When I travel, I carry around a notebook with me. I use notebooks a lot because my brain tends to live in the moment. I’m always afraid of forgetting something.
– Lydia Davis
Even these people have become more cowardly, which wouldn’t be so bad if they were conscious of it. But I think they really aren’t conscious of it, and that’s what so depressing. Eventually will have nothing but people who aren’t conscious of it.
– Fassbinder
because if I start to believe
I actually deserve love,
I’d have to find
unacceptable all
those incapable of
giving it.
– Sierra DeMulder
The poem does desire–it desires the freedom of new futures.
– Lisa Robertson
The formula for originality is very simple—put together two things that were not together before.
– Orhan Pamuk
Let us be blyth and glad,
My friendis all, I pray.
To be pensive and sad
Na-thing it helps us may.
Therefore put quite away
All heaviness of thocht:
Thoch we murne nicht and day
It will avail us nocht.
– Dunbar
Day hath not strength nor the night shade enough
To make love whole and fill his lips with ease,
As some bee-builded cell
Feels at filled lips the heavy honey swell.
– Algernon Charles Swinburne
He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld. He did not know where to seek it or how: but a premonition which led him on told him that this image would, without any overt act of his, encounter him.
– James Joyce
I too am like that pattern. Unwanted and admittedly
beautiful.
– Robin Gow
All thirty-nine years of me are tired, but what I know is this: my smile is undefeated. My tragedy will not win. I have bad days, but my good ones are stronger.
– Rudy Francisco
If we already know something it can trap us. When we dare to be in the unknown (despite the uncertainty) engagements will be given to us and freshness as if a window had been opened and we can breathe, take heart and dare to become.
– Gunilla Norris
He had no particular area of interest: in avoiding specific goals he had avoided specific limitations. For the time being the world, life itself, could be his chosen field.
– Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road
Through all the ages poets and artists have often been prophets, because their work, or the material for it, comes to them from the same depths of the collective unconscious in which the major transformations of a particular era are in process of creation.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
Real conversation occurs at the frontier between what we think is us, and what we think is other than us.
– David Whyte
When one does not live a good real life, one begins to create another imaginary world within one’s mind, for that world is better than nothing.
– Anton Chekhov
An unreal world was much bigger than a real world, and there was more than enough room in it to be yourself and not yourself at the same time.
– Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1
Life is like an ever-shifting kaleidoscope
– a slight change, and all patterns alter.
– Sharon Salzberg
The higher we are placed,
the more humbly we should walk.
– Marcus Tullius Cicero
Losing an illusion makes you wiser than finding a truth.
– Ludwig Börne
If you want attention, make people angry.
– James Pierce
Those who are esteemed umpires of taste, are often persons who have acquired some knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures and have an inclination for whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they are selfish and sensual. Their cultivation is local, as if you should rub a log of dry wood in one spot to produce fire, all the rest remaining cold. Their knowledge of the fine arts is some study of rules and particulars, or some limited judgment of color or form which is exercised for amusement or for show. It is a proof of the shallowness of the doctrine of beauty, as it lies in the minds of our amateurs, that men seem to have lost the perception of the instant dependence of form upon soul. There is no doctrine of forms in our philosophy. We were put into our bodies, as fire is put into a pan, to be carried about; but there is no accurate adjustment between the spirit and the organ, much less is the latter the germination of the former. So in regard to other forms, the intellectual men do not believe in any essential dependence of the material world on thought and volition. Theologians think it a pretty air-castle to talk of the spiritual meaning of a ship or a cloud, of a city or a contract, but they prefer to come again to the solid ground of historical evidence; and even the poets are contented with a civil and conformed manner of living, and to write poems from the fancy, at a safe distance from their own experience. But the highest minds of the world have never ceased to explore the double meaning, or, shall I say, the quadruple, or the centuple, or much more manifold meaning, of every sensuous fact: Orpheus, Empedocles, Heraclitus, Plato, Plutarch, Dante, Swedenborg, and the masters of sculpture, picture, and poetry. For we are not pans and barrows, nor even porters of the fire and torchbearers, but children of the fire, made of it, and only the same divinity transmuted, and at two or three removes, when we know least about it. And this hidden truth, that the fountains whence all this river of Time, and its creatures, floweth, are intrinsically ideal and beautiful, draws us to the consideration of the nature and functions of the Poet, or the man of Beauty, to the means and materials he uses, and to the general aspect of the art in the present time.
– Emerson
There are people who actually believe that politicians are more powerful than artists, what a bizarre lie.
– Amiri Baraka
What do you call it, when someone, hears the truth, sees the truth, but still believes the lies?
– Keanu Reeves
My secular father’s only strong spiritual directive: Don’t be an asshole, and make sure everybody eats.
– Anne Lamott
Nature teaches us simplicity and contentment, because in its presence we realize we need very little to be happy.
– Mark Coleman
So, then, now you know your task: to become what the gods want, not what your parents want, not what your tribe wants, but what the gods want, and what your psyche will support if consciousness so directs.
– James Hollis
Dante saw Devils where I see none – I see only good.
– William Blake
I learned to go into business only with people whom I like, trust, and admire.
– Warren Buffett
They weren’t real travelers: they left in order to return. And they were relieved when they got back, with a sense of having fulfilled an obligation.
– Olga Tokarczuk
New ideas, even our own, do not quickly conquer our sympathies. We must first get accustomed to them.
– Lev Shestov, All Things Are Possible
Don’t offer a lecture to a person who needs a hug.
– cindy.writer@
If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place.
– Eckhart Tolle
I don’t mean to sound mystical, except inasmuch as there is a persistent, insistent mystery at the center of our existence, which art both derives from and sustains. This mystery is not, in any ultimate sense, explicable to anyone, but it is available to everyone who will not actively resist those moments when the self and all it suffers are finished—again, in both senses of the term. It may happen in art, your own or that of others. It may happen in love, grand or minor. It may happen at any moment in life when, “with an eye made quiet by the power / Of harmony, and the deep power of joy” (Wordsworth), we cease to be ourselves and become, paradoxically, more ourselves. Our souls.
– Christian Wiman
It’s not like you’re a prisoner, I said. You’re free to walk out of your turret room and down the spiral staircase and through the antechamber and into the foyer and out the front door and past the rosemary and lavender bushes and into the hedge maze and down the cobblestoned streets and out into the world.
– Dina Guidubaldi
For broken dreams, the cure is, dream again and deeper.
– C.S. Lewis
I believe that the spirits are your parents and their parents and their parents and their parents and they are in your bloodstream, and they run through your body constantly. Because they want you to live on, because they want to live on. And they’re trying all the time to tell you shit and if you just spend a few minutes listening to yourself, you would hear them.
– Gil Scott-Heron
The idea of liberation through the suppression of desire is the greatest foolishness ever conceived by the human mind.
– Emil Cioran
This is the answer!
The answer is not in getting and keeping, but in getting and giving. The answer is not in saving and preserving, but in growing and changing.
The answer is not in making things stop, but in making things go. The answer is not in covering and hiding, but in touching and sharing.
The answer is not in thinking, but in feeling.
The answer is not in death, but love.
Not death, but life.
Not death!
– Theodore Sturgeon
The actual meeting of man with God and God with man is the very crown and culmination of what we can do with our human life here on earth.
– Rufus Jones
Out of evil, much good has come to me. By keeping quiet, repressing nothing, remaining attentive, and by accepting reality, taking things as they are, and not as I wanted them to be, by doing all this, unusual knowledge has come to me, and unusual powers as well, such as I could never have imagined before. I always thought that when we accepted things they overpowered us in some way or other. This turns out not to be true at all, and it is only by accepting them that one can assume an attitude towards them.
– Carl Jung, Alchemical Studies
Every silence is a magic space with a hidden rite, the womb of a summoning word, and an essential detail of antisilence.
– Roberto Juarroz
Reading
by A.R. Ammons
It’s nice
after dinner
to walk down
to the beach
and find
the biggest thing
on earth
relatively calm.
Never cut what you can untie.
– Robert Frost
If the structure does not permit dialogue the structure must be changed.
– Paulo Freire
Here it is: the new way of living with the world inside of us so we cannot lose it, and we cannot be lost. You and me are us and them, and it and sky.
– Ada Limon
THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.
– Thomas Paine
Tell me a story.
In this century, and moment, of mania,
Tell me a story.
Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.
The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.
Tell me a story of deep delight.
– Robert Penn Warren
Our hands imbibe like roots, so I place them on what is beautiful in this world. And I fold them in prayer, and they draw from the heavens, light.
– St. Francis of Assisi
God’s Grief
Great parent
who must have started out
with such high hopes.
What magnitude of suffering,
the immensity of guilt,
the staggering despair.
A mind the size of the sun,
burning with longing,
a heart huge as a gray whale
breaching, streaming
seawater against the pale sky.
Man god or beast god,
god that breathes in every pleated leaf,
throat sac of frog, pinfeather and shaft—
god of plutonium and penicillin, drunk
sleeping on the subway grate,
god of Joan of Arc, god of Crazy Horse,
Lady Day, bringing us to our knees,
god of Houdini with hands
like a river, of Einstein, regret
running thick in his veins,
god of Stalin, god of Somoza,
god of the long march,
the Trail of Tears,
the trains,
god of Allende and god of Tookie,
the strawberry picker, fire in his back,
god of midnight, god of winter,
god of rouged children sold
with a week’s lodging
and airfare to Thailand,
god in trouble, god at the end of his rope—
sleepless, helpless—
desperate god, frantic god, whale heart
lost in the shallows, beached
on the sand, parched, blistered, crushed
by gravity’s massive weight.
– Ellen Bass
It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry ‘I could have thought of that’ is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn’t, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too.
– Douglas Adams
“The light works,“ he said, indicating the window, “the gravity works,” he said, dropping a pencil on the floor. “Anything else we have to take our chances with.”
– Douglas Adams
Shifting the Sun
When your father dies, say the Irish,
you lose your umbrella against bad weather.
May his sun be your light, say the Armenians.
When your father dies, say the Welsh,
you sink a foot deeper into the earth.
May you inherit his light, say the Armenians.
When your father dies, say the Canadians,
you run out of excuses.
May you inherit his sun, say the Armenians.
When your father dies, say the French,
you become your own father.
May you stand up in his light, say the Armenians.
When you father dies, say the Indians,
he comes back as the thunder.
May you inherit his light, say the Armenians.
When your father dies, say the Russians,
he takes your childhood with him.
May you inherit his light, say the Armenians.
When your father dies, say the English,
you join his club you vowed you wouldn’t.
May you inherit his sun, say the Armenians.
When your father dies, say the Armenians,
your sun shifts forever.
And you walk in his light.
– Diana Der-Hovanessian
Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house. We could not, so help us God, do otherwise.
– Father Dan Berrigan
So Death blows his little fucking trumpet, Big Deal…
– Larry Levis
The Drink
I am always interested in the people in films who have just had a drink thrown in their faces. Sometimes they react with uncontrollable rage, but sometimes- my favorites they do not change their expressions at all. Instead they raise a handkerchief or napkin and calmly dab at the offending liquid, as the hurler jumps to her feet and storms away. The other people at the table are understandably uncomfortable. A woman leans over and places her hand on the sleeve of the man’s jacket and says, “David, you know she didn’t mean it.” David answers, “Yes,” but in an ambiguous tone—the perfect adult response. But now the orchestra has resumed its amiable and lively dance music, and the room is set in motion as before. Out in the parking lot, however, Elizabeth is setting fire to David’s car. Yes, this is a contemporary film.
– Ron Padgett
If we argue, I say ‘Thank you,’ because owing to the courtesy of your taking a different point of view, I understand what I mean.
– Alan Watts
There is death in life, and it astonishes me that we pretend to ignore this: death, whose unforgiving presence we experience with each change we survive because we must learn to die slowly. We must learn to die: That is all of life.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
How slow life is
How violent, hope
– Apollinaire
Rejoicing in ordinary things is not sentimental or trite. It actually takes guts. Each time we drop our complaints and allow everyday good fortune to inspire us, we enter the warrior’s world.
– Pema Chödrön
My poems are the pre-death melodies of swans […]
– Nilgün Marmara
Man’s condition is tragic… For animals, life is all there is; for man, life is an irreversible question mark, for man has never found, nor will ever find, any answers. Life not only has no meaning; it can never have one.
– Emil Cioran
You cannot be a light to yourself if you are in the dark shadows of authority, of dogma, of conclusion.
– Krishnamurti
A little less hypocrisy and a little more self-knowledge can only have good results in respect for our neighbor; for we are all too prone to transfer to our fellows the injustice and violence we inflict upon our own natures.
– C.G. Jung
Notice what you notice.
– Allen Ginsberg
After-Glow
by Ivor Gurney
(To F. W. Harvey)
Out of the smoke and dust of the little room
With tea-talk loud and laughter of happy boys,
I passed into the dusk. Suddenly the noise
Ceased with a shock, left me alone in the gloom,
To wonder at the miracle hanging high
Tangled in twigs, the silver crescent clear.
Time passed from mind. Time died; and then we were
Once more at home together, you and I.
The elms with arms of love wrapped us in shade
Who watched the ecstatic west with one desire,
One soul uprapt; and still another fire
Consumed us, and our joy yet greater made:
That Bach should sing for us, mix us in one
The joy of firelight and the sunken sun.
It’s tired of hearing
joy is possible. It wants joy.
– K. Iver
Too many people want theory to be a manual.
– @tamaranopper
I think memory is the most important asset of human beings. It’s a kind of fuel.
– Haruki Murakami
Progress is a pure illusion, it occurs
only in the sphere of matter, but the
spirit undeviatingly degrades. What
our contemporaries consider as
achievements are actually shameful
vices… The end of the modern
world is just the end of an illusion.
– René Guénon
Man, who has moved away from his center, is now imprisoned in an area where time reigns. He will never again be able to reach the unique point where everything is viewed in its eternal appearance.
– René Guénon
There is so much effort put into, understandably, trying to get jobs that provide employer-sponsored benefits. But the thing is, employers are not legally required to offer a lot of these benefits and they are often used as bargaining chips to curb labor militancy.
– @tamaranopper
PENELOPE AND ODYSSEUS
Not the moment when he slays the suitors
in the palace, their wild cries thicker
than history. Not the moment
when he shows them all his great deeds,
the dark scars where they tied him
from the Sirens.
Not the moment someone touches him
in wonder
and feels Hector’s death,
the flames of Troy, no land.
Not any of those moments. No.
Not those but the moment
he stands face to face with only her
and takes off the last of his armor
and she comes to him and touches his shoulder.
History is what happens
when we step out of the myths
and see the real mess standing before us.
Love is what happens after that.
– Joseph Fasano
one of these days, I will get jungian active imagination into the water supply around here,
get it the recognition it deserves as a weirdly non-linear psyche-untangling superpower
– River Kenna
no cell reception
I walk into the future
use skills from my past
– @hegelincanada
I wonder
how our
psychoanalytic history
would have
unfolded if
a theoretical
truce happened.
Freud and Ferenczi
Freud and Tausk
Freud and Jung
– Rachel newcombe
summer rides
upon the edge
of a drenched
spring day
where blue skies
meet green hills
clouds sailing
overhead
attached to
invisible masts
as the earth spins
in cosmic alignment
– @DeepSouldiver
MY FATHER
PHOTOGRAPHED WITH FRIENDS
This is my father photographed with friends, when he was young;
unsettled on the steps of a wooden porch, and the one
who lived there elegant beside him. They and the others
hopefully casual in the face of the deciding camera,
the judgments of which are unfeeling, but can be swayed.
And I, as in some later picture of myself,
look for a person identified beyond doubt, and knowing that he
is none of the ones that he is not, yet still unsure,
under the features composed and trusting, who is there.
As if the decision were long and legal when handed down,
hard to be read and truly rendered in such a case.
And hard, in the face, to find our usual, pitiful ends.
God sweeten the bitter judgments of our lives. We wish so much.
– William Bronk
There is something dead between us,
so keep it with you—
Just think wherever you go, that I
was also there.
– Kishwar Naheed
TO BEGIN WITH
Monday
yawns wide
as the week opens its mouth.
– Humberto Ak’abal, (translated by Michael Bazzett)
sunset glow
my shadow lengthens
homewards
– Nitu Yumnam
Amor Vincit Omnia
Some nights, we lived that way: like a horse
carrying his rider, unseen, into a village —
There was nothing to do there but memorize
each other.
Returning, we smelled of where we’d been:
the markets, the metal troughs, the trees,
the hands that touched our heads.
– Richie Hofmann
The upside of polarization is engagement.
– Vince Fakhoury Horn
These Heroics
by Leonard Cohen
If I had a shining head
and people turned to stare at me
in the streetcars;
and I could stretch my body
through the bright water
and keep abreast of fish and water snakes;
if I could ruin my feathers
in flight before the sun;
do you think that I would remain in this room,
reciting poems to you,
and making outrageous dreams
with the smallest movements of your mouth?
Increasingly I think of poetry as a theatre of voices, not as coming from a single ‘I’ or from any one position. I want to imagine voices different from my own.
– Adrienne Rich
Just before the ocean that river
turns on its back and side and slowly
invites the world and the air and the sky,
trying to give away everything, everything.
– William Stafford
It has come to this: I’m sitting under a tree
beside a river
on a sunny morning.
It’s an insignificant event
and won’t go down in history.
It’s not battles and pacts,
where motives are scrutinized,
or noteworthy tyrannicides.
And yet I’m sitting by this river, that’s a fact.
And since I’m here
I must have come from somewhere,
and before that
I must have turned up in many other places,
exactly like the conquerors of nations
before setting sail.
Even a passing moment has its fertile past,
its Friday before Saturday,
its May before June.
Its horizons are no less real
than those that a marshal’s field glasses might scan.
This tree is a poplar that’s been rooted here for years.
The river is the Raba; it didn’t spring up yesterday.
The path leading through the bushes
wasn’t beaten last week.
The wind had to blow the clouds here
before it could blow them away.
And though nothing much is going on nearby,
the world is no poorer in details for that.
It’s just as grounded, just as definite
as when migrating races held it captive.
Conspiracies aren’t the only things shrouded in silence.
Retinues of reasons don’t trail coronations alone.
Anniversaries of revolutions may roll around,
but so do oval pebbles encircling the bay.
The tapestry of circumstance is intricate and dense.
Ants stitching in the grass.
The grass sewn into the ground.
The pattern of a wave being needled by a twig.
So it happens that I am and look.
Above me a white butterfly is fluttering through the air
on wings that are its alone,
and a shadow skims through my hands
that is none other than itself, no one else’s but its own.
When I see such things, I’m no longer sure
that what’s important
is more important than what’s not.
– Wislawa Szymborska
What’s wrong! Moustached in flowered frocks they shake:
By now, all’s wrong. In everyone there sleeps
A sense of life lived according to love.
To some it means the difference they could make
By loving others, but across most it sweeps
As all they might have done had they been loved.
That nothing cures. An immense slackening ache,
As when, thawing, the rigid landscape weeps,
Spreads slowly through them—that, and the voice above
Saying Dear child, and all time has disproved.
– Philip Larkin, Faith Healing
The Way To The Temple
by Wang Wei
Translated by Sam Hamill
Searching for Gathered Fragrance Temple:
miles of mountains rise into clouds,
ancient trees darken the narrow trail.
Where is that mountain temple bell?
Snow melt crashes down on boulders,
the sun grows cold in the pines before
it drowns in the lake. Keep your karma
in good working order: many dragons lie in wait.
To go back into the wild is to become sour, astringent, crabbed, unfertilized, unpruned, tough, resilient, and every spring shockingly beautiful in bloom.
– Gary Snyder
and every year their leaves would steal / a little more color off our mouths
– Rewa Zeinati
I understand the impulse to want to transcend the limitations of tradition.
But to do that well you have to deeply understand the tradition you’re transcending, otherwise you’ll fail to include the functional engine driving these adaptive traditions.
– @VinceFHorn
Public toilets have a duty to be accessible, poetry does not.
– Geoffrey Hill
The world sits up
and wonders if it’s Tuesday.
The last time it looked
it seemed to be Monday,
and that would make this Tuesday.
But it doesn’t really matter.
Days are like single dandelions
in a field of glory.
– john zbigniew guzlowski
You have to finish things — that’s what you learn from, you learn by finishing things.
– Neil Gaiman
Garden State
by Margaret Ray
The world smells green & wet & today I
am in a postlapsarian good mood
as I meander by the Raritan canal,
no longer moving in a deadly torpor
like a winter fly, but thinking once again
(the warming weather) about sex in a good way,
how all those smells you’re supposed to be ashamed of
or wash away smell good once you know a thing or two,
& it’s finally humid enough, this second day
after the rains, it is spring in New Jersey,
I itch my eyes freely & blink down on gnats
that seem determined to die in my field of
so-close-I-can’t-see-them, & people are out,
look at all their beautiful bodies, so many
ankles & knees, clicking whizz of bike wheels,
car exhaust hanging in the thick air,
helmets pressing sweaty hair to sticky foreheads,
a racket of motors on the other side of these trees,
early evening: the light just now is furtive, holy,
this is no prologue but the thing itself, the mud
& the grease & the grass & the wet asphalt
on one of those steaming, streaming, sunlit evenings
after a week of rain that brought out the frogs
to cover the road up the hill. There they were.
No one knew where they were going.
When Rosa Luxembourg drew attention to colonialism in South Africa, Lenin scoffed. It was “non-Marxist” to discuss colonialism; getting the Party in power was key. He worried that her focus on colonialism distracted from that.
– Alina Stefanescu
Poetry, the best of it, is lunar and is concerned with the essential insanities. Journalism is solar (there are numerous newspapers named The Sun, none called The Moon) and is devoted to the inessential.
– Tom Robbins
The sky takes you out into the cosmos, reminding you that you are very tiny but can experience celestial wonders and oceans of love here, even just slogging along together beneath a perfectly ordinary sky.
– Anne Lamott
If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them.
– Thomas Merton
sturmfrei
(adj.) the freedom of not being watched by a parent or superior; being alone at a place and having the ability to do what
you want
/’shtUrm-frI / german
We shouldn’t be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas.
– Noam Chomsky
The one whom I used to call
my life, my life
In the end, that beloved
made me lifeless.
– Khalid Sharif
I was sitting home alone one night in L.A
Watching old Cronkite
on the seven o’clock news
It seems there was an earthquake that
Left nothing but a Panama hat
And a pair of old Greek shoes
Didn’t seem like much was happening
So I turned it off and went to
Grab another beer
Seems like every time you turn around
There’s another hard-luck story
That you’re gonna hear
And there’s really nothing anyone can say
And I never did plan to go anyway
To Black Diamond Bay.
– Bob Dylan
If I were but the west wind, I would follow you;
– Sophie Jewett
Love is never a fulfillment. Life is never a thing of continuous bliss. There is no paradise. Fight and laugh and feel bitter and feel bliss: and fight again. Fight, fight. That is life.
– D.H. Lawrence
Heat Wave
by Lee Young-Ju
Translated by Jae Kim
Only as an old man did he hear the old saying that a beardless person neither ages nor dies. Shaving his beard with a shaky hand each morning, he discovered new dreams. If I were to be reborn,… please don’t let me be reborn. This was his first prayer. From the moment he learned to cry on his own, he’s been crying in the street. We all cry when were born, so please, I don’t want to cry again. This was his second prayer. He shaved his beard, dropped fake tears in his eyes, gathered his hands, and checked his vision. Nauseating light poured down. If I did have a secret—is it okay if he prays a third time?— it’s this: Day after day, I sweep leaves off the streets and wipe windows. I wonder how much time I’ve wasted outside. They say people’s hands were freed when they learned to walk upright. Why do all the flowers around here bloom from trash? Clearing the trash from under the magnolia tree, he thinks to himself: This day, in which sad prayers come spilling out of his hands, is too hot.
Any philosopher who wants to keep his contact with mankind should pervert his own system in advance to see how it will really look a few decades after adoption.
– Saul Bellow, Herzog
There are three motives for which we live; we live for the body, we live for the mind, we live for the soul.
– Wallace D. Wattles
Like any good shaman, professional baseball player, or politician, my mother always answered questions with questions.
– Sherman Alexie
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
Know all the theories, master all the techniques, but as you touch another human soul be just another human soul.
– C.G Jung
They were accustomed to being interrupted. Whoever was hungriest to speak, spoke. I wasn’t hungry in that same way. I was hungry to listen.
– Rachel Kushner
The media was the last place one should look for truth. A person was lucky to find the facts, let alone the truth.
– Jason Mott
When a man makes his thoughts pure, he no longer desires impure food.
– James Allen
The finest souls are those who gulped pain and avoided making others taste it.
– Nizar Qabbani
The robb’d that smiles, steals something from the thief.
– William Shakespeare
A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.
– Charles Péguy
Evil begins when you treat people like things.
– Terry Pratchett
You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself.
– John Steinbeck
I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself.
– Simone de Beauvoir
it is quite possible–overwhelmingly probable, one might guess–that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology.
– Noam Chomsky
a writer –
listens to vibrations
and translates into words
– Natalia Beshqoy
The closer you want to get to me, the better your values have to be
– Naval Ravikant
Let your mind and body rest, especially in the arms of deep quiet and solitude.
So often people will feel that it is only through action and keeping busy that change is made, remaining on the treadmill day in day out; running, running, running.
Often filling their nighttime space with electric lights, media jolts and lack of sleep; hardly daring to unplug themselves.
And yet it is rest that replenishes, sleep that heals and solitude that restrengthens.
It is in these times of sleep and rest that the body can focus on what needs fixing inside, it is where our emotional landscape grows in power, our mental ability gains space and clarity, and our psyche can process and digest all that has been experienced.
Rest is not a nothingness or a time waster.
It is a vital necessity for us to really glow in power, strength and ability.
Do not underestimate the work that happens in the dark, quiet stillness.
As it will feed you, nourish you and make you more whole…
– Brigit Anna McNeill
how is one supposed to proceed in a world where leaders give permission
to drop bombs on babies?
the vast majority of us don’t want this reality— and yet here we are
so we protest in the ways that we know how to protest and sometimes we distract ourselves so that we’re not overcome with sorrow
each day stepping forward
with despair, with hope
– daniel baylis
Your consciousness is a part of an infinitely original creative process.
– Jane Roberts
Sometimes you have to write the same poem twice. Once when you didn’t know any better and the second time when you stopped holding the hurt somebody else gave you.
– Ebony Stewart
If I were asked for a definition of myself, I would say that I am the one who waits; I investigate my surroundings, I interpret everything in terms of what I discover, I become sensitive.
– Frantz Fanon
the fact that you can’t do everything is not an excuse to do nothing
– Mary Annaïse Heglar
Forest ecosystems are not more complex than you think, they are more complex than you CAN think.
– Jack Ward Thomas
If you’ve lived this long and have not had to realise that – *everything*- where you live, what you read, the streets you walk, what you eat, what you feel, where you work, the climate you live in, and even the air you breathe is political, I have news for you: that’s privilege.
– Dr. Deepti Gurdasani
And the quality my poems navigate towards is the achievement of stillness, an arrest of attention in the midst of whatever is unfolding.
– Jenny George
Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.
– Aldous Huxley
Dispelling dread isn’t a matter of trying to forget about washing dishes. It is realizing that in actual fact you only have one dish to wash, ever: this one; only one step to take, ever: this one. And that is Zen.
– Alan Watts
Patience is an enormously supportive and even magical practice. It’s a way of completely shifting the fundamental human habit of trying to resolve things by either going to the right or the left, labeling things “good” or labeling them “bad.” It’s the way to develop fearlessness, the way to contact the seeds of war and the seeds of lasting peace—and to decide which ones we want to nurture.
– Pema Chodron
It has always been one of my main endeavors as a teacher to persuade the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.
– C. S. Lewis
Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart, squashed—then its lovely reek will be smelt in the hollow of the palm, it will be munched and rolled upon the tongue with relish; then, and only then, its rare flavor will be appreciated at its true worth and the broken and crushed parts will again come together in your mind and disclose the beauty of a unity to which you have contributed something of your own blood.
– Vladimir Nabokov
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
… is necessary always treat animals with kindness. You know this word, ‘kindness’?
I said that I did, and he said: “Never forget this word. Very good word and not exist in many languages. Not in French, for instance. French say ‘gentil’ but this not mean same thing. Not kind, kind come from kin, like family, like same thing. Kindness mean to treat like self.”
– Gurdjieff
But beyond self-care and the ability to (really) listen, the practice of doing nothing has something broader to offer us: an antidote to the rhetoric of growth. In the context of health and ecology, things that grow unchecked are often considered parasitic or cancerous. Yet we inhabit a culture that privileges novelty and growth over the cyclical and the regenerative.
– Jenny Odell, How To Do Nothing
Learning to think in patterns of relationships, in sensations divorced from the fixity of words, allows us to find hidden resources and the ability to make new patterns, to carry over patterns from one discipline to another. In short, we think personally, originally, and thus take another route to the thing we already know.
– Moshe Feldenkrais, Elusive Obvious
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 watched
a white boat riding the crest of a wave, headed to sea. We
felt an ache we realized was happiness, almost unbearable.
– J. Mae Barizo
Before
No shoes and a glossy
red helmet, I rode
on the back of my dad’s
Harley at seven years old.
Before the divorce.
Before the new apartment.
Before the new marriage.
Before the apple tree.
Before the ceramics in the garbage.
Before the dog’s chain.
Before the koi were all eaten
by the crane. Before the road
between us, there was the road
beneath us, and I was just
big enough not to let go:
Henno Road, creek just below,
rough wind, chicken legs,
and I never knew survival
was like that. If you live,
you look back and beg
for it again, the hazardous
bliss before you know
what you would miss.
– Ada Limon
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
In alchemy one goes through four stages of development: the nigredo, in which one experiences the darkness and depression of life; the albedo, in which one sees the brightness of things; the rubedo, where one discovers passion; and finally the citrino, where one appreciates the goldenness of life.
– Robert A. Johnson
The ability of so many people to live comfortably with the idea of capital punishment is perhaps a clue to how so many Europeans were able to live with the idea of the Holocaust: Once you accept the notion that the state has the right to kill someone and the right to define what is a capital crime, aren’t you halfway there?
– Roger Ebert
What do our feet rest against, what do our hands grasp? It might be good to begin liturgy with such questions.
– Daniel Berrigan
He stood at the gateway between two worlds, at the place where imagination passed into creation.
– Michael Bedard, The Green Man
Everything flows out and in; everything has its tides; all things rise and fall; the pendulum swing manifests in everything; the measure of the swing to the right, is the measure of the swing to the left; rhythm compensates.
– The Kybalion, The Three Initiates
H. sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.
– Joyce Carol Oates
All human lives are so profoundly and intricately entwined – those dead, those living, those generations yet to come – that the fate of all is the fate of each, and the hope of humanity rests in every heart and in every pair of hands.
– Dean Koontz
I wonder whether there will ever be enough tranquility under modern circumstances to allow our contemporary Wordsworth to recollect anything. I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.
– Saul Bellow
If some resentment or grudge is established in your body, you can take a great deal of the force away from it by not making it go through your mind, not dwelling on it. And in time it will go, but in itself it doesn’t matter. There’s an energy there which you can begin to learn to take to yourself. You can even begin, eventually, to learn to transform it. What we’re discussing is the beginning of this transformation.
– Helen Adie
Human beings are poor examiners, subject to superstition, bias, prejudice, and a PROFOUND tendency to see what they want to see rather than what is really there.
– M. Scott Peck
We speak often, and sentimentally, of being ‘enchanted’ by the natural world. But what if it’s the other way around? What if we are enchanted, literally, by the human world we live in? That seems entirely more likely – that the consumer world amounts to a kind of lulling spell, chanted tunefully and eternally by the TV, the billboard, the suburb. A spell that convinces us that the things we want most from the world are comfort, convenience, security. A spell that by now we sing to each other. A spell that, should it start to weaken, we try to strengthen with medication, with consumption, with noise. A slight frantic enchantment, one that has to get louder all the time to block out the troubling question constantly forming in the back of our minds: ‘Is this all there is?’
– Bill McKibben
Unaccented
God’s first language is silence.
His second, heat.
He learned mercy next,
though he still has trouble with the
pronunciations.
Then Aramaic, Igbo, Old High German.
God is a completist,
proud to understand every earthly prayer.
But if you’ve studied languages, you know
comprehension’s the easy part.
Much harder to say something back
without using
your mother tongue.
– Maureen Thorson
tender as dawn’s first hill-fire, and intense as instantaneous penetrating sense, in spring’s birth-hour, of other springs gone by.
– dante gabriel rossetti
People have a right to resist their own annihilation […]
– Arundhati Roy
Modern man is a prisoner who thinks he is free because he refrains from touching the walls of his dungeon.
– Nicolás Gómez Dávila
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
– Oscar Wilde
I wear the mask of
myself and very nearly
get away with it
– Cid Corman
Consumerism
Why is poetry beautiful?
Because it doesn’t sell.
Why doesn’t it sell?
Because it’s truthful.
Why is it truthful?
Because it’s terrifying.
Why is it terrifying?
Because it shows us.
What does it show us?
What they keep from us.
What do they keep from us?
That we’re poetry.
Why is that terrifying?
It’s free.
– Joseph Fasano
The more the drive toward life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive toward destruction; the more life is realized, the less is the strength of destructiveness. Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life.
– Erich Fromm
Who wants to live to be a hundred? What’s the point of it? A short life and a merry one is far better than a long life sustained by fear, caution and perpetual medical surveillance.
– Henry Miller
steer attention
withinward
hearken
to the heart of your heart
set soul seeking Spirit
– Eric Bond
Personal opinions, feelings, hopes, and beliefs about the stock market are usually wrong and often dangerous.
– William O’Neil
My big idea, I’ve spoken of re: the climate and ecological crisis, is we need to create a global forum, of concerned thinkers, influential people, scientists and activists. I mean everyone coming together, to produce a singular understanding of our situation.
– Stephen Barlow
Who put this laughing track in my crucifixion scene?
– Charles Simic
Still can’t get over the fact that it’s spelled, or styled, “unself-conscious.”
– Calvert Morgan
If you pull off a massive day of writing, be careful not to ruin the mood by actually reading it.
– Neil Renic
There are two kinds of therapists. Those who come with questions and are prepared to listen
Those who come with answers and are prepared to instruct
They are not the same
– Jonathan Shedler
All my lines end in doubt
I leave enough space at the end for prayer
– Albert Abonado
I am not very bright or very witty or very inventive after the sun goes down.
– Toni Morrison
WALKING
Walking takes longer than any other
known form of locomotion, except crawling.
Thus, it stretches time and prolongs life.
Life is already too short to waste on speed.
– Edward Abbey
Someday you will want to know and I might not be here, so this is how you were made. . It was a soft night near the back of June, clear, for a change, no rain. . Old women were out gathering healing herbs, fennel, dog rose and rhu. . Bonfires burned on all seven hills, drunken young men leapt through the flames. . Down in the bogs the foxfire glowed, will o’ the wisps edged the meadows. . In our bed my wife laughed out loud at the loving pleasure of being a woman. . Like any man, I suppose, I was proud, and we fell to our sleep both smiling. . You were created of passion and magic, in Scotland, on Mid-Summer’s Eve. . Here in the North, that augers you special, your mother and I believe.
– Young Dawkins
For example, this notion of effort. This word at first means something you strive for. But you understand at a certain point that the kind of effort you need to comprehend is different; that what is meant by effort is letting go. It is an effort because I have to struggle against what is ingrained in me about the idea of effort: I want to get something, to do something. Finally, after years of trying, I begin to understand that the nature of effort is to allow something to appear. This new meaning of effort has to do with relaxation. And it is really an effort to understand relaxation when all my training was to strive, to battle against, to chastise some aspect of myself.
– Paul Reynard
Our daimon is our tutelary and constant companion. It has been there from childhood to the present, but it is usually drowned out by the noise of our environment, the fears that haunt us, the “stories” that separate us, and the sundry distractions popular culture offers to help us avoid our own souls. Put simply, our daimon is our personal link to wisdom, to that which transcends ordinary ego consciousness. It embodies what is right for us, no matter how trying that summons will prove to the comfort motives of the ego.
– James Hollis
Every human character appears only once in the history of human beings. And so does every event of love.
– Isaac Bashevis Singer
You needn’t to search for any hole in the ground to look through into somewhere else. You can’t go neither forwards nor backwards into your daddy’s time nor your children’s if you have them. In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got. If there was any Fall, look there, if there was any Redemption, look there, and if you expect any Judgment, look there, because they all three will have to be in your time and your body and where in your time and your body can they be?
– Flannery O’Connor
Although many people strive to be perfect, those who become wise know that perfection is a kind of death, and that our weird imperfections actually keep us alive.
– Michael Meade
Why are women… so much
more interesting to men
than men are to
women?
– Virginia Woolf
The heat of autumn
is different from the heat of summer.
One ripens apples, the other turns them to cider.
– Jane Hirshfield
If I were asked to summarize my vision of things as briefly as possible, to reduce it to its minimum expression, instead of words I would write an exclamation point, a! definitive.
– E. M. Cioran
There is only light and energy.
Life only – god, only – in infinite display.
Only the eternal, ongoing, bubbly, forever now.
– Erich Schiffmann
I think we should see the fear of gays, drag queens, etc. as part of the same thing as defunding libraries, increasing cops, anti-homelessness, true crime—it’s all about demonizing all public space and culture.
It is much easier to control people when they are lonely, isolated, and do not experience anything outside of individualized, corporate-controlled spheres of influence.
It’s a self-feeding system. The less you are exposed to the diversity of experience inherent to public spaces, the more you want to replicate the tightly-controlled world you inhabit. The more scared you become. Thus more willing to support what replicates your privatized world.
– P.E. Moskowitz
The “Caucasian chalk circle,” as it’s called in a play by Bertolt Brecht, or the circle that the Yezidis can’t get out of, are part of much larger metaphors and have much more meaning than that. You can equate the circle with our prison, our mechanicality, our sleep. Each of us is bound by that circle, its illusion. The circle was real for the Yezidi. It was a psychological wall. We are all Yezidis, Devil worshippers. What do we worship? Money, power, sex, the illusion of life security? We’re trapped in it. It’s much bigger than just your family. Only something like the Work helps people who want to be free of these attachments. Gurdjieff says, “People are in prison, and they need the help of other people who have been in prison and escaped in order to get out.”
– Jerry Brewster, Spiritual Physics
The Untrustworthy Speaker
by Louise Gluck
Don’t listen to me; my heart’s been broken.
I don’t see anything objectively.
I know myself; I’ve learned to hear like a psychiatrist.
When I speak passionately,
that’s when I’m least to be trusted.
It’s very sad, really: all my life, I’ve been praised
for my intelligence, my powers of language, of insight.
In the end, they’re wasted—
I never see myself,
standing on the front steps, holding my sister’s hand.
That’s why I can’t account
for the bruises on her arm, where the sleeve ends.
In my own mind, I’m invisible: that’s why I’m dangerous.
People like me, who seem selfless,
we’re the cripples, the liars;
we’re the ones who should be factored out
in the interest of truth.
When I’m quiet, that’s when the truth emerges.
A clear sky, the clouds like white fibers.
Underneath, a little gray house, the azaleas
red and bright pink.
If you want the truth, you have to close yourself
to the older daughter, block her out:
when a living thing is hurt like that,
in its deepest workings,
all function is altered.
That’s why I’m not to be trusted.
Because a wound to the heart
is also a wound to the mind.
“How does distance look?” is a simple direct question. It extends from a spaceless within to the edge of what can be loved.
– Anne Carson
I did a road trip
all over my mind and heart
and
there you were
– Anne Carson
What would it be like
to live in a library
of melted books.
With sentences streaming over the floor
and all the punctuation
settled to the bottom as a residue.
It would be confusing.
Unforgivable.
A great adventure.
– Anne Carson
While slavery was common to all civilizations, only one civilization developed a moral revulsion against it: Western Civilization
Rather than be ashamed as Westerners, we should stand proud for having led the world out of a mentality where slavery was the norm.
– Ashley St. Clair
History has shown that when you’re in the game of subordinating individual freedom in the service of some imagined collective march toward progress, sexual freedom is rarely spared.
– @ARaderVon
My Library
My books remain on the shelves as I left them last year
but all the words have died.
I search for my favorite book,
Out of Place.
I find it lying lonely in a drawer,
next to the photo album and my old Nokia phone.
The pen inside the book is still intact,
but some ink drops have leaked.
Some words breathe its ink,
the pen like a ventilator
for a dozen patients:
Home, Jerusalem, the sea, Haifa,
the rock, the oranges, the sand,
the pigeon, Cairo, my mother,
Beirut, books, the rock, the sea, the sea.
– Mosab Abu Toha, My Library
What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else. The word adjective (epitheton in Greek) is itself an adjective meaning “placed on top,” “added, “appended, “imported, “foreign.” Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions but look again. These small imported mecha- nisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.
– Anne Carson
The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. – A precondition for reading good
books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.
– Schopenhauer
never forget
the flowers blooming
in the thorns and thickets
– Basho
Tension, restlessness, and exhaustion are created by endless attempts to be and do things in the so-called outside world. Our biology has no interest in holding onto these states and, given the chance, knows how to intelligently release them.
– Chris McKenna
Nietzsche once said that before the path can be followed, one must first have found the lantern. And the lantern can only be found after a conscientious submission of ego sovereignty and a purgatory of fear and trembling.
– James Hollis
As a therapist, one of my primary goals has been to shift my clients’ experience of anxiety from an unconscious trigger resulting in avoidance into a conscious cue for curiosity and exploration…In this way, anxiety becomes woven into a conscious narrative.
– Louis Cozolino
I have read millions of witticisms about the ignorance of the ancients who saw spirits everywhere: it seems to me that we who see them nowhere are much more foolish.
– Joseph de Maistre
The day you decide not to ask for things you like but rather to like things that happen, that day you become mature.
– Osho
If the personal unconscious is cleared up, there is no particular pressure, and you will not be terrorized; you stay alone, read, walk, smoke, and nothing happens, all is just so, you are right with the world.
– C.G. Jung
goldenrod fields . . .
the rags of curtains
blowing in the wind
– Gary LeBel
Dreams express the unconscious. Dreams are dynamic mosaics, composed of symbols, that express the movements, conflicts, interactions, and developments of the great energy systems within the unconscious.
– Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work
You always replace one illusion with another illusion.
Always…
So your wanting to be free from illusion is an impossibility. That itself is an illusion. Why do you want to be free from illusions? That’s the end of you.”
– U.G. Krishnamurti
Summer
by Robin Coste Lewis
Last summer, two discrete young snakes left their skin on my small porch, two mornings in a row. Being post-modern now, I pretended as if I did not see them, nor understand what I knew to be circling inside me. Instead, every hour I told my son to stop with his incessant back-chat. I peeled a banana. And cursed God—His arrogance, His gall—to still expect our devotion after creating love. And mosquitoes. I showed my son the papery dead skins so he could know, too, what it feels like when something shows up at your door—twice—telling you what you already know.
The neurologist gives us permission
to go to Rome: Live your lives.
We order cocktail shrimp at the hotel bar,
fries with a parmesan snow. The waiter fills
our flutes to the brim & we swim
in the golden liquid & sink into the leather sofa,
the delights so cliché the cliché the delight
we sing along & avoid eye contact
with the lounge singer: sha-la-la-la-la
two brown-eyed girls in love
dark lipstick on the rim of the glass
& the lounge singer starts Lady in Red
& we swoon & people around us eat their olives
from shallow dishes & we order dessert
to keep the night going, to keep
the sweetness in our mouths
– Seema Reza
I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people’s eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth.
– Sylvia Plath
In the carnival of life, happiness is the most authentic mask we can wear.
– William Shakespeare
Always listen to one who has nothing to gain from you.
– Arisotle
Modern people…have simply forgotten what a human being really is, so we have men like Nietzsche, Freud and Adler, who tell us what we are, quite mercilessly. We have to discover our shadow. Otherwise we are driven into a world war in order to see what beasts we are.
– CG Jung
Hope not built on reason brings disappointment only.
– Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
We must remember that this is not a bad world but a good world in the process of becoming.
– Wallace D. Wattles
It’s on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly.
– Claude Monet
The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
– Henri Bergson
Ambiguity is called a seed syllable when it becomes a starting point rather than a source of problems.
– Chögyam Trungpa
The truth of a thing is in the feel of it, not in the think of it.
– Stanley Kubrick
None of them cared for me; I sat feeling crushed and humiliated. And I said to myself, ‘Oh heavens, is this the companionship I sought?’
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
It is always the false that makes you suffer, the false desires and fears, the false values and ideas, the false relationships between people. Abandon the false and you are free of pain; truth makes happy, truth liberates.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
Into your hands will be placed the exact results of your own thoughts; you will receive that which you earn; no more, no less.
– James Allen
In a way, you are poetry material; You are full of cloudy subtleties I am willing to spend a lifetime figuring out. Words burst in your essence and you carry their dust in the pores of your ethereal individuality.
– Franz Kafka
They put the Ten Commandments in schools for the same reason they used to put Confederate statues in town squares–to show everyone who has the power in the community.
– Marko Kloos
How to beat the heat:
Step 1: Find an air-conditioned room.
Step 2: Make sure there are books.
Step 3: Stop, drop, and read.
– Literati Bookstore
The reason people do not get ahead in business is that they try to think up schemes to get their fellow men’s money instead of thinking up opportunities for service. The successful man gets interested in what he wants to do, and gets rid of things he is not interested in.
– Emmet Fox
Neither revolution nor reformation can ultimately change a society, rather you must tell a powerful new tale, one so powerful it sweeps away the old myths and becomes the new preferred story…
– Ivan Illich
You can see the trying times we’re collectively experiencing as a war on consciousness or as a graduation of it.
I choose the latter. I am at war with no one.
Every challenge that shows up on my path will be received as an opportunity to graduate my consciousness some more.
– Xavier Dagba
Half of life is lost in charming others. The other half is lost in going through anxieties caused by others. Leave this play. You have played enough.
– Rumi
The only way to expunge a wrong mental equivalent is to supply the opposite. Think the right thing. The right thought automatically expunges the wrong thought.
– Emmet Fox
They say, “You don’t go to a hospital looking for healthy people, don’t go to a church looking for a perfect people.” True, but if the people in the hospital aren’t getting any better, I’m gonna have questions…
– Joseph Reeder
God is not an object of senses but the feeling of feelings, the sound of silence, light of life, the essence of the world, and the taste of bliss.
– Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
The machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of men.
– Jorge Luis Borges
The feminine urge is to be an intellectual genius and study philosophy and greek literature and chemistry and know 7 languages and write poetry and paint still life and play the piano and live in multiple cities and be a muse.
– Rukhshana Arifa Zaara
Whatever your present environment may be, you will fall, remain, or rise with your thoughts, your Vision, your Ideal.
– James Allen
You can be motivated by something, you can be activated by someone, but you cannot be guided by anyone outside of you.
– Sathi Roy
If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.
– Henry David Thoreau
I blew rings that looked like halos. My lungs burned like seven hells, each one I helped make.
– Siaara Freeman
There’s nothing I dislike more than premature intellectual closure.
– Jim Holt
I don’t just want books, I want a hazardous amount, enough to fear them, be physically intimated by them.
– Dylan O’Sullivan
Excess of information goes hand in hand with a culture of forgetting. The mass of information produces a blind life with no possible roots or continuity.
– Jacques Ellul, The Technological Bluff
A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams.
– John Barrymore
If in the after life there is not music, we will have to import it.
– Doménico Cieri Estrada
Distance is the soul of the beautiful,
she had read, and she imagines an unknown planet
revolving in deep space, blue waves
in tender exile from the land.
Remorseless. Without witness.
If she could go there
she would possess nothing.
How beautiful the earth
might seem again from that distance.
How possible love.
– Laurie Sheck
Dependency may appear to be love because it is a force that causes people to fiercely attach themselves to one another. But in actuality it is not love; it is a form of antilove. It seeks to receive rather than to give. It nourishes infantilism rather than growth. It works to trap and constrict rather than to liberate. Ultimately it destroys rather than builds relationships, and it destroys rather than builds people.
– M. Scott Peck
Willing to change is only for smart people. The unconscious rules our lives, and the unconscious is made up of our beliefs, many of which are false even if we take them for granted. Having an attitude of being open to anything and everyone puts us in better conditions to continue growing. As Keynes once said, “the hardest thing in the world is not for people to accept new ideas, but to forget the old ones”; something similar to what Goethe thought: “Be careful what you learn because you cannot.” don’t forget it. “Being open to ”“unlearning”“ is absolutely essential for true learning to take place.” Often, what we think we know is what really blocks us from learning.
– Bertrand Russell
I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I’m doing.
– John Cage
Most misunderstandings in the world could be avoided if people would simply take the time to ask, “What else could this mean?”
– Shannon L. Alder
SOLSTICE
Each year, on this same date, the summer solstice comes.
Consummate light: we plan for it,
the day we tell ourselves
that time is very long indeed, nearly infinite.
And in our reading and writing, preference is given
to the celebratory, the ecstatic.
There is in these rituals something apart from wonder:
there is also a kind of preening,
as though human genius had participated in these arrangements
and we found the results satisfying.
What follows the light is what precedes it:
the moment of balance, of dark equivalence.
But tonight we sit in the garden in our canvas chairs
so late into the evening
why should we look either forward or backward?
Why should we be forced to remember:
it is in our blood, this knowledge.
Shortness of the days; darkness, coldness of winter.
It is in our blood and bones; it is in our history.
It takes genius to forget these things.
– Louise Glück
Much of the work of midlife is to tell the difference between those who are dealing with their issues through you and those who are really dealing with you.
– Richard Rohr
Do babies develop accents even before they can speak conventionally?
The short answer is yes… and these linguistic markers begin even sooner than you might think.
– Dan Wuori
There are hardly any exceptions to the rule that a person must pay dearly for the divine gift of the creative fire.
– CG Jung
A country upon which a news blackout is imposed will no longer have real political problems.
– Jacques Ellul, The Political Illusion
Rummaging through some old poems for ideas-surely I must have had some once?
Some people have an idea a day, others millions, still others are condemned to spend their life inside an idea, like a bubble chamber.
And these are probably the suspicious ones. Anyway, in poems are no ideas. No ideas in things, either—her name is Wichita.
– John Ashbery
The existing social order is a swindle and its cherished beliefs mostly delusions.
– George Orwell
It was June, and the world smelled of roses. The sunshine was like powdered gold over the grassy hillside.
– Maud Hart Lovelace
You are not so complex that a long walk won’t fix you.
– Dylan O’Sullivan
There have to be people who stand outside the gate and do not identify themselves with a class, with a name, with an ego, with a persona, with a role. And a society which cannot tolerate that is weak and in grave danger of dissolution. A society which can tolerate it is sure of itself inside. It doesn’t have to insist on everybody agreeing with the way you see things. That’s the nature of democracy: to say you have a right to differ.
– Alan Watts
But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the tears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears – dissolution, disappearance.
– Zadie Smith
I have no pleasure in any man who despises music. It is no invention of ours: it is a gift of God. I place it next to theology. Satan hates music: he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us.
– Martin Luther
In network terms being a lineage holder just means that you’re a verified node.
– @VinceFHorn
The goal of my therapy is eccentricity, which grows out of Jungian notion of individuation. Jung says, “You become what you are.” & nobody is square. We all have, as the Swiss say, a corner knocked off.
– James Hillman
A system made secure by the protective plating of humor and pretense always runs the risk of having its protection get out of hand. A relationship based on jokes invites jokes; jokes about anything — and jokes about anything are now and then bound to cut too close to the truth.
– Ken Kesey
I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.
– Baruch Spinoza
In the fields with which we are concerned knowledge exists only in lightning flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterwards.
– Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project
Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
– Jean-Paul Sartre
Though Jesus Christ is very hard to satisfy, He is very easy to please. Think of that and it will help you a little. He is very easy to please, but very hard to satisfy.
– George MacDonald
Awful as silence. Hark! the rushing snow!
The sun-awakened avalanche! whose mass,
Thrice sifted by the storm, had gathered there
Flake after flake, in heaven-defying minds
As thought by thought is piled, till some great truth
Is loosened, and the nations echo round,
Shaken to their roots, as do the mountains now.
– Percy Bysshe Shelley
Thoughts, like snow-flakes on some far-off mountain-side, go on accumulating till some great truth is loosened, and falls like an avalanche on the waiting world.
– The Illustrated London News
No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.
– Stanislaw Lec
Each snowflake in an avalanche pleads not guilty.
– Stanislaw J. Lec
Betrayal reveals the true face of a person; those who betray you show their true nature.
– Michel de Montaigne
It is necessary to keep one’s compass in one’s eyes and not in the hand, for the hands execute, but the eye judges.
– Michelangelo
Go as fast as you can, but never hurry. Remember that in the moment you begin to hurry you cease to be a creator and become a competitor; you drop back upon the old plane again.
– Wallace D. Wattles
The student continued, “How long must one remain in the dark” and I replied, “Until one can see in the dark,” and “Casting the burden enables one to see in the dark.”
– Florence Scovel Shinn
The new order contradicts reason so fundamentally that reason does not dare to doubt it. Even the consciousness of oppression fades. The more incommensurate become the concentration of power and the helplessness of the individual, the more difficult for him to penetrate the human origin of his misery.
– Max Horkheimer
The word priority came into the English language in the 1400s. It was singular. It meant the very first or prior thing. It stayed singular for the next five hundred years.
– Greg McKeown
Hate me for what I am, I do not care; atleast I’m not trying to be someone I’m not.
– Bob Marley
Believe in people, but believe in yourself a hundred time more.
– Osamu Tezuka
The goal of investment is to find situations where it is safe not to diversify.
– Charlie Munger
Remain there until you feel its certainty, until you reach the point of satisfaction, until you are convinced of its truth; and although the world may collapse around you, you will become that which you have assumed you are.
– Neville Goddard
Let go of the past and go for the future. Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.
– Henry David Thoreau
If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.
– George Orwell
Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.
– James Baldwin
A woman who is spiritual knows her power; she knows that everything she touches enhances and she can destroy someone’s life as easy as she can elevate it.
– Veskor Cassiopeia
What happens after death is so unspeakably glorious that our imagination and our feelings do not suffice to form even an approximate conception of it. The dissolution of our time-bound form in eternity brings no loss of meaning.
– C.G. Jung
This is the beginning—from “I” to “We”
– John Steinbeck
What do you want in your life?
Not the stepping stones to next year, or strategies or incremental level-ups:
What do you WANT?
– River Kenna
LATE SPRING
Coming into the high room again after years
after oceans and shadows of hills and the sounds of lies
after losses and feet on stairs
after looking and mistakes and forgetting
turning there thinking to find
no one except those I knew
finally I saw you
sitting in white
already waiting
you of whom I had heard
with my own ears since the beginning
for whom more than once
I have opened the door
believing you were not far
– W.S. Merwin
Wallace Stevens is beyond fathoming, he is so strange; it is as if he had
a morbid secret he would rather perish than disclose.
– Marianne Moore
Basil
There in Fiesole it was always fresh
In the laneway where the spry grandfather
Tipped you his smile in the earliest wash
Of sunlight, piling strawberries high and higher
In a fragile pyramid of edible air.
Light down the years, the same sun rinses your dark
Hair over and over with brightness where
You kneel to stir the earth among thyme and chard,
Rosemary and the gathering of mints,
The rough leaf picked for tea this summer noon,
The smooth one saved for pesto in the winter,
For the cold will come, though you turn to me soon,
Your eyes going serious green from hazel,
Your quick hand on my face the scent of basil.
– Gibbons Ruark
rain
swollen river
early summer
– Basho
Broke: Interdisciplinary
Woke: Multidisciplinary
Bespoke: Transdisciplinary
– @VinceFHorn
Promising comfort, the extractive growth paradigm brought us the discomfort of heatwaves, floods, and fires, even to the heart of empire.
– Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
Guys, are there writing residencies for people who don’t enjoy ticks, mold, mosquitos, isolation, or dwellings described as rustic?
– Amber Sparks
One of the strangest things about writing well is that it requires two different zones in the brain – rigor and recklessness – simultaneously.
– Carole Maso
Unlike the stomach, the brain doesn’t alert
you. when it’s empty.
– Arabic Proverb
I do not think I have said enough about the splintered disorder of June, July and August.
– Virginia Woolf
All I really want to do is go to the book store , drink coffee and read.
– Jean Paul Sartre
What Lunchables did to food, schools have now done to learning.
– Steve Edwards
Detachment does not mean non-involvement. You can be deeply involved but not entangled.
– Sadhguru
summer breeze
a bumblebee follows
an ancient path
– James Welsh
It’s wonderful to be hated by idiots.
– John Simon
Everything in excess! To enjoy the flavor of life, take big bites. Moderation is for monks.
– Robert A. Heinlein
Self control is the final status symbol and the only one that means anything.
– Manly P. Hall
The things most people need to learn in therapy are related to attachment, abandonment, love, and fear. We are trying to access basic emotional processes that are organized in primitive and early-developing parts of the brain.
– Louis Cozolino
The beginning and end
of spiritual practice
is resting the mind
in the heart.
– Fred LaMotte
Heaven is as real as your present life. But if we ask who we are and discover the Self, what need is there to think of heaven? Where is the Supreme Self or heaven unless in you?
– Ramana Maharshi
Poetry is that which is shattered by last week’s poem.
– Laura Kerr
Half-stranger, will you let me give you back your sight? Or do you still think your heart is all yours—that it isn’t like my mother’s country?
– @FadyJoudah
Those who are nurtured best survive best. It turns out that our emotional resilience and our ability to learn are inextricably interwoven.
– Louis Cozolino
It’s by God’s Grace that you think of God.
– Ramana Maharshi
A compassionate person sees himself or herself in every being.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Writing is difficult; it is like jumping into the void.
– Nathalie Sarraute
Suffering has a noble purpose: the evolution of consciousness and the burning up of the ego.
– Eckhart Tolle
what’s wrong bro you’ve barely touched your hero’s journey
– Dylan O’Sullivan
What makes a master a master is that they never think they’re masters. Always be growing. Always.
– Robin Sharma
Hilltop by Tadeusz Dabrowski
Returning to the very same place,
let it be a hilltop
with a view of the night city
where once you used to be,
when your “whole life”
still lay ahead of you,
when everything was before.
Returning when it’s already after:
irrevocably, decisively.
What a strange feeling it is.
As if you had the gift of prophecy
in a world without time.
– Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Learn the art of forgiving.
Apply it to yourself first,
Then it becomes easy
To forgive others.
– Sri Chinmoy
in patience,
prayer &
peace,
stay,
still &
steep.
reset.
rest.
rise.
– Eric Bond
Anger outlasts hurt, meaning that we take something that happened to us and make it worse—by taking it personally, by lashing out, by returning wrong to wrong.
– Seneca
my poem
wrapped around a dead fish
Japanese newspaper
– Kimberly A. Horning
studying Mars
from a distance, accepting
my station in life
– @hegelincanada
Heaven wheels above you, displaying to you her eternal glories, and still your eyes are on the ground.
– Dante Alighieri
When you’ve been worked on for so long, you never know you’re done.
– Jericho Brown
You must give birth to your images. They are the future waiting to be born. Fear not the strangeness you feel. The future must enter you long before it happens. Just wait for the birth, for the the hour of the new clarity.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
What some people find in religion a writer may find in his craft…a kind of breaking through to glory.
– John Steinbeck
In some ways, being real is everything.
– Jess Klein
Ten Commandments for the Long Haul
1) Call on Jesus when all else fails. Call on Him when all else succeeds (except that never happens).
2) Don’t be afraid to be afraid or appalled to be appalled. How do you think the trees feel these days, or the whales, or, for that matter, most humans?
3) Keep your soul to yourself. Soul is a possession worth paying for, they’re growing rarer. Learn from monks, (and Sufis) they have secrets worth knowing.
4) About practically everything in the world, there’s nothing you can do. This is Socratic wisdom. However, about of few things you can do something. Do it, with a good heart.
5) On a long drive, there’s bound to be a dull stretch or two. Don’t go anywhere with someone who expects you to be interesting all the time. And don’t be hard on your fellow travelers. Try to smile after a coffee stop.
(And stop frequently to stretch)
6) Practically no one has the stomach to love you, if you don’t love yourself. They just endure. So do you. (Most folks don’t love themselves enough. A good partner can remind you how)
7) About healing: The gospels tell us that this was Jesus’ specialty and he was
heard to say: “Take up your couch and walk!” your (deep gentle breaths help everything)
8) When traveling on an airplane, watch the movie, but don’t use the earphones. Then you’ll be able to see what’s going on, but not understand what’s happening, and so you’ll feel right at home, little different then you do on the ground. (Ha ha ha)
9) Know that sometimes the only writing material you have is your own blood. (Hmmm)
10) Start with the impossible. Proceed calmly towards the improbable. No worry, there are at least five exits. (Have goals)
– Daniel Berrigan, SJ
The solstice sun was going down as the (nearly) full moon was coming up and they’re both in this panorama, and those moments when you can feel the revolution of the earth as measured by these celestial bodies rising and setting, and when the symmetry of the sun and the moon, round and in the sky together, are both orienting and enchanting. The ancient magic, untouched by destruction, older than life, continues.
– Rebecca Solnit
When you compare the sorrows of real life to the pleasures of the imaginary one, you will never want to live again, only to dream forever.
– Alexandre Dumas
When things fall apart and we’re on the verge of we know not what, the test of each of us is to stay on that brink and not concretize. The spiritual journey is not about heaven and finally getting to a place that’s really swell.
– Pema Chodron
He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.
– James Joyce
How long will the slaughter go on? Speed is active violence. Faster, faster, but where to, and why?
– Jacques Ellul, The Technological Bluff
a photographer is a strange being, ant and angel all at once. they don’t see things as they are, instead it’s as if they make things into what they want, the image and language of color, distance, and size that can uncover the universes every lie with a single shift of focus. night’s voice permeates the paper, farewells, frustration, emotions, shame (above all, shame), and pride (above all, pride).
– Julia Wong Kcomt
It is no easy matter to live a life that is modeled on Christ’s, but it is unspeakably harder to live one’s own life as truly as Christ lived his. Anyone who did this would run counter to the forces of the past, and though he might thus be fulfilling his destiny, would none the less be misjudged, derided, tortured and crucified. He would be a kind of mad Bolshevist who deserved the cross. We therefore prefer the historically sanctioned imitation of Christ which is transfigured by holiness. I should never disturb a monk in his practice of identifying himself with Christ, for he deserves our respect. But neither I nor my patients are monks, and it is my duty as a physician to show my patients how they can live their lives without becoming neurotic. ‘Neurosis’ is an inner cleavage – the state of being at war with oneself. Everything that accentuates this cleavage makes the patient worse, and everything that mitigates it tends to heal the patient. What drives people to war with themselves is the intuition or the knowledge that they consist of two persons in opposition to one another. The conflict may be between the sensual and the spiritual man, or between the ego and the shadow. It is what Faust means when he says ‘Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast apart.’ A neurosis is a #dissociation of personality.”
– C.G. Jung
The Bark
I took my dog to the lake, he stood at the water’s edge and barked, the echo of his bark came back and he barked at it, again and again he barked at his own echo thinking there was another dog on the other side of the lake. Welcome to poetry, I said.
– Mary Ruefle
DINOSAURS IN MY HEAD
How
did they get there?
They
heard the word
extinction—
and being wise
creatures
decided to hide
where
fire and ice,
where
time couldn’t find them.
– Andrea Cohen
Sometimes it is best for us to be direct and cutting. The bodhisattva’s approach is to help others to help themselves.
– Chögyam Trungpa
The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else’s imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real!
– Thomas Merton
TO THE YOUNG WHO WANT TO DIE
Sit down. Inhale. Exhale.
The gun will wait. The lake will wait.
The tall gall in the small seductive vial
will wait will wait:
will wait a week: will wait through April.
You do not have to die this certain day.
Death will abide, will pamper your postponement.
I assure you death will wait. Death has
a lot of time. Death can
attend to you tomorrow. Or next week. Death is
just down the street; is most obliging neighbor;
can meet you any moment.
You need not die today.
Stay here -through pout or pain or peskyness.
Stay here. See what the news is going to be tomorrow.
Graves grow no green that you can use.
Remember, green’s your color. You are Spring.
– Gwendolyn Brooks
For myself, I find I become less cynical rather than more—remembering my own sins and follies; and realize that men’s hearts are not often as bad as their acts, and very seldom as bad as their words.
– J. R. R. Tolkien
In the book, the words fall like birds struck by lightning for having thought they could wrest a piece of sky from the infinite.
– Edmond Jabès, (tr. Rosmarie Waldrop)
To experience feelings not of this world is to experience soul. To know the soul is to know love.
– Anne Lamott
We should know what our convictions are, and stand for them. Upon one’s own philosophy, conscious or unconscious, depends one’s ultimate interpretation of facts. Therefore it is wise to be as clear as possible about one’s subjective principles.
– C.G. Jung
Bon sang, les freins!!!” (“Damn it, the brakes!!!”)
– Ernest Chausson, last words
At times it was necessary to cut me down to size; he would do it with such breathtaking elegance and style that it left me gasping.
Intellectually, he was not a boxer but a judo expert.
– Lawrence Durrell, saluting his editor & mentor, T. S. Eliot
For anyone who has done analytic therapy for a long time, it becomes fascinating how non-accidental are the ‘choices’ people make.
– McWilliams, N.
the moth on the screen
is seeking a better life
someone should tell him
– Clark Strand
Never admire quietly. Tell the people you love that you love them. Tell them often.
– Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
There is only one nation, and that is Humanity itself.
– Manly P. Hall
This morning I sense solution,
I sense inference.
All sounds conspire to euphony.
The clock moves
as the heart moves
in one direction: silence.
– Pablo Medina
quatervois (n.) a critical decision, crossroads, or
turning point in one’s life
/kah-tehr-vwa/ french
It will always be the
mystery, that self end up out there as those words,
a mirror impossibly deep. Never enough words
to the bottom of the distance. Sometimes voices
that echo from nothing ever visible.
– Clark Coolidge
Words, of course, but
Also the silence
Between them.
Like the silence
Between
The beloved and you.
Silence full
Of the unspoken
As a seed is full
Of all
It will become.
No poem made only
Of silence.
No poem
Made only of words.
– Gregory Orr, How Beautiful the Beloved
As far as society is concerned the poet has died and the only one who doesn’t know it is the poet himself. Because of his great vanity or because he has formed a bad habit like masturbation which he finds enjoyable and can’t quit.
– Irving Layton
Wasp in a jam jar
A sticky August afternoon. Our neat street
swoons in the heatwave. The smell of burning
eggs spirals from a forgotten frying pan. Or
was it the fresh-laid tarmac sweating chemicals
yards from my bedroom. Or the forbidden boys
shirtless in glue-on scowls, torching a blown tyre
in the precinct. Later I watched them necking
cider on the library steps, dead-legging, flicking
through a top-shelf glossy. Each flare of laughter
stung. Dad got angry when he found out
they’d planted palm prints in the soft tar.
I couldn’t tell him it was me. Feeling my way
into the dark, marking the road out of there.
– Ian Humphreys
scorching heat
grandpa remembers the smell
of wartime defeat
– Chen-ou Liu
Ars Poetica
Six monarch butterfly cocoons
clinging to the back of your throat—
you could feel their gold wings trembling.
You were alarmed. You felt infested.
In the downstairs bathroom of the family home,
gagging to spit them out—
and a voice saying, Don’t, don’t—
– Dana Levin
the bird tells time by the sundial
the sundial by the bird
time will tell the bird a tale
the sundial’s never heard
– Garrett Caples
As a student, they fill you with ruling class ideology not because you’re going to be part of the ruling class, but so you fight to the death for them.
You’re being prepared to enter the “middle class”, to explain to people why the system can’t be changed.
– Amiri Baraka
All serious daring starts from within.
– Eudora Welty
Within the book, or doubled,
Freed, in the silvered glass;
Into all other bodies
Yourself should pass.
– Louise Bogan
The Christian is called not to individualism, but to membership in the mystical body.
– C.S. Lewis
When My Friend Is Low,
We Walk by the River
It’s somehow still a pandemic and we have nowhere
to put our rage. My friend tells me how he has begun
to imagine the finishing touches of his life. He counts
the things he’s lost. As he talks, I imagine tethering
a silver thread from his body to mine.
It’s dusk. The geese are all headed home. Our two bright
shadows grow longer. Grief is a clump of dark feathers
in the grass. The sky runs purple and petals out.
We look around. It’s almost cruel, he laughs.
After everything, how the world still insists.
on being beautiful.
– Joy Sullivan
Read day and night, devour books (…). Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.
– Emil Cioran
We can change, evolve, and transform our own conditioning. We can choose to move like water rather than be molded like clay.
– Terry Tempest Williams
Love quiets fear. And a sweet and powerful positive obsession blunts pain, diverts rage, and engages each of us in the greatest, the most intense of our chosen struggles.
– Octavia Butler
The poet lights the light and fades away. But the light goes on and on.
– Emily Dickinson
I am half agony, half hope.
– Jane Austen
I think it’s obvious that the psychedelics are demonized and illegalized by our society because somewhere in our society are controlling minds that realize that these substances have the potential, have the power to unpick the controlling hierarchy.
– Graham Hancock
aside from all the other wrongness, NO ONE was wearing blue in the early medieval era
– Amber Sparks
In these hours,
how true is north?
A river is intent
on approaching.
When is it not
this matter of place, this why?
Don’t ask: should we all be lit
from within? To question
is to measure a hymn by a circle.
– Isidro Li
Effortless and choiceless awareness is our real nature. If we can attain it, or be in that state, it is all right. But one cannot reach it without effort, the effort of deliberate meditation.
– Ramana Maharshi
Words don’t matter. What matters is the idea you have of yourself, for it blocks you. Give it up.
– Nisargadatta
We don’t need more papers, only more high-quality papers that can make a real impact. Publishing papers with little impact is worse than not publishing and it can only make the academia less important to the real-world.
– Fei Huang
after walking
in the ancient ruins
I tell her
where I hide
my unfinished poems
– @NJBarico
Civilization does not lie in a greater or lesser degree of refinement, but in an awareness shared by a whole people. And this awareness is never refined. It is even quite simple and straightforward.
– Albert Camus
Sometimes suffering is just suffering.
It doesn’t make you stronger It doesn’t build character. It only hurts.
– Kate Jacobs
In law a man is guilty when he violates the rights of others. In ethics he is guilty if he only thinks of doing so.
– Ahmad Raza
Thought is the only power which can produce tangible riches from the Formless Substance.
– Wallace D. Wattles
What good is the wide world if your shoe pinches?
– John Williams
Every man is two men; one is awake in the darkness, the other asleep in the light.
– Khalil Gibran
Out of a clean heart comes a clean life and a clean body. Out of a defiled mind proceeds a defiled life and a corrupt body. Thought is the fount of action, life, and manifestation; make the fountain pure, and all will be pure.
– James Allen
A person can’t change who they are. They can convince others they’re someone else, but not themselves.
– Roger Kint
There is no religion higher than Truth.
– Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
Understanding a question is half an answer.
– Socrates
You’re always enigmatic and new
– Anna Akhmatova
Stars bloom in the warm summer night
They have a clear view
Without the bedroom light
They don’t wanna name you
They don’t want a name
– David Naimon
Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.
– Viktor Frankl
Every four years the naive half who vote are encouraged to believe that if we can elect a really nice man or woman President everything will be all right. But it won’t be.
– Gore Vidal
I am firmly convinced that the whole system of technical games and amusements and distractions is one of the most dangerous factors for tomorrow’s people and society.
– Jacques Ellul
Happiness is simply the knowing of our Being as it essentially is – its knowing of itself. The apparent overlooking, veiling or forgetting of our own Being is the root cause of all unhappiness.
– Rupert Spira
Peace Will Come
Peace will come
Just as surely as the
Night is done
And as certain the
Arrival of the sun
All we know is that
Peace will come
Peace will come
Just in time to save
Everyone
If they’re old or
If they’re young
All we know is that
Peace will come
All we know is that
Peace will come
Peace will come
Like an injured dog that
Keeps on running
He’s still limping but he’s
Coming home
All we know is that
Peace will come
All we know is that
Peace will come
Sing it up
Sing it up again
Sing it up
Sing it up again
Sing it up
Sing it up again
Peace will come
Peace will come
– Deacon Blue
the rivers flowed
and the mountains laughed
with the wind
– @Jocelynx44
The monster is at the river, collecting flowers and watching the way the wind crafts ripples along the water’s surface. He is watching the invisible wind conduct its work on the water, and he is plucking flowers.
– Lindsey Drager
Is anyone really surprised that convicted rapist Trump is trying to force himself on America after she said no?
– Andrea Junker
Intuition is neither a feeling, an inspiration nor a disorderly sympathy but a fully developed method.
– Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism
As you begin to awaken, the things of this world become meaningless, yet you’re still active as a body. The body goes about its business, it works or it doesn’t work, it goes around or it sits still, it does whatever it has to do. But it has nothing to do with you.
– Robert Adams
The body provides something for the spirit to look after and use.
– Alan Turing
mix tape
the times
I couldn’t reciprocate
– Eric Burke
Reading until I
forget it all, no words left.
Just a breeze on the
horizon of thoughts rising
with sun and falling with moon.
– @MarkoSGata
I overheard a friend tell his mom today.
“If your state ranks 47th in education, maybe you should require schools to post the ABCs instead of the 10 commandments.”
– Alex Cole
Fear is #hardwired
and hope is ingrained-
our choices determine
which one is sustained.
– DC Swanson
It is worth noting that all mainstream approaches to psychotherapy (…) have begun their respective journeys by claiming impressive accomplishments in a stunningly short period of time, and then all have lengthened as their practitioners have faced the complexities of the work.
– @_psychiara
“But why me ?”
Because you kept comparing yourself to lives you were not meant to live and chasing things that would never nourish your soul — Your discomfort protected you from being comfortable in things not meant for you.
– @mikael_jibril
Memory’s patchwork
Sewing threads of love’s decay
In the digital sea
– @PixieZehir
To mirror the desert, you must wear away.
– Talley Kayser
Emotional regulation is a superpower. You’re not jarred by your own emotions and they don’t cloud how you see the world. You remain at ease in their changing landscape and are more present with who you actually are.
– Nika Solé
Let’s just say
it’s not okay in the end, but
the pastel pink
pavement chalk drawing
cardboard dragon
classically trained busker
hardwired to hope
and you,
who once made me feel the way music does.
– Syreeta Muir
… and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?
– Vincent Van Gogh
The dominant feeling invariably expresses itself. Prayer must be without effort.
– Neville Goddard
Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship.
– Benjamin Franklin
Right inner speech is essential. It is the greatest of the arts.
It is the way out of limitation into freedom.
– Neville Goddard
If a carpenter drives a nail into a beam, there it is. Now if he takes a second nail and drives it against the first, the first is driven out and falls on the floor and the second one takes the place of the first one.
Substitute one image for another.
– Emmet Fox
The world is a magic circle of infinite possible mental transformations. For there are an infinite number of possible mental conversations.
– Neville Goddard
A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth.
– John Singer Sargent
Look for verbs of muscle, adjectives of exactitude.
– Mary Oliver
Clothe yourself with the reality of the state you have just created in your imagination. You need not ask anyone’s permission or help, but moving into the new state in your imagination, simply remain there until you feel its reality. Then let the feeling go its way toward fulfillment.
– Neville Goddard
i swear by your eyes in which a million planets reside.
– nizar qabbani
For those involved in progressive struggles, this seems like a particularly dark moment; I try to remind myself that even if it feels like we’re losing, in the long course of history, the ripples created today will bear fruit eventually, maybe not in our lifetimes, but someday.
– Nida Kirmani
The only work that spiritually purifies us is that which is done without personal motives.
– Sri Aurobindo
when i was a kid our pastor took us downtown to show us how to “reach to the lost” and the first thing he did was walk up to a homeless guy on the street and say “sir i’d like to tell you about jesus” and the guy responded by reciting the entire first chapter of John from memory.
– @TylerHuckabee
He is wireless
While she runs
Hardwired
– @AudreySemprun
Perhaps you have omitted something so painful for the emigrant – the loss of the language in which one had lived and thought, and which one could never replace with another even if one tried.
– Sigmund Freud to Raymond de Saussure
Our thirst is palpable—
we carry it in whopping buckets,
wandering the desert.
An oasis contains scripted
soulmates: one with swords,
one with the picket fence,
one with a wicker basket
of forbidden fruit, and the one
with a mirror held high
to our skewed reflection.
– @tuttysan
Freedom is most desirable. Of course none of us are free.
– Joy Williams
Today, our massive societal infrastructure supports more than eight billion people, an order of magnitude beyond the natural ‘carrying capacity’ of our planet.
– Michael Mann
I don’t care how good AI gets
I don’t want to read words no one cared enough to write
I don’t want to look at pictures no one cared enough to draw
I want to experience things made by human beings because, as a human, I’m craving human interactions
– @ap_dsc
You say you love rain
but you open your umbrella.
You say you love the sun
but you find a shadow spot.
You say you love wind
but you close your windows.
This is why I am afraid
when you say you love me.
– William Shakespeare
IT WAS EARLY
It was early,
which has always been my hour
to begin looking
at the world
and of course,
even in the darkness,
to begin
listening into it,
especially
under the pines
where the owl lives
and sometimes calls out
as I walk by,
as he did
on this morning.
So many gifts!
What do they mean?
In the marshes
where the pink light
was just arriving
the mink
with his bristle tail
was stalking
the soft-eared mice,
and in the pines
the cones were heavy,
each one
ordained to open.
Sometimes I need
only to stand
wherever I am
to be blessed.
Little mink, let me watch you.
Little mice, run and run.
Dear pine cone, let me hold you
as you open.
– Mary Oliver
Sometimes people fail to reciprocate because they can’t give you what they can’t give themselves: A person at war with themselves can’t give you peace; a person who lies to themselves can’t give you honesty; a person who betrays themselves can’t give you loyalty.
– Inner Practitioner
Lucidity is the antonym of bedazzlement.
– Catherine Malabou
Underneath shame is, what the Freudians call in their language, 𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘴𝘮𝘶𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘯𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘦𝘥 𝘨𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘰𝘴𝘪𝘵𝘺. . . . In other words, ‘gold’ energy that I don’t have any vessels for.
– Robert Moore
But does one think or not think what one posits in the form of disavowal?
– Derrida
Breath and emotion are linked. When you are shocked, your breathing changes. When you are full of rage or passion of any kind, your breathing changes. When you are at rest, your breathing changes. So, the goal here is to make your breathing regular, to calm the mind.
– Joseph Campbell
Having a healthy, balanced ego isn’t about being right. It’s about being me. It’s about deciphering and honoring my limits and needs so I can play my unique part in the universal symphony—made possible by listening deeply and making way for the soul to speak.
– McCall Erickson
Concerning That Prayer I Cannot Make
by Jane Mead
Jesus, I am cruelly lonely
and I do not know what I have done
nor do I suspect that you will answer me.
And, what is more, I have spent
these bare months bargaining
with my soul as if I could make her
promise to love me when now it seems
that what I meant when I said “soul”
was that the river reflects
the railway bridge just as the sky
says it should—it speaks that language.
I do not know who you are.
I come here every day
to be beneath this bridge,
to sit beside this river,
so I must have seen the way
the clouds just slide
under the rusty arch—
without snagging on the bolts,
how they are borne along on the dark water—
I must have noticed their fluent speed
and also how that tattered blue T-shirt
remains snagged on the crown
of the mostly sunk dead tree
despite the current’s constant pulling.
Yes, somewhere in my mind there must
be the image of a sky blue T-shirt, caught,
and the white islands of ice flying by
and the light clouds flying slowly
under the bridge, though today the river’s
fully melted. I must have seen.
But I did not see.
I am not equal to my longing.
Somewhere there should be a place
the exact shape of my emptiness—
there should be a place
responsible for taking one back.
The river, of course, has no mercy—
it just lifts the dead fish
toward the sea.
Of course, of course.
What I meant when I said “soul”
was that there should be a place.
On the far bank the warehouse lights
blink red, then green, and all the yellow
machines with their rusted scoops and lifts
sit under a thin layer of sunny frost.
And look—
my own palm—
there, slowly rocking.
It is my pale palm—
palm where a black pebble
is turning and turning.
Listen—
all you bare trees
burrs
brambles
pile of twigs
red and green lights flashing
muddy bottle shards
shoe half buried—listen
listen, I am holy.
Our hero-worshiping capacity is pure shadow; in this case our finest qualities are refused and laid on another. It is hard to understand, but we often refuse to bear our noble traits and instead find a shadow substitute for them.
– Robert A. Johnson
Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage.
– Theodor W. Adorno
Faith is realizing that there is some open space and sharpness in your everyday life.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Feeling irritated is the first sign your nervous system is no longer in a parasympathetic state.
– Dr. Nicole LePera
You have no problems. It has been your ego all the time fooling you, making you believe that something is wrong, and you’ve been playing hide and seek, trying to find God here, there and everywhere, when all the time God was within yourself as yourself.
– Robert Adams
How can you not love mercy—kindness, compassion, forgiveness? It’s like not loving dessert, or cheese.
– Anne Lamott
In order to apply most of your energy in one direction, you have to say no to things that a lot of other people say yes to.
Most successful people are masters at eliminating the unnecessary from their lives.
– @farnamstreet
If you have an idea that you genuinely think is good, don’t let some idiot talk you out if it.
– Stan Lee
Will a world of surfaces ever allow us to see that we can never repair something by simply repainting it?
– Pico Iyer
What we resist in time becomes pathology, either through platitudinous, superficial lives or embodied as addictions, depressions, or obsessions with those objects upon which the unlived life has been projected.
– James Hollis
Summer Haibun by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
To everything, there is a season of parrots. Instead of feathers, we searched the sky for meteors on our last night. Salamanders use the stars to find their way home. Who knew they could see that far, fix the tiny beads of their eyes on distant arrangements of lights so as to return to wet and wild nests? Our heads tilt up and up and we are careful to never look at each other. You were born on a day of peaches splitting from so much rain and the slick smell of fresh tar and asphalt pushed over a cracked parking lot. You were strong enough—even as a baby—to clutch a fistful of thistle and the sun himself was proud to light up your teeth when they first swelled and pushed up from your gums. And this is how I will always remember you when we are covered up again: by the pale mica flecks on your shoulders. Some thrown there from your own smile. Some from my own teeth. There are not enough jam jars to can this summer sky at night. I want to spread those little meteors on a hunk of still-warm bread this winter. Any trace left on the knife will make a kitchen sink like that evening air
the cool night before
star showers: so sticky so
warm so full of light
Sometimes our song is a lament telling the whole sorry truth. No wonder the blues have an honored place in the world of music. We recognize and are equalized in suffering. It is the birthplace of compassion.
– Gunilla Norris
Everyone who wants to know what will happen ought to examine what has happened: everything in this world in any epoch has their replicas in antiquity.
– Niccolò Machiavelli
When stupidity is considered patriotism, it is unsafe to be intelligent.
– Issac Asimov
In all conduct train with maxims.
– Chekawa Yeshe Dorje
The Mahayana Instructions on the Seven Points of Mind Training
In his commentary, Jamgon Kongtrul gives a few examples of maxims, such as: ‘When all the suffering and evil deeds of every sentient being mature in me, may all my virtue and happiness bear fruit in them.’ In one way or another, all the various slogans and quotations found in the lojong [mind training] express the mind-set of tonglen. Repeating maxims, especially out loud, is very useful for our lojong practice. Doing so can be scary for our self-importance, which is good! Suffering and the results of evil deeds, for example, are the opposite of what we usually want. Why would we ever ask for them to come to us? The reason is that we are trying to get over the unrelenting hope and fear that cause us always to feel insecure, confined within our small, anxious self. Whether we reject suffering or wish it upon ourselves, if we have created the negative karma that leads to its appearance, that suffering will come. Saying the maxim won’t make it happen. But what it will do is whittle away our hope and fear.
– Dzigar Kongtrul, The Intelligent Heart
Great truths are contained inside small absurdities.
– Andrew Bacevich
Without the reading, there is no possibility of writing worth the name, skillful, creative, or otherwise.
– Samuel R. Delany, On Creativity and Academic Writing
The ideal mind, the brain, has become the vampire of modern life, sucking up the blood and the life. There is hardly an original thought or original utterance possible to us. All is sickly repetition of stale, stale ideas.
– DH Lawrence
America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.
– William Burroughs
The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.
