All literature is literature in translation. There is no mother tongue. All of it migrates out of the body, out of a tangle of sensations and intuitions, obscure rancor and desire; we hunt racks of ready-made language for words that might fit.
– Parul Sehgal
The best thing you can do for your fellow, next to rousing his conscience, is – not to give him things to think about, but to wake things that are in him, or each to make him think things for himself.
– George MacDonald
Without the right words, without long practice in putting them together, nothing comes out alive and true.
– Elena Ferrante
If you have to abandon your voice, power, standards, your level, your ways of doing things, or any other aspect of yourself, in order to be in a relationship with someone, that someone is probably not for you.
– Nika Solé
& I thought this black certainty / of my own uselessness might evaporate / like spilled beer.
– Megan Williams
Treat a work of art like a prince: let it speak to you first.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Your whole idea about yourself is borrowed. Borrowed from those who have no idea of who they are themselves.
– Osho Osho
Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends.
– Alphonse de Lamartine
I am persuaded that there is absolutely no limit to the absurdities that can, by government action, come to be generally believed.
– Bertrand Russell
Most people use music as a couch; they want to be pillowed on it, relaxed and consoled for the stress of daily living. But serious music was never meant to be soporific.
– Aaron Copland
A song has a few rights the same as ordinary citizens… if it happens to feel like flying where humans cannot fly… to scale mountains that are not there, who shall stop it?
– Charles Ives
Exercise for ‘reversing space,’ which involves sitting very still, with all attention focussed in the centre of the chest, and slowly surrendering and realising that instead of looking you are being observed; instead of hearing, you are being heard; instead of touching you are being touched; instead of tasting you are food for God and are being tasted… it is most certainly necessary to seek, to ask the question; rather than pushing away the answer by chasing after it, one must ask and listen at the same time, in trust and good faith that the answer is contained in the question.
– Reshad Feild, The Last Barrier
Sometimes destiny is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing direction. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. Spinning again, but the storm is adjusting. Over and over again you play this, like a sinister dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm is not something that came from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to her, step right into the storm, close your eyes and cover your ears so the sand doesn’t come in, and walk through it, step by step. There is no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling to the sky like sprayed bones. That’s the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.
And you really will have to weather that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it may be, make no mistake: it will cut flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Blood is Red and Hot. You will catch that blood on your hands, your own blood and others blood.
And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you survived, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, if the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. This is what this storm is all about.
– Haruki Murakami, Kafka at the Coast
The man with a hole in his head knows more about empty spaces than anyone you’ll ever meet. For instance, a hole, he wrote to a friend, weighs twice as much as whatever it once held.
– Rick Bursky
Creative Writing
When I told a student
not to use single quotation marks
around lines of dialogue,
he told me that all our words
are already inside the quotation marks
that God placed around Creation.
– Billy Collins
Some say we need a third party. I wish we had a second one.
– Jim Hightower
Mencken once said that a person who thinks clearly can write well. But I don’t think clearly–too many thoughts bump into one another.
– James Thurber
If a cursory study of somatics shows that we think with our entire body, then how much better could we think, if we thought with our entire web of wild kin? I want to think and feel and weep and grieve with my whole multi-species, poly-nucleated mind. I want to let the yolk of my small desires slide into otherness. I want to nucleate a symbiotic quest for a better future. Throw open all the doors in my cells. Let my river run both ways.
– Sophie Strand
Being a seer in the matrix is like living in a world of people who don’t even know the elephant is in the room.
– Nika Solé
I think one of the symptoms of being civilized is that you never know when you’re being courageous.
– Kenneth Rexroth
TRIOLET FOR CAROL
So many things that still feel new
are old, and that’s the way it goes.
This is what always happens to
so many things that still feel new.
I think of how I have loved you
all these years, and that just shows
so many things that still feel new
feel new because of the life we chose.
– John L. Stanizzi
WHY WOULDN’T AUTONOMOUS
CARS CRY AT NIGHT?
Awake and acutely aware
of each other’s proximity
to streetlights and the shifting
shapes of moons on their own
empty interiors, with enough
of them huddled in the lots,
why not honk? Why not holler
at the silent ones, identically dark
and empty on their left and right,
the whole still pile like a flicker
of a future scrapyard in the making?
Why not scream to call a crowd
of ghosts down from their squares
of light up there, those past
wanderers of these same streets,
subjects of their own lonely stories
now forgettable as algorithms,
broke codes that used to commute
in packs, hunter gatherers
heading into the sunrise chatting,
now silent, autonomous, floating
like a disconnected signal? And how
do we hear our children in the night
calling, but tomorrow all the same
just ride them silently to work?
– Ryan McCarty
Afternoon with Irish Cows
by Billy Collins
There were a few dozen who occupied the field
across the road from where we lived,
stepping all day from tuft to tuft,
their big heads down in the soft grass,
though I would sometimes pass a window
and look out to see the field suddenly empty
as if they had taken wing, flown off to another country.
Then later, I would open the blue front door,
and again the field would be full of their munching
or they would be lying down
on the black-and-white maps of their sides,
facing in all directions, waiting for rain.
How mysterious, how patient and dumbfounded
they appear in the long quiet of the afternoon.
But every once in a while, one of them
would let out a sound so phenomenal
that I would put down the paper
or the knife I was cutting an apple with
and walk across the road to the stone wall
to see which one of them was being torched
or pierced through the side with a long spear.
Yes, it sounded like pain until I could see
the noisy one, anchored there on all fours,
her neck outstretched, her bellowing head
laboring upward as she gave voice
to the rising, full-bodied cry
that began in the darkness of her belly
and echoed up through her bowed ribs into her gaping mouth.
Then I knew that she was only announcing
the large, unadulterated cowness of herself,
pouring out the ancient apologia of her kind
to all the green fields and the gray clouds,
to the limestone hills and the inlet of the blue bay,
while she regarded my head and shoulders
above the wall with one wild, shocking eye.
For the last few years, I’ve become more sensitive to artificial smells like air fresheners, certain kinds of perfumes, soaps, and shampoo. I get what feel to me like sinus headaches, a vague sense of vertigo, and a lethargic feeling. I don’t remember ever having this sensitivity when I was younger, which makes me wonder if there isn’t some psychological issue playing out for me that I’m not aware of. It seems like it frustrates people who don’t experience this sensitivity when I express my reaction to these smells. Can anyone point me to resources about why I might have these sensitivities? Resources about whether the chemicals in these products really do harm humans? Resources for communicating about this kind of sensitivity?
– Will Falk
You have never met a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations—these are mortal… But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.
– C.S. Lewis
I believe the reason many run to nature is the signature of God is there — and we are tied at the umbilicus — we seek our root.
– Marian Haddad
Here is what I learned: Simone Weil was right. ‘Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.’
– Sigrid Nunez, The Friend
THRESHOLD
It has happened.
You thought you had some control
of your life
and that you were in a place
you understood
in a time that moved
from a past you knew
to a future that followed
in a more or less straight line.
But here you are at the edge
of a shore, the shallow waves
washing over your feet
taking the sand you stand on
away and suddenly you wonder
if all the ground beneath you
is disappearing.
You have stepped through the threshold.
The door closed and locked behind you.
You are on the other side.
You try to forget it, distract yourself,
but nothing works.
You check your messages.
The doctor’s office left a number
on your phone.
Is it is a blood test result,
survival rate for treatment,
or days left to live?
Now you are alone.
After the panic subsides you stand there
looking around.
Everything is fresh,
colors are vivid,
you can smell scents,
even subtle ones,
and your hearing is sharp.
You feel the breeze on your skin
and the tickle of hairs moving
across your brow.
You are pierced through
with the inexplicable joy
at having nothing.
The sand forms around your foot
and the water wipes out all traces of your path.
Everywhere you turn there is something new
and the space around you
holds you gently
as it spills out and becomes
a part of the expanding world.
So many things are remarkable now.
Here is the freedom that always frightened you.
You have forgotten your name
and it does not matter.
– Newton Smith
May I be a guard for those who need protection
A guide for those on the path
A boat, a raft, a bridge for those who wish to cross the flood
May I be a lamp in the darkness
A resting place for the weary
A healing medicine for all who are sick
A vase of plenty, a tree of miracles
And for the boundless multitudes of living beings
May I bring sustenance and awakening
Enduring like the earth and sky
Until all beings are freed from sorrow
And all are awakened.
– Shantideva, Way of the Bodhisattva
There are words that will never pass my lips, that will never pass my heart, that will never pass the frontiers of my being. Words that do not exist. It is those which must be heard.
– Henri Thomasson
True spirituality is not a search for perfection or control or the door to the next world; it is a search for divine union now.
– Richard Rohr
The liar’s punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.
– George Bernard Shaw
In life, you always need to learn.
– Alain Delon
High powered angels walk the earthplane.
– Nika Solé
You’re much more powerful when you flow and align, than when you force and push. There’s a lot more to this than you.
– Nika Solé
Waiting for a Miracle
by Bruce Cockburn
Look at them working in the hot sun
The pilloried saints and the fallen ones
Working and waiting for the night to come
And waiting for a miracle
Somewhere out there is a place that’s cool
Where peace and balance are the rule
Working toward a future like some kind of mystic jewel
And waiting for a miracle
You rub your palm
On the grimy pane
In the hope that you can see
You stand up proud
You pretend you’re strong
In the hope that you can be
Like the ones who’ve cried
Like the ones who’ve died
Trying to set the angel in us free
While they’re waiting for a miracle
Struggle for a dollar, scuffle for a dime
Step out from the past and try to hold the line
So how come history takes such a long, long time
When you’re waiting for a miracle
You rub your palm
On the grimy pane
In the hope that you can see
You stand up proud
You pretend you’re strong
In the hope that you can be
Like the ones who’ve cried
Like the ones who’ve died
Trying to set the angel in us free
While they’re waiting for a miracle
THIS SUMMER DAY
That sprinkler is at it again,
hissing and spitting its arc
of silver, and the parched
lawn is tickled green. The air
hums with the busy traffic
of butterflies and bees,
who navigate without lane
markers, stop signs, directional
signals. One of my friends
says we’re now in the shady
side of the garden, having moved
past pollination, fruition,
and all that bee-buzzed jazz,
into our autumn days. But I say wait.
It’s still summer, and the breeze is full
of sweetness spilled from a million petals;
it wraps around your arms, lifts the hair
from the back of your neck.
The salvia, coreopsis, roses
have set the borders on fire,
and the peaches waiting to be picked
are heavy with juice. We are still ripening
into our bodies, still in the act of becoming.
Rejoice in the day’s long sugar.
Praise that big fat tomato of a sun.
– Barbara Crooker
It is better to say, “I am suffering,” than to say, “This landscape is ugly.”
– Simone Weil
Come into my eyes, and look at me through them, for I have chosen a home far beyond what eyes can see.
– Rumi
But what matter whether I was born or not, have lived or not, am dead or merely dying, I shall go on doing as I have always done, not knowing what it is I do, nor who I am, nor where I am, nor if I am.
– Samuel Beckett
This material dimension is just samsara. See it and you see samsara for what it’s worth. But what does it mean?… Nothing but shifting names and changing forms. But when the ego drops away (is extinguished) you experience this Flux… And it is beautiful not just because it is dazzling, but because the act of seeing it as it is necessitates the ego’s oblivion… The Veil (of ego) is lifted and you see clearly…
– Chuang Tzu
Poets are simply those who have made a profession and a lifestyle of being in touch with their bliss.
– Joseph Campbell
Everything that ended in fame and everything that issued from fame was inevitably diminished. Fame’s message was unadorned. Fame and literature were irreconcilable enemies.
– Roberto Bolaño
Jung was absolutely correct when he insisted that the therapists of neurosis must also be doctors of philosophy.
– David Tacey
Our whole life, to be life at all, must be a growth in understanding.
– George MacDonald
The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out.
– JRR Tolkien
I had to look up at her then. Them eyes was staring down at me. I can’t say they was kind eyes. Rather they was tight as balled fists. Full. Firm. Stirred. The wind seemed to live in that woman’s face. Looking at her was like staring at a hurricane.
– James McBride
He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.
– Socrates
Let us claim for ourselves no more indulgence than we give to [our neighbor].
– George MacDonald
Not all churches in America are created equal, not in practice and not in politics. And, for me, the damage of going to a church where people whispered disparaging words about “my kind” was itself a spiritual wound — so deep and so hidden that it has taken me years to find and address it.
– Yaa Gyasi
Study successful investors, and you’ll notice a common denominator: they are masters of psychology. They can’t control the market, but they have complete control over the gray matter between their ears.
– Morgan Housel
There is no second, or higher self to search for. You are the highest self, only give up the false ideas you have about your self.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
A song is like a dream, and you try to make it come true. They’re like strange countries that you have to enter.
– Bob Dylan
You yourself become a living teaching; you yourself become living dharma.
– Chögyam Trungpa
You can’t, if you can’t feel it, if it never
Rises from the soul, and sways
The heart of every single hearer,
With deepest power, in simple ways.
You’ll sit forever, gluing things together,
Cooking up a stew from other’s scraps,
Blowing on a miserable fire,
Made from your heap of dying ash.
Let apes and children praise your art,
If their admiration’s to your taste,
But you’ll never speak from heart to heart,
Unless it rises up from your heart’s space.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
You do not know yourself; you discover yourself. You catch a glimpse, recognize a characteristic response, a preference. You see the consistency of your image despite the ups and downs of mood. And you need others to wake you up if you’re to find your face.
– James Hillman
Your whole being is a stained glass window and your human life is only a fraction of it.
– MS.
In low theologies, hell is invariably the deepest truth, and the love of God is not so deep as hell.
– George MacDonald
My heart is a thousand years old. I am not like other people. People only care about happy endings. I live a life full of empty faces. My mind is a dark forest that everyone tries to avoid. I only attract those who are lost in the dark. I am a well that’s been drained. I am a tree that bears no fruit. I am a dog with no home. I am a bird with no wings. I am the person nobody wants to talk to.
– Haruki Murakami
The first thing all of us are taught is right from wrong. We’re not taught right from left.
– J. Michael Luttig
Dwelling on the negative simply contributes to its power.
– Shirley MacLaine
In this way, to make art is also, like handwriting, a form of insistence. A form, too, of resistance. To write is to resist invisibility. By having spoken, I’ve resisted silence before again returning to it.
– Carl Phillips
Poetry is nobody’s business except the poet’s, and everybody else can fuck off.
– Philip Larkin
A genius is the man who can do the average thing when everyone else around him is losing his mind.
– Napoleon
My Hole. My Whole.
by Sam Sax
what to call you who i’ve slept beside through so many apocalypses
the kind that occur nightly in this late stage of the collapsing west
boyfriend was fine even though we are neither boys nor men but love
how it makes us sudden infants in the eyes of any listener—how
it brings us back to some childhood we never got to live. that was,
at the time, unlivable. my sweetheart. my excised sheep’s-heart.
my fled garden. my metal garter. after yet another man calls his wife
his partner at the dog park it’s clearly time to find another name for you—
he says it’s my partner’s birthday we’re going to buca di beppo then key largo—
and wild how quick a name becomes yet another vehicle
through which to reproduce violence. partner fit like a skin and then
that skin tightened and tore off—you who are neither my chain
italian restaurant nor my all-inclusive vacation spot. not my owner
or my only or my own. not my down payment or my dowery
of sheep and crop. not lost. not loss. apophasis is a way of naming
what is by what is not—but what is? my boutonniere. my goofy queer.
my salt. my silk. my silt. my slit. my top and my basement. my vanquished
prostate. my battered apostate. my memory. my memory. my meteor.
all these names for what exactly? to introduce what is to those
who don’t know. this is my whole. this is my hole. take part of me.
As he thinks, so he is; as he continues to think, so he remains.
– James Allen
Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.
– René Girard
The finest souls are those who gulped pain and avoided making others taste it.
– nizariat
It’s the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter.
– Marlene Dietrich
All the love in the world is useless when there is a total lack of understanding.
– Franz Kafka
The problem is that the analytical mind cannot be freed by another aspect of analytical mind.
– Chögyam Trungpa
None of us knows if we will be great—or even good—but we keep studying and trying and hoping. We do have control over some things: We can develop our minds and our bodies to the breaking point, and every single actor with whom I’ve worked has improved when they have expanded their mind and their heart and their soul. When the soul is dearer, the desire to house it in a healthier body develops. Read, listen, look, pray—soak up all that the world has to offer and analyze and appreciate it. You will grow; you will change. It will improve whatever work you happen to do. It will improve your life and every circle in which you move. You have control over these things. Take control over these things.
– Uta Hagen to James Grissom
Sunset is an angel weeping
Holding out a bloody sword
No matter how I squint I cannot
Make out what it’s pointing toward
Sometimes you feel like you live too long
Days drip slowly on the page
You catch yourself
Pacing the cage
I’ve proven who I am so many times
The magnetic strip’s worn thin
And each time I was someone else
And every one was taken in
Powers chatter in high places
Stir up eddies in the dust of rage
Set me to pacing the cage
I never knew what you all wanted
So I gave you everything
All that I could pillage
All the spells that I could sing
It’s as if the thing were written
In the constitution of the age
Sooner or later you’ll wind up
Pacing the cage
Sometimes the best map will not guide you
You can’t see what’s round the bend
Sometimes the road leads through dark places
Sometimes the darkness is your friend
Today these eyes scan bleached-out land
For the coming of the outbound stage
Pacing the cage
Pacing the cage
– Bruce Cockburn
I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.
Up to a certain point, it is necessary for a man to live his life in the world in which he finds himself, and to make the best of it. But beyond that point, he must create a world of his own. And the greatest thing about life is that it is always giving us the opportunity to create something new. It is never too late to start over, to make a fresh beginning, to blaze a new trail.
Life is short, and we have but a brief time in which to explore, to learn, to experience, and to create. Let us make the most of that time, and let us burn brightly, like meteors across the night sky, leaving behind us a trail of light and inspiration for those who come after us.
– Jack London
Paradox is where enlightenment is born—it’s not about resolving or conquering paradox by choosing one side; rather, it’s in the tension of more than one truth being true that a new wisdom arises.
– Kai Cheng Thom
As long as “being the Beloved” is little more than a beautiful thought or a lofty idea that hangs above my life to keep me from becoming depressed, nothing really changes. What is required is to become the Beloved in the commonplaces of my daily existence, and bit by bit to close the gap that exists between what I know myself to be and the countless realities of everyday life. Becoming the Beloved is pulling the truth revealed to me from above down into the ordinariness of what I am thinking of, talking about, and doing from hour to hour.
– Henri Nouwen
Joy creates a spaciousness in the mind that allows us to hold the suffering we experience inside us and around us without becoming overwhelmed, without collapsing into helplessness or despair.
– James Baraz
A man who uses an imaginary map, thinking that it is a true one, is likely to be worse off than someone with no map at all; for he will fail to inquire whenever he can, to observe every detail on his way, and to search continuously with all his senses and all his intelligence for indications of where he should go.
– E. F. Schumacher
PORTRAIT WITH A GOAT
We were reading to ourselves. Sometimes to others.
I was quietly reading the margin
when the doves fell, it was blue
outside. Perhaps in a moment,
he said. The moment never came.
I was reading something else now,
it didn’t matter. Other people came, and
dropped off their resumés. I wasn’t being idle,
exactly. Someone wanted to go away
altogether in this preposterous season.
– John Ashbery
What would you write if you were up on the moon and you knew nobody would ever see it? The writing would be sublime because there would be no reason not to say everything.
– Allen Ginsberg
Walk with Me (When the Sun Goes Down)
I wanted to bring you a brand new story
Wanted to sing you a brand new song
Hopin′ the notes would flow real easy
Hopin’ the words wouldn′t take too long
I didn’t want to make you think
I didn’t want you to make you frown
But in the heart of a quiet little English town
Walk with me when the sun goes down
I don′t wanna sing about rural poor
I don′t wanna sing about country life
I don’t need another song about greedy bankers
Don′t need another song about my life
Don’t wanna sing about street life heroes
Don′t wanna sing about well bred clowns
But in the heart of a quiet little English town
Walk with me when the sun goes down
Walk with me when the sun goes down…
Walk with me when the sun goes down…
Walk with me when the sun goes down…
Walk with me when the sun goes down…
Walk with me when the sun goes down…
Let’s have a note from the deep dark bass
And the mandolin′s gonna fill the space
And the sweet sound of the violin
And the steel guitar where it all begins
In the heart of a quiet little English town
Walk with me when the sun goes down
In the heart of a quiet little English town
Walk with me when the sun goes down
In the heart of a quiet little English town
Walk with me when the sun goes down
Writer(s): Trevor Smith, Jason Phillips,
Leslie Pridgen, and Don Cannon
To be fully integrated and fully embodied is the real measure of success. To be the you that was divinely designed.
– Nika Solé
Many are still operating in the old world. But others of us have already made our way to the new one. Timeline split. Consciousness shift. We’re doing it different now.
– Nika Solé
The right people turn you up, not down.
– Nika Solé
The world needs you—yes you, exactly you—now, with your kind soul, big heart, and fierce goodness. Si se puede. You in?
– Anne Lamott
But the music of your talk
Never shall the chemistry
Of the secret earth restore.
All your lovely words are spoken.
Once the ivory box is broken,
Beats the golden bird no more.
– Edna St. Vincent Millay
Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.
– G. K. Chesterton
Truth is revealed. It cannot ever be told. We cannot tell the truth. It has to appear inside the telling or through the telling. That’s why we listen to what’s not said in psychoanalysis & that’s again what goes wrong in an interview: It focuses too much on what’s said.
– James Hillman
a life
of running away
summer cicada
– Issa
One of the great problems of the United States, legally and politically, is that we have never quite had the courage of our convictions. The republic is founded on the marvelously sane principle that a human community can exist and prosper only on a basis of mutual trust.
– Alan Watts
All art brings about a distancing from the immediacy of things: it allows the concreteness of stimulated to recede and stretches a veil between us and them just like the fine bluish haze that envelops distant mountains.
– Georg Simmel
When our metaphors of God are no longer seen as metaphors, but as literal descriptions, then God is dead, because we have killed him with our words and literalism.
– David Tacey
There is too little mystery in the world; too many people say exactly what they feel or want.
– Robert Greene
There are a whole lot of things in this world of ours you haven’t even started wondering about yet.
– Roald Dahl
Bach opens a vista to the universe. After experiencing him, people feel there is meaning to life after all.
– Helmut Walcha
What to Say to Those Who Think
You’re a Fool for Choosing Poetry
by Joseph Fasano
Tell them yes.
Tell them poetry is what chose you.
Tell them
you had a night, once,
just as they did,
when you knelt alone on the cold tiles
and asked the night
to give you a reason for being.
Tell them the answer was your life.
Tell them we are nothing, nothing
without passion,
the wild dark flock
that fills our rooms with joy.
Tell them
you will give the rest of your blazing days
to try to give another life
that moment,
that moment when you opened
to the coldness
and found that the music of your ruin
was too beautiful to ever be destroyed.
You realize this is bigger than politics right? This is a universal shift. Congratulations, humanity. You’re about to graduate.
– Cassandra Workman
Attaining consciousness is connected with the gradual liberation from mechanicalness, for man is fully and completely under mechanical laws.
– P.D. Ouspensky
To be sane, we must recognize our beliefs as fictions.
– James Hillman
We’re strongest when we fight for what we believe in, not just against what we fear.
– Doug Emhoff
Sitting in public,
a library or a barstool,
doesn’t make it easier to write.
It makes it easier to recall
why it’s worth the effort.
– Jarod K. Anderson
How we remember, what we remember and why we remember form the most personal map of our individuality.
– Christina Baldwin
Everything has already been said but nobody was listening, so we have to say it again.
– Kevin Kelly
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
What would your good do if evil didn’t exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared?
– Mikhail Bulgakov
He realized that much of his torment of the years past had been self-inflicted, and an inevitable part of growing up. And, most important of all for one who had taken so long to grow up, he thought he had learned not to be the slave of his emotions.
– Thomas Wolfe
God is concealed from the mind but revealed in the heart.
– Anonymous
What a beautiful thing it is to find somebody who is both strong and soft, somebody who can match the texture of your soul.
– Mark Anthony
Do not leave your reputation to chance or gossip; it is your life’s artwork, and you must craft it, hone it, and display it with the care of an artist.
– Robert Greene
He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.
– Douglas Adams
Stop making love to your misery, It eats away at you like a vulture!
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
You can’t skip chapters, that’s not how life works. You have to read every line, meet every character. You won’t enjoy all of it. Hell, some chapters will make you cry for weeks. You will read things you don’t want to read, you will have moments when you don’t want the pages to end. But you have to keep going. Stories keep the world revolving. Live yours, don’t miss out.
– Courtney Peppernell
The fundamental attribution error: We overestimate others’ character and underestimate their circumstances.
– Lee Ross
The actor-observer bias: We attribute our own behavior to circumstances, but others’ behavior to character.
– Edward Jones & Victor Harris
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
– Carl Sagan
One night Werner and Jutta tune in to a scratchy broadcast in which a young man is talking in feathery, accented French about light. The brain is locked in total darkness, of course, children, says the voice. It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light. It brims with color and movement. So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light? The broadcast hisses and pops. “What is this?” whispers Jutta.
Werner does not answer. The Frenchman’s voice is velvet. His accent is very different from Frau Elena’s, and yet his voice is so ardent, so hypnotizing, that Werner finds he can understand every word. The Frenchman talks about optical illusions, electromagnetism; there’s a pause and a peal of static, as though a record is being flipped, and then he enthuses about coal.
Consider a single piece glowing in your family’s stove. See it, children? That chunk of coal was once a green plant, a fern or reed that lived one million years ago, or maybe two million, or maybe one hundred million. Can you imagine one hundred million years? Every summer for the whole life of that plant, its leaves caught what light they could and transformed the sun’s energy into itself. Into bark, twigs, stems. Because plants eat light, in much the way we eat food. But then the plant died and fell, probably into water, and decayed into peat, and the peat was folded inside the earth for years upon years—eons in which something like a month or a decade or even your whole life was just a puff of air, a snap of two fingers.
[…]
Open your eyes, concludes the man, and see what you can with them before they close forever, and then a piano comes on, playing a lonely song that sounds to Werner like a golden boat traveling a dark river, a progression of harmonies that transfigures Zollverein: the houses turned to mist, the mines filled in, the smokestacks fallen, an ancient sea spilling through the streets, and the air streaming with possibility.
– All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
If man no longer finds any meaning in his life, it makes no difference whether he wastes away under a communist or a capitalist regime. Only if he can use his freedom to create something meaningful is it relevant that he should be free. That is why finding the inner meaning of life is more important to the individual than anything else, and why the process of individuation must be given priority.
– C.G. Jung
That which speaks to us from within, the imagination that leads us beyond the limitations of the individual self, the intuitive knowledge that seizes the mind with its clear insight and its profound certainty, the higher sentiment that says this is the way my heart is, all of that and more is lost to the modern sensibility with its focus on the material, the physical, and the merely practical. As products of the unique modernist vision, we reach deep down into the world of matter to examine the minutest particles of quantum physics and explore with high-tech space telescopes the vast reaches of the universe in search of a knowledge that will prove our theories right. We wait to be chosen, expecting to hear the secrets of the universe without truly endeavoring to listen, and we want to be called, hoping to see a visionary world of truth and reality without any intuitive insight to substantiate such a sublime vision.
– John Herlihy
One of the great purposes of the American nation is to shelter and guard the rights of all men and women to seek the conditions and the companions necessary for the inner search.
– Jacob Needleman
I exist as I am, that is enough,
If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware I sit content.
One world is aware, and by the far the largest to me, and that is myself,
And whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand or ten million years,
I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness, I can wait.
– Walt Whitman
You have an identity not because you have invented one, or because you have a little hard core of selfhood that is unchanged, but because you have a witness of who you are. What you don’t understand or see, the bits of yourself you can’t pull together in a convincing story, are all held in a single gaze of love.
– Rowan Williams, Being Disciples
If sentences really rendered thoughts ! -What effect would be produced on you by pictures if you saw them as a sequence of brush strokes? I could sing you vague, delightful tunes that I have in my head and make you feel the passions that I think of; [but] I could tell you all my reveries, and you will know nothing about them-because there are no words to express them.
– Gustave Flaubert
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
Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic ‘til I’m gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove
Dance me to the end of love
– Leonard Cohen
I am not a slow learner
I am a quick forgetter
such erasing makes one voracious
if you teach me something beautiful
I will name it quickly before it floats away
– Kaveh Akbar
The seal woman returns to the sea, not because she just feels like it, not because today is a good day to go, not because her life is all nice and tidy – there is no nice and tidy time for anyone. She goes because it is time, and therefore she must.
– Clarissa Pinkola Estés
It is because so much happens. Too much happens. That’s it. Man performs, engenders, so much more than he can or should have to bear. That’s how he finds that he can bear anything. That’s it. That’s what is so terrible. That he can bear anything, anything.
– William Faulkner, Light in August
If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.
– Lyndon B. Johnson
The most sacred place on earth is the space between the cracks of a broken heart. Sadly, a broken heart is rarely treated with such reverence in our culture today. Instead, it is typically treated as an infirmity or flaw that one must heal or hide. Consequently, our economy is fueled by anti-depressants, alcohol, opiates, Saviors, therapists, counselors, doctors, pastors, priests, and spiritual schemes of all kinds.
A broken heart often comes with a heavy dose of shame because you are treated as if something is wrong with you. At best, grief is treated as an inconvenience—a momentary interruption in the natural order of things. We are encouraged to get over it quickly so we can get back to doing more “productive” things. Hence, we have numerous books, therapies, and techniques geared towards healing trauma and curing heartbreak, but little attention is given to grief or understanding what it is for. People don’t know what to do with a broken heart, and most are completely illiterate in the ways of Grief. They don’t know how to respond or care for their own grief, much more the grief of another.
It is our responsibility as mature adults to tend to these poverties, and to do so requires a commitment to learning to care for one another in a more village-minded way. This is the impetus behind Care2gather.
– Joshua Avritt, Care2gather
Why is it that for the last two or three centuries the educated have been generally wrong and the uneducated relatively right?
– G.K. Chesterton
Being a writer guarantees that you will spend too much time alone—and that as a result, your mind will begin to warp.
– Anne Lamott
Spiritual warfare is also jealousy, gossip, backstabbing, talking down on you, and all of the other ways people move energy against you. This is why energetic boundaries are so key. They keep you safe from the unconscious antics of others.
– Nika Solé
A poet should leave, not proofs, but traces of his passage. Only traces set us dreaming.
– René Char (translated by Mary Ann Caws)
A pure heart is the antidote to all of it but you have to go through yourself to find out what that really means.
– Nika Solé
Whatever comes to pass: you know your time,
my bird, you pull on your veil
and fly through the mist to me.
We peer into the haze where the rabble houses.
You follow my nod and storm out
in a whirl of feathers and fur—
– Ingeborg Bachmann (translated by Mark Anderson)
To ever break the stranglehold of addiction, one is going to have to face what the compulsive behavior is a defense against. To go down into that anxiety state, to really feel what we already feel…is to “go through” the addiction to its other side.
– James Hollis
In This Place (An American Lyric)
by Amanda Gorman
An original poem written for the inaugural reading of Poet
Laureate Tracy K. Smith at the Library of Congress.
There’s a poem in this place—
in the footfalls in the halls
in the quiet beat of the seats.
It is here, at the curtain of day,
where America writes a lyric
you must whisper to say.
There’s a poem in this place—
in the heavy grace,
the lined face of this noble building,
collections burned and reborn twice.
There’s a poem in Boston’s Copley Square
where protest chants
tear through the air
like sheets of rain,
where love of the many
swallows hatred of the few.
There’s a poem in Charlottesville
where tiki torches string a ring of flame
tight round the wrist of night
where men so white they gleam blue—
seem like statues
where men heap that long wax burning
ever higher
where Heather Heyer
blooms forever in a meadow of resistance.
There’s a poem in the great sleeping giant
of Lake Michigan, defiantly raising
its big blue head to Milwaukee and Chicago—
a poem begun long ago, blazed into frozen soil,
strutting upward and aglow.
There’s a poem in Florida, in East Texas
where streets swell into a nexus
of rivers, cows afloat like mottled buoys in the brown,
where courage is now so common
that 23-year-old Jesus Contreras rescues people from floodwaters.
There’s a poem in Los Angeles
yawning wide as the Pacific tide
where a single mother swelters
in a windowless classroom, teaching
black and brown students in Watts
to spell out their thoughts
so her daughter might write
this poem for you.
There’s a lyric in California
where thousands of students march for blocks,
undocumented and unafraid;
where my friend Rosa finds the power to blossom
in deadlock, her spirit the bedrock of her community.
She knows hope is like a stubborn
ship gripping a dock,
a truth: that you can’t stop a dreamer
or knock down a dream.
How could this not be her city
su nación
our country
our America,
our American lyric to write—
a poem by the people, the poor,
the Protestant, the Muslim, the Jew,
the native, the immigrant,
the black, the brown, the blind, the brave,
the undocumented and undeterred,
the woman, the man, the nonbinary,
the white, the trans,
the ally to all of the above
and more?
Tyrants fear the poet.
Now that we know it
we can’t blow it.
We owe it
to show it
not slow it
although it
hurts to sew it
when the world
skirts below it.
Hope—
we must bestow it
like a wick in the poet
so it can grow, lit,
bringing with it
stories to rewrite—
the story of a Texas city depleted but not defeated
a history written that need not be repeated
a nation composed but not yet completed.
There’s a poem in this place—
a poem in America
a poet in every American
who rewrites this nation, who tells
a story worthy of being told on this minnow of an earth
to breathe hope into a palimpsest of time—
a poet in every American
who sees that our poem penned
doesn’t mean our poem’s end.
There’s a place where this poem dwells—
it is here, it is now, in the yellow song of dawn’s bell
where we write an American lyric
we are just beginning to tell.
Death impregnates Persephone. This is the secret of all the Great Mysteries: death is the source of all life. To experience this essential truth is to experience The Miracle of Death.
– Betty J. Kovacs
When looking at any significant work of art, remember that a more significant one probably has had to be sacrificed.
– Paul Klee
AUGUST
How I have taken for granted
the galaxies of crickets
the black dog resting
her head on the ample moon
these nights
laying their calm blankets out
to forget me
– Frannie Lindsay
Anytime you’re gonna grow, you’re gonna lose something. You’re losing what you’re hanging onto to keep safe. You’re losing habits that you’re comfortable with, you’re losing familiarity.
– James Hillman
Infatuation, obsession, or limerence is common when you were emotionally neglected growing up. The fantasy that a ‘perfect’ person can finally love you in the way you’ve never been loved becomes all-consuming.
The first step is to recognize this is an attempt to heal attachment wounding. This will help you not idealize. The next step is to learn to meet you own needs so your external focus isn’t on someone else doing this (solely) for you. And lots of self compassion
– Dr. Nicole LePera
God never forsakes one who has surrendered.
– Sri Ramana Maharishi
I think having one’s own sound in a sense is the most fundamental kind of identity in music. But it’s a very touchy thing how one arrives at that. It has to be something that comes from inside, and it’s a long-term process. It’s a product of a total personality. I think sometimes the people I seem to like most as musical artists, are the late arrivers, the ones who have had to work a lot harder in a sense to get facility, to get fluency. Whereas you see a lot of young talents that have a great deal of fluidity and fluency and facility, and they never really carry it anyplace. Because in a way they’re not aware enough of what they’re doing.
– Bill Evans
And when you find it, you’ll probably be disappointed. It isn’t the devil. It isn’t the State. It isn’t a magical child. It’s the void.
– Roberto Bolano
This world is just a little place, just the red in the sky, before the sun rises, so let us keep fast hold of hands, that when the birds begin, none of us be missing.
– Emily Dickinson
Walk away, away from the dread
of the thing that must be told.
Of how the mountains lost their heads
and even the sun grew cold.
When we, the last-born of earth’s bright brood –
fresh from the stars come down –
went over the edge of time’s dark doom,
and the heavens turned around.
Let’s walk away from the long years lost
in pity and shock and shame,
as those who loved this world were tossed
into a forge of flame.
Into the fires of history,
where land and sea change place
with such uncertain constancy
that even death is grace.
But even death gives no escape,
as the wheel of this time rolls on.
Back and again to the freezing flame,
where even hope is gone.
Till deathless, hopeless, hollow-eyed –
spawn of the aeon storm –
we cannot remember how or why
we came to claim this form.
We are strong and fierce and cunning as steel,
the progeny of ruin,
but we must not ever forget the feel
of the beautiful childlike tune
sung by our mothers before the storm –
the gentlest lullaby
that ever soothed the thought of harm,
or made an angel cry.
As here in the fires of hell we stand
as cold as a thousand lies,
and here comes crashing down again
the temple of the sky,
hear, my people! Oh, do you not hear
from over the edge of doom
an olden song. It stills the fear
and lets love come to you?
– George Gorman
Never
underestimate a
public school
teacher.
– Tim Walz
If you set an example as someone worth looking up to, you do not have to do much parenting.
– Sadhguru
Tell the ones who are weeping
to also weep for those whose
conditions didn’t let them weep.
– Faakir
Psychological or spiritual development always requires a greater capacity for anxiety and ambiguity.
– C.G. Jung
Goodnight, Great Summer Sky
by Rose Styron
Goodnight, great summer sky
world of my childhood and the star-struck sea.
White chaise from that ancestral southern
porch my raft,
white goose-down quilt my ballast,
under Orion on the green-waved lawn
I float, high—
new moon, old craft
tide strong as ever to the sheer horizon.
Over the seawall, on the dock
Andromeda their strict and jeweled guard
as tall Orion—seas and lawns ago—
chose to be mine,
our children sleep: Alexandra, Tom
under their folded goose-wing sails
true friends in dream,
the folly wrangle of their sibling day
outshone by starlight.
Calm island evening, never-ending sea—
our lovers’ rages, too, are quiet,
drowned.
Miracle of midsummer, the trust of dark
sails us beyond this harbor.
The Universe gave me a body in so that I may be carried, gave me life so that I may work, old age so that I may repose, death so that I may rest… Therefore the Sage roams freely in the realm in which nothing can escape but all endures.
– Zhuang Zi
Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.
Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.
Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.
Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after
the planting,
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.
– Marge Piercy
Art is standing with one hand extended into the universe and one hand extended into the world, and letting ourselves be a conduit for passing energy.
– Albert Einstein
In My Craft or Sullen Art
by Dylan Thomas
In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.
Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.
We cannot safely confine government programs to our own domestic progress and our own military power. We could be the wealthiest and the most mighty nation and still lose the battle of the world if we do not help our world neighbors protect their freedom and advance their social and economic progress. It is not the goal of the American people that the United States should be the richest nation in the graveyard of history.
– Dwight David Eisenhower
I had to call someone, so I picked on you-ou-ou
– David Bowie
The truth is of course is that there is no journey. We are arriving and departing all at the same time.
– David Bowie
On a bad day you…don’t need a lot of advice. You just need a little empathy and affirmation.
– Anne Lamott
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 & expressing our creative nature, which turns against us in self-&-other-destruction.
– Paul Levy
To emphasize only the beautiful seems to me to be like a mathematical system that only concerns itself with positive numbers.
– Paul Klee
If men knew what women say to each other about them, the human race would die out.
– W. H. Auden
We live in a society that pedestals mental intelligence without realizing that there are a number of other intelligences (emotional, spiritual, social, etc) that are equally as important. Just being ‘really smart’ is not the whole package, nor does it make you a good person.
– Nika Solé
We are all part of a greater whole, connected and interrelated by a web of energy and information.
– Heidi M. Morrison
Nothing ejaculates American exceptionalism like the belief that what our government does abroad isn’t “relevant” to our lives “at home.”
– Alina Stefanescu
To not be stingy with my life, with myself, is to fully express myself at every moment—fully express everything that I am.
– Roshi Nancy Mujo Baker
I AM SO SICK OF BINARY THINKING AND BINARY THINKERS
– Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg
If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.
– Aldous Huxley
Consciousness is not mind; it is the ground of all being, the ground of both matter and mind. Matter and mind are both possibilities of consciousness.
– Amit Goswami
No one ever reads a book. He reads himself through books…
– Romain Rolland
I hate Parties;
They bring out the worst in me.
– Dorothy Parker
There is a temple in India, one of the most famous. They take vows to the image inside and pour in thousands of dollars a day. It has become a tremendous business affair – just as all religion has.
– Krishnamurti
Clear, cold, and still. A hummingbird finds the one wild bergamot blossom hiding next to the porch and circles its purple mop-head, tonguing a dozen tubes.
– Dave Bonta
Gently down the incline of the mind
Speeds the flower, the leaf, the time—
– Laura Riding Jackson
The ultimate reason for meditating is to transform ourselves in order to be better able to transform the world.
– Mathew Ricard
All impartiality is artificial. Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial. He was of the party of the impartial.
– Lichtenberg
Disability or not, part of being human is feeling pride, joy, and the full spectrum of emotions.
– Jordyn Zimmerman, On Gus Walz
Not but in all removes I can
Kind love both give and get. Only what word
Wisest my heart breeds dark heaven’s baffling ban
Bars or hell’s spell thwarts. This to hoard unheard,
Heard unheeded, leaves me a lonely began.
– Gerard Manley Hopkins
Ninth Elegy
by Rainer Maria Rilke
Why—when we might have been laurel trees,
a little darker than all the other greens,
with tiny curves at the edge of every leaf
(like the smiles of a wind)—why, then,
did we have to be made human, so that
denying our destiny, we still long for it?
Certainly not because happiness really exists,
that quick gain of an approaching loss.
Not to experience wonder or to exercise the heart.
The laurel tree could have done all that.
But because just being here matters, because
the things of this world, these passing things,
seem to need us, to put themselves in our care
somehow. Us, the most passing of all.
Once for each, just once. Once and no more.
And for us too, once. Never again. And yet
it seems that this—to have once existed,
even if only once, to have been a part
of this earth—can never be taken back.
And so we keep going, trying to achieve it,
trying to hold it in our simple hands,
our already crowded eyes, our dumbfounded hearts.
Trying to become it. And yet who do we plan
to give it to? True, we’d rather keep it all
ourselves, forever. But into that other state
what can be taken across? Not the ability to see,
which we learn here so slowly, and not anything
that’s happened here. None of it. And so,
the pain. And so, before everything else,
the weariness. The long business of love.
Only the completely indescribable things.
But later, under the stars—what good would it do
anyway, then, to describe these things?
For the traveler doesn’t bring back
from the mountainside to the valley
a handful of earth, which would explain nothing
to anyone, but rather some acquired word, pure,
a blue and yellow gentian. And are we here,
perhaps, merely to say: house, bridge, fountain,
gate, jar, fruit tree, window—at most,
pillar, tower? But to say them, you understand—
to say them in such a way that even the things
themselves never hoped to exist so intensely.
Isn’t the sly earth’s secret purpose,
when it urges two lovers on, that all of creation
should share in their shudder of ecstasy?
A doorsill: the simple way two lovers
will wear down the sill of their door a little—
they too, besides those who came before
and those who will come after . . . gently.
Here is the time for what you can say,
this is its country. Speak and acknowledge.
More than ever things are falling away—
the things that we live with—and what is replacing them
is an urge without image. An urge whose crusts
will crumble as soon as it grows too large
and tries to get out. Between the hammerblows
our heart survives—just as the tongue, even
between the teeth, still manages to praise.
Praise, but tell the angel about the world,
not the indescribable. You can’t impress him
with your lofty feelings; in the universe,
where he feels with far greater feeling, you’re
just a beginner. So show him some simple thing,
something that’s fashioned from generation to generation
until it becomes really ours, and lives near our hand,
and in our eyes. Tell him about the things.
He’ll stand there amazed, the way you stood
beside the rope-maker in Rome or the potter on the Nile.
Show him how happy a thing can be, how innocent
and ours, how even the groan of sorrow decides
to become pure form, and serves as a thing
or dies in a thing, escaping to the beyond,
ecstatic, out of the violin. And these things,
that live only in passing, they understand
that you praise them. Fleeting, they look to us,
the most fleeting, for help. They hope that within
our invisible hearts we will change them entirely into—
oh endlessly—into us! Whoever we finally are.
Earth, isn’t this what you want, to rise up in us
invisible? Isn’t it your dream to be someday
invisible? Earth! Invisible! If not this change,
what do you ask for so urgently? Earth, loved one,
I will. Believe me, you don’t need any more
of your springtimes to win me: one
is already more than my blood can take.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been yours
completely. You’ve always been right,
and your most sacred idea is that death
is an intimate friend.
Look: I live. But from where do I draw this life,
since neither childhood nor the future grows less . . . ?
More being than I can hold springs up in my heart!
– Translated by Gary Miranda
The Ninth Duino Elegy
by Rainer Maria Rilke
Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely
in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all
other green, with tiny waves on the edges
of every leaf (like the smile of a breeze)–: why then
have to be human–and, escaping from fate,
keep longing for fate? . . .
Oh not because happiness exists,
that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.
Not out of curiosity, not as practice for the heart, which
would exist in the laurel too. . . . .
But because truly being here is so much; because everything here
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way
keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.
Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,
just once. And never again. But to have been
this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.
And so we keep pressing on, trying to achieve it,
trying to hold it firmly in our simple hands,
in our overcrowded gaze, in our speechless heart.
Trying to become it.–Whom can we give it to? We would
hold on to it all, forever . . . Ah, but what can we take along
into that other realm? Not the art of looking,
which is learned so slowly, and nothing that happened here. Nothing.
The sufferings, then. And above all, the heaviness,
and the long experience of love,– just what is wholly
unsayable. But later, among the stars,
what good is it–they are better as they are: unsayable.
For when the traveler returns from the mountain-slopes into the valley,
he brings, not a handful of earth, unsayable to others, but instead
some word he has gained, some pure word, the yellow and blue gentian.
Perhaps we are here in order to say: house,
bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window–
at most: column, tower. . . . But to say them, you must understand,
oh to say them more intensely than the Things themselves
ever dreamed of existing. Isn’t the secret intent
of this taciturn earth, when it forces lovers together,
that inside their boundless emotion all things may shudder with joy?
Threshold: what it means for two lovers
to be wearing down, imperceptibly, the ancient threshold of their door–
they too, after the many who came before them
and before those to come. . . . ., lightly.
Here is the time for the sayable, here is its homeland.
Speak and bear witness. More than ever
the Things that we might experience are vanishing, for
what crowds them out and replaces them is an imageless act.
An act under a shell, which easily cracks open as soon as
the business inside outgrows it and seeks new limits.
Between the hammers our heart
endures, just as the tongue does
between the teeth and, despite that,
still is able to praise.
Praise this world to the angel, not the unsayable one,
you can’t impress him with glorious emotion; in the universe
where he feels more powerfully, you are a novice. So show him
something simple which, formed over generations,
lives as our own, near our hand and within our gaze.
Tell him of Things. He will stand astonished; as you stood
by the ropemaker in Rome or the potter along the Nile.
Show him how happy a Thing can be, how innocent and ours,
how even lamenting grief purely decides to take form,
serves as a Thing, or dies into a Thing–, and blissfully
escapes far beyond the violin.–And these Things,
which live by perishing, know you are praising them; transient,
they look to us for deliverance: us, the most transient of all.
They want us to change them, utterly, in our invisible heart,
within–oh endlessly–within us! Whoever we may be at last.
Earth, isn’t this what you want: to arise within us,
invisible? Isn’t it your dream
to be wholly invisible someday?–O Earth: invisible!
What, if not transformation, is your urgent command?
Earth, my dearest, I will. Oh believe me, you no longer
need your springtimes to win me over–one of them,
ah, even one, is already too much for my blood.
Unspeakably I have belonged to you, from the first.
You were always right, and your holiest inspiration
is our intimate companion, Death.
Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future
grows any smaller . . . . . Superabundant being
wells up in my heart.
– Translated by Stephen Mitchell
Trickle down economics was, and is, an upward tsunami of wealth for the few.
– Andy Perrin
Not sure I can handle watching patriotism tonight. It’s like being in the presence of perfect mustaches: I have to protect myself from them because they generate an aesthetic frisson that prevents me from actually thinking. The sentimentalism is obfuscating.
– Alina Stefanescu
Some of y’all out there didn’t read encyclopedias for fun as a kid, and it shows.
– Natania Barron
Walter Benjamin called Charlie Chaplin “the only angel of peace who is suited to this world.”
– Alin Stefanescu
ODE TO SOFTNESS
Mornings are blind as newborn cats.
Fingernails grow so trustfully, for a while
they don’t know what they’re going to touch. Dreams
are soft, and tenderness looms over us
like fog, like the cathedral bell of Krakow
before it cooled.
– Adam Zagajewski
Scarecrow on Fire
We all think about suddenly disappearing.
The train tracks lead there, into the woods.
Even in the financial district: wooden doors
in alleyways. First I want to put something small
into your hand, a button or river stone or
key I don’t know to what. I don’t
have that house anymore across from the graveyard
and its black angel. What counts as a proper
goodbye? My last winter in lowa there was always
a ladybug or two in the kitchen for cheer
even when it was ten below. We all feel
suspended over a drop into nothingness.
Once you get close enough, you see what
one is stitching is a human heart. Another
is vomiting wings. Hell, even now I love life.
Whenever you put your feet on the floor
in the morning, whatever the nightmare,
it’s a miracle or fantastic illusion:
the solidity of the boards, the steadiness
coming into the legs. Where did we get
the idea when we were kids to rub dirt
into the wound or was that just in Pennsylvania?
Maybe poems are made of breath, the way water,
cajoled to boil, says, This is my soul, freed.
– Dean Young
the liberal is so preoccupied with stopping confrontation that he usually finds himself defending and calling for law and order, the law and order of the oppressor.
– kwame ture
Translation wreaks havoc on official exchange rates and economic ideals
– Johannes Göransson, On Ann Jäderlund
Summer, do your worst!
Light your tinsel moon, and call on
Your performing stars to fall on
Headlong through your paper sky;
– Dorothy Parker
code-switching is a phenomenal tonal and rhetorical resource—admire it whenever and wherever it appears, flashing its doubleness—and understand its history.
– Wayne Koestenbaum
Ballad of Forgotten Places
by Olga Orozco
translated from the Spanish by Mary Crow
My most beautiful hiding places,
places that best fit my soul’s deepest colors,
are made of all that others forgot.
They are solitary sites hollowed out in the grass’s caress,
in a shadow of wings, in a passing song;
regions whose limits swirl with the ghostly carriages
that transport the mist in the dawn,
and in whose skies names are sketched, ancient words of love,
vows burning like constellations of drunken fireflies.
Sometimes earthly villages pass, hoarse trains make camp,
a couple piles marvelous oranges at the edge of the sea,
a single relic is spread through all space.
My places would look like broken mirages,
clippings of photographs torn from an album to orient nostalgia,
but they have roots deeper than this sinking ground,
these fleeing doors, these vanishing walls.
They are enchanted islands where only I can be the magician.
And who else, if not I, is climbing the stairs towards those attics in the clouds
where the light, aflame, used to hum in the siesta’s honey,
who else will open again the big chest where the remains of an unhappy story lie,
sacrificed a thousand times only to fantasy, only to foam,
and try on the rags again
like those costumes of invincible heroes,
circle of fire that inflamed time’s scorpion?
Who cleans the windowpane with her breath and stirs the fire of the afternoon
in those rooms where the table was an altar of idolatry,
each chair, a landscape folded up after every trip,
and the bed, a stormy short cut to the other shore of dreams,
rooms deep as nets hung from the sky,
like endless embraces I slid down till I brushed the feathers of death,
until I overturned the laws of knowledge and the fall of man?
Who goes into the parks with the golden breath of each Christmas
and washes the foliage with a little gray rag that was the handkerchief for waving goodbye,
and reweaves the garlands with a thread of tears,
repeating a fantastic ritual among smashed wine glasses and guests lost in thought,
while she savors the twelve green grapes of redemption—
one for each month, one for each year, one for each century of empty indulgence—
a taste acid but not as sharp as the bread of forgetfulness?
Because who but I changes the water for all the memories?
Who inserts the present like a slash into the dreams of the past?
Who switches my ancient lamps for new ones?
My most beautiful hiding places are solitary sites where no one goes,
and where there are shadows that only come to life when I am the magician.
On Crip
by Sin à Tes Souhaits
On certain corners cars circle ceremoniously & couriers carry cake to
circumvent cases. Classics & coupes constellate
Crenshaw, Carey, Compton. Cobalt chrysanthemums,
candles, & champagne celebrate cherished companions ‘cause
comrades collaborated to counter crooked cops
& corrupt civic commanders cannibalizing our cities, coloring us cancerous
Courts, Congress & CEOs conspired to confine citizens
in coffins & cells, like crack was contagious.
Churches cried considering their children,
the condition of their classrooms.
Caught in a cruel, ceaseless cycle of crisis,
Crip clenched circumstance
Crip cracc’d the cement chasin’ chicc’n & change
in California, that concert of calamities.
Crip cultivated concrete, co-created a community
of cousins, a coalition come covenant, connected
by the crimson chronicle of cotton, the collective choice to chase
control coverless in the center of chaos.
Curiously commentary censors constructive critiques that challenge
common conversations about the culture of crippin. Contrary to
contextless caricatures of conflict & consumption C-notes, Chucks, &
chunky cuban chains, cartoonish
canards of capos, cognac, cocaine, & caskets,
the code calls for care, coordination. Character is critical.
It’s criminal how Crip been criminalized, then
commodified. Caliban of Calabasas,
conscious of the cosmos’ complexity,
capitalism’s chokehold & its charter,
the clock’s cold, constant counting,
& the cramped capaciousness of County,
Crip charted a coastline, cartography of chances
for the chronically cut off, credit-less, convicted &
concurrent, constrained like chattel, clamoring
for a cathartic clash, a calm chapter:
a clean crib to chill in, consistent checcs
compassion, a cure for the cancer of civility
Cuhz came correct, clutch Curry. Coruscant champion, clear-sighted
Caesar with cloth cerulean crown, confident, cunning, cutthroat for the
conclusion of combat, crumple the Constitution. Cremate this colony
HARRIET
by X. J. Kennedy
Bullied by Pound, ran “Prufrock” in the back
Of a dull summer number-shot heard round
The world. Rattling across Siberia
By railcar over tundra, stony ground
Where stunted fir trees struggled to breathe free
Like poets in America, she had found
Her vision, stuck out chin. By God, she’d pack
Not pork but poetry.
Vestal, bluestockinged warrior- what long nights
She spent uprooting tick-tock lyricists,
Sowing and weeding fields of neophytes.
Who could have thought the Mountain of the Mists
Would host her grave when, frail, on Andes heights,
She’d close eyes that had blazed like amethysts?
My unique relation to my work—and it is a tenuous one—is the making relation. I am with it a little in the dark and fumbling of making, as long as that lasts, then no more. I have no light to throw on it myself and it seems a stranger in the light that others throw.
– Samuel Beckett
What Will You Do at the End of the World?
by Julia Bouwsma
When I watch the video where the violinist plays
as surgeons cut the cancer from her brain,
my first impulse is to descend into metaphor—
to imagine the plaintive cry of her violin as a singular
silvery thread that leads the surgeons—sublimely,
tremulously—through the Minotaur’s maze,
so they can extract the tumor abutting the lobe
that controls her left hand, so they can navigate
the fleshy labyrinthine folds and electric shocks
that make a human mind. When I watch her bow
graze the ventilator tube again and again,
I want to recall the old story of Nero playing
as Rome burned, which is supposed to be a story
about callous cruelty and ineffectual leadership,
but which fails to hold up under historic scrutiny
for many reasons, including that the violin
was not invented until the 11th century.
Still, the fable lends him more humanity than not—
the notion that there was music inside him,
even if it took six days of burning to fan it out,
a music so powerful it forced itself to escape
his tyrant’s mouth. If art is only pleasure,
Nero’s act is selfish, loathsome, but if art is survival—
a violin’s siren might morph to beacon
against the smoky air. I keep asking my poems
what the world needs from me in these days
of quickening dread, of burgeoning conflagration,
what they want me to do. In the comments section
below the hospital video, no one can agree
on what they’re seeing: Creepy, incredible,
horrifying, beautiful. Afterward, the violinist recalls,
I kept thinking, Get out of my way. I need to play louder.
Embodiment has never been my strong suit.
– Diane Seuss
At sixteen, I memorized Keats’s odes and wrote them out, to see how it felt to write incontestably great poetry. … His language—it’s right at the edge of the cliff.
– Robert Glück
Summer is trapped under the thin
glass on the brook, making
the sound of an emptying bottle.
– Chase Twichell
All literature carries exile within it, whether the writer has had to pick up and go at the age of 20 or has never left home.
– Roberto Bolano
Nationalism is wretched and collapses under its own weight. If the expression “collapses under its own weight” doesn’t make sense to you, imagine a statue made of shit slowly sinking into the desert…
– Roberto Bolano
I will never be held hostage by a world without Love.
– Nicholas Pierotti
To address the climate, to recognize this crisis, is to recognize that everything is connected.
– Rebecca Solnit
DAFFODILS
Wordsworth in New York
Those daffodils that I recall
While lying on a bed settee
Are faded now, their petals fall
In nature and in memory.
It’s time to rise, to go outside
And head off for a subway ride.
I’m in New York’s YMCA
Undressing for a midday swim;
A poet could not but be gay
With bodies toned up in the gym.
But I am getting no cheap thrills
From dongs like dangling daffodils.
I twinkled at the twinkies there
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance
Or heading for the sauna where
I might get lucky if, by chance,
One of the bronzed and buffed young men
Is eager for my fountain pen.
But, sadly, no one needs to hear
This exiled poet strut his stuff.
I am an old Romantic queer,
Ignored, unloved. I’ve had enough.
I join the hustling New York crowd
And wander lonely as a cloud.
– Conor Kelly
There were probably too many exclamation points, but I couldn’t bear to erase them. I wanted to take shelter behind their manic enthusiasm, their idiotic sparkle.
– Rebecca Makkai, The Borrower
Perhaps you also will one day understand that it is only the man who is really capable of being alone, and without bitterness, who attracts other people.
– CG Jung
The Enemy
— after Shantideva
The enemy is never another person.
The enemy is an absorbed toxin
taken within
that festers and burns through
dims the lantern light of soul
spills over, splashes all around,
shrapnels back outward into the world.
The enemy is hateful glances.
The enemy is dagger-like words
streamed into brains
screamed into faces
sprayed onto walls
mobs smashing windows
bombs dropped onto innocents.
The enemy is not another people.
The enemy is a thoughtless act
a generational habit
a fiery impulse ignorant of consequence
a “convenient” sweeping under the rug
of all that’s happened, and continues to.
The enemy is a reactive poison;
a chemical reaction in the bones
that renders us incapable
of feeling the grief
or seeing the pain of others
as our own.
The enemy is an infection
cancerous exclusivity
fear-driven insularity
privileged passivity
a failure of hospitality
stone-hearted immovability
entrenched inflexibility
entrained insensitivity
a learned inability
to search for a better way.
The enemy is callousness
dismissive disregard
widespread “justified” neglect
a virus that takes root in the mind
that blinds the eyes to clear sight
blinds the eye of heart-mind
endlessly spinning the cycle of revenge.
Hear these words from a higher ground.
The enemy is the falsehood of conflation;
the skewed logic that says:
*if I defend the humanity
of your perceived enemy
then I am somehow your enemy too.*
Hear these words from a higher ground.
The enemy is having no empathy:
actively fracturing the world
with no thought of soul
no thought of wound
no thought for the precious young
the precious old
those ancestors yet to come.
The enemy is hard-heartedness —
this universal human lineage
of dehumanizing The Other
so nothing is felt
when they are disenfranchised
displaced
replaced
snuffed out.
The enemy is the failure
to learn from history.
When one people
makes another people
unwelcome
homeless
forgotten
they both become haunted
by the same restless ghost
that will never let them sleep.
If we can’t sleep
we can’t dream;
if we can’t dream
we’ll never find
another way than this.
Hear these words from a higher ground.
The enemy is not another person.
The enemy is a mutual hallucination;
our ongoing shared banishment
here in the great garden of plenty.
– 2024 / Frank Inzan Owen
Empathy emancipates.
– Amanda Gorman
All we are not
stares back
at what we
are.
– W. H. Auden
THE WAY IT GOES
Driving by
our old home
on Mayfair,
the cairn was gone
the tire swing
still floating there.
– Wendy Videlock
I am not anti-rational, just unrational. You may infer a rational meaning in what I say or do, but it is your doing, not mine.
– U.G. Krishnamurti
We will say, we did not give up on love today.
– Sara Bareilles
Welcome All Guests
The heart is not a filter.
You cannot separate one
strand of happiness from
the sorrow with which
it was woven, both of them
slipping into the blood
at the very same moment.
The heart is a waiting room
and every stranger you meet,
every feeling that arises
must pass through. You might
as well leave the door open,
welcome them all.
– James Crews
KEYS
The small man
builds cages for everyone
he
knows.
While the sage,
who has to duck his head
when the moon is low,
keeps dropping keys all night long
for the
beautiful
rowdy
prisoners.
– Hafiz
I don’t sit in front of the news the way my parents do,
Instead I let the waves of social commentary through,
The six o’clock, the ten o’clock – I haven’t watched for years
The residue blasts plenty round my eyes and round my ears,
It’s amazing what you catch – what rises and floats,
what sticks in people’s craws and really gets their goats –
A boy crying, a man lying, a woman defying –
What should be obvious and right, is treated like pigs flying –
I cried the other day because a speech of common sense
Felt like something rose again from almost-obsolescence
We struggle way too hard and I am always wondering why
Truth and care and kindness are so hard to come by
In the big picture, in the long-term, in the systems and the laws
Evil and derision get equal applause
It’s not that it is arrogance, I think it’s more like fear,
The way I avoid details when the gist is clear,
I can’t bare to watch it all play out,
To hear the whispers and the shouts,
I am exhausted. I feel led on.
There are those who make you weak
And those who make you strong,
But it’s a see-saw ongoing nauseating motion
Suspense and disappointment and a whole lot of commotion
The human story –
Some have said it’s been my job to tell it,
I cringe to think, it’s more than that, I’ve even tried to sell it.
I crave a patch of land now, a garden, a dog
I want to sip a cup of tea and watch the morning fog
I want to stop caring what happens to each nation,
Bring me my crossword, bring me sedation.
But if I am to live in the human game,
I must go back out there, and use my real name,
And face the music and face the facts,
And participate in what will happen in the next acts.
So I do my stretches, and try to eat well,
Try to stay soft when my heart starts to swell,
Let my tears fall when they start to flow
Write down these words and let myself know:
I care, I promise, I do.
My passion isn’t through,
But I need little rests in between
All of the things I have already seen.
– Orit Shimoni
Love casts out fear; but conversely fear casts out love.
And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth.
– Aldous Huxley
Every thought, action, decision, or feeling creates an eddy in the interlocking, inter-balancing, ever-moving energy fields of life, leaving a permanent record for all of time. This realization can be intimidating when it first dawns on us, but it becomes a springboard for rapid evolution.
In this interconnected universe, every improvement we make in our private world improves the world at large for everyone. We all float on the collective level of consciousness of mankind so that any increment we add comes back to us. We all add to our common buoyancy by our efforts to benefit life. What we do to benefit life automatically benefits all of us because we are all included in that which is life.
– David R. Hawkins
Suddenly: the word most used by Dostoevsky. Somebody told me that. Some Dostoevsky expert. Suddenly. As though any kind of action could be drawn into words: Suddenly music. Suddenly turning. Suddenly silent. Suddenly. As though I never saw the process. Everyone in the old house is sick but me. Silence, except for the snoring, coughing, and occasional trips to the bathroom. Snow everywhere through the windows. You can’t look out without seeing it. Suddenly winter. Frozen rivers. Bitter cold. Barren trees. Small silver plane etched out against a chalk, still sky. Suddenly, completely alone.
– Sam Shepard, Day Out of Days
If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Before you became a cloud, you were an ocean, roiled and murmuring like a mouth. You were the shadow of a cloud crossing over a field of tulips. You were the tears of a man who cried into a plaid handkerchief. You were a sky without a hat. Your heart puffed and flowered like sheets drying on a line.
And when you were a tree, you listened to trees and the tree things trees told you. You were the wind in the wheels of a red bicycle. You were the spidery María tattooed on the hairless arm of a boy in downtown Houston. You were the rain rolling off the waxy leaves of a magnolia tree. A lock of straw-colored hair wedged between the mottled pages of a Victor Hugo novel. A crescent of soap. A spider the color of a fingernail. The black nets beneath the sea of olive trees. A skein of blue wool. A tea saucer wrapped in newspaper. An empty cracker tin. A bowl of blueberries in heavy cream. White wine in a green-stemmed glass.
And when you opened your wings to wind, across the punched-tin sky above a prison courtyard, those condemned to death and those condemned to life watched how smooth and sweet a white cloud glides.
– Sandra Cisneros, Cloud
The first thing is to love yourself. You cannot progress by self-doubt. You can only progress by self-love.
– Dipa Ma
I am a strong wind in the face of lesser natures and I offer this advice to my enemies: Take care not to spit against the wind.
– Nietzsche
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
This human herd all started out as potential geniuses, before the tacit conspiracy of social conformity blighted their brains. All of them can redeem that lost freedom if they work at it hard enough.
– Robert Anton Wilson
When images overwhelm me and create an unintended organon, that other nature, that time is the most beautiful.
– Bohumil Hrabal
Why Are Your Poems So Dark?
Isn’t the moon dark too,
most of the time?
And doesn’t the white page
seem unfinished
without the dark stain
of alphabets?
When God demanded light,
he didn’t banish darkness.
Instead he invented
ebony and crows
and that small mole
on your left cheekbone.
Or did you mean to ask
“Why are you sad so often?”
Ask the moon.
Ask what it has witnessed.
– Linda Pastan
I have frequently been censured for errors I have committed which those who have censured me had not the energy or the wit to commit themselves.
– Georg Lichtenberg
Madness gives me hope. […] If there are more neurotics, it’s because intelligence and sensibility are growing; it’s because the world is becoming less and less bearable.
– Marguerite Duras
There are so many geniuses about nowadays we ought to be right glad when Heaven for once bestows upon us a child who isn’t one.
– Georg Lichtenberg
Rather they hear this noise as music,
a jazz riff or a smooth soul remix,
a moan of an old-time blues band.
Lulling the aging body back to sleep.
– Jan Mandell, Ode to Aging Bodies
Most of us didn’t know how truly good or truly bad we were, and most of us would never be sufficiently tested to find out.
– Rachel Cusk
What if instead of saying, this border divides these places. We said, this border unites these places. This border holds together these two really interesting different places. What if we declared border crossings places where, listen, when you crossed them, you yourself became doubly possible.
– Ali Smith, Spring
The pain of life is pure salt; no more, no less. The amount of pain in life remains the same, exactly the same. But the amount of bitterness we taste depends on the container we put the pain in. So when you are in pain, the only thing you can do is to enlarge your sense of things. . . . Stop being a glass. Become a lake.
– Mark Nepo
There were 180 million people in the US when I was born. 3 billion in the world. I was just reading a novel set in 1940, when the US population was 132 million and the world population was 2.3 billion. Now US is 336 million and world is 8.2 billion. This cannot go on. Every cell in my body wants for it to go down quickly and voluntarily. But every cell in my body knows it won’t be voluntary, although it may be quick. This exponential growth cannot go on.
When I read books set in the past, I envy the wild nature that still existed. I even envy the wild nature that still existed in my own past.
– Derrick Jensen
Been in the desert too long.
I want to live on Cold Mountain
– Nicholas Pierotti
My right hand has written all the poems that I have composed.
My left hand has not written a single poem.
But my right hand does not think,
“Left Hand, you are good for nothing.”
My right hand does not have a superiority complex.
That is why it is very happy.
My left hand does not have any complex at all.
In my two hands there is the kind of wisdom
called the wisdom of nondiscrimination.
One day I was hammering a nail
and my right hand was not very accurate
and instead of pounding on the nail
it pounded on my finger.
It put the hammer down and took care
of my left hand in a very tender way,
as if it were taking care of itself.
It did not say, “Left Hand, you have to remember
that I have taken good care of you
and you have to pay me back in the future.”
There was no such thinking…
And my left hand did not say,
“Right Hand, you have done me a lot of harm
— give me that hammer, I want justice.”
My two hands know that they are members
of one body; they are in each other.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
We often wish things that are rooted in our weakness and compensate for it; we dream of ourselves as famous, all powerful, loved by everybody, etc. But sometimes we dream of wishes which are the anticipation of our most valuable goals. We can see ourselves as dancing or flying; we see the city of light; we experience the happy presence of friends. Even if we are not yet capable in our waking life to experience the joy of the dream, the dream experience shows that we are at least capable of wishing it and seeing it fulfilled in a dream fantasy. Fantasies and dreams are the beginning of many deeds, and nothing would be worse than to discourage or depreciate them. What matters is the kind of fantasy which we have-does it lead us forward or does it hold us back in the chains of
unproductiveness?
– Erich Fromm
All day I have been reading
about the invisible world, the one
that’s always trying to reach us.
What if we could hear
the small round o’s of dirt,
the chant of stars and plants,
carbon and sulphur, calling to each other, innumerable
to innumerable, a throat at every blade of grass.
– Ellery Akers
The soul demands your folly; not your wisdom.
– Carl Jung
Heaney. Who once translated Virgil thus: ‘There are tears at the heart of things.
– Rebecca Solnit
Now she felt breathing a pleasure as deep as the pleasure of drinking cool water. I breathe, am breathed, am breath; I am so, am so. So walk, so go on earth, am earth, breath; and beneath all, joy.
– Ursula le Guin
Don’t worry about things. Don’t push. Just do your work and you’ll survive. The important thing is to have a ball, to be joyful, to be loving and to be explosive. Out of that comes everything and you grow.
Looking back over a lifetime, you see that love was the answer to everything.
You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
I don’t believe in being serious about anything. I think life is too serious to be taken seriously.
If you write a hundred short stories and they are bad, that doesn’t mean you’ve failed. You fail only if you stop writing.
May you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days.
– Ray Bradbury
It is important to see that the main point of any spiritual practice is to step out of the bureaucracy of ego. This means stepping out of ego’s constant desire for a higher, more spiritual, more transcendental version of knowledge, religion, virtue, judgment, comfort, or whatever it is that the particular ego is seeking. One must step out of spiritual materialism. If we do not step out of spiritual materialism, if we, in fact, practice it, then we may eventually find ourselves possessed of a huge collection of spiritual paths. We may feel these spiritual collections to be very precious. We have studied so much. We may have studied Western philosophy or Oriental philosophy, practiced yoga, or perhaps have studied under dozens of great masters.
We have achieved and we have learned. We believe that we have accumulated a hoard of knowledge. And yet, having gone through all this, there is still something to give up. It is extremely mysterious! How could this happen? Impossible! But unfortunately it is so. Our vast collections of knowledge and experience are just part of ego’s display, part of the grandiose quality of ego. We display them to the world and, in so doing, reassure ourselves that we exist, safe and secure, as “spiritual” people.
– Chogyam Trungpa
A time has to be gone through without any reward, natural or supernatural.
– Simone Weil
I pass through life
finding you over
and over again—
oppress you
with love.
– Jennifer Franklin
Literature is heading towards itself, towards its essence, which is its disappearance
– Maurice Blanchot
In the Straubian system, a retro trend is simply impossible: everything is in the present.
– Serge Daney
There is nothing “conservative” about yanking society back in time.
– @QueerMajority
Let us be alive without anything
asking us not to be.
– Angelika Brewer
Laugh at the unshed leaf, say what you will,
Call me in all things what I was before,
A flutterer in the wind, a woman still;
I tell you I am what I was and more.
– Edna St. Vincent Millay
Our air is quiet because those same aircraft are realizing their maximum capabilities for sonic and material destruction elsewhere.
– Abu Hamdan
Blessings
by Jay Parini
Blessings for these things:
the dandelion greens I picked in summer
and would douse with vinegar and oil
at grandma’s little house in Pennsylvania,
near the river. Or the small potatoes
she would spade to boil and butter,
which I ate like fruit with greasy fingers.
Blessings for my friend, thirteen
that summer when we prayed by diving from a cliff
on Sunday mornings in the church
of mud and pebbles, foam and moss.
I will not forget the fizz and tingle,
sunning in wet skin on flat, cool rocks,
so drenched in summer.
And for you, my love, blessings
for the times we lay so naked in a bed
without the sense of turbulence or tides.
I could just believe the softness of our skin,
those sheets like clouds,
how when the sunlight turned to roses,
neither of us dared to move or breathe.
Blessings on these things and more:
the rivers and the houses full of light,
the bitter weeds that taste like sun,
dirt-sweetened spuds,
the hard bright pebbles, spongy mosses,
lifting of our bodies into whiffs of cloud,
all sleep-warm pillows in the break of dawn.
Say what you will, and scratch my heart to find
The roots of last year’s roses in my breast;
I am as surely riper in my mind
As if the fruit stood in the stalls confessed.
– Edna St. Vincent Millay
We don’t create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay.
– Lynda Barry
Today it still is summer,
Tomorrow will be fall.
I see the purple asters,
I hear the autumn’s call.
I feel the warm sun shining
As a balmy south wind blows;
I see more flowers blooming,
And I see the grass still grows;
The goldenrod is waving,
The bees are in the clover.
I hear a distant honking-
The geese are flying over.
The maple leaves are golden;
The pumpkins, round and yellow.
The apple cheeks are rosy,
The pears are getting mellow.
The nuts are growing rounder,
The cornstalks, brown and sear.
By twenty lovely tokens
I know that fall is near.
Today it still is summer,
Tomorrow will be fall.
Today I still am barefoot-
Oh, how I love it all!
– Nona Keen Duffy
So therefore I dedicate myself, to my art, my sleep, my dreams, my labours, my suffrances, my loneliness, my unique madness, my endless absorption and hunger because I cannot dedicate myself to any fellow being.
– Jack Kerouac
I just what to remind myself that a pro being good at one thing does not make that person smart and definitely doesn’t make that person good at everything else.
– Jericho Brown
You shouldn’t write without inspiration—at least not very often.
– Lorrie Moore
Life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation…
– Lewis Mumford
A Stoic is a person that keeps their mind focused on what is good and true. They create a moral code-of-conduct for themselves and they stick to it. This way, they aren’t easily swayed by just whatever anybody says, but only by what their reason tells them is just.
– @dailystoic
I don’t like people who ask you to follow or believe. I like people who ask you to think independently.
– A. S. Byatt
When there’s nothing left
is when it comes —
that’s how the system works,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
I have to write
short lines or
my poems end
up with tails,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
raining down on me
all the love you could never show
– O’Prunty
late night shift over
on the snowy way home
my dream poem comes
and goes… and comes at last
on little puppy feet
– Chen-ou Liu
Snowstorm
by Hayden Carruth
Everywhere men speak in whispers.
Tumult, many new ghosts. Storm
hurls itself across the valley
and careens from the ridges, swirls
of snow lapsing, leaping, colliding.
Outside on the highway a car
has rolled over the guard rail,
two pickups have stopped, men
stand hunched with their hands
in their pockets. We are looking
from our kitchen windows, we
have called the country sheriff
and the wrecker, we have asked
the men to come in for coffee.
But they have said no, somewhat
sullenly. Earlier we had been speaking
of war in the Persian Gulf, of
all the wars and how armies are
everywhere now, hardly one
peaceful corner remaining
in the world. In strange cities
and in wastelands, on mountains
and on islands, young men and women
in clumsy uniforms and in unease
stand hunched with their hands
in their pockets, or drink
as much beer as they can, or screw
themselves silly––but mostly
they stand hunched with their hands
in their pockets, scornful of the native
people. Now through the snow
the men on the highway are vague
distant figures in a veiled world,
the car’s lights are dim and unclear.
In our eaves and around our dormers
the wind cries and moans with increased
force, and the night comes on.
Projection is a wonderful thing too. Marie Louise von Franz remarked somewhere, “Why do we always assume projection is bad? ‘You are projecting’ becomes among Jungians an accusation. Sometimes projection is helpful and the right thing.” Her remark is very wise. I know that I was starving myself to death, but the knowledge couldn’t move directly from the bag to the conscious mind. It has to go out onto the world first.
– Robert Bly
Suddenly for no earthly reason I felt immensely sorry for him and longed to say something real, something with wings and a heart, but the birds I wanted settled on my shoulders and head only later when I was alone and not in need of words.
– Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
Non-attachment is not complacency. The philosophy of non-attachment is based in the understanding that holding on too tightly to those things, which in any case are always going to be slipping through our fingers, hurts and gives us rope burn.
– Lama Surya Das
The system doesn’t want you healed… it wants you dependent.
– Brad Schipke
Non-polarity thinking . . . teaches you how to hold creative tensions, how to live with paradox and contradictions, how not to run from mystery, and therefore how to actually practice what all religions teach as necessary: compassion, mercy, loving kindness, patience, forgiveness, and humility.
– Richard Rohr
It is a simple matter of what you will do when the chips are down, my friend. When the fat lady is singing. When the walls are falling in, and the sky is dark, and the ground is rumbling. In that moment our actions will define us. And it makes no difference whether you are being watched by Allah, Jesus, Buddha, or whether you are not. On cold days a man can see his breath, on a hot day he can’t. On both occasions, the man breathes.
– Zadie Smith
Ethan Nichtern:
Wait, we never thought the liberal/progressive portion of our audience would push back. That’s not fair.
– America media, 2024
The soul of Man must quicken to creation.
– T.S. Eliot
If you can find a company that can get away with raising prices year after year without losing customers you’ve got a terrific investment.
– Peter Lynch
I cannot understand how anyone can be a sceptic sincerely and on principle. Either such philosophers do not exist or they are the most miserable of men. Doubt with regard to what we ought to know is a condition too violent for the human mind; it cannot long be endured; in spite of itself the mind decides one way or another, and it prefers to be deceived rather than to believe nothing.
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau
For the divine Mind is diffused throughout the whole body of the universe as in a circle, now outside, now inside, and rules and orders all things
– Firmicus Maternus
I have seen people who were rich no matter how much life took from them, and I have seen people who were poor no matter how much they took from life.
– Shams Tabrizi
Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.
– Charles Mingus
I walk boldly up to the lion on my pathway and find it is a friendly airedale.
– Florence Scovel Shinn
I have found that it is the small everyday deed of ordinary folks that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
The most common meta-mistake in inner work:
getting focused on a bottleneck, forgetting that there’s something on the other side of it.
– River Kenna
Everybody trying to be more in touch with their inner child, when what most people need right now is finally being in touch with their inner adult.
– @JLBornstein
Sitka
On a trail in the Oregon woods
breath tastes like old skin.
Lichens I scrape from a sponged log
scab the back of my soon-to-be future hand,
the siskin’s sweet eats a eulogy
for the fallen. When we hug a spruce
six centuries thick, moss threads
our fingers with ringlets green as time
while our free hands, a strained reach,
embrace a girth of twenty missing arms.
If resin is the smoke of our breaths
a blue-tailed skink climbs faster than thought.
Here, whatever it was escapes us.
The trunk trembles like a yawn of iron.
Unseen yet felt, the crown scrapes
a sky of pre-Columbian stars.
– William Johnson
There are poems that tell stories but there are also poems that just give you a moment of vision or transcendence or colour even, or just an image that you can carry around with you. Two lines. Two lines can save a life, I believe it.
– Caroline Quinn
Go as far as you can see; when you get there you’ll be able to see farther.
– Thomas Carlyle
a book
for pillow
in the summer heat
– Issa
“I went to Europe and lost weight”
What people really mean is that they walked a lot, ate smaller portions, higher quality food, and didn’t stress that much.
– Dan Go
Musee des Beaux Arts
by W. H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share. This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity.
– Paulo Coelho
El Paso
The sun is different here
Drastic and dense
We are drowning in the light
– Marian Haddad
One Mile Apart
My name is Mary Francis
And I live in El Paso
In a large house on Mt. Franklin
I have quite a view
I can see the desert
Pecan trees in the valley
Those little shacks in Juarez
I can see them too
My name is Juan Contreras
And from my home in Juarez
I can see El Paso
And the houses of the rich
I leave my children sleeping
To earn a few centavo
Selling red pistachios
To the tourists on the bridge
Which side of the river
Did someone flip a coin
It’s sad enough to break a river’s heart
How can there be so much distance between us
When our houses are one mile apart
My house is Spanish stucco
I have a blue Jacuzzi
Four bedrooms and a fireplace
A swimming pool with heat
My house is brown adobe
I don’t have running water
I don’t have indoor plumbing
Or pavement on my street
Which side of the river
Did someone flip a coin
It’s sad enough to break a river’s heart
How can there be so much distance between us
When our houses are one mile apart
When our houses are one mile apart
– Lisa Aschmann
If I am essential, I wish to only be so in a world whose sole currency is tenderness.
– Kevin Kantor
I’ve always loved friends of the Way
Always held them dear
Meeting a stranger with silent springs
Greeting a guest talking zen
Talking about mysteries on a moonlit night
Searching for truth until dawn
When the tracks of our inventions
disappear and we see who we really are.
– Cold Mountain
Learning:
To believe you are magnificent.
And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent.
Enough labor for one human life.
– Czeslaw Milosz
Diaries are very futile. I must be all dream or all deed. It is quite impossible for me to express any of the beauty I feel to half the degree I feel it; and yet it is a great pleasure to seize an impression and lock it up in words: you feel as if you had it safe forever.
– Wallace Stevens
Close your eyes and get quiet for a minute, until the chatter starts up. Then isolate one of the voices and imagine the person speaking as a mouse. Pick it up by the tail and drop it into a mason jar. Then isolate another voice, pick it up by the tail, drop it in the jar. And so on. Drop in any high-maintenance parental units, drop in any contractors, lawyers, colleagues, children, anyone who is whining in your head. Then put the lid on, and watch all these mouse people clawing at the glass, jabbering away, trying to make you feel like shit because you won’t do what they want – won’t give them more money, won’t be more successful, won’t see them more often. Then imagine that there is a volume-control button on the bottle. Turn it all the way up for a minute, and listen to the stream of angry, neglected, guilt-mongering voices. Then turn it all the way down and watch the frantic mice lunge at the glass, trying to get to you. Leave it down, and get back to your shitty first draft. A writer friend of mine suggests opening the jar and shooting them all in the head. But I think he’s a little angry, and I’m sure nothing like this would ever occur to you.
