We forget so much. All those memories of great meals, travel, landscapes, conversations, insights, theater, and scenes in distant cities, moments you swore you’d remember forever, so many washed away like Etch A Sketch drawings.
– Anne Lamott
The Zen way of teaching teaches one to see that you cannot be in complete control of your whole life situation. You cannot, in other words, fundamentally possess yourself.
– Alan Watts
For a lifetime I was
unable to say my heart’s desire
And the beloved never understood
what this silence was.
– Nida Fazli
the CEO’s / primary rival / is sleep
– Alec Finlay
Out of the silence of centuries, discrete words will, one day, surface for us and then for those who have gradually learned to read us in the void. Our book is for tomorrow.
– Edmond Jabès, (tr. Rosmarie Waldrop)
Powers of the deeper world move among us. Call them gods or daimons, ancestors or archetypes. Most of the time we are unaware of their presence. When they are in the field – noticed or invisible, invoked or uninvoked – their presence has a shimmer effect on the ordinary world. The fabric of physical reality in their vicinity becomes fluid and unstable. We experience the shift as synchronicity or anomaly. If we become alert to the shimmer effect, and make the right moves in that moment, we can help manifest extraordinary things.
– Robert Moss
The irony is that we attempt to disown our difficult stories to appear more whole or more acceptable, but our wholeness – even our wholeheartedness – actually depends on the integration of all of our experiences, including the falls.
– Brené Brown
The dancer’s body is simply the luminous manifestation of the soul. The true dance is an expression of serenity; it is controlled by the profound rhythm of inner emotion. Emotion does not reach the moment of frenzy out of a spurt of action; it broods first, it sleeps like the life in the seed, and it unfolds with a gentle slowness. The Greeks understood the continuing beauty of a movement that mounted, that spread, that ended with a promise of rebirth.
– Isadora Duncan
Dividing earth and sky
is not the right way
to think about this wholeness.
It only allows one to live
at a more precise address–
were I to be searched for
I’d be found much faster.
My distinguishing marks
are rapture and despair.
– Wislawa Szymborska
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
– alicia ostriker
Recovery cannot be pigeonholed in one genre category: poetry and prose, autobiography and theory, fiction and nonfiction, for instance, are labels that are not only challenged and deconstructed, but that rapidly prove utterly irrelevant. What comes instead to the fore is a kind of linguistic and performative “flicker,” with rhythm and kinetics as its key features.
– Jan Baetens
There was a silly damn bird called a Phoenix back before Christ, every few hundred years he built a pyre and burnt himself up. He must have been the first cousin to Man. But every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we’re doing the same thing, over and over, but we’ve got one damn thing the Phoenix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did. We know all the damn silly things we’ve done for a thousand years and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, someday we’ll stop making the goddamn funeral pyres and jumping in the middle of them. We pick up a few more people that remember every generation.
– Ray Bradbury
At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.
– Aristotle
I don’t have that thing that everyone wants to talk about—writer’s block.
– Alice Notley
— Go, my beauty, and live! Strut at concerts, give talks, love, and make your mistakes!
– Mandelstam, The Egyptian Stamp
We were kissed by poems,
taken away by seas of prose.
– Rudy Vitkauskas
Maybe life is a series of crashes, climbs, and smiling for pictures.
– Rudy Francisco
We already have everything we need. There is no need for self-improvement. All these trips that we lay on ourselves— the heavy-duty fearing that we’re bad and hoping that we’re good, the identities that we so dearly cling to, the rage, the jealousy and the addictions of all kinds-never touch our basic wealth. They are like clouds that temporarily block the sun.
But all the time our warmth and brilliance are right here. This is who we really are. We are one blink of an eye away trom being fully awake.
Looking at ourselves this way is very different from our usual habit. From this perspective we don’t need to change: you can feel as wretched as you like, and you’re still a good candidate for enlightenment. You can feel like the world’s most hopeless basket case, but that feeling is your wealth, not something to be thrown out or improved upon.
– Pema Chödrön
For psychotherapy to be effective a close rapport is needed, so close that the doctor cannot shut his eyes to the heights and depths of human suffering.
– C.G. Jung
A tainted society has invented psychiatry to defend itself against the investigations of certain superior intellects whose faculties of divination would be troublesome.
– Antonin Artaud
puddles in retreat –
like untrained men
stepping into Spring.
– Pure Land Haiku
The person engaged in action is always unconscionable; no one except the contemplative has a conscience.
– J. W. von Goethe
Three apples fell from heaven: the first, for the one who told the tale, the second for the one who listened, and the third for the one who understood. This is the way most Armenian fairytales end.
– Osip Mandelstam
I love man as my fellow; but his scepter, real or usurped, extends not to me.
– Mary Wollstonecraft
Thought is always troublesome to him who lives without his own approbation.
– Samuel Johnson
Is there anything better than iced coffee and a bookstore on a sunny day? I mean, aside from hot coffee and a bookstore on a rainy day.
– Emily Henry, Book Lovers
I could tell you that listening is made for the ashen sky,
– Deema K. Shehabi
I’m for the living, suffering, laughable, stuck-in-a-rut human being who blows his stock of meager life-juice just to feel a moment of fraternity with another derivative being.
– Charlie Chaplin
It is thus that arabesques spring up in the margins of first drafts and live independent, gorgeous, and perfidious lives.
Little men shaped like violins drink the milk of the paper.
– Mandelstam
He spoke – a question, perhaps, all in mumble, and she replied, perhaps, an endearment of words, and that was all he needed …
– shome dasgupta
I have run the sands of this day
through my fingers and watched them sparkle
into smoke, and blow away.
Tomorrow I will do the same.
If I’m lucky.
– @cross_mouse
I am tired of little tight-faced poets sitting down to
shape perfect unimportant pieces.
Poems that cough lightly — catch back a sneeze.
This is the time for Big Poems,
roaring up out of sleaze,
poems from ice, from vomit, and from tainted blood.
This is the time for stiff or viscous poems.
Big, and Big.
– Gwendolyn Brooks
I’ve known many successful people whose lives I wouldn’t want to have. They had intelligence, they had drive, they had opportunity, and the wherewithal to use them all. But they were missing something else. They knew how to get what they wanted, but the things they wanted weren’t worth wanting. In fact, the things they wanted ended up disfiguring their lives.
– @farnamstreet
The hardest thing to listen to – your instincts, your human personal intuition – always whispers. So you have to be ready every day of your lives to hear what whispers in your ear.
– Steven Spielberg
In the distant sky, a bird has gotten hold of a fat snake of smoke and is wrangling it out from the treetops, while down below, a woman lies in the burning house where the bright hot tongue of the snake is lashing.
– @CynthiaMHoffman
Religion is a framing mechanism. It is a language of orientation that presents itself as a series of questions.
– Marilynne Robinson
The highest level of consciousness is not the one who speaks in a language that no one else can understand. It’s the one who can meet anyone right where they’re at and speak to them in the exact language that they can hear.
– Nika Solé
I’m not your love,
I’m the excuse not to love.
Please stop using me.
Open your heart and go.
– @tuttysan
yes, it’s bizarre for educated people to “believe” in astrology; I prefer to think it’s like “believing” in poetry–a kind of benign groupthink. yet, oddly, people will argue about it, & it is difficult to change the subject. must be a kind of secular religion? whyever?
– Joyce Carol Oates
such a dream of cleaving
a clandestine meeting
of moving earth from deep within
of mysterious molten things
most elemental
– Julie Kalendek
We are building a life
upriver from the
place where life fell
apart.
– Leslie Jamison
Some of the difficulty with quantum mechanics has to reside in the problem of coming to terms with the simple fact that there is no such thing as information in and of itself independent of the apparatus necessary to its perception. There were no starry skies prior to the first sentient and ocular being to behold them. Before that all was blackness and silence.
And yet it moved.
– Cormac McCarthy
Busy your mind with the concepts of harmony, health, peace, and good will, and wonders will happen in your life.
– Dr. Joseph Murphy
It is always difficult, the transition from noisy refusal to humble acceptance.
– Zoë Heller
People nowadays think that scientists exist to instruct them, poets, musicians, etc. to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them — that does not occur to them.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
We did that often, asking each other questions whose answers we already knew. Perhaps it was so that we would not ask the other questions, the ones whose answers we did not want to know.
– Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Married life is not all sugar, but grace in the heart will keep away most of the sours.
– Charles Spurgeon
We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
– Ernest Hemingway
If they feel as we feel they may stop.
– Ernest Hemingway
The irony of not wanting your taxes to pay for services like healthcare and student loans is that people who take this position are often afraid that if they get taxed, they won’t have enough money to pay for their healthcare and student loans.
– Ethan Nichtern
“None of these things move me,” is a wonderful affirmation.
– Florence Scovel Shinn
The things the spectacle presents as eternal are based on change, and must change as their foundations change. The spectacle is totally dogmatic, yet it is incapable of arriving at any really solid dogma. Nothing stands still for it. This instability is the spectacle’s natural condition, but it is completely contrary to its natural inclination.
– Guy Debord
Normalize not building your identity around a career.
– the.holistic.psychologist@
Our judgments, like our watches, none go just alike, yet each believes his own
– Alexander Pope
No man who merely skims the Bible can profit from it. We must dig and mine until we obtain hidden treasure.
– Charles Spurgeon
Individuation is not linear but a circumambulation of the self; a spiral journey towards wholeness where the head and heart work together; a life-long process of integrating the opposite, bringing split-off parts into more holistic personality.
– Karin Syrett
The only path by which another person can upset you is through your own thought.
– Dr. Joseph Murphy
The only absolute
You should keep in your boot
Is that absolutes
Are absolutely
Ridiculous
– Mark Haptonstall
We are slowed down sound and light waves, a walking bundle of frequencies tuned into the music of the cosmos, we are souls dressed up in sacred biochemical garments, and our bodies are the instruments through which our souls play their music.
– Albert Einstein
The old hunger for voyages fed at his heart… To go alone…into strange cities; to meet strange people and to pass again before they could know him; to wander, like his own legend, across the earth–it seemed to him there could be no better thing than that.
– Thomas Wolfe
The difficulty for me in writing—among the difficulties—is to write language that can work quietly on a page for a reader who doesn’t hear anything … one has to work very carefully with what is in between the words. What is not said.
– Toni Morrison
You need to have a community. You need to have meaningful values, not the junk values you’ve been pumped full of all your life, telling you happiness comes through money and buying objects. You need to have meaningful work. You need the natural world. You need to feel you are respected. You need a secure future. You need connections to all these things. You need to release any shame you might feel for having been mistreated.
– Johann Hari
So, I begin each day with a gesture of cynicism, and close it with a gesture of faith; or, if you prefer, begin it by reminding myself that, for me at least, goals and objectives are without value, and close it by demonstrating that the fact is irrelevant. A gesture of temporality, a gesture of eternity. It is in the tension between these two gestures that I have lived my adult life.
– John Barth
I marvel at the capacity
Of memory
Which, in some deep pocket
Of my mind, preserves you whole—
As wind is wind, as the lion-taming
Sun is sun, you are, you stay:
Nothing is lost, nothing has blown away.
– Barbara Howe
Feminism is an endeavor to change something very old, widespread, and deeply rooted in many, perhaps most, cultures around the world, innumerable institutions, and most households on Earth—and in our minds, where it all begins and ends. That so much change has been made in four or five decades is amazing; that everything is not permanently, definitively, irrevocably changed is not a sign of failure. A woman goes walking down a thousand-mile road. Twenty minutes after she steps forth, they proclaim that she still has nine hundred ninety-nine miles to go and will never get anywhere.
– Rebecca Solnit
Living in duality ignores the collective self, while embracing our interdependence aligns our universal essence.
– Mitch Takefman
Seek not the favor of the multitude; it is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of few; and number not voices, but weigh them.
– Immanuel Kant
It is good to stand in the middle of the stream and live rather than stand on the bank..to have both a sense of participation and also a sense of wise detachment because one knows the reality of things.
– Amitava Kumar
I never knew the charm of spring, Never met it face to face, I never knew my heart could sing, Never missed a warm embrace ‘til April in Paris…
– Yip Harburg
For us only a name remains
A sound miraculous and lasting.
Take from me these grains of sand:
I’m pouring them from hand to hand.
– from Mandelstam’s final poem to Tsvetaeva
SPRING
Something new in the air today, perhaps the struggle of the bud
to become a leaf. Nearly two weeks late it invaded the air but
then what is two weeks to life herself? On a cool night there is
a break from the struggle of becoming. I suppose that’s why we
sleep. In a childhood story they spoke of the land of enchant-
ment. We crawl to it, we short-lived mammals, not realizing that
we are already there. To the gods the moon is the entire moon
but to us it changes second by second because we are always fish
in the belly of the whale of earth. We are encased and can’t stray
from the house of our bodies. I could say that we are released,
but I don’t know, in our private night when our souls explode
into a billion fragments then calmly regather in a black pool in
the forest, far from the cage of flesh, the unremitting “I.” This was
a dream and in dreams we are forever alone walking the ghost
road beyond our lives. Of late I see waking as another chance at
spring.
– Jim Harrison
A RIVER MOVING IN YOU
When you do things from your soul,
you feel a river moving in you, a joy.
When actions come from another place,
the feeling disappears.
Don’t let others lead you. …
Don’t insist on going where you think you want to go.
Ask the way to the spring.
Your living pieces will form a harmony.
– Rumi
We disliked the rigors 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, The Famished Road
Cause-and-effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Sometimes one person inspires a movement, or her words do decades later, sometimes a few passionate people change the world; sometimes they start a mass movement and millions do; sometimes those millions are stirred by the same outrage or the same ideal, and change comes upon us like a change of weather. All that these transformations have in common is that they begin in the imagination, in hope.
– Rebecca Solnit
The path up is the path down. The way forward is the way back. The universe inside is outside but the universe outside is inside.
– Robert Anton Wilson
When I overgive, I feel terrible. What am I trying to get from it? What’s my neediest need underneath that I’m not listening to, communicating, and receiving where it is (and isn’t) being met?
– McCall Erickson
Our society has not even begun to face its shadow.
– C.G. Jung
The photograph is meant to get lost somewhere in a box in an attic. It is a nomadic thing that has only a small chance to survive.
– WG Sebald
Even in the darkest and most devastating times, love is nearby if you know what to look for.
– Anne Lamott
The things, which impress us from outside, can only do so because of our inner attitude.
– CG Jung
We’ve convinced ourselves that the land around us—generously abundant at some moments, ferocious and unforgiving at others—is really a set of sheer facts; we hold ourselves apart from the world in order to subdue its wildness.
– David Abram
Because you don’t
you can’t,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
Where I begin is all one to me
Wherever I begin I will return again
– Parmenides
(tr. Stanley Lombardo)
Sometimes on arriving at dusk at a small town I would feel that I had been transported into another world ….the church bell clanging, the sense of being unknown to everyone and perhaps invisible would make me walk as if I was treading on air.
– Gerald Brenan
Everything is Broken
by Bob Dylan
Broken lines, broken strings
Broken threads, broken springs
Broken idols, broken heads
People sleeping in broken beds
Ain’t no use jiving, ain’t no use joking
Everything is broken
Broken bottles, broken plates
Broken switches, broken gates
Broken dishes, broken parts
Streets are filled with broken hearts
Broken words never meant to be spoken
Everything is broken
Seem like every time you stop and turn around
Something else just hit the ground
Broken cutters, broken saws
Broken buckles, broken laws
Broken bodies, broken bones
Broken voices on broken phones
Take a deep breath, feel like you’re choking
Everything is broken
Every time you leave and go off someplace
Things fall to pieces in my face
Broken hands on broken ploughs
Broken treaties, broken vows
Broken pipes, broken tools
People bending broken rules
Hound dog howling, bull frog croaking
Everything is broken
The fundamental, ultimate mystery-the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets-is this: that for every outside there is an inside and for every inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together.
– Alan W. Watts
If you don’t tell the whole truth about yourself, life is a ridiculous exercise.
– Joel Grey
an old gnarled root
dried out and dishevelled
the rope still around it
that dragged it from the
ground
– Thomas A Clark
Be grateful for
what you’ve got —
there’s not much of it
going around,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
I want to write in the language of those
who have been to that place before me.
– Chase Twichell
Welcome events in whichever way they happen: this is the path to peace.
– Epictetus
I am sorry but the list of questions does not interest me to answer. Nor have I that respect for the public.
– Djuna Barnes
lichens, droppings, stones
I bend to inspect
detail in a clarity
I cannot leave
– Thomas A Clark
Against whom do we ever struggle if not against our own double?
– Yves Bonnefoy
Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.
– Fernando Pessoa
Cliche protects us from facing the catastrophe, the unbearable, the ineffable; thus far the major inexplicable areas of human existence—birth, death, and love—we have the maximum number of cliches.
– Svetlana Boym
The poem is the skin of the poet.
– Alda Merini
Can’t you calm him down? It’s only in bourgeois countries that people are shot because of poems.
– Soviet soldier to Nadezhda Mandelstam about Osip, on train from Kazan station to Solikamsk
I am freezing without proper clothes.
– Mandelstam
a full moon
the magnolia
shines bright
– James Welsh
Close your ears.
To hear again
is to be in love
with that strange girl
under the wave,
who lulls you
till you want to be her.
Come inside,
before she’s all you
know and you live forever
in a house with no floor.
– Billie Chernicoff
tenderly
tend
this
you.
– Eric Bond
Was she ever the same person? Were there any two moments in her life when she was comparable to herself?
– Jenny Erpenbeck
Poetry matters, because even when a country & language are fragmented, shattering around you, it is a human voice that won’t refuse to speak.
– Ilya Kaminsky
There is something in you I like
more than yourself. Therefore
I must destroy you
– Jacques Lacan
Happiness is not determined by what’s happening around you, but rather what’s happening inside you.
– @JoshBulriss
But the sense is much altered and the hearer’s conceit strangely entangled by the figure *metalepsis*, which I call the Far-Fetched. As when we had rather such a word a great way off then to use one nearer hand to express the matter as well and plainer.
– George Puttenham
The soul is but a flaw in this flesh.
I’m a stream deprived
of the right to flow into the sea.
I’m a plant
that’s seedless and rootless.
I’m the stone
that cannot pass the test
of its own duration.
– Alain Bosquet (translated by Édouard Roditi)
Nature is pleased with simplicity. And nature is no fool
– Isaac Newton
People who didn’t grow up in a small town church will never know the awkward savour of those sermons aimed specifically at one member of the congregation, and everyone knows who
– River Kenna
An ecosocialist version of the fetter thesis would recognize that democratic control over the productive forces would enable us not only to unleash socially and ecologically beneficial forms of production but also reduce damaging and unnecessary forms of production.
– Jason Hickel
What sounds dissonant to you may sound quite mellifluous to me. The literary world does not expect Gide or Mann or T.S. Eliot to emote with the accents of Victor Hugo or Walter Scott. It may be that new music sounds peculiar for the sole reason that, in the course of ordinary listening, one hears so little of it by comparison with the amount of conventional music that is performed year in and year out. Radio and concert programs, the advertisements of the record manufacturers, or school curricula – all emphasize the idea, unwittingly, perhaps, that “normal” music is music of the past, familiar music that has proved its worth.
– Aaron Copland, 1949
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
Ajahn Chah said, “I hope you’re not afraid to suffer.” I asked him what he meant. He continued “There are two kinds of suffering. There is the suffering you run away from, which follows you everywhere and there is the suffering you face directly and in doing so become free.”
– Jack Kornfield
A heavy burden lifted from my soul, I heard that love was out of my control.
– Leonard Cohen
Happy is what you realize you are a fraction of a second before it’s too late.
– Ali Smith
Shamanistic cultures view illness and trauma as a problem for the entire community, not just for the individual or individuals who manifest the symptoms.
– Peter A. Levine
There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.
– William James
Put it to the test and cast your eyes upon the history of mankind.
– Notes from the Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky
What a beautiful inspirational model for how human beings might live: in a shared economy based not on greed but on nurturing relationships and mutual cooperation.
– Paul Stamets
Be seriously involved with growing, with your own development, and never fear.
– Jeff Buckley
The maker of the stars is at the same time the physician for broken hearts and wounded spirits.
– Charles Spurgeon
Awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters.
– C. S. Lewis
The decks are cleared for Divine action.
– Florence Scovel Shinn
Wake up first,
with pure and unapologetic selfishness,
or you’re just another shipwreck victim
floundering in the ocean
and all the compassion in the world
is of absolutely no use to the other victims
floundering around you.
– Jed McKenna
When you’re the OPPRESSED you know everything about the OPPRESSER.
– Elizabeth Plank
The highest level of consciousness is not the one who speaks in a language that no one else can understand. It’s the one who can meet anyone right where they’re at and speak to them in the exact language that they can hear.
– gyallikevee@
Avoid a sugar-coated gospel. Seek that gospel which rips up, tears, and cuts, and even kills, for that is the gospel that makes alive again.
– Charles Spurgeon
Normalize using words like: colleague, classmate, acquaintance, old school mate, neighbor, client. Not everyone is your friend.
– empowerwomen.empire@
What do I bring to the table?
Firstly, I don’t want to sit at your table if your love is transactional & full of requirements.
– _thecosmicmuse_@
Lost Letter
Tory Adkisson
I watched as the white
marble chipped, watched
as the coast eddied
with elegiac seafoam
and two men plunged their hands
into the deep
recesses of a small, seaside
cave. I held the silver letter
opener to my breast like a sword.
I didn’t know what I was
protecting myself from.
My friend, if you find
this letter in Paris
or Parnassus, remember
how the statues of boys bent
toward each other
like Actaeon’s hounds bared
themselves against their master’s
throat—an interminable
thirst for the flesh consuming
their primitive minds.
And remember me, sitting
across from you
at the teahouse feeling much
the same, our lips painted
the same shade of rooibos red.
I want a poem that’ll fry me up green, turn purple slacks to pom pom, that takes an emotional peak and cranks the dial to infinity; ah, sublime, you wouldn’t like me when I’m sublime.
– Nebraska State Poet Matt Mason
I recently found out that people living with ADHD do not miss people. For them, it is “out of sight, out of mind” . If you are not physically there, you don’t “exist”. This has really messed up a lot of relationships…
– @UchePOkoye
Spirituality and sexuality are not your qualities, not things you possess and encompass. Rather, they possess and encompass you, since they are powerful daimons, manifestations of the Gods, and hence reach beyond you, existing in themselves.
– @RedBookJung
Clouds in their roundelay,
pass through the world’s repose.
– Robert Walser, (trans. Kristofor Minta)
All empty souls tend toward extreme opinions.
– William Butler Yeats
All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.
– Ellen Glasgow
I hope the sun is shining upon your work
– Franz Kafka, 1921.
Can we please stop assuming the worst of one another? In a harsh political and economic climate where the arts are being cut to the bone, and then cut some more – and freedom of expression is under threat – we need, more than ever, to support and uplift one another.
– Georgia Hilton
Do nothing to injure the living
aspect of the human spirit.
It is the only aspect of ourselves
that can afford to live.
The struggle to keep this alive
is our present and painful
predicament.
How can we live, otherwise.
– Marsden Hartley
Everything we take in becomes us on a cellular level. Our food, our products, our environment, and even our thoughts impact the chemical reactions in our cells.
– Kim Eallonardo
It is hard for me to understand a culture that not only hates and fights his brothers, but even attacks Nature and abuses her. Man must love all creation or he will love none of it. Love is something you and I must have. We must have it because our spirit feeds upon it. Without love our self esteem weakens. Without it our courage fails.
Without love we can no longer look out confidently at the world. Instead we turn inwardly and begin to feed upon our own personalities and little by little we destroy ourselves.
– Chief Dan George
I wish that I could put up yesterday’s evening sky for all posterity, could preserve a night of love, the sound of a mountain stream, a realization as it sets my mind afire, a dance, a day of harmony, ten thousand glorious days of clouds that will instead vanish and never be seen again, line them up in jars where they might be admired in the interim and tasted again as needed.
– Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
Let’s never accept half our country living with fewer rights than they had 50 years ago. Let’s never normalize a political party embracing Russian propaganda. Let’s never relent until those who attempted to overthrow our democracy are held to account – in the courts and at the ballot box.
– Jack E. Smith
I detect an undercurrent of self-doubt among some Americans about what your role in the world should be… At a time when our world is at history’s turning point… Freedom and democracy are currently under threat around
the globe.
– Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, 2024
Some empathy must be learned and then imagined, by perceiving the suffering of others and translating it into one’s own experience of suffering and thereby suffering a little with then. Empathy can be a story you tell yourself about what it must be like to be that other person; but its lack can also arrive from narrative, about why the sufferer deserved it, or why that person or those people have nothing to do with you. Whole societies can be taught to deaden feeling, to dissociate from their marginal and minority members, just as people can and do erase the humanity of those close to them.
Empathy makes you imagine the sensation of the torture, of the hunger, of the loss. You make that person into yourself, you inscribe their suffering on your own body or heart or mind, and then you respond to their suffering as though it were your own. Identification, we say, to mean that I extend solidarity to you, and who and what you identify with builds your own identity. Physical pain defines the physical boundaries of the self but these identifications define a larger self, a map of affections and alliances, and the limits of this psychic self are nothing more or less than the limits of love. Which is to say love enlarges; it annexes affectionately; at its utmost it dissolves all boundaries.
– Rebecca Solnit
Drugs. Alcohol. Poverty. Violence. The seeds of the problem were planted long before she or Maya or anyone of their generation took a breath. The heritage of historical trauma loomed large over all Native people. For the Diné, Hwéeldi, or the Long Walk, epitomized the cruel efforts of mainstream society to turn Indians into white people. The forced march from their homeland to the prison camp at Bosque Redondo and the devastating loss of elders and infants during those years of captivity and dislocation still rippled through the Navajo world. When the People returned to their sacred land, they faced more hardship. The boarding school movement sent children to institutions that forcibly prohibited them from speaking the Navajo language and returning home for ceremonies. How did people learn to be parents if they grew up without the example and guidance of loving relatives? It was a testimony to the enduring strength and wisdom of the Navajo culture that so much of their traditions remained vibrant and resilient. They were as much a part of this landscape as the mountains and rivers.
– Anne Hillerman
Journalist: “What do you think is your greatest achievement?”
David Bowie: “Marrying my wife.”
“But as a musician?”
“Nothing else matters.”
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
Things look different depending on your perspective. As I see it, fighting to bridge those gaps isn’t what really matters. The most important thing is to know them inside and out, as differences, and to understand why certain people are the way they are.
– Banana Yoshimoto
Jung recounts that his intense study of mythologies forced him to conclude that without a myth, a human “is like one uprooted, having no true link either with the past, or w/ the ancestral life which continues within him, or yet with contemporary human society.
– Lance Owens
Synchronicities can produce the crack in our consciousness that expands our choices, our capacities and our consciousness of the divine. These mysterious moments go beyond our ego consciousness and open us to the sacredness of being a part of something larger than we are.
– Laurence Hillman, Alignments
If your everyday life appears to be unworthy subject matter, do not complain to life. Complain to yourself. Lament that you are not poet enough to call up its wealth. For the creative artist there is no poverty—nothing is insignificant or unimportant.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible of beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others.
– David Hume
A mind that believes there is a God, or that there is no God, is a conditioned, prejudiced mind.
– Krishnamurti
The earthy smell, the sunless air, the sensation of the world being shut out, the resounding of the organ through the black and white arched galleries and aisles, are wings that take me back, and hold me hovering above those days, in a half-sleeping and half-waking dream.
– David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
To evolve is to explore the vast landscapes of self, where each step forward is a homecoming to who we are meant to be.
– Avalon Ash
You could go to brunch this weekend, or you could stay home and make a dent in the to-read pile that’s been sitting on your nightstand since January. But we’re not judging or anything.
– literaryhub@
Our hearts are the canvas, our love the colors. With every stroke, we paint the infinite possibilities of ‘us’.
– Avalon Ash
Seneca, 2,000 years ago:
You are living as if destined to live forever; your own frailty never occurs to you; you don’t notice how much time has already passed, but squander it as though you had a full and overflowing supply — though all the while that very day which you are devoting to somebody or something may be your last. You act like a mortal in all that you fear, and like an immortal in all that you desire.
Every heartbreak weaves a new patch into the quilt of our emotions, colorful and resilient in its unfolding.
– Avalon Ash
Any worldview organizes a world to view.
– Joseph Pearce
It’s your life. No one can do this for you. Your teacher can set you in a particular direction, but you have to go on the path alone.
– Jakusho Kwong-roshi
Myth: Universal Basic Income is a magnet for the idle. In reality, it’s the catalyst for unleashed potential. Visualize a world where your next meal isn’t your next worry. That world is one giant leap closer to solving the puzzles of poverty and unleashing collective brilliance.
– Scott Santens
I can’t sit at my desk and wait for ideas. I have to go out there and get them. I find them in the most unexpected places.
– Hayao Miyazaki
We wholly overlook the essential fact that the achievements which society rewards are won at the cost of a diminution of personality.
– CG Jung
Love is how hope takes flight, in swamps and barren fields, arising in different frequencies, blending the way sound vibrations of different pitches organize to make music.
– Anne Lamott
Whenever contents of the collective unconscious become activated, they have a disturbing effect . . . If the activation is due to the collapse of the individual’s hopes and expectations, there is a danger that the collective unconscious may take the place of reality.
– C.G. Jung
If every head of state and every government official spent an hour a day reading poetry we’d live in a much more humane and decent world.
– Mark Strand
We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
– Werner Heisenberg
people are small
clots of soul
never sated
by rain or
their brief
soaring
– Jean Donnelly
The tranquility that comes when you stop caring what they say. Or think, or do. Only what you do.
– Marcus Aurelius
Wind throbs in the treetops; the birdcall app thinks it’s a drumming grouse. Juncos twitter from the lilac, which has just burst its buds—a green apparition against the brown woods.
– @morningporch
Most of the mainstream media isn’t actually journalism.
It’s capitalist propaganda.
– Climate Dad
I became a painter because I wanted to raise painting to the level of poignancy of music and poetry.
– Mark Rothko
Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even can enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind… I long to be a greater failure in life so I can write better books.
– Theodore Roethke
The separation of races is not a disease of colored people but a disease of white people. I do not intend to be quiet about it.
– Albert Einstein
That’s my principal message to writers: for God’s sake, keep your eyes open.
– William S. Burroughs
Tolerance will reach such a level that intelligent people will be banned from thinking so as not to offend the imbeciles.
– Fyodor Dosteovsky
There was a whole, large vocabulary involved, a conceptual vocabulary that was completely alien to me. I couldn’t comprehend a thing that was said, and my solution to this problem was to stay in bed.
– Deborah Eisenberg
I stand by my taste and not anyone else’s. Am prepared to run riot exercising my druthers.
– Gordon Lish
I wonder what worlds open up when we model a radical poetics of relation, when we reckon with our historical and literary entanglements and intimacies.
– Jason Magabo Perez
A poem should not be flawless but should be able to bear the burden of its flaws
– Chelsey Minnis
There is suspicion
here that violet
traces of
sacrifice
stand
bare.
– Jay Wright
The reconciliation of all antagonistic forms in the name of consensus or conviviality is the worst thing we can do. We must reconcile nothing. We must keep open the otherness of forms, the disparity between terms; we must keep alive the forms of the irreducible
– Baudrillard
A poem can’t free us from the struggle for existence, but it can uncover desires and appetites buried under the accumulating emergencies of our lives…
– Adrienne Rich
Can’t just ‘let it go’ ? That’s because emotions aren’t like rocks we can drop and throw. They’re more like drops of water that need to run through us. So don’t let it go, let it flow.
– Lori Deschene
Just walk away, away from the dread
of the thing that must be told:
of how the mountains lost their heads,
even the sun grew cold.
When we, the last-born of earth’s bright brood,
fresh from the stars come down,
went over the edge of time’s dark doom
and heaven turned around,
Walk far away from the long years lost
in pity, shock, and shame.
When those who loved this world were tossed
into the forge of flame –
into the fires of history
where land and sea change place,
with such uncertain constancy
that even death is grace.
But even death gives no escape.
as the wheels of time roll on
back and forth in the freezing flame
till even hope is gone,
till deathless, hopeless, hollow-eyed,
spawn of the aeon storm,
we cannot remember how or why
we came to claim this form.
But strong and fierce and cunning as steel,
the progeny of ruin,
we cannot seem to forget the feel
of the beautiful, childlike tune
sung by our mothers before the storm,
the gentlest lullaby
that ever soothed the thought of harm
or made the angels cry.
Though in the fires of hell we stand,
cold as a thousand lies,
and though comes crashing down again
the temple of the sky,
hear, my people, oh, do you not hear
from over the edge of doom,
an ancient song that stills the fear
and lets love come to you?
It lets love come to you.
– George Gorman
Man is weak, and community is therefore indispensable.
– @RedBookJung
We always feel we can make a book of what we know: we cannot.
– George Oppen
You are the cutting edge of a thirteen-billion-year-old process of defining novelty. Your acts matter. Your thoughts matter. Your purpose? To add to the complexity. Your enemy? Disorder, entropy, stupidity, and tastelessness.
– Alan Watts
There’s only one way this void can be filled & that’s by
putting words on paper.
– Lewis Warsh
So many years of misguided self-reflection,
examining every curve in the mirror!
– Toi Derricotte
One of the curses of history
is that we cannot go back and change the course leading
to disasters, no matter how much we might wish to.
The past has its own terrible inevitability.
But it is never too late to change the future.
– Heather Cox Richardson
as soon as one gets close to other people, other lives, ready-made labels and classifications appear unduly crude
– Marcel Proust
I originally coined the term spiritual bypassing in 1984, to describe a common tendency I discovered among Western spiritual seekers to use spiritual ideas and practices to avoid dealing with their emotional unfinished business.
– John Welwood
I’ve only been to a few poetry readings I could bear.
– Elizabeth Bishop
Writers have a rare power not given to anyone else: we can bore people long after we are dead.
– Sinclair Lewis
What happens to all the tears we do not shed?
– Jules Renard
Deep in the shady sadness of a vale
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star,
Sat grey-haired Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his lair;
Forest on forest hung above his head
Like cloud on cloud.
– Keats
Limit yourself to the present.
– Marcus
only true love loves every man according to his individuality.
– kierkegaard
The highest, most varied and lasting pleasures are those of the mind.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
you cannot
make blossoms
by tearing off petals
– Ikkyu
Jung once said, “Find out what a person fears most and that is where he will develop next.” The ego is fashioned like the metal between the hammer and the anvil.
– Robert A. Johnson
The Western worldview says, in essence, that technological progress is the highest value and that we were born to consume, to endlessly use and discard natural resources, other species, technological gadgets, toys, and, often, other people, especially if they are poor or from the Third World. The most highly prized freedom is the right to shop. It’s a world of commodities, not entities, and economic expansion is the primary measure of progress. Competition, taking, and hoarding are higher values than cooperation, sharing, and gifting. Profits are valued over people, money over meaning, First-World entitlement over global peace and justice, ‘us’ over ‘them’. This addiction is the most dangerous one in the world, not only because of its impact on most of humanity but because it is rapidly undermining the natural systems that sustain the
earth’s biosphere.
All other addictions in the West can be seen as components of this larger one. If we are born to consume, then it is a dog-eat-dog world, there is no deeper meaning, no human soul, and creation is just a huge, dumb joke. That’s a conclusion you wouldn’t want to live with every day; better to
distract and deaden yourself with addictions. By the time we reach adulthood, our ways of thinking about ourselves and the world have been moulded and constrained by the predominant values of Western culture. This limits us in ways difficult to see at first; we are like fish in the sea, unconscious of the cultural
waters within which we have come of age.
All children and adolescents fashion personalities that fit within their native culture. In the West, that means a society largely materialistic, synthetic, technological, anthropocentric, ethnocentric, and egocentric. Fitting in with such a culture is difficult to accomplish without losing contact with our souls and with nature, the web of life. Western lifestyles that revolve around a constant barrage of anaemic distractions may be, in part, ways of self-numbing so as to minimise the pain of that loss. Many people have succumbed to daily routines of soul-starving entertainment, superficial fashion, and mind-numbing jobs. This way of life becomes an addiction. The more we live this way, the more alienated we become from something deeper and more meaningful, and the more we need this way of life to keep us from experiencing that alienation.
– Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft
Our identities are not really as individual or independent as we think. They’re interrelated with other people’s lives.
– Gabriella Souza
There is a movement of transmuting suffering into art;
It can only take place when things have been sufficiently felt through.
It is the culmination of the breakdown –
Art falls out the bottom.
This might happen as actual art (poems, drawings, music),
Or it may come in a moment of transmuted perception,
Where personal psychological pain becomes redeemed
In the life of soul and the meaning of all things.
– Daniel Thorson
the history of my poetry must coincide with my history. i reject and i consider out of bounds the cold determination of the intellect, the exercises (no matter how civilized), the experiments that slyly or ingenuously attempt the impossible throw of the dice.
– bartolo cattafi
If poetry has half a chance to getting wind of truth, it is because it knows all its disguises. (If truth has eluded philosophy through time, it is because philosophy has claimed truth’s territory as intrinsic.)
– Stathis Gourgouris
Just as no bodily pleasure at all can gladden the mind of one whose body is engulfed in flames, so too those full of compassion cannot come near to feeling joy when living beings are in distress.
– Śāntideva
Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.
– Federico Fellini
A pendulum feeds on the energy of its adherents which increases the power of its sway.
– Vadim Zeland
To eradicate something from your life all you have to do is stop thinking about it, pass it by with indifference and it will disappear. To eliminate something from your life, ignore it, do not avoid it.
– Vadim Zeland
We must distinguish two others, at least two; an other with a big O, and another with a small o, which is the ego. In the function of speech, we are concerned with the big Other.
– Jacques Lacan
Let the world be as it is and learn to rock with the waves.
– Joseph Campbell
The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.
– Vladimir Nabokov
The next war …
may well bury Western
civilization forever.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Wherever there is a reaching down into innermost experience, into the nucleus of personality, most people are overcome by fright, and many run away . . . The risk of inner experience, the adventure of the spirit, is in any case alien to most human beings.
– Carl Jung
existence itself, existing, is a striving (…) directed towards the infinite.
– Kierkegaard
For the Young Who Want to Write
I love you because you want to try
what is impossible
I love you because you already know beauty
is more than ruin
I love you because you’ve stood above some city
on the worst night of your life
and decided to come down
and tell about it
I love you because you want to win prizes
and you will
I love you because you are alone and you know
there is no other way
I love you because you have not forgotten
the ancient things
because you are the ancient things
I love you because you will read this and then
do something else
because that something else is your life
I love you because you know tyranny arrives
first in the language
in its long soft boots
I love you because you know love is not a shelter
from ourselves
I love you because poetry will save
your life that it has ruined
again and again
I love you because you stand alone
in the harsh light of the grocery aisle
wondering whether you can afford
the good sauce
I love you because your bands are called
Good Sauce
I love you because the grass the green the Spring
because the bread the breath the Winter
I love you because if someone showed you
a rabbit you would cry
(an internet rabbit)
I love you because you can make anything
beautiful
but you won’t
I love you because your debt is unforgiven
but you know you are not a crime
I love you because you already know your sorrow
is just your joy untransformed
I love you because you would edit this
I love you because you have done
so much already
I love you because no one tells you whom
to love I love you because you wouldn’t write whom
I love you because of that night you lay awake
having visions you’ll never be able to explain
I love you because of EasyMac and tunafish
and misfit vegetables
I love you because you name yourselves
I love you because your names are your names
I love you because you read I love you because you quit that job
I love you because someone broke you once
and you said
I have words for that
I love you because it’s hard for you
and you know it
I love you because you finally sent that email
that message that DM
I love you because you are listening
I love you because you know the earth is
burning the earth
is burning
I love you because you know the earth is the
greatest poem and (it is burning it is burning it is burning)
you wouldn’t end a poem this way
you wouldn’t end anything this way
– Joseph Fasano
When the Great Way is abandoned, policies
for benevolence and morality are instituted.
When knowledge and cleverness appear, great
hypocrisy and pretense follow in their wake. It
is when families lose their natural harmony,
that family respect and love are touted. Finally,
it is when the nation is in darkness and strife
that we hear of patriotic officials.
– Andrew Beaulac
War: a massacre of people who don’t know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don’t massacre each other.
– Paul Valery
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
You alone have been made the image of the Reality that transcends all understanding, the likeness of imperishable beauty, the imprint of true divinity, the recipient of beatitude, the seal of the true light. When you turn to him you become that which he is himself.
– Gregory of Nyssa
Finding the center of strength within ourselves is in the long run the best contribution we can make to our fellow men. … One person with indigenous inner strength exercises a great calming effect on panic among people around him. This is what our society needs — not new ideas and inventions; important as these are, and not geniuses and supermen, but persons who can “be”, that is, persons who have a center of strength within themselves.
– Rollo May
It’s not enough to love something–or someone. Of course you love a person or art or music or the theatre. But you have to imagine that this person or this thing is trapped in a house afire, and the fire is apathy, and the fire is ignorance, and you have to go into the house all the time, day after day, year after year, and put out the flames and save the thing you love and rebuild the house in which it lives, and show it to others who will come to the rescue when you no longer can. Love is cheap and silly–a moron can love ice cream–but devotion is something worth talking about.
– Eva Le Gallienne
People are mostly layers of violence and tenderness wrapped like bulbs, and it is difficult to say what makes them onions or hyacinths.
– Eudora Welty
For there is a spot the size of a shilling at the back of the head which one can never see for oneself. It is one of the good offices that sex can discharge – to describe that spot the size of a shilling at the back of the head. Think how much women have profited by the comments of Juvenal; by the criticism of Strindberg. Think with what humanity and brilliancy men, from the earliest ages, have pointed out to women that dark place at the back of the head! And if Mary were very brave and very honest, she would go behind the other sex and tell us what she found there. A true picture of man as a whole can never be painted until a woman has described that spot the size of a shilling.
– Virginia Woolf
Beauty is often spoken of as though it only stirs lust or admiration, but the most beautiful people are so in a way that makes them look like destiny or fate or meaning, the heroes of a remarkable story.
– Rebecca Solnit
Here’s how I became myself: mess, failure, mistakes, disappointments, and extensive reading; limbo, indecision, setbacks, addiction, public embarrassment, and endless conversations with my best women friends; the loss of people without whom I could not live, the loss of pets that left me reeling, dizzying betrayals but much greater loyalty, and overall, choosing as my motto William Blake’s line that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love.
– Anne Lamott
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
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
The thing we must do intensely is be human together. People are more important than things. We must get together. The best thing humans can have going for them is each other. We have each other. We must reject everything which humiliates us. Humans are not objects of consumption. We must develop an absolute priority of humans ahead of profit — any humans ahead of any profit. Then we will survive… Together.
– Frank Herbert
I am neither in nor out.
I am in between.
– Mosab Abu Toha
Community is depth, singleness is height.
– @RedBookJung
When artists give form to revelation, their art can advance, deepen
and potentially transform the consciousness of their community.
– Alex Grey
I am still shocked I get to love you again.
– Sierra DeMulder
peace to the world
from now and forever
cherry blossoms
– Issa
Problems arise when we start compromising our own standards, those we have set for ourselves, in order to earn the admiration of others. Problems come when we choose to focus on what others think and see versus reality.
– The Inner Scorecard
After an expansive experience that challenges our narrow way of being in the world, we often retreat instead of pressing forward into the unknown.
– Lisa Marchiano
I believe my unconscious knows what I need more than anyone else does. If you allow a dream image into your life when you are sick or having psychological difficulties, it can pull you in a helpful direction.
– Marion Woodman
I have found so much beauty in the dark,
as I have found a lot of horror in the light.
– Azereth Skivel
We can sometimes find a person again, but we cannot abolish time.
– Marcel Proust
Creativeness presupposes a tremendous capacity for being genuine, for letting go, for being spontaneous—for if one cannot be spontaneous one cannot really be creative—therefore most artists and other creative people have a normal and genuine tendency to playfulness.
– Marie-Louise Von Franz
The best business decisions really have to do with picking people.
– Bill Gates
If you’re not moving according to a higher power, you exist only in your own ego. And that’s most of the reason the world is in the shape that it’s in.
– Nika Solé
In the realm of the heart, there exist diverse expressions. Some label it as love, while others refer to it as lovingkindness.
– Marcela Clavijo
To create one’s world in any of the arts takes courage.
– Georgia O’Keeffe
There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.
– Kazuo Ishiguro
A work of genius which is at first disconcerting may create, little by little, by the simple fact of its presence, a conception of art and an artistic atmosphere which bring it within our comprehension.
– Bergson
Your ideological and political beliefs shouldn’t cause you to tear down the dignity of others
– Katie Moran
The more easily you get offended, the less intelligent you actually are.
– Naval Ravikant
The world is full enough of hurts and mischances without wars to multiply them.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
citational politics? oh, you mean
parenthethicals?
– John MacIntosh
Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.
– Hemingway
He had bleach-blond hair and wore a golden lamé jacket. David was very erudite and could talk for hours on almost any subject: Walt Whitman, Gandhi, Duccio, Durrell or Cavafy.
He was so intensely alive that ideas just came toppling out.
– Peter Adam on David Hockney
The landscape of your world is the world’s landscape. But its frontier is open.
– Glissant
My experience is mostly that the will can make prose and it can’t make poetry. But it takes will, sometimes, to put yourself in the place where poetry might happen.
– Robert Hass
absent friends…
the way the addict
spins a story
– Brendon Kent
Not one person in a hundred knows how to be silent and listen, no, nor even to conceive what such a thing means. Yet only then you can detect, beyond the fatuous clamour, the silence of which the universe is made.
– Samuel Beckett
Isn’t the philosopher someone who always hears (and hears everything), but who cannot listen, or who, more precisely, neutralizes listening within himself, so that he can philosophize?
– Jean-Luc Nancy
If you tell enough lies, you’re bound to say something true.
– William Meredith
Art must not be concentrated in dead shrines called museums. lt must be spread everywhere – on the streets, in the trams, factories, workshops, and in the workers’ homes.
– Vladimir Mayakovsky
Contradiction alone is the proof that we are not everything. Contradiction is our wretchedness, and the sense of our wretchedness is the sense of reality. For we do not invent our wretchedness. It is true. It is why we have value at all.
– Simone Weil
The moment has arrived when a really thoroughgoing spiritual materialism is the intelligent and essential attitude for the management of technology, and for helping mankind to be something better than the most predatory monster yet evolved.
– Alan Watts
War is no longer made by simply analyzed economic forces if it ever was. War is made or planned now by individual men, demagogues and dictators who play on the patriotism of their people to mislead them into a belief in the great fallacy of war when all their vaunted reforms have failed to satisfy the people they misrule.
– Hemingway
The novel wins by points, the short story by knockout.
– Julio Cortázar
Music directly represents the passion of the soul. If one listens to the wrong kind of music, he will become the wrong kind of person.
– Aristotle
I wonder if the things I think are important are just shadows on a cave wall, the cave is blocked by a boulder, the floor will soon all be on fire.
– Neil Hilborn
The jonquils. They come back. They split the earth with
their green swords, bearing cups of light.
The forsythia comes back, spraying its thin whips with
blossom, one loud yellow shout.
The robins. They come back. They pull the sun on the
silver thread of their song.
The irises come back. They dance in the soft air in silken
gowns of midnight blue.
The lilacs come back. They trail their perfume like a scarf
of violet chiffon.
And the leaves come back, on every tree and bush, millions
and millions of small green hands applauding your return.
– Barbara Crooker
We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
– John Fowles
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
It is necessary to know how to sacrifice everything, including oneself. A price has to be paid for knowledge. You yourself are this price.
– Gurdjieff
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
Keep the doors open,
See how nature makes you smile,
Certainly winds would enter,
Into your heart will bestow pleasure,
– Saddik Ahmed
I am going to tell you a secret. Everything is about wanting. Everything. Things happen because of people wanting. Watch closely, and you’ll see what I mean.
– David Mitchell
Personality – We have a saying, ‘He stands in his own light’ He can’t see his real self because of his personality.
– Kathryn Hulme
Ordinary man is at the mercy of his organism – at the mercy of the instinctive centre; impressions received by the senses, of appetites, inertia, disease – at the mercy of the feelings; associations connected with people and places past and present, likes and dislikes, fear and anxiety – at the mercy of the mind; imagination, day-dreaming, suggestibility.
– A.R. Orage
Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.
– Simone de Beauvoire
I believe good art, good poetry, and true mythology communicates, without our knowing it, that life is not just a series of insulated, unrelated events. The great truths—when they can be visualized in images—reveal deep patterns, and reveal that we are a part of them. That deeply heals us, and it largely happens beneath our conscious awareness. A great story pulls us inside of a cosmic story.
– Richard Rohr
I did not feel Armageddon in my bones but I worried about all those people who did, who were ready for it, wishing hard, making phone calls and bank withdrawals. If enough people want it to happen, will it happen? How many people are enough people?
– Don DeLillo
Virtues are things we have to cultivate over a lifetime… a superior kind of well-being that’s the result of cultivating virtue and wisdom.
– Seth Zuiho Segall
According to Jung, metaphor affects the person on three levels: the mental level on which we interpret meaning, the imaginative level, where the actual transforming power resides, and the emotional level connected to the feelings embodied in the metaphor.
– Ralph Earle
And when you get blue, and you’ve lost all your dreams; There’s nothin’ like a campfire and a can of beans.
– Tom Waits
Meditation is not a quick cure or cover-up for the complicated or embarrassing aspects of ourselves.
– Chögyam Trungpa
I want a blaze of light to flame in me forever in a timeless, dear love of everything.
– Jack Kerouac
Community is a body of people crying for one another, working together for a common cause, enjoying and overlooking (or grimly tolerating) each others foibles; it’s a rough and beautiful quilt sewn of patches that don’t seem to go together at all, and then do.
– Anne Lamott
Tribes like the Buddha’s could be found everywhere in the 6th century BCE, but the Shakyas stand out because their form of government strikingly resembles that of ancient Athens.
– Kurt Spellmeyer
I am unfinished business.
The business that did not finish me
or my parents
won’t leave my children
in peace. In my right hand,
a paper. In my left, a feather.
To toss, to quill, to meet
my terminal velocity.
I forget Palestine
has a kind way of remembering
those who mark it for slaughter,
and those it marks for life.
I write for the future
because my present is demolished.
I fly to the future
to retrieve my demolished present
as a legible past. To see
what isn’t hard to see
in a world that doesn’t.
– Fady Joudah
Time is not a straight line, it’s more of a labyrinth, and if you press close to the wall at the right place you can hear the hurrying steps and the voices, you can hear yourself walking past on the other side.
– Tomas Tranströmer
Art is the technology of the soul.
– Laura Kerr
Oh mother, mother, where is happiness?
They took my lover’s tallness off to war,
– Gwendolyn Brooks
Losing something is just revising it.
After this love there will be more love.
– Hala Alyan
Fortune cannot aid those who do nothing.
– Sophocles
Hide nothing, for time, which sees all and hears all, exposes all.
– Sophocles
The fundamental koan is the Earth, which is also inseparable from the fundamental human koan of what is this self? They are the same koan in a way. They heal into eachother, like medicine and sickness do.
– Susan Murphy Roshi
There is an art in listening. Listen to find out if what is said is of significance, and after listening, judge, accept, or throw out; but first of all listen. The difficulty with most of us is that we do not listen. We come prepared to be antagonistic or friendly, and not to listen neutrally. If you listen neutrally, surely then only you begin to discover what lies behind the words. Words are a means of communication. You have to learn my vocabulary, the meaning behind my words, and then you will find the significance of the subject. The thing of first importance is to learn to listen rightly. If you read a poem and are biased, how can you understand it? To appreciate what the poet wants you to understand, you must come with freedom to do so.
– Krishnamurti
I know a few things about healing
it’s not a good employee.
it shows up when it’s ready
and only works when it wants to.
– Rudy Francisco
The story doesn’t change when we pretend it was all an illusion. The story doesn’t change when we get addicted to transcendence and float above it. The story doesn’t change when we feign forgiveness and resolution. The story doesn’t change when we confuse dissociation with expansion. The story doesn’t change when we tell ourselves that there are no victims. The story changes when we own our pain. The story changes when we are truly seen in our suffering. The story changes when we work it through to the lessons at its core. The story changes when we heal our heart. We are made of story- there’s no shame in that. The illusion is illusion, itself. Either we work through our story, or our story will work through us.
– Jeff Brown
I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple – or a green field —a place to enter, and in which to feel. Only in a secondary way is it an intellectual thing—an artifact, a moment of seemly and robust wordiness— wonderful as that part of it is. I learned that the poem was made not just to exist, but to speak-to be company. It was everything that was needed, when everything was needed. I remember the delicate, rumpled way into the woods, and the weight of the books in my pack. I remember the rambling, and the loafing-the wonderful days when, with Whitman, I tucked my trowser-ends in my boots and went and had a good time.
– Mary Oliver
Sweet enemy,
with a butterfly net
you set traps for me
among the folds of pleasure.
– Maria-Mercè Marçal
The world is wonderful, it was said, if you take the trouble to travel through it on foot.
– Robert Walser
All song is bent
by a silent measure;
a dancer’s foot
is a luminous disk in flight.
This song is an open field,
and a fibrous exploration
where the voice feels braced
by its own fluidity.
– Jay Wright, Music’s Mask and Measure
The choice to abstain from certain technologies is – and will increasingly become – key to human flourishing
– River Kenna
I am not able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself.
– George Orwell
When I see a man getting ready to put the world in order, I know there will be great trouble.
– Alan Watts
The artist tries to see what there is to be interested in … He has not created something, he has seen something.
– T.E. Hulme
Hegel is the last great philosopher. After him, decadence begins.
– Cioran
Yes, when I address someone, I do not know whom I am addressing; furthermore, I do not care to know, nor do I wish to know, him. Without dialogue, lyric poetry cannot exist. Yet there is only one thing that pushes us into the addressee’s embrace: the desire to be astonished by our own words, to be captivated by their originality and unexpectedness. Logic is merciless. If I know the person I am addressing, I know in advance how he will react to my words, to whatever I say, and consequently, I will not succeed in being astonished in his astonishment, in rejoicing in his joy, in loving in his love. The distance of separation erases the features of the loved one. Only from a distance do I feel the desire to tell him something important, something I could not utter directly seeing his face before me as a known quantity. Allow me to formulate this observation more succinctly: our sense of communication is inversely proportional to our real knowledge of the addressee and directly proportional to our felt need to interest him in ourselves. Acoustics can take care of itself: we need not be concerned about it. Distance is another matter. Whispering to a neighbor is boring. But it is downright maddening to bore one’s own soul. On the other hand, exchanging signals with the planet Mars (not fantasizing, of course) is a task worthy
of a lyric poet.
– Osip Mandelstam
Write when you’re emotional. Edit when you’re not.
– David Mcllroy
The great law of nature is that it never stops. There is no end.
– Ryan Holiday
The stars are undoubtably superb, as Freud remarked on reading Kant’s cosmological proof of the existence of God.
– Samuel Beckett
Very few of us are what we seem.
– Agatha Christie
THE GOOD LIFE
When some people talk about money
They speak as if it were a mysterious lover
Who went out to buy milk and never
Came back, and it makes me nostalgic
For the years I lived on coffee and bread,
Hungry all the time, walking to work on payday
Like a woman journeying for water
From a village without a well, then living
One or two nights like everyone else
On roast chicken and red wine.
– Tracy K. Smith
I never wrote poems in summer. The blossoming and resplendence were too sensuous for me. In summer I was melancholy. In autumn a melody came over the world. I was in love with the fog, with the first beginnings of darkness, with the cold. I found the snow divine, but perhaps even more beautiful, more divine, seemed the dark wild warm storms of early spring. In the winter cold, the evenings glistened and shimmered enchantingly. Sounds bedazzled me, colors spoke. It goes without saying I lived eternally alone. Loneliness was the bride I indulged, the friend I preferred, the conversation I adored, the beauty I enjoyed, the society in which I lived. Nothing was more natural and nothing friendlier to me. I was a clerk and often without a suitable position, which was fine with me. O the delightful dreamy melancholia, the enchanting hopelessness, the heavenly beautiful dejection, genial sorrow, sweet cruelty. I adored the outskirts with its figure of the solitary laborer. The snow- covered fields spoke intimately to me, the moon seemed to be weeping low onto the ghostly white snow. The stars! It was glorious. I was so princely poor and so regally free. In the wintry night, towards morning, I stood at the open window in only my nightshirt, the icy air blowing on my face and chest. And at the same time I had the strange illusion that the air was glowing all around me. Often in the remote room that I inhabited, I threw myself on my knees and begged God to give me a pretty line of verse. Then I walked out the door and lost myself in nature.
– Robert Walser, Poetry, (t. by Whalen, Kongeter, and Wiesner)
Now the traveling eye presents its ambassadorial credentials to the consciousness. A cold treaty is drawn up between the viewer in the picture, something on the order of a state secret.
– Osip Mandelstam
You have dared call Time your “brother,” take as your ally the worst of torturers. On this point, our differences explode: you walk in step with Time, while I precede or drag after it, never adopting its manners, unable
to think of it without experiencing something like a speculative sorrow.
– Emil Cioran
Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I’m one of them.
– Ray Bradbury
here are three people in one person, one eight years old, another forty, the third one, one hundred and five years old. Picture this: those three people live in one room; they have nothing in common in terms of coming to agreement and sharing work.
– Gurdjieff, Paris Meetings
Being stubborn, set in their ways and uninterested in being lectured to for four hours, the questioners, when they read this, will doubtless ask me: ‘well, but what solutions do you offer?’ And I, to conclude, will tell you that if you want solutions, go to the store across the street, because I have no such thing to sell you. My endeavor has been, is and will be that those who read me should think and meditate on fundamental things, and it has never been to give them ready-made answers. I have always sought to agitate, and, at most, suggest, rather than instruct. What I offer is not bread, but the yeast or ferment with which to make it.
– Miguel de Unamuno
It is the artistic mission to penetrate as far as may be toward that secret ground where primal law feeds growth.
– Paul Klee
And again and again I have to remind myself that the whole art of life is to lean on people, to involve oneself with them quite fearlessly and yet—when the props are kicked away—remain leaning, as it were, on empty air. Like levitation.
– Christopher Isherwood
If you feel irritated by the absurd remarks of two people whose conversation you happen to overhear, you should imagine that you are listening to a dialogue of two fools in a comedy.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
It is better to remain in a state of not knowing than to go into the mind in search of an answer.
– Leonard Jacobson
When at last we knew how little
Would survive us—how little we had mended
Or built that was not now lost—something
Large and old awoke.
– Tracy K. Smith
No man is entitled to act toward me as if he knew me
– Walser
Going was dying, and staying was dying. When we get to junctures like that, we had better choose the dying that enlarges rather than the one that keeps us stuck.
– James Hollis, What Matters Most
How often I find you
then on your patio, pajamaed
and distressed, head thrown
back so your eyes can pick apart
not the darker version of myself
but the carousel of stars.
To you I am merely background.
You barely hear my voice.
Remember I am most vibrant
when air breaks my light.
Do something with your brokenness.
– David Hernandez
Not knowing can help.
Every knowing ignores something else.
Each this is not that.
Freedom doesn’t have a home
What if my songs go for a vacation?
What if my heart decides to live again?
– George Gorman
Different people
have different inclinations.
Every human
is a different species.
Every relationship
is a different throw
of the chemistry inherent
in everything.
– George Gorman
Philosophy and literature are speculative constructs of the commerce between word and world.
– George Steiner
If people are living the same as always, with their bellies full of food, they’ll just go on the same way. If they get hungry and unhappy enough, something happens.
– Paul Bowles
In transactional relationships, people only reach out when they want something from you. They use your connection to achieve their goals.
In meaningful relationships, people get in touch when they think of you. Staying connected and being helpful are their goals.
– Adam Grant
All those years and their moments—
Crackling bacon, slamming car doors,
Poems tried out on friends,
Will be one more archive,
One more shaky text.
– Gary Snyder
I myself had to undergo the original experience, and, moreover, try to plant the results of my experience in the soil of reality; otherwise they would have remained subjective assumptions without validity.
– C.G. Jung
Which is worse for your mental health…?
Being subjected to the pain & suffering of the world.
or
Attempting to ignore it.
– Vince Fakhoury Horn
Instead of waiting until you die, die now. Die now to the personal pronouns; die now to your big ego trip and story of myself and how horrible or how great or wondrous. And by dying now, wake up to the beauty of this moment and realize how much bigger you are than your story.
– Jon Kabat-Zinn
It’s not ‘cloud seeding’.
It’s $7,000,000,000,000 a year in fossil fuel subsidies.
– Climate Dad
I don’t think anybody ever knows what another person means when they speak, frankly. It’s more than translation, it’s just throwing yourself into the dark. Language is so very, very personal, private. Weird. I guess you could think of it as translation, that seems like a kind of euphemistic metaphor. It’s probably a lot more hopeless than that. But the effort of speaking as a human is the effort to get past that hopelessness with every sentence.
– Anne Carson
Some people will do a PhD rather than go to therapy.
– @AcademicChatter
the happiest person in this country cannot help breathing in smokers’ cigarette fumes, auto exhaust, and airborne chemical dust…that happiness can insulate us against the results of our environmental madness is a rumor circulated by our enemies to destroy us.
– Audre Lorde
A tear may be the poetical resume of so many simultaneous impressions, the quintessence of so many opposing thoughts ! It is like a drop of one of those precious elixirs of the East which contain the life of twenty plants fused into a single aroma.
– H.-F. Amiel
God save us from twentysomethings who’ve recently discovered a System That Explains Everything.
– River Kenna
Babel was a blessing. Each and every language maps a possible world, a possible calendar and landscape.
– George Steiner
My heaven, my art, became a world beyond, as remote as my love. Everything real became hazy and what is hazy has no definite outlines.
– Karl Marx
At the bottom of the modern man there is always a great thirst for self-forgetfulness, self-distraction… and therefore he turns away from all those problems and abysses which might recall to him his own nothingness.
– Henri-Frédéric Amiel
SPACE IN THE MIND
When there’s space in the mind, the mind relaxes, and we feel a simple sense of delight. We experience the possibility of living a life in which we are not continuously aggravated by emotions, discursiveness, and concepts about the nature of things….
Despite all the ups and downs of our life, we are fundamentally awake individuals who have a natural ability to become compassionate and wise. Our nature is to be cheerful. This cheerfulness is deeper than temporary conditions. The day does not have to be sunny for us to be cheerful.
– Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche
Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 rules for writing:
1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted. 2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them-in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
i miss the days my friends
knew every mundane detail about my life
and i knew every ordinary detail about theirs
adulthood has starved me of that consistency
that us
the walks around the block
the long conversations when we were
too lost in the moment to care what time it was
when we won and celebrated
when we failed and celebrated harder
when we were just kids
now we have our very important jobs
that fill up our very busy schedules
we compare calendars just to plan coffee dates
that one of us eventually cancels
cause adulthood is being too exhausted
to leave our apartment most days
i miss knowing i once belonged
to a group of people bigger than myself
that belonging made life easier to live
– Rupi Kaur
Metaphors are not how we define territories; they are how we travel across thresholds between categories. They are bridges across difference. Through them, we connect the abstract and the concrete, the small and the large, the live and the inanimate, the human and the nonhuman. Sometimes the metaphors are built so deeply into language we hardly notice the bodily anatomy that gives mountains foothills, rivers headwaters and mouths (curiously, at opposite ends), needles eyes, vases necks, chairs arms, and tables legs. We think through our bodies, and that includes seeing bodies elsewhere, making bodies the terms of understanding how animate and inanimate, tiny and huge objects and systems work. Both needles and storms have eyes. Metaphor is the process of relating things that are alike in some fashion, to some degree, and the literal-minded object on the grounds of those differences while the metaphorically minded understand the limits of similarity.
– Rebecca Solnit, Crossing Over
And we offer each other words of consolation or distraction or encouragement when we see that one or the other of us is in need of such words.
– Javier Marías
…the holy innocence of those who forgive themselves.
– Albert Camus
Anyone whose goal is ‘something higher’ must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”
– Milan Kundera
I should like to know which is worse… to undergo all the miseries we have each of us suffered — or simply to sit here and do nothing?
– Voltaire
Your supply comes from Infinite Intelligence, you will always be provided for, in both big and little ways. The big things in life will come easily if you have no doubts or fears. So live fully in today, and bring your future into the now.
– Florence Scovel Shinn
Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and to have her nonsense respected.
– Charles Lamb
I see vividly my immediate and endless supply. It comes from a Higher Power, and all doors fly open! All channels are free. I see vividly my radiant health, perfect and permanent. I see vividly my heart’s desires come to pass in the twinkling of an eye.
– Florence Scovel Shinn
A man remains ignorant because he loves ignorance, and chooses ignorant thoughts; a man becomes wise because he loves wisdom and chooses wise thoughts.
– James Allen
Men imagine that thought can be kept secret, but it cannot; it rapidly crystallizes into habit, and habit solidifies into circumstance.
– James Allen
Watch out for intellect,
because it knows so much it knows nothing
and leaves you hanging upside down,
mouthing knowledge as your heart
falls out of your mouth.
– Anne Sexton
Wherever you come near the human race there’s layers and layers of nonsense.
– Thornton Wilder
As the sailor has the port toward which he is sailing in his mind, you must have a clear mental picture continually in your mind. You must keep your face toward it all the time. You must no more lose sight of it than the steerman loses sight of the compass.
– Wallace D. Wattles
Think of the conditions you want to produce. If you want to be healthy, happy, prosperous, doing a constructive work, having a continuous understanding of God, you do not picture it necessarily, but you think it, feel it, and get interested in it.
– Emmet Fox
You cannot show me any man or woman who is successful in his field, from president down to shoeblack, who is not interested in his work; nor can you show me any man who has his heart in his work who is not successful.
– Emmet Fox
There is no algorithm
To silence our poetry.
– Darryl Barfuss
Some triangles are broken
from the start
Hearts dangle
Victors guilty
Unruly desires
Love
too complex for geometry
– Rachel Newcombe
The mark of a basic shit
is that he has to
be right.
– William Burroughs
rain, flower, sea, wind
map my dark horizon. i
inhale earth’s songbook
– Tyehimba Jess
The reason I stopped seeing my psychotherapist was that she wanted to talk about how I should get a teaching job, and I knew I wasn’t going to get one.
– Alice Notley
Making jazz swing in
Seventeen syllables AIN’T
No square poet’s job.
– Etheridge Knight
Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.
– Thornton Wilder
The slowing
stream of morning
news murmurs in his ear.
It cradles him
in a sound, like some
object of history.
– John James
Blues Haiku [let me be yo wil]
let me be yo wil
derness let me be yo wind
blowing you all day.
– Sonia Sanchez
I come weary,
In search of an inn—
Ah! These wisteria flowers!
– Matsuo Bashō, translation by William George Aston
Winter, dealing in bare truths, does not expect / or deceive: takes us as it finds us.
– Nicola Healey
Marxism is about leisure, not labour.
– Terry Eagleton
The desire to know why and how is called curiosity.
– Hobbes
Enter every moment as if you had no past. Fresh and new.
– Eckhart Tolle
The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.
– Oscar Wilde
Not what you see, but what you perceive: that’s poetry. Not the noise, but its rhythm; an arrangement of derangements…
– Terrance Hayes
Seven Steps to Heaven Haiku
by Tony Medina
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
indigo bunting
the birds I see
in my dreams
– @pauldavidmena
The essay is a true story told with art.
– Brian Doyle
You begin to realize that the mind is limitless. When I mean the mind, I mean awareness. So this is something that’s not particular to me or you or people who really are devoted to meditation. Everybody, the nature of the human mind is that it’s It’s limitless.
– Jon Kabat-Zinn
Bioregional learning is not an option. It’s a necessity.
– Legacy Project
It is difficult to speak of or to practice love, friendship, generosity, understanding, or solidarity within a system whose rules, goals, and information streams are geared for lesser human qualities. But we try, and we urge you to try.
– Dana Meadows
BABEL
Scattered across the islands of the Galápagos archipelago there are half a dozen species of lizard that rely upon a method of communication comprised of what can only be called “push-ups.” When one lizard encounters another, each takes its turn bobbing head and torso up and down in a complex and jerky system of frantic interaction. By this means, lizards of each species establish territorial authority, reinforce social hierarchies, even engage in mating rituals.
It appears that these lizards evolved from a single species settling the islands from the mainland some 34 million years ago in what scientists have identified as two major waves of colonization. A small “Eastern Radiation” left two species endemic to San Cristóbal and Marchena, while the majority of lizards have come to inhabit the southern and western islands, spreading over time to the younger islands as the older were transported eastward, eventually eroding below sea level.
Each species has developed its own particular vocabulary, its own dialect of body language, to such an extent that each species might be said to “speak a different language.” Suffice it to say, when a lizard from one species encounters a lizard from another, bobbing head and torso up and down in a complex and jerky attempt at frantic interaction, try as they might they cannot understand each other. Lizards from one island are consequently unable to interbreed with lizards from another island. Without communication, it appears, there can be no intercourse.
– Matthew Shelton & Timothy Liu
At our core, we are devoted to learning. Specifically, we want to learn how to extract as much value as possible from everyone and everything we interact with.
– Andrew Patrick Clark
A little Learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring
– Alexander Pope
Second Place
a string of prayer flags
holding the night breeze
… letting it go
– Chen-ou Liu, Canada
At best, sometimes I think of myself as a Platonic anarchist. It is not a winning ticket.
– George Steiner
Vinegar and milk, sky, ocean,
The sky’s dense mass,
Everything conspires towards this quivering
Lying in the dense heart of darkness.
– Antonin Artaud, (translated by Victor Corti)
All that we reckoned settled shakes and rattles; and literature, cities, climates, religions, leave their foundations and dance before our eyes.
– Emerson
Every abyss is navigable by little paper boats.
– João Guimarães Rosa, Tutaméia
What I mean of course is that voices on the radio and in politics and public life in general speak a language that marches all too well with the executioners and therefore I, we, must seek a new language that does not collaborate with the executioners.
– Tomas Tranströmer
Fruit of the earth, sprout, rise up — and Heaven, pour out the water of life.
– @RedBookJung
I’m so glad you outlasted your worst storms.
You’re still here.
Instead of constantly looking for rainbows, you decided to became one.
– Dr. Thema
Postactivism is not a project,
it is grace.
A grace that flowers.
– Báyò Akómoláfé
Let us justly appreciate the old opportune Belgian motto: ‘Light bursts forth from the collision of ideas’.
– James Ensor to Albert Einstein
We unwittingly worship
Whatever we keep
Held in our unconscious
Bring it to light
And we intentionally
Participatory
Get to serve and receive
The beautiful Life we choose
To move unconscious material
Into consciousness
Isn’t a vain pursuit
It is the forfeiting
Of a life as a blind, controllable
Pawn
A life as a slave
To the Stockholm syndrome
Of your own wounds
To the retrieval of choice,
Of freedom,
Of agency, of power
Of love.
Please do not
Believe the stories
Of the darkness within you.
Not one of them is ultimate.
Each just needs
To be truthfully seen
And it will yield to love.
– Chelan Harkin
Without bravery, we will never be able to realize the vaulting scope of our own capacities. Without bravery, we will never know the world as richly as it longs to be known. Without bravery, our lives will remain small – far smaller than we probably want our lives to be.
– Jack Gilbert
Amor Intellectualis (1878)
by Oscar Wilde
Oft have we trod the vales of Castaly
And heard sweet notes of sylvan music blown
From antique reeds to common folk unknown:
And often launched our bark upon that sea
Which the nine Muses hold in empery,
And ploughed free furrows through the wave and foam,
Nor spread reluctant sail for more safe home
Till we had freighted well our argosy.
Of which despoilèd treasures these remain,
Sordello’s passion, and the honied line
Of young Endymion, lordly Tamburlaine
Driving his pampered jades, and more than these,
The seven-fold vision of the Florentine,
And grave-browed Milton’s solemn harmonies.
The night is fresh and cool—
Staff in hand, I walk through the gate.
Wisteria and ivy grow together along the winding mountain path;
Birds sing quietly in their nests and a monkey howls nearby.
As I reach a high peak a village appears in the distance.
The old pines are full of poems;
I bend down for a drink of pure spring water.
There is a gentle breeze, and the round moon hangs overhead.
Standing by a deserted building,
I pretend to be a crane softly floating among the clouds.
– Ryokan
He drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to himself: —A day of dappled seaborne clouds. The phrase and the day and the scene harmonised in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language manycoloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?
– James Joyce
Paradoxically, the moment of utter defeat can be the traditional turning point in the journey. It is the moment when all conscious strategems have failed, the ego abdicates, and deeper forces of life may make their appearance.
– Marc Ian Barasch
One does not become fully human painlessly.
– Rollo May
If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth–certainly the machine will wear out… but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.
– Henry David Thoreau
Most of us identify ourselves with something – with the family, with the country, with an idea, with a belief – hoping thereby to forget our petty little selves.
– Krishnamurti
Repetition is the ritual of obsession. Repetition is a way to jumpstart the indecision of beginning. To persevere and to begin over and over again is to continue the obsession with work. Work comes out of work. In order to work you must already be working.
– Richard Serra
I border still on a word and on a different land,
I border, like little else, on everything more and more.
– Ingeborg Bachmann (translated by Mark Anderson)
Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.
– Plato
Letting go means falling behind the energy instead of going into it. It just takes a moment of conscious effort to decide that you’re not going there. You just let go. It’s simply a matter of taking the risk that you are better off letting go than going with the energy.
– Michael Singer
We cannot be present and run our story-line at the same time.
– Pema Chodron
In an age in which the media broadcast countless pieces of foolishness, the educated man is defined not by what he knows, but by what he doesn’t know.
– Nicolas Gomez Davila
The same eyes
that fix on us
were closed before
The same ears
that eavesdrop
were shut before
The hounds
sniffing for blood now
cared not when we were bleeding
– Grace Tame, Hard Pressed
With every piece of advice,
consider sometimes the
opposite is equally true.
– Rick Rubin
heavy traffic
to my nearside
rooks amid cowslips
– James Gilbert
I moved my chair into sun
I sat in the sun
the way hunger is moved when called fasting.
– Jane Hirshfield
In guarding their fortune men are often closefisted, yet, when it comes to the matter of wasting time, in the case of the one thing in which it is right to be miserly, they show themselves most prodigal.
– Seneca
To Be a Good Buddhist Is Ensnarement
The Zen priest says I am everything I am not.
In order to stop resisting, I must not attempt to stop resisting.
I must believe there is no need to believe in thoughts.
Oblivious to appetites that appear to be exits, and also entrances.
What is there to hoard when the worldly realm has no permanent vacancies?
Ten years I’ve taken to this mind fasting.
My shadow these days is bare.
It drives a stranger, a good fool.
Nothing can surprise.
Clarity is just questioning having eaten its fill.
– Jenny Xie
I often think about wanting my writing to cut through something, to be piercing. A sound that rings like a bell. Or the sound of a needle – so quiet you can barely hear it – going through cloth.
– Amina Cain
Love is obtuse and reckless; it interferes.
– Elizabeth Bowen
Revolutionary Letter #15
When you seize Columbia, when you
seize Paris, take
the media, tell the people what you’re doing
what you’re up to and why and how you mean
to do it, how they can help, keep the news
coming, steady, you have 70 years
of media conditioning to combat, it is a wall
you must get through, somehow, to reach
the instinctive man, who is struggling like a plant
for light, for air
//
when you seize a town, a campus, get hold of the power
stations, the water, the transportation,
forget to negotiate, forget how
to negotiate, don’t wait for De Gaulle or Kirk
to abdicate, they won’t, you are not
‘demonstrating’ you are fighting
a war, fight to win, don’t wait for Johnson or
Humphrey or Rockefeller, to agree to your terms
take what you need, it’s free
because it’s yours’
– Diane di Prima
FLYING SHOES
The reporter threw his shoes at the President,
shouting: “This is your farewell kiss, you dog!
This is from the widows, the orphans,
& those killed in Iraq!”
The reporter was pummeled into submission,
jailed & tortured — & viewed around the world,
& especially in Iraq,
as a hero.
It was shoes greatest moment
since Imelda Marcos’s closet opened,
or since Khruschev pounded the podium
at the United Nations with his loafer
before retiring to write surrealist poetry
– unknown
The Heat of Midnight Tears
by Mirabai
English version by Robert Bly
Listen, my friend, this road is the heart opening,
Kissing his feet, resistance broken, tears all night.
If we could reach the Lord through immersion in water,
I would have asked to be born a fish in this life.
If we could reach Him through nothing but berries and wild nuts,
Then surely the saints would have been monkeys when they came from the womb!
If we could reach him by munching lettuce and dry leaves,
Then the goats would surely go to the Holy One before us!
If the worship of stone statues could bring us all the way,
I would have adored a granite mountain years ago.
Mirabai says: The heat of midnight tears will bring you to God.
Since there are parts of ourselves that are a mystery to us, and these are aspects that we and others can’t possibly know unless and until they reveal themselves, can any of us truly say that we know each other? I don’t think so. We can only ever know aspects of another person or aspects of ourselves. Embrace the unfolding mystery of Self and Other. Don’t assume you know another person simply because you have some familiarity with a few of their aspects. Don’t assume you know yourself simply because you have some familiarity with a few of your own aspects. There is always more to discover.
– Darion Kuma Gracen
But there’s beauty still. I can’t remain indifferent to that.
– Anton Chekhov
What quantum physics teaches us is that everything we thought was physical is not physical.
– Bruce H. Lipton
The study of mathematics is the indispensable basis for all intellectual and spiritual progress.
– F. M. Cornford
There are no rules / except that the children must always play / orphans and the orphans / must always play house. / The father is a title card. / The mother is the postscript. / You are a pine cone. Welcome to my world.
– Eliza Gilbert
Poetry is only a havoc which restores.
– Georges Bataille
Only together
do male and female
truly transform.
Not predictably,
but like appleseeds,
dolphins,
and Saturday nights.
Dreaming does come natural,
not only for remembering
but for inventing.
The best transformations
are strictly improvised,
especially when not looked for,
except for inside,
where love grows.
– George Gorman
Where there is an emptiness, the mind will obligingly fill it up. Fear is always at hand to supply any vacancies, as is curiosity. I have had ample experience with both.
– Margaret Atwood
Do tears not yet spilled wait in small lakes?
– Pablo Neruda
Leaving behind the babble of the plaza, I enter the Library. I feel, almost physically, the gravitation of the books, the enveloping serenity of order, time magically desiccated and preserved.
– Jorge Luis Borges
Don’t push away all that is uncomfortable, & cling to all that is pleasurable. This is ego. Instead, breathe deeply & relax into the present moment. This nervous feeling in your heart? Breathe in, breathe out. Stay for one moment. This is fearlessness.
– Waylon Lewis
Man’s greatest wealth is to live on little with contented mind; for little is never lacking.
– Lucretius
As I grew older and found I had things to protect, I forgot. I completely forgot that I had always had enough in the first place. Now I am trying to learn this once again—total abundance, nothing begrudged.
– Sallie Jiko Tisdale
I believe that a different therapy must be constructed for each patient because each has a unique story.
– Irvin D. Yalom
All this searching
And stripping away of the false
It’s not a half way thing
It’s not a polite tea party inquiry
It’s a serious demolition
And the most important
Love affair
You will ever have.
– @KavijiPoet
We spend hours performing the needful, yet the soul can live on thirty seconds of fiery encounter and be filled.
– Gunilla Norris
a moment
of spring twilight
is worth a days wages
– Sotoba
A shattered moon
gradually
reaccumulates.
– Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot
The most wasted of all days
is one without laughter.
– e e cummings
Places I Have Heard the Ocean
In a cat’s throat, in a shell I hold
to my ear — though I’m told
this is the sound of my own
blood. I have heard the ocean
in the city: cars against
the beach of our street. Or in
the subway, waiting for a train
that carries me like a current.
In my bed: place of high and low
tide or in my daughter’s skates,
rolling over the sidewalk.
Ocean in the trees when they
fill their heads with wind.
Ocean in the rise and fall:
lungs of everyone I love.
– Faith Shearin
Alchemical images depict an intermediate realm, which is neither physical nor spiritual but which includes something of each. Alchemy is about the in-between states.
– Jeffrey Raff
The understanding of Zen, the understanding of awakening, the understanding of— Well, we’ll call it mystical experiences, one of the most dangerous things in the world. And for a person who cannot contain it, it’s like putting a million volts through your electric shaver. You blow your mind and it stays blown. Now, if you go off in that way, that is what would be called in Buddhism a pratyeka-buddha—’private buddha’. He is one who goes off into the transcendental world and is never seen again. And he’s made a mistake from the standpoint of Buddhism, because from the standpoint of Buddhism, there is no fundamental difference between the transcendental world and this everyday world. The bodhisattva, you see, who doesn’t go off into a nirvana and stay there forever and ever, but comes back and lives ordinary everyday life to help other beings to see through it, too, he doesn’t come back because he feels he has some sort of solemn duty to help mankind and all that kind of pious cant. He comes back because he sees the two worlds are the same. He sees all other beings as buddhas. He sees them, to use a phrase of G.K. Chesterton’s, ‘but now a great thing in the street, seems any human nod, where move in strange democracies the million masks of god.’ And it’s fantastic to look at people and see that they really, deep down, are enlightened.
– Alan Watts
WHEN I MET MY MUSE
I glanced at her and took my glasses
off—they were still singing. They buzzed
like a locust on the coffee table and then
ceased. Her voice belled forth, and the
sunlight bent. I felt the ceiling arch, and
knew that nails up there took a new grip
on whatever they touched. “I am your own
way of looking at things,” she said. “When
you allow me to live with you, every
glance at the world around you will be
a sort of salvation.” And I took her hand.
– William Stafford
If I believed in a god, he would be a sea god, like the sea
in its predictability—now approach, now recede—beneath
such a god I would not mind, I think, being the shore, say of the sea
what you will, it’s the shore that endures the routine loss
without which what strategies would there be for softening
the hollowness that any victory, give it time, comes with,
how curb the risk of arrogance, with its doomed but
not undangerous hound, complacency?
– Carl Phillips
Ocean
I am in love with Ocean
lifting her thousands of white hats
in the chop of the storm,
or lying smooth and blue, the
loveliest bed in the world.
In the personal life, there is
always grief more than enough,
a heart-load for each of us
on the dusty road. I suppose
there is a reason for this, so I will be
patient, acquiescent. But I will live
nowhere except here, by Ocean, trusting
equally in all the blast and welcome
of her sorrowless, salt self.
– Mary Oliver
joy and sorrow in this world pass into each other, mingling their forms and their murmurs in the twilight of life as mysterious as an over shadowed ocean, while the dazzling brightness of supreme hopes lies far off, fascinating and still, on the distant edge of the horizon.
– Joseph Conrad
never understood the kind of thrift they recommend. i wanted to pay my tribute to the sea, its ships and its men, to whom i remain indebted for so much which has gone to make me what i am. it is possible that i am a bad economist; but it is certain that i am incorrigible.
– Joseph Conrad
as in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself mostly by the passion of his prejudices and by the consistent narrowness of his outlook. but i have never been able to love what was not lovable or hate what was not hateful out of deference for some
– Joseph Conrad
Active annihilation is obtained through a process of ‘recording’, a kind of continuous, effortless awareness of God, and through a pure faith, which conceives of God as really present even in those circumstances, in which there is no sensible inward evidence of that presence and no reason for inferring it.
– Aldous Huxley
The teacher is of course an artist, but being an artist does not mean that he or she can make the profile, can shape the students. What the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves.
