known is
much more in the
Person who is
annoying me at the
moment rather than
in the sunset.
– Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber
the sheer weariness
of repeating everything
thunderstorms and war
– Suzanne Tyrpak
WILD JOY
The cloud road’s choked with deep mist. No one gets here that way,
but these Heaven-Terrace Mountains have always been my home:
a place to vanish among five-thousand-foot cliffs and pinnacles,
ten thousand creeks and gorges all boulder towers and terraces.
I follow streams in birch-bark cap, wooden sandals, tattered robes,
and clutching a goosefoot walking-stick, circle back around peaks.
Once you realize this floating life is the perfect mirage of change,
it’s breathtaking — this wild joy at wandering boundless and free.
– Han Shan
What beauty are those
who do not find their place
among so many people;
it is not loneliness,
it is a privilege not to fit in.
– Alejandra Pizarnik
For all healing, mental or material, is attuning each atom of the body, each reflex of the brain forces, to the awareness of the divine that lies within each atom, each cell of the body.
– Edgar Cayce
Social support is the most powerful protection against becoming overwhelmed by stress and trauma. Social support is not the same as merely being in the presence of others. The critical issue is reciprocity: being truly heard and seen by the people around us, feeling that we are held in someone else’s mind and heart. For our physiology to calm down, heal, and grow we need a visceral feeling of safety. No doctor can write a prescription for friendship and love: these are complex and hard-earned capacities.
– Bessel A. van der Kolk
December days were brief and chill,
The winds of March were wild and drear,
And, nearing and receding still,
Spring never would, we thought, be here.
– Arthur Hugh Clough
THROUGH THE GREEN DOOR
For Eva Sophia
I am one of eternity’s illegal aliens.
I have crossed time’s borders without proper papers.
Detained by the immigration officers of life and death, I have jumped across the chessboard of days.
Shrewd customs officials in search of valuable mementos have rummaged through my suitcase of shadows.
Nothing to declare. Nothing to regret.
I have made it through the green door
– Homero Aridjis
We should not try to ‘get rid’ of a neurosis, but rather to experience what it means, what it has to teach, what its purpose is. We should even learn to be thankful for it, otherwise we pass it by and miss the opportunity of getting to know ourselves as we really are.
– CG Jung
When I was small and easily wounded, books were my carapace. If I were recalled to my hurts in the middle of a book, they somehow mattered less. My corporeal life was slight; the dazzling one in my head was what really mattered. Returning to books was coming home.
– Lauren Groff
Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy, absentminded. Someone sober will worry about things going badly. Let the lover be.
– Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī
Perhaps in another life, I will be more likeable. Perhaps in another life, I will have mentally healthy parents and a stable extended family. Perhaps in another life, I will be taken more seriously. Perhaps in another life, I will have a personality that can truly bring about independence. Perhaps in another life, I will not complain.
– Frederick Phoenix
People who make a difference do not die alone. Something dies in everyone who was affected by them.
– Daniel Kahneman
Shall we educate ourselves in what is known, and then casting away all we have acquired, turn to ignorance for aid to guide us among the unknown?
– Michael Faraday
Just as madness, in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom, so it is the beginning of all art and all fantasy.
– Hermann Hesse
I wouldn’t trade my solitude for a little love.
For a lot of love, yes. But a lot of love
is itself a kind of solitude.
– Dulce María Loynaz
Let’s talk about how tiring it is to meet new people, introducing yourself again, narrating old experiences, giving nicknames, making memories, sharing your fave music and darkest secrets just to end up as strangers again.
– milaadamian@
Read, every day, something no one else is reading. It is bad for the mind to be always part of a unanimity.
– Christopher Morley
All obstacles now vanish from my pathway. Doors fly open, gates are lifted and I enter the Kingdom of fulfillment, under grace.
– Florence Scovel Shinn
Guilt is also arrogant because it means we have taken sides in an issue and are sure that we are right.
– Robert A. Johnson
If a man isn’t willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he’s no good.
– Ezra Pound
Expectation is the grandfather of disappointment.
The world can never own a man who wants nothing.
– Wu Hsin
No one who observed the first months of National Socialism could fail to perceive the moment of mortal sadness, of half-knowing surrender to perdition, that accompanied the manipulated intoxication…
– Adorno
Grass lives next to grass,
mud next to mud,
and in the wind live
storms, hurricanes,
and scent-laden gusts.
Unbroken, without knots,
the earth’s wind is one
with our breathing.
– Vinod Kumar Shukla
(tr. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra)
Christians still haven’t understood that God is further from people than people from him. I imagine a God bored beyond the edges of these people who only know how to ask, a God who are exsperated by the triviality of his creation, a disgust of earth and heaven.
– Emil Cioran
What is a blossom anyway
but a fist saying I can’t
do this
anymore
– Joseph Fasano
All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it.
– Thoreau on the Aeolian
The safest place to store important knowledge is in the bodies of your friends.
– Daniel Thorson
Wild how we call it biodiversity “loss” instead of biodiversity destruction. Biodiversity is not just spontaneously disappearing.
– Jason Hickel
God may say to me: “I am judging you out of your own mouth. Your own actions have made you shudder with disgust when you have seen other people do them.”
– Wittgenstein
the song thrush
singing or not —
is a smile-breaker
day-maker
– James Gilbert
test your body’s metal. cold, heat? your blood will tell against the snow, or behind the window (…) your task is to carry your life high, and play with it, hurl it like a voice to the clouds; so it may retrieve the light already gone from us.
– pedro salinas, (tr. willis barnstone)
If a writer could write the truth about one Chicago street, that would be a good life’s work.
– Nelson Algren
I make friends with hindrances and every obstacle becomes a stepping-stone. Everything in the Universe, visible and invisible, is working to bring to me my own.
– Florence Scovel Shinn
Surrendering does not involve preparing for a soft landing; it means just landing on hard, ordinary ground.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Beware, my dear Christian friends of living by feeling.
– Charles Spurgeon
Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.
– Jane Yolen
Nobody over the age of 40 should be allowed to make any decisions about how our society is run.
We’ve had our chance and we’ve blown it.
– Climate Dad
It is good to surrender things that poison us and our world.
– Anne Lamott
All year,
I’ve said, You know what’s funny? and then,
Nothing, nothing is funny. Which makes me laugh
in an oblivion-is-coming sort of way.
– Ada Limón
wet earth, lingering under winter’s spell, aching with spring’s promise, fills my breath and suddenly
a rainbow
– @inthreelines
There will come a time in your life in which you will have to accept that your old ways cannot carry you any longer. You will know that it is time to light fire to the past, and shed your old self. When the heaviness slows you to a stop, a reinvention must occur.
There will come a time in your life when you will realize that a new version of yourself is trying to emerge. You are allowed to cry and grieve the loss, but you must also keep your eyes toward what’s next. It’s time to wipe the slate clean, and start again. It’s time to break the chains of routine and expectation and fear. It’s time to become different and stronger and clearer, at once new, and yet more yourself than ever before.
– Brianna Wiest
politicians are not born; they are excreted. “poets,” said the ancient wisdom, “are not made, but born.
– marcus tullius cicero
I was recently at a dinner party, and we were asked to boil down the 20th century to one feature, and our answer was separation. Separation from the natural world, separation from each other.
– @kristatippett
If you think of writing as a form of self expression, I think you’re missing the point. For me, it’s a way of pulling things up & out – guts. Things that have not been spilt before.
– Colm Tóibín
Starlight
All night, this soft rain from the distant past.
No wonder I sometimes waken as a child.
– Ted Kooser
line breaks are balm and interruption and are foundations for keen feeling
– @CampMarmalade
Music is liquid architecture; architecture is frozen music.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
And now April raises up her plaque of flowers
and the heart
expands to admit its adversary.
– Louise Glück
You left
My heart
Ontological desert
– Rachel Newcombe
burned toast
the vivid memories
of youth
– @hegelincanada
We are never simply seeing what’s ‘really there,’ stripped bare of our own anticipations or insulated from our own past experiences. Instead, all human experience is part phantom — the product of deep-set predictions.
– Andy Clark
The beauty of the universe consists not only of unity in variety, but also of variety in unity.
– Umberto Eco
Fine poets do psychoanalysis
Perhaps I am no one.
True, I have a body
and I cannot escape from it.
I would like to fly out of my head,
but that is out of the question.
It is written on the tablet of destiny
that I am stuck here
in this human form.
That being the case
I would like to call attention
to my problem.
There is an animal inside me,
clutching fast to my heart.
– Anne Sexton
creativity is the missing pillar within the self development space.
Art is the new meditation
Art is the new mindfulness.
Art is the new good night’s sleep.
spend the a little time each day creating and watch how you transform, physically, emotionally, spiritually.
– inspiredtowrite@
And so to interact with anything that had tried to destroy you means that you want to be destroyed. It means that you want to remain in what held you captive and in what stained every part of your being.
– Phillip B. Williams
I consider nature a vast chemical laboratory in which all kinds of composition and decompositions are formed.
– Antoine Lavoisier
Today’s generation operates on a belief of ‘I am incomplete without a relationship.’ This is the wrong notion of love we must break and the wrong sense of self we must put to an end. This mindset breeds desperation and a functioning from a place of lack, not of wholeness. This is not the proper frame of mind to have when entering one of life’s greatest works, which is to share your love with another person.
– thoughtcatalog@
So having unsettled what beauty is, let us go on.
– Charles Ives
It’s a rare reader who doesn’t go to the novel looking for a kind of encouragement to live.
– Norman Rush
I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.
– Virginia Woolf
Poetry’s great pursuit is
permanence.
– John Barr
We need a mass of ancestors at
our backs as ballast. Sometimes,
we feel it’s impossible to push
into the future without such a
weight behind us, without such
heaviness to keep us steady, even
if it is imaginary.
– lauren groff
Previously, I believed that poetry was a form of combat, but today I don’t think that it has an immediate task. Its influence is very slow, cumulative.
– M. Darwish
I desired always to stretch the night and fill it fuller & fuller of dreams.
– Virginia Woolf
It takes approximately 20,000 hours of meditation to begin to learn to love a woman well.
– Daniel Thorson
In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity.
– Sun Tzu
Whatever it is, it matters.
– Daniel Thorson
I’ve dedicated my life to the culture because of a small sentence that my grandmother always told me growing up: ‘One day, they will need people like us.’
– Samuel Gensaw
To those who see only division and separateness,
I remind you that a part is born only by bisecting a whole.
For those who have forgotten the tender mercy of a mother’s embrace,
I send a gentle breeze to caress your brow.
To those who still feel somehow incomplete,
I offer the perfect sanctity of this very moment.
– Kuan Yin
True love is the natural energy
of our settled mind.
– Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche
And don’t we all, with fierce hunger, crave a cave of solitude, a space of deep listening – full of quiet darkness and stars, until finally we hear a syllable of god echoing in the cave of our hearts?
– Macrina Wiederkehr
His disciples said to Him, “When will the Kingdom come?”
Jesus said, “It will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying ‘Here it is’ or ‘There it is.’ Rather, the Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it.”
– Gospel of Thomas
We are born to overcome ourselves. We are born for that – we are not yet that. We are searchers; that is the essence of our humanness.
– Jacob Needleman
Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.
– C.S. Lewis
In New Mexico he always awoke a young man… Beautiful surroundings, the society of learned men, the charm of noble women, the graces of art, could not make up to him for the loss of those light-hearted mornings of the desert, for that wind that made one a boy again. He had noticed that this peculiar quality in the air of new countries vanished after they were tamed by man and made to bear harvests… That air would disappear from the whole earth in time, perhaps; but long after his day. He did not know just when it had become so necessary to him, but he had come back to die in exile for the sake of it. Something soft and wild and free, something that whispered to the ear on the pillow, lightened the heart, softly, softly picked the lock, slid the bolts, and released the prisoned spirit of man into the wind, into the blue and gold, into the morning, into the morning!
– Willa Cather
AS THE POEMS GO
as the poems go into the thousands you
realize that you’ve created very
little.
it comes down to the rain, the sunlight,
the traffic, the nights and the days of the
years, the faces.
leaving this will be easier than living
it, typing one more line now as
a man plays a piano through the radio,
the best writers have said very
little
and the worst,
far too much.
– Charles Bukowski
A man does not really begin to be alive until he has lost himself, until he has released the anxious grasp which he normally holds upon his life, his property, his reputation and position.
– Alan W. Watts
Life does not get in the way; it is the way.
– Rebecca Li
We know from experience the impact a line of poetry can have, the miraculous way in which two selves unknown to each other until that very moment come to share not only an understanding but a single imaginative space.
– Charles Simic
During my first years at the university I made the discovery that while science opened the door to enormous quantities of knowledge, it provided genuine insights very sparingly, and these in the main were of a specialized nature.
– C.G. Jung
Nature’s the boss. It’s always been the boss and will ever be the boss.
– Oren Lyons
Great is the power of habit. It teaches us to bear fatigue and to despise wounds and pain.
– Cicero, Tusculan Disputations
You must return, wiser creatures, to the nature that spawned you—not only as loving caretakers but as partners with the other species of the earth.
– Jane Roberts
Create a vacuum between you and what you’re
looking for. Instead of forcing it, Step back and draw it
to you.
– Rick Rubin
Life, after all, is but one great insomnia and there is a lucid half-awakeness about everything we think or do.
– Fernando Pessoa
If something is humanly possible, it’s attainable by you too.
– Marcus Aurelius
Loans from the source language and words and phrases kept untranslated point to a choice by the speakers of the language and by the translator. The choice not to translate doesn’t mean the word or phrase is untranslatable.