– Anne Lamott
Photosynthesis
Morning falls out of its orbit
and swims up through the blue.
Last night, when I heard the news,
I forgot my human hunger.
Now I am making calculations
with a row of ivy and old hibiscus.
I am silent as a shadow in the ferns,
I am frond green and curled.
It may be necessary to drink through
the roots; I could eat sunlight and air,
start a green factory in each finger;
I could make each arm a branch.
Let me begin as stem and leaf.
I’ll make something you can breathe.
– Joyce Sutphen
The illuminati used flagellation, levitation and starvation as a method of accounting for the power of the invisible world over their lives. Public suffering and scars gave the evidence of hidden miseries which had begun to require daylight.
The poet uses words to do the same. From the lashes of whip and ink the secrets become common, rather than signs of individual genius.
After all, the point of art is to show people that life is worth living by showing that it isn’t.
– Fanny Howe
That we go numb along the way is to be expected. Even the bravest among us, who give their lives to care for others, go numb with fatigue, when the heart can take in no more, when we need time to digest all we meet. Overloaded and overwhelmed, we start to pull back from the world, so we can internalize what the world keeps giving us. Perhaps the noblest private act is the unheralded effort to return: to open our hearts once they’ve closed, to open our souls once they’ve shied away, to soften our minds once they’ve been hardened by the storms of our day.
– Mark Nepo
Do not dwell in the mistakes of the past. Do not lose yourself in the castles of the future and do not give your authenticity away to experts, gurus, government commissions, bosses, wives, mates – take back your mind and your body and begin to engage with the fact that you are alive, you are going to die, nobody knows what being alive is and nobody knows what dying is. You’re involved in a mysterious engagement where every living moment presents you with mystery, opportunity, and wonder. There is no mundane dimension, really. If you have the eyes to see it, it’s all transcendental.
– Terence McKenna
It’s kind of get your boats time, but it’s also rebuild your levees time, and it’s also time to address the climate change that drives the floods literally and in terms of this metaphor. You can mourn and organize. And there will always be lives, projects, communities, hopes, ideas worth fighting for. There are so many. In that sense we are rich.
– Rebecca Solnit
We applied our muzzy intellects to a theory of light. That all are born radiating light but that this light diminished slowly (if one was lucky) or abruptly (if one was not). The most charismatic people – the poets, the mystics, the explorers – were that way because they had somehow managed to keep a bit of this light that was meant to have dimmed. But the shocking thing, the unbearable thing it seemed, was that the natural order was for this light to vanish. It hung on sometimes through the twenties, a glint here or there in the thirties, and then almost always the eyes went dark.
– Jenny Offill
I was a Zen monk who didn’t know Zen
so I chose the woods for the years I had left
a robe made of patches over my body
a belt of bamboo around my waist
mountains and streams explain Bodhidharma’s meaning
flower smiles and birdsongs reveal the hidden key
sometimes I sit on a flat-topped rock
after midnight cloudless nights when the moon fills the sky
– Stonehouse
translated by Red Pine
Maybe love, too, is beautiful because it has a wildness that cannot be tamed. I don’t know. All I know is that passion can take you up like a house of cards in a tornado, leaving destruction in its wake. Or it can let you alone because you’ve built a stone wall against it, set out the armed guards to keep it from touching you. The real trick is to let it in, but to hold on. To understand that the heart is as wide and vast as the universe, but that we come to know it best from here, this place of gravity and stability, where our feet can still touch ground.
– Deb Caletti
So our families were train wrecks; we’ve ruined the earth; kids die all the time. How do we understand that something welcoming remains, sometimes hidden, that we can still trust? When all seems lost, a few friends, the view, and random last-ditch moments of grace, like Liquid Wrench, will do. Otherwise, I don’t know. We don’t exactly solve this problem, or much of anything, although one can learn to make a perfect old-fashioned, or blinis.
– Anne Lamott
This is an old man’s poetry,
written by someone who’s spent his life
Looking for one truth.
Sorry, pal, there isn’t one.
Unless, of course, the trees and their blow-down relatives
Are part of it.
Unless the late-evening armada of clouds
Spanished along the horizon are part of it.
Unless the diminishing pinprick of light
stunned in the dark forest
Is part of it.
Unless, O my, whatever the eye makes out,
And sends us, on its rough-road trace,
To the heart, is part of it,
then maybe that bright vanishing might be.
– Charles Wright
I’ve never been afraid of the American Nazi Party, on the grounds that anybody dumb enough to pick a name like that is not a serious threat. Any real fascist movement that’s a threat, that’s serious and really endangers us, would call itself the Red, White, and Blue Christian American Party, or something like that. They wouldn’t be dumb enough to call themselves Nazis.
– Robert Anton Wilson
You don’t want awakening, you want high quality samsara.
– Leigh Brassington
The world consists of imaginary people, claiming imaginary virtues and suffering from imaginary happiness.
– Vernon Howard
Do not, I beg you, look for anything behind phenomena. They are themselves their own lesson.
– Goethe
Happiness is a how, not a what; a talent, not an object.
– Hermann Hesse
I tell people to get to know themselves. Some people think this means what beginners observe, and consider it easy to understand. Reflect more carefully, in a more leisurely manner, what do you call your self?
– Foyan
Listening, whether to a book or to a person, is the most challenging of the arts, because in listening truly we have to become aware of our own resistances to what is being said, which might be the truth; we must be able to be open and vulnerable in following the thoughts of another person as sincerely, deeply, and imaginatively as we can.
– Krishnan Venkatesh
Everything is always falling out of balance against a background of perfect harmony.
– Suzuki
Still, “write what you know” commanded such influence that I couldn’t ignore it completely. I made my peace with it by turning it backwards: not write what you know, but know what you write. If you write about a world before, after, or other than this one, enter it completely. Search it to find your deepest longings and most terrible fears. Let imagination carry you as far as it may, as long as you recount the voyage with excitement and wonder.
But this is the most important rule: Write the book you most long to read. Writing a first novel takes so much effort, with such little promise of result or reward, that it must necessarily be a labor of love bordering on madness.
– Steven Saylor
Knowing who you are is not a mystical thing, but a matter of experience, acceptance, honesty, and compassion. It is knowing you are small and selfish and angry, and great, creative, tender-hearted and caring.
– Jason Shulman
If you want to take away the I-my-me mountain,
you must get a cane made of rabbit horn.
If you want to cross the ocean of suffering,
you must take the ship with no bottom.
1. Where do you get a cane made of rabbit horn?
2. Where is the ship with no bottom?
– Hyo Bong
But if you don’t write of things deep in your own heart,
What’s the use of churning out so many words?
– Ryokan
Fixed beliefs are typically very dangerous, if for no other reason than their fixedness. Consciously or otherwise, you have stopped seeking or receiving and processing new information. You’re treating the belief as fact, and will no longer subject it to debate or modification. In this condition, you will not only miss new information, you will overlook important changes in yourself or other people that would negate the fixed belief.
– Phillip McGraw
I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant –
Among other things – or one way of putting the same
…..thing:
That the future is a faded song, a Royal rose or a lavender
…..spray
Of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret,
Pressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never been
…..opened.
And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the
…..way back.
– T. S. Eliot
We now know that human transformation does not happen through didacticism or through excessive certitude, but through the playful entertainment of another scripting of reality that may subvert the old given text and its interpretation and lead to the embrace of an alternative text and its redescription of reality.
– Walter Brueggemann
Keep asking “What idea of self have I dreamed up today?”
– Zenkei Blanche Hartman
Some days, you and I go mad.
Our bellies get stuffed full,
Hearts break, minds snap.
We can’t go on the old way so
We change. Our lives pivot,
Forming a mysterious geometry.
– Deng Ming-Dao
In the presence of some people we inevitably depart from ourselves: we are inaccurate, we say things we do not feel, and talk nonsense. When we get home we are conscious that we have made fools of ourselves. Never go near these people.
– Mark Rutherford
The heart is always the place to go. Go home into your heart, where there is warmth, appreciation, gratitude and contentment.
– Ayya Khema
“You talked about the first principle again, but I still don’t know what it is,” I said to Suzuki.
“I don’t know,” he said, “is the first principle.”
– David Chadwick
Inside yourself or outside, you never have to change what you see, only the way you see it.
– Thaddeus Golas
Well while I’m here I’ll
do the work –
and what’s the Work?
To ease the pain of living.
Everything else, drunken
dumbshow.
– Allen Ginsberg
You can live as a particle crashing about and colliding in a welter of materials with god, or you can live as a particle crashing about and colliding in a welter of materials without god. But you cannot live outside the welter of colliding materials.
– Annie Dillard
If one compares the teaching of Christ, the teaching of Buddha, and the…refined Schopenhauerian teaching, then with each, one will find that they in essence show the greatest possible conformity; for, self-will, karma, and individual will to live are one and the same thing.
All three systems furthermore teach that life is essentially an unhappy one and that one can and should free oneself through knowledge. Ultimately, the kingdom of heaven after death, nirvana, and absolute nothingness are one and the same.
– Philipp Mainlander
If you think of the great icon of the Trinity by Andrei Rublev, you will recall that (as many commentators have noted) we who are looking into the icon are in effect occupying the vacant place on this side of the table around which the angelic figures representing the Trinity are placed; we are invited to grow into that place at the table. And all the literature about these things is simply about how we learn to unblock the path to get there.
– Rowan Williams, Passions of The Soul
Thus is it ever so: we oppose, when we misunderstand, what, if we understood, we would love with all our hearts. The skeptic of today is so much like Criminino in Bruno’s day, who refused to look through Bruno’s instrument, his telescope, at the mountains on the moon, because Criminino said, “There can be no mountains on the moon.
– Rudolf Steiner
I sell mirrors in the city of the blind.
– Kabir
Thine is the mystic melody,
The far-off murmur of some dreamland sea
Lifting throughout the night,
Up to the moon’s mild light,
Waves silver-lustrous, silvery-white,
That beat in rhythm on the shadowy shore,
And burst in music, and are seen no more.”
– George Sidney Hellman
To accuse others for ones misfortunes
is a sign of want of education.
To accuse oneself
shows that ones education has begun.
To accuse neither oneself nor others
shows ones education is complete.
– Epictetus
The arts liberated
Lament, the end of your dreams shows in your eyes.
Webbed, The window’s shattered
Trapped, Yet inside your true dreams lie
Fettered, You lie shivering chanting ‘nothing matters’
Hopeless, Until the day your fire dies
Chasmed, The cuts press and increase in length
Creaking, Nearing the breaking
Awakened, The spirits gather strength
Shattered, Phantasms flee, the Earth is shaking
Blinding, Light shines with the strength of the core
Illuminating, Show the path paved with the soul
Spreading, Sweet desires thaumaturgy pours
Freeing, Banality’s bondage shrugged off like days of ol’
Hope, The future continues, the arts liberated.
– Thairone Medina
In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
– Bertrand Russell
Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you are alive!
Think … and think … while you are alive.
What you call salvation belongs to the time before death.
If you don’t break your ropes while you are alive,
do you think
ghosts will do it after?
The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic
just because the body is rotten
that is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now,
you will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death.
If you make love with the divine now, in the next life
you will have the face of satisfied desire.
– Kabir
Do not surrender your individuality, which is your greatest agent of power, to the customs and conventionalities that have got their life from the great mass. Do you want to be a power in the world? Then be yourself.
– Ralph Waldo Trine
Well, I wanted to be a philosopher, which is the idlest occupation in the world. I wanted to be involved in abstract thought, but because of various problems with the authorities I wasn’t able to pull that one off. A lifetime of idleness in academia would have really suited me. So I was thrown out, as it were. Other than that, there seemed no possible idle occupations, so writing . . . although writing isn’t exactly idleness. There’s an enormous tension between indolence and languor.
– Will Self
The poet discovers himself alone on a darkened stage, suffering temporary amnesia. What terror not to be able to remember or to imagine what you wanted to say. A language dysfunction, a disease of imagination’s present time. The expectant audience sits unmoving and utterly silent. A small asexual voice offstage prompts the first words of a monologue in whispers, and the poet begins to speak, a time-delayed recitation of the future. A light at the back of his head comes on and moves to direct his footsteps as the ghostly unembodied voice continues to prompt him. When it stops, he asks himself: ‘What was I saying, what was it I wanted to say? This is a play I am making up and someone is directing me from the wings. I want to scratch at the back of my head where the light is coming from, but it only gutters when I swing my hand and remains out of reach. There is a silence you choose and a silence that descends on you when the prompter decides to make you nervous, and that is terrifying. I cannot memorize what I will think to say when it tells me. It is so unnewtonian it takes your breath away.
– Bruce Whiteman
The human mind has grown even since the time of the Buddha, 2,500 years ago. The human mind is more noisy and more all-pervasive, and the egos are bigger. There’s been an ego growth over thousands of years; it’s growing to a point of madness, with the ultimate madness having been reached in the twentieth century. One only needs to read twentieth-century history to see that it has been the climax of human madness, if it’s measured in terms of human violence inflicted on other humans.
So in the present time, we can’t escape from the world anymore; we can’t escape from the mind. We need to enter surrender while we are in the world. That seems to be the path that is effective in the world that we live in now. It may be that at the time of the Buddha, withdrawing was much, much easier than it would be now. The human mind was not yet so overwhelming at that time.
– Eckhart Tolle
There is a catalogue of private acts which you harbour inviolable and do not speak about. Hold it whole in your head and consider what everyone you know is doing right now. Small isolated things which your imagining rescues from the silence of privacy. A social encyclopedia of the present tense. Somewhere the personality slips its leash and disappears over the back fence leaving nothing ferocious to fight off the throng of details that rushes into your brain. You become a society, a public resource, a random dictionary of ephemera. And love is the force which allows you to speak in the midst of all this negative capability and which keeps you away from madness and inside a body with a future.
– Bruce Whiteman
Killing the Buddha on the road means destroying the hope that anything outside ourselves can be our master. No one is bigger than anyone else. There are no mothers and fathers for grown-ups, only sisters and brothers.
– Sheldon Kopp
What actually happened was something absurdly simple and unspectacular: just for the moment I stopped thinking. Reason and imagination and all mental chatter died down. For once, words really failed me. I forgot my name, my humanness, my thingness, all that could be called me or mine. Past and future dropped away. It was as if I had been born that instant, brand new, mindless, innocent of all memories. There existed only the Now, that present moment and what was clearly given in it. To look was enough. And what I found was khaki trouserlegs terminating downwards in a pair of brown shoes, khaki sleeves terminating sideways in a pair of pink hands, and a khaki shirtfront terminating upwards in – absolutely nothing whatever! Certainly not in a head.
– Douglas Harding
Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine
Unweave a rainbow.
– John Keats
An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.
– Charles Horton Cooley
It is customary for adults to forget how hard and dull school is. The learning by memory all the basic things one must know is the most incredible and unending effort. Learning to read is probably the most difficult and revolutionary thing that happens to the human brain and if you don’t believe that watch an illiterate adult try to do it. School is not so easy and it is not for the most part very fun, but then, if you are very lucky, you may find a teacher. Three real teachers in a lifetime is the very best of luck. I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.
– John Steinbeck
We all have a deep longing and a deep fear of the discovery of what we are, and the mind devises any way it can to avoid this discovery.
The most effective way it avoids Awakening is to seek it.
You are already that which is.
But your mind is frightened to let go and still has an idea that something special should happen.
– Tony Parsons
A man who does not lose his reason over certain things has none to lose.
– Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.
– Brenda Ueland
How does the creative impulse die in us? The English teacher who wrote fiercely on the margin of your theme with blue pencil: “Trite, rewrite,” helped to kill it. Critics kill it, your family. Families are great murderers of the creative impulse, particularly husbands. Older brothers sneer at younger brothers and kill it. There is that American pastime known as “kidding”, – with the result that everyone is ashamed and hang-dog about showing the slightest enthusiasm or passion or sincere feeling about anything.
You have noticed how teachers, critics, parents and other know-it-alls, when they see you have written something, become at once long-nosed and finicking and go through it gingerly sniffing out the flaws. Aha! a misspelled word! as though Shakespeare could spell! As though spelling, grammar and what you learn in a book about rhetoric has anything to do with freedom and the imagination!
So often I come across articles written by critics of the very highest brow, and by other prominent writers, deploring the attempts of ordinary people to write. The critics rap us savagely on the head with their thimbles, for our nerve. No one but a virtuoso should be allowed to do it.
But this is one of the results: that all people who try to write become anxious, timid, contracted, become perfectionists, so terribly afraid that they may put something down that is not as good as Shakespeare.
And so no wonder you don’t write and put it off month after month, decade after decade. For when you write, if it is to be any good at all, you must feel free, – free and not anxious.
Yes, I hate orthodox criticism. The usual small niggling, fussy-mussy criticism, which thinks it can improve people by telling them where they are wrong, and results only in putting them in straightjackets of hesitancy and self-consciousness, and weazening all vision and bravery.
I hate it not so much on my own account, for I have learned at last not to let it balk me. But I hate it because of the potentially shining, gentle, gifted people of all ages, that it snuffs out every year. It is a murderer of talent. And because the most modest and sensitive people are the most talented, having the most imagination and sympathy, these are the very first ones to get killed off. It is the brutal egoists that survive.
– Brenda Ueland
the ars memoria:
the ancient mnemonic technique of building architectural databases inside your skull
A few Roman writers gave compelling technical descriptions of these “memory palaces,” considering them a vital and practical aspect of the art of rhetoric. Memory palaces could be based on real spaces or imaginary ones; some believed the best palaces combined the two modes, so that simulations of actual buildings were infused with magical properties. Though it’s tough to believe this rather baroque system worked very well, the prodigious memories of the classical world suggest otherwise. Seneca, we are told, could hear a list of two thousand names and spit them back in order, while Simplicius, a buddy of Augustine, got a kick out of reciting Virgil’s Aeneid off the top of his head — backward.
We are as chipmunks to these mighty elephants of recall. Having externalized our memories, we squirrel facts away in written texts, hard-discs, and Palm Pilots rather than swallow them whole. And yet with the immense honeycomb of cyberspace — the supreme amputation of memory — we spiral around again to the experience of memory as a space of information, a three-dimensional realm that’s outside ourselves while simultaneously tucked inside an exploratory space that resembles the mind. From this perspective, Saint Augustine’s paean to memory in the Confessions suggests not only the realms of the artificial memory but also the evanescent grids of cyberspace: “Behold the plains, and caves, and caverns of my memory, innumerable and innumerably full of innumerable kinds of things.” Augustine calls this an “inner place, which is as yet no place,” piled high with images, information, emotions, and experiences. “Over all these do I run, I fly,” he writes, sounding like one of Gibson’s console cowboys. “I dive on this side and that, as far as I can, and there is no end.”
No wonder Aristotle warned his readers that memory palaces could leak into the dreams of their users — adepts of the art were trafficking with the fierce phantasms of the unconscious.
– Erik Davis
– Cyberspace: The Virtual Craft [excerpts from TechGnosis]
O for a life of sensations rather than thoughts.
– John Keats
I have no doubt whatever that most people live, whether physically, intellectually, or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness . . . we all have reservoirs of life to draw upon, of which we do not dream.
– William James
Quantum Consciousness
I believe that if we try to examine the nature of our consciousness we will find at its basis it exhibits quantum like qualities. Seen from a distant, large scale and external perspective, we seem to be able to structure our consciousness in an exact and precise way, articulating thoughts and linking them together into long chains of arguments and intricate structures. Our consciousness can build complex images through its activity and seems to have all the qualities of predictability and solidity. The consciousness of a talented architect is capable of designing and holding within itself an image of large solid structures such as great cathedrals or public buildings. A mathematician is capable of inwardly picturing an abstract mathematical system, deriving its properties from a set of axioms. A solo cellist is able to hold the whole musical structure of a Elgar’s Cello Concerto or Bach’s Cello Suites in his or her consciousness when preparing for a performance.
In this sense our consciousness might appear as an ordered and deterministic structure, capable of behaving like and being explicable in the same terms as other large scale structures in the world. However, this is not so. For if we, through introspection, try to examine the way in which we are conscious, in a sense to look at the atoms of our consciousness, this regular structure disappears. Our consciousness does not actually work in such an ordered way. We only nurture an illusion if we try to hold to the view that our consciousness is at root an ordered deterministic structure. True, we can create the large scale designs of the architect, the abstract mathematical systems, a cello concerto, but anyone who has built such structures within their consciousness knows that this is not achieved by a linear deterministic route.
Our consciousness is at its root a maverick, ever moving, jumping from one perception, feeling, thought, to another. We can never hold it still or focus it at a point for long. Like the quantum nature of matter, the more we try to hold our consciousness to a fixed point, the greater the uncertainty in its energy will become. So when we focus and narrow our consciousness to a fixed center, it is all the more likely to suddenly jump with a great rush of energy to some seemingly unrelated aspect of our inner life. We all have such experiences each moment of the day. As in our daily work we try to focus our mind upon some problem only to suddenly experience a shift to some other domain in ourselves, another image or emotional current intrudes then vanishes again, like an ephemeral virtual particle in quantum theory.
Those who begin to work upon their consciousness through some kinds of meditative exercises will experience these quantum uncertainties in the field of consciousness in a strong way.
In treating our consciousness as if it were a digital computer or deterministic machine after the model of 19th century science, I believe we foster a limited and false view of our inner world. We must now take the step towards a quantum view of consciousness, recognizing that at its base and root our consciousness behaves like the ever flowing sea of the sub-atomic world. The ancient hermeticists pictured consciousness as the Inner Mercury. Those who have experienced the paradoxical way in which the metal Mercury is both dense and metallic and yet so elusive, flowing and breaking up into small globules, and just as easily coming together again, will see how perceptive the alchemists were of the inner nature of consciousness, in choosing this analogy. Educators who treat the consciousness of children as if it were a filing cabinet to be filled with ordered arrays of knowledge are hopelessly wrong.
– Adam McLean
Of course there is nothing the matter with the stars
It is my emptiness among them
While they drift farther away in the invisible morning.
– W. S. Merwin
Sometimes I think the people to feel the saddest for are people who once knew what profoundness was, but who lost or became numb to the sensation of wonder – people who closed the door that leads us into the secret world – or who had the doors closed for them by time and neglect and decisions made in times of weakness.
– Douglas Coupland
Traveling is a fool’s paradise . . . I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life would be so much easier if we just had the source code.
– Oscar Migueis
I existed in a world of newly connected and newly modified ideas. I theorized. I imagined. I made discoveries.
– Humphrey Davy
Not being alienated from one’s own essential nature is itself a field of blessings.
– Hui-Neng
no person could be really well . . . without spending at least six weeks by the sea every year.
– Jane Austen
Is love stronger than unlove? Only the unloved know. And the mockingbird, whose heart is cloned and colorless.
– Charles Wright
I sometimes feel that the settled classes, the contemporary cultural czars who are the arbiters of taste in the arts and in literature, are often wary of the real, deep, unsettling politics that are not part of accepted pedagogy.
– Arundhati Roy
East of me, west of me, full summer. How deeper than elsewhere the dusk is in your own yard.
– Charles Wright
The safest place to be is in Divine alignment.
– Lalah Delia
Truth never penetrates an unwilling mind.
– Borges
When aliveness is present, it radiates intent
You can spot check your life, where is aliveness present?
Does your heart radiate intent?
Do your eyes? Your voice?
Your work? Your relationships?
Do your choices radiate intent?
– River Kenna
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
sick on my journey my dreams wander in withered fields
– Basho
There’s nothing more tiring than an opening sentence.
– Dany Laferrière
Somewhere unwritten poems wait, like lonely lakes not seen by anyone.
– Anna Kamieńska (translated by Grażyna Drabik & David Curzon)
What is it that you love in others?
– My hopes.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Toni Morrison said, “I do write towards something…The possibility of moving from data to information to knowledge to wisdom is the track of everything I have ever written.” This is also a good approach to teaching.
– @tamaranopper
Tonight we live to devastate our haters.
– Sean Patrick Mulroy
The habit of looking to the future and thinking that the whole meaning of the present lies in what it will bring forth is a pernicious one. There can be no value in the whole unless there is value in the parts.
– Bertrand Russell
Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be obtained only by someone who is detached.
– Simone Weil
If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.
– Noam Chomsky
Soon / there will be a ladder out of this grief.
– xochi quetzali cartland
May our weapons be effective feminine inventions that like life.
May we blow up like weeds, and be medicinal and everywhere.
May the disturbed ground be our pharmacy.
May the exhausted hang out in the beautiful light.
May our souls moisten and reveal us.
May our actions be deft as the inhale after a dream of suffocation.
May the oligarchs get enough to eat in their souls.
May we participate in the intelligence we’re in.
May we grow into our name.
May political harm be a stench that awakens.
May we not be distracted.
Let our joy repeated be power that spreads.
May our wealth be common.
May oligarchs come out of their fortresses and become psychologically well.
May their wealth be returned to the people and places.
May we shift slide rise tilt roll and twist.
May we feel the very large intimacy
And may it assist us.
– Erin Robinsong
No matter the conditions around us, there are two great adventures that the soul would have us undertake. Our life-project involves both making a way in the outer world and awakening to the way of being already planted within us as a divine spark-seed. The first adventure of life begins with the first breath we take; it concerns the course of human development that leads to “growing up” and eventually entering the world on our own two feet and establishing ourselves in the marketplace of life. The first arc of adventure requires that we produce something, achieve in some way, and “make something of ourselves.” While following this initial arc we make a life, find a livelihood, and adopt a lifestyle.
On the first adventure we take up the common challenges of life and often do so while following paths that others choose for us. We follow an education track or a career course that “runs in the family” or seems most likely to lead to security or worldly success. Whether we succeed or fail, we become socialized in certain ways that inevitably lead away from the inner design and true aim of our intended personality. For what allows us to adapt to the culture around us most often leads to an over-adaptation in regard to our deeper sense of how to dwell in this world.
The first adventure of life is necessary for us as well as for the culture around us. Yet the deep psyche has a better design than the ego’s plan, the family’s requirements, or the culture’s map. Whereas the first adventure may involve the pursuit of happiness and the recognition that comes from outer accomplishments, the second adventure of life involves the fulfillment of the inner longings and hidden destiny of the soul.
The second adventure aims at a path that leads beyond the concerns of the daily world, yet it is of great importance for the continuance of that world. It involves stepping off the common pathways and going off the map that others have given us. It involves finding a way that takes us further into life rather than simply adapting to available lifestyles. We are here to decipher and live up to what life asks of us, not what others might ask us to live up to for them. This idea does not arise from simple rebellion or egocentricity, rather it is the essence of spiritual growth. We all have something to give to the world from our essential nature, and when the world around us becomes dark and increasingly uncertain, it becomes more essential for us to live the adventure of the soul.
The second arc of life involves taking up the inner-directed path and following the thread of destiny that truly orients us to life and to our genuine destination. This more radical path leads to a spiritual journey, not because it is religious in nature, but because it serves the uniqueness in one’s soul, the “spirit that is already there.” The first adventure tends to involve gathering information about the world and common knowledge of how to survive in it. The second adventure involves a kind of “gnosis,” a deeper knowledge of life that becomes available once we awaken to the nature of the inner spark and the greater calling set within the soul. It involves finding and learning to give one’s god-given talents, skills, and gifts in ways that make life in general more meaningful and genuine human community more possible. The second adventure leads to the pursuit of wisdom, the kind of transcendent knowledge that enlivens individual life, nourishes genuine community, and helps re-create culture.
Outer success, common expectations, and evident achievements usually reign over the course of the first arc of life, but the second arc is a deeper venture that values things differently. Our worst failures in the course of life’s first adventure can become the fecund soil from which the second adventure grows. Places of struggle, loss, and suffering can be revalued as the inner arc of awakening revisits core life experiences to reclaim meaning, even from seemingly wasted aspects of life. The key to understanding our true nature often resides where we have fallen the hardest yet somehow have survived. The often avoided places of loss and collapse, of abandonment and rejection, are where the inner light of soul waits to be found. The soul values depth and the darker knowledge of understanding that often grows more from failure than from success. In the dark times it becomes important to value the darker knowledge found in trials and tribulations that reveal the spark burning and glowing within us all along.
– Michael Meade, Why the World Doesn’t End
Oscar Wilde said that if you know what you want to be, then you inevitably become it – that is your punishment, but if you never know, then you can be anything. There is a truth to that. We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing – an actor, a writer – I am a person who does things – I write, I act – and I never know what I am going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.
– Stephen Fry
And it was then I began to realize for the first time that there are two distinct sides to a writer. First, there is the side he displays to the public, that of an ordinary person like anyone else, a person who does ordinary things and speaks an ordinary language. Second, there is the secret side, which comes out in him only after he has closed the door of his workroom and is completely alone. It is then that he slips into another world altogether, a world where his imagination takes over and he finds himself actually living in the places he is writing about at that moment. I myself, if you want to know, fall into a kind of trance, and everything around me disappears. I see only the point of my pencil moving over the paper, and quite often two hours go by as though they were a couple of seconds.
– Roald Dahl
As soon as we abandoned our own reason, and are content to rely upon authority, there is no end to our troubles.
– Bertrand Russell
Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.
– John Lubbock
And so we live in a living world
we can never fully understand
nor refrain from loving.
Enough with the parables of knowledge.
Since superstition wears the cloak of reason
let’s talk about fuzzy ownership.
How entropy withers when symbiosis thrives.
O, the resilience of grass and spirit!
O, the leap of our hearts when you called
and twenty ring-necked doves came straight to you!
What is this wildness of great drama?
Why so much sailing away to find home?
“Everyone has multiple personalities,” you whisper.
“Water still finds its way in the dark.”
– George Gorman
What Changes Us
What changes us
must come to know
of our vulnerabilities
and the direction
of our dreams.
It must feed us
doubts, but also
new possibilities.
It must break us
at the very same
moment that
someone or something
begins to move
our way with needle
and thread, but
no skill for sewing.
We will come to
remember what it
is to be animal. We
will have the chance
to choose what it
is to be human,
while we sit there
in the darkness,
gaze guided by
firelight,
darning the fabric
that we had torn
ourselves away
from.
– Jamie K. Reaser
The fact that we are I don’t know how many millions of people, yet communication, complete communication, is completely impossible between two of those people, is to me one of the biggest tragic themes in the world.
– Georges Simenon
POLITICS,
the art of the IMpossible
occasionally
achieved
– Jack Foley
What everybody sees in a movie is such a private emotion. I mean in the cinema I think that when you go to see a movie we all enter into a kind of a special light. There is this amniotic darkness, and we are going all together to dream the same dream. And this is the great thing of cinema; it is something that happens in a community, we are all together. We start dreaming the same dream because there is… It let’s us think that the movie is projected not only by the projector, which is behind everybody, but is also projected by our own eyes. So we participate in our own personal, private way to this kind of ballet of ghosts that we have on the screen.
– Bernardo Bertolucci
SUPPER
There is the curdling sky
and the green spry beans
finger-long and knuckled
and the bird’s flat fleeting path
across my window
and still
you will not come
– Alison Fell
Origin Story
A helicopter entered the eye
of a protester.
The frowns went underground.
Midnight, that hand clasped rap of prayer.
You checked your phone for cancer.
It was there.
Time entered the room
and quickly spread over everything.
– Noah Falck
A Poem for Someone Who is
Juggling Her Life
by Rose Cook
This is a poem for someone
who is juggling her life.
Be still sometimes.
Be still sometimes.
It needs repeating
over and over
to catch her attention
over and over,
as someone who is juggling her life
finds it difficult to hear.
Be still sometimes.
Be still sometimes.
Let it all fall sometimes.
Ode to the Hoarders
“The library will endure; it is the universe.”
– Jorge Luis Borges
Adoring architects,
Sculpting cities of newspapers
& burnt out bulbs.
Rome wasn’t built in a day,
It was years of collected dreams.
& you look for God in every
Thing. Sure that one of these days,
He’ll be at the bottom of a hefty bag
With the fish bones & milk cartons. Another
Ordinary love, cluttered & disposed
Of-don’t you want to be brave?
Enough to see it all as worth saving?
– xochi quetzali cartland
I AM
Joy
which is neither
because
nor in spite of
but is
joy
and despair
which neither
was
nor will be
but is
all.
– William Bronk
Juan Rulfo didn’t write more than three hundred pages, but they are almost as many and, I believe, as durable as those we’re acquainted with from Sophocles.
– Gabriel García Márquez
all is stillness
now the cicadas
have entered
parinirvana
– Clark Strand
I Wrote a Good Omelet
I wrote a good omelet… and ate a hot poem … after loving you
Buttoned my car … and drove my coat home… in the
rain. • • after loving you
I goed on red… and stopped on green… floating somewhere
in between .
being here and being there … after loving you
I rolled my bed… turned down my hair … slightly confused
but … I don’t care …
Laid out my teeth… and gargled my gown … then I stood
… and laid me down…
to sleep … after loving you
– nikki giovanni
Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position, it is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. Each redemptive or loving act as small as you like, such as reading to your little boy or showing him a thing you love or singing him a song or putting on his shoes keeps the devil down in the hole. It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending. It says the world is worth believing in. In time we come to find that this is so.
– Nick Cave
The Present
I wanted to give you something —
no stone, clay, bracelet,
no edible leaf could pass through.
Even a molecule’s fragrance by then too large.
Giving had been taken, as you soon would be.
Still, I offered the puffs of air shaped to meaning.
They remained air.
I offered memory on memory,
but what is memory that dies with the fallible inks?
I offered apology, sorrow, longing. I offered anger.
How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.
I stood on one side of the present, you stood on the other.
– Jane Hirshfield
One of the prime injunctions in the spirituality of the desert fathers is “be watchful,” be attentive. The advice is so central to the mystical teachings of the desert and so easily overlooked that it deserves careful consideration.
Saint Hesychius of Sinai says of attention that it is a spiritual method that, if diligently practiced over a long period of time, does three things: completely frees us from the bondage of ourselves, leads us to an intimate experience of the inapprehensible, and helps us to penetrate the divine and hidden mysteries. The work of “being watchful” progresses slowly but surely through four stage, according to Saint Hesychius. Fidelity to the practice of attention produces inner stability, which in turn effects a natural intensification of attentiveness. Intensification of attentiveness in due measure yields contemplative insight, which in turn opens out into a condition in which a person, free from all images, enjoys complete serenity. Attention draws to consciousness an authentic, mysterious wholeness, and original innocence that is the human yearning expressed by the Garden of Eden myth. It is a reunion with the source and substance of one’s being, a reunion that transforms human consciousness.
– Gregory Mayers, Listen to the Desert
The personification of the natural is exactly the tendency I wish to suppress in myself, to eliminate for good. I am here not only to evade for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if it’s possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us.
I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities, anti-Kantian, even the categories of scientific description. To meet God or Medusa face to face, even if it means risking everything human in myself. I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with a non-human world and yet somehow survives still intact, individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock.
– Edward Abbey
Wait, for now.
Distrust everything if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become interesting.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again;
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. The desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.
Wait
Don’t go too early.
You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a little and listen:
music of hair,
music of pain,
music of looms weaving our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.
– Galway Kinnell
The reason I am animated by an alive, active hope is because of this one truth, still a secret to too many. And that is this: that all suffering ripens into surrender. The process of surrender is opening the channel that is us for the creative flow of the genius of grace. This process can be delayed but never thwarted. Joy is ours to the degree we participate in this process, but ultimately, in the deepest sense, there is nothing to fear. Understanding this is how to live so that no matter the calamity, the core of our light never trembles.
– Chelan Harkin
Life is hard. Stress is hard. Disagreements are hard. Pressure is wearing on the strongest of hearts, the most joyful of relationships. Major life decisions don’t wait for calm, easy, peaceful, successful times. Community helps. Meditation helps. Nature helps. Communication helps. But loneliness is real, and suffering is real, and perspective gets lost in the tense swirl of insistent change.
– Waylon Lewis
I hurt too much to be a saint. Most of us do.
– Andrea Gibson
Sing yourself to where the singing comes from…
– Seamus Heaney
If you can’t see
the dirt on it
I’m not interested in
buying from you,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
I want to lead a double life but I don’t want it to be secret.
– Sommer Browning
When things
stop talking,
you listen,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
If there is such a thing as philosophical progress, then why – unlike scientific progress – is it so invisible? Philosophical progress is invisible because it is incorporated into our points of view. What was torturously secured by complex argument comes widely shared intuition, so obvious that we forget its provenance.
– Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away
If you don’t exert yourself, or if your exertions don’t amount to much of anything, then you might as well not have bothered to have shown up for your existence at all.
– Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away
Given cognitive vulnerabilities, it would be convenient to have an arrangement whereby reality could tell us off; and that is precisely what science is. Scientific methodology is the arrangement that allows reality to answer us back.
– Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away
And what is it, according to Plato, that philosophy is supposed to do? Nothing less than to render violence to our sense of ourselves and our world, our sense of ourselves in the world.
– Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away
…(W)hat is remarkable about the Greeks–even pre-philosophically–is that despite the salience of religious rituals in their lives, when it came to the question of what it is that makes an individual human life worth living they didn’t look to the immortals but rather approached the question in mortal terms. Their approaching the question of human mattering in human terms is the singularity that creates the conditions for philosophy in ancient Greece, most especially as these conditions were realized in the city-state of Athens.
– Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away
The artistry of the writing is meant to stir the whole of our person, since it’s the whole of that person who must feel the force of philosophy and be changed as a consequence.
– Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away
Philosophical thinking that doesn’t do violence to one’s settled mind is no philosophical thinking at all.
– Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away
In a field like philosophy, where understanding involves not so much the reception of knowledge but rather a transformation of the receiver itself, so that the receiver, which is to say the student, can generate the knowledge for him- or herself, then the physical presence of the teacher is essential.
– Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away
Jung once said that the anima is not only an inner figure, she is also a living woman. Likewise, the animus is not only a dream image, or the masculine pole of a woman’s psyche, but a living man. I think it’s very difficult to know where these two begin and end.
– Liz Greene
People don’t want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.
– Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor
Love seeketh not Itself to please, Nor for itself hath any care, But for another gives its ease, And builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair.
– William Blake
And I will luve thee still, my dear, Till a’ the seas gang dry.
– Robert Burns
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
Those to whom a man is closest
Will be attached to him the most
And value him the least.
– Kapil Gupta
The best way to minimize risk is to think.
– Warren Buffett
All men have had proof of the power of faith. The faith that moves mountains is faith in yourself.
– Neville Goddard
Freedom lies not in feeling free
It lies in the genuine indifference to how one feels.
– Kapil Gupta
The chameleon changes color to match the earth; the earth doesn’t change colors to match the chameleon.
– Senegalese Proverb
You will need a deep reason to know.
Otherwise, it will be intellectual.
– Kapil Gupta
When you start to notice the mystical, the mystical will start to notice you.
– Dacha Avelin
Do you ever just look at a tree and think, maybe I should have devoted my life to studying these. And then you have that same thought about flamenco guitar, the night sky, and the works of Virginia Woolf and countless other things but then you just simply go back to your job.
– Elle Cordova
The real act of, say, building a friendship or creating a community involves performing a series of small, concrete social actions well: disagreeing without poisoning the relationship; revealing vulnerability at the appropriate pace; being a good listener; knowing how to end a conversation gracefully; knowing how to ask for and offer forgiveness; knowing how to let someone down without breaking their heart; knowing how to sit with someone who is suffering; knowing how to host a gathering where everyone feels embraced; knowing how to see things from another’s point of view.
– David Brooks
I feel that I am caught in a net woven by my thoughts, my emotions, my sensations; and I am convinced that it is my thoughts, my emotions that hold me. On the contrary, my thinking is not to blame. I have to understand something that is easy to grasp logically, but very difficult to understand with feeling: it is ‘me’ who clings to these thoughts, these emotions, these objects that reach my senses. In fact, it is through these thoughts, these objects that I have the impression of existing, but this is not true. I can feel my true nature behind this. This is something I do not know and must be prepared to accept by giving up what I usually cling to.
– Michel Conge
Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries–stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.
– Herman Melville
Let us go
each, into the valley—
turn ourselves
& our hairshirts
inside out, let the world
itch—for once—
– Kevin Young
Grief
byRaymond Carver
Woke up early this morning and from my bed
looked far across the Strait to see
a small boat moving through the choppy water,
a single running light on. Remembered
my friend who used to shout
his dead wife’s name from the hilltops
around Perugia. Who set a plate
for her at his simple table long after
she was gone. And opened the windows
so she could have fresh air. Such display
I found embarrassing. So did his other
friends. I couldn’t see it.
Not until this morning.
Personal
by Tony Hoagland
Don’t take it personal, they said;
but I did, I took it all quite personal—
the breeze and the river and the color of the fields;
the price of grapefruit and stamps,
the wet hair of women in the rain—
And I cursed what hurt me
and I praised what gave me joy,
the most simple-minded of possible responses.
The government reminded me of my father,
with its deafness and its laws,
and the weather reminded me of my mom,
with her tropical squalls.
Enjoy it while you can, they said of Happiness
Think first, they said of Talk
Get over it, they said
at the School of Broken Hearts
but I couldn’t and I didn’t and I don’t
believe in the clean break;
I believe in the compound fracture
served with a sauce of dirty regret,
I believe in saying it all
and taking it all back
and saying it again for good measure
while the air fills up with I’m-Sorries
like wheeling birds
and the trees look seasick in the wind.
Oh life! Can you blame me
for making a scene?
You were that yellow caboose, the moon
disappearing over a ridge of cloud.
I was the dog, chained in some fool’s backyard;
barking and barking:
trying to convince everything else
to take it personal too.
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
Old age is not a necessary end to human life.
A particular value has sometimes been given to old age for social or political reasons. For some individuals — women in ancient China, for instance — it has been a refuge against the harshness of life in adult years. Others, from a pessimistic general outlook on life, settle comfortably into it… The vast majority of mankind look upon the coming of old age with sorrow and rebellion. It fills them with more aversion than death itself.
And indeed, it is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life’s parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension.
– Simone de Beauvoir, The Coming of Age
The global village is at once as wide as the planet and as small as a little town where everybody is maliciously engaged in poking his nose at everybody else’s business.
– Marshall McLuhan
The best writing comes not when you want to say something but when you want to find something.
– Andre Dubus III
My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here. My heart’s in the Highlands, a-chasin’ the deer. Chasing the wild-deer, and following the roe. My heart’s in the Highlands, wherever I go.
– Robert Burns
There’s a common misunderstanding among all the human beings who have ever been born on the earth that the best way to live is to try to avoid pain and just try to get comfortable. You can see this even in insects and animals and birds. All of us are the same.
A much more interesting, kind, adventurous, and joyful approach to life is to begin to develop our curiosity, not caring whether the object of our inquisitiveness is bitter or sweet. To lead a life that goes beyond pettiness and prejudice and always wanting to make sure that everything turns out on our own terms, to lead a more passionate, full, and delightful life than that, we must realize that we can endure a lot of pain and pleasure for the sake of finding out who we are and what this world is, how we tick and how our world ticks, how the whole thing just is.
If we’re committed to comfort at any cost, as soon as we come up against the least edge of pain, we’re going to run; we’ll never know what’s beyond that particular barrier or wall or fearful thing.
– Pema Chodron
What Is Love? I have met in the streets a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, the water passed through his shoes and the stars through his soul
– Victor Hugo , Les Misérables
Everything is transient except the Golden Flower, which grows in the soil of detachment inside the things of the world.
– Lao Tzu
To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don’t know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly. And that the unofficial history of the world shows that dedicated individuals and popular movements can shape history and have, though how and when we might win and how long it takes is not predictable. Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it;
– Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me
The mind, it occurs to me, is an engine. There is an ambient mode in which the mind sits idling, before there is information. Some minds idle in a kind of dreading crouch, waiting to be offended. Others stand up straight, eyes slightly wide, expecting to be pleasantly surprised. Some minds, imagining the great What Is Out There, imagine it intends doom for them; others imagine there is something out there that may be suffering and in need of their help.
Which is right?
Neither.
Both.
Maybe all of our politics is simply neurology writ large. Maybe there are a finite number of idling modes. Maybe there are just two broad modes, and out of this fact comes our current division.
– George Saunders
I never cease to marvel at the capacity of men and women to leave home and venture into the unknown. I never cease to admire the courage of those who first crossed mountains, who navigated the wine-dark seas, who went down into Hades’ Kingdom and wrote “sonnets to Orpheus” or the fifth symphony. And I ask myself as Yeats did, “Why should we only honor those that die upon the field of battle, a man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself.
– James Hillman
238. I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.
239. But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. “Love is not consolation,” she wrote. “It is light.”
240. All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.
– Maggie Nelson, Bluets
There is a need for a new fantasy, it is not the time for new rules but for breaking rules. We do not need therapy, we need to burn the clinics.
We must go out, out into the stench, out in the frightening night on skid row, and hear the locust cries of our future…
We cannot simply suffer in silence, and spare ourselves the risks of joining into the frays of a sham world.
– Charles Bowden
The best way to travel, after all, is to feel,
To feel everything in every way,
To feel everything excessively,
Because all things are, in truth, excessive
And all reality is an excess, a violence,
An extraordinarily vivid hallucination.
– Fernando Pessoa
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
When the Sky Clears
The drop grows happy by losing itself in the river.
A pain when beyond human range becomes something else.
One man’s heart died when he insisted on treating his own problems.
Sometimes people solve jute knots by rubbing them on rocks.
Since I am weak, I sigh instead of weeping.
My experience tells me that water can change and become air.
The sky abruptly clears following thick clouds and heavy rain.
The clouds, recognizing separation, cried and vanished into non-existence.
We make the back of the mirror green in order to see our faces.
Sometimes nature makes the front of the mirror green as well.
We love seeing the beauty of poppies and lilies.
When the eyes lose themselves in the colors, they are seeing at last.
– Ghalib, (trans. Robert Bly)
There’s a belief
that thoughts are bad.
But thoughts are just
fish in the river.
You think a river
minds having fish?
– Pamela Wilson
I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god – sullen, untamed and intractable.
– T.S. Eliot
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
– Norman MacLean
psyche in wild water, rivers remembered and rivers imagined. Rivers course through my dreams, rivers cold and fast, rivers well-known and rivers nameless, rivers that seem like ribbons of blue water twisting through wide valleys, narrow rivers folded in layers of darkening shadows, rivers that have eroded down deep into the mountain’s belly, sculpted the land, peeled back the planet’s history exposing the texture of time itself.
– Harry Middleton
It’s hard to see a river all at once, especially in the mountains. Down on the plains, rivers run in their course as straightforward as time, channeled toward the sea. But up in the headwaters, a river isn’t a point where you stand. In the beginnings of the river, you teeter on the edge of a hundred tiny watersheds where one drop of water is always tipping the balance from one stream to another. History changes with each tiny event, shaping an outcome that we can only fully grasp in hindsight. And that view changes as we move farther downstream.
– Lynn Noel
Rivers are magnets for the imagination, for conscious pondering and subconscious dreams, thrills, fears. People stare into the moving water, captivated, as they are when gazing into a fire. What is it that draws and holds us? The rivers’ reflections of our lives and experiences are endless.
– Tim Palmer
But I also know that in places, the river still runs deep, and though I’ve floated it in these places, it hasn’t revealed itself in such obvious ways. I know that it might be months – years, even – before I understand what it has to teach me. I still need to give myself over to the flow and pattern and rhythm of it to learn its lessons and hear its messages. The river is inside me now, I know, and I need only wait and see where the current takes me, and what lies beneath it.
– Jeff Wallach
I was born upon thy bank, river,
My blood flows in thy stream,
And thou meanderest forever
At the bottom of my dream.
– Henry David Thoreau
Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth Unseen,
both when we wake and when we sleep.
– John Milton
You can think of yourself as a biocomputer or an intelligent terminal, run by a cosmic computer in the Earth Coincidence Control Office. The biocomputer contains certain wired-in survival programs dealing with eating, reproduction, and so on, which lower animals also possess. But when the biocomputer reaches a certain threshold of complexity, there are higher-level programs in the association cortex that permit such things as making models, learning to learn, choice, and so forth. We have short-term choices, but God help you if you go against the Master Control Program. A terminal cannot understand itself, because it lacks sufficient space, but a replica of itself is in the cosmic computer, which can understand it. At the highest level, your true self is a cosmic game player, with access to an infinite computer — the ECCO computer. That is metaprogramming, self-metaprogramming.
– John Lilly
I know that I exist; the question is, what is this ‘I’ that I know?
– Descartes
The soul, so far as we can conceive it, is nothing but a system or train of different perceptions.
– Hume
What was I before I came to self-consciousness? . . . I did not exist at all, for I was not an I. The I exists only insofar as it is conscious of itself. . . . The self posits itself, and by virtue of this mere self-assertion it exists.
– Fichte
The ‘Self’ . . . , when carefully examined, is found to consist mainly of . . . peculiar motions in the head or between the head and throat.
– James
The ego continuously constitutes itself as existing.
– Husserl
Any fixed categorization of the Self is a big goof.
– Ginsberg
The self which is reflexively referred to is synthesized in that very act of reflexive self-reference.
– Nozick
The self . . . is a mythical entity . . . . It is a philosophical muddle to allow the space which differentiates ‘my self’ from ‘myself’ to generate the illusion of a mysterious entity distinct from . . . the human being.
– Kenny
A self . . . is . . . an abstraction . . . , [a] Center of Narrative Gravity.
– Dennett
My body is an object all right, but my self jolly well is not!
– Farrell
It can truly be said: Men are the devils of the earth, and the animals are the tormented souls.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Do you really believe that the sciences would ever have originated and grown if the way had not been prepared by magicians, alchemists, astrologers and witches whose promises and pretensions first had to create a thirst, a hunger, a taste for hidden and forbidden powers? Indeed, infinitely more had to be promised than could ever be fulfilled in order that anything at all might be fulfilled in the realms of knowledge.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
There is no study so saddening, and none so sublime as that of the early religions of mankind. To trace back the worship of God to its simple origin, and to mark the gradual process of those degrading superstitions, and unhallowed rites which darkened, and finally extinguished His presence in the ancient world.
At first men enjoyed the blessings of nature as children do, without inquiring into causes. It was sufficient for them that the earth gave them herbs, that the trees bore them fruit, that the stream quenched their thirst. They were happy, and every moment though unconsciously they offered a prayer of gratitude to Him whom as yet they did not know.
And then a system of theology arose amongst them vague and indefinite, as the waters of the boundless sea. They taught each other that the sun, and the earth, the moon, and the stars were moved and illumined by a Great Soul which was the source of all life, which caused the birds to sing, the brooks to murmur, and the sea to heave. It was a sacred Fire which shone in the firmament, and in mighty flames. It was a strange Being which animated the souls of men, and which when the bodies died, returned to itself again.
They silently adored this Great Soul in the beginning, and spoke of Him with reverence, and sometimes raised their eyes timidly to His glittering dwelling-place on high.
And soon they learned to pray. When those whom they loved lay dying, they uttered wild lamentations, and flung their arms despairingly towards the mysterious Soul; for in times of trouble the human mind so imbecile, so helpless, clings to something that is stronger than itself.
As yet they worshipped only the sun, the moon, and the stars-and not as Gods but as visions of that Divine Essence, which alone ruled and pervaded the earth, the sky, and the sea.
They adored Him kneeling, with their hands clasped, and their eyes raised. They offered Him no sacrifices, they built Him no temples; they were content to offer Him their hearts which were full of awe, in His own temple which was full of grandeur. And it is said that there are yet some barbarous islands where men have no churches nor ceremonies, and where they worship God, reflected in the work of His thousand hands.
– W. Winwood Reade
Dear Anna,
Did I say that the human might be filed in categories? Well, and if I did, let me qualify – not all humans. You elude me. I cannot place you, cannot grasp you. I may boast that of nine out of ten, under given circumstances, I can forecast their action; that of nine out of ten, by their word or action, I may feel the pulse of their hearts. But of the tenth I despair. It is beyond me. You are that tenth.
Were ever two souls, with dumb lips, more incongruously matched! We may feel in common — surely, we oftimes do — and when we do not feel in common, yet do we understand; and yet we have no common tongue. Spoken words do not come to us. We are unintelligible. God must laugh at the mummery.
The one gleam of sanity through it all is that we are both large temperamentally, large enough to often understand. True, we often understand but in vague glimmering ways, by dim perceptions, like ghosts, which, while we doubt, haunt us with their truth. And still, I, for one, dare not believe; for you are that tenth which I may not forecast.
Am I unintelligible now? I do not know. I imagine so. I cannot find the common tongue.
Large temperamentally — that is it. It is the one thing that brings us at all in touch. We have, flashed through us, you and I, each a bit of universal, and so we draw together. And yet we are so different.
I smile at you when you grow enthusiastic? It is a forgivable smile – nay, almost an envious smile. I have lived twenty-five years of repression. I learned not to be enthusiastic. It is a hard lesson to forget. I begin to forget, but it is so little. At the best, before I die, I cannot hope to forget all or most. I can exult, now that I am learning, in little things, in other things; but of my things, and secret things doubly mine, I cannot, I cannot. Do I make myself intelligible? Do you hear my voice? I fear not. There are poseurs. I am the most successful of them all.
– Jack London
Dear Writer,
Although it must be a thousand years ago that I sat in a class in story writing at Stanford, I remember the experience very clearly. I was bright-eyes and bushy-brained and prepared to absorb the secret formula for writing good short stories, even great short stories. This illusion was canceled very quickly. The only way to write a good short story, we were told, is to write a good short story. Only after it is written can it be taken apart to see how it was done. It is a most difficult form, as we were told, and the proof lies in how very few great short stories there are in the world.
The basic rule given us was simple and heartbreaking. A story to be effective had to convey something from the writer to the reader, and the power of its offering was the measure of its excellence. Outside of that, there were no rules. A story could be about anything and could use any means and any technique at all – so long as it was effective. As a subhead to this rule, it seemed to be necessary for the writer to know what he wanted to say, in short, what he was talking about. As an exercise we were to try reducing the meat of our story to one sentence, for only then could we know it well enough to enlarge it to three- or six- or ten-thousand words.
So there went the magic formula, the secret ingredient. With no more than that, we were set on the desolate, lonely path of the writer. And we must have turned in some abysmally bad stories. If I had expected to be discovered in a full bloom of excellence, the grades given my efforts quickly disillusioned me. And if I felt unjustly criticized, the judgments of editors for many years afterward upheld my teacher’s side, not mine. The low grades on my college stories were echoed in the rejection slips, in the hundreds of rejection slips.
It seemed unfair. I could read a fine story and could even know how it was done. Why could I not then do it myself? Well, I couldn’t, and maybe it’s because no two stories dare be alike. Over the years I have written a great many stories and I still don’t know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances.
If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes, but by no means always, find the way to do it. You must perceive the excellence that makes a good story good or the errors that make a bad story. For a bad story is only an ineffective story.
It is not so very hard to judge a story after it is written, but, after many years, to start a story still scares me to death. I will go so far as to say that the writer who is not scared is happily unaware of the remote and tantalizing majesty of the medium.
I remember one last piece of advice given me. It was during the exuberance of the rich and frantic ’20s, and I was going out into that world to try and be a writer.
I was told, “It’s going to take a long time, and you haven’t got any money. Maybe it would be better if you could go to Europe.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because in Europe poverty is a misfortune, but in America it is shameful. I wonder whether or not you can stand the shame of being poor.”
It wasn’t too long afterward that the depression came. Then everyone was poor and it was no shame anymore. And so I will never know whether or not I could have stood it. But surely my teacher was right about one thing. It took a long time – a very long time. And it is still going on, and it has never got easier.
She told me it wouldn’t.
– John Steinbeck
Our consciousness is at its root a maverick, ever moving, jumping from one perception, feeling, thought, to another. We can never hold it still or focus it at a point for long. Like the quantum nature of matter, the more we try to hold our consciousness to a fixed point, the greater the uncertainty in its energy will become. So when we focus and narrow our consciousness to a fixed centre, it is all the more likely to suddenly jump with a great rush of energy to some seemingly unrelated aspect of our inner life. We all have such experiences each moment of the day. As in our daily work we try to focus our mind upon some problem only to suddenly experience a shift to some other domain in ourselves, another image or emotional current intrudes then vanishes again, like an ephemeral virtual particle in quantum theory.
– Adam McLean
Now there is present in the world at the moment, or at least I like to think so, an impulse which I have named the archaic revival. What happens is that whenever a society really gets in trouble, and you can use this in your own life – when you really get in trouble – what you should do is say “what did I believe in the last sane moments that I experienced” and then go back to that moment and act from it even if you no longer believe it.
– Terence McKenna
To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence
I who am dead a thousand years
And wrote this sweet archaic song,
Send you my words for messengers
The way I shall not pass along.
I care not if you bridge the seas,
Or ride secure the cruel sky,
Or build consummate palaces
Of metal or of masonry.
But have you wine and music still,
And statues and a bright-eyed love,
And foolish thoughts of good and ill,
And prayers to them who sit above?
How shall we conquer? Like a wind
That falls at eve our fancies blow,
And old Mæonides the blind
Said it three thousand years ago.
O friend unseen, unborn, unknown,
Student of our sweet English tongue,
Read out my words at night, alone:
I was a poet, I was young.
Since I can never see your face,
And never shake you by the hand,
I send my soul through time and space
To greet you. You will understand.
– James Elroy Flecker
“Were you always a wizard?”
How could I have been? I once walked around like you, and when I looked at a person, all I saw was a form of flesh and bones. But after awhile I noticed that a person lives in a house that extends that body – unhappy people with messy emotions live in messy houses; happy, contented people live in orderly houses. It was a simple observation, but after awhile I thought, when I see a house, I am actually seeing more of that person. Then my vision got wider. When I saw a person, I also couldn’t help seeing her family and friends. These were also extensions of the person that told me much about who she really was. And still my vision expanded. I began to see beneath the mask of physical appearance. I saw emotions, desires, fears, wishes, and dreams. Certainly these are part of a person too, if you have eyes to see them. I began to observe the energy each person emanates. By this time the physical arrangement of flesh and bones had become almost insignificant, and soon I saw worlds within worlds in everyone I encountered. Then I realized that every living thing is the entire universe, only wearing a different disguise.
A day will come when you will realize that the entire universe can be found inside you, and then you will be a wizard.
– Deepak Chopra
The Definitive Guide to Life
1.
Everything is uncertain.
The Buddha shits, the same as anyone.
Your truths may be true for you.
All truths are opinions.
Your opinion is not the only valid one.
The opposite of every great truth is equally true.
There are two sides to every coin.
The world is too complex to comprehend.
Our brains are too limited to understand reality.
We are not meant to know the Truth.
It is my right to be ignorant.
Everything is meaningless.
Nothing matters.
2.
Look for the Truth if you must, but don’t find it.
The search is what’s important.
Anyone who thinks they know something is a fool.
It is better to travel than to arrive.
The wisest man is he who does not believe he is wise.
Those who speak do not know.
The older I grow, the less I know.
3.
Reason is useless.
Thinking gets you nowhere.
The great philosophers themselves used reason, and they didn’t agree.
Plato was a great man.
Descartes possessed courage.
Kant had integrity.
Hume was honest.
It is an exaggeration to say that Western philosophy is thoroughly evil.
The great questions of life are unsolvable.
4.
Whatever you do, do it in moderation.
The best things carried to excess are wrong.
A wise person is anyone who follows a middle course.
Contentment is the highest virtue.
We will never know the reason for our existence, not until we die at least.
No one will ever know why the evil prosper and the good suffer.
Our suffering will always be a mystery.
5.
All religions proclaim the one God.
If there was no God, life would be meaningless.
All religions are spiritual.
Meditation and prayer leads to enlightenment.
Christians are spiritual; atheists are materialists.
Anyone who wears robes and smiles is spiritual.
The Pope and the Dalai Lama are spiritual men.
Mother Teresa is good, while Hitler is evil.
Doing good is good.
Keep going to church.
Submit.
Humility is the greatest of all virtues.
6.
People who judge are evil.
Do not judge others.
Stop being judgmental.
Truth brings forth hatred.
To think is to differ.
Thinking causes pain.
Thinking upsets people.
The highest virtue is to accept our limitations and tolerate other people’s weaknesses.
You must tolerate other people’s views.
You must have faith in people.
There are more good people in the world than bad.
7.
Man is born to believe.
We cannot live without hope.
Hope feeds the soul.
Without hope, we would never get out of bed.
Everything’s going to be alright.
8.
Have the courage to believe in yourself.
Don’t listen to other people.
Let nobody deter you from doing what you believe is right.
You are important.
You only live once.
History never repeats.
9.
The Devil finds work for idle hands.
I earn a wage, therefore I am good.
Businessmen are virtuous.
A busy life is a virtuous life.
There is no substitute for hard work.
Work harder and run faster than everyone else.
One should aim to live a rich and varied existence.
Variety is the spice of life.
10.
Honour your parents.
Pursue a career.
Get married.
Love your wife unconditionally.
Family means everything to me.
Having children puts everything in perspective.
Children are valuable.
Always listen to little children.
11.
Motherly love is pure and selfless.
Mothers are saints.
The feminine is the spiritual aspect of ourselves.
Our emotions are spiritual.
Christmas is a special time of year.
12.
Women have souls.
Women think.
Women are conscious.
You can’t judge a woman from the dress she wears.
13.
Men and women are equal.
Women are more emotionally mature than men.
Women are more caring than men.
Women are less violent than men.
Women are less egotistical than men because they are less dominating.
It is wrong to think of women as slaves to fashion. A part of them is deeper.
Women are not victims.
14.
Everybody needs somebody to love.
Love one another.
Without love, there is nothing.
Love is wonderful.
Love conquers all.
The world needs more love.
A hug a day keeps the demons at bay.
The more love, the less war.
15.
Lighten up, for heaven’s sake!
Don’t take yourself seriously.
Concentrate on the positives.
Always look on the bright side of life.
It is better to be entertaining than wise.
A smile goes a long away.
Laughter is the best medicine.
If you can’t find something pleasant to say about someone, then say nothing at all.
Put people at their ease.
Never make an enemy.
Dare to be naive.
16.
Relax.
Take it easy.
We are meant to be happy.
If it feels good, do it.
If you’ve got it, flaunt it.
We can do what we want, as long as we don’t hurt anyone else.
Anything you do is right.
Do what works.
Don’t fight it.
Anything which feels this good can’t be wrong.
Go with the flow.
Everything just is.
Be happy.
Life and Death
The Magazine of The Society for the Elimination of All Truth
And all these questions I ask myself. It is not in a spirit of curiosity. I cannot be silent. About myself I need know nothing. Here all is clear. No, all is not clear. But the discourse must go on. So one invents obscurities. Rhetoric.
– Samuel Beckett
Success is as dangerous as failure.
Hope is as hollow as fear.
What does it mean that success is as dangerous as failure?
Whether you go up the ladder or down it,
Your position is shaky.
When you stand with your two feet on the ground,
You will always keep your balance.
What does it mean that hope is as hollow as fear?
Hope and fear are both phantoms
That arise from thinking of the self.
When we don’t see the self as self,
What do we have to fear?
See the world as your self.
Have faith in the way things are.
Love the world as your self;
Then you can care for all things.
– Lao Tzu
The search is what everyone would undertake if he were not stuck in the everydayness of his own life. To be aware of the possibilities of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
– Walker Percy
Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are: by which we can see Life as a whole: by which, and by which alone, we can understand others in their real as in their ideal relations.
– Oscar Wilde
If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go into business, because we’d be cynical. Well, that’s nonsense. You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.
– Ray Bradbury
I’ve lost the will to paint literally. I don’t see the point in worrying away with a paintbrush trying to reproduce a literal photographic texture like cloth or skin. Paint is best at being paint. Paint can never be as perfect as nature when it is trying to imitate nature. It’s a lost cause. Paint can only be as beautiful as nature when it is nature, when it is it’s own texture. Marks on paper have their own beauty, and it is this slipping from the literal world into the world of abstract qualities that I try to achieve in my work. If I need a shirt to look like a shirt I’ll scan it into my computer. If I want a shirt to feel like the wind, or like a constricting skin, or angry, or like a consoling embrace, then maybe it should be painted or drawn . . .
– Dave McKean
It is not the poet’s business to save man’s soul but to make it worth saving . . . However, few poets have written with a clear theory of art for art’s sake, it is by that theory alone that their work has been, or can be, judged; -and rightly so if we remember that art embraces all life and all humanity, and sees in the temporary and fleeting doctrines of conservative or revolutionary only the human grandeur or passion that inspires them.
– James Elroy Flecker
Around you is a subtle electromagnetic body of energy that is sometimes called the subtle body and is normally unseen by the naked eye. The ancient Greeks called it the etheric body. This is where the real you resides. It’s also where your real feelings reside.
Imagine it to be a faint energy field, like a colorless mist. But, unlike a slow, wafting mist, the etheric is moving very, very quickly. Flashing through it are mini-lightning bolts of energy, and fingers of flamelike etheric sunbursts that shoot out from you in all directions. Underlying the flashes are great waves of rolling energy that move up and down and sometimes outward, tumbling and turning in response to emotion. You walk inside an amazing glowing bubble of light that sometimes projects three or four feet away from you in every direction.
The etheric is fascinating and beautiful to watch. I find it very humbling – the secret human is all there to see, spiritually naked in his or her identity. In the etheric, you see how the human condition is complicated by the ego/personality, but you can have a deep compassion for it. For a human is not just a mind, a body, or an emotion – it is light. The brilliance of that human light overshadows the personality traits and weaknesses that come from human frailty.
– Stuart Wilde
See the world as energy, and become responsible for your energy. Realize that everything you do, say, and touch, everything you pass – even for a fleeting second – is affected and changed by you. You impact the animals and plants; the air, water, and buildings; and people – the energy of each drops or rises to reflect the subtle etheric pressure you place on it.
When you are angry, fearful, mean and vindictive, the energy of the room you are in starts to wobble and act chaotically. It metaphysically starts to implode. Anyone standing nearby will be robbed of energy and pulled down. Everything gets sucked into the vortex of your negative implosion.
With perception comes responsibility. Understand that if you are infinite you are everywhere, and you can be anywhere, and you are inside all things, and you affect them.
Remember that the solidity of the world is an illusion created by the speed at which atoms oscillate. If they slowed down just a little, you’d be able to walk through walls. In an out-of-body experience, you have consciousness inside a subtle body that we believe weighs four grams. You can pass right through the wall.
In effect, physical reality is both opaque and ethereal – just a collective feeling. It’s only by habit that you consider yourself solid. In a sense, you are a collection of particles, transmuted from being in the solid-particle state of physical existence to the more ethereal wave-state.
In the wave-state, you are an amorphous oscillation, existing at no particular place in space or time, with no particular human definition. That wave state contains your consciousness and can be driven by your force of will. Through it, you have an immense potential to exert yourself on the etheric reality. The wave can move, so you move. It’s everywhere, so you can be everywhere.
– Stuart Wilde
There by to see the minutes how they run;
How many make the hour full complete,
How many hours bring about the day,
How many days will finish up the year,
How many years a mortal man may live.
– William Shakespeare
Here we languish, a bunch of poor scholars,
battered by extremes of hunger and cold.
Out of work, our only joy is poetry:
Scribble, scribble, we wear out our brains.
Who will read the works of such men?
On that point you can save your sighs.
We could inscribe our poems on biscuits
And the homeless dogs wouldn’t deign to nibble
Hermits hide from mankind
Most go to the mountains to sleep
Where green vines wind through woods
And jade gorges echo unbroken
Higher and higher enraptured
On and on simply free
Free of what stains the world
Minds pure like the white lotus
If you are looking for a place to rest,
Cold Mountain is a good place to stay.
The breeze flowing through the dark pines
Sounds better the closer you come.
And under the trees a white-haired man
Mumbles over his Taoist texts.
Ten years now he hasn’t gone home;
He has even forgotten the road he came by.
High on the mountain’s peak
Infinity in all directions!
The solitary moon looks down
From its midnight loft
Admires its reflection in the icy pond.
Shivering, I serenade the moon.
I climb the road to Cold Mountain,
The road to Cold Mountain that never ends.
The valleys are long and strewn with stones;
The streams broad and filled with thick grass.
Moss is slippery though no rain has fallen;
Pines sigh but it isn’t the wind.
Who can break from the snares of the world
And sit with me among the white clouds?
Have I a body or have I none?
Am I who I am or am I not?
Pondering these questions,
I sit leaning against the cliff as the years go by,
Till the green grass grows between my feet
And the red dust settles on my head,
And the men of the world, thinking me dead,
Come with offerings of wine and fruit to lay by my corpse.
The place where I spend my days
Is farther away than I can tell.
Without a word the wild vines stir,
No fog, yet the bamboos are always dark.
Who do the valleys sob for?
Why do the mists huddle together?
At noon, sitting in my hut
I realize for the first time that the sun has risen.
Today I sat before the cliffs
Sat until the mist blew off
A rambling clear stream shore
A towering green ridge crest
Cloud’s dawn shadows still
Moon’s night light adrift
Body free of dust
Mind without a care.
People ask about Cold Mountain Way;
There’s no Cold Mountain Road that goes straight through:
By summer, lingering cold is not dispersed,
By fog, the risen sun is screened from view;
So how did one like me get onto it?
In our hearts, I’m not the same as you —
If in your heart you should become like me,
Then you can reach the center of it too.
Among a thousand clouds and ten thousand streams,
Here lives an idle man,
In the daytime wandering over green mountains
At night coming home to sleep by the cliff.
Swiftly the springs and autumns pass,
But my mind is at peace, free from dust or delusion
How pleasant to know I need nothing to lean on
To be still as the waters of the autumn river!
Thirty years ago I was born into the world.
A thousand, ten thousand miles I’ve roamed.
By rivers where the green grass grows thick,
Beyond the border where the red sands fly.
I brewed potions in a vain search for life everlasting,
I read books, I sang songs of history,
And today I’ve come home to Cold Mountain
To pillow my head on the stream and wash my ears.
You have seen the blossoms among the leaves;
tell me, how long will they stay?
Today they tremble before the hand that picks them;
tomorrow they wait someone’s garden broom.
Wonderful is the bright heart of youth,
but with the years it grows old.
Is the world not like these flowers?
Ruddy faces, how can they last?
I spur my horse past the ruined city;
the ruined city, that wakes the traveler’s thoughts:
ancient battlements, high and low;
old grave mounds, great and small.
Where the shadow of a single tumbleweed trembles
and the voice of the great trees clings forever,
I sigh over all these common bones —
No roll of the immortals bears their names.
When I see a fellow abusing others,
I think of a man with a basketful of water.
As fast as he can, he runs with it home,
but when he gets there, what’s left in the basket?
When I see a man being abused by others,
I think of the leek growing in the garden.
Day after day men pull off the leaves,
but the heart it was born with remains the same.
Cold Cliff’s remoteness
Is what I love
No one travels this way
Clouds lie around on the peaks
A lone gibbon howls on the ridge
What else do I cherish?
It’s good to grow old content
Cold and heat change my
Appearance; the pearl
Of my mind stays safe
Cold Mountain is a house
Without beams or walls.
The six doors left and right are open
The hall is blue sky.
The rooms all vacant and vague
The east wall beats on the west wall
At the center nothing.
Borrowers don’t bother me
In the cold I build a little fire
When I’m hungry I boil up some greens.
I’ve got no use for the kulak
With his big barn and pasture —
He just sets up a prison for himself.
Once in he can’t get out.
Think it over —
You know it might happen to you.
– Han Shan
a.k.a Cold Mountain
The writer doesn’t trust his enemies, of course, who are wrong about his writing, but he doesn’t trust his friends, either, who he hopes are right. The writer trusts nothing he writes – it should be too reckless and alive for that, it should be beautiful and menacing and slightly out of his control. It should want to live itself somehow. The writer dies – he can die before he dies, it happens all the time, he dies as a writer – but the work wants to live.
Language accepts the writer as its host, it feeds off the writer, it makes him a husk. There is something uncanny about good writing – uncanny the singing that comes from certain husks. The writer is never nourished by his own work, it is never satisfying to him. The work is a stranger, it shuns him a little, for the writer is really something of a fool, so engaged in his disengagement, so self-conscious, so eager to serve something greater, which is the writing. Or which could be the writing if only the writer is good enough. The work stands a little apart from the writer, it doesn’t want to go down with him when he stumbles or fails or retreats. The writer must do all this alone, in secret, in drudgery, in confusion, awkwardly, one word at a time.
– Joy Williams
Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear. If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable.
But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent. When you come close to succeeding, when the words pour out of you just right, you understand that these sentences are all part of a river flowing out of your own distant, hidden ranges, and all words become the dissolving snow that feeds your bright mountain streams forever. The language locks itself in the icy slopes of our own high passes, and it is up to us, the writers, to melt the glaciers within us. When these glaciers calve and break off, we get to call them novels, the changelings of our burning spirits, our lifework.
– Pat Conroy
Writing, for me, is bound up completely in my quality of life. There is much about writing a novel that weighs me down, as if I am having to live two lives, my own and the one I create. But in writing I have purpose, I’m doing the thing I was meant to do. When I’m not writing – and I can go for long stretches without it – things are easier. But this life lived only for myself takes on a certain lightness that I find almost unbearable after awhile, as if everything has become a moderately entertaining sitcom.
– Ann Patchett
Writing, for me, is bound up completely in my quality of life. There is much about writing a novel that weighs me down, as if I am having to live two lives, my own and the one I create. But in writing I have purpose, I’m doing the thing I was meant to do. When I’m not writing – and I can go for long stretches without it – things are easier. But this life lived only for myself takes on a certain lightness that I find almost unbearable after awhile, as if everything has become a moderately entertaining sitcom.
– Ann Patchett
In the end, writing is like a prison, an island from which you will never be released but which is a kind of paradise: the solitude, the thoughts, the incredible joy of putting into words the essence of what you for the moment understand and with your whole heart want to believe.
– James Salter
But what is this urge not only to write, but to publish one’s work? Besides the pleasure of being praised, there is the thought of communicating with other souls capable of understanding one’s own, and thus of one’s work becoming a meeting place for the souls of men.
– Eugene Delacroix
The best way to find things out is not to ask questions at all. If you fire off a question, it is like firing off a gun – bang, it goes, and everything takes flight and runs for shelter. But if you sit quite still and pretend not to be looking, all the little facts will come and peck around your feet, situations will venture forth from thickets, and intentions will creep out and sun themselves on a stone; and if you are very patient, you will see and understand a great deal more than a man with a gun does.
– Elspeth Huxley
The trouble is that unitary reality is too big for us to experience in a way that would make sense to us. It would be like trying to read all the books in a library at once. The human brain and psychic apparatus have great cognitive range, but this challenge would probably prove overly formidable to most of us. So we read one book at a time.
– Richard Leviton
There is a little tale about man’s fate and this is the way it is put. A man is being pursued by a raging elephant and takes refuge in a tree at the edge of a fearsome abyss. Two mice, one black and one white, are gnawing at the roots of the tree, and at the bottom of the abyss is a dragon with jaws wide open. The man looks above and sees a trickle of honey coming down the tree and he begins to lick it up and forgets his perilous situation. But the mice gnaw through the roots and the man falls down and the elephant seizes him and hurls him over the edge to the dragon. Now, that elephant is the image of death, which pursues men, and the tree is this transitory existence, and the mice are the days and the nights, and the honey is the sweetness of the passing world, and the savor of the passing world diverts mankind. So the days and nights are accomplished and death seizes him and the dragon swallows him down into hell and this is the life of man.
– Joy Williams
A person may be very learned in all things, and his philosophical knowledge may be very profound. He has studied all the ancient lore of wisdom, and has even formulated his own system of metaphysics in which he has incorporated all the results of his erudition and speculation. But from the religious point of view he is yet far from enlightenment, for his study is like that of the artist who has painted a dragon and forgot to put the eyes in. His elaborate delineation and coloring in various hues of this huge mystic animal have miserably failed to produce the effect desired and attempted, for the eyes are blank and show no trace of the fiery animation which is possessed by the monster. The scholar has neglected the most important factor that is absolutely necessary in making up the complete knowledge of the universe. He thought that he knew everything under the sun when he exercised his intellectual power to its full extent and considered existence from all the possible standpoints which his understanding could grasp. But, as I stated before, the knowledge of an object is not complete unless its inner life or reason is felt; in other words, unless the duality of a knowing mind and a known object vanishes, and life is comprehended as it is and not in its intellectual mutilation.
– Soyen Shaku
What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.
When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Surely there is grandeur in knowing that in the realm of thought, at least, you are without a chain; that you have the right to explore all heights and all depths; that there are no walls nor fences, nor prohibited places, nor sacred corners in all the vast expanse of thought; that your intellect owes no allegiance to any being, human or divine; that you hold all in fee and upon no condition and by no tenure whatever; that in the world of mind you are relieved from all personal dictation, and from the ignorant tyranny of majorities. Surely it is worth something to feel that there are no priests, no popes, no parties, no governments, no kings, no gods, to whom your intellect can be compelled to pay a reluctant homage. Surely it is a joy to know that all the cruel ingenuity of bigotry can devise no prison, no dungeon, no cell in which for one instant to confine a thought; that ideas cannot be dislocated by racks, nor crushed in iron boots, nor burned with fire. Surely it is sublime to think that the brain is a castle, and that within its curious bastions and winding halls the soul, in spite of all worlds and all beings, is the supreme sovereign of itself.
– Robert Green Ingersoll
“Thoreau on his deathbed and sinking fast was asked by his aunt who’d long worried about her nephew,
“Have you made your peace with your God?”
Thoreau, still alert, replied, “I never quarreled with my God.”
Thoreau’s aunt pursued the matter, asking, “But aren’t you concerned about the next world?”
Thoreau, impatient now, said, “One world at a time.”
How can the cortex observe and control the cortex? Perhaps there will come a day when the human brain will fold back on itself again and develop a higher cortex, but until then the only feedback which the cortex has about its own states comes through other people. (I am speaking here of the cortex as a whole. One can of course remember remembering.) Thus the ego which observes and controls the cortex is a complex of social information relayed back into the cortex – Mead’s ‘generalized other.’ But this is social misinformation when it is made to appear that the information of which the ego consists is something other than states of the cortex itself, and therefore ought to be controlling the cortex. The ego is the unconscious pretense that the organism contains a higher system than the cortex; it is the confusion of a system of interpersonal information with a new, imaginary, fold in the brain – or with something quite other than a neural pattern, a mind, soul, self. When, therefore, I feel that ‘I’ am knowing or controlling myself – my cortex – I should recognize that I am actually being controlled by other people’s words and gestures masquerading as my inner or better self. Not to see this brings about utter confusion, as when I try to force myself to stop feeling in ways that are socially unacceptable.
If all this is true, it becomes obvious that the ego feeling is pure hypnosis. Society is persuading the individual to do what it wants by making it appear that its commands are the individual’s inmost self. What we want is what you want. And this is a double-bind, as when a mother says to her child, who is longing to slush around in a mud puddle, ‘Now darling, you don’t want to get into that mud!’ This is misinformation, and this – if anything – is the ‘Great Social Lie.’
Let us suppose, then, that the false reflex of ‘I seeing my sights’ or ‘I feeling my feelings’ is stopped …. It is hardly too much to say that such a change of perception would give far better ground for social solidarity than the normal trick of misinformation and hypnosis.
– Alan Watts, Psychotherapy East and West
There was a fence with spaces you
could look through if you wanted to.
An architect who saw this thing
stood there one summer evening.
Took out the spaces with great care.
And built a castle in the air.
The fence was utterly dumbfounded –
Each post stood there with nothing round it.
– Christian Morgenstern
I don’t believe, in the strict metaphysical sense, that there are any completely innocent victims. In the totality of an infinite perception, the victim and the aggressor are one and the same energy. If you have done something wrong to somebody, yes, you could have chosen a more righteous way of acting. But on the other hand, they put out negative energy and as a result pulled you into their life. You messed them up at your own time and expense. They can say, “Thank you, God, for sending me a teacher.
– Stuart Wilde
There was also another reason why it was now possible to paint. It was because there was one central fact that made it seem worthwhile going on, whatever the objective value of the pictures to other people. It was that I had discovered in the painting a bit of experience that made all other occupations unimportant by comparison. It was the discovery that, when painting, something from nature there occurred, at least sometimes, a fusion into a never-before-know wholeness; not only were the object and oneself no longer felt to be separate, but neither were thought and sensation and feeling and action towards it, the movement of one’s hand together with the feeling of delight in the “thusness” of the thing, they all seemed fused into a wholeness of being which was different than anything else that had ever happened to me.
– Marion Milner
Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.
– W. Somerset Maugham
Man’s imagination, always bigger than his environment, overleaps the barriers of time and space and claims all worlds as eminent domain, so that literature, which he has the power to create, as he cannot create his material surroundings, possesses a dramatic intensity, an epic sweep, unknown in actuality. In the last analysis, man is as great as his daydreams – or his nightmares!
– Emily Dorothy Scarborough
Any reflective person recognizes how much learning happens outside the realm of analytical deduction. Most of what one knows comes from sensory, intuitive, and imaginative faculties. Reason may later examine and organize this learning, but one first assimilated it holistically.
– Dana Gioia
Everyone has this third eye; all living things, and even inanimate things, have it. All use it without knowing it. It is with this eye that we read poetry, and, oddly enough, listen to music. We may go so far as to say that this eye is things as they really are, since things see themselves (only) when we use it.
– R. H. Blyth
Always be ready to see what you haven’t seen before.
It’s a kind of looking where you don’t know what you’re looking for.
– Corita Kent
You find yourself by losing yourself. By not thinking about yourself all of the time. When I am in a slump with my writing, I’ll go and walk for a week. Walk and not see a human being. Something happens after four or five days which is quite wonderful. It is an ancient thing. Your sense of smell. Your hearing. They come back.
– Doug Peacock
The dragon in the withered tree
really sees
the Way.
– Sozan
Am I just the ghostwriter
of my former selves?
The words crawl forth
from primordial pools
to form oceans on paper.
– Jacob Hayes
In love with being noticed and afraid of being seen.
– Noah Kahan
The metaphors are not imposed upon the story, poem, or essay, they arise from it.
– Sue William Silverman
So you think that you’re a failure, do you? Well, you probably are. What’s wrong with that? In the first place, if you’ve any sense at all you must have learned by now that we pay just as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats. Go ahead and fail. But fail with wit, fail with grace, fail with style. A mediocre failure is as insufferable as a mediocre success.
– Tom Robbins
I’ve given up on my brain.
I’ve torn the cloth to shreds
and thrown it away.