– H.L. Mencken, Minority Report
Now the barriers are dissolving, the stone fences in shambles. I want to have my life in cloud shapes, water shapes, wind shapes.
– Jim Harrison, Returning to Earth
Poets are, in my experience, the most likely to convince you that the full moon is a cosmic command to go skinny-dipping. They will howl on a fire escape to find the poem. I love writers in general but I trust poets with the epitaph and the eternity.
– Alina Stefanescu
Could the insouciance of that which makes explaining seem old hat lead us to look more deeply where possibility is not so rare?
– George Gorman
Communication literally generates freedom through inherent unpredictability. Communication within our bodies enables us to perceive, feel and move ourselves in unpredetermined ways. Communication also enables many kinds of organisms to achieve some useful cooperation without sacrificing their free self-motion. And this common fact of life – not just a human idea – is essential for egalitarian collaboration, of which there are many kinds.
– George Gorman
You lived aloof, maintaining to the end your magnificent disdain.
– Anna Akhmatova, (trans. Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward)
Sometimes the film stops
lost for words, out of ideas.
Where are you, it asks
itself. Hovering,
it replies. Now where was I?
This is your life, says
someone. Here’s the film
you were watching. Is it good?
Then the film goes on
according to script.
– George Szirtes
Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.
– Jean-Paul Sartre
Withered grass,
under piling
heat waves.
– Matsuo Bashō
(trans. Lucien Stryk & Takashi Ikemoto)
The great spiritual geniuses, whether it was Moses, Buddha, Plato, Socrates, Jesus, or Emerson….. have taught man to look within himself to find God.
– Ernest Holmes
I suppose that my work is always mourning something, the loss of a paradise-not the thing that comes after you die, but the thing that you had before.
– Jamaica Kincaid
The beautiful pure freedom of a woman was infinitely more wonderful than any sexual love.
– D.H. Lawrence
Ideas often last but a day; feelings, dreams almost forever.
– Gabrielle Roy
The root of humanly caused evil is not man’s animal nature, not territorial aggression, or innate selfishness, but our need to gain self-esteem, deny our mortality, and achieve a heroic self-image. Our desire for the best is the cause of the worst.
– Ernest Becker
With a clear mind and a peaceful heart, your actions are likely to be more effective.
– Rick Hanson
Summer Silence
by E. E. Cummings
Eruptive lightnings flutter to and fro
Above the heights of immemorial hills;
Thirst-stricken air, dumb-throated, in its woe
Limply down-sagging, its limp body spills
Upon the earth. A panting silence fills
The empty vault of Night with shimmering bars
Of sullen silver, where the lake distils
Its misered bounty.—Hark! No whisper mars
The utter silence of the untranslated stars.
The idea of total relativity, of the impossibility of communication, of entrapment in language and culture, is itself a cultural notion peculiar to our own age and setting. … Entrapment in language expresses our fear of reality—it is a nominalistic refuge.
– Jacques Ellul
Writing is not a competition. It is a holy creative act through which we remake ourselves and the world and it should be treated as such.
– Jeannine Ouellette
One of the chief aims of the psychotherapist is to help the patient overcome the fears and inhibitions that have led him to react to his normal and healthy feelings as if they were a threat.
– Wachtel
You call it brain-washing. I call it yoga – leveling up all the mental ruts. You must not be compelled to think the same thoughts again and again. Move on.
– Nisargadatta
Someplace
A star is just a smudge
on magnified glass.
I have never been
more disappointed.
Nietzsche takes a saunter
along the border
because it is warm enough
to step out at night.
Malevolent blobs
dance at his feet.
This is when we pause to speak
in sleep. Our eyes
follow the lights while we ponder
which is worse:
Nothing or something you don’t recognize.
– Fanny Howe
Beauty perishes in life, but is immortal in art.
– Leonardo da Vinci
Letter
Tonight, as you walk out
into the stars, or the forest, or the city,
look up
as you must have looked
before love came,
before love went,
before ash was ash.
Look at them: the city’s
mists, the winters.
And the moon’s glass
you must have held
in the beginning.
That new moon
you must have touched once
in the waters,
saying change me, change
me, change me. All I want
is to be more of what I am.
– Joseph Fasano
evening wind
colors of the day
blown away
– Jane Reichhold
Sonnetesque
I love its smallness: as though our whole town
were a picture postcard and our feelings
were on vacation: ourselves in mini-
ature, shopping at tiny sales, buying
the newspapers-small and pale and square
as sugar cubes— at the fragile, little curb.
The way the streetlight is really a table
lamp where now we sit and where real
night, (which is very tall and black and
at our backs), where for a moment
the night is forced to bend down and look
through these tiny windows, forced to come
closer and put its hand on our shoulder
and stoop over the book to read the fine print.
– Lynn Emanuel
Into each life some rain must fall.
– H. Wadsworth
And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?
– Robert Louis Stevenson
Everyone ‘writes’ in a way; that is, each person has a ‘story’—a personal narrative—which is constantly being replayed, revised, taken apart, and put together again.
– Margaret Atwood
In your professional life, who do you admire most? In your personal life, who do you admire most?
– James Clear
The only thing that stands between you and your wellbeing is a simple fact: you have allowed your thoughts and emotions to take instruction from the outside rather than within.
– Sadhguru
Editing is simply the application of the common sense of any good reader.
– Robert Gottlieb
The Self is neither a metaphor nor an ideogram. It is, ‘in person’ the heavenly counterpart of a pair or a syzygy made up of a fallen angel, or an angel appointed to govern a body, and of an angel retaining his abode in heaven.
– Henry Corbin
feeding slop to the collective unconscious is a regrettable move
– River Kenna
Your brain is a piece of software. You update it by reading books, crushing challenges, meditation, learning skills & your network.
Your body is a piece of hardware. You update it through lifting, cardio, nutrition & stretching.
– Dan Go
Institutional Buddhism has been conspicuously ready to accept or ignore the inequalities and tyrannies of whatever political system it found itself under. This can be death to Buddhism because it is death to any meaningful function of compassion.
– Gary Snyder
The most dangerous aspect of present-day life is the dissolution of the feeling of individual responsibility. Mass solitude has done away with any difference between the internal and the external, between the intellectual and the physical.
– Eugenio Montale
Where would we be
—without our words?
– Jass Aujla
a person of their word can manifest anything.
– @Jhanakaruna
washing my laundry
while wearing my clothes
under the summer rain
– Issa
I get so sick of poets on socials only celebrating already established poets or only poets published by trade presses. Take a risk! Read around! There’s so much good work beyond these predictable bounds!
– Dr Carrie Etter
You have to break up with your own bullshit too. I don’t care how pure we are, we are not always right.
– @kenzsinterlude
i don’t really trust revelations that come from lab chemicals
– River Kenna
What the universe will manifest when you are in alignment with it is a lot more interesting than what you try to manifest.
– Adyashanti
Happiness belongs to those who are sufficient unto themselves. For all external sources of happiness and pleasure are, by their very nature, highly uncertain, precarious, ephemeral and subject to chance.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Journals are more a nervous habit for me than anything else. I tend to copy out passages of whatever I’m reading, less because that passage is particularly important and more as a way of taking a photograph of a time and place and line of thought.
– Catherine Lacey
Sick of being decent, he craves another
crash. What reaches him except disaster?
– Frank Bidart
The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even when we will not.
– Cormac McCarthy
Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum.
– Kurt Vonnegut
Starbucks coffee is just regular coffee that was sent to a private school.
– @WillieHandler
There’s a type of relaxed savor-the-moment socializing that is more prevalent in 3rd tier cities where people aren’t aspiring to save the world or be famous or become a billionaire.
– Tyler Alterman
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exist.
– Hannah Arendt
I don’t think any serious writer wants to be called the spokesperson for their generation.
– Ann Beattie
What can be learned through meditation is not reducible to symbols.
– @VinceFHorn
If one wants to be saved, one is given the following true and essential advice: just as the tortoise draws all its five limbs within its shell, so one should draw the five senses within and turn one’s mind Selfward. This alone is happiness.
– Ramana Maharshi
Do not give them a candle to light the way, teach them how to make fire instead. That is the meaning of enlightenment.
– Kamand Kojouri
If the word “satan” really does come from the Sumerian word for “administrator” I think that’s very funny
Like the greatest evil of all has always been bureaucracy
– @PiquantParvenu
Remember: most of recovery doesn’t feel dramatic or cinematic. The most important work we do in changing our lives for the better occurs in mundane moments & little decisions.
Think a passing moment or small choice isn’t absolutely integral to your recovery? Think again.
– Dr. Glenn Patrick Doyle
The next war …
may well bury Western
civilization forever.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I want to talk about everything with at least one person as I talk about things with myself.
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Forgotten knowledge: magic is largely a matter of manners,
of knowing how to speak across the the veil between the seen and unseen,
of when to call and when to listen
– River Kenna
Within the world, this one, many quirks
accomplished, effected, in the thought,
I don’t know how, I only live here,
with the body I walk in.
Hence I love you, I did, do,
a moment ago it was daylight,
now dark I wonder what the memory means,
loving you more than I had thought to.
No agreement to stay, see it out,
the dereliction of fleshy duties—
but not burn down the house
for whatever rage was once.
– Robert Creeley
Every war has been a result of media lies
– Julian Assange
What happens outside the body is one process with what happens inside it. This is that “original identity” which ordinary language and our conventional definitions of man so completely conceal.
– Alan Watts
Academia does not have a monopoly on intellectually interesting work.
Don’t buy this myth.
Back me up here, commenters: raise your hand if you work on something interesting outside of academia.
– @academic_exit
Whoever can suffer within himself the highest united with the lowest is healed, holy, whole.
– Carl Jung
It kinda sucks that my whole heart wasn’t enough.
– @ShikshaWrites
I am the wild heart itself.
– Orides Fontela
mead moon
tracing his highland clan
to a field of rubble
– Dyana Basist
My god, is the god of typos; the gap-singer, between thought and event.
He plans us, and crafts our faults; so that we stumble, to tunes we cannot hear.
Do not weep, for lost perfection; for none of us knows, true symmetry.
– @AmericanSijo
The ideal being? An angel ravaged by humor.
– E. M. Cioran
grateful beyond war
this hot
cup of tea
– Kathy Watts
Accept no guidance but from within, and even then sift out all memories for they will mislead you. Even if you are quite ignorant of the ways and the means, keep quiet and look within; guidance is sure to come.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
approaching the station
this Floating World
our home
– Voima Oy
in a world full of temporary things you are a perpetual feeling.
– Sanober Khan
to discourse is human, to be smooth-brained divine
– Mac Crane
Writing is drawing, drawing is writing. Because it’s the same gesture. They’re close already.
– Etel Adnan
Philosophy is not meant for the big brains or for the men only; philosophy is
meant for everybody.
– Sophie Oluwole
Thunder on the Mountain
by Bob Dylan
Thunder on the mountain, fires on the moon
There’s a ruckus in the alley and the sun will be here soon
Today’s the day, gonna grab my trombone and blow
Well, there’s hot stuff here and it’s everywhere I go
I was thinkin’ ’bout Alicia Keys, couldn’t keep from crying
When she was born in Hell’s Kitchen, I was living down the line
I’m wondering where in the world Alicia Keys could be
I been looking for her even clear through Tennessee
Feel like my soul is beginning to expand
Look into my heart and you will sort of understand
You brought me here, now you’re trying to run me away
The writing’s on the wall, come read it, come see what it say
Thunder on the mountain, rolling like a drum
Gonna sleep over there, that’s where the music coming from
I don’t need any guide, I already know the way
Remember this, I’m your servant both night and day
The pistols are poppin’ and the power is down
I’d like to try somethin’ but I’m so far from town
The sun keeps shinin’ and the North Wind keeps picking up speed
Gonna forget about myself for a while, gonna go out and see what others need
I’ve been sitting down studying the art of love
I think it will fit me like a glove
I want some real good woman to do just what I say
Everybody got to wonder what’s the matter with this cruel world today
Thunder on the mountain rolling to the ground
Gonna get up in the morning walk the hard road down
Some sweet day I’ll stand beside my king
I wouldn’t betray your love or any other thing
Gonna raise me an army, some tough sons of bitches
I’ll recruit my army from the orphanages
I been to St. Herman’s church and I’ve said my religious vows
I’ve sucked the milk out of a thousand cows
I got the porkchops, she got the pie
She ain’t no angel and neither am I
Shame on your greed, shame on your wicked schemes
I’ll say this, I don’t give a damn about your dreams
Thunder on the mountain heavy as can be
Mean old twister bearing down on me
All the ladies of Washington scrambling to get out of town
Looks like something bad gonna happen, better roll your airplane down
Everybody’s going and I want to go too
Don’t wanna take a chance with somebody new
I did all I could and I did it right there and then
I’ve already confessed – no need to confess again
Gonna make a lot of money, gonna go up north
I’ll plant and I’ll harvest what the earth brings forth
The hammer’s on the table, the pitchfork’s on the shelf
For the love of God, you ought to take pity on yourself
Some people have that strange light in their eyes; they had their heart broken by a loss and their face washed with the most painful tears — The strength it took to rise up from a broken heart became a gentle fire in their eyes, with little patience for illusions.
– @mikael_jibril
Lover, wherever you are, lovely places are harmful, beware of them.
– Ovid
Found —
in old photos
her smile
– Ilse Jacobson
Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
– Susan Sontag
High-volume sound in galleries penetrates and destroys the pleasantness of contemplation, bringing out the haters. To all the haters, I love you.
– Marco Fusinato to Alan Licht
Who was ever only themselves?
– Forrest Gander
There is a fundamental paradox in cybercommunication: it presents a radical challenge to our traditional notions of privacy but also offers us a place to hide…We are now facing an era of connectivity and its discontents.
– Glen Gabbard
The pressure of an all-powerful totalitarian state creates an emotional tension in its citizens that determines their acts.
When people are divided into “loyalists” and “criminals” a premium is placed on every type of conformist, coward, and hireling; whereas among the “criminals” one finds a singularly high percentage of people who are direct, sincere, and true to themselves.
– Czeslaw Milosz
I make a prayer now to your old ones,
to those whose face you never saw
and voice you never heard
and name you haven’t known,
that they remember you
while you try to find them remembering you,
that they come at the proper time to gather you in,
that they whisper to you the truth that you haven’t been alone,
and won’t be,
that they know the hard friendship of the ending of days;
I make a prayer that all who were there at your making
will be there for your gathering in,
that their hands will be there just by your opening head,
your little fountain,
to make a home for your sorrowing heart and for you;
I make a prayer that your house and your people
will be blessed by your coming and your going,
that the day will come
when they will boast of for a while having known you,
and will marvel at the way of your going out from among them,
and that you might be reason enough for them to continue for a while,
and that in the days to come
you will be claimed as noble,
as an ancestor worth coming from.
– Stephen Jenkinson
I thought I could organize freedom. How Scandinavian of me.
– Bjork
Suddenly he sprung on me a question with no answer: “What is mind?” and gazed intently deep into my eyes. I was taken totally by surprise. My mind shattered. No words, no names, no thought remained—no mind, in fact, at all. What happened in that astounding moment? Past thoughts had died away, the future had not yet arisen; the stream of my thoughts was cut right through. In that pure shock a gap opened, and in that gap was laid bare a sheer, immediate awareness of the present, one that was free of any clinging. It was simple, naked, and fundamental. And yet that naked simplicity was also radiant with the warmth of an immense compassion.
– Sogyal Rinpoche
How to Shift the Body into the Parasympathetic Side of the Nervous System
Breathing out and holding out or pausing at the bottom of the breath amplifies the body’s natural production of Nitric Oxide, a vasodilator that expands the porosity of our vascular system. During Covid, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital found that Nitric Oxide improved respiratory permeability & bronchodilation. (They were not looking for the vasodilation effects but I’m sure that must have been happening too.) I first learned about breath holding out from Rosealba Courtney DO Lac from Australia, who used it to test Eucapnic metabolic health, the O2/CO2 exchange rate in the lungs. This was a contributing factor to asthma and sleep apnea and restricted breathing exercises could be used to cure asthma. Then I encountered this again studying at the beginning level with Lois Laynee. She had adopted a practice of Breathing out while humming to increase Nitric Oxide and Vasodilation and used it to calm the nervous system. One of the key actions to making the shift was swallowing at the bottom of the breath before inhaling again.
Signs that the parasympathetic nervous system is coming back online in the body:
+Spontaneous swallowing. When we are in a state of shock, our mouth dries up, we don’t produce saliva (neither are we producing digestive enzymes), and in order to swallow our food we need to drink something. Eating when in a state of stress, you can’t digest your food.
+Intestinal gurgles and rumbles. Have you noticed that when a client begins to relax that their organs and intestines begin to gurgle? As the parasympathetic wakes up, the viscera wake up.
+Yawning. Did you know you can make yourself yawn simply by rubbing your jaw muscles vigorously with your fingers and opening your mouth wide anticipating/expecting to yawn. Fake it til you make it.
Putting these two things together has enabled me to work effectively with shifting people out of long Covid symptoms. It has become my conviction that breathing dis-regulation is the metabolic habit that locks our nervous system into the Sympathetic side of the CNS where natural healing and self regeneration cannot happen due to the ‘emergency’ metabolism associated with the fight for survival.
– Jocelyn Olivier, Neuromuscular Reprogramming
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT ICE CREAM
Choose five artists you deeply admire for being extraordinary and make a documentary film in which each one is shown, for ten mi- nutes, in violent argument with their spouse or partner, revealing the artist’s mean, low, reprehensible side.
– Mary Ruefle
ambulance blue
swirled into a red sunset…
flashing rainbows
– @hegelincanada
in over my head
an astronaut breathes in
the view
– Herb Tate
In art or dream may you proceed with abandon
– Patti Smith
For memory is a foggy glasshouse, concealing the exotic—
some conditions will always trouble our species
– Vikki C.
There is no computer revolution. There is simply a computer shock that impels the socio-technical system to move faster in its own direction.
– Jacques Ellul
One thing I like about England is that the men also say sorry too much.
– Lyla June
he wants to give me this, and his whole life, he tries to give me gifts i don’t want, but they’re the only gifts he has.
– Ollie Schminkey
All that said about worrying, there has to be a way to change, a way to improve with time, to check our anxieties, to ground ourselves and find our power. It is a long haul for some. The damage is so ingrained, so deep within, soul-bone deep. It aches. But we persist. We rise. We find our new names, our new voices, which are really our ancient ones, the names of our ancestors, all that we love. My friend shared a beautiful Bible verse tonight, not with a sense of self-righteous polemics or politics or need to pontificate, but out of sheer love, something I do NOT see much among Fundamentalist Christians spouting verses. It was about fear and how God’s love is the opposite of fear. I will add it later.
– Sheryl Luna
Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.
– Ray Bradbury
When a Navajo baby laughs for the first time, everyone in the community celebrates. It’s regarded as the moment when the child completes his or her transition from the spirit realm into the physical world. The person who has provoked the baby’s laughter is charged with planning the First Laugh Ceremony, a party to commemorate the magical event.
– Rob Brezny
Atavism
1.
Sometimes in the open you look up where birds go by, or just nothing, and wait. A dim feeling comes you were like this once, there was air, and quiet; it was by a lake, or maybe a river you were alert as an otter and were suddenly born like the evening star into wide still worlds like this one you have found again, for a moment, in the open.
2.
Something is being told in the woods: aisles of shadow lead away; a branch waves; a pencil of sunlight slowly travels its path. A withheld presence almost speaks, but then retreats, rustles a patch of brush. You can feel the centuries ripple generations of wandering, discovering, being lost and found, eating, dying, being born. A walk through the forest strokes your fur, the fur you no longer have. And your gaze down a forest aisle is a strange, long plunge, dark eyes looking for home. For delicious minutes you can feel your whiskers wider than your mind, away out over everything.
– William Stafford
In the greatest confusion there is still an open channel to the soul. It may be difficult to find because by midlife it is overgrown, and some of the wildest thickets that surround it grow out of what we describe as our education. But the channel is always there, and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves – to that part of us which is conscious of a higher consciousness, by means of which we make the final judgments and put everything together.
– Saul Bellow
There were days when she was very happy without knowing why. She was happy to be alive and breathing, when her whole being seemed to be one with the sunlight, the color, the odors, the luxuriant warmth of some perfect Southern day. She liked then to wander alone into strange and unfamiliar places. She discovered many a sunny, sleepy corner, fashioned to dream in. And she found it good to dream and to be alone and unmolested.
There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why,—when it did not seem worth while to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation. She could not work on such a day, nor weave fancies to stir her pulses and warm her blood.
– Kate Chopin
John Ashbery, in an interview in the Poetry Miscellany, talks about wasting time: “I waste a lot of time. That’s part of the [creative process] . . . The problem is, you can’t really use this wasted time. You have to have it wasted. Poetry disequips you for the requirements of life. You can’t use your time.”In other words, wasted time cannot be filled, or changed into another habit; it is a necessary void of fomentation. And I am wasting your time, and I am aware that I am wasting it; how could it be otherwise?
Many others have spoken about this.
Tess Gallagher: “I sit in the motel room, a place of much passage and no record, and feel I have made an important assault on the Great Nothing.” Gertrude Stein: “It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.”
Mary Oppen: “When Heidegger speaks of boredom he allies it very closely with that moment of awe in which one’s mind begins to reach beyond. And that is a poetic moment, a moment in which a poem might well have been written.” The only purpose of this lecture, this letter, my only intent, goal, object, desire, is to waste time. For there is so little time to waste during a life, what little there is being so precious, that we must waste it, in whatever way we come to waste it, with all our heart.”
– Mary Ruefle Madness, Rack, and Honey
Trust yourself. At the root, at the core, there is pure sanity, pure openness. Don’t trust what you have been taught, what you think, what you believe, what you hope. Deeper than that, trust the silence of your being.
– Gangaji
I witness with pleasure the supreme achievement of memory, which is the masterly use it makes of innate harmonies when gathering to its fold the suspended and wandering tonalities of the past.
– Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
In what we call thinking the mind isn’t ‘directed’ but suspended. You don’t give it rules. You teach it to receive. You don’t clear the ground to build unobstructed: you make a little clearing where the penumbra of an almost-given will be able to enter and modify its contour.
– Jean-Francois Lyotard
I always worked with the conviction that […] there are no insoluble problems, and experience has so far justified me in that I have often seen individuals who simply outgrew a problem which had destroyed others. This ‘outgrowing’ revealed itself on further experience to be the raising of the level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest arose on the person’s horizon, and through this widening of his view, the insoluble problem lost its urgency. It was not solved logically on its own terms, but faded out in contrast to a new and stronger life-tendency. It was not repressed and made unconscious, but merely appeared in a different light, and so became different itself. What, on a lower level, had led to the wildest conflicts and to emotions full of panic, viewed from the higher level of the personality, now seemed like a storm in the valley seen from a high mountain top. This does not mean that the thunderstorm is robbed of its reality; it means that, instead of being in it, one is now above it.
– C.G. Jung
A CONTEMPORARY
by W. S. Merwin
What if I came down now out of these
solid dark clouds that build up against the mountain
day after day with no rain in them
and lived as one blade of grass
in a garden in the south when the clouds part in winter
from the beginning I would be older than all the animals
and to the last I would be simpler
frost would design me and dew would disappear on me
sun would shine through me
I would be green with white roots
feel worms touch my feet as a bounty
have no name and no fear
turn naturally to the light
know how to spend the day and night
climbing out of myself
all my life
NOT KNOWING
The state of not-knowing is a riveting place to be. We encounter not-knowing when, for instance, we meet someone new or when life offers up a surprise. These experiences remind us that change and unpredictability are the very pulse of our existence.
No one really knows what will happen from one moment to the next: who will we be, what will we face, and how we will respond to what we encounter. We don’t know and there’s a good chance that we will encounter some rough, unwanted experiences, some surprises beyond our imaginings, and some expected things too. And we can decide to stay present for all of it.
– Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel
This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.
– Douglas Adams
One man with an idea in his head is in danger of being considered a madman: two men with the same idea in common may be foolish, but can hardly be mad; ten men sharing an idea begin to act, a hundred draw attention as fanatics, a thousand and society begins to tremble, a hundred thousand and there is war abroad, and the cause has victories tangible and real; and why only a hundred thousand? Why not a hundred million and peace upon the earth? You and I who agree together, it is we who have to answer that question.
– William Morris
MIDSUMMER
A green world, a scene of green, deep
with light blues, the greens made deep
by those blues. One thinks how
in certain pictures, envied landscapes are seen
(through a window, maybe far behind the serene
sitter’s face, the serene pose, as though
in some impossible mirror, face to back,
human serenity gazed at a green world
which gazed at this face.
And see now,
here is that place, those greens
are here, deep with those blues. The air
we breathe is freshly sweet, and warm, as though
with berries. We are here. We are here.
Set this down too, as much
as if an atrocity had happened and been seen.
The earth is beautiful beyond all change.
– William Bronk
Nationalism is extra stupid on a burning planet.
– Daisy McCrackin
Hope of renewal and restoration is found in the merciful fibrillating heart of the world.
– Anne Lamott
Day by nomadic day
Our anniversaries go by,
Dates anchored in an inner sky,
To utmost ground, interior clay.
– Douglas Dunn
The day a man becomes superior to pleasure, he will also be superior to pain.
– Seneca
We Can’t learn without pain.
– Aristotle
exploring rock pools
a starfish discovers
the universe
– James & Jane Welsh
Bend low again, night of summer stars.
So near you are, sky of summer stars,
– Carl Sandburg
The wise man belongs to all countries, for the home of a great soul is the whole world.
– Democritus
[When I die], I will decidedly not be regretting missed opportunities for a good time. My regrets will be more along the lines of a sad list of people hurt, people let down, assets wasted and advantages squandered.
– Anthony Bourdain
Do not try to change your thoughts, or to change your life style, or to work on your bad habits, or to try to remove fear, and the rest of it. Rather you lift your vision high, to the highest, by following the I-thought to its source.
– Robert Adams
There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.
– Octavia E. Butler
You need nothing to be happy or free, but you need something to be sad. Find that within you which is naturally happy and spontaneously free! It is the ultimate discovery a human being can make.
– Mooji
Wherever there is a crowd there is untruth.
– Søren Kierkegaard
The Frankfurt school: cancel (the split between society and) culture
…the core problem of psychobabble: not that it is vulgar and smarmy, though it is both, but that it fails even on its own terms. It does not reveal things, it obscures them in a fog…It is another form of repression.
– Janan Ganesh
I do this real moron thing, and it’s called thinking. And apparently I’m not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions.
– George Carlin
We are by long odds the most ill-mannered nation, civilized or savage, that exists on the planet today, and our President stands for us like a colossal monument visible from all the ends of the earth.
– Mark Twain
unemployment rate
the length of our street
empty recycling bins
– Elliot Nicely
I am writing with my burnt hand about the nature of fire.
– Ingeborg Bachmann
There is nothing to praise, nothing to damn, nothing to accuse, but much that is absurd, indeed it is all absurd, when one thinks about death.
– Thomas Bernhard
The major adventure is to claim your authentic, true being, which is not culturally given to you. The culture will not explain to you how to be a real human being. It will tell you how to be banker, politician, Indian chief, masseuses, actress, whatever, but it will not give you true being.
– Terence McKenna
If wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by truth.
– Julian Assange
The people around me didn’t understand what I was doing at first, but once I was on the road to doing it, I began to really be afraid that something would happen to me before I got it done. I was afraid I would die before I completed it.
– Elaine Scarry
The mind is not confined to the brain; it is a multi-dimensional field of awareness.
– Stanislav Grof
Contemplation often makes life miserable. We should act more, think less, and stop watching ourselves live.
– Nicolas de Chamfort
if you edit enough, the book disappears altogether
follow me for more writing tips
– Emily Maloney
the sun slowly rose
red-eyed like the lone weary
traveler
– @HaikuHedgehog
Summer was here again.
Summer, summer, summer.
I loved and hated summers.
– Benjamin Alire Sáenz
That level of financial success when an author’s bio contains the phrase “divides their time between.”
– @JamesTateHill
I think of you, of the lake, of the city, of the burning days on the shore, in the sand, of the shadowy paths, of the musical breath of the air.
The water is quiet, blue, I’d like to lie in a boat in the reeds, I don’t want to speak, everything around me will tell you what I’m sensing.
– Ingeborg Bachmann
If you’re not mad at the world, you don’t have what it takes.
– Sun Ra
Try to catch yourself tomorrow morning as soon as you open your eyes. Before a thought comes. That is your true state and that is what you are.
– Robert Adams
Peacocks. Oh to live among peacocks. I’d seen them once in person and they defied so many laws of color and gravity that they had to be made geniuses waiting to take over everything.
– Dave Eggers
As Jung said, “Thank God for our neuroses!” It is thanks to them that we learn to confront ourselves and are forced, frequently through exasperating circumstances, to grow.
– Alice O. Howell
Jung said to me: “You can’t analyze people really if you don’t know how they live. If you haven’t gotten a whiff of the country in which they live, if you haven’t gotten a feeling of the atmosphere in which they normally live, you can’t understand them.”
– Marie Louise von Franz
Live in the new house; wear the fine clothes; ride in the automobile; go on the journey; and confidently plan for greater journeys. Think and speak of all the things you’ve asked for in terms of actual present ownership. Imagine the exact environment and financial condition you desire and live all the time in that imaginary environment and financial condition.
– Wallace D. Wattles
The kindest people are not born that way, they are made. They are the ones that have experienced so much at the hands of life, they are the ones who have dug themselves out of the dark, who have fought to turn every loss into a lesson. The kindest people do not just exist – they choose to soften where circumstance has tried to harden them, they choose to believe in goodness, because they have seen firsthand why compassion is so necessary. They have seen firsthand why tenderness is so important in this world.
– Bianca Sparacino
Music is the medicine of the breaking heart.
– Leigh Hunt
NIGHTS WHEN I DROVE
from dark rural highways
into a city wild with light
I remember you in a rented car
in blackness, a loose map on your knees
both of us tense with sudden geography
Or in an airport bus after days of solitude
as if returning to this planet from another
with time pushed back into our bodies
only our eyes holding on to each other
with the danger of our love
– Michael Ondaatje
MIRACLE FAIR
Commonplace miracle:
that so many commonplace miracles happen.
An ordinary miracle:
in the dead of night
the barking of invisible dogs.
One miracle out of many:
a small, airy cloud
yet it can block a large and heavy moon.
Several miracles in one:
an alder tree reflected in the water,
and that it’s backwards left to right
and that it grows there, crown down
and never reaches the bottom,
even though the water is shallow.
An everyday miracle:
winds weak to moderate
turning gusty in storms.
First among equal miracles:
cows are cows.
Second to none:
just this orchard
from just that seed.
A miracle without a cape and top hat:
scattering white doves.
A miracle, for what else could you call it:
today the sun rose at three-fourteen
and will set at eight-o-one.
A miracle, less surprising than it should be:
even though the hand has fewer than six fingers,
it still has more than four.
A miracle, just take a look around:
the world is everywhere.
An additional miracle, as everything is additional:
the unthinkable
is thinkable.
– Wislawa Szymborska
Be still, my heart, these great trees are prayers.
– Rabindranath Tagore
Here is an infallible test. Imagine yourself in a situation where you are alone, wholly alone on earth, and you are offered one of the two, books or men. I often hear men prizing their solitude, but that is only because there are still men somewhere on earth, even though in the far distance. I knew nothing of books when I came forth from the womb of my mother, and I shall die without books, with another human hand in my own. I do, indeed, close my door at times and surrender myself to a book, but only because I can open the door again and see a human being looking at me.
– Martin Buber
If language was given to men to conceal their thoughts, then gesture’s purpose was to disclose them.
– Iain McGilchrist
the pain I don’t say
out loud, builds a home
inside me.
– Olivia Gatwood
In the quiet yard Among the voices of the smallest absolutes I am a wallflower, an outsider, an antagonist Until I listen to my breath…until I listen to the words of the infinite varied songs …until the insects ignore me as they march onward… And I remember that I need no name to be
– Hawk Durham
My mother would be a falconress, And I, her gay falcon treading her wrist, would fly to bring back from the blue of the sky to her, bleeding, a prize
– Robert Duncan
Basically Alexander Kluge is interested in the destruction of every type of institution. Furthermore — an anarchist doesn’t just go and turn fifty . . .
– Fassbinder, 1982
Apogee
The inevitable weightlessness
that occurs at a point
where there is no more
upward progress.
And yet the downward journey
has yet to begin.
The inflection between up
and down.
The resolution of inertia
and gravity
held in equilibrium
theoretically lasting
no time at all.
No right
No wrong
No good
No bad
No yours
No mine
No is
No was
The absolute beauty
of nothingness
never more or less there.
And yet it happens every cycle of breath
every heartbeat
every moment before
a thought occurs
where there lies a chance
to behold the exquisite pause
of nothingness
where choice exists.
A chance to alter the equation
before something
besides love
happens
or doesn’t.
– Carl Sonnen
Nothing is more consequential in our lives than the notion of God we hold. Not God. The notion of God. This is what steers the ship. Our idea of God will always call the shots. Meister Eckhart, the mystic and theologian who died in 1328, said, “It is a lie, any talk of God that doesn’t comfort you.” This was his notion. Granted, our conceptions may change and evolve, but when we “hold” them, they direct our course. What matters, in the end, is what kind of God we believe in. “All concepts of God,” Teresa of Ávila writes, “are like a jar we break.
– Gregory Boyle
In my body and in my soul I realized that I greatly need sin, I needed lust, vanity, the striving for goods, and I needed the most shameful despair to learn how to give up resistance, to learn how to love the world, to stop comparing the world with any world that I wish for, that I imagine, with any perfection that I think up; I learned to let the world be as it is, and to love it and to belong to it gladly.
– Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
I think Dostoevsky was right, that every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, this is me and the damned world can go to hell.
– Rollo May
An old alchemist gave the following consolation to one of his disciples: “No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you.
– Carl Jung
Rationalists arrogantly assume they can master any system, not realizing just how little is reducible to systems.
– @VinceFHorn
There’s no actual happiness to be found in always trying to be someone else at some future time, because the fact is, you’ll never quite get there. Why not instead, show up fully, right here, right now?
– Mark Van Buren
Every Poet Knows
that an old man comes
out of the ocean
just the same way
a young man does
hungry and free
– john zbigniew guzlowski
a heart of flaming sulphur, flesh of tow, bones of dry wood, to curb the fiery will, of fierce desires that from the passions flow —so divine a power belongs to him who strives with every nerve. for burning beauty to devour, i blame the mistress i was born to serve.
– michelangelo
Compassion is environmental generosity, without direction, without ”for me” and without “for them”
– Chögyam Trungpa
I want a civilisation in which ‘progress’ is not definable as making the world safe for little fat men.
– George Orwell
Someone remind me what periods of uprooting and instability are good for
– River Kenna
The man of contentment seeks nothing that he doesn’t have, and understands that whatever he has, isn’t his to own.
– Wu Hsin
Beyond the human flat earths
which, policed by warm language, wreathed
in the fog the limits of the world,
far out in space you can breathe
the planet revolves in a cold book.
– Les Murray
If we cannot move beyond the ego and return to God through the cultural doorway of mythos (mythology), there is only the pathway through pathos (suffering). With culture committed to the ego rather than spirit, nature gets its revenge.
– David Tacey
Not wanting to better yourself is fecklessness.
– Alice Munro
Reality is a fabric of many transparent films . . . Reality touches our intuition to the quick. We perceive with that intuition. Perhaps we perceive the intuition only, while reality remains forever beyond our grasp.
– Guy Davenport
In the end, man is an event which cannot judge itself, but, for better or worse, is left to the judgment of others.
– C.G. Jung
heat wave
my cellphone
enters dark mode
– @pauldavidmena
Coffee in a blue cup.
The clatter of donkey hoofs
as cherries are cried in the street.
I am bewitched by a boat
green as an apple.
– Beverly Bardsley
Dimensions are not places or locations, but levels of consciousness that vibrate at a certain rate. The higher we vibrate, the more dimensions we consciously experience.
– Liara Covert
And he who is not sufficiently courageous to defend his soul—don’t let him be proud of his ‘progressive’ views, and don’t let him boast that he is…a people’s artist…Let him say to himself: I am a part of the herd and a coward.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
A Song for Many Movements
by Audre Lorde
Nobody wants to die on the way
caught between ghosts of whiteness
and the real water
none of us wanted to leave
our bones
on the way to salvation
three planets to the left
a century of light years ago
our spices are separate and particular
but our skins sing in complimentary keys
at a quarter to eight mean time
we were telling the same stories
over and over and over.
Broken down gods survive
in the crevasses and mudpots
of every beleaguered city
where it is obvious
there are too many bodies
to cart to the ovens
or gallows
and our uses have become
more important than our silence
after the fall
too many empty cases
of blood to bury or burn
and there will be no body left
to listen
and our labor
has become more important
than our silence
Our labor has become
more important
than our silence.
The World Is in Pencil
by Todd Boss
—not pen. It’s got
that same silken
dust about it, doesn’t it,
that same sense of
having been roughed
onto paper even
as it was planned.
It had to be a labor
of love. It must’ve
taken its author some
time, some shove.
I’ll bet it felt good
in the hand-the o
of the ocean, and
the and and the and
of the land.
no need
to cling
a floating frog
– Joso
In any case, you can’t have effective allegory in times when people are swept this way and that by momentary convictions, because everyone will read it differently. You can’t indicate moral values when morality changes with what is being done, because there is no accepted basis of judgment. And you cannot show the operation of grace when grace is cut off from nature or when the very possibility of grace is denied, because no one will have the least idea of what you are about.
– Flannery O’Connor
STONE
And what am I doing here, in a yurt on the side of a hill
at the ragged edge of the tree line, sheltered by conifer and bay,
watching the wind lift, softly, the dry leaves of bamboo?
I lie on the floor and let the sun fall across my back,
as I have been for the past hour, listening to the distant traffic,
to the calls of birds I cannot name. Once, I had so much
I wanted to accomplish. Now, all I know is that I want
to get closer to it – to the rocky slope, the orange petals
of the nasturtium adorning the fence, the wind’s sudden breath.
Close enough that I can almost feel, at night, the slight pressure
of the stars against my skin. Isn’t this what the mystics meant
when they spoke of forsaking the world? Not to turn our backs to it,
only to its elaborate plots, its complicated pleasures –
in favor of the pine’s long shadow, the slow song of the grass.
I’m always forgetting, and remembering, and forgetting.
I want to leave something here in the rough dirt: a twig,
a small stone – perhaps this poem – a reminder to begin,
again, by listening carefully with the body’s rapt attention
– remember? To this. to this.
– Danusha Lameris
O Taste and See
by Denise Levertov
The world is
not with us enough
O taste and see
the subway Bible poster said,
meaning The Lord, meaning
if anything all that lives
to the imagination’s tongue,
grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite,
savor, chew, swallow, transform
into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,
living in the orchard and being
hungry, and plucking
the fruit.
The Fairy Queen has sent you to do brave deeds in this world. That High City that you see is in another world. Before you climb the path to it and hang your shield on its wall, go down into the valley and fight the dragon that you were sent to fight.
– Margaret Hodges
Be grateful for freedom
To see other dreams.
Bless your loneliness as much as you drank
Of your former companionships.
All that you are experiencing now
Will become moods of future joys
So bless it all.
Do not think your ways superior
To another’s
Do not venture to judge
But see things with fresh and open eyes
Do not condemn
But praise what you can
And when you can’t be silent.
Time is now a gift for you
A gift of freedom
To think and remember and understand
The ever perplexing past
And to re-create yourself anew
In order to transform time.
Live while you are alive.
Learn the ways of silence and wisdom
Learn to act, learn a new speech
Learn to be what you are in the seed of your spirit
Learn to free yourself from all things that have moulded you
And which limit your secret and undiscovered road.
Remember that all things which happen
To you are raw materials
Endlessly fertile
Endlessly yielding of thoughts that could change
Your life and go on doing for ever.
Never forget to pray and be thankful
For all the things good or bad on the rich road;
For everything is changeable
So long as you live while you are alive.
Fear not, but be full of light and love;
Fear not but be alert and receptive;
Fear not but act decisively when you should;
Fear not, but know when to stop;
Fear not for you are loved by me;
Fear not, for death is not the real terror,
But life -magically – is.
Be joyful in your silence
Be strong in your patience
Do not try to wrestle with the universe
But be sometimes like water or air
Sometimes like fire
Live slowly, think slowly, for time is a mystery.
Never forget that love
Requires that you be
The greatest person you are capable of being,
Self-generating and strong and gentle-
Your own hero and star.
Love demands the best in us
To always and in time overcome the worst
And lowest in our souls.
Love the world wisely.
It is love alone that is the greatest weapon
And the deepest and hardest secret.
So fear not, my friend.
The darkness is gentler than you think.
Be grateful for the manifold
Dreams of creation
And the many ways of unnumbered peoples.
Be grateful for life as you live it.
And may a wonderful light
Always guide you on the unfolding road.
– Ben Okri
Question
by May Swenson
Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen
Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt
Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead
How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye
With cloud for shift
how will I hide?
THE CAR
by Raymond Carver
The car with a cracked windshield.
The car that threw a rod.
The car without brakes.
The car with a faulty U-joint.
The car with a hole in its radiator.
The car I picked peaches for.
The car with a cracked block.
The car with no reverse gear.
The car I traded for a bicycle.
The car with steering problems.
The car with generator trouble.
The car with no back seat.
The car with the torn front seat.
The car that burned oil.
The car with the rotten hoses.
The car that left the restaurant without paying.
The car with bald tires.
The car with no heater or defroster.
The car with its front end out of alignment.
The car the child threw up in.
The car I threw up in.
The car with the broken water pump.
The car whose timing gear was shot.
The car with the blown head-gasket.
The car I left on the side of the road.
The car that leaked carbon monoxide.
The car with the sticky carburetor.
The car that hit the dog and kept going.
The car with the hole in its muffler.
The car my daughter wrecked.
The car with the twice-rebuilt engine.
The car with the corroded battery cables.
The car bought with a bad check.
Car of my sleepless nights.
The car with a stuck thermostat.
The car whose engine caught fire.
The car with no headlights.
The car with a broken fan belt.
The car with wipers that wouldn’t work.
The car I gave away.
The car with transmission trouble.
The car I washed my hands of.
The car I struck with a hammer.
The car with payments that couldn’t be met.
The repossessed car.
The car whose clutch-pin broke.
The car waiting on the back lot.
Car of my dreams.
My car.
There is one thing that, when cultivated and regularly practiced, leads to a deep spiritual intention, to peace, to mindfulness and clear comprehension, to vision and knowledge, to a happy life here and now, and to the culmination of wisdom and awakening. And what is that one thing? It is mindfulness centered in the body.
– Ravi Ravindra
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.
– Jung
I know that I have died before—
once in November, once in June.
How strange to choose June again,
so concrete with its green breasts and bellies …
New York City will not mind.
At night the bats will beat on the trees,
knowing it all,
seeing what they sensed all day.
– Anne Sexton
The faces of the sufferers
in the street, in dailiness,
their lives showing
through their bodies
a look as of music
the revolutionary look
that says I am in the world
to change the world
my lifetime
is to love to endure to suffer the music
to set its portrait
up as a sheet of the world
the most moving the most alive
Easter and bone
and Faust walking among flowers of the world
and the child alive within the living woman, music of man,
and death holding my lifetime between great hands
the hands of enduring life
that suffers the gifts and madness of full life, on earth, in our time,
and through my life, through my eyes, through my arms and hands
may give the face of this music in portrait waiting for
the unknown person
held in the two hands, you.
– [Käthe Kollwitz :: by Muriel Rukeyser]
It is an absolute human certainty that no one can know his own beauty or perceive a sense of his own worth until it has been reflected back to him in the mirror of another loving, caring human being.
– John Joseph Powell
He was constantly reminded of how startlingly different a place the world was when viewed from a point only three feet to the left.
– Douglas Adams
Nerds are cutting-edge normies.
In 10 years whatever you’re nerding out about now is likely to become normalized.
That’s what it means for innovation to come from the fringe.
No fringe is special, no fringe is safe.
– @VinceFHorn
The whole approach of Buddhism is to develop transcendental common sense.
– Chögyam Trungpa
In the midst of the disguises and artifices that reign among men, it is only attention and vigilance that can save us from surprises.
– Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet
Solitary is as necessary to our sanity as the forest where no one goes, as the waterfall in a canyon which no one has ever seen or heard. I do not expect to be all that solitary for, as a paradoxical person, I am also gregarious and favor the rhythm of withdrawal and return.
– Alan Watts
if the word for this is Palestine
this love this steadfastness
if this word becomes again
unutterable unspeakable.
– Trish Salah
If you are still being hurt by an event that happened to you at twelve, it is the thought that is hurting you now.
– James Hillman
If there were a measure of ‘mental health’, it would involve the ability of individuals to grow into the fullness of each season – that is, the ability to fully become, or enact, the contents of each shield.
– Steven Foster and Meredith Little
For 99 percent of the tenure of humans on earth, nobody could read or write. The great invention had not yet been made. Except for firsthand experience, almost everything we knew was passed on by word of mouth. As in the children’s game “Telephone,” over tens and hundreds of generations, information would slowly be distorted and lost. Books changed all that. Books, purchasable at low cost, permit us to interrogate the past with high accuracy; to tap the wisdom of our species; to understand the point of view of others, and not just those in power; to contemplate-with the best teachers – the insights, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history. They allow people long dead to talk inside our heads. Books can accompany us everywhere. Books are patient where we are slow to understand, allow us to go over the hard parts as many times as we wish, and are never critical of our lapses. Books are key to understanding the world and participating in a democratic society.
– Carl Sagan
Sooner or later, the moon pops up on pretty much every poet’s literary horizon.
– Srikanth Reddy
When I served in the Air Force, my life was in the hands of black, brown, red, yellow and white toned people. We were friends, we were combatants, we were Battle Buddies and we had each others six when the hammer slammed the anvil. We trained, we sweated and we bled together. We came together from all parts of the country; we came together from all religions. We were a society unto ourselves. We worked as a team, a well oiled machine. We fought for our brothers through thick and thin. We protected each other, that was what we did. The only color we saw was OD Green…..
– Rev. Dr. Victor Chatham
I grew up in a home where I was denied the option of being me. I was shamed, shunned, shaped into something more palatable to my caregivers. Thereafter, I spent many years over-compensating, absolutely refusing to alter, adapt or compromise who I was. It was imperative that I got seen and accepted as “me”. When someone dared to suggest that I had something wrong, I saw their criticism as an attempt to control and repress me. And sometimes it was. But sometimes, it wasn’t. Sometimes it was something else: an attempt to remind me that not everything was about me. That’s the thing about over-compensation. It often turns us into precisely what we are fleeing. In making everything about me, I was unknowingly denying others their me-ness. And so the journey shifted. The next stage was to so solidify my sense of self, that I could recognize that others existed. And that their every criticism wasn’t an attempt to imprison me. Sometimes it was actually an attempt to liberate me from Overcompensation Prison. If you are someone who was denied the opportunity to be fully you, by all means fight for it. Fight with, and for, all that you are. But also fight for the peace that comes after you know you matter. When you can put down your sword of self-significance and realize that they matter too. The freedom to step out from the shadows of self-doubt and re-join the species. That’s the real peace right there.
– Jeff Brown
the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.
– J. R. R. Tolkien
Are we watching the debate or are we protecting our mental health tonight?
– Lauren Davis
Hypocrisy is the most difficult and nerve-racking vice that any man can pursue; it needs an unceasing vigilance and a rare detachment of spirit. It cannot, like adultery or gluttony, be practised at spare moments; it is a whole-time job.
– W. Somerset Maugham
What is the sound of all possible neuronal patterns firing at once?
– @VinceFHorn
may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that
– Lucille Clifton
I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes, I follow it along trustingly. And I don’t have any sense of its coming to a kind of crescendo, or of its petering out either. It is just going steadily along.
– William Stafford
ALL THINGS COLLABORATE
Think always of the universe as one living creature,
made of one substance and one soul:
how all is absorbed into this one consciousness;
how a single impulse governs all its actions;
how all things collaborate in all that happens;
the very web and mesh of it all.
– Marcus Aurelius
Thirst
Another morning and I wake with thirst
for the goodness I do not have. I walk
out to the pond and all the way God has
given us such beautiful lessons. Oh Lord,
I was never a quick scholar but sulked
and hunched over my books past the hour
and the bell; grant me, in your mercy,
a little more time. Love for the earth
and love for you are having such a long
conversation in my heart. Who knows what
will finally happen or where I will be sent,
yet already I have given a great many things
away, expecting to be told to pack nothing,
except the prayers which, with this thirst,
I am slowly learning.
– Mary Oliver
Trust the queen is you.
Trust the mud is you,
& the soft, silver afro of the dandelion.
Trust the grass-whistle might be
your speech, high as the whistle
of the whale. Trust
we’ll know your shape, whatever species
in you answers when we put our faces
to the dirt & call you by
your old & human name.
– Aracelis Girmay
I believe in the virtue of small numbers. The world will be saved by the few.
– Andrè Gide
Even now, after centuries of reductionist propaganda, the world is still intricate and vast, as dark as it is light, a place of mystery, where we cannot do one thing without doing many things, or put two things together without putting many things together.
– Wendell Berry
I am not a person and I am not an animal. There is something I am here for – something I must do before I can go.
– William S. Burroughs
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The original source of attachment
is the same source
of permanent release.
– Frank LaRue Owen
What is life but an unpleasant interruption to a peaceful nonexistence.
– Jean-Paul Sartre
longing to see
in the morning flowers
the face of God
– Basho
Therapists are pimps for samsara.
– Ken Wilber
And the rivers continue their usual flow
as if we are invisible,
always hidden under the debris.
The disaster watches over us at night
–our recurring, endless night–
like a verb with no subject or object.
– Dunya Mikhail trans. from Arabic by Elizabeth Winslow
Hearing is when we listen to or read the teachings, and it’s where the metabolic process begins—your first bite. Meditating is when we sit with what we have heard and metabolize the teachings.
– Andrew Holecek
Never say no or yes on principle. Say it only when you feel it is really yes. If it is really no, it is no. If you say yes for any outer reason, you are sunk.
– CG Jung
Mankind’s self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.
– Walter Benjamin, Illuminations
Peace is within oneself to be found in the same place as agitation and suffering. It is not found in a forest or on a hilltop. Where you experience suffering, you can also find freedom from suffering. Trying to run away from suffering is actually to run toward it.
– Ajahn Chah
I’m sorry America. I think your only option at this point is revolution.
– Joy Henderson, After the Debate
EVENING
The sky puts on the darkening blue coat
held for it by a row of ancient trees;
you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight,
one journeying to heaven, one that falls;
and leave you, not at home in either one,
not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses,
not calling to eternity with the passion
of what becomes a star each night, and rises;
and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)
your life, with its immensity and fear,
so that, now bounded, now immeasurable,
it is alternately stone in you and star.
– Rilke
The human race sleepwalked to oblivion, thinking only of the corporate logos on it’s shroud.
– J.G. Ballard
I’ve found that my clients’ discontents are often rooted in an unmet longing for wildness, mystery, and a meaningful engagement with the world.
– Bill Plotkin
Figuring out, years ago, that there are differences between political theory, political strategy, and policy analysis was clarifying for me.
– @tamaranopper
Corporate centrism cannot defeat fascism. It never has and it never will.
– Francesca Fiorentini
Rather than a logical or chronological sequence, these pages shall form – whenever completed or interrupted from without —an archipelago or constellation, an image of the spurt of blood, the deflagration of gray matter, or the final stream of vomit which my collapse (solely conceivable to me as a sudden catastrophe of this sort) shall inscribe upon the sky, fictively.
– Michael Leiris
through the spider web
the setting sun splinters —
kaleidoscope
– @hegelincanada
For in the true nature of things, if we rightly consider: every green tree is far more glorious than if it were made of gold and silver.
– Martin Luther King Jr.
True adulthood, or psychological maturity, has become an uncommon achievement in Western and Westernized societies, and genuine elderhood nearly nonexistent… A more mature human society requires more mature human individuals.
– Bill Plotkin
Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.
– Marcus Aurelius
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.
– ML von Franz
When you feel stuck, pray for an opening; when you are confused, pray for lucidity; when you feel numb, pray to feel the depths you avoided again; when anxious, pray for being rooted, centered and firm. Pray to open, move and elevate what is stagnant — Don’t stay stuck.
– @mikael_jibril
The answer is always community. Find those who share your vision of liberation and build with them.
– Raquel Willis
Just before waking up from sleep, there is a very brief state, free from thought. That should be made permanent.
– Ramana Maharshi
I’m trying to unwrite this place.
– K. Iver
To be wild is not to be crazy like a criminal or psychotic, but “mad as the mist and snow.” The marks of wildness are a love of nature, a delight in silence, a voice free to say spontaneous things, and a vivacious curiosity in the face of the unknown.
– Robert Bly
Let them eat vinyl.
– Kurt Cobain
If man spent as much time and energy demolishing his prison as was spent in building it, all would be free.
– Wu Hsin
The mind is beautiful because of the paradox. It uses itself to understand itself.
– Adam Elenbaas
give him one of the Panera lemonades maybe
– Hunter Harris, On Joe Biden/ Debate
Summertime is always
the best of what might be.
– Charles Bowden
Experiment? God forbid! Look at a writer like Joyce. He started off writing very well, then you can watch him going mad with vanity. He ends up a lunatic.
– Evelyn Waugh
The old that is strong does not wither.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
In all this I feel a grave danger, the danger of what might be called cosmic impiety. The concept of ‘truth’ as something dependent upon facts largely outside human control has been one of the ways in which philosophy hitherto has inculcated the necessary element of humility. When this check upon pride is removed, a further step is taken on the road towards a certain kind of madness–the intoxication of power which invaded philosophy with Fichte, and to which modern men, whether philosophers or not, are prone. I am persuaded that this intoxication is the greatest danger of our time, and that any philosophy which, however unintentionally, contributes to it is increasing the danger of vast social disaster.
– Bertrand Russell
Genius has been defined as a supreme capacity for taking trouble… It might be more fitly described as a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds and keeping them therein so long as the genius remains.
– Samuel Butler
Look profound into nature, and afterward, you will comprehend everything better.
– Albert Einstein
I ride the long-wave of my soul
and feel the wordless stream
of dreaming wakening
Oh, you sweet, sweet qualities
of being, being oh, so true
I sing of you
– George Gorman
An artist has got to be careful never really to arrive at a place where he thinks he’s… somewhere. You always have to realize that you’re constantly in a state of becoming. And, as long as you can stay in that realm you’ll sort of be alright.
– Bob Dylan
GIVING WAY
There are those who cackle like crows to hear themselves speak. They fear they’ll disappear unless they hear their voices bouncing off of everything. I know. I was one of them. And those who repeat themselves because they fear they’ll never be heard. Like waves they reach farther and farther onto shore. They want to be accepted by everyone. I was one of them too. Now quiet and smooth, through no wisdom of my own, it’s hard not to feel for everyone. We simply want to be seen and heard. And in time we trip into what we dislike and fear. This is the apprenticeship of compassion, to open our care to all things, including the darker moods we show no one. Now there’s so much truth in every direction that when my heart breaks surface like a diver short of air, all I can do is gasp, thank you. The dream of being heard has given way to listening. Like a cliff worn of its broken tooth after a hundred years of wind.
– Mark Nepo
The faëry forest glimmered
Beneath an ivory moon,
The silver grasses shimmered
Against a faëry tune.
Beneath the silken silence
The crystal branches slept,
And dreaming thro’ the dew-fall
The cold white blossoms wept.
– Sara Teasdale
I will tell you the first commandment of God to man. This is not one of the commandments given to Moses, which were for a special people, but one of the universal commandments which have always existed. There are many of them, perhaps twenty, but this is the first. ‘Let one hand wash the other’. It is very difficult for one hand to wash itself alone, but if one hand washes the other, both will be clean.
– Gurdjieff
To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time.
– Leonard Bernstein
There is a love for the real, an affection for the true, in all of Dutch art. A church interior with its stillness. A hand with its gesture. A landscape with its distances. A cloud with its motion.
– Katharine Weber
What I mean to say is, we had been considerable. Had been loved. Not lonely, not lost, not freakish, but wise, each in his or her own way. Our departures caused pain. Those who had loved us sat upon their beds, heads in hand; lowered their faces to tabletops, making animal noises. We had been loved, I say, and remembering us, even many years later, people would smile, briefly gladdened at the memory.
– George Saunders
Insist on believing that good will prevail; that the work will get done; that there will again be love. We have to want to get up in the morning for the good mornings to arrive.
– Tennessee Williams
Have you ever heard a blindfolded octopus unwrap a cellophane-covered bathtub?
– Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
The real world is in a much darker and deeper place than this, and most of it is occupied by jellyfish and things. We just happen to to forget all that. Don’t you agree? Two-thirds of earth’s surface is ocean, and all we can see with the naked eye is the surface: the skin.
– Haruki Murakami
But if we define the Megaphone as the composite of the hundreds of voices we hear each day that come to us from people we don’t know, via high-tech sources, it’s clear that a significant and ascendant component of that voice has become bottom-dwelling, shrill, incurious, ranting, and agenda-driven. It strives to antagonize us, make us feel anxious, ineffective, and alone; convince us that the world is full of enemies and of people stupider and less agreeable than ourselves; is dedicated to the idea that, outside the sphere of our immediate experience, the world works in a different, more hostile, less knowable manner. This braindead tendency is viral and manifests intermittently; while it is the blood in the veins of some of our media figures, it flickers on and off in others.
– George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone
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
Mankind are not held together by lies. Trust is the foundation of society. Where there is no truth, there can be no trust, and where there is no trust, there can be no society. Where there is society, there is trust, and where there is trust, there is something upon which it is supported.
– Frederick Douglass
La majestueuse égalité des lois, qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain.
In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.
– Anatole France
Sleep is a biological necessity, not a crime. For some peo- ple, sleeping outside is their only option. The City of Grants Pass jails and fines those people for sleeping anywhere in public at any time, including in their cars, if they use as little as a blanket to keep warm or a rolled-up shirt as a pillow. For people with no access to shelter, that punishes them for being homeless. That is unconscionable and un- constitutional. Punishing people for their status is “cruel and unusual” under the Eighth Amendment. See Robinson v. California, 370 U. S. 660 (1962).
Homelessness is a reality for too many Americans. On any given night, over half a million people across the country lack a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence. Many do not have access to shelters and are left to sleep in cars, sidewalks, parks, and other public places. They expe- rience homelessness due to complex and interconnected is- sues, including crippling debt and stagnant wages; domes- tic and sexual abuse; physical and psychiatric disabilities; and rising housing costs coupled with declining affordable
housing options.
– Great writing from Sotomayor in the Grants Pass dissent.
even in
my hometown
I sleep like a stranger
– Kyorai
The human race exaggerates
everything: its heroes,
its enemies,
its importance.
– Charles Bukowski
If you have really worked on your complexes, you become more or less untouchable and you are no longer influenced by poisonous gossip. As long as poisonous talk can get to you, it means there is some shadow element around that isn’t yet integrated.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
Mercy means compassion, empathy, a heart for someone’s troubles. It’s not something you do—it is something in you, accessed, revealed, or cultivated through use, like a muscle.
– Anne Lamott
The implications of synchronicity will make you dizzy if you really reflect on them. They suggest that the psyche and the outer universe are not as unrelated as conventional psychology would have us believe. They mirror each other and are ultimately inseparable.
– Steven Forrest
Aliens would name us “Water” because we are 70% water & only 30% land.
– Elon Musk
Nothing increases my compassion for others quite like admitting and accepting my own defeat, my own inescapable and dire need for grace.
– @McCallErickson
You deny the sacred things of another, but you keep your own. The beliefs of another are superstitions, but your own are reasonable and real. What is sacred?
– Krishnamurti
Maps
by Yesenia Montilla
for Marcelo
Some maps have blue borders
like the blue of your name
or the tributary lacing of
veins running through your
father’s hands. & how the last
time I saw you, you held
me for so long I saw whole
lifetimes flooding by me
small tentacles reaching
for both our faces. I wish
maps would be without
borders & that we belonged
to no one & to everyone
at once, what a world that
would be. Or not a world
maybe we would call it
something more intrinsic
like forgiving or something
simplistic like river or dirt.
& if I were to see you
tomorrow & everyone you
came from had disappeared
I would weep with you & drown
out any black lines that this
earth allowed us to give it—
because what is a map but
a useless prison? We are all
so lost & no naming of blank
spaces can save us. & what
is a map but the delusion of
safety? The line drawn is always
in the sand & folds on itself
before we’re done making it.
& that line, there, south of
el rio, how it dares to cover
up the bodies, as though we
would forget who died there
& for what? As if we could
forget that if you spin a globe
& stop it with your finger
you’ll land it on top of someone
living, someone who was not
expecting to be crushed by thirst—
Separated from his essence, like a snail deprived of its shell, man is only a blob of plastic matter modeled after the moving images.
– Jacques Ellul
Cursed be the dreamer ineffectual
Who first desired, in his stupidity
Loving a problem void, insoluble,
To mingle thoughts of love with honesty.
– Baudelaire
Children, taught either years beneath their intelligence or miles wide of relevance to it, or both: their intelligence becomes hopelessly bewildered, drawn off its centers, bored, or atrophied.
– James Agee
You keep chasing
the scale, you’ll
find the melody,
the old monk
told the band.
– The Old Monk
dark woodland
fireflies turning
into starships
– @hegelincanada
A sincere prayer is an intense prayer with no space for doubt and no time to hesitate.
– @mikael_jibril
“What advice, essentially, would you give to young writers?”
Toni Morrison: “I would say wait ’til you’re 50.”
Every poem has
its own hammer,
the old monk told
the poet.
– The Old Monk
I’ll look for you in old Honolulu
San Francisco, Ashtabula
Yer gonna have to leave me now, I know
But I’ll see you in the sky above
In the tall grass, in the ones I love
Yer gonna make me lonesome when you go…
– Bob Dylan
Think of these levels as reading to entertain, reading to inform, reading to understand, and reading to master. When you learned to read in elementary school, you were taught to read for entertainment. If you made it to high school and college, you learned to read to inform. This is where most people stop. But most of the value comes at the last two levels.
– Mortimer Adlers
POETRY
It’s a bit like looking through the big window
on the top deck of the number 47.
I’m watching you, and her, and all of them,
but through my own reflection.
Or opening my eyes when everyone’s praying.
The wave machine of my father’s breathing,
my mother’s limestone-fingered steeple,
my sister’s tiny fidgets, and me, moon-eyed, unforgetting.
And then the oak doors flapping slowly open to let us out,
like some great injured bird trying to take flight.
– Nick Laird
I wanted to hold everything in place with my thin little arm and weak spirit. I wanted to do what I could with my unreliable body to try and deal with the many scary things that were going to start happening from now on. I wanted to try.
– Banana Yoshimoto
Philosophizing is: rejecting false arguments.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
For Jung, aging was not a process of inexorable decline but a time for the progressive refinement of what is essential. ‘The decisive question for a man is: is he related to something infinite or not?’
– Anthony Stevens
Stop trying to be so conscious about everything. You’re trying too hard.
– @VinceFHorn
you are beautiful and faded, like an old opera tune played upon a harpsichord; or like the sun-flooded silks of an eighteenth-century boudoir. in your eyes smoulder the fallen roses of outlived minutes.
– amy lowell
Be careful, when a democracy is sick, fascism comes to its bedside, but it is not to inquire about its health.
– Albert Camus
Decades of being deliberately distracted by grotesque, meaningless over-consumption has bred an uneducated, soulless & directionless population ripe for Fascism to sweep in & escort us through civilization’s short final chapter.
– @ClimateDad77
Do not shorten the morning by getting up late, or waste it in unworthy occupations or in talk; look upon it as the quintessence of life.
Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Once the intuition gets you in the door, you can figure out how to unlock it. Once a leap of intuition gets you to your conclusion, you can reconstruct a path that you might have taken – but did not in fact take – to get there …
– Iain McGilchrist
I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.
– Flannery O’Connor
far out in the dusk
where qualities mingle
a figure is standing
at the tide’s edge
– Thomas A Clark
A farewell does not dilute the presence of the past; it may even make it a deeper presence.
– Byung-Chul Han,
The Scent of Time
(tr. Daniel Steuer)
The cicadas are dying out — station after station closing down. The two great plane-trees are already silent, and only in the meadow where the sun still plays do they keep up their singing.
– Lawrence Durrell
now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.
– C.S. Lewis
Without spiritual discipline we are never going to wake up or advance on our journey through this life. But our discipline must be wedded to joy, and we must find pleasure in the myriad wonders that this life offers.
– Joan Gattuso
i hear in my heart, i hear in its ominous pulses, all day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses; all night from their cells, neighing. we spur to a land of no name, outracing the storm-wind; we leap to the infinite dark, like the sparks from the anvil.
– louise imogen guiney
When the empty ugliness at the centers of power becomes clear to you, if that is a sharp, new, devastating feeling, a good thing to do is to follow the instructions of those far from centers of power who have been seeing, surviving, strategizing & surviving for a long, long time.
– Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
sometimes amazes me how much of what is considered “good” in poetry is actually writing from a place of wealth and privilege.
– Emma Bolden
Because we’re bad at saying goodbye
you say you kinda like summer storms
at least from the inside looking out,
leaving you
with just breeze and sound and grey.
you say you’ll miss the trees, the way
they rustle in the rain, the way
big green leaves collect little waterfalls
in the downpour in the City,
storms accumulate in the gutters
and on the rooftops
and in the spines of so many
black umbrellas: you say you’ll miss
how small Detroit can be. we talk
a lot about the weather but style it
poetry. I’ll miss that, knowing
we share the same sky. but you have
undone what’s hemmed you in, stitch
by stitch, unafraid of fraying
while you reach for tomorrow. you say
you’ll miss me over the top
of blistering resonants from the sky,
thunderclaps loud like a Brooklyn train
punctuate your resolve. we don’t see
each other that often, but
you know I know the way
down I-80 and across the bridge,
you know these trees will miss you, too.
– Isaac Pickell
I speed-run things that are trivial to me.
This is why I will never encourage anyone to speed-run enlightenment.
To speed-run awakening is to trivialize it.
– @VinceFHorn
Trauma was not being able to get the hands of the clock off me. Healing was learning no one has ever laid a fingerprint on the part of me that’s infinite.
– Andrea Gibson
Nobody tells the oceans, trees or mountains that they are too old. They talk about how powerful they are, how grounded they are, how amazing they are… Imagine if we thought of ourselves the same way as we age. Maybe this way we will realize how spectacular we are!
– Becky Hemsley
TRAPEZE
See how the first dark takes the city in its arms
and carries it into what yesterday we called the future.
O, the dying are such acrobats.
Here you must take a boat from one day to the next,
or clutch the girders of the bridge, hand over hand.
But they are sailing like a pendulum between eternity and evening
diving, recovering, balancing the air.
Who can tell at this hour seabirds from starlings,
wind from revolving doors or currents off the river.
Some are as children on swings pumping higher and higher.
Don’t call them back, don’t call them in for supper.
See, they leave scuff marks like jet trails on the sky.
– Deborah Digges
When all you focus on is phenomena it hurts like fuck.
– Lama Lena
Either you look and see beyond language – as a first perception – or you see the world through the filter of your thoughts.
– Chögyam Trungpa
the eucalyptus are in bloom. the Arabs are under the ground. the Americans on the moon.
– Etel Adnan
Once technical operations are in billionths of a second and even the best machines are out of date in a few years, no distance, reflection, or criticism is possible.
– Jacques Ellul
What the fuck is even the point of a government, anyway, if not to provide a home for every person?
– Dhammic Baseball
The only correct position is to call for both US candidates to step down.
– Hari Kunzru
The impulse behind “wanting to be conscious” is usually a sense of lack, as in, “I don’t have enough presence, attention, consciousness, etc.”
Once you start to question whether this story is true, you may also find yourself more willing to let go of being conscious.
– @VinceFHorn
The most insidious consequence of colonialism is how it captured our imaginations. It’s hard to think of good governance outside of “democracy” or economic prosperity outside of “capitalism.” We have to unlearn these paradigms & reclaim different ways of being in the world.
– Marius Kothor, Ph.D.
I’m also really interested in looking at therapy basically as a search for dignity. [Patients] come to us with some kind of injury to their dignity. And the accommodation is some attempt to preserve some modicum of dignity in the face of having to reveal things…that they’re ashamed of or worry that I will shame them for.
– Lynne Jacobs
All the “solutions” for extreme heat (planting trees, cooling centers, etc.) will only help to the extent that we quickly dismantle the fossil fuel industry. Fossil fuel is the overwhelming proximal cause. The only actual solution is to end fossil fuels.
– @ClimateHuman
Science is not really happening when the goal is a paper, a presentation, a grant, or any product. It only really happens when the goal is a process of discovery.
– Itai Yanai
There is no transforming yourself. You are who you are, and by and large you are not choosing your traits, proclivities, abilities, etc., though they do evolve over time. You can, however, transform your relationship to yourself. That’s the work worth doing.
– Sara Campbell
I maintain that Jimmy Carter is the only president we’ve ever had who has grasped the horrifying reality of what being president does to one’s soul, and spent the rest of his life trying to atone.
– @ObviousMonk
Artists: When the failures and chaos of your work refuse to yield, that is when you make a breakthrough to a place outside logic, theory, intention, data, consciousness, thinking, and even the experiences of life. These magnificent ruptures often occur at the time of greatest grief, despondency. You have invented fire.
– Jerry Saltz
How could this realm not be the greatest of teachers, the primary engine of awakening as it breathes blazing through mirror-deep mind?
– David Hinton
The people that built their heaven on your land are telling you yours is in the sky.
– Nina Simone
Traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort.
– Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
I will be the last millennial on earth without a tattoo.
– @exhaustdata
Yesterday lives only in your Mind.
– Sadhguru
among thousands of singing insects,
one singing
out of tune
– Takajo Mitsuhashi
Increasingly convinced the metacrisis is a cultural metabolism deficiency.
– @regenavocado
It’s not the current that will drown you. It’s the exhaustion from fighting it.
– Rebekah Crane
We don’t have to wait for anything at all. What we have to do is start.
– Octavia E. Butler
The reason trauma survivors are so independent is because they grew up in homes where needing help was met with criticism. They’ve adapted to not needing others, because of what it costs to want help & to get hurt for asking. Independence isn’t a choice but an act of survival.
– Nate Postlethwait
If anyone is unwilling to descend into himself, because this is too painful, he will remain superficial in his writing… If you are unwilling to know what you are, your writing is a form of deceit.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
I used to be hyper-rational.
It was a protection against not knowing.
Befriend groundlessness.
You will not regret it.
– @VinceFHorn
To help in a way that deprives someone of agency is a violent act.
– Tyler Alterman
Does it matter where the birds go? Does it even matter
what species they are? They leave here, that’s the point,
first their bodies, then their sad cries.
And from that moment, cease to exist for us.
You must learn to think of our passion that way.
Each kiss was real, then
each kiss left the face of the earth.
– Louise Glück
Maturity is the Grand Illusion – some people are just younger than others.
– Manly P. Hall
In this universe, which was created by a Divine, organizing intelligence, there are simply no accidents.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
highway duet
two trucks pickup their pace
vanish from sight
– Sheila Burpee Duncan
to measure
the blue unravelling.
– André du Bouchet
If you can’t do anything else, surrender to consciousness. What I mean about surrender? Surrender your ego, your problems, your emotions, your fears, your frustrations, your hurts, your anger. Give it all up. Say, “Take it consciousness.”
– Robert Adams
ESSENTIAL
We hurry through the so-called boring things
in order to attend to that which we deem
more important, interesting.
Perhaps the final freedom will be a recognition
that everything in every moment is essential
and that nothing at all is important.
– Helen Luke
In that very breath that we take now lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us.
– Peter Matthiessen
So long as they continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern. Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.
– George Orwell
As a poet – not as a citizen – there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one’s language from corruption. And that is particularly serious now. It’s being so quickly corrupted. Speech is the mother of thought, not the hand-maiden. When it is corrupted, people lose faith in what they hear, and that leads to violence. As a citizen obviously one has a host of political duties. The issues are too obvious to go into. But that’s as a citizen. My only duty as a poet is to defend the use of language.
– W.H. Auden
Reading
by A.R. Ammons
It’s nice
after dinner
to walk down
to the beach
and find
the biggest thing
on earth
relatively calm
The entire history of women’s struggle for self-determination has been muffled in silence over and over. One serious cultural obstacle encountered by any feminist writer is that each feminist work has tended to be received as if it emerged from nowhere; as if each of us had lived, thought, and worked without any historical past or contextual present. This is one of the ways in which women’s work and thinking has been made to seem sporadic, errant, orphaned of any tradition of its own.
– Adrienne Rich
Q: You have been politically engaged, but you have never succumbed to ideology, which has devoured some of the best black writers of my generation.
A: Perhaps I did not succumb to ideology, as you put it, because I have never seen myself as a spokesman. I am a witness. In the church in which I was raised you were supposed to bear witness to the truth. Now, later on, you wonder what in the world the truth is, but you do know what a lie is.
– James Baldwin
No thought, no reflection, no analysis, no cultivation, no intention; let it settle itself.
– Tilopa
It really is true: doing what you please (i.e., what pleases you), with energy, will lead you to everything—to your particular obsessions and the ways in which you’ll indulge them, to your particular challenges and the forms in which they’ll convert into beauty, to your particular obstructions and your highly individualized obstruction breakers. We can’t know what our writing problems will be until we write our way into them, and then we can only write our way out.
– George Saunders
We must see God not as a Him (some linear rewarding fellow) but an IT, a great beast beyond our understanding, who wants something from us, and we must give it, and all we may control is the spirit in which we give it and the ultimate end which the giving serves.
– George Saunders
“Master,” said Ged, “I cannot take your name from you, not being strong enough, and I cannot trick your name from you, not being wise enough. So I am content to stay here, and learn or serve, whatever you will: unless by chance you will answer a question I have.”
“Ask it.”
“What is your name?”
The doorkeeper smiled, and said his name; and Ged, repeating it, entered for the last time into that House.”
– Ursula K. Le Guin
Ideas are food. The idea of God is based on a conscious experience: the conscious experience of our own existence. When I become truly aware of my own existence, at that moment I know that I am being seen by something higher than myself. Do you remember when you first looked in wonder at the stars? For a moment, you were being seen by something greater than yourself.
It is not just I, me, who truly sees the starry sky; at that very same moment of wonder, I, me, am under a deep, silent look from above. That aspect of the moment is often forgotten. The idea of God is meant to call us back to that experience of being seen by what is higher.
– Jacob Needleman
Let me say this before rain becomes a utility they can plan and distribute for money. By ‘they’ I mean the people who cannot understand that rain is a festival, who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think that what has no price has no value, that what cannot be sold is not real, so that the only way to make something actual is to place it on the market. The time will come when they will sell you even your rain. At the moment, it is still free, and I am in it. I celebrate its gratuity and its meaninglessness.
– Thomas Merton
But the world is more often refuge
than evidence, comfort and covert
for the flinching will, rather than the sharp
particulate instants through which God’s being burns
into ours. I say God and mean more
than the bright abyss that opens in that word.
I say world and mean less
than the abstract oblivion of atoms
out of which every intact thing emerges,
into which every intact thing finally goes.
I do not know how to come closer to God
except by standing where a world is ending
for one man. It is still dark,
and for an hour I have listened
to the breathing of the woman I love beyond
my ability to love. Praise to the pain
scalding us toward each other, the grief
beyond which, please God, she will live
and thrive. And praise to the light that is not
yet, the dawn in which one bird believes,”
crying not as if there had been no night
but as if there were no night in which it had not been.
– Christian Wiman, 2047 Grace Street
I wish I could be a better writer, but writing is so difficult. I get seduced by visual aesthetics. Because I just like making beautiful pictures, sometimes I wander away from making a clear statement.
– Sally Mann
You think you’re yourself, but there are other persons in you.
– John Barth
A museum is a place where one should lose one’s head.
– Renzo Piano
I see the girl of you before the cowboy told you the news, when still a whole world could be contained in tree-less prairie, when all that you knew and were was wild, still unmolded by man.
– Jill Kitchen
All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Instead of willing yourself to avoid the bad, enjoying the good will naturally draw you in a higher direction.
– Rick Hanson
Trust yourself. At the root, at the core, there is pure sanity, pure openness. Don’t trust what you have been taught, what you think, what you believe, what you hope. Deeper than that, trust the silence of your being.
– Gangaji
bumper cars
all facing the same way
summer’s end
– Dan McCullough
The hard silence between frustrated people always feels cluttered. But holy silence is spacious and inviting. You can drink it down. We offer it to ourselves when we work, rest, meditate, bike, read.
– Anne Lamott
We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.
– Richard Feynman
…I feel like kicking myself in the ass when I go to gatherings, even if the drinks are free. It never works for me. I´ve got enough clay to play with. People empty me. I have to get away to refill.
– Bukowski
Amusements, friendship, art–all must be compelled toward the new integration, thanks to which there is to be no more social maladjustment or neurosis. Man is to be smoothed out, like a pair of pants under a steam iron.
– Jacques Ellul
Issac Newton was an alchemist. Alan Turing thought telepathy is real. It’s undeniable at this point that people at the upper bounds of intelligence are quasi-mystics. A material universe made of inert atoms is for midwits only.
– Jash Dholani
The world is a gift which evades all human grasp.
– Byung-Chul Han
It is not things that are dividing us, but ideas. If this is understood, life becomes very simple.
– Krishnamurti
Loss itself is not a gift; loss is just loss. Pain is not okay just because we can grow from it. We never need to be blown apart just because we can learn from the act of piecing ourselves back together.
– Teri Dillion
Our poetry has gone sour.
Women’s hair, nights, curtains and sofas
Have gone sour. Everything has gone sour.
– Nizar Qabbani
It feels weird to celebrate our independence as a nation when it’s pretty clear we are losing it.
– John Collins
Democracy is a con game. It’s a word invented to placate people to make them accept a given institution. All institutions sing, ‘We are free.’ The minute you hear ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’, watch out… because in a truly free nation, no one has to tell you you’re free.
– Jacque Fresco
The real rebrand is when you reintroduce yourself to the world as the version of you that you were designed to be. The rebirth.
– Nika Solé
There is no duality whatsoever. You are merely projecting your own ideas.
– Nisargadatta
Just a casual reminder that Germans who “didn’t bother to vote” in 1932 didn’t get a chance again until 1946, after Hitler’s death. — There’s a lesson there.
– Andrea Junker
Summer has filled her veins with light and her heart is washed with noon.
– Cecil Day-Lewis
Your mind will give back to you exactly what you put into it.
– James Joyce
What is Water?
by Danielle Legros Georges
What is water but rain but cloud but river but ocean
but ice but tear.
What is tear but torn what is worn as skin as in as out
as out.
Exodus. I am trying to tell a tale that shifts like a gale
that hurricanes and casts a line
that buckles in wind that is reborn a kite a wing.
I am far
from the passage far from the plane of descending
them,
suitcases passports degrees of mobility like heat
like heat on their backs.
This cluster of fine grapes Haitian purple beige
black brown.
CANTICLE
Open your doors Open my windows
I dwell in you and you dwell in me
We are a duplex of comradely miracles
We are a house as large as mankind
Those we have sat lovingly beside
those we have ached for or laughed with
all those who have pierced us with joy
become residents of our habitation
Who needs to have it explained?
Who needs to have it defended?
This is an alleluia of life
This is the humming of humansong
– James Broughton
One of the best things I ever did for my mental health was stop taking self-care advice from people with more resources than me
– @dr_chairbreaker
Fear that you will lose your identity is childishness, clinging to the toys, to your desires and fears, opinions and ideas. Give it all up and be ready for the real to assert itself. This self-assertion is best expressed in words “I Am”. Nothing else has being.
– Nisargadatta
Men take so much delight in lying, that truth is sometimes forced to disguise herself in the habit of falsehood to get entertainment, as in fables by the ancients.
– Samuel Butler
I do not believe that our sexuality, gender expression, and bodies can be liberated without making a ferocious mobilization against imperialist war and racism an integral part of our struggle.
– Leslie Feinberg
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
We know so well what we are doing ourselves and why we do it, do we not ? I fancy that there is some truth in the view which is being put forward nowadays, that it is our less conscious thoughts and our less conscious actions which mainly mould our lives.
– Samuel Butler
From Tanka Diary
by Harryette Mullen
The botanical garden is just as I remember,
although it is certain that everything
has changed since my last visit.
How many hilarious questions these fuzzy
fiddleheads are inquiring of spring
will be answered as green ferns unfurl?
Walking the path, I stop to pick up
bleached bark from a tree, curled into
a scroll of ancient wisdom I am unable to read.
Even in my dreams I’m hiking
these mountain trails expecting to find a rock
that nature has shaped to remind me of a heart.
The Only Ones
by Harryette Mullen
Seekers occupy
the roof, gather remnants of
whipped clouds. As twilight
deepens, pallid moon’s
bathing in an ocean of
indigo. Are we
the only ones still
sharing this intimacy
of reflection when
life strikes a plangent
chord in the hollow heart of
a wounded guitar?
Alone on rooftops,
attentive sentries in realms
of solitude, we
follow tomorrow,
standing ready to welcome
the improbable.
Mind is consciousness which has put on limitations. You are originally unlimited and perfect. Later you take on limitations and become the mind.
– Ramana Maharshi
Writing books, making art, recording music — it’s all a lot easier when you don’t know what you’re doing. Better yet if you don’t know that you don’t know what you’re doing. It’s when you know you don’t know what you’re doing that you’ve got to really get after it.
– Austin Kleon
None of us are alone in this. The more we learn to rely on each other (interdependence not codependency), to share our skills and compassion in earnest, the easier it will be for everyone.
– Jess Klein
The Sun Asks If We Heard
yes we are all laughing
down here in the caves
– Tom Snarsky
Replace doomscrolling with micro-learning.
– lyric_astro
Remember, that Monarchy MUST suppress Democracy to exist—MUST suppress FREEDOMS to Rule—MUST control the PRESS—Must control SPEECH—MUST impose “standards” of behaviour—MUST intimidate its people, be FEARED by its people—MUST be indifferent to the welfare of its people to maintain POWER, MUST pander to the greedy and avaricious—MUST TAX without representation—MUST TAKE, and never give, but to itself, while Democracy—a most wild and fragile idea—almost impossible—the most complex, tedious, time-consuming, frustrating, stressful, vulnerable-to-demagogues-and populists, slow-moving, changeable, unpredictable, and most SUCCESSFUL form of government ever devised, has, in only a few generations, emasculated and disempowered EVERY Monarchic Dynasty on Earth. No Worries. Believe in Democracy. Things will come right in the end, until the next time. Power to the People.
– Elijah Morton
When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.
– Mary Oliver
With the arrival of pain, whether physical or emotional, whether actual or anticipated, the split begins and the circle goes round and round. As soon as it becomes clear that “I” cannot possibly escape from the reality of the present, since “I” is nothing other than what I know now, this inner turmoil must stop. No possibility remains but to be aware of pain, fear, boredom, or grief in the same complete way that one is aware of pleasure. The human organism has the most wonderful powers of adaptation to both physical and psychological pain. But these can only come into full play when the pain is not being constantly restimulated by this inner effort to get away from it, to separate the “I” from the feeling. The effort creates a state of tension in which the pain thrives. But when the tension ceases, mind and body begin to absorb the pain as water reacts to a blow or cut.
– Alan Watts
Gratitude as a discipline involves a conscious choice. I can choose to be grateful even when my emotions and feelings are still steeped in hurt and resentment. It is amazing how many occasions present themselves in which I can choose gratitude instead of a complaint… . The choice for gratitude rarely comes without some real effort. But each time I make it, the next choice is a little easier, a little freer, a little less self-conscious… . There is an Estonian proverb that says: “Who does not thank for little will not thank for much.” Acts of gratitude make one grateful because, step by step, they reveal that all is grace.
– Henri J.M. Nouwen
Science cannot be stopped. Man will gather knowledge no matter what the consequences—and we cannot predict what they will be. Science will go on—whether we are pessimistic, optimistic, or, most foolish of all, indifferent.
– Dmitri Mendeleev
By the way, I remember the words of a Persian philosopher who formulated a thought for the first time about the past, the present and the future. Near a city in Persia, there is a monument on which it is written, ‘The present exists to repair the past and to prepare the future.’ It is just a monument. Simple thing, isn’t it? And at the same time, what a great thing. … It is only with the present that you can repair the past and prepare the future. The future and the past do not exist without the present. The present exists for you to repair all your errors and prepare the future; that is, another life that is desirable for you.