– Paulo Freire
Where someone spray painted
ATHENS IS THE NEW BERLIN
the retort follows
BERLIN IS THE NEW ATHENS
on a billboard for instant coffee above the café
in the ardent sun
go ahead / wish for it
– Ari Banias
Even broken in spirit as he is, no one can feel more deeply than he does the beauties of nature. The starry sky, the sea, and every sight afforded by these wonderful regions, seems still to have the power of elevating his soul from earth. Such a man has a double existence: he may suffer misery, and be overwhelmed by disappointments; yet, when he has retired into himself, he will be like a celestial spirit that has a halo around him, within whose circle no grief or folly ventures.
– Mary Shelley
What I must do, is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
I was thinking about how life is long so that lots of growth can happen slowly, while I want it all at once.
– Sheila Heti
Our world is so exceedingly rich in delusions that a truth is priceless, and no one will let it slip because of a few exceptions with which it cannot be brought into accord.
– C.G. Jung
Please. I’d rather be alive than holy.
– Hala Alyan
Preserve my words forever for their aftertaste of misfortune and smoke.
– Mandelstam to Akhmatova
For decades the government abused the faith of the people.
For decades the media abused the faith of the people.
The result is the near total loss of agreed upon truth.
How to we regain trust?
– Erin Brockovich
Any economic or social revolution only breeds the need for further reform, and that is an endless process. Real revolution is inward, and it comes into being without the mind seeking it.
– Krishnamurti
The terraces. Their awnings set since Dawn
Stepped dripping from the sea.
And up and in
Between the parapet, the flaps,
Murmuring shimmers drift.
– Christopher Logue
War Music: An Account of Homer’s Iliad
This I learned in the Mysterium: to take seriously every unknown wanderer who personally inhabits the inner world, since they are real because they are effectual.
– CG Jung
A good book is an event in my life.
– Stendhal
bell hooks said “No insurgent intellectual, no dissenting critical voice in this society escapes the pressure to conform,” especially in institutions “where rewards and benefits are awarded.” But “irrespective of our locations, we are all vulnerable,” and must work on resisting.
– @tamaranopper
Nina Simone noted “the tightrope of doing what you think is your best and making money at it,” and needing to “constantly re-identify myself to myself, reactivate my own standards, my own convictions about what I’m doing and why.” Relevant to all whose work addresses inequality.
– @tamaranopper
The most beautiful part of your body / is where it’s headed. & remember, / loneliness is still time spent / with the world.
– Ocean Vuong
There is a difference between urge and action, being tempted and indulging temptation. The urge is human. The ability to restrain from, to mitigate, to redirect the urge? That’s Stoicism.
– @dailystoic
All this Americanizing and mechanizing has been for the purpose of overthrowing the past. And now look at America, tangled in her own barbed wire, and mastered by her own machines.
– D. H. Lawrence
You must practice thrift in order to achieve that luxurious quality of wastefulness—that sense that you have enough to waste, that you are holding back—without actually wasting anything.
– Toni Morrison
The “inner work” that does not result in you being better connected to the outer world, is not inner work, it’s dissociation.
– Matt Jugo
Would I be persuaded by anyone else’s opinion? Fat chance!
– Gordon Lish
Strangely enough my ambition tends to come in moments of depression.
– David Bowie
Poems are bullshit unless they are teeth.
– Amiri Baraka
There will be no good art made in this country until you can rent studio apartments for $900 a month again.
– Jack Califano
Introverts are attracted to authenticity. They don’t care about how you look or the zeroes in your bank, they care about who you are as a person. Your wit. Your wisdom. Your idiosyncrasies. The rare inside you.
– @master_nobody
In real life you aren’t allowed to say you’re angry but in music you can say anything.
– Sinead O’Connor
I was a flurry of atoms.
I was a disassembled spark.
– Ladan Osman
I HEAR THE AXE HAS FLOWERED,
I hear the place can’t be named,
I hear the bread that looks on him
heals the hanged man,
the bread his wife baked him,
I hear they call life
the only refuge.
– Paul Celan, (trans. Ian Farley)
Most of my poems begin with an image or some kind of sonic surprise, but this poem began as an episode—a childhood memory of living in Section 8.
– Adrian Matejka
17 Kinds of Hungry
by Adrian Matejka
Until around sundown, the surviving
lilies in the yard stay wide open,
like the window of a car passing
on a hot day. No music from the flowers,
but they smell like somebody’s fragrant
soap unwrapped on a dish edged
with daisies. All those smells expressing
themselves haphazardly like a band
trying to tune up. Escape is what I’ve wanted
since I was little, cramped in summertime
Section 8: flowers everywhere,
my bird-legged brother a couple steps
back, my sister book-nosed somewhere
in the radius of us. Just a deciduous minute
when the blossom of noises
was from my own AM radio & not my thin
stomach. No more backtalks, no more
slapbacks. Just a quick inhale before
I tiptoed out the front door. Unlatch, turn,
run away. Escape, as Indiana bats wheeled
up top, chirping sonorous somethings.
I ran under them & to the bus, past
those long-necked lilies, self-congratulatory
in their exploded colors. Their purples leaned
the way June does, their reds hot as the woman’s
attitude waiting at the bus stop while
the #17 scooted past without picking us up.
There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination.
– Daniel Dennett
I think there’s a point in your healing journey where you stop trying to convince other people to do the right thing; you just observe their choices, understand their character, and decide what you’re going to allow in your life.
– Brianna Wiest
PROGRESS
REPORT
Now I’m
into things
so small
when I
say boo
I disappear
– A.R. Ammons
authors should rewrite each other’s books
the way singers cover each other’s songs
– @arabelladevine
I don’t think anybody ever knows what another person means when they speak, frankly. It’s more than translation, it’s just throwing yourself into the dark.
– Ann Carson
People mainly change when they have an inner experience. You can read all the books in the world, you can look at a million tweets; but if it’s not creating an inner experience it will go in one ear and out another. In order to create lasting transformation, what your mind reads has to also touch your heart, soul, and body—*and* you have to be open and receptive enough to receive that message. Direct experience trumps intellectual information.
– Laura Matsue
Colors are not possessions; they are the intimate revelations of an energy field… They are light waves with mathematically precise lengths, and they are deep, resonant mysteries with boundless subjectivity. Colors challenge language to encompass them. (It cannot; there are more sensations than words for them. Our eyes are far ahead of our tongues.) Colors bear the metaphors of entire cultures. They convey every sensation from lust to distress. They glow fluorescent on the flanks of a fish out of the water, then flee at its death. They mark the land of a woman deity who controls the soft desert rain. Flowers use colors ruthlessly for sex. Moths steal them from their surroundings and disappear. An octopus communicates by color; an octopus blush is language. Humans imbibe colors as antidotes to emotional monotony. Our lives, when we pay attention to light, compel us to empathy with color.
– Ellen Meloy
When a name for a color is absent from a language, it is usually blue. When a name for a color is indefinite, it is usually green. Ancient Hebrew, Welsh, Vietnamese, and, until recently, Japanese, lack a word for blue… The Icelandic word for blue and black is the same, one word that fits sea, lava, and raven.
It has been shown that the words for colors enter evolving languages in this order, nearly universally: black, white, and red, then yellow and green (in either order), with green covering blue until blue comes into itself. Once blue is acquired, it eclipses green. Once named, blue pushes green into a less definite version. Green confusion is manifest in turquoise, the is-it-blue-or-is-it-green color. Despite the complexities of color names even in the same language, we somehow make sense of another person’s references. We know color as a perceptual “truth” that we imply and share without its direct experience, like feeling pain in a phantom limb or in another person’s body.
Within every color lies a story, and stories are the binding agent of culture.
– Ellen Meloy
Turquoise is ornament, jewel, talisman, tessera. It is religion. It is pawn. It is not favored for pinkie rings. It did not likely come from Turkey, its namesake, but took the name of the land it crossed on the old trade routes from Persia to Europe.
The chemistry of turquoise: CuAl6(PO4)4(OH)8•4H2O, a hydrous phosphate of copper and aluminum. The copper and aluminum — along with iron and other mineral traces — join with a phosphate radical, a group of oxygen atoms so clustered around nonmetallic phosphorus that they behave like a single atom.
Phosphates are known for their bright colors. In turquoise, according to some mineralogists, the blue comes from the copper; the green comes from the presence of iron. Dark, spidery veins reveal the matrix in which turquoise participates; the veins are usually limonite, iron-stained quartz, metallic oxides, or other minerals.
Turquoise occurs in limestone, batholithic and feldspathic granites, shale, and trachyte, rocks that are found nearly everywhere. Unless they are in an arid environment, however, they are not likely to bear turquoise. Although turquoise has more than one origin, most types formed million years ago, when groundwater seeped into alumina- and copper-rich mineralized fractures in zones of igneous rock. What has been said about gold can be said about turquoise: turquoise is the burden of waters.
Ancient southwesterners gave turquoise, the greatest wealth, as offerings to water, the desert’s greatest gift. They left tokens of turquoise at canyon seeps and springs amid emerald mosses, maidenhair ferns, creamy blooms of columbine, crimson monkey flowers, dragonflies the color of flame, and heron-blue damselflies with bodies as thin as a vein. From turquoise they carved tadpoles a quarter-inch long and set raised turquoise eyes in toads of black jet. With turquoise they traded for copper bells, macaw feathers, the skins and plumes of parrots, and pearlescent shells from the Pacific and the Sea of Cortez — the stone of the desert for the glories of sea and forest.
– Ellen Meloy
Above all, I feel that the sounds of this world are so beautiful in themselves that if only we could listen to them properly, cinema would have no need for music at all.
– Andrei Tarkovsky
roaring fire
only the blue flames
speak for me
– @YourMoonliness
My biggest mistake during the ‘80s was trying to anticipate what the audience wanted.
– David Bowie
The bright day is done,
And we are for the dark.
– William Shakespeare
Love is the strongest force in the universe, capable of transforming even the darkest of souls.
– Bulleh Shah
We have something inside of ourselves that built the pyramids, wrote the sacred books, waged all the wars, created all the arts, and perpetuated the species itself with an infinite diversity of individualities.
– Manly P. Hall
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
– Samuel Beckett
You should forgive your Enemy if for no other reason than every bad thing you do to him binds you to that man in deeper communion.
– @AmericanGwyn
While spacewalking I realized something: I used to think I was scared of heights but now I know I was just scared of gravity.
– NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman
Everyone carries his parents around inside of him.
– Eric Berne
Other Wound
The wound is usually someone else’s.
My love was never enough.
I couldn’t touch the whole of it.
I wasn’t a match for that depth.
Every daughter
has a cage around her head
and a mother on the cross.
I always hope to take it off, and rarely do.
Instead, I climb up, like a child into the bed.
I nail myself beside you.
– Bianca Stone
Over time, Jung concluded that there was within each of us a deep resilience guided by some locus of knowing, independent of ego consciousness; a center that produces our dreams to correct us, symptoms to challenge us, and visions to inspire us.
– James Hollis
We believe that once we have the words to describe a phenomenon, we understand it, but although words are necessary, they are insufficient. Meaningful discovery becomes possible only when knowledge is enlivened by experience that is lived through the body. If an experience is not coming from the body, then it is not known.
– Marion Woodman
Perhaps that was why I had to endure pain — because true transformation can only happen in the crucible of suffering. All impurities fall away from gold only when it’s heated to melting.
– Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Your hope lies in keeping silent in your mind and quiet in your heart.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
If you wish to glimpse inside a human soul and get to know a man, don’t bother analyzing his ways of being silent, of talking, of weeping, of seeing how much he is moved by noble ideas; you will get better results if you just watch him laugh. If he laughs well, he’s a good man.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
And the heart that abandons itself to the Supreme Mind finds itself related to all its works and will travel a royal road to particular knowledge and powers.
– Wallace D. Wattles
It is the natural and inherent impulse of life to seek to live more; it is the nature of intelligence to enlarge itself, and of consciousness to seek to extend its boundaries and find fuller expression.
– Wallace D. Wattles
When love is not madness, it is not love.
– Pedro Calderon de la Barca
A person is limited only by the thoughts that he chooses.
– James Allen
Every man is a golden link in the chain of my good.
– Florence Scovel Shinn
The first draft is a skeleton….just bare bones. The rest of the story comes later with revising.
– Judy Blume
To empathize
Is not to indulge or enable,
It is to see another rightly.
It is to see their being that is beyond
The current pain that they’re in
It is to acknowledge the real, temporary
Truth
Of the impact of the pain
They’re in
In a way that frees their identity
From its trappings.
It is to understand the realness
And the relativity of pain
And knowing the lasting light
Beyond it
To be with it fully
In another
Without flinching.
To bring pain
From otherness
To belonging
Is how we become free.
– Chelan Harkin
The shortest essay I ever wrote, maybe the shortest essay anyone has ever written, was ‘Little Essay on Form.’ It went like this: ‘We build the corral as we reinvent the horse.’
– Stephen Dunn
haiku’s third line
switching to blue ink
– Roberta Beach Jacobson
It is inherent in human nature to consider a thing untrue if one does not like it.
– Sigmund Freud
Boredom is the root of all evil – the despairing refusal to be oneself.
– Søren Kierkegaard
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
Whereas pain is a physical experience, suffering is a mental one. It is the sense that things should be other than they are. Its antidote is acceptance.
– Wu Hsin
I think it’s largely the conundrum of being human that makes us keep making. I think it has something to do with revision-how, not only is the world in constant revision, but each of us is, as well.
– Carl Phillips
I’ve been studying creative coding and minimalist art. I am thinking a lot about how our latest technology would have impacted past artist’s work. (Had they the means) I want to explore that concept.
– Laura Kerr
Love is intensity and for this reason it is a relaxation of time: it stretches out the minutes and lengthens them like centuries.
– Octavio Paz
The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.
– Samuel Beckett
Connection alone does not create an incredible relationship, choosing to face challenges together and learning how to care for each other does.
– yung_pueblo@
Despair is a greater sin than any of the sins which provoke it.
– C.S. Lewis
We don’t change the outer world; we pattern ourselves differently through internal shifts and the outer world seemingly changes to match our inner state of being.
– Natalia Beshqoy
I search for the language
that is also yours–
almost all our language has been taxed by war.
– Allen Ginsberg
And I am in love with women
So very much
That the art I create
Is almost,
Always,
Of them.
– Frederick Phoenix
Whoever does not ensure the humbling of knowledge for a moment will remain in the humbling of ignorance forever.
– Al-Asma‘i
I don’t like the idea of “understanding” a film. I don’t believe that rational understanding is an essential element in the reception of any work of art. Either a film has something to say to you or it hasn’t. If you are moved by it, you don’t need it explained to you. If not, no explanation can make you moved by it.
– Federico Fellini
And you, too, youthful reader, will realize the Vision (not the idle wish) of your heart, be it base or beautiful, or a mixture of both, for you will always gravitate toward that which you, secretly, most love.
– James Allen
A single dream is more powerful than a thousand realities.
– Nathaniel Hawthorne
It is always Americans who pretend they can be free in a completely structured situation.
– Gayatri Spivak
One ought to hold on to one’s own heart, for if one lets it go, the one soon loses control of the head, too.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
They always come for the poets first. Just ask Lorca.
– Leah Callen
Leave everything undefined, Including yourself. Befriend uncertainty. Fall in love with mystery. Kneel at the altar of Not Knowing. Give your questions time to breathe and the answers will find you.
– Jeff Foster
People know when you’re speaking from el coraón. You
have that pain. Take that pain and do something with it.
That’s very powerful.
– Sandra Cisneros
What the warrior renounces is anything in his experience that is a barrier between himself and others.
– Chögyam Trungpa
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
The elder said: Humility is acquired after struggles. When you know yourself you acquire humility, which become a (permanent) condition. Otherwise one can become humble for a moment, but your thought will say to you that you are something although in reality you’re nothing. and you’ll be deluded like that to the moment of death. If death finds you with the thought that you are nothing, then God will speak. If however your thought says at the hour of death that you are something and you don’t understand it, all your effort goes to waste.”
– Elder Paisios of Mount Athos
Every person, from morning till evening, is making invisible forms in space by what he says. He is creating invisible vibrations around him, and so he is creating an atmosphere.
– Hazrat Inayat Khan
I think that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn’t do. All that I might have been and couldn’t be. All the choices I didn’t make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven’t been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.
– Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind
When someone doesn’t show up, the people who wait sometimes tell stories about what might have happened and come to half believe the desertion, the abduction, the accident. Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don’t–and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown. Perhaps fantasy is what you fill up maps with rather than saying that they too contain the unknown.
– Rebecca Solnit
The world is his who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold, is there only by sufferance – by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
– T. S. Eliot
Anyone who undergoes a development of consciousness is immediately assailed by a sense of abandonment and excommunication from most of the values that formerly sustained one. The old kingdom dissolves beneath and one is left to feel exiled and without any container for life.
– RA Johnson
I try to hold both history and wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.
– Gary Snyder
The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.
– Erich Fromm
Be so good they can’t ignore you.
– Steve Martin
Men liked to put me down as the best woman painter… I’m one of the best painters.
– Georgia O’Keeffe
If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four minutes. If it’s still boring, try for eight minutes. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. We end up discovering that it’s not boring at all.
– John Cage
Life is hard, you know, and laughter is how we come to terms with all the ironies and cruelties and uncertainties that we face.
– Desmond Tutu
Buddhism says that the purpose of life is to know oneself, because without that internal self-realization, all other goals will be thwarted. This is the lesson that we all need to learn.
– Lama Surya Das
It was a night of little ease to his toiling mind, toiling in mere darkness and besieged by questions.
– Robert Louis Stevenson
The quality of sacredness consists not only in what is there in the inner world, but also in the attitude we take toward it. It is made up not only of what is, but also of what one does with it. It is up to us to recognize it, to treat it as the sacred, in order to experience its power.
– Robert A. Johnson, We
The more stubborn the isolation, the more vivid these unlooked-for fragments, the more oppressive their weight. So that it seems the place I flee to is not so much a city on the other side of the world as further into my own interior.
– Han Kang
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
All the experiences of life are designed by Providence to force men and women into self-activity; to compel them to cease being creatures of circumstances and master their environment.
– Wallace D. Wattles
Morality is a subject that interests us above all others: We fancy the peace of society to be at stake in every decision concerning it; and it is evident, that this concern must make our speculations appear more real and solid, than where the subject is, in a great measure, indifferent to us.
– David Hume
However beneficial a secret shared with several persons may be, a merely private secret has a destructive effect. It resembles a burden of guilt which cuts off the unfortunate possessor from communion with his fellow-beings. Yet if we are conscious of what we conceal, the harm done is decidedly less than if we do not know what we are repressing—or even that we have repressions at all.
– C.G. Jung
No greater good can come to any man or woman than to become self-active.
– Wallace D. Wattles
Flat tires are part of the journey.
– Chögyam Trungpa
The world is your kaleidoscope, and the varying combinations of colours, which at every succeeding moment it presents to you are the exquisitely adjusted pictures of your ever-moving thoughts.
– James Allen
The connections we make in the course of a life–maybe that’s what heaven is.
– Fred Rogers
Life is too deep for words, so don’t try to describe it, just live it.
– C. S. Lewis
Creation is lifework, creation is how… you spend your life, you cannot divide life and the creation, it’s impossible. Shut your eyes, close your ears, don’t use your brain, use your heart, your soul.
– Yohji Yamamoto
Long enough have you dream’d contemptible dreams, Now I wash the gum from your eyes, You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life
– Walt Whitman
Procrastination is a lack of alignment.
No urgency, meaning, or priority in the goal you are trying to achieve makes distraction the only other option.
You don’t need to stop procrastinating, you need to choose something better to focus on.
– Dan Koe
Each of us can carry the torch of knowledge but a part of the way, until another takes it from him.
– Carl Jung
How much more ancient is the heart’s deep root, and mind is but a last, last bloom of little memory!
– Nikos Kazantsakis, (tr. Kimon Friar)
Saturday
You are reading now.
I am thinking of your voice.
– Paul Celan to Ingeborg Bachmann
PASSENGERS
The world will burst like an intestine in the sun,
the dark turn to granite and the granite to a name,
but there will always be somebody riding the bus
through these intersections strewn with broken glass
among speechless women beating their little ones,
there will always be a slow alphabet of rain
speaking of drifting and perishing to the air,
always these separate jails of light in the sky
at the wedding of this clarity and this storm
and a woman’s turning — her languid flight of hair
traveling through frame after frame of memory
where the past turns, its face sparking like emery,
to open its grace and incredible harm
over my life, and I will never die.
– Denis Johnson
I guess there are never enough books.
– John Steinbeck
Passion is greater than existence,
the meaning of life is of more worth
than life itself.
– Stefan Zweig
“If you keep things on a psychological level,” the Zen teacher Maurine Stuart told Helen Tworkov, “you cannot understand what makes life magical.”
– Pico Iyer
One is irresistibly tempted to compare the strange longings and nauseous qualms that enter into the complicated ecstasies accompanying the making of a young writer’s first book with childbearing.
– Nabokov
In the modern technoindustrial culture, it is possible to proceed from infancy into senility without ever knowing manhood… Some lives are tragic, some ridiculous. Most are both at once.
– Edward Abbey
Some saw him take the graveyard’s zigzag mountain path,
some saw him leap on rocks that edged the savage shore …
but only a small boy saw him in a lonely dream
sit crouched and weeping by the dark sea’s foaming edge.
– Nikos Kazantsakis, The Odyssey, (tr. Kimon Frair)
bluebirds
hidden
in the summer sky
– James Welsh
More important than a work of art itself is its effect. Art can fade, a picture can be destroyed. What counts is the seed.
– Joan Miro
Your life can either be a German weather report or a Greek weather report.
Be the Greeks.
– Michael Girdley
Worth remembering that much of politics & the media exist purely to confuse, scare, distract & lure us into being the willing agents of a system that is on course to kill everything & everyone we love within decades.
– Climate Dad
We die over and over for that same unfaithful person.
Our life has fallen back into the old familiar ways.
– Ghalib
the green, lush planet
seen from a distant space
optic illusions
– @hegelincanada
the relentless logic of anxiety: might as well never relax, just in case
– R.O. Kwon
Black milk of morning we drink you at night
we drink you at noontime and dawntime we drink you at dusktime
we drink and drink
– Paul Celan
if I had a month devoted to getting on your level what would you recommend I do?
– @soundrotator
I do not believe in a God who maliciously or arbitrarily interferes in the personal affairs of mankind. My religion consists of a humble admiration for the vast power which manifests itself in that small part of the universe which our poor, weak minds can grasp!
– Albert Einstein
Letter to the Person Who Carved His Initials into the
Oldest Living Longleaf Pine in North America
by Matthew Olzmann
—Southern Pines, NC
Tell me what it’s like to live without
curiosity, without awe. To sail
on clear water, rolling your eyes
at the kelp reefs swaying
beneath you, ignoring the flicker
of mermaid scales in the mist,
looking at the world and feeling
only boredom. To stand
on the precipice of some wild valley,
the eagles circling, a herd of caribou
booming below, and to yawn
with indifference. To discover
something primordial and holy.
To have the smell of the earth
welcome you to everywhere.
To take it all in, and then,
to reach for your knife.
So the universe is not quite as you thought it was. You’d better rearrange your beliefs, then. Because you certainly can’t rearrange the universe.
– Isaac Asimov
FYI much of politics & the media is owned by corporations happy to run down the clock on this planet.
They don’t want us to adapt, prepare & give our kids & ourselves a chance of survival.
They want us to keep working & spending, perpetuating a system on course to kill us all.
– Climate Dad
I know that genuine* climate deniers are the victims of a vast, decades-long propaganda & disinformation campaign, but it would be easier to sympathise with them if they weren’t generally so abusive
*not the professionals, they’re agents of disinformation, not its victims
– Dr Charlie Gardner
Happiness is not found in living a life without problems, but in solving them.
– Diogenes
Neurodiversity has existed in books for centuries – it just hasn’t always been diagnosed.
– Kat Brown
Gallop is to Horse as Fall is to
by Jane Zwart
Gallop is to Horse as Fall is to
A. Angel
A gelding, an emasculated seraph:
both know the pinch of deference.
Say the horse finds an orchard
suited to brushing the rider
from his back, and say the angel
gives God the brush-off.
Both would bolt after that,
both would go as fast as four legs
or gravity would take him.
B. Rain
Think about the sound,
the drumming of hooves
and drops of water.
C. Fall
If you have seen the way power
moves through a horse and a horse
through a field, if you have paid
even the smallest attention
to seasons, you’ll understand.
The throughline is the unstable
gilding of living things;
the throughline is a glory that can be
neither denied nor sustained.
D. Man
The man will try to hold on. He
will wrap his arms around the
horse’s neck. Do not worry. He
will tumble off in a soft place.
ODE TO BROWN SKIN
by Jose Hernandez Diaz
People assume I want to be lighter. Never crossed my mind. I know l’m indigenous and strong. Like my ancestors, proud and wise. Do not assume I will rob or murder you when I walk behind you, in a parking lot, late at night. Do not assume I’m a high school dropout, or in gangs. Even though the Spanish channel prefers light-skinned actors, I’m not fooled by the shaky lens. Typically, Mexican families have instructed their children to marry lighter skinned folks. But I can see above the noise. Above the hate. The hate we can’t live without. The hate we love. Brown skin, like pan dulce. Brown skin, like la tierra. Brown skin, like a tortilla. Brown skin, ancient armor.
Do you suppose that I shall take any notice of what someone says who is so perverse that he writes a letter without a word of inquiry about how I am enjoying the snow? I am most disappointed in you.
– Kenkō
A great writer reveals the truth even when he or she does not wish to.
– Tom Bissell
Everything may change in this demoralized world except the heart, human love and our striving to know the divine.
– Chagall
All our offerings, whether of music or martyrdom, are like the intrinsically worthless present of a child, which a father values indeed, but values only for the intention.
– C.S. Lewis
Miss you. Would like to take a walk with you.
by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Do not care if you just arrive in your skeleton.
Would love to take a walk with you. Miss you.
Would love to make you shrimp saganaki.
Like you used to make me when you were alive.
Love to feed you. Sit over steaming
bowls of pilaf. Little roasted tomatoes
covered in pepper and nutmeg. Miss you.
Would love to walk to the post office with you.
Bring the ghost dog. We’ll walk past the waterfall
and you can tell me about the after.
Wish you. Wish you would come back for a while.
Don’t even need to bring your skin sack. I’ll know
you. I know you will know me even though. I’m
bigger now. Grayer. I’ll show you my garden.
I’d like to hop in the leaf pile you raked but if you
want to jump in? I’ll rake it for you. Miss you
standing looking out at the river with your rake
in your hand. Miss you in your puffy blue jacket.
They’re hip now. I can bring you a new one
if you’ll only come by. Know I told you
it was okay to go. Know I told you
it was okay to leave me. Why’d you believe me?
You always believed me. Wish you would
come back so we could talk about truth.
Miss you. Wish you would walk through my
door. Stare out from the mirror. Come through
the pipes.
The Native American notion of All My Relations views all of reality and life as related and interconnected. Every aspect of life is seen as part of one intrinsic family. In the Blackfoot tribe, when people meet, they don’t say ‘How are you’ but ‘Tza Nee Da Bee Wah?’ which means, ‘How are the connections?’ If the connections are in place, we must be all right. If the connections are not in place, then we need to tend them first. Inherent in the Native American view is that our well-being is based on how everything goes together. There can be no lasting individual health unless there is a working harmony among all living things. The practice that grows from this worldview is the need to discover, name, and repair the connections that exist between all things. This is considered sacred and necessary work.
– Mark Nepo
He…who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle.
– Albert Einstein
I despise the kind of book which tells you how to live, how to make yourself happy. Philosophers have no good news for you at this level. I believe the first duty of philosophy is making you understand what deep shit you are in!
– Slavoj Žižek
This was the thing that nearly had us mastered;
Don’t yet rejoice in his defeat, you men!
Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard,
The bitch that bore him is in heat again.
– Bertolt Brecht
It is important to see that the main point of any spiritual practice is to step out of THE BUREAUCRACY OF EGO.
This means stepping out of ego’s constant desire for a higher, more spiritual, more transcendental version of knowledge, religion, virtue, judgment, comfort, or whatever it is that the particular ego is seeking. One must step out of spiritual materialism. If we do not step out of spiritual materialism, if we in fact practice it, then we may eventually find ourselves possessed of a huge collection of spiritual paths. We may feel these spiritual collections to be very precious. We have studied so much. We may have studied Western philosophy or Oriental philosophy, practiced yoga, or perhaps have studied under dozens of great masters. We have achieved and we have learned. We believe that we have accumulated a hoard of knowledge.
And yet, having gone through all this, there is still something to give up. It is extremely mysterious! How could this happen? Impossible! But unfortunately it is so. Our vast collections of knowledge and experience are just part of ego’s display, part of the grandiose quality of ego. We display them to the world and, in so doing, reassure ourselves that we exist, safe and secure, as “spiritual” people.”
– Chögyam Trungpa
Everything is hard—making money is hard, watching your body change is hard. You can take these problems when you’re young—something’s difficult for a while, but you’re confident. If it doesn’t work out, you’ll do something else.
– Louise Glück
…when people learn intellectual knowledge that they have not verified for themselves, they do not in fact know what they think they know. This is called “compound ignorance” (jahl murakkab). In other words, they do not know it, and their ignorance is compounded by the fact that they do not know that they do not know it.
– William Chittick
Ultimately the destruction of the Earth is due in part, perhaps in large part, to a failure of the imagination or to its eclipse by systems of accounting that can’t count what matters. The revolt against this destruction is a revolt of the imagination, in favor of subtleties, of pleasures money can’t buy and corporations can’t command, of being producers rather than consumers of meaning, of the slow, the meandering, the digressive, the exploratory, the numinous, the uncertain.
– Rebecca Solnit
In thinking about trauma and resilience as I reflect on what is unfolding in our world at this time: From the point of view of systems theory, systems that break down have the potential to reorganize themselves at a higher more robust level of functionality. The experience of breakdown can give one a very deep and optimistic view of the potential of others to grow from trauma, instead of being diminished. This is called post-traumatic growth and refers to the benefit from psychological changes that can be experienced as a result of the struggle with challenging life circumstances and can foster greater resilience. We have to remember that people who have survived trauma can come back transformed by the experience and see that suffering has made them more resilient rather than more fragile, with the ability to thrive in the present rather than being overwhelmed by the past. Beyond the ending of the old way of being, there is hope for the emergence of the new, and to imagine a future in which the wounds are still there, but in a form that makes one wiser and humbler and helps one to thrive.
– Roshi Joan Halifax
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
Julia Stiles (co-star, ‘Bourne’ films): After The Bourne Ultimatum came out, there was a premiere in London. Prince actually came to it, then got tickets for the cast to come see him [perform]. We were summoned into a room to meet him [after the show]. Matt said, “So you live in Minnesota? I hear you live in Minnesota.”
Matt Damon: Prince said, “I live inside my own heart,
Matt Damon.”
Third places are those needed spaces, neither home nor work, where we are known by our names and valued for being whatever we decide to be […].
– Wendy Welch
Sorcerers say that the true rebellion, and humanity’s only way out as a species, is to stage a revolution against one’s own stupidity.
– Carlos Castaneda
you will know yourself by remembering the clouded canvases of old dreams; on a grim day when you walk, with your eyes open. what counts in memory is the clean gift of evoking dreams.
– antonio machado, (tr. willis barnstone)
ten million years ago an ocean floor
glides like snake beneath the continent crunching up
old seabed till it’s high as alps.
– Gary Snyder
You can refuse a shadow projection and stop the endless cycle of revenge if you have your own shadow under conscious control. To be in the presence of another’s shadow and not reply is nothing short of genius.
– Robert A. Johnson
I don’t believe in an interventionist God
But I know, darling, that you do
But if I did I would kneel down and ask Him
Not to intervene when it came to you.
– Nick Cave
As any good therapist will tell you, you cannot heal what you do not acknowledge, and what you do not consciously acknowledge will remain in control of you from within, festering and destroying you and those around you.
– Richard Rohr
Modern technology teaches man to take for granted the world he is looking at; he takes no time to retreat and reflect.
Technology lures him on, dropping him into its wheels and movements. No rest, no meditation, no reflection, no conversation – the senses are continually overloaded with stimuli.
[Man] doesn’t learn to question his world anymore; the screen offers him answers-ready-made.
– Joost Meerloo
I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel
You were famous, your heart was a legend
You told me again you preferred handsome men
But for me you would make an exception
And clenching your fist for the ones like us
Who are oppressed by the figures of beauty
You fixed yourself, you said, “Well never mind,
We are ugly but we have the music”
– Leonard Cohen
To name something is to claim a relationship to it.
– David Alexander
…the devil of the dullest place in the world to live, one store and no beer in it—People watering their prison lawns, children with dogs, mid-Industrial America in the afternoon…
– Jack Kerouac
Planet Earth is resilient.
Modern human civilization is not.
– Sarah Connor
When there’s nothing more,
the poor guests tend to go,
the old monk noted.
– The Old Monk
always remember
there are flowers
blooming in the thicket
– Basho
Maybe self-improvement isn’t the answer,
maybe self-destruction is the answer.
– Chuck Palahniuk
We were
hands,
we bailed the darkness empty, we found
the word that ascended summer:
flower.
– Paul Celan
Symphony means to sound together…not to sound alike.
– David Alexander
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Glacier
(after Wallace Stevens)
by Craig Santos Perez
I
Among starving polar bears,
The only moving thing
Was the edge of a glacier.
II
We are of one ecology
Like a planet
In which there are 200,000 glaciers.
III
The glacier absorbed greenhouse gases.
We are a large part of the biosphere.
IV
Humans and animals
Are kin.
Humans and animals and glaciers
Are kin.
V
We do not know which to fear more,
The terror of change
Or the terror of uncertainty,
The glacier calving
Or just after.
VI
Icebergs fill the vast Ocean
With titanic wrecks.
The mass of the glacier
Disappears, to and fro.
The threat
Hidden in the crevasse
An unavoidable cause.
VII
O vulnerable humans,
Why do you engineer sea walls?
Do you not see how the glacier
Already floods the streets
Of the cities around you?
VIII
I know king tides,
And lurid, inescapable storms;
But I know, too,
That the glacier is involved
In what I know.
IX
When the glacial terminus broke,
It marked the beginning
Of one of many waves.
X
At the rumble of a glacier
Losing its equilibrium,
Every tourist in the new Arctic
chased ice quickly.
XI
They explored the poles
for offshore drilling.
Once, we blocked them,
In that we understood
The risk of an oil spill
For a glacier.
XII
The sea is rising.
The glacier must be retreating.
XIII
It was summer all winter.
It was melting
And it was going to melt.
The glacier fits
In our warm-hands.
Twitter is a library
of poetic misinformation,
or so I hope to make it,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
who walks on his head, sees the sky below as an abyss.
– Celan
Kurt Vonnegut tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope:
Oh, she says, well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope.
I meet a lot of people. And see some great looking babies. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And I’ll ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is – we’re here on Earth to fart around.
And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And it’s like we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore.
Let’s all get up and move around a bit right now… or at least dance.
But pleasures are like poppies spread, You seize the flower, its bloom is shed; Or like the snow falls in the river, A moment white—then melts for ever; Or like the borealis race, That flit ere you can point their place; Or like the rainbow’s lovely form Evanishing amid the storm.
– Robert Burns
What the universe will manifest when you are in alignment with it is a lot more interesting than what you try to manifest.
– Adyashanti
We unstave the winter’s tangle.
Sad tomatoes, sullen sky.
– Tess Taylor
That the voice might somehow channel something raw and elemental. Something true. Something from the gut. And in doing so, begin to tell a tiny fragment of the story… To be tied by blood and breath to every living thing. To be windblown and alive.
– David Gray
You know how when you go to the sauna, you sweat and you get rid of all the toxins in your body? Whenever I send a story to The New Yorker, I tell Alberto, ‘Oh, the story went to the spa.’
– Jhumpa Lahiri
When you realize you are mortal you also realize the tremendousness of the future. You fall in love with a Time you will never perceive.
– Etel Adnan
Art is one of the roads to Paradise.
– Etel Adnan
Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording…. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night…
– Sylvia Plath
I was a briar patch for your catching
– C.T. Salazar
I am a completely horizontal writer. I can’t think unless I’m lying down.
– Truman Capote
Things of too serious a nature don’t really appeal to American readers.
– José Saramago
Facts do not convey truth. That’s a mistake. Facts create norms, but truth creates illumination.
– Werner Herzog
You must know all, then not tell it all, or not tell too much at once.
– Eudora Welty
There is no pulse so sure of the state of a nation as its characteristic art product which has nothing to do with its material life.
– Gertrude Stein
One of the pleasures of getting older is learning that though we are not all broken the same, we’re all broken.
– Ross Gay
If anyone asks her to do the washing-up in the wrong tone of voice she goes into the forest and stays there for several days and nights and sings to make it rain.
– Tove Jansson, Sculptors Daughter
Only my books anoint me,
and a few friends,
those who reach
into my veins.
– Anne Sexton
Calling bigotry an opinion is like calling arsenic a flavor.
– Jack Cameron
If you made a mistake, apologize. If you are thankful, say it. If you are confused, ask questions. If you learn something, teach it. If you are stuck, ask for help. If you are wrong, admit it. If you can unselfishly give, give. If you love someone, tell them, now.
– Simdha Getul Rinpoche
I was surprised, as always, by how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility.
– Jack Kerouac
Books are becoming the only place in the house where you can still be calm.
– Julio Cortazar
city street
the darkness inside
the snow-covered cars
– Cor van den Heuvel
In a world where vows are worthless, where making a pledge means nothing, where promises are made to be broken, it would be nice to see words come back into power.
– Chuck Palahniuk
The key to longevity is to learn every aspect of music that
you can.
– Prince
The Park
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
The prosperous and beautiful
To me seem not to wear
The yoke of conscience masterful,
Which galls me everywhere.
I cannot shake off the god;
On my neck me makes his seat;
I look at my face in the glass,——
My eyes his eyeballs meet.
Enchanters! enchantresses!
Your gold makes you seem wise;
The morning mist within your grounds
More proudly rolls, more softly lies.
Yet spake yon purple mountain,
Yet said yon ancient wood,
That Night or Day, that Love or Crime,
Leads all souls to the Good.
How long can anyone bear to live with someone whose mind wanders off to a place where their love no longer exists?
– Edwidge Danticat, Everything Inside
Cease to be a disobedient child in the school of experience, and begin to learn, with humility and patience, the lessons that are set for your ultimate perfection.
– James Allen
Each man had only one genuine vocation—to find the way to himself.
– Hermann Hesse
There is a wonderful intelligence to the unconscious. It’s always smarter than we are.
– Russell Banks
Whereas we think in periods of years, the unconscious thinks and lives in terms of millennia.
– CG Jung
Here where the world ends, and has beginning,
Here where the sunlight-spring of all our minds
Has birth again, and new beginning
The seeker finds.
Here there is body’s peace, and the heart’s uprising,
Here the illumined minds of other men
Are beacons on a mountain peak uprising
Beyond our ken.
Here there is quiet, and the world about us,
Here there is wisdom foolish men must know.
The earth is dumb with suffering about us,
And I must go.
– Christmas Humphreys
BLACK OAKS
Okay, not one can write a symphony, or a dictionary,
or even a letter to an old friend, full of remembrance
and comfort.
Not one can manage a single sound though the blue jays
carp and whistle all day in the branches, without
the push of the wind.
But to tell the truth after a while I’m pale with longing
for their thick bodies ruckled with lichen
and you can’t keep me from the woods, from the tonnage
of their shoulders, and their shining green hair.
Today is a day like any other: twenty-four hours, a
little sunshine, a little rain.
Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from
one boot to another — why don’t you get going?
For there I am, in the mossy shadows, under the trees.
And to tell the truth I don’t want to let go of the wrists
of idleness, I don’t want to sell my life for money,
I don’t even want to come in out of the rain.
– Mary Oliver
He stayed in his walk to watch a typesetter neatly distributing type. Reads it backwards first. Quickly he does it. Must require some practice that. mangiD kcirtaP. Poor papa with his hagadah book, reading backwards with his finger to me. Pessach. Next year in Jerusalem. Dear, O dear! All that long business about that brought us out of the land of Egypt and into the house of bondage alleluia. Shema Israel Adonai Elohenu. No, that’s the other. Then the twelve brothers, Jacob’s sons. And then the lamb and the cat and the dog and the stick and the water and the butcher. And then the angel of death kills the butcher and he kills the ox and the dog kills the cat. Sounds a bit silly till you come to look into it well. Justice it means but it’s everybody eating everyone else. That’s what life is after all. How quickly he does that job. Practice makes perfect. Seems to see with his fingers.
– James Joyce
These poets and other creative persons are the ones who express being itself, he held. As I would put it, these are the ones who enlarge human consciousness. Their creativity is the most basic manifestation of a man or woman fulfilling his or her own being in the world.
– Rollo May
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
Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing. The only worthwhile miracle in the New Testament—the transmutation of water into wine during the wedding at Cana—is a tribute to the persistence of Hellenism in an otherwise austere Judaea. The same applies to the seder at Passover, which is obviously modeled on the Platonic symposium: questions are asked (especially of the young) while wine is circulated. No better form of sodality has ever been devised: at Oxford one was positively expected to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied. It’s not a coincidence that Omar Khayyam, rebuking and ridiculing the stone-faced Iranian mullahs of his time, pointed to the value of the grape as a mockery of their joyless and sterile regime. Visiting today’s Iran, I was delighted to find that citizens made a point of defying the clerical ban on booze, keeping it in their homes for visitors even if they didn’t particularly take to it themselves, and bootlegging it with great brio and ingenuity. These small revolutions affirm the human.
– Christopher Hitchens
…beg Love’s pardon for your want of faith. Helen chose you without reason because she loves you without cause; embrace her without question and watch your weather change.
– John Barth
It was then that I dedicated myself to service of the psyche. I loved it and hated it, but it was my greatest wealth. My delivering myself over to it, as it were, was the only way by which I could endure my existence and live it as fully as possible.
– C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
The meaning of becoming “whole” or creating “wholeness” is to make something holy or to heal. The descent into one’s depths brings healing. It is the path to total being, the treasure which makes sacrifice worth the effort. This is the place where consciousness is born, and at the same time the place where healing and redemption take place. It is the cave where the dragon of chaos lives. But it is also the place of an indestructible city, a sacred place in yourself where all the split-off parts of personality are united and become connected.
– C.G. Jung
Aesthetics by its very nature is applied psychology.
– Carl Jung
When thinking leads to the unthinkable, it is time to return to simple life. What thinking cannot solve, life solves, and what action never decides is reserved for thinking.
– CG Jung
Everyone suffers from stinginess, from wrongdoing, lack of virtue, impatience, aggression, laziness, distraction, and ignorance. The six paramitas of generosity, discipline, patience, diligence, meditation, and wisdom are needed to combat these frames of mind.
– Dzigar Kongtrul
Although I am a typical loner in my daily life, my awareness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice has prevented me from feelings of isolation.
– Albert Einstein
I like the way poetry comes up from the sink, through the mind, and onto the page!
– James Webster
It is not the sale of my soul that troubles me: I have sold it too often to care about that. I have sold it for a professorship. I have sold it for an income… What is all human conduct but the daily and hourly sale of our souls for trifles?
– G. B. Shaw
Joy is the overflowing consciousness of reality.
But to suffer while preserving our consciousness of reality is better.
To suffer without being submerged in the nightmare. May the suffering be in one sense purely exterior, and in another purely interior.
– Simone Weil
I don’t get in Charles Mingus’s way. I might add something, a little pepper, a little salt, some cayenne. But I follow his lead. Because you can’t interfere with that spirit.
– John Stubblefield (Stubbs)
My lifelong cross to bear has been secret derisive judgment, a pinball machine of sizing up everything and everyone. I am working on it, but the healing is going slightly more slowly than one would hope.
– Anne Lamott
It’s more advantageous to structure decisions to be easily reversible than to take too much time trying to make the perfect choice.
– Shane Parrish
When you spend your life in a place that feels defined by its monotony, it’s hard to find a sense of personal identity that isn’t mass produced.
– Aaron Tyler Hand
We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and Titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees…
– Henry David Thoreau
People who’ve never read fairy tales, the professor said, have a harder time coping in life than the people who have. They don’t have access to all the lessons that can be learned from the journeys through the dark woods and the kindness of strangers treated decently, the knowledge that can be gained from the company and example of Donkeyskins and cats wearing boots and steadfast tin soldiers. I’m not talking about in-your-face lessons, but more subtle ones. The kind that seep up from your sub¬conscious and give you moral and humane structures for your life. That teach you how to prevail, and trust. And maybe even love.
– Charles de Lint, The Onion Girl
But this is how faith works its craft. / One foot set in front of the other, while the wind / rattles the cage of the living, and the rocks down there // cheer every wobble.
– Matthew Olzmann
Looking deeply into yourself as a reality, you see you’re connected with everyone. In your self, I see your father. In your self, I see your mother. In your self, I see your ancestors.
– Cuong Lu
Attention is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being, but in doing so makes others recede. What a thing is depends on who is attending to it, and in what way. Attention has consequences.
– Iain McGilchrist
Everyone is isolated from everyone else. The concept of society is like a cushion to protect us from the knowledge of that isolation. A fiction that serves as an anesthetic.
– Paul Bowles
One doesn’t possess poetry or a poet.
– Hoa Nguyen
Why should a novelist, a pretender by profession, be any less deft or more reliable than a stolid, unimaginative suburban accountant cheating on his wife?
– Philip Roth
I’ll play it first and tell you what it is later.
– Miles Davis
Earth Day
I accidentally
bring it inside
– @pauldavidmena
It grieves me to think
the dead won’t see them—
these things we depend on,
they disappear.
– Louise Glück
There is always something quite sensual about bringing together a black and a blue, we indulge in it with a certain voluptuousness.
– Pierre Soulages
A voice is not just a voice: it is breath, words, silences. A voice is the whole world repainted by one person.
– Christian Bobin
There’s no system foolproof enough to defeat a sufficiently great fool.
– Edward Teller
I knew what was coming. We all did. Forgive us:
we were entwined, we were betwixt, time was not yet bent.
I was unable to resist tipping my head back to catch those petals
– Nickole Brown
I am so heavy on the ‘I love you’ and ‘be safe’ because life isn’t fair and life is too short.
– Vic Moser
But here I am, in a winter
of the mind, surrounded by surplus capital, an excess
of heat, which lifts green things from their beds.
– John James
Our generation has bequeathed many riches, but we have failed to protect the planet and we are not safeguarding peace. We are called to become artisans and caretakers of our common home, the Earth which is “falling into ruin.”
– Pope Francis
It’s the eternal problem, isn’t it,
how ego blossoms in paraphrase, propagates our deep, deciduous need
to seed the severed world of object-things with our image?
– J.P. Grasser
Still, I open my eyes
to the husk of morning,
draw my name in the sand
– Ariel Francisco
Therefore they had to learn what they did not know, that man is a gateway through which crowds the train of the Gods and the coming and passing of all times.
– @RedBookJung
What separates humans from nonhuman animals, Sorman suggests, is not our thumbs or our mental gymnastics, but our lack of insides, or maybe, rather, our shame about them, or their uselessness
– Ania Szremski
the heat …
deleting a comma
placed yesterday
– Nicholas Klacsanzky
Emerging from / an Abyss and / entering it again / that is Life, is / it not?
– Emily Dickinson
Prince Charming, prince of the mockers —
compared with him the foulest of sinners
is grace incarnate…
That woman I once was,
in a black agate necklace,
I do not wish to meet again
till the Day of Judgement.
– Anna Akhmatova
As the creators of sophisticated technologies, we have made ourselves increasingly machine-like; robotic servants of institutional systems we have been conditioned to revere, whose purposes we neither understand nor control, and of which we are afraid to ask questions.
Our corporate-state world plunders, enslaves, controls and destroys us, all in the name of advancing our liberty and material well-being. Most of us are dominated by an unfocused fear of uncertainty, a longing for the security of emptiness.”
– Butler Shaffer
Some say a group of moths is called / an eclipse, and a group of eclipses is what I decide / to call a pandemic.
– Traci Brimhall
Modern life tends to inoculate us against these risks, but the God of wild places peels away that safety and brings us back in touch with who we’re meant to be.
– Tony Jones
I keep your heavy memory,
wild one, little bear, Mignon…
But the wheels of the mills are wintering in snow,
the horn of the postman is thinly blowing.
– Osip Mandelstam, To the memory of Olga Vaxel
(trans. by Olga Carlisle and Robert Lowell)
We’d have worked well together, for a moment,
for a century. I’ve wanted rapids like those.
I’d have laid my ear under the bark of drifting logs
to hear the rings marching outward.
– Osip Mandelstam, (trans. by Brown & Merlin)
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.
– Aldous Huxley
You can only be afraid of what you think you know.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
I always felt the book was directed against me, mutilated and humiliated me in the eyes of the whole world, and was destroying everything we had preserved of love for one another.
– Sonya Behrs Tolstoy on the Kreutzer Sonata
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.
– Delmore Schwartz
The matter with human beans… is that they is absolutely refusing to believe in anything unless they is actually seeing it right in front of their own schnozzles.
– Roald Dahl
To save the world requires faith and courage: faith in reason, and courage to proclaim what reason shows to be true.
– Bertrand Russell
We cannot desire things which do not harmonize with the forces within, for a thing which does not harmonize with the forces within is repulsive to us.
– Wallace D. Wattles
You direct the will upon the mind, and use it in determining what you shall believe, what you shall think, and to what you shall give your attention.
– Wallace D. Wattles
Bring your mind back from its wandering after the false Gods of fear and doubt, to rest in the Omnipotence of the Spiritual Power within you.
– Dr. Joseph Murphy
Against the infinity of the cosmos and the silent depths of nature, the human face shines out as an icon of intimacy.
– John O’Donohue, Anam Cara
Build a mental equivalent of freedom, of vibrant physical health, of true prosperity, of increasing understanding and achievement for God.
– Emmet Fox
Introverts shut down when they’re going through shit. They want no sympathy. No advice. No “fixing”. All they want is silence & solitude. They know how to pull themselves out. Just leave them alone for a while.
– @master_nobody
I have come to believe that the writing of all poems is a form of collaboration. A poet collaborates with another voice, or other voices. Those voices can take many forms, and are always there, if the poet is listening.
– Matthew Rohrer
The truth is, I never picked up a book without pen and paper in hand, nor have I ever been in a position to get involved with a book without constantly taking notes, it’s like a disease.
– Friederike Mayröcker; (tr. Beth Bjorklund)
The way things appear is not always an accurate reflection of the way things really are. We unwittingly project the qualities of stability and permanence onto a reality that is constantly in flux.
– Andrew Holecek
The unknown is an abstraction; the known, a desert; but what is half-known, half-seen, is the perfect breeding ground for desire and hallucination.
– Juan José Saer
Take this bowl of blackberries from the garden. The sun has made them warm. I picked them just for you.
– Ross Gay
I am not sure the language
I write in is spoken here, or anywhere.
– Celan
Earth was created for all of
us, not some of us…
– Anthony Douglas Williams
Yet there is one hard cold clear fact about him, a fact that freezes the mind that dares to contemplate it: in the beginning William Shakespeare was a baby, and knew absolutely nothing. He couldn’t even speak.
– Mary Ruefle
Why should you demonstrate at all? Some people say, “Since God is all, and everything is perfect, why should I seek to demonstrate His law?” Because you have to prove the harmony of being in your own life. That is why.
– Emmet Fox
The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.
– Marcus Aurelius
To accomplish great things we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.
– Anatole France
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
Quick, quick, tell me something awful. Like you are a poet trapped inside the body of a finance guy.
– Taylor Swift
SAY LESS
True listeners open the ear in the heart.
They love the gossip of raindrops,
the breaking news of Spring peepers.
Say less than you mean.
Grace is the gift of subtraction.
The trembling crystal of a chickadee
proclaims the whole Godspell.
Tell as little as a willow by a pond
where the heron glides away
on the first breath of twilight.
And if you must speak, leave
a rippled stillness between words,
the kind of mirror where
the long-beaked huntress might pause
on one leg on a golden afternoon.
Be more like the moon between clouds,
until your silences say everything.
– Alfred K. Lamotte
Since your mind is with you wherever you go, you need to sit down and start unwinding your ball of yarn.
– Jakusho Kwong-rosh
One of the questions asked by al-Balkhi, and often repeated to this day, is this: Why do the children of Israel continue to suffer? My grandmother Dodo thought it was because the goyim were jealous. The seder for Passover (which is a shame-faced simulacrum of a Hellenic question-and-answer session, even including the wine) tells the children that it’s one of those things that happens to every Jewish generation. After the Shoah or Endlösung or Holocaust, many rabbis tried to tell the survivors that the immolation had been a punishment for ‘exile,’ or for insufficient attention to the Covenant. This explanation was something of a flop with those whose parents or children had been the raw material for the ‘proof,’ so for a time the professional interpreters of god’s will went decently quiet. This interval of ambivalence lasted until the war of 1967, when it was announced that the divine purpose could be discerned after all. How wrong, how foolish, to have announced its discovery prematurely! The exile and the Shoah could now both be understood, as part of a heavenly if somewhat roundabout scheme to recover the Western Wall in Jerusalem and other pieces of biblically mandated real estate.
I regard it as a matter of self-respect to spit in public on rationalizations of this kind. (They are almost as repellent, in their combination of arrogance, masochism, and affected false modesty, as Edith Stein’s ‘offer’ of her life to expiate the regrettable unbelief in Jesus of her former fellow Jews.) The sage Jews are those who have put religion behind them and become in so many societies the leaven of the secular and the atheist.
– Christopher Hitchens
Every man must be guaranteed his liberty and his right to do as he likes with his property or his labor, so long as he does not infringe the rights of others. No man is above the law and no man is below it; nor do we ask any man’s permission when we require him to obey it. Obedience to the law is demanded as a right; not asked as a favor.
We have cause as a nation to be thankful for the steps that have been so successfully taken to put these principles into effect. The progress has been by evolution, not by revolution. Nothing radical has been done; the action has been both moderate and resolute. Therefore the work will stand. There shall be no backward step. If in the working of the laws it proves desirable that they shall at any point be expanded or amplified, the amendment can be made as its desirability is shown. Meanwhile they are being administered with judgment, but with insistence upon obedience to them, and their need has been emphasized in signal fashion by the events of the past year.
– Theodore Roosevelt
I have often run across men (and rarely, but not never, women) who have become so powerful in their lives that there is no one to tell them when they are cruel, wrong, foolish, absurd, repugnant. In the end there is no one else in their world, because when you are not willing to hear how others feel, what others need, when you do not care, you are not willing to acknowledge others’ existence. That’s how it’s lonely at the top. It is as if these petty tyrants live in a world without honest mirrors, without others, without gravity, and they are buffered from the consequences of their failures.
– Rebecca Solnit
The word ‘matter’ remains a dry, inhuman, and purely intellectual concept… How different was the former image of matter—the Great Mother—that could encompass and express the profound emotional meaning of the Great Mother.”
– C.G. Jung
Sons and daughters of the earth, steep yourself in the sea of matter, bathe in the fiery waters for it is the source of your life and your youthfulness. You thought you could do without it because the power of thought has been kindled in you? You hoped that the more thoroughly you rejected the tangible, the closer you would be to spirit: that you would be more divine if you lived in the world of pure thought, or at least more angelic if you fled the corporeal? Well, you were like to have perished of hunger. you must have oil for your limbs, blood for your veins, water for your soul, the world of reality for your intellect: do you see that the very law of your own nature makes these a necessity for you?
– Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
We live in a scientific age; yet we assume that knowledge of science is the prerogative of only a small number of human beings, isolated and priestlike in their laboratories. This is not true. It cannot be true. The materials of science are the materials of life itself. Science is part of the reality of living; it is the what, the how, and the why of everything in our experience. It is impossible to understand man without understanding his environment and the forces that have molded him physically and mentally.
The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities. If they are not there, science cannot create them. If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.
– Rachel Carson
Everyone arrives one day and asks, is this it? And the stars answer back with more stars.
– Victoria Chang
It is hard to be generous, disciplined, or patient if we are not fully present. If we are present and attentive, and our mind is flexible, we are more receptive to the environment around us.
– Judy Lie
Nobody escapes being wounded. We are all wounded people, whether physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually. The main question is not, ‘How can we hide our wounds?’ so we don’t have to be embarrassed, but ‘How can we put our woundedness in the service of others?
– Henry Nouwen
Declining from the public ways, walk in unfrequented paths.
– Pythagoras
Jung maintained that psychology must go deeper than the intellect because “the totality of the psyche can never be grasped by intellect alone.” Like it or not, “the psyche seeks an expression that will embrace its total nature.”
– Scott Hill
Unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments.
– Neil Strauss
I cannot repress my longing for the sky where I should be, and which I can reach only by the oblique line of the human career.
– Maurice de Guérin
With age, you become used to your own terrors, you undertake nothing more in order to be disengaged from them, you become quite bourgeois in the Abyss.
– Cioran, (tr. Richard Howard)
Loving always begins by drinking with someone. Perhaps because no other sensation disappoints so little. A dry throat imagines water as ecstasy . . .
– Amelie Nothomb
Hope is radical openness for surprise – for the unimaginable. If that is the attitude with which we look, listen, & open all our senses, we enter into a meaningful relationship with whatever life offers us at a given moment.
– David Stendal-Rast
The best reader is somebody who’s crazy about your work but doesn’t like all of it.
– Frank Bidart
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
– William Shakespeare
There are certain verbs I avoid, such as prefer, or replace— people have no idea how alike these verbs are. I’ve seen people fight in order to be preferred, never realizing that this merely makes them replaceable.
– Amelie Nothomb
Books are mirrors: You only see in them what you already have inside you.
– Carlos Ruiz Zafón
When you care how
you shape your letters
it’s called calligraphy.
When you don’t, it’s
what you learned in school,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
It is a very good thing, which is worth doing, to work on oneself in the early morning, before, as it were, descending into life and duty. A little conscious work at that time, noticing the small beginnings of worrying or negative thoughts or self-pity, etc., etc…
– @GurdjieffStudy
Our spirits have their own private way of understanding each other, of becoming intimate, while our external persons are still trapped in the commerce of ordinary words, in the slavery of social rules. Souls have their own needs and their own ambitions, which the body ignores when it sees that it’s impossible to satisfy them or achieve them.
– Luigi Pirandello
burned coffee
another premonition
earth day
– @hegelincanada
I don’t think a writer can permit himself subterfuges, or tricks, or camouflage, or masks.
– Camilo José Cela
Protest
by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
To sin by silence, when we should protest,
Makes cowards out of men. The human race
Has climbed on protest. Had no voice been raised
Against injustice, ignorance, and lust,
The inquisition yet would serve the law,
And guillotines decide our least disputes.
The few who dare, must speak and speak again
To right the wrongs of many. Speech, thank God,
No vested power in this great day and land
Can gag or throttle. Press and voice may cry
Loud disapproval of existing ills;
May criticise oppression and condemn
The lawlessness of wealth-protecting laws
That let the children and childbearers toil
To purchase ease for idle millionaires.
Therefore I do protest against the boast
Of independence in this mighty land.
Call no chain strong, which holds one rusted link.
Call no land free, that holds one fettered slave.
Until the manacled slim wrists of babes
Are loosed to toss in childish sport and glee,
Until the mother bears no burden, save
The precious one beneath her heart, until
God’s soil is rescued from the clutch of greed
And given back to labor, let no man
Call this the land of freedom.
Do the dead see everything?
What is the suffering to joy index?
Today the land you were forced from is famous
for ice cream.
– Melanie Tafejian
Can we normalize dancing or yoga or exercising at airports instead of just sitting with our phones?
– Mitra Peter X Park
Passover
by Mary Rose O’Reilley
“Art is what remains when the pot is broken.”
– Chinese proverb
I know we are bound to the earth,
and the cracked heart, old terra cotta,
surrenders to vine.
Listen—I’ve seen
wind stir the hair of the dead at Belsen,
growing like art from the lacing grass;
what is terrible, even, rises.
The ruined pot dreams of ignition,
each molecule coddles its flame.
Enough alphabet for a torah
sits on the tongue. And all shards
from the winds’ end gather again.
I know we are bound to the earth
by desire’s green thread
or the milk snake’s slippery pass.
Hepatica splits now from its leaf-wing.
Out of the vessel’s wreck,
inwardness forms on the air
and that ghost tenderly enters
the soul of some mortal thing.
When we stop resisting sadness—trying to sweeten it with phone calls, distractions, or pleasures—and just let ourselves feel it in all its heaviness, darkness, and pain, it disappears by itself
– David Edwards
Saving $8 per day
= $3,000 per year
Reading 20 pages per day
= 30 books per year
Walking 10,000 steps per day
= 70 marathons per year
Never underestimate the
power of small habits.
Often people think the world should work differently than it does, and when they don’t get the outcomes they want, they try to wiggle out of responsibility by blaming other people or their circumstances. Avoiding responsibility is a recipe for misery, and the opposite of what it takes to cultivate good judgment.
Improving your judgment, it turns out, is less about accumulating tools to enhance your rationality and more about implementing safeguards that make the desired path the path of least resistance. It’s about designing systems when you’re at your best that work for you when you’re at your worst. Those systems don’t eliminate the defaults, but they do help you recognize
when they are running the show.
– @farnamstreet
Come, see
the true flowers of
this pained world.
– Basho Matsuo
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
Clearly one must read every good book at least once every ten years.
– C.S. Lewis
Were it not for this dark streak inside me, I could never have fallen in love. Falling in love does not lie in wait for creatures unversed in evil. … one must have those deep abysses to accommodate its profound dizziness.
– Amelie Nothomb
We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.
– D.H. Lawrence
All the ice has broken and as a result there are no such things as strangers anymore. Or polar bears, but that’s not the point.
– Robert Wood Lynn
Whatever may be meant by moral landscape,
it is for me increasingly a terrain
seen in cross-section: igneous, sedimentary,
conglomerate, metamorphic rock-
strata, in which particular grace,
individual love, decency, endurance,
are traceable across the faults.
– Sir Geoffrey Hill, The Triumph of Love
The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
– Aldous Huxley
Forgotten of the Foot
by Anne Stevenson
Equisetum, horsetail, railway weed
Laid down in the unconscious of the hills;
Three hundred million years still buried
In this hair-soft surviving growth that kills
Everything in the glorious garden except itself,
That thrives on starvation, and distils
Black diamonds, the carboniferous shelf —
That was life before our animals,
With trilobite and coelacanth,
A stratum of compressed time that tells
Truth without language and is the body store
Of fire, heat, night without intervals —
That becomes people’s living only when strange air
Fills out the folded lungs, the inert corpuscles.
Into the mute dark, light crawls once more.
So the hills must be pillaged and cored.
Such history as they hide must be hacked out
Urgent as money, the buried black seams uncovered.
Rows of stunted houses under the smoke,
Soot black houses pressed back hard against pit
By fog, by smoke, by a cobra hood of smouldering coke
Swayed from the nest of ovens huddled opposite.
Families, seven or ten to a household,
Growing up, breathing it, becoming it.
On winter mornings, grey capped men in the cold,
Clatter of boots on tarmac, sharp and empty,
First shift out in thick frost simple as gold
On the sulphurous roofs, on the stilted gantry,
Crossing to engine house and winding gear —
Helmet, pick, lamp, tin bottle of tea.
A Nan or Nora slave to each black grate.
Washing on Monday, the water grimed in its well.
Iron and clean on Tuesday, roll out and bake
Each Wednesday (that sweet bituminous smell
No child who grew up here forgets).
Thursdays, the Union and the Methodist Circle;
Fishday on Friday (fryday), a queue of kids,
Thin, squabbling by the chippy. Resurfaced quarrels
After pay day — hard drinking and broken heads.
Wheels within wheels, an England of working Ezekiels.
Between slag-heaps, coke-tarns and black sludgy leavings,
Forges roaring and reddening, hot irons glowing like jewels.
No more, no more. They’ve swept up the workings
As if they were never meant to be part of memory.
A once way of being. A dead place. Hard livings
That won’t return, grim tales forgot as soon as told,
Streaming from the roofs in smoke from a lost century —
A veil of breath in which to survive the cold.
When the mine’s shut down, habits prolong the story,
Habits and voices, till grandmothers’ old ways pass,
And the terraces fold into themselves, so black, ugly
And unloved that all but the saved (success
Has spared them, the angel of death-by-money) move away.
The town’s inhabited by alien, washed up innocents.
Children and animals, people too poor to stay
Anywhere else, stray, dazed, into this slum of Eden.
the church is without saints or statuary.
The memorial is a pick, a hammer, a shovel, given
By the men of Harvey Seam and Victoria Seam. May
Their good bones wake in the living seams of Heaven.
He breaketh open a shaft away from where men sojourn.
They are forgotten of the foot that passeth by.
I would rather die than confront my mistakes, and I spent long enough fixing nothing so I could feel nothing that now it’s just mistakes all the way down.
– Neil Hilborn
The magical always surrounds me, always involves me. lt opens spaces that have no doors and leads out into the open where there is no exit.
– Carl Jung
If the right to mind one’s own business is recognized, the whole shit disposition is untenable and Hell hath no vociferous fury than an endangered parasite.
– William S. Burroughs
The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow.
– Ai Weiwei
My mom bought me books on love and delinquency… My mother would never admit it, but she wanted me exactly how I turned out. Scattered and deviant and too loud.
– Rachel Corrie, Let me Stand Alone
Writing, like dancing, is one of the arts available to people who have nothing. “For ten and sixpence,” advises Virginia Woolf, “one can buy paper enough to write all the plays of Shakespeare.” The only absolutely necessary equipment in dance is your own body.
– Zadie Smith
not a haiku
These recycled dreams-
Repeated, same old things
Spewing from the heart of me
Regurgitating useless hopes
Of what will not be
Why do I still hope? Still cling?
We do that, you know-
Strive for loftier things
To be more than we are
Cast our eyes,
Our wishes at the stars-
So, I guess I’m just
One of those dreamers
Waiting for the impossible
Yearning for the implausible
Praying for anything
Unrecycled.
– @haikufeels
Without you I survived and with you I live again in a radical augmentation of identity because we have effaced our outer limits, because we summoned each other. In you, I cast my life beyond itself.
– Forrest Gander
Our business is to present that which is timeless (the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow) in the particular language of our own age.
– C. S. Lewis
I was looked at, but I wasn’t seen.
– Albert Camus, The Misunderstanding
It has been said that we can’t give what we don’t have, but do we really know what we have? Is it possible that we possess dormant qualities we first need to give, in order to find?
– Michele Harvey
Love Sometimes I still sleep with your boots
on in case I am you
in the dream-snows
and you’re cold and you want to come home.
– Joseph Fasano
You better than me, you kinder and so blistering with anger, you are who I love, standing in the wind, salvaging the umbrellas, graduating from school, wearing holes in your shoes
– Aracelis Girmay
Recycle the news, don’t read it, don’t read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.
– Louise Erdrich, Advice to Myself
When we talk mathematics, we may be discussing a secondary language built on the primary language of the nervous system.
– J. von Neumann
April snow
teaching me how to doubt
everything I know
– @hegelincanada
for us to look
toward what time has done to us
over there, and what we’ve done to time.
As if we were of it and outside it.
– Mahmoud Darwish
A resolute and wise refusal to take part in festivities will be an incentive for introspection and self-purification.
– Mahatma Gandhi
Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish.
Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day.
Just set one day’s work in front of the last day’s work.
That’s the way it comes out. And that’s the only way it does.
– John Steinbeck
In other people’s collected poems, it’s just rectangle, rectangle, rectangle. I’d say my entire oeuvre is a movement between large scale, small scale, minor, major, intimate, grand.
– Alice Notley
There is infinity within you… if only you don’t think of the end.
– Ilarie Voronca
—I’m sorry, he said. Shakespeare is the happy huntingground of all minds that have lost their balance.
– Ulysses
Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.
– B. F. Skinner
I’m going back to Minnesota where sadness makes sense
o California, don’t you know the sun is only a god
if you learn to starve for her? i’m over the ocean
i stood at its lip, dressed in down, praying for snow.
i know i’m strange, too much light makes me nervous
at least in this land where the trees always bear green.
i know something that doesn’t die can’t be beautiful.
have you ever stood on a frozen lake, California?
the sun above you, the snow & stalled sea—a field of mirror
all demanding to be the sun, everything around you
is light & it’s gorgeous & if you stay too long it will kill you.
it’s so sad, you know? you’re the only warm thing for miles
the only thing that can’t shine.
– Danez Smith
To be lost in spiritlessness is the most terrible thing of all.
– Søren Kierkegaard
Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor.
– Alexis Carrel
You will be a river that pours forth over the lands. It seeks every valley and streams toward the depths.
– @RedBookJung
Poetry doesn’t talk about the world, nor does it create meaning, but rather aims at meanings not yet articulated, not catered to in the currently available aesthetic and social networks.
– Sean Bonney
I hate that when the discussion
turns to helping people, there’s
always someone who takes the
most ungenerous, contemptible
stand toward others.
If by helping legitimately needy
people, I accidentally help some
lazy people, so what? How is
that worse than helping no one?
– Jason D. Bradley
What If
we remember the depth
of what it means to be human;
enter a portal
to stars
and earth’s core;
converse with trees and seas
imagine into sunbeams and streams
be dreamt into mountain and stag.
What if
we remember beauty,
our own and Others;
singing them by their own true names
and making a pilgrimage to remember our own;
a name given before birth,
remembered by the Others
such as soil and the milky way
in living image, symbol, metaphor, and myth;
a name not invited
by this current industrial extraction culture
where forests scream with the voices of animals burning
and whales swallow plastic as they feed;
swim off-course due to human created noise and greed
from the great forgetting and the great longing.
What if
we live singing our own true name
with all beings,
earth-centred.
What if
we live from our unique place in the community of Allbeings,
singing our note with the cosmic symphony:
with iron atoms created from nebula collisions
-did you know there is one atom of iron in every human heart?-
with cyanobacteria creating the ozone over millions of years,
and painted lady butterflies pilgrimaging over generations;
each surrendering to Mystery’s love call, a different kind of Gravity.
What if
with that very note a heartcrack grief
opens us to The Holy
remembering love divine
in marrow married in our bones
in animate ozone offering breath
in sweet-scented wild mint meadows
in tears nourishing flower, hummingbird to nectar,
in moonblood to earth and water,
in sacred sage offerings.
What if
we remember praise, prayer
and celebration;
in so doing
makes all the difference
with Allbeings then, now and to come.
It is so.
– Wendy Robertson Fyfe
What sort of mind have you? I am not going to tell you — and do not let anyone else tell you either, because they do not know. People who like you will think your mentality is better than it is; those who do not like you will think it is worse.
– Emmet Fox
The difference between you and me is, I want to be misunderstood. My knowledge isn’t meant to be digested by the whole village.
– Diary of an Aquarius Moon
The important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.
– Doris Lessing
In the psychoanalytic life history, what was, is, and what is, was.
– Roy Schafer
Would writing be to become, in the book, legible for everyone, and indecipherable for oneself? (Hasn’t Jabès almost told us this?)”
– Maurice Blanchot; tr. Ann Smock
Civilizational crisis has spurred many a painter.
– Julian Bell
What you are you must find out. I can only tell you what you are not. You are not of the world; you are not even in the world. The world is not, you alone are. You create the world in your imagination like a dream.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
It’s not books you need, it’s some of the things that were once in books. The same things could be in the ‘parlour families’ today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios and televisors, but are not. No, no, it’s not books at all you’re looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them, at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.
– Ray Bradbury
Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It’s by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth! I talk nonsense, therefore I’m human.
– Dostoyevsky
The blues is the sound a baby makes when it cries for the first time because after you know you’ll get picked up, then it’s all show business.
– Arnie Lawrence founder of New School’s jazz program
Everyone, in some small sacred sanctuary of the self, is nuts.
– Leo Rosten
Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for.
– Seamus Heaney
Barthes liked beginnings. I like endings. What does it say that I feel most comfortable closing a door? [. . .] Blotting out the sun with my fist? Perhaps the photograph is something I love because it is the last moment of a moment.
– @KimmyGrey
You are not meant to understand (a story, poem, essay) in an intellectual, abstract way. You are meant to thrum, like a string on a stringed instrument.
– Robert Olen Butler
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
I know no greater help to understanding a poem than writing it out in longhand with the illusion that one is composing it—deciding on this word rather than another…this prolonging…this closure.
– Vendler
When the sentence is particularly intense I spell it sentense.
– Sommer Browning
Poems help me to know what I’m feeling. Out of the depths of my heart will come a quotation completely unbidden. And then I will think, Oh, so that’s what I am feeling today.
– Helen Vendler
I would say the single best thing people could and should be doing, the easiest one, is just go jog barefoot on the grass or sand. Single best foot exercise you can do.
– Golden Harper
I think the poet who didn’t feel the pressure at a politically difficult time would be either stupid or insensitive.
– Seamus Heaney
REMINDERS
Before dawn, across the whole road
as I pass I feel spiderwebs.
Within people’s voices, under their words or
woven into the pauses, I hear a hidden sound.
One thin green light flashes over a smooth sea
just as the sun goes down.
What roses lie on the altar of evening
I inhale carefully, to keep more of.
Tasting all these and letting them have
their ways to waken me, I shiver and resolve:
In my life, I will more than live.
– William Stafford
JUST AS YOU ARE
The belief that you are whole just as you are requires a simple, yet radical shift in thinking. It involves a kind of total acceptance, in the moment, with what is. When you witness the sundown see the day as complete, when you have pain in your hip feel the sensation, when you get stuck in traffic be in traffic. The finite is always an expression of the infinite. Thus whatever gets revealed, whether terrible or sublime, see it as part of a greater whole.
Try this. Spend a day being with things just as they are. Don’t reject things. Don’t cling to them. Simply be awake to the fact that everything is “full on,” just as it is.
– Tias Little
night beckons / an endless path / yawning towards eternity.
– Salma al-Khadra al-Jayyusi
I believe that the Universe is one being, all its parts are different expressions of the same energy, and they are all in communication with each other, therefore parts of one organic whole. (This is physics, I believe, as well as religion.) The parts change and pass, or die, people and races and rocks and stars, none of them seems to me important in itself, but only the whole. This whole is in all its parts so beautiful, and is felt by me to be so intensely in earnest, that I am compelled to love it and to think of it as divine. It seems to me that this whole alone is worthy of the deeper sort of love and there is peace, freedom, I might say a kind of salvation, in turning one’s affections outward toward this one God, rather than inwards on one’s self, or on humanity, or on human imaginations and abstractions — the world of spirits. I think it is our privilege and felicity to love God for his beauty, without claiming or expecting love from him. We are not important to him, but he to us.
– Robinson Jeffers
If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you’re a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.
– Kurt Vonnegut
Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made personal, merely personal feeling. This is what is the matter with us: we are bleeding at the roots because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars. Love has become a grinning mockery because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the Tree of Life and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table.
– D.H. Lawrence
If he who is organized by Divine Providence for spiritual communion, refuse, and bury his talent in the earth, even though you should want natural bread, sorrow and desperation pursue you through life, and after death shame and confusion of face to eternity.
– William Blake
In silence the heart raves.
– Robert Penn Warren
The Game of Life is a game of boomerangs. Man’s thoughts, deeds and words, return to him sooner or later, with astounding accuracy.
– Florence Scovel Shinn
An excellent question to ask ourselves is, “Who would I be without this story? This belief? This identity? This fear?” This question takes courage, because we have to look beyond the safety of the familiar.
– Ezra Bayda, The Authentic Life
Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
– Robert Frost
Everything we need isn’t found within.
That’s a Myth of Individualism.
We need relationships, we are made up by them.
– @VinceFHorn
today is a good day
to unseal the new tea
cold winter rain
– Issa
We cannot work with our fixations if we do not acknowledge them and accept their existence. The more we accept them, the more we are able to let go of then.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Why is there not a cheese shop called, “The Grate-ist Love”?
– Shaindel Beers
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
– George Orwell
Parents – scientists are telling us climate & ecological breakdown means there’s a very high chance our civilization will have collapsed before your kids get to be the age you are now.
A world of hunger, disease & unimaginable violence.
That’s all.
– Climate Dad
There are a lot
of old monks in
the mountains —
what makes me
so special,
the old monk asked
the poet.
– The Old Monk
The Wanderer
by Ameen Rihani
I wander among the hills of alien lands
Where Nature her prerogative resigns
To Man; where Comfort in her shack reclines
And all the arts and sciences commands.
But in my soul
The eastern billows roll—
I hear the voices of my native strands.
My lingering eyes, a lonely hemlock fills
With grace and splendor rising manifold;
Beneath her boughs the maples spread their gold
And at her feet, the silver of rills.
But in my heart
A peasant void of art
Echoes the voices of my native hills.
On every height a studied art confines
All human joy in social pulchritude;
The boxwood frowns where beckoning birches stood,
And where the thrushes caroled Fashion dines.
But through the spreading cheer
The shepherd’s reed I hear
Beneath my Lebanon terebinths and pines.
And though no voices here are heard of toil,
Nor accents least of sorrow, nor the din
Of multitudes, nor even at the Inn
The City is permitted aught to spoil,
Yet in my breast,
A shack at best,
Laments the mother of my native soil.
Even where the sumptuous solitudes deny
A shelter to a bird or butterfly,
As in the humblest dwelling of the dale
A gracious welcome’s shown the passer-by;
But evermore clear
Allwhere I hear
The calling of my native hut and sky.
Land of my birth! a handful of thy sod
Resuscitates the flower of my faith;
For whatsoever the seer of science sayth,
Thou art the cradle and the tomb of God;
And forever I behold
A vision old
Of Beauty weeping where He once hath trod.
Since people, according to Proust, often do not understand themselves very well, since they have an interest in concealing things about themselves even from those closest to them…
– Milton Hindus
wedding ring lost
in the ocean…will it reach
the other shore?
– KathyWatts
let truth shine;
dispel the shadows
where schemers hide.
may predators who plot & serve
violence, injustice, corruption,
bigotry, disinformation & fraud
be cast out from positions of power
& face such accountability
as begins to steady
a stumbling nation.
amen.
– Eric Bond
Walking and driving a car are part of my life as a writer, really. I can’t imagine myself apart from these activities.
– Joyce Carol Oates
RUMORS
Someone gets mad. A boy
brings a gun to school
and plans to use it
seventh period. At the end
of the day, the bell sounds.
My daughter runs to the car
like a shot. Leaving
books and questions in her
locker. I hug her
under the crooked cherry,
where blossoms flurry.
It’s so hard to believe
the trees grow this way.
– Katy Luxem, Poets Respond
Happy is the man who has broken the chains which hurt the mind, and has given up worrying once and for all.
– Ovid
from Voyager
The world is the world.
To deny it is to break with reason.
Nevertheless it would be reasonable to question the affair.
The speaker studies the world to determine the extent of his troubles.
He studies the night overhead.
He says therefore.
He says venerable art.
To believe in the world, a person has to quiet thinking.
The dead do not cease in the grave.
The world is water falling on a stone.
– Srikanth Reddy
I am slow and need to think about things for a long time, need to hold on to the trace on paper. Thinking is adventure. Does adventure need to be speedy? Perhaps revising is a way of refusing closure? Not wanting to come to rest?
– Rosmarie Waldrop
I guess when people think of compassion, they might think of it as something soft, that it doesn’t require much strength, but real compassion is a feat.
– Akil Kumarasamy
What are the sermons that the woods — those places of betweenness, repositories of ancient stories — might impart from their fretwork of branches and twigs…?
– @BarbaraMahany
Welcome to Earth Day, for us this feels like Groundhog Day.
– Gary Wockner
Langston Hughes vowed that his generation would express their dark-skinned selves without apology.
– Darryl Pinckney
A lot of my ideas about ambition and a functional life shifted when I realized there was no chance of someone waving a magic wand and getting better.
– Polly Atkin
We only understand what a place is like after we’ve spent four seasons there. A one-year pattern can be seen after one year, a fifty-year pattern after fifty. I’m not talking about statistics. A human can only see a pattern after having lived it. Enlightenment is like this.
– Kenneth Folk
No ocean is ever crossed without that willingness to risk, to leave behind the known shoreline long before the new land is found. As Jung expressed succinctly, “If you want to cure a neurosis, you have to risk something”.
– James Hollis
In the deep of my winters There rose a cry for spring It’s echos pooled in the ears of my heart And with reluctance— my eyes Searched for green
– K. Alexandria
In a whirlwind world, independent languor becomes a virtue, and meditation engenders a finer art than any nervousness.
– Vachel Lindsay
Every Christian would agree that a man’s spiritual health is exactly proportional to his love for God.
– C.S. Lewis
Whatever you are doing conjure up the slide in your mind’s eye as often as you can. You can think about other things but the picture should always be there in the background. Seeing the slide has to become a habit. A slide will only bring results if it is reproduced systematically over a period of time.
– Vadim Zeland
If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
…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
So long as you write it away regularly
nothing can really hurt you.
– Shirley Jackson
Whenever I am very miserable, I do a comedy. And whenever I’m in a wonderful mood, then I make a serious picture. I make a serious picture, a film noir, but then it gets boring, so I go back to a comedy.
– Billy Wilder
I can relinquish the demands of my ego, capitulate to art,
to creation-above all to creation.
– Anaïs Nin
Yeah everyone is a fucking Napoleon
– Ani DiFranco
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But a half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor.
– Neil Gaiman
During the Vietnam War… every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.
– Kurt Vonnegut
Free speech is the right to shout ‘theater’ in a crowded fire.
– Abbie Hoffman
Zen is very simple.
Dishwashing time, just wash dishes; sitting time, just sit;
driving time, just drive; talking time, just talk.
That’s all. Not special.
But that is very difficult. That is absolutes thinking.
When you’re doing something, just do it. No opposites.
It’s easy to talk about “When you’re doing something, just do it,” but action is very difficult. But don’t hold. Thinking is OK. Checking is OK. Only holding is a problem. Don’t hold. Feeling coming, going, OK. Don’t hold. If your mind is not holding anything, it is clear like space. Clear like space means that sometimes clouds come, sometimes rain or lightning or airplane comes … but the air is never broken. This space is never broken.
– Zen Master Seung Sahn
Thus human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future. Within a few centuries we are returning to the atmosphere and oceans the concentrated organic carbon stored in sedimentary rocks over hundreds of millions of years.
– Bill McKibben
If the human race is still here in 100 years, it will be because of lots of people doing lots of little things. Bigger things can get co-opted or bought off by the powers that be. But if there are many, many little things going on it will be too hard for them to keep up with all of them. I consider myself to be a sower of seeds. Some seeds fall on stones and don’t even sprout, but some seeds fall on fallow ground and multiply a hundredfold.
– Pete Seeger
If I am bound to men and things, I can neither go on with my life to its destination nor can I arrive at my very own and deepest nature.
– @RedBookJung
Since their invention, cars and automobility have killed 60–80 million people and injured at least 2 billion.
– Journal of Transport Geography
Public Speech
by Susan Tichy
It is not very often me.
When it is, I start
by holding on to hatred.
I believe it is freedom.
I believe it is the smallest stone
of the self. Inside the walls
of the dream, I can’t stand,
I can’t lie down.
So I survive by hunching.
And it’s not that hard.
The blows—I survive them too.
Bones split on the grain, or,
brittle from hunger, snap
like twigs under boot soles.
It’s not that hard to turn my back—
I’ve done it before—
to walk right out of my body,
to look back and see it surviving.
Maybe they’ve won. Maybe
it’s all they wanted, for me
to see me as they do.
Or is it what I wanted—
to walk away, then turn back
and force myself to answer.