If you’re not completely naked,
wrap your beautiful robe of words
around you,
and sleep.
– Rumi
What you don’t feel, you will not grasp by art,
Unless it wells out of your soul
And with sheer pleasure takes control,
Compelling every listener’s heart.
But sit – and sit, and patch and knead,
Cook a ragout, reheat your hashes,
Blow at the sparks and try to breed
A fire out of piles of ashes!
Children and apes may think it great,
If that should titillate your gum,
But from heart to heart you will never create.
If from your heart it does not come.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Stuck shift key poetry
the bang splat poem:
<>!*”#
^@`$$-
!*’$_
%*<>#4
&)../
|{~~SYSTEM HALTED
Transliterated:
Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash,
Caret at back-tick dollar dollar dash,
Bang splat tick dollar under-score,
Percent splat waka waka number four,
Ampersand right-paren dot dot slash,
Vertical-bar curly-bracket tilde tilde CRASH.
– Fred Bremmer and Steve Kroese
Poets utter great and wise things which they themselves do not understand.
– Plato
Your Shoulders Hold Up The World
A time comes when we no longer can say:
my God.
A time of total cleaning up.
A time when we no longer can say: my love.
Because love proved useless.
And the eyes don’t cry.
And the hands do only rough work.
And the heart is dry.
They knock at our door in vain, we won’t open.
We remain alone, the light turned off,
and our enormous eyes shine in the dark.
It is obvious we no longer know how to suffer.
And we want nothing from our friends.
Who cares if old age comes, what is old age?
Our shoulders are holding up the world
and it’s lighter than a child’s hand.
Wars, famine, family fights inside buildings
prove only that life goes on
and not everybody has freed themselves yet.
Some (the delicate ones) judging the spectacle cruel
will prefer to die.
A time comes when death doesn’t help.
A time comes when life is an order.
Just life, without any escapes.
– Carlos Drummond de Andrade
The real wilderness of the hermit is the wilderness of the human spirit which is at once his and everyone else’s. What he seeks in that wilderness is not himself, not human company, and consolation, but God.
Man’s loneliness is, in fact, the loneliness of God. This is why it is such a great thing for a man to discover his solitude and learn to live in it. For there he finds that he and God are one: that God is aloneness as he himself is alone. That God wills to be alone in man.
You will never find interior solitude unless you make some conscious effort to deliver yourself from the desires and the cares and the attachments of an existence in time and in the world.
– Thomas Merton
If we follow the reasoning of the ancients, this evolutionary course extends over many incarnations and is sometimes spoken of as the Path. On this Path there are innumerable awakenings or births of new awareness. At times understanding will flood our nature and so alter our outlook that we are never again the same. At other times insight glows for an interval, but fades in the confused welter of daily events. The old saying has it that “the Self can only be grasped in each moment as it passes.” When we go out under the stars and gaze into the immensity of space, something marvelous stirs in us – to which we cannot give labels and which cannot be confined in a human mind. The deep without us calls forth the deep within us – indeed what is outside and what is inside? Our human consciousness cannot contain it, so no matter how many times we bring ourselves back to the scene, the magic moment, though evoked time and again, cannot be sustained.
– John P. Van Mater
A large part of the pleasure that I have experienced in the study of Buddhism has arisen from what I may call the strangeness of the intellectual landscape. All the ideas, the modes of argument, even the postulates assumed and not argued about, have always seemed so strange, so different from anything to which I have been accustomed, that I felt all the time as though walking in Fairyland. Much of the charm that the Oriental thoughts and ideas have for me appears to be because they so seldom fit into Western categories.
– Henry Clarke Warren
We think we are observing nature, but what we are observing is our own mind at work. We are the subject and object of our own methodology. Moreover, this mind encompasses the entirety of the universe; there is nothing outside of it, nothing it does not contain.
– Martin J. Verhoeven
Enlightenment does not annihilate the ego. Why would someone want to annihilate something so useful and extraordinary? It has not been by chance that we have mentioned many times how important the mind and ego are as the creative force of our intelligence. We need to dissolve this dangerous spiritual conditioning that has taken deep root in our habitual way of thinking. Irresponsible psychological language has caused a lot of harm to those on the Path. The ego concept needs to be defined in a way that relates to our everyday experience, and to all those complicated processes in meditation and on the spiritual Path.
In the case of people without insight into the nature of consciousness, the mental activity is in the center of consciousness. Every thought creates a new center, a new identification which is the ego – there is nothing else there. We cannot talk about “one” ego but rather about a flow of conscious or semi-conscious events, being capable of operating in a relatively integrated way. This is the function of the ego.
When Enlightenment takes place, the Presence becomes the center, and there is the feeling that all the thoughts are only witnessed objects-events on the periphery of consciousness; they are guests coming and going, having nothing to do with the stillness of our being. For that reason, it is easy to conclude that there is only Witnessing, and the rest is irrelevant, impersonal and objective. But this popular conclusion is one-dimensional and is not able to grasp the dynamics of human consciousness. Thoughts are being witnessed and observed. The center is empty and uninvolved. Is that all? Not fully. Although the thoughts are witnessed, the intelligence which is using them represents also a parallel center of relative consciousness – it is also the “Me.”
We can speak about two centers within us, as manifested beings: one is the Witnessing Consciousness – a constant flow of presence, and the second is the moving self-conscious center of our personality. When we see this clearly, there is no doubt that the thoughts, which are being witnessed, are simultaneously an indivisible part of Me, and it is Me who is thinking them! In the case of an Enlightened being, although thoughts have a different quality, still they remain as a function of consciousness and as a functional self-relating center, which we interpret as “me.” The absolute Me and the relative me are one. Being and self-conscious expression are one.
– Aziz Kristof
If you have a beautiful voice, don’t think that you have created that beautiful voice for yourself. It has been transmitted by your ancestors, your parents. If you have the talent of a painter, don’t think that you have invented that talent. It has been transmitted to you as a seed. So everything you have thought that you are has come from the cosmos, from your ancestors. The water in you, the heat in you, the air in you, the soil in you, belong to the water outside, the soil outside.
Without the forest how could you be? Without your father and mother how could you be there this moment? Therefore you say, in wisdom, that you are nothing. Everything that you think, you thought that you are, you have received from the cosmos, from parents – including your body. Suddenly non-self arises as an insight. You belong to the stream of life. If you bear hatred toward your father, you think that your life has been ruined by your father, that you don’t want to have anything to do with your father. It is out of ignorance that you have thought so. Because if you touch the reality of no-self, you see very clearly that you are your father. You are just a continuation of your father, and your father is a continuation of your grandfather.
We are one in a stream of life. To think that you are a separate entity, that you are a self that can be independent from your father, is a very funny thing. Because your father is inside you, you can never get rid of him. There is no alternative except to reconcile with your father. To reconcile with him means to reconcile with yourself. The other person, it might not be your father, he may be your brother or your spouse or anyone. You think that he or she has made you suffer so much, has made your life miserable. There is a tendency in you never to see him again, to hear from him again or from her again. That kind of willingness, that kind of feeling is born from your ignorance of the reality of no-self. Because we are all together. Not only are we together, we are inside each other, we inter-are. So if you surrender your idea of self, suddenly you release a lot of suffering, a lot of anger. You give yourself a chance for compassion and understanding to be born in your heart.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
The human mind prefers to be spoon-fed with the thoughts of others, but deprived of such nourishment it will, reluctantly, begin to think for itself – and such thinking, remember, is original thinking and may have valuable results.
– Agatha Christie
Here where the world ends, and has beginning,
Here where the sunlight-spring of all our minds
Has birth again, and new beginning
The seeker finds.
Here there is body’s peace, and the heart’s uprising,
Here the illumined minds of other men
Are beacons on a mountain peak uprising
Beyond our ken.
Here there is quiet, and the world about us,
Here there is wisdom foolish men must know.
The earth is dumb with suffering about us,
And I must go.
– Christmas Humphreys
There is no greater mystery than this, that we keep seeking reality though in fact we are reality. We think that there is something hiding reality and that this must be destroyed before reality is gained. How ridiculous! A day will dawn when you will laugh at all your past efforts. That which will be the day you laugh is also here and now.
– Ramana Maharshi
Truth is revealed. It cannot ever be told. It has to appear inside the telling or through the telling.
– James Hillman
Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire
with God:
but only he who sees takes off his shoes.
– Elizabeth Barrett Browning
BOURGEOIS
What we’d never let ourselves become, tra la. Especially a petit. Wasn’t the edge the only place to be? Or of the working class, which would rise someday. Startling that it rose, without rancor, happily in fact, toward the bourgeoisie. Startling, too: capitalism’s elasticity, that fat boy with quick feet, subtly accommodating, and not quite there when we swung. In a few long years we’d be his wary friend. We’d own mutual funds. Our property was our property, and fences were good. Parents now, we offered “Be carefuls” as often as we once cried, “Fascist pigs.” Oh not petit, but grand! So what if we believed in the efficacies of art, and still spoke about our souls? So what if we still resisted the God-fearing and the Republicans and a few of their little, dispiriting rules? Each year we felt less and less dislocated at the mall. We used our remotes without irony and for entire evenings hardly moved.
– Stephen Dunn
You’d probably say it was a small world, but not if you have to clean it.
– The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century, by Olga Ravn.
Don’t know how to grasp this happiness with words, eyes, hands, and the poor heart, the happiness that you are here and that you belong to me.
– Franz Kafka, 1920.
I love having problems & tangles & blocks between me and what i want,,
It’s like the gods plunging their hands deep into my life, past all the love and care and ease, into the muck, and pulling on one specific fibrous clot like “this, this is the one you gotta release right now.
– River Kenna
Our very life here depends directly on continuous acts of beginning.
– A spell against stagnation – John O’Donohue
I wanted simply to say
some sweet, direct things, out of envy
for old married couples, human figures
I’ve always seen as joined by a cowardly bond —
I wanted to say that when their love —
which lasts for decades— is about to vanish
like a star streaking the sky above –
I wanted to say that what survives this
is something like love’s illusion,
certainly not its reality: a simple pact — which
is in fact what gave it its name —
Of mine all that’s left are the cryptic
reasons for which it was born –
It never received any blessing.
– Pier Paolo Pasolini, (trans. Stephen Sartarelli)
…storytelling reveals meaning without committing to the error of defining it.
– Hannah Arendt
Why write love poetry in a burning world?
To train myself, in the midst of a burning world,
to offer poems of love to a burning world.
– Katie Farris
So apparently the act of sending loved ones little videos and cute pictures and funny things throughout the day is called “Pebbling” because there’s a species of penguin that likes to leave pebbles in their partners’ nests to show they care, and this is my happy thing for today.
– Jonathan Edward Durham
All your friends have houses in the suburbs and are sloughing off the brittle husks of their human bodies and becoming unspeakable vermin whose very appearance induces madness in the living, while you’re still single and renting a one-bedroom.
– Austin Gilkeson
Most people think self care is watching Netflix, bubble baths, and overall hedonistic behavior.
When it’s really going to sleep on time, working out daily, and eating a healthy diet.
– Dan Go
Instead of viewing exercise as a punishment, see it as a privilege.
Give thanks for the ability to move your body.
There are people who would do anything to have what you have.
– Dan Go
Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s
Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota
by James Wright
Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year’s horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
My life is dope as hell!!
Re-reading Foucault after many years, I am struck by something only incidental to his point: the Church/the old European morality REALLY hated “idleness”, the “mother of all evils”.
Nietzsche’s pro-leisure stance is just as revolutionary as his critique of pity.
– Host of the Nietzsche Podcast
Under the Tree of Idleness
This is where I was going the whole time
when they thought I was lost and were looking
for me everywhere I was right here
but as long as they were looking for me
they walked past and never laid eyes on me
it was only when one stumbled on me
by accident that I seemed to have been
found for a moment before I was gone
again following shadows on the leaves
of the oldest limb where they might never
have been noticed but I watched them as though
I was remembering after a long
time without seeing them although that had been
no time in the life of the tree where I
had heard far away a voice calling to
someone and asking what are you doing
until I answered to call it nothing
– W. S. Merwin
DHAMMAPADA
Live in joy,
In love,
Even among those who hate.
Live in joy,
In health,
Even among the afflicted.
Live in joy,
In peace,
Even among the troubled.
Live in joy,
Without possessions,
Like the shining ones.
The winner sows hatred
Because the loser suffers.
Let go of winning and losing
And find joy.
There is no fire like passion,
No crime like hatred,
No sorrow like separation,
No sickness like hunger,
And no joy like the joy of freedom.
Health, contentment and trust
Are your greatest possessions,
And freedom your greatest joy.
Look within.
Be still.
Free from fear and attachment,
Know the sweet joy of the way.
How joyful to look upon the awakened
And to keep company with the wise.
How long the road to the man
Who travels with a fool.
But whoever follow those who follow the way
Discovers his family, and is filled with joy.
Follow then the shining ones,
The wise, the awakened, the loving,
For they know how to work and forbear.
Follow them
As the moon follows the path of the stars.
– The Buddha
When Moses, at the burning bush, says to God, “Who are you?” God says to him three words: “Hayah asher hayah.” And those words are mistranslated in English as “I am that which I am.” But in Hebrew, it means “I will be who or how or where I will be,” meaning, don’t think you can predict me. I am a God who is going to surprise you. And one of the ways God surprises us is by letting a Jew or a Christian discover the trace of God’s presence in a Buddhist monk or a Sikh tradition of hospitality or the graciousness of Hindu life. You know, don’t think we can confine God into our categories. God is bigger than religion.
– Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
My Imagination is a Monastery and I am its Monk.
– John Keats
To be what I am. To voice the things that only I can voice. To bear the blossoms that are commanded of my heart. This is what I want.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
To live content with small means;
to seek elegance rather than luxury,
and refinement rather than fashion;
to be worthy, not respectable,
and wealthy, not, rich;
to listen to stars and birds,
babes and sages, with open heart;
to study hard;
to think quietly, act frankly, talk gently,
await occasions, hurry never;
in a word, to let the spiritual,
unbidden and unconscious,
grow up through the common
– this is my symphony
– William Ellery Channing
In this spiritual world there are no time divisions such as the past, present and future; for they have contracted themselves into a single moment of the present where life quivers in its true sense . . . The past and the future are both rolled up in this present moment of illumination, and this present moment is not something standing still with all its contents, for it ceaselessly moves on.
– D.T. Suzuki
Trauma destroys the fabric of time. In normal time you move from one moment to the next, sunrise to sunset, birth to death. After trauma, you may move in circles, find yourself being sucked backwards into an eddy or bouncing like a rubber ball from now to then to back again. … In the traumatic universe the basic laws of matter are suspended: ceiling fans can be helicopters, car exhaust can be mustard gas.
– David J. Morris
When will they know that running a country includes running the arts of a country, that art is not a fad, but one of the [most] direct means of communication that human beings have, and their most personal expression?
– Leonard Bernstein
Nobody gets me but the riverwash
I am ready to go into the far country
– Nicholas Pierotti
Culture, as I understand it, is essentially a product of leisure. The art of culture is therefore essentially the art of loafing. Those who are wise won’t be busy, and those who are too busy can’t be wise. The wisest man is therefore he who loafs most gracefully.
– Lin Yutang
Christianity didn’t save me. Therapy didn’t change me. Buddhism didn’t calm me down. Journaling didn’t go anywhere. No, the truth, thirty years later, is that all the self-help programs I tried in my twenties, and I tried a lot of them, didn’t really work. What worked was love. Thirty years ago today, on my father’s birthday which is why I remember the date, and only now feel a deep gratitude to a mysterious spiritual entanglement and sense of him as an unconscious magician, thirty years ago today, a man walked into a coffee shop and asked to sit across from me. We talked for hours and both of us knew almost immediately that we were only picking up a conversation we’d been having for lifetimes, eons, eternities. Thirty more years together will never be enough, there will never be enough lifetimes, enough epochs for our love. Everything changed when we found each other again. Children were born. Books were written. Joy was renewed. My prayer today and always is that we always find each other, lifetime after lifetime. Perhaps it is not fashionable or cool anymore to believe in love. But I believe in love because I know it changes everything. I know that the robins are praying for love and the dandelions and the mountains and the rivers and even the stones. The whole world changes when we pray for love. Love heals everything, changes everyhing, renews everything, and saves each and every one of us now and always.
– Perdita Finn
The watcher comes, knowing the small
knowledge of his life in this body
in this place in this world. He comes
to a place of rest where he cannot
mistake himself as larger than he is,
the place of the gray flycatcher,
the yellow butterfly, the green dragonfly,
the white violet, the columbine,
where he cannot mistake himself
as more graced or graceful than he is.
At the woods’ edge, the wild rose
is in bloom, beauty and consolation
always in excess of thought.
– Wendell Berry
Turn Again To Life
by Mary Lee Hall
If I should die and leave you here a while,
be not like others sore undone, who keep
long vigils by the silent dust, and weep.
For my sake – turn again to life and smile,
nerving thy heart and trembling hand to do
something to comfort weaker hearts than thine.
Complete these dear unfinished tasks of mine
and I, perchance may therein comfort you.
…I keep looking for one more teacher, only to find that fish learn from the water and birds learn from the sky.
– Mark Nepo
WRITTEN AT EL ESCORIAL
i call you
as in years past, one friend to another
in little songs
afraid of the sunrise
– Alejandra Pizarnik
What is an artist? A provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one…. It’s this in-between that I’m calling a province, this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one—which is really the realm of the artist.
– Federico Fellini
You often say,
‘I would give, but only to the deserving.’
The trees in your orchard say not so,
nor the flocks in your pasture.
They give that they may live, for
To withhold is to perish.
Surely he who is worthy to receive his days and his nights,
is worthy of all else from you.
And he who has deserved to drink
from the ocean of life
deserves to fill his cup from your little stream.
And what desert greater shall there be,
than that which lies in the courage and the confidence,
nay the charity, or receiving?
And who are you that men should rend
their bosom and unveil their pride,
that you may see their worth naked
and their pride unabashed?
See first that you yourself deserve to be a giver,
and an instrument of giving.
For in truth
it is life that gives unto life—
while you, who deem yourself a giver,
are but a witness.
– Khalil Gibran, The Prophet
By the time she had finished unburdening herself, someone had turned off the moon.
– Gabriel García Márquez
When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.
– William Least Heat-Moon
There is no greater wonder than to range the starry heights, to leave the earth’s dull regions, to ride the clouds, to stand on Atlas’ shoulders, and see, far off, far down, the little figures wandering here and there, devoid of reason, anxious, in fear of death, and so advise them, and so make fate an open book.
– Pythagoras, Ovid, Metamorphoses
All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perception and arbitrary values.
– Marshall McLuhan
I advance slowly, a dead man, and my vision, no longer my own, is nothing now: it is merely that of a human animal who unwittingly inherited Greek culture, Roman order, Christian morality and all the other illusions that make up the civilization in which I live and feel.
– Fernando Pessoa
That, in my opinion, was the most diabolical aspect of those old-time big brains: They would tell their owners, in effect, ‘Here is a crazy thing we could actually do, probably, but we would never do it, of course. It’s just fun to think about.’ And then, as though in trances, the people would really do it–have slaves fight each other to death in the Colosseum, or burn people alive in the public square for holding opinions which were locally unpopular, or build factories whose only purpose was to kill people in industrial quantities, or to blow up whole cities, and on and on.
– Kurt Vonnegut, Galápagos
I consider it my sacred duty
to break the rules.
A broken rule is the open gate
to a wilder meadow.
I smoked an Arturo Fuentes cheroot
with the Buddha.
Forgive me.
Asked if he had any rules.
He said, just one.
Vow to be healed by your tears.
Then he opened up to me about his sadness,
admitted he had to come back
because he was lonely.
Maybe as Anthony Bourdain.
Maybe Dolly Parton.
I made a bourbon smoothie
and shared it with Jesus.
Asked if he had any rules.
He said, just one.
Call me brother, not Lord.
Cucumber, mint, and kale
with a shot of Wild Turkey,
forgive me, it was delicious.
A broken rule is the open gate
to a deeper rule, unwritten
and harder to disobey.
The rules of the body
lead to the rules of the soul.
Like the one that says,
love for no reason.
The one that says,
make friends with the brokenhearted.
The one that says, forgive yourself
again and again.
So I discover the rules I cannot break
by breaking the ones
I can.
– Fred LaMotte
Keep in mind, the news media are not independent; they are a sort of bulletin board and public relations firm for the ruling class-the people who run things.
Those who decide what news you will or will not hear are paid by, and tolerated purely at the whim of, those who hold economic power. If the parent corporation doesn’t want you to know something, it won’t be on the news.
Period. Or, at the very least, it will be slanted to suit them, and then rarely followed up.
– George Carlin
Loving comes sideways
with lightning and laughter,
with music and mayhem,
with midnights and moons.
Sweet medicine weaves it.
Death won’t deceive it.
But whimsy relieves it
with geysers and goons.
Old porcupiners
know how to pucker
into love slowly
with all of its moods,
With sharks and shanachies,
love comes to dinner.
Dispenses with chitchat
and makes you the food.
– George Gorman
A library should fill our leisure with adventure. It is a refuge from the commonplace and the dull, a sanctuary where all the trials, the tribulations, and the boredoms of the outer world are forbidden.
– E. Norman Torry, Round My Library Fire
My Criminal Notebook
by Alberto Rios
I am stealing things All the time.
I steal what I can from everywhere,
The light, the air, The music that matters most to me.
I carry them away neatly, invisible in word
Valises, inside unfathomable
Thoughts, attached to the magnet
Harvest of a song I’m singing-nobody,
Nobody is the wiser- I carry everything away with me
Using rhyme dollies and spelling knots.
The police have not caught on.
But I am at large,
Unwieldy, and unstoppable.
I walk freely
Every day, anywhere, all the time
In spite of having stolen
Horses and kisses-the stars themselves,
More than one, more than once.
I steal, I steal,
I have always stolen.
Be careful of me. When you see me,
Speak quietly and do little.
Do not let me notice you.
Get away
If you want to be safe.
Get away.
The oppressor would not be so strong if he did not have accomplices among the oppressed.
– Simone de Beauvoir
Loving comes sideways
with lightning and laughter,
with music and mayhem,
with midnights and moons.
Sweet medicine weaves it.
Death won’t deceive it.
But whimsy relieves it
with geysers and goons.
Old porcupiners
know how to pucker
into love slowly
with all of its moods,
With sharks and shanachies,
love comes to dinner.
Dispenses with chitchat
and makes you the food.
– George Gorman
When it comes to engendering the Bodhisattva attitude, goodwill is more helpful than ill-will. So as a practitioner, we are advised to cultivate the attitude of goodwill as much as possible and to diminish and reduce our ill-will. Why? Because when we become used to an attitude, sooner or later it manifests; sooner or later, it expresses itself not only in words, but in actions as well. If we express goodwill, it immediately helps others, and indirectly, sooner or later, that helps us. On the other hand, ill-will immediately hurts others and indirectly hurts us as well. Where do ill-will and goodwill spring from? Ill-will comes from regarding ourselves as being most important and goodwill comes from regarding others as most important.
– H.E. Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche
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
The commentary of Zurchungpa’s Testament.
On Useless Things
you are worth so much more than sent emails & crossed off to-do lists.
– Blythe Baird
If we stayed with a careful consideration of history, with the ways that the world upsets binary formulations, it’s not quite the case that light chases out darkness. There’s something ‘queer’ here that disrupts convenient notions of victory and success – gently urging us towards other kinds of futures. Watch my talk at the Aspen Action Forum last month.
– Bayo Akomolafe
The imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere.
– Terence McKenna
A complex is cluster of energy in the unconscious, charged by historic events, reinforced through repetition, embodying a fragment of our personality, and generating a programmed response and an implicit set of expectations.
– James Hollis
The prophecy will always be that it’s time for the divine to take the world back.
– Nika Solé
The spiritual warfare and agenda against the people is real, but the divine ones among us are much realer.
– Nika Solé
A man lives in slavery without meditation because he lives unconsciously. He lives like a robot.
Meditation starts changing you: it transforms your unconsciousness into consciousness. It changes your darkness into light.
– Osho
If you give freely, there will always be more. This is a radical proposition that runs so contrary to human nature, or at least to my nature, that I personally keep trying to find loopholes in it.
– Anne Lamott
Nature is itself always a sanatorium. If it can cure nothing else, it can cure man of megalomania. Man has to be “put in his place,” and he is always put in his place against nature’s background.
There is, too, the silence of the mountains, and that silence is therapeutic —the silent peaks, the silent rocks, the silent trees, all silent and all majestic. Every good mountain with an enclosing gesture is a sanatorium. …
… I do believe in the spiritual, healing properties of grand, old trees and mountain resorts, not for curing a fractured shoulder-bone or an infected skin, but for curing the ambitions of the flesh and diseases of the soul.
– Lin Yutang
The whales turn and glisten, plunge
and sound and rise again,
Hanging over subtly darkening deeps
Flowing like breathing planets
in the sparkling whorls of
living light
– Gary Snyder
Meditation becomes both a refuge and a training: a refuge into being, and a training into doing.
– Martine Batchelor
Equanimity arises when we renounce control—or, more accurately, when we renounce the illusion of control.
– Christopher Willard
Cure yourself of your nostalgias, of the childish obsession with the beginning and the end of time. Eternity, that dead duration—only the weak are concerned with such things. Let the moment do its work, let it reabsorb your dreams.
– Emil Cioran
It’s on its own, not friends with the other houses. I shall pretend it’s mine, and that I live there alone. .. I shall have a sword, like Peter Pan, and fight, if anyone comes.
– Daphne du Maurier
(On the red house she imagined for herself at the age of 5)
When universities eliminate all the creative writing departments, imagine what would be possible. Poetry intensives at national parks. Novel camps inside abandoned strip malls we rent for a weekend. Essay writing at the club. No faculty meetings ever! No grades! No paperwork!
– Jake Skeets
Creative attention means really giving our attention to what does not exist.
– Simone Weil
There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
– William Shakespeare
I open the crumbled balls of poetry,
spread them on my desk,
wish the words into sparrows.
– john zbigniew guzlowski
Surrealism refused to face the problem of ontology and thus ended in macabre impotence.
– Eugene Jolas, French Poetry and the Revival of Mysticism
Call yourself out, but love yourself through it.
– Lalah Delia
May we sow seeds of LOVE, not fear, into our children.
– Lynn Dailey
Just like a low resting heart rate is the byproduct of intense exercise, low anxiety is the byproduct of intense self-examination.
– Naval Ravikant
Ghosting
How cavalier
people are-
with language
and with silence.
Any ghost will
tell you-
the last thing
we mean
to do
is leave you.
– Andrea Cohen
And naturally, everything they tell about in books can happen in real life, but not in the same way. It is to this way of happening that I clung so tightly.
– Jean Paul Sartre
Poetry is a soul inaugurating a form.
– Pierre-Jean Jouve
THINGS OF AUGUST
by Wallace Stevens
These locusts by day, these crickets by night
Are the instruments on which to play
Of an old and disused ambit of the soul
Or of a new aspect, bright in discovery-
A disused ambit of the spirit’s way,
The sort of thing that August crooners sing,
By a pure fountain, that was a ghost, and is,
Under the sun-slides of a sloping mountain;
Or else a new aspect, say the spirit’s sex,
Its attitudes, its answers to attitudes
And the sex of its voices, as the voice of one
Meets nakedly another’s naked voice.
Nothing is lost, loud locusts. No note fails.
These sounds are long in the living of the ear.
The honky-tonk out of the somnolent grasses
Is a memorizing, a trying out, to keep.
Sometimes I wish I’d kept a diary. I love diaries. I wrote the books instead, I suppose.
– Jane Gardam
The perspective of love doesn’t leave anybody out.
– Adyashanti
Ever since I read about how RFJ Jr. had literal brain worms, and how eating pork is what can cause those brain worms, I’ve stopped eating pork again because holy shit Jews and Muslims both got this one right
– Talia Ringer
Evil isn’t hard to comprehend, it is nothing
but unhappiness
In its most successful disguise.
– Franz Wright
clean running water
and a roof overhead
What luxuries
these simple things
this simple life
– Voima Oy
it’s weird to have a sibling. like some guy from the same house who experienced everything totally differently from you.
– roxy demento
I’ve started a new poetic movement called The New Passion, & if you think I’m kidding, expand this whole tweet:
What is The New Passion? A poetics that turns away from cold irony but turns toward craft, especially rhythmic craft, which is the basis of our breath and being. A poetics that fears no charge of sentimentality, for it knows that the line between sentimentality and life-saving clarity is razor-thin, and the poet must risk it. A poetics that rejects the disingenuous self-deprecation that is just another form of the narcissism that expects the reader to lean in. A poetics that leans toward the reader, that knows it must earn the reader. Earn. A poetics that knows “passion” is suffering and joy, ancient and new, and that poetry must renew itself as it has always done: by recovering a radical belief in the other. By not infantilizing the reader into a collection of fears, taboos, accepted truths. A poetics that knows the poem is a moral organism and that it should be held accountable for what it tries to do, but that it should try to do it. That no imagining is a crime if it is done well. With impossible compassion.
Because the poet’s work is to fail splendidly in the attempt at the impossible: the poem that speaks to all. Because a disdain for the “common” reader is merely a fear of what’s common in you, and your task as a poet is to say what’s common, extraordinarily.
Because between the art that is willfully obscure (which comes from fear of being seen) and the art that is simply craftless (which comes from fear of not being seen), there is the art that tries, through a practice of craft so masterful that the craft becomes invisible, to communicate the infinite and common mystery of being alive, of being together and alone. Because the heart is not a formless thing. And every age must find the forms that make it, somehow, free.
Let us have a poetics that knows both craft and magic. Let us have a poetics that trades the nihilism and onanism of cleverness for the vision and urgency of wisdom. Because it risks belief in what’s least fashionable and most feared: wisdom. A poetics that knows the mark of a sick age, which has fallen in love with chaos, is its fear of wisdom and clarity, the ancient truths we have forgotten again and again, the forgetting of which has always led to more chaos.
We need a poetics that reaches out, with radical clarity, for the democratic vision of art, a vision which has despite all protest to the contrary been largely abandoned by the institutionalization and “professionalizing” of poetry. Because clarity is not simplicity. It is mystery. Mystery. And, as Lorca once said, “only mystery lets us live.”
There are so many brilliant poets working right now, moving in this direction. You know them when you read them. You know them by what their poems actually do to you, apart from what anyone tells you a poem should do or be. Read poets like that. Share their works. Celebrate them.
They are the keepers of the ancient thing, carriers of the fire; they are believers in that sacred place where craft and magic are one, and they are just wild and wise enough to seek it.
– Joseph Fasano
I know it’s statistically unlikely that my specific friends are The Best People There Are, but good luck convincing me otherwise.
– River Kenna
You don’t even have to see the future to be a seer. You just have to see reality as it is and not how they’ve distorted it to be.
– Nika Solé
where master mixologists serve up hand-crafted cocktails— I will not be going.
– todd dillard
I can give you a six-word formula for success: Think things through – then follow through.
– Edward Rickenbacker
To those who evaded the green art of dying,
those who loped
over the eastern hills to live chronicle,
living the sunlight,
condolences.
– Tares Oburumu
LETHARGY
It smiles to see me
Still in my bathrobe.
It sits in my lap And will not let me rise.
Now it is kissing my eyes.
Arms enfold me, arms
Pale with a thick down.
It seems I am falling asleep
To the sound of a story
Being read me.
This is the story.
Weeks have passed
Since first I lifted my hand
To set it down.
– Donald Justice
There is real magic in enthusiasm. It spells the difference between mediocrity and accomplishment.
– Norman Vincent Peale
Sometimes it is not enough to do our best; we must do what is required.
– Winston Churchill
You’d have longer
lines if you wrote
smaller,
the old monk told
the poet.
– The Old Monk
Those who think
they know are
half-full barrels,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
Knowing and
not knowing
takes real talent,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
The Jewish experience was similar to the Palestinian experience, but not taboo. Over time, she had built up what she described as a “totally artificial identity” into which she could put all her pain.
– Sarah El Bulbeisi
You know, once they’re declaring a renaissance, my God, that means that some dark age will be fast upon us.
– Tobias Wolff
Counterpublics are not magically and automatically realized through disidentifications, but they are suggested, rehearsed, and articulated.
– Jose Esteban Munoz
Literature – even though people usually study it author by author – is always a dialog amongst many voices which intersect and reply to each other within literature and outside it.
– Italo Calvino
Everything in the universe is thought in material form. The spirit could not create matter as anything different from itself, for it had only itself as the tissue or material with which to build the cosmos.
– Paramahansa Yogananda
Tears, sorrow, and disappointment are bitter, but wisdom is the comforter in all psychic suffering.
– C.G. Jung
If I accept the fact that a god is absolute and beyond all human experiences, he leaves me cold. I do not affect him, nor does he affect me. But if I know that a god is a powerful impulse in my soul, at once I must concern myself with him, for then he can become important.
– C.G. Jung
You have to explain that the darkness is not a stain she can erase. Rather, it’s shade and shadow, a stranglehold.
– Andrea Cohen, Explanation (Hiroshima)
During the dry years, people forgot about the rich years, and when the wet years came back, they lost all memory of the dry years. It’s always been that way.
– John Steinbeck
Sometimes you have to go down the path of life to fully understand certain people and timelines that have existed prior. It can take years for you to get to that ‘I can see you now.’
– Nika Solé
The most powerful ones in the room are those who stand completely solid in who they are as a person. Not what or who they know. Not their accomplishments. But who they are. The real ones.
– Nika Solé
In the even more congested times that await us, literature must aim at the maximum concentration of poetry and of thought.
– Italo Calvino
We have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love and the community to produce a kind of human paradise. But we are led by the least among us – the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary.
– Terence McKenna
On this summer night
All the household lies asleep,
And in the doorway,
For once open after dark,
Stands the moon, brilliant, cloudless.
– Jusammi Chikako
I am no longer afraid of time, even if I am baffled and dismayed by what it is so often doing to me and my friends. We can’t defeat time, but we can embrace it. So much shrinks as you get older–opportunities, mobility, memory–but your soul begins to expand. You are forced, or at least I have been forced, to look inward, to reflect, and I’m quite happy with it. I don’t think I’m resigned to age and limitation, but I do think I’m able to find the blessings within it. I wasn’t always good at finding the blessings, and age has taught me that. There’s a lesson and a blessing everywhere, and solitude is a treasure.
– John Gielgud
Sometimes while I ride the subway I try to look at each person and imagine what they look like to someone who is totally in love with them. I think everyone has had someone look at them that way, whether it was a lover, or a parent, or a friend, whether they know it or not. It’s a wonderful thing, to look at someone to whom I would never be attracted and think about what looking at them feels like to someone who is devouring every part of their image, who has invisible strings that are connected to this person tied to every part of their body. I think this fun pastime is a way of cultivating compassion. It feels good to think about people that way, and to use that part of my mind that I think is traditionally reserved for a tiny portion of people I’ll meet in my life to appreciate the general public. I wish I thought about people like this more often. I think it’s the opposite of what our culture teaches us to do. We prefer to pick people apart to find their flaws. Cultivating these feelings of love or appreciation for random people, and even for people I don’t like, makes me a more forgiving and appreciative person toward myself and people I love. Also, it’s just a really excellent pastime.
– Dean Spade, For Lovers and Fighters
I don’t go out there to impress musicians, I go out there to give the public a great time and distract them from whatever their problems are.
– Tommy Emmanuel
Your niche will be shaped by three things: your gifts, your wounds and your nature. Your gifts will give the shape of your work.
Your wounds will provide the direction of it. Your nature will give the tone to it.
– Tad Hargrave
FLIRTATION
In a corner at the cafe. Two of them because it takes two. All parry now, no thrust. The waiters know how to leave them alone. Outside, waiting to be seated: Illness, Boredom, Sorrow. As sure of themselves as ever.
Loneliness already seated, dining with a group. For the man and woman, not much of an investment yet. Their currency disposable: hope & charm. Layers of it before the heart will be exposed. Their souls, at this stage, not in the vicinity. A tilt of the head, the puffing up, this little dance-they could be goats or birds. Too soon to be a story, just sequences. The future occurring. The eros of moving into it while keeping it at bay. The weight of survival, the daily trivia, all suspended.
Between them, the unknown almost palpable now. Look, Sorrow’s just been let in and given its favorite table at the far end of the room. I’s taking off its cloak. They’ll not see it for a while.
– Stephen Dunn
While fantasizing has played an integral part in my development as a human, in my ability to self-soothe as a child, in identifying my dreams and certain paths that feel most aligned, and in helping me to overcome obstacles, I’m not so sure l want to continue using it so often.
Maybe I can keep it in my back pocket and pull it out when I really need it. Maybe I can just know it’s there, but not be so attached to it.
Maybe I can let go of my fantasies, and create space for life to flow, and who knows, maybe it’ll turn out better than I imagine…
– Eliza Pedder
drink lots of water
otherwise not much to it
becoming a cloud
– clark strand
I’m really not sure what you measure
achievement with. I was brought up
with people who just thought you
were all right, the way you were,
and that was so valuable to me
– Eddi Reader
I will participate in the game. It’s a wonderful, wonderful opera–except that it hurts.
– Joseph Campbell
Consciousness must essentially cover an interval of time; for if it did not, we could gain no knowledge of time, and not merely no veracious cognition of it, but no conception whatever.
– Charles Sanders Peirce, The Law of Mind
Dissociation involves compartmentalizing mental contents, often leading to memory repression.
– Brad Schipke
The old appeals to racial, sexual, and religious chauvinism, and to rabid nationalist fervor, are beginning not to work. A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet.
– Carl Sagan
There is an infinite, changeless reality supporting the world of change. This same reality lies at the core of every human being. The purpose of life is to discover this reality experientially, that is, to realize God while here on earth.
– Brandy Anderson
The psychological meaning of the Last Judgment: Sooner or later the individual has to take responsibility for all repressed contents. You do not get away with anything, in the long run…. In the short run, yes, but in the long run, no.
– Edward Edinger
At best love is a gift that changes in time from enchantment, wildness, blindness, rage, and fury into sweet companionship. At worst it ruins your life.
– Lynn Freed
You’re a language I’m no longer fluent in but still remember how to read.
– Ashe Vernon
A novel should reflect its society and its circumstances.
– Penelope Lively
Friends are as companions on a journey, who ought to aid each other to persevere in the road to a happier life.
– Pythagoras
The man who does more than he is paid for will soon be paid for more than he does.
– Napoleon Hill
Too much stress cannot be laid on the importance of frequent contemplation of the mental image, coupled with unwavering faith and devout gratitude. This is the process by which the impression is given to the Formless, and the creative forces set in motion.
– Emmet Fox
Best way to improve a song: Play it in front of an audience. Let the audience teach you.
– Dan Wilson
The ability to sit down with another person and talk for hours, about anything and everything, is more attractive to me than anything else.
– Koi Fresco
Good questions outrank easy answers.
– Paul Samuelson
Read a thousand books and your words will flow like a river.
– Virginia Woolf
We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Perhaps inner peace can only be ours if we learn to love and live with our questions, rather than trying to silence them with answers.
– Patty de Llosa
It is not a fragrant world.
– Raymond Chandler
Jung believed synchronicities reveal the hidden threads that weave our reality together. Are you noticing them?
– tonyquid17@
London really is a city that sleeps.
– Arielle Dundas
He alone did not obey the law of immutability in the enchanted, sleeping castle.
– Leo Tolstoy
Spiritual maturity is giving up the illusion that I can ever be alone.
– Tad Dunne
Laugh at yourself first before anyone else can.
– Elsa Maxwell
XL
I was four but I turned four hundred maybe,
Encountering the ancient dampish feel
Of a clay floor. May four thousand even.
Anyhow, there it was. Milk poured for cats
In a rank puddle-place, splash-darkened mould
Around the terracotta water-crock.
Ground of being. Body’s deep obedience
To all its shifting tenses. A half-door
Opening directly into starlight.
Out of that earth house I inherited
A stack of singular, cold memory-weights
To load me, hand and foot, in the scale of things.
XLII
Heather and kesh and turf stacks reappear
Summer by summer still, grasshoppers and all,
The same yet rarer: fields of the nearly blessed
Where gaunt ones in their shirt-sleeves stooped and dug
Or stood alone at dusk surveying bog-banks –
Apparitions now, yet active still
And territorial, still sure of their ground,
Still interested, not knowing how far
The country of the shades has been pushed back,
How long the lark has stopped outside these fields
And only seems unstoppable to them
Caught like a far hill in a freak of sunshine.
XLV
For certain ones what was written may come true:
They shall live on in the distance
At the mouths of rivers.
For our ones, no. They will re-enter
Dryness that was heaven on earth to them,
Happy to eat the scones baked out of clay.
For some, perhaps, the delta’s reed beds
And cold bright-footed seabirds always wheeling.
For our ones, snuff
And hob-soot and the heat off ashes.
And a judge who comes between them and the sun
In a pillar of radiant house dust.
XLVI
Mountain air from the mountain up behind;
Out front, the end-of-summer, stone-walled fields;
And in a slated house the fiddle going
Like a flat stone skimmed at sunset
Or the irrevocable slipstream of flat earth
Still fleeing behind space.
Was music once a proof of God’s existence?
As long as it admits things beyond measure,
That supposition stands.
So let the ear attend like a farmhouse window
In placid light, where the extravagant
Passed once under full sail into the longed-for.
XLVIII
Strange how things in the offing, once they’re sensed,
Convert to things foreknown;
And how what’s come upon is manifest
Only in light of what has been gone through.
Seventh heaven may be
The whole truth of a sixth sense come to pass.
At any rate, when light breaks over me
The way it did on the road beyond Coleraine
Where wind got saltier, the sky more hurried
And silver lamé shivered on the Bann
Out in mid-channel between the painted poles,
That day I’ll be in step with what escaped me.
– Seamus Heaney, Squarings
The Singer’s House
When they said Carrickfergus I could hear
The frosty echo of saltminers’ picks.
I imagined it, chambered and glinting,
a township built of light.
What do we say any more
to conjure the salt of our earth?
So much comes and is gone
that should be crystal and kept
and amicable weathers
that bring up the grain of things,
their tang of season and store,
are all the packing we’ll get.
So I say to myself Gweebarra
and its music hits off the place
like water hitting off granite.
I see the glittering sound
framed in your window,
knives and forks set on oilcloth,
and the seals’ heads, suddenly outlined,
scanning everything.
People here used to believe
that drowned souls lived in the seals.
At spring tides they might change shape.
They loved music and swam in for a singer
who might stand at the end of summer
in the mouth of a whitewashed turf-shed
his shoulder to the jamb, his song
a rowboat far out in evening.
When I came here first you were always singing,
a hint of the clip of the pick
in our winnowing climb and attack.
Raise it again, man. We still believe what we hear.
– Seamus Heaney, Field Work
Realize that silence comes from your heart and not the absence of talk.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
wildflower –
maybe in some way
it picked me
– Herb Tate
Even when [only] flowers were between us / there were distances.
– Javed Akhta
Profit and fame aren’t worth extolling
to an untroubled solitary mountain monk
weeds of delusion don’t grow in the mind
where flowers of wisdom bloom instead
bamboo shoots and fiddleheads blanket the slopes
dust seldom falls on moss-covered ground
I was over thirty when I first arrived
how many sunsets have turned my windows red
I was a Zen monk who didn’t know Zen
so I chose the woods for the years I had left
a robe made of patches over my body
a belt of bamboo around my waist
mountains and streams explain the Patriarch’s meaning
– Stonehouse
Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.
– Virginia Woolf
They might not need me; but they might.
I’ll let my head be just in sight;
A smile as small as mine might be
Precisely their necessity.
– Emily Dickinson
Along a parabola life like a rocket flies, Mainly in darkness, now and then on a rainbow…
– Andrei Voznesensky
What the herd hates most is the one who thinks differently; it is not so much the opinion itself, but the audacity of wanting to think for themselves, something that they do not know how to do.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
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
Do I, then, belong to the heavens?
Why, if not so, should the heavens
Fix me thus with their ceaseless blue stare,
Luring me on, and my mind, higher
Ever higher, up into the sky,
Drawing me ceaselessly up
To heights far, far above the human?
– Yukio Mishima
Training- training is everything; training is all there is to a person. We speak of nature; it is folly; there is no such thing as nature; what we call by that misleading name is merely heredity and training. We have no thoughts of our own, no opinions of our own; they are transmitted to us, trained into us.
– Mark Twain
Slow is often overlooked in rushed culture. Its’ oracle is not acknowledged, properly understood, or respected. The slow breath. A slow first kiss. Slowly disrobing in front of a lover. Slow lovemaking. Slow to get up out of a warm bed. Slow stretching. Slow yoga. Slow bathing. Slow and steady. Slowly walking through an airport to catch a flight. Slow decision-making. Slow crockpot cooking. Slow eating. Slow creativity. The pause before we speak. When we give ourselves (our cells) permission to slow down, our whole system is met in a magical place where regeneration and rejuvenation naturally begin to occur without any effort from us.
– India Ame’ye
Once freedom lights its beacon in a man’s heart, the gods are powerless against him.
– Jean-Paul Sartre
The idea of expansion has to be properly understood. There can be no expansion except through love. In love we come out of our little ego. But this love has to be impersonal. I can speak to you about it by using the Vedic image of the sun, which radiates energy and thereby illuminates, loves, and creates. This is the essence of its expansion. It is not attached to anything, yet it attracts everything to it in its kingdom of light. Expansion does not mean doing something; it means being and becoming. The capacity to do flows spontaneously from the capacity to be.
– Shri Anirvan
Why does one write, if not to put one’s pieces together? From the moment we enter school or church, education chops us into pieces: it teaches us to divorce soul from body and mind from heart. The fishermen of the Colombian coast must be learned doctors of ethics and morality, for they invented the word sentipensante, feeling-thinking, to define language that speaks the truth.
– Eduardo Galeano
The body / remains a house unaware of its rooms.
– Maggie Smith
Life is made up of a collection of moments that are not ours to keep. The pain we encounter throughout our days spent on this earth comes from the illusion that some moments can be held onto.
Clinging to people and experiences that were never ours in the first place is what causes us to miss out on the beauty of the miracle that is the now. All of this is yours, yet none of it is. How could it be? Look around you. Everything is fleeting.
To love and let go, love and let go, love and let go…it’s the single most important thing we can learn in this lifetime.
– Rachel Brathen
For he had gone alone into the island / And brought back the whole thing.
– Seamus Heaney
We began engaging the secret kinesis of things by extending our feeling sense into objects in a room but what happens if we extend our awareness in a new direction? What happens if we leave the human world entirely and enter the wildness of the world? What happens if we use this capacity for nonphysical touching out there? What happens when we look closely at some part of the natural world and ask ourselves, “How does it feel?”
Try it yourself now and find out.
For instance, you might go into your yard or take a walk in a park. Let yourself wander, just looking at this and that, until something catches your attention—a large tree perhaps. Stop and let yourself really look at it and then, when you are really immersed in seeing it, ask yourself, “how does it feel?”
In that tiny moment of time a unique feeling tone will emerge into your awareness, just as it did before. But, if you pay close attention, you will notice that there is a difference. There is a livingness to it, which the pen or cup or desk did not have (or perhaps did not have as much). And that livingness itself has a particular feeling to it. There is a secret kinesis to the natural world and it is perhaps the most important secret kinesis of all.
– Stephen Harrod Buhner, Ensouling Language
Try another way of looking.
Try you looking and the whole universe seeing.
– Rumi
Nurturing
Embrace the two souls,
In harmony they become eternal.
Regulate your Qi to soften the body,
Return your energy system to a congenital state,
Wipe dust from the hidden mirror,
To cleanse the Heart-Mind.
Interact with people as do Heaven and Earth.
Achieve your state of Wu-Wei.
Can you remain still and empty,
While life struggles around you?
As you achieve transcendent comprehension,
Can you remain in serene emptiness,
Free from consciousness?
Dao gives birth to the myriad things,
Yet it does not own them.
To lead others without dominating
Is the most profound virtue.
– Lao Tzu, Dao De Ching, (trans. Stephen Mitchell)
Silence, you know, is something that can’t be censored. And there are circumstances in which silence becomes subversive. That’s why they fill it with noise all the while.
– John Berger
My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself.
– George Bernard Shaw
Nostalgia is not for the God we are missing, it is the nostalgia for ourselves who are not enough. We miss our impossible grandeur—my unreachable present is my paradise lost.
– Clarice Lispector
What I had learned from Buddhism was that I did not have to know myself analytically as much as I had to tolerate not knowing.
– Mark Epstein
others, not for ourselves. We must respect those who sacrifice themselves in the public service, load them with honours, and pity them for allowing, as they must, the inevitable compromise; but for ourselves let us fly fame, honour, and all offices that put us under an obligation to others. Let us simmer over our incalculable cauldron, our enthralling confusion, our hotch-potch of impulses, our perpetual miracle – for the soul throws up wonders every second. Movement and change are the essence of our being; rigidity is death; conformity is death: let us say what comes into our heads, repeat ourselves, contradict ourselves, fling out the wildest nonsense, and follow the most fantastic fancies without caring what the world does or thinks or says. For nothing matters except life; and, of course, order.
– Virginia Woolf
The word “myth” comes from the ancient word “mythos” meaning word. Both ‘logos’ and ‘mythos’ mean ‘word’. While logos refers to rational thinking, mythos describes poetic or intuitive thinking.
– Mariann Burke
To have opinions is to sell out to yourself. To have no opinion is to
exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet.
– Fernando Pessoa
If you resist sadness, you are always sad. If you resist suffering, you are always suffering. If you resist confusion, you are always confused. We think that we resist certain states because they are there, but actually they are there because we resist them.
– Adyashanti
I struggled with some demons / They were middle class and tame.\
– Leonard Cohen, You Want It Darker
Your laughter frees me and lends me wings.
– Miguel Hernández
To tell the truth about oneself, to discover oneself near at hand, is not easy.
– Virginia Woolf
Spiritually we are either teaching a lesson, learning a lesson, or functioning as the object by which a lesson will be taught.
– Iyanla Vanzant
Humility is an under-rated systems change skill.
– Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
Substance preys upon substance. As in the droplet monad swallows monad, so in the vast of Space do spheres consume each other. Stars give being to worlds and devour them; planets assimilate their own moons. All is a ravening that never ends but to recommence.
– Lafcadio Hearn
I’M SEARCHING, I’M SEARCHING. I’M trying to understand. Trying to give what I’ve lived to some- body else and I don’t know to whom, but I don’t want to keep what I lived. I don’t know what to do with what I lived, I’m afraid of that profound disorder. I don’t trust what happened to me. Did something happen to me that I, because I didn’t know how to live it, lived as something else? That’s what I’d like to call disorganization, and I’d have the confidence to ven- ture on, because I would know where to return afterward: to the previous organization. I’d rather call it disorganization be- cause I don’t want to confirm myself in what I lived — in the confirmation of me I would lose the world as I had it, and I know I don’t have the fortitude for another.
– Clarice Lispector
Whenever you are offended, understand that you are complicit in taking offense.
– Epictetus
All human wisdom is contained in these two words, Wait and Hope.
– Alexandre Dumas
We were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isn’t big enough for all that wanting. I don’t know. I don’t know anything.
– John Updike
It is so much more fun to be a little richer than you were yesterday, than merely to be rich.
– Alice Wellington Rollins
There is a kind of sadness that comes from knowing too much, from seeing the world as it truly is. It is the sadness of understanding that life is not a grand adventure, but a series of small, insignificant moments, that love is not a fairy tale, but a fragile, fleeting emotion, that happiness is not a permanent state, but a rare, fleeting glimpse of something we can never hold onto. And in that understanding, there is a profound loneliness, a sense of being cut off from the world, from other people, from oneself.
– Virginia Woolf
I’m very pleased to think that there are people with whom I agree on some issues and not others. I don’t want a world in which we all agree. I want a world in which people feel that they have the standing and confidence to feel that they can disagree. I’m interested in why people think as they do.
– Mary Beard
Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible.
– C.S. Lewis
Reciprocity underlies everything from basic human kindness to the most complex trade systems. At its core, reciprocity is the simple idea of treating others as they treat us—giving what we get. From this simple principle grows a vast web of social interactions and expectations that shapes nearly every aspect of our lives.
Many people seem to expect the world to hand them things without effort. This is a poor strategy because it doesn’t align with the human behavior you can observe around you every day. Reciprocation teaches us that if you give people cynicism and curtness or nothing at all, you are likely to receive the same. But if you give people an opportunity and the benefit of the doubt, you will often be on the receiving end of the same behavior.
Become what you want to see in the world, and the world will return it to you. If you want an amazing relationship with your partner, be an amazing partner. If you want people to be thoughtful and kind to you, be thoughtful and kind to them. If you want people to listen to you, listen to them. The best way to achieve success is to deserve success. Small changes in your actions change your entire world.
One of the biggest misperceptions about reciprocity is that people should sit around waiting for others to go first rather than unlocking the power of reciprocity in their favor by going positive and going first without expectation.
Reciprocity reminds us that our actions tend to come back on us. It’s an important reminder that we are part of the world, and thus our actions do not happen in isolation but are instead part of an interconnected web of effects.
– Shane Parrish
The River
by Manuel José Othón
translated from the Spanish by Alice Stone Blackwell
With graceful waves, ye waters, frolic free;
Uplift your liquid songs, ye eddies bright,
And you, loquacious bubblings, day and night,
Hold converse with the wind and leaves in glee!
O’er the deep cut, ye jets, gush sportively.
And rend yourselves to foamy tatters white,
And dash on boulders curved and rocks upright,
Golconda’s pearls and diamonds rich to see!
I am your sire, the River. Lo, my hair
Is moonbeams pale: of yon cerulean sky
Mine eyes are mirrors, as I sweep along.
Of molten spray is my forehead fair;
Transparent mosses for my beard have I;
The laughter of the Naiads’ is my song.
On the spiritual path, it’s not just about swallowing your emotions and traveling the Earth smiling and saying “love and light” to the people you meet. It’s also not neatly creating a setting for your social media, where you pose in a yoga position with meditation music in the background.
To be on a spiritual path means getting to know all parts of yourself, light and dark, in order to heal what hurts. It means working on the ego and learned behaviors.
It’s a deep dive into your soul. It’s about being raw and vulnerable, and speaking your truth. It’s about respect not only for yourself but for every living being. You can feel uncomfortable sometimes, but that’s okay, you defeat years of programming and heal every part of your soul. This is brave. You can feel lonely, you’re awake while everyone around you is still sleeping.
That’s ok, let them sleep, keep moving, follow your path and shine like the divine being that you are.
– Jean Francois Brabant
Travelling women will inevitably encounter many gateways, portals or tenuous partings in the shadowy fabric of worlds. To reach such a threshold is one thing; to work out a way through is another matter, requiring determination, daring, and some personal act of magic.
– Carolyn Hillyer, Weaver’s Oracle
The Earth listens and it hears; it has language; it has a soul. We are all part of its song of life. If we give thanks, if we allow ourselves to be human, if we attune to the Real, all creation will respond.
At this present time there is a hunger for direct inner experience, a need to reclaim our spiritual heritage. While our materialistic culture tries to keep our attention firmly in the physical world of the senses, many of us sense a longing to know this hidden mystery of what it means to be human. And so we are able to turn to the teachings and traditions that have been given to us, whether in yoga, Buddhist meditation, Sufi dhikr or other spiritual practices.
It is important to recognize the root of our longing, that we are no longer prepared to live in a purely physical world, but need the living presence of the spiritual. We need to know and be nourished by the invisible world that is within us and all around us. We need to reclaim the mystery and magic of being fully alive.
– Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
And I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more.
– Franz Kafka, The Castle
I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and the dragons of home under one’s skin, at the extreme corners of one’s eyes and possibly in the gristle of the earlobe.
– Maya Angelou
There are people who try to raise their souls like a man continually taking standing jumps in the hopes that, if he jumps higher every day, a time may come when he will no longer fall back but will go right up to the sky. Thus occupied he cannot look at the sky. We cannot take a single step toward heaven. It is not in our power to travel in a vertical direction. If however we look heavenward for a long time, God comes and takes us up. He raises us easily. As Aeschylus says, “There is no effort in what is divine.” There is an easiness in salvation which is more difficult to us than all our efforts.
In one of Grimm’s stories there is a competition between a giant and a little tailor to see which is the stronger. The giant throws a stone so high that it takes a very long time before it comes down again. The little tailor lets a bird fly and it does not come down at all. Anything without wings always comes down again in the end.
– Simone Weil
Now we have to get back the cosmos, and it can’t be done by a trick. The great range of responses that have fallen dead in us have to come to life again. It has taken two thousand years to kill them. Who knows how long it will take to bring them to life.
When I hear modern people complain of being lonely then I know what has happened. They have lost the cosmos. — It is nothing human and personal that we are short of. What we lack is cosmic life, the sun in us and the moon in us.
– D.H. Lawrence
When a man dies, he is like those who are being initiated into the mysteries. The one expression teleutan the other teleisthai correspond….. Our whole life is but a succession of wanderings, of painful courses, of long journeys by tortuous ways without outlet. At the moment of quitting it, fears, terrors, quiverings, mortal sweats, and a lethargic stupor, come over us and overwhelm us; but as soon as we are out of it pure spots and meadows receive us, with voices and dances and the solemnities of sacred words and holy sights. It is there that man, having become perfect and initiated–restored to liberty, really master of himself–celebrates crowned with myrtle the most august mysteries, and holds converse with just and pure souls.
– Harold R. Willoughby
A life well-lived is boring. When you live life, and I say this to my students all the time, if you live a life that’s exciting enough to be of interest to other people, it’s going to whip you. You’re going to be miserable. It’s exhausting to live that life. A life well-lived is a life that is boring and of service to others. It is not about you. As I’m fond of saying to my students, you go on stage, not to be seen. You go so you can see. You don’t make music to be heard. You make music so you can hear, so you can organize and have people still, and can tell you how broken their heart is, or how much joy they have, how much pain they have.
– Livingston Taylor
What is not built on love or truth will always collapse. This is one of the greatest teachings of the spiritual path.
– Nika Solé
Injustice governs the universe. Each being feeds on the agony of some other; the moments rush like vampires upon time’s anemia; the world is a receptacle of sobs. In this slaughterhouse, to fold one’s arms or to draw one’s sword are equally vain gestures.
– Emil Cioran
I love unions. I love them in the same way I love libraries and redwood groves. They are like churches: sacred. They are what make this country great.
– Anne Lamott
Imagine thinking self improvement is selfish, when it’s the single best thing you can do for yourself and every person around you.
– Nika Solé
The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience.
– Albert Camus
Ah, if you could really understand why we of all people need art . . . another kind of art, for artists only!
– Nietzsche
The rest of the year is bringing in a brand new era. The seers are in power now.
– Nika Solé
Symptoms have a meaning and they are not there randomly; we must ask the question, “What changes are being asked of me?”
– James Hollis
A feeling of aversion or attachment toward something is your clue that there’s work to be done.
– Ram Dass
My soul has almost always pulled me counter to culture, even the most enlightened aspects of it. At times I’ve thought I’d snap with that much tension. Instead, it’s held me to my true belonging, a creative dance with an unsayable wildness within and beyond.
– McCall Erickson
the fields and
ocean all green
early autumn
– Basho
The loneliness of mythlessness.
– Rollo May
You have to be extra particular about whose energy you get tangled into. The wrong connections will have you carrying other people’s stuff, thinking it’s yours.
– Nika Solé
The confused man, the negligent man, the reckless man, the lusty, obscene, boisterous, thoughtful, scrupulous, lying, diabolically truthful man that I am.
– Henry Miller
Streaming services employ the worst metadata. I can’t find anything. And I’m certain that’s on purpose. So we’re coerced into watching the proprietary “content” plastered across their home pages.
– Sommer Browning
does anyone know what to do about that thing where the more employed you get the less intellectual you get.
– Emily Zhou
All the months are crude experiments,
out of which the perfect September is made.
– Virginia Woolf
I’ve seen things you wouldn’t believe… sound landscapes shimmering off the shoulder of the universe… beats and rhythms that light up the night like meteors in the dark. All those moments captured, timeless and unforgettable…
– Alex Paterson
It was working men and women who made the 20th century the American century. It was the labor movement that helped secure so much of what we take for granted today.
– Barack Obama
A mature civilization is caught in an entropy trap from which escape is well nigh impossible. Because the available energy and resources can no longer maintain the existing level of complexity, the civilization begins to consume itself by borrowing from the future and feeding off the past, thereby preparing the way for an eventual implosion…
This is the tragedy of civilization: its very “greatness”—its panoply of wealth and power—turns against it and brings it down.
As Gibbon said, instead of asking why Rome fell, “we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long.”
– William Ophuls
Every individual needs revolution . . . and renewal, but not by forcing them upon his neighbors under the hypocritical cloak of Christian love or the sense of social responsibility or any of the other beautiful euphemisms for unconscious urges to personal power.
– C.G. Jung
Why would you let the time you live in
determine the size of your soul?
– Joseph Fasano
They don’t allow convicted felons to serve in the military, so why would we put one in charge of the military?
– Alex Cole
as kids we were taught that taking anything from the mini bar would bring financial ruin upon our family
– Marlow Stern
summer isn’t completely over, it will return, but there’s no way to know if you’ll still be here. so this seasonal ‘over’ always carries the potential of being an absolute ending.
– Anselm Kiefer
we must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.
– simone weil – gravity and grace
(trans. emma crawford)
Deep within our being is a place of peace, joy and knowing. It is a place called love.
– Iyanla Vanzant
We depend on incongruities and irregularities in the official narrative, so-called ‘spaceship moments,’ to confirm what we already know, namely that we’re alive in a substandard fiction that doesn’t add up.
– Isabel Waidner
The fields are white,
The laborers are few;
Yet say the idle,
There’s nothing to do.
– James Ephraim McGirt
Let your heart go out in spontaneous and immeasurable compassion. It is compassion that is the best protection; it is also, as the great masters of the past have always known, the source of all healing.
– Sogyal Rinpoche
It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?
– Henry David Thoreau
It’s going to be September now / For many years to come
– Leonard Cohen
September: redwings & fieldfares reach the shore of my mind.
– James Gilbert
In works of labor or of skill,
I would be busy too;
For Satan finds some mischief still
For idle hands to do.
– Isaac Watts
The artist prays by creating.
– Flannery O’Connor
I’ve decided to make up my mind
about nothing. To assume the water mask,
to finish my life disguised as a creek,
an eddy, joining at night the full,
sweet flow, to absorb the sky,
to swallow the heat and cold, the moon
and the stars, to swallow myself
in ceaseless flow.
– Jim Harrison, Cabin Poem
Following your own star means isolation, not knowing where to go, having to find out a completely new way for yourself instead of just going on the trodden path everybody else runs along.
– Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream
Sometimes the most powerful place to be, is out of the mix.
– Nika Solé
On the deepest level, change always involves the body. A new attitude means new perceptions, new feelings, and new muscular patterns. Psychological and physiological change go hand in hand.
– Kurtz and Prestera
Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it.
– Anne Lamott
I swear, many of y’all fuckers are too clever for your own good.
Try being a dumb simpleton and you’ll get a lot further, much faster.
Clever people make up problems where they don’t exist, because they aren’t wise enough to be curious and explore what has already been said on the subject.
Clever people are more interested in being recognized for their brilliance than in recognizing the brilliance that’s already here.
– @VinceFHorn
It should be easy, affordable, and common to go back to school or to take classes at any time at any age.
– D. A. Powell
You have to grow from the inside out. None can teach you, none can make you spiritual. There is no other teacher but your own soul.
– Swami Vivekananda
Your energy says far more about you than how smart you are or what you know. Anyone can memorize facts. Only the realest among us are purifying their energy.
– Nika Solé
Yes, it’s called kindness.
Instead of flagellating yourself & others out of a sense of lack & unworthiness–believing that you can turn yourself into a hyper-agent who isn’t ruffled by anything–you could instead recognize that we’re all basically good, and act accordingly.
– @VinceFHorn
My tunes often deal with a moral crisis. I often feel myself a part of such a crisis and try to relate it in song. There’s a line in a poem I wrote that sums this up perfectly: ‘My betrayals are so fresh they still come with explanations.’
– Leonard Cohen
To love friendship, it is not enough to know how to bear the other in mourning; one must love the future. And there is no more category for the future than that of the ‘perhaps’…
– Derrida
The fact is that being inside a whale is a very comfortable, cosy, homelike thought. The historical Jonah, if he can be so called, was glad enough to escape, but in imagination, in day-dream, countless people have envied him. It is, of course, quite obvious why. The whale’s belly is simply a womb big enough for an adult. There you are, in the dark, cushioned space that exactly fits you, with yards of blubber between yourself and reality, able to keep up an attitude of the completest indifference, no matter what HAPPENS. A storm that would sink all the battleships in the world would hardly reach you as an echo. Even the whale’s own movements would probably be imperceptible to you. He might be wallowing among the surface waves or shooting down into the blackness of the middle seas (a mile deep, according to Herman Melville), but you would never notice the difference. Short of being dead, it is the final, unsurpassable stage of irresponsibility. And however it may be with Anais Nin, there is no question that Miller himself is inside the whale. All his best and most characteristic passages are written from the angle of Jonah, a willing Jonah. Not that he is especially introverted-quite the contrary. In his case the whale happens to be transparent. Only he feels no impulse to alter or control the process that he is undergoing. He has performed the essential Jonah act of allowing himself to be swallowed, remaining passive, ACCEPTING.
– George Orwell
Let life live you for a while instead of trying to make yourself live life.
– Alan Watts
The popular mythology about the whale notwithstanding, the great fish that swallows Jonah is by no means an agent of destruction. The fish is what saves him from drowning in the sea. “The waters compassed me about, even to the soul: the depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head.” In the depth of that solitude, which is equally the depth of silence, as if in the refusal to speak there were an equal refusal to turn one’s face to the other (“Jonah rose up to flee from the presence of the Lord”) -which is to say: who seeks solitude seeks silence; who does not speak is alone; is alone, even unto death-Jonah encounters the darkness of death. We are told that “Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights,” and elsewhere, in a chapter of the Zohar, we are told, ” ‘Three days and three nights’: which means the three days that a man is in his grave before his belly bursts apart.” And when the fish then vomits Jonah onto dry land, Jonah is given back to life, as if the death he had found in the belly of the fish were a preparation for new life, a life that has passed through death, and therefore a life that can at last speak. For death has frightened him into opening his mouth. “I cried by reason of mine affliction unto the Lord, and he heard me; out of the belly of hell cried I, and thou heardest my voice.” In the dark- ness of the solitude that is death, the tongue is finally loosened, and at the moment it begins to speak, there is an answer. And even if there is no answer, the man has begun to speak.
– Paul Auster
I think if there is anything in us that is purely preliterate and unconscious, it is rhythm. We are subject to its influences incessantly, and our lives depend on it, our sense of timing.
– Michael Ryan, On the Nature of Poetry
In the right spaces, the very aspects of you that were attacked will be celebrated.
Don’t let ignorance and oppression silence you.
Your fire will warm many you have never met. Your fire will save lives, including yours.
– Dr. Thema
I used to love September
but now it just reminds me of remember.
– Dominic Riccitello
The Poetry of earth is never dead:
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge…
– Keats
There is no such thing in anyone’s life as an unimportant day.
– Alexander Woollcott
The nation was a bawling historical infant masquerading as a biblical patriarch.
– Georgi Gospodinov
They told me to know (not hope, not believe — know) good things were coming my way.
– Pat Foran
And in the sick son’s blood the deposit of lime
will melt, and there’ll be sudden blessèd laughter.
– Osip Mandelstam (translated by Clarence Brown & W. S. Merwin)
Man becomes whole, integrated, calm, fertile, and happy when (and only when) the process of individuation is complete, when the conscious and the unconscious have learned to live at peace and to complement one another.
– C.G. Jung
In youth, we are so insecure that we need others to confirm our shaky hold on reality. The insecure tend to band together to reinforce each other. Maturity, however, requires that we accept the largeness of our journey, and understand that we journey alone. What an astonishing thing it is, to be here, to be conscious, to feel the movement of eternal energies coursing through us, to intimate from time to time the high calling of personhood, the vocation of growth in service to
the mystery which each of us embodies.
– James Hollis
The only freedom we’ve got is not to react to anything, but to turn within and know the truth.
– Robert Adams
Has anyone figured out how to leave home without spending $40?
– Sophie Vershbow
… imagine there’s a staircase in front of you, and at the top of those stairs is the farthest patch of the universe. Do whatever you can to get to it.’
– Catherine Roberts
To treat the universe with the same tenderness with which a dog licks its balls is imperative.
– Lama Lena
If the Powers must tear me in pieces to break our enemies, God’s will be done.
– Merlin (C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength)
Do I, then, belong to the heavens?
Why, if not so, should the heavens
Fix me thus with their ceaseless blue stare,
Luring me on, and my mind, higher
Ever higher, up into the sky,
Drawing me ceaselessly up
To heights far, far above the human?
– Yukio Mishima
I was childish for so, so long: I walked around all the time wanting this and wanting that. ‘I want to be happy.’ ‘I want to work better.’ ‘I want to improve my health.’ ‘I want to make a difference.’ This, I believe, is the stance of childhood. The adult walks around, upright, deserving things. Because they do the right things and show up and make a difference, they deserve to be happy and work better. They deserve to make a difference. So wanting is useless. It’s a hunger, and it’s selfish. Don’t want for peace; work toward it. Don’t want for pain to be eased; work at easing it. Then you will be a deserving person, and the gifts of life appear.
– Elizabeth Taylor
Meditation is not what you think.
You sit in absolute silence and your mind starts going over all your movies. During that process, you become so familiar with the scripts you keep in your life that you end up getting sick of them. Then you realize that the person you think you are is nothing but a complicated script you spend most of your energy on.
After a more thorough examination, you discover your personality disgusts you, and that’s because it’s not really you. If you feel terrified enough about that personality, you spontaneously allow it to fade away. Then, if you’re lucky, you can experience yourself without the distortion of that personality.
There’s so much talk about the mechanics of happiness – psychiatry and pills, positive thinking and ideology – but I really think the mechanism is there. All you have to do is get quiet for a moment.
– Leonard Cohen
Of what is the body made? It is made of emptiness and rhythm. At the ultimate heart of the body, at the heart of the world, there is no solidity. Once again, there is only the dance. At the unimaginable heart of the atom, the compact nucleus, we have found no solid object, but rather a dynamic pattern of tightly confined energy vibrating perhaps 1022 times a second: a dance…
– George Leonard
what places of heaven, what planets directed, how long the effects? or, the general accidents of the world?
– david gatten
to create
out of his own imagination
the beauty of his wild
forebears-a mythology
he cannot inherit.
Will he later hallucinate
his gods? Waking
among mysteries with
an insane gleam
of recollection?
– Allen Ginsberg
At dawn, staff in hand, I climb the crags,
and by dusk settle among the mountains.
Scarcely a peak rises as high as this hut
facing crags and overlooking winding streams.
Forests stretch before the mountain’s open gate
boulders heaped round its very steps.
Mountains crowd around, blocking out roads.
Trails wander into bamboo thickets.
Visitors lose their way on coming up
or forget the paths leading home when they descend.
Raging torrents rush through the dusk,
Monkeys howl throughout the night.
Deep in meditation I hold the inner pattern,
nurturing the Way, never severing from it.
My heart is one with the autumn trees,
My eyes delight in the flowering of spring.
I inhabit the constant and await my end,
Content to dwell in peace, accepting the flux of things.
I only regret that there is no kindred spirit here
to climb this ladder of sky and clouds with me.
– Hsieh Ling-Yun, Mountain Poems
In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.
– Antonin Artaud
On Freedom
You must understand that you cannot begin with freedom–freedom is the goal, the aim. People say that God created man free. That is a great misunderstanding. Freedom cannot be given to anyone–even by our all-loving Creator Himself. God has given to man the biggest thing he can–that is the possibility to become free. The desire for freedom exists in every man worthy of the name–but people are stupid and they think they can have outward freedom without inner freedom. All our evil comes from this stupidity. Unless we desire, first of all, to be free from our own inner enemies, we shall only go from bad to worse.
Therefore everyone must examine himself and try to find in himself a sincere wish to be free from the forces of Vanity and Self-Love acting in him. That inner slavery is the worst degradation for man, it is the Hell in which man allows himself to exist. The sincere wish to be free from that degradation is the beginning of Real Pride.
– Gurdjieff
You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working; and just so, you learn to love by loving. All those who think to learn in any other way deceive themselves.
– Saint Francis de Sales
It’s interesting that the evolving body of life has continually become more freely unique and more intimately unified at the same time. Healthy ecosystems made of freewheeling differences cooperate through powerful sympathies. A mature forest of diverse species is more sympathetically attuned than any human city. Even tightly-knit associations, such as a digestive system or a musical band, have interactions that require the freedom of some unpredictability. A better understanding of this could move us away from domineering monocultures toward the collaborative diversity of natural lives with plenty of freedom and love.
– George Gorman
To create a novel or a painting, an artist makes choices that are fundamentally alien to artificial intelligence.
– Ted Chiang
The idea of patriotism is not very strong in me. My country is the country of Chekhov, Beethoven, Velasquez – writers I like, painters and artists I admire.
– António Lobo Antunes, Portuguese novelist
I have been saying
Untrue prayers.
Prayers of grandeur
And self-definition.
Prayers of empire
Of conquering the invisible
Cavalry of grace
To make me into something
More beautiful and love worthy
My prayers have crafted large castles
With larger motes
They have made my heart splendid,
Palatial,
And unreachable
My prayers have raised me up
Like a bright star in the sky
Above access or injury
But my approach has been injurious.
I don’t want to look down
Upon anything
I just want to feel safe and brave enough
To lay down my shields
And love you.
– Chelan Harkin
Feeling-Tones
Your feeling-tones are your emotional attitudes toward yourself and life in general, and these generally govern the large areas of experience. … They give the overall emotional coloration that characterizes what happens to you. … You are what happens to you. Your emotional feelings are often transitory, but beneath there are certain qualities of feeling uniquely your own, that are like deep musical chords. While your day-to-day feelings may rise or fall, these characteristic feeling-tones lie beneath. … Sometimes they rise to the surface, but in great long rhythms. You cannot call these negative or positive. They are instead tones of your being. They represent the most inner portion of your experience. This does not mean that they are hidden from you, or are meant to be. It simply means that they represent the core from which you form your experience. … Your flesh springs about you in response to these inner chords of your being, and the trees, rocks, seas and mountains spring up as the body of the earth from the deep inner chords within the atoms and molecules, which are also living. … The feeling-tone then is the motion and fiber — the timber — the portion of your energy devoted to your physical experience. … Once you learn to get the feeling of your own inner tone, then you are aware of its power, strength and durability, and you can to some extent ride with it into deeper realities of experience. … The incredible emotional richness and variety and splendor of physical experience is the material reflection of this inner feeling-tone. It pervades the events in your life, the overall inner direction, the quality of perception. It fills up and illuminates the individual aspects of your life, and largely determines the persuasive subjective climate in which you dwell.
– Jane Roberts, The Nature of Personal Reality
Thank You for letting me live for a little as one of the
sane; thank You for letting me know what this is
like. Thank You for letting me look at your frightening
blue sky without fear, and your terrible world without
terror, and your loveless psychotic and hopelessly
lost with this love.
– Franz Wright
Happiness means resting in the light, not to get in the way, not to obscure what is naturally pouring forth. Insofar as there is any inside or outside, happiness comes from within. We just live in harmony with the currents of the wind, like the wavering lines of geese in the autumn sky, like the thick bull kelp undulating in the surf.
As we continue on the journey without end, we no longer hold on to the light – the light adheres to us, in our weariness as well as in our joy. Where the primal stuff seemed dark, now, when we are happy, close to the earth, it seems bright even when it is dark.
Doing nothing, we work through joy, feeling there is no separation between ourselves and what we are doing. Whatever rises before us is the answer we have always waited for, the thing for which we are grateful. It comes to us from before the beginning of time.
– John Tarrant
Yes, even when I don’t believe— there is a place in me inaccessible to unbelief, a patch of wild grace, a stubborn preserve, impenetrable, pain untouched by the sleeping body, music that builds its nest in silence.
– Anna Kamienska
We don’t want pain to appear, and yet it appears. We don’t want fear to appear, and yet it appears. Because of our conditioning, we don’t see pain, fear, sadness, anger, and all kinds of other feelings as part of the completeness, as part of the wholeness of life. We have been conditioned to see parts of our experience as imperfections, contaminations, aberrations, impurities, expressions of incompleteness. In other words, we have been taught, trained, even brainwashed, to see some parts of our experience as threats to life itself. We believe that parts of our experience are somehow against life—like they don’t deserve a place in us. Anger, fear, sadness, discomfort, pain—they should not be allowed in. I reject them because I believe that they don’t belong in me. I don’t see them as being part of the wholeness of life. I believe that they are dangerous to my well-being. And so I spend my life running away from them.
– Jeff Foster
Sometimes it is tempting to say that feelings get in our way — that if we didn’t have them we would be happier. We wouldn’t have to bother with pain, sadness or even happiness. We’d just carry on like robots. But the reality is that without feelings, one would lose the entry into the world of consciousness.
– António Damásio
…unfortunately, it’s true: time does heal. It will do so whether you like it or not, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. If you’re not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have ever lost, and replace it with knowledge. Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience. Raw data will be compiled, will be translated into a more comprehensible language. The individual events of your life will be transmuted into another substance called memory and in the mechanism something will be lost and you will never be able to reverse it, you will never again have the original moment back in its uncategorized, preprocessed state. It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter.
– Charles Yu
A day is like a whole life. You start out doing one thing, but end up doing something else, plan to run an errand, but never get there … And at the end of your life, your whole existence has the same haphazard quality, too. Your whole life has the same shape as a single day.
– Michael Crichton
I see a United States which can demonstrate that, under democratic methods of government, national wealth can be translated into a spreading volume of human comforts hitherto unknown…But here is the challenge to our democracy: In this nation I see tens of millions of its citizens…who at this very moment are denied the greater part of what the very lowest standards of today call the necessities of life…The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.
– Franklin D. Roosevelt
We cannot, of course, save the World because we do not have authority over its parts. We can serve the world though. That is everyone’s calling, to lead a life that helps.
– Barry Lopez
Wherefore strive or run, On dusty highways ever, a vain race? The long night cometh, starless, void of sun, What light shall serve thee like her golden face?
For I had pondered on a rune of roses, And knew some secrets which the moon discloses.
– Ernest Christopher Dowson
And then no slip of the tongue but a prophecy would be contained in Dostoyevsky’s words: “Beauty will save the world.”
– Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
The universe favors those who operate in authenticity, which is not something you can fake. The real rise accordingly.
– Nika Solé
I know that without these great writers’ holy words seared into my brain, I would most likely have ended up chained to a wall in Camarillo State Hospital, zapped beyond recognition, or dead by misadventure.
– Johnny Depp
Life, after all, is but one great insomnia and there is a lucid half-awakeness about everything we think or do.
– Fernando Pessoa
Compatibility is not about shared interests. Compatibility is that you can hug me because you know that that’s what I need, and I can leave you alone because I know that that’s your way to reset. But what happens in many relationships is that I tend to give to you that which I would want you to give to me, but it isn’t necessarily what you need or want. So I define compatibility, not in both of us like this, but I can give you what suits you, and you give me what suits.
– Esther Perel
Everybody complains that they’re so busy they haven’t got any time. But why are they so busy? It’s only their illusions that keep them busy. A person who practices zazen has time. When you practice zazen, you have more time than anyone else in the world.
– Kodo Sawaki Roshi
But happiness can never be achieved. If we succeed in overcoming the force of circumstances, nature at once shifts the battle-ground, placing it within ourselves, and effects a gradual change in our hearts until they desire something other than what they are about to possess.
– Marcel Proust
one sign that something Very Real is waking up in your system is that you’re forced to use language you’re uncomfortable with to describe it.
– River Kenna
the dragonflies
a celebrating
the autumn festival too
– Issa
The Hawaiian shirts
are to remind them
not to take us
too serious,
the old monk on bass
told the band.
– The Old Monk
Walking teaches you
That your feet and legs
Are as hungry for wonder
And peace as you are.
– john zbigniew guzlowski
Breathe and know that you’re covered by forces much greater than you.
– Nika Solé
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
To stand with Palestine is to be human
– Greta Thunberg
Those who think –as do many– “Let me first correct society, then get around to myself” are barred from even the outer gate of the mansion of God’s peace.
– Joseph Campbell
That those who do stop
doesn’t mean those who don’t
will start,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
If you want to keep a secret, don’t tell it to a writer.
– jami attenberg
When you re-think
your thinking it’s
never the same,
the old monk noticed.
– The Old Monk
One wants to keep one’s hand in every type of poem, serious and frivolous and proper and improper.
– T. S. Eliot
If you wish to know the mind of a man, listen to his words.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
We are made in the image and likeness of God. We’re all being invited to put those words into action and to let them mean something—not just broadly speaking, as a concept, but in a specific way, as the daily basis for every choice, decision, and action.
– Neale Donald Walsch
Everyone wants
what they want
so you adjust your
pitch accordingly,
the salesman told
the old monk.
– The Old Monk
in the waiting room
the tick-tick-tick from my watch
yaffle crescendo
– @hegelincanada
A person who desires truth becomes a scholar. The person who wants to put his or her subjectivity to play becomes, perhaps a writer; what should she do who is looking for something in between?
– Robert Musil
Nothing in the world is astonishing,
unbelievable or forsworn anymore
now that Zeus has made night out of moon
and hidden away the blazing light of the sun.
– Archilachos
A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.
– James Dickey
Men protect women in the physical realm.
Women protect men in the spiritual realm.
Divine design.
– Divine Alchemist
He that is discontented in one place will seldom be happy in another.
– Aesop
Works of art are not born in flashes of inspiration but in a daily fidelity.
– Albert Camus
In Greek, noesis and nostos are from the same word route. To think is to regret. To regret is to see what he’s not before our eyes. It is hunger hallucinating what it lacks.
– Pascal Quignard, Abysses, translated by Chris Turner
Isn’t it a miracle that we’ve ended up as ourselves?
– Hilton Als
Never have coffee with people who want to ‘grab’ it with you.
– Charlotte Mandell
Poetry is intensification pressed to the point of absolute impotence against the real limit of capitalist social reality, where abstract relations reveal their abhorrent imperviousness to poetry in ‘brutal’ detail.