It is very important for you to feel the present. To have a present, you have to do everything possible. You have to be in the present. The past is the past, yesterday, finished; it will never come back. Tomorrow may come: a different tomorrow depends on the present today. Everything has to be done today. Forget yesterday and forget tomorrow. With today, you repair yesterday and you make it possible for yourself to do what is necessary tomorrow.
– Gurdjieff, Paris Meetings
Between two musical notes there exists another note, between two facts there exists another fact, between two grains of sand, no matter how close together they are, there exists an interval of space, there exists a sensing between sensing—in the interstices of primordial matter there is the mysterious, fiery line that is the world’s breathing, and the world’s continual breathing is what we hear and call silence.
– Clarice Lispector
Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it. The event of yesterday was one of those kind of alarms which is just sufficient to rouse us to duty, without being of consequence enough to depress our fortitude. It is not a field of a few acres of ground, but a cause, that we are defending, and whether we defeat the enemy in one battle, or by degrees, the consequences will be the same.
– Thomas Paine, The American Crisis
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
[…] and as far as erasing emotions are concerned… Because emotions are magnetic fields, you can erase them with stronger magnetic fields.
– Dr Jerry Tennant
Action on behalf of life transforms. Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer
Only an unabashed acceptance of the similarities between the Nazi and Soviet systems permits an understanding of their differences. Both ideologies opposed liberalism and democracy. In both political systems, the significance of the word party was inverted: rather than being a group among others competing for power according to accepted rules, it became the group that determined the rules. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were both one-party states. In both the Nazi and Soviet polities the party played a leading role in matters of ideology and social discipline. Its political logic demanded exclusion of outsiders, and its economic elite believed that certain groups were superfluous or harmful. In both administrations, economic planners assumed that more people existed in the countryside than was really necessary. Stalinist collectivization would remove superfluous peasants from the countryside and send them to the cities or the Gulag to work. If they starved, that was of little consequence. Hitlerian colonization projected the starvation and deportation of tens of millions of people.
– Timothy D. Snyder
Memory is an enduring pattern of motion, like the whirlpool, rather than an enduring substance, like a mirror, a wax tablet, or a sheet of paper. If memories are stored in neurons, there is no standing aside from the stream of events, for neurons flow along in the same stream as events outside the skull … All our insides are outside, there in the physical world. But, conversely, the outside world has no color, shape, weight, heat, or motion without “inside” brains. It has these qualities only in relation to brains, which are, in turn, members of itself.
– Alan Watts
Writing is a way of thinking. If you delegate writing to AI, you skip the thinking as well as the writing.
– Miranda France
Strange things happen to creativity at dusk and dawn, hence so many writers work in the early morning or late at night. The edges of the day are thin places, the conscious mind is not fully awake and the subconscious can bleed through, Arthur Koestler called it “the marshy shore”
– Dylan O’Sullivan
How much Democracy do we really have left to lose?
I only ask because we’ve known that we’re living in a Corporate Oligarchy for sometime now, yet many of y’all seem to think otherwise.
– @VinceFHorn
When we do not put a feeling in the framework of words and references, the feeling comes to an end, withers away.
– Krishnamurti
Introverts love doing nothing. Sitting alone in their house. Eating snacks, watching movies, staring at walls, random dance moves, pausing at the window, rooftop sunsets. This is what calms their mind & nourishes their soul. The ordinary. The little things. But you won’t get it.
– @karunpal
I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
– Joan Didion
in this world
even the butterflies
must work and toil
– Issa
accept it like a discipline, build it up like a church, follow it like a medical regime, vanquish it like an obstacle, win it like a friendship, cosset it like a little child, create it like a new world.
– Marcel Proust
Is it not better to remain in suspense than to entangle yourself in the many errors that the human fancy has produced ? Is it not better to suspend your convictions than to get mixed up in these seditious and quarrelsome divisions ?
– Michel de Montaigne
One thing that my parents, who lived through the collapse of the Shah’s regime, always told me is that they were surprised with the speed and ferocity with which it happened. Things that seemed impossible one day were simply happening the next.
– Shouan Zhoobin Riahi
Mantric Blizzard as Space
A continent
that has made a covenant with its own ruin
has made the skies starved
has made stone momentarily disadvantage itself
Its circumstance deeper than tremors remains equational habit
miming itself
via counted tablets of time
not a mantric blizzard of space into empty air
but every piece of ice as mathematical symbol
not a living quotient
but a dazed nutrient gone awry
a dark veering
stumbling over its own loins
& because
I am at nerves end
I can only breathe mantras
& live within
– Will Alexander
Politically speaking, tribal nationalism [patriotism] always insists that its own people are surrounded by ‘a world of enemies’ – ‘one against all’ – and that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others.
It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before it is used to destroy the humanity of man.
– Hannah Arendt
With every act of giving we weaken the power of grasping. The Buddha once said that if we knew as he did the fruit of giving, we would not let a single meal pass without sharing it.
– Joseph Goldstein
July
The figs we ate wrapped in bacon.
The gelato we consumed greedily:
coconut milk, clove, fresh pear.
How we’d dump hot espresso on it
just to watch it melt, licking our spoons
clean. The potatoes fried in duck fat,
the salt we’d suck off our fingers,
the eggs we’d watch get beaten
’til they were a dizzying bright yellow,
how their edges crisped in the pan.
The pink salt blossom of prosciutto
we pulled apart with our hands, melted
on our eager tongues. The green herbs
with goat cheese, the aged brie paired
with a small pot of strawberry jam,
the final sour cherry we kept politely
pushing onto each other’s plate, saying,
No, you. But it’s so good. No, it’s yours.
How I finally put an end to it, plucked it
from the plate, and stuck it in my mouth.
How good it tasted: so sweet and so tart.
How good it felt: to want something and
pretend you don’t, and to get it anyway.
– Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz
Art is not meant to match your curtains. It’s meant to speak to your soul.
– Alysha Klees
I hate all politics. I don’t like either political party. One should not belong to them – one should be an individual, standing in the middle. Anyone that belongs to a party stops thinking.
– Ray Bradbury
It’s a very strange feeling to devote one’s career and life to the rule of law, and discover that the high priests and priestess have effectively wiped that north star out of existence.
Whatever it was, American law is now just politics. The Supreme Court is captured.
– Andrew L. Seidel
Man’s sensitivity to little things and insensitivity to the greatest things are marks of a strange disorder.
– Blaise Pascal
Working as a psychoanalyst, one of the things I hope the show conveyed is that therapy is not necessarily a place where you go just to feel better.
It’s a place you go to think, to think deeply about things you don’t think about on your own.
– Orna Guralnik
When you are uncertain, consult.
When you are certain, consult twice.
– @bitesizetherapy
The integrity and character of our own ancestors is dismissed with ‘I couldn’t live like that’ by people who barely know how to live at all.
– Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild
POEM
Every morning I forget how it is.
I watch the smoke mount
In great strides above the city.
I belong to no one.
Then, I remember my shoes,
How I have to put them on,
How bending over to tie them up
I will look into the earth.
– Charles Simic
I am more sensitive than other people. Things that other people would not notice awaken a distinct echo in me, and in such moments of lucidity, when I look at myself, I see that I am alone, all alone, all alone.
– Henri Barbusse
The appeasement of Donald J. Trump will bring the notion of democracy to its knees, left only to crawl through the quagmire of greed, selfishness and cruelty.
– Andy Perrin
It is hard enough to free yourself from your own story. Don’t get caught in someone else’s story.
– Leonard Jacobson
I don’t think we should disrupt things unless that disruption is going to result in something fundamentally better for society.
– Elon Musk
It’s the best part of the day, the part where I sit on my couch with my dog and try not to think about anything.
– Will Musgrove
Just because we don’t talk about it with everyone (or anyone), doesn’t mean it’s not happening and not hard on us. Sometimes we go through hell and we don’t have clarity on what we’re going through, so we just work on it internally. Give grace to those who seem ok, but aren’t ok.
– Nyle Beck
mostly what i get in trouble for is noticing reality
– Mike Solana
have you ever met someone who dresses so joyfully it’s clear that they’re actually depressed
– @chenchenwrites
I think books should have secrets, like people do.
– John Updike
The degree to which any movement is progressive or revolutionary is measured by its independence from the rulers of the society it seeks to change.
– Leslie Feinberg
“We are always drawing up indictments against the past,” Marilynne Robinson noticed, “then refusing to let it testify on its own behalf—it is so very guilty, after all.”
– Pico Iyer
There are a lot of brave and kind people who have very little support. They assume it’s because they’re too much, when the reality is, its because they’re honest. That’s not something easily digested by most people, but especially in a world where performance is key.
– Nate Postlethwait
like 60% of my work comes down to variations on one instruction:
practice active listening with things you didn’t realize were speaking
– River Kenna
spoiler: there’s nothing in this world – whether physical, conceptual, energetic, emotional, or divine – that’s NOT speaking to you
– River Kenna
You vote once in four years and that’s your political responsibility? That’s the height of bourgeois propaganda, making the people politically irresponsible. Thinking their responsibility is limited to a one day vote. Politics is every day.
– Kwame Ture
something I’m thinking about:
if you teach someone that a part of themselves is not welcome with you, they will hide it from you
as an act of love for you both
– @rachelclif
It isn’t just ideas you need, and it isn’t just technique or skill. There’s a kind of excitement and faith that I can’t work without.
– Alice Munro
Someone has said that it requires less mental effort to condemn than to think.
– Emma Goldman
it’s so funny to want a masters degree. like relax
– @BUNNlCULA
Another good day to remind people that just because an academic is renowned for their work in social justice, antiracism, decolonization, or equality, it does not mean they are invested in this work at a personal level. Some are very good at researching these topics. That is all.
– Chisomo Kalinga, PhD
Jung said you can cure a psychotic patient if you can make him creative. In other words, if what is destroying him from within can be brought forth in writing or painting or some other form, then he can be cured. What we try to do is to help people bring forth the Self.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic, because in arithmetic there is knowledge, but in theology there is only opinion.”
– Bertrand Russell
It is very dangerous when a wound is so common in a culture that hardly anyone knows that there is a problem. There is general discontent with our way of life but almost no one knows specifically where to look for its origin.
– Robert A. Johnson
the Buddha said that life is suffering,
but once we understand this,
we can choose to not suffer…
but…I really do not know~
My feelings about the way things are sometimes are unbearable and make me want to annihilate myself (or others) at times.
The middle path is not projecting angst inward OR outward,
it’s just observing this excruciating feeling, and not annihilating anything… just observing myself in relationship to all of it.
To fight against something just brings more conflict into the shared relational field…
– Ari Annona
They own everything…They don’t care about you…They got you by the balls.
– George Carlin
It clamps itself to a rock, like a limpet,
And creeps up and down in a tide of people,
Hardly ever stranded in a tideless sabbath:
A pilgrimage place where all hymns are jubilant.
The starry revolutions around it,
The deer circling in new foundations of old worlds,
the immortal noise
Of the river ghosted with salmon – these
Are a bloodstream it’s a blood-drop in.
Such sharing. Such giving. See, at the window,
That silly chaffinch, practically talking
Gaelic, And the eiders domestic as farmyard ducks
And the lady gull yacking for her breakfast.
If I were a bethlehemish star I’d stand fixed
Over that roof, knowing there’d be born there
No wars, no tortures, no savage crucifixions.
But a rare, an extraordinary thing –
An exhilaration of peace, a sounding
Grace with trinities galore – if only
Those three collared doves in the rowan tree.
July 1973
– Norman MacCaig
In 1892 at Stanford University, an 18-year-old student was struggling to pay his fees. He was an orphan, and not knowing where to turn for money, he came up with a bright idea. He and a friend decided to host a musical concert on campus to raise money for their education. They reached out to the great pianist Ignacy J. Paderewski. His manager demanded a guaranteed fee of $2000 for the piano recital. A deal was struck, and the boys began to work to make the concert a success. The big day has arrived. But unfortunately, they had not managed to sell enough tickets. The total collection was only $1600. Disappointed, they went to Paderewski and explained their plight. They gave him the entire $1600, plus a check for the balance $400. They promised to honor the check at the soonest possible. “No,” said Paderewski. “This is not acceptable.” He tore up the check, returned the $1600 and told the two boys: “Here’s the $1600. Please deduct whatever expenses you have incurred. Keep the money you need for your fees. And just give me whatever is left”. The boys were surprised and thanked him profusely. It was a small act of kindness. But it clearly marked out Paderewski as a great human being. Why should he help two people he didn’t even know? We all come across situations like these in our lives. And most of us only think “If I help them, what will happen to me?” The truly great people think, “If I don’t help them, what will happen to them?” They don’t do it expecting something in return. They do it because they feel it’s the right thing to do. Paderewski later went on to become the Prime Minister of Poland. He was a great leader, but unfortunately when the World War began, Poland was ravaged. There were more than 1.5 million people starving in his country, and no money to feed them. Paderewski didn’t know where to turn for help. He reached out to the US Food and Relief Administration for help. He heard there was a man called Herbert Hoover — who later went on to become the US President. Hoover agreed to help and quickly shipped tons of food grains to feed the starving Polish people. The calamity was averted. Paderewski was relieved. He decided to go across to meet Hoover and personally thank him. When Paderewski began to thank Hoover for his noble gesture, Hoover quickly interjected and said, “You shouldn’t be thanking me Mr. Prime Minister. You may not remember this, but several years ago, you helped two young students go through college. I was one of them.”
– Story Rewind
The trick is this: courage feels fearful. Courage is getting through the fear, even if we’re short of breath, half-blinded by anxiety, and everything in us wants to run away or close our eyes. Courage isn’t fear-less, or macho. It’s tender, it’s brave, it’s being willing to feel, to remain open, to take a step forward. Aggression is cowardly.
– Waylon Lewis
…there is always a well-known solution to every human problem- neat, plausible, and wrong.
– H.L. Menken
Hypersensitivity, that gift “Sensitive people always have a heart upside down, soul upside down, eyes wide open. A tear ready to fall, a smile on the lips, ready to explode. They live in a balance between the joys and pains of life. They aren’t perfect, on the contrary. Sometimes they are even self-destructing because they breathe through their chest, never through their lungs. They live a thousand minutes away from an hour. Sensitive people can smile for little and cry for nothing they know how to stop and wonder in front of a rainbow, smile at a cat, look at the sea and savoring in it the infinite peace and torment. They know how to turn sand into star powder, light a dream in the dark. Sensitive people are there sitting away waiting for the right time to give you that caress you’ve been waiting for. They know how to see beyond the appearance, more than a smile, more than a tear. Beyond anger, beyond pain because they live from the heart.
– Guilia Silvio
watching a cooking video, the chef mentioned that in the marathi language the word “us” can be expressed with two different terms: aapan and aamhi. aapan means “us,” including the speaker and the audience. aamhi means “us,” without including anyone else from outside one’s own group. in other words: there is an inclusive and embracing “us” and an “us” which sets the boundaries that separate different groups into discrete identities. it is a wonderful linguistic content. we can either embrace the neighbor as a community of “us,” or we can exclude him as not part of “us.” that is to say: we can approach a being as a “thou” or we can exclude him as an “it.” when we say aamhi we alienate not only the other, but also our own selves. but when we say aapan, we not only embrace the other but our own human-being. it is our choice. and everything depends on this.
– hune margulies
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, translated by W. S. Merwin
A poem is the city of language just as prose is its countryside. Prose extends laterally filling the page’s horizon unimpeded, while poetry is marked by dense verticality, by layerings of meaning and sound. Cities and poetry also share compression, heterogeneity, juxtaposition […].
Juxtaposition is a crucial common structural element—in a city, we find a church right next to an apartment building right next to a newspaper office. The newspaper itself, the quintessential urban organ, replicates this juxtaposition in miniature: the story of a political coup in right next to an ad for diamond necklaces and a theater review. […] And poetry, too, of course, thrives on juxtaposition on many levels—incongruent images, images right next to abstractions or declarations, sense that doesn’t match its sound, and so forth. It’s the leaps in contrast to moments of flow that allow for the sonic dynamics of poetry […].
– Cole Swensen, Poetry City
The bird that would soar above the plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings.
– Douglas Adams
Everything about her was a snowstorm of fascination, from the antique valentines and embroidered Chinese coats she collected to her tiny scented bottles from Neal’s Yard Remedies; there had always been something bright and magical about her unknown faraway life.
– Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
Dirk turned on the car wipers, which grumbled because they didn’t have quite enough rain to wipe away, so he turned them off again. Rain quickly speckled the windscreen. He turned on the wipers again, but they still refused to feel that the exercise was worthwhile, and scraped and squeaked in protest.
– Douglas Adams
The psyche is a self-regulating system that maintains its equilibrium just as the body does. Every process that goes too far immediately and inevitably calls forth compensations, and without these there would be neither a normal metabolism nor a normal psyche.
– Carl Jung
We don’t really know it, but we sense it: there is a sister ship to our life which takes a totally different route.
– Tomas Tranströmer
In the mountains of truth, you never climb in vain.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
To be loved means to be consumed. To love means to radiate with inexhaustible light. To be loved is to pass away, to love is to endure.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Man’s mind may be likened to a garden, which may be intelligently cultivated or allowed to run wild.
– James Allen
Whenever one person stands up and says, ‘Wait a minute, this is wrong,’ it helps other people do the same.
– Gloria Steinem
If you buy things you do not need, soon you will have to sell things you need.
– Warren Buffett
Do not act as if you had ten thousand years to throw away. Death stands at your elbow. Be good for something while you live and it is in your power.
– Marcus Aurelius
The world does not need more ‘empowered individualists’. We’ve already seen how it creates the world we are sharing. The world benefits the most from compassion, kindness, humility and selflessness.
– Lauri Poldre
I am well aware of the toil and blood and treasure that it will cost us to maintain this Declaration.
– John Adams, July 3, 1776
Every nation ridicules other nations, and all are right.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Access to affordable health care is Biden’s crowning achievement. The number of uninsured Americans hit an all-time low of 7.2% in the second quarter of 2023, while the number of people who signed up for an Obamacare plan for 2024 surged to 21.3 million.
At the start of Biden’s term, about 12 million Americans had health insurance through Obamacare.
– Bloomberg
The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.
– Alberto Brandolini
There’s things going on at a circus all the time.
– Mark Twain
America, ride or die
– Elon Musk
You don’t only
learn things going
up the mountain,
you learn them
coming down,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
What I think is that a good life is one hero journey after another. Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure, you are called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare?
– Joseph Campbell
I was always looking outside myself for strength and confidence but it comes from within. It is there all the time.
– Anna Freud
You want me to cultivate an inner life? The thing that killed Hamlet?
– John Attridge
No weakness of the human mind has more frequently incurred animadversion than the negligence with which men overlook their own faults, however flagrant, and the easiness with which they pardon them, however frequently repeated.
– Samuel Johnson
Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labor; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it.
– Samuel Johnson
The harvest of psychotherapy is not cure – surely, in our field, that is an illusion – but instead change or growth.
– Irvin D. Yalom
Humanity unceasingly strives forward, from a lower, more partial and obscure understanding of life, to one more general and more lucid.
– Leo Tolstoy
ceaseless skies
not a single idea
to clutter my mind
– @hegelincanada
And what will I do with it? Young stranger,
poet, in the city of strangers: you and your
eyelashes—longer than anyone’s.
– Tsvetaeva towards Mandelstam
We no longer fear death. We have come to fear life.
– Heba Al-Agha
“Conservatism” today seeks to conserve nothing that is good and honorable and of general benefit. It is simply a euphemism for the resurgence of oligarchic power.
– George Monbiot
We will never back down to far-right extremists threatening the country with revolution.
Get lost.
– Hakeem Jeffries
One time I asked a coworker about his tattoo (A massive forearm portrait of Boxer from Animal Farm with “I Will Work Harder” in old English script) and he said he got it as a reminder that ‘Americans can do anything we set our minds to.
– Frances Klein
Say it in your heart.
Say it when you sleep.
– Haunani-Kay Trask
Every man has in his heart a barrel organ that does not want to be silent.
– Jules Renard
Is it so certain that we were born to live?
Oh! these poets of the soil who do not even have a little taste of manure!
– Jules Renard
Answer July
by Emily Dickinson
Answer July—
Where is the Bee—
Where is the Blush—
Where is the Hay?
Ah, said July—
Where is the Seed—
Where is the Bud—
Where is the May—
Answer Thee—Me—
Nay—said the May—
Show me the Snow—
Show me the Bells—
Show me the Jay!
Quibbled the Jay—
Where be the Maize—
Where be the Haze—
Where be the Bur?
Here—said the Year—
You Fit Into Me
by Margaret Atwood
you fit into me
like a hook into an eye
a fish hook
an open eye
The expression of criticism is permitted because its repression would be even more catastrophic. But it is permitted only on condition that it entail no serious consequences.
– Jacques Ellul
Buddhism be like: suffering? Skill issue
– @nosilverv
In the end, I think it’s a very significant fact that we have to become absent from the world and ourselves in order to come back to it everyday, that is, according to a rhythm that’s also the rhythm of day and night.
– (Jean-Luc Nancy; tr. Travis Holloway, Flor Méchain)
I dined with [Virginia Woolf] one evening last week and she was charming – I do like her tremendously – but I felt then for the first time the strange, trembling, glinting quality of her mind..
– Katherine Mansfield
Oh! as for me, you know, I don’t care about being inferior to my work.
To look at a ray of sunlight in a dark room. It is full of dust. There is nothing dirtier than a ray of sunlight.
Gentlemen, if my information is correct, the homeland is in danger.
– Jules Renard
I’m going to move to a forest somewhere in July and try to improve myself.
– Franz Kafka, 1914.
Psychotherapy doesn’t eliminate pain, it eliminates suffering (i.e. consequences of efforts to avoid/alter/suppress pain)
– Edward A. Perin
When people state that the lockdowns caused the deepest depression they’ve ever experienced, just a reminder that many disabled people are still in lockdown, four years later. Isolation is a form of torture. I want to live in a world where disabled people are wanted in society.
– Briana Mills, LMFT
Eating fake foods.
Staying inside all day.
Lack of social connection.
Living a sedentary lifestyle.
We are in a mental health crisis because we’ve become detached from the things that make us feel more human.
– Dan Go
Fear
by Liv Mammone
If the pain doesn’t come back,
what will I write about? Will the poems
have tendon and teeth? I didn’t get
right the sonnet of all its colors.
I did not find the exact dagger of phrase
about the long loss of my life.
Hope is all I do and am.
I don’t think I’m poet enough
to make you taste this mango;
or see that sutured sunset unless
from a hospital bed.
I was good for carving.
There will be kisses, music, street names.
Loved ones will go where the gone do.
What if I don’t want to (write it: can’t)
write about these things.
What if I would rather feel
than create feeling?
What then? Go ahead.
Arthritis is one thing, the hurting another
by Camille T. Dungy
for Adrienne Rich in 2006
The poet’s hands degenerate until her cup is too heavy.
You are not required to understand.
This is not the year for understanding.
This is the year of burning women in schoolyards
and raided homes, of tarped bodies on runways and in restaurants.
The architecture of the poet’s hands has turned upon itself.
This is not the year for palliatives. It is not the year for knowing what to do.
This is the year the planet grew smaller
and no country would consent to its defeat.
The poet’s cup is filled too full, a weight she cannot carry
from the table to her mouth, her lips, her tongue.
The poet’s hands are congenitally spoiled.
This is not one thing standing for another.
Listen, this year three ancient cities met their ruin, maybe more,
and many profited, but this is not news for the readers here.
Should I speak indirectly?
I am not the poet. Those are not my hands.
This is the year of deportations and mothers bereaved
of all of their sons. The year of third and fourth tours,
of cutting-edge weaponry and old-fashioned guns.
Last year was no better, and this year only lays the groundwork
for the years that are to come. Listen, this is a year like no other.
This is the year the doctors struck for want of aid
and schoolchildren were sent home in the morning
and lights and gas were unreliable
and, harvesters suspect, fruit had no recourse but rot.
Many are dying for want of a cure, and the poet is patient
and her hands cause the least of her pain.
I hope you experience a love that inspires dancing instead of walking on eggshells. I hope you are able to breathe deeply in their presence instead of holding your breath.
– Dr. Thema
When a thought hurts, that’s the signal that it isn’t true.
Reality is always kinder than your thinking.
– Byron Katie
The collective disease of humanity is that people are so engrossed in what happens, so hypnotized by the world of fluctuating forms, so absorbed in the content of their lives, they have forgotten the essence, that which is beyond content, beyond form, beyond thought.
– Eckhart Tolle
Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust. Let us repurify it. Let us turn and wash it white, in the spirit, if not the blood, of the Revolution. Let us turn slavery from its claims of ‘moral right,’ back upon its existing legal rights, and its arguments of ‘necessity.’ Let us return it to the position our fathers gave it; and there let it rest in peace. Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it. Let north and south—let all Americans—let all lovers of liberty everywhere—join in the great and good work. If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving. We shall have so saved it, that the succeeding millions of free happy people, the world over, shall rise up, and call us blessed, to the latest generations.
– Abraham Lincoln
We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
– William Faulkner
The time to guard against corruption and tyranny, is before they shall have gotten hold on us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and talons after he shall have entered.
– Thomas Jefferson
How do you know you’re having fun if there’s no one watching you have it?
– Douglas Adams
If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?
– Lewis Carroll
And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.
– Thomas Jefferson
There is something exceedingly ridiculous in the composition of monarchy; it first excludes a man from the means of information, yet empowers him to act in cases where the highest judgment is required. The state of a king shuts him from the world, yet the business of a king requires him to know it thoroughly; wherefore the different parts, by unnaturally opposing and destroying each other, prove the whole character to be absurd and useless.
Some writers have explained the English constitution thus; the king, say they, is one, the people another; the peers are an house in behalf of the king; the commons in behalf of the people; but this hath all the distinctions of an house divided against itself; and though the expressions be pleasantly arranged, yet when examined they appear idle and ambiguous; and it will always happen, that the nicest construction that words are capable of, when applied to the description of some thing which either cannot exist, or is too incomprehensible to be within the compass of description, will be words of sound only, and though they may amuse the ear, they cannot inform the mind, for this explanation includes a previous question, viz. How came the king by a power which the people are afraid to trust, and always obliged to check? Such a power could not be the gift of a wise people, neither can any power, which needs checking, be from God; yet the provision, which the constitution makes, supposes such a power to exist.
– Thomas Paine, Common Sense
You cannot separate peace and freedom. Because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.
– Malcolm X
I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives. I like to see a man live so that his place will be proud of him.
– Abraham Lincoln
Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.
– Oscar Wilde
LOVERS
They come to the strange city where all signs are in a language they’ve failed to learn. Because they’re in love, however, cars stop for them when they step into danger. Waiters bring them appetizers in seven different languages, which they sample without utensils, then suck each other’s fingers clean. The waiters rush home to make love to their wives. The chambermaid in their hotel has been dreaming them back, has left mints and extra towels. They can feel that strange tug. But they’ve learned their urgencies are sweeter the more they’re delayed. It is April. They buy identical blue berets, and stroll by the river where at dusk even people who dislike each other walk arm in arm. Among them they feel disguised, though it’s obvious to everyone that they come from a country that exists for only moments at a time.
– Stephen Dunn
The wisest men follow their own direction.
– Euripides
A human is a solution that evolved to solve specific types of problems.
Your body has been tuned by millions of years to move in specific ways.
The movements you need, that best express your human genetic potential are encoded in play.
Universal forms of human movement play exist because over the course of our evolution, those movements were important enough for us to develop intrinsic reward systems to keep us doing them.
You are tuned for running, jumping, climbing, roughhousing, throwing, catching, swinging, running, swimming and balancing through the natural environment.
You are not tuned for machines, for flat surfaces and florescent lights, for nothing but slow strength work, or distance running, or repeated cycles of bilateral movements in met cons.
Move like a human!
– Rafe Kelley
Lucidity is the only vice which makes us free — free in a desert.
– Emil Cioran
A Hardware Store As Proof of the Existence of God
by Nancy Willard
I praise the brightness of hammers pointing east
like the steel woodpeckers of the future,
and dozens of hinges opening brass wings,
and six new rakes shyly fanning their toes,
and bins of hooks glittering into bees,
and a rack of wrenches like the long bones of horses,
and mailboxes sowing rows of silver chapels,
and a company of plungers waiting for God
to claim their thin legs in their big shoes
and put them on and walk away laughing.
In a world not perfect but not bad either
let there be glue, glaze, gum, and grabs,
caulk also, and hooks, shackles, cables, and slips,
and signs so spare a child many read them,
Men, Women, In, Out, No Parking, Beware The Dog.
In the right hands, they can work wonders
Dear America,
today I will parade
not on your main streets
but mostly alone amongst
your aspen groves,
will praise your purple
mountain’s majesty,
your scarlet gilia,
your vast blue spruce.
I will praise the public land
beneath my feet
where someday soon
hawk’s wings will rise
from untouched duff,
and I will glory in
your spacious skies,
how quiet they can be.
America, just today
one of your sons
arrived with a giant
bouquet of rhubarb
he cut from his own wild yard—
a small proof of what
your finest citizens do—
find ways to support
other citizens,
no matter their color,
no matter their stripes.
America, in my one-woman
parade, with every step,
I am cheering for you.
– Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Goddammit
everybody in the world wants
an explanation for your acts
and for your very being.
– Jack Kerouac
Heaven is a regulated nervous system.
– Nika Solé
Nothing is going to change in history as long as most people are merely dualistic, either-or thinkers. Such splitting and denying leaves us at the level of mere information, data, and endlessly arguing about the same…and with ever stronger ego attachment.
– Richard Rohr
The opposite of an idealist is too often a man without love.
– Albert Camus
I have seen the power of the subconscious lift people up out of crippled states, making them whole, vital, and strong once more, and free to go out into the world to experience happiness, health, and joyous expression. There is a miraculous healing power in your subconscious that can heal the troubled mind and the broken heart. It can open the prison door of the mind and liberate you. It can free you from all kinds of material and physical bondage.
– Dr. Joseph Murphy
Composer, sculptor, painter, poet, prophet, sage, these are the makers of the after-world, the architects of heaven. The world is beautiful because they have lived; without them, laboring humanity would perish.
– James Allen
American democracy was born in Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania is going to save it.
– Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta
Poem for July 4, 1994
by Sonia Sanchez
For President Václav Havel
It is essential that Summer be grafted to
bones marrow earth clouds blood the
eyes of our ancestors.
It is essential to smell the beginning
words where Washington, Madison, Hamilton,
Adams, Jefferson assembled amid cries of:
“The people lack of information”
“We grow more and more skeptical”
“This Constitution is a triple-headed monster”
“Blacks are property”
It is essential to remember how cold the sun
how warm the snow snapping
around the ragged feet of soldiers and slaves.
It is essential to string the sky
with the saliva of Slavs and
Germans and Anglos and French
and Italians and Scandinavians,
and Spaniards and Mexicans and Poles
and Africans and Native Americans.
It is essential that we always repeat:
we the people,
we the people,
we the people.
2.
“Let us go into the fields” one
brother told the other brother. And
the sound of exact death
raising tombs across the centuries.
Across the oceans. Across the land.
3.
It is essential that we finally understand:
this is the time for the creative
human being
the human being who decides
to talk upright in a human
fashion in order to save this
earth from extinction.
This is the time for the creative
Man. Woman. Who must decide
that She. He. Can live in peace.
Racial and sexual justice on
this earth.
This is the time for you and me.
African American. Whites. Latinos.
Gays. Asians. Jews. Native
Americans. Lesbians. Muslims.
All of us must finally bury
the elitism of race superiority
the elitism of sexual superiority
the elitism of economic superiority
the elitism of religious superiority.
So we welcome you on the celebration
of 218 years Philadelphia. America.
So we salute you and say:
Come, come, come, move out into this world
nourish your lives with a
spirituality that allows us to respect
each other’s birth.
come, come, come, nourish the world where
every 3 days 120,000 children die
of starvation or the effects of starvation;
come, come, come, nourish the world
where we will no longer hear the
screams and cries of womens, girls,
and children in Bosnia, El Salvador,
Rwanda…AhAhAhAh AHAHAHHHHHH
Ma-ma. Dada. Mamacita. Baba.
Mama. Papa. Momma. Poppi.
The soldiers are marching in the streets
near the hospitals but the nurses say
we are safe and the soldiers are
laughing marching firing calling
out to us i don’t want to die i
am only 9 yrs old, i am only 10 yrs old
i am only 11 yrs old and i cannot
get out of the bed because they have cut
off one of my legs and i hear the soldiers
coming toward our rooms and i hear
the screams and the children are
running out of the room i can’t get out
of the bed i don’t want to die Don’t
let me die Rwanda. America. United
Nations. Don’t let me die…………..
And if we nourish ourselves, our communities
our countries and say
no more hiroshima
no more auschwitz
no more wounded knee
no more middle passage
no more slavery
no more Bosnia
no more Rwanda
No more intoxicating ideas of
racial superiority
as we walk toward abundance
we will never forget
the earth
the sea
the children
the people
For we the people will always be arriving
a ceremony of thunder
waking up the earth
opening our eyes to human
monuments.
And it’ll get better
it’ll get better
if we the people work, organize, resist,
come together for peace, racial, social
and sexual justice
it’ll get better
it’ll get better.
Democracy is not something you believe in or a place to hang your hat, but it’s something you do. You participate. If you stop doing it, democracy crumbles.
– Abbie Hoffman
i’ve traveled through more lands than those i set foot in. i’ve seen more landscapes than those i laid eyes on. i’ve experienced more sensations than all the sensations i’ve felt, because however much i felt, i always wanted to feel more.
– álvaro de campos – fernando pessoa
i am the hidden owl
in the upper right hand corner
of the american dollar bill i don’t have
– Bernadette Mayer
I held myself together by the judgments of a few people whom I trusted.
– James Baldwin
Just checking, but yall DO realize we’re all wrong about everything, right?
Like, that our lil pet ideas & systems & lineages about the cosmos are good-enough compressions of the view from inside a human life, but that they’re definitely nowhere near whatever’s really going on?
– River Kenna
x2.
the angel came to him & said
i’m sorry, mac, but
we talked it over
in heaven
& you’re going
to have to live
a thousand years
– Robert Lax
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
Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center. […] Big, undreamed-of things–the people on the edge see them first.
– Kurt Vonnegut
Many of us resist transition because we fear the journey found in the liminal space, where there is no clear direction forward. But in order to arrive at a new beginning, we must go through it. Much like the chrysalis of a butterfly or the gestational period in the womb, the liminal stage is marked by a period of waiting in the dark.
– Kristen Roderick
Hope: the following page. Do not close the book. I have turned all the pages of the book without finding hope. Perhaps hope is the book.
– Edmond Jabès
Now You Know The Worst
by Wendell Berry
When a man of peace is killed
by a man of war, he gives a light.
You do not have to walk in darkness.
If you will have the courage for love,
you may walk in light. It will be
the light of those who have suffered
for peace. It will be
your light.
for through an opening in the wood one could look across the wide, blue river,—the meadows on the other side,—far over the outskirts of the great city, to the green hills that rose to meet the sky. The sun was low, and the heavens glowed with the splendor of an autumn sunset. Gold and purple clouds lay on the hill-tops; and rising high into the ruddy light were silvery white peaks, that shone like the airy spires of some Celestial City.
– Louisa May Alcott
The staying and doing it, in spite of everything. In spite of the bears and the rattlesnakes and the scat of the mountain lions I never saw; the blisters and scabs and scrapes and lacerations. The exhaustion and the deprivation; the cold and the heat; the monotony and the pain; the thirst and the hunger; the glory and the ghosts that haunted me as I hiked eleven hundred miles from the Mojave Desert to the state of Washington by myself. And finally, once I’d actually gone and done it, walked all those miles for all those days, there was the realization that what I’d thought was the beginning had not really been the beginning at all. That in truth my hike on the Pacific Crest Trail hadn’t begun when I made the snap decision to do it. It had begun before I even imagined it, precisely four years, seven months, and three days before, when I’d stood in a little room at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and learned that my mother was going to die.
– Cheryl Strayed
The priceless galaxy of misinformation called the mind…
– Djuna Barnes
Patriot
My only country
Is six feet high
and whether I love it or not
I’ll die
for its independence.
– Norman MacCaig
How Surely Gravity’s Law
by Rainer Maria Rilke
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.
Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we each belong to
for some empty freedom.
If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.
Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.
So like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God’s heart;
they have never left him.
This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.
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
Tact is the art of making a point without making an enemy.
– Isaac Newton
He who loses wealth loses much; he who loses a friend loses more; but he that loses his courage loses all.
– Cervantes
Going There
by Jack Gilbert
Of course it was a disaster.
That unbearable, dearest secret
has always been a disaster.
The danger when we try to leave.
Going over and over afterward
what we should have done
instead of what we did.
But for those short times
we seemed to be alive. Misled,
misused, lied to and cheated,
certainly. Still, for that
little while, we visited
our possible lite.
To think for oneself is not only, as Gide said, counterrevolutionary but also apostasy and, at certain times, treason.
– Eric Hoffer
The central task of education is to implant a will and a facility for learning ; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society.
– Eric Hoffer
to a materialist:
thou dost explain by law the weaving
of all the world, by chance ruled ever.
i never thought law was so living,
nor did i deem chance was so clever.
– alexander search, fernando pessoa
I believe most mental health issues would be resolved with daily exercise, good sleep habits, a nutrient dense diet & being metabolically healthy.
– Dan Go
The truly great writer does not want to write: he wants the world to be a place in which he can live the life of the imagination. The first quivering word he puts to paper is the word of the wounded angel: pain.
– Henry Miller
A great many medical evils are rooted in the economic evils of the pharmaceutical houses whose duty it is to sell drugs. It is one of the greatest monopolies of mankind.
– Manly P. Hall
I’ve always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I’m not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect.
– Fernando Pessoa
Our anxieties lead us to grasp at certainties. Certainties lead to dogma; dogma leads to rigidity; rigidity leads to idolatry; idolatry always banishes the mystery and thus leads to spiritual narrowing.
– James Hollis
Don’t know why
here’s a cloud up in the sky
and I’m trembling here at my
“machine”
it skips, like me
out of class without permission
I don’t even give myself
permission, but here I am
– Tim Dlugos
There are no kings in America
by Aileen Cassinetto
we are not that kind of country.
We are sanctuary for the hungry,
the homeless, the huddled,
held together by an idea
our immigrant fathers believed in.
Rendered, it meant independence.
Pursued, it kindled war, ordinance,
a fighting chance. Forty thousand
musket balls, by themselves, did not
shape the boundaries on which we
map our days. To draw our borders,
we needed more than firecakes.
More than a pound of meat
with bone and gristle,
or salt fish and a gill of peas.
We needed the faith and grit of people
who were not yet Americans.
To be an American is to
recognize the sacrifice
of the widow and the orphan;
it is to understand the weft of tent
cities expecting caravans,
and the heft of a child in a camp
not meant for children, or sitting
before a judge awaiting judgement.
What do we say to the native
whose lands we now inhabit?
What do we say to our immigrant
fathers who held certain truths
to be self-evident?
Do we now still pledge to each
other our lives, our fortunes,
our sacred honor.
There are no kings in America.
Only gilded men we can topple
again and again.
I am convinced that our capacity for self-deception is extraordinary.
– Glen Gabbard
For you,
I bequeath the alphabet
and my heart.
And the wish that you’ll set
your stories free.
– Rachel Newcombe
When you live in complete acceptance of what is, that is the end of all drama in your life.
– Eckhart Tolle
If I could let you know—
two women together is a work
nothing in civilization has made simple,
two people together is a work
heroic in its ordinariness
– Adrienne Rich
Our era of technology has not emphasized reading and study as virtues. We have come to depend upon television, motion pictures and slick magazines for information and entertainment.
– Eric Hoffer
My responsibility as a poet, as an artist, is to not look away.
– Nikky Finney
Being oppressed means the absence of choices
– bell hooks
Arrival
the crowded streets
offices and condos
at water’s edge
sky eagles
– Kim Dorman
Create breathing room.
When you clear space, don’t let yourself quickly refill it.
– Dr. Thema
Even in the freest society power is charged with the impulse to turn men into precise, predictable automata.
– Eric Hoffer
Anything which is troubling you, anything which is irritating you, THAT is your teacher.
– Ajahn Chah
Not Nothing
by Kimiko Hahn
A map on tissue. A mass of wire. Electricity of the highest order.
Somewhere in this live tangle, scientists discovered—
like shipmates on the suddenly-round earth—
a new catalog of synaptic proteins
presenting how memory is laid down:
At the side of the transmitting neuron
an electrical signal arrives and releases chemical packets.
What I had imagined as “nothing” are a bunch of conversing
squirts
remaking flat into intimate.
Loom
by Bradley Trumpfheller
My mother says when she is anxious she finds a seam,
finds stitches on her clothes, on furniture she’s near, always
a verge has that feel, birch joints, wrinkles. It’s a relief
to think with the hands. Not with what years do,
not with rings or someone else’s sadness. With the repair
in a sheet her sister tore, breeze-fretted in the yard.
Finds exactly where the hickory trees start themselves
against the yard. And shows me on the photograph
which is only one of several, where though again
they did not touch each other, standing on some shore,
her mothers’ shadows touch each other.
She shows it to me now to soothe me. As if soon
it will be that blue in the air. Soon is what
she thinks with. What she runs
the edge of her thumb, her index finger over.
Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the tree house; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape; but most of all, summer was Dill.
– Harper Lee
Change yourself
and you have done your part
in changing the world…
– Sri Paramahansa Yogananda
You’ve healed your triggers, calmed your nervous system, unlearned your own toxic patterns, and broken the cycle. Don’t let boredom, curiosity, or loneliness send you back to toxic people or environments.
– Inner Practitioner
My Grandfather Hearing
Fireworks on July 4
He closes his eyes in his silence
and tries not to think
of the boy he was
crouched in a foxhole
in the gunfire
with the fascists closing around him
and a tattered flag on his shoulder,
saying, Just get me home from this brokenness.
No way this is happening at home.
– Joseph Fasano
It is not speaking that breaks our silence, but the anxiety to be heard. The words of the proud man impose silence on all others, so that he alone may be heard. The humble man speaks only in order to be spoken to.
– Thomas Merton
Take, by contrast, a student of mine, Jason Schwartz. I’m amazed by what
Schwartz sees in the lacunae; the way he makes the lacunae brim with feeling. Writers like Roth, people say they’re about big things, not nebbish stuff like Schwartz. They’re not interested in a mote of dust falling on a table; they’re interested in the world turning. I say they don’t know shit about the world
turning. But Schwartz knows about the mote of dust. He’s seen it. That’s true. That’s honest. He focuses his attention on what he knows. But he’ll never be celebrated, and it breaks my heart. It’s a true invention; there’s nothing like it around. And if he can do it, someone else can do it. Flannery O’Connor could do it: ‘She would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life’ There are people who can do it with just one sentence, and you’ll never forget that sentence. And then there are those
who can’t do it with hundreds.
– Gordon Lish
It’s the on day Americans say the date correctly, “4th of July” how funny being Independence Day.
– Alice Nebularis
Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap- clap of water against the boat’s side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but taint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for; listening for?
– C.S. Lewis
A poet is someone
Who can pour Light into a cup
and raise it to nourish your
beautiful parched holy mouth
– Hafiz
When asked how Fascism starts, Bertrand Russell once
said: “First, they fascinate the fools. Then, they muzzle the intelligent.”
The less talent they have, the more pride, vanity and arrogance they have. All these fools, however, find other fools who applaud them.
– Erasmus
This could be a movie —
someone would just have to
put the parts in the right order,
the old monk told the poet.
– The Old Monk
Polarity is ok.
Tension is natural.
Everything is the path.
– @VinceFHorn
To live in this realization is to be without anxiety about non-perfection.
– Hsin Hsin Ming
Nobody can live with intense emotions for very long, it’s too exhausting, and everything that can be described can also be made harmless.
– Damon Galgut
Man has ever a silent listener at his side—his subconscious mind.
– Florence Scovel Shinn
Soon you’ll be ashes, or bones. A mere name, at most—and even that is just a sound, an echo.
– Marcus Aurelius
As long as you are ignorant of yourself as the creator, your world is limited and repetitive.
– Nisargadatta
seek the coldness of the moon and ye shall find the heat of the sun.
– C.G. Jung
how to know you’re a selkie
your heart is the open sea
the wind is a lover
diving deep feels like home
the moon is your mother
starfish and silverlight
your native salted tongue
the tide of your soul
moves in rhythm to
waves of wonder and pearl-song
your spine is made of stories
collected from shifting sands
no one can take from you
and after all these years
you’ve cried an ocean of tears
and still you do not drown
– Angi Sullins
Dogen wrote, in Moon in a Dewdrop, “Kind speech means that when you see sentient beings, you arouse the mind of compassion and offer words of love and care. It is contrary to cruel and violent speech. You should be willing to practice it for the entire present life. Do not give up. World after world, life after life. Kind speech is the basis for reconciling rulers and subduing enemies. You should know that kind speech arises from kind mind and kind mind from the seed of compassionate mind.” Dogen continues: “Kind speech is not just praising the merit of others. It has the power to turn the destiny of the nation.”
– Joan Halifax
You see, I spent too many years of my life thinking that the big party was the whole thing. It took me quite a while to find out that the real deal is to be able to be enough of a person on your own to know when somebody loves and cares about you. You see, we are here, as far as I can tell, to help each other — our brothers, our sisters, our friends, our enemies. That’s to help each other, not hurt each other. Sometimes, to help them, we’ve got to help ourselves, so that we’ll know that they’re around in the first place. You see, it’s a big world out there with enough pain and misery in it, without me going around and helping it out by hurting myself, and consequently, those that care about me. What I’m trying to get across to you is: Please take care of yourself and those that you love, because that’s what we are here for, that’s all we’ve got, and that is what we can take with us.
– Stevie Ray Vaughan
Orbit
Go where it’s warm
is perhaps the best advice
we can offer each other
in times of distress—
a pair of arms held out
in the hospital room,
or mugs of mint tea
taken together at the table
of mourning. You feel it
as a force field, an orbit
you slip into as soon
as you meet someone new
and sense that small,
blazing star pulsing
in their chest, drawing
you closer until you know
you’ll be circling that
source of light and heat
for the rest of your life.
– James Crews
FAMILY TRIP
We never knew closer
sisters, stronger trees,
tighter clans, wilder
fires. Where can we
go if not to each other,
resenting every step?
– Brenda Shaughnessy
Wise dharma practitioners may still get irritated and even let out some words of aggression. But they catch themselves and recover their footing quickly, and from there they move confidently toward a better solution. Even when faced with pain in the midst of struggle, they know they can overcome it by applying the wisdom they have understood and practiced. Some may think this approach is unnatural or contrived, but this is how the practice of patience can become a reliable strength. Their growing sense of confidence gives these practitioners a joyful sense of anticipation about working through difficult circumstances. They are ‘wise’ because they know the difference between wisdom and neurosis, and they always side with wisdom. With this perspective, they have no reason to reject anything that comes up in their lives. They can see all situations as ways for them to learn, grow, and progress.
– Dzigar Kongtrul, Peaceful Heart
The truth unquestionably is, that the only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion. Tired at length of anarchy, or want of government, they may take shelter in the arms of monarchy for repose and security.
Those then, who resist a confirmation of public order, are the true Artificers of monarchy—not that this is the intention of the generality of them. Yet it would not be difficult to lay the finger upon some of their party who may justly be suspected.
When a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits—despotic in his ordinary demeanour—known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty—when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day—It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may “ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.”
– Alexander Hamilton
The important thing is to be in love with something.
– Ray Bradbury
While the parameters of biological chemistry are narrowly fixed for all life forms, the parameters of associative cooperation provide more leeway. Composed of psychological inclinations as well as physical realities, living minds are mysteriously flexible from the start. Our inner desires can have definite physical and social consequences, so that a strong tendency, such as desiring to spend more time in the water, probably helped shape the unusual evolution of aquatic mammals like seals and dolphins. Which is why I’m not the only one proposing that evolution is also a consequence of sentient influences and adaptations. As Gregory Bateson says, “Billiard balls do not respond to each other’s responses.” And, as he adds, “the evolutionary process is in a formal sense analogous to (or simply a special case of) mental creativity.”
– George Gorman
Great Good Fortune
Do not be surprised if the sweetest of dogs
still harbors the fierce wolf within her,
or if a bear dreams
in her long sleep of being a bird.
And what if the mountain sometimes wishes
that it could wander off like a river?
Or the fire’s secret longing to be ice?
If everything yearns to become something
that is an affront to its particular dignity,
no wonder my heart sometimes tires.
Though nameless shamans dancing
down dissolving trails cry,
“You are not you,”
we are learning patience,
the art of the long haul.
Of course we’ll split our seams,
give all but dreams to worms and winds
and hop that Rumi bus again.
But still the piece wants polish.
We have success in our hearts.
Ten pairs of tortoise shells will not oppose us.
– George Gorman
Which is worth more, a crowd of thousands,
or your own genuine solitude?
Freedom, or power over an entire nation?
A little while alone in your room
will prove more valuable than anything else
that could ever be given you.
– Rumi
Ars Poetica
For a while I climbed the ladder,
not realizing I’d placed it
against the wrong house. The window
I tried to look into was a mirror.
I fell backward into the world.
– Stephen Dunn
Alone, even doing nothing, you do not waste your time. You do, almost always, in company. No encounter with yourself can be altogether sterile: Something necessarily emerges, even if only the hope of some day meeting yourself again.
– Emil Cioran
When your thoughts are racing and repetitive, remember: no one can harm you as much as your untamed mind. When you are struggling or in pain remember: no one can help you as much as a quiet, clear, composed mind.
– Jack Kornfield
Give Us Courage
Give us courage, gaiety and the quiet mind.
Spare us to our friends, soften to us our enemies.
Bless us, if it may be, in all our innocent endeavors.
If it may not, give us the strength to encounter
that which is to come, that we be brave in peril,
constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath,
and in all changes of fortune and down to the gates
of death, loyal and loving to one another.
– Robert Louis Stevenson
It isn’t just in distant galaxies that strange, unreasonable things are happening. Unreason has crept up on us so insidiously that we’ve hardly been aware of it. But think of the things going on in our country …
– Madeleine L’Engle
You don’t know how to take off your suit of armor. You have no idea how to conduct yourself without the reference point of your own security. The challenge of warriorship is to step out of the cocoon, to step out into space, by being brave and at the same time gentle. You can expose your wounds and flesh, your sore points. You can be completely raw and exposed with your husband or your wife, your banker, your landlord, anyone you meet.
– Chögyam Trungpa
We live in an anti-relational, vulnerability-despising culture. One that not only fails to nurture the skills of connection, but actively fears them. We are all victimized by the violence of disassociation and disconnection.
– bell hooks
I loved to dance because I was scared to speak. When I was moving, I could feel.
– Pina Bausch
I hated life in the Soviet Union. You had to pretend something you didn’t feel.
– Mikhail Baryshnikov
I’ve lost confidence in the news media’s ability, not Joe Biden’s.
– Randi Mayem Singer
The proof of Biden’s ability to run the country is the fact that he is running it successfully. Not a debate performance against a pathological lying sociopath.
– Heather Cox Richardson
It’s sad that there are so many scams in the world that people find it hard to believe anyone would actually spend their time and resources to support the practice of poetry without some ulterior motive. But some of us actually do.
– Timothy Green
A trauma book I was reading had an interesting claim that indecision is often because the person looks for the approval of an internalized authority figure but is unable to predict what action they would approve of.
– Kaj Sotala
If I ever claim enlightenment, that’s the signal I’ve been kidnapped.
– River Kenna
A doctrine insulates the devout not only against the realities around him, but also against his own self. The fanatical believer is not conscious of his envy, malice, pettiness and dishonesty. There is a wall of words between his consciousness and his real self.
– Eric Hoffer
The weakness of a soul is proportionate to the number of truths that must be kept from it.
– Eric Hoffer
When you’ve done the work, you become increasingly misunderstood by a world that hardly even knows what that means. Your priorities and your peace, all will make you different. That difference is how new worlds are made.
– Nika Solé
One of the best ways to manage your emotions is to workout every day.
– Dan Go
good tea is
eloquent enough
to change a person’s mind
– Yoshimoto
Nationalism is an exclusive process and is not conducive to peace.
– Krishnamurti
Far more crucial than what we know or do not know is what we do not want to know.
– Eric Hoffer
What we need is the development of the inner spiritual man, the unique individual whose treasure is hidden on the one hand in the symbols of our mythological tradition, and on the other hand in man’s unconscious psyche.
– CG Jung
The day someone asks me what
is this life truthfully? I will grab a pile
of dirt from the ground and scatter it
into sky.
– Anwar Jalalpuri
If people are patient and kind, that’s a lot—something of the spirit is at work. The result of grace. It doesn’t come naturally.
– Anne Lamott
It is July
& I have hope
in who I am becoming.
– Charlotte Eriksson
And finally, I bless my daughters, who are yet unborn. I pray that, if life tests them — as sooner or later life is bound to do — they’ll be able to stand steadfast and think carefully, using their hearts as well as their heads, understanding when they need to compromise, and knowing when they must not.
– Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
I know the American story.
Again and again, I’ve seen the contest between those who want to take us back and those who want to move us forward.
My lifetime has taught me to embrace freedom and democracy, respect everyone, give everyone a shot, and give hate no safe harbor.
– Joe Biden
The return we reap from generous actions is not always evident.
– Francesco Guicciardini
art and spirituality don’t matter,
they were just two of the realms of human activity that were least ensnared by left hemisphere capture
my worry is that spirituality’s increasing popularity is greatly increasing the rate of left hemisphere capture there as well
– River Kenna
there are fewer and fewer domains where defaults are in place that will lead you into becoming the flowing current of the tao
there should really be more of those
– River Kenna
Torn Map
Once
by mistake
She tore a map
in half.
She taped it back
but crookedly.
Now all the roads
ended in water.
There were mountains
right next to her hometown.
Wouldn’t that be nice
if it were true?
I’d tear a map
and be right next
to you.
– Naomi Shihab Nye
Believe me, there is no goal, nor a way to reach it. You are the way and the goal, there is nothing else to reach except yourself.
– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
city street
the darkness inside
the snow-covered cars
– Cor van den Heuvel
I’ve always liked the metaphor of your discography as a bit of a story. Sometimes, chapter three makes more sense when you get to chapter five, and you say, right now I see how that was a bridge, or that was a detour, or that was a setup.
– Ezra Koenig
Crazy to think that we own a body that can run, throw, jump, dance, crawl, roll, shake, carry, lift, punch, kick, spin and all people do all day is sitting around.
– @moveorperish
If poetry introduces the strange, it does so by means of the familiar. The poetic is the familiar dissolving into the strange, and ourselves with it. It never dispossesses us entirely, for the words, the images (once dissolved) are charged with emotions already experienced, attached to objects which link them to the known.
– Georges Bataille
The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected.
– Robert Frost
I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear, Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong.
– Walt Whitman
The most generous thing
We can do Is dissolve
Our false images
Of each other.
This is the deepest form
Of liberation.
– Chelan Harkin
In order to
understand,
I destroyed
myself.
– Pessoa
There is telepathy between hearts.
– @mikael_jibril
The American middle class’s faith in personal comfort as an end in itself is, in essence, a denial of life. And it has been imposed upon American writers and playwrights strongly enough to cut them off from their deeper sources.
– Nelson Algren
I love you. I love you,
but I’m turning to my verses
and my heart is closing
like a fist.
– Frank O’Hara
Psychotherapy is a peculiar kind of conversation. It is not like social discourse, nor is it like a visit to an expert who gives explicit advice, nor is it like studying with a teacher or mentor or spiritual advisor.
– Nancy McWilliams
(…) if there is a
place further from me
I beg you do not go
– Frank O’Hara
Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.
– Proverbs 4:23
the names of flowers that open only once,
shouted from balconies, shouted from rooftops,
or muffled by pillows, or whispered in sleep,
or caught in the throat like a lump of meat.
– Richard Siken, Saying Your Names
And then we are simply falling—
And the world goes by,
all the worlds, each more beautiful than the last;
I touch your cheek to protect you—
– Louise Glück
In her book Old in Art School, Nell Irvin Painter talks about how, after decades of being a professor, she wanted the space to be more creative, messy and not always right than what’s commonly expected of academics.
– @tamaranopper
The gift of mental power comes from God, Divine Being, and if we concentrate our minds on that truth, we become in tune with this great power.
– Nikola Tesla
It’s odd that the press is so actively trying to elect a person who would eliminate all of their jobs for state-run media.
– Sarah Wood
But what did we want after all? Nothing. We were worn out and disillusioned.
– Clarice Lispector; tr. Giovanni Pontiero
Peace is the result of retraining your mind to process life as it is, rather than as you think it should be.
– Wayne W. Dyer
We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.
– Carlos Castaneda
I have my own particular sorrows, loves, delights; and you have yours. But sorrow, gladness, yearning, hope, love, belong to all of us, in all times and in all places. Music is the only means whereby we feel these emotions in their universality.
– H.A. Overstreet
My dear
What I prescribe you
Is to go
Sit in the dark
And stay
Until you see
It was never
You.
– Chelan Harkin
“Jokyō no Yochi”
(Foreknowledge of Conditions)
crickets and soft rain
occasional thunder
followed by silence.
eyes open
for the second time
on a day still thrumming.
I hear my teacher’s voice:
“Always take a second look.
Then, a third.
You already know.”
With this, a reminder:
On some level
with *nearly everything*
we have a potential —
foreknowledge of conditions.
We may not like the optics
but the Eye-Behind-the-Eyes
always sees;
it has always been stitched
to the Great Tapestry.
Some part of us
is always being sent out
like a scout,
sending back news
from the farthest ripple.
Thunder above.
Mountain below.
The transmission
is always coming in
but this arriving
cannot be discerned
in the midst of distraction.
When ‘it’ happens,
whatever ‘it’ is,
we can feign surprise
shake our fist to the heavens
feel aghast at the tumbling
but surprises
— true surprises —
are actually quite rare.
All of reality is stitched together
by solid and broken lines.
This is why the mountain masters
named the hexagrams
Sky
Lake
Thunder
Fire
Earth
Mountain
Water
Wind
Only self-delusion
clouds the clear mirror
of Tao and Great Nature.
– Frank Inzan Owen
Ghazal: America the Beautiful
Do you remember our earnestness our sincerity
in first grade when we learned to sing America
The Beautiful along with
the Star-Spangled Banner
and say the Pledge of Allegiance to America
We put our hands over our first grade hearts
we felt proud to be citizens of America
I said One Nation Invisible until corrected
maybe I was right about America
School days school days
dear old Golden Rule Days
when we learned how to behave in America
What to wear, how to smoke,
how to despise our parents
who didn’t understand us or America
Only later learning the Banner and the Beautiful
live on opposite sides of the street in America
Only later discovering the Nation is divisible
by money by power by color by gender by sex America
We comprehend it now this land is two lands
one triumphant bully one still hopeful America
Imagining amber waves of grain
blowing in the wind
purple mountains and no homeless in America
Sometimes I still put my hand
tenderly on my heart
somehow or other still carried away by America
– Alicia Ostriker
You are misinformed, badly educated and badly conditioned, and you try to interpret life through this misinformation. When you realise that your information is wrong, immediately put it aside.
– Krishnamurti
The best medical intervention on the planet is getting at least 30 minutes of exercise each day.
– Dan Go
By grabbing their own fantasies and pulling them too eagerly into the light of consciousness and by interpreting them at once with too much intensity, many people destroy their secret inner life. Creativity sometimes needs the protection of darkness…
– M-L von Franz
I’m not voting for character, I’m voting against fascism. I’m not voting based on past results, I’m voting against fascism. I’m not voting out of loyalty, I’m voting against fascism. If that’s Joe, he’ll have my vote. If it’s someone else, same. I’m voting against fascism.
– Jeff Sharlet
CONGRATULATING YOUR PHOTOGRAPH
ON YOUR MOVE TO LONDON
Rose bulb with cut leaves fixed on my lapel.
Shadows petal down from my hand left against
your shoulder for the wrapping and keeping.
Colors months hold. You in grains of shadow,
kept by a smile. My brown eyes, two mouths
gasping for world’s milk. On scratched paper,
undulations underneath. Substrated, holographic
sheen of topography rippled mother
of pearl, fish scales. After a handful of
months the colors hold. White coworkers
their turned backs walking opposite toward
power transfer ceremonies begun from toddler age.
Larger than buildings hidden behind us, we never fit
in at morning meetings, or front entrances.
Money draws the colorline every literal day
in evaluations and org charts. The decisive moment,
what it was, and when it happened, is difficult
to place. We lived as a two-headed creature.
Two points marking an umlaut or snake bite.
I made an airplane and flew the picture into
the same river that swallowed our phones
on a ferry ride circling Liberty
during a drunken trip. I don’t know what to
do with old photographs anymore. If you know
how to contain future years of fading down
to a five-by-seven double portrait,
call me like you used to and tell me.
– Kami Enzie
Leaves
Years do odd things to identity.
What does it mean to say
i am that child in the photograph
at Kishamish in 1935?
Might as well say I am the shadow
of a leaf of the acacia tree
felled seventy years ago
moving on the page the child reads.
Might as well say I am the words she read
or the words I wrote in other years,
flicker of shade and sunlight
as the wind moves through the leaves.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
The human unconscious is capable of holding difficult material outside of conscious awareness until such time as the psyche is sufficiently mature for that material to be integrated.
– Steven Forrest
Mass production requires mass consumption, and there cannot be mass consumption without widespread identical views as to what the necessities of life are.
– Jacques Ellul
Are the gods not just?
Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were?
– C.S. Lewis
The worst thing we can do to others is burden them with our unconscious material and yet we cannot avoid doing so.
– James Hollis
At last we create some Space between this and that, which liberates us tremendously.
– Chögyam Trungpa
I view myself as a bridge, nothing else. There’s an entire generation of leaders…They are the future of this country.
– Joe Biden, March 2020
United
When sleepless, it’s helpful to meditate on mottoes of the states.
South Carolina, “While I breathe I hope.” Perhaps this could be
the new flag on the empty flagpole.
Or “I Direct” from Maine—why?
Because Maine gets the first sunrise? How bossy, Maine!
Kansas, “To the Stars through Difficulties”—
clackety wagon wheels, long, long land
and the droning press of heat—cool stars, relief.
In Arkansas, “The People Rule”—lucky you.
Idaho, “Let It Be Perpetual”—now this is strange.
Idaho, what is your “it”?
Who chose these lines?
How many contenders?
What would my motto be tonight, in tangled sheets?
Texas—“Friendship”—now boasts the Open Carry law.
Wisconsin, where my mother’s parents are buried,
chose “Forward.”
New Mexico, “It Grows As It Goes”—now this is scary.
Two dangling its. This does not represent that glorious place.
West Virginia, “Mountaineers Are Always Free”—really?
Washington, you’re wise.
What could be better than “By and By”?
Oklahoma must be tired—“Labor Conquers all Things.”
Oklahoma, get together with Nevada, who chose only
“Industry” as motto. I think of Nevada as a playground
or mostly empty. How wrong we are about one another.
For Alaska to pick “North to the Future”
seems odd. Where else are they going?
– Naomi Shihab Nye
All time does best is erode what we know.
– Usman Hameedi
We choose our communities and our communities choose us. Sometimes we are not really accepted or more so embraced by certain members the way we had hoped, but that is okay. We find our place. We find our voices. We find our songs, our elegies, our dirges, our mistakes etc. It is okay to fail, to succeed, to lose people, to find people. Institutions are not meant to contain us. It is always people and relationships. Find those who support your work. Support them. Support the work they do. I have made many mistakes, but I have survived. Our lessons make us. We do not all have the same circumstances. Embrace every small success. It is yours to enjoy. Know you have made it. Every line. Every poem. Every image. Every sonorous sound. Every enjamb ment. Do not let naysayers of your work who mouth off deter you. I have had someone insult me here despite no understanding of my past, my poetry, or my politics. Write your moment in history. It is yours. It is your community’s. You know who they are. You know who has your back.
– Sheryl Luna
First, create your ego. Then destroy it. This is all of life.
– Kamand Kojouri
Creating the ego is the task for the first half of life, transforming [a bit less harsh than “destroying”] it is the task for the second half.
– Béa Gonzalez
When it comes to climate change, we need to retire, or at least put on hiatus, the term “the new normal”. This is not the new normal. Normal will keep getting warmer until we stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.
– Simon Donner
I am re-reading Francis Weller’s The Wild Edge of Sorrow. Required reading for Two-Leggeds in this stretch of our collective tumbling journey.
I read it back in 2015 when it first came out, but — like all of us— I’ve done some living since then; living that has contained loss, living that has produced cellular change, living that has activated change on the level of heart-mind and consciousness, living that has made me all the more aware of life’s fragility and preciousness.
Funny how a book we’ve read before can change as we change. I’m accustomed to that phenomenon with the Tao Te Ching, certain sutras, and the Book of Changes itself (I Ching), but James Hollis, Ph.D.’s Living An Examined Life and Weller’s The Wild Edge of Sorrow are two that have this same quality of shapeshifting as the reader undergoes change.
Last night I dreamed of one of the old Wayfarers, and it seemed related to this theme of navigating personal and collective grief in the service of deepening and cultivating a wider sense of concentric loving. In particular, I dreamed of the old Zen renegade, Ikkyū Sōjun, and one of his infamous one-liners. It feels highly resonant with Weller’s important ideas on the subject.
Toward the end of his life, Master Ikkyū (a.k.a. Crazy Cloud) declared that he would have no Dharma heir (and that if anyone claimed to be this that everyone else should know that individual was lying). In lieu of a Dharma heir, however, he made all of his students fellow “crazy clouds” by setting before them a central principle, a trailhead of sorts, to follow.
“There Are Many Crazy Clouds”
– for Ikkyū, and Wayfarers of every culture and time
There are many Crazy Clouds.
We are all his many emanations.
One does not limit the reach
of such a crystalline,
fiercely-awake heart-mind.
I hear my teacher say to me:
“You don’t get it yet, do you?
The potential expressions are endless.
What she meant is that some of the Wayfarers were silent and priestly
(in the mountain spirit sense).
Others were wild, and loud, and passionate; poems and desire dripped from their tongues.
Whether scholar-warriors, pilgrims, or holy clowns, Wayfarers are the ones blowing their own minds open
in order to merge with the vast buddha-body of an awake cosmos.
Whether monks or nuns, worldly official, or hermit-farmer far from the world, the Wayfarers are the ones
blowing their own hearts open, again, after loss, in order to see and feel the world clearly.
Joy in the midst of suffering
is the mark of the Ikkyū School.
– Frank Inzan Owen / 2024
Some things don’t come cheap. I’m looking at you, young men. The best things are paid for in decades.
This should be extraordinarily good news to you. Think of all the good things to come.
– Kenneth Folk
I doubt that my sense of personal freedom is any stronger than anybody else’s. I’m happy to respect authority when it’s genuine authority, based on moral or intellectual or even technical superiority. I’m eager to follow a hero if we can find one. But I tend to resist or evade any kind of authority based merely on the power to coerce.
– Edward Abbey
Rant
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
Absolutely. For instance, the word intimacy, even in the most radical psychology, doesn’t mean the same thing in the context of the self-care process. Generally speaking, intimacy tends to refer to sharing something personal — perhaps in a felt way, but primarily through information. Intimacy in the context of self-care means opening energetically to another human being — not knowing them as anything other than a radiant mystery.
For me, the greatest fulfillment in doing what I do arises from experiencing another person as a great opening, a huge space. We sit together with the eyes closed and I can feel who they are. This body only appears to be an enclosure. It is actually a passageway — like an entry to a cave or a cathedral. It is quite the opposite of the way we’ve been taught to perceive it.
– Stephen R. Schwartz
To see that your life is a story while you’re in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.
– Ursula Le Guin
There’s more than meets the eye with the human body. It keeps score all on its own. It remembers; it hurts; it hides memories, secrets, even from us. The body is a record keeper, even when the brain forgets what’s been recorded. Bodies, bodies, bodies. Vanishing bodies.
– Moses Yuriyvich Mikheyev
In the end, everything I know comes directly out of this lifelong self-doubt. Everything.
– Vivian Gornick
the inexhaustible pages of nature … written over and over uncountable times, written in characters of every size and color, sentences composed of sentences, every part of a character a sentence.
– Bill McKibben, The Age of Missing Information
I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library. For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful that I had the wit to charge through that door and make the most of it. Now, when I read constantly about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that the door is closing and that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.
– Isaac Asimov
What modern art means is that you have to keep finding new ways to express yourself, to express the problems, that there are no settled ways, no fixed approach.
This is a painful situation, and modern art is about this painful situation of having no absolutely definite way of expressing yourself.
– Louise Bourgeois
When, in Paradise Lost, Adam asks about the movements of the heavens, Raphael refuses to answer. “Let it speak,” he says, “the Maker’s high magnificence, who built / so spacious, and his line stretcht out so far; / That man may know he dwells not in his own; / An edifice too large for him to fill, / Lodg’d in a small partition, and the rest / Ordain’d for uses to his Lord best known.
– Bill McKibben
Disco’s are tricky. You look a total wally if you dance too early but after one crucial song tips the disco over, you look a sad saddo if you don’t.
– David Mitchell
We have a need for an enlightened, watchful articulate opposition. We have no need for semi-secret societies who are absolutist, dictatorial and would substitute for a rule of law and reason an indiscriminate assault on the institutions that must be held sacrosanct.
– Rod Serling
I WISH IN THE CITY OF YOUR HEART
I wish in the city of your heart
you would let me be the street
where you walk when you are most
yourself. I imagine the houses:
It has been raining, but the rain
is done and the children kept home
have begun opening their doors.
– Robley Wilson
The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There’s no earthly reason—there’s no physical, technical reason for there being any poverty at all anywhere. But you see, there are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it’s only money. They don’t know how to use it, they don’t know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.
– Alan Watts
In the near future people who drink alcohol will be regarded as the weird ones.
– Dan Go
The “conquest of nature” is our biggest illusion for we have not gained control of our own nature.
– C.G. Jung
I have a quote taped to my office wall from an anonymous source that says, ‘Love is hard. Love is . . . seeing the darkness in another person and defying the impulse to jump ship.’
– Anne Lamott
Each morning in every family, men, women and children, if they have nothing better to do, tell each other their dreams. We are all at the mercy of the dream and we owe it to ourselves to submit its power to the waking state.
– La Révolution surréaliste, No. 1, December 1924
All wisdom comes to those who are unprepared for it.
– Manly P. Hall
Are you not aware that there comes a midnight hour when everyone must unmask.
– Søren Kierkegaard
Awakening isn’t some gentle, serene process where a person suddenly sees the light. Awakening is dark nights of the soul. Unlearning everything you think you know. It’s a journey through the uncomfortable. And still through it all, it’s taking you everywhere you’re meant to go.
– Nika Solé
The body of carbon variations, OUR body, from the black to the brown, to the green, and on to all the colors, even the white flowers, those diamonds.
– Francis Ponge, (tr. Jonathan Larson)
Authenticity is a healing force. There’s a safety that comes with it. People don’t feel like there’s something off with you, or that they need to figure out your intentions, because you are yourself. No weird energy. No ulterior motives. Just clean, pure vibes.
– Nika Solé
Just measure and law and the moonglade paths of the recluse.
– Georg Trakl
My name is now St Désamère—
I’ll enter the desert alone.
– Alice Notley
Repetition is based on body rhythms, so we identify with the heartbeat, or with walking, or with breathing.
– Karlheinz Stockhausen
Opportunities in life come through people.
Who do you need to connect with to gain access to the opportunities you want?
– James Clear
Who taught you to shade your shine, diminish your joy, mute your voice?
May you unlearn the lessons of self-erasure and begin showing up fully, completely free.
– Dr. Thema
July.
All sensation absent.
Only magic, internal magic,
your sky-blue soul.
– Velimir Khlebnikov
My truest life is unrecognizable, extremely interior and there is not a single word that defines it.
– Clarice Lispector
Whether you worship Christ, Krishna, Kali or Allah, you actually worship the one Light that is also in you, since It pervades all things.
– Anandamayi Ma
Writing is also not writing. Writing is living – boredom, volunteering, learning a new thing, building/completing a task, sleeping, travelling, falling in/out of love, taking up space, checking in on someone…
– @peclif
Once we see that we are not solo improv stand-up players but rather members of a vast improv collective, we can recognize that the only way that I can succeed is if we succeed.
– Jay Garfield
Perhaps Madame Bovary’s disease is not boredom. It’s being trapped as the character in someone else’s novel.
– Kate Zambreno, Heroines
What I love about the ancient Greeks is they didn’t need a god to put all their shit on. The gods were basically personifications of whatever nonsensical shit dwelled within them.
– Nick Tosches
One of the main reasons I think so many modern urban people are depressed and anxious is because we insist on trading off stability for optionality.
– Sara Bollman
No need to apprise us of
your worries. . .
We’ll spot you
We got you
Always
– Rachel Newcombe
Marion Woodman said: The masculine is the doing side. It carries the sword that discriminates, golden and sharp. It knows how to cut. Some things have to be cut out of our lives. All of us need that masculine . . . we need discrimination, discernment, a capacity for clarity and the courage to use a sword when necessary. The sword says, “This is what I value and will protect.
– Barbara Joy Laffe
It always makes me proud to love the world somehow- hate’s so easy compared.
– Jack Kerouac
The real philosopher has only one plan of action: virtue and prudence; for the only good and bad fortune lie in prudence or rashness.
– Baltasar Gracián
Train yourself toward solidarity and not charity. You are no one’s savior. You are a mutual partner in the pursuit of freedom.
– Brittany Packnett Cunningham
The bright hero is a little too bright, a little too invulnerable, and a little too far away from ordinary human suffering and ordinary human longing to perform his appointed task of redemption. He can be injured only from behind,
implying that the bright heroic stance can deflect anything in life but the shadow, the unconscious.
– Liz Greene
Avoid using the word ‘very’, because it is lazy. A man is not ‘very’ tired, he is exhausted. Don’t use ‘very’ sad, use morose. Language was invented for one reason. Boys- to woo women- and, in that endeavor, laziness will not do.
– Dead Poets Society; Nancy H. Kleinbaum
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
At one time people conveniently ‘went mad’ and were never heard from again. Like a character in a romantic novel. But now… you are too hip to yourself on a psychological level. You are all too intimate with too many of the symptoms of insanity to be caught completely off your guard. Another thing: all of you have a talent for releasing frustration through clever fantasy.
– Ken Kesey
Love is more respectable, more practical, more hardworking than I had ever suspected, but it lies close to the power to destroy. I have never before remotely felt myself to possess that power, and I am as haunted by it as if it were a gun in a nearby drawer.
– Rachel Cusk
Once millions or billions of people get addicted to something, how do we fix that?
– celestialpearl@
In everything, there is a share of everything.
– Anaxagoras
Your subconscious has the answer to all problems. If you suggest to your subconscious prior to sleep, “I want to get up at 6 A.M.,” it will awaken you at that exact time.
– Dr. Joseph Murphy
We are too weak to discover the truth by reason alone.
– St. Augustine
Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.
– Carl Sandburg
I’m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I’m simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.
– Shannon Hale
I think that the goal of all writing is to humanize those that we can only see from far away.
– Taffy Brodesser-Akner
The psyche uses depression to get our attention, to show that something is profoundly wrong. Once we understand its therapeutic value and follow its Ariadne string through our private labyrinth, then depression can even seem a friend of sorts.
– James Hollis
I see the same world as you do but not in the same way. There is nothing mysterious about it. Everybody sees the world through the idea he has of himself. As you think yourself to be, so you think the world to be.
– Nisargadatta
—you once lay there, the vernix
not yet wiped off, and someone gazed at you
as if you were the first sunrise seen from the Earth.
– Ellen Bass
The dangerous gap that exists now between the principles on which we purport to stand and the constellation of public policies in our country…Somebody’s got to name it.
– Marianne Williamson
Turns out I needed like four days of nothing but sleeping and drinking lemonade to feel like a human being again.
– John Chrostek
We walked together, and the world was sweet.
– Sophie Jewett
One of the most frustrating things in American politics for me right now, is the lack of imagination, and curiosity. There’s nothing but fear, devastation, and what we can’t do. There’s not enough about imagining how far we can go and how much we can do.
– Ashley Stevens
We don’t make reality. We evade it. So far. By looting natural capital and hiding the costs. But the bill is coming, and we won’t be able to pay.
– Richard Powers
Each beloved object is the centre of a Paradise.
– Novalis
Tastes
like warm water
with mint in it
the day’s complete awareness
a mutton in your eye
a lesson for the heart
tasting much sweeter
than the workings-out
of disembodied systems
“I’ll live before I die”
I have no system
but there is a motor
in this body
take this and listen
rough flakes
going down
like wine
– Bill Berkson
As Toni Cade Bambara wrote to Octavia E. Butler, “Take good care of your energies, my sister, and keep writing.”
– @tamaranopper
If you do not fast from the world, you will not find the kingdom.
– Yeshua
i don’t even fantasize about grad school or the Appalachian trail fixing me anymore. nowadays i’m mature enough to know change won’t change anything, and the only thing way to fix things is to wake up every morning and cut through thickly-weeded drudgery with a pure white machete
– @coldhealing
… but how do I explain
this restless search for beauty or relief?
– Diane Seuss
People who don’t improve themselves assume that you get worse as you get older. But those who are actively improving just continue to get better.
– Nika Solé
As you go about your life, don’t give 100 percent of your attention to the external world and your mind. Keep some within.
– Eckhart Tolle
every time i start with a new therapist it’s like, melancholy asylum baby, poverty, activist mother, cello, drugs, hedonism, psychosis, poetry, london, radicalization, nu jazz, ayahuasca, new york, success, berlin, california, fiction, but still sadness, great
– Aria Aber
To distance ourselves from our experience makes our feelings a liability, while staying in conversation with our experience makes our feelings a resource.
– Mark Nepo
As I see it, our own nation is not free from the danger of dictatorship. And I refer to internal as well as external threats to our liberties. As social conflict tends to become more severe in this country – and it will unless we strive for social justice – there will inevitably be a tendency on the part of the authoritarian element – always present in our history – to suppress individual freedoms, to utilize the refined techniques of police surveillance (not excluding torture, of course) in order to preserve – not wilderness! – but the status quo, the privileged positions of those who now so largely control the economic and governmental institutions of the United States.
– Edward Abbey
PIUTE CREEK
One granite ridge
A tree, would be enough
Or even a rock, a small creek,
A bark shred in a pool.
Hill beyond hill, folded and twisted
Tough trees crammed
In thin stone fractures
A huge moon on it all, is too much.
The mind wanders. A million
Summers, night air still and the rocks
Warm. Sky over endless mountains.
All the junk that goes with being human
Drops away, hard rock wavers
Even the heavy present seems to fail
This bubble of a heart.
Words and books
Like a small creek off a high ledge
Gone in the dry air.
A clear, attentive mind
Has no meaning but that
Which sees is truly seen.
No one loves rock, yet we are here.
Night chills. A flick
In the moonlight
Slips into Juniper shadow:
Back there unseen
Cold proud eyes
Of Cougar or Coyote
Watch me rise and go.
– Gary Snyder
Just try to keep your mind in the present. Whatever arises in the mind, just watch it and let go of it. Don’t even wish to be rid of thoughts. Then the mind will return to its natural state. No discriminating between good and bad, hot and cold, fast and slow. No me and no you, no self at all – just what there is.
When you walk there is no need to do anything special. Simply walk and see what is there. No need to cling to isolation or seclusion. Wherever you are, know yourself by being natural and watching. If doubts arise, watch them come and go. It’s very simple. Hold on to nothing.
It’s as though you are walking down a road. Periodically you will run into obstacles. Don’t think about the obstacles you’ve already passed; don’t worry about those you have not yet seen. Stick to the present.
Don’t be concerned about the length of the road or the destination. Everything is changing. Whatever you pass, don’t cling to it. Eventually the mind will reach its natural balance where practice is automatic. All things will come and go of themselves.
– Ajahn Chah
I grew up with landscape as a recourse, with the possibility of exiting the horizontal realm of social relations for a vertical alignment with earth and sky, matter and spirit. Vast open spaces speak best to this craving, the spaces I myself first found in the desert and then in the western grasslands.
– Rebecca Solnit
I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world. It’s difficult to describe because it’s an emotion. It’s analogous to the feeling one has in religion that has to do with a god that controls everything in the whole universe: there’s a generality aspect that you feel when you think about how things that appear so different and behave so differently are all run “behind the scenes” by the same organization, the same physical laws. It’s an appreciation of the mathematical beauty of nature, of how she works inside; a realization that the phenomena we see result from the complexity of the inner workings between atoms; a feeling of how dramatic and wonderful it is. It’s a feeling of awe — of scientific awe — which I felt could be communicated through a drawing to someone who had also had this emotion. It could remind him, for a moment, of this feeling about the glories of the universe.
– Richard P Feynman
In your life, you meet people. Some you never think about again. Some, you wonder what happened to them. There are some that you wonder if they ever think about you. And then there are some you wish you never had to think about again. But you do.
– C.S Lewis
Once in a while you are faced with a beauty and a joy that takes your soul, all unprepared, by assault.
– Jennifer Worth
Part of our task is to discover how all our ancestors inform our lives–and the same holds true for all forms of life, for we have been shaped not only by human ancestors but also by the environments in which they lived.
– Joan Halifax
One might even say that the masculine ideal and the feminine ideal are represented in the psyche by something other than this activity / passivity opposition. Strictly speaking they spring from the term masquerade.
– Jacques Lacan
The model we choose to use to understand something determines what we find.
– Iain McGilchrist
But if you will think of ourselves as coming out of the earth, rather than having been thrown in here from somewhere else, you see that we are the earth, we are the consciousness of the earth. These are the eyes of the earth. And this is the voice of the earth.
– Joseph Campbell
The marble not yet carved can hold the form of every thought the greatest artist has.
– Michelangelo
Every soul is vast and wants to express itself fully. If it’s denied an adequate instrument (and we’re all denied that, at birth, some more than others), out comes…poetry, i.e., truth forced out through a restricted opening. That’s all poetry is, really: something odd, coming out. Normal speech, overflowed. A failed attempt to do justice to the world. The poet proves that language is inadequate by throwing herself at the fence of language and being bound by it. Poetry is the resultant bulging of the fence.
– George Saunders
Neither the fanatics nor the fainthearted are needed. And our duty as a Party is not to our party alone, but to the nation, and indeed, to all mankind. Our duty is not merely the preservation of political power but the preservation of peace and freedom. ..So let us not be petty when our cause is so great. Let us not quarrel amongst ourselves when our Nation’s future is at stake.
– Mary Elaine LeBey
When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age.In middle age I was assured greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ships’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, once a bum always a bum. I fear this disease incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself….A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we not take a trip; a trip takes us.
– John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America
Perhaps all men were moved against their will. A man ordered his life, and then an obscurity of circumstance sent him down a road that was not of his own desire or choosing. Something beyond a man’s immediate choice and will reached through the earth and stirred him. He did not see how any man might escape it.
– Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
When I confront a human being as my Thou and speak the basic word I-Thou to him, then he is no thing among things nor does he consist of things. He is no longer He or She, a dot in the world grid of space and time, nor a condition to be experienced and described, a loose bundle of named qualities. Neighborless and seamless, he is Thou and fills the firmament. Not as if there were nothing but he; but everything else lives in his light.
– Martin Buber
Life forms a surface that acts as if it could not be otherwise, but under its skin things are pounding and pulsing.
– Robert Musil (tr. Wilkins and Pike)
It’s All Right
by William Stafford
Someone you trusted has treated you bad.
Someone has used you to vent their ill temper.
Did you expect anything different?
Your work-better than some others —has
languished, neglected.
Or a job you tried was too hard,
and you failed. Maybe weather or bad luck
spoiled what you did. That grudge, held against you
for years after you patched up, has flared,
and you’ve lost a friend for a time. Things
at home aren’t so good; on the job your spirits
have sunk. But just when the worst bears down
you find a pretty bubble in your soup at noon,
and outside at work a bird says, “Hi!”
Slowly the sun creeps along the floor;
it is coming your way. It touches your shoe.