At the centre of each person is an incommunicado element, and this is sacred and most worthy of preservation.
– Winnicott
Neurosis is the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning.
– Jung
The Truth:
We are in our bodies
and not in our bodies.
We are not where we say we are
and we are where we say we are.
The truth is always the truth
and not the truth.
Always.
If it wasn’t,
it wouldn’t be.
I’m a wave and a particle.
And you are too.
– john zbigniew guzlowski
If the world
Should split in two
Let me be
With the lovers
And the mystics
And those who
Hold life as sacred.
– @KavijiPoet
He wasn’t one of anyone.
– Cynthia L. Haven, On Czesław Miłosz
Throw a Stone in the Water, See the Ripples Spread
We set up our tent, secure the gear,
and sink into the deep green quiet
of the woods, even though it’s a state campground,
and boom boxes crackle by the campfires,
even though we’ve brought our children,
one of whom doesn’t understand the meaning of silence,
but babbles in his own language like clear water
running in a stream or the lake water rippling
off the prow of our canoe as we drift at twilight;
the full moon spills its light in the water,
bullfrogs chug-a-rum in the cattails,
the thin blue smoke of campfires rises in the hemlocks,
circles the lake, a tart blue, the berries we picked
on the island where the bushes grew over our heads,
but now the dark tent of night covers the sky
and we drift off to sleep, soughed by the pines;
our breath in the tent rises, joins the small music
of the crickets and katydids, floats all the way
to the harmony of the stars.
– Barbara Crooker
A large body of literature suggests that wellbeing is intimately linked to attachment – not only to other people, but also to the natural world.
– George Monbiot
Without disillusion you never acquire knowledge, and without knowledge you never acquire a new consciousness, and without consciousness you never change: living unconsciously you remain forever the same.
– Carl Jung
The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.
– C.S. Lewis
The whole problem is precisely that humanity never coincides with itself.
– Slavoj Žižek
The world is ruled by great communicators
Not by the smartest
Not by the most hard working
Not by the most focused
But by the ones who dominate the art
Of verbals and non verbals –
Who have the power to move things inside us
– Amanda Matsui
A laugh can be a very powerful thing. Why, sometimes in life, it’s the only weapon we have.
– Roger Rabbit
A creative life is a life where you routinely choose the path of curiosity over the path of fear. Not twice or three times, but daily. Systematically. It becomes your habit and practice to say, I don’t even know why I’m interested in this, but I’m interested and I’m going to look into it.
– Elizabeth Gilbert
Guard your heart above all else, for it determines the course of your life.
– Proverbs 4:23
Writing is an act of faith. Like all beloved acts.
– Lydia Millet
When you choose to forgive, it does not require that you reconnect. It’s damaging to hold on to the people who are hurting you and making you feel safe and loved at the same time. Choosing to spend less time around or avoiding people who are emotionally unsafe, deeply unconscious, and disconnected to protect your own nervous system from dysregulation is self-care. You can be who you need for you. Learn to let go of the people who have already let go of you.
– holistic.therapist@
Come to us, dear poet[s], with April, with the dawn, with
the spring, with the songs of the birds.
– Victor Hugo
…a rich man is just a poor man with money.
– W.C. Fields
If you aren’t lucky enough to spend lots of time with college students, maybe you don’t know how earnest, smart, and resolute they are. I can tell you that I, for one, find hope every day I spend with them. They’re inheriting the problems of the world. They deserve respect.
– Kathleen Belew
The realized man lives on the level of the absolutes; his wisdom, love and courage are complete, there is nothing relative about him. Therefore he must prove himself by tests more stringent, undergo trials more demanding.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
We should be working to provide the same future and the same hope for the people we don’t know as we do for our own communities. It is not a sign of weakness to feed strangers; it is a sign of strength.
– Chef Jose Andres
Jung wants you to bear the cross. Marx wants you to crucify the oppressor.
– @ngigeaux
There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
One of the issues I have with the burgeoning conscious relationship movement is that it often implies that if we provoke each other’s triggers, that it is an indication to stay together. This is not always true. Again, I appreciate the value of not turning away from paths and people just because it becomes uncomfortable. We cannot only remain in situations when they feel good, because there may be essential lessons to learn in the heart of the discomfort. At the same time, the idea that all trigger-laden connections carry a seed of transformation is unhealthy and is not always true—even when there is willingness to do the work. There is a meaningful difference between difficult situations that are fodder for expansion, and those where the discomfort is a signal to walk away. This is as true for love relationships as friendships. Sometimes the shadow emerges because we have something to work through. Sometimes it emerges because we are simply not where we belong.
– Jeff Brown
To suffer is to grant something supreme attention.
– Paul Valery
The unreal is more powerful than the real.
Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it.
Because it’s only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die.
But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.
If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. If you do that, you can change the way people live their lives. And that’s the only lasting thing you can create.
– Chuck Palahniuk
EARTH
You see a woman of a certain age,
not old, yet seeing every sign
of how the world will change her.
More and more, you’ll find her in the garden
but not for onions or potatoes.
She wants blooms, color,
a breaking in the earth’s disorder.
Swollen branch, the right bird—
they can make her cry. And the fussing
over moving this or that to the right location.
Learning to be alone,
she brings out ten varieties of rose,
armed against pest or blight
and the cutting northern
cold she fights with blankets of dirt.
Earliest spring will find her hovering
over the waxy perfection of tulips, the ones
closest to the thawing ground.
You’d think it’s the opening she loves,
the loosening flower revealing
the meticulous still-life deep in the cup.
But what she needs is to see
those stiff-petaled, utterly still ones
rise out of the dirt.
The weather won’t cooperate. She sinks
hundreds of bulbs in the rain,
mud on her hands, black smear on her neck.
For this birthing, all she pays
is stiff joints, and she knows again
the insistence of flowering.
Falling, she knows the flowers
fall to the season, and the seasons
to the great wheel. Fallen, she’s learned
to prefer the fallen.
– Cleopatra Mathis
And once you have tasted flight, you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you long to return.
– Leonardo Da Vinci
In order to spread your wings to Heaven you must have roots that reach all the way to Hell.
– Nietzsche
The love of God is the fire of Hell.
– St Isaac the Syrian
For St George knew very well what all real soldiers know; that the only way to be even approximately likely to kill a dragon is to give the dragon a heavy chance of killing you. And this method, which is the only one, is much too unpleasant to be talked about.
– G.K. Chesterton
I like unformed characters. This may be because, no matter how old I get, I am still unformed myself.
– Akira Kurosawa
Here in America we the people have a continent on which to work out our destiny, and our faith is great that our men and women are fit to face the mighty days. Nowhere else in all the world is there such a chance for the triumph on a gigantic scale of the great cause of Democratic and popular government. If we fail, the failure will be lamentable, and our heads will be bowed with shame; for not only shall we fail for ourselves, but our failure will wreck the fond desires of all throughout the world who look toward us with the fond hope that here in this great Republic it shall be proved from ocean to ocean that the people can rule themselves, and thus ruling can gain liberty for and do justice both to themselves and to others. We who stand for the cause of the uplift of humanity and the betterment of mankind are pledged to eternal war against wrong whether by the few or by the many, by a plutocracy or by a mob. We believe that this country will not be a permanently good place for any of us to live in unless we make it a reasonably good place for all of us to live in. The sons of all of us will pay in the future if we of the present do not do justice to all in the present. Our cause is the cause of justice for all in the interest of all.
– Theodore Roosevelt
Heart,
I implore you,
it’s time to come back
from the dark
– Mary Oliver
into the ocean
I throw my sandals
rain falling on my head
– Basho
The most silent campus I’ve ever visited: Caltech. Few students, few professors, and all—one assumes—working round the clock in their labs to design the future. I might be wandering through the immaculate courtyards of a deserted planet.
– Pico Iyer
In spite of our proud domination of nature, we are still her victims, for we have not even learned to control our own nature.
– CG Jung
i only love letters; but the love of letters does not make a literary man, any more than the love of the sea makes a seaman. and it is very possible, too, that i love the letters in the same way a literary man may love the sea he looks at from the shore—a scene
– joseph conrad
Your soul is both of you and of the world. The world cannot be full until you become fully yourself. The soul corresponds to a niche, a distinctive place in nature, like a vibrant space of shimmering potential waiting to be discovered, claimed, . . . occupied.
– Bill Plotkin
Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.
– Audre Lorde
Life delivers the unbelievable so often that you might as well believe.
– Anne Lamott
It is the way of the superior man to prefer the concealment of his virtue, while it daily becomes more illustrious, and it is the way of the mean man to seek notoriety, while he daily goes more and more to ruin.
– Confucius
humpback whale!
for a split-second
the sky steps back
– @haikueveryday
Your life is meant
to prepare you to
see God,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
If you can’t depend on God
for mercy, why’s that,
the old monk asked.
What does that say about you?
– The Old Monk
[The flowers and my love,]
by Ono no Komachi
translated from the Japanese by Yone Noguchi
The flowers and my love,
Passed away under the rain,
While I idly looked upon them:
Where is my yester-love?
what struck me most about those who are protesting is how long they waited. the restraint they showed. not the spontaneity, the restraint. they waited and waited for justice. and it didn’t come. no one talks about that…
– Toni Morrison
A man passes for that he is worth. What he is engraves itself on his face, on his form, on his fortunes, in letters of light.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
This evening, I sat by an open window
and read till the light was gone and the book
was no more than a part of the darkness.
– Ted Kooser
The path leading to infinite union with God wells up beneath our feet when we go looking for it.
– James Finley
We have arrived at a moment when many sense that we are again on the threshold of something ominous, already, in fact, tragically unfolding in parts of the world.
– Ellen Hinsey
..one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.
– Edith Wharton
What will suffice for a true-love knot? Even the rain?
But he has bought grief’s lottery, bought even the rain.
– Agha Shahid Ali
This is the year of knowing who your people are, and spending more time and energy with them. Trying to match energy isn’t going to help anyone. It only holds us all back. Go where your energy resonates, where you feel more alive, seen, valued. It’s time to rise. No looking back.
– @IAmMyBestToday
Violated, dishonored, wading in blood, dripping filth – there stands bourgeois society. This is it, in reality. Not all spic and span and moral, with pretense to culture, philosophy, ethics, order, peace, and the rule of law – but the ravening beast…
– Rosa Luxemburg
The good thing about writing books is that you can dream while you are awake.
– Haruki Murakami
God made everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shows through.
– Paul Valéry
Earth Verse
Wide enough to keep you looking
Open enough to keep you moving
Dry enough to keep you honest
Prickly enough to make you tough
Green enough to go on living
Old enough to give you dreams
– Gary Snyder
Love now dissolves and dissipates every wrong condition in my mind, body and affairs. Divine Love is the most powerful chemical in the universe, and dissolves everything which is not of itself!
– Florence Scovel Shinn
It’s the hardest thing to do, to see a book that no one has ever seen before except its author, to say something about it, to investigate it and solve its poetics to your own satisfaction.
– Helen Vendler
I wear my wonder
like old running shoes—
not elegant,
not sophisticated,
surprisingly inappropriate
in certain rooms.
I notice how others
sometimes wrinkle their noses
at a blatant sporting of wonder,
thinking, perhaps, I must be oblivious
to the dress code:
stilettos of apathy,
high heels of indifference,
boots of cool reserve.
But dang, this wonder
gets me where I need to go
every inch,
every mile, even
across the room.
When everywhere I step
is broken glass,
wearing this wonder
is the only reason
I can move at all.
– Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Wonder
dreaming of empire dandelions
– @hegelincanada
Looking back, I see that I was drawn to marginal figures because that was how I felt, existentially.
– Jhumpa Lahiri
It takes courage to face one’s emotional states directly and to dialogue with them. But therein lies the key to personal integrity. In the swamplands of the soul there is meaning and the call to enlarge consciousness. To take this on is the greatest responsibility in life… And when we do, the terror is compensated by meaning, by dignity, by purpose.
[…]
Our task at midlife is to be strong enough to relinquish the ego-urgencies of the first half and open ourselves to a greater wonder.
– James Hollis
When we are preoccupied with survival, we cannot play. We have lost our trust. When we were talking about what it feels like to be creative, one of you mentioned the experience of not being bound by time and space – being “taken out of yourself”
– Liz Greene
The person who really experiences the Truth will be more silent than others. Silence is the edge of the experience. To be humble, to be as quiet and silent as possible, is a sign of great wisdom.
– Hafiz
Every movement, every glance, every thought, and every word can be infused with love.
– Thích Nhat Hanh
Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them.
– Heinrich Heine
Recovery
Today, I’m in love with the word recovery- its feeling of safety and the sense of discovery that lives inside those sounds, like the wonder that rises up in me, sudden bubbling spring when I see a toad the same color as dust at my feet, and move him back to the shadows of a flowering lilac. His heft and fear both cupped in my hands as I place him softly on the earth again, and I’m cured, something I didn’t know was missing now returned to me as I kneel on the pebbled ground, watching him mend my world with every quick movement
of his chest, every new breath he takes.
– James Crews
To talk about you feels like describing
a landscape through a telescope
—distorted, magnified into a few blurry features.
– Sierra DeMulder
If a person never contradicts himself, it must be that he says nothing.
– Miguel de Unamuno
Anything forced is not beautiful.
– Xenophon
Creativity rides the tides of love. When love is denied its natural expression, creativity suffers.
– Jane Roberts
Saying thank you is more than good manners. It is good spirituality.
– Alfred Painter
If I say, I’ve dropped out of polite society because everyone is so breathlessly homophobic— I cannot complete the sentence without first considering, out loud, the feelings of my oppressor.
– Sean Patrick Mulroy
Are not men ungrateful? Does their craving know no limits?
– C.G. Jung
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.
– Hunter S. Thompson
Throw everything out of your mind. Read a little, sleep. The world will still be here when you wake up, and there’ll still be everything left to do.
– James Baldwin
One has to be wounded in order to become a healer. This is the local image of a universal mythological motif, which is described in Eliade’s book about the initiation of medicine men and shamans. Nobody becomes either one or the other without first having been wounded, either cut open by the initiator and having certain magical stones inserted into his body, or a spear thrown at his neck, or some such thing. Generally, the experiences are ecstatic – stars or ghost-like demons – hit them or cut them open, but always they have to be pierced or cut apart before they become healers, for that is how they acquire the capacity for healing others.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
This is my delight, thus to wait and watch at the wayside where shadow chases light and the rain comes in the wake of the summer.
– Rabindranath Tagore
Thinking the event is the story is the biggest mistake of student writers. The transformation of the self is the story.
– Claire Dederer
To the living, I am gone,
To the sorrowful, I will never return,
To the angry, I was cheated,
But to the happy, I am at peace,
And to the faithful, I have never left.
I cannot speak, but I can listen.
I cannot be seen, but I can be heard.
So as you stand upon a shore gazing at a beautiful sea,
As you look upon a flower and admire its simplicity,
Remember me.
Remember me in your heart:
Your thoughts, and your memories,
Of the times we loved,
The times we cried,
The times we fought,
The times we laughed.
For if you always think of me,
I will never have gone.
– Margaret Mead
My writing process is mysterious, even to me. It’s slow and inefficient.
– Andrea Barrett
Ask yourself what’s in your heart, that reliquary—blood locket and seed-bed—and contend with what it means
– Natasha Trethewey
I’ve absorbed so much poetry over the years, that there are just hundreds and hundreds of lines in my mind. And when one of them floats up out of the mass, I know it’s telling me something.
– Helen Vendler
Comparison is the death of contentment.
– John Powell
I have been easy with trees
Too long.
Too familiar with mountains.
Joy has been a habit.
Now
Suddenly
This rain.
– Jack Gilbert
Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world, a world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. And that led me wonder, If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn’t we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe, it’s as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can’t explain his to us, and we can’t explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown of communication… and there is the real illness.
– Philip K Dick, How to Build a Universe that Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later
I think there should be a rule that everyone in the world should get a standing ovation at least once in their lives.
– R.J. Palacio
Too late she saw: what she’d favored him with in jest he had received with adoration.
– John Barth
Human beings have launched satellites into outer space, and yet they still grovel on earth looking at their own feet like wild dogs. What is to become of our planet?
– Akira Kurosawa
I knew a wise woman
And she said to me
That the river would mold me
And the wild wind would cool me
The trickster the coyote
He would fool me
That father sun would warm me
Mother earth would clothe me
Grandmother moon would greet me
And of the old ways she would teach me
Wise woman, she told me
To always walk lightly
Tread the earth ever gently
Lovingly so preciously
And take from her sparingly
She said, to share with others
What you have learned from me
Be still and breathe, ever patiently
For the web of life
Has woven what is to be
But you must still choose
Your own path, you will see
And lastly, the wise woman said to me
To listen to the wise one
That dwells within me
To walk my path in balance
Is to be free
More than just words
So mote it be.
– Jonathan Bear Geronimo Ramaker
I’ve never liked housework. I get by doing little chores when I feel like them, in between paintings. Who wants to chase dust all their life? You can spend your whole lifetime cleaning the house. I like watching the patina grow. If the house looks dirty, buy another bunch of flowers, is my advice.
– Margaret Olley
Practicing Being Present:
You find relief when your pulled away from it. ( distraction ) “Just like elastic, your naturally brought back to it and so you find relief. It really is natural to be present; and the further we are pulled away from being unnatural, the stronger that elastic will pull us back. The more we live in a world of chaos the more that elastic will pull us back to search for peace. In a meaningless chaotic world this instinct for meaning will drive us ever more powerfully to seek and seek and seek until we find. Which again you see is this wonderful natural balance that is there behind the scenes, you could say it is the will of God, which maybe out of mind may be out of fashion, but it’s still there the secret power behind the scene that keeps the whole world as in the saying” “is in God’s hands.”
– John Butler
Truth’s an indefinite article.
When we live, we live for the last time, as Akhmatova says,
One the in a world of a.
– Charles Wright, Broken English
The future belongs to crowds.
– Don DeLillo
A Zen Master’s life is one continuous mistake
– Dogen Zenji
I attended sesshin with Roshi Hogen, once upon a time. One of the attendees asked, “Roshi Hogen, you are the Abbott of a Buddhist monastery and took vows of celibacy – and yet you have a wife and children. How do you explain this?”
He pondered for a minute or two and then replied, “Perhaps I failed.”
– Ian Sanders
If you have looked hard at the manner of things, if you have surveyed the troubles of our time, and cannot discover a way forward, do not despair. Do better. Grieve: mount an altar to the sensuous feelings of loss that swim through you. In the stinging fumes that redden the eyes, you might partly recover a clear vision of where to go. You might come to see that forward movement is no longer possible in these moments, and that the way to go was never forward anyway – but awk-ward: into the blackness of catacombs, into the shadows of sanctuary, into the riven cracks signed with the pen of the trickster, into the heat of compost, into the position of a prostrated man who knows that when the storm roars the thing to do is to be still. In that stillness, entire worlds churn.
– Bayo Akomolafe
Poetry isn’t benign. It can break you.
For National Poetry Month:
Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods
by Tishani Doshi
for Monika
Girls are coming out of the woods,
wrapped in cloaks and hoods,
carrying iron bars and candles
and a multitude of scars, collected
on acres of premature grass and city
buses, in temples and bars. Girls
are coming out of the woods
with panties tied around their lips,
making such a noise, it’s impossible
to hear. Is the world speaking too?
Is it really asking, What does it mean
to give someone a proper resting? Girls are
coming out of the woods, lifting
their broken legs high, leaking secrets
from unfastened thighs, all the lies
whispered by strangers and swimming
coaches, and uncles, especially uncles,
who said spreading would be light
and easy, who put bullets in their chests
and fed their pretty faces to fire,
who sucked the mud clean
off their ribs, and decorated
their coffins with briar. Girls are coming
out of the woods, clearing the ground
to scatter their stories. Even those girls
found naked in ditches and wells,
those forgotten in neglected attics,
and buried in river beds like sediments
from a different century. They’ve crawled
their way out from behind curtains
of childhood, the silver-pink weight
of their bodies pushing against water,
against the sad, feathered tarnish
of remembrance. Girls are coming out
of the woods the way birds arrive
at morning windows—pecking
and humming, until all you can hear
is the smash of their miniscule hearts
against glass, the bright desperation
of sound—bashing, disappearing.
Girls are coming out of the woods.
They’re coming. They’re coming.
The real damage is done by those millions who want to ‘survive.’ The honest men who just want to be left in peace. Those who don’t want their little lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves. Those with no sides and no causes. Those who won’t take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness. Those who don’t like to make waves—or enemies. Those for whom freedom, honor, truth, and principles are only literature. Those who live small, mate small, die small. It’s the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you’ll keep it under control. If you don’t make any noise, the bogeyman won’t find you. But it’s all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn.
– Sophie Scholl
What sets wilderness apart in the modern day is not that it’s dangerous (it’s almost certainly safer than any town or road) or that it’s solitary (you can, so they say, be alone in a crowded room) or full of exotic animals (there are more at the zoo). It’s that five miles out in the woods you can’t buy anything.
– Bill McKibben
I think people who don’t know the woods very well sometimes imagine it as a kind of undifferentiated mass of greenery, an endless continuation of the wall of trees they see lining the road. And I think they wonder how it could hold anyone’s interest for very long, being all so much the same. But in truth I have a list of a hundred places in my own town I haven’t been yet. Quaking bogs to walk on; ponds I’ve never seen in the fall (I’ve seen them in the summer – but that’s a different pond). That list gets longer every year, the more I learn, and doubtless it will grow until the day I die. So many glades; so little time.
– Bill McKibben
No matter what the practice or teaching, ego loves to wait in ambush to appropriate spirituality for its own survival and gain.
– Chögyam Trungpa
I desired nothing more than
to be a wandering cloud
before the wind
– Basho
When we speak with greater skill, our true self—our compassionate, loving self—emerges with gentle ease. So before you speak, stop, breathe, and consider if what you are about to say will improve upon the silence.
– @AllanLokos
Students, in a way, are the conscience of our culture.
– Dr. Noelle McAfee
Magic is deeply embedded in the human psyche. More than that, it is a projection of the human psyche. Though it has, effectively, been banished from the land, still it surfaces in thought and language: in dreams, in madness, in superstition and ritual. . .
– Neel Burton
I’ve got a few hours to kill today, maybe I should try to figure out how to live, how to be and to see
– Elisa Gabbert
the path ends in
fragrant blossoms
wild roses
– Buson
Very slender and modest, those alders and birches. Shy they were, didn’t like to be looked at. They had their own way of listening to the voices of the wind; thinly they took the light, they made small shadows on the water and the reeds.
– Russell Hoban
The tragedy is not
that the world is broken.
The tragedy is that
it’s not being mended.
– john zbigniew guzlowski
My thoughts are tired. I am not seeing things freshly, but rather in a pedestrian, lifeless way. It is as if a flame had gone out and I must wait until it starts to burn again by itself.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours…
– Rilke
Walking is a form of thinking.
– John Berger
I am so afraid of people’s words.
They describe so distinctly everything:
And this they call dog and that they call house,
here the start and there the end.
I worry about their mockery with words,
they know everything, what will be, what was;
no mountain is still miraculous;
and their house and yard lead right up to God.
I want to warn and object: Let the things be!
I enjoy listening to the sound they are making.
But you always touch: and they hush and stand still.
That’s how you kill.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connexion with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
I remember, when I was a boy, we had a common saying: Talking to yourself is the first sign of madness. Now, obviously, if I talk all the time, I don’t hear what anyone else has to say. And so, in exactly the same way, if I think all the time—that is to say if I talk to myself all the time—I don’t have anything to think about except thoughts. And therefore I’m living entirely in the world of symbols, and am never in relationship with reality.
You see, 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. And if you stay in your mind all the time, you are over-rational. In other words, you’re like a very rigid bridge which—because it has got no give, no craziness, in it—is going to be blown down in the first hurricane.
– Alan Watts
The great majority of the irreligious are not liberated from religious behavior . . . . They sometimes stagger under a whole macro-religious paraphernalia, which . . . has degenerated to the point of caricature and hence is hard to recognize for what it is.
– Mircea Eliade
Concern over detail, over our many conflicting thoughts and feelings, will not bring about an understanding of the whole. What is required is the sudden perception of the totality of the mind.
– Krishnamurti
Forcing will often produce the opposite of the outcome you desire. The tension in your mind is felt in the energy of your actions, which can push away good ideas and good people. Your best self emerges when your mind is in between focused and relaxed.
– Yung Pueblo
May you no longer adjust to dysfunction.
Freedom looks good on you.
– Dr. Thema
While it is easy to be intimidated by the largeness of life, seduced by lethargy, diverted by popular culture, and assimilated into collective fantasies that have little to do with our soul’s agenda, we still have to face ourselves in the end.
– James Hollis
Mythic images . . . are pictures that involve us both physiologically in our bodily reactions to them and spiritually in our higher thoughts about them. When a person is aware of living mythically, she or he is experiencing life intensely and reflectively.
– Naomi Goldenberg
DON’T WORRY
Don’t worry there’ll still be a lot of suffering
For now you have the right to cling to the sleeve
of someone’s blunt friendship
To be happy is a duty which you neglect
A careless user of time
you send days like geese to the meadow
Don’t worry you’ll die many times
until you learn at the very end to love life
– Anna Kamieńska
When I sing, it’s the most solitary state: just me, and the microphone, and the holy spirit. It’s not about notes or scales, it’s all about emotion.
– Sinéad O’Connor
My creative process is quite slow. I hear melodies in my head while I’m washing the dishes and I allow my subconscious to do the work.
– Sinéad O’Connor
He who takes not counsel of the Unseen and Silent, from him will never come real visibility and speech.
– Thomas Carlyle
The longer I live, the more urgent it seems to me to endure and transcribe the whole dictation of existence up to its end, for it might just be the case that only the very last sentence contains that small and possibly inconspicuous word through which everything we had struggled to learn and everything we had failed to understand will be transformed
suddenly into magnificent sense.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Someone will
sweep the fallen
petals away
away. I know,
I know. Weight of
red shadows.
– Cid Corman
This is the main instruction that I would leave my family in my swag bag of spiritual truth: be goodness with skin on.
– Anne Lamott
Disorder, mental, strikes me; I
Slip from my pocket Dante to
Chance hit a word, a friend’s reply
In this bar; bare, dark avenue
The lunge of headlights, then bare dark
Cross on red, two blocks home, old Sixth
The alive, the dead, answer, ask
Miracle consciousness I’m with
At home cat chirps, Norwegian sweater
Slumped in the bar, I mind Dante
As dawn enters the sunk city
Answer a one can understand
Actual events are obscure
Though the observers appear clear
– Edwin Denby, Later Sonnet
You can get there from here, though there’s no going home.
Everywhere you go will be somewhere you’ve never been.
– Natasha Trethewey
Invisible flare
Unnoticeable sparkle
Visible promise
– Rachel Newcombe
LOVE’S AVERMENT
My sure desire is a covering canopy
and, under it, I stand secure in want
of some security known not to be.
Desire wants uncaring what isn’t there.
– William Bronk
There is no pain in life equal to that which two lovers can inflict on each other.
– Cyril Connolly
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
– LP Hartley
Sunday afternoon
—
concert of coffee spoons
from the balconies
– Rita Rosen
Once more the desperate heart
brought me to you
what can I do?
It didn’t suit our stars
to be distant
what can one do?
– Sayeed Quadri
Surely something resides in this heart
that is not perishable –
and life is more than a dream.
– Mary Wollstonecraft
There are men who are too fragile to fall apart. I belong to them too.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
Under a white sky, the rambling old white lilac is beginning to bloom. Half an hour past sunrise, the first, tentative raindrops on the roof.
– Dave Bonta
Scientific method … is powerless
to explain the consciousness
that directs it.
– Saul Bellow
Before
Sadness
After
Distress
We meet
Serendipity
– Rachel Newcombe
Something … Swedenborg practiced throughout his life was a curious ability to hover in that strange state between sleeping and waking. This condition, known as “hypnagogia,” allows for a conscious experience of the unconscious …
– Gary Lachman
The goal isn’t to be happy with my voice. What I want is simply to have one.
– Jhumpa Lahiri
The Paradise Notebooks: A Poet and a Geologist’s
Love Letter to Life Lensed Through a Mountain
BY MARIA POPOVA
The Paradise Notebooks: A Poet and a Geologist’s Love Letter to Life Lensed Through a Mountain
How astonishing to remember that nothing has inherent color, that color is not a property of objects but of the light that falls upon them, reflected back. So too with the light of the mind — it is attention that gives the world its vibrancy, its kaleidoscopic beauty. The quality of attention we pay something or someone is the measure of our love. And because every littlest thing is, as John Muir observed, “hitched to everything else in the universe,” when we pay generous and unalloyed attention to anything, we are learning to love everything; we are learning that all around and within this world there is another, numinous and resinous with wonder, shimmering with a sense of the miraculous.
That recognition and its ample rewards animate The Paradise Notebooks: 90 Miles across the Sierra Nevada (public library) — the soulful chronicle of thirteen summer days the poetic geologist Richard J. Nevle and the Buddhist poet Steven Nightingale spent walking across one of the world’s most majestic mountains with their wives and teenage daughters, recording and reflecting on those devotional acts of pure attention in diary entires, essays, and poems that interleave science and spirit, observation and metaphor, grandeur and smallness. What emerges is a love letter to “a tender whole that is so much sweeter than the sum of its lonely parts.
One of Japanese artist Chiura Obata’s 1930s paintings of Yosemite
Nevle — who was first enchanted by the distant contour of the mountains when he was five but did not see them fully until he began his doctoral studies in geology eighteen years later — writes:
Many claim to have found God in the mountains. I don’t know what God is, but I admit to having sought her there too. Whatever my search, I have found that the pursuit of scientific inquiry — its own, necessarily limited kind of truth-seeking — can be as much an act of devotion as it is scholarly meditation. For to pay attention to the world, to seek its stories, to run your fingers along some crack of rock or furrow of tree bark, to admire a raptor in flight, to look, closely, at the construction of a previously unencountered wildflower — to wonder and to seek answers to how these things might have come to be in the world — are themselves acts of devotion, ways of knowing, ways of longing for communion.
Nightingale harmonizes:
Each world bears all the worlds we might find within it. If you understand one outcropping of stone, or one wildflower, or one hummingbird — if we see our way along the tracery of cause and effect, the mystery of change and recreation — then we are led to everything we see, and everything we are.
It is no accident that Virginia Woolf arrived at her epiphany about the unity of being while looking at a flower, that Oliver Sacks grasped deep time while walking in a forest, that Mary Oliver contacted the interconnectedness of life while observing an owl: It is beauty that beckons our attention, and it is attention that lets us see the world whole. Nightingale considers the common root of these experiences, these revelations of wholeness:
In most cultures, in every century, beauty is bound up with unity. Beauty illuminates the affinity, the inner relation, the resemblance, the kinship, the concord and identity of things. We are all trained to tell things apart. In the experience of beauty, we learn to tell things alike; to move from the darkness of oneself to a sympathy, an open rapport; a longed — for, conscious union with the world. Beauty is a lucid and graceful assembly of forms that calls the mind close to life, our bodies close to the earth, and all of us closer to one another.
[…]
There is nothing more powerful than the movement toward beauty. As we walked, this thought sustained us. What we needed was to keep moving: one more day, and in each day, all day, one more step. It struck me as the simplest rule of life and of reflection: keep moving. Stay in readiness. Cultivate openness, clarity, affection, an easygoing revelry of the senses, a trust in our luck that we are here on earth at all, that we have this moment at all. Movement along a trail is movement within the mind. In the long run, the revelation of beauty is not a matter of chance: it is the centermost surety in life.
Beauty matters because it swings open the doors of perception, and it is by seeing — by taking in what is there, incorporating it into our inner world — that we can begin to comprehend and connect, out of which the sense of belonging arises. Nightingale reflects:
This is true for everyone, wherever we are: what we see is the preface to what we can see. Beyond that preface, with work and love, is what we can come to understand. If we can understand, then we can live. In the Sierra, we understood that we might, after all, belong here with tree and rock and time and light. We might, for a brief spell of years, have the luck to find a home here by following the beauty that beckons us.
One of Wilson Bentley’s “miracles of beauty”
Observing the delicate fragility of a single ice crystal, and thinking about Wilson Bentley’s snowflakes, he adds:
The world around us is not what we see. It holds a life-giving, gift-giving, invisible order everywhere and always. It is an order of musical and exultant beauty. It has a mysterious and radiant splendor. Everywhere we look, if we would look, the natural world is making beauty, without fanfare, and the work is so plain, intelligent, playful, and devoted, that there is only one word for it: cosmic.
Throughout their journey, what kindles this sense of the cosmic are encounters with the earthly, in all its glorious smallness and specificity — a mountain chickadee hardly larger than a grape, singing in its “husky, harsh-sweet voice”; clouds “tangerine then crimson then lavender then gray”; a nutcracker harvesting ninety thousand whitebark seeds in a single year with its bill “black as obsidian”; a yellow-legged frog “as small as a baby’s hand, as still as a Buddha”; an aspen with its aria of color sung by chloroplasts that outnumber the stars in the Milky Way one hundredfold; a prairie falcon slicing through the clear blue with its speckled body, evoking a rush of astonishment that “such a wholly perfect thing could exist.” Nevle writes:
There is something numinous and joyful in these encounters, a way in which the boundary between the world we sense and the world that is beyond our senses becomes, for the briefest of moments, thin — almost transparent.
Punctuating the poems and essays are diary entries raw with aliveness. On the second day of the expedition, Nevle records:
Up too early again. Listening to the patter of rain dripping from the tree limbs onto the tent and the hush of the creek in the darkness. Breathing in the scent of earth and rain. I can’t believe we are here, surrounded by these old trees and mountains, with days ahead of us. I’m a little boy all over again, incredulous that this place actually exists, and I am here in it. I want to get up and wander down to the creek and feel its black, wet, cold aliveness on my skin.
Another of Chiura Obata’s Yosemite paintings
That exhilaration emanates from a sudden and vivid sense of the interconnectedness of life in the mountain, the interbelonging of the wanderer and every wild creature, every rocky crevasse:
The great spine of rock holds diverse forests, dreamy meadows, skeins of streams, radiant lakes, and rare glaciers. Life ascends even to the highest reaches of the range, thousands of feet above tree line, where gardens of black, orange, and chartreuse lichen adorn the rock. Everywhere a tenacious living skin sheaths the ancient bones of the mountains.
[…]
The gray-crowned rosy-finch, the bighorn sheep, the pika, and the skypilot with its violet-cobalt blooms make their home among the enchanted stone that air and dust and time and life made possible.
Art by Matthew Forsythe from The Gold Leaf
Moving through the mountain, Nightingale embraces the poet’s task of wresting metaphor from observation. In a reflection that calls to mind poet Natalie Diaz’s magnificent meditation on brokenness as a portal to belonging, he writes:
The mountains are whole and beautiful for one principal reason: they have been broken so often… It is the very breaking and jointing, the cracking and carving and breakdown, the weathering and scouring, that all together give rise to the countless forms of beauty — iridescent, miraculous, gift-giving, exultant — throughout the whole of the range.
But it is often the geologist who best channels the poetic dimension of the living world. A century and a half after Emily Dickinson gasped in a poem that “to be a Flower is profound Responsibility,” Nevle writes:
What do we know of flowers? Of their wiliness and brilliance born of a ferocious will to live? Of their ability to extract what they need to survive over their fleeting lives, only so it can be given away? Consider the genus of flowering plants known as Castilleja, the paintbrushes. Species of Castilleja occur throughout the Sierra, from the oak savannas of the lowland foothills to the fragrant conifer forests of the mid-elevations to the sky gardens of the alpine fellfields — almost to the very crest of the range — blossoming in flames of vermillion and violet and cream and silvery mauve. Valley Tassels, Owl’s-Clover, Wooly Indian Paintbrush, Great Red Indian Paintbrush, Hairy Indian Paintbrush, Subalpine Paintbrush, Alpine Paint-brush, to name just a few of more than a dozen species of Castilleja whose blossoms return each year to the mountains. The sheer variety of Castilleja species you might encounter in a single summer day of wandering the Sierra might be enough to make you weep with gratitude for all the world offers us.
In the epilogue, Nightingale reflects on this countercultural endeavor to reunite dimensions of being that naturally belong together, that illuminate and magnify each other, despite how much our siloed and segregationist culture tries to keep them apart. (That, of course, is the animating spirit of The Universe in Verse.) He writes:
Science is thought by some to be dry, technical, and quantitative. It is not. Study is exaltation. Fact is miracle. Number is portal. Understanding is joy.
Poetry and spirituality are thought by some to be abstract, ethereal, private. They are not. Nature is language. Mind is sensual. Soul is earth.
How long have I been waiting for that person Who said to me once, don’t wait for me.
– Javed Akhtar
The human mind is always searching for possessions and never feels fulfilled. This causes impure actions ever to increase. Bodhisattvas, however, always remember the principle of having few desires. They live a simple life in peace in order to practice the Way and consider the realization of perfect understanding as their only career.
– The Sutra on the Eight Realizations of the Great Beings
NOMADS, PIRATES, BANDIT QUEENS
Wild: an uncultivated or untamed state, disposition to rove or go unrestrained! Webster’s Dictionary, 1913 ed.
I want to ride to the ridge where the west commences. I can’t look at hobbles and I can’t stand fences. Don’t fence me in.
Cole Porter, Don’t Fence Me In
If you don’t want to be Crazy Horse, Boudicca, or Pablo Neruda, stop now. It’s probably best we nip this relationship in the bud. This is a book about teasing out the mischievous, solitude-loving, flamboyant, sorcerous, arms-extended-into-the-inky-blackness singing songs of the lost-highwayman aspect of your nature. If something in the last two sentences doesn’t ring true then head for the door; there still may be a place for you in polite society. Hurry, As for the rest of you vagabonds, draw closer, there’s strength in numbers. This is a strange book: sometimes it says simple things, sometimes it’s complicated, po-etic, and obtuse. It draws on wild places, wild stories, and wild thinking as its inspiration. As the Romany gypsies like to say, “May God strike me down if I don’t finish this bottle with you, here tonight!” There is no other life.
– Martin Shaw
MY DEAR
is it true
that your mind is sometimes like
a battering ram
running all through the city,
shouting so madly inside and out
about the ten thousand things
that do not matter?
– Hafiz
BEFORE THE SUN COMES UP
There are monks who sing
for the laity—May you be happy,
and today I sing it, too,
though I have not been
anointed and have no special
sway, but I stitch my song
into the morning’s ferocious wind
and send it everywhere,
May you be well.
The wind rips the words
from my lips. I sing them
again. This is all
we have in this world,
the way we choose
to meet it.
– Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Everyone has eaten and fallen asleep.
The house is empty.
We walk out to the garden to let the apple
meet the peach, to carry messages
between rose and jasmine.
Spring is Christ,
raising martyred plants from their shrouds.
A leaf trembles. I tremble
in the wind-beauty like silk from Turkestan.
The censer fans into flame.
This wind is the Holy Spirit.
The trees are Mary.
Watch how husband and wife play subtle games
with their hands. Strings of cloudy pearls
are thrown across the lovers,
as is the marriage custom.
We talk about this and that. There is no rest
except on these branching moments.
– Mevlana Rumi, (Trans. Coleman Barks)
There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo.
– Beryl Markham
When I rummage in my own mind I find no noble sentiments about being companions and equals and influencing the world to higher ends. I find myself saying briefly and prosaically that it is much more important to be oneself than anything else. Do not dream of influencing other people, I would say, if I knew how to make it sound exalted. Think of things in themselves.
– Virginia Woolf
Among the great struggles of man-good/evil, reason/unreason, etc.-there is also this mighty conflict between the fantasy of Home and the fantasy of Away, the dream of roots and the mirage of the journey.
– Salman Rushdie
You are the traveler, you are the path and you are the destination. Be careful never to lose the way to yourself.
– Shihab al-Din Yahya Suhrawardi
When the end comes, you will be esteemed by the world and rewarded by God, not because you have won the love and respect of the princes of the earth, however powerful, but rather for having loved, defended and cherished one such as I … what you receive from others is a testimony to their virtue; but all that you do for others is the sign and clear indication of your own.
Quando verrà la fine, sarai stimato dal mondo e ricompensato da Dio, non perché ti sei guadagnato l’amore e il rispetto dei principi della terra, per quanto potenti, ma piuttosto per aver amato, difeso e amato uno come me. .. ciò che ricevi dagli altri è una testimonianza della loro virtù; ma tutto ciò che fai per gli altri è il segno e la chiara indicazione del tuo.
– Giordano Bruno
Sit, drink your coffee here; your work can wait
awhile.
You’re twenty-six, and still have some of life ahead.
No need for wit; just talk vacuities, and I’ll
Reciprocate in kind, or laugh at you instead.
The world is too opaque, distressing and profound.
This twenty minutes’ rendezvous will make my day:
To sit here in the sun, with grackles all around,
Staring with beady eyes, and you two feet away.
Sit
– Vikram Seth
let them in
weary women, men and children
..into our hearts
– Gabriel Rosenstock
Try to travel, otherwise
you may become racist,
and you may end up believing
that your skin is the only one
to be right,
that your language
is the most romantic
and that you were the first
to be the first.
Travel,
because if you don’t travel then
your thoughts won’t be strengthened,
won’t get filled with ideas.
Your dreams will be born with fragile legs
and then you end up believing in tv-shows,
and in those who invent enemies
that fit perfectly with your nightmares
to make you live in terror.
Travel,
because travel teaches
to say good morning to everyone
regardless of which sun we come from.
Travel,
because travel teaches
to say goodnight to everyone
regardless of the darkness
that we carry inside
Travel,
because traveling teaches to resist,
not to depend,
to accept others, not just for who they are
but also for what they can never be.
To know what we are capable of,
to feel part of a family
beyond borders,
beyond traditions and culture.
Traveling teaches us to be beyond.
Travel,
otherwise you end up believing
that you are made only for a panorama
and instead inside you
there are wonderful landscapes
still to visit.
– Gio Evan, poet and songwriter.
Translated from Italian.
All higher forms of humor begin with a decision no longer to take your own person seriously.
– Hermann Hesse
Perhaps we humans
have wanted God most as witness
to acts of choice
made in solitude. Acts of mercy,
of sacrifice. Wanted
that great single eye to see us,
steadfast as we flowed by.
Yet there are other acts
not even vanity,
or anxious hope to please, know of –
bone doings, leaps of nerve, heart-
cries of communion: if there is bliss,
it has
been already
and will be; out-
reaching, utterly.
Blind
to itself, flooded
with otherness.
– Denise Levertov
Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work. It means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger. It means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind. It means being able to say, with Charlotte Brönte’s Jane Eyre: “I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.”
– Adrienne Rich, Claiming an Education
It’s quite a job starting to love somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment, in the very beginning, when you have to jump across a precipice: if you think about it you don’t do it.
– Jean-Paul Sartre
To be human is to be born into a dance in which every animate or inanimate, visible or invisible being is also dancing. Every step of this dance is printed in light; its energy is adoration, its rhythm is praise. Pain, desolution, and destruction in this full and unified sacred vision are not separate from the dance, but are instead essential energies of its transformative unfolding. Death itself cannot shatter the dance, because death is the lifespring of its fertility, the mother of all its changing splendor. If we could bring ourselves to open to this vision, we would undergo a revolution of the heart.
– Andrew Harvey
We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all. We sleep to time’s hurdy-gurdy; we wake, if we ever wake, to the silence of God.
– Annie Dillard
Be out of sync with your times for just one day, and you will see how much eternity you contain within you.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
if only
there was a way to
stop blossoms from falling
– Basho
The best medicine I have found is to love a woman.
– Alan Watts
just see these superfluous ones! sick are they always; they vomit their bile and call it a newspaper. they devour one another, and cannot even digest themselves.
– nietzsche
The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism […]
– Hannah Arendt
If you’re working out, eating a nutritious diet, making a solid income, and, doing something you believe in, and have a household full of love you’ve already made it.
Everything else is just empty calories.
– Dan Go
As Jung said once, we all walk in shoes too small for us. And so, what he meant by that metaphor, we all live in adaptive, protective psychologies, that’s understandable but it keeps us locked in. It keeps us blocked. It keeps us stuck.
– James Hollis
The problem with just giving up on philosophy is that bad philosophy is omnipresent.
– Hilary Putnam
Now I know it better every year and can tell people better all the time that there is a great deal of beauty in the world — almost nothing but beauty.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
I listen and dispense pretty much the same advice every time: breathe, pray, seek wise counsel, be friendly with yourself, and so on. I bore myself blue sometimes, but that’s all I know.
– Anne Lamott
Life takes pride in not appearing uncomplicated. If it relied on simplicity, it probably would not succeed in moving us to do all those things that we are not easily moved to do.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
First, create your ego. Then destroy it. This is all of life.
– Kamand Kojouri
Two of their young hunters rescued a dragonfly stuck in the mud. It gave them the usual wishes you get in these stories. One wished to be the smartest man in the world. The dragonfly said, ‘So you shall be.’ But the second hunter wanted to be smarter than the smartest man in the world.” On this Leaphorn paused, partly for effect, partly to see if Bernie had already heard a version of this, and partly to see if she had cheered up enough to be listening. She was listening. “So the dragonfly converted the second hunter into a woman,” Bernie said, laughing and nodding at Leaphorn.
– Tony Hillerman, The Wailing Wind
People who are really good at boiling things down for others are called masters.
– Vince Fakhoury Horn
For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper
by Joseph Fasano
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.
It is not enough to raise consciousness. One must lower the spirit into the earth to embody a change in things as basic as food, shelter, and livelihood.
– William Irwin Thompson
The great thing in Marseille is not the buildings it is the people … all who live here walk the decks of their city with grace and equilibrium, the joy of acrobats and sailors.
The city is full of Mogadors …
– Robert Lax
In the last analysis, a work of art is justified only insofar as it can give pleasure. Somehow it must contrive to convert the imitation of ethical liabilities into aesthetic assets.
– Kenneth Burke
Without reflection, without mercy, without shame,
they built strong walls and high, and compassed me about.
– C. P. Cavafy
And some who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
– Manuscript of Cavafy’s
We live and move by splitting the light of the present, as a canoe’s bow parts water.
– Annie Dillard
The best antidote to burnout is not teaching people coping skills to handle stress. It’s redesigning work to reduce stress.
The cure for exhaustion is removing overwhelming demands and the norm of self-sacrifice.
Healthy workplaces value well-being as much as performance.
– Adam Grant
The window has a wonderful view of a lake,
but the view doesn’t view itself.
It exists in this world
colorless, shapeless,
soundless, odorless, and painless.
The lake’s floor exists floorlessly,
and its shore exists shorelessly.
Its water feels itself neither wet nor dry
and its waves to themselves are neither singular nor plural.
They splash deaf to their own noise
on pebbles neither large nor small.
And all this beneath a sky by nature skyless
in which the sun sets without setting at all
and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud.
The wind ruffles it, its only reason being
that it blows.
– Wisława Szymborska
Normal day,
let me be aware of
the treasure you are.
Let me learn from you,
love you, bless you
before you depart.
Let me not pass you by
in quest of some rare
and perfect tomorrow.
Let me hold you while I may,
for it may not always be so.
– Mary Jean Iron
Perhaps it’s that you can’t go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fatal decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal. They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way you too become them. They are what you can possess and in the end what possesses you.
– Rebecca Solnit
Nothing is ever lost as time passes, it merely metamorphoses into something as wonderful or, in some cases, into something even better than before.
– Carole Carlton
The acorn becomes an oak by means of automatic growth; no commitment is necessary. The kitten similarly becomes a cat on the basis of instinct. Nature and being are identical in creatures like them. But a man or woman becomes fully human only by his or her choices and his or her commitment to them. People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day by day. These decisions require courage.
– Rollo May, The Courage to Create
The outcome of an actual encounter with someone who is a carrier of the anima or animus projection ‘frequently gives rise in dreams to the symbol of psychic pregnancy, a symbol that goes back to the primordial image of the hero’s birth. The child that is to be born signifies the individuality, which, though present, is not yet conscious.’ The real psychic purpose of the conventional man’s affair with his very unconventional anima woman is to produce a symbolic child, which represents a union of the opposites in his personality and is therefore a symbol of the self. The meeting with the anima/us represents a connection to the unconscious even deeper than that of the shadow. In the case of the shadow, it is a meeting with the disdained and rejected pieces of the total psyche, the inferior and unwanted qualities. In the meeting with the anima/us, it is a contact with levels of the psyche which has the potential to lead into the deepest and highest (at any rate furthest) reaches that the ego can attain.
– Murray B. Stein, Jung’s Map of the Soul: An Introduction
Fire
a woman can’t survive
by her own breath
alone
she must know
the voices of mountains
she must recognize
the foreverness of blue sky
she must flow
with the elusive
bodies
of night winds
who will take her
into herself
look at me
i am not a separate woman
i am a continuance
of blue sky
i am the throat
of the mountains
a night wind
who burns
with every breath
she takes
– Joy Harjo
Whoever writes poetry engraves forms in our memory, wonderful old words for stone or leaf, tied to or released by new words, new signs of reality. And I believe that whoever inscribes these forms also disappears into them with his own breath, which he offers as the unrequited proof of these forms’ truth.
– Ingeborg Bachmann
Water will well up everywhere, in the being and outside the being.
– Bachelard
it may be that not until many years have elapsed will we recall that the most important event in our emotional life occurred without our having time to give it any prolonged attention.
– Marcel Proust
I believe in old age; to work and to grow old: this is what life expects of us. And then one day to be old and still be quite far from understanding everything – no, but to begin, but to love, but to suspect, but to be connected to what is remote and inexpressible, all the way up into the stars.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect.
– Lionel Trilling
Jung says in a letter: Somewhere there seems to be great kindness in the abysmal darkness of the Deity. The word “kindness” is so deep because it means, for me, kinship with every person, every animal, every plant—the entire creation. Everything is kin.
– Helen Luke
Traditions are because
that’s how we learn,
the old monk said.
Some of us learn
the wrong ones.
– The Old Monk
The earth in your eyes
is the ink in your words.
Each look writes another line.
– Farnaz Fatemi
Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.
– John Milton
a red balloon
in the blue sky
passing by
– James Welsh
The heavens seem to offer us such gifts every hour, but we keep our eyes firmly fixed on the less nourishing words and deeds of men.
– Pico Iyer
Can we fold into and around each other a
Tesseract through time where every instance
Of you finds every instance of me?
– Brandy Norrbom
Listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world.
– Jack Kerouac
Publishing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
– Don Marquis
What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music…And people flock around the poet and say: Sing again soon…
– Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or
Civilizations in decline are consistently characterized by a tendency towards standardization and uniformity.
– Arnold Toynbee
April,
the Angel of months,
the young love of the year.
– Vita Sackville-West
Learning history was a lot more fun than bearing witness to it.
– Lisa Lucas
I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active – not more happy – nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.
– Edgar Allan Poe
It is a ridiculous thing for a man not to fly from his own badness, which is indeed possible, but to fly from other men’s badness, which is impossible.
– Marcus Aurelius
One accurate measurement is worth a thousand expert opinions.
– Grace Hopper
an ancient fire
still burning
a moonlit night
– Issa
Anything that can be commodified will be. It’s neoliberalism in action. The neolib pop effect of capitalist realism.
– Alina Stefanescu
The artist works by locating the world in himself.
– Gertrude Stein
James K. Galbraith: global South countries should coordinate a collective default on external debt.
In addition to liberating the South from financial imperialism this would force the US to nationalise its banking sector and do the whole world a favour.
– Jason Hickel
I’d like to see more novels not written by people who have all the time in the world to write them.
– William F. Buckley Jr.
A line is a dot that went for a walk.
– Paul Klee
The wind that breaks and shatters,
The cold wind,
[…]
Let it take my heart and hurl
Its fragments
To the moon, the trees, the beasts
In the air, the dark, the waters,
So that nothing ever again
Returns to me.
– Les Plaintes d’Ariane, Anna de Noailles
The singular of sheep
should be shoop.
– John Gallaher
By changing the proportions of a very average man, we can obtain a monster. We make him a monster if we minimize, let us say, how he feels when patting his little daughter on her curls or when hurrying to some address with a round of presents, and stress how he feels when fleecing his partner or when, like a male mosquito, he cannot eat, so that his only hunger is for the female. That is, a monstrous or inhuman character does not possess qualities not possessed by other men— he simply possesses them to a greater or less extent than other men. Fiction is precisely this altering of proportions. The fictions of science alter them by such classifications as Nordic, capitalistic, agrarian, hyperthyroid, extravert. The fictions of literature alter them by bringing out some trait or constellation of traits, some emotional pattern, and inventing a background to fit. So science and fiction alike make monsters, though adults have agreed not to call an anatomical chart morbid, confining their attacks to the monsters of art. These monsters are constructed partly in the interests of clarity (as is shown in classical drama, where the depiction of violence, dis-ease, excess, coexists with the ideal of clarity, strongly unbalanced characters more readily displaying the mainsprings of conduct). But there is a second factor which leads us, whether scientists or artists, to evolve monsters. A reptile must consume another reptile to become a dragon, says a Latin saying (serpens nisi serpentent comederit non fit draco) — and who would not make himself a dragon?
– Kenneth Burke
Science is not about building a body of known ‘facts’. It is a method for asking awkward questions and subjecting them to a reality-check, thus avoiding the human tendency to believe whatever makes us feel good!
– Terry Pratchett
A novel without a story must work very hard in other ways to be worth reading. Some of today’s antistory novels are too deliberately arcane. I think story is essential to the survival of the novel.
– Iris Murdoch.
more than ever, i believe there is no difference.
the most privileged nation, most americans do not know the difference
between indians, afghanis, syrians, muslims, sikhs, hindus.
more than ever, there is no difference.
– Suheir Hammad
The relative without the ultimate is indulgent materialism and the ultimate without the relative is dissociative nihilism. The open heart is the balance point where both truths live.
– Chelan Harkin
Blessed be the broken cycle
Even though it must begin Here.
– Rudy Francisco
‘Aloha’ means ‘the sharing of spirit through breath’ in Hawaiian and ‘Nashakh’ has the very same meaning in Hebrew. And here are some thoughts from Rudolf Hauschke about the connection between breath and nitrogen: “nitrogen seems inappropriately named. It should be called movement-substance or air-stuff. Nitrogen is of such a nature as to lend itself to being a carrier of feeling as well as of breathing. Everyone knows how closely related to feeling breathing is. When we feel joyful our breath quickens. When grief weighs on the soul, breath comes slowly and heavily…. Breathing is a constant rhythmic mediating between man and his surroundings. Every breath we draw brings the outside world into us. This enables us to have a feeling of our surroundings, similar to a touching with hands and fingers or a grasping with thought. One of the greatest achievements of the new approach…inaugurated by Rudolf Steiner was the discovery that the breathing system is the physiological basis of feeling, as the nervous system is of thinking. Is the fact of my inhaling something of another person’s being not a way of feeling what his nature is – feeling it lovingly?
– Rudolf Hauschke, The Nature of Substance
Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race.
– Johann Georg Hamann
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
Pictures, images, and other symbolical representations speak to the imagination. The mighty fortress of the human heart silently withstands the assaults by the rifled cannons of reason, but readily falls before the magic power of mystery.
– Frederick Douglass
It was hard to decide on a literature course. Everything the professors said seemed to be somehow beside the point. You wanted to know why Anna had to die, and instead they told you that 19th century Russian landowners felt conflicted about whether they were really a part of Europe. The implication was that it was somehow naive to want to talk about anything interesting, or to think that you would ever know anything important.
– Elif Batuman, The Idiot
Spirit is never too late.
– Florence Scovel Shinn
I like poetry that doesn’t fancy itself up to be poetry.
– Seamus Heaney
A Possible Future
Scars healed, she came through
shimmering green and blue
The multitudinous parts of herself
no longer at war.
With all manmade boundaries dissolved,
her scattered selves reconnected,
cell to cell, skin to skin,
person to person,
now seeing themselves in the other,
at one.
Unified, now glorified,
she twirls in the dark canopy of space,
our sacred place,
Earth.
– Debra Yvonne Mathis
Any critic of a living wage for Buddhist teachers must first explain how shaming the profession of lay dharma teacher out of existence would benefit the spread of the dharma.
– Kenneth Folk
I love mornings because of the coffee & the possibilities. I continue to believe that poetry contains revolutionary power. Small talk is an art.
– @CarolinaEbeid
Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Everything that is possible demands to exist.
– Gottfried Leibniz
CNN, Fox, MSNBC throwing around every possible theory—1960’s relapse, the economy, privilege, antisemitism, Hamas, drugs, radical textbooks, Tiktok, not enough sex—anything ANYTHING except what protestors say and demand, namely to divest from Israel’s genocide.
– @aliner
Everything I do is for the 17-year-old version of myself.
– Virgil Abloh
Come with me tonight so that we might make tonight a shared past, says the one afflicted with longing. I will come with you to make a shared tomorrow, says the one afflicted with love.
– Mahmoud Darwish, (trans. Sinan Antoon)
to see ourselves
in the eyes of
all of the others
is to risk the impulse
to share everything
in sight and sound
I am not convinced
humanity is ready
for such a moment
– Andy Perrin
the final solution
of the Nationalist problem
a high-end campervan
– Alec Finlay
To think that the sun rose in the east-that men and women were
flexible, real, alive—that every thing was alive,
To think that you and I did not see, feel, think, nor bear our part,
To think that we are now here and bear our part.
– Walt Whitman, To Think of Time
The time has come when each must do his own work of redemption.
– @RedBookJung
Like one who finds himself in a game the rules of which he doesn’t know, I feel like a knot in the thread on thousands of occasions.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
A novel is the only place where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy. The reader and the writer make the book together. No other art can capture the essential inwardness of human life.
– Paul Auster
Another day proving that the two limitless emotions are grief and love.
– Paisley Rekdal
In order to think, speak, write, work, exist in another way, we felt we had nothing to lose by trying everything.
– Annie Ernaux tr. by Alison L. Strayer
I have a PhD in morbid reflection, and in a strange way it centers me.
– Anne Lamott
Dostoyevsky’s insight into hell as the suffering of no longer being able to love reverberates in my heart and mind when inquiring into the existential conundrum of the mystery of trauma and the question of what can move the traumatized psyche toward the other shore.
– Ursula Wirtz
The students are not delusional. The students are not violent. The politicians and leaders who facilitate and deny genocide are. Support the student protesters wherever you are, however you can. They are our ethical guides.
[—Source unknown but wise!]
When the executioner’s bored he’s dangerous.
The blazing sky rolls itself up.
From cell to cell there’s knocking
and space wells up through the ground frost.
A few stones shine like full moons.
– Tomas Tranströmer
A miracle is a thought of such pure love that it becomes a portal into a realm of possibility that would not otherwise occur.
– Marianne Williamson
Everyone reads a different book. Everyone sees a different film as well. We bring our past lives to whatever work of art we’re experiencing at that moment, and that’s what makes it interesting. It’s not mathematics. There are different answers for different people.
– Paul Auster
Hopeless to make the point once again that patriarchies are all about division & hatred taught as theology . “trickle-down” hatred makes of persons who resemble one another enough to be relatives enemies instead of loving one another as they would in different circumstances.
– Joyce Carol Oates
What kind of dragon would you be, said the fox-girl.
Fire, water, fields and mountains?
I would be a May dragon, said the little ghost Belle.
Fearless and poetic as the flowers…
– Voima Oy
Convert the locals with your sunscreen and lip balm, your style of adjusting the shades on your eyes, the way you mouth Hello.
– @tara_zambrano
walking
to a poem party
under a spring moon
– Issa
For how can I be sure
I shall see again
The world on the first of May
Shining after the rain?
– Sara Teasdale
That is the dream, I suppose, of all novelists—that one of their characters will become ‘somebody.’
– José Saramago
He told you not to fear the waves. It was the wives, rather, to watch for, their mysterious incantations and dangerous interventions.
– Lorette C. Luzajic
The father is a title card.
The mother is the postscript.
You are a pine cone. Welcome to my world.
– Eliza Gilbert
Darling Coffee
by Meena Alexander
The periodic pleasure
of small happenings
is upon us—
behind the stalls
at the farmer’s market
snow glinting in heaps,
a cardinal its chest
puffed out, bloodshod
above the piles of awnings,
passion’s proclivities;
you picking up a sweet potato
turning to me ‘This too?’—
query of tenderness
under the blown red wing.
Remember the brazen world?
Let’s find a room
with a window onto elms
strung with sunlight,
a cafe with polished cups,
darling coffee they call it,
may our bed be stoked
with fresh cut rosemary
and glinting thyme,
all herbs in due season
tucked under wild sheets:
fit for the conjugation of joy.
LIFE UNFOLDING
There is no question that the real mindfulness teacher, and the real meditation practice, is life itself. Every moment is an opportunity to realign ourselves with the actuality of what is unfolding, however challenging or mundane, and thereby choose not lose ourselves in our interpretations and stories about what is going on. This is easier than you may think. It is also hugely liberating each time we make even a momentary gesture in that direction.
And those moments, those conscious realigning gestures can add up to a different life, a more mindful and emotionally balanced life. Not only that: they can influence your future in ways that may be not only beneficial to you, but transformative. Because if you take care of this moment, now, with kindness and awareness, the next moment will be different because of your having taken care of this one, because of your gesture of sanity, trust, and balance.
– Jon Kabat-Zinn
Often I imagine the earth
through the eyes of the atoms we’re made of—
atoms, peculiar
atoms everywhere—
no me, no you, no opinions,
no beginning, no middle, no end,
soaring together like those
ancient Chinese birds
hatched miraculously with only one wing,
helping each other fly home.
– Dan Gerber
Ken Burns: … the next question I was going to ask you. What do we find when we search?
Bill Segal: Again, it may sound presumptuous, but being an old man I can say that one finds a network of unity, of oneness. I am not separated from you, or from the animals, from the insects, or even from the stone, from nature. One finds truly a oneness with all things. But I don’t know whether these are just words, “I am,” this wonderful phrase, “I am.” Just this is-ness is wonderful. I don’t have to say I am something-I am. That’s enough. One finds this “I am-ness” through the silence. The silence is, the nothingness is filled with everything. I can’t answer some questions. Words are not very adequate to express what one might find. One finds this moment. One finds your smile.
– From Parabola, Vezelay is Here, A Conversation with Ken Burns
What could lessen its power, drain it of some of that fuel? True solidarity. Humanism that unites people across ethnic and religious lines. Fierce opposition to all forms of identity-based hatred, including antisemitism. An international left rooted in values that side with the child over the gun every single time, no matter whose gun and no matter whose child. A left that is unshakably morally consistent, and does not mistake that consistency with moral equivalency between occupier and occupied. Love.
– Naomi Klein
Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.
– Neil Postman
Art without meaning is
just decoration.
The art is in the idea.
– Rick Rubin
At this point, my Big Wisdom for people under 30 is “feel your feelings, get really good at a skill, and don’t eat processed foods”
– River Kenna
Neurosis is an inner cleavage – the state of being at war with one- self. … What drives people to war with themselves is the intuition or the knowledge that they consist of two persons in opposition to one another.
– CG Jung
The aspiration to ‘save’ the world is the morbid phenomenon of a people’s youth…The more we are dispossessed, the more intense our appetites and our illusions become.
– Emil Cioran
You can decorate absence
however you want,
but you’re still gonna feel
what’s missing.
– Siobhan Vivian
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
I Have Changed the Numbers on
My Watch
I have changed the numbers on my watch,
and now perhaps something else will change.
Now perhaps
at precisely 6 a.m.
you will not get up
and gathering your things together
go forever.
Perhaps now you will find it is
far too early to go,
or far too late,
and stay forever.
– Brian Patten
Fiber optic cables
are the nervous system
of the Great AI,
the old monk realized.
– The Old Monk
In the City
for Monica Sok
These bridges are a feat of engineering. These pork & chive dumplings
we bought together, before hopping on a train
& crossing bridges, are a feat of engineering. Talking to you, crossing bridges
in trains, eating pork & chive dumplings in your bright boxcar
of a kitchen in Brooklyn, is an engineer’s dream-feat
of astonishment. Tonight I cannot believe
the skyline because the skyline believes in me, forgives me my drooling
astonishment over it & over the fact that this happens,
this night, every night, its belief, glittering mad & megawatt like the dreams
of parents. By the way, is this soy sauce
reduced sodium? Do you know? Do we care? High, unabashed sodium intake!
Unabashed exclamation points! New York is an exclamation
I take, making my escape, away from the quiet snowy commas of Upstate
& the mess of questions marking my Bostonian past.
In New York we read Darwish, we write broken sonnets finally forgiving
the Broken English of Our Mothers, we eat
pork & chive dumplings, & I know, it’s such a 90s fantasy
of multiculturalism that I am
rehashing, but still, in New York I feel I can tell you how my mother & I
used to make dumplings together, like a scene
out of The Joy Luck Club. The small kitchen, the small bowl of water
between us. How we dipped index finger, thumb.
Sealed each dumpling like tucking in a secret, goodnight.
The meat of a memory. A feat of engineering.
A dream of mother & son. Interrupted by the father, my father
who made my mother get on a plane, a theory,
years of nowhere across American No’s, a degree that proved useless.
Proved he was the father. I try to build a bridge
to my parents but only reach my mother & it’s a bridge she’s about to
jump off of. I run to her, she jumps, she’s
swimming, saying, Finally I’ve learned—all this time, trying to get from one useless
chunk of land to another, when I should’ve stayed
in the water. & we’re drinking tap water in your bright Brooklyn kitchen.
I don’t know what to tell you. I thought I could
tell this story, give it a way out of itself. Even here, in my fabulous
Tony-winning monologue of a New York, I’m struggling to get
to the Joy, the Luck. I tell you my mother still
boils the water, though she knows she doesn’t have to anymore.
Her special kettle boils in no time, is a feat of engineering.
She could boil my father in it
& he’d come out a better person, in beautiful shoes.
She could boil the Atlantic, the Pacific, every idyllic
American pond with its swans. She would.
– Chen Chen
That shoreline where the island of knowing meets the unfathomable sea of our own being is the landscape of myth.
– William Irwin Thompson
DOCUMENTARY
Today I saw a city burning on TV.
Someone distant and ghostlike
Walked through the rubble,
And then the camera made a sweep
Of the fiery sky and the clouds.
Alone, stepping carefully,
His head bowed so low — he didn’t have a head –
While searching for something
Of no interest to the camera
Which wanted us to admire the sky
With its towers of black smoke,
And the accompanying commentary,
Words about “our tragic age.”
Which I didn’t hear – watching him
Stop and bend over
Just as he vanished from view.
– Charles Simic
I suppose listening is a kind of knowledge, or as close as one can come.
Perhaps we can use our knowledge to preserve a space where lack of knowledge can survive.
– Mary Ruefle
as immortal
as possible
strawflower
– Ernest Wit
You can’t destroy someone
with a verb —
you need a noun,
the old monk told
the debate team.
– The Old Monk
The only advice I have for you tonight is not to actively resist or fight the system, because active protest and resistance merely entangles you in the system. Instead, ignore it, walk away from it.
Turn your backs on it, laugh at it. Don’t be outraged, be outrageous! Never be stupid enough to respect authority unless that authority proves itself respectable.
So be your own authority, lead yourselves…Refuse to play it safe, for it is from the wavering edge of risk that the sweetest honey of freedom drips and drips. Live dangerously, live lovingly.
– Tom Robbins
No easy thing to bear, the weight of sweetness.
– Li-Young Lee
I want to live to an age when I look hardly human.
– Sharon Olds
the house
by Irena Klepfisz
i
arranging it is far easier
than living it. the books
stand ready on the shelves.
classifications by time or place
come naturally to me. alone
finding the book important is difficult.
i’ve started to live here many mornings
opening my eyes vowing this morning
i will really begin. objects intrude themselves:
floors need sweeping and one carton
unopened is hidden in a closet.
ii
the telescope is still
disassembled (at night
the skies are clear).
mirrors and lenses
lie in velvet lined cases.
i am afraid to use them.
iii
one of my cats was badly
clawed i could see layers
of muscle and fat. my neighbor
warns there are foxes here.
i do not tell my neighbor
his cats look wild. i do not
know my neighbor’s name.
iv
there are fears to which
i do not admit. there are fears
which i refuse to name. alone
in the dark i am
afraid of others but also
of the clean smell
of the refrigerator;
the freshness of chlorine
draws me. i walk quickly
towards the bedroom.
v
this morning i cleaned
the yard. i saw a face
from the city in the trees.
the face was a mask
and i pulled it off
but there was nothing.
vi
patterns in rock originated from
pressure. the veins were once separate
stones pushed together stamped into
other hard flesh. they merged
and became ornamental.
the colors
blend surprisingly well. rings
match shapes and textures. unwilling
inanimate they played their roles
the iceberg scraping off layers till
the desired smoothness was achieved.
vii
i do not understand my place
in it. it seems to have a life
of its own made by others
simply on loan for a year.
they ask me: how is
your book? and i give accurate
gas meter readings wondering
where i will be next year.
the world here is fluid
the beaches undefined. there are rocks
whose function i do not know.
Restricted Fragile Materials
by Catherine Barnett
It should be easy, I tell my son,
to dispose of the possessions kept
in these rooms.
I’ve left some things on a shelf for him, see?
These coupons might still be valid,
the vinegar will keep forever.
I’ve always liked the idea of order.
I’ve always liked the idea of the sofa at West Elm
but never did commit.
If I could, I’d just lie here
taking measurements,
leaving ghostlier and ghostlier
impressions until thinking ends
and the lights go out.
Let my memory-depleted memory
preserve all this joy:
restricted fragile materials.
Who can stop me?
It’s not illegal to want to hold on.
To get to my archives,
my son will have to put his ear to the ground,
listen for a quiet scream.
And beneath that, like groundwater,
the endless chatter
of praise and lament.
How will I tell him the river I
feared to drink from
has come to drink from me?
May he, too, have fair winds
and following seas.
Translators are the shadow heroes of literature.
– Paul Auster
We’ve all led raucous lives,
some of them inside, some of them out.
But only the poem you leave behind is what’s important.
Everyone knows this.
The voyage into the interior is all that matters,
Whatever your ride.
Sometimes I can’t sit still for all the asininities I read.
Give me the hummingbird, who has to eat sixty times
His own weight a day just to stay alive.
Now that’s a life on the edge.
– Charles Wright
May I meet this moment fully,
May I meet it as a friend.
– Sylvia Boorstein
Let me stay here until the end, I said to the lord, and we’ll call it even. Let me tie my shadow to your feet and call it friendship, I said to myself.
– Ocean Vuong
Mine ear is open, and my heart prepared. The worst is worldly loss thou canst unfold. Say, is my kingdom lost?
– Richard II by William Shakespeare
There is a pattern to the universe and everything in it, and there are knowledge systems and traditions that follow this pattern to maintain balance, to keep the temptations of narcissism in check. But recent traditions have emerged that break down creation systems like a virus, infecting complex patterns with artificial simplicity, exercising a civilizing control over what some see as chaos. The Sumerians started it. The Romans perfected it. The Anglosphere inherited it. The world is now mired in it. The war between good and evil is in reality an imposition of stupidity and simplicity over wisdom and complexity.
– Tyson Yunkaporta
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
Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead…Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father.
– G.K. Chesterton
Flowers ::
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
Your thoughts and feelings are an organic part of nature expressing itself through you. Nature isn’t going to be dishonest about how you feel, and you don’t have a choice about what thoughts nature brings up in you. Accepting the truth of your feelings and thoughts doesn’t make you a bad person. It makes you a whole person, and mature enough to know your own mind.
– Lindsay C. Gibson
Danger, when it is always imminent, does harm. It doesn’t need to actually arrive. You exhaust yourself in the act of forever looking over your shoulder. Your body readies itself to fight and never quite discharges that chemical cocktail. You channel it instead into anger and self-pity and anxiety and hopelessness. You divert it into work. But really what you do, with every fibre of your being, is watch. You are incessantly, exhaustingly alert. You don’t dare ever let up, just in case the danger takes advantage of your inattention. I’ve forgotten what it feels like to have space in my brain for anything other than watching. For a long time I kept working teaching, pitching articles, writing editorial reports and for a while, that felt like a life raft. But then, incrementally, it became impossible. I was aware of a fog descending, a seizing of the gears, but it seemed diffuse until now.
– Katherine May
I have come to understand my spirituality as an ongoing internal lyrical state of consciousness, semi-consciousness and unconsciousness in which I find meaning, comfort, refuge, inspiration, mystery and strength.
– Michael Leunig
The so-called ‘black sheep’ of the family are, in fact, seekers of liberation roads for the family tree. Those members of the tree who do not adapt to the rules or traditions of the family system, those who were constantly seeking to revolutionize beliefs, going in contrast to roads marked by family traditions, those criticized, tried and even rejected, those, by general, they are called to release the tree of repetitive stories that frustrate entire generations.
The ‘black sheep’, those who do not adapt, those who scream rebel, repair, detoxify and create a new and blooming branch… Countless unfulfilled desires, unfulfilled dreams, frustrated talents of our ancestors manifest themselves in their rebellion looking to take place. the family tree, by inertia, will want to continue to maintain the castrating and toxic course of its trunk, which makes its task difficult and conflicting… That no one makes you doubt, take care of your ‘rarity’ as the most precious flower of your tree.
You are the dream of all your ancestors.
– Bert Hellinger
The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.
– Cormac McCarthy
The doorman yells “Les, there’s someone down here to see you. His name is Django Reinhardt.” I hollered back, “Yeah, right. Send up Jesus Christ and a case of beer.”
– Les Paul, In His Own Words
A classroom is really the rehearsal room. It is where we can make mistakes; figure out what works and what doesn’t work; and blunder our way to beauty. All masters were once foolish apprentices and to know the process that mastery requires is to also know that self-esteem is not found in perfection but in the fundamental belief that with practice, the learner will improve.
– Elizabeth Napp
If you are perfect, you cannot be complete, because you leave out all the imperfections of your nature. If you are complete, you cannot be perfect, for being complete means that you contain good and evil, right and wrong, hope and despair. So perhaps it is better to be content with something less than perfection and something less than completion. Perhaps we need to be more willing to accept life as it comes.
– June Singer, PhD
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 Gottschalk
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
To a large extent, creativity is self-generated in areas of the mind beyond or beneath the individual’s willful, conscious control. All he can do is discipline his consciousness to accommodate the needs of the creative process.
– Ingo Swann
People fill in the unknown with what fits with THEIR known.
– Ingo Swann
An ARCHETYPE is defined as “the original pattern or model”
– Ingo Swann
Seen from Earth, a comet is a prodigy, coming out of the void for no reason, returning to the void for no reason. They call it unpredictable because they cannot predict it. From the comet’s own point of view, nothing could be simpler. It starts in the outer darkness, aims directly at the sun, and never stops till it gets there. Everything else spins in its same orbit forever. The comet heads for the source. They call it crooked because it is too straight. They call it unpredictable because it is too fixed. They call it chaotic because it is too linear.
– Scott Alexander
My poetics and my writing practice are shaped somewhat by Zen Buddhist philosophy. I’ve been, for as long as memory serves, drawn to the presence of silence, to intuitive leaps of the mind, to the unsayable, and to deep attention and still contemplation. If I were to examine the intersection of my interest in Buddhism and in poetic practice, I believe it partially comes out of an intractable frustration with my own painful slowness as a writer, and feeling somewhat alienated by the professionalization of poetry—the demands to publish and to be public-facing—simply, by all that seems counter to what drew me to this slow and solitary art to begin with. In times where the psychic pressure around writing and publishing have built in my head, or when I have drained myself of creative energies, I long to access a place of clarity and play. I seek out a space where there are no stakes, a space where the ego is quieted or dissolved, and where practice is pleasure unyoked from my own or another’s critical gaze.
– Jenny Xie
Meditation aims not so much to solve a person’s particular problems as to solve the person altogether.
– David Rome
Empires do not suffer emptiness of purpose at the time of their creation. It is when they have become established that aims are lost and replaced by vague ritual.
– Paul Muad’Dib, Dune
But love, sooner or later, forces us out of time. It does not accept that limit.’
– Wendell Berry
A wave is never found alone, but is mingled with the other waves.
– Leonardo da Vinci
Studying texts and stiff meditation
can make you lose your Original Mind.
A solitary tune by a fisherman, though,
can be an invaluable treasure.
Dusk rain on the river,
the moon peeking in and out of the clouds;
Elegant beyond words,
he chants his songs night after night.
– Ikkyu
You go up in the Hills and there are gurus and shamans who diddle the various gods, and their answers all, amazingly, reveal to the adherents the same thing: There is nothing wrong with you; you are perfect. You only fail when you fail to bring love and light and a mirror of the perfect soul you own to full fruition. And then you chant a song, rub on an oil, and make another appointment to find surcease, love, attention, a reason to continue.
There is no improvement of love, life, or art in the Hills, but there are comfortable gurus, teachers, coaches, and there is light and love and peace and odd cereals and unguents, and those perpetually diddled gods, who must, at some point, become abraded and irritated, and we can only guess what might happen at that point.
But we know what happened to Bill Inge, on Oriole and Thrasher, in 1973, when gurus, both human and of liquid spirit, failed to deliver. The Hills, and, of course, the flats, too, are full of dead people imitating life every day, looking for light and love, and leaving nothing but rich gurus.
– Tennessee Williams, Life in Hollywood
This unfinished business of my
childhood
this emerald lake
from my journey’s other
side
haunts hierarchies of heavens
a palm forest
fell overnight
to make room for an unwanted
garden
ever since
fevers and swellings
turn me into a river
– Etel Adnan
As I sit here
in my little boat
tied to the shore
of the pasing river
in a time of ruin,
I think of you,
old ancestor,
and wish you well.
– Wendell Berry
If while washing dishes, we think only of the cup of tea that awaits us, thus hurrying to get the dishes out of the way as if they were a nuisance, then we are not “washing the dishes to wash the dishes.” What’s more, we are not alive during the time we are washing the dishes. In fact we are completely incapable of realizing the miracle of life while standing at the sink. If we can’t wash the dishes, the chances are we won’t be able to drink our tea either. While drinking the cup of tea, we will only be thinking of other things, barely aware of the cup in our hands. Thus we are sucked away into the future—and we are incapable of actually living one minute of life.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Be wary of any influence in your environment that dismisses or judges your enthusiasm. Without it, you would become anesthetized to life itself.
Anyone who demands this smallness of you is in danger themselves and may have contracted this insidious, deadening monotone.
Enthusiasm is the vitality of spirit, expressing itself through us, and its grace in our voice should be welcomed and cherished.
The word originates in the early 17th century, from the Greek enthousiasmos meaning ‘possessed by god.’
Now, more than ever, the world needs your enlargement, your weirdness, your fiery crescendos of rebellion from boring.
– Toko-pa Turner
This life has been a landscape of pain and still, flowers bloom in it.
– Sanober Khan, A Thousand Flamingos
Why is some music so much deeper and more beautiful than other music? It is because form, in music, is expressive–expressive to some strange subconscious regions of our minds. The sounds of music do not refer to serfs or city-states, but they do trigger clouds of emotion in our innermost selves; in that sense musical meaning IS dependent on intangible links from symbols to things in the world–those ‘things’, in this case, being secret software structures in our minds.
– Douglas Hofstadter
The activities of writing and reading are essentially about freedom, about going out into the open, and it is this striving toward freedom that is fundamental, rather than that what we seek to free ourselves from, which can be an identity, and ideology of equality, or a certain conception of reality.
– Karl Ove Knausgaard
Bees Were Better
In college, people were always breaking up.
We broke up in parking lots,
beside fountains.
Two people broke up
across a table from me
at the library.
I could not sit at that table again
though I did not know them.
I studied bees, who were able
to convey messages through dancing
and could find their ways
home to their hives
even if someone put up a blockade
of sheets and boards and wire.
Bees had radar in their wings and brains
that humans could barely understand.
I wrote a paper proclaiming
their brilliance and superiority
and revised it at a small café
featuring wooden hive-shaped honey-dippers
in silver honeypots
at every table.
– Naomi Shihab Nye
All theory, dear friend, is gray, but the golden tree of life springs ever green.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
To make some sense of the world, according to our bent of mind and the circumstances into which we have been born, we may resort to religion, philosophy, or science. But however clever and compelling our thinking and investigation may be, it is all based upon concepts spun out in a mind we do not fully understand. We are using an uncharted and uncalibrated instrument as our means of comprehension. So everything we think we know is related to a point of ignorance.
The only answer to the mystery of life in this ocean of material existence is recollection of our Source – with the help of the ever-present divine grace, to stitch together whatever fleeting moments of remembrance we may have into one continuous awareness of the divine presence within ourselves and within all things. Then, by degrees, the veil will be pulled aside, the clouds of ignorance will disperse, and the light of true understanding will dawn. Then, little by little, our awareness of the Divine will grow until at length we realize the One who has been with us all along.
– Jim Fagiolo
…the worst of all possible misunderstandings would occur if psychology should be influenced to model itself after a physics which is not there any more, which has been quite outdated.
– J. Robert Oppenheimer
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
No matter what,
nobody can take away the dances
you’ve already had.
– Gabriel García Márquez
Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form inself on the edge of consciousness.
– Raymond Chandler
In a fairy tale, there are no roads. You start out walking, as if in a straight line, and eventually that line reveals itself to be a labyrinth, a perfect circle, a spiral, or even a star . . .
– Christina Campo, (tr. Alex Andriesse)
We live in a fantasy world,
a world of illusion. The great
task in life is to find reality.
– Iris Murdoch
never say die
a little wildflower
blooming
– Issa
The materialist sees myth as superstitious gibberish from the old days before we had science and technology; the idolator takes the myth literally. The problem is that both are interested in power.
– William Irwin Thompson
I think this is the key dialectics of the current moment, of capitalist realism, that nothing is fixed, but nothing will ever happen. The two are totally related.
– Mark Fisher
every morning
a cricket practicing
to improve
– Basho
I wanted my films to be like a snail’s trail in the moonlight.
– Stan Brakhage
Why was someone else’s need for a home / greater than our own need for our own homes / we were already living in?
– Naomi Shihab Nye
goddamn it, so much energy I’ve spent convincing myself that the most important thing in Life is something other than poetry
all that effort, wasted
– River Kenna
The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.
– Eric Hoffer
To make others comfortable, first make yourself comfortable with them. It is not very easy, but in time we may see it as worthwhile—even natural!
– Bhante Henepola Gunaratana
Jung had the intuition that we somehow contain the spirits and gods, and that there are forces deep inside us that can somehow be brought into harmony with the forces outside us.
– Colin Wilson
Our nation’s conscience is speaking to us through our children […]
– Rashid Khalidi
Love is not a phenomenon of this world, and it does not belong to men, but is infinity itself.
– Peter Ouspensky
Dear spit, the week is turning over
with the world. All is angry shouting outdoors.
I feel like one of St. Ursula’s virgins
taking a last look at shelving rock and tree,
sailing into what must be the ineffable
if indeed it means anything to itself.
– John Ashbery
People became so used to seeing shit on film that they no longer realized it was shit.
– Charles Bukowski
If you can get yourself
halfway there,
we can get you
the rest of the way home,
they told the old monk
at the end.
– The Old Monk
If your doctor says you need to avoid fruits to burn fat you need a new doctor.
– Dan Go
These are your
instructions:
you find a stone
and rub it til it
shines,
the old monk told
his students.
– The Old Monk
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 write poetry that is concealed in the reader.
Between my text and image
-their junction-
Is The Poem
Taking the importance of
the other voice
Further
– Laura Kerr
If you’re going to do anything new or innovative, you have to be willing to be misunderstood.
– Jeff Bezos
People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.