– Keston Sutherland
My life is inconceivable without ennui.
– E.M. Cioran; tr. Jason Weiss
The gods have spoken.
The gods said nothing.
All our clamour
sounded the same.
Your window is closing,
they said, they didn’t say
on what. I am not a window,
I said, I am the view.
The window was on the ground floor.
The ground was grass.
The room had a working door.
The building was on fire.
The building was on ice.
The ground was glass.
The gods have spoken.
The gods said nothing.
The window was playing
peekaboo with the view.
I was plotting my leap.
You were plotting our stay.
I lost my elevation chart.
You lost our blueprint.
I was uncouth. You to the hilt.
I kissed your cave on the mouth:
it wasn’t goodbye, wasn’t hello.
We were naked, in disguise.
Planning one sound for history,
another for otherwise.
– Fady Joudah
ARCTIC NIGHT, LIGHTS ACROSS THE SKY
by Linda Hogan
We are curved together,
body to body, cell to cell,
arm over another.
The world is the bed for the cold night,
one cat curled in the bend of a knee,
dog at the feet,
my hand in yours, we are embraced
in animal presence, warmth,
the sea outside sounding
winter waves, one arriving after another
from the mystery far out
where in the depths of the sea
are other beings
that create their own light,
this world all one heartbeat.
A Held Breath
Dense dark day, two sun chairs
sit on the lawn in the rain.
Which stops. A mist comes to
roost in leafy intervals of
trees over-burdened in mid-
September. It still seems far
from turning time. August,
where did you go? The water
globes that are mist hang with
a look of permanence. Down the
street houses go soft in it,
color smears on water color
paper. A frowzy day, cool
and clammy. The typing paper
is limp as the skin on the
face of someone old you fondly
kiss. Summer leaves, in un-
seen ripenings, readying
to fill the air with falling.
– James Schuyler
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
Ours is a culture that enshrines the ephemeral, and that leaves certain things and people out.
– James Salter
MEMORY
by Margaret Atwood
Memory is not in the head
only. It’s midnight,
you existed once, you exist
again, my entire skin
sensitive as an eye,
imprint of you
glowing against me,
burnt-out match in a dark room.
OBJECT PERMANENCE
(for John)
We wake as if surprised the other is still there,
each petting the sheet to be sure.
How have we managed our way
to this bed—beholden to heat like dawn
indebted to light. Though we’re not so self-
important as to think everything
has led to this, everything has led to this.
There’s a name for the animal
love makes of us—named, I think,
like rain, for the sound it makes.
You are the animal after whom other animals
are named. Until there’s none left to laugh,
days will start with the same startle
and end with caterpillars gorged on milkweed.
O, how we entertain the angels
with our brief animation. O,
how I’ll miss you when we’re dead.
– Nicole Sealey
All those solitary hours of daydreaming were a kind of training for poetry.
– Charles Simic
All the beauty and ugliness and turbulence one found scattered through nature, one could also find in people themselves, all collected there, all together in a single place.
– Lorrie Moore, Birds of America
Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creative.
– Charles Mingus
We have a Midas problem. There’s no endgame, just a stagnant pyramiding scheme. Endless, pointless prosperity
– Richard Powers, The Overstory
What you remember saves you.
– W.S. Merwin
A lot of good things don’t get made because of too much thinking.
– Agnes Martin
I desire the things which will destroy me in the end.
– Sylvia Plath
All the lights were off, and I just lay there, trying to pass the hours before I had to get up and go to work, which was impossible when the night was so loud. My neighbor’s electric air conditioner, the bass pumping from other people’s cars. They were all converging together to say one thing: You are alone. You are alone. You are alone. You are truly and really alone.
– Ling Ma, Severance
The intuitive is a type that doesn’t see, doesn’t see the stumbling block before his feet, but he smells a rat for ten miles.
– CG Jung
I once had a thousand desires. But in my one desire to know you all else melted away.
– Rumi
A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light.
– Da Vinci
She’s the kind of magic you never know is magic at first, but eventually can never deny.
– Frederick Phoenix
Reading is more efficient when at rest. Audio is more efficient when in motion.
– Naval Ravikant
Kill the snake of doubt in your soul, crush the worms of fear in your heart, and mountains will move out of your way.
– Kate Seredy
I have a great need for Christ.
I have a great Christ for my need.
– Charles Spurgeon
GETTING IT RIGHT
Lying in front of the house all
afternoon, trying to write a poem.
Falling asleep.
Waking up under the stars.
– Jack Gilbert
Many of our fears are tissue paper thin, and a single courageous step would carry us clear through them.
– Brendan Francis
The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.
– Tom Waits
Love for our neighbor, being made of creative attention, is analogous to genius.
– Simone Weil, Waiting for God
Transfer
I tried all the things-
made a book for you, signed, sealed,
carried you across an ocean.
The shirt on my arms
had started to fray,
I didn’t stop
to mend it—
probably unmendable
I simply carried my body
to where you were sunning
and lay myself down.
In this way,
I told myself
I could be your lifeboat
a ship for you to sail
those dark waters
we seemed to inhabit.
– Ethel Rackin
There is a silence that follows a heartbreak, a stillness that fills the space where someone used to be. It’s in the empty seat at the table, in the quiet of an empty room, in the spaces between breaths. You keep waiting for the noise to return, for the familiar sound of their laughter or their voice, but it never does. And so, you live in that silence, carrying the weight of their absence like a stone in your chest, wondering if you’ll ever feel whole again or if you’ll always be just a little bit broken.
– Lang Leav
The good poem allows us to believe we have a soul. In the presence of a good poem we remember/discover the soul has an appetite, and that appetite is for emotional veracity and for the unsayable. The general condition of the soul, therefore, is stoic hunger, stoic loneliness. Paul Éluard wrote, “There is another world, and it is in this one.”
– Stephen Dunn
LATE SUMMER EARLY FALL
Here and there dust is rising
to settle in every corner of the state.
Men and machines march into the long fields
like soldiers solemn to the duties of the dying.
In the mid-west there is farmland turning
over and over like a semaphore for this
hard life, its darkness rising in black
clusters that refuse again and again the point of a plow.
But endings are not what you remember most
rather moments of light, the flash of
heat-lightning, or a streak of the real thing
striking just before rain. Or the light
of morning coming over the tip of the barn
or the last light of day closing this world down,
that settles like dusk in your mind.
And then there is this – the flash of a hand
that waved to you over the wheel of a tractor,
that one you remember, as if it were a signal.
– Robert Kinsley
Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, though these are things which cannot inspire envy.
– Viktor E. Frankl
Society cares about the individual only in so far as he is profitable. The young know this. Their anxiety as they enter in upon social life matches the anguish of the old as they are excluded from it.
– Simone de Beauvoir
If the heart wanders or is distracted, bring it back to the point quite gently… And even if you did nothing during the whole of your hour but bring your heart back, though it went away every time you brought it back, your hour would be very well employed.
– St. Francis de Sale
The syndrome of kali yuga is marked by the fact that it is the only age in which property alone confers social rank; wealth becomes the only motive of virtues, passion and lust the only bonds between the married, falsehood and deception the first condition of success in life, sexuality the sole means of enjoyment, while external, merely ritualstic religion is confused with spirituality. For several thousand years, be it understood, we have been living in kali yuga.
– Mircea Eliade
‘The sea is never pregnant,’ a Wolof proverb goes: You can never predict when it will deliver. You can never predict what it will take, either. The immensity of the ocean has room for every variable – God, genie, climate change, tides – but it bestows and withholds its wealth, shelters and destroys at whim unfathomable to man. To live off the sea is to submit to its vagaries, to endure constantly the tension between desire and defeat.
– Anna Badkhen
At dawn, staff in hand, I climb the crags,
and by dusk settle among the mountains.
Scarcely a peak rises as high as this hut
facing crags and overlooking winding streams.
Forests stretch before the mountain’s open gate
boulders heaped round its very steps.
Mountains crowd around, blocking out roads.
Trails wander into bamboo thickets.
Visitors lose their way on coming up
or forget the paths leading home when they descend.
Raging torrents rush through the dusk,
Monkeys howl throughout the night.
Deep in meditation I hold the inner pattern,
nurturing the Way, never severing from it.
My heart is one with the autumn trees,
My eyes delight in the flowering of spring.
I inhabit the constant and await my end,
Content to dwell in peace, accepting the flux of things.
I only regret that there is no kindred spirit here
to climb this ladder of sky and clouds with me.
– Hsieh Ling-Yun, Mountain Poems
[…] and as far as erasing emotions are concerned… Because emotions are magnetic fields, you can erase them with stronger magnetic fields.
– Dr Jerry Tennant
The Mind
The mind is a hotel with a thousand rooms. When I tilt my head a certain way, I think about certain things. When I tilt my head another way, I think about other things. If I sleep on the right side of my face, for example, I’d dream of a pale rose, the future, or a continental diner in Passaic, New Jersey. When I sleep on the left side of my face, I’d dream that a hand is squeezing my heart, that I’m in prison, or that I’m watching hockey at an airport bar, about to miss a flight.
– Linh Dinh
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
Everything is Going to be All Right
How should I not be glad to contemplate
the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window
and a high tide reflected on the ceiling?
There will be dying, there will be dying,
but there is no need to go into that.
The poems flow from the hand unbidden
and the hidden source is the watchful heart.
The sun rises in spite of everything
and the far cities are beautiful and bright.
I lie here in a riot of sunlight
watching the day break and the clouds flying.
Everything is going to be all right.
– Derek Mahon
Always trust yourself and your own feeling, as opposed to argumentations, discussion, or introductions of that sort; if it turns out that you are wrong, then the natural growth of your inner life will eventually guide you to other insights.
Allow your judgments their own silent, undisturbed development,
which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be forced or hastened.
Everything is gestation and then birthing.
To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
You are sending off energy, emitting energy, right now,
from the center of your being in all directions.
This energy, which is you, moves outward in wave patterns.
The energy leaves, moves through walls, over mountains, past the moon, and into Forever. It never, ever stops.
– Neale Donald Walsch
To hear never-heard sounds,
To see never-seen colors and shapes,
To try to understand the imperceptible
Power pervading the world;
To fly and find pure ethereal substances
That are not of matter
But of that invisible soul pervading reality.
To hear another soul and to whisper to another soul;
To be a lantern in the darkness
Or an umbrella in a stormy day;
To feel much more than know.
To be the eyes of an eagle, slope of a mountain;
To be a wave understanding the influence of the moon;
To be a tree and read the memory of the leaves;
To be an insignificant pedestrian on the streets
Of crazy cities watching, watching, and watching.
To be a smile on the face of a woman
And shine in her memory
As a moment saved without planning.
– Dejan Stojanovic
Writing is pretty easy for me. After coke, wine, pistachios, a Ritter Sport bar, gummy bears, hours of deep self-hatred on other people’s author/faculty sites, tidying the house, reading much better writers, and overcoming desire to vomit and weep, the writing just flows!
– Irina Dumitrescu
Vibe so high they have to rise to even perceive you.
– Nika Solé
Active men are usually lacking in higher activity — I mean individual activity. They are active as officials, businessmen, scholars, that is, as generic beings, but not as… unique men. In this respect they are lazy.
– Nietzsche
A high vibration is the ultimate healer.
– Nika Solé
People will see you pulling your energy back from the world and think you must be falling off. When really, the journey into the self is where the real world begins.
– Nika Solé
Our highly mechanized Western civilization has many devices for limiting the province of the dream : we even canalize the subjective life into collective mechanisms like the radio and television, and let a machine do our dreaming for us.
– Lewis Mumford
For the Student Who Said Grammar
Doesn’t Matter When People Are Dying
What can kill is unclarity.
The misplaced modifier, for instance:
Having no hope, the wind didn’t move him.
Did the wind have no hope?
Clearly the writer meant,
Having no hope, he wasn’t moved by the wind.
But someone no doubt had told the writer
about the passive voice, to avoid it
at all costs, like passion,
and the writer, feeling with a chill
how costly life can be
when we are passive (the lover’s last knock
unanswered at the door),
opted for this construction.
Having no hope, the wind didn’t move him.
The difference
is between mystery and confusion,
between the wind’s stillness and a soul
that won’t be opened.
And why not? Why can’t
the wind hope?
I don’t know. I just know
it matters. Everything matters. What is erasing
what. Who is bombing whom.
It took me all day to misunderstand correctly:
Forgetting their children, the conquerors
destroyed them.
– Joseph Fasano
Without going out the door,
Know the world.
Without peeping through the window,
See heaven’s Tao.
The further you travel,
the less you know.
– Tao Te Ching
Loves, we are not who we think we are. And our entire society is a bizarrely crude and reductive construct that binds us to highly distorted operating patterns so far from reflecting the magnitude, truth and scope of our reality. Reclamation of our reality is the revolution. We are magnificent beings of light, forces and frequencies of power and majesty and beauty and generosity. Any pain that you have is absorbed from the myths and practices of a very ill society. Purge your pain. Discover your depths, scale and altitude. Oh we are so much more than we’ve thought ourselves to be! Truly.
– Chelan Harkin
you can embrace desires & expectations, enjoy them, love them, & release them to the Stream
no need to avoid them, or cling to them, or tense yourself against them
they’re like stray cats — when they approach, feed them, pet their lil noses, & send them on their way
– River Kenna
a blank page
bereft of muse
winter fog
– @NituYumnam
humanity needs
to be able to empathize
in order to avoid extinction
– Andy Perrin
LINES FOR MY CHILD TO
CARRY WHEN LEAVING HOME
Go, my only,
Gо.
Go learn in the darkness
what the heart is:
not a book,
not a door,
not a blossom—
but the only thing
in this ruinous
universe
that can open again
knowing
why it closed.
– Joseph Fasano
Walk. Always walk. Walk with no goal. No destination. No timeline. Walk with friends. Walk alone. Walk with music. Walk with silence. Walk the long way. Walk without your phone. Walk when you don’t know what to do next. Because somehow, walking shows you exactly where to go.
– Zach Pogrob
The corporate entity is psychopathic, and government regulations are the only protections for workers and people. Corporations have no place colluding with politicians.
– Sarah Connor
The biggest barrier to awakening is the belief that it is something rare.
– Adyashanti
In order to attract better:
Our energy has to align with better.
Our thoughts have to be better.
Our actions have to represent better.
– Rachael Wolff
true love won’t confuse you,
it should actually heighten your senses.
– @Jhanakaruna
You cannot perform in a manner inconsistent with the way you see yourself.
– Zig Ziglar
Things that are so basic, that while climbing the ladder of development, we forget how to do.
– @VinceFHorn
Community is first of all a quality of the heart.
It grows from the knowledge that we are alive
not for ourselves but for one another.
Community is the fruit of our capacity
to make the interests of others
more important than our own.
– Henri Nouwen
We know now that memory formation has to do with emotion. The more emotionally impressive something is, the more it sticks in the memory.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
I no longer have nightmares at all. Literature has appeased my anxieties.
– Jorge Semprún
I was nervous. It had been a long time since I’d gone any place I wanted to be.
– Ottessa Moshfegh
Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.
– Warren Buffett
Modern paintings are like women, you’ll never enjoy them if you try to understand them.
– Freddie Mercury
In this work of the spirit, it is the one who thinks less and has the desire to do less that accomplishes more.
– Teresa of Avila
When you go into the body you encounter your history and all that may be dwelling there. The body is the best authentic text that we have, and carries the burdens that our psyche has repressed until they can be brought to consciousness.
– Tina Stromsted
To a visitor who described
himself as a seeker after
Truth the Master said, “If
what you seek is Truth,
there is one thing you must
have above all else.”
“I know. An overwhelming
passion for it.”
“No. An unremitting readiness
to admit you may be wrong.”
Anthony De Mello
What do you think an artist is? …he is a political being, constantly aware of the heart breaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.
– Pablo Picasso
Whether we know it or not, we transmit the presence of everyone we have ever known, as though by being in each other’s presence we exchange our cells, pass on some of our life force, and then we go on carrying that other person in our body, not unlike springtime when certain plants in fields we walk through attach their seeds in the form of small burrs to our socks, our pants, our caps, as if to say, “Go on, take us with you, carry us to root in another place.” This is how we survive long after we are dead. This is why it is important who we become, because we pass it on.
– Natalie Goldberg
If people reach perfection they vanish, you know.
– T.H. White
A Message From Space
Everything that happens is the message:
you read an event and be one and wait,
like breasting a wave, all the while knowing
by living, though not knowing how to live.
Or workers built an antenna—a dish
aimed at stars—and they themselves are its message,
crawling in and out, being worlds that loom,
dot-dash, and sirens, and sustaining beams.
And sometimes no one is calling but we turn up
eye and ear—suddenly we fall into
sound before it begins, the breathing
so still it waits there under the breath—
And then the green of leaves calls out, hills
where they wait or turn, clouds in their frenzied
stillness unfolding their careful words:
“Everything counts. The message is the world.”
– William Stafford
There are many gradations of listening: listening with one’s ears, hearing sounds; and listening to inner vibrations, listening to meanings. There is listening that is beyond sound altogether. When one is really watching, then one is listening, waiting and watching. Whatever kind of listening it may be, it has this in common, that it opens the door for something to enter. If we cannot listen, that door is closed. The door of the ears may be open, the door of the mind may be closed. The door of the heart may be open, but it also can be closed. The understanding also may be listening.
– J.G. Bennett, The Sevenfold Work
I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people..
– Isaac Newton
Our modern world-view tragically misperceives and wrongly defines what it is to be human. We are conditioned by our society to believe happiness comes from pleasure, or from getting things or power over people or money or fame or even health and survival. None of these sometimes very good things can bring ultimate meaning to our lives. We are born to be deeply conscious, inwardly free and deeply capable of love. The longing for these things is the definition of what it means to be human.
– Jacob Needleman
When I criticize a system, they think I criticize them—and that is of course because they accept the system and identify themselves with it.
– Thomas Merton
I think what’s always drawn me to poetry is the way that it takes our ordinary experiences and re-arranges them. Poetry creates gaps in time that allow the reader to look again, discover what they haven’t yet noticed either in the poem, or in their own lives.
– Marjorie Lotfi
the last time I placed shiny bows on misery, I healed, then mistook deferred pain for gift and had to start again.
– Miya Coleman
whatever returns from oblivion / returns to find a voice.
– Louise Glück
The problem isn’t a lack of money, food, water or land. The problem is that you’ve given control of these things to a group of greedy psychopaths who care more about maintaining their own power than helping mankind.
– Bill Hicks
Yes. I rewrite my poems so often that I sometimes get mixed up about which version was finally published. I don’t want to let a poem go until I think I’ve got it honed down just to what it should be, and that involves all sorts of weird problems. One of them is that you overwrite it. You’ve got to know when to stop. Bach is the greatest of the human composers, but in my opinion Mozart is an angel. And one thing that makes him angelic is that he knows exactly when to stop. He knows when to shut up. And in doing that he gives you your own song. I think he is the greatest thing who ever… He is the spring. I think he’s an angel, I think he was an angel that came to the earth. And that is one thing that makes him angelic-he knows exactly when to shut up. And by knowing that, you sit there, and you realize that your own song is coming awake in music. He can give you your own song. Think of that! God I think that is miraculous, I think that literally is miraculous.
– James Wright
Raising your vibration is the ultimate way of saying, miss me with the bs. It can’t even reach you.
– Nika Solé
Please seek intimacy today. The war-machine’s agenda is to pull us out of intimacy, to see another as an other, to flatten a bloodfull human into a barely, a number, not valid, whatever. To move toward intimacy, toward closeness, is to reject this agenda. Love another, palpably.
– Shira Erlichman
The real drip is the way your spirit glows when it’s healthy, illuminating everything around you.
– Nika Solé
My originality consists in putting the logic of the visible to the service of the invisible.
– Odilon Redon
One hundred years ago, in 1924, André Breton published his Surrealist Manifesto, which advocated for a revolution against rational thought and its constraints. Breton’s definition was simple: “Psychic automatism in its pure state,” he wrote at the time, “by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought.” But psychic automatism could function in many ways. Salvador Dalí, for example, made spare landscapes that looked irradiated, melting. Max Ernst waded into abstraction. René Magritte let symbols speak of a numbing sameness in many souls. And Giorgio de Chirico’s ghostly plazas are places of haunting loneliness. In this exhibition, which celebrates the movement’s centenary, works by the greatest Surrealists are on view. The centerpiece is the manifesto itself.
– Elena Clavarino
Every human being is both a social self and an embryonic soul. The challenge of life is to support the former while nourishing the latter. It is not easy…
Psychology’s healing insights and methods were never intended and never were able to address the “verticality” of the human psyche.
…We are not saints, we are not angels; we are embryonic souls immersed in a badly educated body being pulled along by a love-starved lonely horse called the emotions.
Mankind is called – to maintain the human reflection of divinity in a world overwhelmed by violence, confusion, and illusion.
– Jacob Needleman
All ideologies are idiotic, whether religious or political, for it is conceptual thinking, the conceptual word, which has so unfortunately divided man.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
A diet lacking in moral fiber leads to existential constipation.
– Vince Fakhoury Horn
ADDITION
I do not question whether I am happy or not.
But one thing I always keep gladly in mind;
that in the great addition-their addition that I abhor-
that has so many numbers, I am not one
of the many units there. I was not counted
in the total sum. And this joy suffices me.
– C. P. Cavafy, translated by Rae Dalven
Many people are more comfortable in chaos than they are in peace. This world trains the peace out of you. You have to earn it back.
– Nika Solé
Nothing has changed the nature
of man so much as the
loss of silence.
– Max Picard
Coda
Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world.
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable.
To learn to see.
Your glance scattered seeds.
It planted a tree.
I talk
because you shake its leaves.
– Octavio Paz
Something in his work is shivering, beyond the cool, the rational, the poetic, or the sublime.
– Peter Eisenman on Tadao Ando
Leisure, instead of being a vacuum representing a break with society, is literally stuffed with technical mechanisms of compensation and integration.
– Jacques Ellul
The nervous system is a conductor of intuitive information. It reads what’s being said energetically and spiritually, and guides you accordingly. This is why nervous system regulation is so important. It allows you to hear what the unseen is saying.
– Nika Solé
Rhyme is an intelligence.
– Shane McCrae
If you’re gonna write, for God in heaven’s sake, try to get naked. Try to write the truth. Try to get underneath all the sham, all the excuses, all the lies that you’ve been told.
– Harry Crews
A divine woman is a whole revolution all by herself.
– Nika Solé
Practicing mindfulness is a living tradition, not a dead culture. It’s always up to date.
– Chögyam Trungpa
We who are dead
Depend on the imagination.
Facts are useless to us
They are always the facts of life.
– Thomas M. Disch
Dante and Shakespeare divide the world
between them—there is no third.
– T. S. Eliot
Anything that you resent and strongly react to in another is also in you.
– Eckhart Tolle
Again it is September
by Jessie Redmon Fauset
Again it is September!
It seems so strange that I who made no vows
Should sit here desolate this golden weather
And wistfully remember—
A sigh of deepest yearning,
A glowing look and words that knew no bounds,
A swift response, an instant glad surrender
To kisses wild and burning!
Ay me!
Again it is September!
It seems so strange that I who kept those vows
Should sit here lone, and spent, and mutely praying
That I may not remember!
To be influenced by somebody is not to write like him or her; rather, someone’s work suddenly opens up new possibilities that you never thought of before.
– Fredric Jameson
From “Spanish Folk Songs”
by Salvador De Madariaga
II
Of the dust of the earth
Can I make songs.
One is scarcely over,
A new one comes.
Del polvo de la tierra
Saco yo coplas.
No bien se acaba una
Ya tengo otra.
LV
Like two trees we are
By fate separated.
The road is between
But the boughs are mated.
Como dos árboles somos
Que la suerte nos separa,
Con un camino por medio,
Pero se juntan las ramas.
CII
I see myself as a crow.
All are wearing clothes of gladness,
Clothed in black mourning I go.
Me comparo con el cuervo.
Todos visten de alegría,
Yo visto de luto negro.
By starting our meditation practice with joy in our hearts, we begin to associate all dharma activity with joy and we will, in time, begin to look forward to practice.
– Pema Düddul
Give me these years again and I will
spend them wisely.
Done with the compass; done, now, with the chart.
The ferry at the dock, lit
stern to bow,
the next life like a footfall in my heart.
– John Burnside
Human character? I imagine that what we call personality may be an illusion, and in thinking of it as a stable thing we are trying to put a lid on a box with no sides.
Human beings are really walking question marks — hows and whys and perhapses.
– Lawrence Durrell
Mythology was never designed to describe historically verifiable events that actually happened. It was an attempt to express their inner significance or to draw attention to realities that were too elusive to be discussed in a logically coherent way.
– Karen Armstrong
For what prevents us from saying that the happy life is to have a mind that is free, lofty, fearless and steadfast – a mind that is placed beyond the reach of fear, beyond the reach of desire…
– Seneca
A fool is known by his speech, and a wise man by silence.
– Pythagoras
Those promises we make to ourselves when we are younger, about how we mean to conduct our adult lives, can it be true we break every last one of them? All except for one, I suppose: the promise to judge ourselves by those standards, the promise to remember the child who would be so appalled by compromise, the child who would find jadedness wicked.
– Jonathan Lethem
If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.
– Marcus Aurelius
At the height of laughter, the universe is flung into a kaleidoscope of new possibilities.
– Jean Houston
He that respects himself is safe from others; he wears a coat of mail that none can pierce.
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Your taste in music is absolutely chaotic, and well, I love that. I love you.
– Frederick Phoenix
I wanted to write literature. I didn’t want to carry so much pain into the art form.
– Frederick Phoenix
Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man’s desire to understand.
– Neil Armstrong
One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.
– Nikola Tesla
My uncle once told me to read the poets, to love them, and to use them -but never to trust them.
– Augustus
Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings— a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss.
– Gustave Flaubert
Men are respectable only as they respect.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Happy, even in anguish, is he to whom God has given a soul worthy of love and of grief!
– Victor Hugo
Try to reduce everything you see to the utmost simplicity. That is, let nothing but the things which are of the utmost importance to you have any place. People see too much, scatteringly.
– Robert Henri
I will not live my life completely. I cannot. For to live at all, to breathe, to sigh, to dream, to wonder, is to always be in the process of having to let go of what may have been, what might yet be, and what might yet have been. We can only live in part. We can only show up partially. Always in tantalising proximity of the other lives that haunt the present, taunt the past, and flaunt other futures. We can only live in part. We can only die in part. The universe is too light for fully realized lives, too tender for arrivals. Maybe that’s enough.
– Bayo Akomolafe
My Life as an Avant-Garde Painter
I paint mostly on stop signs. The word, ‘Go!’
I’m a menace to the suburbs, I should grow up.
I have a canvas the size of the Capitol Records building.
I drip blue paint on it like wind on a mountain.
When I go to the grocery store, I buy an assortment of colours:
Oranges, blueberries, papayas, mangoes.
The teller tells me to have a great day. I buy four lottery tickets.
I’m not really waiting to be discovered. I’ve learned
To appreciate those who are already here.
Autumn leaves, my dog, a sunset: these are a few
Of my favourite things to paint. The greats:
Van Gogh, Picasso, Kahlo: they all sought change.
I remember this every day that I paint.
– Jose Hernandez Diaz
The hour is striking so close above me,
so clear and sharp,
that all my senses ring with it.
I feel it now: there’s a power in me
to grasp and give shape to my world.
I know that nothing has ever been real
without my beholding it.
All becoming has needed me.
My looking ripens things
and they come toward me, to meet and be met.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
I put my hand on the altar rail. ‘What if … what if Heaven is real, but only in moments? Like a glass of water on a hot day when you’re dying of thirst, or when someone’s nice to you for no reason, or …’ Mam’s pancakes with Toblerone sauce; Dad dashing up from the bar just to tell me, ‘Sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite’; or Jacko and Sharon singing ‘For She’s A Squishy Marshmallow’ instead of ‘For She’s A Jolly Good Fellow’ every single birthday and wetting themselves even though it’s not at all funny; and Brendan giving his old record player to me instead of one of his mates. ’S’pose Heaven’s not like a painting that’s just hanging there for ever, but more like … Like the best song anyone ever wrote, but a song you only catch in snatches, while you’re alive, from passing cars, or … upstairs windows when you’re lost …
– David Mitchell
There are two hypotheses that need to be tested for humanity to transform this world from a chaotic place of madness into an abode of love. They are:
Can suffering be generatively transmuted into creative, authentic agency and more substantive, satisfying, fulfilling truth and love?
And
Is communion with our universe possible? Is there an intelligent, benevolent force that is with us that is more effective than our dominant, forceful control that we can hand the pain of that into and that moves and operates and provides for us on our deepest behalf when we surrender to it?
The revolution is our findings from this experiment. Ready go.
– Chelan Harkin
Your part is to intelligently formulate your desire for the things which make for a larger life and to get these desires arranged into a coherent whole.
– Wallace D. Wattles
You feel you are hedged in; you dream of escape; but beware of mirages. Do not run or fly away in order to get free: rather dig in the narrow place which has been given you; you will find God there and everything. God does not float on your horizon, he sleeps in your substance. Vanity runs, love digs. If you fly away from yourself, your prison will run with you and will close in because of the wind of your flight; if you go deep down into yourself it will disappear in paradise.
– Gustave Thibon
Thin and Thick Barriers
One major personality dimension that’s been described, on the basis of many years of research and supported by hundreds of studies, is “openness to experience” which is one of what are called the “big five” dimensions of personality.* Another concept is “barriers” in the mind, [a continuum] which distinguishes between people who have “thick” barriers, who compartmentalize their different experiences, from those with “thin” ones, whose experiences merge together. Many investigators use the term “boundaries,” but we think “barriers,” which can be porous, is a better descriptor. …
People with thin barriers tend to be open, emotional, and perhaps spiritual; those with thick barriers tend to be detached and perhaps religious, traditionalist, or conservative. Those on the autistic spectrum, and religious or scientific fundamentalists usually have very thick barriers. Most people are somewhere between the extremes.
… Adherence to a single extreme way of understanding gives comfort to the “believers” in both extremes but is the cause of much incompatibility, and one way or the other, both miss the truth. The arguments just pass each other by; it’s like listening to a flat-earther debate with an alien-from-outer-space adherent.
– Robert Ornstein and Sally Ornstein
Were we, on the contrary, to close the book of Acts, we would imply something drastic about ourselves: that holiness and heroism had somehow been pre-empted by the ancestors, but in our time had fled the earth. To leave the story open, unfinished, awaiting our acts and choices, on the other hand, is a sign of trust. Holiness and heroism, the faith that moves mountains and overcomes death, these are among us, within us; for God is God and the world, and our poor selves, are charged with God’s grandeur.
– Daniel Berrigan, The Acts of the Apostles and Ourselves
In the beginning was Alpha and the end is Omega, but somewhere between occurred Delta, which was nothing less than the arrival of man himself and his breakthrough into the daylight of language and consciousness and knowing, of happiness and sadness, of being with and being alone, of being right and being wrong, of being himself and being not himself, and of begin at home and being a stranger.
– Walker Percy
Missing the Boat
by Naomi Shihab-Nye
It is not so much that the boat passed
and you failed to notice it.
It is more like the boat stopping
directly outside your bedroom window,
the captain blowing the signal-horn,
the band playing a rousing march.
The boat shouted, waving bright flags,
its silver hull blinding in the sunlight.
But you had this idea you were going by train.
You kept checking the time-table,
digging for tracks.
And the boat got tired of you,
so tired it pulled up the anchor
and raised the ramp.
The boat bobbed into the distance,
shrinking like a toy—
at which point you probably realized
you had always loved the sea.
You probably know some people who air their grievances like every day is Festivus.
It turns out that this is a strategy that selfish people often use to signal virtue without having to model it.
– Adam Grant
Why do we argue? Life’s so fragile, a successful virus clinging to a speck of mud, suspended in endless nothing.
– Alan Moore
The day you realize the Buddha wasn’t kidding.
– Kenneth Folk
Just an alchemist in a world of weird vibes and side eyes, trying to make things right.
– Nika Solé
We are on guard against contagious diseases of the body, but we are… careless when it comes to the even more dangerous collective diseases of the mind.
– Carl Jung
I do believe there is ultimately meaning in the chaos, and also in the doldrums. What I resist is not the truth but when people put a pretty bow on scary things instead of saying, ‘This is a nightmare. I hate everything. I’m going to go hide in the garage.
– Anne Lamott
The “danger” of vagabonding resides in having your eyes opened–in discovering the world as it really is.
– Ed Buryn
Purity here is a counterfactual, a veil
upon the proportion and form of a city engaged
with its enharmonic being.
– Jay Wright
If you do not acquire good training in detachment, you may attach to all the wrong things.
– Richard Rohr
Each soul has its own rhythm and pace
Trying to live faster than your soul will strain you
Living slower than your soul will pain you
Can you feel the pace of your soul?
– River Kenna
The process of meditation is to witness the heaven within with closed eyes and this enables us to see it everywhere with open eyes.
– Sri Satishji
An afternoon frolic among the ruins has gone precipitously wrong.
– Alexander Nagel
Poetic imagination or intuition is never merely unto itself, free-floating, or self-enclosed. It’s radical, meaning root-tangled in the grit of human arrangements and relationships: how we are with each other.
– Adrienne Rich
Another word to substitute for ‘spirit’ might be ‘silence’—the nourishing interiority from which thoughts and ideas emerge.
– Elaine Equi
a wind in the west
fallen leaves gathering
in the east
– Buson
In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and praxis.
– @monostich
You cannot heal what you refuse to first acknowledge.
– Bryant McGill
I always got the feeling that music fandom was something you were supposed to grow out of; but there’s no way you can grow out of being a musician.
– Robyn Hitchcock
We can err our way into mercy because words stretch and bend and fail to shoulder the fullness of what we mean even as they hold out to us the abundance of memory and the abundance of forgiveness.
– Jane Zwart
There’s a burning coal inside of us—the poet’s job is to unearth it.
– Edward Hirsch
every now and then
the deliberate breath
blue lotus
– James & Jane Welsh
Sometimes I liked the rain. Little by little the level of the water in the stream rose. And now I hoped it would go on raining, and that I would wake up to find it coming down hard. Perhaps I ought to put on Wellington boots and go and see what was happening.
– C.R. Milne
There were a small number of novels that got passed around my middle school in secret, until they lost their front or back covers … By the time they reached me, I’d have no idea even what their titles or who their authors were.
– Yu Hua
They want you ungrounded, ungodly, and unsupported; that’s why connecting with nature, communing with God, and being of service to your community are true measurements of person breaking free from this modern mess. Everything else is an illusion.
– @tenomnft
How can you claim to be spiritual, and yet you don’t listen to your soul?! It’s all ego, pride, and overthinking.
– @frequency__444
The word Beauty is as easy to use as the word Degenerate. Both are handy when one does or does not agree with you.
– Charles Ives
Aye I need everybody shake all that weird dark energy off and get back to living life!
– @FATMANKEY
When I set out in search of you,
I saw many illusions. Sometimes, I
Called the night— day—&
Sometimes,
In the day, I saw dreams.
– Jameel Malik
Remaining like a log is neither passive nor pacifist. Rather it describes a state of mind capable of making wise decisions, unplugged from the emotional charge of compulsive reactivity.
– Helen Tworkov
You want a poem to register in every mind the way it did in yours. Then you discover this never happens. Still, it is what you strive for. You try to make a version of it as incapable of being mutilated as possible.
– Louise Glück
Weldon Kees
The other day I wanted to see you
like I haven’t wanted anyone before.
But I was in New York
and you were in San Francisco.
I completely forgot we’d never met.
That you had left the country
and possibly the earth.
Which is how I would describe desire.
– Alex Dimitrov
The small things of life were often so much bigger than the great things, she decided… the trivial pleasures like cooking, one’s home, little poems especially sad ones, solitary walks, funny things seen and overheard.
– Barbara Pym
So the French sixties, the high point of all this, is a constant fight over new problems, new solutions. It is a very lively intellectual era.
– Fredric Jameson
Evil is unspectacular and always human, And shares our bed and eats at our own table.
– W. H. Auden
its maybe alarming how many women I know in academia (in diverse stages) who would happily give up and go eat fresh caught fish on a beach somewhere if they could.
– Aparna Nair
The West implicitly refuses to give up its own extravagance and high tech. It tries instead to soothe its conscience by arguing that it is precisely these factors that will enable the Third World to get out of the impasse.
– Jacques Ellul, The Technological Bluff
Nommo in September
by Hannah Sanghee Park
There you exist in water.
Unending sketch and erase
of waves on the sea surface.
Today, you’ll be all the words
I wanted to say: look, they’re so
pretty in that second they
surface. You almost didn’t
see them. You didn’t see them.
Sinuous, so commitment’s
a strange shape to hold and take.
I loved the water of you, the snake of
you, everything amorphous and short-lived,
as I expected nothing to last of us.
But when the waves break I still call them by name.
uncluttered
mansion of a mind
forgiving
– Charlie Lawler
All music is folk music. I ain’t never heard a horse sing a song.
– Louis Armstrong
Everyone’s a philosopher.
But boring academics have turned it into a dry classroom sport.
Philosophy is not a theory but an activity
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
“Philo” (φίλος) = Lover “Sophia” (σοφία) = Wisdom
Algorithm, I’m not asking for much—just some quiet thinkers, people chasing wisdom, not clout.
Let’s connect.
– the stoic podcast
What’s genius? I don’t know but I do know that the difference between a madman and a professional is that a pro does as well as he can within what he has set out to do and a madman does exceptionally well at what he can’t help doing.
– Charles Bukowski
The painful secret of gods and kings is that men are free… You know it and they do not.
– Jean-Paul Sartre
I think there’s eternity in every second we’re alive.
– Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads
A good poem is simply an agreement, an arrangement, as is music.
– Frederick Phoenix
What does it matter how one comes by the truth so long as one pounces upon it and lives by it?
– Henry Miller
If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish. It is the key to modern life.
– David Foster Wallace
We have to continuously critique what we think, feel, and believe and ask ‘what is that really in service to inside of me?’ Many times it’s a fear-based response or a need to fit in.
– James Hollis
Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.
– Werner Herzog
This love of mine that never sought return. Was the tender passion of my being’s core.
– Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
Porch Swing in September
by Ted Kooser
The porch swing hangs fixed in a morning sun
that bleaches its gray slats, its flowered cushion
whose flowers have faded, like those of summer,
and a small brown spider has hung out her web
on a line between porch post and chain
so that no one may swing without breaking it.
She is saying it’s time that the swinging were done with,
time that the creaking and pinging and popping
that sang through the ceiling were past,
time now for the soft vibrations of moths,
the wasp tapping each board for an entrance,
the cool dewdrops to brush from her work
every morning, one world at a time.
RHAPSODY
If you are in the garden, I will dress myself in leaves.
If you are in the sea I will slide into that
smooth blue nest, I will talk fish, I will adore salt.
But if you are sad, I will not dress myself in desolation
I will present myself with all the laughters I can muster.
And if you are angry I will come, calm and steady, with
some small and easy story.
Promises, promises, promises! The tongue jabbers, the heart
strives, fails, strives again. The world is perfect.
Love, however, is an opera, a history, a long walk, that
includes falling and rising, falling and rising, while
the heart stays as sweet as a peach, as radiant and
grateful as the deep-leaved hills.
– Mary Oliver
I have built, deep in my heart, a chapel filled with you.
– Marcel Proust
Your life’s a nanosecond; if you have a contribution to make, then make it. Don’t bitch about it, just do it.
– Richard Serra
I felt like things were getting away from me. I’d found heaven and grabbed it as tightly as I could, but it was unraveling, an insubstantial thread sliding between my fingers, too fine to hold.
– Maggie Stiefvater
In the pre-war era when itinerant home-remedy salesmen still wandered the country, they had a traditional patter for selling a potion that was supposed to be particularly effective in treating burns and cuts. A toad with four legs in front and six behind would be placed in a box with mirrors lining the four walls. The toad, amazed at its own appearance from every angle, would break into an oily sweat. This sweat would be collected and simmered for 3,721 days while being stirred with a willow branch. The result was the marvelous potion.
When writing about myself, I feel something like that toad in the box.
– Akira Kurosawa
To want to run away is an essence of being human, it transforms any staying through the transfigurations of choice. To think about fleeing from circumstances, from a marriage, a relationship or from a work is part of the conversation itself and helps us understand the true distilled nature of our own reluctance. Strangely, we are perhaps most fully incarnated as humans, when part of us does not want to be here, or doesn’t know how to be here. Presence is only fully understood and realized through fully understanding our reluctance to show up. To understand the part of us that wants nothing to do with the full necessities of work, of relationship, of loss, of doing what is necessary, is to learn humility, to cultivate self-compassion and to sharpen that sense of humor essential to a merciful perspective of both a self and another.
– David Whyte
Third-eye seeing is the way the mystics see. They do not reject the first eye (thought or sight); the senses matter to them, but they know there is more. Nor do they reject the second eye (the eye of reason, meditation, and reflection); but they know not to confuse knowledge with depth, or mere correct information with the transformation of consciousness itself. The mystical gaze builds upon the first two eyes—and yet goes further.
It happens whenever, by some wondrous “coincidence,” our heart space, our mind space, and our body awareness are all simultaneously open and nonresistant. I like to call it presence. It is experienced as a moment of deep inner connection, and it always pulls you, intensely satisfied, into the naked and undefended now, which can involve both profound joy and profound sadness at the very same time.
– Richard Rohr
It’s one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself, to forgive. Forgive everybody.
– Maya Angelou
Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
The old threads are unraveling,
Get your needles ready.
We are stitching a new quilt
of Humanity.
Bring your old t-shirts,
worn out jeans, scarves,
antique gowns, aprons,
old pockets of plenty
who have held Earth’s treasures,
stones, feathers, leaves,
love notes on paper.
Each stitch
A mindful meditation.
Each piece of material
A story.
The more colour the better,
so call in the Tribes.
Threads of browns, whites,
reds, oranges
Women from all nations
start stitching.
Let’s recycle the hate, the abuse,
the fear, the judgment.
Turn it over, wash it clean,
ring it out to dry.
It’s a revolution
of recycled wears.
Threads of greens, blues, purples
Colourful threads
of peace, kindness,
respect, compassion
are being stitched
from one continent to the next
over forests, oceans, mountains.
The work is hard
Your fingers may bleed.
But each cloth stitched together
Brings together a community.
A world, our future world
Under one colourful quilt.
The new quilt of humanity.
– Julia Myers
They will call you “crazy” because you are, because you were born with the gift of seeing things differently and that scares them.
They’re going to call you “intense” because you are, because you were born with the value well placed to allow yourself to feel it all fully and that intimidates them.
They’re going to call you “selfish” because that’s right, because you found out that you’re the most important thing in your life and that doesn’t suit them.
You’re going to be called in many ways, with many judgments, for a long time, but stay firm on yourself and what you want, and I promise you one day they’re going to call you to say, “thank you for existing.”
– Frida Kahlo
It is the responsibility of the artist to make the world a more human dwelling place.
– James Baldwin
At the movies, she had thought about how the only real friends she had were characters in novels, not real at all. And then [he] had appeared and swallowed up a bit of her loneliness with his blue whale eyes. The next day she wouldn’t for the life of her be able to remember what the movie was called.
– Yaa Gyasi
When we’re making things we love, our mission is accomplished.
– Rick Rubin
The best opportunities are usually found among things most others won’t do.
– Howard Marks
Culture, then, only truly becomes culture when it is embodied in someone.
– László Krasznahorkai
And what I really intended to say in the end remains unsaid.
– Franz Kafka
Read the Holy Scripture, dear friend, read the Scriptures and be immersed in them; receive their sweetness, nourishment, and delight, which is not empty and transient.
– Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain
When you are in a crowd that gets agitated you will be infected, even if you do not share the people’s conviction. You can’t do anything against it, because nothing is passed on more easily than emotions. It goes straight into the unconscious…
– CG Jung
One day you will have to give up some of your dreams, in order to live your reality.
– Gibran Khalil Gibran
Hands are unbearably beautiful. They hold on to things. They let things go.
– Mary Ruefle
He sensed between them an understanding too deep to articulate: the unspeakable knowledge that everything is lost.
– Jennifer Egan
Don’t get married unless you’re ready to do the work.
– Jayson Gaddis
Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know.
– Edward Sapir
Never be ashamed to write a melody that people remember.
– Burt Bacharach
I’ve found that growing up means being honest. About what I want. What I need. What I feel. Who I am.
– Epiphany
If it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.
– Leo Tolstoy
IT’S OKAY…
To wear old clothes.
To not upgrade your phone.
To buy second hand items.
To live in a simple home.
It’s okay to live a simple life.
– safe.journa@
Mercy is the golden chain by which society is bound together.
– William Blake
Your nervous system relaxes around people who have peace in their eyes, growth in their plans, kindness in their speech, compassion in their perception, emotional maturity in their decisions.
– yung pueblo
If you want to see the brave, look to those who can return love for hatred. If you want to see the heroic, look to those who can forgive.
– The Bhagavad Gita
The only thing evil can’t stand is forgiveness.
– Fred Rogers
It is difficult to express with clarity conceptions which by their very nature are opposed to logic
– Marc Bloch
If you deliberately set out to be less than you are capable, you’ll be unhappy for the rest of your life.
– Abraham Maslow
You’ll never find a rainbow if you’re looking down.
– Charlie Chaplin
I’ve learned as time passes, all the things that you’re afraid of will come and they will go, and you’ll be alright.
– Stevie Nicks
I don’t know what they are called, the spaces between seconds, but I think of you always in those intervals.
– Salvador Plascencia
Put usefulness first, and you lose it; put beauty first, and what you do will be useful forever.
– Roger Scruton
The poet knows that there is no rest for his mind, his soul, his heart.
– Frederick Phoenix
Look at you comforting others with the words you wish to hear.
– William Wordsworth
I live by two words, gratitude and tenacity. Tenacity gets me where I want to go, and gratitude doesn’t allow me to be angry along the way.
– Henry Winkler
I rewrote the ending to Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.
– Ernest Hemingway
When it feels scary to jump, that’s exactly when you jump. Otherwise you end up staying in the same place your whole life. And that I can’t do.
– J.C. Chandor
Reading any philosopher is like. Dude. You need to hang out with your friends or something.
– B. C. Vital
Picking myself up has been the heaviest weight I have lifted.
– Heba Nazar
I let go of everything not divinely designed for me, and the perfect plan of my life now comes to pass.
– Florence Scovel Shinn
My mistakes come from
not paying attention.
To the toaster, to my body, to my mother
when she tells me to close the window after
smoking. She shouts from her room asking
if I want any pistachios they’re over the sink,
and bring me some, she says, as I’m writing
a poem about myself and all the attention
I need to pay like debt. To my students,
to my heart. She enters and I switch the screen
she says don’t mind me I’m just coming in
for pistachios do you want some? And I say no,
try to keep typing to get myself to that place
beyond confession where I can see myself
in a new way, where I can use a poem as a tool
to open up my life, like my mother using the shell
of a pistachio to wedge open another pistachio.
– Matthew Siegel
Too protected to worry about anyone working against me. Take it up with God.
– Nika Solé
The human race exaggerates
everything: its heroes,
its enemies,
its importance.
– Charles Bukowski
One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between man and nature shall not be broken.
– Leo Tolstoy
Traumatized individuals must accomplish a similar grief work, accepting the fact that there may be no answer to the question “Why?” if they hope not to remain stuck in rumination.
– Ursula Wirtz
Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs.
– Leo Tolstoy
How bitter were
the Prozac pills
of the last
few hundred mornings.
– Leonard Cohen
September days have the warmth of summer in their briefer hours, but in their lengthening evenings a prophetic breath of autumn.
– Rowland E. Robinson
Of what significance is ‘justice’ to a court of law that tries the foreigner in a language that defines him as the stranger? To “be in” justice, or to be capable of recognizing its presence, is not a transcendent event, is it? Isn’t reasoning/reasonability what creates ‘justice’?
– Alina Stefanescu
That is where the question of hospitality begins: must we ask the foreigner to understand us, to speak our language, in all the senses of this term, in all its possible extensions, before being able and so as to be able to welcome him into our country?
– Derrida
An authentic rise is slower because it takes you through yourself, but the legacy lasts forever.
– Nika Solé
I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread
by thread, into the fabrics of their life.
– Leo Tolstoy, What is Art?
Give love as a gift
But use your brain.
– Kenneth Koch
They speak as (or like) judges, the citizens who speak in the name of their citizenship.
– Derrida
in autumn even
the birds and clouds
look old
– Basho
There is nowhere that a person can find a more peaceful and trouble-free retreat than in his own mind…So constantly give yourself this retreat, and renew yourself.
– Marcus Aurelius
The Presence In Absence
Poetry is not made of words.
I can say it’s January when
it’s August. I can say, “The scent
of wisteria on the second floor
of my grandmother’s house
with the door open onto the porch
in Petaluma,” while I’m living
an hour’s drive from the Mexican
border town of Ojinaga.
It is possible to be with someone
who is gone. Like the silence which
continues here in the desert while
the night train passes through Marfa
louder and louder, like the dogs whining
and barking after the train is gone.
– Linda Greg
… however pleasurable its effects, closure is fiction, one of the amenities that falsehood and fantasy provide.
– Lyn Hejinian
II.
Litany
We never know self-realization.
We are two abysses – a well staring at the sky.
– Fernando Pessoa
The troubled waters
are frozen fast.
Under clear heaven
moonlight and shadow
ebb and flow.
– Murasaki Shikibu
(trans. Kenneth Rexroth & Ikuko Atsumi)
Calling in bonds that are intentional, reciprocal, and spiritual.
– @Zodi_Am
I stared
in reverence of
an autumn leaf temple
– Buson
It is pretty obvious that the debasement of the human mind caused by a constant flow of fraudulent advertising is no trivial thing. There is more than one way to conquer a country.
– Raymond Chandler
It is the higher power which does everything and man is only a tool.
– Sri Ramana Maharshi
Some of us don’t want to be tough alpha leaders. Some of us just want to write and wander the garden and breathe in the sky and nourish and nurture and quietly create new pathways and live our lives as our art. To know the earth as poetry.
– Victoria Erickson
Haiku [for you]
by Sonia Sanchez
love between us is
speech and breath. loving you is
a long river running.
When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language.
– James Earl Jones
It’s come to this: the interstate with star-shaped
plants and mile markers that multiply one’s belonging
Can you hear the low pulse tree-growth consuming the fence?
– Carolina Ebeid
If I was listening to Mozart, I would already be close to the realm of the angels.
– Mahmoud Darwish
I want to remind us all that art is dangerous. I want to remind you of the history of artists who have been murdered, slaughtered, imprisoned, chopped up, refused entrance.
– Toni Morrison
Meaning is in crisis. And we are embroiled, everywhere, in contests over meaning—which are also contests of power, contests over living. And dying.
What I am experiencing now, what I think many of us are experiencing, is a kind of distributed mourning.
– Christina Sharpe.
Poet is a word one can use when speaking of others, if one admires them sufficiently. If someone asks me what I do, I say I’m a critic, or a historian.
– Yves Bonnefoy
I don’t do a block of research and then write. It’s a fluid movement between one thing and another.
– Hilary Mantel
You mere man who come here to put you and your pipestem between clay and sky, do you think that because you can strike a bit of green light from the Leyden jar, that you can thoroughly avert the supernal bolt?
– Herman Melville, The Lightning-Rod Man
I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love…
– William Butler Yeats
You can make art to either feed the machine, the algorithm, or your soul. Choose wisely.
– Ravi Vora
The higher a man is in grace, the lower he will be in his own esteem.
– C. H. Spurgeon
We are children of chance, born of a billion bright improbabilities that prevailed over the infinitely greater odds of nonexistence, living with only marginal and mostly illusory control over the circumstances of our lives and other people’s choices, forever vulnerable to the accidents of a universe insentient to our hopes.
– Maria Popova
It’s so easy to have an opinion about an issue based on reading the newspaper or listening to a news anchor. But when people hear a story directly from the person who’s most affected by it, suddenly, there can be real change.
– Catherine Burns
Everything is collage, everything needs prior art.
– Warren Ellis
i am not ashamed to let my friends know i need their collective spirit—not to make me live forever, but rather to help me move through the life i have. but i refuse to spend the rest of that life mourning what i do not have.
– audre lorde
“I recover out loud because I almost died in silence.” A WORD!
– Lucy Jayes
Introverts are attracted to authenticity. Real & raw. Straightforward. In your face. No games. No drama. No shit. They like keeping things plain, simple, and honest. When you’re in, you’re in forever. Be real or leave. There’s no in-between.
– Cici Holliday
It’s in the moments, small and pure
where love speaks louder than any word.
A gentle act, a cure so sure,
A kindness seen. yet softly heard.
– origion_al@
I Was Told the Sunlight Was a Cure
by Hanif Abdurraqib
for the cloak of despair thrown over our bright & precious
corners but tell that to the lone bird who did not get the memo
dizzy & shouting into the newly unfamiliar absence of morning
light from atop a sagging branch outside my window—a branch
which, too, was closer to the sky before falling into the chorus
line of winter’s relentless percussion all of us, victims to this flimsy math
of hours I was told there was a cure for this. I was told the darkness
would surrender its weapons & retreat I know of no devils who evict themselves
to the point of permanence. and still, on the days I want
to be alive the sunlight leaves me stunned like a kiss
from someone who has already twirled away by the time my eyes open
on the days I want to be alive I tell myself I deserve a marching band
or at least a string section to announce my arrival above
ground for another cluster of hours. if not a string section, at least one
drummer & a loud-voiced singer well versed in what might move me
to dance. what might push my hand through a crowded sidewalk
towards a woman who looks like a woman from my dreams
which means nothing if you dream as I do, everyone a hazy quilt
of features only familiar enough to lead me through a cavern of longing
upon my waking & so I declare on the days I want to be alive I might drag
my drummer & my singer to your doorstep & ask you to dance
yes, you, who also survived the groaning machinery of darkness
you who, despite this, do not want to be perceived in an empire
awash with light in the sinning hours & we will dance
until our joyful heaving flows into breathless crying, the two often pouring
out of the chest’s orchestra at the same tempo, siblings in their arrival & listen,
there will be no horns to in the marching band of my survival.
the preacher says there will be horns at the gates of the apocalypse & I believed even myself
the angel of death as a boy, when I held my lips to a metal mouthpiece & blew out a tune
about autumn & I am pressing your ear to my window & asking if you can hear the deep
moans of the anguished bird & how the wind bends them into what sounds like a child
clumsily pushing air into a trumpet for the first time & there’s the joke:
only a fool believes that the sound at the end of the world would be sweet.
As humans we’ve long been forged on the anvil of the mysteries: Why are we here? Why do we die? What is love? We are tuned like a cello to vibrate with such questions. What is entirely new is the amount of information we are receiving from all over the planet. So we don’t just receive stress on a localized, human level,
we mainline it from a huge, abstract, conceptual perspective.
Perpetual availability to both creates a nervous wreck. The old stories say, enough; that one day we have to walk our questions, our yearnings, our longings. We have to set out into those mysteries, even with the uncertainty. Especially with the uncertainty. Make it magnificent. We take the adventure. Not naively but knowing this is what a grown-up does. We embark. Let your children see you do it. Set sail, take the wing, commit to the stomp. Evoke a playful boldness that makes even angels swoon. There’s likely something tremendous waiting.
– Martin Shaw, Emergence Magazine
Somebody said: “Not only does God replace what you’ve lost, He upgrades it!”
– Benji Newman
Thoughts fly and words go on foot. Therein lies all the drama of a writer.
– Julien Green
The reason we’re all so anxious is because we’re about to find out in less than two months if America is too stupid to live.
– Adam Parkhomenko
A writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy and unlimbers his typewriter.
– E. B. White
The spectacle has us all compliant and hypnotized.
– @schweben_weben
Hope Is Not a Bird, Emily, It’s a Sewer Rat
by Caitlin Seida
Hope is not the thing with feathers
That comes home to roost
When you need it most.
Hope is an ugly thing
With teeth and claws and
Patchy fur that’s seen some shit.
It’s what thrives in the discards
And survives in the ugliest parts of our world,
Able to find a way to go on
When nothing else can even find a way in.
It’s the gritty, nasty little carrier of such
diseases as
optimism, persistence,
Perseverance and joy,
Transmissible as it drags its tail across
your path
and
bites you in the ass.
Hope is not some delicate, beautiful bird,
Emily.
It’s a lowly little sewer rat
That snorts pesticides like they were
Lines of coke and still
Shows up on time to work the next day
Looking no worse for wear.
My words will either attract a strong mind or offend a weak one.
– Anne Sexton
It’s infinitely easier to be AGAINST something than to be FOR something.
It takes BRAVERY to be for something, because then you have to DEFEND your position.
BE BRAVE.
– Heather Cox Richardson
Stay creative with the writing process and make it your own. Don’t let it be a sterile institutional form of learning. Use terms you like and what makes sense to you. We think about these tools year after year, over and over again, so they should change/shift/move/grow with you.
– Oscar Hokeah
At first dreams seem impossible, then improbable, then inevitable.
– Christopher Reeve
The karmic debt you receive for playing with certain folks just isn’t worth it.
– @kenzsinterlude
a child is crying on a plane, devastated by the volume & velocity
that leaving and returning requires.
– @NifMuhammad
SUMMER IN A SMALL TOWN
When the men leave me,
they leave me in a beautiful place.
It is always late summer.
When I think of them now,
I think of the place.
And being happy alone afterwards.
This time it’s Clinton, New York.
I swim in the public pool
at six when the other people
have gone home.
The sky is grey, the air hot.
I walk back across the mown lawn
loving the smell and the houses
so completely it leaves my heart empty.
– Linda Gregg
I want to unfold.
Let no place in me hold
itself closed,
for where I am closed,
I am false.
I want to stay clear in
your sight.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
OUR THRONES DECAY
I SAID my pleasure shall not move;
It is not fixed in things apart :
Seeking not love-but yet to love—
I put my trust in mine own heart.
I knew the fountain of the deep
Wells up with living joy, unfed :
Such joys the lonely heart may keep,
And love grow rich with love unwed.
Still flows the ancient fount sublime ;—
But, ah, for my heart, shed tears, shed tears;
Not it, but love, has scorn of time ;
It turns to dust beneath the years.
– George William A.E. Russell
Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in this enormous world.
– Gustav Flaubert
The sounds of the singing human voice has outlasted almost every chain, bilbo, and shackle that our capitalistic few could latch onto us. The people that sing their real Peoples’ songs will be the people that will win our new world just around this next bend.
– Woody Guthrie
The gate of gratitude is the threshold of a spiritual life. Being liberated from the need to achieve goodness, we flow naturally toward harmony.
– Rev. Dr. Kenji Akahoshi
We all get those moments, days, weeks, months – even years – when the thought of carrying on as a poet feels, at best, unreasonably indulgent, and at worst, largely pointless.
Then comes that moment: a word, a phrase, an inkling or feeling. Suddenly, poetry is everything again.
– Mark Antony Owen
If you behold the earth and the rocks you will acknowledge that there is a life in them; for if this were not so, there would be in them neither gold nor silver, and neither herbs nor grasses.
– Jakob Boehme
There is so much to read and the days are so short.
– George Eliot
THEY HAVE DECIDED
Comes a time they have decided who you are.
But you have not decided who you are.
Your wrists have decided.
Your knees have decided.
The hair that will leave its braidings behind has decided.
Your ears, your rebelling ears,
have decided: enough.
They surrender cities, pianos, sentences, whistlings, cries.
Your thoughts, it seemed once, had decided.
But you, past naming, past weighing, have not decided.
Like a foal still trying to find which leg goes where for standing:
you have not decided.
– Jane Hirshfield
A man should conceive of a legitimate purpose in his heart, and set out to accomplish it. He should make this purpose the centralizing point of his thoughts.
– James Allen
I am a highway wildflower
whose orphaned blooms
begin to blister with the
slightest frost.
– Will Kimbrough
Congratulations you’ve just realised you can’t say “Irish WristWatch”
– Jamie Bibb
Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish yourself to be.
– Thomas À Kempis
Oh, lonely heart, you’re all I have— A memory of a life I’ve lived. Now silence is my only friend; It numbs the pain I cannot mend.
– James McInerney
Of all men’s miseries the bitterest is this: to know so much and to have control over nothing.
– Herodotus
We don’t need a melting pot in this country, folks. We need a salad bowl. In a salad bowl, you put in the different things. You want the vegetables – the lettuce, the cucumbers, the onions, the green peppers – to maintain their identity. You appreciate differences.
– Jane Elliott
The hardest thing is facing yourself. It’s easier to shout “revolution!” and “power to the people” than it is to take a look at yourself, find out what’s real inside you and what isn’t when you’re pulling the wool over your own eyes and your own hypocrisy. That’s the hardest one.
– John Lennon
Some people don’t understand your silence. Some don’t care about your silence. And then there are those rare individuals who understand your silence and are deeply worried, showing their genuine concern for your well-being.
– Ameer Suhail
Thank you for touching me. Some of the only moments worth living were spent with you. Not you especially, the collective you.
– Henry Rollins
Overloading someone with information is a sneaky way to confuse them and get them to agree to something they wouldn’t if they understood the situation clearly.
– lifeechoes4real@
Literature is the safe and traditional vehicle through which we learn about the world and pass on values from one generation to the next. Books save lives.
– LaurieAnderson
One thing I’ve noticed about introverts, is that they can’t be easily influenced or persuaded into something they aren’t interested in, or something they don’t want to do. Introverts have a mind of their own and they know themselves VERY well. So they can’t be convinced of anything that doesn’t feel good or right for their own soul.
– soulalivebarrie@
Every person needs to take one day away. A day in which one consciously separates the past from the future. Jobs, family, employers, and friends can exist one day without any one of us, and if our egos permit us to confess, they could exist eternally in our absence. Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for. Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us.
– Maya Angelou
Community is not where forgiveness is unnecessary or unneeded. It is where forgiveness is very free to happen. And if it doesn’t happen on a daily basis, at least imperfectly, there will be no community.
– Richard Rohr
I became a good pitcher when I stopped trying to make them miss the ball and started trying to make them hit it.
– Sandy Koufax
Nature isn’t at the surface; it’s in the depth.
– Cezanne
To be a giant and keep quiet about it,
To stay in one’s own place;
To stand for the constant presence of process
And always to seem the same;
To be steady as a rock and always trembling,
Having the hard appearance of death
With the soft, fluent nature of growth,
One’s Being deceptively armored,
One’s Becoming deceptively vulnerable;
To be so tough, and take the light so well,
Freely providing forbidden knowledge
Of so many things about heaven and earth
For which we should otherwise have no word –
Poems or people are rarely so lovely,
And even when they have great qualities
They tend to tell you rather than exemplify
What they believe themselves to be about,
While from the moving silence of trees,
Whether in storm or calm, in leaf and naked,
Night and day, we draw conclusions of our own,
Sustaining and unnoticed as our breath
And perilous also – though there has never been
A critical tree – about the nature of things.
– Howard Nemerov
There is one thing in this world which you must never forget to do.
If you forget everything else and not this,
There is nothing to worry about.
But if you remember everything else
And forget this, then you have done nothing with your life.
– Rumi
Last Hope
by Paul Verlaine
Beside a humble stone, a tree
Floats in the cemetery’s air,
Not planted in memoriam there,
But growing wild, uncultured, free.
A bird comes perching there to sing,
Winter and summer, proffering
Its faithful song—sad, bittersweet.
That tree, that bird are you and I:
You, memory; absence, me, that tide
And time record. Ah, by your side
To live again, undying! Aye,
To live again! But ma petite,
Now nothingness, cold, owns my flesh…
Will your love keep my memory fresh?
In this spiritual world there are no time divisions such as the past, present and future; for they have contracted themselves into a single moment of the present where life quivers in its true sense . . . The past and the future are both rolled up in this present moment of illumination, and this present moment is not something standing still with all its contents, for it ceaselessly moves on.
– D.T. Suzuki
Even though I write about the human race, the further away from them, the better I feel. Two miles is great; two thousand miles is beautiful.
– Charles Bukowski
[for Tu Fu] only men’s steadfastness, love, magnanimity, calm, and compassion redeem the night-bound world … for me his response to the human situation is the only kind of religion to outlast this century.
– Kenneth Rexroth
You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.
– Eckhart Tolle
IN THE MUSHROOM SUMMER
Colorado turns Kyoto in a shower,
mist in the pines so thick the crows delight
(or seem to), winging in obscurity.
The ineffectual panic of a squirrel
who chattered at my passing gave me pause
to watch his Ponderosa come and go –
long needles scratching cloud. I’d summited
but knew it only by the wildflower meadow,
the muted harebells, paintbrush, gentian,
scattered among the locoweed and sage.
Today my grief abated like water soaking
underground, its scar a little path
of twigs and needles winding ahead of me
downhill to the next bend. Today I let
the rain soak through my shirt and was unharmed.
– David Mason
LULLABY FOR THE GRIEVING
at the Sipsey River
make small steps.
in this wild place
there are signs of life
everywhere.
sharp spaces, too:
the slip of a rain-glazed rock
against my searching feet.
small steps, like prayers—
each one a hope exhaled
into the trees. please,
let me enter. please, let me
leave whole.
there are, too, the tiny sounds
of faraway birds. the safety
in their promise of song.
the puddle forming, finally,
after summer rain.
the golden butterfly
against the cave-dark.
maybe there are angels here, too—
what else can i call the crown of light
atop the leaves?
what else can i call
my footsteps forward,
small, small, sure?
– Ashley M. Jones
Nothing is ever solved. Solving is an illusion. There are moments of spontaneous brightness, when the mind appears emancipated, but that is mere epiphany.
– Patti Smith
The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism.
– Norman Vincent Peale
Feminism is an endeavor to change something very old, widespread, and deeply rooted in many, perhaps most, cultures around the world, innumerable institutions, and most households on Earth—and in our minds, where it all begins and ends. That so much change has been made in four or five decades is amazing; that everything is not permanently, definitively, irrevocably changed is not a sign of failure. A woman goes walking down a thousand-mile road. Twenty minutes after she steps forth, they proclaim that she still has nine hundred ninety-nine miles to go and will never get anywhere.
– Rebecca Solnit
Her ability to stop herself from saying and ”this motherfucker” on national television requires the kind of willpower most of us could never even dream of.
– Amanda Litman, On Kamala Harris at the Debate
To pull the metal splinter from my palm
my father recited a story in a low voice.
I watched his lovely face and not the blade.
Before the story ended, he’d removed
the iron sliver I thought I’d die from.
– Li-Young Lee
When God has written something into your life, it doesn’t matter who tries to stop it. It simply cannot be stopped.
– Nika Solé
How does the ordinary person come to the transcendent? For a start, I would say, study poetry. Learn how to read a poem.
– Joseph Campbell
All mystics are unanimous on one thing: that all is well, all is well! Though everything is a mess, all is well. Strange paradox, to be sure. But, tragically, most people never get to see that all is well because they are asleep. They are having a nightmare.
– Anthony de Mello
There is no choice of mercies; but what comes
Is grace; whatever’s proportioned, not ours,
At the final tally of loves and crimes
– Geoffrey Hill
Spiritual maturity is realizing that your experience and your beliefs are not the only ones to exist, and not needing them to be “right.”
– Nika Solé
All my life I have been in love with bad weather. The clouds calm me down; if in the morning, from bed, I see them pass, I feel capable of facing the day. But I could never learn with the sun;…The sun only makes me lie down, digest my darkness.
– Emil Cioran
15 REMINDERS FROM THE ELDERS:
1. Get up with the sun to pray. Pray alone.
2. Be tolerant of those who have lost their way. Ignorance, presumption, anger, jealousy and greed come from a lost soul. Pray for them to find guidance.
3. Find yourself, by your own means. Do not let others make your path for you. It is your path, and only yours. Others may walk with you, but no one can make your way (or walk your path) for you.
4. Treat guests in your home with great consideration. Serve them the best food, give them the best bed and treat them with respect and honor.
5. Do not take what is not yours, whether from a person, a community, from the jungle or from a culture. It was not given or won. It is not yours.
6. Respect all the things that are on this earth, be they people, plants and animals.
7. Honor the thoughts, desires and words of all people. Never break them in, or make fun of them, or imitate them rudely. It gives each person the right to their personal expression.
8. Never talk about others in a bad way. The negative energy you put into the universe will multiply when it returns to you.
9. All people make mistakes. And all the mistakes can be forgiven.
10. Bad thoughts cause illness to the mind, body and spirit. Practice optimism.
11. Nature is not FOR us. It is PART of us. She’s part of your family in the world.
12. Children are the seeds of our future. Sow love in your hearts and water them with wisdom and life lessons. When they grow up, just give them space to grow up.
13. Avoid hurting the hearts of others. The poison of their suffering will return to you.
14. Be true (transparent ) all the time. Honesty is the test of one’s will in this universe.
15. Keep yourself balanced. Your Mental person, your Spiritual person, your Emotional person, and your Physical person: they all have the need to be strong, pure and healthy.
– via Lacey Troka
After tragedies, one has to invent a new world, knit it or embroider, make it up. It’s not gonna be given to you because you deserve it; it doesn’t work that way. You have to imagine something that doesn’t exist and dig a cave into the future and demand space. It’s a territorial hope affair. At the time, that digging is utopian, but in the future, it will become your reality.
– Björk
HAS BEEN
It used to take time -ten years,
twenty — for now to glaze over, age
itself into a harmless then. Now,
in my mild years, it comes with the glaze on.
– William Bronk
All sorts of things in this world behave like mirrors.
– Lacan
Melancholia is, I believe, a musical problem: a dissonance, a change in rhythm. While on the outside everything happens with the vertiginous rhythm of a cataract, on the inside is the exhausted adagio of drops of water falling from time to tired time.
– Alejandra Pizarnik
People think reading a bunch of books in a year is a flex….it’s not.
Instead, read a few very good books, very slowly.
Truly ingest & apply the content
That’s the win.
– Dr. Julie Gurner
You wouldn’t go through the purgatory of writing unless you were a lonely person.
– Edna O’Brien
There is not a more repulsive spectacle than on old man who will not forsake the world, which has already forsaken him.
– T. S. Eliot, The Elder Statesman
Realize that your world is only a reflection of yourself and stop finding fault with the reflection. Attend to yourself, set yourself right; mentally and emotionally. The physical self will follow automatically.
– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
We always have the belief and the illusion that we are the ones writing, that we are the ones dreaming. …We are not having the dream, the dream has us…
– Hélène Cixous
The text remains, like a musical score, always ready for another, quite different performance.
– Michael Wood
September 11
by Giannina Braschi
Banks are the temples of America.
This is a holy war.
Our economy is our religion.
The people who criticize others a lot or harshly are often the people with the most healing to do. Be mindful of who you “look up to”, admire or seek guidance or advice from, as you may be led down a path of misery.
– Nyle Beck
back to grey
the bleak aesthetics
of work
– @hegelincanada
He who says he is happy lies, and invoking happiness, sins against it. He alone keeps faith who says: *I was happy*. The only relation of consciousness to happiness is gratitude: in which lies its incomparable dignity.
– Adorno
Poetry operates through a kind of breaking apart that is, to me, the most authentic mode of storytelling.
– Elaine Kahn
STAY PRESENT
The primary focus of this path of choosing wisely, of this training to de-escalate aggression, is learning to stay present. Pausing very briefly, frequently throughout the day, is an almost effortless way to do this. For just a few seconds we can be right here. Meditation is another way to train in learning to stay, or, as one student put it more accurately, learning to come back, to return to being present over and over again…
Sometimes my mind is busy. Sometimes it’s still. Sometimes the energy is agitated. Sometimes calm. All kinds of things happen when we meditate—everything from thoughts to shortness of breath to visual images, from physical discomfort to mental distress to peak experiences. All of that happens, and the basic attitude is, “No big deal.” The key point is that, through it all, we train in being open and receptive to whatever arises.
– Pema Chodron
August
I spend
all day among the high
branches, reaching
my ripped arms, thinking
of nothing, cramming
the black honey of summer
into my mouth; all day my body
accepts what it is.
– Mary Oliver
I release you, my beautiful and terrible
fear. I release you. You were my beloved
and hated twin, but now, I don’t know you
as myself. I release you with all the
pain I would know at the death of
my children.
You are not my blood anymore.
– Joy Harjo
Perhaps the most “spiritual” thing any of us can do is simply to look through our own eyes, see with eyes of wholeness, and act with integrity and kindness.
– Jon Kabat-Zinn
I know no woman – virgin, mother, lesbian, married, celibate – whether she earns her keep as a housewife, a cocktail waitress, or a scanner of brain waves – for whom her body is not a fundamental problem: its clouded meaning, its fertility, its desire, its so-called frigidity, its bloody speech, its silences, its changes and mutilations, its rapes and ripenings.
– Adrienne Rich
Body, be who you need to be. Brown girl in an orange dress.
Red macaw in a canopy. Be flock. Be the oldest living thing
rooted beneath the language of things. The cypress your mother
called Sarv-e Abarkuh. Be a life less heavy with history.
Be the little boy who skips school to sell tea on the street.
Be a box of pears clothed in gold paper. Be something more tart.
Lime. Be mouth, be kingdom. Wear something made of infinity. Be sunset
over a silk Zardosi sea. Be the young girl who survived a drowning
by her loved ones. Be acid. Be sailed. Be colony. Be endangered
and dangerous. Wear your own damp skin. Body, be something
useful. Be dam and river the desert like blue streamers.
River the village like the saddest epic. When you lay in the street
with blood pooling around you, be memory. Be at the center
of living. If nothing else, be a shadow of the thing.
- Shireen Madon
30 Cents, Two Transfers, Love
Thinking hard about you
I got onto the bus
and paid 30 cents car fare
and asked the driver for
two transfers
before discovering that I
was alone.
– Richard Brautigan
We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feelings.
– Hannah Arendt, We Refugees
An open heart is a conduit through which collective life can express its grief of uncertainty and loss.
– Nikayla Jefferson
Trauma doesn’t make people stronger. It damages their nervous system. It hijacks their digestive track. It keeps the person in a constant loop of hypervigilance. To tell someone they are stronger because of trauma is to deny what it has cost them to survive.
– Nate Postlethwait
Many of us don’t have mentors or role models because no one has ever done what we’re here to do. The divine mission is higher and realer than it’s ever been.
– Nika Solé
Parents should always be conscious of the fact that they themselves are the principal cause of neurosis in their children.
– CG Jung
on a abandon road
a lonely poet marches
into the autumn dusk
– Basho
The fact that a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing . . . He must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths.
– Carl Jung
There he would sit, almost motionless except for his swift writing. He would be so still that the lizards would run over him and the birds hop close around him. An occasional hunter would start at this silent figure.
– Freida Lawrence on D.H. as he wrote Lady Chatterly
See how our wants horrify us.
– Ruth Awad
Be on your guard against day-dreaming; it is a vicious monster, very seductive, that has already devoured much of my substance. It is the siren of the soul; it sings and beckons; once you answer its call you never return.
– Gustave Flaubert
[Life] can so suck, to use the theological term. It can be healthy to hate what life has given you, & to insist on being a big mess for a while. This takes great courage. But then, at some point, the better of 2 choices is to get back up on your feet & live again.
– Anne Lamott
Observance of customs and laws can very easily be a cloak for a lie so subtle that our fellow human beings are unable to detect it.
– C.G. Jung
Discontent, blaming, complaining, self-pity cannot serve as a foundation for a good future, no matter how much effort you make.
– Eckhart Tolle
The most zealous proponents of freedom are the very ones who formulate the most rules, precepts, imperatives, and limits.
– Jacques Ellul
The way the media truffle hunts for Black republicans is just so wild.
– Lisa Lucas
It is a great trick of oratory sometimes merely to persuade people when you could have convinced them; then they will often think they have been convinced when in fact all you are able to do is merely persuade them.
– Lichtenberg
The guide is not outside, the guide is within you. One has to go deeper into one’s own being to find the guide.
– Osho
Your whole life can be altered just by associating with someone. So yes. Be selective.
– @hustlanani
It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled […] can reveal the most secret places of life.
– D. H. Lawrence
God made the illusion look real
and the real an illusion.
– Rumi
If you wish to improve, be content to appear clueless or stupid.
– Epictetus
Forgive yourself for your faults and your mistakes and move on.
– Les Brown
dramatic flair
my percussion solo
on the coffee grinder
– @pauldavidmena
A writer
Events got him in a corner
and gave him a bad time of it –
poverty, people, ill-health
battered at him from all sides.
So far from being silenced,
he wrote more poems than ever
and all of them different –
just as a stoned crow
invents ways of flying
it had never thought of before.
No wonder now he sometimes
suddenly lurches, stalls, twirls sideways,
before continuing his effortless level flight
so high over the heads of people
their stones can’t reach him.
– MacCaig
BROKEN SPOKE
You grow old.
You love everybody.
You forgive everyone.
You think: we are all leaves
dragged along by a wheel.
Then comes a splendid spotted
yellow one—ah, distinction!
And in that moment
you are dragged under.
– Mary Ruefle
I cross the borders without touching them,
Their ample patch of shadows,
Hollowing out with words
My long, flayed song.
– Jorge Valls (translated by Louis Bourne)
When you get what you want
it’s time to start over,
the old monk always thought.
– The Old Monk
Been teaching college for 15 years. Have an entire PhD. Still have to google the definition of “ontology.”
– Racquel Gates
When faith arises as a result of analysis, it is much more stable, because that analysis will astutely detect and be able to resolve whatever doubts one might have.
– Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso
Every time you post about humans being inherently bad for the planet, I want you to know that you’re playing into that very recently invented colonialist mindset that divides “man” from “nature.”
– Mary Heglar
I’m a poet, so I can empathize with minor gods.
– Chuma Nwokolo
The work that hurts you less than it hurts others is the work you were made to do.
– James Clear
Literary fiction & poetry are real marginalized right now. The audience only wants to go this deep, but if an art form is marginalized it’s because it’s not speaking to people.
– David Foster Wallace
Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.
– Alfred North Whitehead
Repeat anything often enough and it will start to become you.
– Tom Hopkins
the walls we have built around us must come down if we want to let life in. but this process cannot involve destroying them, because love — the only thing powerful enough to deconstruct — doesn’t engage in acts of destruction.
– Amanda Melito
It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Most people think, speak, and write in the way they sleep, eat, and drink — with no question ever arising of their relation to the idea. It happens with very few, and then this decisive moment has either an extraordinary propulsive power (the genius) or through anxiety it paralyses the individual (irony).
– Søren Kierkegaard
Leisure without books is death, and burial of a man alive.
– Seneca
Songwriting is an art unto itself, not to be confused with performing.
– Jo Stafford
The world is not a wish-granting factory.
– John Green
I would like, in my arbitrary way, to bring one closer to the actual human being.
– Francis Bacon
There is no harm in repeating a good thing.
– Plato
The eyeglass lens corrects the view, but you must open your eyes to see.
– theawakingvoice@
You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.
– James Clear
It is pointless trying to know where the way leads. Think only of the first step. The rest will come.
– Shams Tabrizi
Understand this: The world wants to assign you a role in life. And once you accept that role you are doomed.
– Robert Greene
We all wear masks, and the time comes when we cannot remove them without removing some of our own skin.
– André Berthiaume
I always think that the quickest way to understand someone is to look at what’s on their bookshelves.
– Matt Haig
How beautifully leaves grow old. How full of light and color are their last days.
– John Burroughs
It is the mark of a good man to be able to give a good account of himself.
– Epictetus
Two sounds of autumn are unmistakable: The hurrying rustle of crisp leaves blown along the street by a gusty wind, and the gabble of a flock of migrating geese.
– Hal Borland
Nostalgia – that’s the Autumn, dreaming through September; Just a million lovely things; I always will remember.
– Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
Consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown.
– Erwin Schrödinger
The big money is not in the buying or selling—but in the waiting.
– Charlie Munger
In fact, a sense of essence is, in essence, the essence of sense, in effect.
– Douglas Hofstadter
The subway moves underground, unnoticed, yet it’s always moving people forward.
– theawakingvoice@
Wisdom is ofttimes nearer when we stoop than when we soar.
– William Wordsworth
Creative people are creative because they consume different forms of art, continuously. Because they think in ways that are not direct.
– Frederick Phoenix
A teacher or fellow traveler on the path might show us where we are on a map and where we might go from there, but we have to make the journey ourselves.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Poets are the songwriters for people too wounded to sing.
– Frederick Phoenix
For those habituated to high levels of internal stress since childhood – it is the absence of stress that creates unease, evoking boredom and a sense of meaningless. People may become addicted to their own stress hormones – adrenaline & cortisol.
– Gabor Mate
And how should we behave during this Apocalypse? We should be unusually kind to one another, certainly. But we should also stop being so serious. Jokes help a lot. And get a dog, if you don’t already have one.
– Kurt Vonnegut
Stop trusting that the
arc of the moral
universe will simply
bend toward justice –
– and decide to be
arc benders.
– John Pavlovitz
I’d rather let my spirit fly free, than be caged by religion. Become a Buddha, not a Buddhist; become a Christ, not a Christian. One implies an awakened state of consciousness, the other a dogmatic approach to life.
“God” is too big for one religion. Love and quantum physics are my religion. At one level, all religious traditions have the same aim – to transform the individual into a positive being. I love Jesus, I love Shiva, I love Krishna, I love Buddha. All rivers lead to the same ocean.
– John Lennon
To the extent that this world surrenders its richness and diversity, it surrenders its poetry. To the extent that it relinquishes its capacity to surprise, it relinquishes its magic. To the extent that it loses its ability to tolerate ridiculous and even dangerous exceptions, it loses its grace. As its options (no matter how absurd or unlikely) diminish, so do its chances for the future.
– Tom Robbins
Sometimes, the stars come down
and walk among us as people.
– Pico Iyer
More and more, he comes to realize that people fall into three camps: those who hardly, if ever, see beauty, even when it strikes them between the eyes; those who recognize it only when it is made apparent to them; and those rare souls who find beauty everywhere they turn, even in the most unexpected places.
– Elif Shafak
Remember
That to have the eyes of an artist,
That can be enough,
The ear of a poet,
That can be enough.
The soul of a human
just pointed
in the direction of the divine,
that can be more than enough.
I tell you this to remind myself.
Every gesture is an act of creation.
Even empty spaces and silence
can be the wings and voices of angels.
– Michele Linfante
And therein lies the whole of man’s plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.