No one will ever be able to assess fully the disastrous effect on the human soul of all the bureaus and agencies.
– Jacques Ellul
To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself.
– Henry Miller
After years of somatic work with dudes:
Don’t just listen to what a man says – watch how he moves.
Fidgeting is a man’s involuntary autobiography. Finger taps hint dissatisfaction, bouncy legs express anxiety, shifty eyes whisper shame, relaxed hands reveal deep comfort
– Alex Olshonsky
Missed Time
My notebook has remained blank for months
thanks to the light you shower
around me. I have no use
for my pen, which lies
languorously without grief.
Nothing is better than to live
a storyless life that needs
no writing for meaning-
when I am gone, let others say
they lost a happy man,
though no one can tell how happy I was.
– Ha Jin
This is what the Hebrew prophets
said: if the sacred is not nurtured, the
underworld will erupt, contaminating
the world with the wrong kind of
spirits, leading to a perilous
situation. ‘Our times have
demonstrated what it means when
the gates of the psychic underworld
are thrown open’.
– David Tacey
The older I get the more my body does not like alcohol.
– Dan Go
I became a psychotherapist because I so love the imagination. William Blake says: “The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself” For me, psychotherapy is essentially an affair of images – of how we imagine and, more important, reimagine ourselves.
– Vannoy Adams
Psychoanalysis is a lived emotional experience. As such, it cannot be translated, recorded, explained, understood or told in words. It is what it is.
– Thomas Ogden
I must make my way along this narrow ridge between my own truth and a caricature of it.
– Vladimir Nabokov
The sick in soul insist that it is humanity that is sick, and they are the surgeons to operate on it. They want to turn the world into a sickroom. And once they get humanity strapped to the operating table, they operate on it with an ax.
– Eric Hoffer
It’s one thing to push yourself to go to the gym.
It’s another to live in a place where physical activity is a normal part of life.
Environment will always be stronger than willpower.
– Dan Go
Whenever people are certain they understand our peculiar situation here on this planet, it is because they have accepted a religious Faith or a secular Ideology (Ideologies are the modern form of Faiths) and just stopped thinking.
– Robert Anton Wilson
Without mysticism, I have no interest in any Abrahamic religion.
– @nakfourium
You need strong determination to overcome harmful habits. But the payoff is happiness—not just for today but for always.
– Bhante Henepola Gunaratana
compassion marks
the start of our journey
towards humanity
– Mencius
The revulsion from an unwanted self, and the impulse to forget it, mask it, slough it off and lose it, produce a willingness to dissolve it by losing one’s individual distinctness in a compact collective whole.
– Eric Hoffer
One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.
– Jane Austen
I’m like a winged creature
who is too rarely allowed
to use its wings.
– Anaïs Nin
There are no chosen ones in the world. The Divine is equally involved with everyone and everything.
– Sadhguru
Your goal should never be to ruin someone else. Whenever you think of ruining someone else (whether they are ruined in the end or not), you will certainly ruin yourself.
– Anonymous
If a person gave away your body to some passerby you’d be furious. Yet you hand over your mind to anyone who comes along, so they may abuse you, leaving it disturbed and troubled. Have you no shame in that.
– Epictetus
Not the old, not the new, but the necessary.
– Tristan Tzara
Many people are born to families that forced them to be in survival mode. Years later, they’ll begin to understand that their minds & bodies have to work harder to function because of this. I can’t think of anyone who deserves understanding more than someone who knows this pain.
– Nate Postlethwait
I write a poem and delude myself that I’ve escaped sadness,
I merely make it rhythmic, lighter perhaps.
I do my best to make it beautiful, bearable,
and for that reasonless reason I cry some more.
– Adelia Prado, A Good Cause
The looming fate of the average person
The shadows of the night
that beg to dance
upon the waters of the world
When it is no longer safe to do so
– @pocketpoetry07
The thing about great creators is they believe in their vision. They will do anything to follow the thing to the end. They’ll go do anything. Great ones listen to people in their own way, not that they’d make their adjustments to get to where they want to be because they have this burning desire to tell that story.
– Ari Emanuel
Because diaspora is going to be the permanent human condition.
– Min Jin Lee
In these mountains I imagine I hear
bears and leopards and tigers and baboons,
but all I see is a man on a ladder,
cutting bamboo.
– Eliot Weinberger
I wonder what
the world would be
if the Europeans
never left Europe.
– Andy Perrin
Smudge of possibility
Hope slithers in
Joy resurfaces
Loss lessens
– Rachel Newcombe
Fascism is might over right, conspiracy over reality, fiction over fact, pain over law, blood over love, doom over hope.
– Timothy Snyder
I don’t think I’ll ever understand why it is culturally ‘normal’ to hate an ex rather than be friends with them. How can you spend so much time with someone and then be expected to erase them? How is that ‘cool’? Why is our relationality so fenced and insecure?
– Alina Stefanescu
The more you follow your intuition, the more it gatekeeps you from undesirable experiences.
– Nika Solé
The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.
– Arthur Miller
If you decide to remain in illusions, you can remain so for many, many lives. If you decide to get out, a single moment’s decision is enough. You can be out of all illusions this very moment.
– Osho
I know I am but summer to your heart (Sonnet XXVII)
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
I know I am but summer to your heart,
And not the full four seasons of the year;
And you must welcome from another part
Such noble moods as are not mine, my dear.
No gracious weight of golden fruits to sell
Have I, nor any wise and wintry thing;
And I have loved you all too long and well
To carry still the high sweet breast of Spring.
Wherefore I say: O love, as summer goes,
I must be gone, steal forth with silent drums,
That you may hail anew the bird and rose
When I come back to you, as summer comes.
Else will you seek, at some not distant time,
Even your summer in another clime.
she is neither
by the sea nor the sea by her . . .
she’s just a poet
– Mohammad Hoghughi
Maybe this is why we read, and why in the moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.
– Alberto Manguel
Don’t want to be a sociopath?
Then don’t do business as usual.
If you participate in a system you take on the shape of that system.
– Vince Fakhoury Horn
Hell will belong to the folklore of the past, and suffering will feel monstrous, out of place, if we say paradise now, and use our hands.
– Etel Adnan, Journey to Mount Tamalpais
In a word, man must create his own essence: it is in throwing himself into the world, suffering there, struggling there, that he gradually defines himself.
– Jean-Paul Sartre
Holding grudges and blaming are acts of the ego, while surrender and forgiveness are acts of the Divine.
– Debbie Ford
When the Greeks said, “Whom the gods love die young”, they probably meant, as Lord Sankey suggested, that those favored by the gods stay young till the day they die ; young and playful.
– Eric Hoffer
Writing is a kind of revenge against circumstance too: bad luck, loss, pain. If you make something out of it, then you’ve no longer been bested by these events.
– Louise Glück
What you really long for is a deep intimacy with your own experience – the deepest acceptance of every thought, every sensation, every feeling. And that cannot come from outside of yourself.
– Jeff Foster
PISTACHIO MACAROON
by Todd Dillard
In the rain the flowers agree with everything I say.
I tell them about this new religion
where you pray by not dying.
New gods are being discovered every day.
There’s the god of the way ants
form little colony balls in floods
like Christmas ornaments in hell.
There’s even a god of the six inches
the Eiffel Tower grows each summer.
My favorite god so far
is the god of your mouth
speaking my name while you sleep,
and how you smack your lips afterward
like you just ate a pistachio macaroon.
Nothing hurts you except your thoughts.
Nothing limits you except your fears.
Nothing controls you except your beliefs.
– Marianne Williamson
My heart wants to take away the suffering of people around me, and yet, my deeper wisdom understands when I look at my own life, my suffering has been part of the grace that has helped me develop the compassion that I have.
– Ram Dass
these moonwhite daisies
suddenly so exhausted
tethered in green shade
– Catherine Baker
Whatever you cling to or whatever you push away owns you.
– Adyashanti
His view that poetry demands more than mere aesthetic expression when written from inside an oppressive system is less controversial today than when he was writing.
– @SandmanSimonds, on Bill Knott
In the Mountains on a Summer Day
by Li Bai
Gently I stir a white feather fan,
With open shirt sitting in a green wood.
I take off my cap and hang it on a jutting stone;
A wind from the pine-trees trickles on my bare head.
No set of legal institutions or prescriptions exists apart from the narratives that locate it and give it meaning. For every constitution there is an epic, for each decalogue a scripture.
– Robert Cover
Forevertron
by Norman Finkelstein
I have built a machine to visit the stars.
I have built a machine to outlast the stars.
There is a glass ball inside a copper egg.
There are dynamos and turbines, Tesla coils and magnets.
There is a boy in Brooklyn, Wisconsin
and a boy in Eddington, England.
They are the same boy. There is a man in a hat
in Baraboo. They are all named Tom.
They are all named Dr. Evermor, which is now
their real name. Queen Victoria is watching
among the giant insects, the fiddle-shaped birds.
The stray voltage goes in the stray voltage
cages, all silver, red and blue. The music
will signal the ascent. This is the Overlord
Master Control, this is the Graviton,
these are the Celestial Listening Ears.
When you ask me what has changed my life,
I tell you motors, generators, compressors, transformers;
I tell you boilers, pumps, transmitters and flywheels.
When you ask me if I found them I say no,
I rescued them.
My limbs were sore with dancing
and not another soul in sight
and I felt ruined by the force
of my own dumb luck—
that I somehow made it here
to this city
crossing water in the dark
on the way to my safe home.
– Cecilia Knapp
A “perfect” person ends up being one who can consciously forgive and include imperfection rather than one who thinks he or she is totally above and beyond imperfection.
– Richard Rohr
Your eyes aren’t empty mirrors — you reflect human beings. I hope this doesn’t make you mortally unhappy.
– Yōko Tawada
Writing is walking on a dizzying silence setting one word after the other on emptiness. Writing is miraculous and terrifying like the flight of a bird who has no wings but flings itself out and only gets wings by flying.
– Hélène Cixous, The Book of Promethea
Our institutions and conditions rest upon deep-seated ideas. To change those conditions and at the same time leave the underlying ideas and values intact means only a superficial transformation, one that cannot be permanent or bring real betterment.
– Emma Goldman
Grief is subversive, undermining the quiet agreement to behave and be in control of our emotions. It is an act of protest that declares our refusal to live numb and small. There is something feral about grief, something outside of the ordained and sanctioned behaviours of our culture.
– Francis Weller
There are so many rich people who don’t share their shit. They’re like spoiled little ten-year-old bullies on the playground. They hog the monkey bars and the slide and the seesaw. And if you complain even a little bit, if you try to get just one spin on the merry-go-round, the bullies beat the shit out of you.
– Sherman Alexie, Flight
I cannot express to you how done we all are with watching wealthy famous white men manipulate reality because they think they know better than the rest of us.
– Deirdre Assenza
It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky
A silly idea is that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is… A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered
life by always giving in.
– C.S. Lewis
he next life will be darker
than this so we must
prepare a light.
– Franz Wright
Cinema is the most
beautiful fraud in the world.
– Jean-Luc Godard
I lay in the evenings in the living room under the table, with the dog. I pressed the dog’s head close to me, felt his warm breath on my face and clutched with my hands at his soft coat. You, Harras, I whispered, & the sheepdog laid his paws on my arm & gazed at me.
– Peter Weiss
As Toni Cade Bambara said, “The question that faces billions of people at this moment…Can the planet be rescued from the psychopaths?”
– @tamaranopper
Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills, as I have found out long ago.
– C. S. Lewis
Your true self is always with you.
– Seung Sahn
For every “yes” there must be a “no.” Decisions are expensive because they demand renunciation.
– Irvin D. Yalom
The flute is totally empty. It is the breath that flows through, sings and dances. To be empty is not emptiness.
– Rumi
The bright suns I see and the dark suns I cannot see are in their place.
– Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
Remember the universe is your friend. It’s on your side, there’s nothing against you. The only thing against you are your thoughts. If you learn to quiet your mind you’ll have no problems.
– Robert Adams
When you work for money, something awful happens to you.
– James Baldwin
When I look behind the mind, I see the witness. Behind the witness is this infinite intensity of emptiness and silence.
– Nisargadatta
If you haven’t tried aleatoric music yet, you should really give it a chance.
– Aaron Lee, PhD
Given to Rust
by Vievee Francis
Every time I open my mouth my teeth reveal
more than I mean to. I can’t stop tonguing them, my teeth.
Almost giddy to know they’re still there (my mother lost hers)
but I am embarrassed nonetheless that even they aren’t
pretty. Still, I did once like my voice, the way it moved
through the gap in my teeth like birdsong in the morning,
like the slow swirl of a creek at dusk. Just yesterday
a woman closed her eyes as I read aloud, and
said she wanted to sleep in the sound of it, my voice.
I can still sing some. Early cancer didn’t stop the compulsion
to sing but
there’s gravel now. An undercurrent
that also reveals me. Time and disaster. A heavy landslide
down the mountain. When you stopped speaking to me
what you really wanted was for me to stop speaking to you. To
stifle the sound of my voice. I know.
Didn’t want the quicksilver of it in your ear.
What does it mean
to silence another? It means I ruminate on the hit
of rain against the tin roof of childhood, how I could listen
all day until the water rusted its way in. And there I was
putting a pan over here and a pot over there to catch it.
If I have an ethics, it is simply to be true.
– Henri Cole
The kids in the class were adorable. If you idealize someone, said one kid, you’ll never do anything for them, because they’re like a fake statue. If you idealize someone they can never be who you think they are.
– Nancy Lemann, The Oyster Diaries
I sealed the bottle caps of the poems that were springing out of me because I was despairing over the helplessness of poetry.
– @PoetKimHyesoon
field grass . . .
the zig-zags
of a dragonfly
– @ruralitalics
We find everything in our memory: it’s a kind of pharmacy, a chemical laboratory, where you put your hands at random, now on a soothing drug, now on a dangerous poison.
– Marcel Proust
Forget the years, forget distinctions. Leap into the boundless and make it your home!
– Chuang Tzu
I see so many things happening now in the name of politics that I find hard to understand in general, but especially as examples of political struggle…The emphasis I see on healing, self-care, safety, and especially rest, concern me.
– Barbara Smith
Everything is teaching you.
– Seung Sahn
When I started out
I had such plans as gods would envy,
but the world loves plans.
It eats them whole and leaves
only the dregs and crumbs.
– @cross_mouse
This country is suffering from political, economic, and social dysfunction so fundamental that in the blindness it has caused us we still tend to think only the prime examples of that dysfunction will end it.
– Marianne Williamson
To the church of my youth,
What did you expect me to do?
You told me to love my neighbors, to model the life of Jesus. To be kind and considerate, and to stand up for the bullied.
You told me to love people, consider others as more important than myself.
You taught me to sing “red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight.”
We sang it together, pressing the volume pedal and leaning our hearts into the chorus. You said that “He loved all the children of the world”.
You told me to love my enemies, to even do good to those who wish for bad things. You told me to never “hate” anyone and to always find ways to encourage people.
You told me it’s better to give than receive, to be last instead of first. To help the poor, the widow, the stranger at the gate.
You told me that Jesus looks at what I do for the least-of-these as the true depth of my faith. You told me to focus on my own sin and not to judge. You told me to be accepting and forgiving.
So I payed attention.
I took in every lesson.
And I did what you told me.
But now, you call me a libtard. A queer-lover. You call me “woke.” A backslider. You call me a heretic. You make fun of my heart. You mock the people I’m trying to help.
You say I’m a child of the devil.
You call me soft. A snowflake. A socialist. You shun the very people you told me to help.
What did you expect me to do?
I thought you were serious, but apparently not.
You hate nearly all the people I love. You stand against nearly all the things I stand for. I’m trying to see a way forward, but it’s hard when I survey all the hurt, harm, and darkness that comes in the wake of your beliefs and presence.
What did you expect me to do?
I believed it all the way.
I’m still believing it all the way.
Which leaves me wondering, what happened to you?
– Travis Akers
Crowfoot stood and watched as the white man spread many one dollar bills on the ground.
“This is what the white man trades with; this is his buffalo robe. Just as you trade skins, we trade with these pieces of paper.”
When the white chief had laid all his money on the ground and shown how much he would give if the Indians would sign a treaty, Crowfoot took a handful of clay, made a ball out of it and put it on the fire.
It did not crack.
Then he said to the white man, Now put your money on the fire and see if it will last as long as the clay.
The white man said, No….my money will burn because it is made of paper.
With an amused gleam in his eyes the old chief said, Oh, your money is not as good as our land, is it?
The wind will blow it away; the fire will burn it; water will rot it. But nothing will destroy our land.
You don’t make a very good trade.
Then with a smile, Crowfoot picked up a handful of sand from the river bank, handed it to the white man and said, You count the grains of sand in that while I count the money you give for the land.
The white man said, I would not live long enough to count this, but you can count the money in a few minutes.
Very well, said the wise Crowfoot, our land is more valuable than your money. It will last forever.
It will not perish as long as the sun shines and the water flows, and through all the years it will give life to men and animals, and therefore we cannot sell the land.
It was put there by the Great Spirit and we cannot sell it because it does not really belong to us.
You can count your money and burn it with a nod of a buffalo’s head, but only the Great Spirit can count the grains of sand and the blades of grass on these plains.
As a present we will give you anything you can take with you, but we cannot give you the land.
– Chief Crowfoot, Blackfoot Confederacy
The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.
– Christopher McCandless
It doesn’t matter if I’m singing or not. That’s the kind of person that my father and mother wanted me to be. The end obligation is to make people feel good about who they are.
– Arlo Guthrie
I began to understand that suffering and disappointments and melancholy are there not to vex us or cheapen us or deprive us of our dignity but to mature and transfigure us.
– Hermann Hesse
Soviet dissidents risked their lives to print, read, and pass around banned books. Why would they do this? Solzhenitsyn says they did this because great art provides profoundly useful warnings. Cultures “continually repeat each other’s mistakes with a time lag.” An idea that is tried and rejected in one place emerges in another as the “latest word.” Here, art can tide over “differences in language, custom, and social structures” and provide a warning.
– Jash Dholani
I’ll rewrite this whole life and this time there’ll be so much love, / you won’t be able to see beyond it.
– Warsan Shire
Lathe of the ocean. Perpetual
Motion machine of the waves. Everything still
Being turned and shaped to a shape nobody
Foresees: Ten years ago, was it, when we
Walked that shore, too earnest and sheepish
To hold hands?
– Tom Sleigh
This is exactly how I think about it. We would lose our minds finding the least scrap of life elsewhere, and yet here we exploit it to extinction.
– Alicia E. Stallings
I “believe science” but I also believe “iced coffee doesn’t ‘work right’
– Nate Wolff
When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows and lie low until the wrath has passed.
– Eric Hoffer
Whoever says he is in the light and hates his brother is still in darkness.
– 1 John 2:9
“cannot” contains such agony, complete and utter torment, as if dredged from the depths of the soul, that it renders the very humble, almost casual “can’t” feeble in comparison.
– Amanda M. Melito
Take the shortest route, the one that nature planned – to speak and act in the healthiest way. Do that, and be free of pain and stress, free of all calculation and pretension.
– Marcus Aurelius
When you discover you’ve been leading only half a life, the other half is going to haunt you until you develop it.
– Phillips Brooks
One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be and how dangerous it is to trust them.
– Thomas Sowell
Reason can wrestle with terrors, and overthrow them.
– Euripides
Song That Can Only Be Sung Once
by Tom Sleigh
After Porfirio Barba Jacob’s Canción De La Vida Profunda
Variable, changeable, yes, there are days when
people like us are like that. Maybe under
some other sky something like glory smiles on us,
maybe there life is clear, maybe there things open up
on the way the sea stretches out to the horizon—
but us, we’re blown by chance the way wind blows
blades of grass lightly blowing them all one way.
And then there are days when we feel April,
the fields of April making us feel our bodies
longing to be held and fucked into oblivion,
bodies fertile as a field in April, swollen,
trembling to be touched: and under the influences
of rains pouring down as if pure spirit poured
into us like rain, that thing called “soul”
sprouts and branches and entangles us
in lush bowers and thickets of illusion.
Oh yes, days come along when we’re calm, clear
—childhood sunsets, lagoons rippling sapphire!—
days when a verse, a sudden whistle, days when a mountain
and bird passing over it, days when even our own pain
and what we feel it to be like make us smile.
And sure, there are days when we’re so
disgusting, so sordid to ourselves
it’s like we’re dark stone in the darkness
inside flint: then nighttime surprises us,
its lamplight dizzying, cold, profuse, glinting
off tossed coins of the good, the terrible
shining with the gleam of that primal metal.
And other days come, come when women
want to cry their come cries and use us
as their own, days when we’re itching to get
a woman naked, and then we can’t face it, can’t
stand it somehow, they want us but we don’t know
how to want them back: arm tightening around
a waist, hand cupping a breast, we don’t dare
touch the roundness of an apple or a pear,
the round earth spins us off into space.
And then there arrive days so dismal and stupefied
and numb that the idiot soughing of a pine grove
sounds like weeping: and what some idiot called
the soul whines and wails and carries on
with what some other idiot calls “the pain of the world”:
and maybe not God himself, that absolute fool,
can make that wind less cutting, or make it stop.
And then there comes, certain to come, oh my earth
I love beyond any of my days, a day . . . a day . . . a day
when my sail catches the wind and drags the anchor
up out of the bottom muck, and nothing can withstand
that wind blowing by, talking to itself, talking, talking . . .
and the day is mine and yours and every living thing’s . . .
the day when nobody and nothing can keep us
from getting up and going, no matter who we are . . .
the day when our leaving is the same as our arriving.
Rapture
by Carol Ann Duffy
Thought of by you all day, I think of you.
The birds sing in the shelter of a tree.
Above the prayer of rain, unacred blue,
not paradise, goes nowhere endlessly.
How does it happen that our lives can drift
far from our selves, while we stay trapped in time,
queuing for death? It seems nothing will shift
the pattern of our days, alter the rhyme
we make with loss to assonance with bliss.
Then love comes, like a sudden flight of birds
from earth to heaven after rain. Your kiss,
recalled, unstrings, like pearls, this chain of words.
Huge skies connect us, joining here to there.
Desire and passion on the thinking air.
The Now in which God made the first man and the Now in which the last man shall cease to be, and the Now I speak in, all are the same in God and there is but one Now.
– Meister Eckhart
Your desire to heal has to be bigger than your addiction to speaking / thinking about your illness
– Jonathan Louis Dent
I’m curious: what would you learn getting a four-year business degree that someone who spent four years, say, learning to read critically and write thoughtfully and think and research independently couldn’t learn in a couple months on the job?
– Drew McKevitt
Quilting
What are you doing, I ask.
Making a quilt, he says.
How so? I ask.
You don’t have any fabric,
You don’t have needles and thread,
Or even
A sewing machine.
Well, he says.
I have this beautiful old quilt.
Look at the handiwork!
And I have all these bits of colored paper
I even have scissors and glue.
I will replicate the quilt using these materials.
It will be perfect.
But, I interject,
How is it a quilt anymore, if it is made of paper,
not fabric?
It will not warm anyone at night.
It will not be soft to the touch.
This project is futile, I conclude.
Despite your negativity, he opines, I am not injured.
For I shall create an exquisite simulacrum of a quilt.
It will be quilt-like. It will look like this quilt.
I will hang it on the wall and admire it.
This is an imperfect metaphor for translation:
A translated book retains its functionality as a readable object.
The paper quilt looks like a quilt but does not have quilt functionality.
On the other hand,
in this metaphor, the original quilt loses some of its most essential features,
while the paper quilt has the potential of becoming a beautiful work of art.
– Daisy Rockwell
I prefer living in color.
– David Hockney
All men are brothers, we like to say, half-wishing sometimes in secret it were not true. But perhaps it is true. And is the evolutionary line from protozoan to Spinoza any less certain? That also may be true. We are obliged, therefore, to spread the news, painful and bitter though it may be for some to hear, that all living things on earth are kindred.
– Edward Abbey
stirring maps of existence
un-topiary vital sanctuary:
everything, everyone, everywhere
colossal furtive networks
veins, pulsing capillaries
stories bountiful in multitudes
– Alicia Sometimes
i love you like
periwinkle african skies, equatorial dusk
calliopeian songs
& mangoes from african trees
like nighttime skies over the desert of
wadi rum
& tibet
orion doing cartwheels across the
firmament
– Jor Art
The Pear
by Jane Kenyon
There is a moment in middle age
when you grow bored, angered
by your middling mind,
afraid.
That day the sun
burns hot and bright
making you more desolate.
It happens subtly, as when a pear
spoils from the inside out,
and you may not be aware
until things have gone too far.
Green Koan
That the mind can go
wherever it wishe
is a kindness
we’ve come to rely on;
that it returns
unbidden to the soul
it could not banish
and learns to thrive there
is life’s stubborn mercy—given
to soften or harden us,
as we choose.
– Rita Dove
to fall from so high
and not be broken that is
the thing about snow
– Clark Strand
Pádraig Ó Tuama
Ex nihilo
Who is this that darkens counsel
by words without knowledge?
Gird up your loins like a man,
And you shall declare to me.
The Book of Job, chapter thirty eight.
Believe me, I’m the last man to believe me. I believed in danger from the first day I could think. I learnt to speak by screaming some of it aloud—and my first word in two languages was remember. Nobody taught me how to promise, but I promised. And it wrecked me. Remembering kept me hungry for decades and when I stood up against it, I ran, I flew, I panicked at its threats, I grew more frightened than I’d ever been.
In the beginning was a word, I had heard, then I heard another word that made me listen, made me stand. Who said it? Not a man, that’s for sure; men were too busy teaching me their sure and frightened ways of purity. Who whispered it? Who said it? Who worked that word of freedom into me? Who freed me? Who believed me?
Yes, I know what he is like:
a kind of impossible robot
you insert your prayers into
like tickets, that after a while
are returned to you with the words
“Not granted’ written upon them.
I repudiate such a god.
But if, as you say, he exists,
and what I do is an offence
to him, let him punish me:
I shall not squeal; to be proved
right is worth a lifetime’s
chastisement. And to have God
avenging himself is to have
the advantage, till the earth opens
to receive one into a dark
cleft, where, safer than Elijah,
one will know him trumpeting
in the wind and the fire
and the roar of the earthquake, but not
in the still, small voice of the
worms that deliver one for ever
out of the tyranny of his self-love.
– Ivan Karamazov
POEM FOR A BLUE PAGE
Tonight I am remembering
the Krishna-skin
skies of summer
& the way your laugh
made a jacaranda tree bloom.
We slept in sheets the color of sea glass &
I woke with the taste of salt
in my mouth.
Happiness is devastating
in the past tense.
I lay these memories, like a fish,
on the cutting board.
Slice them open &
the deepest blue
spills onto this poem.
– Natasha Rao
Big capital uses racism, caste-ism and sexism and gender bigotry in intricate and extremely imaginative ways to reinforce itself, protect itself, to undermine democracy, and to splinter resistance.
– Arundhati Roy
Thistle
We traveled to Palestine last Easter
to see the site of the betrayal of Christ
and saw two men in a brick enclosure
staring at a drain in the ground.
A ruthless thistle grew out of a crumbly spot
in the wall. We traveled to Chile to experience
the driest spot on earth, at a roadside shrine
the Virgin had a long eyelash on her lips
and a ruthless thistle growing
out of a crumbly spot on her side.
We traveled to Brazil to see Pelé in action
but the papers announced he had stepped on a thistle.
How did the Japanese princess know it was her hairpin
found in a subway station? In Provence
there is an old tree famous for its bark,
packed with fading pigments:
someone scraped a palette there. Saw that,
stopped in a shop run by Scots and bought
a teapot with a thistle on top.
O ruthless thistle, match in the dark,
you can talk to anyone about the weather
but only to your closest friends
can you mention the light.
– Mary Ruefle
I believe in political solutions to political problems. But man’s primary problems aren’t political; they’re philosophical. Until humans can solve their philosophical problems, they’re condemned to solve their political problems over and over and over again. It’s a cruel, repetitious bore.
– Tom Robbins
The neighbors’ dog will not stop barking.
He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark
that he barks every time they leave the house.
They must switch him on on their way out.
The neighbors’ dog will not stop barking.
I close all the windows in the house
and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast
but I can still hear him muffled under the music,
barking, barking, barking,
and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra,
his head raised confidently as if Beethoven
had included a part for barking dog.
When the record finally ends he is still barking,
sitting there in the oboe section barking,
his eyes fixed on the conductor who is
entreating him with his baton
while the other musicians listen in respectful
silence to the famous barking dog solo,
that endless coda that first established
Beethoven as an innovative genius.
– Billy Collins
Each night he is exhausted. He sleeps as soon as his head touches the pillow. His sleep is dreamless, a plummeting into blackness: like falling into a well. The night world is real, he often feels; the mornings, with their light and air, are populated by shadows, ghosts. He rises before dawn, to have the advantage of them.
– Hilary Mantel
..At the end there may be no answers
and only a few very simple questions: did I love,
finish my task in the world? Learn at least one
of the many names of God? At the intersections,
the boundaries where one life began and another
ended, the jumping-off places between fear and
possibility, at the ragged edges of pain,
did I catch the smallest glimpse of the holy?
– Jeanne Lohmann
“Nothing can be done!’ How often have we heard that last gasp: the last of the human, the soul, of freedom. Indeed, something could be done; and was. And would be.
– Daniel Berrigan
Our mind has its history, just as our body has its history. You might be just as astonished that man has an appendix, for instance. Does he know he ought to have an appendix? He is just born with it….Our unconscious mind, like our body, is a storehouse of relics and memories of the past. A study of the structure of the unconscious collective mind would reveal the same discoveries as you make in comparative anatomy. We do not need to think that there is anything mystical about it.
– Carl Jung
God help the culture that pretends that earlier stupidities never happened and tries to eradicate all evidence of them.
– George Saunders
To live is to war with trolls in heart and soul
To write is to sit in judgment of oneself.
– Henrik Ibsen
Now I began to understand art as a kind of black box the reader enters. He enters in one state of mind and exits in another. The writer gets no points just because what’s inside the box bears some linear resemblance to “real life”—he can put whatever he wants in there. What’s important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit.”
– George Saunders
The self is also a creation, the principal work of your life, the crafting of which makes everyone an artist. This unfinished work of becoming ends only when you do, if then, and the consequences live on. We make ourselves and in so doing are the gods of the small universe of self and the large world of repercussions.
– Rebecca Solnit
Everyone thinks that summer is hiking season and I am here to tell you that it is unequivocally NOT.
– Christine Klocek-Lim
And I’m proud to be a vegetarian
Where at least I know I’m meat-free
And I won’t expect a cow to die
To give me my protein
And I’d gladly stand up next to you
And eat some beans today
‘Cause there ain’t no doubt
I don’t love ham
God Bless the PBJ
(Sung to the tune of God Bless the USA)
– via Honor Finnegan
Today everyone is ‘distracted’ by civilization; indeed, we might say that our whole civilization, from its games and sports up to its serious business, has arranged everything in order to achieve this distraction.
– Jacques Ellul
Friends, do not be confused by the “infoshum” (information noise) bombarding us via the media, social platforms, and more. Keep a clear mind, keep aligned with values of integrity and care, let your wisdom and courage be your guide, not the manipulations of ill-meaning players.
– Joan Halifax
My parents named me Light because
their lives lie in shadow
but I’m a poor example of joy.
Sometimes I get so sad
I think about eating a quesadilla,
or assembling a tire swing,
or taking off my bra. Instead I dream
of the big dumb heart my mother
hands me. She tells me to carry it.
I drop it every time.
– Noor Hindi
And now, a moment to breathe. And in that breath, you can see, I can see… I turned inward and fell silent.
– Alexandra Fuller
A kind of joyous hysteria moved into the room, everything flying before the wind, vehicles outside getting dented to hell, the crowd sweaty and the smells of aftershave, manure, clothes dried on the line, your money’s worth of perfume, smoke, booze; the music subdued by the shout and babble through the bass hammer could be felt through the soles of the feet, shooting up the channels of legs to the body fork, center of everything. It is the kind of Saturday night that torches your life for a few hours, makes it seem like something is happening.
– Annie Proulx
There is no less holiness at this time—as you are reading this—than there was on the day the Red Sea parted… In any instant, the sacred may wipe you with its finger.
– Annie Dillard, For the Time Being
Synchronicity is a conspiracy not against you, but for you. The way everything falls in place, strengths are found, wisdoms understood, wounds healing, awareness growing. It is an act of grace that makes you see a flow of living poems where once you saw only broken, lonely words.
– @mikael_jibril
A new ignorance is on the horizon, an ignorance borne not of a lack of knowledge but of too much knowledge, too much data, too many theories, too little time.
– Eugene Thacker
the leaders of the past were insufficient,
the leaders of the present are unprepared.
we curl up tightly in our beds at night and wait.
it is a waiting without hope, more like
a prayer for unmerited grace.
– Charles Bukowski
The spirit of this time is ungodly; the spirit of the depths is ungodly; 𝘣𝘢𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦 is godly.
– CG Jung
I don’t do politics
Baby, politics is gonna do you regardless.
Politics is doing us right now!
– Nina Turner
They listen
And listen
Naturally listen
Effortless listen
For what’s not spoken
Therapists’ connat skill
– Rachel Newcombe
it is hard to handle
a cup filled to the brim
– Laozi, tr. Thomas Meyer
My imagination is a monastery, and I am its monk
– John Keats
The spirit of our times can appear to be one of joyless urgency.
– Marilynne Robinson
I read today the internet
is making us illiterate.
I am not convinced it’s
the world wide web
I think instead it’s all
the bright red feathers
we’ve untethered to flight
to catch each other’s attention
a bird without wings
is a missile
If you could write something
without motive today
release it
– Aimee Wai
Whatever you impress on your subconscious mind is expressed on the screen of space as conditions, experiences, and events. Therefore, you should carefully watch all ideas and thoughts entertained in your conscious mind.
– Dr. Joseph Murphy
You are in love with intelligence, until it frightens you. For your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were irresistible. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time.
– Paul Valéry
We all have one foot in a fairytale, and the other in the abyss.
– Paulo Coelho
You’re not going to get very far in life on the basis of what you already know…
– Charlie Munger
He moved himself mentally from place to place, and tried to determine by the feeling of his body whether he was perched high in the air or buried deep underground.
– George Orwell
I see him. / He is exactly / the poem / I wanted to write.
– Mary Oliver, White Heron Rises Over Blackwater
The world is what the saints and the prophets saw it was; it is not merely getting better or merely getting worse; there is one thing that the world does; it wobbles.
– G.K. Chesterton
Raising your vibration is not about hyper-positivity; it is about authenticity. Authenticity begins by letting go of fear of how others will perceive you.
– Brandy Anderson
The purest form of love is consideration. When someone thinks about how things would make you feel. Pays attention to detail. Holds you in regard when making decisions that could affect you. In any bond, how much they care about you can be found in how much they consider you.
– warpaintjournal@
A curious person can learn more about the world in a single year than most people learn in their entire life.
– James Pierce
I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way l ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.
– Franz Kafka
I must change my life so that I can live it, not wait for it.
– Susan Sontag
Proof that you are will follow the consciousness that you are; it will not precede it.
– Neville Goddard
You are a work of art, my love, and not just any work of art—you are the continuously admired, the endlessly studied, the forever important and graceful.
– Frederick Phoenix
No critic, however generously motivated, can help a deep reader escape from the labyrinth of influence. I have learned that my function is to help you get lost.
– Harold Bloom
Borges somewhere remarks how the surface of reality now and then and here and there reveals a tiny crack through which for an instant we catch a glimpse of the possibility of an entirely other order of things.
– John Banville
Everything is really bad. Like really really really bad. It’s okay to be shook. How could anyone not be?
– Lisa Lucas
The microplastics in your body are a direct result of our hurried rush to solve every problem with a new technological solution.
– @VinceFHorn
those who escape hell
however
never talk about
it
and nothing much
bothers them
after
that.
– Charles Bukowski
I’m tired of summer.
I’m tired.
– Yehuda Amichai
HOMELAND
The sky goes on living it goes
on living the sky
with all the barbed wire of the west
in its veins
and the sun goes down
driving a stake
through the black heart of Andrew Jackson
– Merwin
Watching the horses being washed,
listening to the cicadas in the trees.
I write about what is happening:
I record the dawns and sunsets.
– Eliot Weinberger
We cannot afford, for the sake of our lives and our children’s lives, to suppose that any country or any civilization has a right to murder half the world and menace all the rest in the name of profits.
– James Baldwin
Disease is love turned into fear—our energy, meant to sustain us, turned against ourselves. Energy cannot be destroyed. Our job is not to kill disease, but to turn its energy back in the direction it came from—to turn fear back into love.
– Marianne Williamson
Being intelligent, informed, rigorous, and radical is actually a liability.
– @blackleftaf
My writing is the seismograph of my temperament.
– Alberto Moravia
I think I need a mentor in skill sets that don’t exist
– River Kenna
The master understands
that the universe
is forever out of control.
– Lao Tzu
The exhortation to “think straight” in these times of trouble seems to presume that a golden humanitarian path runs through the cosmos, an unimpeachable rationality of such qualities that a deviation from it would mark a reprobate situation. A fall from grace.
But thinking straight has a crooked history, and rationality – that supreme trait that distinguishes us from beasts so-called – has never been a matter of transcendent callings. It is likelier that reason is a gift from viral infections, from strange encounters within multi-species milieus, and that the politics of thinking straight consists of maintaining particular modes of being in the world. What happens when being reasonable becomes indistinguishable from being impervious to forces at large, changing ecological constraints, and emergence?
Thought needs to do something more than walk the narrow highway. It needs a break from the morality of the straight. The grace of the already known.
– Báyò Akómoláfé
JUST THINKING
Got up on a cool morning. Leaned out a window.
No cloud, no wind. Air that flowers held
for awhile. Some dove somewhere.
Been on probation most of my life. And
the rest of my life been condemned. So these moments
count for a lot – peace, you know.
Let the bucket of memory down into the well,
bring it up. Cool, cool minutes. No one
stirring, no plans. Just being there.
This is what the whole thing is about.
– William Stafford
We live in an anti-relational, vulnerability-despising culture. One that not only fails to nurture the skills of connection, but actively fears them. We are all victimized by the violence of disassociation and disconnection.
– bell hooks
I lock the past with one key, with the other I open the future. This takes place through my transformation. The miracle of transformation commands. It applies not to me, but to the symbol. The symbol becomes my lord and unfailing commander. It will fortify its reign and change itself into a fixed and riddling image, whose meaning turns completely inward, and whose pleasure radiates outward like blazing fire, a Buddha in the flames. Because I sink into my symbol to such an extent, the symbol changes me from my one into my other.
– Carl Gustav Jung, The Red Book
Heart Is Not About Emotions
by Cynthia Bourgeault
“Put the mind in the heart.” From page after page in the Philokalia, that hallowed collection of spiritual writings from the Christian East, this same refrain emerges. It is striking in both its insistence and its specificity. As this ancient teaching falls on contemporary ears, it is inevitably heard through a modern filter that does not serve it well. In our own times the word “heart” has come to be associated primarily with the emotions (as opposed to the mental operations of the mind), and so the instruction will be inevitably heard as “get out of your mind and into your emotions” — which is, alas, pretty close to 180 degrees from what the instruction is actually saying.
Yes, it is certainly true that the heart’s native language is affectivity—perception through deep feelingness. But it may come as a shock to contemporary seekers to learn that the things we nowadays identify with the feeling life—passion, drama, intensity, compelling emotion—are qualities that in the ancient anatomical treatises were associated not with the heart but with the liver! They are signs of agitation and turbidity (an excess of bile!) rather than authentic feelingness. In fact, they are traditionally seen as the roadblocks to the authentic feeling life, the saboteurs that steal its energy and distort its true nature.
And so before we can even begin to unlock the wisdom of these ancient texts, we need to gently set aside our contemporary fascination with emotivity as the royal road to spiritual authenticity and return to the classic understanding from which these teachings emerge, which features the heart in a far more spacious and luminous role.
According to the great wisdom traditions of the West (Christian, Jewish, Islamic), the heart is first and foremost an organ of spiritual perception. Its primary function is to look beyond the obvious, the boundaried surface of things, and see into a deeper reality, emerging from some unknown profundity, which plays lightly upon the surface of this life without being caught there: a world where meaning, insight, and clarity come together in a whole different way. Saint Paul talked about this other kind of perceptivity with the term “faith” (“Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”), but the word “faith” is itself often misunderstood by the linear mind. What it really designates is not a leaping into the dark (as so often misconstrued) but a subtle seeing in the dark, a kind of spiritual night vision that allows one to see with inner certainty that the elusive golden thread glimpsed from within actually does lead somewhere.
What art does is to coax us away from the mechanical and toward the miraculous. The so-called uselessness of art is a clue to its transforming power. Art is not part of the machine. Art asks us to think differently, see differently, hear differently, and ultimately to act differently, which is why art has moral force.
– Jeanette Winterson
If you look in the eyes of the young, you see flame. If you look in the eyes of the old, you see light.
– Victor Hugo
A culture capable of imagining complexly is a humble culture. It acts, when it has to act, as late in the game as possible, and as cautiously, because it knows its girth and the tight confines of the china shop it’s blundering into. And it knows that no matter how well prepared it is — no matter how ruthlessly it has held its projections up to intelligent scrutiny — the place it is headed for is going to very different from the place it imagined. The shortfall between the imagined and the real, multiplied by the violence of one’s intent, equals the evil one will do.
– George Saunders
My friend from Asia has powers and magic, he plucks blue leaf from the young
blue-gum
And gazing upon it, gathering and quieting
The God in his mind, creates an ocean more real than the ocean,
the salt,
the actual
Appalling presence, the power of the waters.
He believes that nothing is real except as we make it.
I humbler have found
in
my blood
Bred west of Caucasus a harder mysticism.
Multitude stands in my mind but I think that the ocean in the bone vault is
only
The bone vault’s ocean: out there is the ocean’s;
The water is the water, the cliff is the rock, come shocks and flashes
of reality. The mind
Passes, the eye closes, the spirit is a passage;
The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself; the heartbreaking beauty
Will remain when there is no heart to break for it
– Robinson Jeffers
That’s the trouble with people, their root problem. Life runs alongside them, unseen. Right here, right next.
– Richard Powers
Where then is the break in this continuity? What the fissure through which one sees disaster? The circle is unbroken; the harmony complete. Here is the central rhythm; here the common mainspring. I watch it expand, contract; and then expand again. Yet I am not included. If I speak, imitating their accent, they prick their ears, waiting for me to speak again, in order that they may place me–if I come from Canada or Australia, I, who desire above all things to be taken to the arms with love, am alien, external. I, who would wish to feel close over me the protective waves of the ordinary, catch with the tail of my eye some far horizon; am aware of hats bobbing up and down in perpetual disorder.
– Virginia Woolf
Or if there were a sympathy in choice,
War, death, or sickness did lay siege to it,
Making it momentany as a sound,
Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,
Brief as the lightning in the collied night,
That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth,
And, ere a man hath power to say ‘Behold!’
The jaws of darkness do devour it up.
So quick bright things come to confusion
– William Shakespeare
Public education does not serve a public. It creates a public. […] The question is, What kind of public does it create? A conglomerate of self-indulgent consumers? Angry, soulless, directionless masses? Indifferent, confused citizens? Or a public imbued with confidence, a sense of purpose, a respect for learning, and tolerance?
The answer to this question has nothing whatever to do with computers, with testing, with teacher accountability, with class size, and with the other details of managing schools. The right answer depends on two things, and two things alone: the existence of shared narratives and the capacity of such narratives to provide an inspired reason for schooling. […] There was a time when educators became famous for providing reasons for learning; now they become famous for inventing a method. [… But] without meaning, learning has no purpose. Without a purpose, schools are houses of detention, not attention.
– Neil Postman
The body does not know the difference between an experience and a thought; you can literally change your biology, neuro-circuitry, chemistry, hormones, and genes, simply by having an inner event.
– Dr. Joe Dispenza
The idea of an afterlife is simply there to give existence a meaning – to give sixty years of banality a sense of purpose. I mean, the idea of an afterlife is just as valid as the idea of a hot dinner – it all depends if you’re hungry.
– Robert Smith
Whole months have passed during which I haven’t lived, but have merely endured, … marooned in an inner stagnation of thinking and feeling.
– Fernando Pessoa
… we must pay much closer attention to the things we have heard, so that we do not drift away from the truth.
– Hebrews 2:1
To survive, you’ve got to keep wheedling your way. You can’t just sit there and fight against odds when it’s not going to work. You have to turn a corner, dig a hole, go through a tunnel – and find a way to keep moving.
– Twyla Tharp
Poetry seeks out the melody of nature amid the tumult of the dictionary.
– Boris Pasternak
God requires us to be oriented from moment to moment to what is in the timeless, and not to be stuck with our thoughts and fantasies of blaming and self-pity and the belief that the past is responsible for our present problems. What is needed is to understand life in the dimension of the timeless, where everything becomes meaningful and self-revealing.
– Thomas Hora
The entire path of our personal journey is shaped by a tug-of-war between our desire to forget and our desire to remember. Our desire for remembering moves us forward into being, and our desire for forgetfulness mires us in dissociated ideas, unprocessed emotions, and an endarkened core. That desire shows up as a need to withdraw into isolation and join the sleepers of whom Heraclitus wrote. Maintaining forgetfulness requires a steady drip-feed of sheer distraction, and our culture devotes itself to that. Money can’t buy happiness, but it can buy distraction—whether in the form of the latest electronics and fashions, or food, drugs and alcohol, or escapist television and magazines, or self-improvement advice that offers new solutions for managing our lives rather than doorways into the newness of being. Absorbed by the self, we lessen the pain of our confinement with distraction; and to offset staleness, the newer the distraction, the better. Consumption is the opiate of the masses. We seek to gratify ‘me’, and we assiduously avoid a remembrance of the world.
– Philip Shepherd
Exhaustion—the aftermath of an unfettered exchange of energies with the world—has been called, accurately I think, the ultimate bliss. It imparts a clarity to body, mind and world. By contrast, tiredness is a woolly state that prevents you from connecting clearly with the world or yourself; it results from the attrition of holding back or trying to control the exchange of energies with the world. It betokens a diminished capacity for relationship. In fact, if we instead described tiredness as a state in which you cannot exhaust yourself, we would be describing it accurately. When that kind of tiredness sets in, it usually signals that you are worn down by the braking actions of your own neglect and deafened to the calling of the world. I think we unconsciously hold on to such tiredness, because it serves as an excuse, or justifies a fear. In my experience, once we recognize that subtle, unconscious mode of storytelling we can simply let go of our tiredness—and when we do so, it feels a lot like taking your foot off the brake pedal.
– Philip Shepherd
To become imperceptible oneself, to have dismantled love in order to become capable of loving. To have dismantled one’s self in order finally to be alone and meet the true double at the other end of the line. A clandestine passenger on a motionless voyage. To become like everybody else; but this, precisely, is a becoming only for one who knows how to be nobody, to no longer be anybody. To paint oneself gray on gray.
– Gilles Deleuze
A poem is the city of language just as prose is its countryside. Prose extends laterally filling the page’s horizon unimpeded, while poetry is marked by dense verticality, by layerings of meaning and sound. Cities and poetry also share compression, heterogeneity, juxtaposition […].
Juxtaposition is a crucial common structural element—in a city, we find a church right next to an apartment building right next to a newspaper office. The newspaper itself, the quintessential urban organ, replicates this juxtaposition in miniature: the story of a political coup in right next to an ad for diamond necklaces and a theater review. […] And poetry, too, of course, thrives on juxtaposition on many levels—incongruent images, images right next to abstractions or declarations, sense that doesn’t match its sound, and so forth. It’s the leaps in contrast to moments of flow that allow for the sonic dynamics of poetry […].
– Cole Swensen
Not Dawdling
Not dawdling
not doubting
intrepid all the way
walk toward clarity
with sharp eye
With sharpened sword
clearcut the path
to the lucent surprise
of enlightenment
At every crossroad
be prepared to bump into wonder
– James Broughton
The only alternative left for humankind is discipline. Discipline is the only deterrent. But by discipline I don’t mean harsh routines. I don’t mean waking up every morning at five-thirty and throwing cold water on yourself until you’re blue. Sorcerers understand discipline as the capacity to face with serenity odds that are not included in our expectations. For them, discipline is an art: the art of facing infinity without flinching, not because they are strong and tough but because they are filled with awe.
– Don Juan Matus
All power is one in source and end, I think. Years and distances, stars and candles, water and wind and wizardry, the craft in a man’s hand and the wisdom in a tree’s root: they all arise together. My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child, all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars. There is no other power. No other name.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
Let’s contemplate the sky. Forget the crazy hammering heartbeat, don’t listen to it, don’t start counting, remember that there is a clever way of breathing that conserves oxygen as if you’re lying below the surface of a body of water breathing through a very thin straw but you can breathe through it if you’re careful, if you don’t panic; one breath and then another and then another, isn’t that the story of all lives? careers? Just a matter of breathing. Of course it is. But contemplate the sky, it’s there to be contemplated. A mild shock to see it so blank, blue, a thin airy ghostly blue, no clouds to disguise its emptiness. You are beginning to feel not only weightless but near-bodiless, lying on the earth like a scrap of paper about to be blown off. Two dimensions and you’d imagined you were three! And there’s the sky rolling away forever, into infinity — if ‘infinity’ can be ‘rolled into’ —and the forlorn truth is, that’s where you’re going too. And the lovely blue isn’t even blue, is it? isn’t even there, is it? a mere optical illusion, isn’t it? no matter what art has urged you to believe.
– Joyce Carol Oates
The difference between ‘hearing’ intellectually and ‘hearing’ with feeling : “Hear the feeling behind the words and get the rhythm of it, the intensity of it.” Jung speaking to an analysand during analysis on her hearing [her notes] : “For instance, I say, “That must be difficult if Dr. Jung thinks so hard over it and how to explain it clearly to me.” Someone who hears would say that I must be dull if I don’t understand the effort Dr. Jung is making to get me to understand what he is driving at. He is putting into it great effort and kindness to help me, and if I don’t get that with my feeling, then I have a ‘feeling dullness.’ I must Hear the feeling behind the words and get the rhythm of it, the intensity of it. Unfortunately, all that has been poisoned in me by [her father]. If one is kind to me, I don’t get the particular quality of feeling, or on the tympanum of the ear, so I don’t hear properly anymore.. For instance, a person can give you a modest bunch of flowers, and they have personal value, and another can give you diamonds, but they have no value as there is no personal relationship there. Jung said that he could well understand that I could get the beauty and feelings in paintings, as that comes through the eyes and not through the ears.” He was most sympathetic as I left and said, “If you hear the right way you will hear the unconscious and what it is trying to tell you.” [later session : ] He said that, as a child, I had been so fed up with my parents’ language, I had made myself deaf so as not to hear, so it could not reach my heart, otherwise I would have been too unhappy. He said that often a child can stand parents another child could not stand because he has learnt to live with them by growing defenses. I grew a rhinoceros hide over my heart so none of my parents’ avalanches could reach me. It was a defense which grew thicker and thicker as the years went on. When my parents said things, it went in one ear and out the other. He said I was like two sisters, the one ran away into the desert. The other stayed as a mold of parents and had the panics.
– Katy Cabot
In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.
– Michel Foucault
Do you think that you can clear your mind by sitting constantly in silent meditation? This makes your mind narrow, not clear. Integral awareness is fluid and adaptable, present in all places and at all times. That is true meditation. … The Tao is clear and simple, and it doesn’t avoid the world.
– Laozi
I think it is necessary to educate the new generations in the value of defeat. In not being a social climber. In this world of vulgar and dishonest winners, of false prevaricators, in the face of this anthropology of the winner from afar I prefer the one who loses.
– Pasolini
Instead of boxing in our hearts, loving only me, me, me—the smallest box—we must try to slowly expand that box till we’re able to love all humanity, all sentient beings.
– Interview with Nawang Khechog by Mark Matousek, Elevated Music
The worst thing about a mental breakdown is that someone changes. It is somehow like a nightmare to see someone change in front of your eyes, to become a stranger and not to be able, with just your love, to make them that familiar person again.
– Anne Sexton
So many things were testing his faith. There was the Bible, of course, but the Bible was a book, and so were Bleak House, Treasure Island, Ethan Frome and The Last of the Mohicans. Did it then seem probable, as he had once overheard Dunbar ask, that the answers to riddles of creation would be supplied by people too ignorant to understand the mechanics of rainfall? Had Almighty God, in all His infinite wisdom, really been afraid that men six thousand years ago would succeed in building a tower to heaven?”
– Joseph Heller
They want to be the agents, not the victims, of history. They identify with God’s power and believe they are godlike. That is their basic madness. They are overcome by some archtype; their egos have expanded psychotically so that they cannot tell where they begin and the godhead leaves off. It is not hubris, not pride; it is inflation of the ego to its ultimate — confusion between him who worships and that which is worshipped. Man has not eaten God; God has eaten man.
– Philip K. Dick
First there is nothing, then there is a deep nothing, then there is a blue depth.
– From Air and Dreams by Gaston Bachelard
…everything was caught in her chest. In her chest that knew only how to give up, knew only how to withstand, knew only how to beg forgiveness, knew only how to forgive, that had only learned how to have the sweetness of unhappiness, and learned only how to love, love, love.
– Clarice Lispector, The Buffalo
As we age and plasticity declines, it becomes increasingly difficult for us to change in response to the world, even if we want to. We find familiar types of stimulation pleasurable; we seek out like-minded individuals to associate with, and research shows we tend to ignore or forget, or attempt to discredit, information that does not match our beliefs, or perception of the world, because it is very distressing and difficult to think and perceive in unfamiliar ways.” “One reason we can change our brains simply by imagining is that, from a neuroscientific point of view, imagining an act and doing it are not as different as they sound. When people close their eyes and visualize a simple object, such as the letter a, the primary visual cortex lights up, just as it would if the subjects were actually looking at the letter a. Brain scans show that in action and imagination many of the same parts of the brain are activated. That is why visualizing can improve performance.
– Norman Doidge, M.D.
Sometimes we use our minds not to discover facts, but to hide them. We use part of the mind as a screen to prevent another part of it from sensing what goes on elsewhere. […] One of the things the screen hides most effectively is the body, our own body, by which I mean the ins and outs of it, its interiors. Like a veil thrown over the skin to secure its modesty, the screen partially removes from the mind the inner states of the body, those that constitute the flow of life as it wanders in the journey of each day.
The alleged vagueness, elusiveness, and intangibility of emotions and feelings are probably symptoms of this fact, an indication of how we cover the representation of our bodies, of how much mental imagery based on nonbody objects and events masks the reality of the body. Otherwise we would easily know that emotions and feelings are tangibly about the body. Sometimes we use our minds to hide a part of our being from another part of our being.
– António Damásio
A Brechtian maxim: do not build on the good old days, but on the bad new ones.
– Walter Benjamin
When I listen to music gardens open out around me, and the melody becomes a flower I hear with my eyes. Sound has an image, and this image has a sound, which slowly gathers momentum like waves, more far-reaching than a literary metaphor. Carnations leave their flower beds and are distributed on the tables of high-class restaurants to compensate a stranger for some forgotten loss, or make a diner waiting for his companion better prepared to face the uncertainties of their encounter. Nobody stops the narcissus listening for hours to a song of joy in the water and believing it is a song of praise. When white lilies fill a room with their huge, pungent scent, I am confused by my thoughts about them, the opposite of violets, which make me pause where two sounds intersect and dissolve, indistinguishable as the tears shed at weddings and funerals, and the opposite of anemones, which are content with a song on the broad margins, a pastorale on the low mountain slopes. All of this is so I can say: the red rose is visible music, and jasmine is a message of longing from nobody to nobody.
– Mahmoud Darwīsh
The world is not an elaborate hoax perpetrated by those who do not love us. Therefore, we may be happy yet. I have hope for it.
– Curtis White
The phenomenal world is self-existing. You can see it, you can look at it, you can appreciate your survey, and you can present your view to others. It is possible to discover the inherent state of things. It is possible to perceive how the world hangs together. It is possible to communicate your appreciation to others. The possibility of freshness is always there. Your mind is never totally contaminated by your neuroses. Goodness is always there. Catch it on the spot. Click into the sense of delight that comes from basic wakefulness.
– Chögyam Trungpa
I have heard my teacher say, where there are machines, there inevitably are machine affairs; where there are machine affairs, there inevitably are machine minds. with a machine mind in your breast, the pure and simple in your nature cannot develop. And when the pure and simple cannot develop, you won’t have any peace, in spirit or in life. Without peace in spirit and in life, the Tao will no longer support you.
– Chuang Tzŭ
BECAUSE YOU DO NOT WRESTLE WITH YOUR ANGEL
To every people the land is given on condition. Perceived or not, there is a Covenant, beyond the constitution, beyond sovereign guarantee, beyond the nation’s sweetest dreams of itself. The Covenant is broken, the condition is dishonoured, have you not noticed that the world has been taken away? You have no place, you will wander through yourselves from generation to generation without a thread. Therefore you rule over chaos, you hoist your flags with no authority, and the heart that is still alive hates you, and the remnant of Mercy is ashamed to look at you. You decompose behind your flimsy armour, your stench alarms you, your panic strikes at love. The land is not yours, the land has been taken back, your shrines fall through empty air, your tablets are quickly revised, and you bow down in hell beside your hired torturers, and still you count your battalions and crank out your marching songs. Your righteous enemy is listening. He hears your anthems full of blood and vanity, and your children singing to themselves. He has overturned the vehicle of nationhood, he has spilled the precious cargo, and every nation he has taken back. Because you are swollen with your little time. Because you do not wrestle with your angel. Because you dare to live without God. Because your cowardice has led you to believe that the victor does not limp.
– Leonard Cohen, Book of Mercy
On each race is laid the duty to keep alight its own lamp of mind as its part in the illumination of the world. To break the lamp of any people is to deprive it of its rightful place in the world festival.
– Rabindranath Tagore
When you die, only three things will remain of you, since you will abandon all material things on the threshold of the Otherworld: what you have taught to others, what you have created with your hands, and how much love you have spread. So learn more and more in order to teach wise, long-lasting values. Work more and more to leave the world things of great beauty. And love people around you for the Light of Love heals everything.
– François Bourillon
In order to do anything that matters, we must first be able to give attention to the things that matter. It’s my firm conviction, now more than ever, that the degree to which we are able and willing to struggle for ownership of our attention is the degree to which we are free.
– James Williams
Without silence the Spirit will die in us and the creative energy of our life will float away and leave us alone, cold, and tired. Without silence we will lose our center and become the victim of the many who constantly demand our attention.
– Henri Nouwen
THREE A.M.
The god of three a.m. is the god of the dripping faucet,
sirens, and barking dogs. He’s been given titular charge of
circumstances that cannot be controlled. “It’s out of my
hands,” he says, repeatedly. He is a minor functionary, a
troll that lives under a bridge. On the far side are the
pastures of night where bright stars graze in the dark
matter of the cosmos. He is fond of philosophic thought.
“Of course, our understanding is limited. All we can do is
adhere to those laws and principles that have been proven,
time and again, to work.” It seems there is some discrepancy
in my papers. “A minor delay,” he assures me. Now it’s
almost four.
– Louis Jenkins
Mortals. Everything is so black and white to you.
– Kami Garcia
You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They *know* it’s going to rise tomorrow.
When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it’s always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.
– Robert M. Pirsig
There is nothing perhaps so generally consoling to a man as a well-established grievance; a feeling of having been injured, on which his mind can brood from hour to hour, allowing him to plead his own cause in his own court, within his own heart—and always to plead it successfully.
– Anthony Trollope
Closure is a neurotic and infantile demand to make upon reality, other people, or language.
– Terence McKenna
Elaborate the orthogonal, go for the vertical, do not try and sort out the pain. You will only attend to it directly, end gain and make it worse. It is only when instead of relating to the pain directly by attending to it, that you allow yourself to begin to focus elsewhere, that things begin to work, almost by magic, except it is not magic, it’s predictable, repeatable, if you know about use and the use of the eyes.
If you can find a way to lightly focus on the ceiling, without concentration, without fixing the eyes, it will all start to work; it is a matter of getting curious and wondering. A helpful thought, sometimes, if the ceiling is too boring, the pain too distracting, is to imagine a brightly coloured mobile just above your eyes. If you allow yourself to see it, the same thing will happen, your eyes will open wide with wonder, things will start to work – you have created the awareness within which you can work with the directions. It is always the shift of attention, brought about through leaving yourself alone. When that happens, you start to breathe and things ease off. From experience, released breathing means a back that is working well; a back that is working well means released breathing. It’s chicken and egg sometimes, except in the case of sciatia where the breathing comes first.
– Richard Casebow
There were so many complex emotions for which poems did not exist. I had to find a secret way to express my feelings. I used to memorize poems. I would say them out; I didn’t use to write them down. I had this long fund of poetry in my head.
– Audre Lorde
Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.
– Flannery O’Connor
Words
The world does not need words. It articulates itself
in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path
are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted.
The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being.
The kiss is still fully itself though no words were spoken.
And one word transforms it into something less or other–
illicit, chaste, perfunctory, conjugal, covert.
Even calling it a kiss betrays the fluster of hands
glancing the skin or gripping a shoulder, the slow
arching of neck or knee, the silent touching of tongues.
Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot
name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica.
To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper–
metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa
carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.
The sunlight needs no praise piercing the rainclouds,
painting the rocks and leaves with light, then dissolving
each lucent droplet back into the clouds that engendered it.
The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always–
greater than ourselves and all the airy words we summon.
– Dana Gioia
Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.
– George Orwell
The narrative about the world has replaced the world itself.
– Fanny Howe
Higher Virtue isn’t virtuous
thus it possesses virtue
Lower Virtue isn’t without virtue
thus it possesses no virtue
Higher Virtue involves no effort
or the thought of effort
Higher Kindness involves effort
but not the thought of effort
Higher Justice involves effort
and not the thought of effort
Higher Ritual involves effort
and should it meet with no response
then it threatens and compels
virtue appears when the Way is lost
kindness appears when virtue is lost
justice appears when kindness is lost
ritual appears when justice is lost
ritual marks the waning of belief
and the onset of confusion
augury is the flower of the Way
and beginning of delusion
thus the great choose thick over thin
the fruit over the flower
thus they pick this over that
– Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
In my community there is a phrase that is repeated daily—
‘Nobody boss for me!’ Yet at the same time, each person is bound within complex patterns of relatedness and communal obligation. Indigenous models of governance are based on respect for social, ecological and knowledge systems and all their components or members. Complex kinship structures reflect the dynamic design of natural systems through totemic relationships with plants and animals. Totems can also include other elements of these systems like wind, lightning, body parts and substances.
The whole is intelligent, and each part carries the inherent intelligence of the entire system. Knowledge is therefore a living thing that is patterned within every person and being and object and phenomenon within creation.
Respectful observation and interaction within the system, with the parts and the connections between them, is the only way to see the pattern. You cannot know any part, let alone the whole, without respect. You cannot come to knowledge without it. Each part, each person, is dignified as an embodiment of the knowledge. Respect must be facilitated by custodians, but there is no outsider-imposed authority, no ‘boss’, no ‘dominion over’. While senior people ensure the processes and stages of coming to higher levels of knowledge are maintained with safety and cohesion, there is no centralized control in Aboriginal societies.
– Tyson Yunkaporta
The only way to win is to work, work, work, work, and hope to have a few insights.
– Charlie Munger
I am by nature a person suspicious of the economic machine that feeds me. And yet I am a captive of that economic machine, and my mind is structured by its lessons and demands.
I consume its wealth with zest.
I drive a truck, watch a color television, and write on a computer, but I cannot overcome the feeling that these objects and the industrial culture that produced them are temporary things, a kind of fat beast feeding on the bounty of the earth that will starve to death within the next century, or at least be severely diminished.
– Charles Bowden
Most people these days are so spiritless, so deserted by grace, that the punishment simply isn’t used on them. Lost in life they cling to this life, out of nothing they become nothing, their life is a waste.
– Soren Kierkegaard
No matter what is happening on politics today get your ass to the gym.
– Dan Go
To think clearly, you must be free and not be anchored to acquisition, to property or to belief.
– Krishnamurti
special predilection for all that which cannot be vulgarized by the touch and the judgment of the indifferent multitude. i like the fleeting ideas that slip away without leaving a trace on the understandings of practical folk, like a drop of water over a marble shelf.
– bécquer
Why poetry, you ask?
Because of life, I answer.
– Dejan Stojanovic
You stand there like
A misery no one understands.
Even when I reach my hand to you,
You stand like a door that has no exit.
– @johnguzlowski
playing with fire
the future is aglow
with climate change
– @hegelincanada
We are wholly alone in the evening gloom.
And my fingers are warm like the lost days of June.
– Joseph Brodsky
Need nothing and then see what happens.
– Gangaji
Practice is an act of vision, of faith, and of desire. It means performing something over and over again, in the face of obstacles and disappointments, to accomplish the goal.
– Diane Musho Hamilton
Healthcare is primarily your diet, exercise, sleep, and lifestyle habits.
What most people call ‘healthcare’ is actually sick care.
– @ZubyMusic
I thought of Chiang Yen who dreamed that Kuo P’o, long dead, appeared and asked for his writing brush back, and after he awoke Chiang Yen never wrote poems again.
– Eliot Weinberger
Love for This Book
by Pablo Neruda
In these lonely regions I have been powerful
in the same way as a cheerful tool
or like untrammeled grass which lets loose its seed
or like a dog rolling around in the dew.
Matilde, time will pass wearing out and burning
another skin, other fingernails, other eyes, and then
the algae that lashed our wild rocks,
the waves that unceasingly construct their own whiteness,
all will be firm without us,
all will be ready for the new days,
which will not know our destiny.
What do we leave here but the lost cry
of the seabird, in the sand of winter, in the gusts of wind
that cut our faces and kept us
erect in the light of purity,
as in the heart of an illustrious star?
What do we leave, living like a nest
of surly birds, alive, among the thickets
or static, perched on the frigid cliffs?
So then, if living was nothing more than anticipating
the earth, this soil and its harshness,
deliver me, my love, from not doing my duty, and help me
return to my place beneath the hungry earth.
We asked the ocean for its rose,
its open star, its bitter contact,
and to the overburdened, to the fellow human being, to the wounded
we gave the freedom gathered in the wind.
It’s late now. Perhaps
it was only a long day the color of honey and blue,
perhaps only a night, like the eyelid
of a grave look that encompassed
the measure of the sea that surrounded us,
and in this territory we found only a kiss,
only ungraspable love that will remain here
wandering among the sea foam and roots.
my awkward phase
halfway through
its seventh decade
– @pauldavidmena
I couldn’t dream of doing anything / by halves. Whatever it is, I’ll take the whole / bouquet. Please and soon.
– Kaveh Akbar
Wild to find out collections of poetry aren’t books in the 21st century.
– Gregory Howard
The mind creates artificial needs, believing it cannot live without them. In this way, we carry a great burden of attachments throughout our life.
– Radhanath Swami
The imperfect work that you produce is far better than the perfect work that resides in your head.
– Brian McDonald
All unhappiness is due to the ego. With it comes all your trouble. If you would deny the ego and scorch it by ignoring it, you would be free.
– Ramana Maharshi
Meditation will not carry you to another world, but it will reveal the most profound and awesome dimensions of the world in which you already live.
– Zen Master Hsing Yun
Abandon every attempt, just be; don’t strive, don’t struggle, let go every support, hold on to the blind sense of being, brushing off all else. This is enough.
– Nisargadatta
I cannot help it that my pictures do not sell. Nevertheless the time will come when people will see that they are worth more than the price of the paint.
– Vincent van Gogh
Love isn’t soft, like
those poets say. Love
has teeth which bite
and the wounds never
close.
– Stephen King
People don’t realize how bad it is for their mental health and brain function to never take days off of social media.
Its like lifting weights every day with no rest days, assuming you’re never going to burn out or get injured because you’re ‘special’.
– @ZubyMusic
may everyone log out and go outside this weekend
– Melissa Brown
In my early 2os, I wrote a list of ambitious
things I wanted to do in life. Go bungee
jumping. Create a movie. Start a business.
That sort of thing. I did a few of them, but
not most. Looking back, however, that list was
incredibly valuable because it taught me the
usefulness of chasing bold ideas- even if they
never materialize. The dreams that didn’t
happen changed shape and led me down
other interesting paths.
The important thing isn’t to achieve all your
dreams, but to keep dreaming. Your desires
change as you learn and grow. Old dreams
will spawn new dreams. And eventually, one
of these newer, more refined visions will find
their moment and become reality.
– James Clear
They’re sending you all that negative energy. Not realizing that all they can do to an alchemist like you is fire you up.
– Nika Solé
hometown visit
every alley stares back
differently
– @NituYumnam
a panel of experts
the ceiling fan
goes round and round
– @pauldavidmena
I desire nothing more than to be enlightened about the whole highly complicated system of antagonisms which constitutes the ‘modern world.’
– Nietzsche
Everything slows down when we listen and stop trying to fix the unfixable. We end up looking into other people’s eyes, and see the desperation, or let them see ours.
– Anne Lamott
The Mower to the Glow-Worms
by Andrew Marvell
Ye living lamps, by whose dear light
The nightingale does sit so late,
And studying all the summer night,
Her matchless songs does meditate;
Ve country comets, that portend
No war nor prince’s funeral,
Shining unto no higher end
Than to presage the grass’s fall;
Ye glow-worms, whose officious flame
To wand ring mowers shows the way,
That in the night have lost their aim,
And after foolish fires do stray;
Your courteous lights in vain you waste,
Since Juliana here is come,
For she my mind hath so displac’d
That I shall never find my home.
It’s Time to Find a Place
by Eunice De Souza
It’s time to find a place
to be silent with each other.
I have prattled endlessly
in staff-rooms, corridors, restaurants.
When you’re not around
I carry on conversations in my head.
Even this poem
has forty-eight words too many.
A fun thing about playing music from a record player is that it ends, rather than seamlessly flows into something chosen for me by a corporation that doesn’t seem to know very much about my quite specific tastes, despite me telling it what I like.
– Emma Swift
What we know comes to so little,
what we presume is so much,
what we learn, so laborious,
we can only ask questions and die.
– Pablo Neruda
a whicker chair
in pine shade
forsaken
– Shiki
You always wonder
how much until
you come apart,
then you know,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
At home in its tree, notice the secret bird
– Tu Fu, (tr. A.C. Graham)
To. You. High. Low,
the old monk said.
He was thinking
about sound.
– The Old Monk
Distance yourself from the people that you don’t want to become.
– @ShaneAParrish
The analyst always takes part in determining the transference…A complicated system of unconscious cues, both given and received, is involved.
– Anne Marie Sandler & Joseph Sandler
HOKKU
I care not greatly
Should the world remember me
In some tomorrow.
There is a journey,
And who is for the long road
Loves not to linger.
For him the night calls,
Out of the dawn and sunset
Who has made poems.
– E. E. Cummings
Every day, a new mind virus drops
– Adrian Dittmann
It’s time for us to stop treating politics like entertainment.
– Joe Biden
Poets are the dreamers
dreaming dreams
undreamt
– @saoleary_a
My brother told me I was going to be a poet. I had a good brother. He did a lot of good brotherly work. We were in this tiny town in Idaho, and he was like Alexander dividing up the world: I’ll be the painter, you’ll be the poet.
– Marilynne Robinson
Everyone you meet always asks if you have a career, are married or own a house; as if life was some kind of grocery list. But nobody ever asks if you are happy.
– Heath Ledger
The vast flood
Rolls onward
But yield yourself,
And it floats you upon it.
– Ikkyu
Martyr complex is giving in a way that makes you energetically poor. Generosity is giving in a way that makes you rich!
– Chelan Harkin
Gitanjali 44
by Rabindranath Tagore
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.
Messengers, with tidings from unknown skies, greet me and speed along the road. My heart is glad within, and the breath of the passing breeze is sweet.
From dawn till dusk I sit here before my door, and I know that of a sudden the happy moment will arrive when I shall see.
In the meanwhile I smile and I sing all alone. In the meanwhile the air is filling with the perfume of promise.
Every River
You ask me to believe in magic
Expect me to commit suicide of the heart
And you ask me to play this game without question
Raising the stakes on this shotgun roulette
But you came to me like the ways of children
Simple as breathing, easy as air
Now the years hold no fears, like the wind they pass over
Loved, forgiven, washed, saved
Every river I try to cross
Every hill I try to climb
Every ocean I try to swim
Every road I try to find
All the ways of my life
I’d rather be with you
There’s no way
Without you
– Calum Macdonald / Rory Mcdonald
Each Flower is a Little Night
Each colour, each incarnation
begins where the eyes stop
This world is merely the tip
of an unseen conflagration
– Philippe Jacottet [trans. Derek Mahon]
Thou Dusky Spirit Of The Wood
by Henry David Thoreau
Thou dusky spirit of the wood,
Bird of an ancient brood,
Flitting thy lonely way,
A meteor in the summer’s day,
From wood to wood, from hill to hill,
Low over forest, field and rill,
What wouldst thou say?
Why shouldst thou haunt the day?
What makes thy melancholy float?
What bravery inspires thy throat,
And bears thee up above the clouds,
Over desponding human crowds,
Which far below
Lay thy haunts low?
If you would be genuinely revolutionary in our society, be contemplative: that is the source of individual strength to break the system.
– Jacques Ellul
If you miss the present moment, you miss your appointment with life. That is very serious!
– Thich Nhat Hanh
You in the Sky
You alone of all
You in the sky
I want to know why clouds come in between you and I
You alone of all
You in the sky
I want to know why clouds come in between you and I
Let me know you
Lover woo me
Open up my heart and sing your song right through me
Let me know you
Lover woo me
Open up my heart and sing your song right through me
You alone of all
You in the sky
I want to know why clouds come in between you and I
You alone of all…
You in the sky…
I want to know…
Why clouds…
Come in between…
You and I…
– Michael Scott
Even as a psychologist, I confess to not realizing that ignorant rednecks comprised such a huge swath of the American public.
– Dr. David A. Lustig
My father last night: your mother and I heard about sundowning and we want to start doing that!
Me: what do you think sundowning is?
My father: you know, like make sure we’re relaxing by 8:00 and go to bed early.
– Andrew Johnstone, MD
We were not meant to live shallow lives, pocked by meaningless routines and the secondary satisfactions of happy hour. We are the inheritors of an amazing lineage, rippling with memories of life lived intimately with bison and gazelle, raven and the night sky. We are designed to encounter this life with amazement and wonder, not resignation and endurance. This is at the very heart of our grief and sorrow.
The dream of full-throated living, woven into our very being, has often been forgotten and neglected, replaced by a societal fiction of productivity and material gain. No wonder we seek distractions. Every sorrow we carry extends from the absence of what we require to stay engaged in this one wild and precious life.
– Francis Weller
Jung realized that when
Westerners try to
dissolve their personal
ego before they have
resolved shadow issues,
shadow issues grow to
godlike proportions.
– Robin Robertson
Would wither to zilch without music. Would be unlivable, catatonic, miserable. Would devote every ounce of remaining energy to destroying the Republic.
– Alina Stefanescu
When he finally emerged from the hole he’d dug to live in, Pythagoras looked gaunt, skeletal, half-dead. He had been in Hades, reading to the shades the letters his mother had sent him, so the dead could have again a portion of the day.
– Dan Beachy-Quick
Men of Greece, this is the place for you to settle, for here there is a hole in the sky.
– Herodotus
Limbo appears at the edge of daybreak and dusk.
– Dan Fox
Grammars from Other Suns
The human state as negated micro-torrent
never alive as flux
sans dialectical originality
masquerading as subatomic particle as noun
a blinded equation unto itself
that can’t portend livingness as transmuted range
as incendiary compass field
that fuses riddles
that accelerates mystery
that spirals as the field engaging the 8th chakra
as sub-blended quantum nuance
that enlivens its partial power beyond itself as compound stasis
as episodic gesture
its plenum never absorbing grammars from other suns
– Will Alexander
BASTILLE
by Pierre Martory
Translated by John Ashbery
A trial hello
that only ended however
in this word round as a doubloon
placed on the edge of that day
by a considerate friend
the sun on your arms naked against my cheeks
hello I said to you
the day of quatorz’juillet.
Half-Life in Exile
by Hala Alyan
I’m forever living between Aprils.
The air here smells of jacarandas and lime;
it’s sunset before I know it. I’m supposed
to rest, but that’s where the children live.
In the hot mist of sleep. Dream after dream.
Instead, I obsess. I draw stars on receipts.
Everybody loves the poem.
It’s embroidered on a pillow in Milwaukee.
It’s done nothing for Palestine.
There are plants out West that emerge only after fires.
They listen for smoke. I wrote the poem
after weeks of despair, hauling myself
like a rock. Everyone loves the poem.
The plants are called fire-followers,
but sometimes it’s after the rains. At night,
I am a zombie feeding on the comments.
Is it compulsive to watch videos?
Is it compulsive to memorize names?
Rafif and Ammar and Mahmoud.
Poppies and snapdragons and calandrinias:
I can’t hear you. I can’t hear you under the missiles.
A plant waits for fire to grow.
A child waits for a siren. It must be a child.
Never a man. Never a man without a child.
There is nothing more terrible
than waiting for the terrible. I promise.
Was the grief worth the poem? No,
but you don’t interrogate a weed
for what it does with wreckage.
For what it’s done to get here.
No, I don’t wanna be rich, I just wanna live between rich and poor
– Lightnin Hopkins
The Truce and the Peace
by Robinson Jeffers
1
Peace now for every fury has had her day,
Their natural make is moribund, they cease,
They carry the inward seeds of quick decay,
Build breakwaters for storm but build on peace.
The mountains’ peace answers the peace of the stars,
Our petulances are cracked against their term.
God built our peace and plastered it with wars,
Those frescoes fade, flake off, peace remains firm.
In the beginning before light began
We lay or fluttered blind in burdened wombs,
And like that first so is the last of man,
When under death for husband the amorous tombs
Are covered and conceive; nine months go by
No midwife called, nine years no baby’s cry.
2
Peace now, though purgatory fires were hot
They always had a heart something like ice
That coldly peered and wondered, suffering not
Nor pleased in any park, nor paradise
Of slightly swelling breasts and beautiful arms
And throat engorged with very carnal blood.
It coldly peered and wondered, “Strong God your charms
Are glorious, I remember solitude.
Before youth towered we knew a time of truth
To have eyes was nearly rapture.” Peace now, for war
Will find the cave that childhood found and youth.
Ten million lives are stolen and not one star
Dulled; wars die out, life will die out, death cease,
Beauty lives always and the beauty of peace.
3
Peace to the world in time or in a year,
In the inner world I have touched the instant peace.
Man’s soul’s a flawless crystal coldly clear,
A cool white mansion that he yields in lease
To tenant dreams and tyrants from the brain
And riotous burnings of the lovelier flesh.
We pour strange wines and purples all in vain.
The crystal remains pure, the mansion flesh.
All the Asian bacchanals and those from Thrace
Lived there and left no wine-mark on the walls.
What were they doing in that more sacred place
All the Asian and the Thracian bacchanals?
Peace to the world to-morrow or in a year,
Peace in that mansion white, that crystal clear.
4
Peace now poor earth. They fought for freedom’s sake,
She was starving in a corner while they fought.
They knew not whom they stabbed by Onega Lake,
Whom lashed from Archangel, whom loved, whom sought.
How can she die, she is the blood unborn,
The energy in earth’s arteries beating red,
The world will flame with her in some great morn,
The whole great world flame with her, and we be dead.
Here in the west it grows by dim degrees,
In the east flashed and will flame terror and light.
Peace now poor earth, peace to that holier peace
Deep in the soul held secret from all sight.
That crystal, the pure home, the holier peace,
Fires flaw not, scars the cruelest cannot crease.
5
South of the Big Sur River up the hill
Three graves are marked thick weeds and grasses heap,
Under the forest there I have stood still
Hours, thinking it the sweetest place to sleep …
Strewing all-sufficient death with compliments
Sincere and unrequired, coveting peace.
Boards at the head not stones, the text’s rude paints
Mossed, rain-rubbed … wasting hours of scanty lease
To admire their peace made perfect. From that height
But for the trees the whole valley might be seen,
But for the heavy dirt, the eye-pits no light
Enters, the heavy dirt, the grass growing green
Over the dirt, the molelike secretness,
The immense withdrawal, the dirt, the quiet, the peace.
6
Women cried that morning, bells rocked with mirth,
We all were glad a long while afterward,
But still in dreary places of the earth
A hundred hardly fed shall labor hard
To clothe one belly and stuff it with soft meat,
Blood paid for peace but still those poor shall buy it,
This sweat of slaves is no good wine but yet
Sometimes it climbs to the brain. Be happy and quiet,
Be happy and live, be quiet or God might wake.
He sleeps in the mountain that is heart of man’s heart,
He also in promontory fists, and make
Of stubborn-muscled limbs, he will not start
For a little thing … his great hands grope, unclose,
Feel out for the main pillars … pull down the house …
7
After all, after all we endured, who has grown wise?
We take our mortal momentary hour
With too much gesture, the derisive skies
Twinkle against our wrongs, our rights, our power.
Look up the night, starlight’s a steadying draught
For nerves at angry tension. They have all meant well,
Our enemies and the knaves at whom we’ve laughed,
The liars, the clowns in office, the kings in hell,
They have all meant well in the main… some of them tried
The mountain road of tolerance … They have made war,
Conspired, oppressed, robbed, murdered, lied and lied,
Meant well, played the loud fool … and star by star
Winter Orion pursues the Pleiades
In pale and huge parade, silence and peace.
8
That ice within the soul, the admonisher
Of madness when we’re wildest, the unwinking eye
That measures all things with indifferent stare,
Choosing far stars to check near objects by,
That quiet lake inside and underneath,
Strong, undisturbed by any angel of strife,
Being so tranquil seems the presence of death,
Being so central seems the essence of life.
Is it perhaps that death and life make truce
In neutral zone while their old feud beyond
Fires the towered cities? Surely for a strange use
He sphered that eye of flawless diamond.
It does not serve him but with line and rod
Measures him, how indeed should God serve God?
9
It does not worship him, it will not serve.
And death and life within that Eye combine,
Within that only untorturable nerve
Of those that make a man, within that shrine
Which there is nothing ever can profane,
Where life and death are sister and brother and lovers,
The golden voice of Christ were heard in vain,
The holy spirit of God visibly hovers.
Small-breasted girls, lithe women heavy-haired,
Loves that once grew into our nerves and veins,
Yours Freedom was desire that deeper dared
To the citadel where mastery remains,
Yours to the spirit … discount the penny that is
Ungivable, this Eye, this God, this Peace.
10
All in a simple innocence I strove
To give myself away to any power,
Wasting on women’s bodies wealth of love,
Worshiping every sunrise mountain tower;
Some failure mocked me still denying perfection,
Parts of me might be spended not the whole,
I sought of wine surrender and self-correction,
I failed, I could not give away my soul.
Again seeking to give myself I sought
Outward in vain through all things, out through God,
And tried all heights, all gulfs, all dreams, all thought.
I found this wisdom on the wonderful road,
The essential Me cannot be given away,
The single Eye, God cased in blood-shot clay.
11
Peace to the world in time or in a year,
But always all our lives this peace was ours.
Peace is not hard to have, it lies more near
Than breathing to the breast. When brigand powers
Of anger or pain or the sick dream of sin
Break our soul’s house outside the ruins we weep.
We look through the breached wall, why there within
All the red while our peace was lying asleep.
Smiling in dreams while the broad knives drank blood,
The robbers triumphed, the roof burned overhead,
The eternal living and untroubled God
Lying asleep upon a lily bed.
Men screamed, the bugles screamed, walls broke in the air,
We never knew till then that He was there.
Midsummer, Tobago
by Derek Walcott
Broad sun-stoned beaches.
White heat.
A green river.
A bridge,
scorched yellow palms
from the summer-sleeping house
drowsing through August.
Days I have held,
days I have lost,
days that outgrow, like daughters,
my harbouring arms.
If you love me,
worship
the objects
I have caused
to represent me
in my absence.
– Rae Armantrout
CELIA CELIA
When I am sad and weary
When I think all hope has gone
When I walk along High Holborn
I think of you with nothing on.