– James Baldwin
Even a false adumbration of the world of the spirit is better than none at all.
– Cormac McCarthy
—Yes he thought Between grief and nothing I will take grief.
– Faulkner, Wild Palms
All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perception and arbitrary values.
– Marshall McLuhan
The remedy for loneliness is in learning to admit solitude as one admits the bayonet: gracefully, now that already it pierces the heart.
– Denis Johnson
I’ve taken up the craft,
so I can weave
traditions
into the palms of my children.
– Arielle Taitano Lowe
The more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become.
– May Sarton
No sunburnt tourists, no convertibles on Kalākaua Ave.
not even a leathery beach boy to survey the shoreline.
– Christy Passion
Nature is pleased with simplicity. And nature is no fool
– Isaac Newton
What causes us to recoil, strike, and retreat is also what allows us to reach out from the anxiety of unknowing and dare to trust what is to come.
– Terry Tempest Williams
Jung was a fierce individualist whose passion was to achieve recognition for the reality of the psyche, and for the continued existence of sacred forces in a desacralized world.
– David Tacey
I guess the point is, as you go on in this life you become aware of the folly of thinking you did something all by yourself. We’re held up by others all along the way.
– Tobias Wolff
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.
– Dorothy Gladys “Dodie” Smith
My internal chrono
Years, hours, minutes
Loves, loss, longing
Desire, drought, dreams
Measurements of life
– Rachel Newcombe
Take a word such as bread, or war; take a word such as chair, or bed or Heaven. Behind every word is a whole world.
– Heinrich Böll
Atonal Breakdown
by Chris Forhan
I was born happy, not knowing about what.
Like Ahab’s hat, I ought to be shrunk
to a speck and dropped by beak into the sea.
I have it coming to me, the way I went
melancholy at the wedding and slunk off
to sleep in the glen of rhododendrons,
the way I find the night sky tiresome,
shabby moon tacked to black.
I was born happy, not knowing about what.
Then came safety pins, bowls
of holy water, caterpillars writhing
in fire in piles of clipped branches.
What life was this, a planet in it,
the dead in flames? Flowers—nasturtium,
delphinium, whatever, so sweet, so strange—
when did I begin to see them
as silent accusations against me? Bad
habit of the brain. When did the sky,
blushing, begin to seem evidence
of a crime I had yet to admit to?
The otter, slippery in her marsh,
the mole in his cellar, some smudge
of trees in the muzzy distance became
my symbols. I’d arrived late, hardly worth
the noticing, amid the rubble
of others’ thinking, a chaos of pig bones
boiled down for lip gloss, cannery ratchets
chewing hands off at the wrist,
pleasure boats, shoulder to shoulder, rising
in the locks, deer stepping tentatively
across megastore parking lots. I step
tentatively, too, bearing my almost-plans
behind my almost-face, my mind a net
any fish slips through, golden, gone.
I ought to seek a new key and new tune,
unhackneyed and true, for child choir and theremin.
I ought to be rethought or forgotten.
I ought to find a rain to wash all I’ve seen
of consequence. This bad tooth wouldn’t hurt me
if I had no head. No nightmare could haunt me
if I were vapor vanishing in the dusk.
I was born happy, not knowing about what.
That’s how it begins, making a film, writing a book, painting a picture, composing a tune, generally creating something.
You have a wish.
You wish that something might exist, and then you work on it until it does.
– Wim Wenders
True love is born from understanding.
– Buddha
García Márquez once told me…about entire villages in Colombia that hauled their cemeteries with them as they migrated, trying to keep some semblance of the past alive in the midst of the multiple catastrophes that had uprooted them.
– Ariel Dorfman
Anxiety doesn’t just come from a thought we’re thinking, it comes from inside our body—from our internal patterning, where unresolved trauma, deep shame, and painful experiences are still running.
– Debra Mittler
I hope when you see things you could have handled differently in hindsight, you can also see that version of yourself that was doing the best they could with what they knew at the time.
– Michell C. Clark
He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.
– Gabriel García Márquez
REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #90
ANCIENT HISTORY
The women are lying down
in front of the bulldozers
sent to destroy
the last of the olive groves.
– Diane di Prima
Art is art (all the arts)and where it is placed be it here, there, museum, gallery, webs, nets etc are only spaces.
– Laura Kerr
When you sit upright but relaxed in the posture of meditation, your heart is naked.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Ideals are for greeting cards. I am trying to change consciousness.
– Harold Brodkey
I see contemporary writing
as a dirty plate
covered with junk food,
and I want something
more substantial than that.
Like tofu sausages.
– john zbigniew guzlowski
I know that attention turns to devotion. And I understand how easily devotion can be exploited and weaponized.
– Meg Conley
Even when I’m stretched out in my coffin they may find me tinkering with some poem.
– Charles Simic
Why speak of the use
of poetry? Poetry
is what uses us
– Hayden Carruth
We’ve been locked in the world’s box,
love sets us free, time kills us.
– Adam Zagajewski
…we owe it to ourselves and to others to keep pushing the envelope in the direction of restraint, to give up the things we don’t need, so as to be as unburdensome as possible.
– Thanissaro Bhikkhu
I’m no conservative, but my god I wish we were anywhere near that strategic and patient.
– Lisa Lucas
The elites have found a way to keep the proletariat down. Endless debt for college degrees that don’t often even result in jobs.
– Zeeshan Jaanam
Our practice as Buddhists is not what style of meditation, which sutra, or which teacher we revere above all else. Our practice is to experience this single moment of faith and understanding, to abide in it, and to share it.
– Mark Herrick
who loves the sun?
a stray dog
stretches out
– @pauldavidmena
knowing nothing
he’s in charge of the rules –
dandelion seeds
– @cloudfollower1
Sometimes, she liked that she had this other work she had no passion for.
– Tommy Orange
We need to do something about our national debt or the dollar will be worth nothing.
– Elon Musk
Describing one’s experience of art is itself a form of art; the burden of describing it is like the burden of producing it.
– Stanley Cavell
Many patients cannot hear until they feel heard.
– Leston Havens
I am life. I have no name.
I am as the fresh breeze
of the mountains.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
That moment when it hits you that your life won’t last forever and you think about the people you love deeply and thinking about it aches, and you don’t know if it’s because sometimes you love people so much it hurts, or because you wonder if you missed opportunities to love them or could have loved them better, and you are reminded once again that there is nothing more important than love.
The greatest single need and desire of humankind is love. To love is the greatest power and freedom we possess. Every thought, word, and action motivated by love, changes the world. Love is the highest expression of what it means to be human. The chief characteristic of true enlightenment is love.
The best I know to say is don’t leave love left undone. There may be things you don’t accomplish, attain, or achieve in this world. But don’t let shrinking back from love be one of them. If you’re fortunate, you discover that love is the only thing that really matters, love heals everything, and love is all there is. On your way out of this world you’ll look back and see it was always about that… it was always love.
– Jim Palmer
Strive to change the world in such a way that there’s no further need to be a dissident. Read between the lives, and write between the lines. “Be committed to something outside yourself.”
– Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Poetry “lies” its way to the “Truth.”
– John Ciardi
“im-mi-grant …”
the way English tastes
on my tongue
– Chen- Ou-Liu
Catching water isn’t hard. Plants love to practice that. Every ocean also knows a lot about holding water. Living bodies are little ponds where love, like water, helps things grow and join.
– George Gorman
There always is the potential to create an environment of blame — or one that is conducive to loving-kindness.
– Pema Chodron
When the rose and the cross are united the alchemical marriage is complete and the drama ends. Then we wake from history and enter eternity.
– Robert Anton Wilson
Chinese silver coin
you handed me
as I left for Canada
lost to the sky —
the mid-autumn moon
– Chen- Ou-Liu
Oh yes, the ronin said. There is wonder in this world. No money in poetry, but the moon is a silver coin.
– Voima Oy
Groovin’ Low
by A.B. Spellman
my swing is more mellow
these days: not the hardbop drive
i used to roll but more of a cool
foxtrot. my eyes still close
when the rhythm locks; i’ve learned
to boogie with my feet on the floor
i’m still movin’, still groovin’
still fallin’ in love
i bop to the bass line now. the trap set
paradiddles ratamacues & flams
that used to spin me in place still set me
off, but i bop to the bass line now
i enter the tune from the bottom up
& let trumpet & sax wheel above me
so don’t look for me in the treble
don’t look for me in the fly
staccato splatter of the hot young horn
no, you’ll find me in the nuance
hanging out in inflection & slur
i’m the one executing the half-bent
dip in the slow slowdrag
with the smug little smile
& the really cool shades
The Gift of India
Is there aught you need that my hands withhold,
Rich gifts of raiment or grain or gold?
Lo! I have flung to the East and West
Priceless treasures torn from my breast,
And yielded the sons of my stricken womb
To the drum-beats of duty, the sabres of doom.
Gathered like pearls in their alien graves
Silent they sleep by the Persian waves,
Scattered like shells on Egyptian sands,
They lie with pale brows and brave, broken hands,
They are strewn like blossoms mown down by chance
On the blood-brown meadows of Flanders and France.
Can ye measure the grief of the tears I weep
Or compass the woe of the watch I keep?
Or the pride that thrills thro’ my heart’s despair
And the hope that comforts the anguish of prayer?
And the far sad glorious vision I see
Of the torn red banners of Victory?
When the terror and tumult of hate shall cease
And life be refashioned on anvils of peace,
And your love shall offer memorial thanks
To the comrades who fought in your dauntless ranks,
And you honour the deeds of the deathless ones
Remember the blood of thy martyred sons!
– Sarojini Naidu
A folk singer never sings a song the same way twice.
– Woody Guthrie
Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.
– George Orwell
Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives and few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time.
– Voltaire
Beyond life there is death, beyond exuberance, there is inevitable decay. Equally beyond death, there is life, old forms in new environments.
– H.D.
Psychoanalysis is the mental illness for which it claims to be the cure.
– Karl Kraus
You’re walking the labyrinth of life. Yes, you’re meant to move forward, but almost never in a straight line. Yes, there’s an element of achievement, of beginning and ending, but those are minor compared to the element of being here now. In the moments you stop trying to conquer the labyrinth of life and simply inhabit it, you’ll realize it was designed to hold you safe as you explore what feels dangerous. You’ll see that you’re exactly where you’re meant to be, meandering along a crooked path that is meant to lead you not onward, but inward.
– Martha Beck
We are the same. There is no difference anywhere in the world. People are people. They laugh, cry, feel, and love, and music seems to be the common denomination that brings us all together. Music cuts through all boundaries and goes right to the soul.
– Willie Nelson
Give everyone healthcare, get rid of student loan debt, and offer childcare. Take care of those around you and make communities healthier and happier. So much money is being wasted on other countries, corporate subsidies, and tax-evading uber-rich. We’ll all be better off if we take care of each other.
– Ruben Quesada
Other people’s life stories are not a topic for debate. One should hear them out, and reciprocate in the same coin.
– Olga Tokarczuk
There is never any hurry on the creative plane; and there is no lack of opportunity.
– Wallace D. Wattles
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
If he’d learned one thing while he’d been away, it was that loneliness is the most taboo subject in the world. Forget sex or politics or religion. Or even failure. Loneliness is what clears out a room.
– Douglas Coupland
The sins of the ancestors continue down the generations until one person comes to consciousness and redeems the curse.
– Sally Kester
You can advance only by more than filling your present place.
– Wallace D. Wattles
Synchronicity is Jung’s coinage for what we can call ‘meaningful coincidence’, when the inner and outer worlds reflect each other with such accuracy and obvious meaning that to resort to mere coincidence as an explanation is useless.
– Gary Lachman
There comes a time when the bubble of ego is popped and you can’t get the ground back for an extended period of time. Those times, when you absolutely cannot get it back together, are the most rich and powerful times in our lives.
– Pema Chodron
You must choose happiness. Happiness is a habit. It is a good habit to ponder often on whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report.
– Dr. Joseph Murphy
It is low hearts and not low brows that are vulgar.
– C.S. Lewis
Freedom is yours when you end the battle.
– Vadim Zeland
Red Sea
We cannot cross until we carry each other,
all of us refugees, all of us prophets.
No more taking turns on history’s wheel,
trying to collect old debts no-one can pay.
The sea will not open that way.
This time that country
is what we promise each other,
our rage pressed cheek to cheek
until tears flood the space between,
until there are no enemies left,
because this time no one will be left to drown
and all of us must be chosen.
This time it’s all of us or none.
– Aurora Levin Morales
how glorious
fresh green leaves
flashing in the sun
– Basho
Dirt is matter out of place. Who names the place.
– Anne Carson
For centuries, knowledge has been pursued as a defense against truth.
– Jacques Lacan
Probability is not always on the side of truth.
– Kleist
The facts are always friendly. Every bit of evidence one can acquire, in any area, leads one that much closer to what is true. And being closer to the truth can never be a harmful or dangerous or unsatisfying thing.
– Carl Rogers
Without passion you cannot do anything vital.
– Krishnamurti
Aesthetic appreciation does not mean looking for beauty alone. It means looking at things with space around them.
– Chögyam Trungpa
In general, if I announce I have a good idea for you, back away slowly. Then run.
– Anne Lamott
for the oars:
part the waters
they fold again
– Gerry Loose
I never heard of anyone who was really literate or who ever really loved books who wanted to suppress any of them.
– Robertson Davies
Artichoke
O heart weighed down by so many wings
– Joseph Hutchison
on a shelf
far from its own habitat
a seashell sings
– James Welsh
And see that you keep a cheerful demeanor and retain your independence of outside help and the peace which others can give. Your duty is to stand straight – not held straight.
– Marcus Aurelius
We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.
– Maya Angelou
A gesture of love for someone who cannot reciprocate: this is to imitate God’s selfless style.
– Pope Francis
I have written
the same poem
many times.
Each time
it is different.
– john zbigniew guzlowski
The errors of great men are venerable because they are more fruitful than the truths of little men.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
So all they have left is the drifting
dinghy of their hearts
the castaway’s jagged rocks
– Mikeas Sánchez, translated by Wendy Call and Shook
Today’s reality
in yesterday’s precise and fine
detail
– Mari Evans
…the essence of normality is the refusal of reality.
– Ernest Becker
The division is wide. Do you remember the ways we knew to say nothing and fill the spaces between us?
– Lara Coley
seventies imprints
new words in our grapholect
like memory foam
– Sheila Burpee Duncan
Reviewing may seem like power, but it’s very ephemeral power.
– Helen Vendler
I cannot tell
if this dark western
sky will bring rain
but a sudden wind
thrashes the trees
– Kim Dorman
All I Ever Wanted
by Katie Ford
for DMK
When I thought it was right to name my desires,
what I wanted of life, they seemed to turn
like bleating sheep, not to me, who could have been
a caring, if unskilled, shepherd, but to the boxed-in hills
beyond which the blue mountains sloped down
with poppies orange as crayfish all the way to the Pacific seas
in which the hulls of whales steered them
in search of a mate for whom they bellowed
in a new, highly particular song
we might call the most ardent articulation of love,
the pin at the tip of evolution,
modestly shining.
In the middle of my life
it was right to say my desires
but they went away. I couldn’t even make them out,
not even as dots
now in the distance.
Yet I see the small lights
of winter campfires in the hills—
teenagers in love often go there
for their first nights—and each yellow-white glow
tells me what I can know and admit to knowing,
that all I ever wanted
was to sit by a fire with someone
who wanted me in measure the same to my wanting.
To want to make a fire with someone,
with you,
was all.
my study Bible
the rainbow display left
by bright markers
maybe it was a test
form a more colorful God
– @hegelincanada
TEN PAST ELEVEN
This is the time of day the mailman comes.
his is the mailman who dreams every night
how his mother is home from vacation in the grave,
waiting to kiss him in the kitchen in the sun.
He steps off down the sidewalk in his brisk black shoes.
All the homesick letters ever written are dangling
from the halltree in his brain. We watch him move
into a cool bower of elms. We are nowhere
near the ocean. There is sunlight everywhere.
We dream in circles, answer our own loveletters,
bring soups all day in huge bowls for the dead.
They primp in our mirrors, borrow our talcum powder,
and depart by way of the backyard iron fence.
This was the light we found ourselves in once
when everyone kept coming through the musty vestibule
on their way in to greet us where we sat in the sun.
…To be, in a word, unborable. . . . It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.
– David Foster Wallace
a clover field
dotted with dandelions
free-range children
– @hegelincanada
It’s useful indeed to break things down into things and to classify them, but the moment it gives us the impression that these little bits into which we have divided the world are really and in nature separate from each other, we get into confusion.
– Alan Watts
I don’t believe it’s possible to be neutral. The world is already moving in certain directions. And to be neutral, to be passive in a situation like that is to collaborate with whatever is going on. And I, as a teacher, do not want to be a collaborator with whatever is happening in the world. I want myself, as a teacher, and I want you as students, to intercede with whatever is happening in the world.
– Howard Zinn
what you see is what you see.
– Frank Stella
I’m a lousy Jew, but I’d like to disturb the grass,
unearth him from the crowded grave, and let his damp fingers
write this story.
– Tony Barnstone
Maybe the only thing left to do is let life unfold.
– J. Mike Feilds
Do not whine…
Do not complain.
Work harder.
Spend more time
alone.
– Joan Didion
it is true that love proceeds from the heart, but let us not be hasty about this and forget the eternal truth that love forms the heart.
– søren kierkegaard
If we don’t negate our habitual patterns, we can never fully appreciate the world.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Enlightenment and mastery are great goals, but not required to reap the benefits of Buddhism. The main thing is to have a practice, and to keep it alive, personally relevant, and engaged. Make it your own, and bring it with you everywhere.
– Erik Hansen
Of all of hauntings, the greatest is the one we alone produce: the unlived life. None of us will find the courage, or the will, or the capacity to completely fulfill the possibility invested in us by the gods. But we are also accountable for what we do not attempt.
– James Hollis
You want to feel the physical, vibrational presence of Jesus on this side of things? Go sit in the waiting room someplace where public servants are tending to the most marginalized in our society.
– Anne Lamott
One can appreciate & celebrate each moment—there’s nothing more sacred. There’s nothing more vast or absolute. In fact, there’s nothing more!
– Pema Chodron
I look at my own body
With eyes no longer blind —
And I see that my own hands can make
The world that’s in my mind.
– Langston Hughes
You want it green
until September,
the old monk insisted.
– The Old Monk
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
If God had wanted to be
totally happy would he have
made the universe so stable,
the old monk asked.
– The Old Monk
the monk’s smile
before the empty page
his moment to teach
somewhere in nothingness
enlightenment rests
– @hegelincanada
All my life I thought some things would hold me back
but now, nobody seems to notice them
and neither do I
– China Clark
a rainbow arch
the violet fades
into the sunset
– James Welsh
Ephemeral
I want to guard the bright center
of my own life like the wide leaves
of bloodroot, one of the first wildflowers
to appear in the now-thawing earth.
How the leaves curl around the filament
of a stem, then the white bud that soon
forms at the tip, protecting it
from pelting sleet, from wind and rain
the way a palm will curve to cup
the rush of match-flame, keeping it lit.
– James Crews
We borrow from the land what we can but cannot
return to it: bluestem, coneflower, boneset, broomcorn,
a ring-necked pheasant tied to a pole, a flat stretch of land
we strip and tar and pave [. . .]
– Sarah McCartt-Jackson
It sounds plausible enough tonight, but wait until tomorrow. Wait for the common sense of the morning.
– H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
You have your Jesus moments
and then it’s Oh, Christ,
the old monk advised.
– The Old Monk
Power is power. The reason it’s power is because it doesn’t listen. If it listened, it wouldn’t be power. It’d be just one of us, and we don’t have any power.
– Arthur Miller
May we co-create spaces that require less courage, fire, hardening, and warrior mode.
May ease, breath, and rest come for each of us. We’re worthy.
– Dr. Thema
I am besieged by land and air and sea and language.
– Mahmoud Darwish
Allow people to have their moods, and allow those moods to have nothing to do with you.
– Liana Naima
In fiction, the most powerful weapon the writer has is suggestion. I think that nearly all good writing is suggestion, and all bad writing is statement.
– John McGahern
The business of philosophy is to teach man to live in uncertainty… not to reassure him, but to upset him.
– Lev Shestov
If a person just refuses to think that he has an inside problem, he’s not going to work the thing out. Nobody can do it for him. You have to learn how to recognize your own depths.
– Joseph Campbell
According to Gramsci, a combo of Taylorism and “puritanism” was “ the biggest collective effort [ever made] to create, with unprecedented speed, and a consciousness of purpose, unique in history, a new type of worker and man.
– Alina Stefanescu
come windless invader
i am a carnival of
stars a poem of blood.
– Sonia Sanchez
Being an artist is not an occupation; it is your life, your whole being.
– Chögyam Trungpa
John Donne said, “Let us make one little room, and everywhere.” That’s what I believe, really, that everything interesting begins with one person and one place.
– John McGahern
I was contemplating our relationship to the land, particularly what it means to conserve or preserve ‘public’ lands as a kind of wilderness that both does and does not remain.
– Sarah McCarty-Jackson
What I want / I simply reach out and take, no delicacy now, / the dark human bread I eat handful / by greedy handful.
– Dorianne Laux
A language is not only a tool, but a set of mental mechanisms, as well as all the cultural baggage one carries around with oneself.
– Tahar ben Jelloun
A simple ‘How can I best support you?’ can go a long way. You don’t need to solve people’s problems or rescue them. Just be there.
– Dr. Sara Kuburic
I already have tens of thousands of poems on my shelves! For me the appeal of magazines is they can be responsive to the moment, keep me up to date and steer me towards poets I wouldn’t otherwise have heard of.
– @poetclare
People strike sparks off each other; that is what I try to note down.
– Henry Green
Zadie did in fact see the inevitable (and varied) commentary coming, for what it’s worth: “Put me wherever you want: misguided socialist, toothless humanist, naïve novelist, useful idiot, apologist, denier, ally, contrarian, collaborator, traitor, inexcusable coward.”
– Lisa Lucas
I like everything in movies. My main pleasure is every day, or every month, discovering a new one. I’d like to have done all sorts of films, to have been in all films, to be known and unknown.
– Jean-Luc Godard
Our faith is expressed through our practice. Our practice is our time to remind ourselves we are worthy, we have buddhanature, we are safe at home right now in this moment. Each and every day, our practice is a gift to ourselves.
– Mark Herrick
Meditation is making friends with yourself. It’s a statement that struck me as hokey when I first heard it, but the more I practice, the more profound it seems.
– Kate Johnson
your flag decal won’t get you into heaven anymore
it’s already overcrowded from your dirty little war
– John Prine
Reducing reality into a single cause or logic is a violation of sacred world punishable by a noogie and/or wet willie.
– Daniel Thorson
Every day, on Morecambe Bay, the path had to be renegotiated, made afresh, the safe places moving with the tides and the seasons. No old way through could be relied upon: the guide must watch the bay closely and respond to it. It takes work and love.
– Noreen Masud, A Flat Place
The psyche’s job is to keep us blissfully ignorant of who we are, what we think, and how we’ll behave in any situation. We’re all operating in a dense fog of mutual reinforcement. Our thoughts are shaped primarily by legacy hardware that evolved to assume that everyone else must be right. But even when the fog is pointed out, we’re no better at navigating through it.
– Richard Powers, The Overstory
Wisdom’s ways are ways of pleasantness and all her paths are peace.
– Florence Scovel Shinn
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 was one of life’s treats, wasn’t it, paying a visit to your past, swinging like a ball on a string away from the person you loved, always knowing that the string must pull you back, and you would be oh so glad to get there.
– Jane Smiley, Golden Age
There is no there—there is only here.
– Florence Scovel Shinn
We should have signs in the subways and shops “Watch your thoughts!” “Watch your words!”
– Florence Scovel Shinn
Make a choice now! Begin to think constructively and harmoniously. To think is to speak. Your thought is your word. Let your words be as a honeycomb, sweet to the ear, and pleasant to the bones. Let your words be “like apples of gold in pictures of silver.
– Dr. Joseph Murphy
Best for a person is to live his life being as cheerful and as little distressed as possible. This will occur if he does not find his pleasures in mortal things.
– Democritus, Fragments
A man can only rise, conquer, and achieve by lifting up his thoughts.
– James Allen
The great enemy of prayer is a sense of tension. When you are tense you are always working from the outside inward. Tension in prayer is probably the greatest cause of failure to demonstrate.
– Emmet Fox
There are still enchanted worlds because the child in us never dies. The doors may be more opaque, but we can still seek them out. There are still noble adventures to be had. There are still trees that talk and caves that lead to underworlds. There will always be fairies and elves in nature because they have always danced in our hearts.
– Ted Andrews
Truth is simple and open to all, why do you complicate?
Truth is loving and lovable. It includes all, accepts all, purifies all.
It is untruth that is difficult and a source of trouble. It always wants, expects, demands.
-Nisargadatta Maharaj
You cannot make a good deal with a bad person.
– Warren Buffett
We could not become like God, so God became like us.
God showed us how to heal instead of kill, how to mend instead of destroy, how to love instead of hate.
When we nailed God to a tree, God forgave.
And when we buried God in the ground, God got up.
– Rachel Held Evans
He who controls the spice is truly the last Jedi.
– Spock
i’m telling it like it isn’t
– fiction writers
Normalize luxury in your life
Suffering is not an achievement
– Amanda Matsui
…for those who value stability, who fear transience, uncertainty, change, have erected a powerful system of stigmas and taboos against rootlessness, that disruptive, anti-social force, so that we mostly conform, we pretend to be motivated by loyalties and solidarities we do not really feel, we hide our secret identities beneath the false skins of those identities which bear the belongers’ seal of approval. But the truth leaks out in our dreams; alone in our beds (because we are all alone at night, even if we do not sleep by ourselves), we soar, we fly, we flee.
And in the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celbrate the non-belongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks. What we forbid ourselves we pay good money to watch, in a playhouse or movie theatre, or to read about between the secret covers of a book. Our libraries, our palaces of entertainment tell the truth. The tramp, the assassin, the rebel, the thief, the mutant, the outcast, the delinquent, the devil, the sinner, the traveller, the gangster, the runner, the mask: if we did not recognize in them our least-fulfilled needs, we would not invent them over and over again, in every place, in every language, in every time.
– Salman Rushdie
So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name. The problem’s name is God.
– Salman Rushdie
Actually, I’m not interested in Zen that much, as a philosophy, nor in joining any movements. I don’t pretend to understand it. I just find it comforting. And very similar to jazz. Like jazz, you can’t explain it to anyone without losing the experience. It’s got to be experienced, because it’s feeling, not words.
– Bill Evans
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
Basically, fiction is people. You can’t write fiction about ideas.
– Theodore Sturgeon
Nothing in the world will ever protect us: not our partner, not our life circumstances, not our children. After all, other people are busy protecting themselves. If we spend our life looking for the eye of the hurricane, we live a life that is fruitless.
– Charlotte Joko Beck, The Eye of the Hurricane
Dancing In Odessa
by Ilya Kaminsky
We lived north of the future, days opened
letters with a child’s signature, a raspberry, a page of sky.
My grandmother threw tomatoes
from her balcony, she pulled imagination like a blanket
over my head. I painted
my mother’s face. She understood
loneliness, hid the dead in the earth like partisans.
The night undressed us (I counted
its pulse) my mother danced, she filled the past
with peaches, casseroles. At this, my doctor laughed, his granddaughter
touched my eyelid—I kissed
the back of her knee. The city trembled,
a ghost-ship setting sail.
And my classmate invented twenty names for Jew.
He was an angel, he had no name,
we wrestled, yes. My grandfathers fought
the German tanks on tractors, I kept a suitcase full
of Brodsky’s poems. The city trembled,
a ghost-ship setting sail.
At night, I woke to whisper: yes, we lived.
We lived, yes, don’t say it was a dream.
At the local factory, my father
took a handful of snow, put it in my mouth.
The sun began a routine narration,
whitening their bodies: mother, father dancing, moving
as the darkness spoke behind them.
It was April. The sun washed the balconies, April.
I retell the story the light etches
into my hand: Little book, go to the city without me.
Ah, God, it were an easy Matter to choose a Calling had one all Time to live in! I should be fifty Years a Barrister, fifty a Physician, fifty a Clergyman, fifty a Soldier! Aye, and fifty a Thief, and fifty a Judge! All Roads are fine Roads, beloved Sister, none more than another, so that with one Life to spend I am a Man bare-bumm’d at Taylors with Cash for but one pair of Breeches, or a Scholar at Brookstalls with Money for a single Book: to choose ten were no Trouble; to choose one, impossible! All Trades, all Crafts, all Professions are wondrous, but none is finer than the rest together. I cannot choose, sweet Anna: twixt Stools my Breech falleth to the Ground!
– John Barth
My childhood seems to have been plowed under, gone subterranean as a dream.
If history did exist it is a great river/cesspool into which countless small streams & tributaries flow. In one direction. Unlike sewage it cannot back up. It cannot be “tested” — “demonstrated.” It simply IS. If the individual streams dry up, the river disappears. There is no “river-destiny.” There are merely accidents in time. The scientist notes that without sentiment or regret.
– Joyce Carol Oates
We are rich: we have nothing to lose.
We are old: we have nowhere to rush.
We shall fluff the pillows of the past,
poke the embers of the days to come,
talk about what means the most,
as the indolent daylight fades.
We shall lay to rest our undying dead:
I shall bury you, you will bury me.
– Vera Pavlova translated by Steven Seymour
Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
Every angel is terrifying.
– Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies
I was walking among the fires of Hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius; which to Angels look like torment and insanity.
– William Blake
Saint Anthony said, in his solitude, he sometimes encountered devils who looked like angels, and other times he found angels who looked like devils. When asked how he could tell the difference, the saint said that you can only tell which is which by the way you feel after the creature has left your company.
– Elizabeth Gilbert
Of Enoch, who walked with Elohim, it is told that he had become one of the angels who was all eyes and wings. Thus is the poet. Everything in him perceives the things, and everything in him flies past the things. He is wholly in the one thing that he experiences, and yet is already and still in all the others at the same time.
– Martin Buber
Our spiritual traditions have carried virtues across time. They are tools for the art of living. They are pieces of intelligence about human behavior that neuroscience is now exploring with new words and images: what we practice, we become. What’s true of playing the piano or throwing a ball also holds for our capacity to move through the world mindlessly and destructively or generously and gracefully. I’ve come to think of virtues and rituals as spiritual technologies for being our best selves in flesh and blood, time and space. There are superstar virtues that come most readily to mind and can be the work of a day or a lifetime—love, compassion, forgiveness. And there are gentle shifts of mind and habit that make those possible, working patiently through the raw materials of our lives.
– Krista Tippett
Now you are walking in Paris all alone in the crowd
As herds of bellowing buses drive by
Love’s anguish tightens your throat
As if you were never to be loved again
If you lived in the old days you would enter a monastery
You are ashamed when you discover yourself reciting a prayer
You make fun of yourself and like the fire of Hell your laughter crackles
The sparks of your laugh gild the depths of your life
It’s a painting hanging in a dark museum
And sometimes you go and look at it close up
– Guillaume Apollinaire, Zone
The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes from within the souls of men when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells Wakan-Tanka, and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us. This is the real peace, and the others are but reflections of this. The second peace is that which is made between two individuals, and the third is that which is made between two nations. But above all you should understand that there can never be peace between nations until there is first known that true peace which is within the souls of men.
– Heȟáka Sápa (Black Elk)
What is my definition of jazz? Safe sex of the highest order.
– Kurt Vonnegut
“Mark Zuckerberg was a dropout.”
Yeah, he dropped out of Harvard not 10th grade social studies.
– withmastery@
If I were a physician, and if I were allowed to prescribe just one remedy for all the ills of the modern world… I would prescribe Silence.
– Søren Kierkegaard
Soul Make a Path Through Shouting
by Cyrus Cassells
for Elizabeth Eckford
Little Rock, Arkansas, 1957
Thick at the schoolgate are the ones
Rage has twisted
Into minotaurs, harpies
Relentlessly swift;
So you must walk past the pincers,
The swaying horns,
Sister, sister,
Straight through the gusts
Of fear and fury,
Straight through;
Where are you going?
I’m just going to school.
Here we go to meet
The hydra-headed day,
Here we go to meet
The maelstrom –
Can my voice be an angel-on-the-spot,
An Amen corner?
Can my voice take you there,
Gallant girl with a notebook,
Up, up from the shadows of gallows trees
To the other shore:
A globe bathed in light,
A chalkboard blooming with equations –
I have never seen the likes of you,
Pioneer in dark glasses:
You won’t show the mob your eyes,
But I know your gaze,
Steady-on-the-North-Star, burning –
With their jerry-rigged faith,
Their spear of the American flag,
How could they dare to believe
You’re someone sacred?:
Nigger, burr-headed girl,
Where are you going?
I’m just going to school.
Seany Boy
Song by The Samples
seany boy
better get yourself in school
the teachers called to say you’re just a fool
but the end is near in there eyes
and the road seems clear in your skies
seany boy better get yourself in school
live alone be a loser all your life
and they also said you’d never find a wife
but I’ll prove to me and not to them
I’ll find a place inside the wind
seany boy better get yourself in school
for people that know so much about this life
they love to stab and jab you with that knife
but the knife’s too short to penetrate
because my mind’s too small to calculate
seany boy better get your butt in school
it’s funny we all find out we die
supposedly our souls head for the sky
but I’ll prove to me and not to them
I’ll find a place inside the wind
seany boy better get yourself in school
seany boy better get your butt in school
seany boy better get your ass in school
I try as hard as I can to create a work that makes one focus on the good things in life.
– Mickey Hart
“Amo: volo ut sis.” (I love you: I want you to be.)
– Martin Heidegger
This mere existence, that is, all that which is mysteriously given to us by birth and which includes the shape of our bodies and the talents of our minds, can be adequately dealt with only by the unpredictable hazards of friendship and sympathy, or by the great and incalculable grace of love, which says with Augustine, ‘Volo ut sis (I want you to be),’ without being able to give any particular reason for such supreme and unsurpassable affirmation.
– Hannah Arendt
I lie down on many a station platform; I stand before many a soup kitchen; I squat on many a bench;–then at last the landscape becomes disturbing, mysterious, and familiar. It glides past the western windows with its villages, their thatched roofs like caps, pulled over the white-washed, half-timbered houses, its corn-fields, gleaming like mother-of-pearl in the slanting light, its orchards, its barns and old lime trees. The names of the stations begin to take on meaning and my heart trembles. The train stamps and stamps onward. I stand at the window and hold on to the frame. These names mark the boundaries of my youth.
– Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.
– Alan Watts
I think that everybody likes music but what you really want is music to like you.
– Tom Waits
What if there was a library which held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book – a key part of our planet’s cultural legacy.
– Aaron Swartz
Images can be sly ways of escaping from a poem.
– Robert Bly, writing to Tomas Tranströmer
I was around computers from birth; we had one of the first Macs, which came out shortly before I was born, and my dad ran a company that wrote computer operating systems. I don’t think I have any particular technical skills; I just got a really large head start.
– Aaron Swartz
Real education is about genuine understanding and the ability to figure things out on your own; not about making sure every 7th grader has memorized all the facts some bureaucrats have put in the 7th grade curriculum.
– Aaron Swartz
The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations.
– Aaron Swartz
Seriously, who really cares how long the Nile river is, or who was the first to discover cheese? How is memorizing that ever going to help anyone? Instead, we need to give kids projects that allow them to exercise their minds and discover things for themselves.
– Aaron Swartz
Kafka tires to wish us well.
Tolstoy tries to wish us well
but they have no idea the empire
we’re dealing with.
– Dean Young
HEARD THE SILENCE SINK
the phone syncs you to something
its noise is not serious
I listen to you the silent film
someone told me god is in the static
so it is okay to be in love with wind
pushing these atoms on your face
not so much connected but with more
information it keeps growing for you
these white flowers on your frequency
& I know you are no garden to be stained
no monochrome voice on the line
did you collect the right call
– Caroline Crew
It helped us, to dream through the shades of light, to know North is a colour.
– Cáit O’Neill McCullagh
The renewables revolution is unstoppable.
The phaseout of fossil fuels is inevitable.
Our task is to ensure the transition is fast enough & fair enough.
– António Guterres
I was glad I wasn’t in love, that I wasn’t happy with the world. I like being at odds with everything. People in love often become edgy, dangerous. They lose their sense of perspective. They lose their sense of humor. They become nervous, psychotic bores.
– Charles Bukowski
Believe the right bone.
Surface calm; disorder within:
Space ties me. Recede, coarse dream.
I can become the leaves, the twisty bird,
Rise from the true
Nest of this change.
– Theodore Roethke
Willpower is needed if it’s a desire from the head.
Willpower is not needed if it’s desire from the heart.
– Joe Hudson
In this life, / I was very minor.
– Olena Kalytiak Davis
My goodness, Dostoevsky is six times as profound as Kierkegaard, because he writes fiction. In Kierkegaard you have this Abstract Man going on and on—why, it’s nothing compared with the Fictional Man, who has always to keep these tremendous ideas alive.
– Aldous Huxley, 1960
There Are Poems
There are poems
that are never written,
that simply move across
the mind
like skywriting
on a still day:
slowly the first word
drifts west,
the last letters dissolve
on the tongue,
and what is left
is the pure blue
of insight, without cloud
or comfort.
– Linda Pastan
And I say to you: When someone leaves, someone remains. The point through which a man passed is no longer empty. The only place that is empty, with human solitude, is that through which no man has passed
– César Vallejo
The collective is the object of all idolatry, this it is which chains us to the earth.
– Simone Weil
Our patients absorb us. This is why personal therapy is a necessity.
– Mary Jo Peebles
from plume grass
has it arisen?
Mount Fuji
お花から出現したかふじの山
obana kara shutsugen shita ka fuji no yama
A perspective haiku: plume grass in the foreground, Mount Fuji in the distance—but it seems as if the great mountain has emerged from a green sea of tall grasses
– @issa_haiku
Thus fear of danger is ten thousand times more terrifying than danger itself when apparent to the eyes ; and we find the burden of anxiety greater, by much, than the evil which we are anxious about.
– Daniel Defoe
courage is the only virtue you cannot fake.
– nassim taleb
Philosophy is like the ear, its standard set to stillness, quiet
Every sound represents shaken forms.
– Hejinian
He wielded mythology with wicked precision, especially when it came to the Bonaparte clan, which was guilty of reducing the Republic of Venice, Canova’s homeland, to a French puppet state.
– Ingrid D. Rowland on the sculptor Antonio Canova
vulture café —
table for three
no napkins necessary
– @pauldavidmena
In my relationships with persons I have found that it does not help, in the long run, to act as though I were something that I am not.
– Carl R. Rogers
Astonishing how many intellectuals are willing to insult their own intelligence by repeating the preposterous idea that some parts of the world have a more “complex” history than others.
– Erik Baker
The Jews I’ve felt rooted among
are those who were turned to smoke
– Adrienne Rich, Sources, 1982
What worries you, masters you.
– John Locke
I don’t like to say I have given my life to art. I prefer to say art has given me my life.
– Frank Stella
Maybe it’s time
To close the page
And notice the sky
– @frghtndmn
Never react to the world, no matter what it shows you. Dive deep within the Self.
– Robert Adams
schools, rather than just expecting students to pay attention, should teach them how.
– @nathanheller
Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it.
– Eckhart Tolle
Honesty saves everyone’s time.
– Simdha Getul Rinpoche
I considered that we were now, as always, at the end of time.
– Borges, quoted by Cristina Campo
Here are people who refused to cheat, who eagerly sought out the truth and shrank from neither poetry nor terror, the two poles of our globe – since poetry does exist in the world, in certain events, at rare moments. And there’s also no shortage of terror.
– Adam Zagajewski
MY RESPONSE
I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous.
I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or de-humanized.
– Haim Ginott
Mixing other substances in the flask, the blackness of the matter eventually disappeared to make room for a whiteness called albedo. This sudden inversion of colors was a sign that the work was going in the right direction. Albedo was usually portrayed in the form of a White Eagle, Dove or Swan. It was also associated with silver, and the moon. The whitening was compared to the coming of dawn after a long night, and embodied as a white Virgin. This was a moment of rejoicing, of hope; it was a proof that darkness would not last forever.
– Jo Hedesan
In the Alchemical process of transformation, Albedo is the stage of illumination, and the symbolic breaking of dawn.
– Center of applied Jungian Studies
Hildegard says that no warmth is lost in the Universe. My phrase is that no beauty is lost in the Universe. If I get it right, Einstein is saying that no energy is lost in the Universe. So I think the gathering up of our awe and wonder and suffering and creativity and compassion, all this gathering up, this volcano, this spewing out, goes out there just like the nutrients do in a volcano. Spiritual nutrients. They are not material so they can go very far. In this context we are beyond space and time where our prayers gather the beauty, the warmth, the compassion, the suffering, the awe, and the creativity of our ancestors. And they fertilize that which is to come.
– Matthew Fox and Rupert Sheldrake
New York is an ugly city, a dirty city. Its climate is a scandal, its politics are used to frighten children, its traffic is madness, its competition is murderous.
But there is one thing about it – once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough.
– John Steinbeck
No matter how old you are, you are not an adult until you have slain that unconscious identification with the grandiose presence within. That is what human initiation is all about. Initiation is death.
– Robert Moore
It is the preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.
– Bertrand Russell
The most profound thought we have about love.. is the idea that love exists between two people who are utterly compatible… In reality, love is a quality of our heart. The heart has no other function.
– Ayya Khema
We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life because it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.”\
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Awareness is very important. We are here, nowhere else. Since we are here, why not be here?
– Chögyam Trungpa
The boats as they pass have dark chocolate sails. You could see them out of a tiny window in his bedroom. On the far horizon passed steamers; up the channels on the white sand played ragged children.
– Winifred Nicholson
Johannes Brahms, Opus 2
I
Oratory of those hammers: tenderness so defined.
Each phrase sounding its own future
resolution in opposition, discord in harmony
plus some other disporting of mastership.
Ponderable the élan and tensile bracing
with sorrow of acceptance
all-comporting; nothing that comes to grief.
Do not compound arrival with destiny, though in this
instance you could act so and be right.
Disposition of mind in the hands’ posture.
II
Or play off deportment into the grand thing.
It will all go, the light clack of the keys
in the highest register, the incumbent sonorities
let us hear them passing, as Berkeley says
particles are units of the mind’s energy:
in a while the body of our endurance
over and done with and still immortal
if we are that way inclined or otherwise
win cadence and closure.
– Geoffrey Hill
In evolutionary prehistory, consciousness emerged as a side effect of language. Today it is a by-product of the media.
– John Gray
— we the where where the wind goes home / guilty of spring and spring’s beginnings
– Derek Gromadzki
Let Them Not Say
by Jane Hirshfield
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.
—2014
Liberal is the most confused and confusing word in the English language.
– George Monbiot
How to love like water loves
when it’s impossible to even taste
all the ghostly sediments
– Ed Bok Lee, Water in Love
stirring lazily
in the early morning breeze
an old windmill
– James Welsh
Art in empire is knowing
how to stitch your mouth open
for a prize to enter
for an editor of a house of record
to keep you periodical
– Fady Joudah
The teaching of poetry requires fanaticism…
I’ll deliver you, dear doves, out of the rational, into the realm of pure song.
– Theodore Roethke
Even in adversity, nobility shines through, when a man endures repeated and severe misfortune with patience, not owing to insensibility but from generosity and greatness of soul.
– Aristotle
We carry soil in small bags: may home never fade in our hearts
– Wang Ping
I don’t think I’ll ever write about Alexander Pope, and I don’t think I’ll ever write about Emily Dickinson … they are not on my wavelength as much as some other authors, and life is short.
– Helen Vendler
Your life is not going to be the same while you are writing.
– Chinua Achebe
What is provincialism? To curse our grandparents for having values–and priorities–different from our own.
– Pico Iyer
The war machine is still with us, directed by politicians, reinforced by our nationalism, by our feeling that we are separate from the rest: ‘we’ and ‘they’, ‘you’ and ‘me’.
– Krishnamurti
People who are unconscious always create unconsciousness, and in this way they influence others; they can get them into an unconscious condition so that they will behave exactly according to their intention.
That is the real essence of witchcraft.
– C.G. Jung
Source makes available. The filter distills. The vessel receives. And often this happens beyond our control.
– Rick Rubin
Better to be at the bottom of a ladder you want to climb than in the middle of some ladder you don’t, right?
– Dave Eggers, The Circle
A harmonious person is never vibrating at the same rate as a germ.
– Florence Scovel Shinn
The cultivation of Christlike qualities demands diligence and discipline.
– Bruce DeMarest
Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.
– Sigmund Freud
Time is free, but it’s priceless. You can’t own it, but you can use it. You can’t keep it, but you can spend it. Once you’ve lost it you can never get it back.
– Harvey Mackay
The deep critical thinker has become the misfit of the world, this is not a coincidence. To maintain order and control you must isolate the intellectual, the sage, the philosopher, the savant before their ideas awaken people.
– Carl Jung
I have no time for the “are robots really people?” allegory when we’re still debating if women are people.
– Ellen Mint
we have been changed
by headlines
emancipation of sorrow
precious children
a world run by lunatics
– Ulrica Hume
It’s a form of human love to accept our complicated, messy humanity and not run away from it.
– Martha Nussbaum
…at moments, I feel dazed
by the sun pawing between the trees
– Adrienne Rich
I still love you,
But not the same way,
As I used to.
Love then was claiming you,
Now it is letting you go.
– @chandanas
As I look at my life,
I am afraid
Only that it will change, as I am changing:
I am afraid, this morning, of my face.
– Randall Jarrell
You will never make anybody’s life better
by agreeing to not be yourself.
Denying who you are will never
bring any other person true peace.
Though it may not seem so from the outside,
every soul in the universe is invested
in every other soul living inline with their truth.
Therefore, anyone asking you
to live in opposition to your essence,
to who you really are,
is not speaking from their soul.
They are speaking from their
learned biases, hatreds, and fears.
So, to be you is not only to be the guardian
of your own spirit, but also to be the guardian
of the spirits of those who mistakenly think
their lives would be better if you would
agree to be someone other than you are.
– Andrea Gibson, Ethel’s Advice
BELONGING
Just like maples
unfurling their leaves
seem to hum
with a deep confidence
about where they belong,
know that you, too,
can find a home
in that wild family of things.
– Heidi Barr
A writer must be as objective as a chemist; he must abandon the subjective line; he must know that dungheaps play a very respectable part in a landscape, & that evil passions are as inherent in life as good ones.
– Anton Chekhov
Tomorrow I shall go back to London, and there already awaits me a string of inevitable experiences — what is called “seeing people.” You don’t know what that means — it means one can’t get out of it.
– Virginia Woolf
sounds of a helicopter
I stir my tea
– Beez Laine
Hope the poets are writing tonight, attuned to dissonance and contradiction, all that fails to harmonize.
– Deborah E. McDowell
Palestinians have the right to self-determination and resistance against Israeli’s occupation, just like Ukrainians have the right to resist Russian invasion.
– Ukrainian Letter of Solidarity with Palestinian people
The PhD student is someone who forgoes current income in order to forgo future income.
– Peter Greenberg
I had requested a long life
from my Maker
when I came to this world.
But in fact all I received
were four days:
Two were spent in wishing
and two in waiting.
– Bahadur Shah Zafar
Hell is truth seen too late.
– Hobbes
As the world cracks
on college campuses
something else
arises
hardly noticeable
at first
a gentle wind
that gets through masks
burrows into the heart
alludes to the spirit
that creates
sunrises
geese streaming
across the sky
to a home they remember
– Mark Gordon
There can’t be a story for an object of light. The second you try to hold it the emptiness takes over. One rebounds the beauty by looking at it, imagining that glowing shape contains loss. Composition by resurrection.
– @KimmyGrey
God is always present. The lessons are always there, We need to calibrate our hearts to the twists and the flow of the path that we’re on.
– James Finley, Turning to the Mystics
My understanding of the second half of life is mostly homesickness for the True Self. I want to learn to be who God really created me to be. And I think all God wants me to be is who I really am.
– Richard Rohr
There are hardly any good poets I don’t like.
– Helen Vendler
The gigantic ant is a monster; but suddenly I know that the original ant is no less monstrous. A drop of water is terrible. A grain of sand is terrible. There is no difference between a grain of sand and a galaxy.
– Steven Millhauser
If they occupy your country, you resist.
– Elias Khoury
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
CLIMBING ALONG THE RIVER
Willows never forget how it feels
to be young.
Do you remember where you come from?
Gravel remembers.
Even the upper end of the river
believes in the ocean.
Exactly at midnight
yesterday sighs away.
What I believe is,
all animals have one soul.
Over the land they love
they crisscross forever.
– William Stafford
Everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath in expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places.
– Joseph Conrad
The living can’t quit living because the world has turned terrible and people they love and need are killed. They can’t because they don’t. The light that shines into darkness and never goes out calls them on into life. It calls them back again into the great room. It calls them into their bodies and into the world, into whatever the world will require. It calls them into work and pleasure, goodness and beauty, and the company of other loved ones.
– Wendell Berry
A dog barks at anyone he does not know. Let humans be different.
– Heraclitus
I should have said,
I take thee and all the treachery
that aliveness guarantees.
– Sierra DeMulder
Meditation is not just a rest or retreat from the turmoil of the
stream or the impurity of the world. It is a way of being the stream,
so that one can be at home in both the white water and the eddies.
Meditation may take one out of the world, but it also puts one totally
into it.
– Gary Snyder
Dinner is a very intimate thing. Anyone can go for coffee or a drink, but you agree to have dinner with someone, that’s different. It has a meaning. You really see people when you watch them eat.
– Wong Kar Wai
Barbarians
Here and there, between trees,
cows lie down in the forest
in the midafternoon
as though sleep were an idea
for which they were willing
to die.
– Mary Ruefle
Resistance squanders
Surrender sustains
– @McCallErickson
What is erotic is the human ruin, and the contamination of pity by a delight in destruction.
– Michael Wood
Realism gives me the impression of a mistake.
– Georges Bataille
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
The Net’s interactivity gives us powerful new tools for finding information, expressing ourselves, and conversing with others. It also turns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment.
– Nicholas Carr, The Shallows
the neighborhood is nothing but a protective zone — remodeling, disinfection, a snobbish and hygenic design– but above all in a figurative sense: it is a machine for making emptiness.
– Jean Baudrillard
To be a good warrior, one has to feel sad and lonely, but rich and resourceful at the same time.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Make it a habit to reach out to people when you don’t need anything.
Life’s too short to play it with transactional people.
– Dan Go
In what language does rain fall over tormented cities?
– Pablo Neruda, The Book of Questions
Writing is nature’s way of telling us how lousy our thinking is.
– Leslie Lamport
Right now, translated literature or literature from other countries is really the only access we have to literature that’s not been watered down into a heinous neo-realist idiom …
– @maxdaniellawton
I was ashamed of myself when I realized life was a costume party and I attended with my real face.
– Franz Kafka
The things you run from are inside you.
– Seneca
I care for you
I care for our world
if I stop
caring about one
it would be only
a matter of time
before I stop
loving
the other.
– Pat Parker, Love Isn’t
In heart’s perspective the distance looms large.
– Rabindranath Tagore
Those who don’t understand the sacred are baffled by your perseverance.
You continue to move forward despite the roadblocks. Your vision carries you through the fog.
– Dr. Thema
It is the glory and good of Art
That Art remains the one way possible
Of speaking truth…
– Robert Browning
There is no dusk to be,
There is no dawn that was,
Only there’s now, and now,
And the wind in the grass.
– Archibald MacLeish
I have a weird fearlessness with translation […] I don’t think they can’t speak with an accent.
– Max Daniel Lawton
A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,
– Archibald MacLeish
I lost a World – the other day!
Has Anybody found?
You’ll know it by the Row of Stars
Around it’s forehead bound!
A Rich man – might not notice it –
Yet – to my frugal Eye,
Of more Esteem than Ducats –
Oh find it – Sir – for me!
– Emily Dickinson
Home is not where you have to go but where you want to go; nor is it a place where you are sullenly admitted, but rather where you are welcomed – by the people, the walls, the tiles on the floor, the play of life, the very grass.
– Scott Russell Sanders
The Gardener 85
by Rabindranath Tagore
Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence?
I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds.
Open your doors and look abroad.
From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before.
In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across an hundred years.
The more the story gets retold, the more goes
missing. A mother to only the imaginary.
– Kush Thompson
Characters in fiction can say anything they want. They’re often quite willful, you know.
– Grace Paley
The American method of making films left the audience with emotions and nothing else; I want to give the spectator the emotions along with the possibility of reflecting on and analyzing what he is feeling.
– Rainer Werner Fassbinder
The essence of being an artist is to confront the things you’re trying to do, to tackle it head on, and if it’s good, it will have its own beauty.
– Paul Auster
house hunting
someone else’s
feathered nest
– Nicola Schaum
Every generation mistakes the limits of its own field of vision for the limits of the world. But what happens when generational visions collide?
– Zadie Smith
in a tree
next to my tent
a goddamn crow
impersonating
a rooster
– @CoyoteSings
Foliage hides the tree that we know in winter. Both trees are the same tree, aren’t they, the one sporting leaves, the one laid bare? Is what hides us any less valid than what’s hidden?
– Carl Phillips
I do not want to erect solidarities in metaphysics.
– Aimé Césaire in a 1956 letter to Maurice Thorez, announcing his resignation from the French Communist Party
The Monk Ikkyu draws
on the shore
It is a poem
for the water
He knows the water
can’t read
but he knows
it can dream.
– john zbigniew guzlowski
Yes, me too, Reading online. Writing online. Dreaming online
– john zbigniew guzlowski
The question is not who influences you, but which people give you courage.
– Hilary Mantel
At the time, queerness was a thing so bright that when I looked too closely at it, it felt like someone had aimed a high-powered flashlight directly into my eyes. It hurt.
– Kristen Arnett
A writer’s duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.
– Zadie Smith
There is in me an anarchy and frightful disorder. Creating makes me die a thousand deaths, because it means making order, and my entire being rebels against order. But without it I would die, scattered to the winds.
– Albert Camus
What do the doctors think? A trauma of the nerve which they call grand sympathique, that large, beautiful tree of nerves which, if it does not bear our fruits, at any rate (possibly) brings forth the most dazzling blossom of our being….
– Rilke to Tsvetaeva
Civilization is a hopeless race
to discover remedies
for the evils it
produces.
– Rousseau
Every line read is a gain.
Every line in the unforgivable book.
– Herbert Pföstl
The pain in the heart will remain
with us for a lifetime:
What does it matter if we cross
the river of sorrow?
– Muneer Niyazi
My severance from life becomes more and more irrevocable. I keep moving, have moved again, taking with me all my passion, all my treasure, not as a bloodless shade but with so great a store of food that I could feed everyone in Hades.
– Tsvetaeva to Pasternak
One must speak; man cannot possibly communicate with his fellows, but the alternative—silence—is irreconcilable with human existence.
– Samuel Beckett
Writing is my way of conjuring queer deities and personal mythologies. It is part of my creative work, which is dense with nature but also deeply dystopian. Writing holds me when I am overwhelmed by grief and anger.
– Angela Peñaredondo
Interview: “I didn’t feel like an editor at all. I felt more like a steward, like a caretaker, like I was only trying to make sure that every plant was in its right spot to get enough light.”
– Ada Limón
Don’t be over-wise; fling yourself straight into life, without deliberation; don’t be afraid—the flood will bear you to the bank and set you safe on your feet again.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
Paul Auster “taught us that the acts of novel-writing and crime-solving are kindred.”
– @benlibman
In thy world I have no work to do; my useless life can only break out in tunes without a purpose.
– Rabindranath Tagore
“Nothing stops a bullet like a job”
+
No daylight to separate us.
Only kinship. Inching ourselves closer to creating a community of kinship such that God might recognize it. Soon we imagine, with God, this circle of compassion. Then we imagine no one standing outside of that circle, moving ourselves closer to the margins so that the margins themselves will be erased. We stand there with those whose dignity has been denied. We locate ourselves with the poor and the powerless and the voiceless. At the edges, we join the easily despised and the readily left out. We stand with the demonized so that the demonizing will stop. We situate ourselves right next to the disposable so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away.
– Fr. Gregory Boyle, SJ
The better part of wisdom is a sublime prudence, a pure and patient truth that will receive nothing it is not sure it can permanently lay to heart. Of our study there should be in proportion two-thirds of rejection to one of acceptance. And, amid the manifold infatuations and illusions of this world of emotion, a being capable of clear intelligence can do no better service than to hold himself upright, avoid nonsense, and do what chores lie in his way, acknowledging every moment that primal truth, which no fact exhibits, nor, if pressed by too warm a hope, will even indicate. I think, indeed, it is part of our lesson to give a formal consent to what is farcical, and to pick up our living and our virtue amid what is so ridiculous, hardly deigning a smile, and certainly not vexed. The work is done through all, if not by every one.
– Margaret Fuller
Put a man in the wrong atmosphere and nothing will function as it should. He will seem unhealthy in every part. Put him back into his proper element and everything will blossom and look healthy. But if he is not in his right element, what then? Well, then he just has to make the best of appearing before the world as a cripple.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
The universe doesn’t need to feel like a cold place, indifferent to our presence. As Dogen puts it in the Shobogenzo, “mountains belong to the people who love them.”
– Mike Gillis
ADULT GRIEF
– For E.V.
Because you were foolish enough to
love one place,
now you are homeless, an orphan
in a succession of shelters.
– Louise Glück
A chaos of mind and body – a time for weeping at sunsets and at the glamour of moonlight – a confusion and profusion of beliefs and hopes, in God, in Truth, in Love, and in Eternity – an ability to be transported by the beauty of physical objects – a heart to ache or swell- a joy so joyful and a sorrow so sorrowful that oceans could lie between them…
– T.H. White
when confronted by small men doing big and stupid things, we need to resist with all the creativity and wit we can muster, and if we can do so without losing the civility that makes life enjoyable, then so much the better.
– Bill McKibben, Radio Free Vermont
Solitude is not chosen, any more than destiny is chosen. Solitude comes to us if we have within us the magic stone that attracts destiny.
– Hermann Hesse
My old dog dreams: paws
Move, she’s running in fields; young
Again, till she wakes
– @hoshigenari
And all our ghosts will assemble / along the sides of
the route, shining through the night, leading us home
/ We have it all, we have it all to heart in its bits &
pieces / look / at it there, the plurality shining in the
night / seeking questions for its answers.
– Peter Riley
From Jung I took courage to tell my patients not to put their faith in abstract concepts. Put your faith in your own unconscious, your own dreams.
– Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work
Might those with a tragic–or at least–a seasoned sense of life often end up happier? If nothing else, their expectations are more realistic and they’re less upended by reality. Old cultures have a resilience that younger and more hopeful ones often lack.
– @PicoIyer
After the catastrophe of his experiments, Victor Frankenstein says: “But I am a blasted tree; the bolt has entered my soul.”
– @aliner
Anyone who has encountered the dharma is the most privileged person in the world.
– Helen Tworkov
More important than what you achieve is who you become as a consequence of the chase—that you’re becoming some kind of person, either brutal, warm, loving, caring, focused, dedicated, or kind. You have integrity; you’re honest; you’re grateful.
– Dr. Jim Loher
Today I escaped anxiety. Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions, not outside.
– Marcus Aurelius
World’s top climate scientists: “What the fuck do we have to do to get through to people how bad this really is?”
– @ClimateHuman
The paradox
of an open heart:
its fullness
– @outbeyondideas
the zombies
do not seem to know
that the cell phones
are a dead giveaway
– Andy Perrin
I have a deadline, we all do, and we don’t know when that is, and that’s the most compelling deadline of all.
– Craig Stanland
The grasses are working in the sun. Turn it green.
Turn it sweet.
– Gary Snyder
The spectre of ‘artificial intelligence’ is a reification—a set of social relations in the false appearance of concrete form; something made by us which has been cast as something outside of us.
– Zhanpei Fang
if you haven’t in a while, i recommend going somewhere nice and sitting with the question, “what do i really want, anyway?”
– Visakan Veerasamy
Sometimes I think about people who are pop stars, or actors, or athletes, or whatever. But climate activists are doing work that is infinitely more important than any of them.
– Peter Kalmus
Americans largely forget that our relative safety, security, & standard of living is at the direct expense of the colonized people around the world who toil away under harsh conditions often condemned to poverty, insecurity, & endless struggle to earn a living. We mustn’t forget.
– Zeeshan Jaanam
Sometimes you’ve just gotta give people time to adjust to your magnitude.
Some will rise to meet you.
Some will vibrate out.
– Nika Solé
Because it hurts // to say goodbye, to pull your body out of the warm water
– Jason Shinder
When we step back from our default coding, we can choose differently, stepping into the unknown rather than the familiar.
– Dana Karout
As traumatized children, we always dreamed that someone would come and save us. We never dreamed that it would, in fact, be ourselves as adults.
– Alice Little
Between us
Heavy aer
Unspoken hurt
Hope dangles
– Rachel Newcombe
You have spread yourself so thin, that you no longer can oversee the whole herd of your thoughts; nevertheless, you still don’t want to tame them.
– Elias Canetti
I reflected that even in the languages of humans there is no proposition that does not imply the entire universe; to say “the jaguar” is to say all the jaguars that engendered it, the deer and turtles it has devoured, the grass that fed the deer, the earth that was mother to the grass, the sky that gave light to the earth.
– Jorge Luis Borges
THE PRACTICE OF MEDITATION
This isn’t rocket science, you know –
it’s just sitting with what is,
letting the whole, wild and
impossible conundrum of life
touch me, change me, shake me awake.
This isn’t difficult exactly –
but neither is it easy to
witness sensations and thoughts
without withdrawing, defending,
pretending to be somewhere else.
You’d think simply being present
would be the most natural act
in the world, but in fact it
requires the unwinding of patterns,
the unlearning of thought loops,
the refusal to stay in old grooves.
It’s a practice, this choice to be
still and know what I know
while allowing the ocean of my
unknowing to scour the mind’s
shoreline until awareness is
laid bare and the subtle sound
of breath vies with silence
for my attention.
– Danna Faulds
If you’re not enjoying something, it’s almost always because you’re doing it too fast.
– Donna Tartt
I prefer people who rock the boat to people who jump out.
– Orson Welles
To have the courage to accept a quality which one does not like in oneself & which one has chosen to repress for many years, is an act of great courage. But if one does not accept the quality, then it functions behind one’s back.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
Hay for the Horses
by Gary Snyder
He had driven half the night
From far down San Joaquin
Through Mariposa, up the
Dangerous Mountain roads,
And pulled in at eight a.m.
With his big truckload of hay
behind the barn.
With winch and ropes and hooks
We stacked the bales up clean
To splintery redwood rafters
High in the dark, flecks of alfalfa
Whirling through shingle-cracks of light,
Itch of haydust in the
sweaty shirt and shoes.
At lunchtime under Black oak
Out in the hot corral,
—The old mare nosing lunchpails,
Grasshoppers crackling in the weeds—
“I’m sixty-eight” he said,
“I first bucked hay when I was seventeen.
I thought, that day I started,
I sure would hate to do this all my life.
And dammit, that’s just what
I’ve gone and done.”
Nothing binds you except your thoughts; nothing limits you except your fear; and nothing controls you except your beliefs.
– Marianne Williamson
Fact is, blatant heterosexuals
are all over the place.
Supermarkets, movies, on your job,
in church, in books, on television
every day and night, every place –
even in gay bars.
& they want gay men & women
to go hide in the closets –
So to you straight folks
i say – Sure, i’ll go
if you go too
but i’m polite
so – after you.
– Pat Parker
At thirty-four I have ticked every box I set out to.
My mistake was thinking I could be loved
in little white squares.
– Elizabeth Metzger
storm clouds
following me around
my mother’s voice
so much cosmos between us
expanding gaps
– @hegelincanada
I’m all these words, all these strangers, this dust of words, with no ground for their settling, no sky for their dispersing, coming together to say… I’m always seeking something, and it’s only the beginning.
– Samuel Beckett
An organization for writers that dismisses what writers say can’t really be described as working for freedom of speech at all.
– Frank Garrett
And the whole time, the book was my prism for understanding the country, looking at the place I was in through this text.
– Max Daniel Lawton
This fire that we call Loving is too strong for human minds. But just right for human souls.
– Aberjhani
I am one of the world’s Greatest Bullshitters.
– Jack Kerouac
The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.
– Christopher Hitchens
There are good men everywhere. I only wish they had louder voices.
– Louis L’Amour
Unable are the loved to die, for love is immortality.
– Emily Dickinson
You’re so vicious. You hit me with a flower.
– Lou Reed
The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart.
– Alexander Solzhenitsyn
To sit alone or with a few friends, half-drunk under a full moon, you just understand how lucky you are; it’s a story you can’t tell. It’s a story you almost by definition, can’t share. I’ve learned in real time to look at those things and realize: I just had a really good moment.
– Anthony Bourdain
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
Only the wise can turn circumstances into methods of teaching.
– Zen Proverb
O thou bright jewel in my aim I strive
To comprehend thee. Thine own words declare Wisdom is higher than a fool can reach.
– Phillis Wheatley
I fill the void
of my heart in exile
with word after word
from a jar of pickles …
the absence breaks in me
– Chen-ou Liu
Without craftsmanship
inspiration is a mere reed
shaken in the wind.
– Johannes Brahms
Some people aren’t speaking to you because they owe you an apology.
– Jacklena Bentley
Don’t be hungry if you’re near the market
Don’t be poor if you’re near the rich
Don’t let them see the house they built from
your bones
Beloved is
The overpriced hour
The unaffordable minute
The day that can’t be bought
Beloved is the CEO of the water
– Daniel Borzutzky
All too often, we find ourselves waiting for others to finally catch up with us. We have grown, and we want them to grow, too. Perhaps they hurt us long ago, and we want them to help us heal. Perhaps we have become healthier, and we feel guilty for leaving them behind. Perhaps we love them, and we want them to love us back. Whatever the reason, we are barking up the wrong tree when we wait on somebody else’s choices. Because we are only allowed to live our life—we aren’t allowed to live anyone else’s. Whether we like it or not, it is for them to decide the direction they want to go. They aren’t responsible for our wantings. We aren’t responsible for theirs. And when we finally put an end to the waiting game, we can finally catch up with ourselves.
– Jeff Brown
If the world, unbelievably wealthy as it is, stands by & does little to address the plight of the poor, we will all lose eventually.
– Dipak Dasgupta
the hardest way to undo an addiction is to try to undo it.
the best way to undo an addiction is to do other things.
– Visakan Veerasamy
Write in recollection and amazement for yourself.
– Jack Kerouac
Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.
– John Locke
Most people won’t know how to navigate you when you’re completely unimpressed by the ways of the world. Suddenly they have to stand on something spiritually substantial and far too many don’t even know what that means.
– Nika Solé
A noble ambition is among the most helpful influences of student life, and the higher this ambition is, the better. No man can work well unless he can speak as the Great Master did of the joy set before Him.
– Inscription at the Stanford Memorial Church
Whoever lives invents his life for himself.
– @RedBookJung
Do you not know what happened? Do you not know that the world has put on a new garb? That the one God has gone away, and that in turn many Gods and many daimons have come to man?
– @RedBookJung
I’d say the 1990s was ‘peak civilization’.
– Sarah Connor
You can’t win the dharma. You can’t figure it out. You can’t posess the dharma or bend it to your will. You can’t leverage the dharma for gain.
See the First Noble Truth, the Truth of Dukkha.
The Buddha said we have our priorities upside-down. Start there.
– Kenneth Folk
Of the many men whom I am, whom we are,
I cannot settle on a single one.
They are lost to me under the cover of clothing
They have departed for another city.
When everything seems to be set
to show me off as a man of intelligence,
the fool I keep concealed on my person
takes over my talk and occupies my mouth.
On other occasions, I am dozing in the midst
of people of some distinction,
and when I summon my courageous self,
a coward completely unknown to me
swaddles my poor skeleton
in a thousand tiny reservations.
When a stately home bursts into flames,
instead of the fireman I summon,
an arsonist bursts on the scene,
and he is I. There is nothing I can do.
What must I do to distinguish myself?
How can I put myself together?
All the books I read
lionize dazzling hero figures,
brimming with self-assurance.
I die with envy of them;
and, in films where bullets fly on the wind,
I am left in envy of the cowboys,
left admiring even the horses.
But when I call upon my DASHING BEING,
out comes the same OLD LAZY SELF,
and so I never know just WHO I AM,
nor how many I am, nor WHO WE WILL BE BEING.
I would like to be able to touch a bell
and call up my real self, the truly me,
because if I really need my proper self,
I must not allow myself to disappear.
While I am writing, I am far away;
and when I come back, I have already left.
I should like to see if the same thing happens
to other people as it does to me,
to see if as many people are as I am,
and if they seem the same way to themselves.
When this problem has been thoroughly explored,
I am going to school myself so well in things
that, when I try to explain my problems,
I shall speak, not of self, but of geography.
– Pablo Neruda
From where we stand the rain seems random. If we could stand somewhere else, we would see the order in it.
– Tony Hillerman
Everything is connected. The wing of the corn beetle affects the direction of the wind, the way the sand drifts, the way the light reflects into the eye of man beholding his reality. All is part of totality, and in this totality man finds his hozro, his way of walking in harmony, with beauty all around him.
– Tony Hillerman
There are times when I can almost feel myself simply being.
– Bill McKibben
True inner work is timeless. It’s only the preparation for it that takes time.
– JG Bennett
In the very earliest time
When both people and animals lived on earth
A person could become an animal if he wanted to
and an animal could become a human being.
Sometimes they were people
and sometimes animals
and there was no difference.
All spoke the same language
That was the time when words were like magic.
The human mind had mysterious powers.
A word spoken by chance might have strange consequences.
It would suddenly come alive
and what people wanted to happen could happen –
all you had to do was say it.
Nobody could explain this:
That’s the way it was.
– Nalungiaq
(Inuit woman interviewed by ethnologist
Knud Rasmussen in the early twentieth century)
The better the images get, the more tempting it’s going to be to interact with images rather than people—and the emptier we’re going to feel.
– David Foster Wallace
There is already too much truth in the world – an overproduction which apparently cannot be consumed!
– Otto Rank
It takes no genius to destroy. The creators, the givers, the lovers, the healers – these are the heroes who know – the building up is so much more difficult than the tearing down.
– Laurence Overmire
Lord Creator and all you His assistants, help us to be able to remember ourselves at all times in order that we may avoid involuntary actions, as only through them can evil manifest.
– Gurdjieff
It’s creepy here on earth, everyone’s
internal light machine broke, they
can’t think. Just about no one. I haven’t
seen this much hate for forever —
– Alice Notley
Everything not saved will be lost.
– Nintendo “Quit Screen” message
There is no charity without justice. Too often we think of charity as a kind of moral luxury, as something which we choose to practice, and which gives us merit in God’s sight, at the same time satisfying a certain interior need to “do good.” Such charity is immature and even in some cases completely unreal. True charity is love, and love implies deep concern for the needs of another. It is not a matter of moral self-indulgence, but of strict obligation. I am obliged by the law of Christ and of the Spirit to be concerned with my brother’s need, above all with greatest need, the need for love.
– Thomas Merton
Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.
– Yukio Mishima
Considering literature as an ethics would allow us more possibilities, ethical and otherwise, than those we currently have available.
– Adania Shibli
and i learned, how i learned, that you can’t put all your dreams on one shining altar, that sometimes, it’s better to build a fire somewhere else.
– Ollie Schminkey
Life beats down and crushes the soul, and art reminds you that you have one.
– Stella Adler
When adults pretend like militaries are not some of our most deadly and pernicious cults, I wonder why they bother to read anything at all.
– Alina Stefanescu
What shall I tell you about the soul? Haven’t you noticed that she has become multiple?
– @RedBookJung
like the beginnings – o odales o adagios – of islands
from under the clouds where I write the first poem
– Kamau Brathwaite
We live in a culture of great spiritual impoverishment: addictive materialism makes us slaves to surfaces; fundamentalist clamour makes us fearful and anxious; and distracting, banal ideologies diminish rather than enlarge the journey of the soul.
– James Hollis, Mythologems
Peace When will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut,
Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?
When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I’ll not play hypocrite
To own my heart: I vield you do come sometimes; but
That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows
Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it?
O surely, reaving Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu
Some good! And so he does leave Patience exquisite,
That plumes to Peace thereafter. And when Peace here does house
He comes with work to do, he does not come to coo,
He comes to brood and sit.
– Gerard Manley Hopkins
Like us they are talking about their lives
on this brief visit to earth.
In truth each day is a universe in which
we are tangled in the light of stars.
Stop a moment. Think about these horses
in their sweet-smelling silence.
– Jim Harrison
Some things
you only
think you think,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
I want to get all the content down so that I can then move on to the fun part, which is sorting out the sentences.
– Geoff Dyer
waking from a dream
of Sweden
the sound of geese
– Sandra Simpson
When you think about everything
God doesn’t seem so important,
the old monk realized.
– The Old Monk
The distinctive human problem from time immemorial has been the need to spiritualize human life, to lift it onto a special immortal plane, beyond the cycles of life and death that characterize all other organisms.
– Ernest Becker
A map may be something we heard from our grandmother about a place. There are maps in song and in prayers. There are maps that are etched in stone and woven into textiles and painted on ceramics.
– Jim Enote
Graduate school had been very disappointing to me, because I thought I was going off to Athens. Instead I was dunked in this kind of country club environment in which everyone was manufacturing intelligence for the Vietnam War.
– Robert Hass
For a child to experience a parent’s psychosis probably has a more disastrous effect than the parent’s actual death. The child relies heavily on the parent’s psychic integrity for its own sense of security.
– Edward Edinger
entering old age
I look less for truth
but find it more —
a mid-winter thaw reveals
pieces of sky
– George Seed
The Bumble of a Bee –
A Witchcraft, yieldeth me.
If any ask me “Why” –
‘Twere easier to die
Than tell!
The Red opon the Hill
Taketh away my will –
If anybody sneer,
Take care – for God is near –
That’s all!
The Breaking of the Day –
Addeth to my Degree –
If any ask me “how” –
Artist who drew me so –
Must tell!
– Emily Dickinson
Neorealism never got more real.
– The Guardian
On the shaded path
Bluebells and pink campion
Entwine in the dark
– @hoshigenari
Why do they not teach you that time is a finger snap and an eye blink, and that you should not allow a moment to pass you by without taking joyous, ecstatic note of it, not wasting a single moment of its swift, breakneck circuit?
– Pat Conroy
We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. Divide. Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother’s birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us.
– Anthony Doerr
There is one thing in this world which you must never forget to do.
If you forget everything else and not this,
There is nothing to worry about.
But if you remember everything else
And forget this, then you have done nothing with your life.
– Rumi
People who have been away from God tend to come back by one of two ways: extreme lack or extreme love, an overmastering sorrow or a strangely disabling joy. Either the world is not enough for the hole that has opened in you, or it is too much. The two impulses are intimately related and it may be that the most authentic spiritual existence inheres in being able to perceive one state when you are squarely in the midst of the other. The mortal sorrow that shadows even the most intense joy. The immortal joy that can give even the darkest sorrow a fugitive gleam.
– Christian Wiman
Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of tears! Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.
From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says, “Disarm, disarm! The sword is not the balance of justice.” Blood does not wipe out dishonor nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each learning after his own time, the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.
In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality may be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.
– Original Mothers Day Proclamation
I Do It for Your Love
by Paul Simon
We were married on a rainy day
The sky was yellow
And the grass was gray
We signed the papers
And we drove away
I do it for your love
The rooms were musty
And the pipes were old
All that winter we shared a cold
Drank all the orange juice
That we could hold
I do it for your love
Found a rug
In an old junk shop
And I brought it home to you
Along the way the colors ran
The orange bled the blue
The sting of reason
The splash of tears
The northern and the southern
Hemispheres
Love emerges
And it disappears
I do it for your love
I do it for your love
Life is an island. People come out of the sea, cross the island, and return to the sea. But this short life is long and beautiful. In getting to know nature man exalts the wonder and beauty of life.
– Martiros Saryan
The higher up you go, the more mistakes you are allowed. Right at the top, if you make enough of them, it’s considered to be your style.
– Fred Astaire
The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism.
– Norman Vincent Peale
There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age.
– Sophia Loren
a life can change in a tenth of
a second.
or sometimes it can take
70
years.
– Charles Bukowski
An open heart is a conduit through which collective life can express its grief of uncertainty and loss.
– Nikayla Jefferson
The knowledge of the heart is in no book and is not to be found in the mouth of any teacher, but grows out of you like the green seed from the dark earth.
– C.G. Jung
Right speech, one of the ethical imperatives of Buddhism, isn’t about censorship; it’s about intention, awareness, and the karmic ripple effect of words.
– Frederick M. Ranallo-Higgins
northern lights
just beyond the reach
of my walking stick
– kjmunro
All heartbreak is a descendant
of the untouched imagination.
– Hanif Abdurraqib
I throw my passport in the sea, and name you my country. I throw all my dictionaries in the fire, and name you my language.
– Nizar Qabbani
Messages from Everywhere
by Naomi Shihab Nye
light up our backyard.
A bird that flew five thousand miles
is trilling six bright notes.
This bird flew over mountains and valleys
and tiny dolls and pencils
of children I will never see.
Because this bird is singing to me,
I belong to the wide wind,
the people far away who share
the air and the clouds.
Together we are looking up
into all we do not own
and we are listening.
I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life but that great consciousness of life.
– Jack Kerouac
Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man who tells the truth. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.
– Albert Camus
We can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge, but we cannot be wise with other men’s wisdom.
– Michel de Montaigne
Not what he wishes and prays for does a man get, but what he justly earns. His wishes and prayers are only gratified and answered when they harmonize with his thoughts and actions.
– James Allen
The history of human thought recalls the swinging of a pendulum which takes centuries to swing. After a long period of slumber comes a moment of awakening.
– Peter Kropotkin
Let a man radically alter his thoughts, and he will be astonished at the rapid transformation it will effect in the material conditions of his life.
– James Allen
Without philosophy the mind is sickly, and the body, too.
– Seneca
The Grey Monk
by William Blake
I die I die the Mother said
My Children die for lack of Bread
What more has the merciless Tyrant said
The Monk sat down on the Stony Bed
The blood red ran from the Grey Monks side
His hands & feet were wounded wide
His Body bent his arms & knees
Like to the roots of ancient trees
His eye was dry no tear could flow
A hollow groan first spoke his woe
He trembled & shudderd upon the Bed
At length with a feeble cry he said
When God commanded this hand to write
In the studious hours of deep midnight
He told me the writing I wrote should prove
The Bane of all that on Earth I lovd
My Brother starvd between two Walls
His Childrens Cry my Soul appalls
I mockd at the wrack & griding chain
My bent body mocks their torturing pain
Thy Father drew his sword in the North
With his thousands strong he marched forth
Thy Brother has armd himself in Steel
To avenge the wrongs thy Children feel
But vain the Sword & vain the Bow
They never can work Wars overthrow
The Hermits Prayer & the Widows tear
Alone can free the World from fear
For a Tear is an Intellectual Thing
And a Sigh is the Sword of an Angel King
And the bitter groan of the Martyrs woe
Is an Arrow from the Almighties Bow
The hand of Vengeance found the Bed
To which the Purple Tyrant fled
The iron hand crushd the Tyrants head
And became a Tyrant in his stead
“People,” Jung observed, “live on only one or two floors of a large apartment building which is our minds, forgetting the rest.” The individuation process puts us in touch with “the rest.”
– Claire Dunne
the book was once blue
and together with its sparse spine
it is said of a beautiful object
that the book was, together with its sparse spine
– Tirzah Goldenberg
The majority of us lead quiet, unheralded lives as we pass through this world. There will most likely be no ticker-tape parades for us, no monuments created in our honor. But that does not lessen our possible impact, for there are scores of people waiting for someone just like us to come along; people who will appreciate our compassion, our unique talents. Someone who will live a happier life merely because we took the time to share what we had to give. Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have a potential to turn a life around. It’s overwhelming to consider the continuous opportunities there are to make our love felt.
– Leo Buscaglia
The aurora is just the sun reminding us that it’s ready and willing to help solve the climate crisis.
– Bill McKibben
My fatherland is dead
they buried it
in the fire
I live
in my motherland—
words.
– Rose Ausländer
ghost town tour
no one around
to take our picture
– @pauldavidmena
Haven’t you heard a politician use fifteen hundred words to say something he could have said in exactly three?
– Jack Kerouac
Across what distances in time do the elective affinities and correspondences connect? How is it that one perceives oneself in another human being, or, if not oneself, then one’s own precursor?
– W. G. Sebald
Being free don’t mean evading necessity, it means outsmarting it.
– Gary Snyder
Audre Lorde said that “attending my own health” was crucial “in my battle for living” and “for doing battle in all other arenas of my life,” and, for her, had the same urgency as “battling racism and battling heterosexism and battling apartheid.”
– @tamaranopper
Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”
– John Keats
No wrong notes in jazz, said the musician
and the poet insisted, no wrong words,
No wrong leaf, said the tree,
and field said, no wrong grass.
No wrong time, promised the friend,
and the river said, no wrong rock.
And the heart said, no wrong love,
but the mind said, no, that’s wrong.
And the wrong love replanted itself like grass
and grew wild in all the wrong places
like a gorgeous weed, like a tap-rooted song
until the whole field was beautifully wrong, wrong.
– Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Maps are ubiquitous in one sense, and completely missing in another. A lot of younger people don’t own maps and atlases and don’t have the knowledge a map gives you. We call things like MapQuest and Google Maps on your phone interactive… but are they? Are they interactive? It’s a system that largely gives you instructions to obey. Certainly, obedience is a form of interaction. (Maybe not my favorite one.) But a paper map you take control of — use it as you will, mark it up — and while you figure out the way from here to there yourself, instead of having a corporation tell you, you might pick up peripheral knowledge: the system of street names, the parallel streets and alternate routes. Pretty soon, you’ve learned the map, or rather, you have — via map — learned your way around a city. The map is now within you.
You are yourself a map.
– Rebecca Solnit
Anxiety starts to spread like mold in the walls, and there’s nothing to stop it in the culture. There’s a lot to stop it in nature, but not in the culture.
– Martha Beck
The Fullness of Time
by James Stephens
On a rusty iron throne,
Past the furthest star of space,
I saw Satan sit alone,
Old and haggard was his face;
For his work was done, and he
Rested in eternity.
And to him from out the sun
Came his father and his friend
Saying,—Now the work is done,
Enmity is at an end—
And He guided Satan to
Paradises that He knew.
Gabriel, without a frown;
Uriel, without a spear;
Raphael, came singing down,
Welcoming their ancient peer;
And they seated him beside
One who had been crucified.
You are a traveler,
you know the open,
hostile smiles of those
stuck in their lives.
Make a fire.
If the Devil sits down,
offer companionship,
tell her you’ve always admired
her magnificent, false moves.
Then recite the list
of what you’ve learned to do without.
It is stronger than prayer.
– Stephen Dunn
A student once asked the spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti what his secret to peace and contentment was. He leaned over and whispered to the student: ‘I don’t mind what happens.’
– @Toni_Bernhard
Externally, if you forget fame and profit, your body will be at peace. Inwardly, if you forget cogitation and rumination, your mind will be at peace.
– Anonymous Taoist
When you are convinced that all exits are blocked, either you take to believing in miracles or you stand still like the hummingbird. The miracle is that the honey is always there, right under your nose, only you were too busy searching elsewhere to realize it. The worst is not death but being blind, blind to the fact that everything about life is in the nature of the miraculous.