– Milan Kundera
No matter how careful you are, there’s going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn’t experience it all. There’s that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should’ve been paying attention. Well, get used to that feeling. That’s how your whole life will feel some day. This is all practice.
– Chuck Palahniuk
For a while there was a mantra and it went like this. You are equally capable of hurting and being hurt. You are equally capable of healing and being healed. You didn’t of course believe it. The hurt part mostly. Day after day, you sank to your ankles in the eddies of your decentest intentions. You do not have to be good, a poem said. But you did! You did. You did, and you wanted to be good, and you wanted to be good. Still you glanced sidelong. Still you wrung, clung, harbored, balked, and spooned transgenic soups from the borrowed pot. Still your longing swerved. You were equally capable of healing and being healed. You were equally capable of hurting and being hurt. The tide trickled ravishing around your feet.
– Robin Myers
These were the delicate words, like wings: ‘I love you’ and ‘I missed you’ and ‘I’m so very sorry.’ They flapped without sound.
– Shuly Xóchitl Cawood
Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.
– Martha Graham
Mind, body and spirit are linked together.
You cannot consider one without the others.
The higher powers, the medicine person, and
the community are linked together. People,
other creatures, and the rest of creation are
linked together. Thinking in dimensions like
these keep us from being narrow and self-centered.
Also, it stretches and expands the mind.
– Frank Fools Crow, Lakota holy man
He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and willful and wild-hearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the sea-harvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight. He felt the emptiness in his chest, an ache that spoke of longing and loneliness, a desire to reach out and touch something, someone, but always finding only emptiness. The world around him was vast, but it offered no solace. Every step he took felt like he was drifting further away from the shore, further into a sea of uncertainty and despair. And he wondered if he would ever find his way back, or if he was destined to wander this wasteland of his own making forever.
– James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Passion creates, addiction consumes.
– Gabor Maté
Frankl gave us three ways to uncover meaning. “Creative” way-write a book, make a movie, create a business, etc. “Experiential” way-encounter another person, love them in their singularity and uniqueness, or go somewhere that changes your life. “Attitudinal” way— this is the path for those who face unavoidable suffering such as an incurable illness or the death camps. You can’t escape the condition, but you can choose your attitude toward it and fill it with meaning: an inner triumph. All three of these ways helped me to uncover the meaning in my life.
– Mary Cimiluca, Parabola Magazine
Something of the hermit’s temper is an essential element in many forms of excellence, since it enables men to resist the lure of popularity, to pursue important work in spite of general indifference or hostility, and arrive at opinions which are opposed to prevalent errors.
– Bertrand Russell, Power
Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution; Choice – not chance – determines your destiny.
– Aristotle
Watching a tiny bird flit down and
perch on a standpipe hose bib
dipping drinking drops of drip
every valve
leaks a little
there is no
stopping the flow.
– Gary Snyder
Spiritually elevated and materially abundant. I want it all in every dimension.
– Nika Solé
one egg
rattling in the pot
autumn rain
– Sandra Simpson
Take stock of the reasons you give yourself for engaging in activities that take you away from your aim to be at peace and attain liberation. Resolve to return, again and again, to those actions that will help you along the path.
– Vanessa Zuisei Goddard
With the idea of the masterly ones, we get the idea of elitism. “Elitism?
Elitism is bad.” Have you ever heard that said? It’s slave morality speaking. I recall lecturing at the University of Oklahoma to a select group of outstanding students from colleges all over the country. I’d never before had such an assemblage of excellent students. One of the professors later told me that one student came to him and said, “Having only excellent students in this group is elitism.” The professor replied, “This program is for people who are up to the scholarship.” “No,” the student argued, “it’s elitism and shouldn’t be on this campus.” So the professor said, “I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Bill. I’m going to recommend to the football coach that you play defensive halfback. What do you think?” He got the idea. The only place where excellence is appreciated is on the athletic field.
– Joseph Campbell
To be an angel in a world ruled by darkness, is the highest task.
– Nika Solé
There is only one inborn error, and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy…So long as we persist in this inborn error, and indeed even become confirmed in it through optimistic dogmas, the world seems to us full of contradictions.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Sentimental Moment Or Why Did The
Baguette Cross The Road?
by Robert Hershon
Don’t fill up on bread
I say absent-mindedly
The servings here are huge
My son, whose hair may be
receding a bit, says
Did you really just
say that to me?
What he doesn’t know
is that when we’re walking
together, when we get
to the curb I sometimes start to reach
for his hand
what they don’t tell you about the spiritual path is that you can go on a harrowing journey through Hell, shaking screaming panting shaking in the floor,
And then like, do some paperwork and go grocery shopping and call some friends
– River Kenna
A true seeker never becomes old, every Eternal Quest is outside the bonds of Life, and the more the outer husk withers, the clearer, the brighter, the more potently glows the kernel.
– Novalis
To disguise nothing, to conceal nothing, to write about those things that are closest to our pain, our happiness; to write about my sexual clumsiness, the agonies of Tantalus, the depth of my discouragement— I seem to glimpse it in my dreams— my despair.
– John Cheever
Returning (again) to softness.
—the daily imperative
– McCall Erickson
My greatest skill has been
to want little.
– Thoreau
The fact that air and water are still sometimes free is a deep pain in the hearts of capitalists everywhere.
– Jacob Wren
I was trying to figure out why Los Angeles feels so different. It’s not just that a lot of rich people moved out, it’s that the middle class don’t live there anymore. All these neighborhoods are now super expensive so it sucked families out, and with them the teenagers that created the culture. Now it’s either rich people, wanna be rich influencers, in debt working professionals, or essentially the poor class that work all the support jobs. There is no SoCal culture anymore of young people creating things like skateboarding or punk music. Just streaming executives in multimillion dollar bungalows that Tony Hawk used to live in as a 12-year-old.
– Joseph Kahn
long conversation
one cricket stops
another starts
– Ricardo Silvestrin
Spiritual sight and pure energy will take you farther than anything else.
– Nika Solé
Hierarchies are celestial. In hell all are equal.
– Nicolas Gomez Davila
a bombed roof
patched with a piece
of starry sky
– Božena Zernec
lightning
writing poetry
shadows on the mountains
– Joso
When you know the truth is that the world is yours, you don’t really worry about them lying saying it’s not.
– Nika Solé
A desirable poem is more rare than rare, & terror is certain.
– Bob Kaufman
Wisdom cries out in the street;
in the squares she raises her voice.
At the busiest corner she cries out;
at the entrance of the city gates she speaks:
“How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple?
How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing
and fools hate knowledge?
– Diana Butler Bass
I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.
– Albert Camus
Empathy has no script. There is no right way or wrong way to do it. It’s simply listening, holding space, withholding judgment, emotionally connecting, and communicating that incredibly healing message of ‘You’re not alone’.
– Brené Brown
Hope tends to appear when we see that all sorts of disparate personalities can come together, no matter how different and jarring they may seem at first.
– Anne Lamott
No thief, however skillful, can rob one of knowledge, and that is why knowledge is the best and safest treasure to acquire.
– L. Frank Baum
Religion is not to be found in a set of dogmas, beliefs or rituals. It is something much greater and far beyond all that.
– Krishnamurti
Stress in the mind can affect your body.
May you have peace in your body, home, job, school, community, nation, and relationships.
May peace abide and reign within you and around you.
– Dr. Thema
If we can change our thoughts, we can ultimately completely change our story.
– Catherine Burns
Be aware of your breathing. Notice how this takes attention away from your thinking and creates space.
– Eckhart Tolle
Real relationships flow and unfold organically and unpredictably — not through strategy and fake synchronicity.
– Leah Callen
These verbal or visual images constitute the total world in which modern man lives: he now spans the entire globe, but experiences it only indirectly.
– Jacques Ellul
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
– Edna St. Vincent Millay
People often claim to hunger for truth, but seldom like the taste when it’s served up.
– George R. R. Martin
Making art / writing poetry, is Holy work. Seeing art / understanding poetry, is Holy work.
– @curtisrobin
Meditation is not a matter of withdrawing — you are not drawing in, retreating from the world. In fact you are getting into the world.
– Chögyam Trungpa
The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy.
– Yevgeny Zamyatin
Why do we ask about God at all? God effervesces in you and sets you to the most wondrous speculations.
People speak of belief when they have lost knowledge. Belief and disbelief in God are mere surrogates. The naive primitive doesn’t believe, he knows, because the inner experience rightly means as much to him as the outer. He still has no theology and hasn’t yet let himself be befuddled by boobytrap concepts.
He adjusts his life -of necessity- to outer and inner facts, which he does not -as we do- feel to be discontinuous.
He lives in one world, whereas we live only in one half and merely believe in the other or not at all.
We have blotted it out with so-called “spiritual development”, which means that we live by self-fabricated electric light and –to heighten the comedy– believe or don’t believe in the sun.
– Carl Jung
All of us who lived on Earth
and all our loves and wars
may not appear at all
in the moon’s memoirs.
– Bill Knott
It’s not over yet.
A dream can spend
all night fighting off
the morning.
– Elizabeth Willis
Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s part of what it means to be alive.
– Haruki Murakami
I’m just a guy trying desperately to become sane
– River Kenna
As a writer, if you know something and then you keep quiet, it’s like dying.
– Arundhati Roy
The soul of the newly born baby is marked for life by the pattern of the stars at the moment it comes into the world, unconsciously remembers it, and remains sensitive to the return of configurations of a similar kind.
– Johannes Kepler , Harmonies of the World
I was bleeding with a September kind of longing; the type of longing that is both patient and unconditional.
– Huang O
Truth is always beautiful to me. Even when it’s hard. While parts of me flail about, my soul self naturally receives.
The soul unfurls and flows in the stream of what is, not what I wish it to be.
– McCall Erickson
Being must be felt. It can’t be thought.
– Eckhart Tolle
In the cold wind, if you can lean against others, none of you will blow away. You keep each other from falling or help each other get back up. Someone holds out a hand, or even scared old you may hold out a hand, and a person in need reaches for it and hangs on.
– Anne Lamott
A new necessity is taking over from the old. … The further the technical mechanism develops which allows us to escape natural necessity, the more we are subjected to artificial technical necessities.
– Jacques Ellul
The individual problem is the world problem. It is what we are as individuals that creates society.
– Krishnamurti
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.
– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Vas Doloris
by Julián del Casal
translated from the Spanish
by William George Williams
To Luis G. Monge
I come from the remote borders
of the land of oblivion. My songs
will not sound beneath your balconies,
I am the singer of the broken sanctuaries.
Artist, dreamer, sensitive and tender,
my music is a voice of affirmation . . .
I am like a winter twilight
in love’s garden.
I love the fire of the sun. My delights are
the flaming rose, the bleeding pink,
and I love the white swans on the lakes
and the blue clouds in the wind.
I love the sad—for life is Pain—
I love your black half-opened eyes
fixed in an unknown direction
where dead loves are forgotten.
I know full well that love is sleep . . .
and my soul sleepless. You are not
to blame for my sorrow. You are a dream . . .
I call you when I wake and you do not come!
You can come only as does death,
silent and fatal. You are anxiety,
no matter, come; my heart is strong . . .
Shed your petals in my hands, faded rose.
I knew in my dreams that love is good
and today, impenitent, a rebel against love,
I weep upon the lilies of your breast
and kiss you on the forehead.
Belief like the rust on barbwire,
I pray past it. Next in line at the reliquary,
I kneel to kiss whatever is left
of the saint.
– Dennis Schmitz
Art doesn’t get made on
the clock,
but it does get finished
on the clock.
– Rick Rubin
synchronicities are very real and very important, but treating them in a systematic left-hemisphere way will destroy you.
– River Kenna
Introverts are attracted to intelligence. The way you think. The way you see the world. Your thoughts. Ideas. Idiosyncrasies. Things that make you different. Unique. Your crazy personality. Not your labels or titles, but who you are from the inside. A connection to your soul.
– @karunpal
In mythology, tears are often supposed to have a redeeming and healing effect. If you have ever dealt with people who have become petrified by suffering, you know how redeeming it is if they can cry.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
the two astronauts trapped in space have a voting plan so i don’t want to hear excuses from anyone.
– @not_chasebank
First Fall
by Maggie Smith
I’m your guide here. In the evening-dark
morning streets, I point and name.
Look, the sycamores, their mottled,
paint-by-number bark. Look, the leaves
rusting and crisping at the edges.
I walk through Schiller Park with you
on my chest. Stars smolder well
into daylight. Look, the pond, the ducks,
the dogs paddling after their prized sticks.
Fall is when the only things you know
because I’ve named them
begin to end. Soon I’ll have another
season to offer you: frost soft
on the window and a porthole
sighed there, ice sleeving the bare
gray branches. The first time you see
something die, you won’t know it might
come back. I’m desperate for you
to love the world because I brought you here.
Prepare yourself with this meditation, and when you feel anger overcoming you, run through it in your mind:
Know that all that befalls you comes from a single Source, that there is nothing outside of that Oneness to be blamed for any event in the universe.
– Rabbi Tzvi Freeman
Being from the South is incredible. We have delicious food, amazing music, and unbelievable storytellers. Without the South, America would just be Canada.
– @MauriceRuffin
This Era
by Tomasz Rózycki
Translated from the Polish by Mira Rosenthal
I’ve said goodbye to the twentieth century,
its porches choked with bindweed, its wild weeping
and wild grapevines. When finally the black
patrol car leaves, then you can hear the panting
of the train, the horses snorting, sweat steaming
in icy air. Nervous, you wonder what might be worth
taking for good: a useless notebook, minor
snapshots, cheap religious medals? Forests and cities
along the way sleep like huge dark churches.
I’ll not be coming back here, windows draped
with dirty towels, signs of widespread plague.
Below the sand, I’ve hidden a handful of words
not yet infected. For you. I put the rest outside
along with the still warm body to see how these times
will take care of it at night. What shape this era will carve
in the flesh, what will be left when morning arrives.
The more in harmony you are with the flow of your own existence, the more magical life becomes.
– Adyashanti
Self-induced punishments
are discouraging.
Proud hyperesthetics
live alone.
Pain is a kind of disdain
in the same town.
Mutual benefit
is more fun.
Beneficent mutualities
live with interest,
cocreating trails
unmappable.
Symbionts don’t mean
to lead the living.
They just do.
– George Gorman
Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes?
– Joseph Campbell
Don’t dumb down: always write for your top five percent of readers.
– Martin Amis
Feel the veins take root. Bloom your fist. Watch the petals fade from crimson to peach, then wilt as the stem goes limp. Call it nothing but growth.
– Ttam Nanooc
In the end the only events in my life worth telling are those when the imperishable world irrupted into this transitory one.
– C.G. Jung
Solitude, my mother, tell me my life again.
– O. V. de Milosz
We young people, however, completely wrapped up in our literary ambitions, noticed little enough of these dangerous changes in our homeland: we had eyes only for books and pictures. We did not have the slightest interest in politics and social problems: what did these shrill wranglings mean in our lives?
The city was aroused at the elections, and we went to the libraries. The masses rose, and we wrote and discussed poetry. We did not see the fiery signs on the wall…
And only decades later, when roof and walls fell in upon us, did we realize that the foundations had long since been undermined and that together with the new century the decline of individual freedom in Europe had begun.
– Stefan Zwieg
Creative work can be exciting, inspiring, and godlike, but it is also quotidian, humdrum, and full of anxieties, frustrations, dead ends, mistakes, and failures.
– Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul
The average citizen likes to compare the dreamer to a madman. The average citizen is right in feeling that he would immediately go mad if, like the artist, the man of religion, the philosopher, he allowed himself to become acquainted with the abyss within him…
– Hermann Hesse
The average citizen has set a watchman between himself and his soul, a consciousness, a morality, a security police, and he recognizes nothing that comes directly from that abyss of the soul before it has been given that watchman’s stamp of approval.
– Hermann Hesse
Academics argue
Over the rate of acceleration
As they hurtle towards the ground
– @kira_clarke
It’s not what you are that holds you back, it’s what you think you are not.
– Denis Waitley
Speaking from the point of view of multiplicity, betweenness, and visitation, the writer can become a person in whom both individuality and community may ripen into true expression.
– Jane Hirshfield
Ours is a culture that enshrines the ephemeral, and that leaves certain things and people out.
– James Salter
It is silence that both is the matrix of the work and is made visible in the work. It is crucial both to its form and to the emotional power it has for me.
– Rosmarie Waldrop
Serving the world is the best form of prayer.
– Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
When poetry exists for no one, for no purpose, it becomes greater. It is not a tool for expression, nor a mirror for the reader—it simply is. In this state, poetry defies interpretation, critique, & value. It moves beyond the grasp of language & transcends into pure existence.
– Laura Kerr
I used to think of Opening My Heart as kind of like a clamshell opening up
Now it feels more like my whole emotional system/energy body has been one big kinked, knotted, leaky hose,
and opening it means painstakingly straightening it out, patching leaks, & unclogging the flow
– River Kenna
And the ideas that I received from Buddhism were kind of this idea of like, we have to escape. We have to escape reality. There’s this kind of up and out mentality. We have to kind of escape the suffering thats here as opposed to this idea of which is more aligned with say, Bill Plotkin, who i am sure will talk about of like, no, we have this kind of specific gift or puzzle piece to contribute to the greater unfolding and the greater evolution of all life. And how that, I guess, set of beliefs that cosmology is for me is such a, it’s more empowering and motivating and like enlivening.
– River Kenna and Tom Morgan
Isn’t it a miracle that we’ve ended up as ourselves?
– Hilton Als
Everything I read becomes part of a mental library, it’s almost like building vocabulary in another language. When you sit down to write a novel, the only tools you have are all the books that you’ve ever read.
– Sally Rooney
I think this is an oversimplification. A lot of people on both the right and left are concerned about fitness and healthy eating.
But it’s true that in the last 10 years or so educated people in the US, including many Democrats, have been over-medicating.
– Joel Atallah
Can somebody please explain to me how being fit, eating clean, and skeptical of medications— became a right wing talking point?
And being obese, depressed, and medicated— a left wing philosophy?
– Suneel Dhand MD
Leaders on the left have emphasized that we should not shame people for being overweight or mentally ill. But it does not follow that obesity and mental illness are inherently good – it’s just that people with these issues should be open about them and not be stigmatized.
– Joel Atallah
Listen
my beloved nothings
your seriousness
will kill you!
– Ilya Kaminsky
We never talked about men or clothes. It was always Marx, Lenin, and revolution – real girl’s talk.
– Nina Simone
I promise if you just listen and I mean, REALLY listen, everything will become so clear to you.
– @avirgoworld
A poetic form or meter is not a box meant to hold a poem. It is, instead, an aspect of the poem’s language. When it’s all about the box, there’s rarely a good poem inside.
Use it to craft a poem. Let it guide you, but don’t be in thrall to it.
– Jane Greer
Each of us is a little word of the Word of God, a mini-incarnation of divine love. The journey inward requires surrender to this mystery in our lives, and this means letting go of our “control buttons.” It means dying to the untethered selves that occupy us daily; it means embracing the sufferings of our lives, from the little sufferings to the big ones; it means allowing God’s grace to heal us, hold us, and empower us for life; it means entering into darkness, the unknowns of our lives, and learning to trust the darkness, for the tenderness of divine love is already there; it means being willing to surrender all that we have for all that we can become in God’s love; and finally, it means to let God’s love heal us of the opposing tensions within us. When we can say with full voice, “You are the God of my heart, my God and my portion forever” [Psalm 73:26], then we can open our eyes to see that the God I seek is already in me … and in you. We are already One.
– Franciscan sister Ilia Delio
I want to feel that I am thoroughly and completely understood so that now and then I can take my guard down and look out around me and not feel that I will be destroyed with my defenses down.
I want to feel completely vulnerable, completely naked, completely exposed and absolutely secure.
This is what you look for in your children when you have them. This is what you look for in your [mate] if you get one.
That I can run the risk of radical exposure and know that the eye that beholds my vulnerability will not step on me. That I can fell secure in my awareness of the active presence of my own idiom in me.
So as I live my life then, this is what I am trying to fulfill. It doesn’t matter whether I become a doctor, lawyer, housewife . . .
I’m secure because I hear the sound of the genuine in myself, and having learned to listen to that, I can become quiet enough, still enough to hear the sound of the genuine in you.
– Howard Thurman
Abundance and destitution are two facets of the one face of God, and to be spiritually alive in the fullest sense is to recall one when we are standing squarely in the midst of the other.
– Christian Wiman
Here is the wind bending the reeds westward,
The patchwork of morning on gray moraine:
Had I words I could tell of origin,
Of God’s hands bloody with birth at first light,
Of my thin squeals in the heat of his breath,
Of the taste of being, the bitterness,
And scents of camas root and chokecherries.
And, God, if my mute heart expresses me,
I am the rolling thunder and the bursts
Of torrents upon rock, the whispering
Of old leaves, the silence of deep canyons.
I am the rattle of mortality.
I could tell of the splintered sun.
I could Articulate the night sky, had I words.
– N. Scott Momaday
I am the dream changing before your eyes. I am my body, a house for blood and breath. I am a man on earth and a god in heaven. While I travel the deserts in frail form, while I grow old and weep and die, I live always as a child inside the body of truth, a blue egg that rocks in the storm but never breaks. I sleep in peace in my mother’s lap, a child mezmerised by sunlight on the river. My soul is swallowed up by God.
Out of chaos came the light.
Out of the will came life.
– The Egyptian Book of the Dead
In the tea ceremony, the expression “once in a lifetime, this one encounter” is often used. The usual way this is interpreted is “a one-and-only encounter.” In Zen, though, we interpret this expression in the following way: In the course of our lifetime, there is one person we must meet. No matter through which grasslands we may walk or which mountains we may climb, we must meet this person. This person is in this world. Who is this person? It is the true self. You must meet the true self. As long as you don’t, it will not be possible to be truly satisfied in the depths of your heart. You will never lose the sense that something is lacking. Nor will you be able to clarify the way things are.
This is the objective of life as well as of the teaching of Buddhism – to meet yourself.
– Sekkei Harada
Gurdjieff said: “Not so much for forest am I. I specialist for sand. Never can I get lost in desert. Travel in desert depend from secrets – two which pass from father to son, a legominism. One I tell. Always big ridges on dunes lie a certain way, according to winds. Before you start, look how lie these dunes, judge about angles, how you must cross, they never change for small storm, only big can make different. Very important know this, because once you are fifty meters from starting place, there is no right, no left.
– Solita Solano
Tonglen
On the in-breath, you breathe in whatever particular area, group of people, country, or even one particular person… maybe it’s not this more global situation, maybe it’s breathing in the physical discomfort and mental anguish of chemotherapy; of all the people who are undergoing chemotherapy. And if you’ve undergone chemotherapy and come out the other side, it’s very real to you. Or maybe it’s the pain of those who have lost loved ones; suddenly, or recently, unexpectedly or over a long period of time, some dying. But the in-breath is… you find some place on the planet in your personal life or something you know about, and you breathe in with the wish that those human beings or those mistreated animals or whoever it is, that they could be free of that suffering, and you breathe in with the longing to remove their suffering.
And then you send out – just relax out… send enough space so that peoples’ hearts and minds feel big enough to live with their discomfort, their fear, their anger or their despair, or their physical or mental anguish. But you can also breathe out for those who have no food and drink, you can breathe out food and drink. For those who are homeless, you can breathe out/send them shelter. For those who are suffering in any way, you can send out safety, comfort.
So in the in-breath you breathe in with the wish to take away the suffering, and breathe out with the wish to send comfort and happiness to the same people, animals, nations, or whatever it is you decide.
Do this for an individual, or do this for large areas, and if you do this with more than one subject in mind, that’s fine… breathing in as fully as you can, radiating out as widely as you can.
– Pema Chödrön
Thinking of nothing. I remember my mother sitting like this. And I would ask, What is it, Mommy? And she would say,
Oh nothing. And now I know what nothing is.
– Patti Smith
When a man works he not only alters things and society, he develops himself as well. He learns much, he cultivates his resources, he goes outside himself and beyond himself. Rightly understood, this kind of growth is of greater than any external riches which can be garnered…. Hence the norm of human activity is this: that in accord with the divine plan and will, it should harmonize with the genuine good of the human race, and allow people as individuals and as members of a society to pursue their total vocation and fulfill it.
– Pope John Paul II
That country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain.
– Ray Bradbury
I was falling. Falling through time and space and stars and sky and everything in between. I fell for days and weeks and what felt like lifetime across lifetimes. I fell until I forgot I was falling.
– Jess Rothenberg, The Catastrophic History of You and Me
In all our hopes and plans for a better world we all recognize that provincial and racial prejudices must be combatted. In the long perspective of history, the right to vote has been one of the strongest pillars of a free society. Our first duty is to protect this right against all encroachment. In spite of constitutional guarantees, and notwithstanding much progress of recent years, bias still deprives some persons in this country of equal protection of the laws.
– Dwight David Eisenhower
Every viewpoint is useful, and it takes a wide diversity of views for any group to navigate this universe, let alone to act as custodians for it.
– Tyson Yunkaporta
These are connections between two points that were previously unconnected. Jokes are one of the most pure examples of this neural creation event; most humor is based on two ideas coming together in a new way: puns, rhymes, double meanings, unusual circumstances, accidents, exposed delusions, and contextually inappropriate content are examples of this. The chemical rush we get from sudden neural connections in jokes is so intense and pleasurable that we laugh out loud. This kind of humor and joy in learning is a huge part of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures. If people are laughing, they are learning. True learning is a joy because it is an act of creation.
– Tyson Yunkaporta
You’re so polite with your sadness. you don’t want to
ruin this for anyone.
– Silas Melvin
We all have this moment, when your folks first see you as someone not growing up to be them.
– Chuck Palahniuk
We know that the wildest and most moving dramas are played not in the theatre but in the hearts of ordinary men and women who pass by without exciting attention, and who betray to the world nothing of the conflicts that rage within them except possibly by a nervous breakdown.
– C. G. Jung
The modern writer (scriptor) is born simultaneously with his text; he is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his writing, he is in no way the subject of which his book is the predicate; there is no other time than that of the utterance, and every text is eternally written here and now.
– Roland Barthes
Who could resist the chance to revisit our memories, the majority of which we’d forgotten so completely that they seemed to belong to someone else?
– Jennifer Egan
I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor.
– Henry David Thoreau
Wisdom isn’t just about knowing more; it’s about understanding better. It’s the clarity that comes from experience and reflection.
– Lachlan McLeod
I wish I still knew how to find joy in the pure thrill of the ten minutes before your favorite cartoon comes on, the rush against time, the body so suddenly delayed, cumbersome yet present, the embodiment of coiled anticipation.
– Ocean Vuong
You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetical justice to your soul and simply experience yourself.
– Albert Camus
Loneliness is the absense of connection not company.
– K. Tolnoe
It’s really hard to be a Christian if you get following Jesus confused with the an American dream.
– Colin Smith
Moral certainty can deafen people to any truth other than their own.
– Geraldine Brooks
The three hardest tasks in the world are neither physical feats nor intellectual achievements, but moral acts: to return love for hate, to include the excluded, and to say, “I was wrong.”
– Sydney J. Harris
Behind it all surely is an idea so simple, so beautiful that when we grasp it- in a decade, a century or a millennium- we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise? How could we have been so stupid?
– John Wheeler
Indeed the mystery of Christ runs the risk of being disbelieved precisely because it is so incredibly wonderful.
– Cyril of Alexandria
You need to remember this. The cat sat on the mat. That’s not a story. But the cat sat on a dog’s mat. Now that’s a story.
– David Cornwell
I studied the mind and was shocked to realize why 95% of people struggle with creativity, clear thinking, and idea generation.
Creativity isn’t what you think
I’d get so frustrated when struggling with creativity that I would nearly punch my screen. My body would tense up. It felt horrible.
But then I discovered meta-physics.
It’s derived from the Greek:
“Meta” > “beyond” “Physika” > “natural things”
It’s the research of all things beyond the 3D world—hence, creativity.
(The mental plane is BEYOND the physical).
– Euan Spencer
According to Vedanta, there are only two symptoms of enlightenment, just two indications that a transformation is taking place within you toward a higher consciousness. The first symptom is that you stop worrying. Things don’t bother you anymore. You become light-hearted and full of joy. The second symptom is that you encounter more and more meaningful coincidences in your life, more and more synchronicities. And this accelerates to the point where you actually experience the miraculous.
– Deepak Chopra
I describe myself as a patternist, and believe that if you put matter and energy in just the right pattern you create something that transcends it. Technology is a good example of that: you put together lenses and mechanical parts and some computers and some software in just the right combination and you create a reading machine for the blind. It’s something that transcends the semblance of parts you’ve put together. That is the nature of technology, and it’s the nature of the human brain. Biological molecules put in a certain combination create the transcending properties of human intelligence; you put notes and sounds together in just the right combination, and you create a Beethoven symphony or a Beatles song. So patterns have a power that transcends the parts of that pattern.
– Ray Kurzweil
It is almost impossible to have an idea of the circle except by being at the centre, because we are so used to relating ourselves to everything as fi we were the centre of it. It is very interesting to try and be aware of the circle from the circumference, for then there is no privileged point, no place in which I can isolate myself – for being the centre is special, therefore separated or isolated from the whole. It is a totally different experience for us when we are not obsessed by being at the centre. Then the centre is everywhere and we see differently.
– J.G. Bennett
But you can eat as much as you want
from the tree of bullshit.
– Edward Steed, New Yorker Cartoons
There’s an old Irish myth about how when the center falls apart, when there is no big unifying story that can be told in public so that everyone remembers, yes, we all are in this together, when that happens, when the center cannot hold, the old story says then it’s time for each person to go to the margins and the edges of life. Because the centre when it’s missing does not completely disappear. Rather, the elements of the centre are then found at the margins and edges of life. And so it becomes a time for each person to go to the edge that attracts them and at the same time causes them to be fearful.
And the old story says that if each person goes in the direction that is both attractive and fearful to them, they will find that at the edge of their life a thread, and if each person would then pick up that thread and begin to pull it back towards the centre, then the unifying centre can be remade from the weaving together of many individual threads of life. In the greater myth that serves life, not death, no one has to be heroic and do it all or claim that they are the only one who can do it. Each person is just responsible to find their thread and find a way to weave it back into life. And the key to this narrative of the great way is that no one can be excluded for any reason, not because of their age, or their origin, or their race, or their economic disposition. Because each person has a life thread that has vitality and meaning and creativity in it.
And the point isn’t to indulge in some kind of magical thinking that would say that no one is going to die on this troubled path that we all share at this point. And certainly, the point cannot be that we’re all going to go back to life and business as usual. The understanding of the bigger myth right now is the world as we knew it is already gone. The point now is to be inhabiting a bigger, unifying living myth in which the words that we are all in this together have genuine, heartfelt meaning. We are in a time of radical change throughout the world, where life and death are struggling on a daily basis. And that requires each of us to change and come out of the crisis as greater souls not smaller people.
– Michael Meade
Forgiveness means giving up hope for a different past. It means knowing that the past is over, the dust has settled and the destruction left in its wake can never be reconstructed to resemble what it was. It’s accepting that there’s no magic solution to the damage that’s been caused. It’s the realization that as unfair as the hurricane was, you still have to live in its city of ruins. And no amount of anger is going to reconstruct that city. You have to do it yourself.
– Heidi Priebe
In Hebrew, the name Noah originates from nuh, “rest, quiet.” Noah brings men back to respect their environment. He is, according to Jewish tradition, the inventor of agricultural tools. We should give him the first grape and the invention of wine. If the Bible emphasizes Noah’s integrity in the face of the extreme decay of his contemporaries, it also shows Noah giving in to his urges by getting drunk and indulging in debauchery. It symbolizes for the Jewish tradition the harmful effects of consumption without moderation.
– Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, Manuscripts
Noah was great in years; Jacob was great in years, Solomon was great in years — that is, through their inner life they had gone beyond time as we know it. This is why the ancient civilizations, those that had roots in the teachings of wisdom, revered old age. It was not out of some sentimentality or some self-serving motive; not out of a sociopsychological pattern of familial bonding. It was for a metaphysical reason. An individual who had spent his life struggling for the inner Self had gathered something within himself that called to every other man or woman who came in touch with him. In such an old man or woman one saw that time was not only a destroyer but a creator.
– Jacob Needleman, Time and the Soul
The ethic of Jesus, as I understand it, issues from the ever so slight edge He grants to life, in the ‘life v. death’ conflict of the Easter hymn. He grants the edge (better, He wins the edge) from the edge. From his chosen place in the world.
– Daniel Berrigan
Let the watchwords of all our people be the old familiar watchwords of honesty, decency, fair-dealing, and commonsense…. We must treat each man on his worth and merits as a man. We must see that each is given a square deal, because he is entitled to no more and should receive no less. The welfare of each of us is dependent fundamentally upon the welfare of all of us.
– Theodore Roosevelt
The beauty of a fragment is that it still supports the hope of brilliant completeness.
– Tobias Wolff
Like romanticism, nationalism is an 18th century invention that is succeeded so spectacularly that we assume nations have always existed. The fiction comes first, then the believers.
– Javier Cercas
Everybody, everybody everywhere, has his own movie going, his own scenario, and everybody is acting his movie out like mad, only most people don’t know that is what they’re trapped by, their little script.
– Thomas Clayton Wolfe
The world does not give us very much now; it often seems to consist of nothing but noise and fear, and yet grass and trees still grow
– Hermann Hesse
There is no cavalry coming. No miracle solution. No saviors.
In the end, we, the American people-not any of our institutions-have to save our democracy by registering and voting in defense of our freedoms the next two months.
We are the cavalry. The responsibility is ours.
– Eric Holder
By vast pains we mine into the pyramid; by horrible gropings we come to the central room; with joy we espy the sarcophagus; but we lift the lid— and no body is there! —
– Herman Melville
Not to know one’s true identity is to be a mad, disensouled thing — a golem. And, indeed, this image, sickeningly Orwellian, applies to the mass of human beings now living in the high-tech industrial democracies.
Their authenticity lies in their ability to obey and follow mass style changes that are conveyed through the media.
Immersed in junk food, trash media, and cryp-tofascist politics, they are condemned to toxic lives of low awareness.
Sedated by the prescripted daily television fix, they are a living dead, lost to all but the act of consuming.
– Terence McKenna
While some people can only see psyops and traps everywhere, I am primarily starting to see God working through the people of this planet in incredible ways.
– Laura Matsue
When we develop self-control and tolerance toward our difficult feelings and impulses, instead of behaving thoughtlessly or reactively, we can choose not to act at all.
– Kimberly Brown
But now delay, and let the heart reverse
Time’s sinister profile on the wall of night.
– Hildegarde Flanner
To make a poem is taking possession of a nuptial celebration beyond anything found in this life, very attached to it, and yet in proximity to the urns of death.
– René Char (translated by Mary Ann Caws)
Each book creates its own system, because each comes from a different obsession, a different question that needs to be answered.
– Javier Cercas
There is nothing like being left alone again, to walk peacefully with oneself in the woods. To boil one’s coffee and fill one’s pipe, and to think idly and slowly as one does it.
– Knut Hamsun
Theology
He tried to think about the zoo,
the bird he’d seen with an anvil head,
slinking lizards in the reptile house.
It had been a good day.
But he remembered the panther enclosure
where he had waited for thirty minutes,
staring up at a dark hut hidden in trees.
Suppose there was no panther.
– Jack Underwood
Attention is the only path to the unsayable, the only path to mystery.
– Cristina Campo (translated by Alex Andriesse)
The connections we make in the course of a life -maybe that’s what heaven is.
– Fred Rogers
The best thing my Italian upbringing taught me is how to enjoy life. I will lounge on a sofa sipping espresso with no guilt about being “unproductive”. I will light candles, make risotto, and romanticise my dinner.
The secret to La Dolce Vita is believing that you deserve joy.
– @iconawrites
I think the measure of a good poem might be that it opens up space for new poems.
– Damen O’Brien
Frustration, discouragement, and depression mean you are working against yourself. Do not try to fix whatever comes in your life. Fix yourself in such a way that whatever comes, you will be fine.
– Jaggi Vasude
Dharma is not the property of anyone. Dharma becomes wealth to those who value it, and apply it to their lives.
– Ven. Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, Wisdom Without Limit
Is there somebody observing what’s happening in your nervous system? Is there somebody watching what you see with your eyes? No. What you’re looking at is you. As your eyes are open now, resting upon this scene, you are observing the flesh and blood of yourself. That’s it. And there’s no “you” observing it. This pattern of lights and colors and shapes is the middle of your brain. That’s how the middle of your brain feels; how you feel—and not only through the sense of sight, but through all your fingertips, the drums of your ears, the taste buds in your mouth and your nose. All they’re conveying to you of the external world is you.
– Alan Watts
Memory is the process of organizing what to forget.
– Elias Khoury
The thing about hatred is that it pre-dates the object of hatred. Once hatred takes full root in the mind, it goes looking for places to land, seeking out things or people or beings to become the new object of that aggression. And if you incite hatred in a group of followers to gain power over their views, it’s inevitable that eventually (maybe not quickly, but eventually) they’ll turn on you, too, as an object of their hate.
Please never confuse anger and hatred. This post is about hatred. Anger always contains wisdom. Hatred is a mental poison.
– Ethan Nichtern
Sometimes you read a poem where every line is good and it’s like, oh right, I guess you can do that. Every line can be good
– Elisa Gabbert
When we get out of the glass bottles of our own ego,
and when we escape like squirrels from turning
in the cages of our personality
and get into the forest again,
we shall shiver with cold and fright
but things will happen to us
so that we don’t know ourselves.
Cool, unlying life will rush in,
and passion will make our bodies taut with power,
we shall stamp our feet with new power
and old things will fall down,
we shall laugh, and institutions will
curl up like burnt paper.
– D.H. Lawrence
THE RULE OF GRAMMAR
The past tense is so severe,
it makes everything
smaller.
I love you, we said
to each other
like that moment in running when both feet
are off the ground.
– Chana Bloch
We’re living in a civilization that doesn’t understand metaphor. So they tend to concretize everything, and not even know that that’s going on.
– Marion Woodman
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
– T.S. Eliot
Philosophy cannot be regarded as a mere equation where nature is the unknown quantity! Remark that the poet, in the moment of inspiration, comprehends God, and consequently does the philosopher’s work. Consequently poetic inspiration is nothing less than philosophical inspiration. Consequently philosophy is nothing but poetry, a higher degree of poetry!
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Yes, like Mother Courage, we have the same same war at our gates, and a handsbreadth from us, if not in us, the same horrible blindness, the same dust in our eyes, the same earth in our mouths.
– Althusser, Bertolazzi and Brecht
The sage is one, who has offered as a sacrifice, his own individuality and this annihilation of identity, is tantamount to a merging with the Totality, in complete
love.
– Ramesh Balsekar
[Nicolas Heredia y Mota attempted] to investigate the sociological background of Decadentism; after asserting that the very name indicated it to be a school without ideals [. . .].
– Poe Carden
There is a difference between waiting and allowing.
Waiting is living in the future and in some other moment than now.
Allowing is letting the universe unfold its grace in divine timing.
– Kute Blackson
lonelier than Father
I pour the night into my cup
– Kineo Hayashida
When My Child Asks About the News
Why are they crying? you ask me.
They’ve lost the ones
they love, I say, their homeland.
And you stare into my eyes in silence.
This is the privilege
of being, of those who wake with a quiet sky
above them, a body untorn, a heart
unturned to stone.
I say the words again
(as though you know them)
and you will not, cannot fathom,
for you are not yet different
from your life,
you are not yet different from your life,
and no one has shattered you or cast you out
and given you a word for love, for home.
– Joseph Fasano
…Until I am free, you are not free either.
– Fannie Lou Hamer
You cannot tailor make your situation in life, but you can tailor make your attitudes to fit those situations.
– Zig Ziglar
The attic holds our memories until we are able to face them again.
– OPrunty
No one has heard thought or listened to a mind,
But where people have lived in inwardness
The air is charged with blessing and does bless;
Windows look out on mountains and the walls are kind.
– May Sarton
ODE TO BLUEBERRIES
Now that it’s September, I want to thank blueberries.
I want to thank peaches, cantaloupes, cherry tomatoes
and corn on the cob. All summer long while we griped
about the Republicans, you were lying there in baskets,
blue eyes silently watching, blinking back tears.
Some of you were whole crimson sunsets in my hand.
I’m not sure what antioxidants are, but thank you:
I know that you were full of them.
I loved your fuzz, buxom peach, your sass, blackberry.
I loved your smile, honeydew, halved and split
as we slobbered together. Local strawberry,
just one of you gushing on my tongue was almost
too much to bear. Next summer you could do a better job
of staying under three dollars a pint; otherwise, no complaint.
How erotic you are, plum, lounging in a sunbeam,
your crimson still-life, your sweated drops of fever!
You should be ashamed the way your waves imploded
on the beaches of my mouth: well, it was a scene!
But thank you. I also want to thank some of you flowers:
begonia, peony, chrysanthemum and lucifer crocosmia.
I do not forget the morning glory, that soft trumpet
made of sky, calling us inward toward granaries
of moonlight. And now, just as the rest of you languish,
the apples arrive! Round crimson shouts
from green caverns of Autumn afternoon.
O humans, we too might burst, an orchard of longings,
wild but rooted, globe-laden, corridored with fruit.
We might drop at the edge of the meadow,
silvered in flurries of milkweed and thistle-down.
Why not bend to our ripening, the pungent smolder
of our inward sugars, the grace and gravity of Fall?
Why not bow to the blessed sag of our limbs
in the gentle bruise of surrender on our knees?
We could lie on the bee-festered earth, hollowed, wormed
out with inner paths, free from every striving to rise. Why not let
this turning planet have her way with us, and do what she loves?
– Alfred K. LaMotte
In this spiritual world there are no time divisions such as the past, present and future; for they have contracted themselves into a single moment of the present where life quivers in its true sense . . . The past and the future are both rolled up in this present moment of illumination, and this present moment is not something standing still with all its contents, for it ceaselessly moves on.
– D.T. Suzuki
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
– Sylvia Plath
I remember a psychiatrist once telling me that I gamble in order to escape the reality of life, and I told him that’s why everyone does everything.
– Norm Macdonald
Nevertheless, there are rare moments when the turmoil ceases and something a little more stable appears. It may be that a train of intellectual reasoning or the working out of a scientific or philosophical theory will arouse a very strong interest and this sustains the direction of my thought for a time. Two different parts of me—two qualities of being—come together for a moment and everything changes.
As soon as the interest begins to fluctuate, I become once more a man who is absent from himself, possessed by dreams and the automatic working of the formatory apparatus, which almost wholly rules his life. A great deal of work on self-observation starts from the study of this dispersal. I must accept the idea that it is not external life that causes my dispersal. Life is the place where it happens: the cause lies in me and I will have to come, little by little, to acknowledge that it is so. How easy it would be if I could stop my perpetual forgetfulness of the fact that my life is a mountaintop which I have not yet conquered!
– Henri Thomasson, The Pursuit of the Present, translation by Rina Hands
Let me fall if I must.
The one I will become
will catch me.
– Baal Shem Tov, founder of Hasidism
A characteristic of human action is that it always begins something new, and this does not mean that it is ever permitted to start ab ovo to create ex nihilo. In order to make room for one’s own action, something that was there before must be removed or destroyed, and things as they were before are changed.
Such change would be impossible if we could not mentally remove ourselves from where we physically are located and imagine that things might as well be different from what they actually are. In other words, the deliberate denial of factual truth — the ability to lie — and the capacity to change facts — the ability to act — are interconnected; they owe their existence to the same source: imagination. It is by no means a matter of course that we can say, “The sun shines,” when it actually is raining (the consequence of certain brain injuries is the loss of this capacity); rather, it indicates that while we are well equipped for the world, sensually as well as mentally, we are not fitted or embedded into it as one of its inalienable parts.
We are free to change the world and to start something new in it. Without the mental freedom to deny or affirm existence, to say “yes” or “no” — not just to statements or propositions in order to express agreement or disagreement, but to things as they are given, beyond agreement or disagreement, to our organs of perception and cognition — no action would be possible; and action is of course the very stuff politics are made of. Hence, when we talk about lying … let us remember that the lie did not creep into politics by some accident of human sinfulness. Moral outrage, for this reason alone, is not likely to make it disappear.
– Hannah Arendt
30 quotes from Gray Cook
1. First move well, then move often.
2. Exercise is nothing more then stress on an organ.
3. Don’t add strength to dysfunction.
4. Moving isn’t important, until you can’t.
5. Maintain the squat, train the dead lift.
6. Don’t look at my workouts, look at my outcomes.
7. Stabilizers don’t do their job by being strong, they do their job by being fast.
8. If mobility is stiff in one position or pattern but wasn’t in a different position or pattern its not a mobility issue
9. A good leg lower is a precursor to a good dead lift. A good dead lift is a precursor to a good swing.
10. Do what people need, not what they want.
11. The missing link in most strength & conditioning programs are carries.
12. Your brain is too smart to allow you to have full horsepower in a bad body position, it’s called muscle inhibition
13. If you have an issue with your active straight leg raise or shoulder mobility, you don’t have the right to go anywhere else in a corrective strategy. Don’t worry about your squat, clean up the active straight leg raise and shoulder mobility FIRST!
14. When someone leaves your weight room they should have a stamp of durability
15. Don’t rehab the injury, rehab the person.
16. When someone hits the end on a carry, the carry is over because the prime movers can’t take over
17. The best athletes are the ones that can use their resources the most resourcefully
18. Why do you need to screen? Because you need to be in-tune with the group that you are training. Not everyone deserves the same program.
19. 1 in 5 individuals have pain in a movement on the screen – that’s a health problem, not a fitness problem
20. If you can’t do a bodyweight squat or push up you shouldn’t load a squat or a bench press
21. The movement screen won’t change injury rates, it changes the way you train
22. FMS isn’t about decreasing injuries…everything we do should be about decreasing injuries
23. Pain screws everything up.
24. The more complex the movement, the easier it is to find a way to compensate
25. Elevating your heels isn’t just about giving you more ankle mobility, it gives you an anterior weight shift that makes it easier to sit back when you squat.
26. Making people use their stability muscles to keep them stable instead of their global muscles will make a huge difference when it comes to injury prevention
27. Before you worry about adding correctives, stop and figure out why/what you are doing is causing these issues
28. Loaded carries show you the limiting factors with your stabilizers instead of your prime movers – how long can you maintain postural integrity under load.
29. The KB Bottoms Up Press will be huge for shoulder health, integrity and proprioception because it is a self-limiting exercise – if you don’t control the small things you can’t perform the press.
30. The number one risk factor for musculoskeletal injury is a previous injury, implying that our rehabilitation process is missing something.
The weirder, the stranger the book is, and the freer the author has been with it, the harder it may be for the reader, but some readers will get it, and that’s who you’re writing for. And you don’t know who they will be, but you have to take a chance.
– Lorrie Moore
When the Gods Come Rushing
past, and you lunge to tackle them
and miss, and your sternum
hits the earth and rough air scrapes
out your lungs, this might be
the most honest form of prayer.
A little huff of loss. It lets you know
you lived, believed in divine
intervention, but just couldn’t pull it off,
and when those gods pause
and tauntingly look back, like
thunderclouds massing
over arid plains, know that it is
not the storm you want,
but the deep, deep drink of rain.
– Michael Bazzett
Losing one’s grip on reality can happen collectively as well. Regressive ideological possession demonstrates how whole groups of people with some childish fantasy of bringing heaven to earth can lose their grip on reality & kill off their surroundings in the process.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
I lie on my bunk in the moonlit night
on my stomach and contemplate
the bottomless horror of
the world…
– Jack Kerouac
Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
– Wallace Stevens
All people can contribute to your understanding, whether you agree with them or not. The ego is quick to make someone who believes differently than you ‘wrong’ or the bad guy, when really diversity in thought is what creates the ecosystem of humanity.
– Nika Solé
What we resist 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. We may confess instead that what we resist will persist, as haunting.
– James Hollis
The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.
– Ernest Becker
A high vibration is a form of revolution.
– Nika Solé
The journey of the hero is about the courage to seek the depths; the image of creative rebirth; the eternal cycle of change within us; the uncanny discovery that the seeker is the mystery which the seeker seeks to know.
– Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Journey
I received the grace of shadows. The grace of remaining in the dark.
– Anna Kamieńska (translated by Clare Cavanagh)
Don’t you hear the terrible screaming all around you? The screaming that men call silence.
– Herzog
Every time you think a loving thought, you literally bless all realms of creation.
– Shanti Cristo
Craft is an invisible seam. You may not notice it, but it makes the difference in the finish.
– Airea D. Matthews
We are born at a given moment, in a given place and, like vintage years of wine, we have the qualities of the year and of the season of which we are born.
– C.G. Jung
The introverted intuitive has, in a way, a very difficult life, although one of the most interesting lives.
– Carl Jung
… on the way, coat spattered
with mud and wine. Every turning
breaks my heart. Maybe at last
I’m a poet––me and my donkey,
mile on mile of drizzle
– Lu Yu
We must first directly comprehend the spiritual reason of things and then let us with this insight look upon things that are about us.
– Soyen Shaku
They call the spiritual world woo-woo and then go back to their fierce commitment to the illusion.
– Nika Solé
Remember that this is not something we do just once or twice. Interrupting our destructive habits and awakening our heart is the work of a lifetime.
– Pema Chodron
Genuine connection can be like a rainbow—to go charging at it, or even to grasp at it, can make it dissolve. Cheerful patience is essential.
– Mindy Newman
OF POETRY
there is only the work.
The work is what speaks
and what is spoken
and what attends to hear
what is spoken.
– William Bronk
The most powerful people on the planet are actively dismantling the system by way of their own spiritual evolution. The new world is already here.
– Nika Solé
Every wall is an eye,
every eye is a wall.
I have only myself tonight
in a language inside a language
about the white sky falling
and the black earth.
– Pablo Medina
There is no room in any town (he said)
To house the towering hugeness of my dream.
It straitens me to sleep in any bed
Whose foot is nearer than the night’s extreme.
There is too much of solitude in crowds
For one who has been where constellations teem,
Where boulders meet with boulders, and the clouds
And hills convene; who has talked at evening
With mountains clad in many-colored shrouds.
Men pity me for the scant gold I bring:
Unguessed within my heart the solar glare
On monstrous gems that lit my journeying.
– Clark Ashton Smith
Don’t stop the flow of abundant energy by hoarding or owning what you receive. Keep it moving. Use your prosperity in the service of others, and for causes greater than your ego.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
This inquiry began with a deceptively simple question. How does it happen that serious people continue to believe in progress, in the face of massive evidence that might have been expected to refute the idea of progress once and for all?
– Christopher Lasch
True Dharma has to be in accord with living experience.
– Ven. Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche
The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things.
– Epictetus
There are no wrong turnings. Only paths we had not known we were meant to walk.
– Guy Gavriel Kay
the lies we believe:
another parliament
of crows
– @hegelincanada
It is well known, and we are all glad of it, that modern life expectancy is greater than in traditional societies. … The human life which is now prolonged is much diminished and very precarious.
– Jacques Ellul
Poetry led me by the hand out of madness.
– Anne Sexton
Embrace the beauty of love: it flourishes when we wholeheartedly accept each other, with flaws and everything.
– Osho
The moment we permit evil to control our imaginations, dictate the way we think, and shape our responses, we at the same time become incapable of seeing the good and the true and the beautiful.
– Eugene Peterson
And nurturing is how we heal our places of former neglect.
– McCall Erickson
In order to create, the need to express has to be bigger than the fear.
– Juliette Binoche
Responding to a calling in life can feel like dying. There is a kind of spiritual or emotional death that happens every time we step into a bigger stage or phase of life. In growing the soul, the ego dies a little. In the following the call, the ego dies again.
– Michael Meade
There is a transcendental dimension beyond language… It’s just hard as hell to talk about it.
– Terence McKenna
Daily life is a symbol of the inner you. In using your ordinary five senses to their fullest, noticing and watching the signs, it assists you in the development of a sixth sense. So, as part of a heightened awareness, start demanding that your mind notice everything. Watch, look, count, and make a mental note of everything. If, for example, you enter a large hotel ballroom, within seconds you ought to know the answers to a dozen simple questions: how many chairs, lights, and waiters are there? What color is the carpet? Where are the tables, what’s on them, and so on?
Constantly demand that your mind notice even the most irrelevant information. In this way, you heighten your awareness in the five senses; and in watching your surroundings carefully, you gradually strengthen your sixth sense, picking up more of what is going on. Heightening your powers of observation in the external world assists you in becoming more aware of your internal, visionary self. The universe is constantly talking to you and showing you things.
So, if you’re walking down the street and something strange happens, stop, watch, and remember. If a black cat hops across your foot, does a somersault, and pees against the pub wall, ask yourself, “What does this mean?” The fact that you are coincidentally there at that precise moment in eternity to witness the cat’s antics means that the symbol is yours. It’s the external world talking to you. It is showing you things about yourself.
Thus, by internalizing the God Force – and by understanding that your Infinite Self and its inherent spirituality develops and grows only when you quiet the mind – you begin to see how the universal law of the God Force is trying to take you by the hand, show you things, and lead you on.
Life is a prayer; it’s a dialogue. You are projecting energy and receiving energy: that is the interaction between you and the God Force. Watch that ebb and flow; watch your inner dialogue and the language of life’s symbols, and offer up your simple human activities, your moments of silence, in a symbiotic exchange of energy and information, of asking and gratitude. The external/internal dialogue comes from silence, and it develops and strengthens through serenity.
In the ancient legend of Camelot, King Arthur took the sword, Excalibur, from the Lady of the Lake. That Excalibur is silent power; it’s not the ego’s power. It came from the placid lake, meaning it came from serenity. You don’t have to be perfect to be serene. Tell yourself constantly, “I am serene and balanced, whether life is perfect or not.”
Accept the gift of serenity, and bit by bit your emotions calm down. As that occurs, your spiritual power flows up from within, creating even more balance. It’s a power that you will want to protect and hide away. You will use it to heal your body and to show you a transcendence that is not normally available to people. Now you must learn to guard the power – to protect your energy – and be vigilant so that you don’t allow your ego to trash it.
It’s a paradox of life that sees the ego, on the one hand, babbling away, trying to build itself up – hoping to generate gratifying experiences, exerting itself to get attention and to sustain its importance – and, on the other hand, generating negativity to trash itself and its dreams. Only the ego would believe that in moaning and groaning things might get better. Essentially, its the small child calling for its mother to help it. I’ll cry. I’ll moan. I’ll demonstrate the unjustice of it all. Save me, help me. If I bitch a lot, will you give me something for nothing?
Expanding your awareness comes from understanding that everything is a feeling, and from asking yourself constantly how things feel. It’s like a muscle that perhaps you haven’t used for years; as you begin to ask, it will strengthen quite quickly. Try this: ask the God Force to show you something in the next 24 hours, something you have never seen before – a perception, an intuition, a different way of looking at things that you’ve seen a hundred times before. Then, watch carefully. Something unusual will pop up – and you’ll see that the seeming external world is, in fact, internal – and it’s talking to you. It loves you in its detached way.
– Stuart Wilde
Usually our minds are an enormously complex stew of thoughts, feelings, sensations, wants, snatches of songs, pains, drives, daydreams and, of course, consciousness itself more or less aware of it all. To understand consciousness in itself, the obvious thing would be to clear away as much of this internal detritus and noise as possible. It turns out that mystics seem to be doing precisely that. The technique that most mystics use is some form of meditation or contemplation. These are procedures that systematically reduce mental activity. During meditation, one begins to slow down the thinking process, and have fewer or less intense thoughts. One’s thoughts become as if more distant, vague, or less preoccupying; one stops paying as much attention to bodily sensations; one has fewer or less intense fantasies and daydreams. Thus by reducing the intensity or compelling quality of outward perception and inward thoughts, one may come to a greater stillness. Ultimately one may become utterly silent inside, as though in a gap between thoughts, where one becomes completely perception- and thought-free. One neither thinks nor perceives any mental or sensory content. Yet, despite this suspension of content, one emerges from such events confident that one had remained awake inside, fully conscious. The pure consciousness may be defined as a wakeful but contentless consciousness.
– Robert Forman
People often say that this or that person has not yet found him or herself. But the self is not something that one finds. It is something one creates.
– Thomas Szasz
When I looked fully, I could see hundreds of souls stretching as far as I could see. Some were looking directly at us, but most appeared to be focused in another direction. I looked to see where they were staring, following their gaze to several large swirls of energy far in the distance.
“What are those places?” I asked.
“Mental constructions set up by souls who in life lived very restrictive control dramas and could not wake up after death. Many thousand of them exist out there. That’s how it works; if we die and we have been so immersed in our control drama and routine as a way to repress the mystery and insecurity of life, to such a degree that we can’t even wake up after death, then we create these illusions or trances so we can continue the same way of feeling safe, even after we enter the afterlife. It’s all a reaction to fear. The people there would be paralyzed with fear if they didn’t find some way to ward it off, to repress it below consciousness. What they’re doing is repeating the same dramas, the same coping devices, they practiced in life, and they can’t stop.”
“So these illusional realities are just severe control dramas?”
“Yes, they fall within the general styles of the control dramas, except that they are more intense and nonreflective. For example, take a person who was no doubt an intimidator in the way that they stole energy from others – they rationalize this behavior by assuming that the world is out to get them, and of course, in their life on earth these expectations draw just those kinds of people into their life, so their mental vision is fulfilled. Here, they just create imaginary people to be after them so they can reproduce the same situation.
If they were to run out of people to intimidate and their energy were to fall, anxiety would begin to seep into consciousness again. So they have to keep up the intimidator role constantly. They have to keep this particular kind of action going, the action they learned long ago, the only action they know, that will preoccupy their mind sufficiently to kill the fear. It is the action itself – the compulsive, dramatic, high-adrenaline nature of the action – that pushes the anxiety so far into the background that they can forget about it, repress it, and feel half at ease in their existence, at least for a little while.
Passivity, the ‘poor me’ control drama, taken to the extreme, projects nothing but despair and cruelty on the entire world, rationalizing a need to escape. But all these illusions always play out and blow up in the end. It works the same way in the physical dimension: a compulsive control drama always fails, sooner or later. Usually it happens during the trials and challenges of life; routines break down and the anxiety rushes in. It is what’s called hitting bottom. This is the time to wake up and handle the fear in another way, but if a person can’t, then he or she goes right back into the trance. And if one doesn’t wake up in the physical dimension, one might have difficulty waking up in the other as well.
These compulsive trances account for all horrible behavior in the physical dimension. This is the psychology of all truly evil acts, the motivation behind the inconceivable behavior of child molesters, sadists, and serial monsters of all kinds. They’re simply repeating the only behavior they know that will numb the mind and keep away the anxiety that comes from the lostness they feel.
There is no organized, conspiratorial evil in the world, there is only human fear and the bizarre ways that humans try to ward it off. The references in sacred texts and scriptures to Satan is a metaphor, a symbolic way of warning people to look to the divine for security, not to their sometimes tragic ego urges and habits. Blaming our behavior on forces outside ourselves is a way of avoiding responsibility. We project that some people are inherently evil so we can dehumanize the ones we disagree with and write them off. Fearful people want to control others. That’s why certain groups try to pull you in and convince you to follow them, and ask you to submit to their authority, or fight you if you try to leave. You are drawn in because you make the mistake of giving yourself over to them, as if they automatically have all the answers, without checking to see whether their motivation is fear or love. Unlike souls who are divinely motivated, souls motivated by fear just pull you into their world, the same way some crazy group or cult might do in the physical dimension if you don’t discriminate.
Communication between the two dimensions is increasing, people are having more encounters with souls in the afterlife, and we must discern between those souls who are awake and connected with the spirit of love and those who are fearful and stuck in an obsessive trance of some kind. But we have to be able to do so without invalidating and dehumanizing those caught in such fear dramas by thinking they are demons or devils. They are souls in a growth process, just like us. In fact, in the earth dimension those who are now caught up in dramas from which they can’t escape are often the very souls who were the most optimistic in their birth visions. That is why they chose to be born into such drastic, fearful situations that necessitate such intense, crazy coping devices.
Abusive and dysfunctional families, intense control dramas of all kinds, whether they are violent or just perverse and strange addictions, come from environments where life is so abusive and dysfunctional and constrictive, and the level of fear is so great, that they spawn this same rage and anger or perversion over and over, generation after generation. The individuals who are born into these situations choose to do so on purpose, with clarity, because they are sure they have enough strength to break out, to end the cycle, to heal the family system in which they will be born. They are confident that they can awaken and work through the resentment and anger at finding themselves in these deprived circumstances, and see it all as a preparation for a mission – usually one of helping others out of similar situations. Even if they are violent, we have to see them as having the potential to break free of the drama. No matter how undesirable the behavior of others is, we have to grasp that they are just souls attempting to wake up, like us.
Everyone is born with a positive intention, trying to bring more of the knowledge contained in the afterlife into the physical. All of us. History has been a long process of awakening. When we are born into the physical, of course, we run into this problem of going unconscious and having to be socialized and trained in the cultural reality of the day. All we can remember are these gut feelings, these intuitions, to do certain things. But we constantly have to fight the fear. Often the fear is so great we fail to follow through with what we intended, or we distort it somehow. But everyone, everyone, comes in with the best of intentions.
All killing is a rage and lashing out that is a way of overcoming an inner sense of fear and helplessness. People are not inherently bad, they just go crazy in the fear and make horrible mistakes. And, ultimately, they must bear the full responsibility of these mistakes.
But horrible acts are caused, in part, by our very tendency to assume that some people are naturally evil. That’s the mistaken view that fuels the polarization. Both sides can’t believe humans can act the way they do without being intrinsically no good, and so they increasingly dehumanize and alienate each other, which increases the fear and brings out the worst in everyone.
– James Redfield
Here’s a terrific exercise that has to do with both geography and point of view: draw a map of where you live, your turf. You know where your house is, where the gas station is, where the mall is, and – if you’re virtuous – where the church is. If you’re the adventurous type, you know where the vacant lot is where you once set that fire. But soon – past the freeway, or by the railroad tracks – your knowledge stops. Drawing where you are in the world is marvelously helpful in showing you where you are in the world.
– Carolyn See
Spirituality begins with a vision, but reality doesn’t fit that vision. The path is what brings them together. Most people who want to experience inner growth begin by reading in the vast spiritual literature. They become discontented with the distance between their own lives and the enlightened existence they discover in their reading; they start to make a break. Yet after the break nothing seems to really change. The haunting insecurity and loneliness, the sense of confusion and conflict, are still there.
But instead of feeling let down by this ‘failure’, you need to realize that all spiritual work is done by yourself, with yourself, and for yourself. No one ‘out there’ can take responsibility. It is all right to be aware of a distance between vision and reality, because that is what it feels like to be on the path. If you had no gaps to close, you wouldn’t need a path.
– Deepak Chopra
Remember this, you don’t have to be important or special or glamorous; all you actually need is success and pleasure from whatever it is that you choose to do with your life. You don’t have to become something in the eyes of others, you only have to become something in your own reality. From this humble attitude flows a sweet serenity which comes naturally from personal healing and spiritual reconciliation.
– Stuart Wilde
This reclusion, I believe, has profoundly benefited my work. Shadow, silence and solitude, by laying their heavy cloak over me, have obliged me to re-create within myself all the lights and music and thrills of nature and society. My spiritual being no longer assails itself against the barriers of the invisible and nothing impedes its freedom […] When it happens that a slender ray of sunlight manages to insinuate itself in here, like the ancient statue of Memnon which produces harmonious sounds when it is struck by the rays of the rising star, my whole being bursts with joy and I find myself transported into worlds of splendour… I have profound luxuries within my imprisonment.
– Marcel Proust
There are some who believe that to live the life that leads to heaven, which is called the spiritual life, is difficult, because they have heard that a person must renounce the world, must divest himself of the lusts called the lusts of the body and the flesh, and must live spiritually. They understand this to mean that they must discard worldly things which consist chiefly in riches and honors; that they must walk continually in pious meditation concerning God, salvation, and eternal life; and must spend their life in prayers and in reading the Word and pious books. Such is their idea of renouncing the world, and living in the spirit and not in the flesh . . . . Those who renounce the world and live in the spirit in this manner acquire a sorrowful life that is not receptive of heavenly joy; for everyone’s life remains with him. But to receive the life of heaven a person must wholly live in the world and engage in business and employments, and then, by means of a moral and civil life there, receive the spiritual life. In no other way can the spiritual life be formed in a person, or his spirit prepared for heaven.
– Emanuel Swedenborg
Let us fix our attention out of ourselves as much as possible; let us chase our imaginations to the heavens, or to the ultimate limits of the universe; we never really advance a step beyond ourselves, nor can we conceive of any kind of existence, but the perceptions which have appeared in that narrow compass. This is the universe of the imagination, nor have we any idea but what is here produced.
– David Hume
I wouldn’t worry too much about the little white lies of life that crop up in social situations; it’s more important to ensure that your main actions and your words emanate from spirit, not ego. If you develop an honor code and an equitable relationship with yourself and others, it pulls you out of the ego’s evolution and eventually into a sacred place. Sure, it may deny you some quick profits, but in the end you have to look back at your life and you will own every moment of it. Did you create light or mayhem? Did you contribute to your enlightenment and the consciousness of others, or did you manipulate and imprison people for your own ends? Did you offer joy and positive hope or did you destroy people and cause more misery? These are impacting questions. Ask them now. Change your ways. Flow along a new path. You don’t want to end up on the despot’s bench looking at the ugliness of your life.
– Stuart Wilde
The human adventure is a wandering through the vale of the world for the sake of making soul. Our life is psychological, and the purpose of life is to make psyche of it, to find connections between life and soul.
– James Hillman
Think of all the other writers out there in the world, taking the same detour from word processor to coffeepot, thesaurus in hand, hopes in tow. We’re all in it together, crossing over and over the elusive bridge between words and literature.
– Abby Frucht
The child we were and are learns by exploring and experimenting, insistently snooping into every little corner that is open to us – and into the forbidden corners too! But sooner or later our wings get clipped. The real world created by grown-ups comes to bear down upon growing children, molding them into progressively more predictable members of society. This devolutionary process is reinforced throughout the life cycle, from kindergarten through university, in social and political life, and most especially in the world of work. Our newest and most powerful educational institutions, television and pop music, are even more thorough than school in inculcating mass-produced conformity. People are grown as a kind of food to be gobbled up by the system. Slowly our eyes begin to narrow. Thus the simplicity, intelligence, and power of mind at play become homogenized into complexity, conformity, and weakness.
We need to recognize that every bit of our culture is school; we are presented moment to moment with affirmation of some realities and denials of others. Education, business, media, politics, and above all family, the very institutions that might be the instruments for expanding human expressiveness, collide to induce conformism, to keep things going in a humdrum level. But so do our everyday habits of doing and seeing. Reality as we know it becomes conditioned by tacit assumptions we come to take for granted after innumerable subtle learning experiences in daily life. That is why creative perceptions seem extraordinary or special to us, when in fact creativity is usually a matter of seeing through those tacit assumptions to what is right in front of our noses.
– Stephen Nachmanovitch
IN THE MOUNTAINS ON A SUMMER DAY
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.
– Li Bai, translated by Arthur Waley
THE BEST SEASON
Ten thousand flowers in spring,
the moon in autumn,
a cool breeze in summer,
snow in winter.
If your mind isn’t clouded
by unnecessary things,
this is the best season of your life.
To see things as they are,
to see the changing nature,
to see the impermanence,
to see that constant flow of
pleasant and painful events
outside our control—
that is freedom.
– Wu Men Hui-k’ai
Life has its own rhythm and you cannot impose your own structure upon it, you have to listen to what it tells you… It’s not earth that you move with a tractor…life is not like that. Life is more like earth that you learn about and plant seeds in… It’s something you have to have a relationship with in order to experience…you can’t mold it, you can’t control it.
– Jeff Buckley
No good at life, but very funny sometimes with the commentary.
– Kurt Vonnegut
My soul is a broken field, plowed by pain.
– Sara Teasdale
We are a nation of many nationalities, many races, many religions, bound together by a single unity, the unity of freedom and equality. Whoever seeks to set one nationality against another, seeks to degrade all nationalities. Whoever seeks to set one race against another seeks to enslave all races. Whoever seeks to set one religion against another, seeks to destroy all religion.
– Franklin D. Roosevelt
[…] operate within a new form of science that asks not just what is possible, but what is appropriate—appropriate to the well-being of self and Earth. Such a question does not originate in the mental realm but the spiritual, and is felt bodily, once our senses and heart are attuned. So the central part of our being that simply must be allowed to function and be attended is the heart.
– Joseph Chilton Pearce, The Heart-Mind Matrix: How the Heart
Can Teach the Mind New Ways to Think
Who are you? They called out, at the edge of the village.
I am one of you, the poet called back.
Though he was dressed like the wind,
though he looked like a waterfall.
– Mary Oliver
We received a letter from the Writers’ War Board the other day asking for a statement on “The Meaning of Democracy.” It is presumably our duty to comply with such a request, and it is certainly our pleasure. Surely the Board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the don’t in don’t shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles, the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere.
Democracy is the letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It’s the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee. Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of the morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.
– E.B. White, What is Democracy?
When your friends begin to flatter you on how young you look, it’s a sure sign you’re getting old.
– Mark Twain
ROOTS
A strong emotion is like a storm. If you look at a tree in a storm, the top of the tree seems fragile, like it might break at any moment. You are afraid the storm might uproot the tree. But if you turn your attention to the trunk of the tree, you realize that its roots are deeply anchored in the ground, and you see that the tree will be able to hold.
You, too, are a tree. During a storm of emotion, you should not stay at the level of the head or the heart, which are like the top of the tree. You have to leave the heart, the eye of the storm and come back to the trunk of the tree. Your trunk is one centimeter below your navel. Focus there, paying attention only to the movement of your abdomen, and continue to breathe. Then you will survive the storm of strong emotion.
It is essential to understand that an emotion is merely something that arises, remains, and then goes away. A storm comes, it stays a while, and then it moves away. At the critical moment, remember that you are much more than your emotions. This is a simple thing that everybody knows, but you may need to be reminded of it: you are much more than your emotions.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
The world works for us and we call it grace.
It works against us and, if we are brave,
We call it nothing and we keep our faith,
And only to ourselves we call it fate.
What makes the world work? No one seems to know.
The clouds arrange the weather, the sea goes
Deep, a black stillness seethes at the earth’s core,
And somebody invents the telephone.
If we are smart, we know where we fit in.
If we are lucky, we know what to bid.
If we are good, we know a charming fib
Can do more good than harm. So we tell it.
The world was meant to operate like this.
The working of the world was ever thus.
The working of the world was ever thus.
The empty air surrounds us with its love.
A fire of water opens at a touch.
And earth erupts, earth curves away, earth yields.
Someone imagines strive and someone peace.
Someone inserts the god in the machine
And someone picks him out like a poppy seed.
In every new construction of desire,
The old dissatisfactions rule the eyes.
The new moon eats the old and, slice by slice,
Rebuilds a face of luminous delight,
In which we see ourselves, at last, make sense.
It is the mirror in everything that shines.
It is the mirror in everything that shines
And makes the soul the color of the sky
And clarifies and gradually blinds
And shows the spider its enormous bride.
And we show our reluctant gratitude,
Searching the paths and runways for a spoor
Of cosmic personality, one clue,
Even the fossil light of burned-out proof.
It is enough and not enough to sketch
The human mask inside the swarming nest
And hold the face, a template, to the egg
And stamp its features on the blank of death.
Although we break rock open to find life
We cannot stare the strangeness from the leaf.
We cannot stare the strangeness from the leaf,
And so we spin all the difference on a wheel
And blur it into likeness. So we seize
The firefly and teach it human need
And mine its phosphor for cold light and call
Across the world as if it were a lawn,
Blinking awake at summer dusk. We talk
Ceaselessly to things that can’t respond
Or won’t respond. What are we talking for?
We’re talking to coax hope and love from zero.
We’re talking so the brain of the geode
Will listen like a garden heliotrope
And open its quartz flowers. We are talking
Because speech is a sun, a kind of making.
Because speech is a sun, a kind of making,
And muteness we have always found estranging,
Because even our silences are phrasing
And language is the tongue we curl for naming,
Because we want the earth to be like heaven
And heaven to be everywhere we’re headed,
Because we hope our formulae, like hexes,
Will stop and speed up time at our behesting.
There is no help for us, and that’s our glory.
A furious refusal to acknowledge,
Except in words, the smallness of our portion,
Pumps heart, lights brain, and conjures up a soul
From next to nothing. We know all flesh is grass.
And when the world works, we still call it grace.
– Mark Jarman, UNHOLY SONNETS,
PART IV, 48: THE WORLD
To know yourself as light, dear, is the nature of consciousness. To know yourself as darkness is the nature of humanness. You must all do both, and there’s no way to do it wrong. Everything that’s happened is just as it should be.
– Martha Beck
They say that in the second before our death, each of us understands the real reason for our existence, and out of that moment, heaven or hell is born.
– Paulo Coelho
All that you held most dear you will put by
and leave behind you; and this is the arrow
the longbow of your exile first lets fly.
You will come to know how bitter as salt and stone
is the bread of others, how hard the way that goes
up and down stairs that never are your own.
– Dante Alighieri, Paradiso
I want you to do this with me for one month. One month. Write 10 observations a week and by the end of four weeks, you will have an answer. Because when someone writes about the rustic gutter and the water pouring through it onto the muddy grass, the real pours into the room. And it’s thrilling. We’re all enlivened by it. We don’t have to find more than the rustic gutter and the muddy grass and the pouring cold water.
– Marie Howe
Open your mouth for the mute, for the rights of all who are destitute. Open your mouth, judge righteously, defend the rights of the poor and needy.
– Proverbs 31:8-9 ESV
A POET
A poet is someone
Who can pour light into a cup
and raise it to nourish your
beautiful parched holy mouth.
– Hafiz
Once I looked at the moon and caught sight of a strange thing. A cricket had perched upon the handrail, only a few inches away from me. My line of vision was such that the creature filled the moon like a fossil. It had gone there, I thought, to live and die, for there, of all places, was its small definition made whole and eternal. A warm wind rose up and purled like the longing within me.
– N. Scott Momaday
We know how complicated and inexplicable we are as individual human beings. We are constantly perceiving, our bodies taking in and processing sensual information and concurrently affecting that information, our minds debating, formulating, contradicting, playing, dismissing, remembering, on many levels simultaneously. The mind works that way – memories, thoughts, images, facts, rising up, many without being consciously recalled or summoned, occasionally coming together in strange juxtapositions, then vanishing quickly. I believe it’s important for a writer to latch on to these disappearing words and images, to capture them before they escape. Some may hold the potential for insight or revelation.
– Pattiann Rogers
Once you start to speak of things that are precious, you are immediately anxious about how people will react to what you have said, and you want to protect these things, to defend them against incomprehension.
– Andrei Tarkovsky
If you can remember a great poem, you’ve stolen the Mona Lisa. It’s now part of your body.
– Don Paterson
Just make sure you’re not taking advice from people whose ceiling is your floor.
– Nika Solé
Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing.
– Iris Murdoch
Love feeds the whole universe.
– Nika Solé
Being highly intuitive means being grounded in the wisdom of the unseen.
– Nika Solé
The main problem in any democracy is that crowd-pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage & whup their supporters into an orgiastic frenzy—then go back to the office & sell every one of the poor bastards down the tube for a nickel apiece.
– Hunter S. Thompson
Love, inclusive mania of not wanting to die absolutely, shabby loophole, false brother that you are, I shall not tell you that it is high time you explain yourself!
….
How long art is, and how short is life!
– Jules Laforgue
What is it about mimicry that is so dangerous? What is its relationship to the body? And why is the body such a problem for translation?
– Johannes Göransson
Abstract painting and sculpture have a capacity, a projective capacity, that for many people is very different—an infinite capacity to project emotions.
– Mark di Suvero
O little town, you once were my only love, but now no longer.
– Jules Laforgue
You meet them in the woods, their disturbed faces twitching, strewing bits of torn letters in the antediluvian ravines. These are the neurotics, children of too brilliant a century; you find them everywhere.
– Jules Laforgue, (trans. by William Jay Smith)
I had the happy idea to polish the reflecting glass and say
hello to my own blue soul. Hello, blue soul. Hello.
It was my happiest idea.
– Mary Szybist
Art must violate our expectations, somehow, to become visible to us. So art must change, is going to change. But that doesn’t mean that art is going any place, in a historical sense.
– Dave Hickey
Final Performance
by Cynthia Cruz
I crawl along the wet floor
Of my mother’s childhood,
A serpent, or a long-buried secret,
In my mother’s bisque
Chiffon gown with small stars
Stitched in silver, a crown
Of tinsel pinned into the dark
Blonde knots and dreads of my hair.
I follow a sequin thread of dead
Things, stop when the moon clocks out,
Polish my long nails in the sun.
Where sail you to? If Helen were not there,
What would Troy mean to you?
You swim in moon, you left too soon.
And the dark sea thunders, eloquent . . .
– Tricky, We Don’t Die
Beauty Feast
by Hannah Emerson
The love
the only kissing union
that helps union become
nothing
freedom just becoming
greeting needing nothing
heaving heaving reality
helping reality become
beauty kissing tree
becoming becoming
just becoming free yes yes yes
Love just help greeting
need mother universe
need food
making greeting reality
become nothing
freedom help us
become helpful dreamer
that is making union
become nothing bounty
beam nothing yes yes yes
Look
nothing becomes the
food that reality needs to
come
ingest becoming
becoming reality meal
reality freedom union
need reality to become
become helpful freedom
reality greeting union
sun yes yes yes
I think poetry is the practice of ultimate polarity, ultimate stillness, and ultimate motion. It’s this tension between absolute stillness or silence and the speed of the fastest thought.
– Li-Young Lee
Affirmation
by Donald Hall
To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
and a friend from school drops
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself
in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond’s edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.
Bad taste is real taste, of course, and good taste is the residue of someone else’s privilege; Liberace cultivated them both in equal parts and often to disastrous effect.
– Dave Hickey
To me, it has always been the heart of the mystery, the heart of the heart: the way people talk about loving things, which things, and why.
– Dave Hickey
We were born to ward off this desolation
that grinds mountains into floss, bores into our books
for a whim that ordains blood, our blood
and others, our sisters, mothers.
– Khaled Mattawa
Speak to strangers. Demolish the construct in the performance.
– Mónica de la Torre
And all that remains for me is to follow a violet darkness
on soil where myths splinter and crack.
– Najwan Darwish
Leaf! don’t be neurotic
like the small chameleon!
– Frank O’Hara
Since it’s the migratory season (I concluded)
I hope you don’t mind if I bypass the formula for farewells—
– Alba Cid, translated by Jacob Rogers
That’s how life is! We are all going to die before we put it all together.
– Frank Bidart
I believe narrative knows better than we all do.
– Luisa Valenzuela
Emergency Vehicles
by Kay Ryan
Emergency vehicles
are on the way but
slow ones. You will
have to go on for
some time. Well, years.
Then one day they will
suddenly arrive
and show you your
chest, which is
neatly packed with
something, you see.
You thank them,
having feared you
would be lost.
A young man with a prominent broken nose and receding hair, and also wearing suntans, a Shetland sweater, and white sneakers, came up to me and said, ‘Hello. I’m Frank O’Hara,’ to which he added, ‘You’re Jimmy Schuyler.’
– James Schuyler
We keep looking for those first faces, first
familia. Every culture, every eon. Witness
the oldest we know, his cave, his wall, one
hundred seventy centuries gone.
– Bryan D. Dietrich
Hell, to me, is a literary party. I mean, talking to people one-on-one I love, but I go to a soirée and leave feeling dirty and drunk.
– Javier Cercas
I really want stories that are rippers in the old sense. Tales of high danger, high adventure.
– Barry Hannah
People run themselves
through right and
left and don’t
know they do.
– Kay Ryan
Slopping out the main story, that’s hell, that’s as hard as it can be. But I tell myself as I’m writing not to worry, I can always do the connecting later.
– Mary Robison
To give life shape—that is what a writer does.
– Jean Rhys
If you don’t like someone’s story, you write your own.
– Chinua Achebe
So much is happening in any given moment, both internally and externally—so much of life is not about words.
– Mary Gaitskill
Boats are light lumps on the bay
stretching past erased islands
to ocean and the terrible tumble,
and London (‘rain persisting’)
and Paris (‘changing to rain’).
– James Schuyler
Must you kill me to paint me right?
– LaWanda Walters
Immense and Inclined to Pulse
by Kay Ryan
Since then I have slowly learned to grasp how everything is connected across space and time.
– W.G. Sebald, A Place in the Country
There is a webby and
exalted state of
comprehension wherein
discrete events—like the
rigging lights of separate
boats upon a midnight
ocean—suggest a net:
something immense and
inclined to pulse—not
hideous with meaning yet
but already strangely tedious
if expressed.
I looked forward to the struggle of the writing life. I thought of it as a heroic vocation.
– Susan Sontag
A continual
climbing is the one
form of arrival
we ever come to—
– Donald Hall
People would ask me, ‘What do you do about reviews?’ I would say, ‘Well, my response is first I throw up, then I cry, then I go to sleep, and then I wake up. It’s a four-step program.’
– Sharon Olds
When someone said, This isn’t good, I would say, Well, I actually think it’s brilliant, and the brilliance will be revealed when you’re ready.
– Lynn Nottage
Speak to strangers. Demolish the construct in the performance.
– Mónica de la Torre
My father says, “you ain’t making any money”
My doctors say, “you just took it to the limit”
And here I stand with this sword in my hand
You can say it one more time—
– Alina Stefanescu
Never have I dealt with anything as difficult as my own soul.
– Imam Al-Ghazali
autumn night—
the moon at the window
of the space museum
– Barry George
But do we really live?
To live without knowing
what life is.
– Fernando Pessoa
I had to be taught that it was even okay to *make* mistakes at the age of thirty-two, by the people who fished me out of the sludge of alcohol, confusion and perfectionism.
– Anne Lamott
You are looking everywhere except within you, and that is the only place where you are going to find the treasure, the truth, the beauty.
– Osho
leaves falling
without a break…
do not rush do not rush so much
– Shuson Kato, (tr. Gabi Greve)
no need to tell me
everything comes to an end
flowering basil
– Catherine Baker
Those who have subdued their ego understand that it doesn’t degrade you when others treat you poorly; it degrades them.