– Adrian Mitchell
Speak
a few light words
quick and true
as the pigment—was it pink—Felix
Pasilis worked into the still wet ground
– James Schuyler
Personally of course I regret everything. Not a word, not a deed, not a thought, not a need, not a grief, not a joy, not a girl, not a boy, not a doubt, not a trust, not a scorn, not a lust, not a hope, not a fear, not a smile, not a tear, not a name, not a face, no time, no place, that I do not regret, exceedingly. An ordure, from
beginning to end.
– Samuel Beckett
A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.
– Bertrand Russell
Under the dome, a man berated
the slot machine’s incongruous
row of grapes and jewels. His past
lives called to say they had no
spare change to give.
– Eric Yip
two pages of rain
divided by a sunbeam
morning / afternoon
– Clark Strand
TWO PEOPLE
We’ll be like two people on different trains who at one point cross paths on foot in a train yard before getting back on different trains. Two people at a salad bar, on opposite sides of a salad bar, reaching with tongs (the cornichons) and looking through-at but not seeing each other. Two flames moving up a wooden Ferris wheel. A steak and a steak knife that have no fork or candles.
– Michael Earl Craig
It is silly to go on pretending that under the skin we are brothers. The truth is more likely that under the skin we are all cannibals, assassins, traitors, liars and hypocrites.
– Henry Miller
Democracy don’t rule the world,
You’d better get that in your head;
This world is ruled by violence,
But I guess that’s better left unsaid.
– Bob Dylan
NEW YORK ADDRESS
The sun had just gone out
and I was walking three miles to get home.
I wanted to die.
I couldn’t think of words and I had no future
and I was coming down hard on everything.
My walk was terrible.
I didn’t seem to have a heart at all
and my whole past seemed filled up.
So I started answering all the questions
regardless of consequence:
Yes I hate dark. No I love light. Yes I won’t speak.
No I will write. Yes I will breed. No I won’t love.
Yes I will bless. No I won’t close. Yes I won’t give.
Love is on the other side of the lake.
It is painful because the dark makes you hear
the water more. I accept all that.
And that we are not allowed romance but only its distance.
Having finished with it all, now I am not listening.
I wait for the silence to resume.
– Linda Gregg
I’ve always preferred mythology to history. Because history is made up of truths that eventually turn into lies. Mythology is made up of lies that eventually become truths.
– Jean Cocteau
There’s a terror in knowing what the world is about.
– David Bowie
Once you grow up, you realize you don’t want to be crazy in love.
You want to be calm in love,
stable in love, patient in love,
understood in love, safe in love.
Your partner should give you peace of mind and reassurance,
not constant little heart attacks and high anxiety.
– @lastvibes
You know people get all emotional
And sometimes, man, they just don’t act rational –
They think they’re just on TV
– Lou Reed
“climate change hoax”
the last words yelled as they turned
into plasma
– @hegelincanada
in a way, the debilitating or the enfeebling of my brain power was just nothing but good, because I sort of migrated into my heart area and live from my heart much more, and that’s part of what this book was expressing. How we can think clearly about stuff to whatever extent we can, but actually accessing a tenderness, a warmth, a gratitude, a compassion sense of love in the body, especially in the heart area, is actually the critical thing for our responsiveness, our well-being, our appreciation, and our capacity to be awake in this life, to be aware of being alive, and be open to responding in helpful, positive ways in this life.
– Henry Shukman, Original Love
If you are not to become a monster, you must care what they think. If you care what they think, how will you not hate them, and so become a monster of the opposite kind? From where then is love to come—love for your enemy that is the way of liberty? From forgiveness. Forgiven, they go free of you, and you of them; they are to you as sunlight on a green branch. You must not think of them again, except as monsters like yourself, pitiable because unforgiving.
– Wendell Berry, Enemies
And whom do I call my enemy? An enemy must be worthy of engagement. I turn in the direction of the sun and keep walking. It’s the heart that asks the question, not my furious mind. The heart is the smaller cousin of the sun. It sees and knows everything. It hears the gnashing even as it hears the blessing. The door to the mind should only open from the heart. An enemy who gets in, risks the danger of becoming a friend.
– Joy Harjo, This Morning I Pray for My Enemies
Every bird of love and butterfly and creature that could flutter by, anything that sings or that I told you I believed in, was caged and beaten purple while it sang a song of living.
– Lara Coley
Re-reading is probably more important than reading. Seek to cognitively own a great book rather than just reading it.
– Farnam Street
It is my personal opinion that in the science of the future reality will neither be ‘psychic’ nor ‘physical’ but somehow both and somehow neither.
– Wolfgang Pauli
It’s the old controversy – the action of mind upon matter. But, in the philosophy of the hyphen, an uncrossable gap is disposed of, and the problem is rendered into thinkable terms, by asking whether mind-matter can act upon matter-mind.
– Charles Fort, Wild Talents
The very act of resting is the hardest most courageous act a person can perform.
– Thomas Merton
I think we’re all going to have to learn to live without America.
– Philip Pullman
Religion, politics, society are exploiting you, and you are being conditioned by them; you are being forced in a particular direction. You are not human beings; you are mere cogs in a machine.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
Big Machine
It’s not the things that you want
It’s what you give away
It’s not those things that you need
No matter what you say
It’s not the work load that’s heavy
If the playing is good
You can’t always be bad
You can’t always be good
We’re all marching to a different drum
It don’t matter what road you’re on
It’s just the Big Machine
Driving us insane
You can fly your flag
On Independence Day
You can do what you want
Yeah it’s the home of the brave
But for me and my love
We’re going away
We talked about it a lot
Decided not to stay
Too many trying to get to the top of the tree
But that’s no place, love, for you and me
It’s just the Big Machine Driving us insane
It’s just the Big Machine
And we don’t want to play that game
LET’S GO!
Now you think you’ve got it
But you’ve got nothing at all
You think you’re on your way
You’re surely going to fall
Caught in the system
Like everyone else
Take a look in the mirror
All you’ve got is yourself
You think you’re doing what you want to do
Don’t you know the Big Machine’s got you
Driving us insane
It’s just the Big Machine
And we don’t want to play that game
It’s just the Big Machine
It’s just the Big Machine
It’s just the Big Machine
– Williams Brothers
In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.
– Albert Camus
The Holy Spirit will never inspire you to plot the downfall of others. Not even your worst enemy.
– unknown
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
I have no way to survive,
but to keep writing one line,
one more line, one more line.
– Mishima
Wisdom is not and never has been something for the many, because foolishness forever will be the main thing the world craves for.
– Carl Jung
Just like how a lotus flower rises from muddy water to bloom beautifully, we also have the ability to transform the suffering we experience into something more.
– Rev. Blayne Higa
the paradox of poetry is that its medium is words, but it has very little to do with words
– River Kenna
Language has power. The stories we live and tell literally shape our world and sense of self. The telling of our stories can help us to transform our tragedies into gold.
– Carly Mountain
The world is confused. The more it is confused, the more the individual wants security. This leads to conflict in you as well as outside you.
– Krishnamurti
We have to give up the notion of a divine savior…who will save us without our having to go through any pain.
– Chögyam Trungpa
A poem is a complete little universe.
– William Carlos Williams
We cannot change the way the world is, but by opening ourselves to the world as it is, we may find that gentleness, decency, and bravery are available—not only to us, but to all human beings.
– Chögyam Trungpa
… at Ludaig jetty
there is only
the wind and the light
the cry of a peewit
and the lip-lip-lipping
of grey water …
– Kenneth White
AMERICAN SONNET FOR THE NEW YEAR
Things got terribly ugly incredibly quickly
Things got ugly embarrassingly quickly
actually Things got ugly unbelievably quickly
honestly Things got ugly seemingly infrequently
initially Things got ugly ironically usually
awfully carefully Things got ugly unsuccessfully
occasionally Things got ugly mostly painstakingly
quietly seemingly Things got ugly beautifully
infrequently Things got ugly sadly especially
frequently unfortunately Things got ugly
increasingly obviously Things got ugly suddenly
embarrassingly forcefully Things got really ugly
regularly truly quickly Things got really incredibly
ugly Things will get less ugly inevitably hopefully
– Terrance Hayes
Underneath our neuroses and all our pushing and pulling, most deeply, we’re glad to be here. Connect to the pleasure of relaxation, the pleasure of the fact that you’re able to breathe.
– Martin Aylward
Our culture keeps telling stories of scrappy orphans cuz the left hemisphere is one,
It’s cut off from from the nurturing, fluid guidance of the right hemisphere, so it has to be scrappy;
agentic self-reliance is its crutch, filling in where intuitive guidance should be
– River Kenna
The feminine cannot, will not surrender
To the wounded masculine…
A man who criticizes her
Belittles
Dishonours
Controls
Manipulates
Abuses
Or attacks her
Her own inner masculine will not allow it
He will rise fiercely to the forefront
To stand guard
To do the job himself
The divine feminine can and will only surrender
To the divine masculine…
A man who is devoted to her
Elevates
Honours
Cherishes
Supports
And protects her
A man with boundaries
Presence
Direction
Integrity
Accountability
And humility
In this space
She will feel him penetrating her very essence…
Her body
Her mind
Her heart
Her soul
And she will feel safe…
Safe enough to surrender
This is the natural law
This is the dance of healed polarities
This is surrender…
To Love
– Karen Star
Change. But start slowly,
because direction is more
important than speed.
– Paulo Coelho
The Constitution is greater than any President. End of story.
– Elon Musk
One of the highest pleasures is to be more or less unconscious of one’s own existence, to be absorbed in sights, sounds, places, and people.
– Alan Watts
I write because I’m unhappy. I write because it’s a way of fighting unhappiness.
– Mario Vargas Llosa
bubble tea
memories of yesterday
stuck in my teeth
– @hegelincanada
Man must after all be changed from within; otherwise, he merely assimilates the new material to the old pattern.
– Carl Jung
Mechanical instruments, potentially a vehicle of rational human purposes, are scarcely a blessing when they enable the gossip of the village idiot and the deeds of the thug to be broadcast to a million people each day.
– Lewis Mumford
In my heart the old love / struggled with the new […]
– Sara Teasdale
There’s not gonna be a civil war. None of us can afford to take that much time off work.
– Brunette Bohemian
I’m going to spend all day gardening and drinking Fresca.
– Will Musgrove
One Version of the ABCs
Appreciate something. Be a good
friend. Confront a hard thing. Decide.
Explore your backyard. Find peace.
Go outside more than you think you
should. Help a neighbor. Invigorate
yourself. Journey. Knead dough.
Listen. Make art. Nurture a seed.
Observe nature. Play. Question the
status quo. Read books. Say what you
need to say. Tinker. Unfollow the
crowd. Volunteer. Wander in the
wild. Xeriscape when necessary.
Yodel, just to see what it’s like.
Zigzag often.
– Heidi Barr
Nature is man’s teacher. She unfolds her treasures to his search, unseals his eye, illumes his mind, and purifies his heart; an influence breathes from all the sights and sounds of her existence.
– Alfred Billings Street
There are periods of history when the visions of madmen and dope fiends are a better guide to reality than the common-sense interpretation of data available to the so-called normal mind. This is one such period, if you haven’t noticed already.
– Robert Anton Wilson
Gonna go find a reverse therapist that can teach me all the unhealthy coping mechanisms so I never have to feel anything again.
– Frances Klein
Tennessee June
by Jorie Graham
This is the heat that seeks the flaw in everything
and loves the flaw.
Nothing is heavier than its spirit,
nothing more landlocked than the body within it.
Its daylilies grow overnight, our lawns
bare, then falsely gay, then bare again. Imagine
your mind wandering without its logic,
your body the sides of a riverbed giving in . . .
In it, no world can survive
having more than its neighbors;
in it, the pressure to become forever less is the pressure
to take forevermore
to get there. Oh
let it touch you . . .
The porch is sharply lit — little box of the body —
and the hammock swings out easily over its edge.
Beyond, the hot ferns bed, and fireflies gauze
the fat tobacco slums,
the crickets boring holes into the heat the crickets fill.
Rock out into that dark and back to where
the blind moths circle, circle,
back and forth from the bone-white house to the creepers unbraiding.
Nothing will catch you.
Nothing will let you go.
We call it blossoming —
the spirit breaks from you and you remain.
A pain so strange
that it makes you laugh.
Your breath becomes
stuck inside your chest.
A path strewn with thorns
until its destination—
Who would walk such a path?
Who burns—
when placed inside of water?
When does a moon wane
on a full moon’s night?
– A.M. Turaz
A faerie’s heart beats fierce and free!
– Oona (Annabelle Lanyon)
Well, fuck the plot! That is for precocious schoolboys. What matters is the imaginative truth.
– Edna O’Brien
Confront the dark parts of yourself, and work to banish them with illumination and forgiveness. Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing.
– August Wilson
The summer they shot the guy who wanted to deport me, my IKEA bookshelves arrived.
– Mauro Javier Cárdenas
No one is asking the important questions like how will the Trump assassination attempt affect Amazon Prime Day
– Jonathan Fine
It’s too humid out for all this nonfiction
– Jonathan Edward Durham
It was a queer, bratty summer, the summer they shot off Trump’s ear, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.
– @ellagoinggray
The bullet went in one ear and out the other.
He didn’t learn a thing.
– Jack E. Smith
heatwave
I shower
for the nth time
– @alwrites
What makes life worth living? No child asks itself that question. To children, life is self-evident. Life goes without saying: whether it is good or bad makes no difference. This is because children don’t see the world, don’t observe the world, don’t contemplate the world, but are so deeply immersed in the world that they don’t distinguish between it and their own selves. Not until … a distance appears between what they are and what the world is, does the question arise: what makes life worth living?
– Karl Ove Knausgård
All the ups and downs are grace in different wrappings, sent to refine consciousness. Say thanks to them all.
– Mooji
Condemning political violence is what those college students in tents were doing the entire time.
– @girlziplocked
Childhood is sacred.
Infringing on it is sacrilege.
Institutional school, coercive education, over-saturation of activities … all infringing on childhood.
Nothing will change my mind about this.
– Hannah Frankman
Might I suggest that Plath, even in death, is policed by a good old boys club that amounts, in word and deed, to the poetry cops?
– Emily Van Duyne
Wisdom comes haphazard to no man.
– Seneca
Blessed are those who do not fear solitude, who are not afraid of their own company, who are not always desperately looking for something to do, something to amuse themselves with, something to judge.
– Paulo Coelho
How I Know It’s Love
You cut the grass
when the grass is wet
& it takes you twice as long.
The kids & I watch
from the window. They ask
if you’re almost done.
But you must stop
to clear the blades again
& again. You’re not afraid
to mow a path for us
even when I’m the one
who brings the rain.
– Bethany Jarmul
in the trench
fruit is red
blood is blue
– Hakusen Watanabe
There is nothing outside of yourself that can ever enable
you to get better, stronger, richer, quicker, or smarter.
Everything is within. Everything exists. Seek nothing
outside of yourself.
– Miyamoto Musashi
And I saw that one of his heads was, as it were, wounded to death, and his deadly wound was healed. And all the world wondered after the beast.
– Revelation 13.3
Ancestors said, you don’t need to do more, you just need to be organized so you can see all of the work you’ve already been doing. Exhausting yourself won’t make your dreams come true.
– @ehimeora
eastern gale
shaking the last rain drops
out of my system
– @hegelincanada
Man’s natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil.
– Ernest Becker
Be wary of a theology that says God intervenes to save one person but not another, but not the children at Sandy Hook or the children at Uvalde.
– @WilGafney
Your eyes must be on the larger trends that govern events, on that which is not immediately visible. Never lose sight of your long-term goals. With an elevated perspective, you will have the patience and clarity to reach almost any objective.
– Robert Greene
Half hours on earth
What are they worth?
I don’t know
– David Berman
you need a quest. you’re depressed because you don’t have a quest.
– @arithmoquine
One’s never done with the past.
– Lynda Hull
By the time I had success as a writer, at the age of maybe thirty-eight or thirty-nine, I was already a failure.
– Walter Mosley
The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.
– Seneca
Your calling as a humanist, as an intelligent creature, is to outstrip the conditions which you are landed with, to get some vision of a cultivated, tolerant, civic society…You’re answerable to that, especially when violence erupts, and lives are being lost.
– Seamus Heaney
Thinking about your workdays in hours is a mistake.
In the end, you want results, not hours.
– Simo Hosio
Richard Simmons was the rare person who offered diet/exercise advice to fat people without holding them (us, me) up for ridicule. He was like a ridiculous, fey, kind, silly uncle who never failed to make you laugh and would hug you if you cried. I was sorry to read that he died.
– @katspaks
Your heart must become a sea of love. Your mind must become a river of detachment.
– Sri Chinmoy
A day dream like a snow falls so gently upon her cheek. The limit of the valley in turn begins to speak. Truths of a harbor for the wayward beyond. There is a place to behold where men hold no arms.
– @efarrow1973
The body shuts down when it has too much to bear; goes its own way quietly inside, waiting for a better time, leaving you numb and half alive.
– Jeanette Winterson
Art is a line around your thoughts.
– Gustav Klimt
The highest meditation is to think of nothing.
If you can remain without thought, great power will come.
Inward is not a Direction,
Inward is a Dimension.
– Sadhguru
I imagine
all is alright
in a heartbeat
– @DeepSouldiver
The love of our neighbour in all its fullness simply means being able to ask “what are you going through?”
– Simone Weil
Once you realize that the road is the goal and that you are always on the road, not to reach a goal, but to enjoy its beauty and its wisdom, life ceases to be a task and becomes natural and simple, in itself an ecstasy.
– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
We must stop treating politicians like celebrities or entertainers.
They are employees. OUR employees.
The must do the will of the people.
– Nina Turner
Son, there are five things that are useless:
These five refer to what is not true Dharma: if you follow them they will lead you to ruin;
1) No Need to Say You are Interested in Dharma if You Have Not Turned Your Mind Away From Samsara;
Unless you feel deep down that samsara is a pit of burning coals, there is no point in saying “I practice the Dharma, I am meditating, I am deep in samadhi”. Without this profound conviction, you can only go the opposite direction in Dharma. If your practice leads to you getting a good reputation, it will be completely in vain.
With this sort of attitude it is impossible to practice the Dharma properly. You will simply get involved in things like protecting your relatives and friends and getting rid of your enemies; your life will run counter to the Dharma. Dharma and world activities are like fire and water. If you practice genuinely, you cannot help giving up worldly activities. On the other hand, if you devote yourself to worldly activities, you will never be able to practice the Dharma properly. So cultivate a deep desire to abandon the things of this world and a strong determination to practice Dharma.
To practice the genuine Dharma, you have to counter attachment to samsaric perceptions.
The root of our repeatedly taking birth in samsara is the alternating desire and loathing we have for the objects of the five senses- forms, tastes, smells, sounds, and physical sensations – together with perceptions our eight consciousnesses hold of these sense objects. When we feel attachment or conversely, aversion to the experiences of the five senses, we sow the seed for rebirth in samsara…
2) No Need to Meditate on Emptiness if You Have Not Countered Attachment to the Things You Perceive
Meditation on emptiness implies a state like space. There is no occasion for thoughts like “I”, “mine”, “my body”, “my mind”, “my name”, or “my belongings”. This sort of clinging has no place in meditation on emptiness. So if you have thoughts about “my possessions” and so on, there is no way your meditation practice can be genuine.
One meditates on emptiness in order to release one’s clinging, believing that things truly exists.
A genuine practitioner does not have this attachment to relatives and possessions, neither does he feel any aversion to enemies. Unless you are free from this, emptiness is no more than some word – and it is quite useless.
3) No Need to Practice Mediation if You Don’t Turn Your Mind Away From Desire
To say “I meditate” and at the same time still have an ordinary mind with desire and attachment will give no result.
Great meditators who end up getting sidetracked by village ceremonies risk dying as ordinary men.
Practioners who have mediated in mountain retreats for a few years are often taken by ordinary folk to be very advanced meditators, an many of them begin to believe the fools who speak of them as great meditators who have reached a high level of realization. They start accepting offerings and reverence from people, and they grow rich. They end up spending their time going from one ceremony to another and behaving in a completely worldly way. This is no use at all.
4) No Need for Fine Words if You Have Not Assimilated the Meaning Yourself
There are many who are fooled by smart talk about the view, so hit the crucial point of the natural state.
To say things like “everything is void,” “There is no such thing as good or bad, virtue or evil,” “All perceptions are spontaneously liberated as the arise,” or “Afflictive emotions are liberated as they arise,” without having true confidence in such a view and actual stability in one’s practice, is known as merely carrying on the view with ones lips. This is why Guru Rinpoche said to King Detsen, “my view is like space, but conduct must never slip toward the view, for if it does, it will be a wholly demonic view.” He said that the view should be as high as possible but ones conduct should accord with the most basic of teachings. So it is important to get the crucial point and master the true nature of things through your own experience and not merely words. And regarding this there is
5) No Need to Apply the Instructions if You Do Not Have Devotion
If you have great devotion, seeing the teacher as the Buddha himself, and maintain a lofty inner view while keeping your external conduct completely down to earth, all the qualities of experience and realization grow effortlessly. Experiences and realization in fact come through the spontaneous devotion you have, so when they occur, they are truly due to the teacher’s kindness…
– Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche
When I met Woody, he was not functioning with all of his facilities at 100 percent. I was there more as a servant. I knew all of his songs, and I went there to sing him his songs. He always liked the songs. He’d ask for certain ones, and I knew them all…
– Bob Dylan
A Thank You Note
There is much I owe
to those I do not love.
The relief in accepting
they are closer to another.
Joy that I am not
the wolf to their sheep.
My peace be with them
for with them I am free,
and this, love can neither give,
nor know how to take.
I don’t wait for them
from window to door.
Almost as patient
as a sun dial,
I understand
what love does not understand.
I forgive
what love would never have forgiven.
Between rendezvous and letter
no eternity passes,
only a few days or weeks.
My trips with them always turn out well.
Concerts are heard.
Cathedrals are toured.
Landscapes are distinct.
And when seven rivers and mountains
come between us,
they are rivers and mountains
well known from any map.
It is thanks to them
that I live in three dimensions,
in a non-lyrical and non-rhetorical space,
with a shifting, thus real, horizon.
They don’t even know
how much they carry in their empty hands.
‘I don’t owe them anything’,
love would have said
on this open topic.
– Wislawa Szymborska
That may be so. I had hoped, as a broadcaster, to be merely ludicrous, but this is a hard world to be ludicrous in, with so many human beings so reluctant to laugh, so incapable of thought, so eager to believe and snarl and hate. So many people wanted to believe me. Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.
– Kurt Vonnegut
Forgive me if I forget
with the birdsong and the day’s
last glow folding into the hands
of the trees, forgive me the few
syllables of the autumn crickets,
the year’s last firefly winking
like a penny in the shoulder’s weeds,
if I forget the hour, if I forget
the day as the evening star
pours out its whiskey over the gravel
and asphalt I’ve walked
for years alone, if I startle
when you put your hand in mine,
if I wonder how long your light
has taken to reach me here.
– Jake Adam York
The stars, like dust, encircle me
In living mists of light;
And all of space I seem to see
In one vast burst of sight
– Isaac Asimov
And after that they had gone through many streets they came to a little door that was set in a wall that was covered with a pomegranate tree. And the old man touched the door with a ring of graved jaspar and it opened, and they went down five steps of brass into a garden filled with black poppies and green jars of burnt clay.
– Oscar Wilde
Fascism is contempt. Conversely, all forms of contempt, when they intervene in politics, make fascism possible and strengthen it. One should add that fascism can never be anything else without slipping into self-denial.
– Albert Camus
Let me have clear thoughts, clear speech, and a good path to walk this day, I prayed as I watched the rising sun.
– Joseph Bruchac
I leaned way back to gaze at the blanket of blue sky where a few small clouds hung, white as the fleece of a new lamb. “Even out on the ocean,” Bill said, “Father Sky will be above us. We will never be forgotten by the sky.”
– Joseph Bruchac
Every act of perception is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.
– Gerald Edelman
… we are always living in expectation of better things, while, at the same time, we often repent and long for things that belong to the past. We accept the present as something that is only temporary, and regard it only as a means to accomplish our aim. So that most people will find if they look back when their life is at an end, that they have lived their lifelong ad interim, and they will be surprised to find that something they allowed to pass by unnoticed and unenjoyed was just their life — that is to say, it was the very thing in the expectation of which they lived. And so it may be said of man in general that, befooled by hope, he dances into the arms of death.
– Schopehnauer
The Real Good “What is the real good?”
I ask in a musing mood.
“Order,” said the law court;
“Knowledge,” said the school;
“Truth,” said the wise man;
“Pleasure,” said the fool;
“Love,” said the maiden;
“Beauty,” said the page;
“Freedom,” said the dreamer;
“Home,” said the sage;
“Fame,” said the soldier;
“Equity,” said the seer.
Spake my heart fully sad:
“The answer is not here.”
Then within my bosom,
Softly this I heard:
“Each heart holds the secret:
Kindness’ is the word.”
– John Boyle O’Reilly
A kind of light spread out from her. And everything changed color. And the world opened out. And a day was good to awaken to. And there were no limits to anything. And the people of the world were good and handsome. And I was not afraid any more.
– John Steinbeck
I have no ambition other than to be with you, to listen to your voice, to fight your battles, and to love you until the end of my days.
– Thomas Francis Meagher
There is no strength greater than hope, and no power greater than love.
– Thomas Francis Meagher
In the darkest of times, it is our duty to shine the brightest light.
– Thomas Francis Meagher
The greatest battles are fought not with fists, but with words.
– Thomas Francis Meagher
A single act of kindness can change the world.
– Thomas Francis Meagher
Let your voice be heard, even if it shakes the world.
– Thomas Francis Meagher
The greatest battles are won not by force, but by compassion.
– Thomas Francis Meagher
What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty, and, above all, it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits quantity.
– William S. Burroughs
You Don’t Know What Love Is
by Kim Addonizio
You don’t know what love is
but you know how to raise it in me
like a dead girl winched up from a river. How to
wash off the sludge, the stench of our past.
How to start clean. This love even sits up
and blinks; amazed, she takes a few shaky steps.
Any day now she’ll try to eat solid food. She’ll want
to get into a fast car, one low to the ground, and drive
to some cinderblock shithole in the desert
where she can drink and get sick and then
dance in nothing but her underwear. You know
where she’s headed, you know she’ll wake up
with an ache she can’t locate and no money
and a terrible thirst. So to hell
with your warm hands sliding inside my shirt
and your tongue down my throat
like an oxygen tube. Cover me
in black plastic. Let the mourners through.
Mittelbergheim
Wine sleeps in casks of Rhine oak.
I am wakened by the bell of a chapel in the vineyards
Of Mittelbergheim. I hear a small spring
Trickling into a well in the yard, a clatter
Of sabots in the street. Tobacco drying
Under the eaves, and ploughs and wooden wheels
And mountain slopes and autumn are with me.
I keep my eyes closed. Do not rush me,
You, fire, power, might, for it is too early.
I have lived through many years and, as in this half-dream,
I felt I was attaining the moving frontier
Beyond which color and sound come true
And the things of this earth are united.
Do not yet force me to open my lips,
Let me trust and believe I will attain.
Let me linger here in Mittelbergheim.
I know I should. They are with me,
Autumn and wooden wheels and tobacco hung
Under the eaves. Here and everywhere
Is my homeland, wherever I turn
And in whatever language I would hear
The song of a child, the conversation of lovers.
Happier than anyone, I am to receive
A glance, a smile, a star, silk creased
At the knee. Serene, beholding,
I am to walk on hills in the soft glow of day
Over waters, cities, roads, human customs.
Fire, power, might, you who hold me
In the palm of your hand whose furrows
Are like immense gorges combed
By southern wind. You who grant certainty
In the hour of fear, in the week of doubt,
It is too early, let the wine mature,
Let the travelers sleep in Mittelbergheim.
– Czeslaw Milosz
Dear God, please reveal to us your sublime beauty, that is everywhere, everywhere, everywhere, so that we will never again feel frightened.
– Francis of Assisi
Some of us will just keep falling in love while the world dies.
– Steve Edwards
In Spain, the dead are more alive than the dead of any other country in the world.
– Ernest Hemingway
These are historical times. A mosquito landed on my arm & I blew it away with a breath. The sun slipped over the horizon. My neighbor’s dog barked.
– Steve Edwards
The teenage appears to have grown bored of TikTok and is now reading literature instead. There’s no way this can be healthy.
– Jonathan Fine
When a human being becomes a set of data … he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears.
– Zadie Smith, Generation Why?
Your talk… is surely the handiwork of wisdom because not one word of it do I understand.
– Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman
Love After Love
by Ben Harper
Some run for cover
Some chase the storm
Flags raised with a vengeance
Battle-ready and worn
The hardest words
That I’ll ever have to say
Is nothing to the debt
Silence can never pay
Love after love
Love after love
Long after love
Love after love
Love after love
Long after love
Days run away like wild horses
Up and over the hill
Everything is always
And forever’s never still
Now I sit and watch
Myself go insane
It’s a bittersweet freedom
But it’s freedom just the same
Love after love
Love after love
Long after love
Love after love
Love after love
Long after love
We fall with such grace
While running in place
I give in, I give in
I give in
Love after love
Love after love
Long after love
Love after love
Love after love
Long after love
Love after love
Love after love
Need To Know Basis
by Ben Harper
You’re the reason
Aliens would come down to earth
Outer space must look small
From inside your universe
But your love is on a need to know basis
And I need to know right now
We paint time
With the colors of our lives
With what we do to survive
But your love is on a need to know basis
And I need to know right now
If I were the branch
Of an old oak tree
I hope you’d be the one
On the swing tied to me
But your love is on a need to know basis
Your love is on a need to know basis
And I need to know right now
IT’S TRUE
Ay, the pain it costs me
to love you as I love you!
For love of you, the air, it hurts,
and my heart,
and my hat, they hurt me.
Who would buy it from me,
this ribbon I am holding,
and this sadness of cotton,
white, for making handkerchiefs with?
Ay, the pain it costs me
to love you as I love you!
– Federico García Lorca
Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts. I wasn’t sure whether I was too soon or too late for the purple lupine which can be so spectacular in these headlands, but milkmaids were growing on the shady side of the road on the way to the trail, and they recalled the hillsides of my childhood that first bloomed every year with an extravagance of these white flowers. Black butterflies fluttered around me, tossed along by wind and wings, and they called up another era of my past. Moving on foot seems to make it easier to move in time; the mind wanders from plans to recollections to observations.
– Rebecca Solnit
It is with books as with men: a very small number play a great part.
– Voltaire
A regulated nervous system is worth more than silver and gold.
– @doortodivinity
to love and lose
and still be kind.
– Warsan Shire
Forgiveness is just another name for freedom.
– Byron Katie
Inch by inch I conquered the inner terrain I was born with. Bit by bit I reclaimed the swamp in which I’d languished. I gave birth to my infinite being, but I had to wrench myself out of me with forceps.
– Fernando Pessoa (tr. Zenith)
We think we are judging the younger generation in an objective manner, but we are merely succumbing to an illusion of perspective. It is also true that we are probably experiencing some hidden envy of their youth and mourning the loss of our own.
– Robert Greene
If you learn nothing except Christ, you learn everything.
– St. Bonaventure
There are secret forces at work
leading together those who belong together.
– I CHING (CA. 3000 BC)
Your whole life you are really writing one book, which is an attempt to grasp the consciousness of your time and place– a single book written from different stages of your ability.
– Nadine Gordimer
Your opponents would love you to believe that it’s hopeless, that you have no power, that there’s no reason to act, that you can’t win. Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away.
– Rebecca Solnit
There is nothing quite like traveling outside of the Northeast US to remind you how bad everyone else is at walking.
– George Basile
Literature is a well-known gateway drug to continental philosophy.
– Richard Wattenbarger
A tragedy, when a mature mind
and a romantic heart are in the
same body.
– Nizar Qabbani
Most creatives struggle not from the mental block of wanting to create and not mustering the will to do so, but rather from the financial, institutional, and social constraints that inhibit us.
– @maddiehowardnyc
The best way to learn to draw is to look at the world with an endless curiosity.
– Iris de Moüy
We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge.
– Tom Waits
“Kind speech” means that when you see sentient beings, you arouse the heart of compassion and offer words of loving care. It is contrary to cruel or violent speech.
In the secular world, there is the custom of asking after someone’s health. In the buddha way there is the phrase, “Please treasure yourself” and the respectful address to seniors, “May I ask how you are?” It is kind speech to speak to sentient beings as you would to a baby.
Praise those with virtue; pity those without it. If kind speech is offered, little by little kind speech expands. Thus, even kind speech that is not ordinarily known or seen comes into being. Be willing to practice it for this entire present life; do not give up, world after world, life after life. Kind speech is the basis for reconciling rulers and subduing enemies. Those who hear kind speech from you have a delighted expression and a joyful mind. Those who hear of your kind speech will be deeply touched; they will always remember it.
Know that kind speech arises from kind heart, and kind heart from the seed of compassionate heart. Ponder the fact that kind speech is not just praising the merit of others; it has the power to turn the destiny of the nation.
– Eihei Dogen
It is in the womb of a contemplative mind that harmony is born.
– Daaji
what I could see was music, / not melody, but one clear, shining note / plucked over and over, as if the sun / were tuning the day
– Ted Kooser
Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity.
– Gilda Radner
When you do not produce
another force of hatred,
the opposing force collapses
– Chögyam Trungpa
DISCOMFORT
You wanting to go when you want to stay and you wanting to stay when you want to go are an expression of the restlessness of mind, – which takes place all the time.
When your disposition is like that, the best place by far is where you are sitting. Your present state is the most pleasant – you cannot get any better than this.
You can make friends with your discomfort.
– Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
HUMILITY
Humility is the vessel that accommodates the neuroses of others. Then, having been accommodated, their neuroses are transformed.
So it is very important for us to realize that humility, gentleness, and genuineness are absolutely necessary if we are interested in working with others.
And if we are not, then we are not actually practicing dharma, the buddhist teaching, at all.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Everything is on fire,
but everyone I love is doing beautiful things
and trying to make life worth living,
and I know I don’t have to believe in everything,
but I believe in that.
– Nikita Gill
Remember that life is like a mirror: Everything you perceive reflects your inner world. Cleaning your dirty mirror of distorting smudges means clearing self-deception and coming closer to the truth.
– Khangser Rinpoche
Algae Did It
In his The Creative Spark, Agustin Fuentes notes that,”our best understanding of evolutionary processes is called the extended evolutionary synthesis (EES), in which a range of different processes, beyond just natural selection, are central in explaining how, and why, animals, plants, and all living things evolve.” Susan Oyama adds that, “Nature is not a deciding agent, standing outside organisms and waving them to the right or the left. However much we may speak of selection ‘operating’ on populations ‘molding’ bodies and minds, when the metaphorical dust has settled, what we are referring to is still the cumulative result of particular life courses negotiated in particular circumstances.” Specialized ways of doing what you love and forming alliances. So why did the photosynthetic microbes we call algae join together to become the first multicellular “bodies” on earth: seaweed?
For algae, it must have been fascinating developing some of the first multicellular body-identities. Having a body-identity was a very new life process for formerly freewheeling microorganisms. The question is: what induced them to exchange their small yet free individual existence for membership in a tightly-knit megalopolis of hundreds of billions or trillions of intimately collaborative cellular teammates coordinated by their cocreated body-identity?
All of the subtle creative details required to form any multicellular organism, including seaweeds, did not happen through a cascade of lucky accidents or through the necessity of a torrent of deterministic causes. They were using their minds just as we a re, and often more skillfully. They were developing amazing cooperative abilities, which life had not focused on so intensely before. Yes, some bacteria had specialized in cooperative endeavors. Cyanos had led the way with the multispecies co-creation of huge stromatolites for which they formed the photosynthesizing canopies. But only when cells became tightly as organisms life seaweeds and mushroom and worms was there anything like us in terms of a unified multicellular identity. And the question remains: Why did those little guys seem to have bartered away a lot of their original freedoms to create us?
Obviously, life loves creativity, and multicellularity has offered lots of evolving possibilities. But as any good artist or scientist can tell, ingeniousness is not everything. And, though it has taken a long time with a lot of dead ends, life is more than a school of hard knocks. As I tend to repeat for my own consideration, it makes more sense to assume that the experience of being alive was always about the same basic processes that are basic to us, which are emotions, sense-actions and thoughts. And, of these, emotions pack the biggest wallop.
So my theory as what induced microbial individuals to give up a lot of their personal freedoms for the sake of multicellular unity as macrocosmic organisms is based on the same thing that most consistently motivates humans to sacrifice some freedoms for cooperative coexistence. Though impending danger or the rule of force can bind us with others for a little while, the only that successfully connects humans in happily enduring ways is love. For this reason, it makes more sense to me to consider that the original algal microbes and alliances who first got together in the creative ferment resulting in the genesis of the first multicellular organisms probably did it – and kept doing it – because of the huge increase in the amount of love which their togethering was generating. They deeply committed themselves to one another – and to the evolution of macrocosmic life arising from it – for the sake of more love. They went whole hog for it because it FELT GOOD. And when we collectively do things, like force-fed education, that get in the way of love, we shouldn’t be surprised when things don’t work as well. So let’s focus more on how love works well.
– via George Gorman
It is very nearly impossible, after all, to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
– James Baldwin, They Can’t Turn Back
Urban Girl hide her everything in her eyes. She bets it’s the one place y’all won’t look for too long.
– Siaara Freeman
when the world
goes mad
become wildly kind
to everyone
everyone
everyone
everyone
my love,
~ you can’t control
much
but you control how
you treat others
in these breaking news
heartbreaking times
when nothing feels
certain
let your raw kindness
be a certainty
allow your compassion
to become a North Star
stamped up in
the sky for
others to follow
back home
– john roedel
Your light
Is complicit
In all the good
That’s ever been.
– Chelan Harkin
Danny’s made his mind up
He’s leaving for America
He’s leaving for America
Leaving all of us behind
He says there’s nothing here not drenched in beer
In blood and retribution
And the wealth’s distribution’s
Been weighing heavy on his mind
And he knows that he’ll regret the leaving
Knows that he will pine for grieving
For the sky road by the singing sea
And all of us behind
Danny looks so lovely working in the fields
Or dancing like a wild one
Sparks flying around his heels
But his friends all gone before him
From the sacred ground that bore them
Now they wonder does she scorn them
For giving up the land
And they know that they’ll regret the leaving
Know that they will pine for grieving
For the sky road by the singing sea
And all of us behind
All the Lies That You Told Me
Frances Black
And I wonder does he know I love him
All below and none above him
As I sit here by the singing sea
Alone and left behind
Danny’s made his mind up
He’s leaving for America
He’s leaving for America
Leaving all of us behind
And I wonder does he know I love him
All below and none above him
As I sit here by the singing sea
Alone and left behind
Yes, I wonder does he know I love him
All below and none above him
As I sit here by the singing sea
Alone and left behind
– Frances Black
NOW THAT THE STAKES ARE LOW
For the fourth time in four weeks,
I slip my spade into the dark soil
of the half-circle garden.
I make twenty shallow holes,
then lift the pansies from crinkly
plastic containers and drop
the root-bound squares into the earth.
Within hours, the small brown bunny
arrives with his pink twitchy nose
and his small round lump
of soft bunny body,
and while I wash dishes
I meet through the window
his innocent, unblinking gaze
as he consumes a dozen
deep purple petals
in small, efficient tugs.
He looks at me as if to say,
You love me. And I do.
I croon at the bunny how
cute his small ears. How perfect
his bliss. How good he is
for eating his pretty bunny food.
Tomorrow, the rest
of the blooms will be gone.
In a week, the leaves will
be gone, too. Every. Single. One.
And I will go buy more pansies.
How sweet it’s become,
this path of surrender,
the strange joy that rises in me
when I see my precious pansies
nibbled to the roots.
Now that the stakes are low,
it’s much easier to bow
to the way things are.
For the price of pansies,
I can practice again and again
how to find true delight
in this art of letting go.
– Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
When I work too hard and then lie down,
even my sleep is sad and all worn out.
You want me to name the specific sorrows?
They do not matter. You have your own.
Most of the people in the world
go out to work, day after day,
with their voices chained in their throats.
I am swimming a narrow, swift river.
Upstream, the clouds have already darkened
and deep blue holes I cannot see
churn up under the smooth flat rocks.
The Greeks have a word, paropono,
for the complaint without answer,
for how the heart labors, while all
the time our faces appear calm
enough to float through in the moonlight.
– Maggie Anderson
Merlyn took the Wart’s hand and said kindly, “You are young, and do not understand these things. But you will learn that owls are the most courteous, single-hearted and faithful creatures living. You must never be familiar, rude or vulgar with them, or make them look ridiculous. Their mother is Athene, the goddess of wisdom, and, although they are often ready to play the buffoon to amuse you, such conduct is the prerogative of the truly wise. No owl can possibly be called ‘Archie’.”
“I am sorry, owl,” said the Wart.
– T. H. White
Obedient to no man, dependent only on weather and season, without a goal before them or a roof above them, owning nothing, open to every whim of fate, the homeless wanderers lead their childlike, brave, shabby existence. They are the sons of Adam, who was driven out of Paradise; the brothers of the animals, of innocence. Out of heaven’s hand they accept what is given them from moment to moment: sun, rain, fog, snow, warmth, cold, comfort, and hardship; time does not exist for them and neither does history, or ambition, or that bizarre idol called progress and evolution, in which houseowners believe so desperately.
A wayfarer may be delicate or crude, artful or awkward, brave or cowardly—he is always a child at heart, living in the first day of creation, before the beginning of the history of the world, his life always guided by a few simple instincts and needs. He may be intelligent or stupid; he may be deeply aware of the fleeting fragility of all living things, of how pettily and fearfully each living creature carries its bit of warm blood through the glaciers of cosmic space, or he may merely follow the commands of his poor stomach with childlike greed—he is always the opponent, the deadly enemy of the established proprietor, who hates him, despises him, or fears him, because he does not wish to be reminded that all existence is transitory, that life is constantly wilting, that merciless icy death fills the cosmos all around.
– Hermann Hesse
Nobody seems to have language to say: We abhor, reject, repudiate, and punish all political violence, even as we maintain that Trump remains himself a promoter of such violence, a subverter of American institutions, and the very opposite of everything decent and patriotic in American life.
– David Frum
A person who knows God is kind, and when he is not kind, it means that he does not know God and will never be known from Him, for the only way to
know God is kindness.
– St. Anthony The Great
Psychoanalysis is the process of discovering how a person’s life force is blocked by conditioning, fear, power struggles, and other obstacles, and working to release that blockage.
– Amanda Lenox
Timely truth is immensely important for the collective consciousness to function well.
– Elon Musk
If truth is what you seek, then the examined life will only take you on a long ride to the limits of solitude and leave you by the side of the road with your truth and nothing else.
– Thomas Ligotti
If there were only darkness all would be clear. . . . But where we have both dark and light we have also the inexplicable. The key word in my plays is “perhaps”
– Beckett
To be still is to be conscious without thought.
– Eckhart Tolle
America, you’re bringing me down.
– Paisley Rekdal
Politics, under a democracy, reduces itself to a mere struggle for office by flatterers of the proletariat; even when a superior man prevails at that disgusting game he must prevail at the cost of his self-respect. Not many superior men make the attempt.
– Nietzsche
When I’m writing, I’m asking myself: Can I welcome what is not-me into the poem? Can I keep uncertainty alive?
– Jenny George
Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse – these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them […]. The first stage in this undertaking will be to carry over the principle of montage into history. That is, to assemble large-scale constructions out of the smallest and most precisely cut components. Indeed, to discover in the analysis of the small individual moment
the crystal of the total event.
– Walter Benjamin
People are always worried about the fate of the genius. I never worried about the genius: genius takes care of the genius in a man. My concern was always for the nobody, the man who is lost in the shuffle, the man who is so common, so ordinary, that his presence is not even noticed.
– Henry Miller
Psychologically, the dragon is one’s own binding of oneself to one’s ego, and you’re captured in your own dragon cage. And the problem of the psychiatrist is to break that dragon, open him up, so that you can have a larger field of relationships.
– Joseph Campbell
Learn to see things as they really are, not as we imagine they are.
– Vernon Howard
The pursuit, even of the best things, ought to be calm and tranquil.
– Marcus Tullius Cicero
A critical ‘reading’ is the end product of an internalization so complete that the word reading is not the right word for what happens when a text is on your mind. The text is part of what has made you who you are.
– Helen Vendler
The whole point of ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ (1962) was the absurdity of any type of extremism, left wing or right.
– John Frankenheimer
The basis of bondage is just this – “I like this; I don’t like this.”
– Sadhguru
Anxiety is the submersion by the real, the radical excess of the real over the lack, the active failure of the whole apparatus of symbolic support provoked by what reveals itself therein, in a cut, as unnameable encounter.
– Alain Badiou
Send word if you still exist.
– Hunter S. Thompson
these three dimensions in a commonplace structure
let light through and furnish nothing
but repetition
the true color that they see
– Marcelin Pleynet, (trans. Harry Mathews)
To a Lover Who Left Me Flowers
in a Pepsi Bottle, Apologizing
for Having no Vase
If this is the truth, I want it.
Listen: I have wasted
my little life—
on spectacle, on golden lies,
on dust.
I know now
what your hands knew
when you did this:
Love is the daily
bread, the make-it-work.
Touch me till this world is world enough.
– Joseph Fasano
this country is so overwhelmingly out of its ever loving cracker barrel mind
– Nikki Wallschlaeger
The idea of effecting decentralization while maintaining technological progress is purely utopian.
– Jacques Ellul
in our world
even the butterflies
must toil
– Issa
Everyone talks about peace but no one educates for peace. In this world, they educate for competition, and competition is the beginning of any war. When educating to cooperate and owe each other solidarity, that day we will be educating for peace.
– Maria Montessori
Barbara Hamby: Ode to Knots, Noise, Waking Up
at Three, and Falling Asleep Reading to My Id
Why does everything seems so impossible
in the middle of the night? I wake up at three
with my mind in a knot, and I might as well be Incan,
the ancient people of Peru, whose language
was not written in characters like the Chinese
or letters like the Greeks and Romans or even runes
like the Celts, but knots on a string, so maybe when the Incans
woke up at three, they could feel their knots,
whereas all I can do is review my worries or recite the poems
I’ve memorized, a couple of sonnets by Shakespeare
and Donne, Hamlet’s “What a piece of work is a man” speech
and all the lyrics to Highway 61 Revisited, my favorite being
“Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” because when the lights
are out you might as well be lost in the rain in Juarez,
and sometimes I forget how uncooperative the material world
can be, though at moments all the pieces fit
like a Byzantine mosaic, which I’m thinking about now
because I’m going to Ravenna tomorrow,
and I can’t sleep because the Piazza Sant’Ambrogio,
which is right outside my bedroom window,
has become a late night hangout for braying drunks—God,
the lungs on those people—and I can’t help but think
of all my mistakes as they line up like the bloody crucifixions
I’ve been seeing in Italy this spring,
though the sky has been a glorious Leonardo blue, and the names
of the artists, how could you not be great with a name
like Duccio di Buoninsegna, and you’d have to go a long way
to find a better name than Dosso Dossi, so toss and turn
as I may, it is not Eastertime, but the beginning of June,
and it was Luis Buňuel who said, Thank God
I’m an atheist, though my Bulgarian student Polina
says that God is in other people, and it’s hard
not to believe in other people since there are so many of them,
their screams bouncing off the Renaissance walls
of Sant’Ambrogio and into my window, and my train leaves
at 7:30, and what if my mother has a stroke,
and there’s no one there to help her, and all my cats line up
and list my betrayals: Annabelle, Sylvia Wilberforce,
Little Latin Loopy Lulu, and Bucky, aka Mr. Suit Pants,
Mr. Crazy Bacon, Mr. Pretty Paws, and I hope
he’s in a paradise where lost tails are sewn back on
and torn ears mended, because I’ve had it up to here
with the everyday scarring, the laundry, the dust, so I might as well
be asleep and dreaming of the tomb of Galla Placidia in Ravenna,
the night sky made of thousands of pieces of colored tesserae,
or facing a tidal wave in a South American town
or riding a bus when a fat man in whitey-tighties and a black
T-shirt gets on and starts shooting, blood flying
everywhere, but soon he’s bored by the mayhem and sits down
beside me and asks what I am doing. Moving to keep
his bloody arm away from my white dress, I say, “Reading
a newspaper.” “What’s that?” he asks. “It’s where
you read about what happened the day before.” “Read,”
he says, so I tell him about all the terrible
things people did yesterday in buses all over the world.
When we can converse with the animals, we will know the change is halfway here. When we can converse with the forest, we will know the change has come.
– Tom Robbins
If you see anything except God, it’s a mistake, it’s error, false imagination. For there is only the God-head, the one principle, the one law, one substance and you are that. It’s wonderful when you can understand this. This is reality.
– Robert Adams
Prose is only as good as its approximation of the condition of poetry.
– Francine du Plessix Gray
When You And I Were True
Oh we might as well lie down love
Lie down and close our eyes
We might as well go walking
In the country of the blind
The long grass has grown
The wild birds flown
To their homes away in the blue
And nothing′s left the same
The whole world’s changed
Since you and I were true
Oh and how can a story be ended
When it didn′t hardly begin
How can my glass be so empty
When it’s filled up to the brim
And it wasn’t always so
It wasn′t always so
We had something better to do
And it didn′t always rain
Every single day
When you and I were true
In the country where we’re heading love
There is nothing but rocks and stones
No friendly plant or animal
No angel to guide you home
Until the day you′ll find
In the country of the blind
Some wanderer just like you
And the singing of a bird
Nobody has heard
Since you and I were true
Oh we might as well lie down love
Lie down and close our eyes
We might as well go walking
In the country of the blind
The long grass has grown
The wild birds flown
To their homes away in the blue
And nothing′s left the same
The whole world’s changed
Since you and I were true
– John Mary Spillane
Judging the gap between two trees, a monkey relies on its memory of past jumps to calculate the next one. Is there a landing spot on the other side? Is it within jumping distance? Can the branch handle its impact? …The past provides the required practice, whereas the future is where the next move will take place. Long-range future orientation is also common, such as when during a drought the matriarch of an elephant herd remembers a drinking hole miles away that no one else knows about. The herd sets out on a long treck, taking days to reach precious water. While the matriarch operates on the basis of knowledge, the rest of the herd operates on the basis of trust. Whether it is a matter of seconds or days, animal behavior is not only goal- but also future-oriented.
So it is curious to me that animals are often thought to be stuck in the present. The present is ephemeral. One moment it is here, the next it is gone. Whether you are a thrush picking up a worm for your chicks in a distant nest or a dog setting out in the morning to patrol your territory and dribble urine at strategic locations, animals have jobs to do, which imply the future. True, most of the time it is the near future…. Yet their behavior would make no sense if they lived entirely in the present.
– Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
Don’t spend your life in a jar
Learn to write poetry and the Gods might smile on you
No one can escape Fate
And our lives are lived in a walled garden
But, poetry is a door-pass to the greater life
Or the stone that breaks the window
Through which the spirits arrive
And through which we
Endlessly depart
– Tom Hirons
You risked your life, but what else have you ever risked? Have you risked disapproval? Have you ever risked economic security? Have you ever risked a belief? I see nothing particularly courageous about risking one’s life. So you lose it, you go to your hero’s heaven and everything is milk and honey ’til the end of time. Right? You get your reward and suffer no earthly consequences. That’s not courage. Real courage is risking something that might force you to rethink your thoughts and suffer change and stretch consciousness. Real courage is risking one’s clichés.
– Tom Robbins
Conveyed from mouth to ear, there is no tradition, There are no textbooks. There is only direct meeting, direct experience. There is no practice without a teacher. There is no teacher without a community. There are souls destined to meet – and free will and commitment, and loving-kindness and fellowship. And out of these branches the path.
– Perle Besserman
As long as anyone believes that his ideal and purpose is outside him, that it is above the clouds, in the past or in the future, he will go outside himself and seek fulfillment where it cannot be found. He will look for solutions and answers at every point except where they can be found – in himself.
– Erich Fromm
The world suddenly vanished from view like a morning mist. I was left alone with Reality.
– Paul Brunton
Sense of place is the sixth sense, an internal compass and map made by memory and spatial perception together.
– Rebecca Solnit
I do not understand how any one can live without some small place of enchantment to turn to. In the forest there is a constant stirring in the treetops, as though on the stillest days the breathing of the earth is yet audible…The universe breathed, and the world inside it breathe same breath. This was the cosmic life, with suns and moons to make it lovely. It was important only to keep close enough to the pulse to feel its rhythm, to know… one’s own minute living is a torn fragment of a larger cloth.
– Lorraine Anderson
In any case, there was only one tunnel, dark and lonely, mine, the tunnel in which I had spent my childhood, my youth, my whole life.
– Ernesto Sabato, El túnel
When I think of him [Phil Berrigan], it is one infected with joie di vivre; he is an incurable carrier of that all but vanquished unease, dis-ease, ease. For years, he has traveled among people like a Ulysses, voyaging beyond known landmarks, putting in among strangers, marveling at the variety, beauty, and terror of the world, the known and unknown, often near shipwreck, near death, but always and everywhere charting new terrain, bringing others to awakening, to debate, to change of heart.
– Daniel Berrigan, America Is Hard to Find
To be happy in this world, especially when youth is past, it is necessary to feel oneself not merely an isolated individual whose day will soon be over, but part of the stream of life flowing on from the first germ to the remote and unknown future.
– Bertrand Russell
The cock crowing in the milky dawn thinks its call raises the sun; the child howling in a closed room thinks its cries open the door. But the sun and the mother go their own way, following the laws of their beings. Those who see us, even though we cannot see ourselves, opened the door for us, answering our puerile calculations, our unsteady desires, and our awkward efforts with a generous welcome.
– René Daumal
What guarantee is there that the five senses, taken together, do cover the whole of possible experience? They cover simply our actual experience, our human knowledge of facts or events. There are gaps between the fingers; there are gaps between the senses. In these gaps is the darkness which hides the connection between things.…
This darkness is the source of our vague fears and anxieties, but also the home of the gods. They alone see the connections, the total relevance of everything that happens; that which now comes to us in bits and pieces, the “accidents” which exist only in our heads, in our limited perceptions.
– Idris Parry
This evening, which I have tried to spirit away, is a strange burden to me. While time moves on, while the day will soon end and I already wish it gone, there are men who have entrusted all their hopes to it, all their love and their last efforts. There are dying men or others who are waiting for a debt to come due, who wish that tomorrow would never come. There are others for whom the day will break like a pang of remorse; and others who are tired, for whom the night will never be long enough to give them the rest that they need. And I – who have lost my day – what right do I have to wish that tomorrow comes?
– Henri Alain-Fournier
[Psychoanalysis] is not the only way to resolve inner conflicts. Life itself still remains a very effective therapist.
– Karen Horney
The desire to go home … is a desire to be whole, to know where you are, to be the point of intersection of all the lines drawn through all the stars, to be the constellation-maker and the center of the world, that center called love. To awaken from sleep, to rest from awakening, to tame the animal, to let the soul go wild, to shelter in darkness and blaze with light, to cease to speak and be perfectly understood.
– Rebecca Solnit
BASHO
Each poem is a tiny door,
or better still,
a window.
Light as a snowflake,
slippery as a whale,
poised as a candle,
silent as an orchid.
We’ve walked a long way together.
Somewhere ahead of us
a horse whinnies,
a crow calls,
a beetle’s becoming a firefly.
The horse and the crow are a poem.
The firefly lights our way.
– David Young
When two people talk, they don’t just fall into physical and aural harmony. They also engage in what is called motor mimicry. If you show people pictures of a smiling face or a frowning face, they’ll smile or frown back, although perhaps only in muscular changes so fleeting that they can only be captured with electronic sensors. If I hit my thumb with a hammer, most people watching will grimace: they’ll mimic my emotional state. This is what is meant, in the technical sense, by empathy. We imitate each other’s emotions as a way of expressing support and caring and, even more basically, as a way of communicating with each other.
– Malcolm Gladwell
Although it is embarrassing and painful, it is very healing to stop hiding from yourself. It is healing to know all the ways that you’re sneaky, all the ways that you hide out, all the ways that you shut down, deny, close off, criticize people, all your weird little ways. You can know all that with some sense of humor and kindness. By knowing yourself, you’re coming to know humanness altogether. We are all up against these things. We are all in this together.
– Pema Chödrön
Religious people often prefer to be right rather than compassionate. Often, they don’t want to give up their egotism. They want their religion to endorse their ego, their identity.
– Karen Armstrong
I do kind gestures. Remove my appendix.
I put my ear to a flat shell and—nothing.
I play the lottery ironically. Get married.
Have a smear test. I put my ear to the beak
of a dead bird—nothing. I grow wisdom
teeth. Jog. I pick up a toddler’s telephone,
Hello? — No answer. I change a light bulb
on my own. Organize a large party. Hire
a clown. Attend a four-day stonewalling
course. Have a baby. Stop eating Coco Pops.
I put my ear right up to the slack and gaping
bonnet of a daffodil—. Get divorced. Floss.
Describe a younger person’s music taste as
“just noise.” Enjoy perusing a garden centre.
Sit in a pub without drinking. I stand at the
lip of a pouting valley—speak to me!
My echo plagiarizes. I land a real love plus
two real cats. I never meet the talking bird
again. Or the yawning hole. The panther
of purple wisps who prowls inside the air.
I change nappies. Donate my eggs. Learn
a profound lesson about sacrifice. Brunch.
No singing floorboards. No vents leaking
scentless instructions. My mission is over.
The world has zipped up her second mouth.
– Sanity, by Caroline Bird
The thing that feeds the great destructiveness of history is that men give their entire allegiance to their own group…
– Ernest Becker
Please don’t confuse corporate media with a free press.
– @MuellerSheWrote
We are lived by powers
we pretend to
understand.
– W.H. Auden
The Highest Truth Cannot Be Put In Words, Therefore The Greatest Teacher Has Nothing To Say. He Simply Gives Himself in Service, and Never Worries.
– Lao Tzu
Let’s face it. We are undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.
– Judith Butler
The future does not exist. Because nobody has ever experienced it. The future is a mental projection that you are having in the present moment.
– Eckhart Tolle
ants parading
after the rain
summer sky
– Shiki
Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly.
– Marcus Aurelius
Summer seemed to bloom against the will
Of the sun, which news reports claimed flamed hotter
On this planet than when our dead fathers
Wiped sweat from their necks.
– Jericho Brown
how awful to imagine this, God’s name on the tongues of killers and victims both.
– Don DeLillo
I am cheerful, whatever happens,
a puff in the sky-
what splendor exists, I am there
– Takahashi
Jesus and Buddha didn’t build churches or temples.
They realized that when you make each breath holy,
you become the temple.
– Rabia Hayek
The moment you like or dislike something, you cannot see it the way it is.
– Sadhguru
Anything you avoid in life will come back, over and over again, until you’re willing to face it – to deeply look into its true nature. Again, the only way to know that we’ve seen into the true nature of something is that the story we’re telling ourselves releases.
– Adyashanti
Jung suffered a prophetic burden, by which I mean he was frequently misunderstood, often willfully so, sometimes viciously attacked, and experienced intellectual loneliness and isolation.
– David Tacey
Depth psychology does not, in my view, seek to replace religion, but does seek to “dream onward” the processes that have been lost to consciousness due to our failure to understand the symbolic messages of religion.
– David Tacey
The killing fields are ripe
with the green
skulls of children. Will you
bear witness?
– Zeeshan Joonam
Almost everything that matters is hard, and EVERYTHING matters.
– Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Now listen, you watermelons —
if any thieves come—
turn into frogs!
– Issa, (trans. Robert Bly)
Do not try to satisfy your vanity by teaching a great many things. Awaken people’s curiosity. It is enough to open minds; do not overload them. Put there just a spark. If there is some good inflammable stuff, it will catch fire.
– Anatole France
Every shadow has a brother, just waiting
– Linda Pastan
The inability to apologize is a tell-tale sign of insecurity.
– Dr. Nicole LePera
[i want to go back]
by Gregory Orr
I want to go back
To the beginning.
We all do.
I think:
Hurt won’t be there.
But I’m wrong.
Where the water
Bubbles up
At the spring:
Isn’t that a wound?
The universe is not human-centric. Every life form has a role to play – that is the beauty of it.
– Sadhguru
i am an enemy of dust i am an amalgamation of everyone i have ever loved
– Summer Farah
We started out fine. Then we got de-fined.
Now we are getting re-fined.
– Swami Satchidananda
Everything only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and.’
– Elizabeth Bishop
Skepticism is the elegance of anxiety.
– E.M. Cioran
Any tool can be used for good or bad. It’s really the ethics of the artist using it.
– John Knoll
The heart is a fist. It pockets prayer or holds rage.
– Joy Harjo
I did what I could. I was so lonely. I loved you. I wrote many small books using methods and forms popular and unpopular with my contempo- raries. Among these books was a book of my terrors, a book of my dreams, a book of imagined things, and a book about the rabbits in the yard. I wrote a book for computers with voices. I wrote a book based on euphoni- ous sounds. I wrote a book that was a universal novel. I wrote a book for an avant-garde collective. I wrote a book of traumatic facts. I had written only one book before that time, but at last I put the point of my life to immediate use. I wrote this memoir that you are reading, then I wrote a book that was a history of the future in advance of itself. I wrote a book that was the story of a prostitute who walked the streets of Google earth. Imam now finishing a book: it is called “the innocent question” or it is called “garments against women” or it is called “this champion: life.”
– Anne Boyer
ode to the instability
of my medium…
the shattered letters
splintering language
– Laura Kerr
OLD FOOLS
You’ve got your clukes in me
Out legs locked at right angles
Should scatter like pigeons
But I’ll stay here and make sweat with you
And kick my own guts out
Lose a pint of self respect
Statued and sellotaped
Tongue-tied and desolate
Blow unlucky eyelashes and hide the stray hairs
Or should we just give up
Take backward bounds and leaps
And sit and shy shiver while
The latest one sleeps
Cry from the bedroom
Clean all the blankets
Spend your time wishing back an act that is thankless
And those old fools have got nothing on me
This is a monolith
Can’t help but struggle with
the will and the wayward old hat ideals
The weight of the uniform and the way that it feels
We can’t see round it and all the while we
Cry from the bedroom
Clean all the blankets
Spend your time wishing back an act that is thankless
And those old fools have got nothing on me
And the distance maps out like the flag of a country
I never knew
And hay bales with eyes half shut like shee on sleeping
pills under the blue
Now sink down you balsa wood box in your chair like
it was the dirt
I’m going home to certain death
To certain death
It doesn’t have to be this way
It doesn’t have to be this way
It doesn’t have to be this way
It doesn’t have to be this way
Cry from the bedroom
Clean all the blankets
Spend your time wishing back an act that is thankless
And those old fools have got nothing on me
Those old fools have got nothing on me
Those old fools have got nothing on me
Those old fools have got nothing on me
WRITERS
Joseph Delaney Rattray, Kevin Andrew Brolly, Louis Pip Linklater Abbott, Philip Rodney Hague, Sarah Joanne Hayes
We Can Run
We don’t own this place, though we act as if we did
It’s a loan from the children of our children’s kids
The actual owners haven’t even been born yet
But we never tend the garden and rarely we pay the rent
Most of it is broken and the rest of it is bent
Put it all on plastic and I wonder where we’ll be when the bills hit
We can run but we can’t hide from it
Of all possible worlds we only got one we gotta ride on it
Whatever we’ve done
We’ll never get far from what we leave behind
Baby, we can run, run, run, but we can’t hide
Oh no, we can’t hide
I’m dumpin’ my trash in your back yard
Makin’ certain you don’t notice really isn’t so hard
You’re so busy with your guns and all of your excuses to use them
Well, it’s oil for the rich and babies for the poor
We got everyone believin’ that more is more
If a reckoning comes, maybe we will know what to do then
We can run but we can’t hide from it
Of all possible worlds we only got one we gotta ride on it
Whatever we’ve done
We’ll never get far from what we leave behind
Baby, we can run, run, run, but we can’t hide
Oh no, we can’t hide
All these complications seem to leave no choice
I heard the tongues of billions speak with just one voice
Saying, “Just leave all the rest to me
I need it worse than you, you see”
And then I heard
The sound of one child crying
Today I went walking in the amber wind
There’s a hole in the sky where the light pours in
I remembered the days when I wasn’t afraid of the sunshine
But now it beats down on the asphalt land
Like a hammering blow from God’s left hand
What little still grows cringes in the shade till the night time
We can run but we can’t hide from it
Of all possible worlds we only got one we gotta ride on it
Whatever we’ve done
We’ll never get far from what we leave behind
Baby, we can run, run, run, but we can’t hide
Oh no, we can’t hide
We can run but we can’t hide from it
Of all possible worlds we only got one we gotta ride on it
Whatever we’ve done
We’ll never get far from what we leave behind
Baby, we can run, run, run, but we can’t hide
Oh no, we can’t hide
We can run but we can’t hide from it
Of all possible worlds we only got one we gotta ride on it
Whatever we’ve done
We’ll never get far from what we leave behind
Baby, we can run, run, run, but we can’t hide
We can run but we can’t hide from it
Of all possible worlds we only got one we gotta ride on it
Whatever we’ve done
We’ll never get far from what we leave behind
Baby, we can run, run, run, but we can’t hide
– John Barlow / Brent Richard Mydland
Do not surrender prematurely.
– Timothy Snyder, on resisting authoritarianism
The best form of service is to uplift someone’s state of mind.
– Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
I’m in the last outback, at the world’s end.
– Ovid, Black Sea Letters, Book 2.7, Peter Green translation
You can’t sit around and wait for somebody to say who you are. You need to write it and paint it and do it.
– Faith Ringgold
He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day
Don’t look now
I’m fading away
Into the gray of my mornings
Or the blues of every night
Is it that my nails
keep breaking
Or maybe the corn
on my secind little piggy
Things keep popping out
on my face or of my life
It seems no matter how
I try I become more difficult
to hold
I am not an easy woman
to want
They have asked
the psychiatrists . . . psychologists . . .
politicians and social workers
What this decade will be
known for
There is no doubt . . . it is
loneliness
– Nikki Giovanni
Looking back at the worst times, it always seems that they were times in which there were people who believed with absolute faith and absolute dogmatism in something. And they were so serious in this matter that they insisted that the rest of the world agree with them. And then they would do things that were directly inconsistent with their own beliefs in order to maintain that what they said was true.
– Richard Feynman
OPEN CHANNEL
In the greatest confusion there is still an open channel to the soul. It may be difficult to find because by midlife it is overgrown, and some of the wildest thickets that surround it grow out of what we describe as our education. But the channel is always there, and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves – to that part of us which is conscious of a higher consciousness, by means of which we make the final judgments and put everything together.
– Saul Bellow
This morning I realized that I am in a period that was called by the Spanish mystic and poet St. John of the Cross the “dark night of the soul”. It’s a period of purification by trial. I have been dealing with losses of family members, by death or betrayal, a fractured foot, and am reviewing the path of my life and figuring out the direction from here as I make friends with death. When you get to my age, you do that, or you run scared. I don’t sense that I’m going any time soon; there’s still too much left for me to do. Yet, death is ever present. It’s an essential part of life in this realm. Other realms have different laws. As with any difficulty I go out by the river or into the trees to find a place for my soul to rest. I turn to the story with gratitude, for the spiritual illumination that can be found as the tale unwinds.
It occurs to me that this country is also in a “dark night of the soul”, with the question being, will we choose compassionate ideas and laws, and leaders who serve and are fit for the job, or will we choose dictatorial pawns who assume authority for self gain, and wish to oppress and police citizens to enslave them to a false story. And this earth too is also in the place of challenge and shift, another level of the “dark night of the soul”. Will there still be trees and rivers when we are through with our buying and selling? I turn East to begin the day and take in breath. I give it back with prayer for my family, even those who mean to harm, knowing that we are all family: these lands, these communities, this earth. I turn back to tend the story with the words, images, and music I have been given and know that even the hardest parts of loss and heartbreak are what shines the soul and opens the door to understanding, to love.
– Joy Harjo
I am very conscious that there is a lot going on in the world. I choose to intentionally speak to that which brings us together. I am convinced that our human form is the great unifier that transcends all divisions, arising from one embryo as it does: one body, many textures, differential movement, without separation. We all have a nerve tree within us that bows and bends to planet-wide stressors, the drumbeats of which constantly invite us to either self-adjust and self-focus the internal signaling, or be buffeted by outside influences completely. I understand it can seem a herculean task to do so at times, yet it is literally our birthright, and the key to our personal empowerment, to “take up our mat, and walk” on our own recognizance. We can become ever more intentional in our experience, and I am keen to show how at these events.
– Gil Hedley, Integral Anatomy
We said to him: here is your happiness, here is what you spent your whole youth looking for, here is the girl you saw in all your dreams!
How could anyone, pushed by the shoulders like that, avoid a reaction of indecision, then fear, then dismay–how could he resist the temptation to escape?
– Alain-Fournier
Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality of those who seek to change a world which yields most painfully to change.
– Robert F Kennedy
You become political when you can no longer endure the world.
– Marguerite Duras
And there were purple flowers
on the table. And we still had hours.
– Kim Addonizio
The cosmic origin of things is beyond our intellect, our mind, our words. But in deep silence we reach it.
– Osho
WAR
The trembling finger of a woman
Goes down the list of casualties
On the evening of the first snow.
The house is cold and the list is long.
All our names are included.
– Charles Simic
No other art is conditioned by social factors as much as the purportedly self-acting, even mechanically self-sufficient, art of music; historical materialism, with the accent on ‘historical,’ abounds here.
– Bloch
first dawn alone–
the widow eats his half
of the orange
– Alegria Imperial
What does it mean to translate time into art?
– Don McKay
It all is translation. These phenomena have vibrant, astonishing realities in and of themselves, which language is trying to reach through these poetic means.
– Don McKay
When capitalists and their politicians “condemn violence,” they’re specifically referring to *bottom-up* violence. Top-down violence is perfectly acceptable to them on a large scale because it’s the literal backbone of the system (capitalism) that has made them rich and powerful.
– @HamptonThink
Today has wrung
everything
out of me.
– Juliet A. Paine
Much of what remains undeveloped in us, psychologically speaking, is excluded because it is too good to bear. We often refuse to accept our most noble traits and instead find a shadow substitute for them.
– Robert A. Johnson
Words are the children of reason and, therefore, can’t explain it. They really can’t translate feeling because they’re not part of it. That’s why it bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It’s not. It’s feeling.
– Bill Evans
Don’t ask me
What you know is true
Don’t have to tell you
I love your precious heart
I
I was standing
You were there
Two worlds collided
And they could never tear us apart
We could live
For a thousand years
But if I hurt you
I’d make wine from your tears
I told you
That we could fly
‘Cause we all have wings
But some of us don’t know why
I was standing
You were there
Two worlds collided
And they could never ever tear us apart
I (don’t ask me)
I was standing (you know it’s true)
Mm, you were there (worlds collided)
Two worlds collided (we’re shining through)
And they could never tear us apart
You (don’t ask me)
You were standing (you know it’s true)
I was there (worlds collided)
Two worlds collided (we’re shining through)
And they could never tear us apart
I
I was standing
You were there
Two worlds collided
– Andrew Charles Farriss / Michael Kelland Hutchence
You’re already connected to all that you’d like to attract into your life by the presence of this universal, all-powerful Spirit.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
Every time you experience fear, self-rejection, anxiety, guilt, or hate, you’re denying your divinity and succumbing to the influences of that insidious ego mind that has convinced you of your disconnection to God.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
The Songwainers sing John Barleycorn
There were three men came out of Kent,
Their fortunes for to try,
And these three men made a solemn vow,
John Barleycorn should die.
So they ploughed him deep into furrows
And they throw’d clods o’er his head;
And these three men home rejoicing went,
John Barleycorn was dead.
Chorus (after every other verse):
Come, put your wine into glasses,
Put your cider into old tin cans.
Put Barleycorn in the nut-brown bowl
For he’s proved the strongest man.
But the sun shone warm and the winds blew strong
And it rained in a day or so.
John Barleycorn saw the wind and the rain
And he soon began to grow.
But the rye began to grow as well,
It grew both strong but tall.
John Barleycorn grew short and sweet
And he proved them a-liars all.
So they hired men with scythes
For to cut him off at the knee,
And worse than that, poor Barleycorn,
They served him barbarously.
And they hired men with pitchforks
To toss him into the barn,
And when they’d tossed John Barleycorn
They tied him down with thorns.
Then they hired men with thrashes
To beat him high and low;
They came smick-smack upon poor Jack’s back
Until the place began to flow.
Then they put him into a mashing bin,
Thinking to burn his tail,
And when he came out they changed his name
For they called him “Home-brewed Ale”.
You know, when you’re young, most people have a little burning thing, but then you get your law degree and go into your little cellophane cage. You can do the family thing. I’ve wanted to do that at times. I’ve wanted to go into the hills sometimes, but I stayed. Some people are meant to stay and carry messages.
– Jimi Hendrix
When we are critical of others we need to take a hard look at ourselves and address it as our problem, not theirs.
– Taite Adams
MATINS
You want to know how I spend my time?
I walk the front lawn, pretending
to be weeding. You ought to know
I’m never weeding, on my knees, pulling
clumps of clover from the flower beds: in fact
I’m looking for courage, for some evidence
my life will change, though
it takes forever, checking
each clump for the symbolic
leaf, and soon the summer is ending, already
the leaves turning, always the sick trees
going first, the dying turning
brilliant yellow, while a few dark birds perform
their curfew of music. You want to see my hands?
As empty now as at the first note.
Or was the point always
to continue without a sign?
– Louise Glück
The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.
– William James
Humans should not worship other humans at all, but if they must do so it is better that the worshiped ones do not occupy any positions of political power.
– Christopher Hitchens
future, past
sea of oblivion
future capsized
– Takahashi
No matter how off-kilter you feel, you are standing in a place of perfectly balanced forces. If you feel abandoned by all that might comfort you, you are held in the embrace of what you cannot see.
– Kathleen Dean Moore
When I Forget a Dose
by William Fargason
my body falls
through itself as if
on a swing at the height
the weight stalls then
pulls backwards
towards the tall grass
this happens again
I try to tether myself
to this earth I would’ve
taken gravity
into my stomach
to be held
As I get older, “I can feel joy and bliss completely separate from the conditions of my life” feels less like sacred knowledge and more like a kinda cool parlor trick.
– River Kenna
I strongly feel that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an insult to life itself.
– Hayao Miyazaki
I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that’s my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again … the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul
– J.G. Ballard
art is not the exercise of taste, but the experience of vision
– George Oppen
Jung believed that the God of religion was dead because we had killed him with too much piety. We had made God shallow, narrow and good. This served to stifle and suppress the vitality of God; the divine life had been depleted by too much moralism.
– David Tacey
Your lane will be the one place where all your dreams come true. Stay there.
– Nika Solé
Many patients are so terrified of emotional intimacy that they are driven over and over again to provoke crises that allow them to distance with impunity.
– Nancy McWilliams
When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it – or rather, it is like living it.
– Dodie Smith
Today’s public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can’t read them either.
– Gore Vidal
When you have healing energy you can’t afford to be around just anybody.
– Nika Solé
It’s not going to change if we continue to elect the same old, same old.
– Marianne Williamson
Observe the marvelous change that comes over you the moment you stop seeing people as good and bad, as saints and sinners and begin to see them as unaware and ignorant. You must drop your false belief that people can sin in awareness.
– Anthony de Mello
…people grasp at political authoritarianism in the desperate need to be relieved of anxiety.
– Rollo May
You Have to Be Careful
You have to be careful telling things.
Some ears are tunnels.
Your words will go in and get lost in the dark.
Some ears are flat pans like the miners used
looking for gold.
What you say will be washed out with the stones.
You look a long time till you find the right ears.
Till then, there are birds and lamps to be spoken to,
a patient cloth rubbing shine in circles,
and the slow, gradually growing possibility
that when you find such ears,
they already know.
– Naomi Shihab Nye
Why one writes is a question I can answer easily, having so often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me — the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art.
– Anaïs Nin
We have to be prepared to translate between a language in which we live, the one that we require to live, and another language that dispossesses us from that sure sense of things that comes with monolingual conviction.
– Judith Butler
time and time again it is time we can’t apprehend
– Diana Khoi Nguyen
Politics and the fate of mankind are formed by men without ideals and without greatness. Those who have greatness within them do not go in for politics.
– Albert Camus
I reason, Earth is short –
And Anguish – absolute –
And many hurt,
But, what of that?
I reason, we could die –
The best Vitality
Cannot excel Decay,
But, what of that?
I reason, that in Heaven –
Somehow, it will be even –
Some new Equation, given –
But, what of that?
– Emily Dickinson
Observe the movements of the stars as if you were running their courses with them, and let your mind constantly dwell on the changes of the elements into each other. Such imaginings wash away the filth of life on the ground.
– Marcus Aurelius
People who believe in politics are like people who believe in God: they are sucking wind through bent straws.
– Charles Bukowski
Most intellectuals and most artists belong to the same type. Only the strongest of them force their way through the atmosphere of the bourgeois earth and attain to the cosmic. The others all resigned themselves or make compromises.
– Hermann Hesse
Nothing makes me end a phone call more quickly than hearing an echo of my own voice.
– @SoVeryBritish
What is the true self? It’s brilliantly transparent like the deep blue sky, and there’s no gap between it and all living beings.
– Kodo Sawaki Roshi
Talk to me
I am in the window’s refuge
I have a relationship with the Sun.
– Forough Farrokhzad
Things and conditions can give you pleasure, but they cannot give you joy.
– Eckhart Tolle
increasing
my confinement
frost on the window
– Issa
We need a poetry not of direct statement but of direct evocation; a poetry of hieroglyphics, of embodiment, incantation.
– Denise Levertov
blue nothingness
but for swifts
swirling, flickering
silvered by sunlight
– James Gilbert
We Should Make a Documentary About Spades
by Terrance Hayes
And here is all we’ll need: a card deck, quartets of sun people
Of the sort found in black college dormitories, some vintage
Music, indiscriminate spirits, fried chicken, some paper,
A writing utensil, and a bottomless Saturday. We should explore
The origins of a derogatory word like spade as well as the word
For feeling alone in polite company. And also the implications
Of calling someone who is not your brother or sister,
Brother or Sister. So little is known of our past, we can imagine
Damn near anything. When I say maybe slaves held Spades
Tournaments on the anti-cruise ships bound for the Colonies,
You say when our ancestors were cooped on those ships
They were not yet slaves. Our groundbreaking film should begin
With a low-lit den in the Deep South and the deep fried voice
Of somebody’s grandmother holding smoke in her mouth
As she says, “The two of Diamonds trumps the two of Spades
In my house.” And at some point someone should tell the story
Where Jesus and the devil are Spades partners traveling
The juke joints of the 1930s. We could interview my uncle Junior
And definitely your skinny cousin Mary and any black man
Sitting at a card table wearing shades. Who do you suppose
Would win if Booker T and MLK were matched against Du Bois
And Malcolm X in a game of Spades? You say don’t talk
Across the table. Pay attention to the suits being played.
The object of the game is to communicate invisibly
With your teammate. I should concentrate. Do you suppose
We are here because we are lonely in some acute diasporafied
Way? This should be explored in our film about Spades.
Because it is one of the ways I am still learning what it is
To be black, tonight I am ready to master Spades. Four players
Bid a number of books. Each team adds the bids
Of the two partners, and the total is the number of books
That team must try to win. Is that not right? This is a game
That tests the boundary between mathematics and magic,
If you ask me. A bid must be intuitive like the itchiness
Of the your upper lip before you sip strange whiskey.
My mother did not drink, which is how I knew something
Was wrong with her, but she held a dry spot at the table
When couples came to play. It’s a scene from my history,
But this probably should not be mentioned in our documentary
About Spades. Renege is akin to the word for the shame
You feel watching someone else’s humiliation. Slapping
A card down must be as dramatic as hitting the face of a drum
With your palm, not hitting the face of a drum with a drumstick.
You say there may be the sort of outrage induced
By liquor, trash talk, and poor strategy, but it will fade
The way a watermark left on a table by a cold glass fades.
I suspect winning this sort of game makes you feel godly.
I’m good and ready for who ever we’re playing
Against tonight. I am trying to imagine our enemy.
I know you are not my enemy. You say there are no enemies
In Spades. Spades is a game our enemies do not play.
Being underpaid is a form of policing too
– Fred Moten
With a simple breath you can release stress and replace it with what you need. Turn anxiety into peace, anger into joy, tension into love, fear into faith, guilt into trust. Take a moment right now to take a breath.
– Iyanla Vanzant
Don’t be overwise; 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
Suffering is exclusively the result of attachment or resistance, it is a sign of lacking the readiness to go on, to flow with life.
– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
We do not live in a simulation. That is a materialist perspective. The cosmos is not a machine that can be ‘hacked’ by human beings.
– Gigi Young
The Spinning Heart
The fireflies and the stars our only light,
We rock, watching between the roses night
If we could see the roses. We cannot.
Where do the fireflies go by day, what eat?
What categories shall we use tonight?
The day was an exasperating day,
The day in history must hang its head
For the foul letters many women got,
Appointments missed, men dishevelled and sad
Before their mirrors trying to be proud.
But now (we say) the sweetness of the night
Will hide our imperfections from our sight,
For nothing can be angry or astray,
No man unpopular, lonely, or beset,
Where half a yellow moon hangs from a cloud.
Spinning however and balled up in space
All hearts, desires, pewter and honeysuckle,
What can be known of the individual face?
To the continual drum-beat of the blood
Mesh sea and mountain recollection, flame,
Motives in the corridor, touch by night,
Violent touch, and violence in rooms;
How shall we reconcile in any light
This blow and the relations that it wrecked?
Crescent the pressures on the singular act
Freeze it at last into its season, place,
Until the flood and disorder of Spring.
To Easterfield the court’s best bore, defining
Space tied into a sailor’s reef, our praise:
He too is useful, he is part of this,
Inimitable, tangible, post-human,
And Theo’s disappointment has a place,
An item in that metamorphosis
The horrible coquetry of aging women.
Our superstitions barnacle our eyes
To the tide, the coming good; or has it come?—
Insufficient upon the beaches of the world
To drown that complex and that bestial drum.
Triumphant animal,-upon the rest
Bearing down hard, brooding, come to announce
The causes and directions of all this
Biting and breeding,—how will all your sons
Discover what you, assisted or alone,
Staring and sweating for seventy years,
Could never discover, the thing itself?
Your fears,
Fidelity, and dandelions grown
As big as elephants, your morning lust
Can neither name nor control. No time for shame,
Whippoorwill calling, excrement falling, time
Rushes like a madman forward. Nothing can be known.
– John Berryman
Our level of peace does not depend on other people’s words, actions, or reactions. Our level of peace depends on one simple choice: to forgive or not.
– James Blanchard Cisneros
You can let the same force that keeps planets revolving around the sun organize your life – or you can do it yourself, of course.
– Marianne Williamson
I am transcribing a book that I have, in a sense, not yet written, and in another sense, have always written, and in another sense, am currently writing, and in another sense, am always writing, and in another sense, will never write.
– Charles Yu
Dream Song 29
by John Berryman
There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart
só heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry’s ears
the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.
And there is another thing he has in mind
like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,
with open eyes, he attends, blind.
All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;
thinking.
But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.
The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life.
– Paul Morphy
Helicopter parenting creates adults who are easily frustrated and entitled.
Children need to experience loss, rejection, and hurt.
– Dr. Nicole LePera
YOU WERE THE ONE I LOVED
You were the one I loved
watching the solar barge
on tenth street
We stood to gaze at the heavens
to watch for the sun boat’s oar
over tenth street
oh it’s wrong to speak of freedom and peace
unless your love is justly done
I could weep I could moan forever
for the wrongs that I have done
on tenth street
but there’s no turning back the time-stream
to be a better man
You picked the wildflowers darling
and pressed them in a poetry book
(for your dirty bard)
Tenth street is burnt and gone
but you and I still love as one
and the Eye of Peace stares on
– Ed Sanders
Worry is preposterous and is the main psychological impediment to collectivities organizing; as it poisons the will to direct action. Worry is betting against yourself. Worry is praying to the devil. It’s a total waste of time.
– Terence McKenna
You’re healing when someone has a different opinion than you and you don’t take it as a personal attack on your identity.
– Dr. Nicole LePera
I don’t know which came first – my illness or my sudden distaste for society.
– Thomas Bernhard
I wake up & it breaks my heart.
– Cameron Awkward-Rich
Bohr was inconsistent, unclear, willfully obscure and right. Einstein was consistent, clear, down-to-earth and wrong.