– Henry Miller
When we are told to forego all dissent and division, we must ask: Who is it that is truly dividing the country? It is not those who call for change; it is those who make present policy who divide our country; those who bear the responsibility for our present course; those who have removed themselves from the American tradition, from the enduring and generous impulses that are the soul of the nation…
Those who now call for an end to dissent, moreover, seem not to understand what this country is all about. For debate and dissent are the very heart of all the American process. We have followed the wisdom of Greece: “All things are to be examined and brought into question. There is no limit set to thought.” For debate is all we have to prevent past errors from leading us down the road to disaster. How else is error to be corrected, if not by the informed reason of dissent? Every dictatorship has ultimately strangled in the web of repression it wove for its people, making mistakes that could not be corrected because criticism was prohibited…
The purpose of debate is to give voice and recognition to those without the power to be heard. There are millions of Americans living in hidden places, whose faces and names we never know. But I have seen children starving in Mississippi, idling their lives away in the ghetto; living without hope or future, amid the despair on Indian reservations, with no jobs and little hope. I have seen proud men in the hills of Appalachia, who wish only to work in dignity—but the mines are closed, and the jobs are gone, and no one, neither industry or labor or government, has cared enough to help. Those conditions will change, those children will live, only if we dissent. So I dissent, and I know you do too.
– Robert F Kennedy
It wasn’t what lay at the end of her road that frightened Ammu as much as the nature of the road itself. No milestones marked its progress. No trees grew along it. No dappled shadows shared it. No mists rolled over it. No bird circled it. No twists, no turns or hairpin bends obscured even momentarily, her cheat view of the end. This filled Ammu with an awful dread, because she was not the kind of woman who wanted her future told. She dreaded it too much. So if she were granted one small wish perhaps it would only have been Not to Know. Not to know what each day held in store for her. Not to know where she might be, next month, next year. Ten years on. Not to know which way her road might turn and what lay beyond the bend. And Ammu knew. Or thought she knew, which was really just as bad (because if in a dream you’ve eaten fish, it means you’ve eaten fish). And what Ammu knew (or thought she knew), smelled of the vapid, vinegary fumes that rose from the cement vats of Paradise Pickles.
– Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
I am remembering a lifetime of trying to map
the shape of shadow and light,
To draw the clean edges of change
And what has made me an oddity
Asked me to live far more closely
To the center of all that awe and ache.
– Carrie Newcomer
The wish to be more kind and helpful is the beginning of the bodhisattva path itself, and the treading of this path … will mainly consist of small acts of kindness and concern, brief moments of putting others before ourselves.
– Manjusura
O to be a dragon
a symbol of the power of Heaven–
of silkworm
size or immense; at times invisible.
Felicitous phenomenon!
– Marianne Moore
There is nothing like the sea at night when the water is slightly warmer than the air, even though the air is humid after a 95 degree day… God, I love swimming at night. It is all darkness and mystery. It is the void and it must be done naked. Clothes at the waterline, please. Do this, and my pilgrim, you will become cleansed. Never will the evening air, or a kiss on the beach, or a dry towel, ever feel so good again. The walk to the car will be filled with starlit grace and you will never forget it. Once you hit the water, you will be covered in the blossoming beauty of your youth no matter how old you are and whoever you’re with, you will always remember them.
– Bruce Springsteen
Manners is what holds a society together. At bottom, propriety is concern for other people. When that goes out the window, the gates of hell are shortly opened and ignorance is King.
– Jane Austen
To love someone else is easy, but to love what you are, the thing that is yourself, is just as if you were embracing a glowing, red-hot iron; it burns into you and that is very painful. Therefore, to love somebody else in the first place is always an escape which we all hope for, and we all enjoy it when we are capable of it. But in the long run, it comes back on us. You cannot stay away from yourself forever. You have to return, have to come to that experiment, to know whether you really can love. That is the question – whether you can love yourself. And that will be the test.
– Carl Jung
A dragon, or corrupted aspect of the self, will not always transform, even once it is identified. It takes active work, in the three realms of body, mind, and spirit.
– Marlene Seven Bremner
What really shocks me is how these wizards and masters of the invisible, when they write to communicate or intimate their mysteries, all write abominably. It offends my intelligence that a man can master the Devil without being able to master the Portuguese language. Why should dealing with demons be easier than dealing with grammar? If through long exercises of concentration and willpower one can have so-called astral visions, why can’t the same person – applying considerably less concentration and willpower – have a vision of syntax?”
– Fernando Pessoa
Failures in Infinitives
by Bernadette Mayer
why am i doing this? Failure
to keep my work in order so as
to be able to find things
to paint the house
to earn enough money to live on
to reorganize the house so as
to be able to paint the house &
to be able to find things and
earn enough money so as
to be able to put books together
to publish works and books
to have time
to answer mail & phone calls
to wash the windows
to make the kitchen better to work in
to have the money to buy a simple radio
to listen to while working in the kitchen
to know enough to do grownups work in the world
to transcend my attitude
to an enforced poverty
to be able to expect my checks
to arrive on time in the mail
to not always expect that they will not
to forget my mother’s attitudes on humility or
to continue
to assume them without suffering
to forget how my mother taunted my father
about money, my sister about i cant say it
failure to forget mother and father enough
to be older, to forget them
to forget my obsessive uncle
to remember them some other way
to remember their bigotry accurately
to cease to dream about lions which always is
to dream about them, I put my hand in the lion’s mouth
to assuage its anger, this is not a failure
to notice that’s how they were; failure
to repot the plants
to be neat
to create & maintain clear surfaces
to let a couch or a chair be a place for sitting down
and not a table
to let a table be a place for eating & not a desk
to listen to more popular music
to learn the lyrics
to not need money so as
to be able to write all the time
to not have to pay rent, con ed or telephone bills
to forget parents’ and uncle’s early deaths so as
to be free of expecting care; failure
to love objects
to find them valuable in any way; failure
to preserve objects
to buy them and
to now let them fall by the wayside; failure
to think of poems as objects
to think of the body as an object; failure
to believe; failure
to know nothing; failure
to know everything; failure
to remember how to spell failure; failure
to believe the dictionary & that there is anything
to teach; failure
to teach properly; failure
to believe in teaching
to just think that everybody knows everything
which is not my failure; I know everyone does; failure
to see not everyone believes this knowing and
to think we cannot last till the success of knowing
to wash all the dishes only takes ten minutes
to write a thousand poems in an hour
to do an epic, open the unwashed window
to let in you know who and
to spirit thoughts and poems away from concerns
to just let us know, we will
to paint your ceilings & walls for free
“yUdjEhanAnô sô KAnAnô,” Grounds remembers saying to the bison when he came face to face with them in Denver. It means “We, the Yuchi People, are still here.” They, like the bison, survived colonial efforts to wipe them out, but were physically separated after being forced from their homelands in what is now the southeastern United States.
– Richard Grounds, quoted by Kaitly Radde at NPR
He did not dare to console her, knowing that it would have been like consoling a tiger run through by a spear.
– Gabriel García Márquez
One of the great purposes of the American nation is to shelter and guard the rights of all men and women to seek the conditions and the companions necessary for the inner search.
– Jacob Needleman
Fortunate is the person who assembles a wealth of divine understanding, but a miserable wretch is he who tries to manipulate his fellow humans with his conjectures about the gods.
– Empedokles
Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is the way you can both hate and love something you are not sure you understand.
– Dorothy Allison
We were all raised to be nice, really nice. A reflexive “niceness” is a pathogenic loss of connection to the soul, and is not nice. The opposite of such a reflexive niceness is called authenticity, or integrity.
– James Hollis
The alphabet of grace is full of sibilants—sounds that can’t be shouted but only whispered: the sounds of bumblebees and wind and lovers in the dark, of whitecaps hissing up flat over the glittering sand and cars on wet roads, of crowds hushed in vast and vaulted places, the sound of your own breathing. I believe that in sibilants life is trying to tell us something. The trees, ghosts, dreams, faces, the waking up and eating and working of life, are trying to tell us something, to take us somewhere.
– Frederick Buechner
But have you ever asked yourselves properly how costly the setting up of every ideal on earth has been? How much reality always had to be vilified and misunderstood in the process, how many lies had to be sanctified, how much conscience had to be troubled, how much ‘god’ had to be sacrificed every time?
If a shrine is to be set up, a shrine has to be destroyed: that is the law – show me an example where this does not apply!
– Nietzsche
I remember as well that in Navajo one of the greatest compliments is to say of another ‘he takes care of his relatives,’ where ‘relatives’ means not just other people but all aspects of creation… I offer, for instance, another part of the Bluehouse-Zion article, where they write about someone who has denied their ‘Navajo-ness’ by acting against Navajo teachings: “[This denial] is expressed in the maxim ‘He acts as if he had no relatives.’ A person who acts that way betrays solidarity and kinship; he or she is not behaving Navajo, and may behave in a ‘crazy’ way.’ There are two different worlds emerging here. There is the world I am learning about, where people will consider someone crazy if, for instance, he denies his relationship with rocks, and there is my own world, where will will call him crazy as soon as he does start talking to them!
– Rupert Ross, Returning to the Teachings
SIGHT
Go north a dozen years
on a road overgrown with vines
to find the days after you were born.
Flowers remembered their colors and trees
were frothy and the hospital was
behind us now, its brick indifference
forgotten by our car mirrors. You were
revealed to me: tiny, delicate,
your head smelling of some other world.
Turn right after the circular room
where I kept my books and right again
past the crib where you did not sleep
and you will find the window where
I held you that June morning
when you opened your eyes. They were
blue, tentative, not the deep chocolate
they would later become. You were gazing
into the world: at our walls,
my red cup, my sleepless hair and though
I’m told you could not focus, and you
no longer remember, we were seeing
one another after seasons of darkness.
– Faith Shearin
Nothing is so hateful to the philistine as the “dreams of his youth.” … For what appeared to him in his dreams was the voice of the spirit, calling him once, as it does everyone. It is of this that youth always reminds him, eternally and ominously. That is why he is antagonistic toward youth.
– Walter Benjamin
Oh, the comfort— The inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, Having neither to weigh thoughts, Nor measure words—but pouring them All right out—just as they are— Chaff and grain together— Certain that a faithful hand will Take and sift them— Keep what is worth keeping— and with the breath of kindness Blow the rest away.
– Dinah Maria Craik
…a man with a phone more or less permanently affixed to his palm is partway a robot already
– Bill McKibben
But there’s a story behind everything. How a picture got on a wall. How a scar got on your face. Sometimes the stories are simple, and sometimes they are hard and heartbreaking. But behind all your stories is always your mother’s story, because hers is where yours begin.
– Mitch Albom
Being a parent is like wearing your heart outside of your body. Then, after years spent nurturing, growing, protecting, keeping alive, letting that heart wander off on its own, into a world, we know, can do such harm to it. And all we can hope for, is that our heart calls home, updates us sometimes, with their stories, their safety, their happiness, their troubles. We can only wish that we will be asked to help mend that heart when needed, a job we have long trained in. Being a parent is like wearing your heart outside of your body, and knowing that’s exactly where it’s supposed to be.
– Donna Ashworth
My mother wants to know where I am,
who I am with, and when will I land.
I get frustrated by her insistence on my safety
and survival. What a shame I am. I’m sorry, mom.
– Tiana Clark
Gratitude to Mother Earth, sailing through night and day—
and to her soil: rich, rare and sweet
in our minds so be it.
– Gary Snyder
Green Burial Unsonnet
by Dante Di Stefano
In the milliseconds & minutes &
millennia when I no longer am the
bundle of meat & need unpoeming itself
in the still hours of a full or empty
house, I dream my eye socket encased
underground with root & worm &
watershed threading through it. | | The
summers become hotter & hotter. | |
Unbearable & luminous, the refrain of
the song of extinction—
My children & my children’s children
will inherit the edges of cumulonimbus
clouds, the unexpected sunflower
blooming from a second-story rain
gutter, the gentleness of the marbling
sunlight on the fur of a rabbit stilled in
a suburban backyard. | | I am in love
with the Earth. | | There are still
blackberries enough to light the brain
with the star charts of a sweetness—
& yet & yet & yet, the undertow of the
expanding universe repeats to the
mitochondria in my cells. The tiny
bluebird in my throat continues to build
her nest with twigs & mud & scraps of
Amazon packing tape. | | I feel the now
of now fluttering diastole & systole in
my biceps & lungs & toe bones | | The
oranges & reds & yellows of my many
Octobers leaf to life & spill from my
mouth: unaccountable acorns, midnight
loam, overgrown meadows,
a wee spore adrift among the fireflies—
my sweet angel on earth thank you for this life
by Jenny Zhang
the idea of my current life began
one solar revolution ago
to think
I almost missed this
called the hotline numbers
dropped the mask
old friends who still pick up
on the first ring
it was hard to get up
mostly I crawled like a crushed bug
if I lived it was only partly will
and partly divine
that afternoon I walked out into the sun
one foot in front of the other
I wasn’t trying to step in front of the bus
but neither could I bring myself
to look both ways
it is a miracle
some people can’t
and other people also can’t
but their body stays intact
sinking through the floorboards
down through the basement
and the sub basement
and the sub sub basement
and the sub sub sub sub—
there is no more earth to dig up
the fire holds over the lake
and the air is still when rain ripples
through the cracked soil
sonia found your mom on the roof
what creature doesn’t want to be fed
what creature doesn’t care to be held
what callousness have we enacted
to make earthly creatures so fearful
when you were born I was so terribly alone
it crossed my mind nothing would ever change
I looked for the fates and the furies
the generational curses and inauspicious beginnings
where it was written in the stars
at the very least
I would have liked to blame god
I didn’t know what it was like
to feel another heartbeat
when you show me your belly
I remember all the times I tried and couldn’t
every single instance I chose the wrong time the wrong place
the wrong person to be soft with
we make shapes all through the night
I love it when you perch on me
we hold each other and it is not about being a container
for pain or healing the birth wound
it is really not about saving the world anymore
I feel humble because of you and I know gratitude too
we spoon through all the phases of the moon
and sunbathe in the mornings
I finally know what this feeling is like
I want to explain
but I honestly can’t
to make the words as much or more than the actual experience
would be impossible
maybe even wrong
your love is the sweetest love
it is a miracle
for I still feel sorrow
I still cry for days
the pain is still very much here
but now that this is more than an idea
I have begun to learn
to make myself happy
waiting for things to change
seems silly now
every day you know more of the world
I am your mom
You are my baby
and we have a beautiful life together
When you decided to go
up the mountain, you knew it
would be awhile before you
came back down,
the old monk reminded
his students.
– The Old Monk
of sunlight and small talk
Christ can’t we have a little
shade for our graves
listen are we really fucking
the people we love
– Frank Stanford
The lotus is a metaphor for the bodhisattva, who engages the world of confusion in order to serve beings. But how is it that the bodhisattva stays afloat without sinking into the muddy water of confusion?
– Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche
Look, anyone seeking ontological meltdown can easily find it in the attempt to write.
– Jonathan Lethem
To think that I was once a germ of light
in the belly of another being,
and that this fact is unremarkable
in the vast plod of human existence …
– Dante Di Stefano
You must know how to build your own paradise
on this black soil.
– Nazim Hikmet
It’s hard to be human right now, knowing what humans can do. And it’s hard to be a poet, knowing what words cannot do.
– @PhilipMetres
We are entangled as we codependently arise in this mess together. We’re not separate. It’s not me versus them. It’s us.
– @NikkiMirghafori
Ancestral home
I switch
to my mother-tongue
– @ericcoliu
Hundreds of Purple Octopus Moms Are Super Weird, and They’re Doomed
by January Gill O’Neil
I’d like to be under the sea
In an octopus’ garden in the shade.
– Ringo Starr
The article called it “a spectacle.” More like a garden than a nursery:
hundreds of purple octopuses protecting clusters of eggs
while clinging to lava rocks off the Costa Rican coast.
I study the watery images: thousands of lavender tentacles
wrapped around their broods. Did you know there’s a female octopus
on record as guarding her clutch for 53 months? That’s four-and-a-half years
of sitting, waiting, dreaming of the day her babies hatch and float away.
I want to tell my son this. He sits on the couch next to me clutching his phone,
setting up a hangout with friends. The teenage shell is hard to crack.
Today, my heart sits with the brooding octomoms: not eating, always on call,
always defensive, living in stasis in waters too warm to sustain them.
No guarantees they will live beyond the hatching. Not a spectacle
but a miracle any of us survive.
Drugs don’t help poetry. When you try to write on pot, you think it’s very good, but you are false because you have no real feelings. You think it is very good, but later when you read it, it’s bullshit.
– Andrei Voznesensky
My god,
I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her
raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel
that I never got wet.
– Ada Limón
Northern Lights
by Michael Longley
When you woke me up and showed me through the window
Curtains of silk, luminous smoke, ghost fires,
A convergence of rays above the Black Mountain,
The northern lights became our own magnetic field –
Your hand on my shoulder, your tobacco-y breath
And the solar wind that ruffled your thinning hair.
How do you afford your Kierkegaard lifestyle?
– Cake
The Loaning
by Seamus Heaney
As I went down the loaning to the fields
the wind shifting in the hedge
was like an old one’s whistling speech.
I knew then I was in the limbo of lost words.
They had flown there from outhouses and crossroads,
from under rotten carts and churchyard walls.
I saw them streaming out of birch-white throats
to nest a while in those old places, then
on a day close as a stranger’s breath
rising in smoky crowds on the summer sky
to settle in the uvulae of mossed stones
and the soft lungs of the hawthorn.
I knew then why from the beginning
the loaning breathed upon me
though now each hole in the hedge was blowing cold
as I went stooped and shivering beneath
the spit blood of a few last haws and rose-hips.
We live in the world when we love it.
– Rabindranath Tagore
Mothers
Some people seek comfort in a priest,
the way he washes his hands in holy water,
raises his chin to drink the wine. But it’s mothers
who divide the loaves & fishes, collect
the crumbs, sweep the floor, & find lost coins.
One day they’ll call us home for the last supper
– @johnguzlowski
The existentialists declare/they are in complete despair/but go on/writing
– WH Auden
For as long as I can remember My mother has been the strongest woman I’ve ever known
– Angelo Geter
The wind is against us and the ash of war covers the earth.
– Adonis
The annihilating smile
The year your married the falcon
– C. D. Wright
Suddenly, he had transformed into the hero of a detective novel, in hot pursuit of two coconspirators.
– Julien Columeau, Derrida in Lahore
How Becoming a Mother is Like Space Travel
by Catherine Pierce
The astronaut told us
he didn’t look out the window
for eight and a half minutes
as the rocket launched him
beyond our atmosphere.
Terrifying things happened—
ground vanished, boosters
exploded, day became
night—and he did not look.
He was focusing,
he said, on his job.
He was up there
a long time. He learned
to sleep suspended. He learned
how the sunrise looks
when you watch it every morning
from the soft dark mouth
of space. Many things,
he told us, were different
than he’d once expected.
There’s no space ice cream,
he said. That’s a big hoax.
His vision blurred.
His body became a study:
blood, appetite, cognitive function.
He took many pictures.
All of them were beautiful.
None of them showed
what it was like to float.
When the astronaut returned
to earth, more tests were run.
Scientists discovered that
seven percent of his genes
had changed in space.
He left the planet
as himself. He came back
as himself, rearranged.
Epilogue
Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme –
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter’s vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All’s misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.
– Robert Lowell
Our minds do not come of age until we discover that the great writers of the past whom we patronize, dead though they may be, are none the less far more intelligent than ourselves —Proust, James, Voltaire, Donne, Lucretius — how we would have bored them.
– Cyril Connolly
One thing I wished more people understood about climate change is that we have not yet experienced any where near the full consequences of the warming we’ve already caused.
– Dr. Aaron Thierry
Don’t be surprised that I have suddenly taken to the woods. I hate routine!
– Zora Neale Hurston
I confess that I consider life to be a thing of the most untouchable deliciousness, and that even the confluence of so many disasters and deprivations, the exposure of countless fates, everything that insurmountably increased for us over the past few years to become a still rising terror cannot distract me from the fullness and goodness of existence that is inclined toward us.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
I think the biggest single problem we face at the moment, is this false view promoted by mainstream politicians and parties, the media, mainstream economists, that Business as Usual BaU, can persist well into the future. It can’t, it’s physically impossible.
– Stephen Barlow
What matters is precisely this; the unspoken at the edge of the spoken.
– Virginia Woolf
I think it’s inevitable one comes to these thresholds of impasse because we have to reverse the image of everything we know about consciousness, we tend to think of our consciousness as small, and by doing this we are opening our consciousness to something larger, but actually I think it would be better if we’d start with what emerges in the work itself is the understanding that consciousness, our consciousness is actually infinite…somehow in taking birth, in incarnating, we have voluntarily accepted to a contraction of consciousness and we stay within that contraction, so we begin to think that is what our consciousness is, that our consciousness is kind of person-sized, but our consciousness is really as large as the universe itself, so if one starts to open to the natural dimensions of one’s own mind, you have to free yourself from that contraction, so the easier it is for you to surrender – the identity that you have developed over all your lifetime – the easier is to open to these deeper currents of mind; the harder it is, the more challenging it is…there will always be a crisis that challenges you to let go of everything you think you are, everything you have known as ‘real’, your whole vision of yourself and reality, that seems inevitable if you are going to push the limits deeply to basically remember what you have forgotten…
– Christopher Bache
BEYOND THE QUESTION
The phoebe sits on her nest
Hour after hour,
Day after day,
Waiting for life to burst out
From under her warmth.
Can I weave a nest for silence,
Weave it out of listening,
Listening,
Layer upon layer?
But one must first become small,
Nothing but a presence,
Attentive as a nesting bird,
Proffering no slightest wish,
No tendril of a wish
Toward anything that might happen
Or be given,
Only the warm, faithful waiting,
Contained in one’s smallness.
Beyond the question, the silence.
Before the answer, the silence.
– May Sarton
To want to run away is an essence of being human, it transforms any staying through the transfigurations of choice. To think about fleeing from circumstances, from a marriage, a relationship or from a work is part of the conversation itself and helps us understand the true distilled nature of our own reluctance. Strangely, we are perhaps most fully incarnated as humans, when part of us does not want to be here, or doesn’t know how to be here. Presence is only fully understood and realized through fully understanding our reluctance to show up. To understand the part of us that wants nothing to do with the full necessities of work, of relationship, of loss, of doing what is necessary, is to learn humility, to cultivate self-compassion and to sharpen that sense of humor essential to a merciful perspective of both a self and another.
– David Whyte
Cultivating loyalty is no small thing. George Orwell, for example, considered preferential loyalty to be the “essence of being human.” Critiquing Gandhi’s recommendation — that we must have no close friendships or exclusive loves because these will introduce loyalty and favoritism, preventing us from loving everyone equally — Orwell retorted that “the essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty … and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.
– The Myth of Universal
All day I have been reading
about the invisible world, the one
that’s always trying to reach us. What if we could hear
the small round o’s of dirt,
the chant of stars and plants,
carbon and sulphur, calling to each other, innumerable
to innumerable, a throat at every blade of grass.
– Ellery Akers
I should have been softer with you. Could have held you differently. I’m sorry for all the devastation I created in the name of tough love.
– Patrick Roche
It Happens to Those Who Live Alone
by David Whyte
It happens to those
who live alone
that they feel sure
of visitors
when no one else
is there,
until the one day
and the one
particular
hour
working in the
quiet garden,
when they realize
at once
that all along
they have been
an invitation
to everything
and every kind
of trouble
and that life
happens by
to those who
inhabit
silence
like the bees
visiting
the tall mallow
on their legs of gold,
or the wasps
going from door to door
in those tall forests
made
so easily
by the daisies.
I have my freedom
today
because nothing
really happened
and nobody came
to see me,
only the slow
growing of the garden
in the summer heat
and the silence of that
unborn life
making itself
known at my desk,
my hands
still
dark
with the crumbling
soil
as I write
and watch
the first lines
of a new poem
like flowers
of scarlet fire
coming to fullness
in a clear light.
it is not easy to depart
this cool green garden
for a dusty old road
– Basho
The coercive, epiphanic mode in some contemporary lyric poetry can serve as a negative model, with its smug pretension to universality and its tendency to cast the poet as guardian to Truth.
– Lyn Hejinian
I don’t believe meditation exists to help me escape or retreat from the world. I practice meditation because it can more fully embed me in the world and prepare me to act more intentionally within it.
– Lauren Krauze
There are still other made-up countries
Where we can hide forever,
Wasted with eternal desire and sadness,
Sucking the sherbets, crooning the tunes, naming the names.
– John Ashbery
It is not enough to have concepts at one’s disposal, you have to know how to set them, like one sets sails, often to save oneself of course, but on condition of knowing how to catch the wind…
– Jacques Derrida
Loving you is every bit as fine as coming over a hill into the sun at ninety miles an hour darling when it’s dawn and you can hear the stars unlocking themselves from the designs of God beneath the disintegrating orchestra of my black Chevrolet…
– Denis Johnson
The reason why the technique is very simple is that, that way, we cannot elaborate on our spiritual materialism trip. Everyone breathes, unless they are dead. Everyone walks, unless they are in a wheelchair.
– Chögyam Trungpa
The entire academic system is being held up by coffee.
– @ThePhDPlace
As Jung says, a person has to “be alone if he is to find out what it is that supports him when he can no longer support himself. Only this experience can give him an indestructible foundation”.
– Robin Robertson
Root Systems
by Kay Ulanday Barrett
for Yolanda P. Salvo
I have this assignment to write on origins.
All I can think about is your rellenong
talong at sunrise, garlic thick air,
wisp of your floral dress sways on linoleum
as you commit to careful chemistry
of fried egg.
To say I have roots means all us kids,
knee deep in dirt. Means I only know how
to eat because you brought backyard, earth
soaked, each bite caressed by sweat of
forehead. The land gives us what we need
not like this country—
We didn’t get it then, you training us for end
of times, or maybe, bringing us back to our beginning.
Bold brown knuckles turned into baon, lunch time
snacks folded of banana leaf. To unwrap
gift every noon, map illustrated of rice, speckled
in sea spinach, while others ate bland
mashed potatoes. A spark of sili, proclamation
of patis, we held up sliced mangoes sculpted into bouquet.
Every summer, you took small seed, harsh stone,
harsh light, profuse cackle, grew it into momentum
to fuel every star speckled report card on the fridge,
every trophy shimmer slung over shoulder.
Our last photo together, San Fabian, July 2007—
96°F heat, palm tree silhouette on cheeks. You said
you liked my haircut, So Pogi! Big smirks. Fingertips
pressed on lychee skin, our version of prayer.
Not to mention, the way you taught me to pick
apart until we found tender.
How we knew somehow together,
there could be sweetness. You asked me to open
every fruit, juice like sprinkler from our old house.
This breaking apart. This delicate pouring.
This bulbous bounty. This bellyful harvest
was always ours, no matter the soil we stood on.
What would the world look like if we read Pascal every day, and the newspapers only once every few years–as Proust suggests in a sudden flight of fancy? Might we not end up better informed?
– Pico Iyer
Here attention attains perhaps its purest form, its most precise name: responsibility, the capacity to respond on behalf of something or someone, which is equally vital to poetry …
– Cristina Campo, (tr. Alex Andriesse)
Round and round
again, and
up and down
again—always
these days do
go by,
– Robert Creeley
Given the immense emotional and financial investment, universities should be more responsible for finding their graduates a job.
– @ThePhDPlace
You know it’s God
when it’s that sharp,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
Warren Buffett on identifying what matters:
“Write your obituary and try to figure out how to live up to it.”
But what I am quite sure speaks through these pauses the most is: silence.
– Jon Fosse
The reading of great books, the contemplation of great art, is somehow very good for one.
– Iris Murdoch
How close to full
is full enough,
the old monk asked.
– The Old Monk
Our practice is our whole life. It’s not about the fifteen or thirty minutes on the cushion; it’s about seeing how much presence, awareness, kindness, joy, and freedom we’re bringing to each moment.
– @SebeneSelassie
The real home of man is not his house but the road. Life itself is a travel that has to be done by foot.
– Bruce Chatwin
All literature is a diary. So indeed is all art and all organized communication, in the sense of its being a reaction to any aspect of the universe.
– Ned Rorem
There is no possibility of freedom here
Except, perhaps, with great pleading before a hunter.
– Parveen Shakir
Memory is such a shifty and shifting process, constantly duping us. What we are remembering is not just the painting itself but its effect on us.
– Julian Barnes
If you consider yourself to be smart yet you’re not exercising you’re not as smart as you think you are.
– Dan Go
Failure to understand brings with it consciousness of our own discontinuity, our own incompleteness of being bound to something beyond ourselves
– Bachelard
It takes two years to learn to speak,
and sixty to learn to keep quiet.
– Ernest Hemingway
Peggys Cove
no, we no longer
punctuate our maps
sailors kept mistaking
apostrophes for reefs
& asterisks for starfish
– Alec Finlay, dailies, 14.V.24
To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don’t know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly. And that the unofficial history of the world shows that dedicated individuals and popular movements can shape history and have, though how and when we might win and how long it takes is not predictable. Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it.
– Rebecca Solnit
If you are not relaxed, then you are uptight. Your experience of you will be uncomfortable. As you relax, you will become the embodiment of comfort. You will expand energetically — sort of like a bubble, relaxing its outer border, which thereby becomes more permeable. You will then feel the air in which you are floating as being the air of which you are made. You will experience yourself merging with Infinity, and you will know there is a Unity. This is the experience of yoga.
– Erich Schiffmann
Every man who is any kind of artist has a great deal of female in him. I act and give of myself as a man, but I register and receive with the soul of a woman. The only really good artists are feminine. I can’t admit the existence of an artist whose dominant personality is masculine.
– Orson Welles
This is where we are right now, as a whole. No-one is left out of the loop. We are experiencing a reality based on a thin veneer of lies and illusions. A world where greed is our God and wisdom is sin, where division is key and unity is fantasy, where the ego-driven cleverness of the mind is praised, rather than the intelligence of the heart.
– Bill Hicks
Once freedom lights its beacon in a man’s heart, the gods are powerless against him.
– Jean-Paul Sartre
Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.
– Douglas Adams
In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places.
– Alice Munro
our song embraces
the depths of loneliness
mountain bird
– Basho
You are always my concern, I ponder a great deal on it and speak to you and take your strange, dark head between my hands and want to push the stones off your chest…
– Ingeborg Bachmann to Paul Celan
That is your old and ingrained mistake, that the one excludes the many.
– @RedBookJung
It is russet and gray: the colors of late autumn. I thought of you a lot when I made this image of myself.
– Celia Paul, Letters to Gwen John
and some of us like me/stare into these films
down long tunnels of history
wondering how it could have ever happened at all
– Pamela Sneed
Archetypes aren’t just keywords you read about in a book and then apply in a mentalistic way. Words are helpful for getting us to the meaning—they’re really crucial at getting us to the meaning—but the full feeling is much more readily conveyed by artistic experience.
– Richard Tarnas
The simplest way to clarify your thinking is to write a full page about whatever you are dealing with and then delete everything except the 1-2 sentences that explain it best.
– @JamesClear
Don’t squander yourself on an asymptotic quest to be less shitty
Be fucking audacious
– River Kenna
Moments of kindness and reconciliation are worth having, even if the parting has to come sooner or later.
– Alice Munro
One should not call oneself a poet. It would be pretentious. It would mean that one has resolved the problems poetry presents.
– Yves Bonnefoy
Go straight to the seat of intelligence.
– Marcus Aurelius
The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.
– Ray Bradbury
It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.
– Alain de Botton
Psychoanalysis
Philosophy
Psychiatry
But my ethos
Grateful Dead song
Uncle John’s Band
” . . . what I want to know
Is are you kind?”
– Rachel Newcombe
You people speak of war so lighty, you don’t know what you’re talking about, war is a terrible thing.
– William Tecumseh Sherman
The nature of a room is not affected by its level of cleanliness. Similarly, our buddhanature is not defined by the presence or absence of our emotional afflictions.
– Guo Gu
Let’s pull our comforters over our heads
and sing ourselves to sleep
like good little civilizations.
– Joy Ladin
I like gaps; all my stories have gaps. It seems this is the way people’s lives present themselves.
– Alice Munro
I feel like I take a lot of science fictional ideas and make them go wrong. There’s often this kind of utopian impulse in science fiction, even in fairly dark science fiction, and I’m more interested in seeing how wrong things can go.
– Brian Evenson
The best way to get into a state is to not assume that you don’t already have access to it.
– @VinceFHorn
I want to know
if you are prepared to live in a world
with its harsh need
to change you. If you can look back
with firm eyes
saying this is where I stand.
– David Whyte
The question is, How do you get to an authentic emotional place?
– Claudia Rankine
There’s a burning coal inside of us—the poet’s job is to unearth it.
– Edward Hirsch
The only healing will be through justice.
– Cristina Rivera
I can’t play bridge. I don’t play tennis. All those things that people learn & I admire, there hasn’t seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.
– Alice Munro
The unexpected connections we make might not last, yet stay with us forever.
– Sofia Coppola
Writing poetry is like tearing open your heart to find a new and better heart within.
– Zeeshan Jaanam
It gets tricky when we act like we really know reality most of the time. It’s that kind of contrast between taking in life somewhat tentatively as opposed to thinking you know how things really are.
– Brian Evenson
Oh world—oh world—
The roses were picked in the season of blooming
and yet
did the wolf cry on the day
it managed to catch and eat the lamb?
– Dareen Tatour, (Trans. from Arabic by Andrew Leber)
I have many illnesses, therefore my only necessities are medicines.
Besides these, what more can so humble a man as I ask?
– Tu Fu, translated by Florence Ayscough and Amy Lowell
In forty years of medical practice, I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical ‘therapy’ to be vitally important for patients with chronic neurological diseases: music and gardens.
– Oliver Sacks
And the mirrors are many.
– Mahmoud Darwish
Let me recite you what history teaches. History teaches.
– Gertrude Stein
Since that time I have by my own count three lives led, one in magic, one in power, one in peace, and still the little wound goes like a well down into the rotten dark and who should breathe near there sees dreams and pales and sickens in a music.
– Denis Johnson
…any man without a history stands in nettles / and no butterflies console him, like surrendering flags, / does he, still a child long for battles and castles / from the books of his beginnings, in a hieratic language / he will never inherit…
– Derek Walcott, The Prodigal
San Francisco is one of the great cultural plateaus in the world….one of the really urbane communities in the United States…one of the truly cosmopolitan places – and for many, years, it has always had a warm welcome for human beings from all over the world.
– Duke Ellington
I don’t think you learn dharma art, you discover it; and you do not teach dharma art, but you set up an environment so it can be discovered.
– Chögyam Trungpa
I’m a man of few words, said the ronin. My ethos is honor, respect, kindness, compassion. That’s my way.
– Voima Oy
a woman is restless
in the evening wind
she has traveled far
nurtured, danced in cities,
held men, held women,
been held by them,
lost and lost again
kept her own mind
her sadness and grief within
she knows the mysteries
of hidden things
takes sustenance from the earth
again and again
she’s pierced her heart early
and known the blood of time
and in her knowledge
there is an art
of living
a quiet truth
at evening she waits
and makes decisions
to dance or hide with the wind
to dance sometimes
and gather strength
to hide sometimes
and find freedom within
she knows the earth
and trusts the wind
– Jack Crimmins
May my mind come alive today
To the invisible geography
That invites me to new frontiers,
To break the dead shell of yesterdays,
To risk being disturbed and changed.
May I have the courage today
To live the life that I would love,
To postpone my dream no longer
But do at last what I came here for
And waste my heart on fear no more.
– John O’Donohue
Nothing is more important than empathy for another human being’s suffering. Nothing. Not career, not wealth, not intelligence, certainly not status. We have to feel for one another if we’re going to survive with dignity.
– Audrey Hepburn
You feel you are hedged in; you dream of escape; but beware of mirages. Do not run or fly away in order to get free: rather dig in the narrow place which has been given you; you will find God there and everything. God does not float on your horizon, he sleeps in your substance. Vanity runs, love digs. If you fly away from yourself, your prison will run with you and will close in because of the wind of your flight; if you go deep down into yourself it will disappear in paradise.
– Gustave Thibon
Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind… When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.
– Alice Munro
She was learning, quite late, what many people around her appeared to have known since childhood that life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements.
– Alice Munro
You can’t betray yourself too often, or you become somebody else.
– Ed Harris
Beneath the surface disturbances
that never really cease is a place
of inner peace. It’s as if a wisdom
voice whispers, “All is well,”
and I can feel the truth of it,
the settling and openness, the love
that seems to come from nowhere
to rest inside my core. No matter
how scattered I am when I begin
my meditation, I somehow make
the journey from there to here,
from that to this, leaving me
light-kissed and receptive to
a little bit of bliss.
– Danna Faulds
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
The complexity of things – the things within things – just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.
– Alice Munro
Save the appearances, Plato said. Then make them all realities. No better way. Yet without that splendid distinction, the novelist as philosopher and the philosopher as novelist would both be out of business.
– William Gass
today
this afternoon I love you
how I loved you other afternoons desperately with a blind love
– Idea Vilariño
The stove long ago became my favourite editor. I like it for the fact that, without rejecting anything, it is equally willing to swallow laundry bills, the beginning of letters and even, shame, oh shame, verses!
– Mikhail Bulgakov
before my eyes
just as it is
poetry
– Basho
the Psyche is, by default, pagan
for a modern, slipping into pagan and/or animist consciousness is equivalent to how a field must feel when you stop monocropping it with soybeans and just let it go back to nature
– River Kenna
I don’t do literature, I do writing.
– Terry Pratchett
If it’s such a deal
someone will already
have bought it,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
A Guide To Usage: Mine
by Monica Youn
A. Pronoun
My.
Be-
longing
to me.
how should I define the limits of my concern the boundary between mine and not-mine the chime of the pronoun like a steel ring cast over what I know what I name what I claim what I own the whine of the pronoun hones its bright edges to keenness because there is power in the categorical that prides itself and plumps itself and proliferates till there is no room in here for anything but power till there is no air in here but there would be no need for air if you could learn to breathe in whatever I breathe out
B. Noun 1
A pit or tunnel in
the earth
from which
precious
stones or ores or coal
are taken
by digging
or by other methods.
because the earth does not gleam with the shine of the noun to dig into the earth is imperative to use my fingers or else to fashion more rigid more perdurable fingers that cut or delve or sift or shatter because we are more evolved than animals because to mine is not to burrow because the earth is not for us to live in because the earth is not precious in itself the earth is that from which what is precious is taken the earth is what is scraped away or blasted away or melted away from what my steeltipped fingers can display or sell or burn
C. Noun 2
A device
intended
to explode
when stepped upon
or touched,
or when approached
by a ship, vehicle,
or person.
my devise my device redefined by intent so thinskinned this earth is untouchable a sly simulacrum of innocence concealing an infinity of hairtrigger malice the cry of the noun sealed in a concentric sphere that sheaths its lethal secret in silence unapproachable it sings its unspeakable harvest in this field I have seeded with violence
D. Verb
To dig
away or otherwise remove
the substratum
or foundation
of.
To sap.
To ruin
by slow degrees or secret means.
to dig is to build dark dwellings of negative space to knit a linked network of nothing the seams of the seemingly solid unravel the itch of erosion the scratch of collapse each absence the artifact of specific intention an abscess a crater a honeycomb of dead husks the home of the verb is founded on ruin the crime of the verb hollows out prisons and graves the rhyme of the verb tunnels from fissure to fracture from factory to faction from faultline to fate this foundation is equal parts atom and emptiness this fear invades fractally by rhizome and root what cement could salvage this crumbling concrete should I pledge my allegiance to unearthing or earth
If the world gives you the blues, if you wake up in the middle of the night with waves of fear and senseless panic washing over you, I am your friend. If you’re overcome by a desperation that makes your mouth open for a scream that never comes out but just freezes your face in mute despair, then you and I have something in common. If you can’t understand them for the life of you, even though you’ve tried so hard, when that dislocation makes you feel like you’re the only one of your species on the planet, I know I can confide in you. If this endless ghetto of lies and heart break, this life-long run of fences and flickering neon signs, night sweats and suicidal urges makes you feel like stopping, just stopping, like stopping breathing, wait. Wait. You don’t have to tell me your name. You don’t have to prove yourself to me. I accept you. If you’re finding life to be the one thing that’s trying to kill you, I want you to stay alive to rise with the sun and fight back.
– Henry Rollins
I pray that each of us stays awake as we fall. I pray that we choose to go into the abyss willingly and that our fall is cushioned by faith – faith that at the bottom we will be caught and taught and turned toward the light. I pray that we don’t waste precious energy feeling ashamed of our mistakes, or embarrassed by our flaws.
After years of teaching, I know only a few things for sure. One is this: We are chunks of dense matter that need to be cracked open. Our errors and failings are chinks in the heart’s armor through which our true colors shine.
– Elizabeth Lesser
The Earth listens and it hears; it has language; it has a soul. We are all part of its song of life. If we give thanks, if we allow ourselves to be human, if we attune to the Real, all creation will respond.
At this present time there is a hunger for direct inner experience, a need to reclaim our spiritual heritage. While our materialistic culture tries to keep our attention firmly in the physical world of the senses, many of us sense a longing to know this hidden mystery of what it means to be human. And so we are able to turn to the teachings and traditions that have been given to us, whether in yoga, Buddhist meditation, Sufi dhikr or other spiritual practices.
It is important to recognize the root of our longing, that we are no longer prepared to live in a purely physical world, but need the living presence of the spiritual. We need to know and be nourished by the invisible world that is within us and all around us. We need to reclaim the mystery and magic of being fully alive.
– Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Think of the many times you’ve been a refuge: welcoming each stray street cat and abandoned potted plant and dear friend saved from heartache. This body has been warm. It’s given past what hands can give. This body has played lighthouse and homemaker and firefighter.
You, a healing breeze; your body, the sky that moves it. A place of rest, a song sent by spring, a flickering light, a wish the world made.
– Schuyler Peck
Long dismissed as children’s stories or ‘myths’ by Westerners, Australian Aboriginal stories have only recently begun to be taken seriously for what they are: the longest continuous record of historic events and spirituality in the world.
– Karl-Erik Sveiby
When the Buddha walked, he walked without effort. He just enjoyed walking. He didn’t have to strain, because when you walk in mindfulness, you are in touch with all the wonders of life within you and around you.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
I think that unless you read deeply and in your own interest; unless you explore what is most profound in what has come before you, then you never will get down to recesses of your own self … and most deeply you never will heal the self.
– Harold Bloom
Yes. Ignoring the old “classics” means your art can’t be in dialogue with the past, and simply won’t have the same resonance as art that is. Besides, you have to know what’s already been done in order to distinguish yourself–you might think you’re original, and be very wrong.
– Francesca Leader
And the poet says: Take my poem, if you want,
there’s nothing in it for me besides you,
take your “I”. I will complete exile
with the messages your hands have left for the doves.
Which one of us is “I” that I may become its other?
– Mahmoud Darwish
It is a curious thing that so many people ascribe to me a distinct style. Believe me, I am not conscious of any such thing. Whenever I undertake to direct a film, I do so out of the deep feeling that it inspires in me.
– John Huston
I am of the Adam of two Edens, I lost them twice.
– Mahmoud Darwish
It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate awaiting them on this earth.
– Joseph Conrad
oh, you who are young, consider how quickly the body deranges itself
how time, the cruel banker, forecloses us to snowdrifts white as god’s own ribs
– D. A. Powel
I wish children didn’t die.
I wish they would be temporarily elevated
to the skies until the war ends.
Then they would return home safe,
and when their parents would ask them,
where were you? They would say,
we were playing in the clouds.
– Palestinian poet, Ghassan Kanafani
May we have space to navigate our lives from a liberated rest state. May all of culture slow down. The time to rest is now.
– @TheNapMinistry
The story always starts on the day that was different.
– Lee K. Abbott
You know, it’s interesting, they always tell people to write about what they know about. But you don’t have to know about things, you just have to be able to imagine them really well.
– Ursula Le Guin
Beoming conscious . . . is not a one-time thing. It is a continuous process, 𝘣𝘺 the ego, of assimilating what was previously unknown 𝘵𝘰 the ego. It involves a progressive understanding of why we do what we do.
– Daryl Sharp
Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation.
– Wallace Stevens
bell hooks wrote “accessibly.” She also critiqued anti-theory and anti-intellectualism. And said, “My decision to stop teaching full-time was influenced by the apathy of many students about reading…the non-readers just simply began to be a toxic presence interrupting class.”
– @tamaranopper
I love the empty, silent, dewy, cobwebby hours.
– C.S. Lewis
Can you name a great writer who isn’t a great reader?
– Lisa Lucas
There’s no such thing as a loser who takes care of their body, prioritizes their family, and works on something that matters to them.
– Dan Go
turns out
there are more planets than stars
more places to land
than to be burned
– D. A. Powell
Vain is the word of the philosopher that doesn’t heal the suffering of man.
– Epicurus
Since the stars have fallen from heaven and our highest symbols have paled, a secret life holds sway in the unconscious. That is why we have a psychology today, and why we speak of the unconscious.
– C.G. Jung
bonsai scissors
shaping a tree’s future
his able hands
holding in, keeping
the wilderness inside
– @hegelincanada
larksong unscrolling
too fast for me to process
the green year passing
– Catherine Baker
A Short History of Greenhouses
In the end, my father’s greenhouse was shipwrecked
By ivy, which spiralled round bamboo canes, stuck
Like octopus suckers glued to a crab-shell, cracked
The last surviving glass and snaked through holes
At the bottom of terracotta plastic pots. An oddball
Nurseryman, a character actor throwing colourful
Shade, Dad brought on innumerable seedlings within
It. In our own garden yesterday, I proposed to Lyn,
Who whistled while she pricked-out and potted-on,
That we ought to get one built, beyond the flowerbed,
Patio, the secrecy of foxholes, Lyn’s shipshape shed.
‘It all depends upon the sun’s trajectory,’ she said.
– Matthew Paul
Every human being is a process: just as the flame is the conversion of wax into gas, so you and I are the conversion of air and water and light and beefsteak and milk into shit—and which again converts into something else, you see? We are the flowing vibration through which all this goes. And not for one moment are we the same.
– Alan Watts
It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand.
– Søren Kierkegaard
I think it’s safe to say that the reason many people in psychotherapy have a hard time choosing a different future
is that they are hung up on wanting a different past
The first step towards autonomy
is to accept the totality of all you are, and have been
– Matt Jugo
I write in longhand. I am accustomed to that proximity, that feel of writing.
– James Salter
There was a whole, large vocabulary involved, a conceptual vocabulary that was completely alien to me. I couldn’t comprehend a thing that was said, and my solution to this problem was to stay in bed.
– Deborah Eisenberg
Yes, I begged for language—
for a word
that meant I was not
still a boy begging
for language.
– Lachlan Chu
It must be visible or invisible,
Invisible or visible or both:
A seeing and unseeing in the eye.
– Wallace Stevens
The man who promises everything is sure to fulfill nothing, and everyone who promises too much is in danger of using evil means in order to carry out his promises, and is already on the road to perdition.
– Carl Jung
Sunbreak. The sky opens its magazine.
– Jorie Graham
Everything will turn out right, the world is built on that.
– Mikhail Bulgakov
One thing I have noticed from teaching a lot of young boys: if young give them like even five words of affirmation they will basically be ready to run through a brick wall.
– @AlaskanKate
after the argument
I lose a game
of solitaire
– @pauldavidmena
Playlist
It didn’t tell me what to do, the playlist, but it helped. One hundred and twelve hours of phantasmagorical voices singing in all manner of tongues, it had been strung together by someone I didn’t know I knew, then lobbed into the ether, where I caught and tucked it away for later. Once later came, I was ready to receive it out of order. As ordained. By continuity, god of singing. Although I never sang, only listened. Walking in the rain, rooted to my rented bed with my heart percussing. It interpreted. When I was desolate, it told me so. When my thinking pitched forward into awe at what awaited, it told me so. When I remembered that I already hadn’t lived my life with whom I’d told myself I could, that every body is a dandelion, that any bond with any place is imaginary or go-it-alone, that I was pledged to this my inner ear, that I was just one person, it told me so. When it told me something I didn’t want to hear, I clicked ahead. When I changed, it did.
– Robin Myers
All our Mexican culture and all the cosmological themes, political themes, social themes and religious themes are always conveyed on huge canvases, with big colors…
– Alejandro González Iñárritu
We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves.
– La Rochefoucauld
I found Luis Buñuel very anti-Godard. He said, “I’ll give him two years more, he is just a fashion.” And it just shows.
– Satyajit Ray
A person with a rainbow lanyard, a Muslim in a hijab, and a transwoman walk into a cafe and people like me, who have and are none of those things, think, well, hey, this is a nice cafe. People feel safe here. Guess I’ll get a hot chocolate.
– Alison K. Montijn
Another word for creativity is courage.
– Henri Matisse
When you show yourself to the world and display your talents, you naturally stir all kinds of resentment, envy, and other manifestations of insecurity… you cannot spend your life worrying about the petty feelings of others.
– Robert Greene
You can’t make gains without tearing your muscles.
You can’t lose weight without some form of restriction.
You can’t succeed in business without failing a couple of times.
You need to understand that achievement & comfort do not co-exist with each other.
– Dan Go
Away, away, from men and towns,
To the wild wood and the downs —
To the silent wilderness,
Where the “soul need not repress its music
– Percy Bysshe Shelley
Once we have clarified what it is we truly long for, it helps a lot to imagine it vividly. This involves the whole body. What does you’re “yet to be” look like? What does it feel like? Taste like? What does it give you permission to do and be? This is not fantasizing but deep imaging. We can’t go where we can’t imagine.
– Gunilla Norris
But a fact, is like a sack which won’t stand up when it is empty. In order that it may stand up, one has to put into it the reason and sentiment which have caused it to exist.
– Pirandello
wondering why
so many poets are writing
about the wilderness
I wander a bit off the path
on my way home
– @NJBarico
There are a whole lot of ways to be perfect, and not one of them is attained through punishment.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
Sensitive Plant in a garden grew,
And the young winds fed it with silver dew,
And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light.
– Percy Bysshe Shelley
But if you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.
– Rollo May
Quetzalcoatl would kill to preserve the thing he was charged with protecting.
– George Zucco’s film, The Flying Serpent
You would give up your dreams in order to escape your nightmares and I would not. I think it’s a bad bargain.
– Cormac McCarthy
avoidance mechanisms sneakily contract your world and close off realms of possibilities, and then make that contracted world feel like the true reality
the slyest avoidance mechanisms cloak themselves in the guise of logic and truth-seeking
– @nowtheo
We hung from a thread
just to prove poetry
undead
– @DavidNaimon
Each note in each margin suggested that he linger on that page, if only to remember what, originally, had caught his attention.
– Patrick Nathan, The Future Was Color
The most audacious thing I could possibly state in this day and age is that life is worth living. It’s worth being bashed against. It’s worth getting scarred by. It’s worth pouring yourself over every one of its coals.
– Jeff Buckley
My mother said: Never underestimate the trouble people will take
to formulate truths possible for them to bear
– Athena Farrokhzad, (tr. Jennifer Hayashida)
A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.
– David Hume
The shock of recognition. In the form of everything most other, alien, and remote—the ever-receding galaxies, the mystery of death, the terrors of disease and madness, the foreign-feeling, gooseflesh world of sea monsters and spiders, the queasy labyrinth of my own insides—in all these forms I have crept up on myself and yelled “Boo!” I scare myself out of my wits, and, while out of my wits, cannot remember just how it happened.
– Alan Watts
As a reviewer, I need people to understand that qualitative research is not just vibes. You can’t just say you “did thematic analysis” and then present research based on vibes alone.
– Jaclyn A. Siegel, PhD
Du Fu said, “The ideas of a poet should be noble and simple.” Zen says, “Unformed people delight in the gaudy, and in novelty. Cooked people delight in the ordinary.”
– Gary Snyder
I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.
– Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
you mumble, ‘forgive me, forgive me,’
as you forget who you pray to tonight.
– Nebraska State Poet Matt Mason
I have to lie humbly at the foot of Christ’s cross and marvel that I am saved at all.
– Charles Spurgeon
Walk with your feet on earth, but in your heart be in heaven.
– Saint John Bosco
Because we think in a fragmentary way, we see fragments. And this way of seeing leads us to make actual fragments of the world.
– Susan Griffin
From a higher point of view, untruth has a much worse side than the usual one. It is the foundation of a false world — the foundation of a chain of errors and confusions that cannot be undone. … One untruth gives birth to countless others. An absolutely posited untruth is so infinitely difficult to expunge.
– Novalis
When your habitual thinking is harmonious and constructive, you experience perfect health, success, and prosperity.
– Dr. Joseph Murphy
There must exist a paradigm, a practical model for social change that includes an understanding of ways to transform consciousness that are linked to efforts to transform structures.
– bell hooks
I will give you a new heart and put a Spirit in you.
– Ezekiel 36:25
Music meant to me, self-exploration, more than anything else
– Todd Rundgren
How sacred, how incomprehensible, and how terrible is this thing that always flows around us, from which we benefit mindlessly, and that makes our globe tremble so when it withdraws, even if only briefly: the Light.
– Adalbert Stifter
If there is a hell, besides the ones we have all known on Earth, it will not include eternal flames and your wife’s sister but will be an attic with just enough light so you can make out the eyes of the rats in the dark.
– Anne Lamott
Red
by Mary Ruefle
I fucking depended on you and
you left the fucking wheelbarrow
out and it’s fucking raining
and now the white chickens
are fucking filthy
One would have confused her with this very abyss…
– Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure
and if the poet says he can incite men to love, which is the most important fact among every kind of animal, the painter can do the same.
– leonardo da vinci, (tr. maurice baring)
Become the person that is endlessly trying to birth itself through you. That’s the mission, that’s the calling.
– River Kenna
i am the mother
no longer willing to sacrifice sons
to wars of men and
gods of war i
mother refuse to lose
more daughters to sons gone crazy
watching kids get bombed and blown
into bits of brain and bone
– Suheir Hammad
all our knowledge is the offspring of our perceptions.
– leonardo da vinci, (tr. maurice baring)
[I won’t be able to write from the grave]
by Fanny Howe
Howe I won’t be able to write from the grave
so let me tell you what I love:
oil, vinegar, salt, lettuce, brown bread, butter,
cheese and wine, a windy day, a fireplace,
the children nearby, poems and songs,
a friend sleeping in my bed —
and the short northern nights.
When your pencil is dull, sharpen it; and when your pencil is sharp, use it until it is dull again.
– Mary Ruefle
Something has to give.
We stand above it all.
Below, the buildings’ tall
but tiny narrative.
– Randall Mann
in some arrangement of my atoms i was allowed to be free
so don’t ask me when freedom is coming
– Kara Jackson
Every sentence records a stretch of becoming invented as it goes.
– Lyn Hejinian
Anxiety
You make among the trees
a nest for our love.
But look at the flowers
you’ve crushed.
– Anna Swir
There are various systems of meditation: the Tibetan, the Hindu, the Japanese Zen, and so on. These systems have been invented by thought, and thought being limited the systems must inevitably be limited.
– Krishnamurti
I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
We are indeed connected to all things, but we should feel free to move about, free to join others, free to examine preconceptions and misinterpretations, and free to find our buddhanature as we engage in the day’s most common actions and events.
– Gary Thorp
they tell me there are four seasons
but I live in a fifth one
which is your space
and your time
– Etel Adnan
In Platonic language, the task of the human being is to “remember” more than his or her personal experience. The larger task is to remember the lost wisdom or legacy of the human soul, and the origins of consciousness from its spiritual source.
– David Tacey
There are thousands
of obsessions that offer pleasure
in love, Dagh,
The people who do nothing at all
don’t they astonish you?
– Dagh Dehlvi
The idea that a woman’s career comes at the expense of her family, while a man’s career is seen as a way to support his family, is rooted in sexist stereotypes and reinforces harmful gender roles.
Challenge sexism. Choose equality.
– @AcademicChatter
The single most important thing about my formation as a writer is that I come from a nonreading family.
– Geoff Dyer
If your hardships do not make you grow, and do not put you in a state of energetic euphoria, but rather depress and embitter you, know that you have no spiritual vocation.
– Emil Cioran
A definition is a sack of flour compressed into a thimble.
– Remy de Gourmont
Let’s talk about creative practices that resist “accomplishment,” and let’s talk about creative practices that in their resistance reveal the world in a new light.
– Lisa Jarnot
The time of harvests is always there.
– Thomas Müntzer
There are so many questions I want to ask about those years, the war—but don’t. Why resurrect those demons?
– @KristinTenor
Moving away from home is a form of daring. It’s, in a sense, too, what the poet does. The poet has to see the world.
– Ishion Hutchinson
As the world around me dims and I search in vain for the everlasting light of Heaven, I realize my only mistake was …
– @kip_knott
What a joy it is to arrive after dark at a snug-looking house, its windows filled with welcoming light, and know that it is yours and that inside is your family.
– Bill Bryson
So I went to New York City to be born again. It was and remains easy for most Americans to go somewhere else and start anew. I wasn’t like my parents. I didn’t have any supposedly sacred piece of land or shoals of friends to leave behind. Nowhere has the number zero been of more philosophical value than in the United States…. and when the [train] plunged into a tunnel under New York City, with it’s lining of pipes and wires, I was out of the womb and into the birth canal.
– Kurt Vonnegut
The forest meets mountain, the sea the shore. Brain meets bone, meets skin, meets hair; meets air. Day would not be, without night. Every limit, a wise woman once wrote, is a beginning as well as an ending.
– Lauren Groff, Arcadia
Some people are doubtless utterly impervious to mystic experience, incapable of feeling or imagining anything of it. But we also meet with people to whom music is nothing but noise.
– Bergson
Good fiction is partly a bringing of the news from one world to another.
– Raymond Carver
Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly…
– Toni Morrison
The world knows many religions but nature has but one truth.
– Manly P. Hall
He’s listed as day to day, but then again, aren’t we all?
– Vin Scully
He is a mediator and a seer more than a witness.
– Christina Campo on Proust
You must understand that in the attempt to correct so many generations of bad faith and cruelty, when it is operating not only in the classroom but in society, you will meet the most fantastic, the most brutal, and the most determined resistance.
– James Baldwin
after
a short nap
spring was gone
– Buson
People have a lot more of the unknown than the known in their minds. The unknown is great; it’s like the darkness. Nobody made that. It just happens. Light and all that — someone made that; it’s written that they did. But nobody made the darkness.
– Sun Ra, Space is still the place
What would the world be without poetry, he asked, and I listened.
– Robert Devlin
ANTS WITHOUT ANTENNAS
Being born into cultural privilege can often be an ethical handicap.
It is very difficult to empathize with pains one has never experienced.
When one is born on a mountaintop above the storms of poverty and oppression, it can be very hard to empathize with those caught in the flood waters below.
Like ants without antennas we privileged people are tempted to use own own numbness as proof others exaggerate their own pain.
What is easier than for a white person to use “law and order” to silence the cries of pain coming from Communities of Color?
What requires less sacrifice than for a man to oppose the reproductive rights of women?
What is more self-serving than for Christians to call for bringing God into the public arena, and by “God” to mean the deification of our own point of view?
We cannot arrive at ethical integrity by reason alone. Justice is impossible for those of us privileged people who cannot, or will not, empathize with the pain of those lacking the privileges into which we were born and which we vainly consider as proof of our own superiority.
– Jim Rigby
Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.
– Wendell Berry
The spirit of the depths teaches me that I am a servant, in fact the servant of a child. This dictum was repugnant to me and I hated it. But I had to recognize and accept that my soul is a child
– C.G. Jung, The Red Book
When asked “Why do people read books?” Jean Paul Sartre answered, “People read books to see if they are in them”
I feel that I am caught in a net woven by my thoughts, my emotions, my sensations; and I am convinced that it is my thoughts, my emotions that hold me. On the contrary, my thinking is not to blame. I have to understand something that is easy to grasp logically, but very difficult to understand with feeling: it is ‘me’ who clings to these thoughts, these emotions, these objects that reach my senses. In fact, it is through these thoughts, these objects that I have the impression of existing, but this is not true. I can feel my true nature behind this. This is something I do not know and must be prepared to accept by giving up what I usually cling to.
– Michel Conge
World War III will be a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.
– Marshall McLuhan
Winter
I will stuff a small rag of
its sky into my pocket forever.
– Larry Lewis
The mystic and the physicist arrive at the same conclusion; one starting from the inner realm, the other from the outer world. The harmony between their views confirms ancient Indian wisdom that Brahman, the ultimate reality without, is identical to Atman, the reality within.
– Fritjof Capra
So I’ve thrown together jottings of places unforgotten. Think of them as the delirium of a drunk or the rambling of one asleep, and listen recklessly.
– Basho
And there are things that are hard to talk about—you’ll rub off their marvelous pollen at the touch of a word.
– Nabokov
[Samuel Beckett] has been reading Heine’s last poems, and he tells me that they are like lamentations. But he prefers doing nothing. Spending hours looking out the window. He is particularly fond of the silence.
– Charles Juliet; tr. Tracy Cooke and Axel Nesme
We thought we had discovered everything about cinema, we thought we knew it all, and suddenly we were confronted with something that had been done without us, without our knowledge, and that deeply moved us.
– Jean-Luc Godard
I am glad to say I have a million or more new facts yet to find out, which of course have been found out by others long before and which I doubtless could read in books—but this would rob the whole pleasure . . .
As John Burroughs says, the beginner learns fact after fact with a joy as if he were the original discoverer.
– Charles Burchfield
Do not forget your enemy is also a human being.
– Haji Bektash Vali
I think there”s a lot of knotty confusion between “escaping samsara” and “escaping suffering”, and it’s given western buddhism a much more navel-gazey and narcissistic tendency than it ought to have
– River Kenna
at home
a fragment moonlight
in my window
– Basho
This world is ugly. We need poetry, art, and each other to make it beautiful again.
– Zeeshan Jaanam
When God imagined
gravity,
did he know Andromeda
would crash the Milky Way,
the old monk asked.
– The Old Monk
The textures of the world are an outline of the infinite. [Wallace] Stevens said, or at least I seem to remember that he said, the thing seen becomes the thing unseen. He also said that the reverse way was impossible. [Theodore] Roethke wrote that all finite things reveal infinitude. What we have, and all we will have, is here in the earthly paradise. How to wring music from it, how to squeeze light out of it, is, as it has always been, the only true question. I’d say that to love the visible things in the visible world is to love their apokatastatic outline in the invisible next.
– Charles Wright
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
In Auerswald’s view, it wasn’t enough to see the child in the context of the family. For him, children’s cognitive territories were shaped not only by their intimate relationships but by the environment they grew up in. I am always reminded here of writer Annie Dillard’s phrase, “The river fits and shapes its banks as the mind shapes its world” (1994).
– Lynn Hoffman
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
My brain is only a receiver, in the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength and inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core, but I know that it exists.
– Nikola Tesla
“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
The highest quality of an individual is to be human. The phrase “to be human” means to follow life wherever it may lead, up and down, down and up, from the bottom of the world to the top, from darkness into light, through each degree of good and evil. As the circle of knowledge widens, life grows more beautiful and heroic. We are part of everything—men, books, cities, railroads—all made from the same atoms and molecules, all living together and dying together, joined into one imperishable unity that can never be divided.
– George Whitman
Crimson gleams of Matter, gliding imperceptibly into the gold of Spirit, ultimately to become transformed into the incandescence of a universe that is person- and through all of this there blows, animating it and spreading over it a fragrant balm, a zephyr of union- and of the Feminine.
The diaphany of the Divine at the heart of a glowing universe, as I have experienced it through contact with the earth- the divine radiating from depths of blazing matter.
– Teilhard de Chardin
In talking to children, the old Lakota would place a hand on the ground and explain; We sit in the lap of our Mother. From her we, and all other living things come. We shall soon pass, but the place where we now rest will last forever.” So we, too, learned to sit or lie on the ground and become conscious of life about us in its multitude of forms.
Sometimes we boys would sit motionless and watch swallows, tiny ants, or perhaps some small animal at its work and ponder at its industry an ingenuity; we lay on our backs and looked long at the sky, and when the stars came out made shapes from the various groups.
Everything was possessed of personality, only differing from us in form. Knowledge was inherent in all things. The world was a library and its books were the stones, leaves, grass, brooks and the birds and animals that shared, alike with us, the storms and blessings of the earth. We learned to do what only the student of nature ever learns, and that was to feel beauty. We never railed at the storms, the furious winds, and the biting frosts and snows. To do so intensified human futility, so whatever came we just adjusted ourselves, by more effort and energy if necessary, but without complaint.
Observation was certain to have its rewards. Interest, wonder, admiration grew, and the fact was appreciated that life was more than mere human manifestation; it was expressed in a multitude of forms.
The appreciation enriched Lakota existence. Life was vivid and pulsing; nothing was casual and commonplace. The Indian lived – lived in every sense of the word – from his first to his last breath.
The white man does not understand America. He is too far removed from its formative processes. The roots of the tree of his life have not yet grasped the rock and the soil.
– Chief Luther Standing Bear
Somewhere on this crowded planet, in a place I have never been before and will never visit in my lifetime, someone I do not know and will never meet has just said a prayer in a language I do not understand as an expression of faith in a religion I do not accept. And yet, the prayer was for me. Please bless all those who are in need, the stranger prayed, and that includes me. The wonder of faith is not that we all agree, but that we all care, even when we are strangers. So I return the prayer: please bless all who are in need. All, please, not some: for they are praying for me as I pray for them.
– The Rt. Rev. Steven Charleston
When we allow ourselves to be irritated out of our wits by something, let us not suppose that the cause of our irritation lies simply and solely outside us, in the irritating thing or person. In that way, we simply endow them with the power to put us into the state of irritation, and possibly into one of insomnia or indigestion. We then turn around and unhesitatingly condemn the object of offense, while all the time we are raging against an unconscious aspect of ourselves which is projected into the exasperating object.
– C.G. Jung
And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?
Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.”
– Jesus, (Matthew 7:3-5 King James Version)
..from the very moment when each and every one of
them acquires the capacity of distinguishing between
‘wet’ and ‘dry’, then, carried away by this attainment,
he ceases forever to see and observe his own
abnormalities and defects, but sees and observes
those same abnormalities and defects in others.
– Gurdjieff
On the spiritual path, it’s not just about swallowing your emotions and traveling the Earth smiling and saying “love and light” to the people you meet. It’s also not neatly creating a setting for your social media, where you pose in a yoga position with meditation music in the background.
To be on a spiritual path means getting to know all parts of yourself, light and dark, in order to heal what hurts. It means working on the ego and learned behaviors.
It’s a deep dive into your soul. It’s about being raw and vulnerable, and speaking your truth. It’s about respect not only for yourself but for every living being. You can feel uncomfortable sometimes, but that’s okay, you defeat years of programming and heal every part of your soul. This is brave. You can feel lonely, you’re awake while everyone around you is still sleeping.
That’s ok, let them sleep, keep moving, follow your path and shine like the divine being that you are.
– Jean Francois Brabant
I am that.
I am that which is highest.
I am that which is lowest.
I am that which is All.
– Julian of Norwich
I fell in love with Tibet because their essential mission was to keep a continual stream of prayer. To me they kept the world from spinning out of control just by being a civilization on the roof of the world in that continuous state of prayer. The prayers are etched on wheels, they feel them with their hands like braille and turn them. It’s spinning prayer like cloth. That was my perception as a young person. I didn’t quite understand the whole thing but I felt protected. We grew up at a time when nuclear war seemed imminent with air raid drills and lying on the floor under your school desk. To counterbalance that destruction was this civilization of monks living high in the Himalayas who were continuously praying for us, for the planet and for all of nature. That made me feel safe.
– Patti Smith
Hell is not punishment, it’s training.
– Shunryu Suzuki
Pentecost is an invitation to dream. For when a community of faith quits dreaming dreams, it has little to offer either its members or the wider world.
Like any good dream, these dreams involve adopting a new perspective on what’s possible, rousing our creativity to free us from conventional expectations. They help us see that maybe what we thought was outlandish actually lies within reach. Maybe I can find freedom from what binds me. Maybe there can be justice. Maybe I can make a difference. Maybe a person’s value isn’t determined by her income. Maybe the future of our economy or our society or our planet is not yet determined. Maybe God is here with me, even if my current struggles never go away.
– Matthew L. Skinner
when albert camus said “the sea; i didn’t lose myself in it. i found myself in it” and when sylvia plath said “if i lived by the sea i would never be really sad” and when van gogh said “the heart of man is very much like the sea” and when homer said “I’d rather die at sea”
– @cinematicfella
The Excursion
by Tu Fu
translated from the Chinese by Florence Wheelock Ayscough
A number of young gentlemen of rank, accompanied by singing-girls, go out to enjoy the cool of evening. They encounter a shower of rain.
I
How delightful, at sunset, to loosen the boat!
A light wind is slow to raise waves.
Deep in the bamboo grove, the guests linger;
The lotus-flowers are pure and bright in the cool evening air.
The young nobles stir the ice-water;
The Beautiful Ones wash the lotus-roots, whose fibres are like silk threads.
A layer of clouds above our heads is black.
It will certainly rain, which impels me to write this poem.
II
The rain comes, soaking the mats upon which we are sitting.
A hurrying wind strikes the bow of the boat.
The rose-red rouge of the ladies from Yüeh is wet;
The Yen beauties are anxious about their kingfisher-eyebrows.
We throw out a rope and draw in to the sloping bank. We tie the boat to the willow-trees.
We roll up the curtains and watch the floating wave-flowers.
Our return is different from our setting out. The wind whistles and blows in great gusts.
By the time we reach the shore, it seems as though the Fifth Month were Autumn.
Just as the body reacts purposively to injuries or infections or any abnormal conditions, so the psychic functions react to unnatural or dangerous disturbances with purposive defence-mechanisms. Among these purposive reactions we must include the dream…
– CG Jung
You can’t keep picking people up, you have to stop them from falling.
– Robin Williams
A moraliste is someone who is interested in the description of what goes on inside man.
– Eric Rohmer
Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the . . . denser it is.
– C.G. Jung
According to the Taoists, yang and yin, light and shadow, useful and useless are all different aspects of the whole, and the minute we choose one side and block out the other, we upset nature’s balance.
– Connie Zweig
IMPOSSIBLE FRIENDSHIPS
For example, with someone who no longer is,
who exists only in yellowed letters.
Or long walks beside a stream,
whose depths hold hidden
porcelain cups – and the talks about philosophy
with a timid student or the postman.
A passerby with proud eyes
whom you’ll never know.
Friendship with this world, ever more perfect
(if not for the salty smell of blood).
The old man sipping coffee
in St.-Lazare, who reminds you of someone.
Faces flashing by
in local trains –
the happy faces of travelers headed perhaps
for a splendid ball, or a beheading.
And friendship with yourself
– since after all you don’t know who you are.
– Adam Zagajewski, (translated by Clare Cavanagh)
SOME GLAD MORNING
One day, something very old
happened again. The green
came back to the branches,
settling like leafy birds
on the highest twigs;
the ground broke open
as dark as coffee beans.
The clouds took up their
positions in the deep stadium
of the sky, gloving the
bright orb of the sun
before they pitched it
over the horizon.
It was as good as ever:
the air was filled
with the scent of lilacs
and cherry blossoms
sounded their long
whistle down the track.
It was some glad morning.
– Joyce Sutphen
There are people in the world all the time who know.… They just move about quietly, saving the people who know they are in the trap. And then, for the ones who have got out, it’s like coming around from chloroform. They realize that all their lives they’ve been asleep and dreaming. And then it’s their turn to learn the rules and the timing. And they become the ones to live quietly in the world, just as human beings might if there were only a few human beings on a planet that had monkeys on it for inhabitants, but the monkeys had the possibility of learning to think like human beings. But in the poor sad monkeys’ damaged brains there’s a knowledge half buried. They sometimes think that if they only knew how, if only they could remember properly, then they could get out of the trap, they could stop being zombies.
– Doris Lessing
Whether we know it or not, we transmit the presence of everyone we have ever known, as though by being in each other’s presence we exchange our cells, pass on some of our life force, and then we go on carrying that other person in our body, not unlike springtime when certain plants in fields we walk through attach their seeds in the form of small burrs to our socks, our pants, our caps, as if to say, “Go on, take us with you, carry us to root in another place.” This is how we survive long after we are dead. This is why it is important who we become, because we pass it on.”
– Natalie Goldberg
She loves the serene brutality of the ocean, loves the electric power she felt with each breath of wet, briny air.
– Holly Black, Tithe
Training- training is everything; training is all there is to a person. We speak of nature; it is folly; there is no such thing as nature; what we call by that misleading name is merely heredity and training. We have no thoughts of our own, no opinions of our own; they are transmitted to us, trained into us.
– Mark Twain
In surrendering our mass storytelling function to entities whose first priority is profit, we make a dangerous concession. “Tell us,” we say in effect, “as much truth as you can, while still making money.” This is not the same as asking: “Tell us the truth.” A culture’s ability to understand the world and itself is critical to its survival. But today we are led into the arena of public debate by seers whose main gift is their ability to compel people to continue to watch them.
– George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone
A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human.
– Alan Turing
I must make my way along this narrow ridge between my own truth and a caricature of it.
– Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift
Neat people are fascists of the mop and bucket, the tight sheet, the silver chest.
– William Gass
Shout out to all the parent poets, the scribble-it-on-a-napkin novelists, the midnight memoirists— to everyone stealing time to write amidst round-the-clock caregiving, working double shifts, handling family situations. Shout out to writing in chaos. Shout out to writing anyway!
– Bethany Jarmul
The whole universe is summed up in the Human Being. Devil is not a monster waiting to trap us, He is a voice inside. Look for Your Devil in Yourself, not in the Others. Don’t forget that the one who knows his Devil, knows his God.
– Shams Tabrizi
goddamn it, I think love is in fact the answer, just in a very specific way.
– River Kenna
It is our imagination that is responsible for love, not the other person.
– Marcel Proust
It just amazes me how much pain it takes to cultivate something beyond pain—in writing and in life. How it’s not easy to explain what can grow from ash when you still smell the sweetness of that rot.
– Veronika Fuchs
When you sit down to write, tell the truth from one moment to the next and see where it takes you.
– David Mamet
My handwriting
reveals
what ails me,
the old monk admitted.
– The Old Monk
The purpose of any good student newspaper should be to piss off the administration and radicalize the students.
– Abbie Hoffman
You always like it
when it comes out
about even,
the old monk noticed.
– The Old Monk
The trouble with temperate people is that they are rarely temperate. All the temperance societies I know promote abstinence.
– William Gass
Bless me Poetry
For I have sinned.
It has been
Two weeks
Since my last poem.
Please give me
The grace
Of falling rain
And dying leaves.
– john zbigniew guzlowski
One day, without thinking, we will laugh again—
Just like this: a lifetime’s weeping will go to waste.
– Khursheed Rizvi
Your divine upgrade is on the way.
Don’t let people talk you into settling for less.
– Dr. Thema
The Swallow
by Luis G. Dato
Little lone swallow frequenting the skies in the bleakness of oncoming rain,
Gloating on the view by the river reflected when days of sun reappear,
You who can sing in the fulness of sorrow, and in seasons of gladness usefully sing,
You who in mirth and melancholy alike find joy, joy in you we find.
We who aspire to vistas beyond us and only can lift our eyes,
We who live in transient gladness and hovering gloom,
We of the earth who cannot fly with you.
What life is yours who pursue not pleasure and yet have it,
You who know sorrow and by it be left unoppressed
You who in shadow arise, and in sunshine pensively dream on the river,
Of gladness not taking nor little nor much,
Of sorrow the master more often than not,
Knowing the one and the other as passing, imperfect,
Passing as the clouds in the bleakness of oncoming rain,
Imperfect as the vista by the river reflected when days of sun reappear.
We can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.
– George Eliot
You are not my dream girl.
You are this earth. You are not a fantasy: you are my love. And love is friendship lit by a wooden match with a white tip on its red tip. I am your match, and you are mine.
– Waylon Lewis
Then back to basics, that is, doing our part which is practice, practice, practice. It is to engage in some way (big or small) honoring our “yet to be” with action and remembrance. This is not about being obsessive. It’s about being practical.
– Gunilla Norris
In our day, we confine ourselves at the best of times to discussing the imagination. The word “imagination” is beautiful and vast, but it doesn’t hold everything.
But what is the spirit, the spiritual life? If only I were up to defining such things! Robert Musil says that the spirit synthesizes intellect and emotion. It’s a good working definition, for all its concision.
In the case of poetry, literature, it’s simpler to say - theologians know a thing or two about this - what the spirit isn’t. It’s not psychoanalytic any more than it is behavioral, sociological, or political. It is holistic, and in it are reflected, as in an astronaut’s helmet, the earth, the stars, and a human face.
These are difficult and dangerous considerations.
– Adam Zagajewski
If you could be anyone, would you choose to be yourself?
– Naomi Shihab Nye
HEART FULL OF LOVE
Spaciousness. Vastness. Mystery. It is one deep breath away. Feel the vastness even now as you read these words.
With a single spacious breath the mind can quiet, the heart can soften, we can become loving awareness. We can hold the sorrows of the world in compassion and offer love without measure to the incandescent beauty of reality.
These are the Buddha’s instructions: “With a heart full of love, continuously pervade the whole wide world, above, below, everywhere around with loving wishes, abounding, sublime, beyond measure.” Try it. You will be glad you did.
– Jack Kornfield
ONE THING NECESSARY
We cannot master everything, taste everything, understand everything, drain every experience to its last dregs. But if we have the courage to let almost everything else go, we will probably be able to retain the one thing necessary for us – whatever it may be.
If we are too eager to have everything, we will almost certainly miss even the one thing we need. Happiness consists in finding out precisely what the ‘one thing necessary’ may be, in our lives, and in gladly relinquishing all the rest.
– Thomas Merton
Master Lu Tzu said : That which exists through itself is called Meaning (Tao). Meaning has neither name nor force. It is the one essence, the one primordial spirit. Essence and life cannot be seen. It is contained in the Light of Heaven. The Light of Heaven cannot be seen. It is contained in the two eyes.
– Richard Wilhelm And Carl Jung, The Secret Of The Golden Flower
Before one can become a magician he must learn to control his own mind; for mind is the substance with which the magician acts, and the power to control it is the beginning of magic.
– Franz Hartmann, Magic, White and Black
Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance.
– Marcel Proust
Modern English is the Wal-Mart of languages: convenient, huge, hard to avoid, superficially friendly, and devouring all rivals in its eagerness to expand.
– Mark Abley
I am on the edge of the crowd, at the periphery; but I belong to it, I am attached to it by one of my extremities, a hand or foot. I know that the periphery is the only place I can be, that I would die if I let myself be drawn into the center of the fray, but just as certainly if I let go of the crowd. This is not an easy position to stay in, it is even very difficult to hold, for these beings are in constant motion and their movements are unpredictable and follow no rhythm. They swirl, go north, then suddenly east; none of the individuals in the crowd remains in the same place in relation to the others. So I too am in perpetual motion; all this demands a high level of tension, but it gives me a feeling of violent, almost vertiginous, happiness.” A very good schizo dream. To be fully a part of the crowd and at the same time completely outside it, removed from it: to be on the edge…
– Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
…that every human being is worthy of attention and that the origins of every good and evil capability of the universe may be found by observing a single, even very humble, person and the turnings of his or her mind.
– George Saunders
Everything is hard—making money is hard, watching your body change is hard. You can take these problems when you’re young—something’s difficult for a while, but you’re confident. If it doesn’t work out, you’ll do something else.
– Louise Glück
When falsehood can look so like the truth, who can assure themselves of certain happiness?
– Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
I wonder if dictators are popular today because hardly anyone alive remembers the havoc they wrought & why we fought against them.
– Neil deGrasse Tyson
I can tell you that events were incremental, that the unbelievable became the believable and, ultimately, the normal.
– Ralph Webster
It has become clear to me that aging itself does not bring wisdom. It often brings regression to childishness, dependency, and bitterness over lost opportunities. Only those who are still intellectually, emotionally, spiritually growing inherit the richness of aging.
– James Hollis
Age is giving me the two best gifts: softness and illumination. It would have been nice if whoever is in charge of such things doled them out in our younger years, but that’s not how it works. Age ferries them across the water, and they will bring us through whatever comes.
– Anne Lamott
I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.
– Sylvia Plath
Do you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished? If it survives anywhere, it’s in a few solid objects with no words attached to them, like that lump of glass there. Already we know almost literally nothing about the Revolution and the years before the Revolution. Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, and every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day-by-day and minute-by-minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right. I know, of course, that the past is falsified, but it would never be possible for me to prove it, even when I did the falsification myself. After the thing is done, no evidence ever remains. The only evidence is inside my own mind, and I don’t know with any certainty that any other human being shares my memories. Just in that one instance, in my whole life, I did possess actual concrete evidence after the event – years after it.
– George Orwell
Perhaps one must not only be aware of injustices but be aware of each other. Perhaps one should not only resist injustice but restore, repair, and reaffirm each other. One must make being well a priority, too.
– Myisha Cherry
Art is not a religion—it is religion. It is the glorification of gifts given to us by God, and to share these gifts is a form of ministry. It is not the only obligation we have, of course, but it is a vocation that is infused with Spirit. All people are chosen to honor and to glorify God in some way, and artists are chosen to share what they can and what they must through their particular art. I never forgot a scripture that seared through me in childhood: ‘Glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s.’ That changed me forever.”
– Martha Graham
Thousands of years ago tribes of human beings suffered great privations in the struggle to survive. In this struggle it was important not only to be able to handle a club, but also to possess the ability to think reasonably, to take care of the knowledge and experience garnered by the tribe, and to develop the links that would provide cooperation with other tribes. Today the entire human race is faced with a similar test. In infinite space many civilizations are bound to exist, among them civilizations that are also wiser and more “successful” than ours. I support the cosmological hypothesis which states that the development of the universe is repeated in its basic features an infinite number of times. In accordance with this, other civilizations, including more “successful” ones, should exist an infinite number of times on the “preceding” and the “following” pages of the Book of the Universe. Yet this should not minimize our sacred endeavors in this world of ours, where, like faint glimmers of light in the dark, we have emerged for a moment from the nothingness of dark unconsciousness of material existence. We must make good the demands of reason and create a life worthy of ourselves and of the goals we only dimly perceive.
– Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov
You do what you can. What you’d done may do more than you can imagine for generations to come. You plant a seed and a tree grows from it; will there be fruit, shade, habitat for birds, more seeds, a forest, wood to build a cradle or a house? You don’t know. A tree can live much longer than you. So will an idea, and sometimes the changes that result from accepting that new idea about what is true, or right, just might remake the world. You do what you can do; you do your best; what what you do does is not up to you.
– Rebecca Solnit
The beauty of a fragment is that it still supports the hope of brilliant completeness.
– Tobias Wolff
I don’t know about you, but I practice a disorganized religion. I belong to an unholy disorder. We call ourselves ‘Our Lady of Perpetual Astonishment.’
– Kurt Vonnegut
I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought or thoughtfulness.
– Rebecca Solnit
Yet some men say in many parts of England that King Arthur is not dead, but had by the will of our Lord Jesu into another place; and men say that he shall come again, and he shall win the holy cross.
– Thomas Malory, Le Morte d’Arthur
“This is beyond understanding.“ said the king. “You are the wisest man alive. You know what is preparing. Why do you not make a plan to save yourself?”
And Merlin said quietly, “Because I am wise. In the combat between wisdom and feeling, wisdom never wins.”
– John Steinbeck, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights
I will tell you something else, King, which may be a surprise for you. It will not happen for hundreds of years, but both of us are to come back. Do you know what is going to be written on your tombstone? Hic jacet Arthurus Rex quondam Rexque futurus. Do you remember your Latin? It means, the once and future king.’