– Ryan Holiday
Night Mail
by W.H. Auden
THIS IS THE NIGHT MAIL crossing the Border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner, the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient’s against her, but she’s on time.
Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,
Snorting noisily as she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.
Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from bushes at her blank-faced coaches.
Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course;
They slumber on with paws across.
In the farm she passes no one wakes,
But a jug in a bedroom gently shakes.
Dawn freshens, Her climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends,
Towards the steam tugs yelping down a glade of cranes
Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces
Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her:
In dark glens, beside pale-green lochs
Men long for news.
Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from girl and boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or to visit relations,
And applications for situations,
And timid lovers’ declarations,
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled on the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, the adoring,
The cold and official and the heart’s outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.
Thousands are still asleep,
Dreaming of terrifying monsters
Or of friendly tea beside the band in Cranston’s or Crawford’s:
Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
But shall wake soon and hope for letters,
And none will hear the postman’s knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
The awakening is finally realizing that you are a part of God, like a single cell that finally sees it is a part of you.
– L.J. Vanie
Toni Morrison said that some of us “have been taught to read very badly.”
Trained to read books “as resolutions and solutions and then to put them to uses that are nefarious, as though they are reading a ‘How To’ column. They go to a book the way you go to a medicine cabinet.”
– @tamaranopper
The inexorable regularity with which the worker must follow the rhythm of the mechanical system is unnatural to man.
– Sigfried Giedion
The easiest way to improve your health:
Make 10k steps a mandatory part of your day.
– Dan Go
Go and love someone exactly as they are. And then watch how quickly they transform into the greatest, truest version of themselves. When one feels seen and appreciated in their own essence, one is instantly empowered.
– Wes Angelozzi
There was a time, long, long ago, when the world seemed to man to be so charged with meanings …
– Eugène Ionesco
I’d never say this in public. I still love beautiful books and believe in them.
– Jacques Derrida
… reality in the North is thinner than anywhere else, like a jumper worn out at the elbows, and the other world shines through it. You only need to see the Northern Lights to feel the cosmos on your shoulders.
– Mariusz Wilk, The Journals of a White Sea Wolf
Your past only has as much power as you give it.
Focus on what is in your power to control now.
You hold the lock and you hold the key to set yourself free.
– Kute Blackson
We see vulnerability as weakness, whereas in actual fact, it is the source of the possibility of care.
– Malcolm Martin
burning bushes
everywhere signs for those
with sense to see
– @hegelincanada
My soul is ten thousand miles wide and extremely invisibly deep. It is the same size as the sea, and you cannot, you cannot cram it into beer cans and fingernails and stake it out in lots and own it. It will drown you all and never even notice.
– Ursula K. Le Guin, Searoad
How would I communicate to paper if it weren’t for the poetry I see in you.
– Jay Vespertine
The beginning is the most important part of the work.
– Plato
When our emotions are engaged, we often have trouble seeing things as they are.
– Robert Greene
If a man does not have Peace it isn’t because he is not doing the “right things”
It is because Peace is not the single most crucial desire of his existence.
– Kapil Gupta
The absence of elders in the lives of the next generation. Births the absence of the foundational importance of historic wisdom’s.
– C.J. MacKechnie
I’m not going to see anybody anymore. They make me talk and exhaust me. If I’m quiet I’ll be alright.
– Katherine Mansfield
One of the most extraordinary things about Bach is that his music had absolutely no affect on either the musicians or the public of his own day. According to the musical disposition of the period, he was generations behind his time.
– Glenn Gould
i do not want you to understand how we feel; i do not care if you understand. i want you to feel it.
– Darius Simpson
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
– Robert Frost
Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.
– Kurt Vonnegut
The med/psych system is losing or failing most neurodivergent people. This is the most common theme I am hearing from patients, parents, teachers, and therapists alike. And it’s not just that we are “falling through the cracks” in the system or being neglected, though those are valid concerns. The bigger concern is that the med/psych system is actively harming many neurodivergent people by forcing cultural assimilation.
The current system of treating mental health is designed to force one culture to act like another. Psychiatry in its modern form is still deeply influenced by a history of eugenics, sterilization laws, and incarceration under the guise of treatment.
The pathology paradigm creates separate groups – the ingroup and the outsiders, the normal and the abnormal, the socially acceptable and the socially unacceptable. Treatments and interventions are then sold to the outgroup to “help” them become like the ingroup. Those who still cannot conform even with “help” are assigned to yet a third group – the treatment resistant, the lost causes, the broken people.
A study in 2019 found that psychiatric diagnosis is scientifically meaningless because there is too much subjectivity in diagnosis and not enough understanding of trauma. And when we look beyond simple accuracy and also consider impact, the failure of diagnostic labels becomes clear. Diagnostic labels as they are currently given are worse than useless, they are all too frequently harmful.
Self-image, Depression, and Shutdown
When we receive diagnosis we are typically also indoctrinated into a system of meaning that says we are disordered, diseased, doomed, or broken. What does it do to a person’s self esteem to internalize the idea that their neurology is broken?
Our neurology determines the way we move our bodies, how we feel, and how we think. It is the foundation of our sense of self and our understanding of others. What does it do to a person’s daily motivation and functionality and quality of life to assume that the foundation of their being is flawed? What is the impact on the body of us believing this?
The story of being broken is not a safe story for us to hold. Such intense negativity about Who We Are commonly triggers fear and panic in the short term and chronic freeze or shutdown states, depression, and hopelessness in the long term. Holding a belief that we neurocept as threatening also causes cognitive dissonance and can be perceived as a rupture in the attachment relationship with Self.
To give credit where credit is due, I first began to consider the deep impact of diagnosis after reading about Gary Sharpe’s experience of being diagnosed with Parkinson’s (a type of neurodivergence). In several blog posts, he clearly articulates “just how much the ‘negativity narrative’ and lack of provision of helpful information at diagnosis may still be impacting our condition today.”
Social rejection, abuse, and PTSD
Since society generally listens to neurotypical doctors regarding what traits and behaviors are good/bad, normal/abnormal, right/wrong, etc. neurodivergents are systematically marginalized in every day life. We understandably get the impression that we don’t belong here, that there isn’t space for us in this society
Parents, teachers, employers, and intimate partners constantly invalidate us, confident that their way of seeing things is the only way, assured that plenty of doctors and scientists agree with them. Many of us become suicidal because we acutely feel this lack of belonging.
Dr. Rebecca Shaw says, “We must be careful of the message we are sending autistic people, that their true self is not acceptable in society. We must work with the autistic community to build a more compassionate society that is more accepting of neurodiversity, so autistic people feel that they belong.’
This is true for all neurodivergent people, not just autistics. The constant messaging that our true self is not acceptable is experienced as emotional and psychological abuse. The pressure to conform to neurotpyical culture also puts us at a higher risk for coercion and abusive relationships.
When our natural way of being in the world is repeatedly threatened, we develop a form of complex PTSD, and become socially avoidant to protect ourselves. This is so common that I do not know a single neurodivergent person who does not have complex PTSD. Isolation becomes our norm, but we want to belong just as much as anyone else.
Mistreatment, Re-Traumatization, and Forced Treatment
The pathology paradigm gaslights us about our natural nervous system responses. Our sensitivity and other unique traits are labeled as dysfunctional. Even in trauma-informed clinics, our evolutionarily adaptive responses to stressors are sometimes labeled “faulty neuroception.” Suppression of neurodivergent traits is marketed as regulation strategies. Common interventions promise to limit how much our stress responses impact others rather than support any actual healing.
Shame from therapists and doctors fuels anxiety and shutdown. I already spoke about the shame that often accompanies stigmatizing diagnosis, but there are many other topics on which neurodivergent people encounter shaming approaches from professionals, particularly – disability, support needs, finances, sexuality, spirituality, relationship styles, learning styles, and communication styles. Professionals (whether they are neurotypical or highly masking neurodivergents) frequently do not realize when they are enforcing a normative cultural ideal.
While speaking different social languages makes relationships difficult, invalidation makes real connection impossible. The neurodiversity paradigm recognizes our different languages and seeks to understand miscommunications instead of pathologizing them. These are some of the reasons that shifting from the pathology paradigm to the neurodiversity paradigm is essential liberation work.
– This is an excerpt from a blog post called Found in Translation: The Social Language Theory of Neurodivergence.
We all do better when we all do better.
– Paul Wellstone
Our world is not just my doing: it is the Dralas. It is our spirit, our gallantry, which create this.
– Chögyam Trungpa
At some point, your discernment becomes so sharp that you don’t entertain anything that feels off, confusing, or weird. Because you know how clear the right things feel.
– Nika Solé
For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
… Nature, even when she is scant and thin outwardly, contents us still by the assurance of a certain generosity at the roots … She is mythical and mystical always, and spends her whole genius upon the least work.
– Thoreau
Inner civil war is why so many people try to drown themselves in addiction. As soon as the rage begins to come up, they start eating or drinking or spending money, or they turn to sex or an obsessive relationship. Or gambling, or TV. Anything that will block out consciousness. The addictive substance acts as a soporific, and gradually they sink into unconsciousness.
– Marion Woodman
Just let go. Let go of how you thought your life should be, and embrace the life that is trying to work its way into your consciousness.
– Caroline Myss
Underneath the inharmonious and trivial particulars, is a musical perfection, the Ideal journeying always with us, the heaven without rent or seam.
– R. W. Emerson
Once you’re solid within your own spirit, when your energy is clear and you’re intentional about how you use it, your whole world changes. You become the ruler of your reality. The outside world doesn’t move you like it used to.
– Nika Solé
When God says ‘dream bigger,’ your only option is to listen.
– Nika Solé
In fact, as I get older, I begin to feel that actually what we need more in the world is doubt; more skepticism, less crazed certainty… People who know the answer and are going to impose it on everybody else, I think, are terrifying people.
– Ian McEwan
I think there are enormous obstacles to deep reading now. I think that the tyranny of the visual is a frightening thing.
– Harold Bloom
Thank God for the fall. Summer nearly does me in every year. It’s too hot, and the light is unforgiving, and the days go on way too long.
– Anne Lamott
… move all we restless travellers through the pilgrimage of life.
– Charles Dickens
Each civilization represents an answer to the questions the universe proposes; but the mystery remains intact; new civilizations, with new curiosities, will come to try their luck, quite as vainly, each of them being merely a system of mistakes.
– Emil Cioran
I was indoctrinated into being a liberal in high school and college.
It happened when I was taught history, the basics of government, and critical thinking.
Really sinister stuff.
– Skyler Johnson
All that punk shit was just a little too trendy. Costello’s okay. We played with him, but I couldn’t call him Elvis.
– Tom Petty
Continuity of mindfulness allows us to course-correct throughout our day. We become familiar with the places where we get caught, and over time, we start to pause more naturally.
– Kathy Cherry
Those who are concerned with the welfare of mankind, put aside all vain beliefs and theories, all associations with religious organizations, and inquire very deeply within yourselves.
– Krishnamurti
The greater the confusion, the more theory enjoys an outstanding success.
– Jacques Ellul
Nothing, not a cracker, not a crumb. Still
a vague intimation shadows the memory of this place, and others,
that somewhere down the pike these landscapes are waiting again,
or are, perhaps, the only things we take with us—
our psychic terrain—
as though through memory we create our own afterlives—
which can’t be the entire breadth of it all,
… but in some way a homeland,
a landscape out of which we might ramble into the afterlives, yes,
the memories, of one another…
– David Bottoms
Although its shape constantly changes to suit the age, the central tenets of the secret tradition remain the same. The idea, for example, that psyche, soul, constitutes the very fabric of reality; that humans are individual manifestations of a collective Soul of the World which interconnects all things; that imagination, not reason, is the chief faculty of the soul – though not the pale imitation of imagination as we now know it; that there is another world whence the soul comes at birth and to which it returns at death; and that the idea of gnosis, of a personal and transforming experience of divinity, is of the essence.
– Patrick Harpur
I don’t know whether I believe in God or not. I think, really, I’m some sort of Buddhist. But the essential thing is to put oneself in a frame of mind which is close to that of prayer.
I would like to recapture that freshness of vision which is characteristic of extreme youth when all the world is new to it.
I have always tried to hide my efforts and wished my works to have a light joyousness of springtime which never lets anyone suspect the labors it has cost me.
– Henri Matisse
The grief of time passing, of life moving on half-finished, of empty spaces that were once bursting with the laughter and energy of people we loved. As long as there is love there will be grief because grief is love’s natural continuation.
It shows up in the aisles of stores we once frequented, in the half-finished bottle of wine we pour out, in the whiff of cologne we get two years after they’ve been gone.
Grief is a giant neon sign, protruding through everything, pointing everywhere, broadcasting loudly, “Love was here.”
In the finer print, quietly, “Love still is.”
– Heidi Priebe
Listen carefully!
I teach you the cause of all illness.
You do not live for yourself.
You are given your daily nourishment in abundance,
but not without reason.
It becomes a wondrous force in you.
But beware if you keep the force
only for yourself!
– Gitta Mallasz
Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day.
– Voltaire
I have had no success, only the usual feeling of walking into yet another empty green field and realizing once again that the absence of an answer was the answer…
– Maria Stepanova
Do not compare, do not measure.
No other way is like yours.
All other ways deceive and tempt you.
You must fulfill the way that is in you.
– Carl Jung
as autumn begins
I thought by now my
journey would have ended
– Issa
You deserve a fresh start.
You’re worthy of a new beginning.
Give yourself permission to turn the page.
– Dr. Thema
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
– Carl Sagan
Need nothing
and then see what happens.
– Gangaji
The innovator is more often than not met with some degree of condemnation; usually according to the degree of his departure from the prevailing modes of expression… Change is always so hard to accept.
– Coltrane
the chrysanthemum
still in his buttonhole
one year of grief
– @hegelincanada
My poetry embodies the seamless synthesis of nature’s organic elements & the precision of technology, reflecting their profound interconnectedness. I listen to the dialogue between the wild & the constructed, the exchange where both forces converge, evolve, & redefine each other.
– Laura Kerr
A good writer is always lucky. Very lucky.
– Dag Solstad
the only thing to do is simply continue
is that simple
yes, it is simple because it is the only thing to do
can you do it
yes, you can because it is the only thing to do
– Frank O’Hara
old rubber boots
swallowed up by the bog
tainted cranberries
– @hegelincanada
Love hums in your veins with the deep and heartening sound
Of a temple gong—
The gong of Dai Nippon
That fused into perfect, fastidious harmony
– Beatrice Ravenel
Those who possess wisdom cannot just ladle it out to every wantwit and jackanapes who comes along and asks for it. A person must be prepared to receive wisdom, or else it will do him more harm than good. Moreover, a lout thrashing about in the clear waters of wisdom will dirty those waters for everyone else. So, a man seeking knowledge must be first tested to determine if he is worthy.
– Tom Robbins
The attempt is not to escape from space and time and from my creaturely situation as a subject facing objects. It is more modest: to re-awake the awareness of that situation. If that can be done, there is no need to go anywhere else. This situation itself is, at every moment, a possible theophany. Here is the holy ground; the Bush is burning now. Of course this attempt may be attended with almost every degree of success or failure. The prayer preceding all prayers is, ‘May it be the real I who speaks. May it be the real Thou that I speak to.’
– CS Lewis
EMBODIMENT
Not enough now to take off
the coat, the gloves.
Let me take off my skin,
my words, my thoughts
so that you can see
the sky here—so that
I might be as transparent
as air and you will find nothing
here but love. There, I said it,
love. Not the images of love,
not two birds or two rivers
or one bread or one blood,
not anything I could ever say
but love itself, infinite, a blue dome
expanding at the same rate
as the universe, on and on,
past the stars, there goes the Scales,
the Bull, the Scorpion, the Ram,
beyond whatever we could name,
it grows on and on and on and on and on
– Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with, we cease to see.
– Anias Nin
Q: Are novelists liars? And if they are not, what kind of truth do they
tell?
A: Novelists tell that piece of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie. To a psychoanalyst it is not so important whether you tell the truth or a lie because lies are as interesting, eloquent, and revealing as any
claimed truth.
I feel suspicious about writers who claim to tell the whole truth about themselves, about life, or about the world. I prefer to stay with the truths I find in writers who present themselves as the most bold-faced liars. My goal in writing If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, a novel entirely based on fantasy, was to find in this way a truth that I would
have not been able to find otherwise.
– Italo Calvino
Parker sat for a long time on the ground in the alley behind the pool hall, examining his soul. He saw it as a spider web of facts and lies that was not at all important to him but which appeared to be necessary in spite of his opinion.
– Flannery O’Connor
You do yourself a disservice when you spend too much time around people who can’t see you.
– Nika Solé
Individuation is not linear but a circumambulation of the self; a spiral journey towards wholeness where the head and heart work together; a life-long process of integrating the opposite, bringing split-off parts into more holistic personality.
– Karin Syrett
Narrative [is the] imaginary resolution of a real contradiction.
– Frederick Jameson
Language is not a carving, it’s a curl of breath, a breeze in the pines.
– Gary Snyder
In English, if someone is dressed very fancily they could be described as being “dressed to the nines.” An equivalent phrase from the Walloon language is riletchî come on vea k’ a deus meres. It means “licked like a baby cow with two mothers”
– Adam Sharp
Have faith in God and in yourself; that will cure all. Hope for the best, expect the best, toil for the best and everything will come right for you in the end.
– Sri Ramana Maharshi
Religion is not dogma. It has nothing to do with belief. Religion does not mean going to church or performing rituals. None of that is religion but merely the invention of man to control man.
– Krishnamurti
I see drawing as thinking, as evidence of thinking, as evidence of going from one place to another.
– Vija Celmins
In a time of destruction, we need the poem. Poetry is the last defense of the soul against annihilation.
– Zeeshan Joonam
Night Needs No Stars
by Youmna Chlala
for Janice Mirikitani
I watched you survivesurvive
your thick hair and wide laugh
a list of words we were not allowed
to write into poems
the blanket is the night
you were too bright to be a star
to give blankets is an ancient trick
for you, a balm
and June who if she was her month
straddling spring and summer
with her arches, tunnels, bridges
then you, might have been her
balance, an autumn predicting
softness, snow that never reaches fog
snow that illuminates no mattermatter the time
you and she making us make words
and we brokebroke by making words
matter and you blanket and stars both and all.
Under the summer’s blast
The soul cannot endure
Unless by sleight or fast
It seize or deny its day
To make the eye secure.
– Allen Tate
Enter any body // of water and you give yourself up / to be swallowed.
– Leila Chatti
Most people will lie to you and say that health is about having big biceps and a six pack.
When it’s really about having good habits and having body that’s high energy & avoidant of preventable disease.
– Dan Go
Could human life’s central task be a matter of consciously discovering and becoming who we already are and what we somehow unconsciously know? I believe so. Life is not a matter of creating a special name for ourselves, but of uncovering the name we have always had.
– Richard Rohr
In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self…
– Marcel Proust
My theory was that readers just thought they cared about nothing but the action; that really, although they didn’t know it, the thing they cared about, and that I cared about, was the creation of emotion through dialogue and description.
– Raymond Chandler
Why are some poets so rigid in their thinking? Why has form, for them, become a prison?
Form is a gateway, a river, a gift, not a prerequisite to be ticked off a list.
Ya’ll need to smoke some reefer & cool out a little bit lol
– @RALPHEEBOI
At the center of every person lies the hidden spark of the Divine…it’s in YOU …it’s in me…it’s in ALL of us. And through it we are all connected. We are one.
– Rebecca Baldwin
I feel like I shouldn’t have to go to work anymore if earth is “temporarily getting a second moon”
– Ashley Rattner
Anything looked at with love and attention becomes very interesting.
– Gary Snyder
Humanity has never been satisfied with “reality such as it is”.
– Ionesco
It is important to find out what gives continuity to desire, not how to end desire.
– J. Krishnamurti
I found the English departments of my era unendurable. The happening critical mode was New Criticism—“We murder to dissect.” I couldn’t make that my life.
– Robert Gluck
Everything is happening altogether, everywhere at once. And meanwhile, we—with our myopic little minds—are working it out step by step.
– Alan Watts
How you react emotionally
is a choice in any situation.
– Judith Orloff
Guilt kept me going. It was impossible not to blame myself for what had happened, but even guilt was a comfort. It was a human feeling, a sign that I was still attached to the same world that other men lived in.
– Paul Auster
Soft living imposes on us the penalty of debility; we cease to be able to do the things we’ve long been grudging about doing.
– Seneca
A song doesn’t just come on. I’ve always had to tease it out, squeeze it out. No thesaurus can give you those words, no rhyming dictionary. They must happen out of you.
– Dorothy Fields
One who does not look ahead remains behind.
– Mexican proverb
We talked about music, read poetry, and the air between us caught fire.
– Nikos Kazantzakis
It is not necessary to change a person in order to change their behavior. Just change their environment.
– James Clear
I thought I’d make them understand, with rhetoric, with everything I had learned. I didn’t realize I was ending it all, that it would really be that easy for me to vanish from the family.
– Catherine Lacey
As far as I can see there is no conquering or exorcising the past with words — words born either of imagination or forthrightness.
– Philip Roth
When your real, effortless, joyful grateful nature is realized, it will not be inconsistent with the ordinary activities of life.
– Ramana Maharshi
You really can change the world if you care enough.
– Marian Wright Edelman
Alexander created cities everywhere he passed: I have left dreams everywhere I have trailed my life.
– François-René de Chateaubriand
If you are free, you are not predictable and you are not controllable.
– June Jordan
For Achilles, anger is more than affect — it’s an adjunct of perception itself. Only once he’s “thrilled his heart with looking hard / at the armor’s well-wrought beauty” does he break off his furious gaze.
– Srikanth Reddy
I love the sea; I have listened to it with the passionate respect one owes it. If I’ve transcribed badly what it dictated to me, that’s no concern of yours or mine. And you’ll allow that all ears don’t hear in the same way.
– Debussy
I’m speaking, of course, on the mirror, the shadow, the other. I’m addressing myself to the dreamer of the body: the one whose eyes open, at night, when you close your eyes. The one who leaves your fingerprints on things you touched tomorrow; whose glove is your hand, whose voice is your muteness, whose sight is your … So: inside the darkest room of the darkest house on the darkest avenue in the darkest city, a man is reading a story to his blind identical twin. A man is shaving his blind identical twin. A man is straightening the tie of his blind identical twin. A man is feeding his blind identical twin soup with a large spoon. Now he’s helping him on with his coat, they re about to take a little air. As they reach the corner they’ll stop, the man will take care to cast a glance left and right before going on; while the brother stands perfectly still, erect, head bowed beneath a black sky in rapt attention to the remote trill of a bird hidden in one of the nearby trees which line this particular street, empty of traffic. All the windows unlit, as you know. No one on earth is awake.
– Franz Wright
In my dreams I also see an unborn infant, abandoned, unnamed, never to be named in a desert of the unborn I know of, never to be planted and never harvested, forever yet to be. The language of the unborn is my language.
– Allen Grossman
All I need to write is to run in the morning, to have coffee and a Coke at hand, and to be able to take a nap. The siesta is crucial.
– Javier Cercas
In flow, we are released from all egoic constrictions, freed from grasping and aversion. The sense of separation falls away as we immerse ourselves wholeheartedly in whatever we’re doing, whatever is arising in the present moment.
– John Brehm
The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.
– John Steinbeck
Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had …
– Italo Calvino
Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state…
– George Eliot
behind the branches
an eagle’s nest
red sunset
– Boncho
Rich people are always hitting me up about translating their memoirs. I do not understand their need to write a memoir or their need to have it translated.
– Anton Hur
Paul Celan to Jean Daive, on the danger of speech:
As soon as we talk the world seems to lose some of its solidity, and it’s this move toward loss that interests us. But we cannot always face it. It requires an availability that is scorching.
The first draft is digging the clay out of the riverbank and taking it home. You still have to prep and mold it, fire and sand and glaze and fire. Don’t look at a lump of clay and despair that it’s not a pot.
– Leslie J. Anderson
Speaking for myself, I am more concerned with the transformation of the individual, which to me is much more important than the so-called political revolution.
– William S. Burroughs
EXTRAORDINARY RICHES
It is very important to go out alone,
to sit under a tree—
not with a book,
not with a companion,
but by yourself—
and observe the falling of a leaf,
hear the lapping of the water,
the fishermen’s song,
watch the flight of a bird,
and of your own thoughts
as they chase each other
across the space of your mind.
If you are able to be alone and watch these things,
then you will discover extraordinary riches
which no government can tax,
no human agency can corrupt,
and which can never be destroyed.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
You can talk with someone for years, everyday, and still, it won’t mean as much as what you can have when you sit in front of someone, not saying a word, yet you feel that person with your heart, you feel like you have known the person for forever…. connections are made with the heart, not the tongue.
– C. JoyBell C.
If in the twilight of memory we should meet once more, we shall speak again together and you shall sing to me a deeper song.
– Khalil Gibran
THE POEM I DIDN’T WRITE
Here is the poem I was going to write
earlier, but didn’t
because I heard you stirring.
I was thinking again
about that first morning in Zurich.
How we woke up before sunrise.
Disoriented for a minute. But going
out onto the balcony that looked down
over the river, and the old part of the city.
And simply standing there, speechless.
Nude. Watching the sky lighten.
So thrilled and happy. As if
we’d been put there
just at that moment.
– Raymond Carver
Promise yourself to be so strong that nothing
can disturb your peace of mind.
To talk health, happiness, and prosperity
to every person you meet.
To make all your friends feel
that there is something in them
To look at the sunny side of everything
and make your optimism come true.
To think only the best, to work only for the best,
and to expect only the best.
To be just as enthusiastic about the success of others
as you are about your own.
To forget the mistakes of the past
and press on to the greater achievements of the future.
To wear a cheerful countenance at all times
and give every living creature you meet a smile.
To give so much time to the improvement of yourself
that you have no time to criticize others.
To be too large for worry, too noble for anger, too strong for fear,
and too happy to permit the presence of trouble.
To think well of yourself and to proclaim this fact to the world,
not in loud words but great deeds.
To live in faith that the whole world is on your side
so long as you are true to the best that is in you.
– Christian D. Larson
Literature is the most interesting thing in the world, maybe more interesting than the world.
– Derrida
We’re in the middle of the collapse of the illusion. All the infrastructures that hold society up that are not built on truth, are coming tumbling down. The veil is dissolving, revealing what’s real and what’s not. A new, divine era is blooming through the concrete.
– Nika Solé
Ever since childhood [I’ve been able to] keep up an obstinate silence, one that no torture could overcome, in the face of anyone who does not seem worth replying to. Silence is my most sublime, my most peacable, but my most undeniable declaration of war or contempt.
– Derrida
Not thinking about anything is Zen. Once you know this, walking, sitting, or lying down, everything you do is Zen.
– Bodhidharma
Anyone who has been through a dark night of the soul knows that everything comes crashing down, only so that you can disconnect from the illusion and remember who you are. This is happening on a mass scale right now. The falsehoods are crumbling so the grand awakening can occur.
– Nika Solé
The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line. The objection to it is not that it is predominantly painful, but that it is lacking in sense.
– HL Mencken
“My country, right or wrong” is a criminal mindset that excuses any crime in advance. “My Party, right or wrong,” is similarly inclined to rationalize inhumanity on the basis of a sports-like feeling.
– Alina Stefanescu
Speaks well of a man to need a little something in this world. I wouldn’t trust a man who could git through it cold sober.
– Harry Crews
it is bonkers that AI now gives us crap answers we didn’t ask for when searching, and uses swimming pools of water & massive amounts of energy to do it. who said yes to this? who??
– Gillian White
We have searched the wide world over and not found forgetfulness.
– Fritz Leiber
Freedom to Read Week
is better than
Banned Books Week
– @StckedLibrarian
To understand any problem, you must give your whole attention to it. And you cannot give your whole attention to it if you are seeking a solution.
– Krishnamurti
Darkness must fall before we are aware of the majesty of the stars above our heads.
– Stefan Zweig
The mighty Ancient of Days a feeble child:
The unseen seen, and God in man reveal’d,
The immortal mortal, Infinity confin’d.
– Laurent Drelincourt (translated by Frank J. Warnke)
The search for meaning will fill you with a sense of meaning. Otherwise life passes by in about seven weeks, and if you are not paying attention and savoring it as it unfurls, you will wake up one day in deep regret.
– Anne Lamott
Nikki Giovanni said, “I expect intelligence, and I think I have a right to expect it.” Thank you.
– @tamaranopper
Working out is hard. Being weak is harder.
Controlling your diet is hard. Being fat is harder.
Fixing your sleeping habits is hard. Being sleep deprived is harder.
Choose your hard.
– Dan Go
The root cause of most preventable diseases is living a shitty lifestyle.
– Dan Go
Where the head goes, the body follows. Perception precedes action. Right action follows the right perspective.
– Ryan Holiday
One of the functions of art is to give people the words to know their own experience… Storytelling is a tool for knowing who we are and what we want.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
Lebanus
by Ameen Rihani
To B.C.R
O my Love, how long wilt thou continue
Fondly nursing every dreaming Hour!
Our Lebanus, O my Love, is calling,
Yea, and waiting in his ancient Tower.
In his ancient, cedar-shaded castle,
Night and day, Lebanus sits a-musing
Of the memories that bloom unnoticed
Every season at the feet of Sorrow;—
Musing of the radiant days of Tammuz
That went dancing with the bride of summer
Down the deep and pine-encircled Wadi;—
Musing of the time the Prophets kindled
Sacred fire in Man’s empurpled temples,
Blazing all the highways of the world;—
Musing of the days embattled monarchs
Laid their shields and lances at his feet,
Bowed before his throne invincible.
O my Love, the sad and lonely Cedar,
Ever rocking in her arid splendor,
Ever in penurious shades embosomed,
Reaches out for water in the meadows
And for sunlight in deserted vineyards;—
Rears her hope above the snow eternal
Crowning her Time-hallowed desolation.
O my Love, the crumbling Temple’s dreaming
Of the star that wanders from its orbit,
Of the rose that blooms and dies forsaken,
Of the leaves that fall from sheltering branches
Only to become the sport of chance winds
Or the bed of some unsightly creeper;—
Dreaming of the Lebanon lily, drooping
In the dells beneath forbidding ridges;—
Dreaming of the corymbs of the elder
That forgot the touch of loving hands,
For the zephyr of the South, which passes
O’er their bloom of tender welcome, only
Fans into a flame the smoldering embers
Of the anguish of departed lovers.
O my Love, the furzes are in full bloom
Waiting on the terrace of Lebanus
For the ardent and enamored seeker,—
Waiting, and the secret of their silence
Locked remains within their shells of amber
Till thou comest, till they hear thee whisper,
I am thine and thou art mine forever.
O my Love, how long wilt hither tarry,
Making toys of Time’s discarded hours?
Fair Lebanus, O my Love, is calling,
Yea, and waiting in his House of Flowers.
And around it wings of song unnumbered,
Amber-tinted, beryline, vermilion,
Pour their riches in the land of mourning,
Strew their silver in the olive grove,
Weave their magic through the almond blossoms,
Shake the incense from the terebinths,
Spread in vain their gladness o’er the pines.
Yea, a sea of Siren witchery,
Like the sundown inundates the heaven,
Rolling o’er a sea of boughs emblossomed,
Multi-hued, aglow with burning rapture;—
Waves of song are on the scented breezes,
Rolling o’er the virgin snow of Sanneen,
O’er the trackless verdure of the lowland,
O’er the mottled mountains joined forever
In a wild embrace of stony silence;—
Rolling over Wadis fondly nursing
Cyclamens of unremembered seasons,
Oleanders of unfathered beauty,
Irises of mothered tenderness.
Yea, my Love, the robin in the olives
Thrills the very shadows of the branch;
In the pomegranate, thrush and skylark
Fills its crimson cups with flaming rapture;
In the fig tree and the laden vineyard,
Bulbuls chant the joy of harvest-time.
Yea, my Love, the birds of dawn are calling,
Whispering, chattering, warbling everywhere,
Dancing, flitting, waiting in the groves,
Lingering in the chinks of terraces,
Making early visits to their young.
Nay, they’re busy making preparation
For thy coming, longing to behold thee,
Signing meanwhile to the morning star,
Which borrows from thine eyes its radiance,
From thy tresses, all its golden splendor.
O my Love, how long wilt hither tarry
Wilt dally with the web of Time, how long?
Lone Lebanus, O my Love, is calling,
Yea, and waiting in his House of Song.
And over it our star is re-appearing!
The star of our own destiny is rising
O’er the mountains of embrace eternal,
O’er the cedars of the sacred faith,
O’er the ruins of the ancient temple,
Flooding them with light of tender pallor
Like the light that lingers in the eyes
Of parted lovers,—shaking from the bosom
Of night their shadows, dew-drenched, iris-scented,—
Garlanding the messengers of morning
For the coming of the well-loved stranger.
Yea, the Star of Love, the Light supernal,
Before which bowed the world in adoration,
Is re-appearing in the Orient heaven
For thy sake, for thee, O my Belovéd.
Yea, without thee, neither song nor flower
Nor star nor temple of antique Lebanus,
Has aught compelling of the Soul’s devotion.
But with thee, the caves, the naked ridges,
The very rocks betoken the divine.
O my Love, how long wilt hither tarry
Weaving gossamer of day and night?
Sad Lebanus, O my Love, is calling,
Yea, and waiting in his House of Light.
He would not stay for me, and who can wonder?
by A.E. Housman
He would not stay for me, and who can wonder?
He would not stay for me to stand and gaze.
I shook his hand, and tore my heart in sunder,
And went with half my life about my ways.
For one thing, you may be strenuously advised to keep reading. Any good book, any book that is wiser than yourself, will teach you something — a great many things, indirectly and directly, if your mind be open to learn.
– Thomas Carlyle
Wherever we are, whatever we’re doing and wherever we are going, we owe it to ourselves, to our art, to the world to do it well.
– Ryan Holiday
Geniuses are like thunderstorms. They go against the wind, terrify people, cleanse the air.
– Søren Kierkegaard
Truth is not a reward for good behavior, nor a prize for passing some tests. It cannot be brought about. It is the primary, the unborn, the ancient source of all that is. You are eligible because you are. You need not merit truth. It is your own.
– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Evening is no more, beyond the threshold.
Elsewhere, tolls the magic hour, when all is clothed
In blue twilight, that flows from stars
Upon my sacred groves. Here, the relentless sun,
Which beams forever an unwavering light.
And yet, what calm delight reigns
In this radiant silence, this untouched
Solitude. Within this dwelling-place, nothing of life.
No bird, in this stifling air,
Could unfurl its weightless wings or let fall
The star of its agile claw upon the sand.
– Charles Van Lerberghe
(translated by Donald Flanell Friedman)
It’s up to you to tell your subconscious what is possible. Then allow it to find the easiest, least resistant way to bring it to you.
– Soledad Francis PhD
A work of literature is at bottom a mechanism for the generation of meaning. The author brings the material and shapes it into a desired form. We bring ourselves to the work, make connections, read other works, allow our thoughts to spiral off into unexpected places. This is how an artwork continues to live. But in order to do so, space must be made for the reader to make their own associations and draw their own conclusions. Irony, ambiguity, ambivalence: all create a chance for misunderstanding. But they also create the necessary gap between author and reader that creates the space for meaning.
– Robert Rubsam, On Olga Tokarczuk
All I want is a little alone time in a house or palace of seemingly limitless dimensions.
– Addison Zeller
Taking the space you need to heal and rediscover yourself is an act of self love.
– @Themagicmuir
dialectical thinking: if power says something is complex, simplify it; if power says something is simple, complicate it; all the while noting why, in each specific instance, it is in the interests of power to designate some things as complex and some things as simple.
– Ryan Ruby
The future will be won by those who unleash the full potential of their people.
To breathe free.
To think freely.
To innovate.
To educate.
To live and love openly, without fear.
That is the soul of democracy.
It does not belong to any one country.
– Joe Biden
Terms of the New Venery
An extinction of birds
a ghosting of whales,
a haunting of humans.
A memory of trees.
An echo of Monarchs.
A sobbing of stars.
– Paula J. Lambert
Unlike the brain, the stomach alerts you when it’s empty.
– African proverb
Whenever you become empowered, you will be tested.
– Caroline Myss
Solitude is strength; to depend on the presence of the crowd is weakness. The man who needs a mob to nerve him is much more alone than he imagines.
– Paul Brunton
Solitude is Sublime, Company is Beautiful.
– Hannah Arendt
I ask no monument, proud and high, To arrest the gaze of the passers-by; All that my yearning spirit craves, Is bury me not in a land of slaves.
– Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
True memoir is a singular life transformed into a signifying life. True memoir is a writer acknowledging that he or she is not the only one in the room.
– Beth Kephart
It’s a spiritual gift to simply see clearly in a world that does everything it can to sell you the illusion.
– Nika Solé
You start to think of contempt as a virus. Infecting individuals first, but spreading rapidly through families, communities, peoples, power structures, nations. Less flashy than hate. More deadly. When contempt kills you, it doesn’t have to be a vendetta or even entirely conscious. It can be a passing whim. It’s far more common, and therefore more lethal.
– Zadie Smith
We can develop a love that is steadfast and universal. We develop it not because we force ourselves to love so fully. Rather, we discover that loving unconditionally is the greatest source of joy, and that we are the loser for any hesitation or interruption in that love, such as “I would really love you if you would just do your share of the cooking, if you would just do this, if you would be like that.”
Whenever we hesitate like that, we lose. This helps me remember not to mortgage away any of my days by having a grudge or a grievance or making myself distant. That would simply cause a rupture in that steadfast, universal love that is so joyful.
– Sylvia Boorstein
To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be. These things were before ever man stood on the shore of the ocean and looked out upon it with wonder; they continue year in, year out, through the centuries and the ages, while man’s kingdoms rise and fall.
– Rachel Carson
The present is already too much for me. I can’t cope with the future as well.
– Salman Rushdie
The imagination is the vehicle of sensibility. Transported by the imagination, we attain life, life itself, which is absolute art.
– Yves Klein
To watch the courses of the stars as if you revolved with them. To keep constantly in mind how the elements alter into one another. Thoughts like this wash off the mud of life below.
– Marcus Aurelius
Like Corbin, Jung understands the importance of naming. He knows that unnamed experiences tend to remain unconscious. Correctly naming an experience is tremendously important.
– Sandra Dennis
Whatever I do, I do with greatest love that I have in me. Try this, and you will see that you do not become fatigued at all. Love is one of the greatest stimulants to the will. Under the influence of love the will can do almost anything.
– Paramahansa Yogananda
The Mechanic
by Lory Bedikian
Stretching over the carburetor,
he shouts about the quality of life here
compared to back home, how they stood
in line for bread, how there were no cedars
more green than those by the shore.
He could be my uncle in Syria, 1948,
a man taking in fumes, a cigarette balancing
on a fender, hands lined with grease,
saving coins in a jar for his newborn,
losing relatives to malaria, to civil war.
But today we’re in Hollywood—the palms
dry. This man speaks to me in Armenian.
He remembers working late into the Lebanese night,
the plaza’s noise of backgammon boards,
headlights beaming beyond the Mediterranean.
Now, he’s used to customers calling out
his American nickname, while he wrenches
spark plugs into place, the old country
preserved on a calendar. He’s used to this
new world of dollar bills, available parts.
I say bless him and this hand-made auto shop,
the first opening, closing of hoods, pump of pistons.
And bless the one who never made it over
the Atlantic, an arm extending into the engine,
a scar exposed, the shape of an eagle’s wing.
When you vibrate high, certain things can’t even enter into your energetic field unless they rise to meet you. Furthermore, your discernment is sharper when your energy is clear and you detect weird vibes from a mile away. This is the spiritual protection you seek.
– Nika Solé
Even in my town
now, I sleep
like a traveller.
– Mukai Kyorai (trans. Lucien Stryk & Takashi Ikemoto)
During my insomnia I tell myself, as a kind of consolation, that these hours I am so conscious of I am wresting from nothingness, and that if I were asleep they would never have belonged to me, they would never even have existed.
– Emil Cioran
A way will be found to vaccinate bodies so that those bodies will not allow the inclination towards spiritual ideas to develop and all their lives people will believe only in the physical world they perceive with their senses.
– Rudolph Steiner, 1917
I am not born for one corner, the whole world is my native land.
– Seneca
Political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism … The only way to react is to get up in the morning and start the day by saying four or five vastly politically incorrect things before breakfast!
– P. D. James
There’s a very fine line between being super smart and super indoctrinated.
– Nika Solé
There must be always remaining in every life, some place for the singing of angels, some place for that which in itself is breathless and beautiful.
– Howard Thurman
It’s funny how humans can wrap their mind around things and fit them into their version of reality.
– Rick Riordan
The secret garden is always open now. Open, and awake, and alive. If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.
– Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden
Nobody offers as much as the one who is not going to deliver.
– Francisco de Quevedo
SOME DAYS
Some days you have to turn off the news
and listen to the bird or truck
or the neighbor screaming out her life.
You have to close all the books and open
all the windows so that whatever swirls
inside can leave and whatever flutters
against the glass can enter. Some days
you have to unplug the phone and step
out to the porch and rock all afternoon
and allow the sun to tell you what to do.
The whole day has to lie ahead of you
like railroad tracks that drift off into gravel.
Some days you have to walk down the wooden
staircase through the evening fog to the river,
where the peach roses are closing,
sit on the grassy bank and wait for the two geese.
– Philip Terman
One thing is definitely known: one of the chief leakages of energy is due to our involuntary tension. We have many other leakages, but they are all more difficult to repair than the first. So we shall begin with the easiest: to get rid of this leakage and to learn to be able to deal with the others.
– Gurdjieff
The good poem allows us to believe we have a soul. In the presence of a good poem we remember/discover the soul has an appetite, and that appetite is for emotional veracity and for the unsayable. The general condition of the soul, therefore, is stoic hunger, stoic loneliness. Paul Éluard wrote, “There is another world, and it is in this one.”
– Stephen Dunn
Passion is greater than existence, the meaning of life is of more worth than life itself.
– Stefan Zweig
In a circle of true Friends each man is simply what he is: stands for nothing but himself. No one cares two pence about anyone else’s family, profession, class, income, race, or previous history. Of course you will get to know about most of these in the end. But casually. They will come out bit by bit, to furnish an illustration or an analogy, to serve as pegs for an anecdote; never for their own sake. That is the kingliness of Friendship. We meet like sovereign princes of independent states, abroad, on neutral ground, freed from our contexts. This love (essentially) ignores not only our physical bodies but that whole embodiment which consists of our family, job, past and connections. At home, besides being Peter or Jane, we also bear a general character; husband or wife, brother or sister, chief, colleague, or subordinate. Not among our Friends. It is an affair of disentangled, or stripped, minds. Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.
– C.S. Lewis
I had broken myself of the habit of thinking in short song cycles and began reading longer and longer poems to see if I could remember anything I read about in the beginning. I trained my mind to do this, had cast off gloomy habits and learned to settle myself down. … I began cramming my brain with all kinds of deep poems. It seemed like I’d been pulling an empty wagon for a long time and now I was beginning to fill it up and would have to pull harder. I felt like I was coming out of the back pasture. I was changing in other ways, too. Things that used to affect me, didn’t affect me anymore. I wasn’t too concerned about people, their motives. I didn’t feel the need to examine every stranger that approached.
– Bob Dylan
Sometimes, in the dark of the night,
I visit my conscience
To see if it is still breathing,
For its dying a slow death
Every day.
When I pay for a meal in a fancy place.
An amount which is perhaps the monthly income
Of the guard who holds the door open.
And quickly, I shrug away, that thought,
It dies a little.
When I buy vegetables from the vendor,
And his son “chhotu” smilingly weighs the potatoes,
Chhotu, a small child, who should be studying at school.
I look the other way
It dies a little.
When I am decked up in a designer dress,
A dress that costs a bomb
And I see a woman at the crossing,
In tatters,trying unsuccessfully to save her dignity.
And I immediately roll up my window.
It dies a little.
When I buy expensive gifts for my children,
On return, I see half clad children,
With empty stomach and hungry eyes,
Selling toys at red light
I try to save my conscience by buying some, yet
It dies a little.
When my sick maid sends her daughter to work,
Making her bunk school
I know I should tell her to go back.
But I look at the loaded sink and dirty dishes,
And I tell myself that is just for a couple of days
It dies a little.
When I hear about a rape
or a murder of a child,
I feel sad, yet a little thankful that it’s not my child.
I can not look at myself in the mirror,
It dies a little.
When people fight over caste creed and religion.
I feel hurt and helpless
I tell myself that my country is going to the dogs,
I blame the corrupt politicians,
Absolving myself of all responsibilities
It dies a little.
When my city is choked.
Breathing is dangerous in the smog ridden metropolis,
I take my car to work daily,
Not taking the metro, not trying car pool.
One car won’t make a difference, I think
It dies a little.
So when in the dark of the night,
I visit my conscience
And find it still breathing,
I am surprised.
For, with my own hands
Daily, bit by bit, I kill it, I bury it.
…and We call it a living
– Ram Jethmalani
We don’t know anything about silent sages, buried knowledge, the eye of the mute poet, serene seers, yet how many talkative destroyers, prophets and ideologues, teachers and beautifiers there are on the other side.
– Dejan Stojanovic
What makes you think human beings are sentient and aware?
There’s no evidence for it. Human beings never think for themselves, they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told-and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare. Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their ‘beliefs.’ The reason is that beliefs guide behavior which has evolutionary importance among human beings. But at a time when our behavior may well lead us to extinction, I see no reason to assume we have any awareness at all. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists.
Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion.
Next question.
– Michael Crichton
The Three Laws of Robotics:
1: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm;
2: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law;
3: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law; The Zeroth Law: A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
– Isaac Asimov
There is in each person, in every animal, bird and plant a star which mirrors, matches or is in some sense the same as a star in the heavens.
– Paracelsus
women like us fall into two categories: dragons and fools. you must make sure they think of you as a dragon
– Maggie Smith
So many live their lives feeling unloved, unseen, unrecognized, unappreciated. So very many. You may not know who they are because we are all conditioned to hide our truth below a bushel of shame. But they are everywhere. When you make an effort to share your love, you don’t always know where it will land. But be sure that it does. Sometimes it lights a torch for others to follow. Sometimes it gives them reason to believe that there is a better life waiting for them after a lifetime of disappointment. Sometimes it builds spirits and sometimes it actually saves lives. We just have to keep giving the love wherever and whenever we can. You never know how far it will travel.
– Jeff Brown
Teach your children the power and the presence of Spirit within
themselves and the great dangers of self-deception and social
manipulation.
– Marshall Vian Summers
Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.
– Margaret Atwood
One must lose resentment; it is big work to resolve fury and grudges. We are full of grudges. We are full of grudges and frustrations for love not obtained. Illness is a lack of love.
– Alejandro Jodorowsky
If you have a theory, you must try to explain what’s good and what’s bad about it equally.
In science, you learn a kind of standard integrity and honesty.
– Richard Feynman
A man does not really begin to be alive until he has lost himself, until he has released the anxious grasp which he normally holds upon his life, his property, his reputation and position.
– Alan W. Watts
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
A man said to a Dervish: “Why do I not see you more often?” The Dervish replied, “Because the words ‘Why have you not been to see me?’ are sweeter to my ear than the words ‘Why have you come again?”
– Robert Greene
Many men are intimidated by beauty and prefer to worship it from afar; others are drawn in, but not for the purpose of conversation. The Beauty suffers from isolation.
– Robert Greene
Mastery requires lots of practice. But the more you practice something, the more boring and routine it becomes.
Thus, an essential component of mastery is the ability to maintain your enthusiasm. The master continues to find the fundamentals interesting.
– James Clear
Too young to hold on, and too old to just break free and run.
– Jeff Buckley
Keep your friends for friendship, but work with the skilled and competent.
– Robert Greene
Joseph Campbell observes that the quester is precisely a person who has failed, because his or her life does not work. Interior difficulties force questers to reorganize their life on a higher level, to become, out of necessity, adept at the art of living.
– Bud Harris
Although some people think that life is a battle, it is actually a game of giving and receiving.
– Florence Scovel Shinn
If we have identified too closely with the light, have too idealized an image of ourselves, then our shadow will surely come up and hit us on the backside. The same is true if we have identified with our negative side. Either position is a denial of our wholeness.
– Marion Woodman
True mentors are as transparent as glass. They let the Light of God pass through them.
– Shams Tabrizi
How do I let my heart become a tree for the world to come and find some shade under without tempting someone in plaid to come along with an axe and cut down my branches so they can build themselves a throne?
– John Roedel
The greatest gift you can give somebody is your own personal development. I used to say, “If you will take care of me, I will take care of you. “Now I say, I will take care of me for you, if you will take care of you for me.”
– Jim Rohn
I was a long long time in the passenger
seat on the highway of
life I had a dream that I was
sleeping while I was
driving when I woke up it was still an
illusion nothing was different
everything was
real there were Bandits all along the
highway disguised as
snakes and blue-haired old ladies driving in
the wrong lane trying to see the United
States there was nothing United or
divided about them nothing was different
everything was the
same Muhammad Ali Bucky Fuller Caesar
Chavez sitting
together at a small
Cafe and everyone trying to eat their
lunch with them everybody trying to dig
what
they had to
say
people straining
nattys and smoking
camels only the least of them are on the
road leading Out of The
Shadows well the kids have all grown up
now had some growing to do
myself and I don’t dream even about the
road too much
anymore but I pray for my children’s
health cuz when they come around to see
me nothing is different everything is
real
– Billy Kreutzmann
Just as we here view a large and luminous moon, so I deduce that from the moon one would view a great and very bright the earth, also illuminated by sunlight, just as the moon has been illuminated.
– Galileo Galilei
I Ask Percy How I Should Live My Life by Mary Oliver
Love, love, love, says Percy.
And hurry as fast as you can
along the shining beach, or the rubble, or the dust.
Then, go to sleep.
Give up your body heat, your beating heart.
Then, trust.
Graceful, spiritual,
with the gentleness of arabesques
our life is similar
to the existence of fairies
that spin in soft cadence
around nothingness
to which we sacrifice
the here and now
Dreams of beauty, youthful joy
like a breath in pure harmony
with the depth of your young surface
where sparkles the longing for the night
for blood and barbarity
In the emptiness, spinning, without aims or needs
dance free our lives
always ready for the game
yet, secretly, we thirst for reality
for the conceiving, for the birth
we are thirst for sorrows and death.
– Hermann Hesse
The Rhythms Pronounce Themselves Then Vanish
After they told me the CT showed
there was nothing wrong with my stomach
but my heart was falling, I plunked
one of those weird 2 dollar tea balls
I bought in Chinatown and it bobbed
and bloomed like a sea monster and tasted
like feet and I had at this huge
chocolate bar I bought at Trader Joe’s
and didn’t answer the door even though
I could see it was UPS and I thought
of that picture Patti took of me
in an oval frame. Sweat itself
is odorless, composed of water,
sodium chloride, potassium salts,
and lactic acid, it’s bacteria growing
on dead skin cells that provides the stink.
The average lifespan of a human taste bud
is 7 to 10 days. Nerve pulses
can travel up to 170 miles per hour.
All information is useless.
The typical lightning bolt
is one inch wide and five miles long.
– Dean Young
In order to identify as neurodivergent, I have first had to understand what I diverge from.
Most people hear the term neurodivergent and hear that I am diverging from ‘typical’.
Typical neurobiology.
But typical does not exist. It isn’t a biological fact at all, it isn’t defined in the DSM and even if it were, there’d be no evidence it existed.
Typical = well behaved, well masked, well hidden, well oppressed, well hushed, well productive, well compliant, well white, well man, well healthy or at least pretending to be.
Neurodiversity is a biological fact, difference among us. Diversity.
So what do I diverge from? An ideal. A threat. A drive for conformity. Populations, generations of people hiding who they are to protect themselves from rejection, abandonment, disapproval and for many, far worse.
In our doing so, learning we should also project that same fear onto others in order to create a society that normalizes our experience of fear fails us. Abysmally. Intergenerationally.
The world I have lived in has been a mirror for me-one that brings into my field what I fear, until I have grown, learnt and unlearned. Until I have begun the process of remembering who I am, only then did the mirror shift and change; new people, places and things finding their way to me and I them.
I am grateful for the language that has been created in order for us to shift away from being pathologized; and created pathways for us to find one another, us lot who have been socially shunned and intentionally misunderstood by those committed to a culture created on the back of lies, lies and more lies. Based on violence, segregation and survival.
There is no typical. It is neither defined, or undefined.
It’s bullshit.
Even when we share commonalities in our brains, our nervous systems, our neurobiology; we are still individual, yet we continue to shift the gauge on what is autism, ADHD, PDA, schizophrenia, narcissism, borderline personality disorder, all forms of neurodivergence based on the ways in which we all show up and show more of who we are, without fear.
We are seeing the luminosity of humanness in it’s many forms and we are driven to understand it all via the lens of pathology, some of it, only the almost socially acceptable forms such as autism, ADHD, etc, merging into a becoming of identity and culture. For those of us with less power and privilege across many areas socially, institutionally, this is all we have. Our kinship. It is everything.
These layers, traits, characteristics, definitions, labels, have saved my life. They have saved me from myself. Understanding I am what is known as autistic, PDA, ADHD, CPTSD and more that I don’t speak about publicly has kept me alive because in the emergence of identify and culture, my experience of humanness was normalized; is normalized.
Today, I am curious as to how much I concede with the fallacy of ‘typical’ by identifying as neurobiologically divergent because, I ask myself again, what am I diverging from?
I wonder if there is more volition in standing in my power as me. As true to who I am, as an act of resistance without having to other myself as divergent from something that does not exist.
I do diverge, it’s true.
I diverge from compliance with minimizing the power and beauty of diversity.
I diverge from pathologizing myself.
I diverge from being convinced that I am broken.
I diverge from actively accepting white supremacist views and approaches, imperfectly, due to my conditioning I am always seeking to undo.
In my true acceptance of my madness, my trauma, in all of the parts I have had to be in order to survive..
I am more sane, more whole and more present than any version of typical I have ever attempted to be. And I have been many.
I have longed for your acceptance, your approval, your love until I realized I was longing for my own acceptance, my own approval, my own love.
While I am divergent, I am far more divergent than neurodivergent.
Because, I am far more expansive than a neurobiology.
So many hear the term neurodivergent and still subscribe to the pathology: the idea of brokenness, of defect, of impairment.
I am divergent, and this is a reclamation of the power that lies within who I am and who I have always been.
Who we are, and who we have always been.
I’d LOVE to hear your thoughts on your own personal identity and culture regarding neurodivergence if you feel you’d like to share.
– Katie Forbes
Only you really know where you come from and how much you’ve overcome and what it means to get to be this version of you.
– Nika Solé
Anthony Burgess says somewhere that with the switch from pen/typewriter to computer, writers compose pages but struggle to see their books as a whole, and I see this painfully when translating. I realize people smile a lot but you cannot have 300 smiles in one book.
– Adrian Nathan West
I love to laugh. And I appreciate books that don’t fear my laughter. Not books with punch-lines, per se, that attempt to ‘earn’ a laugh, but books that enrich absurdity to the point that Nietszche’s Dionysian-pessimist laughter cannot be avoided.
– Alina Stefanescu
Autumn finally arrived. And when it did, I came to a decision. Something had to give: I couldn’t keep on living like this.
– Haruki Murakami
Everything is rhythm, the entire destiny of man is one heavenly rhythm, just as every work of art is one rhythm, and everything swings from the poetizing lips of the god.
– Holderlin
Course correct as many times as you need to until you arrive into perfect alignment.
– Nika Solé
This truly is the sky over things past.
– Rilke to Lou Andreas-Salomé
(for Walter Benjamin)
I am told that you raised your hand against yourself
Anticipating the butcher.
After eight years of exile, observing the rise of the enemy
Then at last, brought up against an impassable frontier
You passed, they say, a passable one.
Empires collapse. Gang leaders
are strutting about like statesmen. The peoples
Can no longer be seen under all those armaments.
So the future lies in darkness and the forces of right
Are weak. All this was plain to you
When you destroyed a torturable body.
– Bertolt Brecht
I love being alive. I love New York City. I love my friends. I love smoking a cigarette in the rain. I love eating a peach. I love America. I love having a crush. I love autumn. I love driving somewhere late at night & the radio on full speed ahead. The past will never happen.
– Alex Dimitrov
Simple Verses
by José Martí
translated from the Spanish by Anne Fountain
A sincere man am I
Born where the palm trees grow,
And l long before I die
My soul’s verses to bestow.
No boundaries bind my heart
I belong to every land:
I am art among art,
A peak among peaks I stand.
I know the exotic names
Of every flower and leaf.
I know of betrayal’s claims
And I know of exalted grief.
I’ve seen how beauteous streams
Flow through the dark of night
And descend as radiant beams
In a luminous shower of light.
As if by wings set free,
I’ve seen women’s shoulders rise:
And beauty emerge from debris
In a flight of butterflies.
I’ve seen a man live with pain
The dagger wounds at his side,
Yet never reveal the name
Of her by whose hand he died.
Two times I’ve sensed inside
The soul’s reflection go by.
Once when my father died
And once when she bade goodbye.
Once I trembled with fear
Close by the arbor’s vine,
As an angry bee drew near
To sing a child of mine.
That day of my death decree
I felt both triumph and pride,
For the warden who read it to me
Pronounced the sentence and cried.
Beneath me I hear a sigh
From the slumber of earth and sea.
But in truth it’s the morning cry
Of my son who awakens me.
The jewel esteemed the most?
The value I most revere?
I would of friendship boast
And hold not love so dear.
The wounded eagle, I know
Can soar to the bluest skies
While the venomous viper below
Chokes on its poison and dies.
I know that when life must yield
And leave us to restful dreams
That alongside the silent field
Is the murmur of gentle streams.
To sorrows and joy, I reply
By placing a loyal hand,
On the star that refused to die—
Proud symbol of my land.
My heart holds anguish and pains
From a wound which festers and cries
The son of a people in chains
Lives for them, hushes, and dies.
All is lovely and right
All is reason and song
Before the diamond is bright
Its night of carbon is long.
I know that the foolish may die
With burial pomp and tears
And that no land can supply
The fruit which the graveyard bears.
Silent, I quit the renown
And boast of a poet’s rhyme
And rest my doctoral gown
On a tree withered with time.
Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules.
– Carl Jung
I tell my students, who believe passionately in explaining the work they’re sharing, You know, when you’re dead, you can’t go around explaining this thing—it has to be right there on the page.
– Louise Glück
Why is it that some people want a Christian America but not a Christian economic system?
– Diana Butler Bass
When you become comfortable with uncertainty, infinite possibilities open up in your life.
– Eckhart Tolle
Learning to forgive takes time, sometimes years. So be patient as you weave a little forgiveness into your daily routine as a way of strengthening your capacity to forgive.
– Mark Coleman
As long as there is nationalism, as long as you are clinging to sovereignty, to an exclusive nationality, you are sure to have war.
– Krishnamurti
these tears are not proof / of our defeat they are proof / of our humanity
– Suheir Hammad
Narcissus to Achilles
Yesterday, I passed over a bridge
and saw a boot underwater.
Such thoughts I had,
I cannot tell you.
– Frank Stanford
I asked you not to hurt me
the way history did
– Nathalie Handal, Palestinian poet
morning sun
not a moment to spare
on hate
– jane ross
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
– Elizabeth Bishop / Questions of Travel
Jung once told me that the unconscious itself was not dangerous. There was only one real danger, he said, but that was a very serious one: panic. The fear that grips a person when something very unexpected confronts him, or when he begins to be afraid of losing his footing in the conscious world, can upset him so much that it is really no wonder that so few people embark on the task. Indeed, it is necessary to have very secure roots and to be well established in the outer world before it is wise to make any such attempt.
– Barbara Hannah
a world
where lotus flowers
are ploughed into the field
– Issa
It’s not enough to see what buddhanature is; you have to realize what buddhanature does.
– Peter Hershock
The books I’m writing are houses that I build for myself.
– Etel Adnan
when we wake the world
is already beginning
small songs of low light
– Catherine Baker
THE GRAINS OF SAND
The grains of sand
are imperceptibly threatening the page
and your hand casts a shadow in the center
of dazzling,
you are writing below the level of breaking waves
and could cave into the sea if you stayed
here long enough.
– Barbara Carle
Since the past is unreal and the future is unreal,
all your thoughts are about nothing.
– Byron Katie
Spiritual growth involves giving up the stories of your past so the universe can write a new one.
– Marianne Williamson
Have you ever just sat down on the floor and checked out the bottom shelves of your bookcases? There’s a lot of cool stuff down there, you should try it.
– Robert Allen, Poet
I am warming my cold
hands at the dancer’s
ruby eye—
the fire, the suddenly discovered knowledge of love.
– Sharon Olds
Some people are afraid of generosity. They feel they will be taken advantage of or oppressed. In cultivating generosity, we are only oppressing our greed and attachment. This allows our true nature to come out and become lighter and freer.
– Ajahn Chah
roadside café
on the flatbed truck
bits of a fairground
– John Kinory
FOUR FRIENDS CATCH UP OVER PASTA
I’m doing better / they need to run more tests / we’re moving in together / I’m never dating again / how is your dad? / how is your heart? how are you dealing with the state of the world? / I love your new hair color / I’m on new meds / remember how young we used to be? / let’s build a commune / we can have sheep / and goats? / yes, and dancing / I missed you / it’s been too long / this is delicious – the sauce, the salad / this night /
all of it.
– Amy Kay
Consciousness has produced this play. Consciousness has written the script. Consciousness is playing all the characters. And Consciousness is witnessing the play. It’s a one man show.
– Ramesh Balsekar
You have everything to learn, everything that cannot be learned: solitude, indifference, patience, silence.
– Georges Perec
what remains
of the apple harvest
mellowing on the ground
– @hegelincanada
a gentle song
ripples
just beyond my grasp
– James Welsh
if you wanted to “de-traumatize people at scale”, how would you do that?
Right and wrong answers accepted.
– Bashu, Canada
THE GHOST OF WALTER BENJAMIN
WALKS AT MIDNIGHT
The world’s an untranslatable language
It’s a language of objects
Our tongues can’t master,
without words or parts of speech.
but which we are the ardent subjects of.
If tree is tree in English,
and albero in Italian,
That’s as close as we can come
To divinity, the language that circles the earth
and which we’ll never speak.
– Charles Wright
Never’s just the echo of forever, lonesome as a love that might have been. Let me go on lovin’ and believin’ ’til it’s over. Please don’t tell me how the story ends.
– Kris Kristofferson
To begin with, I believe with Schopenhauer that one of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one’s own ever shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from personal life into the world of objective perception and thought; this desire may be compared with the townsman’s irresistible longing to escape from his noisy, cramped surroundings into the silence of high mountains, where the eye ranges freely through the still, pure air and fondly traces out the restful contours apparently built for
eternity.
With this negative motive there goes a positive one. Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world; he then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it. This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientist do, each in his own fashion. Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way the peace and security which he cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.
– Albert Einstein
The world’s largest climate and weather data archive is located in Asheville, NC.
Due to an historic climate disaster, its currently offline.
– Michael Thomas
I heard this today from an amazing physician-scientist who I respect a lot: We had two existential threats to humanity – climate change and pandemics. Now we have the third one – disinformation. And we are not doing anything about it.
– Dr. Natalia
We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare : pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose.
– Charles Baudelaire
The enemies of myth are not the friends of reality but of triviality.
– Nicolás Gómez Dávila
It’s important to remember that most people do not see reality as it actually is. They see it through the lens of their experiences, trauma, programming, beliefs, and conditioning. This is why healing is so key. It allows you to actually see.
– Nika Solé
The song as of an angel in the yard;
A song that would have charm’d the infernal gods,
And banish’d horror from the dark abodes:
Had Orpheus sung it in the nether sphere.
– John Dryden
We can complacently watch life from the sidelines, or we can risk our pride, our ideas, and whatever else we use to separate ourselves from others and leap fully into our life.
– Michael Wenger
The Snowfall Is So Silent
by Miguel de Unamuno
translated by Robert Bly
The snowfall is so silent,
so slow,
bit by bit, with delicacy
it settles down on the earth
and covers over the fields.
The silent snow comes down
white and weightless;
snowfall makes no noise,
falls as forgetting falls,
flake after flake.
It covers the fields gently
while frost attacks them
with its sudden flashes of white;
covers everything with its pure
and silent covering;
not one thing on the ground
anywhere escapes it.
And wherever it falls it stays,
content and gay,
for snow does not slip off
as rain does,
but it stays and sinks in.
The flakes are skyflowers,
pale lilies from the clouds,
that wither on earth.
They come down blossoming
but then so quickly
they are gone;
they bloom only on the peak,
above the mountains,
and make the earth feel heavier
when they die inside.
Snow, delicate snow,
that falls with such lightness
on the head,
on the feelings,
come and cover over the sadness
that lies always in my reason.
The Guardian
The sun setting. The lawns on fire.
The lost day, the lost light.
Why do I love what fades?
You who left, who were leaving,
what dark rooms do you inhabit?
Guardian of my death,
preserve my absence. I am alive.
– Mark Strand
A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.
– PB Shelley
Sometimes I picture a drawing of two concentric circles. Inside the inner one is everything we can do to address climate change within current dominant system values, economic systems, and power structures.
– Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
I found a considerable lack of work after doing concerts for Palestinian children.. if that’s the way it has to be, that’s the way it has to be. If you support human rights, you gotta support them everywhere.
– Kris Kristofferson
I’ll fly a starship
Across the Universe divide
And when I reach the other side
I’ll find a place to rest my spirit if I can
Perhaps I may become a songwriter again…
– Kris Kristofferson
Just make sure that the story you’re telling is the one you want to stand on. The one that feels good in your body. The one that opens up the most expansion for future versions of you.
– Nika Solé
But the worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself; you lie in wait for yourself in caverns and forests. Lonely one, you are going the way to yourself!
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Soon
there will be a single hope:
that of the stars
grazing from our hands.
– Alain Bosquet
The generational cycle breaker is the one who reclaims their gifts.
– Nika Solé
The Way to Keep Going in Antarctica
by Bernadette Mayer
Be strong Bernadette
Nobody will ever know
I came here for a reason
Perhaps there is a life here
Of not being afraid of your own heart beating
Do not be afraid of your own heart beating
Look at very small things with your eyes
& stay warm
Nothing outside can cure you but everything’s outside
There is great shame for the world in knowing
You may have gone this far
Perhaps this is why you love the presence of other people so much
Perhaps this is why you wait so impatiently
You have nothing more to teach
Until there is no more panic at the knowledge of your own real existence
& then only special childish laughter to be shown
& no more lies no more
Not to find you no
More coming back & more returning
Southern journey
Small things & not my own debris
Something to fight against
& we are all very fluent about ourselves
Our own ideas of food, a Wild sauce
There’s not much point in its being over: but we do not speak them:
I had written: “the man who sewed his soles back on his feet”
And then I panicked most at the sound of what the wind could do
to me
if I crawled back to the house, two feet give no position, if
the branches cracked over my head & their threatening me, if I
covered my face with beer & sweated till you returned
If I suffered what else could I do
As we are ambitious, seeking success, we are bound to create war. It may not be a war of outward destruction, but we will have conflict between each other and within ourselves.
– Krishnamurti
I am not myself with people […] but am I myself when alone? That seems unlikely, too.
– Susan Sontag
To express oneself in seventeen syllables is very diffic
– J. Cooper Clarke
When we look into our own hearts and begin to discover what is confused and what is brilliant, what is bitter and what is sweet, it isn’t just ourselves that we’re discovering. We’re discovering the universe.
– Ani Pema Chodron
…those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere…
– Roland Barthes; (tr. Richard Howard)
Sea Rose
by H.D.
Rose, harsh rose,
marred and with stint of petals,
meagre flower, thin,
sparse of leaf,
more precious
than a wet rose
single on a stem—
you are caught in the drift.
Stunted, with small leaf,
you are flung on the sand,
you are lifted
in the crisp sand
that drives in the wind.
Can the spice-rose
drip such acrid fragrance
hardened in a leaf?
I have seen, desolate one, the voice has its tower;
The voice also, builded at secret cost,
Its temple of precious tissue. Not silent then
Forever-casting silence in your hour.
– Hart Crane
You won’t suffer your shirt, sewn with the shadows,
spider of stars, to blanket the night…
The slumbering gold, the fog drifts afar.
Who longs for the dew? The tears — who?
– Paul Celan (translated from the Romanian by Julian Semilian & San Agalidi)
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
– Max Planck
Where did I learn these things?
I learned them from my dad
who learned them from his,
the old monk said.
– The Old Monk
you ever get the feeling that Reality is deeply fully in love with you, giving you exactly what you need just at the time you need it?
– River Kenna
Never fall dreaming on celestials,
Lest, bound in a ruinous place,
You turn to wander with celestials
Down holy space.
Never taste that fruit with the soul
Whereof the body may not eat,
Lest flesh at length lay waste the soul
In its sick heat.
– Léonie Adams
We all are so deeply interconnected; we have no option but to love all.
– Amit Ray
The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts.
– Marcus Aurelius
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
Praise ye the Lord. Sing unto the Lord a new song, and his praise in the congregation of saints.
– Psalm 149:1
Craft allows me to open myself to the page—allows the emotions, the confessions, to infuse the work.
– Rita Dove
You can be all
loosey-goosey back here
but we better be tight
when we get on stage,
the old monk told the band.
– The Old Monk
I don’t suppose
you could tell some
interesting stories
to go along with
my nonsense,
the old monk
asked the poet.
– The Old Monk
A mind in the present moment is Meditation.
– Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
Life often feels complex because we think in opposites—me and you, good and bad, here and there.
– Kittisaro
Fate is not late,
Nor the speech rewritten,
Nor one word forgotten,
Said at the start
About heart,
By heart, for heart.
– W. H. Auden
…under the arches / the beggars slept, unfinished as history. / There was the city, then there was the magical / echo of the city’s name and the same sulphurous / mirage of its double created by history…
– Derek Walcott
No poet dies silently.
His old words
The ones he gave birth to
When he was a child
Weep for him.
– john zbigniew guzlowski
The basis of neurosis, or even physical discomfort and pain, is mind and body not joining together.
– Chögyam Trungpa
The world is everywhere within the world.
Music is in everything in motion.
Before all words and after they relent,
the feelings dramatizing every gesture
keep the songs of living minds alive.
– George Gorman
Please understand that Zen is not about being free of worldly concerns, but about being free while in the medium of this world. It is about seeing clearly, caring deeply, living wisely, responding to the suffering of this world fully.
– Joan Halifax
THIS MUCH I DO REMEMBER
It was after dinner.
You were talking to me across the table
about something or other,
a greyhound you had seen that day
or a song you liked,
and I was looking past you
over your bare shoulder
at the three oranges lying
on the kitchen counter
next to the small electric bean grinder,
which was also orange,
and the orange and white cruets for vinegar and oil.
All of which converged
into a random still life,
so fastened together by the hasp of color,
and so fixed behind the animated
foreground of your
talking and smiling,
gesturing and pouring wine,
and the camber of your shoulders
that I could feel it being painted within me,
brushed on the wall of my skull,
while the tone of your voice
lifted and fell in its flight,
and the three oranges
remained fixed on the counter
the way stars are said
to be fixed in the universe.
Then all the moments of the past
began to line up behind that moment
and all the moments to come
assembled in front of it in a long row,
giving me reason to believe
that this was a moment I had rescued
from the millions that rush out of sight
into a darkness behind the eyes.
Even after I have forgotten what year it is,
my middle name,
and the meaning of money,
I will still carry in my pocket
the small coin of that moment,
minted in the kingdom
that we pace through every day.
- Billy Collins
Like a bird on the wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free
– Leonard Cohen, Bird on the Wire
Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.
– Wendell Berry
The very moment you change your perception, you re-write the biochemistry of your body. Our emotions directly influence the amount of active coding sites in the double helix of your DNA, thus changing the gene’s expression and altering our physiology. One of the greatest scientific discoveries of our time is that Biology and Belief are direct reflections of one another.
What you think, what you feel, and what manifests in your body and the experiences you attract are always a match, 100% of the time, no exceptions. There is nothing random about evolution and DNA alterations, animals evolve and adapt to their environments based on their perceptions relative to their habitat.
– Dr. Bruce H. Lipton
Queer people don’t grow up as ourselves, we grow up playing a version of ourselves that sacrifices authenticity to minimize humiliation and prejudice. The massive task of our adult lives is to unpick which parts of ourselves are truly us and which parts we’ve created to protect us.
– Alexander Leon
In the spiritual life, the word ‘discipline’ means ‘the effort to create some space in which God can act’. Discipline means to prevent everything in your life from being filled up. Discipline means that somewhere you’re not occupied, and certainly not preoccupied … to create that space in which something can happen that you hadn’t planned or counted on.
– Henri Nouwen
It is no use walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our preaching.
– Saint Francis of Assisi
I just want one person I can rescue and I want one person who needs me. Who can’t live without me. I want to be a hero, but not just one time.
– Chuck Palahniuk
The handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded; but it will not last long; those others will outshout them, and presently the anti-war audiences will thin out and lose popularity. Before long you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with those stoned speakers—as earlier—but do not dare to say so. And now the whole nation—pulpit and all—will take up the war-cry, and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest man who ventures to open his mouth; and presently such mouths will cease to open. Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.
– Mark Twain
There are nine different words for the color blue in the Spanish Maya dictionary but just three Spanish translations, leaving six [blue] butterflies that can be seen only by the Maya, proving that when a language dies six butterflies disappear from the consciousness of the earth.
– Earl Shorris
Evening Ebb
by Robinson Jeffers
The ocean has not been so quiet for a long while; five night-herons
Fly shoreline voiceless in the hush of the air
Over the calm of an ebb that almost mirrors their wings.
The sun has gone down, and the water has gone down
From the weed-clad rock, but the distant cloud-wall rises. The ebb whispers.
Great cloud-shadows float in the opal water.
Through rifts in the screen of the world pale gold gleams, and the evening
Star suddenly glides like a flying torch.
As if we had not been meant to see her; Rehearsing behind
The screen of the world for another audience.
Listen for the sound of your heart. / Be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope
– Dan Albergotti
The world needs more individuality in its men and women. It needs them with the joy of individual freedom in their minds, the fresh blood of honest purpose in their hearts, and the courage of truth in their souls. It needs more people daring to think their own highest thoughts and strong vibrant voices to speak them, not human phonographs mechanically giving forth what some one else has talked into them. The world needs men and women led by the light of truth alone, and as powerless to suppress their highest convictions as Vesuvius to restrain its living fire.
They have the glad inspiring conscious- ness that they are not mere units on the census list, not weak victims of their own impulses, not human bricks baked into deadly uniformity by conventionality, but themselves -individuals. They are not faint carbon copies of others but strong, bold-print originals,—of themselves. They are ever lights not reflections, voices not echoes. To them the real things of life are the only great ones, the only objects worth a hard struggle.
– William George Jordan
At the time of his writing the Red Book Jung wanted to find out what happened when he switched off ordinary consciousness and allowed expression to remote parts of his psyche. The “spirit of the depths” pointed him toward the recovery of his soul.
– Jung’s Red Book for Our Time
(Editors: Murray Stein, Thomas Arzt)
There is life that
will not give up
Almost annihilated, it picks itself up
and walks
as if for the first time
– Göran Sonnevi, (tr. Rika Lesser)
It is generally the creative artist who creates the future. A civilization that has no creative people is doomed. So the person who is really in touch with the future, with the germs of the future, is the creative personality.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
If you clear the finite games from your body, it stops keeping the score
– River Kenna
THUNDERSTORM STACK
A bird flashed by as if mistaken then it
starts. We do not think speed of life.
We do not think why hate Jezebel? We
think who’s that throwing trees against
the house? Jezebel was a Phoenician.
Phoenician thunderstorms are dry and
frightening, they arrive one inside the
other as torqued ellipses.
– Anne Carson
I am a dwindling minority, someone who sees my appetites as fed by rock and cactus and dry winds. And I am losing to a world of pavement, deals, fine saloons, and new clothes, losing on both sides of the line. Those huge hard plates we call cultures are grinding me up into a very fine dust.
– Charles Bowden
I wish to descend in the social scale.
High society is low society.
I am a social climber climbing downward
And the descent is difficult.
– Lawrence Ferlinghetti
OCTOBER
I used to think the land
had something to say to us,
back when wildflowers
would come right up to your hand
as if they were tame.
Sooner or later, I thought,
the wind would begin to make sense
if I listened hard
and took notes religiously.
That was spring.
Now I’m not so sure:
the cloudless sky has a flat affect
and the fields plowed down after harvest
seem so expressionless,
keeping their own counsel.
This afternoon, nut tree leaves
blow across them
as if autumn had written us a long letter,
changed its mind,
and tore it into little scraps.
– Don Thompson
WONDER
One day I had a momentary, sharp sense of how remarkable it would be to have a way of viewing crows and snow-covered fields without such needy, such self-located eyes. Wouldn’t it be a new and unusually interesting experience, I thought with excitement, to look at a world that is not filtered by me, that loses me in the looking?
I looked at the sea. And in looking at it, all at once I saw the fact of it, the life within it, and the rock I was sitting on, a part of it, I saw warm living shore, cold living sea, and for the moment, detached from my own involvement in earth and sea, I had an illumination of the oneness and the counterpoint of life. And in seeing this I had such a strong sense of life – not a feeling about it but an attentive comprehending of it – that I was taken out of myself in a calm, sensible way. Life is, I thought, with a sober thrill. It is not as I see it, but as it is.
– Peggy Freydberg
“what radicalized you?” probably my basic human empathy
– @rebmasel
If you don’t want your tax dollars to help the poor, then stop saying you want a country based on Christian values, because you don’t.
– Jimmy Carter
Simplicity is the pure white light of a life lived from within.
– William George Jordan
A Brief History of Hostility
by Jamaal May
In the beginning
there was the war.
The war said let there be war
and there was war.
The war said let there be peace
and there was war.
The people said music and rain
evaporating against fire in the brush
was a kind of music
and so was the beast.
The beast that roared
or bleated when brought down
was silent when skinned
but loud after the skin
was pulled taut over wood
and the people said music
and the thump thump
thump said drum.
Someone said
war drum. The drum said war
is coming to meet you in the field.
The field said war
tastes like copper,
said give us some more, said look
at the wild flowers our war plants
in a grove and grows
just for us.
Outside sheets are pulling
this way and that.
Fields are smoke,
smoke is air.
We wait for fingers to be bent
knuckle to knuckle,
the porch overrun
with rope and shotgun
but the hounds don’t show.
We beat the drum and sing
like there’s nothing outside
but rust-colored clay and fields
of wild flowers growing
farther than we can walk.
Torches may come like fox paws
to steal away what we plant,
but with our bodies bound
by the skin, my arc to his curve,
we are stalks that will bend
and bend and bend…
fire for heat
fire for light
fire for casting figures on a dungeon wall
fire for teaching shadows to writhe
fire for keeping beasts at bay
fire to give them back to the earth
fire for the siege
fire to singe
fire to roast
fire to fuse rubber soles to collapsed crossbeams
fire for Gehenna
fire for Dante
fire for Fallujah
fire for readied aim
fire in the forge that folds steel like a flag
fire to curl worms like cigarette ash
fire to give them back to the earth
fire for ancient reasons: to call down rain
fire to catch it and turn it into steam
fire for churches
fire for a stockpile of books
fire for a bible-black cloak tied to a stake
fire for smoke signals
fire to shape gun muzzle and magazine
fire to leap from the gut of a furnace
fire for Hephaestus
fire for pyres’ sake
fire licking the toes of a quiet brown man
fire for his home
fire for her flag
fire for this sand, to coax it into glass
fire to cure mirrors
fire to cure leeches
Fire to compose a nocturne of cinders
fire for the trash cans illuminating streets
fire for fuel
fire for fields
fire for the field hand’s fourth death
fire to make a cross visible for several yards
fire from the dragon’s mouth
fire for smoking out tangos
fire to stoke like rage and fill the sky with human remains
fire to give them back to the earth
fire to make twine fall from bound wrists
fire to mark them all and bubble black
any flesh it touches as it frees
They took the light from our eyes. Possessive.
Took the moisture from our throats. My arms,
my lips, my sternum, sucked dry, and
lovers of autumn say, Look, here is beauty.
Tallness only made me an obvious target made of
off-kilter limbs. I’d fall either way. I should get a
to-the-death tattoo or metal ribbon of some sort.
War took our prayers like nothing else can,
left us dumber than remote drones. Make
me a loyal soldier and I’ll make you a
lamenting so thick, metallic, so tank-tread-hard.
Now make tomorrow a gate shaped like a man.
I can’t promise, when it’s time, I won’t hesitate,
cannot say I won’t forget to return in fall and
guess the names of the leaves before they change.
The war said bring us your dead
and we died. The people said music
and bending flower, so we sang ballads
in the aisles of churches and fruit markets.
The requiem was everywhere: a comet’s tail
disappearing into the atmosphere,
the wide mouths of the bereft men that have sung…
On currents of air, seeds were carried
as the processional carried us
through the streets of a forgetting city,
between the cold iron of gates.
The field said soil is rich wherever we fall.
Aren’t graveyards and battlefields
our most efficient gardens?
Journeys begin there too if the flowers are taken
into account, and shouldn’t we always
take the flowers into account? Bring them to us.
We’ll come back to you. Peace will come to you
as a rosewood-colored road paver
in your grandmother’s town, as a trench
scraped into canvas, as a violin bow, a shovel,
an easel, a brushstroke that covers
burial mounds in grass. And love, you say,
is a constant blade, a trowel that plants
and uproots, and tomorrow
will be a tornado, you say. Then war,
a sick wind, will come to part the air,
straighten your suit,
and place fresh flowers
on all our muddy graves.
It is the window that makes it difficult
To say good-by to the past and to live and to be
In the present state of things as, say, to paint
In the present state of painting and not the state
Of thirty years ago. It is looking out
Of the window and walking in the street and seeing,
As if the eyes were the present or part of it,
As if the ears heard any shocking sound,
As if life and death were ever physical.
– Wallace Stevens
Your voice: an inside-out yawn, the sizzle of hot iron on fresh perm, the song inside the blackest seashell washed up on a sidewalk in Bronzeville.
– Jamila Woods
Politics is personal. Music is personal. Poetry is personal. Write it on the mirror in blood red lipstick. There is no ‘self’ without others.