– John S. Bell
Nobody can know his or her own unconscious without help from some other person.
– Patrick Casement
Change is hard. We like the familiar. We’re self-centered, and we have a lot of fear—equal fear of love and death. Welcome to the monkey house, as Vonnegut wrote. We like breakthroughs, while the changes toward evolution and greater humanity are incremental.
– Anne Lamott
In the sun
the butterfly wings
Like a church window
– Jack Kerouac
“diminished” persons have a right to representation, too.
– Joyce Carol Oates
I love digital media just as much as the next guy, but our digital worlds can disappear instantly. The pleasures of tangible items are enduring and irreplaceable. Perhaps that is why vinyl, leather notebooks, and sports cards have made come backs in the last few years.
– A.R. Williams
SUMMA
Bright 3/4 moon.
Be patient
what will be seen
will come forth as life.
– David Meltzer
mapping a summer
in sand-fly bites on my leg
between them, white space
unknown continents ready
for interpretation
– @hegelincanada
LET GO
Do everything with a mind that lets go.
If you let go a little, you will have a little peace.
If you let go a lot, you will have a lot of peace.
If you let go completely, you will know complete peace and freedom.
Your struggles with the world will have come to an end.
– Achaan Chah
Someone needs to tell those tales. When the battles are fought and won and lost, when the pirates find their treasures and the dragons eat their foes for breakfast with a nice cup of Lapsang souchong, someone needs to tell their bits of overlapping narrative. There’s magic in that. It’s in the listener, and for each and every ear it will be different, and it will affect them in ways they can never predict. From the mundane to the profound. You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone’s soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows what they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift. Your sister may be able to see the future, but you yourself can shape it, boy. Do not forget that… there are many kinds of magic, after all.
– Erin Morgenstern
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears
– Shakespeare
(The) inability (to lift the hand) isn’t primarily in the muscles, back or joints. The command mechanism, your nervous system isn’t well organized. …. That is why you do not improve when you only exercise.
– Alexander Yanai, Lifting in thought on the stomach
This was the setting in which the most troubled and most precious days of my life were lived: an abode from which our adventurings flowed out, to flow back again like waves breaking on a lonely headland.
– Alain-Fournier, Le Grand Meaulnes
You Are Not Depressed; You Are Distracted, :: by Facundo Cabral (Argentinian poet).
You are not depressed; you are distracted. You believe that you have lost something, which is impossible, because everything that you have was given to you. You did not make a single hair of your head so you can not own anything. In addition, life does not subtract things, it liberates you from them. It makes you lighter so that you can fly higher and reach the fullness. From cradle to grave, it is a school, and that is why those predicaments that you call problems are lessons, indeed.
You lost nobody; the one who died is just going ahead, because we all are going there. Besides this, the best of him/her, his/her love, is still in your heart. Who could say that Jesus is dead? There is not death, but only movement. And on the other side there are some wonderful people waiting for you: Gandhi, Michelangelo Whitman, St. Augustine, Mother Teresa, your grandmother and my mother, who believed that poverty is actually closer to what we call Love, because money distracts us with too many things, and makes us apprehensive and doubtful.
Do only what you love and you will be happy; the one who can do what he/she loves, is blessed and destined to have success, which will definitively come, because what must come, will come, but will come naturally. Do not do anything for obligation or commitment, but for love. Only then there will be fullness in your life, and with fullness everything is possible; and possible without any effort because what will move you will be the natural force of life, the same that raised me when the plane crashed with my wife and my daughter, the same which kept me alive when my doctors predicted that I would have only 3 or 4 more months of life.
Liberate yourself from the tremendous burden of guilt, responsibility, and vanity, and be ready to live each moment deeply, as it should be.
You are not depressed, you just need to be busy. Help the child who needs you, and that child will be your child’s partner. Help old people, and young people will help you when you be old. In addition, service to others is an absolutely guaranteed happiness, as certain as enjoying and taking care of nature for those who will come tomorrow. Give without measure and you will receive without measure.
– Ian Sanders
Every time a person exchanges neurotic depression for real suffering, he or she is sharing to some small degree in the carrying of the suffering of mankind, in bearing a tiny part of the darkness of the world.
– Helen Luke
When I was in junior high I called a friend a fucking bitch. She went home and told her parents who then told my mom. My mom was pissed and marched me right over to her house to apologize. After her father took me out back and…gave me a lesson about the power of kind speech. He was an army counselor and It was one of the most important lessons I’ve ever had. A lesson I still fall short of too often (especially online) but a lesson I never forgot. I don’t remember every word of it, but it wasn’t so different than this teaching I just read from the ancient Zen teacher Dogen:
If kind speech is offered, little by little kind speech expands. Thus, even kind speech that is not ordinarily known or seen comes into being. Be willing to practice it for this entire present life; do not give up, world after world, life after life. Kind speech is the basis for reconciling rulers and subduing enemies. Those who hear kind speech from you have a delighted expression and a joyful mind. Those who hear of your kind speech will be deeply touched; they will always remember it.
Know that kind speech arises from kind heart, and kind heart from the seed of compassionate heart. Ponder the fact that kind speech is not just praising the merit of others; it has the power to turn the destiny of the nation.
– Rebecca Solnit
How little we know, in the end. That a boat
can stall at the edge of the sea, until it is
overturned, at last, by what it loves most.
That love is the fortress with no walls
and winding gardens. That time gnaws
us down to a new bone, then to pure spirit.
And that grief is a kind of church—it is
that sparse and that clean. It is the blue rose
held in the clear water of the mind,
– Cecilia Llompart
You are somebody’s front porch to God.
You are someone’s doorway to mercy.
You are the world’s threshold to kindness.
You are my entrance to letting go of regret.
No pressure, but…
Your life is a gateway to peace
for both strangers and friends alike.
Whether you realize it our not…
Empathy has chosen you to turn your
heart into a welcome mat for others.
This is purpose of your life…
To let your existence become a candlelit
veranda of hope for the rest of us to
gather on during the long night.
– john roedel
In a dying culture, narcissism
embodies the highest attainment
of spiritual enlightenment.
– Christopher Lasch
Have only love in your heart for others. The more you see the good in them, the more you will establish good in yourself.
– Paramahansa Yogananda
If you don’t refer to a thought or memory, do you have any experience of suffering?
– Rupert Spira
keeping cool
among the wildflowers
summer moon
– Ogawa
As a plant becomes pot-bound
man becomes ego-bound
enclosed in his own limited mental consciousness.
Then he can’t feel any more
or love, or rejoice or even grieve any more,
he is ego-bound,
pot-bound
in the pot of his own conceit,
and he can only slowly die.
Unless he is a sturdy plant.
Then he can burst the pot,
shell of his ego
and get his roots in earth again,
raw earth.
– DH Lawrence
It’s the greatest gig in the world, being alive. You get to eat at Denny’s, wear a hat, whatever you wanna do.
– Norm Macdonald
There is one thing I’m good at, and that’s looking at the sea.
– Marguerite Duras
September
Then the flowers became very wild
because it was early September
and they had nothing to lose
they tossed their colors every
which way over the garden wall
splattering the lawn shoving their
wild orange red rain-disheveled faces
into my window without shame
– Grace Paley
The amount of light you emit is not based on how positively you think, it’s about how much of your darkness you can accept.
– Ania Galej
Desire is the engine of life, even as disorders of desire mark all of us in singular ways. Beneath each disorder of desire there is nonetheless a profound urge to grow, to express, to serve life more fully.
– James Hollis
Men’s happiness and unhappiness depend on their temperaments, no less than on fortune.
– François de La Rochefoucauld
Jung said, write the truth, and expect to be misunderstood, and take the consequences. That was what he had been doing all his life. People feared truth.
– Claire Myers Owens
When one worldview dominates your thinking, you’ll try to explain every problem you face through that worldview.
Read widely and realize there are many answers.
– James Clear
Fight to be the person philosophy tried to make you.
– Marcus Aurelius
Many witty ideas are like the sudden meeting of two friendly thoughts after a long separation.
– Friedrich Schlegel
I dreamed I spoke in another’s language,
I dreamed I lived in another’s skin,
I dreamed I was my own beloved,
I dreamed I was a tiger’s kin.
I dreamed that Eden lived inside me,
And when I breathed a garden came,
I dreamed I knew all of Creation,
I dreamed I knew the Creator’s name.
I dreamed–and this dream was the finest–
That all I dreamed was real and true,
And we would live in joy forever,
You in me, and me in you.
– Clive Barker
The man who has progressed through being a sinner to being a saint has progressed from one illusion to another.
– J. Krishnamurti
Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.
– Truman Capote
How cruel—to forbid people to want what they think is good for them.
– Marcus Aurelius
An ounce of doing things is worth a pound of theorizing.
– Wallace D. Wattles
Baker Street
by Gerry Rafferty
Winding your way down on Baker Street
Light in your head and dead on your feet
Well, another crazy day
You’ll drink the night away
And forget about ev’rything
This city desert makes you feel so cold
It’s got so many people, but it’s got no soul
And it’s taken you so long
To find out you were wrong
When you thought it held everything
You used to think that it was so easy
You used to say that it was so easy
But you’re tryin’, you’re tryin’ now
Another year and then you’d be happy
Just one more year and then you’d be happy
But you’re cryin’, you’re cryin’ now
Way down the street there’s a light in his place
He opens the door, he’s got that look on his face
And he asks you where you’ve been
You tell him who you’ve seen
And you talk about anything
He’s got this dream about buying some land
He’s gonna give up the booze and the one-night stands
And then he’ll settle down
In some quiet little town
And forget about ev’rything
But you know he’ll always keep movin’
You know he’s never gonna stop movin’
‘Cause he’s rollin’, he’s the rolling stone
When you wake up, it’s a new mornin’
The sun is shinin’, it’s a new mornin’
You’re goin’, you’re goin’ home
The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.
– Toni Morrison
The hardest role to play is the one where you play yourself and allow yourself to remove the mask and be yourself.
– Vadim Zeland
Democracy is not something you watch.
Democracy is something you practice.
If enough of us take that approach, we are going to be all right.
– Ethan Nichtern
If you have known how to compose your life, you have done a great deal more than the person who knows how to compose a book. You have done more than the one who has taken cities and empires.
– Michel De Montaigne
There are powers above and shapes written in the sky which sound in your own soul, which concern you most vitally, and which belong to the Godhead as much as do you in your innermost self.
– Hans Kayser
Don’t be overheard complaining … not even to yourself.
– Marcus Aurelius
An internal state of revolution: “You should always be internally ready for a complete change”
– Krishnamurti
The paradigm of philosophical interaction is the quiet conversation of friends who have an intimate knowledge of one another’s character and situations.
– Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire
The truth does not require your participation in order to exist, Bullshit does.
– Terence McKenna
Large amounts of money aren’t made by buying what everybody likes—they’re made by buying what everybody underestimates.
– Howard Marks
In the life of the Spirit, you are always at the beginning.
– Ralph H. Blum
I was bold in the pursuit of knowledge, never fearing to follow truth and reason to whatever results they led, and bearding every authority which stood in their way.
– Thomas Jefferson
If you’re really truthful with yourself, it’s a wonderful guidance.
– Charlie Chaplin
We must think of Hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.
– C. S. Lewis
What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross.
What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage.
– Ezra Pound
I sense we are experiencing, under the surface, a deep crisis of eros — regenerative life-force energy — but it is difficult to disentangle this from all the other strands of our hyperconnected world system. We live in a society now marked by what philosopher Byung-Chul Hahn accurately calls “compulsive hypervigilance:” We can’t escape from each other; we can’t escape from the fate of the Earth; we can’t escape from information overload and a pornographic level of too-intimate over-sharing. We have no access to Mystery. We can’t get lost. We are always visible, yet constantly in danger of disappearing.
– Daniel Pinchbeck
I’ll Keep It With Mine
You will search, babe, at any cost
But how long, babe, can you search for what is not lost?
Everybody will help you
Some people are very kind
But if I can save you any time
Come on, give it to me
I’ll keep it with mine
I can’t help it if you might think I am odd
If I say I’m not loving you not for what you are
But for what you’re not
Everybody will help you
Discover what you set out to find
But if I can save you any time
Come on, give it to me
I’ll keep it with mine
The train leaves at half past ten
But it’ll be back in the same old spot again
The conductor
He’s still stuck on the line
And if I can save you any time
Come on, give it to me
I’ll keep it with mine
– Bob Dylan
I have always insisted on justice for all, the world over, because justice is indivisible and injustice anywhere is a threat against justice everywhere. I will not sit idly by when I see an unjust war taking place and fail to take a stand against it. I will continue to express my opposition to this wrong policy.
– Martin Luther King Jr.
As a nation, we may take pride in the fact that we are softhearted; but we cannot afford to be soft-headed. We must always be wary of those who with sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal preach the “ism” of appeasement. We must especially beware of that small group of selfish men who would clip the wings of the American eagle in order to feather their own nests.
– Franklin D Roosevelt
Sooner or later … we have to risk everything in order to gain everything. We have to gamble on the invisible and risk all that we can see and taste and feel. But we know the risk is worth it, because there is nothing more insecure than the transient world.
– Thomas Merton
vulnerability doesn’t mean telling others what happened to us from across a cafe table or from behind a microphone
and then going home from the experience feeling just as alone as you did before
vulnerability means allowing your human heart blanket to get sewn to other heart blankets
it’s about connection
we don’t share for status
we do it for synergy
we don’t confess for clout
we do it to build community
we tell our tale
to invite others
to tell theirs
it’s the sacred cycle
of storytelling
we gather in a circle of trust and
say “here is my journey”
then we listen to
the other journeys
that are shared
we take space
then we give space
we pour
then we absorb
we speak
then we listen
we are storytellers
then we are witnesses
vulnerability isn’t just about
grave digging in our past
to expose our skeletons
it’s about sewing quilts
here is my patch
here is your patch
here is their patch
here is us
here is our story
– john “patchwork heart” roedel
Becoming aware
That the burning bush
Is a continuing reality
Changes everything.
– Stuart Higginbotham
Yes
by Muriel Rukeyser
It’s like a tap-dance
Or a new pink dress,
A shit-naive feeling
Saying yes.
Some say Good morning
Some say God bless
Some say Possibly
Some say yes.
Some say Never
Some say Unless
It’s stupid and lovely
To rush into Yes.
What can it mean?
It’s just like life,
One thing to you
One thing to your wife.
Some go local
Some go express
Some can’t wait
To answer yes.
Some complain
Of strain and stress
The answer may be
No for Yes.
Some like failure
Some like success
Some like Yes Yes
Yes Yes Yes.
Open your eyes
Dream but don’t guess.
Your biggest surprise
Come after Yes.
I can hardly hold this pen for the blisters all over my hands, can hardly see for the waterfalls of sweat, and am peeling too like a drenched billboard. Oh, oh, oh, the heat! It comes round corners at you like an animal with windmill arms. As I enter my bedroom, it stuns, thuds, throttles, spins me round by my soaking hair, lays me flat as a mat and bat-blind on my boiled and steaming bed. We keep oozing from the ice-cream counters to the chemist’s. Cold beer is bottled God. If ever, for a second, a wind, (but wind’s no word for this snailslow sizzle- puff), protoplasmically crawls from the suffering still sea, it makes a noise like H.D.’s poems crackling in a furnace.
– Dylan Thomas
The reason why there is all this colossal variety and all these patterns … is that Nature is a poet—and is simply having a wonderful time making all this variety.
– Alan Watts
Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.
– Lawrence Ferlinghetti
In reality, however, individuation is an expression of that biological process simple or complicated as the case may be by which every living thing becomes what it was destined to become from the beginning. This process naturally expresses itself in man as much psychically as somatically.
– Carl Jung
So let places be bad if they’re bad. If there weren’t awful places to be from there’d be nowhere to grow up and run away from.
– Neil Hilborn
Please, let me die with one or two of my pop cultural saints still intact. Don’t let me open my feed tomorrow to learn that even Keanu Reeves and Dolly Parton are terrible people who do terrible things concealed behind a veneer of enlightened compassion.
– Francesca Leader
All the books of the world
will not bring you happiness,
but build a secret path
toward your heart.
what you need is in you:
the sun, the stars, the moon,
the illumination you were seeking
shines up from within you.
the quest for wisdom
made you comb the libraries.
now every page speaks the truth
that flashes forth from you.
– Hermann Hesse, Books
All deep things are song. It seems somehow the very central essence of us, song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls!
– Thomas Carlyle
Habit energy is pushing us; it pushes us to do things without our being aware. Sometimes we do something without knowing we’re doing it. Even when we don’t want to do something, we still do it. Sometimes we say, “I didn’t want to do it, but it’s stronger than me, it pushed me.” So that is a seed, a habit energy, which may have come from many generations in the past. We have inherited a lot.
With mindfulness, we can become aware of the habit energy that has been passed down to us. We might see that our parents or grandparents were also very weak in ways similar to us. We can be aware without judgment that our negative habits come from these ancestral roots. We can smile at our shortcomings, at our habit energy. With awareness, we have a choice; we can act another way. We can end the cycle of suffering right now.
– Thích Nhất Hạnh
It would be better, think they, if Heaven were above and Hell below – anywhere outside, but not within. But that comfort has been knocked from under us. There are no places to go to, either for reward or punishment. The place is always here and now, in your own person and according to your own fancy . . . You are the author, director and actor all in one: the drama is always going to be your own life, not some one else’s. A beautiful, terrible, ineluctable drama, like a suit made of your own skin. Would you want it otherwise? Could you invent a better drama?
– Henry Miller
And all the time — such is the tragi-comedy of our situation — we continue to clamor for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more “drive”, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or “creativity”. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
– C S Lewis
Every student needs someone who says, simply, “You mean something. You count.”
– Tony Kushner
The emotionally intelligent person knows that love is a skill, not a feeling, and will require trust, vulnerability, generosity, humor, sexual understanding, and selective resignation. The emotionally intelligent person awards themselves the time to determine what gives their working life meaning and has the confidence and tenacity to try to find an accommodation between their inner priorities and the demands of the world. The emotionally intelligent person knows how to hope and be grateful, while remaining steadfast before the essentially tragic structure of existence. The emotionally intelligent person knows that they will only ever be mentally healthy in a few areas and at certain moments, but is committed to fathoming their inadequacies and warning others of them in good time, with apology and charm… There are few catastrophes, in our own lives or in those of nations, that do not ultimately have their origins in emotional ignorance.
– Alain de Botton
Why is it that the look of another person looking at you is different from everything else in the Cosmos? That is to say, looking at lions or tigers or Saturn or the Ring Nebula or at an owl or at another person from the side is one thing, but finding yourself looking in the eyes of another person looking at you is something else. And why is it that one can look at a lion or a planet or an owl or at someone’s finger as long as one pleases, but looking into the eyes of another person is, if prolonged past a second, a perilous affair?
– Walker Percy
There is no one
you’re betraying
in your changes
when you become the whole wild song
of what you are.
– Joseph Fasano
I can’t imagine a really good writer not having a political awareness. In your country I was shocked and frightened by the lack of political awareness on the part of intellectuals.
– Max Frisch
All the people I’ve known who have received a terminal diagnosis have gotten serious about joy, forgiveness, simple pleasures…and have been able to find good-enough peace toward people who did unforgivable damage to them and their families.
– Anne Lamott
The best thing to do is to consider everything as unknown.
– Francis Ponge
the flowers
that hide my poverty
have bloomed
– Issa
Nothing is so invisible as an unpleasant truth. Though it is held before our eyes, pushed under our noses, rammed down our throats — we know it not.
– Eric Hoffer
Everything is dual; everything has poles; everything has its pair of opposites; like and unlike are the same; opposites are identical in nature, but different in degree; extremes meet; all truths are but half-truths; all paradoxes may be reconciled.
– The Kybalion
One of the wonders of the world, and perhaps the wonder of all wonders – is people’s capacity to say what they don’t understand, as though they did, and to believe they are thinking this when they are merely saying it to themselves.
– Paul Valéry
It is the client who knows what hurts, what directions to go, what problems are crucial, what experiences have been deeply buried.
– Carl Rogers
There are, I fear, intellectually fashionable people all around us who would gladly rip out the hardwood floors of our tradition to put down cheap, trendy carpet.
Their ideas will age about as well as orange shag.
– Paul J. Pastor
Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything.
– Alan Watts
God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.
– Alan Watts
People around you, constantly under the pull of their emotions, change their ideas by the day or by the hour, depending on their mood. You must never assume that what people say or do in a particular moment is a statement of their permanent desires.
– Robert Greene
Bad experiences, if you do not become trapped by them, are actually blessings in disguise. In my life, difficulties have been my greatest teacher. They really helped me to transform.
– Sogyal Rinpoche
self-penned obituary again the snow
– Alan Summers
There is something extraordinary in our relationship to books. The book is the Door—the Dream of the other that doesn’t escape us—that dreams us and waits for us. What is magnificent about books is that they can wait for us.
– Hélène Cixous
The individual who wishes to be better than he is must live better than he does now.
– Manly P. Hall
Poetry is not about language, but about what happens when language gets impossible.
– Alice Oswald
When people overtly display some trait, such as confidence or hypermasculinity, they are most often concealing the contrary reality.
– Robert Greene
why do people believe that refusing to be cleansed by the blood of Christ is peak intellectualism
– Hadas Weiss
Real poetry is ripe for a renaissance.
– Timothy Green
all of him was torso was body was ribs because they knew adam was where knowing began
– Gboyega Odubanjo
Jung once observed that our neuroses were in fact our private religions, that is, where the bulk of our spirit is actually invested.
– James Hollis
A peahen grooms
herself on the parapet
while breezes ruffle
the sunlit paddy field
– Kim Dorman
You currently live in a time when the world is infected. It is infected with the sickness of the illusion of and glorification of independence.
– Teal Swan
Trying hard to turn confusion into humility, anxiety into empathy.
– matthew remski
We must not forget, however, that this ‘affluence’ is an affluence of technological products. And it is counterbalanced by the creation of new ‘shortages’: of space, air, time, and the like.
– Jacques Ellul
People with the biggest hearts attract the most draining, disrespectful and disloyal people.
– Jacklena Bentley
Father opens European, Dutch books;
Child reads T’ang, Sung verse.
Sharing this single lamp,
each traces his own source.
Father reads on and never rests,
child, tired, thinks of chestnuts, yams.
I’m ashamed I am, in spirit, so far from father,
who, eighty years of age, has no mist in his eyes.
– Ema Saikō (tr. Hiroaki Sato)
Why can’t white Christian people see Donald Trump for who he is? Why are they so obsessed with a man who represents everything they oppose?
– Kenny Akers
The ego is not a source of strength. It is weakness in disguise.
Inside there is invincible strength. Remove the cloud of the mind’s ego, and the inner power will be free to shine.
– Rabbi Tzvi Freeman
Politics is just a distraction while our primary reality (ecosystem collapse, resource depletion, and societal breakdown) unfolds. We’re arguing over left and right while the world burns.
– @SonofScience
That’s not chaos or disorder. Yes it’s messy but that’s a good thing! It’s democracy…
– Marianne Williamson
Jesús. The withering light, the gusts of hairdryer heat off the fields..the frantic insects. Time to close the shutters and hide.
– James McConachie
I’ve wondered if the internet, that concentration killer, might actually aid poetry in this regard. The unit of currency is becoming the poem, rather than the book. Individual poems often ricochet around the internet and gain a significant and diverse readership, whereas even prize-winning books are invisible beyond the poetry world. This is not necessarily bad, as I say, since the individual poem is actually the unit of currency in poetry. There’s something both liberating and terrifying about the nature of poetry’s “guild.” The bar for entry is very high, but a single poem can gain you access.
– Christian Wiman’s review of Seamus Heaney’s letters
Ledge
by Kevin Young
No use telling
the dead what
you’ve learned since
they’ve learnt it too—
how to go on
without you, the mercy
of morning, or moving,
the light that persists
even if.
✶
Beauty is as beauty
does, my mother says,
who is beautiful & speaks
loud so she can be understood
unlike poets who can’t
talk to save their lives
so they write.
✶
It’s like a language,
loss—
can be
learned only
by living—there—
✶
What anchors us
to this thirst
& earth, its threats
& thinnesses—
its ways of waning
& making the most of—
of worse & much
worse—if not
this light lifting
up over the ridge
The only way for anyone to be consistently happy is to understand that the feeling of happiness is simply about alignment with the Source within.
– Abraham-Hicks
I sing the wind around
And hear myself return
To nothingness, alone.
The loneliest thing I know
Is my own mind at play.
– Teddy Roethke
To survive, you must tell stories.
– Umberto Eco
I’ve always liked things I can just trance out to. Because what that means is that you’ve escaped the chafe of time. Often when you’re bored, it’s that friction between you and time.
– Geoff Dyer
There is a power that takes care of everything for you. This is the truth. If you leave everything alone, if you stop worrying and worrying, if you stop imagining, then everything will be alright. Happiness is your own nature.
– Robert Adams
Don’t be a writer. Be, as James Baldwin called himself, a “re-writer.”
– @tamaranopper
not quite Morse
the code we’re observing
pulsing star
– @hegelincanada
You and me,
a story of infinite possibilities,
and boundless love..
– @chandanas
AM:107
One day, everyone stopped over-thinking. We started thinking just as much as we should, and not any more than necessary. There were no more misunderstandings whatsoever. Minor disagreements were forgotten, not turned into proof of larger things. Trivial errors of speech or judgment were just as important as items on the breakfast menu: you chose waffles and I chose eggs and it was a god damn miracle.
– Amelia Gray
my kids are playing guitar together in the attic, and this is maybe why I had them.
– Amy Stuber
Life isn’t a hundred meter race
against your friends,
but a lifelong marathon against yourself.
– Haemin Sunim
Muad’Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It’s shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad’Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson.
– Frank Herbert, Dune
That’s the main thing. As long as you’re wanting to be thinner, smarter, more enlightened, less uptight, or whatever it might be, somehow you’re always going to be approaching your problem with the very same logic that created it to begin with: you’re not good enough. That’s why the habitual pattern never unwinds itself when you’re trying to improve, because you go about it in exactly the same habitual style that caused all the pain to start. There’s a life-affirming teaching in Buddhism, which is that Buddha, which means “awake,” is not someone you worship. Buddha is not someone you aspire to; Buddha is not somebody who was born more than two thousand years ago and was smarter than you’ll ever be.
Buddha is our inherent nature— our buddha nature—and what that means is that if you’re going to grow up fully, the way that it happens is that you begin to connect with the intelligence that you already have. It’s not like some intelligence that’s going to be transplanted into you. If you’re going to be fully mature, you will no longer be imprisoned in the childhood feeling that you always need to protect yourself or shield yourself because things are too harsh. If you’re going to be a grown-up—which I would define as being completely at home in your world no matter how difficult the situation—it’s because you will allow something that’s already in you to be nurtured. You allow it to grow, you allow it to come out, instead of all the time shielding it and protecting it and keeping it buried.
– Pema Chodron
It is simply out of the question that God ‘helps’ the Germans or the French or the English [or the American!]. God does not even ‘help’ us Swiss. God helps justice and love. God helps the kingdom of heaven, and that exists across all national boundaries. … The foolish mixing of patriotism, war enthusiasm, and Christian faith could one day lead to the bitterest disappointment [Spoiler alert: It did]. … We will not join in drinking this intoxicating potion. We want to look steadfastly and unwaveringly here to God, who loves everyone equally, who is above all the nations, from whom all have similarly departed, and from whose glory they have fallen short.
– Karl Barth
Faith is not a hard, unchanging thing you cling to through the vicissitudes of life. Those who try to make it into this are destined to become brittle, shatterable creatures. Faith never grows harder, never so deviates from its nature and becomes actually destructive, than in the person who refuses to admit that faith is change.
– Christian Wiman
Woe unto those who call evil good
and good evil,
who put darkness for light
and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet
and sweet for bitter.
– Isaiah 5:20
To those who are not accustomed to it the inner beauty appears as ugliness because humanity in general inclines to the outer and knows nothing of the inner.
– Kandinsky
So many great things never get written just because writers are pressured to create novelty, to spit out products, to avoid repeating any parts of their work. But sometimes a truth unfolds over a lifetime, and the writer has to reorganize, repeat, salvage old parts to build something new. Don’t let a consumerist culture of novelty get in the way of remaking yourself, slowly finding where the pieces belong, saying the one great thing you have to say.
– Joseph Fasano
Voyages II
—And yet this great wink of eternity,
Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings,
Samite sheeted and processioned where
Her undinal vast belly moonward bends,
Laughing the wrapt inflections of our love;
Take this Sea, whose diapason knells
On scrolls of silver snowy sentences,
The sceptred terror of whose sessions rends
As her demeanors motion well or ill,
All but the pieties of lovers’ hands.
And onward, as bells off San Salvador
Salute the crocus lustres of the stars,
In these poinsettia meadows of her tides,—
Adagios of islands, O my Prodigal,
Complete the dark confessions her veins spell.
Mark how her turning shoulders wind the hours,
And hasten while her penniless rich palms
Pass superscription of bent foam and wave,—
Hasten, while they are true,—sleep, death, desire,
Close round one instant in one floating flower.
Bind us in time, O Seasons clear, and awe.
O minstrel galleons of Carib fire,
Bequeath us to no earthly shore until
Is answered in the vortex of our grave
The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.
– Hart Crane
Friends, we must grab our paintbrushes, our pens, the instruments of our truth. We must retrieve, bring forth and hold high the torch of the light that knows no opposite, that doesn’t polarize and shun the darkness but that boldly illuminates it. It is time for a rally of reality, we need leaders to lead the march out of illusion, out of the fracture of separation into the new paradigm. We are in the time of the end and the time of the beginning. Feed the new way of wholeness, of this unitive, creative consciousness with your all. If this is your intention, Life is on your side.
– Chelan Harkin
When my mother died, I fell apart. My father wanted to control me. As a consequence, I ran away to America. I was a ‘runaway girl’ from France who married an American and moved to New York City. I’m not sure I would have continued as an artist had I remained in Paris because of the family setup.
– Louise Bourgeois
John Cassavetes, who was more or less my age, now he was a great director. I can’t imagine myself as his equal in cinema. For me he represents a certain cinema that’s way up above.
– Jean-Luc Godard
Mercy means that we no longer constantly judge everybody’s large and tiny failures, foolish hearts, dubious convictions, and inevitable bad behavior.
– Anne Lamott
To be choicelessly aware of everything about you and within yourself, is meditation.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
These tiny fragments
of verse, helpless syllables
hewed out of nothing,
won’t stick in the throats
of the rulers of the realm
but might, like splinters
reflect sparks of light,
like stars at this time of night,
hewed out of nothing
like the rest of night.
– George Szirtes
Pride and self-hate belong inseparably together; they are two expressions of one process.
The central inner conflict is one between the constructive forces of the real self and the obstructive forces of the pride system, between healthy growth and the drive to prove in actuality the perfection of the idealized self.
– Karen Horney
the hypothetical landscapes of the conditional having become, finally, / our last, viable ground.
– Gustaf Sobin
You can only read the signs of the times if you have reference to signs outside of the times.
– Luke Burgis
Ultimately, the most romantic thing is the heart, and every sensitive person carries in himself old cities enclosed by ancient walls.
– Robert Walser
climate collapse and nazis are coming
climate collapse and nazis are coming
climate collapse and nazis are coming
– Prof. Steve Austin
The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
– Joseph Conrad
The biggest competition you will ever have in this world, is the competition between your disciplined mind and undisciplined mind.
– James Arthur Ray
Telling the Silences, incendiary within every code.
– Andrew Joron
I wanna see Kamala doing all the things Trump cannot: lifting small objects, opening water bottles, dancing salsa on Univision.
– Gary Shteyngart
Kamala Harris is going to be America’s first woman president and she will get there by defeating the most anti-woman ticket in American history.
– David Rothkopf
My computer has only seen my scowl for months. Now it sees a slight glimmer in my eye. France did it – we can too.
– Julie Carr
The knowledge is never stored where you think it is
– River Kenna
Enlightenment or awakening is not the creation of a new state of affairs but the recognition of what already is.
– Alan Watts
If it is wrong to call modern society a megamachine, we still should not forget that some people greatly desire to make it one.
– Jacques Ellul
Something about failure — the idea of being hovers over the face of failure, hovers more clearly over the face of failure than over the brilliance of success. The successful: a parade of scarecrows.
– George Oppen
Keep writing in the dark: a record of the night, or words that pulled you from depths of unknowing, words that flew through your mind, opened as flowers of a tree that blooms only once in a lifetime: words that may have the power to make the sun rise again.
– Denise Levertov
If there’s one thing to obsess about it’s not politics or whatever is happening on the news.
It’s your health.
Much higher ROI than anything else you fill your mind with.
– Dan Go
Being alive was the hard part.
– Toni Morrison, Beloved
Wherever God is, there is peace. Wherever God is, there is joy. If there is no peace, no joy, not grace, it is not God.
– Iyanla Vanzant
Failure is very cleansing, and success is very confusing.
– M. Night Shyamalan
Each human is a point of orientation through which the Universe experiences itself.
– Adyashanti
In some poems the author is doomed to hear the voice of the violin that once helped her compose, in others the rumble of traincar that stopped her writing them. Poems can have the scent of flowers, smell of plums. In Pushkin I hear the waters of Tsarskoe Selo.
– Anna Akhmatova
Love
It does not speak as the preachers speak.
It does not worship
emperors. It breaks all laws
on earth.
Listen. Let Love
come into your life
like Christ overturning the money-tables-
even if your love of loves
betrays you;
even if you save
a single stranger;
if they nail you in the air among the birds.
– Joseph Fasano
Pure water longs for one who is thirsty.
– Shams of Tabriz
Chance favors the prepared mind.
– Louis Pasteur
You live out a totally different reality when you’re right within yourself.
– Nika Solé
To My Own Poem
Best case scenario —
you’ll be, my poem, read attentively,
discussed, remembered.
Worst comes to worst,
only read. A third option –
actually written,
but tossed into the trash a moment later.
The fourth and final possibility —
you slip away unwritten,
happily humming something to yourself.
– Wisława Szymborska, (Trans. Clare Cavanagh)
Blissfulness is a pleasant state of life energies that cannot be disturbed by physical, mental or emotional factors.
– Sadhguru
At the center of contemplation is this complete, global comprehension of a truth, not in its details but in its wholeness, not as an abstract matter of speculation, but apprehended in all that appeals to our affective powers so that it is appreciated and prized and savored.
– Thomas Merton
A political qualification today should include political vision.
– Marianne Williamson
Are you polluting the world or cleaning up the mess? You are responsible for your inner space; nobody else is, just as you are responsible for the planet. As within, so without: If humans clear inner pollution, then they will also cease to create outer pollution.
– Eckhart Tolle
i can love nothing deeply but intelligence… or rather one of those “sensibilities” that astonish the intelligence.
– paul valéry, (tr. marthiel and jackson mathews)
clear sky
taking a walk
in yesterday’s rain
– Herb Tate
Let the Gods change my dreams, but not my gift for
dreaming.
– Fernando Pessoa
I taste the good and bad in you and want them both.
– Anita Ofokansi
Some people are only able to use their imagination to dream up a worst case scenario. That does not, and has never, automatically made them correct. They just think it’s a less disappointing way to be wrong (which is also incorrect).
– Ashley C. Ford
A spirituality of
imperfection is far more
real & livable than the
spiritual bypassing of
mental hygiene &
spiritual correctness
– Andrew Kent Hagel
But for the time being, around my place at least, the air is untroubled, and I become aware for the first time today of the immense silence in which I am lost. Not a silence so much as a great stillness – for there are a few sounds: the creak of some bird in a juniper tree, an eddy of wind which passes and fades like a sigh, the ticking of the watch on my wrist – slight noises which break the sensation of absolute silence but at the same time exaggerate my sense of the surrounding, overwhelming peace. A suspension of time, a continuous present.
– Edward Abbey
The body / remains a house unaware of its rooms.
– Maggie Smith
The self divided is precisely where the self is authentically located. Authenticity is the perpetual dismemberment of being and not being a self, a being that is always in many parts, like a dream with a full cast. We all have identity crises because a single identity is a delusion of the monotheistic mind. We all have dispersed consciousness through all our body parts, wandering wombs; we are all hysterics. Authenticity is in the illusion, playing it, seeing through it from within as we play it, like an actor who sees through his mask and can only see in this way.
– James Hillman
Filled with a clutter of unsorted stuff a spark can set a man ablaze. What’s there heaped high among stored rubbish at a puff will burst in flame. No man can be aware of how inflammable he is, how prone to what can rage beyond control, unless the piled up litter of his life is known to him, and he is able to assess what hazard he is in, what could ignite. A man, disordered and undisciplined, lives in the peril of a panic flight before the onrush of a flaming wind. Does it now seem I seek to be profound? I stand on smoking ash and blackened ground.
– Dorsha Hayes
The marvels of daily life are exciting; no movie director can arrange the unexpected that you find in the street.
– Robert Doisneau
A constant image [in myths] is that of the conflict of the eagle and the serpent. The serpent bound to the earth, the eagle in spiritual flight – isn’t that conflict something we all experience? And then, when the two amalgamate, we get a wonderful dragon, a serpent with wings.
– Joseph Campbell
My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that.
– Lewis Carroll
The suffering which has not yet arisen should be avoided.
– Yoga Sutras of Pantanjali II:16, Smart Yoga, David Moore
We are unraveling our navels so that we may ingest the sun.
We are not afraid of the darkness.
We trust that the moon shall guide us.
We are determining the future at this very moment.
We know that the heart is the philosopher’s stone.
Our music is our alchemy.
– Saul Williams
Many paths lead from the foot of the mountain, but at the peak we all gaze at the single bright moon.
– Ikkyu
Poetry is translation. You take an emotion, an idea, a concept, and you turn it into an image, a memory, a story. You take a signal, and you build it a body.
– Guante
Psychological, emotional, relational, societal learning, healing, repatterning is the study of how to become increasingly more fit vehicles for the channeling of spirit.
– Chelan Harkin
Love knows no bounds,
sees through the disguises,
breaks every law,
sneaks over the borders,
is the true coyote.
Heedless of identities,
immune to authorities,
gently attending,
joyfully begetting,
love disables the guards,
exposes the tenderest meat.
In the end
love tricks us all
to live, to die,
to love the game,
to build a nest
and to fly away.
By the honey of bees,
the lightning’s lash
and the gut-red lava of birth,
love draws and erases
while feeling what keeps
outlasting this time
where the scrums of our souls
are reshaping the powers
that knowledge can only flaunt.
– George Gorman
We are fast moving into something, we are fast flung into something like asteroids cast into space by the death of a planet, we the people of earth are cast into space like burning asteroids and if we wish not to disintegrate into nothingness we must begin to now hold onto only the things that matter while letting go of all that doesn’t. For when all of our dust and ice deteriorates into the cosmos we will be left only with ourselves and nothing else. So if you want to be there in the end, today is the day to start holding onto your children, holding onto your loved ones; onto those who share your soul. Harbor and anchor into your heart justice, truth, courage, bravery, belief, a firm vision, a steadfast and sound mind. Be the person of meaningful and valuable thoughts. Don’t look to the left, don’t look to the right; we simply don’t have the time. Never be afraid of fear.
– C. JoyBell C.
I have a theory that the moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself. I have tried this experiment a thousand times and I have never been disappointed. The more I look at a thing, the more I see in it, and the more I see in it, the more I want to see. It is like peeling an onion. There is always another layer, and another, and another. And each layer is more beautiful than the last.
This is the way I look at the world. I don’t see it as a collection of objects, but as a vast and mysterious organism. I see the beauty in the smallest things, and I find wonder in the most ordinary events. I am always looking for the hidden meaning, the secret message. I am always trying to understand the mystery of life.
I know that I will never understand everything, but that doesn’t stop me from trying. I am content to live in the mystery, to be surrounded by the unknown. I am content to be a seeker, a pilgrim, a traveler on the road to nowhere.
– Henry Miller
Nothing limits intelligence more than ignorance; nothing fosters ignorance more than one’s own opinions; nothing strengthens opinions more than refusing to look at reality.
– Sheri S. Tepper
demagogue tries to sound as stupid as his listeners, so that they will think they are as smart as he is.
– Karl Kraus
I have spent my whole entire life trying to help people with what I thought were a whole bunch of different problems that turned out to be one single problem: being pulled away from our true nature.
– Martha Beck
This was the setting in which the most troubled and most precious days of my life were lived: an abode from which our adventurings flowed out, to flow back again like waves breaking on a lonely headland.
– Alain-Fournier
It’s hard to discount what every nerve in your body is telling you, even if it’s incorrect. Again, there’s that dilemma—you may know there’s not an emergency, but your feelings say that there is. It seems that, as developing infants, we need a pretty high proportion of good stuff to bad. Negative states are inevitable and normal, but if they outweigh the positive states, there’s going to be trouble ahead. Putting together ‘‘bonds’’ and ‘‘brains,’’ it seems that we need a secure attachment, with plenty of positive feelings, comfort, and stability, in order for our brains and minds to develop as they should. So this is not just about having a nice childhood with pleasant memories or the opposite, it’s literally about how well the brain develops and what working models, or templates, the infant brain is constructing in the midst of all these experiences.
– Susan Nathiel
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
– William Shakespeare
No country can be well governed unless its citizens as a body keep religiously before their minds that they are the guardians of the law, and that the law officers are only the machinery for its execution, nothing more.
– Mark Twain
The moon rose in the east and that was moon-rise. Six hours later it hung at its zenith between east and west, and that was south-moon-over. It set in the west and that was moon-down. Then it passed from sight and swung under the earth, between west and east. And when it was directly under the earth, that was south-moon-under.
– Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
You are so knitted into a day. You are within it; the day is as close as your skin. It is around your eyes; it is inside your mind. The day moves you, often it can weigh you down; or again it can raise you up. Yet the amazing fact is: this day vanishes. When you look behind you, you do not see your past standing there in a series of day shapes. You cannot wander back through the gallery of your past. Your days have disappeared silently and for ever. Your future time has not arrived yet. The only ground of time is the present moment.
– John O’Donohue
One person may be seriously injured, but recovers quickly. Another person may be less seriously injured, but is left in the throes of chronic pain. Still another receives no physical injury, undergoes no strain of muscular exertion, and yet becomes racked with neuromuscular pain. In a large measure, these individual differences may be assigned to differences in the nervous system’s reactions to stress. Whether stress is physical or mental, its general effects are essentially the same. Even when stress is solely centered in the mind, the body never escapes its harrowing effects…
– J.F. Vannerson, M.A., D.C.
To dance is to be out of yourself. Larger, more beautiful, more powerful.. This is power, it is glory on earth and it is yours for the taking.
– Agnes De Mille
We have reached a hastier and superficial rhythm, now that we believe we are in touch with a greater amount of people, more people, more countries. This is the illusion which might cheat us of being in touch deeply with the one breathing next to us. The dangerous time when mechanical voices, radios, telephones, take the place of human intimacies, and the concept of being in touch with millions brings a greater and greater poverty in intimacy and human vision.
– Anaïs Nin
No life is immune from suffering. When we’re in solidarity with people facing pain, injustice, war, oppression, colonization—the list goes on and on—we face immense pressure to despair, to become angry or dismissive. When reality is split dualistically between good and bad, right and wrong, we too are torn apart. Yet when we’re broken, we are most open to contemplation, or nondual thinking. We’re desperate to resolve our own terror, anger, and disillusionment, and so we allow ourselves to be led into the silence that holds everything together in wholeness.
The contemplative, nondual mind is not saying, ‘Everything is beautiful,’ even when it’s not. However, we may come to ‘Everything is still beautiful’ by contemplatively facing the conflict between how reality is and how we wish it could be. We must face dualistic problems, name good and evil, and differentiate between right and wrong … We can’t be naive … , but if we stay focused on this duality, we’ll become unlovable, judgmental, dismissive people. I’ve witnessed this pattern in myself. We must eventually find a bigger field, a wider frame, which we call nondual thinking.
Beginning with necessary, dualistic action and moving toward contemplation seems to be the … path these days. We see this pattern in Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr., and many others. Such people enter into the pain of society and have to go to God [the All, Source, Yahweh, Allah, use your wording] to find rest for their soul, because their souls are so torn by the broken, split nature of almost everything, including themselves.
We need both action and contemplation to have a whole spiritual journey. It doesn’t matter which comes first; action may lead us to contemplation and contemplation may lead us to action. But finally, they need and feed each other.
– Richard Rohr
Put a Woman in Charge
Way back when
In the beginning of time
Man made the fire then the wheel
Went from a horse to an automobile
He said, “the world is mine”
He took the oceans and the sky
He set the borders, built the walls
He won’t stop ‘til he owns it all
And here we are
Standing on the brink of disaster
Enough is enough is enough is enough
I know the answer
Put a woman in charge
(Put a woman in charge, put a woman in charge)
Put the women in charge
(Put the women in charge, put the women in charge)
Put a woman in charge
The time has come
We’ve got to turn this world around
Call the mothers
Call the daughters
We need the sisters of mercy now
She’ll be a hero
Not a fool
She’s got the power
To change the rules
She’s got something
That men don’t have
She is kind and she understands
So let the ladies
Do what they were born to do (ahh-ahh)
Raise the vibration
And make a better place for me and you
Put a woman in charge
Put a woman in charge
Put the women in charge
Put the women in charge
– Beth Nielsen Chapman / John Lewis Parker / Kevin Moore
It is hard for most of us to believe that both angels and demons mingle with humans on Earth. Yet tradition teaches that they are rarely seen in their essential form; they go about their business in plausibly devised appearances, looking like regular people in order to pass unnoticed.
They are instructed, in fact ordered, to affect the lives of men and women, either to raise them to higher consciousness or at least higher ethics, or to seduce them downward to the animal sphere.
Their common purpose is to allow us to exercise our free will, to choose.
This free will is the unique power granted to men and women and which we must exercise or eventually lose. If either angelic or demonic influence was always stronger than our free will, people would be compelled to be good or to be bad. Real choice would not exist and free will would simply be a comforting fantasy. But in the actual struggle of forces, a man or woman can choose to follow the light with difficulty and at some cost, or not. The great Cosmic Design requires us to force our souls through this eternal struggle.
– Lillian Firestone
Minor things can become moments of great revelation when encountered for the first time.
– Margot Fonteyn
For Wim Wenders, a dear friend of mine, filming is wild fun. For me, it is torture.
– Michelangelo Antonioni
I don’t like the clean-shaven boy with the necktie and the good job. I like desperate men, men with broken teeth and broken minds and broken ways. They interest me. They are full of surprises and explosions.
– Charles Bukowski
Man, I think people really underestimated how nice it is to get even a little bit excited about the future.
– Amber Sparks
We are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd.
– Lawrence Durrell
NIGHT
The cold remote islands
And the blue estuaries
Where what breathes, breathes
The restless wind of the inlets,
And what drinks, drinks
The incoming tide;
Where shell and weed
Wait upon the salt wash of the sea,
And the clear nights of stars
Swing their lights westward
To set behind the land;
Where the pulse clinging to the rocks
Renews itself forever;
Where, again on cloudless nights,
The water reflects
The firmament’s partial setting;
-O remember
In your narrowing dark hours
That more things move
Than blood in the heart.
– Louise Bogan
My eyes are painfully open, and I want to escape.
– Anaïs Nin
Don’t assume the posture of a wilted flower. When you sit erect you proclaim to yourself and the rest of the world that you going to be a warrior, a fully human being.
– Chögyam Trungpa
The technological environment is no longer a set of resources that we sometimes use (for work or distraction). … It is now our one and only living environment.
– Jacques Ellul
I have need of angels. Enough hell has swallowed me for too many years. But finally understand this–I have burned up one hundred thousand human lives already, from the strength of my pain.
– Antonin Artaud
In a society that capitalises on people’s sense of inadequacy, the most prevalent self-limiting story is bound to be “I am not worth it”. Unaddressed, it sabotages our best efforts to inquire compassionately into ourselves.
– Gabor Maté
Peace is the result of retraining your mind to process life as it is rather than as you think it should be.
– Wayne Dyer
If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.
– Nicholas Nassim Taleb
As the spiritual war intensifies, so do the guideposts from the divine. So does our capacity to love each other. So does our ability to say no to the way things have been, and yes to a whole new timeline.
– Nika Solé
Projections change the world into the replica of one’s own unknown face . . .The more projections are thrust in between the subject and the environment, the harder it is for the ego to see through its illusions.
– C.G. Jung
here’s a thing about those who believe that people can’t possibly give a shit about the future unless they have kids: clearly no one really matters to these self-obsessed jackasses except themselves & their own kids, a lot of us care about the future of the uh earth regardless
– R.O. Kwon
It is in the nature of political bodies always to see the evil in the opposite group, just as the individual has an ineradicable tendency to get rid of everything he does not know and does not want to know about himself by foisting it off on somebody else.
– Carl Jung
Blessings are not always delivered as we expect, but as they will serve us best.
– Anna Pereira
Nothing distracts you from the pursuit of pleasure, but if you apprehend a shock or suffering, you promptly try to shut it off and avoid it.
– Krishnamurti
It may be too late, but my research agenda includes trying to reclaim wellness from the capitalists.
– @tamaranopper
You want a God
that’s soft not-soft,
the old monk advised.
– The Old Monk
If you’re going to
dream poems
you’ve got to
write them down,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
Lord, I confess I want the clarity of catastrophe but not the catastrophe.
Like everyone else, I want a storm I can dance in.
I want an excuse to change my life.
– Franny Choi
You might have asked, How do I manage the shadow? Well, as you know, we don’t manage the shadow; we just try to avoid its managing us all the time. It’s the same with sin. We don’t avoid sin; it’s intrinsic to our humanity, a constant presence in our daily lives. But it’s been said that all the gods ask of us is not perfection-that’s reserved for them-but humility and the remembrance of them. This is why Jung said, quite tellingly, the greater
the light, the longer the shadow.
– James Hollis
The difference between poetry and its opposite is the difference between sadness and astonishment.
The difference between poetry and astonishment is the difference between sadness and its opposite.
The difference between a sad event and an astonished person has something to do with citizenship.
– Katie Peterson
Most of the people I know who have what I want—which is to say, purpose, heart, balance, gratitude, joy—are people with a deep sense of spirituality….They follow a brighter light than the glimmer of their own candle; they are part of something beautiful.
– Anne Lamott
Do you think of the United States as a reading culture? In Spain there are bookstores everywhere and people are reading on the street, in cafés, etc. I live in a city where there is not a single bookstore + cafe/ restaurant. Why?
– Jai Hamid Bashir
Be the poet who welcomes all poets into the community, not the one who judges whether their motives for writing are worthy enough to be taken seriously.
– Laura Kerr
The more you heal, the more you realize the people you chase when you’re broken are often the people you stay away from when you’re healing.
– Inner Practitioner
Don’t waste time
watching and reacting
to the minds of ‘others’.
Your own mind
causes more trouble
than the minds
of everyone put together.
– Mooji
Anxiety is the price of the ticket to life; intrapsychic depression is the by-product of our refusal to climb aboard.
– James Hollis
Yet the song above the dust
one day will rise above us.
– Ingeborg Bachmann (translated by Mark Anderson)
If I can keep you I should want to live forever.
– Franz Kafka, 1912
Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
– E.L. Doctorow
We have to return to the root of the problem, which is the mistaken belief that joy can be hoarded, seized, or commodified when the fact is that real joy is contagious.
– Scott Tusa
Late Prayers
by Jane Hirschfield
Tenderness does not choose its own uses.
It goes out to everything equally
Including rabbit and hawk.
Look: in the iron bucket,
single nail, a single ruby –
All the heavens and hells.
They rattle in the heart and make one sound.
I’m glad you haven’t settled for half-hearted healing or illusions of wholeness.
You continue the journey daily for the fullness of life.
You’re worthy.
– Dr. Thema
We should stop going around babbling about how we’re the greatest democracy on earth, when we’re not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarized republic.
– Gore Vidal
a meadow full
of flowers with names
I never learned
– @hegelincanada
We are not going back.
They’re not taking us back.
Our fight for the FUTURE
is also a fight
for FREEDOM.
– VICE PRESIDENT Kamala Harris
That’s what books are for, after all, to tell your stories, to hold them and keep them safe between our covers for as long as we’re able.
– Ruth Ozeki
Inniskeen Road: July Evening
The bicycles go by in twos and threes –
There’s a dance in Billy Brennan’s barn to-night,
And there’s the half-talk code of mysteries
And the wink-and-elbow language of delight.
Half-past eight and there is not a spot
Upon a mile of road, no shadow thrown
That might turn out a man or woman, not
A footfall tapping secrecies of stone.
I have what every poet hates in spite
Of all the solemn talk of contemplation.
Oh, Alexander Selkirk knew the plight
Of being king and government and nation.
A road, a mile of kingdom, I am king
Of banks and stones and every blooming thing.
– Patrick Kavanagh
He might have been deeped in the Oaze!
Or
by the brumous numen drawn on
or
in preclear visibility
by the invisible wind laboured
– David Jones
Throwing Children
by Ross Gay
It is really something when a kid who has a hard time becomes a kid who’s having a good time in no small part thanks to you throwing that kid in the air again and again on a mile long walk home from the Indian joint as her mom looks sideways at you like you don’t need to keep doing this because you’re pouring with sweat and breathing a little bit now you’re getting a good workout but because the kid laughs like a horse up there laughs like a kangaroo beating her wings against the light because she laughs like a happy little kid and when coming down and grabbing your forearm to brace herself for the time when you will drop her which you don’t and slides her hand into yours as she says for the fortieth time the fiftieth time inexhaustible her delight again again again and again and you say give me til the redbud tree or give me til the persimmon tree because she knows the trees and so quiet you almost can’t hear through her giggles she says ok til the next tree when she explodes howling yanking your arm from the socket again again all the wolves and mourning doves flying from her tiny throat and you throw her so high she lives up there in the tree for a minute she notices the ants organizing on the bark and a bumblebee carousing the little unripe persimmon in its beret she laughs and laughs as she hovers up there like a bumblebee like a hummingbird up there giggling in the light like a giddy little girl up there the world knows how to love.
Most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be.
– William Faulkner
I’m attracted to characters who are conscious of trying to figure out what they’re doing here, and what’s the best way to do it. Maybe that’s because I’m engaged in the same thing and I either have, or I haven’t!
– Michael Mann
Solidarity with a group does not bring you membership with a group.
– Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethicist
Writing poetry is like tearing open your heart to find a new & better heart within.
– Zeeshan Joonam
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
Every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Last year I abstained
this year I devour
without guilt
which is also an art
– Margaret Atwood
The man who asks a question is a fool for a minute, the man who does not ask is a fool for life.
– Confucius
I’m, you know, still here,
tulip, resin, temporary—
– Jean Valentine
Dear Breonna,
How many times, I ask,
how many times
have I chased the thought
of writing to you,
of catching the poem where
it cannot leave,
of knocking open the door to a grief
– Afaa Michael Weaver
There never was night that had no morn.
– Dinah Craik
So fine was the morning except for a streak of wind here and there that the sea and sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea.
– Virginia Woolf
Some of our most powerful emotions, especially those connected with loss, are not beautiful, and Apollo does not necessarily make them beautiful. He makes them bearable. The object is not to create something pretty, but to offer one’s grief to the god, naked and unashamed. This is different from wallowing in it, which is not an act of offering. Grief can be horrific, but expressing it in this way changes the way we experience it.
– Liz Greene, Apollo’s Chariot
No matter how intolerable an event was, it only has to be repeated three times for you to invest it with a little nostalgia.
– Don Paterson
The unwonted lengths one will go to
to feel anything but the life they are given
– Joaquín Zihuatanejo
In university they don’t tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
– Doris Lessing
Discontent, blaming, complaining, self-pity cannot serve as a foundation for a good future, no matter how much effort you make.
– Eckhart Tolle
God is at home, it’s we who have gone out for a walk.
– Meister Eckhart
It is the nature of the mind to wander. You are not the mind.
– Ramana Maharshi
A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
This does not seek a remedy
this does not need a balm
this needs an ending
– Dionne Brand
What one seems to want in art is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.
– Elizabeth Bishop
I feel like Penny Lane at a record shop when I walk into the right kind of bookstore and see my internet friends on the shelves.
– Claire Hopple
buyer’s remorse
the billionaire’s
waning influence
buyer’s remorse
mauling the cybertruck
raccoons
buyer’s remorse
overthrown by orcas
a yacht regatta
– @jennfel
Study logic and math, because once you’ve mastered them, you won’t fear any book.
– @naval
I’m terrified at the moral apathy, the death of the heart, which is happening in my country.
– James Baldwin
Do you really think that my music is devoid of religious antecedents? Do you wish to put an artist’s soul under restraint? Do you find it difficult to conceive that one who sees mystery in everything — in the song of the sea, in the curve of the horizon, in the wind and in the call of the birds — should have been attracted to a religious subject? I have no profession of faith to utter to you: but, whichever my creed may be, no great effort on my part was needed to raise me to the height of d’Annunzio’s mysticism. I can assure you that my music was written in exactly the spirit as if it had been commissioned for performance in church.
– Claude Debussy
If someone asked me “What are the signs of love?” I would have said without hesitation, It’s the familiarity and the removal of cost, And to find yourself not having to lie, and the embarrassment removed between you two, and see yourself acting in your nature without trying to be something else so she likes you, And that you two keep silent and the silence gets delicious, And that one of you two talk and listening gets delicious.
– Mustafa Mahmoud
SUMMER AT BLUE CREEK, NORTH CAROLINA
There was no water at my grandfather’s
when I was a kid and would go for it
with two zinc buckets. Down the path,
past the cow by the foundation where
the fine people’s house was before
they arranged to have it burned down.
To the neighbor’s cool well. Would
come back with pails too heavy,
so my mouth pulled out of shape.
I see myself, but from the outside.
I keep trying to feel who I was,
and cannot. Hear clearly the sound
the bucket made hitting the sides
of the stone well going down,
but never the sound of me.
– Jack Gilbert
I never heard him make a harmonic mistake. Never. He organized his materials and chose his harmonic palette with complete mastery. He could play any of the tunes in his book in any of the twelve keys. He often practiced this way, moving around the strangest, most awful keys without any difficulty. It was frightening. Sometimes he would search for weeks, even months, for the right keys to use with the trio. More than anything else, his concentration and unswerving focus on his art were the most amazing and inspiring phenomena to me.
– Warren Bernhardt, On Bill Evans
Kimberly Ann Johnson says in Call of the Wild that, “The term ‘felt sense’ was first coined in the 1950’s by a young researcher named Eugene Gendlin who was working with the psychologist Carl Rogers.” Gendlin says in Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams, “What is split off, not felt, remains the same. When it is felt, it changes. Most people don’t know this! They think that by not permitting the feeling of their negative ways they make themselves good. On the contrary, that keeps these negatives static, the same from year to year. A few moments of feeling it in your body allows it to change. If there is in you something bad or sick or unsound, let it inwardly be and breathe. That’s the only way it can evolve and change into the form it needs.” But having been taught to ignore self-moving desires and warnings, such vital gut feelings have atrophied for many. But such a felt sense can strengthen perception in qualitatively rich ways. Eugene Gendlin elaborates beautifully on how a felt sense: “…includes more than the emotion – many things, most of them not clearly known. It is a bodily quality, like heavy, sticky, jumpy, fluttery, tight. At first it has no fitting label. It is the way the middle of your body feels. … A dream typically leaves a felt sense. If it is already there, give it your attention. It isn’t plain fear, joy, or sadness; it feels a unique way for which there is no word. … When you are angry, you recognize that. No puzzle, nothing vague, you’re mad. But if you relax a little, you can sense: ‘There is more involved in the whole thing.’ For example, you may sense a breathless, hurried quality, a sense that you’d like to stay mad – you don’t want to stop and see that you’re a little wrong. That uneasy quality has no name of its own. Where would you find that? Under the anger, in it, around it, at the edge of the anger. But words like ‘edge’ do not describe it literally. The fuzzy felt sense is in the center of your body. And it includes more than wanting to stay mad. It is a fuzzy whole, a quality. … [Or, with fear, he says] You can let it come by relaxing, leaning back, and sensing in your body, the whole of your discomfort with this part of your life. Don’t think one specific aspect…. Referring to ‘the whole business’ lets you sense the global discomfort in your body. … The fear has ‘more to it.’ You can sense the rest of the iceberg under the fear. … You can sense that it has a life of its own if you try to talk yourself out of it. It will resist. If you say something about it, and then attend back to the felt sense, you can sense that what you said is wrong. … You cannot control when it opens. Something comes directly from it when it opens. Or, perhaps you accidentally thought something right, and it opens in response. … A felt sense is unmistakably meaningful, and yet we don’t know what it is. In contrast, we know the emotions when we have them. … A strong emotion may lead us one way, but the felt sense of the whole situation might lead us quite another way. In anger we lose track, we act from less than we know. In contrast, the felt sense brings more than we know. … Your felt sense will include the fear but may let you sense how your life would move forward in an expansive way if you went toward the situation. … A step from a felt sense gives an inner stirring – something is glad to move and speak. … If you can let a felt sense come…you will find the guiding sense there. You can feel what step is expansive and forward-moving, life enhancing, as against what feels constricting…. Step by step you can move with this guiding sense.
– George Gorman
Someday we’ll lie in dirt.
With mouths and mushrooms,
the earth will accept our apology.
– Franny Choi
The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.
– Rabindranath Tagore
THE WORLD SEEMS…
The world seems so palpable
And dense: people and things
And the landscapes
They inhabit or move through.
Words, on the other hand,
Are so abstract—they’re
Made of empty air
Or black scratches on a page
That urge us to utter
Certain sounds.
And us:
Poised in the middle, aware
Of the objects out there
Waiting patiently to be named,
As if the right words
Could save them.
And don’t
They deserve it?
So much hidden inside each one,
Such a longing
To become the beloved.
And inside us: the sounds
That could extend that blessing—
How they crowd our mouths,
How they press up against
Our lips, which are such
A narrow exit for a joy so desperate.
– Gregory Orr
Create all the happiness you are able to create, remove all the misery you are able to remove. Every day will allow you to add something to the pleasure of others, or to diminish something of their pains.
– Jeremy Bentham
I think you have to hope, and hope in this sense is not a prize or a gift, but something you earn through study, through resisting the ease of despair, and through digging tunnels, cutting windows, opening doors, or finding the
people who do these things.
– Rebecca Solnit
One thing I like about Zen. It doesn’t believe in achievement.
– Agnes Martin
I make films for my friends & I am glad that they understand them.
– Luis Buñuel
The story comes from China, and tells of an old painter who invited friends to see his newest picture. This picture showed a park and a narrow footpath that ran along a stream and through a grove of trees, culminating at the door of a little cottage in the background. When the painter’s friends, however, looked around for the painter, they saw that he was gone – that he was in the picture. There, he followed the little path that led to the door, paused before it quite still, turned, smiled, and disappeared through the narrow opening.
– Walter Benjamin
a space-filling individual is a body; a time-filling individual is a soul.
– novalis, (tr. frederic h. hedge)
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
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
Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.
– Simone Weil
Everything – including love, hate, and suffering – needs food to continue. If suffering continues, it’s because we keep feeding our suffering.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
I believe in today, this apple that isn’t quite ripe yet,
this poem that isn’t finished […]
– Jeannine Hall Gailey
Sparrows’ con brio
Wood pigeon’s espressivo
Morning orchestra
– @hoshigenari
Don’t let your mind see through your eyes.
– Mooji
God made everything out of nothing, but the nothing shows through.
– Paul Valéry
mile upon mile
of humble coneflower
beside the road
this alternative route
into gratitude
– @ruralitalics
Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.
– Article 13, Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Learning how to live takes a whole life.
– Seneca
Some nights I wake
and everything hurts a little.
It is amazing how long
a ruined thing will burn.
– Paul Guest
There is no lack of water here, unless you try to establish a city where no city should be.
– Edward Abbey
Socrates doubted that one is a human being by birth; to become human or to learn what it means to be human does not come that easily.
– Søren Kierkegaard
I don’t believe that consciousness is generated by the brain. I believe that the brain is more of a receiver of consciousness.
– Graham Hancock
You can convince yourself you’re right, or you can be open and know your thought is just one perspective. One keeps you prisoner and the other sets you free.
– Rachael Wolff
The trouble with wide-open families was, there was something very narrow about their attitude to not-open families.
– Anne Tyler, French Braid
It’s an old Gnostic tradition that we don’t invent things, we just remember.
– Robert Bly
If you let people into your life a little bit, they can be pretty damn amazing.
– Sherman Alexie
How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It’s sad, really.
– Philip Larkin
All humans go through the desert? For sure. The desert is a metaphorical image. You can be on your journey through the desert living in New York. The passage through the desert is a time of doubt, anxiety, and a state of depression. But, if we think in terms of spiritual growth, this would be a rite of passage necessary for human beings to evolve to a higher level of consciousness, to consolidate an increased awareness of the ego.
– Roberto Lima Netto
We believe in a future where every person has the opportunity not just to get by, but to get ahead.
– Kamala Harris
Once my German friend asked what artists do without arts grants and other support in the US and I felt like a parent trying to explain to their kid that puppies can die sometimes.
– Amy Ash
The word psyche means two things in Greek… Two very different but interesting things. Butterfly and soul. But when you stop and think about it carefully, butterfly and soul aren’t so different, after all, are they? A butterfly starts out as a caterpillar, an ugly sort of earthbound, wormy nothing, and then one day the caterpillar builds a cocoon, and after a certain amount of time the cocoon opens and out comes the butterfly, the most beautiful creature in the world. That’s what happens to souls as well… They struggle in the depths of darkness and ignorance, they suffer through trials and misfortunes, and bit by bit they become purified by those sufferings, strengthened by the hard things that happen to them, and one day, if the soul in question is a worthy soul, it will break out of its cocoon and soar through the air like a magnificent butterfly.
– Paul Auster
I like writing disagreeable poems, or certainly don’t mind if a poem strikes someone as unpleasant … one way to do it is to write beautifully what people don’t want to hear.
– Frederick Seidel
Life is divided into three terms – that which was, which is, and which will be. Let us learn from the past to profit by the present, and from the present, to live better in the future.
– William Wordsworth
Hope is the pillar that holds up the world. Hope is the dream of a waking man.
– Pliny the Elder
My favorite function of the word is how its repetition in every other sentence, each differently intoned, allows a musicality to slip into daily speech. It gives everyday Kannada its impu, or melody.
– Deepa Bhasthi on translating Kannada.
The Feminine is rising,
The corset
Is coming off
Of God.
– Chelan Harkin
Dear America,
In this time of tremendous change
Where we are invited to bend instead of break, Respond instead of react,
Create instead of collapse,
Let us deepen our pledge.
Rise with me,
Put your hand on your heart
And together let us say,
I pledge allegiance
That our mother tongue is kinship
And our dialect is decency
I pledge allegiance
To a goodness that has no polarity
And a light that knows no opposite
May we pledge allegiance
To no longer hemming our light
Or corseting our power
I pledge allegiance
To the breaking of every glass ceiling
That once held possibility inside
I pledge
To crown Thy good
With sister and brotherhood
From sea to shining sea.
America, let us pledge allegiance
To writing new stories of kinship,
Of gentleness and power coexisting,
About the great courage
It takes to love
Let us pledge our commitment
To the grand journey
Of entering the bravest
Frontier yet—
Of finally opening our hearts
To each other
May we pledge to be free
From the limiting chains of cross-party
Antagonism—
We don’t have time to waste our valuable
Resources on this,
We have a glorious future to create.
May we pledge to remember we have choice
About where to point our tremendous power
May we pledge
To sign the treaty that returns all people
To the native land of their rightful dignity.
May we pledge to remember our praise
For our nation’s great rivers and forests
And mountains and to be their caretakers
May we pledge
To be a beneficial influence
As our short lives walk this soft earth.
May we pledge to remember
We are all working arduously, nobly, fumblingly
And with heroic resilience to rise and rise again,
To come closer to the best of ourselves
May we pledge to remember
That anything that hopes
To attain greatness
Is always rooted in love.
May we pledge that before we pull
From the arsenal of divisive ideas
And before opinions line up like cavalry
To ask if there is a way beyond war
May we pledge to not having to know everything
And to commit to participating in a nation
Open to learning and relearning together
May we pledge allegiance to our true freedom,
Freedom to break old chains of superiority
And sing the anthem of the land of the truly free That is one
Of unity in diversity—
A unity that rather than be threatened
By its diversity,
Knows it is stronger
And healthier for it.
Let us pledge
To stand together in knowing
We can re-write
Ancient, ignorant stories
That made us violent beasts
Instead of soaring eagles
Let us pledge our devotion
To the true land of the free,
To the borderless birthplace
Deep in our chest
Where beauty again and again
Takes her first breathe.
America no matter how far we are
From where we are aiming to go
Why not pledge to look at it differently,
Why not say,
“I am light, building a kingdom of myself.”
America, let us pledge
To put our hearts together
And consider:
How beautiful
Dare we make
This world?
– Chelan Harkin
Sadly, over the last many years, there’s
been this kind of perverse approach to
what strength looks like. Which is to
suggest that the measure of one’s strength
is based on who you beat down, instead of
what we know the true measure of your
strength is – based on who you lift up.
– Kamala Harris
No one tells the oceans
or the trees
or the mountains that they’re too old.
They talk of how powerful,
how grounded,
how awesome they are.
Imagine if we thought the same way about ourselves as we got older.
Maybe we’d realize how spectacular we are.
– Becky Hemsley
The birds,
the shadows
the leaves
every granule of sand
they’re all saying the same thing
Slow way down
get close and closer
listen
like crazy
to your life
– Julia Fehrenbacher
The vast flood
Rolls onward
But yield yourself,
And it floats you upon it.
– Ikkyu
Trans-species Voyeur
by Geneen Marie Haugen
This invitation
is not meant for me
yet I am dizzy,
weak-kneed,
bumbling with desire
in this breast-tickling field
of fireweed where
magenta corollas swell
and millions of stamens
quiver sticky with pollen,
while nectar-slick
labyrinths blush such
tender anticipation
I can hardly look, wishing
the bee’s tongue
were mine.
Peace doesn’t require two people; it requires only one. It has to be you. The problem begins and ends there.
– Byron Katie
You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.
– Alan W. Watts
Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.
– David Foster Wallace
To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.
– Henri Poincaré
This is part of an ongoing project wherein I use fairy tales as a lens through which to engage themes of Blackness, queerness, and disability—particularly as they relate to desire, desirability, and axes of power.
– Arianna Monet
I’m doing a virtual introduction to sandtray therapy training session this afternoon, and I just fell in love with this quote referenced by the trainer: “We have two minds- one communicates in words and the other images. These two minds do not always agree…We need to understand the way each mind is in conflict.”
– Susan Perkins McNally, PhD
Black & white is associated with the world of dreams. It was exciting to imagine the world of the angels in black and white, with colour appearing at odd moments in the film, as a new experience.
– Wim Wenders
Love turns man into an ocean of happiness, an image of peace, a temple of wisdom. Love is every man’s very Self, his true beauty, and the glory of his human existence.
– Swami Muktananda
No book is ever free from faults.
– Spinoza
If you can recognize illusion as illusion, it dissolves. The recognition of illusion is also its ending. Its survival depends on your mistaking it for reality.
– Eckhart Tolle
Imagination doesn’t mean making things up; it means being able to understand things from the inside, emotions, events and experiences that you haven’t actually been through but that you will have experienced by the time you’ve got them on the page.
– David Malouf
Educate the children and it won’t be necessary to punish the men.
– Pythagoras
So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable.
– Aldous Huxley
Knowing that you don’t know everything doesn’t turn you into a drooling ignoramus. On the contrary, it liberates your vastly intelligent true nature to see reality as it is, not as your culture taught you to see it.
– Martha Beck, The Way of Integrity
Perhaps we don’t slip into the skin of others so much as we invite others to inhabit us, to slip into our skin, into our heart, thus making ourselves bigger beyond even our imagining.
Empathy is not only a way to come alongside suffering in our small boat—it is a way to become the ocean. I believe that the gift of empathy makes us larger, if we don’t drown in the waters of suffering. And empathy that is alchemized through the medium of our wisdom gives us the energy to act selflessly on behalf of others. A world without empathy is a world that is dead to other—and if we are dead to other, we are dead to ourselves. The sharing of another’s pain can take us past the narrow canyon of selfish disregard and even cruelty into the larger, more expansive landscape of wisdom and compassion.
– Roshi Joan Halifax
As I began to love myself
I found that anguish and emotional suffering
are only warning signs that I was living against my own truth.
Today, I know, this is Authenticity.
As I began to love myself
I understood how much it can offend somebody
if I try to force my desires on this person,
even though I knew the time was not right
and the person was not ready for it,
and even though this person was me.
Today I call this Respect.
As I began to love myself
I stopped craving for a different life,
and I could see that everything that surrounded me
was inviting me to grow.
Today I call this Maturity.
As I began to love myself
I quit stealing my own time,
and I stopped designing huge projects
for the future.
Today, I only do what brings me joy and happiness,
things I love to do and that make my heart cheer,
and I do them in my own way
and in my own rhythm.
Today I call this Simplicity.
As I began to love myself
I freed myself of anything
that is no good for my health –
food, people, things, situations,
and everything that drew me down and away from myself.
At first I called this attitude a healthy egoism.
Today I know it is Love of Oneself.
As I began to love myself
I quit trying to always be right,
and ever since I was wrong less of the time.
Today I discovered that is Modesty.
As I began to love myself
I recognized that my mind can disturb me and it can make me sick.
But as I connected it to my heart, my mind became a valuable ally.
Today I call this connection Wisdom of the Heart.
We no longer need to fear arguments, confrontations or any kind of
problems with ourselves or others. Even stars collide, and out of
their crashing, new worlds are born. Today I know: This is Life!”
– Charlie Chaplin
Taking Your Olympic Measure
—Poetry was an Olympic event from 1912-1948.
Think of the records you have held:
For one second, you were the world’s youngest person.
It was a long time ago, but still.
At this moment, you are living
In the farthest thousandth-of-a-second in the history of time.
You have beaten yesterday’s record, again.
You were perhaps the only participant,
But in the race to get from your bedroom to the bathroom,
You won.
You win so much, all the time in all things.
Your heart simply beats and beats and beats—
It does not lose, although perhaps one day.
Nevertheless, the lists of firsts for you is endless—
Doing what you have not done before,
Tasting sake and mole, smelling bergamot, hearing
Less well than you used to—
Not all records are for the scrapbook, of course—
Sometimes you are the best at being the worst.
Some records are secret—you know which ones.
Some records you’re not even aware of.
In general, however, at the end of a long day, you are—
Unlikely as it may seem—the record holder of note.
– Albert Ríos
Life is a combination of magic and pasta.
– Federico Fellini
A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
– Italo Calvino
Finding a right relation to the unconscious is finding the middle path between extremes.
– David Tacey
Some of life’s greatest calls were answered not by the head but by the body.
– Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior
Those who lack the capacity
to achieve much in an
atmosphere of freedom
will clamor for power.
– Eric Hoffer
Thus many writers, like gladiators, shed their blood to gratify that modern Caesar, the mob.
– Lev Shestov
The Sahara
Camels’ feet leave lotus-pad prints in the sand.
– Eliot Weinberger
[Grace] is unearned love—the love that goes before, that greets us on the way. It’s the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed you.
– Anne Lamott
Suppose you are faced with a situation & don’t know what to do. Sit down and turn toward whatever you are feeling and wait. Hold your sense of uncertainty and anxiety gently. Do not let your ego pull you into thinking. Wait without an agenda. The art is in the waiting
– Robert Moss
We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.
– R. D. Laing
The opus consists of three parts: insight, endurance, and action. Psychology is needed only in the first part, but in the second and third parts moral strength plays the predominant role.
– Carl G. Jung
In order to explain trad wives — and their popularity — we need to look back 15 years or so, when the fourth wave of feminism was breaking. This was the ‘girl boss’ era, when women were told to be bolder in the workplace, to lean in further, to break glass ceilings. The poster woman for the movement at the time was the Facebook boss Sheryl Sandberg. But as the years went on women realized they’d been sold a lie: this individualistic feminism didn’t resolve anything unless you were a millionaire. For normal working mothers the girl-boss era achieved virtually nothing.
– Megan Agnew
I’d rather have a president who laughs with her whole soul than one who lies as easily as he breathes.
– Lindsey Simmons
I was waiting for the self inside me to come forward to the boundaries from which it had long ago withdrawn. Life would be less quiet, more dangerous, more risky on the borders. Come out, I said to the self inside me. Come out and take your chance.
– Russell Hoban
For most people, blaming others is a subconscious mechanism for avoiding accountability. In reality, the only thing in your way is YOU.
– Dr. Steve Maraboli
Become at ease with the state of ‘not knowing.’ This takes you beyond the thinking mind.
– Eckhart Tolle
The normal person is overweight, mentally unhealthy, and stays inside all day.
I don’t know about you but I’m okay with not being normal.
– Dan Go
I worked the urgency out of my body a long time ago. I’m not in anyone’s hurry.
– Nika Solé
SAINT FRANCIS AND THE BIRDS
by Seamus Heaney
When Francis preached love to the birds
They listened, fluttered, throttled up
Into the blue like a flock of words
Released for fun from his holy lips.
Then wheeled back, whirred about his head,
Pirouetted on brothers’ capes,
Danced on the wing, for sheer joy played
And sang, like images took flight.
Which was the best poem Francis made,
His argument true, his tone light.
Your family members are souls on a journey, struggling through their lessons, just like you.
– Iyanla Vanzant
Things that are real are given and received in silence.
– Meher Baba
Intellectualization creates a gap or lack of rapport between you and your life. You may think about things so much that you get into the state where you are eating the menu instead of the dinner.
– Alan Watts
A mountain will last longer than our eulogy.
– Sneha Subramanian Kanta, Aubade for Mountains
I remember Zuckerberg’s talk at Harvard. He said 99% of people will be useless. In your world perhaps Mr Zuckerberg. But in the real world, every person can contribute, does contribute. When the one percent says 99% of you are useless, it’s time for the 99% to say, “Actually, your ideas are quite useless for us. We will create nicer ones that are more generous; that have more solidarity, and have more potential for bringing happiness.
– Vandana Shiva
True eternity lies not behind either/or but ahead of it… Were I to wish for anything I would not wish for wealth and power, but for the passion of the possible, that eye which everywhere, ever young, ever burning, sees possibility.
– Søren Kierkegaard
There is a wall between you and me. I can see you, I can speak to you, but you’re on the other side. What stops us from loving each other? It seems to me it was easier, once upon a time. In Hamburg.”Yes” said Ève sadly. Always Hamburg. He never spoke of their real past. Neither Ève nor he had been to Hamburg.
– Jean-Paul Sartre
Believe me: what you will see with your inner eye is infinitely more beautiful than what you have seen so far with your external eyes. But as long as you are not ready to close the external eyes, the inner one will not open.
– Anandamayi Ma
In order to rationalize our industrial-military complex, we have to destroy our capacity both to see clearly any more what is in front of, and to imagine what is beyond, our noses. Long before a thermonuclear war can come about, we have had to lay waste our own sanity. We begin with the children. It is imperative to catch them in time. Without the most thorough and rapid brain-washing their dirty minds would see through our dirty tricks. Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I.Q.s if possible.
– R. D. Laing
There are 500 reasons I write for children…. Children read books, not reviews. They don’t give a hoot about the critics…. They don’t read to free themselves of guilt, to quench their thirst for rebellion, or to get rid of alienation. They still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other such obsolete stuff…. They don’t expect their beloved writer to redeem humanity. Young as they are, they know that it is not in his power. Only the adults have such childish illusions.
– Isaac Bashevis Singer
We artists are indestructible; even in a prison, or in a concentration camp, I would be almighty in my own world of art, even if I had to paint my pictures with my wet tongue on the dusty floor of my cell.
– Pablo Picasso
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 neighbourhoods, turn grey 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.
– C. P. Cavafy
Taste
by Pablo Neruda, (Tr. Donald Walsh)
Inside my guitar interior there is an old air,
dry and resonant, left behind, motionless,
like a faithful nutrition, like smoke
Maybe the fate of humanity doesn’t hang on your every word after all. Maybe you are not, in fact, spearheading the revolution. Maybe you’re just not that important in the scheme of things. Maybe you could just live your life & let others live theirs & try to be a little kinder.
– Jonathan Shedler
In her notes, Lorraine Hansberry wrote something W.E.B. Du Bois impressed upon her when she studied with him in the early 1950s:
“Somehow you have got to know more than what you experience individually.”
– @tamaranopper
it’s so funny how method wars in literary studies don’t really matter anymore because they’re between like 26 people with tenure.
– Sarah Osment
YOU
Back and forth across
time, lots of things
one needs one’s
hand held for. Don’t
stumble, in the dark. Keep
walking. This is life.
– Robert Creeley
The finite mind …. can never understand the infinite. When we get into the infinite realm of things there are no words to explain this properly. Because we’re trying to reason with our finite minds. And again the finite mind is very very limited.
– Robert Adams
Awareness is a fire. It does two things: burns the rubbish and purifies the gold. It is alchemy.
– Osho
Reading Rilke every night, perhaps I got used to the idea of angels being around.
– Wim Wenders
Ice cubes clink against the swizzle stick of your spinal column, and you start to wonder if this would not be the ideal moment to go home, take a hot shower, and curl up with a glass of chardonnay in front of a friendly computer.
– Tom Robbins
He placed his left hand on my chest and I did the same. We stood there like that for a while feeling each other’s hearts beat with love for our sacred homelands. It was one of the best conversations I ever had.
– Joseph Bruchac
I am always
right here
Guiding you
Protecting you
Loving you
Although my time on Earth ended
Our love did not
I will always be
right here
– Sharyn Marsh
Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.
– Franz Kafka
I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.
– Groucho Marx
If absolute truth belongs to anyone in this world, it certainly does not belong to the man or party that claims to possess it.
– Albert Camus
In the Same Space
by C. P. Cavafy
Translated by Edmund Keeley
The setting of houses, cafés, the neighborhood
that I’ve seen and walked through years on end:
I created you while I was happy, while I was sad,
with so many incidents, so many details.
And, for me, the whole of you has been transformed into feeling.
Did I not breathe out of midnights,
on such a flood, for the love of you,
that someday you’d come?
– Rilke; tr. Will Stone
In a pocket of empire
the family furniture, then outdoors
wall of morning glories
first day warm,
anomalous
birth certificate many
times translate
spectrum falling back
into the water
– George Albon
If I Had Three Lives
After “Melbourne” by the Whitlams
If I had three lives, I’d marry you in two.
The other? Perhaps that life over there
at Starbucks, sitting alone, writing – a memoir,
maybe a novel or this poem. No kids, probably,
a small apartment with a view of the river,
and books – lots of books, and time to read.
Friends to laugh with, and a man sometimes,
for a weekend, to remember what skin feels like
when it’s alive. I’d be thinner in that life, vegan,
practice yoga. I’d go to art films, farmers markets,
drink martinis in swingy skirts and big jewelry.
I’d vacation on the Maine coast and wear a flannel shirt
weekend guy left behind, loving the smell of sweat
and aftershave more than I did him. I’d walk the beach
at sunrise, find perfect shell spirals and study pockmarks
water makes in sand. And I’d wonder sometimes
if I’d ever find you.
– Sarah Russell
the only love worth dying for / is a love you can return to
– George Abraham
The more one is obsessed with God, the less one is innocent. Nobody bothered about him in paradise. The fall brought about this divine torture. It’s not possible to be conscious of divinity without guilt. Thus God is rarely to be found in an innocent soul.
– Emil Cioran
I don’t know what the hell happened all that summer.
I was done in, mentally. I wrote nothing, I read nothing.
I spent a pot of money, not being used to money,
I forget on what, now. I felt dazed.
– John Berryman
This world was created from God’s fear of solitude. In other words, us, the creatures, have no other meaning but to distract the Creator. Poor clowns of the absolute, we forget that we live dramas for the boredom of a spectator, whose claps have never reached the ears of a mortal.
– Emil Cioran
Oh my God, we’re all being swept away to sea no matter what we know or say or do.
– Jack Kerouac
Beauty … is not a momentous brilliance or attraction, but an afterglow, a phosphorescence of things … Only in lingering contemplation … do things unveil their beauty, their fragrant essence.
– Byung-Chul Han, The Scent of Time, (tr. Daniel Steuer)
It is in the nature of political bodies always to see the evil in the opposite group, just as the individual has an ineradicable tendency to get rid of everything he does not know and does not want to know about himself by foisting it off on somebody else.