‘I am to come back as well as you?’
‘Some say from the vale of Avilion.’
The King thought about it in silence. It was full night outside, and there was stillness in the bright pavilion. The sentries, moving on the grass, could not be heard.
‘I wonder,’ he said at last, ‘whether they will remember about our Table?
– T.H. White, The Once and Future King
Arthur without Excalibur was still Arthur.
– Kendare Blake, Anna Dressed in Blood
After the thing went off, after it was a sure thing that America could wipe out a city with just one bomb, a scientist turned to Father and said, ‘Science has now known sin.’ And do you know what Father said? He said, ‘What is sin?
– Kurt Vonnegut
It was like the moment when a bird decides not to eat from your hand and flies, just before it flies, the moment the rivers seem to still and stop because a storm is coming, but there is no storm, as when a hundred starlings lift and bank together before they wheel and drop, very much like the moment, driving on bad ice, when it occurs to you your car could spin, just before it slowly begins to spin, like the moment just before you forgot what it was you were about to say, it was like that, and after that, it was still like that, only all the time.
– Marie Howe
Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us. But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture’s being drained by laughter?
– Neil Postman
Being by the sea is like a permanent baptism; the light and air hypnotizes, and your soul is washed by vastness.
– Iain Pears
Life is complicated. It’s filled with nuance. It’s unsatisfying. If I believe in anything, it is doubt. The root cause of all life’s problems is looking for a simple fucking answer.
– Anthony Bourdain
Coyote’s back!
good coat, fluffy tail,
sees me: quickly gone.
– Gary Snyder
Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.
– Erich Fromm
For an artist with no place for the dark and ugly or, contrarily, with only a place for the dark and ugly, the work is kitsch in one way or the other. And everyone who sees it knows that the full emotional body is not present in it.
– Robert Bly
Gustave Flaubert was once medically diagnosed with a “plethora of excess”, a too much of too muchness.
– @DuncanAStuart
I could no longer participate in an exchange requiring acrobatics of self-denial.
– June Jordan
Everything good that happened in my career happened because someone, normally another writer, helped me. Suggested me for something, put in a good
word, and so on. The idea was always that you help others and they help others in their turn. It’s not a win or lose game.
– Neil Gaiman
sun tea . . .
as if we might slow
the afternoon
– @ruralitalics
I do resent how the humanities are the favored academic punching bag when there are entire fields of the social sciences that are built on smoke, mirrors, and fraud. There are whole disciplines — well-funded disciplines! — that seemingly can’t replicate a study. It’s maddening.
– Tyler Austin Harper
Exercise is the most transformative thing that you can do for your brain today.
– Wendy Suzuki
When the willow tree has grown up tall and can tickle the fish with its hair, you’ll still be coming here to visit your cousins, and you’ll remember the day you helped plant it.
– Jenny Erpenbeck
But to worship our false selves is to worship nothing.
And the worship of nothing is hell.
– Thomas Merton
i think there’s a horseshoe where profound selfishness comes back around to full bodhisattvahood.
– River Kenna
I believe only in the Word become flesh, in the spirit-filled body where 𝘺𝘢𝘯𝘨 and 𝘺𝘪𝘯 are wedded into a living form.
– Carl G. Jung
All I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.
– Edward Hopper
[. . .] many years I’ve taught myself to walk between my child,
any railing they could be tossed over,
put myself between them and, say, train tracks,
knowing others see us as moving targets [. . .]
– Bao Phi
“Himmisacrakrüzidirkenjesusmariaundjosefundblütigeskreuz!” Like that, all in one word. The things people come out with sometimes!
– Samuel Beckett
There can be meaning without things making sense if we are kind and giving. Humane is what makes sense when all else fails.
– Anne Lamott
Perhaps cinema is the most personal art, the most intimate. In cinema only the author’s intimate truth will be convincing enough for the audience to accept.
– Andrei Tarkovsky
I remember I used to half believe and wholly play with fairies when I was a child. What heaven can be more real than to retain the spirit-world of childhood, tempered and balanced by knowledge and common-sense.
– Beatrix Potter
When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
– Arthur Conan Doyle
cumulus clouds
a butterfly drifts
into the blue
– James Welsh
Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are pliable.
– Mark Twain
The way we survive every day, every night, is an art.
– Vlada Mars
Today the ocean is 30% more acidic than it was a 150 years ago. Acidification decreases the amount of calcium carbonate in the water, a mineral that is one of the key building blocks for phytoplankton shells.
– Katharine Hayhoe
The problem with Paradise is that it wants to formalize purity.
– @aliner
Reprieve
Before the insects start to grind their million bodies,
before impulse scatters the deer into the trees,
before desire:
there’s a rest.
The dawn and the day observe each other.
The herd begins to move over the field, one shared dream
of grass and wind.
The small stones of their hooves in the stony field.
I’ve exhausted my cruelty.
I’ve arrived at myself again.
The sun builds a slow house inside my house,
touching the stilled curtains, the bottoms of cups
left out on the table.
– Jenny George
Each one of us should speak of his roads, his crossroads, his roadside benches; each one of us should make a surveyor’s map of his lost fields and meadows. Thoreau said that he had the map of his fields engraved in his soul.
– Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
In a saner happier time line, the major religious dispute would be between those who think god is a cat and those who think god is a peacock.
– Ryan Ruby
A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end.
– William Styron
Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent world of contentment, drunkenness, and good humor, to a state of chronic edginess and the perpetual scanning of bank statements.
– J. G. Ballard
Words hold me in: I’m alone with what I never said.
– Theodore Roethke
low tide
in the gull’s footprints
echoes of flight
– Jane Williams
If A=A, it is because A posits itself as other than itself.
– Jean-Luc Nancy
captured mist
elements converge
in a breath
– Andy Perrin
The animosity of a wise man is better than the friendship of a fool.
– Ibn Qutaybah
That’s where you really belong, in deep silence where there is no good and bad, no one trying to achieve anything. Just Being, pure Being.
– Robert Adams
The ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction.
– Alfred North Whitehead
Talk nonsense, but talk your own nonsense, and I’ll kiss you for it. To go wrong in your own way is better than to go right in someone else’s.
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm; not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the gray gap between black beats: the Tender Interval.
– Nabokov
I look forward to the time when children don’t have to become hardened.
May there be safety, ease, play, and death defying dreams that actually come true.
– Dr. Thema
Who knows what will happen next? And if you still want
to look up, I hope you see the dark sky as oceanic—
boundless, limitless —like all the shades of blue in a glacier.
Listen how this planet spins with so much fin, wing, and fur
– Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Humility lies at the foundation of our Christian life. It is the antidote to arrogance, the worst vice. Pride and arrogance swell the human heart, but humility restores things to their proper dimension. We are marvelous yet limited creatures, with our good qualities and flaws.
– Pope Francis
It is vital to cultivate a good motivation, for this will profoundly influence the nature of your practice.
– B. Alan Wallace
rook wings at sunset
slither the air into silk
the rush of their rise
– Catherine Baker
The Interior
A winter night in desert light:
trucks carving out air-corridors
of headlight on the interstate
at intervals only a vigil
could keep. Constellations
so clean you can see
the possibilities denied.
Now, from the beginning,
tell me everything.
– Katie Peterson
still sniffing
the fumes from the coffee pot
before pouring
a wordless ode to life
and its small vices
– @hegelincanada
The Renaissance
by Trey Moody
I said hello. Then you said you said
hello. In this way, we were touching touching
clouds. Such mannerisms endured throughout
the sixteenth century, when bread was scarce, words
for clouds scarcer. Of course we were younger
then, when all the lakes we wanted belonged
to the aristocracy, so we swam in nothing
but our suffering. As they do, centuries passed.
We kept thinking there were only so many ways
to light a fire. Now, it’s just as likely you’ll call
after a Sunday dip. Usual, you map the passing time
in the shape of a cumulonimbus. I say how quiet quiet
can be when your face is this close to the painting.
blue iris
the waves
wash over me
– James Welsh
watching dandelions
spread out across the lawn
a practice
the gentle art
of acceptance
– @hegelincanada
Movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul’s weather to all who can read it.
– Martha Graham
…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
When people say ‘surreal’ they mean ‘real,’ it’s just most of your life is not very real, just repetition and routine.
– Norm Macdonald
In the Bible, the apple is strange. It is desirable because one has not tasted it yet. From the very moment the girl desires, she tastes distance, difference, strangeness. One can say pleasure is not of this world. It belongs to another world, another language.
– Hélène Cixous
FLOWERS
Don’t go outside your house to see flowers.
My friend, don’t bother with that excursion.
Inside your body there are flowers.
One flower has a thousand petals.
That will do for a place to sit.
Sitting there you will have a glimpse of beauty
inside the body and out of it,
before gardens and after gardens.
– Kabir
Self-proclaimed kings are often seen as jesters.
– Tamerlan Kuzgov
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
Proust wrote in his novel that a man, during the second half of his life, might become the reverse of who he was in the first. When I first read that a few years ago I liked the line so much I wrote it down and put it into my wallet. Then I found a similar one in Simenon’s The Prison: “Alain Poitaud, at the age of thirty-two, took only a few hours, perhaps only a few minutes, to stop being the man he had been up to that time and to become another.” I decided to fill a notebook with quotes conveying that sense of the possibility of a seemingly magical personal metamorphosis, but then I didn’t come across many more.
But I did find this one by Nathaniel Hawthorne that’s like the others but with an intriguing twist: “In Wakefield, the magic of a single night has wrought a similar transformation, because, in that brief period, a great moral change has been affected. But this is a secret from himself.” Something, even overnight, has changed you for the better, but you’re not even aware of it. But can’t it be something that has been building for years and that finally gathers enough weight, even from one day to the next, to tip over from bad into better or even into good? How will you know? Because someone will love you who wouldn’t have yesterday.
– Francisco Goldman
I have heard what the talkers were talking,
the talk of the beginning and the end.
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world…
– Walt Whitman
When the wind blows through the scattered
bamboos, they do not hold its sound after it
has gone. When the wild geese fly over a cold
lake, it does not retain their shadows after they
have passed. So the mind of the superior individual
begins to work only when an event occurs, and
it becomes a void again when the matter ends.
– Hong Zichen
It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate awaiting them on this earth.
– Joseph Conrad
Love develops into harmony, and of harmony is born beauty.
– Hazrat Inayat Khan
Paris was a universe whole and entire unto herself, hollowed and fashioned by history; so she seemed in this age of Napoleon III with her towering buildings, her massive cathedrals, her grand boulevards and ancient winding medieval streets–as vast and indestructible as nature itself. All was embraced by her, by her volatile and enchanted populace thronging the galleries, the theaters, the cafes, giving birth over and over to genius and sanctity, philosophy and war, frivolity and the finest art; so it seemed that if all the world outside her were to sink into darkness, what was fine, what was beautiful, what was essential might there still come to its finest flower. Even the majestic trees that graced and sheltered her streets were attuned to her–and the waters of the Seine, contained and beautiful as they wound through her heart; so that the earth on that spot, so shaped by blood and consciousness, had ceased to be the earth and had become Paris.
– Anne Rice
directions for leaving the desert
push the bones back
under your skin.
finish the water.
they will notice your thorns and ask you to testify.
turn toward the shade. smile.
say nothing at all
– Lucille Clifton
there have been so many times
i have seen a man wanting to weep
but
instead
beat his heart until it was unconscious.
– Nayyirah Waheed
It is through logic that we prove, but through intuition that we discover
– Poincaré
They plunder, they butcher, they ravish … They make a desert and call it peace.
– Tacitus (‘Agricola’)
If you practice enduring people’s bewildering love for you, it will change you molecularly: it loosens you, gooses you, warms you.
– Anne Lamott
Quietness is an essential part of all awareness. In quiet times and sleepy times, a child can dwell in thoughts of his own, and in songs and stories of his own.
– Margaret Wise Brown
Your consciousness is not yours; you suffer as other people suffer.
– Krishnamurti
My grief is the tree, roots swelling beyond a spade’s reach, or I am just too tired to dig all the time.
– Ttam Nanooc
One must allow the schtick to drift and shift and transform — never get stuck on a schtick.
– River Kenna
One of the hardest things is knowing when to stop waiting for a return of who you used to be; when to say farewell to the one who could walk better, breathe better, think better. Accepting that there are wounds that do not heal, and wounds that through healing reveal another.
– Christina Tudor-Sideri
Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings….
– Heinrich Heine
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.
– @farnamstreet
The clearer your energy, the less likely you’re going to get involved with anything that feels off, weird or distorted. Discernment goes way up.
– Nika Solé
after Rishi
the plan has worked
but hasn’t happened
the plan that happened
hasn’t worked
what happened wasn’t
planned and won’t work
what worked wasn’t
planned to happen
what plan?
what happened?
what happens is a plan
when what works hasn’t
– Alec Finlay, 24.V.24
Once you overcome the one inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.
– Bong Joon-ho
The link between lack of sleep and cancer is now so strong that the World Health Organization has classified any form of nighttime shift work as a probable carcinogen.
– Matt Walker
I would like to point to the real, disclose it, to make a poem that has no sound in it but the pointing of a finger.
– Jack Spicer, after lorca
There’s a saying from Kabbala: To contemplate truth without sorrow is the greatest gift.
– Robert Stone / Damascus Gate
Wear your heart on the page, and people will read to find out how you solved being alive.
– Amy Hempel
Cannot keep my heart
as bright
as this spring is
– Paul Blackburn
Why should the truth not be impossible? Why should the impossible not be true?
– Anne Carson
Heavy Summer Rain
by Jane Kenyon
The grasses in the field have toppled,
and in places it seems that a large, now
absent, animal must have passed the night.
The hay will right itself if the day
turns dry. I miss you steadily, painfully.
None of your blustering entrances
or exits, doors swinging wildly
on their hinges, or your huge unconscious
sighs when you read something sad,
like Henry Adams’s letters from Japan,
where he traveled after Clover died.
Everything blooming bows down in the rain:
white irises, red peonies; and the poppies
with their black and secret centers
lie shattered on the lawn.
Only the rhythm of the rain
Can ease my sorrow, end my pain.
– Lynn Riggs
warring winds
the colours of a flag
worn thin
– @hegelincanada
THE MOMENT
Oh, the coming-out-of-nowhere moment
when, nothing
happens
no what-have-I-to-do-today-list
maybe half a moment
the rush of traffic stops.
The whir of I should be, I should be, I should be
slows to silence,
the white cotton curtains hanging still.
– Marie Howe
An open heart is a conduit through which collective life can express its grief of uncertainty and loss.
– Nikayla Jefferson
The universe is represented in every one of its particles. Every thing in nature contains all the powers of nature. Every thing is made of one hidden stuff; as the naturalist sees one type under every metamorphosis, and regards a horse as a running man, a fish as a swimming man, a bird as a flying man, a tree as a rooted man. Each new form repeats not only the main character of the type, but part for part all the details, all the aims, furtherances, hindrances, energies, and whole system of every other. Every occupation, trade, art, transaction, is a compend of the world, and a correlative of every other. Each one is an entire emblem of human life; of its good and ill, its trials, its enemies, its course and its end. And each one must somehow accommodate the whole man, and recite all his destiny. The world globes itself in a drop of dew.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Without an altruistic motivation, scientists cannot distinguish between beneficial technologies and the merely expedient.
– Dalai Lama
As the influence of AI increases and of the Dalai Lama decreases, I trip across this.
– Ian Sanders
The strange thing about growing old is that the intimate identification with the here and now is slowly lost; one feels transposed into infinity, more or less alone, no longer in hope or fear, only observing.
– Albert Einstein
It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it.
– Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Diversity is the magic. It is the first manifestation, the first beginning of the differentiation of a thing and of simple identity. The greater the diversity, the greater the perfection.
– Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth
Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our civilization.
– Mahatma Gandhi
In the modern working world, we define diversity as a concerted effort to accommodate the full spectrum of human experience.
– Blaise Radley
All religions
All this singing
One song.
– Rumi
Diversity is the one true thing we all have in common… Celebrate it every day.
– Winston Churchill
We have become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.
– Jimmy Carter
I saw before me a huge crowd which no one could count from every nation and tongue. They stood before the throne and the Lamb, dressed in long white robes and holding palm branches in their hands…They said, Amen! Praise the glory, wisdom and thanksgiving and honor, power and might to our God forever.
– Revelations 7:9
Diversity may be the hardest thing for a society to live with, and perhaps the most dangerous thing for a society to be without.”
– William Sloane Coffin
On the beach, at dawn;
four small stones clearly
hugging each other.
How many kinds of love
might there be in the the world,
and how many formations might they make
And who am I ever
to imagine I could know
such a marvelous business?
– Mary Oliver, On The Beach
The modern world has far too little understanding of the art of keeping young. Its notion of progress has been to pile one thing on top of another, without caring if each thing was crushed in turn. People forgot that the human soul can enjoy a thing most when there is time to think about it and be thankful for it. And by crowding things together they lost the sense of surprise; and surprise is the secret of joy.
– G.K. Chesterton
Lies About Sea Creatures
I lied about the whales. Fantastical blue
water-dwellers, big, slow moaners of the coastal.
I never saw them. Not once that whole frozen year.
Sure, I saw the raw white, gannets hit the waves
so hard, it could have been a showy blow hole.
But I knew it wasn’t. Sometimes, you just want
something so hard, you have to lie about it,
so you can hold it in your mouth for a minute,
how real hunger has a real taste. Someone once
told me, gannets, those voracious sea birds
of the North Atlantic chill, go blind from the height
and speed of their dives. But that, too, is a lie.
Gannets never go blind and they certainly never die.
– Ada Limón
Sit and lean on the right hand. Then you will see that the right hand bends backwards with ease. Sit and touch with the right hand in all different positions.
You see? The hand bends very well with everyone. It bends.
It is the brains that do not bend.
Because, when you lie on the side, all of a sudden, you forget that you know how to bend the hand.
How is that? When you grow up, you will understand.
– Moshé Feldenkrais
I want one word on my tombstone – dancer.
– Steve Paxton
You’ve been swimming in gravity since the day you were born. Every cell knows where down is. Easily forgotten. Your mass and the earth’s mass calling to each other.
– Steve Paxton
If people ask me how to Contact Improvise, I simply say, “Start small” or, “Start small for a long time.”
After fifty years of all this, I realize I should have said,
Go beyond small to the place where no message is being given. Start there. Let small be the first of the pleasures to come.” Accept the first perturbation of that emptiness as the focus of the next moments. It is not a dance about you, or your partner. It is a dance about its movement.
– Steve Paxton
I was trying to understand what makes integrity in movement.
– Steve Paxton
In the pursuit of effective communication, one can consider a practice known as ‘reflection before response.’
– Oren Jay Sofer
Do not think you can be brave
with your life and work
and never disappoint anyone.
It doesn’t work that way.
– Brene Brown
I really was never any more than what I was — a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze.
– Bob Dylan
Meditation is not necessarily about generating intense concentration. It can be about the exact opposite: a slow, steady gentleness that adds no intensity to what already exists.
– M. Sophia Newman
If Queen Elizabeth or Frederick the Great or Ernest Hemingway were to read their biographies, they would exclaim, “Ah, my secret is still safe.” But if Natasha Rostov were to read War and Peace she would cry out as she covered her face with her hands: “How did he know, how did he know?
– Thornton Wilder
It’s enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.
– Gabriel Garcia Márquez
the woman from the world´s end gives water to the statues, gives dreams to the poets. calls the light with a whistle, cures the tempest, changes the course of dreams, writes letters to the rivers; pulls me from eternal sleep, to her singing arms.
– murilo mendes
I am living a life of the whole of humanity, and if I understand death, if I understand grief, I am cleansing the whole of the consciousness of mankind.
– Krishnamurti
A quotation is a handy thing to have about, saving one the trouble of thinking for oneself, always a laborious business.
– A.A. Milne
I prefer Black & White, because reality is B&W. Colour is distracting. When you see a beautiful landscape in a colour film, you forget the story. Americans use colour for Musicals. All my best films were made in B&W.
– Vittorio De Sica
Every artist must struggle through the misty fumes of crass materialism to those spiritual intimations that build for him the golden bridge into shoreless eternities.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
It is best to be no one, because then everything can flow through you. Emptiness possesses no resistance, and the entire universe exists in emptiness.
– Platonov
These pictures showed something that lay behind the things the lens had focused on, things which, for an imperceptible moment in time, the shutter release must have brushed aside. The images belonged to a past I could not even be sure was my own …
– Esther Kinsky, River
Some of you are in academia for the wrong reasons.
– @ThePhDPlace
Content may be king but community is queen, and the queen is the most powerful piece on the board.
– @MythicPicnic
Regardless of how brutal life is one must go on. Everyone has rights: you have a right to kill yourself if you want to, but as long as you can stay alive you cannot exist in a half world as the central character in our film tries to.
– Sidney Lumet, The Pawnbroker
There are some people who never psychologically leave the Garden of Eden. They have never had to encounter the “law” that contradicts their original ego-Self identity and the inflation that goes along with it. Psychologically, they are unborn.
– Edward Edinger
my heart fell in life, like a star wounded by a hunter’s arrow.
– cecília meireles
What hinders us most to act freely, live freely, have the freedom to be who we want to be? It is fear, fear of some sort of pain. But if we test ourselves over and over again by practicing tonglen whenever our painful emotions come up, we can become fearless in all circumstances. Without fear, we can confront anything that comes up in life and in death. By taking this approach – not rejecting but embracing our darkness – all our ignorance, confusion, neurosis, and negativity become fertile ground for their opposites to grow. Ignorance is the fertile ground for our awareness to develop. Confusion is the fertile ground for clarity, neurosis the fertile ground for sanity, negativity the fertile ground of positivity. And our self-importance becomes the fertile ground for our bodhicitta to blossom. All we have to do is use our own suffering to stimulate compassion for others, and then take their suffering upon ourselves. When we see what’s in our own mind, we’re seeing what’s in the world’s mind as well. If what we see is suffering, that insight becomes compassion for the world. And if what we see in our mind is happiness, we can turn that joy into rejoicing in the good fortune and positive qualities of others.
– Dzigar Kongtrul, The Intelligent Heart
I’m always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it’s very shocking to the system.
– Flannery O’Connor
When you live on the edge of any structure, you have to know that survival is not theoretical…You learn that you have to value and critique the particulars all the time because at any moment, anything can mean the end. And that gives you a kind of sharpness.
– Audre Lorde
The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth. This alignment destroys the commonwealth-the natural wealth of localities & local economies of household, neighborhood & community-and so destroys democracy.
– Wendell Berry
Those who are against fascism without being against capitalism, who lament over the barbarism that comes out of fascism, are like those who wish to eat their veal without slaughtering the calf.
– Bertolt Brecht
If you think hedgerows are great for nature and deserve special status as an important habitat, wait until you here about this thing called “Woodland”
– Rewilding Ireland
A kind of paradise. Everything itself. The sea is water. Stones are made of rock. The sun goes up and goes down. A success without any enhancement whatsoever.
– Jack Gilbert
Philosophy requires only what your nature already demands.
– Marcus Aurelius
THE IMPOSSIBLE MARRIAGE
The bride disappears. After twenty minutes of searching
we discover her in the cellar, vanishing against a pillar
in her white gown and her skin’s original pallor.
When we guide her back to the altar, we find the groom
in his slouch hat, open shirt, and untended beard
withdrawn to the belltower with the healthy young sexton
from whose comradeship we detach him with difficulty.
Oh, never in all the cathedrals and academies
of compulsory Democracy and free-thinking Calvinism
will these poets marry! – O pale, passionate
anchoret of Amherst! O reticent kosmos of Brooklyn!
– Donald Hall
Rereading Frost
Sometimes I think all the best poems
have been written already,
and no one has time to read them,
so why try to write more?
At other times though,
I remember how one flower
in a meadow already full of flowers
somehow adds to the general fireworks effect
as you get to the top of a hill
in Colorado, say, in high summer
and just look down at all that brimming color.
I also try to convince myself
that the smallest note of the smallest
instrument in the band,
the triangle for instance,
is important to the conductor
who stands there, pointing his finger
in the direction of the percussions,
demanding that one silvery ping.
And I decide not to stop trying,
at least not for a while, though in truth
I’d rather just sit here reading
how someone else has been acquainted
with the night already, and perfectly.
– Linda Pastan
If someone were to ask me to teach directing, frankly, I’d be at a loss. I’d perhaps simply be content with showing films. And the one that I would choose over any other is most certainly ‘The Rules of the Game’ (1939) by Jean Renoir.
– Bernardo Bertolucci
Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.
– Pablo Picasso
At least I have a nice life. And that’s what we all want, isn’t it?
– Jim Harrison
The quiet poems are what I worry about–the ones that must be seduced. They could travel about with me for years and no one would notice them.
– Jack Spicer, after lorca
It is the responsibility of the Artist perpetually to question the zealous State and the narcoticized Society.
– James Baldwin
one coffee ring
added to another …
words half spoken
– Chen-ou Liu
The aim of psychoanalysis is to relieve people of their neurotic unhappiness so that they can be normally unhappy.
– Sigmund Freud
All I can say is, having a job hasn’t been a hard price to pay for economic security. Some people, I know, would sooner have the economic insecurity because they have to ‘feel free’ before they can write. But it’s worked for me.
– Philip Larkin
The Mercy Moment
The most outstanding characteristic of the mercy moment, the time when she comes, is how instantly the suffering stops. You have to stop thinking. You don’t have time for guilt, or you will neither sleep nor begin again. This was how I started this time; then I asked myself what I would like to read, or rather what items I wanted in my culture, to contain created, newly and justly, my needs. The world isn’t a text to be deciphered, it is a new creation though ancient—but what is antiquity to me? Every moment must destroy suffering anew; a cloud enters you, to begin in.
– Alice Notely
I can understand and be awed by the ever-changing nature of this ever-changing Earth…Everything changes, and the changes are not always pretty. Who said they had to be pretty?
– Paul Kingsnorth
Earth is always earth. The earth will let anyone sit on it, and earth never gives way.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Think of the most beautiful person you have ever seen. Think of the exact moment you looked into his or her eyes, and for a fleeting second you were paralyzed: you couldn’t take your eyes off that vision. You stared, frozen in time, caught in that beauty. Now imagine that identical beauty radiating from every single thing in the entire universe: every rock, every plant, every animal, every cloud, every person, every object, every mountain, every stream—even the garbage dumps and broken dreams— every single one of them, radiating that beauty. You are quietly frozen by the gentle beauty of everything that arises around you. You are released from grasping, released from time, released from avoidance, released altogether into the eye of Spirit, where you contemplate the unending beauty of the Art that is the entire World.
That all-pervading Beauty is not an exercise in creative imagination. It is the actual structure of the universe. That all-pervading Beauty is in truth the very nature of the Kosmos right now. It is not something you have to imagine, because it is the actual structure of perception in all domains. If you remain in the eye of Spirit, every object is an object of radiant Beauty. If the doors of perception are cleansed, the entire Kosmos is your lost and found Beloved, the Original Face of primordial Beauty, forever, and forever, and endlessly forever. And in the face of that stunning Beauty, you will completely swoon into your own death, never to be seen or heard from again, except on those tender nights when the wind gently blows through the hills and the mountains, quietly calling your name.
– Ken Wilber
A mark was on him from the day’s delight, so that all his life, when April was a thin green and the flavor of rain was on his tongue, an old wound would throb and a nostalgia would fill him for something he could not quite remember.
– Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
And then there’s the time-stopping stillness of sacred moments, as when an eagle drops a feather and the pueblo elders bow their heads in prayer.
– Leila
I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously … And now I seek my hatred and cannot seem to find it. I feel its flame going out as I come to understand [its] existence … It would be difficult for me to avenge all those who should be avenged, because my revenge would be just another part of the same inexorable rite. I have to break that terrible chain. I want to think that my task is life and that my mission is not to prolong hatred but simply fill these pages …
– Isabel Allende
Etymologically, integrity is oneness, integration is what makes something one. To be a thing, one thing, a unity, an entity; to be anything at all: in the metaphysical sense, that is what it means to have integrity. But we use the term for someone who lives up to his own standards. And that is because we think that living up to them is what makes him one, and so what makes him a person at all. It is the conceptions of ourselves that are most important to us that give rise to unconditional obligations. For to violate them is to lose your integrity and so your identity, and to no longer be who you are.
– Christine M. Korsgaard
Be careful, when a democracy is sick, fascism comes to its bedside, but not to get news from it.
– Albert Camus
The sickness of the individual is ultimately caused by and sustained by the sickness of his civilization
– Herbert Marcuse
Joy can be restorative. It can be akin to a good meal: nourishing and necessary.
– @daisyhernandez
The future of cinema is where it started: In a movie theatre.
– Sean Baker
Risks don’t go away because people are tired of thinking about them.
– Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
If my wealth goes away, it takes with it nothing but itself.
– Seneca
You can’t be —
you must become,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
Places that don’t exist have something in common: They’re real.
Places that do exist aren’t so real after awhile.
– Pere Ubu
We want to show them
that love is a many
splendored thing,
Sh-wee said.
– The Old Monk
Wherever you go, you meet part of your story.
– Eudora Welty
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
– W. B. Yeats
Carrion Comfort
by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist — slack they may be — these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?
Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.
Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród
Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.
Being fully in the stillness was not about self-isolation or self-help but about standing in radical relationship with all that stillness holds—all the grief, all the loss, all the loneliness—and standing with it, rather than rushing to reason it away, arrest it, or lock it in a box.
– Jasmine Syedullah
Hildegard says that no warmth is lost in the Universe. My phrase is that no beauty is lost in the Universe. If I get it right, Einstein is saying that no energy is lost in the Universe. So I think the gathering up of our awe and wonder and suffering and creativity and compassion, all this gathering up, this volcano, this spewing out, goes out there just like the nutrients do in a volcano. Spiritual nutrients. They are not material so they can go very far. In this context we are beyond space and time where our prayers gather the beauty, the warmth, the compassion, the suffering, the awe, and the creativity of our ancestors. And they fertilize that which is to come.
– Matthew Fox and Rupert Sheldrake, Natural Grace
My husband said something a few years ago that I often quote: Eighty percent of everything that is true and beautiful can be experienced on any ten-minute walk.
– Anne Lamott
If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.
– Muriel Rukeyser
Any time we are abruptly thrown off course, it is an opportunity to reexamine our lives, our values, and where we are headed.
– Judy Lief
Dare to declare who you are. It is not far from the shores of silence to the boundaries of speech. The path is not long, but the way is deep. You must not only walk there, you must be prepared to leap.
– St. Hildegard of Bingen
If you break down the ego before transcending the superego, you’re gonna have problems
ESPECIALLY if your adopted superego is the thing convincing you to break down the ego
– River Kenna
The past is the past. You just got to leave it. Heck, you can’t unboil an onion.
– Elizabeth Kern
Art matters to fifty people, of whom thirty are not normal.
– Gottfried Benn
All day I’ve built
a lifetime and now
the sun sinks to
undo it.
– Anne Sexton
Hey kids, we’ve underfunded your school, thrown your family into poverty, decimated your community, pumped shit into your drinking water & sold your future to billionaire psychopaths. Now it’s time for you to give something back.
– Climate Dad
It’s not radical to critique your own government. It’s called being a true patriot.
– Zeeshan Jaanam
I’m not a fan of the current education system.
Lack of physical activity. Sitting in classrooms for 8 hours memorizing random things they can search off the internet.
This is not an ideal way to learn.
– Dan Go
i’m not searching for shells at the beach i am looking for friendship.
– Kristen Arnett
For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
– Mark 8:36
A lot of race theorizing emerges from addressing the limits of white leftist analyses and politics, not just liberalism or conservatism.
– @tamaranopper
The power of music just kinda kills all those ills; it cures everything and you’ve got more energy just from the music. And, I’ve never seen it fail. It’s good for ya; real good for ya.
– Levon Helm
I lost something in my poetry that I don’t know will ever return. I’ve been grieving this something that I can’t express or access.
– Natalie Eilbert
I truly don’t think people understand the consequences of getting what we want
Not just the “woe is me I wanted money and fame but now I’m in a lonesome prison of my own design” stuff,
Also eg- “I wanted a life of beauty and connection… and that had fucking consequences”
– River Kenna
Everything has two endings—
a horse, a piece of string, a phone call.
– Jane Hirshfield
James Baldwin said, “The air of this time and place is so heavy with rhetoric, so thick with soothing lies, that one must really do great violence to language, one must somehow disrupt the comforting beat.” And “dismiss any hopes…of winning a popularity contest.”
– @tamaranopper
I’ve always had access to other worlds. We all do because we dream.
– Leonora Carrington
It’s seriously hard to care much about anything besides what horrible shape the US (or, say, entire world) is in. It’s breathtaking.
– Lisa Lucas
gliding with such grace
envy the water skaters
who tread so lightly
who truly leave no trace
who go where we cannot
– @HaikuHedgehog
Pro-tip: Don’t invent a Trinitarian analogy based on corporate capitalism.
Or maybe: Don’t invent a Trinitarian analogy.
Perhaps: Don’t.
– Diana Butler Bass
you are not responsible
neither for the world nor for the end of the world
the burden is lifted from your shoulders
you are like birds and like children
at play
and they play
they forget
that modern poetry
is a struggle to breathe
– Tadeusz Różewicz
May I see things and people as they are, not as I wish them to be. For in the isness, my soul shakes loose, knowing exactly how to flow and be.
– McCall Erickson
I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.
– Max Planck
When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
– Seamus Heaney
When folks who aren’t digitally native complain about how much I tweet, I start giving up on the world and common sense. It takes seconds. Seconds! And I never much cared about what people thought of me beyond honoring commitments and trying hard at work and life!
– Lisa Lucas
The empty hours
are the torment,
when God’s not
talking to me,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
Care is complicated, gendered, misused. It is often mobilized to enact
violence, not assuage it, yet I cannot surrender it. I want acts and accounts of care as shared and distributed risk, as mass refusals of the unbearable life, as total rejections of the dead future.
– Christina Sharpe
Is there a holiday
that honors
all of the civilians
who are targeted
and killed in war?
– Andy Perrin
I don’t know how to explain it but the word balloon does not look right to me because it looks Dutch.
– Brandon Taylor
history reveals
humanity’s fecundity
at solving problems
is transcended only by
our skill at creating them
– Gabe Valentine
Sunday meditation
ice cubes melting
in the sink
– @pauldavidmena
If I had the world in my hand, I’m quite sure I would trade it for a ticket to Rua dos Douradores.
– Fernando Pessoa
Has Spring passed away?
Did Summer already come?
– Jitō Tennō, translated by Yone Noguchi
I know what I liked as a child, and I don’t do any book that I, as a child, wouldn’t have liked.
– HA Rey
A deep smile
Inside my heart
Under the stars
– @frghtndmn
my happy place
a portal
to another dimension
– @pauldavidmena
Song of Nature
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Mine are the night and morning,
The pits of air, the gulf of space,
The sportive sun, the gibbous moon,
The innumerable days.
I hid in the solar glory,
I am dumb in the pealing song,
I rest on the pitch of the torrent,
In slumber I am strong.
No numbers have counted my tallies,
No tribes my house can fill,
I sit by the shining Fount of Life,
And pour the deluge still;
And ever by delicate powers
Gathering along the centuries
From race on race the rarest flowers,
My wreath shall nothing miss.
And many a thousand summers
My apples ripened well,
And light from meliorating stars
With firmer glory fell.
I wrote the past in characters
Of rock and fire the scroll,
The building in the coral sea,
The planting of the coal.
And thefts from satellites and rings
And broken stars I drew,
And out of spent and aged things
I formed the world anew;
What time the gods kept carnival,
Tricked out in star and flower,
And in cramp elf and saurian forms
They swathed their too much power.
Time and Thought were my surveyors,
They laid their courses well,
They boiled the sea, and baked the layers
Or granite, marl, and shell.
But he, the man-child glorious,—
Where tarries he the while?
The rainbow shines his harbinger,
The sunset gleams his smile.
My boreal lights leap upward,
Forthright my planets roll,
And still the man-child is not born,
The summit of the whole.
Must time and tide forever run?
Will never my winds go sleep in the west?
Will never my wheels which whirl the sun
And satellites have rest?
Too much of donning and doffing,
Too slow the rainbow fades,
I weary of my robe of snow,
My leaves and my cascades;
I tire of globes and races,
Too long the game is played;
What without him is summer’s pomp,
Or winter’s frozen shade?
I travail in pain for him,
My creatures travail and wait;
His couriers come by squadrons,
He comes not to the gate.
Twice I have moulded an image,
And thrice outstretched my hand,
Made one of day, and one of night,
And one of the salt sea-sand.
One in a Judaean manger,
And one by Avon stream,
One over against the mouths of Nile,
And one in the Academe.
I moulded kings and saviours,
And bards o’er kings to rule;—
But fell the starry influence short,
The cup was never full.
Yet whirl the glowing wheels once more,
And mix the bowl again;
Seethe, fate! the ancient elements,
Heat, cold, wet, dry, and peace, and pain.
Let war and trade and creeds and song
Blend, ripen race on race,
The sunburnt world a man shall breed
Of all the zones, and countless days.
No ray is dimmed, no atom worn,
My oldest force is good as new,
And the fresh rose on yonder thorn
Gives back the bending heavens in dew.
Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.
– Rene Magritte
Travelling Storm
by Mark Van Doren
The sky, above us here, is open again.
The sun comes hotter, and the shingles steam.
The trees are done with dripping, and the hens
Bustle among bright pools to pick and drink. . . .
But east and south are black with speeding storm.
That thunder, low and far, remembering nothing,
Gathers a new world under it and growls,
Worries, strikes, and is gone. Children at windows
Cry at the rain, it pours so heavily down,
Drifting across the yard till the sheds are grey. . . .
A county father on, the wind is all—
A swift dark wind that turns the maples pale,
Ruffles the hay, and spreads the swallows’ wings.
Horses, suddenly restless, are unhitched,
And men, with glances upward, hurry in;
Their overalls blow full and cool; they shout;
Soon they will lie in barns and laugh at the lightning. . . .
Another county yet, and the sky is still;
The air is fainting; women sit with fans
And wonder when a rain will come that way.
Find the tradeoffs you can’t help but make,
The ones where even when it sinks in, truly sinks in, what the consequences will be, your reaction is to sigh, grimace, and say “yeah, count me in”
There’s no other choice to be made. This is what your soul needs from you.
– River Kenna
When one hears, sees, smells, or tastes something, even when a thought brushes the edge of consciousness, a sensation arises.
A moment of silence, then a thought, accompanied by a tonality.
– Martine Batchelor
Sunset Park
by Patrick Phillips
The Chinese truck driver
throws the rope
like a lasso, with a practiced flick,
over the load:
where it hovers an instant,
then arcs like a willow
into the waiting,
gloved hand
of his brother.
What does it matter
that, sitting in traffic,
I glanced out the window
and found them that way?
So lean and sleek-muscled
in their sweat-stiffened t-shirts:
offloading the pallets
just so they can load up
again in the morning,
and so on,
and so forth
forever like that—
like Sisyphus
I might tell them
if I spoke Mandarin,
or had a Marlboro to offer,
or thought for a minute
they’d believe it
when I say that I know
how it feels
to break your own
back for a living.
Then again,
what’s the difference?
When every light
for a mile turns
green all at once,
no matter how much
I might like
to keep watching
the older one squint
and blow smoke
through his nose?
Something like sadness,
like joy, like a sudden
love for my life,
and for the body
in which I have lived it,
overtaking me all at once,
as a bus driver honks
and the setting
sun glints, so bright
off a windshield
I wince and look back
and it’s gone.
What lay ahead was uncertain but my connection with myself was not.
– McCall Erickson, Down From The Mountain
It goes on being Alexandria still.
– C.P. Cavafy
Too much of even the critical work on political economy doesn’t know what to do with race and racism except to say that nonwhite people have it worse, which is not the same as considering how white supremacy and anti-blackness structure the political economy for everyone.
– @tamaranopper
The Wind Has Died
My little boat,
Take care,
There is no
Land in sight.
– Charles Simic
I never know whether something is going to work until the last word of the last line of the last draft.
– Deborah Eisenberg
open window
the old lilac
sends its best
– @moonflowernco
A leaf falls
Thru a gap
In spacetime
– @frghtndmn
Dreams are so funny because like. Here’s the coolest thing you have ever seen in your life. And no you can’t remember it
– @gloomingly
Conversation with Immigration Officer
by Ae Hee Lee
She looks at your papers.
She asks your husband to step out.
She asks you where your husband’s birthplace is.
She is testing you. You answer:
we were made in water in free-flowing
salt water rich with plankton
& we keep a fire
in our lungs it burns white
red in the center like a hibiscus
you must know we are all manic
you must know we are not ink
more than pencil-point residue
graphite …
She asks for the address of your current home.
You clear your throat and fold your hands on your lap.
Secretly, you imagine you have just met her
in a train, on the way to some undecidedly beautiful place.
we are living
in this continent for now
we had to leave paradise
when we became of age a common ritual
how about you? did you know
this continent is but a well-rooted boat?
did you know roots are easy
to snap?
The officer has a catalog of potential questions in her eyes.
You are the last question mark inside that list.
She asks if you have committed any crimes.
i have lied before
my memories
& my world are always
being devoured
by bright lime groves
but i am committed to lie
with love
to live
i thought everyone
committed lies
& wants
She asks what you had for breakfast.
What your husband had for breakfast.
You smile at what could have been
a question asked by a friend.
i pressed pearly remains
of snow into my mouth
drop drop drop …
i didn’t share
he peeled & ate a secret
he didn’t share
either
But the officer doesn’t smile back.
She asks if you understand what she is saying.
i don’t dream in languages
only in prophecies
& whale songs
Your lawyer, sitting behind you,
says everything is going to be all right.
i believe stories
become real
when you hunger
yes, yes, don’t words make you want
to believe?
But she isn’t smiling either. You shiver.
The air conditioner is always too cold, too powerful
in this country.
see how inside my thorax
minute icicles
prickle and shake
slightly at each hiccup
no … yes … no …
The officer says you will hear from them
in a couple of months. She asks you to leave.
She asks your husband to step in.
yes …
On bringing back the national service:
If we are bringing back national service can we also bring back the NHS and welfare state ?
– Dmdav1
I’d rather they brought back clean rivers, a functioning NHS and trains which run on time.
– @MarcDavenant
Closing libraries, swimming pools, sports centres, youth clubs, compromising children’s services, and then claiming young people need dragging out of their bubble is bullshit.
– Chris Mould
…there could never be an end to the rescue of men from the rubble of their ideas.
– Patrick White
Want
by Joan Larkin
She wants a house full of cups and the ghosts
of last century’s lesbians; I want a spotless
apartment, a fast computer. She wants a woodstove,
three cords of ash, an axe; I want
a clean gas flame. She wants a row of jars:
oats, coriander, thick green oil;
I want nothing to store. She wants pomanders,
linens, baby quilts, scrapbooks. She wants Wellesley
reunions. I want gleaming floorboards, the river’s
reflection. She wants shrimp and sweat and salt;
she wants chocolate. I want a raku bowl,
steam rising from rice. She wants goats,
chickens, children. Feeding and weeping. I want
wind from the river freshening cleared rooms.
She wants birthdays, theaters, flags, peonies.
I want words like lasers. She wants a mother’s
tenderness. Touch ancient as the river.
I want a woman’s wit swift as a fox.
She’s in her city, meeting
her deadline; I’m in my mill village out late
with the dog, listening to the pinging wind bells, thinking
of the twelve years of wanting, apart and together.
We’ve kissed all weekend; we want
to drive the hundred miles and try it again.
The educator has the duty of not being neutral.
– Paulo Freire
Being in movement, being in the midst of everyday life, is my main jam, I guess, as a poet. Then there’s another part to that, and that is, it counters loneliness…
– Diane Seuss
Go all the way with it. Do not back off. For once, go all the goddamn way with what matters.
– Ernest Hemingway
Why do my Zen friends
choose smoke and vines
this life of mine isn’t so hard
gardenias below the cliff
perfume the trees
shoots in my garden
form rows of green…
Life in the mountains
depends on a hoe.
– Stonehouse
such joy
reborn as a butterfly
in a summer field
– Issa
Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands
Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken,
Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken,
Luminously-peopled air ascends;
And past the poppies bluish neutral distance
Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach
Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:
Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.
– Philip Larkin
We need to become vividly aware of our ecology, of our interdependence and virtual identity with all other forms of life which the divisive and emboxing methods of our current way of thought prevent us from experiencing. The so-called physical world and the so-called human body are a single process, differentiated only as the heart from the lungs or the head from the feet.
– Alan Watts
i am looking for peace. i am looking for mercy. i am looking for
evidence of compassion. any evidence of life. i am looking for
life.
– Suheir Hammad
God for us, God alongside us, God within us.
– Fr. Richard Rohr
Prayer for Werewolves
by Stephanie Burt
Someone will probably love you for who you are.
If not, you’ll still find friends,
friends who, given time, or given warning,
will probably gather around you, hold your hands,
and wrap you in soft coats and blankets till the violence
inside your body ends.
Someone will probably love you for who you are,
not just for who you labor to be.
Maybe you’re lost in your skin today. Maybe you’re burning
and wish you could tear it all off. Please don’t. You are variously
a marvel, an athlete, a wilderness, a source of warmth
and a way to learn from fear.
When you have claws, your claws are yours, your ears
bristle and are yours; your irises
are citrine, pure, and yours. They let you see
through smog and pine thickets and into the future, where
you need no chains to feel secure,
and someone will probably love you for who you are:
then you will know each other’s scents
and nuzzle or lope together. But for
now, you have friends,
who are not going anywhere. Please
stay here.
All that echoes
fades too
fast.
– Jeffrey F. Barken
What happens when you die?
What do you dread, in this room, now?
Not listening. Now. Not watching. Safe inside my own skin. To die, not having listened. Not having asked … To have scattered life.
Yes I know: the thread you have to keep finding, over again, to
follow it back to life; I know. Impossible, sometimes.
– Jean Valentine
Who will honor the city without a name
If so many are dead and others pan gold
Or sell arms in faraway countries?
– Czeslaw Milosz
Who can look at this and spin any excuse, say anything that makes sense at all? Someone’s child, all these children.
– Amy Stuber
Although
the cricket’s song has
no words,
still,
it sounds like sorrow.
– Izumi Shikibu
Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.
– Sir Isaac Newton
On the sandy beach,
Footprints:
Long is the spring day.
– Masaoka Shiki, (Trans. R.H. Blyth)
The good artist has supreme vanity.
– William Faulkner
Consider that an AI more intelligent than you may also be less self-destructive. Maybe less sadistic. Perhaps even wise.
– Kenneth Folk
Maybe we need non-compete agreements for AI?
– JRE
There is only one solitude, and it is large and not easy to bear… People are drawn to the easy and to the easiest side of the easy. But it is clear that we must hold ourselves to the difficult.
– Rilke
pickled leather boots
cold from seaweed puddles
and coriander bath
which way is back
to the Chantal Ackerman
tour bus?
– Allison Grimaldi Donahue
Every deity is a metaphor, a mask, for the ultimate mystery ground, the transcendent energy source of the universe, that is also the mysterious source of your own life—and everyone else’s.
– Joseph Campbell
Every person’s map of the world is as unique as their thumbprint. There are no two people alike.
No two people who understand the same sentence the same way. So in dealing with people, you try not to fit them to your concept of what they should be.
– Milton H. Erickson
I like the sea: we understand one another. It is always yearning, sighing for something it cannot have; and so am I.
– Greta Garbo
Everything that happens to you is your teacher. The secret is to learn to sit at the feet of your own life and be taught by it.
– Polly B. Berends
All too often, anger becomes an alluring substitute for grieving, promising agency and control when one’s real situation does not offer control.
– David Whyte
The hero of my tale, whom I love
with all the power of my soul, whom
I tried to portray in all his beauty, who
has been, is, and will be beautiful, is Truth.
– Leo Tolstoy
I see vividly my immediate and endless supply. It comes from a Higher Power, and all doors fly open! All channels are free. I see vividly my radiant health, perfect and permanent. I see vividly my heart’s desires come to pass in the twinkling of an eye.
– Florence Scovel Shinn
Memo to the media: Don’t write about corporations suddenly lowering prices without mentioning how their profits have been skyrocketing or their tax bills have been shrinking. They could have kept prices lower all along. They chose note to. Give people the full picture.
– Robert Reich
College degrees are becoming participation trophies.
Real-world skills are the new GPA.
– Scott D. Clary
I don’t know a lot of things but I know that we can let experiences harden us or soften us, and I know which one of those feels more human.
– Ralph dFe La Rosa
Sanity lies somewhere between the inhibitions of conventional morality and the looseness of the extreme impulse.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Serious artists make bad art, regularily.
– inspiredtowrite@
The human heart is like a night bird. Silently waiting for something, and when the time comes, it flies straight toward it.
– Haruki Murakami
There is an unavoidable tendency to become literally the embodiment of that quality upon which one most constantly thinks.
– James Allen
The sole and supreme use of suffering is to purify, to burn out all that is useless and impure.
– James Allen
A world without delight and without affection is a world destitute of value.
– Bertrand Russell, The Scientific Outlook
Real life means the complete expression of all that man can give forth through body, mind, and soul.
– Wallace D. Wattles
I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats.
– J. M. Coetzee
When you can no longer be disturbed, all disturbance will disappear from the external. When your eyes have seen your teachers, your teachers disappear.
– Florence Scovel Shinn
The wise man dies no better or more wisely than the fool. In what way, then, is the wise man wise?
– Joseph Heller, God Knows
We are far from the poets and poets are far from the public. What was once the daily song and story of the people is now relegated to little magazines, university squabbles, or entertainment, or resurrected through the back door in therapy as we try to remember these things.
– Russell Lockhart
No man can say his eyes have had enough of seeing, his ears their fill of hearing. – Ecclesiastes 1:8
Third-eye seeing is the way the mystics see. They do not reject the first eye (thought or sight); the senses matter to them, but they know there is more. Nor do they reject the second eye (the eye of reason, meditation, and reflection); but they know not to confuse knowledge with depth, or mere correct information with the transformation of consciousness itself. The mystical gaze builds upon the first two eyes—and yet goes further.
It happens whenever, by some wondrous “coincidence,” our heart space, our mind space, and our body awareness are all simultaneously open and nonresistant. I like to call it presence. It is experienced as a moment of deep inner connection, and it always pulls you, intensely satisfied, into the naked and undefended now, which can involve both profound joy and profound sadness at the very same time.
– Richard Rohr
We are constructing a world in which each of us, in his daily experience, encounters only the known.
– Jean-Luc Godard
The task is, not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees.
– Erwin Schrödinger
So I read.
Angels, I read, belong to nine different orders. Seraphs are the highest; they are aflame with love for God; cherubs, they are second, possess perfect knowledge of him. So love is greater than knowledge; how could I have forgotten? The seraphs are born of a stream of fire issuing from under God’s throne. They are, according to Dionysius the Areopagite, “all wings,” having, as Isaiah noted, six wings apiece, two of which they fold over their eyes. Moving perpetually toward God, they perpetually praise him, crying Holy Holy, Holy…But, according to some rabbinic writings, they can sing only the first “Holy” before the intensity of their love ignites them and dissolves them again, perpetually, into flames.
“Abandon everything,” Dionysius told his disciple. “God despises ideas.”
– Annie Dillard
Standing on the bare ground, a mean egoism
vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I
am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal
Being circulate through me; I am part or particle
of God.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
You’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them-if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.
– J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
To know the moment that you’re in, and mobilize accordingly: that’s where grace and style and eloquence are born… Karaoke’s unbecoming when elegance and elegies are called for.
– Stephen Jenkinson
Done are the toils and the wearisome marches, Done is the summons of bugle and drum.
– Paul Laurence Dunbar
Fear is the sister and brother of desire. If you fear something, you may ask yourself if maybe you desire something.
– Luca Guadagnino
A BLESSING
Just off the Highway to Rochester, Minnesota
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.
– James Wright
The man who in his work finds silence, and who sees that silence is work, this man in truth sees the Light and in all his works finds peace.
– Bhagavad Gita
Once more let me remind you what fascism is. Fascism beings the first moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege.
– Tommy Douglas
Although the evening is cold and starless
And the rain is raging,
I’m still singing my song during this period,
Don’t know who’s listening.
Though the world is drowned in war and fear,
At some point
Burning secretly, if no one sees them,
The love continues.
– Hermann Hesse
The lesson taught by the war was clear: to be human is to be small, powerless, and subject to the forces of randomness.
– David J. Morris
Trauma destroys the fabric of time. In normal time you move from one moment to the next, sunrise to sunset, birth to death. After trauma, you may move in circles, find yourself being sucked backwards into an eddy or bouncing like a rubber ball from now to then to back again. … In the traumatic universe the basic laws of matter are suspended: ceiling fans can be helicopters, car exhaust can be mustard gas.
– David J. Morris
The act of writing, especially of putting pen to paper, has always had a sacred quality. The process by which one creates a paragraph-of conceptualizing, framing, and sequencing a moment in time-is the same process that governs some of the most sophisticated psychotherapies.
– David J. Morris
Tell your friend that in his death, a part of you dies and goes with him. Wherever he goes, you also go. He will not be alone.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
Don’t slip on the banana peel of nihilism, even while listening to the roar of Nothingness.
– Lawrence Ferlinghetti
People talk about the happy quiet that can exist between two loves, but this, too, was great; sitting between his sister and his brother, saying nothing, eating. Before the world existed, before it was populated, and before there were wars and jobs and colleges and movies and clothes and opinions and foreign travel — before all of these things there had been only one person, Zora, and only one place: a tent in the living room made from chairs and bed-sheets. After a few years, Levi arrived; space was made for him; it was as if he had always been. Looking at them both now, Jerome found himself in their finger joints and neat conch ears, in their long legs and wild curls. He heard himself in their partial lisps caused by puffy tongues vibrating against slightly noticeable buckteeth. He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away.
– Zadie Smith
Culture is the sum of all the forms of art, of love, and of thought, which, in the course of centuries, have enabled man to be less enslaved.
– André Malraux
Today we know that World War II began not in 1939 or 1941 but in the 1920’s and 1930’s when those who should have known better persuaded themselves that they were not their brother’s keeper.
– Hubert H. Humphrey
Totalitarian movements use and abuse democratic freedoms in order to abolish them.
– Hannah Arendt
The man who has seen the rising moon break out of the clouds at midnight has been present like an archangel at the creation of light and of the world.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Coming Home at Twilight in Late Summer
We turned into the drive,
and gravel flew up from the tires
like sparks from a fire. So much
to be done — the unpacking, the mail
and papers… the grass needed mowing….
We climbed stiffly out of the car.
The shut-off engine ticked as it cooled.
And then we noticed the pear tree,
the limbs so heavy with fruit
they nearly touched the ground.
We went out to the meadow; our steps
made black holes in the grass;
and we each took a pear,
and ate, and were grateful.
– Jane Kenyon
I ate an apple and walked. I was looking for solitude, and perhaps the absolute.
– Fleur Jaeggy; tr. Tim Parks
fireflies
one by one
turning into stars
– Seisensui
The way to wisdom is . . . a great deal less ‘safe’ than the way to making a fortune; it is perhaps the riskiest and most worthwhile thing in the world, but you should not start out unless you are prepared to break your neck.
– Alan Watts
It’s not enough to simply hear the teachings of the Buddha, even if they resonate with you. There’s still a requirement to apply those teachings in your actual, ordinary life.
– Tuere Sala
Many of the most important thoughts are unintentional—they can be neither solicited nor cajoled but have a rhythm of their own, creeping up, arriving, and leaving when we least expect them.
– Mark C. Taylor
When Jung spoke of “The Self’ he was referring to the indescribable. The Self is the total personality, the sum of all the aspects, all parts & all bits of us. It contains victim/victimiser/ego/shadow. It cannot be understood by intellect alone; it is beyond definition.
– D Freeman
Religions are psychotherapeutic systems in the truest sense of the word and on the grandest scale. They express the whole range of the psychic problem in mighty images; From this universal foundation no human soul is cut off.
– CG Jung
earth is round …
the far left
and the far right
become one somewhere
– Sankara Jayanth Sudanagunta
Not to write like a hammer to a nail, or a nail in the word. But to write like the memory of the tree. The tree remembering the rain. To write the rain. To read the wood.
– Sean Thomas Dougherty
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 appear to only her.)
When you kill a child you kill all the stars in the world.
– Joseph Fasano
blue sea
the paper kite rises
again from the sand
– Kala Ramesh
We are, I think, really in need of experiencing the relationship of the individual to the physical world in a way that is more positive, more constructive, more friendly, more close than that which expresses itself in a hostile technology bent on the domination and the conquest of nature considered as something alien to the human spirit, mechanical, thoughtless, and stupid, that surrounds us as the mere featureless energy behind the galaxies.
– Alan Watts
There is nothing more alienating than having your pleasures disputed by someone with a theory.
– Lauren Berlant
Time, which is your enemy in almost everything in this life, is your friend in writing.
– Tobias Wolff
All etymological analysis is oriented not towards the true but the real. Real is the meaning of the Greek word etymos.
An old that is more real than the true.
Words break down into ancestors-of-realities.
– Quignard
Van Gogh had no successors because his interests were not technical, but spiritual.
Van Gogh hatte keine Nachfolger, weil er nicht Technisches, sondern Seelisches hatte.
– Emil Szittya, Malerschicksale
Love is the warmth we feel in the presence of a favorite aunt, the kindness of a waitress, and the warmth of the hand that pulls us back to our feet when the loss of love has all but destroyed us.
– Anne Lamott
A symbol is a mysterious thing. When we grasp at it, we find it leading us ever deeper, like a twig in the ground, into the roots of the psyche under the firm earth of reason. An image points beyond itself. A word says what it means, yet always means more than is said.
– D. Bond
The goal of the revolution is the abolition of fear.
– Theodor Adorno
I say find the place where your hair looks best and move there.
– @fawkesontherun
There comes a time in every musicians life when he wakes up and realizes he has to get his picture taken today.
– Chuck Prophet
without projections, laser light-like effects (from decades ago), robotic instruments and sounds (also from decades ago) and arcade equipment
how will art become post technology
– Laura Kerr
I Still Have Everything You Gave Me
It is dusty on the edges
Slightly rotten.
I guard it without thinking.
Focus on it once a year
when I shake it out in the wind.
I do not ache.
I would not trade.
– Naomi Shihab Nye
Eggs
by Kay Ryan
We turn out
as tippy as
eggs. Legs
are an illusion.
We are held
as in a carton
if someone
loves us.
It’s a pity
only loss
proves this.
“To them that have more shall be given”. Is not “to have” a conscious gratitude for that which we already have? We are assured by this Biblical saying that what follows will bring us ever new “yet to be’s”. Our gratitude and acceptance of the present is the key.
– Gunilla Norris
If your relationship to the present moment is not right, nothing can ever be right in the future because when the future comes, it’s the present moment.
– Eckhart Tolle
Everything will be okay as soon as you are okay with everything. And that’s the only time everything will be okay.
– Michael A. Singer
After Seeing the Wingless Angels
Carved on Gaudi’s Sagrada Família Cathedral
by Mag Gabbert
A little off, perhaps-these half-melted, whipped cream-topped spoonfuls of sundae, spiral swirls lost to heat. But are they not still divine?
To fall: of, to paraphrase Linda Gregg, isn’t the way we make love the collision that makes the thing we call holiness?
Think how a silkworm can eat cinnamon and wild cherry and tulip, then give up its mouth for a chance to fly, for resurrection—yet that same moth will just bang its senseless head like my god god god god—
Water If I were called in
To construct a religion
I should make use of water.
Going to church
Would entail a fording
To dry, different clothes;
My liturgy would employ
Images of sousing,
A furious devout drench,
And I should raise in the east
A glass of water
Where any-angled light
Would congregate endlessly.
– Philip Larkin
Envy is a con man, a tugger at your sleeve, a knocker at your door. Let me in for just a moment, it says, for just one moment of your time. It claims to tell the truth; it craves attention. The more you listen to it, the more you believe what it says. The more thoroughly you believe, the more you think you must lis- ten. You must get the info on who is out there, how young the competition is, where they’ve been reviewed, what they’ve won, and what that means about you. The antidote to envy is one’s own work. Always one’s own work. Not the thinking about it. Not the assessing of it. But the doing of it. The answers you want
can come only from the work itself. It drives the spooks away.
– Bonnie Friedman
Our modern world encourages disembodiment.
When we’re disconnected from our bodies, we can do things we don’t really want to do. We can tolerate the relationship that isn’t serving us, or work the job that leaves us depleted. We can ignore our deepest desires and focus on day-to-day productivity.
Disembodiment is rewarded in the short term, through praise and promotions and all the comforts that come with doing what’s expected of us. In the long term, it produces a life we don’t recognize as our own.
– Scott Domes
Toni Morrison said, “In this world of outrageous, shameless wealth squatting, hulking, preening before the dispossessed, the very idea of ‘plenty’ as Utopian ought to make us tremble. Plenty should not be understood as a paradise-only state, but as normal, everyday, humane life.”
– @tamaranopper
Every time a Labour politician says “We are the party of business”, I think “OK, fine. But who is the party of labour?”
– Simon Price
Be patient. Your future will come to you and lie down at your feet like a dog who knows and loves you no matter what you are.
– Ted Chiang
SKY
There is a blue sky in your heart. Before you take the next inhalation, before you have a single thought, gaze into your radiance.
Not a cloud moves here, and no horizon limits the space of your purity. This sky is before the beginning. Some call it Christ-Consciousness. Some call it Krishna. Some call it Buddha Nature. It is vast compassion.
Deeper than silence, deeper than sin, more inward to I than Am, the sky of the heart forgives all, embraces all, witnesses even our birth and death with joyful equanimity.
This space is the infinitesimal bindhu between breathing out and breathing in. Yet worlds arise here, and dissolve without a sound, without a Word of creation. Here is your true home. You never really left.
To return, surrender this exhalation. Feel the silence for one vast instant. Be one, but no one, annihilated in an inconceivable stillness.
The same sky in every heart, you in I and I in you. Our lives enfold each other like azure petals on a single flower. This is the end of loneliness.
Before you leave this earth, please, at least for a moment, become aware of the blue sky within you. This moment will send waves of joy to all your ancestors, for seven generations past and all the unborn for seven generations to come.
– Alfred K. Lamotte
The story unfurled, its storm rolled in as she spoke, then rolled in once more as I repeated the words. To bake a cake in the eye of a storm; to feed yourself sugar on the cusp of danger.
– Ocean Vuong
Diversity may be the hardest thing for a society to live with, and perhaps the most dangerous thing for a society to be without.
– William Sloane Coffin
Happiness is not something that you can find, acquire, or achieve directly. You have to get the conditions right and then wait. Some of those conditions are within you, such as coherence among the parts and levels of your personality. Other conditions require relationships to things beyond you: Just as plants need sun, water, and good soil to thrive, people need love, work, and a connection to something larger. It is worth striving to get the right relationships between yourself and others, between yourself and your work, and between yourself and something larger than yourself. If you get these relationships right, a sense of purpose and meaning will emerge.
– Jonathan Haidt
Respect every man’s religion.
– Gurdjieff
Now I carry those days in a tiny box wherever I go. I open the lid like this and let the light glimpse and then glance away. There is a sigh like my breath when I do this. Some days I do this again and again.
– William Stafford
The game’s afoot.
I should dearly love that the world should be ever so little better for my presence. Even on this small stage we have our two sides, and something might be done by throwing all one’s weight on the scale of breadth, tolerance, charity, temperance, peace, and kindliness to man and beast. We can’t all strike very big blows, and even the little ones count for something.
And – Elementary:
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
– Arthur Conan Doyle
That luminous part of you that exists beyond personality – your soul, if you will – is as bright and shining as any that has ever been. Bright as Shakespeare’s, bright as Gandhi’s, bright as Mother Teresa’s. Clear away everything that keeps you separate from this secret luminous place. Believe it exists, come to know it better, nurture it, share its fruits tirelessly.
– George Saunders
The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.
– Herman Melville
That, in my opinion, was the most diabolical aspect of those old-time big brains: They would tell their owners, in effect, ‘Here is a crazy thing we could actually do, probably, but we would never do it, of course. It’s just fun to think about.’ And then, as though in trances, the people would really do it–have slaves fight each other to death in the Colosseum, or burn people alive in the public square for holding opinions which were locally unpopular, or build factories whose only purpose was to kill people in industrial quantities, or to blow up whole cities, and on and on.
– Kurt Vonnegut, Galápagos
Statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.
– Mark Twain
The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.
– Blaise Pascal
If there is one question I dread, to which I have never been able to invent a satisfactory reply, it is the question what am I doing.
– Samuel Beckett
Another day, another draft. Reminding myself that James Baldwin said, “I’m not a writer. I’m a re-writer.” And that every time we write is an opportunity.
– @tamaranopper
Three Songs at the End of Summer
by Jane Kenyon
The cicada’s dry monotony breaks
over me. The days are bright
and free, bright and free.
Then why did I cry today
for an hour, with my whole
body, the way babies cry?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
It is somebody wants to do us harm.
No, no, it is the three strange angels.
Admit them, admit them.
– DH Lawrence
Thou art a dreaming thing,
A fever of thyself.
– John Keats
…yet still people find it preposterous that trees, ants, the wind, rivers, birds, rocks, lichen, moss, the sea, communicate with the world around them—including us—shocks me to my core.
– Kerri ní Dochartaigh
There is always some succor in how much worse things could be.
– Anne Lamott
I make time to write because I have to, just like you’d make time for any job. Anyone can do it. You just have to abandon your children & your spouse & all your friends & quit your job & find a therapist to keep you on task. And don’t waste time eating and stuff.
– Bill Roorbach
I remember, when, in high school, if you were green and yellow on Thursday it meant you were queer.
– Joe Brainerd
Since thoughts, like feathers are blown by the wind of hope and fear, The dignified poet remains wherever he is.
– Chögyam Trungpa
long time no see
a friend I met years ago
greets me with hugs …
my immigrant past
now a foreign country
– Chen-ou Liu
Very soon, you are just a wavering, a strangeness suspended between poorly identified states, between pains, between impotences, between failings.
– Jean-Luc Nancy, (tr. Richard A. Rand)
how to unlearn movement? how to build pain into the network of your body?
– Sara H. Hammami
Were you my cactus heart and kelp forest,
a gluttonous hunger I ate myself famished,
an app, a tower or two, and flew
– Fady Judah
I was always
ashamed to take. So
I gave. It was not a
virtue. It was a
disguise.
– Anaïs Nin
In the silence of the night, what
betrayals have I eaten!
When my own heart made a sound,
I thought the beloved had come.
– Qateel Shifai
Call forth the relationships our ancestors forged.
Cross this ocean of liberation in community.
Rebirth the ocean nation our ancestors dreamed.
– Carol Ann Carl
old books
on a cafe shelf
keeping their
thoughts
to themselves
– @Jocelynx44
There is no surer way to escape the world than through art, and there is no surer way to tie oneself to it than through art.
– Goethe
The friends that have it I do wrong
Whenever I remake a song
Should know what issue is at stake,
It is Myself that I remake.
– Yeats
Glitter Road
I’ll take my miracles however they appear
these days— a salamander poking its head
above the bricks; the shocking blue overcoat
of the season’s first bluebird; a spider web
unbroken. At the corner of Molly Barr
and McElroy I saw a thick trail of glitter
in the curve of the right turn lane. Fuchsia.
Heavy shimmer refracting the noonday sun
as if laying flat a rainbow’s extracted hue.
Not paint, or blood, or a parade shedding
its cheer. It’s the faded streak of eye shadow
as it trails into flecks, then disappears.
I think of cars passing through this moment—
their undercarriages aglow with possibility.
Hard not to feel good riding a glistening wave,
my tires now bespeckled with a purple sheen
that’s tough to rid or wash away, the road ahead
made beautiful by this temporary shine.
– January O’Neil
Forgetfulness is the only salvation. I would like to forget everything; to forget myself and to forget the world.
– Emil Cioran
Marks
My husband gives me an A
for last night’s supper,
an incomplete for my ironing,
a B plus in bed.
My son says I am average,
an average mother, but if
I put my mind to it
I could improve.
My daughter believes
in Pass/Fail and tells me
I pass. Wait ’til they learn
I’m dropping out.
– Linda Pastan
I have a habit of reading the last line of a book, or the last paragraph, as a sign of whether the book will be worth reading, and I’m sure that comes from poetry, where the last line is so important.
– Edwin Frank
Too much of our imagination about voting is our imaginary, personal relationship to politicians. Instead of thinking of them as people to reward & punish, we should be thinking of them as weapons/tools & thinking through how we can wield them or how they can be wielded against us.
– Dr. T. Anansi Wilson JD/PhD
I hate losing things.
The fumbling in the dark,
the old-folk ness
of the whole thing.
Makes a person
want to stop
and be the buddha.
– @johnguzlowski
There really is nothing more refreshing than a tall glass of chilled water.
– Leah Callen
Fanon came to believe that colonialism was a system of pathological relations masquerading as normality. ‘For a man armed solely with reason,’ he wrote, ‘there is nothing more conducive to neurosis than contact with the irrational.’
– Susan Neiman
SAME BOAT
Right now, whatever we are going through, other people are going through the same thing. Whatever is stirring up our heart is stirring up the hearts of countless others. Countless others are feeling disturbed by their emotions, getting caught in their storylines, becoming triggered, and reacting in destructive ways. And this confusion, anxiety, and distress is happening in many ways. It comes in so many flavors.
Yet, it is never just my pain. Anything I feel is shared by all. When I touch anger, I know the anger of all beings. When I contact the grasping of insatiable wanting, I know the craving of all beings. All feelings are universal, felt by all of us. We are, in this sense, all in the same boat.
– Pema Chodron
Everything is too full now; we are spoon-fed everything. All songs, now, are about one thing and one thing specifically, there is no shading, no nuance, no mystery. Perhaps this is why music is not a place where people put their dreams at the moment; dreams suffocate in these airless environs.
– Bob Dylan
Patience is an ever-present alternative, even antidote, to the mind’s endemic restlessness and impatience.
– Jon Kabat-Zinn
The Ponds
Every year
the lilies
are so perfect
I can hardly believe
their lapped light crowding
the black,
mid-summer ponds.
Nobody could count all of them—
the muskrats swimming
among the pads and the grasses
can reach out
their muscular arms and touch
only so many, they are that
rife and wild.
But what in this world
is perfect?
I bend closer and see
how this one is clearly lopsided—
and that one wears an orange blight—
and this one is a glossy cheek
half nibbled away—
and that one is a lumped purse
full of its own
unstoppable decay.
Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled—
to cast aside the weight of facts
and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking
into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing—that the light is
everything—that it is more than the sum of each flawed blossom rising
and fading. And I do.
– Mary Oliver
And it will be our love, not our anger,
that heals the world.
– Lauren Fortenberry
I am quite sure now that often, very often, in matters concerning religion and politics a man’s reasoning powers are not above the monkey’s.
– Mark Twain
In empty country everybody knew everything about everybody. One’s inner thoughts seemed to transmit themselves through the clear, dry air without need for verbalizing.
– Tony Hillerman
The horizontal is crawling, walking, running, jumping, talking, skipping, driving, flying. The vertical is imagining.
– Ahmed Salman
The inner world can only be experienced, not described.
– Franz Kafka
Whoever makes all cares into one care, the care for simply being present, will be relieved of all care by that Presence, which is the creative power.
– Kabir Helminks
The more unknowable
the mystery,
the more beautiful
it is
– David Lynch
I have no desire to be witty. I have no desire to construct a plot. I am going to write about things and thoughts. To compile quotations….
– Viktor Shklovsky
Sometimes an abyss opens between Tuesday and Wednesday but twenty-six years may be passed in a moment. Time is not a straight line, it’s more of a labyrinth …
– Tomas Tranströmer, (trans. Robin Fulton)
She sat there with no defender or flag, with no homeland, virtually nameless, with no passport or identity card of her own…not traveling anywhere, because she had nowhere to go, holding on her lap her only possession.
– Dubravka Ugresic, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender
refusing to even look at the political news lest I single-handedly jinx it with the strength of my desire
– R.O. Kwon
Rally
by Elizabeth Alexander
(Miami, October 2008)
The awesome weight of the world had not yet descended
upon his athlete’s shoulders. I saw someone light but not feathered
job up to the rickety stage like a jock off the court
played my game did my best
and the silent crowd listened and dreamed.
The children sat high on their parents’ shoulders.
Then the crowd made noise that gathered and grew
until it was loud and was loud as the sea.
What it meant or would mean was not yet fixed
nor could be, though human beings ever tilt toward we.
bearing down
on a borrowed pen
do not resuscitate
– Yu Chang
No one should be ashamed to admit he is wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.
– Alexander Pope
a small stream –
ripples of silent moonlight
sing
– James Welsh
I have heard it said that writing which ponders things in detail, takes its time, and habitually masticates things until a wonder leaps forth, is “Victorian,” no doubt because the word evokes portly self- satisfaction or finicky dawdling. It makes more sense, though, to think of purple in both its deep and its shallow incarnations as Elizabethan or Jacobean: fine language, all the way from articulate frenzy to garish excess. Purple, it seems to me, is when the microcosm fights back against the always victorious and uncaring macrocosm, whose relative immortality we cannot forgive.
– Paul West, In Defense of Purple Rose
All stories are recycled and all stories are unfair. Many get luck, and many get misery. Many are born to homes with books, many grow up in the swamps of war. In the end, all becomes dust. All stories conclude with a fade to black.
– Shehan Karunatilaka
Story is far older than the art of science and psychology, and will always be the elder in the equation no matter how much time passes.
– Clarissa Pinkola Estés
If you don’t furnish your brain with what everyone knows, then it will furnish itself with what no one else knows!
– Jane Smiley
Without elders, much of our history has been formed by juniors reacting, overreacting, and protecting their own temporary privilege, with no deep-time vision like the Iroquois Nation, which considered, What would be good for the next seven generations?
– Richard Rohr
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
What makes the ego grow, according to Jung, is what he calls “collisions.” In other words, conflict, trouble, anguish, sorrow, suffering. These are what lead the ego to develop.
– Murray Stein
It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.
– Thomas Mann
As you move more into your own heart, you see the Beloved everywhere you look.
– Ram Dass
Life has a way of talking to the future. It’s called memory. It’s called genes.
– Richard Powers
Pure truth could burst the world apart.
– Nikolai Berdyaev
If you will change your mind concerning anything and absolutely keep it changed, that thing must and will change too.
– Emmet Fox
No art is an energy leak
No expression is an energy leak
Creation is Integration
– Elizabeth Forshaw
In order to achieve real success, you have to stop following widely accepted stereotypes and walk your own path.
– Vadim Zeland
Re-examine all you have been told
in school or church or in any book, and
dismiss whatever insults your own soul,
and your very flesh shall be a great poem.
– Walt Whitman
Patriotism is a lively sense of collective responsibility. Nationalism is a silly cock crowing on its own dung hill.
– Richard Aldington
Don’t waste the rest of your time here worrying about other people— unless it affects the common good.
– Marcus Aurelius
They lose the day in expectation of the night, and the night in fear of the dawn.
– Seneca
There were grief and ruins,
and you were the miracle.
– Pablo Neruda
Grateful friends are only the Lord in disguise, looking after his own.
– Paramhansa Yogananda
The mechanism was transparent to me. But what I needed was not knowledge and understanding. What I longed for in my despair was life and resolution, action and reaction, impulse and impetus.
– Herman Hesse
Useless! Useless!
by Jack Kerouac
Useless! Useless!
-heavy rain driving
into the sea
Never Give All The Heart
NEVER give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that’s lovely is
But a brief, dreamy. Kind delight.
O never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost.
– William Butler Yeats
Because, as Marx said,
Sex should be no more important
than a glass of water.
– Larry Levis, from Elegy
I’m at an age when remembering something right away is as good as an orgasm.
– Gloria Steinem to Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Listen, listen. In a filmed interview I conducted with the writer James Baldwin, more than 40 years ago, he said, “No one was ever born who agreed to be a slave, who accepted it. That is, slavery is a condition imposed from without. Of course, the moment I say that,” Baldwin continued, “I realize that multitudes and multitudes of people for various reasons of their own enslave themselves every hour of every day to this or that doctrine, this or that delusion of safety, this or that lie. Anti-Semites, for example,” he went on, “are slaves to a delusion. People who hate Negroes are slaves. People who love money are slaves. We are living in a universe really of willing slaves, which makes the concept of liberty and the concept of freedom so dangerous,” he finished. Baldwin is making a profoundly psychological and even spiritual statement, not just a political or racial or social one. He knew, just as Lincoln knew, that the enemy is often us. We continue to shackle ourselves with chains we mistakenly think is freedom.
– Ken Burns
The highest form of intelligence
is the ability to observe without judging.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
Artists, real artists, have to work. They can’t be hedonists. Really good painters are always working. The world is such a marvelous place. You have to look and to work. That’s exactly why Van Gogh was such a great artist: total commitment. That’s what you need.
– David Hockney
I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.
He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
– William Faulkner
…that every human being is worthy of attention and that the origins of every good and evil capability of the universe may be found by observing a single, even very humble, person and the turnings of his or her mind.
– George Saunders
When we train ourselves by constant practice to stop verbalizing, the brain can experience things as they are. By silencing the mind, we can experience real peace.
– Bhante Henepola Gunaratana
Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.
– Neil Gaiman
When you’re inside a piece of writing that hums and crackles and sparks, when a real person is talking to you from the page, you’ve encountered a voice. ‘Voice’ is what writing feels like.
– Sonya Huber
god is an emaciated young man in a grimy padded room, clutching his head murmuring make it stop make it stop, he created all & is omniscient to his creation but it was too much to constantly know, always KNOW & now he’s stuck he can’t focus to undo it he screams he clutches he
– River Kenna
For my love
Lemon ginger tea
Book of poetry
The mighty willow
Sets us free
– Rachel Newcombe
the skipping game
a stand of breezy aspens
counting themselves in
– Ian Buckley
Many organizers, including people directly impacted by felony disenfranchisement, worked hard for right of convicted people to vote. Some critical discourse trying to point out seeming contradictions, including from abolitionists, obscures some of this labor in favor of virality.
– @tamaranopper
The tongue says loneliness, anger, grief,
but does not feel them.
As Monday cannot feel Tuesday…
– Jane Hirshfield
Some of my shortest stories seem successful because they approach a kind of poem. I don’t think there is an ideal length, though I like the idea of a story in one sentence, and plan to try more of these.
– Amy Hempel
Poetry is like the mystery of the world. It comes from secret wells; it is a fresh draft from heaven, warmed in earth … Every time a man dies we realize that it means more than it did before.
– Richard Eberhart
The jewel
Of spiritual development,
Of clarifying awareness
Isn’t depth,
Isn’t wisdom,
It isn’t having the best
Yoga butt
Or the cleanest diet,
It isn’t expressing the most
Sophisticated philosophy
Or possessing an impressive breadth
Of knowledge.
It isn’t found
In being able to meditate
The longest,
Or appearing extra lofty
In prayer
The jewel is the liberation of
And intimacy with
Your joy.
– Chelan Harkin
It is good for a professional to be reminded that his professionalism is only a husk, that the real person must remain an amateur, a lover of the work.
– May Sarton
Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?
– Hunter S. Thompson
The Garden of Forking Paths
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.
– Jorge Luis Borges
Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.
– Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Self-actualising people are, without one single exception, involved in a cause outside their own skin, in something outside of themselves. They are devoted, working at something, something which is very precious to them-some calling or
vocation in the old sense, the priestly sense. They are working at something which fate has called them to somehow and which they work at and which they love, so that the work-joy dichotomy in them disappears. One devotes his life to the law, another to justice, another to beauty or truth. All, in one way or another, devote their lives to the search for what I have called the ‘being’ values, the ultimate values which are intrinsic, which cannot be reduced to anything
more ultimate.
– Abraham Maslow, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature
Money is the accepted measure of brains. It is thought a man who makes a lot of money must be a clever fellow; a man who does not, is not. So in everything: power lies with those who control finance, not with those who know the matter upon which the money is to be spent. Thus, the holders of power are, in general, ignorant and malevolent, and the less they exercise their power the better.
– Bertrand Russell
In our day, we confine ourselves at the best of times to discussing the imagination. The word “imagination” is beautiful and vast, but it doesn’t hold everything.
But what is the spirit, the spiritual life? If only I were up to defining such things! Robert Musil says that the spirit synthesizes intellect and emotion. It’s a good working definition, for all its concision.
In the case of poetry, literature, it’s simpler to say - theologians know a thing or two about this - what the spirit isn’t. It’s not psychoanalytic any more than it is behavioral, sociological, or political. It is holistic, and in it are reflected, as in an astronaut’s helmet, the earth, the stars, and a human face.
These are difficult and dangerous considerations.
– Adam Zagajewski
When our metaphors of God are no longer seen as metaphors, but as literal descriptions, then God is dead, because we have killed him with our words and literalism.
– David Tacey
A slave is one who waits
for someone to come
and free him.
– Ezra Pound
If you want momentum, you’ll have to create it yourself, right now, by getting up and getting started.
– @RyanHoliday
The Singers Change, the Music Goes On
No one really dies in the myths.
No world is lost in the stories.
Everything is lost in the retelling,
in being wondered at. We grow up
and grow old in our land of grass
and blood moons, birth and goneness.
A place of absolutes. Of returning.
We live our myth in the recurrence,
pretending we will return another day.
Like the morning coming every morning.
The truth is we come back as a choir.
Oherwise Eurydice would be forever
in the dark. Our singing brings her
back. Our dying keeps her alive.
– Linda Gregg
And what is your truth?
What lacerates me.
And your salvation?
Forgetting what I said.
May I come in? It is getting dark.
In each word there burns a wick.
– Edmund Jabes
You trade in the future, which is immediately translated. What you have left is you without you.
– Edmund Jabes
To work against one another is therefore contrary to nature; and to be angry with another person and turn away from him is surely to work against him.
– Marcus Aurelius
I’m a firm believer in walking away.
– Jane Smiley
it is not your loving, even if your mouth
was forced wide open by your own voice—learn
to forget that passionate music. It will end.
True singing is a different breath, about
nothing. A gust inside the god. A wind.
– Rilke, sonnets to Orpheus (Mitchell)
I am of and in an uncertain age.
– Leila Chatti
Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!
– Allen Ginsberg
Nostalgia is a powerful feeling; it can drown out anything. I wanted the picture to set up like a fairy tale, outside time, like Treasure Island.
– Terence Malick
It is June. Let’s hope
Someone is kind, just in time.
– Vanesha Pravin
It shouldn’t be harder for someone who’s served time and expressed remorse for a single crime to get a fast food job than it is for a remorseless criminal convicted of 34 felonies to ascend to the highest office in the land.
– Robert Reich
We could cheer for the dusk.
It is coming. It is here.
– David Kelly-Hedrick
Gone
There is a table. A sweating glass.
And your hands. Here is a table.
A town. A home. My hands.
Bound. Here is where I heard
you laugh for the first time. Or
the millionth. It rings the same
in this tower. This town. Inside
the bells of belief, I listened
from across a table. A glass.
An hour. —and I have taken
a lover. A town. A home. Not
my own. Not you. Or yours.
I have taken a handful of sunsets.
And turned them over my tongue.
Like your laughter. There has never
been. Ours. I went inside and slowly
turned around the tower. All glass.
The crack was imperceptible. The imperfection
was so small and rooted. I touched
the town. Untouched your hands.
Unbound belief. The glass. An hour.
There is a table. Your laughter.