– Alina Stefanescu
Paról
by Feliz Lucia Molina
I love these lanterns not for their meaning
But for the bright colors they still give
when I close my eyes
scenes from a strip mall childhood
Grocery store errands in my Catholic school uniform
Drive-thru’s at McDonalds with Christmas on the radio
Nine-day novenas leading up to Simbang Gabi
and afterward the long awaited Noche Buena
with a shiny lechon in the center of a hall
filled with a hungry diaspora
when there used to be more rain
in those Decembers
I love these lanterns
for other reasons unknown
for the history of this particular star
is filled with tears
It’s hard to understand
why certain artifacts and relics
Call to you
If it’s a desire for meaning
when it’s hard to find stars in this daily sky
And so you look them up
Like stickers imprinted in your mind
And in this fragmented search about the paról
There is the story of Bethlehem
which is the same story of the migrant
Searching for a home
Fleeing homes
Losing homes from floods, fires, wars, capitalism
It’s the same story about the rulers
who produce the stars we believe in
who own the clearest skies to see them
And never mind the rulers created the myth
The poet owns the memory
Soon there will be no ideas but in things,
In rubble, in skulls held under the oceans’ magnifying glass.
– Bill Knott
O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
To-morrow’s wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.
– Robert Frost
Exile is a process, and until the moment comes when we realize there can be no return, our exile continues to feel like a choice.
– Dubravka Ugresic
Dew. And I lay with you, you, amid garbage, a mushy moon
pelted us with answers,
we crumbled apart
and crumbled into one again:
the Lord broke the bread,
the bread broke the Lord.
– Paul Celan, trans. Micheal Hamburger
Note to self: you have been fortunate to get to live into your mid-40’s. Do not waste this privilege by regurgitating some variant of country-club puritanism. Do not go gently into that golf-ball-addled night.
– Alina Stefanescu
We often seek out people who will understand us, not realizing that once you understand yourself, you get why very few people understand you. You’re one of one.
– Nika Solé
Exercise improves cognitive function.
Eating nutrient-dense foods improves emotional regulation.
Getting quality sleep makes everything better.
It’s almost impossible to have a healthy mind in an unhealthy body.
– Dan Go
the mountain
behind the monastery —
just sitting
– George Dorsty
white picket fence
I step on the neighbor’s shadow
he yells at me, “illegal alien”
I hear the sound
of snow geese flying over …
their route, my roots
– Chen-ou Liu
When ,on the road to Thebes , Oedipus met the Sphinx ,
who asked him her riddle ,
his answer was: Man .
This simple word destroyed
the monster .
We have many monsters to destroy.
Let us think of Oedipus’ answer____
– Giorges Seferis
October Daughters
by Michael Occhipinti
Tell me the story of October rain
Of autumn days that brought our saving grace
And tell me all about your strongest hour
That saw you through to hear us sing our power
We call to you a rising wave
To be born into a world that you will change
This fragile place that needs her daughters
To rise in flight, and soar again
If I could teach my daughters
How to carry the weight
of knowing when to fight
and patience
You are the colours of October days
Reflecting back the light in your own ways
The weight of hope is yours to carry
And balance with the weight of life
Real life is healthier if one gives it the holiday in unreality that is its due.
– Bachelard
Every cliché (and a cliché is nothing more than an abstraction that has swallowed its own tail) becomes dangerous when it is made literal.
– G. Gospodinov
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
Had we more paradise
it would be reachable in the imagining.
Behold a still-life permanence:
a saw cutting wood, a woodthrush
calling, a quietude that grieves even
as it teaches us longing, return.
– Pablo Medina
It is very easy to conform to what your society or your parents and teachers tell you. That is a safe and easy way of existing; but that is not living…To live is to find out for yourself what is true.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
Men now live in conditions that are less than human. Consider the concentration of our great cities, the slums, the lack of space, of air, of time, the gloomy streets and the sallow lights that confuse night and day. Consider our public transportation, in which man is less important than a parcel; our hospitals, in which he is only a number. Yet we call this progress. And the noise, that monster boring into us at every hour of the night without respite.
– Jacques Ellul
No one who voluntarily runs with the hounds of falsehood, or props them up, will ever be able to justify himself to the living, or to posterity, or to his friends, or to his children.
– Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Mind is repetitive, mind always moves in circles. Mind is a mechanism: you feed it with knowledge, it repeats the same knowledge. No-mind is clarity, purity, innocence. No-mind is the real way to live, the real way to know, the real way to be.
– Osho
they call me blue because / they don’t understand how the sky work / they call you black because / they don’t understand how god work
– Clint Smith
Prediction: All truth seeking people of sound mind and good heart will be connected in the next 20 years – irrespective of their age, nationality, ethnicity, social class, religion, background, or location.
It’s already happening but people haven’t fully noticed it yet.
– @ZubyMusic
Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.
– Frank Herbert
It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.
– George Orwell
One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
All I know is this: nobody’s very big in the first place, and it looks to me like everybody spends their whole life tearing everybody else down.
– Ken Kesey
The ultimate aim of the quest must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and the power to serve others.” One of the many distinctions between the celebrity and the hero, he said, is that one lives only for self while the other acts to redeem society.
– Joseph Campbell
I think it’s better to feel good than to look good.
– Tom Hanks
Racism should never have happened and so you don’t get a cookie for reducing it.
– Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs. Time and again I, too, have felt so full of luminous torrents that I could burst — burst with forms much more beautiful than those which are put up in frames and sold for a fortune.
– Hélène Cixous
My definition of a devil is a god who has not been recognized. That is to say, it is a power in you to which you have no given expression, and you push it back. And then, like all repressed energy, it builds up and becomes completely dangerous to the position that you’re trying to hold.
– Joseph Campbell
When you don’t want to solve it, you demonize it.
– Tim Walz
We trust women. We trust doctors.
– Tim Walz
As long as there is a ‘you’ trying to stop your mind, you will fail to do so.
– James Pierce
People who judge are intellectually and emotionally lazy. It is easy to judge. It is convenient to judge. It is acceptable to judge. It takes time, effort, and energy to get to know someone, their situation, and their history. It only takes a second to play God and determine someone’s fate.
– Harry Petsanis
We have two choices when confronted by truth.
1. Erect an illusion. 2. Be formed into its framework.
– saltyoceanphilosophy@
Consider this remarkable fact: In the Sermon on the Mount, there is not a single word about what to believe, only words about what to do and how to be. By the time the Nicene Creed is written, three centuries later, there is not a single word in it about what to do and how to be, only words about what to believe.
– Robin R. Meyers
the U.S.A. is only two and a half Jimmy Carters old
– Tim Barnes, Comedian
NOW OF THE NOW
Practice is all about being in the now. You can follow your breath, listen to the sound of the wind or feel tiny nerve pulsations under your skin in order to arrive smack dab in the middle of the now. But wait. The now is a temporary thing. Moments flit by, evanescent, like bubbles on a fast moving stream, like dewdrops on a blade of grass, like candles in a strong wind. If we assume that the flickering moment is all that there is, we are lost, adrift in a sea of transience. In all that you see, hear and do, if you seek fulfillment in the moment you suffer, stranded on the shifting sands of samsara. It is for this reason that you must realize the Now of the Now. Consider that the first now is the small now. It is the now of doing the dishes and waiting at a traffic light. It is the now of your aging body, your cash flow, your kitchen, and the well-being of your kids. The small now includes fluctuations in technology, politics, money markets and weather. The small now is always under the sway of the see-saw effects of karma.
On the other hand, the big now is perpetual, unending, beyond measure. It is the open canvas onto which the scene of the ever changing is projected. The big now does not come and go, it is never born nor dies, it neither increases or decreases and can never be lost or found. The big now is timeless and transcendent. In no way do the fluctuations of the small now ever compromise the big now. It is unshakeable, indestructible, and beyond. Some students believe the big now to be supreme, the true, the great god. But if you worship the big now at the expense of the small now, you fail to respond to the needs of the changing world. You are like an insect frozen in amber, immobilized in the golden glory of your god, incapacitated, heartless. Only when we are touched by the immediacy of the small now, do we open to compassionate presence.
When Ram Dass penned Be Here Now in the mountains of Northern New Mexico in 1971 he was no doubt thinking of the Now of the Now. In being here now, each passing thing appears against the backdrop of the timeless, like the silhouette of a bird in the sky. When you realize the Now of the Now, you are both imminent and transcendent, limited and unlimited, matter and spirit. Know that when you walk the royal road of the Now of the Now you realize the ultimate yoga.
– Tias Little
We actually contain a built-in ability to rise above restriction, incapacity, or limitation and, as a result of this ability, possess a vital adaptive spirit that we have not yet fully accessed. While this ability can lead us to transcendence, paradoxically it can lead also to violence; our longing for transcendence arises from our intuitive sensing of this adaptive potential and our violence arises from our failure to develop it.
– Joseph Chilton Pearce
What did I know of life, I who had lived so carefully? Who had neither won nor lost, but just let life happen to him? Who had the usual ambitions and settled all too quickly for them not being realized? Who avoided being hurt and called it a capacity for survival? Who paid his bills, stayed on good terms with everyone as far as possible, for whom ecstasy and despair soon became just words once read in novels? One whose self-rebukes never really inflicted pain? Well, there was all this to reflect upon, while I endured a special kind of remorse: a hurt inflicted at long last on one who always thought he knew how to avoid being hurt—and inflicted for precisely that reason.
– Julian Barnes
On the Deaths of Friends
by Billy Collins
Either they just die
or they get sick and die of the sickness
or they get sick, recover, then die of something else,
or they get sick, appear to recover,
then die of the same thing,
the sickness coming back
to take another bite out of you
in the forest of your final hours.
And there are other ways,
which will not be considered here.
In the evening, I closed my eyes
by the water’s edge and I pretended
this is what it will look like
or will not look like,
this is where my friends keep going,
a “place” only in quotation marks,
where instead of oxygen, there is silence
unbroken by the bark of a fox in winter
or the whine of an unattended kettle.
With eyes still closed,
I ran in the dark toward that silence,
like a man running along a train platform,
and when I opened my eyes to see
who was running in the other direction
with outspread arms,
there was the lake again with its ripples,
a breeze coming off the water,
and a low train whistle,
and there was I trembling
under the trees, passing clouds,
and everything else that was pouring
over the mighty floodgates of the senses.
Your days are numbered. Use them to throw open the windows of your soul to the sun. If you do not, the sun will soon set, and you with it.
– Marcus Aurelius
…the sad part is, that I will probably end up loving you without you for much longer than I loved you when I knew you. Some people might find that strange. But the truth of it is that the amount of love you feel for someone and the impact they have on you as a person, is in no way relative to the amount of time you have known them.
– Ranata Suzuki
The Broken Piano In 1975
by Marti Leimbach
My favourite piece of music is Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert, an hour-long piece improvised, as all of Jarrett’s concerts are, on a solo piano in front of a live audience. You know the story, right?
For the concert, he’d requested a particular piano, a Bösendorfer.
The Bösendorfer originated in Vienna early in the nineteenth century. It is said to be the first concert piano able to stand up to the playing technique of the young virtuoso, Franz Liszt, whose tough, unforgiving treatment of the pianos he played destroyed them in short order. Perhaps the Bösendorfer’s durability was the reason Jarrett requested one for the concert. The 29-year old jazz musician was known for his eccentric stagecraft, his improvisations played with enormous athleticism and physicality. It’s fair to say he is tough on an instrument, that he plays unconventionally, even wildly, racing over the keys, standing up, sitting, leaning, panting, moaning. His performances move him—and anyone listening—through the disorder and miracle of creative endeavour.
Watching him is watching genius itself, that raw work that is cleaned up only by its imitators.
In short, he needs a good piano.
January 24, 1975. Jarrett arrives to the venue the afternoon of the concert, He is presented with his Bösendorfer. He stands with Manfred Eicher, the man who will one day found ECM Records and who arranged Jarrett’s sell-out concert tour. The piano he has been given for the concert is a Bösendorfer, all right, but it is puny, ancient, totally unsuitable.
Jarrett taps a few keys and finds it is not only the wrong size, incapable of producing enough volume for a concert performance, but also completely out of tune. The black keys don’t all work. The high notes are tinny; the bass notes barely sound and the pedals stick.
Eicher tells the organizer, a teenaged girl named Vera Brandes, that the piano is unsuitable. Either they get a new piano for Jarrett, or there will be no concert.
In a panic, the girl does everything she can to get another piano, but she can’t find one in time. She manages to convince a local piano tuner to attend to the Bösendorfer, but there isn’t much they can do about the overall condition of the instrument.
In the end, Jarrett agrees to play. Not because the piano was fixed up to the extent that he felt comfortable performing, but because he took pity on poor, young Vera Brandes, just seventeen years old and not able to shoulder so great a failure as losing the only performer on a sold-out night.
So he performs on the dreadful instrument. He does what he has to do, not because he thinks it will be good, but because he feels he has no choice.
Tim Harford [described it best], “The substandard instrument forced Jarrett away from the tinny high notes and into the middle register. His left hand produced rumbling, repetitive bass riffs as a way of conveying up the piano’s lack of resonance. Both of these elements gave the performance an almost trance-like quality.”
Jarrett overcame the lack of volume by standing up and playing the piano very hard. He stood, sat, moaned, writhed, and pounded the piano keys. You can hear him on the recording, the agony of the music, his effort at creating any sound at all. He sweated out what must have been an excruciating hour, and he triumphed. The Köln Concert has sold 3.5 million copies and is perhaps the most beautiful, transformative piece of music I’ve ever heard. It makes me cry to hear it, especially if I recall the courage it took for him to perform in front of a live audience on an unplayable piano with that desperate girl in the wings, wringing her hands, hoping beyond hope that he didn’t rise from the stool and walk out.
Hoping nobody noticed her great failure to produce the right piano for this most important occasion. […]
Keith Jarett later said, “What happened with this piano was that I was forced to play in what was — at the time — a new way. Somehow I felt I had to bring out whatever qualities this instrument had. And that was it. My sense was, ‘I have to do this. I’m doing it. I don’t care what the piano sounds like. I’m doing it.’ And I did.”
Everything that is great in life is the product of slow growth; the newer, and greater, and higher, and nobler the work, the slower is its growth, the surer is its lasting success. Mushrooms attain their full power in a night; oaks require decades. A fad lives its life in a few weeks; a philosophy lives through generations and centuries. If you are sure you are right, do not let the voice of the world, or of friends, or of family swerve you for a moment from your purpose. Accept slow growth if it must be slow, and know the results must come, as you would accept the long, lonely hours of the night,-with absolute assurance that the heavy-leaded
moments must bring the morning.
Let us as individuals banish the word “Hurry” from our lives. Let us care for nothing so much that we would pay honor and self-respect as the price of hurrying it. Let us cultivate calmness, restfulness, poise, sweetness,-doing our best, bearing all things as bravely as we can; living our life undisturbed by the prosperity of the wicked or the malice of the envious. Let us not be impatient, chafing at delay, fretting over failure, wearying over results, and weakening under opposition. Let us ever turn our face toward the future with confidence and trust, with the calmness of a life in harmony with itself, true to its ideals, and slowly and constantly progressing toward their realization.
Let us see that cowardly word Hurry in all its most degenerating phases, let us see that it ever kills truth, loyalty, thoroughness; and let us determine that, day by day, we will seek more and more to substitute for it the calmness and repose of a true life, nobly lived.
– William George Jordan
It appears that there is only one
age and it knows
nothing of age as the flying birds know
– W.S. Merwin
I thought my dance alone through worlds of
odd and eccentric planets that no one else knew
would sustain me.
– Joy Harjo
“A time may come soon,” said he, “when none will return. Then there will be need of valour without renown, for none shall remember the deeds that are done in the last defence of your homes. Yet the deeds will not be less valiant because they are unpraised.”
She answered: “All your words are but to say: you are a woman, and your part is in the house. But when the men have died in battle and honour, you have leave to be burned in the house, for the men will need it no more. But I am of the House of Eorl and not a serving-woman. I can ride and wield blade, and I do not fear either pain or death.”
“What do you fear, lady?” he asked.
“A cage,” she said. “To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire.”
– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
People don’t like reality, they don’t like common sense, until age forces it on them.
– Graham Greene
Day said, Rise. Work.
Sing for your mother.
Dance for your sister.
Say the words for your father.
– Li-Young Lee
My Doctor Warns Me Against Travel
Abroad or What Is a Dream to Me
by Camille Rankine
To grieve
an American grief
a delicate feeling:
from afar wistful
and brief To grow soft
on the milk of America thick
with its sleep To export its
ruin outspend its disease
To live in a house with death
in its walls bent-backed
in its building to wander its halls
vigilant in the dark
To be born in the hold
of this dream burnt black in its glare
pick the fruit from its tree
turn its fruits in my hands leave the bruised
to their rot take my choice
cut of meat
To be shaped by a day
lived long
before me a long dead thing
that visits my sleep
now a thing to forget:
An American grief
This Birthday
by E. J. Koh
The cool light turns
everything gray—my fingers settle
in the grass. Wingless cicadas sleep
beneath leaves curling like ribbons
Now is the time to feel alive. Clouds
rear back until light is the holy word
The grass blades under me come to
patterns of rest. Pendulous branches
and fibrous bark make a crown. If
I cannot be a mother I still want no
life but this one pocket of air rising
through the water like a rosary bead
I pray to a God who keeps me here
Soft light from the foliage shatters
I can give up happiness. I’ll go bury
my dreams first thing in the morning
The Plain Sense of Things
by Wallace Stevens
After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.
It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.
The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.
Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence
Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.
What hurt me was actually me, myself. In the midst of that continuing, unsettled silence my feelings, like a heavy pendulum, a razor-sharp blade, made wide swings between one extreme to the other.
– Haruki Murakami
In the months that followed, I began to think of myself as expelled, an exile. I make it seem a gradual process, and indeed it took months for me to find the words for the condition I was in, but I felt the sense of it a lot earlier… Where was I to go if not return?
– Abdulrazak Gurnah
The more fearful a person is, the more he uses his mind. The more fearless a person is, the more he uses his heart.
– Teal Swan
Bills should be paid cheerfully, all money should be sent forth fearlessly and with a blessing.
– Florence Scovel Shinn
The underlying purpose of Al is to allow wealth
to access skill while removing from the skilled
the ability to access wealth.
– @jeffowski
My melancholy is the most faithful sweetheart I have had.
– Kierkegaard
I want you always to remember me. Will you remember that I existed, and that I stood next to you here like this?
– Haruki Murakami
The heart is the toughest part of the body.
Tenderness is in the hands.
– Carolyn Forché
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
– Stephen Jay Gould
Let me then create you… in this lovely, this fading, this still bright October day…
– Virginia Woolf
Individuation is not linear but a circumambulation of the self; a spiral journey towards wholeness where the head and heart work together; a life-long process of integrating the opposite, bringing split-off parts into more holistic personality.
– Karin Syrett
In loneliness, the lonely one eats himself; in a crowd, the many eat him. Now choose.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Never discriminate as to whom you study and whom you trust. Never trust anyone completely and study everyone, including friends and loved ones.
– Robert Greene
You are not judged by the height you have risen, but from the depth you have climbed.
– Frederick Douglass
What an absurd thing it was to expect happiness in a world so full of misery… Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil — or else an absolute ignorance.
– Graham Greene
The commonest ivory tower is that of the average man, the state of passivity towards experience.
– W. H. Auden
MOUNTAIN TALK
I was going along a dusty highroad
when the mountain
across the way
turned me to its silence:
oh I said how come
I don’t know your
massive symmetry and rest:
nevertheless, said the mountain,
would you want
to be
lodged here with
a changeless prospect, risen
to an unalterable view:
so I went on
counting my numberless fingers.
– A.R. Ammons
All the suffering, stress and addiction comes from not realizing you already are what you are looking for.
– Jon Kabat-Zinn
slowly
over the cedars
sunshine and rain
– Gyodai
Thought has divided itself as the controller and the controlled; it is a trick thought is playing upon itself.
– Krishnamurti
my lips too chilled
to chatter on
autumn wind
– Basho
I didn’t become a writer because I had something to say. I became a writer because I had so much to ask.
– Patrick Rosal
Sometimes the best way to win is to not fight at all.
– Sun Tzu
Without having seen the Sistine Chapel one can form no appreciable idea of what one man is capable of achieving.
– Goethe
How warm are we from this love, like the sun.
– Rumi
Let me fall
in love one last time, I beg them.
Teach me mortality, frighten me
into the present. Help me to find
the heft of these days. That the nights
will be full enough and my heart feral.
– Jack Gilbert
Ghost Rider
Parsifal as Ghost rider
“Merlin”, Parsifal said. “Please tell me, where can I find my creator?”
“You mean your source, I guess.”
“Yes”, Parsifal said.
“The source lies in your self.”
Merlin continued. “You and the source are one and the same. You are riding in your dream.”
“How do you know?”
“I do know nothing. I don’t need to. Maybe one day you remember my words. You cannot believe in them. You have to experience them.” He laughed. “Well, call me an idiot. You are right. Nevertheless, you will remember. I nearly died three years ago, you remember? I found it true what a dying woman had told me many years ago. Life is but a dream… The source… The source…. It’s me…!”
– HKD
Remember to leave a bowl of ink out for any poets in your garden on National Poetry Day. They can be quite shy, but whatever you do don’t ask them what they are working on. They might tell you.
– Mat Riches
There must always be two kinds of art: escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep, and parable-art, that art which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love.
– W.H. Auden
Enough
You will never be enough.
Not Chicano enough.
Not Pocho enough.
Not Mexican enough.
Not Latinx enough.
Not American enough.
Not Californian enough.
Not Southern Californian enough.
Not L.A. County enough.
Not Orange County enough.
Not enough of a whole entity.
Not enough of a clear sky.
Not enough of a bottle of tequila.
Not enough of a slice of apple pie.
But you are everything and nothing—
All at once.
You are a modern Mariachi
on a tangled road:
be vigilant. Exist.
– Jose Hernandez Diaz
What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish. This is bad for everyone; the majority lose all genuine taste of their own, and the minority become cultural snobs.
– W. H. Auden
Education will no longer be an unpredictable and exciting adventure in human enlightenment, but an exercise in conformity and an apprenticeship to whatever gadgetry is useful in a technical world.
– Jacques Ellul
Those who are unbroken, how do they manage it?
– Elias Canetti
They will tell you that they are adapting their machinery to the circumstances, but you can see that all they can do is adapt themselves to their machinery, as long as it will still allow them to do so.
– Martin Buber
Neither time nor hands have touched the shrubs in the windless garden…
– Walter Benjamin
The Meaning of Birds
by Charlie Smith
Of the genesis of birds we know nothing,
save the legend they are descended
from reptiles: flying, snap-jawed lizards
that have somehow taken to air. Better the story
that they were crab-apple blossoms
or such, blown along by the wind; time after time
finding themselves tossed from perhaps a seaside tree,
floated or lifted over the thin blue lazarine waves
until something in the snatch of color
began to flutter and rise. But what does it matter
anyway how they got up high
in the trees or over the rusty shoulders
of some mountain? There they are,
little figments,
animated—soaring. And if occasionally a tern washes up
greased and stiff, and sometimes a cardinal
or a mockingbird slams against the windshield
and your soul goes oh God and shivers
at the quick and unexpected end
to beauty, it is not news that we live in a world
where beauty is unexplainable
and suddenly ruined
and has its own routines. We are often far
from home in a dark town, and our griefs
are difficult to translate into a language
understood by others. We sense the downswing of time
and learn, having come of age, that the reluctant
concessions made in youth
are not sufficient to heat the cold drawn breath
of age. Perhaps temperance
was not enough, foresight or even wisdom
fallacious, not only in conception
but in the thin acts
themselves. So our lives are difficult,
and perhaps unpardonable, and the fey gauds
of youth have, as the old men told us they would,
faded. But still, it is morning again, this day.
In the flowering trees
the birds take up their indifferent, elegant cries.
Look around. Perhaps it isn’t too late
to make a fool of yourself again. Perhaps it isn’t too late
to flap your arms and cry out, to give
one more cracked rendition of your singular, aspirant song.
All I know is that spirit guides must be in a constant state of face palm.
– Nika Solé
It is not our job to remain whole. We came to lose our leaves Like the trees, and be born again, Drawing up from the great roots.
– Robert Bly
Always this image
of hand on forehead,
of writing restored
to thought.
– Edmond Jabès, (trans. Keith Waldrop)
There are times when you have nothing, are nothing:
A beach in cold October air
Breathing the space that held you;
Or a cool-dark basement, naked,
The night breeze garlanding your bare skin.
– Paul Zweig
I’m still learning how to write. I don’t know what technique is.
– James Baldwin
If you’re not fit your child won’t be fit.
If you’re addicted to your phone your child will be too.
If you’re not striving for your dreams your child won’t either.
Children cannot be something they cannot see. If you want great things for your kids you must be the example.
– Dan Go
People will decide they don’t like you for reasons like, you see who they are under the mask, or they see you as being further along the path than them. That’s why someone liking you really doesn’t matter. It’s often a projection of their like or dislike for themself.
– Nika Solé
Self awareness is also moving with the understanding that every person around you is experiencing reality differently than you and yours is not the only one there is.
– Nika Solé
To quote the words of my good friend climate diplomat Christiana Figueres “We are funding our extinction.”
– Joan Halifax
The nearness of death destroys shame. Men and women change as soon as they know that the date of their execution has been fixed … They copulate in public, on a small bit of ground surrounded by barbed wire – their last home on Earth.
– Milosz, The Captive Mind
Spiritual sight and understanding, over everything.
– Nika Solé
Sometimes you wake up from a dream and you have no idea what the metaphor means, but you feel whole because emotion, imagination & intellect have been brought together. The experience becomes a touchstone because you have experienced wholeness. That’s where healing begins.
– Marion Woodman
COAST
Calm, he said, in another language
I had become proficient in pretending
I understood. The beach was still
the beach: picturesque, cold
this time of year when everyone preferred
the closeness of coffee shops. Need it be that serious? Yes,
he said, the waves moaning how they’re
moon-trained all year regardless of season,
folding, unfolding, unconcerned with us,
little interruptions in the way of things.
– Oluwaseun Olayiwola
Melville:
By vast pains we mine into the pyramid; by horrible gropings we come to the central room; with joy we espy the sarcophagus; but we lift the lid—and no body is there!—appallingly vacant as vast is the soul of a man!
Finding is the first Act
The second, loss,
Third, Expedition for
The “Golden Fleece”
Fourth, no Discovery-
Fifth, no Crew- Finally,
no Golden Fleece-
Jason-sham-too.
– Emily Dickinson
Read, but don’t just read. Read the best book you can find.
Write, but don’t just write. Write the best idea you can conceive.
– James Clear
i bear witness to no thing
more human than hate
i bear witness to no thing
more human than love
– Lucille Clifton
one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself is the gift of strengthening your discernment in terms of recognizing when you are being used.
– @gaialect
American literature becomes problematical, not to say impossible, because if it limits itself to the traditional language and form of a national literature it misses the basic truths about itself, while if it attempts to tell those truths it abolishes itself as literature.
– Fredric Jameson
Your grief is an inner banner.
You love deeply.
Don’t resist your tears.
Let that water bless you.
Don’t fight sleep.
The truth and the sweet memories
will still be present at daybreak.
– Dr. Thema
Habilitas
by Rodrigo Toscano
One arm can be raised painlessly.
The other arm cannot be raised, painlessly.
One foot beautifully articulates to all sides.
The other foot is locked, causing a limp.
One glute goes unnoticed throughout the day.
The other glute is incessantly irritated.
There’s a million gnats hanging around here.
Not all the gnats are in great shape.
Some more than others are more spry.
Matter of fact, you could line them up, one by one.
An array of nano-differences would emerge.
We might call that a scale.
Whatever.
Primate that doesn’t heal, that’s the poem.
That’s the poem on a scale—of spryness.
It both can and cannot walk—without a limp.
But it moves through—the gnat space, the ape space.
It gears towards its own sun.
That’s the perception, at least
The minimally required deception
To get to sun not its own but felt as its own.
And how not?
“Our collective sun”—that perennialist phrase
Uttered by limpers-in-life, alongside gnats
Agitated, swirling among, swatting each other.
The nerve endings of tendons are fueled by the sun
Not by the stars or the moon, well maybe the moon.
Maybe moving limbs are lunar tributes
Without our sunny consent.
Maybe the gnats should calm the fuck down.
Maybe the apes should dote on more practical matters
Like, four limbs wiggling efficiently enough
Powered by hobbled hips
Happily venerating the sun among gnats
Curiously awaiting what moonlight might bring
What creature companions might emerge
What verse lines will reach out for reception
What painful or joyful range of motion might ensue
Among apes, gnats notwithstanding.
The sun, absurdly sunny, urging on.
Of the Surface of Things
by Wallace Stevens
I
In my room, the world is beyond my understanding;
But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four
hills and a cloud.
II
From my balcony, I survey the yellow air,
Reading where I have written,
“The spring is like a belle undressing.”
III
The gold tree is blue,
The singer has pulled his cloak over his head.
The moon is in the folds of the cloak.
A poem, unlike
a living being, cannot
perceive you and, in
perceiving you, grant you
reality.
– Diane Seuss
Meditations in an Emergency
by Frank O’Hara
Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French?
Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there’ll be nothing left with which to venture forth.
Why should I share you? Why don’t you get rid of someone else for a change?
I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.
Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don’t I? I’m just like a pile of leaves.
However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they’re missing? Uh huh.
My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up. It makes me restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them still. If only I had grey, green, black, brown, yellow eyes; I would stay at home and do something. It’s not that I am curious. On the contrary, I am bored but it’s my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the earth. And lately, so great has their anxiety become, I can spare myself little sleep.
Now there is only one man I love to kiss when he is unshaven. Heterosexuality! you are inexorably approaching. (How discourage her?)
St. Serapion, I wrap myself in the robes of your whiteness which is like midnight in Dostoevsky. How am I to become a legend, my dear? I’ve tried love, but that hides you in the bosom of another and I am always springing forth from it like the lotus—the ecstasy of always bursting forth! (but one must not be distracted by it!) or like a hyacinth, “to keep the filth of life away,” yes, there, even in the heart, where the filth is pumped in and courses and slanders and pollutes and determines. I will my will, though I may become famous for a mysterious vacancy in that department, that greenhouse.
Destroy yourself, if you don’t know!
It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you’ve set. It’s like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.
Fanny Brown is run away—scampered off with a Cornet of Horse; I do love that little Minx, & hope She may be happy, tho’ She has vexed me by this Exploit a little too. —Poor silly Cecchina! or F:B: as we used to call her. —I wish She had a good Whipping and 10,000 pounds.” —Mrs. Thrale.
I’ve got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans. I’ll be back, I’ll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don’t want me to go where you go, so I go where you don’t want me to. It’s only afternoon, there’s a lot ahead. There won’t be any mail downstairs. Turning, I spit in the lock and the knob turns.
Insomniami
by Ariel Francisco
The neon burns a hole in the night
and the Freon burns a hole in the sky
– Dessa
All night darkness
constructs its unquestioning citadel
of intrusive thoughts
*
if you listen closely
you can hear
the rising waters whispers
if you cover your ears
you’ll hear it too
*
trapped in the seashell of night
*
chase the echo
to its origin
*
a useless lullaby
a rythme replacing
the unticking
digital clocks
counting my sleeplessness
in silence
*
the shapelessness of waves
a watery sleep paralysis
gripping the city
*
the high water mark
is reaching for the sky
and getting there
*
new high rises rise
every day like shark teeth
a fire sale
get it while it’s hot
get that land
while it’s still land
*
the world is burning you know
*
all night you can hear them
building another goddamn stadium
while tearing down the house
around you as you sleep
*
enough empty seats
for the displaced
an uncheering home crowd
longing for home
*
enough hollow condos
for everyone
but it’s important
that they stay empty
they won’t say why
*
hurricanes come through
like tourists
and suddenly
there are less homeless people
their names lost
to the larger one
of christened chaos
*
night is a rosary of unanswered hours
*
count them
count them
count them
*
sometimes I’m grateful
for the light pollution
the smug stars
think they know everything
but their slow knowledge
is always late with its light
*
still
I consult the disdainful
horoscope to see what
they promise to promise
*
Miami is obviously
a leo
(look it up)
*
a drowning fire sign
pride pretending everything
is fine
I mean come on
*
a backwards place
you can’t blame everything
on the Bermuda Triangle
but you can try
*
swimming birds
and flying fish
burrowing owls
night sky
reflected in the water
becoming confused
a broth of clouds and corals
*
octopus conspire against us
limbed-brains learning
from our mistakes
our heirs
come too soon
*
certainly
they’ll do better
with this city
than we did
*
this city
with its history of hurricanes
and fraud
*
one day
the neon
will burn out
and then what
*
sun rises
like rent
*
sun rises
like a flag
*
sun rises
like the ocean
*
I can’t sleep
but the city I love
can’t wake up
In solitude a dialogue always arises, because even in solitude there are always two.
– Hannah Arendt
Life is a series of embroilments; living is entangling; hell, as Sartre said, is other people; that is why Rilke always had a preference for things and made his best love by post. The artist must deny life in order to celebrate it.
– William H. Gass
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.
I want my poems to be responsive, permeable. When something seems to just present itself to me—whether a striking sight or an image in a dream, I have to take note.
– Rae Armantrout
Let me make the songs for the people,
Songs for the old & young;
Songs to stir, like a battle-cry
Wherever they are sung.
– Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
HORSES
The way their eyes stare,
sometimes I wonder if we
are really hollow inside.
– Victoria Chang
Poetry raises generations. It fuels a love for writing at a younger age, all the way to the end. I wouldn’t be who l am without it, and neither would the world.
– Year 9 pupil
Uninterpreted feeling is for me a painful state.
– Helen Vendler
My influences have been what I call my four Bs—the blues, then Borges, Baraka, and Bearden.
– August Wilson
What can the two women say to each other, and how can they understand each other? Do their life stories work in unison or merely run parallel?
– Marta Figlerowicz on Scholastique Mukasonga
Every book I’d completed had been followed by what Jabès calls the book of torment—when you’re finished, you think you will never be able to write another line.
– Rosmarie Waldrop
Morning
Each day the milkman comes at six
A little after seven the newspaper lady limps along
At eight I start coming round
On the table there’s still the wine bottle
from last night and the glass, empty.
And there too are the letters
all of them sincerely mine—
Get up, walk around, read
Ecclesiastes eleven
truly the light is sweet
and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun…
– Rainer Brambach, (trans. Michael Hofmann)
Water’s iridescence is language.
– Etel Adnan
ALONE
by The Cure
This is the end of every song that we sing
The fire burned out to ash and the stars grown dim with tears
Cold and afraid, the ghosts of all that we’ve been
We toast with bitter dregs, to our emptiness
And the birds falling out of our skies
And the words falling out of our minds
And here is to love, to all the love
Falling out of our lives
Hopes and dreams are gone
The end of every song
And it all stops
We were always sure that we would never change
And it all stops
We were always sure that we would stay the same
But it all stops
And we close our eyes to sleep
To dream a boy and girl
Who dream the world is nothing but a dream
Where did it go?
Where did it go?
Broken voiced lament to call us home
This is this end of every song we sing
Where did it go?
Where did it go?
Where did it go?
Where did it go?
Broken voiced lament to call us home
This is the end of every song we sing, alone
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. All the light in this room comes in so that the entire room is in effect folded into each part. If your eye looks, the light will be then unfolded by your eye and brain. As you look through a telescope or a camera, the whole universe of space and time is enfolded into each part, and that is unfolded to the eye. With an old-fashioned television set that’s not adjusted properly, the image enfolds into the screen and then can be unfolded by adjustment.
When you are talking to somebody, your whole intention to speak enfolds a large number of words. You don’t choose them one by one. There are any number of examples of the implicate order in our experience of consciousness. Any one word has behind it a whole range of meaning enfolded in thought.
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.
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.”
– David Bohm
Women never have young minds.
They are born three thousand years old.
– Shelagh Delaney
When you really look for me, you will see me instantly –
you will find me in the tiniest house of time.
– Kabir
To the Reader
As you read, a white bear leisurely
pees, dyeing the snow
saffron,
and as you read, many gods
lie among lianas: eyes of obsidian
are watching the generations of leaves,
and as you read
the sea is turning its dark pages,
turning
its dark pages.
– Denise Levertov
Sixty-six times have these eyes beheld the
changing scene of autumn.
I have said enough about moonlight,
Ask no more.
Only listen to the voice of pines and cedars
when no wind stirs.
– Ryonen
O Taste and See
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.
– Denise Levertov
There is a wonderful mythical law of nature that the three things we crave most in life – happiness, freedom, and peace of mind – are always attained by giving them to someone else.
– Peyton Conway March
Generosity is that palpable extra that comes along with the gift, motiveless as a good wind. Best is the extra that comes unencumbered: pure generosity of spirit, always replenishing itself. We the less generous are quick to suspect it, remembering what we’ve given and why. But those who have it irradiate the day. They redefine the meaning of wealth. We fall in love with them, we try to shine that brightly, yet before long they’ve mostly instructed us about what it is we want to keep. Blessed are the generous who keep enough for themselves so we can live with them without guilt. Blessed, too, are those who receive well, so the generous get their reward.
– Stephen Dunn
The new value placed on the transitory, the elusive and the ephemeral, the very celebration of dynamism, discloses a longing for an undefiled, immaculate and stable present.
– Jurgen Habermas
My brother – I have been on a long journey after supreme knowledge, I took a long time to rest. Then, upon coming back, I had to give all my time to duty, and all my thoughts to the Great Problem. It is all over now: the New Year’s festivities are at an end and I am “Self” once more. But what is Self? Only a passing guest, whose concerns are all like a mirage of the great desert . . . .
– Mahatma K.H.
I am aware of the need for constant self-revision and growth, leaving behind the renunciations of yesterday and yet in continuity with all my yesterdays. For to cling to the past is to lose one’s continuity with the past, since this means clinging to what is no longer there.
My ideas are always changing, always moving around one center, and I am always seeing that center from somewhere else.
Hence, I will always be accused of inconsistency. But I will no longer be there to hear the accusation.
– Thomas Merton
There is a hole in the universe.
It is not like a hole in a wall where a mouse slips through, solid and crisp and leading from somewhere to someplace. It is rather like a hole in the heart, an amorphous and edgeless void. It is a heartfelt absence, a blank space where something is missing, a large and obvious blind spot in our understanding of the universe.
That missing something, strange to say, is a grasp of nothing itself. Understanding nothing matters, because nothing is the all-important background upon which everything else happens.
– K. C. Cole
There are a lot of loose ends. You try to look at everything officially as extending from one particular point to another particular point. You have certain boundaries that you don’t go beyond. You can’t be bothered. And beyond those boundaries are still greater loose ends. Then you try to tidy them up again. This is the greater thing that we don’t talk about, that everyone knows about.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Our way of relating to our bodies is often very rigid and tends to restrict our potential as embodied beings. Our attitudes and investigations of the body often perpetuate either a mechanical or a ghost in the machine perspective. These same attitudes in many ways insure that knowing will not change or mature qualitatively and will remain a rather isolated occurrence in a basically unknowing world. The self is the only thing that is allowed to know in such a picture. Everything that supposedly surrounds and interacts with it must be seen as objects which are merely known. However, this rather frozen picture can be thawed. It is possible to allow a greater measure of liveliness, clarity, and intimacy with our surroundings to replace the isolated appearances of body, mind, and world.
In order to thaw out our world of appearance and to regain the knowing that has somehow been frozen in the process of building this world, we need to learn what we ourselves are. We must work with – and thaw out – what we apparently have close at hand.
– Tartang Tulku
To help me work at my painting studio.
Be a Mad Monk
I wrote
Thinking of Shih T’ao and Jung Kwang.
How can I be a mad monk
When I am applying for office work
And paying bills?
You may not know what
You are,
But you can know that
You are
The old books tell me
As I sit in my kitchen
Scrawling poems in the near dark.
– Tanya Joyce
It is a life that cannot be held and studied as object, because it is not a thing. It is not reached and coaxed forth from hiding by any process under the sun, including meditation. All that we can do with any spiritual discipline is produce within ourselves something of the silence, the humility, the detachment, the purity of heart, and the indifference which are required if the inner self is to make some shy, unpredictable manifestation of his presence.
– Thomas Merton
When The Shoe Fits
Ch’ui the draftsman
Could draw more perfect circles freehand
Than with a compass.
His fingers brought forth
Spontaneous forms from nowhere. His mind
Was meanwhile free and without concern
With what he was doing.
No application was needed
His mind was perfectly simple
And knew no obstacle.
So, when the shoe fits
The foot is forgotten,
When the belt fits
The belly is forgotten,
When the heart is right
“For” and “against” are forgotten.
No drives, no compulsions,
No needs, no attractions:
Then your affairs
Are under control.
You are a free man.
Easy is right. Begin right
And you are easy.
Continue easy and you are right.
The right way to go easy
Is to forget the right way
And forget that the going is easy.
– Chuang Tzu
translated by Thomas Merton
After all, it’s rather a privilege
amid the affluent traffic
to serve this unpopular art which cannot be turned into
background noise for study
or hung as a status trophy by rising executives,
cannot be ‘done’ like Venice
or abridged like Tolstoy, but stubbornly still insists upon
being read or ignored . . . ”
– W H Auden
A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good many take their images precooked out of a can and swallow them down, absent-mindedly and with little relish.
– Wystan Hugh Auden
The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person, for our house is open, there are no keys to the doors, and invisible guests come in and out at will.
– Mary Watkins
“ . . . for with some people,” he wrote, “the imagination is so vivid as to be almost an extension of consciousness. . . .” But here he stuck absolutely. He was not quite sure what he meant by the words, and how to finish the sentence puzzled him into blank inaction. It was a difficult point to decide, for it seemed to come in appropriately at this point in his story, and he did not know whether to leave it as it stood, change it round a bit, or take it out altogether. It might just spoil its chances of being accepted: editors were such clever men. But, to rewrite the sentence was a grind, and he was so tired and sleepy. After all, what did it matter? People who were clever would force a meaning into it; people who were not clever would pretend – he knew of no other classes of readers. He would let it stay, and go on with the action of the story. He put his head in his hands and began to think hard.
– Algernon Blackwood
The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring. It is the sensation of a stunt pilot’s turning barrel rolls, or an inchworm’s blind rearing from a stem in search of a route. At its worst, it feels like alligator wrestling, at the level of the sentence.
At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your fists, your back, your brain, and then – and only then – it is handed to you. From the corner of your eye you see motion. Something is moving through the air and headed your way. It is a parcel bound in ribbons and bows; it has two white wings. It flies directly at you; you can read your name on it. If it were a baseball, you would hit it out of the park. It is that one pitch in a thousand you see in slow motion; its wings beat slowly as a hawk’s.
– Annie Dillard
“Didn’t anyone ever tell you it was all right to write?” asked the psychiatrist.
“Yes, but not to be a writer.” Behind me lay the sort of middle-class education that encourages writing, painting, music, theater, so long as they aren’t taken too seriously, so long as they can be set aside once the real business of life begins.”
– Jane Cooper, Maps and Windows
Poem As Priest
Like the good Catholic boy
who tells his all
to the patient priest,
the poet pours his soul
into the poem,
confesses his passions,
his private fears,
that flow like lamb’s blood
upon the pure white page
that passes sentence
after sentence
upon his sins
and turns his penance
into prayer.
– Charles Ghigna
The first demand any work of any art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)
– C.S. Lewis
Trust your original impulse. Trust the muse completely until she proves to be, beyond the shadow of a doubt, unfaithful. But after vision comes revision. That’s another thing, a bag of tricks and then some. You need to know, confidently, that during revision you can fix anything, change anything to suit yourself . . . all of us would rather not have to revise anything at all. Just put it through the typewriter or into the computer, perfect and complete the first time, effortlessly. Pure inspiration. No sweat and strain and doubt. And that happens, probably will happen once or twice in your lifetime. And that will always seem to be the best time, the way it ought to be. But through the labor, sometimes hard labor, you will discover what every good writer does, that you can make a work seem to be the effortless result of pure inspiration.
– George Garrett
The Humpbacks
Listen, whatever it is you try
to do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle you
like the dreams of your body,
its spirit
longing to fly while the dead-weight bones
toss their dark mane and hurry
back into the fields of glittering fire
where everything,
even the great whale,
throbs with song.
– Mary Oliver
The whale moves in a sea of sound:
shrimps snap, plankton seethes,
fish croad, gulp, drum their air-bladders,
and are scrutinized by echo-location,
a light massage of sound touching the skin.
The small, toothed whales use high frequencies:
Finely tuned and focused sound-beams,
intense salvoes of bouncing
clicks, a thousand a second,
with which a hair, as thin as
half a millimeter, can be detected;
penetrating probes,
with which they can scan
the contents of a colleague’s stomach,
follow the flow of their blood
take the full measure of
an approaching brain.
From two cerebral cavities
in their melon-shaped heads,
they can transmit two sonic probes,
as if talking in stereo,
and send them in any direction
at the same time:
One ahead, one behind, one above, one below . . .
lengthening the sound-waves,
shortening them, heightening them,
until their acoustic switchboard
receives the intelligence required.
Spoken to in English,
the smallest cetacean, the dolphin,
will rise to the surface,
alter its vocal frequencies
to suit the measures of human speech,
pitch its voice to the same level
as that of human sounds
when traveling through air –
an unfamiliar medium –
adjust the elastic lips of its blow-hole,
and then, after courteously waiting
for silence,
produce a vibrato imitation
of human language:
Words, phrases, sentences . . .
– Heathcote Williams, Whale Nation
To Tu Fu from Shantung
You ask how I spend my time –
I nestle against a treetrunk
and listen to autumn winds
in the pines all night and day.
Shantung wine can’t get me drunk.
The local poets bore me.
My thoughts remain with you,
like the Wen River, endlessly flowing.
– Li Po
What Space Faith Can Occupy
by TC Tolbert
I believe that witness is a magnitude of vulnerability.
That when I say love what I mean is not a feeling
nor promise of a feeling. I believe in attention.
My love for you is a monolith of try.
The woman I love pays an inordinate amount
of attention to large and small objects. She is not
described by anything. Because I could not mean anything else,
she knows exactly what I mean.
Once upon a time a line saw itself
clear to its end. I have seen the shape
of happiness. (y=mx+b)
I am holding it. It is your hand.
A Witness to Creation
If you could have that one day back, the one that you have kept a secret in your soul, what day would it be? What? One among the many? Well, let me make you this offering:
It would be the day on which I stood on the rim of Monument Valley and beheld those ineffable monoliths for the first time. I was young, you see, like a fledgling who leaves the nest and flies out over the earth. I saw beyond time, into
timelessness. It was the first and holiest of all days. On such a day— on that original day—did the First Man behold the First World. It filled him with wonder and humility. Then and there, looking for one enchanted moment into eternity, I was the First Man. I was present at Creation!
– N. Scott Momaday
It never really goes away, the longing for the life not lived, because isn’t that part of how we come to know ourselves too? Through what we lack as much as what we have, all we dream but do not hold. Some desires have no resolution.
– Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt
It’s an original dance, and we had to perfect it. It’s a dance with an open, line figure. It’s a parade. They dance for the camera, for the audience.
– Jean-Luc Godard
Just Once
Just once I knew what life was for.
In Boston, quite suddenly, I understood;
walked there along the Charles River,
watched the lights copying themselves,
all neoned and strobe-hearted, opening
their mouths as wide as opera singers;
counted the stars, my little campaigners,
my scar daisies, and knew that I walked my love
on the night green side of it and cried
my heart to the eastbound cars and cried
my heart to the westbound cars and took
my truth across a small humped bridge
and hurried my truth, the charm of it, home
and hoarded these constants into morning
only to find them gone.
– Anne Sexton
Your cure for when the spirit flags?
The gym, when virtuous. And a bagel at all other times.
– Nathan Englander
Music is the only religion that delivers the goods.
– Frank Zappa
Read 500 pages every week. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will.
– Warren Buffett
Unforgiveness is the most prolific cause of disease. It will harden arteries or liver, and affect the eye-sight. In its train are endless ills.
– Florence Scovel Shinn
Sometimes you can only find Heaven by slowly backing away from Hell.
– Carrie Fisher
I wish I wasn’t such a dreamer. I’ve ruined this life for myself.
– N.M. Sanchez
Everybody comes from the same source. If you hate another human being, you’re hating part of yourself.
– Elvis Presley
All of the systems that hold the mainstream reality together are compromised. That’s why they’re all coming down.
– Nika Solé
I tried to stay out of the gender discourse, but I just can’t hold back:
Women are so grounding & beautiful & wise, in a world that tries to exploit & terrify them
Men are so brave & tender in a world that tries to make them out as both heartless monsters & weakling failures
– River Kenna
October is about trees
revealing colors they’ve hidden all year.
People have an October as well.
– J.M. Storms
The more the technical universe becomes organized, the more man blows apart in disorder.
– Jacques Ellul
You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
It doesn’t really matter if these poems are thought of as slightly soiled dharma gates or just plain poems. They’ll live or die by their own specific density, flowers for the void.
– Jim Harrison, After Ikkyu
Jung once told me that he made it a great point to see if his patients had a sense of humor. People who have no sense of humor are very difficult to treat and if they are psychotic they are practically incurable.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
It is the human mind that creates its difficulties and then cries for help.
– Ramana Maharshi
Loratus prodes: I advance pointing to my mask: I set a mask upon my passion, but with a discreet (and wily) finger I designate this mask. Every passion, ultimately, has its spectator.
– Barthes
Files sharing can sometimes seem like an orgy or a bathhouse, where the spectacle of erotic bounty, the idea of instant, total access and no limitations to desire, is as exciting as any specific sexual transaction that takes place.
– Simon Reynolds
Only when you do not know yourself, the opinion of other people becomes important.
– Sadhguru
he tells me
you worry too much
from the cauliflower core
a worm
wriggles out
– Nitu Yumnam
Cultivating skillful effort, we learn to distinguish the ‘right’ amount of effort. Not too little. Not too much. Just right. In tune. When we find the right pitch, our practice flourishes.
– Peter Doobinin
I’m right here
sunlight opening up the sidewalk,
opening up today’s first black&white,
& I’m about to be
born again thinking of you
– Ted Berrigan
…for how // in that great darkness could I explain / anything, anything at all.
– Hayden Carruth
All are like soup.
– John Ashbery
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle
Like a bowl of soup
– Bob Dylan
Jung saw a deeper purpose in projection: projection leads to consciousness. Projection occurs when consciousness refuses to acknowledge some symbolic expression which is trying to emerge from the unconscious.
– Robin Robertson
The horror of spoiling is even stronger than the anxiety of losing.
– Roland Barthes
What did I think death was like, [a friend] asked. I didn’t have a clue, but I’d heard an Eastern mystic say that it was like slipping out of a pair of shoes that had never fit very well.
– Anne Lamott
When the tyrant’s voice comes on the car radio, I close my eyes in an effort to slow the rate at which hopelessness enters me.
– Franny Choi
When computers take over our work and most of our thought, operating with a rapidity which the brain cannot, the brain is going to wither.
– Krishnamurti
Our plans never turn out as tasty as reality.
– Ram Dass
It’s a pleasure to finish a page when night falls.
– Octavio Paz
For a Poet
I HAVE wrapped my dreams in a silken
cloth,
And laid them away in a box of gold; Where long will cling the lips of the moth,
I have wrapped my dreams in a silken cloth; I hide no hate; I am not even wroth
Who found earth’s breath so keen and cold; I have wrapped my dreams in a silken cloth,
And laid them away in a box of gold.
– Countee Cullen
And we are plagued by dead language and dead stories that serve people whose aim is nothing short of a dead world.
– Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message
I thought I needed flames to be seen,
To prove my worth through heat, through sheen.
But my love, the fire perished, leaving me behind,
Now just ashes, scattered and lost to time.
– @TheModernMaxims
Withhold not good from them to whom it is due, when it is in the power of thine hand to do it. Say not unto thy neighbor, Go, and come again, and to morrow I will give; when thou hast it by thee.
– Proverbs 3:27-28
Everyone is afraid,
Everyone is afraid, but you and I
Have joined with the lamp, the water and the mirror,
And we did not fear.
– Forough Farrokhzad
Stillness is what aims the archer’s arrow. It inspires new ideas. It sharpens perspective and illuminates connections.
– Ryan Holiday
Again, Toni Morrison said, “I would like my work to do two things: be as demanding and sophisticated as I want it to be, and at the same time be accessible in a sort of emotional way to lots of people, just like jazz. That’s a hard task. But that’s what I want to do.” Lock in.
– @tamaranopper
I’m a nice guy
Until it’s time to play UNO
– Jericho Brown
The Expatriates
by Anne Sexton
My dear, it was a moment
to clutch at for a moment
so that you may believe in it
and believing is the act of love, I think,
even in the telling, wherever it went.
In the false New England forest
where the misplanted Norwegian trees
refused to root, their thick synthetic
roots barging out of the dirt to work on the air,
we held hands and walked on our knees.
Actually, there was no one there.
For forty years this experimental
woodland grew, shaft by shaft in perfect rows
where its stub branches held and its spokes fell.
It was a place of parallel trees, their lives
filed out in exile where we walked too alien to know
our sameness and how our sameness survives.
Outside of us the village cars followed
the white line we had carefully walked
two nights before toward our single beds.
We lay halfway up an ugly hill and if we fell
it was here in the woods where the woods were caught
in their dying and you held me well.
And now I must dream the forest whole
and your sweet hands, not once as frozen
as those stopped trees, nor ruled, nor pale,
nor leaving mine. Today, in my house, I see
our house, its pillars a dim basement of men
holding up their foreign ground for you and me.
My dear, it was a time,
butchered from time
that we must tell of quickly
before we lose the sound of our own
mouths calling mine, mine, mine.
The greatest difficulty is the mental resistance to things that arise, and the underlying assumption that they should not.
– Eckhart Tolle
Have a proper lunch ! And be calm !
– Franz Kafka, 1913.
The borders lost
to the hum of planes, of idling car, hum of the outboard motor
because of the way the line on a map twists into thorns.
– Oliver de la Paz
My ideas are a curse.
They spring from radical discontent
with the awful order of things.
I play clown. I play carpenter. I play nurse,
I play witch. Each like an advertisement
for change.
– Anne Sexton
orbiting
an unknowable planet
homecoming dance
– @hegelincanada
family get-together
somehow the cat and the dog
understand babytalk
– @NJBarico
The Giant in Front of You is never Bigger than the God Inside of You.
– Christine Caine
A Song for Wall Street
by Salomón de la Selva
In Nicaragua, my Nicaragua,
What can you buy for a penny there?—
A basketful of apricots,
A water jug of earthenware,
A rosary of coral beads
And a priest’s prayer.
And for two pennies? For two new pennies?—
The strangest music ever heard
All from the brittle little throat
Of a clay bird,
And, for good measure, we will give you
A patriot’s word.
And for a nickel? A bright white nickel?—
It’s lots of land a man can buy,
A golden mine that’s long and deep,
A forest growing high,
And a little house with a red roof
And a river passing by.
But for your dollar, your dirty dollar,
Your greenish leprosy,
It’s only hatred you shall get
From all my folks and me;
So keep your dollar where it belongs
And let us be!
Joseph Fasano:
This. Please read this. The children have voices:
Dear Joseph, I am a German teacher for Ukrainian refugees.
I translated your prompt into German,
they wrote their poems and I send you now one
I translated back into English.
My name is Eva.
Today I feel like a firebird
sitting in a cage.
Sometimes I am sadness.
Sometimes I am happiness.
But always I am cheerful.
I ask the world, “Why?”
And the answer is
a firebird sitting in a cage.
It is what you don’t write that frequently gives what you do write its power.
– Toni Morrison
Shit I Can Do Now That I’m Invisible
I take boxes of Cheez-Its off the shelf
and just start eating them, knock more boxes
to the floor and keep walking, workers
outraged-What the…who did that?
I put my mouth to the kombucha tap
next to the check-out lines at Market 32
and hit the handle and drink. I cut in lines
at stores, at airports. I stow away on planes,
find a seat and don’t ask for anything,
snooze before liftoff. I nap in exam rooms
in hospitals, jaywalk in cities, take what I want
in malls, wag my titties around, no problem.
I email my grievances, forget the compliment
sandwich, let it rip like I fart in company,
everyone looking at everyone else.
You all can hide behind your potted plants,
but I-I can hide in plain sight! That shit you say
that I hear, I carry it back to its source.
I tell on you and people hear me on the wind.
I sit on my ass and laugh now, nobody. chasing
it anymore, nobody making me feel
like walking quicker to my car, nobody making
those tiger pit eyes at me like they mean
I’m something good, not knowing I’ll plaster
them across the world wide web stretched
like an elastic waistband around my big, fat belly.
I’m headed to a city near you, taking.up more
and more room, working my way toward orca glory—
the only other mammal that goes through
menopause, soundlessly, teeth flashing
like ice picks, out at sea.
– Kerrin McCadden
If we can afford war, we can afford reparations.
If we can afford war, we can afford Medicare for All.
If we can afford war, we can afford universal childcare.
If we can afford war, we can afford college for all.
If we can afford war, we can afford universal basic income.
– Nina Turner
high tide
another poem
unfinished
– @pauldavidmena
I wanted to write a book to accompany me. Because I am lonely. Not the kind of lonely that is met by more good people-I have many… But none of it levels up against the loneliness that comes as a condition of being this human, any human.
– Jade McGleughlin
To the Film Industry in Crisis
Not you, lean quarterlies and swarthy periodicals
with your studious incursions toward the pomposity of ants,
nor you, experimental theatre in which Emotive Fruition
is wedding Poetic Insight perpetually, nor you,
promenading Grand Opera, obvious as an ear (though you
are close to my heart), but you, Motion Picture Industry,
it’s you I love!
In times of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love.
And give credit where it’s due: not to my starched nurse, who taught me
how to be bad and not bad rather than good (and has lately availed
herself of this information), not to the Catholic Church
which is at best an oversolemn introduction to cosmic entertainment,
not to the American Legion, which hates everybody, but to you,
glorious Silver Screen, tragic Technicolor, amorous Cinemascope,
stretching Vistavision and startling Stereophonic Sound, with all
your heavenly dimensions and reverberations and iconoclasms! To
Richard Barthelmess as the “tol’able” boy barefoot and in pants,
Jeanette MacDonald of the flaming hair and lips and long, long neck,
Sue Carroll as she sits for eternity on the damaged fender of a car
and smiles, Ginger Rogers with her pageboy bob like a sausage
on her shuffling shoulders, peach-melba-voiced Fred Astaire of the feet,
Eric von Stroheim, the seducer of mountain-climbers’ gasping spouses,
the Tarzans, each and every one of you (I cannot bring myself to prefer
Johnny Weissmuller to Lex Barker, I cannot!), Mae West in a furry sled,
her bordello radiance and bland remarks, Rudolph Valentino of the moon,
its crushing passions, and moonlike, too, the gentle Norma Shearer,
Miriam Hopkins dropping her champagne glass off Joel McCrea’s yacht,
and crying into the dappled sea, Clark Gable rescuing Gene Tierney
from Russia and Allan Jones rescuing Kitty Carlisle from Harpo Marx,
Cornel Wilde coughing blood on the piano keys while Merle Oberon berates,
Marilyn Monroe in her little spike heels reeling through Niagara Falls,
Joseph Cotten puzzling and Orson Welles puzzled and Dolores del Rio
eating orchids for lunch and breaking mirrors, Gloria Swanson reclining,
and Jean Harlow reclining and wiggling, and Alice Faye reclining
and wiggling and singing, Myrna Loy being calm and wise, William Powell
in his stunning urbanity, Elizabeth Taylor blossoming, yes, to you
and to all you others, the great, the near-great, the featured, the extras
who pass quickly and return in dreams saying your one or two lines,
my love!
Long may you illumine space with your marvellous appearances, delays
and enunciations, and may the money of the world glitteringly cover you
as you rest after a long day under the kleig lights with your faces
in packs for our edification, the way the clouds come often at night
but the heavens operate on the star system. It is a divine precedent
you perpetuate! Roll on, reels of celluloid, as the great earth rolls on!
– Frank O’Hara
Translating can be quite a lonely occupation, although not as lonely as being a writer—because you do at least have the text to keep you company.
– Margaret Jull Costa
No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess.
– Isaac Newton
The revolution should not be made within us, but on the outside – and if we make it within ourselves, it is only a way of not doing it on the outside.
– Gilles Deleuze
Real friends boss
the wind around.
– Jordan Stempleman, All Actually
Writing has always had a tactile quality for me. It’s a physical experience.
– Paul Auster
Foxglove Country
Sometimes I like to hide in the word
foxgloves – in the middle of foxgloves.
The xgl is hard to say, out of the England
of its harbouring word.
Alone it becomes a small tangle,
a witch’s thimble, hard-to-toll bell,
elvish door to a door. Xgl
a place with a locked beginning
then a snag, a gl
like the little Englands of my grief,
a knotted dark that locks light
in glisten, glow, glint, gleam
and Oberon’s banks of eglantine
which closes in on the opening
of Gulliver whose shrunken gul
says ‘rose’ in my fatherland.
Meanwhile, in the motherland, the xg
is almost the thumb of a lost mitten,
an impossible interior, deeper than forests
and further in. And deeper inland
is the gulp, the gulf, the gap, the grip
that goes before love.
– Zaffar Kunial
a dialog on the strand (dream)
i want to come
with you.
yes, but i’m
going out deep.
– A. F. Caldiero
A Short Poem for a Hard Friday
Hope is our mother,
and Kindness is our father
And we are the children
who sometimes stray.
– john zbigniew guzlowski
Realizing that people can only ever see and understand you from their level, allows you to be a lot more comfortable being misunderstood.
– Nika Solé
The seasons where you don’t have much, teach you how little you actually need.
– Nika Solé
The words in our mouths do as much damage as our feet on the grass. But so do our silences.
– Herta Müller
We are asked by science to believe that the entire universe sprang from nothingness, and at a single point and for no discernible reason. This notion is the limit case for credulity. In other words, if you can believe this, you can believe anything.
– Terence McKenna
Is a book a work of art?
I believe so. But the more important question is, do we need to make something rare for people to recognize its worth, or can we reframe our appreciation of the everyday, accessible book as an artistic object in its own right?
– Laura Kerr
The Windows
by George Herbert
Lord, how can man preach thy eternal word?
He is a brittle crazy glass;
Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford
This glorious and transcendent place,
To be a window, through thy grace.
But when thou dost anneal in glass thy story,
Making thy life to shine within
The holy preachers, then the light and glory
More reverend grows, and more doth win;
Which else shows waterish, bleak, and thin.
Doctrine and life, colors and light, in one
When they combine and mingle, bring
A strong regard and awe; but speech alone
Doth vanish like a flaring thing,
And in the ear, not conscience, ring.
Most of us have very little idea what it would feel like to be part of a system whose purpose was to protect the wellbeing of nature, people, and future generations.
But we must try to imagine it. And to inhabit it, if only in tiny ways, little pockets of care and mutuality, and responsibility.
– Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
I have a close relationship with silence, with things withheld, things known and not said.
– Colm Toibin
the usual remedy
for my lonely life…
spring blossoms
– Kobayashi Issa
These are the feet of the punished pilgrim
And in his book of punished love
You see his eyes, you see no surprise
Waiting for a lie that’s true…
– Aslan
Simply by waking, waves of feeling pulse close to the bone, and this continual pulse is so deep it aches. It is the ache of being alive… This waking close to the bone is the pulse from which both joy and sadness rise, where pain and wonder meet.
– Mark Nepo
low tide
leaving behind the debris
broken poem
– @hegelincanada
I have always been afraid, purely afraid, with a fear that sprang not from the thought of some danger, but from life itself. I live in a blind person’s fear, in the uneasiness of one who does not hear.
– Mircea Cărtărescu, Solenoid
The Heliand
A Gospel From The North
by Martin Shaw
A long time ago, secret runes started to grow in the people’s hearts.
They would catch each other’s eye, and they would know this about the other.
They recognised something. They shone.
Down in the fertile darkness of themselves, something wonderful was happening.
And from such secrets a story wished to announce itself. One slow rune at a time the story started to form, one luminous truth after another. .
These runes were Christ-lettered, spelling out the achievement of what King Jesus had accomplished. The wise jostled in their excitement to praise him, to create a bright-book that laid out how to live. This was not an unusual reaction. But in the end it would fall to four to receive the spirit and the strength to do it.
It was a heroic age, and from such a time emerged Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
God had a spell you see.
The spell was one of both power and wisdom, and these men were worthy of relaying his incant. In a world of cheap tricks, there was nothing like the Godspell. The dear Chieftain crafted it to fell both demon and sorcerer, to unpick the weave of wickedness, to wither all acts of wallop and malice.
And the spell was to be a song.
So, something rather special today. This isn’t a note from a young Tolkien’s journal, or footnotes of an Icelandic saga, what we have here is the beginning of a song well over a thousand years old. An epic Christian poem.
If the hunter turns his dogs loose
on your dreams
start early, tell no one
get rid of the scent.
– C. D. Wright
“Oh, but we’ve plenty of off hours.” “Off hours, yes. But time to think? If you’re not driving a hundred miles an hour, at a clip where you can’t think of anything else but the danger, then you’re playing a game or sitting in some room where you can’t argue with the televisor. Why? The televisor is ‘real’. It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and blasts it in. It must be right. It seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn’t time to protest, What nonsense!”
– Ray Bradbury
The difference between passion and addiction is that between a divine spark and a flame that incinerates.
– Gabor Mate
When you eat the Standard American Diet, you get the standard American diseases.
– Ocean Robbins
Today in one of our classes I introduced the children to two apples (the children didn’t know this, but before the class I had repeatedly dropped one of the apples on the floor, you couldn’t tell, both apples looked perfect). We talked about the apples and the children described how both apples looked the same; both were red, were of similar size and looked juicy enough to eat. I picked up the apple I’d dropped on the floor and started to tell the children how I disliked this apple, that I thought it was disgusting, it was a horrible colour and the stem was just too short. I told them that because I didn’t like it, I didn’t want them to like it either, so they should call it names too. Some children looked at me like I was insane, but we passed the apple around the circle calling it names, ‘you’re a smelly apple’, ‘I don’t even know why you exist’, ‘you’ve probably got worms inside you’ etc. We really pulled this poor apple apart. I actually started to feel sorry for the little guy. We then passed another apple around and started to say kind words to it, ‘You’re a lovely apple’, ‘Your skin is beautiful’, ‘What a beautiful colour you are’ etc. I then held up both apples, and again, we talked about the similarities and differences, there was no change, both apples still looked the same. I then cut the apples open. The apple we’d been kind to was clear, fresh and juicy inside. The apple we’d said unkind words to was bruised and all mushy inside. I think there was a lightbulb moment for the children immediately. They really got it, what we saw inside that apple, the bruises, the mush and the broken bits is what is happening inside every one of us when someone mistreats us with their words or actions. When people are bullied, especially children, they feel horrible inside and sometimes don’t show or tell others how they are feeling. If we hadn’t have cut that apple open, we would never have known how much pain we had caused it. I shared my own experience of suffering someone’s unkind words last week. On the outside I looked OK, I was still smiling. But, on the inside someone had caused me a lot of pain with their words and I was hurting. Unlike an apple, we have the ability to stop this from happening. We can teach children that it’s not ok to say unkind things to each other and discuss how it makes others feel. We can teach our children to stand up for each other and to stop any form of bullying, just as one little girl did today when she refused to say unkind words to the apple. More and more hurt and damage happens inside if nobody does anything to stop the bullying. Let’s create a generation of kind, caring children. The tongue has no bones, but is strong enough to break a heart. So be careful with your words…
– Source: Relax Kids Tamworth
Calling All Grandmothers
by Alice Walker
We have to live differently.
or we will die
in the same old ways.
Therefore
I call on all Grand Mothers
everywhere on the planet
to rise and take your place
in the leadership of the world.
Come out of the kitchen
out of the fields
out of the beauty parlors
out of the television
Step forward and assume
the role for which you were
created:
to lead humanity
to health, happiness
and sanity.
I call on all the
Grand Mothers of Earth
and every person
who possesses the
Grand Mother Spirit
of respect for life and
protection of the young
to rise and lead.
The life of our species
depends on it.
& I call on all men of Earth
to gracefully
and gratefully
stand aside
& let them
(let us) do so.
October Evening
by Robinson Jeffers
Male-throated under the shallow sea-fog
Moaned a ship’s horn quivering the shorelong granite.
Coyotes toward the valley made answer,
Their little wolf-pads in the dead grass by the stream
Wet with the young season’s first rain,
Their jagged wail trespassing among the steep stars.
What stars? Aldebaran under the dove-leash
Pleiades. I thought, in an hour Orion will be risen,
Be glad for summer is dead and the sky
Turns over to darkness, good storms, few guests, glad rivers.
Work with laughter. Love with heart. Cause that’s all that matters in the end.
– Kris Kristofferson
The game of words is a terrible losing game. You can’t flatter or win the world with words, not really. There has to be a presence, a power behind those words. And if you pretend, somebody will call you out. And if you are bit honest, you will have to see that there is some truth in that NO, to you detractors, that they are really even more valuable than your admirers. On the other hand, if you stay mute, and leave everything up to the spiritual or intellectual authorities, you are just hiding. So you go into the con, with open eyes and a fighting spirit.
It’s a dangerous game. Better avoid words. Better stick to painting or music or dance something that transcends language, because language is full of terrible pitfalls and hidden traps. And you voice is never fully your own, but is a myriad of other voices, clamoring to speak through you, many of them demonic, many mimetic, many fake voices, along with the real ones. Maybe it’s better to give up the game entirely and go into quietude. Or find some other, less dangerous hobby, than writing.
– Andrew Sweeny
Humor attends the embraces of incompatibles. Who knows whether it is the condition of their occurring or their consequence? Certain it is that we gain composure in the presence of irony by having many former ironies composed within us. And equally certain is it that the less sense we have of humor the more we have to simplify, evade some facts, make up our minds too soon.
– Sidney Cox, Indirections: For Those Who Want to Write
Newness, O my friends, has not begun
with the hand’s being ousted by machinery.
Don’t let’s be confused by change of scenery:
those who praised the ‘New’ will soon have done.
For the whole is infinitely newer
than a cable or a tall façade.
Look, the ancient stellar fires endure,
while the newer fires begin to fade.
Don’t suppose our longest power-transmissions
are generating for us what’s to be.
Aeons have determined our conditions.
Much has happened that we could not see.
The future will be nothing less
than the flowering of our inwardness.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
When you don’t have control of your own mind you drain not only your own energy, but the people around you. Making up scenarios in your head, deregulating yourself, creating problems that aren’t there. So unnecessary. Mental clarity serves you and everyone around you.
– Nika Solé
A high vibration will have you flipping tables, glitching the matrix, and raising the average – all while you simply enjoy right where you are.
– Nika Solé
In ancient Greece, lit mag rejections used to come back on ships with black sails, acceptances on ships with white ones. True story.
– Brecht De Poortere
To die before you die, no longer to live on the surface of yourself: that is what Parmenides is pointing to. It demands tremendous courage. The journey he describes changes your body: it alters every cell.
– Peter Kingsley
It is a moral necessity that we not be forced to bring children into the world for whom we cannot be responsible and adoring and present. We must not inflict life on children who will be resented; we must not inflict unwanted children on society.
– Anne Lamott
Reading, done properly, is every bit as tough as writing.
– Zadie Smith
In the absence of its joys, love attempts to eternalize its sorrows.
– Chateaubriand
Why America? Is it really so important to gather experience in a place where it is so often measured by success?
– Paul Celan to Ingeborg Bachmann, July 7, 1951, wondering why she’d consider a US scholarship
Meditation is simply reminding yourself again and again that you are not the limited physical body, but the infinite spirit. Meditation is arousing the memory of your real Self and forgetting what you imagined you are.
– Paramahansa Yogananda
We cannot change the circumstances, the seasons or the wind,
but we can change ourselves.
– Penny Simkin
The anxiety aroused in man by the turbulence of the machine is soothed by the consoling hum of a unified society.
– Jacques Ellul
Life is an organization that will not work under dominance. It will only work by cooperation.
– Alan Watts
I have come to the naked
thirst of earth.
Already I have become
deep silence. Behind me,
a whirl of dust.
– Salvador Espriu (translated by Magda Bogin)
chestnuts
souvenirs from
this transient world
– Basho
Challenges are here to awaken you and even if your awakening life continuously gives you challenges… the awakening accelerates and deepens.
– Eckhart Tolle
climate change
misinformation
in all caps
– @pauldavidmena
the parking lot is
crowded and I stand
rattling my keys the car
is empty as a bicycle
– Frank O’Hara
We know that if there is to be a viable, morally grounded, and healthy future, beneficial and committed social and environmental action is essential.
– Joan Halifax
sleeper
one more overnighter
on the sands
from lonely whispers torches
remotes snacks and clocks
pressing on politely for
the right train the right time
my cheeks responsible and red
like a season deep Cox
from pockets empty of tickets
leaves fall like destiny
all aboard carriages of cellophane sacks
full of bio and auto geographies
small uncharted things
that hold my love together
little by little we reach a glass dome
where daylight is carved into civilization
over tenements and rainbows a hotpot stews
a bed is made for heavy resting
– Polly Read
Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back – in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.
– Frederick Buechner
Anger, [Evagrius] wrote, is given to us by God to help us confront true evil. We err when we use it casually, against other people, to gratify our own desires for power or control.
– Kathleen Norris
Tree, give up your secret. How can you be so satisfied? Why don’t you need to change location, look for a better job, find prettier scenery, or even want to get away from people?
Grass, you don’t care where you turn up. You appear running wild in the oat field, out of a crack in a city street. You are the first word in the vocabulary of the earth. How is it that you are able to grow so near the lake without falling in? How can you be so alert for the early frost, bend in the slightest breeze, and yet be so hard to break that you are still there, quiet, green, among the ruins of others?
Weed, it is you with your bad reputation that I love the most. Teach me not to care what anyone has to say about me. Help me to be in the world for no purpose at all except for the joy of sunlight and rain. Keep me close to the edge where every wild thing begins.
– Tom Hennen
When it gets really cold bluebirds roost together in a pile using their collective body heat to help them survive. They arrange themselves so they don’t smother and alternate positions within the pile. Bluebirds are smarter than many humans.
– Ian Sanders
Today we are faced with a challenge that calls for a shift in our thinking, so that humanity stops threatening its life-support system. We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds and in the process heal our own – indeed to embrace the whole of creation in all its diversity, beauty and wonder.
– Wangari Maathai
Saving Grace
I didn’t even see
the slender red salamander
curled in the middle
of the country road,
but Brad stopped to kneel
beside it and told us
if you pick them up
by the tail, they will lose
their tail—an attempt
to distract a predator
while the rest
of the body escapes.
So tenderly, he brushed
the small amphibian
into his open palm,
then gently placed it intact
in the wet grass beside the road.
If this day were a novel,
I’d say the morning walk
was foreshadowing.
Everywhere we went
there were hands
that opened in kindness—
to greet, to serve cake,
to hug, to wave—
as if everyone agreed it matters,
the way we treat each other.
How quickly we can fall apart
when threatened.
How easily, sometimes,
we are saved.
– Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
From March 1979
Tired of everyone
who comes with words, words
but no language,
I go to the snow-hushed island.
The wild has no words.
The unwritten pages spread out
in all directions.
I come across the tracks of deer hooves
in the snow.
Language. Language but no words.
– Tomas Transtromer,
translated by Joseph Fasano
It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.
– Franklin D Roosevelt
You see, I am alive, I am alive
I stand in good relation to the earth
I stand in good relation to the gods
I stand in good relation to all that is beautiful
I stand in good relation to the daughter of Tsen-tainte
You see, I am alive, I am alive
– N. Scott Momaday
There was a time when “man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent,” this New World, “commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” I would strive with all my strength to give that sense of wonder to those who will come after me.
– N. Scott Momaday
Above all we have to go beyond words and images and concepts. No imaginative vision or conceptual framework is adequate to the great reality.
– Bede Griffiths
The God I Know (Despite Everything)
The God I know
doesn’t occupy lands
and support the oppression
of a people for decade
after decade.
The God I know
doesn’t kill the children
of one people
to liberate the children
of another.
The God I know
doesn’t condone violence
of any kind as justice
no matter how righteous
that violence seems to some.
The God I know
sits with parents of children lost and living
on both sides of the blockade
as they do their best to tend their pain
and embody love in a war zone.
The God I know
keeps laying bricks
on the bridge to peace
even when more parts of that bridge
are blasted away every day.
The God I know
helps bear loads too heavy
to carry up mountains
we may not summit
in this lifetime.
The God I know
takes the packs of the weary,
sets the table with hope, and
invites us to sit together to listen
long enough to find a new way forward.
– Heidi Barr
In the time of my confession,
In the hour of my deepest need
When the pool of tears beneath my feet
Flood every newborn seed
There’s a dyin’ voice within me
Reaching out somewhere
Toiling in the danger
And in the morals of despair
Don’t have the inclination
To look back on any mistake
Like Cain, I now behold this chain
Of events that I must break
In the fury of the moment
I can see the Master’s hand
In every leaf that trembles,
In every grain of sand
Oh, the flowers of indulgence
And the weeds of yesteryear
Like criminals, they have choked the breath
Of conscience and good cheer
The sun beat down upon the steps
Of time to light the way
To ease the pain of idleness
And the memory of decay
I gaze into the doorway
Of temptation’s angry flame
And every time I pass that way
I always hear my name
Then onward in my journey
I come to understand
That every hair is numbered
Like every grain of sand
I have gone from rags to riches
In the sorrow of the night
In the violence of a summer’s dream,
In the chill of a wintry light
In the bitter dance of loneliness
Fading into space
In the broken mirror of innocence
On each forgotten face
I hear the ancient footsteps
Like the motion of the sea
Sometimes I turn, there’s someone there,
Other times it’s only me
I am hanging in the balance
Of the reality of man
Like every sparrow falling,
Like every grain of sand.
– Bob Dylan
All of us compose our works in a dream, even if we compose them while awake [.] All that we truly think or feel, all that we truly are — as soon as we try to express it, even if only to ourselves – suffers the fatal interruption of that visitor who we also are, that person from the outside who is inside us all […] between the beginning and the end of a poem, composed in its entirety but not allowed by us to be written. And all that really survives, whether we be great or small artists, are fragments of what we don’t know what but which would have been, if realized, the very expression of our soul.
– Fernando Pessoa
Love’s Beginning
O smile, inaugurating smile, our smile!
How one it was!-Breathing the scent of lime-trees,
hearing park stillness, suddenly looking up
each in the other, wondering, till we smiled.
Within that smile was mutual reminiscence
of a young hare that we had just been watching
out on the lawn at play; such was its childhood,
that smile of ours. It took a graver impress
from motion of the swan that we saw later,
dividing the still lake into two halves
of soundless evening.-And the tree-tops, outlined
against the pure, free sky, already teeming
with future nights, had described outlines for it
against the ecstatic future in our faces.
– Rainer Maria Rilke, Munich, 1915
The worlds in which I have lived and grown have made me what must be called a controversial figure, as I have been told often enough, and this is because inescapably, by experience and nature, I see the other side of every human being. If he be good, then there is that other side, and if he be evil, there is again another side, and if the ability to comprehend the reasonableness of both seems confounding to those who are content with one dimension, to others as to me, it is an endless source of interest and amusement and opportunity for love and life. We have no enemies, we for whom the globe is home, for we hate no one, and where there is no hate, it is impossible to escape love.
– Pearl Buck, My Several Worlds
Know the value of momentum. Of simply doing. Push the rock forward, even when you are in no mood to do it. Move and you will end up in places you never expected. Stay still and do nothing and the tendency is to grow paralyzed or shrivel with terror.
– David Gessner
You know that to be read by you is the surest means of elevating my mind. It is already partly realized through writing; but the welcome of your intelligence is the supreme achievement to which it clings, the consummation, the very mouth of the river.
– Proust to Anna de Noailles
When you allow yourself to think inexactly your prejudices, your bias, your self interest comes in ways you don’t notice. You do bad things without knowing that you are doing them: self deception is very easy. So that I do think clear thinking immensely important. I have myself a passion for clarity and exactness and sharp outlines. I do like clarity and exact thinking. I believe that very important to mankind.
– Bertrand Russell
We breathe air exhaled from trees whose leaves are made of starlight. Our veins echo the patterns of rivers, branches, and root systems. We are not a part of nature. We are nature.
– Marysia Miernowska
There are seasons in your life, as in nature. Bountiful and barren; warm and cold; becoming and declining.
– Chögyam Trungpa
My work is also my life. So worth/value is inevitably tied to what I do. How much someone pays me affects my own understanding of self at times.
– Fariha Róisín
For Christians, Jesus’ life is the archetypal map of Everyman and Everywoman: divine conception, ordinary life, betrayal, abandonment, rejection, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension. It all comes full circle, as we return to where we started, though now transformed. Jung saw this basic pattern repeated in every human life. He called it the Christ Archetype, “an almost perfect map” of the whole journey of human transformation.
– Richard Rohr, A Great Story
First of all, we want to understand signal. Signal is a key to determine how an identity defines itself as a life-form in a communications environment, how it defines its presence against a background. We want to understand how signal is produced.
Signal is noise with a pattern. It is not materially different from the background noise against which it appears. Signal and noise are not different substances. Instead, signal is background material that gains form and contour, and this is the way it becomes an identifiable figure against a field of noise.
Imagine that there are one thousand people in a room, all of them speaking and each of them saying something different. The results would be a lot of background noise. Now imagine that you step among them and say, “Just start saying the world ‘violin, violin, violin’.” And you convince more and more of these people to repeat the word “violin.”At some point, a critical mass is achieved—let’s say, two hundred people speaking in unison. An aural shape emerges from the background and pulls the contour of “violin” out of the noise of a thousand voices. Shaping that contour is the essence of signal production. The exercise of producing identity is all about giving environmental noise a defined pattern. The question is, how do we produce pattern? How do we go about convincing any two people in the room, much less two hundred, to say the word “violin”? In a more realistic (or at least typical) scenario than the fiction I have just proposed, quality will produce pattern. The issue is not good quality vs. bad, but quality in the sense of difference. In our fictional theater of the signal, the word “violin” has a differential capacity that permits it to endure repetitions. This quality of difference is one that less idiosyncratic words like “hello” or “excuse me,” for example, might not have under these circumstances.