– Ilze Duarte
“There are even fewer who study man than who study geometry,” noted the brilliant reformed geometrician Pascal.
– Pico Iyer
Dumbledore turned back to Snape, and his eyes were full of tears. “You’re still writing your PhD, after all this time?”
“Always,” said Snape.
– @ThePhDPlace
Under capitalism you end up with…
A food industry where the priority isn’t feeding people.
A pharmaceutical industry where the priority isn’t keeping people healthy.
A media where the priority isn’t informing people.
& a fossil fuel industry being subsidised to kill everyone.
– Climate Dad
What I need is the dandelion in the spring. The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction. The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses. That it can be good again.
– Suzanne Collins
Nature is the missing person at the table, and it’s her table.
– Kenny Ausubel
You must form the habit of living in the fourth dimension, “The World of the Wondrous.” It is the world where you do not judge by appearances.
– Florence Scovel Shinn
To attain the Grail you must become who you are, realize your unique potentiality, become a type unto yourself. For no one else exactly like you has ever lived before, and no one exactly like you will ever live in the future.
– Keiron le Grice
I deny debt, there is no debt in Divine Mind, therefore, I owe no man anything. All obligations are now wiped out under grace in a miraculous way.
– Florence Scovel Shinn
One day, when I had only five dollars, I treated a friend to dinner, and afterward we laughed about my now total poverty. It was easy to give away what I had; I never doubted that the world would somehow provide for me in turn.
– Sallie Jiko Tisdale
If you see someone trying to back into a parking spot, maybe just give them a hot second. Patience feels good.
– Melissa Ferrick
Achievement without purpose is crisis.
– Ash Ambirge
Solitude is the human condition, the universal vocation to be human. It is the willingness, with love indwelling, to go to the heart of pain to find new life and share it with the world even though you may be separated from it physically. It is from this commitment to be focused through the narrow gate of solitude that self-emptying love is out-poured, and the heart of the community, the heart of its pain, is transformed into the heart of joy.
– Maggie Ross
In short: who can take away suffering without entering it?
– Henri J. M. Nouwen, The Wounded Healer
Our very nature is differentiation.
– @RedBookJung
“I think that one of these days,“ he said, “you’re going to have to find out where you want to go. And then you’ve got to start going there.”
– J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
Bob Dylan writes of a song capturing “the moment of shimmering persistence of memory in a way the printed word can only hint at.” He goes on to say “But so it is with music, it is of a time but also timeless; a thing with which to make memories and the memory itself. Though we seldom consider it, music is built in time as surely as a sculptor or welder works in physical space. Music transcends time by living within it, just as reincarnation allows us to transcend life by living it again and again.
– Philosophy of Modern Song
All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.
– Tennessee Williams
At least one way of measuring the freedom of any society is the amount of comedy that is permitted, and clearly a healthy society permits more satirical comment than a repressive, so that if comedy is to function in some way as a safety release then it must obviously deal with these taboo areas. This is part of the responsibility we accord our licensed jesters, that nothing be excused the searching light of comedy. If anything can survive the probe of humour it is clearly of value, and conversely all groups who claim immunity from laughter are claiming special privileges which should not be granted.
– Eric Idle
It was the anonymity. He wanted to be unknown, unpossessed by others’ knowledge of him. That was freedom.
– Ling Ma
Fear must be erased from the consciousness.
– Florence Scovel Shinn
Can it really be that for us existence means exile, and nothingness, home?
– Emil Cioran
Believe nothing of me except that I felt your beauty more closely than my own.
– Leonard Cohen
Without passion there is no creation. Total abandonment brings this unending passion.
– Krishnamurti
Kafka, late in his illness, told Max Brod, There is only one disease, no more, and medicine blindly chases this one disease like an animal through endless forests.
– Sean Singer
You have that kind of intoxicating insanity that lets other people dream outside of the lines and become who they’re destined to be.
– Jennifer Elisabeth
You are not a fraud or a failure because you can appear enormously competent & composed in certain life or career situations, but you’re a sh*t show alone or behind closed doors. That’s how trauma works.
You’d be shocked at how many “successes” secretly struggle & suffer.
– drdoylesays@
In every child who is born, under no matter what circumstances, and of no matter what parents, the potentiality of the human race is born again.
– James Agee
Read more poetry by living poets.
– Daniel Torday
When I say I have abandonment issues what I mean is that at least once a month I want to abandon society and go live in the forest with the woodland creatures and read all day, everyday.
– macabredarklingwanders@
Your ability to instantly cut people off is not always a boundary to be proud of. It’s a trauma response.
– poetrysilv@
If you knew how God deals with your affairs, your heart would break out of love for Him.
– imshotta@
I heard something that really stuck with me.
“The potential you see in other people isn’t real. It is the projection of what you would do in their position.”
This made me start reevaluating my expectations in interactions and relationships of any kind.
– withmastery@
If you do not run your subconscious mind yourself, someone else will run it for you.
– Florence Scovel Shinn
Those who benefited from your brokenness will be the same people offended by your healing.
– ashley_winnn@
Neuroplasticity is your ally in personal transformation.
Consistent, purposeful actions forge new neural pathways.
– pircherreid@
Our healthcare system is broken. There’s no healthcare system in the world keeping up with the skyrocketing rates of chronic diseases. So clearly, the status quo is not working, and change and innovation are urgently needed.
Two great examples of that are the Heartland Whole Health Institute and the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine being built by Alice Walton in Bentonville, Arkansas.
– Arianna Huffington
Fine philosophers do psychoanalysis
We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Remember: trauma slaps a toxic filter on our thoughts & beliefs about ourselves. That sh*t that Trauma Brain is trying to get you to believe about yourself? It’s not real. It’s distorted. It’s rooted in old tapes of how abusers & bullies talked to & treated us.
Remember.
– drdoylesays@
Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.
– Alan Watts
That’s what you think.
– Nikolai Gogol
We are going ’round in circles. But, you see, going ’round in circles—as you may have observed by looking at the sky—is what the universe is doing.
– Alan Watts
Our neocortex has made us meaning-seeking creatures, acutely aware of the perplexity and tragedy of our predicament, and if we do not discover some ultimate significance in our lives, we fall easily into despair.
– Karen Armstrong
The world shall be nothing but a howl of pain and ecstasy, and the purest among men shall only be able to avoid self-contempt by resorting to weariness. The choice of agony will be the only choice left, and this will be sooner than we expect.
– Albert Caraco
There is no difference between the energy that shapes your ideas and the energy that grows a flower, or that heals your finger if you burn it. The soul does not exist apart from nature. It is not thrust into nature. Nature is the soul in flesh, in whatever its materializations. The flesh is as spiritual as the soul, and the soul is as natural as the flesh. In your terms the body is the living soul. Now the soul can live, and does, in many forms – some physical and some not, but while you are material, the body is the living soul. The body constantly heals itself, which means that the soul in the flesh heals itself. The body is often closer to the soul than the mind is because it automatically grows as a flower does, trusting its nature.
– Jane Roberts
Farewell, my friends, my path inclines to this side the mountains, yours to that. For a long time you have appeared further and further off to me. I see that you will at length disappear altogether. For a season my path seems lonely without you. The Meadows are like barren ground. The memory of me is steadily passing away from you. My path grows narrower and steeper, and the night is approaching. Yet I have faith that in the infinite future new suns will rise and new plains expand before me, and I trust I shall therein encounter pilgrims who bear that same virtue that I recognized in you, who will be that very virtue that was you. I accept the everlasting and salutary law which was promulgated as much that spring when I first knew you, as this when I seem to leave you. Love is a thirst that is never slaked. Under the coarsest rind the sweetest meat.
– From Thoreau’s Journal
Beyond a certain point, the music isn’t mine anymore. It’s yours.
– Phil Collins
I offer You also my prayers and the Sacrifice of Peace in particular for those who have in any way injured, grieved or maligned me, or who have done me any kind of harm or hurt; likewise for any whom I have at any time grieved, troubled, injured or offended by word or deed, knowingly or unknowingly; that You may in mercy pardon all our sins and offences one against another. 0 Lord, take from our hearts all suspicion, ill feeling, anger, and contention, and whatever may injure charity and brotherly love. Have mercy, 0 Lord, have mercy on all who ask Your mercy.
– Ps.123:3, The Imitation of Christ, Thomas A Kempis
No matter how the official narrative of this turns out… these are the places we should be looking, not in newspapers or television but at the margins, graffiti, uncontrolled utterances, bad dreamers who sleep in public and scream in their sleep.
– Thomas Pynchon
The mind fits the world and shapes it as a river fits and shapes its own banks.
– Annie Dillard
I don’t put much stock in remembering things. Being able to forget is a superior skill.
– Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Before We Visit the Goddess
They know it is rude to ask you what you are, but they think it’s rude that you won’t mention.
– Siaara Freeman
A big skill, if you want to play for a long time, is just being honest in assessing how you’re playing. If you wait until the coach tells you you’re not playing well, a lot of times it’s too late.
– Jason Spezza
your body is not a vehicle of consciousness, your body is consciousness.
– Kristin Kirk, Science and Nondualiy (SAND) Conference Oct, 2014)
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
Beyond the wall of the unreal city … there is another world waiting for you. It is the old true world of the deserts, the mountains, the forests, the islands, the shores, the open plains. Go there. Be there. Walk gently and quietly deep within it. And then — May your trails be dim, lonesome, stony, narrow, winding and only slightly uphill. May the wind bring rain for the slickrock potholes fourteen miles on the other side of yonder blue ridge. May God’s dog serenade your campfire, may the rattlesnake and the screech owl amuse your reverie, may the Great Sun dazzle your eyes by day and the Great Bear watch over you by night.
– Edward Abbey
When first asked, ‘Where are you from?’ I was hardly old enough to hold my sentences together, barely graduated from my mother’s back.
– Akosua Zimba Afiriyie-Hwedie
Where can I free myself of the homeland in my body?
– Mahmoud Darwish
Your religion of origin has such a bone-deep hold on you that, as with a native language, it’s your only hope for true religious fluency.
– George Lindbeck
In certain countries the great masters of any art
will never teach for money.
There are measurements other than those we know.
– Evan S. Connell
ODE TO THE JOYFUL ONES
Shield your joyful ones.
– from an Anglican prayer
That they walk, even stumble, among us is reason
to praise them, or protect them—even the sound
of a lead slug dropped on a lead plate, even that, for them,
is music. Because they bring laughter’s
brief amnesia. Because they stand,
talking, taking pleasure in others,
with their hands on the shoulders of strangers
and the shoulders of each other.
Because you don’t have to tell them to walk toward the light.
Because if there are two pork chops
they will serve you the better one.
Because they will give you the crutch off their backs.
Because when there are two of them together
their shining fills the room.
Because you don’t have to tell them to walk toward the light.
– Thomas Lux
I often wonder if “the meta-crisis” is more a description of the collapse of one’s own hyper-modern objective worldview, rather than the collapse of the actual objective world itself.
To what degree are people conflating Ego with Eco?
– @VinceFHorn
Carl Jung said that if you find the psychic wound in an individual or a people, there you also find their path to consciousness. For it is in the healing of our psychic wounds that we come to know ourselves.
– Robert A. Johnson
Narcissistic leaders are threatened by talent. They want to be the smartest person in the room.
Humble leaders are drawn to talent. They surround themselves with people who make them smarter.
Great leaders grow talent. They strive to make everyone in the room smarter.
– Adam Grant
The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard observed that the most common form of despair is that of not knowing who we really are, adding that an even deeper form of despair stems from choosing to be other than oneself.
– Howard Sasportas
On A Train
by Wendy Cope
The book I’ve been reading
rests on my knee. You sleep.
It’s beautiful out there—
fields, little lakes and winter trees
in February sunlight,
every car park a shining mosaic.
Long radiant minutes,
your hand in my hand,
still warm, still warm.
Tree [Studies], 1944
Once they picked a date, I knew something the
eucalyptus tree did not. Someone knows when the
earth will end. I think that person is a lumberjack. To
be alive is to accept perception but to use
the perceived. To know a tree has no bones but to paint
in bones. To know that we aren’t actually writing
poems but our own autopsies. That the earth is a
collage of the sky, the leaves, and its own grave.
Things stay alive by eluding our perception. The
same gaze that believes a tree is there for us to
draw. That its branches have tiny offices. That it can
fly away or be poured. The miracle is that the earth
holds the weight of the living, the dead, and our
imaginations, but it doesn’t sink. Picasso drew in a
branch collar, where a tree branch had been cut. As
if he knew that the whole drawing depended on it.
– Victoria Chang
What you do on your bad days matters more than what you do on your good days.
Anyone can nourish their most important relationships when life is smooth, but the effort you put in during the rough patches matters more. When you’re motivated, eating healthy is easy, but your choices on your toughest days can undo your progress. Keeping your emotions in check is easy when things are going well, but managing your emotions when the world isn’t cooperating sets you apart.
Push through the grind and maintain the momentum.
– Shane Parrish
I find nothing healthful or exalting in the smooth conventions of society. I do not like the close air of saloons. I begin to suspect myself to be a prisoner, though treated with all this courtesy and luxury.
– R.W. Emerson
Beyond the clouds, the sun never stops shining.
– Gavin Pretor-Pinney
Assert yourself to the things that matter to you. If you are sticking up for yourself and getting your needs met, you won’t be as likely to get reactive with others.
– Rick Hanson
Eating our shadow is a very slow process. It doesn’t happen once, but hundreds of times. Churchill said, “I have had to eat many of my own words, and I found the diet very nourishing.”
– Robert Bly
New research shows that doing a PhD is actually the easiest degree you can do.