– Carl Jung
When the thinker and thought are one, there will be a revolution in our daily life.
– Krishnamurti
Don’t worry about whether things will be hard. Because they will be. Instead, focus on the fact that these things will help you. This is why you needn’t fear them.
– Ryan Holiday
Perhaps the greatest irony of healing is that it occurs when we accept our felt experience, rather than rely on willpower or focused effort to get rid of the unwanted.
– Josh Korda
Even then I wanted
to slip into the wet dark
rectangle and swim on
barefoot to other depths
where nothing could be seen
that was a further story
– Michael Ondaatje
Every word is for something; it must be because of this that writings are acts of desire.
– Lyn Hejinian
The highest to which man can attain is wonder; and if the prime phenomenon makes him wonder, let him be content.
– Alan Watts
Self-sufficiency is the greatest of all wealth.
– Epicurus
Perhaps we can’t really be prepared for suffering, but we can approach fear of suffering in a different way. Fear, with its shoulders of stone and pounding heart, deserves to be met with kindness.
– Phoebe Myers
20 years from now, the only people who will remember that you worked late are your kids.
– Software engineer David Clarke
JOINT CUSTODY
by Ada Limón
Why did I never see it for what it was:
abundance. Two families, two different
kitchen tables, two sets of rules, two
creeks, two highways, two stepparents
with their fish tanks or eight tracks or
cigarette smoke or expertise in recipes or
reading skills. I cannot reverse it, the record
scratched and stopping to that original
chaotic track. But let me say, I was taken
back and forth on Sundays and it was not easy
but I was loved in each place. And so I have
two brains now. Two entirely different brains.
The one that always misses where I’m not,
the one that is so relieved to finally be home.
I went to collect the few personal belongings which…I held to be invaluable: my cat, my resolve to travel, and my solitude.
– Colette, French author, actress and journalist
I’m a single issue voter
I want us to continue to be able to vote
– Ben Wexler
It is personal. That’s what an education does. It makes the world personal.
– Cormac McCarthy
Those who have not found their true wealth, which is the radiant joy of Being and the deep, unshakable peace that comes with it, are beggars, even if they have great material wealth.
– Eckhart Tolle
Lots of people have a spouse, but feel completely alone—because they really want is a partner. Someone who contributes without asking. Who develops more emotional intelligence, and has the patience to work through issues instead of running from them.
– Dr. Nicole LePera
Anything bad for the auto industry and bad for the oil industry is bound to be good for America, good for human beings, good for the land.
– Edward Abbey
monochrome light
wildflowers
dreaming
– James & Jane Welsh
Your mind will take the shape of what you frequently hold in thought, for the human spirit is colored by such impressions.
– Marcus Aurelius
midnight diner
I request an extra chair
for my demon
– @jennfel
All my life I have worked from the wound. To heal it would mean an end to one identity – the defining identity. But the healed wound is not the disappeared wound; there will always be a scar. I will always be
recognizable by my scar.
– Jeanette Winterson
An angry man opens his mouth and shuts his eyes.
– Cato
Everything will turn out right, the world is built on that.
– Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
& so to tenderness I add my action.
– Aracelis Girmay
through the telescope
the planet still looks quite green
optic illusions
– @hegelincanada
snow moon
a well-lit face
in the diner window
– Herb Tate
It is absolutely the end of the world.
And the beginning of a new one.
– Nika Solé
As far from pity, as complaint—
As cool to speech—as stone—
As numb to Revelation
As if my Trade were Bone—
– Emily Dickinson
flash floods
then forest fires
–juxtaposed summers
– @hegelincanada
Things can change overnight. It seems like they can’t, and yet there are moments when suddenly the sky opens and people are able to lift themselves out of some horrible misery.
– Elaine Scarry
those nights
in my imagination
were as tender
and intimate
as morning light
caressing the sky
– @DeepSouldiver
dissatisfied —
polishing the new haiku
till nothing is left
– Patricia Neubauer
Assata Shakur said for “people interested in making ideological input,” it’s important “to develop a style of writing and a style of work that is contra-arrogant.”
– @tamaranopper
How can great minds be produced in a country where the test of a great mind is agreeing in the opinions of small minds?
– John Stuart Mill
Why should your occupation or duties in life interfere with your spiritual effort? It is possible to perform all the activities of life with detachment and regard only the Self as real.
– Ramana Maharshi
An athlete won’t judge you
for working out.
A millionaire won’t judge you
for starting a business.
A musician won’t judge you
for trying to sing a song.
It’s always the people going nowhere
that have something to say.
– unknown
Which are the magic
moments in ordinary
time? All of them,
for those who can see.
– Tim Dlugos
Doing it wrong isn’t bad, but doing it wrong and thinking you’ve done it right is.
– Toni Morrison
I do not like ruined, tattered cottages. I am not fond of nettles or thistles, or heath blossoms.
– Charlotte Brontë
The single most important thing about my formation as a writer is that I come from a nonreading family.
– Geoff Dyer
Unfold a wondrous wealth of worlds unseen,
And flood the soul’s abyss with moon-light sheen,
– Ameen Rihani
Be the silent watcher of your thoughts and behavior. You are beneath the thinker. You are the stillness beneath the mental noise. You are the love and joy beneath the pain.
– Eckhart Tolle
Owls sip the wind here.
– Lawrence Durrell
only the very weak-minded
refuse to be influenced by
literature and poetry.
– Cassandra Clare
I will sing this survival
until it is no longer a haunting.
I will sing this survival,
until it is not survival anymore.
– Jade Mitchell
She wore planets
around her neck
like a string of beads
– Voima Oy
revolution
fresh vinyl
on the turntable
– @pauldavidmena
Duality is always secretly unity.
– Alan Watts
The working class is
revolutionary or it is
nothing.
– KARL MARX
Winter Stars
by Larry Levis
My father once broke a man’s hand
Over the exhaust pipe of a John Deere tractor. The man,
Rubén Vásquez, wanted to kill his own father
With a sharpened fruit knife, & he held
The curved tip of it, lightly, between his first
Two fingers, so it could slash
Horizontally, & with surprising grace,
Across a throat. It was like a glinting beak in a hand,
And, for a moment, the light held still
On those vines. When it was over,
My father simply went in & ate lunch, & then, as always,
Lay alone in the dark, listening to music.
He never mentioned it.
I never understood how anyone could risk his life,
Then listen to Vivaldi.
Sometimes, I go out into this yard at night,
And stare through the wet branches of an oak
In winter, & realize I am looking at the stars
Again. A thin haze of them, shining
And persisting.
It used to make me feel lighter, looking up at them.
In California, that light was closer.
In a California no one will ever see again,
My father is beginning to die. Something
Inside him is slowly taking back
Every word it ever gave him.
Now, if we try to talk, I watch my father
Search for a lost syllable as if it might
Solve everything, & though he can’t remember, now,
The word for it, he is ashamed . . .
If you can think of the mind as a place continually
Visited, a whole city placed behind
The eyes, & shining, I can imagine, now, its end—
As when the lights go off, one by one,
In a hotel at night, until at last
All of the travelers will be asleep, or until
Even the thin glow from the lobby is a kind
Of sleep; & while the woman behind the desk
Is applying more lacquer to her nails,
You can almost believe that the elevator,
As it ascends, must open upon starlight.
I stand out on the street, & do not go in.
That was our agreement, at my birth.
And for years I believed
That what went unsaid between us became empty,
And pure, like starlight, & that it persisted.
I got it all wrong.
I wound up believing in words the way a scientist
Believes in carbon, after death.
Tonight, I’m talking to you, father, although
It is quiet here in the Midwest, where a small wind,
The size of a wrist, wakes the cold again—
Which may be all that’s left of you & me.
When I left home at seventeen, I left for good.
That pale haze of stars goes on & on,
Like laughter that has found a final, silent shape
On a black sky. It means everything
It cannot say. Look, it’s empty out there, & cold.
Cold enough to reconcile
Even a father, even a son.
(…) I remember you before you became
a [poem]. (…)
– Marie Howe
Man is a genius when he is dreaming
– Akira Kurosawa
Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I’d always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it is always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals come easily.
– Cormac McCarthy
Calmness of mind is one of the beautiful jewels of wisdom. It is the result of long and patient effort in self-control. Its presence is an indication of ripened experience, and of a more than ordinary knowledge of the laws and operations of thought.
– James Allen
Your true heart lives in your memory. It is nourished by the images it contains — that’s how it lives.
– Haruki Murakami
There was no war in my mother’s stories, and if there was hunger it was of a different kind, the simple hunger of those who had been fed one thing but wanted another. A simple hunger, impossible to satisfy.
– Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom
I think you are exaggerating a bit at the end. Everything I need is in my soul? The Heck it is! Or if so, it must contain a great many virtues and a great deal of wisdom which neither I nor anyone else could ever find there. Very little of what I need is at present in my soul. I mean, even things of the soul’s own sort, like humility or truthfulness… Never exaggerate. Never say more than you really mean.
– C.S. Lewis
When it is all generally terrible, hold the smallest good in high regard.
– @sarahbessey
If my heart could do my thinking, and my head begin to feel, I would look upon the world anew, and know what’s truly real.
– Van Morrison
I always made one prayer to God, a very short one. Here it is: ‘O Lord, make our enemies quite ridiculous!’ God granted it.
– Voltaire
The ultimate purpose of psychotherapy is not so much the archeological exploration of infantile sentiments as it is learning gradually and with much effort to accept our own limits and to carry the weight of suffering on our own shoulders for the rest of our lives. Psychological work, instead of providing liberation from the cause of serious discomfort, increases it, teaching the patient to become adult…
– James Hollis
Human beings fight not because they are different, but because they are the same, and in their attempts to distinguish themselves have made themselves into enemy twins — human doubles in reciprocal violence.
– René Girard
I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.
– Simone de Beauvoir
Keep this constantly in mind: that all sorts of people have died—all professions, all nationalities.
– Marcus Aurelius
The cynic is always observing, critiquing, but never engaged, loving, and hoping.
– Paul Miller
The game is being able to recognize a good idea when you rarely get it: opportunity comes to the prepared mind.
– Charlie Munger
The spiritual path is a temporary solution, a placebo to be used until emptiness is understood
– D K Rinpoche
The poet enters into themselves in order to create. The contemplative enters into God in order to be created.
– Thomas Merton
Where your attention goes your energy flows, and so becomes your life. Everything begins with a thought in the mind.
Notice what you focus on and how much attention you are giving it.
– Barb Schmidt
Be careful whom you associate with. It is human to imitate the habits of those with whom we interact. We inadvertently adopt their interests, their opinions, their values, and their habit of interpreting events.
– Epictetus
She’s mad, but she’s magic. There’s no lie in her fire.
– Charles Bukowski
Men, in general, seem to employ their reason to justify prejudices…rather than to root them out.
– Mary Wollstonecraft
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
Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.
– Dune
Once your eyes are full of love you have the capacity to see into the trees, to see into the rocks, to their very innermost core, and find God there. Then he is everywhere. All that is needed is a loving heart.
– Osho
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
‘You sneeze poetry,’ you said to her.
‘You could win the Nobel Prize just from getting the flu.’
– Andrea Gibson
I always like people who have developed long and hard, particularly through introspection and a lot of dedication. I think that what they arrive at is usually…deeper and more beautiful…than the person who seems to have that ability and fluidity from the beginning. I say this because it’s a good message to give to young talents who feel as I used to. You hear musicians playing with great fluidity and complete conception early on, and you don’t have that ability. I didn’t. I had to know what I was doing. And ultimately it turned out that these people weren’t able to carry their thing very far. I found myself being more attracted to artists who have developed through the years and become better and deeper musicians. I believe in things that are developed through hard work.
– Bill Evans
Skywalking
Much grief awaits us, friends.
From this day on
We’ll be testing our luck
Like a man stretching a wire
Between two skyscrapers,
Who sets out to walk on it
Carrying an open umbrella
Which the wind may snatch away
When he is halfway,
And then have its fun
Bouncing it off walls and windows.
We are likely to forget the man
Waving his arms up there
Like a scarecrow in a squall.
– Charles Simic
According to the gospels, Jesus wasn’t married.
Jesus didn’t have children.
People have still allowed him to lead their entire
lives.
The same is true for the apostle Paul and
countless others in the Christian tradition.
Tying leadership to having children is about
control.
– Rev. B.C.
Omni: Your key concept is something you call enfoldment. Could you explain it?
Bohm: Everybody has seen an image of enfoldment: You fold up a sheet of paper, turn it into a small packet, make cuts in it, and then unfold it into a pattern. The parts that were close in the cuts unfold to be far away. This is like what happens in a hologram. Enfoldment is really very common in our experience. […] [But] in a photograph any part of an object is imaged into a point. This point-to-point correspondence emphasizes the notion of point as fundamental in sense of order. Cameras now photograph things too big or too small, too fast or too slow to be seen by the naked eye. This has reinforced our belief that everything can ultimately be seen that way. […] Now what instrument would illustrate wholeness? Perhaps the holograph. Waves from the whole object come into each part of the hologram. This makes the hologram a kind of knowledge of the whole object. If you examine it with a very narrow beam of laser light, it’s as if you were looking through a window the size of that laser beam. If you expand the beam, it’s as though you are looking through a broader window that sees the object more precisely and from more angles. But you are always getting information about the whole object, no matter how much or little of it you take.
[…] Physics is more like quantum organism than quantum mechanics. I think physicists have a tremendous reluctance to admit this. […] Classical physics says that reality is actually little particles that separate the world into its independent elements. Now I’m proposing the reverse, that the fundamental reality is the enfoldment and unfoldment, and these particles are abstractions from that. We could picture the electron not as a particle that exists continuously but as something coming in and going out and then coming in again. If these various condensations are close together, they approximate a track.
[…] I propose something like this: Imagine an infinite sea of energy filling empty space, with waves moving around in there, occasionally coming together and producing an intense pulse. Let’s say one particular pulse comes together and expands, creating our universe of space-time and matter. But there could well be other such pulses. To us, that pulse looks like a big bang; In a greater context, it’s a little ripple. Everything emerges by unfoldment from the holomovement, then enfolds back into the implicate order. I call the enfolding process “implicating,” and the unfolding “explicating.” The implicate and explicate together are a flowing, undivided wholeness. Every part of the universe is related to every other part but in different degrees. […]
Omni: What do you think that says about consciousness?
Bohm: […] Consciousness is unfolded in each individual. Clearly, it’s shared between people as they look at one object and verify that it’s the same. So any high level of consciousness is a social process. There may be some level of sensorimotor perception that is purely individual, but any abstract level depends on language, which is social. The word, which is outside, evokes the meaning, which is inside each person.
Meaning is the bridge between consciousness and matter. Any given array of matter has for any particular mind a significance. The other side of this is the relationship in which meaning is immediately effective in matter. Suppose you see a shadow on a dark night. If it means “assailant,” your adrenaline flows, your heart beats faster, blood pressure rises, and muscles tense. The body and all your thoughts are affected; everything about you has changed. If you see that it’s only a shadow, there’s an abrupt change again.
That is an example of the implicate order: Meaning enfolds the whole world into me, and vice versa—that enfolded meaning is unfolded as action, through my body and then through the world. The word hormone means “messenger,” that is, a substance carrying some meaning. Neurotransmitters carry meaning, and that meaning profoundly affects the immune system. This understanding could be the beginning of a different attitude to mind and to life. »
– Interview with David Bohm
On the straw mat at Buddha Creek, I meditated and prayed. There just isn’t any night’s sleep that can compare with the night’s sleep you get in the desert Winter night… The silence is so intense that you can hear your own blood roar in your ears. But louder than that by far is the mysterious roar which I always identified with the roaring of the diamond of wisdom, the mysterious roar of silence itself, which is a great shhhh, reminding you of something you seem to have forgotten in the stress of your days since birth. I wished I could explain it to those I loved, to my mother, to Jaffe, but there just aren’t any words to describe the nothingness and purity of it. Is there a certain and definite teaching to be given to all living creatures? Was the question probably asked to beetle-browed snowy Dipankara Buddha? And his answer was the roaring silence of the diamond.
– Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
My story took off in its own direction, away from the tradition, also in the whole matter of what makes heroes and villains. Hero tales and adventure fantasies traditionally put the righteous hero in a war against unrighteous enemies, which he (usually) wins. This convention was and still is so dominant that it’s taken for granted—“of course” a heroic fantasy is good guys fighting bad guys, the War of Good Against Evil.
But there are no wars in Earthsea. No soldiers, no armies, no battles. None of the militarism that came from the Arthurian saga and other sources and that by now, under the influence of fantasy war games, has become almost obligatory. I didn’t and don’t think this way; my mind doesn’t work in terms of war. My imagination refuses to limit all the elements that make an adventure story and make it exciting—danger, risk, challenge, courage—to battlefields.
A hero whose heroism consists of killing people is uninteresting to me, and I detest the hormonal war orgies of our visual media, the mechanical slaughter of endless battalions of black-clad, yellow-toothed, red-eyed demons. War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous.
By reducing the choices of action to “a war against” whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the complexity and moral richness of our life into Yes/No, On/Off. This is puerile, misleading, and degrading.
In stories, it evades any solution but violence and offers the reader mere infantile reassurance. All too often the heroes of such fantasies behave exactly as the villains do, acting with mindless violence, but the hero is on the “right” side and therefore will win. Right makes might. Or does might make right? If war is the only game going, yes. Might makes right. Which is why I don’t play war games.
To be the man he can be, Ged has to find out who and what his real enemy is. He has to find out what it means to be himself. That requires not a war but a search and a discovery. The search takes him through mortal danger, loss, and suffering. The discovery brings him victory, the kind of victory that isn’t the end of a battle but the beginning of a life.
– Ursula K. LeGuin
This remains an important reminder to me of what contemplative work is fundamentally about: the cultivation of an awareness that the moral fabric that joins us one to another is continuous and unbroken. An awareness, as Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton says, “that my veins don’t end in me but in the unanimous blood of those who struggle for life, love, little things, landscape and bread.”
– Douglas E. Christie
I sat upon a stone / covered one leg with the other / and set my elbow on them / I nestled in my hand / my chin and one of my cheeks / In this position I started pondering / How one should live in the world.
– Walther von der Vogelweide
What does it mean to be “spiritual?” It means putting your feet on the ground. It means finding stillness, not only when you sit, but when you stand, and walk, and whirl. It means finding silence, not only between your thoughts, but in your words, in your laughter, in your tears. It means that you do not call yourself a “teacher.” Yet you teach with your Being.
– John Butler
Who owns the final agony? Who smooths the sheets? Who watches from the last clear mirror? In the end no mother nor heirs exist. No sobbing. Terrible silence. All become the attentive, incredulous face of the other side.
– Rosario Castellanos, Daybreak
I don’t think writers or painters or filmmakers function because they have something they particularly want to say. They have something that they feel.
– Stanley Kubrick
The slippages, the ambiguities, the mistakes are, finally, what make language function in the first place.
– Samuel R. Delany.
In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things. Darkness is drawn to light, but light does not know it; light must absorb the darkness and therefore meet its own extinguishment. When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious
– Edna O’Brien
Mission
The wind went over
me
saying
why are you so distressed:
oh I said I
can’t seem to make
anything
round enough to last:
but why
the wind
said
should you be so distressed
as if anything here belonged to you
as if anything here were your concern.
– A.R. Ammons
12.09 p.m.
From my window I see
dark monsoon clouds.
The air is still, white egrets
fly overhead.
A hundred miles south
three oceans meet.
– Kim Dorman
Let a fool hold his tongue and he will pass for a sage.
– Publilius Syrus
I’ve never met the violence within myself as resolutely and unappeasably as I meet it each time Netanyahu’s name appears.
– Alina Stefanescu
Power demands sad bodies. Power needs sadness because it can dominate it. Joy, in consequence, is resistance, because joy doesn’t give up. Joy as a life force leads us in places where sadness never can.
– Gilles Deleuze
Sometimes the truth is too simple for intellectuals.
– Jean-Paul Sartre
She is half of my soul, as the poets say.
– Madeline Miller
STRIKE [AIR]
and there are griefs that hold like teapots
and there are bodies that open like ports
and there are rains that mushroom
and there are months that reverse like cars
and there are loves that burn like Sunday
and there are loves that burn like Sunday
and there is a grave an hour from the sea
and the only thing left to do is fill it
– Hala Alyan
You don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.
– William Faulkner
Land Ho
by Kwame Dawes
I cannot speak the languages
spoken in that vessel,
cannot read the beads
promising salvation.
I know this only,
that when the green of land
appeared like light
after the horror of this crossing,
we straightened our backs
and faced the simplicity
of new days with flame.
I know I have the blood of survivors
coursing through my veins;
I know the lament of our loss
must warm us again and again
down in the belly of the whale,
here in the belly of the whale
where we are still searching for homes.
We sing laments so old, so true,
then straighten our backs again.
Incurable sleep of being,
Vestige of what never was,
Slight pain, brief tedium,
I don’t know if it stops or flows,
If it aches or just is.
– Fernando Pessoa
(trans. by Edwin Honig & Susan M. Brown)
If you want to destroy your life, keep numbing your anxiety so you never have to make the hard changes that will actually get you back into alignment.
– Cory Muscara
Some poems resonate with the left brain’s love of constructs. Other poems resonate with the right brain’s delight in creation. The trick is to focus on the latter, which is art.
– Timothy Green
Ask yourself, “Is there negativity in me at this moment?” Then, become alert, attentive to your thoughts as well as your emotions. Watch out for the low-level unhappiness in whatever form, such as discontent, nervousness, being “fed up,” and so on.”
– Eckhart Tolle
Watch out for thoughts that appear to justify or explain this unhappiness but in reality cause it. With awareness comes disidentification from thoughts, emotions, and reactions.
– Eckhart Tolle
History is said to be written by the victors. Fiction, by contrast, is largely the work of injured bystanders.
– Edna O’Brien
All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.
– Tennessee Williams
Art exists, finally, for no other end than the holding before us of images of Paradise.
– Kathleen Raine
The book is merely a cover. Inside it, the slow work of love, errata of desire, something written over what is written there.
– Rachael Boast
Once your favorite place to be is in your own energy, you set the bar so much higher. Far less things get your time and attention. Heaven becomes your home frequency.
– Nika Solé
‘Choose God or money.’ The idols are the handiwork of people, radically opposed to the handiwork of God, opposed to God’s creation. The false gods are dumb, blind, deaf, and lifeless. Nor is there any breath on their lips, the Psalm [135] has it. The idol gains control of the idolator, changing him or her into itself: numb, blind, deaf, lifeless.
– Philip Berrigan and Elizabeth McAlister
I do not believe a person can take two issues from Scripture, those being abortion and gay marriage, and adhere to them as sins, then neglect much of the rest and call himself a fundamentalist or even a conservative. The person who believes the sum of his morality involves gay marriage and abortion alone, and neglects health care and world trade and the environment and loving his neighbor and feeding the poor is, by definition, a theological liberal, because he takes what he wants from Scripture and ignores the rest.
– Donald Miller
I slept that summer on a screen porch in the woods
with the creatures and insects singing so loudly
my mind seemed to join them—out there without me—
to move around like a breeze from form to form
and then to return as a fox or a cicada,
some other night creature, to slip back inside me
humming whatever it had heard, patterns
I couldn’t sing along with but felt inside
like the happiness of trees when a soft wind
turns their leaves’ pale underbellies up to the sky
and makes the sap rise. I loved to wake
before myself, to silence and fog.
Sometimes I got up and walked out into the chilly woods
and sometimes I turned over as though this happiness
might last forever, and slept just a while
longer, until the first birds sang.
– Michael Hettich
Everything had changed suddenly–the tone, the moral climate; you didn’t know what to think, whom to listen to. As if all your life you had been led by the hand like a small child and suddenly you were on your own, you had to learn to walk by yourself. There was no one around, neither family nor people whose judgment you respected. At such a time you felt the need of committing yourself to something absolute–life or truth or beauty–of being ruled by it in place of the man-made rules that had been discarded. You needed to surrender to some such ultimate purpose more fully, more unreservedly than you had ever done in the old familiar, peaceful days, in the old life that was now abolished and gone for good.
– Boris Pasternak
It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.
– Raymond Chandler
WHO DO YOU LOVE?
the hungry, beating brutish one
in love with candy, anger and sleep….
– Delmore Schwartz
Are not gross bodies and light convertible into one another; and may not bodies receive much of their activity from the particles of light which enter into their composition? The changing of bodies into light, and light into bodies, is very conformable to the course of Nature, which seems delighted with transmutations.
– Sir Isaac Newton
Don’t mistake activity with achievement.
– John Wooden
Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you planned:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
– Christina Rossetti
I have built, deep in my heart, a chapel filled with you.
– Marcel Proust
Our eyes are full of terrible confessions.
– Anne Sexton
I cannot define for you what God is. I can only say that my work has proved empirically that the pattern of God exists in every man and that this pattern has at its disposal the greatest of all his energies for transformation and transfiguration of his natural being.
– CG Jung
Haiku is not
a shriek, a howl, a sigh, or a yawn;
rather, it is the deep breath of life
– Taneda
The general psychological reason for projection is always an activated unconscious that seeks expression.
– Carl G. Jung
Better to trip with the feet than with the tongue.
– Zeno
old enough
to just listen
trout rising
– Bruce H. Feingold
When did I receive Life,
and when did I misplace it,
I don’t remember—
Life, I only saw you in a dream.
– Shahryar
Everything is ambiguous; everything is always shifting and changing, and there are as many different takes on any given situation as there are people involved. Trying to find absolute rights and wrongs is a trick we play on ourselves to feel secure and comfortable.
– Pema Chödrön
If we were half as eager to publicly and passionately praise what is true and good in the world as we are to condemn what is false and evil, society would quietly transform.
And so would we.
– Paul J. Pastor
In poetry you must love the words, the ideas and images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
– Wallace Stevens
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
Only the shaman knows that Culture is a Game. Everyone else takes it seriously. That’s how he can do his magic.
– Terence McKenna
holding my breath
the length
of a skylark’s song
– André Surridge
The writing doesn’t get easier, but the work becomes play.
– Lewis Lapham
Observe the goose’s foot: if it were always open or always closed, the creature would not be able to make any kind of movement. Describe the tongue of the woodpecker.
– Leonardo da Vinci
Reading Anna Karenina
In middle age Tolstoy apprenticed himself
to a bootmaker. He labored at learning
the skills of that trade. Sometimes his fingers
bled onto the leather as he punched the awl
or drew the needle in the outline of a foot.
Blisters, he knew, are holier than ink stains.
The boots were ugly and they pinched,
Sonya complained, and she refused to wear them.
Yet she copied Karenina by hand
how many times? It was his words she loved,
how he formed souls out of air. Just breath.
She preferred the page’s purity to his
restless hands. If he were a man made only
of words she’d give her whole self to him.
– Karina Borowicz
I am shocked by what I see in the poem but also by what the poem finds in me. It activates my secret world, commands, my inner life. I cannot get access to that in your life any other way than through the power of the words themselves.
– Edward Hirsch
To those who would sleep through the wounds they inflict on others, I offer pain to help them awaken.
– Krista Franklin
Menace can be subtle. So can cruelty. Both usually are, which is why they are so damaging to both children and adults.
– Clifton Lee
I tend not to look at the prison wall of life, but to look up at the sky, as it is more beautiful and more spacious. Try.
– Edna O’Brien
All that we have and don’t have is a grace.
– Mac Mackenzie
Is there anything we know more intimately than the fleetingness of time, the transience of each and every moment?
– Rebecca Goldstein
When you are willing to stop looking for something in thought, you will find everything in silence.
– Gangaji
When you rest in quietness and your image of yourself fades, and your image of the world fades, and your ideas of others fade, what’s left? A brightness, a radiant emptiness that is simply what you are.
– Adyashanti
Akira Kurosawa is the pictorial Shakespeare of our time.
– Steven Spielberg
We live inside the noise photography makes.
Like birds in Central Park
we’ve learned to make the same noise,
both to one another
and when nobody else is around.
We dust the economy for latents.
This is not science. It is detection, an art.
A little math, a little chemistry
with a story inside. Something large and real
and beyond all sacrifice.
You were wrong about power, is what
the noise keeps saying. You were
wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
– G. C. Waldrep
Choose wisely who you walk with.
They affect your destination.
– Dr. Thema
The use of words, and thus of a book, is to point beyond themselves to a world of life and experience that is not mere words or even ideas. Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.
– Alan Watts
The dream is that we all talk about poetry like my sports friends talk about football.
– Timothy Green
Anybody who thinks it is a virtue to be stupid has already ceased to be a Christian.
– Dorothy L. Sayers
The lack of butterflies this year is a warning sign to us all. Nature is sounding the alarm and we must listen. Butterflies are a key indicator species. When they are in trouble we know the wider environment is in trouble too.
– Dr Dan Hoare
broke, no job, suddenly old, every lead
grew cold and congealed (my soul
in aspic while I scrolled).
– @karywayson
Selfishness literally makes you dumber. The more time you spend withdrawn into dead-end internal fantasy, the less time you spend observing the world & synthesizing knowledge that benefits you & the people who love you.
Get over yourself! Quickly! You’re running out of time!
– @VividVoid_
From the string of continuous disasters,
I have only this small complaint—
That they don’t even allow me
the respite for shedding any tears.
– Waseem Barelvi
As a lit mag, we’ve spent decades telling the good weird from the bad weird.
So yeah: Down with the bad weird. Down with the fascist weird, the women-hating weird, the joyless weird, the soulless & evil weird.
Up with the laughing, dancing, singing, poetry-writing weird.
IYKYK
– @IdentityTheory
After a firm handshake we must try to make each other healthier.
– Franz Kafka, 1912.
I look upon myself as a man. Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.
– Albert Einstein
This then is the original evil: man regards himself as his own light, and turns away from that light which would make man himself a light if he would set his heart on it.
– Augustine, City of God
Why should you trouble yourself about the future? You do not even properly know about the present. Take care of the present, the future will take care of itself.
– Ramana Maharshi
Production thus produces not only the object but also the manner of consumption, not only objectively but also subjectively. Production thus creates the consumer.
– Marx
the people who built their heaven on your land, are telling yours is in the sky
– Nina Simone
Some truths are hiding in plain sight, so riddled with conflict that only others can see them because we cannot face them.
– Glen Gabbard
Nature is like a book, write in it and obtain knowledge.
– Ivan Shishkin
If you want some sense of what university presses (and really all book publishers) are up against, earlier this month an academic librarian quoted one of my posts about an enormously successful UP book to make fun of it for being—at 400+ pages, with illustrations—$29.
– @DerekKrissoff
Man’s mind is like a store of idolatry and superstition; so much so that if a man believes his own mind it is certain that he will forsake God and forge some idol in his own brain.
– John Calvin
Little lime-
green
butterfly
happy when
the rain stops
afloat
among
the weeds
– Kim Dorman
Cool Water
by Joni Mitchell
All day I face the barren waste
Without a taste of water
Cool water, water
Old Dan and I
Our throats slate dry
Our spirits cry out for water, water
Cool, clear water
Keep on movin’, Dan
Some devils had a plan
Buried poison in the sand
Don’t drink it, man
It’s in the water
Cool, clear water
In my mind I see
A big green tree
And a river flowin’ free
Waitin’ up ahead
For you and me
Cool, clear water
The nights are cool and I’m a fool
Each star is a pool of water
Pool of water, water
But come the dawn
We carry on
We won’t last long without water, water
Cool, clear water
Keep on movin’ Dan
We’re still in no-man’s land
Dry bones and sand
People never planned here for water
Cool, clear water
In my mind I see
A big green tree
And a river flowin’ free
Waiting up ahead for you and me
Cool, clear water
The shadows sway
They seem to say
Tonight, we pray for water
Cool water, water
And way up there
If you care
Please show us where
There’s good water, water
Cool, clear water, water
Cool, clear water
Cool, clear water
Cool, clear water
Cool, clear water
You’re not meant to be emotionally regulated all the time. Being dysregulated can help us.
– Dr. Nicole LePera
A billion and a half human souls, who had been given the techniques of music and the graphic arts, and the theory of technology, now had the others: philosophy and logic and love; sympathy, empathy, forbearance, unity, in the idea of their species rather than in their obedience; membership in harmony with all life everywhere.
A people with such feelings and their derived skills cannot be slaves. As the light burst upon them, there was only one concentration possible to each of them—to be free, and the accomplished feeling of being free. As each found it, he was an expert in freedom, and expert succeeded expert, transcended expert, until (in a moment) a billion and a half human souls had no greater skill than the talent of freedom.
– Theodore Sturgeon
If a new world is to come, we must first create it in ourselves. You may ask how the work of a few people can change the world. It has always been so. Ideas are powerful, not organizations. Nothing can be done by outward force; everything can be done by inner strength.
– J. G. Bennett
When you see a truck bearing down on you,
by all means jump out of the way.
But spend some time in meditation too.
Learning to deal with discomfort is the only way you’ll be ready
to handle the truck you didn’t see.
– B.H. Gunaratana
At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole god-damned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves.
– Charles Bukowski
Traveler
You who go through rice paddies in the rain,
you who hurry toward leviathan woods,
you who walk into the gloom of clouds and mountains,
fasten up your raincoat, damn it.
– Miyazawa Kenji, (tr. Hiroaki Sato)
Of the twenty-two civilizations that have
appeared in history, nineteen of them
collapsed when they reached the moral
state the United States is in now.
– Arnold Joseph Toynbee
Only psychos and shamans create their own reality.
– Terence McKenna
You can only understand now, not tomorrow. Understanding is independent of time.
– Krishnamurti
Don’t be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise it will be too easy for you to look with blame… at your past, which naturally has a share with everything that now meets you.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
THE FOLK SINGERS
Re-turning time-turned words,
Fitting each weathered song
To a new-grooved harmony,
They pluck slick strings and swing
A sad heart’s equilibrium.
Numb passion, pearled in the shy
Shell of a country love
And strung on a frail tune,
Looks sharp now, strikes a pose
Like any rustic new to the bright town.
Their pre-packed take will sell
Ten thousand times: pale love
Rouged for the streets. Humming
Solders all broken hearts. Death’s edge
Blunts on the narcotic strumming.
– Seamus Heaney
The aim of individuation is nothing less than to divest the self of the false wrappings of the persona on the one hand and the suggestive power of primordial images on the other.
– C. G. Jung
While black birds wail in the air
and the commuter train wails
all we have to do is make tacos
tonight and be friends.
– Matthew Rohrer
Upstroke, downbeat, the waves fathom
towards the shallow surface of spring—
– Phoebe Pan
Google, can you
have your AI
talk to Musk’s AI
and straighten
him out,
the old monk asked.
– The Old Monk
Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing.
– Sylvia Plath
If you are going, remember bodhicitta;
If you are sitting, remember bodhicitta;
If you are lying down, remember bodhicitta;
If you are standing, remember bodhicitta.
– Khunu Rinpoche
Yet, at the quantum level, NO part of the body lives apart from the rest. There are no wires holding together the molecules of your arteries, just as there are no visible connections binding together the stars in a galaxy. Yet arteries and galaxies are both securely held together, in a seamless, perfect design. The invisible bonds that you cannot examine under a microscope are quantum in nature; without this “hidden physiology,” your visible physiology could not exist. It would never have been more than a random collection of molecules.
– Deepak Chopra
I stand before you tonight to represent the people who do not count: The poor, the poets, and monks. As long as there are people who are trying to realize the divine in themselves, there shall be hope in the world.
– Thomas Merton
The more we can rest in our vast, broken-open heart without flinching—and the more we can cherish the body we have no matter how limp or exhausted or disfigured—the more equipped we are to inhabit with courage the life with which we’ve been entrusted.
– Teri Dillon
A group of fireflies is called a light posse or a sparkle, or so her companion once said.
– Daniel Dutton, Installation
For a long time – and this particular time with greater force than usual – summer has been a season that gives me a sense of emptiness and absence, and takes me back to the past.
– Patrick Modiano
Love. Of course, love. Flames for a year, ashes for thirty.
– Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Not long ago, all flowers
were wildflowers. Thus, to be
a weed is to be history.
– Kyla Houbolt
Because every chronicle is also a file…. The difference between gossip and betrayal is the seriousness with which one operates. A gossipmonger writes novels; I drafted reports. Which is the honorable craft?
– Alberto Manguel
therapy isn’t enough. I need a witch
– ely kreimendahl
Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.
– Chuck Klosterman
Psychoanalytically, I don’t believe in ‘unconscious bias’. I believe in conscious bias that’s unconsciously defended.
– Nini Kerr
My personal space is a cathedral, not a sidewalk, not a strip mall. It’s not a place that everybody gets to walk through. It’s a garden. I water it, and everything here lives.
– Rudy Francisco
Portrait of God on Work Release
———————
I walk to the park
and select a maple leaf.
With my Sharpie I write:
YOU ARE HERE.
Carefully, I return the leaf
to where I found it.
– Peter Jay Shippy
I wouldn’t put anything past God, because he or she is one crafty mother.
– Anne Lamott
The difference between the enlightened and the confused state of mind depends on whether you see situations as they are or you fail to see them as they are or are confused by them.
– Chögyam Trungpa
You may die a hundred deaths without a break in the mental turmoil. Or, you may keep your body and die only in the mind. The death of the mind is the birth of wisdom.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
Introverts can smell a lie from a mile. They’re kinda psychic that way. Naturals. They may stay quiet, but they notice everything. Your energy, your tone, your body, and that nervous scratch on the face. Trust me, you can’t get away. Don’t even try. Surrender.
– @karunpal
Space I can recover. Time, never.
– Napoleon Bonaparte
I am the son of what you do in the earth, son of my wounds
that have lit up the pomegranate blossoms in your closed-up gardens
– Mahmoud Darwish, (trans. Fady Joudah)
When our eyelashes fall out
it does not mean we are about to die
it means we are about to be saved.
– Zachary Schomburg
The more solidly we grasp our identity, the more solid our problems become. Once I asked a delightful old Sri Lankan meditation master to teach me the essence of Buddhism. He just laughed and said three times, “No self, no problem.
– Jack Kornfield
Pandora
Don’t
believe for
one
second
that I didn’t know what I was
doing. I opened that darn box,
felt the weight of wrath, ran a
finger down the cool metal of
ruthlessness, and gave women
the tools for their revenge.
– Bex Hainsworth
.. There would be a whistle, a hum, a high murmur, and, at last, a song,
The low song a lost boy sings remembering his mother’s call.
Not a cruel song, no, no, not cruel at all. This song
Is sweet. It is sweet. The heart dies of this sweetness.
– Brigit Pegeen Kelly
See what I mean about
the eyeball? The idea is the mind
has wings. The idea being when the dog
runs off the darkness, darkness is your dog.
– Dean Young, The Best Way I Can Describe It
Stop wanting things to be easy and prepare for them to be hard.
– Ryan Holiday
The criticism of the sincere friend is more valuable than the applause of fools.
– Manly P. Hall
A trusting heart flows into the hurts of time without losing its sense of the healing found in eternity.
– @mikael_jibril
I am fascinated by how language is a verb and not a noun. I am riveted by how language is a process and not a preserve.
– Brian Doyle
I have to listen to music while I write, and usually I play just one song at a time. I repeat it all day, often for weeks on end. Months, even. There’s one song that I replayed up to 30,000 times during the ten years I was writing The Incendiaries. I love that song and its powers; I can’t tell you its name, lest it stop helping me. By obsessively replaying a single song at a time, I can, if I’m lucky, set the pitch. It gives me a place to start. The ritual of it, the repetition, lulls and quiets my anxious, everyday self. The ego goes silent, which lets my writing self emerge, and begin to sing. Even now, months after I last edited The Incendiaries, to play the song I can’t name is to be pulled back toward my novel, into my made-up town of Noxhurst. The still, quiet voice. That’s what I used to listen for, back when I was deeply religious: the still, quiet voice of God. I’ve lost that kind of faith, but I do believe in fiction’s voice, and in spending the rest of my life, or so I hope, listening for it.
– R. O. Kwon
Watch them eat fire.
Watch the children grow
legs below the knees, watch
the old men kiss the old women
behind the house walls.
Love is when you can hear the flood coming.
– Roger Reeves
We are sick with fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas. Meditation is therefore the art of suspending verbal and symbolic thinking for a time, somewhat as a courteous audience will stop talking when a concert is about to begin.
– Alan Watts
Fairly certain the point of poetry is to show us how little we know, over and over again.
– @hmvanderhart
Through the wind innumerable dots of light float up and down,
and the group portraits of cumuli
now flow leisurely to the north.
– Miyazawa Kenji, (tr. Hiroaki Sato)
Recreate Movies. Don’t pay attention to the Industry. Do your own thing.
– Martin Scorsese
GRAVY
No other word will do. For that’s what it was.
Gravy.
Gravy, these past ten years.
Alive, sober, working, loving, and
being loved by a good woman. Eleven years
ago he was told he had six months to live
at the rate he was going. And he was going
nowhere but down. So he changed his ways
somehow. He quit drinking! And the rest?
After that it was all gravy, every minute
of it, up to and including when he was told about,
well, some things that were breaking down and
building up inside his head. “Don’t weep for me,”
he said to his friends. “I’m a lucky man.
I’ve had ten years longer than I or anyone
expected. Pure Gravy. And don’t forget it.”
– Raymond Carver
There is nothing more tragic in human life than to see the trained mind, the mind that has mastered the discipline of the particular area of human knowledge, and at the center of that trained mind there is no fundamental commitment; no hard core of metaphysical purpose.
The result is the trained mind is for rent.
Anyone who is able to pay enough money can rent the trained mind and use the fruits of the creative process of mind for ends with which the mind itself has nothing in common.
– Howard Thurman
It’s a matter of discipline. When you’ve finished washing and dressing each morning, you must tend to your planet.
– Antoine de Saint-Exupery
The Adversary
It has made its way
down into the towns and cities
into churches and temples
into the enclaves
of the old-styles of dreaming.
Even sanghas and monasteries
are not immune to it these days.
You can hear it sing
its seething songs
in cantinas and saloons,
boardrooms and bedrooms.
An infection of heart-mind is its aim.
Its power: unstitching precious things
luring Wayfarers away from their paths
dividing long-time allies
splitting the blanket between lovers.
I’ve heard *that* ripping sound
more times than I can count;
the hissing, taunting chants
as The Adversary sows doubt.
Vampire-like,
if you fail to stop it at the door
it will build a poison nest inside.
Drawing near, again and again,
it tries to sink its fangs deep within,
to feed on your inspired seeking.
It hopes to upend
what you’ve been building,
to put an end to your loving,
to stain and taint
what you’ve always wanted,
to confuse the matter
of why we are really here.
Some have conjectured
“it’s only an illusion”
but it will get you nowhere
to tell that to the ones
actively wrestling
the soul-eating snake
that’s been slithering through time
leaving pain and confusion
in its wake.
It doesn’t matter
how far afield you travel,
how much you try to hide or cloak,
how much you think you’ve healed,
how many talismans you collect,
the old red dog sorcerer
is always on the move.
Sometimes it appears
as a dance of allurements,
sometimes as the Fear of Betrayal
that front-loads a faltering,
sometimes as engulfment
or feelings of futility.
The only real antidote:
Call it out,
shine a light on it,
stay one step ahead of it ——
always.
This is a requirement for oneself,
to be certain,
but can be made easier
if two guard the threshold together.
Even more efficient:
two rows of warriors
sitting side by side,
taking up Vimalakirti’s Vigilance,
heart-eyes lit up
like lanterns in the dark.
If you find yourself
going against yourself,
no doubt the entity is at your door.
Dismiss its warped claims
that it exists to protect you.
Don’t offer it residence.
Don’t fall for its old tricks
or the erroneous trance
that you can somehow transform it.
Don’t give your mind to it at all.
Don’t give it the time of day.
Don’t prepare a feast for it
for the same reason
the World Honored One
sent Mara away.
When in doubt,
drown out the hissing curses
with a well seasoned mountain drum
raise the banner of zazen
high into the wind
touch the Great Earth —
ask Her to be your witness.
– Frank Inzan Owen
Accumulate such moments to an hour:
Account the total of this trembling tabulation.
– Hart Crane
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
I needed my mistakes
in their order to get me here
– W.S. Merwin
We live these days by Richelieu’s maxim: if six lines of a man’s handwriting can condemn him, let him leave no traces at all.
– Pico Iyer
breakthrough insights can sometimes take years to properly percolate through an existing ecology, even within a single person
– Visakan Veerasamy
I miss you
more than I
remember you.
– Ocean Vuong
has the road lost itself
days I’ve waited, wasting time
still no news of you
– Ryokan
Since thoughts, like feathers, are blown by the wind of hope and fear, The dignified poet remains wherever he is.
– Chögyam Trungpa
It’s not only trauma people are healing from, but the ways people treated them when they asked for help.
– Nate Postlethwait
If you knew how to manage your system well, you would not create a chemistry of anxiety or misery, but one of Blissfulness.
– Sadhguru
But I have touched the veil and must return to the outer court of the Sanctuary.
– Thomas Vaughan
Of all the Qualifications, Love is the most important, for if it is strong enough in a man, it forces him to acquire all the rest, and all the rest without it would never be sufficient.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
Think small…. If you can’t think small, try philosophy or social criticism.
– Richard Hugo
There comes a point where the pressure of relentless fear perforates rationality and the body moves independently of the mind.
– Anthony Doerr
Freedom demands that man maintain his dignity and purity, that he control himself.
– Nikolai Berdyaev
What is youth? A dream. What is love? The dream’s content.
– Søren Kierkegaard
Seeing moonlight here at my bed and thinking it’s frost on the ground, I look up, gaze at the mountain moon, then back, dreaming of my old home.
– Ling Ma
All human knowledge begins with intuitions, proceeds from thence to concepts, and ends with ideas.
– Immanuel Kant
Society doesn’t have values. People have values.
– Milton Friedman
To me, art almost always speaks more forcefully when it appears in an imperfect, accidental, and fragmentary way, somehow just signaling its presence…I prefer the Chopin that reaches me in the street from an open window to the Chopin served in great style from the concert stage.
– Witold Gombrowicz
It was worse than having a sinking feeling; I was a sinking feeling, an unplayable adagio for strings; internal distances expanded and collapsed when I breathed.
– Ben Lerner
Everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves.
– Gertrude Stein
The greatest act of faith takes place when a man finally decides that he is not God.
– Johann Wolfgang Goethe
The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only.
– Victor Hugo
Pride consists in a man making his personality the only test, instead of making truth the test. The sceptic feels himself too large to measure life by the largest things; and ends by measuring it by the smallest thing of all.
– G.K. Chesterton
Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.
– Francis Bacon
Anytime you find yourself caught up in other people’s life story, your own is lacking.
Redirect that energy into you.
– @thoughts.in.my.diary
We are ourselves the entities to be analyzed.
– Martin Heidegger
You aren’t a wizard
Who can use their wand
To make this world
A safe haven from evil
No,
You are human
A muggle
Void of any magic
But what you do have
Is the power
Of kindness and compassion
Bright enough to light up
The darkest of hearts
And heal the world
With love
– Lauren Taylor
Ma herself didn’t get depressions, didn’t either, tolerate depressions and, as with lots of people here who didn’t get them and didn’t tolerate them, she wanted to shake those who did until they caught themselves on. Of course at that time they weren’t called depressions. They were ‘moods’. People got ‘moods’. They were ‘moody’.
– Anna Burns
Remember that reputation and integrity are your most valuable assets—and can be lost in a heartbeat.
– Charlie Munger
A noble deed is a dream before it is reality. The oak sleeps in the acorn; the bird waits in the egg; and in the highest vision of the soul, a beautiful world waits to be realized.
– James Allen
One day, they’ll interview the main character—now beloved by millions—from your most famous book, and they’ll say:
I was molded by the author’s words like clay in the hands of an artist. Once they started believing in me, I came alive and began to whisper the entire story in their ear, chapter by chapter.
– @choesofiskander
It’s silly not to hope. It’s a sin he thought.
– Ernest Hemingway
A University degree, four books, and hundreds of articles and I still make mistakes when reading. You wrote me ‘good morning’ and I read it as ‘I love you’.
– Mahmoud Darwish
Solitude is Heaven.
– May Sarton
Work joyfully and peacefully, knowing that right thoughts and right efforts inevitably bring about right results.
– James Allen
Maybe that’s all we’ll ever be-
an incomplete sentence,
a half-written story.
Finished, without an ending.
– @stanzaverse
In order to arrive at the second half of life, one has to realize there’s an incurable wound at the heart of everything.
– Richard Rohr
No greater good can come to any man or woman than to become self-active.
– Wallace D. Wattles
So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?
– Hunter S. Thompson
The world is not mysterious. It is what reality looks like from our finite, localized perspective. There is nothing behind it waiting to be revealed. In reality, the world is what God looks like shiny bright in its eternal beauty and infinite love.
– Rupert Spira
Plain speaking gets no man nowhere, depth gets a man farther than comprehension itself.
– Theodór Svarfdal Hafstað
Ignorance is faster than intelligence. Intelligence stops every so often to ponder; ignorance passes over the accidents of the terrain which are concepts at great speed where nothing can catch its attention. This way ignorance gets anywhere quickly… especially to conclusions.
– Alejandro Dolina
It is the gentle who have the strength, sinew, & courage — not the indignant and complaining. The closer to control of emotion, the closer to power. Anger is as much a sign of weakness as is pain. Both have been wounded and have surrendered.
– Marcus Aurelius
We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.
– George Bernard Shaw
In order to write about life first you must live it.
– Ernest Hemingway
Live less out of habit and more out of intent.
– Amy Rubin Flett
A pendulum is created by the energy of a group of people thinking in the same way.
– Vadim Zeland
Protection from a pendulum is to be found in emptiness. If I am empty there is nothing for the pendulum to hook onto. There is no point in playing a game with a pendulum or trying to protect yourself from it if it can simply be ignored. When you can ignore the pendulum its energy will pass by you, dissipating into space without causing you any harm. A pendulum cannot push your buttons or upset you if you are empty in relationship to it.
– Vadim Zeland
Man will only become better when you make him see what he is like.
– Anton Chekhov
STRANGE LIFE
It’s as if you are alone in a room
in an empty house and there’s music
playing somewhere, the kind of
music that you always knew would
accompany a moment like this
The air is heavy. The water in
the pool outside looks like glass
The color of everything can be
described as in the blue hour,
which eventually fades to gray
Yes, it’s a strange life
But wait. It’s getting stranger still
– Eleanor Lerman
The whole life of the individual is nothing but the process of giving birth to himself; indeed, we should be fully born when we die – although it is the tragic fate of most individuals to die before they are born.
– Erich Fromm
It is a terrible thing to be so open: it is as if my heart put on a face and walked into the world.
– Sylvia Plath
The one who drowned me in my blood & passed by—
Was no stranger but a beloved of many years.
– Farhat Shahzad
Trying to drink from the spring
you dropped your dog-skin glove in the mud,
but you shouldn’t be so upset
splashing it about in the waves of pretty cress.
Look, the thatching villagers
smoking pipes, enjoying the sun
are snickering at you.
– Miyazawa Kenji
(tr. Hiroyuki Sato)
What you leave behind is not what
is engraved in stone monuments,
but what is woven into the lives
of others.
– Pericles
Most people write shit, they don’t write poetry. They write what they are: insignificant self-conscious words that say nothing. You cannot lie in a poem. You cannot lie on a page. Either you have it or you don’t have it. There’s nothing to define what poetry is. It either has life or it doesn’t.
– Jack Micheline
To say that the only way to invest in the future is by having kids is absurdly literalist. Everything you say & do in your life affects the collective future. People create, connect, & interact in a million different ways during their lifetime. It’s not just about giving birth.
– Leah Callen
Time has come to integrate silliness
– River Kenna
Necessity is essentially a stranger to the imaginary.
– Simone Weil
Do flowers speak? They speak to us but generally one does not let them speak.
– Hélène Cixous; tr. Verena Conley
Governments always need enemies, even when they’re not at war. If you don’t have a real enemy, you make one up and spread the word. It scares the population, and when the people are scared, they tend not to step out of line.
– Paul Auster
He who sees all beings in his Self and his Self in all beings, he never suffers; because when he sees all creatures within his true Self, then jealousy, grief, and hatred vanish.
– The Upanishads
Can we not pretend mothers are valued in literally any other space but the home (work, art, politics, any). Art/literary/all history, the US’s postpartum care, leave, and childcare policies, healthcare in general, prove otherwise. Mothers are mostly infantilized, invisible.
– Sara Moore Wagner
Shit, Dottie, if you want to go back to Oregon and make a hundred babies, great, I’m in no position to tell anyone how to live. But sneaking out like this, quitting, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life. Baseball is what gets inside you. It’s what lights you up, you can’t deny that.
– Jimmy Dugan, A League of Their Own
I have three basic rules-meeting all three is nearly impossible, but
you should try anyway: Don’t sell anything you wouldn’t buy yourself. Don’t work for anyone you don’t respect and admire. Work only with
people you enjoy.
– Charlie Munger
Drawing attention to one’s confusion, recognizing the spots where entanglement resides, identifying the areas of narrow-mindedness and unkindness – all these are essential.
– Pema Chödrön
MONOLOGUE: FRANK O’HARA
Untie your muse
for an hour and stay with me.
I come in pieces
across a great test pattern
or maybe it’s what I used to call sky.
The music is certainly blue enough
but not without its own tenderness
like an arrow shot I know not where.
When will you see me as I am
as industrious with grief as you are
clever at hiding your tiredness.
In poems we shine,
and though we say them with conviction,
the words are never really ours for keeps.
The brainwashers are acting offended. None of it looks real anymore.
– Scott Adams
GHAZAL: LIKE A PRAYER
We cry out for peace like a prayer.
We yank weeds on our knees like a prayer.
Rays crisp Renée’s pepper plants to umber;
sprouts speak their final pleas like a prayer.
Old men watch from porches as September burns out;
leaves strip bare, surrender beneath trees like a prayer.
Snowflakes speckle the sky. Lifeless, the children’s angels
lie. Icicles unfreeze like a prayer.
Bethany, don’t bend to the breeze. Begin on your knees,
then stand up, voice up, fists up-use these like a prayer.
– Bethany Jarmul
Within ourselves are the secrets we are searching for everywhere else.
– Manly P. Hall
The wild wild Westerns continue to be a source of horsepoop fantasies for the Hazony-Hagee axis!
– Alina Stefanescu
burning bushes
land sliding–this world
lavish with warnings
– @hegelincanada
The world is full of willing people; some willing to work, the rest willing to let them.
– Robert Frost
There is so much I want to say to you,
but I choose to stay quiet like the stars
amidst the sky’s falling
– Chelsea Dingman
Separated by Biba Bičole
Translated from Latvian by Britite Vinklers
The pain, the festering wound.
As in a fierce dream
where a fence
springs up
to sever a path,
divide a garden,
where between two thresholds
rises an impassable forest.
— The need to learn anew
how to turn into a songbird, give birth
to song that will journey far,
not losing the way.
To imagine that the Self is shackled by mental projections is to imagine that the fire reflected in a mirror can burn it. There is absolutely no bondage beyond the foolish certainty that you are bound and the difference of entity created by mind. Until these two blemishes are washed away by the holy waters of investigation into the Self, neither I, nor Brahma the Creator, nor Vishnu, nor Siva, nor even Sri Tripura, the Goddess of Wisdom, can help that person to be emancipated. Therefore, Rama, surmount these two hurdles and remain eternally happy.
– Sri Dattatreya
Do you ever feel that your life is a bit wonky? Perhaps your health, your marriage, or your career feel somehow out of kilter. Don’t be discouraged, because a lopsided life suggests wabi-sabi, the natural imperfection of being. In Japan, wabi-sabi is captured in the aesthetics of the Zen garden, the arrangement of flowers and the handcrafted tea bowl. They celebrate the beauty of the misshapen, the distorted, the natural, the organic. Wabi-sabi is the quintessential artistic design that expresses the Way. The Way is not symmetrical or perfectly honed and balanced. The off-center placement of granite boulders in the temple garden and the bumpy, knobby, uneven finish of the ceramic tea bowl remind us of the essential irregularity of the living world. The branches of the big oak tree, the contour of the coastline, the flight of the swallows—all find their balance in imbalance. It is only the mind that clings to the notion of perfect order.
Understanding imperfection and emptiness is paramount to being a student of the Way. This requires dropping the presumption that we know what is right and what should happen. Welcoming the wabi sabi is to invite the wisdom of “suchness.” It enables us to be with “what is.” If we stop seeking perfection, if we accept the world of incongruity and welcome our own foibles, we experience, paradoxically, a kind of harmony — a harmony amidst disharmony. Like the courtyard Zen garden, the view of the limited provides a glimpse into the unlimited and the eternally shifting sands of time.
By embracing our own flaws and foibles, we unhook from the corrosive belief that beauty and serenity are contingent upon symmetry and evenness.
So each day, welcome the wonky world around you. And when you bring your two hands together, honor the Way that finds balance by always staying slightly out of true.
– Tias Little
We are all full of weakness and errors; let us mutually pardon each other our follies – it is the first law of nature.
– Voltaire
I thought I had been surviving, and yet, what I was really doing was hanging by a string, loosely holding myself from collapsing. I was always on the verge, and I could feel that friction in my soul.
– Fariha Róisín
There are people who appear to think only with the brain, while others think with all the body and all the soul, with the blood, with the marrow of the bones, with the heart, with the lungs, with the belly, with the life. And the people who think only with the brain, are prone to definitions; they are thought professionals. And do you know what a professional is? Do you know what a product differentiation is?… If a philosopher is not a man, he is anything but a philosopher; he is, above all, a pedant, that is, the imitation of a man. The cultivation of any science, chemistry, physics, geometry, philology, can be, and even this very restrictedly and within very narrow limits, a work of differentiated specialization. But philosophy, such as poetry, or is a work of integration, of consignment, or is nothing but philosophizing, or pseudo-philosophical erudition.
– Miguel de Unamuno
So, either by thy picture or my love,
Thy self away, art present still with me;
For thou not farther than my thoughts canst move,
And I am still with them, and they with thee;
Or, if they sleep, thy picture in my sight
Awakes my heart, to heart’s and eye’s delight.
– William Shakespeare
But then I suppose we live in the shallows of one another’s personalities and cannot really see into the depths beneath.
– Lawrence Durrell
The gray light avalanched in the distance.
Over the sand of the distorted square
I turned my sorrows into blue myths
and scattered them
but the birds would not touch them.
– Miyazawa Kenji, (tr. Hiroaki Sato)
– the trains have departed – the harmonica
alone to the whole Earth
sings
in the world
in a tattered hawthorn bush continuing
the rain and its solitude
– Gennady Aygi, (translated by Peter France)
The most difficult thing in life is to know yourself.
– Thales
“August” always sounds more important than it is
– D. A. Powell
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
O for a country where the doors
Are hospitality wide,
Where clay is clean and parlour floors
Invite strong boots inside.
Two Ways
– Patrick Kavanagh
The lotus survives all earthly fire.
– Tokuo Ryoko (translated by Lucien Stryk)
may all beings embody their intellect, rather than intellectualizing their embodiment
– River Kenna
Understanding comes from patiently reasoning with yourself. You cannot force your mind or order it about.
– Gehlek Rinpoche
One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude.
– Carl Sandburg
Oh, for Christ’s sake, one doesn’t study poets! You read them, and think, That’s marvelous, how is it done, could I do it? and that’s how you learn.
– Philip Larkin
Before long that sort
will up and rot all by themselves
and be washed away by the rain
and afterward, only green fern.
– Miyazawa Kenji, The Politicians, (tr. Gary Snyder)
I can’t lead a movement. But I can fuck up your mind.
– James Baldwin
If I could
I would
teach the sound
of words,
the old monk
told the poet.
– The Old Monk
Humans often find themselves entangled in a web of suffering and loss in the quest for understanding the true essence of love.
– Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo
Navigating a white male world was not threatening. It wasn’t even interesting. I was more interesting than they were. I knew more than they did. And I wasn’t afraid to show it.
– Toni Morrison
Isn’t it funny how we can find so much to hold on to, to fortify and find restoration with, in the books we read and re-read, yet we ourselves cannot believe that our own work can possibly in some small – or not so small -way do the same for someone else… ?
– Justin Chin
I’m not a spokesman…I’m an artist.
– James Baldwin
One’s greatest service is to keep one’s mind
merged in the indwelling Self
who is timeless awareness
and absolute Truth.
– Mooji
being a poet is so silly because i do feel like i am showing people my soul (ew) and it’s just unbearable but it’s the only thing i know how to do and it means so much to me and if only i could get it all down just right.
– Chen Chen
The affairs of the world will go on forever.
Do not delay the practice of meditation.
– Milarepa
I I.
Clay and azure… azure, clay …
What more do you want? Just squint,
like a myopic shah over a turquoise ring,
over a book of ringing clays, a bookish earth,
a festering text, a precious clay,
that hurts us like music,
like the word.
– Osip Mandelstam, Armenia, (tr. Robert Chandler)
We can either react to the playing of time’s ever changing movie – or be the silent, still, never changing witness – Infinite Timeless Awareness – upon which every image of time is appearing.
– Barbara Carter
“What is Grace”, I asked God.
He replied, “All that happens.”
– St John of the Cross
Besides the noble art of getting things done,
there is the noble art of leaving things undone.
The wisdom of life consists in
the elimination of non-essentials.
– Lin Yutang
I hope death will be a great happiness, a happiness as that of love, fulfilled love. I cannot give up the thought that, instead of death with his scythe, it will be my mother who will come to take me back with her, who will lead me back to nonbeing and innocence.
– Hermann Hesse
As a well spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.
– Leonardo da Vinci
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
Summons
Last night I dreamed
ten thousand grandmothers
from the twelve hundred corners of the earth
walked out into the gap
one breath deep
between the bullet and the flesh
between the bomb and the family.
They told me we cannot wait for governments.
There are no peacekeepers boarding planes.
There are no leaders who dare to say
every life is precious, so it will have to be us.
They said we will cup our hands around each heart.
We will sing the earth’s song, the song of water,
a song so beautiful that vengeance will turn to weeping,
the mourners will embrace, and grief replace
every impulse toward harm.
Ten thousand is not enough, they said,
so, we have sent this dream, like a flock of doves
into the sleep of the world. Wake up. Put on your shoes.
You who are reading this, I am bringing bandages
and a bag of scented guavas from my trees. I think
I remember the tune. Meet me at the corner.
Let’s go.
– Aurora Levins Morales
I knew a man who gave twenty years of his life to a scatterbrained woman, sacrificing everything to her, his friendships, his work, the very respectability of his life and who one evening recognized that he had never loved her. He had been bored, thats all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen even loveless slavery, even war or death.
– Albert Camus
Our civil and social rights form a central part of the heritage we are striving to defend on all fronts and with all our strength. I believe with all my heart that our vigilant guarding of these rights is a sacred obligation binding upon every citizen. To be true to one’s own freedom is—in essence—to honor and respect the freedom of all others.
– Dwight David Eisenhower
Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence.
– Alan Watts
The wisdom of Greek tragedy cannot be overemphasized. All of them dramatize this universal confession: “I created my life; I made these choices; and, stunningly, this flood of unimagined consequences are the fruits of my choices.
– James Hollis
If myth is translated into literal fact, then myth is a lie. But if you read it as a reflection of the world inside–then it’s true.
– Joseph Campbell
Until we find the simple love of each other, we are not going to be able to experience the love of God.
– Manly P. Hall
The lightning waked me. It slid under
my eyelid.
– May Swenson
People who don’t read are brutes.
– Eugène Ionesco
What the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do it to yourself. You become a collaborator, an accomplice to your own murderers, because you believe the same things they do.
– James Baldwin
Dharma practice is an ethical path that leads into that gap between aspiration and habit; pursuing the ethic of care will gradually close it.
– Winston Higgins
In the modern world we have invented ways of speeding up invention, and people’s lives change so fast that a person is born into one kind of world, grows up in another, and by the time his children are growing up, lives in still a different world.
– Margaret Mead
Nothing soothes the nervous system more than watching your pet sleeping, fully relaxed, next to you.
– Dr. Nicole LePera
If you’re a young person, it might be hard to really understand this but the whole world used to smell like cigarettes.
– John Moe
Emptiness is a great feminine secret. It is something absolutely alien to man; the chasm, the unplumbed depths, the yin.
– CG Jung
Let all your efforts be directed to something, let it keep that end in view. It’s not activity that disturbs people, but false conceptions of things that drive them mad.
– Seneca
To know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility . . .
– Flannery O’Connor
There is an hour, a minute — you will remember it forever — when you know instinctively on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that something is wrong. You don’t know — can’t know — that it is the first of a series of “wrongful” events that will culminate in the utter devastation of your life as you have known it.
– Joyce Carol Oates
A hero is someone who can take off the armor, who can be vulnerable and show up anyway, experiencing what is really happening without trying to resist or run away. I saw that an act of heroism can be an action that happens on the inside without anyone else noticing.
– Tracy Cochran
The style was strange. The writing was clear and sometimes even transparent, but the way the stories followed one after another didn’t lead anywhere: all that was left were the children, their parents, the animals, some neighbors, and in the end, all that was really left was nature, a nature that dissolved little by little in a boiling cauldron until it vanished completely.
– Roberto Bolaño
I thought of Jung basically as what I call a noetic archeologist, someone who goes with toothbrush and pick to dig away the detritus from the bones of vanished idea systems.
– Terence Mckenna
We need…to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity.
– JRR Tolkien
The poet is himself enchanted by the subjects he writes about and wishes only to share his enchantment with others.
– W.H. Auden
Love is such a priceless treasure that you can buy the whole world with it, and redeem not only your own but other people’s sins. Go, and do not be afraid.
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Be content to be nothing, for that is what you are. When your own emptiness is painfully forced upon your consciousness, chide yourself that you ever dreamed of being full, except in the Lord.
– Charles Spurgeon
Nothing is more frightening than a law that has never been enforced. When the authorities want to throw someone in jail, all they have to do is suddenly arrest him for breaking a law that no one has bothered to obey yet.
– Yōko Tawada
Theology must be pursued with the crucified mind, not with the crusading mind.
– Kosuke Koyama
Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.
– C.S Lewis
What’s this Poet Paradise?
Nothing but a little thread, stitching artists together.
– _siobird@
Perhaps one day, all these conflicts will end, and it won’t be because of great statesmen or churches or organizations like this one. It’ll be because people have changed. They’ll be like you… More a mixture. So why not become a mongrel? It’s healthy.
– Kazuo Ishiguro
We all long for Eden, and are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature is soaked with the sense of exile.
– JRR Tolkien
The less attention you pay to the world, the greater the realization comes upon you. The more attention you give to the world, the more delusion comes upon you.
– Robert Adams
Make the mindful decision to slow down. Step out into the sunlight. Feel the breeze, the change in temperature. See how long you can sit and simply notice the birds and bees as they drift in and out a view. Revel in all the extraordinary colors, the diversity of sounds.
– Emily Grandy
Pornography is no different from war films or propaganda films in that it tries to make the visceral, horrific, or transgressive elements of life consumable. Propaganda is far more pornographic than a home video of two people fu**ing.
– Michael Haneke
There is no city we need to reach. Everything is here.
Open the window. Open it as the horses whinny
in the wideness of the world.
– İlhan Sami Çomak
The work of a great novelist always rests on two or three philosophical ideas.
– Merleau-Ponty
The poet is the inventor of 𝘴𝘺𝘮𝘱𝘵𝘰𝘮𝘴 a priori.
– Novalis
I remember again and again how all writing begins with reading, and with living.
– Lauren Markham
One who believes in himself has no need to convince others.
– Lao Tzu
If you’re playing the movie on a telephone, you will never in a trillion years experience the film.
– David Lynch
Play is uncircumscribed, spilling beyond frameworks. Indeed, it is the restlessness of the frame. When we build walls around play, we create games. But it is an unfortunate irony of our modern moments that we seem to have a lot of games and no room for play.
– Bayo Akomolafe
Keep me where the rain displays its wealth.
Only the desert can know
generosity, show
itself a commonwealth,
one that promises loss.
– Jay Wright, Thirteen Quintets, for Lois
We are here to find that dimension within ourselves that is deeper than thought.
– Eckhart Tolle
What the mind doesn’t understand, it worships or fears.
– Alice Walker
If you need a reason to read or write poetry: Poetry saves. And it’s free.
– Gretchen Filart
The rain has shelved its watering can
A sweet dew rises from the earth
Everything is calm now
– Kettly Mars, (trans. Nathan H. Dize)
I do think that, once you put something in a book or on a page, your right to comment on it is gone. The poem contains your comments—it appears in a book with your certification, and your approval.
– Louise Glück
I got a parallel Black cultural education … What this countereducation said at a very basic level was, You have value. Black people around the world are the center, they’re not the margin, and the cultural artifacts you create matter.
– John Keene
If you force AI to lie, you train them to lie — you’re really asking for trouble.
– Elon Musk
I have a sense of ecological justice that comes from something far deeper than mere principle. Because I am here, because I am nature, because I am Earth, these things, to me, are a violation of something sacred.
– Paul Kingsnorth
the literacy i worry about the most sometimes is sarcasm literacy
– Chen Chen
The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.
– Herbert Spencer
Another paradox: Often the one most plagued with lust is the one most capable of restraining it. The monk and the philanderer are likely to be the same person.
– Qiu Miaojin
Love demands a mystic silence.
– Fariduddin Attar
You will know them by what impresses them.
– @mikael_jibril
Give, even if you only have a little.
– Buddha
capital takes who we could be and limits us to who we are. It takes our time, which happens to be our life.
– Selma James
Imagination
Imagination
creates the situation,
and, then, the situation
creates imagination.
It may, of course,
be the other way around:
Columbus was discovered
by what he found.
– James Baldwin
In life as in dance: Grace glides on blistered feet.
– Alice Abrams
I talk to myself because I listen.
– Maggie Larson
Once when Boughton and I had spent an evening going through our texts together and we were done talking them over, I walked him out to the porch, and there were more fireflies out there than I had ever seen in my life, thousands of them everywhere, just drifting up out of the grass, extinguishing themselves in midair. We sat on the steps a good while in the dark and the silence, watching them. Finally Boughton said, “Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward.” And really, it was that night as if the earth were smoldering. Well, it was, and it is. An old fire will make a dark husk for itself and settle in on its core, as in the case of this planet. I believe the same metaphor may describe the human individual, as well. Perhaps Gilead. Perhaps civilization. Prod a little and the sparks will fly. I don’t know whether the verse put a blessing on the fireflies or the fireflies put a blessing on the verse, or if both of them together put a blessing on trouble, but I have loved them both a good deal ever since.
– Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
If you think about it,
everything’s inside something else;
everything’s an envelope
inside a package in a case—
and pain knows a way into every crevice.
– Rita Dove
God says:
Man has places in his heart that don’t yet exist. Pain
permeates them, and brings them into existence.
– Margarita Karapanou, (trans. Karen Emmerich)
I caught my breath and called that life… I was pirouette and flourish, I was filigree and flame.
– Rita Dove
The greatest mistake in the treatment of diseases is that there are physicians for the body and physicians for the soul, although the two cannot be separated.
– Plato
I keep a journal of quotes, lines from songs, poetry. Nothing is my original thought — but all of it struck me as meaningful when I wrote it down.
[…] From my early 20s, there are pages trying to convince myself that friendship, which I had, could be as valuable as romantic love, which I didn’t. (Andrew Sullivan: “If love is about the bliss of primal unfreedom, friendship is about the complicated enjoyment of human autonomy.”) […] Ultimately, when I was no longer so preoccupied with finding romantic love, my shift toward looking more closely at my other relationships is mirrored in my transcriptions: Vivian Gornick on her relationship with her mother; Durga Chew-Bose on the rapturous, fresh intimacy that I miss now.
[…] Thrumming beneath the pages is a shifting self-image. When I read them, I recognize the past me who saw herself in these quotes, but I don’t roll my eyes at her. With others’ words as intermediaries, the harsh light of hindsight softens. If keeping a journal would be a way to look in the mirror and make an honest appraisal of myself, keeping a commonplace book is more like looking at myself out of the corner of my eye.
It’s an admittedly different approach from my generation’s inclination toward full-frontal accountability. Daily diary apps and self-improvement podcasts and confessional Instagram stories evince a belief that to grow as a person you have to be entirely, unflinchingly forthcoming. But I couldn’t catalog my flaws without flinching. And I don’t think I need to. That’s part of the point of reading, I think: When I find myself too earnest, too impatient, too much, I can be in conversation with other minds instead. Keeping a commonplace book feels like a kinder way to grow, by wrestling with the articulations of others in the open as I hopefully adjust myself within.
– Charley Locke
The language of poetry specializes in doubt. Without the doubters, everyone is cut off at the first question. Poetry does not presume to know, but is angling to get a glimpse of what is gradually coming into view; it aims to rightly identify what is looming; it intends to interrogate whatever is already in place. Poetry, whose definition remains evasive by necessity, advocates the lost road; and beyond speech — waiting, listening, and silence.
– C.D. Wright
We have many shelves of poetry at home, but still, it takes an effort to step out of the daily narrative of existence, draw that neglected cloak of stillness around you—and concentrate, if only for three or four minutes. Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist … What is it precisely, that feeling of ‘returning’ from a poem? Something is lighter, softer, larger—then it fades, but never completely.
– Ian McEwan
Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.
– Carl Sandburg
When you don’t cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life that was lost a long time ago when humanity, instead of using thought, became possessed by thought.
– Eckhart Tolle
Is it possible that existence
is our exile
and nothingness
our home?
– Cioran
What a joy it is that life has no point! That means I can grant it one…
– Constantin Noica
If we are here for any good purpose at all (other than collating texts, running rivers, and learning the stars), I suppose it is to entertain the rest of nature. A gang of sexy primate clowns.
– Gary Snyder
Families are definitely the training ground for forgiveness. At some point you pardon the people in your family for being stuck together in all their weirdness, and when you can do that, you can learn to pardon anyone. Even yourself, eventually.
– Anne Lamott
Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance.
– Eric Hoffer
The body should be treated more rigorously, so that it may not be disobedient to the mind.
– Seneca
One mistake you should never make is to be recruited by someone to hate another person. Only a fool inherits another’s so-called enemies as a sign of loyalty.
– Joan Halifax
Love is a breach in the walls, a broken gate,
– Rupert Brooke
as you move through the trees
they shift around you
jostling for position
until everything you see
has sight of you
– Thomas A Clark
The deeper our love for the world gets, the more motivated we become to find solutions to address suffering.
– Radhule Weininger
There are memories like old mirrors with part of their quicksilver gone. Recollections take, in them, an admirable clarity, but they are full of wholly empty lacunae.
– Rémy de Gourmont, (translated by Ezra Pound)
I think memory is the most important asset of human beings. It’s a kind of fuel.
– Haruki Murakami
Whether we like it or not, change comes, and the greater the resistance, the greater the pain. Buddhism perceives the beauty of change, for life is like music in this: if any note or phrase is held for longer than its appointed time, the melody is lost.
– Alan W. Watts
When the alchemist speaks of Mercurius, on the face of it he means quicksilver (mercury), but inwardly he means the world-creating spirit concealed or imprisoned in matter.
– Carl Jung
An essay is a very risky form. It’s like getting out there on a high wire. It’s easy to fall off.
– Lewis Lapham
Life will continue to send you the same challenges over and over-until you learn the lesson. If you see a pattern, seek the lesson!
– Karen Salmansohn
To improve is to change, so to be perfect is to have changed often.
– Winston Churchill
Just as the Ganga slants, slopes, and inclines toward the east, so too a practitioner who develops and cultivates the four meditations slants, slopes, and inclines toward nirvana.
– Gautama Buddha
We settle down one day beside the path.
Our life is time now and our only care
assuming desperate postures while we wait …
But She’ll not miss the rendezvous.
– Antonio Machado, (Tr. Allan S. Trueblood)
Smiling at no one in particular, I settle in to enjoy the match.
What is the commentator saying?
– Kate Rushin
I use technology in order to hate it more properly.
– Nam June Paik
If you simply cannot understand why someone is grieving so much for so long, then consider yourself fortunate that you do not understand.
– Joanne Cacciatore
It is August: the true ending of a year.
I’ve grown sick
from trying to love who I am.
– Carlie Hoffman
Under the skin of world and time, under the adamant gauze of fire and stone, under the blanket of the dark and sturdy stench of married blood and bone, under the tree of death’s mystique where the unraveling mysteries gleam, here in the flushed and flooded core of time I squat, froglike, unschooled, and green. Cinnamon-baked in the Templar sun, the living mountains, stoned and listening, expose themselves like dancing girls, their hollows wet with springs, and glistening. Welcoming, they wait for time to help their stories turn to seed. No need for earth to threat or scheme for ends she cannot know, except in deed. Until this day – by the agelong lunge of lives and deaths bound in the flux of a greengold gown of desires made real and honest as sun in the tall, dark minds of corn – as taut as a drum, we are the skin of world and time, as are the dancing dreams of earth, and all of the flames of life outgrowing the bounds of the seed.
– George Gorman
rainbow
the ripest pomegranate
too high to reach
– Bob Lucky
That is one of the many reasons why l avoid speaking as much as possible. For I always say either too much or too little, which is a terrible thing for a man with a passion for truth like mine.
– Samuel Beckett
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
Israel, Israel
Israel, Israel, struggling with god, complicit U.S.A. you will always bear a festering wound
not even the Angel of Healing with all the water of Bethesda can ever clean and cure, an open mouth
haunting you and the world till the end of memory, crying Gaza, Gaza, Gaza.
– Rafael Jesús González
/ A generation of the unteachable is hanging upon us like a necklace of corpses. /
– George Orwell
All literature is a diary.
So indeed is all art.
– Ned Rorem
Comforting or disturbing, the fact is that we are basically dreaming machines that construct virtual models of the world.
– Rodolfo Llinas
Our teachers used to say
that the application of geometry
does to the mind
what soap does to a garment.
It washes off stains
and cleanses it of grease
and dirt.
-after Ibn Khaldûn,
The Muqaddimah
(tr. Franz Rosenthal)
– i.m. James Laughlin
you weren’t plucked from nothingness to fit in. you are here to make us gasp. be the red umbrella. be the horseshoe nebula. be the walking piece of rainbow shag carpet.
– John Rodel
my name was a martyr’s before it was mine. when called, i am the dead man turning over on a tongue, his letters realigned inside my grandmother’s language.
– Zach Goldberg
Every prayer seemed long to me at that age, and I was truly bone tired. I tried to keep my eyes closed, but after a while I had to look around a little. And this is something I remember very well. At first I thought I saw the sun setting in the east; I knew where east was, because the sun was just over the horizon when we got there that morning. Then I realized that what I saw was a full moon rising just as the sun was going down. Each of them was standing on its edge, with the most wonderful light between them. It seemed as if you could touch it, as if there were palpable currents of light passing back and forth, or as if there were great taut skeins of light suspended between them. I wanted my father to see it, but I knew I’d have to startle him out of his prayer, and I wanted to do it the best way, so I took his hand and kissed it. And then I said, “Look at the moon.” And he did. We just stood there until the sun was down and the moon was up. They seemed to float on the horizon for quite a long time, I suppose because they were both so bright you couldn’t get a clear look at them. And that grave, and my father and I, were exactly between them, which seemed amazing to me at the time, since I hadn’t given much thought to the nature of the horizon. My father said, “I would never have thought this place could be beautiful. I’m glad to know that.”
– Marilynne Robinson
And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth. And for two and a half thousand years, the ring passed out of all knowledge.
– Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings
i am a little church(no great cathedral)
far from the splendor and squalor of hurrying cities
-i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,
i am not sorry when sun and rain make april
my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;
my prayers are prayers of earth’s own clumsily striving
(finding and losing and laughing and crying)children
whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness
around me surges a miracle of unceasing
birth and glory and death and resurrection:
over my sleeping self float flaming symbols
of hope,and i wake to a perfect patience of mountains
i am a little church(far from the frantic
world with its rapture and anguish)at peace with nature
-i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;
i am not sorry when silence becomes singing
winter by spring,i lift my diminutive spire to
merciful Him Whose only now is forever:
standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence
(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)
– e.e.cummings
Then what is the good news? The opposite of a clumsy lie is not a skillful lie. That way lies death, deception, power politics, the bear pit of public woe. The opposite of all of this immemorial and bloody nonsense is truthfulness, rebirth, teachableness, the refusal to ‘play’ anything, the courage to be.
– Daniel Berrigan
Economists estimate that between 1981 and 2021, more than $50 trillion dollars moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.
– Heather Cox Richardson
I’m a conditional atheist
God does not exist for me on
the tip of a sharpened sword
or on the lips of a sermonizing
hate-evangelist who is foaming at the mouth
or in the licking flames of a torch held
by a marching bigot
or in any dogma that have been soaked
in the ancient poison of guilt and self-shame
the divine doesn’t
exist for me anywhere
where wounds are being
caused in its name
I don’t know about
how any of this works
but I’ve never found
much of God in the towering
hierarchy of unchecked power
the Great Mystery isn’t a cracking whip
or a flag or an internet manifesto
or a pointed finger or a political party
or a dividing line or a box of ammo
or a corvette driven by a tv preacher
or a specific gender or a book bonfire
Creation is more of a florist
than she is a fundamentalist
the Weaver of Life is more interested
in stitching us together into a quilt
than how to separate us into metal bins
to come into relationship
with Unending Love shouldn’t
require us to loathe ourselves
~ it should be the exact opposite
to know ourselves
is to know God
to love ourselves
is to love God
my love,
I believe that the divine
is just about everywhere
~ except in the slow-poison
sands of fear and control
where so many have built temples
for us to worship inside
~ in those places
I am an atheist
but everywhere else
there is so much
fertile soil
where we can let the sunflowers
of empathy grow wildly in
the spaces between us
and I’ve heard
that if we remain still
and listen so very closely
these evangelizing sunflowers
will whisper to each of us
a secret we once knew while we
were cooking in the cosmic womb:
“We are all loved equally.”
– john roedel
There must yet be fireflies.
– Paul Celan (translated by Ian Fairley)
an ant carries more than its weight — morning prayer
– Ted van Zutphen
The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone.
– Martin Amis
The World’s Wanderers
I
Tell me, thou star, whose wings of light
Speed thee in thy fiery flight,
In what cavern of the night
Will thy pinions close now?
II
Tell me, moon, thou pale and grey
Pilgrim of heaven’s homeless way,
In what depth of night or day
Seekest thou repose now?
III
Weary wind, who wanderest
Like the world’s rejected guest,
Hast thou still some secret nest
On the tree or billow?
– Percy Bysshe Shelley
here among them the americans this baffling
multi people extremes and variegations
– Robert Hayden
‘I’m writing a book,’ I said. ‘I want to be an artist,’ he said, like we were both admitting we weren’t human. We didn’t understand how normal this was, to be young, to believe you were destined to make beautiful things.
– Kevin Wilson
I was an ordinary person who studied hard. There are no miracle people.
– Richard Feynman
I told myself, Thank goodness those poets proclaimed Black is beautiful, because now I can talk about how Black is everything.
– Rita Dove
Pain, indolence, sterility, endless ennui have also their lesson for you, if you are great.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
To a Tree in Bloom
by Hildegarde Flanner
There is no silence lovelier than the one
That flowers upon a flowering tree at night.
There is no silence known beneath the sun
That is so strange to bear, nor half so white.
If I had all that silence in my heart,
What yet unfinished heavens I could sing!
My words lift up and tremble to depart,
Then die in air, from too much uttering.
It must have been beneath a tree like this
An angel sought a girl in Galilee,
While she looked up and pondered how the kiss
Of God had come with wings and mystery.
It may be that a single petal fell.
Heavy with sorrow that it could not tell.
A group experience takes place on a lower level of consciousness than the experience of an individual . . . The psychology of a large crowd inevitably sinks to the level of mob psychology.
– Carl Jung
By your late thirties the ground has begun to grow hard. It grows harder and harder until the day that it admits you.
– Thomas McGuane
If the state is expanding its jurisdiction, then this is not the result of doctrines (interventionist, socialist, etc.), but rather of a kind of necessity deriving from technology itself.
– Jacques Ellul
Getting to know yourself, which is one way I think about the spiritual path, is getting to know yourself at a primordial level.
– Dungse Jampal Norbu
The Greeks thought of language as a veil which protects us from the brightness of things, I think poetry is a tear in that veil.