Someone else will remember.
It will not be me.
– Jen Rouse
The very metropolis of this lyric realm was Mitylene of Lesbos, where, amid the myrtle groves and temples, the sunlit silver of the fountains, the hyacinth gardens by a soft blue sea.
– Charles G. D. Roberts
My question is, What makes a language yours, or mine?
– Jhumpa Lahiri
Migraine as Whale: A Triptych
by Sarah M. Sala
i
Your wusband and some locals charter a whale-watching
tour in the North Pacific Ocean. The surf is huge—
rough weather moving in tomorrow.
The boat carves celadon waves into midnight navy depths.
All day you scan the horizon for humpback whales until
the captain cuts the engine.
Surface tension gives way to a whale’s bumpy tubercles,
her tuxedo shirt throat grooves, you’re met with her
distrustful orbiting eye. Something shifts in you.
After the catamaran pitches back to harbor, the other
parties disembark. But the horizon continues to lurch
like the unsteady hull of a ship.
Except now, it’s the walls of the apartment. The kitchen
stove, the pendant lights, even the blankets insist on this
heaving motion. Everywhere you sight land, the ocean’s
undulation echoes.
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.
But you awaken to brain coral for a skull. Ocean tackle
lacerates your bottom lip. Trawling nets sink your quads.
Wherever you go, your pant legs pour sand.
You’ve already missed so much work, you drift to the
subway. Today you’re slated to present your research
to the department chair.
When you confess your new body to a colleague
at the elevator bank, she says, but you don’t look sick.
ii
Your wusband and some locals charter a whale watching
tour in the North Pacific Ocean. The surf is huge—
rough weather moving in tomorrow.
The boat carves celadon waves into midnight navy depths.
All day you scan the horizon for humpback whales until
the captain cuts the engine.
Surface tension gives way to a whale’s bumpy tubercles,
her tuxedo shirt throat grooves, you’re met with her
distrustful orbiting eye. Something shifts in you.
After the catamaran pitches back to harbor, the other
parties disembark. But the horizon continues to lurch
like the unsteady hull of a ship.
Except now, it’s the walls of the apartment. The kitchen
stove, the pendant lights, even the blankets insist on this
heaving motion. Everywhere you sight land, the ocean’s
undulation echoes.
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.
But you awaken to brain coral for a skull. Ocean tackle
lacerates your bottom lip. Trawling nets sink your quads.
Wherever you go, your pant legs pour sand.
You’ve already missed so much work, you drift to the
subway. Today you’re slated to present your research
to the department chair.
When you confess your new body to a colleague
at the elevator bank, she says, but you don’t look sick.
iii
Your wusband and some locals charter a whale-watching
tour in the North Pacific Ocean. The surf is huge—
rough weather moving in tomorrow.
The boat carves celadon waves into midnight navy depths.
All day you scan the horizon for humpback whales until
the captain cuts the engine.
Surface tension gives way to a whale’s bumpy tubercles,
her tuxedo shirt throat grooves, you’re met with her
distrustful orbiting eye. Something shifts in you.
After the catamaran pitches back to harbor, the other
parties disembark. But the horizon continues to lurch
like the unsteady hull of a ship.
Except now, it’s the walls of the apartment. The kitchen
stove, the pendant lights, even the blankets insist on this
heaving motion. Everywhere you sight land, the ocean’s
undulation echoes.
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.
But you, awaken to brain coral for a skull. Ocean tackle
lacerates your bottom lip. Trawling nets sink your quads.
Wherever you go, your pant legs pour sand.
You’ve already missed so much work, you drift to the
subway. Today you’re slated to present your research
to the department chair.
When you confess your new body to a colleague
at the elevator bank, she says, but you don’t look sick.
We humans screw up; that is our nature….There is a flaw in our genetic and social coding, which is why we keep kicking up errors in the form of damage to our relationships, to ourselves, and to the planet.
– Anne Lamott
staying awake
and subsisting
on poetry
– Ogawa
God
what a fenestration the heart is.
…
All our old loves are still there,
impervious and glass-enclosed. You can tap
on the glass and get a rise out of them
because into each life there must be
a ruler and a grid, a little schadenfreude
so it won’t be our hearts breaking.
– Ira Sadoff
“After all, one never knows anything, does one?” she concluded with an air of weary scepticism. “So you see it’s wise never to discuss other people’s choices in love.”
– Marcel Proust
Concerning the death of Gertrude Stein: she came out of a deep coma to ask her companion Alice Toklas, “Alice, Alice, what is the answer?” Her companion replied, “There is no answer.” Gertrude Stein continued, “Well, then, what is the
question?” and fell back dead.
– Susan Sontag
I should like to forger everything and waken to a light before time.
– E. M. Cioran
Music School Dropout Tours
Instrument Factory
by David Hayward
When what I wanted was a metal
softer than me, I used to think
that since a trumpet’s mouthpiece
gets as scarred eventually by lips as
lips are by it, it was possible
you would have me. Music is made
of resistance; until the brass cursive
pinches his breath the trumpeter,
no instrument himself, is useless.
Scat too is futile and whistling worse
because it’s blood, not air, that runs through us
and it doesn’t leave. This makes no sound.
Nor does bleeding. We’re left to crave
the player out of approximate love
for his tune. I don’t want anymore
to compose or sing, just to stand
by the vat of potential trumpets
and stir the airless brass.
I hate what is said in places I have left behind.
– Edmond Jabes
We must be bilingual even in a single language, we must have a minor language inside our own language, we must create a minor use of our own language…speaking in one’s own language like a foreigner…That is the definition of style.
– Gilles Deleuze & Claire Parnet, Dialogues II
Every Day
Every day I say a prayer for Palestine
And every day a dog runs away with it
Vanishing down an alley, tail wagging
To benefit who knows which wretch.
I tell myself it doesn’t matter who receives
The gift of my kindness. Such lovely lies
We bestow upon ourselves. Sometimes
I am the dog fleeing with a bastard’s
Love clenched in my slavering jaw.
Sometimes I am the one curled at the end
Of an alley, blessed by the unexpected
Warmth of a snuffling mouth telling
Me I am not forgotten. Every day
I say a prayer for Palestine.
– Omar Sakr
I depart like a bird, with the eastern wind / losing its feathers away from the nest / on a day when the sky wept.
– Haya Abu Nasser
So dark I eat dinner at breakfast.
So rainy I imagine the mountain washing away.
The downpour so strong fish in the river sank.
The mud so bad I was sorry I asked you over.
– Eliot Weinberger
Radicality means taking the risk of being invisible, of not being seen at all, of being despised.
– Olivier Assayas
Reason being cool and disengaged, is no motive to action, and directs only the impulse received from appetite or inclination, by showing us the means of attaining happiness or avoiding misery: Taste, as it gives pleasure or pain, and thereby constitutes happiness or misery, becomes a motive to action, and is the first spring or impulse to desire and volition.
– David Hume
Write like it matters and it will.
– Libba Bray
That things have no hold on the soul…Disturbance comes only from within—from our own perceptions.
– Marcus Aurelius
As I approve of a youth that has something of the old man in him, so I am no less pleased with an old man that has something of the youth. He that follows this rule may be old in body, but can never be so in mind.
– Marcus Tullius Cicero
I am a citizen, not of Athens, or Greece, but of the world.
– Socrates
Nowhere you can go is more peaceful—more free of interruptions— than your own soul.
– Marcus Aurelius
When “you” fight against your ego, it’s really the ego fighting itself.
– James Pierce
Maybe your mind is restless because you’ve been ignoring your heart for too long.
– James Pierce
The ageless melody, unheard – heals The healing vision, unseen – leads The true leaders, unknown – rescue
– Dr. Charles Musaios
Why does thought carry on the memory of an incident that is over and finished?
– Krishnamurti
And then, one fairy night,
May became June.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
I am grateful that my suffering
did not force me to become cruel.
– Mandeq Ahmed
For a pittance men will travel a great distance, but for eternal life many will scarcely take a single step.
– Thomas à Kempis
There is no one behind the mind. The watcher just is another illusion.
– James Pierce
In English, we say ‘depression.’
In poetry, we say,
‘In the silent corridors of the soul, there are tales too delicate for a tongue to utter.’
– warpaintjournal@
You can’t replace reading with other sources of information like videos, because you need to read in order to write well, and you need to write in order to think well.
– Paul Graham
If you have more than three priorities, you don’t have any.
– Jim Collins
And we are out here, and the city is there, all wrapped up in its own coat of a thousand colors.
– Ray Bradbury
Until you can manage your emotions, don’t expect to manage money.
– Warren Buffett
TO THOSE WHO TRY TO BAN BOOKS
I know
you won’t be reading this anyway.
But maybe,
alone under the covers,
a child with a light
in the darkness
is opening
the first words of a story,
a story that your hands
would try to close now.
Whatever you do
for the darkness
that child with the light will survive you.
– Joseph Fasano
fireworks festival
a variety of ifs
between the darknesses
– Ryoko Suzuki
Weeble: They say you are not enlightened! How will you respond?
Zen Master Pink: I am not enlightened.
– Kenneth Folk
Deep Learning is hitting a Wall.
– Gary Marcus
The next time someone judges you based on a small part of what they see and how they interpret that, remember who you are, remember how much you’ve overcome, and smile and keep walking because you don’t have a single thing to prove to anyone else.
– Kirsten Corley
Deep down, you know exactly where you stand with someone. Hope blurs the lines a bit, but you know.
– Mbali Moloto
new in town
the lingering stare
of a stray
– Chen-ou Liu
You lack nothing of the wisdom and perfection of the Buddha, right at this moment.
– Elihu Genmyo Smith
All money is a matter of belief.
– Adam Smith
You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me
– Alexander Solzhenitsyn
III PRAYER
Give me a little less
with every dawn:
colour, a breath of wind,
the perfection of shadows,
till what I find, I find
because it’s there,
gold in the seams of my hands
and the night light, burning.
– John Burnside
This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle!… I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business.
– Henry David Thoreau, Life Without Principle
Five times a day, I make tea. I do this because I like the warmth in my hands, like the feeling of self-directed kindness.
– Leila Chatti
Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
– Ralph Ellison
We are killing perpetually, not only nature but ourselves; our brains are degenerating.
– Krishnamurti
The Christian and the Materialist hold different beliefs about the universe. They can’t both be right. The one who is wrong will act in a way which simply doesn’t fit the real universe. Consequently, with the best will in the world, he will be helping his fellow creatures to their destruction.
– C.S. Lewis
Even though you try to put people under some control, it is impossible. You cannot do it. The best way to control people is to encourage them to be mischievous. Then they will be in control in its wider sense. To give your sheep or cow a large, spacious meadow is the way to control him. So it is with people: first let them do what they want, and watch them. This is the best policy. To ignore them is not good; that is the worst policy. The second worst is trying to control them. The best one is to watch them, just to watch them, without trying to control them.
– Shunryu Suzuki Roshi
I think that the singular evil of our time is prejudice. It is from this evil that all other evils grow and multiply. In almost everything l’ve written there is a thread of this: a man’s seemingly palpable need to dislike someone other than himself.
– Rod Serling
In my world, it is recognizing that fascia is the body’s organ of structure and support. It is recognizing that fascia is layered, and therefore a plastic medium. It is recognizing that these layers slip, slide, and collapse in gravity so that whole body segments become misaligned. It is recognizing that the fascial layers desiccate and fixate into a crystalline matrix glue that sticks the body layers together in all the directions and at all the levels so that alignment with gravity and balanced movement become impossible. It is recognizing that this is a chronic and progressive process that does not fix itself and does not readily respond to local treatment. That is the bad news. Here is the very good news: Structural integration is recognizing that this crosshatched, interlaced, crystalline glue body matrix has an Achilles heel……
– Claude Hutchins
25 And the Lord spake unto the Angel that guarded the eastern gate, saying ‘Where is the flaming sword that was given unto thee?’
26 And the Angel said, ‘I had it here only a moment ago, I must have put it down some where, forget my own head next.’
27 And the Lord did not ask him again.”
– Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
The way I see it, we are all perfectly mediocre day-laborers for God. We forget to punch in, we always forget some important element of inventory; our attitudes sour and fail; we come to act as if we own the store, and then, after all that, we wonder when the raise is coming. And, unlike our earthly supervisors, God bestows upon us, through Christ and the agent of art, which I believe to be God-given, such unfailing love and understanding that we feel we must turn over that new leaf, try to get to work on time, show some initiative, but we never do. In a matter of days–or moments–we are right back to our usual habits, because, as we already know, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. We are only human. We are conceived in sin. We are utterly shit.
I am amazed that in my worst phases, when I was most delinquent, I still knew what I was missing–which makes my dereliction even more fascinating, more pathological than ever.
We like to say that as writers we are own bosses, but I think writers realize more than others just who really is in charge. The blank page, the moistness under the arms and above the lip, the sheer terror of Nothing Happening. I know that it doesn’t come from some nook of the brain when the words start to come. I know that I’m not wrestling forth a novel, a phrase, one perfectly wonderful sentence. I know where it comes from. I can sometimes feel Him slip into me like a thief with good tools. I think Tennessee was permanently in search of his various gods, seeking, hoping. What kills me is that I repeatedly forget the wonder of it–the aid, the completion, the seeking again, the finding again.
– Walker Percy
Awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters.
– C.S. Lewis
If a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power.
– Dwight D Eisenhower
This is when societies perish: when they cease to be able to distinguish the good from the dishonest.
(Tότ᾽ ἔφη τὰς πόλεις ἀπόλλυσθαι, ὅταν μὴ δύνωνται τοὺς φαύλους ἀπὸ τῶν σπουδαίων διακρίνειν.)
– Diosthenes
Writing A Resume
by Wislawa Szymborska
Translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh
What’s needs to be done?
Fill out the application
and enclose the resume
Regardless of the length of life
a resume is best kept short.
Concise, well-chosen facts are de rigueur.
Landscapes are replaced by addresses,
shaky memories give way to unshakable dates.
Of all your loves, mention only marriage:
of all your children, only those who were born.
Who knows you matters more than whom you know.
Trips only if taken abroad.
Memberships in what but without why.
Honors, but not how they were earned.
Write as if you’d never talked to yourself
and always kept yourself at arm’s length.
Pass over in silence your dogs, cats, birds,
dusty keepsakes, friends, and dreams.
Price, not worth,
and title, not what’s inside.
His shoe size, not where he’s off to,
that one you pass off as yourself.
In addition, a photograph with one ear showing
What matters is its shape, not what it hears.
What is there to hear, anyway?
The clatter of paper shredders.
All Night
by Zi Ye
Translated by Arthur Waley
All night I could not sleep
because of the moonlight on my bed.
I kept on hearing a voice calling:
Out of Nowhere, Nothing answered “Yes.”
Learning from the Painting on My Kitchen Wall
by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
with thanks to Rob Schultheis
She is beautiful, the woman
on the wall with one long braid
and an owlet perched on her hand.
Not beautiful the way young girls dream,
but beautiful in the way old women dream.
which is to say she is deeply seen.
Sometimes I swear she watches me
as I slice the shiitake, as I chop the kale.
Her eyes are serious and always keen.
Her gaze makes me beautiful, too,
beautiful the way a morning is beautiful—
because it arrives every day as if
night cannot contain it; beautiful
the way the sun is beautiful, because
it needs no praise to share all its light.
What We Sow
by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
More than twenty years ago,
I planted several wild iris beside the pond.
Today, I sit beside a generous patch
of fluttering blue flags and watch
a gold-dusted bumblebee clumsily
swerve from bloom to bloom to bloom.
Such joy they bring, these wild iris that rise
and multiply every spring. They remind me of how
kindness, too, is rhizomic, how
years ago you planted in me
something beautiful before you left.
If you came again to my shores,
would you be surprised to see
how your kindness continues to spread?
On Memorial Day
by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
after watching Porcelain War
I think of every human
who has given their life
to fight not for war
but for peace. I think
of every mother and father
and son and daughter,
every baker and painter
and teacher and builder
who has learned to use
a weapon to save
the people and places
they love. I think of love—
how the Ukrainian woman
said tonight she had
never been more aware
of how good humans can be—
and how she’s learned this
midst bombs and blood
and broken trust and shattered
glass. I think of how peace
is a choice we make with
every smallest action we take.
I think of the pen in my own hand.
What will I do with it?
Instead of Turning Off the News
by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Because it hurts to think about
the lost look in the boy’s eyes
as he holds out a thin silver pot for food,
because I ache when I think about the rubble
made of kitchen tables and bicycles,
hospitals, homes, high schools, hope,
because it is so painful to not know how
to help hundreds of thousands
of mothers and uncles and brothers
and daughters, I think about trees.
I think about how they grow.
How they need wind and the stress
of the world to build reaction wood
that helps them to lengthen
and strengthen into the bend.
Without such wood, the tree would break,
would fall. Oh self who would try to lock out the news,
oh self who feels the great weight of other’s pain,
of course you would want to look instead
for only what is beautiful, what is kind.
But let it all in. The fear. The worry. The anger.
The wishing. The compassion.
The longing to help. Of course
the big problems make you feel small.
But unless you can stand
in the place of yes to the world,
you can’t really stand at all.
The hunters in Eurasia would harvest
the compression wood created by stress
to make their bow staves—
that wood was stronger, more dense.
Oh self, you too need the right tools
to do the heart work you long to do.
What are you made of?
How strong are your roots?
Who will you be if you do not let it all in?
Making Space
by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
My heart is an unfinished poem
I begin scribbling every morning.
By noon, I sign my name.
By night, the whole page is erased.
I used to lament the erasing.
Now I love the blank more
than any scribbles I could make.
To love you is to lose my story.
Sometimes, when I am brave,
the hand doing the erasing
is my own.
What the Tuner of Souls Knows
by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
The quiet is best. Then
one might hear what is
strung too loose, too tight,
how the voicing is not
quite right. Not so long ago,
the tuner brought
this same instrument back
to true. But there is no failure.
that the instrument
went out of tune.
That’s is simply
what instruments do—
go sharp, go flat,
they waver until
once again the temperament
is set and then
song is what a life does—
we feel it the change
in every note—
oh the bliss of being in tune
with ourselves and
with every other instrument.
Then no matter how old
we are, we are new.
One Reason I Keep Reaching Out
by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
she pushes everyone away
while wanting to be loved—
clear sky pretending it isn’t blue
It’s about all of us wanting to stand where he stands and to include as he does. It is less about what it is we are to do at the margins, and more about what will happen to us if we stand there.
– Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship
Hedgehog, Hamnavoe
by Jen Hadfield
Flinching in my hands
this soiled and studded but good heart,
which stippling my cupped palms, breathes –
a kidney flinching on a hot griddle,
or very small Hell’s Angel, peeled from the verge
of a sweet, slurred morning.
Drunk, I coddle it like a crystal ball,
hellbent the realistic mysteries
should amount to more than guesswork
and fleas.
And just as the typical neurotic is unconscious of his shadow side, so the normal individual, like the neurotic, sees his shadow in his neighbor or in the man beyond the great divide.
– Carl Jung
Strength, strength is what I want. Strength not to endure, I have done that and it has made me weak—but strength to act.
– Susan Sontag
A friend and I were arguing about Freud and I said, ‘My problem with Freud is he suffers the problem of misplaced concreteness. He thinks the mind is in your head.’ My friend said, ‘Where do you think Mind is if it’s not in your head?’ And I said, ‘Here. Between us.’
– Jay Bernstein
INCOMPARABLE VERSE VALLEY
The sounds of the stream
splash out
the Buddha’s sermon
Don’t say
that the deepest meaning
comes only from one’s mouth
Day and night
eighty thousand poems
arise one after the other
and in fact
not a single word
has ever been spoken
– Musō Soseki, (trans. W. S. Merwin)
FOOLISHNESS? NO, IT’S NOT
Sometimes I spend all day trying to count
the leaves on a single tree. To do this I
have to climb branch by branch and
write down the numbers in a little book.
So I suppose, from their point of view,
it’s reasonable that my friends say: what
foolishness! She’s got her head in the clouds
again.
But it’s not. Of course I have to give up,
but by then I’m half crazy with the wonder
of it – the abundance of the leaves, the
quietness of the branches, the hopelessness
of my effort. And I am in that delicious
and important place, roaring with laughter,
full of earth-praise.
– Mary Oliver
To love someone else is easy, but to love what you are, the thing that is yourself, is just as if you were embracing a glowing, red-hot iron; it burns into you and that is very painful. Therefore, to love somebody else in the first place is always an escape which we all hope for, and we all enjoy it when we are capable of it. But in the long run, it comes back on us. You cannot stay away from yourself forever. You have to return, have to come to that experiment, to know whether you really can love. That is the question – whether you can love yourself. And that will be the test.
– Carl Jung
Lately I’ve realized that light is one of the most powerful catalysts for evoking personal memory. I found myself trying to still everything in its immense silence, until I realized that light is kin to music. It too carries the rhythm of the world it encloses–the movement of the clouds, punctuating sun or moon, and boom! the deep pause between thunder and lightning. As the clock measured off the seconds between noon and the untangling of limbs from the metal bars of chairs and desks, we digested more than food and information, we took in the light and dwelled on it as it marched across the room dragging its colors through the windows, open or closed. We waited for it to fall full-face and lull us into daydreams. Sometimes in that atmosphere of hushed and restrained voices, it was the only rhythm that counted.
– Julie Patton, Deep Song
In Greek the word means ‘the wounds of returning’. Nostalgia is not an emotion that is entertained; it is sustained. When Ulysses comes home, nostalgia is the lumps he takes, not the tremulous pleasures he derives from being home again.
– Hollis Frampton
Every person, from morning till evening, is making invisible forms in space by what he says. He is creating invisible vibrations around him, and so he is creating an atmosphere.
– Hazrat Inayat Khan
We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.
– John F. Kennedy
Man must, after all, be changed from within; otherwise, he merely assimilates the new material to the old pattern.
– Carl Jung
“Son, do you know how love should be begun?” The boy sat small and listening and still. Slowly he shook his head. The old man leaned closer and whispered: “A tree. A rock. A cloud.”
– Carson McCullers
The music was more than music- at least what we are used to hearing. The music was feeling itself. The sound connected instantly with something deep and joyous. Those powerful moments of true knowledge that we have to paper over with daily life. The music tapped the back of our terrors, too. Things we’d lived through and didn’t want to ever repeat. Shredded imaginings, unadmitted longings, fear and also surprisingly pleasures. No, we can’t live at that pitch. But every so often something shatters like ice and we are in the river of our existence. We are aware. And this realization was in the music, somehow, or in the way Shamengwa played it.
– Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves
In the Celtic tradition, there is a beautiful understanding of love and friendship. One of the fascinating ideas here is the idea of soul-love; the old Gaelic term for this is anam cara. Anam is the Gaelic word for soul and cara is the word for friend. So anam cara in the Celtic world was the “soul friend.”
In everyone’s life, there is a great need for an anam cara, a soul friend. In this love, you are understood as you are without mask or pretension. The superficial and functional lies and half-truths of social acquaintance fall away, you can be as you really are. Love allows understanding to dawn, and understanding is precious. Where you are understood, you are at home.
The anam cara experience opens a friendship that is not wounded or limited by separation or distance. Such friendship can remain alive even when the friends live far away from each other. Because they have broken through the barriers of persona and egoism to the soul level, the unity of their souls is not easily severed. When the soul is awakened, physical space is transfigured. Even across the distance, two friends can stay attuned to each other and continue to sense the flow of each other’s lives. With your anam cara you awaken the eternal.
– John O’Donohue
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 Golden Notebook
The cosmos is a vast living body, of which we are still parts. The sun is a great heart whose tremors run through our smallest veins. The moon is a great nerve center from which we quiver forever. Who knows the power that Saturn has over us, or Venus? But it is a vital power, rippling exquisitely through us all the time.
– D.H. Lawrence
I thought that my voyage had come to its end at the last limit of my power, that the path before me was closed, that provisions were exhausted, and the time come to take shelter in a silent obscurity, but I find that thy will knows no end in me, and when old words die out on the tongue, new melodies break forth from the heart, and where the old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its wonders.
– Rabindranath Tagore
True spirituality is not a search for perfection, a way into the “next world” or power to control; it is a search for union with God in this present moment.
– Fr. Anthony Coniaris
Though the nation is lost,
the mountains and rivers remain
– Tu Fu
― Gary Snyder
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
– Allen Ginsberg
Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.
– Rumi
Bringing our full attention to focus on our breath in meditation strengthens our ability to concentrate in daily life, in the same way that lifting weights in the gym strengthens our muscles and allows us to lift heavy things elsewhere.
– Dan Zigmond
a map is a claim about what can be ignored
– River Kenna
The piece of writing you feel most unsure of will often be the one singled out as someone’s “favorite.” Your sensors can only tell you what resonates hardest for you, not for others. So if you hear a bell ring—however faintly—put that piece out there. Let it find its home.
– Francesca Leader
Love is a catastrophe. It’s a crazy illness. Love ruins your life. But I am very sad when I am not in love.
– Slavoj Žižek
Experts in ancient Greek culture say that people back then didn’t see their thoughts as belonging to them. When ancient Greeks had a thought, it occurred to them as a god or goddess giving an order. Apollo was telling them to be brave. Athena was telling them to fall in love. Now people hear a commercial for sour cream potato chips and rush out to buy, but now they call this free will. At least the ancient Greeks were being honest.
– Chuck Palahniuk
The loss of paradoxical thinking is the blindness of our civilization. It happened when we repressed the feminine side of our lives as inferior side.
– Richard Rohr
THE POETRY OF W. B. YEATS AND IRISH
FOLKLORE, LEGEND AND MYTH
The vision that Yeats developed was one that sought to unify folk belief; legend; the passionate ‘thrusts of power’ he found in love song; the quality of metaphysical awareness he attributed to Irish country-people;…
His needs were creative, not scholarly; he wanted to hammer his thoughts into unity.
Yeats’s spirit was the animation of a body of knowledge, hitherto neglected, Irish knowledge, based upon Irish life.
His method … was to unify the ‘wild anarchy’ … of legend, myth, folklore, into an imaginative body of knowledge, a tissue (text) to set against the authoritative texts of English.
The conviction informing all his study of Irish material – whether saga, myth, legend or folklore – is that this knowledge is ancient European knowledge, and that Dante, Shakespeare and Blake drew upon it.
The theme of the interanimation of the living and the dead continually recurs.
Yeats held that poetic knowledge came from ‘out there’, from ‘beyond’, from what, to the normal sane way of beholding, is ‘dead’. There is a radical kind of strategy at work here: what to you (the modern world, Britain, materialism) is dead, to us is alive and full of strange complexity. Where your opinionatedness cannot allow you to go, we (‘Irish’) can find a core of energy, a living mathematics. As is often the case there is a method behind the assertion. You think we have no tradition, no power, no knowledge: but the material, unified by imagination, reveals a capacity for vision and wonder. Life is not as the opinionated, the industrialists, and the citizenry think it is; in the world of Irish country belief, in Irish legend and myth, life is continually animated by death.
The otherworld is not distant; it is as near as the air one breathes.
It must be stressed that Yeats’s fairies, the sí (‘others’), belong to Gaelic tradition, in which the otherworld has its own separate life.
Yeats’s idea of the otherworld, which he takes from Gaelic tradition, becomes, in his mental arena, a kind of uncertainty principle. Things are not what they seem to be. We live in a world, apparently solid, but actually, to the eyes of an understanding schooled in ancient wisdom, ‘flowing’ and ‘phenomenal’, … This phenomenal, flowing view of the world was, he also asserted, ‘concrete’, because it was rooted in actual things seen by the eye of imagination, not obstructed by the tired categories of the materialist mind, and thereby rendered static, solidified.
Yeats’s aim was to create a vital Irish imagination based on ancient knowledge, ancient wisdom. He researched and studied all material on Irish folklore, legend and myth available to him at the time, with energy, thoroughness, and commitment. The insights and knowledge this material embodied were Irish, but it also, to his view, connected him to the main line of European tradition. To follow this line of inquiry meant a profound refusal of the Arnold view of Celticism, and of the contemporary Irish middle class’s view of itself. He set about unifying a ‘wild anarchy’ of legends, as he saw it, to create an Ireland of the imagination: eloquent, searching and modern; questioning, open and traditional.
– Robert Welch
Nothing ever ends
poetically. It ends and
we turn it into poetry.
All that blood was
never once beautiful.
It was just red.
– Kait Rokowski
The only status I understand is that of strangeness.
– Paul B. Preciado
A great deal of psychiatry advocates social adjustment at all costs, and Jung was opposed to any conditioning that leads to a betrayal of soul. He recommended that the values of society should be critiqued rather than replicated, and that we cultivate a little madness and some secret space, so that the
soul can flourish.
– David Tacey, How to Read Jung
HELLgorithm
The Algorithm has made a mistake
It’s sending me news that’s obviously fake
It’s sending me films where idiots fight
A tsunami of shite from the far right
It’s advertising stuff I’ll never buy
It’s suggesting I follow some fuckwit guy
It’s recommending mysogynists spouting hate
homophobes hoping to be my mate
Bigots and racists taking liberty
Intolerance in every tweet I see
It’s affecting me mentally
It’s a constant barrage
All because accidentally
I clicked on a clip of Nigel Farage
– Henry Normal
The important point is to realize that you are never off duty. You can never just relax, because the whole world needs help.
– Chögyam Trungpa
from a sunlit slope
a pair of limes
roll into the sea
– James Welsh
They say that mine
is a poetry that doesn’t belong.
But if it was yours it belonged to
someone:
to you who are not form now, but essence.
They say that poetry at its height
extols the All which escapes us,
and they deny that the tortoise
is more rapid than lightning.
You alone knew that movement
is not different from stasis
that emptiness is fullness and clarity.
the most diffused of clouds.
Thus I better understand
your long trip
caged in bandages and casts.
And yet it gives me no peace
to know that alone or together
we are a single thing.
– Eugenio Montale, (tr. Helen Barolini)
fr. Xenia, in memory of his wife.
Love Is Always a Radical
It does not speak as the preachers speak;
it comes into the cities
like a madman overturning the money-tables;
it breaks
all laws
on earth.
Say it:
the mark of a sick age
is the hatred of all that is simple.
In a world of steel
and legions
all they will ever do
with
love one another
is nail it with the thieves among the birds.
– Joseph Fasano
After Many Springs
Now, In June,
When the night is a vast softness
Filled with blue stars,
And broken shafts of moon-glimmer
Fall upon the earth,
Am I too old to see the fairies dance?
I cannot find them any more.
– Langston Hughes
People have, with the help of so many conventions, resolved everything the easy way, on the easiest side of the easy. But it is clear we must embrace struggle. Every living thing conforms to it. Everything in nature grows and establishes itself in its own way, establishing its own identity, insisting on it at all cost, against all resistance. We can be sure of very little, but the need to court struggle is a surety that will not leave us.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Antique
by Arthur Rimbaud
Graceful son of Pan! Around your forehead crowned with small flowers and berries, your eyes, precious spheres, are moving. Spotted with brownish wine lees, your cheeks grow hollow. Your fangs are gleaming. Your chest is like a lyre, jingling sounds circulate between your blond arms. Your heart beats in that belly where the double sex sleeps. Walk at night, gently moving that thigh, that second thigh and that left leg.
making life on a palette
by Raina J. León
After Charles Willson Peale (1741–1827),
“George Washington at Princeton,” 1779
the color of life
takes sun yellow and bluest blue sky and water
for green ferns
chartreuse buds beading above moss
dappled shamrocks
fragrant healing of sage, laurel,
mint, basil, thyme, rosemary, myrtle
amid the tall wonders of juniper
pine, olive, pear
even the meeting of sea and river—
the sky, an intermingling of viridian and chetwode horizons,
and cerulean clarity—
offers its green seafoam,
its seaweed pats,
the crocodile at the edge of a freshwater marsh
its teeth open gritted in green
against the backdrop of hunter rainforest
dripping in green
heaven is a field of persian green
lit by translucent jade and celadon lamps
a many-roomed chateau scented by aromatic tea leaves
the aperitivo: gin, apple, and bitter lime
the time: midnight green
the guardian: a mantis in prayer
joy: harlequin, verdun, spring
magic: kaitoke forest in its energetic whisper and pulse
green must exist
inside brother james
would he call it camouflage
or nyanza or sap
for washington it’s in the colors of flags
the fields far off
feldgrau or military or empire green
or dollar bill or rifle green
revolution with chains the result
mix the green
like a spell in making
safe life
hush arbor life
nurturing abundant life
free life
bring the background to the fore
ease
ease
ease
life
When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy… . Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must—at that moment—become the center of the universe.
– Elie Wiesel
Italy’s great gift to me is the voice that tells me that I don’t have to follow the rules.
– Jhumpa Lahiri
Wilhoit’s Law:
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
In early June the world of leaf and blade and flowers explodes, and every sunset is different.
– John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent
Jung once said that the strongest passion in humans is not hunger, sex, or power, although these are quite strong; the very strongest passion is laziness. The longer I study human beings, including myself, the more I am inclined to agree.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
For a certain length of time, it’s very important for the teacher to lead you. But then when the teacher gives you the reins . . . you should take them. For instance, Yeshe Dorje, Patrul Rinpoche’s best friend who studied under the same teacher he did, wanted to become a layman when he was twenty-three. Everyone went a little crazy about this and told his teacher to advise him not to do that. But when Yeshe Dorje went to see his teacher, the teacher told him, ‘I have given you the leash. Now it’s up to you what you want to do with it. You know best what you want to do.’ Beyond that, he didn’t say another word.
– Dzigar Kongtrul, The Bee Story
Like the Mystic, the imaginative Dreamer can go far from the pragmatic circuses of human affairs. But while a Mystic strives to evaporate more into spirit or idea (going from the the particular into the abstract), the Dreamer complements her by trying to bring new ideas into being, not by escaping matter but refining it. As Jane Roberts says in The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, “You project yourselves into time like children through freely imagining your growth. You instantly color physical experience and nature itself with the tints of your unique imaginative processes. Unless you think quite consistently – and deeply – the importance of the imagination quite escapes you, and yet it literally forms the world that you experience.” Because this mode of experience, which many of us have been taught to see as undignified, is the source of our wholeness.
– George Gorman
I’ve seen academic life destroy the best writers of my generation.
– Susan Sontag
Though it’s still difficult for humans to imagine that other creatures are using their imagination as much as we do, this same imaginative genius is inherent in being alive. More and more of us have begun wondering if, as every step forward for humans began as an imaginative possibility that no one could, at first, take seriously, the rest of natural evolution also appears to be just as creatively artistic as we are! And the same hunger for change which leads species to daringly mutate is at work in every dreamer alive, as imagination keeps freeing us from ruts, opening new trails, and even changing the rules of the game.
– George Gorman
It was hard to avoid the feeling that somebody, somewhere, was missing the point. I couldn’t even be sure it wasn’t me.
– Douglas Adams
Now, a former president has been convicted by a jury in New York, and we have a choice to make. We can show the world that we are still exceptional and continue to lead the international community with integrity and pride, or we can prolong the onslaught of crassness, vulgarity, pettiness and righteous indignation and descend into national mediocrity, where there is nothing of value worth emulating.
– Adm. William H. McRaven (Ret.)
Talented and well-practiced in every vice, a stranger to compassion or empathy, a liar and a cheat so complete in perfidy that he has elevated his dishonesty to hold it up as an ersatz moral principle. Violent, so long as he can order someone else to do the dirty work. Grotesque in body, graceless in action, in possession of a wounded self-regard so colossal as to smother any spark of grace. Treasonous, not only to country, but to every ally he has ever had, the poisoned fruit and rankest flower of racism and contempt for women, and utterly devoid of shame for his moral and spiritual bankruptcy. That is your leader. That is to whom you give your money. That is who you follow and laud. That is whose banner you willingly carry. Why? Because he is a mirror, not a lighthouse. You see yourselves in him. He is what you would be, if you had inherited money and could shed the last vestiges of conscience and shame. No, I do not “respect your choices,” nor do I admire your loyalty and dedication to this miserific, demoniac vision. You have demonstrated not only a lack of civic virtue, loyalty to the Republic and to the rule of law, but a willingness to engage in violence and sedition at his slightest expressed wish. And you will never, ever admit you were wrong. Because you see your dark, twisted, resentful dreams in him. And to renounce him is to renounce yourselves.
– Advocatus Peregrini
You walk into this room at your own risk, because it leads to the future, not a future that will be, but one that might be. This is not a new world, it is simply an extension of what began in the old one. It has patterned itself after every dictator who has ever planted the ripping imprint of a boot on the pages of history since the beginning of time. It has refinements, technological advances, and a more sophisticated approach to the destruction of human freedom. But like every one of the super-states that preceded it, it has one iron rule: logic is an enemy and truth is a menace…
– Rod Serling
Every act of aggression is an act of ignorance. It is an act born in the false self, and the false self is merely the child in us who has not
yet healed the wounds of the past.
The true self is by its very nature always concerned with the wellness of the whole, with every other life and thing, because it knows the fate of each thing is a part of its fate.
When we are in our false selves, we are like children splashing in our coveted puddles, warring over whose is whose, while all along the true self is the river in the distance, common to us all, clean and rich for the drinking.
We could go there, but we’ve lost the way. The true self can only be found by humility, openness, and grace, all of which have become radical acts.
Consumerism feeds the ego. Media rewards chaos. ‘Divide and conquer,’ is the implicit slogan of the “me-first” marketing campaign. In the end, we are divided even within ourselves. And then we are easy to control.
How many bonds are broken in this madness? How many times will we let these forces rend our friendships, shatter our children, destroy
our earth? How many puddles have we won?
To hold this mystery is to heal: in becoming your own deep uniqueness, you move into your commonness with all things.
The true act of revolution is to heal the broken fragments of the
self, to find the true self that can reach out to another life and say,
“When I do harm, it is only because I have not yet become what I am.
For what I am is what I’ve always been afraid of. What I am is you.
What I am is love.”
– Joseph Fasano
Anything that is not love
is only a visitor to your body.
You are not anxious,
stress is simply flowing through you.
You are not permanently depressed,
sadness is simply visiting you.
You are not lost,
confusion is simply wandering within you.
And you are not broken,
pain is simply passing through you.
– Tahlia Hunter
You don’t have to be gay to be a supporter
you just have to be
human.!
– Daniel Radcliffe
According to Buddhism, there is no one in charge of the universe who distributes rewards and punishments. We create the causes by our actions, and we experience their results.
– Ven. Thubten Chodron
Men press towards the light, not so as to see better, but so as to shine better.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
The past is another country.
The borders are closed.
Your visa was lost
So long ago.
– john zbigniew guzlowski
you tried the muses too: you fail’d, sir (…) an artist, sir, should rest in art. to have the deep poetic heart is more than all poetic fame.
– alfred, lord tennyson
Civilization is careening towards dystopia/utopia
– Elon Musk
I can’t unsee: commies’ll yell at capitalism for heartless, stupid, evil effects, & capitalists’ll screech about communism for heartless, stupid, evil effects — both are basically yelling at the LH tendencies of the other while leaning into the LH tendencies of their own.
– River Kenna
whoever loves, if he do not propose the right true end of love, he’s one that goes to sea for nothing but to make him sick.
– john donne
I had a thought for no one’s but your ears:
That you were beautiful, and that I strove
To love you in the old high way of love
– Yeats
Somebody said once or wrote, once: We’re all of us children in a vast kindergarten trying to spell God’s name with the wrong alphabet blocks!
– Tennessee Williams
when you come up out
of shadow, for a moment
you are lost, prised open
by light, without content
– Thomas A Clark
All struggle, all resistance is — must be — concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here.
– Susan Sontag
Who cares who
marches on the beat
or off,
the old monk said.
Why do you ask.
– The Old Monk
to be held in something more
than the loud light of their projectors
of themselves they flicker
– Natalie Diaz
If a poet is really good he can give you a moment of reconcilement to the tragic nature of things.
– John Hall Wheelock
There is a certain category of decisions that work well in the classroom but not in real life. I call these chalkboard decisions. These decisions tease us because the math always seems correct.
The problem is that most decisions are less about the math and more about judgment. The math always points to the optimal immediate decision, which is rarely the best long-term decision.
Consider paying off your mortgage. With 2% interest rates, the spreadsheet will tell you it doesn’t make sense to pay off your mortgage. Instead, put the money you would have used to pay off your house in the stock market. Assuming an 8% return, you’d be much better off.
The math in chalkboard decisions is irrefutable. And yet, the best decisions are often based on positioning yourself for things you can’t see.
What if we have a pandemic? What if the stock market drops 20% or 30%? What if mortgage rates rise 10%? Can you handle these events with equanimity, or will circumstances force you to do something you don’t want to do?
I see the same thing in business all the time. The math says lever up, reduce inventory, pay your employees as little as possible, charge your customers as much as possible, and take advantage of the weakness of your suppliers. You don’t need to look far to see companies who take this approach. In the short term, these decisions seem to lead to victory. In the long term, they almost always lead to defeat.
If it helps to visualize chalkboard decisions, imagine standing at the base of a 2000m mountain with two paths in front of you. You can only see the next 100m of each, and one path looks easier. If you only consider what you can see, you’ll choose the easier path. Only after you walk the first bit do you realize that choosing the easiest visible path leads to a cliff and doesn’t take you where you want to go.
Our ability to predict the future is never as certain in the real world as in the classroom. No matter how compelling the math, the best chalkboard decision might not be the best overall move.
– Shane Parrish
I demanded a realm in which I should be both master and slave at the same time: the world of art is the only such realm. I entered it without any apparent talent, a thorough novice, incapable, awkward, tongue-tied, almost paralyzed by fear and apprehensiveness. I had to lay one brick on another, set millions of words to paper before writing one real, authentic word dragged up from my own guts.
– Henry Miller
Oh, living is so uncomfortable. Everything presses in: the body demands, the spirit never ceases, living is like being weary but being unable to sleep – living is upsetting. You can’t walk around naked, either in body or in spirit.
– Clarice Lispector
In Paradise, where there is no labour, and no need for long rest and heavy sleep, all temptations become dangerous. It is a peril to live there…. Perhaps present-day people eschew the paradisal state. They prefer work, for where there is no work there is no smoothness, no regularity, no peacefulness, no satisfaction.
– Lev Shestov
I am now writing in my subconscious mind the idea of God’s wealth. God is the Source of my supply, and all my needs are met at every moment of time and point of space.
– Dr. Joseph Murphy
I don’t know if I’m extremely
sensitive or life is unbearable.
– Vincent Van Gogh
Although staying silent in the face of provocation is certainly commendable, it may not be sufficient; silence needs to be tempered with wisdom.
– Tara Anand
Take someone who doesn’t keep score, who’s not looking to be richer, or afraid of losing, who has not the slightest interest even in his own personality: He’s free.
– Rumi
In order to seek truth, it is necessary once in the course of our life to doubt, as far as possible, of all things.
– Rene Descartes
If poetry and science cannot change one’s life, they’re meaningless.
– Michael McClure
Nuclear warfare is like two men standing in a pool of gasoline, one with five matches, the other with two.
– Carl Sagan
Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.
– George Orwell
Behavior is something greater than knowledge, because in life there are many situations where knowledge fails but behavior can handle everything.
– Ania Atsu
Paradoxical as it may seem, the purposeful life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on, and misses everything. Not hurrying, the purposeless life misses nothing, for it is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world.
– Alan Watts
Unused talents gives you no advantage over someone who has no talent at all.
– Mark Twain
Law is the soil in which alone beauty will grow; beauty is the only stuff in which Truth can be clothed; and you may, if you will, call Imagination the tailor that cuts her garments to fit her, and Fancy his journeyman that puts the pieces of them together, or perhaps at most embroiders their button-holes. Obeying law, the maker works like his creator; not obeying law, he is such a fool as heaps a pile of stones and calls it a church.
– George MacDonald
Empty pockets never held anyone back. Only empty heads and empty hearts can do that.
– Norman Vincent Peale
The City
by C. P. Cavafy
Translated by Edmund Keeley
You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried like something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”
You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
You’ll walk the same streets, grow old
in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses.
You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:
there’s no ship for you, there’s no road.
Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.
You don’t paddle against the current, you paddle with it. And if you get good at it, you throw away the oars.
– Kris Kristofferson
How many centuries of sight
In this piercing, inhuman perfection
Stretch the gaze off this rocky promontory,
To make the mind exult
At the eye of a sea-hawk,
A blaze of grandeur, permanence of the impersonal.
– Richard Eberhart
I am not an artist. I am an image maker.
– Thomas Hoepker
There are some great writers who are great talkers, but there are more great writers who are not great talkers.
– Fran Lebowitz
I just try to walk my own path. You have to believe
in yourself and you have to ride out the seasons.
Everybody wants it to be summer all the time, in
relationships and with their career. And when
the weather starts to turn, they think they better get
out. So it takes a certain amount of persistence.
– Tom Waits
In order to confirm zeroness, we must create one to prove that zero exists.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Now it is dawn.
A gold eyelid opens
over the harbour.
– Anne Carson
I keep walking across a never-ending moment.
– David Wojo
Yet he will not be your universe, your world, nor your village.
– Jessie Lovett, How The Love Story Goes Next Time
The state mints pain into policy,
crushes the silver of needles and bottle caps
into coins they deposit in a prison guard’s pocket.
– Jarrett Moseley
snagged on something
we continue pulling
until the line breaks
– Laura Kerr
The ability to keep track of the distinct components of our experience is incredibly useful.
– Shinzen Young
The thrust of this paper is not to challenge or discredit the vast literature on masochism and the ever sharpening insight into its psychic functions and meanings, but to attempt to illumine the shroud of mystery that still hangs over this curioushuman phenomenon the seeking out of submission, pain or adversity— by drawing attention to another dimension that in my view plays a major and often deeply buried role in its varied expressions.
By way of circling around the meaning of surrender I would like first to draw upon a paper by Michael Eigen (1981), a remarkable analysis of the work of Winnicott, Lacan and Bion in which he locates a dimension of faith that underlies some of their most basic conceptions. “By the area of faith, ” Eigen says, “I mean to point to a way of experiencing which is undertaken with one’s whole being, all out, ‘with one’s heart, with one’s soul, and with all one’s might.” Faith, surrender, the beginnings of creativity and symbol formation all intersect in the world of transitional experiencing “when the infant lives through a faith that is prior to a clear realization of self and other differences.”
Later, with object usage, there comes a new awakening in which “the core sense of creativeness that permeates transitional experiencing is reborn on a new level, insofar as genuine not-me nutriment becomes available for personal use.” One might imagine the subject saying to the object, “I went all out, completely vulnerable, in the faith [or surrender] that someone was out there and it turned out to be true, as I could only have known by destroying you with all my might, and yet here you are. I love you.”
– Emmanuel Ghent, MD
The discipline of poetry is in overhearing yourself say difficult truths from which it is impossible to retreat. In a sense, all poems are good; all poems are an emblem of courage and the attempt to say the unsayable. Yet only a few are able to speak to something universal yet personal and distinct at the same time; to create a door through which others can walk, into territory that previously seemed unobtainable, in the passage of a few short lines.
– David Whyte
What seems overpriced but in reality is 100% worth it?
The Green New Deal.
– Ethan Nichtern
Do not dwell upon the sins and mistakes of yesterday so exclusively as to have no energy and mind left for living rightly today, and do not think that the sins of yesterday can prevent you from living purely today.
– James Allen
He dare not come in company for fear he should be misused, disgraced, overshoot himself in gestures or speeches or be sick; he thinks every man observes him.
– Burton
I am one thing, my writings are another.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
The best way to become who we really are is to heal at the unconscious roots.
– Lucas Handwerker
There’s talk of the poet but there’s no talk of the poet eating.
– Patrick Kavanagh
For any writer who wants to keep a journal, be alive to everything, not just to what you’re feeling, but also to your pets, to flowers, to what you’re reading.
– May Sarton
Cultivate the ability to see the ridiculous, and to retain the ability to laugh.
– Edgar Cayce
He would walk in the countryside for hours each day, sketching trees, plains, marshes, mossy undergrowth, boulders, dead branches. The humidity of the forests seems to rise from his canvases.
– Sarah Gould, On the paintings of Théodore Rousseau
General, your tank is a powerful vehicle It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men. But it has one defect: It needs a driver. General, your bomber is powerful. It flies faster than a storm and carries more than an elephant. But it has one defect: It needs a mechanic. General, man is very useful. He can fly and he can kill. But he has one defect: He can think.
– Bertolt Brecht
My brother once showed me a piece of quartz that contained, he said, some trapped water older than all the seas in our world. He held it up to my ear. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘life and no escape.
– Anne Carson
The students have become cash cows: milked at one end by universities and at the other by private landlords. Meanwhile, Oxford’s working-class population has been pushed to the margins.
– Patrick McGuinness
Be proud of how you’ve been handling these past few months. The silent battles you’ve fought, the moments you had to humble yourself, the times you’ve wiped your own tears. Celebrate your strength.
– Priscilla A. Ransom
across the street
from a high school reunion
“table for one”
– @hegelincanada
To make any change, you first need to start with your belief system and how you see yourself. Doing anything out of punishment, shame, or insecurity will never last.
– Annie Das
The poet must ramble and prove, he must courageously lose himself, must always venture everything he owns, and he has to hope, or rather he is permitted: permitted to hope.
– Robert Walser
When a phrase is born it is both good and bad at the same time. The secret of its success rests in a crux that is barely discernable. One’s fingertips must grasp the key, gently warming it. And the key must be turned once, not twice.”
– Isaac Babel
It is convenient for the old men to blame Eve.
To insist we are damned because a country girl
talked to the snake one afternoon long ago.
Children must starve in Somalia for that,
and old women be abandoned in our greatest cities.
It’s why we will finally be thrown into the lakes
of molten lead. Because she was confused
by happiness that first time anyone said
she was beautiful. Nevertheless, she must be
the issue, so people won’t notice that rocks
and galaxies, mathematics and rust are also
created in His image.
– Jack Gilbert
A labyrinth is a metaphor in both senses, carrying you on a brief journey that reminds you that you are always on a journey. You are always in a labyrinth, always a little lost and always feeling your way forward, there is always an unexpected turn ahead, in fact you were born into the labyrinth out of the darkness of the womb and you will only exit in that other darkness of tombs.
The two paths, literal and metaphorical, become one path on which you know at last that you are a traveler in darkness. But in the labyrinth, you arrive before that finale, and one of the great spiritual uses of a labyrinth is to compress the journey of pilgrimage into a local space, so that you may wander, may know that in order to get to your destination, you must turn away from it, become lost, spin about, and then only after the way has become overwhelming and absorbing, arrive, without having gone far.
– Rebecca Solnit, Journey to the Center
Lower your head, shut your eyes, breathe out gently and imagine yourself looking into your own heart. Carry your mind, that is, your thoughts, from your head to your heart.
– St. Symeon
Happiness is strange; it comes when you are not seeking it. When you are not making an effort to be happy, then unexpectedly, mysteriously, happiness is there, born of purity, of a loveliness of being.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
There is no one
you’re betraying
in your changes
when you become the whole wild song
of what you are.
– Joseph Fasano
One should sit quietly and let the thing invent itself.
– Iris Murdoch
You grow up hearing two languages. Neither fits your fits
Your mother informs you “moon” means “window to another world.
– John Yau
There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error.
– William Faulkner
The great thing to learn about life is, first, not to do what you don’t want to do, and, second, to do what you do want to do.
– Margaret Caroline Anderson
I plant roots so deeply in the people I love that I always lose a piece of myself when they go.
– Beau Taplin
Intellectuals have a preference for learning things rather than experiencing them.
– Margaret Caroline Anderson, The Fiery Fountains
The steadfastness we develop in meditation is a willingness to stay. It may seem silly, but meditation actually isn’t too unlike training a dog! We learn to stay.
– Pema Chödrön
The bodhisattva, on the other hand, firmly roots himself in the traditions of his society but does not feel obligated to follow them. He is not afraid to take a new step, but the reason he is stepping out of the tradition is because he knows it so well. His inspiration to step out comes from that tradition. First we must step into the tradition, must understand it fully, its wise and its foolish aspects, why people are hypnotized by its dogmas; we must understand what wisdom, if any, lies behind the dogma. Then we can step out of it sanely.
– Chögyam Trungpa
You can only stop the flow of thoughts by refusing to have any interest in it.
– Ramana Maharshi
Even amid all of your confusion you still have one thing going for you. You are tethered to the path of awakening simply because you long for happiness and freedom from suffering.
– Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel
May those who hold pure intentions cross paths with others who share the
same pure intentions.
– @thematrixwizard
I want to develop an image of the world, the real background, in order to unfold my reality before it.
– Robert Musil
These days
whatever you have to say, leave
the roots on, let them
dangle
And the dirt
Just to make clear
where they come from
– Charles Olson
You’ll always reach the end of how you thought your life would go. You’ll reach it many, many times. What looks like the low point is also the high point. What looks like the end is always the beginning.
Finding faith may seem impossible in your darkest times, but like the earth’s eternal orbit and the sun’s ceaseless shine, impossible things happen all the time.
You may be lost right now, but after days, months, even years in the wilderness, you will be found alive. Completely, joyously, miraculously alive.
– Karen Maezen Miller
In 1989, Wendell Berry delivered a Commencement Address at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine that included not Ten Commandments but ten hopes. They are as follows :
1. Beware the justice of Nature.
2. Understand that there can be no successful human economy apart from Nature or in defiance of Nature.
3. Understand that no amount of education can overcome the innate limits of human intelligence and responsibility. We are not smart enough or conscious enough or alert enough to work responsibly on a gigantic scale.
4. In making things always bigger and more centralized, we make them both more vulnerable in themselves and more dangerous to everything else. Learn, therefore, to prefer small-scale elegance and generosity to large-scale greed, crudity, and glamour.
5. Make a home. Help to make a community. Be loyal to what you have made.
6. Put the interest of the community first.
7. Love your neighbors–not the neighbors you pick out, but the ones you have.
8. Love this miraculous world that we did not make, that is a gift to us.
9. As far as you are able make your lives dependent upon your local place, neighborhood, and household–which thrive by care and generosity–and independent of the industrial economy, which thrives by damage.
10. Find work, if you can, that does no damage. Enjoy your work. Work well.
To know a tree best, it’s important to move beyond biology and to the emotions and sensations it stirs. Beauty as a branch of biology is underrated.
– Daniel Lewis
Cato says that aging is in many ways superior to what precedes it because of the quality of the talk it contains. But he doesn’t make good on that promise; Cicero’s letters do. Aging is bound to contain tragedy. It is not, however, bound to contain comedy, or understanding, or love. What supplies all of these is friendship.
– Cicero’s De Senectute
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
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, ‘Look! This is something new’? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time.
– Ecclesiastes 1:9
Think often of how swiftly all things pass away and are no more – the works of Nature and the works of man. The substance of the Universe, matter, is like unto a river that flows on forever. All things are not only in a constant state of change, but they are the cause of constant and infinite change in other things. Upon a narrow ledge thou standest! Behind thee, the bottomless abyss of the Past! In front of thee, the Future that will swallow up all things that are now! Over what things, then, in this present life wilt thou, O foolish man, be disquieted or exalted – making thyself wretched; seeing that they can vex thee only for a time – a brief, brief time!”
– Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
“I would like to believe in God,” she said, “because I don’t want to believe we just end, even though it balances the equation—since we came from blackness, it seems logical to assume that it’s to blackness we return. But I believe in the stars, and the infinity of the universe. That’s the great Out There. Down here, I believe there are more universes in every fistful of sand, because infinity is a two-way street. I believe there’s another dozen thoughts in my head lined up behind each one I’m aware of. I believe in my consciousness and my unconscious, even though I don’t know what those things are. And I believe in A. Conan Doyle, who had Sherlock Holmes say, ‘Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.’” “Wasn’t he the guy who believed in fairies?” Ralph asked.
– Stephen King, The Outsider
Pablo Picasso once said, “My mother said to me, if you are a soldier, you will became a general. If you are a monk will become the Pope. Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.”
walking everyday
five or six miles
in search of you
– Basho
I tell my students, who believe passionately in explaining the work they’re sharing, ‘You know, when you’re dead, you can’t go around explaining this thing—it has to be right there on the page.’
– Louise Glück
Imagine that the soul ceaselessly yearns to dream itself into the world, not just in early childhood. Sometimes the ego cooperates; mostly it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, it’s not likely to inherit the greater life of the soul. The ego tends to think of itself as fully in control. The soul constantly calls the ego to die to its current illusions. To surrender to the underworld is death [to the ego]. We long for transformation but don’t want it that way. As W. H. Auden wrote, “We would rather be ruined than changed.”
– Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft
Now that I realize I don’t hate to write, that I just hate to work, it makes writing easier.
– Fran Lebowitz
There was a bookstore in New York called Wisner’s that you would walk into and see John Coltrane or Sun Ra studying texts on religions and philosophies… I realized that everyone wants the same thing: peace, love and harmony.
– Lonnie Liston Smith
Most of us are perhaps a tiny bit self-absorbed, and good at keeping out people who don’t look, vote, or act like our friends, and that’s very nice. But a good community includes all those other people and those of us at the edges.
– Anne Lamott
He cared only about people; he was scarcely conscious of places except for their weather, until they had been invested with color by tangible events.
– Scott Fitzgerald
It’s a simple world, full of crossovers.
– Maxine Kumin
It’s important to try to write when you are in the wrong mood or when the weather is wrong.
– John Ashbery
Our ferocious desires can be lethal for ourselves and others; and yet, this knowledge doesn’t at all diminish our lust. I think a lot about the connections between violence and appetite.
– JoAnne McFarland
A nasty side effect of aging is witnessing your legends pass into the fields like lightning bugs on a late summer breath. Brilliant supernovae, leaving pin wheels of star dust in their sudden abrupt absence. Illuminated by the morning light, we absorb. I understand.
– Jennifer Warrington
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
You have only one brain; look after it for it is a marvellous thing.
– Krishnamurti
Nobody can tell our story better than ourselves.
– Zanele Muholi
This day, that feeling, drunkenness
Born of indecision, lack of focus, but everything
Forgiven:
– Alberto Ríos
It’s remarkable how often the real problem is not what happened, but how it was communicated.
– @JamesClear
A woman can write as well as a man, but not if one of her hands is tied behind her back.
– Claire Kilroy
A copyeditor seems a good audience to test a joke on. They sure let you know if your word play makes no sense.
– Dustin M. Hoffman
a pause
along the shoreline
driftwood
– James Welsh
When the outcome of a game is known, the game is cancelled—because the whole point of playing the game is that we don’t know the outcome. Because the known future is already past, and the higher the degree of certainty of knowledge as to the future, to that extent it has happened. You’ve had it. And we don’t want to put the future in that situation—not really.
– Alan Watts
When death comes, let it come. Let it step over this tripwire tongue, paint over every poem. My heaven has always been a blank page, so let death make one of me. Until then, I will write. For myself. For my ancestors. I will write. For the whisper of a possibility that it might matter. For the fun of it if it doesn’t.
– Guante
Write until your eyes close
– Canetti; tr. Peter Filkins
when anaïs nin said “my eyes are painfully open” and clarice lispector “i am rudely alive” and sylvia plath “i’m catastrophically aware”
– Zeeshan Jaanam
They put themselves here for what? Because it was the right thing to do… they were not gaining territory, they were not here for riches, they were not here to conquer anything. They were really here in order to mend the future.
– Tom Hanks, reflects on the heroes of D Day
Canoe
Well, I am thinking this may be my last
summer, but cannot lose even a part
of pleasure in the old-fashioned art
of idleness. I cannot stand aghast
at whatever doom hovers in the background;
while grass and trees and the somnolent river
ho know they are allowed to last for ever,
exchange between them the whole subdued sound
of this hot time. What sudden fearful fate
can deter my shade wandering next year
from a return? Whistle, and I will hear
and come again another evening, when this boat
travels with you alone towards Iffley:
as you lie looking up for thunder again,
this cool touch does not betoken rain;
it is my spirit that kisses your mouth lightly.
– Keith Douglas
The Old Masters
by John Burnside
About suffering, they knew no more or less
than we do, being
housed in luminescence;
a local cumulus
of feverfew and jade
reduced to void, the tower overthrown,
the bells upturned.
I see one now, impoverished
and old before his time, a lesser man’s
subordinate, or master to a trade
he never asked for.
Burdened by the weight
of office, or the whim of some mad king,
he stands alone, above the dark lagoon,
and watches, while the city fades from quartz
to plum, from plum
to cochineal, a restless drift
through subtleties and shades
he cannot
capture, though he magnifies the whole
and loves it all the more, for being
useless, fleeting, governed by no rule,
a headlong and unmasterable now
that slips away, one pier light at a time.
parallel universe—
the physics of meeting
myself
– @lafcadiopoetry
My business is to paint what I see, not what I know is there.
– J. M. W. Turner
The planet will be fine. It’s civilization based on industrialized agriculture that won’t be.
– Sarah Connor
I prepare a story and then when I start to write something else emerges.
– Harold Brodkey
To cross the threshold. To abolish all signs, then go after them. To decode the future. To rust. To wonder how to digest defeat instead of vomiting it in the middle of the night, and go back to one’s bed and pull up the covers.
– Etel Adnan, To Be In a Time of War
artists who do not have the energy, the stomach, or the self-loathing required to attempt to “game the algorithm” to promote music, secure work, or amass enough followers on social media to be in contention for 9pt font festival slots that pay $200, unite
– james toth
brought my parents to an American diner for the first time and they think this—air conditioning, big portions, low prices, infinite coffee, pretty and friendly staff, airy booths—is the pinnacle of western civilization.
– @AriaAber
A lot of discourse about class politics as it relates to nonwhite communities is often really talking about wealth, income, and status differences, not about a relationship to the means of production. But W.E.B. Du Bois thought about race as it relates to it, as did James Boggs.
– @tamaranopper
The function of the artist in a disturbed society is to give awareness of the universe, to ask the right questions, and to elevate the mind.
– Marina Abramovic
James Baldwin said, “You know, I think there is something very impressive about being able to get through the world—and still be able to be hurt. Because most people seem to give that up so soon.” I love this. It’s about trying to stay warm in a cold, cold world.
– @tamaranopper
Don’t underestimate the impact your words, actions, and energy have on people. A small act can impact others in bigger ways than you’ll ever know.
– Kat Quach
GOLDEN VERSES
Eh, what! everything is sentientl
– Pythagoras
You, free thinker, imagine only man
thinks in this world where life bursts from all things?
The powers within prescribe your freedom’s wings,
but you leave the universe outside your plans.
Respect the mind that stirs in every creature:
love’s mystery is known by metals too;
every flower opens its soul to Nature;
“Everything’s sentient!” and works on you.
Beware! from the blind wall one watches you:
even matter has a logos all its own . ..
do not put it to some impious use.
Often in humble life a god works, hidden;
and like a new-born eye veiled by its lids,
pure spirit grows beneath the surface of stones.
– Nerval (trs. C.F. McIntyre)
At the world-ash-tree once I wove,
When from the stem
There bourgeoned strong
The boughs of a sacred wood.
In the shadows cool a fountain flowed;
Wisdom whispered
Low from its wave;
Of holy things I sang.
– Richard Wagner
Reading is an exercise in empathy.
– Malorie Blackman
It is an unflinching eye that captures terrible beauty and beautiful terror in equal measure.
– Joyelle McSweeney
Politics is the number of coffee cups on the table, the sudden presence of what you have forgotten, the memories you are afraid to look at too closely, though you look anyway. Staying away from politics is also politics. Politics is nothing & it is everything.
– Mourid Barghouti
To a student who asked me what I wanted to do with my life, what I wanted to achieve, I responded in writing:
…a shamanic affinity with my changing ‘world’; a magical consciousness — which for me indicates some liberation from the shackles of patriarchal godhood stories; some freedom to subversively negotiate my origins and destiny; a small life of joyous intense intimacy with those that I ‘love and care for’; an ebullient sense of undying adventure and wonder; a restrainedly rapturous and liberating culture of insignificance — a life looking down on the wall clock, not up to it. Most of all, I long for a soft, poetic sense of serenity — a life mindfully improvised. It still rings true all these years after.
– Bayo Akomolafe
If you are resourceful and find use in the surviving love, it does not have to corrode there in the burnt bones of a once-was house.
– Rachel Wiley
Unless you’re one of us already, you’ll probably never cook like a professional. And that’s okay. On my day off, I rarely want to eat restaurant food unless I’m looking for new ideas or recipes to steal. What I want to eat is home cooking, somebody’s anybody’s – mother’s or grandmother’s food. A simple pasta pomodoro made with love, a clumsily thrown-together tuna casserole, roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, all of this is pure exotica to me, even when I’ve been neck-deep all day in filet mignon and herb-infused oils and all the bits of business we do to distinguish restaurant food from what you get at home. My mother-in-law would always apologize before serving dinner when I was in attendance, saying, ‘This must seem pretty ordinary for a chef . . .’ She had no idea how magical, how reassuring, how pleasurable her simple meat loaf was for me, what a delight even lumpy mashed potatoes were — being, as they were, blessedly devoid of truffles or truffle oil…
– Anthony Bourdain
My thoughts carry me around the world.
– Liv Ullmann
It’s hard to be neurotic in a grove of trees.
– Thomas Merton
I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion
Has broken Nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle,
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An’ fellow-mortal!
– Robert Burns, The Mouse
Continuing from last time, answering “What is authentic to be about today?” is hard to do. We can’t always know. More questions come than answers. “Am I just showing off?” “Am I hiding?” “Am I just a habit” “What’s the real deal here?” As beloved poet, Rilke, put it, we have to live into the answers.
– Gunilla Norris
Once while visiting his friend Max Brod, young Kafka awakened Brod’s father, who was asleep on a couch. Instead of apologizing, Kafka gently motioned him to relax, advanced through the room on tiptoe, and said softly: “Please – consider me a dream.”
– Franz Baumer
For she had eyes and chose me.
– William Shakespeare
The outside is the only place we can truly be inside the world.
– Daniel J. Rice
I’m not the first person to remind us that if a machine is soulless then it’s because no one bothered to put the soul in there
– Tilda Swinton
Some people will have a diamond in their hand and be looking around at all the rhinestones.
– Francesca Leader
In community, lines of difference blur. We get hydrated, and we get our senses of humor back, the great miracle; we get set back on our feet when we fall or get knocked down, and we’re filled up by helping other people get back on their feet.
– Anne Lamott
He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.
– John Stuart Mill
It’s better to be the oldest person in the weight room than the youngest person in the nursing home.
– Dan Go
The Stoics come down hard on procrastinating. “Putting things off and always deferring the day after which you will attend to yourself,” Epictetus said, “you will live and die as someone quite ordinary.”
– Daily Stoic
Is there any kind of liberation other than collective liberation in an interconnected complex system?
– Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
I try to pull the language in to such a sharpness that it jumps off the page. It must look easy, but it takes me forever to get it to look so easy.
– Maya Angelou
…we now have extremely compelling evidence showing that yes, dharma practice does alleviate destructive emotions and that it does so by profoundly altering the way the brain functions.
– Daniel Goleman
Outside the (dharma) teachings – in the conventional world – there is no one to remind us to focus less on these [our hopes & fears], but the dharma’s teachings hold the key to overcoming all neurosis.
– Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche
The ethical cannot be stated, instead it is practiced to the point of loss, and the text is one of the most accomplished examples of such a practice.
– Julia Kristeva, tr. by Margaret Waller
It isn’t possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.
– E.M Forster
Go to the edge of your practice, where you step into what you do not know.
– Ken McLeod
Language is merely the placeholder for what the LAND has always known.
– Zaina Alsous
The force needed to empower wisdom is compassion.
– Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi
Spring,
being a tough act to follow,
God created June.
– Al Bernstein
We Know Now America and India
Are Different Places
Ask me anything you want.
There is no blood in a stone.
A camel can walk fifty kilometres without water.
A man’s life lasts less than thirty thousand days.
It is our solemn privilege
to decide never to heal.
Talk to me a thousand times.
– Fani Papageorgiou
(i) Frenzied
Maybe holding back
is just another kind
of need. I am a blue
plum in the half-light.
You are a tiger who
eats his own paws.
The day we married
all the trees trembled
as if they were mad –
be kind to me, you said.
– Sarah Howe
The word,
hand in hand
with pain,
upends it,
so that
what’s turned around
would be
through precise pointing?
Clarity
arises, what else,
unburdening the soul.
Closeness of the origin.
– Ernst Meister
(tr. Graham Foust
& Samuel Frederick)
What is a blossom anyway
but a fist saying I can’t
do this
anymore
– Joseph Fasano
I live not in dreams but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Do not fear.
Our system is strong
and so are we.
– Rachel Maddow
Pokeberries
by Ruth Stone
I started out in the Virginia mountains
with my grandma’s pansy bed
and my Aunt Maud’s dandelion wine.
We lived on greens and back-fat and biscuits.
My Aunt Maud scrubbed right through the linoleum.
My daddy was a Northerner who played drums
and chewed tobacco and gambled.
He married my mama on the rebound.
Who would want an ignorant hill girl with red hair?
They took a Pullman up to Indianapolis
and someone stole my daddy’s wallet.
My whole life has been stained with pokeberries.
No man seemed right for me. I was awkward
until I found a good wood-burning stove.
There is no use asking what it means.
With my first piece of ready cash I bought my own
place in Vermont; kerosene lamps, dirt road.
I’m sticking here like a porcupine up a tree.
Like the one our neighbor shot. Its bones and skin
hung there for three years in the orchard.
No amount of knowledge can shake my grandma out of me;
or my Aunt Maud; or my mama, who didn’t just bite an apple
with her big white teeth. She split it in two.
The more crystallized the personality becomes, the stronger the ego gets, the harder you have fought to get things you want, then the more difficult the whole issue [of the shadow] becomes. If you have exercised self-restraint and self-denial in order to achieve some value or ideal, then the more painful the confrontation is, because letting the shadow in may mean that the whole house of cards comes tumbling down. So you can see why there is fear and repulsion. It isn’t just an idle dislike. It’s a threat to established values. The more lopsided we are, the harder we fight to keep that figure out.
– Liz Greene
Anything can happen, the tallest towers
Be overturned, those in high places daunted,
Those overlooked regarded.
– Seamus Heaney
Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.
– Ernest Hemingway
“We should avoid thinking, “Daily life is more important,” or, “Spiritual life is more important.” We live in both realms simultaneously, and if we don’t notice this, we will be off balance.
– Les Kaye and Teresa Bouza
You are wrong to run down your work. We are not literati. If we take sure dire pains, it is not for the result but because that is the only way to keep going on this wretched planet.
– Beckett to Robert Pinget
It still hasn’t occurred to Western man to stop looking on woman as the symbol of something and to begin seeing her simply as a woman —as a human being. He is caught in the ambivalence he feels toward his own inner feminine, sometimes rushing toward it in search of his lost soul, sometimes disdaining it
as a needless complication in his life, a “wrench in the gears” of his patriarchal machinery. This is the unhealed split within man that he projects onto outer woman, the war he fights at her expense.
– Robert A. Johnson
i really became a very different type of person than i was aiming for,
and boy oh boy am i grateful for that fact
– River Kenna
I dream, here, now
Of the two-faced caprice of poetry,
Clarity of day,
Ambiguous necessities of night.
A spirit hovers
Over the stars, and in the heart.
Love is long
And art is good to stitch the time.
– Richard Eberhart
What is accepted as freedom is, in reality, a prison made somewhat liveable in through the growth of technology.
– Krishnamurti
Compassion involves listening to the pain and experience of others that is different than mine and believing them.
– McCall Erickson
Body awakening is not exactly like pure consciousness awakening, even though the body is consciousness. Body awakening is more like the body starts to become alive. It comes out of this sort of deep freeze. The stuck points open up, and the body becomes what it really is, which is an extraordinary sensing instrument for spirit.
– @Adyashanti
In the Next Galaxy
by Ruth Stone
Things will be different.
No one will lose their sight,
their hearing, their gallbladder.
It will be all Catskills with brand
new wrap-around verandas.
The idea of Hitler will not
have vibrated yet.
While back here,
they are still cleaning out
pockets of wrinkled
Nazis hiding in Argentina.
But in the next galaxy,
certain planets will have true
blue skies and drinking water.
Sometimes tribes are thriving, sometimes they are hurting. It is how life works. We thrive, we hide behind our masks, we take risks, our lives get bigger. We fall apart, we rebuild; life, death, new life.
– Anne Lamott
The more you cling to that
which all the world desires, the
more you are Everyman, who
has not yet discovered himself
and stumbles through the
world like a blind mind leading
the blind with somnambulistic
certainty into the ditch.
– C.G. Jung
HOMELESS HEART
When I think of finishing the work, when I think of the finished work, a great sadness overtakes me, a sadness paradoxically like joy. The circumstances of doing put away, the being of it takes possession, like a tenant in a rented house. Where are you now, homeless heart? Caught in a hinge, or secreted behind drywall, like your nameless predecessors now that they have been given names? Best not to dwell on our sit-uation, but to dwell in it is deeply refreshing. Like a sideboard covered with decanters and fruit. As a box kite is to a kite. The inside of stum-bling. The way to breath. The caricature on the blackboard.
– John Ashbery
If I am not brave, what
reason have I to hope
others will be? Courage
and cowardice both are
contagious.
– @Charles_Eisenstein
I want Al to do my
laundry and dishes so
that I can do art and
writing, not for Al to
do my art and writing
so thạt I can do my
laundry and dishes.
– Joanna Maciejewska
If you want answers,
look at who nurtures
the olive trees. And
look at who destroys
them.
– Nikita Gill
I have no rank but
Poet…
– Emily Dickinson
love is much bigger than relationships
love is the way you heal yourself,
the kindness you give others,
the gentleness you give yourself in turbulent times,
the space you hold for close friends,
the intention with which you live in the present,
and the energy that changes the world
love is every moment that elevates the human experience
and all the small things that make life shine
– young pueblo
But you cannot go on ‘explaining away’ for ever:
you will find that you have explained explanation itself away.
You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to ‘see through’ first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.
– C.S. Lewis
I’ve tried
Been tried
I’ll try again
Although my Being’s weak
There’s nothing worth
But God & you
And God has gone to sleep
– Elise Cowen
They cut funding for the arts so that you could
never imagine a way out of capitalism.
– Alex Arrelia
from the mouth of the intercepted
comes a common chord
i.
what a miracle to feel a need
it is an obstruction i have
the bided eye of the missing
bending like the neck of the silenced
the hurtle of the chemical herd
ii.
all these resentments being made
& a blood-dead moon scars their eye at me
although the lighthouses lined across your lips
punch through my darkest obsessions
i’m trying to keep every door closed
because of the wind
—because of the certainty
of what the wind will do
– scott jacobs
UNDER THE RIVER
Under the river of the world, the world,
And beneath that palace, a palace— just the same.
From the quarry ledge, children dive
over and over into blue sky:
it always greets them the same,
laughter, then towels, and going home with watery ears.
It sings to them then for hours, hushing the rest—
family, dinnerware, tires spinning by, all stilled.
Open-winged for those moments between world and world,
the rooms leading one to the next,
each linoleum floor marble-cool,
the ceilings stencilled with water lilies, stars.
– Jane Hirshfield
Morality is simply the attitude
we adopt towards people
we personally dislike.
– Oscar Wilde
It’s weird to see people fired up against postmodernism, like watching someone get red in the face about fax machines.
– River Kenna
search the quiet:
know silence
open heartspace
welcome(d into) presence
receive
grace upon grace
– Eric Bond
14. [Fragment III]
Our collaboration speaks to the long term. Performance
is my required comportment. I do not wish to dissimulate.
My need is for those who will know how
all of this will end. How can he be king who
sets the crown upon his own head, not knowing his own
father.
He grew up as a street urchin, his words tongue full of
curses. Only
at times does he speak in formalities previously studied, or
he is prompted. More like a pantomime: guard, executioner,
whatever part is assigned. I am the one instead of him
who must unravel the role he will assume,
if the scenario is finished. Others prepare his notations,
while I recite a monologue in the wings, where
no one can hear what I am saying. But even now I am not
wholly free. As if an actor were performing in my stead,
I twist the words within myself like a dagger—my wish.
– Szilard Borbely, (translated by Ottilie Mulzet)
An artist wears his work
in place of wounds.
– Patti Smith
May panic and stress no longer be your constant companions.
May your nervous system become familiar with rest and ease
– Dr. Thema
part of what I will never understand about exclusionary queer politics (no kink at pride, bisexuals aren’t real, every anti-trans word that comes from a queer cis woman’s mouth, etc. etc.) is that we are stronger together; the more of us there are, the less they can push us down
– R.O. Kwon
We move thru life in a
continual search.
How can it be better?
Whatever it may be.
– Rick Rubin
Be less curious about
people and more
curious about ideas.
– Maria Skłodowska-Curie
We shall never any of us know what we are worth, and it is the last question we should be asking. I at any rate love what you have done and very much hope that you will carry on.
– Sam Beckett to Robert Pinget
I read Dante and realized how much power a writer could have. A writer could put people in hell who weren’t even dead yet.
– Ishmael Reed
Too often we’re told to do the readings as if it will result in uniform considerations, respect, or enjoyment.
Toni Morrison discussed having permission to read without being fans. And “whatever the consequence, the practice itself is riveting. I don’t need to ‘like’ the work.”
– @tamaranopper
If you’ve stopped hating, you can be my friend.
(You can be my friend anyway, but let’s work together towards less hating.)
– Kenneth Folk
Writing is not therapy. That’s the last thing it is. I still have my grief.
– Alice Notley
It’s really too bad, you know, we’re shooting missiles and rockets and whatnot at each other on this tiny little place we call home. It’s the only home in the universe for us humans. It’s too bad we don’t treat it a little better.
– Bill Anders
The reason why capitalism is a death sentence for humanity is that it is a system which only understands doing, building and achieving.
It is incapable of stopping, retreating and reducing, which are the very things we must do if we want to have any chance of continuing to exist
– George Tsakraklides
II.
In the afternoon, we took a bath filled with fire. We
turned the garden into a lemon grove, burnished amber
sank to its knees from the terracotta roofs, suddenly
I dreamt of lakes filled with gold. Summer corn
and marigolds in January, there was no answering time.
You looked so beautiful, like you were in a commercial
for sun, and in the seconds before the sprinkler system
turned on, we swam in flames: quiet inferno of dandelion
and honeycomb, your chin floating in my hands. I don’t
know why, I wanted to ask if you’d run away with me?
– Molly Zhu, Studies in Yellow
I pray for the desperate earth.
– Mary Oliver
I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.
– Jorge Luis Borges
Glasgow is maybe the most bullshit-free place on earth. I think I call it ‘the antidote to the rest of the world.’
– Anthony Bourdain
No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life.
– Nietzsche
The guy was right. To be a great writer, you need to row your boat on the river of life, read and write. I’m a little sorry to say, but it’s the truth: doing these three things have helped me so much more than all the workshops (combined) I’ve attended.
– Natalie Marino
They who have no central purpose in their life fall an easy prey to petty worries, fears, troubles, and self-pitying, all of which are indications of weakness, which lead, just as surely as deliberately planned sins (though by a different route), to failure, unhappiness, and loss, for weakness cannot persist in a power evolving universe.
– James Allen
The things that I loved were very frail. Very fragile. I didn’t know that. I thought they were indestructible. They weren’t.
– Cormac McCarthy, The Sunset Limited
Some people devote their entire life to denying reality.
– James Pierce
The fundamental aspect of bravery is being without deception.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Suppose your whole world seems to rock on its foundations. Hold on steadily, let it rock, and when the rocking is over, the picture will have reassembled itself into something much nearer to your heart’s desire.
– Emmet Fox
I could put a book in his hands, but I couldn’t take him by the ankles and dip him headfirst in another world. And for some reason, I knew even then that he needed it.
– Rebecca Makkai, The Borrower
Intelligence is the most sensitive trigger point for envy.
– Robert Greene
A single day in Hell will be worse than a whole life spent in carrying the cross.
– J.C.Ryle
Woe to those who respect love in an age where love is not respected.
– Naguib Mahfouz
If one can fabricate the sacred or somehow will its appearance, then by definition it is not what it pretends to be.
– Peter E. Gordon
Love is a fruit in season at all times, and within reach of every hand.
– Mother Teresa
Man, despite his innovations and victories, is still immersed up to his ears in foolishness.
– Naguib Mahfouz
Buddhist me is here to tell you that God has nothing to do with you experiencing the results of your poor decisions. Your problems don’t come from another realm but from the person in the mirror.
– Nicole Presa
My language is German. My culture, my attainments are German. I considered myself German intellectually, until I noticed the growth of anti-Semitic prejudice in Germany and German-Austria. Since that time, I consider myself no longer a German. I prefer to call myself a Jew.
– Sigmund Freud interview, 1926
Who we become in God is then his work and not our own success in conforming to some ideal. The self we become in true prayer is seldom the self we envisioned, but it is a new and marvelous self that God fashions out of the gradual redeeming of the false self we now acknowledge as the work of our own misguided idealism. We then know God in what he has done in us to enable us to discover our true face. And in that face only do we see the reflection of God as he really is.
– Murray Bodo, O.F.M.
When you are as lonely as this, there comes a point at which your only wish is to grow a little lonelier.
– Topaz Winters
All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a philosopher.
– Ambrose Bierce
The rudeness of many Americans depressed him, a rudeness based on a solid ignorance of the whole concept of manners, and on the proposition that for social purposes, all people are more or less equal and interchangeable.
– William Burroughs
A little prayer for world peace – one day our hearts will open and we all will realize who we are. The sea of love moves through us. Instead of being famous at hurting each other, we will be healing herbs for each other. We will raise each other to the towering throne of kindness. All divisions among us will heal and you and I will come together and be the bridge between heaven and earth.
– Guthema Roba
It was a wise old queen – Bob, we called her- who taught me that I had a duty to live and to bear my burden proudly for all to see, to conquer prejudice and ignorance and hate with knowledge and sincerity and love. Whenever you are threatened by a hostile presence, you emit a thick cloud of love like an octopus squirts out ink.
– William S. Burroughs, Queer
The living are ‘just’ writing about their own lives; the dead are writing about their irretrievable *lives*, wow wow wow”
– from U and I by Nicholson Baker
Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveler. What we see isn’t what we see but what we are.
– Fernando Pessoa
On the day I set out on the climb,
grief saddled in my back like a bag of marbles, my breath like clouds hanging on the low peaks of a mountain,
on the day I set out.
– Clifton Gachagua, Mountain
You can’t make homes out of human beings
– Warsan Shire
In East Asia generally, the notion of a Supreme Being, so essential to Western religions, is replaced by that of a Supreme State of Being, an impersonal perfection from which beings including man are separated only by delusion.
– John Blofeld
Tibetan Buddhists say that a person should never get rid of their negative energy, that negative energy transformed is the energy of enlightenment, and that the only difference between neurosis and wisdom is struggle. If we stop struggling and open up and accept what is, that neurotic energy naturally arises as wisdom, naturally informs us and becomes our teacher.
– Natalie Goldberg
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
Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries–stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.
– Herman Melville
This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.
– Marilynne Robinson
I realize that homosexuality is a serious problem for anyone who is – but then, of course, heterosexuality is a serious problem for anyone who is, too. And being a man is a serious problem and being a woman is, too. Lots of things are problems.
– Edward Gorey
I’m at the stage in life where I stay out of arguments. Even if you say 1+1=5, you’re right. Have fun.
– Keanu Reeves
This is for the lover of two women: one who has left, one who waits; for the ice that covers lakes, giving its light to air, its shadows to water.
– James Galvin, Inheritance
Art is the highest form of hope.
– Gerhard Richter
Art is shadow work that transmutes pain into beauty.