– The PhD Place
Already, he was dreaming of a refined solitude, a comfortable desert, a motionless ark in which to seek refuge from the unending deluge of human stupidity.
– Joris-Karl Huysmans
Who am I, what am I? I am nothing but a literary lizard, warming myself all day in the bright sun of Beauty. That is all.
– Flaubert, letter to Louise Colet (1846)
The sense of tragedy – according to Aristotle – comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist’s weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I’m getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues.
– Haruki Murakami
James Baldwin said, “I can’t lead a movement. But I can fuck up your mind.” Keep writing.
– @tamaranopper
the firmament stands curved, compact, blue, over the day. all is a cupola. the rose reposes, central without intending to be, subject to the sun at zenith. and the present gives itself so fully that the walking foot senses the wholeness of the planet.
– jorge guillén, perfection
the guitar makes dreams cry. the whimpering of lost souls escapes from its round mouth. and like the tarantula, it weaves a great star to hunt down sighs that float in its black wooden well.
– garcía lorca
If you want change, build a broad coalition. Beware of alienating potential allies.
– Joel Atallah
We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share. This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity.
– Paulo Coelho
She saw herself set her boots firmly on the turf, and then … like someone rising from the clouds of a sleep, she felt the deep, deep Time below her. She sensed the breath of the downs and the distant roar of ancient, ancient seas trapped in millions of tiny shells. She thought of Granny Aching, under the turf, becoming part of the chalk again, part of the land under wave. She felt as if huge wheels, of time and stars, were turning slowly around her. She opened her eyes and then, somewhere inside, opened her eyes again. She heard the grass growing, and the sound of worms below the turf. She could feel the thousands of little lives around her, smell all the scents on the breeze, and see all the shades of the night … The wheels of stars and years, of space and time, locked into place. She knew exactly where she was, and who she was, and what she was.
– Terry Pratchett
The Dance of the Cherry Trees
by John Spillane
Let me tell you ’bout the Cherry Trees
Every April in our town
They put on the most outrageous clothes
And they sing and they dance around
Hardly anybody sings or dances
Hardly anybody dances or sings
In this town that I call my own
You have to hand it to the cherry trees
And they seem to be saying
To me anyway
You know we’ve traveled all around the sun
You know it’s taken us one whole year
Well done everyone, Well Done
Cherry blossom in the air
Cherry blossom on the street
Cherry blossom in your hair
And a blossom at your feet
You know we’ve traveled all around the sun
You know it’s taken us one whole year
Well Done everyone, Well Done
On behalf of me and the Cherry Trees
Well done
You know me sometimes I think I’m getting old
Not as young as I used too be
So it means even more to me
To see the dance of the Cherry Trees
And they seem to be saying
Is it only to me
You know we’ve traveled all around the sun
You know it’s taken us one whole year
Well done everyone, Well Done
On behalf of me and the Cherry Trees
Well done
Well Done Everyone
You know we’ve traveled all around the sun
You know it’s taken us one whole year
Well done everyone, Well Done
On behalf of me and the Cherry Trees
Well done
Well Done Everyone
icebergs – no safety rail, no lifebelts –where storm tossed ancient cormorants -dead souls of sailors lean upon their elbows in the far spellbinding northern nights. icebergs of eternal winter; such height and scale, such purity of profile born from purest cold!
– henri michaux
Repetition is what allows something brand new to occur. Repetition, like the lapping of ripples against a rock, gently shifts the ground on which we tread, and so alters our relationship to the things we experience.
– @AnnieRigzin
Ulysses could have done with a good editor. You know people are always putting Ulysses in the top ten books ever written, but I doubt that any of those people were really moved by it.
– Roddy Doyle
When a poem
speaks by itself,
it has a spark
and can be considered
part of a divine
conversation.
– Elaine Equi
The products indoctrinate and manipulate; they promote a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood… the indoctrination they carry ceases to be publicity; it becomes a way of life.
– Herbert Marcuse
Horsemen
—after Debbie Fleming Caffery’s photograph
“Mamou, Louisiana, 1997″
Difficult not to sense apocalypse
when there’s a horse and rider
sprinting like this under ominous,
skies. No matter how calm the water
in the rice fields, or empty of blue
the horizon, you just have to ride
toward whatever light there is before
darkness makes its way to ground.
– Jack B. Bedell
The moon is full. Isn’t this proof of something? That things can disappear and then come back again?
– Kelly Link, The Book of Love
the green, lush planet
seen from a distant space
optic illusions
– @hegelincanada
You wouldn’t be so thirsty if you stopped being attracted to empty wells.
Heal your mindset and your taste will change.
– Dr. Thema
Morning has a way
of shoring up the good milk,
strata of possibility taking
the coffee-stained stage. And you ask
again for a day of celestial advances.
– Mónica Gomery
Sometimes being Irish feels like a job you never applied for. I don’t mind being Irish, but I’m not a fan of nationalism.
– Anne Enright
her face
in my whisky
the moon floats
– Chen-ou Liu
Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
– Milan Kundera
We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.
– Milan Kundera
Sometimes in my memory appear those sweet, sweet vestiges of the past:
Those trials of the heart and eye, those intimacies, those distances!
– Faiz Ahmed Faiz
Judas
Go ahead, say
that love is powerless.
Say the heart is carnage,
we are hell.
I lay my face on the cold stone
of the empty tomb.
True saviors do not save you from yourself.
– Joseph Fasano
When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.
– Louise Erdrich
Many artists can only produce because they don’t know what they are producing; the moment they know, the creation is completely stopped. For then they begin to reflect; then they feel responsible and cannot play like the gods, unless they fulfill the psychological demand that they dissociate themselves from the creation, from the archetype, from the creative impulse itself. If they can do that, they can go on creating; then they can allow the god to play.
– CG Jung
Wisdom’s ways are ways of pleasantness and all her paths are peace.
– Florence Scovel Shinn
It is too difficult to think nobly, when one thinks only in order to live. In order to be able and to venture to utter great truths, one must not be dependent upon success
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The world’s opinion, popular as it might be, is rarely a reliable source of truth.
– John MacArthur
Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn’t mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.
– Edward R. Murrow
It, the future, behaves like the past.
– Les Misérables, Victor Hugo
I reread books to measure my degree of difference from
myself.
– Heidi Julavits
Some day people are going to wake up to the fact that Woody Guthrie and the ten thousand songs that leap and tumble off the strings of his music box are a national possession, like Yellowstone and Yosemite.
– Clifton Fadiman
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. The image of God throws a shadow that is just as great as itself.
– Carl Jung
Art should ring a bell in your own life. You should get involved. I don’t want people to say it’s great, I want people
to say: It is for me.
– Agnes Varda
I was always attracted to the language of poetry… If I encounter a poem and I love it, for example, my first instinct will be to get up, walk around, read it out loud, and just sort of fill the room and the air with the sounds of that
poem.
– Zeina Hashem Beck
When turned into a sound, A word comes alive, And when you hear it, Turmoil inside your mind starts to die…
– A full circle.
– Ritu Negi
Now it’s April, and the whales have come home. The finbacks and the humpbacks and the rare right whales, arriving along the coast, coming into the bay, sometimes into the harbor, their massive length and weight churning and breaching as though they, like us, know playfulness. He maketh the deep to boil like a pot, he maketh a path to shine after him, said Job, who, I fear, could not know that there is also a reasoning and a gentleness in these mountains of flesh. Once a whale tangled in line came into the harbor with another swimming just alongside, a companion that would not leave the roped animal but lingered, while brave men went out in little boats and were able to cut the entangling line away. The eye of the humpback is like all the darkness and hope and pain one sees in the eye of the elephant, in whose brain, it is avowed by those who know, nothing is ever forgotten. It is an eye deeper than the deepest well.
– Mary Oliver
The trees act not as individuals, but somehow as a collective. Exactly how they do this, we don’t yet know. But what we see is the power of unity.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer
NATURE AS MIRROR
Can you feel the spiritual ecology we’ve been talking about? If you live in a fully connected world, you’re saved every day, just by playing your part. You are grabbed by God, and you belong to this universe, along with everything else. I was recently feeling discouraged and irritated, and I went out to my garden and spotted a green “stick bug” happily chewing on my flowers, almost completely camouflaged next to the stem. This bug’s simple but amazing existence completely took away all of my negativity. Life was again wondrous and miraculous.
At a recent retreat I gave on the Scottish island of Iona—which was the center point for the diffusion of Celtic Christianity—the attendees remarked how the Celtic “knot” was found on most crosses, gravestones, in manuscripts, and on jewelry. It was apparently their artistic way of saying that all is connected, everything belongs, and all is one in God. They knew about ecosystems long before we did. ALL was held together inside the divine knot that made it one.
T.S. Eliot ends his famous “Four Quartets” quoting Dame Julian, and saying the same: “And all shall be well and / All manner of thing shall be well / When the tongues of flame are in-folded / into the crowned knot of fire.”
– Richard Rohr
When we see, the act of seeing has no shape— it’s what we see that has shape.
– Clarice Lispector
Not your thinking, but your essence, is differentiation. Therefore you must not strive for what you conceive as distinctiveness, but for ‘your own essence’.
– @RedBookJung
Starting from nothing
to where we are,
is farther than the farthest star.
And farther than the farthest star,
is where we’re going from where we are.
– Eyvind Earle
For me, friendship has always been proof that there is something stronger than ideology, religion and nation.
– Milan Kundera
Few enough are the books I decide to keep beyond a culling or two. Barring fire or flood, Dead Man’s Float will be in my library for the rest of my life. If it’s the last poetry collection we get from Harrison—and I hope it isn’t—it is as fine an example of his efforts as any.
– Missoula Independent
We live in a world where the funeral matters more than the dead, the wedding more than love and the physical rather than the intellect. We live in the container culture, which despises the content.
– Eduardo Galeano
You haven’t always been the mug you are today, bogged down by circumstances, work, and thirst, the most disastrous of servitudes … Do you think that, just for a moment, you can revive the poetry in you?
– Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Do you need people to be like you before you consider them people? Would you grant personhood to a foreigner? A member of another race? An alien made of glass and numbers?
– Kenneth Folk
all of us, without exception, are qualified to participate in the rescue of the world.
– Julian Aguon
In the grand tapestry of existence, each thread yearns for happiness, seeks an escape from suffering.
– Mingyur Rinpoche
May we speak up the veins in our necks bulge. May we walk confidently into rooms demanding to be heard.
– Ream Shukairy.
Imagine thinking you’re saving yourself with the one thing that is slowly killing you.
– Kelly Pedro
The trouble with most people is that they want to know the way and the channels beforehand. They want to tell Supreme Intelligence just how their prayers should be answered. They do not trust the wisdom and ingenuity of God.
– Florence Scovel Shinn
We endure creatively due to our imperative ability to say No to reality, to build fictions of alterity, of dreamt or willed or awaited otherness for our consciousness to inhabit. It is in this precise sense that the utopian and messianic are figures of syntax.
– George Steiner
Instead of subtly
Trying to seduce
Or objectify
Anyone
Instead of leveraging
Anything
Over a member
Of our sacred family,
Our brothers and sisters
Walking this hard, remote
And shatteringly exquisite
Path on earth,
Preemptively say,
From the place in your heart
Where we all belong
To each other,
“Bless you, beloved.
May every good come to you.”
– Chelan Harkin
I promise that the people you lose here on this side of eternity, whom you can no longer call or text, will live fully again both in your heart and in the world. They will make you smile and talk out loud at the most inappropriate times.
– Anne Lamott
And they keep you in their hearts, pump you to their minds, circulate you unimagined. Take all the space you need, they say, empathy loves the damaged.
– Fady Joudah
Their questions like a shovel that doesn’t know what earth is, but digging anyway.
– @FadyJoudah
No one can measure the effects of a single act of giving, for its repercussions are beyond our limited imagination.
– Taitetsu Unno
The reason we go to poetry is not for philosophy, but for the dismantling of philosophy.
– Jacques Lacan [?]
Who would dare to say that what we have destroyed was worth a hundred times more than what we had dreamt and ceaselessly transfigured in murmuring to the ruins?
– René Char (tr. Gustaf Sobin)
If you want to cure a neurosis you have to risk something. To do something without taking a risk is merely ineffectual, as we know only too well.
– CG Jung
A spiritual crisis occurs when our identity, our roles, our values, or our road map are substantially called into question, prove ineffective, or are overwhelmed by experience that cannot be contained by our understandings of self and world.
– James Hollis, What Matters Most
LET THEM NOT SAY
Let them not say: we did not see it.
We saw.
Let them not say: we did not hear it.
We heard.
Let them not say: they did not taste it.
We ate, we trembled.
Let them not say: it was not spoken, not written.
We spoke,
we witnessed with voices and hands.
Let them not say: they did nothing.
We did not-enough.
Let them say, as they must say something:
A kerosene beauty.
It burned.
Let them say we warmed ourselves by it,
read by its light, praised,
and it burned.
– Jane Hirshfield
Every war and every conflict
between human beings has happened
because of some disagreement about names.
It is such an unnecessary foolishness,
because just beyond the arguing
there is a long table of companionship
set and waiting for us to sit down.
What is praised is one, so the praise is one too,
many jugs being poured into a huge basin.
All religions, all this singing, one song.
The differences are just illusion and vanity.
Sunlight looks a little different
on this wall than it does on that wall
and a lot different on this other one,
but it is still the same light.
We have borrowed these clothes,
these time-and-space personalities,
from a light, and when we praise,
we are pouring them back in.
– Rumi
There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies.
– Simone Weil
Consequently, the individual history of every creative man is always close to the abyss of sickness; he does not, like other men, tend to heal the personal wounds involved in all development by an increased adaptation to the collectivity. His wounds remain open, but his suffering from them is situated in depths from which another curative power arises, and this curative power is the creative process.