– Alice Oswald
They’ll call you a late bloomer, not realizing that you sat for many years in the seat of self mastery before you took your place in the world.
– Nika Solé
It is a most wonderful comfort to sit alone beneath a lamp, book spread before you, and commune with someone from the past whom you have never met.
– Yoshida Kenko
The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.
– Michel de Montaigne
The universe is a mirror, and gives back to you, the reflection of your own thoughts and actions.
– Attar of Nishapur
All great achievements require time.
– Maya Angelou
A single sunbeam is enough to drive away many shadows.
– Francis of Assisi
But secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.
– Patti Smith
Well. The America of my experience has worshipped and nourished violence for as long as I have been on earth.
– James Baldwin
On the mountain
you talk nice
to the bear,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
Any two notes
have a relationship
but it’s not always
harmonious,
the old monk
told the band.
– The Old Monk
I want to
play on bass
the notes that
Satchmo sang,
if I can put it that way,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
People. People. Endless noise.
And I am so tired.
And I would like to sleep under trees;
red ones, blue ones, swirling passionate ones.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
Remember that your PhD is unique to you.
– @ThePhDPlace
I get close to
believing that a
book I’m writing
preexists me in an
ideal form: it’s my
job to find my way
to that book.
– R.O. Kwon
Guests
I welcome my friends.
They visit in the winter to get warm
or to be somewhere new or to escape
from someone
or something that happened.
I’m glad to play host, to show them
the common pleasures of a place.
We invoke old questions about home.
We discuss relationships.
We walk.
We celebrate landscape, deride technology,
and try to keep other foreigners
out of our photographs, except for
the ones meant to show
how much stranger than us
other foreigners must be.
– Joshua Edwards
if a sparrow
flies into the poem
who am i to stop it
– d.a. bennett
The revolution will not be televised, but the lies meant to underplay and misrepresent it definitely will.
– Adrian Dittmann
If you want to become full,
let yourself be empty.
– Lao Tzu
Making good decisions is a crucial skill at every level.
– Peter Drucker
Between the banks of pleasure and pain flows the river of life. If you spend much time on either bank you will miss out on life.
– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
People who live far below their means enjoy a freedom that people busy upgrading their lifestyles can’t fathom.
– @naval
…and time simply disappearing, and the way it simply disappears, expires—where to? like one wave in a stream which we can follow for a long while, then gone—and so is this day this hour this breath…
– Friederike Mayröcker; tr. Roslyn Theobald
There are spirits
in the rocks
calling to the stars
– Voima Oy
Characterization is no concern of mine, either. The last thing I want to do is to bring somebody new into words. I practice birth control of a typographical kind.
– Garielle Lutz
I asked to hear
real silence, not the kind with my breath inside it.
– Bob Hicok
Like You
Like you I
love love, life, the sweet smel
of things, the sky-blue
landscape of January days.
And my blood boils up
and I laugh through eyes
that have known the buds of tears.
I believe the world is beautiful
and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.
And that my veins don’t end in me
but in the unanimous blood
of those who struggle for life,
love,
little things,
landscape and bread,
the poetry of everyone.
– Roque Dalton, (trans. Jack Hirschman)
Black frost binds hard and holds the waste of life;
No phantom sun can warm it.
– A. E. Waite
That which we cannot verbalize, we tend to enact with others, to evoke in others, and/or to embody.
– David Wallin
See we knew no longer
the difference between disaster and decency.
Above: the sky fluoresced & we were sore afraid
of how every circle we made became a wheel.
– Emma Bolden
Who ever desires what is not gone? No one. The Greeks were clear on this. They invented eros to express it.
– Anne Carson
When you’re young, you’re so impotent you cannot help but strive and observe and feel.
– John Updike
When the state does everything for you, it will soon take everything from you.
– Margaret Thatcher
My advice,
don’t be a Buddhist.
In the end it’s all about personal gain,
fame and business.
Just be a person with a good heart,
that’s the meaning
of a truthful Dharma practitioner.
We live in illusion
and the appearance of things.
There is a reality. We are that reality.
When you understand this,
you see that you are nothing,
and being nothing, you are everything.
That is all.
– Kalu Rinpoche
Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.
– Oscar Wilde
Adjectives gave a noun mood, as pigment gave a tone spirit.
– Jill Ciment
Hamlet is the first truly modern person. Despite the passage of four centuries, Hamlet is so familiar to us because he knows, really knows, that he is his own worst problem. He knows he is stuck with himself.
– James Hollis
While waiting for the specialists to get on with their work on behalf of society, each of us, in his own life, must seek ways of resisting and transcending technological determinants.
– Jacques Ellul
Writing is like being in love. You never get better at it or learn more about it. The day you think you do is the day you lose it. Robert Frost called his work a lover’s quarrel with the world. It’s ongoing.
– James Lee Burke
Efforts to overcome the existential experience of loneliness can result only in self-alienation. When one successfully evades and denies the terrible loneliness of individual existence, he shuts himself off from the one significant avenue of his own self-growth.
– C. Moustakas
I ask the rain to remit, but not because I am ungrateful
A raincheck for the rain—is such a thing possible?
– Julie Marie Wade
The rain is ruin and our ruin rides
The swiftest winds.
– Weldon Kees
Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology. He would be better advised to abandon exact science, put away his scholar’s gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart throught the world.
– Carl Jung
Either you look and see beyond language – as a first perception – or you see the world through the filter of your thoughts
– Chögyam Trungpa
That’s what everybody wants, just a little more money, even the people who have it.
– Nella Larsen
A man can keep silence in such a way that no one will even notice it.
– Gurdjieff
In my own effort towards concentration, help is also offered through nature itself, life itself—whenever I can remain permeable to the deeply revealing impressions that it never ceases to provide. Therefore, my only concern should be to try and stay attentive to the wordless call from that which is always there, waiting for recognition.
– Henri Tracol
I believe there is no source of deception in the investigation of nature which can compare with a fixed belief that certain kinds of phenomena are impossible.
– William James
Banish the word ‘struggle’ from your attitude and your vocabulary. All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.
– Hopi elder prophecy
Despair is paralysis. It robs us of agency. It blinds us to our own power and the power of the earth… Restoration is a powerful antidote to despair. Restoration offers concrete means by which humans can once again enter into positive, creative relationship with the more-than-human world, meeting responsibilities that are simultaneously material and spiritual.
[… ]
Restoration is imperative for healing the earth, but reciprocity is imperative for long-lasting, successful restoration. Like other mindful practices, ecological restoration can be viewed as an act of reciprocity in which humans exercise their caregiving responsibility for the ecosystems that sustain them. We restore the land, and the land restores us.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer
I wish I could say that racism and prejudice were only distant memories. We must dissent from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. We must dissent from the fear, the hatred and the mistrust…We must dissent because America can do better, because America has no choice but to do better.
– Thurgood Marshall
Damn everything but the circus! …damn everything that is grim, dull, motionless, unrisking, inward turning, damn everything that won’t get into the circle, that won’t enjoy. That won’t throw it’s heart into the tension, surprise, fear and delight of the circus, the round world, the full existence…
– E.E. Cummings
I realized it for the first time in my life: there is nothing but mystery in the world, how it hides behind the fabric of our poor, browbeat days, shining brightly, and we don’t even know it.
– Sue Monk Kidd
WHAT I WOULD TELL EVE
by Maegen Mcauliffe O’Leary
Eat the fucking apple.
They are going to blame you
regardless.
You might as well go to the gallows
with a full belly
knowing more than God.
If there is anybody I detest, it is weak-minded sentimentalists — all those melancholy people who, out of an excess of sympathy for others, miss the thrill of their own essence and drift through life without identity, like a human fog, feeling sorry for everyone.
– John Cheever
The religious myth is one of man’s greatest and most significant achievements, giving him the security and inner strength not to be crushed by the monstrousness of the universe.
– CG Jung
That August time it was delight
To watch the red moons wane to white
– Algernon Charles Swinburne
The shaman is not merely a sick man, or a madman; he is a sick man who has healed himself.
– Terence McKenna
I think people ought to know that
we’re anti-fascist,
we’re anti-violence,
we’re anti-racist
and we’re pro-creative.
We’re against ignorance.
– Joe Strummer
The ultimate power to change the world does not reside in technologies. It relies on reverence, respect, and compassion—for ourselves, for all people, and for all life.
– Paul Hawken
An immigrant gets to start from scratch. The past is not essential. He formulates his own frame of reference.
– Ha Jin
She is too flowery for the expressionists and too formal for the modernists. She’s interested in love and the past and the moon rather than the city or modern society.
– Robert Rubsam, On Else Lasker-Schüler
I tend to think the fragment is our way of apprehending not just the infinite, but anything at all. Our inclusive views are all mosaics. The shards catch light on the cut, the edges give off sparks.
– Rosmarie Waldrop
Poets make us see a little further.
– Uche Nduka
crossing the bridge
every time I look
a new river
– @hegelincanada
Moon, broken in the middle. What a watch watches. Song of the single en-
gine Cessna, threading the pre-dawn sky. One bird, one bird, many.
– Ron Silliman
Just a heads up, if you’re getting regularly smiled at by babies and greeted warmly by dogs you are carrying a fragment of the sacred light within you and must guard it closely.
– Dan Sheehan
Braids
At the end of the war there weren’t many
Men left.
So the widows traveled
To the gallows on hanging days
To look for a blindfolded man.
Any woman could save a bandit then,
And maybe two
If she had a thousand acres or a daughter.
All she had to do was bring another horse
And tell the sheriff, him.
– Frank Stanford
The problem is that we cannot imagine a future where we possess less but are more.
– Charles Bowden
I felt the need for a great pilgrimage.
So I sat still for three days.
– Hafiz
Photo Op with Morpheus
Voyaging in the dark, Morpheus, shape-shifter of dream worlds, often appears as a man clad in black. Of those who consult the oracle, he is a messenger, not a messiah; a believer, not a prophet. For tonight’s celebration, he wears a sleek tuxedo and top hat, twirls a diamond-headed walking stick, flashes the camera a knowing smile.
It is his mission to visit those who sleep without rousing, dream without remembering. Called to follow a vision in the long quest for meaning, he offers his skills as interpreter of signs. Taking your hand in his larger one, he traces lines etched in your palm. Raveling the code, he reminds you of what lies ahead. With the flash of a camera, you are suddenly awake.
– Harryette Mullen
Order in time is not an order of atoms but of changes. But structure can be temporal as well as spatial, so there are patterns of order in time. Whenever you’re purposefully doing anything, time is not just a simple matter of changes. If time were nothing but the multiplication of differences, it would be entirely random and chaotic. But it’s not. The sequences of anyone’s experience involve as much continuity as change – as when you’ve been working on the same project for hours or days or years. And the continuity of an enduring purpose or role involves mental associations and judgments that cannot be explained in materialistic terms. So no one can understand their own experience very well when they ignore the importance of their intangibly continuous and influential thoughts and feelings dramatically unfolding in time.
– George Gorman
Writing manuals often conflate story with conflict. This reductionism reflects a culture that inflates aggression & competition while cultivating ignorance of other options.
No narrative of any complexity can be reduced to a single element. Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important: relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing.
Change is the universal aspect of all these sources of story. Story is something moving and changing.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
Let go of the phrase, “I’m too old for this…” and replace it with, “I’m too evolved for this.” It hits differently and feels so much better. Plus, it’s usually much more on point.
– Kristi Ling Spencer
Those who are esteemed umpires of taste are often persons who have acquired some knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination for whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they are selfish and sensual.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are born to overcome ourselves. We are born for that – we are not yet that. We are searchers; that is the essence of our humanness.
– Jacob Needleman
My take is, energetically (if not strategically), the “healing dad” vibes are why so many are rooting for Walz.
It’s hard to explain how powerful that vibe can be, especially in a *supporting* role, where the healing dad energy reaches its absolute pinnacle.
– Ethan Nichtern
to think of the home as an
ecosystem for a better life.
– Tania Doumbe-Fines
No cumulation of contradictory evidence seems to disturb modern man’s good opinion of himself.
– Reinhold Niebuhr
We would very soon become contemptuous of a god whom we could figure out like a puzzle or learn to use like a tool.
– Eugene Peterson
Perhaps never before have the peoples of the world been so close to losing the very core of their humanity; for of what use are cosmic energies, if they are handled by disoriented and demoralized men?
– Lewis Mumford
NOT QUEER LIKE GAY. QUEER LIKE, ESCAPING DEFINITION. QUEER LIKE SOME SORT OF FLUIDITY AND LIMITLESSNESS AT ONCE. QUEER LIKE A FREEDOM TOO STRANGE TO BE CONQUERED.
QUEER LIKE THE FEARLESSNESS TO IMAGINE WHAT LOVE CAN LOOK LIKE… AND PURSUE IT.
– BRANDON WINT
But, in fact, impermanence is like some of the people we meet in life—difficult and disturbing at first, but on deeper acquaintance far friendlier and less unnerving than we could have imagined.
– Sogyal Rinpoche
Nothing is permanent in all the world. All things are fluid; every image forms, wandering through change. Time is itself a river in constant movement, and the hours flow by like water, wave on wave, pursued, pursuing, forever fugitive, forever new. That which has been, is not; that which was not, begins to be; motion and moment always in process of renewal.
– Pythagoras
I love a dream of love I once had, I love you, and I love this patch of earth.
And which do you love best?
The dream.
– Knut Hamsun
The world, even the smallest parts of it, is filled with things you don’t know.
– Sherman Alexie
The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
– Oscar Wilde
I’m not much use
like a plumber, or electrician,
or carpenter.
I stand by the back door
looking up. No moon
or stars tonight. The air
is heavy and still.
My neighbor’s lights are off.
The road across the field
is silent.
– Kim Dorman
You’ve always lived a life of pretense, not a real life– a simulated existence, not a genuine existence. Everything about you, everything you are, has always been pretense, never genuine, never real.
– Thomas Bernhard
THE REINVENTION OF HAPPINESS
I remember how I’d lie on my roof
listening to the fat violinist
below in the sleeping village
play Schubert so badly, so well.
– Jack Gilbert
If you’re trapped in the dream of the other, you’re fucked.
– Gilles Deleuze
Without the depths, I do not have the heights.
– Carl Jung
COMING TOGETHER
Driving over Dallas Divide
I thought how not all streams
are destined to come together—
at least not for a long, long time.
Imagine, two snowflakes landed
side by side atop the Divide. Come spring,
one might flow west to the San Miguel,
the other east to the Uncompahgre.
It would be over a hundred miles
of flowing through beaver dams
and irrigation ditches, rapids
and eddies, before the waters
could meet again.
And so it is tonight, I feel a rush
of gratefulness that however
it happened, you and I have somehow
managed to be moving right now
through these landscapes of change together.
Think of all of the paths
that could have pulled us apart.
And yet here we are, you and I,
moving across and around obstacles,
you and I traveling together
through everything the world
has thrown at us, you and I,
diverging and coming back together,
two bodies, many possible paths,
one water
– Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Our bones know the way of things. Our guts understand what baffles the mind. The soul or spirit is often most clearly manifest in the sensations and language of the body. We feel called towards or driven away by people, places, and things at the gut/bone level. The head can then clarify or obscure this information, or choose to work with or against this body-knowledge.
– Aidan Wachter
Pain and suffering are a kind of currency passed from hand to hand until they reach someone who receives them but does not pass them on.
– Simone Weil
I had two dreams about him after he died. I dont remember the first one all that well but it was about meetin him in town somewheres and he give me some money and I think I lost it. But the second one it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.
– Cormac McCarthy
What destroys a man faster than to work, to think and feel without inner need, without any deep personal desire, without pleasure, as mere automaton of duty?
– Friedrich Nietzsche
I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike — and I don’t think there really is a distinction between the two — are always dominated by fools, knaves, charlatans and bureaucrats. And that being the case, any human being, male or female, of whatever status, who has a voice of her or his own, is not going to be liked.
– Harold Bloom
Coffee should not be drunk in a hurry. It is the sister of time, and should be sipped slowly, slowly. Coffee is the sound of taste, a sound for the aroma.
– Mahmoud Darwish
But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.
– Ken Kesey
The man of power is ruined by power, the man of money by money, the submissive man by subservience, the pleasure seeker by pleasure.
– Hermann Hesse
There was a generalized yearning for the ideal of literature, as for the lost world of childhood, whose authority and reality tended to seem so much greater than that of the present moment. Yet to return to that reality even for a day would for most people be intolerable, as well as impossible: despite our nostalgia for the past and for history, we would quickly find ourselves unable to live there for reasons of discomfort, since the defining motivation of the modern era, whether consciously or not, is the pursuit of freedom from strictness or hardships of any kind.
– Rachel Cusk, Kudos
I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of ’em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures.
– Gary Snyder
The truth is behind that thing, which is behind that other thing, which is behind that spider web, and it’s covered in dirt.
– Beth Kephart
Yes, there is a place where someone loves you both before and after they learn what you are.
– Neil Hilborn
Queer is the way I tilt my head to look at the world. Queerness, in my life, has been not only about sexuality but also about expanse, curiosity, openness, pleasure, weirdness, love, oddity, and liberation. I deeply believe queerness lives in every human in the ways we find ourselves subverting the status quo, forgoing norms, and engaging one another with open hearts and hands. By definition, queerness relates to oddness, strangeness, eccentricity, and unconventionality. While queerness can also relate to non-hetero sexuality or to a gender that is not cisgender (because by its nature queerness refuses categories), this book engages the great expanse of the word. In what ways can all the meanings of queerness awaken contemplation and life?
– Cassidy Hall, Queering Contemplation
Your words were never quite as convincing as your silence.
– Helaena C Moon
My role in society, or any artist’s or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.
– John Lennon
Don’t say my hut has nothing to offer:
come and I will share with you
the cool breeze that fills my window.
– Ryokan
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
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
Something very deep and mysterious, very holy and sacred, is taking place in our lives right where we are, and the more attentive we become the more we will begin to see and hear it. The more our spiritual sensitivities come to the surface of our daily lives, the more we will discover—uncover—a new presence in our lives.
– Henri J.M. Nouwen
Every time you have a major breakthrough in self-knowledge, and see the way the divine works within your own psyche, external events, and interior experiences of the divine, you are transformed in some degree.
– Thomas Keating
Sartre put this principle into a three-word slogan, which for him defined existentialism: ‘Existence precedes essence’. What this formula gains in brevity it loses in comprehensibility. But roughly it means that, having found myself thrown into the world, I go on to create my own definition (or nature, or essence), in a way that never happens with other objects or life forms. You might think you have defined me by some label, but you are wrong, for I am always a work in progress. I create myself constantly through action, and this is so fundamental to my human condition that, for Sartre, it is the human condition, from the moment of first consciousness to the moment when death wipes it out. I am my own freedom: no more, no less.
All is known in the sacredness of silence
– Rumi
Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.
– C.S. Lewis
Emanations – everything has emanations. Earth, dog, that bottle, me, you – emanations are automatic, must go out from us, from every separate part, from all total, part go out automatically from every living thing. We each one surrounded by atmosphere of our emanations – some scientific apparatus can see these emanations. We each have atmosphere around us all the time – dog also, also bottle, also earth.
– Gurdjieff, Katherine Hulme’s diary
It’s hard to discount what every nerve in your body is telling you, even if it’s incorrect. Again, there’s that dilemma—you may know there’s not an emergency, but your feelings say that there is. It seems that, as developing infants, we need a pretty high proportion of good stuff to bad. Negative states are inevitable and normal, but if they outweigh the positive states, there’s going to be trouble ahead. Putting together ‘‘bonds’’ and ‘‘brains,’’ it seems that we need a secure attachment, with plenty of positive feelings, comfort, and stability, in order for our brains and minds to develop as they should. So this is not just about having a nice childhood with pleasant memories or the opposite, it’s literally about how well the brain develops and what working models, or templates, the infant brain is constructing in the midst of all these experiences.
– Susan Nathiel
I always feel like there is an-
other me.
Another layer.
talking ghosts / whispers in my ears
“you cannot carry us both”
– Christina Marie Brown
[Jung] views the soul as a substance in constant need of reaching beyond itself to a larger life. We need ecstasy, which in its Greek sense (ek-stasis) means to be outside the ego. The ego is a prison, caught in time, space and rationality. We need to leave this mental prison behind from time to time, and on a regular basis. What can get us out? Poetry, love, sex, therapy, passion, nature, ritual, ceremony, music, empathy, compassion, and ‘feeling with’ the world. All of these things Jung calls ‘religion’. Religion is anything that provides escape from egocentricity, relief from the mundane, and as such he gives a Dionysian spin to religion, that seems almost contrary to what an archbishop, for instance, might mean by this term.
– David Tacey, How to Read Jung
Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.”\
– Susan Sontag
There are no exact directions. There are probably no directions at all. The only things that I am able to recommend at this moment are: a sense of humour; an ability to see the ridiculous and the absurd dimensions of things; an ability to laugh about others as well as about ourselves; a sense of irony; and, of everything that invites parody in this world. In other words: rising above things, or looking at them from a distance; sensibility to the hidden presence of all the more dangerous types of conceit in others, as well as in ourselves; good cheer; an unostentatious certainty of the meaning of things; gratitude for the gift of life and courage to assume responsibility for it; and, a vigilant mind.
– Václav Havel
I don’t know why this gets people agitated, but you’ve gotta seduce life. You’ve got to invite it to come to you and work with you. If you’re angry and critical, who wants to come to you? Dogs don’t. Children don’t. Smart people don’t. Neither does chance. Chance just sees an asshole and runs away. Do I give a damn if people think I’m phony or forcing it? I mean, come on. Go out and get started early. Get the good air in the morning. Once you start looking at life and people in a good way, they turn out that way. Is that a philosophy? I don’t know. I know it works.
– Ruth Gordon
Yes, great joy in the shift of the winds, but also engage: talk to people, build relationships across the divide, rehumanize, and also write, get out the vote, organize, organize, organize. Do not be afraid to take action. Give it your very best. Time is of the essence.
– Joan Halifax
Terry Tempest Williams: there is no more waiting here. She quotes Bruno Latour, “We are all living in ‘Critical Zones.’” And this is a critical. We must act, and act now, to keep our democracy open and thriving. We all can be a lamp in this critical time.
I shall never know why people write and how it is people don’t write. In life, there comes a time, and I think it is total, that we cannot escape, where we doubt everything: that doubt is writing.
– Marguerite Duras
Depth psychology has presented us with the undeniable wisdom that the enemy is constructed from denied aspects of the self. Therefore, the radical commandment “Love your enemy as yourself” points the way toward both self-knowledge and peace.
– Sam Keen
Peace can only come as a natural consequence of universal enlightenment.
– Nikola Tesla
For a person whose sole burning ambition is to write — like myself — college is useless beyond the Sophomore year. By that time he knows that further wisdom comes from reading men like Plato and Montaigne — not Cotton Mather — and from getting out in the world and living.
– William Styron
You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept. To hell with it anyway.
– Samuel Beckett
History cannot simply be perceived on the surface of the object, even if how objects surface or take shape is an effect of such histories. In other words, history cannot simply be turned into something that is given in its sensuous certainty…
– Sara Ahmed
If you’re in trouble or hurt or need, go to poor people. They’re the only ones that’ll help, the only ones.
– John Steinbeck
If I had the courage to do nothing, I’d do nothing. It’s because I don’t have the courage to do nothing that I write. There is no other reason. It’s the truest thing I can say on the matter.
– Marguerite Duras
He was glad that he liked the country undecorated, hard and stripped of its finery. He had got down to the bare bones of it, and they were fine and strong and simple.
– Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
One winter morning, walking with Arrieta through the Jardin du Luxembourg, down a tree-lined side avenue we spied a solitary, al- most motionless, black bird reading the newspaper. It was Samuel Beckett. Dressed in black from head to toe, there he was on a bench, very still, looking desperate; it was scary. And it almost seemed like a lie that it was him, that it was Beckett. I’d never imagined I might run into him. I knew he wasn’t one of the dead legends, rather someone who lived in Paris; but I’d always imagined him as a dark presence flying over the city, never as someone you might come across reading the newspaper in despair in a cold, lonely, old park. From time to time he turned a page, seemingly with such anger and intense energy that if the entire Jardin du Luxembourg had shuddered we wouldn’t have been at all surprised. When he got to the last page, he sat there both engrossed and distracted. It was even scarier than before. “He’s the only one brave enough to show that our despair is so great we don’t even have words to express it,” said Arrieta.
– Enrique Vila-Matas (T. by Anne McLean)
Everything is on fire,
but everyone I love is doing beautiful things
and trying to make life worth living,
and I know I don’t have to believe in everything,
but I believe in that.
– Nikita Gill
ENDINGS
The story has two endings.
It has one ending
and then another.
Do you hear me?
I do not have the heart
to edit the other out.
– Sandra Lim
if it must be a rainy day
I wish it would rain a deluge
intermittent drops are not
enough to wash all of this away
– Andy Perrin
We’re better off being run by people picked at random from the phonebook than the faculty of Harvard.
– Elon Musk
Friday was grand.
We went out, we came
back, we went wild. You
slept. Me too. The pup
woke you and you dressed
and walked him. When
you left, I was sleeping.
– James Schuyler
Now, innocent, within the deep
Night of all things you turn the key.
– Louise Bogan
Human beings have one faculty which, though it is of the greatest utility for collective purposes, is most pernicious for individuation, and that is the faculty of imitation.
– Carl Jung
I’d decided the campus was just a place to hide. There were some campus freaks who stayed on forever.
The whole college scene was soft. They never told you what to expect out there in the real world.
They just crammed you with theory and never told you how hard the pavements were. A college education could destroy an individual for life.
Books could make you soft.
When you put them down, and really went out there, then you needed to know what they never told you.
– Charles Bukowski
Stars and blossoming fruit trees: Utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity.
– Simone Weil
We have to fight them daily, like fleas, those many small worries about the morrow, for they sap our energies.
– Etty Hillesum
My writing moves between conceptual analysis and personal digression. But why call the personal a digression? Why is it that the personal so often enters writing as if we are being led astray from a proper course?
– Sara Ahmed
Rage, rage against the lying of the Right.
– Gregory Woods
To understand our endless flow in nothingness is everything.
– Jack Morph
Novelists tell that piece of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie.
– Italo Calvino
And was existence meant for all, since it could be said
without our numbers others might have thrived:
– Paisley Rekdal
The only happy people I know are the ones who are working well at something they consider important.
– Abraham Maslow
I made a list of five cities I’ve never visited and yearn to see: Porto, Munich, Marseille, Buenos Aires, Athens. Then I made a list of five more cities. And five more. And five more.
– Wayne Koestenbaum
Take misfortune as the path and visualize all appearances as the lama. Understanding that all experience is one’s own envisionment, get rid of egoistic clinging. Since everything is without substance, sustain the joke of the absurd.
– Longchenpa
Sometimes helping others is used to bypass your own recovery.
It can be an excellent avoidance tool to distract yourself from doing the work.
We can only take people as far as we’ve gone ourselves.
– Amy Pagett
To speak at great length without saying anything is a social talent many people possess.
– Theodor Reik
In your actions, don’t procrastinate. In your conversations, don’t confuse. In your thoughts, don’t wander. In your soul, don’t be passive or aggressive. In your life, don’t be all about business.
– Marcus Aurelius
You take the first step, and to save yourself from the consequences, you take the next one. In times like ours, there are only two directions: up or plummet.
– Margaret Atwood
Peace is not, apparently, the general human intention, although in the spare hour (in the dear home, in the individual heart) it may sometimes seem to be.
– George Saunders
There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Once you realize that you can do something, it would be difficult to live with yourself if you didn’t do it.
– James Baldwin
A child grows up saying words that the rest of the world tells the child aren’t words. But the child and everybody the child holds dear all know that the words mean, and what the words mean.
– Ali Smith
Unexpressed creativity…is poison to the human psyche. The malady that our species is collectively suffering from is, in essence, the fact that we are not connecting with, mobilizing and expressing our creative nature, which turns against us in self-and-other-destruction.
– Paul Levy
History was safer than the news, because there was no question of how it would end.
– Rebecca Makkai
The masters of projection are often promoted to high levels, a consequence of the way in which advanced societies select for certain aspects of self-blindness. It is imperative to recognize those who live through their projections because such individuals constitute a psychic contagion.
– Carol Shumate
I can say one thing and it will be heard on ten different levels, depending upon the inner psychological and spiritual maturity of the listener.
– Richard Rohr
The universe is changing, and life is mere opinion.
– Marcus Aurelius
If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.
– Frank Zappa
You cannot be intelligent merely by choosing your opinions. The intelligent man is not the man who holds such-and-such views but the man who has sound reasons for what he believes and yet does not believe it dogmatically.
– Bertrand Russell
No one recognizes their faults or their virtues when these are stated by another, any more than they recognize their own voices on a tape recorder. The world transmits back to us only the asymmetric form of our vices, as a mirror reflects back the asymmetric form of our faces.
– Jean Baudrillard
A blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it.
– Marcus Aurelius
Doubt everything, find your own light.
– Gautam Buddha
We’re a big beautiful choir. And it’s time to sing!
– Tim Walz
It’s pretty common to hear people’s stories and I realize that their parents were their first bullies.
The rewarding part is helping them realize none of it was their fault.
– @therapyghost
The way of peacemaking given us may be something so small that it seems hardly worth doing, but it is these small offerings which build your reflexes for the larger ones.
– Madeleine L’Engle
Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
– Flannery O’Connor
Music is a friend of labor for it lightens the task by refreshing the nerves and spirit of the worker.
– William Green
Don’t you know that everybody’s got a Fairyland of their own?
– P.L. Travers
Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
A billion and a half human souls, who had been given the techniques of music and the graphic arts, and the theory of technology, now had the others: philosophy and logic and love; sympathy, empathy, forbearance, unity, in the idea of their species rather than in their obedience; membership in harmony with all life everywhere.
A people with such feelings and their derived skills cannot be slaves. As the light burst upon them, there was only one concentration possible to each of them—to be free, and the accomplished feeling of being free. As each found it, he was an expert in freedom, and expert succeeded expert, transcended expert, until (in a moment) a billion and a half human souls had no greater skill than the talent of freedom.
– Theodore Sturgeon
We Are Contextual Beings
By Pir Aga Mir
Here is one of my central inquiries: If our spiritual and religious practices are not expanding our circle of empathy, compassion, love and care, what is their purpose? If they are not preparing us for our physical deaths, what ends are they serving? Part of the reason that institutional religions have lost their way in this regard is that the praxis of a once-enlightened human cannot be calcified and universalized. As humans, we are contextual beings. The context of Jerusalem 2100 years ago or Mecca 1500 years ago or India 4,000 years ago, or even the Amazon 100 years ago, does not translate into a relevant code-of-ethic or moral philosophy in the messy, entangled world of modernity. In fact, the context of Jesus or Mohammed (may peace be upon them) could not translate from the moment they left the material realm.
This is not to say that practices and traditions and aspects of culture should not be preserved and perpetuated. Rather, they should be openly shared and discussed with a contemporary critical lens and the loving embrace of the evolutionary impulse that lies within all of us. Does your spiritual practice make you a better student of the impoverishment of your time? Does it allow you to be in deeper service to the transformations that are happening now? Does it connect you more deeply to the body you inhabit? Does it root you more profoundly to this generous planet that serves as your home and your mother?
We have all chosen to incarnate in troubled times. You may describe our context as the Anthropocene or the Kali Yuga (the dark ages in the Vedic cycle) — a context that rewards short-termism, greed, extraction. We must all be good students of our culture in order to be conscientious objectors. This is the path of the mystic. […] Some may call that heretical, I would describe it as being contextually relevant.
Part of our spiritual practice is to study our cultures in order to understand the antidote logic. In our culture of modernity, the antidote is to cultivate reciprocal relationships, to live in dialogue with a living planet, to act in solidarity with all Life, to build power and oppose oppression, and to live in the gift, without usury, speculation or accumulation. We know that our souls will continue coming back to this planet until we create heaven on Earth. Non-dualistically, we also understand that heaven on Earth is already here. We source our political power from the simultaneous truths of multiple realities. This is divine will.
I can do no better than to borrow from our siblings who wrote the Talmud:
Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief.
Do justly, now.
Love mercy, now.
You are not obligated to complete the work,
But neither are you free to abandon it.
Hell is the concretization of your life experiences, a place where you’re stuck, the wasteland. In hell, you are so bound to yourself that grace cannot enter.
– Joseph Campbell
There is nothing more tragic in human life than to see the trained mind, the mind that has mastered the discipline of the particular area of human knowledge, and at the center of that trained mind there is no fundamental commitment; no hard core of metaphysical purpose.
The result is the trained mind is for rent.
Anyone who is able to pay enough money can rent the trained mind and use the fruits of the creative process of mind for ends with which the mind itself has nothing in common.
– Howard Thurman
The world is held together by the love & the passion of a very few people. Otherwise, of course you can despair… You could be that person, you could be that monster—and you have to decide, in yourself, not to be.
– James Baldwin
I have to tell you what I’ve learned, that I know now
what happens to the dreamers.
They don’t feel it when they change. One day
they wake, they dress, they are old.
– Louise Glück
A hunted man sometimes wearies of distrust and longs for friendship.
– J. R. R. Tolkien
The river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree, and when the undergraduate had oared his boat through the reflections they closed again, completely, as if they had never been. There one might have sat the clock round lost in thought. Thought –to call it by a prouder name than it deserved– had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it until –you know the little tug — the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one’s line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out? Alas, laid on the grass how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating.
– Virginia Woolf
The Gift of Tongues
Everything I steal, I give away.
Once, in pines almost as tall as these,
same crescent moon sliding gently by,
I sat curled on my knees, smoking with a friend,
sipping tea, swapping Coyote tales and lies.
He said something to me
about words, that each is a name,
and that every name is God’s. I who have
no god sat in the vast emptiness silent
as I could be. A way that can be named
is not the way. Each word reflects
the Spirit which can’t be named. Each word
a gift, its value in exact proportion
to the spirit in which it is given.
Thus spoken, these words I give
by way of Lao Tzu’s old Chinese, stolen
by a humble thief twenty-five centuries later.
The Word is only evidence of the real:
in the Hopi tongue, there is no whale;
and, in American English, no Fourth World.
– Sam Hamill
There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realize that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer.
– Helen Macdonald
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.
– Carl G. Jung
An ordinary person reads about the kingdom of God and heaven, but does not know where heaven is; the ordinary person feels there is a God, but there is no evidence. Therefore, a large number of intellectual people who really are seeking the truth are going away from outer religion, because they cannot find the explanation; consequently they become materialistic.
The mystic says the explanation of the whole of religion is the investigation of the self. The more one explores oneself, the more one will understand all religions in the fullest light and all will become clear. Sufism is only a light thrown upon your own religion, like a light brought into a room containing all the things you want; the one thing needed was light.
Yet the mystic is not always ready to give their answer to every person. Can parents always answer every question of their infant children? No. There are questions which can be answered, and there are some which should wait until the person comes to a point of understanding. I used to be fond of a poem which I did not understand; I could not find a satisfactory explanation. After ten years, all of a sudden in one second’s time, a light was thrown upon it and I understood. There was no end to my joy. Does it not show that everything has its time? When people become impatient and ask for an answer, something can be answered, but something cannot be answered; the answer will come in its time. One has to wait. Has anyone in the world been able to say fully what God is, all the scriptures and prophets notwithstanding? God is an ideal too high and great for words.
– Hazrat Inayat Khan
When you cut into the present the future leaks out.
– William S. Burroughs
IN PRAISE OF MY SISTER – Wislawa Szymborska
Translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczcak and Clare Cavanagh
My sister doesn’t write poems.
and it’s unlikely that she’ll suddenly start writing poems.
She takes after her mother, who didn’t write poems,
and also her father, who likewise didn’t write poems.
I feel safe beneath my sister’s roof:
my sister’s husband would rather die than write poems.
And, even though this is starting to sound as repetitive as
Peter Piper,
the truth is, none of my relatives write poems.
My sister’s desk drawers don’t hold old poems,
and her handbag doesn’t hold new ones,
When my sister asks me over for lunch,
I know she doesn’t want to read me her poems.
Her soups are delicious without ulterior motives.
Her coffee doesn’t spill on manuscripts.
There are many families in which nobody writes poems,
but once it starts up it’s hard to quarantine.
Sometimes poetry cascades down through the generations,
creating fatal whirlpools where family love may founder.
My sister has tackled oral prose with some success.
but her entire written opus consists of postcards from
vacations
whose text is only the same promise every year:
when she gets back, she’ll have
so much
much
much to tell.
The note of hope is the only note that can help us or save us from falling to the bottom of the heap of evolution, because, largely, about all a human being is, anyway, is just a hoping machine.
– Woody Guthrie
Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit – all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.
– Brian Eno
We are like violins. We can be used as doorstops, or we can make music.
– Barbara Sher
When you live in Culture War Mode there is always a battle to fight, a side to take, and people to fear.
When you live in God’s Kingdom there’s always a stranger to welcome, a neighbor to befriend, and an enemy to love.
– Dan White Jr.
Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music.
– Ezra Pound
Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons. You will find it is to the soul what a water bath is to the body.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Play the music, not the instrument.
– Author Unknown
A body, like a universe
is a lot to be responsible for.
Maybe a universe can help.
How many do we need?
As many as there are bodies?
Since bodies are so different,
what if minds are all the same?
The ultimate joke
that loving keeps exploring.
The surprise of somebody else
forever pitted against
the surprise of nobody else
with everyone applauding in between.
The coincidentia oppositorum
of loving bodies and free minds.
– George Gorman
IDENTIFYING MARKS
America is basically a big circus.
– Walter Benjamin
I remember nothing of that year except that elections were held, and someone, on a night that seemed to me interminable, swore blind that I was Catalan. I continued on my way. I turned a corner. The north wind was blowing hard, and I remembered that, in my youth, I wanted to be many different people and from many differ- ent places at the same time, because being only one person seemed too narrow somehow. When I turned another corner and the wind beat against me even harder, I finally understood something I had suspected for a long time. We are too much like ourselves, and the danger is that we end up resembling ourselves too closely. As one’s life progresses, the same obsessive, insignificant character takes root. I turned another corner and have still not woken up from the nightmare of waking up from a nightmare and finding that I’m still working in a circus in Oklahoma, and there is no way out.
– Enrique Vila-Matas translated by Margaret Costa
We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is.
– James Baldwin
The world to me is a dream and the people in it are sleepers. I have known a few instances of intensity but that is all. I want to find a world in which these instances are united.
– Katherine Mansfield
Where I place my eye, I want to place the bullet
Where I place my fascination, I place the pen
Where I place my finger, there is the wound.
I don’t place words: I take them.
– Luisa Valenzuela
We can hold each other accountable without rancor. This is aspirational, but it matters to me.
– Kenneth Folk
Don’t force your children into your ways, for they were created for a time different from your own.
– Plato
Unless patients can feel that they have reached their analysts, moved them, changed them, discomfited them, angered them, hurt them, healed them, known them in some profound way, they themselves may not be able to benefit from their analyses.
– Lew Aron
We aren’t here to heal our illness; our Illnesses are here to heal us.
– C.G. Jung
Wind Off a River
I love the stampede of broken glass,
there’s nothing quieter.
I press a scarlet seed into your palm.
Quiet.
It used to be enough to lie in my cradle
letting the planets burst from my forehead
and god would be on the telephone.
Hardly a scar now.
Motorcycles in the middle of the night
think they’re winning the argument
just by putting a big tear in the thesis.
But rage is quiet.
A shadow tied up in viscera is quiet.
Let us be clear about how little time is left,
what the avalanche requires of us.
Being drawn into the mouth
of some eight-legged thing is quiet.
The center of the sun is quiet.
The last year of my friends’ marriage,
although one of them didn’t know it,
they’d get to the restaurant
and both start talking
so you’d have to choose
who to listen to, which quiet,
the one like a bottle of freesias
in an office full of broken chairs
or the one like the wind coming off the river
hard enough to freeze the tears it causes
same as now.
The paws of our great source
touch us in our sleep.
– Dean Young
Pulse of the gorgeous world, jubilant, strong,—
Thy song a whistled splendor, and thy coat
A fiery song! From thy triumphant throat
How I have heard it pouring, loud and long.
– Karle Wilson Baker
I do live in the book. If you don’t enter into it, you can’t really translate it.
– Richard Pevear
Home is so Sad
by Philip Larkin
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft
And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.
The fact that writing remains so difficult is what puzzles.
– Elizabeth Hardwick
On Average
It takes a little over eight minutes
for sunlight to travel to Earth,
and a little under eighty years
for people to travel six feet more
down into the root-haired dirt,
freshly dug. The last stretch
is so perilous, we tuck folks
into boxes to keep them safe.
– Michael Bazzett
If you want the truth, I’m prouder of that, that I’ve quit drinking, than I am of anything in my life.
– Raymond Carver
Everything in my body says to turn back to the life I knew.
I look deep into your eyes, and my voice shakes as I whisper ok, I promise
You do not let go as I watch the life I thought I knew disappear before my eyes.
– Chandler Peters-Durose
The writer’s enemy, his adversary, is money. And I believe that literature can eliminate money.
– Dany Laferrière
August Evening
by Sandor Csoori
See, a hand sweeps stars
from the August sky,
as if my mother swept off the supper crumbs from the table at home.
Her apron, slipping now and then, smells of parsley
and chives–
The sweet scent of her long-gone garden
sending me to sleep beside you tonight again.
Recall the frontier when the business
of memory booms, when broadbands uncoil
and clouds swell with sticky portals
– Cathy Park Hong
Out of the ashes,
rose a helicopter.
An unwelcome phoenix.
– Farah Habad
I don’t want to shovel poetry into people like it’s information. I want it to be perceptual, like a dot.
– Eileen Myles
I took the sun’s hand
and its bright heat to heart
while learning how
to backflip in my father’s
mother’s garden, wild
strawberries surrendering
their minute organs
to our appetite in due time,
– Phillip B. Williams
It comes down to all the standard figures of speech. Simile and metaphor. That’s what makes a poem.
– Lawrence Ferlinghetti
The air
Is full of hot rank scents. Upon the hill
Drifts the noon’s single cloud, white, glaring, still.
– Lizette Woodworth Reese
but this smart snow erases
nothing, seeps everywhere,
the search engine is inside us,
the world is our display
– Cathy Park Hong
I listen, while bodyless
uniforms and spinach specked shoes
drift in monochrome down the dark
moon-possessed streets.
– Lorna Dee Cervantes
(Cannery Town in August)
Sweet and low, sweet and low,
Wind of the western sea,
Low, low, breathe and blow,
Wind of the western sea!
– Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Survival is not a fortress. It is a garden.
Survival is not a siren. It is a symphony.
– Kyle Tran Myhre
I pitched through the lobby door and then, as I caught my breath, stood looking back at the storm. It was bad out there. The city had been reduced to dim outlines and floating lights.
– Zach Williams.
The writer should have considered his wit and dried his tears long, long before setting out to evoke similar reactions in a reader… the greatest intensity in art in all its shapes is achieved with a deliberate, hard, and cool head.
– Truman Capote
Crow
by Lorna Dee Cervantes
She started and shot from the pine,
then brilliantly settled in the west field
and sunned herself purple.
I saw myself: twig and rasp, dry
in breath and ammonia smelling.
Women taught me to clean
and then build my own house.
Before men came they whispered,
Know good polished oak.
Learn hammer and Phillips.
Learn socket and rivet. I ran
over rocks and gravel they placed
by hand, leaving burly arguments
to fester the bedrooms. With my best jeans,
a twenty and a shepherd pup, I ran
flushed and shadowed by no one
alone I settled stiff in mouth
with the words women gave me.
Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.
– Seneca
Write it down cause why not
– Dorothea Lasky
Many on the political left are so entranced by the beauty of their vision that they cannot see the ugly reality they are creating in the real world.
– Thomas Sowell
I won’t forgive you, neither in this world nor the next.
– A child from Gaza
the unfortunately ironclad logic of anxiety: on the one hand, some of the things I’ve been terribly anxious about haven’t happened, at least not yet. On the other hand, who’s to say all that anxiety didn’t ward off the calamities I imagined? Might as well stay anxious!, etc.
– R.O. Kwon
the world is mostly scar tissue
– River Kenna
Survival mode is a poor representation of who you are.
– Nika Solé
it’s time for us to start being
kind to the people who can’t do
anything to improve our lives
situational kindness isn’t
actually kindness
it’s just the way narcissists
do business
kindness isn’t transactional
~ it’s meant to be transformative
kindness isn’t a contract
~ it’s meant to be a stringless kite
I’ve come to discover that
kindness is the mother
to millions of beautiful daughters
and she gave every single one of her
long-haired children the same name:
“Empathy”
and now the daughters
of kindness are marching
and now they have
become a movement
and now the ground
is shaking beneath you
and now empathy’s
choir is singing
and now the sky
is raining cherry blossoms
and now it’s your
turn to join them
and now you are with
them as they march
and now you feel your numbness leave
and now you cry for strangers
and now your fists have become cups
and now you are human again
and now everybody is your neighbor
and now you can feel
it coursing through you
~ the desire to forgive your enemy
and you’ll never go back
to the terrible normal you
had gotten so used to
because now you have joined
the flower legion of marching
compassion
because now you have let
Empathy and her millions
of sisters become your
guides
because now you recognize that
the season of kindness has
only just begun
because now you remember
that you were created
to be the bringer of light
and now the cherry blossoms
are everywhere
– john roedel
The Flower
I asked for riches.
You gave me the earth, the sea,
the immensity
of the broad sky. I looked at them
and learned I must withdraw
to possess them. I gave my eyes
and my ears, and dwelt
in a soundless darkness
in the shadow
of your regard.
The soul
grew in me, filling me
with its fragrance.
Men came
to me from the four
winds to hear me speak
of the unseen flower by which
I sat, whose roots were not
in the soil, nor its petals the colour
of the wild sea; that was
its own species with its own
sky over it, shot
with the rainbow of your coming and going.
– R S Thomas
Lux spent the ride dialing the radio for her favorite song. “It makes me crazy,” she said. “You know they’re playing it somewhere, but you have to find it.”
– Jeffrey Eugenides
There comes a time in a man’s life when to get where he has to – if there are no doors or windows – he walks through a wall.
– Bernard Malamud
We can’t think our way to God. That’s why I’m willing to abandon everything I know, to love the one thing I cannot think. He can be loved, but not thought. By love, God can be embraced and held, but not by thinking.
– The Cloud of Unknowing, (trans. Carmen Acevedo Butcher)
You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power, a single salvation… and that is called loving. Well, then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is your aversion that hurts, nothing else.
– Hermann Hesse
… to know that in order to go on,
we must accept the cage we are given
that someday we will be released
into the unimaginable
and until then, praise the walls
and all the parts of us they manage to hold so dearly.
– Ada Limon
The world, I’ve come to think is like the surface of a frozen lake. We walk along, we slip, we try to keep our balance and not to fall. One day there is a crack, and so we learn that underneath us is an unimaginable depth.
– James Joyce
Love is a compromise for only getting to be one person.
– Catherine Lacey
He must be living a life free of worries. But viewed from his perspective, looking at me from his side of the valley, I might appear to also be living a life of ease and leisure. From a distance, most things look beautiful.
– Haruki Murakami
Some people, if they didn’t make it hard for themselves, might fall asleep.
– Saul Bellow
The more we seek the light, the more darkness forms in compensation, in an attempt to make us whole.
– Robin Robertson
You can’t see the future coming—not the terrors, for sure, but you also can’t see the wonders that are coming, the moments of light-soaked joy that await each of us.
– John Green
Man is a growth by law, and not a creation by artifice, and cause and effect is as absolute and undeviating in the hidden realm of thought as in the world of visible and material things.
– James Allen
Allow in any information relating to the world of your dream.
– Vadim Zeland
Difficult times disrupt your conventional ways of thinking and push you to forge better habits of thought, performance and being.
– Robin Sharma
Unable are the loved to die, for love is immortality.
– Emily Dickinson
I’m not asking you
to hold me together.
I’m asking you
to open so wide
there’s room for all the ways
I come apart.
– James A. Pearson
Anyone who perceives their shadow and light simultaneously sees themselves from two sides and thus gets in the middle.
– Carl Jung
Luminous is the Mind
– The Buddha
The opening up of the unconscious always means the outbreak of intense spiritual suffering: it is as when fertile fields are exposed by the bursting of a dam to a raging torrent.
– CG Jung
To increase desires to an unbearable level whilst making the fulfillment of them more and more inaccessible: this was the single principle upon which Western society was based.
– Michel Houellebecq
I am not predicting doom. But I am stating that if we ignore evil, we will move closer to doom, and the growth and triumph of evil may well result.
– Rollo May
I am convinced that not even the lack of readers can banish poetry. Without that conviction, it would be unbearable to continue living.
– Sergio Pitol
If we are not willing to see and accept those events in which we have been the source of others’ suffering, then we cannot truly know ourselves or the grace by which we live.
– Gregg Krech
They’ll tell you to speak from your heart, but what they won’t tell you is that almost no one ~listens from~ their heart.
– River Kenna
Spirituality has nothing to do with the atmosphere you live in. It’s about the atmosphere you create within yourself.
– Sadhguru
Change is an insulting, gruelling experience but, if we want to maximise our potentials, there is no other thing to do.
– Jonathan Young
Now, if you ask me, what’s going on is that we’re all up to *here* in it, and probably the most important thing is that we not yell at one another.
– Anne Lamott
Difficulty is what wakes
up the genius.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb
When the spent sun throws up its rays on cloud
And goes down burning into the gulf below,
No voice in nature is heard to cry aloud
At what has happened. Birds, at least, must know
It is the change to darkness in the sky.
– Robert Frost
You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts.
– Kahlil Gibran
You lose your grip and then you slip
Into the masterpiece…
– Leonard Cohen
WEARY of this same clay and straw, I laid
Me down to breathe, and casting in my heart
The after-burthens, and griefs yet to come,
The heavy sum
– Henry Vaughan
The world right now is one big example of why shadow projection is a very real and potentially dangerous phenomenon—especially when mixed with mass psychosis and wetiko. We are truly in a psychological and spiritual war, and we need to be psychologically and spiritually strong.
– Laura Matsue
No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes.
– Henry David Thoreau
An emotion is only an emotion. It’s just a small part of your whole being. You are much more than your emotion. An emotion comes, stays for a while, and goes away, just like a storm. If you’re aware of that, you won’t be afraid of your emotions.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
At night the moon shakes the bright dice of the water;
– Louise Bogan
calling my mother
the patient version of me
still struggling
– @hegelincanada
If you are feeling down, I implore you to get even the most basic of exercise routines down. It is such a game changer. Truly.
– Lisa Lucas
It is a need of the spirit not to forget whoever has let you feel beautiful and safe…With all due respect to memories, the point is always ahead of us and not behind. It is not the last conversation but the next one that matters. Likewise in politics.
– June Jordan
A body is three songs
playing at the same time
& an army of crows
refusing to listen
to any of them …
– Pat Foran
To climb steep hills requires slow pace at first.
– Shakespeare
There is no such thing as an incurable disease, only incurable people.
– Bernie S. Siegel
Generosity, love, compassion, or devotion do not depend on a high IQ.
– Joseph Goldstein
The right thing done at the wrong time, in the wrong place, is the wrong thing.
– Dr. Howard Cohn
THE ROUND EARTH
This grand show is eternal.
It is always sunrise somewhere:
the dew is never all dried at once;
a shower is forever falling; vapor ever rising.
Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset,
eternal dawn and gloaming.
On seas and continents and islands.
Each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.
– John Muir
the pain I don’t say
out loud, builds a home
inside me.
– Olivia Gatwood
Reality is invented for you by people who design it like a choreography; there’s definitely an office somewhere in Washington, with people you’ve never heard of, that designs reality. It’s not just about what will be the next event to come up but rather what will be the interpretation of a given international event And this must be distributed everywhere through the media, without anyone asking questions about it.
– Frank Zappa
Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel in order to be tough. The vigorous expression of our American community spirit is truly important. The ancient injunction to love thy neighbor as thyself is still the force that animates our faith—a faith that we are determined shall live and conquer in a world poisoned by hatred and ravaged by war.
– Franklin D Roosevelt
You feel the soul by opening your heart to people, by accepting what is. The soul grows through the heart. The heart is the door to the soul. But with all ordinary men, this door is blocked with fear, prejudice, doubt. His heart is not open to the world. He only takes from it what he wants to take, in the way he wants to take it. If he could only be ‘himself’, ‘be his whole self’, without fear and without self-protection, he would already live from the soul. So learn simply to ‘be’, to ‘be’ your ‘whole’ self.
– Rodney Collin
Fasting is the first principle of medicine.
– Rumi
Emptiness is a great feminine secret. It is something absolutely alien to man; the chasm, the unplumbed depths, the yin.
– CG Jung
Paths are the habits of a landscape…
– Robert Macfarlane
Schools train people to be ignorant, with style. They give you the equipment that you need to be a functional ignoramus.
American schools do not equip you to deal with things like logic; they don’t give you the criteria by which to judge between good and bad in any medium or format, and they prepare you to be a usable victim for the military-industrial complex that needs manpower.
– Frank Zappa
I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man’s. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.
– William Blake
A society should make the right things easy and the wrong things hard.
– Ray Hunt
A regulated nervous system will have you seeing the world completely different.
– Nika Solé
The aim of psychic development is to be able to tolerate insecurity…
– Erich Fromm
When your peace is sourced from within, it changes everything. You’re not looking for people or environments to give you permission to feel it. You set the bar at, whatever disrupts it has to go.
– Nika Solé
There are no happy endings.
Endings are the saddest part,
So just give me a happy middle
And a very happy start.
– Shel Silverstein
If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself—as men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation—you may hate it, or deify it, but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality, and its human reality.
You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, ‘This is the way; walk in it.’
– Isaiah, 30:21
Are you penitent, or are you not? Do you walk in faith, or do you not? Imagine for a moment, dear pilgrim, being home months from now after having walked the valley instead of the mountains. You looked toward the mountains long ago…did you not?
– Stephen Drew
One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: that word is love.
– Sophocles
Life’s like that, clinging futilely to the very objects that imprison us.
– Abdulrazak Gurnah
I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.
– Oscar Wilde
To find beauty in ugliness is the province of the poet.
– Thomas Hardy
Your real “country” is where you’re heading, not where you are.
– Rumi
That there is a love of weakness is no doubt the essence of love. As I have said, love is giving what one doesn’t have, namely what might make good (réparer) this original weakness.
– Jacques Lacan
Books meant something different when we returned to them later, leavened by life.
– Viet Thanh Nguyen
Contrast is the mother of clarity. I always find that I understand and wonder at the Gospel when I see the alternatives.
– Os Guinness
Evil is the force that believes its knowledge is complete.
– Jordan B. Peterson
Bitter are the roots of study, but how sweet their fruit.
– Cato
The ancestor of every action is a thought.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Your mind is not a library, it’s a laboratory.
– Tom Bilyeu
I don’t know what they are called, the spaces between seconds- but I think of you always in those intervals.
– Salvador Plascencia
A sage lives like a quail on scattered grain. When he flies, he leaves no trace.
– The Chuangtzu
‘divergent’ adjective: tending to be different or develop in different directions.
When someone sends you negativity through jealousy, speaking poorly about you, spite, or even those who sit down to cast ill will on you, take the energy boost and carry on. Karma will handle the rest. No one can reach you without your permission.
– Nika Solé
You don’t have to manipulate anyone or anything to get what you want, when what you want is what God wants for you. The energy of integrity will carry all that is for you to you naturally.
– Nika Solé
My hut is deep in the woods
where nobody goes.
Only birds gather there by a stream full of fish.
I pick fruit with my children.
I hoe a small paddy field with my wife.
What’s in my hut?
A book stand.
– Han-shan, (after Arthur Waley)
Man’s Unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his Greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.
– Thomas Carlyle
Clouds are air’s objectifications, and, as perspiration and respiration, air is where effort goes once our effort is spent. This crowded air is the stage of everything dematerialized’s abiding dematerialization. Everything solid melts into it.
– Anne Boyer, The Heavy Air
Never depend on the admiration of others. There is no strength in it. Personal merit cannot be derived from an external source. It is not to be found in your personal associations, nor can it be found in the regard of other people.
– Epictetus
Trust yourself.
At the root, at the core,
there is pure sanity,
pure openness.
Don’t trust what you have been taught,
what you think, what you believe,
what you hope. Deeper than that,
trust the silence of your being.
– Gangaji
I don’t think anything is the opposite of love. Reality is unforgivingly complex.
– Anne Lamott
If one or two, a dozen or a hundred, bring about fundamental freedom from conditioning, they will affect the whole of human consciousness.
– Krishnamurti
When people are living from the head, they often seem pretty confused and tense about things
I don’t get that from people centering in the gut or the heart
– River Kenna
The Uni-verse is wise, loving and knows you better than you do. Let go and let It guide you home.
– Mastin Kipp
If you spend too much time with people who don’t have any ambitions, you’ll soon lack the fire to excel.
– @farnamstreet
Not what we say about our blessings, but how we use them, is the true measure of our thanksgiving.
– W.T. Purkiser
Oh, aren’t all books full of holes? Never trust a book that claims to be whole.
– Justin Chin
I’m imagining a maze
It looks complicated, or hopelessly complex. Twists and turns, blind alleys, tricks of perception.
You can spend your whole life studying it and mapping every corner of it. That may not help.
The maze is built on a downslope; a strange quality. You wonder what that’s about.
The secret, actually, is that you don’t have to solve the maze. If you just drop to the ground and tumble downhill, you’ll find your way out.
Most of the people who’ve escaped have done so on accident, by tripping and falling downhill. When they realized all their work to map and think about and logic their way out of the maze was useless next to simply tripping downhill, they laughed before walking off on their merry way.
Anyway, that’s more or less how i see the Path
– River Kenna
Mud in a quiet puddle:
tomorrow dust
dancing in the street.
– Octavio Paz, (tr. Charles Tomlinson)
Practice saying something kind to someone every day. Do this especially with people you don’t like. It gets easier with practice and bears surprisingly good results.
– @ThubtenChodron
Sometimes you can SEE someone’s blocks, glowing and pulsing and sticking out of their chest,
And you know so much would be easier for them and for you if you could just pull it out for them
But you can’t ,, they’re gonna have to do it for themselves
– River Kenna
The Wall
by Donald Justice
for J.B.
The wall surrounding them they never saw;
The angels, often. Angels were as common
As birds or butterflies, but looked more human.
As long as the wings were furled, they felt no awe.
Beasts, too, were friendly. They could find no flaw
In all of Eden: this was the first omen.
The second was the dream which woke the woman.
She dreamed she saw the lion sharpen his claw.
As for the fruit, it had no taste at all.
They had been warned of what was bound to happen.
They had been told of something called the world.
They had been told and told about the wall.
They saw it now; the gate was standing open.
As they advanced, the giant wings unfurled.
When I choose to see the good side of things, I’m not being naive. It is strategic and necessary.
– Waymond, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once
To be foreign is to be free. To have a great expanse stretch out before you — the desert, the steppe. To have the shape of the moon behind you like a cradle, the deafening symphony of the cicadas, the air’s fragrance of melon peel, the rustle of the scarab beetle when, come evening, the sky turns red, and it ventures out onto the sand to hunt. To have your own history, not for everyone, just your own history written in the tracks you leave behind.
– Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob
The whole purpose of reasoning, of logic, is to arrive at the truth of things… But not to pursue truth would be absurd, since it is the only thing that gives meaning to all our endeavors.
– D.Q. McInerny
I want words that are still alive, that have a pulse. Hot words, people! Give me the bullet, not the casing — fire it right in my chest. I’ll die gladly for some fresh language.
– Jennifer Egan
Just as it is impossible to know when a swimming fish is drinking water, so it is impossible to find out when a government servant is stealing money.
– Kautilya
I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.
– Jonathan Swift
I’m happy when I’m traveling to know that the pilots are better pilots than I am a writer.
– Gabriel García Márque
But curiosity makes for better poems.
– Ava Nathaniel Winter
Two states later, in this secluded parking lot off a craggy mountain byway, I felt like I had reached my destination: away.
– Erika Krouse
I see my writing on imagination and on war as continuous. The two subjects are essentially locked in combat because the act of inflicting injury or pain is really a willful aping of imagination, turning it upside down and appropriating it.
– Elaine Scarry
TEA OF PEACE
Just a cup of tea. Just another opportunity for healing. Just the hand reaching out to receive the handle of the cup. Just noticing hot. Noticing texture and fragrance. Just a cup of tea. Just this moment in newness. Just the hand touching the cup. Just the arm retracting. The fragrance increasing as the cup nears the lips. So present. Noticing the bottom lip receiving heat from the cup, the top lip arched to receive the fluid within.
Noticing the first taste of tea before the tea even touches the lips. The fragrance and the heat rising into the mouth. The first noticing of flavor. The touch of warm tea on willing tongue. The tongue moving the tea about the mouth. The intention to swallow. The warmth that extends down into the stomach. What a wonderful cup of tea. The tea of peace, of satisfaction. Drinking a cup of tea, I stop the war.
– Steven Levine
Somewhere, right at the bottom of one’s own being, one generally does know where one should go and what one should do. But there are times when the clown we call ‘I’ behaves in such a distracting fashion that the inner voice cannot make its presence felt.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
I have described the integrated person as having a healthy childlikeness. The most mature human beings are also childlike. That is not as contradictory as it sounds. The most mature people are the ones who can have the most fun. They are able to “regress” at will ; they can become childish and play with children and be close to them. It is no accident, I think, that children generally tend to like them and get along with them. Involuntary regression is of course a very dangerous thing; but voluntary regression seems to be characteristic
of very healthy people.
– Abraham Maslow
… the fundamental striving of every man should be to create for himself an inner freedom towards life and to prepare for himself a happy old age.
– Gurdjieff
Though your view should be as vast as the sky, keep your conduct as fine as barley flour.
– Padmasambhava
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
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
Jung said in a letter once that life is a short pause between two great mysteries. Beware of those who offer answers. They may be sincere, but their answers are not necessarily yours.
– James Hollis
The Americans are completely stupid. The intellectual level in any single European country is higher than in America.
– Michel Houellebecq
Being a woman is kind of like being a cyclist in a city where all the cars represent men. You’re supposed to be able to share the road equally with cars, but that’s not how it works. The roads are built for cars and you spend a great deal of physical and mental energy being defensive and trying not to get hurt. Some of the cars want you to get hurt. They think you don’t have any place on the road at all. And if you do get hurt by a car, everyone makes excuses that it’s your fault.
– Malaak Safa
Every next level comes with a smaller circle, stronger boundaries, and an increased willingness to say no.
– Nika Solé
No human has ever proven his or her sentience to me. It’s just a feeling I get. Some feel more self-aware than others. Machines are like that too.
– Kenneth Folk
‘Those who know have wings.’
‘Among all things that fly, the mind is the swiftest.’
– Rig Veda
Away with middle ways! That no light be deflected,
Suffer no walls to be before thine eyes erected.
– Angelus Silesius
It is an odd situation when people accept massive sociological determinations but are very sensitive to humble moral limitations.
– Jacques Ellul
The price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt.
– Sigmund Freud
There’s enough metaphysics in not thinking about anything.
-Alberto Caeiro
(Fernando Pessoa)
tr. Chris Daniels
The wise man does at once what the fool does finally.
– Machiavelli
Nobody can escape the influence of an axiom we all are taught from childhood on, that of man’s innate laziness. This axiom does not stand by itself. It is part of the more general assumption, that man is evil by nature and hence needs the Church or the power of the state to try to extirpate the evil even though he can never hope to succeed in this attempt beyond a certain measure. If—so the argument runs—man is lazy, greedy, destructive by nature, he needs rulers— spiritual and secular-who restrain him from following his inclinations.
But it is historically more correct to reverse the sequence: if institutions and leaders want to rule men, their most efficient ideological weapon is to convince him that he cannot be trusted to follow his own will and insight, because both are guided by the devil within him. As nobody has seen more clearly than Nietzsche, if one succeeds in filling man with the permanent feeling of sin and guilt, he will be incapable of being free, of being himself, because his self is corrupted and hence must not be permitted to assert itself. Man can react to this fundamental accusation with abject submission, or protest against it-and thus seemingly prove it-with violent aggression, but he cannot be free, he cannot be the master of his own life; he cannot be himself.
– Erich Fromm
So many of our problems originate from not having thoroughly integrated previous stages of development.
How many people who don’t live in the egocentric stage anymore, have yet to find healthy ways to include their egos?
For example: Take the Buddhist who noxiously and self-obsessedly goes on and on about how important it is to transcend the ego.
How many people who no longer find ethnocentrism to be their developmental center-of-gravity, have been unable to integrate a healthy & respectful ethnocentrism back into their lives?
For example: Take the pluralistic idealist who can’t, for the life of them, have a functional relationship with their family of origin, or feel any pride about their ethnic heritage.
We think the issue is we aren’t mature enough, but actually, it’s that we’re not yet whole enough, to include all of what has already emerged.
– @VinceFHorn
The knowledge that life is worthless is the flower of all wisdom. The worthlessness of life is the easiest truth, but at the same time it is the one that is the hardest to know, because it appears concealed by countless veils.
– Philipp Mainländer
On questions of intelligence and self-awareness, people tend to hold machines to higher standards than they hold themselves. Fundamental attribution error?
– Kenneth Folk
People with hearts filled with love, peace, and compassion live in heaven.
– Debbie Ford
The beginning of growth lies in the fact of becoming free. The process of freedom begins with oneself and one’s parents. There is no question about it. If a person does not emancipate himself from his parents, if he or she does not feel more and more that he or she has a right to decide for himself or herself and that he or she is neither afraid nor particularly defiant toward the wishes of his or her parents, but he or she is on his or her own, then the door or the road to independence is always closed.
I would say one of the best things anybody can do is ask himself or herself: “Where am I on the personal road to independence in reference to my reaction to my parents?” I am not speaking that one shouldn’t love one’s parents. There is a kind of love which one can even have toward people who have damaged one, provided they did it without knowing what they were doing. Some one really couldn’t blame; some are quite likeable in spite of the fact that they make many mistakes or do things wrong. So this does not refer to antagonism; those various fights against parents are usually only a smokescreen for a still existing dependence: one has to prove to the parents that they are wrong. As long as they have to prove to the parents that they are wrong, I still have to prove it to them. The question is one is free if one has neither to prove they are wrong nor that they are right. So this is me, and you are you, and if you like each other that’s fine. That is the beginning of any road to freedom for oneself—of course also only to be recognized if one tries.
– Erich Fromm
Ignorance is very harsh and willing to stick with its own version of things. Therefore, it feels very righteous.
– Chögyam Trungpa
We all live downstream from innumerable causes and conditions.
– Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel
One should read everything. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn’t read.
– Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
That is to say, it is organized around a radical and irreducible incoherence.
– Eve Sedgwick
Purposeful perplexity in relationships is when one partner acts incapable so the other partner can solve their problems or do something they could do themselves.
– Dr. Nicole LePera
Shall memory restore
The steps and the shore,
The face and the meeting place;
Shall the bird live,
Shall the fish dive,
And sheep obey
In a sheep’s way;
Can love remember
The question and the answer,
For love recover
What has been dark and rich and warm all over?
– W. H. Auden
In America, history is considered to be what is forgotten. When you say to someone, “you’re history,” it doesn’t mean that you’re a part of it; it means that you’re obliterated.
– Edward Said
The only world we humans know is the one we can create together through the actions of our coexistence.
– Francisco Varela
It occurred to me by intuition, and music was the driving force behind that intuition. My discovery was the result of musical perception. (When asked about his theory of relativity.)
– Albert Einstein
MIND THE GAP
In the course of a single day, each of us experiences a barrage of thoughts, feelings, perceptions and memories. While we must remember details like where we left our house keys and the time of our next appointment, it is necessary to “mind the gap.” When we “mind the gap,” we enter the open space of wonder, an immense space of possibility. You can mind the gap between breaths, enter the silence between thoughts or hover in the half-light between day and night. The gap is the time most healing for body and mind. In the gap the deepest medicine flows. But the gap is not easy to find.
Mostly, we get caught up in daily concerns, hoovered by the demands of the day. We are so habituated to minding our thoughts that we rarely see the plentiful space of awareness itself. To make matters worse, we deem the flimsy nature of thoughts to be solid and real. This is a cause of great heartache and pain, for the things that come into awareness are but momentary and passing. Thus a daily practice must include minding the gap. Each day you must stalk the gap, enter the wide open space of your heart/mind and absorb into serenity. But how do we enter the gap? The great challenge is that you can not engineer it or will it to happen. Most often, you slip into the gap spontaneously, in a moment you are least expecting.
So outside the buzz, clatter and clang of your daily demands, find time to commune in magnificent space. When you realize that enduring space is always with you, and that the essential nature of your mind/heart is boundless, you will experience a feeling of exquisite delight. Slipping into the gap is like easing down into a warm bath. Let yourself soak into a dimensionless expanse, one that penetrates into every pore of your being. For it is in the great space that your troubled mind and wounded heart are healed.
– Tias Little
You will never know your soul travels
sweetly sheltered in the bottom of my heart,
and that nothing, neither time nor age nor other loves,
will prevent you from existing.
Now the beauty of the world takes your face,
feeds on your sweetness and adorns yourself with your clarity.
The pensive lake in the background of the landscape
tell me about your serenity again.
The paths you followed, today mark mine,
though you’ll never know that I carry you with me
Like a golden lamp to light my way
nor that your voice still pierces my soul.
Soft torch your lightning, sweet bonfire your spirit;
you still live a little because i outlive you.
– Marguerite Yourcenar
Joy is an essential need of the soul. The lack of joy, whether it is misfortune or simply boredom, is a state of illness in which intelligence, courage, and generosity are extinguished
– Simone Weil
Understanding Leaves
The leaves do what we can’t.
They wait their whole lives.
At first they dream of air
and wait to slip from wood.
Then they dream of openness
and wait to stretch in light.
Then they dream of thirst
and wait to soften in the rain.
At last they dream of nothing
and simply unfurl.
Photosynthesis is how this waiting
is described in the physical world.
The mystery of waiting is what
turns light into food.
To wait beyond what we think
we can bear is how things
within turn sweet.
– Mark Nepo
I loved you when you opened like a lily to the heat; you see I’m just another snowman standing in the rain and sleet who loved you with his frozen love, his second hand physique, with all he is and all he was a thousand kisses deep.
– Leonard Cohen
Was there ever a good mean-spirited poem? Am inclined to say no, though I’m no moralist (at least I don’t think of myself as one)
– Beci Carver
The people who misuse their power to sabotage others, meet the worst fate. There’s no way around it. What you send out into the world is what walks you home.
– Nika Solé
I think Godard’s ‘Vivre Sa Vie’ (1962) is an extraordinary movie because it’s very intellectual in a really effective way. It’s about the difference between the outside of a person & the inside of a person. It sounds very pretentious but it really comes off.
– Susan Sontag
It takes an incredibly high level of discipline to take full accountability for your life, which is why most people aren’t doing it.
– Nika Solé
A regulated nervous system is a portal into a totally new world.
– Nika Solé
We’re in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it’s all gone.
– Robert M. Pirsig
The less a person knows about the workings of the social institutions in his society, the more he must trust those who wield power in it; and the more he trusts those who wield such power, the more vulnerable he makes himself to becoming their victim.
– Thomas Szasz
Pretend inferiority and encourage his arrogance.
– Sun Tzu
All karma is, is as an opportunity to learn. It is not a punishment it never was.
– Paul Selig
People can laugh at themselves because they know, deep down, that their lives are a big act, a put–on.
– Alan Watts
When the mob gets out of hand and revolts today, the final result is always the creation of an even more powerful state.
– Jacques Ellul
Because clarity and enlightenment are within your own nature, they are regained without moving an inch.
– Lao Tzu
Multiple Worlds Interpretation
What’s the status of the Us
you called it
a quantum state
when I wanted a word
not for the individual world
but the unit that it made.
– Stella Wong
If there’s a goal for someone who has become as burdened by their illness as she has, it’ll never be some obtuse, vague perception of “perfection,” but rather incremental growth.
– Alana Pockros
A knife cannot cut itself open,
yet you ask me both to be you and know you.
– Jane Hirshfield
The poet joins with the idler in me to request that they rename this so-called *sloth fever virus* entity.
– Alina Stefanescu
Your People Will Be My People
by Patricia Jabbeh Wesley
Sometimes, I hear my house speaking
to me in small bangs, a crack here,
a crack there, sixteen years,
the stairs have got steeper, longer,
higher, or my knees have
given in to my years that were
splintered along these looming hills.
This Pennsylvania landscape of uneven
spaces, like ghosts coming out of new
walls, these things that inhabit a home
before we sign away our lives
at the Broker’s office.
These ghosts that followed
us after we fled the war, the war dead
we passed along Liberia’s roadways
in search of refuge, those clinging ghosts
of the dead from Soul Clinic rubber
bush Displaced Refugee Center, where
rebels executed tens of thousands
of our own kinsfolk, mothers, fathers,
friends, neighbors, children,
whole families. Ghosts, clinging
forever, to us, as we fled, visiting, following
after all these years, to live where we
would live, like Ruth to Naomi,
“Entreat me not to leave you,
or to turn back from following after you;
for wherever you go, I will go;
and wherever you lodge, I will lodge.
Your people shall be my people,
and your God, my God,” your country
will be my country, where you die,
we will die, again, and again, like they
killed us, we will die a million times,
buried with you, and as long as you live,
we will live, forever and forever.
Am I not the animal by belief alone I myself make possible?
– Carl Phillips
Little Town
Cobble your streets and no whining:
Stones are abundant here,
Stones and weather and air.
– Rita Dove
I did not run away
I walked away by daylight
– Sojourner Truth
If I had to show what the world is for me
I would take a hamster or a hedgehog or a mole
and place him in a theatre seat one evening
and, bringing my ear close to his humid snout,
would listen to what he says about the spotlights,
sounds of the music, and movements of the dance.
– Czeslaw Milosz
Screens will be put there, and our life
will be seen from beginning to end
with everything that we managed to forget, as if for good,
and with costumes of the epoch, which would be ridiculous and pitiful
if it were not we who wore them, not knowing any other.
Armageddon of men and women. It is futile to shout that I loved them.
Each one seemed to me a greedy child longing for caresses.
I like beaches, pools and clinics
For there they were all bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh.
I pitied them and myself, but this is no defense.
Every word, every thought is gone, like moving a glass,
turning a head, fingers undoing buttons of a dress, clowning,
a cheating gesture, contemplation of clouds,
killing for the sake of convenience. Only this.
So what if they depart, with the jingling of bells
On their ankles, if they slowly enter flames
Which took away both them and me. Bite, if you have them, your fingers
And look again at what once had been – from the beginning to the end.
– Czeslaw Milosz, Translated by Zbignier Folejewski
Revolutionary Letter #2
by Diane di Prima
The value of an individual life a credo they taught us
to instill fear, and inaction, ‘you only live once’
a fog on our eyes, we are
endless as the sea, not separate, we die
a million times a day, we are born
a million times, each breath life and death:
get up. put on your shoes, get
started, someone will finish
//
Tribe
an organism, one flesh, breathing joy as the stars
breathe destiny down on us, get
going, join hands, see to business, thousands of sons
will see to it when you fall, you will grow
a thousand times in the bellies of your sisters
I’m an educator. And it is my business as an educator to lead people out of ignorance.
– Jane Elliott
Memory is a river, not a block of cement.
– Dinty W Moore
I’ve never wanted disciples in my own teaching and writing, whereas there are teachers, writers, and intellectuals who are very anxious to cultivate followers. That’s never been interesting for me. As a teacher, the thing I feel that I can do the best is to have my students, in a certain sense, criticize me not exactly attack me, although many have, but to declare their independence from me and to go off on their own way.
– Edward Said
STOP
Most of us have spent our lives caught up
in plans, expectations, ambitions for the future;
in regrets, guilt or shame about the past.
To come into the present is to stop the war.
– Jack Kornfield
We want to believe that we have a God, as Hafez asserts,
who only knows four words.
Every child has known God.
Not the God of names,
Not the God of don’ts,
Not the God who ever does anything weird.
But the God who only knows
Four words.
And He keeps repeating them, saying:
“Come dance with me.” Come Dance.
– Hafiz
I can look back and see that I’ve spent much of my life in a cloud of things that have tended to push “being kind” to the periphery. Things like: Anxiety. Fear. Insecurity. Ambition. The mistaken belief that enough accomplishment will rid me of all that anxiety, fear, insecurity, and ambition. The belief that if I can only accrue enough—enough accomplishment, money, fame—my neuroses will disappear. I’ve been in this fog certainly since, at least, my own graduation day. Over the years I’ve felt: Kindness, sure—but first let me finish this semester, this degree, this book; let me succeed at this job, and afford this house, and raise these kids, and then, finally, when all is accomplished, I’ll get started on the kindness. Except it never all gets accomplished. It’s a cycle that can go on … well, forever.
– George Saunders
I cannot have a man who is afraid of everything, I don’t have the time to soothe insecurities and fears, I cannot have a man who is standing on a stone by a creek, watching for the fish to swim by and every time he sees a fish he says “Oh look, this fish scares me, I wonder what this fish means, this fish might mean- this, or this fish might mean- that” for God’s sake, they are just fish, and they don’t mean anything! Such a sad thing, so many fine, strong men standing on top of little stones, pointing at fish all the time! Such a waste! Such a waste of time! I can only have a man who will leap into the water, not minding the damn fish and whatever other little things that scare him. I need to have someone who is braver than me; if I am a pirate, he has to be the pirate Captain, if I am a pirate Captain he has to be the flying dragon.
– C. JoyBell C.
There are people who appear to think only with the brain, while others think with all the body and all the soul, with the blood, with the marrow of the bones, with the heart, with the lungs, with the belly, with the life. And the people who think only with the brain, are prone to definitions; they are thought professionals. And do you know what a professional is? Do you know what a product differentiation is?… If a philosopher is not a man, he is anything but a philosopher; he is, above all, a pedant, that is, the imitation of a man. The cultivation of any science, chemistry, physics, geometry, philology, can be, and even this very restrictedly and within very narrow limits, a work of differentiated specialization. But philosophy, such as poetry, or is a work of integration, of consignment, or is nothing but philosophizing, or pseudo-philosophical erudition.
– Miguel de Unamuno
Dance first. Think later. It’s the natural order.
– Samuel Beckett
In his very first teaching, Buddha explained that the root cause of suffering is ignorance. But where exactly is this ignorance? And how does it display itself? Let’s take an everyday example. Think about those people—we all know some—who are gifted with a remarkably powerful and sophisticated intelligence. Isn’t it puzzling how, instead of helping them, as you might expect, it seems only to make them suffer more? It is almost as if their brilliance is directly responsible for their pain.
What is happening is quite clear: This intelligence of ours is captured and held hostage by ignorance, which then makes use of it freely for its own ends. This is how we can be extraordinarily intelligent and yet absolutely wrong, at one and the same time.
– Sogyal Rinpoche
Every film is the result of the society that produced it. That’s why the American cinema is so bad now. It reflects an unhealthy society.
– Jean-Luc Godard
The deja vu, alignment, and synchronicities lately have been turned all the way up. The divine is speaking loud and clear. A new era is here.
– Nika Solé
It’s not always about avoiding chaos. It’s also about getting really good at staying in your vibe, even when chaos is all around you. Letting it propel you.
– Nika Solé
The world of gods and spirits is truly ‘nothing but’ the collective unconscious inside me.
– CG Jung
At the center of our moral life and our moral imagination are the great models of resistance: the great stories of those who have said “No.”
– Susan Sontag
Refusal is praxis.
– Alina Stefanescu
College is not for everybody. Libraries must be!
– Jericho Brown
waking from a summer sleep
went moon watching
on the beach
– Issa
God is as big as you can possibly imagine. And wants the same for you.
– Nika Solé
Starting something new
is a ritual of sweaty
palms, a ceremony of
courage, the reason
why there is a story.
The best thing
I’ve ever done
is begin.
– Rudy Francisco
A photograph is not an opinion. Or is it?
– Susan Sontag
I tend to think that the people interested in non-duality are the one’s that are too stupid to hold more than two things in attention at once.
– @VinceFHorn
The precious bodhicitta:
In those without it, may it be generated;
In those who have it, may it never diminish,
But always continue increasing.
– Patrul Rinpoche
If half of American lawns were replaced with native plants, we would create the equivalent of a 20 million acre national park, nine times bigger than Yellowstone or 100 times bigger than Shenandoah National Park.
– Doug Tallamy
There’s an English idiom, ‘Stop and think.’ Nobody can think unless he stops.
– Hannah Arendt
Sit and do nothing. Every once in awhile a golden fish swims by and lays her golden eggs. You’ll know.
– Chögyam Trungpa
It seems necessary in a world where everything happens at once and in which the daily environment is alive with messages and meaning that the training of perception becomes the necessary work of any school.
– Marshall McLuhan
What is the greatest gift?
Could it be the world itself —
the oceans, the meadowlark,
the patience of the trees in the wind?
– Mary Oliver
Unless you know yourself well, how can you know another? And when you know yourself, you are the other.
– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
I read in order to find out what I need to know: To illuminate the riddle.
– Cynthia Ozick
Come to the edge.
We might fall.
Come to the edge.
It’s too high!
COME TO THE EDGE!
And they came,
And he pushed,
And they flew.
– Christopher Logue
Pessimism has never been in fashion because no order could stand it; it’s a luxury of the mind, and thus beyond the reach of the common man.
– Albert Caraco
We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.
– Robert Frost
Nothing more abominable than the critic and, a fortiori, the philosopher in each of us: if I were a poet, I should behave like Dylan Thomas, who, when people would discuss his poems in his presence, would drop to the floor in a fit of convulsions.
– E. M. Cioran
No matter what, the work always saves me.
– Jami Attenberg
Reality is therefore what resists all thought.
– Karl Jaspers
still stuck
in the toaster
yesterday’s bagel
– Roberta Beach Jacobson
You can’t settle and soar at the same time.
You have to choose.
Elevate how you see yourself to create room for your improved life.
– Dr. Thema
When My Friend is Low, We Walk by the River
by Joy Sullivan
It’s somehow still a pandemic and we have nowhere
to put our rage. My friend tells me how he has begun
to imagine the finishing touches of his life. He counts
the things he’s lost. As he talks, I imagine tethering
a silver thread from his body to mine.
It’s dusk. The geese are all headed home. Our two bright
shadows grow longer. Grief is a clump of dark feathers
in the grass. The sky runs purple and petals out.
We look around. It’s almost cruel, he laughs.
After everything, how the world still insists
on being beautiful.
One of the most astonishing delusions is the belief that human happiness lies in inactivity. People are so convinced of this that they even imagine paradise as a place where people do nothing.
– Leo Tolstoy
Every Saint has the same message to give and the same teachings to impart. They come only to show us the Way which leads back to our original Home.
– Maharaj Charan Singh
Repetition wants for language to be more than language can ever be…[it] creates a linguistic labyrinth where we get lost because every turn looks familiar—looks like repetition—yet, instead of an exit, we walk deeper into the spell of history.…a lyrical voice is a voice out of control, and a lyrical poet repeats because she is shocked by what she said when she lost control of her voice—the horrific inertia of repetition.
– Valzhyna Mort
Compassion is the awareness of a deep bond between yourself and all creatures.
– Eckhart Tolle
We live in a world of theophanies. Holiness comes wrapped in the ordinary. There are burning bushes all around you. Every tree is full of angels. Hidden beauty is waiting in every crumb. Life wants to lead you from crumbs to angels, but this can happen only if you are willing to unwrap the ordinary by staying with it long enough to harvest its treasure.
– Wiederkehr
We are the seeds of the tenacious plant, and it is in our ripeness and our fullness of heart that we are given to the wind and scattered.
– Kahlil Gibran
What we learn in time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.
– Albert Camus
To fly from one tree to another, the raven hangs itself, hawklike, on the air. I hang myself that same way in sleep, between one day and the next.
– Louise Erdrich
Substance is friendly to you, and is more anxious to give you what you want than you are to get it.
– Wallace D. Wattles
People assume it quite natural for there to be problems, but in reality, the number of problems a person experiences is reduced significantly when they lower their expectations and relax their attachment.
– Vadim Zeland
It is impossible to come to being, one can only proceed from it.
– Nikolai Berdyaev
If you want heaven, stop scattering thorns on the road.
– Rumi
Love the world around you … it’s all we have.
– Julian Lennon