To understand the contemporary problem of identity and the enterprise of producing signal, we have to understand the changing nature of the life-world of identity—the background against which an identity can be made to stand as an entity, or a life-form. We’re living through a period in which the production of background is both expanding and mutating more than at any other moment in history. There are several reasons for this. One is connectiveness. The web of communications media connecting us has drawn tighter than ever before. The density of the communications environment makes it difficult for a single entity to maintain presence and integrity—or to manifest its identity.
– Bruce Mau, Life Style
There is only one directive: that the lost are found; that the thick leaves encasing the dead are parted and they are lifted into the arms of light.
– Patti Smith
A spiral is a potential circle that winds round as it rises, without ever completing itself. But no, the definition is still abstract. I’Il resort to the concrete, and all will become clear: a spiral is a snake without a snake, vertically wound around nothing. All literature is an attempt to make life real. All of us know, even when we act on what we don’t know, life is absolutely unreal in its directly real form; the country, the city and our ideas are absolutely fictitious things, the offspring of our complex sensation of our own selves. Impressions are incommunicable unless we make them literary. Children are particularly literary, for they say what they feel not what someone has taught them to feel. Once I heard a child, who wished to say that he was on the verge of tears, say not ‘I feel like crying, which is what an adult, i.e., an idiot, would say but rather, ‘I feel like tears.’ And this phrase, so literary it would seem affected in a well- known poet, if he could ever invent it decisively refers to the warm presence of tears about to burst from eyelids that feel the liquid bitterness. ‘I feel like tears’! The small child aptly defined his spiral.
– Fernando Pessoa
I would say that that light is needed to be thrown on thought. If it isn’t, thought is a bunch of shadows which will be taken for realities.
– David Bohm
As for the blind musician and the lowly and poor woman, they are of lower social status compared with Dian Xi [Emperor], and more powerless than a floating feather, nonetheless, when they are singled-minded, forget other affairs and concentrate on their ideals, their spirit can reach the highest sky and their absolute sincerity can move Heaven. By this token, if Heaven is about to kill something, although it might stay in the dark wild, concealed in remote areas, be closed in a room encircled by layers and layers of stone, and the path leading to it hiding place is full of obstacles and dangers, it cannot escape. This is obvious.”
– The Huáinánzǐ 淮南子 (The Masters/Philosophers of Huainan) 2nd-century BCE, Book 6; Peering into the Obscure. Translation into English by Zhai Jiangque and Mou Aipeng
You will lose everything. Your money, your power, your fame, your success, perhaps even your memories. Your looks will go. Loved ones will die. Your body will fall apart. Everything that seems permanent is impermanent and will be smashed. Experience will gradually, or not so gradually, strip away everything that it can strip away. Waking up means facing this reality with open eyes and no longer turning away. But right now, we stand on sacred and holy ground, for that which will be lost has not yet been lost, and realizing this is the key to unspeakable joy. Whoever or whatever is in your life right now has not yet been taken away from you. This may sound trivial, obvious, like nothing, but really it is the key to everything, the why and how and wherefore of existence. Impermanence has already rendered everything and everyone around you so deeply holy and significant and worthy of your heartbreaking gratitude. Loss has already transfigured your life into an altar.
– Jeff Foster
Fear And Love
by Jim Moore
I wish I could make the argument that a river
and a sunset plus a calm disregard of the ego
are enough. But whatever comes next must include
tents in the parking lot, that homeless camp
on the way to the airport,
and the hole in your cheek
from the cancer removed yesterday.
I said last night,
in the few seconds before I fell asleep,
You do realize, don’t you, everything
is falling apart? You said, OK,
I’ll try to keep that in mind. And now it is
starting to be late again, just like every other night
for the last seventy-five years. Fear and love,
a friend said in an impromptu speech
at his surprise birthday party,
we all live caught between fear and love.
He tried to smile as he spoke, then sat down.
Yesterday you saw the moon
from the operating table
where they were about to cut you.
Look! you demanded, and the surgeon bent and turned
to see it from your angle,
knife in hand.
all ignorance toboggans into know
and trudges up to ignorance again:
but winter’s not forever,even snow
melts;and if spring should spoil the game,what then?
all history’s a winter sport or three:
but were it five,i’d still insist that all
history is too small for even me;
for me and you,exceedingly too small.
Swoop(shrill collective myth)into thy grave
merely to toil the scale to shrillerness
per every madge and mabel dick and dave
–tomorrow is our permanent address
and there they’ll scarcely find us(if they do,
we’ll move away still further:into now
– E. E. Cummings
Middle East Advice
by Yahia Lababidi
To begin a conversation
about Palestine & Israel
first, you must say:
I am your brother
& you are my sister
I am sorry
how we wronged
ourselves
& the human family
Then, you can speak of history
and compare your losses
Finally, you must embrace
in pity
and be silent.
But how many people will? How many people live in a state of aggressive truth-seeking? The answer is few.
– Dave Eggers
And then the wind smacked the house. Bring it on! I shouted. Or, just maybe, this is another thing in my absurd life that I whispered.
– Lauren Groff
STORM ON THE ISLAND
We are prepared: we build our houses squat,
Sink walls in rock and roof them with good slate.
This wizened earth has never troubled us
With hay, so, as you see, there are no stacks
Or stooks that can be lost. Nor are there trees
Which might prove company when it blows full
Blast: you know what I mean – leaves and branches
Can raise a tragic chorus in a gale
So that you listen to the thing you fear
Forgetting that it pummels your house too.
But there are no trees, no natural shelter.
You might think that the sea is company,
Exploding comfortably down on the cliffs
But no: when it begins, the flung spray hits
The very windows, spits like a tame cat
Turned savage. We just sit tight while wind dives
And strafes invisibly. Space is a salvo,
We are bombarded with the empty air.
Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.
– Seamus Heaney
THIS ONLY
A valley and above it forests in autumn colors.
A voyager arrives, a map led him here.
Or perhaps memory. Once, long ago, in the sun,
When the first snow fell, riding this way
He felt joy, strong, without reason,
Joy of the eyes. Everything was the rhythm
Of shifting trees, of a bird in flight,
Of a train on the viaduct, a feast of motion.
He returns years later, has no demands.
He wants only one, most precious thing:
To see, purely and simply, without name,
Without expectations, fears, or hopes,
At the edge where there is no I or not-I.
– Czesław Milosz
Wild air, world-mothering air,
Nestling me everywhere,
That each eyelash or hair
Girdles; goes home betwixt
The fleeciest, frailest-flixed
Snowflake; that’s fairly mixed
With, riddles, and is rife
In every least thing’s life;
This needful, never spent,
And nursing element;
My more than meat and drink,
My meal at every wink …
– Gerard Manley Hopkins
I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something. You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You’ll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird.
– Richard Feynman
I do not have a teaching,
I have a practice.
I do not have a belief,
I have a practice.
I do not have a message or story to tell,
I have a practice.
I do not have a god,
I have a practice.
The word dissolves into silence.
The silence dissolves into action.
The action dissolves into wonder.
At dawn, be the mist in a sunbeam.
At evening, be the mountain on a cloud.
– Fred LaMotte
It’s not too difficult to get the skeletons out of the closet with people, but to get the gold out is a different matter. That is therapy. Psychology is the Art of finding the gold of the spirit.
– Robert Johnson
Art is not a religion—it is religion. It is the glorification of gifts given to us by God, and to share these gifts is a form of ministry. It is not the only obligation we have, of course, but it is a vocation that is infused with Spirit. All people are chosen to honor and to glorify God in some way, and artists are chosen to share what they can and what they must through their particular art. I never forgot a scripture that seared through me in childhood: ‘Glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s.’ That changed me forever.
– Martha Graham
Where does it start? Muscles tense. One leg a pillar, holding the body upright between the earth and sky. The other a pendulum, swinging from behind. Heel touches down. The whole weight of the body rolls forward onto the ball of the foot. The big toe pushes off, and the delicately balanced weight of the body shifts again. The legs reverse position. It starts with a step and then another step and then another that add up like taps on a drum to a rhythm, the rhythm of walking. The most obvious and the most obscure thing in the world, this walking that wanders so readily into religion, philosophy, landscape, urban policy, anatomy, allegory, and heartbreak. Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented culture, and doing nothing is hard to do. It’s best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking.
Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. It is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals. 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. The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts. This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it.
A new thought often seems like a feature of the landscape that was there all along, as though thinking were traveling rather than making. And so one aspect of the history of walking is the history of thinking made concrete – for the motions of the mind cannot be traced, but those of the feet can.”
– Rebecca Solnit
They share a lot, astronomy and childhood. Both are voyages across huge distances. Both search for facts beyond their grasp. Both theorize wildly and let possibilities multiply without limits. Both are humbled every few weeks. Both operate out of ignorance. Both are mystified by time. Both are forever starting out.
– Richard Powers
Across the evening sky
All the birds are leaving
But how can they know
It’s time for them to go?
Before the winter fire
I will still be dreaming
I have no thought of time
For who knows where the time goes?
Who knows where the time goes?
Sad, deserted shore
Your fickle friends are leaving
Ah, but then you know
It’s time for them to go
But I will still be here
I have no thought of leaving
I do not count the time
For who knows where the time goes?
Who knows where the time goes?
And I am not alone
While my love is near me
I know it will be so
Until it’s time to go
So come the storms of winter
And then the birds in spring again
I have no fear of time
For who knows how my love grows?
And who knows where the time goes?
– Sandy Denny
In a way, youthfulness seems closer to me today than when I was a young man. I no longer regard happiness as unattainable; once, long ago, I did. Now I know that it may occur at any moment but that it should never be sought after.
– Borges
What is your name? What is your Quest? What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?
– Monty Python and the Holy Grail
You hold an absence / at your center, / as if it were a life.
– Richard Brostoff
In a backwards world, people will judge you simply because you refuse to be brainwashed. Resist at all costs.
– Nika Solé
I hate capitalism so much bro. I don’t have a more eloquent way to put it right now, I just hate it. I hate the way it’s brainwashed people into believing we have to live like this. That our reason for being is to buy and sell and to be bought and sold.
– delaney vandergrift
seriously though, it’s the worst when your parents make you feel like your life is a debt you can never repay.
– Alicia Andrzejewski, PhD
Life is a very sad piece of buffoonery, because we have the need to fool ourselves continuously by the spontaneous creation of a reality (one for each and never the same for everyone) which, from time to time, reveals itself to be vain and illusory.
– Luigi Pirandello
If instead of trying to manage your time, you clearly set your Priorities, time will arrange itself around them.
– Sadhguru
If you just let your body relax long enough, it will process your emotional garbage on its own. And so if we had a planet where people learn some basic spiritual techniques instead of going on social media and taking it out on other people.
– Jason Louv
To kiss away from your forehead all the headaches, from the dimmest past to your golden future.
– Franz Kafka, 1912.
A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.
– John Milton
Houellebecq is for people who like the idea of being literary much more than anything resembling literature.
– Robert Rubsam
I hunt everywhere for a life worth living and a knowledge worth knowing. Having roots nowhere, I have everywhere to go.
– Elif Shafak
If you’ve got a problem, you usually have to go look in the mirror.
– Anne Lamott
Academia is held together by caffeine, free labour, and the two people who nod encouragingly during presentations.
– Neil Renic
These flowers, these wounds—they are all yours
These laments, these sorrows, these songs of joy
Yesterday they were all mine—today they are all yours.
– Ahmad Faraz
Sometimes you just have to love them from afar.
– McCall Erickson
Your trials did not come to punish you, but to awaken you – to make you realize that you are a part of Spirit and that just behind the sparks of your life is the Flame of Infinity.
– Paramahansa Yogananda
Call nothing white again,
we were deceived.
The flood of Noah dies,
the rainbow is lived.
Yet from the deluge of illusions
an unknown colour is saved.
White must die black,
to be born white again
From the womb of sounds, the inscrutable grain ,
– K Arun
It is when we are trapped in incessant streams of compulsive thinking that the universe really disintegrates for us, and we lose the ability to sense the interconnectedness of all that exists.
– Eckhart Tolle
Relations with this deeply torn being were not simple. He clung to his biases against one person or another, he sustained his mistrust, all the more so because of his pathological fear of being hurt, and everything hurt him. The slightest indelicacy, even unintentional, affected him irrevocably. Watchful, defensive against what might happen, he expected the same attention from others, and abhorred the easygoing attitude so prevalent among the Parisians, writers or not. One day, I ran into him in the street. He was in a rage, in a state nearing despair, because X, whom he had invited to have dinner with him, had not bothered to come. Take it easy, I said to him, X is like that, he is known for his don’t-give-a-damn attitude. The only mistake was expecting him.
– Cioran on Celan
Benefit what cannot be benefited, do what cannot be done.
– Tang Dynasty Zen Master Ma
I am exploring the blurred space between human and machine input, emphasizing a continuous DIALOGUE where neither has sole control. It is focused on a state of flux rather than fixed co-creation.
– Laura Kerr
Enlightenment is simply peace all the time …
– Sri Avinash Do
The hatred of art… only thrives so well today because it is kept alive by artists themselves. The artists who preceded us had doubts, but what they doubted was their own talent. Artists of today doubt whether their art, and therefore their very existence, is necessary.
– Albert Camus
Silence of the heart is necessary
so you can hear God everywhere —
in the closing of a door, in the person
who needs you, in the birds that sing,
in the flowers, in the animals.
– Mother Teresa
Strength lies in differences, not in similarities.
– Stephen Covey
Poems are things. I like when they’re jagged—long lines and short lines next to each other … If I had to choose between a poem being therapeutic and it being a better poem, I’d want it to be a better poem.
– Sharon Olds
The true subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved.
– Faiz Ahmed Faiz
turkish language has a gossip tense. if you haven’t witnessed an event yourself, you use gossip tense to emphasize that what you say may not be accurate, that it’s hearsay. there’s a cultural element too: if you use any other tense, people would judge you for misleading them.
– sedat kapanoğlu
In the end you’re tired of this old world.
– Guillaume Apollinaire, tr. Beverly Bie Brahic
In every magick book, the first thing they all say is that none of this is going to work if you can’t silence your mind and focus on one thing at a time. So the most important skill in magick is single-pointed focus and being able to direct your mind.
– Jason Louv
Just as a Sufi might say that Sufism is the core of truth behind all religions, an anarchist might argue that anarchism is the urge for freedom behind all political ideologies.
– David Graeber
I was too young for The Beatles.
My Beatles were the RAMONES.
The most distinctive, unique and influential band of their time, they changed the landscape of all guitar music to come.
Who was your Beatles?
– Ginger Wildheart
remember when you had to meet someone cooler than you to discover good music?
– Tyler Dempsey
When the world is storm-driven and the bad that happens and the worse that threatens are so urgent as to shut out everything else from view, then we need to know all the strong fortresses of the spirit which men have built through the ages
– Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way
Do more than believe: practice.
– William Arthur Ward
The spider and the fly can’t make a bargain.
– Zulu proverb
If you can’t convince them, confuse them.
– Harry S. Truman
Fill your mind with the truths of God and radiate the sunshine of His love — this is youth.
– Dr. Joseph Murphy
In a way, people like her, those who wield a pen, can be dangerous. At once a suspicion of fakery springs to mind – that such a Person is not him or herself, but an eye that’s constantly watching, and whatever it sees it changes into sentences: in the process it strips reality of its most essential quality – its inexpressibility.
– Olga Tokarczuk
Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world.
– Napoleon
An old alchemist gave the following consolation to one of his disciples: “No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you.”
– Carl Jung
You have to think big to be big.
– Claude M. Bristol
You ask people about love and they tell you about heartbreak.
– Unknown
Literature offers us the chance, if we want it, to create ourselves again.
– Deborah Levy
Alison Bonds Shapiro in her article, “Paying Attention,” there is something more than just focusing the mind:
We may think we understand the art of paying attention but many times, unfortunately, we mistake attention for judgment. We think about attention as a “critical” function. Attention is not critical. Judgment is. Attention is neutral. We begin to pay attention to something and then we start to judge it, evaluate it, categorize it and, yes, generally “criticize” it. But judging, while certainly useful, is not attention. Judging involves an underlying assumption that our purpose is ultimately to categorize and take action. We judge something to be done with it. The rush to being done with something does not increase our capacity to pay attention to it.
When we judge something we generally assess whether or not we need to “fix” it, reject it or enhance it, and move on. In other words, we are motivated to change it in some way. Whatever it is right now is generally not OK or not enough and has to be altered. If our intention is to fix or change or reject something our capacity to pay attention to it is actually minimized. We will see only as much as we think we need to see to take action. What if there is more to learn?
Attention is noticing and being with something without trying to change it. Attention takes the time to fully explore, to discover whatever there is to know about something, to watch as things change by themselves without our trying to ‘fix” anything. Attention is patient and attention is kind. No rush. No burden. No criticism.
Creativity comes from a conflict of ideas.
– Donatella Versace
The House
Rang like some fine green goblet in the note
That any second would shatter it. Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,
Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,
And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.
– Ted Hughes
HOLDING HANDS
Out
of a great need
we are all holding hands
and climbing.
Not loving is a letting go.
Listen,
the terrain around here
is
far too
dangerous
for
that.
– Hafiz
The model we choose to use to understand something determines what we find.
– Iain McGilchrist
What would the world be without poetry, he asked, and I listened.
– Robert Devlin
Human beings from the moment of entry into language are ready to become dreamers and fiction-makers, not to mention liars, fetishists, and perverters of the real. Our fiction-making capacity may be foundational of our search for truth in our selves and in the world, but it does not guarantee it, nor assure our mental stability. The vehicles of truth and untruth are the same. But fiction-making does seem to be crucial to the ability to carve out a space within reality for attempts at understanding and reflection.
– Peter Brooks
There are prophets, there are guides, and there are argumentative people with theories, and one must be careful to discriminate between them.
– Peter Brook
The spirit of the depths teaches me that I am a servant, in fact the servant of a child. This dictum was repugnant to me and I hated it. But I had to recognize and accept that my soul is a child.
– C.G. Jung
Of course, the truth in the struggle with falsehood must be written and it must not be something general, high or ambiguous. Falsehood stems precisely from this general, high, ambiguous approach. When it is said of someone that ‘he said the truth,’ then some or many or someone else said something else, a lie or a platitude, but he said the truth, something practical, actual, undeniable, and that’s what it’s all about.
– Bertolt Brecht
I, the fiery life of divine essence, am aflame beyond the beauty of the meadows, I gleam in the waters, and I burn in the sun, moon, and stars …. I awaken everything to life.
– Hildegard Von Bingen
God grant me the serenity (and joy) to accept the things I cannot change, the courage (and will) to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference; living one day at a time; enjoying one moment at a time; taking this world as it is and not as I would have it.
– Reinhold Niebuhr
Substituting One Cruelty For Another
by Anthony de Mello
Many people swing into action only to make things worse. They’re not coming from love, they’re coming from negative feelings. They’re coming from guilt, anger, hate; from a sense of injustice or whatever. You’ve got to make sure of your “being” before you swing into action. You have to make sure of who you are before you act.
Unfortunately, when sleeping people swing into action, they simply substitute one cruelty for another, one injustice for another. And so it goes. Meister Eckhart says, “It is not by your actions that you will be [awakened] but by your being. It is not by what you do, but by what you are that you will be judged”. What good is it to you to feed the hungry, give the thirsty to drink, or visit prisoners in jail? Remember that sentence from Paul: “If I give my body to be burned and all my goods to feed the poor and have not love …” It’s not your actions, it’s your being that counts. Then you might swing into action. You might or might not. You can’t decide that until you’re awake.
Unfortunately, all the emphasis is concentrated on changing the world and very little emphasis is given to waking up. When you wake up, you will know what to do or what not to do. Some mystics are very strange, you know. Like Jesus, who said something like “I wasn’t sent to those people; I limit myself to what I am supposed to do right now. Later, maybe”. Some mystics go silent. Mysteriously, some of them sing songs. Some of them are into service. We’re never sure. They’re a law unto themselves; they know exactly what is to be done. “Plunge into the heat of battle and keep your heart at the lotus feet of the Lord”, as I said to you earlier.
Imagine that you’re unwell and in a foul mood, and they’re taking you through some lovely countryside. The landscape is beautiful but you’re not in the mood to see anything. A few days later you pass the same place and you say, “Good heavens, where was I that I didn’t notice all of this”? Everything becomes beautiful when you change. Or you look at the trees and the mountains through windows that are wet with rain from a storm, and everything looks blurred and shapeless. You want to go right out there and change those trees, change those mountains. Wait a minute, let’s examine your window. When the storm ceases and the rain stops, and you look out the window, you say, “Well, how different everything looks”. We see people and things not as they are, but as we are. That is why when two people look at something or someone, you get two different reactions. We see things and people not as they are, but as we are.
Put this program into action, a thousand times: (a) identify the negative feelings in you; (b) understand that they are in you, not in the world, not in external reality; (c) do not see them as an essential part of “I”; these things come and go; (d) understand that when you change, everything changes.
St. Dionysius says that the highest things flow into the lowest and the lowest into the highest, and they are united in the highest. Thus the soul is united and enclosed in God, and there grace slips from her: she works no longer by grace, but divinely in God.
– Meister Eckhart
One night Werner and Jutta tune in to a scratchy broadcast in which a young man is talking in feathery, accented French about light. The brain is locked in total darkness, of course, children, says the voice. It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light. It brims with color and movement. So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light? The broadcast hisses and pops. “What is this?” whispers Jutta.
Werner does not answer. The Frenchman’s voice is velvet. His accent is very different from Frau Elena’s, and yet his voice is so ardent, so hypnotizing, that Werner finds he can understand every word. The Frenchman talks about optical illusions, electromagnetism; there’s a pause and a peal of static, as though a record is being flipped, and then he enthuses about coal.
Consider a single piece glowing in your family’s stove. See it, children? That chunk of coal was once a green plant, a fern or reed that lived one million years ago, or maybe two million, or maybe one hundred million. Can you imagine one hundred million years? Every summer for the whole life of that plant, its leaves caught what light they could and transformed the sun’s energy into itself. Into bark, twigs, stems. Because plants eat light, in much the way we eat food. But then the plant died and fell, probably into water, and decayed into peat, and the peat was folded inside the earth for years upon years—eons in which something like a month or a decade or even your whole life was just a puff of air, a snap of two fingers.
Open your eyes, concludes the man, and see what you can with them before they close forever, and then a piano comes on, playing a lonely song that sounds to Werner like a golden boat traveling a dark river, a progression of harmonies that transfigures Zollverein: the houses turned to mist, the mines filled in, the smokestacks fallen, an ancient sea spilling through the streets, and the air streaming with possibility.
– All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
Hold this thought: Right when you are most defeated—suicidal, perhaps—exhausted, positive of perpetual failure: this is when the epiphany is likely to arrive. One needs to be beaten down to think, and to think so as to escape. To escape death or boredom or the second act that simply will not do as you wish. Or the marriage that is stalled. Whatever is bearing down on you is a great teacher. Calm down and listen and crawl from beneath it a better person.
– Harold Pinter
After tragedies, one has to invent a new world, knit it or embroider, make it up. It’s not gonna be given to you because you deserve it; it doesn’t work that way. You have to imagine something that doesn’t exist and dig a cave into the future and demand space. It’s a territorial hope affair. At the time, that digging is utopian, but in the future, it will become your reality.
– Björk
I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.
– Michel Foucault
Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations, and my thoughts to become writing; in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.
– Annie Ernaux
Unlike music
poetry is more
inquisitive than empathic.
Unlike gravy,
stories are more
adventurous than soothing.
Unlike philosophy,
paintings are more
Immediate than general.
Unlike religion,
singing is more
ancient and natural.
And, as with talking,
values are not everything.
Anything could happen.
– George Gorman
All our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike – and yet it is the most precious thing we have.
– Albert Einstein
The soul is not fed entirely by logic, we are fed by images. Ideas are interesting, but when we want to be absolutely poleaxed by wonder, it is a story that’s going to do it.
– Dr. Martin Shaw
The people who evolve themselves spiritually are the ones who understand the assignment.
– Nika Solé
The literary world, the most repellent of all worlds.
– Thomas Bernhard
One of the things that impresses me most about Glenn Gould playing Bach is the sense that, beyond the purely aural experience, there is also a kind of argument, although you can’t say what the argument is.
– Edward Said on Gould’s Bach
They tried to tell us we can’t speak the truth, but what they didn’t realize is we not only speak it but we exist at that frequency.
– Nika Solé
To procrastinate is to be entitled. It is arrogant. It assumes there will be a later. It assumes you’ll have the discipline to get to it later (despite not having the discipline now).
– Ryan Holiday
Han Kang is the first Nobel Literature laureate to be born in the 1970s.
– Alex Shephard
Never forget that we had all the scientific evidence we needed to act on global warming over 50 years ago, but the fossil fuel industry spent millions to spread disinformation and block climate action.
Global warming isn’t a tragedy, it’s a crime.
– Jamie Henn
Besides the prestige, the Nobel prize for literature is important as the world’s foremost reminder that culture happens outside of New York
– @exhaustdata
Clairvoyant solitude on the obsidian edge of day.
– Jay Wright
I’m going to promote myself exactly as I am, with all my weak points and my strong ones. My weak points are that I’m self-conscious and often insecure, and my strong point is that I don’t feel any shame about it.
– Patti Smith
It is not irritating to be where one is.
It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.
– John Cage
I sat upon a stone / covered one leg with the other / and set my elbow on them / I nestled in my hand / my chin and one of my cheeks / In this position I started pondering / How one should live in the world.
– Walther von der Vogelweide
I pray I’ve done my work so, that when I’ve gone from here, in all the turmoil through the wreckage and rumble, when someone finds themselves digging through the ruins, they’ll find me. Somewhere in that wreckage, they’ll find something they can use, that I left behind. And if I’ve done that, then I’ve accomplished something in life.
– James Baldwin
Tending my inner garden went splendidly this winter. Suddenly to be healed again and aware that the very ground of my being — my mind and spirit — was given time and space in which to go on growing; and there came from my heart a radiance I had not felt so strongly for a long time… You tell me how you are able to feel fully alive every moment of the day and that your inner life is brimming over; you write in the knowledge that what you have, if one looks at it squarely, outweighs and cancels all possible privations and losses that may later come along. It is precisely this that was borne in upon me more conclusively than ever before as I worked away during the long Winter months: that the stages by which life has become impoverished correspond with those earlier times when excesses of wealth were the accustomed measure. What, then, is there to fear? Only forgetting! But you and I, around us and in us, we have so much in store to help us remember!
– Rainer Maria Rilke
the life you lead is a midnight thing, always a hair’s breadth from the witching hour; it is volatile, it is threadbare; it is carefree in the true sense of that term; it is light, losable like a key or a hair clip. And it is lethargy: why not sit all morning, all day, all year, under the same cypress tree drawing the figure eight in the dust? More than that, it is disaster, it is chaos: why not overthrow a government on a whim, why not blind the man you hate, why not go mad, go gibbering through the town like a loon, waving your hands, tearing your hair? There’s nothing to stop you – or rather anything could stop you, any hour, any minute.
– Zadie Smith
Believe me there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory….everything is forgotten, even a great love. That’s what’s sad about life, and also what’s wonderful about it. There is only a way of looking at things, a way that comes to you every once in a while. That’s why it’s good to have had love in your life after all, to have had an unhappy passion- it gives you an alibi for the vague despairs we all suffer from.
– Albert Camus
Remember, this day will never dawn again.
– Dante Alighieri
Forms within the universe, whether galaxies, human beings or trees, are generated as an expression of vast forces at work within a holistic framework. Separateness, fragmentation, and disconnection are all illusions … Wholeness is never lost, and the Health within the human system, which is a manifestation of this unity, is also never lost.
– John Upledger
A neurosis is often a plus, not a minus, but an unlived plus, a higher possibility of becoming more conscious, or becoming more creative, funked for some lousy excuse. The refusal of a higher development or a higher consciousness is, in our experience, one of the most destructive things there is. Among other things, it makes people automatically want to pull back everybody else who tries. Someone who has unlived creativeness tries to destroy other people’s creativity and somebody who has an unlived possibility of consciousness always tries to blur or make uncertain anybody else’s efforts towards consciousness. That’s why Dr. Jung says that if a patient outgrows his analyst, which happens frequently, he has to leave the analyst because the latter will probably try to pull the patient back
onto the old level.
The desire to prevent other people from becoming conscious because one does not want to wake up oneself is real destructiveness.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
Sympathy’s easy. You have sympathy for starving children swatting at flies on the late-night commercials. Sympathy is easy because it comes from a position of power. Empathy is getting down on your knees and looking someone else in the eye and realizing you could be them, and that all that separates you is luck.
– Dennis Lehane
By his or her presence here, each person attending this meeting shows their support for several things in which I passionately believe. One of them is support for the Constitution of the United States which, written in the recognition that all people are the children of God, made no distinction among them by reason of inconsequential factors over which they themselves had no control. I believe those of us who preach so loudly about constitutional government advance our cause as we meticulously observe that particular factor or foundation of that great Document.
Another thing I have preached, as have many others, is against the theory that there can be any second-class citizen. I believe as long as we allow conditions to exist that make for second-class citizens, we are making of ourselves less than first-class citizens. In other words, I believe the only way to protect my own rights is to protect the rights of others. Everything that the Constitution accords to me, I must defend for others–or else finally there will be nobody left to defend me.
– Dwight D Eisenhower
Thousands of years ago tribes of human beings suffered great privations in the struggle to survive. In this struggle it was important not only to be able to handle a club, but also to possess the ability to think reasonably, to take care of the knowledge and experience garnered by the tribe, and to develop the links that would provide cooperation with other tribes. Today the entire human race is faced with a similar test. In infinite space many civilizations are bound to exist, among them civilizations that are also wiser and more “successful” than ours. I support the cosmological hypothesis which states that the development of the universe is repeated in its basic features an infinite number of times. In accordance with this, other civilizations, including more “successful” ones, should exist an infinite number of times on the “preceding” and the “following” pages of the Book of the Universe. Yet this should not minimize our sacred endeavors in this world of ours, where, like faint glimmers of light in the dark, we have emerged for a moment from the nothingness of dark unconsciousness of material existence. We must make good the demands of reason and create a life worthy of ourselves and of the goals we only dimly perceive.
– Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov
Being on the left is, like being on the right, one of the infinite ways that man can choose to be an imbecile: both, in effect, are forms of Moral Hemiplegia.
– José Ortega y Gasset
I read at night, until three or four in the morning. The darkness around you adds greatly to the absolute passion that develops between you and the book.
– The Suspended Passion, Marguerite Duras; tr. Chris Turner
what a man sees, love can make invisible—and what is invisible, that can love make him see.
– ludovico ariosto
Literature is what happens between me and the reader I have never met somewhere in India who discovered something in my text that I wasn’t myself aware of.
– Dubravka Ugresic, after calling nationalism a “form of mental illness” and dragging the TED Talk literati
Autumn is my season, dear.
It is, after all, the season of the soul.
– Virginia Woolf
If a people votes freely for restrictions on its freedom, it should never forget that freedom remains the background and authority for law.
– Alan Watts
By not being aware of having a shadow, you declare a part of your personality to be non-existent. Then it enters the kingdom of the non-existent, which swells up and takes on enormous proportions.
– C.G. Jung
You’ve been provided with a perfect body to house your inner invisible being for a few brief moments in eternity. Regardless of its size, shape, color or any imagined infirmities, it’s a perfect creation for the purpose that you were intended here for.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
Remember: A tariff is basically a sales tax, raising the price of almost everything you buy.
– Robert Reich
For the yogi who has become silent through the certain knowledge that all there is is Consciousness, all thought such as “I am this” or “I am not that”, is extinguished.
– Ashtavakra Gita
I refuse to play the condemnation game. Let me make myself clear. I do not tell oppressed people how to resist their oppression or who their allies should be.
– Arundhati Roy
[…] Literature is not school. Literature must presuppose a public that is more cultured, and more cultured than the writer himself. Whether or not such a pub- lic exists is of no consequence. The writer addresses a reader who knows more about it than he does; he invents a “himself” who knows more than he actually does, to that he can speak with someone who knows more still. Literature has no choice but to raise the stakes and keep the betting going, following the logic
of a situation that can only get worse.
– Italo Calvino
The imagination; that is, the way we shape and use the world, indeed the way we see the world, has geographical boundaries like islands, continents, and countries. These boundaries can be crossed.
– Guy Davenport
Asking the Way by Ko Un
Translated by Suji Kwock Kim
And Sunja Kim Kwock
You fools who ask what god is
should ask what life is instead.
Find a port where lemon trees bloom.
Ask about places to drink in the port.
Ask about the drinkers.
Ask about the lemon trees.
Ask and ask until nothing’s left to ask.
In Envy of Cows
by Joseph Auslander
The cow swings her head in a deep drowsy half-circle to and over
Flank and shoulder, lunging
At flies; then fragrantly plunging
Down at the web-washed grass and the golden clover,
Wrenching sideways to get the full tingle; with one warm nudge,
One somnolent wide smudge
Sacred to kine,
Crushing a murmurous of late lush August to wine!
The sky is even water-tone behind suave poplar trees—
Color of glass; the cows
Occasionally arouse
That color, disturb the pellucid cool poplar frieze
With beauty of motion slow and succinct like some grave privilege
Fulfilled. They taste the edge
Of August, they need
No more: they have rose vapors, flushed silence, pulpy milkweed.
We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.
– Louis Brandeis
Strength is a matter of a made up mind.
– John Beecher
Sprinkle love on animals,
on people,
on birds,
just as clouds sprinkle rain.
Everything needs love,
even the old school wall.
– Nour Al-Mayahy / Iraq
My friends and I worshipped literature. We thought everything we would ever know or care about or be devoted to was to be found in literature.
– Vivian Gornick
We learned the Whole of Love –
The Alphabet – the Words –
A Chapter – then the mighty Book –
Then – Revelation closed –
But in each Other’s eyes
An Ignorance beheld –
Diviner than the Childhood’s
And each to each, a Child –
Attempted to expound
What neither – understood –
Alas, that Wisdom is so large –
And Truth – so manifold!
– Emily Dickinson
Neither concepts nor mathematical formulae can explain the infinite.
– Eckhart Tolle
[ . . . ] 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.
– Ivor Gurney
Change yourself and you have done your part in changing the world.
Every individual must change his own life if he wants to live in a peaceful world.
The world cannot become peaceful unless and until you yourself begin to work toward peace.
– Paramahansa Yogananda
I LOVE MY NEIGHBORS BUT HATE
WHEN THEY BARBEQUE
by Miseong Kong
POLKA FOR EIGHT FREAKING HOURS,
my daughter cries out as she cowers,
taste in this music is not ours.
Polka for eight freaking hours.
Polka for eight freaking hours,
for no other channel he scours.
Change the station? I lack the powers.
Polka for eight freaking hours.
Polka for eight freaking hours,
the accordion groans betwixt towers,
the tuba is killing my flowers.
Polka for eight freaking hours.
Polka for eight freaking hours,
no response to my stares and glowers,
the forecast says sadly no showers.
POLKA FOR EIGHT FREAKING HOURS.
Overheard at the cafe. Someone visiting Ireland.
“I was told there are only two types of Irish tea”
“That’s right.”
“That red one is so horrible.”
– @IrishLitTimes
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
– Jack Gilbert
Don’t ever let the world write you down,
Don’t wear defeat like a heavy crown.
Dear, say it out loud, “This is not my end,”
And watch how your soul begins to mend.
– @TheModernMaxims
Its existence was intolerable and I knew that, being unable to make it go away, I would have to ignore it, forget it, tell no one about it.
– Giacometti
Some people are born plain lucky,
they sail through life without knowing
they don’t know, and not knowing
they don’t know what is worth knowing
protects them from a lifetime of unknowing.
– Shanta Acharya
I’ve always thought that’s what poetry was for, a space for unconventionality, risk, disruption.
– Carl Phillips
Warfare instead of play
Turns society into sorrow
Love is here
Let’s borrow passion and it’s a paradox
But your body talks
I’d love to have passion and silence
I’m self reliant
– Brian Carpenter
For most of us, for almost all of us, truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence. It is in silence that the human spirit touches the divine.
– Iris Murdoch
You cannot make steel until you have made the iron white-hot in fire. It is not meant for us. Our painful experiences are not meant to destroy us, but to burn out our dross, to hurry us back Home. No one is more anxious for our release than God.
– Paramahansa Yogananda
I’ve already said every hopeful thing I can think of.
– Ellen Bass
Not Like Other Birds
by Ian Tattum
White with a necklace of black brush strokes,
and pink-eyed- with the look of a gentle gull.
Balancing cautiously on the table edge,
on your one foot.
Not afraid of falling but wary of me.
I saw the others. One with RS Thomas eyebrows,
but no kindness for your kind.
His companion, wielding a collapsed umbrella,
like a policeman breaking up a crowd.
Pain or power arousing fury at your weakness
and your temerity to silently voice your need.
“You flying rat, you vermin, you lame beggar!’
No, you are an urban rock dove, and like me,
A being of elsewhere, trying to make a city a home.
Student poets need to learn what has come before, what is new and vibrant, what is possible and reflect on what has come before for them and their community, what is new and vibrant from their perspectives and what is possible with language or text or image or new forms for them. I find young people so exciting. So many seem down on them, but I actually am finding them exhilarating, challenging in a good way. Some feel not so young, but to me they have so much life ahead of them that I am excited for them. I want them to find their own poetries, their own ways and perspectives as artists. Yes, artists, not rebellious scholars fighting the man, but conscientious artists moving through the universe helping, healing, thinking and envisioning a better way of being for us all.
– Sheryl Luna
“God,“ he cries, dying on Mars, “God, we made it!”
– Theodore Sturgeon
There is no sense talking about “being true to yourself” until you are sure what voice you are being true to. It takes hard work to differentiate the voices of the unconscious
– Marion Woodman
no one knows what’s really wrong with you but you; no one can find a cure for it but you; no one but you can identify it as a cure; and once you find it, no one but you can do anything about it.
– Theodore Sturgeon
We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infintesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas.
– Alan Watts
And you, lucid madmen, spastics, cancer patients, chronic meningitis cases, you are the misunderstood. There is a point in you which no doctor will ever understand, and for me this is the point which saves you and makes you august, pure, wonderful: you are outside life, you are above life, you have miseries which the ordinary man does not know, you exceed the normal level, and it is for this that men refuse to forgive you, you poison their peace of mind, you undermine their stability. You have irrepressible pains whose essence is to be inadaptable to any known state, indescribable in words. You have repeated and shifting pains, incurable pains, pains beyond imagining, pains which are neither of the body nor of the soul, but which partake of both. And I share your suffering, and I ask you: who dares to ration our relief? In the name of what superior lucidity that usurps our very souls, we who are at the very root of knowledge and lucidity?
– Antonin Artaud
If I survive Milton, I’ll tell you this—
The storms we face are not the earth’s own sin,
But echoes of our carelessness, a hiss
Of winds that howl the warnings deep within.
For every tree we felled, the skies grow dark,
For every stream we taint, the waters rise;
The earth, in rage or sorrow, leaves her mark—
A flood, a fire, a storm beneath gray skies.
Yet still, the beauty lingers in her grace,
In mountains high, and oceans vast and blue;
She’s asking us to slow our reckless pace,
To change, before her wrath sees nothing new.
The hurricanes we face are whispers loud,
Reminding us the balance we have torn;
If we could turn from pride and be less proud,
Perhaps tomorrow’s storms won’t feel so worn.
If I survive, I’ll tell you, there’s a way—
To heal the wounds we’ve carved in land and sea.
It starts with you and I, what we can say,
And do, to let this fragile earth stay free.
– Peter Earthwalker
Intuition, says Ingmar Bergman, is the essence of creativity and
the foundation of his unparalleled success as a film maker.
“I make all my decisions on intuition,” said the 62-year-old Swedish director. “But then, I must know why I made that decision. I throw a spear into the darkness. That is intuition. Then I must send an army into the darkness to find the spear. That is intellect.
– Ingmar Bergman
The Women Who Walk Us Home
The ones who arrive with a bag of clothes, four
tired lemons, half a story from her sister’s trip to
Paraguay. The ones who keep our secrets and whose
secrets we keep in potted plants, in every ocean we’ve
ever known. The ones who know our husbands, their
little pleasures.Our lovers and our scars. The ones who
stay, hope like a moth. Who stare into the gaping
tomb and are not afraid of the unveiling. The ones who
will be there, even then (even then), to walk us home.
– Kate Baer, What kind of Woman
There is something of the charlatan in anyone who triumphs in any realm whatever.
– Emil Cioran
We’re finding out what happens when you subject a planet to an economic system that only works if there are endless wars, if nature is decimated & if billions of people are locked into suicidal overconsumption. When life has less value than profit, don’t expect it to survive.
– Climate Dad
For me, the most significant filmmaker, the director of directors, has always been F.W. Murnau. Fritz Lang thinks too geometrically for me.
– Werner Herzog
Don’t tell me about the end of the world. Tell me about the beginning of the world. A thousand colors of aurora wound in a raindrop, your rainbow wings in a tear. Next Summer’s light on a brittle twig, wrapped in a gray cocoon. Fur self-healing in a mossy burrow. The blue egg waiting in a mother-swirl of sticks, She the shaper of galaxies. Don’t tell me how it ends. Tell me how it begins. How this breath is given, because you surrendered that one.
– Fred LaMotte
You have always exercised your intellect and never your intuition. If you reverse your course and take to inward vision, shutting out all external images and falling back on intuitive feeling, in that dark chamber of your mind you will catch the true picture of yourself.
– Ramana M
We see vacationers surrounded by countless gadgets such as TV and radio sets; even when in contact with nature, they need to reconstitute a technical milieu.
– Jacques Ellul
A book of poems is a sort of diary in which the author tries to preserve certain exceptional moments, whether joyful or unfortunate.
– Octavio Paz, (tr. Eliot Weinberger)
The centuries of our life last scarcely seconds. Scarcely do seconds last loves.
– Robert Desnos (translated by Mary Ann Caws)
Synchronicity is Jung’s coinage for what we can call ‘meaningful coincidence’, when the inner & outer worlds reflect each other with such accuracy and obvious meaning that to resort to mere coincidence as an explanation is useless.
– Gary Lachman
The light of the body is the eye.
– Frederic Zeller
The future of art doesn’t rest in the hands of the influential~it belongs solely to us.
– Laura Kerr
Let the good in me connect with the good in others, until all the world is transformed through the compelling power of love.
– Rebbe Nachman of Breslov
“people shouldn’t go to grad school because academia is collapsing” boy do i have bad news for you about everything else
– Ian Maxton
Our lives are *filled* with people who provoke us, especially people we love. They help us figure out our own shit and why we are here.
– Anne Lamott
On the train that I love so much … The train remains the same. And all the same feelings swell up in me on this train. Same wonders. Same heart-breaking hunger for the land out the window. I’d live on a train if someone gave me one.
– Sam Shepard
What I discern in each moment is its exhaustion, its death-rattle, and not the transition to the next moment. I generate dead time, wallowing in the asphyxia of becoming.
– Cioran, (trans. Richard Howard)
Everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves.
– Adam Phillips
I vow to shovel shit against the tide forever.
– Stephen Gaskin
People will avoid self awareness at all costs, because it means having to take accountability for how they move in the world and how they affect others.
– Nika Solé
So what will happen to your consciousness? Your consciousness, yours, not anyone else’s. Well, what are you? There’s the point. Let’s try to find out. What is it about you that you have always known as yourself? What are you conscious of in yourself? Your kidneys? Your liver? Your blood vessels? No. However far back you go in your memory, it is always in some external active manifestation of yourself that you come across your identity—in the work of your hands, in your family, in other people. And now listen carefully. You in others—this is your soul. This is what you are. This is what your consciousness has breathed and lived on and enjoyed throughout your life—your soul, your immortality, your life in others. And what now? You have always been in others and you will remain in others. And what does it mater to you if later on that is called your memory? This will be you—the you that enters the future and becomes a part of it.
– Boris Pasternak
Only those people who can really touch bottom can be human. Therefore Meister Eckhart says that one should not repent too much of one’s sins because it might keep one away from grace. One is only confronted with the spiritual experience when one is absolutely human.
– Carl Jung
Grace comes into the soul as the morning sun into the world; there is first a dawning, then a mean light, and at last the sun in his excellent brightness.
– Thomas Adams
Any three-centred being can be co-conscious with God.
– A.R. Orage
We now know that human transformation does not happen through didacticism or through excessive certitude, but through the playful entertainment of another scripting of reality that may subvert the old given text and its interpretation and lead to the embrace of an alternative text and its redescription of reality.
– Walter Brueggemann
There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, ‘Consume me’.
– Virginia Woolf
Brothers and sisters, war is an illusion. It is a defeat, and it will never bring peace or security. War is a defeat for everyone, especially those who believe themselves to be invincible. Stop, please!
– Pope Francis
That is the problem with this rich and anguished generation. Somewhere a long time ago they fell in love with the idea that politicians— even the slickest and brightest presidential candidates—were real heroes and truly exciting people.
– Hunter S. Thompson
We are required to accept that there is no parent to lead the way, no guru, no ideology to save us from the complexity and ambiguity of life. The measure of our personal development will hinge on two factors: our willingness to accept responsibility for finding our own myth, and our ability to sustain the ambiguity that always precedes a new experience of meaning. This task is critical for the
health of both individual and society.
– James Hollis
Miss you. Would like to grab that
chilled tofu we love.
by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Do not care if you bring only your light body.
Would just be so happy to sit at the table
and talk about the menu. Miss you.
Wish we could bet which chilis they’ll put
on the cubes of tofu. Our favorite.
Sometimes green. Sometimes red. Roasted
we always thought. But so cold and fresh.
How did they do it? Wish you could be here
to talk about it like it was so important.
Wish you could. Watched you on the screens
as I was walking, as I was cooking. Wished you
could get out of the hospital. Can’t
bring myself to order our dish and eat it
in the car. Miss you laughing. Miss
you coming in from the cold or one
too many meetings. Laughing. I’ll order
already. I’ll order seven helpings, some
dumplings, those cold yam noodles that you
like. You can come in your light
body or skeleton or be invisible I don’t even
care. Know you have a long way to travel.
Know I don’t even know if it’s long
at all. Wish you could tell me. What
you’re reading. If you’re reading.
Miss you. I’m at the table in the back.
I want to be alone for a whole summer, and get to the very dregs of life. I want to be as idle as I can, so that my soul may have time to grow. Nobody shall be invited to stay with me, and if any one calls they will be told that I am out, or away, or sick. I shall spend the months in the garden, and
on the plain, and in the forests.
– Elizabeth von Arnim, The Solitary Summer
I was young here. Riding
the subway with my small book
as though to defend myself against
the same world:
you are not alone,
the poem said,
in the dark tunnel.
– Louise Glück, October
From time to time, they vote.
From time to time, language dies.
– Fady Joudah
Dostoevsky warned that ‘great events could come upon us and catch us intellectually unprepared.’ This is precisely what has happened.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The path diverges at doing the work. Those who do become increasingly more aware, peaceful, glowing, present, and enjoyable to be around. Those who don’t become more stuck in their ways and tethered to the version of themselves that the world molded them into.
– Nika Solé
You want to know how big God’s love is? The answer is: It’s very big. It’s bigger than you’re comfortable with.
– Anne Lamott
God is a contradiction in terms, therefore he needs man in order to be made One…God is an ailment man has to cure.
– Carl Jung
If you relax psychologically and completely let go of things, you will find that you have psychological tonus; energy. And you cannot really do anything skillfully—any art, you can’t talk, you can’t think, you can’t have sexual orgasms, or anything like that—unless you have learned fundamental relaxation.
– Alan Watts
Through kindness, through affection, through honesty, through truth and justice toward all others we ensure our own benefit. This is not a matter for complicated theorizing. It is a matter of common sense.
– The Dalai Lama
There is no one
you’re betraying
in your changes
when you become the whole wild song
of what you are.
– Joseph Fasano
The historic mistakes of men are never so plausible and so dangerous as when they are embodied in a formal doctrine, capable of being expressed in a few catchwords.
– Lewis Mumford
It takes a very long time
to become young.
– Picasso
Wittgenstein wrote that the limits of our language are the limits of our world so imagine what happens to your world when you read and read and read.
– Dylan O’Sullivan
Small presses are like self-built cars, speeding into a distance of their own making, powered by the steam of their invention. Eventually they break down, in the middle of nowhere, and have to be abandoned.
– Longbarrow Press
“If everyone saw the world through green glasses,” Kleist explained in a letter to Wilhelmine,
they would be forced to judge that everything they saw was green, and could never be sure whether their eye saw things as they really are, or did not add something of their own to what they saw. And so it is with our intellect. We can never be certain that what we call Truth is really Truth, or whether it does not merely appear so to us.
This conclusion proved devastating to Kleist. “Since coming to the realization in my soul that truth is nowhere to be known here on earth,” he wrote, “I have not touched another book. I have paced idly in my
room.”
I will never feel too aware, too different, or too misunderstood. I’ve worked too hard to get to this place to be a victim to it.
– Nika Solé
They’re gambling that if we’re kept busy, stressed & swaddled in inanity & meaningless tat, we’ll let them own our politics, our lives & turn everything we need to survive on this planet into shareholder profit.
And we’re proving them right.
– Climate Dad
I do not know what I can tell you about me, this inexpressible person.
– I would like to be able to tear the heart out of my body, parcel it into this letter and send it to you. Stupid thought.
– Heinrich von Kleist
You are never just “rotting.” You are fermenting, effervescing, simmering, bubbling, stewing. You are a piece of artisan sourdough in the making. You are sauerkraut. Kimchi. Soup. You have so much to give.
– @luhaenten
Proem
by Octavio Paz
At times poetry is the vertigo of bodies and the vertigo of speech and the vertigo of death;
the walk with eyes closed along the edge of the cliff, and the verbena in submarine gardens;
the laughter that sets on fire the rules and the holy commandments;
the descent of parachuting words onto the sands of the page;
the despair that boards a paper boat and crosses,
for forty nights and forty days, the night-sorrow sea and the day-sorrow desert;
the idolatry of the self and the desecration of the self and the dissipation of the self;
the beheading of epithets, the burial of mirrors; the recollection of pronouns freshly cut in the garden of Epicurus, and the garden of Netzahualcoyotl;
the flute solo on the terrace of memory and the dance of flames in the cave of thought;
the migrations of millions of verbs, wings and claws, seeds and hands;
the nouns, bony and full of roots, planted on the waves of language;
the love unseen and the love unheard and the love unsaid: the love in love.
Syllables seeds.
A degree on a wall means you’re educated as much as shoes on your feet mean you’re walking. It’s a start, but hardly sufficient.
– Ryan Holiday
What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakable, unforgettable, unshamable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quintessence, pure spirit, resolving into no constituents. Don’t waste your wildness: it is precious and necessary. In wildness, truth. Wildness is the universal songline, sung in green gold, which we recognize the moment we hear it. What is wild is what drives the honeysuckle, what wills the dragonfly, shoves the wind and compels the poem. Wildness is insatiable for life; neither truly knows itself without the other. Wildness… sucks up the now, it blazes in your eyes and it glories in everyone who willfully goes their own way.
– Jay Griffiths
OTHER
Having begun in thought there
in that factual embodied wonder
what was lost in the emptied lovers
patience and mind I first felt there
wondered again and again what for
myself so meager and finally singular
despite all issued therefrom whether
sister or mother or brother and father
come to love’s emptied place too late
to feel it again see again first there
all the peculiar wet tenderness the care
of her for whom to be other was first fate.
– Robert Creeley
Do not accept anything as the truth if it lacks love. And do not accept anything as love which lacks truth.
– Edith Stein
You may not see it today or tomorrow, but you will look back in a few years and be absolutely perplexed and awed by how every little thing added up and brought you somewhere wonderful…
– Rebecca Baldwin
I have found a new kind of pencil—the best I have ever had. Of course it costs three times as much too but it is black and soft but doesn’t break off. I think I will always use these.
– John Steinbeck
In the gentle arch of your smile unfolds,
A tapestry of warmth—its story told,
In whispered words and honest grace,
It paints the light that fills heart space.
– Amy Christie
Deep down I have a talent for well-being.
– Elif Batuman
I can’t live in a world where children are burned alive by democracies. What does that even mean for those who want to have children in the future?
– Zeeshan Joonam
My ideal for writing fiction is to put Dostoyevsky and Chandler together in one book.
– Haruki Murakami
clear blue sky—
his old truck kicking up
clouds of dust
– @ruralitalics
tomorrow’s dreams
a fallen acorn
slips into the mud
– James Welsh
we aren’t asking for answers
we’re asking god to switch hands.
– Lexi Pelle
Consciousness is not computable because it is exactly the stuff that is not knowable from the outside
– Sara Imari Walker
As the very source of creation is within you, all solutions are within you too.
– Sadhguru
If the whole existence is one, and if the existence goes on taking care of trees, of animals, of mountains, of oceans — from the smallest blade of grass to the biggest star — then it will take care of you too. Why be possessive?
– Osho
The most dangerous religion on Earth is worshiping politicians.
– @creation247
Thought works only on memory and man’s likes and dislikes are based on previous experiences.
Without the mediacy of thought, neither likes nor dislikes arise, nor is there any attachment to experience.
– Ramesh Balsekar
Now therefore hearken unto me, O ye children: for blessed are they that keep my ways.
– Proverbs 8:32
Each poem is a mother
Who searches for her son in the clouds […]
– Mahmoud Darwish
As Jung said once, we all walk in shoes too small for us. And so, what he meant by that metaphor, we all live in adaptive, protective psychologies, that’s understandable but it keeps us locked in. It keeps us blocked. It keeps us stuck.
– James Hollis
For poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible.
– C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms
My ambition is to turn everything into poetry, to cultivate the art of unreason, and to break the barriers between the solitary soul and the world.
– Alejandra Pizarnik
My country is a ghost,
a mouth trying to say sorry
and it comes out
all smoke, all citizen, and bullet and seed.
– Hala Alyan
If we do not do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable.
– Murray Bookchin
No propaganda on earth can hide the wound that is Palestine.
– Arundhati Roy
Curb your desire—don’t set your heart on so many things and you will get what you need.
– Epictetus
A simple message of the teachings is that much of the pain, suffering, confusion and contradiction you encounter in your own life is simply caused by not paying attention to what you have closest to you from the beginning and then using it well: body, speech, and mind.
The three practices are then : sitting meditation for exploring the mind: singing or chanting, or poetry or mantras for exploring the speech and voice; and yoga, or dance, or hoeing the garden and gathering firewood for the exploration of the body. Added to that …is a realization of the marvelousness and the mysteriousness of all these simple acts.
– Gary Snyder, The Real Work
Let A =
Sierra Amerrique
mountains
Los Amerriques
people
America Amerrique
Land of the strong wind
Let I equal isthmus
between Turtle Island
and Aba Yala
ique ika
the spirit, the breath
behind the strong wind
that blows across the isthmus
Alberigo, Amerigo Amerrrigo
Did you extract your fame name
from the mountains?
from the people?
Or did you suck it in from the strong wind
that blows across the isthmus
that curves East as it connects with Aba Yala?
Connection that will later be cut
by a canal
Amerrigo Alberigo.
did you listen to the spirit
that breathes the strong wind?
Alberigo Amerigo Amerrigo,
with your crude map
and your myth of a virgin West.
can European eyes eyes
meet Asian eyes, meet African eyes
meet American eyes
with respect?
– Jerry Pendergast
I don’t know what it’s like inside you and you don’t know what it’s like inside me. A great book allows me to leap over that wall…
– David Foster Wallace
Jung claimed that the use of reason to the exclusion of myth and fantasy makes us sick, because it alienates us from the sources of healing, which are only ever expressed in symbolic language.
– David Tacey
You are not an artist.
You are not an architect.
You are not an alchemist.
You are not the roles you’ve chosen.
You are not the roles you’ve been assigned.
You are infinite consciousness.
You are a finite field of that infinity.
You are god in the joy of experiencing itself.
You can hold a space where art is inevitable.
Where buildings and cities materialise.
Where alchemy transmutes.
Because you have received from the ether,
beauty that is ready to be made matter.
– Dean Power
I don’t know that it was always this way, but for as long as I can remember, just as we move into the final weeks of the presidential campaign, the focus shifts to the undecided voters. “Who are they?” the news anchors ask. “And how might they determine the outcome of this election?”
Then you’ll see this man or woman – someone, I always think, who looks very happy to be on TV. “Well, Brian,” they say. “I’ve gone back and forth on the issues and whatnot, but I just can’t seem to make up my mind!” Some insist that there’s very little difference between candidate A and candidate B. Others claim that they’re with A on defense and health care but are leaning toward B when it comes to the economy.
I look at these people and can’t quite believe that they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention?
To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the human shit with bits of broken glass in it?”
To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.
I mean, really, what’s to be confused about?
– David Sedaris
STARS
Here in my head, language
keeps making its tiny noises.
How can I hope to be friends
with the hard white stars
whose flaring and hissing are not speech
but pure radiance?
How can I hope to be friends
with the yawning spaces between them
where nothing, ever is spoken?
Tonight, at the edge of the field,
I stood very still, and looked up,
and tried to be empty of words.
What joy was it, that almost found me?
What amiable peace?
Then it was over, the wind
roused up in the oak trees behind me
and I fell back, easily.
Earth has a hundred thousand pure contraltos-
even the distant night bird
as it talks threat, as it talks love
over the cold, black fields.
Once, deep in the woods,
I found the white skull of a bear
and it was utterly silent –
and once a river otter, in a steel trap,
and it too was utterly silent.
What can we do
but keep on breathing in and out,
modest and willing, and in our places?
Listen, listen, I’m forever saying.
Listen to the river, to the hawk, to the hoof,
to the mockingbird, to the jack-in-the-pulpit –
then I come up with a few words, like a gift.
Even as now
Even as the darkness has remains the pure, deep darkness.
Even as the stars have twirled a little, while I stood here,
looking up,
one hot sentence after another.
– Mary Oliver
You are not here just to fill space or to be a background character in someone else’s movie. Consider this: nothing would be the same if you did not exist. Every place you have ever been and everyone you have ever spoken to would be different without you. We are all connected, and we are all affected by the decisions and even the existence of those around us.
– David Niven
A ‘complete’ life does not consist in a theoretical completeness, but in the fact that one accepts, without reservation, the particular fatal tissue in which one finds oneself embedded, and that one tries to make sense of it or to create a cosmos from the chaotic mess into which one is born.
– Carl Jung
We wish to control big business so as to secure among other things good wages for the wage-workers and reasonable prices for the consumers. Wherever in any business the prosperity of the business man is obtained by lowering the wages of his workmen and charging an excessive price to the consumers we wish to interfere and stop such practices. We will not submit to that kind of prosperity any more than we will submit to prosperity obtained by swindling investors or getting unfair advantages over business rivals.
– Theodore Roosevelt
People sometimes fail to live
because they are always
preparing to live.
– Alan Watts
I can assure you that my personal needs as an individual are fulfilled when I have good books, good music, and good friends.
– Hannah Arendt
A divine army is rising. The awakened have taken their places. The real will overcome.
– Nika Solé
It is when we tried to grapple with another man’s intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun.
– Joseph Conrad
We are free to change the world and start something new in it.
– Hannah Arendt
They were always at work revising the secret map.
– Robert Aickman
When people don’t have free access to books, then communities are like radios without batteries. You cut people off from essential sources of information—mythical, practical, linguistic, political—and you break them.
– Anne Lamott
Today we can no longer live without the reference and diversion provided by images. For a large proportion of our lives we live as mere spectators.
– Jacques Ellul
Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do. Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else, attaching the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.
– Anne Carson
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
Maybe we found another word for a bluebird
That flew higher and higher up in the blue sky
Maybe we found another gray cloud somewhere
Where sheep gathered in the prolonged mist
Maybe we were all poets today and tomorrow
– Alfred Starr Hamilton
Men worry a thousand times more about increasing their wealth than about increasing their knowledge. And yet it is clear to any one that the happiness of man depends much more upon what is within man than upon what he
possesses.
– Schopenhauer
You should lie down now and remember the forest / for it is disappearing
– Susan Stewart
It’s not that we are always going to have the capacity to engage in tremendous acts of generosity and kindness. It’s that we’re open and available to realizing that things are different than they seem.
– Mindy Newman
The truth is this:
My love for you is the only empire
I will ever build.
When it falls,
as all empires do,
my career in empire building will be over.
I will retreat to an island.
I will dabble in the vacation-hut industry.
I will skulk about the private libraries and public parks.
I will fold the clean clothes.
I will wash the dishes.
I will never again dream of having the whole world.
– Mindy Nettifee
I have never more wanted to see
you than I do now — just to sit
and look at you,
– Virginia Woolf
Doing good holds the power to transform us on the inside, and then ripple out in ever-expanding circles that positively impact the world at large.
– Shari Arison
Before the West finally dies, it will “become every day more snarling, more openly ferocious, more shameless, more summarily barbarous” and it will “disgrace itself completely, on all fronts”
– Césaire
When people allow you to know about their pain and talk about it, take your shoes off. It’s a holy place.
Be humble, be kind when someone shows you vulnerability.
– Amani Albair
Wherever you are, at whatever age, you’re only a thought away from changing your life.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
Many people take no care of their money till they come nearly to the end of it, and others do just the same with their time.
– Goethe
Do whatever it takes – meditate, exercise, pray, read, write, listen to music, whatever you find that works – to ignite your awareness daily. Then you will create and contribute to Life as you have never contributed before.
– Neale Donald Walsch
Say it with your heart
Let love
Start.
– Amy Christie
Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.
– Thomas Jefferson
Arcturus in Autumn
by Sara Teasdale
When, in the gold October dusk, I saw you near to setting,
Arcturus, bringer of spring,
Lord of the summer nights, leaving us now in autumn,
Having no pity on our withering;
Oh then I knew at last that my own autumn was upon me,
I felt it in my blood,
Restless as dwindling streams that still remember
The music of their flood.
There in the thickening dark a wind-bent tree above me
Loosed its last leaves in flight—
I saw you sink and vanish, pitiless Arcturus,
You will not stay to share our lengthening night.
At the end of each day I wondered if there was anything else left to experience. It turned out there was.
– Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel
One day you’re cut off, at the very start you’re cut off and can’t go back, the language you learn and the whole business of walking and all the rest is for the sake of the single thought, how to get back again.
– Thomas Bernhard
A short walk, in a light rain; I veer mazewise, to keep my solitude.
Quiet shaa, of shoe on grainy earth; gentle krat, of droplets on jacket.
Here I hide, from the world of words; neighbor waves hello, and I am found.
– American Sijo
Receive my instruction, and not silver; and knowledge rather than choice gold. For wisdom is better than rubies; and all the things that may be desired are not to be compared to it.
– Proverbs 8:10-11
Yes we should all be speaking out, but the sound of an ocean of words that brings no action whatsoever is crazy-making. Words and the world have just fucked off in opposite directions.
– Ellen Dillon
A world of grief and pain
Flowers bloom
Even then.
– Kobayashi Issa
Normalize ‘I’m willing to work on that’ instead of ’that’s just how I am.’
– Unknown
IN A NET OF BLUE AND GOLD
When the moored boat lifts, for its moment,
out of the water like a small cloud—
this is when I understand.
It floats there, defying the stillness to break,
its white hull doubled on the surface smooth as glass.
A minor miracle, utterly purposeless.
Even the bird on the bow-line takes it in stride,
barely shifting his weight before resuming
whatever musing it is birds do;
and the fish continue their placid, midday
truce with the world, suspended a few feet below.
I catch their gleam, the jeweled, reflecting scales,
small dragons guarding common enough treasure.
And wonder how, bound to each other as we are
in a net of blue and gold,
we fail so often, in such ordinary ways.
– Jane Hirshfield
this grief
not the grief expected
no tears
just miles of sand
and endless desert
– Brian Zimmer
The unsaid, for me, exerts great power.
– Louise Glück
The Mahayana doesn’t say that you should hang out in the Sahā world because it’s a great place to be.
It says you should spend time in the Sahā world so you can help others get out of it.
The Sahā world sucks, people. Once we can admit this, we can practice the bodhisattva way.
– Kenneth Folk
Those days which sometimes—
Sometimes passed in proximity to you
Now I no longer even have an image of them.
– Nasir Kazmi
you cannot vote out what is happening in america
not trying to be a dick, not saying don’t vote
but we gotta be honest in order to change course, & if you can’t see both parties are invested in the rise of authoritarian capitalism then we really are lost
– Brian Tierney
Only the wisest and stupidest of men never change.
– Confucius
It would be fun if public libraries were well-funded and open in the evenings and we built a culture where it’s normal to gather at the library after work and browse the shelves and chat about the latest books and read the Saturday night away.
– @iconawrites
It was impossible to imagine an aesthetic life, or any life, without falling in love. Without love, knowledge itself became a hassle; became bullying and imposition… Being in love was the only thing that made you want to learn about a person’s country, or about anything else outside your experience.
– Elif Batuman
A person is only as big as the smallest thing that provokes them.
– Marcus Aurelius
It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we’re talking about when we talk about love.
– Raymond Carver
You can examine a text closely as a doctor of letters, but you are utterly incapable of examining yourself. You, the zoologist, never the beast. You, the reader, never the text. What if you are both?
– Viet Thanh Nguyen, A Man of Two Faces
While it is easy to be intimidated by the largeness of life, seduced by lethargy, diverted by popular culture, and assimilated into collective fantasies that have little to do with our soul’s agenda, we still have to face ourselves in the end.
– James Hollis
Whoever marries a chicken must be prepared to wake up early.
– Ghanaian proverb
All men have their frailties; and whoever looks for a friend without imperfections, will never find what he seeks.
– Cyrus the Great
She wove and unwove and wove and did not know That even then Ulysses on the long And winding road of the world was on his way.
– Edwin Muir, The Return
Seasons flow in a cycle.
Life too, passes through difficult winters.
But after any winter, spring will follow.
– Toshikazu Kawaguchi
Rhythm, harmony and balance are now established in my mind, body and affairs.
– Florence Scovel Shinn
Speak your heart. If they don’t understand, the message was never meant for them anyway.
– Yasmin Mogahed
Each man’s hell is in a different place: mine is just up and behind my ruined face.
– Charles Bukowski
Every event has two handles—one by which it can be carried, and one by which it can’t. If your brother does you wrong, don’t grab it by his wronging, because this is the handle incapable of lifting it. Instead, use the other—that he is your brother, that you were raised together, and then you will have hold of the handle that carries.
– Epictetus
Health is not just an absence of disease. The word health comes from the word ‘whole.’ When an individual human being feels complete physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually, that is when health is.
– Sadhguru
Always hold firmly to the thought that each one of us can do something to bring some portion of misery to an end.
– Albert Schweitzer
I think you’re taking
momentum
too personally.
– Rae Armantrout
My work does not coagulate. It is as unmanageable as a raw egg on the kitchen floor.
– John Steinbeck
The only poem I can write
by Helene Achanzar
is the one in which she devours an egg sandwich on the overcast train ride to Montauk. Both of us desperate to quit the city, even just for one day, so foolishly we underdressed for the sea. How far a few bucks take us: to the top of a lighthouse, a tote bag full of ceramic souvenirs, a single lobster roll. She poses for photos along the bluffs. I dip my feet into the cold ocean. We talk about our parents, their failures, our own. As she naps on the sand, wrapped in a gauzy scarf, I shiver and watch the clouds move fast across the horizon to reveal sunset’s approach. It is just a sunset. It’s beautiful, and means nothing more than the end of a long day. At dinner, we bicker about the bacon in our pasta. The argument is more about exhaustion than it is about pork. We spend what feels like hours in silence drinking water from a patient bartender. We don’t speak again till we board the last train back to the city when she offers me gummy candy from the depths of her bag. She is alive, and our bodies recline on the train’s seats and thrash with laughter from a joke only we know.
Uninterpreted feeling is for me a painful state.
– Helen Vendler
I always liked people who were older. Of course, every year it gets harder to find them.
– Fran Lebowitz
No Longer Ode
by Urayoán Noel
para mi abuela en la isla
A hurricane destroyed your sense of home
and all you wanted was to pack your bags
in dead of night, still waving mental flags,
forgetting the nation is a syndrome.
All that’s left of the sea in you is foam,
the coastline’s broken voice and all its crags.
You hear the governor admit some snags
were hit, nada, mere blips in the biome,
nothing that private equity can’t fix
once speculators pour into San Juan
to harvest the bad seed of an idea.
She tells you Santa Clara in ’56
had nothing on the brutal San Ciprián,
and yes, your abuela’s named María.
Thoughts of Katrina and the Superdome,
el Caribe mapped with blood and sandbags,
displaced, diasporic, Spanglish hashtags,
a phantom tab you keep on Google Chrome,
days of hunger and dreams of honeycomb.
Are souls reborn or worn thin like old rags?
The locust tree still stands although it sags,
austere sharks sequence the island’s genome
and parrots squawk survival politics
whose only power grid is the damp dawn.
There is no other way, no panacea.
Throw stuff at empire’s walls and see what sticks
or tear down the walls you were standing on?
Why don’t you run that question by María?
Beyond the indigenous chromosome,
your gut genealogy’s in chains and gags,
paraded through the colonies’ main drags
and left to die. So when you write your tome
please note: each word must be a catacomb,
must be a sepulcher and must be a
cradle in some sort of aporía
where bodies draw on song as guns are drawn,
resilient, silent h in huracán.
Your ache-song booms ashore. Ashé, María.
I wasn’t being discouraged— it’s just that ‘writer’ wasn’t on the list of professions that could be a credit to the race.
– Rita Dove
Any parent who’s an artist would know that it would be better for the kids … to have a breather in which they could figure out what their own feelings were about a divorce and what their own reality was before having to see it in a book of poems in the world.
– Sharon Olds
Bolivar
by Luis Lloréns Torres
translated from the Spanish by Muna Lee
Poet, soldier, statesman, hero, he stands—
Great, like the countries whose freedom he won;
He whom no country can claim as her son,
Though as his daughters were born many lands.
His was the valor of who bears a sword;
His was the courtesy of who wears a flower:
Entering salons, he laid by the sword;
Plunging in battles, he tossed away the flower.
The peaks of the Andes to him seemed to be
But exclamation points after his stride:
Soldier-poet he was; poet-soldier was he!
Each land that he freed
Was a soldier’s poem and a poet’s deed:
And he was crucified.
Paris is my wilderness. I love it with all my heart, and that love is like wine—which I can’t drink, because it goes straight to my little head. I can’t drink at all. But Paris gets me drunk.
– Josephine Baker
Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry.
– Gabriel García Márquez
You Are Who I Love
by Aracelis Girmay
You, selling roses out of a silver grocery cart
You, in the park, feeding the pigeons
You cheering for the bees
You with cats in your voice in the morning, feeding cats
You protecting the river You are who I love
delivering babies, nursing the sick
You with henna on your feet and a gold star in your nose
You taking your medicine, reading the magazines
You looking into the faces of young people as they pass, smiling and saying, Alright! which, they know it, means I see you, Family. I love you. Keep on.
You dancing in the kitchen, on the sidewalk, in the subway waiting for the train because Stevie Wonder, Héctor Lavoe, La Lupe
You stirring the pot of beans, you, washing your father’s feet
You are who I love, you
reciting Darwish, then June
Feeding your heart, teaching your parents how to do The Dougie, counting to 10, reading your patients’ charts
You are who I love, changing policies, standing in line for water, stocking the food pantries, making a meal
You are who I love, writing letters, calling the senators, you who, with the seconds of your body (with your time here), arrive on buses, on trains, in cars, by foot to stand in the January streets against the cool and brutal offices, saying: YOUR CRUELTY DOES NOT SPEAK FOR ME
You are who I love, you struggling to see
You struggling to love or find a question
You better than me, you kinder and so blistering with anger, you are who I love, standing in the wind, salvaging the umbrellas, graduating from school, wearing holes in your shoes
You are who I love
weeping or touching the faces of the weeping
You, Violeta Parra, grateful for the alphabet, for sound, singing toward us in the dream
You carrying your brother home
You noticing the butterflies
Sharing your water, sharing your potatoes and greens
You who did and did not survive
You who cleaned the kitchens
You who built the railroad tracks and roads
You who replanted the trees, listening to the work of squirrels and birds, you are who I love
You whose blood was taken, whose hands and lives were taken, with or without your saying
Yes, I mean to give. You are who I love.
You who the borders crossed
You whose fires
You decent with rage, so in love with the earth
You writing poems alongside children
You cactus, water, sparrow, crow You, my elder
You are who I love,
summoning the courage, making the cobbler,
getting the blood drawn, sharing the difficult news, you always planting the marigolds, learning to walk wherever you are, learning to read wherever you are, you baking the bread, you come to me in dreams, you kissing the faces of your dead wherever you are, speaking to your children in your mother’s languages, tootsing the birds
You are who I love, behind the library desk, leaving who might kill you, crying with the love songs, polishing your shoes, lighting the candles, getting through the first day despite the whisperers sniping fail fail fail
You are who I love, you who beat and did not beat the odds, you who knows that any good thing you have is the result of someone else’s sacrifice, work, you who fights for reparations
You are who I love, you who stands at the courthouse with the sign that reads NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE
You are who I love, singing Leonard Cohen to the snow, you with glitter on your face, wearing a kilt and violet lipstick
You are who I love, sighing in your sleep
You, playing drums in the procession, you feeding the chickens and humming as you hem the skirt, you sharpening the pencil, you writing the poem about the loneliness of the astronaut
You wanting to listen, you trying to be so still
You are who I love, mothering the dogs, standing with horses
You in brightness and in darkness, throwing your head back as you laugh, kissing your hand
You carrying the berbere from the mill, and the jug of oil pressed from the olives of the trees you belong to
You studying stars, you are who I love
braiding your child’s hair
You are who I love, crossing the desert and trying to cross the desert
You are who I love, working the shifts to buy books, rice, tomatoes,
bathing your children as you listen to the lecture, heating the kitchen with the oven, up early, up late
You are who I love, learning English, learning Spanish, drawing flowers on your hand with a ballpoint pen, taking the bus home
You are who I love, speaking plainly about your pain, sucking your teeth at the airport terminal television every time the politicians say something that offends your sense of decency, of thought, which is often
You are who I love, throwing your hands up in agony or disbelief, shaking your head, arguing back, out loud or inside of yourself, holding close your incredulity which, yes, too, I love I love
your working heart, how each of its gestures, tiny or big, stand beside my own agony, building a forest there
How “Fuck you” becomes a love song
You are who I love, carrying the signs, packing the lunches, with the rain on your face
You at the edges and shores, in the rooms of quiet, in the rooms of shouting, in the airport terminal, at the bus depot saying “No!” and each of us looking out from the gorgeous unlikelihood of our lives at all, finding ourselves here, witnesses to each other’s tenderness, which, this moment, is fury, is rage, which, this moment, is another way of saying: You are who I love You are who I love You and you and you are who
We can’t fathom
the emergencies of others.
– John Okrent
Speaking and writing without concern for tradition, the revolutionaries left the narrow circle that imprisoned polite language… they used provincialisms from their places of origin … forged the words they lacked —
– Paul Lafargue, Critiques litteraires
It’s not that I is another but that my life is always elsewhere.
– Forrest Gander
[since feeling is first]
– E. E. Cummings
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says
we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis
I don’t see a sign of sleep
I can’t even rhyme tonight
Something here that runs too deep
But I tell you I’m alright
It’s fear that holds my tongue
Fear that holds my hand
The race that I must run
‘Til I can’t stand
I haven’t left a lie untold
Still I watch and wait
I will pray and I will hope
That I learn before too late
I will search my barren soul
To see what I can find
Look at me, the last to know
That I have been blind on the inside
– Gillian Welch
Useful
This is my one prayer,
one intention carried
in the clay of skin:
to be a useful cup
fired in the kiln of life.
Cracked as I am, shaped
by flawed but caring
human hands, let me hold
what is mine to hold,
then give it back,
transformed by the keeping,
to anyone thirsty enough
to receive it.
– James Crews
In a nutshell, you are burning way too much fuel trying to optimize this human life instead of investigating the Buddha’s assertion that this human is not who you are.
What up with that?
– Kenneth Folk
When I was young, I expected from people more than they could give: never-ending friendship, constant excitement.
Now I expect less than they can actually can give: a silent companionship. And their feelings, friendship, noble deeds always seem like a miracle to me: wholly
the fruit of grace.
– Albert Camus
Don’t swallow your tears.
They are medicine waiting to be released.
Free them to free yourself.
Free them to free us from the demand for inhumanity.
Each drop is a revolt declaring “I’m still here.”
– Dr. Thema
Sunrise
Sunset
Edges
Transitions
Avoid the middle
– Rick Rubin
i am looking for peace. i am looking for mercy. i am looking for
evidence of compassion. any evidence of life. i am looking for
life.
– Suheir Hammad
Our view of the world is truly shaped by what we decide to hear.
– William James
alright so we’re all
gonna die but now is the
time to sing & see, to be
humble, sacrificed, late,
crazy, talkative, foolish,
proud, indispensable, early
sane, silent, serious
– Jack Kerouac
We are not here on Earth to be alone, but to be a part of a living community, a web of life in which all is sacred. Like the cells of our body, all of life is in constant communication, as science is just beginning to understand. No bird sings in isolation, no bud breaks open alone.
And the most central note that is present in life is its sacred nature… Hearing its presence speak to us, we feel this great bond of life that supports and nourishes us all. Today’s world may still at times make us feel lonely, but we can then remember what every animal, every insect, every plant knows – and only we have forgotten: the living sacred whole.
– Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Psychoanalysis is not the only way to resolve inner conflicts. Life itself still remains a very effective therapist.
– Karen Horney
The alchemist realizes that he himself is the Philosopher’s Stone, and that this stone is made diamond-like when the salt and the sulphur, or the spirit and the body, are united through mercury, the link of mind. Man is the incarnated principle of mind as the animal is of emotion. He stands with one foot on the heavens and the other on earth. His higher being is lifted to the celestial spheres, but the lower man ties him to matter. Now the philosopher, building his sacred stone, is doing so by harmonizing his spirit and his body. The result is the Philosopher’s Stone. The hard knocks of life chip it away and facet it until it reflects lights from a million different angles.
– Manly P. Hall
the life you lead is a midnight thing, always a hair’s breadth from the witching hour; it is volatile, it is threadbare; it is carefree in the true sense of that term; it is light, losable like a key or a hair clip. And it is lethargy: why not sit all morning, all day, all year, under the same cypress tree drawing the figure eight in the dust? More than that, it is disaster, it is chaos: why not overthrow a government on a whim, why not blind the man you hate, why not go mad, go gibbering through the town like a loon, waving your hands, tearing your hair? There’s nothing to stop you – or rather anything could stop you, any hour, any minute.
– Zadie Smith
In intuition, the single pulsates with the life of the whole, and the whole is in the life of the single. Every genuine artistic representation is itself and is the universe, the universe in that individual form, and that individual form as the universe. In every utterance, every fanciful [imaginative] creation, of the poet, there lies the whole of human destiny, all human hope, illusions, griefs, joys, human grandeurs and miseries, the whole drama of reality perpetually evolving and growing out of itself in suffering and joy.
– Benedetto Croce
Sanctuary
by Ada Limón
Suppose it’s easy to slip
into another’s green skin,
bury yourself in leaves
and wait for a breaking,
a breaking open, a breaking
out. I have, before, been
tricked into believing
I could be both an I
and the world. The great eye
of the world is both gaze
and gloss. To be swallowed
by being seen. A dream.
To be made whole
by being not a witness,
but witnessed.
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
Put it like this: there’s part of me that’s dead, and wants the rest of me dead. There’s a part of me that’s alive, and wants all of me alive.” He looked that over and nodded at it. “My hand, my arm, my thumb on the trigger—they’re alive. All the live parts of me want to help me go on living, d’you see? No live part should help the dead part get what it wants. The way it’ll happen, the way it should happen, is not when I do something to make it happen. It’ll be when I don’t do something. I won’t get out of the way, and that’s it.
– Theodore Sturgeon
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
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
As humans are taken to be units of energy in industrialized societies, they will resist, whether they are conscious of this or not. Thus, much of what is today labelled depression could be understood as old-fashioned hysteria, in the sense of a refusal of current forms of mastery and domination. The more that society insists on the values of efficiency and economic productivity, the more depression will proliferate as a necessary consequence.
– Darian Leader
A ‘complete’ life does not consist in a theoretical completeness, but in the fact that one accepts, without reservation, the particular fatal tissue in which one finds oneself embedded, and that one tries to make sense of it or to create a cosmos from the chaotic mess into which one is born.
– Carl Jung
We love life whenever we can.
We dance and throw up a minaret or raise palm trees for the violets growing between two martyrs.
We love life whenever we can.
We steal a thread from a silk-worm to weave a sky and a fence for our journey.
We open the garden gate for the jasmine to walk into the street as a beautiful day.
We love life whenever we can.
Wherever we settle we grow fast-growing plants, wherever we settle we harvest a murdered man.
We blow into the flute the colour of far away, of far away, we draw on the dust in the passage the neighing of a horse.
And we write our names in the form of stones. Lightning brighten the night for us, brighten the night a little.
We love life whenever we can.
– Mahmoud Darwish
Thirst
by Mary Oliver
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.
She looked, and saw the black, domed sky arching over her head. And her heart dilated; she felt the great black dome in her heart. She sat under the stars, worshipping them. Her heart opened and grew vast, until the whole sky with all its stars began to pour into her, a mysterious flood of star-strung darkness. She wanted to receive the night sky into her heart.
– Anna Kavan, Let Me Alone
Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.
– Bertrand Russell
That which speaks to us from within, the imagination that leads us beyond the limitations of the individual self, the intuitive knowledge that seizes the mind with its clear insight and its profound certainty, the higher sentiment that says this is the way my heart is, all of that and more is lost to the modern sensibility with its focus on the material, the physical, and the merely practical. As products of the unique modernist vision, we reach deep down into the world of matter to examine the minutest particles of quantum physics and explore with high-tech space telescopes the vast reaches of the universe in search of a knowledge that will prove our theories right. We wait to be chosen, expecting to hear the secrets of the universe without truly endeavoring to listen, and we want to be called, hoping to see a visionary world of truth and reality without any intuitive insight to substantiate such a sublime vision.
– John Herlihy
Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.
– Reinhold Niebuhr
You have cast enough light to make my thought visible again.
– Louise Glück