As the myth puts it, only a wounded man can be a healer, a physician. Because in his suffering the creative man experiences the profound wounds of his collectivity and his time, he carries deep within him a regenerative force capable of bringing forth a cure not only for himself but also for the community.
This complex sensibility of the creative man increases his dependence on the center of wholeness, the self, which, in continuous attempts at compensation, enhances the ego development and ego stability that must provide a counterweight to the archetypal preponderance.
– Erich Neumann
each morning i pull myself
out of despair
from a night of coals and a tongue
blistered with smiling
the step past the mother bed
is a high step
the walk through the widow’s door
is a long walk
and who are these voices calling
from every mirrored thing
say it coward say it
– Lucille Clifton
And if you missed a day, there was always the
next, and if you missed a year, it didn’t matter,
the hills weren’t going anywhere,
the thyme and rosemary kept coming back,
the sun kept rising, the bushes kept bearing fruit
– Louise Glück, Sunrise
To hear is to let the sound wander all the way through the labyrinth of your ear; to listen is to travel the other way to meet it. It’s not passive but active, this listening. It’s as though you retell each story, translate it into the language particular to you, fit it into your cosmology so you can understand and respond, and thereby it becomes part of you. To empathize is to reach out to meet the data that comes through the labyrinths of the senses, to embrace it and incorporate it. To enter into, we say, as though another person’s life was also a place you could travel to.
– Rebecca Solnit
This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.
– Marilynne Robinson
It’s totally changing the way we think
of healthcare as well because if biology
and all the cellular activity that are
going on in highly complex systems like
a human being or plant and so on, if all
this is the result of the information
interaction in the field, when those are
electromagnetic interaction, and we learn
how to control these information set
that means that we can reestablish
coherency.
We can re-establish proper
communication links or when there’s
damage to the coherency. And I think that
a lot of what healers do and so on in
the alternative medicine is a way to do
that but we can now with a good
understanding of what is actually going
on. We can as well develop technologies
that will create higher level of
interaction and information transfer so
that there’s high level of coherency in
the crystalline structure of the biology
to produce very high energy states, very
coherent structure and have significant
health effects.
– Ian Sanders
One must explore deep and believe the incredible to find the new particles of truth floating in an ocean of insignificance.
– Joseph Conrad
BEING BUT MEN
by Dylan Thomas
Being but men, we walked into the trees
Afraid, letting our syllables be soft
For fear of waking the rooks,
For fear of coming
Noiselessly into a world of wings and cries.
If we were children we might climb,
Catch the rooks sleeping, and break no twig,
And, after the soft ascent,
Thrust out our heads above the branches
To wonder at the unfailing stars.
Out of confusion, as the way is,
And the wonder, that man knows,
Out of the chaos would come bliss.
That, then, is loveliness, we said,
Children in wonder watching the stars,
Is the aim and the end.
Being but men, we walked into the trees.
Objectionable, tedious, irritating labour — this is the condition of genius, which no doubt explains the reason why men so rarely achieve anything.
– Lev Shestov
Under the influence of great fear, almost everybody becomes superstitious. Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity towards those who are not regarded as members of the herd. Fear generates impulses of cruelty, and therefore promotes such superstitious beliefs as seem to justify cruelty. Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.
– Bertrand Russell
And, finally I see
There right in front of me
Waiting peacefully
Was a bright new day
– Athey Thompson
So that where I once did not know who or what you were, now I wonder who I or we are, or what. What planet is this anyway, my dear?
– Stanley Crawford
Every calling or profession has its own characteristic persona. It is easy to study these things nowadays, when the photographs of public personalities so frequently appear in the press. A certain kind of behaviour is forced on them by the world, and professional people endeavour to come up to these expectations. Only, the danger is that they become identical with their personas – the professor with his text-book, the tenor with his voice. Then the damage is done; henceforth he lives exclusively against the background of his own biography. . . . The garment of Deianeira has grown fast to his skin, and a desperate decision like that of Heracles is needed if he is to tear this Nessus shirt from his body and step into the consuming fire of the flame of immortality, in order to transform himself into what he really is. One could say, with a little exaggeration, that the persona is that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is.
– C.G. Jung
Every time we train our most sophisticated tools upon the central questions of our existence – Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? – the answer comes back clearer: Everyone and Everywhere.
– James Bridle
The arch sin of faith, it seemed to me, was that it forestalled experience.
– C.G. Jung
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
Gratitude is seeing how someone changed your heart and quality of life, helped you become the good parts of the person you are.
– Anne Lamott
Sol Le Witt stated: ‘Ideas alone can be works of art….All ideas need not be made physical.…A work of art may be understood as a conductor from the artist’s mind to the viewer’s. But it may never reach the viewer, or it may never leave the artist’s mind’ Timelines are irrelevant in art.
– Laura Kerr
Ninety per cent of the world’s woe comes from people not knowing themselves, their abilities, their frailties, and even their real virtues. Most of us go almost all the way through life as complete strangers to ourselves – so how can we know anyone else?
– Sydney J. Harris
I believe humanity is capable of building a worthy, godlike intelligence that will improve and deepen the existence of every living thing.
what I don’t believe is that our current culture is remotely in the ballpark of being able to do anything of the sort
– River Kenna
A History of Clouds
by Christopher Brean Murray
You can think while walking, running,
washing the dishes, reading, grocery shopping,
or sleeping. Driving across Nevada at night
breeds thoughts—they leap from sagebrush
like jackrabbits into your high beams.
Most people can’t think while writing.
They have ideas, yes, but not thoughts.
Anyone can snatch an old idea out of the dust
and show it around. Trying to think
will invariably prohibit thought. I thought
of writing this poem while driving to work
this morning. I made sure not to
think about it much. The wind swayed
a stoplight until it turned green.
A man in a yellow tank top leaned
into the window of a parked car.
It was not yet 8 a.m. Wisps of cloud
coursed though the sky over Houston.
Someone should compile a book
called A History of Clouds. It could be,
among other things, an anthology
of descriptions of clouds, from novels,
from the love letters of exiled princes.
Shakespeare’s “pestilent congregation
of vapors” speech would appear, as would
Mayakovsky’s “A Cloud in Trousers.”
Clouds aren’t mentioned much in the Bible.
God did, however, call to Moses from inside
a cloud. Enoch speaks of “the locked reservoirs
from which the winds are distributed.”
Crane’s “To the Cloud Juggler” and
Stevens’ “Sea Surface Full of Clouds”—
and that passage from Gogol where
a cloud slithers over Nevsky Prospect.
It stretches and coils and becomes an intestine
embracing the anxious protagonist until we realize he’s being suffocated by his thoughts.
Somewhere Rilke speaks of “vast, ruined
kingdoms of cloud.” That, from the love letter
of another exiled prince.
Writers… do need to do some sort of work to supplement the writing, to earn a living and so forth. But to find just enough work—either you can’t get anything and you’re in trouble, or you’ve got too much. To try and get the balance right can be really hard.
– Deirdre Madden
I feel strongly that writing is more of an artisan activity than an intellectual one because you’re actually making something. I would feel closer to a basket maker, or a baker, or a weaver… rather than to an academic, or a critic, or a journalist.
– Deirdre Madden
Whatever the dharma has contributed so far to life in the United States, it has something to teach us now about how our democracy can thrive in a globalizing world…
– Kurt Spellmeyer
My advice, as in everything, is to read widely and think for yourself. We need more dissent and less dogma.
– Camille Paglia
Good cinema is what we can believe & bad cinema is what we can’t believe. What you see & believe in is very much what I’m interested in.
– Abbas Kiarostami
be my guest I’ll take you there
& introduce you around & show
you the sky ropes & the
city maps and the world as
flat as a map and the world
as round as a lively face.
– Anne Waldman
I am after small truths, not after truth with a capital T.
– Daniel Kahneman
God,
when he slides into home,
is always safe,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
By stretching language we’ll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.
– Jean Genet
While Kraftwerk was still wearing lederhosen, Sun Ra was experimenting with early electronic instruments.
– Greg Rowland
I cannot line-dance with the cybersexual splatterpunk avant-poppers.
– John Barth
Whatever lesson we have missed, we will get it again. That is why we find ourselves reacting to similar situations in similar ways many times.
– Ayya Khema
It is not what our mind falsely believes that makes us happy. It is the moment-to-moment lived reality of being alive.
– Matthias Esho Birk
See how I wrote those words and survived, how you read them and lived?
– Abby E. Murray
The message to me? Be thankful for what you have. Stop and appreciate at all you’ve been given. Breathe spring’s sweet air and look for her messengers. They’re all around you, flying in by night and blossoming by day, singing the song that can’t be stopped. Listen to it!
– Julie Zickefoose
Our lives are lived as stories
Though their intrapsychic actors
May play from scripts whose scripting comes
From key genetic factors;
Our lives are understandable
In terms of mental rules
Though they respond, like puppets,
To brain protein molecules.
– Samuel Barondes
One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII
Translated by Mark Eisner
I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as one loves certain obscure things,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries
the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself,
and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose
from the earth lives dimly in my body.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you directly without problems or pride:
I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love,
except in this form in which I am not nor are you,
so close that your hand upon my chest is mine,
so close that your eyes close with my dreams.
– Pablo Neruda
It’s only true love when you don’t have a choice.
– Martin Walser
The reciprocal truth of the observer changing what is observed is that what is observed changes the observer. This was a view espoused by Goethe, and not just in the obvious ways you might imagine. According to him, we literally grow faculties. He held that an object properly contemplated generates in the beholder the faculty proper to its own perception: ‘Every new object, well contemplated and clearly seen, opens up a new organ within us’. Contemplation of the world in a spirit of openness and humility fundamentally enlarges our being, where dogma and complacency simply narrow it.
Equally it enables the greater reality of the cosmos – whatever it may be – to fulfil itself through us.
– Iain McGilchrist
Even now, after centuries of reductionist propaganda, the world is still intricate and vast, as dark as it is light, a place of mystery, where we cannot do one thing without doing many things, or put two things together without putting many things together.
– Wendell Berry
But maybe they understood more about life than I did. From an early age they knew what little value the world placed in books, and so didn’t waste their time with them. Whereas I, even now, persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest significance, that if I keep writing, I might be able to catch the rainbow of consciousness in a jar.
– Jeffrey Eugenides
They said nothing and our parents said nothing, so we sensed how ancient they were, how accustomed to trauma, depressions, and wars. We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in, and for all their caretaking and bitching about crabgrass they didn’t give a damn about lawns.
– Jeffrey Eugenides
I want to write the world gorgeous
enough for my father to return to it. A world
where oceans meet. A world of lands
never split
with fire. Where you can tell the time
by the stars or the sun or by the dimming
minutes themselves, the way they feel
light in your hands.
– L.A. Johnson
Love and quantum physics are my religion. At one level, all religious traditions have the same aim – to transform the individual into a positive being. I love Jesus, I love Shiva, I love Krishna, I love Buddha. All rivers lead to the same ocean.
– John Lennon
Don’t look up from your work. Except to acknowledge those around you also buried in their work. Look at that. Look at their work. It’s damn great to know you are not alone…then get back to your work.
– Laura Kerr
In ideal of courtly love, unless you’ve got it in the gut & can hardly bear it, it hasn’t happened. The idea was to feel; the Buddha says all life is sorrowful. This is the experience of the pain of being alive. Where your pain is, that’s where your life is. So find it.
– Joseph Campbell
Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly.
– Marcus Aurelius
Meritocracy endorses a competitive, linear, hierarchical system in which by definition people must be left behind. The top cannot exist without the bottom. Not everyone can ‘rise’.
– Jo Littler, Meritocracy as Plutocracy: the Marketising of Equality Under Neoliberalism
This enormous desire lifts our spirits, but painfully so: alas, lying here below, we are propelled up to lofty heights only as epileptics.
– Jean Paul
The words you delete from a piece of writing are like the onions you cut and throw away for certain recipes — they may not go into the final product, but they leave behind a scent that adds depth and enriches flavor. They still matter.
– Francesca Leader
Artless
by Brenda Shaughnessy
is my heart. A stranger
berry there never was,
tartless.
Gone sour in the sun,
in the sunroom or moonroof,
ruthless.
No poetry. Plain. No
fresh, special recipe
to bless.
All I’ve ever made
with these hands
and life, less
substance, more rind.
Mostly rim and trim,
meatless
but making much smoke
in the old smokehouse,
no less.
Fatted from the day,
overripe and even
toxic at eve. Nonetheless,
in the end, if you must
know, if I must bend,
waistless,
to that excruciation.
No marvel, no harvest
left me speechless,
yet I find myself
somehow with heart,
aloneless.
With heart,
fighting fire with fire,
flightless.
That loud hub of us,
meat stub of us, beating us
senseless.
Spectacular in its way,
its way of not seeing,
congealing dayless
but in everydayness.
In that hopeful haunting,
(a lesser
way of saying
in darkness) there is
silencelessness
for the pressing question.
Heart, what art you?
War, star, part? Or less:
playing a part, staying apart
from the one who loves,
loveless.
Painting is not for me either decorative amusement or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.
– Max Ernst
I’ve made a choice, I sometimes think: Wonderful children instead of hard liquor.
– Louise Erdrich
an orphan
chooses her birthday
first crocus
– Bill Cooper
No other art form can fix time except cinema.
– Andrei Tarkovsky
I couldn’t have thought of her more. Even vacancy was crowded with her.
– Graham Greene
If the original divine incarnation was and is true, then resurrection is both inevitable and irreversible… Alpha and Omega are in fact one and the same.