– Adrian Ernesto Cepeda
Only a soul full of despair can ever attain serenity and, to be in despair, you must have loved a good deal and still love the world.
– Blaise Cendrars
The gods live inside you,
You can either make your soul a welcoming home and well-equipped workshop for them,
Or you can watch them rip the walls apart like a wolf stuck in a studio apartment
– River Kenna
Whatever is there, favorable or unfavorable, is workable: it is the universe.
– Chögyam Trungpa
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
– Edna St. Vincent Millay
I think Jesus would agree that some people are incredibly annoying. (Many days He had to lie down with a cold compress on his head.
– Anne Lamott
Have you ever wondered why human beings go wrong? They become corrupt, indecent in their behaviour, aggressive, violent and cunning. It is no good blaming the environment, the culture or the parents.
– Krishnamurti
If Palestine dies, humanity dies. And we are not going to let it die.
– President Gustavo Petro of Colombia
I believe that only end of all human activity— whether it be politics, art, science, etc. — is to find enlightenment. I ask of film what most North Americans ask of Psychedelic drugs.
– Alejandro Jodorowsky
The problem is that every developmental container (a subculture, school, friend group, job, etc) has a natural center of gravity, a stage or balance that it
A) pulls its members up to, and
B) holds its members back at
Tpot is no exception. It works to pull people up to a certain balance… and then actively hinders development beyond it
It’s a functional fact of developmental containers, and tpot can’t think or vibe it’s way out of it
– River Kenna
The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human
– Aldous Huxley
Walking lowers stress.
Workouts stimulate the brain.
Healthy foods manage your moods.
Sleep enhances your overall performance.
You simply can’t operate at your best if you’re unhealthy
– Dan Go
old bookstore
creaking floors
and quiet people..
– Elle Justine
with a line of red thread, you stitch you and your love’s new last name onto the collars of your work coats
– @apastoraldream
“I would like to convince a few people that
nothing is simpler than what I have to say.”
– Francis Ponge
Finding a penny every day
bright beads of rain
sparkle on the windows
– Bill Corbett
Take me, I want to break into shards
of varnished maple.
– Reuben Gelley Newman
…a love unheard of, / a love that hurts to be heard.
– Reuben Gelley Newman
‘Seven Samurai’ (1954) is not an adventure film from my point of view. It’s about the relationship of the samurai and the farmers and I wanted to describe the character of each samurai
– Akira Kurosawa
Every boomer was born at the right time to benefit from a secular economic boom, rich social programs and peak civilization. This doesn’t mean every boomer was able to take advantage of that timing.
– Sarah Connor
Emotions circulate in the body. … Noting that stirring, that circulating, can help us find settledness even within difficult emotions.
– Grace Schireson
Your love granted me a strange light.
Now, I can see the world better than before.
– Parveen Shakir
pinholes of sunlight—
a caterpillar’s perfect path
over an oleander leaf,
this loveliness
on a bleak afternoon
– John Wisdom
A great goal is to keep your body in the same (if not better) shape than when you met your spouse.
Too many people let themselves go when they get in relationships.
– Dan Go
If someone is falling behind in life, you don’t have to remind them. Believe me, they already know. If someone is unhealthy, they know. If someone is struggling in their relationships, with self-image, they know. It’s what consumes their thoughts each day. What you need to do for those who are struggling is not to reprimand, but encourage. Tell them what’s good about their lives, show them the potential that you see. Love them where they are.
– Brianna Wiest
There is a big difference between being interested in something and being committed to something.
Committed people do what interested people won’t.
– Shane Parrish
There are few ways to free the body of desire, all end in anarchy.
– Mary Jo Bang
The question of whether Mindfulness has been a societal net positive hasn’t been answered yet. We probably won’t be able to answer that question for some decades to come.
– Vince Fakhoury Horn
The modern world worships the gods of speed and quantity, and of the quick and easy profit, and out of this idolatry monstrous evils have arisen.
– Rachel Carson
Breathing Room
There should be a room in every house
or office building set aside strictly
for breathing. No speaking allowed,
no phones, clocks or other devices
may be brought inside. Let the walls
be empty and white, only potted ferns
stirring near windows thrown open
to a night-breeze bearing the scents
of jasmine and lilac. You can count
if you like until your heartbeat slows
to its own natural pace, and your mind’s
as blank as a page in the back of a book.
If someone asks for directions, say
it’s the room at the end of the hall
with nothing else in it but a few plants
and all the air you can breathe.
– James Crews
Make no mistake: these are not all easy poems. There is, as promised, silence. The silence of darkness, the silence of death, the silence of sorrow and what can’t be said. And yet—as also promised—there are miles. There is a wandering along a way. It comes with glances, missteps, light-glints, and stones. And: it comes with the constant companionship of the one who speaks into the silence. The one who reminds us we are never lost, never alone. Despite all evidence to the contrary, in the company of these poems, we believe.
– Claire Miller Colombo
For My Lover, Returning To His Wife
She is all there.
She was melted carefully down for you
and cast up from your childhood,
cast up from your one hundred favorite aggies.
She has always been there, my darling.
She is, in fact, exquisite.
Fireworks in the dull middle of February
and as real as a cast-iron pot.
Let’s face it, I have been momentary.
vA luxury. A bright red sloop in the harbor.
My hair rising like smoke from the car window.
Littleneck clams out of season.
She is more than that. She is your have to have,
has grown you your practical your tropical growth.
This is not an experiment. She is all harmony.
She sees to oars and oarlocks for the dinghy,
has placed wild flowers at the window at breakfast,
sat by the potter’s wheel at midday,
set forth three children under the moon,
three cherubs drawn by Michelangelo,
done this with her legs spread out
in the terrible months in the chapel.
If you glance up, the children are there
like delicate balloons resting on the ceiling.
She has also carried each one down the hall
after supper, their heads privately bent,
two legs protesting, person to person,
her face flushed with a song and their little sleep.
I give you back your heart.
I give you permission —
for the fuse inside her, throbbing
angrily in the dirt, for the bitch in her
and the burying of her wound —
for the burying of her small red wound alive —
for the pale flickering flare under her ribs,
for the drunken sailor who waits in her left pulse,
for the mother’s knee, for the stocking,
for the garter belt, for the call —
the curious call
when you will burrow in arms and breasts
and tug at the orange ribbon in her hair
and answer the call, the curious call.
She is so naked and singular
She is the sum of yourself and your dream.
Climb her like a monument, step after step.
She is solid.
As for me, I am a watercolor.
I wash off.
– Anne Sexton
What happens in the mind of the reader when the reader moves his or her eye across the page—that’s what a story actually is.
– Samuel R. Delany
Friendly reminder that “elite overproduction” is a classist myth.
We are not overproducing “elites” by educating people; we are underproducing outlets for their skills and training.
– Sheila Liming
Europe is freezing.
History is creeping up
its troubled body.
It is returning
to a block of ice. Winter
replaces summer.
Its thoughts turn backward
to old hurts in new places
with new people. Time
winds its oldest watch.
– George Szirtes
Something in me always looks at things like this and thinks
A) yeah, that straightforwardly works quite well
B) the fact that we made a world where that’s the best option a lot of the time feels deeply spiritually unhealthy
– River Kenna
It could turn out to be the greatest tragedy in the history of our species that people have been deliberately politically disengaged to the extent that the only alternative they see to evil-corrupt-corporate-owned-puppets are evil-corrupt-corporate-owned-fascist-puppets.
– Climate Dad
Can we endure this transcending thirst
without giving in?
– Rainer Maria Rilke
between the blues
of the sea and sky
whale song
– Fatha Heinz Ward
My hell is no worse than yours
though you pass among the flowers and speak
with the spirits above earth.
– H.D.
The collapse of a global hegemon is always an extremely dangerous time. The fall of the British empire was the proximate cause of two world wars and many smaller conflicts, for example, and the fall of the Spanish empire was even more of a mess.
– John Michael Greer
Yes, but what can I do about it? All those things, the wrong women, the wrong actions, the wrong circumstances, all those are tools to the poet. A poet should
think of all things as being given him, even misfortune. Misfortune, defeat, humiliation, failure, those are our tools. You don’t suppose that when you are happy you can produce anything. Happiness is its own aim. But we are given mistakes, we are given nightmares, almost nightly, and our task is to make them into poetry. And were I truly a poet I would feel that every moment of my life is poetic, every moment of my life is a kind of clay I have to model, I have to shape, to lick into poetry. So that I don’t think I should apologize for my mistakes. Those mistakes were given me by that very complex chain of causes and effects, or rather, unending effects and causes—we may not begin by the cause —in order that I might turn them into poetry.
– Jorge Luis Borges
It’s all right if we keep forgetting the way home.
It’s all right if we don’t remember when we were born.
It’s all right if we write the same poem over and over.
– Robert Bly, What Did We See Today?
I’ll never get over the fact that in the west Buddhism is seen as some progressive hippy religion while in the east it’s hardcore conservative.
– @iacobusstudies
The whole task of applied science is, as it were, to assimilate the world of knowledge to the patterns of human order in rather the same way that, when we eat, we assimilate dead bulls and dead vegetables and eggs and all that kind of thing—we absorb them in and we assimilate them to the physical organization of the human body. Knowledge is, in other words, a form of eating, for the two processes are equally of assimilation. And therefore, the extension of man’s control over nature might metaphorically be described as a mental eating up of the universe. And as a result of this process, the organization of human life, its systems of communication and systems of control, are extended more and more and more in just the same way, for example, that by assimilating the minerals out of the soil and the rays out of the sunlight, a plant like a fern grows and grows and grows and extends its form. And in this way its organization prevails.
Now then, you see, if you take this task of what we call the conquest of nature—the task of making order victorious over chaos or randomness—if you take this seriously, you will look upon it as warfare and you will firmly believe that the most urgent thing that there possibly can be is to make order prevail over randomness, to make good prevail over evil, to make life prevail over death. And we find that when we are in a contest of this kind, a serious warfare game of this kind—and we take it seriously—we are involved in it in a very deep and bitter sense.
– Alan Watts
Poetry people and writing people are my community- when I am with them, my opinions are not too big, my feelings aren’t too big. My expressions are just fine. But [academia] is a rule-following
space, so often.
– Han VanderHart
Synchronicity is an ever present reality for those who have eyes to see.
– Carl G. Jung
A mother with a shovel comes every day and digs from 7.30am to 4pm. She still hasn’t found her son.
– Jessica Traynor, On Gaza
We just want to find a place that is affordable, has access to nature, some kind of lit scene, bookstore and movie theatre/s, Ideally a few people we know, pedestrian friendly, not too far from an airport, near water, not too conservative, peaceful, did I mention trees?
– Patricia Q. Bidar
Everyone should see how complicated, how deeply troubled, and yet at the same time, beautiful and awesome the world can be. Everyone should experience, even as the clouds gather, what’s at stake, what could be lost, what’s still here.
– Anthony Bourdain
A fundamentalist can’t bring himself or herself to negotiate with people who disagree with them because the negotiating process itself is an indication of implied equality.
– Jimmy Carter
“Nobody owns it” is the very essence of colonialist logic. It allows for the easy justification of theft.
– @VinceFHorn
Introverts are both “fast replier” and “never replies” kinda of people. It depends on their mood and who you are. If you know, you know.
– @karunpal
I was willing to yield to nostalgia, that melancholy residue of desire.
– Marguerite Yourcenar
When you cross the entrance arch to the temple of dreams, there, right there, there is the sea…
– Luis Sepúlveda
“How are you feeling?”
“A bit mortal.”
– Robin Myers
The idea that some people may freely poison others is one of the most astonishing but least contested aspects of modern life.
– @GeorgeMonbiot
OSTENSIBLY
One might like to rest or read,
Take walks, celebrate the kitchen table,
Pat the dog absent-mindedly, meanwhile
Thinking gloomy thoughts-so many separate
Ways of doing, one is uncertain
What the future is going to do
About this. Will it reveal itself again,
Or only in the artificial calm
Of one person’s resolve to do better
Yet strike a harder bargain,
Next time?
– John Ashbery
And it’s not finished
until we can all stand here, together,
hand holding hand, and simply call it love.
– Chad Frame
And you became like coffee,
in the deliciousness,
and the bitterness,
and the addiction
– Mahmoud Darwish
In 2001, in backcountry Oregon, I once went 10 days without seeing another person. Rocks hummed in the noontime heat. Every dust mote had a name. Deer. Fence lizards. Vultures & osprey. Mountain & river. We shared one mind: the sky.
– Steve Edwards
There is an old illusion.
It is called good and evil.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Seven times a day in the church we prayed,
Psalms tugging a thread through the seasons,
Striking new at each change in fortune,
Age, or circumstance.
– Geraldine Clarkson
Experience is something you don’t get until just after you need it.
– Steven Wright
What if I slept a little
more and forgot about
all this nonsense.
– Franz Kafka
All things are already said; but since no one is listening, you always have to start over.
– Andre Gide
I love having my teeth kicked in by a different perspective.
– Anthony Bourdain
People are always asking ‘what’s the use of poetry?’ The mystery of language, the poetic imagination, and the mind of compassion are roughly one and the same, and through poetry perhaps they can keep guiding the world toward occasional moments of peace, gratitude, and delight.
– Gary Snyder
Here I am, seated, with all my words,
like a basket of green fruit, intact.
The fragments
of a thousand destroyed ancient gods
seek and draw near each other in my blood. They long
to rebuild their statue.
From their shattered mouths
a song strives to rise to my mouth,
a scent of burned resins, some gesture
of mysterious wrought stone.
But I am oblivion, treason,
the shell that did not keep from the sea
even the echo of the smallest wave.
I look not at the submerged temples,
but only at the trees that above the ruins
move their vast shadow, with acid teeth bite
the wind as it passes.
And the seals close under my eyes like
the flower under the searching fingers of a blind man.
But I know: behind
my body another body crouches,
and round about me many breaths
furtively cross
like nocturnal beasts in the jungle.
I know: somewhere,
like the cactus in the desert,
a constellated heart of spines,
it is waiting for a name, as the cactus the rain.
But I know only a few words
in the lapidary language,
under which they buried my ancestor alive.
– Rosario Castellanos
To all that is brief and fragile superficial, unstable, To all that lacks foundation argument or principles; To all that is light, fleeting, changing, finite To smoke spirals, wand roses, To sea foam and mists of oblivion… To all that is light in weight for itinerants on this transient earth Somber, raving with transitory words and vaporous bubbly wines I toast in breakable glasses.
– Maria Eugenia Baz Ferreira
HELP is strangely, something we want to do without: as if the very idea disturbs and blurs the boundaries of our individual endeavours, as if we cannot face how much we need in order to go on. We are born with an absolute necessity for help, grow well only with a continuous succession of extended hands, and as adults depend upon others for our further successes and possibilities in life even as competent individuals. Even the most solitary writer needs a reader, the most Machiavellian mobster a trusted lieutenant, the most independent candidate, a voter. Not only does the need for help never leave us alone; we must apprentice ourselves to its different necessary forms, at each particular threshold of our lives. At every stage we are dependent on our ability to ask for specific forms of help at very specific times and in very specific ways. Even at the end, the dignity of our going depends on others’ willingness to help us die well; the sincerity of their help often commensurate to the help we extended to them in our own life. Every transformation has at its heart the need to ask for the right kind of generosity. There are two kinds of generosity or help for which we must ask: visible help and invisible help. Visible help is practical or transactional help, asking for visible help we ask for help with what we can see is troubling us or we pay for a bed and a meal on our onward way or we pay someone to work for us. But it may be that it is the second less easily recognizable and invisible help which is most crucial at stepping into the unknown. Though we can think of invisible help in the old sense of an intervention from angelic or parallel worlds, we can also think of it in a an every day practical way: invisible help is the help that we do not as yet know we need. Invisble help is the help we are not quite ready for and all we can do is shape our identity toward revelation, toward being surprised, toward paying attention to what is just about to appear over the horizon of our understanding. This overwhelming need for visible and invisible help never really changes in a human life from the first day we are brought from the womb calling lustily for those commodities. We need extraordinary physical help to get through our first years, continued help through our childhood and extraordinary emotional help and good luck to get through our adolescence. After that the need for continual help becomes more subtle, hidden as it is by the illusion that we are suddenly free agents able to survive on our own, the one corner of the universe able to supply its own answers. It may be that the ability to know the necessity for help; to know how to look for that help and then most importantly, how to ask for it, is one of the primary transformative dynamics that allows us to emancipate ourselves into each new epoch of our lives. Without the understanding that we need a particular form of aide at every crucial threshold in our lives and without the robust vulnerability in asking for that help we cannot pass through the door that bars us from the next dispensation of our lives: we cannot birth ourselves. To ask for visible and invisible help and to ask for the right kind of help and to ask in a way in which we feel that it is no less than our due, that, in effect, we deserve a visible and invisible helping hand, may be an engine of transformation itself. Our greatest vulnerability is the very door through which we must pass in order to open the next horizon of our lives. In the very end comes also another beginning, the ancient sense of a door opening to some final unknown, some invisible voice attempting to help us come to terms with our own disappearance, the hand extended to help us over a horizon equally as mysterious as the one we crossed at our birth. …
– David Whyte
I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.
– Diane Arbus
Fight fascism of every stripe and degree. Don’t forget. Ever.
– Andrew Quist
Emery hitchhiked to Paris and, after eight or nine swirling days amid its miracles, he made his way south to the village of Grez-sur-Loing at the edge of the Fontainbleau forest, where he got a job at a quaint bookshop called The George Sand. There Emery pitched in, helping the proprietor Walt Lowen, a Don Quixote look-alike, in exchange for bathroom privileges, a couch to sleep on, and lessons in bookselling. When it came time for Emery to say goodbye, Lowen said for sure another lousy dough-faced book lover would show up to replace him, not to worry. So Emery didn’t feel so bad. He and Pike boarded a late night train going down to Monaco, a dazzling place of Baroque casinos, palms, and terraced gardens with views all out to the sparkling ocean.
– Tom Foran Clark
Intuition is the supra-logic that cuts out all the routine processes of thought and leaps straight from the problem to the answer.
– Robert Graves
All time does best is erode what we know.
– Usman Hameedi
People who are hurting don’t need Avoiders, Protectors, or Fixers. What we need are patient, loving witness. People to sit quietly and hold space for us. People to stand in helpful vigil to our pain.” “The only meaningful thing we can offer one another is love. Not advice, not questions about our choices, not suggestions for the future, just love.
– Glennon Doyle
Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day.
– Voltaire
Like a lot of poets, I am deeply neurotic, and I came to poetry as a means of negotiating my
neuroses.
– Kathryn Hargett-Hsu
COLUMBA’S SONG
Where’s Brude? Where’s Brude?
So many souls to be saved!
The bracken is thick, the wildcat is quick,
the foxes dance in the moonlight,
the salmon dance in the waters,
the adders dance in the thick brown bracken.
Where’s Brude? Where’s man?
There’s too much nature here, eagles and deer,
but where’s the mind and where’s the soul?
Show me your kings, your women, the man of the plough.
And cry me to your cradles.
It wasn’t for a fox or an eagle I set sail!
– Edwin Morgan
Maybe that’s enlightenment enough: to know that there is no final resting place of the mind; no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom is realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.
– Anthony Bourdain
As Kleist says, “For it is not *we* who know things but pre-eminently a certain *condition* of ours which knows.
– Alexander Kluge
There’s always a sunrise and always a sunset and it’s up to you to choose to be there for it,’ said my mother. ‘Put yourself in the way of beauty.’
– Cheryl Strayed
When you simply ride with your impulses, you don’t understand their force. They’re like the currents below the surface of a river: only if you try to build a dam across the river will you detect those currents…
– Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Our poetry has gone sour.
Women’s hair, nights, curtains and sofas
Have gone sour. Everything has gone sour.
– Nizar Qabbani
Welcome to your new season, your next chapter, your jubilee.
You’re no longer bound.
Give thanks. You had the courage to release it all and start over.
– Dr. Thema
There is another issue here. Humans have practically no influence over decisions declaring war or peace, decisions that deter- mine sovereignty and the freedom of a people as these terms are classically understood. In lieu of wonderfully confused senses, a conspiracy takes hold affecting things, circumstances, completed groundwork, forced alliances, and every coincidence. As Kleist writes, “All a man needs for slipping up is feet.”20 Countless feet have marched back and forth throughout Europe so much, that this no longer holds true. Or, one could say: All the feet that ever were have together rotted into something that has become uncontrollable and that can effectively do only one thing: stumble! We act as if we were helpers standing by.
Significant changes of this kind involving de-subjectification make the act of writing, which still occurs individually and is subject to the fixed editions typical of publishing books, into a luxurious activity. We are writing messages in bottles. I would not underestimate, however, this activity, for within it lies a great deal
of continuity.
– Alexander Kluge
I wish you a big garden and blue sky.
– Franz Kafka, 1921.
You were the one who lit the candle
of wanting on my ruined streets.
You were the one who wanted
that I write
the roses of my heart’s desires
with parched lips.
– Noshi Gilani
We are losing information. We are losing our collective mind, and it is being replaced with a contrived one. The contrived collective is run by oligarchs and steals your money and your faith. It doesn’t feel coincidental that this is happening in a time of genocide and global kleptocracy.
We are not supposed to know why so many atrocities are converging at once. We are not supposed to know the backstory of the villains. We are not supposed to know the history of the victims. We are not supposed to know who to blame. We are supposed to accept the inhuman — in all its forms.
They want us to trust the machines and eat the rocks.
– Sarah Kendzior
I knew I wanted to be creative, and one day I just started writing.
– Walter Mosley
I don’t get why people keep acting like climate change is still in the future.
We already have the wildfires, floods, storms, ice loss, disease, habitat destruction, pollution, amoc, war…..
Why are we still pretending?
– @dadothreee
The heat makes people and animals lose their minds. Flesh-eating bacteria waits in warm, stagnant water. Things melt. Sharks hunt at the beach. The kudzu is always hiding something. The blistering sun wakes up the ghosts sleeping in the walls. Remember: summer is horror season.
– @Gabino_Iglesias
Goethe configured his life as a landscape. Now he is part of the earth, but with birds flying above
– Canetti
Be a loner. That gives you time to wonder, to search for the truth. Have holy curiosity. Make your life worth living.
– Albert Einstein
sometimes a conversation can feel psychedelic if everyone drops their cognitive firewalls.
– @viemccoy
One of the worst ways to deal with something like climate change is to divide the world into 200 different countries and have them argue with each other.
– Jeff Goodell
the gap between your plans and your execution shows the mismatch between your conscious & subconscious priorities
which is great info
fighting against your subconscious priorities is a losing battle; better to uncover them asap and learn to work with them
– @scottdomes
We all have made the mistake of thinking someone else can be our healer, our thriller, our filling. It takes a long time to find it is not so, mostly because we project the wound outside ourselves instead of ministering to it within.
– Clarissa Pinkola Estés
My favorite metaphor
is the spider and its web.
So, extended cognition researchers
at MIT have been showing…
There is new research
every day pretty much…
that spiders’ cognition is not
in its brain or its body,
It extends into its web.
And if you damage part of the web
it acts as if it has had a stroke.
And so, human beings are like this.
Most animals have some amount
of extended cognition.
and what I like to think is that
because we are only self through other
through a constant
intaking of otherness,
to very materially
metabolically build our bodies,
We are, you know…
Our minds are not in our head.
Minds are territories that we inhabit,
That multiple beings inhabit.
And so that’s why the therapeutic model
sometimes seems too small for me.
If a mind is a territory
that many beings are inside of
how can two human beings in a
sterile room solve the problem
that is constituted by a
whole web of wild kin?
– Sophie Strand
IN CASE I FORGET TO SAY IT
Thank you for this day made
of wind and rain and sun and the scent
of old-fashioned lilacs. Thank you
for the pond and the slippery tadpole
and the wild iris that opened beside the pond
last week, so pale, so nearly purple,
their stems already flagged and bent.
Thank you for the yellow morels hiding in the field grass,
the ones we can only see when we are already
on our knees. And thank you for the humming
that rises out of the morning as if mornings
are simply reasons to hum. What a gift,
this being alive, this chance to encounter the world.
What a gift, this being a witness to spring –
spring in everything. Spring in the way
that we greet each other. Spring in the way the golden eagle
takes to the thermals and spirals up to where
we can barely see the great span of its wings.
Spring in the words we have known
since our births. Like glory. Like celebrate.
like flowering. What is it in us that longs to unfurl,
to expand, to open up and leap out—
something feral, unnamable, something
so fierce it can push through the crust of the soil,
something so vulnerable it can freeze and overnight
disappear. Thank you for this return to exactly
where we are, this greening, this bright roar
of the river rising, this swooping
of swallows, this leafing of lettuce,
this now, this yes, this here.
– Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously … And now I seek my hatred and cannot seem to find it. I feel its flame going out as I come to understand [its] existence … It would be difficult for me to avenge all those who should be avenged, because my revenge would be just another part of the same inexorable rite. I have to break that terrible chain. I want to think that my task is life and that my mission is not to prolong hatred but simply fill these pages …
– Isabel Allende
There is an old Jewish legend that in any point of history, there are 36 pure souls on whom the fate of the world depends, and they don’t know who they are. These 36 people hold up and support the world just as the foundations of a building support it. It’s likely these are unknown and unsung people, who do extraordinary things that go unnoticed. There are always 36 good people. Who save the world. One of them could be you.
– Jim Palmer
Here. Have a poem. A beautiful poem. And read it, if you can make time, and if you can stretch your ever-shrinking attention span (like mine is). Not sure why this one today. Maybe because Jerusalem has risen to glory and fallen to desolation repeatedly. It has never been so populous with so many buildings and so much life. It doesn’t seem possible it could be desolate yet again. But it probably didn’t seem possible at any previous pinnacle either. It certainly didn’t to the author of the biblical Lamentations, whose speaker stares in disbelief after its sack by Babylon, as they ask in the opening verse,
How sits the city solitary, that was full of people.
How is she become as a widow.
She that was great among the nations,
and princess among the provinces, how has been laid low.
Someday, maybe not all that far off, this place where I love, charmed as I remain by its layers of history and poetry, could resemble Browning’s vision. Maybe our great edifices will greet people like broken Ozymandias as an unintended caution against arrogance and vainglory. Certainly enough of that to go around these days. Can it be avoided? Seems like that would be bold new territory for this city, and perhaps all humanity.
Or, maybe just because I love this poem.
It is an error to divide people into the living and the dead: there are people who are dead-alive, and people who are alive-alive. The dead-alive also write, walk, speak, act. But they make no mistakes; only machines make no mistakes, and they produce only dead things. The alive-alive are constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment.
– Yevgeny Zamyatin
Houses, gardens, and people were transfigured into musical sounds, all that was solid seemed to be transfigured into soul and into gentleness. Sweet veils of silver and soul-haze swam through all things and lay over all things. The soul of the world had opened, and all grief, all human disappointment, all evil, all pain seemed to vanish, from now on never to appear again. Earlier walks came before my eyes; but the wonderful image of the humble present became a feeling which overpowered all others. The future paled, and the past dissolved. I glowed and flowered myself in the glowing, flowering present. From near and far, great things and small things emerged bright silver with marvelous gestures, joys, and enrichments, and in the midst of this beautiful place I dreamed of nothing but this place itself. All other fantasies sank and vanished in meaninglessness.
I had the whole rich earth immediately before me, and I still looked only at what was most small and most humble. With gestures of love the heavens rose and fell. I had become an inward being, and walked as in an inward world; everything outside me became a dream; what I had understood till now became unintelligible. I fell away from the surface, down into the fabulous depths, which I recognized then to be all that was good. What we understand and love understands and loves us also. I was no longer myself, was another, and yet it was on this account that I became properly myself. In the sweet light of love I realized, or believe I realized, that perhaps the inward self is the only self which really exists.
– Robert Walser
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
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
It was the kind of nightmare where you realize that the missing weight of things is sitting right there on your chest, like some kind of succubus, but before you can shove it off, it gets sucked away through a mysterious process into the unknowable realm of your cells, and from there on you are defenseless, your cells already weigh a ton, while your whole body is so light it almost floats, and that’s how it goes until you can only wonder how the cells could be so unbearably heavy when the body is so nauseatingly light, and in this nauseating lightheadedness things gradually recede from you just as you too begin to gradually recede from them, in a word it is like when a person lugging a load becomes exhausted by all this lugging and suddenly looking down at his hands sees that there is nothing in them, there never was, that he had been lugging nothing—that is, when you suddenly realize that something is no longer in your possession, just as nothing ever had been.
– László Krasznahorkai
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!
Mein inneres Gärtnern war herrlich diesen Winter. Das plötzlich wieder heile Bewußtsein meiner tief bestellten Erde ergab mir eine grosse Jahreszeit des Geistes und eine lange nicht meht gekannte Stärke des Herzstrahles… Sie schreiben von dem in jedem Moment schon Erfülltsein, schon Überreichsein des inneren Daseins, von einem (wenn man nur recht zusieht) alle später möglichen Entbehrungen und Verluste schon von vornherein überwiegenden und gleichsam wiederlegenden—Besitz. Genau dies habe ich diesen langen Winter in der tiefe meiner Arbeit erfahren, mehr und unwiederruflicher, als ich es bisher wußte: daß das Leben jedem späteren Armwerden mit den seine Maße übertrefflichsten Reichtümern schon längst zuvor gekommen sei. — Was also bliebe zu fürchten? — Nur, daß man dies vergäße! Aber um uns, in uns, wieviel Hülfen zur Erinnerung!
– Rainer Maria Rilke
All through my life I’ve had this strange unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world, something big, even sinister, and no one would tell me what it was.
“No,” said the old man, “that’s just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that.”
– Douglas Adams
To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.
– Douglas Adams
Perhaps it’s the color of the sun cut flat
An’ cov’rin’ the crossroads I’m standing at
Or maybe it’s the weather or something like that
But mama, you been on my mind
I don’t mean trouble, please don’t put me down or get upset
I am not pleadin’ or sayin’, “I can’t forget”
I do not walk the floor bowed down an’ bent, but yet
Mama, you been on my mind
Even though my mind is hazy an’ my thoughts they might be narrow
Where you been don’t bother me nor bring me down in sorrow
It don’t even matter to me where you’re wakin’ up tomorrow
But mama, you’re just on my mind
I am not askin’ you to say words like “yes” or “no”
Please understand me, I got no place for you t’ go
I’m just breathin’ to myself, pretendin’ not that I don’t know
Mama, you been on my mind
When you wake up in the mornin’, baby, look inside your mirror
You know I won’t be next to you, you know I won’t be near
I’d just be curious to know if you can see yourself as clear
As someone who has had you on his mind
– Bob Dylan
Body means reality. Sometimes the body is an abyss and one gets engulfed, while spirit flutters around by itself like a butterfly. A dangerous separation ensues that leads to death, for one lives outside of reality. Vitality in its fullest is experienced when one lives totally within the body and with the body!
Every spiritual progress includes a better connection to the body.
– C.G. Jung
The real act of, say, building a friendship or creating a community involves performing a series of small, concrete social actions well: disagreeing without poisoning the relationship; revealing vulnerability at the appropriate pace; being a good listener; knowing how to end a conversation gracefully; knowing how to ask for and offer forgiveness; knowing how to let someone down without breaking their heart; knowing how to sit with someone who is suffering; knowing how to host a gathering where everyone feels embraced; knowing how to see things from another’s point of view.
– David Brooks
I suppose every real intimacy includes its end—and not as a concept either, not as a realization or focus, not a third thing upon which two people might focus their gazes instead of directly at each other-like art, like children. No, the end inhabits every authentic act and word, and the final silence that so pains love is the same silence that sustains love. In other words, the knowledge of love and the knowledge of death are the same, and
neither is knowledge.
I’m saying I have considered, as we’ve all considered, not being: we sat in hospitals for each other, facing each of our fathers trying not to leave: I am thinking of you tonight and how once you consider death, really consider it,
you realize here we are, and what you’ve been considering is love.
A voice we don’t recognize calls up from ourselves.
We move in closer, trying to make out the words.
That begins love, or ends it —we start to make out the words.
We give to save ourselves. We forgive to save ourselves
We recognize death and love when we can start calling them names.
Each other’s.
– Christian Wiman
What good is it if God or Jesus is really present, but you are not? If you are Really Present, you will know the Real Presence. It is really that simple.
– Fr Richard Rohr
The Holy Longing
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
translated by Robert Bly
Tell a wise person, or else keep silent,
because the mass man will mock it right away.
I praise what is truly alive,
what longs to be burned to death.
In the calm water of the love-nights,
where you were begotten, where you have begotten,
a strange feeling comes over you,
when you see the silent candle burning.
Now you are no longer caught in the obsession with darkness,
and a desire for higher love-making sweeps you upward.
Distance does not make you falter.
Now, arriving in magic, flying,
and finally, insane for the light,
you are the butterfly and you are gone.
And so long as you haven’t experienced this: to die and so to grow,
you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth.
The Committee Weighs In
I tell my mother
I’ve won the Nobel Prize.
Again? she says. Which
discipline this time?
It’s a little game
we play: I pretend
I’m somebody, she
pretends she isn’t dead.
– Andrea Cohen
Unfortunately, saying you aren’t being judgemental, right after dropping a bunch of out-right & explicit judgements, doesn’t nullify them.
– Vince Fakhoury Horn
the mountains
in their silence
nurture the spirit
– Basho
Advice
by Naomi Shihab Nye
My friend, dying, said do the hard thing first.
Always do the hard thing and you will have a better day.
The second thing will seem less hard.
The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.
– James Baldwin
Michelangelo claimed that he was guided by a faculty he called intelleto. Intelleto is intelligence, not of the merely rational kind, but visionary intelligence, a deep seeing of the underlying pattern beneath appearances. Here the artist is, as it were, an archaeologist, uncovering deeper and deeper strata as he works, recovering not an ancient civilization but something as yet unborn, unseen, unheard except by the inner eye, the inner ear. He is not just removing apparent surfaces from some external object, he is removing apparent surfaces from the Self, revealing his original nature.
– Stephen Nachmanovitch
Think about something you are facing right now. Are you trying to think your way to a solution or act your way to a solution? Sometimes you need more action, sometimes you need a better strategy.
– James Clear
Self-Soothing
If I,
When you need distance,
Tear my nails,
Chew my lips,
Pull out my eyebrows,
Pick at my back and neck and face until I bleed, then pick the
scabs,
Binge and purge,
Walk for hours,
Sleep for days,
Would you
Call that
Self-soothing,
Or
Self-Destruction?
– Francesca Leader
A different machine
leaves a different pattern —
we never had one like that,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
There are more invisibilities
to be attained
– Philip Lamantia
There is another world.
The winter is gone.
There is a new world of spring
– D.H. Lawrence
The bird that would soar above the plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings.
– Douglas Adams
Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world. We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.
– Anthony Doerr
If we could use our associative commons to revive the natural political know-how of our species, that could help us outgrow our controlling world-view. But we could use another word for this process of becoming a leader-like channel for the shared progress of an associative process? There is no leader in a perfectly coordinated murmuration of starlings because the high-focus reasonings of deliberate self-motion are not at the core of the psychological How of cooperation. And since there is a felt resonance that is the “musical” guide for cooperative rhythm entrainment, the question is not mainly, “Who should lead?” but, “How to feel with this process and to help catalyze meaningful developments in mutually rewarding ways?”
“The idea of catalysis gives intermediaries a new status. Previously, they were mere links or hyphens, supplying needs felt by others. As catalysts, by contrast, they have independent existence and purpose; they can create new situations and transform people’s lives by bringing them together, without having arrogant pretensions themselves. To be a catalyst is the ambition most appropriate for those who see the world as being in constant change, and who, without thinking that they can control it, wish to influence its direction.”
– Theodore Zeldin, An Intimate History of Humanity
And such feeling-with of the best catalysts of social organization can avoid a lot of what Kenneth Burke calls “the bureaucratization of politics.”
Clearly, as a species skilled at collectively fashioning new possibilities, we still need to get the “works well with others” part of it. As Edith Turner says in Communitas: The Anthropology of Collective Joy:
“Communitas occurs through the readiness of the people…. It does not merge identities, the gifts of each and every person are alive to the fullest. It remains a spring of pure possibility, and it finds oneness, in surprise. That is, it has agency, and seems to be searching. It has something magical about it. There appear to be innumerable threads of crisscrossing lines of meaning, flows of meaning, in my words on communitas. That is its nature. It comes unexpectedly, like the wind, and it warms people toward their fellow human beings. It arises when people let go into negative capability, which itself is a condition of creativity, a readiness without preconceived ideas.”
Turner says that the communitas we need “resides in the poor and those considered inferior in their culture, a gift coming up from below. In concrete circumstances, communitas may be found when people engage in a collective task with full attention – often a matter of ordinary work. They may find themselves ‘in flow.’ That is, they experience a full merging of action and awareness, a crucial component of enjoyment.”
– George Gorman
Since I no longer expect anything from mankind except madness, meanness, and mendacity; egotism, cowardice, and self-delusion, I have stopped being a misanthrope.
– Irving Layton
In Celtic imaginations, a ‘thin place’ is a moment, a site, an event where the sacred leans so heavily on the vanishingly thin membrane that divides it from the commonplace that this is intuited by those concerned. If ‘thin places’ are to be considered as such, then this event with my brother Ned Busbirk this past March was a ‘fat place’ – a place where the sacred, unrelenting in its intimacy, finally broke through…spilling its contents into the ordinary, leaving no room for a parsing between familiar things and stranger things. I am grateful for it and can now share this with you.
– Báyò Akómoláfé
There is one
special ingredient
that propels life forward,
gives us the wisdom
and unbridled power
required to release
judgment, fear,
blame and skepticism,
tap the brilliance
we are capable of,
rediscover connection
to divine flow.
This is not a
secret ingredient.
One that has to be
mentioned in
hushed voices,
squirreled away,
hoarded to avoid
over-use.
It is to be
celebrated with
a clear, vibrant voice
that hides nothing,
shares everything,
an ingredient
to be used liberally,
spread far and wide
without equivocation:
LOVE.
– Kimberly Jonas
That This
Day is a type when visible
objects change then put
on form but the anti-type
That thing not shadowed
The way music is formed of
cloud and fire once actually
concrete now accidental as
half truth or as whole truth
Is light anything like this
stray pencil commonplace
copy as to one aberrant
onward-gliding mystery
A secular arietta variation
Grass angels perish in this
harmonic collision because
non-being cannot be ‘this’
Not spirit not space finite
Not infinite to those fixed—
That this millstone as such
Quiet which side on which—
Is one mind put into another
in us unknown to ourselves
by going about among trees
and fields in moonlight or in
a garden to ease distance to
fetch home spiritual things
That a solitary person bears
witness to law in the ark to
an altar of snow and every
age or century for a day is
– Susan Howe
Pythagorean Silence [excerpt]
1.
age of earth and us all chattering
a sentence or character
suddenly
steps out to seek for truth fails
falls
into a stream of ink Sequence
trails off
must go on
waving fables and faces War
doings of the war
manoeuvering between points
between
any two points which is
what we want (issues at stake)
bearings and so
holes in a cloud are minutes passing
which is
which
view odds of images swept rag-tag
silver and grey
epitomes
seconds forgeries engender
(are blue) or blacker
flocks of words flying together tense
as an order
cast off to crows
– Susan Howe
some nights
you may experience
thought’s diamond
drop squeezed
from an enraged
zero.
– Kaie Kellough
Being called a “bad citizen” is a compliment to a novelist, at least to my mind. That’s exactly what we ought to do. We ought to be bad citizens. We ought to, in the sense that we’re writing against what power represents, and often what government represents, and what the corporation dictates, and what consumer consciousness has come to mean. In that sense, if we’re bad citizens, we’re doing our job.
– Don DeLillo
I have practice in the art of being cold on purpose.
How else to keep the inside from spoiling?
To keep the rot from creeping in?
– Brenna Twohy
Art is born out of an
ill-designed world.
– Andrei Tarkovsky
Victor: Does enlightenment come with dissolution of all shadow?
Just because the Sun is out doesn’t mean all the snow will melt at once.
– Chinul
I am sad today because I really thought the end of things would be less small; it’s like if the Roman Empire fell into a ball pit and drowned taking selfies
– Amber Sparks
There is no such thing as fantasy unrelated to reality.
– Maurice Sendak
The world doesn’t just contain optimists and pessimists, and wise and unwise technology users. It contains enemies of civilization as well. And knowledge is impartial. It can be used for good or evil. But the enemies of civilization all necessarily have one thing in common. They are wrong. And so they fear error correction and truth. And that’s why they resist changes in their ideas, which makes them less creative and slower to innovate. So our defense against the existential danger from malevolent uses of technology, the only defense, is speed. The good guys must use their only advantage to stay ahead.
– David Deutsch
I suppose everyone tries to ignore the passing of time: some people by doing a lot, being in California one year and Japan the next; or there’s my way—making every day and every year exactly the same. Probably neither works.
– Philip Larkin
You can’t laugh
at your own jokes
when you’re trying
to sell them,
the comedian told
the old monk.
– The Old Monk
You will be reborn in a Pure Land.
– Kenneth Folk
The problem with our thoughts is that they’re often wrong—sometimes preposterously so. Epictetus said we had to put our impressions to the test, to really look at them, so they don’t lead us astray or into embarrassment.
– @dailystoic
how soft they appear
the needles of the pine tree
after the first snow.
– Vladimir Martinovski
I am way too confident about my odds of surviving in a post-apocalypse for a person with my glasses prescription
– @VeryBadLlama
I write, erase,
rewrite erase again,
then a flower blooms
– Hokusai
Synchronicity is Jung’s coinage for what we can call ‘meaningful coincidence’, when the inner & outer worlds reflect each other with such accuracy and obvious meaning that to resort to mere coincidence as an explanation is useless.
– Gary Lachman
In those days, I fed my hopes of freedom in whichever way I could, without realizing that I was only hooking myself to different lures.
– Laila Lalami
An enemy has to be defeated in battle, but an adversary’s different. You must outwit an adversary.
– Louise Erdrich
No, no, you are not thinking; you are just being logical.
– Niels Bohr
A human being, perhaps, is made up of many nonsensical movements. But they’ve forgotten the movements necessary for life. These humans are manipulated by what remains of their memories.
– Yōko Tawada
You poor bastard. You don’t know what real life is, you’ve never been near it. All you have is a thousand intellectualized ideas about life. But life? Have you ever measured yourself against anything but your own lousy past? Have you ever faced anything outside yourself? Life! You poor bastard.
– William Gaddis, The Recognitions
If the world is cold, make it
your business to build fires.
– Horace Traubel
The grateful mind is constantly fixed upon the best; therefore it tends to become the best; it takes the form or character of the best, and will receive the best.
– Wallace D. Wattles
We agree finally that our bodies deteriorate with age — but the mind?! We would like to see it different from any earthly mechanism subject to defect. We crave an ideal — even one carrying a minus sign, even one shameful, sinful, so as it delivers us from an explanation worse than the Satanic: that what is taking place is a certain play of forces perfectly indifferent to man.
– Stanisław Lem
What the devil loves is that vague cloud of unspecified guilt feeling or unspecified virtue by which he lures us into despair or presumption
– C.S. Lewis
Nothing can make you happy
until nothing can make you happy.
– Jeff Foster
You must positively claim health, harmony, and True Place, if you really want those things.
– Emmet Fox
Dante and Virgil in Hell always move to the left (the accursed direction), and in Purgatory always to the right.
– Samuel Beckett
The far right is rising across Europe because politicians on both sides have pandered to their rhetoric and normalized their ideas.
The only answer to hatred is hope.
We have to stand up to racism, defend refugees and inspire people to believe that a kinder world is possible.
– Jeremy Corbyn
The right to be human is inextricably intertwined with the right to tell your story. Better to be buried with your story told, than live with your story buried. Your story is your glory. Tell it.
– Jeff Brown, Soulshaping Institute
Trust life, even if you cannot trust people. For human nature is unreliable, but life itself is ruled by immutable law. Right action leads always, in the end, to victory.
– Swami Kriyananda
If you see someone greedy for many things, you should consider him the poorest of all, even if he has acquired everyone’s money. If on the other hand, you see someone with few needs, you should count him the richest of all, even if he acquired nothing
– St. John Chrysostom
Pretend you are a penny, travel as one for two weeks, come home and tell your friends where you have been, where you stayed, what you saw, the people you met and all your adventures. You might not have any pictures, but you came home spent and anyone will be able to see it was a wild vacation, one that makes two weeks in an Italian villa seem boring, yep, everyone agrees you are lucky, your face is shining and you’re ready to leave again at a moment’s notice.
– Mary Ruefle
I suspect that there is no serious scholar who doesn’t like to watch television. I’m just the only one who confesses.
– Umberto Eco
We are hungry for tenderness
in a world where everything abounds.
– Alda Merini
You’ll never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine.
– John C. Maxwell
For a Teacher
Yes, you will be tired.
You will be tested by their wild hearts.
But those hearts are little fires in the darkness.
Remember
what the gift is.
Remember
to help a voice begin is a sacred act.
Remember no one knows when they’ve been saved.
Listen. Let the world say all is ruined.
You know
where the changes start, in darkness.
Start again with the small things, the smallest things.
Breathe. Be open. Keep going.
Show them
you are listening, in wonder.
Gentleness is the next revolution.
Help them all to say each other’s names.
– Joseph Fasano
Envy those who see beauty in everything in the world.
– Egon Schiele
Knowledge, experience, and theory have limitations: no amount of thinking in advance can prepare you for the chaos of life, for the infinite possibilities of the moment.
– Robert Greene
To be a philosopher you need only three things. First, infinite intellectual eros: endless curiosity about everything. Second, the ability to pay attention: to be rapt by what is in front of you without seizing it yourself, the care of concentration—in the way you might look closely, without touching, at the green lacewing fly, overwintering silently on the kitchen wall Third, acceptance of pathlessness (aporia): that there may be no solutions to questions, only the clarification of their statement. Eros, attention, acceptance.
– Gillian Rose, Paradiso
The awakening process can be dark and lonely.
Just know that you are lucky to have eyes in a blind world.
– Sam Rode, Eye of God
I like the feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art.
– Eudora Welty
here’s our conundrum: we’re stuck in a system that we cant change and one science shows will not last and terribly, it appears the end is coming much faster than most scientists predicted.
– Prof. Steve Austin
There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.
– George Orwell
What we’re hoping for is a sense of urgency, a velocity of prose filtered to perfection. The right word, the right detail, a fresh insight into the world the character inhabits, and finally a …true feeling we would call resonance.
– Tommy Dean
Look well into thyself; there is a source of strength which will always spring up if thou wilt always look.
– Marcus Aurelius
There is a life-force within your soul, seek that life. There is a gem in the mountain of your body, seek that mine. O traveller, if you are in search of that Don’t look outside, look inside yourself and seek that.
– Rumi
The heart is the only reality. The mind is a transient phase. To remain as one’s Self is to enter the Heart.
– Ramana Maharshi
The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules but by people following the rules.
– Banksy
I will arise and go now,
and go to Politicsfree,
and a small cabin build there,
of clay and wattles made
without Wifi or TV or Politics
– john zbigniew guzlowski
The purpose of real art is to fuck up the very people who are obsessed with making money from art.
– Irvine Welsh
You need to write about the life you’ve lived. It can’t all be aspirational. It’s part of your job, as a poet, to write out of experience. To name what matters to you. You’ve only got one life to draw on.
– Edward Hirsch
Call me crazy but in ten years, being able to read and write on a normal level will be considered a skill.
– @edgeofanatolia
The person who takes up the pen (or brush) is brave. Truly brave. Perhaps you aren’t a fan of what a particular creative produces, but that’s really beside the point. They picked up a pen (or a brush) and opened themselves to the Powers, The Muse, the archetypes, the ancestors, the land, the spirit of the times, their dreams, the untold stories of place, hallowed memory, the moment of midnight churning, the dark-enigma of the personal and collective unconscious, and…that right there is brave!
You also probably have to be a special kind of crazy to decide: I’m going to write a book.
– Frank LaRue Owen
I think my ideal friend is a venn diagram of curiosity, high agency & kindness.
– Anne-Laure Le Cunff
I’ve got
nothing against
the English, but
I don’t want
Westminster
ruling my
country. I want
neighbours not
masters.
– Peter Mullan
So much of the work of oppression is about policing the imagination.
– Saidiya Hartman
The art world is the biggest joke going. It’s a rest home for the overprivileged, the pretentious, and the weak.
– Banksy
Words / have as much substance / as shadow.
– Jenny Wong
Change is one thing, progress is another. ‘Change’ is scientific, ‘progress’ is ethical; change is indubitable, whereas progress is a matter of controversy.
– Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays
A good teacher does not teach facts, he or she teaches enthusiasm, open-mindedness and values.
– Gian-Carlo Rota
Horses at Midnight Without a Moon
Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods.
Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt.
But there’s music in us. Hope is pushed down
but the angel flies up again taking us with her.
The summer mornings begin inch by inch
while we sleep, and walk with us later
as long-legged beauty through
the dirty streets. It is no surprise
that danger and suffering surround us.
What astonishes is the singing.
We know the horses are there in the dark
meadow because we can smell them,
can hear them breathing.
Our spirit persists like a man struggling
through the frozen valley
who suddenly smells flowers
and realizes the snow is melting
out of sight on top of the mountain,
knows that spring has begun.
– Jack Gilbert
Every book has a voice of its own and you can’t impose it, you have to learn to recognize it.
– Mary Lee Settle
The truth of yesterday must be set aside for what is now the truth of one’s psychic life.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.
– Leo Tolstoy
I’m basically of the mind that spiritual lineages should exist and flourish, and that very few people should be involved with them.
A lineage is an archive. It is by nature quite conservative. it doesn’t want change, it doesn’t care about change – it wants to maintain what matters, and any individual member can’t be sure which things matter most, so there’s limited freedom to adapt while also preserving. You can add incremental pamphlets and marginalia to the material already in the archive.
But we live in a world that needs adaptation more than preservation right now, we need to be trying things out, mixing and matching, innovating, AND returning to what’s been preserved to see what’s there…
At times like these, lineages have an archival function more than anything else. They preserve what worked for previous versions of various societies. Keeping that around is important, it gives us a whole lot of material to find what works in this version of this society
…but if too many people stay in lineages like that, stay in the environment that shames and discourages renewing the sacred,
the whole ecosystem gets stiff, there’s less room to roll with the punches and find what works.
There are times when we can live by the wisdom already in the archives, and there are times when we need to explore new things to ADD to the archives,
and us? right here, right now? we are definitely living through a period where the latter must be emphasized more than the former
– River Kenna
The two of them got along famously- one grunted and the other talked in a language that nobody could understand, so they got along well.
– an observation on the relationship between Van Morrison and Dr. John
NYT: do you speak Spanish?
Dr. John: Spanish??
I don’t even speak English!!
Cum grano salis, we always see our own unavowed mistakes in our opponent. Excellent examples of this are to be found in all personal quarrels.
– C.G. Jung
Writing teaches writing.
– John McPhee
Art Is a Way Out. Do not let life overwhelm you. When the old paths are choked with the débris of failure, look for newer and fresher paths. Art is just such a path. Art is distilled from suffering.
– Nathanael West
Most “spiritual” practitioners would be better served by working on owning their judgements, rather than by trying to be non-judgmental.
– @VinceFHorn
The great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving. We must sail, sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it, but we must sail, not drift, nor lie at anchor.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
You know, I’ve been around the ruling class all my life, and I’ve been quite aware of their total contempt for the people of the country.
– Gore Vidal
a hero will emerge from the bushes
of a summer evening
bearing the first green figs of the season.
– David Lehman
I have a friend who measures
desire by stillness
– Jenny Johnson
MEDITATIONS IN AN EMERGENCY
I wake up & it breaks my heart. I draw the blinds
& the thrill of rain breaks my heart. I go outside.
I ride the train, walk among the buildings, men in
Monday suits. The flight of doves, the city of tents
beneath the underpass, the huddled mass, old
women hawking roses, & children all of them,
break my heart. There’s a dream I have in which I
love the world. I run from end to end like fingers
through her hair. There are no borders, only wind.
Like you, I was born. Like you, I was raised in the
institution of dreaming. Hand on my heart. Hand
on my stupid heart.
– Cameron Awkward-Rich
And the old hunger returned—the terrible hunger that haunts and hurts Americans, and that makes us exiles at home and strangers wherever we go.
– Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel
How hollow to have no secrets left; you shake yourself and nothing rattles. You’re boneless as an anemone.
– Andrew Sean Greer, The Story of a Marriage
When we stop and conscientiously consider our life’s patterns, especially the self-defeating patterns, the ones that bring harm to ourselves or others, the ones where we are most stuck, we realize that indeed we are the progenitor of most of our problems.
– James Hollis
Write in order not simply to destroy, in order not simply to conserve, in order not to transmit; write in the thrall of the impossible real, that share of disaster wherein every reality, safe and sound, sinks.
– Maurice Blanchot
Everyone — irreligious people included — relies on irreducible answers every day. All religion really does is to be honest about this, by giving the reliance a specific name: faith.
– Lisa Halliday
I never thought,
forty years ago,
taping my poems into a notebook,
that one day the tape
would turn yellow, grow brittle, and fall off
and that I’d find myself on hands and knees
groaning as I picked the pieces up
off the floor
one by one
– Ron Padgett
You cannot write a single line w/out a cosmology
a cosmogony
laid out, before all eyes
there is no part of yourself you can separate out
saying, this is memory, this is sensation
this is the work I care about, this is how I
make a living
it is whole, it is a whole, it always was whole
you do not “make” it so
there is nothing to integrate, you are a presence
you are an appendage of the work, the work stems from
hangs from the heaven you create
every man / every woman carries a firmament inside &
the stars in it are not the stars in the sky
w/out imagination there is no memory
w/out imagination there is no sensation
w/out imagination there is no will, desire
history is a living weapon in yr hand &
you have imagined it, it is thus that
you “find out for yourself”
history is the dream of what it can be, it is
the relation between things in a continuum
of imagination what you find out for yourself
is what you select out of an infinite sea of possibility
no one can inhabit yr world
yet it is not lonely,
the ground of the imagination is fearlessness
discourse is video tape of a movie of a shadow play
but the puppets are in yr hand
your counters in a multidimensional chess
which is divination
& strategy
the war that matters is the war against the imagination
all other wars are subsumned in it.
the ultimate famine is the starvation
of the imagination
it is death to be sure, but the undead seek
to inhabit someone else’s world
the ultimate claustrophobia is the syllogism
the ultimate claustrophobia is “it all adds up”
nothing adds up & nothing stands in for
anything else
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION
ALL OTHER WARS ARE SUBSUMED IN IT
There is no way out of the spiritual battle
There is no way to avoid taking sides
There is no way you can not have a poetics
no matter what you do: plumber, baker, teacher
you do it in the consciousness of making
or not making yr world
you have a poetics: you step into the world
like a suit of readymade clothes
or you etch in light your
firmament spills into the shape of your room
the shape of the poem, of yr body, of yr loves
A woman’s life / a man’s life is an allegory
Dig it
There is no way out of the spiritual battle
the war is the war against the imagination
you can’t sign up as a conscientious objector
the war of the worlds hangs here, right now, in the balance
it is a war for this world, to keep it
a vale of soul-making
the taste in all our mouths is the taste of our power
and it is bitter as death
bring yr self home to yrself, enter the garden
the guy at the gate w/ the flaming sword is yrself
the war is the war for the human imagination
and no one can fight it but you/ & no one can fight it for you
The imagination is not only holy, it is precise
it is not only fierce, it is practical
men die everyday for the lack of it,
it is vast & elegant
intellectus means “light of the mind”
it is not discourse it is not even language
the inner sun the
polis is constellated around the sun
the fire is central
– Diane di Prima
One day, as he slept in a cave, he dreamed that he saw his own body sleeping. He came out of the cave on the night of a new moon. The sky was clear, and he could see millions of stars. Then something happened inside of him that transformed his life forever. He looked at his hands, he felt his body, and he heard his own voice say. “I am made of light, I am made of stars. He looked at the stars again, and he realized that it’s not the stars that create the light, but rather the light that creates the stars. “Everything is made of light,” he said, “and the space in-between isn’t empty.” And he knew that everything that exists is one living being, and that light is the messenger of life, because it is alive and contains all information.”
– Miguel Ruiz
When I was seven, I said to my mother, may I close the door? And she said yes, but why do you want to close the door? And I said because I want to think. And when I was eleven, I said to my mother, may I lock my door? And she said, yes, but why do you want to lock your door? And I said, because I want to write.
– Dorothy West
The music was more than music- at least what we are used to hearing. The music was feeling itself. The sound connected instantly with something deep and joyous. Those powerful moments of true knowledge that we have to paper over with daily life. The music tapped the back of our terrors, too. Things we’d lived through and didn’t want to ever repeat. Shredded imaginings, unadmitted longings, fear and also surprisingly pleasures. No, we can’t live at that pitch. But every so often something shatters like ice and we are in the river of our existence. We are aware. And this realization was in the music, somehow, or in the way Shamengwa played it.
– Louise Erdrich
We are not helpless. Even after Orpheus was torn to pieces, his severed head, floating down the river Hebrus, went on singing, reminding us that song is stronger than death. We can sing the truth and name the liars. We can stand in solidarity with our fellows on the front lines and magnify their voices by adding our own.
Above all we must understand that stories are at the heart of what’s happening, and the dishonest narratives of oppressors have attracted many. So we must work to overturn the false narratives of tyrants, populists, and fools by telling better stories than they do, stories in which people want to live.
The battle is not only on the battlefield. The stories we live in are also contested territories. Perhaps we can seek to emulate Joyce’s Dedalus, who sought to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race. We can emulate Orpheus and sing on in the face of horror, and not stop singing until the tide turns, and a better day begins.
– Salman Rushdie
The world that used to nurse us now keeps shouting inane instructions. That’s why I ran to the woods.
– Jim Harrison
I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I’m doing.
– John Cage
The Great Blending
by William Stafford
For intervals, then, throughout our lives
we savor a concurrence, the great blending
of our chance selves with what sustains
all chance. We ride the wave and are
the wave. And with renewed belief
inner and outer we find our talk
turned to prayer, our prayer into truth:
for an interval, early, we become at home in the world.
One night, a full moon watched over me like a mother. In the blue light of the Basin, I saw a petroglyph on a large boulder. It was a spiral. I placed the tip of my finger on the center and began tracing the coil around and around. It spun off the rock. My finger kept circling the land, the lake, the sky. The spiral became larger and larger until it became a halo of stars in the night sky above Stansbury Island. A meteor flashed and as quickly disappeared. The waves continued to hiss and retreat, hiss and retreat.
In the West Desert of the Great Basin, I was not alone.
– Terry Tempest
Not for Love or Money. Not on your life.
No, said the cabbie when I asked him to change the station.
No, said the waiter when I tried to apologize for spilling the soup. No, said my mother, when I begged her to stop firing her nurses.
No, said my daughter, when I told her she’d feel better tomorrow. Not now. Not ever. On no account.
Under no circumstances.
Oh, n, what would we do
without your almost blissfully stubborn
negativity, your fervent
refusal to look
on the bright side, your delight
in slamming the door with such emphasis
it’ll never be opened again? Doctrinaire. Single-minded.
Devoted to your convictions.
The nail driven in:
Nada. Null. Nicht. Nope. Nah.
As if that’s what the mouth was made for:
to find fault with as much as it can,
to settle for nothing and to relish doing so.
Uun-unnh.
No siree.
Not on your life. Not now.
Never.
– Christopher Bursk
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 Dostoevski
Lovers In A Dangerous Time
Don’t the hours grow shorter as the days go by
You never get to stop and open your eyes
One day you’re waiting for the sky to fall
The next you’re dazzled by the beauty of it all
When you’re lovers in a dangerous time
Lovers in a dangerous time
These fragile bodies of touch and taste
This vibrant skin — this hair like lace
Spirits open to the thrust of grace
Never a breath you can afford to waste
When you’re lovers in a dangerous time
Lovers in a dangerous time
When you’re lovers in a dangerous time
Sometimes you’re made to feel as if your love’s a crime —
But nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight —
Got to kick at the darkness ’til it bleeds daylight
When you’re lovers in a dangerous time
Lovers in a dangerous time
And we’re lovers in a dangerous time
Lovers in a dangerous time
– Bruce Cockburn
The next time you look into the mirror, just look at the way the ears rest next to the head; look at the way the hairline grows; think of all the little bones in your wrist. It is a miracle.
– Martha Graham
Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.
Consider all this; and then turn to the green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!
– Herman Melville
As we inhabit our body with increasing sensitivity, we learn its unspoken language and patterns, which gives us tremendous freedom to make choices. The practice of cutting thoughts and dispersing negative repetitive patterns can be simplified by attending to the patterns in the body first, before they begin to be spun around in the mind.
– Jill Satterfield
Is any man afraid of change? Why what can take place without change? What then is more pleasing or more suitable to the universal nature? And canst thou take a bath unless the wood undergoes a change? And canst thou be nourished, unless the food undergoes a change? And can anything else that is useful be accomplished without change? Dost thou not see then that for thyself also to change is just the same, and equally necessary for the universal nature?
– Marcus Aurelius
The little girl’s sense of secrecy that developed at prepuberty only grows in importance. She closes herself up in fierce solitude: she refuses to reveal to those around her the hidden self that she considers to be her real self and that is in fact an imaginary character: she plays at being a dancer like Tolstoy’s Natasha, or a saint like Marie Leneru, or simply the singular wonder that is herself. There is still an enormous difference between this heroine and the objective face that her parents and friends recognize in her. She is also convinced that she is misunderstood: her relationship with herself becomes even more passionate: she becomes intoxicated with her isolation, feels different, superior, exceptional: she promises that the future will take revenge on the mediocrity of her present life. From this narrow and petty existence she escapes by dreams.
– Simone de Beauvoir
We carried you in our arms
On Independence Day
And now you’d throw us all aside
And put us on our way
Oh what dear daughter ’neath the sun
Would treat a father so
To wait upon him hand and foot
And always tell him, “No?”
Tears of rage, tears of grief
Why must I always be the thief?
Come to me now, you know
We’re so alone
And life is brief
We pointed out the way to go
And scratched your name in sand
Though you just thought it was nothing more
Than a place for you to stand
Now, I want you to know that while we watched
You discover there was no one true
Most ev’rybody really thought
It was a childish thing to do
Tears of rage, tears of grief
Must I always be the thief?
Come to me now, you know
We’re so low
And life is brief
It was all very painless
When you went out to receive
All that false instruction
Which we never could believe
And now the heart is filled with gold
As if it was a purse
But, oh, what kind of love is this
Which goes from bad to worse?
Tears of rage, tears of grief
Must I always be the thief?
Come to me now, you know
We’re so low
And life is brief
– Bob Dylan
But the reason I call myself by my childhood name is to remind myself that a scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting
– Douglas Adams
Long dismissed as children’s stories or ‘myths’ by Westerners, Australian Aboriginal stories have only recently begun to be taken seriously for what they are: the longest continuous record of historic events and spirituality in the world.
– Karl-Erik Sveiby
The Dreaming is now. The Dreaming is always; forever; it circles around and around. It never ends. It’s always happening, and us mob, we’re part of it, all the time, everywhere, and every-when too.
– Kate Constable
If they follow the way of Money Chiefs, they shall die. Earth is sick and can no longer care for her children. Now, Earth’s children must care for Earth. Continue to pollute rivers and oceans – rivers and oceans shall drown you. Pollute sky – Sun Spirit shall burn you. Kill more trees – unclean air shall strangle you. Kill more Spirits – disease shall destroy you. Already, Money Chiefs’ skin burns. Their lungs choke on unclean air. Poisoned water spreads disease among them and all Spirits. Rising rivers and oceans shall sweep their homes and lives away. Money Chiefs think money heals broken lives. Unchanged, in the end, Money Chiefs’ money shall cost them their lives.
– Frederic Perrin
The final stages of capitalism, Karl Marx predicted, would be marked by global capital being unable to expand and generate profits at former levels. Capitalists would begin to consume the government along with the physical and social structures that sustained them. Democracy, social welfare, electoral participation, the common good and investment in public transportation, roads, bridges, utilities, industry, education, ecosystem protection and health care would be sacrificed to feed the mania for short-term profit. These assaults would destroy the host. This is the stage of late capitalism that Donald Trump represents.
– Chris Hedges
I don’t know anything about consciousness. I just try to teach my students how to hear the birds sing.
– Shunryu Suzuki
The Dogs at Live Oak Beach, Santa Cruz
As if there could be a world
Of absolute innocence
In which we forget ourselves
The owners throw sticks
And half-bald tennis balls
Toward the surf
And the happy dogs leap after them
As if catapulted-
Black dogs, tan dogs,
Tubes of glorious muscle-
Pursuing pleasure
More than obedience
They race, skid to a halt in the wet sand,
Sometimes they’ll plunge straight into
The foaming breakers
Like diving birds, letting the green turbulence
Toss them, until they snap and sink
Teeth into floating wood
Then bound back to their owners
Shining wet, with passionate speed
For nothing,
For absolutely nothing but joy.
– Alicia Ostriker
Cherry blossoms
everywhere: this
undeserving world.
– Issa, tr. Stryk
Because fiction is a temporal art, it’s based on time that’s irreversibly passing in one direction. And I think one of the things that makes reading possible, or pleasurable, is that everybody knows what a day is…And one day we won’t get to the end of that day. And that piece of time between now and then is called our lives. And I think if you’re a fiction writer, you want to say something
meaningful about that.
– Claire Keegan
And if they ask you about Palestine, tell them:
In it there is a martyr,
nursed by a martyr,
photographed by a martyr,
sent off by a martyr,
and prayed for by a martyr.
– Mahmoud Darwish
SHORT TALK ON THE SENSATION OF
AEROPLANE TAKEOFF
Well you know I wonder, it could be love
running towards my life with its arms up
yelling let’s buy it what a bargain!
– Anne Carson
To live, by definition, is not something one learns. Not from oneself, it is not learned from life, taught by life. Only from the other and by death. In any case from the other at the edge of life.
– Derrida
Buddhist practice is not about forcing ourselves to be natural. It is about being ourselves.
– Gary Thorp
Valley Candle
My candle burned alone in an immense valley.
Beams of the huge night converged upon it,
Until the wind blew. Then beams of the huge night
Converged upon its image,
Until the wind blew.
– Wallace Stevens
Do not ask me from me, my love,
The love that we had before…
– Faiz Ahmed Faiz
To ask the right question is already half the solution of a problem.
– C.G. Jung
It is good to wake up without a single thought or problem. Then the mind is rested; it has brought about order within itself, and that is why sleep is so important.
– Krishnamurti
Foremost we admire the outlaw
who has the strength of his own lawfulness.
– Robert Duncan
Creativity represents a miraculous coming together of the uninhibited energy of the child with its apparent opposite and enemy, the sense of order imposed on the disciplined adult intelligence.
– Norman Podhoretz
O beloved, there is a storm in the
heart of every person—
May the lamp of your cheek not
blow out, be careful.
– Faiz Ahmed Faiz
art is only the giving of shape and form.
– goethe
Might we all be defined in the end by the ratio between the suffering we’ve caused and the suffering we’ve endured?
– Pico Iyer
when the path is lost, benighted,
love can sense the way unsighted.
– henrik ibsen, tr. john northam
Ruth Wilson Gilmore said, “Policy is the new theory. Policy is to politics what method is to research. It’s a script for enlivening some future possibility—an experiment.” I think it’d be useful for more leftists and radicals to engage in policy analysis, even if for opposition.
– @tamaranopper
Goals are for people who care about winning once. Systems are for people who care about winning repeatedly.
– James Clear
starry night
as vast as the universe
our ignorance
– @hegelincanada
Your eyes are like a night of rain,
My ships drown in them,
My writing disappears in their reflection,
Mirrors have no memory.
– Nizar Qabbani
One is very dull when one starts. You have to give yourself several good kicks in the behind.
– V. S. Pritchett
Silence is really appealing to me, and loss is what feeds narrative. The people who aren’t able to talk are the ones who are hurting the most. That’s why short stories stay short.
– Claire Keegan
election day —
tough decision between
black or green tea
– Mueder Krieger
He was electrocuted by the divine fire[…] He was probably—might have been the greatest, but he was electrocuted. He had more talent than he could control.
– William Faulkner on James Joyce
There is beauty in the imperfections of life, just like there is beauty in a broken melody.
– Francoise Hardy
The American diet was meant to put you in an American hospital for American health care so you can buy American Pharma drugs so you can go through American health insurance.
– Dan Go
My heart is a warm plate tonight.
Outside the snow is like cold rice.
– Mike Maniquiz
Language doesn’t exist without an audience.
– Harold Brodkey
morning fog
noon fog, evening fog
covering my home
– Issa
On a primitive level, the mind doesn’t discriminate between fantasy and reality. That’s why we have cultural and literal wars.
– Byron Gaist
The more you know yourself, the more clarity there is. Self-knowledge has no end – you don’t come to an achievement, you don’t come to a conclusion. It is an endless river.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
Recognize that your struggle and your suffering is the same as everyone else’s, I think that’s the beginning of a responsible life. Otherwise, we are in a continual savage battle with each other with no possible solution, political, social, or spiritual.
– Leonard Cohen
I Will Not Goose Step (Just So We’re Clear)
I will saunter I will amble
I will roam and I will ramble
I will walk with all those who step
Up to say I will not goose step
I will hike and promenade
I will march in a parade
In freedom’s name I’ll learn some new steps
But my friends I will not goose step
I will poodle I will yomp
I will trek and I will stomp
I will slog and I will plod
Yes and with the help of God
I will mosey and I will tramp
I will carry freedom’s lamp
I’ll wend my way with all those who schlep
Through this world I will not goose step
My knees bend when I’m perambulating
But not when some dictator’s dictating
I will poodle I will yomp
I will trek and I will stomp
I will slog and I will plod
Yes and with the help of God
I will saunter I will amble
I will roam and I will ramble
If brown shirt thugs tell me how to step
I won’t comply I will not goose step
– John Flynn, Flying Stone Music
MIRACLE
It’s an open question whether a full and un-averted look at death crushes the human psyche or liberates it. One could say that it’s the small ambitions of life that shred our souls and that if we are lucky enough to glimpse the gargoyles of our final descent and make it back alive, we are truly saved.
Every object is a miracle compared to nothingness and every moment an infinity when correctly understood to be all we’ll ever get. Religion does its best to impart this through a lifetime of devotion, but one good look at death might be all you need.
– Sebastian Junger
ETERNAL LOVE
It isn’t possible to love and to part.
You will wish that it was.
You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it,
but you can never pull it out of you.
I know from experience that
the poets are right: love is eternal.
– E. M. Forster
I loved to dance because I was scared to speak. When I was moving, I could feel
– Pina Bausch
Few of us understand the street, even when we step into it doubtfully, as into a house or room of strangers. Few of us see through the shining riddle of the street, the strange folk that belong to the street only – the street-walker or the street arab, the nomads who, generation after generation have kept their ancient secrets in the full blaze of the sun. Of the street at night many of us know less.
– G. K. Chesterton
I’d rather risk an ugly surprise than rely on things I know I can do.
– Helen Frankenthaler
The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is “man” in a higher sense – he is “collective man,” a vehicle and moulder of the unconscious psychic life of mankind.
– Jung, Modern Man In Search Of A Soul
That’s the way with a cat, you know – any cat; they don’t give a damn for discipline. And they can’t help it, they’re made so. But it ain’t really insubordination, when you come to look at it right and fair – it’s a word that don’t apply to a cat. A cat ain’t ever anybody’s slave or serf or servant, and can’t be – it ain’t in him to be. And so, he don’t have to obey anybody. He is the only creature in heaven or earth or anywhere that don’t have to obey somebody or other, including the angels. It sets him above the whole ruck, it puts him in a class by himself. He is independent. You understand the size of it? He is the only independent person there is. In heaven or anywhere else. There’s always somebody a king has to obey – a trollop, or a priest, or a ring, or a nation, or a deity or what not – but it ain’t so with a cat. A cat ain’t servant nor slave to anybody at all. He’s got all the independence there is, in Heaven or anywhere else, there ain’t any left over for anybody else. He’s your friend, if you like, but that’s the limit – equal terms, too, be you king or be you cobbler; you can’t play any I’m-better-than-you on a cat – no, sir! Yes, he’s your friend, if you like, but you got to treat him like a gentleman, there ain’t any other terms. The minute you don’t, he pulls freight.
– Mark Twain, The Refuge of the Derelicts
The whole idea of revenge and punishment is a childish day-dream. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.
– George Orwell
There is a feeling the body gives the mind of having missed something, a bedrock poverty, like falling without the sense that you are passing through one world, that you could reach another anytime. Instead the real is crossing you, your body an arrival you know is false but can’t outrun. And somewhere in between these geese forever entering and these spiders turning back, this astonishing delay, the everyday, takes place.
– Jorie Graham
The World wants to know
what I am made of. I am trying
to find a way
to answer Her.
– Robin Coste Lewis
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
How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d.
– Alexander Pope
This planet has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much all of the time.
– Douglas Adams
Highly sensitive people are too often perceived as weaklings or damaged goods. To feel intensely is not a symptom of weakness, it is the trademark of the truly alive and compassionate. It is not the empath who is broken, it is society that has become dysfunctional and emotionally disabled. There is no shame in expressing your authentic feelings. Those who are at times described as being a ‘hot mess’ or having ‘too many issues’ are the very fabric of what keeps the dream alive for a more caring, humane world. Never be ashamed to let your tears shine a light in this world.
– Anthon St. Maarten
For those of us who live in the ongoing catastrophe, it does not matter if ruling administrative apparatuses assign the catastrophe an unofficial status, or if they assign the catastrophe a reality-for-some status, or if they say the catastrophe is nothing out of the ordinary, or if their word for catastrophe is profit, or if their word for catastrophe is benefit, or if their word for catastrophe is wealth or if their word for catastrophe is democracy; or if their phrase for catastrophe is good life; or even if they say there is no catastrophe. There was a catastrophe and therefore there is a catastrophe. The word for catastrophe is car. The word for catastrophe is boat. The state of catastrophe is exposed. The word for catastrophe is street. The word for catastrophe is photograph. The word for catastrophe is news. The word for catastrophe is lumber, is factory, is field, is oil, now, is monocrop, is virus, now.
– Dionne Brand
God wants to be born in the flame of man’s consciousness, leaping ever higher. And what if this has no roots in the earth? If it is not a house of stone where the fire of God can dwell, but a wretched straw hut that flares up and vanishes? Could God then be born? One must be able to suffer God. That is the supreme task for the carrier of ideas. He must be the advocate of the earth. God will take care of himself. My inner principle is: Deus et homo. God and man. God needs man in order to become conscious, just as he needs limitation in time and space. Let us therefore be for him limitation in time and space,
an earthly tabernacle.
– Carl G. Jung
Some plausibly sorrowful lie
got me into this, maybe
one will get me out
– Franz Wright
Then evening came, and I thought
this world is like an ocean,
a watery expanse at dusk,
where a boatman rows
with unsteady hands.
– Chuya Nakahara
Don’t try to behave as though you were essentially sane and naturally good. We’re all demented sinners in the same cosmic boat – and the boat is perpetually sinking.
– Aldous Huxley
Misty morning,
fog in my eyes and ears.
The world breathes gray.
I close my eyes and dream.
– john zbigniew guzlowski
grass
withering
under waves of heat
– Basho
If you want to gain any real benefit from [Buddhist teachings], you have to let them stretch your own lived experience.
– Larry Rosenberg
Sometimes the only way you can deliver truth to a loved one is to start from deep inside, let it rise up through the chest and out the mouth, and then waft downward to the earth, the rug, a lap.
– Anne Lamott
Ask your questions, but then leave a lot of space so I can bring you something real, something more radical than the truths your mind thinks it already knows.
—soul to my inquisitive self
– McCall Erickson
I think what we have metabolized as normal is deeply frightening.
– Dahlia Lithwick
Exercise is a long term investment in your brain health.
– Dan Go
Boys do not kiss boys. They catch frogs.
– Grant Chemidlin
We cannot do this work justice in colonial language(s)—and so, we invent new practices. And so, the immersion of image.
– Summer Farah
“Don’t push the river,” my Zen teacher says to pull me back when he sees my mind wander off in search of a someday. “Let the future come to you.” Ready or not, it does. It toddles forward on its first step, teeters on a threshold for one agonizing instant, then turns and waves bye-bye. Goodbye sweet baby; hello sweet girl.
When I occupy that instant, any instant, my heart’s fullness reminds me that here is everything and everything is here. This is how I would live if I had mastery of myself – without wasting one sideways glance at what was or what has yet to be.
– Karen Maezen Miller
The social rewards for going with the crowd are felt long before the benefits of going against it are gained.
– Shane Parrish
A well paid job. A nice car. A big house. A luxury holiday.
The things we’ve been told our whole life to strive for are the things driving our life support systems toward collapse.
Degrowth means striving for goals that enable humans to keep on living on this planet.
– @ClimateDad77
seasonal crossroads
a hawk on the power line
supervising all
– Jason Gould
my own shadow
in the winter sun
blocking my way
– Kijo
Somewhere between ‘I love you’ and ‘but’ is mankind, a giant loneliness strolling through an even greater loneliness.
– Negar Emrani (trans. by Kaveh Akbar)
I don’t “believe” Jung or “believe in” his ideas. His ideas are valuable because they are so good to work with and against. Good ideas, like Jung’s, allow the widest play for thought.
– James Hillman
The main pathology of later years is our idea of later years. It is your own youth and a culture whose ideas derive from youth that can make your old age morbid. After fifty or sixty another therapy begins—the therapy of ideas.
– James Hillman
knobs, switches, levers—
i can set them to do
whatever i want,
but your inner workings
are a mystery to me
– @TankaDaily
Hush now, Sometimes words are dangerous things. Inventing chaos. Where none was intended.
– Brian Patten
It’s actually totally insane that absolutely no scammers abroad have figured out that the one thing we don’t call each other in the English speaking world is “dear.”
– Max Wittert
When we arrived
at the prison
for the poetry reading,
they took our shoelaces.
But they gave them back.
after the reading. Something about
weaponizing shoelaces. Nothing
about weaponizing poetry.
– Paul Hostovsky
Life doesn’t always get better.
But you do.
You get stronger.
You get wiser.
You get softer.
With tattered wings you rise.
And the world watches in wonder
at the breathless beauty of
a human who survived life.
– L.R. Knost
There shall be no more death, Because we have already seen all that, It’s old and we are tired of it, And now we need something new, And this new thing is Eternal Life
– Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
How much future the depths carry!
– @RedBookJung
Remember
that you are
song walking.
– Heidi Barr
Breakfast
Oh hush up
about the
Future: one
morning it
will appear,
right there on
your breakfast
plate, and you’ll
yell “Take it
back,” pounding
the table.
But there won’t
be any
waiters.
– Everette Maddox
A NOTE FROM THE TRANSLATOR
Thunder only happens when it’s raining.
– STEVIE NICKS
– Anne Carson
NEWFOUNDLAND DOG EARS HAIKU
This beautiful big
black dog’s innocent floppy
ears are like the rain.
– Caroline Knox
Let us always have a vast condom within us to protect the health of our soul amid the filth into which it is plunged.
– Flaubert
The Angels are Reading You
There are 50,000 writers this very minute writing out of their hearts and brains and souls at full throttle.
Somewhere the angels are reading as fast as they can.
Don’t worry.
If you’re not read in this world, you’re read in the next.
– john zbigniew guzlowski
It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet
in soul.
– Sofya Kovalevskaya
The sea, the snotgreen sea, the
scrotumtightening sea.
– James Joyce
We can recognize ourselves as part of the community of beings forever coming to know, forever unlearning what we thought was reality because we’re growing. You’re not growing if you know everything.
– Kamilah Majied
Economics lesson of the day.
Those two girls are not upset at the ice cream guy’s inflation.
They are upset at the ice cream guy’s price gouging.
– Andy Perrin
Jaguar shade
A chlorophyll canopy of life
light phased and harnessed
raging chemistry of growth and form
Warm and wet, an invitation, to flourish
Haven to reptiles, amphibians, insects
An avian & mammalian cacophony
In the shadow, Jaguar stretches
Feline perfection
– Matt Guntrip
In the cold night, in this place I didn’t ask to inhabit.
How did I end up here? What wind blew me
off course, took me from heart and home?
– Donika Kelly
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
That’s what the twentieth century was, a kind of windstorm-scouring of all we thought was knowledge, and truth, and ours—until it became too strong for us, or we too weak for it, and “the self replaced the soul as the fist of survival” (Fanny Howe).
– Christian Wiman
people are always saying “get therapy” two people who have actually had too much therapy and need to do two years of a brutal physical labor job instead Genuinely no more therapy-speak and obsessing over the supposed intricacies of your average mind for you get your ass on the Alaskan salmon fishing boat
– [electroshocktherapist-deactivat]
The therapist, after a deeply upsetting investigation of normality at this time and place, was bound to conclude that a normal person, functioning well on the upper levels of a prosperous, industrialized society, can hardly hear his conscience at all.
– Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
The moon and the flowers,
forty-nine years,
… … walking around, wasting time.
– Issa
An evening of expected rain. Out the window clouds
lifted their skirts and the wind poured in. We were the
mothers lingering over the dessert tray, placing the sweets
in our mouths, one by one. We were the soothers and givers,
keepers of children and men. Those days, our skin bunched
up at the bra line, eyelids gathering like crinoline as it folds.
Yet standing there at the table, there was nothing in the world
we were in want of, not even the loves that had escaped us.
Whatever we suffered, we let go of willingly. To know we
were not the same women as before did not pain us. When
the others spoke their voices swept over us like bees
hovering over lilacs. Outside, lights strobed over the
Hudson; we watchedma white boat riding the crest of a wave,
headed to sea. Wemfelt an ache we realized was happiness,
almost unbearable.
– J. Mae Barizo
In The White Sky
by William Stafford
Many things in the world have
already happened. You can
go back and tell about them.
They are part of what we
own as we speed along
through the white sky.
But many things in the world
haven’t yet happened. You help
them by thinking and writing and acting.
Where they begin, you greet them
or stop them. You come along
and sustain the new things.
Once, in the white sky there was
a beginning, and I happened to notice
and almost glimpsed what to do,
But now I have come far
to here, and it is away back there.
Some days, I think about it.
Words In A Certain Appropriate Mode
by Hayden Carruth
It is not music, though one has tried music.
It is not nature, though one has tried
The rose, the bluebird, and the bear.
It is not death, though one has often died.
None of these things is there.
In the everywhere that is nowhere
Neither the inside nor the outside
Neither east nor west nor down nor up
Where the loving smile vanishes, vanishes
In the evanescence from a coffee cup
Where the song crumbles in monotone
Neither harmonious nor inharmonious
Where one is neither alone Nor not alone,
where cognition seeps
Jactatively away like the falling tide
If there were a tide, and what is left
Is nothing, or is the everything that keeps
Its undifferentiated unreality, all
Being neither given nor bereft
Where there is neither breath nor air
The place without locality, the locality
With neither extension nor intention
But there in the weightless fall
Between all opposites to the ground
That is not a ground, surrounding
All unities, without grief, without care
Without leaf or star or water or stone
Without light, without sound
anywhere, anywhere. . .
EXPERIMENT IN INVISIBILITY
Today I held two bananas
over each of my shoulders
and presented myself
as a quotation.
I’ve been a cry for help mostly,
sometimes a joke.
When you stirred from
your sleep you wanted breakfast
but it was too late.
I had become the urgent
prayers of a desperate pilot.
I had become a marriage
proposal blown by a strong arctic
wind across Lake Ontario.
– Zachary Schomburg