– Richard Rohr
I think everything is really boring right now. I find it hard to muster the energy to write about contemporary culture anymore.
– Lauren Oyler
I hate teaching, actually, and I hate giving out grades. I can’t stand doing the things you’re supposed to do for a university.
– Alice Notley
People seldom do what they believe in. They do what is convenient, then repent.
– Bob Dylan
…I don’t know what damage was nature or nurtured…
– S. Fey
Everything has been said about me; I have been called a genius and I have been called mentally deficient. At least one of the two charges must be erroneous!
– Camilo José Cela
Poetry is the human voice, and we are of interest to one another, are we not?
– Mark Doty
…The man that is poor at night / Attended / Like the man that is rich and right / The great men will not be blended… / I am the poorest of all / I know that I cannot be mended / Out of the clouds, pomp of the air / By which at least I am befriended.
– Wallace Stevens
Not that I don’t like myself. It’s this strange rhythm in my chest. Keeps me up at night. Distracts me at work. Always and forever with the Thump. Thump. Thump. Sometimes fast and sometimes slow.
– Kristy Crabtree
Poem for People Who Don’t Like Poems
So, I wrote this poem for your acceptance.
Someone told me I shouldn’t admit that.
Someone also once told me not to use the word poem in a poem.
Well, poem, poem, poem.
I’m going to use this poem to break the stupid rules.
I’m also going to write plainly so everyone can see it.
Ready?
This is a poem.
My dad says he’s a simple man and doesn’t understand poems.
I’m going to write so he can understand this poem.
He likes plain talk.
He probably still won’t like this poem.
And likely neither will you.
But I’m still going to write it.
And if you’re the only person who likes this poem, l’ve made a big difference.
This is a poem, and I hope it’s no longer for you.
– Nicole Tallman
What I am more concerned about is whether our whole civilization will be around in the next 25 years.
– Sonny Rollins
If it comes, it comes; if it does not come, no process of reasoning can force it. Yet it transforms the value of the creature loved… and it sets the whole world to a new tune for the lover.
– William James
Seediness has a deep appeal. It seems to satisfy, temporarily, the sense of nostalgia for something lost
– Graham Greene
Devotion to the sacred, one’s ancestors, or a teacher uplifts the heart and calls forth our potential. Their goodness elicits the best in us.
– Oren Jay Sofer
you never see people in cahoots anymore
– Kirsti MacKenzie
As long as we try to patch over what we feel are unworkable situations with metaphysical, philosophical or neat religious ideas, then the lion’s roar turns into a coward’s scream, which is very pathetic.
– Chögyam Trungpa
—how gentle,
the edges—
tilt the vowel skyward
– Robin Walter
sipping tea
I look forward
to nothing
– @alwrites
To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
…no one can do a thing about feelings, they exist and there’s no way to censor them…
– Milan Kundera
There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in…
– Graham Greene
I love the man who is uncertain of his ends as the fruit tree is in April.
– René Char
shall I choose
to go back to the beginning
or is it better
to keep memory full
of what might have been
– Kath Abela Wilson
There is a part of oneself that needs to know what one wants and a part of oneself that needs not to.
– Adam Phillips
One of the immense, and apparently ineradicable stupidities of the species is the need to wait for the predictable consequences of something to appear before taking steps to prevent it. It’s going to kill us all.
– Ryan Ruby
The first duty of a man is to think for himself.
– Jose Marti
Highly evolved ones have their own conscience as the pure law.
– Lao Tzu
Literature is like phosphorous: it shines with its maximum brilliance at the moment when it attempts to die.
– Barthes
One of the best things to bring into the world… is a natural humility of spirit. About the next best thing… and they usually go together, is an appreciative spirit—a loving and susceptible heart.
– John Burroughs
Accepting things as they are is the pinnacle of humility.
– Sri Ramana Maharshi
Where has everyone gone? What cataclysm has transformed the familiar and strange landscape?
– Hazel V. Carby, Indigenous Artistic Imaginings of the American Ecosystem
There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.
– Bertrand Russell
Arriving at last
It has stumbled across the harsh
Stones, the black marshes.
– Daniel Hoffman
Go away, miss her
drive over a silver & blue river
go home
Breathe, breathe
the darkness needs a little shove
– Matthew Rohrer
You lack ideas because you don’t have meaningful conversations with others, yourself, and the books you read.
– Dan Koe
I don’t want to do self care, I want institutions to do better.
– Thomas Lecaque
Self-care doesn’t fix structural exhaustion and institutional burnout.
– Josh Call
The rebranding of linear algebra as “artificial intelligence” may be the most successful marketing campaign of all time.
– Will Slaughter
Writing, in its noblest function, is the attempt to unerase, to unearth, to find the primitive picture again, ours, the one that frightens us.
– Hélène Cixous
You must give to receive. You must give mental attention to your goals, ideals, and enterprises, and your deeper mind will back you up. The key to wealth is application of the laws of the subconscious mind by impregnating it with the idea of wealth.
– Dr. Joseph Murphy
The ultimate point of view is that there is nothing to understand, so when we try to understand, we are only indulging in acrobatics of the mind. Whatever you have understood, you are not. Why are you getting lost in concepts? You are not what you know, you are the knower.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
Dissatisfaction with life is not a sign of mental illness, but of growing intelligence.
– Ken Wilber
My turn shall also come: I sense the spreading of a wing.
– Osip Mandelstam
The inharmonious situation comes from some inharmony within man himself. When there is, in him, no emotional response to an inharmonious situation, it fades away forever, from his pathway. So we see man’s work is ever with himself.
– Florence Scovel Shinn
On the opposite side of every front, there is a back; on the opposite side of every back, there is a front…Yet human beings invariably tend to see only the front and to assume that this is all that exists.
– Masahiro Mori
This Life
by William Stafford
With Kit, Age 7, at the Beach
We would climb the highest dune,
from there to gaze and come down:
the ocean was performing;
we contributed our climb.
Waves leapfrogged and came
straight out of the storm.
What should our gaze mean?
Kit waited for me to decide.
Standing on such a hill,
what would you tell your child?
That was an absolute vista.
Those waves raced far, and cold.
“How far could you swim, Daddy,
in such a storm?”
“As far as was needed,” I said,
and as I talked, I swam.
A pattern I’ve noticed in successful people:
They disappear from the world for months at a time to force pure focus on themselves and their vision. They laser in on one meaningful goal and make it a reality.
– Dan Koe
Thou art the couch of dreams that never sleep ; Thou art the phoenix of the poet’s soul,
– Ameen Rihani
It is very dangerous when a wound is so common in a culture that hardly anyone knows that there is a problem. There is general discontent with our way of life but almost no one knows specifically where to look for its origin.
– Robert A. Johnson
Integrate local specifics with global vision. We’ve seen the ants’ triple-unit leaders and the honeybee scouts – buzzing out into the world to look for homesites and flower patches. Arguably these represent a kind of leader class, but not the way we are used to thinking about it. What’s the difference? There are far more leaders in these societies. For one thing, 30% of outside workers ‘lead,’ exploring, observing local realities, distilling them into larger patterns, and disseminating that vision back down and across the colony. They don’t command or control – they look for patterns, using them to knit their modular teams into an integrated system. … Early European explorers and anthropologists were mystified by their encounters with foraging societies. It wasn’t clear whether leaders even existed. But they did, and still do. The ideal conception of a leader looks similar in foraging societies worldwide: they should be generous, kind, and respectful, and completely absent of temper, greed, or bias. Honest, patient, humble, couching opinions as suggestions. Gifted at sensing what others want, skilled at facilitating consensus – they should be last to speak up and least opinionated, like a hamadryas [baboon] leader male. Foraging societies don’t have a set number of leaders either, any more than ants and bees do. Anyone with the right temperament can step into the role. The more the better, in face, as more diverse and independent voices make greater collective intelligence. Each of us has an important role to play in our collective future, and the more who step forward to fill it, the better.
– Tamsin Woolley-Barker, Teeming: How Superorganisms Work Together to Build Infinite Wealth on a Finite Planet
More and more, our culture has become incapable of reverence before the mystery of being… And this pervasive, largely unthinking impiety underlies most of our time’s special barbarisms.
– Martin Heidegger
Love is the original impulse.
– George Gorman
Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own ego. That is the way we all see each other in life. Vanity, fear, desire, competition – all such distortions within our own egos – condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions to our own egos the corresponding distortions in the egos of others – and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other.
– Tennessee Williams
You cannot study a snowflake profoundly without being led back step by step to the constitution of the sun.
– John Tyndall
The next Buddha will be a network.
And that network will be created by those who have learned to see networkedly.
– Daniel Thorson
Most of my spiritual breakthroughs have been against my will. I am mortal, impermanent, imperfect, scared, often uptight and even petty, but wow, what a beautiful sunset.
– Anne Lamott
But since no one teaches them, I must do so. That is what love demands, since they wanted to hear, even if they grumble. But why do I impart this teaching of the ancients?
– @RedBookJung
We have almost reached the point where praise of rationality is held to mark a man as an old fogey regrettably surviving from a bygone age.
– Bertrand Russell
What God says
doesn’t mean squat
if you’re not listening,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
What hath night to do with sleep?
– John Milton
Moon’s barge over milk-blue water
– Ezra Pound
I am persuaded that there is absolutely no limit to the absurdities that can, by government action, come to be generally believed…
– Bertrand Russell
… scale is also about risk: who is willing to risk the interruption of their specific life in order to have a lifeworld they would welcome? In short, what are you doing with the time you don’t have to make something else happen?
– Lauren Berlant
That resplendent space created by a piece of fiction can really expand the width of time… Clearly there is a spot somewhere inside our heads that records the feelings we had when we read the book, and it stays with us forever.
– Banana Yoshimoto
I want to tell you, don’t marry suffering. Some people do. They get married to it, and sleep and eat together, just as husband and wife. If they go with joy they think it’s adultery.
– Saul Bellow
Be sure that your mind never retires. It must be like a parachute, which is no good unless it opens up. Be open and receptive to new ideas.
– Dr. Joseph Murphy
Be thankful for the thorns and thistles which keep you from being in love with this world.
– Charles Spurgeon
Collective intelligence also rests on the independence of its members.
– Tamsin Woolley-Barker
If you create something and everybody likes it:
You haven’t gone far enough.
The best work divides the audience.
– Rick Rubin
Why is it that the look of another person looking at you is different from everything else in the Cosmos? That is to say, looking at lions or tigers or Saturn or the Ring Nebula or at an owl or at another person from the side is one thing, but finding yourself looking in the eyes of another person looking at you is something else. And why is it that one can look at a lion or a planet or an owl or at someone’s finger as long as one pleases, but looking into the eyes of another person is, if prolonged past a second, a perilous affair?
– Walker Percy
There are times the earth graced me
extra minutes so i can stop &
feel into it –like when he finally arrives
after i’m convinced love is as intangible as it sounds
– DeShara Suggs-Joe
Meaning is secondary to
intuitive response.
Sometimes mindless play
can hold more power
than meaning.
– Rick Rubin
My wife is gone, my girl is gone, my books are loaned, my clothes are worn, I gave away a car; and all that happened years ago. Mind & matter, love & space are frail as foam on beer.
– Gary Snyder
I am beset with the dualism of this age. It is my aim to reach a concept of unity between mankind and the natural world.
– Gary Snyder
It is your birthright you be held deeply, warmly, in the family of things.
– Adrie Kusserow
It is important to remember that patterns don’t have to repeat themselves. Through remaining in the present, we can let go of the past and the future—the headquarters of our fears.
– Lama Tsony
A haiku is not a poem, it is not literature; it is a hand beckoning, a door half-opened, a mirror wiped clean.
– R.H. Blyth
We cannot find the unconditioned out in the world. We can only know it in the heart.
– Ayya Medhanandi Bhikkhuni
You don’t find God
tearing yourself to pieces,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
Kinship is seldom defined by those who look or sound like you; it’s only a matter of who feels, or thinks, who lives as you do.
– Pico Iyer
The mind is mediocre, bound by tradition, by the past; and when the mind tries to improve itself, to break through its own limitations, it remains the same mediocre mind.
– Krishnamurti
In many cases in psychiatry, the patient who comes to us has a story that is not told, & which as a rule no one knows of. To my mind, therapy only really begins after the investigation of that wholly personal story . . . If I know his secret story I have a key to the treatment.
– C.G. Jung
After the War
by Jotamario Arbeláez
a day
after the war
if there is a war
if after the war there is a day
I will hold you in my arms a day after the war
if there is a war
if after the war there is a day
if after the war I have arms
and I will make love to you with love
a day after the war
if there is a war
if after the war there is a day
if after the war there is love
and if there is what it takes to make love
Translated by Nicolás Suescún
midday
pollen on our tongues
each syllable
flecked with sunbeams
– Manny Loley
I love that kids have favorites for things like planets and numbers, and they introduce themselves by it. Hey, I’m 5 and a half and did you know that a year on Mercury is only 88 Earth days? So much passion! We are all born poets.
– Edie Meade
I sometimes think that ‘no’ is the most necessary word of our times.
– José Saramago
across thousands of years, solar eclipses are a re-affirmation that there is a sublime clock-work to our universe
– Laura Kerr
I kneel into a dream
where I am good & loved.
I am good. I am loved.
– Natalie Wee
It can be difficult to appreciate just how much avoiding the standard ways of failing dramatically increases the odds of success.
– @farnamstreet
Resurrection happens every time we love someone even though they were not very loving to us.
– Richard Rohr
Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.
– Kazuo Ishiguro
You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.
– Rabindranath Tagore
Ordinary rain
There’s a total solar eclipse
here every day.
We call it night
because we have
small names
for ordinary things.
My God, what we could
call the rain.
– Wayne Hill
Real avant-garde writing today would frame and reflect our misuse of the world, our destruction of its beauties and wonders.
– Joy Williams
We are always captive to others, to our work, to the work of others; there are rooms that are nearly impossible to escape.
– Lori Marso, On Chantal Akerman and Christine Smallwood’s La Captive
HOW POETRY COMES TO ME
It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light
– Gary Snyder
A garden offers the opposite of the disembodied uncertainties of writing. It’s vivid to all the senses, it’s a space of bodily labor, of getting dirty in the best and most literal way, an opportunity to see immediate and unarguable effect…
– Rebecca Solnit
It’s strange to think of the mortality of institutions. Things that are the product of many lifetimes ending in one’s own. How easily and cavalierly the works of decades and centuries are demolished.
– Michael Hofmann
The images are where the psyche is. People say, “I don’t know what the soul is,” or “I’ve lost my soul” or whatever. To me the place to look when you feel that way is immediately to the images that show where you are with your soul in your dreams.
– James Hillman
There’s one journey
in which not our feet
but our heart tires.
– Ahmad Faraz
Nocturne for a Closed Spiritualist Church
After Jane Burn
I pass by every day on my journey home.
Its curved bricks are squeezed between
a department store and an office block.
Unobtrusive, appropriately liminal,
a church entering its own afterlife.
The windows are boarded up
like bruised lids, the doors are bolted
with paradoxical finality. A gaudy logo
from the business that moved in later
hangs above the archway.
I’m not sure why the venture failed,
whether they felt unwelcome, heard
footsteps and creaks at closing time.
There is still a chalk board on one wall
which lists the week’s services: half-
scrubbed letters float in the winter twilight.
Mediumship was every Sunday, 4pm.
It’s all very foreign for a Methodist agnostic,
and I linger, between belief, consider
what might happen if I knocked.
Leaves rattle against the step. I wonder where
the congregation has gone, what they took
with them, what they left behind.
– Bex Hainsworth
It’s a pleasure to read a book in which an obsession with the metaphysical, the spiritual, and the ethical is neither a joke nor an occasion for a sermon.
– Francine Prose
A little too much anger, too often or at the wrong time, can destroy more than you would ever imagine.
– Marilynne Robinson
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
You are the philosopher’s stone; The holy grail is you.
– veskor_cassiopeia@
When they promise the passing mariner the revelation of all that has been, is and shall be, the Sirens are setting Hegel to music.
– George Steiner
Sometimes I see myself driving through hell with this wagon and selling brimstone. And sometimes I’m driving through heaven handing our provisions to wandering souls! If only we could find a place where there’s no shooting, me and my children—what’s left of ‘em—we might rest a while.
– Bertolt Brecht
He was there alone with himself, collected, tranquil, adoring, comparing the serenity of his heart with the serenity of the skies, moved in the darkness by the visible splendors of the constellations, and the invisible splendor of God, opening his soul to the thoughts which fall from the Unknown. In such moments, offering up his heart at the hour when the flowers of night inhale their perfume, lighted like a lamp in the center of the starry night, expanding his soul in ecstasy in the midst of the universal radiance of creation, he could not himself perhaps have told what was passing in his own mind; he felt something depart from him, and something descend upon him, mysterious interchanges of the depths of the soul with the depths of the universe.
– Victor Hugo
Love must be as much a light, as it is a flame.
– Henry David Thoreau
In intuition, the single pulsates with the life of the whole, and the whole is in the life of the single. Every genuine artistic representation is itself and is the universe, the universe in that individual form, and that individual form as the universe. In every utterance, every fanciful [imaginative] creation, of the poet, there lies the whole of human destiny, all human hope, illusions, griefs, joys, human grandeurs and miseries, the whole drama of reality perpetually evolving and growing out of itself in suffering and joy.
– Benedetto Croce
In Praise Of Limestone
If it form the one landscape that we, the inconstant ones,
Are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly
Because it dissolves in water. Mark these rounded slopes
With their surface fragrance of thyme and, beneath,
A secret system of caves and conduits; hear the springs
That spurt out everywhere with a chuckle,
Each filling a private pool for its fish and carving
Its own little ravine whose cliffs entertain
The butterfly and the lizard; examine this region
Of short distances and definite places:
What could be more like Mother or a fitter background
For her son, the flirtatious male who lounges
Against a rock in the sunlight, never doubting
That for all his faults he is loved; whose works are but
Extensions of his power to charm? From weathered outcrop
To hill-top temple, from appearing waters to
Conspicuous fountains, from a wild to a formal vineyard,
Are ingenious but short steps that a child’s wish
To receive more attention than his brothers, whether
By pleasing or teasing, can easily take.
Watch, then, the band of rivals as they climb up and down
Their steep stone gennels in twos and threes, at times
Arm in arm, but never, thank God, in step; or engaged
On the shady side of a square at midday in
Voluble discourse, knowing each other too well to think
There are any important secrets, unable
To conceive a god whose temper-tantrums are moral
And not to be pacified by a clever line
Or a good lay: for accustomed to a stone that responds,
They have never had to veil their faces in awe
Of a crater whose blazing fury could not be fixed;
Adjusted to the local needs of valleys
Where everything can be touched or reached by walking,
Their eyes have never looked into infinite space
Through the lattice-work of a nomad’s comb; born lucky,
Their legs have never encountered the fungi
And insects of the jungle, the monstrous forms and lives
With which we have nothing, we like to hope, in common.
So, when one of them goes to the bad, the way his mind works
Remains incomprehensible: to become a pimp
Or deal in fake jewellery or ruin a fine tenor voice
For effects that bring down the house, could happen to all
But the best and the worst of us…
That is why, I suppose,
The best and worst never stayed here long but sought
Immoderate soils where the beauty was not so external,
The light less public and the meaning of life
Something more than a mad camp. ‘Come!’ cried the granite wastes,
“How evasive is your humour, how accidental
Your kindest kiss, how permanent is death.” (Saints-to-be
Slipped away sighing.) “Come!” purred the clays and gravels,
“On our plains there is room for armies to drill; rivers
Wait to be tamed and slaves to construct you a tomb
In the grand manner: soft as the earth is mankind and both
Need to be altered.” (Intendant Caesars rose and
Left, slamming the door.) But the really reckless were fetched
By an older colder voice, the oceanic whisper:
“I am the solitude that asks and promises nothing;
That is how I shall set you free. There is no love;
There are only the various envies, all of them sad.”
They were right, my dear, all those voices were right
And still are; this land is not the sweet home that it looks,
Nor its peace the historical calm of a site
Where something was settled once and for all: A back ward
And dilapidated province, connected
To the big busy world by a tunnel, with a certain
Seedy appeal, is that all it is now? Not quite:
It has a worldy duty which in spite of itself
It does not neglect, but calls into question
All the Great Powers assume; it disturbs our rights. The poet,
Admired for his earnest habit of calling
The sun the sun, his mind Puzzle, is made uneasy
By these marble statues which so obviously doubt
His antimythological myth; and these gamins,
Pursuing the scientist down the tiled colonnade
With such lively offers, rebuke his concern for Nature’s
Remotest aspects: I, too, am reproached, for what
And how much you know. Not to lose time, not to get caught,
Not to be left behind, not, please! to resemble
The beasts who repeat themselves, or a thing like water
Or stone whose conduct can be predicted, these
Are our common prayer, whose greatest comfort is music
Which can be made anywhere, is invisible,
And does not smell. In so far as we have to look forward
To death as a fact, no doubt we are right: But if
Sins can be forgiven, if bodies rise from the dead,
These modifications of matter into
Innocent athletes and gesticulating fountains,
Made solely for pleasure, make a further point:
The blessed will not care what angle they are regarded from,
Having nothing to hide. Dear, I know nothing of
Either, but when I try to imagine a faultless love
Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur
Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.
– May 1948
I have lived in a kind of a coma. The loss of consciousness for me was never any great loss.
– Samuel Beckett
Those roads were echoes and footsteps,
women, men, agonies, resurrections,
days and nights,
half dreams and dreams,
every obscure instant of yesterday
and of the world’s yesterdays,
the firm sword of the Dane and the moon of the Persian,
the deeds of the dead,
shared love, words,
Emerson and snow and so many things.
Now I can forget them. I reach my center,
my algebra and my key,
my mirror.
Soon I will know who I am.
– Jorge Luis Borges
Like now. Take the love medicine. I don’t know where she remembered that from. It came tumbling from her mind like an asteroid off the corner of the screen. But when she mentions them love medicines, I feel my back prickle at the danger. These love medicines is something of an old Chippewa specialty. No other tribe has got them down so well. But love medicines is not for the layman to handle. Before you get one, even, you should go through one hell of a lot of mental condensation. You could really mess up your life grinding up the wrong little thing.
– Louise Erdrich
A little over two years ago at the outset of the pandemic I wrote: If you’re pregnant or you’re healing from something or you’re a child or adolescent in a growth spurt, you are working all the time to produce what comes next. What looks like “doing nothing” is productive on all sorts of levels, most of them below the horizon of consciousness.
If you’re in the middle of a pandemic, just absorbing what it means in terms of your own transformed life and the fate of whatever nation you’re in and the world, of practical plans and metaphysical and political implications, is a huge task. I think most of us are absorbed in this task and it should be recognized as hard and necessary work, because that will help us forgive ourselves for not being so productive at our everyday work in the normal world we left behind this month. Because you probably are very productive now, but not in the way that was the norm a few weeks ago, and this is probably the most important work you can do. Still true of living through violent change and turmoil.
– Rebecca Solnit
Slow is often overlooked in rushed culture. Its’ oracle is not acknowledged, properly understood, or respected. The slow breath. A slow first kiss. Slowly disrobing in front of a lover. Slow lovemaking. Slow to get up out of a warm bed. Slow stretching. Slow yoga. Slow bathing. Slow and steady. Slowly walking through an airport to catch a flight. Slow decision-making. Slow crockpot cooking. Slow eating. Slow creativity. The pause before we speak. When we give ourselves (our cells) permission to slow down, our whole system is met in a magical place where regeneration and rejuvenation naturally begin to occur without any effort from us.
– India Ame’ye
We live in a society where people are not taught the most basic peace skills. We don’t teach people how to heal or how to feed their non-physical needs in healthy ways. So we shouldn’t be shocked or despairing that most people aren’t good at creating peace, especially when our society teaches people harmful habits that are the opposite of peace-literacy skills.
– Paul K. Chappell
For in the popular way of thinking, history draws a time “line,” as if time marched in lockstep in only one direction. Some people say that time is a river into which we can step but once, as it flows in a straight path to the sea. But Nanabozho’s people know time as a circle. Time is not a river running inexorably to the sea, but the sea itself—its tides that appear and disappear, the fog that rises to become rain in a different river. All things that were will come again.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer
Art without meaning is
just decoration.
The art is in the idea.
– Rick Rubin
Buddhism taught me that the way to change your karma is not to respond, but to feel the feeling without responding. Then it is passed on. It does no harm.
– David Guy
no sign of their paths through the air
from ancient times birds know the paths of birds
– Mary Oppen
Buying a book is good
Reading the book is better
Thinking about a book you’ve read is nuts
Writing your thoughts about it is how you become a genius
What’s your favorite book?
– Olabanji Stephen
Because it strikes me there is something greater than judgement. I think it is called mercy.
– Sebastian Barry
The words do not illuminate the poem;
the poem illuminates the words.
– St John of the Cross, (tr. Mary Oppen)
With social media and worldwide conversations on every imaginable topic, more people are likely to recognize other people’s shadows and failures. Whether we can recognize our own is still in question.
– Robert Bly, More than True
If you try to convert someone, it will never be to effect his salvation but to make him suffer like yourself, to be sure he is exposed to the same ordeals and endures them with the same impatience. You keep watch, you pray, you agonize–provided he does too, sighing, groaning, beset by the same tortures that are racking you.
Intolerance is the work of ravaged souls whose faith comes down to a more or less deliberate torment they would like to see generalized, instituted.
No one saves anyone; for we save only ourselves, and do so all the better if we disguise as convictions the misery we want to share, to lavish on others… We convert not to liberate but to enchain.
– Emil Cioran, The Fall into Time
All of western medicine is built on getting rid of pain, which is not the same as healing. Healing is actually the capacity to hold pain.
– Gabor Maté
Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness. And they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy… or they become legend.
– Jim Harrison
Last night, my friend said: “bioregions can’t conquer each other because their identity is rooted in place.”
Bioregionalism is anti-imperial.
Bioregionalism is community sovereignty.
Bioregionalism is belonging to Life and to place and to each other.
Bioregionalism is peace.
– @omniharmonic
Since thoughts, like feathers, are blown by the wind of hope and fear, The dignified poet remains wherever he is.
– Chögyam Trungpa
All songwriters are links in a chain.
– Pete Seeger
The problem of psychotherapy is: people have problems. Why? Because they don’t know how to listen to themselves & their own impulses, their own truth, their own myth. Why don’t people all follow their inner passion? Because the outside world overwhelms them.
– R. Hill and E. Rossi
She had wild eyes, slightly insane. She also carried an overload of compassion that was real enough and which obviously cost her something.
– Charles Bukowski
Within the poem, I sometimes think, is all the evidence you need for explaining how that poem came to be and why it is as it is.
– Ted Hughes
What I judge most in other people points me toward something I’ve yet to integrate in myself.
Thank you, judgement, for the signposts. The shadow always be shadowing.
– @McCallErickson
We listened through wind-vents
for echoes of earthquakes, listened for God
until the radio died.
– Jennifer Foerster
Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river…
– Borges
I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.
– Sylvia Plath, The Morning Song
Springing
by Marie Ponsot
In a skiff on a sunrisen lake we are watchers.
Swimming aimlessly is luxury just as walking
loudly up a shallow stream is.
As we lean over the deep well, we whisper.
Friends at hearths are drawn to the one warm air;
strangers meet on beaches drawn to the one wet sea.
What wd it be to be water, one body of water
(what water is is another mystery) (We are
water divided.) It wd be a self without walls,
with surface tension, specific gravity a local
exchange between bedrock and cloud of falling and rising,
rising to fall, falling to rise.
(1962)
Thinking about how the hardest blindspots to see are the blindspots around what we are NOT doing.
– Heidi Priebe
hey man they’re calling your academic monograph a “slim volume”
– katie kadue
You’re painfully alive
in a drugged and
dying culture.
– Richard Yates
Poetry can be everything that it is because it is also a game. A very serious game but a game nonetheless. A game of the imagination placed in bold relief by Leopardi: the thing that surpassed rational understanding was transfigured by the imaginative game.
– Rafael Argullo
I’m not intelligent. I’m not arrogant. I’m just like the people who read my books.
– Haruki Murakami
As a plant becomes pot-bound
man becomes ego-bound
enclosed in his own limited mental consciousness.
Then he can’t feel any more
or love, or rejoice or even grieve any more,
he is ego-bound,
pot-bound
in the pot of his own conceit,
and he can only slowly die.
Unless he is a sturdy plant.
Then he can burst the pot,
shell of his ego
and get his roots in earth again,
raw earth.
– DH Lawrence
Have you known how to regulate your conduct, you have done a great deal more than he who has composed books. Have you known how to take repose, you have done more than he who has taken cities and empires.
– Michel de Montaigne
Let it be clear that the traces of surrealism that exist in me come from Buñuel’s films, and not from the clown Dalí.
– Francis Bacon
I flew across the ocean, and when I came back, I could no longer sleep.
Something foreign had lodged in me and formed a cord, leeching from me what it needed.
– Tracy Fuad
Making art matters more than ever. In a society that revolves around consumption, finding joy and fulfillment in creation is an act of resistance.
– @iconawrites
We have an invitation to go to church in a new way, by praying before the new leaves budding through dormant trees or the wobbly flowers by the side of the road pushing through the solid earth.
– Ilia Delio
It’s only the young who are free. As people get older they slip, inch by inch, into the swamp of habitual life. Refusing to marry, refusing to have kids, avoiding a fixed way of life: that won’t work either. People who live all alone have their own kind of swamp.
It’s only the young who are free. Once they start learning about the world and the rarity of their freedom first dawns on them, they can’t keep it in their grasp. It’s the very preciousness of freedom that makes it seem to burn in one’s hands—a person who has freedom goes around knocking his head on the ground, submissively, to others, begging them to take it from him.
– Eileen Chang
The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.
– Marcus Aurelius
Indigenous artists talk about their work as “remembering the future”. Indigenous language and design is not consigned to the past but provides the means of understanding – and perhaps reimagining – a threatening future.
– Hazel V. Carby
I had no connections, no writing circle. I typed everything single-spaced so it would look as though it were already published.
– Joy Williams
Genius tends not to survive in accounts of it. Genius from peripheral and exotic backgrounds is even more difficult. It is like a design sketch or architectural drawing submitted without any indication of scale.
– Michael Hofmann on Halldór Laxness
Beachcombing isn’t necessarily a form of escapism. Paying close attention to jetsam and flotsam means confronting much that is wrong with the world.
– Sally Huband
The nearer a man comes to a calm mind, the closer he is to strength.
– Marcus Aurelius
For it was indubitably a masterpiece these children were creating; a masterpiece devoid of intellectual content, devoid — this was the miracle — of any worldly aim; the masterpiece of their own being.
– Jean Cocteau, Les Enfants Terribles
The point is I came back
from the deep places. Always
there was help, a man or woman
who asked no questions, an animal’s
warm body, the itch in my muscles
to climb a swinging rope.
I started out as a girl
without a shadow, in iron shoes;
now, at the end of the world
I am a woman full of rain.
The journey back should be easy;
if this reaches you, wait for me.
– Lisel Mueller
The Buddha says, ideally, you want to make your mind like a broken gong. People can hit it, but there’s no reverberation.
– Thanissaro Bhikkhu
We fall in love for a smile, a look, a shoulder. That is enough; then, in the long hours of hope or sorrow, we fabricate a person, we compose a character.
– Marcel Proust
new ballpoint pen
the words gush out
so fast
they barely touch
the truth I carry
– @hegelincanada
People get absolutely intolerable when they have a creative idea in their womb and can’t bring it out. They’re neurotic, aggressive, irritable, and depressed. So then one has to help them bring the child out.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
listen carefully enough, the ideas you carry with you will fall away / john cage said that, or something like
– Ian Buckley
A soul that goes more naked than the others from nothingness through the world to hell makes a greater impression on the world than the dressed bourgeois souls.
– Wittgenstein
Topsy-turvy is often a symptom for the presence of God—the last become first, the hungry are fed, the obnoxious are welcomed.
– Anne Lamott
your hand was trying the keyboard,
your eyes were following the impossible
signs on the sheet: and every chord
was broken, like a voice in grief.
– eugenio montale, (tr. jonathan galassi)
For the most part we do not first see, and then define; we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world .. we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.
– W. Lippmann
You cannot know yourself if you are merely accumulating knowledge about yourself, for then you know only that which you have accumulated.
– Krishnamurti
Never before have we had to rely so completely on ourselves. No guardian to think for us, no precedent to follow without question, no lawmaker above, only ordinary men set to deal with heartbreaking perplexity. All weakness comes to the surface. We are homeless in a jungle of machines and untamed powers that haunt and lure the imagination. Of course our culture is confused, our thinking spasmodic, and our emotion out of kilter. No mariner ever enters upon a more uncharted sea than does the average human being born in the twentieth century. Our ancestors thought they knew their way from birth through all eternity; we are puzzled about day after to-morrow…. It is with emancipation that real tasks begin,
– Walter Lippmann
All the wingless birds
sang on my shoulders
– Vicente Huidobro
how audacious
those who critique
the eclipse
– Issa
Nowadays we can see as never before that the peril which threatens all of us comes not from nature, but from man, from the psyches of the individual and the mass.
– Carl Jung
Why are the first days of love
like the first days of springtime,
the most fleeting, the least faithful?
– Zeeshan Jaanam
Somehow we desire our problems; we are in love with them much as we want to get rid of them… Problems sustain us. There is a secret love hiding in each problem.
– James Hillman
Feelings of love and care arise naturally; they are not the product of pressures and demands.
– Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche
Telescope
There is a moment after you move your eye away
when you forget where you are
because you’ve been living, it seems,
somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky.
You’ve stopped being here in the world.
You’re in a different place,
a place where human life has no meaning.
You’re not a creature in a body.
You exist as the stars exist,
participating in their stillness, their immensity.
Then you’re in the world again.
At night, on the cold hill,
taking the telescope apart.
You realize afterward
not that the image is false
but the relation is false.
You see again how far away
every thing is from every other thing.
– Louise Glück
When the daylight world and surface aspects of life become stuck, vitality and change must be sought on the side tracks and winding paths where the oft-ignored small voices of intuition and instinct wait to have their say and indicate surprising ways to turn and learn.
– Michael Meade
Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.
– Gustave Flaubert
Sometimes I don’t think I’ll ever love the Moon enough to be a poet.
– @whyrobynwhy
After all the world is indeed beautiful and if we were any other creature than man we might be continuously happy in it.
– Sebastian Barry
For greed, the entire world is too little.
– Seneca
A kingdom founded on injustice never lasts.
– Seneca
Stillness. One of the doors
into the temple.
– Mary Oliver
Experimental art deserves experimental criticism from an experimental critic.
– Laura Kerr
You never dreamed, did you, that a piano could be made to express all that?
– Marcel Proust
I never knew anyone who had a passion for words who had as much difficulty saying things as I do.
– Marianne Moore
He was of the forest and I was of the desert. Our friendship grew from what was hidden and what was exposed.
– Terry Tempest Williams
There are no universities in Gaza left standing and now no hospitals
– Benjamin Balthaser
They asked me to
describe the pain
but the pain defied
description, on
a scale of one to
ten it demanded a
different scale.
– Garth Greenwell, Small Rain
Lines Written in Early Spring
by William Wordsworth
I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.
To her fair works did nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.
Through primrose tufts, in that sweet bower,
The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
And ’tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.
The birds around me hopped and played:
Their thoughts I cannot measure,
But the least motion which they made,
It seemed a thrill of pleasure.
The budding twigs spread out their fan,
To catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure there.
If this belief from heaven be sent,
If such be Nature’s holy plan,
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?
Mysteries are not to be avoided. Rather they are a locus of hope, they enrich and complicate. That is why we have them. That is perhaps one of the reasons we have children.
– Donald Barthelme
There were deer there once, in the clearing,
three deer, large as memory objects.
They stood in a circle
as if they knew life was a game.
– Elisa Gabbert
elitism is and always will be gross. support independent.
– Vic Nogay
The sun has long been set,
The stars are out by twos and threes,
– William Wordsworth
What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.
– Jean Cocteau
Listen, that’s my heart’s hot stutter.
– Emily Van Duyne
Study closely the patterns of things.
– Eliot Weinberger
WHY MUSIC?
I. Music is a Science. It is exact, specific, and it demands exact acoustics. A conductor’s full score is a chart, a graph which indicates frequencies, intensities, volume changes, melody, and harmony all at once and with the most exact control of time.
II. Music is Mathematical. It is rhythmically based on the subdivisions of time into fractions which must be done instantaneously, not worked out on paper.
III. Music is a Foreign Language. Most of the terms are in Italian, German, or French; and the notation is certainly not English – but a highly developed kind of shorthand that uses symbols to represent ideas. The semantics of music is the most complete and universal language.
IV. Music is History. Music usually reflects the environment and times of its creation, often even the country and/or racial feeling.
V. Music is Physical Education. It requires fantastic coordination of fingers, hands, arms, lip, cheek, and facial muscles in addition to extraordinary control of the diaphragmatic, back, stomach, and chest muscles, which respond instantly to the sound the ear hears and the mind interprets.
VI. Music Develops Insight and Demands Research.
VII. Music is all these things, but most of all, Music is Art. It allows a human being to take all these, dry technically boring, (but difficult) techniques and use them to create emotion. That is one thing science cannot duplicate; humanism feeling, emotion, call it what you will.
That is why we teach music:
Not because we expect you to major in music
Not because we expect you to play or sing all your life
BUT – so you will be human
so you will recognize beauty
so you will be closer to an infinite beyond this world
so you will have something to cling to
so you will have more love, more compassion, more gentleness, more good – – in short, more life
– unknown
The sins of the ancestors continue down the generations until one person comes to consciousness and redeems the curse.
– Sally Kester
This world is full of conflicts and full of things that cannot be reconciled. But there are moments when we can… reconcile and embrace the whole mess, and that’s what I mean by ‘Hallelujah.’
– Leonard Cohen
Only a loudmouth would mistake silence for agreement. Silence is as often conspiracy as it is consent.
– Anne Boyer
Stop thirsting for things that are bitter
– Patricia Smith
Language reveals the man. Speak that I may see thee.
– Ben Johnson
We would be a two-woman throng of spectators to this world’s everyday marvels.
– Stephanie Hunt
Wind We always forget what poetry is
(or maybe it happens only to me).
Poetry is a wind blowing from the gods, says
Cioran, citing the Aztecs.
But there are so many quiet, windless days.
The gods are napping then
or they’re preparing tax forms
for even loftier gods.
Oh may that wind return.
The wind blowing from the gods
let it come back, let that wind
awaken.
– Adam Zagajewski
Every good poem asks a question, and every good poet asks every question. No one can call herself a poet unless she questions her ideas, ethics, and beliefs.
– Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux
In an interview, Jericho Brown said “you always have to be able to cast what you love into skepticism.” Poetry is more than an affirmation of our beliefs. We risk meeting the unplanned and unexpected. It is terrifying. It is humbling. It is hard. And that is the point.
– @aliner
Oh to be in England now that April’s there.
– Robert Browning
She pulls
And the notes fall
Into her molten mold
Of flaming sound.
– Frank Marshall Davis
Everything blooms coldly
– Lisa Olson
coasting
on stardust
lost
to the night
and old dreams
– @osbornecsue
It’s never too early to plant the seeds of simplicity in your company.
Start with the simplest possible thing that could work, and then see what happens.
You will have to fight for simplicity, because complexity is in insidious force that seeps in.
– @dharmesh
The right way, like the wrong way, must be paid for
– C.G. Jung
I wanted to tell a story about Americans paying in the present for the US’s crimes in the past.
– @lilyjmeyer
sent home
affairs in order
spring snowman
– Roland Packer
THANK YOU TERROR
Each mirror contains
terror. In the photo
of you & me I am
wearing the shirt I loved,
which I threw away
years ago when I could
no longer bear the love
of anything, even a shirt.
– Mathias Svalina
You don’t have to do anything as a writer. But being kind and supportive doesn’t hurt.
– Casey Stegman
Who liveth alone longeth for mercy,
Maker’s mercy. Though he must traverse
tracts of sea, sick at heart,
– trouble with oars ice-cold waters,
the ways of exile – Wierd is set fast.
– Anonymous, The Wanderer, (translated by Michael Alexander)
When you operate from a high level, there will always be people who try to reduce you. Sometimes even without realizing that’s what they’re doing. Because they’d rather bring you to them than rise to meet you.
– Nika Solé
Poetry is just waiting for our gaze.
– Andrée Chedid
Lovely days don’t come to you, you should walk to them.
– Rumi
… someday we will regard our children not as creatures to manipulate or to change but rather as messengers from a world we once deeply knew, but which we have long since forgotten, who can reveal to us more about the true secrets of life, and also our own lives…
– Alice Miller
We may try to think of you, Time, / but you, Time, think yourself continually, / without need of imagination, assistance, or witness.
– Jane Hirshfield
I say this with my whole chest – elitism in literary spaces only serves the elite. There is room for lots of paths and perspectives in this community. What we don’t have to make room for is unkindness and disdain.
– Meg Pillow
Yet, even as the air is rumorous of fray
Before the first shafts of the sun’s onslaught
From gloom’s black harness splinter,
And Summer move on Winter
With the trumpet of the March, and the pennon
of the May
– Francis Thompson
can someone explain the true psychology of people who enjoy playing board games and card games
– Όντρεϊ Χορν
Because what they call passion actually is not some emotional energy, but just the friction between their souls and the outside world.
– Tarkovsky
I discovered over the past six months that I do believe in God – just not the God I wanted to believe in. Not one I know how to talk to.
I’m so conscious and ashamed that He is watching us desecrate human life in His name. In my sleep His anger is a palpable force.
– Celeste Marcus
I much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single intelligent man to the thoughtless approval of the masses.
– Johannes Kepler
You know who said it best? Leonard Cohen. He meditated all those years often for 12 hours at a time. In an interview, he said his storyline just wore itself out. He got so bored with his dramatic storyline. He said: “The less there was of me, the happier I got.”
– Pema Chödrön
Sometimes I wonder whether we hide lovers from others because it makes it easier to hide ourselves from ourselves.
– Lisa Halliday, Asymmetry
…poetry is a vital part of our intelligence, our ability to learn, our ability to remember, the relationship between our bodies and minds. Poetry’s highest purpose is to provide a unique sensation of coordination between the intelligence, emotions and the body.
– Robert Pinsky
All were in sorrow, or had been, or soon would be. It was the nature of things. Though on the surface it seemed every person was different, this was not true. At the core of each lay suffering; our eventual end, the many loses we must experience on the way to that end. We must try to see one another in this way. As suffering, limited beings – Perennially outmatched by circumstance, inadequately endowed with compensatory graces.
– George Saunders
Sound had a freedom that no thought could equal because a sound made no absolute claim on meaning. Any word, on the other hand, could be forced to signify its opposite.
– Madeleine Thien
Some communities will be abandoned, others will struggle along, others will split, others will flourish, gain members, and be duplicated elsewhere. Each community must win and hold the voluntary adherence of its members.
– Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia
The law of your mind is this: You will get a reaction or response from your subconscious mind according to the nature of the thought or idea you hold in your conscious mind.
– Dr. Joseph Murphy
If the Lord shall break your heart, consent to have it broken.
– Charles Spurgeon
There must always be two kinds of art: escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep, and parable-art, that art which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love.
– W.H. Auden
All bondage is an illusion of the race consciousness. There is always a way out of every situation, under grace. Every man is free to do the will of God.
– Florence Scovel Shinn
It does not trouble us if anyone rejects us for imitating God.
– Charles Spurgeon
We talked about music, read poetry, and the air
between us caught fire.
– Nikos Kazantzakis
I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow; but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.
– Agatha Christie
Ars Poetica, 2021
I lived a question.
Survived the answer.
– Jessica Cuello
All I wanted is what I still want. I want to be a great writer. And the only way to do that, it seems to me, is not to complain about anything that happens to you, but to use whatever happens to you—from starvation to champagne.
– James Baldwin
Perhaps our dreams are there to be broken, and our plans are there to crumble, and our tomorrows are there to dissolve into todays, and perhaps all of this is all a giant invitation to wake up from the dream of separation, to awaken from the mirage of control, and embrace whole-heartedly what is present. Perhaps it is all a call to compassion, to a deep embrace of this universe in all its bliss and pain and bitter-sweet glory.
Perhaps breakdown always contains breakthrough. Perhaps suffering is simply a right of passage, not a test or a punishment, nor a signpost to something in the future or past, but a direct pointer to existence itself, here and now. Perhaps life cannot go ‘wrong’ at all.
– Jeff Foster
My mother was a braid of black smoke.
She bore me swaddled over the burning cities. The sky was a vast and windy place for a child to play.
We met many others who were just like us.
They were trying to put on their overcoats with arms made of smoke.
The high heavens were full of little shrunken deaf ears instead of stars.
– Charles Simic
The Rider
Some believe the end will come
in the form of a mathematical equation.
Others believe it will descend as a shining horse.
I calculate the probabilities to be even at fifty percent:
Either a thing will happen or it won’t.
I open a window,
I unmake the bed,
Somehow, I am moving closer to the equation
or to the horse with everything I do.
Death comes in the form of a horse
covered in shining equations.
There will be no further clues, I see.
I begin to read my horse.
The equations are drawn in the shapes of horses:
horses covered in equations.
I am tempted to hook an ankle
around the world as I ride away.
For I am about to ride far beyond
the low prairie of beginnings and endings.
– Sarah Manguso
Melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies.
– Emil Cioran
Liminality (which is derived from the Latin Urnen, meaning doorway or threshold) is a word used to describe a phase when the old isn’t working but the new has not yet come to replace it.
– Howard Sasportas
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
Only music can create an indestructible complicity between two persons. . . A passion is perishable, it decays like everything that part takes of life, whereas music is of an essence superior to life and, of course, to death.
– Cioran
PROBABILITY
Most coincidents are not
miraculous, but way more
common than we think –
it’s the shiver
of noticing being
central in a sequence
of events
that makes so much
seem wild and rare –
because what if it wasn’t?
Astonishment’s nothing
without your consent.
– Lia Purpura
I do not care for “systems,” what concerns me is the philosophy of the astonished.
– George Oppen
Once you create a self-justifying storyline, your emotional entrapment within it quadruples.
– Pema Chödrön
If you wish to improve, be content to appear clueless or stupid.
– Epictetus
One of the biggest troubles hitchhiking is having to talk to innumerable people, make them feel they didn’t make a mistake picking you up.
– Jack Kerouac
truth and understanding are not such wares as to be monopolized and traded in by tickets and statutes and standards. we must not think to make a staple commodity of all the knowledge in the land, to mark and license it like our broadcloth and our woolpacks.
– john milton
Only the good worry about whether they were wrong.
– John le Carre
Nobody resembles my dream.
– Alejandra Pizarnik
The psychic aberration of man is the danger. Everything depends upon whether or not our psyche functions properly.
– C.G. Jung
In academia, diversity is often treated as an ornament to display rather than a foundation to build upon.
– @AcademicChatter
Holy spirit is what
keeps creator and
savior together,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
Her own thoughts and reflections were habitually her best companions.
– Jane Austen
Broken Haiku
First, count the words
and color them
with sticks touched
by the recent frost
then warm the paper
with a match and watch
the syllables turn into sparrows.
– john zbigniew guzlowski
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
– Leonardo da Vinci
Crossings
by Ravi Shankar
Between forest and field, a threshold
like stepping from a cathedral into the street—
the quality of air alters, an eclipse lifts,
boundlessness opens, earth itself retextured
into weeds where woods once were.
Even planes of motion shift from vertical
navigation to horizontal quiescence:
there’s a standing invitation to lie back
as sky’s unpredictable theater proceeds.
Suspended in this ephemeral moment
after leaving a forest, before entering
a field, the nature of reality is revealed.
The quality of what you pursue determines the quality of your life.
– @farnamstreet
Final Curve
When you turn the corner
And you run into yourself
Then you know that you have turned
All the corners that are left
– Langston Hughes
The Lorca Variations (I)
“Lorca’s Spain: A Homage”
by Jerome Rothenberg
Beginning with olive trees.
Shadows.
Beginning with roosters.
Crystal.
Beginning with castanets & almonds.
Fishes.
This is a homage to Spain.
This mists dogs.
This silences rubber.
This is Saturn.
Beginning with yellow.
Eclipse.
Beginning with needles.
Insomnia.
Beginning with baskets.
The Moon.
Who is naked? The imagination
(wrote Lorca) is seared.
This is a homage to water.
Beginning & end.
Why kid ourselves, people have nothing to say to one another, they all talk about their own troubles and nothing else. Each man for himself, the earth for us all.
– Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Everybody’s in the middle of a story. So you just have to write the ending.
– Paula Fox
AS IF TO DEMONSTRATE AN ECLIPSE
I pick an orange from a wicker basket
and place it on the table
to represent the sun.
Then down at the other end
a blue and white marble
becomes the earth
and nearby I lay the little moon of an aspirin.
I get a glass from a cabinet,
open a bottle of wine,
then I sit in a ladder-back chair,
a benevolent god presiding
over a miniature creation myth,
and I begin to sing
a homemade canticle of thanks
for this perfect little arrangement,
for not making the earth too hot or cold
not making it spin too fast or slow
so that the grove of orange trees
and the owl become possible,
not to mention the rolling wave,
the play of clouds, geese in flight,
and the Z of lightning on a dark lake.
Then I fill my glass again
and give thanks for the trout,
the oak, and the yellow feather,
singing the room full of shadows,
as sun and earth and moon
circle one another in their impeccable orbits
and I get more and more cockeyed with gratitude.
– Billy Collins
It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Writing is writing what you cannot know before you have written: it is preknowing and not knowing, blindly, with words. It occurs at the point where blindness and light meet.
– Hélène Cixous
It was the upward-reaching and fathomlessly hungering, heart-breaking love for the beauty of the world at its most beautiful, and, beyond that, for that beauty east of the sun and west of the moon which is past the reach of all but our most desperate desiring and is finally the beauty of Beauty itself, of Being itself and what lies at the heart of Being.
– Frederick Buechner
I sit up late dumb as a cow,
which is to say
somewhat conscious with thirst and
hunger, an eye for the new moon
and the morning’s long walk
to the water tank. Everywhere
around me the birds are waiting
for the light. In this world of dreams
don’t let the clock cut up
your life in pieces.
– Jim Harrison
I need my memories. They are my documents. I keep watch over them. They are my privacy and I am intensely jealous of them. Cézanne said, ‘I am jealous of my little sensations.’ To reminisce and woolgather is negative. You have to differentiate between memories. Are you going to them or are they coming to you? If you are going to them, you are wasting time. Nostalgia is not productive. If they come to you, they are the seeds for [your work].
– Louise Bourgeois
Releasing Beauty
Spirit waits in everything like the
incandescent shimmer between electrons.
Each time we’re drawn to create, it’s the
shimmer that recreates us. Each time we
shape something out of nothing, the heart
stirs like a red bird remembering it was
meant to fly. Each time we give when no
one is looking, we peel what covers our
timeless center. When softened this
way, silence reaches through us till we
admit we are chimes carrying an ancient
song. “Then why try so hard?” you ask.
Because trying is singing, too. Because
sweat exercises the dream. After so much
work, we think we’ve produced something
that never existed, when it is we who wake
closer to what never dies. Whatever stirs
us to put together the few things we find,
it is we who flower from giving away
the nectar of our being.
– Mark Nepo
A pedal point as you may know is a bass note prolonged, not only on the organ, but in all music. Grief is such an undertone; you don’t hear it all the time, but it’s there, a tone reminding us of loss.
– Alan Bowers
I never lose sight of the fact that just being is fun.
– Katharine Hepburn
Instead of running after patience, relax and let it come to you. Loosen the tension in your body; open your concentration and allow your emotional energy to flow. Let the warm, soothing energy of patience arise within you and flow through your body easily and freely. This practice is the act of patience.
– Tarthang Tulku
There are two ways of exerting one’s strength: one is pushing down, the other is pulling up.
– Booker T. Washington
The vision of the splendor of creation, like all kinds, lays a duty upon one who has been fortunate enough to receive it, a duty in his turn to create works which are as worthy of what he has seen as his feeble capacities will permit. And many have listened and obeyed. It has been, I am quite certain, the initial cause of all genuine works of art and, I believe, of all genuine scientific inquiry and discovery for it is the wonder which is, as Plato said, the beginning of every kind of philosophy.
– W. H. Auden
In spite of all apparent tiredness, when one takes the right course one finds that inner energy increases, new force appears and it begins to be easier to make new efforts.
– Thomas de Hartmann
This is all I have to tell you. In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned.
– Annie Dillard, Total Eclipse
How then does light return to the world after the eclipse of the sun? Miraculously. Frailly. In thin stripes. It hangs like a glass cage. It is a hoop to be fractured by a tiny jar. There is a spark there. Next moment a flush of dun. Then a vapor as if earth were breathing in and out, once, twice, for the first time. Then under the dullness someone walks with a green light. Then off twists a white wraith. The woods throb blue and green, and gradually the fields drink in red, gold, brown. Suddenly a river snatches a blue light. The earth absorbs color like a sponge slowly drinking water. It puts on weight; rounds itself; hangs pendent; settles and swings beneath our feet.
– Virginia Woolf
We boast our light, but if we look not wisely on the sun itself, it smites us into darkness… The light which we have gained was given to us, not to ever staring on, but by it to discover onward things more remote from our knowledge
– John Milton
A great sea fog is not homogenous–its density varies: it is honeycombed with streets, it has its caves of clear air, its cliffs of solid vapour, all shifting and changing place with the subtlety of legerdemain.
– Henry de Vere Stacpoole